I’ve been addicted at least three different brands of the vapes that make up the dazzling multicoloured display behind the counter; my attempts to stop vaping have often led me to become addicted to the sweets, chocolates and crisps lining one wall; and my efforts to quit those have led me to become addicted to the fizzy drinks (both the high-sugar and “diet” versions) in the fridge on the other wall. I’ve never been addicted to the caffeinated “energy” drinks that seem to be a speciality of the Dopamine Store (I’m too scared to see what would happen if I tried them); but for a while recently I did become addicted to the duty-free Marlboro Lights they sell illegally under the counter, figuring they might help me quit the vapes I originally started using to help me quit Marlboro Lights.

I don’t qualify for an Ozempic prescription because, despite my frequent late-night sorties into the Dopamine Store, I’m not overweight (I’m addicted to the gym). But it’s not impossible that that one day could change. New research suggests drugs like Ozempic may help reduce not just overeating but alcohol and drug abuse. And many people who take them have reported significant reductions in compulsive behaviours like gambling, shopping and smoking.

Despite these encouraging signs, semaglutide-based drugs don’t appear to be a magic bullet cure for addiction — at least, not yet. But recently I’ve been asking myself: what if they were? What if it turned out that the next generation of Ozempic-like drugs was an antidote not just for overeating but all compulsive behaviours? What would happen to the world we’ve created?

Here’s my theory: very quickly, everything would fall apart. Whole industries would collapse. The economy would hit rock bottom. Individually and collectively, we’d have to figure out how to rehabilitate ourselves.

That’s because we live in a world of what the historian David Courtwright calls “limbic capitalism”: an economic system that drives profit by capturing the part of our brains responsible for emotions, rewards and behaviour — regardless of the havoc it wreaks on our bodies and minds. Notice this is the exact opposite of the way we’re taught capitalism is supposed to work: via a free market of rational individuals making informed decisions.

For a beautiful example of limbic capitalism, take a recent promotion from Pizza Hut, which offered online customers free bets at gambling websites. In other words: as a reward for buying an addictive food via an addictive device, you were able to indulge in a notoriously addictive behaviour on a platform optimised for addiction.

The notion that the gambling industry relies on addiction isn’t just a hunch: a report from the Gambling Commission shows that, without “problem gamblers”, betting companies literally couldn’t turn a profit. Everybody knows the slogan “Please gamble responsibly” is a sick joke: if customers were actually able to adhere to it, the industry would vanish into thin air. They might as well sell heroin in packages bearing the same disclaimer.

But, in terms of both market value and the social harm it causes, gambling is just a street-corner dealer compared with the Mexican cartel of the modern food industry. As the author Johann Hari points out in his recent book Magic Pill, Ozempic and similar drugs are an artificial solution to an artificial problem: a health crisis created by western countries’ transition, since the Seventies, from a diet based on fresh food to one based on industrially manufactured food that confuses your body’s sense of satiety and keeps you eating when you’re full — that turns you, in other words, into an addict. The results can be measured in our expanded waistlines: nearly a third of UK adults are obese (up threefold among women and fivefold among men since 1980) and nearly two thirds are overweight, dramatically increasing their risk of everything from heart attacks and strokes to diabetes and cancer. The corporations responsible for this state of affairs are, quite literally, making a killing.

Still, it wasn’t until each of us started carrying a miniature Dopamine Store around with us at all times that limbic capitalism finally took over the world. The flashing, buzzing little Pavlovian machines in our pockets were designed by people who studied how slot machines overstimulate our brains’ reward centres to keep us hooked. As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt convincingly shows, the evidence that smartphones and social media are causing major societal and psychological harm — particularly among young people — is now too strong to ignore. Some researchers even argue that they’re responsible for a general decline in western countries’ average IQ over the last decade: in other words, smartphones are actually making us dumber.

When, as a full-blown smartphone alarmist, I talk to people about the way our devices turn us into addicts, they usually shrug and tell me that they need their iPhone for important things like work, and staying connected to friends and family. This is absolutely true, and it’s also exactly how addiction works: most alcoholics start going to the pub not for the alcohol but to meet the very real human need for connection and community. But over time, the distinction between the two needs gets blurred, until one cannibalises the other — and the alcoholic ends up drinking alone with the curtains drawn. Our age of hyper-connectivity is also one of loneliness and isolation of epidemic proportions. People in the western world have fewer friends than any previous generation, and studies show Britain may be the loneliest country of all.

For every fundamental human need, limbic capitalism provides a dopamine-fuelled answer. Love? Online dating. Sex? Online porn. Play? Online gaming. Intellectual curiosity? Twitter/X. Aesthetic joy? Instagram. (I’m afraid if you want to know what fundamental human need TikTok is supposed to serve, you’ll have to find a member of Gen Z and see if they understand the meaning of the words “fundamental human need”.)

But, for me, the most insidious aspect of limbic capitalism is the way it can turn even health products into new addictions. This category includes not only a plethora of bogus “diet” foods made of chemicals you could use to clean a drain pipe. There’s also the array of meditation, therapy and sleep apps that promise to help reduce the stress that’s exacerbated by the very device you’re using to access them. You could always try turning off your phone instead, of course ­– but who the hell would ever do that?

Perhaps you’re thinking: sure, it sucks to be an addict in the modern world — but I’m not an addict, and neither are most people. But if you think you’re immune to the effects of limbic capitalism, think again. Modern neuroscience and cognitive psychology teach us that we’re all much less free than we think. As Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman has shown, most of our actions are automatic, triggered by environmental stimuli or past experiences and propelled by unconscious motivations. The behavioural engineers who designed your smartphone and the platforms they carry have no time for metaphysical distinctions between “addicts” and “non-addicts”. To them, we are all walking limbic systems, waiting to be exploited.

Although they’re hardly its most pernicious manifestation, for me the evil genius of limbic capitalism is best symbolised by my recent nemesis: the nicotine vape. Vapes show how even what appears to be a genuine miracle cure for addiction can be hacked to create a new cohort of addicted consumers. When I first tried them 10 years ago, I was amazed to find I could quit cigarettes at a stroke. But before long manufacturers started making single-use vapes full of candy-like flavours in colourful packaging (irresistible to teenagers and, unfortunately, 40-year-old men like me). Now vapes create blood nicotine concentrations at much higher levels than the cigarettes they were meant to replace; I wasn’t joking when I said I have tried taking up Marlboro Lights again to help me quit vaping.

If Ozempic 2.0 does come along, cure all addictions and thereby abolish modern capitalism, will that be such a bad thing? On the one hand, it will presumably cause untold economic destruction. On the upside, it might help solve the teen mental health crisis, raise our IQs, force us to rediscover authentic sources of meaning and connection, and compel us to build a society based on something other than short-term gratification.

Until then, if the Marlboro Lights method doesn’t stop me from scurrying into the Dopamine Store for yet more candyfloss flavoured Elf Bar vapes in 2025 – well, I suppose I could always try taking up heroin again.

But Iran, which dominates Iraq through its proxy Shia militia groups, has long wanted us out. In September, the US and Iraq agreed to conclude the formal coalition mission by September 2025, though some troops will remain in advisory roles. The first phase of withdrawal has already begun. A final withdrawal means that Iraq will fall almost completely into Tehran’s grip. My interlocutor was Kurdish and, unsurprisingly, this worries him — as it does millions of Sunnis.

There are, you see, many Iraqis who not only have no problem with Western intervention in their country, but don’t want it to end.

But I was surprised later when a Sunni Arab friend told me that many Iraqis love Trump because, in January 2020, he whacked Qasem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s Quds Force and the man responsible for so much violence in their country. No matter that Trump brought in a so-called “Muslim ban”, his Western “intervention” in Iraq was more palatable to a section of its people than Iran’s far more localised — and constant — meddling.

This speaks to a broader, unignorable truth: the reality on the ground in the Middle East is often not just merely different to what we read, believe or are told in Oxbridge Area Studies departments, but entirely at odds with it; as is our relationship to the region, and how that is often received by the people there. I was reminded, here, of Elie Kedourie. An Iraqi Jew who ended up a professor at the LSE in London, this great scholar of the Middle East also happened to be married to my mother’s cousin.

Kedourie, who passed away in 1992, was famous for many books but what stands out is his genuinely iconoclastic 1970 work The Chatham House Version: and Other Middle-Eastern Studies. This percipient and literary book is a forensic dismantling of the “Chatham House” — the informal name for the Royal Institute of International Affairs think tank — analysis of the Middle East. For Kedourie, Chatham House stands as shorthand for an elite British view of the Middle East (and the Arabs in particular) that he argues is based around a mix of sentimentality, guilt, and self-flagellation brought together by a guiding tendency to favour romantic illusion over prosaic reality.

Kedourie was most scathing about the effect of this approach in his homeland of Iraq. He watched the British scuttle out of there, and indeed the region, during the end of empire, and let chaos ensue — and he damned them for it.

According to Kedourie, “The British left behind a region whose political, social, and economic structures were inadequate to sustain the independence they had promised and which they had uncritically imposed.” Add “Americans” alongside “British” and you’ll recognise not only the timeless wisdom of his words, but also the West’s ability to make the same mistakes, timelessly.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq was a historical mistake. We should not have done it. But we did, and in so doing we removed a brutal and sadistic dictator, but one who nevertheless kept chaos at bay. Chaos that, lest we forget, is built into the Iraqi state, carved illogically from three Ottoman provinces, and filled with a toxic mix of Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. Iraq was constructed (by us and the French no less) as if it were designed to be a sectarian tinderbox; and once Saddam’s controlling authority was gone, that tinderbox erupted. Last year, on the 20th anniversary of the invasion, I reported for UnHerd from Baghdad where my fixer Ammar told me something that has lodged, ineradicably, in my mind ever since. “We had so much hope in the beginning,” he said. “Then the country turned to a path of blood, and then people started to want Saddam back to keep order. Even with all the misery he brought…We didn’t see all this blood in the streets.”

And it’s not just Iraq where coalition troops are indispensable, but Syria too. There, they are concentrated mainly in the northeast and comprise a limited but strategic presence focused on counterterrorism, military partnerships with the Kurds, who control an autonomous region in parts of the north and east, and containing Russian and Iranian influence.

Quite aside from the fall of Assad — and was not the rapid fall of this supposedly immovable dictator yet another orthodoxy shattered? — the rise of rebels to replace him threatens the coalitions role in Syria. Then there is the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army, which is already skirmishing with Kurdish forces, primarily the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who are allied with Washington in the fight against Islamic State, but which Turkey views as a threat due to their links to Kurdish groups it views as terrorists. My Kurdish friends on the ground are understandably worried. Now reports reach me of US forces pulling out of parts of the northeast, leaving them exposed. The situation is made worse through the presence of the terror group Islamic State (IS). Over the first half of 2024 IS claimed responsibility for 153 attacks in Iraq and Syria (almost more than double the total number of attacks claimed in 2023). In that time, US forces along with the Iraqi security forces and the SDF have conducted 196 missions, killed 44 IS operatives and detained 166. According to US CentCom, “these leaders include those responsible for planning of operations outside of Syria and Iraq, recruiting, training and weapons smuggling”.

The Kurds also control Al-Hol Camp, where 10,000 to 12,000 imprisoned jihadist fighters and former IS members are imprisoned (the camp houses around 50,000 to 60,000 people, including family members of IS fighters, one of whom is Shamima Begum). If the Kurds come under sustained SNA attack, they will no longer be able to effectively control the camp, and  thousands of Jihadis could go free. These are not just issues of Syrian and Iraqi security, but our own too. And finally, there is the problem of Russia and Iran. Both regimes are now under huge pressure at home and abroad, and they will grasp any opportunity to claim any sort of victory — Iraq and Syria offer them a chance.

We have a responsibility to the people of Iraq whose country we invaded, destroyed and now want to hand over to Iran. We have a responsibility to the people of Syria too, especially the Kurds, who fought with us to defeat IS. If we flee (again), we will abandon the region to chaos: just as Kedourie shows we did over half a century ago. Both US and UK diplomats have admitted to me over recent years the shame and awkwardness they feel because of the failed invasion. They are right to feel ashamed, but it is dangerous madness to leave Iraq, above all for the Iraqis we profess to care about so much.

So, why have we promised that we will? For the same reasons Kedourie identified over half a century ago: loss of nerve born from a failure of confidence. We fear being called occupiers or imperialists while the Iranians and Russians are shamelessly trying to rebuild the empires they have lost. Then there is Turkish President Recep Erdoğan’s drive across Syria, which is led by several geopolitical considerations but also the more far amorphous vision of rebuilding the Ottoman Empire there.

In the name of anti-imperialism, we would hand these countries over to the worst imperialists of our day.

Action can indeed be disastrous, but so can inaction. We invaded Iraq in 2003, it brought chaos and bloodshed to Iraqis. But in 2011, Barack Obama, haunted by Iraq’s legacy, refused to enforce his own red line and punish Bashar al-Assad for gassing his own people. He failed to act, and it brought chaos and bloodshed to Syrians.

And if we do cut and run, who suffers most in the countries we abandon? Again, we turn to Kedourie who, as a Jew, was always sensitive to the treatment of minorities (that supposedly sacred group in contemporary Western policy-making). He was just 15 when he witnessed, along with most of my maternal family, the June 1941 pogrom known as the Farhud (“Looting”) in which officers of the state murdered over 180 Jewish men, woman children. For Kedourie, two lessons emerge, not just from the Farhud but post-imperial Iraq. The first is that living as a minority under the cosmopolitan Ottoman empire was preferable to a Sunni Iraq, increasingly gripped by notions of nationalism it had imported from the West, but which lacked the institutions and traditions to fully understand or implement. The second, was that, as the author Robert Kaplan has observed, Kedourie understood that Empire provided the kind of Hobbesian Leviathan needed to control a Middle East gripped by incessant turmoil and violence (which he exhaustively detailed in his work) and protect the weak from the strong.

Now I am emphatically not suggesting that the coalition remain in Iraq (nor to a far lesser extent Syria) to act as Leviathan. But when the US crowbarred itself in that role for close to two decades to suddenly abandon Iraq, not to its own people but to the far less palatable Leviathan next door, is not merely inadvisable, it is inexcusable.

All this is so obvious that mere loss of confidence seems inadequate to explain it. In fact, it is compounded by something else that Kedourie identified in the British foreign policy establishment: a deep strain of orientalist fascination with, and fetishisation of, Arab culture (how else to explain its indulgence of that bloviating fraud T.E. Lawrence). This is then compounded by guilt: at the problems caused by their drawing of post-imperial borders and, perhaps above all, the foundation of the state of Israel. Simply put, British officials believed that the Arabs, once freed from the twin evils of Zionism and imperialism, would naturally establish peaceful, stable governments, without recognising the challenges posed by centuries of division and conflict. Once again, add “Americans” to “British” and this book, which was written over half a century ago, could have been written this morning.

Kedourie understood that this was nonsense; he understood that what followed the end of empires was not a halcyon age of “authentic” liberation but often corrupt governance and mass violence; he understood, also, that it is only a “fashionable western sentimentality which holds that Great Powers are nasty and small Powers virtuous”. This phrase should be cast in bronze to hang over the desk of every FCDO and State Department official, and of every foreign news editor. Any temptation to view it as simplistic or exaggerated is swiftly disabused with consideration of the behaviour of many Global South countries towards Russia’s attempted colonisation of Ukraine. Clearly, being colonised a century ago may give you an insight into that form of suffering, but it doesn’t extend to empathy for countries undergoing similar threats today, and it absolutely does not endow you with any superior ability to analyse contemporary geopolitics.

But most of all Kedourie understood the problem was not Zionism but, as Robert Kaplan observes, that “the Ottoman Empire with its caliphate crumbled, leaving an Islamic civilisation without a recognised religious authority. The result was various groups and factions and ideologies that competed for which one could be the most pure; that is, the most extreme. Today’s problems are old problems, going back to the decades of Ottoman decline, with the realisation that the Middle East, from Algeria to Iraq, has still not found a solution to the final collapse of the Turkish sultanate in 1922.”

Still, though, it was Zionism, or more correctly the State of Israel, which supposedly sat and sits at the centre of orthodox Middle East analysis and reporting today as a source of all instability — a font of original sin in a region that, without its cancerous presence, would surely exist as an oasis of tranquillity. It is notable that directly challenging this orthodoxy has led to the greatest regional breakthrough of the last decade in the region, the 2020 Abraham Accords. That the series of normalisation agreements between Israel and several Arab states were brokered by Donald Trump is extraordinary but perhaps also inescapable.

Only a man so divorced from the Western foreign policy establishment could go so directly against one of its guiding principles, as articulated by then-US secretary of State John Kerry in 2013. “I will tell you that peace between Israel and the Arab world is impossible without a Palestinian peace,” he said. “It’s not going to happen. You’re not going to get it.”

After Hamas committed the October 7 atrocities — which occurred just weeks after another star of the DC foreign policy establishment, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, declared that the Middle East is “quieter than it has been for decades” — Israel launched its war in Gaza. It then launched its war in Lebanon and took out the leaders of both Hamas and Lebanon; it then struck Iran directly for the first time. At each stage the world (most importantly the Americans) told Israel to stop. They told it to make peace. They told it that an extended war would be bad for everyone; and that it would strengthen Hamas. They said, going into Lebanon would be a bloody disaster (as would going to Rafah, where in fact the IDF managed to kill Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar); and that Iranian missiles could destroy large parts of its territory. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ignored them on every occasion.

I make no moral judgment on each of these actions, merely on their efficacy, which as of now, is proven. And Netanyahu was able to accomplish everything he has for a variety of reasons (not least that he wants to put off the post-war enquiries over October 7) but above all because he understands that the Middle East that matters is not that the one that triggers undergraduate protestors, or makes the hard Left go misty-eyed, or the one that aging Foreign Office or State Department mandarins fondly imagine.

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David Patrikarakos is UnHerd‘s foreign correspondent. His latest book is War in 140 characters: how social media is reshaping conflict in the 21st century. (Hachette)

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