Category: The Conversation – UK

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jason Ralph, Professor of International Relations, University of Leeds

Foreign policy doctrines are often forgotten as soon as they are written. Take the November 2025 US National Security Strategy, which told us that “the days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy … are thankfully over”.

Keir Starmer, however, has stuck to his promise to “use realist means to pursue progressive ends”, even when placed in a difficult position by Donald Trump. The prime minister’s decision not to take part in offensive military action in the Middle East is, I would argue, consistent with his foreign policy doctrine of progressive realism.

There is, of course, room for debate. Some progressives will point to the Iranian government’s egregious human rights abuses as reason for supporting externally enforced regime change. UK government ministers acknowledge this – they are not mourning the Ayatollah.

But progressivism is also committed to peace between nations. This is because nationalism, as well as a yearning for individual freedom, is a powerful ideology. Foreign intervention can often provoke a nationalist backlash, even if its aims are to advance universal rights. While many Iranians celebrate the death of the Ayatollah, they may be wary of supporting external intervention.

This is the progressive value of an international law that rejects the great power’s right to overthrow other governments. It defends the right of national self-determination, and believes human rights are ultimately more secure when nations live together peacefully. If nations are less suspicious of each other, they are less inclined to crackdown on domestic opposition. That creates the political space – so the theory goes – for gradual, less violent reform.

Labour prime ministers have not always understood progressive foreign policy in these terms. Tony Blair took a more revolutionary approach. His decision to join the Bush administration’s 2003 war to overthrow the Iraqi regime was motivated in part by the progressive’s commitment to improve the lives of those repressed by dictatorships. His case for war centred on the threat of weapons of mass destruction, but his decision to join the US aligned with an American neoconservative view of promoting democracy through regime change. That ended badly, with tens of thousands of civilians killed in the violence that followed.

These “mistakes of the past” were uppermost in Starmer’s thinking when he addressed parliament on March 2. The possibility that the unintended consequence of military action could be deadly chaos, rather than democratic revolution, reflects the realist side of UK foreign policy.

Foreign policy realists have less faith in the progressive value of international law. Yet they are often aligned with progressives in opposition to military-enforced regime change. Realists appreciate that the mobilising force of nationalism makes the foreign intervener’s task much more difficult. A realist ethic focused on a prudent assessment of consequences makes them sceptical toward revolutionary goals and military gambles.

Again, there is room for debate. The current US National Defense Strategy has a different understanding of realism. It throws out utopian idealism and brings in hard-nosed realism. This perspective demands the pursuit of ever more military power to secure the state in a position of undisputed primacy. Consequences still matter when considering when to use force, but priority is given to demonstrating a status of military superiority and political dominance.

This kind of realism is, of course, unavailable to all but a few superpowers. The fact that it has been adopted by the UK’s one-time closest ally is troubling. US power used to be restrained by a combination of classical realist prudence on the one hand, and a liberal internationalism committed to multilateral decision-making on the other.

Trumpian realism, however, seemingly rejects this in favour of demonstrating the president’s power to decide at will which foreign regimes should survive. So long as the UK remains committed to progressive realism, the Trumpian realist pursuit of regime change in states like Venezuela and Iran will put even more pressure on the special relationship.

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Read more:
Iran is putting pressure on the US-UK ‘special relationship’ – but it has survived worse

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A more authentic realism

Not all foreign policy experts are happy with how the US is now invoking realism. Kevin Maloney of the Carnegie Council, a thinktank dedicated to ethics in international affairs, accuses the Trump administration of “gaslighting” when it describes its foreign policy as “realist”. He points to a more authentic form of realism in the ideas of intellectual giants like German-American political scientist Hans Morgenthau. Morgenthau warned against both ends of the progressive realist spectrum: power detached from progressive values can be just as dangerous as ideals detached from power.

The fusion of progressivism and realism in UK foreign policy led on this occasion to a “deliberate” decision not to support US military action against Iran. That annoyed Trump, but as Maloney’s assessment illustrates, it is not necessarily out of step with a wider tradition of American foreign policy thinking.

One thing that progressives and realists agree on is that the state has a responsibility to protect its own citizens, including those abroad. Starmer’s eventual decision to allow the US to use UK bases for this defensive purpose was, arguably, consistent with his initial policy, and not another U-turn.

Of course, doubts remain that the US will use UK assets for defensive purposes alone. But the decision is understandable in the context of Iran’s widespread retaliation and the risk it poses to the 300,000 UK citizens in the region. One possible scenario is that the UK may need to call on US capabilities to evacuate those citizens, as well as prevent Iranian missile strikes. Maintaining access to those capabilities is a prudent move in line with the national interest.

In the longer term, the UK and other “middle powers” need to develop their own capabilities so that they are less dependent on the US, and more able to maintain their progressive realist stance.

Jason Ralph has previously received funding from Research Councils UK and the European Union. He is a member of the UK Labour Party.

– ref. Starmer’s Iran approach may anger Trump, but it fits with his foreign policy philosophy – https://theconversation.com/starmers-iran-approach-may-anger-trump-but-it-fits-with-his-foreign-policy-philosophy-277412

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Richard Toye, Professor of Modern History, University of Exeter

When Donald Trump criticised Keir Starmer for failing to sufficiently support American and Israeli operations against Iran, he did so with a historical flourish. “This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with,” he complained.

The implication was clear: Churchill would have stood shoulder to shoulder with Washington in a confrontation with Tehran. The remark invites an obvious question: what would Churchill have made of war with Iran?

The answer is not as straightforward as Trump’s comparison suggests. Churchill’s record shows a mixture of hawkish rhetoric, strategic caution and a constant concern with maintaining Anglo-American unity. Far from embodying a simple instinct for confrontation, he tended to see war and diplomacy as inextricably linked.

Churchill’s famous 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri, is a case in point. During this address, he warned that an “iron curtain” had descended across Europe. But the speech – formally titled The Sinews of Peace – was not simply a call to arms against Soviet expansion. Churchill simultaneously emphasised the need for understanding between adversaries and the importance of strengthening the United Nations. His core message was that peace could best be preserved if the western powers demonstrated sufficient unity and strength to deter aggression.

Iran already featured in the geopolitical crisis surrounding that speech. At the time, Soviet troops had failed to withdraw from northern Iran despite wartime agreements. The episode formed part of the early tensions that would harden into the cold war. Churchill therefore already viewed Iran through the lens of great-power rivalry.

That perspective had deep roots. During the second world war, Churchill had travelled to Tehran in 1943 to meet Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin at the first conference of the allied “big three”. The gathering took place in the capital of Iran because the country had become a crucial logistical corridor through which allied supplies flowed to the Soviet Union.

For Churchill, the conference was a sobering experience. Roosevelt increasingly cultivated Stalin’s goodwill, sometimes at Britain’s expense. Afterwards Churchill reflected ruefully that he had sat “between the great Russian bear … and the great American buffalo,” while Britain resembled “the poor little British donkey”. The remark captured his growing awareness that Britain was no longer one of the world’s dominant powers.

That realisation reinforced a central element of Churchill’s postwar strategy: the cultivation of an enduring Anglo-American partnership. His call at Fulton for a “special relationship” between the British Commonwealth and the United States was not a mere rhetorical gesture. It was an attempt to anchor Britain’s future security within the emerging American-led order.

The irony of a Churchill reference

But Churchill’s thinking about Iran did not stop with cold war diplomacy. In 1953, during his second premiership, Britain and the US supported a covert operation that overthrew Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and restored the authority of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The coup was organised largely by the CIA, under the direction of Kermit Roosevelt Jr., but Churchill enthusiastically backed the plan. When Roosevelt later described the operation to him at Downing Street, the ageing prime minister reportedly declared that he would gladly have served under his command in such a venture.

That episode suggests that Churchill could certainly favour forceful action when he believed western interests were threatened. Yet it also highlights a historical irony. The overthrow of Mosaddegh became one of the central grievances invoked by Iran’s revolutionary leaders after the Iranian revolution. Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has repeatedly invoked foreign intervention – particularly the Anglo-American coup – to legitimise its rule and to portray itself as the defender of Iranian sovereignty against external domination.

In other words, the legacy of western interference in Iran has become one of the regime’s most powerful political weapons.

Churchill was well aware that wars and interventions could produce unintended consequences. Reflecting on his experiences as a young officer during the Boer war, he later wrote that once the signal for conflict was given, statesmen lost control of events. War became subject to “malignant Fortune, ugly surprises, awful miscalculations”. This was not the sentiment of a pacifist. But it was the observation of someone who had seen how quickly political decisions could unleash forces that no government could fully control.

What would Winston do?

How might these instincts translate to the present crisis? Churchill would almost certainly have regarded Iran’s regime with deep suspicion. His cold war mindset inclined him to see international politics in terms of ideological confrontation and strategic balance. He might well have argued that weakness in the face of aggressive regimes invited further challenges.

At the same time, Churchill rarely believed that military action alone could resolve geopolitical disputes. His preferred approach was to combine firmness with diplomacy – to negotiate from strength while maintaining channels of communication with adversaries. Even at the height of the cold war he hoped that a position of western strength might eventually persuade the Soviet leadership to strike a bargain.

Above all, Churchill believed that Britain’s influence depended on maintaining close alignment with the US. But that alignment, in his mind, was meant to shape American power rather than simply echo it. The “special relationship” was supposed to be a partnership, not a blank cheque.

Trump’s invocation of Churchill therefore rests on a simplified image of the wartime leader as an instinctive advocate of military action. The historical record reveals a more complicated figure: a strategist who believed in strength, certainly, but also in diplomacy, alliances and the careful management of great-power rivalries.

If Churchill were alive today, he might indeed be urging western governments to demonstrate resolve. But he would probably also recognise that Iran’s political system has been forged in the memory of past foreign interventions – and that any new conflict would risk reinforcing the very forces it seeks to weaken.

Churchill once observed that war https://wist.info/churchill-winston/11013/, once unleashed, rarely follows the tidy paths imagined by those who start it. That warning may be as relevant as any of his more famous phrases.

Richard Toye receives funding from The Leverhulme Trust.

– ref. What would Winston Churchill make of war with Iran? – https://theconversation.com/what-would-winston-churchill-make-of-war-with-iran-277525

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Matt Barr, Senior Lecture in International Relations, Nottingham Trent University

The so-called “special relationship” between the UK and the US appears to be at its lowest ebb for decades. As he sat alongside the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, at a White House press call on March 3, Donald Trump bitterly criticised Keir Starmer for his refusal to let the US use British bases to launch initial strikes on Iran.

Declaring he was “not happy with the UK”, he added: “This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with.” Churchill was, of course, the first person to talk of a special relationship between the UK and the US in a speech made at Westminster College in Missouri in March 1946.

Over eight decades since then, successive British and US governments have projected an image of exceptional closeness, particularly in matters of defence and foreign policy. But Trump’s return to the US presidency and his pursuit of a more aggressive foreign policy, including most recently his decision to launch, with Israel, a campaign of airstrikes against Iran in pursuit of regime change, has revived an old question for the Starmer administration: how far should the UK publicly diverge from Washington given the significance of this relationship?

Starmer ruled out joining America and Israel in their campaign in a speech in the House of Commons on March 2, saying “the British government does not believe in regime change from the skies”. Having initially refused to allow British airbases to be used by the US in its campaign, he later softened his stance, allowing some UK bases in the Middle East to be used for strictly “defensive purposes”.

The US president and his secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, have strongly condemned his position. Trump said the prime minister “has not been helpful” and that the special relationship is “obviously not what it was”. Hegseth spoke of “traditional allies who wring their hands and clutch their pearls hemming and hawing about the use of force” in a clear reference to Starmer’s stance on Iran.

But, as Starmer told the Commons: “President Trump has expressed his disagreement with our decision not to join the initial strikes. But it is my duty to judge what is in Britain’s national interest, and that is the judgment I made. I stand by it.”

There were shades of his criticism of Trump over his declaration in January that the US must acquire Greenland by force if necessary. Then Starmer said that the world’s largest island “belongs to the people of Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark alone” and that “applying tariffs on allies for pursuing the collective security of Nato allies is completely wrong”, adding that: “We will of course be pursuing this directly with the US administration.”

The special relationship is often characterised as Britain acting as Washington’s subordinate, sacrificing independent judgement to remain close to the US. This view of the alliance is usefully captured by the caricature of Tony Blair as George W. Bush’s “poodle” over the 2003 Iraq war, blindly following Bush into folly. Indeed, with Iraq, the special relationship was described as having a “vice-like grip”, constraining British foreign policy.

But in important ways, this interpretation is misleading. Understanding why can help give an indication of how Keir Starmer’s government can respond to differing views with the US over foreign policy.

2003: ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’

Over Iraq, preserving the special relationship unquestionably mattered to British decision-makers – but it was not their primary focus. Instead, British and American leaders were in agreement. Both governments came to believe that regime change through military action was the only viable policy option to disarm and topple the regime of Saddam Hussein.

It was felt that containment and weapons inspections were unworkable to prevent the Iraqi dictator from fulfilling his intention to regain a weapons programme in the future (he had previously used chemical weapons to terrible effect against Iran and his own people, but had destroyed them before the Gulf war).

Blair’s thinking was determined by his exposure to UK intelligence briefings. Analysing declassified briefings shows how the key concern changed over time. Intelligence moved the focus away from existing “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs) in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf war to Iraq’s breakout potential. This is having the technological, intellectual and financial resources to acquire them in the future.

Blair was reportedly willing to resign over his support for the invasion. This was nothing to do with pressure from Washington – he was a true believer in regime change in Iraq and was in lockstep with Bush as a result. Interviewed for a Channel 4 documentary in February 2026 – more than two decades later – Blair repeated his passionate belief that a military invasion of Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam from developing WMDs: “I did it because I thought it was right.”

No longer in lockstep?

But you don’t have to look far to find notable examples of where the UK has not aligned with the US: the Vietnam war was one – then prime minister Harold Wilson refused Lyndon Johnson’s request to send British troops to Vietnam. Previously in 1956, the Suez crisis, when the British prime minister Anthony Eden ignored US president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning not to intervene in the Egyptian nationalisation of the Suez canal, but was forced to back down.

So the idea that the UK has acted in lockstep with the US over major foreign policy decisions is far from the truth.

Starmer’s challenge, whether it’s over Greenland, Iran or a future foreign policy issue, is how to manage a relationship in which disagreement is open and rooted in competing views. Trump’s habit of seeking retribution against those he thinks have slighted him is worrying, his condemnation of Starmer for their differences over Iran shows this with some sharp words on both sides.

There’s no doubt that the divergence between the US and Britain over Iran is putting pressure on relations between the two countries. But for a relationship to be “special” implies respect that goes both ways. How that survives the current episode will tell us a lot about the relationship’s future.

Matt Barr does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Iran is putting pressure on the US-UK ‘special relationship’ – but it has survived worse – https://theconversation.com/iran-is-putting-pressure-on-the-us-uk-special-relationship-but-it-has-survived-worse-274037

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Tom Benn, Associate Professor in Crime Writing (Creative Writing), University of East Anglia

In 1950, William Faulkner delivered a famous acceptance speech for the Nobel prize in literature in which he rallied for the “inexhaustible [human] voice” and his belief in its supremacy – not merely to endure but to prevail. Faulkner reasoned this was because the human voice, transmuted into art, possesses soul – a soul capable of compassion and sacrifice.

Fast forward 75 years. Irish writer Colm Tóibín is asked about AI’s impact on writers in a newspaper interview. His wry response: “AI will be the end of us.”

Tóibín seems to believe that the triumphant human voice, one which writers and artists often cling to, will neither endure nor prevail. At least, not over the disruptive, transformative technology of Generative AI. He continued:

This idea [that] no machine could ever replace my sensibility, which is so rich, varied, complex, and arising from experience and from history – that’s all rubbish. You can actually manufacture that. And the more material they put into the machines, the more the machines will just learn about what sentences sound like, what rhythm is like. And the novelist can go and do something more useful.

Equally pertinent and pessimistic are the final pages of the late Cormac McCarthy’s penultimate novel, The Passenger. The great American writer had spent the last decades of his life studying complex adaptive systems at the Santa Fe Institute, writing: “In the end, there will be nothing that cannot be simulated. And this will be the final abridgement of privilege. This is the world to come. Not some other.”

Art versus algorithm

What to do with such doomsaying? What can novelists and creative writing students say in our paltry human voices that won’t simply be co-opted for training data?

Well, it’s worth noting some hard truths first. Generative AI and proprietary large language models (LLMs) are not neutral tools to be either ethically harnessed or maliciously abused. They are predictive matrices, data harvesters and plagiarism remixers, designed to collate and privatise human knowledge and activity to maximise corporate interests over social needs.

We should consider both the ideological and environmental implications for AI. As institutions default to these technologies, AI becomes a shiny symbol that accelerates the drive to value creative writing only as a measurable professional output. AI adoption may signal competitive productivity, efficiency and innovation, while actually deskilling and disempowering the majority of creative writers.

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This article is part of our State of the Arts series. These articles tackle the challenges of the arts and heritage industry – and celebrate the wins, too.

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AI’s vast computational infrastructure requires ever more data centres, processing units, cloud networks, water consumption, and rare earth element mining and export. This is so planet-wrecking in its resource intensity, it is already probably irreconcilable with present climate goals.

Nevertheless, “the world to come” is already here. AI is swiftly becoming our status quo. As a creative writer’s tool, it can serve as a shortcut, eliminating the need to take the traditional toilful journey of conflicting desire in which the writer writes to both better understand and be better understood.

There might now be little effort or intentionality for the writer beyond inputting a prompt. That misses the point of what authors do and why. Perhaps AI-free creative writing composition will become an artisan commodity. The publisher Faber has already placed “Human Written” stamps on the cover of author Sarah Hall’s latest novel.

But AI will continue to affect writers, existentially and economically, as it disrupts the creative industries and beyond. Last year, novelist and GenAI researcher Clementine Collett published her sobering author and publisher survey, in which respondents reported increasing anxiety, grievance and loss of income.

There is small comfort in the fact that, as long as there are people around, there will always be some human and market interest in beautiful and provocative things that have been created solely by other people.

We can care more deeply about a thing because of what we feel we know of its creator, and what they might have endured and sacrificed to create it. Often this is what imbues art with its real meaning and value. How can it be truly meaningful or valuable if its creation has not cost its creator something?

Our desire for and engagement with any creative work is often at an uncanny remove from the thing itself. It is partially rooted in the relational – all the surrounding elements that influence how we encounter and interpret the creative work. This framing constructs a story around it that can also manipulate our desires.

What a shame that capitalism knows this. For this is not just how it eternally sells us stuff, it is now how its technology gets us to concede its claim on our endeavours – stealing, recomposing and hallucinating them for our convenience. And while AI is unlikely to exhaust what Faulkner called the “inexhaustible [human] voice”, it may drown it out under its own artificial echo.

Let’s say Tóibín and McCarthy are right: all our past and future creative labour will be stolen, simulated and commodified without friction. Nonetheless, creative writing, outside of markets and databanks, remains a stubbornly human essential.

As a successful species of emotional primates hardwired for both aggression and collaboration, we still seek to relate, exchange and communicate honestly with ourselves through the creative struggle. Personal artistic creation and its reception by others can alter our moral trajectories, expand consciousness, challenge, comfort and disturb. This is partly because writing is an act, not just a product.

As Faulkner suggested in his Nobel speech, it is the creative act of writing which demonstrates “the human heart in conflict with itself”. This is why it is dangerous. This is why trillions of dollars will soon be invested in making readers and writers forget this. It’s critical that we don’t forget.

Tom Benn does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. ‘AI will be the end of us’ – is Colm Tóibín right about the threat to creative writing? – https://theconversation.com/ai-will-be-the-end-of-us-is-colm-toibin-right-about-the-threat-to-creative-writing-275898

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Mark Ireland, Senior Lecturer in Energy Geoscience, Newcastle University

The Middle East plays a central role in global energy and therefore global markets. As tensions escalate and the strait of Hormuz, a key trade route, faces disruption, headlines assessing the wider impact of the Iranian conflict often centre on oil and gas supply.

There’s one underlying reason that so many oil tankers and liquefied natural gas (LNG) cargoes pass through the strait, and that Middle East conflict shakes global energy markets. That reason is a geological one: an extraordinary concentration of oil and gas accumulations.

As the deadly Ukraine conflict showed in 2022, a predominance of supply from one region can, justifiably, ignite concerns over supply disruption. So much of the world’s oil and gas supply is clustered in one region. This helps explain today’s volatility.

The Middle East is responsible for some 30% of global oil production and 17% of global natural gas production. The revenues from this vast scale of production underpin the economies of many Middle Eastern countries and provides important energy supplies around the world. Incredibly all this oil and gas is found within a single minor tectonic plate – the Arabian plate.

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Read more:
The oil price surge is just one symptom of a supply chain network that is not fit for this age of global tensions

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This plate covers more than 1 million square miles and hosts 55% of the world’s proven oil reserves and 40% of the natural gas. The region also hosts a disproportionate number of giant and supergiant fields. Giant oil and gas fields are those with more than 500 millions of barrels of oil equivalent; supergiant are those with more than 5 billion barrels of oil equivalent.

The Arabian plate is bounded by the Red Sea, the Zagros mountains, the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. The Arabian plate separated from the African plate about 25 million years ago. As the Arabian plate shifted northwards, it collided with the Eurasian plate. This resulted in the formation of the Zagros mountains.

The Arabian plate hosts a quarter of all the world’s giant and supergiant fields. Historically, more than 500 commercial fields have been found here. Current production today accounts for roughly a third of global output.

In Iran, commercial production began in 1908 when oil was discovered just over 50 miles north-east of the city of Ahvaz in western Iran. That oil field is known as Masjed Soleyman. This discovery triggered a century of foreign involvement and political attention.

Development of Iran’s oil and gas resources has changed at each of the previous turning points in its political history, notably the Iranian revolution of 1979 which sent oil prices upwards. Today, Iran hosts hundreds of fields, both onshore and offshore, notably including its share of the world’s largest gas field — South Pars/North Dome field, which is shared with Qatar.

A shared super-giant field

The South Pars/North Dome field highlights the geopolitical complexity of energy supply. Geologically, South Pars/North Dome is a single structure. Politically, it is divided by a maritime boundary. South Pars lies in Iranian waters; North Dome (also referred to as North Field) lies in Qatari waters.

The field was first discovered in Qatari waters in 1971, with its northern extent confirmed by Iran two decades later. The gas here is found in a series of reservoir rocks known as the Khuff formation. These rocks are porous and permeable and are between 200 and 300 million years old – formed during the Permian and Triassic periods. They are found extensively across the Arabian plate. These rocks lie almost two miles beneath the seafloor.

The development of this gas field transformed Qatar into the world’s largest exporter of LNG. Until the recent strikes, North Dome, operated by QatarEnergy, the world’s largest producer of LNG, was producing approximately 18.5 billion cubic feet per day. This enables Qatar to process and supply around one-fifth of the world’s LNG.

This extraordinary share has resulted in oil and gas accounting for around 80% of Qatar’s government revenues. On the Iranian side, daily production at South Pars, operated by Petropars, (a subsidiary of the National Iranian Oil Company) is estimated at around 2 billion cubic feet per day.

Over the past 25 years, Iran’s gas output has increased fivefold. Much of this growth has been driven by extensive drilling to increase production across South Pars. Key importers of Iranian gas, by pipeline, are Turkey and Iraq. The National Iranian Oil Company has started developing it’s own LNG facility to try to meet growing global demand, but this is yet to be complete.

While LNG accounts for only about 8% of global gas supplies, it is a crucial marginal source of energy in most countries, except those where electricity supply is dominated by hydropower or nuclear.

The gas price rise of the last week still pale into insignificance compared with those that were ultimately seen as a result of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, although it remains to be seen how this will play out in the longer term.

As tensions escalate and energy infrastructure comes under threat, the consequences are already reverberating globally. Disruptions to production in a region that supplies such a large share of the world’s energy inevitably affect short-term prices, longer-term investment and political decision-making far beyond the Middle East.

The distribution of oil and gas resources has shaped political relationships, global investment and regional conflicts. Even as the world moves to reduce it’s reliance on oil and gas, the geological concentration in the Middle East ensures that energy security will remain closely tied to the politics of the region for decades to come.

Mark Ireland does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How one massive gas field shapes the global stakes of conflict in the Middle East – https://theconversation.com/how-one-massive-gas-field-shapes-the-global-stakes-of-conflict-in-the-middle-east-277439

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Tony D Sampson, Reader in Digital Communication, University of Essex

Against rising adult concern about child sexual abuse content and children’s mental health, recent calls to follow Australia and ban under-16s from accessing social media in the UK are understandable. It reflects genuine parental anxiety about online harms.

These harms are not abstract. Research shows that young people are exposed to violent misogynistic cultures and toxic manospheres online.

But despite being consistently critical of the viral and experiential platform business models driving much of today’s social media harm, as an expert in digital communication, I do not support the ban. This is not because I defend the kind of libertarian politics adopted by Silicon Valley.

It isn’t because I consider social media harmless either. The situation is more nuanced. I oppose the ban because it is based on questionable assumptions about under-16s’ vulnerability to social media and overlooks the broader harms platform business models present to all users.

What’s needed is a hardline regime of regulation and education across all age ranges.

I challenge the pro-ban debate because it too often rests on a crude and narrow adult perception of young online experiences. This often overstates media effects on attention and other brain functions. It also crucially underestimates the significance of learning about wider digital cultures in the everyday social, political, creative and emotional experiences of young people.

More profound issues persist in the business models that structure digital experiences. There is little doubt that doomscrolling has negative psychological effects, as many users discovered during the COVID pandemic.

As an invention of the attention economy, endless feeds are not accidental: they are shaped by design choices that keep users scrolling long past the point of diminishing returns. These systems are purposefully optimised for engagement metrics, not wellbeing. Platforms do not sell content; they sell scarcity of attention, optimising and farming user experiences for advertisers and data companies.

Where I am more sceptical is in claims that social media rewires young people’s brains or directly destroys attention spans. Such arguments often imply a simple cause-and-effect relationship between screens and declining cognition. Historically, anxieties about distraction long predate social media. Technology scholars point out that forms of shorter, more fragmented attention most probably preceded the deep attention required to read books.

The problem is not that under-16s are uniquely vulnerable to encounters with screens. It is that all users are navigating systems engineered to optimise distraction at scale. Attention is not disappearing. It is being captured and redirected.

Regulation, not prohibition

There is no question that under-16s face particular risks online. But banning social media will not eliminate those risks. Young people are adept at working around restrictions, whether through VPNs, shared logins or burner accounts. When a cultural practice is pushed underground, it does not disappear. It becomes more secretive, less supervised and often more socially risky.

Prohibition also tends to increase desirability. Social media does not become less tempting because it is forbidden. It becomes rebellious, status-laden and harder for parents, educators and researchers to engage with openly. Historically, prohibitionist approaches to alcohol and gambling have driven cultures of harm underground rather than eliminating them.

In the UK context, this matters. While policymakers debate bans, the same global platforms continue to operate with limited accountability, despite legislation such as the Online Safety Act. Silicon Valley companies have become too powerful to self-regulate and increasingly unwilling to act in the public interest. Decades of government-backed deregulation (or re-regulation) driven by digitisation have left platforms with unprecedented reach and minimal responsibility.

This situation is not sustainable.

Social media is a media industry, no different in principle from film, television, radio or newspapers. Yet it has grown with almost no editorial responsibility or enforceable public standards. Leaning on automated filters or AI moderation does not remove harmful content at source.

The answer is not prohibition, but stringent regulation: clearer rules, enforced transparency, content governance and meaningful oversight of how algorithms function. A ban avoids the hard questions. Regulation forces us to confront them, including how recommendation systems shape experience, and whose interests those systems ultimately serve.

Why media literacy matters

Media studies is often derided as a shallow subject lacking rigour, but digital media literacy is now essential. Understanding how algorithms work is crucial for grasping how attention is farmed, manipulated and sold.

Social media is not only informational but emotional. Platforms trade heavily in outrage, affirmation, anxiety and belonging. Media literacy must therefore go beyond recognising misinformation, fact-checking or managing screen time. It must involve an “education of the senses”. In this case, learning how to discern between commodified emotional experiences and what constitutes a genuinely flourishing online life.

This is not about teaching young people to simply resist platforms. It is about equipping them with conceptual tools to recognise how digital experiences are designed, how their feelings are being engaged, and how their attention is being steered.

If the UK government is serious about protecting young people online, it needs to regulate social media as the powerful media industry it is. It needs to educate users about how their emotional experiences are extracted and commodified. That approach is slower and more politically demanding. But it addresses the problem at its source.

Tony D Sampson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Banning social media for under-16s won’t fix the real problem – the business model of these platforms is dangerous for all of us – https://theconversation.com/banning-social-media-for-under-16s-wont-fix-the-real-problem-the-business-model-of-these-platforms-is-dangerous-for-all-of-us-275602

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Karin Rosenkilde Laursen, Postdoctoral fellow in Public Health, Aarhus University

During the winter months, when days are short and cold and nights are long and dark, creating a warm and cosy indoor atmosphere can feel especially important.

Where I live in Denmark, around 75% of the population burns candles two or more times a week, and 34% use them daily during the winter months.

In fact, Denmark is often said to be the country with the highest per-capita candle consumption in Europe. Danes burn around 5.8kg of candle wax per person per year – the equivalent of about six bags of sugar.

Yet, nice as they can look, studies show burning candles is one of the biggest sources of indoor air pollution. This is because when burning, candles emit a large number of ultrafine particles.

These particles are so small that they are invisible to the human eye, and more than a thousand times thinner than a human hair. They can remain airborne for long periods, and when candles are blown out, the concentration of these particles (including soot) increases even further.

Candles vs cooking

In our experiments conducted in exposure chambers (where the climate is controlled) at Aarhus University, we examined how indoor air is affected both by burning candles and cooking pork in an oven.

Cooking – and especially frying – is known to emit high concentrations of particles due to combustion (the process of burning something). Particles from combustion processes are among the most harmful to human health – but less is known about the role that particles emitted from candles plays when it comes to indoor air pollution.

Our research found that while both candles and cooking emit high levels of particles, the number of particles from candles was much higher. Even more significant was the difference in particle size: cooking produced particles about 80 nanometers wide, whereas candles generated particles around seven-to=eight nanometers in size – much smaller and much easier for our lungs to inhale.

We also measured chemical compounds in the air, and found that burning candles produced not only soot particles but gases such as nitrogen dioxide and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) – a group of chemicals associated with inflammation and even cancer.

The particles we breathe

Ultrafine particles are of particular concern from a health perspective. They are easily inhaled into our lungs, but research has found they are excreted from the body very slowly.

Due to their extremely small size, particles from candles can penetrate deep into our smallest airways, known as the alveoli, and may even enter the bloodstream. From there, they can reach organs such as the heart and brain.

Indeed, the particles formed when candles are burning are remarkably similar to those found in diesel exhausts in size and composition. These particles have been linked to increased mortality rates from lung and cardiovascular diseases.

In our study, we also investigated how candle burning affects young adults with mild asthma. We found subtle but measurable biological changes following exposure to candle emissions.

Some markers of airway and blood inflammation were altered, and participants reported irritation and discomfort. Other studies among healthy adults have observed small decreases in lung function, changes in arterial stiffness and heart rate, and reduced cognitive function after exposure to burning candles.

Light and dark

You might be thinking: all this from just a candle? But it’s worth remembering that people with chronic conditions like asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are far more sensitive to particulate air pollution.

Because people with these conditions already have chronically inflamed airways, even relatively low levels of pollution — including particles released by burning candles — can be enough to trigger symptoms.

Children, older adults and people with chronic illnesses are also particularly vulnerable to air pollution, due to immaturity of their lungs or weakened immune systems.

Indeed, for anyone with asthma or other respiratory conditions, the quality of indoor air is not a minor detail, but a key factor in day-to-day symptom control and long-term respiratory health.

Blow out all the candles?

But that’s not to say those without lung disease or asthma aren’t affected. As research shows, burning candles affects not only the indoor environment but potentially everyone’s health. Fortunately, a few simple steps can help maintain a healthier indoor climate.

Try using LED candles, for example, or light only a few candles at once. You should also place candles away from drafts to avoid a flickering flame, which can produce more soot and smoke. Trim your candles’ wicks to reduce soot formation, too. And candles should never be burned near (or by) people with respiratory disease.

Most importantly, air out the room afterwards by opening your windows. Such measures can help reduce the number of particles significantly, and make all the difference when it comes to keeping your cosy or hygge-time healthy.

Karin Laursen received funding from Realdania and Innovationsfonden (Denmark) to conduct exposure trials with burning candles.

– ref. That cosy candle? It’s also polluting the air you’re breathing – https://theconversation.com/that-cosy-candle-its-also-polluting-the-air-youre-breathing-269126

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Conor Boland, Assistant Professor of Materials Science, Dublin City University

A plastic drinks bottle is one of the most “recyclable” objects in the modern waste stream. It is lightweight and collected in huge volumes. Yet even for this item, the reality of recycling is messy: labels, inks, caps, food residues, colourants and the occasional wrong plastic all get bundled together. The chemistry may be simple, but the waste is not.

My team is developing a new way to deal with contaminated plastic waste. Instead of assuming perfect sorting, we start from the reality that waste streams are mixed, inconsistent and often dirty – and design chemistry that can tolerate that.

Using nanomaterial-based catalysts, we drive depolymerisation, a process that breaks plastics back into their molecular building blocks. By tuning the reaction, it becomes possible to selectively target specific plastics even in mixed or impure streams. The aim is a process built for real-world waste, not laboratory conditions.

This work matters because the scale of the problem is vast. Globally, only about 9% of plastic waste is recycled after losses and residues are accounted for. Much of the rest is sent to landfill, burned or leaks into the environment.

Recycling can look deceptively successful when you only track what gets collected.

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is the single polymer – molecular material – used in many bottles. In Europe, collection for PET drinks bottles has reached around three-quarters in recent years. But collection is only the start. What happens next determines whether plastic truly circulates or quietly exits the system.

Most PET today is recycled mechanically: the plastic is sorted, washed, melted and remoulded. This works well for clean, colourless material, but it is sensitive to contamination and additives. A small amount of the wrong polymer can weaken a batch. Dyes and stabilisers can persist. Each heating cycle can slightly reduce performance. Over time, the material drifts away from the quality required for food-grade packaging and is often downcycled into lower-value products.

That is why chemical recycling attracts attention. Instead of melting plastics into new shapes, the aim is to break the polymer back into small molecules that can be purified and used again, effectively returning it to its chemical building blocks.

Recent reviews of chemical recycling highlight both the promise and the technical challenges, especially when waste streams are mixed. The difficulty is not proving that plastics can be broken down in a laboratory. It is making that chemistry work reliably with real-world waste.

Nanomaterials are engineered at a very small scale – thousands of times thinner than a human hair – which gives them a large reactive surface area. That surface can be tuned to encourage specific chemical reactions while discouraging others, making depolymerisation faster and more controllable. Broader catalytic depolymerisation research highlights how advanced materials may help make these processes more practical at scale.

Embracing imperfections

Contamination tolerance shapes the economics of recycling. Studies in waste management show that mixed or contaminated plastics drive up recycling costs because they require extra separation and cleaning. Water, energy and labour are spent chasing purity. A chemistry that can accept dirtier inputs could shift where value is created.

When plastics cannot be recycled into new products, they are often incinerated or landfilled. A UN roadmap on plastic pollution argues that more circular approaches could significantly reduce waste and emissions. That requires seeing plastic not just as rubbish, but as stored carbon that can be redirected.

Plastics are often treated as rubbish, but chemically they are concentrated carbon and hydrogen. If those molecules can be reorganised rather than discarded, waste plastic becomes a potential feedstock for hydrogen production. Hydrogen is widely discussed as a future fuel and industrial feedstock, yet most hydrogen today is still produced from fossil fuels.

According to the International Energy Agency, global hydrogen production in 2023 emitted about 920 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. If hydrogen demand grows for industry, transport and energy storage, its carbon footprint will matter. Some emerging research explores converting plastic waste into hydrogen-rich gas using catalysts to guide the breakdown of long plastic molecules. By carefully controlling the reaction conditions, the process can favour the production of hydrogen rather than unwanted by-products.

In this way, waste plastic shifts from being purely a recycling challenge to becoming a potential feedstock for lower-carbon energy systems.

The practical test for any of these approaches is straightforward: do they keep working when feedstock changes day to day? A bale that is mostly bottles but includes trays. A batch with too much dye. A stream with traces of paper and glue.

Industrial reality is rarely tidy. If that variability can be dealt with under less than ideal conditions rather than having to eliminate it, plastic waste becomes an imperfect, but still incredibly useful, raw material. In a world where waste is inevitable, designing processes that work with the mess may prove more important than designing ones that only work without it.

Conor Boland receives funding from the Research Ireland – Gas Networks Ireland Innovation Challenge 2025 (25/FIP/GNI/14147)

– ref. Most plastic waste is contaminated – our new ‘nano’ recycling tech embraces this messy reality – https://theconversation.com/most-plastic-waste-is-contaminated-our-new-nano-recycling-tech-embraces-this-messy-reality-277103

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Anneliese Hodge, PhD Candidate, Ecotoxicology, Plymouth Marine Laboratory

Our beliefs aren’t fixed. They’re shaped, stretched and sometimes overturned by the ideas we encounter as we move through life. For many of us, novels are the moments where that shift happens.

For World Book Day, we asked ten academic experts to share a work of fiction that has challenged their assumptions and changed their thinking in a lasting way.

1. A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines (1968)

A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines showed me that my potential could not be defined by anyone but myself. The novel made me realise how easily labels from teachers and colleagues can become self-fulfilling. If you’re consistently told that you’re bad at something, you often end up believing it; like the main character Billy, and like myself, when my A-Level biology teacher told me I wouldn’t amount to anything in science and that I should quit.

Hines shows that potential isn’t determined by the people who underestimate you. Learning thrives when it is fuelled by passion and determination, and Billy’s dedication to training his kestrel Kes mirrored my own dedication to become a scientist.

The novel reminded me that the most meaningful growth happens when you trust your abilities more than the limitations other people put on you.

Anneliese Hodge is a PhD researcher in biological sciences

2. Beautiful World Where Are You? by Sally Rooney (2021)

Beautiful World Where Are You? follows the lives and loves of two friends for a period in their late 20s. It is the novel that changed my mind in relation to writing about sexual consent, at least, writing explicitly and positively about it.

I thought that consent was a subject rarely tackled by writers, unless to violate it or teach teenagers. In the latter case, it was usually done in a responsible style – not something stylish or sexy. Choosing a formative diet of 19th-century novels from the western canon undoubtedly biased my perceptions. Beautiful World shattered them. Its graphic sex scenes are peppered with the language of consent. Alright? OK? Can I? Do you want? Yes.

Rooney normalises seeking and giving clear, continuous consent, regardless of gender. Consent is integral to these scenes and part of the pleasure for characters and – if her bestseller status is any indication – readers.

Sarah Olive is a senior lecturer in English literature

3. Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2004)

I grew up Roman Catholic in an all-boys school, and I first read Purple Hibiscus as a teenager, when faith was not a question but a climate of incense, rosaries and the quiet mathematics of guilt.

The novel follows Kambili, a Nigerian teenager navigating family, politics and belief under a father whose strict Catholicism masks violence and silence. One scene, in which he pours boiling water over her feet while praying for her soul, captures that terrible fusion of devotion and control.

Across the novel, Adichie unsettled me. I had assumed to question the church was to wound God. She showed me that devotion and questioning can live in the same breath, and that faith is deepened by honest attention rather than unexamined obedience.

This insight continues to shape my thinking about identity, scholarship and everyday moral life, including on African diaspora faith and international development.

Edward Ademolu is a lecturer in cultural competency

4. The Years by Annie Ernaux (2008)

The Years by Annie Ernaux changed my mind on how a life can be narrated.

Childhood by Nathalie Sarraute had already pushed the boundaries of autobiography in 1983 by splitting the narrating self and exposing the inconsistencies of memory. Ernaux masterfully continued along that path, showing how the images and memories that shape us are at once both personal and collective.

The book’s protagonist is approached through descriptions of photographs taken over the years by family members and others. These passages are interwoven with images, events and stories cutting across generations.

What emerges is a fragmented, patchwork portrait that is able to provoke the strongest emotions – immensely more than in a narration where the illusion of the singularity of a life is maintained. And this is probably because of its strange realism, allowing proximity through impersonality. Reading it, I encountered a life as an open space, a theatre of memory where I could wander, moving in and out, getting closer or just passing by.

Cecilia Benaglia is associate professor of French and comparative literature

5. Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (2020)

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future opened my eyes. Not only to the future reality of climate change, but it also made it clear to me that my naive belief that we could engineer our way out of the problem was very far from the truth.

I’d never read a more visceral description of what living and dying in a world ravaged by climate change would feel like. When the temperature climbs and we hit 100% humidity it’s simply impossible for the human body to cool itself, leaving the power grid straining to keep up with demand as those who can afford it attempt to stay alive with air conditioning.

Nothing short of a fundamental shift in what we value and how we act as a collective can get us close to avoiding the worst consequences of the climate crisis, and whichever way we choose the world will change beyond recognition. We just have to pick which path to follow.

Richard Sulley is a senior research fellow in sustainability policy

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Read more:
Top climate books to look out for in 2026 – recommended by experts

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6. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)

In Never Let Me Go, humans are farmed so their organs can be harvested by benefactors whenever needed. The book raises numerous moral questions but the core question for me is – how far will we go to meet a human need?

History suggests that we will damage our natural environment and destroy human lives, societies and even civilisations, to meet some human needs. We face this question now regarding technology such as AI and genetic engineering. They meet human needs of quick data processing or improved health outcomes, but present untold negative risks. Our activities around fossil fuels and minerals raise similar concerns.

This core question, raised by my reading of the novel, has shaped my career. It led me to leave a career in business to retrain as a philosopher so that I could combine business theory with philosophy. I now explore ways of continuing to innovate, but do so more awake to the potential harms and perhaps to make trade-offs that favour human dignity rather than economic progress alone.

Athol Williams is a senior fellow in strategy, leadership & ethics

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Read more:
Kazuo Ishiguro said he won the Nobel Prize for making people cry – 20 years later, Never Let Me Go should make us angry

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7. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970)

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye had a deep impact on me. It changed how I understand racism. The novel shows that racism is not just built into institutions and systems. It also shapes how people see themselves and the world around them. In the book, whiteness is treated as the standard for everything – beauty, goodness, success, and even what it means to be fully human.

The novel details how Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl growing up in post-Great Depression Ohio, internalises anti-Black racism and develops a crippling inferiority complex through her desperate yearning to have blue eyes. The psychopathological effects of internalising anti-Black racism lead to Breedlove’s eventual insanity, which in a way constitutes her only protection from the misogynoir world.

What is further instructive about Morrison’s work is that it shows what literature, rather than highly technical theory, can do – connects us at a deeply emotional level, helping forge cultures of empathy and care.

Paul Giladi is a reader in philosophy

8. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871)

Middlemarch calls itself a “study in provincial life”. It traces a picture of how – even in the 19th century – shifts in religion and science created complicated webs of human relationships.

I read the novel when I was 16, an age at which few people’s ideals are taken particularly seriously. Nevertheless, its central character, Dorothea, gave me a hugely formative model of an unapologetically clever, ardent woman shut out from formal education and struggling to find a meaningful channel for the intensity of her faith. Dorothea keeps searching for meaning, no matter how often she stumbles.

Middlemarch changed my mind by teaching me a kind of consolatory optimism: that whether we place our faith in religion or science, both can set us out “with a glorious equipment of hope and enthusiasm and get broken by the way”. To persist, we need “patience with each other and the world”.

Miranda Jane Mourby is a PhD candidate in law

9. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (1966)

Back when I was 17, youthfully arrogant and thinking intelligence to be the only virtue worthy of measure, an unassuming sci-fi novel found me.

Flowers for Algernon is told through progress reports penned by the main character, Charlie. Charlie is born with a very low IQ, and is chosen to become the first human subject for an experimental treatment that enhances his IQ over time, eventually making him a genius. The treatment is not successful long term – and so what goes up must also come down.

Transhumanism is the philosophical movement in favour of transforming the human condition through technology, including enhancing cognitive abilities. Flowers for Algernon changed my naïve acceptance of the transhumanist core premises, as the novel forces you to ask instead: What makes intelligence good? Who is this enhancement for, and who does it benefit? How do we define what makes humans “better”?

In these days of tech billionaires investing in gene-editing and hailing the coming of artificial general intelligence, words from this novel still echo in my head: “Intelligence and education that hasn’t been tempered by human affection isn’t worth a damn.”

Sarah Moth-Lund Christensen is a fellow in AI and In/equality

10. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata (2016)

Whenever I’m asked if I “live to work” or “work to live”, I think of the adage: “I do not dream of labour.” My position has been troubled once, namely by Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman.

Murata’s novel follows Keiko, a convenience store worker who is socially shamed to leave her job and find a husband. Despite establishing a fake relationship with her workshy former colleague Shiraha, she still earns scorn from their respective families. Keiko ultimately leaves, determined to work at a convenience store again.

Initially, I was tempted to read this as a sad ending. Considering the novel’s critique of how society forces people into specific “norms” against their better judgement, I suddenly paused; was I missing the point?

This is not to say that the novel presents Keiko’s return to low-wage work as a fully positive thing. There is a gothic quality to Keiko’s view that she is a mere appendage of the store’s ecosystem. However, the ending made me consider: as a reader, was I adding to socially prescribed assumptions of what a “happy” ending might look like?

Lillian Hingley is a researcher and tutor in English

Has a novel ever changed your mind? Let us know in the comments below.

Richard Sulley receives funding from The Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment

Anneliese Hodge, Athol Williams, Cecilia Benaglia, Edward Ademolu, Lillian Hingley, Miranda Jane Mourby, Paul Giladi, Sarah Moth-Lund Christensen, and Sarah Olive do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The novel that changed my mind – ten experts share a perspective‑shifting read – https://theconversation.com/the-novel-that-changed-my-mind-ten-experts-share-a-perspective-shifting-read-274073

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Conor O’Kane, Senior Lecturer in Economics, Bournemouth University

In the annual State of the Union address in late February, the US president, Donald Trump, declared: “This is the golden age of America.” In a lengthy and wide-ranging address, the president told his fellow Americans that the nation was “bigger, better, richer and stronger” than ever before.

The US economy, and specifically the cost of living, was the key issue with voters in the 2024 presidential election. Exit polls from key states showed that, among voters who said the economy was the most important issue for them, 90% voted for Trump.

However, results from a more recent poll suggest voters are not happy with his economic agenda. Among the more than 2,500 adults surveyed, 57% said they disapprove of the way the president is managing the economy, 65% disapprove of the way he is handling inflation and 64% disapprove of how he is handing tariffs.

With mid-term elections coming in November, the economy is likely to continue to be a key factor with US voters. So are the president’s bold claims supported by the data?

On the president’s claim that inflation is “plummeting”, he can indeed claim success. At the start of his second term in January 2025, inflation was 3%. By January 2026, this had dropped to 2.4% and is now closing in on the 2% target set by the Federal Reserve, the US’s central bank. The rate of increase in prices is slowing and this should ease cost-of-living pressures for US consumers.

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Read more:
Trump’s attacks on the Federal Reserve risk fuelling US inflation and ending dollar dominance

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What about the claim that the US economy is “roaring like never before”? In 2025, the economy grew at 2.2%, lower than the 2.8% growth during President Joe Biden’s last year in office but above the average growth of around 2% achieved over the last few decades.

So while “roaring” might be an exaggeration, given there was a 43-day government shutdown in the last quarter of 2025 the US economy is achieving impressive growth. The International Monetary Fund expects the US to grow at the fastest rate among the world’s most advanced economies again in 2026.

Trump is often keen to cite the US stock market as an indicator of how well the country’s economy is performing. In his address he said the stock market had set “53 all-time record highs” since his election.

This is true, and in early February the Dow Jones index crossed the historic milestone of 50,000 points. Overall, the US stock market gained 19% in the period from January 2025 until February 2026. However, analysis shows that when compared to stock market returns from other advanced economies, the US ranks 21st out of 23 countries with only New Zealand and Denmark indices doing worse.

Campaigning in 2024, Trump had pledged to slash energy prices by 50%. In his address, he claimed that reductions in energy prices that were like “another big tax cut” for US consumers.

However, in the 12 months to January 2026, electricity prices rose by 6.3%, more than double the rate of inflation. Natural gas prices rose by 9.8% during the same period. Energy-hungry data centres to feed the AI boom are a key driver of US energy prices and this trend looks set to continue in the short term at least.

Job creation has historically been a key metric with US voters. On this issue the president told his audience there were more Americans working “than ever before”. With around 164 million Americans in work, this statement is true. The US is experiencing population growth, and so it is not surprising that the number of people in employment is rising.

However, the US unemployment rate was 4.3% in January 2026, a slight increase on the 4% rate in January 2025. The US added an average of 49,000 jobs per month in 2025, down from an estimated gain of 168,000 a month the year before.

Economic challenges remain

Tariffs have been the cornerstone of Trump’s second-term economic policy agenda. He even claimed they helped drive US stock market prices to historic highs, although there is little evidence to support this.

There was only a brief mention in his State of the Union speech regarding the US Supreme Court decision ruling against his liberation day tariffs, describing it as “unfortunate”.

The US government is now facing more than 2,000 lawsuits from companies looking to reclaim US$175 billion (£131 billion) in tariffs they have paid since last April. Experts agree that the situation is a mess and the uncertainty around how or whether tariffs will be applied going forward will only deepen this.

It is not surprising that tariffs are unpopular with US consumers. Research from the New York Federal Reserve found that nearly 90% of the economic burden of tariffs fell on US firms and consumers. The Tax Foundation, aou non-partisan thinktank, estimates that tariffs amounted to an average tax increase of US$1,000 per US household in 2025. The US bombing of Iran could drive up oil prices and this may fuel inflation in the coming months.

There are also rising concerns among the president’s Maga base about the potential effect of AI on jobs and energy prices. Polling for the Financial Times found about 60% of Trump voters were concerned about AI’s rapid development and almost 80% believed the technology needed more regulation.

US taxpayers are due to start receiving some of the US$4.8 trillion in tax cuts promised by the president’s One Big Beautiful Act passed in 2025. But with the midterms looming, it remains to be seen how much credit the president will get for this.

Conor O’Kane does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Donald Trump has made some bold claims on the US economy. But how do they stack up against the data? – https://theconversation.com/donald-trump-has-made-some-bold-claims-on-the-us-economy-but-how-do-they-stack-up-against-the-data-277296