On November 25, 1970, the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima (and four members of his Shield Society, Tatenokai, a private militia manned largely by right-wing university students) seized the general in charge of the Ichigaya military base. After an attempt to free the general was repelled, Mishima was allowed to address the base’s soldiers. But his call, given—in keeping with coup etiquette—from a balcony, to overthrow the constitution and return to an older Japanese order was greeted with jeers, not cheers.

Mishima stepped back inside and committed seppuku, ritual suicide (or, as it was topped off with beheading by a kaishakunin, assisted suicide), which was probably how he had expected the day to end. And that wasn’t so bad. His death wish was satisfied, and, despite the beheading needing some mulligans, he had staged a spectacle so dramatic and freighted with meaning that its memory would endure, he hoped, as an inspiration to future generations.

When I see epic, self-inflicted disasters crowned by poor planning, slovenly, often outdated thinking, remarkable carelessness, and predictions of victory that are little more than slogans, the qualities of leadership that led to World War I — and the way that it was fought — have a way of coming to mind. They did so, for example, during the pandemic, and they do so when contemplating the pointless “race” to net zero.

And so, when thinking about the crisis dramatically deepened by “liberation” day, I recalled “The General,” a poem from 1917 by Siegfried Sassoon…

April 2 will be “liberation day for America” as President Donald Trump unveils his tariff hikes, he promised — one of the “most important days in modern American history,” according to Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

Trump will say what he’s going to say, but the basic picture he paints has not changed for decades, although the role of principal villain may do so (in the 1980s, it was Japan). Leavitt sets it out again: A lack of reciprocity has contributed to a “large and persistent annual trade deficit that’s gutted out industries and hollowed out key workforces.” This, the president says, will now change.

Britain’s Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (good luck with combining those) Ed Miliband has been working to accelerate the rate at which Britain runs the “race” to net zero since assuming office after the Labour party’s election victory in July 2024. Part of that acceleration will involve decarbonizing 95 percent of the U.K.’s electricity grid by 2030, an impossible objective. The people, equipment, and resources are not there. Nevertheless, the disconcertingly exuberant Miliband exudes the confidence of a Soviet central planner of the high Stalinist era, convinced that determination, coercion, and the arc of history will overcome all obstacles…

If the Labour Party won the United Kingdom’s July 2024 general election, promised Keir Starmer in June, it would “relight the fire” of optimism in Britain. Well, it went out. According to one recent poll, three-quarters of Britons think that the country is going in the wrong direction. According to another, 62 percent disapprove of the job the government is doing. Six months after Tony Blair had won a similarly lopsided parliamentary majority, in 1997, one poll found that 52 percent were satisfied with his government and 70 percent with Blair himself.

Wait, what?

In the third quarter Argentina’s GDP grew by 3.9 percent over the previous quarter, more than the 3.4 percent that was expected. This follows earlier signs of improvement and reinforces hopes of strong growth next year, albeit from a deep trough. Year-on-year, the quarterly numbers still show a decline of 2 percent (compared with the third quarter of 2023), but recovery must start somewhere…

We should not, or so we are told, judge a book by its cover, but when that book is an “Atlas of Finance”—and one of the two people featured on its cover, a clever tribute to banknotes, is Karl Marx (the other, reassuringly, is Adam Smith)—it’s reasonable to think that the image hints at what may be lurking inside….

ean McMeekin is a historian perhaps best known for his revisionist accounts of the Russian Revolution and World War II. He’s not afraid of a challenge. Nevertheless, while his thought-provoking new book, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, is well worth reading, it does not quite deliver — presumably, in part, for reasons of space — on the immense promise implicit in its subtitle. Moreover, the second “rise” of communism (if that’s what it is) turns out to be far from its second coming, which would otherwise be a not inappropriate phrase to use. Even in the secular form it has taken since Karl Marx’s time, communism is a religion in all but name, and one with obvious millenarian overtones…

Germany has slipped deeper into crisis with the collapse of its governing coalition. An unlikely union between the center-left SPD, the Greens, and the free-market(ish) FDP never made much intellectual sense, but the parliamentary arithmetic worked, so that was that.

And that was then.

Until gang warfare and the bombings that went with it broke Sweden’s calm (the consequences of recent mass immigration have proved rougher-edged than many Swedes chose to expect), the Nordic region had for a long time been renowned for its tranquility, making it somewhat surprising that it gave birth to Nordic noir, a genre of thriller often as chilly as the realm from which it emerged. Each Nordic country has its leaders in this field, and in Norway the top dog is Jo Nesbø, hip, stylish, something of a polymath (soccer player, stockbroker, musician), and the best-selling Norwegian author of all time, renowned above all for a series of often brutal stories (recommended) featuring Harry Hole, a brilliant, awkward Oslo detective with a fondness for the bottle…