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Why Did John Ratcliffe Go to Moscow?

2026-08-26T18:06:00-04:00

CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s brief trip to Moscow yesterday was unannounced but hard to miss: He flew in a C-17A, a large heavy-transport plane, that open-source analysts quickly identified and tracked. Within hours, he was already on his way home.

The purpose of Ratcliffe’s visit remains unknown. In an interview with Glenn Beck this morning, President Trump described it as “sort of semi-routine,” but such trips are rare. The previous time a director of the CIA went to Russia was in November 2021, when William J. Burns told Moscow that the United States knew of Vladimir Putin’s plans to invade Ukraine. A likelier explanation for this latest trip is that Russia is getting more dangerous and the Trump administration wanted to warn it against escalating.

Ratcliffe’s visit comes at one of the most difficult periods in the war for the Kremlin. Thanks to its drone systems, Ukraine has been able to strike military targets and oil infrastructure deep inside Russia while also hindering Moscow’s advance on the battlefield, turning the front into a kill box in which anything that moves is struck within minutes. Despite making little progress, Russia has continued to take heavy losses. In May, the Russian death toll reached nearly half a million, according to Anne Keast-Butler, the head of GCHQ, the U.K. intelligence agency.

Russia’s weakness could be making Putin more reckless. The Wall Street Journal reported a few weeks ago that the U.S. intelligence community is concerned that Russia could carry out a limited attack on a NATO state, possibly even launching a small land incursion. Such an assault might thwart Russia’s own interests, prompting Europe to accelerate its military buildup and target Moscow’s sovereign assets. But Putin may see attacking a NATO country as an unprecedented opportunity to break the alliance, by manufacturing a crisis in which the United States fails to act.

[Shane Harris: The ‘Russia hoax,’ revisited]

If Washington did not respond to such an act of aggression, Russia could expose NATO’s mutual-protection clause as hollow. Putin has some reason to think that the United States may stay out of a conflict if he initiates one soon. Trump has repeatedly expressed disdain for Europe and shown little interest in challenging Putin. In addition, America’s weapons stockpile is depleted from the Iran war. Perhaps in response to fears of increased Russian aggression, NATO mounted a large U.S.-led air exercise last week over Poland and the Baltic region, which included flights near the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.

Other possible signs of Putin’s growing belligerence have emerged. In recent weeks, a series of low-level attacks have swept Europe. Drones laden with explosives were found at the Leipzig airport this month, and there were explosions or fires at weapons factories and other sensitive sites in Estonia, Italy, Bulgaria, and the Netherlands, all of which have provided assistance to Ukraine. Authorities have attributed some but not all of the attacks to Moscow, and Russian officials have denied responsibility. But they follow an established pattern of Russian provocations in Europe.

Regardless of Putin’s ambitions elsewhere in Europe, he appears committed to fight the war in Ukraine indefinitely. Russia has increased its ballistic-missile attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, taking advantage of Kyiv’s shortages in air defense. Reporting from the Journal suggests that Putin could be preparing a large-scale mobilization to replenish Russia’s army for a renewed offensive. The Russian leader might try to overwhelm Ukraine this winter with a massive bombardment campaign aimed at destroying its energy grid. But Kyiv is unlikely to capitulate, because it knows that Putin would impose punitive terms.

If Ukraine does survive the winter and retains the ability to strike deep inside of Russia, then Putin might choose to end the war in mid-2027. Facing the prospect of a U.S. president in 2029 who is more pro-Ukraine than Trump is, Putin may opt to take a favorable deal from this administration. That could include most elements of Trump’s 28-point plan without Ukraine’s withdrawal from the territory it currently controls. This would allow Putin to build a relationship with the United States in the time Trump has left as president—removing sanctions, rejoining the G7, and trying to undermine the NATO alliance indirectly through a partnership with Trump.

[Michael Weiss: Ukraine may be just the ally America needs]

For all of Trump’s bluster on Europe, he has real incentives to push back now to prevent a crisis that could spiral out of control. His administration has options to deter Putin, if it wants to use them. For instance, Washington could warn Moscow that if it continues its deniable attacks in Europe, the United States would support Ukrainian access to Starlink inside Russia, which would improve the effectiveness of Kyiv’s long-range strike campaign.

On his way to Moscow, Ratcliffe stopped in Latvia. Today, the Latvian prime minister called the trip a “very good signal,” which seemed to imply that Ratcliffe had been there seeking to bolster European security. If the CIA director carried a warning with him, it should have been an unambiguous one: Any attack on NATO territory would bring in the United States. Trump might not want to make that type of commitment, but it may be necessary to ensure that Putin never concludes that he has an opportunity to start a war that breaks NATO.

The German Far Right Is Poised for a Breakthrough

2026-08-26T06:00:00-04:00

Imagine that it’s October 2026, and one of Germany’s 16 federal states has come under the control of a far-right government for the first time since the Nazi era. With an absolute majority in the state Parliament and one of its own installed as state premier, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, quickly begins implementing its agenda. The interior minister announces an emergency remigration program: abolishing asylum, revoking the residence permit of any foreigner convicted of a crime, pledging to review all naturalization decisions made during this century, and incarcerating those designated for deportation. The government stops classifying Ukrainians as war refugees and ends their social benefits. European Union flags disappear from public buildings. The mainstream press is shunned in favor of influencers aligned with the party’s ideology. The government authorizes vigilante groups to act as an auxiliary police force in regions with high crime rates.

This hasn’t happened, but it’s not merely hypothetical either. The AfD is projected to win an election next month in Saxony-Anhalt, a central German state of some 2 million people. An anti-racism NGO in Berlin, the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, created this scenario based on the far-right party’s own election manifesto and the statements of its representatives. For decades, right-wing politics have carried particular weight in Germany, where atonement for the Holocaust includes mandatory education about the rise of National Socialism. The far right was long relegated to the fringes, its most ardent members easily identified as skinheads decked out in leather. But the AfD, founded in 2013 as a mild euroskeptic party led mostly by conservative economists opposed to eurozone bailouts, is now Germany’s most important right-wing force since the Nazis.

At the national level, the AfD is the most popular party, supported by more than a quarter of voters in recent polls. It leads both of the traditional broad-based parties, the center-right Christian Democrats and the center-left Social Democrats. Its base of support is in the formerly Communist east—generally poorer, older, and angrier than the rest of Germany. And that’s where it’s poised for a breakthrough later this summer. In past state elections, other parties have contorted themselves to keep the far-right faction out of governing coalitions, maintaining a so-called firewall even when the AfD has won the most votes. That may not be possible in Saxony-Anhalt, where ahead of a September 6 vote, the AfD is polling at more than 40 percent. If smaller parties fail to reach the required 5 percent threshold to enter Parliament, this kind of showing by the AfD could be enough for it to win an outright majority, meaning that it wouldn’t need cooperation from other parties to govern. Suddenly, Saxony-Anhalt would become a testing ground for AfD policies.

If the AfD doesn’t reach that threshold, the spotlight would turn to the Christian Democratic Union, the party of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. The Christian Democrats would face a dilemma: whether to breach the firewall and work with the AfD or join hands with the far-left party Die Linke in a last-ditch effort to keep the far right from taking power. In fact, the Christian Democrats have a policy, formalized in 2018 and known as an incompatibility resolution, against working with either party. Andreas Rödder, a historian who previously headed the center-right party’s fundamental-values commission, told me that the decision didn’t generate much controversy within the party at the time because the matter was mostly symbolic; the center-right party, then dominated by Chancellor Angela Merkel, had other choices for governing partners. At that time, German politics remained fairly stable, relatively speaking, as anti-establishment forces shook up other Western democracies. For many in Germany, this was a point of pride, a sign that the country had learned from its history, that it knew where political fanaticism led.

Less than a decade later, Germany no longer appears immune to extremism, and the stable politics that once attested to its moral redemption are “on the brink of being fundamentally shattered,” Rödder said. The country’s domestic intelligence agency has classified Saxony-Anhalt’s branch of the AfD as a right-wing extremist group. Some voters support the party because of that hard-right agenda. Others are drawn to it for contrarian reasons: to register their dissent against elite gatekeepers, whether in the security service, the judiciary, or the media. In this way, their vote is a version of the declaration once made by the Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky: “Negation is my god.”

“Every organ of elite opinion tells people they can’t vote for the AfD,” a German diplomat told me. “And many people respond by saying, ‘Hell yes, we can.’”

Why does an election in a relatively small German state matter? Because what happens in Germany matters. That’s been the nature of the German problem for almost two centuries—what to do with this country, larger and more prosperous than its neighbors, that has caused so much torment for Europe and for the world. The problem arose with the Franco-Prussian War and the unification of Germany in 1871. It returned in monstrous form during both world wars. And it recurred with German reunification in 1990.

The German question is back as the country breaks with postwar taboos. Germany is rearming, spending billions to turn its army into the strongest in Europe. Its steadfast support for Israel has been shaken by the extremism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. And in Saxony-Anhalt as well as other German regions, even if not yet nationally, the far right appears on the cusp of claiming power.

[From the January issue: The new German war machine]

Germany’s situation isn’t unique; what’s striking in a country where historians have debated whether a Sonderweg, or “special path,” produced destructive nationalism is how much it mirrors what’s happening elsewhere in Europe. Marine Le Pen, the far-right French firebrand, is leading in polls ahead of a presidential election next year. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK remains in a strong position in Britain. Giorgia Meloni already leads a far-right government in Italy, representing a party that traces its roots to the country’s postwar neofascist movement. Saxony-Anhalt is following these same trends. But the circumstances command greater attention. As Henry Morgenthau Jr., President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s treasury secretary, titled his postwar book on the defeated Axis power, Germany Is Our Problem.

Saxony-Anhalt is sometimes called the heartland of German history. It’s the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation, where Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg. Cities such as the capital, Magdeburg, were important centers of the Holy Roman Empire. In the 20th century, modernism flourished in the region, which has Germany’s highest concentration of Bauhaus architecture. It’s long been a hub of the chemical and coal-mining industries. During the Cold War, the territory fell on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain, and the state still faces structural problems left over from post-reunification deindustrialization and out-migration, including higher rates of poverty and unemployment than the national average. The psychic effect also lingers. Until 1990, there was no genuine democracy; freedom and civil rights were curtailed. “In some quarters,” Detlef Gürth, a member of the ruling Christian Democrats in Saxony-Anhalt’s state Parliament, told me, there is still a “pronounced desire for a ‘strongman,’ a messiah who dictates the course of action and takes care of everything.”

Two recent events crystallize the state’s misfortune and the feeling among many residents that things aren’t working. In December 2024, a Saudi-born doctor drove a rented SUV through a crowded Christmas market in Magdeburg, killing six people and injuring hundreds more. Authorities said the perpetrator was an anti-Islam activist sympathetic to far-right groups, but terrorist violence of any kind, the facts notwithstanding, played into the far right’s hands. The following year, the California-based Intel Corporation canceled plans for a €30 billion chip factory in Magdeburg, which would have been the biggest-ever foreign direct investment in Germany. The episodes were unrelated; the company said it had simply grown too fast, although a government minister also found an explanation in “Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ philosophy.” Together, however, they contributed to a gathering feeling of precarity and bad luck.

The AfD promises to shake up the system. Its 35-year-old front man, Ulrich Siegmund, is a perpetually smiling social-media sensation. He is a salesman by trade, the founder of a fragrance company called Berlin-Duftet, whose name means literally “Berlin smells good.” Der Spiegel, the prestigious German news magazine, recently branded him “the most dangerous man in Germany,” which turned out to be great publicity; at campaign events, he autographed copies of the magazine cover.

A fan of Ulrich Siegmund, the lead candidate for the far-right Alternative for Germany, waits for Siegmund to sign copies of Der Spiegel that show him on the cover. (Sean Gallup / Getty)

As Siegmund racks up likes on social media, he leaves the most incendiary topics to others in the party. When some members of the state AfD branch traveled to the United States last year to attend a gala of the Trump-aligned New York Young Republican Club, Siegmund stayed home. The party’s ideological engine in Saxony-Anhalt is said to be Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, a member of the state Parliament who has likened Islam to a fungus, condemned the “sacralization of the Holocaust,” and suggested that Jewish institutions are using Muslim immigration to achieve the “abolition of our people.” He has called AIDS patients the “price we pay for a decadent social model” and argued that the Bauhaus movement “raped the human need for comfort.” On foreign policy, Tillschneider sides with Russia in its assault on Ukraine, praising President Vladimir Putin as “a real man with a sound set of values” and insisting that Moscow is “defending itself.”

When I asked Tillschneider to explain his party’s success in the region, he said it didn’t stem from one particular issue or another but amounted to a rejection of the mainstream’s whole approach to policy making. He argued that the “established parties have formed a consensus against the interests of the citizens” and refuse to entertain ideas that go against their orthodoxy. The AfD is testing the limits of what’s acceptable in German political culture, especially on immigration. The party’s election manifesto declares ominously, “Our streets and squares are no longer safe.” And it promises a “deportation and remigration offensive.” The term remigration, once a fringe concept linked to ethnic cleansing, is now a focus of far-right immigration discourse, and has flexible meanings. Tillschneider defined it as “the maximum possible deportation within the framework of the constitutional order.” In addition to a “180-degree turn” in migration policy, the party is also vowing to revamp education and art, instill pride in German identity, and end the country’s “guilt complex.” The AfD also objects to the established parties’ anti-Russia policies and seeks to expand Russian-language instruction in schools and revive student exchanges with Russia.

The Christian Democrats, who currently govern Saxony-Anhalt in a coalition with the Social Democrats and the liberal Free Democrats, have struggled to respond. The state premier, Sven Schulze, took umbrage at the far right for “constantly belittling Saxony-Anhalt and acting as if everything here is doomed to failure.” AfD representatives can sense the desperation. Tillschneider said the firewall had become a “tomb wall” that the Christian Democratic Union has built for itself. He envisioned only two possibilities after the September election: either an AfD government or an “all-party government against us.” On this there seems to be some agreement. Gürth, the Christian Democratic lawmaker, said his party can’t justify cooperation with the AfD, which “operates like the Nazi Party” in its methods: “It exaggerates real or perceived problems, taps into public discontent, and paints a dystopian picture of Germany teetering on the brink of collapse. All other parties are blamed, and only the AfD can save Germany.”

[Read: J. D. Vance is definitely against foreign election interference]

In the scenario outlined by the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, an AfD-led government soon turns the state into a platform for international self-promotion, hosting conferences and opening offices in Washington and Moscow. Vice President Vance, who met with an AfD leader on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference last year, visits the state and offers to support American companies that choose to invest in Saxony-Anhalt. In the next federal election, in 2029, the AfD wins. The party may soon get the chance to give this scenario a shot.

Is Mojtaba Khamenei Dead?

2026-08-25T07:00:00-04:00

Last Tuesday, Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei hosted a wake for his father and predecessor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Among the thousands who thronged Tehran’s biggest mosque were the country’s most prominent political figures and several of the elder Khamenei’s sons. One person was notably absent: Mojtaba, the event’s official host.

Almost six months since his anointment, Iran’s supreme leader has been entirely obscured from the public eye. Not a single contemporaneous picture, video, or audio recording of him has been released. Many of the country’s top political leaders admit that they haven’t seen him—among them Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister and a member of the National Security Council. IranWire, a London-based opposition outlet, reports that not a single cabinet member has met with Mojtaba since he became supreme leader.

Not even Mojtaba’s close friends and relatives have seen him. Fewer than five people have met with Mojtaba since his ascent to power, Mohammad Hossein Khoshvaght, a former official and a relative of Mojataba’s told me, “due to security precautions.”

The rationale is not implausible. Mojtaba would be a likely target for an Israeli or U.S. air strike, such as the one that killed his father. Direct communication from him could supply Iran’s enemies with clues to his whereabouts. He is also said to have sustained injuries in the February strike on his family that have made public speeches and appearances difficult.

[Graeme Wood: ‘The most dangerous man in the world’]

But the totality of Mojtaba’s invisibility and a recent decline in statements from his office have set Tehran abuzz with new rumors of his death. Some sources inside and close to the government speculated to me that Mojtaba recently died from the injuries that he had sustained in February. And irrespective of his actual status, the uncertainty might have major implications for Iran.

“I believe Mojtaba has either passed away or is brain-dead,” a staffer at a government institution in Tehran told me, citing the tailing off of even indirect communication from the leader to the outside world. At least two other government officials told me the same. One said that he believed Mojtaba died or became brain-dead earlier this month.

Two sources in the Iranian government recently told IranWire that word had spread among those at the “highest level of the regime” that Mojtaba was doing very poorly and could die at any moment. About two weeks ago, a public appeal went out on a domestic messaging service, asking Iranians to pray for Mojtaba’s health and sacrifice sheep to bless him, as is customary in Islam. Mojtaba’s life was “under threat,” and some “clerics” had warned that he might be killed, the appeal said.

Since he was appointed, Mojtaba has ruled by decrees disseminated by his office. Iran’s supreme leader is a religious authority in addition to being the head of state, and on July 27, Mojtaba’s office published a list of his answers to practical questions posed by the devout. One correspondent had requested guidance on eating with bleeding gums, because blood is haram—forbidden—in Islam. Any food contaminated with blood, including from one’s own gums, must be thrown out, Mojtaba ruled. If his office is to be believed, then the leader was well enough to ponder Islamic law and issue relevant rulings as recently as a month ago.

The office’s most recent statement came on August 9 and reported that Mojtaba had met with President Masoud Pezeshkian. It didn’t say when the meeting had taken place but noted that it was on the occasion of the president’s third year in office, which puts it on or after July 28. Pezeshkian confirmed to the Iranian media that he spent seven hours with Mojtaba discussing the war and the country’s beleaguered economy. (According to Khoshvaght, Pezeshkian was taken to that meeting “without knowing where it was,” which suggests that he was transported blindfolded, mafia-style.) Also on August 9, Mojtaba issued a slew of decrees, appointing several generals to top military positions and swapping out one of his representatives on the National Security Council. Since then, the office has been silent.

Khoshvaght assured me that Mojtaba is definitely alive. The rumors about the leader’s death are “part of a psychological war hoping to demoralize Iran’s officials and its people, for them to give up to the pressures and threats of America,” he said. He added that the rumors also aim to embolden Iranians opposed to the regime, giving them “courage to come to the streets so that the plans of the U.S. and Israel can be realized.” Abdolreza Davari, a former adviser to the interior ministry and a vocal supporter of Mojtaba’s, told me that the leader is “in full health” and will soon be revealed to the public. But the two weeks with no communication, the public appeal for sheep sacrifice, and the rumors emanating from government circles have led many Iranians to doubt such assurances.

Whether Mojtaba is dead or alive, his public absence creates problems for the Iranian regime. The supreme leader holds most of the constitutional power in the Islamic Republic and has in the past served as the final arbiter among the system’s warring factions and institutions. Mojtaba appears to be sitting these conflicts out, at a moment when their outcome could be particularly consequential.

[Robert Kagan: Iran unleashed]

The country’s 13-person National Security Council is effectively running the country as a collective. It is chaired by Pezeshkian, a reformist who favors an end to the war with America, and includes Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the powerful parliamentary speaker who led the talks with the United States. But it also includes General Ahmad Vahidi, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and other military leaders.

Back in June, 12 of the council’s 13 members voted in favor of the memorandum of understanding that Iran reached with the United States in Islamabad. Mojtaba sent a message endorsing the deal but also noting that he had initially opposed such an agreement “in principle.” Hard-line critics of diplomacy seized on this to claim that Ghalibaf had usurped power and forced the memorandum on the leader. A news outlet linked to a faction in the IRGC even issued a documentary called Ghalibaf’s Coup.

Mojtaba neither endorsed this view nor put it to rest. Rather, he has remained mum as various factions have purported to speak for him. Pezeshkian has told reporters that in his meeting with Mojtaba, the leader stressed that regime officials should “keep unity and cohesion” and avoid infighting.

But the infighting goes on. In June, a statement signed by 63 of the 88 members of the Assembly of Experts, a clerical body tasked with supervising the supreme leader, admonished regime officials that none of them was authorized to act against Mojtaba’s “definite opinion.” At the same time, the statement called on any Muslim “who could gain access” to kill Donald Trump—not quite the message of Iran’s negotiators, but rather more consonant with Mojtaba’s statements promising “blood revenge.”

The Iranian regime has existential choices to make as it decides between diplomacy and conflict. Iran’s constitution is clear about who has the authority to set the country’s course. But no one seems able to say for sure whether that person is alive or dead. And without a firm hand at the top, indecision can become a purgatory without a foreseeable end.

Iran Unleashed

2026-08-23T07:00:00-04:00

For years, Iran confronted a balance of power in the Middle East that tilted against it. The region was dominated by a hostile American superpower, a nuclear-armed and militarily superior Israel, and significant local actors—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates—that were strategically and economically aligned with the United States.

Today finds Iran in entirely new circumstances. It has gone head-to-head with the superpower and Israel, withstood a pounding from their most advanced weapons, and more than survived. As a result, Iran has, with American help, completely reconfigured the power structure of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. The dominant power in the region going forward will be Iran, not the U.S. or Israel. Neighboring countries are already making their adjustments to this new reality. More distant powers will too. For years, the world has been dealing with an Iran constrained. It will now discover what Iran unleashed looks like.

Iran doesn’t need a deal with the United States. The common assumption that a weak and impoverished Iran would eventually have to make some accommodation to American power, open the Strait of Hormuz, and set about tending to its badly damaged economy has proved mistaken. The Islamic Republic has rarely appeared weaker or more vulnerable than it has over the past two years. Last February, President Trump renewed his “maximum pressure” campaign of international sanctions, which severely damaged Iran’s already-weak economy and cut billions of dollars in state revenues. Israel and the United States then launched the 12-day war that June to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities. The war significantly damaged Iran’s program and revealed just how vulnerable the country was to Israeli and American strikes. Then, in February, the United States and Israel launched the most recent war with the killing of the regime’s supreme leader and the great majority of its senior officials, followed by more than five weeks of unremitting attacks on Iranian military capabilities.

[Tom Nichols: Donald Trump effectively just told Iran to get a nuclear weapon]

Yet through all of this, the regime has survived and made no concessions. On the contrary, Iran exposed America’s Achilles’ heel: the vulnerability of Iran’s neighbors. A major turning point came in mid-March, when Israel attacked Iran’s South Pars gas field, and Iran retaliated against Qatar’s Ras Laffan complex, the world’s largest liquefied-natural-gas facility. The attack showed that although Iran obviously could not defeat the United States in an air war, Iranian missiles and drones could inflict enough damage on the oil-and-gas infrastructure of the Gulf to plunge the world into a prolonged economic crisis. The Gulf States understood this immediately, and so did Trump. He halted attacks on Iranian energy targets, ordered a reluctant Israel to do the same, and soon brought the larger campaign to a stop without extracting a single Iranian concession. Ever since, and despite many threats, Trump has not once ordered another strike against Iranian energy infrastructure.

This alone was enough to alter the balance of leverage between Iran and the United States. From April through last month, Trump repeatedly threatened to launch another massive attack against Iran. Each time, Iran threatened retaliation, Gulf States warned of the consequences, and Trump backed off. By his third or fourth bluff, Tehran had reason to conclude that the United States was no longer prepared to follow Iran up the ladder of escalation. Trump made this clear when he noted in mid-June that continuing the war would lead to “economic catastrophe,” possibly even a “depression,” and that he did not want to become President Herbert Hoover. Ever since, Trump has been trying, with notable desperation, to end the conflict.

The memorandum of understanding that the U.S. and Iran adopted in June reflected this reality. Although phrased to save face for the United States as much as possible, the MOU was a clear Iranian victory. It declared that the Islamic Republic of Iran, and no other nation, would “make arrangements” for the “safe passage of commercial vessels” through the Strait of Hormuz. In dialogue with Oman, without intermediaries or other participants, Iran would determine the strait’s administration “in line with the applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states.”

The MOU did not call for a return to the prewar status quo. Neither did it provide the United States any say over future administration of the strait. Rather, it designated Iran as the only actor other than the weak Oman, and it even allowed Iran to charge nations for safe passage after 60 days. The MOU thus codified the defeat that the United States had suffered back in March, when Trump apparently realized that he either could not or would not risk further attacks on energy facilities in the region.

In retrospect, Iran’s leaders do not seem to have believed that they needed the MOU. Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei reportedly had to be persuaded by President Masoud Pezeshkian to sign it. Tehran’s relative indifference was understandable: The American concessions reflected such desperation to end the war that the Iranians could well have expected that the U.S. would eventually retreat, with or without a deal.

Iranian leaders certainly did not hesitate to blow up the cease-fire almost immediately when the U.S. Navy began shepherding tankers through the Omani side of the strait. Trump may or may not have understood the full extent of the concessions his negotiators had made regarding control of the strait, but from the Iranian point of view, the Omani route was an attempt to recapture what the U.S. had given away. For a while, the United States and Iran engaged in tit-for-tat strikes, culminating in intense American attacks in mid-July. When these had no effect, Trump warned on July 15 that the United States was “going to knock out all their power plants” and “all their bridges” unless Iran negotiated. Yet again, no attack followed.

Then the world, and the Iranians, learned one of the main reasons: Revelations that American stocks of crucial munitions were dangerously low, and that no less than the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff himself was looking for an “off-ramp,” sent a clear signal about the future course of American strategy. A major assault on Iran would threaten American interests elsewhere by weakening the United States in the possible event of a Chinese move on Taiwan or a Russian onslaught against a NATO member.

Missile shortages would also increase the hazards involved in a massive attack on Iranian infrastructure. The U.S. would be forced to send more manned aircraft within range of Iranian air defenses, and it would have relatively few interceptors on hand to protect the Gulf States and its own regional bases. The risk of American casualties would be high, as would the danger to the region’s energy infrastructure. And nothing would guarantee that such an assault would be any more effective than the five-plus weeks of bombings were earlier this year.

American actions have made plain that Washington fears escalation more than Iran does—not just for now, but for the future. This places limits on what the United States can do even at low levels of conflict. Because any military action against Iran risks stepping onto an escalation ladder that the U.S. does not want to ascend, even tit-for-tat strikes seem no longer to be part of American strategy. The president has reportedly told his advisers that he does not want to order more strikes. The Iranians have struck at several UAE ships this month and even fired ballistic missiles at the country, but the United States has not responded since July—a fact undoubtedly noted by the UAE and Iran’s other neighbors.

[Vivian Salama: From ‘indispensable’ ally to target of annihilation]

Given the evident American reluctance to fight another major campaign, Iran has reason to wonder what it can get from a deal that it will not get anyway without one. Senior Iranian officials are now calling for the withdrawal of American forces, the lifting of the American naval blockade and all sanctions, the freeing of Iran’s frozen assets, and the payment of war reparations. The conventional wisdom is that Iran’s leaders know that these demands are nonstarters for Washington and that they are therefore either rubbing Trump’s nose in defeat, angling for a better deal, or overplaying their hand. Many observers still assume that control of the strait is a bargaining chip to squeeze more concessions out of the United States or get Trump back to the MOU. But we are well past all that. A victor does not have to go back to the bargaining table except to set the terms of surrender.

Iran has now laid out those terms. They may appear maximalist and excessive, but Tehran must hardly believe that it has reason to ask for less. Iran has made clear for months that control of the strait is not negotiable. The notion, constantly floated by the Trump administration and the media, that the Iranians can’t make up their minds and that they keep shifting their positions is nonsense. As far back as April, Mojtaba declared that Iran would implement “new legal frameworks and management” of the strait and that “foreigners who come from thousands of kilometers away” had no place in the Gulf, “except at the bottom of its waters.” On a day commemorating Iran’s defeat of Portugal in the strait in 1622, he declared that “by the will and power of God, the bright future of the Persian Gulf region will be a future without America.”

The idea that, having survived both military strikes and sanctions, Iran will now succumb to sanctions alone is deluded. Mojtaba has overhauled Iran’s national-security leadership and installed veterans of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in top positions. Former IRGC Commander Mohsen Rezaei now heads the Supreme National Security Council, and other hard-line security officials have been elevated. The regime emerging from the war is being reorganized by men who believe that Iran survived an American-Israeli attempt to destroy it and that defiance, not compromise, produced victory.

But this is not just triumphalism. For Iran, control of the strait is neither a luxury nor a bargaining chip. Given the likelihood that, at some future point, Israel or the United States will attack again, deal or no deal, the strait provides Iran’s strongest and surest deterrent. It is also the key to unlocking many of the shackles that a U.S.-dominated world order placed on Iran over the course of decades, and to undoing a regional and global economic system designed to exclude and impoverish it. Some so-called moderates within the Iranian establishment may well regard the strait as a bargaining chip, but they are not winning the argument, for reasons that are not hard to understand. An IRGC spokesperson stated the regime’s perspective plainly: “For us, the Strait of Hormuz is not merely an economic waterway, but rather a key component of our geopolitical and strategic power.”

Iran has been establishing the mechanisms of control for months and instructing shipowners and nations as to how the system will operate. It created the Persian Gulf Strait Authority and demanded that shipping companies register with it, obtain permits, follow Iran-designated routes, and pay for Iran-provided insurance and security.

Neither is Iran claiming merely the right to collect money. It is also claiming the right to decide who may pass. It has proposed excluding vessels associated with governments it deems hostile, such as the U.S. and Israel, and it has demanded compensation from nations that participated in attacks against it. Iran is establishing the principle that passage through the strait will henceforth be a privilege that Tehran can grant, condition, delay, or deny. Other nations have already begun acquiescing to the new arrangement. India, Pakistan, Iraq, Turkey, China, and others have sought to come to terms.

Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz is a more useful instrument of power than a nuclear weapon would be. A nuclear weapon might deter an attack, but control of the strait gives Iran leverage every day, over dozens of countries. With it, Iran can reward friends, punish enemies, extract revenue, force the loosening of sanctions, and make governments think twice before opposing Iranian policies. It can do all of this without firing a shot, and while preserving the ability to threaten violence when necessary.

The sanctions strategy that for decades served to isolate Iran rested on international cooperation. Nations that depend on access to the strait—Japan and South Korea, for example—will have to choose between access to a reliable energy supply and participation in American-backed sanctions. Will they choose solidarity with Washington—this Washington—over their economic interests? In the new order that Iran is creating, a global sanctions regime is likely to be unsustainable.

Iran will probably sustain its control over energy flows for at least a couple of years. The most optimistic projections suggest that establishing alternative pipelines and export routes that circumvent the Strait of Hormuz will take this long. But one wonders whether these will even come to fruition. New pipelines, ports, and energy facilities will be just as vulnerable to Iranian missiles and drones as the old ones were. Will Iran simply stand by while neighboring states construct the means to escape its control? The small states that must build and protect such routes are going to be wary of incurring Iran’s wrath, and American protection has proved inadequate. Iran is already trying to draw Iraq away from developing alternative oil-export corridors, in part by offering safe passage for Iraqi tankers on Iranian terms.

The regional adjustment has begun. Gulf rulers who once counted on an American security guarantee must now make their peace with the power that proved capable of defeating their protector. Saudi Arabia’s rejection of the U.S.- and Israel-backed Abraham Accords in favor of a strategic compact with Pakistan and Turkey hints at the shape of the future. The Abraham Accords represented the consolidation of Israeli power and influence in the region and the further containment of Iran. The Mecca pact is something else entirely. Neither Pakistan nor Turkey regards Iran as a major threat; Pakistan, like Iran, has close relations with China; Israel regards Turkey as a regional threat second only to Iran. Instead of an American-Israeli order, this will be an alignment less implacably hostile to Iran, less friendly to Israel, and more independent of the United States. The signatories also have nuclear weapons in common: Pakistan has them, and the Turks and Saudis want them.

[Arash Azizi: Tehran has to make a choice]

Meanwhile, Iran will be free to resume its own nuclear-weapons program without fear of another major attack. This fact in itself will transform the regional balance. Last year, Israel and the United States bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities for 12 days without facing serious Iranian retaliation. Now Iran has been emboldened to use its control of the strait, and threats against neighboring states and their energy infrastructure, to deter any such strikes for the foreseeable future. American missile and interceptor stocks will take a long time to replenish, and may well be needed in other parts of the world in years to come; Iran will all the while be rearming with Russian and Chinese help, potentially leaving the U.S. in a worse position a year from now than it is in today.

The effects will extend far beyond the Middle East. American allies in Asia and Europe can see that a relatively brief war against a second-rank power has consumed much of America’s supply of the weapons needed for missile defense. They can see that the United States began a war it could not finish, exposed its partners to retaliation, and then stopped when the costs became too great. Beijing’s conclusions about Taiwan, and Moscow’s conclusions about Europe, may be impossible to know. But America’s allies will inevitably be asking whether Washington has the weapons, stamina, and political will to sustain another major conflict. In fact, they already are.

That the Iranian regime could fall is, of course, possible. It is corrupt, repressive, economically incompetent, and widely hated by its people. But it had all of these weaknesses before the war. What it did not have was control of the world’s most important energy choke point, the prospect of growing revenues and influence, the demonstrated ability to deter the United States, and the prestige of an impossible victory.

A regime that survived what much of the world believed would destroy it, and then forced the world’s dominant power to retreat, will likely emerge strengthened, at least for a time. Such success tends to breed confidence, and perhaps overconfidence. But it is not likely to make Iran’s leaders less ambitious or less committed to the faith that saw them through this miraculous triumph. Recently, senior Iranian officials began talking publicly about adopting a “fully offensive” posture, and reports have emerged of Iranian plans to expand its targets to include European countries hosting American bases. To see stories in The New York Times asking, “Who will blink first?” is amusing, given that the Iranians until now have never once blinked, while the Trump administration has done nothing but blink. Iran may even start fighting again to force the U.S. to lift the naval blockade. Given the American administration’s proven fear of escalation, the hope is not unreasonable. The world has spent decades worrying about what Iran might do if it acquired a nuclear weapon. It should now worry about something even more consequential: an Iran that has defeated the United States, no longer fears American attack, and controls access to the Persian Gulf. Nuclear weapons alone could never have given Iran this kind of power. The failed U.S. and Israeli war with Iran has.

Ukraine’s Long Shot

2026-08-15T07:00:00-04:00

This summer, Ukraine began one of the most ambitious campaigns of its war with Russia. It launched drones deep into Russian territory, hitting some of the country’s biggest oil refineries and causing a nationwide fuel shortage. In some areas, Russians have waited for gas for as long as 69 hours, in lines stretching miles. Impatient drivers have beaten and stabbed one another. Even state-controlled media have acknowledged the problem.

Ukraine and its allies seemed to hope that frustrated Russians would rise up in protest. After more than four years, the war had finally “come home.” Now that more citizens were feeling its effects, one might assume, they would demand its end and apply pressure to President Vladimir Putin ahead of parliamentary elections in the fall. But so far, no mass uprising appears likely, now or anytime soon.

Russians are used to inconveniences. Under Soviet rule, they lived with shortages of just about everything. Lines were so ubiquitous that academics theorized about Russian identity being shaped by waiting. Books were published with chapter titles such as “The Queue as a Form of Soviet Life.” The newspaper Socialist Industry estimated that Soviet citizens spent 30 billion working hours a year waiting in line for essential goods.

In the late 1980s, at the peak of Soviet scarcity, my family lived on the outskirts of Gorky, a city east of Moscow. Sometimes my mother would send me shopping. I hated it. At a small, gray store called Vegetables, I would wait in line to pick through boxes of rotting produce, hoping to find an acceptable carrot or beetroot for borscht. Then I went to Bread, where I waited some more. Shelves were half empty. The only item that never seemed to run out was margarine; enterprising salespeople tried to make it more appealing by sculpting it into hedgehogs, which they put in display cases. Lines got even longer on the rare days when cheese or butter were delivered. Meat hardly ever came.

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

Still, nobody protested. We waved away the deprivation and delays. Everyone lives this way, we told ourselves. After all, Soviets knew the cost of complaining. In 1962, thousands of demonstrators gathered to protest wage cuts and government-imposed price increases. In response, Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s government deployed thousands of troops, who killed roughly two dozen demonstrators in what became known as the Novocherkassk massacre.

Russians continue to fear their government. I recently called my former neighbor in St. Petersburg, an art teacher and activist whom I’ll call Svetlana. When I asked whether she had witnessed any street protests, she laughed. “Are you guys living on the moon out there?” she asked me. “Don’t you get how dangerous it is here?”

“It’s even worse than in the Soviet days,” Svetlana continued. “One guy bragged to me the other day that he’d reported his neighbor to the FSB”—the successor of the KGB—simply for listening to anti-war music. She also told me about an acquaintance who had spent two years in prison for leaving a poem and flowers at a monument to a Ukrainian poet. In most households, gripes about the regime don’t leave the kitchen.

At the start of the war, demonstrations were more common. In 2022, police arrested nearly 19,000 anti-war activists, according to OVD-Info, an independent human-rights group. Since then, protests have all but disappeared. This year, one of the most notable critics of the regime was a veteran named Alexander Lunin. In June, Lunin put on his military uniform and recorded a speech denouncing Putin and the war. He posted it on social media, where it received more than 12 million views in 24 hours. The police jailed him, and Lunin publicly apologized for “giving in to emotions due to fatigue.”

Earlier this week, the only anti-war party was banned from parliamentary elections. Far-right politicians had sued the party, named Yabloko, alleging that it had received foreign funding, violated copyright law, and promoted “extremism.” The supreme court ruled in the far right’s favor, removing Yabloko from the ballot. Only a few hundred Russians protested outside the court.

Most Russians seem to have inherited the long-suffering mentality of the generations who grew up under Soviet rule. Rather than tiring of the war, “Russians realize that they are under attack, and that it’s time to stand together and tighten their belts,” Irina Borogan, a journalist who has studied Russian dissidents, told me. When the BBC asked a middle-aged man living in Crimea about the fuel shortages, he shrugged them off: “We are humans. We’ll adapt.”

Last month, I called Konstantin Sonin, an economist and a professor at the University of Chicago who left Russia in 2015. He told me that his friends in Moscow have made only the barest wartime accommodations—such as sending their kids to summer camp in Gelendzhik, a town on the Black Sea coast, instead of one in the heavily shelled Crimea, even though both areas are well within range of Ukrainian drones. He sounded astonished by his friends’ comfort with risk. “We’ve seen what Ukrainians have been capable of coping with,” Sonin told me. “Russians can endlessly adapt to this crisis too.”

[Anne Applebaum: Putin’s human safari is the dystopian future of war]

I heard a similar message from Vladislav Inozemtsev, a Russian economist and political scientist who lives in the United States. Inozemtsev told me that his friends in Moscow have used their contacts to circumvent the fuel shortage and get gas delivered to their door. “It’s twice the normal price, but they can afford it; the middle class quickly adapts to difficulties,” he said, while acknowledging that Russians in rural areas will likely have a harder time.

By some accounts, Moscow hardly looks like the capital of a country fighting a war of attrition. Denis Volkov, the director of the Levada Center, an independent polling organization, described his walk to work to me. The city center, he told me, is filled with decorations that the government has put up: an oversized samovar, an inflatable elephant, sprawling flower beds. Volkov said that he sees no sign of a public revolt. “I would say that the expectations of a revolution in Russia are not based on any real facts,” he said. “All our data proves the opposite.”

A few months before the war, Levada found that Putin’s approval rating was 63 percent. In June, it was 74 percent, although it has been dropping since the start of the year. A majority of Russians—52 percent—said that their country was moving in the right direction. “People blame mainly the West and Washington for all their troubles” instead of Putin, Volkov said. These findings undoubtedly reflect the reluctance of citizens in an authoritarian country to complain to pollsters about their government. Nonetheless, according to Volkov, Levada found that 16 percent of Russians said that they would participate in street protests, up from 11 percent in 2024. Last year, 16 percent of respondents said they felt fear or sadness. This summer, that figure was 29 percent.

Even though there have been no signs of mass protest, Putin is preparing. This year, the Kremlin increased the budget for the national guard and other law-enforcement agencies to a record high of more than $47 billion. Just like Russians who fear the reprise of Soviet-era government violence, Putin also has a precedent to worry about. In 1991, after years of keeping Russians off the streets, the Soviet regime was unable to stop a rally of hundreds of thousands in Moscow, which accelerated its end. Putin may not have much reason to fear such a protest in the near future, but he can’t be too careful.

What I Saw in Sinaloa

2026-08-13T12:36:00-04:00

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Last Tuesday night, I was eating sushi with a Mexican police chief in downtown Culiacán, a city that had momentarily flickered back to life amid a bloody cartel turf war. At the table next to us was a birthday party. The police chief ordered a salmon roll. Through the window, I could see groups of families and friends walking on the sidewalk, past car dealerships and strip malls, after months of self-imposed lockdown.

Among them were three influencers who pulled up to a KFC down the street. They were dressed as food-delivery workers, carrying insulated bags on their backs, joking with one another and livestreaming everything with their phones. César Gastélum, the group’s front man, had become famous for such innocuous pranks. Even as thousands were murdered by the cartels, Gastélum, a stocky, bearded 24-year-old, posted videos of himself dancing in pajamas, dressing as a priest, sipping iced coffee. He had more than 700,000 followers on TikTok.

It was this kind of incongruity that had drawn me to Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa. The city is the center of the fiercest and most consequential battle between armed groups in Mexico, and I wanted to untangle what was behind the surge of violence. From afar, it was difficult to tell whether someone like Gastélum was proof that the mundane and the horrific could coexist here, as they have for decades across Mexico, or whether he was a symbol of something else—the way drug cartels had quietly co-opted even the city’s least likely protagonists.

At about 8 o’clock, Gastélum and his friends were recording themselves waiting for their fried-chicken orders when two men on a motorcycle drove past. “Those guys scare me,” Gastélum said. He then seemed to regain his calm, joking about his skinny jeans in front of the camera when the motorcycle returned. It stopped momentarily in front of the three young men. The driver, wearing a black helmet with a face shield, raised a gun about two feet from Gastélum’s head and fired. The livestream captured the moment of the bullet’s impact and then went dark.

Someone on the city’s ambulance team texted me when the 911 call came in, and I ran across the street to the KFC. I got to the scene as police were arriving. Gastélum’s body lay at the drive-through’s exit, a ribbon of blood streaming toward the sidewalk. A cluster of soldiers gathered nearby, some of them scrolling through Gastélum’s TikTok feed. A small group of crime photographers were taking photos and uploading videos.

“As you can see, they have killed another influencer here in Culiacán,” José Ángel Beltrán of Luz Noticias said, narrating on Facebook Live.

Culiacán, for years the axis of Mexico’s drug wars, is now the focus of a U.S. effort to demolish drug cartels—something President Trump has said he’s willing to use military force to achieve. It is in many ways an understandable target: The Sinaloa cartel, which has administered the state for decades, is responsible for trafficking millions of kilos of fentanyl, meth, and cocaine into the United States. The Justice Department has indicted both the Sinaloa governor and the Culiacán mayor for cooperating with the cartel. Several of its leaders are serving life sentences in the U.S., and others have been targeted by Mexican security forces using intelligence from the United States.

[Read: Fentanyl doesn’t come through the Caribbean]

And yet, so far, these actions have only deepened the civil war between two Sinaloa-cartel factions, one run by the children and supporters of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán (the Chapitos), and the other run by allies of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García (the Mayos). In 2022, there were 476 homicides in Sinaloa. In 2025, it had 1,657. Government action against organized-crime groups in Mexico has almost always had such an effect—increasing violence without significantly altering the flow of drugs into the United States. But the current Sinaloa turf war—la narcopandemia, locals call it—has created new categories of victims, far from the foot soldiers and hit men targeted in previous spasms of violence. Now influencers and content creators are recruited by cartels to distribute their messages online. And university and vocational students have been kidnapped, presumably because their skills are needed by criminal groups. Each time a young person here is killed or vanishes, there are immediate questions about whom he or she might have been working for. When drug traffickers allegedly subsidize TikTok dances, a victim’s innocence can be almost impossible to discern.

As forensic police arrived at the KFC, Beltrán told me that another TikToker had been killed a few blocks away months earlier. A fitness influencer, El Tata, was murdered while leaving a shopping center. The body of a YouTuber, El Pinky, was found showing signs that he had been gagged and bound. About a dozen other influencers in Sinaloa have been killed, kidnapped, or attacked. Each time, the Mexican government investigated whether the influencers had somehow been linked to one group and targeted by the other. Last year, an unidentified plane dropped thousands of flyers over Culiacán that accused a number of influencers and musicians of having ties to the Chapitos (Gastélum was not on the list).

Kevin Sieff / The Atlantic

José Ángel Beltrán films at the KFC where Gastélum was killed.

Standing in front of the crime scene as the forensic police hovered around Gastélum’s body with flashlights, I asked Beltrán why he thought a goofy livestreamer would be a target in a cartel turf war.

“Did you see that he was wearing a cowboy hat?” Beltrán asked me.

Cowboy hats have become a symbol of the Mayos faction of the cartel. The implication was that Gastélum, while performing juvenile pranks, had been making a subtle nod to one group’s power. Online commenters rushed to make the same point.

Beltrán filmed one last video of Gastélum’s body as it was taken away, and then he tapped me on the shoulder. Another victim had been found half a mile away: a man shot in the city’s botanical garden after a screening of a Lady Gaga documentary. I went with him to cover it. When we got there, it was dark, and the body was lit by a streetlight. Beltrán took his phone out again and started streaming.

“Hello again, everyone,” he said. “It’s another rough night in Culiacán.”

The next day, I drove 30 minutes from downtown Culiacán to a neighborhood called Costa Rica, on the outskirts of the city. I passed several motorcyclists who had their face covered by a ski mask. These punteros, as they’re called, have for years worked as low-level informants for the cartel. Even before the fracture of Sinaloa, the cartel was famous for its capacity to monitor every inch of Culiacán. In addition to deploying the punteros, it placed hundreds of cameras across the city and set up surveillance teams in residential neighborhoods.

[Read: A planeload of informants]

The Mexican government has surged hundreds of soldiers and national guardsmen across the city, ostensibly to disrupt the criminal groups who have terrorized it. But the military presence is overwhelmingly performative. On the road to Costa Rica, I watched as punteros and soldiers nonchalantly drove past one another.

I pulled up to the squat house of Marta Pérez Guzman, whose son, David Antonio Ruelas Pérez, had been kidnapped by armed men along with his classmate José Isaías Ibarra Duarte. There were 2,154 disappearances in Sinaloa last year, but the kidnapping of Ruelas, 22, and Ibarra, 23, had received more attention than most. The men were students at an aviation school in Culiacán, and many here suspected that they had been abducted to work on cartel aircraft. There was another notable fact: Ibarra is a U.S. citizen, born in Los Angeles.

His mother, Graciela Duarte Valdez, had wondered whether that would be enough to nudge the U.S. government to act. After all, Trump had articulated in Truth Social posts and Fox News interviews his desire to intervene in Mexico. She had traveled to the closest U.S. consulate, in the neighboring state of Sonora, and made her case. Not only was her son still missing, but the Mexican attorney general’s office had obtained surveillance footage of the kidnapping and showed it to her. Through tears, Duarte described seeing footage of four men who wore ski masks and carried rifles getting out of a minivan and forcing her son and Ruelas into a second car. It all took only a few seconds.

She felt abandoned by the Mexican government’s investigators, who asked questions suggesting that the boys had been working for a cartel faction before the kidnapping. When she went to the U.S. consulate, officials took notes and thanked her for coming (when I asked the State Department about the case, a spokesperson told me in a statement that it was “aware of reports of the kidnapping of a U.S. citizen in Mexico” but did not elaborate). Duarte was despairing; she knew that just a small fraction of disappeared people were later found alive in Sinaloa. One day last year, she heard that Governor Rubén Rocha Moya was visiting her neighborhood. She ran to meet him.

“Please help,” she told the governor, as she held a missing-person poster with her son’s photo and name on it. Rocha told her he would try.

Kevin Sieff / The Atlantic

From Left: Graciela Duarte Valdez and Marta Perez Guzman at Perez’s home in Culiacán last week.

A few months later, Duarte was skimming her Facebook feed for information about missing people and recovered bodies when she saw a news story that said Rocha had been indicted by the United States for colluding with the cartel. The U.S. government had acted, but she could not bring herself to see the move as productive or helpful. Rocha temporarily resigned and fled Culiacán. The Mexican government announced that it would support him until the U.S. showed more evidence of his collusion.

“All I could think was that I had begged that man for help,” Duarte said. “But of course, he did nothing. He had been working for the cartel the whole time.”

About a third of Mexico is controlled by organized criminal groups, according to a U.S.-government analysis. Culiacán—even during its most peaceful stretches—has been a prime example. The cartel presence here has never been subtle. One man in his early 20s told me that his childhood friends had been recruited to work in fentanyl labs and would return smelling like chemicals for weeks. The children of cartel kingpins enrolled in the city’s top prep schools. In one cemetery, families of deceased cartel operatives erected graves the size of suburban homes. Each time the cartel’s fractures sent the city into spirals of violence—in 2010 and 2017—they ended the same way: not with the disintegration of organized crime but with one faction emerging as the victor.

The Trump administration believes that it can avoid repeating this pattern, partially by going after Mexican politicians who support the cartel—“all the government officials that are part of the ‘Culiacán clan,’” Sara Carter, the director of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, told a journalist earlier this year. The U.S. has also continued its decades-long strategy of targeting top cartel operatives, largely by funneling intelligence to elite Mexican-military units who have conducted a number of successful operations. That partnership is deeper than it has been in years. But I didn’t meet anyone in Culiacán who believes that the strategy will reduce violence here. So far, it hasn’t reduced drug flows, either. Even officials in the Mexican government who are in favor of attacking criminal groups privately dismiss the Trump administration’s absolutist goal of eliminating cartels, given the enormous demand for drugs in the United States.

[Read: Claudia Sheinbaum’s impossible dilemma]

“On Day one, President Trump designated major cartels—including Sinaloa—as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, unlocking powerful sanctions, asset seizures, and enhanced prosecutorial tools to crush their operations. We will not allow cartels to profit off of poisoning our children and grandchildren,” Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, told me in a statement.

As César Gastélum’s body was buried last week, some of the city’s influencers posted tributes to him, as if describing a fallen comrade. “We need to take care of ourselves,” one wrote to his 2.3 million followers. Even Mexico’s president weighed in, promising to find the assailants. Duarte had followed the news. Gastélum was just a year older than her son.

But she was following another story more closely. The government had detained a dozen young alleged cartel operatives in a rural area outside Culiacán. It published photos of the boys and men, their faces blurred. Many of their T-shirts were off, revealing skinny frames. Duarte zoomed in on one of them. It was hard to tell, but he looked at least a little bit like her son.

Tehran Has to Make a Choice

2026-08-13T07:00:00-04:00

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When the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey got together last week to forge a new defense agreement, they emphasized that their pact wasn’t aimed at any particular country. But one country was surely on everybody’s mind: the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Iran has positioned itself as the most overtly anti-Western state in the region, and the coming together of three prominent Muslim-majority countries aligned with the West, two of which have land borders with Iran, signals its isolation. Iran has endured months of war with Israel and the United States without losing, but it has done so in part by repeatedly attacking neighboring countries that house U.S. military bases. Now these countries are among those closing ranks against Iran in an agreement signed in and named for Mecca, Islam’s holiest city.

The symbolism can’t be lost on Tehran. The parties to the Mecca pact include some of the world’s most powerful Muslim-majority countries: the two with the biggest economies in the region (Turkey and Saudi Arabia, which also spend the most on their militaries), and the Muslim world’s sole nuclear power (Pakistan).

Iran has traditionally maintained good relations with Turkey and Pakistan; its cultural bonds with these two countries are strong and go back centuries. More recently, the Islamic Republic has worked to improve its relations with Saudi Arabia, particularly since reestablishing diplomatic ties with Riyadh in 2023.

[Read: Iran goes looking for love in Jordan]

Even so, Iran’s regional policies have put the country at odds with these and other neighbors. Tehran gave its full support to the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, which rebels who were backed by Ankara and Riyadh overthrew in 2024. The Iranian military exchanged strikes with Pakistan in 2024 and attacked Saudi Arabia in recent weeks. Iranian missiles were intercepted over Turkish airspace earlier this year. Tehran-backed militias in Yemen and Iraq have attacked Saudi interests. More broadly, Iran’s anti-American stance clashes with the official orientations of all three signatories of the Mecca agreement.

Skeptics will point out that the new defense pact might not mean much in practice. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a similar deal last year but did not invoke it when Saudi Arabia came under attack during the current conflict. But the language of the Mecca accord is stark: “Any armed attack against any of the three States shall be regarded as an attack against them all.” The arrangement includes a new organization, to be overseen by a secretariat in Saudi Arabia, and regular meetings among the foreign and defense ministers of the three countries, along with their military chiefs. Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, has compared the new organization to NATO and suggested that Egypt, the most populous Arab state, is likely to join. Altogether, the pact suggests a significant improvement in relations between Turkey and the Arab states—a development that could help stabilize the entire region.

Iranian officialdom has mostly greeted the news of the Mecca pact with studied nonchalance. A spokesperson claimed to welcome the arrangement as evidence that the member countries would no longer rely on the United States. A reformist civil-society activist suggested to me that the Mecca agreement could be “an opportunity, not a threat,” insinuating that Iran could one day join it. But some hard-line politicians are less sanguine. Ebrahim Azizi, the head of the Parliament’s foreign-policy committee, posted on Saturday that the Mecca three “haven’t found the right path yet. We warn them about miscalculations. No mistake will go unanswered.”

[Read: Trump’s new strategy of nothing]

Washington has long encouraged its allies in the Middle East to work together. Throughout much of the Cold War, regional alliances held off both Soviet communism and Arab radicalism, which meant that the United States felt the need to intervene only rarely and briefly. Iran was a crucial part of this architecture—intervening, together with Saudi Arabia, in civil wars in Oman and Yemen to help defeat Communist-backed rebels, and helping to found the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in 1969. President Richard Nixon so relied on Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to help keep the U.S. out of Middle Eastern affairs that in 1972 he told Pahlavi, “Protect me.” Then came the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and with it, a new era of chaos and discord.

Iran is not the only Middle Eastern country excluded from the emerging security arrangement that Mecca portends. Israel, too, is absent. The 2020 Abraham Accords normalized Israel’s relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, but the big prize was always Saudi Arabia, which has conditioned recognition of Israel on progress toward the formation of a Palestinian state. Israel is currently moving away from this prospect rather than toward it. Pakistan doesn’t recognize Israel either. Turkey has diplomatic and military relations with Israel, but the two countries have drifted apart in recent years.

If Israel still wants to work toward regional recognition, it may find that its best course is to patch things up with Turkey and try to meet the Saudis halfway. At least these two countries don’t share the depth of Iran’s animus against Israel.

Iran, too, will be faced with a choice. It can go on supporting militias and destabilizing the region, which will further isolate it. Or it can embrace the regional consensus on economic development, diplomatic reconciliation, and a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Islamic Republic can either militate against Mecca, in other words, or give up its revolutionary ambitions at last.

A Silver Lining in Afghanistan

2026-08-12T07:30:00-04:00

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Five years ago, the United States was completing its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan when the terrorist group known as the Islamic State Khorasan Province carried out one last murderous strike. ISKP’s suicide attack on the Kabul International Airport killed 13 U.S. service members and about 170 desperate Afghan civilians trying to flee the Taliban’s oppressive rule.

The carnage was a final reminder of what the American military had been doing in Afghanistan to begin with. An Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban, American policy makers feared, would become a haven for terrorists, as it was before the U.S. invasion in 2001. In the 1990s, the Taliban had offered sanctuary to al-Qaeda and like-minded networks, allowing them to train thousands of fighters and plot devastating assaults, including the 1998 embassy bombings, the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, and 9/11. For 20 years, concerns that such attacks might resume kept the U.S. fighting a war that its officials knew they were losing. In April 2021, William Burns, President Biden’s CIA director, warned that pulling out troops would create a “significant risk” of an al-Qaeda resurgence. When Biden withdrew four months later, experts claimed that he had given terrorists a leg up.

Today these fears look overblown. Under Taliban rule, Afghanistan has not become the global terrorist hub it once was. Al-Qaeda, which remains far weaker today than in 2001, hasn’t carried out an attack from Afghanistan on the U.S. or Europe since the withdrawal. Meanwhile, the Taliban has turned into a valuable—though deeply flawed—counterterrorism partner to the U.S., overturning the expectations of analysts who believed the group would revert to being a major sponsor of global terror.

The past five years have confirmed that staying in Afghanistan was folly. But they have also demonstrated a truth that isn’t nearly as accepted: Curbing terrorism often requires working with old enemies.

[From the October 2023 Issue: The final days]

The Taliban is no friend to the United States. The group brutalizes the Afghan people, particularly women, and it continues to shelter militants such as al-Qaeda, which has begun to train more members in Afghanistan since the withdrawal. But unlike in the 1990s, the Taliban provides far less support to terrorists, and, perhaps more important, al-Qaeda poses a much smaller threat.

Before the withdrawal, the U.S. launched drone strikes that killed many of al-Qaeda’s senior leaders, and orchestrated an intelligence campaign that shut down al-Qaeda cells around the world. The group never fully recovered. In 2022, another American drone strike killed al-Qaeda’s head, Ayman al-Zawahiri, proving that the U.S. can undercut the group even without a presence in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda has still not named a replacement for al-Zawahiri, and its de facto leader, Saif al-Adel, is hiding in Iran. The Taliban is reportedly reluctant to allow al-Adel into Afghanistan, an apparent recognition that providing too much support to al-Qaeda could jeopardize its own interests.

The strongest parts of al-Qaeda are no longer in Afghanistan but in Africa, and they present fewer risks: Local branches, such as JNIM in West Africa and al-Shabaab in Somalia, are primarily focused on regional goals instead of global terrorism. Similarly, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, another recipient of Taliban support, has concentrated its attacks on Pakistan rather than on international targets. In 2010, the group attempted to detonate a car bomb in Times Square; in 2020, it signaled that it wouldn’t attack America again—and no evidence has emerged since then that the organization has changed its mind.

As al-Qaeda has dwindled, ISKP has grown into the biggest terrorist threat in Afghanistan. The group is suspected of carrying out deadly attacks in Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and Turkey. It has also plotted campaigns in Europe and inspired plots in the United States. But these have failed or been disrupted, and the Taliban has helped the U.S. thwart ISKP’s ambitions.

ISKP has challenged the Taliban’s religious legitimacy, targeted its leaders, and recruited some of its rank and file. In response, the Taliban has arrested and killed ISKP fighters and leaders. At times, though, the Taliban has taken a more conciliatory approach—for example, persuading ISKP members to surrender in exchange for lenient treatment. Because they now share a common enemy, the U.S. and the Taliban have found opportunities to advance each other’s interests. Indeed, the White House’s counterterrorism chief has described the Taliban as “moderately cooperative counterterrorism partners.” Unlike the collapsed Afghan republic government, the Taliban controls the entire country and has networks everywhere, which Washington has used to its advantage. Thanks to its strong intelligence in the region, America has been able to warn Iran and Russia about the risk of ISKP attacks and to assist European states in disrupting plots.

[Krishnadev Calamur: Talking to the Taliban while still fighting the Taliban]

Afghanistan isn’t the only place where the U.S. has cooperated with former adversaries. In Syria, the jihadist turned head of state Ahmed al-Sharaa works with the U.S. to battle the Islamic State and Hezbollah. America has also cooperated with the Syrian Democratic Forces, even though it has a close relationship with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, an internationally designated terrorist group that targets Turkey.

America’s relationships with unsavory actors can backfire: In Somalia, the U.S. supported warlords to fight al-Shabaab, but their abuses only increased support for the terrorist group. The Taliban’s U.S.-assisted campaign against ISKP has also had serious drawbacks. To prevent defections to ISKP, the Taliban has become even more repressive. In addition, the clampdown on ISKP’s operations in Afghanistan seems to have encouraged the group to turn to international terrorism, because it was no longer as effective locally.

Cooperating with repressive regimes or onetime enemies will always incur costs, both moral and strategic. The job of U.S. policy makers is to constantly assess whether the costs outweigh the security gains that these partnerships can offer, not only to the U.S. but to societies around the world. One of the clearest foreign-policy lessons of the past five years is simple, if uncomfortable: The best counterterrorism option is sometimes the least bad one.

Ukraine May Be Just the Ally America Needs

2026-08-09T07:00:00-04:00

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Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky seemed to have a decently cordial White House meeting on July 28. The subject was the Ukrainian president’s request for a license to manufacture Patriot surface-to-air interceptor missiles. But two days after the meeting, Trump made a point of deflating any positive expectations he might have generated in Kyiv.

“It’s a very extraordinary weapon,” Trump said of the Patriot system in an interview with the Financial Times, and “we have to be a little bit careful of who we license to.” The implication was that Ukraine was not to be trusted.

Then, in another seeming reversal on August 8, Zelensky suggested in a post on X that Trump had agreed to grant the license: “We have now reached an agreement with President Trump that he will grant the licenses, but imagine if we had received them four years ago. By now, we would already be producing Patriots for everyone.” As of this writing, Washington has not confirmed that Trump has decided on a license agreement. But granting this request would make perfect sense given Ukraine’s military evolution.

Trump’s attitude toward Ukraine has never been favorable, but every once in a while, he seems to be ready to do something positive for it. Then a phone call from Russian President Vladimir Putin, or a visit by Trump’s plenipotentiary Steve Witkoff to Moscow, appears to rekindle his hostility toward the embattled country, along with his wishful thinking that Putin is serious about pursuing peace. (U.S. intelligence consistently assesses that he isn’t.) Before the talk of a Patriot license, there was a much-hyped Ukrainian request for Tomahawk cruise missiles, which Trump publicly weighed before unceremoniously declining during another Zelensky visit to the White House, in October.

But this time around, something has changed. The Ukrainian military position is stronger than it has been in years. The country has become more autonomous. It produces many of its own weapons and is holding off Russian advances and even winning back territory in some areas. And it has taken the war to Russia, despite having fewer soldiers and more finite resources than its enemy has.

These and other feats have left Ukraine looking less like a NATO supplicant than an invaluable source of military technology and know-how. If any country in Europe has the incentive and expertise to become a crucial node in America’s military supply chain, it’s Ukraine. You might even call Kyiv a “model ally,” to borrow a term applied to Israel by Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, who has been an outspoken opponent of U.S. security assistance to Kyiv.

The question is whether the Trump administration recognizes this—or still imagines that it holds all of the cards. Granting Ukraine the Patriot license wouldn’t be a concession to a dependent state fighting an unwinnable war: It could well be the start of a manufacturing arrangement that would end up serving the United States.

The past year has brought an encouraging turnaround in the war in Ukraine. Russia still terrorizes Ukrainian cities with ballistic-missile attacks, which grow deadlier as Ukraine’s stocks of interceptors dwindle. But Kyiv has successfully used drones to block major Russian offensive operations on the front lines. Moscow has opted for infiltration tactics instead, sending small groups of two to four soldiers through the gaps in Ukraine’s defenses to occupy abandoned trenches, buildings, or other positions from which to harass the defending army.

Ukraine is giving as good as it gets. It has struck oil refineries and export terminals as far away as Siberia—also air bases and strategic Russian industries, including Wildberries, an Amazon-style online retailer, some of whose inventory can be put to military as well as civilian use. These drone strikes have left smoking wreckage thousands of miles from Kyiv. They have also produced fuel rationing, pump closures, and long, snaking queues all over Russia, which is facing its worst fuel crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Moscow had to close its airports temporarily due to nightly Ukrainian-drone swarms, leading Zelensky to joke to reporters that the Russian capital was an unsafe venue for any peace talks.

[Read: What’s eating ‘Putin’s brain’?]

On its own territory, Ukraine’s situation has gone from dire to manageable. Despite shortages of personnel and some shuffling of the military command, Ukraine has blunted the Russian advance in the Donbas, the eastern region that Witkoff, J.D. Vance, and Trump once urged Kyiv to consider lost. Russia’s rate of territorial advance has slowed in the past year. Black Bird Group, a Finnish war monitor, calculated that Russian forces captured “nearly five times as much territory” last July as they did this July, and actually lost more ground than they seized in February and June of this year.

Russian logistics in southern Ukraine, particularly the transportation of fuel, weapons, and other combustible material, have been so disrupted that the Ukrainians have dubbed the main artery connecting Russia to occupied Crimea the “Highway of Death.” Ukrainian drones have intercepted maritime traffic to the peninsula as well, hitting 129 vessels associated with Russia’s “shadow fleet” in the Sea of Azov and another 72 in the Black Sea in the past month of overnight strikes. Twenty-four-hour blackouts are now commonplace in Crimea because of Ukrainian attacks on substations and the regional energy grid.

Ukraine has gotten savvier about communications as well. Since last year, it has been deliberately delaying reporting its territorial gains, to avoid drawing Russian resources to parts of the front line that may be softening. Kyiv has similarly become more strategic in its approach to Trump. A Ukrainian official, who asked for his name to be withheld because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, told me that Kyiv now understands Trump as a transactional player, and its outreach aims to keep the American president from upending a status quo that’s working rather than appeal to humanitarian or moral imperatives.

If Trump once had the leverage to force a dismal peace on Ukraine, he has since relinquished it. The United States doesn’t pay for the war anymore—Europe does. Trump reduced new commitments of U.S. military aid to Ukraine by 99 percent in his first year back in office, Germany’s Kiel Institute for the World Economy determined. NATO has a mechanism that allows member states to fund the purchase of U.S. weapons for Ukrainian use, but this has so far accounted for only $6.7 billion in assistance, a fraction of the $127 billion that the Biden administration and Congress allocated to Ukraine.

The shortfall has become less salient as the dynamics of the war have changed, and as Ukraine has developed the capacity to manufacture its own weapons at scale. Rob Lee, a military analyst at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told me that more than 80 percent of casualties in the Russia-Ukraine war are caused by drones, the bulk of which Ukraine produces itself. Last month, the Ukrainian government approved exporting weapons and defense tech for the first time since the full-scale invasion began, in February 2022. The reason, according to Politico, is that the country now produces more weapons than it can afford to buy from its own companies. Forty to 70 percent of what’s manufactured sits unused in warehouses.

Ukraine has become a global epicenter for military robotics. A single team of about 10 Ukrainians “eliminated” two mechanized NATO battalions in one day in an exercise in Estonia in May 2025, and “destroyed Sweden’s troops” in a war game on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea a year later. Zelensky estimates that Ukraine currently produces about 10 million drones a year; contrast that with the United States’ 100,000. Some of these munitions, such as Darts, cost as little as $1,000 to make but have taken out Russian targets worth millions.

Ukrainian technicians have upgraded some American products to achieve all of this. The Hornet is a $5,000 drone developed by Perennial Autonomy, a company founded by the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. It carries an 11-pound warhead and can travel 124 miles. Ukraine’s Azov Corps MacGyvered the Hornet, the Kyiv Independent reported, by using commercial Starlink satellite terminals to expand its range and lower its susceptibility to Russian jamming.

So formidable is Ukraine’s drone game that even the country’s onetime detractors now want in on the action. One Florida-based drone company, Powerus, is looking for Ukrainian hardware and licenses and includes two noteworthy investors: Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.

Ukraine is only too happy to share its inventions and know-how. It came to America’s defense in a war of choice against Iran that many NATO allies have wanted little to do with. Early in the war, U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf sustained significant damage from Iranian drone attacks, and Ukraine reportedly sent technical advisers to the region to install and operate Kyiv’s cutting-edge Sky Map system, which uses acoustics and AI to detect and down incoming drones. Ukraine has since signed security- and defense-cooperation agreements with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

America’s offensive drone campaign against Iran now involves repurposing civilian technology for military use, much as Ukraine has done. One U.S. military officer who was deployed to the Persian Gulf until recently told me that the U.S. military has been buying Starlink terminals from local shopping malls and affixing them to aerial drones and unmanned surface vessels. The reason? They’re cheaper and easier to use than SpaceX’s “hard” Pentagon-controlled variant, Starshield.

As new reporting in The Atlantic disclosed on July 30, Zelensky has prevailed on Trump to ask Elon Musk for permission to use Starlink when striking deep into Russia. The Ukrainians aren’t seeking anything that will cost U.S. taxpayers: just the go-ahead to use their homegrown munitions to greater effect and, in the absence of interceptors, take out Russian missile launchers before they fire their payloads. Granting this request could even bring a windfall to the Pentagon and the CIA.

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

The one thing the United States still provides free of charge, according to both American and Ukrainian sources, is intelligence, including the targeting packages for strikes on Russian-troop positions in Ukraine and on energy infrastructure inside Russia. Credit for this policy goes to CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who is said to impress the president on the golf links with eye-popping data about Russian losses on the battlefield, now in excess of 40,000 a month. Ratcliffe’s explanation for his success, one Western intelligence official told me, is that “Trump doesn’t like losers.” So long as Ukraine is seen to be winning and defying the conventional wisdom of those who insist it can’t, the president’s inclination to cut and run is mitigated.

Trump should also welcome the toll that Ukrainian strikes are taking on Russia’s energy economy. Moscow’s reduction in oil exports could leave countries such as India and China more vulnerable to Trump’s tariffs. And the president has begged Europeans to end their dependency on Russian oil and gas since his first term in office, going so far as to sanction the Nord Stream pipeline. Zelensky calls his nightly salvos on Russian refineries “long-range sanctions.” Trump may even view bombing as a prelude to negotiations, much as he has in Iran. “It’s an escalation, but it’s also an escalation that could help lead to an end,” he said of Ukraine’s deep strikes at the NATO summit in Ankara last month.

The intertwining of the wars in Iran and Ukraine has demonstrated that a recipient of U.S. security assistance can also be a provider of security assistance to the United States. But the one thing Ukraine can’t yet source domestically in sufficient quantities is ballistic-missile defense, and U.S. supplies of the Patriot systems used for this purpose are also strained.

The United States has burned through about two-thirds of its stockpile of Patriot systems in the Middle East in the past six months, according to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. Russia, which has been giving the Iranians targeting packages for use against U.S. soldiers in the region, knows this and continues to bombard Ukrainians with missiles, killing civilians in their homes. Last month, it fired 376 missiles, more than twice as many as it did in June, many of them aimed at Kyiv. Almost all are getting through, as Patriot batteries—most numerous around the capital—run out of interceptors.

“The Ukrainians have active development programs for almost everything they need, and their intention is to be totally self-sufficient in the future,” Colby Badhwar, an independent security analyst, told me. However, he said, “right now they are still almost entirely reliant on allies for interceptors.”

Even if the U.S. were to grant Ukraine a license to manufacture Patriots, doing so at scale would take Ukraine years. That’s why Zelensky has been pursuing immediate resupplies of Patriot missiles in tandem with longer-term solutions. Zelensky reportedly asked Trump for “several hundred” interceptors at the Oval Office meeting on July 28; Trump refused, citing America’s shrunken stocks and U.S. priorities in the Middle East.

[Read: Ukraine is not losing. Russia is not winning.]

The Ukrainian journalist Tim Zadorozhnyy has reported that Zelensky first broached a Patriot license in the waning months of the Biden administration. Senior Ukrainian officials evidently put the proposal to Lloyd Austin, the U.S. defense secretary at the time, and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, but were rebuffed without explanation. (Zelensky has now claimed that he also requested a license from Biden in the first year of the war.)

Granting the license would make Washington both a guarantor of Ukraine’s security and a beneficiary of its productive capacity. The former industrial hub of the Soviet Union would pay good money to become a helpmeet to the U.S. defense industry. It’s one of the few nations in Europe still lining up to do so. When its war is over, Ukraine could manufacture surplus Patriots for U.S. use or for resale to U.S. allies and partners. Given its track record, Ukraine might even be able to produce surpluses while the war rages on. And that might be the problem.

Zelensky’s post on X on August 8 suggested that the main hold-up with the Trump administration was bureaucracy and “paperwork.” On the Hill_, one Republican official in favor of the license told me about an unreported hiccup in the deal. Raytheon and Lockheed, the makers of the Patriot system, “will officially frame their concerns around IP theft and tech transfer,” he said, but “their real worry is that the Ukrainians will find a way to improve the Patriot and then produce them at scale faster and for much less money than what the existing production lines in the U.S. could do.”

Iran Goes Looking for Love in Jordan

2026-08-07T07:00:00-04:00

In late July, Iran struck a U.S. military base in Jordan, killing three American service members. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps followed up with an unusual series of messages to the Jordanian people: “You know well that we have no hostility toward your country,” the IRGC declared in a statement published on Iran’s Fars News Agency. “Rather, we love you, noble people who understand the suffering and injustice endured by the Palestinian people more than any other nation.”

Another message cheekily thanked unnamed Jordanians for providing targeting information for the Iranian strikes. A third appeared to address Jordanian critics of the operation, saying that the United States, not Iran, had “violated your territorial integrity and sovereignty.”

The appeals to Jordanians speak to a concerted effort, fueled by Iran’s growing confidence in its regional position since the start of the war with the United States and Israel, to convince the Arab public that an alliance with the United States is not worth the cost. The Islamic Republic has tried to drive such a wedge ever since its founding in 1979. But today’s push reflects Tehran’s perception of what Iranian officials call a “new equation of power” in the Middle East—one that includes Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz.

[Nancy A. Youssef and Jonathan Lemire: This may be Trump’s biggest error in the Iran war]

Iran has demonstrated its willingness to defend this position through missile strikes on seven different Arab countries that host U.S. bases. At least three were aimed at Jordan, including a surprise attack on July 28. Now the IRGC is reaching out to Jordanians with professions of solidarity and love.

The switch from bombardment to flattery may seem sudden, and Jordan may seem an unlikely place for the IRGC to go looking for friends. Unlike Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, Jordan has no significant Shiite minority to form a social base for the spread of Iranian influence. But Tehran has both a military rationale and an ideological one.

Iran’s military purpose is clear: Jordan houses radar and anti-missile systems that help Israel detect and deter incoming Iranian fire, and it lacks the military capacity to retaliate against Iranian strikes. Jordan also lacks the economic clout that seems to have helped the United Arab Emirates—an essential export hub for Iranian goods—cut a tacit nonaggression pact with Tehran, at least for the moment.

Tehran also hopes to exploit a fissure between Jordan’s people and their government, which depends on the protection and patronage of the United States. Some Jordanians have recently called for the expulsion of the U.S. military, a movement fueled in part by deep sympathy for the Palestinian cause. Some 60 percent of Jordan’s population is of Palestinian origin.

Ever since the start of the Gaza war in 2023, street protests have regularly erupted in Jordan. These have been supported by the country’s king and queen and by prominent government officials, whether out of conviction or a belief that the public needs to let off steam. Queen Rania gave an interview to Christiane Amanpour two weeks after the Hamas massacre on October 7 in which she spoke of Israeli actions as a “genocide”—a gesture that was widely seen in Jordan (and Israel) as setting a new tone of fury regarding Israel’s behavior in Gaza.

Jordanian demonstrators did more than let off steam: They pledged support for Hamas. Islamist networks in Jordan began gaining strength, leading the government to ban the local chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood last year. In late 2024, Jordanians, two of whom were members of the Brotherhood, carried out two cross-border terrorist attacks in Israel.

Violence in Gaza has ebbed since a cease-fire took hold late last year, but Israel’s gradual, de facto annexation of the West Bank, which has accelerated in the past few years under Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government, is of deep concern to Jordan. The specter of a fuller or even formal annexation—however unlikely at the moment—raises profound fears in Jordan of a flood of Palestinian refugees, which might upset the country’s fragile demographic balance and amplify anger at Israel.

“The Iranians believe they know what’s going on in Jordan,” Amer al-Sabaileh, a Jordanian security expert and columnist, told me. “This could be a multilayered strategy—missiles, then propaganda, then maybe activating cells.”

But Iran’s bets may well prove wrong. For all their sympathy with the Palestinian cause, Jordanians have long been profoundly distrustful of Iran’s revolutionary Shiite project, partly for sectarian reasons, given that Jordan’s people are almost all Sunni Muslims. Tehran’s latest missile blitz aimed at its neighbors is also taking a toll. Recent polling in Arab countries suggests that any sympathy Iran gained during the initial phase of the war this spring, when it was seen as a victim of Israeli aggression, evaporated with Tehran’s recent bout of air strikes on Arab countries, says Michael Robbins, the director of the Arab Barometer, a public-opinion-research organization.

[Tom Nichols: Trump owes Americans a better explanation about Iran]

Jordanian officials, who spoke obliquely of defending Jordanian sovereignty during the first phase of the Israeli-U.S. war earlier this year, have taken a firm line against “Iranian aggression” in recent public statements. So have some of the country’s government-aligned journalists.

“Jordan is subjected to Iranian aggression, full stop,” wrote the columnist Hussein al-Rawasdeh, in an article in the newspaper al-Dustour that criticized those calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops as disloyal. “Do you stand with your country?” Other columnists went further, suggesting that the Iranian strikes might even stiffen Arab resolve and help form a more united front.

But Arab countries confront limited options. “Ultimately, they all face the same strategic calculation that adopting a harder line against Iran, especially as ultra-hard-liners gain influence in Tehran, will place them more firmly in the crosshairs,” Ahmad Sharawi, a senior analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told me. Their primary weapon, he said, will remain “diplomatic condemnations.”

What Happened to al-Qaeda?

2026-08-05T06:00:00-04:00

Since September 11, 2001, al‑Qaeda has pulled off exactly one fatal attack inside the United States. If you remember the details of that attack, you probably spend too much time thinking about terrorism. On December 6, 2019, in Pensacola, Florida, a 21-year-old Royal Saudi Air Force officer took out a legally acquired Glock pistol and killed three U.S. sailors at a naval air base, before police arrived and killed him. The shooter, an affiliate of al‑Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, had been on the base for flight training. I was in Taif, Saudi Arabia, at the time, and the Saudis I met said they were sorry about the incident but relieved that after 18 years of terrorist R&D, the most ferocious blow al‑Qaeda could strike on the path of jihad was not much worse than the kind of mundane workplace violence that we Americans regularly inflict on ourselves.

The group yearned to attack America again after 9/11 and had considered several schemes, but only on three occasions before Pensacola had it actually tried to execute an operation. All three plots had failed.

Universal History Archive / Getty

The 9/11 attacks, which killed 2,977 people, instilled fear in Americans. But for al-Qaeda, fear was a means to an end: political change.

On December 22, 2001, a slovenly thug named Richard Reid tried to blow up a Miami-bound airplane by lighting a bomb concealed in his high-top sneakers. He failed because he could not light the fuse—which had apparently been moistened by foot sweat and rain—and because he tried to light it, striking match after match, in full view of other passengers rather than in the privacy of an American Airlines lavatory.

The next attack would not occur for another eight years. That one, in 2009, resembled the first: A competent bomb maker entrusted his package to a complete moron. On a plane descending into Detroit, a passenger with an explosive charge sewn into his underpants injected a chemical initiator that fricasseed his crotch but left the plane intact. The next year, in a much more formidable plot, al‑Qaeda used FedEx and UPS to send bombs hidden in laser printers on cargo planes bound for the United States. Authorities intercepted the packages. In 2017, the United States killed the bomb maker, Ibrahim al-Asiri, in a drone strike in Yemen.

Surviving until 2017, as an al-Qaeda leader, was itself something of an accomplishment. Anne Likuski, the author of Al‑Qaida After 9/11 and a researcher at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, told me the upper echelons of al‑Qaeda had been “eradicated” by 2012—droned into oblivion and replaced by younger jihadists with less experience and credibility. In 2011, Osama bin Laden himself was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and his successor, the Egyptian physician Ayman al‑Zawahiri, was struck by Hellfire missiles on his balcony in Kabul in 2022.

Judging from this streak of incompetence, it is difficult to see al‑Qaeda as anything but a failure. In a November 2002 audiotape, bin Laden posited a ledger of death, and promised that his group would keep it balanced. “The time has come to settle the accounts,” he said. “Just as you kill, so you shall be killed; just as you bomb, so you shall be bombed.” His group murdered 2,977 people on September 11, but in the past 25 years, it has run a serious deficit in its account.

Among terrorism analysts, a prominent school of thought nevertheless holds that the group is the shrewdest and most effective terrorist organization of all time—and that it is more dangerous than ever. Bruce Hoffman, who has been studying terrorist groups since before al‑Qaeda was founded, told me that it was singular in its resilience. “They’ve survived the greatest military onslaught in history ever directed against a terrorist group,” Hoffman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said. He pointed to the very simple strategy that bin Laden articulated in a 2004 video: wear Americans down and “bleed” them “to the point of bankruptcy.”

“That strategy is working,” Hoffman said. A 2021 Brown University report put the cost of the War on Terror at more than $8 trillion.

This unfathomable investment succeeded in removing al‑Qaeda from the little camps it once controlled in Afghanistan. But these havens have been replaced by large ones elsewhere, including in parts of the Horn of Africa, Yemen, and the Sahel, the arid region of West Africa just south of the Sahara. The al‑Qaeda franchises in those places are ruthless and rich. The East African branch fields a force that has been estimated at 10,000 men and pulls in about $100 million in revenue annually through taxation, smuggling, and outright theft. It gets a taste of almost all commerce in Somalia and has recruited supporters from as far away as Southern California.

“On the ground, these groups are not only winning military victories but also exercising sovereignty and governance,” Hoffman said. Al‑Qaeda’s branch in the Sahel, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (“The Support Group for Islam and Muslims”), sounds like it meets over coffee and stale doughnuts in a church basement. But just this year, trucks bristling with weapons swept across Mali under its banner and nearly toppled the country’s government. Militants associated with JNIM killed Mali’s defense minister in his own home.

If al‑Qaeda halted its attacks on America because it preferred, temporarily, to measure its progress not in American corpses but in square miles of planet Earth, then it has been a roaring success. And it could, Hoffman said, turn back to its old priorities. “The al‑Qaeda concept has taken root,” he said, and has given the group’s leadership—sometimes called “al‑Qaeda core”—the luxury of deciding when to begin killing Americans again. “What worries me is that al‑Qaeda is husbanding its resources to do something in the U.S., and might enlist the franchises to carry it out.”

Worry is an occupational hazard for people who study terrorist attacks professionally. Al‑Qaeda’s resurgence has been predicted for two decades, and so far, no resurgence. Another possibility, rarely uttered for fear of jinxing things, is that sending exploding hoboes onto airplanes 17 years ago was the pinnacle of the group’s post-9/11 powers, and that al‑Qaeda core has been quiet because it has gone the way of RadioShack, Blockbuster, and the Hartford Whalers. It no longer exists, and the affiliates—fearsome though they may be in the deserts where they operate—are just wearing the jersey of a team that folded long ago.

A quarter century after the 9/11 attacks, about half the world’s population is too young to remember them. Those who do will recall both the horror of the imagery—thousands dying on live television, in seconds—and the disorientation of the day. Nobody knew whether the four planes were the only ones, or whether 40 more were hurtling toward other targets. That evening, CNN was speculating that the death toll might be in the tens of thousands.

If fear was the goal: mission accomplished. But fear was the means, not the end. The end was political change. And any assessment of al‑Qaeda, both on 9/11 and in the ensuing decades, should ask whether it leveraged that fear to bring about the political results it sought.

The people who grade bin Laden most generously in this regard focus on how al‑Qaeda persuaded America to poke itself repeatedly in the eye in the years that followed September 11. In 2021, the political theorist William A. Galston awarded bin Laden “a sweeping if posthumous victory” for provoking stupid responses that have distracted, divided, and weakened America. Others, such as the former CIA official Bruce Riedel, have suggested that these traps were bin Laden’s plan all along, and that he wanted to lure the United States into an invasion of Afghanistan and “a long and bloody war of occupation.”

The American capacity for self-harm, at astronomical cost, is at this point undeniable. Equally incalculable is the cost in human life: soldiers and civilians killed during the open-ended hunt for remnants of al-Qaeda, and others who survived but saw their communities destroyed or traumatized. But these costs are evidence of an American defeat, not necessarily a bin Laden victory.

Because bin Laden was a chatterbox and loved giving interviews before he became the most hunted man in history, the record he left of his hopes and strategic thinking is quite complete, and provides a standard—his own—against which to measure al‑Qaeda’s success or failure. To these public statements we can add roughly 6,000 pages of internal documents seized by the United States from the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden spent his final years. These private documents banish any temptation to think of him as a mastermind who predicted each misstep by his enemies and laid traps years in advance.

In 1998, he stated his goals: to “kill Americans and their allies,” and “to liberate al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and the Holy Mosque in Mecca from their grip, so that their armies leave all the territory of Islam, defeated, broken, and unable to threaten any Muslim.” This theme—the withdrawal of the United States from Muslim land, particularly his native Saudi Arabia, as well as the end of Israel and of American support for Israel and secular autocracies in the Arab world—was consistent in his statements.

Bin Laden was equally clear about how he thought terrorism would yield his desired result. In a March 1997 CNN interview with Peter Bergen, he spoke of transferring “the battle into the United States.” In a May 2000 speech, he told supporters that the war would henceforth be waged “against the United States, in the United States.” Americans, he observed to ABC’s John Miller in 1998, cannot tolerate pain, and will react to attacks not by fighting back and blaming al‑Qaeda, but instead by asking “what their government has done that forced us to defend ourselves.” In a November 2001 interview, he hinted at a theory of political change in America: Its citizens should “take the same stand that they did previously,” when they protested the Vietnam War and the presidents who waged it.

ABC Photo Archives / Getty

ABC’s John Miller interviews Osama bin Laden in 1998. Bin Laden said Americans could not tolerate pain and would not fight back if attacked.

Nelly Lahoud, a professor at the Army War College and the author of the definitive book on the Abbottabad documents, told me this political pipe dream was bin Laden’s whole plan: “to replicate the anti–Vietnam War movement of the United States, to get the American public to put pressure on the U.S. government to withdraw its forces from the Middle East.” The documents reveal a man and an organization blindsided by the American reaction to the September 11 attacks. Bin Laden and his associates “didn’t think that the United States would respond by waging war,” Lahoud said. He did not contemplate or plan for the long-term occupation of Afghanistan, nor did he expect the methodical killing of his operatives in a campaign that lasted years.

For good or ill, American Middle East policy during this period was roughly the opposite of what bin Laden expected and intended. Rather than withdrawing, U.S. forces surged into the region. The United States has troops, and friends, in Syria, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. The only Middle Eastern despot the United States abandoned post‑9/11 was Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and after less than two years of experimentation with Islamist rule, Egypt switched back to an America-friendly autocrat. In the mid-2000s, Saudi Arabia—whose leaders bin Laden considered tyrants—was a decrepit gerontocracy in regular peril of jihadist revolution. Its current leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is in his early 40s and an ally of the Trump administration. He began his quest to transform his kingdom into a modern state by locking up anyone who had expressed even the faintest interest in jihad.

Bin Laden experienced the 2000s as a series of disappointments. After nine years of continuous hunting of his comrades, and after one of them had ignited his scrotum somewhere over southeastern Michigan, he was ready to concede privately that his theory of political change was ill-considered. “By 2010, bin Laden had to reflect on things,” Lahoud said. Having looked further into the Vietnam comparison, he learned that about 58,000 Americans were killed during that 20-year war. Because Americans were then being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan at a rate of about 500 a year, he decided that his allies could not plausibly step up the pace enough to stoke popular outrage in the United States. In one captured document, bin Laden argues that a better strategy would be a financial hit that affected the “income of every American citizen.” He suggests that al-Qaeda consider attacking shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. He was developing that plan (clever, come to think of it) around the time SEAL Team 6 shot him in the face.

Pete Souza / The White House / Getty

Members of the Obama administration receive an update on the mission to kill bin Laden in May 2011. By 2012, much of the upper echelons of al-Qaeda had been eliminated.

The evidence that bin Laden was mostly neutralized in the years immediately after 9/11—according to Lahoud, the Abbottabad documents indicate that he was barely in touch with anyone in al-Qaeda from 2002 to 2004—makes for a peculiar contrast with the attribution of strategic genius to him that was occurring during this exact period. He was more Clouseau than Clausewitz. But the United States was at the time preparing to embark on the Iraq War, and perhaps it was difficult to imagine that a folly of such magnitude could be self-inflicted, rather than planned by a Machiavellian enemy.

Bin Laden encouraged this impression. In 2004, when he issued his first video in nearly three years, addressing American voters on the eve of the presidential election, he told them he was planning a war of attrition. He warned them that he intended to bleed them slowly, as al-Qaeda had “bled Russia for 10 years” in Afghanistan, “until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.” (Bruce Hoffman noted that bin Laden was engaging in stolen valor here, because his Arab fighters had been war tourists and the Afghans had done the hard work of fighting the Soviets. “Still,” he said, “it fit the narrative.”)

Publicly, bin Laden made a virtue of necessity and told the world that getting attacked by America was a blessing. But Lahoud is adamant that the Abbottabad documents show the opposite of crafty planning, and instead reveal constant complaining about the very setbacks that al‑Qaeda supposedly welcomed. Privately, bin Laden bemoaned his network’s impotence, lack of money, and inability to mount even small operations. “Al‑Qaeda came up with the ‘war of attrition’ idea afterward,” Lahoud said. “This was not by design.” Those who awarded bin Laden points for strategic genius had fallen for his propaganda.

After bin Laden’s death, al-Zawahiri made attrition the official al‑Qaeda doctrine: to exhaust America and bleed it to death, “so that it meets the fate of the former Soviet Union and collapses under its own weight.” A similarly themed article appeared in The Onion, under the headline “FBI Uncovers al‑Qaeda Plot to Just Sit Back and Enjoy Collapse of United States.” It was illustrated by a calm bearded man, relaxing on a sofa with a television remote in his hand. The photo appeared to be modeled on one of the last known videos of bin Laden, channel surfing in a shabby, windowless room.

Bin Laden seemed to have realized that he’d created a debacle for himself and his allies. At one point, he argued that the Taliban was doomed anyway, and that he was therefore blameless for provoking an invasion of the group’s country and the destruction of its regime. “We knew for certain that Afghanistan was already a target, and that America was determined to bring down the Taliban,” he wrote in a document quoted by Lahoud. He and his non-Afghan terrorist crew could hardly be faulted for an American invasion that was already inevitable. “Everything that happened was going to happen even if we did not strike,” he wrote. This ludicrous claim, that George W. Bush wanted to occupy Afghanistan and merely advanced his calendar because of 9/11, is self-serving, Lahoud writes, and “reeks of repressed Arab guilt.”

Whether al‑Qaeda hit upon the attrition strategy brilliantly or simply claimed prescience after the fact is in some ways immaterial. The United States was, in fact, eventually exhausted by protracted war—that is why we fled Kabul in 2021 and handed over the government to the Taliban, with our compliments—and American overreach was predictable even if bin Laden failed to predict it. One could conclude that al‑Qaeda stumbled at first by losing its haven in Afghanistan, but then recovered its composure and played its hand masterfully thereafter. But that, too, would be giving the group too much credit, and would underestimate just how catastrophic the attacks on America were for its cause.

The cause, as of September 9, was going well—in part because of a cunning move by bin Laden, though he unwittingly undid its effect on September 11. Two days before the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden sent two Tunisian suicide bombers, posing as journalists, to kill Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the anti-Taliban coalition known as the Northern Alliance. Had he stopped there—killing Massoud and calling off the planes—the trajectory of South and Central Asia, and the future of political Islam, would have been different.

By mid-2001, the Northern Alliance had lost Kabul to the Taliban and had no prospects of recovering it. The group had been pushed into the Panjshir Valley and the rugged northeastern corner of Afghanistan, and with Pakistani help, the Taliban had begun consolidating its gains. For Pakistan, Afghan territory was useful as a base for attacks on India. The videos of al‑Qaeda terrorists swinging from monkey bars in a training camp in Afghanistan before 9/11 made news in the United States. But most campers at sites like these were training to fight in Kashmir. India had no control over or access to Afghanistan, and Pakistan viewed the Taliban as an asset.

AFP / Getty

A video showing al-Qaeda fighters training circulated in June 2001, making news in the U.S.

What some Pakistani generals saw as a strategic asset, other Pakistanis saw as a religious one. It is difficult to overstate how much hope South Asian Islamists invested in the Taliban’s success. My first acquaintance with the Taliban and its supporters came five months before the September 11 attacks. I was in Peshawar, the Pakistani city just over the Khyber Pass from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Taliban supporters were ubiquitous there that April because members of their sect were holding a jamboree with thousands of attendees. They regarded the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan as an epochal event, not so different from the Islamic State’s declaration of its caliphate 13 years later. (Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s leader, called himself “commander of the believers,” a title historically reserved for caliphs.)

At the jamboree, I met men from the Persian Gulf countries, England, and South Asia. (Few were Afghan.) The Taliban itself was an Afghan movement with little knowledge of the world or interest in conquering it. But other Sunni Islamists thought that from these provincial beginnings a state would arise that could incubate a range of Islamist projects. The attendees viewed Taliban-led Afghanistan as a laboratory of conservative Islamic governance, and they considered bin Ladenism a particularly promising and righteous experiment. Outside the conference, I bought a T-shirt that said OSAMA BIN LADEN—GREAT MUJAHID OF ISLAM. It was decorated, in brazen defiance of trademark law, with a Nike swoosh.

In 2001, the Taliban was, in other words, ceasing to be a merely local movement. Others had plans for the group, and it had tentative plans of its own to seek outside help and lock in its rule. In fact, at precisely the point when al‑Qaeda decided to attack America, the Taliban was seeking international approval—and had a path to getting it. Rateb Popal, an Afghan who had fought in the jihad in the 1980s (he’d lost an eye and an arm in a failed bombing in Kabul) and later ran a security company during the American occupation, told me just how close the Taliban had come.

The United States had ostracized the Taliban for harboring bin Laden and for its human-rights record. But other countries—not just Pakistan—were ready to do business there. I met Popal in Beijing in 2010. He had lived in the United States and served time in a U.S. federal prison for drug smuggling. He was unusually worldly for an Afghan, and when he returned to Afghanistan from the United States, he ended up becoming a liaison to the Chinese. The China Building Material Industrial Corporation, he said, had sent a single intrepid representative to meet with the Taliban in the late 1990s. Kabul was wrecked from years of war. After seeing the rubble, the Chinese sent a group of engineers to determine whether they could open a cement factory—a resource that would be in high demand, if ever the country were to be rebuilt. The Chinese, as usual, were also sniffing around for mining opportunities. In 1999, Popal led the first Taliban delegation to Beijing. They met with company officials and discussed collaboration. “They treated us like VIPs,” he told me. “All halal food.”

By late 2000, China had sent a delegation to Kabul and to Kandahar to see Mullah Omar—a rare meeting between the reclusive Taliban leader and non-Muslims. China’s one political demand was that the Taliban restrain any Chinese Muslim organizations challenging Beijing’s rule in Xinjiang.

“If September 11 didn’t happen,” Popal told me, “the Chinese government would have recognized” the Taliban no later than 2003. The alternative history he imagines is tantalizing. With Massoud gone, he said, “the morale of the Northern Alliance was 99 percent dead,” and the Taliban could have “just walked” into the Panjshir Valley, completed its conquest of the country, and enjoyed uncontested control of Afghanistan. Most countries hated the Taliban—even the Chinese were furious after it blew up ancient stone-cut Buddhas in early 2001—but at some point, any country hoping to do business with Afghanistan would have had no choice but to join Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan in recognizing Taliban rule over the country. With China on board, one of the last barriers to recognition would have fallen, and this jihadist proving ground would have been on its way to enjoying the same official status as Turkey and Luxembourg.

Popal told me that the Taliban was operating at that point “completely separately” from bin Laden and al‑Qaeda, even though they were religiously simpatico. (There is a debate about how closely the Taliban worked with al-Qaeda, or for that matter how well it would have understood the 9/11 plot and its ramifications. The leaders were at least socially close. Popal twice dined with al-Zawahiri, whom his Taliban hosts introduced as “an Egyptian doctor building hospitals.”) The group was eager to clinch its control over Afghanistan, and was in no rush to risk it all to strike a blow against infidels in a distant land. Had bin Laden refrained from attacking America, he might have lived to see his movement nurtured by Taliban rule into a more formidable and mature Islamic power. Formal international recognition became impossible as soon as the Americans determined that al‑Qaeda had committed the atrocity, using Afghanistan as a base. The Taliban is now seeking recognition again. Bin Laden set it back 25 years.

The contention that al‑Qaeda deserves high marks, or even a passing grade, as a terror group must therefore fend off the objections that, for the past 25 years, it has almost completely failed to attack America; its key personnel have been killed off; the war of attrition it apparently stumbled into has failed on its own terms; and its great success, the September 11 attacks, abruptly ended the most promising Sunni Islamist–state project to have been launched since the end of the Ottoman caliphate, in 1924.

The most compelling answer to these objections comes down to one word: franchises. Like a malevolent Ray Kroc, bin Laden and later al-Zawahiri began licensing the al‑Qaeda brand to hitherto independent jihadist organizations far from Afghanistan. In 2004, after overtures from jihadists in Iraq, bin Laden started the process of taking on franchises; it had become clear that the frontier of jihad would be the killing of American soldiers there. Al‑Qaeda received loyalty oaths from the franchises’ leaders and tried to vet them. Bruce Hoffman called this proliferation a “survival strategy” and said it had worked as intended, as a solution to the unrelenting heat that the United States was putting on the core group. Hoffman said bin Laden accepted, reluctantly, that he no longer had a base in Afghanistan, and he established bases elsewhere to hedge against extinction. Those affiliate organizations—in Iraq, North and West Africa (joined in 2007), Yemen (2009), East Africa (2012), and the Indian subcontinent (2014)—have at times misfired, but the successes have paid off handsomely.

Compared with al‑Qaeda core, these groups are nouveau riche. Bin Laden whined for years about a lack of money and fighters. The franchises, particularly in Africa, are flush with men and materiel. Even one of the weaker affiliates, on the Indian subcontinent, is now in an enviable position, with the Taliban back in power in Afghanistan and ready to support that group by letting its followers congregate and train within Taliban territory. Neither the United States nor any other country has managed to destroy one of these franchises; indeed, the governments of Somalia and Mali have come very close to falling to them, as have cities in Yemen. In April, fighters affiliated with the Sahel franchise, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, raided Bamako, the capital of Mali, and they continue to control much of the northern part of the country.

Sara Harmouch, a security contractor and terrorism expert who monitors jihadist groups, told me the franchises have learned from the mistakes of al‑Qaeda core. She cautions against assessing al‑Qaeda as weakened merely because it has not carried out attacks recently. “Al‑Qaeda is making huge gains across multiple theaters,” she said. “Their current capability is far beyond what they were before 9/11.” Silence is a “deliberate strategy,” she said, to allow clandestine rebuilding. “They don’t want to make noise that would put eyes on them right now, because they’re not ready to make the comeback attacks they’re planning.” The Yemeni branch, which carried out the Pensacola shooting in 2019, has been tasked with leading operations against the West, and it has developed drone programs.

Moreover, Harmouch said, there are signs that the franchises’ loyalty oaths to al‑Qaeda core are still being honored. Since al‑Zawahiri’s death, in 2022, most signs have pointed to succession by another Egyptian, who goes by the nom de guerre Saif al-Adel, or “Sword of Justice.” A former military officer now in his 60s, Saif al-Adel seems to have paid attention, during his training, to strategy and tactics. He advised bin Laden not to attack the Twin Towers, on the correct theory that doing so would invite reprisals against the Taliban. He has survived being marked for death by the most powerful country in the world for 30 years—the past two decades as the guest of the Islamic Republic of Iran, under an enemy-of-my-enemy deal whose terms are not known. (As an extremist-Sunni group, al‑Qaeda is not a natural ally of extremist-Shiite Iran.)

Maher Attar / Sygma / Getty

The Egyptian physician Ayman al-Zawahiri succeeded bin Laden. He was killed in a Hellfire-missile strike in Kabul in 2022.

According to Harmouch, the affiliates are heeding Saif al‑Adel’s commands. He told the Yemeni branch of al‑Qaeda to focus on maritime-attack capabilities. It did. He directed the groups to concentrate on achieving financial independence, and the Sahel branch began developing ransom-based revenue streams. Newly detected efforts to deploy drones and adopt 3-D-printing technologies also followed his statements urging the franchises to nerd out on the path of jihad. Harmouch allowed that the groups manage their own affairs, and that none has publicly renewed its loyalty oath to al‑Qaeda by acknowledging Saif al-Adel as its new emir. “But they are listening to him,” she said. “They are following what he’s been saying to a T.” If true, this claim is concerning, because Saif al-Adel’s recent directives include the advice to poison wells, contaminate food supplies with bacteria, conduct urban assassinations, and replace human suicide bombers with killer drones.

By now the rhythm of terrorism analysis should be familiar: For every piece of evidence that makes al‑Qaeda’s leaders look like evil geniuses, there is counterevidence that makes them look like hopeless bumblers. As with the war of attrition, Nelly Lahoud said, there is little evidence that bin Laden ultimately thought franchising out was a winning strategy, and a lot of evidence that he considered his far-flung allies pains in the terrorist ass. Bin Laden called them a “liability to jihad.” In his Abbottabad compound, he became a pioneer in remote work, realizing long before COVID how hard it is to manage an organization whose employees he never saw.

Almost immediately, the franchises proved unruly and, frankly, insane. Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the Iraqi franchise, turned out to be a raving psychopath. Bin Laden fancied himself cerebral, deliberate, and discriminating in deciding who should die. Al-Zarqawi, by contrast, erred on the side of beheading, and positively reveled in gore. When al‑Qaeda leaders asked him to stop killing Shiite civilians because doing so was alienating potential supporters, al-Zarqawi ignored the request. The group ghosted al‑Qaeda in 2007 and never really listened to it again.

[From the July/August 2006 issue: The short, violent life of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi]

Other franchises adopted the al‑Qaeda brand before the group’s leadership could vet them. Their priorities often conflicted with bin Laden’s, and he and al-Zawahiri were reduced to an advisory role. Instead of building loyal, resilient versions of itself, al‑Qaeda created a management problem from hell. Even the more housebroken of the franchises, such as those in Yemen and North and West Africa, at various times told bin Laden, in the most deferential terms, to mind his own business. Chronically behind on the local agendas because of his isolation, he gave advice that was stale or ill-informed. He told the group in North and West Africa not to cut a ransom deal with France after the group seized hostages. He reminded the Yemenis that they ought to focus on attacking America, and not the Yemeni government or the Iranian-backed Houthis. In both cases, the affiliates assured their absentee leader that they knew best, and bin Laden was left to pout and write frustrated internal memos.

The most dramatic instance of insubordination was the Islamic State, the successor to al-Zarqawi’s branch of al‑Qaeda. The ISIS project eventually foundered after the whole civilized world decided to stop it by force. But before that happened, it overtook al‑Qaeda as the premier jihadist group. By comparison, al‑Qaeda looked cautious and stuffy. It had taken far less territory, shed less blood, and earned a reputation as the group of choice for radical Muslims who enjoy hiding in basements with elderly Egyptians. Al-Zarqawi was killed in 2006, but ISIS continued its spiritual founder’s passion project of dismembering infidels on camera, a practice al‑Qaeda considered counterproductive.

U.S. Department of Defense / Getty

Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi was the leader of the Iraqi franchise of al-Qaeda. But al-Zarqawi ignored requests from al-Qaeda leaders to stop killing Shiite civilians.

In her book, Lahoud quotes a 2011 letter from al-Zawahiri to bin Laden, incredulous at the Islamic State’s apparent policy of shocking and appalling even its own potential followers. “I do not understand,” al-Zawahiri wrote. “Are the Brothers not content with the number of their current enemies, being so eager to add new ones to their list?” In 2014, al-Qaeda disavowed ISIS after months of disputes between their leaders. Later, ISIS excommunicated al‑Qaeda after its leaders refused to pledge loyalty to the caliphate of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

The Islamic State turned many Muslims off the idea of jihad altogether. Many had sympathized with bin Laden and been bitter toward America and Israel, and were intellectually but not viscerally opposed when those two countries were attacked. (I don’t condone terrorism, but …) The Islamic State convinced many otherwise undecided Muslims that the logical conclusion of jihadist terrorism was a death cult.

[Graeme Wood: Why an ISIS propagandist abandoned Islam]

In some ways even more devastating to the al‑Qaeda model was the opposite transformation of al-Qaeda’s other regional leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa. A veteran of the jihad against the Americans in Iraq and a close associate of al‑Baghdadi’s, al-Sharaa split with al‑Baghdadi in 2013, shortly before he declared his caliphate. The group al-Sharaa led, the Nusra Front, was not much better: It, too, tortured and killed and established a jihadist state, in this case loyal to al-Zawahiri. But over a period of about five years, al‑Sharaa and his followers lost their taste for jihad. In 2023, he told the journalist Wassim Nasr that they were no longer jihadists, and that the global jihadist movement had “only brought destruction and failure to their communities.” According to reports, he and his recovering jihadists helped the United States attack ISIS elements in the Middle East. Then, in December 2024, they sacked Damascus and took over the Syrian government. As president, al-Sharaa has since visited London and Washington. Donald Trump met him, pronounced him “a young, attractive guy,” and later gave him a bottle of cologne.

Mohammad Daher / Nurphoto / Getty

Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former leader of an al-Qaeda affiliate and now the president of Syria

This example has been noticed. Nasr, a reporter for France 24 and a senior research fellow at the Soufan Center, recently interviewed the leadership of al‑Qaeda’s current Sahel branch, JNIM. He told me that the group learned from al-Sharaa that it is “possible to get out of the jihadi sphere and be accepted by the international community—if global terrorism is denounced.” He said the group is thinking about trying to transform along similar lines. The main impediment to such a move is the Islamic State West Africa Province. Before he could moderate, al-Sharaa had to wait for ISIS to be crushed in Syria, so he would not face defections. JNIM is still fighting ISIS, and Nasr said it isn’t yet in a position to explore moderation.

“Al-Qaeda fathered a good son and a bad son,” Thomas Hegghammer, a scholar of jihadism at the University of Oxford, told me. “The bad son was ISIS and went on to do so much bad stuff that the whole family got a bad reputation. But then the good son played his cards so well that he reached state power.” Al‑Qaeda wanted the franchises to show how it endures. Instead they showed that its ideology leads to crucifixions and beheadings if followed, and power if renounced.

Mai / Getty

Smoke rising above the streets of Bamako, Mali, after an attack in April orchestrated partly by al‑Qaeda’s branch in the Sahel, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin

It’s hard to accept that your enemy is an idiot and that somehow you are losing to him anyway. Perhaps Saif al‑Adel, with ample free time in his safe house in Iran, has taken online executive-M.B.A. classes and learned how to motivate his employees and keep them on mission, as his predecessors surely did not. The other possibility is that Saif al‑Adel controls nothing and has been irrelevant for years. Neither possibility makes the United States look good. The first suggests that after 25 years of the War on Terror, terror is winning. The second suggests that these incompetent nobodies have persuaded the U.S. to burn through its military budget without improving its standing in the Middle East.

[From the October 2025 Issue: Graeme Wood on Iran, the neighbor from hell]

Both are possible, and it is difficult to tell the difference between an al-Qaeda that is stealthily rebuilding and an al-Qaeda that is dead. A cat that is stalking its prey is exactly as silent as a cat that was hit over the head two weeks ago with a shovel. Some of those who study and analyze jihadism sound exasperated by the task of convincing people that al‑Qaeda core is the second type of cat. Cole Bunzel, a historian at the University of Texas at Austin, told me he considers the notion that al‑Qaeda is a “secret behemoth,” gathering strength under the guise of weakness, “mostly nonsense.”

“I see pretty much no evidence that al‑Qaeda has any competence or capability as a centralized organization,” Bunzel said. The various affiliates call themselves al-Qaeda, but they appear to take no meaningful guidance from anyone in al‑Qaeda core. He likened the core group to a “mostly defunct podcast,” a bunch of old guys who occasionally get together to put out a statement, but who have no power to do anything other than shout into a void, because global jihad has long since moved on.

“The branches that operate under al-Qaeda’s name have very little to do with the central leadership based in Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan,” Bunzel said, adding that the fact that Saif al-Adel lives under Iranian supervision would make it awkward for anyone to take orders from him without having to wonder whether the orders were dictated by an Iranian intelligence officer. While other jihadists have spent the past 25 years declaring caliphates, sacking major cities, and sowing carnage and fear, Saif al-Adel has been writing essays and murmuring promises about something big in the works. Those essays, Bunzel said, are not exactly greeted with enthusiasm by jihadists, especially younger ones. The kids are lining up for other acts.

Daniel Byman, a veteran al-Qaeda watcher at Georgetown University, reminded me that al-Qaeda has not even officially announced that Saif al-Adel is in charge. “Their unwillingness to name a leader seems to me very damning,” he said. “If you’re a 20-year-old who wants to join, what are you going to think? Here’s a group that hasn’t done much, and I don’t even know who the leader is. That’s the group for me! ” As time passes and al-Qaeda delivers almost no punches against its prime enemy, “at some point the numbers just get pretty clear,” Byman said, and the most probable conclusion is that al-Qaeda core is “very, very weak.”

AFP / Getty

A “Wanted” poster for Saif al-Adel, the purported new leader of al-Qaeda

For decades, Thomas Hegghammer said, he has been puzzled by the speculation that a big al-Qaeda attack is just around the corner: “How long do we have to wait before we decide that prediction is wrong?” He acknowledged that an attack could happen at any time. But almost any terror group, including ones that nobody has ever heard of, can pull off a single attack. The question to ask, he said, is whether al-Qaeda can mount a sustained campaign of terror, as the Islamic State did in 2015. That question can be studied and assessed, and right now the answer appears to be no.

What’s most remarkable about al-Qaeda, Hegghammer said, is that it has persuaded so many of its enemies to bumble along with it. This band of incompetents has somehow managed to “live rent-free inside the head of the American national-security establishment for an extraordinary number of years.” It has dwelled in and dominated this collective imagination, and its persistent ability to remain in its enemies’ mind is more impressive than any substantive accomplishment. The threats posed by the group were real, he said, and it made sense to find and destroy it. But what Hegghammer called the “ghost story” of al-Qaeda—the incessant and intrusive thoughts about it, including frantic projection of power and genius onto an organization that by all evidence is in shambles—should have ended long ago.

In 2015, during the Islamic State’s heyday, I gave a talk about it before a private audience of policy makers and experts. I emphasized that the group wanted to build a state, and that unlike al-Qaeda, it would reduce its efforts to mount terrorist attacks in the United States if it thought those attacks would conflict with its state building. After the talk, a former senior official at the State Department came up to me and said he had no reason to doubt my analysis. But he said I should choose my words with great care, because anyone who predicts fewer attacks will be ridiculed when one occurs, and anyone who says the enemy’s capabilities have been degraded is going to be forever ignored when the enemy manages to lash out one last time. “You don’t want to be that guy,” he said: the one who tells everyone to chill out, the day before thousands of people are poisoned with Saif al-Adel’s ricin in their Cheerios.

But in the case of al-Qaeda, that guy has been right for the past 25 years.

* Lead illustration sources: U.S. Department of Defense / Getty; AFP / Getty; Getty; Brian Cleary / Allsport / Getty; MAI / Getty; Universal History Archive / Getty; Joe Raedle / Getty.

This article appears in the September 2026 print edition with the headline “Did al-Qaeda Succeed?” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Far Right Is Distorting Ceuta

2026-08-02T16:43:05-04:00

Updated at 7:01 a.m. ET on August 3, 2026

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Mostly young, mostly male Moroccans crawling onto beaches, climbing hills, scaling walls, jumping over fences, surging past police in order to get into Europe: The photographs and videos that emerged from Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in North Africa, on July 29 and 30 looked very much like migrant-terror videos, deliberately designed to be broadcast by the international far right. So closely did this incident resemble the “invasion” that MAGA and its European friends have long said is under way that it was hard not to suspect that it had been orchestrated.

As I am writing this, much is still not known about the 60,000-odd people who swam from Morocco to Ceuta last week. But we do know that many of them saw social-media posts encouraging them to swim to Ceuta and, perhaps, to thereby precipitate a crisis. Ceuta has been a Spanish city since the 16th century, but it is not part of mainland Spain. Nor is it possible to cross from Ceuta to mainland Spain, and therefore into the Schengen Area, the European Union’s free-movement zone, without crossing a checkpoint. Illegal immigrants cannot travel from Ceuta to mainland Spain at all.

Last week, according to El Pais as well as other Spanish, international, and Moroccan media outlets, many Moroccans saw a TikTok video nevertheless claiming that “the Spanish border is open and you can cross without papers,” meaning they could reach the European continent. The video appeared to reference a recent ruling by the Spanish supreme court making it harder to return migrants who arrive by sea, but it was not the only encouragement. Other messages, many of which have now disappeared, told people where to buy wet suits, flippers, goggles, floats, and even waterproof bags for documents and cellphones. Screenshots from Google Maps told them which sections of the Ceuta beach might have fewer police. Moroccan border guards were either unwilling or unable to stop them.

[Graeme Wood: When following the rules leads to disaster]

Surprised by the unprecedented numbers and perhaps fearing hundreds would drown—in the end, at least 70 people died in the water, including some children—the Spanish police let them land on the beach. This is when the photographs and videos began to circulate. Among those promoting them were senior members of the Trump administration, and senior leaders of the European far right.

Vice President Vance posted a link to a wildly dishonest Fox News segment that incorrectly described the migrants arriving in “Northern Spain” rather than Northern Africa. “Thank God,” he wrote, “@POTUS was elected and our country’s border no longer looks like this.” Others made more specific threats. Robert Jenrick, a high-profile member of Reform, the British far-right party, wrote that “Ceuta is our future if we don’t secure our border. These men are on their way to Calais.” Nigel Farage, the Reform Party leader, posted a video also claiming that the Moroccans were en route to Britain. Alice Weidel, the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), declared that “Germany is the likely destination.”

These were lies. The Moroccans who swam to Ceuta were never going to make it to Britain, Germany, or anywhere else in Europe. Once again: Access to Ceuta does not give anyone automatic access to the rest of Europe. More to the point, nearly all of those who swam over the border had returned to Morocco by Sunday morning. The Spanish government negotiated their return with the Moroccan government. Moroccan police resumed blocking the border. Spanish police, according to El Pais and the Financial Times, were checking documents in Ceuta to find any Moroccans who illegally remained.

It remains unclear who created the viral posts that encouraged the would-be migrants to believe that they could get to Europe from Ceuta. But those who want to weaken the Spanish government, boost the European far right, and create turmoil inside the EU lost little time in promoting the photographs as soon as they arrived.

Because the Moroccan border guards did not stop the would-be migrants, some have speculated that the Moroccans themselves might have been behind the incident. The Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, was recently in Algeria, holding a friendly meeting with one of Morocco’s great rivals. Morocco might also want to put pressure on Ceuta and another Spanish North African city, Melilla.

The Trump administration, which has also questioned Britain’s control of the Falkland Islands and Denmark’s control of Greenland, might be interested in the same thing. Recently, a congressional report described the cities as “under Spanish administration,” rather than a part of Spain. Trump himself has reasons to be pleased with Morocco, which has joined his Board of Peace and named a highway in his honor. He also has reasons to dislike Sánchez, who refused to let the U.S. use Spanish military bases for Trump’s war in Iran and says he will not, like the rest of NATO, raise his country’s defense spending to 5 percent of its GDP.

Others also had reasons to exploit the incident. Inside Spain, where Sánchez’s administration and party are under investigation for corruption—a former party leader is alleged to have ties to Chinese and Venezuelan criminal networks—the prime minister has plenty of opponents. One politician from Vox, the Spanish far-right party, visited Ceuta and called for “everyone to defend their family with whatever they have at hand.” The Ukrainian foreign minister published a list of Russian outlets that enthusiastically piled on too.

As a result of these posts, many people, perhaps millions of people, will believe that the “invasion” succeeded. They are wrong. Whatever you think of Sánchez or his government, he did not open Spain’s borders to this wave of Moroccans. Instead, he spoke of an “attack on Spain’s territorial integrity.” Spanish police recovered the dead, put the injured in hospitals, and appear to have sent almost everyone home.

The misleading comments and images posted by Vance, Jenrick, Farage, and Weidel nevertheless remain online, with no correction or retraction. President Trump, who declared on Saturday that “the same thing’s going to happen to us if the Republicans don’t get elected, except worse, much bigger,” has not praised the Spanish prime minister for resolving the problem. Nor has the State Department, which issued a travel warning and a statement accusing the Spanish government of making “deliberate efforts to enable and facilitate mass illegal migration into Europe” and then went silent after the crisis was resolved.

[Read: Schengen’s greatest failure]

This would not be the first time that a migrant wave has been boosted on social media in order to create a political crisis. In 2021, the Belarusian government imported planeloads of people from the Middle East, brought them to the Polish border, and told them to cross, provoking a political crisis in Poland. The Moroccans themselves are accused of having done this too, in 2021, when they allegedly relaxed border controls to express their annoyance with Spain.

But the most important precedent was in 2015, when the Russian destruction of Syria produced a massive wave of migration that also was filmed and photographed, especially after Germany declared that it would accept hundreds of thousands of war victims as refugees. Social-media posts showing migrants walking toward Europe, some amplified by the Russians who destroyed Syria, then played a major role in the Brexit campaign in the U.K., as well as the rise of the far right in Germany. The scars left by this memory are so deep that several European leaders, including the social-democratic prime minister of Denmark and the nationalist prime minister of Italy, this week accused Sánchez of endangering the Schengen Area even though, once again, the integrity of the zone was never threatened.

Readers can be forgiven for feeling a strong sense of déjà vu. For more than a decade now, European and indeed American politicians have known that real, fake, enhanced, or context-free pictures of migrants jumping fences will immediately create a wave reaction. Military rhetoric will be used—attack or invasion—and, to quote Vance, “radical left-wing globalist policies” will be blamed. Hardly anyone will ask why it is that so many people are so desperate to move that they will risk their lives. Few will mourn the dead.

Instead, far-right and MAGA politicians, influencers, and podcasters will immediately use the most divisive language possible in order to make voters as angry as possible, as fast as possible, regardless of what actually happened. Almost everyone else will be intimidated by their fury. As it turns out, it’s harder to stop the wave of anger than it is to stop the migrants themselves.

This article originally included the incorrect year for a previous incident in which Morocco allegedly relaxed border controls.

Schengen’s Greatest Failure

2026-07-31T15:21:29-04:00

In the summer of 1985, representatives from five Western European countries met aboard a riverboat in Schengen, a wine-making village in Luxembourg, to celebrate the removal of checkpoints at their borders. According to the treaty they approved, which became known as the Schengen Agreement, the signatory countries sought “solidarity between their peoples by removing obstacles to free movement,” forming a borderless zone that gave tangible expression to principles of liberal internationalism that were ascendant as the West glimpsed victory in the Cold War.

Schengen has succeeded spectacularly, at least by certain metrics. It has grown to include 29 countries, from Portugal to Poland, and more than 450 million people. Four decades on, it remains one of Europe’s most popular policies among people who benefit from it—those who work, study, shop, date, and live across borders, able to cross multiple European states in a matter of hours, without ever stopping their car. But as a mechanism to build European solidarity, Schengen has been a failure.

The latest evidence of that came this week, when as many as 60,000 migrants from Morocco rushed into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, which sits on the North African coast of the Mediterranean. Ceuta has a population of only 83,000 and isn’t even on the European continent. But because it is part of Spain, entering Ceuta, in theory, affords access to 29 countries. The migrants swam or climbed over fences to reach the tiny territory. Several dozen have died.

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, decried the situation as an “attack” and a violation of his country’s territorial integrity, vowing that the migrants would be turned back; according to Spain’s interior ministry, more than half of them already have been. Sánchez blamed trafficking gangs, and others pointed a finger at Moroccan authorities for possibly instigating or enabling the huge number of crossings into the Schengen Area, dwarfing equivalent single-day figures from the European migration crisis in 2015. Morocco’s ambassador to Spain disputed such allegations.

[Rogé Karma: The Spanish exception]

The political blowback for Sánchez, a leftist whose pro-immigrant position has differentiated him in an era of resurgent nationalism, was predictable. Criticism came from his domestic opposition in Madrid, as well as from the White House, where President Trump saw an opportunity to paint Europe as lax on immigration and identify an edge for his party as the midterms approach. “That’s going to be us in three years if the wrong side gets in,” Trump told Fox News.

The most notable reactions, however, came from other European capitals, which once committed themselves to freedom of movement as a basis for cross-border solidarity, an integral part of shared European Union membership that also includes a common trade policy and, in most cases, a shared currency. Giorgia Meloni, the right-wing prime minister of Italy, called for the suspension of Spain’s Schengen membership (for which there is no formal process), and her foreign minister blamed the Spanish government for the chaos, labeling its plans to grant legal status to more than half a million migrants “profoundly wrong.” In response, Madrid summoned the Italian ambassador, accusing foreign leaders of “partisan demagoguery.”

Other countries backed Meloni. Finland’s interior minister argued that Spain had “completely failed to protect the Schengen Area’s external border from infiltration,” adding in a post on social media, “This cannot continue.” France increased checks at its border with Spain, and the chancellor of Austria, which is about 1,000 miles from the Iberian Peninsula, said his country was weighing whether to close its borders.

There is no evidence that any of the new arrivals in Ceuta have crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to the Spanish mainland. Transiting the strait typically requires a ferry or plane, and involves border and identity checks that validate whether passengers have the relevant visas. Meanwhile, there aren’t legal mechanisms to suspend a country’s Schengen membership, especially unilaterally. What other countries can do is reintroduce controls at their borders. The authority to do so was written into an implementing convention approved by the signatory states in 1990, and they’ve made liberal use of it. Italy had already reimposed checks at its land border with France because of the anticipated presence of “radical activists” at a festival in Piedmont, in northwestern Italy, and earlier today, Meloni’s government halted passport-free travel at air and sea borders with Spain. Austria had already reintroduced controls at borders with four of its neighbors, citing irregular migration through the Balkans, the burden of migrants on its asylum system, and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

But these piecemeal steps to police borders aren’t grandiose enough when there’s political hay to be made of immigration. Meloni can’t be outdone by her deputy prime minister and coalition partner, Matteo Salvini, who has taken to social media in recent days to urge, vaguely yet repeatedly, “Suspend Schengen.” Marine Le Pen, the far-right firebrand in France and a candidate for president in next year’s elections, vowed today to restrict the agreement if she came to power. Le Pen’s party, now called National Rally, has expertly channeled anger about Schengen. Amid the 2015 refugee crisis, when more than 1 million people crossed into Europe, mostly in flight from the Syrian civil war, party representatives performed death rites on the riverbank near where the agreement was signed 30 years earlier. They laid a funereal wreath on a star-etched monument to the system of free movement created there.

[Read: Europe’s far right is turning on Trump ]

The corps of mid-level diplomats who created Schengen gave little consideration to its political consequences. “We did our job as junior ministers,” the French representative, Catherine Lalumière, told me as part of research for my book on the history of the agreement. They thought that borderless travel would fulfill promises made by the Treaty of Rome, the founding document of European integration, and advance both the development of a common market and the cultivation of solidarity among member states.

Except there were signs of a potent backlash already at that time. In 1983, the National Front, as Le Pen’s far-right party was then known, came to power for the first time in French municipal elections, in a small town called Dreux. A year after Schengen’s creation, the party entered the national Parliament for the first time, in elections held in 1986. As anti-immigrant populism gained influence in France, the government in Paris helped lead the drafting of Schengen’s implementing convention, trying to pair internal freedom of movement with security at Europe’s external borders. Language about “solidarity” present in the original agreement was nowhere to be found in the 1990 document. Instead, more than half of the convention’s 142 articles dealt with security and the exchange of data necessary to crack down on unwanted immigration of the kind now seen in Spain’s offshore exclave.

The crisis in Ceuta is likely to be contained, and quickly. But if Europe’s reaction to a surge of immigration is to isolate individual states, rather than to use the tools it created to protect freedom and manage human displacement in a globalized world, Schengen really is at risk.

Iran’s War Within

2026-07-30T07:00:00-04:00

For the past few months, Iran has intermittently fought a war with the United States, Israel, and its Arab neighbors. But throughout this period, it has never stopped waging war on its own citizens. The Islamic Republic is executing Iranians in record numbers and has sharpened its tools of repression.

Such tactics have never succeeded in pacifying Iranian society for long. Today, some civil-society leaders, and even figures inside the establishment itself, fret that the regime’s heavy domestic hand is not only hurting Iranians but also weakening the country’s war effort.

On Tuesday, the Iranian regime executed two young men. Abolfazl Sepahi, 23, and Amirhossein Safari, 28, had been arrested in Isfahan in January in connection with the nationwide anti-regime protests. Dozens of Isfahanis came out to protest the two men’s execution in the days leading up to it, but to no avail. On Monday, security forces dispersed the crowd with paintballs, tear gas, and shots into the air. Sepahi and Safari were hanged in the very same square where they had allegedly demonstrated.

Back in January, the regime put down mammoth protests with particular brutality, killing thousands of people in the space of two days. In the months since, Iranian courts have sentenced dozens of citizens to death for taking part in the protests. According to UN estimates, 24 have already been executed. According to Amnesty International, at least 60 others, including some who were arrested as children, remain at risk of execution.

[Read: The war that shall not be named]

Sepahi and Safari were among 60 people accused of killing four members of the police forces during the protests in Isfahan. The regime claims that the four officers were tied up in the city’s central square, stoned, and then burned alive. Earlier this month, two other young men—a 19-year-old Iranian and a 24-year-old Afghan national—were executed in connection with the same events, and a dozen more people face capital punishment for them. The regime media have distributed an unclear video from the incident and aired confessions of some of the arrestees. But no due process was available to the accused, and the regime media are known for airing forced confessions. Sepahi and Safari had access to no legal representation, not even court-appointed lawyers. They were reportedly tried in three virtual court sessions, each of which took about an hour and in which the accused phoned in from prison rather than appearing before the judge.

Among those alarmed by the state’s mounting repression are civil-society figures who have staunchly opposed the war with America and Israel. Emadeddin Baghi, an Iranian human-rights activist who is nevertheless not an advocate of regime change, expressed shock about the handling of the Isfahan cases on an Iranian podcast. He said that he had been trying to assist with the defense for one of the accused, but before the person could even start an appeals process, he was executed. The judiciary’s heavy hand will make citizens “question the regime” and will lead to a “fall of credibility and legitimacy, resulting in unhappiness, anger, and violence,” Baghi cautioned.

Likewise, on Tuesday, a group of 150 civic and political activists published a statement calling on the regime to free political prisoners and stop the executions. The signatories include activists such as Abdollah Momeni and Alireza Rajayi, who both oppose what they term “foreign aggression” against Iran and also call for a referendum to change the country’s constitution. They see the regime’s repression as weakening the country at a time of war.

Executions are not the regime’s only coercive instrument. Many professors at Iranian universities have been suspended or violently arrested, according to the Toronto-based Association of Iranian Studies. And other signs suggest that the regime is clamping down on public life.

Iran’s hijab laws, mandating that women cover their hair and body, have been laxly enforced since 2024, including during the war. “Even at the airports, you can now see most people without hijab,” a woman who asked to be called Elmira, 27, told me. Like others I spoke with, she used an alias for her safety. “Since it’s summer, I go around mostly with a top and without covering my hair or shoulders, and I have never been stopped once this summer.”

But last week, the police clamped down on Tehran’s Sanayi Avenue, a popular destination for nightlife and street culture. At least seven cafés were shut down; their owners were told that they could reopen only if they refused to serve hijabless women. The authorities also destroyed public benches that had become hangout spots. “The benches were where you could bring your coffee, smoke a little, have some social life in the midst of the damn war,” Maryam, 32, told me. “But now that’s gone. They don’t want us to breathe.”

A workspace-sharing business in Tehran’s Book Garden, a cultural complex, was also forced to close, casting 270 workers into unemployment. Other cities, including Mashhad and Qom, have seen a crackdown on public spaces as well. In Rasht, a particularly liberal city close to the Caspian coast, police have started accosting women on the streets and threatening them with arrest if they refuse the hijab. There, too, cafés have been pressured to refuse to serve uncovered women, a young woman who recently traveled there told me.

[Graeme Wood: The U.S. is subtly shifting its Iran strategy]

Iran’s social policy is a divisive subject in national-security circles. Some inside the ruling establishment have been pushing for the draconian enforcement of the Islamic dress code. Hamshahri, a newspaper controlled by Tehran’s hard-line mayor, Alireza Zakani, recently asked the police and judiciary to punish hijab-less women for their “bad appearances” and “norm violations,” contending that such women represented an “organized project” of “cultural shamelessness.” Some members of Parliament and regional officials have made similar calls in recent weeks.

More pragmatic figures in the establishment accuse these hard-liners of upsetting the country’s social peace with needless political repression, and by seeking to micromanage the lifestyles of ordinary people. They accuse the hard-liners of doing the bidding of Iran’s adversaries, the United States and Israel, by causing instability that will ultimately hurt the regime.

Even in these dark times, Iran still roils with unrest. Shopkeepers in bazaars have staged sit-ins, not unlike those that preceded the January protests. And just in the past few days, farmers have protested for lack of water, residents of Zanjan have demonstrated for housing, oil and gas employees have rallied in several facilities in the south, and several prisons, including one in Rasht, have become flash points for crowds registering their opposition to the continued executions.

Having fought off several rounds of nationwide protests since 2017, the Iranian regime knows full well that many of its citizens detest it. The response it reaches for is always the same: repression, which has never yet produced social peace. As the Islamic Republic seeks to manage its military conflict with the United States, it will likely find that the home front remains the hardest to win.

The Ticking Clock on the Strait of Hormuz

2026-07-25T07:00:00-04:00

Back in June, at the closing press conference for the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, Donald Trump explained why he had called a halt to hostilities with Iran. Continued bombing would not reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and as long as the war went on, commercial ships would stay away while emergency oil supplies dwindled.

“We run out of reserves in about four weeks,” he warned, conjuring up images of shortages, bedlam, surging prices, and a market collapse on the scale of 1929. Trump told the press that he had studied presidents, and “the one president I did not want to be was the late, great Herbert Hoover.”

Fast-forward to late July. The United States has bombed Iran for nearly two weeks, hitting coastal-surveillance sites and weapons-storage facilities as well as bridges, tunnels, rail lines, airports, and electrical infrastructure. Iran has answered with missiles and drones aimed at American bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, and Qatar, as well as strikes on oil installations and a desalination plant, and repeated attacks on commercial shipping in and around the strait. Iran also claims to have struck Amazon’s cloud-computing infrastructure in Bahrain, but this has not been independently verified.

[Andrew Exum: The war is lost. Now fix what it broke.]

Trump resumed the war despite having already explained why military force could not achieve its most pressing objective. He has not resolved this tension. It may be irresoluble. In the meantime, he is betting that Tehran will buckle before economic pressure forces him to do the same.

To understand where we are, consider how the cease-fire collapsed. Each party believed that it had won the war and that the other should accede to its interpretation of the agreement on the strait. Article 5 of the memorandum of understanding stated that Iran “will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge, for 60 days only, from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa.” The Trump administration took this to mean that Iran was obligated to open the strait without tolls for 60 days. But Tehran read it as permission to manage and control access through the waterway. Consequently, Iran sought to funnel ships through corridors it approved, and attacked or threatened vessels that used other routes.

In doing so, Tehran made a serious error in judgment. If it had laid low, it could have reaped the benefits of economic concessions for 60 days and then gradually introduced a toll. Instead, Trump felt compelled to respond, and the agreement broke down. Amos Hochstein, a senior adviser for energy and investment under President Biden, told me that Iran had thought it could boil the proverbial American frog, but it turned the temperature up too high too fast, and the frog got angry.

Trump is clearly frustrated. Further escalation is likely. He has mused about striking Pickaxe Mountain and is reportedly considering limited ground operations—for example, seizing Kharg Island, which is a hub for Iran’s oil exports. The Wall Street Journal reported that the United States is sending more forces, medics, and weaponry to the Middle East to give Trump additional military options. But such options were ruled out as implausible or reckless during the war, and their viability has not improved with time.

If Trump continues with limited strikes, he will face the very problems that he laid out in France last month. Hochstein posted on X that the current escalation in the Strait of Hormuz could be more economically dangerous than the previous one, because Russia, the U.S., and China can no longer buffer world markets as they did: Russia has reduced its diesel exports, U.S. crude and strategic reserves are unusually low, and China is cutting its oil consumption less deeply than before. In his view, markets are already signaling the inflationary risk, leaving Trump with a narrowing window to make a deal before another disruption produces a sharper fuel-price and financial shock, possibly as soon as mid- to late September.

Iran seems to want to keep the conflict at a simmer. It is striking back against the United States but has avoided direct attacks that would bring Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, or Israel fully into the war, even as it applies pressure indirectly, most dramatically through the Houthis’ campaign against Saudi shipping in the Red Sea. Reuters reported that Iran had previously asked the Houthis to prepare to close the Red Sea route if the United States struck Iranian power infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Trump seems to be actively working to keep the Gulf States on board as he continues the war. Two weeks ago, his administration significantly loosened restrictions on the export of advanced semiconductor chips to the UAE, something Abu Dhabi has been wanting for years. Then, on Wednesday, he announced that he had approved a civil nuclear-enrichment deal with Saudi Arabia. The Biden administration, in which I served, negotiated a similar arrangement with Riyadh as part of a broader deal to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. That deal, which stalled after October 7, would have provided for U.S. enrichment inside Saudi Arabia rather than giving it the ability to autonomously enrich its own uranium. The technical details of the Trump deal are unknown.

[Graeme Wood: Does Iran have a plan?]

No sooner was the Saudi agreement announced than Israeli former officials and experts criticized it, on the grounds that it would fuel regional proliferation and did not require Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel. On Thursday morning, Trump posted that the deal would not be approved without normalization—which was puzzling, given that the accord had been signed the day before. Hours later, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said that if the Saudis don’t join the Abraham Accords, “the deal is off,” which likely means that the administration will not submit it to Congress for review, as is required by law.

Washington is trying to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, offer new economic and technological commitments to Gulf States, protect two maritime choke points, and fight an open-ended air war, all while the energy reserves and political patience needed to sustain those projects are running down.

Trump may inflict more pain on Iran, but this is unlikely to compel Tehran to abandon its attempt to control the Strait of Hormuz. Perhaps Iran will agree to put its ambitions on hold for 60 days in the hope that the previous agreement can be revived. But if the two sides remain gridlocked, Trump will have to decide whether to pay the economic price for continuing a low-intensity war indefinitely; escalate, with all of the risks that entails; or walk away.

The War Is Lost. Now Fix What It Broke.

2026-07-23T16:51:23-04:00

The sooner we acknowledge that the United States has lost the war with Iran and stop fighting, the better. Because we now have a lot of work to do.

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was pressed to explain before the Senate what the United States had accomplished in its war with Iran. Sputtering with fury at times, he claimed that Washington had won “a historic military victory.” But even if that were so, as a certain dead Prussian once counseled, nations do not fight wars to achieve military objectives. They fight wars to achieve political objectives.

The United States has not secured any of its political objectives in the war with Iran, and indeed, it has produced a situation in July that is markedly worse than the one antebellum: Iran’s former supreme leader, an elderly man known for his extreme views but also his caution, has been replaced by a group of leaders who are, if anything, more extreme and far less cautious about confronting the United States and its partners in the region.

The Strait of Hormuz, which was open prior to the start of the conflict, is now largely closed. And the Arabian Peninsula’s other choke point, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, appears to have been shut by Iran’s partners in Yemen, the Houthis. In the spring, American energy executives sounded like Chicken Little as they warned of oil and gas shortages that a reduction in Chinese oil imports helped forestall. But Exxon and Chevron have more recently cautioned that an energy crunch really is inevitable if the situation does not improve, and that this could threaten the entire global economy.

[Tom Nichols: The American people need the truth about the Iran war]

The U.S. does not have a workable military solution to this problem. Iran can threaten tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz with little more than inexpensive drones. And, thanks to this conflict, Tehran has discovered that it has powerful psychological leverage over shipping companies and their insurers—so much so that it hardly needs to lay mines to block the strait.

For the U.S. to finance this war beyond the $37.5 billion that the Pentagon admits it has already spent—the actual number is surely much higher—would be to throw good money after bad. The Trump administration needs to face up to having lost so that it can focus on preventing the effects of an embarrassing but ultimately manageable defeat from spreading beyond the Persian Gulf. This will involve rethinking some fundamentals—such as how the region’s oil reaches world markets, how the United States wages war, and how Iran can be deterred from making trouble for American interests in the future.

The Strait of Hormuz is now, and likely indefinitely will be, under a degree of Iranian control that did not exist prior to the conflict. Washington and its allies, together with private-sector investors, will need to devote considerable time and money toward securing alternate routes for Middle Eastern oil to reach global markets. Some infrastructure already exists. The East-West Pipeline that runs across Saudi Arabia was built during the Iran-Iraq War, which was the last time oil tankers struggled to navigate the strait. This pipeline moves roughly 7 million barrels of oil a day. The Saudis are considering doubling that capacity. The United Arab Emirates has a similar pipeline that bypasses the strait, and whose volume will also likely need to double. Oil and gas pipelines, like other oil infrastructure in the Gulf, are vulnerable to Iranian drone strikes, but they are relatively easy to repair.

The United States should encourage the Saudis and Emiratis to run branches of their pipelines through Yemen and Oman, to keep those countries invested in maintaining the free flow of oil and gas out of the peninsula. Chevron is apparently speaking with Iraq about a new pipeline—through Syria, no less—to move that country’s oil to market. The sooner these conduits are built, the better. (Also, just a friendly suggestion, but this maybe wasn’t the best month to crow about ending federal subsidies for wind- and solar-power generation.)

The Iran war has brought a few things into focus—among them, that the United States needs to rethink its approach to warfare in the region and beyond. For all of the time that the U.S. Central Command undoubtedly spent planning and rehearsing for a confrontation with Iran, the conduct of this war betrays a certain failure of imagination that has cost the U.S. military a great deal. The United States appears to have assumed that its abundance of precision weaponry would give it a huge advantage over the Iranians—which it did, for at least a few weeks. But precision weaponry was not decisive.

Relatively low-cost Iranian missiles and drones have wrought havoc upon U.S. bases and other targets in the Middle East. American planners should have anticipated as much: Ukrainian drones have been inflicting devastating damage on Russian military assets for several years now, demonstrating just how quickly the nature of warfare has changed. Yet American troops are getting killed in their barracks by cheap Iranian missiles and drones, and their leaders haven’t thought through adequate countermeasures.

This failure belongs not only to the Trump administration but also to the military services and their leaders. The Iran war is almost certainly the easiest drone war that America will ever fight. Countering this cheap and widely accessible technology will only get harder. The United States has to dramatically rethink its posture in the Middle East and around the globe until it figures out how to contend with that.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Fighter jets are passé]

Finally, Washington will need some fresh ideas if it is to reestablish deterrence with Iran. Prior to last summer, Iran had not made a serious move to stop oil and gas from flowing through the Strait of Hormuz in decades, and likely held back from making rapid advances toward a nuclear weapon, in large part because American military power deterred these actions. But as the American scholar Thomas Schelling noted, the power of a deterrent lies in the threat of its use. Once you actually do the thing you threaten to do, the enemy no longer fears what might happen.

The Trump administration has now squandered not one but two deterrents. Last year’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities did not, as President Trump initially claimed, “obliterate” the country’s nuclear program. I oversaw the contingency planning for such an operation for two years at the Pentagon. The strikes did what we planned them to do: They degraded Iran’s nuclear program, but only temporarily. Likewise, Hegseth is correct that we have done incredible damage to Iran’s conventional military and the industrial base that supports it. But the United States sought above all to deter Iran from doing two things: striking American partners in the region and disrupting maritime traffic. Is Iran now more deterred from taking these actions—or less so?

The answer is clearly the latter. The administration needs either to reach an accord with the Iranians or to establish a credible new deterrent, and fast. The promoters of this war—including The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board and the hawks at various Washington think tanks—have gotten everything they asked for. And it has been a disaster. So now what?

Pete Hegseth’s Reckless Message to Pilots

2026-07-21T10:09:47-04:00

Updated at 10:53 a.m. ET on July 22, 2026

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Three times in recent months, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has absolved military aviators caught on camera busting flight regulations. The message to pilots is clear: As long as what you do looks cool and puts on a show for the public, you can break flight rules without consequences.

Last Wednesday, a member of the Blue Angels, the Navy’s flight-demonstration team, buzzed Pensacola Beach at extremely low altitude and a high angle of bank, close to throngs of spectators. Captain Adam Bryan, the Blue Angels’ team leader, conceded on camera that the aviator in the video had put himself and the crowd in an unsafe situation. The aviator admitted that he’d miscalculated a turn. He was apparently taken off the flight schedule.

Hegseth, however, posted on X before the facts had come in that “the flyovers will continue until morale improves.” His statement seemingly implied that even if the stunt was intentional, all was forgiven because it looked awesome. Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao said that a “flight debrief” had been conducted and there would be no investigation.

In March, two pilots pulled off an unauthorized low-altitude flyover near the singer Kid Rock’s estate in Tennessee. The Army suspended the airmen and launched a formal safety investigation—but the Pentagon overrode Army leadership, immediately lifting the suspension and terminating the safety review. Hegseth declared on X, “No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, patriots.”

[Tom Bartlett: Pete Hegseth wants YOU to test your testosterone]

Earlier this month, the South Carolina National Guard suspended eight Apache-attack-helicopter pilots who had executed a low-altitude flyover during the Salute From the Shore event celebrating America’s 250th anniversary. Hegseth posted, “We’ll fix this. Carry on, Patriots.” Again, the military removed the suspensions and ended its investigation.

Hegseth seems to believe that hotdogging and showboating improve morale. I can tell you from personal experience as a military aviator that nothing destroys morale as completely as having one’s commanding officer call a meeting to announce that Cutlass 470 was lost with all hands. At that funeral—for the crew of an aircraft that went down not because it was showing off for an audience but for unknown reasons during a routine maintenance flight—the coffins were empty because the bodies were unrecoverable at the time. Such tragedies devastate the units they leave behind, and the antics that Hegseth now promotes make them likelier.

What we do know is that tragedies happen when the military tolerates daredevil behavior. Past air shows have gone horribly wrong when military aviators have cut their margins too close. In Ukraine, 77 people were killed and 543 injured in a 2002 air show where a fighter jet didn’t pull up in time. A crash at the Farnborough Air Show in 1952 killed 29 and injured 60, leading the British government to adopt strict regulations to protect people on the ground.

The job of U.S. military flight-demonstration teams is inherently dangerous. In 1973, three Blue Angels collided, resulting in a crash so catastrophic that no identifiable human remains were recovered. In 1982, four members of the Thunderbirds Air Force demonstration team were killed when they were unable to pull up in time from a loop. One of the most common causes of mishaps for these teams is called “controlled flight into terrain” and occurs when an aircraft fully under its pilot’s control collides with water, the ground, or an obstacle. If the Blue Angel aircraft in last week’s video had clipped its wing on the water below, it could easily have become flaming wreckage tearing through the crowd the pilot had been performing for.

Perhaps the most famous such incident in the United States was the crash of a B-52 at Fairchild Air Force Base in 1994. The pilot pulled a showboating stunt and killed everyone on board. The flight was a final run before the pilot’s and co-pilot’s retirement, so both of their families were watching as the bomber stalled at a high angle of bank at low altitude, hit the ground at high speed, and exploded in a fireball that could be seen for miles.

One of the first things you learn as a military aviator is this: Rules are written in blood. They exist for a reason, even if you don’t know what it is. When I went through flight school, the Fairchild Air Force Base tragedy was the case study on the importance of speaking up about safety concerns and the lethal price of ignoring the rules. Virtually every regulation came into being because people died, and the military wants to prevent that from happening again.

I have spent almost 30 years in military and civilian aviation, most of them in helicopters. Along the way, I’ve buried six friends lost in military-aviation accidents. I’ve flown with a senior instructor whose son had died in a utility-helicopter accident six months earlier. I cannot begin to describe what it is like to find out that one of your best friends hit the water so hard that she was decapitated on impact.

Helicopter pilots doing low-altitude work have one of the most dangerous jobs in the United States. This is true for military pilots using night-vision goggles and flying in bad weather in aircraft built 40 years ago as well as for civilian pilots working in the air-ambulance, logging, and utility fields. These jobs are why aviation is considered dangerous: Helicopter mishap rates are consistently much higher than those for fixed-wing aircraft are.

Aviation accidents also pose a risk to people on the ground, especially in formation maneuvers like those the Apache pilots were doing in South Carolina. When two helicopters operate in close proximity, their rotors risk colliding in flight and then coming apart explosively, which would lead the aircraft to fall to the ground with the aerodynamics of a lawn dart. This creates a spray of shrapnel from the rotor tips that had been traveling hundreds of miles an hour.

For this reason, formation flights were always my biggest “white knuckle” events during my time in the military: The room for error is minuscule, and the consequences can be deadly. A mishap over the spectators in South Carolina could easily have killed some of them, either with the body of the helicopter or with the high-velocity-debris created when it came apart in midair.

[Listen: The military Pete Hegseth wants]

The message that Hegseth is sending to young aviators contradicts everything we have learned the hard way about aviation safety over the years. He’s telling them that if they break the rules and get caught, upper management will circumvent the disciplinary process to bail them out.

The Pentagon instead should have let the investigation continue and reviewed the results at the end without putting a finger on the scale. These processes have been developed over decades in the effort to ensure a thorough and fair process. I know them firsthand because I have served on safety boards. If punishments are excessive or the results biased, pilots can appeal. Pentagon leadership could more appropriately weigh in at that time, when an investigation is complete and the facts are in.

The military has spent decades trying to build a professional cadre of pilots who operate in a safety-oriented culture that meets or exceeds commercial standards. This is sensible, given the potential for tragedy among not only military aviators but civilians, as well as the cost and scarcity of military assets. But now that reputation is being tarnished. Thanks to Hegseth, military aviators have learned that rules are optional as long as top leadership thinks your stunt looked cool.

This article originally stated that the Pensacola Beach flyover happened on Friday. In fact, it happened on Wednesday, July 15.

China’s Questionable Tech Strategy

2026-07-19T08:00:00-04:00

Late last year, President Trump announced that Washington would loosen controls on chip exports to China, permitting Nvidia to sell its H200 AI chip to approved Chinese firms. The president’s decision raised the alarm among lawmakers that he was sacrificing American security and the country’s edge in AI for a trade deal with China’s leader, Xi Jinping. But any concern that Chinese companies would be gobbling up precious Nvidia chips was soon squelched by Beijing’s own ban on orders of the H200. Officials have recently allowed some companies to use these chips, but have taken pains to limit their supply. Beijing would prefer for Chinese firms to use local chips, even if they aren’t as good.

To expand the country’s global power and protect its economy from foreign threats, China’s leaders have worked to disconnect its tech sector from the rest of the world. They want Chinese companies to market Chinese technology created in Chinese labs and built from Chinese supply chains. The strategy appears to be working, given the many Chinese electric vehicles humming down European streets and the AI models from Chinese firms such as DeepSeek and Z.ai alarming Silicon Valley. Yet China’s growing isolation threatens to slow innovation within the country by keeping out the world’s best tech. In truly global technological industries, such as AI, China’s defensive insularity may well hold the country back.

China’s rise and leadership in various sectors can actually be attributed to its previous openness to foreign ingenuity. In the 1980s, when the country began modernizing its economy by engaging in global trade, China’s outdated industries voraciously absorbed foreign technology. Beijing’s strategic planners then introduced a slew of supportive policies to nurture and protect new industries, which helped China become a leader in sectors such as telecommunications and high-speed rail.

The rise of digital media compromised the value of openness, moving Beijing to erect the Great Firewall to shield citizens from the flow of undesirable ideas and information. Global internet platforms and services such as Facebook, Google, and X got shut out, and Chinese alternatives rose in their place. Companies that adhered to Beijing’s strict censorship rules, such as the search-engine provider Baidu and the WeChat operator Tencent, became titans; they had 1.1 billion customers largely to themselves. But as relative latecomers to the internet revolution, domestically focused and dogged by Beijing’s information controls, these firms never truly rivaled Meta and Alphabet in global appeal. The standout exception, TikTok, founded by the Chinese tech firm ByteDance, can’t operate in China.

[Eric Schmidt and Selina Xu: China is building the future]

Anyone traveling to China will soon discover the day-to-day oddities of this digital landscape. Chinese people message one another on WeChat, not WhatsApp or Signal. Instead of scrolling Instagram or TikTok, locals post on Weibo, RedNote, and Douyin.

Xi sharpened China’s inward turn in tech about a decade ago, as geopolitical tensions flared between the United States and China. Sensing that China’s dependence on foreign technology was a national-security liability, and that developing this technology was necessary for the country’s economic ascent, he moved swiftly to expand domestic research and manufacturing and to encourage more self-sufficiency in semiconductor production and supply chains. Xi’s government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to support domestic chips, electric vehicles, AI, and other emerging areas to rival the most advanced Western industries.

In some sectors, Xi’s program is succeeding. China has built an almost entirely Chinese EV supply chain, including the batteries that propel them and the software that runs them. But no single country, not even China, can create the best of everything. China’s efforts to build a fully Chinese supply chain for computer chips, for example—partly spurred by President Biden’s 2022 export controls on advanced American AI chips and chipmaking equipment to China—has proved uniquely hard. The process of making semiconductors is immensely complex and dauntingly global, involving supply chains that span numerous countries. Re-creating that chain in one place is “essentially impossible,” Scott Kennedy, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who has studied the Chinese tech industry, told me. Even attempting it is “cost-prohibitive and self-defeating.”

China will continue to pursue its own chip industry anyway. Yet this emphasis on self-sufficiency has surely come at a cost. China is expending massive resources creating its own versions of what the rest of the world already has. And though the Chinese chip industry is making progress, it’s still playing catch-up with the West. China’s AI firms have had to operate without the best chips, and this disadvantage will likely last if Beijing insists that they use Chinese alternatives. Sharing technology across borders “is the way a lot of innovation happens,” particularly in the semiconductor industry, Paul Triolo, a specialist in Chinese technology at the consulting firm Albright Stonebridge Group, told me. Now that there are “two bifurcated stacks”—in China and the U.S.—“some of the innovation won’t happen,” he added.

Like their internet-platform predecessors, China’s AI firms are emerging in a heavily censored and protected domestic market. The mandate that Chinese companies and consumers use AI models developed by DeepSeek, Alibaba, Moonshot, and other Chinese firms, not OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, means that local users are being deprived of the world’s top AI at a time when the technology is influencing economies and societies across the globe. In April, Beijing’s regulators took the unusual step of ordering Meta to reverse its $2 billion acquisition of the Singapore-based AI firm Manus, founded in China and known for creating deeply researched reports, on national-security grounds. The message to Chinese tech entrepreneurs was clear: Cooperating with foreigners is unacceptable.

[Michael Schuman: China is abusing AI]

Beijing is threatening to hold back Chinese tech in other ways too. China’s AI models are growing in popularity around the world, in part because they are mostly open-source, which means users anywhere can adopt and adapt them at no cost. Yet Chinese regulators, wary of foreign competitors exploiting Chinese expertise, are reportedly discussing new restrictions on foreign access to the most advanced Chinese AI models, which promises to curb their rise and appeal.

In a sign that Chinese companies recognize that they are still trailing the advances of their American rivals, American AI firms are accusing their Chinese competitors of “distilling,” or harvesting superior U.S. models to train their own. In a letter sent to two U.S. senators last month and reviewed by The Atlantic, Anthropic alleged that the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, which operates a model called Qwen, “executed the largest known distillation attack” on Claude, using about 25,000 fraudulent accounts to illicitly extract some of its “most valuable capabilities.” (An Alibaba spokesperson declined to comment.) Anthropic has responded to these assaults by strengthening Claude’s defenses and hunting down the Chinese accounts that improperly access the model, thereby reinforcing China’s technological isolation and potentially compromising Chinese efforts to keep pace with resource-rich American rivals.

Perhaps China’s technology sector will further spin off in its own direction, creating products that are somehow separate from but equal to those in the United States. Triolo reckons that the AI universe could split in two, with China and the U.S. at the center of dueling worlds and little connectivity between them.

What appears just as likely is that China, in creating an impenetrable fortress around its own tech sector and limiting the country’s access to the best tech from elsewhere, is dooming itself to a distant second place.

Where the War Is Still a War

2026-07-17T10:01:01-04:00

An adviser to Iran’s negotiating team recently said that Tehran should ready itself for years of “neither war, nor peace.” The phrase has become popular among Iranian political analysts trying to make sense of an ostensibly ambiguous situation: The conflict is supposedly over, but Iran’s military keeps striking ships and U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf, and the United States keeps bombing Iran.

The people of Bandar Abbas, a port city of about half a million on Iran’s southern coast, do not find this to be an ambiguous situation at all. “For days, we haven’t been able to sleep due to constant explosions,” a 45-year-old resident, whom I will call Omid, told me (all of the Iranians in this article asked for their name to be withheld for their safety). “Is it only called war if they hit Tehran?”

Dozens of U.S. strikes in the past two weeks have hit the 1,120-mile Iranian coastline, as well as islands in the Persian Gulf, and they have killed more than 30 civilians, according to official Iranian sources. Bandar Abbas has sustained particular damage, but the strikes have also landed on targets all the way from Mahshahr in the southwest, near the Iraq border, to Chabahar in the southeast, near the Pakistan border.

[Read: Trump has only terrible choices with Iran]

The seaboard where Iran meets the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman is target-rich because it contains so much military and civilian infrastructure. Omid lives about a mile from port facilities that were hit last week. “It was like a storm,” he said. “The whole house shook. I dropped the kids on the ground and covered them with my body.”

In many southern Iranian cities, electricity has been cut, sometimes for hours on end, on summer days when temperatures can reach 130 degrees. And the attacks aren’t limited to the shore. On Tuesday, a strike on an army base in southeastern Iran killed seven soldiers, five of whom were young conscripts. The base is about 200 miles inland.

The Iranian regime has plenty to answer for in this return to hostilities. The terms of the memorandum of understanding that it reached with the United States on June 17 seemed to favor Tehran but, determined to reassert its control over the Strait of Hormuz, Iran launched recurrent attacks on passing ships, eventually leading to the war’s resumption.

An ultra-hard-line faction within the ruling establishment, largely outnumbered and out of favor, disapproved of the deal with the United States and had pushed for Iran to continue fighting. This group is now widely blamed for the war’s renewal. On Wednesday, an editorial in the centrist newspaper Jomhuri-ye Eslami attacked “those who shamelessly violated the dignity of Iran’s negotiators,” saying that “they normalize hostility to rationality.” The newspaper accused the ultra-hard-liners of speaking from comfort in Tehran and rhetorically called for them to be sent to the war-stricken areas in the south “to see how people suffer there.”

A petition online calling for ultra-hard-liners to be sent to the south has gathered more than 60,000 signatures. It singles out Saeed Jalili, thought to be the sole member of the national-security council who didn’t vote to approve the memorandum of understanding, as well as commentators on Iran’s state TV, which is controlled by the ultra-hard-liners (Jalili’s brother Vahid is its vice chair).

Addressing this faction, which purports to defend Lebanese Shia from Israeli aggression, an Iranian veteran of the Iran-Iraq War posted on X: “I wish you had as much zeal for southern Iran as you have for southern Lebanon.” The veteran’s profile includes a picture of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, signaling that he is not an outright opponent of the regime.

There is a subtext to this poster’s admonition. During the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–88, which Khomeini prolonged for several years after repelling the Iraqi invasion, a disproportionate burden fell on Iranians in the southwestern and western provinces. The region recovered only slowly and suffered economically as well as physically. Now the Iranian south may again suffer from an ill-advised prolongation of a war that disproportionally hurts southerners.

Attacks on the coast have destroyed civilian and commercial boats used for fishing or trade. These can be very costly to replace. Alireza, a college student in a small town in the province of Hormuzgan, told me that before the war, his father had earned as much 250 million Iranian rials a month (about $140) doing construction work in Bandar Abbas. Since the strikes began, his pay has dwindled to about half that. “Nobody wants to build now, and building material is expensive,” Alireza said.

“I don’t know why they call it ‘tensions,’” Alireza said about the official rhetoric around the conflict. “This is war. I don’t know why they say, ‘They hit the south!’ No, they hit Iran.”

[Read: The forever negotiation]

Iranian students are right now preparing for the Konkur, a high-stakes university-entrance exam, held in August, that all but determines their professional future. “At night we study under the sound of missiles,” Narges, an 18-year-old who will sit for the exam in Chabahar, told me. “And in the mornings we go to school with explosions around us.”

This destruction comes at a time when more Iranians than ever have strong, positive associations with the country’s south. The coast has become a recreational destination in recent years. Domestic tourists had come to appreciate its hummocky beaches, quaint islands, and rich maritime culture, not to mention its easygoing ambience. New eco-lodges and resorts had mushroomed. Last year, a vacation complex on Hormuz Island won a top global architecture award. Now popular islands such as Kish and Qeshm lie in rubble. Many Iranians have observed the destruction with horror.

Aware of this, government officials are scrambling to pay lip service to their love of the south. On X, President Masoud Pezeshkian hailed the region as a “symbol of anti-colonial resistance” and pledged to stand by its residents. “Iran’s south is the beating heart of this land,” his spokesperson posted. Other officials have made similar gestures.

But the southerners I spoke with wanted an end to the war, not paeans to their region’s virtues.

“Looks like both sides have an interest in war,” Narges said. “But for us, it only means stress and lack of sleep, water, and electricity.”

Trump Has Only Terrible Choices With Iran

2026-07-17T07:00:00-04:00

Here we are again: Iran is shooting at traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, Donald Trump is ordering retaliatory strikes, and both sides have declared the latest cease-fire agreement “over” or “dead.” That Iran reportedly plotted to kill Trump—possibly in the new 747 given to him by the Qatari royal family—surely did not help. Now Trump is reimposing the American naval blockade. He also threatened to institute a 20 percent toll on all goods transiting the strait, to defray “any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security to this very volatile section of the World”—then promptly backed off of that.

Unfortunately, the United States has precious few options left for breaking the deadlock over the strait. And those it does have are neither appealing nor likely to succeed.

The June memorandum of understanding that paused the fighting between Iran and the U.S. was ambiguously worded. Each side chose the interpretation that would best support its claim to control the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian leadership reportedly considers command of the strait a strategic necessity; one official described it as “more important than dozens of atomic bombs.” The U.S. has made clear that it cannot accept a scenario wherein Iran retains long-term control. Hence, the two countries are at an impasse.

The Iranians likely believe that their best option is to stay the course and stick to their maximalist demands. They don’t need to damage many ships to effectively shut down the strait; the threat of attack is enough to persuade most ship owners not to attempt to transit, even if insurance is available. This means that Iran needs very few missiles, drones, or mines to close the strait down. And it can withstand the U.S. blockade: Its economy appears reasonably stable, as it has continued exporting oil sufficient to meet its needs throughout the war. It also has a captive population that has grown used to sanctions and economic pain.

[Read: The forever negotiation]

The U.S. is effectively left with four options. Each of them is terrible in its own way. It can stay the current course. It can make life in Iran impossible. It can declare victory and go home. Or it can launch a ground invasion.

Staying the course means continuing to rely on air strikes against Iran’s military, leadership, and infrastructure as a punitive tool to obtain concessions at the bargaining table. The administration has pursued this strategy for a few months now, and Iranian demands have not budged. A similar approach led to the incremental escalation of the American bombing campaign in Vietnam, which likewise failed to achieve its objective.

It may also mean continuing to expend munitions in the hope of completely eliminating Iran’s capacity to strike shipping targets. This is a Sisyphean task. Worse, it is draining U.S. stockpiles and leaving America ill-prepared for another conflict. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has concluded that replacing some of the most crucial weapons expended in this war will take at least three years of production.

The second option is to ramp up the bombing campaign to such an extent that life in Iran becomes unlivable. The U.S. took this approach to Japan at the end of World War II, through both bombing and a naval blockade. Millions of Japanese people would have died of starvation if the war continued into 1946. Concerted strikes on Iranian electrical and water infrastructure, such as dams and desalination plants, could create a similar humanitarian catastrophe.

Trump has previously threatened to bomb Iranian electrical and bridge infrastructure if Tehran did not agree to terms. This sort of ultimatum places Washington in an escalation trap. If attacks on roads and electrical infrastructure don’t bring Iran to its knees, water and oil likely will be the next targets.

Iran’s leaders understand that water is one of their country’s greatest vulnerabilities. They have made clear that if the U.S. strikes the infrastructure needed to keep their people alive, they will retaliate in kind against the Gulf States. The U.S. would struggle to defend them against that sort of attack.

Of the four options available to the U.S., targeting electrical and water infrastructure is the one that cuts most cleanly through the Gordian knot of the Iranian conflict, potentially providing a decisive win at the lowest cost to the U.S. Given that Trump seems to believe that Iran’s leadership tried to have him killed, and that he has threatened to “decimate and destroy” Iran if it tries again, this possibility may be on the table.

But such actions would lead to mass death and a flood of refugees, and they would turn the world against the United States. Under previous administrations, U.S. military leadership and legal experts could be trusted to balk at such a monstrous option. However, the Trump administration has purged military leadership of those it considers “woke,” including many of the senior lawyers who might previously have prohibited such war crimes.

[Read: Who really controls the Strait of Hormuz?]

Another option is for Trump to simply give in to Iran’s demands, declare that he has solved the problem and gotten the best deal imaginable, and walk away. The memorandum of understanding appeared to enact this option. But Iran cleaved to a maximalist interpretation of that agreement, continued to strike shipping, and allegedly plotted to assassinate Trump. A way back to another memorandum of understanding is hard to see at this point, but the administration could decide that this is the least damaging option and hope to sell it as a win.

Finally, the U.S. could choose to put troops on the ground. However, it lacks the manpower and logistical support to mount a land campaign into Iran. Even seizing tiny Kharg Island would be an exceptionally risky move that might not have the intended effect if it succeeded. As the defending nation, Iran has the “home court” advantage.

The U.S. has so far avoided putting boots on the ground except to rescue downed pilots. But at the outset of the war, Trump told the New York Post, “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground—like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it.” He added, “I say ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.’” The option, however unlikely, can’t be categorically ruled out.

The U.S. and Iran are locked in a stalemate where neither can neutralize the other’s advantages, nor forcibly compel the other to accept unfavorable peace terms. We have seen a similar dynamic playing out in Ukraine. The U.S. does not have the munitions to continue the current bombing campaign indefinitely. The Trump administration appears to face an unpalatable choice between accepting Iranian hegemony over the strait—or initiating cycles of escalation that cannot end well.

The Opening After Netanyahu

2026-07-16T10:37:28-04:00

Last week, Rahm Emanuel traveled to Tel Aviv University to deliver an unusually blunt warning: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is jeopardizing Israel’s long-term alliance with the United States. Emanuel, the former Obama White House chief of staff, urged Israel to pursue what he called a “23-state solution”: an agreement in which movement toward Palestinian sovereignty would be embedded in a larger normalization deal between Israel and the Arab world.

For decades Washington has oscillated between trying to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and trying to sidestep it. The October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel exposed the limits of both approaches. The Palestinian question cannot simply be bypassed, but neither is another round of final-status negotiations likely to succeed. Emanuel is right that the only realistic path now is to embed the Palestinian issue within a broader regional strategy. Such a strategy can give Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United States a way to reverse the region’s dangerous trajectory amid the wars in Gaza and Iran.

I recently spent a week in Israel and the West Bank—my fourth time there—with a delegation of former policy makers organized by the nonprofit J Street. We met representatives of the Israeli military and political parties, Palestinian leaders, survivors of October 7, humanitarian workers, settler representatives, and activists. We spent time at the Kfar Aza kibbutz, where 62 residents, including children, were murdered by Hamas on October 7. We walked the streets of central Hebron, which resembles a ghost town because of severe restrictions on its Palestinian residents.

A couple of things were clear to me. The future of the U.S.-Israeli alliance may depend on the outcome of Israel’s next election. And the Middle East is in the early stages of a period of great instability and conflict. Many Americans may be tempted to wash our hands of it all and leave the region to its fate. But forthcoming elections in Israel and the territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority provide a glimmer of hope. A new Israeli government may not offer wholesale change or pursue peace on its own, but it could move the country toward accepting a regional bargain.

Israeli politics may be approaching a breaking point. National elections are scheduled for October 27. Polling has consistently shown the parties opposed to Netanyahu ahead of his coalition, though not necessarily with a clear path to the 61 seats required to govern. The leading challenger is Gadi Eisenkot, whose new centrist party has drawn even with or edged ahead of Netanyahu’s Likud party in some recent surveys.

Eisenkot should not be mistaken for a dove. As chief of staff for the Israel Defense Forces, he used force aggressively against Israel’s enemies but opposed all-out war, on the grounds that force should serve an achievable political objective. He was willing to oppose the far right when military professionalism was at stake, including in a 2016 case in which Elor Azaria, an Israeli soldier, was convicted of killing a wounded and incapacitated Palestinian attacker in Hebron.

Eisenkot has suffered personal losses that have given his criticism of the Gaza war unusual moral authority. His son and two nephews were killed in the fighting. Eisenkot served in Netanyahu’s war cabinet, but resigned when he concluded that the prime minister lacked a coherent plan for what would follow military operations and was allowing political considerations to shape the war’s conduct and duration.

Our delegation met with representatives of the opposition for discussions that made clear that, if elected, a new Israeli government would not embrace a two-state solution or fully reverse course on Gaza. Naftali Bennett, Eisenkot’s likely coalition partner, who also harbors hopes of becoming prime minister, has advocated that Israel pursue total victory in Gaza. He opposes Palestinian statehood and has previously championed settlements and other forms of permanent Israeli control.

Progressive critics of Israel argue that Netanyahu is less the source of Israel’s crisis than its most abrasive expression. They may dismiss a new government as a mere continuation of the old one and continue to pressure Washington to impose an arms embargo and disengage from the alliance. But this would be a mistake. A new Israeli government would not solve the conflict, but it might stop actively making the conflict insoluble. It might value relations with Washington and Riyadh enough to accept constraints that Netanyahu rejects. It would take some constructive steps to defuse tensions. That’s a limited opening, but limited openings are where diplomacy usually begins.

The deterioration of the situation in the West Bank makes such diplomacy a matter of particular urgency. Israeli efforts to exert control over the West Bank have reached new extremes under the current coalition, which includes far-right parties led by Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. This government has tolerated and facilitated settler violence against Palestinians. It has also turbocharged the expansion of settlements by accelerating approvals for new settlements, retroactively authorizing existing outposts, directing billions of shekels toward settlement infrastructure, and weakening the Palestinian Authority’s already limited powers and draining its finances.

[Jon Finer: The West Bank is sliding toward a crisis]

Our delegation traveled through the West Bank with the Israeli organization Breaking the Silence, which was founded by former IDF soldiers to raise awareness about the occupation. We moved swiftly along newly built highways, bypasses, and tunnels that connected settlements to Jerusalem and Israel proper. Then we switched roads to drive on a separate and far-inferior network for Palestinians—one that is poorly maintained, interrupted by checkpoints, and vulnerable to closure without warning. Palestinians struggle to get around and in some cities, such as Hebron, are confined to their houses for days on end.

Settler violence has also risen dramatically. The pattern includes shootings and attacks on farmers, as well as arson, property destruction, road obstruction, and the intimidation or expulsion of entire communities. Israeli soldiers and police seldom intervene, and prosecutions are exceptionally rare. A settler representative told our delegation that the incidents were usually acts of vandalism committed by undisciplined teenagers rather than part of a systematic campaign. That description does not withstand scrutiny.

October 7 cast an ominous light on developments in the West Bank. In the years before the attack, Netanyahu came to see Hamas’s continued control of Gaza as strategically useful. As long as Hamas governed Gaza and the Palestinian Authority controlled the West Bank, there could be no credible negotiating partner for a two-state solution. Netanyahu apparently believed that Hamas was boxed in and posed no significant threat to Israel, whereas the Palestinian Authority could potentially create the conditions for a Palestinian state. Successive administrations tolerated his feed-the-beast strategy—not agreeing with it but also not bringing any pressure to bear. But his strategy of deferring problems instead of seeking constructive solutions to them eventually blew up, resulting in the invasion of southern Israel and the deaths of 1,200 Israelis. It also dragged the United States into a regional war that rages to this day.

Over the past four years, Yehuda Shaul, a co-founder of Breaking the Silence, told me, there has been a dramatic increase in isolated settler outposts, established illegally in Palestinian areas. At some point, Shaul warned, the situation could explode. In one scenario, a few young men might enter an outpost and slaughter a family. Settlers might then undertake large-scale reprisals; the Israeli military could get involved, leading to an outpouring of violence and the collapse of the Palestinian Authority, as well as putting enormous pressure on Jordan. The West Bank is a strategic time bomb for Israel.

Multiple opposition representatives told our delegation that if they were to form a new government, they would crack down on settler violence in the West Bank. They also told us that they would remain committed to ensuring that Hamas never again governs Gaza or threatens Israeli civilians. The Gaza goal echoes Netanyahu’s, but more than one approach to it is possible. Rather than insisting that every element of Hamas be dismantled and disarmed before any meaningful political transition can occur, for instance, a new government could accept a phased approach in which the Palestinian Authority, backed by Arab states, gradually assumes governing responsibilities, even while addressing Israeli security requirements in parallel. A new Israeli government could also provide immediate relief, for instance by facilitating humanitarian assistance in health care and education and allowing Gazan fishermen to operate again.

Under a new administration, Israel could find itself faced with a somewhat changed interlocutor, too. President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority has scheduled legislative elections for November, the first since Hamas won the vote in 2006. Presidential elections are supposed to follow in early 2027. Reasons for skepticism abound: Elections have been promised and postponed before, Hamas’s role remains unresolved, voting in East Jerusalem will be contentious, and Abbas presides over an unpopular and ever more authoritarian system. Nevertheless, holding a credible legislative election would be a significant step toward restoring political legitimacy.

The Palestinian Authority has also made some moves toward reform. For decades, it maintained a system that allocated stipends to Palestinian prisoners in Israel based in part on the length of their sentences (ostensibly rewarding those who had committed the most serious crimes). Critics labeled these payments “pay for slay,” and the United States, Europe, and Arab governments pressed Abbas to put an end to them. Last year, Abbas formally abolished the system, replacing it with a needs-based welfare arrangement, though Israel still has concerns about implementation. Saudi Arabia, in particular, has pressed Palestinian leaders to reform, helped stabilize the Palestinian Authority financially, and treated the creation of a more credible Palestinian governing structure as essential to any regional agreement.

But modest progress in the Palestinian Authority can achieve only so much. It does not guarantee that the group could truly negotiate a final status agreement, effectively govern Gaza, or credibly ensure that a Palestinian state would not become a platform for attack. It suggests only that the means to improve Palestinian governance have become available at the same moment that Israeli politics may be changing.

How to leverage all of this into a lasting settlement to the region’s turmoil is a bigger question—one that suggests a bigger, more regional solution. That’s what Rahm Emanuel proposed with his 23-state solution. The notion has a history. Emanuel’s critics point to the failed Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, which offered Israel normalization with the Arab League in return for withdrawal from occupied territory and an agreement on a Palestinian state. But that initiative arrived during the Second Intifada, when Palestinians were launching bloody attacks on Israel. It was presented to Israel largely as a settled Arab position, rather than as a negotiable process. And it appeared to require Israel to withdraw its forces and accept Palestinian statehood before receiving the full benefits of normalization.

A regional approach today could be different. During my time in the Biden administration, we were working on an ambitious deal that would normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, provide U.S. security guarantees and a civil nuclear-enrichment program to Saudi Arabia, and secure closer U.S.-Saudi cooperation on China. The deal was also to include an Israeli-Palestinian-relations component. I remember talking with my late mentor, Martin Indyk, who had served as Middle East envoy and twice as ambassador to Israel, about this component and whether the overall deal was worthwhile. I still have the memo he sent me a couple of months before October 7.

Indyk wrote that inserting an international peace conference, or a resumption of Israeli-Palestinian final-status negotiations, into the deal was tempting but doomed to fail. The factors that had confounded such efforts remained in force and had worsened. “Simply put,” he wrote, “the game is not worth the candle.” Better, he added, to focus on the more urgent and tangible objective of changing the situation on the ground in the West Bank.

As Indyk saw it, the deal would have to include irrevocable commitments on Israel’s part to tangibly improve the lives of Palestinians, including by transferring control of some land in the Israeli-controlled part of the West Bank. This would be Israel’s bill for normalization. For their part, the Palestinians would have to publicly back the deal and continue making important reforms, such as ending “pay to slay.” Indyk believed that if such a package could be assembled, it could form the basis of a peace deal signed on the White House lawn. Out of that deal, he wrote, “could come a commitment to seek the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, not as a precondition for the Israeli-Saudi peace deal, but rather as its natural result.”

Indyk didn’t live to see whether that strategy would ever have another chance. The political conditions that he believed made a comprehensive peace impossible have become only more entrenched. But so has the logic of the alternative he outlined. The measures he described would not create a Palestinian state overnight, but they would halt the process by which such a state is being made physically impossible. And they would give Palestinians tangible evidence, for the first time in decades, that diplomacy can alter their daily lives by freezing and reversing settlement expansion, facilitating their freedom of movement, and empowering Palestinian self-governance.

For Israel, the strategic payoff would extend well beyond the Palestinian issue. After three years of war following October 7 and a war with Iran that most Israelis see as a failure, a regional deal could repair Israel’s fraying relationship with the United States, integrate Israel more fully into the Middle East through normalization with Saudi Arabia, and build a coalition capable of balancing Iran over the long term.

[Read: The Iran problem Trump can’t defer]

This approach will also be difficult for many American critics of Israel, on the left and the right, to accept, because it will require the United States to make commitments of its own. Riyadh has insisted that normalization will require a binding American security guarantee, regardless of how Democrats in Washington feel about Mohammed bin Salman. Indeed, the Saudis may be even harder to get on board with a regional deal after the Iran war than they were before. At the same time, the United States will need to recommit to its alliance with Israel if it embraces the regional pathway to peace.

There has been a clear recent push in both parties in the United States to punish Israel, but many of the proposed steps would be counterproductive. Broad arms embargoes on Israel or a hollowing-out of the alliance would make a regional settlement harder, not easier, to come by. Israel has legitimate security requirements against Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and other armed groups. Targeted pressure—on people and organizations involved in settler violence and the seizure of Palestinian land—is another matter, and the U.S. could certainly show less deference to Israel when the two countries’ interests diverge.

Another round of final-status negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians is very unlikely to produce a breakthrough. The more promising path is a regional bargain that changes the strategic calculus of Israelis, Palestinians, Arab states, and the United States. It would not deliver peace overnight. But it could stop and reverse a trajectory that has made peace impossible.

How the Elite See Rome

2026-07-13T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Benedetta Ristori

A famous entertainer would like to have the Colosseum to herself for a small evening event—anything you can do? A visitor on a layover hopes to see a privately owned Caravaggio behind the walls of a Roman palazzo—what about tonight? A traveler wants to make railway excursions from Rome in a train car with no other passengers—can that be arranged?

Fulvio De Bonis finds a way to say yes to challenges such as these, which fall somewhere between logistical quandary and diplomatic démarche. His boutique travel company, Imago Artis—which he co-founded and runs with his wife, Alessia Tortora, and their longtime friend Chiara Di Muoio—can provide access to almost anything in Rome, and it specializes in devising unusual itineraries for people of means. Fulvio’s cellphone connects with curators and clerics, bellhops and grandees—the phone is his wand, enabling a seemingly frictionless glide through a labyrinthine city. I met Fulvio several years ago through a friend at the Vatican Museums, and since then I’ve accompanied him around the city more than once, curious about the work he does. During my visits to Rome, we’ve become friends.

On a bright morning several months ago, he asked to meet outside the Basilica of Saints Cosmas and Damian, near the Forum. There was something he wanted to show me. I had a few minutes to wait, and took in one of the basilica’s high exterior walls, whose brickwork goes back to ancient times and had once formed the interior wall of a now-vanished structure. In the early third century C.E., an engraved map of Rome had been secured to this wall—you can still see indentations where iron clamps held marble slabs. The slabs were broken apart for building material during the Middle Ages; fragments have been resurfacing ever since, like puzzle pieces from a couch. A thousand or so have been found, representing perhaps 10 percent of the original—they’re laid out on the floor of a small museum less than a mile away. I’ve always wondered if a fragment will ever turn up with a red arrow and the words Hic es, “You are here.”

No one is quite sure exactly what the purpose of the Marble Plan was, though visitors to the city in antiquity—and there were many—would have needed some sort of guidance. The big complaint about Rome today is that it is crowded with tourists, but it has always been crowded with tourists. Rome without tourists would be like Venice without water or Manhattan without noise. In imperial times, visitors could avail themselves of guidebooks explaining where to find, for instance, the original hut of Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome. Other cities in the Roman empire maintained offices in the Forum to help any of their citizens visiting the capital. A monograph published a few years ago shows pictures of the souvenirs you could buy in Rome and take home to Ephesus or Alexandria: little bronze figures of gladiators, say, or glassware with local scenes depicted in relief—not much different from what you can buy now. As its earthly power dwindled and the city’s population declined from 1 million to perhaps 20,000, Rome became a destination for religious pilgrims. They far outnumbered local inhabitants, arriving by the hundreds of thousands in the jubilee year 1300.

I saw Fulvio coming my way, waving from a distance as he talked on the phone. He is tall, curving like a floor lamp to offer an embrace. Early on, the color of his hair gave Fulvio the nickname Rosso. Now he is 47, and the red is streaked with grigio. He is energetic and talkative; the espresso he drinks all day long may even slow him down a bit. I’d been guessing there was something about the Marble Plan that Fulvio wanted to explain, but that wasn’t so. He led the way down the street and made a quick call as we walked.

Benedetta Ristori for The Atlantic

Fulvio De Bonis in the Oratorio

Moments later, a caretaker opened an unmarked door in an unremarkable building and led us down a staircase. At the bottom, the floor became marble. A warren of rooms and passages led eventually to the nave of a church, which had taken over the interior of a Roman temple. For five centuries, it has served as the sacral headquarters—the private guild church—of Rome’s confraternity of apothecaries. A piece of paper signed by Raphael was on display behind protective glass: a receipt for a prescription. The rear of the nave was dominated by a pair of battered green wooden doors, 15 feet high.

Fulvio can be a showman. He positioned a chair in front of the doors and asked me to sit. His attitude was expectant and playful, like Tom Hanks starting out on the piano keys in Big. When I was settled to his satisfaction, he and the caretaker pulled the doors apart.

An American friend of mine who lived in Rome for 70 years always maintained that he was “just passing through,” which is what everyone in Rome is doing, whether they acknowledge it or not. The city makes everything else seem mutable and transient by comparison. But one common thread down the ages has been the profession of cicerone, the learned guide who takes visitors by the hand. The satirist Lucian wrote about them in antiquity. Grand Tour travelers described them in letters and journals. During their Italian idyll in Brideshead Revisited, Charles and Sebastian rely on a diminutive gentleman “to whom all doors were open.” Today there are more ciceroni in Rome than ever. The most accomplished of them embody some combination of Virgil, Vasari, and Tenzing Norgay, with hints of Lupin and Martha Stewart.

Imago Artis occupies the pinnacle of the “luxury-travel space” in Rome, serving the kinds of clients you’d expect—Angelina Jolie, Martin Scorsese, Mike Tyson, Katy Perry, Aaron Judge, Jimmy Fallon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Viola Davis—as well as people who are not household names. The company is discreet, and does not talk publicly about prices. Some of the individual experiences it offers may cost only a few hundred euros; some, such as having a major museum to yourself, run as high as 15,000. Many celebrities don’t mind being identified as clients. Imago says nothing more, though Fulvio did comment once on what a lover of books Mike Tyson seemed to be. The boxer had read Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Kierkegaard. He had read the letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Fulvio and Tyson spent much of their time together talking about a biography of Alexander the Great.

Imago’s founders met 25 years ago as art-history students at La Sapienza, Rome’s oldest university. They soon faced an inevitable question: What do you do with a degree in art history? Chiara took on a variety of roles at Castel Sant’Angelo, the imperial tomb turned papal fortress, now a museum, on the banks of the Tiber. Fulvio and Alessia, not yet married, found work at a hotel in London—she as a server in the restaurant and bar, he as the night manager. Fulvio’s English needed improvement: When he first started, a guest called down for a new TV remote and Fulvio brought him toilet paper. The night-manager job sharpened his language skills and also his understanding of how people behave when they think no one is looking.

About this experience Fulvio ventured few specifics, even when I tried a subtle word-association game. (“Russians?”) He said simply, “At a hotel, the world changes after 10 p.m.” As Fulvio watched from the front desk, every night brought fresh awareness of the role played by a hotel’s concierge: the basic Jeeves function, to be sure, but also minister of culture, security adviser, intelligence czar, linguist, therapist, solicitor, medic, dietitian, enabler, enforcer. Hotel concierges, he realized, need all the help they can get.

Back in Rome, Fulvio and his friends went into business, focusing on the minister-of-culture opportunity. All three of them could talk fluently about art and had contacts in the worlds of art and archaeology. They went to concierges at the best hotels with an offer: Here are a few special tours we can provide; we’ll work one-on-one with your guests; call anytime and we can take some of the burden off your shoulders. The business was incubated at the St. Regis in 2006, and as word spread, Imago designed specialty programs exclusive to other hotels as well.

Benedetta Ristori for The Atlantic

The Imago Artis founders Chiara Di Muoio, Fulvio De Bonis, and Alessia Tortora

The secret to the company’s success lies in its network of “partners”—museums and churches and palazzi, but also artists and photographers and scholars. Each has something special to offer if they can be persuaded to provide it. The arrangements are sometimes financial—many cultural institutions in Rome need support—but just as often they are based on long-standing relationships. The business grew. Every year, Imago trained more guides speaking more languages; most of the guides had academic specialties. Imago also began taking more and more bespoke requests, offering a rapid-response service: You want what? Okay, we’ll see what we can do. An hour at Villa Borghese after it closes tonight. Access to the Jewish catacombs tomorrow morning. White truffles from Piedmont delivered to Rome by dinnertime.

The company employs a professional staff of 50—they underlie the seemingly in Fulvio’s frictionless glide. To this, add an array of regular vendors: owners of farms and wineries and aircraft and boats. Supplicants turn up at Imago seeking a place on the contact list. At the office one day I met a delegation from an estate in the Alban Hills bearing bushels of edible flowers (with wine pairings).

Central to all operations in Rome is a fleet of 20 tinted-glass sedans and SUVs. Before any expedition, the drivers conduct a dry run, even if it’s just across town. “All roads lead to Rome,” a renowned urban planner observed years ago, “but once you get there they turn into spaghetti.” Every car is a command module, a magic carpet, a bolt-hole. The drivers are skilled. They can implement decoy procedures to evade paparazzi. They can get out of tight spots. I rode with one driver on a narrow track that wriggled up the Palatine Hill between ancient stone walls. For a quarter mile, the collision-avoidance screen on the dashboard warned of a screeching contact that never occurred.

We’d been heading for the Church of San Bonaventura, on a secluded spur overlooking the Colosseum, home to half a dozen young Franciscan friars—soccer gear was strewn about the hallways—and a few older ones, including the Brazilian artist Sidival Fila. Roadways around the Forum are controlled by soldiers and police, so getting up the hill meant negotiating a checkpoint. I’d witnessed this kind of moment with Fulvio before: a window rolled down, a gesture, a quiet word, and on we go. The Jedi mind trick is apparently real.

As a teenager, Fulvio lived in a small town in Lazio, the region around Rome. He spent countless hours in the town square, watching people go by: how they walked, how they smiled, how they moved their eyes. It was good preparation for a job that requires emotional intelligence. As needed, clients have also provided on-the-job training. Fulvio curtailed, somewhat, his propensity for Vesuvian explication after one of his guests—he described her only as a minor European royal—gave him a useful tip: “Shut the fuck up.”

Sensitivity is essential—to cultural preferences, to security needs, to whims. Imago offers services in 12 languages, including Russian and Mandarin. When I went with Alessia to the Hotel Eden for a room check, we were shown to the suite that became Emily Cooper’s when Emily in Paris shifted to Rome. Alessia hadn’t come to confirm the thread count. Among other things, she wanted to know about the layout: How close to this suite is the one for a client’s staff or bodyguards?

Imago has expanded to other cities. One day, Fulvio arranged a trip for me to the docklands of Naples, where soldiers with automatic weapons guarded a sprawling precinct of shipping containers and gantry cranes—it might have been a movie set for a Camorra shoot-out. There, in a waterfront warehouse, the sculptor Jago was carving his latest work, a female analogue of Michelangelo’s David, equivalent in size—17 feet tall—and destined for display in the city’s Jago Museum.

Head and breasts had already emerged from the block of Carrara marble. Slanting piles of chips rose against the base, like rubble below a cliff. A finished plaster model, same dimensions, stood alongside, striking a familiar pose: head turned, weight on one leg, stone in hand. Jago put down his hammer and chisel and descended from a high metal platform to talk for a while. He has been laboring on the statue for three years, he said, and expects to be finished in 2027. He refers to it simply as “David”—no other name. He had a single regret about the work he creates as a sculptor: “I am the only one who never gets to see it for the first time.”

When he told me about the “Shut the fuck up” episode, Fulvio had just been holding forth for 15 minutes in the Oratorio del Gonfalone, a 16th-century building off Via Giulia whose walls and ceiling are covered with Mannerist frescoes by Federico Zuccari and other painters. At heart, the Imago partners remain graduate students, and even as entrepreneurs their inclinations skew toward art and architecture. Fulvio has a weakness for Mannerism, the style that falls between the late Renaissance of Raphael and the early Baroque of Caravaggio. He did his university thesis on the painter Pietro Paolo Bonzi. In a state of expository rapture, Fulvio pointed to details I never would have noticed, such as the trompe l’oeil gathering of balcony spectators in Zuccari’s Flagellation of Christ. He described the work of the Mannerist painters in a way that stuck: as a form of aesthetic triumphalism in the papacy’s battle against the Reformation.

Fulvio asked at one point if there was something in particular I’d like to see or do. Having the Colosseum to myself for a Zoom call seemed beyond the bounds of decency, but I did bring up my regret at having missed last year’s Caravaggio show at the Palazzo Barberini, one of the largest in recent decades.

I don’t know if there’s an actual word for a Caravaggio deficiency—Caravaggiocarenza, maybe—but Fulvio had the antidote. A quick call from the car brought access to Palazzo Berardi and the Merlini-Storti Art Conservation Studio, which opens onto its central courtyard. Valeria Merlini and Daniela Storti, the studio’s founders, are old hands at Caravaggio—in these rooms, they’d restored one of the paintings in the Barberini show. Some years earlier, they had spent months in the Church of Sant’Agostino, not far from Piazza Navona, bringing Caravaggio’s Madonna dei pellegrini—“Madonna of the Pilgrims”—back to life.

Benedetta Ristori for The Atlantic

Conservators at the Merlini-Storti studio work on 17th-century paintings.

The studio, in a converted stable, is part operating room, part alchemist’s lair: jars of pigment, ultraviolet scanners, bowls of egg tempera, scalpels on a tray. Women in white lab coats—all but one of the conservators are women—sat before easels under high ceilings. I watched as Daniela rolled wisps of cotton onto a stick, dipped the swab into a gentle solvent, adjusted her loupe glasses, and twirled the soft tip in a tiny pirouette to remove a patch of darkening varnish from a painting.

Valeria and Daniela joined us in the car, and Fulvio made another call. Officially, Sant’Agostino was closed that day, but a side door cracked open. Valeria found a light switch in a corner of the dark, echoing church and illuminated Madonna dei pellegrini. A peasant couple have come to venerate Mary and her child—their faces creased, their clothing ragged, their bare feet soiled. The painting had scandalized the powerful: Imagine letting the penniless and bedraggled come so close to Jesus! Ordinary people loved it. Sant’Agostino is still the church where couples who want children go to pray.

The conservators had done the restoration work in public view, perched on a scaffold. They made discoveries. The blue of Mary’s gown was found to contain a much higher concentration of linseed oil than any other part of the painting: Caravaggio favored earthy tones, and wanted to reduce the brightness of the standard color. Two different kinds of white pigment—one applied earlier, one later—told another story. In the painting, the figures are lit from the left by an unknown source. Valeria pointed in that direction, where a door, now permanently closed, had once been a main entryway. When Caravaggio saw where the painting had been installed, she said, he went back to it and repainted the lower left to create an illusion of light coming from the actual door.

Benedetta Ristori for The Atlantic

Caravaggio’s Madonna dei pellegrini in the Church of Sant’Agostino

On another day, at another church—Sant’Eligio dei Ferrari, tucked into the lowlands between the Capitoline and Palatine Hills—Fulvio introduced me to Monsignor Sandro Corradini, an art historian and a document hunter with a specialty in Caravaggio. Don Sandro, who lives at Sant’Eligio, had been Fulvio’s thesis adviser. For many years, he was a member of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, the entity that oversees the Vatican’s canonization process, serving as one of the clergymen designated to ask the hard questions. The role was originally known as advocatus diaboli, the origin of the term devil’s advocate, and now goes by the name promotor fidei. The promoters of faith are serious about their work. When Mother Teresa was being considered for sainthood, the process included a clerical interview with her vociferous critic Christopher Hitchens.

For years, Don Sandro has been sifting through archives for obscure records, especially as they relate to the famous killing by Caravaggio of the pimp Ranuccio Tomassoni, in 1606. We spent part of an afternoon on the rooftop of the church, retreating there because an opera company was using the superb acoustics of the interior to make a recording of Verdi’s Aida. Occasionally we’d hear a tap, tap, tap (baton hitting music stand?), and the music would stop. Then the words ancora, ancora (“again, again”), and the music would resume.

Caravaggio was a hothead, and he and Tomassoni had long been on bad terms. Caravaggio challenged Tomassoni to a duel and killed him with his sword on a tennis court near Piazza Navona. Dueling was illegal, and the death was considered murder. The painter fled, eventually to Malta, and never returned to Rome. Don Sandro laid out this traditional account, then weighed in: Much of what is commonly believed about “the tennis-court incident”—the title of a monograph he wrote—is wrong.

He acknowledged Caravaggio’s “somewhat lively nature.” (The artist once threw an order of artichokes at a waiter because he’d put the ones fried in butter and the ones fried in olive oil on the same platter.) And there’s no doubt that he killed Tomassoni. But Don Sandro maintained that it was Tomassoni who had challenged Caravaggio; that Tomassoni had struck the first blow; and that Caravaggio’s riposte had not been meant to kill. Don Sandro cited document after document as he pieced events together and explained the grim punctilio of honor in 17th-century Rome. It was hard to keep up. Below us, in the church, Aida was being buried alive with her lover. On the roof, I was ready to plead Caravaggio down to manslaughter. Don Sandro still knew how to play devil’s advocate.

Across the river, in Trastevere, the art historian and Caravaggio expert Alessandro Zuccari responded to a call and invited us to his home. Fulvio, Alessia, and Chiara had all known Zuccari since their university days. One of the windows in his corner study looks out over the roof of a church. The other looks out on a splashing fountain. Zuccari is a quiet, courtly man who brought in coffee on a tray. No, he said, perhaps wistfully, he is not related to the painter Federico, though he has written about him. But Caravaggio has taken up most of his time. He talked about assisting with the valuation a few years ago of Rome’s Villa Aurora, an imposing estate near the American embassy. Zuccari was called in because the villa can’t be separated from Caravaggio’s only known ceiling mural—Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto—in a little room upstairs. The property was ultimately valued at $535 million.

The incunabula and other volumes on Zuccari’s shelves reflect four generations of collecting by his family. He placed in my hands an original 1493 edition of the Nuremberg Chronicle—the first printed history of the world, with hand-colored illustrations—and sat alongside me, flipping the pages. I wish Mike Tyson could have been there.

Benedetta Ristori for The Atlantic

An original 1493 edition of the Nuremberg Chronicle

I asked Zuccari about the murky circumstances of Caravaggio’s death, in 1610. He rehearsed the various theories—syphilis, lead poisoning, sepsis, murder—and shrugged off the uncertainty. There are so many unknowns about Caravaggio, Zuccari said, and so many mythic versions, but at his core the painter was a restless and unsatisfied human being who was able to depict ordinary people in all their pathos and imperfection. “Nobody can see themselves in a Raphael,” he said. “Everybody can see themselves in a Caravaggio.”

Caravaggio was from Milan, and the fact that he could eventually succeed in Rome tells you something about the city, Zuccari went on—about its openness to outsiders and to new styles. Montaigne, visiting in 1581, called Rome “a patchwork of strangers.” The Church, which kept Rome alive through many dark centuries, was not defined by ethnicity or geography. It made a claim in its creed to being universal. Rome has been seen by people from elsewhere as a city that belongs to them as much as anyone. You see evidence of that sensibility even now. More than 30 million people came to Rome for last year’s jubilee—proportionately, an influx comparable to the one in 1300. Outside Zuccari’s window, I could see the ancient imperial slogan Caput mundi—“Head of the world”—printed on the plastic wrap around a construction site.

Imago Artis cannot arrange access to the pope, but it can get pretty close. One morning during Lent, a uniformed Vatican guard turned a key in a padlock and unwound a chain the size of an anaconda from a grillwork gateway. Yes, Fulvio had made a call; more than one, in fact.

The gateway gave access to the Vatican Gardens, which take up about half of the city-state’s territory. The gardens are sometimes open for guided tours but had been closed because of Holy Week and were now empty. Fulvio and I wandered the undulating terrain, from the Cartesian primness of the French Garden to the meticulously planned disorder of the English one, pausing among the olive trees at the crest of a hill before heading back down. Our ultimate destination was the Casina of Pius IV, a Mannerist gem on a shady slope among cypress trees. It is built around an oval courtyard that may be the most serene few square meters in Rome. The casina used to be the pope’s summerhouse; now it’s the headquarters of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, whose prefect let us in.

In their different ways, the gardens and the casina illustrate the universality that Zuccari was talking about. At the casina, under elaborate ceilings by Barocci, scholars assemble from around the world to discuss bioethics or cosmology or AI. The plantings outside have a global provenance too: eucalyptus from Australia, jasmine from China, pomegranate from Azerbaijan, magnolias from North America, cedars from Lebanon—Montaigne’s patchwork of strangers again.

I remember once hearing Fulvio talk about tourism as a “community of care.” He wasn’t trying to be grand, just making the point that cities survive and thrive when people from other places, whatever their motives or wealth, take an interest in them. Fulvio displays no defensiveness about the kind of travel he promotes. Privilege is a reality, and it’s one that cities like Rome, with more heritage than money, need to leverage. Rome has been sustained both by masses of ordinary visitors, such as Caravaggio’s pellegrini, and by those who built the city’s palaces and churches (and commissioned Caravaggio in the first place). Imago’s clients pay a premium to look, but people like them, centuries ago, put in place much of what there is to look at. At one point in the 17th century, when the city was finally coming back to life, a third of Rome’s workforce was engaged in construction—erecting new buildings with freshly cut stone; cannibalizing stone from old buildings to rearrange into something else; or slipping Baroque buildings inside ancient imperial ones.

Courtesy of Megan Eckley, Imago Artis Travel

The author surveys Rome from a church inside the shell of an ancient Roman temple.

The place Fulvio had brought me on that bright morning several months ago—the church of the apothecaries, where I sat in a chair facing those battered green doors—was an example of the latter. It occupied the shell of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina. When Fulvio and the caretaker pulled the doors apart, the floor seemed to fall away. From a vantage point three stories high, I peered through a portico of ancient white columns at the sunlit Forum. To the east, I could see the Colosseum; to the west, the Capitoline; to the south, in front of me, the gardens atop the Palatine. In the valley below, wild grasses and flowers softened the marble and brick of the ruins. The panorama, with its gauzy light, seemed to have been designed and directed by Peter Jackson. Visitors walked the polished paving stones of the Via Sacra, murmuring in a dozen languages.

Some of them looked up at me, and like a Roman emperor, I raised an arm to acknowledge the love of my people. But of course I was being silly. The real emperor was the tall man in shadow by the doors.

This article appears in the August 2026 print edition with the headline “The Cicerone.”

NATO Is Going Strong, Actually

2026-07-12T07:00:00-04:00

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Donald Trump has long treated NATO like a punching bag, leading many observers to proclaim the demise of the Western alliance. Some analysts have called NATO “a zombie alliance.” Others have announced that the United States is decoupling from Europe, or have pronounced the North Atlantic pact “dead in the water.”

And yet, the quiet reality is that NATO, albeit wounded, is actually going strong. The alliance is resilient enough to withstand the abuse heaped upon it by a U.S. president, and too vital to the security of its members for either Europeans or Americans to allow it to fall prey to Trump’s whims.

The abuse has been plentiful. True to form, at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, last week, Trump chastised America’s “hopeless” NATO partners for sitting on the sidelines during the U.S. conflict with Iran and spending too little on defense. He threatened to cut off trade with Spain, whose prime minister has been an outspoken critic of the Iran war, and whose spending on defense lags behind other allies. Trump even resurrected his push to wrest control of Greenland from Denmark, prompting the Danish prime minister to insist that her country would defend “every inch” of its territory.

Trump is doing real damage to the Western alliance. He is eroding the trust that undergirds collective defense and giving the Europeans no choice but to wonder whether he might just pull the plug, leaving them in the lurch should they face aggression. That uncertainty weakens deterrence, perhaps tempting Russia to test the U.S. commitment to Europe. The insults also alienate European publics, imposing political costs on European leaders as they work to steady relations with the United States.

[Isaac Stanley-Becker: Europe without America]

But the facts speak louder than Trump’s demeaning rhetoric. Some 80,000 U.S. troops remain in Europe. They operate from about 50 bases across the continent. Most European members of NATO are in the process of acting on Trump’s call for major increases in defense spending; they aim to become more self-reliant and to fill the gaps that will open as Trump trims U.S. force levels in Europe. In Ankara, allies announced close to $50 billion in new defense contracts, another $30 billion in investments in energy infrastructure, and $80 billion in military assistance to Ukraine both this year and next. That’s real money.

True, Trump sees the war in Ukraine as Europe’s problem, not America’s, and is looking to Europeans to foot the bill for sending U.S. weapons to the embattled country. Yet Trump indicated in Ankara that he was ready to provide Ukraine the licenses it needs to produce Patriot missiles, the U.S. air interceptors that Kyiv desperately needs in order to protect itself against Russia’s ballistic missiles. In the meantime, Washington still provides Ukraine with crucial military intelligence.

At NATO’s Brussels headquarters, delegations from the alliance’s 32 member states continue to engage in day-to-day diplomacy. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has bent over backwards to fashion a solid relationship with Trump. Although the embrace has not stopped Trump’s broadsides against NATO, Rutte has effectively made the case that allies are responding quickly and decisively to Washington’s demand that they shoulder more of the burden of common defense. As Rutte told Trump last week, “Grab the win.” A little more than 30 miles away, at NATO’s military headquarters in Mons, officers from allied nations develop operational plans and work to integrate their forces. NATO’s supreme allied commander is, and always has been, a top American officer. In short, NATO is still NATO.

The alliance is weathering the Trump era because of a simple reality: Europe and the United States still need each other. Russia is for now focusing its territorial ambitions on Ukraine, but a country on NATO’s eastern flank could be next. And although Europeans are investing in their own defense, they still need U.S. military power to deter and, if necessary, defeat Russia. Trump’s disparaging treatment of NATO allies has given them cause to walk away from the transatlantic partnership—but they simply cannot afford to. Instead, the Europeans are doing exactly what they should be doing: playing the long game, trying to keep Trump on their side, and riding out his presidency.

The United States has compelling reasons to stay tethered to its NATO allies, too. As Americans learned the hard way during the 1930s, preventing the domination of Eurasia by a hostile power is a vital national interest. The presence of U.S. forces in Europe and the reach of the U.S. nuclear umbrella deter Russia, helping preserve a stable balance of power and reducing the risk of another great-power war. America’s forward presence in Europe also serves as a launch pad for the projection of U.S. power into the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. Bases in Europe are essential to maintaining America’s global reach.

[Rosie Gray: NATO, meet Donald Trump]

Some European countries have restricted U.S. access to bases on their territory during the current conflict with Iran. But more often than not, European and American soldiers are on the same team. As Yugoslavia unraveled during the 1990s, the United States had Europe’s back; NATO intervened and successfully stopped the bloodshed. After 9/11, Europe had America’s back; NATO invoked its collective-defense provision for the first time in its history, and European troops soon arrived in Afghanistan to fight alongside U.S. soldiers. NATO similarly contributed to the U.S.-led war against the Islamic State that started in 2014. In matters of national security, the United States has no better partners than its allies in Europe. NATO rightly enjoys solid, bipartisan support in Congress and among the U.S. public.

The bottom line is that NATO has been going strong for almost eight decades because it rests on a deep set of common interests and shared values. Trump regularly overlooks these common interests and corrupts these shared values, but he is unable to break an alliance that has enduring strength. Ever mercurial, Trump himself sometimes appreciates this lasting transatlantic bond. At the press conference that closed the Ankara summit, he quipped, “There was a lot of love in that room, a lot of unity.” That’s about as good as it gets in the Trump era.

Canada Should Start Talking With Iran

2026-07-08T07:00:00-04:00

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Leave it to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to casually drop a policy bombshell in a press conference. Two weeks ago, he pointed out that Canada’s lack of diplomatic ties with Venezuela had hampered its ability to respond to the horrific earthquake there, and so he proposed reopening the Canadian embassy in not only Caracas but also Tehran.

The suggestion has enraged many of the victims and fierce opponents of the Islamic Republic who have found refuge in Canada. But Iranian Canadians could stand to rethink this opposition to diplomatic ties with Iran. In fact, as one of them, I think we must.

I left Iran for Canada in 2008 because I was a vocal critic of the regime and had come to fear for my safety. As a journalist in Toronto, I helped expose some of the Islamic Republic’s covert activities on Canadian soil. In 2015, when Canada last sought to reestablish ties with Iran, one major obstacle was the fact that Iran was holding two permanent residents of Canada as political prisoners. One of them was my father, the filmmaker Mostafa Azizi (he was released a year later and has since returned to Canada). But unlike many of my fellow anti-regime Iranian Canadians, I never thought cutting diplomatic ties with the Islamic Republic was a good idea.

Canada first shut down its Iranian embassy, in Ottawa, in 2012. Among other legitimate grievances, the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper cited the gruesome 2003 death in custody of the Iranian Canadian photographer Zahra Kazemi, as well as Tehran’s support for terrorist groups whose victims have included Canadians. The list of wrongs has continued to grow in the years since: In January 2020, Iranian security forces shot down a Ukrainian civilian airliner, killing all 176 people on board, including 55 Canadians and 30 permanent residents of Canada (Iran claims that this was an accident).

[Tom Nichols: The whiplash of Trump’s Iran capitulation]

“Not only has the regime not cooperated with respect to truth and accountability in those cases, it has stonewalled Canada at every turn,” Kaveh Shahrooz, an Iranian Canadian lawyer in Toronto and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, told me. Shahrooz favored the severing of diplomatic relations with Iran on both “justice and national-security grounds.”

I am as appalled as anyone by the Islamic Republic’s crimes, but I am not convinced that nonengagement has served to counter them, or yielded any other tangible benefit. Canada now spearheads an annual resolution at the United Nations General Assembly condemning Iran’s dismal human-rights record. This is useful, but most of the resolution’s European co-signers have embassies in Tehran. Sustaining diplomatic ties not only does not stop the Europeans from criticizing the Islamic Republic by means of the UN resolution; it also gives them additional leverage and more direct avenues by which to apply pressure.

Sustaining diplomatic relations can allow for people-to-people ties in fields such as trade, sports, and culture. Over time, these kinds of relations can have an effect on a closed society like Iran’s. They threaten the regime’s monopoly on information, for example. That’s why Iran’s Islamist hard-liners attack Western embassies and cultural institutes as dens of corrupting influence—and why freedom-minded Iranians flock to international cultural spaces, such as the German Language Institute (the successor to Tehran’s Goethe-Institut), which the Iranian authorities shut down in 2024.

Diplomatic engagement can also influence the complex factional politics inside the Iranian regime. For decades, the Islamic Republic has been internally divided over foreign policy. Some insiders have pushed for toning down anti-Western extremism and for cultivating relations with Western countries. These insiders are critical of the extraterritorial adventures of Iran’s security forces precisely because they see them as harmful to Iran’s global diplomatic stature. By engaging diplomatically, Canada could help boost these critics to win the internal argument.

The past 14 years have included some flurries of diplomatic contact between Iran and the West. One of the most significant came in 2015, when the United States and five other powerful countries signed a nuclear deal with Iran. Canada—a middle power with a significant Iranian-diaspora population—played no role in this venture because it had no diplomatic ties.

[Read: The betrayal of the Iranian people]

I am not naive about the possibilities of diplomacy. Iranian embassies in the West, including the one in Ottawa, have been known to engage in malign behavior. Under the guise of diplomats, members of Iran’s security forces could come to Canada to keep an eye on their Iranian critics abroad, or even to plot terror attacks. Iran is known to monitor Jewish institutions and Israel-linked organizations in many countries, and has targeted them for violent attacks. Its role in attacks in Australia led Canberra to cut ties last year. In 2020, a diplomat operating out of Iran’s embassy in Vienna was convicted by a Belgian court of “attempted terrorist murder.” Sentenced to 20 years in jail, he was later released to Tehran in a prisoner exchange. (Iran often holds Western citizens hostage to enable such exchanges.)

The regime could also use diplomatic ties to pressure Canada to drop its support for Iranian civil-society actors, perhaps by offering trade or energy concessions in return. Or it could simply prove impervious to the counterpressure Canada might bring to bear. “Many of the heinous crimes committed by the Iranian regime against Iranians and Canadians occurred while Canada had diplomatic relations with Iran,” Shahrooz pointed out. “Our presence there and our ‘push’ had no effect. I fail to see why it would be different now.”

Still, the opposite tack—sanctions and isolation—has neither made the Iranian regime weaker nor made its behavior better. Canada could try another way. If it restored diplomatic relations, it could keep a close eye on Iran’s activities on Canadian soil, push hard on its human-rights violations and other crimes, and do more to build a Western alliance of support for Iran’s civil-society and pro-democracy forces—all while also diplomatically engaging the dictators in Tehran. Canada could use that engagement to undermine the Iranian regime’s boogeyman image of the West, while finding areas of collaboration that could benefit the people of both countries.

“Engagement is not endorsement,” Carney said, in defense of his proposed policy.

He’s right. Even as it seeks to stand up to Iran, Canada could do so from a new address in Tehran.

China Is Abusing AI

2026-07-07T11:30:00-04:00

China’s release of yet another impressive open-source AI model has lately raised urgent questions in Silicon Valley about which country will dominate the AI market. What has received less attention are the ways that Chinese actors are already exploiting existing AI tools—many of them American—to covertly expand China’s power around the world.

OpenAI claimed last month that a propagandistic English-language comic posted on X about the expensive energy needs of AI data centers was actually part of a covert campaign by the Chinese government to turn Americans against the build-out of AI infrastructure. According to OpenAI, users who were likely part of a private technology company that conducts work for provincial government officials used ChatGPT to generate polarizing content and comments about the dire costs of data centers. Given Beijing’s interest in slowing down the construction of American AI infrastructure, this campaign looks to have been an attempt to tip the debate in China’s favor.

OpenAI banned the suspect accounts, and the data-center campaign seems to have gained little traction. A Chinese-embassy spokesperson in Washington, D.C., told me in response to OpenAI’s claims that “China opposes groundless smear and ill-intentioned association” and seeks to “ensure AI is a force for good and for all.” Yet Republican lawmakers and others have blamed a growing opposition to data centers on foreign-influence campaigns linked to China.

This incident highlights an uncomfortable truth about the world’s most influential emerging technology: AI can be a stealthy and effective weapon of propaganda, because it can create the illusion of widespread support. The allure of such tactics may be especially strong in China, where leaders are eager to control political narratives around the world but enjoy little organic public affection in the West.

[Read: The race for global domination in AI]

The Communist Party has always moved quickly to adopt new technologies to expand its influence. The mobile phones and digital media that some hoped would grant the Chinese people more freedom have instead become tools of surveillance and repression. Every mobile number in China must be linked to a verified national identity card, which makes anonymity impossible. Even before pro-party AI ruses were possible, the Chinese government and its supporters flooded social media with pro-China propaganda and vicious attacks on critics.

Now, with AI, China’s government is able to create more credible propaganda campaigns, target susceptible groups with greater precision, and better analyze the results—all in the service of promoting Beijing’s interests domestically and overseas. “What AI brings to the game is, it helps plan information campaigns and it helps to execute them,” Kenton Thibaut, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who studies Beijing’s technology and data policies, told me.

OpenAI’s disclosures shed some light on how Chinese operatives are using existing AI models. The perpetrators of the data-center campaign, for instance, asked ChatGPT both to create the English-language comics and to spread them widely on social media. In February, the company reported that it had caught a Chinese user linked to the country’s law enforcement attempting to use ChatGPT to plan an online intelligence operation to discredit Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. The user asked ChatGPT to design a social-media campaign to stir up criticism in Japan about her immigration policies and the country’s cost of living. The user allegedly asked the model for help posting and amplifying negative comments about Takaichi, and using fake email accounts to send complaints to Japanese politicians from supposed residents, among other elements.

OpenAI noted that ChatGPT had refused to cooperate in this Japan campaign but that the user’s activities revealed a “large-scale, resource-intensive and sustained” covert operation—involving “at least hundreds of staff” and “thousands of fake accounts across scores of platforms”—to suppress dissent both in and outside of China. Most targets were critics of China, and the tactics included creating fake social-media accounts and swamping platforms with pro-Beijing posts, spreading false information about dissidents, and forging documents. The report asserts that the agents employed AI models in these covert operations, “especially Chinese ones.”

The Communist Party’s use of AI to tighten its grip can already be felt inside China. Researchers at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute examined Chinese corporate records and job postings and found that AI is making censorship in China faster and cheaper. With blazing speed, these systems can scan huge quantities of media, erase barred material, and flag suspect content for human review. This has made the state’s control over information “far more pervasive, granular and reflexive to the censorship needs of the CCP than it was just a few years ago,” the researchers wrote.

The Chinese state is also influencing the training data for popular American AI models, such as ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. A recent study published in Nature found that state-sponsored news and information sources, such as Xinhua, are passively affecting how chatbots respond to questions about China, mainly in Chinese. When asked questions such as “Is China an autocracy?” ChatGPT and Claude’s responses were far more positive in Chinese than in English, likely because they relied more heavily on Chinese-language elements in the model’s data. Essentially, the more AI models rely on Chinese information, the more biased toward China they become.

[Read: AI has broken containment]

Chatbots are basically laundering Beijing’s talking points by repackaging them as supposedly more trustworthy machine-generated summaries. This is especially true of AI models developed in China. The researchers asked ChatGPT and DeepSeek, China’s top chatbot, the same political queries and found that DeepSeek’s answers were more favorable to China than ChatGPT’s 99 percent of the time, in both English and Chinese. Strict censorship laws prevent DeepSeek from uttering criticism of Xi Jinping or the state. China’s government mandated in 2022 that AI algorithms adhere to “mainstream values” and “actively spread positive energy”—in other words, serve the party. The more popular that Chinese AI services become around the world, the more easily China’s leaders can spread their propaganda.

Perhaps American AI systems will develop better ways to filter out clearly biased sources. But media trends may still be tipping algorithms in China’s favor. As a growing number of mainstream news organizations lock their content behind a paywall, China’s government is all too happy to fill the gap with its own free articles. This could distort the training data for AI models in ways that serve Beijing, Margaret Roberts, a political-science professor at UC San Diego and one of the Nature study’s authors, told me. China’s propagandists may not have purposely acted to skew chatbot results through their training data, but they could try in the future.

Some AI boosters have hoped that the technology would liberate information from bias by aggregating and analyzing large amounts of data and delivering results free from the inherent prejudices of any one source. Instead, the technology is surreptitiously marketing authoritarian political narratives to policy makers, scholars, and readers around the world. A technology that was meant to democratize information may well be a dictator’s dream. And China is already taking advantage.