Out on the Atlantic, beyond the curve of Galway Bay, something shifted this week—not just on the radar screens, but in the collective sense of where we stand in the world. For generations we believed that the ocean was a buffer, a vast blue reassurance that whatever madness consumed continents would lose its force long before it reached our western edge. That confidence now feels quaint. That mass of water over which JFK ran his ‘on a clear day’ speech here in Galway now seems different.
This was the week when Venezuela was effectively taken over by the Americans, a phrase that once would have sounded like Cold War pulp fiction but now barely raises an eyebrow. It was also the week when tankers were pursued across the Atlantic by NATO, Irish and US aircraft, when Russian submarines loitered beneath the surface like patient sharks, and when a drama playing out between superpowers unfolded closer to home than we ever expected.
For some years now there has been a sense that the world has become one vast reality TV show. Perhaps it was inevitable, in an age when actors and television stars sit at the top table of global politics, that world affairs would begin to mimic bingeable drama: cliffhangers, sudden reversals, villains rebranded mid-season. Nothing surprises us anymore—or so we tell ourselves. And yet, somehow, it still does.
Way off our west coast, between here and Iceland, there are ships and submarines in motion, part of a new and unsettling choreography. The pursuit of a so-called shadow tanker fleeing a US blockade on Venezuelan oil has drawn British surveillance aircraft, French naval patrols, Irish Air Corps planes and US P-8s into the same cold airspace. A vessel hastily repainted with a Russian flag, renamed for the sixth time in a few years, its crew hoping that a lick of paint and a database update might deter seizure. Russian military vessels, including a submarine, watching from nearby. This is not a movie set; it is the North Atlantic.
The tanker’s course—threading its way northeast between Ireland and Iceland, possibly bound for Murmansk—brings the drama uncomfortably close. Irish airspace, traditionally neutral and carefully guarded from active military operations, suddenly becomes a corridor for surveillance. The sea we assumed would always protect us now looks less like a moat and more like a stage.
The meme of “that escalated quickly” has become an accidental motto for world affairs. A US pressure campaign turns into a full oil blockade. A disputed boarding becomes a two-week pursuit across the ocean. Flags are swapped, names changed, diplomatic notes issued—and still the chase continues. Nothing seems beyond doing now. Nothing seems too ridiculous to be attempted. The guardrails that once limited behaviour between states feel worn down, if not removed entirely.
There is also a deeper unease beneath the spectacle. The old reliables—the assumptions that great powers would avoid direct confrontation, that international law would at least slow things down, that geography still mattered—are no longer reliable. The race for Greenland, the militarisation of the Arctic, the casual proximity of rival forces all point to a world shrinking under pressure, where distance offers no comfort.
We on the west coast of one of Europe’s most westerly countries have long traded on a sense of benign remoteness. But this week made it clear that remoteness is no longer a defence. The Atlantic is not empty; it is crowded with interests, ambitions and risks. The drama that once played out on far-off shores now unfolds within our maritime doorstep.
We were already exhausted by the crises of recent years—pandemics, wars, economic shocks—without needing this reminder. Yet here it is. The ocean still looks the same from the shore, endlessly grey and familiar. But beyond the horizon, it has become the playground for the next phase of world affairs. And for the first time in a long while, it feels as though the waves are carrying the noise of that world straight back to us.
