And these things don’t happen in a vacuum.

In 1953, Iran's democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalised his country's oil fields. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company — which later became BP — held a monopoly on Iran's oil industry under a lopsided agreement that returned as little as 16% of profits to Iran; the company never permitted Iran to see its accounts. Washington initially refused to support British efforts to reverse the nationalisation — President Eisenhower, persuaded that a communist takeover was imminent, ultimately authorised the CIA operation that removed Mossadegh in August 1953. He was tried for treason, sentenced to three years in prison and then kept under house arrest for the rest of his life. The Shah, whose powers had been largely stripped by Mossadegh's government, was restored to full authority. His secret police, SAVAK, operated with American funding and training for the next 26 years. As for the oil: the United States did not restore the British monopoly. Instead, American companies were cut into a new National Iranian Oil Company alongside British and European firms, on a 50/50 profit split. The 1979 revolution and everything since flows directly from that decision.

In 1954, Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz introduced land reform that redistributed unused agricultural land, including large holdings owned by the United Fruit Company, an American corporation. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had worked for United Fruit’s law firm. His brother Allen ran the CIA and sat on its board. A CIA-backed coup removed Árbenz. Two hundred thousand people died in the civil war that followed.

In the Congo in 1960, Patrice Lumumba became the country’s first democratically elected prime minister following independence from Belgium. The Congo held vast mineral wealth — uranium, cobalt, copper — including the ore used in the Manhattan Project. Within weeks of independence, Belgium backed the secession of the mineral-rich Katanga province. CIA director Allen Dulles told Eisenhower that Lumumba “remained a grave danger as long as he was not disposed of.” Eisenhower authorised his assassination. The CIA’s chief scientist arrived in Congo with poison intended for Lumumba’s food or toothpaste. In the event, he was arrested by soldiers loyal to General Mobutu — who had been installed with American and Belgian backing — transferred to Katanga, tortured, and shot by a firing squad under Belgian command on 17 January 1961. He had been prime minister for less than seven months. His body was dissolved in sulphuric acid. A 1975 congressional investigation confirmed the CIA had plotted his assassination.

The United States then backed Mobutu’s dictatorship for over thirty years. The Congo’s mineral wealth — cobalt, coltan, copper, uranium — went largely unextracted by Western interests during the decades of conflict that followed. That changed in 2025. As M23 rebels, widely reported to be backed by Rwanda, seized control of mineral-rich eastern Congo, the Congolese government approached the Trump administration with a proposal: American companies would receive preferential access to the country’s critical mineral reserves in exchange for US military support. Trump sent Massad Boulos — his senior adviser for Africa and the father of Tiffany Trump’s husband — to Kinshasa to negotiate. In June 2025, Washington brokered a peace deal between Congo and Rwanda. In December 2025, Trump hosted both countries at the White House for the signing of the Washington Accords. “We’re getting for the United States a lot of the mineral rights from Congo,” Trump told the room. The Democratic Republic of Congo is the world’s largest producer of cobalt, accounting for roughly 70% of global production — the mineral without which there is no electric vehicle battery, no smartphone, no modern defence technology.

In Chile in 1973, Salvador Allende nationalised the copper industry, which was dominated by three American corporations — Anaconda, Kennecott and Cerro — that together accounted for more than 80% of Chilean copper production. At the time, Chile held roughly 20% of the world’s known copper reserves. Nixon directed the CIA to destabilise Allende’s government as early as 1970; declassified records show he instructed the agency to “make the economy scream.” A memorandum from Kissinger to Nixon that year stated: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people.” On 11 September 1973, the presidential palace was bombed, killing Allende. General Augusto Pinochet seized power. Under his seventeen-year rule, more than 3,000 people were killed or disappeared, and tens of thousands more were imprisoned and tortured. The United States recognised the junta immediately and sent Chile almost $350 million in economic aid over the following three years. Nixon later remarked of the coup: “Our hand doesn’t show on this one.” In 1998, Pinochet was arrested in London on an international warrant issued by a Spanish magistrate, charged with genocide, torture and crimes against humanity. He was held under house arrest for sixteen months before being released on grounds of ill health. He died in Chile in 2006 without facing trial.

In Indonesia in 1965, President Sukarno was moving to expropriate American oil companies operating in Sumatra — Caltex and Stanvac — and had aligned his government with the Indonesian Communist Party, then the third largest in the world. Richard Nixon had described Indonesia as “by far the greatest prize in the Southeast Asian area.” A CIA-supported coup brought General Suharto to power. What followed was one of the worst mass killings of the twentieth century. Between half a million and one million people were killed over the following months — Communist Party members, ethnic Chinese, and alleged leftists, hunted down across the archipelago. The US Embassy in Jakarta provided the Indonesian military with comprehensive lists of Communist Party officials, from national leadership down to village cadres — as many as five thousand names. Embassy staff then tracked the progress of the killings by checking off names as they were captured or killed. Approval for handing over the lists came from the top of the embassy, including the US Ambassador. The CIA’s own 1968 assessment called the carnage “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.” Suharto remained in power for 31 years. The oil companies continued to operate.

In Iraq in 2003, the stated justification for invasion was weapons of mass destruction. On 5 February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared before the United Nations Security Council and told the world: “Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts.” No weapons of mass destruction were found. Powell later called the speech “a blot” on his record. Iraq held the world’s second-largest proven oil reserves. In November 2002 — four months before the invasion — the Army Corps of Engineers tasked Kellogg Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, to develop an oil contingency plan for Iraq. On 8 March 2003, eleven days before the first bombs fell, the Army Corps awarded KBR the no-bid Restore Iraqi Oil contract. An internal Pentagon email dated 5 March 2003 recorded that the contract had been “coordinated” with the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney had served as Halliburton’s chief executive from 1995 to 2000 and continued to receive deferred compensation from the company while in office. By the time the contract was eventually replaced, Halliburton had been paid $1.59 billion. Pentagon auditors found the company had overcharged the government by $61 million on fuel purchases alone. The FBI opened a criminal investigation. By 2008, American oil companies had signed contracts for Iraqi oil fields, ending 36 years of nationalisation. In October 2025, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and KBR — the same KBR — signed new agreements with Baghdad giving them a direct share of profits and access to physical barrels of crude.

In Ukraine in 2025, the Trump administration’s opening position in peace negotiations was a demand for $500 billion worth of profits from Ukraine’s rare earth minerals, oil, gas and natural resources — framed as repayment for American military aid already provided. The initial draft contract, delivered by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to President Zelensky in February 2025, covered the entire economic value of Ukraine’s resources, including its ports. Ukraine holds some of the world’s largest deposits of graphite, lithium, titanium and uranium — minerals essential to defence technology, electric vehicles and the entire clean energy supply chain currently dominated by China. Zelensky rejected the initial terms. Trump called him “a dictator.” When Zelensky said Ukraine did not recognise the aid as a debt to be repaid, Trump threatened to withdraw American military support entirely. A joint investment fund was eventually signed on 30 April 2025, under which Ukraine would contribute 50% of future royalties from newly issued licences for critical minerals, oil and gas. Ukraine retained formal ownership of its resources. It did not retain the leverage it had before the negotiation began. No security guarantees were included in the final agreement.

In Iran in 2026, three months into an active war with a ceasefire on life support and the Strait of Hormuz still closed, the outlines of a potential deal have begun to emerge. Among Iran’s pre-war offers to Washington: participation rights for American companies in Iran’s oil and gas industries. Among the conditions now being discussed: Iran’s right to sell oil freely again. Seventy-three years after the CIA removed a prime minister for nationalising his country’s oil fields, the negotiation is still, at its core, about the same thing.

In each case, a sovereign government moved to control, or was asked to share, its natural resources. The Cold War framing — the communist threat, the Soviet alignment — was the blanket justification from an earlier era. What has remained, post-Cold War, is access.

For decades, American foreign policy came with a humanitarian wrapper. USAID delivered food, medicine and infrastructure to more than a hundred countries. PEPFAR prevented an estimated 26 million deaths from HIV/AIDS across sub-Saharan Africa. GAVI vaccinated hundreds of millions of children. The Young African Leaders Initiative brought a generation of Africans to American universities and sent them home connected to Washington. The United States funded almost 25% of the WHO budget and underwrote much of the UN. The generosity was real. So was the calculation behind it. The money was never unconditional, the relationships were never without expectation, and the goodwill it generated made it considerably harder for recipient governments to say out loud what they actually thought of American foreign policy. Soft power is still power.

When Elon Musk called USAID “a criminal organisation” and dismantled it in February 2025 — eliminating 90% of its contracts and most of its 10,000 staff — he was not eliminating waste. He was removing that wrapper.

Exploitation on this scale, across this many countries and this many decades, does not magically disappear. It has a return address.

I thought she was taking the piss. But the science holds up. Humans and yeast diverged about one billion years ago. We share around 2,000 genes, and the amino acid sequences of comparable yeast and human proteins overlap by 32 percent on average. When researchers replaced 414 essential yeast genes with human equivalents, nearly half still worked — keeping the yeast alive. One billion years of separate evolution, and we remain, at the molecular level, recognisably related to that packet in the pantry.

Which got me thinking about the other end of the evolutionary ladder.

Bonobos. Specifically, the Lola Ya Bonobo sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of Congo — Lola being Lingala for paradise. So, Bonobo Paradise. It was 2003, smack dab in the middle of a civil war, and I was there — on a tourist’s visa, ostensibly to write about bonobos for a glossy magazine, though the real reason I was in Kinshasa was rather more complicated. A story for a proper essay.

Bonobos are hippie chimps. All peace and love and lots of sex. They share 98.7 percent of our DNA, and were only identified as a separate species in 1928 — the most recently discovered great ape, and already critically endangered. Bonobos have a relatively small habitat, existing only south of the Congo River. Scientists believe the river is the reason they’re distinct from chimpanzees — that when it formed about two million years ago, it divided an ancestral population in two. Same DNA. Different river bank. The chimps became male-dominated and aggressive. The bonobos became matriarchal, empathetic, conflict-resolving.

Anyway, I was on a small fibreglass boat floating on a lake, the natural boundary of the reserve, since bonobos (supposedly) don’t swim — when the alpha male, Miguel, swung Tarzan-style via a palm frond and landed on the prow. Simultaneously sending the captain diving overboard. Miguel — 60 kilograms of pure muscle — grabbed the head of my minder, Eric, by his ears tearing one from the side of his head. Having been told to avoid eye contact, I fixed my gaze on the pool of blood forming at my feet.

A few minutes later, I slipped into slimy green water holding my camera above my head, worrying less about crocodiles than parasitic worms and bacteria — and headed for shore. After dumping my equipment, I swam back and got Eric off the boat — all six foot four of him — and swam him to shore.

From the yeast in the pantry to being locked in the research centre’s kitchen store while Miguel ran riot outside. One billion years at one end, six million at the other.

The full story — Kinshasa, the soldiers, Eric, Stanley the boat captain in his nautical cap and cravat, and an entire bonobo colony cheering for their rebel leader — is coming soon.

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I live in Virginia. Data centre capital of the world. Loudoun County (the next one over from Fauquier, where I live) has 200+ facilities — more than any other community on earth — and the expansion is on the march, moving south and west into Prince William, Culpeper and beyond — edging ever closer to national parks (Shenandoah is on my doorstep), preserved battlefields and historic sites.

The economics — loudly touted as transformative by the Magnificent Seven (not the samurai, but the trolls running the biggest tech companies in the world) — are genuinely complicated. In Loudoun, data centres generate nearly half of all property tax revenue. Homeowners there have seen their property tax rates fall every year for a decade. The county’s schools are well funded. The roads in good shape.

But Loudoun is not Montana. Nor is it Remington, Virginia.

The state-wide overview is stark. Virginia gave data centre companies nearly $2 billion in combined state and local sales tax exemptions in fiscal year 2025. For that sum, the state’s own auditors counted 1,610 net new permanent jobs — do the math and that’s a taxpayer cost of more than $1.2 million per job. Or some $267 million of lost state revenue that could otherwise have gone to K-12 schools. The benefit flows overwhelmingly to wealthy, lawyered-up Northern Virginia counties. What’s worrying is the expansion is now heading to communities that don’t have Loudoun’s leverage, existing infrastructure or institutional capacity to negotiate.

The fight is now holding up the entire Virginia state budget. A deal must be reached by 30 June or the state government shuts down.

Michael Power has been thinking a lot about all this. He was my first podcast guest (Cracks in the Edifice)— an Oxford PPE graduate with a PhD from UCT and a Master’s from The Fletcher School, who spent 22 years as Global Strategist at Ninety One, one of the world’s largest emerging market asset managers. His audience is investment bankers, VCs and the kind of people who move capital. What he’s been documenting in a series of rigorously researched essays is something that I’d put in the category of breaking news: the business model underpinning these data centres may be coming apart faster than the concrete is drying. The cloud AI industry has negative margins and CAPEX is heading toward $1 trillion a year globally. Meanwhile, a $4,000 Mac Mini running an open-weight AI model can do 80 percent of what a $5 billion data centre does.1

There is currently a six-month waitlist for the Mac Mini. Though fear not. Huawei just announced a chip architecture that sidesteps the entire Western semiconductor supply chain.

What interests me about where this is heading is not just the financial exposure of rural communities that pick up the electricity bill and sign away their water tables for thirty permanent janitor jobs. It’s that the alternative — AI running on affordable personal systems, open-weight, offline, accessible to anyone — is far more energy efficient and genuinely more democratic.

In China it is already happening. The technology is seen as a tool rather than a toll road, empowering the person using it rather than extracting value upward toward a handful of tech titans who have decided that Kassi Solberg has no role in the conversation.

She does. And so do we.

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El Niño is a periodic warming of equatorial Pacific surface temperatures that disrupts trade winds and, subsequently, rainfall patterns across the planet. A devastating cycle, it recurs every two to seven years, lasts a year or more, and has aftershocks — including the La Niña correction that often follows — that play out for years after. Think of it less like a hurricane and more like an epidemic: it takes hold slowly, moves through systems — weather, water, food production, commodity prices, government policies — and doesn’t let go. When Pacific water temperatures rise by even a degree or two above normal, the consequences are felt in fields and cities that have no idea why rains have stopped or floodwaters won’t recede.

Scientists are now projecting a three-degree spike in ocean temperature. The last time the Pacific ran that hot was 1877. That El Niño killed tens of millions of people.

All three of the world’s major forecasting centres agree it’s coming. Meanwhile the Trump administration has gutted NOAA, eliminated its entire climate research division, and driven out more than 2,000 scientists since last year. Fifty years of life-saving institutional knowledge. Gone.

This is the same man who told the world that climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated” and that the carbon footprint is “a hoax made up by people with evil intentions.” The same man who, nine days ago, standing on the White House lawn with inflation at a three-year high and petrol at nearly $5 a gallon, was asked directly how much Americans’ financial situation was motivating his decision-making. “Not even a little bit,” he said. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”

Meanwhile, we are so transfixed — by the billion-dollar ballroom renovation, the $1.776 billion slush fund for pardoned criminals, the IRS immunity secured for himself and his family, the deliberate starvation of Cuba — that we’re not watching what is forming right now, in the Pacific. This is his playbook. The media failure is on us.

El Niño doesn’t negotiate, tweet, or hold rallies. It just comes. And when it does, the people who feel it first will be the ones who can least afford to. The early warning systems that might have told us how bad and how soon, have been dismantled on purpose by a man who has told us that he doesn’t give a toss about any of us.

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A few weeks earlier I had been on a plane to London — not a commercial flight. I was travelling with Harry Oppenheimer, the South African mining magnate, who had offered me a seat on his plane so I could attend the memorial for my grandmother-in-law, Viscountess Leila Hampden (she’s a whole other essay — I adored her).

We stopped to refuel in Libreville, Gabon and were told to stay on the plane. That there was an Ebola outbreak. Harry, who always travelled with his chef, smiled and asked if we should have champagne with our scrambled eggs. We sat on the runway and I filed it away as one of those strange dispatches from a continent that never seemed to run short of strange dispatches.

A few weeks later, Chris called.

A Gabonese doctor — known only as Angel for the lives he routinely saved in Libreville’s resuscitation unit — had flown to Johannesburg on 27 October. He’d been suffering from acute gastritis. What he hadn’t disclosed was he had been treating Ebola patients in Libreville. Nobody at Morningside had any reason to think about Ebola — they were treating a doctor who said he had stomach trouble.

When the team couldn’t find a diagnosis, they considered auto-immune disease. Chris told me: in medical school they taught him that when everything else fails, you throw steroids at the problem. That’s what he did, and it saved Angel’s life.

But on 29 October, theatre nurse Marilyn Lahana had assisted with a procedure, been exposed to Angel’s blood, and fallen ill. She died of Ebola on 24 November. She was the only secondary case. Three hundred and fifty contacts were traced. Fortunately, the outbreak stopped there — contained by people who had the training and the infrastructure to respond.

I wrote about it for the FT. I’ve never forgotten it. Which is why, when the DRC declared its 17th Ebola outbreak since 1976 this week, I felt a familiar chill.

Experts believe the recent outbreak had been spreading for weeks before anyone knew. The International Rescue Committee had been monitoring five health zones in Ituri Province. After USAID was gutted, they pulled back to two. The laboratory networks that moved viral samples from remote areas to testing facilities were dismantled and the trained health workers who notice, trace, report all fired.

Elon Musk told a cabinet meeting that DOGE had “accidentally” cut Ebola prevention programmes. “We restored it immediately,” he said. “There was no interruption.”

As of this morning, there are more than 600 suspected cases. At least 139 dead. It has crossed into Uganda, reached Goma, a major transit hub. The WHO has declared a global health emergency. This strain — Bundibugyo — has no approved vaccine and no treatment.

My latest essay will publish Tuesday.

In the meantime…now you know. Share it.