The Unraveling: Four Crises That Prove Nobody's Actually in Control

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Here’s what strikes me about this week in global politics: everyone’s confident they’ve got a handle on something they absolutely don’t.

The UK just dropped £662 million on a three-year deal with France to stop small boats crossing the Channel. Fifty riot-trained police officers. Hostile crowds. Violence. This is what two developed democracies think counts as a solution to migration—throwing money at the symptom while pretending they’re treating the disease.

Meanwhile, in Washington, the Trump administration just reclassified medical marijuana out of Schedule I, the same category as heroin. That’s a real shift. But read deeper: it’s not legalization. It’s not freedom. It’s regulatory shuffling that satisfies nobody—not true legalization advocates who want full decriminalization, and not the law-and-order crowd who wanted harder lines.

And then there’s the small matter of a diesel shortage caused by Iranian oil disruptions, combined with the fact that AI is already shrinking entry-level job markets for young people, while the UK Prime Minister is defending himself at PMQs about whether he personally asked for a job for his communications director.

None of these problems has a solution that makes sense to the people who caused them.

Photo by Berna / Pexels

The Migration Theater Nobody’s Fooling

Let’s be honest: the UK-France small boats agreement is a cash transfer that buys political cover. That’s not cynicism—that’s just watching how democratic governments work when facing public pressure on an intractable problem.

Fifty riot police officers aren’t stopping migration. They’re theater. They’re proof that someone is “doing something.” The real drivers of small boat crossings—state collapse in Syria, economic devastation in Afghanistan, the simple math that European wages beat Middle Eastern poverty—those things don’t care about uniforms.

What’s revealing is that both the UK and France think this needs doing at all. Migration has become the third rail of Western politics, the one issue where governments feel compelled to perform toughness even when toughness is geometrically ineffective. You could quadruple the police presence and redirect more resources, and you’d still have the same underlying pressure: people in desperate circumstances trying to reach places where they might survive.

The £662 million might be better spent on literally anything else—port security infrastructure, better vetting systems, processing centers that don’t take two years to review claims. But “we built better infrastructure” doesn’t poll well. “We deployed riot police” does.

Here’s my read: this deal lasts exactly as long as it takes for either government to face a domestic political crisis that makes them want to withdraw. When that happens, everyone will act surprised, and then they’ll spend another £662 million on the next theatrical solution.

When Your Communist Drug Schedule Meets Market Economics

The marijuana reclassification is genuinely interesting because it shows the Trump administration actually understanding something about federal policy: the Schedule I classification is indefensible as a scientific matter.

Heroin has no approved medical use in the United States. Schedule I is for drugs with no medical use. Marijuana has FDA-approved derivatives. So either the law was wrong, or the facts changed. The administration chose to acknowledge the facts.

What’s weird is that this doesn’t actually matter that much. States already have medical marijuana programs. Patients already access it. What this does is create a new regulatory category that… allows the FDA to study it? Allows research? Maybe shifts DEA enforcement priorities?

The real work happens in Congress, and Congress isn’t touching this. Nobody wants to vote on marijuana legalization right now—not House Republicans asking ActBlue executives to testify about liberal fund-raising, not Senate Democrats who still remember when being tough on drugs was Democratic policy. So the Trump administration gets to claim victory on something that meaningfully changes very little.

But here’s what it actually signals: even Republican administrations now accept that the War on Drugs classification system is obsolete. That’s a real crack in the edifice. Give it five years and you’ll see actual legalization bills because the intellectual foundation for prohibition has crumbled.

Photo by Andrew Neel / Pexels

The Diesel Problem Nobody Predicted

This one’s brutal. The Iran situation has squeezed diesel supplies far more than gasoline because diesel powers the machines that move the physical economy—trucks, construction equipment, shipping vessels. It’s the fuel of actual work.

And nobody’s discussing this in the context of the AI jobs story, but they should. Sunak’s right that graduates are facing a real job market squeeze, and it’s partly AI displacement. But it’s also partly because the physical economy is about to get much more expensive to run.

Diesel isn’t a luxury input. When diesel prices rise, the cost of moving goods rises. That ripples through inflation, through supply chains, through the ability of small businesses to operate. An 18-year-old wondering if they can find entry-level work in an AI-disrupted market is also facing a world where that entry-level work might be in an industry that’s suddenly dealing with 15-20% input cost increases.

I’m genuinely uncertain what the medium-term play is here. The U.S. is seizing Iranian tankers, which is effective theater for the “we’re tough on Iran” crowd. But it doesn’t create new diesel supplies. It just redistributes scarcity. And scarcity in the fuel that powers economic activity is the kind of slow-motion crisis that sneaks up and then suddenly everyone’s angry.

The Mandelson Question That Won’t Die

Cat Little, the top Cabinet Office official, went to Parliament and said due process was followed in Lord Mandelson’s vetting for his role. That’s her job—to defend the process. But the fact that the Prime Minister felt compelled to answer questions at PMQs about whether he’d asked for a job for his then-communications chief?

That’s the sound of a government that’s lost the ability to control its own narrative.

Starmer’s answer—yes, it happened, it was normal—probably is the truthful answer. People do ask for things. Powerful people especially ask for things. But the fact that this became a story worth pursuing suggests the government’s press shop isn’t where it needs to be. Matthew Doyle’s departure was supposed to be about something else entirely, but now it’s wound up as a story about whether the Prime Minister improperly intervened in his behalf.

That’s not a scandal. It’s just bad management of the things that become scandals.

What I’m Watching

The diesel shock hitting retail prices (April-June). Watch whether trucking companies start passing through increased fuel surcharges on deliveries. If this becomes visible in cost-of-living metrics by May, expect political heat on energy policy that nobody’s currently prepared for.

ActBlue testimony to House Republicans (specific date TBD). If Republicans actually get Regina Wallace-Jones in front of a camera and this becomes a legitimacy crisis for Democratic fund-raising infrastructure, watch for a counter-move targeting Republican digital fundraising. This escalates the already-tense relationship between Congress and the platforms.

UK government announcing another “migration solution” by Q3 2025. The £662 million runs for three years, but I’m betting the political pressure forces a new announcement within 18 months. Watch for either a repatriation deal with an EU country or a dramatic expansion of offshore processing. Both are already in the planning stages.

FDA marijuana scheduling rules taking effect vs. Congress doing nothing about it. By summer, we’ll know whether the reclassification actually changes anything on the ground. If it doesn’t, legalization becomes a 2026 midterm issue. If it does, expect Republican states to panic about federal overreach.