When the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran nearly two weeks ago, the first confirmation didn’t come from governments. It came from commercial satellites.
Images from US companies Planet Labs and Vantor captured smoke billowing over central Tehran and ships burning at the coastal city of Konarak – evidence of strikes on naval bases, airfields and missile sites that global media confirmed within hours.
But space-based technology was not just observing the conflict, it was also a target. US officials said early strikes hit “Iran’s equivalent of Space Command”, undermining Tehran’s ability to coordinate via satellite.
Simultaneously, US Space Command and Cyber Command launched operations to jam, hack and disrupt Iranian software systems, known as “non-kinetic” attacks in the jargon of modern warfare.
Such operations are a kind of “silent sabotage”, disabling communications or corrupting GPS signals without blowing anything up with conventional “kinetic” attacks.
This combination of advanced battlefield tactics and the rapid commercialisation of space technology, as well as the erosion of the old rules-based order in general, means international law is now falling well behind.
Blurred lines of accountability
Non-kinetic tactics have quickly spilled into civilian life. In January, amid anti-government protests, and later during the first wave of strikes, Iran used GPS jamming and spoofing to disrupt Starlink terminals, which civilians and protesters depended on to stay online and share information during internet blackouts.
At the same time, commercial satellite imagery became part of the conflict itself. After Planet Lab’s images revealed Iranian retaliatory strikes on US and US-linked sites in the Persian Gulf, the company delayed releasing new imagery to avoid aiding real‑time damage assessment by Iranian forces.
On March 10, Planet Labs extended the delay time to two weeks for non-government users, but the US military still receives immediate access.
Modern warfare depends heavily on these kinds of commercial, dual-use space systems. The same satellites that time financial transactions, support hospitals and manage global logistics also guide military operations.
This blurs the traditional legal boundary between civilian and military objects and activities. The International Committee of the Red Cross has warned repeatedly that interference with satellites can harm civilians by disrupting power grids, navigation, emergency services and humanitarian operations.
Outer space is not a legal vacuum. The United Nations’ Outer Space Treaty, the UN Charter itself, and international humanitarian law all apply to warfare in orbit. But the Iran war shows how real‑world practice is advancing faster than these legal frameworks.
A proper treaty is unlikely
Dual-use satellites providing both civilian broadband and military communications also complicate decisions about what constitutes a lawful target.
Legal experts say satellites providing essential civilian services should be presumed to be non-military unless direct military use is demonstrated. But this precept is tested daily over Iran.
Another challenge is political neutrality. If a private company based in a neutral state provides data that can assist military operations elsewhere, the neutral state may face serious questions and diplomatic pressure from other governments about whether it should be held responsible.
The law has not caught up with these commercial realities. Planet Lab’s imagery delays show how companies are having to improvise policy themselves during armed conflict.
And because cyber-attacks can disable military systems without causing physical destruction, they can fall short of “armed attack” thresholds under international law. States can exploit this legal grey zone to gain strategic advantage.
New legal norms may eventually evolve out of the behaviour of governments and commercial operators rather than through formal agreements and treaties. Indeed, geopolitical tensions make a new treaty on military space operations highly unlikely.
This leaves companies, regulators and militaries to define the boundaries of acceptable conduct through their real‑time responses. The result is a battlefield where satellites shape strategy faster than lawmakers can respond.
Anna Marie Brennan 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.
Film critics – myself included – love to bemoan the death of high-quality cinema in the age of streaming, pointing to mediocre Best Picture Oscar nominees as evidence that the production of great (or even good) films is on the wane.
But perhaps things are changing. Are people sick of being inundated with short videos on TikTok and Youtube, and once again hankering for a cinematic experience? The quality of this year’s nominees suggests they are.
For the first time in a while, most of the nominated films are excellent – and nearly all of them are watchable.
Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value is my pick for the Best Picture Oscar. It’s the kind of meticulously crafted film in which the naturalism seems effortless.
The narrative follows acclaimed filmmaker Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), a quintessential Euro-auteur, who comes back into the lives of his estranged daughters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) following their mother’s death.
Gustav is making a new film, and wants his daughter Nora – an acclaimed theatre actress who has her own demons to battle (stage fright among them) – to star in it.
Nora assumes it’s a cynical manoeuvre for funding on her father’s part and refuses. So Gustav casts American star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) instead, who is immediately out of her depth.
The drama unfolds around the family home in Oslo, interweaving narratives of the home’s history across generations with the tensions plaguing its current inhabitants.
Sentimental Value has a strikingly lyrical quality. Some may say it’s overdone, but every element is so perfectly executed that it doesn’t come across as pretentious or laboured. It is, in many respects, thoroughly sentimental – yet never feels like it’s performing this as some kind of effect.
Despite its considerable formal and narrative complexity, it plays in a starkly simple fashion, thanks to the light touch of Trier, coupled with stunning cinematography by Kasper Tuxen Andersen.
The lead performances by Reinsve, Lilleaas and Skarsgård are extraordinarily convincing and, perhaps more surprisingly, Fanning is awesome as the uncomfortable American trying to please the European artiste.
Sentimental Value brilliantly weaves a sense of European social and cultural history with carefully observed character moments, becoming, by the end, a kind of treatise on the affirmative potential of art to transcend and transform interpersonal barriers.
Despite the difficulties of life, the detritus of broken promises and hearts, and the disappointments minor and not so minor, we can still come together – beautifully and wholeheartedly – through the practice of that abstract dream that is called art.
Other excellent contenders
There are a few other strong contenders – films which, any other year, would have stood out above the pack.
Bugonia
Yorgos Lanthimos is one of the most acclaimed filmmakers of the past decade, and yet his films have been hit and miss. After his last great film, the 2015 black comedy The Lobster, Bugonia marks a return to form.
The film follows bumbling paranoiac conspiracy nut Teddy (Jesse Plemons) as he and his half-witted cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) kidnap Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the CEO of pharmaceutical company Auxolith.
Fuller is the kind of ruthless business leader who appears on the cover of Forbes magazine with the caption “Breaking Barriers” and who spouts endless nonsense about diversity while her company wreaks havoc on the planet and the people around them.
According to Teddy, she is also an “Andromedon” alien sent to Earth to enslave and exploit the human population, bringing death to humans as it has been brought to the bees.
The brilliance of the film largely revolves around its manipulation of our identification with the two leads. At times Teddy seems like a lunatic serial killer, and Fuller a heroic victim. At times we empathise with Teddy, while Fuller looks like a manipulative, cold-hearted sociopath.
The whole thing builds up to an immensely satisfying resolution, suitably nihilistic and absurd in equal measure.
As is often the case with Lanthimos’ films, the figures are caricaturish, but the comedic timing – and the oscillation between humour and discomfort for the viewer – is spot on, so it works.
Sinners
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a great yarn: a well-executed rock ‘n’ roll fable slash vampire siege, full of electrifying music.
It’s 1932. Twin gangster brothers Smoke and Stack (a dual role played by Michael B. Jordan) return from working for Al Capone in Chicago to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to open up a juke joint.
Their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), a cotton picker and bluesman – with Charley Patton’s guitar – steals the show at the hugely successful opening night, fulfilling the legend of a musician who can play so well the barriers between the living and the dead come down. Everything seems to be going well – until some redneck vampires decide to assail the venue.
The whole thing is rather gaudy and silly. But like its forebear From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) – it’s so energetically (and pleasurably) handled that it doesn’t matter.
Michael B. Jordan is brilliant in the two roles, and the end result is a muscular, satisfying film that feels like a good pulp novel or comic book – capped off with a Buddy Guy jam session in the final moments.
Sinners is a delicious dream. It’s unlikely to win Best Picture; there was a time, not so long ago, when this kind of genre film wouldn’t have made it into the mix. But it’s well worth its more than two-hour runtime.
Marty Supreme
It would be hard to think of a stupider premise for a movie. In the 1950s, fast-talking entrepreneurial New York hustler Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) has to raise money so he can make it to Japan to beat world number one Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi) in the table tennis showdown of the century.
Yet, director/co-writer Josh Safdie treats the premise with enough seriousness that we end up with a high octane sports film to rival Rocky IV. This is helped by the stunning cinematography by Darius Khondji. Shot on 35mm film, the images have a rich colour and texture rarely matched in digital cinematography.
There’s also a dynamite score from Daniel Lopatin, and an anachronistic soundtrack featuring several stellar 1980s pop tunes from the likes of Public Image Limited, New Order and Tears for Fears, to name a few.
Despite Marty’s arrogance, sweet-talking, womanising, con-artistry and generally bad behaviour, Chalamet invests the character with enough pathos and humour that he comes across as a thoroughly loveable – or at least likeable – rogue.
He is a crackpot whose self-belief and willingness to do anything to achieve his dream tricks the viewer into becoming equally invested in his absurd quest as he (and the film) bounce around New York and the world like a bright ping pong ball.
Marty Supreme is an odd – and oddly arresting – film capturing something of the madness at the heart of the American dream. Mauser does whatever he can to make it to Japan. And after several escapades – and some downright brutal scenes featuring cult director Abel Ferrara as an ageing gangster – he does make it.
The rest
Unusually for the Oscars, the pack of 2026 nominees is rounded out by several other good films.
Although not as good as some of his other films, such as Neighbouring Sounds (2012) and Bacurau (2019), Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent is a rollicking political thriller. Set in the 1970s, it features a standout performance by Wagner Moura as a dissident academic evading persecution from a brutal dictatorship.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a wacky comedy occasionally masquerading as a serious political action thriller. It follows the burnt out leftist Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) as, with his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti), he evades capture by police and a militia led by the moronic Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). The whole thing is pretty silly, but like its inspiration – Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland – it is fun nonetheless.
F1 is likewise good. This finely wrought racing flick follows all of the delightfully dumb cliches of the genre. Hard-boiled and burnt-out old timer Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) makes it to Formula One for the first time, and contends with a new era of racing epitomised by his nemesis, the brash young gun Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris).
It’s hard to imagine such a film being nominated for Best Picture in any other era; Tony Scott’s Days of Thunder (1990) is equally stupid, but better made, and has been universally lampooned by critics. But people seem to be craving (and appreciating) big screen popcorn films in an era where streaming and second-screen viewing has all but destroyed commercial narrative cinema.
Only three nominees stick out as dreary
Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams is an earnest but visually unappealing Netflix film, following a ho-hum period love story about class, racism and the American Dream. Joel Edgerton is solid as usual, and the film is watchable enough, but the whole thing seems rather tired. And the digital video look really doesn’t work with the kinds of exterior, panoramic images that dominate the film.
In Frankenstein, director Guillermo del Toro takes one of the duller, more proselytising novels in the Gothic canon and gives it a suitably ponderous treatment. Oscar Isaac hams it up in full actor mode as Dr Frankenstein. Jacob Elordi is ridiculous as the monster. And Christoph Waltz as Harlander delivers such humdingers as “Can you contain your fire, Prometheus, or are you going to burn your hands before delivering it?” (in case you didn’t know, the novel’s subtitle is The Modern Prometheus).
Made for Netflix, Frankenstein tries hard to look sumptuous with period décor, but it can’t mask the sterility of its digital images. While the novel, at least, has a simple elegance to it, del Toro’s version is meandering, gaudy and cheap-looking.
It is difficult to treat Hamnet – the unbearably pretentious latest film from director Chloe Zhao – seriously, because the filmmakers do it for you. Though there are some things to like – Paul Mescal, for instance, is nice to watch, the cast are generally proficient, and the score is fine – this self-satisfied nonsense plays more like an Instagram video performing its own seriousness than a genuinely engaging feature film.
7 hits out of 10
As usual, the best films of 2025 haven’t been nominated for Best Picture (where’s Sirât, Redux Redux, or Harvest?). Nonetheless, most of this year’s nominees are films that warrant watching more than once for a variety of reasons: pleasure, complexity, nuance.
Perhaps Hollywood is starting to make good films again after decades of superhero trash. Or, at least, the Academy has started to recognise them.
Ari Mattes 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.
Over the past two years, viral clips, news headlines and TV series such as Adolescence have ensured much of the public has encountered the “manosphere” – an online ecosystem that repackages misogyny, anti-feminism and male grievance as self-improvement and hustle.
Journalist Louis Theroux is further lifting the lid on this dangerous ideology with his new Netflix documentary, Inside the Manosphere, in which he showcases the individuals driving this culture.
In his measured and sometimes risky style, Theroux traces not only the rhetoric of “high-value men”, but also the livestream formats and business models that sustain this world. The result is both illuminating and unsettling.
An insidious ideology
What emerges in Theroux’s exposé is not just provocation, but a clear misogynistic worldview. Across interviews and through influencers’ own content, we see the defence of a regressive gender hierarchy – and attempts to restore it.
Women are described as having innate value through their beauty and sexuality, yet dismissed as less rational and emotionally stable. Monogamy is framed as binding for women, but optional for men. Gender equality is blamed for cultural decline.
At times the language is openly authoritarian. Infamous influencer Myron Gaines describes himself to Theroux as a “dictator” in his romantic relationship. He casts intimacy as something he permits, and domestic care as something owed to men.
But Gaines also rejects that he is a misogynist; he claims he loves women, but that women don’t know what they want, and must be led.
The hypocrisy is striking. Several manosphere figures such as Harrison Sullivan publicly deride women who use platforms such as OnlyFans, while claiming to privately profit from managing their accounts.
Misogyny as a business model
Theroux also shows how the audiences of these influencers form.
In one early scene, young boys who look to be around tween age (with blurred faces) repeat lines about hating women and gay people with unsettling ease. Later, young adult men speak of having “no value” unless they accumulate wealth, status and dominance. Working a nine-to-five job is framed as submission to the “matrix” and the “hustle” as freedom.
The complaint that stable work no longer guarantees security will resonate with many. But in the manosphere, economic strain becomes personal failure: if you are struggling, you have not worked hard enough. This is not just ideology. It is a business model.
Subscription “academies”, private groups and coaching schemes convert insecurity into income. In one example from the documentary, we see American influencer Justin Waller promoting The Real World – an online university run by his close friend and business partner Andrew Tate (who is currently facing charges of rape and human trafficking in multiple countries).
Young men and boys are told they are deficient unless wealthy, muscular and emotionally invulnerable, and then charged for access to the mindset said to fix them. The hierarchy that elevates dominant men and denigrates women simultaneously and exploitatively monetises the boys beneath it.
The worldview is not confined to provocation. In one segment, Waller’s partner Kristen explains that she feels fulfilled staying in her “lane”, and caring for the children and home, while he occupies his role as provider and leader.
She speaks warmly of their respective “masculine and feminine energies”, presenting inequality not as constraint but as comfort – despite viewers learning she has no legal right to his wealth as they are not legally married.
Breeding ground for conspiracies
Running alongside the hustle narrative is a thread of conspiracy theorising. The “matrix” is invoked as a metaphor for societal and institutional systems said to keep men compliant and blind to alternative paths to power.
From there it darkens into talk of shadowy elites engineering cultural decline, including “moral” decline and the erosion of men’s place in the world (which they bizarrely link to the growth of pedophilia).
The “manfluencers”, notably Sullivan and Gaines, suggest recent political developments – such as the rise of President Trump – vindicate their worldview.
Theroux’s instinct is to return to the manfluencers’ own accounts of absent fathers and unstable upbringings. That humanising impulse tilts the story toward sympathy and, problematically, to trauma as a key explanation.
But misogyny does not require trauma to flourish, nor are most boys who experience hardship drawn into sexist worldviews. These ideas are ideological and structural, with long-standing gender hierarchies repackaged and broadcast at scale.
The real-life consequences
Inside the Manosphere does acknowledge harms to women, but doesn’t dwell on it very long.
One segment on schools uses news clips from English-speaking countries to signal the spread of misogynistic language among boys. But the documentary could have done more to highlight these significant manosphere-inspired flow-on effects.
Research I conducted with Stephanie Wescott and colleagues extensively documents how manosphere narratives have permeated schools internationally. This has resulted in higher levels of harassment and gender-based violence by some boys against girl peers and women teachers, eroding women’s workplace safety and girls’ participation.
Theroux is right to suggest we are all, in some sense, now living inside the manosphere. Understanding what drives the men at its centre matters – as does focusing on the real-world harms they cause.
Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere is on Netlix from today.
Steven Roberts receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is also a Board Director at Respect Victoria, but the article is written wholly independently from this role.
The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Since the beginning of the conflict involving the United States, Israel and Iran on Feb. 28, 2026, oil tanker traffic through the world’s most critical oil shipping choke point has collapsed, dropping by more than 90%.
Iran has threatened to destroy any ships, including oil tankers, that pass through the strait from the oil depots of the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea and the rest of the world. Companies that insure ships against the risks of traveling in war zones are deciding whether to issue coverage on an individual-ship basis. The international body that sets many shipping regulations has told ships’ crews that they have the right to refuse to sail into the area.
In maritime circles, these vessels are called the “shadow fleet.” They are vessels that ignore international restrictions on trade with certain countries, violate anti-pollution regulations, smuggle unauthorized goods or don’t want their cargo or activities too closely monitored.
They exist, even in a world filled with electronic tracking, because the world’s oceans aren’t governed the same way the land is. On land, armed personnel closely monitor carefully delineated borders, seeking to force everyone to follow clear rules. But at sea, regulation is almost the opposite. The system that governs international shipping is, at its foundation, voluntary.
That international agreement, which is enforced by individual countries, requires ships to leave the transponders on and active. But there is no physical mechanism preventing a crew from switching it off or broadcasting a false position.
When a vessel turns off its transponder and goes dark, it doesn’t trigger an alarm at some global maritime headquarters. There is no such headquarters. The ship simply disappears from the map. Every map.
National jurisdiction is a matter of preference, not law. Every vessel sails under the flag of a nation, and that nation is theoretically responsible for regulating and inspecting it. But in practice, a ship’s registration in a particular country is a commercial transaction. Many law-abiding shipping companies make this business decision, but this system leaves an opening for those who seek to skirt the rules.
A ship owned by a shell company in the United Arab Emirates can register under the flag of Cameroon, Palau or Liberia, or any country that may lack the resources or the incentive to conduct real inspections. Even landlocked Mongolia has a registry of oceangoing ships flying its flag.
When a vessel comes under scrutiny from port inspectors or coast guards, it can simply reregister under a different flag. Some registries even offer online registration. If the new registration is fraudulent or the registry doesn’t actually exist, the vessel effectively becomes stateless.
But companies can avoid those rules, too. Two-thirds of ships carrying Russian oil – the trade of which is restricted by the U.S. and other countries – reportedly have “unknown” insurance providers, meaning nobody knows whom to call to cover the cleanup costs after a spill or collision. The enforcement mechanism works until ship owners realize they can just opt out of it entirely, using less reputable ports or transferring oil from ship to ship out at sea.
The dark fleet did not emerge because the maritime system is broken. It emerged because the system is built on voluntary participation, all theoretically ensured by market forces.
For decades, the system worked not because it forced compliance but rather because opting out was more costly than opting in.
What changed is that international sanctions made compliance ruinously expensive and politically disastrous for some countries. A system built on voluntary participation, it turned out, could be voluntarily left.
If your national economy depends on oil exports, and the compliance system is preventing those exports, you build a parallel system. Iran began doing so in 2018, after sanctions were reimposed as part of negotiations over its nuclear development. Russia dramatically expanded that system in 2022 as restrictions hit in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine.
Now, with the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed to aboveboard maritime trade, the only vessels still moving are the ones that ignore the rules.
But the existence of the dark fleet doesn’t mean that the rules of the sea have failed. Rather, it reveals what kind of rules they always were. Illegal oil is the only oil moving in a crisis. In my view, that sends a message to those still playing by the rules: Opting out might be a viable option.
The opinions and views expressed are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent those of the Department of the Navy or the U.S. Naval War College.
Charles Edward Gehrke does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Et si on pensait le problème des espèces invasives au-delà du cadre strict de l’espèce ? En effet, les invasions biologiques interagissent étroitement avec l’écosystème local : elles peuvent modifier durablement les sols, l’eau ou encore les interactions écologiques. Nous avons développé un nouvel outil de classification pour mieux tenir compte de ces effets, encore trop souvent ignorés.
Lorsque l’on évoque les invasions biologiques, l’imaginaire collectif convoque souvent une scène de duel dramatique : un prédateur qui débarque d’un autre continent pour éradiquer une proie native. Pourtant, cette focalisation sur le risque direct d’extinction occulte une réalité bien plus insidieuse. En effet, bon nombre des invasions les plus dévastatrices ne se contentent pas d’éliminer des espèces : elles remodèlent fondamentalement l’environnement. Elles altèrent les habitats, recâblent les interactions entre espèces et modifient des processus vitaux d’une façon que les listes d’espèces menacées ne sauraient révéler à elles seules.
Prenez la chèvre, le cheval sauvage ou le cerf, introduits sur des îles où ces espèces ne sont pas natives. Leur voracité peut conduire la flore locale à l’extinction, mais leur impact s’inscrit bien plus profondément, dans la chair même du paysage.
Ces herbivores envahissants compactent les sols, accélèrent l’érosion, ouvrent les sous-bois, ce qui modifie ensuite les régimes de feux de forêt. Leur action laisse des cicatrices sur les paysages bien après que les troupeaux aient disparu. Ces bouleversements systémiques menacent la biodiversité tout aussi profondément que la perte d’une espèce.
Cependant, l’EICAT a un angle mort important : il place l’espèce au cœur de son raisonnement. Il attribue ainsi un score de sévérité global unique à un envahisseur donné, généralement basé sur le pire scénario enregistré pour toutes ses invasions connues. Intéressante pour permettre la priorisation des enjeux à l’échelle mondiale, cette approche gomme les subtilités des écosystèmes locaux, chacun possédant ses propres vulnérabilités. C’est pourquoi, dans une étude récemment publiée dans la revue PLOS Biology, nous proposons d’aller plus loin.
L’architecture invisible des invasions
De fait, les invasions biologiques génèrent un spectre d’impacts qui vont bien au-delà de la simple prédation ou compétition entre espèces considérées dans les évaluations classiques. Dans une synthèse publiée en 2025, nous avions catalogué 19 types distincts d’impacts environnementaux.
Lorsque nous avons examiné l’ensemble des impacts documentés, il est devenu évident que la plupart opèrent au niveau des communautés, des écosystèmes ou des processus physiques. 12 de ces catégories concernent des échelles plus larges que celle de l’espèce, par exemple le cycle des nutriments, la structure de l’habitat ou les propriétés physiques du sol et de l’eau, dont les impacts sont donc sous-estimés.
Sont ainsi considérés trois niveaux distincts :
celui des individus et populations (avec des impacts sur le comportement ou la santé des individus par exemple),
celui des communautés d’espèces (assemblages d’espèces et aires de distribution par exemple)
et enfin celui des écosystèmes et de leurs composantes abiotiques, c’est-à-dire physiques et chimiques non vivants de l’environnement, mais affectant les organismes vivants (la pollinisation ou le régime des feux par exemple).
Le castor est une espèce dite « ingénieur d’écosystèmes ». Max Saeling
Tous ces impacts sont documentés, étendus et souvent sévères, mais restaient encore largement ignorés par les classifications actuelles, qui se concentrent avant tout sur la perte d’espèces natives.
Cette omission est critique, car de nombreuses espèces envahissantes agissent comme des « ingénieurs des écosystèmes – par exemple, le castor. Ces organismes ne se contentent pas d’habiter un environnement donné, mais le modifient activement, influençant le destin de communautés entières.
Pour capturer cette nuance, nous avons développé dans notre dernière étude un outil complémentaire d’évaluation, que nous avons baptisé EEICAT (Extended Environmental Impact Classification for Alien Taxa, en français, classification étendue des impacts environnementaux des invasions biologiques). Autrement dit, une version étendue de l’EICAT.
L’EEICAT n’est pas un remplacement, mais une évolution de l’EICAT qui déplace le périmètre de l’espèce invasive à celle l’événement d’invasion. Il permet ainsi d’évaluer l’ensemble des 19 types d’impacts (et non seulement 12 comme précédemment).
Prenons par exemple les systèmes aquatiques envahis par les moules zébrées (Dreissena). Dans d’innombrables lacs, ces mollusques menacent les populations de moules natives par compétition et bio-incrustation (aussi appelé biofouling, qui correspond à la colonisation biologique des surfaces sous-marines, par exemple la surface immergée des navires).
Moules zébrées (Dreissena polymorpha) installées sur une moule endémique.
Cette compétition avec les moules natives est bien capturée par les évaluations standard. Mais celles-ci ignorent qu’elles transforment l’eau elle-même. En filtrant massivement les particules, ces moules invasives réduisent la turbidité, altèrent les cycles des nutriments et déclenchent des changements en cascade dans la végétation et les réseaux trophiques (c’est-à-dire, les chaînes alimentaires).
L’EEICAT permet alors de cartographier, avec un cadre unique, à la fois les effets directs portés à la biodiversité et la réingénierie écosystémique du lac.
Une logique similaire s’applique pour les espèces terrestres. La fourmi d’Argentine (Linepithema humile), par exemple, est connue pour complètement éliminer les nombreuses fourmis natives des régions envahies. Mais son influence est bien plus profonde. En perturbant les mutualismes anciens entre plantes et insectes, ces envahisseurs altèrent la dispersion des graines, la pollinisation, les assemblages d’invertébrés et même les processus du sol.
La fourmi d’Argentine, accidentellement propagée dans le monde du fait du commerce international, est une espèce invasive de fourmi particulièrement agressive envers les autres espèces de fourmis. Alex Wilde (réutilisation interdite sans autorisation)
Ces effets indirects au niveau communautaire varient considérablement selon le climat et l’intégrité de l’écosystème récepteur, si bien que chaque invasion pourra manifester des effets différents. Avec l’EEICAT, on peut désormais les prendre en compte.
Des invasions variables en fonction du contexte, même pour un même envahisseur
Ce sont probablement les invasions biologiques touchant le règne végétal qui plaident le plus pour une telle approche centrée sur l’invasion et non l’envahisseur. Les espèces d’Acacia, introduites mondialement, agissent comme des caméléons écologiques. En Afrique du Sud, elles saturent les sols en azote et assèchent les cours d’eau, supprimant agressivement la flore native du Fynbos.
En France méditerranéenne, l’impact se déplace : l’Acacia argenté (Acacia dealbata, appelé aussi Mimosa d’hiver), très inflammable, modifie radicalement le régime des feux. Par l’accumulation de litière, il crée une « échelle de feu », qui permet aux flammes de monter dans la canopée. Il rend de ce fait les incendies beaucoup plus difficiles à maîtriser.
De plus, le passage du feu lève la dormance de ses graines : une zone brûlée voit souvent une explosion de mimosas, rendant la zone encore plus inflammable pour l’avenir. Cet arbre invasif perturbe également l’hydrologie locale par une consommation d’eau excessive qui réduit le débit des nappes de surface en période estivale. L’EECIAT permet de documenter ces contrastes, où chaque preuve contextuelle redéfinit la sévérité de l’invasion.
Adopter l’EEICAT n’implique pas de réinventer la roue. Il est possible de l’appliquer aux études d’impact existantes déjà produites au cours des dernières décennies. Il est d’ailleurs organisé selon les cinq mêmes niveaux de sévérité que l’EICAT, avec une échelle allant de préoccupation minimale à impact massif, avec les mêmes règles. Cette rétrocompatibilité permet de réinterpréter de façon plus large et plus précise l’histoire écologique des invasions.
Parce que l’EEICAT est basé sur l’invasion, et non sur l’espèce, il permet de rendre compte des différentes façons dont une espèce invasive peut avoir des effets en fonction des écosystèmes, comme l’acacia, ou encore comment plusieurs envahisseurs peuvent cumuler les pressions sur un même écosystème. Ce sont des enjeux que des scores globaux ne savaient jusqu’à aujourd’hui pas articuler.
Les invasions biologiques ne se résument pas à la perte d’espèces : elles sont aussi une réécriture silencieuse des écosystèmes. De la chimie du sol au rythme des feux de forêt, leurs impacts résonnent dans l’environnement bien après leur arrivée. En embrassant le cadre EEICAT, nous pouvons enfin capturer toute l’ampleur de ce que les invasions biologiques font réellement aux écosystèmes, et adapter nos stratégies de gestion aux réalités complexes du monde vivant, invasion par invasion.
Créé, en 2007, pour aider à accélérer et à partager les recherches scientifiques sur des enjeux sociaux majeurs, le Fonds d’Axa pour la recherche soutient près de 700 projets dans le monde mené par des chercheurs issus de 38 pays, dont celui de Franck Courchamp. Pour en savoir plus, visiter le site ou bien sa page LinkedIn.
Franck Courchamp a reçu des financements du Fond AXA pour la Recherche.
Laís Carneiro a reçu des financements du Fond AXA pour la Recherche.
But that claim misses two key points. First, while Canada as a whole might gain from higher oil prices as a net energy exporter, those gains are unevenly distributed across sectors and provinces. Second, the mechanism that softened that pain — a stronger Canadian dollar — has weakened.
When crude prices rise, Alberta and Saskatchewan collect more royalties, and energy company revenues climb. For that slice of Canada, conflict in the Persian Gulf can bring economic benefits.
Yet windfall gains are also constrained by infrastructure. Pipeline capacity and production limits mean Canadian producers cannot expand quickly when global prices surge.
For most Canadians, the picture is simpler and less pleasant. Higher oil prices means higher costs not only at the pump, but also gradually in grocery stores and heating bills, and reduced purchasing power.
Economists typically analyze oil shocks through four transmission channels: terms of trade, income, costs and monetary policy.
The first is the terms-of-trade channel. Because Canada exports more energy than it imports, higher oil prices mean the country earns more for its exports relative to what it pays for imports. That improves Canada’s purchasing power in global markets.
The second is the income channel, which determines who receives those gains: higher oil prices raise producers’ revenues and governments’ royalties, concentrating much of the windfall in oil-producing regions and among shareholders.
The fourth is the monetary policy channel, which often shapes the broader economy. Central banks like the Bank of Canada aim to keep inflation near a stable target. If rising oil prices keep inflation elevated for long enough, policymakers may delay interest rate cuts or keep borrowing costs higher.
Perhaps the most consequential shift over the past decade is the changing relationship between oil prices and the Canadian dollar.
As noted by the Bank of Canada, for most of the 2000s and early 2010s, the Canadian dollar behaved like a petrocurrency. When oil prices rose, the loonie often strengthened as well.
A stronger currency made imported goods cheaper and helped offset some of the inflationary pressure from higher gasoline and energy prices. The exchange rate acted as a natural shock absorber.
That cushion has weakened substantially. Research by Alberta Central, CIBC Capital Markets and several economists all point out that the relationship between oil prices and the Canadian dollar weakened in the mid-2010s and continues to remain weak.
Rolling correlation between oil prices and the CAD-USD exchange rate from 2000 to 2025. (Author provided), CC BY
Second, energy companies are now more likely to return profits to shareholders through dividends and buybacks than to launch new projects. However, many of those shareholders are foreign investors, and even domestic holders, such as pension funds, distribute returns across global portfolios.
As such, the reinvestment of oil windfalls back into the Canadian economy has declined significantly compared to the investment-led boom years of the 2000s. Other factors, like the rise of U.S. shale, have also weakened the oil-currency link.
The practical consequence is that when oil spikes today, Canadians absorb more of the inflationary impact and receive less of the offsetting currency benefit they did a decade ago. For Canada, war-driven oil price spikes are therefore less a national windfall than a redistribution across sectors, provinces and from consumers to energy producers.
With the Canadian dollar no longer rising alongside oil as it once did, price spikes now translate more directly into higher living costs for Canadians.
The author would like to thank Vinh Nguyen, a research assistant and undergraduate student at MacEwan University’s School of Business, for her contribution to this article.
Subhadip Ghosh 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.
For all the parallels to history, though, Trump’s Iran war is historically unique in one critically important way: In its early stages, the war is not popular with the American public.
A recent CNN poll found that 59% of Americans oppose the war – a trend found in poll after poll since the war began.
As an expert on U.S. foreign policy and regime change wars, my research shows that what’s likely generating public opposition to the Iran war today is the absence of a big story with a grand purpose that has bolstered public support for just about every major U.S.-promoted regime change war since 1900. These broad, purpose-filled narratives generate public buy-in to support the costs of war, which are often high in terms of money spent and lives lost when regime change is at stake.
Likewise, in the 2000s a dominant narrative about preventing a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and stopping terrorism brought strong initial public support for the war in Afghanistan, with 88% support in 2001, and the war in Iraq, with 70% support in 2003.
With no comparable narrative around Iran today, Trump and Republicans could face big problems, especially as costs continue to rise.
No anti-Iran narrative
Iran has been a thorn in the side of many American presidents for a long time. So, what’s missing? Why no grand-purpose narrative at the start of this war?
A U.S. Army carry team in Dover, Del., moves a coffin on March 7, 2026, containing the remains of a U.S. soldier killed in the retaliatory Iranian strike on Kuwait’s Port of Shuaiba. Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images
Gains like these by rivals prove traumatic to the nation. They also dislodge the status quo and provide the opportunity for new grand-purpose narratives with new policy directions to emerge.
Today, most Americans see no existential danger around Iran. A Marist poll from March 3, 2026, found that 55% of Americans view Iran as a minor threat or no threat at all. And the number who see Iran as a major threat, 44%, is down from 48% in July 2025.
By contrast, 64% of Americans saw Iraq as a “considerable threat” prior to the 2003 U.S. war in Iraq.
In the summer of 2025, Iran’s nuclear nuclear enrichment facilities were significantly damaged – “completely and totally obliterated,” according to Trump, though there is no confirmation of that claim – during the 12-Day war between Iran and Israel.
As the polls show, none of that has sparked a grand-purpose narrative.
Missing a good story
The second missing factor for narrative formation today is any strong messaging from the White House.
In the months prior to World War II, Roosevelt used his position of authority as president to give speech after speech, setting the context of the traumatic events of the 1930s, explaining the dangers at hand and outlining a course going forward. Though less truthful in its content, Bush did the same for nearly two years before the Iraq War.
Trump did almost none of this storytelling leading up to the Iran war. Five days before the war started, the president devoted three minutes to Iran in a nearly two-hour State of the Union Address.
Prior to that, he made a comment here and there to the press about Iran, but no storytelling preparing the nation for war. Likewise, since the war began, the administration’s stated reasons for military action keep shifting.
By comparison, Americans approved of Bush’s handling of foreign policy by 63% in early 2003.
Absent a cohesive, unifying story, it’s also no surprise there is lots of political fracturing today.
Partisan divides run deep – Democrats and independent voters strongly oppose the war. But Trump’s MAGA coalition is cracking too, with people like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene sharply criticizing the war.
The way out
If he opts for it, there is an off-ramp for Trump from the Iran war. It’s one he knows well.
When U.S. leaders get caught up in costly regime change wars that outrun national support, they tend to back down, often with far fewer political costs than if they’d continued their unpopular war.
When the disaster referred to as Black Hawk Down hit in Somalia in 1993, killing 18 U.S. Marines, President Bill Clinton opted to end the mission to topple the warlords that ruled the country. Troops came home six months later.
Likewise, after the Benghazi attack killed four Americans in Libya in 2012, Obama pulled out all U.S. personnel working in Libya on nation-building operations.
And just last year, when Trump realized that U.S. ground troops would be necessary to topple the Houthi militant group in Yemen, he negotiated a ceasefire and ended his air war in that country with no significant political fallout.
When US and Israeli forces launched airstrikes on Iran, the shock waves were felt far beyond the region. As the conflict escalates, understanding who benefits from this crisis might be as important as counting its costs.
The timing could hardly be worse for the UK economy. Official forecasts for GDP growth in 2026 had already been downgraded to 1.1% before a single missile was fired. Predictions that inflation might dip now look optimistic; and expectations of an interest rate cut on March 19 have fallen sharply.
The energy shock is immediate. Tanker traffic in the strait of Hormuz has fallen by around 90%. Qatar, the world’s second largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, halted production indefinitely. Although the UK sources little gas directly from the Gulf, energy markets are global so UK households could see more than £500 added to their annual bills.
For defence stocks, however, the picture is different. London-based BAE Systems surged around 6% on the first day of the conflict. And the American defence industry seems determined to quadruple production of some weapons.
Peace benefits ordinary citizens, small businesses, global supply chains and the planet’s climate trajectory. The beneficiaries of war are more concentrated.
One of the most uncomfortable truths about this conflict is that while it inflicts pain on some, it creates windfalls for others. In my co-authored research, we call this the “paradox of incentives”. Determining who benefits is essential to understanding why wars persist long after it may seem rational to stop.
Defence contractors and the arms economy
On Wall Street, defence firms including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and RTX rose between 4% and 6% on the first day of the strikes. The three firms’ combined shareholder gain on that one day was US$25–30 billion (£18.7-£22.5 billion).
In Israel, Elbit Systems briefly became the country’s most valuable listed company, with its shares up 45% since January. In Europe and the UK, defence stocks surged against a falling FTSE 100.
The rally ‘round the flag effect
Wars may also be good for incumbent politicians in the short term. Before the strikes began, the fallout from the release of the Epstein files was reverberating globally, and piling scrutiny on to many with connections to the White House. Within hours of the first strikes, web searches for the Epstein files collapsed.
But perhaps the most counterintuitive application of the paradox concerns Iran itself. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) controls up to half of Iran’s oil exports. Its engineering arm, Khatam al-Anbiya, has become one of the largest contractors in the country, controlling construction, telecoms, agriculture and energy.
Economic sanctions designed to weaken Tehran have actually entrenched the power structures they were meant to erode. As foreign firms exited and domestic companies struggled, IRGC-linked entities used access to informal trade routes, currency controls and security networks to expand their dominance.
At the same time, according to the World Bank, close to 10 million ordinary Iranians fell into poverty between 2011 and 2020 as the sanctions tightened.
The energy windfall
The oil and gas price shock is already providing a windfall in unexpected places. The US could benefit as Europe’s reliance on American energy exports, accelerated by the Ukraine war, grows even more.
For the Gulf petrostates, the picture is nuanced. Saudi Arabia and the UAE together hold a huge share of the world’s spare production capacity. They face real costs from the conflict, but their exposure to the Hormuz closure is lower than neighbours Kuwait, Qatar and Iraq. Both countries built bypass pipelines specifically to export oil without transitting the Strait.
And for Russia, the war diverts price-sensitive buyers such as India and China away from competing suppliers in the Gulf.
The green transition
Higher oil and gas prices make new fossil fuel extraction more commercially attractive. The same crisis that bolsters the case for renewables also makes fossil fuels more profitable. This could slow the transition by redirecting attention back towards oil and gas.
In our research, we argue that breaking the paradox of incentives is possible. But it would require the financial interests of powerful actors like those mentioned above to become aligned with solutions. In the context of this conflict, that principle points towards four routes.
The first would be a windfall tax on companies benefiting exceptionally from wars. The UK already has a precedent: its energy profits levy hits oil and gas profits above a set threshold until 2030. Although this levy has come under fire recently, there is a strong case for extending its principles to defence contractors whose share prices and profits surge during conflicts.
For oil-producing nations, a release of emergency stocks coordinated by the International Energy Agency (IEA) could cap price spikes. This happened in 2022 when IEA member countries released 60 million barrels from strategic reserves. The G7 nations have now said they “stand ready” to do this.
On the political side, democratic accountability, independent economic institutions and a free press all narrow the window within which leaders can exploit wartime popularity. These things can’t always be changed from the outside however, and underline the need for robust domestic institutions.
The green transition paradox is perhaps the hardest to address in the short term, but it is also where the fix is clearest. It has been argued that the more dependent economies become on the profits of war through arms exports, fossil fuel revenues or defence procurement, the harder it becomes to divert funding and attention to climate issues.
The solution is not to stop countries defending themselves – but to ensure that the transition to a green and secure energy system proceeds, precisely because of crises like this one.
The costs of this war are already being counted in energy markets. Before long, they will show up in national and household budgets. What makes this crisis particularly hard to resolve is the paradox at its heart: the actors best placed to end it are among those with the most to gain from its continuation.
Jagannadha Pawan Tamvada 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.
Would it be obvious if artificial intelligence (AI?) created your new favourite song?
Millions of listeners have recently encountered that question through a viral Afro-soul cover of Papaoutai, the 2013 hit by Belgian artist Stromae. The cover has skyrocketed in popularity across streaming platforms and social media.
But unknown to most audiences, it was created using AI, according to Deezer, a French music-streaming service.
The Afro-soul cover highlights a growing challenge — the difficulty identifying when generative AI has been used in production — and how audiences, platforms and artists are struggling to respond.
Some 12 years later, in December 2025, an Afro-soul cover of Papaoutai was uploaded to Spotify. While it’s hard to track the exact reach of the song due to various removals and re-uploads on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, the song currently has almost 80 million streams on Spotify.
The authorship of the Afro-soul version is commonly attributed to mikeeysmusic — a Swedish musician with a verifiable social media presence and discography — Chill77, whose identity is difficult to verify, and Unjaps, an independent record label. None of the artists have made a public statement about the controversy.
Why does all of this matter? Most music platforms lack clear labelling for AI music, and this places the difficult task of identification on listeners.
Identifying AI use in music production
AI-generated music has become a very broad category. As machine learning engineer and researcher Christopher Landschoot argues, the term AI-generated music “is casually tossed around whether AI is used to emulate an effect, automatically mix or master, separate stems, or augment timbre. As long as the final audio has been touched in some way by AI, the term gets slapped on the entire piece.”
It’s hard to tell how and to what extent AI was used in the making of the cover of Papaoutai. Did mikeeysmusic and Chill77 upload Stromae’s original song into an AI program, like OpenAI’s Sora, give it a command and upload the AI-generated result? Did they train an AI program on the vocals of another musician, Arsene Mukendi, to generate choir vocals? Or was the cover an iterative process where the artists fine-tuned and edited the output?
Does it matter when the lyrics and melody were written by someone else?
Identifying AI use in music is difficult, even for scholars like us who study generative AI. A study published by Deezer-Ipsos, which surveyed 9,000 people across eight countries, found that 97 per cent of people couldn’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and human-authored music.
A big contributor to the confusion is the lack of response from platforms. While Bandcamp has taken a clear anti-AI stance and works to keep AI-generated music off the platform entirely, other platforms like Spotify have gestured towards governance changes but largely allowed AI music to rack up streams without clearly disclosing the use of AI.
The popularity of short-form videos (like on TikTok), in which users encounter uncontextualized song snippets, further propels the prominence of AI-generated music.
“If listeners cannot tell the difference — and if platforms decline to tell them — then consent becomes impossible.”
Emotional responses on social media
In comment sections, audiences are often surprised to learn that the song was created using AI. Many have praised the cover, describing it as “a lot more instrumental, emotional and grand.”
“I’m actually so sad it [is AI]-generated. It sounds wonderful, but I personally can not support [AI] taking over creative industries such as music and art. And I know there are plenty of African choirs who could have nailed the vision without the use of [AI].”
Whether audiences choose to listen to AI-generated music is often framed as a moral decision. This is complicated, however, when it becomes increasingly difficult to discern what music is AI-generated or how generative AI was used in its creation.
According to the same Deezer-Ipsos study, 73 per cent of people surveyed “think it’s unethical for AI companies to use copyrighted material to generate new music without clear approval from the original artist.”
Stromae has remained quiet on the issue so far, with audiences speculating about his response to what some see as an AI appropriation of a very personal song written about his father, who died in the Rwandan genocide.
Many English-speaking users, unaware of this context, have used the heavy drums of the Afro-soul version to soundtrack everything from fashion haul videos to comedy shorts. As one TikToker asked:
“Did you ever think that the song about losing your father in the Rwandan genocide would be used, in your lifetime, to post gym thirst traps?”
AI as a tool for remixing
Artists have been grappling with the possibilities and concerns of AI use in music production, but there has been a precedent for “playing” with original songs.
On the legal side, all seems above board — at least in France. In the case of the Papaoutai cover, the French Society of Authors, Composers and Music Publishers has upheld its legality. They note that Stromae is “properly credited” and that royalties will be shared between Stromae and the record label that produced the cover.
So is it remix? Maybe. Is it legal? Apparently.
But as seen in this example, audiences still struggle with songs extracted from their original context and created with AI technologies, which are themselves inherently extractive.
Does this context shift the perception of this song as a form of extractive remix production?
The Afro-soul cover of Papaoutai illustrates how quickly AI-generated music can circulate. It also signals an increasing amount of debate as artists, audiences, and platforms navigate the future of AI-generated music.
Cate Cleo Alexander has received funding from SSHRC (Doctoral Canadian Graduate Scholarship) and is a member of the Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) project.
Lauren Knight receives funding from SSHRC (Doctoral Canadian Graduate Scholarship) and is a member of the Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) project.
Vietnam War veterans are suing to block construction of United States President Donald Trump’s proposed triumphal arch in Washington, D.C., arguing that it would detract from the solemnity of nearby Arlington Cemetery.
Having demolished the White House’s East Wing and shuttered the renamed Kennedy Center for “complete rebuilding,” Trump plans to install what he calls an Independence Arch to mark the country’s 250th anniversary this July.
Since Trump’s re-election, Catesby Leigh of the Claremont Institute — a California think tank at the forefront of the “MAGA new right” — has urged him to erect a classical arch to proclaim the “universal significance” of the Declaration of Independence.
Trump embraced the idea. A patriotic landmark would complement his efforts to purge what he called “improper ideology” from Washington institutions like the Smithsonian museum and the National Zoo.
A grand monument would also serve one of the top priorities of the current government: gratifying the president’s ego. When asked who the arch is for, Trump was honest: “Me.”
But the project professes a nobler mission. Trump’s executive order to “make federal architecture beautiful again” praised the Founding Fathers’ use of neoclassicism to “visually connect” the American republic “with the antecedents of democracy” in ancient Athens and Rome.
As a historian who studies the French Republic’s slide into military dictatorship in the early 19th century, what troubles me about this rationale is that there is nothing inherently democratic about arches.
If he had a Roman forebear, it was the humble farmer Cincinnatus rather than Julius Caesar, whose insatiable ambition toppled the republic and laid the foundation for empire.
Under the Republic (509 BCE to 27 BCE), the Roman Senate rewarded victorious generals and their armies with triumphs, celebratory processions under temporary wooden arches. The enduring marble arches of Titus, Septimius Severus and Constantine, meanwhile, were erected during the Empire (27 BCE – 476 CE) to glorify their imperial namesakes.
Art historian Kirk Savage notes that early Americans preferred to honour exemplars of civic virtue with “words, not stones or statues.” The nation’s capital already bore Washington’s name — no need to sully it by aping Roman tyrants.
The American republic developed what R. Grant Gilmore, a specialist in historic preservation, calls a “clear, democratic architectural language” that spurned the strident jingoism of Roman monuments.
As later generations warmed to the idea of honouring the country’s great men on the National Mall, the capital’s designers continued to embrace neoclassicism while eschewing triumphal arches.
Instead, they favoured obelisks (the Washington Monument) and temples (the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials), which foreground public service and national unity.
When Trump visited Paris in 2017, he was so impressed by the country’s Bastille Day demonstration of “military might” that he instructed his advisers to “top it.”
When Trump hosted his own parade in June 2025, it coincided with two birthdays: the U.S. Army’s 250th and his own 79th. He then set his sights on the Arc de Triomphe, which anchors the Bastille Day parade on the Champs-Elysées.
In 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew France’s First Republic by donning a Caesarean laurel wreath. The next year, Emperor Napoleon commissioned a Roman-style arch to mark his Grande Armée’s victory at Austerlitz. Its foundation stone, dedicated to “Napoleon the Great,” was laid on his birthday in 1806.
Empire-building is a recurrent theme. London’s Wellington Arch stands as imperial Britain’s post-Waterloo refutation of Napoleonic invincibility. Benito Mussolini’s Arch of the Philaeni in colonial Libya featured engravings of Il Duce (“the Leader”) resurrecting the Roman Empire.
The meaning of arches, however, can evolve. After the First World War, the U.K. installed New Delhi’s India Gate as a tribute to Commonwealth casualties. Since India’s independence, it has anchored the country’s Republic Day celebrations as its National War Memorial.
The focus of Napoleon’s triumphal arch has likewise shifted to include both fallen soldiers and the victims of French imperialism. Since 1920, the Arc de Triomphe has housed France’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. In 1999, a plaque acknowledged that the Algerian War (1954-1962) was an actual war, not a “pacification operation.”
Critics have expressed concerns about the proposed arch’s regulatory oversight, funding and impact on existing commemorative spaces. But another pressing question relates to its symbolism.
Is this truly the message the Trump government wants to send as the American republic prepares to mark a major milestone?
Kelly Summers 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.
