Connexion
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Calley Means, a senior advisor to Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., resigned from his position Thursday. In a post on X announcing his departure, Means wrote that he retained “tremendous respect for President Trump and Bobby Kennedy,” who “laid out a vision of combating the entrenched, dark forces in DC that profit from Americans getting sick.” He also touted his work on policies including “Dietary Guidelines reform, psychedelic reform, removing soda from SNAP, removing food dyes, GRAS reform, and overhauling government food procurement.”
Means first gained prominence as an advocate for the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. He was involved in the 2024 presidential campaigns of both RFK, Jr. and Donald Trump, and reportedly played a key role in brokering a political alliance between the two men. (His sister, Casey Means, is also a well-known figure in the MAHA movement, and was tapped for the post of surgeon general before her nomination was withdrawn earlier this year.)
Although Means did not give a reason for resigning, sources close to him attributed the decision to frustration with delays on advancing MAHA priorities. As one health influencer reportedly close with Means told the New York Times: “It became very clear in the last few months that no progress was getting made. And when you’re spinning around in circles, you can only take so much.”
The post Calley Means, Key WH Health Advisor, Resigns appeared first on The American Conservative.
A new book lays out how progressives would reshape U.S. strategy.
A World for All, edited by Matt Duss, OR Books, 2026, 250 pages.
Opposition to U.S. foreign policy has always tended to bring together strange ideological bedfellows. During the 1890s, when our republic shed its innocence to don the gaudy trappings of empire, populist Democrats joined aristocratic Mugwumps to take a stand against what one far-sighted pamphlet called “the conquest of the United States by Spain.” Before both world wars, a ragtag collection of socialists and pacifists found themselves on the same side as fanatical capitalists in futilely opposing America’s entry into the conflicts of the Old World. And from the Cold War through the Global War on Terror, libertarians and paleocons made common cause with hippies, Marxists, and other assorted denizens of the left to attack America’s globe-spanning military commitments.
These sorts of coalitions are easiest to maintain when the establishment is at its most imperial. It is no coincidence that the wild excesses of the Bush years produced the most durable and influential critique of interventionism since the Vietnam War, one that would eventually break containment to shape how the electorate as a whole thought about the country’s “forever wars.” Indeed, so thoroughgoing was this backlash that by 2016, the most exciting and compelling candidates vying for the Republican and Democratic nominations—Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders—would both be unrelenting critics of America’s foreign policy orthodoxy. And each held out strikingly similar prescriptions: end the wars, stop policing the world, and turn our gaze inwards.
Today, the promise of such a transpartisan alliance remains a major element of the movement known in DC circles as “restraint”—a loose but very real project to bring the national security state to heel, retrench from our garrisoning of the globe, and unwind an empire that has proven far more of a liability than an asset. But big struggles have a way of papering over differences. And although both left-wingers and right-wingers do meaningfully come together to advance restraint, their premises, priorities, and ultimate aims often diverge significantly.
One of the most influential and, I think, accurate taxonomies of this movement posits three distinct species of “restrainers” (to use the inelegant but unavoidable term): realists, conservatives, and progressives.
Realists come to restraint through their understanding of the international system, which they believe tends to punish overextension and make the employment of military force particularly risky. Of the three schools, they tend to be the most focused on the material costs of primacy. (Although realism and restraint are often used synonymously, they are conceptually distinct: The former is a descriptive theory, while the latter is a set of prescriptions.)
Conservative restrainers are more concerned about what interventionism does to America’s own values, domestic institutions, and republican traditions. Although they, too, decry the waste and risk associated with our global entanglements, they also see empire as inherently corrosive, even if the bill in blood and treasure could be kept manageable.
And progressive restrainers are most exercised about war and militarism. They are comfortable with engagement, broadly speaking, and in fact often harbor their own plans to remake global order, but reject an American hegemony that is enforced with or underwritten by military power.
A World for All, a new volume of essays edited by the leftist foreign policy guru Matt Duss, represents an attempt to articulate the worldview of this last group. The foreword—which is written by Sanders, Duss’s old boss—frames things in starkly moral terms, as an epic struggle between oligarchy and democracy. “A progressive foreign policy,” Sanders writes,
must begin with moral clarity. We cannot champion human rights abroad while violating them at home. We cannot condemn Russia’s bombing of civilians while funding Israel’s atrocities. We cannot lecture others about democracy while billionaires buy our elections and policymakers serve their donors rather than their constituents. Authoritarian rivals are exploiting our hypocrisy, making consistency not only a moral obligation but a strategic necessity.
But clarity is not enough. We must also articulate an affirmative vision: a foreign policy that confronts global oligarchy, strengthens democratic institutions, and builds genuine partnerships. This means focusing on collective action rather than dominance. It means making anti-corruption a central pillar of our foreign policy. It means supporting democracy not through military intervention but by helping societies meet the needs of their people. It means recognizing that true security comes not from trillion-dollar arsenals but from addressing the root causes of instability: inequality, injustice, and environmental catastrophe. And it requires humility—an understanding that US leadership must be earned, not assumed.
The book is divided into three thematic sections: one offering regional sketches; one focused on economics and migration; and one mainly concerned with government and technology. It draws from a range of contributors, including former officials in Democratic administrations, academics, and think-tankers, all of whom share a firmly left-wing and broadly idealistic orientation.
But despite the aspirations of the foreword (and the introduction, and the prologue—the volume does a hat trick of prefatory materials), what we get falls a little short of an “affirmative vision.”
Partly this is because the essays are uneven. Some are sharp and thought-provoking. The piece on Congress, for example, deftly analyzes the causes of our current dysfunction and lays out the foreign policy stakes of continuing to tolerate an utterly supine legislature. The chapter on corruption puts forward specific, actionable policy fixes, ones that seem to me to have a decent chance of cutting down the sale of political outcomes both here and abroad.
Others read as throwbacks to the nadir of what we’re now calling “Woke 1.” One chapter ponders earnestly the question of how America can build a “feminist, anti-racist foreign policy;” another recommends open borders and a return to the “see no evil” approach to immigration policy that Americans so roundly rejected in 2024.
And then there are some contributions that leave the reader scratching his head. The essay on Europe, for instance, talks airily of the need for both “deeper engagement and genuine give-and-take,” while entirely ignoring the most pressing issue in transatlantic relations: namely, what should be done with the 80,000 or so American troops currently stationed on the continent. In the volume’s piece on Russia, the role of the United States in the Ukraine War—obviously the gravitational center of bilateral relations right now—is disposed of in a few hand-wavey sentences:
If negotiations on ending the war become possible with Russia, the key diplomatic instrument will not be rhetoric or the art of persuasion but the cumulative leverage over Russia that Ukraine and its partners are able to amass. Military aid to Ukraine should be organized accordingly, not around the unobtainable goal of defeating Russia outright but of blocking Russia from moving forward in Ukraine and of demonstrating to Russia that the war is futile—a costly dead end. The unpredictable details of such military aid will vary month by month and year by year.
Perhaps it’s just me, but those “unpredictable details” seem rather important!
But the other reason the effort to build a coherent blueprint falls short is because there are major, unresolved tensions at the heart of progressive thinking about foreign policy. The most important of these concerns the relationship of values to statecraft. On the one hand, there is a strong impulse among leftists to orient themselves around bright, moral lines—to lay down sweeping, universal principles and build upwards from those. At the Munich security conference this year, AOC mused that rather than the post-rules-based international order many IR theorists profess to see in the aftermath of Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran, we may in fact be living in a pre-rules-based international order. Progressives, she said, therefore “have an opportunity to explore what a world would look like if we upheld democracy, human rights, trade that actually centers working-class people.”
At the same time, there is also a nagging sense that the United States is itself a morally compromised actor, which leads naturally to a discomfort with Washington unilaterally setting and enforcing the rules by which the rest of the world must play. In addition, many progressives’ aversion to militarism and securitized rivalries gives them a pragmatic streak when it comes to great power diplomacy, even when that involves (as it must) legitimating forces that are antithetical to many of the values upon which a left-wing vision for world order supposedly rests.
We can see this tension at work in the different approaches to issues like regime character. Authoritarianism is often seen by the progressive set as a foreign policy problem with both ethical and strategic costs. Coziness with autocratic states is often decried in the strongest moral terms, and U.S. policy mistakes tend to be framed as natural outgrowths of our relationships with evil governments. This perspective is most influential in the approach to places like Latin America and the Middle East, whose strongmen—Bukele, Netanyahu, MbS—are particularly distasteful to the progressive left. (This book’s chapter on the Middle East, for example, makes reference to “the mistaken belief that authoritarian regimes could ensure American interests,” and goes on to blame “short-term authoritarian bargains” for most of our troubles in the region.)
Yet when it comes to China, there is a markedly different—and, I should add, vastly more reasonable—approach. This is to accept the existence and legitimacy of a repressive, non-democratic regime ruling over 1.4 billion people; explicitly to reject the logic of great power competition and the “authoritarianism versus democracy” framing of the Biden years; and instead to reach for a grand bargain to minimize the risk of war and work to manage irreducibly international problems like AI risk and climate change.
There is a similar ambiguity about another major component of American statecraft: trade policy. On the one hand, the left is perfectly willing to employ public power to shape the economy for social and political ends; the use of tariffs as part of a broader effort to reverse neoliberalism, globalization, and the immiseration of American workers seems a perfectly natural aim for a progressive foreign policy. And obviously until Trump came along, Democrats were far the more protectionist of the two parties. But the Donald has scrambled that, particularly in his second term, and now opposition to a tariff regime directly and seemingly irreducibly associated with Political Enemy No. 1 is orthodoxy for most Democrats. Moreover, some progressives are uncomfortable with the adversarial character of tariffs, which they fear drive interstate conflict and competition. (Indeed, the book’s prologue argues the United States should “unwind its tariff regime toward China and marry Western capital with Chinese green tech overcapacity.”)
But if these uncertainties make it difficult to predict exactly what a progressive administration would do, they shouldn’t obscure the fact that there is an underlying coherence to much of this worldview. Two elements of this are particularly important.
The first is internationalism, the embrace of universalizing aims that imply deep and sustained engagement with the rest of the world. This is not McGovern’s “Come Home, America;” it is resolutely interventionist, in the broadest sense of that word, and sees the United States as an (if not, as Albright had it, the) indispensable nation. Its adherents would harness U.S. influence to advance ambitious—some might say utopian—projects like halting climate change, combating “oligarchy,” and redistributing wealth from the global North to the global South.
The second is a related tendency to look at geopolitics as an extension of domestic politics. Developments inside and outside our borders are connected; it is all “one struggle,” as some of the more radical proponents of this view used to say. Thus fighting inequality and corruption in the United States requires tackling it in Central America as well, and advancing gay rights in Africa is part and parcel of defending them here.
It must be said that there are some things for which this is obviously true: If one believes that multinational corporations pay too little tax, for example, trying to coordinate an international corporate tax regime makes eminent sense. Likewise for restricting carbon emissions, if fighting climate change is your bag.
Still, there is something quite unsettling about such a Weltanschauung. Even accounting for the progressive aversion to militarism, this is the stuff of which crusades are made.
So what are other restrainers to take away from all this?
Progressives remain important allies for those of us who care about right-sizing America’s global posture, and who aspire to an international system shaped by something more than brute force. This is especially true as an administration which came into office with such promise degenerates into the crudest, most overtly imperialistic version of primacy imaginable. I’ll take a flawed idealism that seeks to unwind American empire over a bloody-minded interventionism built around the precept that (as the president put it while cataloguing his various acts of aggression in front of the UN) “to the victor belong the spoils.”
Yet as 2028 heaves into view, the differences between the respective camps will start to matter more and more. It is conceivable that both the Republican and Democratic nominees could plausibly claim the mantle of restraint: a Vance–AOC showdown, for instance, could well be seen as pitting the project’s realists and conservatives against its progressives. This is especially important given the way the second Trump administration has bulldozed the U.S. foreign policy establishment, clearing out decades of accumulated policy choices, personnel, and bureaucratic inertia. Whoever steps into the Oval Office in January 2029 will have more latitude to reshape U.S. strategy than any president since the end of the Cold War. Restrainers would therefore do well to ponder their allegiances carefully before then.
The post Building a Better World? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Americans no longer have the stomach for public displays of violence.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced last week that the infamous Fort Hood terrorist will die by firing squad. Not only will Nidal Hasan be shot to death, but his execution will be broadcast live for the whole world to watch.
The news wasn’t greeted with much enthusiasm. Some hardcore MAGA types loved the idea, arguing it would deter future terrorists and provide the public with proper justice. But they’re a distinct minority. The idea naturally outraged the left, who argued the whole idea is abominable. Many Republicans were also not thrilled with the decision. Louisiana’s Sen. John Kennedy, a strong ally of the administration, said it would make our society “coarser.” House Speaker Mike Johnson said the execution could be used as a “recruiting tool for future terrorists.” Even Vice President J.D. Vance isn’t a fan of the livestreamed execution, and President Donald Trump himself denied any involvement in the decision.
It’s unlikely the live execution will be a crowd-pleaser if even Trump and Vance are weirded out by it.
Hegseth assumes the American public is the same as it was in the 19th century. Back then, hangings served as community entertainment. But we live in a different age now, and the people don’t want to have the government broadcast such acts of violence to households across the country. The purpose of such a move is ostensibly to sate the public’s appetite for justice. But all it will do is repel them.
This is not an argument against the death penalty. The sentence is necessary for certain crimes. People like Hasan, who shot and killed 13 people and wounded dozens more, should not be allowed to live out their days on the taxpayer’s dime. There are crimes so horrible that they demand the ultimate penalty. It matters little if studies “prove” that the sentence doesn’t deter future horrific crimes. Certain offenses should be met with death.
The problem with the death penalty is how it’s implemented. The recent Christa Pike case exemplifies one way America gets this wrong. Pike brutally murdered a romantic rival in 1995. A year later, the state of Tennessee sentenced her to death. After 30 years on death row, Pike was finally set to meet her maker via lethal injection. It went terribly wrong, in spite of multiple attempts, and the murderer is now still alive and even receiving public sympathy.
This should’ve never happened. Pike should’ve been dispatched long ago by a more effective means than lethal injection. The death penalty is made ineffective by the endless rounds of appeals and delays on behalf of the defendant. Executions should be carried out quickly and in a way that will ensure the criminal dies.
A firing squad is better than lethal injection, which is an attempt to make the execution seem like a routine medical procedure and thereby take the nastiness out of the whole thing. But that’s a fool’s errand. Whatever happens, you ultimately kill a person (or at least, that’s the objective). Lethal injection is meant to be more “humane,” but it’s no such thing if it can have results like Pike’s botched execution. It’s only humane for people who want to think of the act as putting a killer to “sleep” like a dog.
This event should convince states to ditch lethal injection in favor of a more traditional execution approach. It’s far better to drop the humanitarian pretenses of such an execution and go with a firing squad, which is more humane and effective than trying to kill someone by a medical procedure. Hegseth has the right idea to execute Hasan by firing squad. Another Christa Pike situation is virtually impossible with this method.
But broadcasting the execution of Hasan will likely have a political effect opposite the one Hegseth is hoping for. Americans don’t have the stomach for such publicized displays of violence, particularly at the hands of the government.
Violent deaths are occasionally shown on the news, and they rarely win the public over to the killer’s side. Clips of police officers using lethal force against suspects inspired Black Lives Matter protests. There would’ve been no riots over George Floyd without the video of Derek Chauvin having his knee on a black man’s back. That particular clip persuaded nearly two-thirds of the country to support BLM and tens of thousands of Americans to march in the streets. You had Republicans like Governor Greg Abbott of Texas saying it was the “most horrific tragedy” they’ve ever seen. Many Americans agreed.
Similarly, the videotaped ICE shootings this January made Americans turn against immigration enforcement. It didn’t matter if the officers were justified in shooting Renee Good and Alex Pretti, or if the enforcement operations during which the shootings happened were justified; Americans felt queasy, and some turned against ICE.
Americans rarely experience such acts of violence. We barely even see public fights break out, much less witness someone getting seriously hurt. Public executions too are foreign to our daily lives. The United States is not like a Middle Eastern country; we even get upset and start defending cold-hearted killers like Pike when they’re slated for execution.
Nidal Hasan, it’s worth noting, was shot in the back during his arrest and has been in a wheelchair ever since. Wheeling out a handicapped man to die before a firing squad will not thrill the masses. It doesn’t matter how many pictures of 19th-century crowds gathered before hangings you find to “prove” the people will love it. Americans of 2026 are not the same people they were in the 1870s. On top of that, Hasan, who committed his crimes in 2009, has largely been forgotten by the public. There aren’t millions of people baying for his blood. Even the families of his victims aren’t happy with the idea of a livestreamed execution.
Theoretically, Americans may have supported a public execution of Osama bin Laden, especially if we had captured him immediately after 9/11. But that’s about the only recent case where you could have expected strong public support for such an act.
Supporters of the Hasan execution claim it could deter future terrorists. But Islamists are infamous for seeking death, particularly in a highly public fashion. Shooting a handicapped Hasan before a live audience isn’t going to terrify would-be suicide bombers. It’s a great way to make Hasan a hero to jihadis all over the world and further condemn America in their eyes.
The livestreamed execution will not deter a single terrorist, nor satisfy some imaginary public demand for justice. All it will do is undermine support for the death penalty and the administration itself.
To be sure, it won’t mark the end of the Trump White House, and people will probably forget about it after the outrage. But that doesn’t make it a worthwhile idea to pursue. It’s a cartoonish idea perfectly designed to tick off the public and make Pete Hegseth appear completely out of touch with mainstream America.
The post Livestreaming an Execution Is a Bad Idea appeared first on The American Conservative.
The 47th president has been a disaster for nonproliferation.
President Donald Trump thinks big. “I like making deals, preferably big deals,” Trump writes in The Art of the Deal. “That’s how I get my kicks.” Go big or go home (the latter being a palatial Manhattan penthouse atop a golden tower with your name on it). That was Trump’s philosophy in the business world, and that’s his philosophy as president of the United States.
At the beginning of term two, Trump said he wanted to make a big deal, not a big war, with Iran. But diplomacy—tedious, boring, often hinging on the smallest of technical details—isn’t how Trump “gets his kicks.” Negotiations did seem promising for about a month, until the Trump administration started making big demands, namely, that Iran cease enriching uranium even at levels well below weapons grade.
That was a nonstarter for Tehran, as The American Conservative and other institutions repeatedly warned, so instead of a deal, we got a war—bigger and longer than Trump expected. The president underestimated Iran’s resilience and the intensity of its retaliation, though the Islamic Republic had threatened to ignite a conflagration that would consume the Middle East. He dismissed warnings from Dan Caine, America’s highest-ranking general, that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz, a vital artery for the global energy trade. He expected the war to last mere weeks if not days.
Yet here we are.
The war has been a catastrophe for American interests, emptying stockpiles of key defensive munitions even as Iran has managed to wreck U.S. bases in the region. At least 18 American service members have been killed and more than 800 wounded. Oil prices have rocketed, worsening general inflation and raising risks of global recession. The illegal war—undeclared by Congress, unprovoked by Iran, and unnecessary by any reasonable metric—subverts the U.S. Constitution and makes a mockery of the UN Charter.
But the fallout could prove even bigger and more dramatic than all that. For while Trump claims he acted to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, the war has made that outcome more likely, not less, experts told TAC. Moreover, it has undermined the cause of nuclear nonproliferation across the Middle East and beyond. “The clear lesson coming out of this for countries that are not friends of the United States would be: get a nuclear weapon,” Rosemary Kelanic, a Middle East expert at Defense Priorities, told The American Conservative.
And it’s not like Trump resorted to military action only after exhausting diplomatic options—quite the contrary.
Back in 2018, Trump pulled out of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—aka the JCPOA, or Iran nuclear deal—despite Iran’s continued compliance. Under that agreement, the United States provided sanctions relief and Iran accepted restrictions on its nuclear program beyond those it had already agreed to as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (a cornerstone of international law in force since 1970). After Trump withdrew from the deal and imposed “maximum pressure” sanctions, Tehran began enriching uranium far beyond the limits imposed by the JCPOA. It also, eventually, curtailed the additional access it had granted to inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Since returning to the White House in January 2025, Trump has attacked Iran twice, both times amid nuclear negotiations and alongside Israel, a bitter enemy of the Islamic Republic. While U.S.–Israel strikes have set back Iran’s nuclear program, they’ve done even more damage to America’s diplomatic credibility—and prompted Tehran to reconsider its nuclear policy. “The Iranians have lost faith in the Americans as good-faith negotiating partners,” said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association. “So that is leading them to look at a secret nuclear weapons program.”
The way things are headed, Trump 2.0—and especially the calamitous Iran War—will accelerate the demise of a global non-proliferation regime that has worked better than many had expected at its inception during the darkest years of the Cold War. In Kimball’s telling, Trump has eschewed arms-control negotiations with adversaries—“one of the classic and proven tools of U.S. foreign policy,” Kimball noted—reverting instead to “blustery threats” and ham-fisted diplomacy that relies on his personal relationships with foreign leaders. “He has nothing to show for it,” Kimball added.
Nothing good, anyway.
Beijing is expanding its own nuclear arsenal, in part to shore up its deterrence capabilities vis-à-vis Washington. Meanwhile, the New START treaty with Moscow expired this February, and Trump rebuffed an offer by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to extend the accord’s limitations on the number of deployed nuclear weapons. After New START died, the White House didn’t seem very eager to allay fears of a 21st-century nuclear arms race, to put it mildly.
“In the five days since the last remaining nuclear treaty between the United States and Russia expired, statements by administration officials have made two things clear: Washington is actively weighing the deployment of more nuclear weapons, and it is also likely to conduct a nuclear test of some kind,” reported the New York Times. “Both steps would reverse nearly 40 years of stricter nuclear control by the United States, which has reduced or kept steady the number of weapons it has loaded into silos, bombers and submarines.”
Amid the uncertainty, even America’s friends are drifting away from their nonproliferation commitments. Three days after the American-Israeli surprise attack on Iran this late February, President Emmanuel Macron announced the first expansion in decades of France’s nuclear arsenal. “To be free, we have to be feared,” Macron said. Officials in other European nations apparently share that sentiment. Asked by TAC whether any non-nuclear-armed European countries had started to consider getting the bomb, the foreign minister of one small European nation answered yes—his own.
Of course, America’s European allies are reacting less to the Iran War than to other emanations of Trump’s erratic and confrontational persona: his threats against Greenland, tariffs against the European Union, and perceived unwillingness to defend NATO partners against any future attack by Russia. But beyond Europe, the Iran War itself has caused some U.S. partners to eye nuclear weapons.
In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia seeks uranium enrichment capabilities, signing a civil nuclear deal with the U.S. that experts warn could ignite a regional arms race. Riyadh is motivated, in part, by the ongoing Iran quagmire and perceived need to build a latent nuclear capability to deter Tehran, an historic rival. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has said for years that if Tehran ever acquires nuclear weapons, Riyadh will need to do the same. Moreover, America’s inability throughout the war to protect Saudi Arabia from attacks by Iran and its allies—especially the Yemeni Houthis—has prompted the Kingdom to diversify the sources of its own security.
The odds of nuclear proliferation have also grown in East Asia. “With Washington focused on the Middle East, the world desperate for energy, and Asian allies unsure of the future, the possibility of multiple nuclear-armed states in Northeast Asia looks dangerously plausible,” warns Joshua Kurlantzick, a regional expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The region, Kurlantzick notes, is heavily reliant on oil and natural gas from the Gulf and thus acutely impacted by the supply crunch. To meet energy needs, Japan and South Korea have mulled an expansion of their nuclear programs, despite risks of a Chinese backlash. As the Trump administration moved weapons systems from East Asia to the Middle East to support its Iran War, the two nations grew concerned about the reliability of U.S. security guarantees. Officials and analysts in Seoul and Tokyo began asking whether their nations should not only expand their civilian nuclear programs—but weaponize them.
From Eurasia to the Middle East to the United States itself, nuclear proliferation increasingly looks like a plausible long-term consequence of the second Trump administration. Such an outcome would be not only depressing, but the very opposite of what Trump had said he wanted in early 2025. Back then, America’s 45th-and-47th president unexpectedly made global denuclearization a foreign policy priority. And he wasn’t talking about some technocratic add-on to extant international law. True to form, Trump teased a new grand bargain among the United States, China, and Russia, the great powers of the world system and the states with the largest nuclear arsenals.
He first floated the idea in early February 2025, during a speech at the glitzy, uber-elite World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “I want to see if we can denuclearize, and I think it’s very possible,” Trump said. He reiterated the proposal days later. “You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over, and here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, referring to China and Russia. “We’re all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually hopefully much more productive.”
A year and a half later, a U.S.–China–Russia denuclearization pact seems downright fanciful. Fyodor Lukyanov, a prominent and well-connected political analyst in Russia’s capital, told TAC that U.S. militarism generally—and Trump’s Iran War in particular—had all but killed any prospects for eliminating nuclear weapons. “As far as the general issue about ‘denuclearization’ is concerned, I think that everybody understands that this notion is utopian now,” Lukyanov said. “The nuclear factor is back as a political tool, maybe even a military one.”
One major problem, as Kelanic and Kimball also emphasized, is that American aggression has demonstrated the vulnerability of states that lack a nuclear deterrent. “The cause of events is very clear,” Lukyanov said. “Those who abandoned the nuclear program—Iraq, Libya, now Iran—are being attacked, while those who completed the program—North Korea—are untouched.” Moscow insiders assess that Trump’s war not only gave Iran added incentive to acquire a nuclear deterrent, but exposed Tehran’s folly in failing to do so before now.
Apparently, Iranian elites see things much the same. “By all accounts, the war has dramatically changed the debate in Iran, including within the Iranian security establishment, about weaponization,” said Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “There is a strong narrative now, right or wrong, that had Iran built the bomb, the U.S. and Israel would never have attacked it, just like the U.S. has not attacked North Korea.”
Both Lukyanov and Parsi were quick to mention the fatwa—a type of Islamic legal ruling—against nuclear weapons issued by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who always insisted that Iran’s nuclear program was solely for peaceful energy purposes. While some analysts have dismissed the fatwa as irrelevant if not a ruse, others judge it to be real, binding, and sincere—at least until early this year. Khamenei, of course, was killed in the opening strikes of the current war, and the fatwa seems to have died with him.
Even before Khamenei’s assassination, Iranian officials stressed that the fatwa could be rescinded. In 2021, an intelligence chief said the Islamic Republic would drop it if “pushed in that direction” like a “cornered cat.” Last year, amid a growing sense that war was inevitable, members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps—a hardline force of the Iranian military—urged Khamenei to cancel it, apparently to no avail. But Khamenei’s son and successor, Mojtaba, appears more amenable to the views of hardliners, who increasingly are calling on Tehran to exit the NPT and build the bomb. “It is noteworthy that the new supreme leader has not renewed his father’s fatwa against weaponization,” Parsi said.
If he’s been listening to the U.S. president’s recent speeches, the new Khamenei’s amenability has probably only grown. “If they had a nuclear weapon, I’d be calling the supreme leader,” Trump quipped at a campaign rally this September. “And I’d be saying, ‘Mr. Supreme Leader, how are you, sir? Is there anything we can do for you?’ As opposed to bombing the crap out of them.” The crowd roared, and Trump continued, using repetition to drive home the point: “We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon, it’s very simple. We cannot let them have a nuclear weapon.”
The irony, of course, is that “bombing the crap out of them” has only made Iran more likely to get the bomb, at least in the long run, and especially compared to what Trump might have achieved through earnest diplomacy. Despite Trump’s claim to have achieved “the essential Denuclearization of Iran,” Tehran retained its enriched uranium and Iranian scientists haven’t forgotten how to conduct the full nuclear fuel cycle, which they mastered long ago. The Islamic Republic will reconstitute its nuclear facilities and, this author predicts, make a dash for the bomb—if it’s not doing so already.
And the human wrecking ball known as President Donald Trump didn’t smash only that part of the nonproliferation order holding Iran back from weaponizing its nuclear program. No world leader could fail to notice that Iran was attacked precisely because it lacked a nuclear deterrent. Nor could anyone fail to hear the implicit nuclear threat contained within Trump’s pledges to wipe out Iranian civilization and unleash a level of military destruction not seen since World War II.
The president seems to have been bluffing, but can anyone doubt that a man obsessed with so meager a concept as bigness finds himself drawn, at least unconsciously, to pushing the big red button?
The post How Trump Made the World Go Nuclear appeared first on The American Conservative.
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It’s not just the political embarrassment.
In 1626, England’s Parliament sought to impeach the Duke of Buckingham, a widely despised advisor to King Charles I. The king moved quickly to shield his favorite; on hearing the news, he said curtly that Parliament would sit “not a minute” more and gave orders for its immediate dissolution.
Exactly four centuries later, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) has taken a page from the Stuart playbook, dismissing our own legislature (or at least, its lower chamber) to protect an unpopular official. Following a mid-September move by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) to force a vote on impeaching Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Johnson—who had previously cut the House’s schedule short by two weeks, breaking an earlier pledge to “work all the way through September and every day that’s on the calendar”—abruptly cancelled the last day of session.
Although Johnson made noises about giving members more time to campaign in their districts, the reason for the dismissal was obvious: He wanted to avoid that impeachment vote. Massie’s measure had a 48-hour timer baked into it, and it was introduced on a Tuesday. Johnson sent his members home on Wednesday night, thus punting consideration of impeachment until the House gavels back in after the midterms. (In an interview with CNN, Massie dubbed that cancelled Thursday “the Hegseth holiday.”)
The Kentucky congressman has become adept at congressional maneuverings, and his latest move appeared to take GOP leadership by surprise. Had the House remained in session as planned, it would have had to vote for the first time in Trump’s second term on impeaching a cabinet official. And not just any cabinet official: Hegseth has antagonized Republican lawmakers to an unusual degree, including by summarily dismissing senior defense officials and military officers, failing to offer details on how he’ll spend the gargantuan sums for which his department is asking, and generally exhibiting what might charitably be called an indecorous manner. And more than any other administration figure—excepting only the president himself—Hegseth owns the least popular war in American history. Indeed, polling suggests a majority of Americans support Hegseth’s impeachment.
It’s therefore not inconceivable this thing might have passed. And even an unsuccessful impeachment measure would be politically embarrassing, both for Johnson and the White House.
But there may be another reason the GOP establishment went to such lengths to scuttle the vote. Already Democrats are salivating over the prospect of wielding state power against their political enemies, should they regain power. Assuming a blue wave in the midterms, this would start next year with congressional investigations, hearings, and impeachments. If a Democrat were to win the White House in 2028, these efforts would quickly escalate to encompass the full machinery of government.
Hegseth is likely to be among the highest-priority targets. His record reads like it was cooked up in a lab to enrage liberal sensibilities: He is a former Fox News host who has been accused of sexual assault, a brash and crude culture warrior who delights in what progressives call “punching down,” and a combination hype man/executive agent for the president’s various military interventions. Dozens of Democratic lawmakers have openly said he is guilty of war crimes; one liberal outlet published a piece last year that began with a simple assertion—“Pete Hegseth is a murderer.”
And Dems are unlikely to be content with bagging Hegseth; others further down in the Pentagon bureaucracy could be in legal jeopardy as well. Nor is the American justice system the only worry. One increasingly hears speculation that a liberal administration could manifest its enthusiasm for the “rules-based international order” by working with the Hague on this.
Viewed in this light, the significance of Massie’s impeachment move is that it could significantly bolster such a case. For his effort isn’t hastily drawn-up hackwork; it consists of eight separate articles, each of which is specific and serious. The articles accuse Hegseth of illegally using U.S. forces for hostilities not authorized by Congress in Iran, Venezuela, and Yemen; contravening the War Powers Resolution of 1973; ordering extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific; ignoring legislation requiring the minimization of civilian casualties; and using his department to retaliate against Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) in violation of the latter’s First Amendment rights. And while most of the charges essentially amount to carrying out illegal orders from his commander-in-chief, two of them—ignoring responsibilities for protecting civilians and targeting Kelly—concern things that Hegseth seems to have done on his own.
To have these articles debated, memorialized in the public record, and voted upon—even if ultimately rejected—would be to give substance to prospective future prosecutions, both domestic and international. The whole affair is also likely to spook those currently running the war, especially if the president at some point decides to make good on his perennial threats to “annihilate” Iran. (This is a particularly relevant fear given the UN’s recent finding that there are “reasonable grounds” to believe the U.S. military has committed war crimes in Iran.)
It may well be that this was seen as the most dangerous part of Massie’s maneuver. Postponing the vote until after the midterms relieves some of the pressure on Republican congressmen, and it also provides a little breathing space if the White House escalates over the next month or so. Yet impeachment will sooner or later be considered by the House. And these are unlikely to be the last charges lodged against Hegseth.
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The Mecca Pact creates new opportunities for Islamabad—and new headaches.
Pakistan has long practiced a careful balancing act to manage relations with Iran and the Gulf Arab monarchies. But against the backdrop of the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, and the emergence of Yemen and the Red Sea as the “Western Front” of this regional crisis, the balancing act is getting harder to sustain.
Pakistan has strong strategic and economic ties with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members, and has long seen stability in the Gulf as important to its interests. So Islamabad naturally has no appetite for Iranian or Houthi attacks on targets in GCC states, and officials in Islamabad have been quick to condemn such aggression. At the same time, Pakistan has much at stake in its relationship with Iran, with which it also seeks stable and cordial ties.
Geography dictates that Pakistan accept fundamental differences between its relationship with Iran and those with Gulf Arab states. The Pakistan–Iran border is long and difficult, and cross-border militant activity, particularly in Balochistan, is a persistent concern for both countries. Iran’s engagement with Afghanistan also affects Pakistani security interests in its near abroad. Nor is the relationship limited strictly to security. Pakistan has sought to expand bilateral trade and remains interested in energy cooperation, including the long-discussed Iran–Pakistan gas pipeline. Iran’s position on the Gulf of Oman also touches Pakistan’s maritime and economic interests, to say nothing of Tehran’s relationship with New Delhi.
Therefore, Pakistan’s regional balancing act requires recognizing that while Saudi Arabia is a crucial strategic, defense, and economic partner, Iran is Pakistan’s immediate neighbor. A serious deterioration in relations with Tehran could generate direct consequences for Pakistan’s border security, regional stability, and economic interests, underscoring why Islamabad has such strong incentives to preserve a functional relationship with Iran, independent of its desire to maintain its partnerships with Saudi Arabia and other GCC members.
Domestic politics matter too. Pakistan has a sizable Shia minority, which includes elements sympathetic to Iran, so there is a chance taking a harder line toward Tehran could trigger protests at home.
Pakistan wants to see the current U.S.-Iran crisis resolved as quickly as possible, which is why its government has invested considerable diplomatic energy in trying to de-escalate the conflict, seeking to position itself as a bridge between the two sides. Preserving that intermediary role requires Pakistan to avoid becoming an active belligerent.
Unveiled last month, the new Mecca Joint Defense Agreement—a security configuration consisting of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—and Pakistan’s recently ratified defense pact with Kuwait stand to significantly complicate this delicate balancing act.
The latest Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia are an early test of what these new security commitments actually mean. The Mecca pact does not appear to create an automatic obligation to fight if a member is attacked; rather it provides a framework for consultation and collective action. The affected country requests assistance under the agreement, and the members themselves determine what form that assistance should take. Nevertheless, such an arrangement can strengthen deterrence without guaranteeing immediate military response.
The alliance itself is still a work in progress. The military and policymaking integration necessary to implement such an agreement takes time. And, notably, Saudi Arabia has not actually requested direct Pakistani or Turkish military intervention. For now, Islamabad is more likely to contribute through diplomacy, intelligence, air-defense capabilities, and technological assistance, and perhaps supporting a multinational naval presence around the Bab al-Mandeb. (It’s worth noting that this past May, Pakistan reportedly deployed a detachment including 8,000 troops and 16 military aircraft to Saudi Arabia.)
There are good reasons for this restraint. Pakistan has previously resisted becoming a combatant in Yemen, highlighted by a parliamentary vote on April 10, 2015, to reject a proposal to join the Saudi-led military coalition fighting the Houthis. At that time, Pakistani parliamentarians vowed “unequivocal support for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” while also declaring that Islamabad “should maintain neutrality in the Yemen conflict so as to be able to play a proactive diplomatic role to end the crisis.”
Today, sending troops into the conflict would still carry serious domestic, economic, security, and diplomatic costs for Pakistan. More importantly, joining the war on the Saudi side could undermine Islamabad’s channels with Tehran and its effort to facilitate U.S.–Iran de-escalation.
Here is a dilemma. An alliance’s credibility ultimately rests on its members’ willingness to commit to collective defense in the face of real costs. If Pakistan consistently avoids direct military involvement, members and non-members alike may come to wonder how far the pact’s security guarantees actually extend.
Nevertheless, restraint should not automatically be interpreted as failure, especially at this early stage. Pakistan can contribute meaningfully, whether by diplomacy or through the provision of ancillary military support, in ways that don’t require the involvement of combat forces. The challenge for Pakistan is to use those contributions to demonstrate that its defense commitments are credible, without widening a regional war or endangering its role as a mediator.
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Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) introduced articles of impeachment against Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Tuesday, accusing him of high crimes and misdemeanors over the Trump administration’s continued military operations in Iran without congressional authorization.
The Republican congressman, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, introduced the measure as privileged, meaning he will force the House to take up a resolution that is unlikely to pass in the Trump-controlled House of Representatives. The maneuver will put GOP lawmakers on the record over Hegseth’s handling of the war.
Massie’s measure could pose a difficult political choice for Republicans such as Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) and Tom Barrett (R-MI), who joined Democrats and Massie in voting for recent measures to curb Trump’s war powers. Both are facing competitive reelection contests in November. Massie lost his Republican primary to Trump-backed challenger Ed Gallrein in May, for whom Hegseth also campaigned.
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Tom knew the best people, threw the best parties, and was the best of friends.
I grew up in a Buckinghamshire village called Iver, living for 18 years in a Queen Anne house called Copthall. In the early 1970s, when I was about 10, a glamorous couple moved to the other end of the village: Tom and Miriam Stoppard.
Tom soon became a close friend of my father, the historian and journalist Paul Johnson. I suppose there weren’t many other successful writers living in the village, and convenience is a powerful factor in life.
In some respects Tom and my father plowed different furrows: Tom wrote fictional scripts for stage and screen, while my dad wrote big factual books like A History of the American People or A History of the Jews.
But they were close friends for over 50 years. When my father died two years ago, Tom and I read the eulogies at his funeral. My dad was older than Tom, and towards the end of his life he had outlived all his other close friends, so visits from Tom were always very special.
Tom was a rare individual. He was famous and hugely esteemed—and yet he was a fundamentally kind man with a good heart. I’ve met a few showbusiness grandees over the years, and most are narcissists. Who knows if they started like that or their celebrity warped their personalities? Tom was the opposite; he was interested in other people, self-deprecating, and never self absorbed.
Because Tom and my dad lived down the road from each other, and both worked from home, they supported each other in very personal ways. My father was a heavy drinker until he gave up the booze in his 50s; on one legendary occasion, my mother Marigold was obliged to call Tom to help get my drunk dad out of the bath.
Meanwhile, Tom would suffer from bouts of writer’s block. This was a condition from which my father—who wrote over 40 books and thousands of newspaper articles—never suffered. So when Tom was struggling to put pen to paper, my dad would often provide encouragement and wise advice about how to get the words flowing again.
I think my father’s views on politics probably influenced Tom. In the late 1970s, when the trade unions were destroying Britain, my father moved from socialism to becoming a vocal supporter of free enterprise, the Conservative Party, and in due course, Margaret Thatcher. Unusually for a figure in showbusiness, Tom Stoppard was an anti-communist (he was a refugee from Czechoslovakia) and a great believer in Western liberal democracy, so he had much in common with my dad when it came to politics, philosophy and history.
By contrast, my parents were also close friends with Harold Pinter, who had married one of my mother’s oldest friends, Antonia Fraser. Harold was a passionate left-winger, and strongly disagreed with my father’s politics. Luckily, I never talked to him about that: we used to discuss cricket, which he loved almost as much as theater and film.
Tom and Miriam Stoppard were endlessly generous to me. They lived in a beautiful Palladian house called Iver Grove, surrounded by spectacular gardens. I can recall one day I was in their splendid drawing room full of bookshelves, and Tom asked me which authors I liked. I said I loved Raymond Chandler, but that I had read all seven of his novels. Tom was an autodidact who read very widely. He had of course read Chandler, and he immediately pulled out the perfect recommendation for me from his bookshelf: The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins. I became a lifelong fan of the novelist and have read all his books too.
Miriam was actually more famous among non-theater people than Tom in the 1970s and 1980s, because she was a high-profile medical doctor who wrote books and newspaper columns and presented popular TV shows. She was also a managing director at Syntex, a multinational pharmaceutical business with a factory nearby, where I worked one summer holiday. She partly inspired me to study medicine at Oxford, although while there I discovered business and never qualified as a doctor.
Meanwhile, Tom inspired my interest in the theater. I became a co-owner of Assembly Festival, the largest complex of theater spaces at the Edinburgh Fringe, some decades ago. Later I served for six years as chairman of Channel 4 Television; I was also chairman of the Almeida Theatre in London, and through various producing partnerships, I have backed hundreds of West End shows over the years. It all stems back to Tom the family friend—and perhaps Britain’s most talented playwright.
Tom was also a world-class party host. I can remember going to sophisticated summer gatherings as a teenager, full of well-known actors and intellectuals. One year two guests arrived by helicopter, landing in the field beside their house. Out stepped Bianca Jagger and Roald Dahl! Tom was then at the height of his talents; when he sent you an invitation, you accepted.
After Tom moved from Iver in the 1990s, he would host a biennial party in the Chelsea Physic Gardens, next to the River Thames in London. I must have attended at least 10 of them; they were reliably the best party of the year. The guests were a glittering array of performers, politicians, writers and assorted friends. They ranged from Mick Jagger to Rupert Murdoch. One year my daughter hit it off with the brilliant Barry Humphries; my wife and I met four of our closest friends at one of his parties. There was live jazz, a Punch and Judy show for children, an incredible array of food and drink from midday until dusk, all in the most sublime surroundings London has to offer. And the sun always seemed to shine.
Of course Tom was a renowned playwright and Oscar-winning scriptwriter. But to me he was more than that: a luminous presence during most of my life, a deep family friend and a truly generous spirit. Tom was a genuine star but also a really fine human being—a rare and special combination.
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Other historical analogies offer more relevant lessons.
In 1919, John Maynard Keynes left the Paris Peace Conference convinced the Allies were making a blunder of historic proportions. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, he prophesied that the terms imposed by the victors were so punitive they would wreck the defeated Germans’ economy and set the stage for another world war.
He was right, and there is a lesson here for President Trump’s war with Iran. Supporters of U.S. militarism frequently rely on the Munich analogy to justify Middle Eastern wars. The argument goes like this: Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement in 1938 emboldened Hitler to amp up his aggression well beyond the Sudetenland. What was supposed to deliver “peace in our time” instead led inexorably to a global conflagration—one that might have been averted, had the British leader only shown a little backbone.
What is less often recognized is how and why Hitler came to power in the first place. I call this the Versailles analogy. In 1918, Germans lost not only the war, but also their sense of national pride and dignity. As Keynes predicted, ordinary Germans became destitute amid rampant inflation—clearing the way for an unscrupulous demagogue to take power.
This history has been largely ignored; the constant refrain for the Middle East is simply “do not appease evil.” The Munich case has been invoked to justify a litany of aggressive and counterproductive policies. Gamal Abdel Nasser was deemed “Hitler on the Nile”; ultimately he would stumble into the Six-Day War. Saddam Hussein was “Hitler on the Euphrates” (though only after receiving U.S. support during his war with Iran); Hussein too contributed to the outbreak of major Mideast conflict.
Commentators frequently accuse politicians and diplomats of being Neville Chamberlain without actually knowing what Chamberlain did. In 2008, when presidential candidate Barack Obama signaled a willingness to engage Iran diplomatically, he was widely accused of appeasement—even by then-President George W. Bush during a trip to Israel. (The Bush camp alleged that the president’s comments were directed at Obama.) In one memorable televised exchange, a radio host echoing Bush’s criticism was pressed by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews to explain what Chamberlain had actually done in 1938. After a few minutes of evasion, the host admitted he had no idea.
Despite criticism, upon entering the Oval Office, Obama pursued the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Although his administration’s response to the “Arab Spring” was largely harmful to U.S. interests, the JCPOA remains one of the most significant achievements of nuclear non-proliferation in history. The agreement, it is true, did not address the Axis of Resistance, Iran’s ballistic missile program, or its other malign regional behavior. But it did deal with the single most critical threat to global security: Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
At that time, the Pickaxe Mountain facility—which probably holds much of Iran’s highly enriched uranium today—did not even exist, and the Strait of Hormuz was a free waterway. Yes, Obama met Tehran’s need for cash by releasing frozen funds, but he secured something vital in return: stringent international oversight of Iran’s nuclear material and activities.
As the U.S. continues to dig itself into a deeper hole by implementing an “economic D-Day” against Iran, we can learn from several other historical examples where maximum economic punishment did not produce the desired results. Cutting Imperial Japan off from energy resources contributed to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Embargoing Castro’s Cuba helped trigger the Cuban Missile Crisis—arguably the most dangerous moment in recorded history. Sanctioning Saddam Hussein decimated Iraq’s middle class and prepared the ground for the second Iraq War, which cost America thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.
My point is not that economic sanctions are never useful, especially as an alternative to war; but that we must think carefully before launching an economic onslaught that could devolve this lose-lose conflict into something even more serious involving the Strait of Hormuz, the destruction of vital civilian infrastructure, the radicalization of the general public, and—if things deteriorate enough—the use of unconventional weapons by someone.
History also provides a template for navigating a stalemate. The War of 1812 ended without a decisive victory; British troops had burned the White House, and American forces had failed to take Canada. Yet Britain didn’t try to cripple the young republic economically, and a bankrupt United States had no appetite to keep fighting. The Treaty of Ghent recognized this impasse and simply restored the prewar borders. The U.S. and Britain then spent the next century working out how to coexist, eventually forging a seemingly unbreakable “special relationship.”
Instead of issuing new threats—from seizing Kharg Island to bombing civilian infrastructure—Washington should accept that there is no military solution. Instead of climbing further up the escalation ladder, we need to step off and implement what you might call a “Ghentleman’s agreement.”
Essentially, such an approach would return the U.S. and Iran to the status quo antebellum. Crucially, it would rely on trust-building reciprocal steps rather than a signed treaty. If a treaty is possible, all the better. But at this stage, neither side puts much faith in the other’s signature. The United States can take unilateral steps to deescalate, such as withdrawing its strike groups, and the Iranians can reciprocate by inviting inspectors—supported by the world’s nuclear powers—back into the country.
Why would either side agree to this? Because the current war is a lose-lose proposition. For one, the risk of unconventional escalation is real. Israel operates under the Begin Doctrine—an unofficial policy of preventive war to eliminate unconventional threats—which means that, left to its own devices, the country is unlikely to tamp things down anytime soon. Second, although the Islamic Republic has demonstrated it can absorb blows from the world’s most powerful military, it remains in severe economic peril and faces the threat of internal uprisings. As Iran’s pragmatic Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf recently acknowledged, “No matter how strong our military power becomes, if we are hungry, we will not be able to endure.”
Why would the United States agree to “appease” Iran? Because by almost any measure, this war has already been a disaster, and one year more of this war will not make it any less so. As the former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel recently told me, it ranks among “the biggest, most costly foreign policy blunders in the history of our country.”
The true human cost is still being uncovered: The Pentagon recently updated its database to reflect a total of 624 wounded service members after introducing a new reporting category to track ongoing overseas operations. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told Congress the war has cost about $37.5 billion. But the Harvard economist Linda Bilmes notes that this figure covers only munitions already fired, not the cost to replace them. By her accounting, short-term operational costs are roughly $120 billion, and rebuilding destroyed American bases adds another $250 billion. That puts the hard cost near $370 billion—roughly 10 times Hegseth’s figure—before accounting for a single long-term expense like lifetime veterans’ care. Factoring in these indirect, long-term costs and macroeconomic fallout could easily push the total price tag past $1 trillion. With our national debt having just crossed $40 trillion and 20 percent of American children lacking adequate food, should we really push deeper into another trillion-dollar war?
Before every ballgame, Americans sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” often mistakenly believing it to be about the War of Independence. It was in fact written about the War of 1812. (Francis Scott Key penned it after watching the defense of Fort McHenry from the British side, where he had successfully negotiated with the British for the release of an imprisoned American doctor.)
It is fitting that this song became our national anthem. It commemorates a war in which the nation’s capital burned, and where James Madison—the “Father of the Constitution”—accepted a stalemate to save the republic.
The man he wisely appointed to lead the Peace Commission for the Treaty of Ghent was none other than John Quincy Adams, one of America’s greatest statesmen. As we navigate our current crisis, we would do well to remember Adams’s timeless warning: “America… goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
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The United States Treasury announced plans Friday to cut a major Egyptian bank’s branches in the United Arab Emirates out of the dollar system as part of “Operation Economic Outcast,” the new sanctions campaign against Iran.
Banque Misr, Egypt’s second-largest bank, has 30 days before the new rule revoking correspondence rights with American financial institutions for its UAE operation comes into effect.
“Treasury promised to sever every economic lifeline Tehran has left and finally end the threat of the Iranian regime,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in a department press release. “We also warned that Iran’s enablers cannot continue to enjoy access to the U.S. dollar and the global financial system. Banque Misr UAE decided to find out the hard way, and today, we are taking the first step in holding it accountable for its continued, egregious support of the Iranian regime.”
“Treasury estimates that between January 2024 and June 2026, Banque Misr UAE processed approximately $1.8 billion for 103 companies that are potentially part of Iranian shadow banking networks,” the press release alleged.
The press release also noted sanctions against the manager of Bank Melli’s UAE branch and a Hong Kong–based trading house for facilitating transactions for sanctioned Iranian entities.
In an interview with Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian conceded the economic damage from American sanctions. In an interview with the Iranian Student News Agency, he commented, “For those who say sanctions have no effect at all, I really don’t know what to say to them. I mean, common sense is a good thing. That’s all I want to say. Common sense is really a good thing.”
Brent crude closed Friday at $89.37 per barrel. AAA reported a national average of $4.08 per gallon of regular gasoline.
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The Lee government is moving towards greater independence from the U.S.
The Republic of Korea and the State of Israel were both founded in 1948, out of the wreckage of colonial empires upended by the Second World War. The two governments did not establish formal diplomatic relations until 1962, but they were on the same side for much of the Cold War, with Israel balancing against anti-American forces in the Middle East and South Korea doing the same in East Asia. Despite difficult security environments, each would not only survive, but grow into a prosperous, developed society. And, used to having their legitimacy questioned, both Israel and South Korea learned to assertively tout their democratic and capitalist credentials, as well as lay claim to long and illustrious histories. Their views of one another have also been broadly favorable, and in 2019 the two nations signed a free trade agreement to expand their economic ties.
Which is why the South Korean government’s recent denunciations of Israel’s conduct stand out, even amidst the storm of criticism the latter government has faced since October 2023. These moves reflect not just the degree to which Israel’s international reputation has suffered, but also a broader shift in Seoul’s relationship with the U.S.
In May, after two South Korean nationals were detained trying to reach the Gaza Strip aboard humanitarian aid boats, South Korea’s progressive President Lee Jae-myung made a strongly worded attack on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he labeled a war criminal. This followed Lee’s earlier suggestions that the Israeli government’s conduct in Gaza resembled Nazi massacres during the Holocaust and—even more explosively for his South Korean audience—Japan’s “comfort women” system.
Naturally, Israel’s Foreign Ministry objected, claiming that such statements trivialized the Holocaust, while conservatives at home said that Lee’s silence on North Korea’s human rights abuses revealed a double standard.
But the pressure did little to change the Korean leader’s mind about Israel, and Lee went on to suggest Netanyahu could be arrested were he ever to visit South Korea.
The Lee administration has faced criticism since its early days from those who asserted that it was aligned with China and North Korea, and that it intended to turn against the U.S., undo diplomatic progress with Japan, and sell out the country’s democracy to communism.
Such allegations have been overblown from the start. Lee is, to be clear, a scandal-plagued politician with a questionable grasp on institutional independence (not that this wasn’t true of his predecessors). But he has also sought to maintain good ties with Japan and keep the United States engaged in peninsular affairs, even as his administration seeks stability in its relations with China. And while the Lee government did take tentative steps in its early days to lower tensions with North Korea, Kim Jong Un mostly responded with scorn, so intra-peninsular rapprochement has accordingly been put on the backburner.
Though Lee does not want to abandon his country’s historic relationship with the United States, he does seek to increase South Korea’s ability to act independently in diplomatic, military, and economic matters. Soon after his inauguration, Lee announced plans to transfer the operational control of South Korean troops to Seoul in the event of war; he also released a public statement lambasting domestic critics of this move for their “submissive mindset.” (This is an amusing criticism coming from Lee, who in his second encounter with President Donald Trump presented him with a massive replica of a crown from the peninsula’s Silla era.) But Lee’s flattery of Trump is quite clearly strategic, as it has not only secured for his country a landmark (and, for South Korean progressives, long-desired) deal on the manufacture of nuclear submarines, but also papered over a number of persistent U.S.–South Korea bilateral disagreements on issues ranging from alleged Korean discrimination against U.S. businesses to the makeup of the UN Command that still polices the DMZ.
It is in this context that President Trump’s recent decision to scale down U.S.-South Korea exercises must be understood. While much of the American press framed this negatively, seeing in it evidence of Trump’s affinity for dictators and disdain for alliances, Lee saw it as an opportunity. He praised the U.S. president’s decision, and used the occasion to reiterate his support for the accelerated development of nuclear subs and the expedited transfer of operational control (the latter of which Lee wants to see happen before he leaves office in 2030).
In doing so, Lee avoids an open rupture with the White House, even as he signals a path toward greater self-reliance—and a desire to distance himself from Trump’s more unpopular impulses. Trump, it will be recalled, also justified this decision as punishment for Seoul’s refusal to get involved in the Iran War; the market turmoil and high oil prices caused by the war have imposed heavy costs on ordinary Koreans.
For this reason, Lee not only feels comfortable in verbally sparring with Israel, but probably regards it as a canny political move. Despite the two nations’ historical common ground, Israel’s reputation among the South Korean public has not been good in recent years, particularly since the commencement of the Gaza war.
Even those, inside or outside of Korea, who dislike Lee’s government and policies should recognize that, while he won’t be in office forever, this trend toward greater autonomy is likely to continue, especially as questions over U.S. reliability persist.
Whatever a given administration’s attitude toward Israel, this shift toward greater autonomy for American partners is something Washington should continue to support—though preferably in a more tactful way.
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Why do the Brits imitate the worst in American culture?
Assuming the ridiculous gushing over a Cambridge conman was not a national Monty Python sketch arranged for tourists, the Jason Arday affair reminded me of one of the most peculiar things about Britain: It’s more woke than the U.S. Which is weird, because the Mother Country still has a monarchy that rules over tens of millions of white subjects. The closest we have to that in America is the NAACP.
According to the 2021 census, the UK is 2.5 percent black, but around half of all its TV advertisements feature black people. (That’s even more lopsided than their representation in the country’s homicide statistics, where black Britons make up around 20 percent of all convicted killers.)
You’d never know Britain was among the first nations in the world to abolish slavery, and that it then proceeded to use the most powerful navy in the world to end the global slave trade. Black lives mattered to them way before Michael Brown got himself killed in Ferguson, Missouri.
At a cost of perhaps thousands of sailors’ lives and billions of dollars relative to GDP at the time, British ships patrolled the African coast for 50 years, intercepting more than 1,000 slave ships, and freeing 150,000 humans. British taxpayers finally finished paying off the emancipation bill in 2015.
So obviously, Britain has a lot to atone for.
The study of TV ads, undertaken by the UK’s left-wing Channel 4 last year, also found that “multi-ethnic families with young multi-ethnic children continue to be the go-to for family representation,” constituting 47 percent of all ads with families. Interracial couples in the UK are like gay-wedding planners in the U.S. Nobody has ever met one, but they seem to be everywhere.
For extra “diversity,” Asians (mostly Indians and Pakistanis), who make up 9.3 percent of the population, seem to be featured in 28 percent of ads. To be fair, Pakistanis are also wildly over-represented among leaders of white slavery rape gangs.
The census numbers don’t quite add up, but 81.7 percent of Britons identified their ethnic group as “white.” Yet perhaps as low as 12 percent of TV ads show only white people. On the bright side, gay people in ads were more likely to be white than nonwhite.
London is gorgeous, has more shops than New York City, and fewer muggers, homeless people, and pot-smokers than in many American cities. But in some ways, it’s insane.
Plastic is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. More than half a century ago, the civilized world dispensed with rotting fruit and carcinogen-laden paper containers, and embraced the bright new future of plastic bags, cups, and straws that were lighter, stronger, and a whole lot more sanitary. Life was better.
But since this is Britain, and Britain is insane, plastic is virtually banned. You have to drink your Starbucks quickly or start eating cardboard. Useless paper straws dissolve in about two minutes. Grocery store paper bags are capable of holding roughly 8 ounces without breaking. I assume dry cleaning is returned to you wrapped in corn husks.
California isn’t this ridiculous, and their state symbol is a passed-out homeless guy in buttless chaps.
Continuing the kookiness: After the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri (completely justified according to both the grand jury and the Obama administration’s Department of Justice), idiot British protesters marched through London, chanting, “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!”
London bobbies don’t carry guns. In fact, this is a chronic plot hole in British television dramas: You see an officer chasing a suspect and wonder, what’s he going to do when he catches him? Ask about his tweets?
The country is so gun-phobic that a few years back a farmer was sentenced to life in prison for shooting criminals breaking into his home. But wokeness struck back! His sentence was reduced to three years based on his lawyers’ claim that he was neurodivergent: “paranoid personality disorder.” Yes, he paranoidly thought burglars were burgling him.
As the Arday episode demonstrates, the British aren’t sold on free speech either. To hide their embarrassment over the Cambridge fraud, an army of DEI mediocrities exploded in a murderous rage at the academic Nathan Cofnas for his Substack post pointing out Arday’s plagiarism.
Liberals in the U.S. aren’t this demented. A number of black professors have been fired for academic scams far less egregious than Arday’s—and the liberal newspaper of record, the New York Times, didn’t run interference for them. The paper mostly reported those cases honestly, as it did with Arday’s. (The Times’ approach to censorship is simply not to report news that would confuse its readers.)
Meanwhile, the BBC belched out 11 radio shows, four news articles, and two TV interviews fawning over Arday and lustily repeated his preposterous lies—until the truth emerged (thanks to Cofnas).
It’s amazing that Americans got both our First and Second Amendment rights from the British. Their 1689 Bill of Rights gave the king’s subjects the right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” and his Protestant subjects the right to “have arms for their defense.” Now, you can’t even defend your home or speak the truth in Britain if it could hurt someone’s feelings.
These are the same Britons who get snippy about the U.S.—our patriotism, our guns, our directness, and (at least when a Reagan, Bush, or Trump is in the White House) our supposed Nazi-ness.
Okay, fine. You have more beautiful buildings, accents, traditions, and castles, etc. We’re vulgar arrivistes who eat Texas chili out of a Frito bag. Then why, Britain, do you slavishly imitate the worst woke nonsense America has to offer?
My rewrite of John of Gaunt’s deathbed speech from Richard II:
This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for her self
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
COPYRIGHT 2026 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY IMPOLITE DEBATES
The post We Happy Few, We Band Of Wokesters appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Iran War has undermined key U.S. partnerships.
Henry Kissinger famously (if apocryphally) said, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.” This may be the year the world finally got the message.
President Donald Trump said he wanted his legacy to be “the wars that we end—and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.” It won’t be. Instead, he will be remembered by history as the president who squandered trust in and respect for Washington and brought the post–Cold War era of American hegemony to an end. Trump’s America leads by threats, punishments, and broken promises. It leads for its own short-term benefit and is followed out of fear.
Other NATO members are preparing for a world without U.S. leadership. Canada—America’s second largest trading partner—is proof that no country is safe. Trump has declared economic warfare on Canada with tariffs big enough to cripple its economy, and he has repeatedly threatened to make America’s northern neighbor the 51st state. He recently called the leadership of Canada “nasty.”
Nor is Canada alone. Denmark has faced American threats to seize Greenland. After Spain followed international law instead of Washington’s dictates and declined to join the war on Iran, Trump called the country “a wasted cause” and a “terrible partner.” At a press conference at the July NATO summit at Ankara, he told Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, “We don’t want to do any trade business with Spain anymore…. I’d like you to cut it off…. I don’t want anything to do with Spain. Cut off all trade with Spain, please, including visits.”
The American friends who paid the highest price for the war on Iran are those who lie within easy striking distance of Tehran. The Gulf states lobbied Washington not to start the war. They are furious that their warnings were brushed aside and that the U.S., after sparking a regional war, failed to protect them.
The Gulf countries paid a heavy price for being America’s friends. Like many Western nations, they are looking beyond the American security umbrella and toward diversification. Earlier this month, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey signed a mutual defense pact.
Oman, in particular, has felt the sting of a betrayed friendship. The Gulf country has an uninterrupted history of good relations with the United States. It has frequently facilitated diplomacy and helped to get Washington out of jams. Over a decade ago, Oman helped the Obama administration secure a nuclear deal with Iran. It mediated a ceasefire between the U.S. and the Yemeni Houthis last year. Most recently, Oman has played an indispensable role in mediating between Washington and Tehran in the current conflict.
Nevertheless, Trump has twice threatened to bomb Oman. In May, Trump warned that Oman had to “behave just like everybody else, or we will have to blow them up.” On that occasion, the president seemed to be angry with Oman because it had entered into negotiations with Tehran about the countries’ joint control of the Strait of Hormuz. Those progressing discussions with Iran that led a frustrated Trump to threaten again this month, “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the s**t out of them.”
South Korea is another key partner feeling the pains of friendship with America, having become the target of Trump’s wrath, ostensibly over the war in Iran. The country is a linchpin of America’s defense strategy in Asia and has a 72-year-old mutual defense treaty with Washington. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently called South Korea a “model ally.” Camp Humphreys, in Pyeongtaek, is the headquarters of United States Forces Korea and is the largest overseas American military base in the world.
Nonetheless, Trump recently announced he had instructed Hegseth “to substantially reduce the Joint Military Exercises” being held with the Asian ally. Trump listed several reasons for the decision: South Korea denying his request to join “in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Trump’s “very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea,” and the “hostile” message the exercises send to Pyongyang. The last reason is fair. The first two are not.
Contra Trump’s insistence that North Korea “has been unthreatening and respectful,” it has most recently sided against the U.S. by providing military aid to Russia in its war against Ukraine. Additionally, Pyongyang has conducted several ballistic missile tests, including just days before Trump’s announcement, and expanded its nuclear weapons program. Trump’s surprise announcement induced significant uncertainty in South Korea and prompted its president to call for an accelerated push for military independence from America.
In just the past few weeks, Trump has flagrantly broken trust with U.S. partners. He reneged on a promise to allow Ukraine to manufacture Patriot interceptors, explaining that “those people you give the technology, they could someday turn on you.” And he altered the terms of a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia the day after it was signed, demanding that the kingdom normalize relations with Israel before the agreement could take effect. That’s probably a nonstarter for Saudi Arabia.
Trump has fulfilled Kissinger’s warning about the dangers of being America’s friend. In the process, he has jeopardized U.S. leadership while making the world a more dangerous place.
The post Friendship With America Can Be Fatal appeared first on The American Conservative.
The critics miss the big picture.
On the 2024 campaign trail, Donald Trump’s surrogates often highlighted the importance of revamping U.S. foreign policy to focus on the threat of a rising China. After decades of failed nation-building operations in the Middle East, figures like J.D. Vance argued, it was time to shift priorities and secure America’s actual interests. Yet less than a year into Trump’s second term, another war in the Middle East is pulling attention and resources away from the Asia-Pacific region.
Trump’s recent decision substantially to reduce joint military exercises with South Korea marks another shift away from the “pivot to Asia” strategy. Trump presented the decision as punishment for Seoul’s refusal to aid the U.S. war against Iran, and that seems to be the impression of South Korea’s Foreign Minister Cho Hyun. The order surprised officials in both Seoul and Washington and met significant criticism from opponents of the Iran War and supporters of strong U.S.–South Korea ties. While many of these criticisms are fair, the panic surrounding the move doesn’t capture the full picture.
Following Trump’s announcement, the office of South Korea’s President Lee Jae Myung actually welcomed friendlier U.S. relations with North Korea as offering a possible pathway to stability in the Korean peninsula. Long before the Iran War began, Trump had complained about the cost of America’s overseas alliances, including the one with South Korea, and showed interest in a rapprochement with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un. The Iran War thus provided an immediate justification for a move that Trump was already inclined to make.
The joint military exercises have not been without downsides. While they have some value for South Korea’s military readiness, their utility must be considered in light of the current geopolitical environment. North Korea is more capable today than it was in Trump’s first term, having expanded its nuclear and missile capabilities while solidifying its relationship with Moscow and Beijing. This doesn’t mean Pyongyang is more eager to start a war, but it is better positioned to deter and intimidate its southern neighbor. Under these new circumstances, reducing exercises that the Kim regime has long viewed as rehearsals for an invasion brings diplomatic benefits that plausibly outweigh the military costs.
Trump’s decision creates room for diplomacy. The failure of negotiations with Kim in Trump’s first term doesn’t prove that constructive diplomacy is impossible. The Trump–Kim summit in Hanoi collapsed largely over disagreements about the scale of sanctions relief that the U.S. should trade for limits on North Korea’s program. Pyongyang appeared willing to dismantle its Yongbyon nuclear complex, but Washington demanded more on the nuclear front before it would grant sanctions relief. This disagreement exposes a real problem at the heart of American relations with North Korea. While American officials continue to treat the North Koreans like irrational actors, Pyongyang has little rational incentive to surrender the weapons that ensure the survival of their regime. For that reason, it opposes complete denuclearization—a longstanding U.S. demand that North Korea wants dropped before diplomacy resumes.
Whatever one thinks of Kim, his reasoning on this matter is easy to grasp. After watching the U.S. wage war on several states that lacked a nuclear deterrent—Iraq, Libya, and now Iran—Kim has good reason to believe that North Korea would become much more vulnerable if it dismantled its nuclear weapons program. Similar to America’s insistence that Iran stop enriching uranium for nuclear fuel, demanding North Korean denuclearization obstructs diplomacy. Instead, officials in Washington and Seoul should focus on finding room for agreement to avoid conflict with an increasingly well-armed state. This is hardly an alien concept in the history of inter-Korean relations. From Kim Jong Il’s Sunshine-era summits to Kim Jong Un’s more recent acceptance of South Korea’s statehood, Pyongyang has sometimes shown a willingness to find a workable modus vivendi between North and South.
The Hanoi summit demonstrated not that constructive diplomacy with Pyongyang is a fool’s errand, but that Washington’s goals were unrealistic. Nearly eight years later, with even less leverage, continuing to insist on denuclearization is foolish. Pyongyang’s initial response to Trump’s reduction of joint military exercises has been less than warm. Kim Yo Jong, the sister of Kim Jong Un, insisted the reduction does not change the exercises’ inherently hostile posture, though she also maintained that her brother’s relationship with Trump is “excellent.” Trump, for his part, has complimented Kim, teased a possible meeting between the two leaders sometime this year, and even appeared to treat North Korea’s nuclear arsenal as an inconvenient but inalterable fact. “If I were president, I wouldn’t have allowed it,” Trump said Wednesday. “But he’s got them. I get along with him very well.”
While coaxing Pyongyang into a diplomatic process remains challenging, at least Trump wouldn’t be negotiating over the head of an unwilling Seoul. Lee has made détente a central goal of his presidency while emphasizing the importance of greater South Korean control over its own defense. Seoul’s frustration with Trump’s announcement was less about substance than the fact that Washington once again made a major decision concerning the peninsula without first consulting South Korean leadership.
Lee continues to support the alliance, but has demonstrated a willingness to distinguish between South Korean and American interests in an unprecedented way. Deterring North Korean aggression is obviously a national interest of Seoul, while a Mideast war simply is not. For decades, American politicians, including Trump specifically, have rightfully encouraged wealthy allies to take greater responsibility for their own security. Those same officials shouldn’t act surprised when that independence naturally results in said allies deciding for themselves what their interests require.
After all, Washington often pursues its own foreign policy objectives at the expense of its allies. Earlier this year, Washington shifted THAAD munitions and radar assets from South Korea to the Middle East and discussed doing the same with Patriot missile-defense systems. Politicians in Washington continue to insist that China is America’s defining strategic competitor, yet resources in Asia are consistently redeployed elsewhere. Just this month, the Navy ordered the USS George Washington out of the western Pacific and sent it to the Middle East, leaving Asia without a single American aircraft carrier. Lee, rather than treating the redeployments as a crisis, has admirably emphasized the importance of South Korea shouldering more of its own defense.
Meanwhile, Lee has been settling on a friendlier approach to China. The Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s visit this week, his first to South Korea in five years, comes as Lee seeks China’s help to reopen dialogue with Pyongyang. Beijing reaffirmed its pledge to play a “constructive role”in promoting peace on the peninsula.
None of this means Seoul is becoming a Chinese ally. Rather, South Korea, which endured considerable Chinese retaliation for accepting THAAD in the first place, has been reminded that Washington’s priorities often shift without warning. South Korea is simply demonstrating that it is an independent nation with a strong interest in avoiding an unduly antagonistic relationship with its powerful neighbor.
Trump’s decision to reduce joint military exercises with South Korea should be viewed with this broader diplomatic context in mind. Of course, his overall foreign policy does not reflect any principled commitment to military non-intervention, as the Iran War demonstrates. Regardless, in Korea, he is right to challenge the assumption that permanent military pressure and impossible demands are prerequisites for peace. Securing peace in Asia may require America to do less, not more, so the region can chart its own course and find a stable equilibrium.
The post Trump Has Good Reason to Reduce U.S.–South Korea Defense Ties appeared first on The American Conservative.
Great works of literature are not self-help books.
When, as a young man, I applied to be an English teacher, I recall being asked during interviews why it was so vital to interest my (hypothetical) charges in literature. I felt obliged to respond with what I intuited were the expected answers: “To teach them human empathy via the medium of prose,” or some such pablum.
But did I really believe this? Personally, the only reason I have ever read books is because I enjoy reading books. De gustibus non disputandum est; matters of taste are beyond dispute (I read that in a book once).
But from looking around, I get the sense this is a minority opinion. Reading, society tells us, must provide utility. Moby Dick or Crime and Punishment are less valuable as aesthetic experiences and more as step-by-step guides to whale hunting and axe murdering, respectively.
Yet in truth, the supposed “life lessons” to be drawn from many works of literature are tenuous indeed. The Invisible Man? Don’t make an invisibility serum. The Time Machine? Don’t build a time machine. Dracula? Don’t befriend Transylvanians. I wasn’t planning on doing any of those things anyway.
The latest work of literature to get this treatment is, ironically, one of the earliest: Homer’s Odyssey, which has been given a new lease on life by Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film.
The Odyssey Mindset: 7 Timeless Lessons for Living, by Oxford classicist turned clinical psychologist Dr. Sam Akbar, purports to “translate the ancient wisdom of Homer’s timeless epic into a reassuring and helpful toolkit for modern life.” Helpful how? In case one day you, too, are embroiled within a long, bitter, and drawn-out war over a convoluted misunderstanding with some Anatolian goddesses about a golden apple?
“Wherever you are on your journey, The Odyssey Mindset will help you navigate the obstacles that life presents,” says the blurb, steering you self-actualizingly between the Scylla of burnout and the Charybdis of chronic back pain, or something.
As the author of earlier works like Stressilient: How To Beat Stress and Build Resilience (based upon The Epic of Gilgamesh) Dr. Akbar is able to divine, like Joseph Campbell crossed with Oprah Winfrey, that The Odyssey is really one gigantic bronze-age metaphor for one’s own inner journey, the ultimate destination of which will be a personal Ithaca. Says Dr. Akbar:
I used to worry that I had taken too long on my Odyssey to find my thing! Now I see how helpful it has been to have a winding path, because it has given me so many different experiences and learning. Every ‘island’ I visited taught me something about what was important to me … I think it’s about assimilating all those different parts of yourself, and knowing that it takes time to get there, just like getting back to Ithaca. I would also add that nothing is really a straight line because that would presuppose you are in control of every outcome. Diversions happen to you whether you like it or not so learn what they tell you about yourself and what is important to you, and try to steer in that direction.
Sounds like driving back home drunk from a holiday with the GPS turned off.
But Dr. Akbar is not alone in her effort to wring modern utility out of this ancient text.
Elsewhere in Britain, Lord Sewell, our race-relations tsar, drew a strained comparison between Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, who had to wait 20 long years for his father to return from his wanderings, and the young boys of our urban dystopias, whose fathers are also frequently absent for long stretches. (Though Odysseus wasn’t doing a 20-year sentence in Belmarsh for armed robbery.)
There are 1.25 million boys in the United Kingdom of Ithaca growing up without a father right now, and one of them, journalist Zack Asgard, leapt at the chance to sell a column to The Times, bemoaning how, raised with an absent father himself, he too was a modern-day Telemachus. With a surname like Asgard, you’d expect his dad to be Thor or Loki, but as the next Marvel film isn’t due out until next summer, he had to go for an Odyssey tie-in.
How precisely was Zack’s old man like Odysseus, then? The 21st century Telemachus explains:
Visiting Sundays were much of a muchness. He would arrive at 11.30am and whistle to announce his arrival. Then we would climb into his car and hit the South Circular [highway] at speed, stopping off at the Tesco [supermarket] near his house to buy a pack of Chesterfield Blue Superking [cigarettes]. Back at his place I would sit on a pillow in front of the TV and watch a pirated DVD. It was usually Men in Black or Men in Black II – sometimes both. We didn’t speak … He would stand by the corner of the room smoking a thousand cigarettes … On warmer days, we’d walk down the high street. He would point at the gadgets in the shop windows and ask ‘Would you like that?’ I would nod. ‘Great,’ he would say. ‘Get your mother to buy it.’ That was our routine.”
Yes, but did he ever kill a Cyclops?
I wish I could say this craze was restricted to Homer. But our own national bard comes in for it too.
There has been a recent debate in Great Britain about the purpose of schooling: should it emphasize academic or vocational pursuits? One retired English teacher wrote in to The Times expressing skepticism that all the hours she spent teaching Shakespeare to catatonic schoolgirls who only ever wished to leave school and become florists, hairdressers or mothers, had been anything other than wasted.
Repelled by such sentiments, another reader wrote back, educating Times readers that, in fact, Shakespeare’s works held “valuable insights into each of their career choices”, as “his plays include more than 100 botanical references” for florists, and several “powerful depictions of motherhood, including that of Lady Macbeth” (who isn’t a mother during the play, and who famously fantasizes about bashing any hypothetical baby’s brains out). As for hairdressers, the correspondent explains, Bottom at one points utters the line “methinks I am marvelous hairy about the face” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. How’s that going to help someone wield a pair of fringe-scissors?
Still, I thought, at least he isn’t recommending trainee doctors read Shakespeare to learn how to perform surgery. Then I read his letter’s signature: “Dr David Jeffrey, Author, How Shakespeare Inspires Empathy in Clinical Care.”
Looking him up, I find Dr. Jeffrey has crafted an entire sideline in penning academic treatises urgently urging that modules in reading Shakespeare be added to UK medical degree courses. Why? Because he can “teach them empathy”, supposedly, the same clichéd stock answer fib I parroted when asked why I wanted to teach kids literature several decades ago. Specifically, Dr. Jeffrey indicates Shakespeare touched upon various palliative care matters during his plays. Here, for instance, he discusses voluntary euthanasia in King Lear:
When King Lear dies, Edgar steps forward to revive him, but Kent stops him, ‘Vex not his ghost; O, let him pass. He hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer’.
“Doctors need ‘narrative competency’ to allow them to interact with the patient in a joint process of making sense of their stories of suffering,” says Dr. Jeffrey, to justify all this. I’d rather my own doctor had spent his days reading Grey’s Anatomy than Gray’s Elegy, personally. Otherwise I might end up lying forgotten far from the madding crowd buried in a churchyard too.
I remember one amiably empty-headed girl I taught, who only wanted to leave school to become a cake-decoratrix. She loved doodling pictures and words onto bits of sponge with icing, was actually good at it (apart from the spelling), and had a job lined up waiting for her when she finally turned 16, doing just this, with a family friend.
But, in the meantime, she had to endure two more years of her life with me, reading The Tempest. By Dr. Jeffrey’s logic, I could surely have transformed her cosmic levels of boredom and incomprehension at this task into raptures of purest intrigue, simply by pointing out that, as one fascinating website all about The Bard and Buns details:
Touchstone in As You Like It and the Clown in All’s Well talk about pancakes, Doll Tearsheet tells us that Pistol lives on ‘mouldy stew’d prunes and dried cakes’, Pistol mentions ‘wafer-cakes’, and Dromio of Ephesus talks about cakes in The Comedy of Errors. Hugh Otecake and Alice Shortcake are mentioned by comic characters in Much Ado About Nothing and The Merry Wives of Windsor respectively.
At which point, the little girl would have baked me and Dr. Jeffrey a very special cake, iced over on top with a short two-word phrase, distinctly less than Shakespearean in its diction, which cannot be reproduced here.
It’s pointless trying to persuade or trick people who just don’t enjoy books into reading them by glibly lying how there are loads of cakes in Shakespeare/cats in The Great Gatsby/donuts in Buddenbrooks/quad bikes in Middlemarch/Ewoks in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, or by saying that memorizing The Iliad will somehow teach them how to overcome their childhood stutter or repair their broken vacuum-cleaner.
People who like to read, should. People who don’t like to read, shouldn’t.
The End.
The post What’s the Point of Reading? Just Reading. appeared first on The American Conservative.
Peace in the Middle East requires dealing with nationalism.
Last year, in an English-language interview with Sky News Arabia, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and Special Envoy for Iraq and Syria Tom Barrack made headlines by arguing that the Middle East is destined for perpetual conflict. The issue, he claimed in a rather puzzling statement, is that there is no word in Arabic for “submit.”
The Arabic subtitles to the interview itself provided a translation for “submit.” Moreover, as many viewers were quick to point out, the word “Islam” is derived from an Arabic root that can be rendered as “to submit.”
This gaffe revealed a larger problem. Rather than relying on facts and history, policymakers often reach consequential conclusions based on unfounded assumptions and cultural stereotypes.
What Barrack failed to explain to his viewers is that nationalism is one of the most consequential and complex developments in our recent history and that this sociological phenomenon, not any purported linguistic deficiency, is the primary driver of conflict in the modern Middle East.
From its origins in early modern Europe, nationalism has forged states and shattered empires the world over. It was a major factor in both World Wars, along with the myriad other conflicts that killed tens of millions of people in the bloody 20th century. It led to messy partitions from Ireland to India, sundering populations that had lived side by side for centuries.
And it remains a critical dynamic in geopolitics today. Indeed, without nationalism it would be difficult to explain the resilience of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the face of sanctions, blockade, and withering bombardments by the most powerful and technologically advanced military in human history. More than religious devotion alone, attachment to the nation, and the desire to protect the homeland in the face of threatened civilizational extinction, have led many Iranians to rally behind a regime they might otherwise have opposed.
Nationalism also helps explain the difficulty of resolving the Israel-Palestine dispute. Clearly, here too something more than Arabic vocabulary is at play. The Palestinian people, on the one hand, and the Jewish people, on the other, belong to imagined communities that view the same land as essential to their respective political destinies.
A bit of history here is helpful. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 proposed the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. The British intentionally kept the declaration vague—it did not promise the establishment of a Jewish state, nor provide that such a homeland should encompass all of Palestine. But its statement of “sympathy with” Zionism—the movement for Jewish national self-determination—was widely understood by Zionists as opening a path toward eventual Jewish statehood, while Arab Palestinians feared that it would do precisely that. Conflict inevitably arose between the two groups. The British government, responsible for the administration of Mandatory Palestine, repeatedly attempted to create a compromise arrangement, but it was unable to stem the ongoing violence between Jews and Palestinians.
By 1947, it was increasingly clear that neither the nationalist vision of the Jews nor that of the Arabs could be realized at an acceptable cost, and the United Nations proposed partition. Dividing the metaphorical baby—the land—was the more humane option, allowing both sides a nation and state of their own. Today, partition remains the only framework with any prospect of producing a lasting peace, precisely because it reduces the existential fear of one side’s nationalism being consumed by the other.
Now, as Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, and others (including, oddly, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair) work to realize a lasting peace plan for Gaza, this essential point must not be ignored. No amount of luxury hotels, weapons-confiscation efforts, economic incentives or governance reforms will prevent future wars unless the basic nationalist aspirations of both peoples are addressed in a meaningful way.
As one of the principal architects of the Good Friday Agreement, Tony Blair, in particular, would be wise to review his own diplomatic history. Seven and a half centuries after the Norman invasion of Ireland, the island was formally partitioned in 1920; the subsequent Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 reinforced that divide through the establishment of the Irish Free State while leaving Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. The treaty split the nationalist movement itself, helping produce the Irish Civil War of 1922–23. Decades later, competing claims of national identity, sovereignty, and political rights catalyzed the Troubles in Northern Ireland. But ultimately, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 built on the reality of partition to provide a framework in which British and Irish identities could coexist, while making consent—not force—the basis for determining Northern Ireland’s constitutional future.
There are striking parallels here to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: tragic history, the demand for a state, the bitter internal conflict between Hamas and Fatah, and the reality that a minority of Palestinians already live either as full citizens or permanent residents of Israel. The lesson of Northern Ireland is that partition can become the starting point for a political framework in which competing national identities, territorial claims, and questions of sovereignty can be negotiated rather than fought over.
Today, we can still find inspiration for the Middle East in the Irish experience. To quote the words of a 19th-century English poet associated with the cause of Irish emancipation: we must continue “to hope till Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.”
Hope alone will not resolve the Middle East conflicts. But soberly understanding nationalism and building peace around it, may be the best way forward for a region that, despite everything, still hopes.
And yes, there are words in Arabic, Hebrew, and Farsi for that.
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Even if you have good coverage, it can be hard to find a doctor.
Everyone talks about the health insurance crisis in America, but rarely do we talk about the other crisis: people with decent insurance coverage who simply cannot access healthcare. There’s more to this than single payer versus private coverage. Health insurance is meaningless if patients cannot actually obtain timely medical care.
This week I helped a friend access healthcare in America. She has health insurance from a national provider. She is a recent legal immigrant (from a place with good national health care) but had little idea how getting a doctor here actually works. She had come down with a terrible case of shingles, which had spread across her face and back and was moving toward her eye. But she had no primary care physician. After three ER visits she still had no referral. The emergency room dispensed only minimal pain medication and told her to find a primary care physician on her own. None she called would accept new patients before a six-week wait. We finally, using a combination of sweet talk and some advanced begging, found a rare doctor willing to put the patient ahead of the paperwork. She recovered.
For many Americans, the challenge is no longer only paying for health care but finding a clinician who is available to provide it in a timely manner. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 10.6 percent of insured U.S. adults could not obtain an appointment when they needed medical care in the previous year, unrelated to cost or insurance. Some 4.6 percent could not reach providers during open hours because of work or caregiving. About 4.4 percent could not easily find a physician compatible with their insurance, while 2.4 percent said providers were too far away. The latter is a critical issue in rural America and across the bulk of America that has little to no public transportation. All those figures above exclude people who never seek care because they cannot afford the deductible their insurance requires.
Maybe it is time to move to Canada. Two acquaintances just immigrated there after a multi-year screening process that included producing original college and high school transcripts, taking a health exam, taking a French language test, interviews, and forms, lots of forms. They needed to hire lawyers to get them over a few humps, but ultimately made it. Their motivation resonates strongly: They want decent health care.
I don’t want to break bad news to the newly-minted Canadians, though they have probably already found out for themselves the problems of accessing healthcare in their new home. Canada’s largely taxpayer-funded system provides universal coverage for medically necessary physician and hospital services, but coverage does not necessarily translate into access. Seventeen percent percent of Canadian adults do not have a regular family doctor, more than in America. Some 77 percent say it is not easy to obtain care on evenings, weekends, or holidays. Emergency rooms are overcrowded as a result, in part because 15 percent of ER visits could have been treated in primary care if it were available (a problem America shares because the homeless and others uninsured use the ER as their only doctor). The more specialized the health need, the longer the wait. Some 36 percent waited three months or longer for an initial specialist consultation. The median wait from a primary care physician referral to treatment is around 30 weeks. But at least they do not face the risk of bankruptcy from a medical emergency.
What is a Canadian, already paying for health insurance via taxes, to do? There is no one good answer. Some relief is found among the approximately two-thirds of Canadians who pay for private health insurance on top of the mandatory national kind. That private insurance, except in Quebec, primarily covers only services outside the universal provincial health plans, such as prescriptions, dental and vision care, and other supplemental benefits. It generally does not purchase faster access to medically necessary physician or hospital services covered by the public system. Other sick people resort to private clinics and pay in cash. A lucky few use employer-paid executive health programs. A few even resort to travel to the United States and pay cash directly for specialist care to avoid potentially dangerous waits. These workarounds reflect a fundamental reality of Canada’s health care system: The principal barrier is usually access, not insurance coverage, as in the United States.
Many of the reasons for these access problems are similar in the U.S. and Canada. They include population growth outpacing growth in primary care providers, retirements among the baby boomer docs, and increased demand from an aging population. Doctors in America face the additional administrative burdens of insurance prior authorizations and processing claims through the specific system each insurance company requires. There is also a problem training more doctors in the U.S. to meet demand. Medical education slots face limits because the federal Balanced Budget Act of 1997 capped Medicare funding for residency positions, which hospitals rely on heavily to pay for that training. Congress froze the number of funded residency slots (at a cost of some $21 billion) based on 1996 levels. The number of new slots trails the rising need for doctors. American doctors also face a substantially greater risk of malpractice lawsuits than in Canada. In addition to paying out for expensive malpractice insurance, American doctors must also practice defensive medicine, care and tests ordered primarily to minimize the chance of getting sued. This reduces physician capacity.
If you’re looking for solutions (or planning on emigrating somewhere), the place to look might be Denmark. Denmark has a tax-funded, universal health care system in which nearly all medically necessary physician and hospital services are provided without charge. Funding comes mainly from national taxes. Most Danes do not receive their primary health insurance through an employer, and unlike patients in Germany or the Netherlands, they do not generally pay mandatory health insurance premiums to a sickness fund or private insurer. To work around the access problem, about one-half of Danes have voluntary private health insurance. Unlike in Canada, this coverage is allowed to provide fast access to private hospitals and specialist consultations without some of the delays of the public system. It supplements rather than replaces the public system as it grows. Denmark also helps ameliorate the access problem by assigning almost every person in the country (over 99 percent) a primary care physician. There are still problems with a lack of doctors, especially since Denmark made the decision to greatly open its borders to large numbers of immigrants, and it can be hard to switch doctors from the one you are assigned to use. Denmark solves the access problem not by abandoning universal care but by allowing supplemental private care. Denmark demonstrates that universal coverage and private alternatives need not be mutually exclusive.
This is where someone asks how much it all costs. It is a complex question, given the cost of the variety of health insurance plans with their varying deductions and provided services in America, plus a very messy tax code that almost ensures no two Americans pay the same amount of tax. With the danger of oversimplifying things, but to try and bring some clarity to all this, OECD calculations set the average tax wedge Americans and Canadians pay at about 30 percent. For Denmark, the same OECD study shows a single worker earning an average wage faces a tax wedge of 36 percent. But in return Danes get free universal health care, free public schools and universities, pensions, generous unemployment insurance, child care and family benefits, and elder care. Americans and some Canadians pay for all of those things in addition to taxes.
We have spent decades in the U.S. arguing over how to pay for healthcare. Increasingly, the question is instead whether anyone can actually access it. America, alongside Canada, supposedly has some of the most advanced healthcare available in the world; too many people just can’t use it. Coverage under any system is not the same as access.
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Looking for my key amid the shrubbery, I found a fossil instead.
Slight setbacks may have disproportionate effects upon one’s mood, and despair may be induced by trivia. For example, the other day I lost the key to my post-box somewhere between the latter and the house, 500 yards away. The track is somewhat overgrown, and despite several prolonged searches, I could not find the key. Even on the very small scale of my own life, this was no tragedy, but the inconvenience of it—having to buy and install a new post-box—nevertheless made me wonder whether it (that is to say, life) was all worth it.
There was one small consolation during my tedious searches, however, namely that I found another fossil ammonite by the side of the track. I have found about a hundred such fossils on my land, but none of trilobites, from which I conclude, no doubt crudely, that these fossils of mine are between 66 and 250 million years old, ammonites having gone extinct 66 million years ago and trilobites 250 million years ago.
The ammonites were cephalopods, related to the present-day nautilus, and there were thousands of species of them during their long sojourn in the oceans. The trilobites (even more species of them) were arthropods, related to the present-day horseshoe crab.
The ammonites and trilobites coexisted for millions of years, though not necessarily peacefully, the larger types of the former being inclined to eat the smaller types of the latter. I confess that, whenever I think of ammonites and trilobites (which is not often), I think of them as two tribes in the Old Testament. The Ammonites were indeed a tribe in the Bible, not well spoken of although (or perhaps because) they were closely related to the Israelites, with whom they were often in conflict.
Since the trilobites went extinct before the ammonites, a ridiculous phrase runs through my mind: The ammonites rose up and smote the trilobites. This biblical-sounding genocide never took place, the trilobites, unlike the ammonites, not surviving the Permian-Triassic mass extinction caused not by genocide but by volcanic activity—or perhaps I should say, overactivity. The cephalopods, it seems, were more adaptable.
Even if the fossil I found were only the most recent of its type, that is to say 66,000,000 years old, it was enough to hold such evidence in my hand to cause me to reflect on the disjunction between the ridiculous strength of my emotions and the fleetingness of my existence. It seems unlikely that mankind will last as long as the ammonites, that is to say 300,000,000 years, certainly not the way we are going on; and it is a sobering, if useless, thought that the life of a man is one eighth as long in years as 300,000,000 is in minutes.
I returned from a fruitless third search for the keys to my post-box very frustrated. When one loses something, failure to find it seems almost a moral failure, for it is there somewhere to be found, if only one looked hard enough. Therefore, not to have found it is the result of insufficient effort. And whenever this situation arises, I think of, and adapt slightly, Bishop Butler’s great (though seemingly banal) metaphysical principle, that everything is what it is and not another thing. I change this while I am searching to, “Everything is where it is, and not anywhere else.” It is there to be found; it is just that I have not found it.
When frustrated, I retire to my library and leaf through a few books: But the thought occurs to me that, in this, I am almost as much a fossil as the ammonite itself. Only that same day, I had read an article in a newspaper (itself a medium in the process of fossilization) that the habit of reading has declined yet further, in children by 50 percent since 2016 alone, by which time it was already not a favorite pastime.
As for books, they are decreasingly necessary in people’s lives—but not in mine, on the contrary. Now that I am retired, I live mainly in or through books, which are, so to speak, in dialectical relationship with my past life. I suppose this cannot be the case for much younger people who have not yet had a wide enough experience of life that almost every book, no matter how seemingly recondite, has some personal meaning for them. But by the time they reach my age, books will have gone the way of trilobites and ammonites. I, also, will have gone that way, having lived the last years of my life like a dinosaur just before the Great Extinction, or perhaps like the last thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, that was filmed in 1936 in Hobart zoo, the last of his species that was, with his death, about to go extinct: the difference being that, unlike the thylacine, I know that my species, that of the bibliomane, is about to go extinct.
Of course, there are compensations to being a living fossil. At least you are not of the common herd and are therefore able secretly, in the recesses of your heart, to feel superior to it. Reading books is not just pleasurable, but mentally elevating; I cannot remember having read a book in the last decade that taught me nothing, even if only about the time in which it was written. Not even the pulpiest of pulp novels is completely without instruction.
But are books necessary to moral development? We may dismiss their sufficiency in this regard straight away; no one would expect the person who had read 100 books to be necessarily twice as good, or even only slightly better, than someone who has read 50. Indeed, reading the wrong books can probably make you worse than you would otherwise have been; nor does it follow from the fact that books can make you worse that they must also be able to make you better. It is easier to corrupt than to correct.
So, why do I lament the decline of reading, especially of books? I can say that it is because I think it will render people more superficial, less informed, and even less intelligent, that it represents a thinning out of our culture. But really it is because I don’t want to think that, whatever its snobbish consolations, I have been engaged throughout the last half century in self-fossilization.
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Hamas said it would not disarm until Israel withdraws from Gaza, while Israel refuses to withdraw until Hamas disarms.
The U.S.-led Board of Peace and the mediating countries of Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, and the United States announced Thursday that Hamas had agreed to a detailed roadmap for implementing the next phases of the Gaza ceasefire, including the group’s disarmament. In a statement, the Board said, “For the first time, Hamas officially has committed to an actionable plan for relinquishing all its weapons, which will be followed by Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.”
President Donald Trump praised the announcement as a “HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT of Hamas,” adding that “as disarmament is completed, Israeli forces will withdraw, and the International Stabilization Force will work with a new Palestinian police force to take responsibility for Gaza being safe for its residents and its neighbors.”
But despite its promotion by the Trump administration as a “major milestone” and “monumental step toward lasting PEACE and SECURITY,” some details of the purported agreement remained unclear, and questions persist over whether each side shares the same understanding of the agreement and its timeline.
Shortly after the agreement was announced, Hamas said that any discussions over its heavy weapons would be conditional on a permanent end to Israeli attacks, a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the dismantling of Israel-backed armed militias, and progress toward Palestinian self-determination and an independent Palestinian state, among other terms.
The Hamas negotiator Ghazi Hamad told Al Jazeera that the group would not take any disarmament step before Israel pulled back to the phase one line, and would not act at all if Israel failed to meet its obligations.
Israeli forces currently occupy roughly 64 percent of Gaza, while implementing phase one’s “yellow line” would reduce Israel’s presence to about 53 percent of the strip.
Documents obtained by Drop Site News show that Hamas agreed to give up its heavy weaponry only after Israel ends its attacks, withdraws its forces from Gaza, and allows the entry of life essentials like medicine and food.
Israel, likewise, did not immediately endorse the deal, with a spokesman for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu telling NBC News that “Israel has conveyed its comments and concerns on the proposed framework to our American counterparts. The version that has been made public does not reflect Israel’s positions.” Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on Friday more openly rejected the leaked agreement, writing on X that “the draft agreement published by the ‘Peace Council’ is not acceptable to Israel.”
On Monday, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Missions Minister Orit Strock called on the government to hold a new vote on the Board of Peace, criticizing its mechanism for an International Stabilization Force. Further complicating matters, Smotrich also called for the construction of three new Israeli outposts on the Gaza border. Defense Minister Israel Katz recently called for similar settlements.
Egypt meanwhile said Friday that Hamas had agreed to disarm in a “gradual and sequenced” process and hand its weapons to a new committee called the “National Committee for the Administration of Gaza.” That body was created in January 2026 and is currently headquartered in Cairo but, as the Financial Times reports, “has been unable to enter the enclave” at all.
The latest disagreement relates to a controversial authority granted to the Trump administration on November 17, 2025, by UN Security Council Resolution 2803, which states that the IDF will withdraw “based on standards, milestones, and timeframes linked to demilitarization that will be agreed upon between the IDF, ISF, the guarantors, and the United States,” but without direct input from Palestinians in Gaza. Resolution 2803 also allows Israel to keep a “security perimeter presence” in Gaza until the strip is “properly secure from any resurgent terror threat,” but it notably does not define that condition or set a timeline for it. On the question of Palestinian statehood, the resolution says that “the conditions” for “a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination” and statehood “may finally be in place” once the Palestinian Authority’s reform program is “faithfully carried out.”
Pro-Palestinian analysts argue that this resolution undermined the UN’s own record on Palestine, noting the absence of the UN’s typical preamble recalling the governing law on the matter: that Gaza is “occupied territory” and that Israel is obligated by international law to withdraw.
Despite a ceasefire deal signed last October, Israeli attacks have killed at least 1,230 people, according to Gaza health authorities. As Hamas says it will not disarm until Israel withdraws from Gaza and fulfills its obligations, as Israel refuses to withdraw until Hamas disarms, and as Israeli cabinet officials continue to call for resettling parts of Gaza, it remains to be seen whether the U.S.-led Board of Peace will fulfill the hopes its name has inspired.
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A realist analysis of power and interests points to a mutually beneficial outcome.
The conflict between the United States and Iran has laid bare a profound failure of political judgment and strategic adaptation in Washington and Tehran alike. Both sides locked themselves into rigid adversarial paradigms and prioritized short-term tactical military successes at the expense of long-term strategy. For the United States in particular, this failure is a symptom of a much larger, more dangerous disease—a stubborn adherence to a militaristic, interventionist grand strategy that refuses to accept the realities of a multipolar world in which its relative financial and military resources are much more limited.
The on-again, off-again conflict, characterized by tit-for-tat retaliatory strikes, is a lose-lose situation for both parties and for the region as a whole, yet we are unlikely to escape this tragic dynamic unless more realist strategic thinking prevails in both Washington and Tehran. Neither side can “win” this war, but they can cut their losses before they incur even higher human, financial, and military costs. The realist school of thought offers a compelling diagnosis of this conflict, and points the way to a mutually beneficial conclusion.
At the strategic level, Washington’s approach to Tehran has been trapped in a tragic cycle best understood through the theoretical lens of Robert Jervis’s “security dilemma.” Aggressive American and Israeli actions to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons only made Tehran want to increase its military capabilities, nuclear and otherwise. The operating assumption in Washington was that sustained economic “maximum pressure,” combined with overwhelming military coercion, would inevitably force either Iran’s complete submission or the structural collapse of the regime.
This approach fundamentally misunderstands how states behave under anarchy and existential threat. As Jervis famously articulated, in an anarchic international system, the very means by which one state attempts to increase its own security often inadvertently decreases the security of others. Over the years, American and Israeli coercive actions may have been intended to buttress regional stability by mitigating Iran’s nuclear threat, but they were predictably interpreted by Tehran as a campaign of aggression. It’s hardly surprising that Tehran, in response to a U.S.-Israeli war actually aimed, in part, at collapsing the regime, dug in and fought for its very survival, countering with a doctrine of asymmetric resistance rather than capitulating.
Since late February, when the U.S. launched Operation Epic Fury, heavy-handed military confrontation has consistently failed to achieve structural change within the Iranian regime. Instead, it has compelled Tehran to acquire more disruptive capabilities to escape the effects of American pressure. Rather than recognizing this classic security dilemma and the reality that unyielding coercion was making the region vastly more volatile, the U.S. has doubled down, forcing Tehran to further entrench its doctrine of resistance.
Given this basic misunderstanding of the relationship between U.S. military pressure and Iranian fragility and amenability, it was all too predictable that the Memorandum of Understanding achieved last month quickly collapsed. When disagreements arose about what the MOU required, the Trump administration turned to coercive pressure. The hardliners in Tehran are now holding the Strait of Hormuz hostage and threatening U.S. bases all around the region, thus escalating the conflict horizontally. Tehran has in some ways proven itself to be a savvy actor, but the wrecking of Iran’s economy and infrastructure, mounting casualties, and massive civilian displacement demonstrate the self-defeating nature of its own hardball strategy.
Therefore, both states are pursuing aggressive strategies that reinforce each other in a vicious cycle. As I explored in my book Emergent Strategy and Grand Strategy, when states lock themselves into rigid grand strategic frameworks and fail to embrace emergent adaptation, they court disaster.
Ultimately, the most glaring failure of political judgment was Washington’s inability to match its military means to its political objectives. In other words, the Trump administration ignored Clausewitz’s first and most important warning to leaders contemplating military action: War is an “instrument of policy,” not something autonomous, and leaders should understand what kind of war they are planning to wage and what it is meant to achieve.
The intense U.S. air campaign achieved distinct tactical successes—such as the destruction or degradation of Iran’s nuclear facilities, missile and air defense installations, and their modest Navy—but utterly failed to secure its primary objectives. Those included neutralizing Iran’s nuclear program and, if possible, instigating regime change. Once failure became clear, there were some modest signs of learning on the part of the White House, as when Vice President J.D. Vance pushed successfully for the ceasefire and MOU, but alas this shift was short-lived, and the U.S. military resumed its tactically successful but strategically useless airstrikes.
Hawks are now calling on Trump to take out a critical nuclear facility at Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain. Defense experts assess that the facility is buried 300 to 450 feet beneath solid granite, likely placing it beyond the reach of even bunker-buster bombs. High-end airpower alone cannot permanently dismantle nuclear infrastructure dispersed deep underground. As former UN weapons inspector David Albright bluntly concluded regarding precision munitions, it is “just not possible” to use a bunker-buster to pass through a mountain.
Furthermore, as realists have long understood, external military bombardment rarely precipitates the collapse of entrenched regimes; more often than not, it rallies the populace around the flag. This dynamic aligns precisely with Robert Pape’s seminal book Bombing to Win, which demonstrates that strategic air coercion rarely achieves significant political concessions or sparks popular revolts against authoritarian regimes. Instead, states facing external aerial punishment routinely absorb tactical destruction while adapting their defense posture and hardening domestic political control.
Further U.S. military force is in fact actively counterproductive to creating favorable political change in Iran because the perception of foreign sponsorship delegitimizes opposition movements, as shown in this case by the ascendancy of hardliners to positions of power after the killing of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other leaders. Airstrikes may destroy hardened facilities and kill commanders, but the neoconservative theory that decapitation strikes will weaken a regime enough for the population to revolt has no historical support.
The growing financial and military costs of this war are proving to be a political loser for the administration on the home front. The American public possesses a sharper strategic instinct than the foreign policy establishment realizes, and they are firmly rejecting this interventionist misadventure. A late June Quinnipiac University poll revealed that 60 percent of voters think the military action against Iran was not worth it, with 62 percent explicitly disapproving of Trump’s handling of the situation. The domestic opposition has only calcified over time; taxpayers recognize that borrowing billions for an unwinnable Middle Eastern conflict is the antithesis of a sound grand strategy. For an administration that campaigned on an America First platform of ending endless wars, this massive expenditure of political capital on a theater of diminishing strategic importance is a self-inflicted domestic political wound.
Moreover, the regional blowback of this conflict further illustrates the folly of the current strategy. The war’s long-term costs for neighboring states may be even greater than those borne by the two nations that launched the war against Iran. Even nearby states that haven’t become targets of Iranian strikes have paid dearly. The war triggered a massive flight of capital from fragile regional partners. Egypt, for example—already an economically vulnerable nation—saw billions in “hot money” leave its economy. Destabilizing vital Arab partners to pursue an unwinnable coercion campaign against Tehran is the antithesis of a sound realist grand strategy.
This brings us to the core grand strategic lesson of the U.S.–Iran conflict. Many realists and indeed many Trump administration officials, including the Pentagon’s top policy official, Elbridge Colby, warned before the conflict that getting dragged into a new Middle East war would deplete U.S. resources and focus and distract from the top grand-strategic challenge of containing China’s rise to regional and global hegemony. Every dollar, every missile, and every carrier strike group tied down in this frustrating conflict with Iran is a strategic asset diverted from the real fight. As I argue in detail in my new book No Peer Rivals, an America First realist strategy demands ruthless prioritization in today’s multipolar era, especially given the already unsustainable national debt. The era when the U.S. military could conduct long-term campaigns in the Middle East without giving much ground in the great power competition is over. To better position itself vis-a-vis Russia and especially China, the United States must stop squandering its resources on unwinnable fantasies in the Middle East.
This strategic diversion is not merely theoretical; it is actively degrading America’s material readiness for great-power competition. According to a recent analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the intense bombardment campaign has severely depleted America’s stockpile of precision-guided munitions. The U.S. has reportedly fired over 1,000 Tomahawk missiles at Iran—a staggering expenditure that CSIS estimates will take until late 2030 to fully replenish based on current production capacities. Furthermore, replacing the high-end Patriot and THAAD interceptors expended to counter Iranian drone and missile retaliation could take until the end of the decade, forcing agonizing trade-offs. As CSIS bluntly warned, these depleted inventories have opened a dangerous “window of vulnerability for a potential Western Pacific conflict.” The Pentagon is actively burning through the very specialized munitions required to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in order to police the airspace of the Middle East.
The ironic tragedy of this lose-lose war is that its ending is, or should be, straightforward: the U.S. and Iran would both benefit from returning to the status quo ante, and it would be in their mutual interest to arrive at a negotiated settlement along those lines as soon as possible. Neither stand to benefit from the continued tit-for-tat, nor from escalating the war. Much to the chagrin of realists, however, states sometimes fail to follow the prudent path that best serves their national interests, and they often pay a steep price for it. This war is proving to be yet another lamentable example.
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The dictator Isaias Afwerki wants better relations with Washington.
Eritrea’s dictator, Isaias Afwerki, hopes for reconciliation with Washington. The northeastern African state, sometimes called the North Korea of Africa, is one of the world’s most reclusive, impoverished, and repressive states. However, its leader apparently hopes for better times.
No doubt, Asmara needs financial support, given its disastrous dirigiste policies and Eritrea’s forbidding economic conditions. According to Bertelsmann Stiftung: “Eritrea remains one of the world’s poorest countries, and poverty is endemic. … the poverty rate is very high, and most Eritreans rely on support from relatives in the diaspora to survive. Consequently, the majority of the population is structurally excluded from opportunities to earn a decent living, leading to a continuous mass exodus.”
Isaias may also hope for military assistance, or at least Washington’s willingness to warn neighboring Ethiopia against attempting to reacquire a port and coastline and perhaps even force regime change. Eritrea emerged as an independent country only after three decades of armed struggle and remains entangled in Addis Ababa’s affairs. Eritrean forces currently occupy areas of Tigray, an Ethiopian region recently at war with both its national government and Asmara. During the conflict, Eritrea’s military was accused of civilian massacres and sexual enslavement. It continues to pillage and otherwise abuse the local population.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration appears receptive to rapprochement. “Donald Trump’s top Africa adviser is reported to have met the dictator in late 2025,” reported The Economist. “Marco Rubio, America’s secretary of state, has talked of a ‘new era of US–Eritrea relations.’ Much chatter suggests America will soon lift the sanctions it imposed five years ago, perhaps opening the way for Mr. Isaias’s wider rehabilitation.”
Washington would gain little economic advantage from such an opening, since Isaias has shown no interest in serious and sustained policy reform. More likely, the administration hopes to reduce conflict in an important region and gain local assistance in any renewed conflict with Yemen’s Houthis, who could again seek to shut down Red Sea shipping. Washington might also be seeking greater access to Eritrea’s abundant mineral deposits, an industry currently dominated by China.
Critics complain that Asmara has done nothing to warrant what would amount to a reward. However, that is the wrong standard for lifting sanctions. Greater engagement deserves a serious look because current policy has failed. Sanctions imposed during the conflict with Tigray neither changed Eritrea’s international course nor moderated Isaias’s tyrannical rule. Indeed, Eritreans remain desperate to escape what amounts to a national prison. The Economist reported:
When Eritrea’s national football [soccer] team returned home from South Africa in April, seven of its players did not. It was not the first time. Plenty of the 3.5m or so people living in the reclusive dictatorship on the Red Sea would like to escape the indefinite ‘national service’ (essentially, forced labor for the state) and the absence of rights and freedoms enforced by the regime.
No panacea is at hand. However, the administration should incorporate concern for Eritrea’s people, promoting greater protection for their liberties and well-being, in any policy change. Asmara languishes among the world’s most repressive governments, alongside those of North Korea, Turkmenistan, Burma/Myanmar, Equatorial Guinea, and South Sudan, according to the latest Freedom House rankings. In May, Mohamed Abdelsalam Babiker, the UN’s special rapporteur for Eritrea, issued a harsh assessment, decrying possible “crimes against humanity.”
The Trump State Department has highlighted credible reports of major human rights abuses, including
disappearances; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; arbitrary arrest or detention; transnational repression against individuals in another country; serious abuses in a conflict; serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom; restrictions of religious freedom; trafficking in persons, including forced labor; prohibiting independent trade unions and systematic restrictions on workers’ freedom of association; and significant presence of any of the worst forms of child labor.
Particularly brutal has been Asmara’s attack on those who believe in more than politics. According to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, “religious freedom conditions in Eritrea remained extremely poor. The government continued to systematically persecute individuals based on their religious beliefs.” The Eritrean government, the report continues, has detained members of religious communities in abysmal conditions, subjecting them to “sexual violence and physical abuse such as electrocution, exposure, waterboarding, hanging, noise torture, and denial of medical treatment, any of which can result in death.” The regime “also coerced detainees to renounce their religious beliefs and banned praying aloud, singing, preaching, and possessing religious books.”
USCIRF concluded that religious persecution is “systematic, ongoing, and egregious,” with all faith groups at risk. The Commission noted, “Government authorities targeted specific communities, including Baptists, Pentecostals, and evangelical Christians, for persecution and arrest.” Babiker has explained that Muslim communities also “continue to face deep-rooted structural repression,” including the closure of religious institutions and the seizure of property.
So, what to do about Eritrea, which has gained strategic importance even as its domestic practices have deteriorated? Washington’s ability to influence the internal politics of other nations will always be limited, but engagement might work better than isolation at improving the Eritrean government’s behavior.
President Trump deserves credit for reconsidering high-minded, apparently well-intentioned policies that have evidently failed. Nevertheless, he should mix some idealism in with realism in addressing difficult cases like Eritrea. Even as he seeks to take advantage of Asmara’s geographic position, the president should remember the plight of the Eritrean people, denied the most basic of freedoms, including the rights to choose their government and live their faith.
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Washington needs a strategy grounded in realism and reciprocal diplomacy.
Donald Trump entered office promising to end America’s endless wars. Instead, he chose a war openly aimed at regime change in Iran that has predictably become a quagmire, trapping the United States in an open-ended cycle of tit-for-tat strikes, economic blockades, and escalating confrontation over the Strait of Hormuz, with no plausible military path to victory.
The immediate crisis is dangerous enough. The larger problem is that Washington is once again doubling down on a decades-long strategic obsession with Iran that has repeatedly produced the opposite of what American policymakers sought to achieve.
My recent report for the Center for International Policy, Beyond Maximalism, examines U.S. policy toward Iran from Iran-Contra through the 2015 nuclear deal, “maximum pressure,” and the ongoing war. The conclusion is uncomfortable but difficult to escape. The current catastrophe was not inevitable. It is the predictable result of a strategy that consistently overestimated what coercive U.S. policies could accomplish while underestimating how Iran would respond.
The first mistake has been treating Iran as an irrational ideological actor rather than a state pursuing what it believes are its security interests.
This does not mean the Islamic Republic is benign. Tehran supports non-state armed groups across the region, represses its own citizens, and has often pursued policies that have undermined regional stability. None of that should be minimized.
But neither should it obscure an equally important reality. Again and again, American military leaders, senior national security officials, and realist scholars have described Iran as a rational actor responding to incentives rather than seeking conflict for its own sake. Its support for Hezbollah has long functioned as a deterrent against Israel. Its expanding nuclear program accelerated after Washington abandoned the nuclear agreement. Today, its effort to consolidate greater control over the Strait of Hormuz reflects a similar logic. Having concluded that American sanctions relief and political commitments are inherently reversible, Tehran views leverage over the world’s most important energy chokepoint as the most durable guarantee it can create against renewed coercion or attack.
One need not approve of any of these policies to recognize that they follow a strategic logic.
The second mistake has been America’s strategic obsession with Iran.
Relative to the threat it poses to core American national interests, Iran has occupied an extraordinary place in Washington’s strategic imagination. Its economy is roughly the size of Connecticut. Its conventional military spending is dwarfed by that of the United States and its regional partners. It lacks the ability to project sustained military power far beyond its borders. Yet for nearly half a century, successive administrations have treated Tehran as though it were one of America’s foremost strategic adversaries, devoting enormous diplomatic, military, and political capital to containing or transforming it.
The results have repeatedly been the opposite of what Washington intended.
The invasion of Iraq eliminated Iran’s principal regional rival and dramatically expanded Tehran’s influence in Baghdad. Withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal accelerated the growth of Iran’s nuclear program while empowering the very hardliners the agreement had marginalized. The Trump administration’s first-term maximum pressure policy failed to produce capitulation while driving Iran closer to Russia and China. And now the collapse of the memorandum of understanding and the resumption of fighting have only reinforced Tehran’s conviction that it cannot entrust its long-term security to promises of future sanctions relief. Instead, they are attempting to create leverage that rests in their own hands.
Trump’s latest decision to restore a blockade illustrates the problem perfectly. Economic strangulation is once again expected to produce political concessions. But if both recent experience and the broader historical record are any indication, renewed coercion is unlikely to produce capitulation. It is more likely to convince Tehran that preserving every remaining source of leverage, especially Hormuz, is indispensable to its security.
That should concern Washington.
The United States enters this renewed phase of conflict with strategic petroleum reserves still historically low and global energy markets far tighter than in any previous crisis. The room for absorbing prolonged disruptions has narrowed considerably. Continued escalation therefore risks imposing substantial costs not only on Iran but on the United States and the broader global economy.
Diplomacy requires credible and reciprocal incentives. Yet American policy has too often assumed that Iran should surrender its principal sources of leverage, from its nuclear program and missile and drone capabilities to its growing leverage over the Strait of Hormuz, in exchange for economic benefits that U.S. administrations remain free to easily revoke. That asymmetry has become one of the central obstacles to diplomacy. Washington continues to ask Tehran to make permanent concessions in return for commitments that Iranian leaders increasingly view as temporary.
There is no military solution to this problem. There never was.
America’s objective should not be to force Iran’s unconditional submission or pursue another futile search for decisive victory. It should be to manage a long-term rivalry in ways that reduce the risks of nuclear proliferation, regional war, global economic disruption, and an ever deeper strategic alignment between Iran, China, and Russia.
That requires a fundamental shift in strategy. As I lay out in my report, Washington must move beyond the illusion that ever greater coercion will eventually produce a more compliant Iran and instead pursue a policy grounded in strategic realism, reciprocal diplomacy, regional integration, and long-term risk reduction.
The real lesson of America’s nearly half-century conflict with Iran is not that Washington lacked military power or economic leverage. It is that those tools were repeatedly used to achieve political objectives they could not in fact deliver. Until that lesson is absorbed, America is likely to keep winning battles while losing the broader strategic competition.
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U.S. home prices surged to an all-time high in June according to a National Association of Realtors (NAR) report released last Thursday.
The report found that the median existing home price in June reached $440,660, an increase of 1.8 percent year-over-year and a new high according to the NAR’s chief economist Lawrence Yun.
Housing sales declined to 2.4 percent month-over-month in June and 2.8 percent, seasonally adjusted, since June 2025. The NAR’s Housing Affordability Index is up 6.8 points since June 2025 at 102.3, signaling that home prices are more affordable relative to the median family income. Yet the index was down 2.8 points from May.
Home affordability has become a contentious issue as “affordability politics” dominates discussions leading up to the midterms. A Harris poll conducted with the Guardian earlier this month saw 45 percent of respondents share that they found trouble affording housing.
Congress recently passed the “21st Century Road to Housing Act,” which aims to loosen regulatory burdens on building and increase the supply of housing. President Donald Trump declined to sign the bill, letting it become law on Saturday following the 10-day window after being passed by Congress but not vetoed.
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The right has a generational conflict on its hands.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt isn’t thrilled with her generation. In a recent interview with Fox News’ Jesse Watters, she agreed that her fellow Zoomers are lazy and entitled. “This generation, my generation, I hate to say it, Gen Z and those younger than me have been raised with just silver spoons in their mouths,” she told the Fox News host. She added that they’ve been given everything and are completely ungrateful for those privileges. She even thinks some of them need to be sent to Cuba or Iran to straighten up.
The comments didn’t land well on social media. But Leavitt wasn’t bothered by the outrage. She doubled down in a lengthy X post. “I was asked by Jesse Watters why so many young people are buying the false promise of ‘free stuff’ being sold by communist politicians,” she wrote. “My answer: a combination of laziness, yes, and the liberal indoctrination that has been taking place in our education system for far too long.”
It’s a strange message for the administration to blast out when President Donald Trump is underwater with young voters. A June poll from NBC found that 77 percent of voters under 30 disapprove of the president’s job performance. If accurate, those figures represent a complete wipeout of Trump’s gains among young voters in 2024. Leavitt’s comments risk reinforcing a negative impression of the administration among Zoomers.
But the message was likely well received among its target audience. Those who regularly watch Fox News aren’t Zoomers. The median age among Fox News’ regular TV audience is 69. For this demographic, youth-bashing is music to their ears. It’s been a common trope in conservative media for years to portray the young as lazy and entitled. Millennials were depicted the same way in their younger years. Conservative media loved to attack these “snowflakes” who couldn’t handle real life and were too liberal. Now it’s Gen Z’s turn to play this role for older conservatives.
Leavitt’s comments reflect the generational conflict within American politics. The young hate the Boomers and the Boomers hate the young. Older people make up the vast majority of Republican primary voters and the chief consumers of traditional conservative media, so most leaders on the right cater to their hostility. But the young make up much of the audience within the new media space; thus, Boomers are regularly savaged by the podcasters and streamers.
Right-wing figures are torn between these two tendencies. Leavitt chose the youth-bashing.
Her statements fit the conservative Boomers’ conception of youth. In the picture presented by her and Watters, young people are good-for-nothing losers who can’t even offer a firm handshake. That’s why they vote for socialism. At the same time, these shiftless individuals could also be dangerous criminals. As Watters noted, if they misbehave, we may need to send them to the Army or even to a foreign country.
This is a bizarre image of reality. It’s doubtful DSA activists are the ones committing all the crime in New York City and elsewhere. That’s another demographic misbehaving, one that likely didn’t pay much attention to the Bolshevik history taught in high school. But Boomers seemingly like to believe this image reflects reality.
It’s not hard to think that the true enemy for this class is young people. Rather than class war, generational conflict animates older conservatives. They don’t want to hear about the challenges young people face. They believe these problems are purely the result of laziness, entitlement, and misbehavior. Maybe that’s the case with some youngsters, but it doesn’t reflect the entire generation.
The fact is that things aren’t so rosy for Gen Z. Recent college grads are more likely to be unemployed than the average worker. This is a huge change from the past, when the unemployment rate among recent college grads was significantly lower than the national average. The young, if they are employed, face historically low income growth. While this demographic faces a grim labor market, recent college grads are also likely to have more student loan debt than their counterparts in past generations. Zoomers are also carrying more personal debt than any other generation at their age. It’s far harder to buy a house as a young person, with home ownership notably lower among those under 40.
The World Economic Forum warns of “financial nihilism” among Gen Z. Many within this generation no longer believe in the values of prudence and long-term planning. Instead, they favor an “apparently self-destructive relationship with money, which includes crypto bets, prediction markets and retirement accounts raided to pay off credit cards.”
This same mentality also animates the growing support for socialism among Zoomers. If they think the system is rigged against them, why shouldn’t they want to blow it up and redistribute the wealth of Boomers to the young? DSA candidates offer this promise, which is one reason they’re becoming more popular with Gen Z voters.
Leavitt’s response is essentially “Let them eat cake.” It mocks the young for feeling aggrieved and offers tone-deaf advice. It’s a message that will only appeal to old people.
Generational conflict is stupid. We shouldn’t hate our parents and grandparents. At the same time, our parents and grandparents shouldn’t hate the future of our country. While both sides of the generational war are making waves in politics, animosity toward the young is a more powerful force. Property tax bans, which would defund services such as schools meant for the next generation, are pushed by older Americans—not the young. There is zero effort to reform the entitlements enjoyed by Boomers. Even some DSA candidates try to cater to the old. Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed wants to freeze property taxes, but only for homeowners over 65. New homeowners would not receive this benefit, even when buying a property that had its property taxes frozen under a previous owner.
This can all seem rather selfish, but it’s easy to justify if you believe the young fit the caricature painted by Karoline Leavitt. It’s a self-serving belief to subscribe to: You worked hard for what’s yours. These young people demanding more attention haven’t. They don’t want to work and just want the government to take care of them. They got a degree in Snowflakeology at a college that only taught them how to share their gender pronouns. So why should politicians offer to help out the Zoomers?
It’s a terrible way to think, but it is common. It’s not going to help Republicans win elections, that’s for sure.
If Republicans want a chance to win over the young, they’ll have to stop with Zoomer-bashing aimed for the old. What makes for good Fox News segments doesn’t make for effective political pitches. It doesn’t matter what the White House is doing for Gen Z if its spokeswoman calls this generation lazy and entitled.
Young people aren’t the enemy. They’re the future of America. And if you want them to keep the nation great, it’s smart to get them on your side rather than propose sending them to Iran.
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In a crowded movie theater, the man next to you may have interviewed the stars on the screen.
As an inhabitant of one of the cities caught up in the nationwide heatwave earlier this month—Columbus, Ohio—I can confirm that the weather was stifling.
The heatwave has dropped out of the news—that will happen when a Democratic Senate candidate has ended his cataclysmically ill-advised candidacy and the Iran War peace deal has evidently failed to hold—but the temperatures remain persistently unpleasant. But, having learned from my upbringing in the reliably hot and humid suburbs of New Orleans that the solution when such weather arrives is to buy a ticket for as long a movie as possible in an air-conditioned movie theater, I did just that this past week.
So, on Wednesday night, I went to one of my usual haunts in downtown Columbus, a big performing-arts venue that honors its movie palace roots by showing classic flicks each summer, to see Jack Clayton’s 1974 film version of The Great Gatsby. This movie—whose admirable fidelity to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel was confused for shallowness in its day— starred Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby, Mia Farrow as Gatsby’s longtime idée fixe Daisy Buchanan, Bruce Dern as her moneyed but ill-mannered husband Tom, Karen Black as Tom’s lover Myrtle, and Sam Waterston as the genteel narrator Nick Carraway. The screening was pitched as a tribute to Redford, who died last September at age 89.
As it happens, I have interviewed three-fifths of the principal cast—though none of them about Gatsby and all by telephone.
I interviewed Redford in 2017, about his experience with director Michael Ritchie on the movies Downhill Racer and The Candidate; Dern in 2019, about working with director Hal Ashby on Coming Home, and again in 2023, about his memories of director Peter Bogdanovich, whose distinguished career was preceded by a period of grunt work as Roger Corman’s assistant on The Wild Angels; and Waterston in 2009, about appearing in a play directed by my then-biographical subject James Bridges, and again in 2019, about James Thurber. (Look up my piece in The Christian Science Monitor—it’s good.)
But enough about me—really. Believe it or not, while watching The Great Gatsby, I was not thinking about my fleeting telephonic encounters with Redford, Dern, or Waterston (all of whom were exceedingly nice, incidentally). This is not a matter of false modesty but of how many things I can keep in my head at once: I can either tick off each person in a given movie that I might have had some long-ago conversation with, or I can watch the movie. I’m happy when I forget that I once interviewed this or that person. Really? I once interviewed Dustin Hoffman? About what? (I did, and it was about the great prison movie Papillon.)
Since I happen to love Clayton’s film—and admire the performances therein of Redford, Dern, Waterston, and the rest—the choice was simple.
Yet my principles were put to the test upon exiting the theater the other night and overhearing a conversation among my fellow moviegoers. This experience is not unknown to me. Years ago, when I reviewed classical music and dance performances for my hometown paper, I often overheard the chitchat of departing attendees (who invariably liked the show more than I did). Back then, I kept quiet out of professional integrity: I was not about to divulge my views before they had appeared in print.
This time, a few people just ahead of me were wondering among themselves whether or when Robert Redford had died—a simple matter that could have been cleared up by someone who hadn’t ever spoken to the man, though I will admit that, listening to them talk, it occurred to me I was uniquely qualified to share some insight into the star. I could have said that, yes, Redford sadly did die last year, and by the way, I interviewed him once, and he was really very nice.
Instead, I kept with tradition and said nothing. Would they have believed me if I had said I had talked to Redford once? Would I have believed myself? I did not want to taint a memorable movie experience by trying to be the star pupil. I also wanted to get home, back into air conditioning.
Yet it occurs to me, as I contemplate my own silence, what double lives we can lead. Politeness dictates that we seldom share the full breadth of our own experience. Just as no one at the theater could have guessed that among them was an interlocutor of several members of the cast of The Great Gatsby, I, by turn, would have had no way of knowing if some other ticket-buyer that night had some similarly unlikely impressive quality or story to tell. What if I had been sitting next to some distant descendant of F. Scott Fitzgerald?
It’s nice to think that the person next to you in a movie theater or in a restaurant or on a plane has some hidden depths. Of course, it is not lost on me that I am sharing my own hidden depths in a column for the world to read. I have gone this long without mentioning that another movie I plan to see this summer is the original 1961 version of West Side Story—whose talented and kindly co-director, Robert Wise, I interviewed the year before he died. Well, I have to tell someone, don’t I?
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More nations seek nuclear protection outside the U.S.-led order.
The U.S. proxy war in Ukraine and the direct U.S. war in Iran have made the world a more dangerous place, raising nuclear risks.
Ukraine is the dam, we were repeatedly told, that would hold back the Russian invasion of Europe. We were told that by Ukraine, by the U.S., and by NATO. To keep the world safe from Russia, Russia needed to be fought in Ukraine.
It was never true, as even Western officials sometimes admit. As early as two years ago, America’s then-Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith said, “we do not have indicators or warnings right now that a Russian war is imminent on NATO territory.”
And now, after years of war and hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed, General Alexus G. Grynkewich, the head of U.S. European Command, says concern about Russia expanding the war by attacking a Baltic country is not necessary because “Russia is not looking for a conflict” and that they wouldn’t “risk” something when they “understand that… they won’t succeed.” Asked about the constant warnings of Russia attacking a Baltic country, Ulf Kristersson, the prime minister of nearby Sweden, agreed with Grynkewich: “We don’t see any signs of that.”
So, the war has not made Europe safer. But it has created a European security architecture that is antagonistic to Russia and that keeps Russia on the other side of a rigid line. That, as we have seen, is a dangerous situation.
Worse, it has allowed nuclear risks to proliferate along that line. Finland, which shares an 830-mile border with Russia, has overturned a decades-old ban by allowing its territory to be used to host nuclear weapons. And it will permit its NATO allies to transport NATO weapons through its territory or hold them there.
Moscow has taken note. “By placing nuclear weapons on its territory, Finland will begin to pose a threat to us. And if Finland threatens us, we will take appropriate measures,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
And the dangerous situation is spreading. Last week, Lithuania’s parliament began to lift a three decade’s old constitutional ban on NATO deployment of nuclear weapons on its territory. Lithuania shares a border with the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.
The Polish government has declared an interest in participating in the U.S. nuclear sharing program that is under consideration. If implemented, that program would allow the U.S. to deploy nuclear weapons to additional NATO states. Poland has expressed a strong desire to host nuclear weapons. Like Finland and Lithuania, Poland shares a border with Russia.
Poland has also joined France’s forward nuclear deterrence scheme. France is the only nuclear power in the European Union and the only fully independent nuclear power in NATO other than the United States. Under the plan, France would allow partner European nations to temporarily host French strategic air forces. Poland is joined by Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway.
The war in Iran has also led to nuclear proliferation. It has critically harmed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by exposing its hypocrisy and impotence. As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran was supposed to be protected by the “inalienable right” to a civilian nuclear program. And yet, though Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, declared that the organization “did not find in Iran elements to indicate that there is an active, systematic plan to build a nuclear weapon,” the IAEA did not condemn the attack or come to Iran’s legal defense. The NPT is the best thing the world has for preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. Its discrediting does not make the world a safer place.
The bombing of Iran’s civilian nuclear program has destabilized the nuclear order and put upward pressure on proliferation. Iran may conclude it has more incentive to acquire nuclear weapons, as may neighboring nations. Though the U.S. had promised to protect the Gulf countries under its security umbrella, their partnership with the U.S. made them targets for Iranian missiles instead. Their confidence in American defense arrangements has been shaken, and some have begun considering diversification.
In September of last year, months after the Twelve Day War and America’s bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities, Saudi Arabia signed a Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement with Pakistan. It is a full alliance that commits “that any aggression against either country shall be considered an aggression against both.” Pakistan is the only Muslim nation with nuclear weapons. “What we have, and the capabilities we possess, will be made available to [Saudi Arabia] according to this agreement,” said Pakistan’s defense minister.
The war against Iran has shaken confidence in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and may incentivize nations to acquire nuclear weapons or ally with nations who possess them. The war on Russia has led to the proliferation of nuclear weapons along the Russian border, which can only be seen by Russia as threatening.
Both wars could have been avoided. NATO could have agreed to keep its promise and not expand to Ukraine. Ukraine and its Western partners could have used the Minsk Accord as a path to peace and implemented it instead of using it as an opportunity to arm for war. As for Iran, it had already signed a nuclear agreement that clearly stated that “Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.” Diplomacy was an option.
Both wars were supposed to make the world a safer place. Both have increased nuclear risks.
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The White House misunderstands when and why diplomacy with Russia might work.
Time, they say, is a flat circle.
That’s certainly true of the Russia–Ukraine war. This week’s headlines could have been written last October, when I was in Kiev, or on many other occasions stretching back to the Biden years. “Russia’s missile and drone attacks on Ukraine kill at least 22,” read one from the Associated Press.
During my trip, I had heard from Ukrainian officials, former officials, and military analysts that Kiev was running dangerously short on “interceptors,” or anti-missile missiles. Perhaps they were exaggerating the scarcity to press for U.S. assistance. Or perhaps not. After one unnerving night of air attacks, word on the street was that not a single ballistic missile had been shot down.
The more things change…
“The Ukrainian Air Force says a ‘serious shortage’ of interceptor missiles meant none of the 23 ballistic missiles fired by Russia at Kyiv on Sunday night were shot down,” the BBC reported this Tuesday.
The time-circle is flat indeed, with no downturns or upswings that truly change the basic shape of the Russia–Ukraine war. If it isn’t wrapped up soon, more of Ukraine will be flat too.
That’s why I was especially perturbed on Tuesday to read this reporting from Axios: “European officials say the message from Washington in recent weeks has been that Ukraine now has the upper hand on the battlefield, giving the White House less urgency to launch a new diplomatic initiative.”
How, you might ask, does that newfound optimism square with Russia’s deadly attacks and Ukraine’s fraying defenses? As Kiev has absorbed major blows, it’s also managed to launch missiles and drones deep inside Russian territory, raising hopes in European capitals, and apparently in Washington, that Moscow will give up its supposedly “maximalist” aims.
President Donald Trump appears to be repeating a serious mistake of his predecessor.
Way back in November 2022, disagreement broke out inside the Biden administration about the implications of recent military gains made by Ukraine. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advised pushing hard for a diplomatic settlement to lock in those gains. He warned that Ukraine’s battlefield position—and thus also its bargaining position—were likely to worsen in the coming months.
Biden listened instead to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. They counseled against peace talks while Ukraine had the momentum and a chance to roll back the Russian invaders. Milley—at the time, America’s highest-ranking general—turned out to be right about the war’s trajectory. Tough luck for Ukrainians.
Now, nearly four years later, Western media again are saying that “the tide has turned” against Russia. And the White House has again concluded that it’s therefore a bad time to push for peace. But sooner or later, the tide will turn again, and the next big wave could drown Ukraine.
Don’t take it from me. Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior military analyst at Defense Priorities, wrote this week, “The pendulum is likely to swing back in Moscow’s favor soon enough.”
To be sure, Ukraine has found some dramatic success striking inside Russia. But, Kavanagh writes, Russia’s firepower superiority enables Moscow to climb higher than Kiev up the escalation ladder—hence the rather dire recent headlines—and its manpower advantage is what matters in the attritional war on the ground. Indeed, Ukraine’s losing strategically important territory even now.
Still, the moment can’t be a comfortable one for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. A recent poll by the Levada Center, a Moscow think tank, found that 67 percent of Russians said peace talks should begin—a record high—while only 24 percent said military action should continue. I doubt Putin would call a general mobilization amid such war fatigue, and Russia, for the first time in years, seems to be losing more troops each month than it recruits.
Ukraine’s deep strikes on Russian oil refineries have contributed to the fatigue, generating fuel shortages and ominous images. This week in Russian-occupied Crimea, a Ukrainian attack on energy infrastructure knocked out power across the peninsula. “The situation is catastrophic. We have blackouts, water cuts, the beaches are empty,” one resident told the BBC. “People thought the war would be far away in Ukraine. But now, it’s here.”
Moreover, global oil prices plummeted following a ceasefire agreement between the U.S. and Iran (granted, an ever more tenuous-looking arrangement), robbing Putin’s government of revenue. That’s money the Kremlin can’t pour into the Russian economy as the wartime sugar high fades. Sixty percent of Russians say their local economic conditions are getting worse, according to a recent Gallup survey. It was the first time in the survey’s 20-year history that a majority of Russians had expressed that view.
Contra the White House’s apparent reasoning, now would seem a relatively propitious time to seize the diplomatic initiative. Moreover, Trump has reduced American direct support for Ukraine’s war effort, and Europe has shouldered more of the burden, making Washington a more plausible mediator than it had been under Biden or even last year.
Of course, negotiating an end to the Russia–Ukraine war is easier said than done. Deep distrust between the belligerents makes diplomacy that much harder. And, as I have reported, Trump never put together the kind of professional diplomatic team that could create space for agreement between the two sides.
But resolving the war was a key campaign promise for Trump. As Biden should have known, the best time to push for peace is when the wheel turns in Ukraine’s favor. At some point, the Ukrainians won’t get another turn.
The post Trump’s Last Chance for Ukraine Peace appeared first on The American Conservative.
The new U.S.-brokered memorandum of understanding between Israel and Lebanon has the weaknesses of its predecessors.
The recent memorandum of understanding between Israel and Lebanon is not the first time the U.S. has placed itself at the center of Lebanese affairs. Serial interventions, both military and diplomatic, have been undertaken by Democrats and Republicans alike in Washington over close to a century. These efforts attest to Lebanon’s outsized ability to engage Washington at the highest level, and highlight the at best limited, short-term effectiveness of that involvement.
The story of American engagement is a long one.
On July 14, 1958 Iraqi army officers overthrew Iraq’s pro-Western Hashemite monarchy. Fearing Lebanon would also join an anti-American Arab orbit dominated by Egypt’s President Gamal Nasser, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved an immediate military deployment after Lebanon’s President Camile Chamoun formally requested American assistance.
About 1,700 U.S. Marines from the Sixth Fleet landed south of Beirut, the deployment of what eventually numbered 14,000 American “boots on the ground.”
The landing encountered virtually no resistance. The marines were an instrument supporting a domestic political solution rather than an offensive military force.
The crisis ended, and U.S. forces withdrew when Chamoun agreed to leave office when his term expired. He was succeeded by the widely respected General Fouad Chehab.
The environment was far different in the summer of 1982, when in the first months after Israel’s occupation of Beirut, U.S. Marines deployed to the airport and other positions in the city.
By September, 22,000 PLO fighters were evacuated from Beirut under international supervision, signaling an end to Palestinian attacks on Israel from Lebanese territory that precipitated the war.
On 14 September 1982, Lebanon’s President-elect Bachir Gemayel, the key interlocutor with both Israel and the U.S., was assassinated, precipitating the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps. Heated confrontation between American and Israeli forces outside Beirut resulted in Israel’s withdrawal from Beirut, and the multinational force led by the U.S. returned to the city.
Gemayal’s assassination effectively ended efforts—highlighted by the stillborn May 17 agreement between Israel and Lebanon and the bloody attack on Marines barrack in late 1983—to promote a complete Israeli withdrawal. Instead Israel unilaterally established a “security zone” in the south similar to its current deployment.
The PLO disappeared as a security factor in the confrontation with Israel after 1982, but Israel’s assault sparked the creation of a militant Shia revivalist movement—Hezbollah—which has proven a far more effective enemy.
The Reagan administration, blindsided by its historic losses, “redeployed offshore”—a prelude to Washington’s complete disappearance from the scene and the end of meaningful American engagement.
In May 2000, Israel retreated unilaterally from Lebanon, a key factor in the election of Ehud Barak and the (temporary) defeat of Benjamin Netanyahu, ending Israel’s 18-year military presence in southern Lebanon.
Today Israel has once again embraced the notion of forward defence, highlighting the advantages of Israel’s military deployment beyond its border—in this case Lebanon—to enable the safe return of its citizens and the destruction of Arab opponents.
One of the striking historical contrasts with the current negotiations is that Israel withdrew from Beirut — but not its self-defined security zone — in 1982 under US pressure without first obtaining a peace treaty or the disarmament of emerging Lebanese militias. And while Washington has today once again inserted itself as a key diplomatic factor, there is absolutely no discussion or interest in a US military presence in anything but an advisory form.
Instead, the current 2026 framework links Israeli withdrawal from occupied areas in southern Lebanon to phased implementation of security measures, especially the disarmament of Hezbollah and the expanding deployment of the Lebanese Armed Forces, the former of which has grown and prospered as both the key Lebanese political and security factor during the last decades.
Hezbollah’s expansive role in Lebanon today reflects the political and military mobilization of Lebanon’s historically underserved Shia community, especially in the south. The attack on US forces in 1982 marked its debut as a political and security factor. It remains the principal Lebanese enemy of Israel in the south and the principal Lebanese obstacle to an extension of state control in the south—now the key objectives of U.S.-supported diplomacy reflected in the MOU.
According to Israel’s prime minister,
Under these understandings, the US and Lebanon have recognized Israel’s right to maintain the security zone inside Lebanon for as long as it is required for our security. We will continue to hold it until Hezbollah and the rest of the terrorist organizations are disarmed, and until no further threat to Israel is posed from Lebanon.
I want you to know – this is a massive blow to Iran and Hezbollah. Iran tried to force a withdrawal from southern Lebanon upon us. You heard these demands all the time, and you also heard their disappointment and their criticism of the agreement – both theirs and Hezbollah’s. I stood firm on our vital interests and forcefully opposed the notion of forcing a withdrawal upon us.
Lebanon, Israel, and the US are essentially saying to Iran: This is none of your business. You have no status here. You have no involvement and no role, not you, not Hezbollah, and not any terrorist organization.
Israel and Lebanon have agreed on two adjacent areas near the Yellow Line, recommended by the IDF, where there will be a pilot program for disarming Hezbollah and transferring the territory to the control of the Lebanese army.
This is a tremendous achievement, because what were they trying to do? They tried to get us out of there through all kinds of means and pressures. That, of course, will not happen.
The MOU has excited the opposition of Lebanese factors closely associated with opposition to the May 17 agreement.
Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, whose Amal Movement is closely associated with Hezbollah, opposes the MOU, as Amal opposed the May 17 agreement, for the very reasons Netanyahu supports it.
The MOU, he argues, is politically suspect because it is imposed and unworkable. In security terms enforcement could trigger internal conflict. He said the U.S.-brokered framework—which allows for Israeli forces to maintain a security zone in southern Lebanon until Hezbollah is removed from the area—is “10 times worse” than the May 17 agreement.
For all of its shortcomings, the May 17 agreement did not have to accommodate the presence and power of Hezbollah, which today are the principal focus of diplomatic efforts detailed in the MOU. Notwithstanding these real advantages, the agreement failed.
The MOU aspires to a more limited agenda of compromise and Israeli military deployment objectives which nonetheless require greater domestic political resilience than Lebanon’s domestic political system has on offer—a conundrum which will continue to confound US efforts.
The post How Lebanon Continues to Confound the U.S. appeared first on The American Conservative.
China test-launched an intercontinental ballistic missile from a nuclear-powered submarine in the South Pacific Monday, a rare show of force demonstrating Beijing’s expanding nuclear capabilities. The missile carried a dummy warhead and was launched at 12:01 p.m. local time, per China’s official Xinhua News Agency.
According to Beijing, the test was part of routine training, complied with international law, and was not directed at any specific target. “We hope relevant countries will not over-interpret the matter,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said.
U.S. allies expressed concern, with the governments of Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan each releasing statements critical of the launch. A spokeswoman for Taiwan’s Presidential Office told reporters that the test was the latest example of China “attempting to intimidate the international community.”
China last fired a long-range missile into the Pacific in 2024. Prior to 2024, its last long-range missile launch into international waters took place in 1980.
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Congress has a fitness problem, and Kean is just the latest example.
Against the wishes of his doctors, Rep. Tom Kean (R-NJ) returned to Congress on Tuesday, his first appearance there in more than 100 days.
Addressing the House floor, Kean began by noting that he is a “private person” before explaining his multi-month absence from his duties in Washington, DC.
“Several months ago, due to health concerns, I entered the hospital for some testing,” said the 57-year-old Kean. “I was given the diagnosis of depression.”
It was a stark admission for a politician whose critics have long questioned his absence but were met with silence. Though depression is not disqualifying in and of itself, the lack of transparency from a person who was elected to provide it is worrying. Furthermore, if a disability keeps you off the job for four months, especially a job as important as serving in Congress, then the job likely isn’t compatible with the disability Kean is currently navigating.
More worrying yet is how the rollout of Kean’s diagnosis was handled. Kean gave his speech to a largely empty House chamber, then breezed past CNN’s Manu Raju as the reporter peppered him with questions after four months of silence. Kean has also yet to hold the kind of press conference his absence warrants, one which would allow the Congressman to address questions regarding the current state of his recovery or the treatment plan given to address his diagnosis.
In the nearly four months since he stood before the public, Kean had reported expenses for personal travel in San Francisco and staff travel in Las Vegas. He also submitted his personal stock trading activity. But as the weeks turned into months, and with little details provided by staff members, questions arose as to the whereabouts and condition of the U.S. representative for New Jersey’s 7th congressional district.
Though Kean has framed his return as an act of courage, a man who had time to file expense reports and disclose stock trades but not to answer a single question about his condition is not a man who is simply managing an illness, but one who is more concerned with managing his image. Furthermore, both Kean and his staffers chose silence over a press release, statement, or a single tweet that could have addressed the issue directly.
Speaking with reporters outside Congress on Tuesday, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) refused to apologize for what she characterized as fair criticism of her Republican colleague. “I think not showing up for work is discounting the voters,” Boebert told TMZ. “That’s literally taxation without representation. It’s awful. We were elected to be here to work, and it’s unacceptable.”
And then there’s Kean’s voting record on paid sick leave. During his time in Congress, he has repeatedly voted against the sort of relief he was granted as a member of Congress. In 2018, Kean, then a member of the New Jersey Senate, voted against the Earned Sick Leave Act, a piece of legislation that mandated five paid sick leave days per year for New Jersey workers. “He’s been able to rely on things he directly voted against,” said Yarrow Willman-Cole, a member of the nonprofit New Jersey Citizen Action, the group who organized the legislation.
But despite Kean’s failure to support legislation that would’ve provided New Jersey workers with protections similar to the ones he took advantage of as a member of Congress, other congressional colleagues were sympathetic to Kean’s condition. Responding to Boebert’s claims that Kean took off four months from work because he was “sad,” Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) suggested the high-octane representative from Colorado should “educate herself about mental health.”
“Depression is not an emotion, it’s a condition,” Torres told TMZ. “You should no more blame someone for their depression than you would blame a diabetic for the inability to generate insulin. It’s a condition beyond their control. When someone comes out as struggling with depression, the proper response is empathy and sympathy, not disdain and dismissiveness.”
Though Torres makes a fair point, it’s not beyond the pale for Boebert and others to point out that across the political spectrum in Congress, several politicians have suffered or are currently suffering from ailments that keep them from performing to the sort of standard expected of federal legislators. Whether it’s Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) freezing on camera or Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) suffering a stroke and being treated for depression in the aftermath, both political parties feature notable examples of lawmakers who have battled debilitating illnesses without resigning to address health concerns.
None of this is an argument that sick people don’t belong in public life. It’s an argument that Congress currently has no real standard for when illness—whether physical or mental—makes the job impossible to do, and lawmakers are left to police themselves, which mostly means they don’t. Kean didn’t create that problem. But his four months of silence, followed by a return with no real accounting for them, is exactly the kind of case that should force the question: not whether depression disqualifies someone from serving, but whether an institution this important can keep functioning on the honor system.
Until Congress builds something better, the least voters can ask of Kean and others is the transparency he’s so far refused to give them. If he can’t offer that, he should do the honorable thing and step down.
The post The Tom Kean Question appeared first on The American Conservative.
Israel isn’t the only Mideast country receiving vast sums of American tax dollars.
In April, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) called for Washington to end assistance to Israel, insisting that the funds would be better spent on hospitals and childcare in America. On the other side of the aisle, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) also opposed sending billions to Israel, citing the soaring U.S. deficit. Despite receiving minimal press coverage, many of the same arguments could also be made about the Israel’s eastern neighbor, Jordan, a country roughly the size of Indiana that has received massive amounts of U.S. aid.
The United States has provided Jordan with around $33.8 billion in assistance during the past 75 years. In 2022, the Biden Administration signed a memorandum of understanding with Jordan pledging $1.45 billion annually over seven years, the largest-ever MOU with the Hashemite Kingdom. This year, Congress authorized over $2 billion in aid to the country, placing it among the top three recipients of U.S. aid worldwide for 2026.
It might seem logical to some for Washington to send billions in aid to a nation facing a desperate financial crisis. But while Jordan indeed experiences an elevated unemployment rate, it is far from the world’s poorest country. According to the World Bank, its GDP has quadrupled during the last two decades and is significantly higher than that of many African countries, including Burundi, Malawi, and Madagascar. “Jordan’s economy remains resilient, supported by sound macroeconomic policies,” asserted the International Monetary Fund in December. The life expectancy of Jordanians is around 78 years, ranking in the top third of countries, indicating relatively better healthcare services offered to citizens.
For progressives, it is important that Washington only send aid to countries that share its values. Unfortunately, Jordan does not meet this criterion. According to the Economist’s most recent rating of countries’ levels of democracy, Jordan is labeled an “authoritarian regime,” the lowest ranking. In the 2024 parliamentary election, the Islamic Action Front—long considered the Muslim Brotherhood’s political wing—won the most seats. Yet, the following year, Jordanian authorities banned the Muslim Brotherhood and raided its headquarters. Reporters Without Borders ranked Jordan 142nd out of 180 countries worldwide in its 2026 press freedom ranking, lamenting widespread censorship. If U.S. aid is meant to support democracies, then there is little reason to send billions to Amman as King Abdullah II and his intelligence services continue to dominate Jordanian politics.
Another reason cited for offering aid to Jordan is the Syrian refugee crisis. After the 2011 war erupted, Jordan generously accepted over 600,000 Syrian-registered refugees, ensuring that these Syrians stayed in the region and did not migrate to the United States or Europe. But, after rebels ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, the UN noted that 196,000 Syrian refugees had left the Hashemite Kingdom and returned home. Since the Syrian refugee population in Jordan continues to decline, it makes little sense that U.S. assistance to Jordan has only increased.
Republicans have long justified assistance to Jordan in part due to Amman’s 1994 peace treaty with Israel. Jordan and Egypt—the only Arab countries to maintain ties with Israel for much of its history—received the most U.S. assistance among Arab states despite being wealthier than Yemen and Sudan. But the U.S.-brokered 2020 normalization agreements with additional Arab states, including Morocco, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, make Jordan’s diplomatic relations with Israel less unique. While King Abdullah maintains security cooperation with Israel, Jordan’s ties with the Jewish state are at a low point after recalling its ambassador from Tel Aviv and suspending a water-for-energy agreement in 2023, in protest of the Gaza war. Furthermore, if lawmakers on Capitol Hill are moving to end aid to Israel itself, then it makes little sense for Jordan to keep receiving such a massive amount of U.S. assistance because of its relations with the Jewish state.
It is true that the Hashemite Kingdom has been a helpful security partner for Washington. Jordan hosts nearly 4,000 U.S. troops and has cooperated closely with the Central Intelligence Agency during Abdullah’s rule. At the same time, American soldiers are also stationed in several other nearby Arab countries, including Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Moreover, Amman has occasionally snubbed Washington despite the strategic partnership. Last year, Abdullah rejected President Donald Trump’s request for the deployment of Jordanian troops to Gaza for a U.S.-sponsored peacekeeping mission.
Abdullah’s wealth raises further questions about the necessity of such a large amount of U.S. aid. In 2021, the Pandora Papers revealed that the Hashemite ruler owned 14 luxury homes in the United Kingdom and the United States, totaling over $106 million. The New York Times reported the next year that Abdullah owned six Swiss bank accounts, with one of them exceeding $224 million. It is reasonable to ask why Americans thousands of miles away should be footing the bill for Jordan when Abdullah has amassed a fortune that he keeps stashed abroad rather than using it to care for his own population.
While much attention has been devoted to U.S. aid to Israel, the billions in support to neighboring Jordan have not received anywhere near the scrutiny. Yet there is little evidence that Washington providing billions of dollars to Jordan indefinitely serves American national interests. Given the U.S.- Jordanian security partnership, it would be unfair for Washington to completely sever assistance. Instead, aid could return to the 2006 level, some $400 million.
From Ohio to Oregon, there is likely scant support for sending astronomical sums of taxpayer dollars to a country that most Americans could not identify on a map, especially as prices rise across the United States. With American strategists recommending Washington deprioritize the Middle East amid threats from China and Russia—along with renewed focus on the Western Hemisphere—Jordan should no longer be among the top three recipients of U.S. aid.
The post Stop Sending Billions in U.S. Aid to Jordan appeared first on The American Conservative.
The mastermind of the modern Federal Reserve passed away at 100.
Alan Greenspan was the first celebrity Federal Reserve chair. Everyone knows “Tall” Paul Volcker for the macroeconomic (and literal) giant he was, but Greenspan was the first true celebrity chair. He served in various roles under six presidents, Bob Woodward wrote a book about him in 2000, He was hailed as a “rock star,” and everyone knew him as “the maestro.” Just before the financial crisis he helped to bring about, 6 in 10 Americans expressed confidence in Greenspan’s leadership of the economy, more than both George Bush and John Kerry.
That would change sharply when, by 2009, he was named by TIME magazine as one of the “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis”––by a publication that had featured him on its cover in 1997 and 1999. The low-interest-rate policies Greenspan had pushed that became known as the “Greenspan Put” had fueled a housing bubble, and the growth of the money supply incentivized banks to lower their lending standards to get unneeded liquidity off their balance sheets.
Greenspan himself was an enigma, a jumbled mess of contradictions and smooth talk—which made him the perfect candidate to be chair of the world’s most powerful central bank according to some.
Alan Greenspan was born in New York City in 1926 and graduated in 1948 from New York University with a bachelor’s in economics. Only two years later he would secure a master’s degree in the same field from NYU. Greenspan would go on to join the economic consulting firm Townsend-Skinner, which by 1958 would become Townsend-Greenspan & Co., Inc.
Greenspan earned his reputation as a free-marketeer under the tutelage of Ayn Rand and her associate (and lover) Nathaniel Branden. Introduced to the self-made philosopher and writer by his first wife, Joan Mitchell, he quickly became a staple in Rand’s circles. He authored chapters for Rand’s book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and taught courses for the Nathaniel Branden Institute (which would be the chief Randian organization until the Branden-Rand break in the late 1960s).
But Greenspan hardly remained a laissez-faire policymaker when he finally entered the public sphere. He first entered the public spotlight as an advisor to Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign, a role that would earn him his eventual nomination to be Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisors chair. Nixon exited the White House before he took office, but he served in the position for Ford.
Inflation began to grow in 1974 during the tenure of Federal Reserve Chair Arthur Burns, and the Ford administration was left holding the bag of oil shocks, high inflation, and high unemployment. The Ford administration embarked on perhaps its greatest public relations blunder: WIN, “Whip Inflation Now.”
The campaign, complete with its own buttons and slogans, encouraged decreasing consumption in order to bring down inflation. Greenspan himself would acknowledge the stupidity of the policy in tackling the actual issue, but went along nonetheless. He seemed more than willing to suppress his previous beliefs in order to climb up the social ladder.
Following a brief stint helping the Reagan administration save Social Security, he was finally nominated to the position all social-climbing economists aspire to: chairmanship of the Federal Reserve.
Greenspan’s methodology was inspired less by a commitment to a set of economic theories or rules than by his own statistics-fed intuitions. It was reported that he would consume statistics hour by hour and assign probabilities to future events based on the data he saw. He became known as “the maestro,” a fitting name for this methodology.
Of course, this technique justified his own cause. His job was to tame the attitudes of the market, whose swings were dictated by fears and optimism that was in charge of taming. By speaking in a language that nobody could understand, “Fed Speak,” he became the embodiment of a technocrat in whom the public was supposed to place its trust and think little about. This was perhaps embodied most in a talk he gave to business leaders in what should have been seen as a condescending remark: “If I’ve made myself too clear, you must have misunderstood me.”
Yet all of the data in the world did not bring him to acknowledge publicly or halt the financial crisis that he laid the groundwork for. Volcker aggressively raised interest rates to combat inflation, while Greenspan kept rates close to the floor after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001. It was under his tenure that the Federal Reserve saw a revolution in form and began to deemphasize the role of the money supply in its monetary policy.
The low rates began inflating bank balance sheets, which in turn led to lowered lending standards and a housing bubble. The adjustable-rate mortgage only became attractive because of those conditions. By pushing down the short end of the yield curve, the curve showing the normally increasing yields on shorter- to longer-maturity assets, adjustable rates grew too cheap for many borrowers to pass up.
Greenspan’s “put” pushed real rates negative, creating a grand bubble. The maestro clearly did not understand his craft as much as he claimed. But the Federal Reserve couldn’t hold interest rates down forever, and the bubble popped.
Greenspan was the father of the modern Federal Reserve. His technical jargon and language obscured inflationism under the garb of “playing to the market’s passions.” The negative real interest rates of the post-financial crisis era were given to the world under his tenure. He lived his life like a rock star, but will not be remembered as fondly. RIP Alan Greenspan.
The post The Bubble Architect appeared first on The American Conservative.
As we celebrate America 250, Washington’s Farewell Address is as relevant as ever.
The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is upon us. And despite the celebratory mood inside the country, much about the world outside our borders seems grim and uncertain. This is particularly true in the Middle East, where, despite laudable efforts at peacemaking, the possibility of renewed war still looms. What makes this situation more frustrating is the fact that our own government has conceded this involvement occurred at the behest of a foreign country—one whose boosters seek to integrate it ever more closely into the machinery of American statecraft.
Although this seems strange, it is not without precedent. During the early years of our republic, a similar situation prevailed with respect to France. Then, as now, a country with strong claims on Americans’ affections sought to influence our politics for its own ends, becoming in the process a lightning rod for partisan disagreement.
During the Revolutionary War, France had played a pivotal role in securing our independence. After news of the American victory at Saratoga reached Europe in 1778, the French decided to intervene directly, seeing an opportunity to strike a major blow against their age-old rival England. Their involvement was a major factor in the war’s successful outcome. But it came with serious costs for the Bourbon monarchy, which—partly owing to debts incurred helping the American rebels—soon fell to a revolution of its own.
At first, this development was greeted with jubilation across the Atlantic. The cause of democracy had been vindicated abroad, and now a closely-aligned great power was following America down the path of self-government. But as France embarked on a series of wars for the survival and expansion of its own revolutionary experiment, it began aggressively lobbying the United States to get involved, particularly by serving as a base for privateering and other forms of economic warfare against Great Britain.
For the United States, it was an inconvenient time for a dust-up with the Brits. America was embroiled in difficult negotiations over Britain’s continuing occupation of forts in the Great Lakes, as well as its de facto sanctions regime on American traders in the Caribbean. The young U.S. was weak and unstable; another war with Britain could threaten its very viability as a state.
Doing whatever it took to avoid conflict, the Washington Administration both issued a Proclamation of Neutrality and successfully concluded the Jay Treaty of 1795, ensuring a lasting peace with Great Britain. The aim was strategic rather than ideological: despite the continuing solidarity of many Americans with their old ally, America’s national interests demanded non-involvement with Europe and peace with Britain. The Jay Treaty, in particular, was extremely controversial and helped create the nation’s first partisan political system, with Federalists lining up behind the Treaty and nascent Democratic-Republicans opposing it. The feelings stirred up were intense. John Jay, the primary American negotiator, was burned in effigy across the nation, and Alexander Hamilton was struck by a stone while speaking in favor of the treaty.
It was during this period of diplomatic crisis that George Washington’s second term came to an end. Refusing to run again, he instead opted to publish a valedictory statement, which would rapidly become known as his Farewell Address. It is a testament that is, in some ways, as radical and vital as the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, in the field of diplomacy, it could well be seen as a kind of second Declaration.
Washington, who had been a land surveyor before the Revolution, had a spatial, rather than ideological, conception of geopolitics and saw the success of the American experiment as dependent upon leveraging its geographical advantages to ensure its national security. Distant as we were from the capitals of Europe, this meant staying out of that continent’s wars and preserving our freedom of action to the maximum extent possible. America’s society and economy needed peace.
This meant not just avoiding unnecessary enemies, but also staying away from entangling alliances. Friends, no less than adversaries, can threaten national sovereignty and strategic decision-making. As the Farewell Address put it:
So, likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill will, and a disposition to retaliate in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld; and it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation) facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country without odium, sometimes even with popularity, gilding with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.
As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils! Such an attachment of a small or weak toward a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of the latter. Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy, to be useful, must be impartial, else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people to surrender their interests.
The genius of this statement was its application, not just to the America of the 1790s, but to American foreign policy for decades and centuries to come. It would effectively serve as a roadmap for the future, its wisdom justified by the unprecedented development the country would go on to see.
The French, of course, were outraged at what they saw as a betrayal. Desperate for money to finance their ever-lengthening list of wars, Paris’ revolutionary Directory unleashed the privateers that were now denied the ability to operate out of American harbors onto American shipping. The primary challenge facing the new Adams Administration was therefore to create a deterrent that would stop these attacks. The newly-born U.S. Navy put to its first major test—not to fight the original British enemy, but to defend against our former ally France. The Navy did its job, and a kind of deterrence was restored. The rise of Napoleon and an attendant sea change in French foreign policy finally ended the threat for good, with France formally recognizing American neutrality by 1800.
This part of our history, so often overlooked, is of critical import to us today. Too often Americans have preferred to see foreign policy as a black and white affair, a theater in which unalloyed good confronts pure moral evil. But as we commemorate our republic’s 250th anniversary, the Farewell Address reminds us that the truth is more difficult and more complicated. We have preserved our sovereignty and independence over two and a half centuries by pursuing strategic self-determination. If we would flourish for another 250 years, we will need to maintain this same course, avoiding the entanglements of both permanent enemies and permanent allies.
For, as George Washington presciently noted in a letter to Alexander Hamilton: “If we are to be told by a foreign power what we shall do, and what we shall not do, we have Independence yet to seek, & have contended hitherto for very little.”
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A new Democratic insurgency looks a lot like the GOP’s agitation of yesteryear.
The editors at the New York Post couldn’t hide their animosity.
“The Hateful Slate” read Wednesday’s screaming headline over an image of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani celebrating with Darializa Avila Chevalier, one of three Democratic Socialists backed by Mamdani who won their Congressional campaigns in New York state on Tuesday night. It was a clean sweep for Mamdani, who watched as Chevalier, Brad Lander, and Claire Valdez toppled establishment Democrats, signaling growing momentum for a progressive movement that first took New York City by storm when Mamdani overwhelmed the former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the 2025 NYC mayoral election. The sudden jolt of outsiders-turned-mainstream is reminiscent of another insurgent political movement, one that swept through the GOP in 2010 and reshaped the Republican Party in ways that later enabled Donald Trump’s takeover.
Two years after Barack Obama’s generational victory, the Republican Party was reeling and directionless as it approached Congressional midterm races in 2010. Years of frustration had built up toward the establishment GOP as voters watched Republican politicians prioritize costly and unpopular wars in the Middle East over the ideological discipline that had driven the party to such great heights after the Reagan Revolution in the 1980s. What ultimately molded this inchoate dissatisfaction into a movement was Obama’s economic platform. For conservative voters who preferred the vision of small-government politics, the 2009 stimulus package, the continuation of Bush-era bank bailouts, and the passage of the Affordable Care Act were each a bridge too far.
In stepped the Tea Party. Featuring a rich cast of aggressive political characters, the Tea Party wasn’t so much built on one figure as it was a coalition of new faces on a mission to lower taxes, limit government spending, and grant greater authority to state governments in response to what many viewed as Obama’s federal overreach. Its champions prioritized anti-government ideas of decentralization and its electorate featured an impressive mixture of both suburban and rural voters.
Though prominent early figures such as Alaska’s former Governor Sarah Palin were eventually eclipsed by the MAGA project, politicians who absorbed the messaging of the Tea Party movement, such as Sen. Rand Paul and the current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have continued to shape the conservative movement under President Donald Trump. And while Trump’s unique brand of conservatism has increasingly embraced an activist use of federal power that would have been anathema to many early Tea Partiers, his rise was undeniably energized by the anti-establishment energy that the Tea Party used to transform the GOP in the 2010s.
Fifteen years ago, Republican voters revolted against a party they believed had abandoned its principles. Today, a similar backlash is unfolding inside the Democratic Party, where a coalition of young, highly-educated white voters and working-class minority communities is finding common cause in a socialist vision that rejects the party’s neoliberal consensus. For many of these voters, The Biden administration and its cadre of sycophants became synonymous with both an affordability crisis that eroded confidence in the Democratic establishment and a U.S. foreign policy toward Israel that helped enable violence in Gaza and beyond. Though economic concerns are the driving force behind what transpired on Tuesday, opposition to the Democratic Party’s open embrace of Israel has become an equally powerful organizing issue for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the group that worked to spearhead a slate of progressive candidates seeking midterm success in 2026.
Though the ascendancy of a more progressive Democratic wing has been building for two decades, between the financial crisis to the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, the election of 35-year-old Zohran Mamdani in the fall of 2025 is what really transformed a simmering ideological movement into a new political force. More than any left-wing electoral victory in modern American history, Mamdani’s triumph signaled that it could be done, that a socialist with a TikTok channel could challenge the party’s power brokers and capture one of the country’s most visible executive offices. In winning, Mamdani provided evidence that an insurgent Democratic movement is possible.
Worst of all for Republicans, Mamdani is now beginning to deliver on the kinds of platform planks they have long warned could upend America’s hyper-capitalist system. In one of his first headline governing victories, the city’s Rent Guidelines Board voted to freeze the rent for nearly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments, a central campaign promise enacted early in his tenure. At the same time, Mamdani has moved forward with an expanded free childcare program backed by a state-city partnership with Gov. Kathy Hochul and the legislature in Albany. The initiative not only places a signature campaign promise into practice but it underscores a more pressing political reality, one in which Mamdani-aligned progressives are capable of finding common ground with establishment Democrats when governing power is at stake.
Though prominent billionaires such as Citadel CEO Ken Griffin warned that capital would flee as a result of Mamdani’s threat to install a progressive tax agenda, the mass exodus has yet to materialize in any meaningful way. And while conservative commentators predicted crime in the city would surge under his leadership, New York City is currently experiencing the safest start to a year on record: The murder rate has dropped by more than 20 percent compared to last year.
Mamdani’s New York has so far diverged sharply from the dire predictions. Speaking before millions of fans who flooded the streets of Manhattan following the New York Knicks’ first NBA title in over half a century, Mamdani struck a celebratory tone that underscored a broader political point. The city his critics had warned was on the brink of collapse was, at least in the immediate term, experiencing something closer to resurgence than decline. For supporters, the moment crystallized a growing sensation that great things are possible when the constraints of neoliberal orthodoxy begin to loosen.
Early indicators suggest the Democratic coalition may be entering a period of internal reconfiguration, shaped in part by figures such as Mamdani and his fellow New Yorker, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This shift has prompted concern among the Democratic donor class. Now, moderate Democrats are confronting questions that once defined the Republican Party’s internal struggle, when Trump’s rise culminated in his 2016 presidential victory and a fundamental realignment of the modern GOP.
“Who gets to determine who is a Democrat?” the progressive political commentator Emma Vigeland asked on Thursday’s episode of the Majority Report podcast. “If Democratic voters vote for somebody in a Democratic primary and decide that they’re a Democrat, doesn’t that matter a little bit more than the corporate lobbyists who want to gatekeep who gets to enter into the Democratic Party?”
Mamdani’s rise, the electoral gains of allied progressive candidates, and the early governing outcomes in New York City point to the emergence of a new and increasingly coherent Democratic insurgency. What began as a diffuse ideological movement, spanning the financial crisis, Occupy Wall Street, and the Sanders campaigns, is finally coalescing into a political force that could reimagine the Democratic Party for years to come in ways not dissimilar to the meaningful gains of the Tea Party movement within the GOP. The ripple effects are yet to fully reveal themselves, but as it stands, this is Mamdani’s wave. The question now is whether Democrats want to ride it.
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For the prospective prime minister, each candidate has drawbacks.
The relationship between the prime minister and the chancellor is the most important in British politics. In short, they have to get on, or the government doesn’t. History is littered with examples of administrations that became dysfunctional because the first lord of the Treasury—to give the prime minister his full title—and the chancellor of the Exchequer did not see eye to eye.
Most recently, when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown fell out in 2005 over the Labour succession, the government largely lost the plot. Andy Burnham, the presumptive heir to the recently resigned Prime Minister Keir Starmer, was in government at the time, and he saw what happened. He will insist now on a chancellor who is simpatico.
The obvious choice is his leading supporter Environment and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband. Labour’s deputy leader, Lucy Powell, has publicly backed him for the post. But there is considerable opposition to “Red Ed,” as he is called by the tabloid newspapers, because of his almost messianic pursuit of the green energy agenda.
Powerful trade unions, such as the GMB, and MPs from industrial seats think he is crucifying British industry on the altar of Net Zero by banning drilling in the North Sea and allowing Britain to have some of the highest energy prices in the industrialized world. That is one big handicap.
Next on the wannabe chancellor list is the former Health Secretary Wes Streeting. He arguably opened the way for Burnham’s coup by his dramatic resignation from Starmer’s government last month. He was originally thought to be a possible candidate for the party leadership, but he decided to back Burnham when he apparently failed to get the required 81 names for a leadership challenge.
This lack of popularity in the Parliamentary Labour Party is Streeting’s main handicap in the race for chancellor. He is on the right of the party and was close to the disgraced former Labour spin doctor Peter Mandelson. That may be enough to rule him out as chancellor.
Many Labour MPs believe Burnham should have a woman chancellor to give gender balance to his administration and break up “the boys’ club,” as Labour feminists call it. Shabana Mahmood, the hard-hitting home secretary and architect of Labour’s more stringent immigration policies, has been widely touted for the second most important job in the cabinet. She would be capable and is highly respected for her intelligence and fortitude. But it is not clear that she is one of Burnham’s people. She is also in the middle of introducing Labour’s policy on creating “safe and legal routes” for would-be migrants and so is not easy to replace.
Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper is one of the most experienced politicians in the Cabinet. She served as chief secretary to the Treasury from January 2008 to June 2009, the first woman to hold the post. She is also the wife of the former Labour minister Ed Balls, who helped mastermind Gordon Brown’s policy of central bank independence in the 1990s. Cooper must be under consideration at least, even though she too is not obviously close to the future prime minister
The dark horse in the race is John Healey, the former defense secretary. His resignation two weeks ago over defense cuts was the final knife in Starmer’s back, and the PM resigned within days. Healey is highly thought of by civil servants for his competence and common sense. But he resigned because Starmer reneged on his promise to allocate £28 billion for the all-important Defence Investment Plan. It is not clear that Burnham, who has other priorities, would be willing to deliver on defense spending. The Prime Minister-in-waiting does not want another resignation early in his time in Number 10.
There are no easy choices in politics, and perhaps the most likely move would be for Burnham to go with his instincts and support his close friend and key supporter, Miliband. But he would have to make it absolutely clear that, as chancellor, Miliband would have to accept cutting energy costs as the top priority.
If that means reopening the North Sea and allowing development of the blocked Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields, then Miliband would have to accept it with good grace. Whether the bond markets would accept Miliband with the same grace, given his left-wing credentials and his support for more public spending, is another matter.
Finally, Burnham could just leave the current Chancellor Rachel Reeves in post. She has been a modest success by Labour standards since she ramped up taxation without scaring the bond markets. She would solve Burnham’s woman problem.
But “Rachel from Accounts,” as she is known by her critics, was perhaps too closely associated with the old Starmer regime. The King of the North seems to want a clean sweep when he finally takes the reins of power in about two weeks.
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Washington should pursue a limited nuclear agreement where possible, while reducing its military exposure in the Middle East.
The signing of the memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the United States and Iran has opened the possibility for a new trajectory in one of Washington’s most intractable relationships. Although the deal is tenuous, the Trump administration has signaled a willingness to quickly change its approach after failing to achieve its objectives in a costly war. Already, the United States has granted waivers for Iran to sell its oil into the global market and signaled some willingness to move away from the maximalist demands that contributed to the crisis—though given the recent strikes, how durable that movement will be is an open question. But what might the U.S. relationship with Iran look like by the end of Donald Trump’s presidency?
There are three scenarios worth considering. Each considers three key variables: the status of Iran’s nuclear program, Iran’s economic condition, and the U.S. military footprint in the Middle East. Taken as a whole, these scenarios are intended not to be predictions but instead serve as models to consider what direction the relationship may head in, and the implications of the policies chosen today.
The most likely scenario is a return to something resembling the status quo ante. This consists of the United States and Israel periodically carrying out strikes against Iran’s nuclear (and possibly missile production) facilities, sustained sanctions that curb Iran’s growth, and a robust U.S. military posture in the region, with more troops regularly deployed for ongoing operations than before the war. Under a “mowing the grass” approach, the nuclear issue is not permanently resolved, and the United States remains entrenched in the Middle East. While it’s worth acknowledging this real possibility, it is an undesirable outcome and not one that we will dwell on.
Two alternative, non-maximalist paths are available. One is a limited diplomatic deal that curtails Iran’s nuclear program without requiring Tehran’s capitulation. We call this “the charm offensive.” The other involves a declaration of victory by Trump and reduced U.S. exposure in the region, forcing local powers to manage the balance of power without assuming Washington will underwrite every confrontation with Iran (a.k.a. “Time to Get out of Dodge”). Crucially, both recognize that Iranian capitulation is a pipe dream and that another round of fighting will not be worth the cost.
The Charm Offensive
In this scenario, the ceasefire holds, and Iran proves willing to work in good faith toward a lasting agreement.
Iran, having successfully weathered U.S. attacks and imposed costs in return, does have leverage, but it plays its hand carefully and does not antagonize Trump. Instead, it offers Washington a way to claim victory: The war brought Iran back to the table, and now Trump can secure a deal that meaningfully limits Iran’s nuclear program. For its part, Tehran asks for reconstruction funds as part of any deal, which the Trump administration initially delivers on, although it falls on the next president to decide whether it is politically and economically feasible to sustain these payments. With the initial reconstruction funds and sanctions relief, Iran is able to rebuild its infrastructure and begin revitalizing its economy, strengthening it beyond pre-war levels.
The United States does not rush for the exits. While it draws down to pre-war levels, it maintains its bases in the region. Gulf partners express some dismay at American accommodation of Tehran, but the continued U.S. presence reassures them enough to stay quiet. That said, they successfully push for Trump and Congress to allocate billions more to missile and drone defense systems in the region.
Time to Get Out of Dodge
There is another path, one that does not depend on a diplomatic breakthrough on a vexing issue. Here, Trump declares victory and moves on. No lasting agreement comes out of the MOU. Eager to leave the strategic defeat against Iran in the rearview mirror, however, Trump changes the narrative, treating the Iran problem as largely solved and reducing U.S. exposure in the region. While there is no agreement limiting Iran’s nuclear program, a combination of reduced U.S. pressure and Iranian caution dissuades Tehran from racing toward a nuclear weapon, as it has no desire to hand Washington a pretext for another round of strikes. At the end of the Trump administration, Iran has a very short breakout time and the United States has little insight into Iran’s nuclear activities, but Iran has not engaged in saber-rattling and instead is working to manage its shifting position in its neighborhood.
Iran is bolstered economically by being able to charge a fee for ships navigating the Strait of Hormuz, but it does not receive relief from U.S. sanctions, which carry on largely as they had before and during the conflict. Iran seeks greater trade with China, Pakistan, and India, but outside of oil sales, it is unable to develop robust export markets. Iran’s size and resources make it a regional power, but it is not able to economically or militarily dominate the region.
Iran remains a threat in the Middle East, but the Trump administration wants to avoid being sucked back into a conflict; the White House quietly draws down U.S. military presence there to well below pre-war levels. Though the United States maintains a presence in Qatar, the U.S. drawdown spurs Gulf states to become more self-reliant. Moreover, Gulf states take steps toward a regional security architecture while also cautiously pursuing a modus vivendi with Iran, recognizing that Iran is here to stay. The balancing coalition is adequate to prevent Iran from seeking regional domination.
Which Scenario Best Serves the United States?
The worst outcome would be to pretend that the war vindicated the tired maximalist approach to Iran. Maximalism did not work before or during the war. It certainly won’t work now. The MOU, while necessary to halt a mistaken war, represents a strategic defeat for the United States. Returning to “mowing the grass” or “maximum pressure” would be the easiest mistake to make, allowing Washington to avoid hard choices in the short term while locking the United States into a costly cycle. Doing so would solve little—the war has made clear the limits of U.S. power vis-à-vis Iran—would not prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon over the longer term, would not change Iran’s government, and would cost the United States massively in both dollars and opportunities to shift its resources elsewhere.
The Charm Offensive could be the best option for preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, but Iran will have reasons to doubt the credibility of the United States, and any agreement will be fragile. If reconstruction payments are halted or a new administration walks away from an agreement, Iran could quickly make progress toward a nuclear weapon. And because Iran would likely emerge in a better economic position and with a stronger sense of its own leverage, the collapse of a deal could leave the United States facing a more capable Iran. That’s all the more reason to prioritize keeping a deal afloat.
If the United States gets out of Dodge, Washington will have reduced leverage in the region, and Iran may come to play a greater role in the Middle East. But the United States can live with that. Most importantly, the United States will have less risk of being pulled back into a war that is not vital to U.S. interests, regardless of what trajectory Iran takes. Freed from the burden of trying to manage an unmanageable region, the United States will be able to redirect resources and attention to more pressing matters—as at least three presidents, Trump included, have wanted to do.
Ideally, the United States would combine elements of both non-maximalist paths, pursuing a limited nuclear agreement where possible, while reducing its military exposure and ambitions in the region regardless. But if the choice is between trying to return to an old, untenable approach and accepting a less dominant but less costly role, the latter better serves U.S. interests.
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The Islamic Republic may be in a stronger position than ever before.
Nobody is making it easy for Vice President J.D. Vance and his team of negotiators.
Israel’s continued military campaign in Lebanon has caused Iran to doubt America’s commitment, or ability, to carry out the very first point of the memorandum of understanding (MOU), which calls for an end to the war in Lebanon and ensures that nation’s “territorial integrity and sovereignty,” and has led to the possible reclosure of the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump’s threat, as the negotiators sat down to talk, to the Iranians that if they close the Strait, “you won’t have a country. You won’t even make it back to your f—ing country” violated the clause in point one committing both sides to “refrain from the threat or use of force against each other” and nearly caused Iranian negotiators to walk out just as they were getting started.
The only gain the U.S. negotiators have secured so far is that Iran, in Trump’s words, “fully and completely agreed to the highest level Nuclear inspections.” But have they? Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Esmail Baghaei, says Iran has “no plans to invite inspectors from the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency to nuclear sites that were hit by U.S. and Israeli airstrikes in June 2025.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio says that’s not true: “We know what they agreed to. I don’t know why they have to say the things they say.”
Iran aims to table nuclear negotiations until near the end of the current talks, but it likely will have to agree to inspections as part of the complete agreement. But that is not a U.S. negotiating win that can be sold to justify the war.
As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has historically allowed inspections of its nuclear sites. As part of the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement, Iran implemented an Additional Protocol agreement and voluntarily subjected itself to perhaps the toughest inspection regime in history. They suspended the Additional Protocol only in 2021, almost three years after Trump pulled out of the JCPOA and subjected Iran to maximum pressure sanctions. It was only after the bombing of Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities in June last year that Iran suspended cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency. The U.S. isn’t likely to secure an inspection regime better than what the JCPOA brought. But, for Iran, some things may well be better.
Agreement has been reached to begin releasing frozen Iranian funds. After the first day of negotiations, the release of $12 billion of frozen funds was agreed to. That promises massive economic relief for the Iranian people.
Trump says, “Money that’s being unfrozen is going to be used to buy food, and the food is going to be bought exclusively through the United States.” But remarks by Iranian officials suggest that may not be true. Iran’s central bank governor, Abdolnaser Hemmati, says that, although Iran can purchase American agricultural products “if the price and quality of American inputs are more suitable compared to other countries,” Iran is under “no obligation” to do so under the MOU. Indeed, the document states that the unfrozen funds “shall be made fully usable for payment to any ultimate beneficiary designated by the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
And Iran has, at least temporarily, won another massive source of economic relief from maximum pressure sanctions. This week, the U.S. Treasury Department waived sanctions on Iranian oil exports during the 60-day negotiations kicked off by the MOU, meaning that Iran can export oil at market rates.
One concession that the U.S. is likely to gain is Iran’s agreement to dilute its 60 percent enriched uranium and to suspend its nuclear enrichment program for a specified time.
Diluting its highly enriched uranium, though, is not a huge win or improvement over the JCPOA era. As part of that agreement, Iran shipped about 97 percent of its enriched uranium to Russia and limited future enrichment to 3.67 percent: enough for a civilian nuclear power program but not nearly high enough for a weapons program. After Trump pulled out of the JCPOA and subjected Iran to maximum pressure sanctions, Iran began enriching to 60 percent—still well short of the 90 percent required for a weapon—precisely as leverage to get a deal like this one.
As for suspending enrichment, depending on the length of the required period, Iran may well be willing to do that too. It probably needs several years to rebuild the war-damaged infrastructure anyway. The extra years are the trade Iran may be willing to make to win two larger prizes. Barbara Slavin, distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center, told The American Conservative that Tehran is willing to temporarily suspend enrichment to win permanent access to their frozen funds, which, ultimately, could bring Iran as much as $124 billion to $167 billion of relief.
But, more importantly, a lesson Iran has learned from this war, Slavin says, is that the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz gives them way more leverage than adding another centrifuge or increasing its stockpile of enriched uranium ever did.
Along with enrichment, the fate of that crucial sea passage is the tough terrain over which the negotiations will be fought.
Rubio says that the Strait is “an international waterway” and that “no country is allowed to charge tolls or fees on an international waterway,” but that’s not quite what the MOU says. It says only that Iran must allow safe passage “with no charge, for 60 days only.” That suggests that Iran could see the realization of its demand to charge a fee for transiting as part of a final agreement.
The Strait had always been free and open prior to the war. But the MOU suggests that it could stay under some kind of Iranian management after the war, stipulating that Iran “will conduct dialogue” with Oman to “define the future administration” of the Strait.
Returning from the first day of talks, Iran’s chief negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said, “The Strait of Hormuz will never return to its pre-war conditions and will be administered by the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
On Tuesday, the dialogue conducted between Oman and Iran produced “a joint working group” on the management of the Strait. Contrary to Rubio’s declarations, the two countries emphasized “their sovereignty and sovereign rights over their territorial waters in the strait.” While they committed to keeping the Strait open and safe, they, notably, discussed “the future administration of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, the services to be provided there and the associated costs,” suggesting that, though they would charge no tolls, they could charge service and environmental fees.
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian has also made it plain that Iran’s ballistic missile program will “never” be part of the final agreement: “We will never negotiate with anyone, under any circumstances, ever, about our defensive capabilities.” For Tehran, there is no point in a negotiated settlement that leaves Iran in a position to lose the next round of the war: “If the missiles we have for our defense did not exist, Israel and the United States would have ploughed Iran just like Gaza.”
The Trump administration is right to defend the MOU as necessary and good. But it is good because it ends the war instead of allowing it to continue on its increasingly damaging path. They are wrong to defend it as an improvement over the JCPOA or even the deal that was on the table before the U.S. and Israel attacked this February. The Islamic Republic, liberated from maximum pressure sanctions and having demonstrated its ability to close the Strait of Hormuz and withstand major attacks, will be in a stronger position than perhaps ever before. A final agreement should be signed; the war should never have been fought.
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Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan passed away Monday at 100 years old, following a battle with Parkinson’s disease. He served as the 13th chair of the nation’s central bank and an advisor to six presidents.
Greenspan earned his baccalaureate and graduate degrees in economics from New York University and was a close friend of the libertarian author Ayn Rand beginning in the 1950s until her death in 1982.
He began his career in politics as an economic advisor to Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign and was nominated to serve as the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers just before the president’s resignation in 1974. He served under Gerald Ford as chair and subsequently served on a Reagan-era commission to reform Social Security.
President Ronald Reagan nominated Greenspan to chair the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors in 1987 after Paul Volcker, who stepped down following his largely successful fight with inflation. Greenspan began the process of lowering interest rates from Volcker’s record highs, a process that some economic analysts allege helped to inflate the housing bubble that collapsed after his exit from the Fed.
Greenspan is survived by his wife Andrea Mitchell, NBC News’ chief Washington correspondent and chief foreign affairs correspondent.
The post Alan Greenspan, Economist and Former Fed Chair, Dies at 100 appeared first on The American Conservative.
On April 17, President Donald Trump, using what Reuters termed “an unusually harsh tone,” told Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that they would be prohibited from attacking Lebanon. “Enough is enough!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Within two days of Trump’s declared prohibition, the Israelis issued fresh forced displacement orders in southern Lebanon, accompanied by home demolitions and airstrikes that killed civilians.
It was not the first time the Israelis had ignored ostensible directives from Washington. Vice President J.D. Vance had said in October that the Trump administration would not allow Israel to annex the West Bank. Yet Israel is continuing its inroads into the West Bank anyway.
But unlike the situation in the West Bank, which the U.S. and Arab governments have effectively ceded to Israeli settlers, Israel’s ambitions in Lebanon face a serious geopolitical obstacle. Iran has, since March, made a ceasefire in Lebanon one of its stated conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz and ending the broader war—a conflict, now in its fourth month, which has substantially depleted American munitions stockpiles and hit Americans at the gas pump.
“For us, a ceasefire in Lebanon is just as important as a ceasefire in Iran,” Iran’s Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Ghalibaf said in April. Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, reports that Iranian security officials are now openly discussing a “UAE for Lebanon” strategy involving costly retaliation on Emirati territory for every Israeli strike on Lebanon.
Parsi identifies several reasons why Iran has made a ceasefire in Lebanon a strict term of any deal, with “perhaps the most consequential issue” being “what Lebanon reveals about Washington itself.” For Iran, Parsi says, binding Israel to the ceasefire is “a test of America’s willingness—and ability—to restrain its closest regional ally.”
Indeed, Lebanon, more than anything else, could be a lasting obstacle to resolving the Iran War. When reports circulated in late May that the U.S. had moved closer to a deal with Iran that included a ceasefire in Lebanon as a term of the agreement, Netanyahu quickly phoned Trump to secure his personal assurances that Israel would retain “freedom of action” in Lebanon regardless of any agreement the American president signs.
But Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon is more than a spoiler for the ongoing Iran War. It is rapidly becoming a sequel to the brutality in Gaza before it, and is likewise one in which all Americans, whether they like it or not, have a stake through their tax dollars.
Courtney Bonneau, an American-Dutch journalist who has reported from southern Lebanon throughout Israel’s ongoing assault, told The American Conservative that the destruction she has documented is neither incidental nor impacted by ceasefire agreements.
“The destruction has been systematic,” she said. “They’ve destroyed between 37 and 40 towns and villages so far, and they started that destruction during the last ceasefire period.”
Bonneau says she has personally documented extensive structural damage across roughly 140 towns. From where she lives near the border, she can see and hear Israeli forces carrying out demolitions across the frontier on a daily basis.
Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz gave orders on March 22, 2026 to “accelerate the destruction of Lebanese homes” following the “model in Gaza,” and footage posted by journalists like Courtney Bonneau demonstrates that is exactly what Israeli soldiers and civilian volunteers have done.
Bonneau says the most “arduous” demolitions she has witnessed involved Israeli forces rigging Lebanese homes in the ancient town of Yaroun during the supposed ceasefire that followed the 2024 war: “We watched them for weeks rigging homes with C4, going house to house. It takes all day because they go on foot, rigging them all together with wire hooks. And at the end of the day, they would detonate them.”
Israeli officials have been explicit about how broadly they define their target in Lebanon. During his September 2024 address to the UN General Assembly, Netanyahu said Hezbollah had “a missile in every kitchen, a rocket in every garage” in Lebanon.
Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health reports that Israeli attacks since March 2 have killed around 3,500 people. Journalists from Lebanon say that total does not include Hezbollah militants. The Beirut-based photojournalist Mohamad Kleit told TAC that the death toll from the Lebanese Health Ministry “excludes active Hezbollah fighters since the civil defense can’t reach the areas where clashes occur like the border towns,” so the count is composed exclusively of civilians.
The bombs killing them, in many cases, bear American markings. “A lot of the military waste that I personally photographed after the last war in 2024 said ‘made in the USA’ right on the boxes,” Bonneau told TAC.
Among the weapons Bonneau has documented Israel using against Lebanese civilians is white phosphorus, an incendiary chemical that ignites on contact with air and inflicts severe burns on humans. The deployment of white phosphorus against civilian targets has long been banned under the laws of war. “They’ve been using that at least since 2024,” Bonneau said, describing Israeli deployment of white phosphorus in the olive groves of border villages and, most recently, in Nabatieh. The Washington Post confirmed in December 2023, through analysis of munition fragments collected in southern Lebanon, that the white phosphorus Israel was firing into the country was U.S.-supplied. Lebanese media reported a further white phosphorus attack on the southeastern town of Shebaa on May 26, 2026.
The international relations scholar John Mearsheimer argues that the broader Israeli project in Lebanon, which at one point may have been Jewish settlement of the land, is now the destabilization of the country itself. “Israel is number one interested in creating a Greater Israel, expanding and creating an almost purely Jewish state,” Mearsheimer told TAC.
“What I think Netanyahu wants to do is to foment civil war in Lebanon, a war with the government on one side and Hezbollah on the other, as a way of weakening them both,” Mearsheimer said. “The Israelis can’t disarm Hezbollah, so they want the Lebanese government to do it.”
Israeli officials are openly calling for the conditions that would produce such a collapse. On April 12, Israel’s Energy and Infrastructure Minister Eli Cohen called for Israel to bomb Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure. Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has called for Israel “to cut off the electricity in Lebanon.”
Israel has demonstrated a clear will to ethnically cleanse southern Lebanon; Iran, by conditioning the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz on an end to those hostilities, is seemingly their main obstacle. What happens next depends entirely on Trump’s willingness to restrain the foreign government he sponsors.
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U.S. partners all lack either the capability or motivation to join a credible anti-China coalition.
U.S. political leaders and opinion shapers now openly regard the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a dangerous challenger to America’s status as the dominant global power. Sometimes that point is made in relatively polite ways, for example, using the term “economic competitor” or “peer power” with respect to China. Increasingly, though, the preferred labels in Washington are: rival, challenger, expansionist threat, security threat, and the like. Although many prominent figures within America’s political and foreign policy establishments treat Russia as merely the Soviet Union under a different name and still regard Moscow as the principal threat to U.S. hegemony, a growing, vocal faction, including some officials in the intelligence agencies, argues that the PRC deserves that designation.
There also is a growing inclination among policymakers wary of China to insist that the United States forge and lead a global coalition of major powers to contain Beijing’s influence and ambitions. There is a very large problem with such a strategy, however. Most proposed coalition partners for such a mission are simply not up to the task. Moreover, that deficiency will become increasingly obvious and debilitating in the near future.
The most frequently suggested core members for a U.S.-led, anti-PRC great power coalition are Japan, India, and the European Union (EU). In the unlikely event that a democratic, anti-Putin government took power in Russia, Moscow might also become eligible for that “honor.”
The core great power members supposedly would be aided by smaller, like-minded allies, such as the Republic of Korea (ROK), Taiwan, Canada, and—less likely—Vietnam and other members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). However, such secondary actors would be of only limited importance in a strategic showdown against Beijing. Even the bigger powers on the list are not credible candidates to join a U.S. crusade to contain China. Although all of them have major strengths, they also have equally substantive drawbacks.
Japan, for example, is undoubtedly an economic great power. Based on gross domestic product, Tokyo leads the world’s fourth largest economy. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s government also seems serious about significantly increasing the country’s military capabilities. Even the acquisition of an independent nuclear deterrent now appears to be a possibility. Tokyo’s suspicions about Beijing’s ambitions in East Asia and beyond are also on the rise, and the current Japanese government is embracing a noticeably more assertive, even confrontational, policy toward the PRC.
However, other factors make Japan a less credible candidate to be the linchpin in a U.S.-directed coalition against Beijing. Despite ongoing and proposed buildups, the country’s overall military capacity remains modest. Tokyo’s 2026 military budget is $64.2 billion. China’s estimated 2026 spending of $336 billion dwarfs that figure.
Moreover, the two leading East Asian powers are intertwined in an extensive, diverse economic relationship. China is Japan’s largest trading partner. Joining an explicitly anti-PRC coalition would automatically jeopardize Tokyo’s lucrative bilateral commercial ties, deterring Japanese policymakers from taking that path.
Still other factors would diminish Japan’s ability or inclination to act as Washington’s anti-PRC consiglieri. Chief among them is demographics. The country’s population is now a mere 120 million, and it is shrinking at an alarming pace because of an extremely low birth rate. By 2050, Japan is more likely to be merely another unexceptional midsize country, rather than a front-line major state able to confront and contain the power of its much larger neighbor.
The EU confronts similar worrisome demographic trends as Japan. Worse, unlike Japan, the EU is not a cohesive nation-state but a multinational entity with decidedly uncertain prospects for unity in the future. Indeed, one could legitimately describe the association as little more than a shrinking collection of trendy “woke” cultural enclaves uneasily sharing the same neighborhood with a growing collection of Islamic beachheads. Such an entity is not a great candidate for a leading role in a project to contain the PRC.
Moreover, despite an intensive propaganda campaign to highlight the EU’s alleged determination to play a more serious role in both European and global security affairs, there appears to be little real substance involved. To the extent that there is genuine determination and not merely empty posturing, the primary motive seems to be a desire among both officials and European publics to wean their nations off an excessive, pervasive dependence on the United States for the region’s security. That dependence has existed since the end of World War II, but a growing chorus of pundits on both sides of the Atlantic contend that President Donald Trump’s behavior has greatly increased European desire for regional self-reliance and independent security initiatives.
Even if that speculative thesis proves true, it would not necessarily translate into a greater willingness on the part of a more robust EU to enlist in a U.S.-orchestrated containment policy against the PRC. Indeed, it would seem more likely that European leaders would seek to distance the EU from such a scheme hatched by Washington and designed primarily to benefit the United States.
A more vigorous, effective European security body is unlikely in any event. Such a shift would require the members to take meaningful, painful steps and no longer count on Washington’s lucrative de facto subsidy of Europe’s defense. Polling data reveal little appetite for making either the massive tax hikes or the deep cuts in entrenched, popular domestic welfare state programs that a major military buildup would require. Those factors, combined with the lack of an independent nuclear weapons capability (except for France’s small national arsenal), mean that the EU is not a credible candidate to join a great power coalition to contain the PRC.
India is just marginally better for playing such a role. The country does have a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons (estimates range from 180 to 190 warheads) and the necessary delivery systems in the form of both aircraft and missiles. However, the size and capabilities of the PRC’s nuclear deterrent and conventional military forces seem to outmatch Delhi’s. India’s economic foundation is improving, but in several respects, the country does not yet deserve to be on the roster of the world’s major commercial powers despite ranking 6th overall in terms of GDP. It is highly questionable whether the country could bear the burden of sustained funding for a first-class military.
Worse, deep religious, cultural, linguistic, and political divisions continue to characterize India, making a sense of national unity extremely fragile. Such a lack of unity could create major problems in any showdown with the PRC.
Finally, the current government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi might be ambivalent at best about embracing a blatant containment strategy against the PRC. Delhi undoubtedly has reasons to be wary about Beijing’s ambitions, territorial and otherwise. The two countries have waged nasty skirmishes along their disputed border in the Himalayas on several occasions. There also is little doubt that Modi and other members of India’s political elite do not want to see China become the de facto hegemon of East and South Asia.
At the same time, they have little reason to help Washington preserve its hoary global hegemony, which is under growing strain. A discreet neutrality between the United States and its new dynamic challenger would logically have considerable appeal to Indian leaders. Indeed, the most recent trends in India’s foreign policy hint of a slight tilt toward China. For example, Delhi has been about as adamant as Beijing in rejecting Washington’s pressure to forge an international coalition to isolate Russia because of its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. India is not a promising candidate to join an even broader, more controversial, multilateral effort to ostracize China.
The bottom line is that trying to assemble a U.S.-led coalition of great powers to neutralize Beijing’s rising international clout by establishing an effective containment policy is an unrealistic objective. Washington simply does not have enough capable geostrategic teammates to play that game.
The post Washington Doesn’t Have the Right Teammates to Contain Beijing appeared first on The American Conservative.
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