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Why India is Erupting

2026-10-28T11:54:01-04:00

India has been convulsed with protests that challenge Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s authoritarian vision. The most recent of them are defending the franchise from an administrative action that struck millions of voters from the rolls. But the challenge to Modi’s Hindu nationalism really began over the summer, after India’s chief justice dismissed the country’s unemployed youth as “cockroaches” and “parasites.” Flipping the insult into a badge of honor, an Indian graduate student at Boston University, Abhijeet Dipke, began accounts across social media under the name “Cockroach Janta Party,” a play on Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.

Modi has been in power for more than a dozen years. In that time, he has faced nothing like the current level of unrest. The protests roiling the country suggest that he is vulnerable. They are also a consequence of his subversion of India’s democratic institutions: Street action has become the most potent means of contesting the Hindu-nationalist movement he leads.

The CJP held its first offline protest in June at Jantar Mantar, an 18th-century observatory in central Delhi. By that time, its Instagram account had amassed more than 20 million followers—more than the account for the BJP itself. The CJP demanded the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, India’s education minister, on the grounds that he had sabotaged the country’s high-stakes exam system and created uncertainty for millions of students. The demand was hardly a radical one to make in a democracy. But as part of his strongman persona, the prime minister has long made a habit of refusing to concede to public pressure.

[From the February 2025 issue: Narendra Modi’s populist facade is cracking]

The CJP enlisted the support of some prominent figures, including Sonam Wangchuk, an educator and activist from Ladakh, a Buddhist region bordering Kashmir. In late June, Wangchuk embarked on a hunger strike, a classical Gandhian form of protest that has deep emotional resonance in India. By its third week, the crowds at Jantar Mantar had surged, and the activist had lost more than 20 pounds, shrinking his body mass by 20 percent. Public clamor about Wangchuk’s deteriorating condition mounted, and the authorities forcibly removed him from Jantar Mantar.

Far from quieting the movement, this gambit transformed it into a mass uprising. On July 20, more than 100,000 protesters turned up for the CJP’s planned march to Parliament. The epicenter of New Delhi soon resembled a war zone; paramilitary forces lobbed tear-gas shells at protesters, while the cops pummeled the crowd indiscriminately with lathis, wooden clubs used by the Indian police. A paramilitary officer fired seven rounds of a pellet gun, injuring at least 10 protesters.

The violence provoked a countrywide backlash that went well beyond the education minister: The demonstrators began targeting Modi himself with expletive-laden chants. No previous Indian prime minister in living memory had faced this kind of public vitriol. The protests spread to more than a dozen cities across the country. And on July 25, Pradhan resigned.

Where established political parties and well-known civil-society organizations had failed, the CJP had achieved something extraordinary: A weeks-old youth movement blasted through the authoritarian firewall of Modi’s India, dispelled the climate of intimidation fostered by the Hindu right, and created a new democratic opening.

The columnist Tavleen Singh, once a Modi supporter, noted that “something fundamental had changed in recent weeks” and that “people seemed no longer scared.” Jawhar Sircar, a former opposition politician, wrote that the protests had “shattered the dome of fear and re-awakened India.”

Since the Cockroach movement’s victory in late July, protests have been erupting across the country—on city streets and university campuses, outside government buildings and police stations—against the rise in crimes against women, the poor quality of government schools, and a range of other ills. On October 7, a Mumbai newspaper reported that 88 protests had taken place over the previous 10 days in the western state of Maharashtra alone.

The latest round of demonstrations concerns the election commission’s review of voter rolls, which began last year and has so far purged more than 130 million citizens. In a country whose adult population is growing, the number of eligible voters shrank by more than 10 percent; those voters expunged were disproportionately Muslim. A September 23 report in the newspaper Indian Express revealed allegations from two election commissioners that Gyanesh Kumar, India’s chief election commissioner, had taken “unauthorized and illegal” actions in relation to the revision.

Kumar is widely seen as an acolyte of India’s ruling establishment. In 2023, shortly before he was appointed, the Modi government pushed a law through Parliament giving election commissioners lifelong immunity from prosecution. This sweeping immunity does not exist for any other government official in India—not even the president or prime minister.

[Read: Modi’s escalation trap]

The Cockroach protests during the summer were primarily a youth phenomenon, but the subject of voting rights, in a country with a proud democratic history, has universal resonance. Despite being largely poor and illiterate at the time, India enshrined the universal adult franchise shortly after its independence in 1947, inaugurating one of the world’s most audacious democratic experiments. Since then, elections and voting have become something akin to a sacred rite, emanating from the founding ethos of modern India.

A large portion of the Indian public views Kumar’s actions as equivalent to treason. The protesters are demanding that he be removed, that the revision to the voter rolls be reversed, and that the law bestowing lifelong immunity on Kumar be scrapped so that he can be prosecuted.

Earlier this month, episodic mayhem took over New Delhi as protesters blocked streets, detainees on police buses smashed the windows and escaped, and demonstrators perched on the roofs of government vehicles in acts of defiance. I met Indians of varying ages, backgrounds, and political convictions at those protests: construction workers, upper-class designers, Communist foot soldiers.

But the Modi government seems to fear nothing more than the Cockroach movement. The youth group, which threatened to instigate nationwide demonstrations if Kumar did not resign, announced a protest in New Delhi on October 10, and the government panicked.

The authorities transformed New Delhi into a fortress, flying in tens of thousands of paramilitaries from the hostile borderlands where they are usually deployed. Much of the city’s subway network was shut down. Trains scheduled to arrive from all over India were canceled at the last minute, to prevent protesters from swarming the capital.

Security forces detained thousands of protesters and dozens of journalists. Right-wing militias threatened demonstrators unhindered by the police. The Cockroach leaders, who’d flown in from Mumbai that morning, were arrested aboard their airplane. Central Delhi was a militarized web of barricades and armed enforcers.

Ishrat Ansari, a 49-year-old schoolteacher, had walked two miles from her home to the barricades near Jantar Mantar. She had been detained on a police bus, where she saw a reporter beaten and was so disturbed that she vomited. The heavy-handed measures, she felt sure, were a sign of the regime’s growing fear. “They are taking away our voting rights,” she told me. “When we elected you with our vote, how can you cancel us?”

A government once confident in its ability to set the terms of the public conversation had resorted to lockdown and repression. Surely this was an admission of the failure of the Hindu right’s formidable propaganda machine to steer the narrative.

The protests have not relented. A march on October 12 from New Delhi’s commercial center to the supreme court a mile away was one of the largest protests the city has ever seen. Rahul Gandhi, the leader of India’s opposition, announced it and called on ordinary citizens to participate. That tens of thousands did suggests that the clampdown over the previous two days resolved nothing in the government’s favor—on the contrary, the apparent subversion of India’s democratic tradition was having a galvanizing effect on those determined to resist it.

The previous week, Gandhi had led more than 300 members of Parliament in a march toward the office of the election commission. At that time, he was stopped by the police. Now, a week later, he was leading a gargantuan crowd toward the supreme court. These two constitutional bodies were once fiercely autonomous. Under Modi, they have turned servile. Challenges to the revision of the voter rolls came before the supreme court earlier this year, and the court sided with the election commission, despite strong evidence of disenfranchisement. In an election in West Bengal, for example, Modi’s BJP won many seats by a margin smaller than the number of deleted voters.

[Read: The humbling of Narendra Modi]

As the march neared the supreme court, I stood roughly 20 feet away from an open-top truck painted in the colors of the Indian flag, where Gandhi was surrounded by leaders of opposition parties and civil society. The alliance recalled the diverse, umbrella coalition that had defeated Prime Minister Indira Gandhi after the Emergency, India’s previous spell under authoritarian rule in the 1970s.

Saraswati Sharma, a 60-year-old homemaker, had made the 90-minute trip from the adjacent city of Gurugram. Her name had recently been struck off the voter rolls, after she had moved from Delhi, where she had been a registered voter for decades.

The revision deleted the names of not only Muslims, but also a variety of other inconvenient populations: the residents of neighborhoods associated with the opposition, members of low-income groups that were not considered reliable supporters of Modi’s party. Any small, seemingly insignificant detail—a spelling error, having a suspiciously high number of children—could be used to question a voter’s validity and strike them from the rolls.

“We have never seen such a compromised situation,” Sharma said, lamenting the loss of legitimacy of the supreme court and the election commission. Slogans denouncing Kumar as a traitor rang out in the background, and Sharma told me the march was the first time she had felt compelled to show up at a protest in the Modi years. “This is like a freedom struggle.”

What You Are About to See From Oleshky, Ukraine, Is a Lie

2026-10-28T08:47:46-04:00

This week, Russia will permit handpicked American journalists and influencers friendly to the Trump administration to tour Oleshky, a Russian-occupied Ukrainian town on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River. There, fewer than 2,000 civilians, from a prewar population of 24,000, are trapped in a city that has been effectively under siege since December 2025—a place where they are terrorized by Russian forces, hunted by drones, and lacking reliable access to food, water, or medicine.

Now Oleshky is the site of a humanitarian cease-fire reportedly brokered by U.S. First Lady Melania Trump. Ukraine has long pressed for access to Oleshky’s civilians in order to bring them aid or help them escape to safety. Russia is allowing this only now. At the same time, Oleshky will host a propaganda tour for media visitors under Russian military escort. Whatever these journalists learn about life here almost certainly won’t be the truth.

Oleshky lies just across the Dnipro from Ukrainian-controlled Kherson, a strategically important city in the south of Ukraine. This location makes the town a useful military foothold for the Russians, who launch attacks on Kherson from it while using the presence of its civilian population to shield their positions.

I am the only foreign journalist permanently based in Kherson, where I have been reporting since 2023. Since February, I have been investigating the humanitarian catastrophe in Oleshky and the neighboring settlements. My work has drawn on evacuee testimonies, contacts inside occupied territory, official data, and verified military footage.

According to the Institute for the Study of War, Russian occupation authorities have repeatedly obstructed efforts to evacuate the town or provide humanitarian access. Regular supply deliveries stopped at the end of last year, and food and medicine have not reached Oleshky through conventional channels since May. The city is under what has come to be called a drone siege: Drones monitor all access roads, streets, and civilian movement, remotely mining them to restrict logistics. With conventional access blocked, Ukrainian forces have resorted to delivering food by drone.

“Oleshky is an artificially created hell in the midst of the civilized world,” a woman named Liudmila wrote to me. She asked that I refer to her by only her first name, out of concern for the safety of her loved ones left behind. She prefers to write, rather than speak, about the four years she endured under Russian occupation, even though her eyesight is foggy from months spent sheltering in basements.

When Russian forces entered Oleshky in February 2022, Liudmila and her husband, Andriy, decided to stay. They wanted to protect their family home on the banks of the Dnipro, and they imagined that the occupation would soon end.

Within days, Russian soldiers poisoned their dog, an Alabai, along with all the other large dogs in Oleshky. They killed Liudmila’s nextdoor neighbor and raped his wife. A local butcher disappeared; no one knew whether he was also killed. Some neighbors were detained and beaten. Armed, masked soldiers searched Liudmila’s home three times, confiscating the couple’s Ukrainian passports and leaving them with no documents. And yet, Liudmila and Andriy stayed. They got a new puppy, also an Alabai. Russian troops started to move into civilian houses, parking tanks in what once were gardens.

[Read: The new subterranean front]

In June 2023, the Russians blew up the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant dam, and Oleshky was swept by floods. Homes and corpses floated down the river; bodies washed up onto fences and were left in the sun—no one knew how many. Without access to municipal water or other utilities, the couple collected rainwater in summer and melted ice in winter. During one nighttime battle, Liudmila and Andriy woke to find their roof in flames. Andriy climbed up, and Liudmila handed him containers of water to extinguish the fire. After that, their water supply was gone, and the house was unlivable.

They moved to an abandoned home nearby. Russian soldiers killed their young dog with grenades. Andriy fell ill, and Liudmila prayed next to him at night as the windows trembled from explosions. Ambulances no longer came to their neighborhood, so one morning, she put Andriy in a wheelbarrow and pushed him to the hospital. But there was no medicine there, or fuel to run a generator, and the hospital couldn’t carry out an operation. Andriy died in 2025.

By then, Russian drones had started attacking civilians. Liudmila was afraid to turn on the lights at night, lest they attract drones. Sometimes drones would hover at window level for hours, seemingly spying on people inside.

Winter came, and water froze in buckets inside the house. Some neighbors froze to death. Liudmila, who was caring for her elderly mother-in-law, would push her wheelbarrow along heavily mined streets to look for food in abandoned houses. She’d wait for hours at the market for vehicles to bring supplies while drones circled over. Often, she saw dead bodies in the streets and dogs carrying human bones. When her mother-in-law died of untreated wounds, the Russian occupation authorities took her body to another town for a forensic examination. Liudmila was allowed to pick her up only a month later—from a pile of severely decomposed corpses at the morgue.

Liudmila escaped Oleshky at last this spring. From those left behind, she hears that scrounging for supplies is no longer possible. “Mines lie below; drones hover above. Death is everywhere: beneath your feet and over your head,” she wrote to me. “As you walk, you must watch every step, scan your surroundings, and keep your eyes on the sky.”

Ukraine has long sought to help Oleshky’s inhabitants either survive or escape. The country’s ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, proposed localized humanitarian cease-fires in May, July, and September of this year, but the Kremlin rejected all of them.

Now the White House has announced one that started yesterday and is credited to the first lady. The Trump administration has needed a success story on the eve of the midterm elections, and Moscow appears to have provided press access to exactly the sorts of tribunes that will give the American administration—and the Kremlin—a boost.

The right-wing television network Newsmax has said that it has been granted “exclusive television access” to accompany a delegation of Russian and Ukrainian representatives entering Oleshky this week. According to sources familiar with the arrangements, but who asked for their names to be withheld because they were not authorized to speak with the press, Fox News will also be permitted on the scene. A Russian Telegram channel suggested that Tucker Carlson plans to visit Oleshky too. Most Ukrainian and independent international journalists have been denied access.

[Anne Applebaum: Trump’s message to Ukraine is now crystal clear]

What will happen is predictable. Journalists and influencers loyal to the Trump administration and sympathetic toward the Kremlin will likely spend a couple hours filming Russian soldiers distributing food, assisting the elderly, and facilitating evacuations. They will be permitted only supervised interviews with preselected civilians. Dependent on the Russian occupying authorities for food, health care, and permission to leave, these people will not express themselves freely in the presence of the Russian military. And even if they try, their testimonies will be filtered through the Kremlin-supplied interpreters accompanying the Western press.

The besieged population will appear to be wholly grateful to the Russian authorities for another reason too. After months of deprivation, people perceive even basic assistance as an act of generosity. By suddenly offering food and evacuation, the Russian authorities will present themselves as rescuers rather than as perpetrators, exploiting this psychological dependency to manipulate Ukrainian civilians and international public opinion.

Ukraine is accepting the conditions of this evacuation in order to save lives, and it will maintain an operational silence also to that end. By accrediting only Newsmax and other ideologically aligned outlets, Russia has signaled that it plans to seize the opportunity to control how Oleshky is presented to the world. The participation of a few approved media outlets will be touted as real press coverage, making those American journalists tools for the legitimization of a Kremlin whitewashing operation.

That’s if Newsmax allows it. Its representatives could choose not to. They could instead make their visit to Oleshky an opportunity to practice independent journalism, challenge the Kremlin’s narrative, and expose the reality behind the humanitarian spectacle, rather than becoming a part of it.

Flying Across the World to Vote

2026-10-27T17:21:12-04:00

Photographs and videos by Dana Golan

Since the beginning of the Gaza war, a record number of Israelis have left the country. More than 10 percent of the electorate now lives abroad, and the country generally does not allow absentee ballots: Those who want to vote in today’s election, the first since October 7, need to be there in person.

An estimated 67,000 Israeli expats have traveled thousands of miles—and spent thousands of dollars—to return home. Within Israel, the polls suggest a fairly even split between the parties that favor Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and those that oppose him. But most of the expats are expected to support the opposition. The prime minister’s allies reportedly considered restricting airport capacity to limit the number of arrivals. But the flights still came.

Israelis returning from abroad expressed feelings of deep investment in this election and a belief that the outcome will affect them no matter where they live. Many are willing to travel a long way to vote for what they believe will be a better future.

Dana Golan for The Atlantic

Maya Mor Mitrani, a college student and opera singer in Philadelphia, spoke about concern for her father, who has served in the military reserves since October 7. “I just think the situation is really bad,” she said, “and I want to have at least some influence over how the government tries to solve the problems we’re facing right now. So if my influence amounts to just one ballot in the box, that’s what I’ll do.”

Dana Golan for The Atlantic

Jonathan Matkowsky was born in America, but he moved to Israel in 2012. On October 7, he barricaded his children indoors and drove south to help however he could, working as a volunteer driver for off-duty soldiers and civilians for the next four months. He later moved back to the United States. Now he has returned for the election: “It’s a meaningful vote for me because of how much trauma we’ve been through,” he said. Although he considered voting for Gadi Eisenkot because of his support for extending the draft to the ultra-Orthodox, he ultimately decided to vote for Netanyahu. He trusts the prime minister’s wisdom and experience and credits him with keeping Israel safe: “I’m proud of him. I believe in him. I think he’s a hero,” he said.

Dana Golan for The Atlantic

New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on October 25, 2026

Dana Golan for The Atlantic

A banner that reads “This time, Eisenkot” hangs in Jaffa, Tel Aviv.

Dana Golan for The Atlantic

An organization called Fly&Vote organized expats to fly from New York to Tel Aviv on October 25.

Dana Golan for The Atlantic

Shirily Bar-Or spent years protesting in Israel before moving to Athens last year. “I didn’t give up, exactly. I just needed to breathe. I was running out of air. I hope I’ll be able to breathe again tomorrow.” What she wants, she said, is for “the country to be sane again. I want a government that works for the public good. I want democracy.” To her, this election is pivotal because, she said, what Netanyahu wants “is to destroy us just to save his own skin.”

Dana Golan for The Atlantic

Dan Galezer lives in New York and already had a trip to Israel planned, but he changed his flight to be there on election day. He said that he didn’t know which opposition party to support, but that “I’m just at the stage of saying: Get Bibi out of the seat already. His time is up.” Galezer’s family’s kibbutz was the site of one of the worst massacres on October 7. “Today, even after everything that’s happened,” he said, “I don’t rule out returning.” But whether that will even be possible, he said, may depend on the outcome of the election: “This feels like a breaking point.”

Dana Golan for The Atlantic

Arie Deizer has lived in Bucharest for 30 years and compared Netanyahu to the Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán. Netanyahu, he said, has “destroyed the country—he’s completely lost it now,” and Deizer hopes he’ll be “thrown out, just like Orbán.” Deizer is voting for the Democrats, in part because unlike many other opposition parties, they have not ruled out working with Arab parties, should they win. “I hope we’ll have an overwhelming majority here—70 seats—so that the Arab parties can’t be ignored.”

Dana Golan for The Atlantic

A sign on the entrance to a shop in Jaffa, Tel Aviv, reads “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies.”

Dana Golan for The Atlantic

Shai Sinai hasn’t lived in Israel for 40 years, but he’s come back from Hamburg to vote in every election since Netanyahu came to power. “I was born here, I grew up here, I was educated here, I served in the army here, and my whole family—the family members who are still alive—basically lives here.” Volunteers from Fly&Vote, a nonprofit dedicated to helping expats return for the election, met him and other voters at the airport. So did members of the Democrats, a party Sinai said he will support. He hopes that the government will be replaced, he said, but “to say that I’m expecting it would be too optimistic.”

Dana Golan for The Atlantic

Volunteers and candidates from the Democrats Party came to greet Israelis as they landed in Israel to vote.

Dana Golan for The Atlantic

Election posters at the entrance to a polling station in Tel Aviv include one from Naftali Bennett’s B’Yachad party that reads, “We will only fix this together.”

The Collapse of Cuba

2026-10-26T09:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Moises Saman

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A priest led me up battered stairs to a tiny room at the top of a church. From the window, we gazed down at the decayed colonial villas and scattered trash fires of eastern Havana. He pointed to the yellow wall behind us, where someone had sketched a meticulous map of the local street grid.

“They posted armed guards here, to watch over us,” he said.

Cuba’s Communist government, the priest said, took over the convent, cloister, and school of Los Escolapios after the revolution of 1959, expelling the nuns and setting up a guard post—one part of the regime’s sprawling apparatus of surveillance and control. The church downstairs was virtually closed, the congregation mostly exiled or jailed in accordance with Communist Cuba’s atheist principles.

The guards are gone now, along with the portraits of Fidel Castro and the secular schoolteachers who commandeered the convent’s lower floors after the revolution. The church is in the process of reclaiming the magnificent 18th-century cloister from the state, which left it in ruins. The priest, Iván Guerra Álvarez, made clear he believes that history is approaching another turning point, and that the Communist regime will soon be gone. “The Church will play a big role in the transition,” he told me. “We are the biggest institution in Cuba outside the government.”

No one can say when or how that transition will happen. Donald Trump may or may not have “the honor of taking Cuba,” as he boasted after imposing an oil blockade on the island earlier this year. The Cuban regime has stifled any viable domestic opposition. But the withering of the state—a process that has been under way for decades—has accelerated, and is shocking to see up close. The ration cards that used to guarantee basic foodstuffs for every Cuban had been blank for weeks when I visited in August. Police and soldiers were once ubiquitous throughout the country, but I saw hardly any.

In far-eastern Cuba, I met a fisherman who told me that he and others like him, who lacked electricity for refrigeration, have gone back to traditional methods of drying and salting fish. The average monthly salary for public-sector employees in Cuba—including doctors and teachers—is about 6,500 pesos, which is less than $10 and far below the cost of a subsistence diet (a single carton of eggs can cost up to 4,700 pesos). Even getting small amounts of cash can be a trial: Banks sometimes limit withdrawals to 1,000 pesos (less than $1.50) per person per day.

Moises Saman / Magnum for The Atlantic

A former boarding school in Cienfuegos, established after the 1959 revolution, where students combined classroom education with agricultural labor

The government still purports—on faded billboards, in party speeches—to meet all of the material and spiritual needs of its citizens, but it is now bankrupt in every sense. Almost no one believes in the system anymore, and many, especially outside Havana, behave as if the government simply does not exist. As in the Soviet-dominated Eastern bloc during its final years, destitution is leading people back to older faiths. Afro Cuban Santeria and Catholicism have flourished, and “house churches” have proliferated, often evangelical and sometimes consisting of nothing more than a dozen folding chairs in someone’s living room.

Guerra Álvarez led me down from the church tower to the main sanctuary of Los Escolapios, an atmospheric shift he half-jokingly likened to a trip from North to South Korea. We found ourselves in a noisy crowd of more than 100 schoolchildren and worshippers. A teacher dressed as an angel, with a white beard, wig, and gown, was giving Bible lessons in the dimly lit nave. Afterward, volunteers handed out lunches of rice and beans. To see so many people looking so cheerful was striking; Cuba is now a country full of empty streets and abandoned buildings, having lost as much as a quarter of its population to migration in the past few years.

The expanded role of the churches is partly an outcome of American policy: The U.S. government has long favored the Catholic Church as an intermediary. When the Trump administration approved a $100 million aid package for Cuba in May, it was on the condition that the funds be distributed by faith-based groups and humanitarian organizations. But the rise of religion in Cuba is also a measure of the state’s withdrawal—and perhaps a hint at the island’s future direction.

Moises Saman / Magnum for The Atlantic

Teens receive bread and drinks at a Catholic church in Havana.

I came to Cuba expecting to see suffering. What I did not anticipate was the near-total collapse of the state. This was evident even in Havana, where all-day blackouts are routine, but things are much worse in the eastern half of the island, which has long been poorer and less developed. Cuba’s religious revival has burned brightest there, especially among Pentecostal churches, whose traditions include faith healing and miracles.

[The David Frum Show: Cuba is collapsing. Will Trump invade?]

I drove to the east with the photographer Moises Saman, an 18-hour journey that sometimes made us feel as if we were traveling back in time. Weaving slowly among enormous potholes, we passed few other cars. As we got closer to Santiago de Cuba, Cuba’s second-largest city, we saw almost as many horse-drawn carts as motorized vehicles.

Moises Saman / Magnum for The Atlantic

A weathered roadside billboard, bearing a portrait of Fidel Castro, reads, Son las ideas las que nos hacen un pueblo combatiente (“It is ideas that make us a fighting people”).

Poverty is not new in the country, but the number of street beggars I saw shocked me. On the seafront in Santiago, a mother and daughter approached me, both of them skeletally thin, to ask for money. The mother, a white-haired 76-year-old, told me that their only means of support had been her son, who had worked as a security guard and died of cancer last year. Now they spend all day begging and collecting plastic bottles in the hopes of trading them for a few pesos, she said. They get nothing from the state. Later, I visited their home, a filthy ground-floor room where they sleep on metal bed frames topped with cardboard instead of mattresses. When I asked whether there was any electricity, the mother said that they did not even have a bulb.

Moises Saman / Magnum for The Atlantic

The collapse of the state has left impoverished Cubans with few options besides begging or relying on charity.

The failure of Cuba’s health-care system may be the most damning indictment of its Communist regime. Castro once held up the country’s network of local clinics as a model for the world, visible proof that socialism could triumph where capitalism had failed. He sent hundreds of thousands of doctors overseas, an “army of white coats” to bolster Cuba’s image and generate money for the state. (It later emerged that the doctors had been given little choice and many were victims of what has been called forced labor.)

Some doctors are still being sent abroad, but more have simply fled Cuba. On Cayo Granma, an island at the entrance to the bay of Santiago, I found a single nurse caring not only for all 870 residents but also for many people from the neighboring coastal areas. She no longer knows how many people she is responsible for, because doctors have been leaving the region so fast that she cannot keep track of the patients forced to seek new care.

Her name is Clara Luaces, a woman of 55 with a direct gaze and an air of brisk competence. Her clinic was a room the size of a large closet, hot and crowded with patients when I arrived; outside, it was almost 100 degrees. A 12-year-old boy with a fever sat on a bench, an IV drip in his arm; a girl with a skin infection sat nearby with her mother.

“We have to work miracles here,” Luaces said, answering my questions as she checked the boy’s pulse and adjusted his IV. The government had stopped piping water to the island three months earlier, she said, and the resulting lack of clean water had led to a sharp rise in bacterial fevers and skin infections. “Even young people are dying on me,” she said. She was chronically short on medicine and had very little money of her own to supplement the clinic’s supply.

The boy began moaning, and Luaces comforted him, putting a pillow under his head and calling him “sweetheart.” “I’m not going to retire,” she said, looking up at me, “because there is no one else to take this on.”

Luaces did not want to talk about politics. She confined herself to saying that she had been a student during what Castro dubbed the “special period” in the 1990s, when Cuba went through a severe economic crisis after losing its Soviet patron and the regime seemed on the brink of collapse. What is happening now, she said, is “much more special.”

Moises Saman / Magnum for The Atlantic

Two people sit outside a house during a nighttime power outage in Camagüey.

Others lashed out directly at the state. Not long ago, the country bristled with informants working for the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. But when I asked people about the CDR, some laughed, and few seemed worried about being overheard. One evening on a beach in Baracoa, a man in his 30s asked me what I thought about Communism. He was lying in a hammock talking with four other men, drinking cheap sugarcane rum from a plastic bottle; they had been complaining about the ever higher prices of rice, beans, and other basic foods. I told him I thought Communism was a lousy way to run a country.

He looked squarely at me and said, “I shit on Fidel Castro’s mother.” The other men laughed. He uttered a few more obscenities. Then, suddenly, all of the humor drained from the man’s face. His voice went taut with anger, and tears welled up in his eyes.

“Cuba is frozen in time!” he shouted. “There’s no hope. It’s a sad thing to be born a Cuban. That’s what I think, and I don’t care; they can send me to prison if they want.” The other men had gone silent.

Here is another measure of Cubans’ anger at their government: During nine days of travel around the island, I did not meet a single person who blamed Donald Trump or the United States for their situation. I sometimes reminded them about the blockade Trump had started earlier this year, cutting Cubans off from the cheap oil that Venezuela had been supplying before the U.S. military captured Nicolás Maduro in January. Hadn’t things gotten worse since then?

[Read: Cuba’s old economic model is ‘exhausted’]

“I don’t see any change since January,” a retired engineer named Guillermo Almeida told me. “That oil from Venezuela wasn’t reaching the people anyway.” He and others said that the more important turning point was the coronavirus pandemic, which destroyed Cuba’s tourism industry and shrank the value of remittances from family members abroad that many Cubans depend on, exposing more fully a state that had long been depleted. Another man put it differently: “It seems to us that the real embargo is inside of Cuba.”

The churches have taken on much of the Cuban state’s old role in keeping people alive. In Baracoa, I met Raul de Jesus Muñoz Munder, a Pentecostal pastor who has been evangelizing in the area for 32 years. He had seen hunger and deprivation, he said, including during the years he spent in a tiny church in the mountains, but nothing as bad as the present.

Muñoz Munder described his work almost as if it were a military operation. Every week, he said, he meets with a team of associate pastors at his church, and each man reports on the situation in his home neighborhood: who is sick and needs medicine, who needs food, and how to get it to them. The pastor’s congregation has about 1,100 regular members, but he provides aid to a much larger group. His denomination, the Assemblies of God, has expanded from two to 40 churches in the Baracoa region over the past three decades.

The growth of the evangelical movement is hard to quantify in Cuba, where the Catholic Church was once almost universal. No independent numbers on religious affiliation exist—the government has long had a lock on surveys. But everyone I spoke with, both inside and outside the country, agreed that the evangelical presence has surged in recent years.

Moises Saman / Magnum for The Atlantic

A pastor and a church secretary at the Iglesia Evangélica Pentecostal Asambleas de Dios de Baracoa, in eastern Cuba. The congregation is one of the city’s most active Protestant churches.

In Baracoa, I stumbled upon several different evangelical services one Saturday evening, each of them loud and raucous, the congregation on its feet and clapping along. These kinds of scenes are still a little jarring to many older Cubans. They tend to associate church with more orderly Catholic rituals, and grew up without seeing much of the flamboyant evangelical religiosity that has become common across Latin America. But the island is changing. I heard a fair amount of God talk even on the street. One afternoon in Camagüey, a beautiful, decaying city in east-central Cuba, an elderly woman in a wheelchair called out to me as I passed her open front door.

“We have to tell people that God exists,” she said, in an urgent tone. “God’s word has to be fulfilled in its entirety.”

One of her children had left the country, and the other one, a high-school teacher, was in prison; she said he’d been given a 14-year sentence for accusing a high-ranking official of corruption. The old woman was living alone, and the only thing she had left was her faith.

In Havana, I visited a nursing home owned by the Catholic Church that was full of former civil servants and military officers. In one room I found a dozen old men, their beds lined up about a yard apart. Each had a single narrow locker for all of his earthly possessions. A nurse gave me permission to speak with residents but cautioned me that they were “very sad.” Many of them, she explained, had had distinguished government careers but had found themselves abandoned by both the state and their family at the end of their life. In many cases, their children had left the country.

Moises Saman / Magnum for The Atlantic

People in need receive a meal at the Concatedral de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, a Catholic church in Baracoa.

One of the men, a wiry 65-year-old, had fought for two years in Angola, where Castro had sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the 1970s and ’80s to support a Communist-aligned government. The former soldier had once been a fan of the revolution; you could tell because he had a big tattoo of Che Guevara on his right arm. He’d gotten it when he was 18. He showed me several scars left over from battles in Africa, and I asked him how he felt about the situation in the country.

[From the September 1964 issue: An eyewitness account of Cuba’s fumbling Marxism]

He answered with an expletive. I asked him what should be done to make things better. Cuba needed to be bombed, he told me. Specifically, Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother and successor, should be bombed. And Raúl’s daughter Mariela. And the prime minister, Manuel Marrero Cruz.

Again and again during my travels on the island, people told me: Cuba is not like this. They didn’t just mean the hunger and sickness and lack of electricity. They meant the anger, the emptiness, the absence of music and laughter.

There used to be a musical group on every corner of Santiago, an 81-year-old man who had spent 45 years as a singer in a band recalled. Now there were none.

After the 1959 revolution, Fidel Castro enshrined atheism in the new state, exiling many prominent Catholic figures and sending believers to reeducation camps. But in a sense, he did not so much banish religion as create a new cult, with its own rituals and holy martyrs. That cult staggers on today in a weird half life, abandoned by most of its people after decades of misery and repression, yet somehow defying a final collapse.

Moises Saman / Magnum for The Atlantic

Soldiers perform a changing-of-the-guard ceremony at Santa Ifigenia Cemetery in Santiago, where Fidel Castro’s remains are entombed.

The only immaculately clean place I saw in all of Cuba was the Santa Ifigenia Cemetery, where Fidel’s ashes are held, in Santiago. The grass there is green and mowed to razor-perfection, the walkways carefully swept; not a single visitor was in sight when I went there.

As I stood looking at the rounded granite boulder that marks Fidel’s tomb, patriotic music began blaring from invisible loudspeakers, and an honor guard of soldiers in neatly pressed uniforms began goose-stepping in unison, rifles pointed skyward. They marched to the mausoleum honoring José Martí, Cuba’s great nationalist hero; presented arms; and relieved a group of similarly uniformed compatriots, who marched back. They do this changing of the guard every half hour, all day long, I was told.

Watching those perfect soldiers, you could believe for a moment that you were in another place—perhaps that far-off country Castro had dreamed of, where socialism is triumphant, no one is sick or unhappy, and everyone aspires to follow the heroic example of the man who led a glorious revolution. Then a breeze swept across the grass, carrying the acrid stench of burning garbage, and I remembered where I was.

This article appears in the December 2026 print edition with the headline “How Castro’s Cuba Ends.”

Why Trump Can’t Sell Putin a Deal

2026-10-23T07:00:00-04:00

On April 7, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson gave a speech at Johns Hopkins University in which he effectively offered to build the equivalent of the Tennessee Valley Authority for North Vietnam on the condition that Hanoi cease supporting the insurgency in South Vietnam. On the helicopter ride back from the speech, Johnson leaned across to an assistant, put his hand on his knee, and said of Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese leader, “Old Ho can’t turn that down, Old Ho can’t turn that down.”

Ho did turn Johnson down. Today, the incident is taught in political-psychology courses to illustrate how presidents can naively think that transactional politics, commonplace in states and cities, will work on the global stage, only to find out that nationalism, ideology, and rivalry matter more.

Donald Trump has fallen into the same trap with Vladimir Putin, apparently believing that the right economic incentives will persuade the Russian leader to make peace. This approach is not working. Instead, it’s closing off the one realistic pathway to end the conflict with Ukraine, and making the war likelier to expand and worsen.

Early in his second term, Trump was surprised that Putin would not end the war quickly with a freezing of the territorial lines and a promise that Ukraine would not join NATO. Rather than seeking to improve Ukraine’s position on the battlefield or apply leverage against Russia through sanctions, Trump decided to convince Putin that peace would be financially rewarding. Trump pulled his Ukraine envoy, Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, off the negotiating team after the Kremlin complained that he was too favorable to Ukrainians and replaced him with his friend Steve Witkoff, a real-estate tycoon. The Russian financier Kirill Dmitriev would be Trump’s conduit to Putin.

[Robert F. Worth: The magician of the Kremlin]

Witkoff and Dmitriev worked out a deal almost a year ago that included a full lifting of sanctions, joint U.S.-Russian business ventures, and even Russia’s readmission to the G7 (turning it into the G8), but it foundered on Putin’s demand that Ukraine cede territory on the battlefield. Witkoff and Dmitriev continued their efforts.

The latest version emerged in the past week as U.S.-Ukraine relations reached their lowest point since the Oval Office bust-up in February 2025. Trump and Putin struck an agreement in which Russia would provide diesel fuel to the United States and global markets. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky slammed the arrangement, saying that it was “not fair and honest” and that it looked like “a happy-birthday present for Putin.”

An infuriated Trump called for Zelensky to be replaced and said that he was harder to deal with than Putin. In the days that followed, Kyiv accused Washington of curtailing intelligence cooperation, including by withholding information on incoming ballistic-missile strikes (the administration denied this). The Financial Times reported that the administration is considering returning some of the frozen assets to Russia as an incentive for a partial cease-fire. Trump then waived sanctions on Russia under the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, saying that doing so was in the national interest of the United States. On Truth Social, Trump posted that he was in negotiations to end the war and didn’t “want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table.”

As U.S.-Ukrainian relations seemed to nose-dive, the administration tried to convey a larger rationale behind its decision making. A senior official told The Washington Post’s David Ignatius that because a Ukraine deal was proving difficult to negotiate, the White House would enlarge the problem and negotiate a regional deal. This would include provisions to supply energy to Europe through a new pipeline, with profits to be shared between Ukraine and Russia, and the resolution of Moscow’s differences with European countries.

This proposal is, in effect, the Johnson plan. The naivete behind it would perhaps be excusable if Putin were a new leader with no track record, but he is a known quantity. Ukraine is his obsession, his white whale. He wants to subjugate it and has proved that he will pay an enormous price to achieve this goal.

The immediate diplomatic problem that Trump needs to solve is that Putin will not settle for anything less than the surrender of additional territory by Ukraine, which is something no Ukrainian leader can accept. Putin stands little chance of taking this territory by force: The front line is largely static, thanks to the saturation of the area with drones. However, the Russian leader has two hopes.

One is to break Ukraine this winter with a brutal air offensive that would destroy its energy grid and deliver misery to millions. Maybe such pressure would cause Ukraine’s front line to collapse or lead Kyiv to accept Moscow’s demands at the negotiating table.

The other prospect is to escalate Russia’s shadow war against Ukraine’s European partners. Moscow is already linked to assassination plots, arson, and the planting of explosive-laden drones in airports. A number of European leaders, including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and French President Emmanuel Macron, have warned that Russia is considering hitting Eastern European states with drone and missile attacks that it would later deny. Putin hopes that this shadow war will weaken European governments and bring to power parties that will cut off aid to Ukraine and pressure it to capitulate to Russia’s demands.

[Read: Russia’s real strategy in Europe]

If Putin succeeds in these two gambits—weakening Ukraine over the winter while stoking unrest in Europe—he will be confident that Russia can grind out a bloody victory over the next couple of years.

Putin seems to think that time is on his side. Trump’s concessions reinforce that perception. But if Trump can change Putin’s expectations about the future, a diplomatic deal might become possible. In particular, Trump must convince Putin that the war will not get any better for Russia, and that the deal he can get now is better than the one he can get later.

This means doing everything possible to ensure that Ukraine survives Putin’s winter campaign: supplying Kyiv with as much air defense as possible, providing advance warning of incoming missiles, encouraging allies to seize Russia’s sovereign assets to provide Ukraine with economic relief, and helping Ukraine impose costs on Russia.

It also means helping Europe deter Putin from escalating his shadow war against NATO members. This is difficult but doable. Europe needs to convince Putin that increased attacks, especially any that result in casualties, will deepen Europe’s and the United States’ involvement in the Ukraine conflict. For instance, Europe could say that if Russia launches missiles or drones against NATO members, a European coalition will place air defenses in western Ukraine. Trump could tell Putin that if Russia keeps harassing Europe, he will clear the way with Elon Musk for Ukraine to use Starlink to hit military targets inside of Russia.

If one of Russia’s attacks resulted in mass casualties, such as the downing of a civilian airliner, the allies could designate Russia a state sponsor of terrorism. When I served at the National Security Council in the Biden administration, we communicated this to the Russians after they plotted to place flammable devices on airliners carrying DHL packages. We made clear that such a designation would likely lead to the closure of the Russian embassy in the United States. They stopped the plots.

Helping Ukraine survive the winter and deterring Russian attacks on Europe will help keep diplomacy alive. But to close the deal, Trump needs to convince Putin that his window of opportunity is closing. Here, Trump’s political weakness could work to his advantage.

Putin surely fears that Trump’s successor—if a Democrat or a Republican other than J. D. Vance—will be more favorable to Ukraine. A new administration will likely increase U.S. support for Ukraine and rebalance any deal made in the Trump years, possibly linking sanctions relief to Russian withdrawal from all of Ukraine.

Trump could turn this prospect into leverage. He can tell Putin that the opportunity for a favorable deal is real, but that it may not last forever. Only he can deliver it. If Putin keeps fighting, he will not make territorial gains, Ukraine will survive and retain the capacity to strike inside of Russia, Europe will become more involved, and the favorable terms will expire.

Then Trump needs to get serious about revising the offer so that it is acceptable to Ukraine. At a minimum, that means a freezing of the territorial lines, and no legal recognition of the occupied territory.

Trump wants to be remembered as the president who ended the war in Ukraine, but unless he changes course, he may instead be remembered as the president who gave Putin the confidence to widen and prolong it. Trump has spent nearly two years trying to convince Putin that peace will be more rewarding than war. To get a cease-fire, he must now convince him that war will be more costly than peace.

China’s Economy Has a Huge Weakness

2026-10-22T08:13:00-04:00

As China’s manufacturers flood the global market with cars, chips, and just about everything else, the country’s economic juggernaut seems unstoppable. Policy makers in the United States and elsewhere fret that this onslaught will overrun their own industries, destroy jobs, and leave them reliant on a rival for vital products. But a growing number of Chinese factories are failing to produce at least one crucial thing: a profit. According to the London-based research firm Capital Economics, the share of Chinese industrial firms that are losing money has doubled since 2018 to 30 percent this year.

Losses are piling up at Chinese firms even as exports surge. Local governments regularly prop up unprofitable enterprises to preserve employment and meet economic targets. This has had a perverse effect throughout the country. An economic program that was meant to make China stronger and more independent has in fact made it more vulnerable to the policies of other countries.

Profitability was never a top priority of the Chinese Communist Party. Economic planners have assumed that a large manufacturing base is essential to China’s national security, technological advancement, political stability, and global influence. China’s leaders therefore value the production, exports, and jobs that factories generate far more than any financial return on their investments. As a result, China’s economy has long been cluttered with “zombie” companies: effectively bankrupt firms that are kept alive by creditors.

[Michael Schuman: China is flatlining]

But as the economy has slumped in recent years, the strain on Chinese companies has increased and their finances have deteriorated. Total net profit at 5,400 Chinese companies listed on local stock exchanges fell for the third consecutive year in 2025, according to data from Nikkei Asia, a Japanese business news outlet. Excess factory capacity and weak domestic demand have created a brutal competition for shoppers, and the resulting price wars have narrowed profit margins.

In market-based economies, unprofitable companies either fold or reorganize. In China, however, the government tends to sustain uncompetitive companies. Major banks, controlled largely by the state, roll over loans for troubled enterprises that can’t pay. Government officials offer tax breaks, subsidies, and general support to reduce costs, stimulate sales, or engineer bailouts. In an analysis of subsidies received by industrial firms in major economies from 2005 to 2024, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that Chinese state support was as much as eight times larger than government assistance elsewhere.

This advantage serves Beijing’s agenda. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has promoted manufacturing to expand China’s global power and make the country less reliant on foreign supplies. American CEOs, who are under constant pressure to increase shareholder value and post ever larger quarterly profits, have to compete with Chinese companies that can simply slash prices, grab market share, and not worry as much about the bottom line. “I don’t think Xi Jinping thinks in terms of profits. I don’t think he cares,” Mark Williams, the chief Asia economist at Capital Economics, told me. Instead, Xi knows that getting other countries hooked on Chinese supplies “gives China a huge amount of leverage.”

But profits do matter. Without them, companies have fewer resources to invest and grow; in China’s case, they become more reliant on the state for their survival, which has knock-on effects for everyone. Capital thrown away on unproductive businesses can’t be invested in profitable ventures. Banks forced to direct funds to loss-making enterprises have trouble making money themselves, which limits their ability to lend. These inefficiencies are contributing to a massive rise in the nation’s debt-to-GDP ratio in the nonfinancial sector, which has nearly doubled since 2010 and now exceeds 300 percent. By crowding the market with uncompetitive firms, China’s state-led economic policies make it harder for any company to turn a profit. This has resulted in an economy that is not quite collapsing, but is suffering a “prolonged decay,” according to Logan Wright, a partner at the research firm Rhodium Group.

The more money that Chinese companies lose, the more the government must spend to sustain its economic model. Policy makers no longer have a lot of cash to spare. Government revenues declined in 2025. Tax collectors, scrambling for funds, are cracking down on Chinese tycoons who hold their wealth outside the country.

Xi could reduce the strain on the economy and help Chinese companies by stimulating domestic demand for their products. But he continues to show no interest in introducing the politically sensitive reforms that could encourage more household spending, such as building a stronger social safety net. Facing an unstable job market and slumping property prices, Chinese consumers are reluctant to shop—car sales, for instance, in China have plunged by more than 20 percent so far this year.

These problems at home have forced Chinese manufacturers to search more desperately for profits abroad. China’s trade surplus is on track this year to break the 2025 record of $1.2 trillion. But exports are no panacea. Chinese automakers shipped nearly 80 percent more cars overseas in August than they did a year earlier, but their profits still sank by 16 percent. In theory, Chinese manufacturers that gain market share should also gain more power to raise prices and increase profits. But their greater reliance on foreign customers leaves them vulnerable to protectionism. If policy makers around the world impose tariffs or other barriers on Chinese goods, the pressure on China’s economy may be too much for Beijing to bear. The Chinese government has already been scaling back tax breaks that help electric-vehicle companies even as the industry’s profits suffer.

China’s leaders have largely managed to keep global markets open to its subsidized exports because most trading partners are wary of confronting Beijing. But as Chinese exports surge, Beijing is facing greater opposition to its predatory trade practices. The United States has already taken steps to protect its strategic industries, in part by slapping high tariffs on Chinese EV makers, effectively shutting them out of the American market. In a mostly contentious meeting of G20 finance ministers in September, a rare moment of amity involved a statement that criticized countries that rely too heavily on exports for growth—an implicit rebuke of China, which was the only member not to sign on. Even Russia, China’s supposed close friend, approved.

[Patrick George: The firewall against Chinese cars is cracking]

In a report published earlier this year called “The Chinese Steamroller,” the French government’s High Commission for Strategy and Planning asserted that China’s export surge “now threatens and directly affects the very core of Europe’s productive system.” Germany’s Volkswagen, undercut by Chinese automakers, announced in September that the company’s decade-long restructuring would include cuts to 100,000 jobs—double earlier plans. Europe’s ballooning trade deficit with China, which has more than doubled over the past decade, has recently motivated European Union officials to discuss new mechanisms to block Chinese imports.

Protectionism in Europe would be especially damaging to Chinese companies, which can tap European consumers with bigger spending power than in many other parts of the world. Beijing had initially threatened to retaliate against proposed trade barriers by targeting European businesses—but earlier this month, Chinese leaders unexpectedly blinked. To avoid tariffs, Beijing agreed to a cap on exports of hybrid cars to Europe—a plan that could halve the number of these cars entering the EU over the next four years. By making this relatively minor concession, China’s leaders likely hope to stave off a wider trade war that could inflict even more harm on the domestic economy.

Global trade is becoming a grudge match between a stretched but determined Beijing and its frustrated trading partners. At the moment, Xi still holds the upper hand: Advanced democracies, leaderless in the age of Donald Trump, have been slow to organize against his ambitions. But the struggles of Chinese companies—and their overreliance on foreign markets—undercut Xi’s leverage. How he navigates these negotiations and trade-offs will directly affect companies and consumers not only in China but around the world. At the moment, Xi seems set on ushering in an era of greater economic conflict in which everyone loses.

What the U.S. Is Really Doing in Venezuela

2026-10-22T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Lynsey Addario

Updated at 11:08 a.m. ET on October 27, 2026

I.

We drifted past abandoned drilling platforms, ghostly remnants of better days. Cormorants perched on the metal bars of broken oil rigs, drying their wings in the sun. When we reached a swirling, brown-green oil slick, Carlos slowed his motor. Raw oil could damage the engine, he said, and we’d already had to return to shore once that day to swap boats. We floated for a bit. Carlos, who makes his living as a fisherman on Lake Maracaibo, pointed out some surface bubbles, evidence of a leaky pipeline beneath the water. There was a strong smell of gas. He lit a cigarette anyway and laughed.

That morning, Carlos and his team had caught about 30 pounds of fish in the lake, a brackish estuary where oil was discovered more than a century ago. The subsequent boom built the cities of Caracas and Maracaibo, three generations of wealth, and four decades of democracy. A century later, tens of billions of barrels’ worth of reserves remain beneath the water. Some of them might now be controlled by the American government.

They will not be easy to extract. After the boom came the bust, at first slowly and then very fast. Hugo Chávez, who ruled the country as a leftist authoritarian from 1999 to 2013, and then Nicolás Maduro, the autocrat who succeeded Chávez and ran the country until he was removed by an American military operation early this year, undermined the industry, chasing away engineers and impoverishing workers. Even as they said they were building “Bolivarian socialism,” they removed benefits, lowered salaries, and created a capricious, repressive regime. Millions of people left the country.

Most American and European companies left too. The Russian and Chinese companies that arrived to replace them invested very little. Lake Maracaibo, the largest body of water in South America, also became one of the largest environmental disasters in South America. Two decades of neglect produced leaks, spills, poisoned water, and the ghostly drilling platforms I saw from the fishing boat. Fishermen sometimes rinse their crabs and shrimp with gasoline to remove the crude oil. All of their nets turn brown.

Billions of dollars of investment will be needed to remediate the site and recover more oil. In the meantime, people who live around the lake, like millions of other Venezuelans, work hard and earn very little. Their fish have to be sold immediately, because electricity is unpredictable and freezers are thus unreliable. Rapid inflation—20 percent in July, an annualized rate of 783 percent—has made everything unaffordable. In a Caracas market, I found prices and exchange rates written on whiteboards, because they change every day.

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic

A collapsed high-voltage transmission tower in Lake Maracaibo, amid other deteriorating oil and electrical infrastructure

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic

Fishermen and their families live along the polluted shores of the lake, the largest body of water in South America—and one of the continent’s largest environmental disasters.

The state is absent, or indifferent. Carlos pointed to a scar on his leg that he said was an old gunshot wound, the souvenir of an assault by one of the pirates who control the lake: “If you don’t pay them, they kill you and take your boat.” The coast guard is supposed to patrol the lake, he said, but it is rarely there.

The oil industry offers few well-paying jobs. At a lakeside town, its beaches blackened by oil, Francisco, a former boat mechanic at the state oil company⁠—Petróleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA—told me he had quit because he got tired of not having the right tools and spare parts. One of Francisco’s neighbors, Iliana, told me her husband had quit PDVSA too, after his salary plummeted from $50 a day to just a few cents a day. He now works for a Russian company that pays about $35 a day, but he has to spend most nights sleeping on the drilling platform.

From a great distance—Washington, say, or Mar-a-Lago⁠—Venezuela is sometimes described as a bonanza for America, a trove of riches. On January 3, the day that the U.S. military captured Maduro, Donald Trump promised that it would be. “We’ll run it properly; we’ll run it professionally,” he said at a press conference that day. “We’ll have the greatest oil companies in the world going and invest billions and billions of dollars, and take out money, use that money in Venezuela, and the biggest beneficiary are gonna be the people of Venezuela.” But at that same press conference, he also announced that he would be working with a new president: Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s deputy and a leading member of the regime that had caused the destruction in the first place. He dismissed the country’s opposition leader, María Corina Machado—who was the true winner of Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election—as a “nice woman” who “doesn’t have the respect within the country.”

In Venezuela, this language sounded jarring. Since then, it has become even more confusing, because it is so at odds with reality. When I asked people living right next to some of Venezuela’s largest oil fields whether Rodríguez had made any difference to the industry or the country, they laughed or sneered. Iliana told me, “People thought that things would change, but in reality nothing changed.” José, another fisherman who used to work for PDVSA, had a darker view: “The gringos came to rob everything—the oil, the minerals. We are rich in everything, but here, we don’t have anything.” Later, a local oil engineer told me that none of the American agreements matters anyway, because the Venezuelan government is illegitimate and so “nothing is legal.”

These opinions are widely shared. Perhaps surprisingly, given the disparate worlds they inhabit, the views of Maracaibo fishermen are not far from those of Ricardo Hausmann, a Harvard economist who served decades ago in a very different Venezuelan government, one that opened the country’s natural resources to foreign investment through a transparent process. In the 1990s, PDVSA explained to legislators, foreign companies, and the public what it was doing. Contracts were made public. Money produced by oil investments long funded social programs, including scholarships to study at American universities. These produced warm feelings toward America among educated Venezuelans that outlasted years of Chavista anti-gringo propaganda.

The political and business relationship now being forged between America and Venezuela is completely different. It’s not a relationship of two equals, obviously. But nor is it exactly an occupation. Some have compared it to the Anglo-Persian oil deal of the early 20th century, or the 1905 treaty that gave the U.S. government control over the customs service of the Dominican Republic, but neither of those analogies is quite apt. Searching for a model or a reference point, I asked Hausmann how he would describe it. “A coalition of two kleptocracies,” he said.

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic

Clauimar Aguiar lives beside an oil field in Cabimas, Venezuela, where vast petroleum reserves coexist with poverty and failing infrastructure.

II.

What happens to Venezuelan oil when it is pumped out of the ground? Where does the money go afterward? And how did that change following Trump’s announcement, on August 28, of “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY”? None of these questions has a simple answer. Over several days in Caracas and Madrid (where much of the Venezuelan opposition currently resides), and in telephone calls to Boston and Houston, I asked six people—two formerly in the oil industry, two still in the industry, and two in academia—to explain the details. All of them struggled to do so. One of them, an industry executive in Caracas who would speak only off the record, covered four pages of my notebook in diagrams and drawings, taking more than an hour and a half to explain how the previous legal system had worked, how a hydrocarbon law had been rewritten, how the new deals were unfolding and the old deals were being revised.

Perhaps the complexity is the point: Maybe the situation is hard to understand because neither the Rodríguez regime nor the Trump administration really wants anyone to understand it. Hausmann told me the Venezuelan constitution says that “anything of national interest should be approved by parliament, by the National Assembly. They haven’t done that, and so right now they are protecting themselves through obscurity.”

Despite the obfuscation, some of what Trump says is true: The U.S. really is controlling the sale of “millions and millions of barrels of oil” in Venezuela, as well as the sale of gold and other minerals. As a condition of lifting the economic sanctions that the U.S. had previously imposed on the country, all royalties and taxes from licensed companies are deposited into a special account originally set up in Qatar and later moved to Citibank. Industry analysts believe that more than $13 billion worth of oil has been sold since January, but that number is speculative. At a congressional hearing on September 15, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent refused to confirm it. Repeated requests from congressional Democrats for more information have also received inadequate responses.

Some of the funds have been returned to the Venezuelan government. At another congressional hearing, a State Department official told legislators that money was being provided to pay “the salaries of government workers in Venezuela,” among other things. Hard currency is also made available to Venezuelan banks. But although there is no evidence that money is being stolen or siphoned off to pay for other Trump-administration projects, there is also no evidence that it is not being stolen or siphoned off. Ostensibly, the accounting firm KPMG is auditing the process, but despite requests from Democrats in Congress, an audit was not released by the October 8 deadline. In his congressional appearance, Bessent did not say if or when it would be.

Opacity has consequences. Partly thanks to this system, the major new investments necessary for a real recovery have been slow in coming. The old oil fields I saw near Maracaibo, as well as the untouched reserves in the Orinoco River belt, will require billions of dollars and very long time horizons to develop or redevelop. Any company planning such a project needs to believe that its contracts, and the political and social stability required to preserve them, will last for a decade or more. Francisco Monaldi, an oil-industry analyst at Rice University, told me that although the new hydrocarbon law, passed on January 29 under American pressure, is an improvement, it still affords Venezuela’s Ministry of Oil the flexibility “to give you the best deal in Latin America, or the worst”—and then to change the terms of that deal later if it chooses. No wonder the current situation—an unpopular, illegitimate Venezuelan president propped up by an unpredictable and term-limited U.S. president—makes big companies nervous.

If the oil companies would prefer an elected Venezuelan president and a stable political system, this is not a matter of benign, high-minded principle. Oil executives “are not in the business of charity; these are not nuns,” Monaldi said. “But these guys know when things are being done in a way that will eventually create trouble for them.” With the exception of Chevron, which remained in Venezuela throughout the Chávez-Maduro era and is still reinvesting the revenues it earns in the country (although nothing more), most large companies have merely sent envoys to Caracas, signed memorandums of understanding, and returned home. Gold refiners are equally ambivalent about processing the Venezuelan gold bars that a Trump-friendly company removed from the country, according to The New York Times, because the gold was likely mined by criminal organizations and the industry has strict rules about proof of origin.

Trump’s “biggest oil deal in world history” seems to have been designed to encourage American companies to start drilling faster and, more important for him, to distract from the oil crisis created by his war in Iran. But the announcement may have had the opposite effect because the deal, at least as it has been described in public, is even more opaque than the existing arrangement, and is even more unpopular. After the announcement, thousands of people left angry messages on the U.S. embassy’s social-media pages, reflecting both fury and surprise. And no wonder: The U.S. administration’s main business partner is a company called North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), whose notorious CEO, Alejandro Betancourt, is a household name in Venezuela. Betancourt has been investigated for money laundering in multiple countries, including the United States, Switzerland, and Spain. (He has previously denied wrongdoing and has never been charged with a crime.) After being arrested at London’s Charing Cross Station on a Swiss warrant in November 2025, he was stuck in England for more than six months while the extradition case proceeded. Spanish police searched his estate outside Madrid as recently as August 28. The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration pressured Swiss officials to halt an investigation and lift an extradition request, seemingly in order to allow Betancourt to travel to the U.S. and Venezuela and close the deal.

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic

Venezuelans play dominoes by flashlight during a rolling blackout in Maracaibo. Although the region sits atop some of the country’s largest oil and gas reserves, many residents spend much of the day without electricity.

Inside the country, Betancourt is infamous for bungling an upgrade of the electricity grid, overcharging for used, poor-quality equipment and enriching himself in the process. People openly blame him for blackouts and power cuts that continue to this day. An opposition leader told me that he’d been hearing Betancourt’s name cited as an example of regime corruption since he was a teenager. The fishermen in Lake Maracaibo knew exactly who he was, and everyone else I met did too. An analyst in Madrid told me that everything he thought he understood about U.S. intentions in Venezuela had been upended by the deal with Betancourt.

Like the system of oil payments, the deal with Betancourt is also suspiciously difficult to describe. In essence, the Venezuelan government has allocated 17 oil fields to NABEP, a company originally created with an American businessman, Harry Sargeant. According to the White House, the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital has acquired not ownership but “a 35% equity stake in its corporate parent”; others explained that the acquisition is a share in a contract, but this is again uncertain. The State Department seems to get the right to buy 20 percent of NABEP’s oil at production cost—whatever that means—as well as the first right of refusal on the other 80 percent. Some analysts told me they fear that the Rodríguez regime, to stay in power, will sell its oil below market prices.

No money was exchanged, and none has been invested. The Pentagon and NABEP are now responsible for attracting people who actually know how to drill oil to Venezuela—including to places without roads or infrastructure of any kind. I asked several oil analysts and economists, inside and outside the country, if the Trump administration and Betancourt could simply give drilling contracts to their respective friend groups in America and Venezuela. They all said yes.

A few people did try to see a glass half full. If more oil is pumped, then at least some money will eventually reach people, for example, which is better than no money. “It’s a process,” said Enrique Novoa, the former president of the Venezuelan Petroleum Chamber. “Tomorrow we hope to work a little bit better than today.” But even among those trying to look favorably on the deal, everyone I met was either surprised or confused that the United States—a longtime critic of the Marxist language and statist practices of the Chávez and Maduro regimes—had so quickly and enthusiastically embraced the corrupt habits, and the corrupt personnel, of the Chavista elite.

At the end of the day I spent floating through the postapocalyptic landscape of Lake Maracaibo, I met Juan Pablo Guanipa, one of the best-known opposition leaders in Venezuela. Guanipa, who lives in Maracaibo, was released in February after eight months in prison. He was detained on the street the next day, placed under house arrest, and then released again. He is still followed by the Venezuelan security service wherever he goes. Sitting in a room filled with books, we talked about the oil deal, the poor economy, the rising frustrations of Venezuelans.

I asked him whether he found the new union between Americans and Chavistas peculiar. Of course he did, he told me. Most perplexing to him, it seemed, was the absence of Yankee pragmatism, the most basic thing Venezuelans expected of Americans. At the very least, American capitalists should know about the rule of law. “I never thought we would reach a moment when we would have to convince the United States of the obvious—that Venezuela needs a legitimate government, that we need elections, and that we need change.”

III.

There is a straightforward way for Venezuela to acquire a legitimate government, one that would reassure both oil companies and ordinary people that a stable political and social order will endure: The regime could hold an election or a referendum, and let people choose the next president.

The U.S. administration, which not only controls Venezuela’s most important sources of income but also holds the threat of further U.S. military action over the heads of Maduro’s former henchmen, could help make this happen. Indeed, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly said that it will. He has described a three-stage process: stabilization, recovery, and transition. With American encouragement, the regime and a part of the opposition—members of the last legislature recognized as legitimate, elected in 2015—have begun transition negotiations. Several people involved told me that although slow, the negotiations have been productive. In the first round, in August, discussions focused on reforming the supreme court, which slavishly followed the demands of the Maduro government, and which must be independent to ensure that the regime does not refuse to recognize an election result, as it has done in the past.

Unfortunately, many still aren’t convinced that the transition is real. In large part, this is because Trump’s description of Venezuela—a country where he says people are “really happy” and “dancing in the streets”—differs so dramatically from the reality they can see. But it’s also because Trump seems so enthusiastic about a status quo that includes Betancourt, Rodríguez, and a host of other figures from the past. A few days after meeting with Rodríguez on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, he described her as “very nice, very terrific,” without naming a date for elections. On September 2, when a reporter asked him about Venezuelan elections, Trump said, “I just don’t think they’re ready yet. You know, it’s very new.”

Is democracy in Venezuela “new”? Are Venezuelans “not ready”? This language sounds just as strange and discordant to Venezuelans as the talk of great wealth supposedly flowing in their direction. After all, they did have a presidential election, and not that long ago. In July 2024, when Rodríguez was the vice president, Maduro was the regime’s candidate. He lost decisively, even after stacking the cards in his favor. In the run-up to the vote, his regime disqualified María Corina Machado, who had been selected in a national primary, a decision she called “judicial criminality.” They also nixed her first-choice substitute before finally allowing Edmundo González, a retired diplomat, to run as her surrogate. Then they harassed his supporters, used state media to insult and demean them, and even arrested them for fake crimes.

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic

Venezuelan security forces form a barricade on the streets leading to Miraflores, the presidential palace in Caracas, as anti-government protesters demand the release of political prisoners. More than 320 remained incarcerated as of early October.

González won a landslide victory anyway, and the opposition could prove it. Anticipating that the regime might try to falsify the results, Machado and her team mobilized more than 600,000 volunteers to monitor polling stations and report irregularities using secure messaging apps. They collected and scanned the tally sheets produced by each voting machine, and uploaded them to a secure website, sometimes at great personal risk. In Antímano and La Vega, two barrios in western Caracas, I met community activists who regaled me with stories of that campaign. I was told of women who hid tally sheets in their underwear, of a man who stashed one underneath his toupee, of others who dressed as Maduro supporters to avoid being searched at the doors of polling stations. One local community leader told me that his 8-year-old son had gone around to polling stations on his bicycle and collected the printouts, knowing no one would suspect a child. Maybe Trump is “not ready” for democracy, but I met people in Antímano and La Vega who have fought for it longer and harder than most Americans.

The regime never published its own evidence. Instead, it declared victory and launched one of the most brutal repression campaigns in the country’s history. Security and paramilitary forces fanned out across the country, arresting thousands of people and killing dozens. Independent organizations, including humanitarian groups, were effectively banned.

If Venezuelans aren’t convinced that their country is making progress toward democracy, it’s also because the apparatus that carried out this wave of repression is still in place. Numbers differ, depending on who counts as a political prisoner, but as of early October, 920 to 1,110 of them have been released since January, while more than 320 remain incarcerated. I met some of their relatives, camped outside the U.S. embassy because they had given up on their own government and hoped that the Americans would help them. “Marco Rubio says there are no political prisoners,” one of them told me. “But the political prisoners are still behind bars.” As of early September, no one from the U.S. delegation had acknowledged or interacted with the families. These kinds of protesters still face risks too: In the second week of September, a man who had joined a march organized by the prisoners’ families was arrested, in public view, by men without uniforms.

Even among the political prisoners who have been released, hundreds are still, like Juan Pablo Guanipa, constantly followed, or else forced to report regularly at a courthouse, as if the regime were reminding them that they are only temporarily free. Perkins Rocha, a lawyer who was one of the opposition campaign’s representatives before the electoral council in 2024, is still under house arrest. Seized off the street a month after the election, Rocha, a bespectacled scholar of constitutional law, was charged with terrorism, treason, criminal association, incitement to hatred, and conspiracy. He was taken to the country’s most notorious prison, El Helicoide, where he spent two weeks in handcuffs, his head sometimes covered by a hood. After that, he spent many months in concrete rooms with no windows, sometimes shared by up to 20 people. Since his release in February, he has remained at home with an ankle bracelet, which he jokes is like “prison but with sunlight.” To visit him in his Caracas apartment, I had to check in with the policemen who stand in the lobby of his building and beside the elevator outside his front door. One of them took my name and wrote it on his hand.

But the most important reason Venezuelans doubt the prospects of a democratic transition is the long absence of Machado, the opposition leader. Machado went into hiding after the election, at an unknown location inside Venezuela. In December 2025, she finally escaped the country, taking a fishing boat to Curaçao, the Dutch island territory off the coast of Venezuela, before flying to Norway to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic

A protester holds a sign that says “Come back already Mari!”—a reference to the opposition leader, María Corina Machado.

In January of this year, Machado visited Trump at the White House, and she made what seemed to be a bid to win his favor, presenting him with her Nobel medal in appreciation of his “unique commitment” to Venezuelan freedom. But if she hoped that this would persuade him to throw American power behind her and the country’s democratic opposition, that doesn’t seem to have worked: Nearly a year later, Trump has not proposed a date for an election and Machado has remained stuck abroad, first in Washington, D.C., then in Panama.

Initially, the U.S. administration advised her not to go back: Her safety could not be guaranteed. Later, her attempts to return were blocked, and not only by the Rodríguez regime. Rubio did explicitly say—albeit in a Spanish-language interview, which Venezuelans would understand but his boss would not—that Machado has “every right to enter her country whenever she wants to return.” But private planes she has chartered have been refused landing rights, even by Curaçao and Aruba, another Dutch territory. A boat she hired mysteriously developed “engine trouble.” A commercial airline would not let her board.

Multiple people in Caracas told me that U.S. diplomats in the city describe Machado as a “problem.” Indeed, if the Trump administration’s most important goal is to cement oil deals with corrupt figures linked to Rodríguez, then perhaps she is. Machado has been clearer than others about the need to hold the regime accountable for past crimes. She has long argued that private companies should play a bigger role in the Venezuelan economy, a position that, ironically, puts her at odds with those in the U.S. administration who want to work with the Venezuelan state to extract resources.

I spoke with her while she was in Panama in early September, and she told me that her main concern, other than returning home, is that too many people, Americans included, do not “understand at all what is going on in Venezuela. Everything I hear is about conventional formulas for transition that take into account everyone’s interests and opinions except the people’s, as if the people did not matter.”

Both in Caracas and in Washington, there are clearly actors who aren’t that interested in “the people” or what they want. But if the U.S. government wants to carry out a transition without Machado, the attempt will backfire. If Betancourt is the country’s most famous symbol of past misrule and corruption, Machado remains the most famous symbol of a democratic future. Without her, no election will be legitimate, and legitimacy is a necessary part of ending the Venezuelan crisis. “There are 1.1 million Venezuelans living in the United States, and 65 percent are willing to come back,” Machado told me. “But they are not going to do it while the same regime that expelled them in the first place is still in power.” Legitimacy is required for the construction of a Venezuelan military that can cooperate with the U.S. in the fight against criminal networks in the region, instead of being part of them. And again, legitimacy is the missing ingredient in oil-market reform, the insurance that companies need before they will make long-term investments.

Even if Machado returns (as perhaps she will have done by the time you are reading this article), nobody imagines that the country’s path will be straightforward. In a busy open-plan office, crowded with people talking over small plastic cups of black coffee, I met Henry Alviárez, the national coordinator of Vente, Machado’s political party. Alviárez told me that after he was released from prison in February, Vente had to “rebuild everything—regroup, recover the organization, and recover our direction.” Vente started with 55,000 people, Alviárez said, and was up to 150,000 in September: “We now have structures throughout the country and in all municipalities, and according to the polls, we are the leading party in Venezuela.” It is planning to launch a national debate—using online platforms, social media, and town halls—about what Machado calls a “grand national agreement” to amend the constitution, the educational system, the health-care system, and more. Vente isn’t asking for an immediate election. But the party’s leaders at least want to know when one will take place so that they can plan.

Some do believe they should wait: wait for the influence of the Rodríguez regime to wane further; wait for the Trump administration to lose power; wait for the congressional Democrats and the Republicans who support Venezuelan democracy to take action; wait for more oil to start flowing. There are risks to a transition, after all. No one can be sure when the economy will start growing again, and a new government could be blamed if it doesn’t. But if waiting seemed like a good strategy six months ago, the risks are increasing quickly. Everything here looks normal, Alviárez said, gesturing at the people drinking coffee. But appearances of normality are deceptive: “There is a feeling of exhaustion and a desire for change that can only be channeled through a clear leadership and a clear objective. It can only be resolved if people finally have a date for elections. That could prevent a social explosion.”

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic

Oil pollution is so pervasive in Lake Maracaibo that fishermen sometimes rinse their catch with gasoline to remove the crude oil.

Some people, he told me, without naming names, “have said that María Corina is coming to destabilize the country. No. She is coming to channel that anger and conduct it toward a civic, peaceful process: an election.” After fighting Chavistas and their Russian, Iranian, and Cuban allies for so long, nobody in Venezuela’s historically pro-American democratic opposition ever expected a U.S. administration to stand in their way. But if it does, they are preparing to fight that obstacle too.

IV.

On June 24, two earthquakes shook Caracas, the seaside city of La Guaira, and several smaller towns along the coast. Suddenly, the risks of waiting became clear.

Within minutes of the quakes, several large apartment buildings collapsed, including a public-housing complex built by the Chávez regime for victims of a 1999 mudslide. Tens of thousands of other buildings were damaged. At least 6,500 people died (the full number is still unknown), more than 16,800 were injured, and about 17,000 became homeless.

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic

A 2-year-old child bathes outside her family’s tent at a camp for people displaced by the earthquakes, which left more than 17,000 Venezuelans homeless.

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic

Two sisters, both sick with chickenpox, live in a makeshift shelter at a beachside camp for displaced people. Heavy rains flooded the shelter the night before.

Some governments, even some authoritarian governments, rally during a crisis. In the face of this tragedy, the Venezuelan regime froze. Rodríguez has enough police officers to guard Perkins Rocha’s elevator. But she did not have enough soldiers, police, or rescue workers to dig Venezuelans out of the rubble, to offer people medical help and food, or to find homes for them in the days that followed.

I visited La Guaira, the city most badly affected, the week before school was scheduled to begin. No one I met in the refugee camps knew where their children were supposed to go, or whether studies would resume at all this year. One local school had been taken over by refugees who had no intention of relinquishing it, because they still had nowhere else to live. On the site of the collapsed public-housing complex, where bulldozers had finally arrived to take away the rubble, I met Ellie Solano, a bereaved mother who asked the men with machines to leave one part of the debris untouched, because she knew it lay on top of a sports field where her son had been playing. Two months after the disaster, she was searching for his corpse, digging in the early mornings and in the evenings, when it wasn’t too hot.

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic

Volunteers and relatives dig through rubble in search of the bodies of missing loved ones after back-to-back earthquakes flattened entire neighborhoods.

Over the course of a day in La Guaira, I asked everyone I met how long it had taken for a government official to offer help after the earthquake. Some said four days. Some said five. Some thought it had been more. “We didn’t see policemen. No army, no nothing,” one woman told me. “It was people helping people, neighbors helping neighbors, and like that, many, many days.”

It still is. Just as grassroots movements emerged in Ukraine to support the army after the 2022 Russian invasion, many different kinds of voluntary organizations suddenly appeared in La Guaira after the earthquakes. Some, like Alimenta la Solidaridad, a charity founded a decade ago, had deep roots in the community already. Before 2024, Alimenta had more than 200 soup kitchens around the country. After the election, the regime restricted the activity of independent organizations and Alimenta had to shut down the kitchens. But the group revived itself after the earthquakes, reasoning that the situation had changed and, as Juan Andrés Saavedra, one of the group’s leaders, told me, “the government didn’t exist.” Saavedra now organizes teams of volunteers who bring food every day to several sites, including the refugee camp inside the school.

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic

Skarlys Rodríguez looks through a classroom door at a school in La Guaira that has been converted into a temporary shelter for families displaced by the earthquakes. Rodríguez runs the shelter.

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic

Children gather for free lunch at a community kitchen.

In some societies, the absence of the state leads to anarchy. In others, people organize themselves instead. Venezuela is one of those countries, as Machado herself told me in an interview in December 2024. Even when she was in hiding, even when the political situation was at its most dire, Machado was certain that the experience of election organization had brought about “anthropological change,” forging connections among people from different parts of society, inspiring them to want to reform their country from the bottom up.

Nearly two years later, Venezuelans kept telling me the same thing. One young woman, a political activist who had left the country and only recently returned, told me that the earthquakes and the chaos that followed were a sobering reminder of the lessons learned during the 2024 election campaign: The government won’t save us; the Americans won’t save us; we have to work together.

“We are on our own,” she said.

A photo caption in this article originally described a group of Venezuelans playing checkers by flashlight during a rolling blackout. In fact, they were playing dominoes. The article appears in the December 2026 print edition with the headline “After the Apocalypse.”

Decoupling From the U.S. Is Awkward

2026-10-19T07:00:00-04:00

Suddenly, Canada is in the middle of a defense boom. Like other NATO countries that have skimped on their armed forces for decades, Canada is trying to quickly build up its military in the face of both rising international-security threats and a White House that regularly treats friends like foes. In the absence of trustworthy American leadership, many allies are working to become more self-reliant. But this is easier said than done, especially for Canada, which has enmeshed its own self-defense with the U.S. military more than any other American ally.

Since 1957, when Canada and the United States established the North American Aerospace Defense Command to jointly defend the continent during the Cold War, the Canadian military has grown closer to America’s. The otherwise small and underfunded Canadian Armed Forces is structured to deploy alongside its U.S. counterparts and to interoperate seamlessly with them. This has allowed Canada to make valuable military contributions in both countries’ interest at relatively low cost.

Until Donald Trump’s return to the White House, few in Canada were worried about how deeply intertwined the two militaries had become. Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government had contracted for billions of dollars’ worth of American-made military capabilities, including new surveillance planes, the combat system on Canada’s new warships, and 88 F-35 fighter aircraft. These investments have spared Canada the cost of developing cutting-edge equipment and allowed Canadian forces to operate interchangeably with the U.S. military. As long as the United States remained a benign ally, Canada was getting a great deal.

[Vivian Salama: America’s allies are no longer waiting for Trump to leave]

Trump has shaken Canadian thinking. His repeated talk of making Canada the 51st U.S. state and his jokes about “Governor Trudeau” went from weird to worrisome, and his unprovoked trade war has hurt Canadian businesses and consumers. Early last year, in one of his final speeches as prime minister, Trudeau warned that Trump wants “to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us.” Canada’s longtime military and economic partner had suddenly become a threat.

Trudeau’s successor, Prime Minister Mark Carney, has responded in part by trying to appease Trump. He has addressed long-standing American complaints about Canada’s limited defense spending and has emphasized the importance of continued military cooperation. Carney has increased Canada’s military expenditures to 2 percent of the country’s GDP and agreed to Trump’s demand that NATO countries spend at least 5 percent of their GDP on defense by 2035. Carney has also said that his government is in talks about taking part in Trump’s plans for a Golden Dome missile-defense system. Even amid the tariff fight, Carney has been trying to win the president over by pitching a vision of deeper economic integration with the U.S.—a so-called Fortress North America—to help push back against China’s economic influence. Carney’s defense minister reportedly told the U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that Canada is “moving in lockstep” with the U.S. on continental defense.

Yet Carney is also trying to reduce Canada’s dependence on the U.S. military. He announced last year that “new security threats” necessitated “the biggest investments in our military in generations.” Instead of spending more than 70 percent of the country’s military-capital budget on American equipment, his government plans to route 70 percent of Canada’s defense contracts to Canadian firms within a decade. His government has also been diversifying Canada’s industrial partnerships by negotiating new agreements with European and Pacific allies. This has included selecting a Swedish airborne-surveillance early-warning aircraft instead of an American one, and rethinking that fleet of F-35s—perhaps buying some Swedish Saab Gripen fighters instead.

Most Canadians applaud these efforts, according to polls. And domestic firms are poised to benefit; core defense spending is projected to grow from about $64 billion in 2025 to $160 billion by 2035. But there are good reasons to question whether these ambitions will become a reality. The spending that Carney has pledged would normally be unthinkable during peacetime, and the country will struggle to meet these promises without new taxes, cuts to social programs, or serious debt. Carney has not said how his government will finance these plans through 2035, and the public has not had to make any sacrifices so far.

Another problem is that Canada’s defense industry is neither large nor self-sufficient. Canadian firms will need time to expand their production to deliver Canadian-made capabilities. Those capital costs require access to long-term contracts, not grand political pronouncements.

Even if Carney figures out how to pay for this domestic military buildup, Canada’s dependence on the U.S. military runs so deep, and has been entrenched over so many decades, that pivoting away will involve more than just a few years of strategic spending. Canada cannot mount a major military operation overseas without American support and, like most NATO allies, is utterly reliant on the United States for core capabilities in communications, command and control networks, intelligence, and other areas. Developing non-American alternatives will require unprecedented levels of investment and cooperation among Canada and European NATO allies.

Mounting threats from China and Russia make the challenges of disentangling from the U.S. military only more profound. Despite simmering tensions with the U.S., the defense of North America will always be a joint endeavor, with Washington in the lead.

The Trump administration has already shown that it is willing to use the continental-defense relationship to rebuke its northern neighbor. In May, the U.S. suspended its participation in a joint board for continental defense that dates back to World War II, partly in response to Carney’s widely praised speech at Davos in which he warned that “the rules-based order is fading.” This was troubling for Canada, which is ostensibly on equal footing with the U.S. in well-established continental-defense institutions. If the larger, more powerful U.S. demands that the continent’s defense requires the exclusive use of American equipment, such as the F-35 or U.S.-made surveillance planes, Canada’s options may be limited.

[Chrystia Freeland: The art of dealing with Trump]

Notwithstanding escalating political and economic tensions between the two neighbors, Canada has been quietly keeping its relationship with the U.S. military steady. Intelligence sharing, military exchanges, and North American air-defense cooperation are operating as normal. Most of the Canadian military leaders I’ve spoken with assume that the relationship between the two countries will largely recover when Trump is no longer in office. Defense planners in both countries recognize the importance of continued cooperation, regardless of tariffs or hostile rhetoric.

Trump may not single-handedly undo decades of close military cooperation between Canada and the U.S., but his presidency has certainly forced America’s northern neighbor to be less trusting and complacent. Canada may not be able to fully divest itself from the U.S. military, but relying too heavily on American defense cooperation and goodwill no longer seems wise. Fixing this problem will require more time and money than Canadians are typically willing to spend, but Canadians appear at least willing to pay this price if it will deliver better security for themselves.

Iran’s ‘Anti-Imperialism’ Is a Dead End

2026-10-17T07:00:00-04:00

What has the Islamic Republic done for Iranians? Under its rule, citizens have suffered decades of economic decline, sociopolitical repression, and international isolation. Now the country is engaged in an open-ended war. In almost every way, Iranians are doing much worse than they were 20 years ago.

Not even the regime’s propagandists can deny these realities. Many of them therefore insist that the Islamic Republic’s failures are justified by its unbending resistance to American imperialism. Nearly all of Iran’s economic suffering, defenders say, can be explained as the price of this heroic stance, to which the West has responded with sanctions that have crushed Iran’s standard of living.

But the story of the Islamic Republic’s relationship to American power, and of how that relationship has and has not served the cause of Iranian sovereignty, is more complicated.

Iran’s prerevolutionary ruler, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was an anti-communist autocrat who prized ties with the United States. His successors condemned him as an American stooge and claimed to have freed Iran from its slavish dependence on the “Great Satan.” In its early days, the Islamic Republic signaled independence from both the Soviet Union and the United States with the slogan “Neither East nor West,” which still adorns the facade of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs headquarters in Tehran. The foundational anti-imperialism of the new regime was also a promise that Iran would fight for the “oppressed of the world,” as well as a call to resist cultural absorption by the West—a fate one revolutionary intellectual decried as “Westoxification.”

[Read: The battle for Hormuz is not the war]

The Islamic Republic has failed in its anti-imperialism by all of these measures, especially as compared with the monarchy. Pahlavi was an American ally who owed his throne in part to a CIA-abetted coup that elevated him over a popular prime minister in 1953. But he sustained Iran’s independence by skillfully playing the United States and its rivals, the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, off of each other when doing so suited Iranian interests. The Soviets helped build Iran’s ironworks and welcomed the shah as a rare royal to pay a state visit to Communist Moscow. Pahlavi’s slogan could well have been “Both East and West.”

The shah backed the United States in some Cold War battles, but he also threatened to sign security deals with Moscow when he wanted better terms from Washington, and he offered to mediate the conflicts in the Middle East and in Vietnam. In most ways, Pahlavi’s foreign policy was closer to that of the Non-Aligned Movement countries than to that of either Cold War bloc. In the ’70s, scholars of Iranian foreign policy described Tehran as following “defacto non-alignment.” By the end of the shah’s rule, Iran had considerable international influence and was respected by both superpowers, not only as a sovereign country, but also as a regional power. You might even say that Pahlavi was a successful anti-imperialist—not in the sense of having stuck a finger in the eye of the great powers, but in the sense of having effectively secured Iran’s sovereign interests rather than being forced to capitulate to those he cooperated with.

The revolutionaries who toppled the shah accused him of servility to Washington. They pointed to the coup that had cemented his power in 1953 and halted the nationalization of Iran’s oil resources. But in fact the monarchy had restored Iran’s sovereignty over its oil industry in 1973. They pointed to a 1964 agreement with the United States, ratified by the Iranian Parliament, that gave U.S. military personnel immunity from local prosecution. But such agreements were common around the world and hardly represented Iran’s “capitulation,” as its critics claimed. The shah was in any case far from passive in his relationship with Washington and worked to improve his position.

The monarchy’s foreign policy belonged to a long tradition of efforts to extend Iran’s independence. Well before 1979, Iran had spent centuries fending off the designs of the British and Russian empires. Standing up for the country’s sovereignty was the work of generations of Iranian statesmen, just as it was for their counterparts in other countries of the global South. But not every Iranian government has been equally successful at it. The one that came to power in 1979—the Islamic Republic—has been manifestly terrible.

The Islamic Republic has not prioritized classic anti-imperialist goals. Among these is improving the economic position of postcolonial states, as set forth in the New International Economic Order that the United Nations General Assembly adopted in 1974 (and that Iran voted for). The Iranian government since 1979 has rarely prioritized such goals. The former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reportedly boasted that he didn’t care about his people’s welfare, just about how religious they were. (His office has denied this.) He thus preferred to fight the West rather than attend to his people’s needs—even basic ones, as, for example, in 2021, when he refused to import COVID-19 vaccines from the United States, a decision that likely cost thousands of Iranian lives.

The Islamic Republic has pursued an ideological campaign against the United States and other Western countries, not just for being imperialist, but also for being, according to Iran’s Islamist standards, licentious and morally depraved. Iran’s rulers frame these objections as opposition to cultural imperialism, but in practice they have become a pretext for domestic repression. The regime’s austere, draconian version of Islam is less a celebration of Iran’s endogenous culture than a suppression of its traditional creativity.

In the name of anti-imperialism, Iran has quixotically attacked the international order without making it any fairer for itself or others. In fact, Iran’s actions have put the country at the mercy of foreign powers. The Islamic Republic committed itself to the pursuit of a nuclear program, on the grounds that this would buttress its sovereignty and demonstrate its independence from imperial diktats. Instead, its nuclear intransigence incurred sanctions from the United States and Europe as well as the UN Security Council, with support from Russia and China. Iran’s involvement in terrorism and international crime (including drug running and counterfeiting) has made it one of only three countries, alongside Myanmar and North Korea, on the blacklist of the Paris-based anti-money-laundering outfit Financial Action Task Force. These measures have interfered with Iran’s ability to collect payments for its energy exports, even from friendly countries, such as neighboring Iraq. Sanctions have so weakened Iran’s position in trade that it is selling its oil at a discount to China.

The regime’s proponents will argue that the country is a victim of foreign-imposed sanctions. But the sanctions are the result of Tehran’s choices, which have prized refusal and defiance over actually improving Iran’s stake in the international order vis-à-vis the great powers that might seek to dominate it. The world abounds in examples of better strategies. Many of those involve sustaining ties with competing superpowers as a hedge against domination by any one of them. Nonaligned countries such as India, heir to a proud tradition of opposing colonial dominance, have pursued this course. Turkey remains a key NATO ally, but it has managed to play an independent role in Ukraine while maintaining relations with Russia and the United States. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have aligned with the West on many issues while nurturing significant trade ties with China. Even Argentina’s right-wing president has toned down his anti-China rhetoric for economic reasons.

[Read: Fighting Israel to the last Palestinian]

In contrast, Iran’s foreign policy remains ideologically defined, and the country suffers from what the political scientist Mohiaddin Mesbahi has called “strategic loneliness.” At the outset, the revolutionary regime rejected both East and West. But in recent years, it has tried to draw closer to Beijing, only to discover that China sees Western allies, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and even Israel, as better investment prospects. Until this year, Iran’s closest partner was the socialist government of Venezuela—but that was an alliance of desperation, born of both regimes’ isolation. Then the Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro was overthrown by the United States.

Iran has failed to secure effective sovereignty for itself and to deliver on its promise of reducing imperial dominance globally. Instead of helping the “oppressed,” it has become a scourge to the sovereignty of other countries. Throwing away Iran’s traditional policy of neutrality in foreign conflicts, Khamenei robustly backed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and equipped Moscow with Iranian drones. Iran has also played an imperialist role in its own region by funding and arming militias in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza, and Syria, and by intervening in several Arab civil wars.

The Islamic Republic still claims to stand in principled opposition to imperialism, now on the grounds that it has withstood an American and Israeli assault without capitulating. But the claim rings hollow for Iranians, who have reaped no dividends from this great resistance and now must endure a devastating war with no end in sight. That’s hardly a win for Iranian sovereignty.

What the Loss of Starshield Revealed

2026-10-16T10:22:48-04:00

Starlink and its military-grade counterpart, Starshield, have become indispensable to Ukraine’s armed forces. That much became clear this week, when a sudden outage plunged Ukraine’s air defenses into semidarkness. As one Ukrainian officer told Politico, “This is comparable to a nuclear strike against us. All operations are on hold.”

Ukraine uses Starshield to control drones via secure internet. These include interceptor drones as well as other short- and medium-range drones inside Ukraine. This week, Starshield connectivity abruptly cut out as soon as Ukrainian drones and vehicles began to move faster than 100 miles an hour (and, in some cases, well short of that threshold), making the interception of incoming Russian fire virtually impossible.

As of Thursday morning, Starshield service was reportedly restored. But the outage revealed a vulnerability that hasn’t gone away. Russia has been hitting Ukrainian energy infrastructure with drones and missiles every winter since the war began and has made clear that it intends to begin targeting water infrastructure as well. Ukraine’s primary counter to Russian drones has been a fleet of small, cheap, fast drones controlled remotely by operators on the ground using Starshield. Without access to these high-speed data links, Ukraine loses most of its defensive capability.

[Read: Zelensky asked Trump for a favor from Elon Musk]

Without Starshield, Ukraine also loses its “middle strike” capability. The military deploys drones to hit moving targets as near as 20 and as far as 125 miles behind the front lines, with the goal of disrupting Russian logistics, particularly by destroying fuel trucks. Ukraine has been blowing up more than 700 supply trucks a month, leaving Russian troops short on fuel and other necessities.

To a lesser extent, the throttling of data could also affect Ukraine’s front-line tactics, which involve the use of drones against infantry and small vehicles near the front. This week, some reports suggested that data cut out for vehicles moving as slowly as 45 miles an hour, which could include short-range drones chasing down motorcycles, trucks, and all-terrain vehicles carrying Russian troops.

The importance to the warring armies of Starlink, Starshield’s civilian cousin, has already been demonstrated. In February, SpaceX shut down Russia’s pirated access to Starlink in Ukraine, and the effects were immediate: Communication between distant outposts and field units collapsed, forcing Russian troops into a chaotic retreat coordinated by radio and other unreliable wired alternatives. Thousands of these pirated Russian Starlink terminals continued to try to connect to the network, and in doing so gave away their position to the Ukrainians. This became actionable intelligence for artillery strikes and psychological disruption.

The chaos coincided with a change in fortunes for Russia, as its gains in Ukraine ground to a halt and were even reversed. Since then, the front lines have been practically frozen, with neither side decisively gaining or losing ground. Russia is scrambling to develop its own version of Starlink but is years away from implementing it.

The timing, abruptness, and severity of this week’s disruption invite questions—most obvious, about who was responsible and why. SpaceX has adjusted Starlink’s maximum operating speed in the past, bringing it down from 550 miles an hour to 450 at the end of last year, and then capping standard plans to a strict 100 miles an hour in March. Starshield satellites and government services, however, are owned and controlled by the American government. Some news outlets have reported that this week’s sudden speed cap came from SpaceX, but Elon Musk indicated on X that the ultimate decision lay with President Trump. A Reuters report last night confirmed that the order originated inside the White House.

The limitation came at a time when U.S.-Ukrainian relations are at a nadir. Trump has publicly blamed Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for high diesel prices in the United States. He points to Ukrainian strikes on Russian refining facilities, despite the far greater likelihood that the price hikes are tied to America’s war in the Middle East, and he has demanded that Ukraine hold new elections to replace Zelensky. He also claimed to have negotiated an “energy ceasefire ,” in which Ukraine would stop attacking Russian petroleum facilities in exchange for Russia ceasing to attack Ukrainian energy infrastructure. Russia effectively rejected this offer and continued to hit Ukrainian electrical facilities. Over roughly the same period, Trump announced a surprise deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to supply more than 4 million metric tons of Russian diesel to U.S. and global markets.

[Read: Ukraine may be just the ally America needs]

The Starshield decision was likely meant to pressure Ukraine into complying with U.S. demands to stop hitting Russian oil facilities, so that the president could be seen as bringing fuel prices down before the midterm elections. But why, then, would the administration call for Starshield to be switched back on?

Maybe Trump sought to avoid a showdown over the decision in Congress. Maybe the idea was just to scare the Ukrainians and not to actually destroy them. Or just as likely, Elon Musk, who has spent $366 million on Republican campaigns in 2026, could have let the White House know he was unhappy with actions that might lead Starshield clients to seek alternatives to his products.

Surely other defense-industry leaders and U.S. allies were also alarmed. Messing with Ukraine’s defensive capabilities doesn’t cause problems for just Kyiv: Poland and Germany supply and pay for Ukraine’s Starlink and Starshield terminals, and these are directly pertinent to Poland’s defense. Russian drones have repeatedly breached the Polish border, many of them passing first through Ukrainian airspace. The episode signaled something that many American allies already feared: that U.S.-made military technology could become a liability to those who depend on it.

Starshield is reportedly back online, and so are Ukraine’s operations, for now. But the incident puts all American allies on notice: Developing homegrown technology, however expensive, may be better than relying on SpaceX and the United States.

Saudi Arabia Is Running Out of Options

2026-10-14T11:43:35-04:00

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Sometimes, disasters can be clarifying. Not so long ago, the Houthi warriors who have ruled northern Yemen for the past decade seemed more like a nuisance to Saudi Arabia than a threat. The Saudi leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was busy glad-handing with tech bros and AI executives, talking up the kingdom’s future as a tourism destination. Then, on Saturday, a Houthi missile struck two terminals in the Saudi capital’s main airport, sending fire and smoke through the halls and causing ceiling tiles to collapse on terrified passengers. Pilgrims making their way to Mecca rolled their suitcases through trails of blood.

Although Houthi strikes are not new in the kingdom, Saturday’s attack on the Riyadh airport, which killed 13 people and wounded hundreds, signaled something different. The Houthis apparently have the ability to evade the kingdom’s dwindling supply of missile interceptors by launching coordinated waves of drone swarms, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles. Saudi Arabia is now a country where the ruler must shuttle among palaces equipped with underground bunkers.

“Total disbelief,” a friend in Riyadh told me. “I don’t think people thought this could happen to them.”

Saudi Arabia cannot realize the crown prince’s dreams of economic and social transformation—or even continue luring foreign investors—if this kind of mayhem becomes routine. But the Houthis have become ever more intransigent, and the limits of Saudi Arabia’s ability to contain them ever more apparent.

[Read: The Houthis have a rich sense of irony and timing]

“It is starting to look as if there is no diplomatic third way,” Adam Baron, a fellow at the New America Foundation, in Washington, who specializes in Yemen and the Gulf, told me. “The Saudis will have to try to push the Houthis back militarily or accept a settlement that essentially leaves the Houthis in control of Yemen.”

Both of those possibilities are risky. Experience has taught the Saudis that only a sustained ground offensive will make real headway against the Houthis, who have survived multiple bombing campaigns over the past decade, including last year’s seven-week air war by the United States. But the Saudis don’t have a ground force equal to the task. They depend on the perennially divided armed forces commanded by Yemen’s weak, internationally recognized government, based in the country’s south.

Last month, the Houthis captured the area around the Bab al-Mandab Strait, a crucial conduit for global oil supplies, and the Saudis responded by coordinating a new offensive to recapture the lost terrain. That effort has had mixed results; the Saudi-backed forces retook some ground, but the Houthis have unleashed a new level of firepower at the kingdom, including the strikes on the Riyadh airport.

The Saudis hope to build a larger military coalition against the Houthis and have held talks with the leaders of Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey. But those countries have made clear that their support goes only so far. They might be willing to help defend the kingdom’s borders in the event of a major ground incursion (one of the nightmare scenarios being discussed in Riyadh), but they will not become involved in a war to recapture northern Yemen.

This reluctance is rooted in history: The Turks suffered legendary defeats in Yemen in the 17th and 19th centuries. Egypt got drawn into a civil war in Yemen in the 1960s—a draining conflict that has been called Egypt’s Vietnam.

The Saudis could instead seek some kind of settlement with the Houthis in exchange for peace, but this seems equally elusive. The United Nations has been mediating talks in Yemen since 2012. It helped negotiate a 2022 truce that ended a seven-year war between the Houthis and a Saudi-led coalition. But the Houthis, who adhere to a revolutionary ideology rooted in an offshoot of Shiite Islam, have grown steadily more aggressive in their demands.

Although the Houthis are fiercely independent and have their own ideas about ruling Yemen, their strategy appears to be carefully coordinated with Iran, which is still locked in its own struggle against Israel and the United States. Tehran has helped train and arm the Houthis over the years, and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps advisers are widely said to be taking part in the current fighting. The Houthis appear to be using fiber optics supplied by China to build a far more sophisticated drone force. All of this makes any kind of reliable settlement with the Houthis more difficult to achieve.

[Graeme Wood: The only thing the Houthis have done successfully]

“If you listen to the speeches by Houthi leaders, they basically say there is no such thing as Saudi Arabia—they see the kingdom as totally illegitimate and want to see it fall,” Bernard Haykel, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Princeton University and an expert on Saudi Arabia and Yemen, told me. “And unfortunately, they are able to draw on a deep well of resentment against the role that Saudi Arabia has historically played in Yemen.”

In recent months, the Houthis have stepped up their demands, insisting that the Saudis withdraw all support from the internationally recognized government in the south, lift all sanctions, and pay reparations. But they have a long-standing habit of moving the goalposts in negotiations.

“What would it take to placate the Houthis?” Haykel asked. “Can you live with them?”

Many Saudis fear the answer is no. But the alternative is a war that could turn the whole country into a battleground.

The French Are Very Worried, and That’s Making Things Worse

2026-10-10T07:00:00-04:00

In 2017, when French voters first elected Emmanuel Macron as president, pundits hailed him as the antidote to their nation’s “decline.” The term, in the parlance of that moment, seemed to encompass a condition that was not just economic and cultural but existential: France, as an idea and ideal, was decaying as surely as its national debt was deepening.

Nearly 10 years later, as Macron’s second presidential term comes to an end, the French are nearly unanimous in their belief that their country is still on a downward slope. In a recent Ipsos-BVA poll, 85 percent of French respondents said that France was in decline, and 98 percent were dissatisfied with the present state of the country.

One might have seen such numbers in the spring of 1789, if opinion polls had existed then. In that prerevolutionary time, France was burdened with staggering debt, skyrocketing prices, and in a sclerotic state overseen by a clueless and corrupt elite. Today similar factors, together with the memory of past glory, are driving the public’s belief that France’s Fifth Republic is faltering. And declinism, in turn, seems to be fueling the rise of extremist radicals intent on remaking the republic itself.

Gallic morosity might be easy to dismiss. After all, few peoples are more inclined toward claims of national decay than the French. Members of the country’s political and intellectual elite point to auguries of its descent throughout the 19th and 20th centuries—a sweep of time punctuated by the rise and fall of authoritarian states (whether Bonapartist or Pétainist) and republican governments (from the Second to the Fifth). Charles de Gaulle’s assertion that France could not be France without la grandeur could be said to channel a certain anxiety as much as pride.

Soon after de Gaulle’s death in 1970, le déclinisme was again on the rise. Thirty years of economic growth came to an end with the global energy shocks and financial crises of that period. In 1976, the distinctly non-Gaullist president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, declared that France was no longer a fully autonomous power as it had been in the past, but was instead what commentators have described as a “world middle power”—an observation that angered his opponents across the political spectrum. An influx of immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East had helped fuel decades of industrial growth; they then became scapegoats for growing fears over national decline and disintegration.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Our oldest ally]

As the 20th century gave way to the 21st, this French fixation expanded and darkened. Following Robert Frank’s fine historical account La hantise du déclin (The Obsession With Decline), published in 1994, came works such as Nicolas Baverez’s wildly polemical 2003 tract, La France qui tombe (Falling France). And then the public appetite for books proclaiming the End Times for France grew fiercer. Pundits furiously supplied the grim prognoses—most notoriously Éric Zemmour, who a little more than a decade ago published his best-selling Le suicide français, which married xenophobic rage to potted history. The book boosted the “Great Replacement” theory, which claims that Western elites are enabling great waves of Muslim immigrants to replace les français de souche—the loaded term for those of “purely French heritage.”

Zemmour went on to found a political movement named Reconquête!, a heavy-handed reference to the medieval “reconquest” by Catholic rulers of Moorish Spain. The party remains politically marginal, but its message—that France’s immigration policies amount to national suicide—has gone mainstream. The current justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, recently proposed a three-year moratorium on legal immigration, declaring that France has reached “the limit of our capacities for integration and assimilation” of immigrants. This view, and the moratorium idea, have the approval of 63 percent of the public, judging from a CSA Institute opinion poll conducted in May.

Those numbers partly explain Marine Le Pen’s remarkable lead in polling for next spring’s presidential election. The movement she inherited from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, then called the National Front, once gathered neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and die-hard supporters of the French colonial administration of Algeria. Now called National Rally, the party mainly demonizes Muslims in place of Jews as the source of all of France’s ills. But just last week, the party’s president, Jordan Bardella, was revealed to have spent his late teens marinating in the writings of the Holocaust denialist Alain Soral. In line with her party’s ethno-nationalist ideals, Le Pen promises a policy that she calls a “national priority,” which would give French citizens preferential treatment over noncitizens for an array of social benefits, and she has said she’d be willing to change the constitution by referendum.

The most recent Ifop-Fudicial poll, published on September 30, put Le Pen in the lead with 31 to 36 percent support. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the founder of the extreme-left party France Unbowed, is fighting for second place, at 14 to 17 percent. Like Le Pen, Mélenchon has pledged to disobey certain European Union regulations that infringe on French sovereignty; also like her, he seems to trust Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky less than Russian President Vladimir Putin; and, along with some members of Le Pen’s party, he enjoys flirting with anti-Semitic tropes. Both candidates exercise full control of the parties they either created or re-created and seem to satisfy the public’s broad desire, according to a 2019 Ipsos poll, for a “strong leader who will break the rules.”

Le Pen, the reactionary, and Mélenchon, the revolutionary, share a common goal: to bury the French Republic in its current form. Mélenchon seeks to replace the hybrid regime of the Fifth Republic, which fuses presidential and parliamentary institutions, with a Sixth Republic dominated solely by Parliament. Le Pen’s “national priority” would undermine the universalist foundation of French republicanism—and imposing it by referendum would elevate that instrument as a means of circumventing the legislature.

For French voters repelled by both extremes, the prospects are grim. Their predicament stems from a decision President Macron made in 2024. His party, Renaissance, and other centrist parties took a beating in elections for the European Parliament that year. Infuriated, Macron dissolved the National Assembly and called for snap elections. Rather than the usual face-off between the traditional right and left, three blocs of roughly equal size emerged: the remnants of Renaissance, the National Rally, and a hastily slapped-together coalition of left-wing parties—France Unbowed, Communists, Socialists, and the Ecologists—that purported to form a “republican rampart” against Le Pen.

Personality clashes have since reduced the republican rampart to rubble, allowing the National Rally and France Unbowed to solidify their places in the polls while a now-lame-duck president has meanwhile presided over a series of flailing governments that can’t seem to pass a budget through Parliament. The National Assembly has been paralyzed, and a host of politicians have tossed their hat into the ring for the upcoming presidential election. The first round of votes will happen on April 18 and, in the extremely likely case of no candidate winning a majority, the second round will take place on May 2. At last count, 34 presidential candidates have declared themselves, mostly from the center left and center right. Several others, including former President François Hollande and former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, are testing the waters.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: The violence sweeping France was never really about schools]

The proliferation of candidates attests to the fragmentation of a political landscape that once neatly divided into left and right. It is a sign not of healthy competition but of democratic fragmentation: This multitude of candidates, most with relatively few supporters, will ultimately help secure the second-round election for one of the two contenders who represent the greatest danger to democracy in France.

The growing prospect of this face-off reinforces a widespread perception of decline—of a nation not just reduced to the ranks of middle powers, but where the political center no longer holds. This explains, in part, what the Le Monde columnist Solenn de Royer describes as “a spirit of defeatism” now haunting French politics. During an August visit to a town in southern France, Macron adopted that language, urging a small crowd to resist “the rampant spirit of defeatism,” whether in response to recent wildfires or in politics. A few weeks later, two well-known establishment political figures, the conservative Xavier Bertrand and the socialist Bernard Cazeneuve, joined forces to press their followers not to give in to despair in response to Le Pen’s seemingly irresistible rise.

The call to resist such fatalism has been sounded before in France—from within the walls of the Paris Commune of 1871, and across the trenches of World War I. A presentiment of decline was thought to fuel pacifism in the interwar period, and de Gaulle decried such thinking in his BBC address in 1940. But perhaps no one in France has offered greater insight into the declinist mentality, and greater courage to combat it, than Marc Bloch, the historian who chronicled France’s defeat by Nazi Germany, in 1940. He attributed the debacle in part to an elite “only too ready to despair of the country they had been called upon to defend, and of the people who furnished the soldiers they commanded.”

More than 80 years later, the problem is less that France’s political elite is ready to despair of the country than that the nation is ready to despair of its political elite.

Reducing the Number of Generals Isn’t the Problem

2026-10-08T07:00:00-04:00

The self-styled secretary of war strode confidently across the stage as he outlined his vision for America’s armed forces. He spoke of establishing an autonomous warfare command and an office of religious affairs, of developing preferred relationships with select universities, of reducing the number of senior officers by 20 percent, and of creating an external team of civilians to chart the future of warfare. Unlike last year, when the senior officers Pete Hegseth called to order in Quantico responded with silent stoicism, this year the junior officers and enlisted troops he addressed gave him a standing ovation.

Some of Hegseth’s supporters have compared him to George Marshall, the legendary U.S. Army chief of staff who reshaped that service before World War II, because Marshall relieved at least 600 senior officers of their positions. He defended the choice on the grounds that “most of our senior officers on such duty are deadwood and should be eliminated from the service as rapidly as possible.” Only 11 of 42 generals retained their commands for combat; only one was given a top command during the war.

But the taciturn, disciplined Marshall would never have crowed that “the ideological clowns are out. The patriotic cowboys are in, with testosterone testing on top,” or suggested that journalists who criticized a military mission were guilty of treason, both of which Hegseth did in his speech. And this is just the beginning of what makes the comparison both ridiculous and patently self-serving for Hegseth.

Marshall had to create a wartime military from an Army that hadn’t fought in 20 years. Hegseth is leading a military that has been at war for more than 25 years. Marshall’s judgments were trained on his long experience in important positions inside the military hierarchy. Hegseth sits in judgment of an officer corps that found his performance wanting at a fairly junior level of leadership. Marshall evaluated combat capabilities through rigorous field experiments known as the Louisiana Maneuvers, in which officers tested new technology, such as tanks, and were assessed by experienced officers. Hegseth proposes to test combat fitness largely through a two-hour written exam administered by an ideologue drummed out of service for insubordination. Marshall gained congressional authorization before enacting his program. Hegseth’s comportment has drawn articles of impeachment from a congressman of his own political party.

[Listen: The military Pete Hegseth wants]

What Marshall and Hegseth do have in common is that their plans for radically reshaping the military begin with selecting its senior leadership. In Marshall’s day—he was appointed chief of staff in 1939—seniority, meaning time in service, was the main criterion for promotion. But technological advances had increased the Army’s mobility and firepower, and Marshall believed that more imaginative leadership was needed to make the adjustment. At the time, the U.S. Army was rated the world’s 19th-largest fighting force, behind Portugal’s and just ahead of Bulgaria’s.

Marshall established a two-part system of officer evaluation. First, a board of ranking veterans, selected by Marshall for their rigor and judgment, would review the officers’ records. Then the commanders would undergo a demanding field test to evaluate performance in combat conditions. The processes Marshall put in place—merit-based evaluation boards, an up-or-out promotion system, rotations through field testing at a national training center—produced the military leadership that Hegseth is culling.

The U.S. military is, in fact, top-heavy. Congress has authorized 857 general and flag officers for a force of only about 1.35 million active-duty personnel and 771,200 reservists. The National Defense Authorization Act of 2024 called for the armed forces to study the possibility of drawing down the number of such officers, and in 2025, Hegseth directed a minimum 10 percent reduction in general officer billets, and a minimum 20 percent reduction in both four-star and National Guard generals. In his State of the Force speech, Hegseth raised the level to 20 percent, with a deadline of January 2027—just about 90 days from the announcement—while also establishing a new four-star command.

An organization as large as the U.S. military no doubt can, and perhaps even should, cut back its senior management. The proportion of generals has increased by 31 percent over the past 50 years, as have the responsibilities, as the American way of war has come to rely more and more on technology, joint operations, leadership of coalition forces, and managing and reporting on financial resources. Some responsibilities have also migrated from the one- and two-star levels up to the three- and four-star levels, and these could be forced back down the grade structure.

[Missy Ryan: The ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ theory of Pete Hegseth]

But the way Hegseth is doing his job does not merit the benefit of the doubt that was accorded to Marshall—an officer so concerned about even the appearance of political favoritism that he declined to vote. Hegseth, by contrast, claims that he’s eradicating political bias from the military but is in fact importing the culture wars into the force in a way that damages both the military and the public’s trust in it.

He convenes troops for partisan purposes. At the Quantico meeting, he distributed a collection of his speeches titled “The War Department Field Manual.” He relieved or coerced into retirement without explanation 23 senior officers, and in at least two cases replaced them with dramatically less qualified successors. He removed 80 officers from merit-based promotion lists, and precipitated the resignation in protest of the secretary of the Army. He attempted to censure and court martial a sitting senator. He revoked press access to the Pentagon. The U.S. has been at war for five months without a single Pentagon press briefing. Most dangerously, as the Quantico meeting demonstrated, he and the president are corroding the chain of command by encouraging disrespect for “the generals” and inculcating loyalty to themselves instead. Such politicization of the military destroys republics.

Hegseth is arrogating to himself authorities that properly belong to Congress. Article I of the U.S. Constitution vests Congress with the authority to raise armies and maintain a navy. Congress is the body that establishes the standards for appointments, assignments, duties, and grades of general and flag officer positions. Congress determines these officers’ promotions. And this Congress is overdue to protect the American military from a civilian leadership that is its greatest threat.

The Battle for Hormuz Is Not the War

2026-10-06T07:00:00-04:00

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Proponents of the war with Iran have taken recent increases in crude-oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz as proof that the U.S. strategy is finally working. President Trump is so confident in this that he recently rejected a seven-day plan, set forward by Iran’s foreign ministry, to end the war and open the strait. The United States is “winning tremendously,” Trump boasted.

A confused administration is conflating tactical dominance with strategic success. Seven months into a war that its planners suggested would last four to five weeks, the Trump administration’s understanding of Iran remains deeply flawed, and increases in oil exported through the strait don’t mean that the U.S. is close to ending the conflict on its terms.

The president’s self-assurance doubtless derives in part from his reported belief that this conflict will come down to which side is able to endure economic pain the longest. The countdown clock on Iran’s economy appears to be ticking ever faster: The U.S. Navy’s blockade on Iranian ports has been ruthlessly effective, as, to a lesser extent, has the Treasury Department’s Operation Economic Outcast, announced in August as “an unprecedented campaign to sever every remaining economic lifeline sustaining the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

[Read: Trump could leave the Iran mess to his successor]

Iran’s economy was in bad shape before the war. Now it is in deep crisis. The Iranian rial is trading at a record rate of more than 2.5 million to a dollar, versus a prewar exchange rate closer to 1.2 million. Year-over-year food inflation was more than 125 percent in late August, according to Iranian-government statistics. A country accustomed to cheap, plentiful gasoline now has severe shortages, and its government is progressively scaling back subsidies. The International Monetary Fund projects that the Iranian economy will contract by 5.4 percent in 2026, and the U.S. administration has assessed, as Treasury Secretary Bessent said early last month, that Iran is in a “death spiral,” desperate to make a deal.

The administration appears to believe that the clock on American economic pain, meanwhile, has been slowed by Iran’s decreased ability to close or even significantly constrain maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s grip on that choke point, through sea mines and attacks on tankers, had reduced the daily transit of oil from 20 million barrels a day before the war to fewer than 3 million a day by March. But in late August, the U.S. military claimed a “major milestone”: It had cleared the strait’s transit routes of mines. A mid-September Centcom press statement said that the strait was “open for transit.”

Regional oil exports rose significantly in September. According to a JP Morgan assessment that circulated on social media late last month, regional exports rebounded to just 11 percent below prewar levels. The maritime intelligence company Kpler reported the September daily average of oil through the strait at 10 million barrels; an additional 6 million barrels left the area by means of ports and pipelines that avoided the strait. A late-September headline on CNN seemed to capture the general assessment: “Iran has lost considerable leverage in the Strait of Hormuz. It can’t go on like this forever.”

One reason for the resumption of oil flows is that Saudi, Emirati, Qatari, and Kuwaiti oil companies, working with the U.S. Navy, have started pulling off risky transfers that evade the Iranian anti-ship missiles and drones threatening the strait. Shuttle tankers inside the waterway turn off their transponders, load up with oil, and, watched over by U.S. Navy fighter jets and attack helicopters, leave the strait by hugging the Omani coast. Once in safe waters, they transfer their crude cargo to larger supertankers for onward transport.

But the new status quo in the strait is neither sustainable nor scalable. Ship-to-ship transfers are dangerous and expensive, and they rely on active U.S. military operations, which currently involve two Navy aircraft-carrier strike groups already in the region and a third on its way.

Meanwhile, transit through the strait remains dangerous. At least eight tankers have been attacked in the week ending October 5, and the multinational Joint Maritime Information Center, based in Bahrain, still assesses the threat for strait passage as “severe.” According to the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Organization, strait traffic remains 75 percent below pre-conflict levels. The global supply of crude and refined products trails demand, and regional exports of refined products are at only 58 percent of prewar norms. As the Kpler trade-risk analyst Ana Subasic recently told The New York Times, the passage of more ships and oil through the region than earlier in the war “doesn’t mean we’re seeing a normalization of flows.”

Trump could well be right in believing that Iran’s economic pain is increasing faster than America’s. But the Iranian regime, engaged in a fight it believes to be existential, will tolerate pain levels much higher than those acceptable to a U.S. administration mired in an unpopular war. The soaring price of gasoline and diesel could be a problem for Republicans in the midterm elections next month. By contrast, the Iranian regime, with its extensive and tested infrastructure of popular repression, has shown its willingness to slaughter its citizens en masse and is not calibrating its policies to the ballot box.

[Read: Gas prices could cost the Republicans the midterms]

The Trump administration seems not to realize that Iran’s leaders—more militarized and hard-line than those the U.S. and Israel killed at the start of the war—are operating on the assumption the United States is dead set on toppling the Islamic Republic. They see compromise under pressure as hastening, not delaying, their own destruction. In response to intensifying U.S. economic pressure and a worsening strategic situation, they are far likelier to escalate militarily than to capitulate.

Shortly after the Vietnam War ended, an American colonel talking with his Vietnamese counterpart is reported to have asserted, “You never defeated us on the battlefield.” The Vietnamese colonel allegedly thought about it, then replied, “That may be so, but it’s also irrelevant.” The same could be true with Iran. Yes, the U.S. has destroyed huge swaths of Iran’s military. Yes, it is crippling Iran’s economy and immiserating ever more of its citizens. And yes, it is getting more oil out of the region than earlier in the war. But none of that is getting America much closer to a win.

The Baltic States Prepare for War

2026-10-01T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Maciek Nabrdalik

One evening this summer, in the village of Bezdonys, in eastern Lithuania, I watched as a platoon of riflemen arrived at a train station occupied by enemy forces. Some of the Lithuanians let out a burst of gunfire from across the tracks, pinning the adversary in place as the rest of the unit advanced on the station. As the firefight intensified, wounded riflemen were evacuated to makeshift medical tents. An enemy soldier lay slumped against the station’s yellow clapboard siding.

Military exercises are elaborate acts of make-believe. I was observing this one to understand how a large-scale attack on the most vulnerable part of the NATO alliance might play out—and to see how the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania think about their own defense. The raid in Bezdonys was part of a nationwide simulation and involved the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union, a state-supported militia group that traces its history to the end of World War I. The Lithuanians I met wore camouflage fatigues and had no trouble accepting the scenario behind the exercise: that the enemy—Russia—had invaded their country, and that defensive forces had retreated to a city in the north. In their civilian lives, the riflemen are teachers and sales managers, economists and medical students. Now, suddenly, they were responsible for ambushing Russian outposts, killing enemy soldiers, and transmitting intelligence to the army.

“The enemy has to know,” General Raimundas Vaikšnoras told me, “that if they step one foot in our territory, we will strike back.” Vaikšnoras is Lithuania’s defense chief, and his distrust of Russia, a former occupying power, is not a notional concern. Ever since Russia’s invasions of other post-Soviet nations—Georgia in 2008; Ukraine in 2014 and 2022—conflict with Moscow has been front of mind for the people of the Baltic states. The three countries are small—Lithuania, the largest, is about the size of West Virginia—and grouped, one atop the other, on the shores of the Baltic Sea. They are also linked geopolitically by their common experience on Russia’s western borderlands, one of subjugation and dispossession. The Baltic states escaped some of that past after the fall of communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union, when they regained their sovereignty. And they took measures to solidify that status when they joined NATO, in 2004, attaching themselves to the American-led security order.

They have much to lose from what looks to be the unraveling of that order. Donald Trump has mused repeatedly about taking the United States out of NATO. On the campaign trail in 2024, he encouraged the Russians to do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO members delinquent in their defense spending. This year, he threatened to invade Greenland, a self-governing territory of Denmark, an alliance member. When European partners declined to join his war of choice against Iran, he disparaged NATO as a “paper tiger.”

[Read: Europe without America]

Even a small incursion by Russia into the Baltics could be catastrophic if NATO did not adequately respond, thereby breaking the promise of collective defense enshrined in Article 5 of the founding treaty—an attack on one is an attack on all. Over breakfast in Washington, D.C., earlier this year, I asked Jens Stoltenberg, a former NATO secretary-general, whether he was confident that Trump would help defend the Baltic states in the event of a Russian attack. He said, “We base our security on that,” a careful reply that stated an incontrovertible fact but did not answer the question.

The threat of Russian expansionism may feel remote in the United States. But the idea that Russian soldiers might invade their countries doesn’t seem implausible to the 6 million people who live in the Baltic states. It has happened before. The Second World War brought Soviet and Nazi invasions, and the postwar Soviet occupation threatened to extinguish Lithuania entirely. (“Lithuania is beautiful without the Lithuanians,” a Politburo member once remarked.) In 1990, Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to declare its independence, and since then has transformed itself into a lively democracy with a high-tech economy. But it remains uniquely vulnerable: hemmed in to the east by the Russian satellite state of Belarus and to the west by the sea, and pinched to the south by the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, home to Russia’s Baltic Fleet and a staging ground for ballistic missiles capable of reaching most of Europe. Nuclear weapons are likely stored there too. Lithuania spends more on defense as a share of its economic output than any other NATO country, and for years has urged the West to take Russian aggression more seriously. The possibility of war is lodged in its politics, its economy, and its psyche; the memory of occupation haunts its present and its view of the future.

[Read: Europeans have realized their error]

Whether Russia has imminent designs on the independent Baltic countries it once ruled is a matter of dispute, though the dispute centers mainly on the word imminent, not on Moscow’s desires. The Russian military is in poor condition in key respects. The cost of recruiting is high, armor stocks are dwindling, and corruption is endemic. But Russia has improved its performance in other areas, including its use of drones and glide bombs, and its agile infantry tactics. A recent American-led air exercise in Poland and the Baltic states, which massed fighter aircraft near Kaliningrad, seemed designed to warn Moscow of the costs of adventurism. Many analysts believe that any mobilization against the Baltics would come only after the end of hostilities in Ukraine, where almost all capable Russian ground forces are currently engaged. Ukraine, Vaikšnoras noted hopefully, is “keeping Russians away.” Others see Russian President Vladimir Putin’s incentives differently, fearing that he might wish to act sooner, exploiting the interval in which the U.S. commitment to Europe seems to be faltering but Europe’s rearmament, after decades of disinvestment, is incomplete. Russian coordination with China—timing an attack in Europe to coincide with a move by Beijing against Taiwan—could be disastrous. Some U.S. and European officials I spoke with believe that the high burn rate of American munitions in Iran may increase Russia’s appetite to test NATO with a limited ground attack in the Baltics. The aim would be a fait accompli, taking a small piece of territory so quickly that the defenders decide the cost of reversal is too high. Putin once boasted that Russian forces could seize the Baltic capitals in two days. A Putin ally not long ago described Latvia, Lithuania’s neighbor to the north, as a “nonexistent country.”

Maciek Nabrdalik for The Atlantic

General Raimundas Vaikšnoras, Lithuania’s chief of defense, at his office in Vilnius

For the Baltic nations, “wait and see” is not a strategy. Distrust of Russian intentions has given rise to a low-grade but pervasive dread that hangs over daily life and has an impact on all institutions. Cities constantly hone their evacuation plans. Hospitals can shift at once to a wartime footing. After Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, membership in the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union doubled, and now stands at about 20,000. When I visited Vaikšnoras, he brought me to an alcove behind his office where his helmet, rucksack, and body armor were hanging on a small wooden stand. It’s his job to imagine the worst. But as I learned during a month spent talking with political and military leaders, it’s also true that, in a struggle for survival, the Baltic states possess advantages. They are ready to commit their whole societies to the fight. What they no longer know is whether the United States will be by their side—and in Russian eyes, uncertainty may seem like an invitation.

THE FIRST DAY

What would a Russian attack on the Baltic states look like? It could come in the form of outright invasion, designed to control all three countries and restore what Russia has declared to be its rightful sphere of influence. It could come in the form of “hybrid war,” which the Baltic states have gotten a taste of already: think cyberintrusions, assassination attempts, arson, damage to undersea infrastructure, interference with GPS frequencies, and a deliberately heightened volume of asylum flows—transporting desperate migrants from the Middle East and Africa to the border of European Union countries, as Belarus has done since 2021. Russia could also stir up unrest among the Russian-speaking minority who still live in the Baltic states—a scenario that figures in If Russia Wins, a best-selling book published last year by the academic analyst Carlo Masala. Short of invading all three countries, Russia could attempt to close the Suwałki Gap—the small patch of border that Lithuania shares with Poland, stretching for roughly 40 miles between Kaliningrad and Belarus. This corridor is the only friendly overland route between the Baltic states and the rest of NATO Europe—an essential lifeline.

[Read: Russia’s hybrid-war strategy in Europe]

Despite the shortcomings revealed by its war in Ukraine, Russia would be a formidable adversary. It is willing to send soldiers to their deaths by the hundreds of thousands, and it possesses nuclear weapons. Baltic leaders do not make the mistake of thinking that Russia will behave the way they want it to. As former U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis has cautioned, about all military conflict, “The enemy gets a vote.” That said, it would be hard to hide large-scale Russian preparations for invasion. Baltic intelligence officers are so focused on every permutation of the Russian threat that their mindset was summarized to me this way by a European expert in Baltic security: “If a seagull shits in the harbor, we know what it had for breakfast, we know where it nests, and we know when it last went to Russia.” When I visited Vaikšnoras, I noticed on his desk a map of a new training area, planned for the southwestern part of the country, right near the Suwałki Gap. If enemy troops start massing on Russian or Belarusian territory, Lithuanian troops will assemble opposite them—force-shadowing, as it is called.

The Baltic states can’t trade space for time—a classic defensive strategy that involves yielding territory in order to exhaust the enemy, then waiting until a counterattack becomes feasible. Vilnius, the capital, home to 600,000 people, is a mere 20 miles from Belarus. In the early days of an invasion, it would quickly be threatened by the Russian army. The Baltic states need to hold off the invaders for as long as possible, hoping that allied help will arrive—whether in the form of ground forces or, even more useful, airpower—before the situation becomes irretrievable.

Lithuania’s military, though the largest among the Baltic states, is nonetheless modest: some 60,000 men and women in active and reserve units. In an emergency, and with the assistance of well-trained volunteer groups such as the Riflemen, the number could swell to more than 80,000—still small compared with any potential Russian force. To help contain the enemy forces and keep them as close to the border as possible, the Baltic states are building a defensive line—digging anti-tank ditches and erecting concrete obstacles called “dragon’s teeth” because of their hulking triangular shape.

Maciek Nabrdalik for The Atlantic

Anti-tank “dragon’s teeth” on Lithuania’s heavily fortified border with Belarus

Modern technology could make a big difference. The plan is to saturate the border with infrared cameras and acoustic sensors, a network modeled on a Ukrainian system called Sky Fortress. Data gathered by this equipment would be shared with allies and analyzed by artificial intelligence to help determine the best way to neutralize incoming threats. Border areas could also be heavily mined. All three Baltic states, along with Poland and Finland, have withdrawn from the 1997 Ottawa Treaty, aimed at eliminating antipersonnel land mines, which can kill or maim civilians long after conflicts have ended. The move caused some disquiet in allied capitals. The reply from the Baltics was, What choice do we have?

One afternoon, two soldiers picked me up outside the ministry of defense in a military off-roader, and we drove east to the Belarusian border. The terrain is flat, seemingly favorable to an attacker. But it’s also full of spongy bogs, which serve as natural choke points. Last year, four American soldiers died during a training mission in Lithuania when their 70-ton armored truck sank in a wetland. Lithuania is re-creating swamps and reforesting parts of the border to force the enemy into predictable routes. Man-made obstacles are layered on top of natural barriers to channel (or, in military parlance, canalize) the enemy into narrow zones.

The dragon’s teeth rise to about chest height, and they’re linked by a tangle of metal cords. The fortifications are perhaps the most conspicuous part of Baltic war planning. Rather than destroying a tank outright, the dragon’s teeth catch a vehicle’s underside, where its armor is thinner, and lift the hull off the ground. This leaves the vehicle stranded and vulnerable to artillery and anti-tank missiles. The military has bottleneck coordinates already plotted, anticipating that the enemy will need to slow at specific points.

A breach attempt at a fortified point would create extraordinary violence: tanks caught on dragon’s teeth, mines detonating, artillery landing on the stalled convoy, drones circling overhead to hit anything left moving. Meanwhile, the Baltic states would be striking deep in enemy territory. All three Baltic countries have ordered missile launchers called HIMARS, and their most powerful precision-strike missiles have a range of about 190 miles. That’s almost exactly the distance from Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, to the Russian city of St. Petersburg.

THE FIRST 72 HOURS

Given the likely warning signs, political and military consultations would begin within NATO before Russian troops cross any border. When the Baltic states joined the alliance, NATO leaders initially resisted developing plans for their defense so as not to provoke conflict with the Kremlin. Then, in 2008, Russia invaded Georgia. That year, a senior Russian official and close associate of Putin’s publicly described the Baltic states, along with Crimea and other parts of Ukraine, as “traditional territory of the Russian nation.” In response, an existing NATO playbook for the defense of Poland was extended to the Baltics. But only meager forces were pre-positioned, and reinforcement timelines were inexact. Implicitly, the strategy was to cede territory in hopes of later taking it back. Widespread Russian atrocities in Ukraine following the 2022 invasion made that prospect unacceptable, and Baltic leaders pressed for changes. A year later, the alliance adopted new regional defense plans aimed at containing and countering an incursion, rather than rolling it back.

The main conference chamber at NATO headquarters, in Brussels, is known as Room 1—an amphitheater with an oval table in the middle. This is where ambassadors would gather in the event of an attack to consider a bid by the Baltic states for a declaration under Article 5—the necessary first step toward a collective response. The ambassadors make up the North Atlantic Council, the alliance’s main political decision-making body. They would seek options from NATO’s military committee, composed of the member states’ national-defense representatives. Remigijus Baltrėnas, a Lithuanian general, currently leads NATO’s military staff, although NATO doesn’t have any forces of its own; everything is provided by member countries. When I asked Baltrėnas if he believed that the alliance would come to the aid of the Baltic states, he said, “I’m convinced, practically, that if it will be needed, nations will be able to push aside their national ambitions, their national restrictions, and agree for the cohesion and defense of the alliance, to move forward with whatever is necessary.” But as the clauses and qualifications in his gnarly statement suggest, it would be, as he put it, a “painful process.” Different alliance members will view the risk of escalation differently. Some may even have different interpretations of the facts.

A new color-coded alert system dictates what degree of mobilization is called for: yellow, amber, and red, with the last meaning that an attack is imminent or has already started. The Supreme Allied Commander Europe, who leads all NATO military operations, has the authority to rush certain forces to the region before the member countries reach a consensus. An American has held that job since the alliance’s founding, in 1949. Today, it belongs to Alexus G. Grynkewich, an Air Force general. He can call upon tens of thousands of troops supplied by member countries; their duty is to be mission-ready and able to deploy within 10 days of activation.

Maciek Nabrdalik for The Atlantic

Members of the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union monitor military exercises from a facility in Vilnius.

The U.S. military has been training Lithuanian troops and other armed forces in the Baltics for years. The Riflemen’s exercise I witnessed in Lithuania took place at the conclusion of a nine-week commando course run by the 1st Battalion of the Army’s 12th Cavalry Regiment, deployed from Fort Hood, Texas. But the American battalion was rotating out of the country the next day—and there would be no “heel to toe” replacement, as there had been since 2019.

That may seem like a small thing, but it occasions nervousness about a larger one. Deterrence is about signaling, and the Baltic nations need Russia to believe that Washington would treat an attack on their territory as an attack on all NATO members. In the past, the U.S. has spoken loudly in support of the Baltic countries. On a trip to Vilnius in 2002, President George W. Bush vowed that “anyone who would choose Lithuania as an enemy has also made an enemy of the United States of America.” Those words are engraved on a plaque outside the entrance of city hall. Do they remain true more than two decades later?

NATO could be drawn into a conflict regardless. Each of the Baltic states hosts allied forces, initially assembled in the years after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and then expanded after the invasion in 2022. Multinational forces were originally intended as trip wires that would compel a larger NATO force to intervene. Now their mission is contributing to a credible defense from the very start of an invasion. Kris Reeves, a Canadian colonel who until recently commanded multinational forces in Latvia, told me, “I can fight tonight and tell Ottawa tomorrow.” The brigade in Lithuania is expanding to include 5,000 Germans and the latest tanks for added firepower and mobility. About 20 countries contribute to military forces in the three Baltic states, led by Germany, Canada, and Britain.

Žilvinas Gaubys, a brigadier general who heads Lithuania’s training-and-doctrine command, told me that the military has considered a scenario in which help from Washington is delayed or does not arrive—indeed, war games have been conducted that consider this premise. Military planners, the general said, must test “the most difficult scenarios.” According to established war plans, American forces stationed in Poland or Germany should be activated from the “first minute” of an invasion, Gaubys explained. But what happens if that minute goes by and the Americans don’t come? The presence of other international forces offers a measure of reassurance. So, too, according to Baltic officials, does the progress made by NATO’s European members in acquiring certain capabilities, such as aerial refueling, that the U.S. once mostly provided. But there would be no easy replacement for American satellite intelligence, or for American missiles and hypersonics capable of reaching far behind the front line. Loss of American support would diminish what the Baltic states can see and what they can strike.

NATO planners know that, early on, Russia would rely not only on physical force but also on cyberwarfare to disable critical infrastructure in the Baltic states—the energy, transport, water, and communications systems that enable their societies to function. The vulnerability, however, goes both ways. When it comes to cyberoperations, Estonia is a global leader. It made cybercapabilities a priority after a sweeping digital assault brought down government and commercial servers in 2007—a surprise move by Russia or Russian sympathizers to protest the relocation of a Soviet-era statue. In response, Estonia established a dedicated cybercommand within its armed forces, as well as a cyberunit within the Estonian Defence League, a volunteer reserve team drawing on the country’s immense civilian IT talent pool. One way reservists contribute is by looking inside successful Ukrainian technology—the Baltic states understand how Ukraine’s innovations are transforming the nature of warfare.

[Read: Lessons from the world’s most tech-savvy government]

Estonia’s cybercommand is led by a taciturn colonel named René Innos. When I met him over the summer, in Tallinn, he was wearing combat fatigues and black boots but had the tired and under-exercised look of someone who spends most of his time looking at a computer screen. Part of his job, he said, is defensive: Every year, he sees billions of “knocks on the door” by Russian hackers looking to penetrate Estonian networks. But the cybercommand is capable of offensive operations too, and it would be an invisible but major part of any war. One objective, Innos said, would be to disrupt the “kill chain”—the communications links that connect target acquisition and target destruction. Another objective would be simply sowing confusion. The enemy, of course, is renowned for its own digital expertise. Both sides would be asking, What is the next new trick?

THE FIRST WEEK

The conflict would soon begin to stabilize—not to ease, necessarily, but to unfold along more predictable lines. Both sides would be using a dense network of drones, sensors, and mines, making a surprise breakthrough on the front difficult to achieve. Russian infantry and armored vehicles would be detected by drone reconnaissance and then destroyed before they could generate momentum and push past defensive fortifications. Many of the defenders wouldn’t be firing machine guns or driving tanks. They’d be operating small quadcopters known as FPV drones, because of the first-person view they give remote pilots. FPV drones mostly function as one-way strike weapons, though the same airframes can fly reconnaissance. One Lithuanian colonel estimates that 80 to 90 percent of Russian casualties could be inflicted by FPV drones.

A visit to a training area in the southwestern part of Lithuania, about 30 miles from the border with Kaliningrad, gave me a sense of the country’s growing drone capabilities. Trainees were sitting behind a pair of laptops placed on a folding table in a tent. A Monster Energy drink was open on the table. The primary pilot used simple mouse clicks to direct an airborne vehicle—an Estonian-made reconnaissance drone with a range of about 30 miles. Sitting alongside, his co-pilot operated the camera system using a joystick resembling a PlayStation controller.

I had come to the training area from Kaunas, Lithuania’s second-largest city, where a military-drone laboratory occupies space in a glass-sheathed university building. The army is using the facility to turn soldiers into engineers. FPV drones are cheap—they can cost only a few hundred dollars apiece—but also full of bugs. Being able to replace a battery in the field could save money and lives. Inside the lab, an airy space with soldering irons and fume extractors, soldiers in army fatigues were bent over worktables. A reservist in jeans and a T-shirt stood at a whiteboard, delivering a lesson about the battery’s power connector and protective casing. Nearby, university students were completing an academic 3-D-printing project, unconnected with warfare. They appeared unbothered by the military preparations, which are difficult to keep neatly apart from civilian life. Schools operated by the ministry of defense are teaching children as young as 10 how to assemble, program, and fly drones.

Paula Bronstein / Getty

A trainee learns to fly an attack drone at a military school near Lviv, in Ukraine.

I was in the company of Arnoldas Sadauskas, a major in the Lithuanian armed forces. Earlier, I had seen in the back of his van a pile of torpedo-shaped warheads with propellers, which he showed me while casually lighting a cigarette. The most important lesson to learn, Sadauskas said, is the need for improvisation. He brought up Ukraine, as Baltic commanders often do. Its armed forces no longer wait for foreign companies to provide state-of-the-art equipment. Ukraine builds its own, and constantly changes the technical composition to elude electronic countermeasures. The takeaway—that technical advances can make up for a relative disadvantage in troop strength—is now dogma in Baltic defense thinking. Officers from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania make frequent trips to Ukraine. I asked Sadauskas if he was adapting lessons from Americans too. He said, “I don’t know what they have to teach me.”

In a sustained conflict, the Baltic states would need private industry to replenish weapons stocks and modify technology as battlefield dynamics change. Because of their size, the Baltic states don’t build heavy platforms, such as battle tanks and self-propelled artillery. Their advantage lies in niche areas, including electronics, optics, and ammunition components. The field of photonics, devoted to generating and controlling light, is especially strong in Vilnius. Julius Skruibis, the chief technology officer of Aktyvus Photonics, told me that the city is home to no fewer than 60 companies active in this area.

Aktyvus Photonics is in a tech hub on the outskirts of Vilnius, and I met Skruibis at the company’s offices. He gave me a pair of sunglasses, and with our eyes shielded and shoes wrapped in plastic coverings, we entered an antiseptic space where engineers in blue lab coats were experimenting with laser designators—highly concentrated light sources used to “light up” military targets. These laser beams guide munitions to their destinations.

The company has developed a handheld designator for the Ukrainian armed forces. In my hand, it felt like a state-of-the-art film camera, smooth and compact. The designator has a range of six miles. The drawback is that a soldier using one from a ground position, kneeling and pointing it at a target, risks exposure to the enemy. The company’s newest designator, not much bigger than a Duracell nine-volt battery, can be lifted by a small drone, and is now the biggest-selling Aktyvus product. Keeping the designator steady is the challenge; it’s buffeted both by wind and by vibrations from the drone. Digital stabilization is able to remove imperfections in the video feed, but there’s as yet no analogue for adjusting the beam of light. The company is working intensively on stabilization technology to hold the designator in place. Skruibis was frank about the kind of accuracy he’s seeking: He placed an index finger on his forehead, right between his eyes.

THE FIRST MONTH

The consequences of any conflict in the Baltic states will quickly expand outward. Within a month of the war launched by the U.S. and Israel against Iran in February, it had grown to involve more than a dozen other countries, closed the Strait of Hormuz, and sent global oil prices to their highest levels in years. Some ramifications of a Baltic conflict are unpredictable, but one is not: The Baltic Sea would become a contested strategic space.

One of the keys to controlling the Baltic Sea is Gotland, a Swedish island about 80 miles from the Baltic states. Its sandy beaches and limestone cliffs make it a tourist jewel. It is also vital to establishing air and naval dominance over the entire region. Several years ago, Russian state television hosted a reserve officer and pro-Kremlin commentator who explained how Russian forces could commandeer Gotland, which is about the size of Long Island, and leverage it as a base while Moscow set about conquering the Baltic states. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have no combat aircraft of their own, and only gunboat navies. Lithuania’s largest ship is a minelayer that came used from Norway.

Maciek Nabrdalik for The Atlantic

A sign reading #MesNATO, or “We Are NATO” in Lithuanian, outside the defense ministry’s headquarters, in Vilnius

Sweden and Finland joined NATO in the aftermath of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, casting aside a long tradition of neutrality and military nonalignment. One day this summer, I met Sweden’s defense chief, Michael Claesson, on the deck of the Carlskrona, which at 350 feet has the distinction of being the longest ship in the Swedish navy. It packs little firepower but bristles with masts, antennas, radar arrays, and communications equipment. It was docked in the harbor at Visby, Gotland’s capital. The fortification of Gotland, Claesson explained, would allow NATO to project air and maritime superiority in the broader Baltic Sea region. Kaliningrad is to the southeast. Rockets and long-range missiles launched from Gotland could easily strike Russian supply lines and other infrastructure supporting military operations in the Baltics. The island is an ideal staging ground for fighter jets: close enough to high-value Russian targets but far enough away to be untouchable by short-range drones launched from Russian terrain. That enviable location has earned the island its description as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier.”

Hostilities would convulse the entire maritime zone, one of the busiest in the world for commerce. Trade and civilian traffic in the Baltic would be suspended, with priority given to reinforcement and evacuation efforts. Moscow is not without options, even if the Baltic Sea, ringed almost entirely by Western allies, has come to be seen as a “NATO lake.” Russia still has access to Baltic waters from ports at St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad. It could provide military escorts for its merchant fleet and target undersea cables used for power and communication. Missiles from Kaliningrad could menace maritime operations and hold regional economies hostage.

In some ways, Gotland is to NATO what Kaliningrad is to Russia—a forward outpost that helps control access to a vital theater of operations. Which is why the island itself is vulnerable to attack, and why war could spread quickly to Sweden. The Swedish armed forces disbanded the island’s last defensive regiment in 2005 and began restoring its defenses only after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. In 2022, as Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s border, Sweden dispatched additional units to Gotland. Armored vehicles clambered down Visby’s medieval streets. The government in Stockholm is building new barracks and other facilities, and Sweden’s military has conducted joint exercises involving U.S. Marines. Bolstering the garrison on Gotland remains a work in progress, and a visitor may well be more aware of archaeological activity (the island has been settled, sparsely, for millennia) than of a humming military presence. Ewa Skoog Haslum, a vice admiral and Sweden’s chief of joint operations, was blunt about her view when we spoke: “We have too few forces on Gotland.” Moscow is definitely aware of Gotland’s strategic value. Russia’s ambassador to Sweden recently accused the government in Stockholm of “provocative steps” on Gotland, vowing that Moscow would “take all of this into account in our military-political planning.”

Maciek Nabrdalik for The Atlantic

General Michael Claesson, Sweden’s defense chief, aboard the Carlskrona in Gotland

Although NATO forces have trained on Gotland, offensive weapons aren’t currently stored there. I asked Claesson how long it would take to turn Gotland into a platform for serious offensive operations. “Days,” he said, holding up a few fingers. “Days on one hand.”

ENDGAME

Men in hooded suits, gas masks, and orange boots lifted bodies from wheeled gurneys and placed them on folding tables: yet another training exercise, this one taking place in a barracks belonging to the Vitkus Engineer Battalion, in Kaunas. The battalion builds defensive fortifications, clears land mines, and removes chemical and biological hazards. The premise of the training exercise was that the enemy had used chemical weapons against civilians. Victims had to be cut out of their clothes and doused with soapy water. Medics triaged cases while a decontamination team rushed people through washing stations. The equipment came from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the part of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for countering weapons of mass destruction.

The longer a war persists, and the deeper into civilian society it penetrates, the more resources the engineer battalion will require. Its commander told me that its motto is “First in, last out.” The battalion is still finding and disposing of mines and other unexploded ordnance from both world wars. It is named for Juozas Vitkus, a colonel in the country’s interwar army who helped train members of the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union. He was killed by Soviet troops in 1946.

The Lithuanians I met in military barracks, on training fields, and at government offices all wanted to make sure I witnessed the many ways in which the United States is still participating in their defense—presumably, they want to believe, with every intention of assisting in a potential war with Russia. Strategic culture in the Baltics is indebted to American guidance. Many generals have studied and trained in the United States. When I met with Vaikšnoras, the Lithuanian defense chief, I noticed a photograph of his graduating class at the U.S. Army War College, where he received a master’s degree in 2013. Ties between the two militaries remain close. And although many nations, including NATO allies, are skittish about having nuclear weapons based on their soil, Lithuania is revising its constitution to permit such staging. But the American commitment to NATO—to countries such as Poland and Germany, never mind the Baltic states—is no longer a given. As I watched U.S. Army personnel give pointers to Lithuanian troops, I wondered if they might be among the last American military representatives engaged in Europe in this way.

Maciek Nabrdalik for The Atlantic

During military exercises, Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union volunteers clear a railway station in the town of Bezdonys.

These days, the truly inescapable sight in Lithuania is not the Stars and Stripes but the blue-and-yellow flag of Ukraine. It flies outside government ministries. It is draped inside hipster coffee shops. Near the Neris River, which cuts through the capital, I saw a bird feeder painted in blue and yellow. Don’t mistake this for a mere token of solidarity. It is a badge acknowledging Ukraine’s contribution to the defense of Europe.

The Baltics are sometimes described as the Cassandra of European states—doomed for their prescience. But the metaphor is not quite right. Vilnius isn’t Troy, and it wasn’t sacked when Lithuania’s warnings about Russian expansionism were vindicated in 2022. For now, Ukraine is absorbing the Russian onslaught, and giving survival lessons to other vulnerable democracies. One counterpoint to a weakening American military presence in Europe has been an acceleration of visits by European military leaders to Ukraine. My interview with General Gaubys had to be cut short because he was scheduled for a trip to the Ukrainian battlefield.

Questions about the future of the American-led order are unavoidable in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The doubts provoked by Trump about the principle of collective defense will not easily be assuaged or argued away. But I also encountered something else: the emergence of a new order, in which Ukraine matters as much to the security of Europe as the United States does. Baltic soldiers are in Ukraine every day, embedding with officers close to the front line, helping where they can, but most of all learning, adopting their tactics, and preparing their own defense. They believe that war with Russia is coming. They would prefer to have American backing when it does. But they’ll fight without the United States if they need to.

This article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “The Next Front.”

Pete Hegseth’s Magic Marker

2026-09-30T15:20:28-04:00

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The supersize black Sharpie is what gives it away. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s order to stop awarding tenure to civilian professors at the military academies ends with a huge, jagged signature—an homage, perhaps, to that of the president—the size of two of the paragraphs above. With the same instrument, he also underlined, word by word, two key sentences that are as blunt as the message they are intended to deliver and the mind that conceived them.

In appearance and tone, the document reminds one of the kind of note that a really steamed preteen, grounded because of poor classroom behavior, drops on his father’s or mother’s dinner plate before stamping upstairs. It is all temper.

Hegseth did not strip current faculty at the military academies (including West Point, the Naval Academy, and the U.S. Air Force Academy) of tenure, though he no doubt would have liked to. That probably would have failed in court, like so many of the administration’s efforts to punish people it dislikes or at least shove them into obscurity. But the language, the tone, and the angry scrawl tell us much about the mindset of the civilian head of our armed forces as he strikes another blow against the educational dimension of military preparedness.

To be sure, academic tenure has its critics. In the popular imagination, sinecured professors live on easy street, but that is rarely the case. Professors at top-notch institutions (such as the service academies) are a highly self-motivated lot who continue to churn out research after receiving tenure, because that is why they joined a relatively low-paying profession. Moreover, tenured professors still have to teach to a certain standard, still can get fired for all kinds of misdeeds, and still are subject to the artifices employed by deans everywhere to nudge them off of faculties—zeroed-out pay increases and travel budgets, unappetizing and onerous committee assignments, buy-outs, and above all, cramped, windowless offices coupled with in-person attendance mandates.

The legitimate case against tenure is different. The system can preserve in amber fields that are obsolete, artificial, or merely tendentious. It can also keep faculty stale by slowing down the intake of young talent, and in some cases, tolerating mediocre but just-acceptable classroom performance.

[From the September 2026 Issue: Pete Hegseth, you call that a pull-up?]

But tenure does preserve intellectual independence from the fads of any field: You cannot get rid of that historian of Rome just because you prefer someone who does something trendier. It also protects faculty engaged in deep, long-term, and consequential works of scholarship and research. The alternative is a system that encourages the continual production of superficial and conventional work. And above all, tenure protects the unpopular, the controversial, and the ornery freethinker from the tyranny of student, staff, or faculty mobs on the left or the right—or, in this case, from a government that actively hates its critics.

Military education is still education—a point that Hegseth fails to understand. It seeks to develop disciplined, curious, insightful thinkers. The service academies do not, in any meaningful way, teach tactics. They are there to educate young officers, admittedly emphasizing some qualities that get a lighter touch in civilian institutions.

Only a poorly educated person would think that civilians, including tenured professors, have no role in this endeavor. The best anthology of writing about leadership I know of was produced by a West Point professor—someone with nary a day of military service—who also edited a fantastic edition of the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. Men and women who are going to be officers will learn as much about what leadership entails from Shakespeare, or classes in cognitive psychology or ancient history, as they will from a perusal of field manuals.

Civilian faculty at the service academies, as at staff colleges and war colleges, provide depth and expertise that their military counterparts simply cannot. They are more likely to go somewhat against the grain of military life and cultural assumptions—and that is a good thing. There is a peculiar blindness, or worse, hypocrisy, in an administration that denounces (with reason) the ideological homogeneity of many university faculties, while at the same time attempting to enforce a similar outcome by different means in the armed forces.

Diversity of mindset, background, and professional formation are essential to a military that is state-of-the-art, open to oddball ideas and personalities, and able to think, as the cliché has it, outside the box. Could one get these benefits without tenure? In theory, yes, but for better or worse, tenure is the coin of the realm among ambitious young professors, a mark of respect and recognition of achievement.

The bigger message that Hegseth is sending, and intends to send, is that civilian faculty are unwelcome in the Department of Defense. His argument consists of a chest-pounding, tough-guy emphasis on “lethality”—his cant word of choice—that has no bearing on what military leadership really is. The latter is more likely to be found in the large and well-thumbed libraries of leaders such as Generals Jim Mattis and David Petraeus, and Admirals James Stavridis and William McRaven—readers and thinkers whose imagination and understanding of the military profession extend far beyond the Hegsethian conception of push-ups, pull-ups, and annual testosterone tests.

[Missy Ryan: The Top Gun: Maverick theory of Pete Hegseth]

Hegsethian thinking, if that is the right word, has permeated the senior ranks of officers and officials in some of these institutions. In a particularly egregious act, the Air Force Academy has removed the word educate from its mission. This is a step backward worthy of a caveman in a G suit—someone who thinks that fancy weapons and aggressiveness guarantee victory. It is the mindset of someone who has learned nothing from the American military failures that now stretch back to Vietnam, and will produce more such in the future.

This period will not last forever. In two years, quite possibly less, Hegseth will be gone, and with him the memory of the worst civilian leader of the American military since John Floyd in 1860, who, as a Confederate general (of the kind that Hegseth chooses to honor), was a traitor. But Hegseth’s legacy will have to be rooted out.

If a moderate Republican, or more likely a Democratic, presidential administration comes to power in January 2029, its reconstruction of the Defense Department will require more than restoring the old names on buildings and changing the names of forts back to those that Americans can in decency honor. The new team will need to survey and repair the damage that has been done to the military’s intellectual infrastructure, which is considerable and, in some ways, more consequential than the damage Iranian missiles have done to America’s unprotected bases in the Persian Gulf.

A restored American military will need to reckon—severely—with the leaders and senior officials who, inspired by this secretary, are taking their own initiatives to make the armed services stupider by doing things such as changing the Air Force Academy’s mission statement, harassing or firing civilian faculty, and failing to stand up for intellectual freedom. One hopes that someone will have been keeping track of these officials’ names and assignments, because they are doing a profound disservice to the young men and women in uniform and to the country they serve. They, and not a few civilian professors of English literature, are the ones the defense department can do without.

Gaza’s Open Horizon

2026-09-29T12:35:26-04:00

Here in Gaza, war has changed everything, even the sea. During the long, hot summer, children went to the beach either early in the morning or just before sunset. They stepped around piles of garbage, and the tents of displaced families, to wade into water contaminated by sewage.

And yet, they went. We all did. And I think we always will.

I recently started aiming to take 10,000 steps a day, to get back in shape. To reach that number, I walk from my home to the seafront road and back. I have been doing this for a month now. The distance to the shore and back happens to be 10,000 steps. Which means that, really, my aim was never the step count, but the Mediterranean.

I go before sunset, when the heat starts to ease slightly. Not that it ever gets truly cool. July and August brought the worst of the humidity, which sometimes reached 86 percent. As I walk, I watch the sunlight stretch across the water before it slowly disappears.

A few children still fly kites along the beach. Kite-flying was common in Gaza before the war and even during it—just a month ago, the sky above the sea was full of kites almost constantly—but now it has become an act of defiance, because the Israelis have said that they will treat kite-flying as a hostile act, on the grounds that kites were sometimes used, before the war, to launch incendiary devices into Israel.

In the past, children fashioned kites from brightly colored paper and wooden sticks they bought at stationery stores. Now they improvise, using whatever they can find. Some work with dry palm fronds. I met a boy who had carved his kite’s frame from a long piece of wood; others weave frames from plastic bags, or from the sacks that once carried flour and food aid, joining the edges with torn scraps from old notebooks.

[Ghada Abdulfattah: Feeding a family of seven in Gaza]

Everyone in Gaza is a sea person. That 25-mile coastline is more than a place to walk or fly a kite; it’s a point of access to the outside world. In past summers, all of Gaza would seem to be at the shore—sitting on the beach, or maybe higher up, in wooden chairs near the road. Children dashed in and out of the water, or rode camels or horses along the water for a small fee. Vendors sold grilled corn, lupin beans, and cotton candy, circulating among the blankets with sweet tea and roasted seeds. Some families pitched tents right at the shoreline. People posed there for selfies or wedding photos. The air smelled of corn and charcoal; you’d hear the clatter of backgammon stones, the hiss of a narghile being lit. Sometimes the sound of the sea drowned out nearly everything else.

One of my enduring memories of the seashore is from July 2023. My nephews and nieces dug holes in the sand to bury themselves, then ran to the water to wash off, then came back to start digging all over again. The adults swam, pretended to swim, pushed whoever wasn’t swimming into the water anyway. We cracked open a watermelon, hoping it would be ripe—too sweet, too red, and a little sandy, the way we liked it. When I was about 6 years old, my parents took us to the beach to crack open a watermelon just like that. My siblings and I still laugh about this when we remember: Did we go to the sea just to eat a watermelon and go home? No swimming, no playing, no walking—just the watermelon, and then back. Now the stretch of sand where we did this has become a makeshift camp crowded with families displaced from the north and south of the Gaza Strip.

We are more than 2 million people living on a ribbon of land about 25 miles long and seven and a half miles wide. This makes Gaza one of the most densely populated places on earth. Before the war, to leave the Strip from any direction required a permit. But the sea asked for nothing. You didn’t need a document to look at it, to wade into it, to let your eyes follow it to a horizon with no drone or checkpoint in sight. The sea was our open horizon, the place we went when we needed to breathe. When I was in a bad mood, my mother would tell me to go there.

In the last years before the war, the shore was lined with tourist facilities: chalets, amusement parks, restaurants, and other amenities that welcomed thousands of visitors every summer. Now these are mostly gone, and the few that remain are affordable for only a privileged few. Throughout the Strip, prices are high, air strikes continue, and about half of Gazans now live in tents, which offer little shelter from the scorching summer heat. More than 60 percent of Gaza has become inaccessible, as the so-called yellow line expands westward, pushing people ever closer to the sea. For many of us, the need to be in contact with the water has grown as the space around us has constricted: A person needs a place—any place—to escape the feeling of being trapped.

A few weeks ago, I met a fisherman named Hasan Shehada. He told me that Gaza’s port services and many of its fishing boats had been destroyed in the war, and that going out on the water is still dangerous because of Israeli naval fire. Before the war, together with other fishermen, some of them his siblings and cousins, he could bring in enough fish to feed his eight-member family and still earn an income. Now he lacks the boats or equipment that once made this work possible.

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib: Flying over my battered homeland]

“The war has changed our sea too,” he told me. “Sometimes I sit on the beach and cry, thinking about where we were and where we are now.”

Now the season is turning. For the families living in tents along the shore, the sea is no longer a place of rest: The sand is windblown and gets into everything, the air is heavy with humidity, and the tents will protect their occupants from the coming cold as little as they did them from the heat that has only just subsided. Still they are patched together against whatever the day might bring. Perhaps looking out at the water will make this bearable—will allow me not to see the tents, if only for a moment, by fixing my eyes on something wider.

Sometimes I ask myself: What if Gaza had no sea? What if it were landlocked? I cannot let myself contemplate the answer.

The Art of Dealing With Trump

2026-09-29T07:00:00-04:00

The best metaphor for trade negotiations may be trying to arrange a marriage. Countries come to the table with friendly intentions, hoping to form a partnership. The pressure is to make a deal, not to block one, and if they don’t succeed, that is a cause for sorrow, not anger.

Donald Trump has changed all of that. He has turned trade deals from negotiations about marriage to threats of divorce.

Before Trump, the Western consensus had long been that free trade made individual countries richer overall, and the world richer too. Trump does not believe that. More importantly, his trade negotiations aren’t only, or even mostly, about trade. They are about domestic politics and geopolitics, and, above all, they are about staging a drama in which he, and America, wins. Trump is trying to turn trade from a win-win relationship to a battle for dominance over adversaries and a protection racket for friends. This is trade policy as per Roald Dahl’s Matilda rather than Adam Smith.

The organizing principle for this MAGA administration is that countries need to pay for the right to sell things to the United States. They can pay quite literally, through tariffs. They can pay by pledging investments in the U.S. And they can pay with actions that have no connection to trade but that the White House wants. Most of America’s allies have simply capitulated—accepting harmful and unjust tariffs or offering other forms of tribute.

[Read: Why Trump has it out for Canada]

My experience as Canada’s international trade minister and foreign minister during the first Trump administration suggests another possible strategy. A decade ago, Trump threatened to tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement and destroy Canada’s most important trade relationship. Canada was gobsmacked, but we were also prepared. In the summer of 2016, our ambassador began to warn us that Trump might win. So I asked our outstanding trade officials to prepare a memo outlining what we should do if a victorious Trump carried through on his campaign-trail attacks on NAFTA. We called it the “in emergency, break glass” briefing note. In the days after the election, that homework paid off. Canada was angry, but we also stayed calm. We met Trump and his team at the table, looked for things we could agree about, and held firm to our red lines.

Throughout two years of negotiation, Trump and his minions insulted and demeaned Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and me, calling me a “nasty woman” who “hates America.” In 2018, he imposed illegal and unjustified tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum. Canada then did something that much of the world has forgotten how to do: We fought back, with dollar-for-dollar reciprocal tariffs. Because ultimately, the only thing that works with this president is strength.

During our years of negotiating, we developed a three-part playbook for handling the Trump administration. It eventually got us to a great deal, and it can help America’s allies deal with the White House today. First: Look for areas where you agree and can work together. Second, apply the doughnut strategy: Yes, the president is important, but he is just one figure in the middle of a big country. Be sure to talk with Americans in the rest of the doughnut, not just in the Oval Office in the middle. Third, and most important: Do not capitulate.

During the NAFTA negotiations, we shuttled back and forth to Washington more than a dozen times. The talks were high drama. Sometimes the Americans yelled at us; at other times, they graciously served us snacks, including Hershey’s Kisses with packaging signed by Donald Trump. As we waited in the White House for a bilateral meeting between the president and the prime minister, a smiling, jocular Gary Cohn, a senior economic aide to Trump at the time, once told me: “You’re definitely going to get screwed. The only question is whether you get screwed with a kiss.” Occasionally, I would take refuge in the ladies’ washroom—generally a safe space, because there were usually no women on the U.S. side of the table. Once, at a particularly dire moment, I got down on my knees there and prayed.

Holding your ground when Trump demands that you buckle is not easy. Political rivals accused our team of “Napping on NAFTA” and said we should accept more of Trump’s proposals. In response, I said then what I believe now: “Capitulation is not a negotiating strategy.”

This article has been adapted from Chrystia Freeland’s new book, Unreliable Boyfriend: An Insider’s View of Dealing With a Chaotic Superpower, Plutocrats, and Other Complicated People.

That doesn’t preclude finding areas of agreement. Trump lies so much about trade that it can be hard to recognize when he has a point. But the fact is that the old NAFTA, and the free-trade consensus it represented, really did have problems. For example, Trump was right that the low wages paid to Mexican auto workers undermined American workers, especially in the states that had gotten him elected in 2016. We had dealt with similar concerns when negotiating an earlier trade deal between Canada and the European Union: European socialists, much like American right-wing populists, wanted deals that supported high wages for workers and that protected national sovereignty against multinational corporations. I agreed. And that is one reason we were able to make a deal with Donald Trump.

The Americans demanded that a specific quota of U.S.-made parts be included in a NAFTA-compliant car. We made a counterproposal: A certain percentage of the car had to be manufactured by workers making at least $16 an hour. This would become one of the smartest features of the new NAFTA, designed to protect the jobs that had been outsourced since the original deal while disarming American efforts to kill the Canadian auto industry.

But for Trump, getting a good deal isn’t really the point. In 2018, the United States levied illegal and unjustified tariffs against Canadian steel and aluminum, claiming that our exports were a threat to U.S. national security. I pushed for retaliation, and Prime Minister Trudeau agreed. We weren’t a security threat to America; to suggest that we were was insulting. We were responding more in sorrow than in anger. But this was a big move, the largest trade retaliation Canada had imposed since the second world war.

We targeted goods that would cause maximum political pain in the United States and do little damage in Canada: ketchup and jam made in Pennsylvania and Ohio, to put pressure on the president’s Rust Belt constituency; bourbon and playing cards, to make an impact in Kentucky, home to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the U.S. ambassador to Canada, Kelly Craft; and cheese and yogurt to pressure House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.

[Read: Europe and Canada are like the kids in an ugly divorce]

Canada didn’t start this fight. We were simply responding, dollar for dollar, to the tariffs the U.S. had imposed on our steel and aluminum. We coordinated with Mexico and the EU to maximize our impact, and we left room for negotiation by waiting a month after U.S. tariffs went into force before imposing our own. When we announced our retaliatory action, I told Canadians that I had spoken with Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, six times in the previous week and that Canada was willing to talk any place, any time.

The mere declaration that we were going to retaliate infuriated President Trump. He started bullying Canada and Canadian leaders publicly and privately. Just as we were getting ready to unveil our final tariff list, Trump made a personal phone call to Trudeau, in which he threatened dire consequences, including destroying the Canadian auto industry, if we went through with our plan. He told Trudeau that I was a “nasty woman” who had spoken critically about him to other world leaders. Peter Navarro, the White House’s trade adviser, hastily dismissed the impact of retaliatory tariffs as little more than a “rounding error” for the U.S. economy, but Trump’s intemperance betrayed greater anxiety.

Many Canadian business leaders were anxious about an all-out trade war with the United States, and at least one of my cabinet colleagues, the finance minister, argued that we should postpone our trade action beyond the one-month grace period we had already extended and just keep talking. I understood the fear. A trade fight with the United States would be more painful for us than for the Americans, as the $16.6 billion in goods targeted by the tariffs was 0.06 percent of the U.S. GDP, but 0.74 percent of ours. We also had more at stake: Trade accounts for about 65 percent of the Canadian economy, and more than 70 percent of our exports were to the United States in 2018. Trade is about 25 percent of the U.S. economy, and 18 percent of U.S. exports were to Canada in 2018.

But I was absolutely certain that we needed to fight back, and I was equally confident that if we did so, we would succeed. Trump is a textbook bully. For him, weakness is a provocation. But when he is met with strength, he finds a way to make a deal. Trump doesn’t always chicken out, per the TACO meme. Just ask Nicolás Maduro. But he does find ways to change course when the other side keeps its nerve, as the dictators in Beijing and Tehran—and the Democrats in Minneapolis—have shown.

The economic facts had always been on our side. Trade between Canada and the United States was balanced, mutually beneficial, and made both of our countries more secure. Our countries had been building things together since Henry Ford manufactured the first Model T, and Canada was a secure and reliable supplier of oil and electricity to the United States. The value of this partnership should have been enough to secure a deal—and it had been, for decades.

But with this president, facts alone don’t matter, and a win-win outcome is a last resort. We had to prove to him that he couldn’t bully Canada, and that trade with Canada was actually in America’s national interest. Only by demonstrating painful consequences could we get back to a reciprocal relationship with our neighbor.

We also knew that we needed to talk with people other than Trump. Among the Republican allies we courted, starting in 2017, was Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, whose home state of Wisconsin exported nearly $7 billion a year to Canada. “I just like trade,” Ryan told me, saying that among partners, “Canada is the one that’s fair and balanced.” I met with Arizona Senator John McCain, who warned me that some of the tariff proposals, including those involving Canada, were “nuts, crazy, insane.” But he said that he would “lay down on the tracks” to oppose that approach and that “there’s enough Republicans who are against it.”

Fewer than four weeks after our retaliatory tariffs went into effect, in July 2018, a business coalition supported by farm-state political leaders on both sides of the aisle launched a multimillion-dollar campaign called “Tariffs Hurt the Heartland.” They held 15 town halls across the Midwest and carried out three aggressive ad campaigns, including one called “Rounding Error” and one titled simply “Tariffs Are a Tax.” This political pressure on Trump, including from his own supporters, kept the talks on track through difficult weeks. It also enraged the president. But ultimately, and quite rightly, the people whose views most mattered to the administration were Americans themselves. They were the lobbyists who really counted. And that is why retaliation, together with the doughnut strategy, was so important.

In arguing that tariffs and counter-tariffs couldn’t really hurt the United States because international trade was relatively unimportant to the American economy, Navarro and like-minded economists made the same mistake that globalization advocates once made. They failed to account for the pain their policy would cause specific people and specific communities. Tariffs might be a “rounding error” in aggregate, but for some people and some places, they were devastating. Ground zero for tariff pain was Iowa, a farm state where one in five jobs depended on trade. By May, coordinated retaliatory tariffs imposed by Canada and other countries hurt by the U.S. had cost the state’s farmers, particularly pork and soybean producers, nearly $1.5 billion in lost export revenue. That came out to roughly $17,000 per farm. The Tariffs Hurt the Heartland campaign created an interactive map, populated with heart-wrenching stories from midwesterners.

When President Trump took office for his second term last year, he was met with a wave of capitulation. Many American CEOs, lawyers, and university presidents bowed their heads to avoid his wrath. America’s international allies largely surrendered too—knuckling under in response to tariffs, appeasing the president at the first NATO summit, and responding to insults and ridicule during White House visits with sycophancy and fixed smiles.

But America’s allies have also shown that they can stand Trump down. When Trump threatened to seize Greenland in January 2026, the EU did not give in. And Greenland remains part of the Kingdom of Denmark, following some clever diplomacy by Copenhagen, which succeeded in reaffirming its sovereignty without reigniting the war of words.

[Read: America’s allies are no longer waiting for Trump to leave]

Many of us in allied countries feel so angry, so frightened, and so betrayed right now that we easily forget how much we have prospered, together, during the American century. Pax Americana has not always been benign, of course, and living with a hegemon is often uncomfortable. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, Justin’s father, brilliantly compared sharing a border with the United States to sleeping next to an elephant: Even if the elephant is gracious and well disposed toward you, you never sleep altogether easily.

A lot has changed since 2018, but I still believe two things that I believed then—that America can be a force for good in the world, and that we need to be frank with our American friends about how profoundly they are losing our trust. The official public obsequiousness that is the love language of the Oval Office, and which America is hearing from too much of the world, masks a disenchantment that is hardening into contempt.

Rather than containing the president, his appeasers have enabled him. America’s allies must speak out, and they must do so together. Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, is showing America’s other friends that when you stand up to a bully, you can rally your country behind you. That approach worked in 2018, and it can work today. And, ultimately, it is in America’s best interest too. By refusing to submit, we can help Americans remember that the most effective way to treat their allies—and not just authoritarian tyrants—is with partnership, not punishment. If America can relearn that lesson, which the postwar generation first taught, it will be a win-win outcome for democrats and democracies everywhere.

This article has been adapted from Chrystia Freeland’s new book, Unreliable Boyfriend: An Insider’s View of Dealing With a Chaotic Superpower, Plutocrats, and Other Complicated People.

The Babies Left Behind in America

2026-09-28T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Meridith Kohut

Estela Díaz and 2-year-old Eber repeat their routine every morning: Around 8 a.m., he rustles her awake in the bed they share. She picks him up, changes his diaper, and pulls out a fresh set of tiny clothes. While Estela dresses him, Eber coos, “Mama, mama.” She smiles and strokes his cheeks, trying to hide her sadness at his confusion. Estela is 50 and has three sons, but Eber is not one of them. She’s been caring for him because ICE deported his parents to Venezuela, despite his mother’s pleas to be reunited first.

Estela and her husband, Miguel, moved to Mobile, Alabama, 20 years ago to raise their own boys in a place that felt safe and had a slower rhythm than Las Vegas, where they’d met. Miguel works as a remodeling contractor. He spent years developing their four-acre property, building a wood shop, a chicken coop, and houses for two of their children (the third lives 15 minutes down the road). They bought peacocks as pets and planted bright perennial gardens, adorning them with stone fountains. By the driveway, they fly an American flag from an antique tractor. Over the years, their home evolved into a kind of retirement sanctuary—until this past winter, when it started to look like a day care.

A police officer pulled over Eber’s mother, Marlyn, last November and, without accusing her of an infraction, turned her over to ICE, despite her work permit and pending asylum application. Eber, who had just finished breastfeeding, and his 7-year-old brother, Isaac, had nowhere to go. Marlyn’s 23-year-old cousin took the boys briefly. Then two of Marlyn’s friends—both undocumented—agreed to take one child each. Eber was moved into a rusty trailer with no heat; the woman watching him put socks on his hands to keep him warm. He was sick, but she was too scared of ICE to take him to a doctor. Isaac’s caregiver worked nights. Sometimes he made it to school; sometimes he didn’t.

The boys needed a better home. Frantic phone calls among Marlyn’s friends and co-workers eventually led to Estela. They had all worked together at a plant nursery, and Estela was the only American citizen they knew. She agreed to take the boys and then return them to Marlyn, not knowing that doing the right thing would go so wrong: that county officials would end up investigating her for trafficking; that her bank account would dwindle to almost nothing; that Eber would still be in her home, unable to remember his own mother, nearly a year after she was picked up.

“I’ve lost a lot of weight because it’s so stressful,” Estela told me, sitting in her living room. Eber was clinging to her, his face buried in her chest. “My family is like, ‘What have you done?’ ”

President Trump’s rush to deport as many immigrants as possible is creating a new family-separation crisis. Whereas his first administration took children from their parents at the border to deter illegal crossings, the second is separating families living in the United States as part of a purge. Like last time, Trump officials claim that this is untrue. But stories like Eber’s are not hard to find, as I learned this year while reporting on immigration enforcement in Alabama, California, Illinois, Missouri, and Texas.

[From the September 2022 issue: Caitlin Dickerson on the secret history of family separation]

As of April, the Brookings Institution put the total number of affected children at about 205,000—71 percent of whom are U.S. citizens. Most of those cases involve the loss of one parent, a devastating blow to families. But the Brookings researchers believe that more than 35,000 of the cases are like Eber’s, in which a child has been left with no parent at all.

Since the analysis was published, the pace of ICE arrests has increased. In July, the agency arrested a record 49,000 people, a majority of whom have no criminal record, according to a New York Times review of data obtained by the Deportation Data Project. Many of the people ICE is targeting entered the United States legally, through parole programs or by requesting asylum, and were in the process of working toward permanent legal immigration status. (A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told me the Deportation Data Project’s numbers are “inaccurate” but did not correct them, adding that a pending application for legal status does not shield immigrants from arrest.)

In recent years, ICE policy required officers to either reunite detained parents with their children before deportation or confirm that the children had an official caregiver in their parents’ absence. But in July 2025, DHS revised the policy, sprinkling it with caveats, such as “when operationally feasible,” that appear to allow officers to prioritize the speed and volume of deportations over everything else—including the children whom deportees leave behind.

Meridith Kohut for The Atlantic

Estela talks with Eber’s mother, Marlyn, who was deported to Venezuela in February, and the social worker Shaina Simenas on a video call.

The result is tens of thousands of children being shuffled among the houses of anxious temporary caregivers. It can take months to procure the passports, visas, and other permissions necessary to transport children to their parents, many of whom have been deported to countries whose governments can’t help, or won’t. This past spring, the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration reunified 12 children with their deported families using funding from the U.S. State Department, according to a UN official, who added that the organization has received requests to help other children, but they lack the proper paperwork.

Some children end up with foster families after caregivers burn out, and some have landed in the homes of abusive relatives or acquaintances. In January, 2-year-old Orlin Hernandez Reyes was left with his aunt’s ex-partner, who was known to be dangerous, when ICE detained his mother. She begged deportation officers to reunite her with Orlin before she was deported to Honduras, but that didn’t happen. Soon after, Orlin’s body was found with broken bones and signs of sexual abuse, and his caregiver was charged with murder. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Then–ICE Director Todd Lyons blamed his mother, saying that she “chose to leave her son here with a violent murderer who took his life.”

Even children like Eber, who land in a safe place, are likely to experience long-term psychological harm from separation. “To have such a huge number of children forced into a traumatic situation because of some policy—it’s really kind of unimaginable,” Wendy Smith, a retired associate dean at the University of Southern California’s school of social work and a co-founder of the nonprofit National Foster Youth Institute, told me. We are “creating a whole class of children who are going to grow up with all sorts of problems.” (The DHS spokesperson said that the agency “does not separate families or deport U.S. citizens” and that, absent indications of abuse or neglect, parents “can choose to take their children with them.”)

There are key differences between the family separations happening now and those of the first Trump administration. In 2017 and 2018, career bureaucrats worked from within the government to try to prevent separations, alert the press when they happened, and reunite families under court orders that high-level DHS officials were trying to defy. But many civil servants deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump were fired en masse during the early months of his second term. Since then, the White House has sent a clear message that pushing back on mass deportation will cost you your job.

Also different: The separations of the first Trump administration were the result of a distinct policy (“Zero Tolerance”) that, once brought to light, could be challenged in federal court. Today, family separations appear to be incidental—the consequence of a ruthless effort to hit a quota, no matter the cost. And this time, people with firsthand knowledge of separations are keeping quiet. Many temporary caregivers are undocumented themselves or have relatives who are; they worry that drawing attention would put their own families at risk. Government and nonprofit workers are also scared to speak up. The White House has attacked organizations that oppose its goals by cutting funding, launching dubious criminal investigations, and issuing retaliatory executive orders.

“In a lot of jurisdictions, people don’t want to write anything down,” Maria Cancian, a Georgetown University economist who co-authored the Brookings study, told me. She and her colleagues spoke with caseworkers in more than half a dozen states who had assisted separated families; they agreed to communicate only because she did not plan to disclose their identities or locations in her report. “Why would you volunteer any information that makes you more of a target?” said Cancian, a former Obama appointee in the Department of Health and Human Services who helped oversee children in immigration custody.

Alabama, where Estela lives, has an estimated 70,000 undocumented immigrants. Many are concentrated near Mobile, where they work at plant nurseries, shipyards, construction sites, and fish-packing plants. On a visit there over the summer, I was barraged with stories of parents swept up in ICE raids, leaving children marooned with relatives or neighbors who were unprepared to care for them. These arrests were a constant topic of discussion in churches, at dinner tables, during school drop-offs. Everywhere I went, cellphones buzzed with information about immigration checkpoints and intersections where local police seemed to be pulling over anyone who was visibly Latino.

Meridith Kohut for The Atlantic

Estela’s husband, Miguel, plays with Eber outside their home in Mobile, Alabama.

A woman named Josefa told me that she and her relatives were taking turns caring for their nieces and nephews—ages 9, 7, and 1—because they could afford only a few days of diapers and extra food at a time. A 15-year-old girl was living alone in a squalid trailer because her father had been detained, and his last paycheck was running out. When Miguel, Estela’s husband, got home from work one evening, I asked if he would call around to co-workers and friends to see if they knew of any other displaced children. “Oh yeah,” the first man he called said. “My wife and I also have two little girls.”

The police officer did not tell Marlyn why he’d pulled her over on a grocery run outside Mobile—but he asked if she was in the United States illegally. She pulled out her phone to show him that she’d attended all her ICE check-ins, and that her asylum case was scheduled to be heard in June.

“The immigration judge wants to talk to you,” the officer said, as Marlyn recalled when I first spoke with her, earlier this summer.

“I don’t understand,” she replied. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Don’t worry, they’re not going to deport you,” the officer said.

Of course they are, she thought.

Marlyn says she asked the officer if they could pick up her children because they were at home with a roommate who wasn’t prepared to care for them indefinitely. He refused. She spent about an hour in the Mobile County Metro Jail, followed by 10 days in an ICE detention center in Mississippi. Then she was transferred to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, a 1,000-bed facility 90 miles west of Baton Rouge.

Marlyn’s family had arrived at the southern border in May 2023, as Venezuela devolved into chaos under Nicolás Maduro’s regime. A friend had told them that there was work for new immigrants in Mobile. They rented a house and found jobs—Marlyn at the nursery and her husband, Jesus, at Walmart. In April 2024, Jesus got into an altercation with a co-worker, was charged with a misdemeanor for reckless endangerment, and was deported to Venezuela. With two young children to support, Marlyn leaned on other immigrant families for help. She felt adrift but was getting by, until five months later, when she was pulled over on the grocery run.

At the facility in Louisiana, she spoke with an immigration lawyer who told her that she had virtually no chance of getting out on bail under the Trump administration’s policies. The lawyer said she could spend up to two years detained while she waited for a decision in her case, which she was likely to lose anyway.

Marlyn had heard that people who agreed to be deported could request to be reunited with their children beforehand, so she decided to give up her asylum case. She started sending ICE officials three messages a day—the maximum allowed—asking to be deported with Eber and Isaac.

“I told them, ‘I have my two children. One is a little baby who was born here. I have no one to take care of them. They’re going to be left alone,’ ” she recalled, adding: “They just kept giving the same response—that they were going to work on it. But they never did anything.” (DHS did not comment on individual cases in this story.)

In detention, Marlyn worried about Isaac and Eber constantly. Eber was weak and small for his age; he’d been born with a cyst in his lung that still needed to be surgically removed. She would fear the worst anytime Estela didn’t answer the phone. “It’s agonizing not knowing about your children,” Marlyn said. She befriended other mothers in detention. Some had been there for many months. She saw them faint and have panic attacks. One told Marlyn she had been arrested while taking her 10-day-old baby to the doctor.

Early one morning in February, three months into her detention, a staff member woke Marlyn and said she was being deported. Her time had run out. She had to board a plane back to Venezuela, and leave her kids behind.

Trump’s immigration crackdown has sent countless families into crisis. Sharon Balmer Cartagena, a family lawyer in Los Angeles, has had to deliver bad news to parents over and over, with the help of her colleagues at Public Counsel, the largest pro bono law firm in the country. They told one mother, who’d tried to create an emergency plan in case she was detained, that she’d filed the wrong paperwork in court and accidentally given up her parental rights. They told another mother from Mexico, whose ex-wife had cut off contact as soon as she was deported, that the best she could hope for was one or two weeks of court-ordered visitations a year. And they told a mother from Haiti—who was so scared of being deported that she preemptively moved to Mexico—that she may never see her child again; the estranged father had agreed to care for their 3-year-old temporarily, but then blocked the mother’s phone number as soon as she arrived in Mexico. “We had to explain to her, ‘There’s nothing we can do. You have no viable pathway to regain any kind of contact with your child,’ ” Cartagena told me. “It was horrific.”

[From the April 2026 issue: Caitlin Dickerson on how the Cruz family decided to self-deport]

These cases fall into a gray area between immigration law and family law. This means that many of the families ICE is separating will need not one but two lawyers to try to get their children back—and there isn’t enough legal help to go around. Cartagena has tried to recruit more family lawyers to help with immigration cases, without much success. “I’m trying to be like, ‘Everybody, there’s a family-law emergency here!’ ” she said. “Everyone’s busy.”

Meridith Kohut for The Atlantic

Attorney Sharon Balmer Cartagena in her home office in L.A.

Cartagena grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania, one of the poorest cities in America, and saw how much her classmates were traumatized when child-welfare agencies broke up their families—often because the adults were too poor to provide for their children, not because they were unfit parents. She went to law school hoping to help children in foster care. Her career has tracked a period of growing consensus that this kind of family separation often does more harm than good; foster-care systems around the country have been shrinking and state agencies have been directed to keep children in their home whenever possible. But under the first and second Trump administrations, separations have become more common for parents who are detained by immigration authorities.

Cartagena first discovered how complicated these separations were in 2018, when she became a directing attorney at Public Counsel. Immigration lawyers started contacting her, asking for help with clients who had been separated from their children under the Zero Tolerance policy. The parents had been allowed to return to the United States under a federal-court settlement, but enough time had passed that some children had been deemed wards of the state, while others had new legal guardians. Family-court judges were blocking their reunifications. Cartagena explained that family courts exist to protect children whose parents have been accused of abuse or neglect; the system is not set up to deal with parents who face none of these allegations but lose custody because they have been deported. She helped one mother regain custody of her teenage daughter, but the process took more than a year. Others never had their parental rights restored.

When I first spoke with Cartagena this year, she was working with a mother named Magdalena Callejas, who had full custody of her 4- and 6-year-old children in March 2024, when she was arrested at a Border Patrol checkpoint in Texas. Magdalena had a pending visa application. Her ex-partner was undocumented, with multiple DUIs; Magdalena had a restraining order against him for abusing her and her son from a previous relationship. But after ICE detained her, he took the 4- and 6-year-old back. She was powerless to stop it.

Magdalena says she asked ICE officials to reunite her with her children but was told the agency “did not do that.” She agreed to leave the country voluntarily, hoping to get her children back as soon as she arrived in El Salvador. In the meantime, her ex filed for custody. An immigration lawyer who met Magdalena in detention contacted Cartagena, who explained that because Magdalena was unavailable to care for the children, the father was within his rights. In court, Magdalena’s ex argued that he was a changed man, and that unsafe conditions in El Salvador outweighed his criminal past. The trial dragged on for months. The judge ordered the children into the custody of a neutral caregiver; when she was no longer willing to help, the judge sent the children to another home. On video calls during the father’s court-ordered visits, Magdalena’s children used a shorthand to tell her that he was still drinking: “Dad went to get some juice.”

Cartagena shared all of this with the court but still didn’t know how the judge was going to rule. Most family-court judges aren’t familiar with immigration law, or accustomed to granting custody to a parent in another country. The longer a separation lasts, the harder it is to reverse; Cartagena said that family-court judges often defer to the status quo rather than disrupt a child’s living arrangements a second time—even if it means keeping them from their biological parent, or a parent who is more fit to care for them. Despite Magdalena’s ex’s history of abuse, Cartagena worried that she could still end up permanently separated from her children. “If she doesn’t win,” Cartagena said, “what do I tell everyone else?”

A judge eventually ordered that Magdalena’s children be returned to her in El Salvador after a 30-day legal stay to allow her ex-husband to appeal. He had stopped submitting weekly alcohol tests, which Cartagena believes may have swayed the judge. But that same day, the children’s caregiver said she was fed up. She was going to drop them off at a police station if no one retrieved them. So even though the judge renewed Magdalena’s five-year restraining order against her ex, he also ordered the father to pick up and care for the children until Cartagena could raise money and find a volunteer to transport them to El Salvador. There was nowhere else for the children to go but back to their father.

Cartagena has a tattoo on her wrist of a mama bear and two cubs—one for each of her children, who are 11 and 14. “I couldn’t imagine if I couldn’t see my kids or I didn’t know where they were,” she said. Sometimes the best advice she can offer detained parents is to get their children out of the United States as quickly as possible, before anyone can intervene. She’s helped procure travel documents and recruit volunteers to shuttle children across borders to their deported parents, including an 18-month-old and a 3-year-old who were sent to Peru in May. She also ghostwrites emails to ICE on behalf of immigration lawyers who want to pressure the agency to reunify families before a parent is deported. Since Trump took office a second time, she has started waking up to answer emails at 5 a.m. instead of 6. She works every weekend. And she began raising money so that Public Counsel can start a five-person division focused on immigrant-family separations. “We’re all doing this on top of our regular work,” Cartagena said. (She recently became the executive director of LevittQuinn, another family-law legal-aid organization in L.A., but will continue partnering with Public Counsel in her work on immigrant-family separations.)

She and her colleagues have held dozens of trainings across Los Angeles for immigrant parents. I attended one at an elementary school in Boyle Heights, an immigrant enclave and a hot spot for ICE raids. A dozen people sat in plastic chairs, their eyes darting to the door each time someone entered. One of Cartagena’s colleagues told the group to be careful about paperwork; well-meaning immigration lawyers had been giving clients a “temporary guardianship” form, which isn’t valid in some states. She urged the parents to arrange a caregiver, a backup caregiver, and a backup for the backup. People burn out or give up, and if there is no plan, the children are left in limbo.

A mother raised her hand. “The only people I know are like me,” she said. “They’re also undocumented.” Another said: “I don’t have anyone. What do I do?”

I found a family with no backup plan in the spring, when I went to Honduras to interview deportees as they arrived by the planeful from ICE detention centers. A father named Edwin said that after three years of meticulously following the government’s requests to further his family’s asylum case, his wife, Sarah, was thinking about going into hiding; she didn’t want to be picked up by ICE and have to leave her children alone.

[Read: A new kind of family-separation crisis]

When I went to visit Sarah in May, in a Dallas suburb, her 4-year-old son, Johnny, answered the door and asked me: “Do you know when my dad is coming home?”

Before I could answer, Johnny continued: “Do you know what happened to him?” He repeated versions of these questions over the two days of my visit. “Do you know where my dad is? Do you know if he’s okay?”

When the questions would start, Johnny’s 12-year-old sister, Katie, tried to distract him with coloring books and screens. Recently, he’d had an hours-long meltdown when Sarah tried to donate some of Edwin’s work clothes that were crowding the closet. Every afternoon he sits at the front window waiting for his dad’s truck to pull up outside.

While reporting this story, I talked with other families with credible asylum cases who were considering going underground to avoid being separated from their children, knowing that it would likely sabotage their chances of ever gaining legal status. This is the bracing irony of Trump’s deportation campaign: Its goal is to crack down on lawbreaking, but its implementation is encouraging it. Immigrants who have complied with the law are being targeted, and they are choosing to hide, despite the fear and stress, because the alternatives are worse: abandoning their children, or being deported with them to dangerous places.

Sarah and Edwin have been running from MS‑13 since 2013, when Sarah witnessed a murder in Honduras. Gang members wrongly assumed that she had testified against the killer and started threatening her. In 2022, they showed up at a relative’s house and killed a young woman, likely mistaking her for Sarah. She and Edwin decided it was time to go. They requested asylum and were admitted across the border during the Biden administration and moved to the Dallas suburbs. Edwin started working in construction and Sarah worked nights as a janitor. They rarely saw each other, but their schedules ensured that one of them was always home with the kids. (I’m using pseudonyms for this family because of ongoing threats.)

In January, the four of them went to an ICE office for a routine check-in. Edwin was detained without explanation. Sarah and the kids were distraught, and hoped it was a mistake. She planned to sell their cars to cover the cost of Edwin’s bond, but then he was transferred from a detention center in Texas to one in Mississippi. There, he checked the agency’s online portal for detainees and saw that he was being deported for allegedly skipping a court appointment that he had not been given the chance to attend. (The DHS spokesperson said the agency affords immigrants due process.)

“If we hadn’t gone to the check-in, my husband would be here,” Sarah told me. “It would have been better if we did things the wrong way.” Without Edwin, Sarah felt forced to take a series of risks. She didn’t have a license but started driving herself to work, because she was now solely responsible for paying the bills. She skipped her next check-in with ICE and, knowing that officers might come looking for her, moved apartments without telling the government. She started leaving Katie in charge of her younger brother while she was at work. “My daughter’s teacher said I shouldn’t tell anyone, because they could be taken away from me,” Sarah said.

Without child care, Sarah installed cameras in the apartment and watched the kids on her phone, in between cleaning toilets and vacuuming. Katie would fall asleep as soon as she left for work. Johnny, who was used to sleeping in his father’s arms, would pace the house every night. One time, Sarah saw him jamming an air freshener into an electrical outlet, which started to spark and smoke. Katie slept through the sound of her mother’s phone calls.

Meridith Kohut for The Atlantic

Johnny and Katie settle down for the night as their father, whose face has been blurred to protect his identity, watches via video call from Honduras.

Sarah changed her schedule to work one overnight shift during the week and double shifts on Saturdays and Sundays. Edwin started watching the children on video calls from Honduras while she was gone. On the first evening that I visited, he called while she was making dinner. “Have you eaten, my love?” she asked him.

“Not yet. I’m still working,” he said. Then he pointed the phone at a young man crouched on a hillside just outside the house, looking over the village below. “They’re here watching.”

“Put it down! Put it down!” Sarah told him. “Don’t let him see you.”

MS‑13 patrols their community, setting curfews and extorting people. Sarah and Edwin weren’t sure if the gang had realized that he was back. They were looking for a place to hide if Sarah ends up being deported, but nowhere in Central America seemed safe.

Sarah scarfed down some shrimp pasta. Katie cut Johnny’s food and tried to keep him in his chair. “She’s become my right hand,” Sarah told me of her 12-year-old. She looked at the clock and determined that she had time for a quick nap. She went into the bedroom and set a timer on her phone for 27 minutes. Katie started doing the dishes. She packed some leftover pasta into a Tupperware container for her mom and placed it in Sarah’s backpack with two bottles of water and a ziplock bag of cookies.

Sarah sprang up when her alarm went off. Her eyes were red and wet. She threw on her uniform—khakis and a polo shirt—and brushed her hair back into a ponytail. She called the kids into the bedroom and told them to put their pajamas on while she did her makeup. They climbed into bed and Katie dialed Edwin, then propped her phone up against a lamp so that he could watch them after they fell asleep. A minute later, Johnny was out of bed, pacing. When Sarah finished getting ready, she gathered him in her arms and placed him next to his sister. She looked into the camera at Edwin and said, “Okay, you’re in charge now.”

Marlyn has been living a version of Sarah’s nightmare since she arrived back in Venezuela in February, with video calls as the only portal to her children. She and Jesus moved back into their family home in Guanare, a small city about six hours by car from Caracas. Jesus struggled to find work and Marlyn spent most of her days trying to figure out how to reunite with her sons.

Back in Mobile, Eber demanded to be held constantly, screaming every time Estela put him down. Isaac would hyperventilate and hide anytime someone mentioned ICE. He started acting out in school. Estela was called in for a meeting with his teachers, during which she explained that she was trying to figure out how to get the boys back to Marlyn. This only seemed to make things worse. A county social worker showed up at her house unannounced, asking questions: Where were the boys sleeping? What did they eat? Did they have clean clothes? A few days later, the social worker called and threatened to take the boys from her. “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into,” the social worker said, according to Estela. “If you don’t have custody and their parents aren’t here, the state has the right to take them.”

“I just wanted to do something good,” Estela told her, “and everyone is making it seem like I’m doing something wrong.”

She called Marlyn in a panic. After her own experience in detention, Marlyn was terrified of her children ending up in government custody. Estela tried to reassure Marlyn that she wouldn’t let anyone take the boys. But she was also scared that she might not be able to stop it from happening. Tension was building between the two women. Estela despaired about giving up her life to take care of Eber and Isaac. All of her time, and a lot of her money, was going toward the boys’ needs: clothes, school supplies, food, medication. Marlyn, who had no way to repay her, was grateful for the help and embarrassed by how much she needed it. She also worried that her children were becoming too attached to Estela. “She was scared I would keep her kids,” Estela told me. “I said, ‘No, I would never do that, because I’m also a mom.’ ” But she knew that sending the boys to Venezuela could traumatize them all over again. She put Eber in day care so they wouldn’t grow too close.

Eber couldn’t travel until he’d had lung surgery; his doctors said the cyst would become cancerous if it wasn’t removed, and getting the procedure in Venezuela would be nearly impossible. And no airline would be willing to fly Isaac out of the country without a legal guardian or passport.

Estela made dozens of calls to lawyers and nonprofit groups. She contacted ICE offices in Georgia and Alabama but received no response. Finally she reached an official in Chicago who said that if she turned Isaac over to the government, he could be deported back to Venezuela within a few weeks. It seemed like the only option.

Estela asked Isaac’s father to explain the plan to his son over a video call. Jesus told Isaac that he was going to a shelter with other children who were waiting to be returned to their parents. “You are going to be okay,” he said. “Nothing bad is going to happen to you.” Marlyn and Estela repeated the reassurances until Isaac was willing to go.

In late April, Estela loaded a backpack with clothes and snacks. The next morning, she put a piece of paper with phone numbers into Isaac’s shirt pocket and told him not to lose it. She drove him two and a half hours to the closest ICE field office, in southern Louisiana. They said they loved each other. A couple of hours later, she got a text from ICE saying that Isaac was on a plane to a foster home in Texas, where the 7-year-old would wait until he could go before an immigration judge and formally request “voluntary departure” to Venezuela.

Meridith Kohut for The Atlantic

Estela greets Miguel as he arrives home from work. Caring for Eber has drained their bank account.

Estela returned to Mobile, and to Eber’s more complicated situation. He needed surgery, and his travel would be harder to arrange than Isaac’s. He was a U.S. citizen, so he couldn’t enter Venezuela without a visa—which requires a parent’s permission and usually their presence. Meanwhile, most construction work around Mobile was on hold because workers were too scared to leave their houses. Miguel’s business was suffering, but Estela couldn’t help, because she had no time to work.

And soon after she began to look into travel documents for Eber, the police started showing up at her house.

The sheriff’s deputy at the door said he was looking for Isaac. Estela started to explain the situation all over again, but her heart was racing. She worried that the officer didn’t understand or believe her, so she called Shaina Simenas, a social worker at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights. “Okay, put him on the phone,” Simenas said. She told the officer that Isaac was in federal custody and that ICE had deported both of his parents. He seemed satisfied, but officers returned to Estela’s house twice, until finally Simenas persuaded the department to close its investigation.

The Young Center normally advocates for unaccompanied children in their immigration proceedings, but when family separations began to accelerate after Trump took office for the second time, it assigned a team of six to focus on them. Since then, they’ve worked on more than 150 cases and have a growing waitlist. “It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the need,” Kelly Kribs, one of the team’s co-directors, told me.

Even without advertising this work, the Young Center has been overwhelmed. Some children and detained parents have found them by word of mouth. “We got a call from a 17-year-old boy a few weeks ago who was looking for help because his mom was his only caregiver, and he’s couch surfing in upstate New York,” Kribs said. “I think he Googled us.”

Kribs and her colleagues have tried to advocate for a number of women who were still breastfeeding when they were detained, despite an ICE policy against such detainments outside “exceptional circumstances.” One mother from St. Louis who had no criminal history was detained at three months postpartum. ICE ignored the Young Center’s request to release her under the policy. It took days for Simenas and a colleague to set up an account on the detainee tablet system, so she could message her family. “She went weeks without even seeing her infant because of how nonfunctional the system is for these families,” Simenas told me.

The Young Center has also tried to support temporary caregivers who are so overwhelmed that the children are unsafe. Kribs told me about a man in Florida who’d had to quit his job to care for five children, including a six-month-old, after their mothers—the man’s girlfriend and her sister—were detained. He had no income to pay for food and diapers. “He was father to none of these children,” Kribs said. One Illinois woman taking care of a 5-year-old boy whose father had been deported to Mexico was so financially strapped that she became homeless; she sent the child to sleep at a friend’s apartment while she lived in her car. Kribs eventually persuaded ICE to transport the boy back to his father. But first she had to send the caregiver $20 in gas money so the boy could be handed off.

On rare occasions, Kribs and her colleagues have transported children themselves, as in the case of a 13-month-old girl they ferried back to Mexico last year. Kribs said the reunion was bittersweet: The baby’s mother was waiting at the airport with balloons and a giant stuffed animal. But the little girl, who had spent more than half her life separated from her mother, didn’t seem to recognize her.

Now that ICE is almost solely dedicated to maximizing deportations, Kribs said, few people are left at the agency who will listen to their concerns. When possible, the Young Center tries to work with contractors to encourage ICE to comply with the policy on reunifying parents and children, or sorting out custody before deporting them. But not every detention center has enough staff to handle those requests, and some are busier than others. Kribs said that trying to appeal to deportation officers, who are under the most pressure to hit the president’s numerical goals, is especially challenging. One officer admitted to her that he thought it was “just so much easier when they leave their kids here,” she recalled. “Like it’s a logistical headache for them to try not to separate families.” (DHS did not comment on this claim.)

Separated parents have told me their pain is all-consuming. Before she was deported, a mother named Lucía called me from the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, crying about not having seen her 14-month-old and 3-year-old in three months. She said it was excruciating not being able to explain to them why she was gone. “They’re babies,” she said. “They don’t understand.” Lucía said that most of the women around her were in similar situations. Some had a spouse who was with their children, but other kids were staying with extended relatives or acquaintances. “In this room where I am,” she said, “there are 56 of us, and the majority are moms.”

After just over a month in federal custody in Texas, Isaac landed at the airport in La Guaira, Venezuela, in May. When Eber had his surgery, also in the spring, Estela spent three days and nights in a chair next to his hospital bed. She sent pictures to Marlyn and Jesus to keep them updated. Marlyn said very little in response. Not being able to be with Eber had left her speechless. “Thank you, Estela,” Jesus replied in one message. “I don’t know how, but one day I’m going to repay you for everything you’ve done for my son.”

Estela promised Marlyn that she wouldn’t hand off Eber to another caretaker, and that she’d get him back to Venezuela. But she’s exhausted. She feels like she’s neglecting her sons and her husband. Recently their bank account was down to $27. She used to go to church four times a week, but now manages just one. In the pews, she asks God to allow Eber to return to his family, and for the patience to keep caring for him in the meantime. “This baby needs to be with his mother,” she said.

Meridith Kohut for The Atlantic

After a year of separation, Eber seems to no longer remember Marlyn and calls Estela “Mama.” Estela has been trying to arrange Eber’s transfer to Venezuela all year.

During a video call with Marlyn in August, he sat on a couch next to Estela, picking Lucky Charms out of a bowl. For 10 long minutes, Estela cajoled him to say hello or blow his mom a kiss. He only glanced at the camera, and didn’t seem to recognize Marlyn’s face or voice.

When I speak with Marlyn by phone now, her speech is slow and soft, almost zombie-like. She says she can’t sleep. Venezuelan officials said that they would add her name to a list of parents who need their children back from the U.S., but they have not given her a timeline for Eber’s return. She calls them every day, but they tell her to keep waiting. She stays in touch with mothers she met in detention, and they update one another on trying to get their children back. So far, Isaac is the only success story among them. Meanwhile, Marlyn didn’t see Eber’s first steps or hear his first words. He was so fragile the last time they were together. Now he’s much bigger, with a mischievous smile that she’s never seen in person. He launches himself into bear hugs that she’s never felt. Even if he makes it to Venezuela, they’ll never regain the time they lost. “I’ve missed everything,” she said.

This article originally misstated Estela Díaz’s surname. The article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “The Babies Left Behind in America.”

The Hidden State Russia Is Building Inside Ukraine

2026-09-27T07:00:00-04:00

The world has watched Russia’s war against Ukraine largely through the movement of its front lines. But behind those lines, Moscow is building something more durable: a hidden state inside Ukraine. Across the Russian-occupied parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, Russian institutions are steadily replacing Ukrainian ones and reshaping the routines of everyday life.

Schools teach Russian curricula. Official documents, such as mandated Russian passports, tie residents to the Russian state. Russian systems govern access to housing and public services. On June 13, Vladimir Putin told Russian officials that Moscow’s task is to unify these Ukrainian territories into a legal, economic, educational, cultural, and information space under Russia by 2030. The objective is permanence: to make Ukrainian civic life hard to maintain and Russian rule hard to undo.

This agenda predates the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Crimea became an early laboratory for it after Russia annexed the peninsula, in 2014. Moscow quickly imposed Russian citizenship on Crimeans and made documentation—most commonly passports—necessary for employment and access to basic services. It introduced Russian law in Crimea and replaced Ukrainian institutions with Russian ones.

[Read: Russia’s real strategy in Europe]

The Ukrainian territories occupied after the 2022 invasion have been more difficult to wrangle. The eastern provinces house major industrial assets, hundreds of thousands of people who consider themselves Ukrainians, and active resistance networks. Moscow initially relied heavily on occupation administrations, military coercion, and improvised measures. Gradually, however, it has introduced a more durable architecture to yoke the territories to the Russian state.

Russia has extended the dominion of its administrative state across occupied Ukraine. Russian federal courts claim jurisdiction there, and Russian taxation, migration, security, and military apparatuses hold authority. In 2025, Moscow integrated the occupation administrations into the monitoring software it calls the Governor’s Dashboard, which keeps track of local construction projects, budgets, and administrative compliance in real time across Russia.

One aim of this integration is to sever occupied Ukraine from Kyiv and pull its residents firmly under Russian oversight and control. Ukrainians are required to get Russian passports, without which they cannot receive pensions, get jobs, collect state benefits, or pursue studies. They can’t even use phones: Local mobile operators now require Russian identity documents for SIM cards. A young man who left Kherson because he feared being detained for his pro-Ukrainian views, or conscripted into the Russian military, described how he was forced to obtain a Russian passport. “They put a gun to my head,” he told us. Like other Ukrainians we spoke to from these territories, he asked that his name be withheld for fear of retaliation against his loved ones.

Many Ukrainians living under occupation have become convinced that independent Ukraine is unreachable. Russia took, replaced, or made unusable the Ukrainian documents that residents once had. Sophia, a 24-year-old from occupied Donetsk, told us that the occupation authorities repeatedly informed residents that Kyiv had abandoned them, and that only Moscow would issue them passports now. Without documents, Sophia felt trapped: Russia “was the only place I could legally go,” she said, even though she did not want to live there.

To men aged 18 to 65, Russian citizenship brings military registration and punishment for noncompliance. From February 2022 to the end of 2025, in direct violation of international humanitarian law, the Russian army forcibly mobilized approximately 50,000 Ukrainians to fight against their own country.

At the same time, Russia has been systematically expropriating Ukrainians’ property. Many who fled the territories under Russian occupation left real estate behind. Some of their homes have been classified as ownerless or unregistered, paving the way for their confiscation. Those who wish to retain their property must reregister it under Russian law by the end of the year. Doing so requires Russian citizenship and personally returning to the occupied territory.

Since 2024, Russian authorities have confiscated, or identified for confiscation, at least 34,000 properties belonging to Ukrainian citizens. And they have begun allocating some of these homes to Russian citizens, whom they encourage to settle in occupied Ukraine, with the alleged goal of increasing the territories’ total number of Russians to 1 million by 2045. This year, occupation authorities began transferring plots of Ukrainian land to Russians, with preference given to servicemen and those who have signed military contracts.

The state that Moscow is building in occupied Ukraine is more isolated and poorer than the one from which it was wrenched. Since 2022, Moscow has worked to cut off the occupied regions from the Ukrainian information space by blocking independent media, restricting messaging services, and replacing the communications infrastructure with Russian-controlled networks. Hundreds of Ukrainian and independent websites are inaccessible, and residents struggle to access Telegram, WhatsApp, and VPNs.

Since 2022, Moscow has poured billions of dollars into reconstructing occupied Ukraine. Officially these funds are meant to rebuild housing, roads, and public services. In reality, they have facilitated patronage and resource extraction.

Moscow has built up infrastructure that supports Russian military objectives, while living conditions for civilians deteriorate. It has closed or repurposed about 90 percent of the industrial facilities in occupied Ukraine. Many of these Ukrainian factories have been absorbed into Russian defense production, and Moscow has commandeered mines, machine-building plants, metallurgical facilities, and chemical plants for military use.

[Read: Ukraine’s short-lived comeback]

Since 2023, Moscow has expanded road and port infrastructure to support military logistics and resource extraction. It has spent about $425 million on railroads, including new routes farther from the front lines to move ammunition and military equipment to its forces. Russia has also integrated the occupied ports of Mariupol and Berdyansk into its maritime network, using them to export grain, energy, minerals, and other products to Russia and elsewhere. In 2025 alone, Moscow exported more than 2 million tons of grain from occupied Ukraine.

Russia’s militarization of the economy in these regions has left few jobs and low salaries for Ukrainians. One resident of occupied Luhansk told us that many men prefer to take temporary or unofficial work for one reason: “Official employment means going straight to the military-enlistment office.”

The worsening economic situation has deepened social tensions, and many residents describe feelings of despair and a sense of “frozen time.” One person in Kherson spoke of “moral exhaustion” from the occupation. Another told us, “Those who live better are those collaborating with occupation authorities.” The Russians brought into the territories, meanwhile, are reportedly paid substantially more than locals.

The Kremlin knows that the Ukrainians living under these conditions are potentially hostile. And so its occupation authorities have adopted what some of them call a “preventive threat elimination” approach, which assumes that most civilians are disloyal and treats even passive dissent as a security threat. Having Signal, Ukrainian apps and media, pro-Ukrainian Telegram channels, or suspicious contacts in your phone can attract scrutiny and, in some cases, lead to detention or beatings. From February 2022 to August 2025, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Russian occupation forces detained about 15,000 civilians, although the true number may be significantly higher.

As a result, Ukrainians are self-censoring. Many remove Ukraine-related material from their devices or use a second phone while traveling. Some avoid speaking in public places for fear of being reported and detained. A resident living in occupied Zaporizhzhia told us, “There shouldn’t be anything unnecessary on your phone so there won’t be unnecessary questions.”

About 1.6 million Ukrainian children live under occupation, and Russia has made their ideological education a state priority. The objective is to Russify them and shape them into future military recruits.

Schools in the occupied areas stress hostility toward Ukraine and the West and glorify Russian national symbols. Teaching in the Ukrainian language is verboten. A resident of occupied Kherson told us that “anything that reminds people of Ukraine, even the colors, is strictly forbidden.” Volodymyr, a young man also from Kherson, told us that school officials and Russian representatives warned students against speaking freely, opposing Russian occupation, and maintaining contact with relatives in Ukraine or abroad. This year Moscow has introduced a new curriculum at all levels, from kindergarten through university, aimed at strengthening Russian identity and glorifying “defenders of the fatherland,” including participants in the war against Ukraine.

At the same time, Moscow has expanded patriotic, military-linked youth groups into the occupied territories. Membership has grown rapidly. “They did not ask whether I wanted to join the Russian youth organization,” Volodymyr told us. Rather, he said, it was: “You, you, you, and you—you must join today.”

The Movement of the First, often described as the successor to the Soviet Pioneers, has more than half a million members in occupied Ukraine. Yunarmia, which Putin has called a “school of life,” has at least 44,000 members there. VOIN, a network of military sports-training and patriotic-education centers, has swept up at least 10,000 young people since 2024. These organizations operate under the close supervision of the Kremlin and even Putin himself. They introduce children, some as young as 6, and young adults to firearms, tactical medicine, drone piloting, survival skills, reconnaissance, and sniping.

[Read: The armored sarcophagus saving Ukrainian soldiers]

Oksana, a caregiver from Kherson, left the occupation with her family after pressure grew on her sons to enter Russia’s military system. She described schools where academic subjects had been pushed aside by militarization and indoctrination. “In the first place—military training. In second place—propaganda,” she told us. “From kindergarten, they already start teaching them to march.”

For a child living under occupation, four years is enough time to reshape an identity—to learn or forget a language, and to set the course of education, friendships, and future plans. For those who have lived under Russian occupation since 2014, this is no longer a temporary disruption. It is the formative experience of their lives. A child who was 6 when Russia first occupied Crimea or parts of the Donbas is now an adult who has never known life under Ukrainian rule.

The institutions Russia has built behind the front lines are hardening. For Russia, they are the groundwork of annexation. For Ukraine, they are an obstacle, even if Kyiv one day wins those territories back.

Russian indoctrination and coercion could be a security problem that will outlast any cease-fire. And every passing year that Russian institutions endure increases the difficulty Ukrainians will have in restoring their country’s sovereignty, reconnecting their families, regaining their property, and providing young people with a meaningful sense of belonging.

Trump Could Leave the Iran Mess to His Successor

2026-09-24T07:00:00-04:00

Nearly seven months in, the war in Iran seems nowhere close to a conclusion. Although talks between the United States and Iran continue, including this week, a disengaged Donald Trump appears uninterested in resolving the conflict; his administration has put forth no coherent plan and has not demonstrated the capability to win the war. Iran’s leadership seems unwilling to end it. (One can hardly blame them: It’s only once the shooting stops and the regime is left with an angry, impoverished population to govern that the leaders’ real troubles begin.) The most significant push for a resolution of some sort is coming from the Gulf States, whose economies are at stake and whose leaders appear inclined to agree to some degree of Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz, which would have been unacceptable—unthinkable, even—prior to the conflict.

This means that Trump, despite the fact that he has 27 more months in office, is most likely going to attempt to stick the next administration with the unenviable, messy task of resolving this quagmire. And if the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are anything to go by, Republicans will be struck by collective amnesia regarding how this unnecessary, wasteful, destructive war started in the first place—especially if Trump’s successor is a Democrat.

This is the third time this century that the United States has begun a reckless, poorly planned war in the greater Middle East, and the lessons from how the others ended are instructive. In Iraq, the George W. Bush administration famously salvaged the war—at the expense of thousands of American and Iraqi lives—by surging troops into the country while it was in the middle of a brutal civil war, which Iraq’s Shia Arabs and Kurdish communities had decisively won by 2008. Those conditions allowed for the Bush administration to negotiate an honorable Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq in 2008 that affirmed Iraqi sovereignty and required U.S. forces to depart the country by the end of 2011. Implementing the agreement was, by necessity of time, left to the next administration.

All of this was in the public record, preserved for posterity. Yet none of it prevented Republican hawks from denouncing what they described as Barack Obama’s “decision” to withdraw from Iraq. Even today, many Republicans still talk about “Obama’s withdrawal” from Iraq as if it were something unilaterally decided by the 44th president. The media picked up on this at the time, amplifying Republican talking points and questioning whether “Obama’s decision” was also responsible for the rise of the Islamic State in 2014.

[Read: The Middle East still to come]

If this was not maddening enough, the pattern repeated itself in Afghanistan. The Trump administration, in 2020, negotiated—bilaterally with the Taliban, no less—the withdrawal of U.S. forces from that country. By the time Joe Biden took office 11 months later, its options in Afghanistan were severely constrained. The Biden administration, and especially the Department of Defense and the uniformed services, deserve plenty of criticism for the messy, chaotic way in which U.S. forces left the country in 2021. But listening to Republican critics of the withdrawal, you would be forgiven for thinking that the decision to withdraw had been Biden’s, and Biden’s alone.

Most likely, the Trump administration is going to leave its successor with some truly horrific strategic options in the Persian Gulf. Previous administrations deterred Iran from making the final push toward the acquisition of a nuclear weapon. But Trump exhausted the most well-publicized deterrent that the U.S. had available—an aerial campaign to set back Iran’s nuclear program—during his 2025 operation in Iran. And although he damaged the program, it was not, as he later claimed, “obliterated.” Developing a new, credible military deterrent will take many months, if not years.

The next administration would count itself lucky to be able to renegotiate an agreement akin to the much-maligned 2015 Iran nuclear deal. But that might not be possible with the current Iranian leadership, and it’s unclear if Iran would—or should—trust a future administration to abide by whatever terms had been negotiated. Many of the people who encouraged Trump to abandon that agreement in 2018, after all, are the same people who encouraged him to go to war with Iran in 2025 and, again, in 2026. Despite the political disaster this war has become for Republicans, those hawks somehow retain influence within the party.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Don’t ask how this war ends]

My hope—which is merely that, a hope—is that Iran now realizes that its newfound ability to close the Strait of Hormuz represents a nonnuclear deterrent against future strikes by the United States and Israel, which obviates Tehran’s need for a nuclear deterrent. The situation with the strait is untenable, however. Freedom of navigation through the waterway had previously been assured by another deterrent—the presence of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, based out of Bahrain. But the future of U.S. bases in the Gulf is uncertain. And although the Navy has proved its ability to enforce a naval blockade of its own against Iran, it has failed in another core task—guaranteeing passage of friendly commerce through the strait. Iran, for its part, will be delighted with its new ability to choke off one of the world’s most important trade routes.

As for the United States, we have a painfully short memory. Many of the hawks who steered Washington into one strategic blunder after another in the years after September 11, 2001, were nonetheless granted platforms to defend their records and offer new policy advice in the weeks leading up to the 25th anniversary of those attacks. We forget, too quickly, how much damage these people have done to the American economy and to American power around the world. Which is why efforts to blame what happens next in Iran on the next administration are such good politics—and will likely succeed.

The Makings of a Prewar World

2026-09-23T16:26:51-04:00

Donald Trump offered perhaps the clearest summation yet of his worldview in an otherwise discursive address to the United Nations General Assembly yesterday. Defending the American takeover of Venezuelan oil, he invoked an old maxim: “To the victor belongs the spoils.” He then presented Iran with a choice between accepting his terms and being driven “into hell with no chance of survival.”

These remarks are the latest sign that world politics is entering an era when might makes right. Yet Trump is only one of the leaders driving this rupture from the post–World War II international order. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have also broken the order, although their methods differ profoundly—morally, legally, and otherwise. American policy may change when Trump leaves office in January 2029, but Putin and Xi may remain in power well into the next decade.

A new American president will likely not be able to restore the old order or create a better one, even if they want to. Their greatest challenge will be to arrest the slide.

International order is a notoriously vague and politically contested concept. Many leaders in the global South, along with Western critics, reject the idea that the United States ever consistently abided by a rules-based system. They point to Western military interventions, double standards, and the unequal distribution of power within international institutions. But the old order’s failures do not mean that its restraints were meaningless.

In his first book, A World Restored, Henry Kissinger argued that a stable and legitimate order rests on a limited consensus: an understanding among the major powers about what he called the permissible aims and methods of foreign policy. Governments can compete intensely and violate rules without seeking to overturn the system itself. The danger arises when a major power becomes so dissatisfied with the limits imposed upon it that it adopts a revolutionary foreign policy.

[Vivian Salama: America’s allies are no longer waiting for Trump to leave]

Under the old international order, major powers did not, as a general rule, conquer and annex the territory of their neighbors. The global trading system was based on reciprocity, tariffs were historically low, and markets were relatively open. And, although it was the world’s strongest country, the United States exercised enough self-discipline to allow its allies to grow into genuine partners, not vassals to be constantly squeezed for concessions.

Over the past decade, and decisively since the pandemic, that consensus about permissible conduct has collapsed. Putin launched the largest war in Europe since World War II with his invasion of Ukraine in 2022. He more than anyone has revived the idea that countries can expand their borders through the use of force. Combined Russian- and Ukrainian-military casualties (those killed, wounded, and missing) have reached approximately 2 million people. European governments have accused Russia of an expanding campaign of sabotage, cyberattacks, arson, and drone incursions below the threshold of conventional war. North Korea has intervened directly in this war, and many other nations are indirectly involved—China and Iran on the side of Russia; Europe, the United States (at least under Joe Biden), and Asian democracies on the side of Ukraine.

Under Xi, China has broken the global trading system. Xi has used the power of the Chinese state to establish dominance in advanced manufacturing, reduce China’s imports as much as possible, and aggressively grow its exports. The result is that China has enormous excess capacity. Its goods flood into the rest of the world at prices impossible to compete with, leaving other countries to choose between deindustrialization and protectionism. More and more of them are selecting the latter. This policy is not as morally egregious as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but it has toppled a key pillar of the international economic order.

Since taking office for a second term, in 2025, Trump has turned American power against U.S. allies and partners. He imposed the highest tariffs in nearly a century on Canada, Japan, South Korea, India, and the European Union and used the threat of more to extract hundreds of billions of dollars in investment pledges. He mused about making Canada the 51st state and seizing Greenland. He pushed Ukraine to sign over a share of its mineral wealth in the middle of a war for its national survival. Under Trump, the United States sees itself not as the guarantor of an alliance system of like-minded democracies, but as a dominant power that wields its influence for singular, transactional gain.

Trump has broken the restraint that made American primacy tolerable to most of the rest of the world. Reports suggest that he may meet Xi and Putin for a “big three” trilateral on the margins of the Asia Pacific Economic Summit in Shenzhen in November, which could mark the formal end of the old order.

The rupture has produced an international environment that feels ever more like that of a prewar period. This does not mean that a major conflict is inevitable. But if one occurs, future historians will not find its causes sudden or mysterious. They are in plain sight.

[Listen: Trump battles against an economy of his making]

The major powers are building up their militaries and racing to master drone warfare and artificial intelligence. Trump’s lack of commitment to alliances, especially in Europe, raises the prospect that an aggressor may calculate that it can act without triggering much of a U.S. reaction. Meanwhile, America’s rivals are more and more aligned as they integrate their military production, share sensitive technology, and assist one another in battle.

The shift has generational and psychological drivers. Putin, Xi, and Trump are elderly, sometimes erratic, insulated in information bubbles, and animated by ideological visions of national revival. The moment may feel like a closing window—a now-or-never opportunity to remake the world while they still can.

A future American president may promise to build a new and improved international order. But Xi and Putin will have little reason to accept the restraints that Washington wants to restore, and although American allies may welcome a return to a more internationalist U.S. foreign policy, they will harbor doubts that it will survive the next election.

Rather than promising what they cannot deliver, aspiring presidents should level with the American people. The international order has come to an end. The next president will inherit one of the most unforgiving international environments since 1945. Their task will be to stop the deterioration, inject some stability into world affairs, and begin to lay the foundation for a better future, even if that is not achievable in the short term.

The Middle East Still to Come

2026-09-23T11:27:13-04:00

“My love is not for places or for lands. My only passion is for the lightning ﬂash,” wrote Ibn Arabi, a philosopher who in 1200 C.E. set out to travel across the war-torn chaos we now call the Middle East. Ibn Arabi’s reaction to the conﬂicts, fanaticisms, and hatreds of his time was to develop an idea he called “The Absolute”—Wahdat al-wujud, or the unity of being—which combined his own Suﬁ Islam with other faiths and dreams with such a generosity of spirit that his critics accused him of heterodoxy and heresy. His ideas were complex and often obscure, but today they seem startlingly modern, tolerant, and hopeful.

Journeying from his native kingdom of Murcia, in Islamic Spain, through a Maghreb ruled by revivalist conquerors called the Almohads, to Cairo, Mecca, and Damascus, Ibn Arabi judged people by their worth, not their identity, and ideas by their value, not their origin.

Now as then, the Middle East is a region where wars destroy people, places and civilizations, yet also give rise to auspicious conjunctions and technical ingenuities. As Abu Tamman ibn Aws wrote in his “Ode on the Conquest of Amorium” in 838 C.E., “knowledge sparkles on the tips of lances.” In today’s hurtling, interconnected world, wars are fought in arenas that did not exist just 20 years ago—not only battleﬁelds of men and heavy metal but multiple echelons, some high tech, digital, multimedia, and even intergalactic, others distant, indirect, and improvised, guerrilla-style.

Neat triumphs do not come often, and when they do, they are as transient as the apogees of empires. The consoling superiority of military ingenuity is short-lived: The other side always catches up fast, and many new technologies empower the weaker party against the mighty, granting brave resisters survival and even victory. In what I call iPhone-and-dagger societies, berobed warriors in Toyota pickups can use game consoles to direct drones that doom gleaming million-dollar fighter jets—and may one day sink an aircraft carrier.

In the past quarter century, one of the most important changes in the region has been the rise within it of new great or median powers willing to manipulate the legacy of the European imperial powers that ruled before 1945, and to defy or challenge the superpowers that dominated during the Cold War. The United States, Russia, and China still intervene in the Middle East, but in a manner that is Olympian, erratic, and inconsistent. Behind them lurks a deeper conﬂict of entire systems: the open world, still (just) led by America, versus the closed world that is the axis of China and Russia. A parallel, simultaneous battle, centered within the Middle East, rages among diﬀerent versions of, or attitudes toward, the practice of Islam and its complex relationship with the West.

This article was excerpted from Simon Sebag Montefiore’s forthcoming book, The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East.

Despite the superpowers’ insatiable appetite for mastery and resources, they are often absent, and the Middle East abhors a vacuum. Yet the region now lacks the type of hegemon that dominated it in the past, such as the Akkadians, Persians, Ottomans, and the Anglo-French.

Regional powers today are ambitious to dominate not just their own neighborhood but lands beyond. In the past 10 years, three of them—Turkey, Iran, and Israel—have come to command the region’s preeminent military forces. Saudi Arabia has taken the place of Egypt as leader of the Sunni world. But paramilitary proxies that live in caves and deploy missiles can hold regional powers at bay—as the Houthis have proved. At the same time, the luxury monarchies of the small Gulf states, some of which were obscure quasi-colonies only a few generations ago, have come to exercise inﬂuence and power far beyond the region—in Africa, South Asia, and even Europe and America.

[Thomas Wright: The price of defeat in Iran]

New and seemingly improbable alignments are coming into being under the whoosh of missiles. Perhaps the most extraordinary has been the de facto alliance of Israel and the United Arab Emirates against Iran. Certainly few would have imagined just a decade ago that Israeli units or advisers might be deployed in the Emirates itself—1,400 years after Mohammed defeated the Jewish tribes of Arabia, 1,700 since the Jewish kingdom of Himyar (now Yemen). Pakistani, Egyptian, Iranian, and Ukrainian military contingents now serve in Arabia, marking a convergence of the Middle East theater with those elsewhere, and increasing the dangers of conﬂict fusion.

All this expansion and convergence make the very expression Middle East—once defined by a Levantine fulcrum, Ottoman past, Arab culture, and perennially insoluble Israel-Palestine conﬂict—no longer ﬁt to describe the panorama before us.

Looking back over the past half century, Iran’s Islamic revolution makes 1979 a world-changing epochal moment as signiﬁcant as 1789 and 1917. One of the curiosities of the modern era is that the non-Arab, Shiite Iranians gave birth to the Sunni Arab movement of radical Islamist-nationalism. But Sunni and Shia have cohabited and intermingled for millennia. The radical doctrine of “resistance”—Muqawama—developed in Beirut in the 1960s, linking Marxism, anti-colonialism, and anti-imperialism to the righteous vanguard of the Palestinian cause. The Iranian revolutionary ideologue Ali Shariati understood that the idiosyncrasies of Shiite doctrine and ritual made it particularly suitable for revolutionary resistance and martyrdom—what he called “Red Shiism.”

One could argue Islam was not so much radicalized after 1979 as revolutionary thought was Islamized. In Muslim societies, Islam is indivisible from politics. The ultimate battle is not between Islam and secularism, the Lebanese economist Nadim Shehadi has written, but between “a liberal Islam allied with the West versus a radical Islam in confrontation with the West.” Iran’s ruling ayatollahs loathed the Gulf Arab monarchies (“the Riyadh camel-grazers,” in Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s words) almost more than they hated America and Israel, because they were the successful model of an alternative, prosperous, and open-minded society.

[Robert Kagan: Iran unleashed]

Some of the Arab monarchies have become citadels of the open version of Islam. But this is a recent, fragile achievement, dependent on particularly inspired leaders in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates—and, since 1991, on a period of safety under American protection that may already be over. The monarchies’ successes derive in part from their nature, the fact that most were not created by European empires or ever fully colonized, and instead developed organically—sometimes at the tip of a sword wielded by swashbuckling warrior kings, such as in Saudi Arabia.

The luxury monarchies rose thanks to a blend of vision, perceived security, the ability of absolute rulers to move quickly, and a bounty of fossil fuels. Oil was not the only factor: Morocco in 2025 overtook South Africa as Africa’s leading industrial economy. The cosmopolitan cultures and mercantile traditions of the Gulf—whose entrepôts always traded with India, Africa, and Europe—produced a measured pragmatism preﬁgured by Muawiya, the 7th-century Umayyad caliph who ruled the vast Arab empire. “I never apply the sword when the lash suﬃces,” Muawiya said, “nor the lash when my tongue is enough. If there is even one thread binding me to my fellow man, I do not let it break. If he pulls, I loosen. If he loosens, I pull.” Has the art of politics ever been better expressed?

The past half century, and especially the past two decades, have seen an astonishing increase in the Middle East’s global inﬂuence, especially on Washington. In the 1970s, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Israel maintained legendary lobbies in D.C. Today, the Saudis, the Pakistanis, the Turks, and the Gulf states have curated deep inﬂuence—though Israel’s access may be in danger of a precipitous decline. The reach of tiny Qatar all across the Western world is unparalleled.

Yet these are bellicose and unpredictable times. A harsh new realism seems likely to sweep away the structures and traditions of statecraft that have governed the region since the foundation of the Arab League in 1945 and OPEC in 1960, replacing them with multilayered and overlapping security arrangements. Some of the region’s nation-states are in crisis: New states already seem to be emerging from Sudan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia. Ultimately, new sorts of states, including parastates and federations, with new borders, will likely take shape.

Since October 7 and the Iran war, the luxury monarchies are no longer the peacefully sybaritic domains of inﬂuencers, footballers, supermodels, and gangsters, but will have to balance military force against cultural mission in the quest for survival and leverage. They will fear and loathe Iran, but it looms too large, too lethal, and too close to ignore, and they will seek safety in expensively armed accommodation while trying to curate prosperity, secured by overlapping conjunctions between spheres and powers. Both South Asian giants, India and Pakistan, and both Slavic titans, Russia and Ukraine, will likely play larger roles—and even station forces or advisers—in the Middle East in the future as security zones converge. After the war, there will be fewer art galleries and skyscrapers, more drones and Iron Domes. Luxury monarchies will become military monarchies.

America will remain the paramount power and coveted protector. Yet its capricious ambitions, its pomp and plenitude, its abuse of long-standing friendships, its mercurial interventions and angst-driven withdrawals make it an ever less reliable ally. America is big enough to recover from its neo-Tsarist follies, but many Middle Eastern powers will never trust it again. Many states will instead turn to China, which will expand its reach as planetary hegemon through its Belt and Road Initiative, deploying commercial ports, military bases, a global ﬂeet, and alliances with new friends weary of American fecklessness. Not for nothing does Xi Jinping so often laud the Ming Dynasty treasure fleets that visited Hormuz, Oman, and Jeddah under the eunuch admiral Zheng He.

The region’s three preeminent military powers—Turkey, Israel, and Iran—combine force with fragility. Turkish power is restrained and strengthened by NATO membership, U.S. support, and European Union relationships. But President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s survival in power depends on repressing opposition politicians while his economy falters. He regularly heralds neo-Ottoman influence over Syria, Lebanon, and Israel: “Jerusalem will be ours,” he says. Few Arab nations wish to become vassals of a neo-Ottoman “sultanate,” nor do they welcome Erdoğan’s version of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the war he threatens with Israel could ruin Turkey’s Eurasian role.

Israel is even more contradictory—swaggering and insecure, overreaching and underprepared, secular liberal and militaristic messianic, spectacular in tactics, impoverished in strategy. However superior its military, its way of war—overdependent on its peerless, sophisticated air force and secret agency Mossad—has become bombastic and bloody, yet inconclusive. Whoever leads it, Israel has no choice but to defend itself against Iran, its belligerent satraps and their destructive mission. For all its dynamism and eclecticism, Israel is hobbled by its own politics. The Judaic republic could even be wrecked by an intra-Jewish civil war, perhaps triggered by its religious-fascist politicians and overmighty paramilitaries, with their campaign to achieve Jewish supremacy in the West Bank through pogroms against Palestinian civilians.

To thrive, the ingenious Jewish state needs to convert technological talent and military success into creative coexistence and regional alliance. That begins with a pathway to Palestinian self-determination—which requires an Israeli leader capable of reassuring Palestinians that Israelis can envisage a peaceful Palestinian entity on their borders, as well as a pragmatic Palestinian leader capable of persuading Palestinians to accept an outcome that is well short of Israel’s destruction. Indeed, Palestinian leaders would need to accept the reality of the permanent Israeli presence and complete the circle by convincing a majority of Israelis that a shared, peaceful future is possible. All this seems far oﬀ after the trauma of October 7 and the Gaza war. Nonetheless it is essential, existential, and still achievable.

No beast in the jungle is so dangerous as a wounded tiger: Iran. With every crisis and every misstep of its enemies, its ruling kernel hardens. Its messianic praetorian oligarchy, now led by veteran generals emboldened by war, will surely reﬂect that only nuclear arms can safeguard their regime. For now, that regime will survive through a form of geostrategic blackmail paid by America and Arab states. Rearmed by Russia and China, it will pursue its Islamic-resistance mission aided by weakened but lethal proxies. Its real challenges will come after the guns go silent, when it can only maintain itself through barbaric repression. It will subside from within when no one expects it.

The architecture of trade is likely to change as a result of the Iran war. New pipelines that would have reduced the importance of strangle grips like Hormuz and Mandab were never built due to the instability of Iraq and the Levant, and a taboo on running them through Israel. It is now more than possible that the pipelines will be built from the Gulf to Levantine ports and even, if Israel is governed sensibly, to Haifa, just as the British planned in Sykes-Picot back in 1915. In a few years, Hormuz will matter less.

New transcontinental blocs may come into being. A Sunni aﬃnity could include Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan; another could bind together India, Israel, Kazakhstan, Greece, Cyprus, Ethiopia, Somaliland, Bahrain, Morocco and the UAE. The Abraham Accords lost some of their glow after October 7—and more after Iran attacked the Gulf states. But they represent a worldview. An India–Middle East–Mediterranean pathway would make sense for Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, but that would require engaging Israel. Who knows what this month’s election could bring?

The new Arab-Islamic era is also playing out in Western societies. Europe is now home to large, growing, and ever more politically powerful communities of Muslim immigrants and their children. The coming decades will see the political consequences of that inﬂuence and the reaction to it. At the same time, a movement of Western activists seeking to inﬂuence the fate of the Holy Land has grown so intense and widespread that Israel-Palestine has become a domestic issue in many parts of Europe and North America. This is just the latest chapter in the West’s strange proprietary interest in the Holy Land, which started late in the ﬁrst millennium after Christ and is still going strong.

Between 1914 and the 2000s, this spirit worked in favor of a Jewish state; in the past 20 years, the same obsession has inverted against it. The emotional, ideological campaign to replace the Judaic republic with a state of Palestine is ostensibly secular but often has the feel of a religious movement, even a crusade.

[Graeme Wood: Israel can’t postpone its reckoning forever]

Simpliﬁcation is always the enemy of history. Significant parts of the Middle East have long been neglected, if not ignored, by the West. This moral selectivity has been joined by a missionary activism wildly detached from the reality of geopolitics. Yet, again and again, the West has dramatically changed the history of the Holy Land—notably in 1099, 1918, 1947, 1991, 2003, 2026. Today’s activism could inﬂuence Europe’s befuddled governments and America’s polarized politics. A deeper irony is that Western Europe, which was chased out of the Middle East during decolonization, may well ﬁnd itself pushed back in by its own electorates—a new sanctimonious imperialism.

We do not yet know if the post–October 7 wars will mark the end of the jihadist aggression the 1979 revolution fostered—or reinvigorate it with a new legend of Iranian deﬁance. The Gulf vision of a Muslim society that is directed but tolerant and prosperous is a vibrant rebuke to the Iranian ayatollahs and Hezbollah gunmen who oﬀer only killing and poverty tempered by the promise of paradise. But it requires safety to thrive while its rival revels in mayhem. Which way will triumph? Blood or honey? The choice belongs to the peoples themselves.

Ignorance is the father of righteous certainty, hatred, and slaughter; knowledge is the mother of respect for others, alliance, sharing, and tolerance. Knowledge is an elixir, the antidote to the poisons of supremacy, bigotry, and ignorance. Peace is only possible when a majority in any society hears and accepts the narrative of the others.

“As you conduct your wars,” wrote the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, “don’t forget those who seek peace.”

Don’t seek “the peace of a ceaseﬁre,” warned the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. “Let it come like wildﬂowers, suddenly the ﬁeld must have it: wildpeace!” Perhaps we need to let the poets command the armies.

“If only,” wrote Darwish, “I were a candle in the dark.’”

Yet those candles still ﬂicker in Istanbul, Marrakesh, Cairo, Abu Dhabi, Isfahan, Tel Aviv, and Beirut—a golden inheritance that was history’s gift to them alongside the ﬁres of conquest, resistance, and hatred. The mystic Ibn Arabi saw more than just candles in the dark. He saw ‘“that miracle: the garden amidst the ﬂames,” and, traveling through his Middle East of chaos and conﬂict, left us advice on how to live today: “I follow the religion of Love whatever way Love’s caravans are heading.”

*Sources: Mary Evans / Bridgeman Images; Marwan Naamani / AFP / Getty; Hulton Fine Art Collection / Getty; PHAS / Universal Images / Getty.

Xi Is Getting What He Wants

2026-09-23T11:21:00-04:00

Once Upon a Time in the Middle East, a movie that premiered in China last month and is coming to the United States in October, is about a Chinese chef who moves to the Middle East to find work, only to become a savior for the locals amid the chaos of an American invasion. This box-office hit has earned rave reviews in China—especially from China’s government, which has promoted the film’s themes of Chinese peacefulness versus American warmongering. The film “casts US as invader, outperforms Hollywood,” according to a headline from the Global Times, a news outlet run by the Communist Party. The message: America is the bad guy, and China’s job is to clean up.

Donald Trump should keep that in mind as Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in Washington for his first state visit since 2015. Trump may laud Xi as a respected friend, as he did when the two men met in Beijing in May. Yet Xi is no friend of Trump’s. Throughout his 14 years in power, China’s president has acted deliberately and consistently to undermine the United States. His two-day trip to Washington now seems perfectly timed to exploit the weakness of his host and main strategic rival, lately enfeebled by rising domestic prices, plummeting approval ratings, and a costly ongoing war in Iran. This timing makes the spectacle of the purported leader of the free world fawning over a Communist dictator more than just embarrassing.

Trump’s soft touch on China is widely unpopular in Washington. In advance of a summit that is expected to cover AI safety, trade, and Taiwan, John Moolenaar, the chair of the House Select Committee on China and a member of the U.S. president’s own Republican Party, called for a tougher line. Xi, mindful that American foreign policy can change dramatically with elections, seems to see the Trump administration as a potentially brief window of opportunity to expand Chinese influence. While Trump has been distracted by the Iran war and White House redecorations, Xi has remained focused on enhancing China’s technological and industrial might and diplomatically asserting Beijing’s global leadership.

In the weeks before this visit, Xi met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at two major forums for developing countries, where he pitched China as a more stable and reliable great power than the United States. Although Xi avoids mentioning the U.S. by name, he leaves little doubt which country he is describing as a rogue state that threatens global peace. “Unilateralism and power politics are surging against the tide,” Xi told the BRICS group of emerging economies, which includes Brazil, Russia, India, and China, earlier this month, “lashing at multilateralism and the international order.”

[Read: China is flatlining]

Xi seems to perceive himself as a man of destiny, ruling China at a pivotal moment when he can build and lead a new world order. “Today, changes unseen in a century are accelerating across the world,” he said in that BRICS speech, repeating a phrase he often uses to describe global shifts in the balance of power. “The global South is gaining strength, and the trend toward a multipolar world is unstoppable,” he declared.

Xi’s “whole worldview is to see a new international order arise where China and authoritarian states play a bigger role,” Nicholas Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to China who is now a professor of diplomacy at Harvard University, told me. Xi’s “short- and long-term view is that we’re standing in China’s way as China seeks to become more influential, more powerful in the world,” he added, referring to the United States.

But, if Beijing is right, it won’t be for much longer. Xi and others in China’s elite believe that the U.S. is in decline. Wang Huning, the Communist Party’s chief theorist and a close adviser to Xi, helped shape this assumption with America Against America, a 1991 book about his travels in the U.S., in which he portrayed the country as rich and technologically advanced but rotting from within due to its eroding public institutions and decaying cultural values.

Rather than waiting patiently for the U.S. to fall apart on its own, Xi has spent his entire reign testing the pillars of American power. In 2013, he launched the Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure-building program to expand China’s influence in the developing world. In 2015, he introduced the “Made in China 2025” program, a plan to dominate various manufacturing industries, such as electric vehicles, through massive state support. Against Washington’s objections, Xi has asserted China’s claims to the South China Sea by building military installations in the vital waterway. Since 2021, he has promoted a series of “global initiatives” to spread his vision of a reformed world order based on Chinese political principles. In 2022, he deepened his partnership with Putin days before the Russian leader invaded Ukraine.

Yet even though Xi has worked hard to reduce China’s reliance on the United States by developing homegrown technology, promoting the Chinese currency in global business, and expanding trade with the developing world, China’s economy still exchanged more than $410 billion in goods with America last year—and depends on the economic stability of the U.S. for its own growth. Rather than take the United States head-on, as the Soviet Union tried to do during the Cold War, Xi has worked to carefully undermine American power without provoking a costly confrontation. During Trump’s visit to Beijing in May, Xi asked whether the two countries could avoid the Thucydides Trap—the theory that an established power will invariably clash with a rising one, owing to the threat of being displaced. Trump seemed to miss the point. In a post on Truth Social a day later, he implied that his America was under no such threat: “When President Xi very elegantly referred to the United States as perhaps being a declining nation, he was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration, and on that score, he was 100% correct.”

But in posing his question, Xi was signaling why he bothers meeting with Trump. Xi “believes that the United States, despite its descent in global politics, still is enormously potentially dangerous,” Kurt Campbell, a former U.S. deputy secretary of state and now the chair of the Asia Group, a consulting firm, told me. “Xi is animated by the idea of how to avoid a great-power war and to help ease the United States into a more orderly decline. He believes that this kind of personal diplomacy with Trump is an important ingredient” in that strategy.

[Listen: Trump battles against an economy of his making]

So far, Xi’s approach has paid off. In return for spending a few hours with Trump, he has effectively neutralized his supposedly more powerful opponent. Trump appears to have little interest in pressuring Xi to step back from his partnership with Putin, even as it has likely sustained Moscow’s war in Ukraine. Despite threats to sanction countries that support Iran, the Trump administration has not taken meaningful action against China, Tehran’s largest oil customer. Trump has also softened American support for Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its own, including by delaying approval for a $14 billion arms sale to the democratically governed island.

From Beijing’s perspective, Trump is simply bowing to the global shift in power. “It’s the reality of the world that China is rising, and the U.S. has to accept that,” Wang Huiyao, the president of the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing-based think tank, told me. “We have to coexist, compromise, accommodate each other. That’s what Trump is doing.”

In the United States, however, Trump’s dalliances with Xi look more like appeasement. Engaging in constructive dialogue to stabilize relations between the two great powers makes perfect sense, but Trump’s efforts seem to involve conceding to Xi’s wishes while avoiding the issues that matter most to American industry and security. Perhaps the midterm elections, now only weeks away, will deliver a new Congress capable of checking Trump’s behavior. But given the president’s personalized approach to China, anyone hoping for a smarter, tougher line on Beijing may have to wait for a new president—one who understands who the bad guy really is.

Guatemala’s Democracy Dilemma

2026-09-20T07:00:00-04:00

Just over three years ago in Guatemala, a coalition of young and Indigenous voters helped propel Bernardo Arévalo, a reformer who campaigned against corruption, to an astounding presidential win. Guatemala had not only refused the global trend toward populist authoritarianism; it had also defied what its citizens called “the pact of the corrupt,” a loose alliance of politicians, judges, criminal networks, and crony capitalists that had gained control of the country’s institutions.

Today the mood in Guatemala is less hopeful. Some of Arévalo’s former allies, and many of those who voted for him, are dejected, convinced that the president missed a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform the country. When I met with Arévalo in Guatemala City in May, he defended the pace of his administration’s progress and suggested that the alternative would have been to abuse the powers of a government he was elected to reform.

In Latin America, “we never truly got used to understanding that the rule of law is fundamental,” he told me. “Rule of law is not the same as rule by law. Rule of law is when we all accept that we are subject to the law and we operate within that framework to solve problems. Rule by law is when I use the law that’s at my disposal as part of my political arsenal.”

Had he crossed that line, Arévalo insisted, he would have risked being ousted by his opponents and replaced by someone willing to do much worse. His critics disagree.

Arévalo’s personal integrity is undisputed. But some of the reformers who helped elect him now argue that he may be too scrupulously rules-respecting to deal effectively with the “pact of the corrupt” and the institutions it captured—too much of a liberal democrat to save democracy. When he leaves office in 2028, they fear that the pact will quickly retake control of the few institutions it has lost, or that voters will choose an autocrat who promises to crush crime without concern for legality.

Guatemala’s predicament points to a more universal problem. Can liberal reformers unwind authoritarian state capture without, themselves, engaging in at least a little bit of illiberalism? The dilemma is not Guatemala’s alone. Move too aggressively, and you risk being branded an autocrat, or even becoming one. Move too cautiously, and you risk obstruction, sabotage, and ineffectuality. South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa chose a gradualist approach to reversing Jacob Zuma’s state capture and disappointed many of his supporters. Placing the opposite bet, Poland’s Donald Tusk bent rules to try to undo the damage done by the right-populist Law and Justice party—and stood accused of undermining the rule of law. Hungary’s post-Orbán leader, Péter Magyar, seems to be following Tusk’s example.

[Read: How to defeat a mafia state]

In a way, both Arévalo and his critics are right. Guatemala has avoided a democratic breakdown. But the president’s rules-bound approach has also left many Guatemalans feeling that he has not fought for them forcefully enough. The question now is whether Arévalo has preserved democracy as an ideal that Guatemalans believe in and, if necessary, will defend.

In Guatemala City, I watched as hundreds of people gathered outside the country’s public prosecutor’s office, a bunker-like building ringed by a huge black-steel fence put up three years before, allegedly to shield the occupants from nonviolent democracy protesters. The crowd had come to celebrate the long-awaited end to the term of María Consuelo Porras, the country’s attorney general and, to many citizens, the personification of the pact of the corrupt.

For the past eight years, Porras had been a figure of fear. She used the power of her position to investigate and jail critics of state corruption. When Arévalo was elected in 2023, her office tried to overturn the results, alleging irregularities that international observers found baseless. That effort looked likely to succeed—until indigenous Maya communities organized peaceful demonstrations that lasted 106 days and drew the participation of nearly 2 million Guatemalans. Arévalo was inaugurated.

That he did not take extralegal action to remove Porras from her post has given rise to some of the fiercest criticism against him. She opened an investigation into Arévalo’s party, the Seed Movement, for relatively minor party-registration irregularities. Although the probe did not produce formal charges, it led to the party’s dissolution and thus thwarted any hope of its controlling Congress. Porras also brought more than 75 legal cases or complaints against the president and his supporters, including the arrests of two of the Indigenous leaders behind the 2023 protests, and even a cabinet minister. Now Porras was finally leaving, and a new attorney general was taking over.

The Guatemalans gathered outside the office had waited for this moment. What they had not anticipated was how long Porras’s departure would take, and how few people would come out to celebrate it. Thousands had massed in the same street just a few years before.

When I met Arévalo a few days later, he justified the delay by explaining that his government had arrived “with an enormous level of public legitimacy, but without control of the Congress, and with the justice system positioned against us.”

Legally, he had no authority to simply eject the attorney general. He sent a bill to Congress to grant him that power, but the opposition blocked it. “If, in that scenario, I make a political miscalculation, the result isn’t that I go with a hundred people to pull Consuelo Porras out of that building and that this is sustainable and produces results,” he said. It was that “I go to prison or into exile, and someone else comes in, one of them, to take power.”

Like much else in Guatemala, the colossal, mint-green presidential palace where Arévalo sat down with me is a holdover from a bygone era of authoritarianism. It was built by Guatemala’s Hitler-admiring, yet U.S.-backed dictator, Jorge Ubico, who rose to power in 1931 and was forced to resign amid mass protests in 1944.

Arévalo, before winning the presidency, was best known as the son of the man who succeeded Ubico, in Guatemala’s first truly free elections. Juan José Arévalo, an educator and a social democrat, returned to Guatemala from exile in 1944 to run for president against the ex-dictator’s favored candidate. As his son would later, he won by a landslide, and Guatemala’s “democratic spring” began, a time of expanded rights and education. But after his freely and fairly elected successor, Jacobo Arbenz, went further, carrying out a land reform that threatened the interests of wealthy families and the powerful U.S.-based United Fruit Company, the United States organized a coup that put the military in power in 1954. Nine years later, a guerrilla leader asked Arévalo to help spearhead armed resistance to the regime, and the former president refused, saying that confronting the military head-on would turn Guatemala “into a lake of blood.”

He was right. In the name of crushing the greatly outnumbered guerrillas, the military and its allies killed or disappeared more than 100,000 Guatemalans over the next three decades. It massacred leftists, labor leaders, and residents of more than 400 Maya villages suspected of supporting insurgents. Guatemalan courts eventually deemed the latter crime a genocide.

Bernardo Arévalo, born in exile in Uruguay, returned with his family in the middle of the dictatorship period, and he began a career as a diplomat at its tail end, as the country formally returned to elections and civilian rule in 1985. He later left the diplomatic service, earned a Ph.D., and worked in international peace-building.

The wood-paneled presidential office where we met was decorated only with two portraits: his father’s, in black-and-white, and his own, beside it, in color. Arévalo’s demeanor was professorial.

“We are in a process of recovery,” he said. “Democracy doesn’t develop in a linear, unidirectional way; it has leaps and twists, not only here, but everywhere in the world.” For much of the 1990s and 2000s, Guatemala had been twisting its way toward democracy, but corruption networks and drug traffickers had insinuated themselves into the country’s institutions. “Part of what we set out to do is to recognize the serious damage this had caused the country—this corrosion, this penetration of political-criminal networks” that served no “ideological interest,” Arévalo said, but rather “the highest bidder: whoever could pay for impunity.”

Dislodging these forces from the machinery of the state has been neither swift nor straightforward, and even those most anxious for change are hard-pressed to offer practical solutions. The president told me that some supporters had asked him to use the military to remove Porras. He found the suggestion unsettling: “Are you really asking us to go back to the years of military dictatorships of the 1970s, when armies were the only solution?”

[Read: A new history of the Western Hemisphere]

I asked Arévalo about the Indigenous protest leaders, Luis Pacheco and Hector Chaclán, who had then been imprisoned for more than a year while under investigation on terrorism charges. “I would like the people who say ‘But the government could have done something else’ to tell me what,” Arévalo replied, exasperated. “What they’re venting is the frustration we all feel.”

He assured me that the pact of the corrupt was weakening incrementally as its networks lost access to the state: first the executive branch, then the public-works contracting system, now the prosecutor’s office. “Without tools, they aren’t powerful. And our task is to keep removing those tools from them.”

Arévalo can point to some successes. Young lawyers have worked to clean up corruption in the judicial selection process. Appointed in March, the new bench of the Constitutional Court, which rules on the constitutionality of laws and policies, is more favorable to reformers than the one it replaced, as is the new electoral tribunal, which oversees elections. I spoke with the new attorney general a few days after he assumed his post: He was so busy firing Porras’s apparatchiks and preparing for the institution to resume serious criminal investigations that he was sleeping only four or five hours a night. An anti-corruption commission that Arévalo formed early on has already filed more than 200 criminal complaints against former officials.

Arévalo was tasked with not only freeing a state captured by kleptocrats, but also strengthening one that was fundamentally weak. The bureaucracy he inherited had little capacity to provide public services, reduce poverty, or fight organized crime. In this, too, his administration has made some progress. It has hired more than 15,000 new teachers, and built or refurbished more than 150 rural-health clinics (his predecessor built just six in four years, Arévalo said). The government has also replaced dirt floors with cement in more than 75,000 households in the country’s poorest rural municipalities, and has distributed water filters and cleaner-burning stoves.

Still, much else that Guatemalans had hoped for has failed to materialize. Congress, which remains dominated by the old-guard pact forces, has blocked or stalled bills aimed at curbing corruption—for example, bills to modernize public-works contracting, require shell companies to disclose who owns them, and protect whistleblowers. Partly because the contracting system remains dysfunctional, the government has made little visible progress toward repairing the country’s crumbling highways. And, unwilling to buy votes in Congress outright, as his predecessors did, Arévalo has resorted to pork-barrel spending and raising congressional salaries to win legislative support. Such tactics are deeply unpopular with the public.

Another limiting factor has been the Trump administration. Although Arévalo’s cooperation on crime and drugs has kept the relationship cordial, his opponents have courted President Trump to try to tip the scales against reformers. In April, the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala personally called reluctant Guatemalan lawmakers to pressure them to approve a Constitutional Court judge favored by pact elites and conservatives, a top lawmaker, Luis Aguirre, told me. This tied the court between reformers and their opponents, leaving Arévalo without a reliable majority.

The young reformers who campaigned with Arévalo knew that he would face constraints, but some wish that he had more often tested those limits.

Samuel Pérez, 34, is a member of Congress; he was also the head of the Seed Movement bloc in Congress before it was dissolved. I went to see him in a building plastered with missing-persons flyers for those who were disappeared during the military dictatorship decades ago. The flyers are a common sight in Guatemala City, posted and reposted by the victims’ families.

Pérez told me that Arévalo was elected not only “to overthrow the regime, but also to construct something new, and that isn’t happening.” Now Pérez was creating a party, called Raíces, to which most of the lawmakers formerly associated with the Seed Movement had defected. They would still support Arévalo, but they would advocate for a more confrontational approach. “The president interprets power and good government as doing things a little better and a little more than what already existed. For me, no. You don’t use power to administrate what’s already there, but to transform what isn’t working,” Pérez explained.

I’d last seen Pérez during Arévalo’s presidential campaign in 2023. He’d told me then that if the Seed Movement won, the government’s greatest difficulty would be managing popular expectations. But he hadn’t predicted that he himself would be among the disappointed. Arévalo should have rallied the public to pressure Congress to pass the law removing Porras, Pérez said. He should have conceded less to business elites, and done more to free Pacheco and Chaclán. Pérez was particularly upset that the police had come to arrest the two men in a white van with tinted windows—a symbol of the dictatorship, which used such vehicles to disappear its victims—and that the government had not stopped this.

Several young Guatemalans in the reform movement suggested to me that the political caution of their parents’ generation was a product of the fear instilled in them during the years of military rule and internal armed conflict. Some speculated that Arévalo’s aversion to escalation emanates from that experience, too, given his youth in exile and the persecution of many of his father’s supporters in the years after the 1954 coup. “I think he is a son of his circumstances,” said Andrea Reyes, a young lawmaker helping Raíces organize.

Arévalo readily locates his most formative influences in that era—as a source not of fear, but of strengthened conviction. He spoke to me of his father’s refusal to abandon democratic principles: “Even when the world began to change around him, he kept his convictions, which today we see were the correct convictions, after all, 80 years later.”

Arévalo, too, has found his convictions under pressure—not only from former allies who worry that his reforms have gone too slowly, but also from constituents and conservative politicians who want a government that will ignore constitutional limits in cracking down on crime. In this they compare him unfavorably with the autocrat next door: Many Guatemalans who live in daily fear of extortion and kidnapping see gangs, not illiberal state capture, as the biggest threat to their basic freedoms, and they see President Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador as a beacon of safety.

[Read: El Salvador’s exceptional prison state]

Bukele, first elected in 2019, took an almost opposite approach from Arévalo’s to governing. He purged institutions of his political rivals, packed them with loyalists, and then cut secret deals with gang leaders before cracking down on their followers. His mass roundups virtually eliminated violent crime in his country, by jailing more than 90,000 people suspected of gang ties, many without due process. Arévalo is unwilling to pursue such methods. He has, however, seized record quantities of cocaine, extradited crime bosses, hired thousands of new police officers, and begun building the country’s first new maximum-security prison in 40 years. But murder and extortion rates have proved stubborn, and many are now demanding more-radical methods.

“Guatemalans are searching for their Bukele,” said Alvaro Arzú Escobar, a conservative lawmaker sanctioned by the Biden administration for allegedly trying to undermine Arévalo’s inauguration. Arévalo “isn’t radical in his ideas or his actions,” Arzú told me. But, he added, “the country’s biggest problem right now is a lack of authority. As president, he doesn’t exercise the power he holds. There is a lot of rhetoric, but little action.”

The Mariscal Zavala military prison sits on a pine-covered ridge on the outskirts of Guatemala City. A former army base, it houses the state’s highest-profile prisoners. I went there to meet Pacheco and Chaclán, the Indigenous leaders who’d played such an instrumental role in safeguarding the 2023 presidential election. Both had been on the board of the 48 Cantones of Totonicapán—one of the country’s oldest Indigenous self-governing bodies, in rural western Guatemala—when the attorney general’s office had moved to annul the vote. Pacheco and Chaclán canvassed rural villages on foot, helping gather some 50,000 signatures calling for Porras’s resignation. Later they helped organize protests in the capital.

“The 48 Cantones is also a democracy, with elected leaders and term limits,” Chaclán told me. “For us, democracy is sacred, and although Guatemala often doesn’t reflect it much, we must respect it.”

In April 2025, Porras ordered him and Pacheco into pretrial detention. After that, their court hearings were repeatedly delayed, seemingly intentionally, and when I met them in May, they had no idea when the next one would be.

I asked them whether they believed Arévalo should have rallied protesters or found some other tool to remove Porras, and thus to free them. Pacheco responded, “I would have liked it at first, but later I realized it would have only changed the person, not the form of doing justice.” Chaclán added, “This is nothing simple, and surely he is doing what is best for the country. We have faith we have already passed the majority of our time here.”

Chaclán was right. On August 5, a judge released Pacheco and Chaclán to house arrest, reuniting them with their families. Around the same time, the prison-like, black-steel fence was taken down from around the public prosecutor’s office.

Guatemala’s next presidential election is just nine months away. Right-wing candidates are beginning to emerge, some imitating Bukele, and many sure to court the White House, in the hope that Trump will try to tip the scales. Arévalo’s and Pérez’s reformists claim that they will join forces behind a unity candidate, but such a figure has not yet surfaced. Democracy is twisting its way forward, in Arévalo’s words. No one thinks it is leaping.

But the passage of time may provide a different perspective. On one of my last days in Guatemala City, I walked by a cathedral I had passed dozens of times before. I had never previously noticed the tiny engraved names of more than 13,000 victims of the internal armed conflict, so small as to be illegible from even a short distance, on its stone columns.

For much of the 20th century, Guatemalans who advocated for self-government, equality before the law, and the welfare of the majority—that is, social democrats—knew that the state might try to kill them. Today, social democrats govern. Reformers may disagree as to whether Bernardo Arévalo made the most of the opportunity he was given. But that such an opportunity could ever arise is more than many members of his father’s generation likely thought possible.

*Image Sources: Luis Soto / AP; Johan Ordonez / AFP / Getty; Arnulfo Franco / AFP / Getty.