Leaving the US felt like the last chopper out of Saigon, except it was the Americans being left behind, and instead of a Huey it was an Aer Lingus A321neo.¹

I spent about two and a half weeks in the US in July and August, for a mixture of business and leisure. If you follow me on social media or tried to visit this blog at some point in the past few weeks, you might have noticed my entire online presence disappearing temporarily. This was no accident. I was trying to make sure I made it through the US immigration process unscathed, having read a few too many news stories about travellers being refused entry and/or detained in recent months, such as the journalist who had written about Palestine protests, the academic whose phone contained messages critical of Trump’s government, or the tourist who had saved a meme of JD Vance. By those measures, it is not difficult to imagine myself being refused entry² based on any number of features of my online presence and body of published writing. And so I temporarily self censored: I scrubbed my online life, I factory-reset my phone (after backing it up, obviously); I brought my work laptop and left my personal one at home; I left my keffiyeh and anything covered in provocative stickers in Berlin; I was even careful about what books to pack for the plane ride.³

As it happened, the process was almost comically smooth. They didn’t even open my bag; there was some process by which travellers were selected to undergo a second round of security screening, but I could not discern what it was and was, in any case, not among them. All that happened was a bored-looking agent fingerprinted me and took my photo, then asked where I was going, why, and for how long, before ushering me onwards. It was over in less than three minutes.

I had suspected this might happen. I wagered there was a small chance I would run into actual difficulty, possibly being refused entry, and a large chance that it would all be fine and my preparations would look like paranoia in retrospect.⁴ Talking to friends and family about the issue before and after, they generally occupied one of these two positions too: some seemed positively doubtful that I would be admitted and/or very seriously advised me to “be careful” during my visit; others seemed surprised that I was worried at all.

This is, I think, characteristic of the US’s descent into authoritarianism.⁵ Immigration agents are not rejecting or abusing all visitors, but they are encouraged and empowered to do so whenever the fancy strikes them. Equally, not every Hispanic person in the US is being imprisoned, but federal agents have made it clear they may imprison anyone who is (or looks) Hispanic, if they feel like it. So on and so forth. Much of what is happening obviously contravenes US federal and constitutional law, so rather than being applied as uniform policy, it falls back on that wonderfully opaque tool: officers’ “discretion”. In any case, the mere possibility that you’ll be unlucky is enough to create fear and thereby limit people’s freedom of action and movement; thus, the regime is exerting power and achieving some of its aims even when you’re not actually being detained. My self-censorship is a prime example.

My aim here is not to write a comprehensive account of The Current Moment in America, though. There are many people much better suited to the task. I’d recommend Jack Hill’s excellent piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer or Charlotte Shane’s essay, for example.

The United States of America and I have always had a complicated relationship. Much about the country and its culture appeal to me, embarrassingly. I am of course an avid baseball fan. I went to an American university for my Master’s, even if I did the whole thing at a European satellite campus. And – at the risk of endangering my leftist credentials – I am genuinely compelled by the professed ideals of the US as a political project, their implementation notwithstanding. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” is among the most powerful sentences ever written, both in terms of influence and pure prose.

But it’s always begun and ended at profession, of course. The history of the US is one of cognitive dissonance, of lies, of broken promises. If we wish to talk about founding documents, it can never be claimed that the US was actually founded on principles of liberty when its constitution still contains the text defining Black people as three-fifths of a white person, and when the man who wrote “We hold these truths” was a prolific owner of enslaved people. The whole concept of the nation as a “melting pot” of immigrants, bound together only by ideals – compelling as that might be in abstract – is inextricably bound to its foundation on land “cleared” of its indigenous inhabitants by means of genocide. None of that can be put aside; it is written into America’s DNA.

I thus find myself torn. The largest part of me thinks that the idea of America is irredeemable, that the soul of a country so stained with the blood of hundreds of millions can never be saved. And yet I can’t help but be attracted by the notion – an old one at this point – that even if the United States has never upheld its own ideals, those ideals are sufficiently powerful that it is worth trying to radically remake the country so that it does. The history of America is one of promises made dishonestly and then broken: but imagine if they were fulfilled.

So I am compelled by Martin Luther King Jr.’s hope that “one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed”. I am moved by the text of Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address.⁶ I became emotional looking at the memorial to the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, one of the first Black regiments of the US Civil War, in the National Gallery of Art; I was thinking about what it meant to those men to know that if there was going to be a price in blood for the abolition of slavery, they were putting their share on the table. It was a crusade, a true holy war.  Scarcely in history has there been a cause so pure or so righteous as that of freeing people from bondage. I don’t know what proportion of those (especially freedmen) who fought were purely concerned with abolition, and were ambivalent or even negative about the US as an idea, but if any thought they might in the process build a country worth living in, who am I to say that dream was foolish?

The National Museum of African American History and Culture in D.C. is excellent.⁷ I read much of its history section as a struggle between those two ideas: that the US has an evil at its core that can never be expunged; and that even if those who founded the US never believed in the principles they committed to paper, those principles could upend the world if made reality. Both of those positions seem more than defensible to me. It isn’t my call. It isn’t my country. I was not born there, I do not live there, and I am not most hurt by the privations it inflicts.

What does all that mean now? A lot, in fact. I promised I wasn’t going to try to articulate a grand narrative of the current moment, but I am hardly the first to note that what the US is currently experiencing is merely the most recent stage of the 150-year backlash to Reconstruction. When you read accounts of that time – what the Radical Republicans wanted to accomplish, the volume of  new Black representatives elected, state power being used as a force for good (i.e. by sending the US Army against the KKK), you feel like you’re being given a glimpse into an alternate universe in which everything worked out –  one where the arc of history really does bend towards justice. If there was an inflection point in the battle for America’s soul, it was the Compromise of 1877.

More recently, I have long been of the opinion that the Republican Party’s transformation⁸ can be read as a reaction to 2008; there are so many American conservatives who are simply unable to forgive the rest of the country for making a Black man president.⁹ What we are witnessing is a section of the population fundamentally unable to accept the slow march of social progress. When they say they hate “DEI”, they mean that they think racial minorities (and women, and openly LGBTQ+ people) occupying prominent positions in society is fundamentally and inherently unnatural.¹⁰ On a strategic level, their political project doesn’t have real policy goals: they just want to turn back time. Again, I am not making any novel observations here.

The morning I left for the US, I downloaded Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories to my e-reader. I have been meaning to read them for some time. This pair of autofiction books were the basis for the musical Cabaret; Isherwood was a British writer who lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1933, leaving not long after the Reichstag Fire Decree. The novels are about many things, but their stories fundamentally concern being a late-20s expatriate against the backdrop of a country rapidly disintegrating as fascism rose. I live in Berlin and was travelling to the United States at a time when a far-right authoritarian regime is consolidating power. I am just a few months younger than Isherwood was when he finally left Germany. It felt apt, and I’d been meaning to read them for a while anyway.

Though I had actual reasons to travel Stateside, I was admittedly also motivated by a kind of scholarly curiosity. While my academic work doesn’t focus on the far-right, I have long been interested in it as an object of study.¹¹ So having followed events in America over the past few months with significant interest and concern, I was very curious to see them up close. When I first read about Isherwood,¹² it did occur to me how interesting his experience must have been, all the tragedy notwithstanding.

What America is going through in this moment is not unique in the world;¹³ but then neither was Germany in the 30s. If I’m being honest, much of my preoccupation with the American experience now is to do with my personal connections with the United States and the obvious influence of its culture globally – particularly for anglophones. Still, I think we all recognise that America’s trajectory is important not just for its own sake but because of how it affects the rest of the world. Again, the Germany parallel is instructive. Even at the time, people in other countries were more interested in the rise of Nazism than they were in the rise of Italian fascism, the Iron Guard in Romania, or other fascist and fascist-adjacent regimes, because it was evident to many observers that 1. the German regime was intent on transforming not just Germany but the world, and 2. that they had, (unlike, say, the Italians) the means to do so.

They were proven right. The Berlin Stories was first published as an omnibus in 1945. The political events that form the stories’ backdrop are ominous precisely because we know where they led. I don’t know that now. I do know that very soon after I left D.C., Trump seized control of the city and deployed the national guard and paramilitary federal law enforcement to its streets (which I vote we start calling Martial Law Lite™).¹⁴ I also know the regime has stated its intention to effectively purge the Smithsonian Institutions of material it dislikes, so those exhibits that so moved me may not be long for this world. But I do not know how this ends, or at what stage of the process we are at, or anything.

I felt at my most Isherwoodian (if I can coin a word) on my last night in D.C. We went out to a few bars, and ultimately ended up at a kind of speakeasy/dance club behind a door at the back of a deli. I was beginning to feel tired (on my fourth night out in a row) and I had a flight to Albuquerque early the next morning, so I was less than totally into it. As I looked around, I realised everyone else in that room seemed to be really into it though, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by how beautiful and precious a moment it was. Even with everything outside already so bad and getting worse, everyone here was having the time of their lives – not because they were ignorant of or avoiding the reality of the moment, but because when everything is going to shit, joy is more necessary than ever. I wanted to seize each person by the face and tell them I loved them, that they deserved this, that I’d buy them a drink. I didn’t, of course. It would’ve been as self-defeating as it was insane: it was a special moment because it was carefree, and to point it out would be to ruin it.¹⁵

Like I said, I don’t know how all this ends. However, I think even in the better scenarios – where this tide of right-wing authoritarianism in the US and across the world is reversed in the relatively near future – things are going to get worse before they get better. So while I think we have a duty not to despair and not to let ourselves or those around us give up hope, I am also scared. I’m scared for all the people who are going to get hurt; I am scared for the people I care about who are in harm’s way; I am scared for the people who were getting hurt even back when we considered things “normal”, who still are now.

However, while I am particularly given to draw historical parallels right now because I’m currently working on a literature review that requires me to read nothing but material about the lead-up to major historical catastrophes¹⁶ (and because of who I am as a person), those comparisons shouldn’t be read as predictive. The fact that this moment felt to me like being in Berlin in 1932 does not mean that the Berlin of 1945 is an inevitability. The comparisons can also be instructive. If you know anything about the Nazis’ seizure of power and the lead-up to WWII, you know how much might have been done (by all kinds of people) to prevent what happened, whether before or after ’33.

So, if there’s a lesson to take away, it’s that. Things look really bad: what do we wish had been done before, when things were about to get really bad?

1. I am aware that a WWI reference in the title, a Vietnam reference in the first line and a WWII metaphor throughout most of the body is messy, and you might consider that bad writing. But consider this: bite me. ↩︎
2. But not detained: on the insistence of my mother I travelled through Dublin, which has US immigration preclearance. ↩︎
3. As I read a lot of non-fiction, most of it is either left-wing political theory or about nuclear weapons, and neither of those felt like a good look. ↩︎
4. Somewhat like Y2K; if you let me, I will go on an extended rant about how the popular memory of Y2K as a nothingburger exists only because countless engineers patched the issue in advance, and we have learned precisely the wrong lesson as a result. ↩︎
5. it is evident that democracy in the US is being dismantled. You can call it the path towards actual fascism (I think there is ample reason to do so, and the potential consequences are almost unthinkably bad) or not, but if you don’t at least recognise this as a far-right authoritarian regime which is trying to consolidate power, you are either woefully under-informed or suffering from a severe failure of reasoning. Either way I don’t know that reading this will be much use to you. ↩︎
6. I had already read it several times but inscribed in stone at the Lincoln Memorial it gains new emotive power. I’m only human. ↩︎
7. You may be gathering that a lot of my time in D.C. was spent in museums. ↩︎
8. Not to imply it was anything good before 2016 – I have no time for those who are nostalgic for “normal Republicans” like George Bush – but it is worse, and very different. ↩︎
9. In Chapter 8 of The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, Tim Alberta quotes (former National Director of Faith Engagement for the Republican National Committee) Chad Connolly as saying, “Obama created the race problem in America”, which sort of sums up the whole thing. There was a previous time when this bloc felt assured that white supremacy in America was unassailable; when they lost that assurance, that to them was the moment there came to be a “race problem”. Regardless of Obama’s merits as a president, his election was symbolic. To US conservatives, it symbolised that loss of certainty – and was to them the ultimate humiliation. ↩︎
10. Since they think it is fundamentally unnatural, they assume it must be a conspiracy. Society can’t just be changing slowly over time and their ideals going out of fashion: there must be an orchestrated project to indoctrinate people and rig the system. When they attack media and universities, it is partially because they’re trying to find the secret cultural control centre that they genuinely believe must be at the centre of all of this. ↩︎
11. Longtime fans will remember me reporting from Covid conspiracist rallies in 2020. ↩︎
12. After a tour of historical queer Berlin a few months back. ↩︎
13. See also: Russia, the UK, Hungary, El Salvador, Italy to an extent, Poland until recently, South Korea very nearly etc. ↩︎
14. Charlie Kirk kind of gave the game away when he called for “military occupation” and “tanks” in “every street”, similar to when Kristi Noem said the purpose of the National Guard deployment in L.A. was to “liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership” of the municipal and state Democratic administrations. To that end, I think it is the wrong approach to point out that they’re making it up when they say D.C. is full of crime; obviously that is true, but it doesn’t matter, because: 1. When these people say “crime” they are referring to the existence of homeless people, or the presence of young Black people; they mean it that way and their supporters understand it that way. So do a lot of people who think of themselves as moderates, who are saying stuff like “but they have a point about the crime”. 2. They’ve explicitly admitted the real aim is to seize power, so anyone arguing the facts of their cover story is wasting their time and letting them make the debate about what they want. Stop trying to debate fascists, for the love of god. They’re establishing a quick-reaction force to crush domestic dissent, this really is not the time to try to have a mature discussion about crime statistics. ↩︎
15. “There is much pain in the world but not in this room”, to quote the meme. Why bring it in? ↩︎
16. Which reminds me, if you know any good scholarly work on the theories of war causation that I might not have read yet, please send it my way, because I need to read all of it. ↩︎

An interesting thing happened to me last summer: I was plagiarised.

Basically, a post appeared on a political science blog belonging to a highly-regarded European university which was, apart from about two original paragraphs, a near word-for-word reproduction of an article I had written just a few weeks prior for the blog of the organisation I then worked for. The plagiarised post was published under the name of a real academic, though not someone I had heard of. The theft was laughably blatant: the sentences had been rearranged a little in some places (though not everywhere), and almost nothing had actually been reworded.² Even the section heading I chose as an homage to Rosa Luxemburg was kept in place.

This was a novel experience for me. My writing has elicited strong positive and negative reactions from various people at various times, I have been the subject of minor far-right smear campaigns,³ and I have even passed my own work off as the work of others,⁴ but never before has someone wanted to claim that my work was theirs. Fascinating.

I did not discover the theft on my own; a colleague came across the blog post and shared it with the team.⁵

My first instinct was to be bemused and amused.

Even if I had been otherwise inclined to get angry, the repackaging job was so half-hearted and amateurish as to be comical. It was also, frankly, somewhat flattering to know that even a frankensteined version of my writing was apparently good enough to be published in this setting.

The bemusement had a similar genesis. Though the venue of the plagiarism was not formally academic – not a journal or conference, and certainly not peer reviewed – it was the blog of a university, and the person taking credit was a career academic. Given academia (nominally, theoretically) takes plagiarism very seriously, why risk the reputational damage on such a low-effort endeavour? It’s one thing when academics steal from their own students, when they may reason that no one will ever find the original; it is quite another to steal from something very recently published, which related to a small, specialised field – the practitioners of which number in the low dozens in Europe and all know each other.

So after I’d exhausted the “this is proof that I’ve made it as a writer” jokes, I became fixated on one question: how did this happen?

The seminal work on internet plagiarism was, of course, published 14 months ago by Hbomberguy. The four-hour video essay contains much valuable meditation on the psychology of and motivation behind plagiarism. It was on my mind during this episode. Still, it can be applied to my case only partially, I think. It is concerned chiefly with plagiarism in the realm of YouTube, and Hbomberguy’s thesis for why people plagiarise – because they crave validation and/or success but lack the skills to achieve it, and see those they crib from as unworthy of their respect anyway⁶ – felt to me like it failed to fully explain my experience.

In the case of plagiarism, as in all harmful behaviour, I am interested in knowing what the offending parties are thinking when they do it and how they justify their actions to themselves.

I find it very hard to imagine the process of copying and pasting someone else’s writing into your Word document⁷ and then trying to conceal it by way of editing. Even if you don’t view that behaviour as wrong, would you not be kind of embarrassed to debase yourself like that? Perhaps, as someone who really enjoys writing in almost any context, I am overestimating the pride people have in their own work, or underestimating their laziness. Perhaps I am imagining that people’s consciences are more vocal than they really are.

Still, we’re not talking about an undergrad ripping off an obscure journal article to finish an imminently-due assignment for a class they don’t care about, this is a case of someone who chose a career in academia publicly taking credit for someone else’s work.⁸

I don’t know about anyone else, but I have no interest in receiving credit or praise as such; I am interested only in receiving credit or praise for my work. Yes, I absolutely crave external validation – I’m only human – but only actual validation of me as a person, not the mere performance of it. I will feel validated only if the thing people are commenting on is actually the product of my labour and intellect and therefore a reflection of my abilities and character. I don’t just want to hear the words.

Also, does it not eat at you? With every positive comment, every time someone makes reference to what “you” wrote, do you not feel a twinge in your gut? Maybe it’s my deeply-rooted cultural Catholicism speaking, but I think that would bother me. Rather a lot, in fact. How can recognition you know to be hollow ever be remotely satisfying?

So is plagiarism a symptom of a person’s fundamental shallowness, an indication that they desperately want positive attention from others even when it reflects no labour or inner quality on their part? Maybe, but I don’t find that satisfying as an explanation. It brings me no closer to imagining what a plagiariser tells themselves as they do it.

I reached out directly to the editor of the blog that had published the plagiarised article. They took it down relatively quickly (though without publishing an acknowledgement, which I had requested), and said they could put the academic in contact for the purposes of a “formal apology”, if I wanted.⁹ I said yes – not because I really cared about being apologised to, but because I hoped in the process I might learn more about what had happened. I received the following:

My name is […] and I am the person responsible for the really serious situation that has occurred in the past few days. 

I am grateful that you have accepted to share your email address with me, in order to receive my formal apology. 

Going into the details of what happened would involve other people and I wish therefore skip details, which I also think are fundamentally irrelevant. My name was eventually on the post and I am therefore responsible. What matters here is that the piece was your intellectual property and the result of probably several hours of work. These things should simply not happen – or official and formal methods of quoting and referencing should be taken. 

May I reassure that, in no way, I am unaware of what plagiarism entails. In no way, also, I take this not seriously. 

I hope you could accept my formal apology. I understand if you do not wish to accept them. 

There were two things that struck me about this email. The first was that though the subject line was “Formal Apology”, the body does not contain the words “I apologise”, “I’m sorry” or any synonyms anywhere. It twice references an apology that is presumed to exist somewhere else in the text, but it is nowhere to be found. The second was that it, if anything, significantly deepened the mystery over what precisely had transpired.¹⁰

Listen, clearly myself and this academic disagree on a number of things, but when you take credit for a bastardised reproduction of my work but simultaneously claim that you understand and abhor plagiarism, I really have to emphasise how much I do not think “details…are fundamentally irrelevant”.

I shared the email with some friends at the time, and theories were proffered as to what it might mean. Some thought perhaps the plagiarism had been done via a large language model (LLM), like ChatGPT. I think this is unlikely for several reasons: my article had only come out a few weeks before, and therefore probably hadn’t been crawled by most LLMs yet; and while admittedly my experience using such tools is limited, based on what I’ve read (and what I know about how neural networks function) I think very obviously and sloppily plagiarising a single source would be highly unusual behaviour for them – unless the user specifically asked.

The other popular theory, and one that seems most plausible to me, is that the phrases “involve other people” and “My name was eventually on the post” indicate that the writing of the article was farmed out to another person or persons – likely some combination of intern, research assistant, and student – and they plagiarised.

If true, this raises a whole host of new issues and questions.

Ghostwriting is a tricky one. In formal academic settings – college assignments, journal articles, reports, conferences etc – it is universally considered an ethical violation and/or academic fraud. But this wasn’t such a setting; it was a blog. The blog in question does not have a very detailed editorial policy, but does describe itself as an “academic blog” hosting “academic commentary and research”. I think it is reasonable, then, to say that work in that setting should be held to general principles of academic ethics, and that ghostwriting therefore constitutes not-insignificant misconduct. Furthermore, the blog stipulates that contributors must meet a certain standard of academic or professional expertise, a policy which would make no real sense if the pieces were not written by the nominal contributors.

In other words, if my work hadn’t been stolen, this would still have been a case of plagiarism. It would just be plagiarising the ghostwriters instead of me.

Yes, the ghostwriters probably agreed to it, but that isn’t an excuse for two reasons. First, plagiarism with consent is still plagiarism, given the existence of “self-plagiarism”. Even if these ghostwriters were perfectly happy with the arrangement, it would still be dishonest of the academic to take credit for their work.¹¹

Second, there’s a really good chance these writers were unpaid interns, or underpaid grad students, or some other victims of the rampant problem of exploited casual academic labour.¹² Such unfair work arrangements are maintained by the implication that there is no other way to a career in academia;¹³ thus the “agreement” was very likely extracted under conditions of significant power imbalance.

So, ironically, given the rather opaque email was nominally trying to protect them from my wrath, I don’t think that these unnamed writer(s) bear any blame. If someone else is already going to dishonestly claim credit for your work, I say you are welcome to take any and all shortcuts when doing that work, up to and including plagiarism. Someone was going to get plagiarised, so you might as well have that someone be me, instead of putting in enormous time and effort just to have it be you. Fuck the system, man, I’m on your side here.

It’s possible, of course, that I’ve missed some potential explanation for what really happened here, or my picture of the situation is not quite right. But the email I received quite clearly indicates that someone was working on the problematic article without being credited for it, and this is clearly problematic.

So the academic did not plagiarise me in the direct way I had imagined, but had nonetheless set out to commit plagiarism from the beginning. My article being stolen was an accident, caused when the proximate victim(s) of plagiarism decided to save themselves some work.¹⁴

So we return, then, to the question of what makes people plagiarise and how they justify it to themselves.

It’s notable that the academic’s “apology” email didn’t even gesture at the idea that their initial intention – putting their name on an article written by their intern or whoever – might be bad. If anything it did the opposite when it kind of implied that them taking “responsibility” for the final product was brave, or an act of leadership, or upholding some kind of principle. It wasn’t, of course; they weren’t shielding a subordinate from trouble, they were hiding the details of their own meta-plagiarism. And in so doing, they brought into focus the absurdity of the whole business: yes of course you should be “responsible” for the contents of an article which you say you wrote – you should have written the goddamn thing.

In other words, though they professed to be keenly aware of “what plagiarism entails”, I don’t think it ever crossed their mind that they were, in fact, engaged in plagiarism all along. And perhaps this is the very unsatisfying answer to our question: people justify plagiarism to themselves by finding a way to believe they’re not doing it.¹⁵

In this case, it was probably a matter of having the interns write 98% of it – because research assistants do background work all the time, that’s normal – editing it lightly, and then publishing it only under the your name, because, darn it, the blog has those pesky rules about contributors’ qualifications.

When it comes to professors stealing from their students, they’re probably thinking that of course there’s no harm in re-reading that student’s essay now that you’re writing on the same topic. Maybe you’ll just copy and paste in the specific way they phrased something, just to help you structure this paragraph. You’ll definitely go back and rephrase it later. And after all, they learned from you when they wrote that essay.

Other times you don’t even need to paste, you just happen to write something in precisely the same words as a source you read,¹⁶ and if asked about it later you’re sure it was a total accident. When you’re talking about non-textual media, like in Hbomberguy’s video, that kind of precise recreation (since actually copying-and-pasting isn’t possible) is even easier to explain away as “inspiration” that got out of hand.

And so on and so forth.

On the other hand, one’s sense of cognitive dissonance would need to be really well developed for some of these cases. When this academic was telling their Twitter followers about “My latest contribution to [blog]” (and tagging a bunch of accounts in the process), was it not on their mind that they had no idea where almost all the text came from?

I am a person who feels the need to prove themselves. I have a well-developed sense of intellectual insecurity. But as much as I may feel the need to impress those around me,¹⁷ my biggest critic is and always will be the voice inside my head. If I plagiarised and got away with it, that guy would still know the truth and he wouldn’t give me a minute’s peace. In other words, I need to impress the people around me, but I also need their impressions to be well-founded.

So when all is said and done, I still don’t get it.

Perhaps I can’t.

1. I generally try to be diligent about accreditation anyway but now would really be the worst time to break that habit. ↩︎
2. And at the risk of twisting the knife or appearing self congratulatory and/or snobbish, where there were edits, they all made the writing worse. I feel strongly that:
   1. if you’re going to edit plagiarised material, you should do enough editing to go some way to disguising the theft, otherwise you’re just wasting your time, and
   2. If anyone is going to edit my writing, I would rather it was to improve it.
   They went 0 for 2 there. ↩︎
3. Who can forget when a far-right account (widely believed to be operated by Gemma O’Doherty) compiled my old tweets into infographics. Apparently the fact that in 2018 I tweeted “Next time I hear a food product described as ‘made without any chemicals’ I’m going to commit mass murder. Feel free to use this tweet as evidence at my trial” was a sign of rampant violent extremism on the Irish left, or something. ↩︎
4. Enough time has passed that I am now comfortable admitting that, as editor of Trinity News, I occasionally wrote small, print-only pieces for the Sport section under the name “Alan Smithee”. We didn’t have a Sport editor so when I had not organised myself to find enough contributing writers, I ended up writing a lot of the articles myself, and I thought it would look bad in print if the same byline appeared four or five times in the same two page spread. I don’t think anyone got the joke of the name at the time. ↩︎
5. Again, we must scrupulously give credit where credit is due. ↩︎
6. This latter part is interesting to consider in the context of those stories of academics stealing from their own students, isn’t it? For the record I think Hbomberguy’s theory is a very good one, just not universal. ↩︎
7. I do not find it hard to imagine doing the same thing for code, of course. Back in my day that was how all software got made. We didn’t need some stupid AI to copy other people’s work for us; we had StackOverflow and we were happy with it. Kids these days, I swear. ↩︎
8. Including sharing the plagiarised article on Twitter and LinkedIn multiple times – posts which were not deleted and can still be found. ↩︎
9. I had been planning to make contact myself, and had prepared an email draft that began “Hello, my name is Jack Kennedy. I believe you’re familiar with my work.” Alas I never got to use it. ↩︎
10. On reflection, a third notable thing is the language of the email. The style and grammar suggest it was written by someone who is less than fully proficient in English. This is not notable on its own, but having done some minor research on the academic in question, I know they are without a doubt fluent in English, including teaching and publishing in it. So that’s odd. ↩︎
11. And I must emphasise how directly credit was taken, even aside from the byline. The academic’s posts on Twitter and LinkedIn said things like “I have written…”, “in my latest article for..” etc. ↩︎
12. Yeah, it’s technically possible that this was someone selling their writing skills from a position of relative autonomy, like a professional ghostwriter penning a sports star’s autobiography, but such a person would presumably not sloppily steal from me because it would be bad for their career. People not being fairly treated or compensated have more incentive and less to lose by such shortcuts. Plus if they were enough of an actual subject expert to demand real money, why wouldn’t they cut out the middleman and just submit to the blog themselves? ↩︎
13. That implication is, of course, often accurate. ↩︎
14. Just to reiterate: they have my unconditional support in this, as do all workers who cut corners in their crappy jobs. ↩︎
15. Unsatisfying perhaps, but also an answer I could probably have foreseen if I’d thought about it harder. But then how would I have structured this blog post? ↩︎
16. Just as background, so you conveniently didn’t need to cite it. ↩︎
17. And I’ll be the first to admit it’s a somewhat pathetic need. Let’s call a spade a spade. ↩︎

The USS Mesa Verde. Image: Ivan T/Wikimedia

I’m aware Ireland isn’t the only or even most interesting place where the practical implications of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) can be examined, but it is one. And I don’t see anyone else regularly writing about Irish anti-nuclear commitments: I see a niche, I fill it. So here we are again.

Ireland is notable among current state parties to the TPNW in that it is one of the most closely-aligned to the United States (and NATO), albeit at a distance in the military domain. Similar states include Austria, Malta, Thailand, New Zealand and the Philippines. That creates interesting issues, even under Ireland’s current policy of neutrality.

The USS Mesa Verde, a San Antonio-class landing platform, dock (LPD), visited Dublin Port on Friday August 25th and 26th, to coincide with the Notre Dame vs Navy American football game taking place that weekend. Such port visits by warships are a regular feature of international relations, and the US, with its large navy and network of international alliances and associations, is a frequent participant. But when warships visit states which are party to the TPNW, this poses interesting questions about the practical implementation of the treaty, particularly because of how incredibly cagey the US Navy (USN) is about nuclear weapons. I want to explore that here, with reference to the Mesa Verde but with an eye to the wider issue.

The Legal Aspect

Under Article 1 of the TPNW, each state party must “never under any circumstances…Allow any stationing, installation or deployment of any nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices in its territory or at any place under its jurisdiction or control.”

Under Article 5, it is clarified that that each state must specifically “take all appropriate legal, administrative and other measures…to prevent and suppress any activity prohibited to a State Party under this Treaty undertaken by persons or on territory under its jurisdiction or control”.

In other words, it is not just that the Irish government may not possess nuclear weapons, but it has a positive obligation to “take all appropriate measures” to prevent the presence of nuclear weapons in Irish territory at any time. Allowing aircraft or ships carrying or armed with nuclear weapons to use Irish airspace or waters would be an abrogation of Ireland’s treaty obligations, and the government is required to take active steps, preventative and responsive, to stop this happening.

The Technical Aspect

According to publicly-available information, which for the US nuclear arsenal is quite good, the San Antonio-class cannot currently be armed with nuclear weapons. The ships were going to be fitted with the Mk-41 missile launcher, used by a variety of US and allied surface ships and capable of fielding a variety of missiles against naval, air and land targets. The latter role is mainly filled by the BGM-109 Tomahawk, a highly-versatile cruise missile. There did exist a version of the Tomahawk made to carry the W80-0 5-150kt nuclear warhead. That variant is understood to have been withdrawn from service in 2010, and a report from the Pantex nuclear weapons plant from 2012 appears to confirm that the last remaining W80-0s had been dismantled by then. As it happened, the Mk-41 was never fitted to the San Antonio-class anyway; little has been said about the planned armament since 2016, and it seems to still be in stasis.¹

For the USN, low-yield, sea-launched nuclear capabilities are currently only provided by Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines using one of the variants of the Trident missile. The Trump administration had planned to develop a new sea-launched nuclear cruise missile (SLCM-N), but Biden killed the project. Congressional Republicans as well as chunks of the national security establishment continue to push for the programme’s restart, so depending on the outcome of the 2024 election, the SLCM-N (and with it, the nuclear capability of the USN’s surface fleet) could yet rise from the grave.

This does not necessarily preclude an LPD (or any other non-Ohio-class ship) from carrying nuclear weapons—exactly how nuclear weapons are usually transported by the US military is, unsurprisingly, rather an opaque subject, but sea transport is certainly an allowed mode—but it does make the likelihood of nuclear weapons being on any particular LPD at any given time very low.

¹ Thanks to my good friend Louis Martin-Vézian for tipping me off about this, I was using outdated info.

The Declaratory Aspect

The real problem arises from US Navy (USN) policy. In late 1991, with the Cold War winding down, then-President George H.W. Bush instructed the USN to begin removing all nuclear weapons from surface ships and attack submarines. The process was completed by mid-1992, leaving the Ohio-class the USN’s platform for nuclear weapons, with its high-yield Trident ballistic missiles, and low-yield Tridents and Tomahawks (until the latter were retired in 2010, as discussed above). This meant that in 1996, the commander of the USS John F. Kennedy was able to confirm to the Irish Times that the ship carried no nuclear weapons when it visited Dublin that year. I have not been able to confirm that those assurances were given in response to an Irish government request, but given the TPNW would not be ratified for another 24 years, there existed no domestic or international legal obligation to do so then. In either case, the confirmation was likely politically important, given longstanding anti-nuclear sentiment in Ireland.

However, in 2006, the USN’s Chief of Naval Operations issued a directive entitled “Release of Information on Nuclear Weapons and on Nuclear Capabilities of U.S. Forces”. Among other things, it stipulated that:

“Military members and civilian employees of the Department of the Navy shall not reveal, purport to reveal, or cause to be revealed any information, rumor, or speculation with respect to the presence or absence of nuclear weapons or components on board any specific ship, station or aircraft, either on their own initiative or in response, direct or indirect, to any inquiry.”

Release of Information on Nuclear Weapons and on Nuclear Capabilities of U.S. Forces, US Department of the Navy, 2006

This policy, usually referred to as Neither Confirm Nor Deny (NCND), remains in effect, as far as I know. The Congressional Research Service referred to it as current policy as of 2021, and doubtless someone would have noticed if a retraction had been issued within the last two years. It is not difficult to foresee the clash between the USN’s refusal to comment on the presence/absence of nuclear weapons on its vessels, and the positive obligation on TPNW states to ensure no nuclear weapons enter their territory.

There is precedent for navigating this issue. New Zealand is a TPNW state party, but more than that, has since 1987 maintained a prohibition in domestic law on the entry of nuclear-powered ships or ships carrying nuclear weapons into the country’s territorial waters. After the passage of the legislation, no USN vessel visited New Zealand for 29 years. This changed in 2016, when the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Sampson visited, and indeed aided in relief efforts after the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake.

The NZ situation is subtly distinct; the complete absence of USN ships from the country’s waters for three decades was mostly US policy, signalling objection to the nuclear-free zone (and featuring a reciprocal ban on NZ ships visiting the US, until 2014) . The change in 2016 was widely seen as final US “acceptance” of NZ’s position, but did not see any abrogation or suspension of the NCND rule. The NZ anti-nuclear legislation merely requires the prime minister to be “satisfied that the warships will not be carrying any nuclear explosive device upon their entry into the internal waters of New Zealand” in order to grant access. Wellington made an assessment based on publicly-available information about the capabilities of the Arleigh Burke-class and achieved the necessary satisfaction on the prime minister’s part that the Sampson was not nuclear armed. The TPNW was not a factor, as it was not signed until 2017.

Treaty obligations and signalling

The question then is, what level of certainty must TPNW state parties achieve that a vessel is not nuclear armed before granting it access to their territorial waters, and can this level of certainty be achieved for USN vessels given the NCND policy.

The answer is up for debate. One could argue that the NZ solution is fine; that in practice the chances of any US warship other than a ballistic missile submarine carrying nuclear weapons at any given time are extremely low, and thus port visits by such ships present no problems to TPNW state parties. On the other hand, the language used in the TPNW is arguably quite a bit stronger than the NZ legislation, specifically requiring “all appropriate legal, administrative and other measures…to prevent and suppress any activity” rather than merely that “the Prime Minister shall have regard to all relevant information and advice” until they are “satisfied that the warships will not be carrying any nuclear explosive device.” To me, this appears to confer a stronger preventative obligation, and state parties should take a stronger stance than NZ did in 2016.

As is so often the case with international law, the fundamental issue is much more political than it is legal. The TPNW has only been ratified by states with existing antipathy towards nuclear weapons; the point is much less to have enforceable bans on such weapons, and much more to contribute to creating a strong international norm on the barbarity and odiousness of such weapons, hopefully laying the groundwork for future arms control and disarmament efforts with nuclear-armed states. It’s about signalling.

The NCND policy is in part a security measure; ambiguity about where nuclear weapons are or are likely to be is a good way to prevent an adversary from attempting to attack or steal them in transit. But it is also, like the TPNW, a political statement. By refusing to provide even confirmation of the absence of weapons, the USN is asserting impunity from international scrutiny and a right to carry such weapons wherever and whenever it pleases, despite the transnational threat they pose to human life and security, and despite the right of states to adopt prohibitions on the presence of nuclear weapons. Such a statement runs directly counter to the principles of the TPNW, the signalling it is meant to achieve, and the stated desire of countries like Ireland to reinforce a taboo on nuclear weapons.

In my view, therefore, TPNW state parties should push back against such policies. They should take seriously their obligations to actively prevent transit of nuclear weapons through their territory and demand confirmation that aircraft and ships are not carrying them. Mere assessments of low likelihood, like NZ in 2016, are not enough. If they do not receive confirmation, they should deny entry. This should be policy and, ideally, be codified in domestic law.

For the purposes of this article, I submitted a query to the Press Office of the Department of Foreign Affairs, asking if it or any other part of the Irish government had sought or received assurances about the absence of nuclear weapons aboard the Mesa Verde during its visit to Dublin, referencing the state’s TPNW obligations as I did so, but did not receive a response. I do not know, therefore, if they asked, or even carried some kind of formal external assessment of the Mesa Verde’s capabilities à la Wellington in 2016.

It is good at least that the DFA claims it is policy to confirm all aircraft transiting Irish airspace are unarmed, but in practice, the government receives only cursory details of overflights after the fact in the case of the US. Shannon Watch has also noted that the government grants hundreds of exceptions per year to the “unarmed” requirement, and I can find no information anywhere on whether it is policy to specifically enquire about nuclear arms.²

That’s not really good enough. Ireland has, as I have discussed previously, a strong history of anti-nuclear advocacy, and moments like this are great opportunities to do more. We should not be afraid to stand up to the US in frankly quite small ways to do so; if we are serious about achieving a nuclear-free world, we are at some point going to have to tell the Americans off, to their faces.

At a certain point this begins to merge with my broader discomfort about Ireland’s deference to the United States, of which the over-the-top celebrations around the Notre Dame-Navy game are a potent symbol. I would like to be part of a nation with a stronger moral backbone.

This issue applies more widely than just in Ireland, though; it is about when TPNW state parties must take their obligations seriously. The US-aligned countries mentioned at the beginning, like the Philippines, must think about what commitment to disarmament really means; NZ, for example, must consider acting more forcefully in future than it did in 2016.

The principle applies to port visits and overflights from non-US nuclear states too, though few of them move their nuclear weapons around the world and deploy them on a variety of platforms in the way the US does. Achieving confirmation of aircraft and ships’ non-nuclear status should therefore be easier, but it is just as important to seek it; the point is, as discussed previously, to make a point.

The TPNW is about signalling, but if the treaty remains merely a piece of paper, that signalling will be weak; it must have on-the-ground implications, and the Irish government must understand that some of that ground is in Dublin Port.

² At some point I may try FOI-ing this, but given the widespread practice in the Irish public sector of denying FOI requests or heavily redacting released documents, and given this is even vaguely related to an issue of security, I am not at all hopeful.