Armchair strategist. No formal qualifications in geopolitics, economics, military strategy, or finance. Opinion and analysis only — not investment or policy advice. I have been wrong before and will say so when I am.
On Method Written in collaboration with my favourite LLM. Editorial direction and final judgement are mine.
A Note Before the Argument
This is the hardest post I have ever written and I want to say so plainly before I write it.
Every word that follows is going to feel wrong while I am writing it, and is going to feel wrong to many readers while they are reading it, because the entire argument is structured against something that evolution has spent two hundred thousand years training us to do. We are wired to respond to images of dead children with immediate, total, action-now urgency. That wiring is not a defect. It is what kept the species alive. In the ancestral environment, the dead child was your child or your sister's child or the child of someone in your band of forty people, and the action required was within your agency. Grief was diagnostic. Anger was instrumental. The wiring served the survival function.
The wiring is now being exploited by media systems whose images and policy domains have no biological overlap. The child in the photograph is six thousand miles away. The policy response is mediated through political institutions you do not personally control. The action your evolutionary wiring is demanding cannot be taken, because the action it is demanding is do something now, immediately, with your own hands, and there is nothing your own hands can do. The grief and the anger have nowhere to discharge. They accumulate. They radicalise. They produce demands for policy responses that the political system then has to either deliver or pretend to deliver. The pretending becomes the politics. The deliverable policies become the disasters.
This is not a defect of the public. This is a feature of how evolution wired us interacting with media systems we did not evolve for. The radicalisation is rational at the individual level. Each reader who sees an image of a dead child and feels their gut clench is responding correctly to the stimulus their nervous system was built to receive. The radicalisation is also catastrophic at the collective level, because the policies that emerge from millions of such individually-rational responses are policies built on a category error.
The category error is the subject of this post. I am going to argue that anecdotal images of suffering should not drive policy. I am going to argue this knowing that my readers' evolutionary wiring is going to fight every sentence. I am going to use the framework as a way of asking the reader to consciously override the wiring with deliberation. This is hard. It is hard for me. It is hard for you. I do not pretend otherwise.
I am also going to argue, eventually, that every dead child has a state that owes them accounting, and that the failure of states to discharge their accounting is what produces the conditions under which these images can be used to manipulate publics whose own states are functioning correctly. That argument is sharper and harsher than the typical commentary on these images allows. The framework demands the sharpness. I will not soften it.
The reason all of this is worth writing despite the difficulty is the alternative. The alternative is the politics we have, where atrocity images circulate without analytical framework and produce policy disasters that compound the original atrocity. Europe doomed itself on migration policy. America keeps making the same Middle East mistakes. India tears itself apart on whataboutery. The framework is the way out. Or at least it is one possible way out. Hence the title.
What This Justifies
The framework is hard to write because the wiring resists it. The framework matters anyway because the alternative is what we have.
What we have is whataboutery as the engine of political violence at planetary scale. The mechanism is consistent across cases. An image of suffering circulates. The image short-circuits deliberation in the receiving public. The public demands action. The state cannot act in ways that would actually address the underlying suffering, because the suffering is happening in a jurisdiction the state does not control. The state's options collapse to two — perform action that fails to address the suffering but satisfies the public's emotional demand, or refuse to act and absorb the political consequence. Both options leave the underlying grievance unaddressed. The grievance compounds. New images circulate. The cycle accelerates.
Inside this cycle, whataboutery becomes the conversational instrument by which the cycle's participants justify increasingly extreme responses. What about their dead children? is the verbal form of the radicalisation. It is used to justify suicide bombings. It is used to justify assassinations of elected representatives. It is used to justify campaigns of suppression against domestic dissent. It is used to justify rounds of violence that produce more dead children, more images, more whataboutery, more violence. The pattern has been running across multiple jurisdictions for decades and it produces consistent outputs. Northern Ireland for thirty years. Israel-Palestine for seventy-five. Kashmir for thirty. The Balkans through the 1990s. Sri Lanka through the 2000s. Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya. Each case has its own specifics. Each case runs the same engine.
The other thing worth naming, before the section closes, is that the engine is not inevitable.
Some populations have absorbed atrocities of the most extreme kind and converted them into civilisational improvement. Germany after 1945. Japan after the same year. Rwanda after 1994. Each of these populations went through suffering that any framework would acknowledge as foundational. Each made specific choices about what to do with the suffering afterward. The choices produced constitutional architectures designed to prevent recurrence, civic cultures explicitly anti-pathological, economic and political integration with former adversaries, and remembrance practices that honour the dead without making the dead into instruments for continued violence. None of these conversions was complete or perfect. All of them are demonstrably better than the alternative.
Other populations have absorbed atrocities and converted them into permanent grievance maintained by political institutions whose legitimating function is the grievance itself. North Korea has built three generations of population control on the framework of permanent siege. The Palestinian political class has, across multiple moments where structural improvement was on offer, chosen the maintenance of the grievance over the discharge that would have ended the grievance's political utility. The Tamil Tigers ran thirty years of civil war against discrimination that was real, refused multiple opportunities for political settlement, and ended in total military defeat that left the Tamil population worse off than at any prior moment in their political history.
The difference between the two patterns is not the severity of the original atrocity. The original atrocities are comparable across many of these cases. The difference is what the political institutions choose to do with the atrocity afterward. The framework is the analytical instrument for understanding why some institutions choose conversion and others choose perpetuation. The short version is that conversion requires the political class to give up the legitimating function the grievance provides, and self-immolation preserves that function at the cost of the population's continued suffering. The choice is recognisable across cases. The framework does not let either side off.
The framework I am offering does not stop the engine. The framework names the engine. Naming it is the first step toward dismantling it. The dismantling is the work of generations and the framework can only contribute one piece — the recognition that the engine runs on a category error, that the category error can be corrected, that correcting it is the responsibility of voters who are willing to demand more from their states than performance. The dismantling is hard. The framework only makes it possible. The doing is yours.
The Image That Doomed a Continent
On September 2, 2015, a three-year-old Syrian boy named Alan Kurdi drowned in the Mediterranean. His body washed ashore on a Turkish beach near Bodrum. A photojournalist named Nilüfer Demir, working for the Doğan News Agency, photographed him. The photographs reached European editors within hours. Within a day they were on every front page on the continent.
Within a week, Angela Merkel had said wir schaffen das — we can manage this — and committed Germany to an open-door migration policy that would receive nearly a million Syrian refugees in 2015 alone, with similar numbers expected for 2016. Other European leaders followed. The Dublin Regulation was effectively suspended. The Schengen architecture buckled. The political consequences of the policy are still being measured ten years later.
You know how this story ends. The integration capacity Germany assumed it had turned out to be smaller than the inflow. The labour market absorption was slower than projected. The cultural and political tensions produced electoral consequences that have remade German and European politics. The Alternative für Deutschland is now a major party. France's Rassemblement National is a major party. Italy's Meloni won and governs. The British vote on Brexit was driven significantly by migration anxiety that traced directly to the 2015 inflow. Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands — every country that received significant numbers in 2015 has had its politics fundamentally restructured by the consequences.
The political class that produced the 2015 policy now describes the electoral consequences as a far-right surge they cannot understand. They understand it fine. They priced one image and ignored the structural inputs. The image of Alan Kurdi on the beach was real. The image was also a single data point in a vast, complex, slow-moving system of demographic, economic, security, and integration variables that the European political class declined to consider because the image had emotionally overridden their capacity to consider them. The image short-circuited the deliberative process that complex policy requires. The policy that emerged was built on the short-circuit. The policy failed in exactly the ways it was always going to fail, because it was built without consulting the variables that determined whether it would succeed.
Ten years on, the bill is still being paid. Some of it is being paid by the original Syrian refugees, whose integration prospects were sabotaged by the political reaction the rapid inflow produced. Some of it is being paid by European publics whose political systems have been destabilised by a decade of consequences nobody priced. Some of it is being paid by future migrants who will face much harder reception conditions because the 2015 experience poisoned the receiving capacity. The bill is paid by everyone except the people who produced the original policy, who have mostly retired with their reputations intact.
That asymmetry is the mechanism this post is about.
The Framework
I am going to declare a framework. It has three propositions. Each is harder than the one before. Each follows from the one before. Together they are an argument for a particular relationship between images of suffering and the political systems that respond to them.
The first proposition is this. Anecdotal evidence of suffering is admissible as moral testimony. It is inadmissible as causal claim. Alan Kurdi's death is real. The image of his body on the beach is real. The image does not tell you what migration policy should be. The image contains zero information about reception capacity, integration timelines, demographic trajectories, labour market absorption rates, security screening adequacy, or downstream electoral consequences. Treating the image as if it contains that information is a category error. The category error has produced almost every major Western policy disaster of the past twenty years.
The same proposition applies to every other image in the genre. Nick Ut's photograph of Phan Thi Kim Phuc fleeing the napalm strike in Trang Bang in 1972 did not tell you whether the Vietnam War should have continued or ended. The photograph told you that the war was producing nine-year-old girls running naked down a road with their skin on fire. That was true and the truth was sufficient. It was not, however, an argument for any particular policy. The image was used as an argument for ending the war and the war did eventually end, but the argument for ending the war had been available in operational terms for years before the image existed. The image accelerated a political process whose underlying logic was already in motion. It also short-circuited similar deliberation about the consequences of withdrawal — the boat people, the re-education camps, the Cambodian genocide that the American withdrawal helped enable. The image did not contain information about those consequences either. It contained moral testimony. It was used as causal claim. The category error compounded.
The second proposition is this. The image has a half-life. The policy does not. This is the structural problem and it is what makes the first proposition operationally important rather than merely philosophical. If images had the same temporal scope as the policies they produced, the category error would self-correct. The image-driven policy would fail visibly within the image's window of public attention, the public would update, the policy would be revised. That is not how it works. Public moral attention to Alan Kurdi lasted approximately six weeks. The migration policy that resulted has lasted ten years and is still running. Public moral attention to the Trang Bang image lasted maybe three years. The Vietnam withdrawal and its regional consequences ran for fifteen years and the political reckoning continued for forty.
The asymmetry between image-attention and policy-duration is the mechanism by which image-driven politics produces compounding disasters. The image creates the political mandate to do something. The mandate decays as the image fades from public attention. The something does not. By the time the public has moved on, the policy is locked in and only its costs remain visible. The political class that produced the policy responds to the visible costs with new policy, also driven by whatever new images have replaced the old ones. The cycle continues. The compounding compounds.
The third proposition is the hardest. The honest position is to absorb the image without letting it govern. This is harder than either pretending the image does not exist or letting the image set policy. It is also the only position consistent with serious decision-making in a media environment that produces images faster than political systems can deliberate about them.
The disclaimer at the top of every post in this series has been doing exactly this work for ten weeks. I acknowledge that, and carry it, and move on to do what I do here — which is read the mechanism. That sentence is the framework in miniature. The acknowledgment is real. The carrying is real. The moving-on is also real, because the alternative to moving on is letting the acknowledgment govern, and letting the acknowledgment govern is what produces the disasters this framework is trying to prevent.
This is asking a lot of the reader. I know it is asking a lot. I am asking it anyway.
Whose Dead
The framework gets harder when we add the responsibility question, but it also gets cleaner. The framework so far has been about how publics should relate to images of suffering. The next layer is about who is actually responsible for the suffering in the images and what they owe.
Here is the principle. The Westphalian state has two defining properties — it collects taxes and it holds the monopoly on legitimate violence within its territory. Those properties are not free. They are paid for by full responsibility for every death within the state's jurisdiction. Not partial responsibility. Not shared responsibility. Full. The state collects taxes from the living. The state owes accounting to the dead. There is no other deal. There is no version of statehood that takes the privileges and declines the obligation.
The mechanism for discharging that responsibility splits cleanly along one axis. If the death was caused by an internal actor — citizen, resident, criminal, accident, negligence — the state's instrument is the legal system. Investigation, prosecution, restitution, due process. If the death was caused by an external actor — foreign military, foreign-sponsored proxy, foreign intelligence service — the state's instrument is the armed forces. Defence, deterrence, retaliation, war if necessary. Those are the only two legitimate responses available to a state that takes its monopoly on violence seriously. Anything else is the state failing at the one job that justifies its existence.
Apply this to Alan Kurdi. He died in Turkish territorial waters fleeing the consequences of a Syrian civil war that the Syrian state had abdicated all responsibility for. The Syrian state had ceased to be a state in the meaningful sense by 2015. Turkey allowed the transit. Greece received the body. Germany absorbed the political consequence. None of those four governments was the entity actually responsible for that death. The Syrian regime was. And precisely because the Syrian regime had abdicated, the photograph became a free-floating moral artefact that lodged in whichever European policy framework had the weakest immune system. Germany's. The image went to the place where no state was discharging its responsibility, and produced policy in that vacuum.
Apply this to the napalm girl. She fled a strike conducted by South Vietnamese aircraft against a target inside South Vietnamese territory in the context of a war the South Vietnamese state was waging against an internal insurgency backed by an external state. The responsibility lattice is genuinely complex — the South Vietnamese state, the North Vietnamese state, the United States as ally of the first, the Soviet Union and China as backers of the second. But the responsibility framework is still operative. The American withdrawal in 1973 was a decision by the United States to stop discharging its commitment to the South Vietnamese state's defence. The South Vietnamese state then collapsed because it could not, alone, discharge its responsibility against the external threat. The boat people, the re-education camps, the Cambodian genocide — all of these were downstream of one state's incomplete discharge and another state's complete abdication. The napalm photograph circulated because the war was producing images. The images did not cause the consequences. The consequences came from how states discharged or failed to discharge their responsibilities.
The Symmetry
The framework's hardest test is whether it applies symmetrically to cases where readers' political priors run in opposite directions. If it only applies to cases where the reader already wants it to apply, it is propaganda. If it applies to cases where the reader does not want it to apply, it is theory. I am going to make it apply symmetrically and let the chips fall.
October 7, 2023, was an attack on Israeli citizens inside Israeli sovereign territory by an external armed force. The Israeli state's response — military operation against the entity responsible — is the textbook instrument the framework prescribes. Whether the operation has been proportionate, whether it has been competently executed, whether it has produced acceptable second-order outcomes are separate questions. The first-order question — does Israel have the right and the obligation to fight — is not actually contested by anyone applying the framework consistently. It is contested almost entirely by people who will not extend the same framework to states they do not like.
The Gaza casualties are where the framework gets sharper, not weaker. Gaza is governed by Hamas. Hamas collects taxes. Hamas has a monopoly on legitimate violence within its jurisdiction, or claims to. Hamas therefore bears the same responsibility for deaths in Gaza that every other governing entity bears for deaths in its territory. That responsibility is discharged by either fighting the external actor or signing a peace. Hamas is doing neither. Hamas is collecting photographs and circulating them to international audiences as a substitute for the two legitimate responses available to a governing entity. That is not resistance. That is the same begging the Iranian regime is doing at a larger scale, in a smaller jurisdiction with a less defensible record.
This is the part of the post that will lose readers on both ends of the political spectrum. The framework treats Hamas as a state for purposes of the responsibility question. That treatment is required if the framework is to be coherent. A governing entity that taxes and rules cannot simultaneously claim non-state status when it suits and state-like status when it suits. The framework collapses if any party gets to choose which categorisation applies to it. Either Hamas is a state and bears state responsibility, in which case the responsibility framework applies. Or Hamas is not a state, in which case the responsibility for Gaza deaths falls on whichever state should have been governing Gaza, which by the framework's logic is some combination of the Israeli state during occupation periods and the Palestinian Authority during its periods of nominal jurisdiction. Either way the responsibility is assignable. The current arrangement where Hamas takes the taxation and the monopoly on violence but rejects the responsibility is a category fraud the framework refuses to accept.
The same logic, symmetrically, applies to the Israeli state's responsibility for civilians killed in operations it conducts. The framework does not give Israel a free pass. The framework says Israel, like every other state, is accountable for outcomes within its jurisdiction and for outcomes of operations its instruments produce. The Gaza casualties from Israeli operations are part of Israel's responsibility ledger and Israel will be judged by its citizens and by history on whether the operations were instrumental — meaning they achieved specific outcomes proportional to the cost — or performative.
Applied to October 7 specifically, the framework's reading is that Israeli citizens were killed inside Israeli sovereign territory by an external force, and the Israeli state's military response is the legitimate instrument the framework prescribes. Applied to Gaza casualties from Hamas governance, the framework's reading is that Hamas has abdicated state responsibility and the abdication is what creates the conditions under which the casualties can be used as international policy lever. Applied to Gaza casualties from Israeli operations, the framework's reading is that Israel bears responsibility for the outcomes of its operations and is accountable through its democratic instruments and through whatever international legal framework binds it. Three different applications, one framework, no exemptions.
The reader who applies the framework only to one of these three is not using the framework. They are using the framework's vocabulary as cover for prior conclusions. The framework demands the symmetry.
The Whataboutery Cure
The framework as I have developed it so far is an answer to image-driven policy in democracies. It is also, and this is the part that matters most for many of this blog's readers, an answer to whataboutery.
The Indian political conversation has been dominated by whataboutery for two generations. Every domestic grievance is met with but what about Pakistan. Every historical claim is met with but what about the Mughals. Every current policy debate is met with but what about the British. Every accusation against one party is met with but what about the other party. The whataboutery is endless and it is endless precisely because it has no framework for resolving any of it. Every grievance is equally valid because nothing is being discharged. Nothing is being discharged because the responsibility framework has never been stated plainly enough for voters to demand it.
The framework, applied domestically, says the Indian state is responsible for every death within its jurisdiction. That responsibility is discharged through the legal system for internal causes and through the armed forces for external causes. There is no third instrument. Whataboutery is the third instrument. Whataboutery is what a population reaches for when its state has not discharged its responsibilities and the population has stopped expecting it to. The cure for whataboutery is not better arguments. The cure for whataboutery is voters demanding that the state actually use its two legitimate instruments, and accepting that the use of those instruments has costs that the voters have to be willing to pay.
The Ram Mandir case and the Operation Sindoor case are the two clean Indian examples of the framework working. Both are politically loaded. Both are also, on the framework's logic, examples of the state finally discharging a responsibility that had been deferred for decades. The Mandir corrected a historical wrong through legal and political process — slowly, imperfectly, with costs that voters absorbed in real time. Sindoor answered an external attack with the external instrument, swiftly and at acknowledged cost. Both were vindications of the framework. Both were also things that whataboutery had previously made impossible. But what about had been the procedural defence of inaction for forty years. The framework names that defence as what it actually is — the abdication in conversational form.
The framework does not endorse every detail of how the Mandir was resolved or every operational choice in Sindoor. The framework endorses the act of discharge. The state finally moved items from the deferred ledger to the discharged column. Whether each discharge was perfectly executed is a separate question the framework does not require you to take a position on.
The framework's neutrality is what makes it a tool rather than a partisan instrument. Hand it to a voter on the left and they will use it to demand discharge of items the current government prefers to defer. Hand it to a voter on the right and they will use it to demand discharge of different deferred items. The framework does not care which deferred items the voter prioritises. The framework insists only that deferral has a cost and that the cost is paid by someone, eventually, usually the dead.
No Cost Free
The framework's hardest demand is on the voter, not the state. The state will discharge what it is forced to discharge. The voter has to decide what they are willing to pay for. If they will not pay anything, they get the abdication they are silently endorsing.
Mandir cost time, political capital, social tension, real money, and the willingness to absorb international criticism. Voters paid it. Sindoor cost military risk, escalation potential, and the certainty that some of the cost would land on Indian families if the response went wrong. Voters accepted it. Both were chosen knowing the cost.
The corollary is that any voter or commentator who wants the responsibility discharged but does not want to pay the cost is engaged in a different kind of begging. Demanding action without underwriting its consequences. The whataboutery uncle is doing this domestically. The European voter who wanted Alan Kurdi avenged but did not want to absorb the migration costs of the policy that resulted was doing this. The American voter who wanted Iran punished but does not want oil at one hundred and twenty dollars is doing this. The Indian voter who wants every historical wrong corrected but objects to any specific correction's cost is doing this.
The state will discharge what it is forced to discharge. The voter has to decide what they are willing to pay for. If they will not pay anything, they get the abdication they are silently endorsing.
The Western voters who did not want to pay border costs got the immigration crises that have remade their politics. The Indian voters who tolerated whataboutery for two generations got the deferred problems compounding into the present moment. The chain of responsibility runs from the dead through the state's instruments through the voter who funds and elects the state. Every link is paid in actual cost. Anyone telling you it can be done cost-free is selling you the same thing the photograph circulators are selling — the fantasy that responsibility can be discharged through performance rather than through consequence.
The ballot is not symbolic. The ballot is the operational instrument by which the chain of responsibility is enforced. Voters cast ballots. States respond to electoral pressure. The pressure produces either discharge or replacement of the governing entity. The cycle runs as long as the ballot runs. The framework's entire political theory depends on the ballot being available and being functional.
Where the ballot is not available, the framework's demands escalate rather than disappear. A population whose state denies it the ballot does not lose its responsibility for that state's behaviour. The responsibility shifts to setting up the conditions under which the ballot becomes available. That is harder work. It is also work that has been done before in many jurisdictions and is being done now in others. The mechanisms vary — internal political organisation, international pressure, eventually civil resistance — but the work is recognisable. A population that does this work is discharging its responsibility. A population that does not is silently endorsing the state's abdication, the same way voters in functioning democracies silently endorse abdication when they refuse to demand discharge.
The Iranian voters who supported forty-seven years of Axis-of-Resistance ideological foreign policy are now paying the bill in a war they did not consent to but cannot escape. They are also paying the bill for two generations of accepting that the ballot was not actually available, that the Guardian Council would vet the candidates, that the Supreme Leader's office would determine outcomes regardless. The acceptance has a price. The price is the current corrida. The voters in Iran who are now suffering the consequences of policies they did not get to vote against are paying for the prior generation's failure to demand the ballot when demanding it might have produced different outcomes.
This is harsh and I want to acknowledge that it is harsh. The framework does not pretend the work is easy. The framework only insists that the work is the work, and that no other work substitutes for it. The ballot or the conditions for the ballot. Discharge or replacement. There is no third instrument and there is no exit from the chain of responsibility that does not run through one of those two options.
There is no cost-free version of statehood. There is no cost-free version of citizenship. There is no cost-free version of having opinions about how the world should work. The price is paid by someone, eventually, usually the dead. The framework's contribution is to make the price visible and to assign the responsibility for paying it to the people who actually have the obligation. Voters, through the states they elect and the taxes they pay and the violence those states are licensed to use on their behalf.
Closing
I started this post by saying it was the hardest one I had ever written. I want to say something at the end that I could not say at the beginning, because the framework had not yet been built.
The reason this post is hard is not that the framework is morally wrong. It is that the framework is morally demanding. It asks the reader to override evolutionary wiring with deliberation. It asks the voter to accept that their political opinions have prices. It asks the citizen to demand that their state use its legitimate instruments rather than perform around them. It asks all of us to refuse the easy comfort of being moved by photographs that cannot be acted on, and instead to do the hard work of evaluating the states we are responsible for by results rather than by tempo or rhetoric.
This is more work than the alternative. It is also the only honest position available to anyone who actually wants the dead children to mean something. The current arrangement — where atrocity images circulate and produce policy disasters that compound the original atrocities — is not honouring the dead. It is using them. The framework is the only way I know of to stop using them and start meaning them.
Alan Kurdi died in 2015. The policy his photograph produced has run for ten years and is still running. I do not know if I have honoured him by writing this. I know that the alternative was to write another corrida post and let his photograph keep doing the political work the framework says it should not be doing. I chose this one.
The framework is one possible solution. It is not the only one. It is the one I can defend. It is the one I am willing to be wrong about in public. The tracker at the bottom of every post in this series exists precisely so that there is nowhere to hide when I am wrong. The framework piece does not have predictions on the tracker. The framework piece is the tracker, made explicit, applied to the question of what states owe and what voters are willing to pay.
People are dying. Families across Iran, the Gulf, and Lebanon are living through things no analytical framework can adequately price. One hundred and twenty girls went to school in Minab on the first morning of this war and did not come home. I acknowledge that, and carry it, and move on to do what I do here — which is read the mechanism.
I am still doing that. The framework is the mechanism. The mechanism is now legible. The legibility is the contribution.
