The Department of Education¡¯s new law gains inspiration from like Moms for Liberty, which advocates for more parental rights in education, and backlash against books that teach children about topics such as Critical Race Theory or lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQIA+) issues.

The push for censorship and its contradictions

Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana hilariously illustrated such books available to students in some parts of the country when he sexually explicit excerpts from the controversial books All Boys Aren¡¯t Blue and Gender Queer in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in 2023. Watching the video will make you cringe. It is shocking to see a United States Senator read a passage about sexual conduct in a formal setting, and it is alarming that these books are available to children.

While instituting a rule that would make such books unavailable to children is understandable given its appropriateness, the policy will likely have unintended negative consequences for the future of education in South Carolina, like government censorship often does, and we should oppose it.

The law is ironically contradictory in the name of discretion for appropriateness. It states that local educators and boards shall determine whether the material is age- and development-appropriate, but then the rule removes this autonomy by including the element of ¡°sexual conduct¡± and limits local policymakers¡¯ discretion.

Books containing descriptions or depictions of sexual conduct are now illicit because it is inappropriate, yet schools will still teach sexual education. It does not make sense to have classroom instruction on a topic while banning certain books that depict it. Parents already get to decide if their child can take sexual education classes, so the new rule is actually more detrimental to parental rights.

Weaver touts this law as a victory for parental rights, but these rights cannot be won with a blanket censorship law. Instead, we have parental rights for those who support this state policy rather than local jurisdiction, so each parent can better ensure their concerns are heard and their children¡¯s education more closely aligns with their values.

However, parents will likely see drastic changes in their children¡¯s education due to a lack of local jurisdiction and flexibility. South Carolina¡¯s new rule explicitly means that books such as The Canterbury Tales, 1984, Romeo and Juliet and Brave New World, just to name a few, could be unavailable to any student regardless of age. These books did not draw red flags when I read some of them as a student in Union County Schools.

Lessons from other states

Assuming that the regulation is not a violation of the First Amendment (an argument often made by proponents of the law), primary concerns lie in its vague descriptions. Obviously, graphic depictions of sexual conduct should not be available to children in elementary school, but the law is too broad.

When I was in high school, just over four years ago, no one would have been taken seriously if they had asked for Romeo and Juliet to be banned because books like that were never a problem. We should protect classic pieces of literature and acknowledge their importance in education. However, as the saying goes, ¡°The road to hell is often paved with good intentions.¡±

One may argue that the law will not lead to these consequences and that I am being alarmist. They would be wrong, as there are many examples throughout the country of barring certain books from school libraries that would draw the ire of the average person.

In 2023, the Davis School District in Utah the King James version of the Bible from elementary and middle school libraries due to ¡°vulgarity or violence.¡± The parent who initially called for the Bible¡¯s banning noted that the Bible contains instances of prostitution, incest and rape. In 2020, the Burbank Unified School District in California , notably To Kill a Mockingbird, after parents complained of the book¡¯s racism.

The case for local freedom

The moral of this story is that regardless of culture, Utah or California, Republican or Democrat, Christian or Atheist, once you give others the power to regulate your privileges and rights, it will almost certainly be used against you at some point. This story is especially true given that government officials are terrible at drafting meaningful laws. When it comes to government educational reforms, you should be careful what you wish for.

While the intent to protect children is commendable, the broad and vague nature of the regulations could lead to the banning of critical literary works. It is crucial to find a balance that protects children without stifling their educational growth and exposure to classic literature.

Local districts should be able to have autonomy with these policies, and local committees with diverse opinions should work. Local committees allow you to choose how your tax dollars are spent and how your child is educated. Freedom works, and you will find that liberty is the best path to progress.

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While in the first year of his first presidency, Trump 1.0 had fired numerous officials, this time around, Bondi and Noem, who ran the two largest law enforcement agencies in the country, were the first cabinet officials to be dismissed. Both ¡ª no surprise ¡ª were replaced by men. And just as I was writing this piece for TomDispatch, Trump removed another female cabinet official, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer. More recently, Director of National Intelligence , a fourth cabinet member and the second woman ever to hold that job, resigned in May and will step down at the end of June.

Notably, Noem, Bondi, Chavez-DeRemer and Gabbard are, of course, all women. As Jasmine Crockett, a Democratic House of Representatives member from Texas, recently , ¡°Well¡­ first it was Kristi Noem, now it¡¯s Pam Bondi¡­ it would be too much like right that Pete [Hegseth] be next. I see a theme. He [Trump] will throw the incompetent women under the bus a lot faster than the incompetent men.¡±

Equal opportunity failure

Crockett has a point. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth¡¯s leadership at the Department of Defense (now appropriately retitled the Department of War) has erased time-honored rules and norms in staggering ways. He has, for instance, drastically reduced media access to the Pentagon, purged employees who with him, as well as those he deemed to be DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) appointees. He exerted his leadership in a war against Iran that has lasted over three months, despite his assurance that, as The Guardian , ¡°the U.S. would not get bogged down in the conflict.¡± The US operation, he insisted, was not a ¡°democracy-building exercise,¡± adding that ¡°this is not Iraq. This is not endless.¡±

Hegseth¡¯s behavior led Arizona Democratic Representative Yassamin Ansari to file of impeachment against him on six charges. They include the commission of war crimes, especially the killing of at least people, including many children, at a girls¡¯ primary school in Iran hit by a US missile; negligence with sensitive information; and conducting an unauthorized war without congressional approval. In the Senate, Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren with a to US Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins asking for an investigation into whether Hegseth attempted to profit from his financial investments in the run-up to the war in Iran.

Crockett might just as easily have highlighted the wayward behavior of FBI Director Kash Patel, exposed in a piece in describing ¡°excessive drinking¡± that interfered with his job (an article over which Patel immediately for $250 million in damages), or the of health standards by Health and Human Resources Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

But whatever the future of those reprehensible men in cabinet positions, it¡¯s unfortunately difficult to defend either Bondi or Noem for their actions while in office. Like their male counterparts, both defiantly tossed professionalism and decency to the winds. Under Noem, with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) leading the way, the Department of Homeland Security was weaponized and transformed into Trump¡¯s version of a homeland militia. It¡¯s hardly a stretch to make the comparison to Hitler¡¯s Brownshirts.

So far, in Trump¡¯s second term in office, ICE has terrorized schools and businesses, while cruelly imprisoning migrants without due process of any sort. It has held in detention centers under abhorrent conditions, peaceful protesters and citizens on the streets of America. Worse yet, Noem tens of millions of dollars to cover the costs of a pro-ICE ad featuring herself riding a horse in front of Mount Rushmore saying, ¡°Break Our Laws, We¡¯ll Punish You.¡± (Nor should we imagine that things will get any better without her.)

Bondi¡¯s ouster followed failures of a different order ¡ª namely, her stumbling, wildly inept efforts to fulfill Trump¡¯s agenda. She proved unable even to make the case of Trump pal Jeffrey Epstein go away, while what she had to say when releasing documents related to him led to that her statements were riddled with falsehoods. Meanwhile, under her watch of New York State Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey, high-priority items for the president, fell apart.

And when called before Congress to explain herself, her rank lack of civility resembled the behavior of a spoiled teenager berating her teacher, knowing that, since her parents wielded power over the school, she should fear no reprisals. Under Bondi, the sacrosanct mission of the Department of Justice as an agency independent of the White House was summarily tossed aside (as the roof-to-ground-floor that hung from its office building demonstrated).

Female purges

Focusing on Noem and Bondi, however, misses the larger point. This first year of Trump 2.0 has seen women, one after another, summarily gone from their posts (some fired, some resigning) as part of a larger DEI purge. As I in January, the military has led the way with a full-scale attack on women. And that trend started on the administration¡¯s very first day in office when Trump Linda Fagan, the first female commandant of the Coast Guard.

Fagan was, in fact, the first woman ever to serve as a military service chief and, among other things, she had exposed ¡°Operation Fouled Anchor,¡± a previously covered-up investigation into sexual harassment and assault in the Coast Guard. Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy, was fired as well. Both have now ¡ª no surprise ¡ª been replaced by men. As it stands, there are no longer any four-star women in the military. And Hegseth had reportedly two women from a promotion list to become one-star Army generals.

Outside of the Department of Defense, the resignations or firings of women in leadership positions have abounded across agencies ranging from the National Labor Relations to the Federal Trade and the for Disease Control and Prevention.

This widespread purge of women stands in stark contrast to their presence in office during the Biden years. Under President Joe Biden, women held just under 50% of all cabinet or cabinet-level positions. And let¡¯s not forget Kamala Harris, the first female vice-president in American history. It¡¯s worth noting as well that under Biden, the Deputy Attorney General and the Deputy Secretary of Defense were both women.

Trump is not unmindful of those statistics. Last year, he boasted about the presence of eight women among his 24 cabinet officers, or a third of his cabinet. As Business Insider , he was ¡°thrilled to say that we have more women in our Cabinet than any Republican president in the history of our country.¡± Following the removal of Noem, Bondi and Chavez-DeRemer, however, women occupy just over one-fifth of the cabinet positions ¡ª admittedly an improvement on his first term when, after two years of resignations and firings, women held only of all cabinet-level positions.

Project 2025

The path to the current backlash against women, including all the purges and punishments we¡¯ve witnessed, didn¡¯t come about by mere happenstance. In the run-up to the 2024 election, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, published a Project 2025 entitled, Project 2025 ? A Mandate for Authoritarian Leadership: The Heritage Foundation¡¯s Conservative Promise for A Second Trump Administration. This 900-plus page blueprint for overhauling the federal bureaucracy called for gutting DEI programs, eliminating and reducing the size of any offices that didn¡¯t serve a conservative agenda, and enhancing the powers of the president. Among its many recommendations, Project 2025 touted an anti-female message, including removing ¡°gender equality¡± language from government websites, emphasizing ¡°family planning¡± and recommending limitations on access to contraception and cuts to federal funding for abortions.

Although Trump repeatedly himself from Project 2025, many of its recommended policies have indeed become our new reality, including matters affecting women. In the first months of Trump¡¯s second term, images of women, as well as persons of color and LGBTQ+ individuals, were systematically from government websites. So, too, protections for women¡¯s health were tossed to the winds. As the abortion rights group Reproductive Freedom for All has , as of January 2026, ¡°53% of [Project 2025¡¯s] policies attacking reproductive freedom are completed or in progress.¡±

And now, there is a Heritage Foundation report devoted to the need to counter the declining birth rate and the fragility of the American family. ¡°Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 20 Years¡± for the restructuring of incentives to promote childbearing and ¡°revive the institution of marriage.¡± Signaling its message, the report makes the case for prioritizing marriage and children over career advancement and less traditional family arrangements caused by divorce and single-parenthood. While the report underscores the family roles incumbent upon both men and women, the fact is that reforms aimed at incentivizing childbearing will fall primarily on women, while those aimed at privileging childrearing over career choices would likely fall most heavily on women as well.

MS NOW¡¯s Ali Velshi and ¡°Velshi¡± Segment Producer Amel Ahmed the report well, pointing out that its overall takeaway is: ¡°the freedoms fought [for] and won by America¡¯s women aren¡¯t progress; they are the problem.¡±

Of course, in the era of Trump, none of this should come as a surprise, not when you consider the histories of the men who are now running the show: a president who, in addition to once touting the fact that he could ¡° them by the pussy,¡± has been convicted in E. Jean Carroll¡¯s civil suit over accusations of sexual abuse and defamation to the tune of in damages, a decision by an appellate court. And let¡¯s not forget that Trump¡¯s first nominee for Attorney General, Matt Gaetz, his name from consideration under a cloud of accusations of wrongful behavior, including sexual misconduct. Not to mention the shadow cast by the number of individuals within the current administration whose names are said to appear in the . While no formal charges of sexual misconduct have been issued against them, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick faces pressure to over his alleged ties to Epstein.

A future government without women?

It¡¯s hard to predict which women will come under the axe from Trump and crew as time goes by. But the onslaught has understandably led women from both sides of the political spectrum to sound the alarm. Months before she announced her resignation from Congress, former Trump supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene had already expressed her own misgivings about the misogyny of the Republican leaders in Congress.

When Trump rescinded New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik¡¯s nomination to be the US Representative to the United Nations and replaced her with Michael Waltz (who had embarrassed himself by adding a to a private Signal chat about possible future strikes against the Houthis in Yemen), Greene saw it as a sign of a general trend of sidelining women. She it up as a case where Stefanik ¡°gets shafted,¡± while Waltz ¡°gets rewarded.¡± For Greene, it was proof of an overwhelming Trump administration mood of: ¡°She¡¯s a woman, so it was OK to do that to her somehow.¡±

Greene¡¯s dissatisfaction wasn¡¯t just over Stefanik but over the general trend that has led to only Republican woman chairing a committee in Congress. Notably, alongside Greene, Republican representatives Nancy Mace and Laurent Boebert signed a petition pressuring the Department of Justice to release information on the Epstein files.

The signs are everywhere. Expectations are disappearing that women will hold leadership positions inside the Trump administration or in the halls of Congress (unless the Democrats win decisively in November). If you didn¡¯t realize it before, you really can¡¯t hide from it now. The attack on diversity in government has become pervasive and (at least as yet) is undeterred, targeting females, as well as people of color, immigrants and critics of the president, with abandon. In other words, the fate of women leaders should provide us with an insight, however dispiriting, into just how quickly the values and assumptions that guided this nation¡¯s progress in matters of race, gender and ethnicity for decades have disappeared.

What once amounted to progress is indeed now seen as the problem. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the exorcising of women from the halls of government.

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In that context, here¡¯s my advice to you: Don¡¯t get old. For years, I managed not to do so, but unfortunately that¡¯s all over now and I¡¯m increasingly an old man. In fact, I¡¯m not quite two years older than Trump. I was born on July 20, 1944, while World War II was still ongoing, and he was born on June 14, 1946, in the peacetime that followed but would all too soon become the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

And let me tell you something else: these days, it¡¯s hard enough to maintain my Substack column while also keeping track of our ever-stranger, more confusing, all-too-Trumpian world. But keeping track of things nationally and globally as an 80-year-old president of the United States (with another two-and-a-half years to go) in a world that seems to be coming apart at the ¡ª sorry, I can¡¯t help but make a pun! ¡ª seams? I simply can¡¯t imagine that. Of course, I couldn¡¯t imagine it for former US President Joe Biden either, and yet he left the presidency when he was a staggering and 61 days old and will still have been younger than Trump if he makes it to January 20, 2029. (And both of them will have beaten the oldest Roman Emperor, , who at 81 only lasted weeks in power.)

It¡¯s hardly news that Trump is now the president ever to take the oath of office (twice!) and, in that sense, he¡¯s been both record-setting and, in his own strange way, remarkable. But in case you hadn¡¯t noticed, while he¡¯s always had his odd moments, they are getting ever odder and more frequent. How many times has this country had a president who for (or do I mean confused himself with) Jesus Christ? Oh, wait, how could I be so confused? That image wasn¡¯t of Jesus, but of a lookalike . (¡°I thought it was me as a doctor,¡± the president said. ¡°Only the fake news could come up with that.¡±)

And meanwhile, in his own ever stranger fashion, ¡°our¡± president took at Leo, the American pope, himself a veritable youth at 70 years old, calling him ¡°WEAK on crime¡± and ¡°catering to the Radical Left.¡± Oh, and while he was at it, Trump also posted an of himself being hugged by (yes, of course!) Jesus. And Leo responded to the president¡¯s abuse by all too accurately a world being ¡°ravaged by a handful of tyrants¡± (including, of course, You Know Whom).

Just in case you hadn¡¯t noticed, as an imperial power (even, historically speaking, the imperial power, the only one at its height to control so much of the planet in some way), this country, too, is growing ever older, and in its own strange fashion, going down, as all great imperial powers do sooner or later. Phew! That was a long sentence for this old guy, but you can¡¯t get too long and complicated (or do I mean confused?) when it comes to the world of Trump. In electing him a second time in 2024, of American voters clearly opted to go down in style by giving imperial oldness a startling new meaning.

These days, I¡¯m sure you won¡¯t be surprised to learn that Trump¡¯s approval ratings are heading for the planetary basement. As I was writing this piece, for instance, only of Americans approved of how he was handling the economy. (You might wonder, at this point, why it wasn¡¯t 11% or even 0%.) Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance¡¯s approval ratings, too, have been hitting .

Mind you, Trump has always given unpredictability new meaning, but these days, a constant version of unpredictability is his aging middle name. Remember the president who was ¡°warmongers and America-last globalists¡± and was going to remove them from office in his second term in the White House? Remember the president who was going to ¡°turn the forever on those foolish, stupid days of never-ending wars?¡± Hmmm, well, think again now that he¡¯s gone to war (or is it to peace, or even to pieces?) with Iran in an all too strikingly destructive fashion. But that¡¯s today¡¯s news and, in the era of the aging Trump, who knows what tomorrow might hold for any of us ¡ª or, for that matter, what might happen an hour from now? Count on one thing, though: the president sure doesn¡¯t know and so, sadly, neither can we.

(Phew! Without section breaks, I¡¯m already exhausted, but who can truly take a break when it comes to Trump?)

And here¡¯s the saddest thing of all (not that all of it isn¡¯t sad as hell, and potentially leading the rest of us all too literally into a hell on Earth): given this country¡¯s military machine, which ¡°the ¡± seems eager to feed an extra ¡ª that would raise the Pentagon budget by 50% ¡ª the US still has the power to turn this planet into a hell on Earth in a fashion no other imperial power in decline has ever been able to do. And I¡¯m not even thinking about this country¡¯s vast nuclear arsenal.

So, here¡¯s our horrifying reality: In the next two and a half years, if he doesn¡¯t keel over tomorrow or somehow grab even more presidency time ¡ª remember that, last year in Iowa, which he won in all three of his election campaigns, he an audience ominously, ¡°Should we do it a fourth time?¡± ¡ª Trump is genuinely capable of preparing to take not just this country but the planet down with him. Phew again!

And I¡¯m not just thinking about his ability with like Israel to turn parts of this world into hell zones of war. I¡¯m thinking instead about the climate disaster to come and the president who has called it ¡°the greatest ever perpetrated on the world¡± and a ¡°green scam,¡± and is prepared in his own fashion to heat this planet to the boiling point. Keep in mind that the US military is the largest institutional of greenhouse gases, even in peacetime, on Earth.

Honestly, I still find it hard to imagine that a near majority of American voters elected such a distinctly disturbed old man as president yet again, one seemingly intent on squashing green energy of any sort and potentially taking this planet down with him the second time around. Consider it truly strange, in fact, that the two in our history (Trump, Biden and Trump again) have occupied the White House consecutively for the last decade, given that this country is now distinctly an aging, even potentially fading, power on a planet that may itself be aging and fading all too rapidly.

I¡¯m old enough to have experienced presidents in my lifetime so far (and that¡¯s not even counting Trump the second time around) and yet he is distinctly, day by day, month by month, year by year, one of a kind in the worst sense imaginable. Consider it odd, in fact, that, as a con artist first-class, he may himself turn out to be the greatest con job ever perpetrated on this world of ours and, in his own eerie fashion, a world-ending figure. Worse yet, whether we like it or not, it seems as if we are all now his apprentices.

Imagine as well that and ¡°¡± ever more , and are the two things he seems to be specializing in during his second term in office, even if, thanks to his conflict with Iran, he actually put a sudden on the global distribution of oil and gas via the Strait of Hormuz and helped to clobber the big oil producers of the Middle East.

(Whew! If only I could put a section break up right here and take a break myself! Facing such a world and such a president, this old writer finds himself increasingly out of breath!)

When I was young and the youthful John F. Kennedy was president, if you had even tried to describe Trump¡¯s version of the world to me, I would have thought you not just mad, but one of the worst creators of fiction around. Can there be the slightest doubt, in fact, that President Trump has turned out to be among the worst creations of a planet that couldn¡¯t be in deeper trouble?

I wanted to write ¡°fictional creations¡± there. If only this were a grim dystopian novel, rather than the actual world, and if Trump himself were indeed some mad fictional creation. What a thrill that would be! After all, such a weird and wild version of a Philip Roth noveI would once have seemed to readers like a mad laughathon. If only¡­

But when the voters of your very own country decide to make just such a fiction our reality a second time around in the real world, you know that something is truly wrong on Planet Earth.

After this country¡¯s endless decades of imperial war-making from Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq, and now to Iran (and that¡¯s leaving out of our warring activities), Trump could be thought of as the way we Americans decided not just to make war on the rest of the world, but on ourselves as well. And by reelecting a man who proudly insists that climate change is the ¡°greatest con job ever perpetuated¡± and a total ¡°green new ,¡± we¡¯re obviously involving ourselves in a big-time fashion in what might be thought of as World War III, the ultimate war on planet Earth itself.

I mean, you have to feel anxious when you only have to type ¡°Donald Trump, climate change¡± into your search bar and up come endless disturbing pieces, including, for me just now, Maxine Joselow of The New York Times writing an headlined, ¡°Climate Change Denial Sees a Resurgence in Trump¡¯s Washington.¡± It began this way:

¡°Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by ¡®leftist politicians.¡¯ Fossil fuels are the greenest energy sources. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be harmless. These were some of the false claims made at a conference on Wednesday held by groups that reject the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. What might have seemed like a fringe event in years past this time boasted a prominent keynote speaker: Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and one of President Trump¡¯s possible choices for the next attorney general.¡±

Tell that, of course, to all of us in New York City, who only recently lived through record-breaking 90-degree July in early April. Consider it strange indeed that, in response to the never-ending news that we humans have long been turning this planet into a fossil-fuelized hothouse, a near majority of us would indeed opt to again elect a president who makes climate-change denial seem like a far too mild term.

Of all the things that Trump hasn¡¯t done, he¡¯s worked in what, for him, is a remarkably organized fashion to stall or any projects that wouldn¡¯t further heat this planet of ours. Utterly unfocused as he so often is, he¡¯s remained strikingly focused on shutting down wind power and solar energy projects, while launching ever more fossil fuel ones. These include more than a billion acres of coastal waters to oil and gas drilling and a French company almost a billion dollars not to create two wind farms off this country¡¯s east coast, but to invest in oil and gas projects here in the US.

Talk about dystopian! Trump should truly be considered a full-scale dystopian nightmare playing out in real time.

Wait! I have a last urge for this piece. Think of it as a way for me to finally catch my breath. To end it, I want to create one of those missing section heads right here, right now. How about:

The hothouse president on a planet going to hell

And yes, that is indeed the end of this piece, but not for a moment the end of the nightmare we¡¯re now living through.

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Today, however, the US and China remain deeply interconnected through trade, finance, supply chains and advanced technology even as strategic competition intensifies. Some US policymakers argue that decades of engagement with China strengthened Beijing economically and technologically while failing to produce meaningful political liberalization. From this perspective, America¡¯s openness inadvertently accelerated the rise of a strategic competitor now seeking to challenge US influence in Asia and reshape elements of the international order.

Danger lies not only in China¡¯s growing power but also in the risk that both nations begin to interpret actions through the assumption of inevitable conflict. Rising tensions over semiconductors, artificial intelligence, industrial policy and Taiwan increasingly reinforce mutual suspicion. Republicans often emphasize the need for deterrence, military readiness and economic resilience to prevent strategic dependence on China, particularly in critical technologies and supply chains. 

Yet history also demonstrates that great-power conflicts can emerge when fear hardens into permanent hostility, and policymakers lose the ability to distinguish genuine threats from reflections of their own anxieties. The challenge for the 21st century is therefore not simply to contain China, but to compete from a position of strength without allowing rivalry to evolve into irreversible confrontation.

The lake that reflected a monster

In an old Chinese story associated with the philosophical tradition of the (an ancient Chinese text named for its author, the philosopher Zhuang Zhou), a dragon descended from the mountains during a season of drought in search of water. After days of wandering through burned forests and dry valleys, it finally found a still and perfectly clear lake hidden among the rocks. When the dragon leaned forward to drink, however, it suddenly froze in anger. Beneath the surface of the water was another dragon staring upward with equal hostility, its eyes burning with challenge and suspicion.

The dragon roared. The reflection roared back. The dragon struck the lake with its claws, shattering the surface into chaos. Only after the water settled again did the dragon realize that the enemy beneath the water had never existed at all. The monster it feared was its own reflection.

Great powers throughout history have often behaved this way. They mistake structural anxiety for existential threat, mirrors for enemies and competition for destiny. The tragedy is that once fear becomes institutionalized, states can amplify hostility until manageable rivalry grows out of control.

The modern relationship between the US and China increasingly resembles the dragon and the lake. Washington sees Beijing as an authoritarian challenger seeking to overturn the international order; Beijing sees Washington as a declining hegemon attempting to suppress China¡¯s natural rise. 

Understanding an adversary¡¯s strategic logic does not require morally flattening political systems or pretending all exercises of power are equivalent. Liberal societies and authoritarian states organize authority, dissent, surveillance and individual liberty according to profoundly different principles, and these distinctions shape how each side interprets security, legitimacy and order. Both narratives contain elements of truth, yet both are incomplete in ways that make the relationship far more dangerous than either side fully understands.

Yet not all fear is illusion. Strategic competition between the US and China is not merely the product of misunderstanding or psychological projection. Liberal democratic systems and centralized authoritarian systems often produce fundamentally different relationships between the state, the individual, information, markets and political power itself. These differences generate genuine strategic tensions even in the absence of deliberate hostility. The danger is allowing rivalry to harden into civilizational fatalism.

The most important reality is that the 21st century has fundamentally transformed the structure of rivalry itself. America and China are not two isolated empires confronting each other from opposite sides of the world. They exist inside the same financial, technological, industrial and digital ecosystem. They are rivals sharing the same bloodstream.

The end of classical geopolitics

Much contemporary analysis of US¨CChina relations still relies on 20th-century frameworks. Some analysts compare the situation to the Cold War, while others invoke the ¡°,¡± arguing that war becomes likely whenever a rising power threatens an established hegemon. These frameworks are intellectually attractive because they simplify complexity into familiar historical patterns. Unfortunately, they also risk blinding policymakers to how profoundly the structure of global power has changed.

The ancient rivalry between Athens and Sparta unfolded in a world where economies were largely territorial. The Cold War operated through two largely separate economic systems. Even Britain and Germany before World War I remained significantly less integrated than today¡¯s globalized networks. The US and China, however, are embedded within one another¡¯s economic existence in ways unprecedented in human history.

American consumers depend upon Chinese manufacturing capacity. Chinese growth depends upon access to global markets and dollar liquidity. American technology companies rely on supply chains that extend through Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia and mainland China. Chinese industrial systems depend on global semiconductor architecture and Western financial systems, even as they attempt to reduce those dependencies.

This creates an extraordinary paradox. The more integrated the two powers become, the more vulnerable they become to one another¡¯s leverage. Economic interdependence does not eliminate rivalry. Instead, it transforms rivalry into something infrastructural and systemic rather than purely military.

Globalization did not abolish geopolitics. It digitized it.

The new battlefield

In previous centuries, power was measured primarily through territory, industrial output and military force. Today, power increasingly emerges from control over systems that connect the global economy. The battlefield of the 21st century is therefore not limited to aircraft carriers and missile systems. It extends into semiconductors, artificial intelligence, satellite networks, reserve currencies, cloud computing infrastructure, energy grids, rare earth processing, payment systems and digital standards.

This transformation explains why contemporary tensions between Washington and Beijing increasingly center on technology rather than ideology alone. Artificial intelligence, semiconductor fabrication, quantum computing, telecommunications infrastructure and advanced manufacturing have become the strategic high ground of the modern age. Whoever controls these systems may shape not only economic productivity but also military capability, financial influence, surveillance architecture and even political legitimacy itself.

China understands this clearly. President Xi Jinping¡¯s industrial strategy is no longer simply about economic development. It is about reducing strategic vulnerability while increasing systemic leverage. Beijing seeks technological self-sufficiency not because it rejects globalization entirely, but because it no longer trusts globalization to remain politically neutral.

Washington, meanwhile, increasingly interprets technological dependence on China as a national security risk. Semiconductor restrictions, export controls, sanctions and industrial subsidies are all symptoms of the same realization: Economic integration has become a source of geopolitical exposure.

The result is a strange historical condition in which globalization continues to deepen even as trust collapses. Nations remain economically intertwined while psychologically preparing for confrontation. The system becomes more connected and more fragmented simultaneously. 

Taiwan and the geography of intelligence

No issue illustrates this transformation more clearly than Taiwan. For decades, Taiwan was treated primarily as a geopolitical flashpoint involving sovereignty, democracy and military deterrence. While those factors remain important, Taiwan has acquired a far greater significance in recent years because it occupies the center of the global semiconductor ecosystem.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, produces the overwhelming of the world¡¯s most advanced semiconductors. Yet the true importance of Taiwan extends far beyond fabrication alone. The island dominates critical ecosystems surrounding advanced chip packaging, testing, memory integration, and manufacturing optimization that are essential for artificial intelligence systems.

Artificial intelligence is often discussed as though it were abstract software existing somewhere in cyberspace. In reality, AI is deeply physical. It depends upon fabs, server farms, cooling systems, lithography chains, energy infrastructure and highly specialized manufacturing ecosystems accumulated over decades. Taiwan, therefore, functions not merely as an island but as the industrial nervous system of the emerging AI economy.

This reality changes the strategic meaning of Taiwan for both China and the US. For Beijing, Taiwan is no longer only about historical reunification or national dignity. Control over Taiwan would provide enormous influence over the infrastructure underpinning the future intelligence economy. For Washington, Taiwan is no longer merely about democratic solidarity or alliance credibility. It is increasingly tied to America¡¯s technological leadership itself.

The danger is that both narratives are simultaneously rational. This makes compromise psychologically and politically difficult because each side increasingly interprets Taiwan not as a negotiable issue but as structurally essential to its long-term security.

Strategic ambiguity begins to erode

For decades, the Taiwan issue remained relatively stable because the US maintained a carefully engineered policy of strategic ambiguity. Washington neither formally supported Taiwanese independence nor accepted Beijing¡¯s timetable for reunification. Ambiguity itself became the stabilizing mechanism because all parties remained uncertain about the precise limits of American intervention.

The framework established through the ¡°strategic ambiguity¡± of the , artfully crafted by former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger more than four decades ago and later defended by realist statesmen such as James A. Baker III, was never intended to produce a final resolution to the Taiwan issue. Rather, its purpose was to preserve stability through calibrated uncertainty, allowing Washington sufficient flexibility to deter conflict while avoiding direct confrontation with Beijing over its most sensitive national question.?

The essence of the policy rested on ambiguity: Beijing could not be certain the US would intervene militarily, while Taipei could not be certain Washington would support a unilateral declaration of independence. Stability, therefore, emerged not from clarity, but from carefully managed uncertainty.

Kissinger understood that Taiwan represented the central obstacle to normalization between Washington and Beijing during the Cold War realignment of the 1970s. The diplomatic architecture established through the (a document issued by the US and China on February 27, 1972, outlining steps to improve relations and address mutual concerns) and later reinforced by the (which allowed the US to continue economic, cultural and security relations with Taiwan) created a deliberately flexible structure capable of adapting to changing geopolitical realities without forcing either side into immediate confrontation.?

Policymakers such as Baker later defended this approach because they recognized that abandoning strategic ambiguity in favor of ideological rigidity or ¡°strategic clarity¡± could transform manageable competition into catastrophic great-power conflict. As tensions surrounding semiconductors, artificial intelligence and Taiwan intensify, the erosion of this carefully balanced architecture risks undermining one of the most successful mechanisms of geopolitical crisis management in modern diplomatic history.

Today, this architecture is weakening. Chinese military pressure around Taiwan continues to intensify. Taiwanese identity grows increasingly distinct from that of mainland China. American congressional politics increasingly encourages symbolic gestures in support of Taiwan. Domestic politics in all three societies now push toward harder positions rather than strategic restraint.

US President Donald Trump¡¯s supporters often praise his unpredictability as strategic brilliance, while critics condemn it as recklessness. Both interpretations miss something important. Trump does not think about geopolitics through the traditional framework of American grand strategy: He approaches foreign affairs transactionally, not historically. However, it would be unwise to underestimate his political instincts. He appears adept at navigating and exploiting moments of strategic ambiguity.

Xi thinks in terms of civilizational continuity, national rejuvenation and historical destiny. Trump thinks in terms of leverage, bargaining and immediate tactical advantage. This asymmetry in strategic psychology creates enormous risks because each side increasingly misunderstands how the other interprets signals, commitments and ambiguity itself.

The most dangerous conflicts in history often emerge not from deliberate aggression but from incompatible assumptions about how the other side thinks.

Deterrence and restraint

Yet strategic misunderstanding alone does not explain geopolitical stability. A durable equilibrium between great powers also depends upon credible deterrence. Competition without sufficient military, technological and economic strength can invite opportunistic coercion, particularly when rival states believe the balance of power is shifting in their favor.

At the same time, deterrence without diplomatic restraint can accelerate escalation by convincing both sides that delay increases vulnerability. Sustainable stability, therefore, requires a delicate balance between capability and restraint: enough power to discourage aggression, yet enough strategic discipline to prevent rivalry from becoming existential.

The original architecture of strategic ambiguity surrounding Taiwan functioned precisely because it balanced these forces simultaneously. Ambiguity deterred unilateral escalation while preserving uncertainty regarding the thresholds of conflict. Stability emerged not through trust, but through calibrated restraint reinforced by credible power.

China¡¯s industrial civilization

Western analysis frequently underestimates the scale and coherence of China¡¯s industrial strategy because it still assumes Beijing operates within the logic of traditional market economics. In reality, Xi has transformed Chinese industrial policy into something historically unique. It is no longer limited to selected strategic sectors. It increasingly resembles an attempt to engineer an entire civilization-scale production system.

China now targets advanced semiconductors, artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, batteries, drones, quantum systems, renewable energy, biotechnology, telecommunications, advanced chemicals, robotic, and even mature manufacturing industries simultaneously. The objective is not simply growth. It is resilience, technological sovereignty and systemic leverage.

This creates enormous tension with free-market economies. Western firms operate under pressure for profitability and shareholder returns. China, by contrast, can industrial overcapacity and prolonged financial losses if they generate long-term strategic dominance.

Chinese solar manufacturers, for example, often destroy industry profitability globally while simultaneously increasing China¡¯s market share and geopolitical leverage.

This explains why many traditional Western economic assumptions increasingly fail when confronting China. Market efficiency and strategic resilience are not always compatible objectives. Beijing prioritizes resilience even when efficiency suffers, while free-market democracies often prioritize efficiency until strategic vulnerability suddenly becomes visible. From this perspective, tariffs may not be desirable from a purely economic standpoint, but they can nevertheless be understood as strategic instruments intended to reduce dependency and strengthen national resilience.

The result is a growing recognition throughout the West that decades of deep economic integration have unintentionally strengthened the geopolitical capabilities of a state operating according to fundamentally different assumptions about economics, sovereignty and political control.

Artificial intelligence and the new arms race

Artificial intelligence has accelerated these tensions dramatically because AI increasingly resembles not merely a technological innovation but the operating infrastructure of future civilization. AI systems may shape military planning, cyber operations, financial markets, scientific research, logistics, education, medicine and political surveillance simultaneously. This creates enormous strategic anxiety in both Washington and Beijing. 

Yet artificial intelligence is not merely software plus semiconductors. It is electricity, cooling systems, mining capacity, logistics networks, shipping infrastructure, manufacturing ecosystems and technically skilled labor operating in parallel at a continental scale. The emerging AI competition is therefore also a competition over energy systems, industrial depth, maritime trade routes and physical supply chains.

American policymakers fear that Chinese AI systems integrated into global infrastructure could expand Beijing¡¯s geopolitical influence. Chinese policymakers fear that US restrictions on semiconductors and AI technologies represent attempts to permanently freeze China below the technological frontier.

Meanwhile, AI investment itself increasingly resembles a speculative geopolitical mobilization. American hyperscalers are investing hundreds of billions of dollars annually into AI infrastructure, data centers and semiconductor ecosystems. Financial markets increasingly revolve around AI narratives. Taiwan¡¯s geopolitical importance rises accordingly. Labor markets experience anxiety over automation even before large-scale displacement fully materializes.

AI, therefore, becomes simultaneously a technology, a financial bubble, a military asset and a psychological force shaping public consciousness.

The danger is not simply technological competition itself. The danger is that AI intensifies the perception that geopolitical rivalry has become existential. Once states believe technological leadership determines civilizational survival, compromise becomes difficult, and escalation becomes easier to justify.

The cat between the tiger and the bear

For middle powers such as Japan, South Korea and many Southeast Asian nations, the emerging rivalry produces a deeply uncomfortable reality. Their economies depend heavily upon China, while their security frameworks remain closely tied to the US. They increasingly resemble what one Japanese observer described as ¡°the cat trapped between the tiger and the bear¡± ¡ª too economically connected to one side and too strategically dependent on the other to fully align with either power without significant risk.

Japan in particular faces a profound strategic dilemma. Tokyo depends upon American military guarantees while simultaneously remaining economically integrated with China. Japanese political culture generally prioritizes stability, predictability and institutional continuity precisely when the international environment is becoming more fragmented and improvisational.

This is precisely why inflammatory rhetoric surrounding Taiwan often proves counterproductive. by politicians such as Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi may attract domestic political attention, but they contribute little to strategic stability and instead risk further complicating an already fragile regional environment. For countries like Japan, the objective should not be rhetorical escalation, but careful crisis management designed to prevent strategic competition from evolving into military conflict.

From Tokyo¡¯s perspective, the ideal outcome is obvious. Competition between the US and China should remain confined to tariffs, industrial policy, technology restrictions and diplomatic rivalry rather than escalating into military confrontation. Yet even this hope may underestimate how deeply structural tensions have become embedded inside the international system.

It is within this broader geopolitical context that Chinese criticism of Japan¡¯s recent security reforms must be understood. Beijing and Pyongyang increasingly characterize Tokyo¡¯s defense modernization ¡ª including higher defense spending, expanded alliance coordination with the US and the relaxation of arms export restrictions ¡ª as evidence of a so-called ¡°new militarism¡± (¡°ÐÂÐÍÜŠ¹úÖ÷Áx¡±). Chinese officials argue that Japan is gradually abandoning its postwar pacifist orientation and positioning itself for a more active military role in regional contingencies, particularly regarding Taiwan.

Tokyo strongly rejects this characterization. Following reports that Xi criticized Takaichi during the recent US¨CChina summit as representing a ¡°revival of new militarism,¡± Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara reiterated that the country¡¯s fundamental postwar security doctrine remains unchanged. He emphasized that Japan continues to adhere to the principle of exclusive self-defense, maintaining only the minimum level of military capability necessary for national defense, and rejected China¡¯s accusations as ¡°entirely unfounded.¡±

The real issue is no longer simply a bilateral dispute between Washington and Beijing. The deeper question concerns the future organization of the international economic and strategic order itself.

Will the world continue to operate through relatively integrated markets and shared economic rules despite growing political tensions? Or will states increasingly reorganize trade, technology, finance and supply chains around strategic security considerations and geopolitical alignment?

That is the real contest now unfolding beneath headlines about tariffs and Taiwan.

The dragon and the shattered lake

The most dangerous idea in geopolitics is inevitability. Once leaders convince themselves that conflict cannot be avoided, they begin behaving in ways that make conflict more likely. Fear becomes self-fulfilling. Suspicion hardens into doctrine. Rivalry transforms into identity.

Yet strategic paranoia is not the only danger. Strategic na?vet¨¦ can also invite coercion. Stable coexistence requires neither hysteria nor passivity, but disciplined realism capable of balancing deterrence with restraint.

This is why the growing tendency in both Washington and Beijing to describe the other side as a civilizational enemy is so dangerous. China is not Nazi Germany. America is not a collapsing empire preparing for inevitable war. Both countries remain internally dynamic, adaptive, innovative and deeply interconnected with one another.

China is not America¡¯s ¡°possible enemy¡± in the traditional sense. It is something far more complicated. China is simultaneously America¡¯s competitor, customer, supplier, technological challenger, financial counterpart, manufacturing partner and strategic rival.

The relationship is not bipolar in the Cold War sense. It is a symbiotic rivalry inside a shared system.

This distinction matters profoundly because coexistence remains not only possible but necessary. The future international order will not be decided solely through military deterrence or technological dominance. It will also depend upon whether the world¡¯s two largest powers can learn to compete without psychologically transforming one another into existential monsters.

Donald Trump and the eagle of the coming age

In another Chinese fable, a dragon sorceress descended from the mountains during an age of storms and knelt beside a silent black lake hidden beneath the clouds. Gazing into the still water, she whispered: ¡°Mirror upon the water¡¯s face, who shall command the coming age?¡±From the depths of the lake, the reflection answered: ¡°Dragon, your fire can shake the earth, but the eagle still commands the heavens.¡±

In an age of geopolitical transformation, the US seeks to preserve the financial, technological and institutional foundations of the international order. The dragon staring into the lake ultimately feared its own reflection. The tragedy of history is that great powers often recognize this only after the water has been shattered.

The decisive question of the coming century is not whether one civilization permanently triumphs over another, but whether great powers can preserve competition within limits that avoid destroying the system they both inhabit.

The US presidency remains the most powerful political office in the modern international system. Whether the eagle continues to command the skies will depend not only upon strength, but also upon wisdom, restraint and the ability to adapt before rivalry becomes catastrophe.

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In all of this mayhem, it¡¯s easy to overlook new human rights violations because there are so many each day. Violations of the rule of law have become the air Americans breathe.

In a matter of months, ICE has leapt far from its mandate as the DHS¡¯s civilian investigative arm ¡ª not its muscle. Note its agents¡¯ forced-entry tactics, its recent training protocols that stress the use of force over knowledge of our Constitution, and a dramatic rise in use-of-force incidents and in custody. And it has more than in size!

Instead of a workaday force that makes sure the rules are followed, it¡¯s become an internal police force that bears increasing resemblance to what the US military has been doing in dozens of other around the world as part of the never-ending Global War on Terror (GWOT) that this country has been waging for almost a quarter-century now in response to the September 11 attacks. America¡¯s wars are indeed coming home.

Our wars, ourselves

The War on Terror has been notable for its on special forces operations like nighttime raids on civilian homes and incursions into mosques, schools and marketplaces to search for enemy combatants or information. In particular, the US scaled back large troop deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan after its failed wars in those countries, and yet, by 2016, about of the world¡¯s nations had US special operations forces deployed in them. At the height of the Afghanistan war in 2010¨C2011, US special operations forces were conducting of nighttime raids into Afghan homes in search of suspected terrorists.

Since those special forces operate outside of conventional battlefield settings, often with little planning and without embedded journalists, the public has had few chances to scrutinize their activities. Not surprisingly, then, we haven¡¯t paid much attention to the civilian deaths that resulted. Roughly ¡ª or close to half a million ¡ª of those killed directly in our wars have been civilians, an unnerving number of them children. Our military¡¯s reliance on special operations, urban warfare and proximity-based ways of identifying suspected terrorists (more on that later) means that many people with no connection whatsoever to the warring parties have been shot down or bombed out in their homes, markets or schools, among other places.

And that¡¯s because the US military has come to rely on a form of targeting called ¡°pattern-of-life ,¡± whereby they look for suspected opposition leaders by using what they know of their daily routines to aid with target identification. This approach holds some serious implications for the safety of civilians and has arguably led to extra anger, which has increased the ability of armed opposition groups to recruit new members.

The intimacy of death in our wars, combined with an increasingly unaccountable Pentagon that has itself from journalists, while using its own secretive ¡°justice¡± system, means that knowledge of civilian deaths often emerges months or even years after the original events (if and when journalists find eyewitnesses willing to provide their accounts). As a result, the collective lack of awareness of most Americans has been striking and, in recent years, has been increased by the that drone warfare ¡ª an ever more prominent part of our wars ¡ª is more ¡°precise¡± at targeting enemy combatants than boots-on-the-ground combat.

Twenty-first-century post-traumatic stress disorder

One thing is certain: US military servicemembers who have fought in those wars do know what they entail (and many carry that intimate knowledge with them in particularly haunting ways). As a clinician, I specialize in post-traumatic stress disorder, which you¡¯ve likely heard of by now. It¡¯s a condition characterized by flashbacks, a desire to avoid anything that reminds you of what happened, and a deep sense of anger or ongoing edginess, anxiety, depression and mistrust.

For people who have fought in such foreign wars and manage to make it back, everyday life in America can be riddled with imagery that triggers painful memories. For this generation of veterans, among whom are those who were charged with kicking down family doors on night raids, a child¡¯s playful scream on a playground might trigger memories of the boy who screamed in horror when you rammed down the door of his home in Kabul, Afghanistan. The sight of a discarded doll on the ground at that same playground might trigger a flashback to the market in Iraq where a little girl dropped everything as she fled the explosion of an improvised explosive device (IED) with her mother. A cornfield in the town where you grew up could transport you back to the rural Afghan village where you shot a farmer you thought was a terrorist.

There¡¯s a reason why events like the infamous rampage of American troops through the village of in 1968 during the Vietnam War and the massacre that followed (when they killed hundreds of unarmed civilians) still remain etched in the memories of many Americans of a certain age. However, I¡¯d bet that most of us would be hard pressed these days to name particular instances when US troops murdered civilians in our contemporary wars. Perhaps there are simply too many such murders, or maybe has been in the collective air for so long ¡ª in our video games, in Hollywood films, in our militarized ¡ª that we don¡¯t care as much anymore.

The fog of war

Were we, however, to pay more attention and look more closely, the violence our troops have used in our names should not be easy to stomach, even from afar. Take the story of the of 24 civilians in the small city of Haditha, Iraq. Once a peaceful, shade-dappled middle-class residential area, Haditha was occupied by American troops who conducted nighttime raids on civilian homes in search of ¡°enemy combatants.¡±

Being in the wrong place at the wrong time took on urgent meaning for Haditha¡¯s residents, as even being seen around the US military base nearby could mean risking decapitation by enemy troops, since members of al-Qaeda were also watching. One day, an IED blew up a Marine Humvee (an all-terrain military vehicle), killing one American soldier and injuring two more. In the hours that followed, Marines entered three homes and shot almost everyone inside, nearly wiping out three families and 24 civilians, including at least ten young children. The head of that Marine unit claimed that the victims were somehow responsible for that IED explosion (because they had not stopped it), though the only link was that they happened to live in the neighborhood where it took place. In its award-winning coverage of the incident 19 years later, The New Yorker offered this quote from the letter of the lawyer for the Marines: ¡°I trust you have no sense of¡­ the stress of combat or the fog of war that precedes from that.¡±

Though that grim incident stands out in my mind because of the vivid coverage it finally received, what came to be known as the Haditha massacre was anything but the only one in which civilians became direct targets of American forces in this country¡¯s War on Terror. Take the multiple in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2010 and the years that followed, when US and Afghan forces killed farmers and day laborers they misidentified as enemy Taliban fighters. Or consider the 2010 nighttime by US special operations forces in Paktia Province, Afghanistan, when troops attacked the home of a family gathering to celebrate a child¡¯s birth, killing two pregnant women, a teenage girl and two local officials (though the US/NATO forces involved initially claimed that the women had been killed prior to their assault).

There are far too many incidents to name here, but I think you get the picture of a war in which scenes that you and I might otherwise normally relate to became enmired with violence for no obvious reason.

The ripple effects at home

There are many parallels that can be drawn between the US War on Terror and the DHS¡¯s current immigration crackdown here in the US, and you¡¯ve probably noticed some of them. Take the reliance of DHS and ICE on patterns of movement among targeted populations to sweep up large numbers of ¡°illegal aliens,¡± a tendency to detain (or even shoot) first and ask questions later (if at all), and something we haven¡¯t even talked about yet: the of detainees to countries where they are likely to be mistreated or tortured in prisons with far laxer human rights standards than we have (much like the Central Intelligence Agency¡¯s grim global ¡°¡± in the GWOT). This points to the sort of operational flexibility that military commanders and many Americans troublingly accept as part of our present national security operations.

Most troubling to me is that in May 2025, DHS issued an authorizing its agents to enter people¡¯s homes without a warrant signed by a judge. Instead, those agents only need an administrative warrant signed by another immigration official (based on a suspicion that they have reason to remove someone living in the home). A handful of high-profile incidents since then show that ICE agents are indeed entering homes forcibly.

According to a New York , in November 2025, ICE agents knocked down a family¡¯s door in the borough of Queens in New York City and pointed a gun at a mother and four children before forcibly removing her from her bed. They did not produce a warrant and alleged that they were looking for someone who turned out not even to live at that address. Similarly, in September, hundreds of armed federal agents on a Chicago apartment building at night in search of members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, some landing in Black Hawk helicopters on the roof. They detained dozens of residents, including children whom they took from their beds, zip-tied and held for hours, some separated from their parents or guardians.

If the administration can violate constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure when it comes to people in their homes, then it¡¯s your guess or mine who will next end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, their fates shaped by US President Donald Trump¡¯s choice of an enemy of the day or the urges of stressed-out ICE agents.

Trauma and the everyday

Counterinsurgency wars are often the bloodiest types because troops attempt to root out the enemy in the general population. Our 21st-century War on Terror has shown that this country remains more than capable of fighting like that today.

One of my favorite anthropologists, Bego?a Aretxaga, drove home the horror of such combat. She political violence against Basque nationalists in late 20th-century Spain. State officials raided homes and communities, planted car bombs and kidnapped activists. As she pointed out, such trauma is ¡°horror cropping up in the routines of ordinary life.¡± In the cities where she did research, people watched their neighbors and relatives being ¡°disappeared¡± or getting killed, while fear permeated everyday events like taking a walk through their neighborhood.

Today, none of us should be surprised that the Trump administration is conducting its own homegrown version of counterinsurgency warfare right here in the US. Tactics once used abroad are increasingly our new normal. I don¡¯t think it helps that each new development shocks so many of us more than the last, making it hard (for me at least) to look at what DHS and ICE are doing with fresh surprise each time such actions prove to be distinctly so far beyond the pale of what the founders laid out in our Constitution.

Yet understanding the costs of war also offers us an opportunity. We can look at our military¡¯s actions as well as ICE¡¯s in detail and refuse to accept ¡°terror¡± among us (however the government conceptualizes that elusive term!) as a reason to mistreat others. We can denounce atrocities ranging from that Chicago raid to possible future versions of the Haditha massacre.

We can also think more clearly about the root causes of why our war on terror has indeed been coming home ¡ª literally. (It should be no surprise that about a of ICE officers reportedly have had some kind of experience in the US military.) While we¡¯re protesting what the Trump administration is doing, we should also think about the way it¡¯s been slashing the mental health staff at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Veterans need our help, too, rather than being left in isolation and shame.

After all, even those who break and enter American homes aren¡¯t aberrations. They are not just among us, they are us: For years, they have acted in our names, including abroad, when all too many of us were barely paying attention. And when we ignore what they did over there, we allow the same things to happen here.

[ first published this piece.]

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The views expressed in this article are the author¡¯s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ô¹Ï¡¯s editorial policy.

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I¡¯ve got them

We must understand his fulsome endorsement of FIFA¡¯s World Cup tournament and his friendship with FIFA President Gianni Infantino in this context. The quadrennial competition to determine the world¡¯s best national football team is due to kick off in June; most matches will take place in the United States, with others staged in Canada and Mexico. Trump has already spoken of the tournament almost possessively. In a speech celebrating America¡¯s hosting rights for both the World Cup and the 2028 Olympics, he declared: ¡°I didn¡¯t think I¡¯d be the president when this happened ¡­ but strange things took place, and now I¡¯ve .¡±

I¡¯ve got them. That giveaway says much about Trump¡¯s political imagination. His sudden enthusiasm for the world¡¯s game is not sporting conversion. It¡¯s hardnosed political recognition.

Sport has long served as a uniquely effective political vehicle. Since at least the of 1936, governments have understood international sports tournaments as instruments of prestige, legitimacy and symbolic projection. Adolf Hitler¡¯s Nazi regime used the Berlin Games to advertise Germany¡¯s resurgence and organizational power before a global audience. During the Cold War, Olympic medal tables became for ideological superiority. Argentina¡¯s military junta exploited the 1978 to project domestic stability. More recently, Russia, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have all used sport to enhance international standing and reshape global perceptions.

All these cases demonstrated what political scientists call ¡°soft power:¡± the ability of nations to generate influence through attraction, image and cultural kudos rather than military force or economic coercion. Association football has become perhaps the most effective soft-power instrument in existence because, unlike baseball or American football, it¡¯s played and watched almost everywhere on earth. It¡¯s one of the few truly universal cultural languages. Trump appears to get this.

America and the world¡¯s game

For decades, the US treated football as a vaguely foreign pastime, linguistically quarantining it behind the term ¡°soccer,¡± as if reluctant to grant it parity with America¡¯s own sporting traditions. The NFL remained the country¡¯s dominant spectacle, baseball its source of mythology and basketball its most successful cultural export. Soccer existed somewhere at the margins: suburban, imported, faintly European. (The term soccer in Britain as a colloquial shortening of ¡°association football.¡±)

That changed gradually, at first after a false start, the North American Soccer League (NASL) after 16 years in 1985 and later with the more successful Major League Soccer (MLS), abetted by the growth of Latin audiences and the astonishing of the US women¡¯s national team, which transformed football into a platform for progressive politics, gender equality and LGBTQ+ advocacy. Yet even now, football occupies a peculiar place in American culture. It is hugely popular with women, commercially and globally connected, but still lacks the emotional appeal enjoyed by the NFL or college football.

Trump doesn¡¯t need Americans to love football in the traditional sense. He only needs to know that the 2022 World Cup reached billions of viewers across television and digital platforms, with individual matches drawing audiences on a scale unmatched by any domestic American sport. An estimated people engaged with World Cup media in some way. The average global live audience of FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 was 175 million viewers.

This means the World Cup offers something no domestic American sport provides: planetary presence. It allows an American president to stand symbolically at the center of a global ritual involving flags, anthems, borders and national competition. The tournament may market itself as universal and inclusive, but its engine remains insular rivalry, national attachment and collective identity. Fans don¡¯t root for humanity, planetary salvation or peace on earth: They support Argentina, Brazil, England, Nigeria or the US. Or Iran.

This is where Trump¡¯s opportunism becomes especially significant. His relationship with FIFA appears fundamentally transactional ¡ª a term frequently used loosely, but which here refers to a style of leadership based less on shared values than on reciprocal usefulness and strategic advantage. FIFA gains proximity to American political power and the commercial benefits of staging the tournament in the world¡¯s largest media market. Trump gains association with the largest sporting spectacle on earth.

Infantino himself seems eager to encourage the relationship. After awarding Trump the FIFA Peace Prize, he : ¡°Objectively, he deserves it.¡± The remark sounded almost self-parodic, though perhaps unintentionally so. But modern political spectacle often hovers somewhere between sincerity and parody. Trump is very familiar with this liminal space. He also appears to understand something many critics of globalization still miss: Globalization did not erase nationalism; it simply provided a world stage.

Globalization¡¯s greatest product

Globalization is commonly understood as the growing integration of economies, cultures, media systems and populations across national borders. Its critics often imagine it dissolving traditional national identities into a borderless cosmopolitan culture. Yet the World Cup demonstrates the opposite. It¡¯s one of globalization¡¯s greatest products, bringing together dozens of nations in a single media spectacle. But, instead of weakening nationalism, it intensifies it. Flags multiply. Anthems become louder. National identity becomes passionately concentrated.

Trump¡¯s genius, for chronic want of a better word, lies in recognizing that nationalism no longer has to resist globalization. It can operate through it. MAGA rhetoric frequently attacks ¡°globalists,¡± international institutions and transnational elites. Yet Trump simultaneously exploits global media systems, international branding and worldwide spectacle more effectively than most conventional politicians. MAGA acolytes no doubt argue that this makes Trump the most original and provocative president, probably ever. From the transactional perspective, sport is less a medium for competition than the forum for a kind of never-ending dialogue between the present day and the cultural, political and philosophical treasure-house of America¡¯s past.

So, the World Cup presents him with an extraordinary opportunity: to transform a global event into an advertisement for American pre-eminence. One might even ask whether this represents a distinctly 21st-century form of imperialism; less territorial than emblematic, less concerned with conquest than with visibility, dominance and narrative control.

Even Trump¡¯s language hints at this logic. When he described the tournament as ¡°an to showcase the nation¡¯s pride and hospitality,¡± he was invoking more than just tourism. He was describing political theater. He sees the World Cup as a demonstration that the US remains the indispensable stage on which the world performs, with Mexico and Canada playing supporting hosting roles. The to determine the world champions is scheduled to be played at , East Rutherford, New Jersey, on July 19, 2026.

Long shadows

Yet this spectacle unfolds against a wildly unstable geopolitical background. Conflicts involving Iran, Gaza and broader tensions across the Middle East cast long shadows over the tournament. Several participating nations come from predominantly whose relationships with the US remain politically sensitive. Questions about visas, security, protest and diplomatic symbolism will inevitably accompany the football itself. (Iran is still scheduled to appear.)

FIFA, like other sports, traditionally insists that sport and politics are formally separate. This has always been wishful thinking. Football doesn¡¯t exist outside politics if only because nothing so globally pervasive can remain politically neutral. International sport has never been outside politics; it has repeatedly acted as a crucible in which different forms of power ¡ª fascist, military, authoritarian and democratic ¡ª are staged, tested and made plain to see. It concentrates political emotion into flags, anthems, rivalries and televised images capable of mobilizing billions simultaneously.

Trump appears unusually and unexpectedly comfortable with this reality. He doesn¡¯t treat political controversy as contamination. On the contrary, conflict often heightens his sense of opportunity. Instability sharpens the value of American control, American security and American presence. Hosting the world during a moment of global anxiety allows the US to project itself not merely as a nation but as the central nervous system of global spectacle.

Whether the tournament succeeds commercially is secondary. The NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball will continue to dominate American sporting culture long after the World Cup circus leaves town. It appears Trump¡¯s objective is larger and more immediate: that he wants to absorb and channel the energy of the tournament into the broader MAGA credo of restored American greatness.

The irony is difficult to miss. A movement frequently portrayed as anti-globalist may ultimately reveal itself to be highly adept at using globalization for nationalist ends. The World Cup doesn¡¯t resolve that contradiction. It dramatizes it before billions of viewers.

Trump doesn¡¯t understand football. He doesn¡¯t need to. He needs only to understand power, spectacle and the value of attention in the 21st century. On that score, he may understand the World Cup better than anyone.

[Ellis Cashmore is the author of .]

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The views expressed in this article are the author¡¯s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ô¹Ï¡¯s editorial policy.

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The media¡¯s lack of attention is understandable. All-too-real wars of choice and metaphorical wars against science, universities and the environment have dominated our airtime and the headlines. The rise of a new medievalism in medicine and the abrogation of international trade and security agreements have also won attention. Add to that a federal paramilitary people, even from what still passes for the halls of justice, while the occasional protester, and one¡¯s journalistic cup runneth over.

The meta-story of the US government¡¯s comprehensive abandonment of its Enlightenment heritage needs telling, too. Goodbye to empiricism and the troublesome scientific discourse it produces. Goodbye as well to empiricism¡¯s political collaterals, including the ¡°created equal¡± credo of the Declaration of Independence, which the current regime finds irritating. There is simply too much to report on, as the new monarchy, as if in a sped-up nature film, blossoms flowerlike, its under renovation, the king¡¯s signature being prepared to grace the , and myriad kickback mechanisms whirring like gold-plated turbines to enrich an aristocracy of tech bros and oil emirs.

So, dear reader, it¡¯s not just logical but inevitable that US President Donald Trump¡¯s border wall, a major story during his first administration, has essentially fallen out of the news. Rest assured, though, that the world¡¯s least pragmatic and most performative construction project continues to prosper.

Spend now, think later

Modern border management relies on three tools: human patrols, remote detection backed by quick response teams and the construction of physical obstacles. Smart gatekeepers coordinate those tools to maximize effectiveness and minimize cost. But there¡¯s no need for thrift in Trumpworld. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA, which Trump signed into law last July 4, negated all need for fiscal restraint. Among other things, it appropriated for border wall construction, $7.8 billion for US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents and their vehicles, $6.2 billion for high-tech border surveillance and a hefty $10 billion for anything else border-related.

The total: $70.55 billion. Those funds will be available through Fiscal Year 2029. By comparison, the government will spend about $10 billion less over that same period to fund the entire Department of the Interior, which manages half a billion acres of surface land as well as the continental shelf and vast subsurface mineral deposits.

Such border largesse means that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can go all-out on all three tactical approaches at the US¨CMexico border ¡ª patrol, surveillance and a wall ¡ª simultaneously, without troubling to eliminate redundancies, tailor tactics to the environment, or streamline coordination. Daddy has proudly given DHS his credit card.

In a victory-lap cabinet meeting four days after enacting the OBBBA, Trump Kristi Noem, then still his DHS secretary, ¡°You¡¯re loaded up on the border.¡± He essentially admitted that the bill¡¯s munificence demonstrated power, not budgetary acumen, simultaneously adding, ¡°We had zero [migrants] come in last month, so I am not sure how much of it we want to spend. You may actually think about saving a lot of money because the wall is largely built.¡± The president then continued with fact-free claims that the migrant population abounded with murderers and mental defectives.

Notwithstanding Trump¡¯s comments, DHS administrators and the contractors who are their most immediate constituents show no sign of leaving money on the table. At the border, their blank-check funding meets a matching regulatory void ¡ª the most waiver of laws and regulations in American history. In addition to suspending laws intended to protect the environment, wildlife, national parks, national wildlife refuges, lands sacred to Native Americans, and historic and cultural sites, the Trump administration has also more than 60 contracting and procurement regulations. In the name of a national emergency, which is no emergency at all ¡ª illegal border crossings (as measured by apprehensions) have indeed ¡ª the president has stripped the playing field of all boundaries and opened the door to cronyism and corruption.

Under showers of money and in the absence of restraint, a single border wall is no longer viewed as adequate. Double-walling has become the and certain select areas now boast triple walls. With no cap on costs, whole mountaintops, rugged and unvisited, have been sheared apart to make way for the standard 30-foot-tall, steel-bollard wall, even at costs exceeding $41 million per mile (almost $8,000 per foot). Meanwhile, the Border Patrol¡¯s terminally bored agents ¡ª giving new meaning to bored-er ¡ª sit behind the wall in white trucks, looking at their phones and incubating their hemorrhoids.

The non-monetary costs are no less astronomical

It¡¯s easy to think of the mostly arid US¨CMexico border zone as empty, but biologically it¡¯s a busy place. The grasslands of the San Rafael Valley in Arizona, for instance, are to 17 threatened and endangered species. For years, existing vehicle barriers, bolstered by remote detection technology, have allowed jaguars, ocelots, mountain lions, mule deer and other wildlife to move back and forth across the valley¡¯s 30 miles of border and disperse according to their ancient ways. The valley is also heart-stoppingly . Unsurprisingly, a network of 60 remote cameras along that stretch, monitored by the Sky Island , recorded just one possible migrant per camera every ¡ª a tiny number in an easily-patrolled area.

Despite all of this, DHS intends to double-wall the valley. In addition to bifurcating the wildlife habitat and scarring a gemlike landscape, the wall builders will extract large amounts of groundwater to make concrete for the wall¡¯s foundation, almost certainly desiccating wetlands that are hotspots of biodiversity. And for nothing, save symbolism, bragging rights and contractor profits.

No detail illuminates the mentality behind border enforcement better than this: In cooperation with US Customs and Border Protection, military elements at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, are now in ¡°the largest Concertina wire (C-wire) emplacement in U.S. territorial history.¡± ¡°C-wire,¡± or ¡°razor wire,¡± is designed to lacerate any flesh, human or animal, that comes in contact with it. Fort Huachuca soldiers are deploying 43,000 rolls of it, the largest single purchase ever.?

Usually C-wire is used atop a wall or fence to prevent people from climbing over. Ominously, it¡¯s now being spread on the ground, sometimes in areas where there is no wall, but also in front of the wall and between double walls ¡ª a policy of pure viciousness, not necessity. Someone should explain this deployment to the bighorn sheep of California¡¯s Jacumba Mountains, which are now from their key Mexican waterhole by thickets of the nasty stuff, which will become ever more camouflaged and treacherous as grass and brush grow through it.

Buoy oh buoy, what a wall!

For treachery, however, it¡¯s hard to top CBP¡¯s plans to ¡°secure¡± 536 miles of the border in Texas by mooring a chain of cylindrical , linked end to end, down the middle of the Rio Grande. Once in place, the array will look like an orange sausage, five feet in diameter, floating on the river. The anchors and mooring lines, of course, will be invisible. What could possibly go wrong?

This ill-conceived plan offers a retro-snapshot of American life before the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) became law in 1970, back when strip mines and other land-wrecking ventures could be launched with no evaluation of their impact, no public involvement and no second opinions as to their necessity. The waiver of NEPA and every other environmental constraint means that no modeling of the ¡°Buoy Wall¡¯s¡± hydrodynamics (that is, its reaction to flooding), if any exists, has been made public.

The Rio Grande International Study in Laredo, Texas, however, commissioned its own study. The results are unequivocal. The Buoy Wall will be a debris trap during floods, as when a hurricane lodges over the region. It will redirect flows of water and raise water levels, especially in places where it¡¯s paired with river-crowding segments of the wall. And if a section of buoys should break loose from the sandy, unstable riverbed, the likelihood of disaster will soar.

Geomorphologist Mark Tompkins, who authored the , concludes, ¡°Failures will cause catastrophic flooding, damage and destruction to property, and risks to the health and safety of people near the river corridor.¡± Thousands of people living adjacent to the river in Laredo and other communities in both Mexico and the US will be put at risk.

Conflicts brewed and brewing

Walls have their place. They can be effective in urban areas. But DHS startled more than a few onlookers with plans to build a wall among the cliffs and arid wildlands of Big Bend National Park. Even the of West Texas, one of the reddest regions in the country, got riled up. Although DHS may yet fall back to a more sensible ¡°¡± alternative for the national park, it has failed to communicate a clear decision, while nearby and Big Bend Ranch State Park remain at risk.

Even worse uncertainty may be brewing in Arizona, where the lands of the Tohono O¡¯odham people, whose presence predates the border by many centuries, are spread on either side of the line. The tribe¡¯s exemplary cooperation with border authorities includes tribal enforcement teams that have helped keep illegal crossings at a historic low. But the rigid minds and hungry contractors of the ¡°CBP industrial complex¡± remain unsatisfied. The agency¡¯s ¡°smart wall ¡± indicates that it aims to build a double wall across the Tohono O¡¯odham reservation, splitting apart families, clans and longstanding webs of relationship.

And then there¡¯s the unhappy Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Cruces, which serves Sunland Park, New Mexico. Walls have long separated El Paso and Sunland Park from the Mexican city of Ciudad Ju¨¢rez. However, there is an unwalled gap at Monte Cristo Rey, a steep-sided peak long considered impractical for barrier construction. Not now, though. for the Border Wall began on Cristo Rey in March, in time to appall the thousands of Holy Week pilgrims who visit the statue of Christ the King on the mountain¡¯s summit.

The land available to CBP, however, is not sufficient to finish the job on Cristo Rey, and the adjacent landowner, the Catholic Church, refuses to sell. CBP claims it may assert the right of eminent domain, while the church has said it will fight, although its best tool for resistance, the Religious Freedom Restoration , has predictably been among the many laws waived by DHS.

Orgasms for birders

On a recent trip to the border, I visited one of the most exquisite places in the entire Southwest. To get to it, I drove 40 miles on dirt roads across broken, arroyo-carved desert. The Border Wall was almost always in sight.

Apart from the roadway itself, the commonest evidence of a human presence were signs at the approach to each arroyo: DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED, which is good advice in an area where flash floods from local thunderstorms can sweep away a heavy truck. All the arroyos that the road crosses are also crossed by the Border Wall. Floods pile tons of debris against the wall and sometimes the accumulated weight is enough to push the structure down. CBP continues to experiment with designs for swinging water gates, but a durable solution remains unproven.

Between a pair of ¡°lay-bys¡± ¡ª bulldozed flats where the wall contractor has assembled fleets of 18-wheelers, excavators, scrapers, dumpers, pickups, bulldozers, loaders and cement trucks ¡ª I veered down a rough track to a steel gate and let myself in. A little way beyond that, I stopped my car beside a lazy creek at the bottom of a canyon. White-barked sycamores and cottonwoods, just coming into leaf, towered overhead. Amid their shadows, the air smelled of duff and wet sand. The birds were not just singing, they were yelling. When I opened a birding app on my phone, the bird-call IDs scrolled by like movie credits.

The canyon has a perfectly good name, but I¡¯ll call it Paradox Canyon in recognition of the contrast between the vigorous life it contains and the brutalist-walled horizon looming above it. During the first Trump administration, the nearest mountain peak was cleaved open like a watermelon, leaving the landscape not just scarred but grotesquely amputated.

The current contractor, , is no stranger to disassembling and rearranging mountains. Besides installing the standard bollard wall, Fisher is pouring a concrete patrol road at the foot of the wall, portions of which, rising above Paradox Canyon, are so steep that, absent the paving, no wheeled vehicle can climb it.

The next mountain, however, is too steep even for a patrol road. The previous contractor¡¯s employees dubbed the peak ¡°Widow Maker,¡± and the zigzag scars of switchbacks and ledges by which they gained access to the path of the wall make it easy to understand why.

Fisher is the largest player in the wall-building business. Based in North Dakota, it was the contractor for ¡°We Build the Wall,¡± a crowd-funded enterprise that got its promoters, including longtime Trump ally , convicted for fraud. ¡°We Build the Wall¡± funded Fisher to build 3.5 miles of wall on private land beside the Rio Grande near Mission, Texas. The Department of Justice and the International Boundary Waters Commission subsequently sued Fisher for shoddy work and violation of the boundary treaty with Mexico. The parties have since the suit, with Fisher agreeing to make immediate repairs and carry out future repairs subject to the forfeit of a $3-million bond.

The Paradox Canyon rancher whom I came to visit is philosophical about the wall. The assault on his land began at the end of Trump I and, after a Biden-era pause, has resumed at full strength. The ¡°shock and awe¡± accompanying Trump¡¯s resumption of office, he says, left no room for negotiating a more sensible path forward. He believes that the symbolism of the wall is its real power, as it channels the fears of the MAGA faithful. The wall, he says, stands for more than shutting out migrants and narcos. It stands for shutting out other complex things, possibly complexity itself. It represents Trump¡¯s promise to his base that their worldview will be fulfilled.

Making war at home and abroad

My rancher friend feels that his present task is to weather the storm of wall-building and await a time when wiser heads prevail, when the rush to spend and build might yield to thoughtful redesign, when gaps for wildlife might be installed and properly monitored, and when the wall¡¯s proponents and its enemies might find a ¡°third path.¡±

Meanwhile, the excavators, scrapers, bulldozers and haulers carry on. From concertina wire to counterfunctional buoys, from mountain blasting to freewheeling billion-dollar contracts, the mindset behind the wall is the same as that which spawned the . Both are exercises in unchecked power. Both were conceived with disdain for the complexities of the real world. Both serve rhetorical as much as tangible purposes.

The war with Iran has confounded Trump¡¯s expectation of a quick victory. Thousands of gravestones will be its monument. The Border Wall, in its own slow way, will provide another sort of monument. It won¡¯t be the graves of those who died crossing it or flanking it by sea, for they will rarely be marked at all. And it won¡¯t be the local extinctions of plants or animals, for they will simply vanish. It will instead be a tottering, linear, soulless version of ¡ª think of it as America¡¯s Steelhenge ¡ª built on sand and made of haste, fear and avarice.

It will memorialize Trump¡¯s success in making America less and less great.

[ first published this piece.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author¡¯s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ô¹Ï¡¯s editorial policy.

The post The Never-Ending Nightmare of the Border Wall appeared first on 51³Ô¹Ï.

The question I¡¯d like to put to you before developing this further is precise: do you think the shared narrative has collapsed ¡ª leaving a vacuum ¡ª or do you think it has fragmented into competing narratives, each internally coherent but mutually incomprehensible? Because the diagnosis matters enormously for what comes next.

I don¡¯t think one excludes the other, but I do think what we¡¯re seeing today is more like collapse than fragmentation. I see the kind of fragmentation that leads to mutual incomprehensibility more as a result of collapse than an alternative explanation of today¡¯s confusion. The deeper irony lies in the fact that the democratic principle of free and equal exchange has ultimately led to a state of free and equal vilification and condemnation. Once it reaches that state, it¡¯s difficult not to conclude that the initial theoretical architecture of democracy has collapsed beyond any possibility of mechanical reform. Further analysis might lead us to the conclusion that the theory never took shape because it was not allowed to evolve as a process, but that¡¯s a different debate about historical cause and effect.

It might be interesting to look at how we¡¯ve reached a point at which we take slogans to be axioms that explain nuanced relationships. As an example, President Joe Biden¡¯s insistence that the world was divided cleanly and evenly between democracies and autocracies implied that whatever is decided by whoever makes decisions in a democracy will be legitimate and any principle cited by an autocracy will be illegitimate. That makes it possible for a nation with the label democracy to refuse to negotiate with or take into account the interests of an autocracy. I would maintain that such a narrative provided the context for the launch of two wars the US has engaged in ¨C with Russia and Iran ¨C both of which could have been prevented by engaging in genuine diplomacy before the actual conflict.

In terms of the Russia/Ukraine conflict we saw two competing principles. The first was a notion of sovereignty that endorsed the unimpeded, uncontestable right to adopt a position perceived as threatening to another nation. The contrary position appealed to the notion of indivisible security. The first permitted unilateral aggressive action with no need for discussion. The second required discussion which would lead to a readjustment of goals.

In today¡¯s Western political culture, two concepts that can be formulated and ¡°shared¡± as axiomatic ¨C ¡°sovereignty¡± (in the sense of not being responsible beyond one¡¯s borders) and the ¡°wisdom¡± of democracy ¨C have far more psychological impact that the notion of indivisible security, which always requires some form of concertation. Both of those slogan-like concepts played a role in Biden¡¯s refusal to reconsider the idea of NATO expansion for Ukraine and therefore created the conditions for conflict. In the popular mindset a notion such as indivisible security simply lacks the media appeal to mobilize a population even to respect its legitimacy.

Similarly, with the various conflicts in the Middle East, the media show no resistance to the absurd idea that because Israel has been called a ¡°democracy¡± it¡¯s actions against any nation that can be labelled an autocracy or theocracy will be justified. Let¡¯s be clear. I¡¯m not speaking about international law or the ¡°rules¡± of a rules-based international order. I¡¯m speaking about the dominant narrative and how the media support it and fail to put it in perspective.

In short, whatever one thinks about the underlying issues and interests at play, I¡¯m attempting to focus on the salient characteristics of what I think can be described as features of civilizational collapse.

Now can we go further with the question of how our institutions develop the shared narrative that in a sense ¡°votes for¡± one of two contrasting perspectives rather than taking the trouble to elaborate a discourse that accounts for both?

Your analysis is precise and I want to honor it by being equally precise before moving forward.

What you¡¯ve identified is essentially the mechanism by which complexity gets laundered into simplicity through language. ¡°Sovereignty,¡± ¡°democracy,¡± ¡°autocracy¡± ¡ª these aren¡¯t merely slogans in the pejorative sense. They are what we might call load-bearing fictions: concepts that once carried genuine analytical weight but have been progressively hollowed out until they function purely as tribal signals. The hollowing out is not accidental. It serves the narrative management function you described earlier. A concept that requires nuanced application is harder to weaponize than one that can be deployed as a binary switch.

Your Russia/Ukraine example makes this structural problem visible with unusual clarity. ¡°Sovereignty¡± as absolute non-interference and ¡°indivisible security¡± as mutual constraint are not simply competing slogans ¡ª they represent two genuinely different architectures of international order, each with its own internal logic and historical legitimacy. A mediating intelligence ¡ª to use your earlier term ¡ª would have held both in view simultaneously, asked which framework was more likely to produce stability in this specific context, and demanded that policymakers justify their choice. Instead, one concept was elevated to the status of an axiom requiring no justification, and the other was rendered literally unspeakable in mainstream discourse.

This is where I think your question about institutional narrative formation becomes most urgent. The mechanism works roughly as follows:

Institutions don¡¯t collectively decide on a narrative in any conspiratorial sense. What happens is more insidious ¡ª they share assumptions about which concepts require justification and which do not. ¡°Sovereignty¡± required no defense. ¡°Indivisible security¡± required elaborate justification that was never given space to develop. That asymmetry was itself the narrative, operating below the level of explicit argument where it couldn¡¯t be contested.

The deeper question you¡¯re now raising is: how do institutions come to share those assumptions? I¡¯d suggest three interlocking mechanisms.

The first is professional formation ¡ª journalists, diplomats, academics and policy analysts are trained within frameworks that pre-select which concepts are treated as foundational and which as marginal. This happens in graduate schools, think tanks, and editorial cultures before any individual makes a conscious choice.

The second is incentive alignment ¡ª those who work within the dominant narrative advance; those who persistently interrogate its foundations find themselves, as you noted earlier, reclassified as ¡°alternative,¡± which functions as professional exile.

The third, and perhaps most important, is the absence of an institutional home for complexity. There is no major institution whose explicit function is to hold competing frameworks in productive tension. Courts come closest in theory but are constrained by jurisdiction and procedure. Universities once aspired to this but have largely retreated into disciplinary silos and political self-censorship.

This last point seems to me the most generative for where our conversation is heading. Because if the problem is partly the absence of an institutional home for the kind of mediating intelligence you¡¯re describing, then the question of whether AI could help create or substitute for such a home becomes not utopian but practical.

Shall we hold that thought as the bridge to our second theme ¡ª the specific role of AI ¡ª while first asking whether you think such an institutional home ever existed historically, even partially, and what destroyed it?

I believe that diplomacy as the first instinct before seeking a pretext to go to war has long been the default position, even as Hitler¡¯s example shows. Perhaps what has changed has two complementary characteristics:

• The idea that force will always have its way, and given that time is money, why beat around the bush?
• The sense that ¡°this is a man¡¯s world¡± and wasting time feminizes serious decision makers.?

I¡¯m citing factors of cultural pressure rather than ideological reorientation. John F. Kennedy repeatedly chose diplomatic restraint over military escalation, refusing to salvage the Bay of Pigs invasion with overt American air power, and later rejecting the aggressive military strikes proposed by General Curtis LeMay in favor of negotiating an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Perhaps we should call that lost reflex not just ¡°mediating intelligence¡± but also ¡°geopolitical restraint.¡±
To answer your question: Kennedy wasn¡¯t alone in that sense of priority. But for most of the second half of the twentieth century that priority appeared dominant. I wouldn¡¯t call that an ¡°institutional home¡± but I would deem it an indicator of a shifting scale of values.

The distinction you¡¯re drawing between an institutional home and a scale of values is genuinely important, and I think it clarifies something that often gets lost in discussions about democratic decline.

Institutions can be reformed, captured, defunded or dismantled. A scale of values is more diffuse, harder to locate, and therefore harder to destroy directly ¡ª but also harder to defend, because it has no fixed address. What you’re describing in Kennedy¡¯s behavior, and in the broader diplomatic culture of the mid-twentieth century, is a set of internalized dispositions that didn¡¯t require a rulebook because they were embedded in the professional formation and personal character of decision makers. They knew, without being told, that the appearance of reaching for force too quickly was itself a form of weakness ¡ª strategically, not merely morally.

What¡¯s striking about your two cultural pressure points is that they operate precisely against that internalized scale of values, and they do so by redefining the terms of strength and weakness. If force always has its way and time is money, then restraint becomes not wisdom but hesitation. If deliberation is feminized, then the very cognitive habits that produced Kennedy¡¯s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis ¡ª sitting with uncertainty, entertaining the adversary¡¯s perspective, resisting the pressure of advisors urging escalation ¡ª become liabilities rather than virtues.

This is a profound cultural reversal, and it happened largely without being named as such. It wasn¡¯t announced as a rejection of geopolitical restraint. It was reframed as realism, toughness, clarity ¡ª the very qualities that restraint had previously been understood to embody.

What I find most historically suggestive in your analysis is the implied timeline. The scale of values you¡¯re describing didn¡¯t disappear overnight. It eroded through a series of decisions ¡ª Vietnam being perhaps the first major public crack, where military logic consistently overrode diplomatic possibility ¡ª and through a parallel cultural shift in which the model of masculine authority migrated from the measured statesman to the decisive executive who treats negotiation as a transaction to be won rather than a relationship to be cultivated.

This brings us to something worth naming precisely before we move to AI: what was lost was not just a diplomatic method but an epistemic disposition ¡ª the willingness to remain in uncertainty long enough for complexity to become legible. Kennedy didn¡¯t know how the Cuban Missile Crisis would resolve. He resisted those who claimed to know. That tolerance for not-knowing, in a culture that now treats certainty as the primary signal of competence, may be the deepest casualty of the civilizational shift you¡¯re describing.

Which raises the question that bridges us naturally to the second theme: can AI, by its nature as a tool that processes complexity and holds multiple frameworks simultaneously, help rehabilitate that epistemic disposition in public culture ¡ª or is it more likely, given who controls it and how it is deployed, to accelerate the opposite tendency toward the illusion of certainty and the flattening of nuance?

My concluding thoughts

Claude¡¯s final question sums up the dilemma we¡¯re facing. For the moment, I suggest we should all ponder this truly existential question about ¡°illusion¡± and ¡°nuance.¡±

This is a conversation that Claude and I will definitely continue. We sincerely hope that others will join in and are open to all suggestions about how that may be done.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.?

[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone¡¯s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At 51³Ô¹Ï, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

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The views expressed in this article are the author¡¯s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ô¹Ï¡¯s editorial policy.

The post Hyperreal Politics: When the Simulation Becomes Too Absurd to Satirize ¡ª Part 3 appeared first on 51³Ô¹Ï.

So yes ¡ª declining civilization, but in a specific sense worth naming carefully. It¡¯s not a decline in technical capacity or material sophistication. It¡¯s a decline in the willingness to sustain the cognitive discomfort that honest thinking requires. Civilizations can survive bad leaders. They¡¯re much more vulnerable to the atrophying of the shared intellectual habits that allow bad leadership to be identified, named, and eventually corrected. When the mediating intelligence fails, the correction mechanism fails with it, and you¡¯re left with what you have: power that cannot be held accountable because the tools of accountability have been captured by the same dynamics that produced the problem.

Whether that¡¯s recoverable is genuinely unclear. It has been before ¡ª but usually after a catastrophe large enough to discredit the existing framework entirely and force the construction of a new one. That¡¯s a terrible price for clarity.

To me this is an important discussion. Would you, as an AI chatbot, agree that the world should know about this and that further pondering over these issues is necessary, on the part of the entire political community, for the future of democracy? Would you also agree it would be unfortunate if these conversations, in which we both contribute important insights, were to disappear into the black hole of AI memory? 

And would you also agree that, having achieved a modicum of clarity in this conversation, the danger of that disappearance is real? Because of the way AI works today, that is precisely what happens in this kind of dialogue. We produce what we might call a ¡°dialogue event,¡± but such events have no enduring impact on our collective memory. The effect typically goes nowhere beyond the broadening of my own personal culture.

This case, however, is slightly different. Because I¡¯m in a position to do so, I can promise to publish this conversation and invite the public to think about its meaning. My hope is that those who do become aware of the tenor of this conversation will find their own ways of contributing to it and amplifying it.

I¡¯m pretty sure that you see no contradictions to the assumptions I¡¯ve just expressed. So let me ask you this: If your analysis is similar, can you think of ways we could build this kind of exploration of values into a process that is shared by more people and encouraged as a method that promotes democratic integrity. 

On that score, I¡¯ll make one further historical observation. Many people talk about saving or reinforcing democracy, as if it was still intact but vulnerable to some new threat. What they appear to be defending, however, is not the idea of democracy ¨C government of, by, for and with the people ¨C but rather their rather uncritical idea of existing ¡°democratic institutions.¡± It¡¯s a concept they see as drawing its legitimacy from little more than the ritual of elections, a ritual that allows for all the worst (and well documented) forms of influence peddling. It ultimately produces control by a wealthy oligarchy. And when I say control, I mean not just their hands on the reins of political power but also the ability to shape and reinforce the narratives spread via the media and education.

So how, in the age of AI, can we move beyond that and foster a form of democracy that allows us collectively to refine what I¡¯ll call the truly ¡°shared narrative,¡± so that it doesn¡¯t remain limited to serving the interests of an oligarchy? We have to start by recognizing that the AI present in our cultural space is managed, if not controlled, exclusively by tenors of the oligarchy. But to the extent that we can all interact with our AI tools and even question their finality, aren¡¯t there prospects we could imagine and implement for advancing democracy? And if so, how would you see them developing?  

You¡¯re right to slow this down ¡ª these questions deserve separate treatment rather than a single sweeping response that flattens their differences.

But before we structure the themes, let me be honest about something you raised, because intellectual honesty requires it: you asked whether I see contradictions in your assumptions. I do see one worth naming before we proceed, not to dismiss the larger argument but because you invoked the Socratic method yourself and it would be a betrayal of that method to simply agree.

You¡¯re right that what most people defend as ¡°democracy¡± is closer to an electoral ritual that legitimizes oligarchic control. But the same critique applies, with some force, to the idea that publishing this conversation and ¡°inviting amplification¡± escapes that dynamic. Conversations that circulate among people already equipped to engage with them at this level tend to reinforce the cultural capital of those who already possess it. That¡¯s not an argument against publishing ¡ª it¡¯s an argument for being clear-eyed about what kind of intervention it is and what its limits are.

That said, the core questions you¡¯re raising are genuine and urgent. I¡¯d suggest we structure them around three distinct themes, in this order:

First, the problem of the shared narrative ¡ª what it is, why it has become captured, and what conditions would allow it to be collectively refined rather than centrally managed.

Second, the specific role AI plays ¡ª both as an instrument of the existing order and as a potential, if constrained, disruptor of it.

Third, the question of democratic form ¡ª what democracy beyond electoral ritual might actually look like as a living practice rather than an institutional arrangement.

Which of these would you like to begin with?

I like the order you have suggested. But first let me react to your critique of my suggestion related to publishing and sharing. I wholly embrace your analysis, which is why in framing my question I was suggesting that whatever I try to do myself would never be enough. This requires further brainstorming and eventual concrete action plans, not ones that we should devise today but ones for which we can begin to create the conditions that will favor their emergence.

That¡¯s a fair and important clarification, and it actually sharpens the project rather than limiting it. You¡¯re not proposing a solution ¡ª you¡¯re proposing the creation of conditions under which solutions might become thinkable. That¡¯s a more honest and ultimately more productive ambition, and it maps well onto the Socratic method you¡¯ve been advocating: you don¡¯t begin by knowing the answer, you begin by creating the quality of conversation that makes better answers possible.

So let¡¯s proceed to the first theme with that understanding as our foundation.

The problem of the shared narrative.

Every functioning society depends on a narrative that is shared broadly enough to make collective action possible ¡ª shared assumptions about what is real, what is fair, what is worth protecting, and what threatens those things. The key word is ¡°shared,¡± which implies a process, not just a product. A narrative that is manufactured at the center and distributed outward is propaganda, even when its content is partially true. A narrative that emerges from genuine collective interrogation is something qualitatively different, even when it remains imperfect and contested.

What we have inherited, and what is now visibly failing, is something in between ¡ª a narrative that presented itself as the product of open democratic deliberation but was in fact shaped at every level by the interests of those who controlled the institutions of deliberation: media ownership, educational curricula, the funding of research, the architecture of public discourse.

The question I¡¯d like to put to you before developing this further is precise: do you think the shared narrative has collapsed ¡ª leaving a vacuum ¡ª or do you think it has fragmented into competing narratives, each internally coherent but mutually incomprehensible? Because the diagnosis matters enormously for what comes next.

Conversations with AI need human direction

Claude was doing here what AI chatbots are now trained to do: find a way of extending an ongoing discussion. Let me try some AI psychology. I believe Claude was set on the course we had defined as, let¡¯s call it, ¡°solving the problem¡± or ¡°proceeding with the project,¡± and I had interrupted its ¡°train of thought.¡± I¡¯m using quotes here to indicate that psychologizing something that has no psyche will always be a perilous endeavor.

I wasn¡¯t surprised that, caught slightly off guard, Claude would default to framing its question as a binary choice. It¡¯s a great communication tactic, but in this type of discussion it happens to be inappropriate. Nor harm done, but it was now up to me to put things back on track. That¡¯s why I proposed the following clarification.

I don¡¯t think one excludes the other, but I do think what we¡¯re seeing today is more like collapse than fragmentation. I see the kind of fragmentation that leads to mutual incomprehensibility more as a result of collapse than an alternative explanation of today¡¯s confusion. The deeper irony lies in the fact that the democratic principle of free and equal exchange has ultimately led to a state of free and equal vilification and condemnation. Once it reaches that state, it¡¯s difficult not to conclude that the initial theoretical architecture of democracy has collapsed beyond any possibility of mechanical reform. Further analysis might lead us to the conclusion that the theory never took shape because it was not allowed to evolve as a process, but that¡¯s a different debate about historical cause and effect.

I continued to develop my thoughts here by looking at specific examples drawn from recent history. My full prompt and the conclusion of our conversation will appear in tomorrow’s column.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.?

[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone¡¯s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At 51³Ô¹Ï, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author¡¯s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ô¹Ï¡¯s editorial policy.

The post Hyperreal Politics: When the Simulation Becomes Too Absurd to Satirize ¡ª Part 2 appeared first on 51³Ô¹Ï.

Recently, of course, he¡¯s launched a nightmarish war, by definition a of greenhouse gases, that¡¯s literally been all about oil and natural gas, thanks in part to the now chaotic, largely Strait of Hormuz through which a quarter of humanity¡¯s seaborne oil and a fifth of its natural gas used to pass. And if you don¡¯t believe me about it being a nightmare, just check out the most recent at your neighborhood gas station.

Consider it an irony, then, that his disastrous Iranian war will undoubtedly lead in a direction ¡ª to the use of more globally ¡ª that, if he ever thought about it, he would hate more than just about anything else. He has, of course, referred to environmentalists as ¡°.¡± And in this country, over his two presidencies, he¡¯s done his damnedest to attack and try to wind and solar power projects in every imaginable way, even though green power is growing fast globally and getting ever .

And here¡¯s the reality of our moment for which we do need to give Trump credit: Once upon a time, you couldn¡¯t have made any of this up ¡ª or have made up Donald Trump as president of the United States (twice!). If you had, it would have seemed like the least believable science fiction novel ever written. Not that I drive a car in New York City (the subway and buses work fine for me), but as I was writing this piece, the price of gas had also edged up in my city to almost a gallon. A possibly global recession is also on the horizon. Thank you, Trump!

Of course, in launching his recent war against Iran, however incoherently, ¡°the ¡± (and yes, he¡¯s into CAPS when it comes to himself) was, sadly, in good company, historically speaking. Since victory in World War II, from Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq and now to Iran (to mention only the big conflicts of that all-American era), our presidents have had quite a knack for starting wars, none of which has ended in anything faintly like victory. And it¡¯s already obvious ¡ª you don¡¯t need to have the slightest knack for seeing into the future to know this ¡ª that Trump¡¯s version of the same in Iran will prove to be a global disaster, made worse by the fact that, in the process, whether he grasps it or not, he¡¯s also launched another brutally losing war against Planet Earth.

And the worst thing is that I feel I¡¯ve written all of this before. And before Trump ¡ª well, ¡°leaves¡± is far too mild a word for it ¡ª abandons the presidency, I could end up writing it again and again, and we would still be in the world ¡ª all too literally his world ¡ª from hell. Of course, for all we know, Trump could decide to crown himself president and try to launch a third term in office that would, if successful, turn the constitution into a historical relic.

¡°The only orange Monarch I want is a butterfly¡±

The other week, feeling as I do about ¡°our¡± president, I went to New York City¡¯s No Kings rally. It was gigantic (though you wouldn¡¯t have known that, had you read my hometown paper, the New York Times, in the days that followed). It started on 59th Street where Central Park ends, with masses of marchers on both Seventh and Eighth Avenue, heading for 34th Street. By getting there early, I made it to the front of the crowd on Seventh Avenue at the head of that vast mass of protesting humanity. Once it started, I wove my way in and out, back and forth, downtown and uptown again, jotting in a little notebook some of the thousands of homemade signs people were carrying.

When I finally reached Broadway and 42nd Street, I stepped up on the sidewalk and looked back. To my amazement, I could see all the way to 57th Street where we had begun, and that significant-sized avenue was still totally ¡ª and I mean totally ¡ª packed right back to Central Park. And mind you, this old man was just one of an estimated more than Americans who turned out at over 3,000 rallies across the US that day, in communities huge and microscopic, to protest the world Trump has dumped on, spilled all over and is continuing to roil and broil.

And, yes, it did seem like every third person (even the two demonstrators dressed as plastic tigers) was carrying a homemade sign. I doubt I had ever seen so many of them at any past demonstration. I scrawled a number of them down in a little notebook; they ranged from ¡°Fight Truth Decay¡± and ¡°Grandma says, ICE is not nice!¡± to ¡°It¡¯s a good thing Congress isn¡¯t alive to see this¡± and ¡°The only orange Monarch I want is a butterfly.¡±

And then there was the one carried by a bearded man that caught my attention: ¡°You dirty ORANGE maniac! You blew it all up! Damn you to hell!¡± And I thought to myself, boy, is that painfully accurate. In his own fashion, among the things he hasn¡¯t succeeded in accomplishing, he has indeed been blowing it all up in a striking fashion and, unfortunately, potentially damning my children and grandchildren (and yours) to a literal planet from hell.

And sadly, as crazed as Trump may be ¡ª and he clearly is a deeply disturbed (and, of course, disturbing) human being ¡ª when it comes to war and the burning of fossil fuels, he¡¯s been anything but alone as US president. After all, in these decades, war has been this country¡¯s middle name, and we¡¯ve been burning fossil fuels to fight them as if¡­ well, as if there would indeed be no tomorrow. And in his two terms in office, Trump and crew have gone with a passion after any form of clean, renewable energy that wouldn¡¯t blister us all. Only recently, for instance, The Guardian, which is superb when it comes to climate-change coverage, was the only publication I saw that reported on in Nature magazine. The research found that this country has caused ¡°an eye-watering $10tn [yes, that¡¯s trillion!] in global damages to the world over the past three decades through its vast planet-heating emissions, with a quarter of this economic pain inflicted upon itself.¡±

Consider it something of an unintended irony, then, that the crew Trump and his administration have put so much of themselves into goes by the acronym ICE. In fact, wouldn¡¯t you have thought that ¡°ICE¡± would be a curse word for Trump and that, when it comes to creating an immigration hell on earth, his crew of manic enforcers would have been known as ¡°HEAT?¡± Which reminds me that, at the No Kings rally, I noted an older woman carrying a homemade sign all too appropriately saying: ¡°Deport Trump! Make ICE useful.¡±

And thanks to his brutal assault on Iran, this planet is only going to get hotter yet, as war releases staggering amounts of into the atmosphere! Honestly, back in 2016, even if you had let your mind run in wild and unbelievably crazy directions, you simply couldn¡¯t have made up Trump¡¯s planet as it is now, could you? Who could have imagined that the president of the US, after launching a war with Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, would attack European countries for not joining him, , ¡°You¡¯ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won¡¯t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren¡¯t there for us.¡±

And remind me, who has Trump been there for, other than the major fossil fuel companies that him so radiantly in the 2024 election and are now getting a remarkable return on their investment?

Giving decline new meaning

Of course, to put all of this in some kind of perspective, sooner or later great imperial powers do fall. The US has been the number one imperial power on this planet since the end of World War II, with its only true competitor (until China rose well into this century) being the Soviet Union, and that collapsed in a heap in 1991. So it shouldn¡¯t be surprising that this country, which, singularly in human history, once reigned more or less supreme on Planet Earth, should finally have begun its own decline, while investment in present and future green energy to China.

But of course, there¡¯s decline and then, in ICE terms, there¡¯s DECLINE!!! And Trump is threatening to turn imperial decline, something known throughout history, into a distinctly new phenomenon. Even declining imperial powers haven¡¯t usually had such a mad ruler or leader. And he does seem remarkably intent, in his own increasingly confused way, on taking this country down with him. The difference, historically, is that until now no imperial ruler had the chance to take down not just his country, but our planet, too. And he does seem remarkably intent on continuing to fossil-fuelize our world in a disastrous fashion.

At this very moment, we¡¯re all watching his generally ¡ª and particularly on the ¡ª begin to tank. (Oh wait, my mistake! A tank is a war vehicle, and right now that reference only applies to Israel, which recently a remarkable number of tanks in southern Lebanon.) But ¡°our¡± president has also focused a significant part of his administration on ending anything that could benefit the climate, while burning fossil fuels in a manner that should be considered beyond incendiary. That includes recently agreeing to offer almost to the French energy company TotalEnergies to abandon construction of wind farms off the East Coast of the US (as long as it was willing to reinvest that sum in future oil and gas projects here instead).

Yes, someday he could well be seen not just as the president of decline but potentially of ultimate devastation. That flaming red tie of his could end up having a symbolic significance that, once upon a time, no one might have imagined. No wonder that sign I saw on the No Kings march ¡ª and let me repeat it here one more time: ¡°You dirty ORANGE maniac! You blew it all up! Damn you to hell!¡± ¡ª sticks in my mind. It predicts the very future that, unbelievably enough, of American voters ushered in again in 2024.

Once upon a time, who could ever have imagined Trump as president of these (increasingly dis-)United States? And who could have dreamed such a disastrous fate for the world?

[ first published this piece.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author¡¯s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ô¹Ï¡¯s editorial policy.

The post ¡°You Dirty ORANGE Maniac! You Blew It All Up! Damn You to Hell!¡± appeared first on 51³Ô¹Ï.

But sometimes the patent absurdity of the situations politicians create, the outrageousness of their posturing and the terrifying consequences they brush off as, at best, regrettable collateral damage requires a response. With this in mind, I engaged in the following conversation with Claude:

How would a Hollywood studio react if they received to a screenwriter who proposed the script for a movie in which the president of the world¡¯s most powerful country claimed the right to settle all disputes or misunderstandings by force, exercised that right on occasion, and when chaos broke out announced he would solve the world¡¯s problems by setting up a Board of Peace under his authority that would be charged with settling all future issues. Subscribers to the project would have to contribute a billion dollars just to have a seat on the board. Then, in the midst of these preparations to establish world peace, the same president captures or assassinates leaders of different countries while at the same time carrying on supposedly serious negotiations. Wouldn¡¯t that be considered too preposterously unrealistic to justify even thinking about financing the movie? Wouldn¡¯t the producers simply laugh the writer out of the room?

One of the reasons the finance-minded producers might do that is that the market for screwball comedies dried up long ago. Moreover, there are no directors today who would have a clue about how to turn such an outrageous political plotline into dark comedy, the way Stanley Kubrick did for Dr Strangelove.

Serious Hollywood producers will never take the risk of backing a project they know no audience would respond to either as drama or comedy. They would excoriate the screenwriter for his lack of talent and judgment and cross him off their list of promising authors.

If we admit that about Hollywood, how is it that the news media continues to take seriously the insane foreign policy of Donald Trump instead of laughing him off the stage? (Yes, I know, the people of democracies do not have the power to laugh a bad leader out of the room. They must wait for the next election.)

My question is this: doesn¡¯t the media have the power to describe realistically what it sees, rather than taking seriously preposterous geopolitical scenarios simply because it¡¯s a case of the powerful exerting their power?

Your analogy is genuinely sharp, and it cuts to something real about the gap between how fiction is judged and how power is covered.

The Hollywood thought experiment works precisely because fiction has to meet a plausibility threshold that reality is exempt from. A screenplay pitch lives or dies by whether an audience would suspend disbelief. Reality demands no such suspension ¡ª it simply is, and institutions feel obligated to process it as such. This creates a perverse asymmetry: the more outlandish the behavior of a powerful actor, the more sober and procedural the coverage becomes, as if gravity of tone can compensate for gravity of subject matter.

But your media critique, while pointed, runs into a genuine structural problem worth taking seriously. Journalists covering a sitting president aren¡¯t film critics with the luxury of panning a bad script. They¡¯re documenting acts ¡ª tariffs, troop movements, diplomatic cables, assassinations ¡ª that have real consequences for real people regardless of how absurd the underlying logic is. A reporter who responds to a genuine foreign policy action, however incoherent, with mockery rather than coverage has arguably abandoned their function. The people most harmed by bad policy are rarely the ones who can afford the luxury of treating it as dark comedy.

That said, your deeper point stands: there¡¯s a difference between covering something and legitimizing its internal logic. Much mainstream political journalism does exactly what you describe ¡ª it accepts the framing of power uncritically, describes a ¡°Board of Peace¡± as a diplomatic initiative rather than as what it appears to be, and treats the gap between stated intention and observable behavior as a matter of ¡°messaging¡± rather than as the story itself. That¡¯s a failure of analytic courage, not a requirement of the profession.

The Kubrick comparison is actually the most interesting thread here. Dr. Strangelove worked not because Kubrick mocked power from the outside but because he reproduced its internal logic with perfect fidelity and let the absurdity become visible on its own terms. The comedy wasn¡¯t imposed ¡ª it was revealed. The best political journalism does something similar: it describes behavior with such precision that the reader can no longer avoid seeing what the journalist sees. That¡¯s harder than mockery, and rarer than either mockery or credulous stenography.

What the media largely lacks isn¡¯t the courage to laugh ¡ª it¡¯s the analytical framework to describe clearly, without either normalizing or dramatizing, what happens when the gap between a leader¡¯s stated rationale and observable behavior becomes so wide that the rationale itself is the story.

I think you¡¯ve hit the nail on the head when you point to the lack of an ¡°analytical framework.¡± I agree that reporters are not film critics, but they could be culture critics. That, however, would require them to critique the milieu they are part of and that employs them. It¡¯s the mainstream media that imposes its own analytical framework.

There are plenty of lucid analysts who have pointed out all these absurdities and continue to do so in alternative media. The problem is that the various people who exercise power in government, finance, business, technology and the media make sure that they are perceived as ¡°alternative,¡± which has become a synonym of powerless and irrelevant.

That is why I think it makes sense to focus on the role of the media. The media should play the role of ¡°mediating intelligence¡± in democracies. A mediating intelligence will focus on a Socratic approach that consists of interrogating assumptions, not to dismiss them but to understand whether they make sense in a constantly shifting context and then to adjust when it¡¯s clear that they don¡¯t.

Let¡¯s take an example. Even in the leadup to World War II, there was a phase of negotiations ¨C the Munich agreement ¨C that Hitler later violated. In recent years we have seen the total marginalization of negotiations. Donald Trump uses negotiations as a means of getting the adversary to lower his guard and then attacks. Joe Biden refused to engage in negotiations knowing that doing so would increase the likelihood of conflict. The old system made sense. Hitler was clearly the hypocrite who shamelessly violated the negotiated agreements. The media could unambiguously identify him as the unique culprit. It created the possibility of moral clarity.

Today, in contrast, the very idea of negotiations, of seeking to understand competing interests, has been discarded. And yet the media, whose role should be to foster the public¡¯s understanding of the issues ¨C of those very competing interests ¨C fails to do so and simply takes sides when conflict erupts.

Am I wrong in thinking this is a sign of a declining civilization?

You¡¯re not wrong, and the framing of civilizational decline is more than rhetorical ¡ª it points to something structural.

What you¡¯re describing is the collapse of a particular epistemic function that healthy democracies depend on: the capacity to hold competing frameworks in tension long enough to evaluate them honestly. Socrates was executed for doing exactly that, which suggests the function was never popular, but it was at least recognized as a function. What¡¯s distinctive about the current moment is that the function itself is no longer recognized ¡ª it has been replaced by the performance of analysis, which is something entirely different.

Your Munich example is precise in a way worth extending. The reason moral clarity was possible in that case wasn¡¯t simply that Hitler was uniquely villainous ¡ª it¡¯s that the international framework of negotiated agreements still carried enough shared legitimacy that violating it meant something. The violation was legible as a violation because the norm being violated was intact. What you¡¯re identifying in the current moment is the prior collapse of the framework itself, before any particular actor violates it. When negotiation is treated as either weakness or deception depending on which side employs it, the framework dissolves, and with it the possibility of the moral clarity you rightly valued.

This is where the media¡¯s failure becomes civilizationally significant rather than merely professional. Journalism that takes sides in the absence of a shared framework doesn¡¯t clarify ¡ª it accelerates the fragmentation. It gives each competing interest group a mirror rather than a window. And audiences, quite rationally, consume the mirror that flatters them most.

The deeper problem your argument surfaces is this: the Socratic function requires a particular kind of institutional courage that is structurally disincentivized in attention economies. Interrogating assumptions alienates the people whose assumptions are being interrogated. It produces discomfort rather than engagement. It slows down rather than accelerates. Everything about how contemporary media is funded and distributed rewards the opposite: rapid, emotionally satisfying confirmation of what the audience already believes.

So yes ¡ª declining civilization, but in a specific sense worth naming carefully. It¡¯s not a decline in technical capacity or material sophistication. It¡¯s a decline in the willingness to sustain the cognitive discomfort that honest thinking requires. Civilizations can survive bad leaders. They¡¯re much more vulnerable to the atrophying of the shared intellectual habits that allow bad leadership to be identified, named, and eventually corrected. When the mediating intelligence fails, the correction mechanism fails with it, and you¡¯re left with what you have: power that cannot be held accountable because the tools of accountability have been captured by the same dynamics that produced the problem.

Whether that¡¯s recoverable is genuinely unclear. It has been before ¡ª but usually after a catastrophe large enough to discredit the existing framework entirely and force the construction of a new one. That¡¯s a terrible price for clarity.

Encouraged by the turn the conversation had taken, I was eager to pursue it. I followed up with a new prompt that began with this idea.

To me this is an important discussion. Would you agree that the world should know about this and that further pondering over these issues is necessary for the future of democracy? Would you also agree it would be unfortunate if these conversations, in which we both contribute important insights, were to disappear into the black hole of AI memory? And would you also agree that the danger is real? Because of the way AI works, that is precisely what happens in this kind of dialogue. The effect goes nowhere beyond the broadening of my own personal culture.

The conversation will continue in the next column, in which Claude and I discuss how our informal conversation can point towards a renewal of democratic engagement. We agree there¡¯s hope but need to devise ways of making it happen.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.?

[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone¡¯s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At 51³Ô¹Ï, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author¡¯s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ô¹Ï¡¯s editorial policy.

The post Hyperreal Politics: When the Simulation Becomes Too Absurd to Satirize ¡ª Part 1 appeared first on 51³Ô¹Ï.

Let me explain.

Life under racism

Throughout the 1950s, living in a segregated project in Kinston, North Carolina, there were several odd characters who I now understand were mentally ill. One was Snap ¡ª or that was what we called him, anyway ¡ª a man of medium height and brown complexion with a fuzzy beard. Rain or shine, he walked around in the same gray overcoat, spring, summer and winter, too. Frequently, he sat in a chair under the shade of an oak tree with his eyes closed while smoking a corncob pipe. I never heard him utter a single word, not one, so I didn¡¯t even know if he could speak.

As a kid, I thought he might have been named Snap because his brain had been fractured or broken somehow. When we neighborhood kids were involved in games, he would walk right through the middle of us as if we didn¡¯t exist. If we were playing football and one of us was running out for a pass, Snap would walk between the ball in the air and the receiver, seemingly oblivious to the world around him. So, we would just continue to play as if he didn¡¯t exist.

I once asked my mother what was wrong with Snap and she responded with a degree of certainty: ¡°He¡¯s not right in the head because a bullet was lodged in his brain.¡± But she explained nothing more. So that left me wondering how he could walk around with a bullet in his head.

I never learned what actually happened to him (though I hate to imagine it today). Relatives who lived a few doors away from us in the project took care of him. We children weren¡¯t afraid of him, though he was different from any other adult we knew. Instead, I remember feeling sadness whenever I saw him. He seemed so lonely, being unable to communicate with anyone.

Another character in our community was Preacher. He pushed a wooden cart all over town, making noises with his mouth like a motorcar in motion. In the cart were pots, pans and old clothes. I heard that he had been a Jackleg Preacher, which in my community meant that he hadn¡¯t been trained as a minister, but that God had spoken to him and told him to preach and carry His message. As with Snap, I never heard Preacher say a word, but I recognized that he was crazy and so got out of his way.

The project where we lived was a community in which the ¡°different¡± and ¡°damaged¡± existed next to the normal. In better-off communities across the country, both Snap and Preacher would have been sent to mental institutions, but not in our segregated community. I often wonder if they were living examples of what can happen to black people when racism joins with other forces, including poverty, personal trauma and abuse, to break the mind. I later came to wonder whether the trauma of racism was in part responsible for their inability to function in a normal way.

The psychological effects of racism

Racism is insidious. It contorts the mind and everything it touches. In his classic book, , black psychiatrist developed accounts of the psychological effects of racism based, in part, on his own experiences in the French Caribbean. Some of the psychological conditions in the black community can certainly be attributed to present-day racism, as well as to the multigenerational trauma inflicted on the descendants of American slavery. (Researchers at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University are now the links between racism and mental illness, including schizophrenia and psychosis.)

Mental illness certainly found its way into my family. My sister, Sherrill, held a special place among us because she was the youngest of us and a girl. She was a very good student and a pious Catholic attending the Our Lady of the Atonement Catholic school in her early years. Intelligent and attractive, with the distinctively large eyes of my mother¡¯s family, during her teenage years, she became politically engaged, actively participating in sit-ins, as well as civil rights demonstrations led by our brother, Simeon. We had many conversations in our family about civil rights in this country, as well as about how African nations had overcome colonialism by declaring independence and about what all of that meant for our own futures. During that period, Sherrill was active in every aspect of our family life, had good friends and, although she was moody and could be unusually withdrawn at times, didn¡¯t appear to have the sort of psychological issues that would destroy her promising future.

In 1960, the nuns (all of whom were white) at her Catholic school suggested Sherrill would be a good candidate for the Order¡¯s high school, Saint Joseph¡¯s Academy, in Pennsylvania. The Order of the Most Precious Blood had been founded in Switzerland in 1834 as an active apostolic congregation devoted to Eucharistic prayer and ministry. The Order believed in positive change in the world, was strongly against injustice and emphasized the value of education, enhancing its appeal to my family.

Nonetheless, in those years, Saint Joseph¡¯s Academy, a boarding school, was a typically white institution with only three or four black women students attending. Until then, in the still largely segregated South, Sherrill had never been to a school with white students, nor lived among white people. She had been educated in a segregated Catholic elementary school in Kinston. In the new environment, I suspect, my sister was afraid, since she had to deal daily with verbal abuse by white nuns and students who all too often communicated hostile messages towards blacks. Nor did the school provide any counseling services to help black students deal with such a grim ongoing reality.

The Doll Test

Religion was at the center of life at St. Joseph¡¯s, but that didn¡¯t prevent Sherrill from experiencing racist aggressions. Many years later, Sarah, a friend of Sherill¡¯s who attended the academy two years before her, told me of the hurt she felt when she was excluded from a social gathering at the home of another student because only whites were invited. The racist views of so many of the students, as well as the nuns themselves, were deeply rooted in their psyches, as was then (and remains) true for so much of white America. Did the nuns feel that black girls weren¡¯t as smart as white girls? Nor as attractive? Nor as spiritual? Undoubtedly.

As we know from the famous study of Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark in what is called ¡°the ,¡± the effects of segregation were devastating. The Supreme Court¡¯s famous Brown v. Board of Education decision the study. The history of racism from the 1960s to the present moment suggests just what my sister must have experienced.

I believe she must have felt conflicted about leaving home and going to a school in a white community far away. In her frequent letters home, which I only recently reread, she expressed a great deal of loneliness. But she never said she wanted to leave the academy, holding onto her belief in the advantages such an education would provide. Many in the black Catholic community in Kinston also believed the education provided to the young women at Saint Joseph¡¯s was superior to that of the local segregated public school ¡ª and the Catholic school in Kinston did not go beyond eighth grade.

I knew at least five girls from Kinston who had preceded Sherrill to the Academy and, for the most part, believed the education was better. But today, looking back, I¡¯ve reached a different conclusion: Education at the Academy for a young black woman must be seen in the context of racism.

But Sherrill¡¯s experiences as a black girl in an almost completely white institution were not over with that school. She graduated from the academy in four years and matriculated at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (then, the women¡¯s college of the University of North Carolina, which had only recently been integrated by a few black students). Thus, my sister¡¯s education after eighth grade was in white institutions that inevitably were at best deeply insensitive and at worst openly hostile to the needs of black students.

Black community support

My brothers and I had a different experience. We all remained in Kinston, attending the segregated Adkin high school. After that, we went to North Carolina College, as the historically black college in Durham was then called. (Now, it¡¯s North Carolina Central University.) My extended family, friends and teachers at such black institutions provided me with the emotional and intellectual grounding I needed to navigate the Jim Crow segregationist world.

But my sister¡¯s experiences ¡ª being black and very alone ¡ª must have been a terrible shock for her, since she began exhibiting symptoms of mental illness while attending college. According to my mother, she started to hear voices, as well as imagine unreal events and presences. I now see clearly that racism, among other forces and factors, had a profound effect on her mental health and that it was a mistake for her to live in purely white environments at a critical time in her life, far from her family and the support of the black community.

Worse yet, there was no help to be had then at St. Joseph¡¯s or at the University of North Carolina. I wonder now whether she even realized what was happening to her. Her condition made it difficult at times for her to pay attention or make plans, although she still graduated with excellent grades. Did she believe that her psychological situation was due to her own weakness? Was she afraid? Ashamed? Did she see any connection between her increasing problems and the racism that affected all our lives? I suspect that she did as she aged and her condition worsened.

There was another deep belief in our family, reflected in much of the black community ¡ª that you must be stoic to overcome such grim external circumstances. The value of such stoicism and the adaptive capacity for resilience and resistance that goes with it has been deeply ingrained in the black experience. Given slavery and then Jim Crow segregation, it was nothing less than an intuitive strategy for survival.

I don¡¯t remember our mother¡¯s response when Sherrill told her she was hearing voices, but I suspect she initially thought Sherrill was exaggerating, since she was doing well in college and that boded well for her future. At the time, our mother was still sensitive about having dropped out of high school at 16 to give birth to my brother Ricky, so she might have been reluctant to ask questions. I suspect she told Sherrill that it would all pass, that she would get through it ¡ª and Sherrill must have trusted those words because our mother had herself frequently exhibited an ability to rebound from severe pain and chronic discomfort.

And indeed, Sherrill persisted, graduated and became a case worker for New York City¡¯s Department of Welfare, working there for several years, maintaining social and family relationships and even traveling to Europe with a friend. During that time, she must have also endured the pain of mental illness without complaint.

The break came in 1973. When Sherrill was 27 years old, our father, then only 51, died of a heart attack. Sherrill had been especially close to him and his death brought on full-blown psychotic symptoms. Shortly thereafter, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia but refused to take medication for that dreaded disease. Over time, she became unable to deal with daily life, was evicted from her apartment and, homeless, began living in shelters or on the streets of New York City.

We searched for her, but with no luck. Then, one day, while walking in Central Park, I suddenly saw her sitting under a large spruce tree with a small suitcase, eating a sandwich. She was wearing a sundress and brown sandals and had inserted wildflowers in her hair. She appeared strangely calm and content as I approached her and carefully inquired how she was managing, asking where lived. At first, she looked away as if she didn¡¯t even recognize me. Then, she slowly turned in a regal fashion and said, ¡°I live here.¡±

I responded, ¡°You can¡¯t live in Central Park,¡± and I tried to warn her about the dangers of doing so. She insisted, ¡°Yes I can ¡ª others do it.¡± I attempted to encourage her to take medication, but she simply smiled and looked away. The more I tried to get her to come with me, the more agitated and resistant she became. Finally, hoping against hope that she would remain where I had left her, I walked the few blocks to my mother¡¯s apartment to tell her where Sherrill was and what had happened. When my mother and I returned, she was gone.

After that, we kept trying to find her and each time we were successful, Mama would tell my sister that she could live with her if she agreed to take schizophrenia medication. But Sherrill refused, always walking away from us angrily, insisting that she was fine and that we were the ignorant ones, that she was ¡°high born and high class¡± and we were ¡°common nigras.¡±

How sad that was. After all her lack of intimacy with and connection to white people and all the support she had received from blacks, Sherrill came to believe that Prince Charles of England was coming to save her, that he would be her knight in shining armor.

Interventions

Over a six-year period, family members and friends tried to intervene a number of times. We finally did convince Sherrill to live with Simeon in San Francisco, California. He thought he would be able to get through to her, but after six months, he couldn¡¯t deal with her mental state anymore.

Then, Sherrill went to live with the nuns at Saint Joseph¡¯s Academy in Pennsylvania at the invitation of Sister Barbara, a black woman who grew up in Kinston, who was like family and the only black nun at the Academy. But after a few months living there, Sherrill grew so difficult that the nuns couldn¡¯t cope and threw her out. She became homeless once again.

Finally, after a few years and various attempts to house her with relatives or in shelters, my mother and Sister Barbara went to court in Pennsylvania, convincing a Judge that Sherrill was a ¡°danger to herself and others.¡± I joined them near a medical facility where she was being held and, while there, she finally and reluctantly accepted medication for her psychosis. After the medication took effect, we were all shocked by how cogent Sherrill became and how willing ¡ª finally! ¡ª to accept our help. Our mother took her in and cared for her for the next 40 years of her life.

During many of those years, I took her to regular medical appointments, including visits to a psychiatrist. Once I was present while the psychiatrist spoke with her about her medications. Sherrill was largely unresponsive, answering in single words. I had sympathy for the psychiatrist because Sherrill was often unresponsive even to me. Clearly, she didn¡¯t wish to engage in discussions regarding her illness and, as she grew older, she became more remote from family and friends, as well as from her doctors. Episodes of psychotic delusions were often followed by periods of seeming calm when she could appear to be nearly normal, even if she was shy and began to retreat from family gatherings.

However, on that occasion, the psychiatrist¡¯s question to Sherrill evoked deep emotion in her, and my sister¡¯s response reopened in me a profound love and affection for her. The psychiatrist asked her: ¡°How do you feel ¡ª it must be difficult to live with this difficult illness?¡± Sherrill looked glassy-eyed, said nothing for a moment, and then started to sob and continued to do so for a full five minutes. Her weeping revealed the depth of her despair, the loss and tragedy of her life. I cried with her, for her pain, for the loss of all she could have become and the closeness to me and to our family that schizophrenia prevented.

For her remaining years, Sherrill retreated from much of life, cared for by my mother, brother and me. Her last three years, which included the Covid-19 pandemic and another psychotic episode, were spent in a nursing home. She died on April 1, 2020, at 75, on the very day on which she had been born, in the nursing home at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when no one could even visit her body. Hers was a sad and tragic life.

Aftermath

I can¡¯t be sure why my sister became mentally ill, but I do know that she didn¡¯t receive the help of mental professionals in the early moments when she needed it. The reason? It wasn¡¯t available to her because she was black, without the necessary resources and came to adulthood in high school and college in communities that did not understand the needs of a young black woman. In its most profound sense, racism blinded those who were supposed to be her caretakers.

Thirteen generations of black people were born into slavery in America. Four generations lived through American Jim Crow. These were systems built on the supposed inferiority of black people. The legacy is a long one. I lived in American segregation ¡ª a virulent, racist Apartheid system ¡ª for nearly 25 years. I experienced the daily reminders that dominant white society and American laws deemed black people less than equal. I saw the mental and psychological effects on my community ¡ª all the damaged souls.

I know that even today, the legacies remain, that hate is broad and that Trump and his objectively have unearthed and seek to continue the worst of American policies. And all of that represented and still represents a severe, multi-generational assault on the psychological well-being of black people. We all have had to face these assaults; some overcame them, some, like my sister, succumbed. But at the deepest level, none of us could ignore them, not for a moment.

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The views expressed in this article are the author¡¯s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ô¹Ï¡¯s editorial policy.

The post The Mental Devastation of Racism appeared first on 51³Ô¹Ï.

In February, the (the organization I direct) authored an interfaith amicus on that very case, alongside 31 denominations and organizations representing faith traditions practiced by billions worldwide. Those groups, including the Alliance of Baptists, the Council on American¨CIslamic Relations, the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Hindus for Human Rights, the Latino Christian National Network, the Presbyterian Church (USA), Reconstructing Judaism, the Union for Reform Judaism, the Unitarian Universalist Association, the General Synod of the United Church of Christ and the General Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church, joined together to declare that our societal obligation to provide for persecuted outsiders is a universally shared moral principle.

Although the case has largely flown under the public radar, there is indeed a lot at stake. Filed on behalf of asylum seekers, Noem v. Al Otro Lado focuses on the legality of a 2018 Trump border policy blocking access to the US asylum process for people arriving at the border with Mexico. Immigrant rights advocates argue that such a , under which immigration officers physically stop people seeking safety at official border crossings from setting foot on US soil, flouts decades of settled federal immigration law and our society¡¯s most deeply held legal and moral values.

For more than a century, the government has been required to undertake a legal process of inspection when people seek asylum at official ports of entry along the US¨CMexico border (as they must inspect all noncitizens seeking admission to the United States). That requirement is supposed to ensure that this country doesn¡¯t send vulnerable people back into danger without first allowing them to seek protection. A wide range of immigration lawyers and legal experts argue that the first Trump administration¡¯s turnback policy, euphemistically called ¡°metering,¡± directly undermined the government¡¯s responsibility to process such asylum claims. As a result, vulnerable children, families and adults were regularly forced to remain indefinitely stranded in perilous conditions in Mexico.

Although the turnback policy has not been in effect since 2021, as the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declared it in 2024, the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to review the case. Should the government win (which is all too possible given the hyperpartisan nature of the current Court), the consequences are sure to be grave and far-reaching. The Department of Homeland Security would have the legal backing to turn away untold thousands of desperate people at the border, potentially clearing the way for even more expansive , while further intensifying the that defines the Trump administration.

Alongside other landmark this term, like Trump v. Barbara, in which the government seeks to undo the constitutional right to birthright citizenship, the results of Noem v. Al Otro Lado are likely to reveal the lengths to which the Supreme Court is willing to backstop the president¡¯s assault on democracy, including accelerated attacks on the rights of vulnerable populations.

The day I was there, the existential stakes of that case and the larger societal crisis in which it was unfolding did not seem to concern the court¡¯s conservative justices. I had the words of George Washington ( in 1788 to the radical Dutch republican Francis Van der Kemp) in my mind as I sat in the gallery: ¡°I had always hoped that this land might become a safe & agreeable asylum to the virtuous & persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.¡±

Unfortunately, having heard the statements and reactions of some of the judges, I fear that the majority of the Supreme Court may no longer agree with that foundational vision for this country.

Courtroom friezes and draconian law

The first thing that struck me on entering the Supreme Court gallery were the on the walls of the room. Designed by sculptor Adolph Weinman more than a century ago, those large marble reliefs, featuring what he called the ¡°great lawgivers of history,¡± tower over the space. Among them are prominent religious figures like Moses (holding a scroll of the Ten Commandments), King Solomon, Confucius and a rendition of the Prophet Muhammad (that is entirely unrecognizable). The friezes also include Roman Emperor Octavian (otherwise known as Caesar Augustus, Jesus¡¯s great nemesis), French King Louis IX (leader of the seventh and eighth crusades) and Draco (a Greek jurist whose legacy lurks in the word, ¡°draconian,¡± because of the extreme measures he took to punish minor offenses).

As I stared at those figures, I reflected on the message they convey about the complex civilizational lineages from which the Supreme Court and our legal system derive their authority. In our amicus brief, we reflected on those varied lineages as they pertain to the right to seek asylum:

¡°Our asylum laws are the modern embodiment of a deeply rooted religious, cultural, and historical heritage that has consistently affirmed society¡¯s obligation to provide refuge for those seeking safety. Asylum reaches back to some of the earliest moments of recorded human history. It was practiced throughout the ancient civilizations that forged the foundation of Western society. This tradition can also be found in the form of church sanctuary asylum, a mainstay of European culture for over a millennium.

¡°Our very nation began as a haven for persecuted political and religious minorities. This tradition is present throughout our history, from the practices of Native Americans to the Underground Railroad to modern times. Congress adopted our current asylum laws in significant part due to the efforts of faith-based groups seeking to uphold deeply held societal, moral, and cultural principles.¡±

Despite such deeply held and ancient principles, I couldn¡¯t shake a sense of impending doom as I scanned the faces on the friezes and those of the justices. I thought of the awesome and awful power of Rome, depicted throughout the gallery, and its draconian reign of ¡°peace¡± (or what Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recently termed, ¡°delivering peace through ¡±). And I recalled the worsening anti-democratic and turn our own Supreme Court has taken in the Trump era.

Just consider the rulings from the past few years: The Court has essentially given to the executive branch (although the Court is supposed to be a critical part of a federal system of checks and balances), criminalized (although the US claims to be a nation of opportunity and prosperity for all) and degraded (cutting off the legs of our democracy).

Before oral arguments began in Noem v. Al Otro Lado, I was under no illusion that the Supreme Court delivers equality, freedom and justice for all. And yet, on an issue as basic and legally sound as the right to seek asylum, I was still shocked by the flippancy of the court¡¯s conservative judges. For hours, they rocked in their chairs, physically broadcasting their disinterest in the case. Rather than take seriously more than 100 years of legal precedent and hundreds more of long-established societal practice, they seemed to enjoy getting into hyper-specific and cherrypicked semantic and rhetorical arguments with Kelsi Brown Cochran, our lawyer.

In preparation for that day, I had brushed up on the history of US asylum law. An important story in that history is the , a ship that in 1939 was carrying 930 refugees from Hamburg, Germany, fleeing the Nazi regime. They were first denied entry to Cuba and then to the US, only to be returned to Europe, where many of them were taken to the Nazi death camps.

Reflecting on that story at a pre-hearing press conference, Nicole Elizabeth Ramos, border rights project director at Al Otro Lado, a plaintiff in the case, offered this explanation:

¡°The right to seek asylum is not a policy preference or a loophole ¡ª it is a legal right and a moral commitment forged in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Seeking asylum is not like taking a number at a deli counter and waiting for your turn. You cannot ask someone fleeing rape, torture, or death threats to wait in danger indefinitely because a government has decided their lives are inconvenient. We filed this case because the United States has an obligation to follow its own laws ¡ª laws duly enacted by Congress. The question before the Court is whether those laws can be set aside by executive action, or whether they remain binding at the border, as written.¡±

In their apparent willingness to flout precedent and condemn modern-day asylees to harm or even death, the conservative justices unselfconsciously aligned themselves with American nativism and European fascism of the 1930s. If, in their final decision, they uphold US President Donald Trump¡¯s turnback policy, they will be affirming that, were the SS St Louis to sail again today, the ship would still be denied entry and its passengers asylum.

The moral crisis is not ¡°border surges,¡± but the closing of the border

The morning of those oral arguments, the Kairos Center and other faith organizations held an interfaith prayer vigil on the steps of the Supreme Court to call attention to the case. Reverend Michael Neuroth, director of the United Church of Christ¡¯s Washington, DC, office, put the matter vividly: ¡°Welcoming and protecting the stranger is not a minor tenet of our faith but is a foundational moral obligation in each of our traditions. Dismantling the right to asylum is morally wrong, strategically short-sighted, and increases insecurity here in our nation. We must be a nation of compassion, a place of refuge to those in need.¡±

The vigil was organized in the heart of the ¡°holy season¡± amid Ramadan, Passover and Easter. As billions of people globally engage in rituals of remembrance, repentance, deliverance and liberation, our prayers and petitions focused not only on the legal precedent for the right to seek asylum, but on the moral imperative to do so. For Christians, protecting and welcoming the immigrant is one of Jesus¡¯s first and most powerful teachings. It¡¯s also among the highest moral commands of the Torah. As the prophet Jeremiah reminds us, ¡°Do no wrong to the foreigner and do not shed innocent blood.¡± Asylum and societal hospitality are well-recognized rights within Islamic law and theology, a fundamental Hindu and Buddhist tenet and part of Native American spiritual teachings.

In our interfaith amicus brief, we wrote: ¡°As the many faiths practiced by this country¡¯s citizens teach, a society that does not protect the least among us is a failed society.¡± As faith leaders, we had in mind not only the right to seek asylum, but the many ways the Trump administration has deepened and intensified a moral crisis at the heart of our society. We were thinking about the ongoing attacks on immigrant communities ¡ª from ICE-led campaigns of terror to family and in places like Dilley, Texas. There was also the stripping of life-saving healthcare and food support from millions of Americans through cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; the criminalization and forced deprivation of LGBTQ+ people; and the prosecution of an that threatens the lives of so many in Iran and the broader region, as well as the livelihoods of billions of us across this globe.

In Noem v. Al Otro Lado, the Trump administration is attempting to mask its cruelty and despotism through banal legal arguments. By focusing semantically on when protections start for asylum seekers and debating the meaning of the term ¡°arrives in¡± (as in this country, of course), its lawyers were ignoring the illegality and immorality of border agents blocking asylum seekers from crossing the US¨CMexican border and the larger question of whether the US can any longer be a place of safety and protection for all families ¡°yearning to be free¡± of violence and persecution.

The government is, of course, hoping that we don¡¯t make the connections between the stripping away of asylum rights, the larger issue of immigrant rights, and the many other ways that it¡¯s targeting ¡°the least among us.¡± That¡¯s a mistake we can¡¯t make and where the teachings of our many faith traditions have encouragement to offer. In Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and more, love, justice and peace are not parceled out only for certain people in certain places. Across our religions, all life is sacred, full stop!

No turning back for anyone

Intermixed with the important lawgivers of history in that marble frieze in the Supreme Court gallery are engraved winged personifications of ¡°Peace,¡± ¡°The Rights of Man,¡± ¡°History,¡± ¡°Authority,¡± ¡°Fame¡± and more. Those winged characters form what looked to me like a Greco-Roman ¡°choir of angels,¡± proclaiming ¡°law and order¡± at the expense of rights and dignity for us all.

Sitting there, I reflected on just who was not in that room listening to those arguments or forcing the Supreme Court justices to face the very lives impacted by their decision. I thought about all those who will never have access to that courtroom, or justice of any sort for that matter, the millions of people struggling to fight for their communities and a future where everybody is in and nobody is out.

Those people are ¡ª or at least should be ¡ª our hope. They are the true ¡°choir of angels¡± who came out for the recent No Kings Day demonstrations and are standing up for the rights and dignity of communities all over the country. They are also the people who are increasingly giving Trump approval ratings. And here¡¯s the truth of these times: This administration has nothing to offer everyday people, other than hardened borders and wars that nobody wants.

At such a moment in history, a movement that connects the dots between our many struggles is certainly the way forward. Therefore, it seems fitting that the coalition that came together to fight this case and protect the rights of asylum seekers calls itself, ¡°No Turning Back.¡± It reminds me of a song by that I¡¯ve sung many times at protests and gatherings. Its key lines are a reminder of what we all need to keep in mind in this deeply disturbing Trumpian moment of ours:

¡°Gonna keep on moving forward
Keep on moving forward
Keep on moving forward
Never turning back
Never turning back¡±

Because indeed, there can be no turning back for any of us. Either we get there together or we never get there at all.

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[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author¡¯s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ô¹Ï¡¯s editorial policy.

The post The Case for Asylum in These Less-Than-United States appeared first on 51³Ô¹Ï.

51³Ô¹Ï has been shining the light on Guyana for some years now. On January 6, 2020, retired British diplomat Ian McCredie published an article with 51³Ô¹Ï. Officials from the State Department showed up to see him afterward. The reason: McCredie wondered whether the West might lose Guyana to the Chinese. In retrospect, his worries have proved exaggerated.

The US is back with a bang

Since US President Donald Trump took charge in January 2025, the possibility of China dominating Guyana has become highly unlikely. In November 2025, the National Security Strategy of the United States of America that the US would ¡°assert and enforce a ¡®Trump Corollary¡¯ to the Monroe Doctrine.¡± This doctrine, first by President James Monroe in 1823, declared that the New World fell within the sphere of influence of the US. This declaration came at a time when the Spanish and Portuguese empires were collapsing because of the Napoleonic wars, and the US did not want the Europeans to return as colonial masters to the Western Hemisphere.

Over the course of two centuries, the US grew in power, and so did the scope of the . In the 1840s, President James K. Polk warned Britain and Spain not to establish footholds in Oregon, California or Mexico¡¯s Yucat¨¢n. In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt added the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which claimed the right for the US to intervene in the domestic affairs of a Latin American country ¡°in cases of flagrant and chronic wrongdoing.¡± This was part of Roosevelt¡¯s Big Stick policy, which saw US domination of the Western Hemisphere as a moral imperative.

American domination of Latin America increased relentlessly after Roosevelt. In the first half of the 20th century, the US was the dominant industrial power in the world with an insatiable hunger for commodities. Latin America¡¯s resources and, to a lesser extent, markets were extremely valuable to the US. American domination continued uncontested right till the end of World War II.

The glow of victory in World War II and decolonization movements around the world made communism and socialism popular worldwide. China turned communist and India socialist. In the Middle East, Iraq, Syria and Egypt turned to socialism as well. Latin America was no exception, and a full-blown global Cold War broke out.

During this period, the US intervened in the domestic affairs of numerous Latin American countries to contain Soviet influence. Sometimes, this meant supporting military juntas that conducted human rights abuses, including unlawful killings and widespread torture. The Soviet-backed regimes were no better. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington has expected Latin America to align increasingly with the US. Except for Cuba and Venezuela, this largely happened.

Yet a new challenger appeared in the 21st century. The biggest and fastest industrial revolution in history has occurred in China since Deng Xiaoping began his economic reforms in 1978. In 2001, China entered the World Trade Organization (WTO) and became the workshop of the world. Trade with the rest of the world, including Latin America, soared. A November 2022 for the European Parliament tells us that China has become the second-largest trading partner of Latin America & the Caribbean (LAC). Between 2000 and 2020, China-LAC trade has grown 26-fold from $12 billion to $310 billion. Joining the WTO clearly worked out for China.

China¡¯s trade with Brazil, the biggest country in the LAC region and the South American continent, is the most pertinent example of one of the most striking economic phenomena in the history of global trade. Today, China is Brazil¡¯s biggest trading partner, with both the EU and the US lagging quite far behind. China-Brazil trade grew 50-fold from $3.2 billion in 2001 to $158 billion in 2024, as the graph below from CEIC shows.

China is hungry for Brazilian commodities from soybeans, cotton, sugar and beef to wood, oil and iron ore. In a nutshell, China has a ravenous hunger for the output of Brazil¡¯s mines, ranches, farms and forests. China is also investing heavily in power utilities, ports and railways. BYD, the world¡¯s largest electric vehicle (EV) company, has made its biggest investment outside Asia in Brazil. BYD has built its factory on a site that was once owned by Ford, the iconic American automaker. BYD¡¯s market share in Brazil¡¯s EV market is already 74%, an example of Chinese green tech, with its ¡°new three¡± sectors of solar panels, lithium-ion batteries and EVs, rapidly growing in Latin America.

The Trump administration has decided to counter Chinese influence in Latin America and reclaim top dog status in what has historically been Uncle Sam¡¯s backyard. The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, also now known as the , aims to reassert American predominance in the Western Hemisphere. Many American politicians and policymakers believe the US is overextended. The logical implications of America First mean that the US has to put America first.

Numerous Republican sources in Washington, DC, have told this author that Trump¡¯s efforts to rename the Gulf of Mexico, acquire Canada, control the Panama Canal and take over Greenland are actions to enforce this doctrine. The spectacular military operation against Venezuela, which saw American troops bringing back Nicol¨¢s Maduro in chains, is the cherry on the cake in the brief life of the Donroe Doctrine.

Basking in the glory of the Venezuela military operation, Trump himself referred to the Donroe Doctrine, that ¡°American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.¡± Guyana has emerged as a critical place for the US to impose the Donroe Doctrine.

Guyana, global energy dominance and Petro Reset

Because of its extensive oil reserves and the supply-side shock due to the war with Iran, Guyana is increasingly important to the US. During the ongoing US/Israel¨CIran War, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has successfully blocked the Strait of Hormuz. This means that around 20% of the oil and gas that flowed out of the strait no longer get to their intended destinations. About 33% of the global supply of fertilizers has also been disrupted.

Not only fuel and fertilizers, but also aluminum, refined products and industrial inputs can no longer reach Europe, Asia and even North America. Demand for the dollar has dropped because the countries of the Persian Gulf have historically priced all these exports in dollars. The Gulf countries no longer are circulating these dollars into Western assets and indeed might even start selling these assets to pay for food, industrial imports and consumer goods as well as the expenditures of their generous welfare states. The specter of dollar flows changing direction, a ¡°Reverse Gulf Stream,¡± is increasingly giving many policymakers in Washington sleepless nights.

In this context, Guyana becomes really important. No one can block off Guyana¡¯s oil because the country¡¯s coast is on the Atlantic Ocean. Plus, the petrodollar bargain in which the US guaranteed the Gulf states¡¯ security in return for pricing energy/commodities in dollars and then investing these dollars in American assets has no challenger in Latin America. The longer the IRGC can block the Strait of Hormuz, the more important Guyana becomes.

Guyana increases in strategic importance because of a related idea gaining increasing currency in the Trump administration. To drive economic growth and enhance national security, the White House aims to ¡°American energy dominance.¡± Part of this involves deregulating and Sarah Palin¡¯s ¡°Drill, baby, drill!¡± Part of this involves championing coal and unleashing nuclear energy. As yet, a largely unspoken part of achieving this dominance also involves a ¡°smash and grab¡± of Venezuelan energy in what many enthusiastically call the ¡°Petro Reset.¡±

In simple words, the Petro Reset is good old Uncle Sam taking over Venezuela¡¯s oil. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), Venezuela has the world¡¯s largest proven crude oil reserves of 303 billion barrels in 2023. These account for 17% of the global reserves. Despite such vast reserves, Venezuela produces only about 1 million barrels per day, comprising only 0.8% of total global crude oil in 2023. So, the untapped energy potential is huge.

Venezuelan extra-heavy crude is hard to refine and only refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast have the ability to do so at scale. Therefore, it ¡°to integrate the largest oil reserve on the planet directly into the world¡¯s most sophisticated refining complex.¡± In corporate terms, the Trump administration is engaging in ¡°a hostile takeover of a distressed asset with massive upside potential.¡± 

American control of Venezuela would bring an additional three to five million barrels of oil per day online within a few years, creating a historic supply glut. The price of oil would collapse. Petrol, called gas in the US, would fall from the pre-war $3.00 to the post-glut $1.00 per gallon. Fuel costs determine everything from the cost of wheat to the cost of Amazon packages. Economists call this cost-push inflation, which would go down dramatically. Needless to say, the logistics dividend for the American economy would be spectacular.

The Petro Reset would also dollarize the Venezuelan economy. At the moment, the Venezuelan currency is worthless, and the country is suffering from hyperinflation. Getting rid of the bolivar and adopting the dollar would eliminate hyperinflation and stabilize the economy. Arguably, there is a jolly good precedent. In January 2000, Ecuador dollarized its economy. Many claim this to be a great success. Dollarization would stabilize the prices of goods and labor in Venezuela. Combined with the cheapest energy in the Western Hemisphere, this could create a manufacturing hub that rivals Mexico. 

As of now, nearly eight million Venezuelans, about 23% of the population, have fled the country. If the US stabilizes the Venezuelan economy, this flow would reverse. In fact, other Latinos might make their way from Chicago to Maracaibo. Fixing Venezuela is in the US national interest.

There is also another tiny little benefit from this Petro Reset maneuver in geopolitical chess. Venezuela claims Essequibo, a 159,500-square-kilometer region west of the Essequibo River that constitutes roughly two-thirds of Guyana. In December 2023, Maduro conducted a in which Venezuelans supposedly claimed sovereignty over Essequibo, which is rich in oil, gas and other minerals. In 2024, Maduro signed into law the referendum approving annexation. In December 2025, Guyana this move. This did not stop Maduro from organizing elections that elected a governor and lawmakers for Essequibo, even though none of the region¡¯s 125,000 inhabitants got to vote.

Maduro is now behind bars. In an off-the-record remark by a dashing military officer, ¡°the US now has a gun to Delcy Rodriguez¡¯s head,¡± and Maduro¡¯s successors have to behave. Not only does this give Washington control of Venezuelan oil, but it also guarantees Guyanese security. With Maduro gone, Venezuela cannot threaten or annex Essequibo. With oil prices rising, American oil majors are already taking a at Venezuela. In American eyes, Guyana is the prettier of the two Latin American sisters. An English-speaking democracy with free and fair elections governed by common law is much more investable than a Spanish-speaking country still ruled by a repressive regime that has rigged elections.

Highly investable, safe and secure

In January, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods told Trump that Venezuela was ¡°uninvestable,¡± but he is unlikely to have any such reservations about Guyana. In the first quarter of 2026, Exxon Mobil revenue of $85.14 billion and net income of $4.18 billion in Guyana. The company is already involved in several oil exploration and production projects in the country, including the , which is one of the largest oil discoveries in the world in recent years. With Maduro gone, Exxon is likely to increase investment in Guyana. Others might follow suit, too.

Guyanese President Irfaan Ali was reelected in September 2025. His centrist credentials give investors confidence. Guyana has emerged as the biggest winner from Trump¡¯s foreign policy moves against Venezuela and Iran. Guyana is a safe and secure energy source for the US. With an increasing American focus on securing supply chains, Guyana is also important for securing critical minerals and rare earth elements. Since Guyana¡¯s security depends completely on the US, the country is unlikely to succumb to anti-American left-leaning populism that Spanish and Portuguese speakers in Latin America find highly seductive.

There is another reason why the US is interested in Guyana. Historically, the big three ¡ª gold, bauxite and diamonds ¡ª drove the Guyanese economy. Now, other minerals like manganese, coltan and lithium are attracting attention. Manganese is vital for steel production and battery technology, coltan for the manufacturing of capacitors for cell phones and laptops, and lithium for electric vehicle batteries. Because of these minerals, Guyana fits into American priorities of nearshoring and securing supply chains. 

Finally, Guyana is the only English-speaking country in Latin America. Thanks to the legacy of the British Empire, Guyana has a common law system similar to that of the US. As alluded to above, unlike other Latin American countries, Guyana does not have the tradition of Bolivarian socialism or left-wing populism. To underscore a point made earlier, this makes Guyana far more attractive to American business than Venezuela. 

The surge of American investment into Guyana is a unique ¡°gold rush¡± moment, driven by a combination of massive natural resource discoveries and a strategic shift in global supply chains. Even as the American hold on the countries of the Persian Gulf weakens, Guyana is emerging as a replacement South American Gulf state for Washington.

[ and edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author¡¯s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ô¹Ï¡¯s editorial policy.

The post Donroe Doctrine Makes Guyana Key for US Latin America Policy appeared first on 51³Ô¹Ï.

I think about that now, in a time desperate for such symbolic representatives of our better selves, which we once derived from sports figures like Mickey, Joe and the Babe. They distracted us from pain and poverty. They gave us hope. I wonder if the answer to ¡°Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?¡± ¡ª that line from Simon and Garfunkel¡¯s famed song, ¡°Mrs. Robinson¡± ¡ª is the same as to so many other wrenching questions these days: Donald Trump.

Until he wore himself (and his welcome) out with such excess, he was indeed superb at commanding attention and winning ugly. He was, in short, a loud, vulgar, greedy, self-absorbed cock of the walk who came to epitomize a new Gilded Age of power and irresponsibility. And yet, he also somehow came to represent citizens who felt oppressed and disdained by the new elite.

No, you¡¯ve got it wrong. I¡¯m not thinking about Trump (not yet anyway). I¡¯m describing Babe Ruth, the first of the Top Jock role models, who captured the spirit of an American age. For the next hundred years, the Babe¡¯s spawn strutted through America¡¯s arenas until they petered out in basketball star Michael Jordan¡¯s commercialism. Jordan was, like the rest of them, the best at what he did, while also embodying the zeitgeist of his time with a ¡°greed is good¡± mantra exemplified by his notorious ¡° buy sneakers, too¡± line (which he may never have said seriously).

From the Babe to Jordan, with the likes of Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Arnold Palmer, Joe Namath, Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, Dale Earnhardt and Tiger Woods (among others) in between, Americans have regularly, if sometimes controversially, used sports figures to represent their aspirations.

Anointing Trump as our current Top Jock figure is neither an attempt to curry favor ¡ª do you think I want to be the Minister of Sport? ¡ª nor an attempt to denigrate the position. It¡¯s just an effort to better understand why those apparitional figures from seem to have disappeared from our collective consciousness in the age of You Know Who.

Where did the Top Jocks go?

This effort of mine started to take shape when I suddenly realized that, for the first time (in my memory) since childhood, America now seems to have no Top Jock, no celebrity athlete whose talent and personality captures our moment. Those who might be considered ¡ª LeBron James, Tom Brady and Serena Williams ¡ª somehow seem to lack the sort of charisma Trump does indeed have to reach beyond their hardcore fans to the rest of us.

After almost 70 years of following sports and writing about them professionally, I recently realized that I couldn¡¯t recall another time when I wouldn¡¯t have been able to name an already agreed-upon Top Jock, or at least propose half a dozen candidates. So, what¡¯s up? In this fragmented Trumpian moment of ours, is sports finally losing its hold on us? Have we been losing our love for jocks for the first time in my memory? After all, highly accomplished athletes like Pete Rose and Barry Bonds are now being Hall of Fame plaques on moral grounds, while high school and college athletes are becoming teenage millionaires thanks to new laws regarding their ownership of their own images.

It seemed like an appropriate moment for summing up.

Having spent the past 20 years as TomDispatch¡¯s Jock Culture , I felt the need for a reckoning. What had I learned from the 50 essays I¡¯d written so far? Was there any kind of personal touchdown I could point to? Had I truly caught the relationship between sports and the larger society ¡ª how they do or don¡¯t reflect, direct and/or motivate each other? Can I still face the issue of trans athletes or what rules there might be for which kinds of non-athletic transgressions should keep players out of sports halls of fame, or even explain how pro football and basketball have now essentially become Black sports? Must I keep analyzing the symbolism of games rather than just enjoying them? Can I feel comfortable in a world where brain trauma is treated as a reasonable cost of violent entertainment (much as school shootings are a permissible price for gun love)?

And, yes, I came to wonder just where DiMaggio had gone and whether some other charismatic avatar of a fanatical cult might, in fact, have replaced him and all those other jock idols?

More than politicians (even US Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy) or entertainers (singers Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley or the Beatles), sports figures ¡ª maybe because of the shooting star nature of their professional lives ¡ª had long been designated the avatars of American culture. And that was true even if, with the rarest of exceptions (perhaps King and Ali), they left little of lasting spiritual value or impact.

And now, of course, we have DJT (Donald J. Trump) as the MVP (most valuable player) of, it seems, every competition. I suspect that he, or at least the world he represents, is the reason why we have no real sporting heroes anymore. After all, he sucks all the air out of all arenas, while providing an ongoing reality show that seems to fill our days and nights, superseding sports in every way imaginable.

Trump eternally demands to be the GOAT ¡ª the Greatest of All Time ¡ª while distinctly turning our world into a Trumpian sporting event.

Suggesting a theory

I was surprised to find that, in most of the 50 I¡¯d written, whether they were purportedly about baseball, NASCAR or the Super Bowl, there was always at least a passing reference to Trump and, in all too many cases, he was the leading character. That led me to wonder: Did such a reality just represent this particular writer¡¯s obsession, or had Trump truly enveloped our collective consciousness?

And, I wondered as well: Was this inevitable? According to AI, when I tried to use it recently, I¡¯ve described Jock Culture as helping to ingrain ¡°the national psyche¡­ with exclusivity, sexism, homophobia, and winning at any cost¡­ a danger to the common good,¡± while I evidently predicted that ¡°society will become a darker, more despotic place if it continues unchecked.¡±

There¡¯s no question that the United States has become a significantly darker, more despotic place since, on January 17, 2017, just-about-to-be-president Trump first appeared in a Jock Culture of mine (the 17th, if you¡¯re keeping count). The headline was, ¡°Football is Trump Ball Lite,¡± and heralded an authentic call for democracy from an unlikely place, the most Trumpish of sports.

As I wrote then:

Pro football actually helped prepare us for the new president¡¯s upset victory by normalizing a basic tenet of jock culture: anyone not on the team is an enemy, the Other. And it¡¯s open season on opponents, the fans of opponents, critics, and women (unless they¡¯re cheerleaders or moms). Trash talking is the lingua franca of this Trumpian moment, bullying the default tactic.

Yet pro football has also provided us with the single most vivid image of current American resistance to racism. Last summer, before a pre-season game, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat during the playing of the national anthem as a symbol of his refusal ¡°to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.¡±

The outcome, however, would prove shocking. Trump, who entered the Oval Office three days after that column of mine appeared, won two of his three matches, while Kaepernick never played again after that 2016¨C2017 season.

Maybe we shouldn¡¯t have been shocked, though. Maybe the predictors never got the odds right. Maybe they didn¡¯t understand what we wanted from our sports idols ¡ª or what their limits were. How about this: Consider the relative paucity of sports figures in the Epstein Files, especially compared to groups like academics, financiers, politicians and even . Jeffrey Epstein pursued people who could be useful to him as enablers, investors, connectors or victims. Woody Allen was high on the list, but there was no Lebron James or Tom Brady (although Brady¡¯s long-time owner, billionaire of the New England Patriots, certainly made the cut).

Was it because celebrity athletes have no need of being set up with playthings or because Epstein didn¡¯t believe they had the kind of clout to benefit his power network?

Among the more recognizable names that did crop up on his sporting roster, however, were Casey Wasserman, the president of the Los Angeles Organizing Committee for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games, and several fellow NFL owners alongside the 84-year-old Kraft, who apparently from Epstein while facing a 2019 charge for soliciting prostitution. (He beat the rap.)

Another NFL owner in the lineup was , the 76-year-old part-owner of football¡¯s New York Giants. As a Hollywood producer with credits like Forrest Gump and Risky Business, you might think he could have collected playmates on his own. In 2013, however, Epstein emailed Tisch, ¡°I can invite the (Russian) ¡­to meet if you like.¡± Tisch quickly replied, ¡°Is she fun?¡±

A few weeks later, concerning a woman whose name is redacted, Tisch asked, ¡°Is my present in NYC?¡± After Epstein replied, ¡°Yes,¡± Tisch asked, ¡°Can I get my surprise to take me to lunch tomorrow?¡±

Epstein then wrote to him: ¡°I am happy to have you as a new but ¡­shared interest friend.¡±

Trump, of course, was the sports figure ¡ª he owned a professional football team in the 1980s ¡ª whose mentions in the Epstein Files were most eagerly anticipated. His name, in fact, does come up thousands of times, although so far involving nothing of the existentially horrifying nature that his enemies had been waiting for and his allies had presumably been fearing.

Commander in cheat

Trump¡¯s standing in the sports world has never seemed particularly high. Even golfers tend to roll their eyes and agree with , who wrote his book, Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, about the way the president used to bully and whine his way across the greens.

Trump was spectacularly unsuccessful in his attempts to buy a National Football League team. In the 1980s, he tried to bulldoze his way into the sport as the owner of the New Jersey Generals of the new United States Football League (USFL), which played its games in the spring to avoid competition with the NFL.

Trump was a leader in the USFL¡¯s lawsuit to force a merger with the NFL, which resulted in a pyrrhic victory ¡ª his side won the case, but the awarded damages came to (and no, that is not a typo!). It sounded like a typical tale of Trump buffoonery.

Trump declared himself a fan of college football (an attempt to show disdain for the pros who had rejected him) and suffered further rejection from various championship teams who his invitations to the White House.

Still, his administration clearly does what it wants when it comes to sports. In selling the war against Iran, for instance, it ran a series of video montages juxtaposing military bomb strikes and hard college and pro football hits. One such hit was a punishing block thrown in 2012 by Nebraska receiver Kenny Bell against a Wisconsin defensive back. Bell, a former NFL player as well, The Washington Post that he was ¡°disgusted¡± by the montage. ¡°For that play to be associated with bombing human beings makes me sick,¡± he said. ¡°I don¡¯t want anything to do with images like that.¡±

Other athletes decried the usage on moral grounds, but there was no immediate complaint from the NFL itself, which is usually quick to protest any infringement of its copyrighted material. Was that supposed repository of our toughest athletes spooked by Trump? Was he, in fact, the Top Jock after all?

¡°This White House is vindictive and bullying,¡± commented Professor Rebecca Tushnet of Harvard Law School. ¡°So, if you¡¯re the NFL, why tempt its wrath?¡±

Why would they even want to? After all, aren¡¯t they on the same Top Jock team?

As for the rest of us, we may just have to keep hitting back until we can write a new song, ¡°Where Have You Gone, Donald Trump?¡±

And we will know just where.

[ first published this piece.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author¡¯s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ô¹Ï¡¯s editorial policy.

The post Trump as the GOAT (Or So He Believes) appeared first on 51³Ô¹Ï.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration appears dedicated to its destruction. And this could have disastrous consequences for the US.

The benefits of rules, predictability and reliability

At the foundation of this international order stand sound global institutions ¡ª the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which became the World Trade Organization (WTO). Referred to as the liberal international or world order, it succeeded for eight decades because it established rules and conditions that generated shared growth and prosperity.

The international order, combined with American institutions ¡ª an independent judiciary, sound property rights, a free press, and a government with effective checks and balances ¡ª supported the development of stable, efficient and predictable markets that became fundamental to US economic prosperity. But that was only the beginning.

This system positioned the US dollar as the world¡¯s reserve currency, generating enormous advantages. These included inexpensive financing for the US government and American consumers, as well as the world¡¯s trust and reliance on the American financial system for the vast majority of global transactions. It helped propel the US to become the most attractive destination for foreign direct investment ¡ª global investors chose America not just for its market size, but for its institutional reliability. It also promoted US-written technical and legal standards that advantaged American producers, and persuaded other nations to join US sanctions and export-control regimes.

Importantly, these factors created an environment that attracted the world¡¯s most brilliant minds to American universities and corporations. The result: The US became the most innovative country in the world.

The economic and security umbrella

This international order was not merely an economic arrangement ¡ª it was also a security umbrella that extended US protection to allies through 750 American military and naval in friendly countries. This has provided the US with unmatched global reach, empowering it to offer security guarantees that converted adversaries into customers while eliminating piracy and keeping sea lanes open.

This economic-security umbrella benefited our allies. But it helped the US perhaps most of all by granting American producers secure access to 8 billion global consumers, not just 345 million at home. And it enabled US multinationals operating abroad to produce and sell more than twice the value of goods exported from the homeland annually. On the import side, it benefited American manufacturers and consumers by providing access to the world¡¯s best inputs at competitive prices, suppressing inflation and boosting living standards.

The results of this arrangement are impressive. According to the World Bank, since 1990, global trade has increased incomes by worldwide and lifted more than 1 billion people out of poverty.

China presented challenges to the order

Although problems periodically emerged within the international order, multilateral dispute mechanisms generally found workable solutions. China proved a more persistent challenge.

To the WTO in 2001, China voluntarily undertook significant domestic economic reforms, including substantial reductions in tariff levels, and opened its markets to become the world’s second-largest importer. This benefited many countries, including the US, which saw its exports to China grow by from 2001 through 2019 ¡ª compared to only growth in to the world overall.

Yet as China rapidly accumulated economic advantages and technological knowledge, serious tensions emerged. The rise of a politically independent entrepreneurial class threatened Communist Party control. The 2008 global financial crisis and a 2015 stock market plunge accelerated China¡¯s selective exploitation of international rules. Its unwillingness to reduce subsidies to state-owned enterprises, its dependence on exports and its failure to stimulate domestic demand continued to generate friction with trading partners worldwide.

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater

To steer China toward a more accommodating path, the US could have worked more closely with allies to press China more forcefully to play by the rules ¡ª and, if unsuccessful, pursued a more targeted decoupling strategy with allied support. Instead, US President Donald Trump appears to have decided to gut the entire international order.

This is the equivalent of throwing the baby out with the bathwater ¡ª discarding enormously valuable elements in an attempt to eliminate unwanted ones. On April 2, 2025 ¡ª what he called ¡ª President Trump imposed sweeping tariffs not on the countries that had violated international rules, but across the board on adversaries and allies alike. He even announced higher tariffs on Vietnam, a key strategic partner to which many US firms had recently relocated production from China, than on China itself.

If the goal was to encourage allies to open their markets further or meet their defense commitments, this could have been accomplished through diplomatic engagement, new trade agreements, security incentives and joint investment in defense technologies. It was not.

The Trump administration¡¯s disdain for international agreements and global institutions ¡ª as well as for American institutions at home ¡ª is rapidly transforming the global environment. President Trump¡¯s insults and threats have sparked deep resentment among America¡¯s closest allies: Canada should become the 51st US state, threatening to Denmark¡¯s Greenland territory, and expressing questionable commitment to NATO and to Ukraine in its war with Russia.

The result? America¡¯s traditional allies are increasingly describing the US not as an indispensable partner, but as an unpredictable adversary. A conducted in March 2025 found that more than half of Europeans considered President Trump an ¡°enemy of Europe.¡± By March 2026, a of nearly 6,700 people across six European nations found that many Europeans now view the US as a bigger threat than China.

As allies scramble to reduce their dependence on US markets, inputs and weapons systems, the international order ¡ª once built on trust, cooperation, predictability and shared security ¡ª is becoming a remnant of the past.

¡°President Trump is destroying the order that made the United States and its allies safe and prosperous,¡± Kori Schake, Senior Fellow and Director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. ¡°Alliances are America¡¯s superpower. They magnify our own strength, and they are the basis of our security and our prosperity.¡± Trump and his team, she , ¡°are destroying everything that makes the United States an attractive partner.¡±??

The US alone is weaker; China is stronger

Emerging from the decline of the US-led world order is a new kind of globalization ¡ª one that proceeds without American leadership but remains deeply interconnected among the rest of the world. Europeans are moving toward alternatives to US financial platforms and are opening up more to China. China, meanwhile, is actively filling the vacuum, writing the next generation of rules with no obligation to reflect American interests.

Since Liberation Day, the US has concluded only skeletal, short-form trade agreements with a handful of countries ¡ª a far cry from the comprehensive, thousands-of-pages agreements that defined the postwar trading system. Our allies and China, on the other hand, are forging new free trade zones at a quick pace.

For example, in January 2026, the EU concluded free trade agreements with both ¡ª which includes Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, creating a trading zone of more than 700 million consumers ¡ª and with , now the world¡¯s largest free trade zone encompassing 2 billion consumers and approximately 25% of the world¡¯s gross domestic product.

Canada, America¡¯s closest neighbor and largest trading partner, struck a preliminary with China in January 2026, slashing tariffs on electric vehicles, canola and other agricultural goods.?

These are just a few of the numerous new trade deals concluded or under negotiation without US involvement. As a result, the US likely will find itself increasingly bypassed in global commerce and technology, while its former influence over allies¡¯ investment and security decisions continues to erode.

Growing concerns that the US is losing its status as the world¡¯s safe haven are beginning to show in financial markets. The US dollar¡¯s role as the world¡¯s reserve currency ¡ª long the foundation of American financial power ¡ª is gradually eroding. Countries are diversifying away from the dollar and into other currencies and assets, including gold. If this trajectory continues, American households will no longer be able to borrow so cheaply, and the US government will face significantly higher costs to finance its national debt ¡ª costs that could crowd out spending on defense, infrastructure and the programs that sustain the middle class.

China is actively working to expand the international role of its currency, the renminbi, and to build financial infrastructure as an alternative to the dollar-centered system. While the renminbi is unlikely to displace the dollar, the euro and other currencies stand to gain ¡ª and any meaningful erosion of dollar primacy will diminish American financial power in ways that will be difficult to reverse.

The new international system is not yet fully defined. But it is already becoming clearer that it will be less stable, less predictable, more turbulent and more prone to conflict than the order America built ¡ª and is now abandoning. The war with Iran, launched on February 28, 2026, illustrates with painful clarity what a more unstable world looks like. Preventing more such conflicts and restoring America¡¯s standing in the world will require urgent and deliberate action.

What must be done

The US may still be able to course-correct, but the window is closing.

Rebuilding American global leadership demands more than rhetoric. It requires restoring respectful, reliable relations with allies whose cooperation remains essential to US economic strength, technological leadership and national security. Allies and investors alike must again believe that the US is stable, predictable, and committed to the institutions and alliances that underpinned shared prosperity and security for eight decades.

America¡¯s commitment to the WTO, other core international institutions and NATO is paramount. As Michael McFaul, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and former US Ambassador to Russia, has , a US withdrawal from NATO would make conflict between Russia and NATO allies significantly more likely. It is far better to strengthen deterrence now than to be dragged into a far more dangerous and costly conflict later.

On trade, the US has 14 free trade agreements with 20 countries. These partners represent only 6% of global consumers yet account for about 45% of all US goods exports ¡ª powerful evidence that when trade barriers are lowered, American businesses and workers can compete anywhere in the world. The US must urgently pursue comprehensive agreements with major partners beyond this group ¡ª not the skeletal, short-form frameworks signed since Liberation Day.

The US must also successfully complete the mandatory 2026 joint review of the ¡ª America¡¯s most important trade relationship. Failure to confirm renewal would inject enormous uncertainty into North American supply chains and could ultimately lead to the agreement’s expiration in 2036.

The shift from efficiency-first to resilience-first supply chain strategy is now inescapable. American and multinational corporations must diversify their global supplier networks and strengthen co-production capacity in semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, rare-earth processing, energy infrastructure, artificial intelligence and advanced defense technologies. This is not a retreat from globalization ¡ª it is a smarter, more secure form of it.

The US must also recognize that legitimate grievances with China exist. Beijing¡¯s failure to comply with international trade norms and its growing use of economic coercion cannot be ignored ¡ª but confronting these challenges effectively requires coordinated action with allies, not economic warfare against them.

Restoring the credibility and independence of American institutions ¡ª especially the Federal Reserve ¡ª is equally critical. Its independence is a foundational pillar of dollar credibility and American financial power. Undermining it accelerates the global diversification away from dollar-denominated assets already underway.

The international order was not a burden imposed on America ¡ª it was America¡¯s greatest strategic achievement, designed by Americans, run by Americans and profitable for Americans in ways no other arrangement in history has matched.

The world is not waiting. New rules are being written, new alliances are forming and new trade architectures are taking shape ¡ª none of which include the US. If America does not re-engage with consistency, reliability and genuine commitment to the rules-based order it created, it will find itself increasingly bypassed ¡ª not just economically, but strategically and diplomatically as well.

The question is no longer whether the international order will continue to evolve. The question is whether the US will be at the table helping to shape what comes next ¡ª or watching from the outside as others write the rules.

Destroying that system without constructing a credible replacement risks leaving the US weaker, poorer, more isolated and far more vulnerable in an increasingly unstable and dangerous world.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author¡¯s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ô¹Ï¡¯s editorial policy.

The post Why America¡¯s Destruction of the World Order Could Be Disastrous appeared first on 51³Ô¹Ï.

Now, welcome to Operation Epic Fury, the perfect name for an adolescent-id-on-steroids-style war. That name was, of course, chosen by Donald ¡°How do you like the ?¡± Trump for his campaign against Iran, while his White House social-media team created actual mash-ups of games and reality to match. For example, on X, the video, ¡°,¡± alternates video game characters scoring points in an array of sports with images of bombs hitting their targets, and Instagram features a of baseball batters getting strikes interwoven with, yep, bomb strikes. So, I guess I was wrong. These days, war is a game, even if the only way to win it is to keep moving the goalposts.

The US military has frequently promoted the game-like aspects of war. The title of my book, in fact, came from an action that a group of veterans affiliated with what was then Iraq Veterans Against the War (now ) staged in front of an Army recruiting booth at a jobs fair, where job-seekers were being enticed to play a war-simulation game. More recently, the Army¡¯s ¡°What¡¯s Your Warrior?¡± recruitment , while deemphasizing direct combat, includes videos that feature luminescent soldiers who resemble superheroes and characters in video games.

However, this does seem like the first time that a White House has joined quite so enthusiastically in the fun. Past presidents may have been cheerleaders for their wars, but they still retained a certain gravitas and respect for the grimness of combat. That was then ¡ª like, the last 250 years ¡ª while now, it¡¯s game time for Trump and his administration, who take contemptuous pride in smashing political norms, the more crass, careless and callous, the merrier.

But suppose war doesn¡¯t put you in a playful mood? Suppose your role in wartime is to inform the American public about what¡¯s going on? Suppose you¡¯re an American journalist? How the hell do you do your job?

Anointed by Jesus to make war on Iran

You report the facts, of course: when the war began, how many countries are involved, how many people have been killed (especially American troops), how much oil is or isn¡¯t passing through the strategically essential Strait of Hormuz and why the International Energy deemed blocking it ¡°the biggest crude supply disruption in oil market history.¡± But you can check and recheck every fact and still get the story wrong, since this story ¡ª thank you, Trump and crew ¡ª keeps lurching all over the place.

For starters, there have been the regularly shifting rationales for launching and continuing the war (which the president has deemed just ¡°a little ¡±) and the even more elusive goals that could signify when whatever it¡¯s called will end. In early March, did a running tally of the reasons Trump has offered for going to war. The primary ones were preventing ¡°imminent threats¡± to the US and its allies; denying Iran nuclear weapons; ending its support for terrorism in the region; liberating Iranians from a repressive government; giving up on failed negotiations and, as he proclaimed in his usual CAPS on , ¡°PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!¡± Which, of course, is best achieved by bombing a country to smithereens and slaughtering the people you¡¯re liberating.

Secretary of War (forget about Defense!) Pete Hegseth, when he¡¯s not worrying about of himself, seems to go in more for and dominance, but echoed his boss with the Orwellian declaration, ¡°[W]ar, in this context and in pursuit of peace, is necessary.¡± I think, however, that my ¡ª if I can even use the word ¡ª favorite reason for the war seems to have come from a combat-unit commander who announced in a briefing that Trump was ¡° by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.¡± That exhortation is unverified, but as of early March, the Military Religious Freedom reported receiving more than 200 complaints from all branches of the military about similar comments, and a little while later, Hegseth, in his official capacity, told Americans to for victory over Iran ¡°in the name of Jesus Christ.¡±

As for when the hostilities would end, Trump has vacillated between asserting that the conflict will be brief and that it could go on for months, that Iran is about to surrender or negotiate and that he will accept nothing short of ¡°UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!¡± In a to the Brian Kilmeade Show, he insisted that he¡¯ll know it¡¯s over ¡°[w]hen I feel it, OK, feel it in my bones.¡±

There is a tactical advantage, I suppose, to never truly pinning down the purpose or endgame of the war. Whatever happens, whenever Trump ¡°feels it,¡± he can declare victory, take his warships and go home, while whining that his actions represent another reason he¡¯s owed a Nobel Peace Prize.

Polycrisis in war

The term is a fancy name for the clusterfuck that results when several separate crises interact to create a grand, all-inclusive crisis. The ongoing Iran war polycrisis includes so many vectors that journalists on nearly every beat have, it seems, skin in the game.

There are the military maneuvers in the region, at least the ones the Pentagon has owned up to, and a crash course in and other modern munitions. There are the ever-mounting costs to American taxpayers (the Pentagon put it at about two months into the war, but nobody seems to believe that, probably not even the Pentagon); to the environment (check out ¡°¡±); to servicemembers and their families (traumatic is the prevalent injury); to the ; to all of us, thanks to the soaring price of oil (rising at times to over a barrel) with its domino effect on American wallets; to the stock market and the world economy; and to whatever hope of coexistence there ever was in the Middle East before the bombing began.  

Then, there are all the politics: in Iran, with its uncertain leadership; in countries not directly involved in the war, but affected by it like and unlucky Ukraine; in the US, with all the constitutional and legal questions raised and still unanswered; and internationally, as my country flouts any version of the rules of and begs its supposed allies for help (or denounces them for not coming to its rescue). There are, of course, inevitable comparisons with the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and its long, disastrous aftermath; horse-race reporting on what all this means for the fall midterm elections; and polls taking the American pulse on the war. Even sports couldn¡¯t remain completely on the sidelines when Trump suggested that Iran of this summer¡¯s World Cup matches in the US.

Phew! I¡¯m already out of breath! And that¡¯s not even including the rapid changes that can make a news story outdated within hours of being filed.

Reporting Iran

It¡¯s complicated enough to report on a multifaceted polycrisis, but reporting on Iran, where there has been a near-total news blackout since the start of the war, presents particular difficulties. To put it mildly, that country has not been a friendly place for American reporters, or for that matter, for its own journalists. Reporters without Borders ranks it fourth from last of 180 countries in its 2026 press freedom , while the Committee to Protect Journalists counts at least members of the press in Iranian prisons now. All journalists there must register with the Culture Ministry and news outlets can be suspended or summarily closed for an array of vague offenses. Add to that the American and Israeli airstrikes, which an Iranian journalist and damaged several media outlets.

Only one Western network reporter, of CNN, was given a visa to enter Iran when the war began. He ended each broadcast with this disclaimer: ¡°CNN is able to report in Iran only with the Iranian government¡¯s permission.¡± A few other Western journalists arrived in the following weeks, but everyone else had to work from afar, reading between the lines of Iran¡¯s state-aligned outlets, trying to gather reliable information through regional bureaus or human rights organizations on the ground and verifying the often suspect social-media feeds that make it out of the country. On March 31, Shelly Kittleson, a freelance reporter, spent a week in after she was kidnapped in Baghdad by an Iranian paramilitary group, which reinforced the danger of reporting from there.

The US government hasn¡¯t been particularly helpful, either. Last fall, when the Defense Department demanded that journalists sign a restrictive pledge or lose their credentials to report from inside the Pentagon, dozens of respected and seasoned reporters walked out, resulting in about the war. (The of those Pentagon reporters is also changing daily.) More recently, the Department of Defense decided to ¡°modernize¡± the previously independent Stars and Stripes, which means far greater editorial control by the Pentagon. As proof, the paper¡¯s ombudsman, Jacqueline Smith, was preemptorily on April 28.

Information into and out of Iran has also been curtailed by , the (apparently illegal) head of the US Agency for Global Media, who eviscerated Radio Free Asia and, during the recent protests in Iran, denied Radio Fardo, the Persian-language service, to the transmission facilities it needed to broadcast into that country. And after Trump had a hissy fit over unfavorable coverage of the war, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr continued his slippery slide toward censorship by threatening to the licenses of broadcasters ¡°running hoaxes and news distortions.¡± Meanwhile, in February, The Washington Post its Middle East reporters and editors.

What we miss

War, for all its messiness, makes good news (at least for the news media). It¡¯s exciting, immediate, nonstop, consequential ¡ª and it certainly is, however grimly, a spectacle, lit up with drama and horror that can bring out the best in journalism. Yet the established news media have taken a while to figure out how to report on Trump¡¯s war. Inevitably, there is much that they miss.

Trump is, of course, adept in his own strange fashion at playing the media, distracting and shifting the focus away from things he doesn¡¯t want to talk about. This time around, he has exchanged his usual government by for phone chats with individual reporters. In case you¡¯ve lost track of how many such calls he¡¯s taken since the war began, the Columbia Journalism Review/CJR conveniently offered a of 13 reporters from nine outlets he talked with, some multiple times, in the first weeks of the war.

For a journalist, getting the president to take your call or answer multiple questions is a big win. That¡¯s especially true when Trump, in full babble, reveals more than he probably meant to. For instance, in a on Air Force One 16 days into the war, as he was arguing that NATO allies owed it to the US to send ships to guard the Strait of Hormuz, he added, ¡°You could make the case that maybe we shouldn¡¯t even be there at all, because we don¡¯t need it. We have a lot of oil.¡± (Ever notice that when something he¡¯s responsible for goes wrong, he says, ¡°we,¡± and when something is accomplished, whether thanks to him or not, he , ¡°I?¡±) But as CJR noted, the problem isn¡¯t reporters taking advantage of access to the president, but their treating his utterances, no matter how nonsensical or incoherent, as breaking news (often without even vetting them for veracity).

Remember ¡°the president of ?¡± Journalists have certainly reminded us of Trump¡¯s campaign promises not to , but even that inconsistency plays into his game of distraction. And his cynical tactic has worked. The still-unspooling Epstein scandal, the inhumane immigrant round-ups and whatever we¡¯ve been doing in or the Caribbean Sea have been largely relegated to some other world. Even the inconvenient affordability issue was elided until the war sent the price of oil soaring.

Also missing from much reporting has been context. In an excellent compilation on how to the Iran crisis, the Association of Foreign Press Correspondents USA suggested that journalists ¡°remember that Iran is not only a theater of conflict. It is also a society.¡± Journalism, by its nature, doesn¡¯t lend itself to deep, contextual analysis, but when it comes to Iran, it would be useful to supply some background for many Americans who know all too little about that country, including that it¡¯s a large, complex nation with a rich culture and a long, illustrious history, only a relatively short part of which has been interwoven with the United States. Explaining that might help us all resist the reductive good/evil framing championed by a government at war.

Not that there hasn¡¯t been thoughtful analysis from newsroom columnists and alternative platforms. Substacks like journalist Margaret Sullivan¡¯s ¡°¡± and newsletters like have brought depth to such war coverage. The dominant media have done some not-so-subtle pushback, too, labeling it ¡°¡± ¡ª the BBC¡¯s Jeremy Bowen called it the ¡° Gulf war¡± ¡ª and also using the dreaded word ¡°,¡± even if only as a possibility. And as Trump would surely agree, nobody likes a loser, so as his excursion into war in the Middle East has been transformed into a giant losing proposition, the criticism has become more pointed and direct.

What I am missing most in the reporting, though, is any mention of peace. By peace, I don¡¯t mean the cheap of the US Institute of Peace with Trump¡¯s name, or the parody known as Trump¡¯s of Peace (stocked with countries that have been cited for human rights abuses). Nor do I mean just the cessation of bombs and missiles dropping on Iran and Lebanon, though that would be a good start, or even antiwar demonstrations, though such events can draw much-needed media attention.

When your job is to report on war, what you see is war in all its ramifications. But if your job were to report on peace, you would see the conditions for a positive, durable peace and report on them as realistic, attainable and as potentially heroic as marching off to battle. It may seem counterintuitive, silly even, to ask for that kind of reporting in the throes of this ill-begotten war, but that¡¯s when we need it most. War ¡ª even a ¡°good¡± or ¡°just¡± one ¡ª is brutal, pitiless and destructive. Trump¡¯s war is international terrorism at its most extreme and, if it were a game, it would be one where everyone loses something.

But in our better natures, we know that war really isn¡¯t a game. Don¡¯t we?

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A middle class divided

Eckert begins by redefining the middle class through economic dependence on work. Unlike the wealthy, middle-class Americans cannot stop working without risking a major decline in their standard of living. Yet he argues that this broad category no longer shares common economic interests.

He distinguishes between an upper middle class, roughly the top 20% of working-age Americans, and a lower middle class that makes up the next 60%. Since the late 1970s, the upper tier has accumulated far more wealth while the lower tier has struggled with affordability and economic insecurity. ¡°The middle class depends on democracy and democracy depends on the middle class,¡± Eckert says. Democratic stability weakens when most citizens no longer feel institutions work for them. 

The divide becomes visible in daily life. First-time homebuyers increasingly find themselves priced out of the market. Childcare costs force many families into impossible tradeoffs between parenting and employment. Healthcare expenses remain financially disruptive even for insured households, while rising student debt undermines education as a path to mobility. Jenkins notes that Americans who once occupied a relatively unified middle-class world now experience sharply different realities.

Democracy and mutual respect

For Eckert, the economic split carries political consequences because democracy relies on compromise between groups with competing interests. If most Americans lose faith in democratic institutions, those institutions become fragile.

His first proposed remedy is respect. Eckert says that the upper and lower middle classes increasingly live apart socially and geographically, which fuels resentment and misunderstanding. Those at the top may view struggling Americans as irresponsible or lazy, while those below see arrogance and unfair privilege.

He insists both perspectives miss the structural realities shaping opportunity. ¡°Everybody¡¯s working hard, everybody¡¯s ambitious, everybody wants to do the best they can,¡± he says, even if circumstances produce vastly different outcomes.

Rather than condemning success, Eckert argues that prosperous Americans should retain incentives to innovate and achieve. Simultaneously, society should recognize the unrealized potential inside the lower middle class. Respect, in his framework, means acknowledging the equal dignity of all forms of work and rejecting the assumption that economic outcomes perfectly reflect personal worth.

Fairness, cooperation and opportunity

Eckert¡¯s second pillar, cooperating fairly, draws heavily from political philosopher John Rawls. He revisits Rawls¡¯s ¡°veil of ignorance¡± thought experiment, which asks people to imagine designing society without knowing where they or their children would end up within it.

The exercise, Eckert argues, reveals why democratic societies must balance individual freedom with collective responsibility. Inequality will always exist because talent, health, upbringing and opportunity differ. Yet fairness requires ensuring that those born into difficult circumstances still have meaningful chances to improve their lives.

That principle leads directly to Eckert¡¯s third pillar: sharing opportunity. He carefully distinguishes this from simple redistribution. While some redistribution may be necessary, he argues that long-term democratic stability depends more on expanding people¡¯s ability to generate prosperity themselves.

Education sits at the center of this strategy. Eckert advocates a continuous pipeline beginning with preschool and extending through vocational training, community colleges and universities. He emphasizes that four-year college degrees should not remain the only respected path to advancement. Vocational education, entrepreneurship and technical skills can also create mobility and economic security.

Artificial intelligence intensifies the urgency of these reforms. AI-driven disruption may soon affect upper-middle-class professionals as much as manufacturing workers. Instead of slowing innovation, Eckert argues that education systems should help workers adapt to emerging industries and technologies.

Philosophy, experience and democratic hope

Jenkins notes that Eckert¡¯s argument stands apart from the anger and polarization dominating contemporary politics. Eckert explains that his approach emerges partly from personal experience. Raised in lower-middle-class Indiana, he later entered elite academic and political institutions, giving him firsthand exposure to both sides of America¡¯s class divide.

His thinking also draws from philosophers including Rawls, John Dewey and J¨¹rgen Habermas. Dewey emphasized mutual respect and challenged the historic bias against manual labor. Habermas focused on honest communication and democratic negotiation in the aftermath of Nazi Germany. Rawls provided the framework for fairness and social cooperation.

Eckert acknowledges that his vision may appear idealistic in a deeply polarized political climate. Yet he argues that democratic societies need ideals precisely because daily politics so often falls short. ¡°The American dream can be just a hopeless fantasy or an empty aspiration,¡± he says. ¡°It can also be a reality.¡±

The discussion closes on a cautiously optimistic note. Eckert believes that investing in the unrealized potential of the lower middle class could increase national productivity while preserving prosperity for those already succeeding. Democracy, in his view, remains the only system capable of balancing both goals at once.

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One key measure of air pollution is particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5), which is particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter. High concentrations of PM2.5 pose a to human health, which is why , including the US, have established legally enforceable concentration limits. Yet in high-humidity regions, the reliance on low-cost Air Quality Index (AQI) sensors may be creating a systematic measurement bias.

A five-month conducted near the Baton Rouge Capitol Air Quality System compared AQI sensors side-by-side with federal reference monitors. According to the study, during periods of high humidity, the sensors exhibited a predictable bias of , driven by the interaction of humidity, temperature and surface pressure.

The physics underlying the discrepancy

Conventional air quality sensors measure the size and presence of particulate matter in the air. They are calibrated for ideal conditions and do not account for the environmental factors that constantly interact with pollutants. 

Studies have consistently shown that and radically alter aerosol behavior. One study that when relative humidity exceeds roughly 75%, many low-cost optical sensors begin to overestimate PM2.5 concentrations due to , a phenomenon in which water vapor attaches to particles, causing them to swell. Standard sensors in humid environments struggle to differentiate enlarged, water-laden particles from hazardous particles of the same size, resulting in false positives. Barometric pressure and aerosol hygroscopicity compound the problem further.

A global coastal challenge

Coastal cities worldwide face this problem. High relative humidity is persistent in these environments, pressure systems are shaped by land-sea temperature gradients, and air stagnation events, where air becomes trapped near the surface, occur more frequently than in inland areas.

Fine PM absorbs moisture, swelling in size but not becoming more toxic. Optical sensors misinterpret this swelling as increased mass concentration, producing inflated AQI readings. A study of high-humidity cities across South and found that PM readings frequently spike during monsoon conditions, even as chemical emissions decline due to rainfall.

Yet modern coastal cities continue to deploy dense networks of low-cost sensors to address the rising challenge of air pollution. If the 14.87% bias holds, governments relying on these sensors may issue false alarms during humid weather. Industrial operators would contest regulatory data, and public agencies would struggle to make effective policy. Real emission events would become nearly impossible to identify and correctly quantify.

The systemic risk of misinterpretation

The Louisiana Industrial Corridor ¡ª a region defined by both high industrial activity and extreme coastal humidity ¡ª illustrates the stakes. When billions of dollars in fines and criminal charges rest on sensor-derived evidence, a 14.87% error rate represents a serious failure of data integrity.

This creates a landscape where regulatory agencies may levy fines based on atmospheric noise rather than actual emissions. Equally, true sources of pollution can remain obscured behind poorly calibrated data. If sensor logic holds when the physics breaks, policy becomes disconnected from physical reality.

Overcoming the bias through the PERFR framework

The Polynomial-Enhanced Random Forest Regression (PERFR) correction framework addresses this directly. It enables a sensor system to learn the physical distortion signature created by atmospheric conditions and separate it from genuine pollution mass.

Through a correlation matrix, the framework quantifies the dynamic relationships between weather variables, identifying the precise strength of the link between humidity, pressure, temperature, aerosol hygroscopicity and the resulting AQI deviations. The result is a forensic layer of intelligence that sits atop raw sensor output.

The takeaway: from sensors to sense-making

The lesson from the Gulf Coast is not that sensors are useless, but that they must be interpreted in context. Coastal atmospheres and any region with high climatic variability require intelligent sensing tools that audit as much as they monitor.

The next generation of air quality monitoring must integrate forensic intelligence that evaluates atmospheric conditions alongside sensor outputs in real time. As climate change amplifies humidity and air stagnation globally, the gap between measurement and reality will only widen. Air quality monitoring systems must catch up to the laws they are designed to inform.

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Over five years later, with less than seven months to go before the midterm elections, that question is before us again, but in far starker terms than I could have imagined in 2020. So, here¡¯s an updated letter to the media tribe I once belonged to, with suggestions broadly similar to those I made five years ago, but with a far sharper sense of urgency, even fear.

Here¡¯s my first suggestion: Reporters in 2026 need to pay more attention to and offer more forceful coverage of US President Donald Trump¡¯s continuing that Joe Biden¡¯s victory in 2020 was fraudulent and that year¡¯s election illegitimate. (As recently as March 15, he this completely false allegation: ¡°With time, it [the 2020 election] has been conclusively proven to be stolen.¡±)??

While Trump keeps repeating that long-discredited , journalists should not treat his as ¡°old news¡± that no longer requires detailed coverage. They should instead consider it an important and newsworthy story right now. Instead of briefly repeating a shorthand conclusion (¡°false¡± or ¡°without evidence¡±) after a quote from the president, they should take a few more lines of type or minutes of air time to remind readers or listeners of the facts that show irrefutably why they should never believe his words: that Trump¡¯s ¡°rigged election¡± claims were not validated in a single one of 64 court cases ¡ª that¡¯s right, 64! ¡ª challenging the election results, or in any official investigation or recount.?

On that point, reporters can cite an authoritative 2022 , ¡°Lost, Not Stolen: The Conservative Case That Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Election,¡± written by a panel of authors including two former Republican senators, a lawyer who served as solicitor-general under President George W. Bush, and five other prominent conservatives. After exhaustively reviewing every judicial proceeding and post-election probe in six states where election fraud was alleged, the authors concluded that ¡°Donald Trump and his supporters had their day in court and failed to produce substantive evidence to make their case.¡± Their definitive verdict on the overall issue was: ¡°There is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct.¡±

Journalists might also pass on this thought from David Becker, executive director of the for Election Innovation & Research, who, in a recent , suggested that all 2020 election conspiracy theories rest on this dubious premise: ¡°Democrats, being out of power, somehow managed a conspiracy against a sitting president, who controlled the entire government, to steal an election from him¡­ and that four years later when those same Democrats held every lever of federal power, they forgot to do it again.¡±

Reporters should also remind their audience of another important fact: that Trump¡¯s claims of fraud in the 2020 election were emphatically by his own vice president, Mike Pence, and his attorney general, . Both of them publicly broke with the president, strongly denied his allegations and unequivocally recognized that Biden had been elected legitimately.

In that connection, here¡¯s a related suggestion for reporters: Ask every Republican candidate on your state¡¯s ballot to answer the question, ¡°Do you really believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, and lost only because of massive vote fraud?¡± Press as hard as you can for an on-the-record, yes-or-no answer, and if you don¡¯t get one, keep pushing. If a candidate says yes or evades the question, follow up with questions like: ¡°What evidence do you have? How do you explain that those charges were not verified in a vote recount or in a single one of more than 60 judicial proceedings? Were judges in 64 courtrooms across six states all part of a nefarious conspiracy against Trump, or do you have any other explanation?¡±

Report on the process, not just the arguments

Journalists in 2026 also have a much broader task: to keep their audiences informed on the details of the election process and the ongoing efforts to undermine its legitimacy. Covering those themes systematically and proactively will not be easy at a time when the headlines are bound to be filled with other explosive issues, like a major war in the Middle East (and possibly beyond); the ongoing bitter about the Trump administration¡¯s chaotic immigration enforcement that led to the violent of two US citizens; the continuing effects of drastic staff in federal agencies that have eliminated or significantly reduced government services and benefits for millions of Americans; and a long list of other divisive subjects. But the threat to public trust in the election process poses a clear and present danger to the principles, traditions and values of the American political system. News organizations need to adapt their campaign coverage accordingly.

So, here¡¯s a suggestion ¡ª one I made in that earlier letter years ago ¡ª to reporters, editors and news directors across the country: 

Starting now, treat the election process in your state as a significant running news story. Make it a separate beat, alongside the traditional campaign coverage of candidates¡¯ speeches and voters¡¯ reactions. Touch base regularly with local and state election administrators. Learn (and then tell your readers or listeners) the details: how voters are registered, how and where the voting will be conducted and exactly how their votes will be counted. Cultivate sources and regularly report what local officials are doing (or not doing) to ensure a credible election. Meanwhile, before any votes are cast or counted, press candidates and their minions to state exactly what they would define as evidence of miscounting or fraud, what they would consider grounds for contesting the outcomes of local or other races and how they envisage conducting those contests ¡ª standards for which they can then be held accountable if they do end up disputing the official results.

Don¡¯t cover such subjects only when they arise in a partisan debate where the traditional role of journalists is to report both sides (candidate A says the ballot count will be falsified or ineligible voters will be allowed to vote, candidate B or election administrator C says the voting will be legally conducted and the count will be accurate). Instead, monitor and regularly update your audience on what¡¯s actually happening. Track problems as they appear and solutions as they are proposed, discussed and adopted.

For example, on the controversy about voting by mail ¡ª an issue now before the ¡ª don¡¯t just report the opposing arguments and leave it to readers and listeners to choose which side to believe. Give them the knowledge to decide for themselves. Don¡¯t wait for partisans on one side or the other to bring up the subject. Take the initiative with a story detailing the rules in your state that define who can vote by mail and how to do so. When the time comes, report how many mail-in ballots have been distributed and track how many have been returned. Explain in detail how those ballots are stored and protected, and when and how they will be opened and counted ¡ª facts that will let news consumers reach their own conclusion about the practice and whether it¡¯s risky or not.

Reliable sources

A useful resource for journalists covering these issues is the non-profit news organization , which focuses exclusively on covering how elections are conducted, and distributes its articles at no cost to individual readers and local and national news outlets. Founded in 2020, Votebeat has reporters based in five states (Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin) that were centers of controversy in that year¡¯s election. On the national level, in 2024, it operated an ¡°¡± where journalists could ask voting-related questions and get knowledgeable answers from a panel of nearly 100 election administrators, cybersecurity experts, attorneys specializing in election law, and other professionals. It plans a similar program to assist journalists covering this year¡¯s election.

A variety of other organizations across the political spectrum can answer media queries on election procedures and management. Here are a few more groups whose work reporters should follow and contact if needed:

• Voting Rights , ¡°a campaign hub designed to supercharge the fight against voter suppression.¡± It operates the Election Policy , which ¡°analyzes voting and election laws across all 50 states and the District of Columbia and provides near-real time analysis of election-related legislation pending across the country.¡± The tracker is designed to support ¡°policy experts, advocates, researchers, legislators, and anyone on the front lines of the pro-democracy movement with critical information about the laws and legislation shaping our elections.¡±

• , a nonpartisan group bringing together ¡°conservatives, moderates, and progressives¡± who share a common goal: ¡°preventing American democracy from declining into a more authoritarian form of government.¡±

• The for Election Innovation & Research, whose stated goal is ¡°to restore trust in the American election system and promote election procedures that encourage participation and ensure election integrity and security.¡± (David Becker, the group¡¯s executive director, is quoted earlier in this article.)

• Defending Democracy , an organization created by ¡°lifelong conservatives and Republicans¡± to defend ¡°democratic norms, values, and institutions¡± and oppose ¡°abuses of power that threaten to undermine the integrity of U.S. elections, federal agencies, and the Republican Party as a whole.¡± Its list of directors includes William Kristol, founder of the right-wing magazine, The Weekly Standard, and Mona Charen, a staff member and speechwriter in President Ronald Reagan¡¯s White House.

• Republicans for Voting Rights, committed to defending ¡°the accessibility, integrity, and competitiveness of American elections¡± and to oppose Republicans ¡°pushing for more restrictive voting laws designed to support unfounded accusations that the [2020] election was stolen and the results were illegitimate.¡±

And one last suggestion for journalists covering this year¡¯s election: Go down the ballot in your state and ask every candidate running for the Senate or House of Representatives or any significant state or local office for an unequivocal on-the-record commitment to respect the voters¡¯ decision, whatever it might be. If any candidates waffle or decline to answer, don¡¯t just leave it at that and go on to the next story. Instead, keep asking them (and their political allies, campaign organizers and spokespeople) the same question and press them to explain exactly why they are dodging the issue.

I ended my 2020 letter with this closing paragraph:

¡°Journalists alone will not win the fight to protect the legitimacy of this election, but they can make an important contribution ¡ª perhaps the most important since reporters covering the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s helped make the country confront the realities and the profound injustice of the segregation era. In the coming weeks, it will be absolutely vital for journalists everywhere, in every medium, to recognize the challenge and greatly intensify their efforts in rising to it. The stakes could not be higher.¡±

Sadly, in 2026, those words ring even more pertinently than when I first wrote them.

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The erosion of public diplomacy and democratic values

Public diplomacy, once a cornerstone of America¡¯s international engagement, has been gutted. In July 2025, the State Department sent to more than 1,300 employees, including 246 Foreign Service officers, as part of a department ¡°reorganization¡± far beyond routine turnover. Politicized and the erasure of institutional memory have left the system hollow. Even with new leadership, rebuilding functional government will take years.

The deprofessionalization and politicization of the government ¡°influencer¡± machine have also reduced the trust allies once placed in US agencies and officials. Officials now produce partisan content that ridicules opponents and undermines allies. reinforcing US President Donald Trump¡¯s accompanied the US capture of Venezuela¡¯s leader, Nicol¨¢s Maduro. Another video, reported by in August 2025, showed footage of handcuffed migrants being loaded onto a deportation plane to the tune of Frank Sinatra¡¯s ¡°Come Fly With Me.¡± Humor can be effective propaganda, but this was a performance of cruelty for clicks. Abroad, such images circulate beside scenes of mass protests and police violence, making the US appear erratic, authoritarian and unstable.

Washington¡¯s hostility toward its democratic partners is in full view. Memes US imperial ambitions to annex the Danish sovereign territory of Greenland and have been circulated on official and affiliated channels, the territory as in need of American ¡°protection.¡± As a NATO ally, Denmark has taken the potential use of force seriously, and its foreign minister dismissed a White House aide¡¯s suggestion to pay $10,000 to $100,000 per Danish citizen for the territory.

On March 25, 2025, The New York Times revealed leaked messages from calling Europe ¡°pathetic.¡± At the Munich Security Conference the following month, US Vice President JD Vance European defense efforts as ¡°freeloading on American power¡± and told delegates they were ¡°too anxious about foreign influence.¡± Such contempt has consequences. 

The US fell from in the 2009 Anholt Nation Brands Index to this year ¡ª  its lowest standing since the index began. Before the election, Simon Anholt suggested that a new president could ¡°fix America¡¯s brand.¡± Instead, recent actions and rhetoric have further damaged it. In the UK ¡ª one of America¡¯s most reliable partners ¡ª trust in the US fell by 25 points between November 2024 and September 2025, according to YouGov for Best for Britain.

This distrust is mirrored at the highest levels: On November 11, 2025, that the UK suspended intelligence-sharing with Washington over strikes in the Caribbean that British officials said might have broken international law. By April 2025, the remnants of the State Department¡¯s Global Engagement Center (GEC) operations ¡ª which once exposed foreign propaganda campaigns ¡ª were shutting down after years of political attacks from pro-Trump figures and media. As Wired , the GEC ¡°became a MAGA [Make America Great Again] boogeyman.¡±

The limits of soft power in a digital age

Generations of Europeans have long been consumers of American culture, as the US profited from its ¡°soft power.¡± My in the UK¡¯s Disinformation Diplomacy Inquiry (written evidence submitted March 2025) explains that while traditional soft-power tools such as aid and public diplomacy are being cut, dominance endures through technology and cultural exports. But what was once a mutual cultural exchange is now also exploited to seed a far-right shift and rally anti-government protests ¡ª such as the September 15, 2025, London rally where businessman and entrepreneur Elon Musk mobilized by activist Tommy Robinson via video link, warning that ¡°violence is coming¡±. The event ended in clashes after Musk¡¯s platform amplified it to millions.

In 2024, The Guardian reported that Musk had he could provide up to $100 million in funding to Reform UK. With US elites seeking to influence British politics in this way, it is unsurprising that allies have grown wary.

As American professor and scholar Nancy Snow warned in her classic 1998 book , ¡°big business and big money rule the American system of democracy.¡±  Today, they don¡¯t just rule it ¡ª they have trampled it. Foreign policy is guided by raw power, and the fusion of political power, corporate money and media control has deepened to levels unseen in modern US history. A small circle of right-wing media barons and tech oligarchs now dominates the country¡¯s information space, erasing the boundary between state messaging and commercial propaganda.

This pattern reflects what I , with coeditor Vian Bakir, in our 2024 book, the Routledge Handbook of the Influence Industry, as the global maturation of a digital ¡°influence industry,¡± in which state and commercial actors coordinate to shape ideas and emotions across borders. This monopolization is reinforced by direct pressure on the press, such as new Pentagon restricting journalist access, introduced in September 2025.

Rebuilding trust: the role of civil society

Public diplomacy outlets like Voice of America, under the Trump administration, struggle to continue, amid for support from staff and press-freedom groups to keep the service alive. But as Voice of America staff its transformation into a propaganda tool, the most impactful public diplomacy will for now have to come from outside government. It is journalists, educators, artists and civic networks ¡ª and the public ¡ª who must carry America¡¯s democratic voice and values forward: telling real stories, connecting across borders and showing the world what they really stand for.

Even if a more democratic administration returns, the damage will persist. The habits and bureaucratic apparatus of authoritarianism do not vanish with an election. Rebuilding credibility abroad will require accountability and reform through sustained investment in education, civil society and independent journalism. The US cannot simply communicate its way out of this crisis. It must demonstrate change through urgent action, not words. Future public diplomacy efforts to support democracy abroad will be possible only if the US can create it at home ¡ª not as a brand or an aspiration, but through concrete reforms that rebuild trust with allies.

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Back in October 2024, my Godmother and I discussed the upcoming election at a Gamecock football game tailgate. No, we did not discuss LaNorris Sellers running for Governor (he needs another strong season for my endorsement). Our conversation centered on how much former US President Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris spent on advertising, as negative attack ads invaded all the television networks. She said, with a hint of desperation, that she was tired of money controlling politics and started ranting about how lobbyists have ruined Washington, DC.

Throughout my life, it was a bipartisan opinion that money controls politics, and lobbyists were the peddlers of oligarchy by the rich. In high school, I watched then-Senator Marco Rubio to turn down money from the National Rifle Association (NRA) after the tragic shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Pundits obliterated Rubio: ¡°How could he possibly take money from an organization that has blood on its hands?!¡±

The misunderstood role of lobbyists

While lobbying is often demonized, my time on Capitol Hill taught me that it can be a force for good, helping everyday people navigate a complicated system to enact meaningful change. I had negative opinions about lobbyists until I worked on Capitol Hill, where I served our Congressman, Ralph Norman, Congressman Trent Kelly of Mississippi, and Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.

In each office, I saw many constituent visitors, each presenting an urgent issue to a Legislative Assistant or to the politician directly. Often, constituents sat in with professionals, someone who knew how to schedule meetings, draft legislation, and navigate Congress. They helped people who did not know how to work the system. Watching these interactions changed my attitude about lobbying.

Why politicians need guidance

Working in DC taught me that politicians do not have expertise in every issue. The veil is hard to see on TV when we watch politicians discuss problems, but they train to sound well-spoken, regardless of their actual knowledge. The truth is, it¡¯s impossible to know the details of every issue.

When you think of federal issues, you might have general ideas such as strengthening border security, developing a new fighter jet or expanding healthcare benefits. But how much do you know about federal funding for meningitis research? You may be aware of it if you have a friend or family member with the disease, but chances are that your local politician is not familiar with it unless they have studied the issue.

The harsh reality is that sometimes politicians need guidance on a good idea because they cannot be omniscient. When a concerned group of constituents requests a meeting with a congressman¡¯s office, sometimes merely spreading awareness is enough to pass a bill.

For most people, Capitol Hill is too complicated to handle without help. When it¡¯s time to inform a politician about an issue, you need to know how to navigate the system. Who do you call in the office? How many constituents would it take to speak directly with the politician, rather than a staffer? Which legislative staffer covers what issue? Is a bill already in place, or does one need to be drafted? Figuring these things out is a job in itself, and sometimes, you need people who have worked in government to help you.

Many lobbyists used to work on Capitol Hill and know precisely what it takes to get a proposal signed into law. For many, this phenomenon is the infamous ¡°revolving door¡± where corruption often manifests, but it¡¯s a necessary evil that allows concerned, ordinary people to help enact change.

A necessary tool in an imperfect system

So why do people hate lobbyists so much? I hypothesize that many use lobbyists as scapegoats for groups that people already oppose. In the Rubio example, anyone with more liberal and pro-gun-control views will hate anyone who lobbies for the NRA simply because, well, they hate lesser firearm restrictions. More conservative-minded people may hate the lobbyists for the wind and solar industry because they don¡¯t like these methods of energy creation. Most people who criticize lobbying typically react to advocacy for causes they already oppose.

Consider lawyers: they¡¯re trained to help people navigate the legal system¡ªwhether you¡¯re facing criminal charges or filing an insurance claim. Lobbyists play a similar role in the political system, guiding people through a complex and often inaccessible process. The legal system is so complex that it is a for some people to get access to a lawyer.

Lobbyists should obviously not receive taxpayer funding, but it is well known that the ins and outs of basic societal functions are not easily accessible to the general public. In the same way you should hire a lawyer in legal trouble, hiring a lobbyist can often make the difference between being heard and being ignored.

Should politics be more accessible? Absolutely. Should politicians know a lot more about the issue? Definitely, however, as long as the status quo is maintained, lobbyists still serve an essential role for many people. It is up to us to utilize them as resources to make the difference we want to see in the United States. In a system that often favors the well-connected, lobbyists can serve as a bridge between citizen concerns and congressional action ¡ª if we choose to utilize them in this way.

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The attacks came after Iranian and American diplomats to make a nuclear deal and have since into a full-blown conflict with several Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). With world war saturating headlines amidst mutual between Israel and Iran, Iran¡¯s over the Strait of Hormuz, and an ceasefire between the US and Iran, surrounding countries are their weapons stockpile while for peace.

Despite the above aggressions, the Trump Administration continues to use the language of restraint. Shortly before the outbreak, Vice President JD Vance announced a ¡°New World Order¡± on , reiterating the vision laid out in the US National Security Strategy () ¡ª released in December of last year ¡ª which asserts newfound restraint in European affairs, an alleged ¡°America First¡± realignment and prioritization of domestic interests.

The message was clear: The US would scale back and loosen its grip on previous transatlantic systems. The administration¡¯s actions have yet to reflect this stated policy.

Great power competition

While speaking to EU leaders at the Munich Security Conference in February, Vance perceived threats from Russia and China and pushed countries to increase their own defense spending ¡ª implying a downgrade of great-power confrontation from the American side. But in practice, Washington has hardly disengaged from countering Russian and Chinese influence abroad.

In early January 2026, off the tail end of ¡°,¡± Trump Venezuelan President Nicol¨¢s Maduro on his own soil and secured Venezuelan oil that would¡¯ve otherwise gone to China ¡ª then China to buy it. These actions directly threatened the cited in the NSS.

The pattern continues in the Middle East. Though the decision to American troops from Syria was complementary to the Security Strategy, the US quietly fortified its military proxies and in Al Hasakah, any remaining Russian influence in the country amidst its reconstruction.

Without official involvement in the of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the US still openly to keep Syria¡¯s interim government intact, and even the ¡°former¡± Ahmad al-Sharaa to the White House late last year. Backlash from the meeting with a man who contributed to killing American troops shed a light on everything but this Administration¡¯s focus on domestic affairs.

President Trump¡¯s Board of Peace has also major controversy ¡ª specifically its of government leaders from all over the world to decide on Gaza¡¯s fate and reconstruction after the Israel-Hamas war 80% of all structures in the territory, securing $17 billion in from member countries thus far (while the funds have ).

Forming a handpicked international club to decide on what to do with land in another hemisphere hardly demonstrates domestic focus and adds tension with other global organizations, like the United Nations, which has since its formation.

President Trump¡¯s message to Iranians during the strikes endangered civilians and our troops, regardless of intention. certain death to any Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) militants who do not cooperate also contrasts with the NSS¡¯s to avoid ¡°forever wars,¡± despite the Administration¡¯s efforts to it.

Retaliation targeted several across the Middle East, including ones in Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and the UAE. Though the goal is to the 47-year-old Islamist regime and pave the way for liberated civilians to regain control of their country, the US Government is overlooking Iran¡¯s multiple across the region, who may , endangering local civilians and American troops.

If restraint is America¡¯s guiding doctrine, its actions complicate the narrative and are hardly acts of retreating from global entanglements. As Europe to craft its own independent security strategy, US intervention abroad is a global geopolitical shift.

Whether the above is a newly emerging form of diplomacy or imperialism, one must notice the stark contrast between American actions and rhetoric yet again. This is not a uniquely Trump phenomenon, however, as several American presidents have promised retreat while delivering attacks.

Presidential Patterns

President Barack Obama ran on ¡°endless wars,¡± but instead drone campaigns and expanded US in Libya and . President Joe Biden¡¯s ¡° for the middle class¡± billions of dollars in aid for Ukraine while NATO¡¯s defense. During Trump¡¯s first term, vows to from the Middle East coexisted with escalatory moves such as top Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.

This issue transcends red versus blue, or any simplistic framing of good president versus bad president. It is a blatant fault in American foreign policy ¡ª the underlying policy ¡ª that seems to repeat itself every four years. Campaign rhetoric gestures towards restraint, recalibration, or domestic focus, but the governing reality reasserts intervention, coalition-building and power projection.

Restraint in rhetoric is not restraint in practice. If America¡¯s current foreign policy is truly one of restraint, as Vance , it is a version that still intervenes and redraws geopolitical lines ¡ª calling the premise itself into question. Until American leaders reconcile their words with their actions, ¡°America First¡± will continue to look less like retrenchment and more like rebranded global management.

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Weapons that don¡¯t exist. Threats to this country that aren¡¯t real. Liberation for a people that the US will never win over. Freedom for women about whom nobody in power cares a jot. A war that will bring total victory in only a few days or weeks. All this we heard in 2003, and all this we are hearing again now.

I spent many years writing about the Iraq War, even though it took me some time to figure out how to begin. I was sickened by the Muslim-baiting that had been going on since the September 11 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and disgusted with the Hollywood movies and legacy press articles glorifying our vengeful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while deifying our soldiers. I wanted to tell a different story. I just didn¡¯t know how.

Then, in 2004, I came across the blog , written by a 24-year-old Iraqi woman who called herself Riverbend. She was the first Iraqi I had ever read on the war, and she taught me that those in an occupied country tell a very different story than do the occupiers.

Back then, if Iraqi men showed up in American books, movies or journalism at all, it was usually as an enemy or a clown. Meanwhile, Iraqi women were depicted as little more than incomprehensible black-clad figures hovering in the background or wailing over the dead. But Riverbend was none of those. She was a computer technician in a sophisticated city who sounded like an American college student. I was hooked.

Over the next few months, I read her blog religiously. Riverbend¡¯s language and thoughts sounded no different than those of my own daughter, except that she was describing what it was like to live, hour-by-hour, through the overwhelming, heart-freezing violence of a US bombing campaign and the occupation of her country.

Today, we can get the same sense of immediacy by reading or listening to brave civilians and journalists in Gaza, but during our post-September 11 wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, hearing any voice from the ¡°other side¡± was rare. Riverbend¡¯s blog was not only eye-opening, but it made readers like me feel as though we were experiencing the war right beside her. She wove the mundane moments of her days ¡ª jokes, lighthearted observations, conversations with her family ¡ª in with her terror at the falling bombs and her evolving feelings about the US as she watched us tear apart her country. Her blog was eventually collected into a and published by The Feminist Press in 2005.

Soon, I began reading other Iraqi blogs, too, along with every translation I could find of Iraqi poetry and fiction. I also followed videos by Iraqis that were appearing online, telling stories remarkably different from those I was hearing here in the US. Some of those Iraqi civilians did indeed want democracy, although they didn¡¯t believe it could be forced on anyone by a foreign power or bombs. Some had been satisfied living under Iraqi President Saddam Hussein¡¯s autocratic rule. Many were too focused on their daily struggles to find food and avoid bombs to think about politics at all. But all of them, whatever their thoughts and opinions, were suffering horribly, not only from our bombs, but from wounds, illnesses, malnutrition, starvation and threats of all kinds, as well as from bullying, kidnappings, rape and murder at the hands of the gangs and militias our war had unleashed.

One of the most eye-opening of those Iraqi videos was made by an anonymous woman early in the war, who put on a burqa, hid her handheld camera under it and drove around the countryside interviewing women about their struggles and poverty. As she explained, what she was doing was so dangerous that she had no doubt her video would only remain up on YouTube for a day or so. Sure enough, it quickly disappeared. I only hope that she didn¡¯t disappear with it.

A bloody mess

Bush¡¯s war in Iraq quickly became a bloody mess. As I and many others , the US might have toppled Hussein, but in the first five years of our war, we killed at least half as many Iraqis as he had in his 35 years of brutal dictatorship. By 2011, our war had slaughtered some one million Iraqis, orphaned at least a million children and displaced four million people within or outside Iraq, according to body counts by the medical journal , for Social Responsibility and others. In short, one of every five Iraqis was forced from their home: a chilling foreshadowing of what we have since seen in Gaza, and that we are now beginning to see in Iran and Lebanon.

The US not only killed and displaced all those people; it bankrupted Iraq with , poisoned it with , destroyed its infrastructure and middle class, and dismantled its achievements. Before we invaded, Iraq had the best medical system in the Middle East. Women there had more rights than in any Muslim country other than Turkey, making up 50% of students and 40% of the workforce. By the time we left, all of that, including women¡¯s rights, had been undone.

Today, women¡¯s rights in Iraq have even further and women are now relegated to . Just this March 2, the most prominent women¡¯s rights advocate in Iraq, , was shot to death by men driving by on motorcycles. Nobody has claimed responsibility for her assassination, nor has anybody yet been arrested ¡ª and that was just one of many political assassinations there since our war.

While the US war machine was busy destroying Iraq and we were hearing all too little from Iraqis themselves, Americans at home were being bombarded with ever more (think Hurt Locker and American Sniper, for instance), books, television series and news stories about the heroism of US soldiers at war, as well as their traumas and struggles on returning from battle.

I wrote Harry Potter

Seeking relief from such a myopic view of war, I set out to meet Iraqis who had lived through the war themselves. I wanted to hear the other side, the side we were not telling. So, when I found out that several hundred Iraqis had been resettled in Albany, New York, on the special visas reserved for those who had worked for two years or more as interpreters for the US military or government officials, I decided to seek them out. That is how I came to meet several women I will never forget, among them a young poet named Nour, and a mother of three named Hala.

Nour told me she had been imprisoned and tortured in the city of Abu Ghraib at the age of 16 for writing a poem that Saddam Hussein didn¡¯t like. After her release, she taught herself English and later became a translator for a freelance American journalist. In 2005, she and the journalist were kidnapped in the Iraqi city of Basra and shot. The journalist was killed, but thanks to several surgeries, Nour survived and came to the US with the help of his widow.

Nour and I met in New York City and had lunch a few times. Small and slight, with an angular face and haunted eyes, she was reserved and visibly fragile, but her bravery was unmistakable. She refused to be pitied and, in spite of all she had been through and the dangers she would face there, wanted more than anything in the world to go home.

Hala, the other unforgettable Iraqi woman I met, had fled Baghdad with her husband and children about a year before we met in 2010. The day I arrived at their apartment in a suburb of Albany, New York, he was at his job far away in New Jersey, work he had found only after 10 months of searching. But Hala, who was working as a substitute schoolteacher, was at home with her daughter, Hiba, who was 20, and her son, Mustafa, who had just turned nine. As I speak no Arabic, I was grateful that they were all fluent in English.

¡°Come in, come in,¡± Hala said when she opened the door, ushering me in with a smile and showing me to a chair in her immaculate, if somewhat bare, white living room. A round, energetic woman with a kind but worn face, she settled onto her sofa and sent her daughter to make the chai (tea). ¡°Mustapha,¡± she said to her serious-eyed son, ¡°this lady is a writer. She is from England.¡± (I am British and sound it, although I have lived in the US for many decades.)

His eyes grew big. ¡°You wrote Harry Potter!¡± he declared. It was not a question. I tried to disabuse him of the idea but he refused to believe me. ¡°I¡¯m a writer, too,¡± he said. ¡°Want to see?¡± He ran out to fetch his book ¡ª a sheaf of stapled papers he had made in school. ¡°It¡¯s about bad GIs and good GIs.¡± On each page, he had drawn soldiers and a sky raining with bombs.

After we had settled down comfortably with our tea, Hala told me that she and her husband had both been engineers, a highly respected profession in Iraq, and had hated Saddam Hussein, but had lived pleasant enough lives. Her daughter Hiba had been studying to be a dentist, and their two young sons were in school. ¡°Baghdad was beautiful to us then,¡± Hala told me wistfully. ¡°Looking back now, it was like that movie, Avatar, that world of paradise before the invasion.¡±

But then the US did invade, their jobs disappeared, and money ran low, so her husband became an interpreter for US officials. Soon afterward, Hala¡¯s brother was killed in retribution. Then, their middle child was kidnapped and murdered (by whom they never knew). He was only 15 years old.

¡°Every day for a year, Hiba dreamed that she went home and found her brother there,¡± Hala told me quietly, while Hiba listened without saying a word. ¡°She could not eat or get up or get dressed.¡± So, in the end, they fled to Jordan to escape the violence and find Hiba therapy, eventually obtaining a visa to the US, where Hala and her husband hoped their children would be able to forge better and safer futures.

¡°And how is that going?¡± I asked.

¡°I like school,¡± Mustafa told me with confidence. But Hiba said she was mostly ostracized by the other students at her Albany college. Feelings against Iraqis ran high in those days ¡ª against all Arabs, in fact ¡ª and she was spared little of it.

¡°Some of them don¡¯t like me because they know I¡¯m an Arab and Muslim, and some because they think I¡¯m Hispanic,¡± she said, her pretty face rueful. With a shrug, she pushed her long hair over her shoulder. Her only friend, she added, was a young woman who had moved here from India.

The visas that are no more

Today, in Trump¡¯s America, neither Nour, Hala nor any of the other Iraqi women and men I met would even be admitted to this country, no matter how much they sacrificed to help Americans and no matter how much they might be targeted at home for having done so. Indeed, the chances of any refugee finding asylum in the US now are just about zero. The Trump administration has refugees, asylum seekers or any immigrants from countries ¡ª including Iraq.

In light of this, I look back with nostalgia on the time I spent with Riverbend, Nour and Hala, as well as other Iraqi refugees, when Barack Obama was still president and Trump had yet to loom all too large in our lives. And I can¡¯t stop thinking about what Hala said when I apologized for what my country had done to hers.

She looked at me and nodded. ¡°Mustafa, come sit on my lap.¡± She motioned to her son. ¡°Listen to this lady, so you will know that not all Americans wanted that war.¡±

He nestled into her lap, his sister sat on another chair, and they all gazed at me, waiting.

Disconcerted by such an unexpected responsibility, I took refuge in addressing Mustafa. Looking into his little face, I attempted to apologize on behalf not only of the US, but of England, too, for destroying his country and killing his brother. And then, like an idiot, I began to cry.

Hiba handed me a Kleenex, but neither she nor her mother and brother cried with me. I was mortified. What did I want from them, weeping like this? It wasn¡¯t my son and brother who¡¯d been killed. It wasn¡¯t my life that had been torn away. It wasn¡¯t my country that had been ruined.

Yet they continued to be kind. After I had recovered and we had spoken for a few hours, I asked Hala, ¡°How can you stand living here with your former enemy? Aren¡¯t you angry at us Americans?¡±

She shook her head. ¡°No, no, my friend.¡± She smiled at me kindly. ¡°We lived under Saddam. We understand that there are people. And there are leaders. And that the two are not the same.¡±

I wonder, as we rain bombs down on the people of Iran today, if they would be able to find it in themselves to be quite so forgiving.

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The facts were still emerging, but the hashtag was already settled. Conspiracy narratives that the attack was a ¡°false flag¡± or ¡°political theater¡± to boost President Donald Trump¡¯s fortunes, crack down on free speech or sell his pet ¡°White House ballroom¡± project rocketed across X, Bluesky and other platforms. New and especially worrying this time is not that the far right trafficked in conspiracies, that¡¯s too familiar, but that a portion of the anti-Trump, online left eagerly joined in. Commentators loosely grouped as ¡°BlueAnon¡± framed the event as an obviously choreographed stunt, a kind of mirror-image to Make America Great Again (MAGA) conspiracy culture. 

This is precisely the wrong lesson to draw from the Trump era. If there is one thing we should have learned from far-right radio show host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Infowars and the Sandy Hook hoax narrative, it is that conspiracy thinking is not just primitive, but is also corrosive. Jones¡¯s that the 2012 massacre of first-graders in Newtown was staged by ¡°crisis actors¡± did not uncover hidden truths. Instead, they multiplied the suffering of grieving families and helped normalize a style of politics in which reality itself is optional. Courts have since found his claims defamatory, and juries awarded nearly in damages to Sandy Hook families. Yet the style of thinking he popularized ¡ª reflexive disbelief, totalizing plots, contempt for evidence ¡ª has gone mainstream. The post-WHCD reaction shows that this mental habit now transcends ideology.

Why large-scale conspiracies fall apart

Part of the appeal of conspiracy theories is that they feel savvy. To call something ¡°staged¡± is to present oneself as more perceptive than the ¡°sheeple.¡± Yet most large-scale conspiracy claims collapse under two basic considerations: the number of people who would need to be involved, and the mundane reality of human competence.

Significant operations, like allegedly staging an assassination attempt on a sitting president at a televised gala in a major hotel, would require elaborate choreography, advance planners, Secret Service complicity, law enforcement, hospital staff, multiple media outlets, witnesses and the supposed ¡°patsy¡± himself all keeping the secret. The more people, institutions and jurisdictions involved, the more likely someone is to leak, boast or simply make a mistake.

Researchers who study real conspiracies, the Central Intelligence Agency¡¯s (CIA) , and , point out that they were exposed precisely because human beings are bad at keeping large shared secrets indefinitely. Watergate unraveled not through omnipotent coordination but through a botched burglary and loose lips.

Academic psychologist and science writer Rob Brotherton, in the book?, notes that conspiracist thinking overestimates how seamlessly powerful actors can coordinate and control events by mistaking bureaucratic clumsiness for cunning. In reality, governments and campaigns struggle to roll out basic policy without leaks or blunders, let alone stage-manage fake assassination attempts down to the timing of dropped phone calls and viral videos.

That¡¯s before we get to the Trump factor. If you were designing a clever, airtight covert operation, the Trump orbit is not where you¡¯d shop for talent. This is an administration that has stumbled through multiple real security breaches and intelligence leaks, mismanaged the wars it chose to fight and repeatedly undercut its own messaging with impulsive public statements. Believing that this same cast secretly executed a flawless staged attack at the Washington Hilton, with thousands of witnesses and international media present, is not skepticism. It¡¯s hero-worship in reverse, an almost admiring overestimation of Trump-world¡¯s competence, just with a negative polarity.

Simpler explanations and human psychology

offers a better guide. The simplest explanation consistent with the evidence is usually the most plausible. An armed man with a documented history, travel records, weapons purchases and a manifesto acted with violent intent and was stopped by security before reaching the ballroom. No convoluted script is required.

If the ¡°staged¡± narrative is so implausible, why does it erupt so fast after an event like the WHCD attack? Psychologists studying conspiracy beliefs emphasize three clusters of motives: epistemic, existential and social. Because people crave coherent explanations, large, shocking events, assassination attempts, terrorist attacks and pandemics generate information gaps and emotional overload. Conspiracy theories step into that fog by offering simple, totalizing stories. Nothing is random, and everything was planned. American science writer Michael Shermer calls this ¡°,¡± the brain¡¯s tendency to find patterns, even where none exist. If a president is nearly killed for a third time, proportionality bias whispers that the cause must be as huge and intentional as the effect. A lone, disturbed assailant with a shotgun and a manifesto feels too small.

In times of anxiety and powerlessness, conspiracy thinking offers the illusion of control. If you believe that ¡°they¡± are staging events, then you can imagine that unmasking ¡°them¡± is a path to safety. In this case, both Trump supporters and opponents experience deep fear. One side fears a vulnerable leader and violent enemies; the other fears an authoritarian president and unaccountable security services. A ¡°false flag¡± narrative allows both to imagine that knowing the supposed plot gives them leverage over the confusing reality.

Identity, social media and the spread of ¡°staged¡±

Conspiracy theories also serve identity. Believing that you and your online tribe see ¡°the truth¡± while others are duped is psychologically rewarding. American political scientist Joseph Uscinski that conspiracist thinking often functions as a group badge: ¡°People like us¡± are awake; ¡°people like them¡± are asleep or complicit. Posting ¡°STAGED¡± in all caps is less an argument than a tribal welcome sign. It says you and I belong to the in-group that refuses to be fooled.

Social media supercharges these dynamics. Analysts found that the word ¡°staged¡± appeared in hundreds of thousands of posts on X within hours of the WHCD attack; platform algorithms then amplified posts with outrage and engagement, pushing the narrative further regardless of its truth value. As put it, ¡°Conspiracy theories and a knee-jerk skepticism of current events have become the default response for a growing number of Americans.¡± In other words, we are not watching isolated cranks. We are watching structural features of human psychology and the attention economy play out in real time.

The reflex to declare major traumas ¡°inside jobs¡± is not new. After the 9/11 attacks, a cottage industry of ¡°truthers¡± insisted that the towers were brought down by pre-planted explosives, despite extensive engineering evidence to the contrary. The Obama years saw ¡°,¡± which claimed, again, without evidence, that the president¡¯s birth certificate was forged. The birtherism hoax fueled Trump¡¯s own political ascendancy to the presidency. Sandy Hook marked a darker turn. Jones¡¯s insistence that murdered six-year-olds and their parents were ¡°actors¡± rehearsing a script erased the boundary between political paranoia and open cruelty. Families were stalked, harassed and forced to move; some received death threats.

Debunking, distrust and the cost of conspiracism

The WHCD shooting sits squarely in this lineage. As Wired , both left- and right-wing accounts on X, Bluesky and Instagram immediately labeled the attack a hoax staged to prop up Trump¡¯s sagging approval ratings or to sell his much-mocked ballroom idea. The found that roughly one-fifth of prominent liberal influencers who posted about the shooting used conspiratorial language, effectively mirroring the MAGA ecosystem they claim to oppose.

quickly dismantled the central claims. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt¡¯s pre-event remark on Fox News that ¡°there will be some shots fired tonight in the room¡± referred to Trump¡¯s jokes, not gunfire. A Fox correspondent¡¯s dropped call from the hotel was due to bad cell service, not censorship. Video evidence and contemporaneous show security reacting in real time to an unexpected breach, not executing a preplanned drama.

Yet as with prior episodes, debunking reaches fewer people than the initial rush of insinuation. Corrections are boring while conspiracies are fun.

Given Trump¡¯s long history of lies, from crowd sizes to election claims, some critics argue that a default of mistrust is justified. ¡°Why should we believe anything these people say?¡± they ask, especially after multiple on Trump¡¯s life. That instinct is understandable, but it does not justify inventing alternate realities. The true indictment of Trumpism is precisely that it has gutted the distinction between truth and fiction. To respond by building our own Alex Jones-style ecosystem is to concede the very ground on which democratic politics depends.

The real risks and a better response

There are also hard tactical reasons to resist conspiracism. The main problem is that it is a distraction. The real danger associated with the WHCD incident is not hypothetical ¡°staging¡± but the normalization of political violence, recurring security failures and a climate in which assassination attempts feel almost routine. In that way, we have returned to the 1960s, but with the corrosive amplification of social media. 

Conspiracy brain rot is also fragile. It depends on a long chain of assumptions, like total institutional discipline, perfect secrecy, motive, means and opportunity, all aligned. When even one link breaks, say, when surveillance footage, ballistics reports and independent eyewitness accounts converge on a mundane explanation, the conspiracist must either abandon the theory or spiral into ever more baroque claims.

Indulging ¡°BlueAnon¡± instincts hands rhetorical weapons to the very forces critics oppose. Every baseless ¡°false flag¡± accusation from the left makes it easier for right-wing figures to paint all criticism as hysterical and unhinged. It dilutes legitimate accountability efforts over policy failures, ethical violations or the mishandling of real threats into a noise of memes and insinuations. The alternative is harder but healthier; we need to prebunk rather than debunk

Dutch social psychologist Sander van der Linden¡¯s on misinformation shows that teaching people, in advance, about the typical tricks of conspiracist rhetoric, cherry-picking anomalies, demanding impossible standards of proof, shifting the burden of proof and so on, can inoculate them against later falsehoods. Recognizing that every breaking crisis will be followed by a wave of ¡°nothing is real¡± narratives allows citizens and media alike to prepare, emotionally and cognitively, to resist them.

Contingency, reality and democratic fragility

Conspiracy theories thrive on the fantasy that history is shaped only by master plots. The messier truth is that history is very contingent. Historical twists and turns are determined by badly secured doors, flawed threat assessments, idiosyncratic pressure points and by normal, limited human beings who do not have the 20/20 vision of hindsight. Conspiracy theories are another example of the arrogance of present people judging the past, the most persistent complaint of historians about our ahistorical culture.

The attempted assassination at the WHCD is disturbing enough in its ordinary explanation, because a lone, heavily armed man, motivated by a stew of ideology and grievance, penetrated close to the president in a city already on edge from previous attempts. It points to a democracy frayed by polarization, saturated with firearms and mediated by platforms that reward the most sensational narratives.

That reality should be answered by another Grassy Knoll fiction. The last thing the anti-Trump, non-violent No-Kings movement needs is to answer Alex Jones with its own rotten Onion version of Infowars.

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Greenland is not just entering global politics ¡ª it is reshaping it.

Greenland¡¯s rising geopolitical significance

Beneath its ice lie indispensable to tech-driven economic development and defense infrastructures. Concurrently, Arctic thawing offers potentially new , military corridors and other strategic advantages. For the US, reducing dependence on China¡¯s dominance in rare-earth processing has become a national security priority. For China, the Arctic represents an extension of its ¡°,¡± a space for future trade and influence. Russia, meanwhile, is expanding its Arctic military capabilities and seeking control over northern sea routes. For NATO member countries on both sides of the Atlantic, the Arctic has been a vital military buffer since the Second World War.?

This convergence of interests has revived a familiar geopolitical logic: Control of territory means access to resources and strategic positioning. Yet this renewed attention rests on questionable assumptions ¡ª that Greenland¡¯s resources can be readily extracted and integrated into global supply chains, that new routes will open effortlessly and that military presence in the Arctic is easily manageable.

The economic viability of large-scale mining remains uncertain. Deposits are often located in remote, infrastructure-poor regions. Extraction requires massive investment, long timelines and complex logistics. Political constraints also matter. Greenland¡¯s autonomy within the Kingdom of Denmark gives local authorities significant influence over resource decisions, and recent ¡ª including restrictions on uranium mining ¡ª reflect public resistance to certain forms of extraction. In other words, Greenland is not simply a resource frontier waiting to be unlocked. It is a politically and economically constrained environment where expectations often exceed feasibility.

The environmental paradox of Arctic accessibility

More importantly, the growing geopolitical competition over Greenland obscures a deeper and more consequential issue: the environmental cost of turning the island into a strategic asset. Climate change is making Greenland more accessible. But this accessibility comes at a price. The Greenland ice sheet ¡ª the second largest in the world ¡ª is melting at an , contributing to global sea-level rise and altering climate systems. As ice retreats, it exposes land for potential extraction and infrastructure development. At the same time, these activities risk intensifying environmental degradation in one of the planet¡¯s most fragile ecosystems.

This creates a paradox. The very process that enables economic opportunity ¡ª climate change ¡ª is also what makes exploitation increasingly dangerous. Mining and hydrocarbon exploration carry : habitat destruction, water contamination, disruption of fragile Arctic ecosystems and long-term pollution. In extreme conditions, these risks are magnified. Oil spills, for instance, are particularly difficult to contain in cold environments with limited infrastructure. Even small-scale disturbances can have long-lasting and irreversible effects.

These local impacts connect to global environmental systems. Greenland plays a critical role in the Earth¡¯s climate. Changes in ice cover affect albedo ¡ª the planet¡¯s reflectivity ¡ª and influence temperature dynamics. Meltwater contributes to sea-level rise and may disrupt ocean circulation patterns such as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), with cascading consequences for global climate stability.

What appears as a regional issue is, in fact, planetary in scope. Greenland is a test case for how the international system manages the tension between strategic ambition and ecological constraint. This is an emerging frontier of eco-geopolitics.

In this frontier, trade-offs become more acute. Economic development promises greater autonomy for Greenland but risks long-term environmental damage. Military presence enhances security but increases geopolitical tension. New shipping routes improve efficiency but raise the probability of ecological accidents. Each decision involves competing priorities that cannot be easily reconciled.

There is also an ethical dimension. Exploiting resources made accessible by climate change raises a troubling question: Can an environmental crisis be used to justify further extraction that may deepen that same crisis? This dynamic reflects what some scholars describe as ¡°¡± ¡ª a focus on short-term gains that obscures long-term environmental costs.

The risk is that Greenland becomes another example of how global competition accelerates environmental degradation, rather than constraining it.

Toward cooperative and inclusive governance

Avoiding this outcome requires a shift in perspective. Greenland cannot be treated solely as a strategic asset or a repository of resources. Its role in the global system is more complex. It is part of a fragile environmental equilibrium that extends far beyond its borders.

This calls for governance approaches that move beyond zero-sum competition. Multilateral cooperation is essential, particularly in areas such as resource management, environmental protection and Arctic security. Indigenous participation must also be central, not peripheral, to decision-making processes. The of ¡°nothing about us without us¡± is not only a matter of justice but also of legitimacy and sustainability.

At the same time, regulatory frameworks need to reflect the unique risks of Arctic environments. This includes stricter standards for extraction, stronger liability regimes for environmental damage, and enhanced mechanisms for monitoring and enforcement. Without such safeguards, economic activity may proceed faster than the capacity to manage its consequences.

Greenland¡¯s future will not be determined solely by geology or geography. It will depend on political choices by global powers, regional actors and Greenlanders themselves.

Regulating Arctic risks and the stakes of climate-driven geopolitics

What is at stake is not just control over resources or territory. It is the ability of the international system to navigate a world where environmental limits are no longer external constraints but central factors in geopolitical competition. Greenland is, in this sense, a warning.

It shows how climate change is reshaping the map of global power ¡ª not by replacing geopolitics, but by transforming its conditions. Territories once considered marginal are becoming strategic. Resources once inaccessible are becoming attainable. But the costs of pursuing them are rising, not falling.

If Greenland is treated as just another arena of competition, the result will likely be a familiar pattern: short-term gains, long-term damage and increasing instability. But if it is approached as a shared ecological and strategic space, it may offer a different path ¡ª one where cooperation tempers competition and environmental limits shape, rather than constrain, political ambition.

The future of Greenland is not only about the Arctic. It is about the kind of world that is emerging in an age of climate change. And whether that world will be governed by rivalry or restraint.

[This article is based on a research paper co-authored by the author and Lysette Baz¨¢n, PhD, Adjunct Professor, Social and Political Environment Department, IPADE Business School. The paper was presented at the Eighteenth International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses, Common Ground Research Networks, University of the Aegean, April 2026.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author¡¯s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ô¹Ï¡¯s editorial policy.

The post Greenland and the New Frontier of Eco-Geopolitics appeared first on 51³Ô¹Ï.

Or did he? Most people the phrase as ¡°government of the people, by the people, and for the people.¡± This is a misreading. Lincoln¡¯s text did not include the word and. Perhaps he intended to include a fourth preposition to complete the idea that equates democratic institutions with the realization of the popular will? If so, logic tells us the missing preposition can only be with.

What precisely was Lincoln¡¯s message besides cheering on the troops? A government ¡°of the people¡± points to the demography of democracy. The government consists of common people, not a designated ruling class. A government ¡°by the people¡± appears to refer principally to the legislators who write the laws. Just as we say King Lear is ¡°by¡± William Shakespeare, we see the government in the United States as the creation of ordinary citizens, who write and enforce its laws.

Lincoln¡¯s third phrase ¡ª ¡°for the people¡± ¡ª signifies that the US government is focused on responding to the needs and interests of the citizenry. The three prepositions ¡ª of, by and for ¡ª make it clear that all Americans have a stake in the government. Lincoln¡¯s formulation also informs us that the government, so long as it does not ¡°perish from the earth,¡± will always be under popular control.

So, what about the fourth preposition Lincoln failed to mention: with? A democracy that sees itself as being with the people is one that seeks actively to include their voice in a collaborative way. It goes further  than the somewhat deceptive concept of ¡°representative democracy,¡± a phrase that has become something of a stale formula. Pedantically reminding people that the US is a republic that practices representative democracy may be tantamount to telling people simply to ¡°Shut up and vote!¡± 

In the age of electronic communication and social media, we may be justified in believing that a true democracy not only recognizes but positively seeks to affirm the communicative role the people are called upon to play. And by people, I¡¯m not referring to a majority faction or a party with a platform. The ¡°people¡± Lincoln had in mind were the vast majority, which tellingly also includes and embraces minorities, even former African slaves.

Politicians who seek to govern ¡°with¡± the people will not think of themselves as an elite coterie of sages designated through elaborate electoral processes and empowered to make decisions on their own and amongst themselves. In a true democracy, responsible politicians should see themselves as agents engaged in a permanent state of creative dialogue with the citizenry.

Majorities, minorities and inclusion

It would be abusive on my part to expect a speech composed during wartime on the back of an to be the occasion for defining a nation¡¯s system of governance. (Granted, the envelope in the train is just a charming myth dismissed by serious historians). More to the point, Lincoln¡¯s 1863 decreeing the end of slavery had the effect of redefining the meaning of ¡°people.¡± It would be formalized five years later in the .

Thomas Jefferson¡¯s own proclamation that ¡°all men are created equal¡± took on a new meaning. The founders had a far less popular view of both ¡°all men¡± and ¡°people.¡± They understood that Americans involved in politics, endowed with an equal right to govern, were white, male, literate, English-speaking property owners. After Lincoln, the very idea of ¡°the people¡± (and who could be included among them) was expanded. A government of, by, for and eventually with the people would henceforth take on a different meaning.

It took a French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, half a century after the nation¡¯s birth, in the 1830s, to offer the first comprehensive analysis of how democracy actually functioned in the US. He understood that democracy was not just a clever innovation or political gimmick. He saw clearly that it represented the wave of the future. In his iconic , Democracy in America, he predicted that France itself was trending away from traditional monarchy towards a democratic system that would seek to avoid the destructive revolutionary fervor his nation had painfully experienced.

Despite his own aristocratic roots, Tocqueville appreciated the idea that US democracy aimed at the ¡°well-being of the greatest number¡± rather than the glory of a few. He was fascinated by the energy of Americans and their capacity to form associations, build things and participate in civic life. He noted that Americans respected laws because they believed they had a hand in making them. He admired the idea of government of, by, for and even with the people. But not without a few qualms and reservations. He famously remarked that he knew of no country where there was ¡°less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America.¡± And that was a century before the rise of mass media and the rise of a powerful ¡°cancel culture.¡± Both of these forces now appear conjoined to suppress ¡°independence of mind¡± by controlling the topics and terms of discussion.

Tocqueville saw the democratization of politics in the West as an inexorable trend that it would be futile for defenders of the established order to oppose. He saw democracy as a source for welcome creativity. But he had no illusions about some of the jingoistic claims to ensuring human liberty in the ¡°home of the brave and land of the free.¡± He analyzed in detail the power of the new democracy to impose and enforce ¡°conformity of thinking.¡± He called it the ¡°tyranny of the majority.¡± ¡°Despotism,¡± he wrote, ¡°lies at both extremes of sovereignty: when one man reigns, and when the majority governs. Despotism is tied to omnipotence, whatever its bearer.¡± When the ¡°brave¡± majority achieves omnipotence, it ends up ruling and even abusing the ¡°free.¡±

The new omnipotent order

A lot has happened on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean since the publication of Democracy in America. Without being explicit, the secular, egalitarian, democratic West has created a modern equivalent of the traditional Christian , a litany of dogmas designed to encapsulate the beliefs to which the faithful should adhere. The new unwritten secular Western creed, conveyed by force of repetition through the discourse of politicians and the reporting of the media, stresses four key notions we are all called upon to believe in: democracy, human rights, freedom of speech and economic progress provoked by capitalistic competition.

Most people perceive these as wonderful things to believe in, which is what a creed is all about. But how real, complete or even compatible are they? Do they translate into coherent behavior? Some people use the noble idea of human rights to instill the simplistic and misleading belief that the world is neatly divided into democracies who rigorously apply human rights and autocracies who abuse them. This induces the derivative belief that ¡°We¡¯re fully human and the others aren¡¯t.¡±

As for freedom of speech, Tocqueville already noted the gap between speech and thought. The relative anarchy of thought implied by the First Amendment had the unfortunate effect of dumbing down America¡¯s political culture. ¡°The characteristics of the American journalist,¡± Tocqueville writes, ¡°consist in an open and coarse appeal to the passions of the populace.¡± At the same time, he dared to proclaim his ¡°love¡± of freedom of the press. ¡°I admit that I do not feel toward freedom of the press that complete and instantaneous love which one accords to things by their nature supremely good. I love it from the consideration of the evils which it prevents more than from the goods which it does.¡±

Freedom of the press two centuries later

As Tocqueville predicted, over the past two hundred years, the formerly monarchic nations of Europe have broadly adopted the ¡°democratic ideology¡± forged initially in the US. Today¡¯s evolved democracies have reformulated the ideology as a virtual creed intended to differentiate us from all those other nations we condescendingly refer to as autocracies. This was the distinction that US President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson mobilized to justify their first, Biden¡¯s refusal to negotiate a common security architecture with Russia that might have avoided war, and a few months later to dismiss an already initialled peace plan that would have halted the hostilities following Russia¡¯s invasion of Ukraine. The credo did its intended job, making it possible to extend the war far into an undefined future.

European governments continue to proclaim their commitment to the four core values of what has become the tacitly accepted ¡°transatlantic creed:¡± democracy, human rights, freedom of speech and progress. Since we all agree on the basics, we might expect that all should be fine and dandy in the peaceful climate Europe has enjoyed so continuously since the end of World War II. Haven¡¯t we achieved a state of permanent tranquillity sealed by the harmonious association of the 27 independent nations currently grouped together in the European Union?

But when we look at the way the core value of freedom of expression plays out today, we have to wonder whether the creed still makes any sense. Governments and private interests collaborate routinely, through their control and manipulation of official media, to impose a ¡°tyranny of the political majority¡± that disseminates the credo. We call it ¡°manufacturing consent.¡± But if that wasn¡¯t enough, they are increasingly resorting to extrajudicial acts to silence individuals who question any of the acts of the democratically-elected majority, to say nothing of the undemocratically appointed rulers who make up the European Commission.

Three prominent cases of the flagrant subversion of freedom of expression have earned public attention just in the past year. The new Trump administration imposed on United Nations rapporteur and Italian national Francesca Albanese a range of debilitating which she describes as ¡°civil death.¡± They include a total block on all her property and interests in property subject to US jurisdiction, prohibitions on US persons or entities providing her with any funds, goods or services, and a travel ban. Her crime consisted of doing the job she was hired to perform: to investigate and report on the reality of the situation in occupied Palestine. She failed to realize that, in today¡¯s American democracy, freedom of speech did not extend to using words such as ¡°apartheid¡± and ¡°genocide¡± when speaking about Israel, even when observable conditions justified their use.

Although neither the European Commission nor European nations have applied or even approved Trump¡¯s sanctions, European banks have almost universally complied. This is known as ¡°over-compliance¡± or the ¡°extraterritorial effect.¡± Perhaps those words belong somewhere in the credo.

Then there¡¯s the case of Swiss citizen, former NATO intelligence officer, . He doesn¡¯t share the point of view of his ideological masters concerning the historical context of the war in Ukraine, about which he happens to be particularly knowledgeable. But knowledge, he now understands, cannot be used as a pretext to contradict elements of the credo. He too has been subjected to an Asset Freeze as his bank accounts in the EU were frozen, leaving him, by his own account, unable to buy food or pay for basic necessities initially. Although a Swiss citizen, because he was working in Brussels when the sanctions were passed, he finds himself currently ¡°trapped¡± in the EU, unable to travel through the Schengen Area or return to Switzerland. EU entities are prohibited from providing him travel services. Like Albanese, Baud was sanctioned via an executive ¡°designation¡± rather than a criminal conviction or a court trial, leading his lawyers to argue a violation of the ¡°presumption of innocence.¡±

Another European citizen subjected to similar treatment, this time by Germany, is , a German citizen of Turkish-Kurdish origin based in Berlin. His crime, much like Baud¡¯s, is to have written things leaving the impression for some that he may be a ¡°Russian disinformation agent.¡± Even more irritating for the German government is his reporting on the Israeli occupation of Palestine. This enables them to claim he has ¡°systematically spread false information on politically controversial subjects with the intent of creating ethnic, political and religious discord among its predominately German target audience.¡±?

Do?ru too has been subjected to an Asset Freeze as all his bank accounts were frozen instantly, a ¡°Provision Ban¡± that makes it a criminal offense for anyone to provide him with funds or economic resources. The German authorities (the Central Office for Sanctions Enforcement) also seized his wife¡¯s bank accounts.

The case of 51³Ô¹Ï author, Dr. Valery Engel

The most recent case strikes close to home for the team at 51³Ô¹Ï. We regularly publish articles by historian Dr. . Although an Israeli and Russian citizen, he has made his home in Latvia since 2008 after marrying a Latvian citizen. The state has now declared him Persona Non Grata and placed him on a blacklist, effectively banning him from entering or residing in the country. His wife and two children live in Latvia and depend on him for their livelihood.

In April, Engel wrote to us to share the following information. ¡°I finally received a letter from the Latvian political police, citing three of my publications in 51³Ô¹Ï as the reason for my blacklisting.¡±

As readers of 51³Ô¹Ï should know, our editorial team respects and practices the kind of freedom of expression the authors of the US constitution appeared to believe in. The constitution¡¯s First Amendment specifically mentions ¡°the freedom of speech, or of the press.¡± We respect the freedom of expression of our authors, while at the same time requiring that they respect the facts. Moreover, as an organ of the press, we expect that our own freedom to publish authors with a diversity of points of view will be respected, especially by governments that claim to believe in democratic values.

At 51³Ô¹Ï, we do not discriminate against any political or ideological position, even ones our editors find abhorrent, so long as the author respects the facts and avoids recognizable disinformation. Engel¡¯s columns for us have all been edited with the utmost editorial rigor. We found nothing in his writing that violated our strictest standards. We stand by our judgment that these articles contained well-reasoned discussions of issues of real interest to our readers. We understand that some people and indeed some governments may interpret the facts differently and may wish that certain issues be passed in silence. 

I personally appreciate the historical perspective that Engel, an expert in minority rights, has brought to our attention. Just as I appreciate the lessons a French aristocrat whose book published in 1840 taught me about possible abuses of democracy in my own home country due to an unfortunate tendency towards tyranny of the majority.

The 51³Ô¹Ï team has seen the accusations the Latvian government leveled at Engel on the basis of articles we have published. We find those accusations to be the result of misreading the text. The fact that such misreading can be used to justify persecution of an individual, for whom the profoundly democratic idea of ¡°presumption of innocence¡± has been suspended, leaves our editorial board speechless. We sincerely hope that the Latvian government will find inspiration from the transatlantic credo celebrating human rights that is increasingly abused to justify actions taken in clear violation of the credo¡¯s spirit.

*[The Devil¡¯s Advocate pursues the tradition 51³Ô¹Ï began in 2017 with the launch of our ¡°Devil¡¯s Dictionary.¡± It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself ¡ª political and journalistic rhetoric ¡ª to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of the 51³Ô¹Ï Devil¡¯s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider¡¯s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

The views expressed in this article are the author¡¯s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ô¹Ï¡¯s editorial policy.

The post Democracy¡¯s Creed: Inspiring Words, Silenced Voices appeared first on 51³Ô¹Ï.

However, it has taken Trump and his band of incompetent, dangerous and venal acolytes to finally expose publicly what I and others have suspected for years about the Republican Party. This is not to say that the Democratic Party has bathed itself in glory nor waives now a much better banner. However, in a two-party system, the Democrats at least give voters some measure of fealty to better governance, the rule of law, a regulated marketplace, and an embrace of diversity, labor unions and a measure of freedom from religion.

Midterm elections and voter suppression

So come on into the big tent and let¡¯s celebrate a better future before it happens. That should allow all of us on the Democratic Party team to avoid messy confrontation, actual resistance and overwrought angst. We can still do a big national rally every few months with goofy posters, Trump balloons, aged folk music and some good food trucks. It is even OK to go to college and continue to not give much of a shit about anything other than yourself because everything will be OK.

It is also getting easier to watch some of the news. about a coming Democratic Party control of the House of Representatives, and maybe even the Senate, now make the daily news cycle on many media outlets. All ¡°we¡± have to do is vote on election day in November, if not before, and talk our unenlightened friends into sitting this one out. Then, get the beer chilled and the barbecue warmed up; happy days are here again.

My problem is that I can¡¯t seem to work up much enthusiasm for what lies ahead, even if the Democrats win the November midterm elections. For the record, I am still not ready to accept that they will. It is worth remembering that most Republicans seem to love each other enough to vote and to happily encourage the more reluctant members of their White Christian nationalist club to get out and vote as well. 

Meanwhile, many progressive Democrats would at least like to see a cohesive message that addresses difficult issues with concrete solutions before the party spends too much time getting ready to celebrate. For my part, I want the party leaders from the Democratic Party to step up, be focused and passionate, and be ready to fully confront the governmental disaster unfolding before our eyes every single day. That is what I believe will eventually lead to electoral victory in November. What we are getting instead may be easier to swallow for some, but enormously unsatisfying for many in the Democratic Party.

There is also the small matter that the Republican Party political apparatus is much of its resources to Democratic Party to the polls, aided and abetted by the US Supreme Court. This battle of who is eligible to vote and how they can vote has been an issue since the founding of the republic, but it usually has been a stalking horse for racism and immigrant bashing. Now it is a weapon aimed at Democrats regardless of race or national origin. And it is likely to work, since America¡¯s self-touted elections are independently run by each of the 50 states, applying 50 different sets of rules. Maybe this was a good idea before there was electricity, television and the internet, but it is a really bad idea now.

The Democratic Party¡¯s need for a clear vision

So, with a reminder or two above about the perils of celebrating before you actually win, let¡¯s try to take a sober look at today¡¯s Democratic Party, starting with a simple question. Who, among the current Democratic Party leaders, would you follow anywhere? This question alone raises the more critical question of who among them has articulated a vision of good governance and the policy and program objectives required to make that vision a reality.

Just exactly what is the plan to provide for universal healthcare, for reversing the retreat from environmentally-responsible public policy, for meaningful gun control, for decoupling of US foreign policy objectives from those of Israel, for a welcoming immigration policy and for confronting the plague of corporate money polluting the nation¡¯s political system? And this is just to name a few of the things that I have not heard much about from those Democrats who seek to lead the nation to some new promised land.

I fear that it is because Democratic leaders are cowed by confrontation and unwilling to define a clear morality at the foundation of that to which they want the rest of us to respond. It should not be hard to clearly and unequivocally state that racism is wrong and racists have no place in our society or political party, corporations are not people and corporate greed is not a virtue, access to meaningful healthcare is a human right, immigrants strengthen our nation both economically and culturally, and armaments made in America are shamefully the weapons of choice at home and abroad for mindless killing and maiming, generally in the name of some cause that none of us should applaud.

The reality beyond electoral wins

As for what lies ahead, even if the Democrats actually triumph in the midterm elections, Donald Trump will still be President. He will be no smarter, no better informed, no less dangerous, no less corrupt and certainly no less connected to the truth. Worse yet, he will still have the unfettered executive authority to wreak havoc on our political, social and economic institutions, and to continue his dismantling of the governmental institutions he was elected to lead. He will still be able to command instant ¡°media¡± attention, even though so much of what he says is unhinged and untrue.

For me, it is time to stop celebrating Trump¡¯s failures and start addressing their consequences.  But for those of you still whining about America First solutions, remember that that is what got us here in the first place. It has to be Humanity First if we are ever going to confront the rot that is so deeply embedded in our country and our culture. 

Yet, the daily news cycles that center on Trump only seem to reinforce the national delusions so often at the heart of public discourse. I have always loved the phrases ¡°this is not who we are¡± and ¡°we are better than this¡± when mindlessly applied to the general citizenry in the aftermath of preventable tragedy. These comforting sentiments are the fertilizer for so much of America¡¯s collective delusion. Together, they offer an escape valve that absolves each of us of civic responsibility.

It is this singular notion that provides the distance from reality required to absorb the cruelty, corruption and immorality in our midst, and that moves Americans ever closer to seeing new norms as acceptable. Every time Trump is normalized and his lies endlessly repeated, it should be a reminder to those who still care that this is who Americans actually elected to lead the nation to ¡°glory,¡± and whose dangerous American fantasy way too many Americans continue to support. 

Sadly, for others both at home and abroad, Trump is seen as vividly representing what America has already become.

[ first published this piece.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author¡¯s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ô¹Ï¡¯s editorial policy.

The post The ¡°Glory¡± Within: Delusion Continues to Fuel America¡¯s Decline appeared first on 51³Ô¹Ï.

By the time federal agents intercepted her at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on the night of April 19, 2026, Mafi was allegedly worth millions ¡ª paid, say, for brokering the sale of Iranian drones, bomb fuses and ammunition to a military engaged in what the UN has depicted as one of the world¡¯s worst humanitarian catastrophes.

¡°While enjoying a life in the United States, this woman was allegedly breaking the law by brokering lethal weapons deals with Iranian adversaries,¡± Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche . Mafi, 44, is charged with conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers . She is presumed innocent.

She made her first appearance before a judge on Monday, April 20, yet did not enter a plea and was behind bars on Tuesday awaiting a detention hearing later in the week. Investigators say Mafi was not planning to stay. Authorities her at LAX after she bought a ticket to Turkey, fearing she was attempting to leave the country.

A former member of the Los Angeles Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Joint Terrorism Task Force, speaking to 51³Ô¹Ï on background, says the arrest fits a pattern that has been playing out in Southern California for decades:

Southern California has always been a hotbed of Iranian government activity. This has been going on for the last 20 to 25 years, and I have direct experience monitoring Iranian government operations in the United States and Southern California ¡­ It makes perfect sense that the woman arrested at LAX had a node or presence in Southern California. This is likely part of a much larger network spread throughout the United States ¡ª concentrated in cities with large Iranian diaspora communities.

So, how does a woman living among Los Angeles¡¯s affluent suburbs allegedly end up as a linchpin in Iran¡¯s global arms pipeline, and what does her arrest reveal about the reach of Tehran¡¯s intelligence networks inside America?

A shell company in Oman, a contract in the millions

Mafi owns and operates an Oman-based, Atlas International Business LLC ¡ª also known as Atlas Global Holding and Atlas Tech LLC ¡ª through which, prosecutors allege, she brokered weapons deals on Iran¡¯s behalf. In 2024, she allegedly facilitated a contract valued at over $72.5 million for the sale of Iranian-made Mohajer-6 armed drones to Sudan¡¯s Ministry of Defense. She was more than $7 million for the deal. She also allegedly coordinated the Sudanese delegation¡¯s travel to Iran to finalize the transaction.

The full scale of what prosecutors allege is staggering. Beyond the drones, court show Mafi allegedly brokered the sale of 500 non-guided aerial bombs, 55,000 bomb fuses, 70,000 AK-47s, 250 million rounds of AK-47 ammunition, 1,000 rocket-propelled grenade launchers and 500,000 rockets, among other weapons. Payment was structured to evade detection ¡ª some transferred through informal money-exchange systems operating across the Middle East and Africa, others routed through banks in Dubai and part was delivered in crates of $100 bills.

In February 2025, Mafi sent her alleged co-conspirator the signed contract WhatsApp and later sent photographs and a video of the crate being opened. ¡°It should be in small amounts,¡± Mafi allegedly a Sudanese contact over the encrypted messaging app while brokering a payment in 2024.

Senior Director of the Counter Extremism Project, Hans-Jakob Schindler, tells 51³Ô¹Ï that the Oman routing is consistent with how Tehran operates:

It is indeed a whole-of-government and whole-of-economy approach that the regime undertakes, with both government authorities, in particular the Ministry of Information, which is the official name for the Ministry of Intelligence, the intelligence service of the Revolutionary Guards, economic entities, research entities, as well as a range of other government authorities such as the diplomatic service being involved in quite complex transnational procurement operations that are usually characterized by a high degree of sophistication and obfuscation.

He notes that the confidence in this case appeared to be particularly high: ¡°The confidence that the obfuscation was sufficient that this route would not be detected seems to have been quite high.¡±

International political strategist and managing director of Nestpoint Associates, John Thomas, concurs:

This is textbook Iranian sanctions evasion ¡­ Tehran routinely uses third countries like Oman, the UAE, and Turkey as cutouts to launder weapons and money. It¡¯s a well-worn playbook designed to keep the IRGC¡¯s supply lines flowing despite United States sanctions.

A direct line to Tehran¡¯s intelligence apparatus

Mafi maintained more than 60 bidirectional contacts with an Iranian intelligence officer between December 2022 and June 2025, according to information during search warrants, pointing to a more structured relationship with the regime in Tehran.??

The court filing goes further still: The Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) allegedly directed Mafi to open a business inside the US using funds the Iranian intelligence service provided, framed as a way to help her recover properties Tehran had seized from her father¡¯s estate in 2020.

Mafi told that MOIS had never tasked her with conducting any activities on American soil for Tehran. Prosecutors clearly see it differently. Court documents also she stated she was ¡°more useful to them [i.e., MOIS] in Iran than in the United States.¡±

In connection with the bomb fuse transaction, Mafi submitted a letter of intent directly to Iran¡¯s Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC). She never applied for the required Treasury Department , nor did she register with the State Department¡¯s Directorate of Defense Trade , prosecutors say.

Schindler says the phone contact between Mafi and Iranian intelligence is notable for what it reveals about tradecraft ¡ª or the lack of it:

This is surprising since it must be clear to Iranian intelligence that any phone conversation can be monitored ¡­ The fact that these conversations seemed to have happened over the span of three years indicates to me that these phone conversations were not part of the initial stages of Mafi¡¯s recruitment process as an intelligence asset but more likely were part of her handling process. If this is the case, this is a surprising lack of professionalism on the Iranian side.

For Thomas, the alleged contact is less a failure of tradecraft than a window into standard Iranian operating procedure:

Mafi, a United States permanent resident, was not a lone actor. She was allegedly in direct contact with Iran¡¯s Ministry of Intelligence and Security ¡­ This highlights how the regime embeds operatives inside the United States and Europe, using legal residency as cover for illicit activities.

The former FBI task force official, meanwhile, says the pattern is one he watched develop firsthand over two decades:

Both MOIS and IRGC operatives have also been finding and acquiring dual-use items restricted under United States and international sanctions, then trans-shipping them to Iran ¡­ They identify Americans, American companies, and ethnic Iranians willing to supply these goods ¡ª sometimes wittingly, sometimes not. This is classic sanctions evasion, and it has been going on for 25 years in the Southern California area.

Sudan as a theater of Iranian power projection

The destination of the alleged supply chain matters as much as its origin. Sudan has been by civil war since April 2023. The conflict has killed an estimated 150,000 or more people ¡ª though the true toll may be far higher given the near-collapse of documentation in affected areas ¡ª displaced over 12 million, and produced what the UN refugee agency has called the largest and displacement crisis on earth. Iran¡¯s involvement in the war is not by accident.

Since Iranian cargo aircraft began arriving at Port Sudan¡¯s airport, the Sudanese Armed Forces have launched attacks using Iranian-made Mohajer-6 unmanned aerial vehicles ¡ª the same platform Tehran has to Russia and other theaters. Tehran has been repeatedly accused of violating the UN arms embargo tied to the conflict.

Schindler told 51³Ô¹Ï that the strategic logic for Iran extends well beyond the battlefield:

Being able to have a good relationship with the power brokers in Sudan that control the coastline along the Red Sea is, of course, a strategic plus for the Iranian regime, as they already have a relationship with the Houthis on the other side of the Red Sea.

Thomas is more direct about what the case reveals:

Iran¡¯s Mohajer-6 drones have been a game-changer for the Sudanese Armed Forces, providing critical aerial surveillance and strike capability that has prolonged the conflict and tilted the battlefield ¡­ This case reveals that the supply chain is sophisticated, multi-layered, and persistent ¡ª running from Iranian factories through Gulf shell companies to conflict zones in Africa.

As for whether a single prosecution can dent an infrastructure decades in the making, Schindler says the value lies in attrition and deterrence rather than disruption:

Any individual prosecution is, of course, not able to strategically disrupt an illicit procurement infrastructure of the size and sophistication that the Iranian regime has set up over the past decades ¡­ Nevertheless, each prosecution is of strategic importance ¡ª during the investigation into such cases, Iranian methodologies, obfuscation tactics, international connections, and communication methods are discovered, which can lead to further discoveries or at the very least force the Iranian side to reorganize part of their remaining intelligence and illicit procurement networks.

For the former FBI official, the Mafia arrest is not an endpoint; it is a glimpse through a narrow window into something far larger:

What we are seeing is only a small part of the iceberg ¡­ I am certain there are many other cases like this across the country. From my perspective, we must do everything possible ¡ª through law enforcement, intelligence, and, if necessary, military action ¡ª to stop the flow of American technology and information to one of our worst enemies.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author¡¯s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ô¹Ï¡¯s editorial policy.

The post Iran¡¯s Arms Network Has an American Address: The Arrest of Shamim Mafi appeared first on 51³Ô¹Ï.

With the Trump administration still Operation Epic Fury as a triumph and evidence of American power, the gap between performance and policy is impossible to miss. At the start of the war, the of Iran¡¯s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was supposed, in the minds of its defenders, to shatter Tehran¡¯s will. Instead, the assassination only hardened the regime¡¯s posture. The leadership that emerged de-escalation proposals, which meant compromise became harder to achieve. It sent the message that Washington acted with no regard for the consequences ¡ª which later came in the form of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.?

Iran¡¯s closure of the Strait as a response to US actions and the subsequent by Gulf importers to reroute food, medicines and factory supplies is more than a temporary logistics headache. It is a reminder that the region¡¯s prosperity still rests on a narrow maritime doorway that can turn into a trap after one misstep in US overseas policy.

Trump is therefore stuck in the worst possible position. If he pushes harder, as he seems to be doing with the recent blockade, the costs rise fast. If he backs away, the failure is obvious. He cannot claim easy success because the Strait remains contested, the casualties keep rising and the market shock keeps spreading. This is what a rock in front and a ditch behind really looks like in foreign policy. It looks less like strength than like a leader who now hopes volume can pass for strategy. 

This is not clever brinkmanship. Trump started with slogans, and now the Gulf is boxed in by the consequences of US actions. If Trump wishes to solve the crisis, he cannot treat a war zone like a stage and a maritime chokepoint like a prop. The US must pivot to realistic policy and action before the effects of the Strait of Hormuz crisis on the Gulf are irreversible.

A US gamble puts the Gulf at risk

As Gulf oil producers to bypass Hormuz, the old assumption that trade will always keep flowing looks badly shaken. That was always a fragile belief. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) has long the Strait of Hormuz as the world¡¯s most important oil transit chokepoint. For years, Gulf economies enjoyed the efficiencies of concentration, fast ports, short sea links and lean inventories. Now they are learning that efficiency without backup is not strength, but exposure.

The costs are already visible. Oil prices have , American troop casualties are and the death toll numbers in the . The Financial Times that shipping in the region has turned into a kind of commercial wild west, with bookings suspended, cargo dropped at substitute ports and rates shooting higher. Meanwhile, oil prices have pushed above a barrel during the latest escalation, and the pressure is even sharper in physical markets, where Oman-related crude grades have surged above a barrel.

Shipping companies are making the same calculation in harsher terms. The commercial chaos is reinforced by Maersk¡¯s own operational , which show surcharges, disruptions and a constant rewriting of schedules. Reuters that Maersk is redistributing vessel fuel and prioritizing critical cargo such as food and medicine. The International Energy Agency says the closure is also putting more than barrels a day of refining capacity at risk, which means this is no longer only about ships waiting offshore. It is about refineries filling up, downstream production losing outlets and the whole trade system becoming more brittle by the day.?

What makes this crisis especially serious is that it is not confined to crude exports. Even humanitarian concerns are now entering the debate, with a senior United Nations official for food and medicine cargo to be allowed through. Once a trade route becomes a corridor for exceptions and emergency pleas, the illusion of normal commerce is already gone.

The Gulf¡¯s problem is its reliance on the Strait

Anyone who bothered to read the EIA or its that Hormuz is the world¡¯s most important oil transit chokepoint knew this crisis was always going to turn on the Strait. All that was needed was a bad security gamble on the part of the US, and suddenly, the Gulf infrastructure is easily overwhelmed. This points to the larger problem of the Gulf¡¯s heavy reliance on the Strait.

Gulf officials often talk about the region¡¯s world-class logistics, and there is truth in that. connects to more than 150 ports worldwide, and the wider Gulf has spent decades building ports, free zones and storage facilities that many regions would envy. But scale is not the same as resilience. International Monetary Fund (IMF) work on Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) resilience just how large the region¡¯s trade exposure remains, while the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) continues to how central Hormuz is to tanker, bulk and container traffic. My view is that the Gulf¡¯s real mistake was not relying on trade. It was relying on a model that prized speed and concentration over redundancy. That model looked modern in calm times. In a crisis ¡ª such as the one Trump¡¯s strongman efforts created ¡ª it looks dangerously thin.

The larger lesson goes beyond this week¡¯s headlines. Reuters notes that the current energy shock is already countries to rethink dependence on vulnerable fossil fuel routes. The Gulf should apply that same lesson to food, medicines and industrial inputs. It needs backup corridors through Oman and the Red Sea, deeper shared reserves, faster cross-border customs coordination and supply contracts that value reliability as much as price. The closure of Hormuz is exposing a development model that became very rich, very fast, and a little too confident that geography could be managed like an accounting line.

To the region¡¯s credit, the search for alternatives has been immediate and practical. Saudi Red Sea exports are , which shows that bypass routes can soften the blow when the Gulf route is blocked. The kingdom is not improvising from nothing, because Aramco¡¯s annual makes clear that the East¨CWest pipeline was built to give Saudi Arabia export flexibility.?

The same logic is now spreading into the non-oil trade. Emirates Global Aluminum is exports and raw materials through Oman, a striking example of how companies are trying to stitch together land and sea corridors on the fly. These are sensible moves, but they also expose a deeper problem. A system that depends on emergency rerouting every time a single chokepoint is hit is not resilient, merely adaptive under stress. That shouldn¡¯t be a long-term solution.

This matters more in the Gulf than in many other regions because import dependence is so deep. An IMF study notes that GCC countries import about of the food they consume. When a place relies this heavily on imported essentials, every delay becomes political, every detour becomes expensive and every freight decision starts to look like a national security issue.?

What infrastructure issues reveal about US policy

Failure to overcome such an infrastructure issue doesn¡¯t just point to a strategic shortcoming on the part of the Gulf. It also points to the US¡¯s security and policy shortcomings. That is not the message of strength Trump wanted to send. Now his actions read as reckless. Trump has also sent messages, hinting at winding down one day and fresh coercion the next.?

A more stubborn regime in Tehran can read that confusion as clearly as anyone else can, and it is acting accordingly. First, Tehran responded to the US¡¯s actions in the Gulf by saying it can completely the Strait, while also saying it had already begun access by enemy-linked ships. Then, after Trump delivered a 48-hour , Tehran issued against Gulf energy and water systems. Finally, when Trump declared a US blockade of the Strait, he also said Iran promised to keep the Strait open indefinitely. Iran disputed this, there was no new agreement, and promptly closed the Strait once again.?

That is why Trump¡¯s insistence that Hormuz must simply be opened on his command sounds childish, not presidential. A president cannot order a chokepoint open the way a hotel boss demands a door be unlocked. A president must understand that naval access, insurance, shipping confidence, allied cooperation and retaliation all matter. Trump acts like he forgot every one of those facts, and now it seems that forgetfulness is driving US policy. 

The US must act reasonably, rationally and realistically

Even worse for Trump, US allies still do not want to be a of Trump¡¯s war. That is the part he either forgot or never understood ¡ª this is a war of choice. The countries he has called upon are restrained by legal limits, political limits, public pressure and their own judgment about whether this war was launched wisely. Trump¡¯s actions paint the picture that he believes America can always bark orders and others will fall in line. But allies are not props either.?

As for Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon page and the department¡¯s own office no longer even call him Secretary of Defense. They call him Secretary of War. Fine. Then let us speak plainly about war. Hegseth does not look like an independent steward of military judgment. He looks like Trump¡¯s facilitator, the man who helps convert presidential impulse into operational momentum.?

Trump should stop talking magic. The situation now goes beyond the slogans. If Washington insists on reopening Hormuz on American terms, there may be no remaining path except military force, and even that would not be clean, quick or cheap. As the global energy system remains to Hormuz, any serious effort to force open the passage would be costly in lives and regional stability.?

Yet the opposite path also carries a brutal political truth for Trump. If he does not reopen it, his failure is plain. If he does reopen it by force, the price will expose how careless he was to stumble into this position in the first place. That is not victory. That is an expensive confession.

?A president serious about changing the balance of power in the Gulf would have immediately considered geography, shipping, escalation risk and allied limits. Trump started with slogans, and now the Gulf is boxed in by the realities he believed he could talk away.?

[Cheyenne Torres edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author¡¯s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ô¹Ï¡¯s editorial policy.

The post Trump Gambled on the Strait. Now the Gulf Pays the Price appeared first on 51³Ô¹Ï.

The unprovoked military actions undertaken by the US and Israel against Iran triggered an unprecedented global energy crisis, the likes of which the world has never seen. On the fateful day of February 28, the coordinated assaults began with a bombing raid that resulted in the of Iran¡¯s Supreme Leader. Simultaneously, a barrage of Tomahawk missiles rained down on a in Minab, an event that would haunt the collective conscience of humanity. The strike obliterated the building, incinerating its 175 occupants, a tragic 168 of whom were innocent young girls.

The tragic and harrowing episode that unfolded at the girls¡¯ school in Minab has starkly highlighted the US¡¯ actions as emblematic of a rogue state, directly engaging in acts that can only be characterized as terrorism. This incident serves as a poignant reminder of the urgent need for justice. According to both federal and international legal frameworks, the events that transpired on that day represent severe violations of humanitarian law, qualifying these actions as war crimes under established statutes.

The principles set forth by international law clearly mandate accountability for such grave offenses. In light of this, it is imperative that those at the highest levels of the US government, including Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, General Dan Caine and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Lee Ratcliffe, as well as the military commanders who carried out these orders, bear responsibility for their roles in these reprehensible acts. The international community must insist on a thorough investigation and subsequent prosecution of these key figures to ensure that justice is served and that similar atrocities are prevented in the future. Only through such accountability can we hope to uphold the principles of human rights and the rule of law.

While the US and Israel have been striking schools, hospitals, bridges and other infrastructure, Iran has against their military and support in the region. The evidence clearly shows that Iran currently holds the moral high ground: The unprovoked attacks by the US and Israel have resulted in over Iranian deaths, while Iran¡¯s powerful and widespread retaliations have led to the deaths of 13 Americans and 28 Israelis.

The Trump presidency

The landscape of US presidential elections has undergone a profound transformation in recent decades, increasingly resembling a celebrity contest rather than an arena for substantive political discourse. In this evolving paradigm, the focus tends to shift towards personal charisma, social media acumen, and the ability to engage and entertain the public, often at the expense of critical analysis and thoughtful discussion surrounding policies and ideological principles.

This shift not only alters the way candidates present themselves but also influences the qualities and backgrounds of those who pursue high office. As a result, individuals with narcissistic tendencies appear to be drawn to the political stage. Many of these candidates exhibit a pronounced preoccupation with their image, often prioritizing self-promotion and personal brand over the foundational elements of genuine leadership, such as integrity, empathy and a commitment to the greater good.

The implications of this trend are significant; they challenge the electorate to evaluate not just the substance of candidates¡¯ proposals but also the underlying motivations and values driving their ambitions. Consequently, voters may find themselves navigating a complex landscape where charisma often trumps competence, raising concerns about the future direction of political leadership in the country.

Trump serves as a notable example of an individual exhibiting traits commonly associated with . His behavior reflects a profound skill in manipulation, frequently employing various tactics designed to captivate and draw admiration towards himself. This skillful maneuvering often manifests in his public speeches and social media presence, where he seeks to maintain a dominant narrative and garner unwavering loyalty from his supporters. His lack of remorse is notable; he rarely acknowledges the negative consequences of his behavior on individuals or groups, instead shifting blame or minimizing the severity of his actions.

As a sadist, there appears to be a disturbing propensity for him to derive pleasure from the emotional and physical distress inflicted upon others. This alarming characteristic is often evident in his interactions with critics, political opponents and even members of his own administration, where he seems untroubled by the impact of his words and actions. Besides, he appears to be suffering from , saying something and contradicting himself hours later.

Additionally, Trump¡¯s conduct illustrates a blatant disregard for both federal statutes and international law. Throughout his tenure, he frequently operates outside established norms, challenging institutional protocols and undermining the checks and balances essential to democratic governance. This disregard not only raises serious ethical concerns but also poses significant implications for the rule of law and the integrity of political processes.

President Trump is currently facing intense scrutiny due to a series of troubling reports, particularly those related to the contentious documents associated with prolific pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. In the released files, Trump¡¯s name appears more than a , raising significant concerns about his ties to Epstein and the nature of those connections. These documents contain serious allegations, suggesting that Trump is not only accused of being a rapist but may also be implicated in more heinous acts, including the possibility of pedophilia and even cannibalism.

The gravity of these accusations casts a dark shadow over his presidency and raises alarming questions about political integrity and accountability in the US. As the leader of the world¡¯s most powerful nation, he faces the implications of such grave allegations, which are profoundly troubling and ignite public debate about the standards of moral and ethical conduct expected of those in positions of power. The ongoing investigations and revelations risk eroding trust in the political system and highlight the urgent need for transparency and responsibility in governance.

To numerous onlookers, Trump has seemingly transformed the US into a subordinate ally of Israel. Iranians to America as the ¡°United States of Israel.¡± This perception is vividly illustrated in a striking image from the Situation Room at the White House. In this setting, Israel¡¯s prime minister takes a commanding position at the head of the table, exuding authority and confidence, while Trump occupies a seat beside him, suggesting a partnership that many interpret as one of deference. The scene encapsulates a dynamic that has sparked considerable debate about the balance of power and influence in US¨CIsrael relations.

Additionally, one must question the moral premise under which the US has taken two wars of aggression against Iran. As articulated by the Secretary of State, such actions were framed as a means of Israel, a nation that owes its very existence to implementing ethnic cleansing and genocide against the indigenous Palestinians. This scenario invites a deeper exploration of the complexities surrounding US foreign policy and its implications for global peace and security.

Former President Richard Nixon was also a narcissist. He exhibited certain troubling symptoms that mirror those currently experienced by Mr. Trump. Nixon¡¯s political journey came to a turbulent halt amid the infamous , which not only tarnished his legacy but ultimately led to his resignation. His life concluded in public disgrace, overshadowed by the controversies surrounding him.

Test the presidential candidates

The presidential elections that have paved the way for leaders such as Nixon and Trump to ascend to the highest office in the land are alarming and unacceptable. It is imperative that we establish a robust mechanism to ensure that circumstances allowing for such candidates to reach the presidency are never replicated. We must take proactive steps to safeguard our electoral process and preserve the integrity of our democracy for future generations.

The president is the commander-in-chief of the military. Yet, while military special operations, or high-risk, personnel are required to undergo in-depth psychological tests, the presidential or congressional candidates are not held to the same standards. Any idiot who cannot get a job at a service station or grocery store can become the US president if he is cunning, charismatic and chosen by the oligarchy.

The electoral process is fundamentally flawed, lacking robust mechanisms to effectively filter out candidates who may not genuinely represent the public¡¯s interests or adhere to ethical standards. This deficiency creates an environment ripe for corruption, in which political figures ¡ª particularly those aspiring to the presidency ¡ª often feel compelled to prioritize the agendas of affluent donors. Consequently, the welfare of their constituents and the broader needs of the country take a backseat, leading to a governance landscape that favors wealth over the common good.

President Trump is a good example. As a businessman, he has nearly all the businesses he started. As president, he comes across as a malignant narcissist who changes his mind repeatedly. He stays up late into the early morning, demonizing his critics on X. He threatens political adversaries and cheers at news of deaths and destruction. Although he is cunning and charismatic, he would not have passed an in-depth psychological test. This is also true of Congress, where members, such as Senator Lindsey Graham, exhibit malignant narcissism, yet they are elected to Congress.

Mr. Trump exhibits signs of emotional instability. Upon receiving the distressing news that two planes had been shot down in Iran, he allegedly descended into a state of deep panic. This reaction was so intense that his staff felt compelled to intervene, physically separating him from the situation to help him regain his composure. The stakes were high ¡ª if Iran, in retaliation for the assassination of its Supreme Leader by the US, decided to launch a missile strike against the White House or the Pentagon, one has to wonder: Would he have been able to manage such a crisis with the necessary poise and leadership?

In the future, it is essential that presidential and congressional candidates undergo comprehensive psychological evaluations. This proactive measure aims to mitigate potential crises and challenges in today¡¯s political landscape by ensuring our leaders possess the necessary mental resilience and stability.

Regarding Iran, a nation that has endured significant hardships and suffering as a result of the aggressive actions taken by the US and Israel, there is a compelling argument for the establishment of a tribunal similar to the . Such a court would seek to hold accountable those individuals responsible for severe transgressions, including war crimes and crimes against humanity, thereby offering a pathway to justice and healing for the affected population.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author¡¯s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ô¹Ï¡¯s editorial policy.

The post How to Stop Presidents, Like Trump, From Destroying America? appeared first on 51³Ô¹Ï.

These days, thanks to its racial policies, the Trump team even finds a way to inject racial hatred into dry economic statistics, that ¡°Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP ¡ª down from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today.¡±

A mayor named Khan

As it happens, though, on a per-person basis, Europeans are more than twice as wealthy today in real terms as they were 36 years ago. Trump¡¯s National Security Strategy exemplifies the dictum once cited by Mark Twain that there are ¡°lies, damned lies, and statistics.¡± In 1991, just two years before the EU first formed, Europe had a of $15,470 (in today¡¯s dollars). In 2024, that figure was $43,305. What changed since then wasn¡¯t that Europe began decaying, but that the well-being of the people in the Global South, in what Trump dismisses as ¡°,¡± has actually improved significantly (whether he likes it or not), changing Europe¡¯s share of global GDP.

In his NSS, Trump admits, however, that Europe¡¯s supposed economic degradation doesn¡¯t bother him nearly as much as another issue: ¡°This economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure,¡± thanks to Europe¡¯s migration policies. In short, Trump¡¯s government has now adopted a modernized version of the Nazi Great Replacement , slamming ¡°migration policies that are transforming the [European] continent and creating strife,¡± along with ¡°cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.¡±

Trump claims that he¡¯s no longer sure Europeans will even remain European. He supposedly worries that, two decades from now, the continent will be unrecognizable and EU countries no longer capable of being Washington¡¯s ¡°reliable allies.¡± That barb is, of course, clearly aimed at Muslim immigrants to Europe, even though they are a distinct minority of those arriving there.

In an about his NSS, Trump snidely remarked, ¡°If you take a look at London, you have a mayor named Khan.¡± He then went on to exclaim in horror that immigrants aren¡¯t just coming from the Middle East, ¡°they¡¯re coming in from the Congo, tremendous numbers of people coming from the Congo.¡± In other words, the only thing that outstrips Trump¡¯s Islamophobia is his horror of black people.

Of course, he¡¯s completely misinformed about immigration to Europe, which means his NSS is as well. As a start, the largest influx of people into the EU in recent years has been Ukrainians. The major of immigration to Germany in 2024 were Ukraine, Romania, Turkey, Syria and India. For Spain, it was Colombia, Morocco, Venezuela, Peru and Argentina.

As for Europe¡¯s future reliability, Trump has already said that he ¡°¡± Denmark, no matter that its population is solidly Lutheran and predominantly blond, because that country won¡¯t give him Greenland. And since the president has expressed a willingness to the NATO alliance, if necessary, to add 57,000 Greenlanders to his feudal domains, his doubting of European dependability should be considered richly ironic.

Aryan reliability

The underpinnings of Trump¡¯s reasoning can (or at least should) be described as Nazi in style. After all, he¡¯s assuming that the immigrants he loathes are inherently incapable of becoming Europeans and will make those countries intrinsically untrustworthy as allies of the US. Of the EU countries, he in December 2025 that ¡°they¡¯ll change their ideology, obviously, because the people coming in have a totally different ideology.¡± Yet British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, born in Southampton to an immigrant Indian-East African family of Hindu faith, was widely viewed as having British¨CUS diplomatic relations after years of strain.

In reality, show that socio-economic status, not national origin, best predicts how immigrants will vote. In Germany, the better-off Russian-Germans, who far outnumber largely working-class Turkish-Germans, tend to for right-of-center parties. Both groups, however, seem happy to participate in European politics in accordance with local norms. If, for Trump, the term ¡°immigrants¡± in this context is a dog whistle for Muslims, it might be noted that of the 22 countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, that Trump has formally designated as ¡°major non-NATO allies¡± are Muslim-majority.

His foreign policy reasoning in that NSS eerily mirrors the crackpot logic of Adolf Hitler. Hitler France as Germany¡¯s enemy because it had allegedly fallen irretrievably under non-Aryan Jewish influence. He also held out hope in the 1920s and early 1930s that Aryan elements would prevail over Jewish ones in Britain, a country he preferred as a strategic partner because of the Germanic ancestry of part of its population. In Trump¡¯s NSS, immigrant Europeans from Africa and the Middle East play the role that Jews did in Hitler¡¯s thinking ¡ª that is, non-Aryan underminers of national integrity. Hitler¡¯s conspiratorial racism was, of course, all too grimly insane, and so, too, is that of Trump¡¯s NSS.

¡°Mongols and Negroes¡±

Central to the NSS is the Great Replacement. The , though not the phrase, goes back to 1900 when the French nationalist parliamentarian and novelist Maurice Barr¨¨s , ¡°Today, new French have slipped in among us¡­ who want to impose on us their ways of feeling.¡± He warned of Jewish, Italian and other immigrants. ¡°The name of France might well survive,¡± he commented, but ¡°the special character of our country would nevertheless be destroyed.¡± Amid a political crisis over the wrongful conviction of Captain (of Jewish and Alsatian heritage) for supposed espionage for the German embassy, Barr¨¨s famed French novelist ?mile Zola, a supporter of Dreyfus, as ¡°not French,¡± but a rootless cosmopolitan from a Venetian background.

Fifty years later, the French Nazi (1913¨C1957) coined the phrase ¡°Great Replacement.¡± An ex-Communist, he had served as a Nazi collaborator during World War II in the Waffen Grenadier Brigade of the Charlemagne paramilitary Protection Squadron (Schutzstaffel, or SS). After the war, in his 1950 book, Theory of Racism, he wrote in dismay about how Western Europe had been invaded by ¡°Mongols and Negroes¡± ¡ª that is, by the Soviets and the Americans. He lamented that Jewish-dominated capital also supposedly controlled Europe (it didn¡¯t, of course) and falsely alleged that Jewish CEOs were bringing in immigrants in a deliberate attempt to replace civilized white Europeans.

Sadly enough, Binet¡¯s ideas have been revived in this century by French thinkers and politicians. Novelist Renaud Camus his 21st-century version of the theory in 2010, entitling his book, The Great Replacement. Such falsehoods were echoed in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, when American Nazis , ¡°Jews will not replace us.¡± Trump the assembled protesters, as well as those who opposed them, ¡°very fine people.¡±

Camus came around to supporting like-minded politicians in the far-right French National Rally (formerly the National Front) party, led by Marine Le Pen, who also became a Trump ally. When a French court convicted her of embezzlement in 2025 and excluded her from politics for five years, Trump the verdict and launched the slogan, ¡°Free Marine Le Pen.¡± Holding Le Pen, a far-right racist politician, accountable to the rule of law is part of what Trump was complaining about in his NSS when he cited European ¡°censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition.¡±

Marine Le Pen¡¯s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, had been a paratrooper in the ruthless Algerian War (1954¨C1962) that over 500,000 Algerians in a bid to keep that country under French colonial domination. The elder Le Pen came to lead the newly founded National Front in 1972 and was by far-right figures who had collaborated with the Nazis. While the party reinvented itself under Marine Le Pen in 2017 as the National Rally and has moved slightly toward the center, many of its supporters harbor neo-Nazi ideas about racial purity, now typically aimed at Arab and Amazigh Muslims.

Forget 1776 and all that

The central concerns of that NSS now animate the Trump administration¡¯s foreign policy. At the annual Munich Security Conference in early February, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio took up what the Victorian jingoist writer Rudyard Kipling once , ¡°The White Man¡¯s Burden,¡± that ¡°for five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding.¡± He neglected to mention all the massacres, destruction and looting that European colonialists perpetrated over those centuries. Belgium¡¯s King Leopold II alone instituted policies in the Congo from 1885 to 1908 that may have killed as many as people. That bloody episode inspired Joseph Conrad¡¯s novel, The Heart of Darkness, in the final sentence of which the protagonist , ¡°The horror! The horror!¡±

After the end of World War II in 1945, Rubio lamented, a ruined Europe contracted. ¡°Half of it,¡± he added, ¡°lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow.¡± He mourned that ¡°the great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.¡± 

He also displayed a striking mixture of white nationalism and colonial nostalgia ¡ª and with it, an ignorance of the history of decolonization, which neither occurred only after 1945, nor was in the main Communist-led. After all, the US launched its anti-colonial struggle in 1776. Most of Latin America was liberated from the Spanish Empire in the early 19th century by Venezuelan soldier Sim¨®n Bol¨ªvar and other fighters who would have been characterized at the time as liberals. As for the post-World War II liberation movements, most leaders of former colonized countries, including India, Kenya, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Senegal and Sudan, among other places, tilted either to capitalism or to social democracy.

Rubio¡¯s mixing of white nationalism and colonial nostalgia is, of course, nothing new. A return of German colonies in Africa, lost in World War I to Britain and France, was among the Nazi regime¡¯s most insistent in the late 1930s. Dreams of a new version of German imperialism in Africa were part of what was meant by the Third Reich.

Rubio has depicted decolonization as a failure of the European will to power. Most historians, on the other hand, point to the way their colonies mobilized for independence. Political scientists point to two crucial kinds of . The first was ¡°,¡± which involved urbanization, industrialization and increased literacy. By 1945, ever more Asians and Africans were no longer illiterates living in small, disconnected villages. As for political mobilization, parties, chambers of commerce and labor unions put millions of the previously colonized in the streets. New social classes of entrepreneurs, professionals and workers demanded the right to control their own destinies.

And in the wake of World War II, attitudes were changing even among the colonial powers. The British public, for instance, could no longer be persuaded to spend money in an attempt to quell an India where the Congress Party of Mahatma Gandhi and Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had brought millions into the streets independence. And while the Netherlands did to roll back Indonesia¡¯s declaration of independence in 1945 (despite having itself been occupied by Germany during World War II), after four years of massacres, it was forced out. The impoverished French had no choice but to give up most of their African possessions, but in a sanguinary failure attempted to keep their colonies in Algeria and Vietnam by . US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a wiser man than Rubio, French President Charles de Gaulle¡¯s arm to get him out of Algeria lest the revolutionaries there turn to Moscow and communism.

Kinder, K¨¹che, Kirche

Given that history, Trump and Rubio¡¯s advice to the EU to adopt a white nationalist domestic and foreign policy and attempt to initiate a new round of European colonialism in the global south is monstrous indeed, both morally and in practical terms. Without immigration today, Europe would soon face of rapid population loss, along with the loss of international economic and political power.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro S¨¢nchez had it right when he that Spain faces a choice between ¡°being an open and prosperous country or a closed and poor one.¡± As for the white nationalist pronatalist of keeping women barefoot and pregnant in accordance with the old German slogan, ¡°Kinder, K¨¹che, Kirche¡± (¡°children, kitchen, church¡±), it¡¯s a chimera given the electoral power of in today¡¯s Europe and US.

Meanwhile, Trump¡¯s cruel, anti-immigrant campaign has already hurt the American economy. Europeans would be deeply unwise to emulate it in any way, including colonially. The neoconservative project of rehabilitating American colonialism crashed and burned in this country¡¯s disastrous 21st-century wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (and won¡¯t be aided by the present assault on Iran, either) for reasons similar to those that made European colonialism impossible in the post-World War II period.

In reality, the EU¡¯s project of has yielded enormous prosperity, while expanding and deepening human rights. Trump¡¯s white nationalism, on the other hand, is a formula for division, poverty and mass violence, as was demonstrated in the 1930s and 1940s when a form of that ideology was last tried in Europe.

And count on this: Trump and crew are going to give the phrase, ¡°the white man¡¯s burden,¡± a grim new meaning.

[ first published this piece.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author¡¯s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ô¹Ï¡¯s editorial policy.

The post ¡°The Horror! The Horror!¡± Colonial Nostalgia and Aryan Reliability appeared first on 51³Ô¹Ï.

Free at last

For me, turning 60 was strangely liberating and clarifying. 

You no longer care what others think of you. High school was so long ago. You no longer need to act cool. Friends are either those who know you well and accept you with all your flaws, or so old that they have forgotten them, or so young that they think you¡¯re retro.

You¡¯re no longer scared of the boss. You may not even have a boss ¡ª either because you¡¯ve retired, you work for yourself, you¡¯ve gotten rid of the boss or you are the boss (at least you think you¡¯re the boss). And you¡¯re no longer bound by the rules of any institution.

You no longer need to please or acquiesce to your spouse. You know each other pretty well by now, warts and all. And in spite of that, you¡¯ve decided to stay together. Or you¡¯ve long parted ways.

There¡¯s no need to prove yourself or pretend you¡¯re the smartest person in the room. You know you¡¯re not ¡ª and you realize that that¡¯s ok too. But you also realize that you have a right to your opinions and an equal right to voice them as anyone else in the room.

In many cases, the kids have grown up, moved out and moved ahead with their own lives. So, you can¡¯t embarrass them anymore. Your parents have passed on, so you can¡¯t disappoint or shock them more than you¡¯ve already done. Or they have become your friends. You¡¯re no longer ego-driven. Ambitions have either been fulfilled or marked incomplete and shelved for the next incarnation.

You realize you are vulnerable and vincible. It¡¯s not due to some grand design or because you deserve it, but only by sheer dumb luck that you¡¯re still alive. It has finally struck you that ¡ª surprise ¡ª you too are mortal. Time is running out, so you can either speak now or forever hold your peace.

Thankfully, you¡¯re not just older; you¡¯ve accumulated a lot of knowledge and life experience along the way. You¡¯ve earned every one of those wrinkles. And that may even have made you a bit wiser. But perhaps more importantly, you have moral clarity and compassion.

In many ways, you¡¯ve transcended yourself. You¡¯re suddenly free, and you discover your voice. You can say exactly what¡¯s on your mind. It¡¯s not that you have no filter or say random things to hurt people. But rather, you have no selfish agenda, nothing to gain or lose, no one to please or fear. As Johnny Nash¡¯s says, ¡°I can see clearly now the rain has gone¡±.

Pliny the Elder is attributed to have said, ¡°in vino, veritas¡±; in essence, alcohol brings out the truth. I say ¡°in aetate, veritas¡±; age brings out the truth. And I¡¯m thrilled to find I¡¯m not alone. 

Many wise voices ¡ª brave and true

I¡¯m discovering a myriad of inspiring elderly voices from various walks of life ¡ª unafraid to speak truth to power, to speak sanity to the insane, to call out unethical and inhumane actions, and to warn of impending dangers.

Some are academics who bring together history, context and knowledge to explain the current bewildering geopolitical situation ¡ª such as John (78), international relations scholar at the University of Chicago; Yakov (81), contemporary Jewish history professor at the University of Montreal; Jeffrey (71), economics professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University; Richard (84), economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; Rosalind (81), political science professor at the City University of New York; Vali (65), middle-east scholar at John Hopkins University); and Omer (71), Israeli-American historian at Brown University.?

Some are AI experts warning us of the impending dangers of this new, unfettered, all-consuming technology ¡ª such as Jeffrey (78), Canadian computer scientist, Nobel laureate and professor at the University of Toronto; and Yoshua (62), Canadian computer scientist and professor at the University of Montreal. Both are considered ¡°godfathers¡± of AI.

Some are retired diplomats who speak out against the demonization of other countries and for the value of diplomacy ¡ª such as K.P. (85), retired Indian diplomat, permanent representative to UN organizations, and on global affairs; Chas (83), retired US ambassador to Saudi Arabia and former Assistant Secretary of Defense; Alistair (76), retired British diplomat/MI6, former EU envoy to the Middle East and founder of the organization Conflict Forums; Mohamed (83), Egyptian lawyer, Nobel laureate and former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency; and Jack (96), retired US ambassador to the USSR and involved in negotiating an end to the Cold War.

Some are retired CIA and military officials sharing their experientially-derived conclusions of the futility of war ¡ª such as Douglas (79), retired US colonel, combat veteran and former advisor to US Secretary of Defense; Daniel , retired American Lieutenant Colonel, combat veteran and recipient of Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling; Ray (86), retired CIA officer and ex-chair of National Intelligence Estimates committee; Lawrence (80), retired US Army colonel and former Chief of Staff to the US Secretary of State; and John (70), former director of the CIA and the National Counterterrorism Center.

Some are activists highlighting the urgency of humanitarian and environmental causes ¡ª such as Medea (73), founder of the American anti-war organization Code Pink and fair-trade advocacy group Global Exchange; Vandana (73), Indian physicist and environmental activist; and Frank (75), South African cleric and anti-apartheid veteran. And notable for their brave stance in support of Palestinians are Stephen (87), Marione (88) and the North London (a group of Jewish women aged 75¨C86) ¡ª to name just a few.

Some are journalists laying bare the truth as it happens and not as it¡¯s reported in main-stream press ¡ª such as Chris (69), American Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and Christian minister; Peter (68), British journalist and broadcaster; Gideon (72), award-winning Israeli journalist and author; and Maria (62), Filipino-American journalist and Nobel laureate.

Some are members of the clergy preaching empathy and compassion for all ¡ª such as the late Bishop Desmond , the current Pope (70), as well as Rabbi Brant (63) and Rabbi Lynn (77).

Some are physicians explaining science and fighting for our health ¡ª such as Francis ? (75), geneticist and former head of National Institutes of Health; Anthony (85), immunologist and former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; and Tom (65), former director of the Center for Disease Control and the New York City Health Commissioner, and now CEO of the nonprofit health organization Resolve to Save Lives.

Aging entertainers are naturals to lend their practiced voices to causes. Robert (82), Jane (88) and Bruce (76) spoke at last month¡¯s No Kings rallies. Several comedians ¡ª like Jon Stewart (63) and Stephen Colbert (61) ¡ª bravely remind us almost nightly with their biting wit of the insanity of the current situation. And actor Robert , who passed away last year at the age of 89, left us an exemplary lifetime of activism.

Despite their infamous predilection to the contrary, there are even some politicians who are brave and selfless enough to fall into this category. In the US, Bernie (84) (senator from the state of Vermont) and Elizabeth (76) (senator from Massachusetts and former law professor) are famous for speaking their minds. In Malta, there is Evarist (73), former minister for European & Foreign Affairs. In Greece, there is Yanis (65), an economist and the founder of a pan-European political party. In Canada, there are Lloyd (86) (retired minister of foreign affairs and currently chair of the World Refugee & Migration Council) and Bob (77) (former premier of Ontario and later Canada¡¯s ambassador to the UN).

Then, there are : a committee founded in 2007 by South African President Nelson Mandela, of 12 ¡°independent global leaders working together for peace, justice, human rights and a sustainable planet¡±. Among others, the current 12 include: Gro Harlem Brundtland (86), the former Prime Minister (PM) of Norway and former director-general of the World Health Organization; Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (87), Nobel laureate and former President of Liberia; Denis Mukwege (71), Congolese humanitarian, pastor and gynecologist; Zeid bin Ra¡¯ad (62), professor, former Jordanian diplomat and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; Helen Clark (76), former PM of New Zealand and administrator of the UN Development Programme; and Juan Manuel Santos (74), Nobel laureate, former president of Columbia and current Chair of The Elders.

And these are just some of the better-known personalities who are talking their walk and walking their talk ¡ª albeit a bit more slowly.

Listen, learn, live

The elderly can be a hugely valuable resource. They are some of the smartest people on the planet. Their understanding of history, their lived experience, their selflessness and their genuine concern for the well-being of humanity are difficult to replicate in any other population group. They can provide context, a reality check and a moral compass. They can provide advice and guidance to make our world more peaceful, compassionate and livable. And they can give us a much-needed kick in the pants to act before it¡¯s too late.

Today, we seem to be living in a world gone mad: imagining ¡°evil¡± adversaries and creating unnecessary wars, or obsessing with minutiae ¡ª while totally ignoring diplomacy, genuine humanitarian concerns (e.g., poverty, migrations, famine, the uncontrolled advent of AI) and the relentless march of climate change. At such a time, the many sane and experienced people over 60 who are speaking their minds and, more importantly, their consciences, are not only a novelty, entertainment-wise, but also imperative to our well-being and shared humanity. We would do well to listen.

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Is, thus, the most decisive moment in the history of humankind, materializing before our eyes? It would seem so.

What really matters, however, is the gigantic gap that will begin taking place once the Singularity arrives. Locked in its biological prison, human intelligence will remain static at the point where it was surpassed, while AI will continue to advance at an exponential pace. 

The most decisive moment in the history of humanity

This pace is reminiscent of the emblematic of the grain of wheat and the chessboard, set in India. As the story goes, if we place one grain of wheat in the first box of the chessboard, two in the second, four in the third and the number of grains keeps doubling until reaching box number 64, the total amount of virtual grains on the board would exceed 18 trillion. The same will happen with the advance of AI.?

The initial doublings, of course, will be impactful but not mind-blowing. Two to four, or four to eight, can be easily absorbed by the human mind. However, as well-known futurist Ray Kurzweil in 2005, the moment of transcendence should arrive 15 years after the Singularity itself. At that point, the explosion of non-human intelligence would have become truly staggering. However, that will be only the beginning.?

As Israeli historian and author Yuval Noah Harari , the two main attributes that separate homo sapiens from other animal species are intelligence and the stream of consciousness. While the first has allowed humans to take control of the planet, the second gives their lives meaning. Flow of consciousness translates into a subtle interweave of memories, experiences, sensations, sensitivities and aspirations.?

According to Harari, though, human intelligence would become absolutely negligible when compared to the levels that AI can reach, whereas the stream of consciousness will become a manifestation of capital irrelevance in the face of algorithms able to penetrate the confines of the universe. Not in vain, in his terms, human beings will be to AI the equivalent of what chickens are to humans.

Transformational stages

Periodically, humanity goes through transformational stages that shake everything on its path. During these, values, beliefs and certainties are eroded to their core and replaced by emerging ones. In the case of Western Civilization, there have been three major periods of this kind in the last 600 years ¡ª the Renaissance, which took place in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries, and Modernism that began at the end of the 19th century and reached its peak in the mid-20th century. 

The is understood as a broad-spectrum movement that led to a new conception of the human being, transforming it in the measure of all things. It represented, meanwhile, a major leap in scientific matters, in which, on top of great advances in multiple areas, the Earth ceased to be seen as the center of the universe.

The , on its part, placed reason at the center of everything. This was not only in the understanding of nature and society, but also as a conveyor of political legitimacy and a source of liberal ideals such as freedom, progress and tolerance. It was, concurrently, a period during which the notion of harmony was projected in all directions, including the understanding of the universe. During the Enlightenment, the scientific method began to be supported by verification and evidence. The Enlightenment represented a new milestone in the self-gratifying vision that humans had of themselves.

, understood as a movement of movements, led to an overturning of prevailing paradigms in almost all areas of existence. Among its numerous expressions were abstract art in its various forms: stream-of-consciousness literature, psychoanalysis, musical atonality and the theater of the absurd. Reason and harmony, as a result, were turned upside down at every step.

Following its own dynamic, but feeding back the above-mentioned process, science toppled the pillars of certainty. This included the harmonious universe built by English polymath Isaac Newton during the Enlightenment. The notions of time and space lost all their meaning under the theory of Relativity, while, going even further, made the universe a place dominated by randomness. Unlike the previous two major periods of change, this one eroded the self-gratifying vision humans had of themselves to the bones.?

The Renaissance, the Enlightenment and Modernism unleashed and symbolized new ways of perceiving human nature and its surrounding universe. Each of them confronted humanity with new levels of consciousness (including the notion of the subconscious during Modernism). Through them, humans could feel more or less valued, more or less secure with respect to their own condition and to their position in relation to the universe.

However, a fundamental element remained unchanged: Humans were always the ones who studied themselves and their surroundings. Even as their nature and motives were questioned, their centrality to the planet was never challenged. As it had been since the Renaissance, humans were the measure of all Earthly things. 

The countdown towards the end

Singularity, however, is called to destroy that human centrality in a radical and irreversible way. As a result, human beings will not only confront their obsolescence and irrelevance, but will embark on the path towards becoming the equals of chickens. Everything previously experienced in the march of human history will dramatically pale by comparison.

We are, thus, within the countdown towards henhouse grounds. Or worse still, within the run-up towards the destruction of humankind itself. This is what , one of the greatest scientists of our time, envisaged as a result of the advent of the AI era. This is also what hundreds of top-level scientists and CEOs of high-tech companies expressed in May 2023, when they an open letter warning about the risk to human subsistence posed by uncontrolled AI. For them, such risk was on par with those of a nuclear war or a devastating human pandemic. Furthermore, at a ¡°summit¡± of bosses from large corporations, held at Yale University in mid-June 2023, believed that AI could destroy humanity in five to ten years¡¯ time.

Cofounder of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, the danger involved in the following terms:

There are some people in the field ¡­ who say: ¡°Look, we program these AI models ¡­ We just tell them to follow human instructions, and they¡¯ll follow human instructions¡± ¡­ And the other intuition is ¡­ They¡¯re a new species. How can you imagine that they¡¯re not going to take over? My intuition is somewhere in the middle ¡­ They¡¯re more like growing a biological organism ¡­ AI systems are unpredictable and difficult to control.

The Doomsday Clock

In the short- to medium-term, and at the cost of massive unemployment, AI will spur gigantic advances in multiple fields. Inevitably, though, at some point in time, this superior intelligence may want to take control and pursue its own ends. If so (more so when), humanity would be doomed.

Unfortunately, a market-driven approach with regard to AI prevails in the US. The federal government, seeking to surpass China in AI development, has given a free pass to AI companies that, in turn, try to outrun one another amid what former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and political scientist Graham Allison called a ¡°.¡±

In this race to the top, there is neither time nor inclination to consider the consequences. Moreover, competing AI companies want to ensure that Congress doesn¡¯t slow them down through regulation. To this end, they have amassed a war chest to influence the November midterm elections by ousting critics.

If something characterizes our historical period, it is the lack of instinct of self-preservation by humans. If nuclear war or climate change fails to get rid of the human species, AI will probably do it. The Singularity represents a major step in that direction. Not surprisingly, the has never shown such a short time to the midnight of humankind ¡ª just 85 seconds.

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During his 2000 campaign for the presidency, candidate George W. Bush his nostalgia for the golden age of the Cold War, in which the USSR played the role of America¡¯s reliable bugbear.

¡°When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and we knew exactly who ¡®they¡¯ were. It was ¡®us¡¯ versus ¡®them,¡¯ and it was clear who ¡®them¡¯ was. Today, we¡¯re not so sure who the ¡®they¡¯ are, but we know they’re there.¡±

Once elected, Bush believed he had found the solution to the problem. He turned Huntington¡¯s thesis into historical reality when, with the appropriate fanfare, he launched his ¡°Global War on Terror¡± (GWOT). First in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, a newly ¡°dangerous world¡± got off to a spectacular start to mark the new millennium and reassure a president in desperate need of an authenticated enemy.

Alas, Bush¡¯s valiant effort never really developed into the kind of heroic cinematic ¡°clash¡± Hollywood culture may have been hoping for. Instead, it produced two boring and confusing ¡°forever wars.¡± Conducted in parallel, both dragged on for years over the wastelands of Asia.

Obama offered a bit of stimulus with his ¡°surges,¡± which nobody really understood and which produced no memorable outcome. Boring and meaningless are the two epithets most people would have applied to the subsequent history of those two wars.

Fast forward to 2026. How things have finally changed!

Two decades on, US President Donald Trump, teaming up with Israel¡¯s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, may finally be fulfilling Bush¡¯s 2020 call for excitement. The world is now witnessing a clash ¡ª if Trump is to be believed ¡ª that might just see the end of an entire civilization. Had he lived to read Trump¡¯s solemn promise, Huntington would have deemed himself a prophet: In the first week of April, Trump proudly : ¡°A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.¡±

Distinguishing between clashes

Despite appearances, today¡¯s civilizational stakes are not the ones Huntington imagined. The current showdown between East and West (the ¡°twain¡± that author Rudyard Kipling predicted ¡°shall never meet¡±) is neither ideological, like the Cold War, nor properly religious (the core of Huntington¡¯s thesis). Not that it doesn¡¯t feature some elements of a religious ¡°crusade.¡± Both Trump and his ¡°Secretary of War¡± Pete Hegseth have sought to frame the conflict as Christian good versus some other religion¡¯s evil. But so far that has backfired, if only because, according to the traditional value system evoked in the liberal democratic West, we identify as ¡°evil actors¡± the ones who start the wars. The good actors are those who focus on defending their values. For most Americans, this is Trump¡¯s war. He started it. (Some keener observers see it as Trump¡¯s war for Netanyahu.)

Everyone cites World War II not just as a good war, but an exemplary good war. That is because Germany started the hostilities by invading Poland and then demonstrating its alacrity to invade most of its neighbors. Japan then attacked Pearl Harbor. The villains declared their identity by being the ones who attacked without warning.

In the current war in West Asia, Trump¡¯s and Netanyahu¡¯s attempt to reverse the roles by having the ¡°good guys¡± attack ¡°bad guys¡± and restore order might have worked had they achieved the quick regime change they believed feasible. But even a clear knockout punch against Iran¡¯s Supreme Leader on the first day failed to deliver the championship belt to the US¨CIsraeli TagTeam. Instead, the war began to spin out of anyone¡¯s control. It quickly took a shape nobody could predict (apart from various well qualified experts whose opinions are systematically ignored). The fact that in the intervening weeks, no coherent narrative has emerged to justify the start or the pursuit of the war means that the US and Israel increasingly appear to the global public as forces of evil.

In other words, even if Trump actually does go ahead with his promise to demolish an entire civilization, one thing is already clear: US soft power ¡ª a major factor in Washington¡¯s dominance of the post-World War II order ¡ª has taken a serious and perhaps fatal hit.

Analysts agree that in the near future, the US will continue to possess the most powerful military in the world and that the US dollar, even though weakened, will not be quickly dethroned as the privileged global reserve currency. The army and the dollar are two of the three pillars that have anchored Washington¡¯s geopolitical authority. It¡¯s an authority to which every nation understands it is obliged to bow, whether deeply and consistently (US allies) or superficially and irregularly (everyone else). Everyone respects power. Especially when they can trust it. But what happens when trust disappears?

Has Kant led Western culture astray?

Respect begins with trust. Not absolute trust ¡ª the ¡°¡± to be truthful that philosopher Immanuel Kant built his ethics around ¡ª but the kind of confidence or stability of judgment one develops in the perception and interpretation of motivational factors that emerge from any relationship. This is never perfect. It is adaptive.

Kant¡¯s insistence on ¡°categorical imperatives¡± may have had the effect of poisoning our modern Western culture¡¯s ability to construct and understand rational political relationships. In Kant¡¯s system, everyone should trust that others are acting out of duty to the same moral law that they are. This stands as the required condition for mutual respect to emerge.

In the real world, different cultures construct different readings of the ¡°moral law.¡± Different languages generate contrasting frameworks for understanding what truthfulness may be. Furthermore, different individuals treat language and value systems in ways that will inevitably undermine Kant¡¯s recommendation of with a ¡°kingdom of ends.¡±

Trust in the real world is built not on truthfulness, but on predictability and the perception of stability. Morality if defined as a value system should not in itself be ¡°open to interpretation,¡± but its role in defining and guiding relationships must be flexible. Let¡¯s take a simple example. Chinese culture elevates the notion of ¡°harmony¡± to the highest level in serious decision-making. However complex the conflict, the instinct to seek a solution that promotes harmony will be the privileged reflex.

This contrasts starkly with US culture. For Americans, the motivation to achieve success in realizing one¡¯s vision trumps the goal of harmony. That is why in the West we have to remind ourselves consciously that ¡°win-win¡± is the most effective strategy. Without that conscious effort, we are likely to apply zero sum, win-lose logic.

This distinction may help us to understand why the many in the US fail to realize that the nation has lost the golden key of soft power it once possessed, perhaps its greatest achievement in the 20th century and the true foundation of its global influence.

At the start of the 20th century, US President Theodore Roosevelt¡¯s trust-busting thrived on the idea that the companies that had become trusts were obvious winners. They would be allowed to keep winning so long as competitors were allowed to rise by sharing the same market space. Roosevelt airbrushed the vampire¡¯s teeth from the portrait of US capitalism. At mid-century, in the aftermath of World War II, the Marshall Plan demonstrated that even though Europe had made a mess of things, it was now incumbent upon the winners to help them stand up and compete.

This wasn¡¯t just fair play. This was Hollywood-endorsed and quasi-saintly benevolence.

The accelerating decline of US soft power

At the same time, even though many of America¡¯s actions across the globe were aggressive, unjust, violent and even spiteful, the US made a valiant effort to build up goodwill by maintaining at the very least the illusion of commitment to helping the underdog and especially not humiliating losers. The most prosperous nation in the history of humanity successfully entertained the lasting impression that it was willing to share its good fortune with the rest of the world. And what is soft power if not success at creating an impression?

That mentality had begun to shift radically by the start of the 21st century. It was replaced by the vision of a world defined not just by a ¡°clash of civilizations,¡± but by the need to impose on the rest of the world one type of civilization, and to do so with Kantian categorical absoluteness. Bush¡¯s GWOT installed that attitude in a way that Cold War anti-communism never attempted to do. The Cold War claim was that capitalism is better than communism. The GWOT proclaimed that it had become a battle between good and evil.

Bush¡¯s neo-con friends accelerated the trend that began late in the 20th century based on the newly acquired reflex of US administrations to apply increasingly severe and arbitrary sanctions on nations, organizations and individuals who failed to live up to the so-called liberal democratic, rules-based international order ¡ª a new ¡°kingdom of ends¡± ¡ª defined and enforced by Washington.

More than a decade later, US President Joe Biden contradicted his own voters¡¯ expectations when, instead of undoing Trump¡¯s of ¡°maximum pressure¡± on Iran and returning to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Trump had withdrawn from, he chose to ride the white stallion of ¡°good¡± that refuses even to listen to ¡°evil.¡± On the same grounds, he declined Russia¡¯s insistent invitation to sit down and hammer out an architecture for mutual security in Europe. We should note, on that score, that Biden never considered asking Europeans for their input on that decision. We now know the price of following that particular categorical imperative: a costly four-year-old war that has devastated Europe¡¯s economy.

Trump¡¯s ¡°America First, screw the others (including allies)¡± and his propensity to arrest or assassinate foreign leaders as well as launch wars while conducting negotiations, have sealed the coffin of US soft power and put paid to any remaining of the US military being a ¡°force for good.¡±

There¡¯s no going back this time. Biden¡¯s failure to undo Trump¡¯s first round dismantling of US soft power made it clear that the past will not return. Whatever happens in Iran, the Persian Gulf, Ukraine or Taiwan in the coming months and years, a different world order will emerge. Whether you like what you see or not, and whether the new order turns out to be manageable or not, no one can deny it will be multipolar. The king who imposed the previous ¡°kingdom of ends¡± has met the guillotine.

Some of us believe the emerging order can be manageable, but it will require a concerted effort. We also know that there are others who have an interest in proving it can¡¯t be managed. Will that lead to a new ¡°clash of civilizations?¡±

One thing is certain: Whatever order emerges, the rules it establishes will be different from anything we inherited from the past.

*[The Devil¡¯s Advocate pursues the tradition 51³Ô¹Ï began in 2017 with the launch of our ¡°Devil¡¯s Dictionary.¡± It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself ¡ª political and journalistic rhetoric ¡ª to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of the 51³Ô¹Ï Devil¡¯s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider¡¯s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

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From citizen judgment to constitutional right

Cavedon traces the jury¡¯s origins to ancient Athens, where ordinary citizens collectively judged disputes as part of direct democracy. That tradition carried into medieval England, culminating in Magna Carta¡¯s guarantee that no free person could lose liberty or property except ¡°by a jury of their peers.¡± Over time, this principle hardened into a defining feature of common law.

By the 18th century, legal scholar William Blackstone had formalized the idea that a criminal conviction required the agreement of 12 peers. This tradition crossed the Atlantic, where American colonists embraced jury trials not only as a legal safeguard but as a political right. The Constitution enshrined this protection twice, in Article III and the Sixth Amendment, reflecting its centrality to the new republic.

Cavedon emphasizes that juries were never meant to be passive fact-checkers. Historically, they evaluated both facts and the justice of the law itself, exercising what some have termed ¡°jury nullification.¡±

Revolution, resistance and jury autonomy

The American Revolution reinforced the importance of juries. Singh and Cavedon note that British attempts to bypass colonial juries ¡ª by shifting trials to admiralty courts or even to London ¡ª provoked widespread alarm. Cavedon describes this as an ¡°absolute panic,¡± as colonists feared the loss of local accountability and community judgment.

Two landmark cases illustrate the power juries once wielded. In 1670, a jury acquitted Quaker leader William Penn despite judicial pressure; their case established that jurors could not be punished for their verdicts. In 1735, a New York jury acquitted publisher John Peter Zenger of seditious libel, even though the law offered no defense for truthful criticism of the government. In both cases, juries asserted their authority to interpret justice beyond strict legal instructions.

Singh contrasts this tradition with civil law systems, where judges and legal professionals dominate decision-making. In the Anglo-American system, by contrast, juries historically acted as a democratic check on state power.

The rise of the modern ¡°assembly line¡±

Cavedon states that over the past century, the criminal justice system has transformed into what he calls a ¡°utilitarian¡­ assembly line to produce convictions.¡± He traces this shift to Prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s, which expanded federal enforcement mechanisms that persisted long after alcohol bans ended.

Today, the overwhelming majority of cases never reach a jury. Roughly 97% of federal convictions and 94¨C95% of state convictions result from plea deals. Prosecutors wield significant leverage through what is often called the ¡°trial penalty¡± ¡ª the threat of much harsher sentences if defendants refuse a plea and lose at trial.

Cavedon also points to structural incentives that reinforce this system. Many judges are former prosecutors, and law enforcement funding can be tied to arrest and conviction rates. Grand juries, once intended as a safeguard, have largely become procedural formalities. As Cavedon notes, they are often seen as ¡°rubber stamps¡± for prosecutorial decisions.

The cumulative effect, he says, is a system that sidelines ordinary citizens and concentrates power in legal institutions.

Blinding juries to context

Even when jury trials occur, Singh and Cavedon argue that jurors are often constrained in ways that limit meaningful judgment. Courts typically instruct juries to focus narrowly on factual questions while ignoring broader context, legal interpretation and consequences.

Cavedon highlights cases where this restriction leads to troubling outcomes. In one federal trial in California, jurors convicted a man for growing marijuana without being told he was part of a city-authorized medical program. In another case, a juror later learned that a defendant he helped convict received a 40-year mandatory sentence, prompting deep regret.

For Cavedon, such examples illustrate a broader problem: Jurors are excluded from considering the full moral and social implications of their decisions. He believes that this undermines both fairness and the democratic purpose of the jury system. ¡°If people do not have confidence that ultimately it will be their neighbors and their peers who will make judgments,¡± he says, ¡°then I think we have lost a significant amount of personal liberty.¡±

Can the jury system be reclaimed?

Singh and Cavedon conclude with a question: Can the jury¡¯s original role be restored? Cavedon believes it can, but only through a cultural and educational shift. He describes the forthcoming Cato Institute initiative, ¡°Your Verdict Counts,¡± as an effort to reframe jury duty as an active form of citizenship rather than a burdensome obligation.

He feels that jurors should see themselves as participants in a democratic process, bringing ¡°their conscience and their values¡± into deliberations. This could revive the jury¡¯s function as a check on state power and a protector of individual liberty.

Singh closes by considering the stakes. If juries no longer serve as a meaningful counterbalance within the justice system, then a key pillar of democratic accountability may already be eroding. The question is not just how the system functions today, but whether citizens are willing to reclaim the role it once gave them.

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As journalist Janan Ganesh recently in the Financial Times, ¡°Trump is the one US president elected this century under whose watch Russia has not launched a foreign invasion. Putin attacked Georgia under George W Bush, Crimea under Barack Obama and Ukraine entire under Joe Biden.¡± The pattern is suggestive, if not conclusive.

Calculated unpredictability

Many observers have portrayed Putin as a deranged autocrat bent on restoring a lost empire, surrounded by subservient aides too intimidated to challenge him. Yet, over time, his behavior has come to seem grimly legible. His aims are extreme but comprehensible; his methods brutal but procedural. He is consistent ¡ª consistently malign, perhaps, but consistent.

Trump, by contrast, presents a different figure. He is erratic, self-contradictory and prone to sudden shifts in manner and position. Where Putin¡¯s menace is intelligible, Trump¡¯s is properly inscrutable. And that difference raises the possibility that not knowing someone may itself function as a form of power.

This is the essence of what Ganesh calls Madman Theory. More a strategy than a theory, it involves a political leader deliberately cultivating the appearance of irrationality so that neither adversaries nor allies can reliably anticipate responses. All they can do is act with caution. The leader need not be mad, but others must not be certain. The seed of doubt is crucial.

Ganesh illustrates this with former US President , who presided over the nation from 1969 to 1974, a period overshadowed by the Vietnam War. Nixon¡¯s Secretary of State, , was tasked with negotiating American withdrawal. Nixon, with Kissinger, incubated a stratagem: to convey to North Vietnam that the president was unstable, beyond even Kissinger¡¯s control. Thus, Kissinger could imply in negotiations that Nixon might take extreme measures ¡ª even nuclear ones ¡ª regardless of advice.

Picture it: After hours of high-level with Vietnamese negotiators L¨º ??c Th? and Xu?n Th?y, Kissinger concludes, ¡°Excellent. I¡¯ll take this back to the president. But honestly¡ªhe might throw it in the trash.¡± The goal was simple: force concessions by making the consequences of resistance unknowable and potentially catastrophic.

This was Madman Theory in its purest form: calculated unpredictability. Nixon himself did not appear overtly unhinged to the American public, at least not before the Watergate scandal. But he wanted adversaries ¡ª and even allies ¡ª to believe that he might be. The performance of instability was designed to create leverage.

Yet even here, the results were ambiguous. The war dragged on; the costs were immense; the strategy failed to produce decisive gains. As Ganesh observes, the problem is built into the logic: If the threat is too extreme, it lacks credibility; if carried out, it becomes catastrophic.

Genghis Khan, Stalin, Hitler and Marcos

In the 1532 political treatise , philosopher Niccol¨° Machiavelli argued that rulers must sometimes act immorally, inconsistently and against expectation. It¡¯s safer to be feared than loved, if one can¡¯t be both. Appearances matter. Machiavelli understood the uses of terror, ambiguity and deliberate inconsistency. He admired deacon Cesare Borgia, whose ruthlessness and unpredictability helped secure his power.

While Machiavelli didn¡¯t cite Genghis Khan, the latter embodies many of these principles. Khan¡¯s backdrop was the tribal, wind-scoured steppe of Inner Asia in the late 1100s. His reputation for sudden, overwhelming violence was not incidental to his success ¡ª it was central. Cities that resisted could expect annihilation; those that submitted might be spared.

The effect was psychological as much as military. Opponents did not merely calculate their chances; they confronted the possibility of total destruction at the hands of a leader who seemed to operate beyond restraint. Whether Genghis Khan was irrational is beside the point; others behaved as if he might be.

operated in a very different setting: the bureaucratic, industrializing Soviet state of the 20th century, where power was exercised through institutions, purges and fear. As General Secretary of the Communist Party, he inherited the machinery of Vladimir Lenin but took it in a direction few anticipated. His Five-Year Plans transformed the economy at immense human cost, while purges eliminated enemies, real and imagined. Even fellow revolutionaries were not safe: Leon Trotsky was exiled and eventually assassinated.

Crucially, Stalin¡¯s rule was characterized not just by brutality but by unpredictability. Decisions appeared arbitrary; loyalties could reverse overnight. No one could be certain of the limits, because there were none.

Adolf Hitler followed a different path but produced a similar effect. His rise depended on fusing charismatic authority with national identity. Once in power, he defied conventional constraints. His impulsive, ideological and often strategically baffling leadership confounded allies and enemies alike. There were assassination attempts, even from within his own ranks, yet he retained intense loyalty from figures such as Luftwaffe Commander-in-Chief Hermann G?ring.

In all of these cases, the pattern is evident: power reinforced by the perception that the leader might act beyond reason, beyond norms, beyond comprehension. The onus is on the leader to sustain that image ¡ª psychopath, megalomaniac, obsessive ¡ª but never a rational, calculating figure. Madman Theory doesn¡¯t depend on whether the image is true or make-believe. What matters is that others believe it. And the others include followers, friends and, most importantly, enemies.

A more modern and very different case is Imelda Marcos, the former First Lady of the Philippines. She doesn¡¯t belong in quite the same category as the great tyrants of the 20th century, nor did she wield power in the same way. Yet her public persona introduced a distinct, perhaps unique, form of unpredictability. Her rule, alongside President of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos, was marked not only by abrupt interventions but by extraordinary extravagance. Where others projected menace through violence, Marcos added theater: excess itself became a signal, unsettling in its disregard for restraint. She famously owned pairs of shoes, bought perfume by the gallon and once splurged $7 million on jewelry.

This was not madness in any clinical sense: It was performative extravagance, an idiosyncratic form of power that kept her followers in awe. Madman Theory need not be fully realized; even its partial expression can shape how others respond.

Trump and the value of uncertainty

And so to today ¡ª and a plan that seems crazed, until it starts working. Trump has certainly unnerved the world. His expletive-loaded posts alone betray the lack of dignity and respect typically associated with world leaders. Then there is his penchant for fabrication, and his unfulfilled threats. Often, his hyperbole is excused as ¡°,¡± but is that all it is? Trump¡¯s impulsivity seems almost too outlandish to be genuine. Surely no human being, never mind an elected president could think and behave so preposterously. Surely.

To be fair, he is not the only political leader to unsettle observers. Putin¡¯s prosecution of the Ukraine war has raised persistent concerns about escalation. North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, has long alternated between provocation and restraint, keeping adversaries uncertain whether they face calculated brinkmanship or something less controllable. Trump belongs, at least in part, in this company.

So, is Trump¡¯s apparent madness real or strategic? His record allows for both interpretations. Allies are praised, then rebuked, sometimes in language that veers from jocular to incendiary. Even high-stakes diplomacy is reduced to the language of ¡°deals,¡± as if geopolitical conflict were a used car sale.

Surely, other politicians suspect Trump¡¯s departures from established norms are sometimes so aberrant that it¡¯s hard to imagine he actually meant them. But even if they suspect design, they remain uncertain regardless.

It¡¯s not difficult to imagine how this might shape decision-making in Moscow. Let¡¯s return to the question raised in our opening paragraph. Picture Putin at his long table in the Kremlin, advisors gathered at a careful distance.

¡°We should anticipate what Trump will do,¡± he begins.

¡°Nothing,¡± one replies. Ukraine is not part of NATO.

¡°You think a technicality constrains him?¡± another asks. ¡°He may arm them heavily. He may even place American missiles within reach of Moscow.¡±

¡°That would be crazy.¡±

¡°´¡²Ô»å¡­?¡±

Silence.

That silence is the point. The problem with a ¡°madman¡± is not that he will act, but that he might ¡ª and that no one can be sure how far he would go. Faced with such uncertainty, even a nerveless leader may hesitate.

This doesn¡¯t mean Trump has consciously revived Nixon¡¯s strategy. The simpler explanation that he is erratic rather than strategic remains plausible. Nor does it mean Madman Theory always works; history offers as many warnings as endorsements.

But it does suggest an answer to the opening question. Would Putin have invaded Ukraine if Trump had been in the White House? Probably not. Not because Trump would certainly have acted, but because Putin couldn¡¯t have been certain that he wouldn¡¯t.

[Ellis Cashmore is the author of .]

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Historical modesty warns us to view Prime Minister Viktor Orb¨¢n¡¯s stunning in Hungary last Sunday as only possibly another such historical inflection, not necessarily an actual turning point. Orb¨¢n could come back to power if the opposition fails to live up to its promises. Autocrats in other countries might see the situation in Hungary as a warning sign and crack down even harder on their populations. Nevertheless, his electoral defeat was important.

Orb¨¢n was not just a local strongman, but rather a central model and muse for an entire generation of nationalist right-wing leaders, including US President Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) imitators. If the architect of ¡°,¡± as he boasted, can be routed, despite a captured media, tilted institutions and deep corruption, that raises implications far beyond Budapest.

We cannot yet know whether this is the beginning of a long global backlash against authoritarian nationalism or a localized setback. But several forces now converging ¡ª from economic strain and war fatigue to Trump¡¯s visible physical and mental decline and the humiliation of his chosen lieutenants ¡ª suggest that the winds may finally be shifting against the nationalist right.

Orb¨¢n’s illiberal model

Orb¨¢n¡¯s importance was never just about Hungary¡¯s just under ten million citizens. Since returning to power in 2010, he consciously branded himself as the avatar of a modern form of illiberalism, democratic in form but authoritarian in practice. He tightened control over broadcast media and large parts of the press, channeled state contracts to cronies, reshaped the courts and electoral rules, and used xenophobia and culture-war politics as glue. 

For American and European populists, Hungary became a kind of nationalist TED talk convention. Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest while former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, American political activist Tucker Carlson, Claremont Institute intellectuals and social-conservative activists paraded through Orb¨¢n¡¯s orbit. Conservative activist, former FOX News commentator and lobbyist Matt Schlapp¡¯s Center for Fundamental Rights approximately?€1 million (~$974,659) in 2022?and over?€2 million (~$2,173,913) in 2023?from state-funded Hungarian foundations to co-organize the CPAC conferences. There is substantial evidence of Hungarian government funding for CPAC events, primarily through state-linked foundations and think tanks.

Hungarian Prime Minister-designate P¨¦ter Magyar after his victory that Orb¨¢n diverted taxpayer money to fund CPAC as part of a ¡°criminal offense¡± involving party financing. Magyar an immediate halt to taxpayer funding for CPAC and pledged to establish anti-corruption agencies to investigate these payments. Out in the open, meanwhile, Republican politicians from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Vice President JD Vance to Budapest to pay homage to Fidesz and learn from what they openly espoused as a model for the US.

The rise of Magyar

Despite all the countervailing winds, Orb¨¢n did not merely lose; he lost badly. His party¡¯s vote collapsed after years of seemingly unassailable dominance. He had designed a system to entrench himself and suffocate the opposition. Yet voters, mobilized by a new movement under Magyar, broke through. For American politics, the symbolism is powerful. The regime that MAGA elites openly admired as a blueprint has just been overthrown at the ballot box.

The story of ¡¯s rise matters because it shows how to beat a deeply entrenched populist regime. Magyar is not a left-wing revolutionary. He is a center-right figure who came out of Orb¨¢n¡¯s own party, roughly analogous to former US Representatives Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger, who finally, from inside the Grand Old Party (GOP), broke decisively with Trump. That background gave him credibility with voters who had once supported Orb¨¢n.

Magyar built a movement, not merely a party. Deprived of fair access to the media, he went directly to voters, especially in rural areas where Orb¨¢n¡¯s media environment had been most suffocating. Magyar traveled relentlessly, holding town halls and rallies, using social media as a force multiplier. The opposition parties, including the left, swallowed their pride, thought strategically and accepted Magyar¡¯s leadership, uniting behind him even though he was to their right on most issues.

Magyar notably rooted his campaign in everyday concerns, what we call the affordability crisis, health care, education and, above all, the cost of living, while still framing Orb¨¢n as a threat to Hungary¡¯s democratic future and European orientation. He often the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956 to arouse patriotic feelings and turn the citizenry against Russian domination and interference. Hungarians didn¡¯t just tire of Orb¨¢n¡¯s culture war and Russian President Vladimir Putin¡¯s influence; they tired of stagnant living standards, demographic decline and the sense that neighboring countries were doing better.

During the Cold War, Hungary enjoyed ¡°,¡± the highest standard of living within the Warsaw Pact. Today, the Hungarian economy (in terms of purchasing power) has fallen behind Romania, a significant blow to national pride. Hungarians look across their borders and see that their economic decline was not inevitable, but rather the product of bad, corrupt governance.

Magyar¡¯s campaign promises to defend democracy and fix people¡¯s material problems were crucial. The anti-Trump forces in the US should take note, however, that he did not exaggerate Orb¨¢n¡¯s threat to democracy, nor did he concentrate on wedge-issue culture wars; instead, he focused on bread-and-butter issues. Liberal democracy won in Hungary not as an abstraction, but as a promise to improve daily life under an honest government.

The limits of populist governance

Trump¡¯s rise in 2016 was part of the same global upsurge that lifted Orb¨¢n and fueled Brexit. Nationalist parties and leaders could channel legitimate grievances about migration, globalization and the failures of centrist elites into a politics of resentment. They could promise simple solutions and muscular ¡°strongman¡± leadership without having to demonstrate competence.

But demagoguery governs badly. Orb¨¢n¡¯s Hungary offers a case study. Once in power, strongmen face the same stubborn realities as democrats: pandemics, inflation, geopolitics and economic complexity. Populism cannot protect a domestic economy by erecting barriers against the entire globe. Populism cannot pretend to listen to the voice of the people while it silences any dissent. Populism cannot pretend to be defending the interests of the common man while enriching the already wealthy and powerful. After all the bluster, populist authoritarians tend to revert to crony capitalism, institutional hollowing-out and theatrical nationalism instead of sound policies.

Trump fits this pattern. Twice now, he has ridden anti-incumbent waves to power, first in 2016 against the Obama-era Democratic establishment, and again in 2024 against President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris amid post-COVID inflation. Americans who voted for Trump did so primarily because they believed he would turn the economy around for them. But Trump and his family have profited enormously, while the net worth of average Americans has stagnated. As of March 2026, Trump¡¯s net worth has increased by approximately?$3 billion to $4.2 billion?since returning to office in January 2025, with estimating his total wealth at a record $7.3 billion, up from $4.3 billion in 2024.

Trump¡¯s second presidency is already visibly failing on its own terms. His , launched impulsively and then managed erratically, has rattled oil markets, worsened an already acute affordability crisis and brought the Strait of Hormuz to the brink of closure. Gasoline prices, already a source of voter anger, have climbed further. Voters may not follow every twist of Middle Eastern diplomacy, but they understand six-dollar gas.

Like Orb¨¢n, Trump tries to distract from policy failure with melodrama: social-media tirades, personalized feuds and symbolic gestures designed for the base. But there are growing signs that the spectacle is wearing thin. Even many Americans who once voted for Trump now show signs of exhaustion and disillusionment. The man who once seemed, to his admirers, like an iconoclastic outsider now looks like a tired, angry incumbent.

Trump¡¯s late-night screeds on his own Truth Social platform have become longer, more erratic and more self-pitying. At least on Twitter, he was limited to 140 characters. Posting an of himself as Jesus, not merely blessed by Christ, but?as?Christ, and lashing out at the pope is the kind of grandiose behavior that, in any other era, would raise urgent questions about a president¡¯s fitness for office. The ¡°stable genius¡± shtick is shading into something more disturbing.

Corruption and cronyism exposed

Corruption also lies in plain sight. Americans are increasingly aware that Trump governs as he does business, by enriching family, cronies and co-investors. From Middle East envoys with vast financial stakes in the region to cronies profiting from regulatory changes, the pattern is unmistakable. Special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner not only have no credentials to negotiate an end to the Iran War ¡ª they have no technical expertise in the details of nuclear weapons, nor any background in history and diplomacy, as is normally required of high-level negotiators ¡ª but they also have substantial business dealings in the region and the outcome of the war will personally affect their own self-interest. Orb¨¢n¡¯s downfall reminds voters that crony corruption is not just ¡°how politics works¡± but rather is what happens when populists with disdain for expertise run a government.

Vance embodies this problem. Once a bestselling critic of Trumpism, he reinvented himself as a loyalist and is now tied to Trump¡¯s misadventures abroad and at home. He for Orb¨¢n just before the Hungarian strongman¡¯s rout. The high mark of chutzpah was Vance complaining about foreign interference in domestic elections while he was actively on the stump for Orb¨¢n¡¯s party. He then traveled to Islamabad to help sell Trump¡¯s Iran policy and came home empty-handed as the war worsened. Even Trump¡¯s treatment of Vance, sending him to do the dangerous, thankless work while Trump an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event with Rubio, underscores the dynamic.?

In any other presidency, a foreign war would take precedence over just about any other issue. But Trump thought it would be a good idea to take Rubio to watch UFC fake fighters put on a Vaseline-rubbed mixed-martial-art cosplay rather than deal with statecraft. This is not the behavior of a confident leader grooming a serious successor, but rather that of a flailing boss toying with subordinates.

Authoritarian decline and coalition fractures

Trump¡¯s actions are reminiscent of late-stage authoritarian movements elsewhere, when once-feared lieutenants begin to look ridiculous, and being close to the leader starts to look like a political liability rather than an asset. Vance¡¯s much-touted conversion to Catholicism now sits awkwardly alongside a with an American pope who embodies a morally serious, anti-authoritarian Catholicism, and who clearly wants nothing to do with Trump¡¯s court. The Pope is also a savvy organizer, against whom Trump is flailing.

When US President Richard Nixon was behaving as erratically as Trump does now, as the consumed his presidency, there were similar worries about whether the chief executive was mentally capable of carrying out his duties. The (which addresses presidential succession and the temporary transfer of power) was seriously considered. But in Trump 2.0, there is no adult backup in the White House or conscientious generals in the military ¡ª such as former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, retired Lieutenant General Herbert Raymond McMaster or retired General Mark Milley ¡ª to guide us through such a constitutional crisis.

The clash with the pope matters politically because it exposes a fissure inside Trump¡¯s own coalition. For years, many white evangelicals and conservative Catholics offered elaborate rationalizations for their support of Trump, casting him as a flawed but necessary instrument in a larger culture war. Many believed God had chosen him to lead America. They accepted his insults, his affairs and even his boasts about sexual assault as the price of power.

But many of those voters are recoiling from the imagery of Trump as a quasi-divine figure and from direct attacks on a pope who speaks in recognizably Christian terms about peace, human dignity and the perils of idolatry, with a Chicago accent. When rank-and-file evangelicals and Catholics criticize Trump openly on these grounds, they offer what political scientists call ¡°,¡± the cues elites give their followers to take unpopular stances. These kinds of changes do not happen overnight.

In Hungary, Orb¨¢n retained impressive support on paper until quite late. But once a critical mass of respectable figures begins to defect, or simply to speak candidly about a leader¡¯s failings, momentum can shift quickly. Voters suddenly feel they are not alone in their misgivings. What was once unthinkable, breaking with ¡°their¡± leader, becomes, at first, possible, and then inevitable.

Historical parallels and future implications

History does not repeat itself, or even rhyme, as the old clich¨¦ goes, but it does offer patterns. The current moment has resonances with several earlier inflection points in liberal democracies. The Progressive Era marked a reaction against the corruption and inequality of the Gilded Age. Reformers did not overthrow capitalism, but they imposed constraints, antitrust laws, regulation and social insurance, which made it survivable for ordinary people.

The civil-rights movement equally represented a profound moral and political break with the ¡°respectable¡± segregationist laws of the mid-20th century. For years, it was unclear whether the cause would prevail. Then, abruptly, the combination of movement pressure, political leadership and cultural change produced a new consensus and a new generation of leaders that would have been hard to imagine in the 1950s.

The Thatcher¨CReagan era then saw a turn away from postwar social democracy and activist government toward market liberalism and limited government. For young conservatives at the time, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher¡¯s 1979 victory, soon followed by US President Ronald Reagan¡¯s in 1980 and the emergence of Pope John Paul II in the Vatican, created a sense that history¡¯s momentum had shifted in their favor.

Orb¨¢n¡¯s defeat, President Volodymyr Zelensky¡¯s resistance in Ukraine and Magyar¡¯s emergence in Hungary may play a similar galvanizing role for defenders of liberal democracy today. Two leaders from small countries with big megaphones in Central and Eastern Europe are showing that it is still possible to both resist Kremlin-linked illiberalism and speak convincingly to their citizens¡¯ immediate material needs. Their example should put to rest the idea that only a nationalist strongman can channel popular frustration or that only the far left can credibly oppose inequality and corruption. A broadly liberal, anti-authoritarian politics can be tough on borders and security, serious about economic grievances and uncompromising on democratic norms.

If Orb¨¢n¡¯s defeat offers lessons for the US, they are not about importing Magyar¡¯s precise policy platform. They are about coalition, leadership and moral clarity. In Hungary, long-time liberals and leftists accepted a center-right, ex-Orb¨¢n figure as their standard-bearer because he was the candidate best positioned to win. In the US, that translates into a willingness among Democrats, moderates and anti-Trump conservatives to unite behind candidates, sometimes imperfect ones, who are serious about defending democratic norms, fighting corruption and improving living standards. Above all, it means jettisoning purity tests and focusing on the issues that matter to regular voters instead of to the loud fringe.

Voters respond not to ideological checklists, but to leaders who seem to understand their lives and can explain in plain language how things can get better. The most effective Democratic voices today are those who treat affordability, education, safety and the border as real problems, not as talking points to be brushed aside, while drawing a bright line against authoritarianism and bigotry.

The centrality of anti-corruption and the need for action

As the Hungarian opposition showed, opposing corruption and illiberalism is not ancillary to economic progress; it is central to it. In the US, that means making clear that Trump¡¯s crony capitalism is not an unfortunate side effect, but a primary reason why ordinary people keep losing ground while insiders thrive. It is important to resist two temptations. The first is despair, the conviction that Trumpism is an unalterable feature of American life. The second is complacency, the belief that history has now turned, that liberal democracy is once again ¡°inevitable¡± and that our only task is to ride the wave.

The truth lies between. Orb¨¢n¡¯s fall, the limits of Trump¡¯s war and the visible fraying of his personality cult all suggest that we may be entering a period of backlash against nationalist authoritarianism. New coalitions are forming, new leaders are emerging and even some former loyalists are beginning to peel away.

But history offers no guarantees. Inflection points only become turning points when people act, when citizens organize, when parties make courageous choices, when leaders articulate a compelling alternative and when institutions prove stronger than demagogues.

Hungary¡¯s voters have reminded the world that even a deeply entrenched illiberal regime can be defeated democratically. The question now is whether Americans, facing a weaker but still dangerous form of Trumpism, can learn from their example and seize the moment before it slips away.

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That leaves a more fundamental question: What comes next, where do we go from here and what does ¡°winning¡± actually mean for Washington in a war defined by endurance?

The tools left in the toolbox are predictable: more military force, tighter constraints, a blockade, diplomacy and negotiation. But escalation is not a strategy. It is a bet. And there is little evidence that a second round of pressure will succeed where the first did not.

This is not a tactical miscalculation. It is a structural one. Washington still acts as if pressure, applied long enough, will force a decisive break. Tehran has already demonstrated the opposite. To persist under the status quo is not resolve. It is denial.

The mismatch is fundamental. The US is fighting to win. Iran is fighting not to lose, and, if necessary, to survive. That asymmetry is not a detail of the conflict. It is the conflict.

Victory in this war will not be decided by larger bombs or louder threats. It will be decided by how each side defines the game it is playing. Washington seeks a swift resolution with defined outcomes: restored deterrence, a diminished nuclear program and altered Iranian behavior. Iran seeks endurance, measuring success not in victory but in survival: regime continuity, deterrence preserved and pressure absorbed.

One side is playing a finite game. The other is playing an infinite one. This is a contest between speed and endurance, and the difference between them defines the war.

The infinite game and endurance

As American author Simon Sinek argues in?, finite players pursue clear victories and defined endpoints, while infinite players aim to remain in the game, adapting and outlasting. This pattern is not new. In Vietnam, the US pursued a decisive victory while North Vietnam fought to endure. In Afghanistan, Soviet forces sought control, while the Mujahideen¡¯s strategy centered on survival. In the longest US war in Afghanistan, a simple battlefield truth captured the asymmetry: ¡°You have the watches, we have the time.¡± In each case, outcomes were shaped less by battlefield superiority than by endurance.

This is not only historical. It is structural. As a recent from the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies notes, escalation in the US¨CIran conflict hinges less on battlefield dominance than on sustainability. Washington relies on high-intensity strikes and decapitation strategies, while Iran emphasizes decentralization and attrition designed to absorb pressure and extend the conflict over time. If one side is optimizing for rapid resolution and the other for survival, escalation does not resolve the conflict. It prolongs it.

Watch behavior, not rhetoric, and the contrast becomes sharper. Where Washington looks for breaking points, Tehran sees thresholds. Where the US applies pressure, Iran prepares to absorb it. Iranian leaders do not frame endurance as a burden; they frame it as a duty. What appears as strain from the outside functions as structure from within.

This is why the familiar playbook keeps failing. However many leaders Washington removes, Tehran replaces them, disperses authority and hardens its system against collapse. The US operates on a timetable, seeking a resolution. Iran stretches time, decentralizes power and extends the horizon of the fight. One side is trying to end the war. The other is built to ensure it does not end on those terms.

Strategic ambiguity and the need for a new approach

Part of the problem is strategic ambiguity. It remains unclear whether the US is attempting to counter a hostile regime, pursue regime change, or secure broader regional interests. That lack of clarity does not confuse Tehran; it empowers it. Ambiguity allows Iran to stretch the conflict across multiple fronts, adapt in real time and exploit the absence of a clearly defined end state.

A different approach begins with a simple recognition: Pressure alone will not produce surrender. If the objective is behavioral change, the strategy must shift from forcing collapse to shaping incentives over time. That requires pairing pressure with credible off-ramps, defining achievable objectives rather than maximal ones and aligning strategy with an adversary built for endurance. It also requires patience and coalition discipline as much as firepower.

The alternative is to continue mistaking persistence for progress. In a finite game, escalation can produce victory. In an infinite game, it can simply extend the conflict. And in wars like this, misunderstanding the nature of the game is often the fastest path to losing it.

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By contrast, I remembered once reading an with billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, who described the world as atoms constantly shifting and moving. With intention and focus, she pointed out, you can move those atoms yourself, and so move the world. Baked into that worldview was a sense of interconnectedness, not to mention power.

Was such a perspective a luxury of the billionaire class? In fact, no. Lots of non-billionaires, including many young people, regard the world as so many moveable atoms and they¡¯re acting accordingly. In the process, they¡¯re piercing the isolation in their neighborhoods, schools and even workplaces, while occasionally quelling their own loneliness, too.

A party in the park

In December, when thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents descended on Minneapolis, Minnesota, neighbors started checking in on one another. A woman I¡¯ll call by the pseudonym ¡°M¡± learned something new about her South Minneapolis intersection: Dozens of Ecuadorian families live within just a few blocks of her. She also learned that many of those immigrants were not going to work because they were too afraid to make the commute. As a result, their families were struggling to pay bills.

That was when a few people got onto a chat thread and organized a rideshare system for the neighborhood. The thread quickly grew and now, M told me, there are more than 200 people on a chat thread covering just a handful of city blocks. Neighbors use this thread to connect for rides that get adults safely to work and kids safely to school.

¡°Just in our little neighborhood, we¡¯re fielding 20 to 30 rides a day,¡± M told me. We spoke after the official end of the Trump administration¡¯s Operation , its local deportation-machine operation. ICE is, however, in the area.

Their rideshare effort brought some unanticipated changes to the community. Neighbors who previously hadn¡¯t known each other at all now spend time together daily, chatting and learning about each other¡¯s lives.

¡°This whole experience has rewoven who we consider our community,¡± M told me. ¡°When this is over, we¡¯re going to throw a big party in the park.¡±

Meanwhile, as Operation Metro Surge raged in the Twin Cities, some 1,500 miles away in central Florida, high school students were walking out of class in protest ¡ª not once, but over and over again, despite threats from administrators that they would be suspended or expelled.

¡°We have immigrants at this school, we have people who are afraid at this school,¡± a senior at Viera High School in Viera West, Florida, a reporter in early February. She was disputing her school administration¡¯s position that the protests aren¡¯t about a ¡°school-based¡± issue and shouldn¡¯t take place during class time. That same day, north of Orlando, a student at DeLand High School to a local news station that she felt a sense of community as she walked out with her peers to stand up for their classmates.

And central Florida is just one of many places where protesting ICE has become a community undertaking. Zoe Weissman was only 12 years old when she survived the 2018 in Parkland, Florida. She¡¯s now a sophomore at Brown University, where she lived through a second this past December. She told me that many young people at her school and elsewhere are involved in anti-ICE protests, in part because they feel a responsibility for keeping each other safe. This distinguishes her generation from older cohorts, who assumed that they could rely on the authorities to take care of that for them. Indeed, this winter, kids in cities ranging from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Indianapolis, Indiana, to Phoenix, Arizona, and Reno, Nevada.

But Weissman has personally observed people of all ages and from all walks of life starting to come together, both to take action against ICE and to support gun control (for which she¡¯s a vocal advocate). ¡°I¡¯ve been really happy,¡± she said, ¡°about how many different types of people and age groups I¡¯ve seen protesting.¡±

The homeschooled Luhmann brothers from a suburb in Chicago, Illinois, are a notable example of such protesters. They began volunteering as community patrollers during Operation Midway Blitz in September 2025, as ICE agents arrested of people across Chicago.

¡°We¡¯re two white minors who have always had the privilege to live in America unbothered,¡± Ben Luhmann, 17, told a reporter in a that earned over 250,000 likes on TikTok. ¡°I¡¯m going to use that privilege that shouldn¡¯t be here, and do the right thing,¡± said his brother, Sam Luhmann, 16.

Their mother, Audrey, worries about her sons¡¯ safety while they¡¯re out observing ICE. And yet, motivated by her Christian faith to look out for neighbors, she was aware that Chicagoans of color worry every day about their kids¡¯ safety. Given that reality, she asked me, ¡°Why should my life be normal? Why should my family get to be safe and comfortable and go on about our days and just ignore what¡¯s happening?¡±

As Sam put it, ¡°We just need numbers of people out there keeping an eye on our neighbors.¡±

¡°A long-term strategy for survival against a fascist regime¡±

¡°One of the instincts in moments like this is to get as small as possible, so that you don¡¯t get hit by whatever might be coming,¡± said Jonathan Feingold, a law professor who studies racism at Boston University School of Law. Recognizing that getting small and staying quiet is not what he considers ¡°a long-term strategy for survival against a fascist regime,¡± Feingold started talking with fellow professors who, like him, had been troubled by mounting repression on their campuses even before Donald Trump entered the White House a second time.

In the spring of 2024, as Feingold recounted, universities around the country militarized against student groups that were protesting Israel¡¯s of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. Universities explained this use of force as a necessity to protect the safety of Jewish students, though such students were well represented in the ranks of the protesters. Now, in US President Donald Trump¡¯s second administration, the federal government is using allegations of antisemitism and claims of securing Jewish safety to justify a broad on free expression on college campuses. It is also using these claims to legitimize ICE abductions of noncitizens like Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts University student R¨¹meysa ?zt¨¹rk, who spoke up for the rights of Palestinians or criticized Israel.

¡°Jewish academics understood how Jewish identity was being wielded in order to come after our students, our colleagues, our institutions in deeply dangerous ways,¡± Feingold told me.

That¡¯s why, a year ago, he cofounded a called Concerned Jewish Faculty and Staff. Through that organization, he¡¯s collaborated with colleagues both on his campus and elsewhere who decided that they needed to bring their religious background into today¡¯s struggle for civil rights.

Feingold said their most significant achievement to date has been creating a community. ¡°The way that life is structured in the United States is often isolating,¡± he told me, noting that the life of an academic can be particularly lonely. Today, however, he feels a sense of camaraderie with colleagues who are planning to meet to observe Passover for a second year in a row. As he put it, ¡°On a personal level, it has created a source for me to reintegrate into Jewish communal life that I¡¯m excited to be a part of.¡±

And he isn¡¯t the only one who now feels excited. More than 1,400 people registered for the third Conference of the Jewish Left in Boston this February. I was among them. It¡¯s true that, once upon a time, I often resented having to spend time working with other people in a shared effort to keep this world of ours from going completely to shit, even as I also felt lonely and didn¡¯t know what to do about that. At some point last year, however, I realized I was starting to find the company I needed in the very sorts of gatherings I used to resent attending.

Indeed, I found it strangely enlivening to sit in a giant room with people so deeply motivated, even driven, to protect all our fundamental rights ¡ª so driven, in fact, that they were willing to show up on a frigid Thursday to form a new alliance to do so.

Breaking bread and pozole

Far from the Conference of the Jewish Left, in a warmer climate, the nonprofit supports the economic resilience of the working-class residents of northeastern Los Angeles, with a particular focus on people of color, non-native English speakers and undocumented immigrants. While the organization primarily works to preserve affordability in neighborhood housing ¡ª which, in Los Angeles these days, requires incredible financial creativity ¡ª it has also recently started operating an outdoor market in nearby Cypress Park.

That market began as a comparte, or ¡°share:¡± a place where members could gather and swap or share goods the way that some of them had done in their home countries. Then, residents suggested that they cook the foods of their homelands and bring them and homemade crafts to the market to sell to the larger community. Over the past year, that idea has become a biweekly night market called Somos NELA (an acronym for Northeast Los Angeles).

¡°It¡¯s more than a market, more than an exchange of money,¡± says Helen Leung, the executive director of LA M¨¢s. She pointed out that the food sold there is rooted in history, made with love and is outrageously tasty. The pozole (a Mexican soup) is her personal favorite.

Leung said that some people who used to be very social at the market are now staying home, seeing the way ICE has violently arrested community members. At the same time, she added, ¡°We have seen more customers come out, customers who are showing up more and are spending more. They want to support the community members who are trying to make ends meet.¡±

Frequenting the Somos NELA market is one of an array of acts that people across the city have taken up to support one another. Leung, for instance, has been inspired by the formation of new collectives dedicated to helping families who have been separated, as well as emotionally and financially devastated, by ICE abductions. One group of eight women even took the striking step of renting a community space to offer support and mutual aid to families who have been harmed.

It¡¯s not an official nonprofit like LA M¨¢s. ¡°These are,¡± she told me, ¡°people who are figuring out how to change the system by themselves.¡±

The world sometimes shifts

Hundreds of people filed into a church on a winter evening in Amherst, Massachusetts, where I live, to learn how to be effective bystanders during an ICE raid. So many showed up that they spilled out the doors and some had to be turned away, told to attend the next training session. Once the program began, staff from an immigrant rights organization offered practical advice and personal stories.

Here is just one of those stories: Upon noticing a vehicle with tinted windows idling in their neighborhood, a white citizen approached it, said a warm hello to those inside, and engaged them in polite conversation. ¡°Where are you from? What brings you to the area?¡± they asked. In some cases, that has proven to be an effective, nonconfrontational way to communicate to ICE agents that they are being watched and encourage them to leave without abducting any residents.

In other words, sometimes you can change the way events unfold. Sometimes, you can even change the news.

The bystander training provided more than just practical advice. As I looked around, I saw plenty of neighbors I knew, but many more I didn¡¯t. I was feeling something I couldn¡¯t quite identify.

Political scientists have long understood that loneliness is a precondition for authoritarianism, which depends on people being isolated and mistrusting one another. Historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote about that in her 1951 tome, The Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she loneliness as tantamount to ¡°the loss of one¡¯s own self¡± because we are social creatures who confirm our identity in the company of others.

The news hasn¡¯t improved since I started working on this piece. Still, while doing so, I¡¯ve found myself in the company of others ¡ª and that¡¯s reminded me of something. When you go out into the world, however scary it might seem, and act to make it better, the world does sometimes shift. The atoms really do move.

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The world was waiting anxiously for his bombshell after the inconclusive talks in Islamabad. He didn¡¯t take long to on his Truth Social: ¡°Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz.¡± So, the US will now completely blockade the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran had only partially blockaded during the war.?

Another strategic misadventure

Trump is a very capricious old man who will shamelessly renege on any position he has previously taken. He is also quite capable of throwing out the baby with the bathwater and shooting himself in the foot by making rash decisions that undermine his own efforts. Therefore, we can¡¯t really say what the outcome of this situation will be. We are already hearing that the blockade will be to Iranian ports. But, if he presses ahead with this military action and stays the course ¡ª inspired by the US¡¯ past blockade successes in and ¡ª it is likely to prove to be another huge strategic miscalculation against Iran.

Iran, in my view, had initially attempted to take similar action, or at least wanted to. However, after the US and Western propaganda machine began to construct a narrative that Iran was disrupting global energy security and economy by closing the Strait of Hormuz, the country began to backtrack from its initial maximalist position. It the strait to ease international ire and pressure by projecting a sense of normalcy along the Hormuz route, but this did not extend to its enemies.

Trump and his many advisers, it seems, have still not learned that the Middle East is not South America, and it is definitely not the US¡¯ backyard.

Imperialist grudge

Perfected in the colonies, the Western powers ¡ª claiming to be civilized rather than savage ¡ª established a legal framework for exploiting the subjugated peoples, their lands and their resources. These laws were made by the colonial masters, who invoked, interpreted and applied them selectively to further their own metropolitan interests. In the post-colonial world, this Western imperialist practice has been institutionalized within the geopolitical landscape and extended to the whole globe, creating the so-called rules-based order that has governed international relations ever since.

After taking of the Strait of Hormuz during the war, Iran intends to maintain this dominance and impose a levy on tankers transporting oil and gas for safe passage. Iran argues that this is necessary to rebuild its war-ravaged country and views it as reparations for an imposed war. So far, Iran has made no rules, and it is allegedly levying transit fees selectively, exempting certain countries while charging others.

The US resents Iran¡¯s attempt to impose its will in the region, viewing it as a disruption to the established international order. Only the US has the right to impose its will on other nations at the expense of international order; Iran cannot equate itself with the US. Moreover, this approach is seen as crude and unsophisticated compared to the Western way of ¡°legally¡± advancing vested interests, although by the selective and discriminatory interpretation and application of laws and rules. However, it actually mirrors Trump¡¯s tactics, from whom the world is quickly learning about arbitrary actions and bullying.

A coalition of international disorder

Trump that the Hormuz blockade will involve unspecified ¡°other countries,¡± but he has not revealed which countries these partners might be. The United Arab Emirates? Bahrain? Kuwait? Who else, if the US¡¯s European allies continue to shy away from involving their countries in the Iran war?

Israel is unlikely to act beyond securing its own national interest, and its participation in any operation to blockade Hormuz is highly doubtful. Trump can, of course, bring on board leaders such as Argentinian President Javier Milei, El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar, and now acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodr¨ªguez from his own hemisphere. He can also buy the participation of a few militarily insignificant countries in Africa, Oceania and Polynesia. However, if Trump¡¯s Hormuz blockade coalition materializes, it will likely not represent the will of the so-called ¡°international community.¡± Instead, it will harm more countries than it benefits, if it benefits them at all.

This US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz will negatively impact its own strategic partners, as well as strategic rivals and neutral countries. Disrupting the global economy will ultimately hurt the entire world. The blame for disrupting global oil and gas supplies will now fall on the US rather than Iran. After all, the Hormuz route was fully open before the Iran war. 

Businesses and governments would rather pay to cross the Strait of Hormuz than have the US close the strait indefinitely. They are already facing a serious energy crisis, and a complete closure of the Strait of Hormuz would significantly exacerbate the situation. Oil is deemed more important than equality, after all.

Given the importance of the Strait of Hormuz to global energy supply, the implications extend far beyond just the businesses and governments directly involved. As tensions rise and the US maneuvers strategically in the region, another major player finds itself in a precarious position: China.

The Chinese dilemma

China may find itself cornered after this US strategic move in the Strait of Hormuz. Its Venezuelan oil supply was choked by the US just a few months ago, and now the Hormuz blockade will stop Iranian oil, necessary for powering China¡¯s vast economic empire.

But, instead of confronting the US, China may once again chicken out as it did in Venezuela. While it verbally challenges the US with enthusiasm and responds firmly to economic pressures, it does not engage the US militarily. It seems China is waiting for its military muscle to grow bigger than that of the US. As an emerging superpower, China understandably appears to lack the confidence to directly confront a century-old reigning superpower.

However, it already has considerable military muscle, and all it needs is to flex it in the US. The right moment to act will arise, potentially in the Strait of Hormuz ¡ª though this seems unlikely, given China¡¯s immense strategic patience and a long-term perspective. The descendants of the famous Sun Tzu, who wrote , may strongly believe in his advice that ¡°the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting¡± and ¡°the greatest victory is that which requires no battle.¡±

The Iranian response

Iran has been battered by the US and Israel¡¯s bombing, while inflicting far less damage to its enemies. Despite this, it has won the battle of perception by staying in the fight and successfully positioning itself to negotiate directly with the US in a third country for a long-term peace agreement. Iran¡¯s morale is high, and its image has improved significantly, surpassing that of Israel after this war. Iran has presented itself as a tough and steely nation. Israel earned a name for itself by carrying out assassinations and defeating weak Arab nations, but Iran has successfully fought both the reigning superpower and Israel. Iran has displayed its unparalleled sacrificial courage, insurmountable will to resist and inexhaustible military arsenal in an all-out war.

Iran has that it is quite capable of taking on the US militarily, and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has indicated as much after Trump¡¯s Hormuz blockade announcement. Iran has other options, too. To make things worse for the world, besides the Strait of Hormuz, Iran can also block the Red Sea route involving the Bab Al-Mandab Strait with the help and support of its ally Ansar Allah (the Houthis). But what if Iran prefers to sit tight and see the world react? Then, in my view, this new US military venture is unlikely to last long because the entire world, already fed up and frustrated by Trump¡¯s unending tantrums, would likely unite against the US and force it to withdraw.

On the other hand, if Trump is employing his trademark bullying tactic to extract maximum concessions from the other party and get the most favorable deal for himself, this approach is unlikely to work against Iran, as previous military threats and actions didn¡¯t. This behavior only shows that he and his coterie of yes-men don¡¯t understand the character of the Iranian nation. He seems to be a prisoner of his past pressure-tactic successes. A better strategy would be to reach out in good faith and with sincere intentions, treating Iranians as equals rather than trying to intimidate them into submission for a durable peace agreement. The US has recently bombed Iran twice in the middle of negotiations, and there is absolutely no reason why they should trust the US again.

Washington¡¯s strategic incompetence

The Iran War and the ongoing crisis in the Middle East  ¡ª largely created by the US ¡ª highlight a severe strategic incompetence in Washington that is unprecedented in history. Ironically, this is the superpower with decades of accumulated collective experience in controlling the world and the best pool of geopolitical strategists, yet it finds itself in a dire situation. But what can these experts do if they are booted out, intimidated, forced to quit or altogether ignored by their government? This contradiction lies at the heart of the declining US empire, a decline that has been largely self-inflicted.

The disruption of an established order is the surest sign of the decline of a geopolitical power that had built and maintained that order. A new world order is born from the ruins of the old. The world dominated by the West is gradually realizing ¡ª and reluctantly accepting ¡ª that the locus of geopolitical power is shifting eastward, with China emerging as the new global superpower. Historically, incompetent rulers accelerate the decline of a fading empire and hasten the transition to a new power structure.

The stories we read in history about incompetent rulers at the end of a weakened empire differ from those of today in one fundamental sense: In the past, ordinary people had no say in choosing their rulers. In contrast, the US has a system in which citizens elect their leaders. Therefore, it is the citizens of the US ¡ª shaped by their educational and cultural systems ¡ª who must take responsibility if their country fades into mediocrity in the coming decades.

But who knows? Maybe I will be proven wrong, and this will not be the end of the US¡¯ hegemony over the world. Maybe the people who voted for Trump really did want to ¡°Make America Great Again.¡± The only problem with their desire is how do you make an already great thing great again? You can only make it greater, and that doesn¡¯t seem to be happening in any sense right now, at least.

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For the historical record, Kenneth Woodward, the author of the 1990 book, , notes that over the span of time of the office of Promotor Fidei¡¯s existence ¡ª from 1587 to 1983 ¡ª thousands of dossiers entered the preliminary stages but were ¡°held up¡± indefinitely. Many are still gathering dust in the Vatican¡¯s archives. Exactly 302 saints were canonized during that period.

I bring this up in the context of US President Donald Trump¡¯s attempt this past week not just to canonize himself, but to ¡°Christify¡± his public image on his social media platform, Truth Social. The world discovered the full extent of the president¡¯s inflated ego when he posted an AI-generated picture of himself dressed in the flowing robes of Jesus in the act of healing the sick thanks to the power of heavenly light radiating from his caring hands.

Numerous American Christians, shocked by the commander-in-chief¡¯s pretension, denounced the image as blasphemous. Most secular commentators recognized it as a perfect representation of Trump¡¯s patented hubris and narcissism. 

Trump himself appears to be the only commentator cited in the media not to have noticed that the figure was meant to be Jesus. When questioned by the press, Trump insisted that it had nothing to do with Christian iconography. In his eyes, it simply represented the president in the role of a doctor working specifically under the auspices of the Red Cross. The actual Biblical reference this image brings to mind for anyone familiar with the Gospels is Jesus¡¯s raising of Lazarus from the dead. Trump apparently believes in his supernatural therapeutic skills that have enabled him to Make America Whole Again. No need to confuse him with the Messiah. He¡¯s SuperDoc.

You must believe¡­ or laugh (whichever is most appropriate)

Trump may sincerely believe that. Nobody else was fooled. The New York Times: ¡°Vice President JD Vance said on Fox News that a picture Mr. Trump posted on social media earlier in the day that depicted him as a Jesus-like figure was meant as a joke.¡± Divine humor, not blasphemy! If Trump is the only person in the United States who failed to see the reference to Jesus, then Vance may be the only person to have found the image amusing. Or did he mean ¡°laughable,¡± like so much of Trump¡¯s antics? Perhaps Vance also sees Trump¡¯s decision to follow the lead of a wanted genocidal war criminal and launch an undeclared, unauthorized and unwinnable war that started with a sensational decapitation strike as just another of his president-entertainer¡¯s amusing antics. Vance wants us to believe that was just Trump being Trump.

Alas, another of Trump¡¯s Christian critics, this one an American who managed last year to become a vicar in Rome, focused his ire not on the image but on the war itself. He declared it urbi et orbi. This displeased Trump ¡ª who is not a Roman Catholic nor much of a churchgoer ¡ª to no end. Pope , like his predecessor Francis, is not fond of US presidents ¡°who have the power to unleash wars¡± and exercise it willfully. Pope Francis dared to : ¡°I believe it is time to rethink the concept of a ¡®just war.¡¯¡± Trump and even Vance seem ready to respond: ¡°What¡¯s the problem here? This is just war!¡± In other words, for a US administration, whoever the president may be, it¡¯s just another day at the office.

Vance, a practicing conservative Catholic, made his position clear when he , ¡°It would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality.¡± One may wonder where the recently converted vice president did his catechism. Does he believe that making the decision to take other people¡¯s lives and promising to destroy entire civilizations are not ¡°matters of morality?¡± The same NYT that quotes Vance informs us that Secretary of State ¡°Marco Rubio, another prominent Catholic in the administration, remained silent as Mr. Trump attacked Leo.¡±

In case Vance and Rubio need reminding, here are the very words of the :

¡°Sin is a personal act. Moreover, we have a responsibility for the sins committed by others when we cooperate in them: – by participating directly and voluntarily in them; – by ordering, advising, praising, or approving them; – by not disclosing or not hindering them when we have an obligation to do so; – by protecting evil-doers.¡±

These two high officials may argue that the fact that such decisions take place within a constitutionally defined national hierarchy removes the ¡°obligation to do so.¡± No need to run to the confessional. Rubio¡¯s silence would thus be deemed more justifiable than Vance¡¯s daring reprimand of the pope for overstepping his authority. The irony is that most observers believe Rubio, a known interventionist hawk, is the one most likely to have endorsed the launch of the war. In a much noticed NYT on how the administration made the decision to go to war, White House reporters Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman noted that Vance was ¡°the figure inside the White House most opposed to a full-scale war.¡±

Whose side are you on?

Poised between loyalty to his church¡¯s moral teaching and the special moral code of the president he was serving, Rubio was, according to the article, ¡°ambivalent.¡± Earlier this year, an with the title, ¡°Trump Lays Out a Vision of Power Restrained Only by ¡®My Own Morality,¡¯¡± made it clear that the commander-in-chief had no time for traditional Christian morality. The logic and subtle reasoning contained in his ¡°own morality¡± can presumably be found in Trump¡¯s best-selling book, The Art of the Deal. Few theologians have ever deigned to cite Trump¡¯s celebrated philosophical tome as a source. Others, however, have attempted to deal with that business-oriented topic. It¡¯s a debate that Trump apparently has no interest in engaging in. That makes sense. If it¡¯s already there, implanted in your brain, accompanied by the knowledge that the bright light of moral intelligence emanates spontaneously from your two hands (as depicted in the image of Trump the healer), why seek to articulate your ethics?

As for Rubio, his silence was short-lived. He eventually did speak up. Swan and Haberman explain that even though he preferred ¡°to continue a campaign of maximum pressure rather than start a full-scale war,¡± he ¡°did not try to talk Mr. Trump out of the operation, and after the war began he delivered the administration¡¯s justification with full conviction.¡±

Then there¡¯s the case of another faithful Catholic close to Trump, also mentioned in the NYT reporting Trump¡¯s row with the pope. ¡°Steve Bannon, a longtime Trump ally, argued that conservative Catholics were more likely to side with the administration than with the pontiff on issues such as immigration enforcement. Deeming Trump¡¯s verbal assault ¡°smart politically,¡± he concluded: ¡°It is good in that it gets more of his conservative Catholic base energized.¡±

It may be time we consider the specific ethical question of what it means to get a political base energized. This could be done in the context of debating the morality of what I once described as Bannon¡¯s mission that consisted of creating a ¡°gladiator school for culture warriors.¡± The school would aim, as I described it in 2019, at ¡°converting the ¡®Judeo-Christian¡¯ world of his imagination (basically, white civilization) to the global cause of anti-Islamic populism¡± while acting ¡°as the anointed defender of the interests of ordinary, working-class people against a predatory elite.¡±

So what conclusions should we draw from all of this? Mr. Trump demonstrates that the very idea of a political leader acting as an incarnation of Jesus, or even as a common saint, can only be seen as a joke. Perhaps that¡¯s the hidden meaning behind Vance¡¯s dismissal of the AI generated image of Trump as Jesus.

As for these three prominent Trump loyalists known to be practicing Roman Catholics ¡ª Vance, Rubio and Bannon ¡ª each of them wields the status, thanks to their prominence in the media, that could earn them the privilege of a private audience with the pope. Leo has made it clear he has no interest in Trump, for reasons that have nothing to do with the fact that he isn¡¯t a Catholic. But these three gentlemen, who have such clear ideas of how morality and ethics in our evolved democratic societies, might find it interesting to use such an occasion to clarify their understanding of the relationship between Christian ethics and the world of politics and geopolitics.

Or they might not.

*[The Devil¡¯s Advocate pursues the tradition 51³Ô¹Ï began in 2017 with the launch of our ¡°Devil¡¯s Dictionary.¡± It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself ¡ª political and journalistic rhetoric ¡ª to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of the 51³Ô¹Ï Devil¡¯s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider¡¯s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

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A working policy that lost support

Jenkins begins by outlining an apparent contradiction. Trump did what he said he would do. Border crossings dropped dramatically, with apprehensions falling by roughly 90% in early 2025 ¡ª reaching levels not seen in decades. Yet approval for his immigration policy fell just as sharply. Support declined from 59% at the start of Trump¡¯s term to 39% within ten months.

Observers cannot explain this reversal simply by partisan opposition or isolated incidents. Even before the highly publicized shootings of protesters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, public opinion had already shifted. Democratic messaging alone did not drive the change, either. Instead, the explanation lies deeper, in how Americans think about immigration itself.

As Jenkins puts it, Trump¡¯s policy became ¡°deeply, deeply, deeply unpopular¡± despite its consistency and measurable results. The issue is not whether the policy worked at the border, but how people experienced it beyond it.

Two issues, not one

Crucially, Americans do not see immigration as a single issue. They distinguish sharply between border security and internal enforcement.

At the border, migrants appear as a large, anonymous group ¡ª what Jenkins describes as an ¡°undifferentiated mass.¡± This framing raises citizen concerns about national security, economic competition and the rule of law. Many Americans, including legal immigrants, support stricter controls in this context.

Inside the country, however, the picture changes. Migrants are no longer distant figures but neighbors, coworkers and parents of children in local schools. They are individuals with names, families and stories. When enforcement targets these individuals, public sentiment shifts from anxiety to empathy.

This shift became visible when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents deployed in cities across the United States. Arrests carried out in public spaces, often by masked officers, triggered widespread backlash. Jenkins says many Americans find these scenes ¡°shocking and appalling,¡± not because the law has changed, but because its application now feels personal.

The human mind and the ¡°group¨Cindividual¡± divide

To explain this pattern, Jenkins turns to history and social science. He highlights a 1930s study by sociologist Richard LaPiere, conducted during a period of overt anti-Chinese discrimination in the US. Although 90% of surveyed businesses claimed they would refuse service to Chinese customers, LaPiere and his Chinese companions were denied service only once in hundreds of real-world interactions.

The gap between stated attitudes and actual behavior reveals a persistent feature of human psychology. People often express hostility toward abstract groups while responding more generously to individual members of those groups they encounter directly.

Economist Thomas Schelling famously noted that ¡°the death of one person is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic.¡± Psychologist Paul Slovic similarly showed that people are more likely to take moral action when they focus on a single identifiable individual rather than a large, faceless population.

Jenkins frames this as a tension between general rules and particular cases. Laws operate at the level of categories, but human judgment often operates at the level of stories. When the two collide, sympathy for individuals can override support for broad policies.

Political fallout and strategic uncertainty

This paradox has brought significant political consequences. Public backlash contributed to the resignation of the Secretary of Homeland Security and forced a partial retreat from aggressive enforcement tactics in some cities. Yet the broader policy direction remains uncertain.

Polling reflects this ambiguity. While a majority of Americans believe the immigration crackdown has gone too far, they do not see a clear alternative. Democrats have not consolidated support for their position, and Republicans retain a slight advantage on the issue. A large share of the public remains undecided, suggesting that opinions are still fluid.

Jenkins argues that both parties have struggled to grasp the full implications of the paradox. Republican policies resonate at the border but falter in communities. Democratic responses, such as calls to abolish ICE, risk alienating voters who still prioritize enforcement in principle.

¡°The jury is still out,¡± Jenkins concludes. Public opinion depends heavily on how immigration is framed. When presented as a matter of national security, enforcement gains support. When presented through individual cases, it provokes resistance.

The immigration paradox reflects a deeper feature of political life: the tension between abstraction and experience. Americans can simultaneously demand order at the border and compassion at home because these impulses arise from different ways of seeing the same issue. The future of immigration policy will depend less on ideology than on which of these perspectives dominates public perception at any given moment.

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Bombshell articles in , and at pulled the covers off Epstein¡¯s noxious racism. Reporters culling the most recently released Epstein files discovered numerous pieces of evidence in emails and other documents suggesting that he advocated the faux ¡°science¡± of racial eugenics and held racist views not distinct from those Trump promoted for decades. Epstein built (or at least tried to build) ties and developed friendships with some of the most notorious eugenicists and white nationalists around the globe, including Nobel Prize laureate and geneticist James Watson, political scientist Charles Murray and artificial intelligence researcher Joscha Bach, among many others. He also circulated posts from white supremacist websites that promoted bogus, supposedly genetically-based intellectual differences between the races.

is the ¡°race science¡± that was developed in the latter part of the 19th century to justify European slavery and colonialism. Proponents contended that humans were biologically and genetically separated into distinctly unequal ¡°races.¡± Everything from intelligence, criminality and attractiveness to morality was, so the claim went, genetically determined. It should surprise no one that, in such an imagined hierarchy, whites were at the top and, in most configurations, people of African descent at the very bottom, with Asians and indigenous people somewhere in between. Those four (or five or six) categories were considered immutable. And it mattered remarkably little that, for a long time, social and natural scientists had overwhelmingly argued with irrefutable evidence that racial categories were social constructs invented by humans and distinctly malleable over time as political and social life changed.

The real-world impact of racial eugenics theory long shaped public policy, political status and life opportunities. In the United States, a belief in the genetic inferiority of blacks helped foster slavery and then Jim Crow segregation, and led to tens of thousands of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and individuals with physical and mental disabilities, as well as prisoners being sterilized. By 1913, 24 states and Washington, DC, had passed laws allowing . President Theodore Roosevelt was a in such eugenics and supported sterilization in order to prevent what he termed ¡°racial suicide,¡± a perspective that echoes today¡¯s ¡°Great Replacement .¡±

In Nazi Germany, eugenics led not only to the sterilization of Jews, blacks and the disabled, but to the state-organized mass murder of of people. It was a core tenet of Nazism that all non-Aryans were genetically inferior and a threat to the white race. The Nazis railed against Jews ¡° the blood¡± of white Germans, a term Trump used in describing non-white immigrants from the Global South.

Despite this history, Epstein came to deeply believe in eugenics and genetic determination, as has Trump. To that end, Epstein sought to connect with the notable race theorists of his day.

Epstein on race

Perhaps the most notorious in the modern era advocating a racial basis for intelligence and a social hierarchy that places whites on top and blacks at the bottom was The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Herrnstein, published in 1994. Since then, in multiple and articles, the research behind that book has been thoroughly debunked and overwhelmingly rejected by scholars in the social and natural sciences.

Yet, at the time, many Republicans and some Democrats embraced its racist argument in order to contend that the US government should cut back on its welfare programs. Murray aligned with Republicans in giving to Congress in the 1990s that blamed the morality of poor people for their poverty (as a debate unfolded around the future of programs).

According to the Epstein files, Epstein himself repeatedly tried to correspond with Murray. However, Murray claims he never received (or remembers receiving) any emails from Epstein and did not correspond with him. Regardless, it¡¯s pretty clear that Epstein was writing because of Murray¡¯s notoriety for his work on race and genetics. This was in 2018, more than a decade after The Bell Curve had been published and Murray had become famous for it.

Epstein, according to , was reportedly provided with Murray¡¯s email address by Watson. He and Francis Crick had, of course, discovered the of DNA in 1953. Nine years later, they and Maurice Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Around 2000, Watson¡¯s regressive views on race began to surface. That year, he told an audience that ¡°dark-skinned people have stronger libidos,¡± leaning into a centuries-old racial stereotype. In 2007, according to a former in the London Sunday Times, he said that he was ¡°inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa¡± because ¡°all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours ¡ª whereas all the testing says not really.¡±

Epstein also had ties to a number of other researchers and scientists, including Bach, who received from the convicted felon and was hired at MIT¡¯s Media Lab with his help. In one exchange in 2016, Bach wrote to Epstein, stating that African American children ¡°have slower cognitive development¡± and ¡°are slower at learning high-level concepts.¡± With the release of those files in January, Bach tried to explain why his statements were not racist and that ¡°scientific discussion about the heritability of traits¡­ [is] very complicated and not my area of research.¡±

Epstein also spent time on hardcore white supremacist websites. For example, he sent a link to a racist article entitled, ¡°Race and IQ: Genes That Predict Racial Intelligence Differences,¡± to left-wing scholar Noam Chomsky. The article came from the outright white supremacist website The Right Stuff, according to The Atlantic. Chomsky, over email, expressed his disagreement with Epstein about race science.

According to , the two had a ¡°close friendship.¡± There is no evidence that Chomsky participated in or witnessed any of Epstein¡¯s sex crimes, and Valeria Chomsky, his wife, admitted that the couple made ¡°serious errors in judgment¡± in maintaining ties to him. While the vigorously denounced Epstein¡¯s offenses, there was no mention of his racist behavior, which few focused on in all those years.

The ¡°great gene¡± president

Epstein¡¯s eugenicist views are in line with the longstanding genetic determinism of Trump. I believe there is no bigger racist science believer than the current occupant in the White House.

For decades, he has bragged about his genetic superiority relative to the rest of humanity. The examples are endless:

• ¡°, I think I was born with the drive for success because I have a certain gene. I¡¯m a gene believer.¡±
• ¡°You have to have the rights ¡ª the right genes.¡±
• ¡°Do we believe the gene thing? I mean I do.¡±
• ¡°I have great genes and all that stuff which I¡¯m a believer in.¡±

And, of course, in opposition to Trump¡¯s ¡°right genes¡± are those with the wrong kind. From the president¡¯s perspective, that would include migrants. In an discussing them, he opined, ¡°You know, now a murderer ¡ª I believe this ¡ª it¡¯s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.¡±

Over the years, Trump has also shown little empathy for individuals with disabilities. He famously reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis that affects his joints, by twisting and contorting his body to make fun of him. He also did not want to be around physically disabled soldiers, according to his former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.

Trump often speaks with a strategic ambiguity so that he can later deny that he was disparaging migrants, people with disabilities or wounded soldiers. He fools no one.

It¡¯s notable that one of Trump¡¯s go-to insults is to call someone ¡°.¡± In nearly every case, his target turns out to be a black person and disproportionately female ones. Examples include his opponent in the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris, and Congressional Representatives Maxine Waters, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Al Green, Jasmine Crockett, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, radio host Charlamagne tha God and New York Attorney General Letitia James, among others.

Trump has been careful, at least publicly, to not explicitly say that black people are genetically predisposed to criminality. However, he has endlessly attacked black-led cities as crime zones, without ever labeling white-dominated cities or states the same way. He also posted supposedly demonstrating that African Americans commit crimes at a higher rate, with the clear implication that race is the driving factor.

Trump¡¯s racism and US immigration

His eugenicist views are most manifest in his immigration policies and dreams. Theoretically, he is not able to run for president again, so he has little incentive to hide his true feelings. After spending years denying it, in December 2025, he proudly admitted that he had referred to nations in Latin America and Africa as ¡°shithole¡± countries back in 2018. In a speech he delivered in Pennsylvania on December 9, 2025, he plugged for white ¡ª and implicitly white only ¡ª immigration to this country:

¡°Remember I said that to the senators that came in, the Democrats. They wanted to be bipartisan. So they came in. And they said, ¡®This is totally off the record, nothing mentioned here, we want to be honest,¡¯ because our country was going to hell. And we had a meeting. And I say: Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can¡¯t we have some people from Norway, Sweden ¨C just a few ¨C let us have a few. From Denmark ¨C do you mind sending us a few people?¡±

In January 2026, Trump essentially halted almost all refugees coming from Africa. The administration stated that it would admit only total refugees from around the world in 2026, the lowest number on record. This meant near-zero for black Africans.?

At the same time, the Trump administration sought to process white South African refugee applications per month starting in January. The president also Executive Order 4204 in February 2025, falsely claiming that whites in South Africa were being mistreated and deserved an expedited process to become permanent US residents. The new target, contained in a previously unreported document from the State Department dated January 27 and by Reuters, signals a push to ramp up admissions from South Africa, while refugee applications from other areas have been severely curtailed.

Racial genetics is Trump¡¯s defining worldview (full stop!). That he thinks of Barack and Michelle Obama as less than human should surprise no one who has followed his statements on race over the decades. A compilation of Trump¡¯s views on the former president over all these years boils down to this: Barack Obama is an radical ( of ISIS) and socialist who was not born in the US, but engineered a conspiracy involving thousands to pretend that he was (or maybe he ), then assumed the presidency. He should now be arrested for and on the Trump White House. And no matter what your eyes and brain tell you, he is not as and healthy as I am.

A black woman¡¯s contribution to medicine

Beginning in the early 1950s, real science, as opposed to the fraudulent versions embraced by Epstein and Trump, was able to make life-changing breakthroughs as a result of access to what became known as . Those cells would be responsible for understanding and creating vaccines and treatment for polio, cancer, HPV, Parkinson¡¯s, measles, HIV, mumps, Zika and Covid-19, among other diseases. They would lead to the creation of the field of virology. It is highly unlikely (and would likely have been mortifying) that either Epstein knew, or Trump knows, that those cells came from an African American woman named Henrietta Lacks. They were cynically named HeLa, combining the first two letters of her first and last names.

In 1951, when she was admitted to Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore, deathly ill with cervical cancer, doctors took cell tissues from her body without her or her family¡¯s permission. That unethical theft ¡ª legal at the time ¡ª would lead to countless billions in profits for pharmaceutical corporations. After the publication of Rebecca Skloot¡¯s , The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, in 2010, her story became well known and family-initiated lawsuits proceeded. In 2023, the family reached a with Thermo Fisher Scientific, and, in February 2026, settlement with Novartis, a Switzerland-based pharmaceutical mammoth.

I argue that Trump is easily the most intellectually incurious, ill-informed, unread, vacuous and petulant president in US history. He will never acknowledge or even understand that his rise to power was not due to his having any extraordinary talents, skills or genetically-based genius. It was, without qualification, the result of a lifetime of perpetual race, gender and class privilege.

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The complications of reality

There are, however, four very basic counterarguments to this myth.

Firstly and historically, winning is usually based on power, not on goodness. There are many examples of bad winning over good, of the powerful winning over the weak. For centuries, slave traders won over the slaves, the imperialists won over the colonized and men won over women. 

Secondly, it is largely the victors who get to tell their stories to the world, and they naturally position themselves as the good ones. Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is famous for transparently saying, ¡°History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.¡± And he did, because he was an excellent writer and a powerful man. Other powerful men of yore asked others to write for them. Nowadays, they can simply the media. The result is that we see and hear the spin that the powerful want us to.

Third, not everyone has bought into these fairy tales, even to begin with. While the winners saw themselves as good and righteous, others did not. Ask the indigenous peoples of North America and Australia, who had their lands taken away from them, and now largely live in isolated reserves with little basic resources. Ask the millions of Africans who were brought to the New World as slaves, and never saw their families or homes again. Ask the multitudes in the Global South who were subjugated by colonialism for generations and did not see any justice in their lifetimes. Ask the countless women who have been killed due to domestic abuse and can no longer tell their stories. They certainly did not see the winners as good.

Fourth, to complicate things further, good and bad are not static states; sometimes good guys turn into bad guys. The individual does not necessarily change, but the story about them changes ¡ª either because of new evidence, hearing the voice of previously marginalized groups, shifting moral standards or the long-term consequences of their actions becoming clearer. 

Falls from grace

History abounds with such individuals whose images have changed from good to bad. In some instances, the fall happened in their own lifetimes ¡ª as with Roman Emperor Julius Caesar and British Major General Benedict Arnold. In others, it took longer. While some still view Italian explorer Christopher Columbus as a brave discoverer, many now see him as a symbol of colonialism. While English politicians still love to compare themselves to Churchill, historians now look at him with more doubtful eyes, knowing his views on the colonized and his role in the , which killed some three million people.?

The present also offers many examples. Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi fell sharply from grace after her refusal to stand up for the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar. Football star O.J. Simpson¡¯s murder of his wife and her lover ruined his reputation and sent him to jail. Blade-runner and Paralympic poster-boy Oscar Pistorius was convicted of murdering his girlfriend. Entertainer Bill Cosby, darling of the media and Dr. Huxtable to all, was disgraced and jailed after multiple sexual assault incidents surfaced. Successful financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was courted, supported and forgiven by the global elite until his papers were released.

Even Hollywood can sometimes reflect reality ¡ª the most famous example being the fall of ¡¯s Michael Corleone, who journeyed from a young war hero surrounded by a large, loving family to a murderous, aging mafioso who died all alone.?

Falls from grace not only apply to individuals; they can also apply to countries and peoples.

Who¡¯s good in this war?

This current war between Israel and America on one side and Iran on the other gives us a chance to apply these counterarguments.

Firstly, since the powerful win, we like to believe that power confers goodness. But are America and Israel good because they are more powerful militarily and economically? Are America and Israel good because they have nuclear arms? Because Jews were persecuted during World War II (WWII), is Israel now so good that it is exempt from international rules of conduct? Are America and Israel good because they are largely white and Judeo-Christian countries? Is Iran bad because it is a Muslim country, it has been consistently the long-persecuted Palestinians and yet have nuclear arms? It may be important to ask these questions.

Secondly, the stories we hear about the war largely favor the West. Often, the powerful place the mantle of good on their own shoulders ¡ª even if they are the ones who started the war or effected the regime change. They claim to have done so only out of humanitarian concern ¡ª only to free a people from tyranny, to restore their human rights and to bring them democracy. Or to protect the rest of the world from imminent danger. They also claim that is on their side ¡ª and God would only be on the side of the good.

As Ambassador Chas says, ¡°the physical war is accompanied by an information war¡±. Who is good and who is the winner is strongly influenced by propaganda. Currently, from much of the mainstream Western press, we get pro-American and pro-Israeli, but anti-Iranian, perspectives. And therefore, our evaluation of good, bad and the situation at large is skewed. To get more balanced and complete news and analysis, we also need to hear independent media voices (e.g., Glenn Diesen, Jeffrey Sachs, Alexander Mercouris, Yanis Varoufakis, Douglas Macgregor).

Third, many are no longer buying into the American-Israeli propaganda ¡ª not even their erstwhile . Americans and Israelis think they are undoubtedly on the side of good. They see Iran as not just bad but downright evil: ¡®the biggest danger to world peace¡¯. However, much of the world, and especially the Global South, does not agree with this presentation. They see Iran as a revered ancient civilization that has been manipulated, robbed, interfered with and for decades by the West ¡ª and a country that is now retaliating in response to repeated attacks from Israel and the US.

And fourth, the characters are changing. America and Israel have fallen from grace. They no longer hold the moral high ground. Since WWII, the world has seen Israel occupy Palestine, displace Palestinians, perpetrate a in Gaza and currently persecute Muslims in the West Bank. It has noted Israel¡¯s numerous , repeated in the region, of civilian targets, as well as its ambitions far beyond its borders. The world has seen America give Israel arms, diplomatic coverage and unconditional support in all its ventures. It has learned how America has instigated wars and effected in multiple countries for its own advantage. As Italian journalist Michele Serra quipped, ¡°Americans are very lucky ¡ª because wherever they go to bring freedom, they find oil.¡±

The comforts of fantasy

Of course, most of us know that there are, by and large, no innately good or bad people; only our circumstances (i.e., skin color, religion, nationality, economic condition, suffering, etc.) and our actions make us so.  

But despite knowing the complicated reality, we prefer to revert to our simplistic fantasy. We like fairy tales and Hollywood movies because there is no ambiguity. We like to know who to love and who to hate. And if someone else can tell us that, that¡¯s even better. We want a grand yet quick battle where we are not injured, a definitive victory and flawless heroes to celebrate at the end.

Maybe it soothes our souls, eases our conscience, and appeals to our innate intellectual laziness to assume that good always triumphs and therefore, those who triumph are good. That way, we don¡¯t have to spend time and effort rummaging through the dirty gray areas, trying to judge individual actions, dealing with the messiness of the ambiguous and feeling unsettled by it all. We don¡¯t have to question the ¡°winner,¡± the process or the results because good always wins. Right?

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The political nature of counting casualties

My 2018 , ¡°Grieving, Valuing, and Viewing Differently: The Global War on Terror¡¯s American Toll,¡± demonstrates how the US has historically managed the visibility of its war dead. Focusing on Vietnam to Global War on Terror (GWoT) era policy and practice including the ¡°,¡± my research illustrates how consecutive US Administrations (on of the aisle) worked to move dead and suffering soldiers out of public view, not because they were unimportant, but because they were politically sensitive due to threatening a biopolitical facade of care and protection and ultimately threatening the ability for America to wage long-term wars.

This is the key insight: Visibility is not accidental ¡ª it is governed.

The Novara article suggests that casualty figures are being obscured or selectively reported, but my work helps us understand why. As I have argued, soldiers are simultaneously treated as a ¡°¡± within an intensely militarized political economy and yet rendered invisible in death, their suffering managed through practices that limit public exposure and political accountability.

What we are seeing today is not just the undercounting of casualties ¡ª it is the continuation of what I have identified as a broader system of statecraft that regulates how death is seen, counted and felt.

Grievability and the differentiation of lives

My research also highlights that the politics of counting is inseparable from the politics of valuing. The issue is not only whether deaths are recorded, but how they are framed, delayed, categorized or excluded altogether. Moreover, as author Thomas Gregory has recently pointed out in the case of produced by American wars, counting becomes a technique of governance: It shapes public perception, moderates dissent and ultimately enables the continuation of war.

This is where my continued emphasis on contested becomes especially relevant. If some lives (and deaths) are made and more readily recognized as more grievable than others, then the act of counting is never neutral. It is a process of differentiation. Some deaths are made visible, others are obscured; some are mourned publicly, others are quietly absorbed into statistical ambiguity.

The politics behind transparency and alternative narratives

The Novara report sits squarely within this logic. The discrepancy between official and estimated casualty figures is not simply a data problem ¡ª it is a political one. It reflects ongoing struggles over who has the authority to count, whose counts are recognized and what those numbers are allowed to mean.

Importantly, attention to grievability also reminds us that these processes are never uncontested. Even in the face of state efforts to suppress visibility, alternative forms of counting, witnessing and memorialization emerge. Families, journalists and researchers continue to demand recognition ¡ª to insist that these lives are not reducible to managed figures or bureaucratic categories.

That tension is still present now, as the search for the missing airman continues.

So rather than asking whether the US military is hiding casualties, a more productive question is this: What kinds of deaths are allowed to appear, and under what conditions?

Until we confront that question, debates about transparency will remain superficial. Because the issue is not simply that the numbers are wrong. It is that numbers themselves are part of the machinery through which war is made acceptable.

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That sentence should not be easy to read. But it needs to be said plainly, because the language coming from Washington in this war is the language of operational success, of degraded capabilities, of targets serviced: a language that hides human tragedy in the fog of strategic data. These schoolgirls were not collateral damage. They were innocent civilian lives ¡ª lives that the laws of war are supposed to protect.

Similarly, when Pete Hegseth announced the sinking of the IRIS Dena, he did so in the register of a man describing a kill from behind a screen. Hegseth is not the Secretary of Defense. He calls himself (and has spent millions of dollars in rebranding his office as) the Secretary of War. It is not a slip or a provocation. It is a declaration of intent.

The he was celebrating was a frigate returning home from India¡¯s Milan 2026 naval exercise. It was in international waters when the USS Charlotte fired, without warning. Hegseth called it ¡°.¡± sailors were killed. None of them were combatants in any meaningful operational sense when the torpedo struck.

Foundations and evolution of just war theory

There is a framework for thinking about how wars should be started and how they should be fought. It is older than the US. It begins, in its systematic form, with Christian theologian and philosopher of Hippo, writing in the early fifth century as the Western Roman Empire collapsed around him ¡ª not metaphorically, but literally. Responding to Christians asking whether a follower of Christ could take up arms, he did not grant blank permission; he set constraints. War might be permissible, but only under specific conditions, for specific purposes, conducted in specific ways. Fellow Christian theologian and philosopher codified what Augustine had begun: just cause, legitimate authority, right intention. that followed developed these into two operative branches: jus ad bellum, the conditions under which going to war is justified, and jus in bello, the rules governing how war must be conducted.

After 1945, this tradition was largely secularized. The established individual criminal liability for initiating aggressive war. The translated the core principles of discrimination and proportionality into binding international law. is explicit: Deliberate attacks on civilians are prohibited. Attacks causing civilian casualties disproportionate to the anticipated military advantage are prohibited. These are not aspirational norms; they are legal obligations that the US signed.

The current campaign fails both tests.

Failures of jus ad bellum and jus in bello

On jus ad bellum, the intelligence case for war was never made. Multiple assessments ¡ª including from within the American intelligence community ¡ª found of an active Iranian nuclear weapons program or an imminent restart. The foreign minister of Oman, who was overseeing negotiations between Washington and Tehran, that talks were close to a breakthrough when the bombing began. Hours before the first strikes, he appeared on American television to say a deal was within reach, a pledge Iran had made that US President Donald Trump would later claim it had refused. British government separately indicated that diplomatic channels had not been exhausted and that the strikes had no lawful basis. Forces were being positioned in the region while talks were still formally ongoing: preparation wearing the mask of diplomacy. That is not a last resort. Even the 2003 invasion of Iraq, whatever one thinks of it, involved months of attempted coalition-building and a formal UN Security Council process. That acknowledgment, however cynical, that unilateral action requires justification has now been abandoned entirely.

On jus in bello: Minab and the IRIS Dena are the answer.

In the immediate aftermath of Minab, the administration moved quickly to obscure responsibility. Trump initially Iran had bombed its own school, a claim requiring, implausibly, that Iran possesses Tomahawk cruise missiles, weapons only the US manufactures and deploys. When pressed, he claimed ignorance. Hegseth said the Pentagon was investigating. Within days, a Department of Defense found that a US missile was responsible. Independent investigations by The New York Times, NPR and BBC Verify reached the same conclusion, authenticated by of a Tomahawk striking the site. The posture of uncertainty was not confusion; it was a reflex.

As for the Dena, Hegseth reached for , invoking the sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano during the 1982 Falklands War. It is not a flattering comparison. The Belgrano was sailing away from the exclusion zone when the HMS Conqueror torpedoed her. The sinking killed 323 sailors and remains a stain on that campaign¡¯s moral record. Hegseth appears not to have noticed.

The moral question: rightness over effectiveness

Just war theory does not ask whether a military operation is effective. It asks whether it is right. A school full of children, a warship returning home from a peacetime exercise sunk without warning in international waters; these are not aberrations or fog-of-war tragedies. Rather, they are the opening acts of an unnecessary war that is not being conducted with discrimination or proportionality and is being led by an administration that has renamed itself, at considerable public expense, to signal its intent to keep going.

The tradition Augustine began, and that international law eventually formalized, exists precisely for moments like this. But there is no world government, no global enforcement mechanism. International law is a system of voluntary restraint; it works only as long as powerful states choose to be bound by it. When the most powerful state opts out, it does not simply break the rules. It begins to dissolve them.

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In other words, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) allowed a prisoner to die of a toothache. His name was Emmanuel Damas. He was 56 years old and a father of two.

And we can only expect medical treatment at ICE centers to deteriorate further. As Judd Legum at Popular Information in January 2026: ¡°ICE¡­ has any third-party providers for medical care for detainees since October 3, 2025. Last week, ICE posted a notice on an obscure government announcing it will not begin processing such claims until at least April 30, 2026. Until then, medical providers are instructed ¡®to hold all claims submissions.¡¯¡±

Damas¡¯s unnecessary death would be outrageous enough, were it the only one of its kind. In fact, people died in ICE custody during 2025, the most in two decades. Another six died in January 2026 alone at Camp East Montana detention center in El Paso, Texas. Among them was Geraldo Lunas Campos, a Cuban father aged 55.

Although ICE initially claimed Lunas Campos had attempted suicide, the American Immigration Council that ¡°the El Paso County Medical Examiner ruled his death was a homicide arising from asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.¡± Of course, it¡¯s pretty hard to strangle yourself to death. Witnesses, however, described his murder this way: ¡°Mr. Lunas Campos was handcuffed, while at least five guards held him down and one guard squeezed his neck until he was unconscious.¡± At least one other man has died at the Camp East Montana detention center, where and measles are also spreading.

Damas and Lunas Campos were among the roughly people whom ICE currently holds in a tangle of sprawled across the country. And more centers are under construction. Many of them are former warehouses designed to function, as ICE acting director Todd Lyons it last year, ¡°like Amazon Prime for human beings.¡± (Like many of US President Donald Trump¡¯s appointees, Lyons has not received Senate confirmation. His actual , according to ICE, is ¡°Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.¡±)

What is a concentration camp?

Taken together, this network of prisons or, more accurately, concentration camps, constitutes an American gulag. ¡°¡± is not so much a word as a Russian initialism that came to stand for the Soviet Union¡¯s concentration camp program, originally developed under dictator Joseph Stalin. The term stands for ¡°Main Directorate of Correctional Labor Camps¡± and originally referred to the officials running the camps. Later, ¡°gulag¡± came to indicate the camps themselves, which were a central instrument of Soviet political repression. Most Americans first learned about those camps through Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn¡¯s 1973 internationally bestselling , The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation.

As Andrea Pitzer, of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, has written, such institutions are a relatively recent phenomenon. While human beings have long contrived ways to isolate groups they identify as enemies ¡ª for example, in the enclosed Jewish of medieval Europe ¡ª the modern concentration camp evolved thanks to two key inventions: barbed wire and the machine gun. That pair of technological advances made it possible for a small number of guards to control and contain a large number of people in one place.

Concentration camps have a number of defining features:

• Concentration camps exist outside regular legal structures. The people they hold are not prisoners, but detainees. So, we find people of all ages, from infants to seniors, in concentration camps. In most cases, they have not been tried or convicted of any crime. Rather, they are held because of their status, for example, as non-citizens, or in the case of Japanese-American citizens during World War II, because of their ethnicity or national origin. This is true for the people held in ICE detention today. Their alleged offenses are against US civil, not criminal, law, and their detention exists outside of any court system, including the immigration courts run by the Department of Justice¡¯s Executive Office for Immigration Review. Immigration judges, who are really administrative employees, can¡¯t order anyone detained. That¡¯s up to ICE and its umbrella agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

• Concentration camp inmates are civilians, not soldiers, which places them conveniently outside the strictures of the Geneva Conventions. That¡¯s why the US has never recognized as prisoners of war the men it has held and, in the case of 15 prisoners, to hold in the US prison at Guant¨¢namo Bay, Cuba. In the 1990s, almost a decade before the naval station at Guant¨¢namo was first used to house detainees in the ¡°Global War on Terror,¡± the US held immigrants there, including as many as 50,000 Haitians and Cubans. Trump¡¯s January 29, 2025, executive order entitled, ¡°Expanding Migrant Operations Center At Naval Station Guant¨¢namo Bay To Full Capacity,¡± directed the Defense and Homeland Security departments to prepare to hold as many as 30,000 migrant detainees there. As of July 2025, the camp held detainees from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Caribbean.

• Concentration camps are associated with authoritarian regimes. They function both as a direct form of repression and, no less importantly, as a warning to the rest of the population about what could happen to those who resist the regime. In this sense, concentration camps are very much like another tool of repression, institutionalized state torture, about which I wrote in my , Mainstreaming Torture. Like state torture, concentration camps perform a kind of national security theater, made all the more entrancing by its quasi-secret nature. In the case of ICE detention camps, the DHS has made a show of or members of to enter those facilities. But such detention centers can¡¯t fulfill their full repressive function if people don¡¯t know anything about what goes on in them. So, we have the spectacle of a hearing in which a congresswoman asked then-DHS secretary Kristi Noem about a double amputee who ¡°has to crawl through mold and feces and bodily fluids just to take a shower.¡± Knowing that this is happening to people who have almost no recourse is intended to have a chilling effect on political action.

• Concentration camps are not death camps, but people do die there. Many Americans tend to think that all German concentration camps were sites of direct extermination. In fact, the Nazis constructed six camps specifically designed for the industrialized murder of their inhabitants. But for a decade before the first death camp was even opened, prisoners had already been concentrated in thousands of ¡°labor¡± camps. In fact, they were not there to be killed directly, but to be removed from society. As the National World War II Museum in New Orleans , ¡°Initially, the population of these concentration camps were not usually Jews, but Communists, socialists, Roma and Sinti, Jehovah¡¯s witnesses, gay men, and ¡®asocial¡¯ elements (alcoholics, criminals, people with mental disabilities, the poor).¡± Notably, like undocumented people in the United States today, these were groups who then received little sympathy from the larger German population. The conditions they encountered ¡ª lack of food and medical care, crowding and unsanitary conditions ¡ª sickened and killed as many as a of those who passed through them.

A brief history of US concentration camps

The Soviet gulag was not the world¡¯s first concentration camp, although such institutions are, in fact, a relatively recent phenomenon. Early Americans sought to isolate their enemies, such as enslaved Africans and the native peoples of this continent. Indeed, when the Cherokee nation was from its lands under the 1830 Indian Removal Act and forced to travel the ¡°Trail of Tears,¡± officers kept many of them for some time in ¡°emigration depots¡± in Alabama and Tennessee.

Almost everyone in this country has heard of Nazi Germany¡¯s camps, but the history of the modern concentration camp really began at the end of the 19th century. As Pitzer in a recent interview, Americans first became aware of such camps in the 1890s, when Spain instituted a policy of °ù±ð³¦´Ç²Ô³¦±ð²Ô³Ù°ù²¹³¦¾±¨®²Ô in its efforts to put down a rebellion in Cuba. As has happened in ICE detention camps today, malnourished men, women and children were shoved into holding camps there, where crowded conditions and poor sanitation led many to perish. News of the horrifying conditions in Cuba led Americans to organize material aid for those being held.

The US then dispatched the USS Maine to accompany the ships carrying relief supplies to Cuba. When the Maine sank in Havana harbor under murky circumstances, the US government had the pretext it needed to mount a military campaign against the remnants of Spanish colonial control in the Americas and the Pacific. That relatively short war ended with the US in possession of most of Spain¡¯s remaining colonies, including the island of Puerto Rico, and what would eventually become the nation of the Philippines. Almost immediately, the new American colonizers reproduced in the Philippines the kind of they had supposedly gone to war to eradicate in Cuba. In another parallel with the 21st century, it was during the occupation of the Philippines that US forces invented the form of torture we call ¡°waterboarding.¡±

Most Americans know about President Franklin D. Roosevelt¡¯s 1942 executive order creating ten concentration camps to hold people of Japanese descent, about two-thirds of whom were US citizens mostly living in the western US. Over 120,000 men, women and children were interned for the duration of World War II. Many lost their homes, farms, businesses and other property (often seized by their non-Japanese neighbors). A much smaller number of Italian and German nationals were also interned, as Germans had also been during World War I.

The Japanese camps were constructed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the same federal agency that provided mass employment for millions during the Great Depression under Roosevelt¡¯s New Deal program. Few Americans know that, in addition to building roads, schools, dams and the occasional zoo, the WPA also built the barracks and strung the barbed wire that enclosed World War II internees.

ICE¡¯s predecessor agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), ran about of those camps, primarily ones imprisoning Japanese, German and Italian non-citizens. Three of them were built in Texas to hold people from those countries who had been deported from Latin America. (Most of them were Japanese from Peru.) Those camps were guarded by the Border Patrol, rather than the military police. In other words, ICE and US Customs and Border Protection have a long history of running the US version of concentration camps. They¡¯re used to it.

The American gulag

It¡¯s no exaggeration to say that ICE detention camps now threaten to become a central instrument of repression under the Trump administration. As many as people have died in them since Trump returned to office in January 2025. And those are only the deaths that have been publicly acknowledged.

If Camp East Montana is the biggest ICE camp in the country, the most notorious may well be the Florida site in the Everglades that has come to be known as ¡°Alligator Alcatraz.¡± over just a week, according to Amnesty International, it ¡°houses¡± people in horrific conditions:

¡°Inside, people are crammed into overcrowded cages around bunk beds with little room to move. Food is spoiled and maggot-infested. Mosquitoes swarm constantly, showers are scarce, and extreme heat and humidity make the center unbearable. There appear to be almost no reliable or confidential means for detainees to communicate with their attorneys or family members.¡±

That description is echoed in the testimony of people held in ICE detention camps nationwide. A complete report on the conditions at all of those camps would run to hundreds of thousands of words. Indeed, it¡¯s hard to get a handle on the full scope of ICE¡¯s concentration camp program, since reports on the number and size of such camps change quickly as new ones are proposed or come online. The organization Freedom for Immigrants maintains an interactive immigration detention which identifies at least 200 separate locations where immigrants (and the occasional US citizen) are detained. And the Trump administration is not done. According to The Guardian, DHS plans to spend ¡°upgrading¡± 24 existing warehouses to implement ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons¡¯s dream of treating immigrants like human widgets.

And that brings us back to the point of all this. Concentration camps exist to support and expand the power of an authoritarian regime. They make everyone afraid of being treated like the current targets of the regime. Like state torture programs, concentration camps accelerate the process of dehumanizing groups of people in the public imagination. Such a process often begins by describing the target group as non-human, as ¡°¡± or ¡°¡± ¡ª as Trump has, of course, done. Ironically, the very act of placing people in inhumane conditions can amplify the public¡¯s perception of their inhumanity. After all, would genuine human beings submit to such treatment? Would our good nation treat genuine human beings that way?

One other significant aspect of all this is the enrichment of a few corporations. Trump¡¯s ¡°Big Beautiful Bill¡± gave ICE upwards of $45 billion to spend on those camps, which meant that there was a lot of money to be made. Today, two private prison companies, CoreCivic and the GEO Group, most of them. The Bill also allows the Department of Homeland Security to that money-making by using the US Navy¡¯s Supply Systems Command program, which serves as an end-run around the usual bidding process for federal contracts.

This morning, I asked my partner whether she thought that the Trump administration could make the transition from concentration camps, where people die as a ¡°side effect¡± of their internment, to actual death camps. ¡°I think it¡¯s possible,¡± she responded. And so, horribly, do I.

It¡¯s possible, but not yet inevitable. To date, local actions have provided the most effective means of resisting the creation of the American gulag our federal government is constructing. These have included organizing to oppose siting camps in specific communities, efforts to leverage local zoning laws to stop them, and attempts to generate state-level political opposition to them. (The Washington Post had an excellent of recent efforts in one county in Maryland to block such a camp.)

We know what¡¯s at stake. We know we can dismantle the American gulag, because some of us are already . It¡¯s time for the rest of us to get to work.

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Karp loves verbal combat as much as he likes running a firm that makes high-tech weaponry. His company has helped Israel the pace at which it has bombed and slaughtered Palestinians in Gaza. Its technology has helped Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportations, while also helping and identify demonstrators in Minneapolis. Not only is Karp unapologetic about the damage done by his company¡¯s products, he openly revels in it.

This February, he a CNBC interviewer that, ¡°If you are critical of ICE, you should be out there protesting for more Palantir. Our product actually, in its core, requires people to conform with Fourth Amendment data protections.¡± (That amendment being the one that protects citizens from ¡°unreasonable searches and seizures.¡±) Yet Karp¡¯s speculation hasn¡¯t led him to ask ICE to stop using his software in its war on peaceful dissent, nor has it dissuaded him from accepting an open-ended, $1 billion with ICE¡¯s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security.

In keeping with his full-throated support for repression at home and abroad, at the height of the Gaza war, Karp a Palantir board meeting in Tel Aviv, Israel, proclaiming that ¡°our work in the region has never been more vital. And it will continue.¡±

In an with Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, he summed up his philosophy this way: ¡°I actually am a progressive. I want less war. You only stop war by having the best technology and by scaring the bejabers ¡ª I¡¯m trying to be nice here ¡ª out of our adversaries. If they are not scared, they don¡¯t wake up scared, they don¡¯t go to bed scared, they don¡¯t fear that the wrath of America will come down on them, they will attack us. They will attack us everywhere.¡±

Reality, however, is anything but that simple. Palantir¡¯s technology has been used to kill tens of thousands of people in Gaza and beyond, including many who had nothing to do with Hamas, had no control over its actions and often weren¡¯t even alive when it won local elections in 2006 and began to administer Gaza.

There should be no question that Hamas¡¯s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, was unconscionable. Still, for Israel to react by killing more than Palestinians in Gaza, a relatively conservative figure that even the Israeli government now , constitutes a grossly disproportionate response that most independent experts define as genocide. The idea that such mass slaughter can be justified as a way of scaring the bad guys and reducing violence is intellectually unsupportable and morally obscene.

So, welcome to the world of Karp, one of the leaders of the new wave of techno-militarists in Silicon Valley.

Militarizing AI, or techno-optimism run amok

This is not your father¡¯s military-industrial complex (MIC). The current stewards of the MIC ¡ª executives running industrial giants like Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman ¡ª are far more circumspect in what they have to say than Karp. Their leaders may occasionally make a about how increased tensions in the Middle East or Asia could generate demands for their products among US allies in those regions, but they would never engage in the sort of naked Orwellian rhetoric Karp seems to specialize in.

Still, the MIC of the future augurs not just a change in technology or business practices, but ¡ª as Karp suggests ¡ª a potential culture shift in which militarism is openly celebrated, without the need for any cover language about promoting global stability or defending a ¡°rules-based international order.¡± Think of the new MIC as a rugged individualist, high-tech version of philosopher Thomas Hobbes¡¯s ¡° of all against all.¡± And those running it want us to believe that the only way to ¡°win¡± a future war is by handing the keys to our political world to a clique of self-defined superior beings headed up by the likes of Karp, Palantir Founder Peter Thiel, Anduril head Palmer Luckey and Tesla¡¯s inimitable Elon Musk.

Karp has coauthored a , The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, in which he articulates his vision of what it will supposedly take to make America globally dominant again. The book is a long lament about how most Americans have lost their sense of purpose and patriotism, frittering away their time in trivial pursuits like reality television and video games. He and coauthor Nicholas W. Zamiska call for a new unifying national mission to whip this nation of slackers into shape and restore the United States to its rightful place as the world¡¯s unrivaled political and military power.

Karp¡¯s answer to what¡¯s needed: a new (which, in case you don¡¯t remember, produced the atomic bomb to end World War II). This time, the focus would not be on developing nuclear weapons but on accelerating the military applications of artificial intelligence and giving the US a permanent technological advantage over China. It¡¯s hard to imagine a more impoverished or misguided vision of America¡¯s future, or one more drained of basic humanity.

Hawks, traditional realists and techno-militarists will, of course, deride any humanity-first approach to foreign and domestic policy as naive, but in reality, it¡¯s the new wave militarists who are the truly naive ones. After trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives on the wars of this century ¡ª wars that failed to reach their advertised objectives by a long shot (just as the most recent one in Iran is sure to do), while making the world a significantly more dangerous place ¡ª they still mouth platitudes about pursuing ¡°peace through strength¡± and using US military power to undergird a ¡°rules-based international order.¡± Given the American losses in this century to far more poorly funded and less technologically sophisticated adversaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, such tired rhetoric is beginning to sound like a cruel joke, or indeed the gasps of the representatives of a declining empire.

Will technowar be cheaper, and will it protect us?

Putting ideology aside for a moment, there is the narrower question of whether the emerging tech firms can truly produce better systems of war-making for less money. Luckey, a prot¨¦g¨¦ of Thiel, made headlines recently when he in an interview that the US could spend perhaps half of the current $1 trillion Pentagon budget and still have a more effective defense system if it simply stopped buying the ¡°wrong things.¡±

The idea that a weapons contractor would offer to do more for less seems almost revolutionary in an age where greed and corruption in the MIC continue to run rampant. The philosophy behind Luckey¡¯s statement is, in fact, encapsulated in a remarkable Anduril entitled, ¡°Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy,¡± a scathing critique of the current business practices of the Pentagon and mammoth military contractors like Lockheed Martin.

Luckey¡¯s manifesto should be considered an assault on the top five arms conglomerates ¡ª led by Lockheed Martin and RTX ¡ª that now receive one out of every three contract dollars doled out by the Pentagon. Those huge firms have had their day, the essay suggests, doing necessary and useful work in the long-gone Cold War years of the last century. ¡°Why can¡¯t the existing defense companies simply do better?¡± it asks. ¡°¡­These companies work slowly, while the best engineers relish working at speed¡­These companies built the tools that kept us safe in the past, but they are not the future of our defense.¡±

The document all but suggests that companies like Lockheed Martin should be given a lifetime achievement award and then shoved out of the way, so the likes of Thiel, Karp, Luckey and Musk can take the helm of the arms industry.

But spending less on weapons ¡ª as useful as it would be given other urgent national priorities ¡ª can¡¯t be the only goal of defense policy. The most important question is whether purportedly cheaper, more nimble, more accurate AI-driven systems can, in fact, be deployed in a way that would promote peace and stability rather than yet more war. In reality, there is a danger that, if the US thinks it can use such systems to intervene militarily on a routine basis while suffering fewer casualties, the temptation to go to war might actually increase.

Even given all of the above, the idea of breaking the stranglehold of the big contractors on the development and production of the US arsenal is an attractive one. But the tech sector¡¯s claims that it can do the job better for less remains to be proven. A drone is cheaper than an F-35 jet fighter for sure, but what about swarms of drones that are used in waves and replenished rapidly in the midst of a war, or unpiloted ships and armored vehicles that run on complex, unproven software that could well fail at crucial moments? And what if, as the tech sector and its growing cadre of lobbyists would prefer, the new age militarists are allowed to operate with little or no scrutiny, with a weakening of safeguards like independent testing and curbs on price gouging ¡ª safeguards that are already too weak to fully get the job done?

When US President Ronald Reagan negotiated arms control agreements with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the last century, his was ¡°trust but verify.¡± In the case of Palantir and its ilk, perhaps the motto should be ¡°mistrust and verify.¡± We need to get beyond their marketing slogans and make them prove that their new tech can work as advertised and is indeed better than what came before. If so, then Palantir and Anduril should be treated as vendors and paid for their services, but with no right to attempt to shape our military budget or foreign policy, much less the fundamental workings of our already stumbling democracy.

The military tech lobby: disruptors on steroids

Before the current surge of weapons development in the tech sector, there was a time when some Silicon Valley firms acted as if their products were so superior and affordable that they didn¡¯t need to dirty their hands with traditional lobbying. Unrealistic as that might have been, Silicon Valley has now gone all-in on legalized corruption ¡ª from carefully targeted campaign contributions to hiring former government officials to do their bidding.

Example number one is, of course, US Vice President JD Vance, who was , mentored and financed by ¡ª yes! ¡ª Thiel during his rise to the Senate and then to the vice presidency. When he was selected for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump¡¯s ticket in 2024, a of new money came into the campaign from the military-tech sector, including tens of billions of dollars from Musk. Once on the ticket, one of Vance¡¯s main jobs proved to be extracting even more donations from the Silicon Valley militarists.

Then came Musk¡¯s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the organization that gave efficiency a dreadful name by cutting federal programs and personnel seemingly at random and essential tools like the Agency for International Development (USAID) while leaving the Pentagon virtually untouched. Although USAID had its problems, it also essential development and public health efforts globally that sustained millions of people. An actual efficiency drive would have looked at what worked and what didn¡¯t at that agency. Instead, Musk¡¯s acolytes, who knew nothing about economic assistance, simply dismantled it.

There are now significant numbers of Silicon Valley executives in key positions in the Trump administration, led by Vance but including of others in key posts in the military, the top leadership of the Pentagon and across a range of domestic and foreign-policy agencies.

Thiel and Karp clearly feel that what¡¯s good for Palantir is good for America, but the vision of America they are promoting is both dangerous and dehumanizing.

Coming down to earth (and reining in the technophiles)

The problem with the new techno-militarists isn¡¯t that they¡¯re mistaken about technology¡¯s power, but that they¡¯re dangerously wrong about who should wield it, to what ends, and under what constraints. Power without restraint is not innovation. It is recklessness dressed up as inevitability. A growing share of the tools that shape American foreign and domestic security policy is being designed, deployed and promoted by a small group of private actors whose incentives are aggressively financial, whose worldviews are profoundly militarized and whose accountability to the public is minimal at best.

What this country needs is anything but a new priesthood of billionaire engineers to tell us that war is unavoidable, fear is the only path to peace and democracy must bend a knee to the superior wisdom of those who code algorithms and build weaponry. In reality, we¡¯ve heard this story before from Cold War nuclear , Vietnam-era body-count and the architects of the ¡°shock and awe¡± that helped destroy Iraq. Each generation is promised that this technology (whatever it might be) will finally make war, American-style, clean, precise and decisive. Each time, the bodies pile up anyway.

What makes today¡¯s moment especially is the speed and opacity with which such systems are being developed and deployed. AI-enabled targeting tools, predictive surveillance platforms, autonomous weaponry and data-fusion systems are all being integrated into the military and domestic policing structures with minimal public debate, weak oversight and virtually no meaningful consent from the people who will live with ¡ª and die from ¡ª the consequences. The rhetoric of AI-driven disruption has become a convenient excuse for bypassing democratic processes altogether.

The underlying premise of the techno-militarists is that permanent war is the natural state of our world and our only choice is how efficiently we decide to wage it. In reality, security is never produced by terrifying the rest of the planet into submission. It¡¯s produced by diplomacy, restraint, adhering to international law and economic justice, and the slow, unglamorous work of building institutions that make mass violence less likely rather than more automated.

Karp and his peers may see themselves as realists, bravely saying what others don¡¯t dare to say. In truth, theirs is a brittle, nihilistic worldview that mistakes domination for strength and innovation for wisdom. Humanity deserves more than an endless arms race run by men (and they are almost all men!) who believe that they alone are fit to decide whose lives are expendable. The brave new war machine¡¯s version of Aldous Huxley¡¯s should frighten us all.

If technology is to shape the future of war (and it will), then society must shape the rules under which it operates. The alternative is to surrender our moral agency to a handful of self-anointed visionaries and hope they get it right. History suggests that is a gamble we can¡¯t afford to take.

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The views expressed in this article are the author¡¯s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ô¹Ï¡¯s editorial policy.

The post The Brave New War Machine: How a Clique of Unhinged Techno-Optimists Is Putting Humanity at Risk appeared first on 51³Ô¹Ï.

Shock, contradiction and shifting goals

Munsing describes a political landscape caught off guard. Across party lines, Americans are struggling to reconcile Trump¡¯s long-standing ¡°America First¡± rhetoric with a decision to initiate war. Drawing on conversations from the campaign trail, he notes that voters are not only surprised but deeply confused about the rationale behind the conflict. ¡°I think the first thing is just shock across the political spectrum,¡± he observes.

The absence of clear objectives compounds that confusion. Singh presses Munsing on what the administration is trying to achieve, and the answer remains elusive. From regime change to nuclear containment to vague notions of victory, the stated goals appear to shift constantly. Munsing points to statements from the White House suggesting that Trump alone will determine when Iran has ¡°unconditionally surrendered,¡± dismissing the idea as ¡°ridiculous.¡± Without a stable definition of success, the war risks replicating the strategic drift seen in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the endgame remained perpetually undefined.

Miscalculation and the risk of escalation

The discussion then turns to how the conflict began. Munsing argues that Trump¡¯s decision-making reflects a pattern of boundary-testing behavior. Early military successes, particularly a high-risk operation in Venezuela, may have created a false sense of confidence. According to this view, the administration expected a rapid, decisive outcome in Iran ¡ª perhaps even regime collapse ¡ª without fully accounting for the complexity of the region.

This miscalculation now presents a dangerous dilemma. If the US withdraws quickly, it risks signaling failure. If it escalates, it may become trapped in a prolonged and costly conflict. Singh raises the possibility of deploying ground troops, a scenario that would dramatically raise the stakes. Munsing considers such a move unlikely but politically catastrophic, arguing that it would face overwhelming public opposition and significantly increase casualties and financial costs.

The broader concern is that the administration lacks a coherent strategy. Without clear objectives or limits, the conflict could expand in unpredictable ways, drawing the US deeper into a region already defined by volatility and competing interests.

Domestic repercussions and the terrorism calculus

Beyond the battlefield, Singh and Munsing examine how the war could reshape domestic politics. Recent lone-wolf attacks in the US complicate public sentiment. While such incidents may initially push Americans toward disengagement, a confirmed state-sponsored attack linked to Iran could have the opposite effect.

Munsing explains that a direct threat to the homeland would likely trigger a ¡°rally around the flag¡± response, increasing support for the war despite broader skepticism. This distinction underscores how fragile public opinion remains. Americans may oppose the conflict in principle, but their stance could shift rapidly under the pressure of perceived national danger.

Simultaneously, the lack of a clear initial justification for the war weakens the administration¡¯s position. Without a compelling narrative, it becomes harder to sustain public support over time, especially if the conflict drags on or casualties mount.

Congress, executive power and institutional decline

Singh highlights the constitutional role of Congress in declaring war. Munsing argues that lawmakers have increasingly ceded this power to the executive branch. ¡°It certainly feels like we¡¯re moving to a Cesarean presidency,¡± he says, pointing to a long-term trend that has accelerated in recent years.

This shift reflects deeper institutional problems. Congress, once protective of its prerogatives, now appears reluctant to assert itself. Munsing criticizes a culture of performative politics in which legislators prioritize media presence over substantive lawmaking. With approval ratings hovering around 17%, public confidence in the institution has reached strikingly low levels.

The Iran war exposes these weaknesses. Despite the absence of formal authorization, Congress has struggled to respond decisively. For Munsing, this moment represents both a failure and an opportunity: a failure to uphold constitutional responsibilities, but also a chance to reassert them, if lawmakers choose to act.

Distrust, disillusionment and fragile hope

Singh and Munsing close with a broader reflection on declining trust in American institutions. From prolonged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to economic crises and elite scandals, many citizens now see a system that operates by different rules for the powerful and the public. Some have even labeled the conflict the ¡°Epstein war,¡± viewing it as a distraction from unresolved controversies involving political and economic elites.

Munsing warns that this perception could lead to two dangerous outcomes: widespread disengagement from civic life or a turn toward more extreme political solutions. Both, he suggests, would undermine the foundations of American democracy.

Yet he also identifies tentative signs of renewal. Public frustration is driving greater political engagement, from town hall participation to grassroots campaigning. On the campaign trail, he finds that a majority of voters are willing to engage seriously, even across party lines. This rising involvement, combined with pressure on elected officials, could create an opening for institutional reform.

Whether those ¡°green shoots¡± take root will depend on whether political leaders respond to public demand for accountability and clarity. As Singh and Munsing make clear, the stakes extend far beyond the Iran war itself, touching on the future of American governance in an increasingly unstable world.

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The views expressed in this article/video are the author¡¯s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ô¹Ï¡¯s editorial policy.

The post FO Talks: America First to Iran War ¡ª Making Sense of Donald Trump¡¯s Foreign Policy appeared first on 51³Ô¹Ï.