Global | The Atlantic

Viktor Orbán Could Actually Lose

2026-04-10T12:15:57-04:00

Viktor Orbán is the closest thing in Europe to a prime minister for life. He has served four consecutive terms since 2010, perpetuating his power with the ruthlessness of a royal. But ruthlessness may not guarantee him reelection. That became clear to me recently in Székesfehérvár, a small city in central Hungary where Orbán was born.

Székesfehérvár lacks Budapest’s grand boulevards and baroque extravagance, but the city is not without luster. Hungary’s first king, Stephen I, built a basilica in Székesfehérvár that served as the coronation site for later monarchs. Rain was lashing the city when I visited one evening last month. It was dark and cold. But close to 1,000 people had gathered in the town square, all of them waiting for Péter Magyar, a onetime Orbán loyalist who broke with the prime minister two years ago and is now trying to unseat him in elections on Sunday. Most polls have shown Magyar’s party, Tisza, with a comfortable lead over Orbán’s Fidesz Party. But it’s not a given that popular support will translate into a victory at the polls.

Such is the state of Hungary’s democracy. Gerrymandered districts give lopsided influence to the rural countryside, traditionally fertile territory for Fidesz. Deceptive campaigning is rampant, in the form of billboards that dot Hungary’s highways, deepfakes that dominate the internet, and pro-government messaging that fills newspapers and television channels owned by the prime minister’s allies. Orbán enjoys the support of foreign governments, in both the United States and Russia. Donald Trump’s endorsements have been as forceful as any he has issued in this year’s domestic midterm elections, a sign of his personal stake in a regime revered by the MAGA movement. His vice president, J. D. Vance, traveled to Budapest this week to underline the political alliance and advance conspiracy theories about “bureaucrats in Brussels” meddling in the election, words that could have come from the lips of Kremlin spin doctors.

It may not be obvious why an election in Hungary, a landlocked European country with a population roughly the size of Michigan’s, has commanded so much international attention. It’s not a nuclear power, a global media hub, or a center of innovation. Its language is a beast to learn. But Sunday’s vote may well be one of the most important elections in the history of postcommunist Europe. It will test the longevity of a regime that has deviated from principles of democracy and the rule of law that were vindicated by the peaceful revolutions of 1989 and later secured by the European Union, which incorporated Hungary as part of its eastward expansion in 2004. The bloc doesn’t have a mechanism to expel a wayward member, but Western diplomats told me that brazen electoral theft would inaugurate a perilous new era. Some suggested that the prime minister, who oversees entrenched patronage networks that reach into the minutiae of municipal jobs, has too much at stake to accept defeat. Each side has accused the other of planning violence if the results don’t go their way.

Successive setbacks have predisposed Hungarians to pessimism, even self-pity. Consider what has befallen them in the 11 centuries since Hungarian tribes moved into the Carpathian Basin in 896. They were abandoned during the Mongol invasion in 1241 and then subdued by the Ottoman empire in 1526. Their aspirations for independence from the Habsburgs were crushed in 1849, and their territory was amputated by the peace agreements that ended the First World War. They suffered under communism when the Iron Curtain split Europe, spilling their blood in a failed uprising against the Soviets in 1956. “We are the most forsaken of all people on the face of the earth,” Sándor Petőfi, Hungary’s national poet, lamented.

It would be natural for people in Székesfehérvár to feel that way today. Their manufacturing-led, export-oriented economy is a textbook expression of the model that made Hungary a postcommunist success story. Now it represents the defects that have made Hungary one of the poorest countries in the European Union, and opened Orbán up to his most serious challenge in 16 years. Hungarians have an expression for accepting a disagreeable situation: lenyeli a békát, literally “swallowing the frog.” The people I met in Székesfehérvár were no longer swallowing the frog.

Erika Nina Suárez for The Atlantic

Two men wait at a bus stop in Budapest on April 9, beside a government poster of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán reading Fogjunk össze a háború ellen! (“Let’s unite against the war!”).

A pack of university students were standing on a retaining wall to get a better view of the stage. The red, white, and green of the Hungarian tricolor, projected onto buildings that surround the square, danced across their faces. One of the students, Márton Szépvölgyi, climbed down to speak with me. He has been thinking of leaving Hungary for a master’s degree in physics. But if Magyar wins this month, he told me, he’ll stay. “I’m hopeful,” he said. Szépvölgyi mocked the prime minister, who is 62, for seeming unsteady when boos erupted at one of his recent rallies. “He’s crashing out like Ceaușescu,” Szépvölgyi said with a snicker, referencing the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu’s shock when an audience turned on him in December 1989, a decisive moment in the collapse of the country’s Communist dictatorship.

When Magyar took the stage, he used the same sardonic tone as the student, calling it “awkward” to watch the prime minister reckoning with the limits of his power. “He realizes for the first time that it’s over, that the Hungarian people will dismiss him,” the 45-year-old candidate, whose gelled hair and Tisza-branded windbreaker project an easygoing polish, said. His party’s full name is the Respect and Freedom Party, but it’s known by a portmanteau of the first syllables of those Hungarian words. Tisza is also one of the country’s most important rivers. It often floods the Great Hungarian Plain, a phenomenon invoked by the chant repeated at Magyar’s rallies: “The Tisza is rising!”

[Read: The MAGA intellectual who prophesied a Queen Melania]

Magyar spoke from a podium bearing the words NOW OR NEVER!, but with a strike-through leaving only the word NOW. Urgency is a theme of his campaign. “This is the very last chance to take back our country,” he told his supporters. Another theme is independence, drawing on Hungary’s historic struggle for self-rule and allowing Magyar to recast the support Orbán has received from the United States and Russia as a liability. “Hungarian history is not written in Moscow or Washington,” he said. His stump speech includes a direct appeal to young people like Szépvölgyi who are contemplating leaving Hungary. The share of emigrants from ages 20 to 24 has doubled during Orbán’s time in office. Magyar urged the crowd to make the outcome of Sunday’s election personal, saying, “Tell your grandparents you want to stay.”

Erika Nina Suárez for The Atlantic

Márton Szépvölgyi on Budapest’s Margaret Island, on April 9

Szépvölgyi told me that his grandmother wants Orbán to win. But maybe she could be convinced otherwise. Toward the back of the crowd, an elderly woman, herself a grandmother, told me that she had lost faith in the ruling party. Fidesz, founded as an anti-communist youth movement, still positions itself as the guardian of Hungary’s independence, secured in the peaceful revolutions that swept Central and Eastern Europe in 1989. “They talk about 1989, but they turned 180 degrees,” she said. “Everything broke down.”

Erika Nina Suárez for The Atlantic

People stand with Hungarian flags during a Fidesz rally in Pécel, Hungary, on March 28.

Orbán has many traits in common with Trump. But on the campaign trail, he doesn’t completely deny reality. Székesfehérvár is an hour’s drive from Pécel, a suburb of Budapest where I saw the prime minister rally his supporters. He seemed to acknowledge that life has not been easy in Hungary, thanking voters for remaining loyal to him over the past 16 years and asking them to cheer for one another. “Go Hungary” is his refrain. “Go Hungarians.”

The prime minister’s delivery was limp, but I could hear hints of rhetorical gifts. He managed to articulate the core claim of his campaign, that he’s a bulwark against Hungary being dragged into the war in Ukraine, in a way that sounded halfway plausible. As bad as things were, Orbán seemed to suggest, they could get much worse. So don’t take a risk with a government willing to advance European plans to send more money to Kyiv. “Your whole monthly salary will be spent on utilities,” he said.

[Read: The hardest job in Europe]

Throughout Russia’s war, Orbán has maintained friendly relations with President Vladimir Putin. Recently leaked audio revealed that Orbán’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, strategized with his Russian counterpart about advancing Kremlin interests inside the European Union. The U.S. government once aspired to impede Hungary’s drift into Russian arms. But the Trump administration has reversed those efforts, giving Budapest relief from U.S. sanctions for buying Russian oil and glorifying Orbán’s government for dissenting against a supposedly woke EU bureaucracy. “We have not only a national but also a Christian government,” Orbán told his supporters in Pécel. In the crowd, I met Adam Hajdu, who is studying to be a police officer, and his grandmother, Klara, both wearing red Make America Great Again caps. They told me that Trump and Orbán both love God and want peace.

Orbán has a knack for conjuring enemies just in time for election season. In 2014, he cast blame on “multinationals, bankers, and bureaucrats in Brussels” for trying to thwart his economic nationalism. In 2018, he cast George Soros, the Budapest-born Holocaust survivor and liberal financier, as a menace to Hungarian sovereignty. In 2022, he repositioned Ukraine, the victim of Russia’s invasion, as a danger to peace in Hungary. Now he is rerunning a version of that campaign, and his supporters seem convinced by it. A retired postman in Pécel told me that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is nothing more than an actor, swindling the rest of Europe.

Piero Cruciatti / AFP / Getty

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in 2024

The cynicism of this strategy is astonishing. It was Orbán’s bold call for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary, in 1989, that first gave him political star power. He was a shaggy-haired, anti-communist youth activist, with humble origins as the son of an agricultural engineer and a teacher, when he delivered a speech at the reburial of Imre Nagy, the Hungarian prime minister who was executed in 1958 for having led the failed uprising two years earlier. At Heroes’ Square in Budapest, Orbán aligned himself with those “fighting for the establishment of liberal democracy.”

When democracy came in 1990—in the form of Hungary’s first free, multiparty elections—Orbán won a seat in Parliament as a representative of Fidesz, an acronym for the Alliance of Young Democrats. Eight years later, he became prime minister, at the age of 35. By that time, he had already redefined his party’s anti-communism, originally identified with Western-style liberalism, as patriotism and national conservatism, a pragmatic move aimed at finding a niche in a fractured right-wing landscape. He was narrowly ousted by a center-left coalition in 2002, a defeat his biographers say he blamed on the media. In the opposition, he plotted total domination, remarking, “We have only to win once, but then properly.” Comments like that fuel criticism of Orbán as an autocrat. Some of his supporters don’t entirely disagree. “He has a firm hand,” a retired teacher at Orbán’s rally in Pécel told me. “He’s almost an autocrat, but not quite.”

When Orbán reclaimed power in 2010, it was with the two-thirds parliamentary majority necessary to rewrite the constitution, which he did, audaciously, in the face of criticism from the European Union and the United Nations. Early changes curbed the power of the judiciary, weakened independent watchdogs, and rewrote election rules to favor the ruling party. A new media law threatened outlets with fines for coverage considered disreputable. By bringing public broadcasters more firmly under government control while clearing the way for loyalists to take over private news organizations, Fidesz now exercises authority over an estimated 80 percent of the country’s media. He continues to reshape the constitution for maximum advantage in the culture wars. Enumerating his government’s accomplishments at his rally in Pécel, he pointed to a constitutional amendment approved last year mandating that all Hungarians are officially counted as either male or female.

These changes form the basis of the “illiberal state” that Orbán first proclaimed in 2014, scorning the values meant to bind EU member states, including fidelity to the rule of law and respect for individual rights. For successful models, Orbán pointed beyond the bloc to Russia, Turkey, and China. It took Brussels another eight years to respond with financial penalties. In 2022, EU institutions began to freeze billions of euros in funds over rule-of-law violations.

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

The consequences have been catastrophic. The economy stagnated for three straight years, starting in 2023. Price shocks from Russia’s war in Ukraine were widespread in Europe, but the loss of EU funds compounded the government’s problems, according to Zoltán Török, head of research at Raiffeisen Bank Hungary, a subsidiary of an Austrian bank. “Hungary is an outlier,” Török told me. “And this is purely derived from the political decisions of the prime minister.”

Bloomberg / Getty

Péter Magyar, leader of the Tisza Party, holds a Hungarian flag during a rally ahead of a general election in Budapest, on March 15.

Janos Kummer / Getty

Magyar delivers a speech at a demonstration during commemorations of the 178th anniversary of the 1948–49 Hungarian Revolution, on March 15, in Budapest.

A different kind of deception about the country’s finances helped lead Magyar into public life, originally as a Fidesz apparatchik. He was a young lawyer in 2006 when a leaked recording caught Hungary’s then–prime minister, from the country’s Socialist Party, admitting that his government had misled the public about the economy. Thousands took to the streets, and police responded by using rubber bullets, tear gas, and water cannons to disperse the protests, in a show of force that carried echoes of 1956.

Magyar, who comes from a well-connected conservative family, helped create a legal-defense group for the protesters. He also lined up behind Orbán, who leveraged the popular anger to make a political comeback in 2010. Magyar held diplomatic roles in Brussels, where his wife advised a Fidesz member of the European Parliament. She became Hungary’s justice minister in 2019, but her political career cratered in 2024 when she took the fall for a widening scandal over a government pardon in a child-molestation case. By then, the couple had divorced, and Magyar soon released audio of his ex-wife, which he secretly recorded, discussing government meddling in politically sensitive prosecutions. The ploy provoked personal blowback, including allegations of domestic abuse, which Magyar denied. But the revelations brought widespread protests. He used the occasion to announce his leadership of Tisza.

Previous election-year efforts to unseat Orbán have fallen well short—first a loose alliance of left-liberal parties, then a far-right party that tacked to the center to broaden its appeal, and finally a broad coalition that united behind a small-city mayor. None achieved consensus or message discipline. But Magyar has some intrinsic advantages, both as a former Fidesz insider and as a frontman for a new party. “People believe him when he talks about Fidesz corruption because he participated in it,” an EU ambassador told me. He also understands how Orbán campaigns; repeatedly, Magyar has prepared his supporters for smear campaigns and false-flag operations designed to strengthen the prime minister’s hand. To fend off attacks, he has found candidates without political baggage to run in the country’s 106 constituencies. His recruits include an opera singer and a zoo director. They have maintained low profiles, keeping the focus on Magyar, who has become a “messianic figure,” as one of his associates put it to me. The associate acknowledged that meteoric expectations may create problems should he get the chance to govern.

Magyar has promised to right the economy and rid the country of graft, studiously avoiding incendiary cultural issues. On immigration, he is said to hew to Orbán’s hard-line views. His foreign-policy adviser, who has a Ph.D. in international relations from Tufts, has told interlocutors that a Tisza government would restore Hungary’s stature in Brussels and reorient its relationship with Moscow. “We’re not a friend of Russia,” the adviser, Anita Orbán (no relation), told the ambassador of a NATO country. At the same time, she outlined a pragmatic approach to the war in Ukraine, reflecting Hungary’s unique energy needs as a landlocked country.

Robert Nemeti / Anadolu / Getty

Tens of thousands of supporters gather at Heroes’ Square as Magyar addresses the crowd.

People who have interacted with Magyar describe him as headstrong and aggressive. But Orbán’s opponents aren’t being picky. Numerous other parties didn’t merely throw their support behind him; they withdrew from the election altogether to avoid dividing the opposition vote. That was a difficult decision for a liberal party called Momentum, according to its parliamentary-group leader, Dávid Bedő. But it’s working. “In previous elections Orbán always controlled the narrative,” he told me. “Now Magyar is in control because he knows how the system works.”

Bedő, who is 33, has been traveling to traditional Fidesz strongholds and recording interviews with locals, which he posts on social media. Some of the clips show onetime Orbán loyalists venting dissatisfaction with the government. Bedő’s surveys, while unscientific, have convinced him that Orbán can’t win an honest election. He predicted that the prime minister will leave office one way or another. If the election doesn’t ratify a change, “people are going to revolt,” Bedő said. “We can’t take it anymore.”

I heard similar sentiments from right-wing opponents of Orbán. Gábor Vona, who challenged the prime minister unsuccessfully in 2018, told me, “We are one step away from a civil war.”

Erika Nina Suárez

Jelenik Tibor, 77, at a Fidesz rally. Of Orbán, he said, “He has a firm hand; he’s almost an autocrat, but not quite.”

Erika Nina Suárez

A woman wears a hat reading Make Europe Great Again during a Fidesz rally in Pécel, Hungary, on March 28.

Western embassies in Budapest are preparing satellite phones and other emergency precautions in the event of mass unrest. Ambassadors who spoke with me did so on the condition of anonymity to avoid the appearance of meddling in domestic politics. Several said it was ironic, however, that Trump issued a public endorsement of Orbán around the same time that Hungary’s foreign minister warned EU ambassadors in a meeting not to get involved in the election. The message, they said, was that interference was acceptable only if it favored the government. Vance reinforced the point when he traveled to Budapest and declared his intention to “send a signal” to European officials to stay out of the election. In remarks to students the next day, he recalled asking the prime minister over lunch, “What can I do to help?”

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

Among foreign diplomats as well as former Hungarian government officials, I encountered different views about the lengths to which Orbán would go to stay in power. A recent documentary alleged a Fidesz-operated scheme to buy the votes of the country’s poorest citizens, especially its large Roma minority. Informal patronage networks are also instrumental. In small towns, municipal jobs or spots in government-run child care may depend on support for Fidesz. Outright manipulation of the vote count may be more difficult. Tisza officials told me they’re positioning multiple observers at each of Hungary’s 10,000 polling stations. But some voters I met speculated that Orbán might take last-minute measures to obstruct the election if he expected to lose. Last weekend, he claimed that explosives had been found near the pipeline that carries Russian gas into Hungary through Serbia—assertions the opposition condemned as a pretext to delegitimize the vote.

Foreign diplomats told me they’re placing their trust in international observers from the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe. In past elections, the organization’s monitors have characterized voting in Hungary as free but unfair, citing Fidesz’s structural advantages. The diplomats told me that they don’t expect the U.S. government, the organization’s largest donor, to hold Hungary to account if voting is marred by irregularities. If anything, they said, Trump might encourage his ally in Budapest to declare victory prematurely, just as he did in 2020, before calling his supporters to the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Zoltán Kovács, Orbán’s spokesperson, dismissed these concerns. When I met him in his office, his television was tuned to CNN. A chyron was relaying Trump’s latest statement about the situation in Iran (Trump: Go get your own oil). Kovács, who is more reflective in person than his bulldog persona online, told me that Hungary’s election system is secure. “Rigged elections are impossible,” he maintained. He allowed that Fidesz is nervous about the final stage of the campaign. “Trying to believe we control reality is a false pretension,” he told me.

Janos Kummer / Getty

Vice President J. D. Vance and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán attend an election campaign rally on April 7, in Budapest.

Vance’s visit added to the surreal quality of the campaign. The vice president stumped with Orbán five days before the election as if they were running mates. While Trump was on Truth Social threatening to wipe out Iranian civilization, his vice president was onstage in Budapest praising the Hungarian prime minister as a partner in the defense of Western civilization.

[Read: The first post-reality political campaign]

After the U.S. and Iran reached a fragile cease-fire, raising hopes for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and a return to normal oil prices, the vice president delivered a debrief on the negotiations. His audience included students at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a government-linked educational institution financed in part by shares in a company that processes Russian oil. Vance mocked European countries for their dependence on foreign fossil fuels, asking, “Why have the Europeans made themselves completely dependent on unreliable sources of energy?”

His interlocutor, the director general of the MCC, didn’t inform him that Hungary is one of the few European countries that didn’t reduce its reliance on Russian oil after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and that Hungary’s reliance on Russian oil is in fact a foundation of the prime minister’s reelection campaign. A student seated next to me laughed intermittently during Vance’s remarks. When the vice president concluded, I turned and asked her what she had found funny. “He doesn’t know much about Hungary,” she said.

On a rainy evening in Budapest, I met Renátó Fehér, a Hungarian poet. He was in good spirits. Previously, Hungarians opposed to the government were indignant but apathetic. “Now we are enthusiastic in our outrage,” he said. The change reflects an energetic opposition party, but also an ability to see clearly what the prime minister represents. In Fehér’s telling, Orbán melds Russian-style tactics with the ideology of the American far right. He is, Fehér said, “truly a man of the future.” That’s why Fehér calls Orbán’s politics not illiberal, the word used by the prime minister, but post-fascist. The term was coined by Gáspár Miklós Tamás, a Romanian-born Hungarian philosopher who died in 2023. Post-fascism doesn’t involve paramilitaries or do away with elections outright. It operates by stripping certain groups, such as immigrants and sexual minorities, of full citizenship. In place of theories of a master race, its rationale is based on perceived cultural incompatibility or civilizational defense. It is not utopian but cynical and bureaucratic.

In 2014, after Orbán announced his plans for what he called an “illiberal state,” Tamás gave an interview in which he implored the public to read between the lines. “He told us that he will not be removed by elections,” Tamás said at the time, predicting that “those who are against him must be prepared for the grimmest struggle.” Yet for all of Orbán’s aspirations to amass unchecked power, Hungary’s democracy is not yet extinguished. The prime minister must still answer to voters, and their preferences may override all of the advantages he has allowed his party. Sunday will put that possibility to the test. The election could mark the conclusion of this chapter in Hungary’s democratic struggle, or else the start of a grim new one.

Karoly Szilagyi contributed reporting.

Reasons to Be Hopeful in Iran

2026-04-09T14:15:00-04:00

President Trump used to quip that Iran “never won a war, but never lost a negotiation.” Perhaps this view explains his decision to forsake previous rounds of talks over Iran’s nuclear program and wage a full-scale assault on the country. But Trump’s gambit may have backfired: In this particular war, Iran remains undefeated, which puts the country in an even stronger position when the two sides start talking in Islamabad tomorrow.

Despite assumptions that this war has propped up the regime, the conflict may have also put Iran on a path toward reconciliation with the rest of the world. Should talks with America resolve the conflict and curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, the result could create better economic prospects and greater freedom for the Iranian people.

Following Tuesday’s cease-fire announcement, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council promptly claimed victory but also expressed some optimism for the talks. The council called for national unity and full support for diplomatic efforts, noting that the negotiations offer Iran a chance to “consolidate” its wins. This reads as a warning to Iran’s hard-liners, who might otherwise rail against the cease-fire and demand a return to combat operations against the United States.

Negotiators will have to bridge seemingly unbridgeable gaps between the two sides. Iran’s leaders have declared that they want the U.S. to recognize Iran’s right to nuclear enrichment, allow Iran to maintain control over the Strait of Hormuz, lift economic sanctions, and pledge not to attack Iran and its allied militias in the region, such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran also wants reparations for all of the war damages (which could come from tolls on ships passing through Hormuz) and for all of this to be enshrined in a resolution at the United Nations Security Council. The United States, for its part, has declared that Iran must dismantle its nuclear facilities, end its uranium enrichment, heavily limit its missile programs, cut its support for military proxies, and fully reopen the strait.

These differences appear irreconcilable. But those of us who have closely followed this saga know that there are work-arounds. Iran might formally reserve the right to enrich uranium while not actually committing to doing it—a compromise that Vice President Vance has already suggested. Iran could agree to some limits on its missile programs in exchange for access to antiaircraft defenses and a pledge that the U.S. will stop attacking Iran. The two sides may be entering talks with long lists of demands and grievances, but no practical negotiator sticks to an opening bid.

[Brynn Tannehill: America looks like a paper tiger]

The real obstacle to a deal between the United States and Iran is less in the practical details than in whether the two sides have enough political will to reconcile. Opponents of the Iranian dictatorship decry negotiation with a regime that has killed tens of thousands of its own people in recurrent waves of recent protests. Many Americans back tightening economic sanctions on Iran, not loosening them, and supporters of Israel are rightfully concerned about bargaining with a government that aspires to destroy Israel. In Iran, where anti-Americanism is enshrined in the leadership’s DNA, the brutality of this war has largely bolstered antipathy for the “Great Satan.”

Overcoming these obstacles requires what one expert has called a “diplomatic miracle.” But given the devastation wrought by this war, quite a few Iranians and Americans seem keen to give talks a go. It bodes well that the two men who reportedly helped bring about the cease-fire—Vance and Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, Iran’s speaker of Parliament—will play prominent roles in the coming talks.

Eager to distance himself from this unpopular war, Vance appears invested in helping end it. After weeks of seeming sidelined by his boss and the more interventionist members of the administration, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vance may appreciate a moment in the global limelight and will be disinclined to leave the talks empty-handed.

Whether the war has rid Iran’s leadership of hard-liners or empowered them further is up for debate, but there’s good reason to believe that Qalibaf will pursue a more diplomatic path. A former high-ranking member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Qalibaf has emerged from this war as the most powerful figure of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and has been effectively running the war effort. Although he was known for repressive moves as National Police chief in the early 2000s, Qalibaf later enjoyed a reputation as a technocrat who hobnobbed with the likes of Gavin Newsom at Davos during his long tenure as mayor of Tehran.

The Islamic Republic’s hard-liners have long mistrusted Qalibaf, calling him “the Godfather” due to his reputation for corruption. Reformist factions, however, have come to back him in recent days. Former President Hassan Rouhani, who signed Iran’s historic deal with the U.S. in 2015, welcomed the cease-fire and showed support for Qalibaf’s leadership. A top aide to the reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian called Qalibaf “a moderate” figure and said that he and Pezeshkian “will now pursue a new mission for Iran’s national interests.”

[Jonathan Lemire and Isabel Ruehl: 1979 is the year that explains Donald Trump]

Any diplomacy will enjoy some international support. Regional powers are likely eager for any agreement that ends the bombing campaign and restricts Iran’s military buildup. (According to Pakistan, other neighboring Muslim-majority countries, including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, and Qatar, contributed to the mediation efforts.) China, keen to prevent further disruptions to energy markets and aid allies in the Persian Gulf, apparently pushed for the cease-fire and will play a key role if a deal is brought to the UN. Even Israel, skeptical of any deal, might judge a militarily degraded Iran that pledges nonbelligerence with the U.S. to be the least bad outcome for now, especially if Iran also gives up its enriched uranium.

Anyone who hoped that this war would yield regime change in Iran is likely disappointed, but many Iranians have welcomed the cease-fire. Hassan Asadi Zeydabadi, a human-rights lawyer in Tehran and a former political prisoner, told me that he hopes the talks help curb the country’s anti-Western hostility. “Iranians want to live normal lives,” he said. “If the Islamic Republic continues its past international policies, we’d go back to conflict abroad and protests at home.”

Both sides appear to have more reasons to negotiate than to return to the battlefield. Much of Iran has been reduced to rubble and is in dire need of relief. Trump is plainly ready to find a solution to skyrocketing oil prices. Regardless of the details, nearly any deal could have lasting consequences in Iran. If Qalibaf is able to make amends with a country that Iran has demonized for close to half a century, it will be the surest sign that he is ruling over a new Iran—still authoritarian and repressive but more economically and diplomatically open; more Vietnam and less North Korea.

America Looks Like a Paper Tiger

2026-04-08T12:40:00-04:00

Last night, Iran, the United States, and Israel agreed to a two-week cease-fire. The central element appears to be a 10-point proposal by Iran that President Trump called “a workable basis on which to negotiate.” The New York Times published the points, which include removing all sanctions on Iran, ceding control of the Strait of Hormuz to Iran, and allowing Iran to charge tolls whose proceeds would be split with Oman.

If these are indeed the conditions under which the war is concluded, the U.S. emerges from the conflict in worse strategic shape than it started, and Iran emerges in better condition in the long run. Although the U.S. demonstrated tactical and operational excellence throughout the conflict, it was not sufficient to provide a real victory.

The Trump administration’s stated aims shifted throughout the conflict. Early on, it hinted that regime change was desired. Later, this goal was dropped in favor of destroying Iran’s missile capabilities and production, dismantling its navy, preventing it from obtaining nuclear weapons, and stopping it from funding, arming, and directing terror groups. Functionally, the United States failed to achieve any of these.

There was regime change, but only in a nominal sense. The U.S. and Israel killed a great many Iranian leaders. However, these were replaced by other Islamic hard-liners, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s son. Trump even admitted as much when he said that most of the “moderates” the U.S. had planned to negotiate with were dead. The result is an even more entrenched Iranian regime.

[Read: A new geopolitical reality is here]

Iran also continued to launch ballistic missiles and Shahed drones steadily through the final weeks of the war. It retained as much as half of its missile-launch capability. Iran also demonstrated the ability to rapidly reconstitute these capabilities after U.S. strikes. These facts suggest that whatever damage the U.S. did, it can be rebuilt relatively quickly.

The Iranian navy was largely destroyed in the first 10 days of the war, but this success proved to be meaningless. The Strait of Hormuz remained effectively closed until the cease-fire, despite the absence of any Iranian navy. Instead, Iran relied on a combination of drones, small craft, and the threat of mines to create a situation where insurers deemed it too unsafe to attempt a transit.

As for the nuclear program, Iran retains control of the fissile material it started the war with. It has far more enriched uranium than it did when the U.S. ended the Obama-era Iran deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Iran’s ability to enrich further has been significantly degraded but can be restored. Before the war, the elder Khamenei may have forbidden the production of nuclear weapons via a 2003 fatwa, and U.S. intelligence also assessed that Iran did not have an active nuclear-weapons program. Now Iranian leadership may be convinced that the only way to deter future U.S. attacks is to take a lesson from North Korea and build nuclear weapons.

The United States’ final declared goal was to stop Iran from funding terror in the future. This is far easier said than done, especially if sanctions on Iran are lifted entirely. Without sanctions, much of the world’s ability to monitor and restrict Iranian transactions goes away, and moving money and goods through more normal channels becomes easier.

But the U.S. not only failed to reach its military goals in anything but a technical sense; it also may have put itself in a weaker position for future conflicts. It has spent a prodigious number of its advanced precision munitions, such as Patriot, THAAD, Tomahawk, and JASSM-ER, and they will take years to replace. These missile systems are essential to defense and deterrence in the Pacific as China attempts to achieve the capacity to take Taiwan by force.

Just as worrisome, the U.S. has lost credibility as a regional check against Iranian aggression. Iran demonstrated that it could shut down the strait, and the U.S. could not be counted on to reopen it. Iran was also able to hit crucial infrastructure targets throughout the region, including Qatar’s gas fields, which could take years to repair.

Meanwhile, U.S. allies (particularly NATO) have been taken aback by Trump’s erratic behavior during the conflict. On Easter Sunday, Trump posted on Truth Social, “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” He followed it up two days later with, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” His words were swiftly criticized by the chief of the United Nations and the pope.

[Read: The forgotten war that Iran already won]

If the United States is on worse footing in many respects than before the war, Iran may be on better footing.

Iran has survived this war battered but sounding triumphant, and it has good reason to be. It has weathered the best punch the U.S. could throw, while keeping the strait closed all the way to a cease-fire. Its oil infrastructure remains intact, and it has demonstrated the capacity for mutually assured economic destruction with neighboring nations. The regime’s hold on power remains, and appears to be getting stronger and harsher. Iran actually increased oil production and revenue during the conflict. It is still in possession of near-weapons-grade uranium.

All of these facts support Iranian claims of victory even before considering the terms of the cease-fire, which lift the sanctions that crippled its economy. It also grants Iran hegemony over the strait in perpetuity, creating a steady flow of income and de facto control over the most important waterway on Earth. Iran had neither of these things at the outset of the conflict.

As recently as January, the Iranian regime was dealing with internal unrest over the economy severe enough to threaten its survival. Khamenei responded with a crackdown that killed thousands. Now, between control of the strait, additional oil revenue, and removal of sanctions, the Iranian economy may begin to recover. This could reduce internal unrest. If the United States had waited, some observers believe, the regime might have eventually collapsed on its own. Instead, it has been fortified.

The Forgotten War That Iran Already Won

2026-04-08T11:32:00-04:00

The most important war that Iran has fought was largely undeclared and is almost entirely forgotten. It was a war against regional peace and the agreements that might have secured it. Iran began that struggle more than 30 years ago and effectively won it. The current conflict in the Middle East is inseparable from that legacy.

My adolescence was shaped by that forgotten war. As a teenager in Israel in the 1990s, I watched the great hope of the peace process rise and violently die. First came reports of a breakthrough in secret talks in Oslo, and a wave of developments that seemed almost miraculous: agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which until then had been designated a terrorist organization, followed by the normalization of Israel’s relations with parts of the Arab world, culminating in a peace agreement with Jordan.

Almost immediately, and in parallel, came actions meant to derail the peace process. An Israeli far-right extremist massacred dozens of Palestinian worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. That was one terrible event. But those years were defined above all by a wave of terror attacks directed at Israelis, carried out by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. These groups aimed to destroy any possibility of compromise because they saw it as a betrayal of the Palestinian cause and of their fanatical vision of Islam. They introduced a brutal new tool to the conflict: suicide bombings. Supporting the Palestinian extremists, not yet fully visible, was Iran.

[Eliot A. Cohen: The strategic follies of the Islamic Republic]

The Oslo Accords would have met with substantial right-wing resistance in Israel anyway—but the bombings and sense of lost personal security sharply intensified this. The political logic was straightforward: Only months earlier, the country had signed agreements with a terrorist organization, and now buses were exploding. Benjamin Netanyahu, then the leader of the opposition, saw a dramatic rise in his political fortunes, as the far right railed against Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

I was 16 years old when I attended the first demonstration of my life, in November 1995, in Tel Aviv. It was a rally in support of the peace process and Rabin, and I came with friends from the small town between Haifa and Tel Aviv where I grew up. As the event reached its end, we heard that Rabin had been shot by a Jewish assassin—a right-wing extremist who sought to sabotage the peace process.

Many people imagine that Rabin’s assassination was what killed the peace process, but this is not exactly the case. Shimon Peres, Rabin’s successor, was committed to continuing the talks, and public opinion still largely supported doing so. In Palestinian society, too, only a minority opposed the Oslo Accords. That Hamas persisted in its suicide attacks, however, fueled a growing skepticism among Israelis. And Israel responded to those attacks by erecting checkpoints and enforcing general closures, cutting Palestinians off from jobs in Israel, which eroded the agreements’ popularity among Palestinians.

None of this was accidental. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, along with Hezbollah, were waging a war against the normalization of Israel’s relations with its neighbors. They had one state ally willing to provide funding, training, and planning for that struggle: Iran, whose supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, described Yasser Arafat, an architect of the Oslo Accords, as “both a traitor and a fool.”

Hassan Salameh, a senior Hamas commander convicted of planning attacks that killed dozens of Israelis in 1996, said that he went to Iran for weapons training and instruction in assembling bombs. One of the attacks he planned was a bombing that took place in the run-up to Israeli elections and helped tip that year’s vote toward Likud. Israel’s military intelligence reportedly assessed that Iran, aiming to weaken the peace process, wanted Netanyahu to win. Which he did—by 30,000 votes, after having been the underdog throughout the race.

A U.S. federal court later described 1995–96—the period covering both Rabin’s assassination and Netanyahu’s rise to power—as a golden age for Iranian support of Hamas. The court found that Hamas received at least $25 million and up to $50 million during those years. More broadly, Iran was channeling from $100 million to $200 million annually—the equivalent of roughly $200 million to $400 million in today’s dollars—to militant organizations that were generally opposed to the peace process. For Hamas, an organization founded only eight years earlier, the sum was staggering.

Iran was not solely responsible for the rise of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or for the structural failures of the Oslo Accords. Palestinian opposition to the agreements, even if initially a minority view, was not fringe, nor was it confined to Islamist organizations. The belief that Israel ought not to exist, and that Palestinian liberation could be achieved only through force, was embedded in Palestinian politics even before the founding of Fatah. Iran exploited and amplified this worldview, but it did not create it.

The Israeli right—not only the far right—also worked to delegitimize the peace process, and to create “facts on the ground,” a favored expression of Israelis for the expansion of settlements. Netanyahu pledged to continue the peace process, met with Arafat, and transferred additional territory to the Palestinian Authority. Yet he regarded the accords as a “terrible mistake,” and later took pride in having prevented the establishment of a Palestinian state. Since 1996, the Israeli right has won all but three elections, and its leaders have been largely determined to halt negotiated territorial compromises with the Palestinians.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is rooted in a long and tortured history, and the failure to achieve a final status agreement needs no external explanation. Yet Iran made itself an indispensable part of this story. It actively sought to collapse the peace process. Suicide bombings were but one instrument to this end. Hassan Nasrallah, the slain leader of Hezbollah, Iran’s most important proxy, later explained that resistance to the Oslo Accords, which his group clearly saw as a threat, led to heightened cooperation among Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Even so, the peace efforts persisted for at least two decades. They produced real changes on the ground, including the creation of administrative zones that still structure governance of the West Bank, as well as ceremonies, economic investments, and a Nobel Peace Prize. But running beneath it all was a determined, well-funded campaign of violence against any meaningful compromise. The result was hundreds of deaths, then thousands.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Three things the consensus gets wrong about the Iran war]

In the 1990s, most Israelis supported a two-state solution; in 2013, roughly half still did; and by 2025, only about one in five still believed such a solution was possible, according to the Pew Research Center. In 1996, Fatah—the faction that signed the agreements with Israel—led Palestinian politics. Currently, according to Khalil Shikaki, a prominent Palestinian pollster, Hamas consistently outperforms Fatah, even though it still falls short of a majority.

Today the Middle East is consumed by a confrontation that began when Hamas attacked Israel on the morning of October 7, 2023. Hamas’s indispensable benefactor was the same Iran that has long opposed any normalization with Israel. In 1993, Iran’s target was Israeli-Palestinian peace. By 2023, it was the prospect of normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Hamas likely also had other motives—concerns about the Temple Mount, for example, and a belief that Israeli society was weak. But once again, violence succeeded in foreclosing a political opening before it could become irreversible.

In the current American-Israeli conflict with Iran, a two-week cease-fire has been announced. But the outcome of the war will ultimately depend on the terms of a final agreement, if one is reached. The debate over the present war is legitimate, and the aversion to open-ended conflict is hard-won. But when we speak of the cost of confronting Iran, we should also acknowledge the cost of not doing so. Three decades ago, a political settlement between Israelis and Palestinians was within reach. All sides made mistakes, and the record of folly is long. But folly alone does not explain what happened. One country—Iran—made the destruction of that possibility its manifest destiny.

Tehran has already won one consequential war: the war against Israeli-Palestinian peace. That victory has shaped the region for decades. If Iran wins this war, too, expect more of the same. Maybe bloodier.

A New Geopolitical Reality Is Here

2026-04-08T10:24:00-04:00

The E-3 Sentry, with its distinctive rotating radar dome, is a flying command center that allows American forces to see and coordinate the battlefield. In recent weeks, Iran destroyed one on a runway in Saudi Arabia and reportedly damaged another. The United States has only a handful of E-3s deployed to the Middle East and a limited global fleet, making the aircraft one of the country’s most strategically valuable assets.

Iran probably did not act alone. A Chinese satellite firm, MizarVision, published imagery of U.S. military movements that could have aided targeting. The Daily Telegraph also reported that China provided Iran with sodium perchlorate, a precursor used for solid missile propellant. And China isn’t the only power that assisted Iran. U.S. intelligence assessments indicate that Russia supplied Iran with intelligence to target U.S. forces and advanced drone capabilities.

The Trump administration has not commented on China’s support for Iran. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News that Russian assistance “does not really matter,” and on another occasion said that it “is not making a difference” to U.S. military operations.

[Read: Three things the consensus gets wrong about the Iran war]

Meanwhile, in a press conference on Monday—a day before Donald Trump announced a two-week cease-fire with Iran—he hammered U.S. allies, saying that NATO hasn’t “helped at all.” “It’s not just NATO,” he went on. “You know who else didn’t help us? South Korea didn’t help us. You know who else didn’t help us? Australia didn’t help us. You know who else didn’t help us? Japan.”

The war has exposed the contradictions of the Trump administration’s geopolitical worldview. Under this president, the United States has rewarded Russia, ignored China, punished Europe, and abandoned its Asian allies and partners to an economic crisis that it helped set in motion.

During the Cold War, one superpower frequently offered indirect help to the enemies of the other. The Soviet Union supported North Vietnam and North Korea, while the United States backed Afghanistan’s resistance to the Soviet invasion. This dynamic was largely absent from America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which occurred at a time when great-power competition was far more muted than it is now.

But today, conditions have again changed. In Iran, Russia would likely take the opportunity to inflict costs on U.S. forces if the cease-fire breaks down and the U.S. deploys ground troops. China is more risk averse and probably wouldn’t directly help Iran fight the United States, but it seems comfortable with providing dual-use goods, such as missile fuel, which also has civilian applications, and commercial-satellite imagery.

Russia’s and China’s assistance to Iran is part of a broader alignment of U.S. adversaries. Since the start of the Ukraine war, Moscow has deepened its ties with China, North Korea, and Iran. China has helped Russia rebuild its military capacity far more quickly than would otherwise have been possible, supplying machine tools, microelectronics, and other crucial technologies while cooperating on drone production. North Korea has provided millions of rounds of artillery ammunition, rockets, missiles, and even troops. Iran has supplied ballistic missiles as well as drones and assistance in manufacturing them.

Russia has not received this help for free. In return, it has transferred valuable military technology to each of these countries, including for fighter jets, air defenses, satellites and missiles, and submarines. Moscow and Pyongyang have signed a mutual-defense treaty, and North Korea has benefited significantly from Russian military and economic assistance. Russia and China don’t have a formal alliance treaty, but Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have met more than 50 times and deepened their military, economic, and technological cooperation.

The Trump administration has still somehow failed to recognize the significance of this shift. In 2025, the U.S. intelligence community warned about the risks of adversary cooperation; then, in 2026, without new evidence, it dismissed those concerns as overstated. The National Security Strategy did not address the issue, and no senior Trump-administration official has spoken publicly about North Korea’s role in the Ukraine war.

Rather, Trump seems to believe that there are no fixed blocs, and that he can work pragmatically with almost all countries, regardless of their geopolitical orientation. After the Iran war broke out, Trump lifted oil sanctions on Russia, compounding the massive financial boom it enjoyed from the increase in oil prices. The administration continues to pursue a major trade deal with China, at the expense of competing with China strategically.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has focused its ire on Europe for withholding support for the war in Iran. Trump called NATO a “paper tiger” and said that he is seriously considering pulling out of it. In practice, most European allies have facilitated U.S. operations with bases, airspace, and logistics. Only one, Spain, has imposed a blanket ban on assistance, but that decision has had little practical impact on the war.

Before the cease-fire, Trump had repeatedly said that Europe should act to open the Strait of Hormuz because it gets much of its oil from there, whereas the U.S. gets almost none. (Yesterday, Iran said it has agreed to allow ships safe passage through the waterway if they coordinate with its military. The details of the agreement, however, remain unclear.) But according to the International Energy Agency, only about 4 percent of the crude oil that transits the strait goes to Europe. Trump had also claimed that the strait was safe to patrol, which was clearly not true, because the U.S. Navy was unwilling to escort oil tankers through it.

Trump has rejected help that would have made a real difference. Ukrainian forces have spent years developing techniques for intercepting Iranian drones at scale, precisely the threat the Gulf States have faced. President Volodymyr Zelensky offered to assist. Trump could have embedded Ukrainian advisers in Riyadh or Abu Dhabi, turning hard-won battlefield knowledge into a force multiplier at minimal cost. Instead, he waved it away, saying, “We don’t need their help in drone defense. We know more about drones than anybody.”

[Read: No good way out]

The consequences of the energy crisis are particularly visible in Asia. Asian economies receive roughly 80 percent of the crude oil and almost 90 percent of the liquefied natural gas that transit the Strait of Hormuz, making them acutely vulnerable to disruption. The region also relies heavily on the Gulf States for refined products, including fertilizer, chemicals, and industrial fuel. Evan Feigenbaum of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace paints a “grim picture” for Asia weeks into the war—including school closures, rationing, work-from-home directives, and water shortages—owing to fuel price increases or shortages caused by the conflict. The two-week cease-fire is unlikely to immediately resolve these issues; shipping through the strait may still be reduced compared to prewar levels.

The United States is nowhere to be found as Asian allies cope with the worst energy crisis in 50 years. There has been no G-20 emergency meeting. No visit by the Treasury secretary to the region. No acknowledgment of the problem. Just a lambasting of U.S. treaty allies for not joining in.

The Iran war came on the back of a year in which the U.S. has levied tariffs on its allies and partners without much forethought or strategy. In the absence of U.S. leadership, Asian nations were seeking to cut deals with Tehran, more out of desperation to avert economic disaster than from any geopolitical preference. If the strait does not fully open under the cease-fire, that pattern could continue.

The Iran war has laid bare a new geopolitical reality. America’s adversaries are becoming more coordinated, sharing resources and capabilities in ways that amplify their power, while America’s global alliances, long its greatest asset, are neglected and fragmenting. The United States is, in effect, moving toward a world in which it faces more connected opponents with a less cohesive coalition of its own. This is a major shift with profound implications for U.S. national security—and it’s one that the Trump administration shows no sign of recognizing, let alone reversing.

Trump’s Fundamental Misunderstanding in Iran

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

Updated at 10:33 a.m. ET on April 7, 2026

One of the U.S. government’s recurring mistakes about Iran has been to conflate the country’s national interests with regime interests. The two are in many ways opposites. What benefits the Iranian people—global economic reintegration, diplomatic recognition, investment, normalcy—threatens a regime that operates an extensive mafia and thrives in isolation. The carrots that America offers the nation are sticks to the men who rule it. And the sticks that America wields against the regime—isolation, conflict, and chaos—are carrots to men whose power depends on all three.

This morning, Trump offered a jarring illustration of this dynamic when he posted on social media: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will.”

This is the Islamic Republic’s survival paradox: What makes the regime thrive makes the nation suffer, and what would allow the nation to thrive threatens the regime’s survival. As a result, the most consequential deliberations of the Iran war have been not between Washington and Tehran but between the American president and himself. Donald Trump has vacillated between Neville Chamberlain and Attila the Hun, threatening to walk away one day and to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age” the next. Tehran, in contrast, has had the benefit of clarity: Its ideology is resistance, its strategy is chaos, and its endgame is survival.

Trump is a president with no fixed foreign-policy principles, facing a regime led by men so loyal to the ideals of the 1979 revolution, most notably resistance against America and Israel, that they call themselves “principlists.” This revolutionary worldview serves as both a glue maintaining the regime’s cohesion and a shackle holding the nation down. The country will never advance while still committed to that ideology. But without it, the regime may not survive.

[Read: The real intelligence failure in Iran]

This is why Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff’s repeated suggestion that Iran could rejoin “the league of nations” fundamentally misread the regime he was dealing with. It is why Trump’s threat to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age does not move men who are prepared to burn down their own country and their own people rather than relinquish their power or their ideology. And it is why some Iranian officials have welcomed the war as a distraction from the country’s internal challenges.

As a former real-estate developer who appointed fellow developers as his envoys, Trump has no mental framework for this adversary. In real estate, both sides want a transaction. But the U.S.-Iran relationship is not a negotiation of that sort. It is a cold war in which one side views normalization as a greater threat to its survival than conflict. The late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei chose martyrdom over normalization. Mojtaba, his son and successor, will likely make the same choice.

Trump’s hope was to turn Iran from an adversary into a partner, as he believes he did with Venezuela. The Islamic Republic is different. For the regime’s remaining leadership, hostility to America is not a bargaining chip; it is the foundation of the regime’s identity and sense of its own legitimacy—what political scientists call “ontological security.” Any deal that requires abandoning it is a greater existential threat than war. You cannot negotiate away the thing that justifies your existence.

Trump speaks about the systematic assassinations of Iran’s leadership with the nonchalance of a mob don. “Leave the gun; take the cannoli,” goes the famous line from The Godfather. “Most of the people we had in mind are dead,” Trump said about political succession in Iran. “Pretty soon, we’re not going to know anybody.” Iran’s leadership, in contrast, is steeped in a Shiite political culture premised on the 680 C.E. martyrdom of Imam Hussein. So long as this regime remains in power, it will mourn, and seek to avenge, the martyrdom of the 86-year-old Khamenei. For Trump, Khamenei’s killing was just business: “I got him before he got me,” he said of the Iranian leader.

The Islamic Republic’s paramount goal is survival. It is willing to destroy the country, and its people, rather than cede power. In the near term, that survival looks achievable: The regime retains enough coercive capacity to hold on. In the medium term, it is far less certain. But men fighting for their lives from bunkers do not think in the medium term. They think about tomorrow.

The assassination of Iran’s top leadership has left no figure with both the power and the will to deliver a major compromise with Washington. But Trump has reportedly pinned his hopes on Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf emerging as the pragmatist willing to break with the past and partner with Washington.

Ghalibaf is a former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander, speaker of Parliament, and close adviser to the new supreme leader. He harbors ambitions of becoming Iran’s nationalist strongman—the man who saves the country from ruin. But ambition is not the same as capacity. He is a creature of the IRGC, the institution most committed to the regime’s ideological survival, and the war has narrowed rather than expanded the space for pragmatic maneuvering. His public statements on X—a combination of grandiose threats, anti-Semitism, and calculated appeals to the anti-imperialist left—are those of a man aspiring to lead the regime, not change it. The Islamic Republic is a path-dependent aircraft with neither a captain willing to turn the wheel nor a crew willing to let him.

Khamenei’s lasting legacy was to spend four decades purging pragmatists and filling the upper ranks of the regime with fellow principlists—men whose entire identity and advancement depended on ideological fealty to the revolution. The result is a system that has selected against the very qualities a transition would require. Nobody wants to be the Iranian Gorbachev—and Khamenei made sure there was no one capable of playing the role.

Trump’s—and America’s—predicament has no quick fix. A regime that came to power in 1979 by seizing the American embassy in Tehran and taking its personnel hostage now holds the global economy hostage, effectively controlling 20 percent of the world’s oil exports. Tehran has begun treating the Strait of Hormuz as its own Panama Canal, running a protection racket in which vessel owners are permitted safe passage only by obtaining IRGC pre-approval and paying tolls in Chinese yuan.

In its 47 years of existence, the Islamic Republic has made perhaps two major compromises. The first was its 1988 decision to end the Iran-Iraq war—after eight years of fighting and an estimated 200,000 Iranian deaths. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini famously likened that concession to drinking poison. The second was the 2015 nuclear deal with Barack Obama. In both cases, Iran had come under existential economic pressure, and in both it was offered a diplomatic exit that did not require it to abandon its revolutionary identity. Many of Iran’s people have concluded that this identity is the problem. But a critical mass of true believers has made the regime too rigid to bend and too ruthless to break.

[Read: Why Trump thinks he can walk away from the Strait of Hormuz]

Whenever this war ends, Iran’s leaders will inherit a country in ruins. And they will find themselves reviled both internally and internationally. Tehran’s stated terms for ending the war include reassurances that it won’t be attacked again, and reparations for the billions of dollars in damages it has endured. But so long as the Islamic Republic’s ideology and behavior remain unchanged—namely its commitment to “Death to America” and the destruction of Israel—neither condition is remotely achievable. No American president or Israeli prime minister will credibly promise not to attack a committed adversary, and the U.S. Congress will never vote for reparations to a government that has spent 47 years fighting America. Indeed, so long as Tehran aspires to rebuild its nuclear program, its missile arsenal, and its network of regional proxies, this war will likely have a sequel.

History suggests that an overconfident Tehran will overplay its hand. Its ideology compels it to pursue vengeance over advantage, even when the national interest demands restraint. This is the same regime that held American diplomats hostage for 444 days, extracting maximum humiliation from the United States at the cost of Iran’s own international standing. It prolonged its war with Iraq six years beyond the point when a favorable settlement was achievable. Believing itself the Middle East’s new hegemon, it was the lone country to publicly praise Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel—leading to the destruction of its regional proxies.

Trump is measuring this war not by what it will achieve but by what it has destroyed. History will judge it by its lasting impact on Iran, the Middle East, and the broader global order, once the bombs have stopped. Ordinary Iranians—many of whom placed undue hopes in swift American salvation—are left to navigate, for now, between two hells: a cruel regime that has spent nearly half a century repressing them, and a war that has so far deepened their despair rather than ended it.

The Iranian Opposition’s Urgent Task

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

The Iranian opposition has never lacked for a common enemy. The Islamic Republic has furnished no end of shared grievances, frustrated hopes, and collective traumas. And yet, its adversaries have long sorted themselves into mutually hostile subgroups. Now the deepest rupture is between those who support former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi as a transitional figure and those who oppose him.

Perversely, this division might prove to be the one that heals.

Last Saturday, in Grapevine, Texas, Pahlavi spoke to throngs of his supporters at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Iranians made up a large proportion of CPAC attendees this year, and they greeted Pahlavi with passionate cheers.

In his speech, Pahlavi pledged to lead a transition to a “free and democratic Iran.” He called on President Trump to continue the American-Israeli military operation against Iran, in the hope of displacing a regime he decried for placing a “sea of blood” between itself and its people. “President Trump is making America great again,” he concluded. “I intend to make Iran great again.”

[Arash Azizi: The ‘existential anxiety’ of the Islamic Republic]

Pahlavi’s star turn in Texas showcased both the appeal and the limitations of his project.

He rallied an impressive number of supporters, who shouted his name at CPAC just as their counterparts did in street demonstrations in Iran. But his unbridled support for the war and his chumminess with the American right have made him a polarizing figure among Iranians. Worse, the American president he praised and beseeched has shown little trust in Pahlavi and seems much more interested in dealing with the current leadership in Tehran.

The day of Pahlavi’s CPAC speech, I was in London, where about 400 Iranians who opposed the regime but were skeptical of Pahlavi had gathered for the launch of something called the Iran Freedom Congress. The groups represented in London had spent years in bitter arguments with one another. The task of the congress was to explore the possibility of building a shared political vehicle.

In the two decades I have spent observing and participating in Iranian opposition politics, I had never seen a meeting so broadly representative as the one in London. Perhaps that was in part because the event’s main organizer was not himself a member of any one diaspora activist group; rather, he was a tech entrepreneur and former World Bank analyst named Majid Zamani, who had spent more than five months in prison for supporting street protests in 2009.

Zamani’s organizing team included such diverse partners as Shariar Ahy, a monarchist and disgruntled former adviser to Pahlavi; Reza Alijani, a religious-nationalist writer; the filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf; Esmayil Abdi, a former teacher and a trade unionist; Mahdie Golrou, a former student activist and a secular feminist; and the leaders of some of the political parties of Iran’s ethnic minorities.

Some of those who came to London were seasoned exiles, but others, including Zamani himself, were more recent arrivals from Iran and had robust links to political figures inside the country. Among the participants were socialists, ex-royalists, liberals, feminists, and nationalists. (I’d been invited as an academic and paid my own way, though the organizers had offered a full ride to all). Many of us had faced one another in online or televised debates in the past. In London, we listened to one another’s speeches and sipped coffee together during breaks. The notion that we might one day be part of the same coalition did not seem so far-fetched.

The London conference was not the first of its kind. More than 700 Iranians came together in Berlin in 2004 to found the United Republicans of Iran. That organization still exists (and its leaders attended the London meeting), but many of the original participants dropped out of it because of differences over tactics and strategy, and the group that remains is small and ineffectual.

The conditions of this moment, however, confront the non-royalist Iranian opposition with a new urgency. Iran is at war, and its regime, after massacring protesters in January, has now hardened in combat. And then there is Pahlavi. The former crown prince has shown little interest in working with others unless they first accept his mantle. Last year, his group organized a meeting in Munich where speakers professed their loyalty to the would-be king; one even prostrated himself before Pahlavi in the style of the Muslim prayer, declaring that he had “no religion” but that Pahlavi was his “Mecca.” Many in the former crown prince’s camp take a sharply antagonistic stance toward the rest of the opposition.

As a result, people in rival groups seem now to understand that they need to come together if they are to offer an alternative. (Zamani’s organizers invited Pahlavi to the London gathering, but there was never a real chance that he would show up.) London was a step in that direction.

[From the May 2026 issue: Someday in Tehran]

Bringing the non-monarchist opposition together was a feat. But uniting it around a common program will be harder. The congress avoided pushing resolutions or holding debates on the most contentious political questions. Chief among these was the war, which many of those present, particularly those on the left, strongly opposed; others, including some from the Kurdish parties, argued that ending the war under current conditions might help prolong the regime. The attendees also differed over the future of the congress itself—whether it should simply provide a forum for discussion among activists or become a membership organization and a united political front.

The Iranian regime is deeply unpopular with its populace. Four waves of protest since 2017 have explicitly demanded its overthrow. But the opposition has lacked an organization and representative leaders. If it wants to have any chance of dislodging the regime, it must build a disciplined force that can overcome its differences to unite around a common agenda. It must also forge links with the opposition inside Iran and perhaps even with elements within the regime who could help ease an eventual transition.

The London meeting made me hopeful that such a trajectory just might be possible. But obstacles remain. As if to remind us of this, as the meeting wrapped up, Pahlavi supporters surrounded the building to protest the congress. Fearful of a violent confrontation, the London police escorted us out a back door.

Someday in Tehran

2026-04-01T12:45:00-04:00

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Like Donald Trump, I, too, once underestimated the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the fall of 2004, as an underemployed freelance journalist drawn to heady stories about international politics, I had the bright idea of traveling to the notoriously closed country on a tourist visa. Press visas for Iran were hard to come by, and my travel was exploratory—I had no particular assignment. My profile was low, I figured. Who would care if, between the obligatory sightseeing expeditions, I rattled around Iranian cities meeting political analysts, philosophers, students, filmmakers, and the relatives of Iranian expats I knew?

The Islamic Republic was not to be messed with in this way. Its visa regime was deadly serious; so was the official paranoia about foreigners. American tourists were required to travel with a specially vetted guide. For four weeks, I strained to see past the diminutive figure of a young woman I’ll call Pardis, who pretended to be a tour guide while I pretended to be a tourist. Pardis excelled at her job, which was not only to make sure that I adhered to the terms of my visa, but also to report on all of my movements and conversations, and to obfuscate everything I saw.

One day I watched a bus disgorge a troop of uniformed Basij militiamen at an intersection in central Tehran.

“Who are they?” I asked Pardis.

“Oh,” she said. “They’re a youth group. Sometimes they help the police.”

Because Pardis stood between me and all that I was truly curious about, I studied her. She was not a dour Islamist but a fun-loving 31-year-old who had hair flowing out of her headscarf and risqué online flirtations with men overseas. She was an orphan, unlucky in love, and ambitious in her minder-ing, circumstances that rendered her marginal—an unmarried career woman living with a roommate. She was also relentlessly trivial, with a knack for diverting any potentially substantive encounter I might have with her country or anyone in it into an endless stream of repetitive inside jokes and girlish banter.

[Read: The ‘existential anxiety’ of the Islamic Republic]

We wandered through bazaars, threatening to buy each other the ugliest items we saw—a giant pair of red satin underwear, a wig, a dowdy zebra-print skirt. We flew to Shiraz on IranAir, a black-turbaned cleric across the aisle from us. Pardis took out a bottle of polish, began painting her nails, and smiled at me impishly. “In front of the mullah!” she said in her little voice. (He was absorbed in opening his airline-issue carton of apple juice.)

Pardis was not invested in anything that the Islamic Republic seemed to care about. But she was, for professional reasons, invested in exercising control over me. For my safety, she insisted, I could never be without her protective presence. But when she entered a room—even, memorably, one where I sat talking with members of her own family about their feelings about the hijab—everyone stopped talking.

Privately, she’d tell me about her love interests. Relationships between unmarried men and women were commonplace but forbidden under the Islamic Republic. Suddenly she’d freeze in fear and implore me not to tell anyone, or backtrack and claim that she was talking about a friend. Toward the end of our month together, in the shadow of a breakup, she sat smoking and brooding in my hotel room. I told her that Iranian women seemed forced to live complicated lives.

She replied with uncharacteristic bluntness: “Better to say that women here find ways to kill lots of things inside themselves.”

Pardis was not interested in politics, but I was. What had drawn me to Iran was a political and philosophical movement that seemed unique in the Muslim world. A circle of the most radical revolutionary elites—hostage takers, religious philosophers, former officials, even founders of the security forces—had fallen out of political favor in the early 1990s and spent the better part of a decade remaking themselves as proponents of incremental democratic reform. They produced an entire theoretical literature that drew on Western and Islamic sources; they mobilized young people to support their campaigns for elected office; and they tried to clean up abuses in some parts of the government they ran. The reformists were insiders who intended not to destroy the regime, but to liberalize it. They sought to make the supreme leader a benign figurehead—like the Queen of England, they sometimes said. The supreme leader had other plans.

My first visit to the country was comically unsuited to exploring any of this. By day, Pardis was obligated to fully occupy my time. Some of what we saw was splendid: palaces and gardens; museums of carpets, miniatures, and Islamic calligraphy; even madrassas and shrines. Then Ramadan set in, and all museums closed. Pardis had us driven around in circles or held me all but captive in her apartment, watching music videos on satellite television. After she dropped me at my hotel in the evenings, I went out to meetings I’d arranged on my own. She was livid when she learned of this. I needed to bring her with me, she insisted, or she’d lose her job. She threatened to sit in my hotel lobby until midnight to make sure I didn’t leave—unless, she said, I agreed to give her the names of everyone I saw.

Sure, I said. I’d give her all of the names before I left. I never intended to do this, and she never again asked me to. Maybe whoever needed to know about my movements already did. Or maybe Pardis covered for me—because she was lonely and considered me a friend, or because she feared she had told me too many of her secrets. Possibly she was simply satisfied that she had already done her job. I returned to New York in relative darkness about the reform movement and loath to write about the one thing I really knew, which was Pardis, and the story of how an otherwise indifferent person comes to hold a stake in a brutal regime—how she forces that stake on others just as it was forced on her.

During the reformist presidency of Mohammad Khatami, from 1997 to 2005, a window opened wide enough for a democratic-minded civil society to draw breath in Iran. A crop of semi-independent newspapers sprouted, along with investigative journalists who dared to write for them. Cultural and philosophical magazines published searching essays on religion and the state. Young people formed NGOs to address an array of civic needs; some ran for newly formed city and provincial councils. Student activism spilled onto the streets.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei did his best to slam this window shut. His henchmen tortured journalists and student activists in prison until they made humiliating confessions on national television. State-linked thugs beat up a philosopher at his lectures and shot a political theorist point-blank on the steps of Tehran’s city hall. Even so, a real infrastructure for democratic change persisted for a time—in the form of people who had the training and experience to run newspapers and civic organizations, citizens who expected these things to be allowed, and the semblance of a political network that connected society to the ministries of the state.

Two presidential elections tested the resilience of this infrastructure. I covered the first of these, in 2005, with a proper journalist’s visa and a minder in her mid-40s who had a deep smoker’s rasp and a loud, insistent warmth. Bahar (also not her real name—for their safety, I’m using pseudonyms for the private citizens I met) belonged to a lost generation of bohemian Boomers whose class and secular social milieu had been violently displaced by the 1979 revolution. Women who had once lived and studied abroad now gathered in homes that smelled of opium smoke, where husbands were absent or idle and grown children seemed adrift. I learned only later of money troubles, past prison sentences, and ethnic- or religious-minority status that must have contributed to the sense of profound isolation in those homes, where it mingled with something louche and lively and almost careless.

Of all the handlers I was assigned to in Iran—I returned in 2006, 2008, and 2012—Bahar was the least beholden to the agency she worked for. I gave her a list of the people I intended to speak with, many of them reformist politicians, student activists, journalists, and former political prisoners. Her boss told her we’d wind up dead, like a photojournalist who had reported near Evin prison a few years before. Bahar was undeterred. The people on my list were heroes to her for standing up to the Islamic Republic, and she would not forfeit the opportunity to meet them. She told her own handlers that my modesty required us to hire a female driver, which is how we managed to get her best friend, Niki, to ferry us around in her red Peugeot.

How to fully convey the eccentricity of my little entourage? Niki had the stark, exaggerated beauty of a fashion model, though she was gaunt and faded, with a thousand-yard stare. She was also mostly bald. She’d first shaved her head in 1979 to taunt the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. By her telling, she went out bareheaded to test the hijab law, which required women to cover their hair.

Where is your scarf ? a Guardsman asked her.

I don’t need one. I have no hair, she said.

Ah, he replied. But you are still a woman.

Now Niki swathed herself in layers of flowing garments that resembled ordinary hijab less than they suggested dervish, flower child, and grim reaper all at once. She, too, wanted to meet the people on my list, and at times she entered the room with us. Bringing Pardis to any meeting had cast a pall of annoyance mixed with fear. Bringing Bahar and Niki added an antic element. They were extravagantly maternal, often starstruck, and prone to tears. One incident remains particularly salient in my memory.

The reformists had flubbed the election I’d come to witness. They ran three candidates, and many liberal-minded Iranians rejected all of them, on the grounds that the reformist project was a failure and Iranian elections were far from free. And so the populist hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—Khamenei’s favorite—surged to the presidency.

The morning the results came in, the red Peugeot was abnormally somber, Bahar and Niki absorbed in a nearly wordless grief. We were on our way to Tarbiat Modares University to see Hashem Aghajari, a reformist intellectual with a revolutionary background and a wooden leg that had replaced the one he’d lost in the Iran-Iraq War. Aghajari had been sentenced to death for a speech he gave in which he said that Muslims need not blindly follow a supreme leader, as though with “shackles around the neck.” Under popular pressure, including an international campaign to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize, the regime had commuted his sentence, but he still lived under the sword of Damocles, and I asked him whether the election results made him fearful.

“We have a saying in Farsi,” Aghajari replied. “ ‘There’s no shade darker than black.’ The worst they can do is execute me. I have prepared myself for that. If I am worried, it is not for myself. It’s for the Iranian people, for young people, today’s generation and future generations. My freedom and my life, and those of one or two people like me, don’t matter. They may take me to prison. I’m ready for that. In this society, we have no freedom to speak or to write. This is a prison, too.”

Outside Aghajari’s office, Bahar, or maybe Niki, motioned for us to sit a moment on a low brick wall in the university courtyard, where the sun beat down, and the two women wept.

“When we have people like this in our country,” Bahar said at last, “why must we have Ahmadinejad as our president?”

The author in Tehran in 2005 (Abbas / Magnum)

Reform was a conundrum like so many others under the Islamic Republic. It demanded cooperation and resistance at the same time—“pressure from below, negotiation at the top,” as one of its theorists articulated the strategy. The trouble was that Khamenei never once indicated that he would negotiate.

A compromise, practically by definition, satisfies no one. Reform was a compromise between hope and resignation. Iranian oppositionists grumbled about the movement’s timidity and its roots in the regime. The alternative, however, was confrontation, and throughout the period of my visits, Iranians were leery of it. The regime’s appetite and capacity for violence were never in doubt, and the country’s last revolution had gone very wrong. The movement behind it was broad-based, including liberals and leftists, but it was the Islamists who had emerged victorious in street battles and in politics, and who sealed their triumph through summary executions and imposed a theocratic state. This was not a distant memory. Mohsen Kadivar, a dissident cleric, once complained to me that his students railed against reform but shied away from rebellion. “If you won’t be the men of revolution,” Kadivar told me he said to them, “then be the boys of reform.”

The last great showing of this meliorist current was the Green Movement of 2009. In that year’s presidential election, liberal-minded Iranians, including many who’d boycotted the 2005 vote, turned out in electrifying force for the moderate reformist candidates Mirhossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. On election day, some polls had barely closed when the regime called an implausible win for Ahmadinejad. Iranians I spoke with were incandescent with fury. Millions poured into the streets, and Mousavi and Karroubi eventually joined them there. The protesters didn’t demand an end to the Islamic Republic, even though many of them undoubtedly wished for it. They followed the cautious, legalistic reformist playbook and simply demanded that the system adhere to its own rules and allow them to elect the relatively moderate insider they’d voted for. They stood silently and held placards that read WHERE IS MY VOTE?

Bahar called me in New York on the day that the crowd was at its maximum in Tehran’s Azadi Square. She was enraptured; the atmosphere was like nothing she had ever known. The barriers of suspicion, private humiliation, and pain that had divided people for decades seemed to drop away in that expanse of shared silence, and the sense of common purpose was like a current passing through the crowd. To her special delight, she saw Aghajari not far from her—maneuvering, unafraid, on his wooden leg.

The Green Movement was the largest, most sustained, and most organized campaign of street protests that the Islamic Republic ever confronted. Foreign commenters sometimes mistook this for the spontaneous cri de coeur of a thwarted presidential campaign, mobilized by Twitter posts, but in fact it was a movement with a history, layers of experienced leaders, painstakingly articulated ideas, a pragmatic strategy, and a networked constituency. Precisely for this reason, the Islamic Republic set about destroying it with bullets, tear gas, batons, and torture.

Ahmadinejad’s first term had already seen the closure of virtually all of the reformist publications and NGOs and the exclusion of reformist candidates from campaigns for most public offices. Now the regime arrested enough of the movement’s leaders and activists to fill an auditorium, where they were paraded, hollow-eyed, in prison pajamas and forced to confess to outlandish conspiracies. Lesser-known young activists were remanded to a fetid metal shipping container in the desert. Many were raped and killed. By 2010, even to speak of or publish a photo of former President Khatami was forbidden; the cautious reform movement was dubbed “the sedition,” and Mousavi and Karroubi were placed under a draconian house arrest that would endure for a decade and a half.

When the Arab Spring came to Tunisia, Egypt, and other countries not long after the Green Movement was crushed, I ached for Iran. Of all the countries in the Middle East, up until 2009, Iran had perhaps the most credible infrastructure for democratic change—and one of the most obdurate autocracies.

My fifth and last visit to Iran, in 2012, felt in many ways like a bookend to the first, but with the coercion unmasked. Foreign journalists had been mostly excluded from the country since 2009, but three years later, I was part of a small group permitted to observe a parliamentary election. We were marched onto buses and driven to photo ops not of our choosing; even the top bureaucrats assigned to corral us made rueful jokes rather than pretend, per usual, that any of this was for our safety. Talking with a Green Movement activist required an assignation in a moving car after dark. Once again, I found myself studying the apparatus that stood in the way of studying anything else.

Just hours before I left the country, agents from the IRGC apprehended me for questioning because I had left my hotel at night without a minder. They interrogated me about my movements, my contacts, the time I asked my minder to take me to a butcher to confirm popular complaints about the price of chicken. “You have not behaved,” an interrogator told me—and, more ominously: “We think you’re not a journalist. We think you’re a spy.”

If they had actually believed this, they might have detained me indefinitely. But in the end I think they meant only to intimidate me. In the third hour of our interview, the interrogator seized my belongings and left the room with them. He returned in a fury and threw a folder of mine on his desk.

“Do you think we are not intelligent?” he demanded. “We’re keeping your receipts.” He waved in front of me the ones I’d collected for reimbursement for my travel expenses on my return. (I later realized that he may have thought I’d kept them to document the inflation that the government was at that moment trying to conceal from its citizens.) “And we are keeping this.” He held up one of the two extra passport-size photos I’d had taken for my visa. But I was a journalist, he conceded, and he let me go.

By that time, Iran’s democratic infrastructure had mostly been torched. But the yearning and anger it had once harnessed only grew and became more confrontational. At times, opposition still attached itself to elections—to whoever among the allowable candidates represented the most liberal edge of the possible. But it also exploded in street protests of a qualitatively new kind, such as those that erupted in 2017 and early 2018, when members of the lower classes in provincial cities openly reviled the Islamic Republic and chanted “Death to Khamenei.” For another hot minute, the world held its breath for the Islamic Republic to collapse. Instead, it killed.

To imagine that this cycle would repeat itself in 2022 was almost unbearable. Outraged by the death of a young woman in the custody of the morality police, women and teenage girls made hijab the symbolic center of their revolt. The headscarf was both a tool and a symbol of suffocation: Removing it publicly, en masse, was an act of civil disobedience without precedent under the Islamic Republic. Although the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising was violently quelled like all the rest—some 500 dead, maybe 20,000 in prison, families forbidden even to publicly mourn—it left a uniquely durable legacy, in that women began appearing uncovered in public with relative impunity. This was something new and promising. But it did not bring democracy or suggest what could.

Iran was and remains a heartbreaker. Where else is the civic spirit so enduring, and so unyieldingly denied? Time and again, the Islamic Republic proved itself implacable before even the most rudimentary of its subjects’ desires. It valued neither their lives nor any legitimacy that their consent could confer on the state. It refused them the dignity of small freedoms that might have cost the system nothing. And it would not even afford them a stake in prosperity: Over the course of the first two decades of the 21st century, a largely middle-class country was driven to penury, not only because of international sanctions, but because of the voracious corruption of the IRGC, which Khamenei allowed and encouraged as a means of hoarding power.

I’ll admit that I distanced myself from Iran. My run-in with the IRGC had made traveling there again impossible, and I questioned the value of what I could observe from afar. My network of sources outside the country had always been eclectic. Now it spanned a venomously polarized diaspora that traded accusations—of complicity with Iran’s foreign enemies, and with the ever more hated regime.

To hope for change in Iran was quixotic; to bet against it seemed cruel. Each upswell of protest presented a breathtaking display of youthful courage shadowed by near-certain tragedy. Eternally optimistic, a friend inside Iran offered me a metaphor: If it takes 100 blows of the axe to cut down a tree, he wrote to me on WhatsApp in 2022, you don’t say the first 99 were useless.

But the Islamic Republic seemed to be made of ironwood. It was not one man’s dictatorship. The revolutionaries had built institutions, both civilian and military, that perpetuated themselves. Networks of violence ran deep, through virtually every power center and organ of the system, and the regime retained a considerable base of ideological support in both the populace and the security apparatus. Time and again, asked to choose between their neighbors and their leaders, Iran’s men under arms chose the regime.

Would they really do it? Would they open fire on unarmed crowds of mostly young people, mowing them down by the thousands? This past January, the Islamic Republic made its security forces the instrument of an atrocity of world-historic proportions, killing at least 6,000 and possibly more than 30,000 protesters. Something broke inside of nearly every Iranian I knew. Or ignited: a fireball of rage and trauma. How could one live under such a regime? But what form of resistance was possible? One exiled activist told me privately that she fantasized about returning as an armed resistance fighter: “The reality is that we have reached a point, a dead end, where you almost have to be a partisan to win. Otherwise you have to accept that they will kill you and move on.”

When American and Israeli bombs began blasting their homeland, many of my old friends and contacts hitched their country’s epic hopes to Trump’s epic fury. No nonviolent effort had dislodged or even shaken the regime; here at last was hard power. The alternative was the Islamic Republic, forever. But others among my old network were aghast. The hard power in question was wielded by outsiders for who knew what purpose, against a continuously widening ambit of targets. One friend texted me to ask: If the Iranians celebrating such violent destruction of their country come to power by means of it, can they really be said to be pro-democratic? How will they treat their opponents?

Lately I’ve been wondering whether a fault line has always run through the opposition, or if what I’m seeing now is new. On one side are those who still believe that despite the outcome of the 1979 revolution, its broadest animating impulses—the rejection of monarchy and American dominion, and the assertion of Iran’s sovereignty over its resources and political fate—are sacrosanct. On the other are those who have concluded that not only the Islamic Republic, but the revolution itself, was a wrong turn. There is a potent symbolism in their embrace of the son of the deposed shah as a leader for the future, and their acceptance of American force as the means for empowering him.

The views of these camps are anathema to each other. I am trying to listen respectfully to both—though truth be told, I cannot at the time of this writing imagine a way that this war ends in Iranian liberation, or a way that the Islamic Republic, with or without the war, decides to yield. But how can I say these things, or even think them? Not when every phone call ends with a promise—that we’ll continue the conversation, someday, in Tehran.

This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “Someday in Tehran.”

The Autocrat’s Dilemma

2026-04-01T11:30:00-04:00

Donald Trump clearly romanticizes the strongman leadership of Chinese President Xi Jinping. On Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2024, Trump praised Xi for being “a brilliant guy. He controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.” As China’s government eliminated term limits on the presidency in 2018, Trump opined that “maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day.”

What Trump has either missed or ignored is how Xi’s ruthlessness has served to make China weaker. Indeed, Xi’s reign in Beijing illustrates, especially now, what happens when an autocrat’s personal interests run counter to his country’s needs.

In late January, Xi sacked China’s top general, Zhang Youxia, the rare Chinese officer with actual combat experience. The government said only that Zhang is under investigation for unspecified violations of law and discipline, but the military’s main newspaper implied that the probe was part of a larger plan to strengthen the military by rooting out corruption. The opacity of China’s government makes it impossible to gauge the validity of any allegations against Zhang, a longtime ally of Xi’s. The timing is also unclear. But in removing Zhang, Xi is sending a signal that no one is safe from his wrath.

This was the most dramatic move in Xi’s campaign to reshape the military’s leadership, which has effectively decapitated the senior ranks of the People’s Liberation Army. Of the 44 officers selected to join the Communist Party’s top-leadership council, 40 have been purged or gone missing since mid-2023, Neil Thomas, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis, told me.

[Michael Schuman: A possible upside to the Iran war]

These moves demonstrate how Xi’s relentless quest for control can perversely sap China’s strength. The turmoil created by Xi’s purges has likely undercut the Chinese military’s “readiness and combat effectiveness” for years, according to a recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The timing is also notable, given the ways Trump’s attacks on Iran and Venezuela have sparked global upheaval and challenged Chinese national interests.

Politics in Communist China—where power struggles are settled in back rooms and the penalty for losing can be death—have always been a dangerous business. But in the 1980s, the Communist Party developed a system of government that orchestrated regular transitions of power, balanced rival interests, encouraged policy discussion, and implemented bold economic reforms. China’s reputation for technocratic pragmatism underpinned the country’s economic success. It seemed safe to assume that China’s economy would eventually surpass even the United States’.

Since taking charge of the party in 2012, Xi has steadily dismantled the system that oversaw three decades of explosive growth by concentrating power in his own hands. He has marginalized party elders, tossed out political rivals, and sidelined members of other factions, which has stifled policy debates and removed checks on his power. Many of Xi’s moves are purportedly about rooting out corruption, but in a political system rife with graft, this tactic enables him to pick off anyone he wishes. In 2022, Xi packed the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, the country’s most powerful governing body, with close associates and political allies. “Personal loyalty to Xi is his absolute priority and a baseline requirement for being promoted to the top leadership,” Thomas said.

Xi has sometimes prized loyalty over experience. Li Qiang, a colleague of Xi’s, had never served in the national government before Xi elevated him to the No. 2 spot in 2023. A year before his promotion to premier, Li had overseen Shanghai’s disastrous coronavirus-pandemic lockdown, which had confined the city’s 25 million residents to their homes for two months. Because these orders were issued without sufficient planning for necessities, many households ran short of food. Officials reinforced stay-at-home orders by erecting fences around some apartment buildings, essentially incarcerating occupants. Babies sick with the virus were forcibly separated from their parents and piled into cribs in crowded wards.

Most national leaders surround themselves with like-minded lieutenants who share their politics and priorities. But in an autocracy with a leader who is quick to promote allies and punish dissenters, officials have far more reason to implement Xi’s policy preferences than to challenge them. The diversity of views that was apparent in the early years of Xi’s tenure has all but evaporated. “The bureaucracy is incentivized to say what they think the leader wants to hear and to hold back recommendations that deviate,” Amanda Hsiao, a director in the China practice at the political-risk consultancy Eurasia Group, told me.

This has granted Xi almost full control of the policy-making process. There is simply no one left at the party’s senior levels with the power—or the incentive—to force Xi to compromise. This overreliance on one man “can be a good thing if Xi makes good decisions, but it can also be very dangerous if Xi makes bad decisions,” Thomas said.

And Xi has made his fair share of poor choices. Trump’s clashes with longtime American allies over trade, the Ukraine war, Greenland, and other matters have left room for Xi to grow China’s power by drawing these countries closer to Beijing. Several European leaders, including the French president, the German chancellor, and the British prime minister, have met with Xi in China in recent months in the hopes of improving relations to balance an unreliable Washington. But Xi sent them all home without making significant concessions on the matters that have strained their relations, including concerns over Beijing’s support for Russian President Vladimir Putin or China’s unfair trade practices that threaten European industry, among other contentious matters.

China’s leadership has appeared even more paralyzed over the country’s mounting economic woes. Xi has avoided reforms that could restore healthy growth, such as tackling the excessive supply and anemic demand behind China’s falling prices and ballooning trade surpluses. Instead, the country’s latest five-year plan, approved by an annual national congress in March, promises to double down on the very strategies Xi prefers, including heavy investments in industry and technology, which will likely exacerbate the economy’s problems.

[Michael Schuman: Rising prices are bad, but plummeting prices are worse]

Despite China’s enormous progress in new industries such as EVs, the economy overall has been underperforming on Xi’s watch. As a share of the global economy, China’s GDP in dollar terms peaked at about 18.5 percent in 2021 and has since fallen to about 16.5 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund.

In purging rivals and enhancing his control, Xi may assume that he is establishing the political stability and predictability that will ensure China’s prosperity. By dismantling the leadership within China’s army, for example, Xi clearly aspires to create a stronger and certainly more loyal military. But by deploying power without restraint and purging whomever he wishes on demand, he is instead creating “uncertainty, instability, and paralysis,” Alexander Davey, an analyst at the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies, told me. The more power Xi pursues, the more political, economic, and military chaos he seems to foment.

Instead of pushing China to liberalize, as recent U.S. presidents have done, Trump has sought to emulate Beijing’s authoritarianism by bullying his political opponents, silencing critics, and demanding unquestioned support from his own party. The lessons of Xi’s hubris seem urgent—and salutary for other countries, including the United States. But any leader who aspires to Xi’s level of power is unlikely to take note.

America Needs to Get Serious About Drones

2026-03-31T07:00:00-04:00

For the past two years, Ukraine has made dramatically effective use of small, cheap drones as complex and deadly tools of warfare. America has paid little attention. So little, in fact, that analysts have been sounding the alarm for some time about the lack of U.S. preparation for the new age of war.

A recent swarm of drones over an American military installation with nuclear weapons ought to change that. During the week of March 9, several waves of 12 to 15 drones flew over Barksdale Air Force Base, in Louisiana. They loitered there for as long as four hours at a time. These were technologically advanced drones, far more sophisticated than those a hobbyist might own. They were also reportedly resistant to jamming.

According to a confidential briefing obtained by ABC News, “After reaching multiple points across the installation, the drones dispersed across sensitive locations on the base,” indicating that the drone operators had a preplanned list of targets to surveil. They may also have been sent to test U.S. defenses.

What makes the incident particularly worrying is that Barksdale is home to the 2nd and 307th Bomb Wings, each with dozens of nuclear-capable B-52H bombers. These aircraft are part of the U.S. nuclear triad of bombers, land-based ballistic missiles, and ballistic-missile-armed submarines. Barksdale houses the Global Strike Command, which controls the Air Force components of the nuclear triad. The United States does not publicly disclose where nuclear weapons are stored, but Barksdale seems a likely location.

Drones the size of those over Barksdale can travel only short distances from their operators, typically about 20 to 50 kilometers. That limitation, plus the nature of the vehicles and the target of their surveillance, strongly suggests that malign foreign actors launched them from inside the United States.

[Simon Shuster: Building tanks while the Ukrainians master drones]

The episode bears an uncanny resemblance to Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb against Russia. Last June, Ukrainian drones concealed inside of pallets on trailers were released to conduct a coordinated, simultaneous attack on several air bases deep inside Russia. About 20 Russian aircraft were reportedly destroyed or damaged, including nuclear-capable Tu-22M3 and Tu-95 bombers. It was the single worst day of the war for the Russian Air Force. The incidents at Barksdale suggest that the U.S. fleet of nuclear-capable bombers is just as vulnerable as Russia’s was.

Barksdale hasn’t been the only target. Also this month, unidentified drones were spotted over Fort McNair, in the Washington, D.C., area. Some prominent U.S. officials live there, among them Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

Given that the United States has made eliminating Iranian leaders a top priority of the war it is waging, Iran could very well be interested in killing a senior U.S. official on American soil. But Russia is also a possible culprit. In the past year, Russia has been probing Polish and NATO airspace with cheap, disposable drones. NATO countries across the North Sea area have also reported numerous drone incursions, particularly over sensitive NATO facilities. Russia denies involvement, but many observers (including myself) believe that Moscow is responsible for a significant number of these events.

China, too, has the capability and possible motivation to have conducted the drone flights over Barksdale. It has a robust drone-development program and the manufacturing base needed for mass production. And China is certainly interested in the war in Iran—particularly in seeing it shrink America’s supply of available long-range precision weapons. The fewer of these the United States has, the sooner China will consider a successful invasion of Taiwan possible. China was conducting reconnaissance flights with balloons over the United States as far back as the first Trump administration, before they were caught red-handed in 2023.

The problems drones pose are not easy ones. Nations now need to defend everywhere, all the time, against threats ranging from a $1,000 quadcopter with a half-pound of explosives to multimillion-dollar ballistic and hypersonic missiles. The United States isn’t alone in being caught flat-footed. Ukraine was the first to adopt drone warfare as the centerpiece of its defense strategy, spurring Russia to employ its own drones: Lancet loitering munitions, which turned out to be one of their most effective weapons against Ukraine.

[Brynn Tannehill: What the drone strikes on the Kremlin reveal about the war in Ukraine]

Ukraine and Russia have been locked in a move-and-countermove race to jam each other’s drones while making their own drones more resistant. Drone countermeasures need to be relatively cheap to be viable. Ukraine has draped nets over many of the roads vital for logistics. Both sides have made effective use of decoys, such as plywood M777 howitzers that are cheaper and easier to replace than the drones used to destroy them. Russian President Vladimir Putin is working to increase domestic security against drones. And perhaps the most important counter-drone development has been Ukraine’s inexpensive, plentiful new interceptor drones, which have performed well against Iranian-made Shahed suicide drones.

The United States now faces some of the same difficulties that Russia does. A big country with a big military has a lot of airspace and many potential targets to protect. An anti-drone system that can cover all of these assets will cost dearly in time, money, and effort—but given the pace of technological development, such a system could be obsolete before it is even ready.

One way to protect American military assets from small drones is to place them in hardened aircraft shelters. But these are expensive and can still be penetrated by high-end missiles. For this reason, the current U.S. Air Force doctrine of Agile Combat Employment prefers dispersing assets rather than counting on hardened facilities to protect them.

But that strategy seems to have been developed in order to counter long-range Chinese munitions in the Pacific, not small-drone swarms with near-real-time targeting within the continental United States. Facilities that were once safe havens from all but the highest-end weapons systems are now exposed to American adversaries with little more than a fleet of small drones. Washington needs to reconsider using hardened shelters for its nuclear-capable bombers, as costly as they are. At a minimum, it should follow the Ukrainian example and place its vital military assets under other sorts of protective shelters, or even netting. And it should be acquiring and fielding interceptor drones much faster—again, just as Ukraine has so successfully done against Shaheds.

Four years into the war in Ukraine, the United States is unprepared for the radically new form of warfare that has been raging there. The swarms over Barksdale suggest how high the price could be.

America Is Now a Rogue Superpower

2026-03-30T07:00:00-04:00

Whenever and however America’s war with Iran ends, it has both exposed and exacerbated the dangers of our new, fractured, multipolar reality—driving deeper wedges between the United States and former friends and allies; strengthening the hands of the expansionist great powers, Russia and China; accelerating global political and economic chaos; and leaving the United States weaker and more isolated than at any time since the 1930s. Even success against Iran will be hollow if it hastens the collapse of the alliance system that for eight decades has been the true source of America’s power, influence, and security.

For America’s friends and allies in Europe, the Iran war has been a significant strategic setback. As Russia and Ukraine wage a grinding war that will be “won” by whoever can hold on the longest, the Iran war has materially and psychologically helped Russia and hurt Ukraine. Even before Donald Trump lifted oil sanctions on Russia, oil prices were skyrocketing—and filling Vladimir Putin’s war chest with billions of dollars, just as Russia’s wartime deficits were starting to cause significant pain. The unexpected windfall gives Putin more time and capacity to continue destroying Ukraine’s economic infrastructure and energy grid. Meanwhile, the Persian Gulf states are burning through U.S.-provided stocks of air-defense interceptors, drawing on the same limited supply that Ukraine depends on to defend its largest cities from Russian missile strikes.

More worrying for European allies has been the evident indifference of the United States to the consequences of its actions. For Europeans, the existential threat today comes not from a weakened and impoverished Iran but from a nuclear-armed Russia that invaded Ukraine in the most brazen act of cross-border territorial aggression in Europe since World War II. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told the Europeans last year to be ready by 2027 to defend themselves without American help, and so they have been desperately reorienting their economies and military strategies to take on the Russian threat without the United States. They have also taken on the bulk of military and economic support for Ukraine because they fear, as many American analysts do, that Putin’s territorial ambitions are extensive, and other European states may be next. Trump’s decision to lift sanctions on Russian oil, over the opposition of Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, and the European Union, showed just how little regard the United States has for Europe’s security. The message to Europe, as the scholar Ivan Krastev has noted, is that “the trans-Atlantic relationship no longer matters.”

U.S. actions have been no less damaging to America’s friends and allies in East Asia and the Western Pacific. Japan gets 95 percent of its oil from the Middle East, and 70 percent of that passes through the now-blocked Strait of Hormuz. Yet Japanese and other Asian diplomats in the first weeks of the war complained that they were “not receiving any communication from the Trump administration.” At the same time, the United States has dispatched an aircraft-carrier battle group and other warships from the Western Pacific to the Persian Gulf, including elements of the Tripoli amphibious ready group, that would be needed for an American response to Chinese aggression, including an attack on Taiwan.

Trump’s supporters have tried to argue that the war with Iran will “boost deterrence” against Russia and China by demonstrating that “a direct confrontation with the U.S. would be extraordinarily damaging.” Given that the United States remains the world’s strongest nuclear-armed power, that is likely not a revelation to Moscow and Beijing. Yet nothing about Trump’s willingness to bomb Iran suggests that he’s any more prone than before to seek a “direct confrontation” with Russia. On the contrary, Trump has consistently sought to appease Putin by cutting off direct supplies of U.S. weaponry to Ukraine, pressuring Ukraine to give in to Russian territorial demands, and now by lifting sanctions on Russian oil.

[From the March 2026 issue: America vs. the world]

As for China, combined Israeli and American forces have demonstrated impressive capabilities, but their success is not necessarily replicable in the Pacific. Taking out an adversary’s sophisticated air defenses is a dangerous operation—one that Israel shouldered in Iran, making the subsequent U.S. assault possible. The U.S. had the capacity to take that first step but would not likely have assumed the risk. In the event of Chinese aggression against Taiwan, will the Israelis take out Chinese air-defense systems for the United States too?

Chinese leaders will also note that the United States has been fearful of sending warships to open the Strait of Hormuz lest they come under fire from a significantly depleted Iranian force. That’s understandable but not very intimidating. Hegseth has said that “the only thing prohibiting transit in the straits right now is Iran shooting at shipping.” No doubt, and the only thing preventing the United States from coming to the aid of Taiwan will be China shooting, with far superior and far more plentiful weaponry. Also not lost on the Chinese is the fact that the United States has had to pull significant air, naval, and ground forces from the Western Pacific, likely for months, in order to fight a decimated Iran.

Some analysts have suggested that Russia and China have failed to come to Iran’s defense, and that this somehow constitutes a defeat for them, because Iran was their ally. But the Russians are helping Iran by providing satellite imagery and advanced drone capabilities to strike more effectively at U.S. military and support installations. And China has not suffered a loss in Iran insofar as Iran has granted safe passage to its oil shipments.

More important, in Russia and China’s hierarchy of interests, defending Iran is of distinctly secondary importance; their primary goal is to expand their regional hegemony. For Putin, Ukraine is the big prize that will immeasurably strengthen Russia’s position vis-à-vis the rest of Europe. For China, the primary goal is to push the United States out of the Western Pacific, and anything that degrades America’s ability to project force in the region is a benefit. Indeed, the longer American attention and resources are tied up in the Middle East, the better for both Russia and China. Neither Moscow nor Beijing can be unhappy to see the war drive deep and perhaps permanent wedges between the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia.

The Trump administration, however, has turned America’s long-standing hierarchy of interests upside down. For eight decades, Americans were deeply involved in the greater Middle East not because the region was intrinsically a vital national-security interest but as part of a broader global commitment to the alliances and freedom of navigation that undergirded the American-led liberal world order.

Smoke rises over a Tehran highway on March 5. (Atta Kenare / AFP / Getty)

No state in the Middle East (including Iraq in 2003 and Iran today) ever posed a direct threat to the security of the American homeland. Iran has no missiles that can reach the United States and, according to American intelligence, would not until 2035. Access to Middle Eastern oil and gas has never been essential to the security of the American homeland. Today the United States is less dependent on Middle Eastern energy than in the past, which Trump has pointed out numerous times since the Strait of Hormuz was closed.

The United States has long sought to prevent Iraq or Iran from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, but not because these countries would pose a direct threat to the United States. The American nuclear arsenal would have been more than adequate to deter a first strike by either of them, as it has been for decades against far more powerful adversaries. What American administrations have feared is that an Iran in possession of nuclear weapons would be more difficult to contain in its region, because neither the United States nor Israel would be able to launch the kind of attack now under way. The Middle East’s security, not America’s, would be imperiled.

As for Israel, the United States committed to its defense out of a sense of moral responsibility after the Holocaust. This never had anything to do with American national-security interests. In fact, American officials from the beginning regarded support for Israel as contrary to U.S. interests. George C. Marshall opposed recognition in 1948, and Dean Acheson said that by recognizing Israel, the United States had succeeded Britain as “the most disliked power in the Middle East.” During the Cold War, even supporters of Israel acknowledged that as a simple matter of “power politics,” the United States had “every reason for wishing that Israel had never come into existence.” But as Harry Truman put it, the decision to support the state of Israel was made “not in the light of oil, but in the light of justice.”

Even the threat of terrorism from the region was a consequence of American involvement, not the reason for it. Had the United States not been deeply and consistently involved in the Muslim world since the 1940s, Islamic militants would have little interest in attacking an indifferent nation 5,000 miles and two oceans away. Contrary to much mythology, they have hated us not so much because of “who we are” but because of where we are. In Iran’s case, the United States was deeply involved in its politics from the 1950s until the 1979 revolution, including as the main supporter of the brutal regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The surest way of avoiding Islamist terrorist attacks would have been to get out.

America’s interests in the Middle East have always been indirect and secondary to larger global aims and strategies. During World War II, the United States led a coalition of nations that depended on the greater Middle East for oil and strategic position. During the Cold War, the United States assumed responsibility not only for the defense of the Jewish state but for the defense and economic well-being of European and Asian allies who depended on Middle Eastern oil. After the Cold War, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait, and the George H. W. Bush administration believed that failing to reverse that aggression would set an ominous precedent in the aborning “new world order.”

That sense of global responsibility is precisely what the Trump administration came to office to repudiate and undo. The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy, which has dramatically shifted the focus of American policy from world order to homeland security and hemispheric hegemony, appropriately downgraded the Middle East in the hierarchy of American concerns. A United States concerned only with defense of its homeland and the Western Hemisphere would see nothing in the region worth fighting for. In the heyday of “America First” foreign policy during the 1920s and ’30s, when Americans did not regard even Europe and Asia as vital interests, the idea that they had any security interests in the greater Middle East would have struck them as hallucinatory.

Yet now, for reasons known only to the Trump administration, the Middle East has suddenly taken top priority; indeed, to supporters of Trump and the war, it seems to be the only priority, apparently worth any price, including the introduction of ground forces and even the destruction of the American alliance system.

This might make sense if there were no other threats to worry about. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the greatest perceived menace was from international terrorism. China was in an accommodating phase, under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao. Russia posed no threat to Europe; rather, these were the years of Russo-German partnership, a time when Western Europeans found the overall strategic situation so unthreatening that they were the ones doubting the necessity of NATO. Only Eastern Europeans still worried about the return of a revanchist Russia, which is why they immediately joined the United States in the Iraq War.

Twenty-three years later, the situation is completely different. The greatest threats to world peace, and to the democracies of Europe and Asia, are not terrorism and Iran but two powerful and expansionist great powers, one of which has already invaded its neighbors and the other of which threatens to. Today’s world looks more like that of 1934 than like the supposedly post-historical paradise that some imagined after the Cold War. And European and American leaders are at odds not over philosophical disagreements about the utility of power but over fundamental security interests. American indifference to the European struggle against Russian aggression constitutes a profound geopolitical revolution—perhaps the final disintegration of the alliance relationships established after World War II.

One would be hard-pressed to find any nation in the world that has been reassured by the Israeli and American war against Iran, other than Israel itself. According to The Wall Street Journal, Gulf state leaders are “privately furious” with the U.S. for “triggering a war that put them in the crosshairs.” Despite its impressive power, the United States was unable to protect these countries from Iran’s attacks; now they have to hope that Trump will not leave them to face a weakened yet intact and angry Iranian regime but will instead double down on America’s long-term military commitment to the region, including by putting ground troops in Iran.

Israelis should also be asking how far they can count on the Americans’ dedication to this fight. A United States capable of abandoning long-standing allies in Europe and East Asia will be capable of abandoning Israel too. Can Israel sustain its new dominance in the region without a long and deep American commitment?

The unintended effect of the war, in fact, may be driving regional players to seek other great-power protectors in addition to the United States. Trump himself has invited the Chinese to help open the strait, and the Chinese are actively courting the Arab and Gulf states. The Gulf states are not averse to dealing with Beijing and Moscow. Neither is Israel. It sold management of a container terminal in the port of Haifa to a Chinese company, despite objections from the U.S. Navy, which uses the port.

Israel, practically alone among American allies, refused to take part in sanctions against Russia when it invaded Ukraine in 2022. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ran for reelection in 2019, some of his campaign posters showed him shaking hands with Putin under the tagline A Different League. No one should blame Israelis for this. They are an independent nation and can be expected to do what they feel they need to do to survive. Americans may have a sentimental or religious attachment to Israel, but Israelis cannot afford to be sentimental in return.

That is especially true given this administration’s cavalier attitude toward international responsibilities. The Iran war is global intervention “America First”–style: no public debate, no vote in Congress, no cooperation or, in many cases, even consultation with allies other than Israel, and, apparently, no concern for potential consequences to the region and the world. “They say if you break it, you own it. I don’t buy that,” Senator Lindsey Graham, arguably Trump’s most influential adviser on the war, said.

For Europeans, the problem is worse than American disregard and irresponsibility. They now face an unremittingly hostile United States—one that no longer treats its allies as allies or differentiates between allies and potential adversaries. The aggressive tariffs Washington imposed last year hit America’s erstwhile friends at least as hard as they hit Russia and China, and in some cases harder. Europeans must now wonder whether Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran makes it more or less likely that he will take similarly bold action on Greenland. The risks and costs of taking that undefended Danish territory, after all, would be far less than the risks and costs of waging the present war. Not some EU liberal but Trump’s conservative friend, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni recently warned that American actions have produced a “crisis in international law and multilateral organizations” and “the collapse of a shared world order.”

This is the world we are now living in. Anti-Americanism is on the rise in formerly allied countries. Asked in a recent Politico poll whether Xi Jinping’s China or Trump’s United States was more dependable, 57 percent of Canadians, 40 percent of Germans, and 42 percent of Britons said China—a sharp decline in America’s perceived trustworthiness. In the past, America’s alliance relationships have survived waves of public disapproval because governments knew that whatever errors the United States made and however unpopular Washington might be, it remained fully committed to defending the order that protected them. Today that is no longer true.

[Read: Trump is right that Pax Americana is over]

Trump has repeatedly made clear, including during this war, that if he is unhappy with an ally, he will withdraw American protection. He temporarily cut off intelligence sharing with Ukraine to punish it for refusing to bend to Moscow. He has warned that allies such as Japan and South Korea should pay the United States for protection. During this war, he has threatened to leave the Strait of Hormuz closed and hand the problem off to those who need it more than the United States does. Trump’s tactics with allies consist almost entirely of threats: to tariff them, to abandon them, and, in the case of Greenland, to use force to seize their territory. When Trump discovered that he needed the help of allies against Iran, he did not ask them for help or work to persuade them. He simply “demanded” that they do what he said. Trump doesn’t want allies—he wants vassals.

As a result, friends and allies will be ever less willing to cooperate with the United States. This time, Spain refused American use of air and naval bases in its territory. Next time, that could be Germany, Italy, or even Japan. Nations around the world will come to rely not on American commitments and permanent alliances but on ad hoc coalitions to address crises. No one will cooperate with the United States by choice, only by coercion. Without allies, the United States will have to depend on clients that it controls, such as Venezuela, or weaker powers that it can bully.

President Trump with NATO leaders in Washington, D.C., August 2025. (Win McNamee / Getty)

For 80 years, the United States defied the closest thing there is to a law of physics in international relations: the concept of balancing. The seminal realist thinker Kenneth Waltz once observed that “unbalanced power, whoever wields it, is a potential danger to others.” This certainly should have applied to the United States, because the global distribution of power for eight decades after the end of World War II was highly “unbalanced” in America’s favor. Yet neither in the 1940s nor after the Cold War did the world’s other powers even consider banding together to balance against the American hegemon. Rather than regarding history’s first global “superpower” as a danger to be contained, they for the most part saw it as a partner to be enlisted.

Americans were not unerring stewards of world affairs. They could be selfish, self-righteous, paranoid, aggressive, and blundering, as well as indifferent and ignorant. They could be too confident about the scope of their power, and then too pessimistic about the possibilities of its use—in other words, Americans were not exceptional, even if their nation’s geopolitical circumstances were. Yet throughout the Cold War and for nearly four decades after it, allies and partners across the globe clung to the American order through thick and thin. It survived unpopular wars in Vietnam and Iraq. It survived made-in-America global economic calamities, such as the 2008 financial crisis. It even survived America’s relative economic and military decline. In fact, America’s great power was more than tolerated and forgiven: Other nations encouraged it, abetted it, and, with surprising frequency, legitimized it through multilateral institutions such as NATO and the United Nations, as well as in less formal coalitions. This, more than raw might, was what made the United States the most influential power in history.

Those days are now over and will not soon return. Nations that once bandwagoned with the United States will now remain aloof or align against it—not because they want to, but because the United States leaves them no choice, because it will neither protect them nor refrain from exploiting them. Welcome to the era of the rogue American superpower. It will be lonely and dangerous.

The Kurdish Ground Force Preparing to Fight in Iran

2026-03-29T07:00:00-04:00

Earlier this month, high in the snow-capped mountains near the border between Iran and Iraq, a Kurdish rebel led me down a foot trail to the opening of a cave. We stepped inside and walked about 50 yards along a dark man-made passageway where water dripped steadily from the rocky ceiling. Then we turned down one of the cave’s branching tunnels and passed through a wood-framed entryway into a brightly lit and immaculate room with a long table and a television mounted on a wall.

A dozen men and women wearing the short jackets, baggy trousers, and waist sashes of the Kurdish rebels known as the Peshmerga greeted me. These were the leaders of the Kurdistan Free Life Party, better known as PJAK, which has been aspiring to topple the Iranian regime for decades.

“We are on the trigger finger,” one of them told me. “After 22 years in the movement, we have never been this busy.”

The American-Israeli effort to bring down the Iranian regime is not likely to succeed without the help of PJAK and other Kurdish armed groups, whose fighters could easily slip across the border that lies near their network of bases in northern Iraq. When Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu appealed to the Iranian people to rise up against the regime, their message was aimed partly at Iran’s minority population of Kurds, who—like their fellow Kurds living in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq—have long been at odds with their rulers. The Kurds now face the latest in a long series of temptations: a chance to overthrow an oppressor that could leave them more vulnerable to retribution than ever before.

[Read: A turning point in the Iran war]

Hundreds of Iranian Kurds living abroad have been returning to the Middle East from Europe over the past two months, hoping to help liberate their homeland. No other segment of Iran’s population is as well prepared. PJAK and other Kurdish factions say they have thousands of sleeper-cell members in Iran who would join the fight as soon as a ground invasion started.

But the prospect of a Kurdish invasion is fraught with danger, not least to the Kurds themselves. They cannot count on support from the American president. And many people in Iran’s Persian majority—including opposition figures such as Reza Pahlavi, the 65-year-old son of the last shah—are deeply suspicious that the Kurds have separatist ambitions. Some Iranians might even rally to the regime’s defense if they feel that their country’s unity is under threat.

If the Iranian regime is left standing, the Kurds will probably be the first victims of its reprisals. If it collapses, the Kurds may be the unwitting agents of a civil war that would probably draw in Turkey and other neighboring states. That could in turn provoke a refugee crisis like the one that followed the Syrian civil war, sowing havoc across the Middle East and even across Europe. All of this might suit Israel, whose leaders have tended to believe that they are safest when their neighbors are weak and divided. But it would make the world a more dangerous place.

PJAK, which has been fighting the Iranian regime from a network of hidden bases since it was founded in 2004, embodies the opportunities and hazards of the Kurdish option. It is widely acknowledged to be the most organized and militarily experienced of all the factions.

The leaders I met in their mountain grotto had the selfless glow of monks, with a similar daily discipline: They all rise at 5:30 a.m. and follow a regimented schedule, which includes shared chores among the male and female fighters. They are well educated and fiercely dedicated to their leftist ideals of feminism, environmentalism, and local democracy. Alcohol is forbidden, and smoking and romantic relationships are strongly discouraged. “We believe we are sacrificing ourselves for the struggle,” Peyman Viyan, a co-chair of PJAK, told me.

PJAK would appear to be a natural candidate if the United States were to arm the Kurdish factions. The CIA may already be doing so, as CNN reported earlier this month, and as one Kurdish leader from another faction hinted to me during an interview. But there is a hitch: PJAK is listed by the U.S. as a terrorist group.

The reason was apparent the moment I entered the meeting room inside PJAK’s underground base, which extends deep into the mountain. On the walls, surrounded by pictures of martyred Kurdish fighters, was a large portrait of Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned Kurdish rebel whom the group treats with a cultish reverence.

Ocalan is the founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a Kurdish group that fought a 40-year insurgency against the Turkish state. The struggle left tens of thousands of people dead, and Turkey considers any group aligned with the PKK, including PJAK, a mortal enemy. PJAK and most other Kurdish factions say that their goal is not a Kurdish state but some form of autonomy within a democratic Iran. Nonetheless, if PJAK fighters were to cross the border into Iran, they might find themselves under attack by Iranian and Turkish forces.

Perhaps the Trump administration could have ironed out some of these problems if it had taken regime change in Iran more seriously and put time and effort into planning for it. Instead, PJAK and other Kurdish factions have found themselves in a strange position: eager to join the American campaign, but deeply uneasy about where it might lead.

Viyan told me that the Kurds would “very likely” take part in a ground invasion of Iran, and soon. She then said that the invasion plans were not ready yet, and that “lots of discussion has to take place about how to proceed.” The position of the United States and Israel would be essential, she said, but no one could say what that was. She pleaded, a little poignantly, for the American government to provide a “guarantee of Kurdish rights in the future”—as if anyone could guarantee anything about the future of Iran.

A fighter from PJAK poses with her weapon. (AFP / Getty)

The evening I arrived in Erbil, the capital of northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region, I passed a huge pillar of black smoke pouring skyward from an Iranian drone strike. The Iraqi Kurds are not involved in the current military campaign, but they have long given shelter to Kurdish groups from other countries, and that has made their region an incidental battleground.

Iran has been targeting Iraqi Kurdistan almost constantly since the war started, as have its Shiite proxy militias inside Iraq. Some of the strikes have been aimed at American military and political targets. Several times, I saw missiles being intercepted right above me—a jet-like sound followed by a loud boom and a flash in the sky, like fireworks.

But most of the attacks seemed to be aimed at the bases of the Iranian Kurdish parties. They do not enjoy the protection of America’s expensive missile defenses: Many have been struck, and a number of Peshmerga fighters have been killed.

On a hillside not far from Erbil, I toured one rebel camp whose tin sheds had been shredded by a drone strike the day before. I interviewed one of the group’s commanders in a car—it was raining—and he spoke dismissively about the Iranian regime, saying that it was weak and running out of weapons. The Kurds massing in Iraq were “ready to fight,” he said, and thousands more would join them the moment they crossed the border.

Shortly afterward, we heard a series of dull thudding sounds in the distance. “I have to go,” the commander said. He yanked open the car door and ran back to his camp, which was under another drone attack.

[Read: The countdown to a ground war]

Iran would not be striking the Kurdish camps if it didn’t fear that the Kurds could soon open up a new front against it. But in another sense, the Islamic Republic has been at war with the Kurdish groups for decades.

At least 30 million Kurds live in the Middle East, scattered across five countries, and they have long dreamed of establishing a nation of their own. Northwestern Iran was where they came closest to achieving this, during a brief Soviet-sponsored period of self-rule in 1946. That lasted less than a year before Soviet forces withdrew under Western pressure, and the Iranian army recaptured the Kurdish region.

The chaos that followed the Iranian Revolution in 1979 offered another opportunity. Kurdish towns began setting up their own local administrations, and the Peshmerga organized to defend them. The Kurds managed to briefly maintain their independence against the forces of the new Islamic Republic. But Ayatollah Khomeini declared jihad against them, and after the regime consolidated its forces, it waged a bloody campaign against the Peshmerga, who eventually retreated to bases across the border in northern Iraq.

Ever since, the regime has waged an unrelenting campaign of assassinations and bombings against its Kurdish opponents. Some of the better-known incidents of this cold war took place in Europe, including the 1992 assassinations of four Kurdish activists at the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin.

The war has been fought mostly in Iran and Iraq, largely unseen by the rest of the world. The Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, the oldest of the Iranian Kurdish groups, has had some 400 members killed in northern Iraq alone, Amanj Zibaee, one of its leaders, told me. Many others have been injured; I met an elderly man in Erbil whose cousin opened a book he received in the mail only for it to explode, leaving him without eyes or hands.

This grinding, surreptitious war has touched almost everyone in the Iranian-Kurdish-exile community in some way. Reza Kaabi, the secretary of the Komala Party, told me that he had lost 36 members of his family in the struggle, including two older sisters who were executed by an Iranian firing squad in 1980, a brother who was assassinated in 2013, and another brother who was killed in a clash with regime soldiers.

After all this suffering, it is not surprising that so many Kurds have embraced the new American-Israeli bombing campaign as their great opportunity to reclaim a lost homeland. I got used to seeing people’s eyes light up when they learned that I was American, and hearing them declare their gratitude to Trump. “The Israelis will destroy Iran,” one beaming Kurdish driver told me several times during a road trip, “and then they will destroy Turkey.”

Iranian Kurds living in exile started trickling back to the region in January, after Trump began assembling an armada for what looked like a renewed war with Iran. I met some of those returnees at a mountainside Peshmerga camp not far from Erbil. One of them was a 53-year-old named Shaho Bluri. He had come back two months earlier from Northern Europe—he preferred not to name the country—where he has lived for the past two decades. He told me he had joined the Peshmerga at the age of 17 and fought for six years, and had lost all three of his brothers in battles during the 1980s and ’90s. He had always dreamed of returning to Iran.

He spoke of night raids that he and his fellow Peshmerga have made across the Iranian border in recent weeks, not to fight but to meet with sympathizers and sleeper cells who provide them with information about the regime’s defenses. “If I go inside Iran, I will never go back to Europe,” he said. “I am there for good.”

After our talk, Bluri and his fellow Peshmerga did a live-fire exercise, the gunshots echoing off the valley walls. As dusk approached, they built a bonfire and sang a rousing song about their movement’s martyrs.

Bluri told me he had taken great comfort from the news in February that the various Iranian Kurdish parties were planning on forming a united coalition. The Kurds have long been plagued by factional disputes, and the coalition was a sign that they were now capable of overcoming them, he said.

But there is no such unity in the broader Iranian opposition. After the Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan declared its formation on February 22, Reza Pahlavi lashed out on X at “separatists” who have made “baseless and contemptible claims against the territorial integrity and national unity of Iran.” It was not the first time that Pahlavi has disparaged the Kurdish opposition, some of whose members he was once friendly with. Every Kurdish leader I spoke with told me they were willing to work with anyone except Pahlavi, whom they regard as an autocrat and a bigot.

How ordinary Iranians see the prospect of a Kurdish front against the regime is difficult to say. In the past, many regime opponents seemed to have shared Pahlavi’s distrust of the Kurds as possible bearers of a separatist agenda. But that began to change in 2022, with the protest movement that arose from the killing of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman arrested by Iran’s morality police for failing to properly cover her hair.

The protests became known inside Iran by the Kurdish-language slogan Jin, Jiyan, Azadi, or “Woman, Life, Freedom.” Although the regime suppressed them, the protests fostered a sense of solidarity between Kurds and the broader Iranian public, and they forced the regime to loosen its enforcement of mandatory head covering for women.

This new solidarity poses something of a dilemma for the Kurdish factional leaders I met in northern Iraq. They know that their fortunes could depend on their ability to appeal to Iranians outside the Kurdish region. But the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran risks making them look like traitors, riding back into their country “on the backs of the American tanks,” as Iraqis said scornfully of the exiles who returned after the American invasion in 2003.

The other great risk for the Kurds became apparent just after Trump started the new bombing campaign on February 28, when they got a real-time illustration of his unreliability. On March 5, Trump declared that a Kurdish ground invasion of Iran would be “wonderful.” Two days later, he said, “I don’t want the Kurds to go into Iran.”

The reason for his reversal was no mystery: The Turks, who have long been extremely suspicious of any military role for the Kurds, appear to have issued indirect but firm warnings to the White House. Turkey is now engaged in negotiations with the PKK, which agreed to disarm a year ago, but the last thing that Turkish leaders want is another Kurdish rebellion on their doorstep.

The Kurds scarcely needed a reminder of American fickleness. Only six weeks earlier, the Kurdish-run statelet in northeastern Syria, which has been a showplace for Kurdish aspirations for more than a decade, was mostly overrun by the forces of Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa. The U.S. military stood by and did nothing to oppose the Syrian onslaught. That left many Kurds—who had looked to the Pentagon as their ally in fighting the Islamic State and other shared causes—feeling betrayed.

The worst-case scenario for the Kurds would be risking their fortunes in this war only to lose their tenuous support both inside and outside Iran. The result could be a bloodbath.

A 23-year-old woman who had just left Iran two months earlier expressed this fear to me more vividly than anyone else I met. At a café in Erbil, she and her husband spoke at length about how miserable their lives had been under the Islamic Republic. (They asked that their names be withheld for their safety.) They are both highly educated and secular, and come from families with legacies of involvement in the Kurdish national cause, which has put them in the regime’s crosshairs. At one point, the woman told me, she cried for hours every day and was unable to do basic household chores. She could not have been more eager to see the mullahs fall. But when I asked her about the prospect of an armed intervention by Kurdish rebel groups, she looked troubled.

“I always dreamed of those groups coming to Kurdistan, but deep down I wish they would not do that,” she said. “I know the slightest thing the Kurds will do, the Islamic regime will bomb every place” in the Kurdish region of Iran, where her family still lives.

A poster of Abdullah Ocalan adorns a wall near the Iraqi border with Iran. (AFP / Getty)

Even among the Peshmerga, not everyone is baying for an invasion. One of the Iranian Kurdish factions, a branch of the Komala Party, has not endorsed the war or joined the new coalition of Kurdish parties. Adib Watandust, a white-haired man of 72 who has been in the movement for Kurdish rights since the mid-1970s, walked with me up the mountain valley where the Komala Party maintains its bases.

Watandust described the decades he spent with an AK-47 over his shoulder, fighting the Iranian regime in northwestern Iran. He noted proudly that his party was the first to arm women, a practice that was shocking in the Middle East’s patriarchal culture but was gradually adopted by other Kurdish rebel factions. He told me he had watched the Iranian regime grow stronger during its bloody war with Iraq through the ’80s, and that this experience had changed his perspective.

[Eliot A. Cohen: The war with Iran is exposing big problems for the military]

“History tells us that you cannot bring freedom and liberation with bombardment,” he said. “It doesn’t work this way.”

Watandust said he thought the current war could easily backfire—it could bolster the regime’s will to fight on, overshadow the brutal crackdown that left thousands of protesters dead in January, and silence the opposition. “The exit plan of the regime was this war; that’s why they welcomed it,” he said. “It seems that for dictators, war is a gift.”

We arrived at a house near the top of the valley, where rifle-toting young Peshmerga fighters laid out a blanket on a terrace and served tea. I asked Watandust what the Peshmerga should be doing instead of making war on the regime. He said they should allow those inside Iran to lead the way. It might begin with a general strike, something that has happened before in the Kurdish parts of Iran, and then spread across the rest of the country.

Once the regime begins to lose control, he said, a power vacuum will emerge. Then the Peshmerga could cross the border and help maintain order. “Our instructions to our people are to take charge of local security; to make sure there’s no chaos, no violence; to avoid looting or any other kinds of security issues.”

It was a hopeful scenario, and I wondered if it was as unlikely, in its way, as the more aggressive proposals coming from other Kurds. Watandust seemed to guess what I was thinking.

“The real alternatives to this regime are not outside Iran,” he said. “They are inside—the political prisoners, union activists, teachers, journalists in jail, women and men. They are the real leadership. And the West cannot dictate an alternative from outside.”

The Worst-Case Scenario for AI and the News Is Already Here

2026-03-27T13:59:37-04:00

Last Thursday, the CNN reporter Jeremy Diamond interrogated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a press conference in Jerusalem. This act of journalism was not unusual, but what happened next was. Diamond uploaded the exchange to social media, and the footage didn’t simply go viral—it became the locus of a mass digital delusion.

The clip racked up millions of impressions across X, Facebook, and Instagram, fueled not by interest in Netanyahu’s words, but by a conviction that the man speaking them didn’t exist. “That is such an obvious composite,” declared one of the most popular replies on X. “How are CNN journalists apparently in on this necromancer-y?!” Countless responses echoed these sentiments. “Netanyahu looks further away than he should,” the top comment on Instagram read. “Looks digitally edited.” Diamond’s reporting had been swarmed by a growing global contingent convinced that the Israeli leader is dead—and that everything we see of him today is the product of AI.

“What do you think about these Netanyahu AI videos?” Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in America, asked one of his show’s guests on March 20. “They think he might be dead.” Rogan went on to suggest that a recent clip of Netanyahu visiting a coffee shop was “clearly AI,” and that not only might the prime minister no longer be alive, but that “his brother got killed in a missile strike.” None of this was true, but Rogan was not alone in voicing the suspicions. “Is Benjamin dead?” Ayoub Khan, a member of the British Parliament, asked on March 14. “I suspect he is dead or at least very seriously injured. Yet the media is completely silent on this topic despite the social media meltdown around this topic!”

Famous people being prematurely buried by social media is not new. You’re not really a celebrity unless X has killed you off at least once. Mahmoud Abbas, the 90-year-old president of the Palestinian Authority, has been erroneously declared dead multiple times. What distinguishes the conspiracy theory about Netanyahu’s demise is its durability. Overwhelming audiovisual evidence, including recent videos of him interacting with journalists and ordinary people, shows Netanyahu to be very much alive. Still, the claim persists.

[Read: How doubt became a weapon in Iran]

“It was really kind of extraordinary,” Diamond told me. He had expected that the news conference he attended, which was broadcast live by various networks, “would kind of put it to bed, but obviously not.”

After Netanyahu posted the clip from the coffee shop, internet sleuths insisted that the beverage in the prime minister’s cup should have spilled based on how he was holding it. Netanyahu then posted a video of himself chatting with Israelis and encouraging them to follow the official safety guidelines for Iranian missile strikes; the digital detectives claimed that Netanyahu’s wedding ring disappeared in the middle of the clip. Mehdi Hasan, the founder of the left-wing media company Zeteo, commented: “I don’t want to be the conspiracy theory guy, and I swear I have resisted all the ‘Netanyahu is dead’ stuff… but this looks so fake.”

Days later, interviewing Senator Chris Van Hollen, Hasan winkingly asked him “a question the entire internet is dying to hear the answer on: Is Benjamin Netanyahu dead?” (An incredulous Van Hollen said no.) The video of that conversation now has more than 800,000 views on YouTube, outstripping most of the other content on Hasan’s Zeteo channel.

On March 16, just four days after Netanyahu’s most recent press conference, The New York Times contributing opinion writer Megan Stack pleaded, “Netanyahu, if you’re there, give a press conference or interview—the timeline has gotten unbearable,” adding that she thought he was “hiding out.” According to one outside analysis, from February 28 to March 19, the claim that Netanyahu was dead appeared in some “800,000 posts from more than 213,000 unique users, accumulating more than 430 million impressions on X.”

The Netanyahu conspiracy theory and its seeming imperviousness to evidence are the by-products of a corrupted information environment. In a world where AI can credibly simulate any possible image, people understandably begin to doubt even the images that are real.

This crisis was anticipated. In 2018, the legal scholars Robert Chesney and Danielle Citron warned that machine learning—and the convincing fakes it produces—would undermine people’s ability to identify fabrications. But they also cautioned about something they called “the liar’s dividend”: a situation in which pervasive fakery would allow propagandists to delegitimize reality itself. “A skeptical public will be primed to doubt the authenticity of real audio and video evidence,” the scholars wrote. “This skepticism can be invoked just as well against authentic as against adulterated content.” The unkillable myth of Netanyahu’s death is the liar’s dividend made manifest.

Of course, AI is not the only culprit here. Monetized algorithmic social media provides the perfect breeding ground for self-sustaining falsehoods. Journalists and traditional media outlets, for all their flaws, have editorial processes and professional incentives in place to point them toward reporting the truth. On social media, however, the currency is not accuracy but virality. If something spreads, it sells—literally, as posters are often paid based on engagement.

A conflict such as the U.S.-Israel-Iran war, which inflames millions of partisans, provides a ready-made audience for unscrupulous manipulators. Pro-Iran posters can churn out deepfakes of Tel Aviv being reduced to rubble or Netanyahu being bombed; pro-Israel posters can produce fraudulent images of Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, maimed in a hospital bed. The more people get their news from social media rather than traditional media, the more people will be prone to believe such propaganda—not because it is convincing, but because they want it to be true. This impulse to inhabit a digital dream world, rather than face the broken one that actually exists, is the engine that keeps delusions like the “death of Netanyahu” running.

[Read: The internet is worse than a brainwashing machine]

After all, there are plenty of prosaic explanations for the various oddities raised by those pushing the nonsense that Netanyahu is dead. The Israeli leader’s facial coloring sometimes looks artificial because he famously wears heavy makeup in public appearances. The edges of Netanyahu’s hands in some of his man-on-the-street videos look blurred not because he is digitally rendered, but because the video is, resulting in an array of artifacts caused by compression and the iPhone’s autofocus and anti-aliasing features. Of the two Israeli flags behind Netanyahu during his press conferences, only one is visible from the diagonal side-shot on TV, not because the other has disappeared, but because that’s how camera angles and perspective work. Netanyahu’s son Yair did not go offline to sit shiva and mourn for his father; he recently flew to Hungary to address a conservative conference in support of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s reelection campaign.

Netanyahu himself has appeared in public numerous times, conversing on video with everyday Israelis and international reporters—not just CNN’s Diamond, but Fox’s Trey Yingst and ABC’s Tom Burridge. Netanyahu even posted a video mocking his doubters alongside U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. That all of these people are in on the same elaborate ruse would seem unlikely.

But reasoned refutations miss the point. Many people hate Netanyahu and wish he were dead. Monetized algorithmic social media allows mercenary opportunists to give these people what they want. The spread of this content enriches those peddling the falsehoods—who accrue followers and engagement dollars—but impoverishes the people they fool by making it harder for them to understand the world around them and act effectively to change it.

Intelligent political agency is impossible without a foundation of fact. Yet the rise of unrestrained AI, combined with the incentives and biases that drive social media, has served to supplant facts with consequential delusions, and helped mass-market them to the very people most inclined to believe them. Seen in this light, the embrace of Netanyahu’s mythical death isn’t a bizarre outlier, an eccentricity of the overly online; it is a preview of a new normal.

The First Post-Reality Political Campaign

2026-03-27T10:31:32-04:00

Flick through pro-government Hungarian accounts on TikTok, and you might see an AI-generated version of Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, sitting on a golden toilet, counting his money, snorting cocaine, and barking orders at a Hungarian soldier. You might also find an AI-generated Péter Magyar, the leader of the Hungarian opposition, appearing to say he’s fine with handing Hungarian factories over to foreigners, as long as he’s the one in charge of the country. Keep going, and you will find images of war, violence, and a SpongeBob look-alike declaring that Magyar “wipes up cocaine with me after he accidentally sneezed and it all fell to the floor.”

You won’t find much about Hungary itself, which is not an accident. In recent years political parties around the world have produced surrealist campaigns, comic campaigns, conspiratorial campaigns, even beer-drinking campaigns. But on any list of strange elections, the 2026 parliamentary election in Hungary will stand out—this may be the world’s first post-reality campaign.

In actual reality, the news for Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, is not good. After 16 years in office, plus an earlier three-year term, Orbán has made his country the most corrupt in the European Union, one of the poorest, and certainly the least free. His political party, Fidesz, now controls most universities, the civil service, the high courts, and, through a network of oligarchs, almost all newspapers and broadcasters, as well as about a fifth of the econom y, according to independent economists. General paranoia about Fidesz spies means that Budapest, once again, has become a city where people lower their voices when talking about politics in public.

With that kind of influence, Fidesz, which is well behind in most polls, cannot evade responsibility for Hungarian stagnation, and so neither the party nor its leader is talking much about Hungary, its falling industrial production, or its shrinking population. Instead—backed by Russian propagandists, the European far right, and now the Trump administration (about which more in a minute)—the party is directing a small fortune’s worth of posters and social-media videos toward a different goal: convincing Hungarians to fear sabotage, thievery, or even a military attack from … Ukraine.

This is an entirely false, even ludicrous threat. The Ukrainians have enough to do without starting a second war in Hungary. But Orbán, his government, his party, and many outsiders are now focused on making this threat seem true. Pay attention, because this may be the future of electoral politics: Multiple politicians from several countries are shoveling propaganda at an electorate in order to build terror of an enemy that doesn’t exist at all.

The campaign is not subtle. In Budapest last week, Orbán’s face was almost nowhere to be seen. But posters featuring Zelensky were ubiquitous. Sometimes the Ukrainian president is seen glowering alongside the slogan “Don’t let Zelensky have the last laugh.” Sometimes Zelensky appears with Magyar and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European commission, along with the slogan “They are the risk. Fidesz is the safe choice.” Peter Kreko, who runs a Budapest think tank, told me that this is unprecedented. In 2022, Orbán campaigned on keeping Hungary out of the war. Now he’s telling Hungarians that, as Kreko put it, “we are under imminent threat of attack.”

The same threats reach Hungarians on their phones. On TikTok, where new pro-Fidesz accounts appear every day, AI-created videos of Magyar seem to show him slandering his country—“I stay silent because my masters in Brussels have forbidden me from defending the homeland”—or else singing the Ukrainian national anthem. Another genre of video shows war violence: a Hungarian girl crying as her blindfolded father, wearing a Hungarian uniform, is executed, apparently in Ukraine. Multiple videos also smear Magyar, making personal, sexual, and financial allegations against him, but the fear-Ukrainian-invasion narrative dominates. During a Fidesz march on March 15, a group in the front of the crowd carried a banner declaring We won’t be a Ukrainian colony!

This language and these images have been backed up by the actions of the Hungarian state, each one designed to reinforce Fidesz propaganda. In February, Orbán sent Hungarian soldiers to guard the country’s oil and gas infrastructure, allegedly to prevent a Ukrainian attack, for which there was no evidence. In March, Hungarian counterterrorism authorities seized two trucks, owned by a Ukrainian bank, that were passing through the country on a routine cash-transport run from Vienna. They arrested seven bank employees, one of whom lost consciousness after they injected him with what may have been truth serum. Later they were all released because, again, there was no evidence against them.

[András Pethő: Trump’s attempts to muzzle the press look familiar]

The Hungarian government nevertheless confiscated $82 million in gold and cash, which it has not returned. The online publication Direkt36, one of a tiny number of outlets still doing investigative reporting in Hungary, wrote that Fidesz reckons this ham-handed operation a success: It provoked Zelensky to half-jokingly threaten Orbán, which gave the Hungarian leader another few days’ worth of material.

Hungarian state institutions are not the only government bodies seeking to shape Hungarian perceptions of reality. Although Orbán likes to use the word sovereignty, he now functions, in practice, as the most important Russian puppet in Europe. According to a Washington Post investigation published last week, Orbán’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, regularly calls his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, to keep the Russians informed following European Union meetings, and sometimes to ask for favors. During a 2020 call between the two men, according to a transcript published by a Hungarian journalist, Szijjártó asked Lavrov to arrange a meeting in Moscow for a pro-Russian Slovak politician, to help him win an election. The meeting did later take place. Other European leaders long ago stopped discussing any security issues in the presence of Orbán himself, who has repeatedly used his veto to block European sanctions on Russia and European aid for Ukraine.

Concerned that a key asset might lose power, the Russians have sent a team of propagandists to Budapest to ensure that Orbán wins. The Financial Times has identified the influence group as the Social Design Agency, a Kremlin-backed IT company whose activities are well known. In 2023, back when the American government was still interested in unmasking Russian propaganda, the State Department’s now-dismantled Global Engagement Center exposed the agency’s role in creating a series of seemingly native pro-Russian websites in Latin America. In Budapest, they were tasked with creating AI videos and using their existing network of trolls and bots to pass them on. One Russian network has circulated doctored screenshots of the English-language website Euronews, with fake quotes attributed to Magyar. The Washington Post investigation revealed that the Russians even proposed to stage a fake assassination of Orbán, in order to build more sympathy for him. They called this strategy “Gamechanger.”

[Anne Applebaum: The longest suicide note in American history]

Tisza, Magyar’s opposition party, is expecting more. Several people close to Tisza told me that they feared a false-flag operation, perhaps an explosion at a Hungarian pipeline or another energy site. I was also told that Tisza has been preparing for a major hack of their internal communications infrastructure, and has built an analog backup system, just in case. Last week, that seemed prudent, since the party’s membership database had already been hacked, with names and private information of members dumped online. Now it seems prescient: This week, Direkt36 published an article, based partly on material from a whistleblower, claiming that this was indeed the Hungarian government’s plan. In response, the Hungarian government said some of the individuals involved were linked to Ukrainian intelligence, and separately accused a Direkt36 journalist of espionage. The story continues to twist and turn.

Not long ago, the U.S. government would have vocally defended the democratic process in Hungary, and might have sought to downplay wild claims about fictional Ukrainian invasions. Instead, the Trump administration is doing its best to amplify them. Strange though it sounds, Hungary, although a tiny country in Central Europe, plays an outsize role in the imagination of the American and European far right: MAGA and its international wing understand that the Hungarian election, the most important in Europe this year, could mark a turning point in the war of ideas that has convulsed the democratic world for the past decade.

Orbán has been actively engaged in this battle, fighting against liberal democracy and the rule of law, advocating for authoritarian populism and one-party rule. He became a beacon for other leaders who seek to alter their own democratic political systems, who also want to twist the rules in order to ensure that they never lose. Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, once said Orbán’s Hungary was not just “a model for modern statecraft, but the model.” Orbán pioneered a form of campaigning too, spending years convincing Hungarians that existential threats—from migrants, from so-called decadence, from the European Union—required the radical institutional changes that have kept his party in power. Americans will be familiar with these tactics, which have been adopted, and adapted, by Trump and Vance.

Now the political leaders who have long admired Orbán’s methods are gathering to help him. Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled to Budapest in February to endorse Orbán, even seeming to offer financial support “if you face things that threaten the stability of your country.” Vice President J. D. Vance is set to visit Budapest, probably after Easter. President Trump himself appeared on video at the Budapest meeting last Saturday of CPAC, the formerly mainstream-conservative organization that now organizes pop-up rallies on behalf of the international radical right. In his message, Trump offered his “complete and total endorsement” for Orbán, Russia’s closest European ally.

Other members of the European far right showed up in person. Alice Weidel, head of the far-right Alternative for Germany, made a speech attacking the European Union for allegedly sending billions of euros to Ukraine, “the most corrupt regime on Earth,” as if she were not speaking on a podium inside the most corrupt state in the EU, and were not echoing the rhetoric of Russia, which might authentically be the most corrupt regime on Earth. She was followed by Santiago Abascal, the leader of the Spanish far right, who said that Orbán’s Hungary—repressed and impoverished after years of ersatz populism—is a “shining beam of light in the darkness.” Marine Le Pen of France, Karol Nawrocki of Poland, and Geert Wilders of the Netherlands have also made appearances. Benjamin Netanyahu endorsed Orbán by video. Even the libertarian president of Argentina, Javier Milei, came all the way from South America to laud Orbán, a man who has built one of Europe’s most centralized and repressive societies.

All of them have their own motives. Maybe Weidel is trying to help out the Russians, who fund some of her party members and amplify her own online campaigns. Milei may reckon it prudent to back an ally of Trump, who gave him $20 billion to shore up his country’s currency just before his own recent election. Perhaps Abascal or LePen hope for a boost in their campaigns too. But mostly they were there because the return of a different government in Hungary would invalidate the claim that the far right represents Europe’s future.

[Read: Is the end of NATO near?]

In Budapest, Orban’s language and tactics already feel like they belong to the past. His old threats aren’t working anymore, perhaps because reality is reasserting itself. There is, in fact, no wave of migration challenging the survival of the Hungarian nation. Brussels doesn’t pose an actual threat to Hungarian health and happiness, but the poor state of the nation’s hospitals very well might. And, of course, Ukraine is not going to invade, but Russia might. Hungary was actually invaded, after all, in living memory—by tanks sent in by Moscow, not Kyiv: In 1956, the Soviet army came to Budapest to crush the anti-Communist Hungarian revolution.

To counter Orbán’s post-reality campaign, Tisza has focused on building a grassroots campaign that reaches actual people in the three-dimensional world. Magyar gives no interviews but instead makes campaign speeches in several different towns and villages every day, mostly on topics people understand: the economy, health, corruption. Usually he stays away from the geopolitical themes Orbán much prefers. But at a large rally in Budapest earlier this month, Magyar did start chanting “Russians go home.”

That chant, and the historical memory behind it, also helps explain why Budapest feels so feverish, and why Orbán’s post-reality campaign is so fraught. To win, Orbán has to corrupt that searing national memory, and to substitute fear of Ukraine. That means waging cognitive warfare on a scale no one else has tried before. Emotions are high because the stakes are high. If he succeeds, he will once again blaze a path that others will follow. And if he loses, an era comes to an end.

Cuba Doesn’t Care About Marxism

2026-03-27T09:56:00-04:00

America’s rivalry with Cuba was once a bitter battle of ideas. When a 20-something Fidel Castro electrified his supporters with visions of a bright socialist future, he wasn’t bluffing. When John F. Kennedy said that the Cuban revolution was “incompatible with the principles and objectives of the Inter-American system,” he meant it. People on both sides defended these ideas around the world. Cuba supported uprisings in Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, the Congo, and elsewhere. It sent thousands of soldiers to fight a revolutionary war in Angola and thousands more to defend a Marxist government in Ethiopia. Wherever the Cubans went, they were countered by Americans—more square, but often just as idealistic—determined to hold the line for democracy and human rights.

That was a long time ago.

Today Washington and Havana are still antagonists, but the ideologies on each side have faded over the years. Cuba’s socialist utopianism wore away gradually. The American government’s commitment to democracy eroded much more quickly, just in the past few years. Both governments still mouth the old slogans, by rote. As they negotiate over Cuba’s future—with the threat of U.S. military intervention hanging over their talks—a new dynamic has emerged: The two sides appear to be haggling not over ideas but over which side can extract the most financial gain from Cuba. The new reality is tawdry, but it might put a resolution within reach. Officials who operate like mob bosses don’t need to agree on transcendent values to make a bargain.

Cuba’s ideological hollowing is decades old. When the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1991, Cuba lost its patron and 35 percent of its GDP. Eastern European Communist Parties were dissolving, and their countries were holding democratic elections. At first, Castro took the opposite path, declaring, “We are not only fighting for ourselves. We are not only fighting for our ideals.” But with the country’s economy in free fall, his government had little choice but to back away from its Marxist orthodoxies. Castro quietly accepted small-scale private enterprise, along with widespread sexual tourism. Regime insiders grasped that they could leverage their power into money. Slowly, Castro’s cronies built a kleptocracy that proved ruinous to the Cuban people, but hugely profitable to them.

Under Raúl Castro—Fidel’s brother and successor, who, at 94, remains the chief authority in Havana—the entity that actually runs Cuba is not the Communist Party, but GAESA, the Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A. GAESA is a military conglomerate that controls 40 to 70 percent of the Cuban economy; it dominates the hospitality sector, gasoline retailing, supermarkets, currency exchanges, and money transfers, and runs the island’s main port. Government documents leaked to the Miami Herald last year suggested that GAESA held as much as $18 billion in assets. The group’s tourism subsidiary earned a 42 percent profit margin in the first quarter of 2024. GAESA pays no taxes, transfers no dividends to the state budget, and is legally exempt from audits. It is a ruthlessly extractive state monopoly, run by generals and Castro-family members and hangers-on, and no longer even pretends to act in the public interest.

[Vivian Salama and Sarah Fitzpatrick: Trump’s eye is already on Cuba]

While GAESA’s leaders profit, 89 percent of Cubans live in extreme poverty. Doctors say that more patients are dying as the health system crumbles. More than 1 million people—a tenth of the population—have fled since the coronavirus pandemic. The situation has become so dire that seven out of 10 Cubans report skipping meals, and one in five intends to emigrate. Many of those who stay behind are older and poorer. But it’s the constant blackouts that bother people the most: Even before the United States imposed an oil blockade earlier this year, 72 percent of Cubans named power outages as their main concern. Since the blockade, virtually everyone on the island has lost power in blackouts that, at one point, lasted 20 hours; three grids have broken down in four months; hospitals have been unable to function. Water pumps have stopped, and garbage trucks, too. The United Nations warns of collapse.

Miguel Díaz-Canel, the puppet president Raúl Castro appointed, has been left to manage the contradictions. He recently invited the Cuban exiles his predecessors called gusanos—“worms”—to invest in island businesses for the first time in 70 years, a move that would once have been considered an unimaginable act of ideological heresy. In Cuba today, Marxist bromides serve as nothing more than rhetorical cover for corruption. Cuba watchers have had decades to get used to this charade.

In America, and not only in the Cuban-exile community, politicians from both parties have made the ideological case against Cuban communism for decades. Back in 2021, then-Senator Marco Rubio railed against the Cuban regime in the language of high moral purpose that conservatives had always adopted, saying, “We condemn this communist, this Marxist, this socialist tyranny. Call it for what it is.” As recently as July 2024, Rubio joined Rick Scott and Ted Cruz in introducing a Senate resolution honoring the anniversary of Cuba’s 2021 protests and condemning the regime for the “brutal oppression, persecution and torture” of citizens demanding freedom; Rubio called the protests “a testament to the Cuban people’s tenacity and their unwavering desire for freedom from tyranny.” Then-Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat, spoke in the same register, calling for solidarity with Cubans “risking it all to liberate themselves from the iron hand of dictatorship.”

Cuban propaganda long dismissed this kind of talk as ideological window dressing for America’s imperialist designs on the island. For decades, that was mostly a lie meant to drain the American opposition of its moral force. What’s startling is how quickly yesterday’s propaganda has morphed into a neutral statement on American policy.

When Donald Trump returned to power last year, the U.S. began dismantling institutions created to defend democracy abroad. It closed USAID; gutted the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor; withheld funding for the National Endowment for Democracy; and effectively shut down Voice of America (a judge recently ordered the organization to resume operations). Members of an administration demanding that Cuba democratize have welcomed Vladimir Putin onto American soil and lavished praise on Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

And now, thanks to reporting from The Atlantic’s Vivian Salama and Sarah Fitzpatrick, we know that Trump’s ambitions in Cuba aren’t primarily ideological. They’re mercenary.

Four sources told Salama and Fitzpatrick that the U.S. attorney’s office in South Florida is preparing indictments against the political and military leadership in Havana—including some members of the Castro family—on potential charges related to drug trafficking, espionage, and violent crime. A similar legal strategy preceded the U.S. capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in January. The possible indictments and the fuel blockade might signal that the administration wants to impose regime change and usher in democracy in Cuba. But people familiar with Trump’s thinking told Salama and Fitzpatrick that the president is most interested in “securing broad U.S. latitude to invest in, develop, and ultimately capitalize on Cuba’s underdeveloped cities and beaches,” they write.

[Vivian Salama: All eyes on Cuba]

“There’s billions of dollars to be made there,” an administration official told them. Trump’s interest apparently dates back to his days in real estate. “He’s interested in Cuba as a market for him, and completely agnostic about the politics,” one person who spoke with Trump about Cuba during his first administration said to Salama and Fitzpatrick. “He didn’t care.” They report that the administration is considering Cuban American GOP donors for potential leadership roles in Havana.

The point of dropping bombs in Cuba, then, wouldn’t be to subdue the Cuban armed forces so much as to produce a visible, unmistakable rupture—a before and after that Trump can point to. In Caracas, the U.S. operation to seize Maduro lasted hours. It left the old regime mostly in place, and simply changed the optics: A dictator had been removed, and Trump could claim the win.

An earlier vintage of American leader might have argued that even if economic opening was his No. 1 concern, ushering in freedom and democracy would be the best way of achieving that. And some of Trump’s advisers and backers may well believe that. But the Trump administration has given little indication that it wants to turn Cuba into a genuinely open economy. Open economies are competitive, and the last thing that a kleptocrat wants is a competitor. What Trump seems to object to in Cuba’s economic system isn’t how corrupt and extractive it is; it’s that he’s not getting a share of the take.

As the fight between Washington and Havana narrows to a dispute over who takes home the guaranteed profits in such a system, the outlines of a potential deal come into focus: The generals keep their cut. The Republican donors get their roles, splitting their loot with the more pliable components of the Castro clique. The president gets his deal, and maybe a hotel. And the Cubans who believed the slogans—from either side—get nothing. The political scientist María de los Ángeles Torres has warned that a deal focused on economic opening alone would “crush the aspirations of Cubans both on the island and in exile who have fought to establish democratic rights in their homeland.”

She’s right, of course, but that hardly registers these days. For nearly seven decades, Americans who worked to contain Cuban influence genuinely believed in the cause that they were fighting for, even when the methods they used in the fight betrayed their ideals. The Cuban regime spent decades warning about an imperialist American enemy that didn’t quite exist. Now that enemy is at the doors, and the revolution has nothing left.

The Countdown to a Ground War

2026-03-26T15:13:38-04:00

Donald Trump announced this week that the United States and Iran had made significant progress in negotiations, and he was allowing five days to reach a deal. Tehran denied that it was talking with Washington at all. This is not, in any meaningful sense, a negotiation: It is a countdown.

The timing is not coincidental. Thousands of Marines and much of the 1st Brigade of the 82nd Airborne are en route to the Middle East. Trump may intend the talks to act as cover for an escalation decision already made. Even if he doesn’t, the structural reality is the same: When the deadline expires, he will be close to having significant ground-combat capability in the region and a collapsing diplomatic process to justify using it.

The gap between the two sides makes the collapse of talks likely. The American framework is, in essence, a demand for Iran’s surrender. The administration’s 15-point proposal, delivered to Iran via Pakistan, requires Tehran to dismantle its entire uranium-enrichment infrastructure, surrender its stockpiles of highly enriched uranium, sever all ties with proxy forces across the region, and accept strict limits on its conventional military. In exchange, Washington is offering sanctions relief and support for a civilian nuclear-energy program. The proposal is very similar to the deal that the United States put on the table before the bombing campaign began.

Iran’s counter-framework reflects a regime that does not believe it is losing. Tehran is demanding binding guarantees that neither the United States nor Israel will strike again, reparations for the damage already inflicted, and formal recognition of its control over the Strait of Hormuz. On enrichment and proxies, Iranian negotiators have shown no willingness to move.

The war has not moderated the Iranian regime. It has hardened it. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps now dominates Iran’s internal deliberations to a degree unprecedented even under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran effectively controls the strait, and it knows that this control affords Tehran real leverage. Iran appears to have concluded that it is better positioned for a war of endurance than for a negotiated capitulation.

Trump could still choose to declare victory, or even accept terms closer to Iran’s position, if he concludes that the alternative is a longer and more uncertain war.

Last year’s trade confrontation with China ended with significant American concessions obscured by wins against U.S. allies and dressed in the language of reciprocal success. A similar reframing is conceivable here. He could point to Iran’s degraded navy, its shattered air force, the deaths of senior regime officials, and the setback to its nuclear program and argue that the threat has been sufficiently reduced to warrant a softer settlement.

[Eliot A. Cohen: The war with Iran is exposing big problems for the military]

But the Iran case will be harder to obscure than the China one was. Trade balances are abstract; the Strait of Hormuz is not. A deal that leaves the IRGC in effective control of the world’s most crucial shipping lane, imposes no enforceable limits on Iran’s missile or enrichment programs, and offers the regime international legitimacy cannot easily be framed as victory, especially when America’s closest regional partners will be lining up to say otherwise.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly told Trump that the United States should continue fighting to destroy the Iranian regime and remake the region. The United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the United States rejected the idea of a “simple cease-fire,” calling instead for “a conclusive outcome that addresses Iran’s full range of threats.” The UAE and Saudi Arabia may not have fully welcomed the war in the first place, but now that it is under way, they will not want to see Iran emerge stronger from it. Meanwhile, Israel remains committed to regime change or, failing that, maximum degradation, and it worries about a deal that meets Tehran halfway or a cease-fire. These governments can be expected to push Trump to continue the war once the talks collapse, although they seem to have concerns about ground operations.

But Trump wants to avoid a messy, long war, which could lead to sustained high oil prices and a possible recession. Ground troops would seem likely to bring this outcome about—but Trump appears to believe that their introduction will instead deliver a decisive knockout blow, which will either compel Tehran to accept his terms or make a U.S. declaration of victory credible. Trump announced yesterday that he had rescheduled a visit to China for May 14 and 15, which suggests that he expects the war to be over by then.

According to media reports about internal Trump-administration deliberations, three ground operations are most likely: a raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities at Isfahan to seize its stockpile of highly enriched uranium; the seizure of Kharg Island, Iran’s principal oil-export hub; and the deployment of troops to Iran’s shoreline to suppress its attacks on shipping through the strait.

Each carries risks that the administration appears to be underestimating. Austin Long, a senior nuclear fellow at MIT, told me that Iran’s highly enriched uranium is a white, crystalline solid, uranium hexafluoride, stored in thick, steel cylinders, and cannot be reliably and permanently destroyed with explosives. If the cylinders are pierced, they emit a severely hazardous gas. A successful seizure from Isfahan would require U.S. troops to secure a wide perimeter, locate and excavate up to 970 pounds of the uranium buried under an unknown depth of rubble, protect it from counterattack, load it onto aircraft, and depart under fire. The operation would be arguably the most complex raid ever carried out by U.S. forces. The 970 pounds of uranium could also be spread among Isfahan and two other sites, raising the possibility of multiple raids.

[Nancy A. Youssef and Missy Ryan: The U.S. and Iran are fighting a massively asymmetrical war]

Kharg Island and the coastal positions present different but equally serious problems. Forces on Kharg would immediately be within range of sustained Iranian fire; Iran could respond by attacking energy infrastructure and desalination plants across the Persian Gulf or destroying the island’s oil facilities to deny them to the Americans. Coastal positions are reportedly located near population centers, which would complicate both the military mission and the international response. In each scenario, the most plausible outcome is not a clean victory but a situation that demands more troops, more time, and more exposure to avert failure.

The deeper problem is that military operations, however successful tactically, cannot substitute for what the war is trying to achieve strategically. Trump launched this conflict believing that Iran was weak, and that a short, sharp campaign would force a new leader to terms. The regime has proved more resilient and more capable of inflicting sustained damage on the region than the president expected.

The question worth asking now is not whether the U.S.-Iran talks will fail, but what the United States will do on the other side of that failure. Trump has a long history of claiming victory in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This may be the rare moment when that instinct serves the country—because the alternative appears to be doubling down on a losing strategy by launching a ground war.

‘You Want to Leave Us Alone With Mojtaba?’

2026-03-24T12:26:00-04:00

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The war in Iran has horrified many inside the country, but some worry that peace could be just as frightening. “I am shit-scared,” Shaghayeh, a 32-year-old living in Tehran, told me last week. “But I won’t cheer if the war ends now. You want to leave us alone with Mojtaba?”

Shaghayeh, a left-wing activist, was referring to the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, whose regime continues to impose a near-total internet blackout. Contacting anyone within Iran’s borders is a challenge, but I have managed to speak with more than a dozen people over the past three weeks. (To protect their safety, I am referring to them by pseudonyms.) I was struck by how many people in Iran expressed the same paradox: They fear the continuation of the war, yet they also fear its end.

Iran is a country of 90 million people, and I can’t claim that the ones I spoke with are representative. But very few of them told me they were content with their lives before the war. At first, some saw America and Israel’s intervention as a sign of hope—a possible escape from economic ruin and social repression. Now some of those same Iranians have begun to fear that the United States and Israel have locked them into a worse fate: Either the war persists and bombs keep falling on their heads, or it ends, giving way to an even crueler regime.

[Read: Iran is trying to defeat America in the living room]

Some Iranians began our phone calls with a dark joke: “As you can see, I am still alive.” Others wasted no time, mindful that the line could cut out at any moment. “We are under bombardment, Arash,” Ali, a left-wing anti-regime activist in Tehran, told me earlier this month. “Get our voice to the world: No to war, no to killing, no to Israeli and American bombs.”

After more than three weeks, the war has killed at least 1,443 Iranian civilians, including 217 children, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, a U.S.-based nonprofit run by Iranians. Some in Iran told me that the costs of the war have been so severe that no end could justify them.

Ziba was crying uncontrollably when she left me a voice message. She was staying at her grandmother’s house in Tehran, and a bomb had just broken the windows. “Why can’t people understand that these conditions are no better than a lack of freedom?” she asked. “Fuck freedom if this is the price we pay for it. I was about to have a heart attack. Fuck this freedom. I still can’t breathe.”

When I spoke with Nastaran, her windows had recently shattered too. Still, she was optimistic. “Hope must not die,” she told me. Nastaran, who is 26, said she’d barely had enough money to survive in Tehran before the bombs started falling. “I hate this war. But something better can follow.” Hassan, 32, went further. “I’ll just tell you one thing,” he said. “I am only unhappy when I don’t hear the sound of missiles.”

That may be the strongest endorsement of the war I’ve heard. Most of the people I talked to have soured on the conflict, and not only because of the destruction it has wrought.

Shahrzad moved to Europe several weeks before the war. I had spoken with her in January, days after the regime had massacred protesters. Back then, the 29-year-old told me that she was in favor of foreign intervention, hoping it would dislodge the Islamic Republic. But last week, Shahrzad said she no longer believes that America and Israel care about achieving that result.

[Franklin Foer: Trump is betraying Iran’s pro-democracy protesters]

“I can now see that their intention is perhaps to make Iran weaker than before, even if the regime stays in power.” She pointed to America’s apparent willingness to negotiate with Khamenei and his inner circle. “I thought they had concluded that an Iran without the Islamic Republic was in their best interests too. Now I know this isn’t their priority.”

Melika, a 21-year-old, also recently left Iran for Europe. Back in January, she told me that she wanted to see the supreme leader killed, but now she opposes the war. “When Khamenei died, I was happy, but only for a moment—like you get a hit from a drug,” Melika said. “It didn’t even last a day. After that I’ve only felt one thing: fear, fear, fear.”

Some Iranians said that they had expected anti-regime forces to revolt after the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—a hope that Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu had expressed too. Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last Shah, has called on Iranians to help bring down the regime. But some of those I spoke with have lost faith in him. “I think people haven’t risen up because they don’t have a proper leader,” Shahrzad said. All Pahlavi does, she said, is “try to placate Trump.”

Even if they did have a proper leader, protesters would still have to contend with American and Israeli bombs, as well as the ample security forces that the regime has mobilized. Dissidents would also face resistance from their fellow citizens, some of whom back the regime. I spoke with one man in his 40s who supported Mojtaba Khamenei and said he would “fight to death to not let Pahlavi come back.”

Some anti-regime Iranians cannot imagine the war yielding any positive outcome without an organized opposition. Melika and Shahrzad both reiterated the grim paradox I’d heard from others: They fear the fighting, but they also fear its conclusion.

“I am amazed at how strong the regime has been,” Melika said. “Even though I want the war to stop, I know they’ll be really brutal once it does.”

Shahrzad echoed her alarm. “The war upsets me, of course,” she said. “But I am worried that when it ends, the regime will be even worse.”

Canada’s Polite Pogrom

2026-03-24T08:29:49-04:00

Ted Rosenberg quit teaching geriatric medicine after 30 years because his employer, the University of British Columbia, was too tolerant.

In the days and weeks following the Hamas massacre of innocent Israelis on October 7, 2023, students and colleagues alike in his academic community posted fiery condemnations of and expressions of moral disgust toward … Israel. Rosenberg felt that some of these messages crossed the line into bigotry. One note accused Israel of harvesting the organs of murdered Palestinians. Another, from a medical-school resident, warned of a sinister, unnamed group of people “pulling the strings, who have orchestrated every war to ever happen, the ones who profit off of death and sickness.” “ The way I saw it,” he told me, “that level of demonization put the whole Jewish community at risk.”

He did not resign because of the messages, though; he resigned because the university wouldn’t do anything about them. “ I tried to meet with the dean,” Rosenberg said, “and he said, ‘If you feel you’re being discriminated against, put it through the DEI program.’ So I met with the head of the diversity, equity, and inclusion program within the faculty, and she refused to acknowledge that anti-Semitism was an issue. They view Jews as white within their DEI framework.” The faculty of medicine’s dean at the time, Dermot Kelleher, referred Rosenberg to UBC’s Equity and Inclusion website. Rosenberg searched the site for the words anti-Semitism and Jew. Neither appeared.

[From the March 2024 issue: The golden age of American Jews is ending]

In his letter of resignation, he wrote, “I have no faith in due process in a faculty that does not even acknowledge the existence or presence of antisemitism/Jew-hatred.” After Rosenberg’s resignation became the subject of media attention, the equity committee of the department of medicine of UBC added a note to its website: “Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia will not be tolerated.”

Hatred against Jews in Canada has spiked to historic levels since October 7. It’s a crisis commonly measured via violence and vandalism. More synagogues in Canada in the past 28 months have been desecrated, burned, shot at, or threatened with bombings than in any other country. Jews in Canada are now statistically more likely to be victims of police-reported hate crimes than any other minority. A Jewish girls’ school in Toronto was shot at on three separate occasions. A Jewish grandmother was stabbed in a kosher supermarket in Ottawa, and a mother in Toronto was assaulted while picking her child up from a Jewish day care. Police have thwarted a half-dozen extremist murder plots since October 7 against Jews by Canadian residents.

These incidents have generated news coverage and sympathetic statements from mayors and members of Parliament, whose proclamations that This is not who we are as Canadians have become commonplace.

Documenting and denouncing shootings and arson attacks are easy. But it’s harder to account for stories like Rosenberg’s, where Jews exit public life without any glass or bones being broken. How many Jewish academics, health-care workers, teachers, and arts-organization employees have left institutions because they no longer feel welcome or protected? Nobody is counting. The diversity statistics collected by these organizations rarely include “Jewish” as a category of self-identification.

Here’s what can be said for sure: 80 percent of Jewish doctors and medical students surveyed by the Jewish Medical Association of Ontario reported experiencing anti-Semitism at work after October 7. In 2024, more than 100 Jewish doctors stopped acknowledging their affiliation with the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine in protest of what they saw as a failure to protect Jewish students and faculty. Almost a third of Ontario’s Jewish doctors say they are considering leaving Canada because of hostile work environments, according to the JMAO survey.

A group of Jewish teachers in British Columbia filed a human-rights complaint against their own union, accusing the BC Teachers’ Federation of ostracizing, bullying, and silencing its Jewish members. A federal report into Ontario’s K–12 schools found nearly 800 anti-Semitic incidents reported in elementary and high schools since 2023, many relating to the conduct of teachers.

[Read: The limits of recognition]

One hundred thirty-five cultural organizations across Canada joined the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel. The Toronto International Film Festival dropped a documentary from its lineup that told the story of an Israeli grandfather’s experience rescuing his family from Hamas on October 7, before an outcry forced its restoration. A Jewish film festival was postponed in Hamilton, Ontario, when the theater hosting the event backed out, citing “safety concerns.” The cartoonist Miriam Libicki was banned from the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival out of “public safety concerns,” because years earlier, she had written a book about her time serving in the Israel Defense Forces. (The festival later reversed course and apologized.)

And then there’s Canadian politics.

In 2023, the mayor of Calgary broke with a long-standing local tradition and refused to attend a City Hall Hanukkah-menorah lighting; she said the event had “political intentions” because it “had been repositioned to support Israel.”

The awkward reality is that a main driver of these incidents is a very Canadian aversion to causing offense: The deference of many politicians and institutions to the views of a rapidly growing minority community is too often leading them to reject another minority community. Although relatively few Canadians hold negative views of Jews, opinion polls have found that such views find greater levels of support within the Canadian Muslim community. From 2001 to 2021, the Muslim population of Canada more than tripled, to about 5 percent of the population. Just 4 percent of non-Jewish Canadians agree that Jews are largely to blame for the negative consequences of globalization, but that figure rises to 28 percent among Canadian Muslims, according to a survey conducted by the University of Toronto sociologist Robert Brym. Similarly, only 16 percent of Canadians believe that it is appropriate for opponents of Israel’s policies to boycott Jewish-owned businesses in Canada, but that claim finds support among 41 percent of Canadian Muslims.

Canada is also the birthplace of a new educational framework called APR—Anti-Palestinian racism. APR was developed by the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association, and in 2024 the Toronto District School Board, which serves more than 230,000 students, voted to integrate APR into its wider anti-hate strategy. Although a new policy against racism might sound benign, many Jewish groups argue that in practice, APR can function as a form of discrimination and censorship. For example, a group of Toronto teachers had been given APR training by their union, in which they were told that it would be racist, and therefore forbidden, to ask why Arab countries don’t help Palestinians. To the claim that the phrase From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free carries genocidal implications toward Israel, the APR training suggests responding that “Palestinian chants and poetry exist to give Palestinians hope, and are not for others to define.”

David S. Koffman, a historian at York University and the editor in chief of Canadian Jewish Studies, writes that Canada’s Jews are turning inward. “Our assumptions about safety, trust, acceptance, and solidarity have been punctured,” he observes. As a result, he says, more Jewish parents are enrolling their children in private Jewish day schools, and job applications at Jewish organizations are rising.

Which is not to say that Jewish spaces are safe from external judgment and scorn. An anti-Zionist website called The Maple published lists of the names of Canadian Jews who have served in the IDF, as well as the names of Jewish children’s schools and summer camps with which they were associated. The author of these lists, Davide Mastracci, wrote that “the complicit segment of Canada’s Jewish population deserves blame for what they do, not who they are.” Weeks after the list was published, five pro-Palestinian groups launched a campaign to revoke the accreditation of 17 Canadian Jewish sleepaway camps. The groups accused the summer camps of supporting “genocide” and called for “a gigantic change.” Then, both synagogues listed by The Maple as complicit Jewish institutions were shot at.

Among my Jewish friends and family, these efforts to intimidate and alienate Jews, to exclude them from civil society and from public life, and to close down private Jewish spaces are discussed with far more concern and frequency than the regular reports of graffiti and name-calling. Five Jewish families pulled their children from the downtown Toronto public school in my neighborhood last year, after a series of controversies. At least four Jewish journalists left the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper, after the paper’s ombudsperson on discrimination and bias wrote a social-media post questioning “who did what” on October 7, and reposted another criticizing North American Jews for “centering their feelings.”

I have a general sense that we’re witnessing a polite pogrom, that Jewish life in my country has forever changed, and that I can no longer take for granted that people like me are represented in Canada’s hospitals, schools, newsrooms, and legislatures. But I don’t know for sure. The data do not exist, and the institutions in question won’t collect them. Perhaps they consider it impolite to ask.

Iran Is Trying to Defeat America in the Living Room

2026-03-23T17:46:00-04:00

Among the first lessons that Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries learned after coming to power in 1979 was that their best ally against American power was American democracy. Their first test case was the seizing of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, in which 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days, an act that devastated Iran’s economy and international reputation but succeeded in humiliating Jimmy Carter and ending his chances of reelection. Over the decades, Iran gained repeated proof that it didn’t need to defeat America on the battlefield; it just had to make the American people feel the war in their living room. And now, in a war for its survival, Tehran is attempting the same play.

In April 1983, Iran—via its newly created Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah—carried out a suicide bombing against the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans. It was the deadliest attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in history. “First word is that Iranian Shiites did it,” Ronald Reagan wrote in his diary, “d__n them.” Although Reagan remained outwardly steadfast, he was briefed that his approval ratings were beginning to sour because of Lebanon. “The people just don’t know why we’re there,” he wrote in his diary. “There is a deeply buried isolationist sentiment in our land.”

Months later, in October, Hezbollah struck again, this time with two simultaneous truck bombs that killed 241 American service members and 58 French soldiers as they slept. Four days after the attack, Reagan addressed the nation and asked: “If we were to leave Lebanon now, what message would that send to those who foment instability and terrorism?” He answered himself four months later, when, under pressure from Congress, he ordered the complete withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Lebanon.

[Eliot A. Cohen: The strategic follies of the Islamic Republic]

Tehran also tried the living-room strategy in Iraq. When George W. Bush invaded in 2003, Tehran feared that a stable, democratic Iraq could become an American platform to threaten or subvert the Islamic Republic. Rather than confront the United States directly, Iran did what it had learned to do in Lebanon: create enough chaos to make the war unwinnable. According to declassified interrogation records, the Iran-backed Shiite-militia leader Qais al-Khazali told his American captors that Iran supported virtually every faction capable of fueling the disorder and making Iraq ungovernable. Iran-supplied weapons, including improvised explosive devices, were responsible for as many as 1,000 American deaths. The United States was spending billions of dollars unsuccessfully trying to stabilize Iraq; Iran was spending millions successfully destabilizing it.

Iran’s path to victory was not on the Iraqi battlefield but at the American ballot box. Bush understood this, telling the American public in July 2007 that “the same regime in Iran that is pursuing nuclear weapons and threatening to wipe Israel off the map is also providing sophisticated IEDs to extremists in Iraq who are using them to kill American soldiers.” By then, however, nearly six in 10 Americans already said that the war had been a mistake. Bush, thanks greatly to Iran, had lost the support he needed at home.

Today, with its existence at stake, Tehran is once again trying to make war too unpopular with the American public for America’s president to continue. The weapons being employed are no longer truck bombs and IEDs; instead they are missiles, drones, and geography.

Unable to compete militarily with the United States and Israel, Tehran has fallen back on its most important strategic card: the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian threats have collapsed the number of ships transiting the world’s most crucial energy corridor each day from an average of 138 to single digits—on some days, just one. At least 20 commercial vessels have been attacked, sending insurance costs soaring to as much as $5 million a ship. Tehran’s $20,000 drones are disrupting hundreds of millions of dollars in cargo for each attack. Oil prices have surged more than 40 percent since February 28; Brent crude oil peaked near $120 a barrel. Americans are paying a dollar more a gallon than they were when the war began.

Donald Trump has threatened to destroy Iran if it refuses to reopen the strait, but the resulting chaos would undermine his own objective: His goal was to turn Iran into a pliant state, not a failed state.

Trump’s war on Iran has not unified Americans like previous Middle Eastern conflicts did; nearly eight in 10 Americans supported both the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq immediately after each of those hostilities began. Today, nine in 10 Democrats oppose the Iran strikes, as do most independents, and an average of polls taken from February 27 to March 11 found that 50 percent of Americans are opposed and only 40 percent are in support. Even within the Republican Party, the divide is striking: About 90 percent of MAGA-aligned Republicans back the war, but non-MAGA Republicans are split; about 54 percent are supportive. Although Trump’s MAGA base has remained remarkably loyal to him, these Americans are acutely vulnerable to the war’s economic costs, paying more for gasoline, diesel, and groceries, whose prices have been swollen by a fertilizer shortage that the Strait of Hormuz’s closure has helped create.

Islamic Republic officials have actively sought to fracture Trump’s base by evoking anti-Zionist conspiracies. “Trump has turned ‘America First’ into ‘Israel First,’” the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, posted, adding, “which always means ‘America last.’” Mohammed Baqer Qalibaf, a former Revolutionary Guard commander who is close with Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, referred to Trump’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an “Epstein Axis” and posted that “American families deserve to know why Trump is sacrificing their sons and daughters to advance Netanyahu’s expansionist delusions.”

Iranian state TV has also amplified the commentary of Tucker Carlson—an outspoken conservative critic of the war—including a recent interview with Joe Kent, Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center who resigned after blaming “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” for the conflict. Tehran doesn’t want to turn Americans against just the war. It wants to turn Americans against one another.

[Rogé Karma: Iran might use its economic-doomsday option]

Although opinion polls, oil prices, and the number of projectiles remaining are measurable, the fate of the war will be determined in part by the resolve of both parties, something far more difficult to measure. A democratic president’s will to fight is constrained by elections, polls, gas prices, and the news cycle. An authoritarian regime fighting for its survival answers to none of those pressures. Reagan had resolve until Congress didn’t. Bush had resolve until six in 10 Americans called his war a mistake. This asymmetry of resolve is Iran’s greatest structural advantage. Tehran wins by not losing; Trump loses by not winning.

The Islamic Republic’s decision to build its political identity around “death to America” has been a 47-year war of choice. Trump’s decision to try to end Tehran’s malign capabilities, rather than merely contain or counter them like past administrations did, has also been a war of choice.

If Iran’s strategy depends on Peoria, Trump’s presidency depends on the Strait of Hormuz. Trump cannot withdraw so long as Iran controls it, but securing it risks the kind of mass American casualties that ended Reagan’s and Bush’s resolve. If Trump reopens it, his appetite for regime change may grow. If he doesn’t, the economic pressure on his base will mount. This is ultimately a war between a democracy’s impatience and a theocracy’s ruthless endurance. The question is whether, for the first time since 1979, Tehran has finally met a U.S. president more committed to destroying the regime than the regime is to destroying him.

The Trouble With Seizing Kharg Island

2026-03-21T07:00:00-04:00

In the Persian Gulf, about 20 miles off the Iranian coast, is a small, rocky island called Kharg that could be the Trump administration’s key to victory in the war it unleashed. It could also be America’s undoing.

The island is tiny—a little less than eight square miles—and has a population of about 20,000 people, most of them oil workers. It’s also the point of departure for approximately 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports. The United States struck military targets on Kharg on March 13 and is now reportedly considering invading it.

The thinking goes something like this: Iran has extended its control over the world’s oil markets by effectively closing the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway through which most Persian Gulf exports must travel. The Iranian regime has made an exception for tankers carrying its own oil, and has reportedly exported at least 16 million barrels since the war began. But other Gulf nations have been largely unable to move their oil, and the effect has been an increase in Iranian revenue as the price of crude oil goes higher. The Iranians have reinforced this outcome by targeting pipelines on the Arabian Peninsula, which bypass the Strait of Hormuz. And the Iran-allied Houthis in Yemen have the capacity, if they so choose, to shut down the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, potentially closing off the Suez Canal.

[Rogé Karma: Iran might use its economic-doomsday option]

That Iran might close the Strait of Hormuz has long been considered a risk of taking military action against the Islamic Republic. But the Trump administration seems to have presumed that the closure would hurt Iranian oil exports, too—leading to economic crisis and possibly even regime collapse. Instead, Iran is continuing to export oil, which helps prop up its wobbly economy and allows the regime to fight another day.

The Islamic Republic’s theory of victory is that Iran can absorb American and Israeli air strikes longer than America can endure the economic pain and pressure of the strait being closed. If the Gulf states and others whose commerce has been disrupted are hurt badly enough, they may urge the United States to end the war, even on terms relatively favorable to Iran. The rise of gas prices, and the prices of other consumer goods, could also push the Trump administration to seek to end the conflict well ahead of the midterm elections in the United States.

Taking Kharg would give the United States an important bargaining chip and undermine Iran’s theory of victory. Unable to export most of its oil, Iran would come under much the same kind of pain and pressure that it is attempting to inflict by closing the strait. The U.S. might then continue its air campaign until Iran decides to accept American terms for ending the war, rather than continue to suffer economic devastation.

This may be why last week the United States dispatched the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit from Japan to the Middle East. The unit operates from the USS Tripoli, an America-class amphibious-assault ship that reportedly carries a rapid-response force of 2,200 to 2,500 Marines. Moving such a unit to a different theater is not a thing done lightly, and the number of troops involved—enough for the island but not enough to seize the Iranian side of the strait—strongly suggests that the United States has designs on Kharg.

An invasion of Kharg would likely be preceded by air strikes against any remaining military targets on the island, as well as those capable of threatening the island from the Iranian mainland. The Persian Gulf is still too dangerous for U.S. warships to enter, so the Tripoli would probably remain at a distance, sending Marines ashore by means of MV-22 Ospreys. Their first goal would be to seize the facilities that could allow Iran to bring in troops and heavy equipment, such as the 5,922-foot runway at Kharg airport. The United States would provide extensive air support to quickly eliminate pockets of resistance.

The United States could probably take Kharg Island relatively quickly. But holding it would be much more difficult and could turn deadly. Iran might order its forces to set the oil facilities there on fire, much as Saddam Hussein did with Kuwait’s oil fields in the Gulf War, contaminating the area and sickening U.S. troops. On the small island of Kharg, U.S. forces would have less access to the equipment they would need to deal with this problem than their predecessors did in Kuwait, and they couldn’t easily move away or upwind from the fires.

But even without such tactics, the Iranians could make holding Kharg very difficult. The operation would likely take longer than 15 days, which is about how long an expeditionary unit can operate without logistical support. Kharg is far—140 miles—from American assets in Kuwait City, but very close to Iran’s coast. Resupply vessels would be exposed not only to cruise-missile fire but also to Iran’s “mosquito fleet,” which includes robotic drones, sometimes called unmanned surface vessels (Ukraine used similar devices to bottle up the Russian Black Sea fleet at Novorossiysk).

Resupply missions by air would be risky too. Kharg’s distance from Kuwait means that American air defenses there would likely consist of only the shoulder-fired MANPADS that the Marines would probably carry and patrols of U.S. fighter planes. These can intercept drones but not ballistic missiles. And Iran could use its ballistic missiles to crater the runway at Kharg, preventing U.S. cargo aircraft from landing there. Tehran probably lacks the capacity to do this with a long-range precision strike, but Kharg lies within the range of its numerous short-range ballistic missiles. A barrage of these would need to land just one lucky strike to make the runway unusable. Oil fires, if they were to occur, could make air access to the island even more difficult.

The final threat is one suggested by experiences in Ukraine. Russia has been using loitering munitions—drones that hover over a territory, scanning for targets that they then dive in to destroy—to great effect. Called Lancets, these cost about as little as Shahed drones, and Iran could employ them over Kharg to seek out resupply ships and aircraft in the process of loading or unloading, as well as vehicles and troops. To guard against loitering munitions has required Ukraine to cover entire road systems with nets. In April 2024, Iran unveiled its own version of the Lancet. This could be a fake meant to boost domestic morale—Iran has done that sort of thing in the past—but if it’s real, it could cause real problems.

[Eliot A. Cohen: One war, two mistakes]

U.S. troops may well take Kharg Island, only to endure ballistic-missile strikes, drone attacks, and petrochemical smoke, all without a reliable means of obtaining logistical support. The result could be a grinding war of attrition that more closely resembles the battle space in Ukraine than it does the “shock and awe”–style campaigns that Americans are used to. Iran has given every indication that it would likely escalate by striking oil-and-gas facilities in the region, just as it did to Qatar and Saudi Arabia after the Pars South gas field was struck. Ground casualties and the destruction of oil infrastructure throughout the region would almost certainly create pressure on Donald Trump to pull out; but extracting troops under loitering munitions is dangerous, and aircraft on the ground are prime targets for these circling drones.

Conversely, if the United States managed to take and hold onto Kharg, the Iranian regime could find itself without the means to export its oil and unable to survive. Iran would then be forced to give the United States some—even much—of what it wants in exchange for control of the island.

That’s one way for Trump to get the off-ramp he desires. But his administration has never tried anything like this. An operation that involves taking land inside an adversary’s territory and then holding it until the cessation of hostilities involves a whole new world of risk—and an escalation to which Iran is sure to respond.

The Slow, Then Sudden, Death of the Hawkish Democrat

2026-03-20T07:00:00-04:00

The speech that arguably won Barack Obama the presidency was delivered six years before he ran for the White House and four years before he reached Congress. In October 2002, Obama, then a state senator from Illinois, delivered a blistering speech against the impending war in Iraq. “I don’t oppose war in all circumstances,” he declared at a Chicago rally. “What I do oppose is a dumb war.”

Years later, that stance would distinguish Obama from Hillary Clinton, the initial front-runner in the 2008 Democratic primary. The two contenders were largely in accord on domestic policy, which made their differences on foreign policy loom large. Clinton, like most Senate Democrats, had voted to authorize the Iraq War. But with that decision now deeply unpopular on the left, Obama leaned into his early opposition. His campaign produced supercuts of his anti-war sentiments over the years and even filmed supporters reciting the lines of his 2002 speech, in one of the earliest examples of viral video in American politics. The contrast proved consequential. Surveys showed that Democratic voters upset by the war broke for Obama, who narrowly edged out Clinton and went on to win the White House.

[David Frum: Can’t stop it, so lead it]

Today’s Democrats appear to have learned from Obama’s example and the Iraq debacle. On March 2, Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, a swing-state politician and potential presidential contender, announced his campaign for reelection and delivered a broadside against another Middle Eastern war. “Eight months ago, President Trump lied to the country when he falsely claimed to have obliterated Iran’s nuclear program,” Ossoff told supporters. “Now he says he’s taken the United States to war for regime change without evidence of imminent threat, without having exhausted diplomacy, without clear objectives or a plan for the aftermath, and without the consent of Congress.”

Ossoff’s speech was powerful, but it was most notable for not being noteworthy. Numerous high-profile Democratic politicians, including moderates in purple states and some considering a run for the presidency, have expressed similar sentiments. Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, a veteran of the Iraq War, has repeatedly dubbed the Iran campaign “a dumb war,” echoing Obama, and warned about America being pulled back into the Middle East. California Governor Gavin Newsom accused Trump of “engaging in an illegal, dangerous war that will risk the lives of our American service members and our friends without justification to the American people.” Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, a past and likely future presidential candidate, called this week for the withdrawal of U.S. forces “from this reckless and unauthorized war of choice with Iran.” The progressive standard-bearer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez predicted that Trump’s bombing would prove “catastrophic,” while on the other end of the party’s ideological spectrum, even Democratic candidates endorsed by AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby group, distanced themselves from the war.

The contrast with the Democratic Party of yesteryear could not be more apparent. Back in 2002, Democrats with White House aspirations felt compelled to authorize the Iraq War, even if they would later turn against it. Many of these politicians had witnessed decisive interventions in places such as Kosovo, Bosnia, and the first Gulf War that had salutary outcomes and ended without devolving into quagmires. Influenced by this experience, Senators John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden—the Democratic nominees for president in 2004, 2016, and 2020—all voted to back the invasion of Iraq. Today the dynamic has flipped, and presidential contenders are tripping over themselves to repudiate Trump’s war. Because so many have staked out opposition, these politicians are unlikely to be the next Obama. But they are ensuring that they will not be the next Hillary Clinton, a promising potential president whose support for a disastrous Middle Eastern war sabotaged her candidacy.

[Franklin Foer: Trump is betraying Iran’s pro-democracy protesters]

The reasons for this reversal are not just hindsight. Ever since Donald Trump assumed office, American politics has become polarized around his personality, with feelings about the president often dictating opinions about his policies. As a result, it has become very difficult for Republicans to oppose his agenda—and toxic for Democrats to support it. Moreover, unlike the Bush administration in 2002, the Trump administration has made little effort to sell the nation or the international community on its intervention, making military action less popular and easier for a poll-conscious politician to reject. Back in 2003, some 60 percent of Americans supported the invasion of Iraq, including about 40 percent of Democrats, creating significant cross-pressures on ambitious liberal elected officials. Today nearly all polls show that most Americans oppose the current campaign in Iran, and that an overwhelming majority reject a prospective ground invasion. When it comes to Democrats in particular, the numbers are laughably lopsided. A YouGov poll released this week found that 81 percent of Democrats believe that war with Iran is “not justified.” Just 7 percent disagreed.

In short, both the ghosts of the past and the polls of the present have conspired to push the Democratic Party in a staunchly anti-war direction. And given that wars tend to lose popularity the longer they drag on, this is likely the most popular the Iran war will ever be among Democrats. If the conflict turns out to be a success for Trump, his opposition will have to account for its nay-saying. But most Democratic elected officials seem to prefer taking that bet over the alternative. Obama’s argument didn’t just carry the day in his primary; it reshaped his party entirely.

The Incredible Story of the Cartel Olympics

2026-03-20T06:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Adriana Loureiro Fernández

They arrived suddenly—five white vans, identical and unmarked, blocking the street.

It was February 9, 2023, and Mauricio Morales was leading a group of migrants he had found at a bus station through Mexico City’s San Rafael neighborhood. Mau, as his friends called him, had told the migrants he could help them at the nearby refugee camp where he worked. They had just crossed a busy boulevard and were making their way down a side street when the five large utility vans lurched to a stop in front of them.

Men with machine guns, wearing tactical gear, spilled out and started barking orders and threats: ¡Entren todos! ¡Ahora mismo, hijos de puta! Were they police? Military? Mau couldn’t tell, and there was no time to ask for identification. Within seconds, the migrants were being shoved into the vans. When Mau tried to resist, something hard hit him on the head, and he fell to the ground. As he was loaded into the back of one of the vans, he heard gunshots. He thought of his mother. If this is the end, he remembers thinking before he lost consciousness, please let her be okay.

Mau woke on the floor of a dank, windowless room with a single mattress and a bucket in one corner. His wallet was gone; so was his phone. He had no idea where he was or why he’d been taken, but for the next few days, he and several other captives held with him were beaten and tortured. Men took turns pummeling him—breaking his ribs and pulling out his fingernails. When he tried to ask what they wanted, the beatings only got worse.

Then one day the men removed him from the room without explanation and deposited him back into a van. Assuming he was about to die, Mau began to weep. But when the van came to a stop and his captors hauled him out, he noticed that they were being careful with him now, almost gentle. “The boss wants to talk to him,” he heard one of them say.

The facility they took him to was strange. It vaguely resembled a school: four wings divided into classroom-like compartments and an enclosed courtyard in the middle. But there were no children here. Instead, men with guns patrolled the premises while women who looked like they were dressed for a night of clubbing loafed around. Narcocorridos, accordion-heavy cartel ballads, played loudly over speakers in the courtyard.

Mau was taken to a makeshift office, where a man with a paunch and a thick mustache sat behind a desk. He was flanked by a large bodyguard in a butcher’s apron and a voluptuous woman in a low-cut, form-fitting dress. He seemed irritated as he assessed Mau. “Look at him,” the man grumbled. “He’s so fucked up.” He sent the bodyguard and the woman, who seemed to be his girlfriend, out of the room. Once they were alone, the man became warm and friendly. He introduced himself as Don Paco, and apologized to Mau for what he’d been put through.

“I know who you are,” Don Paco said.

He told Mau that his men had noticed a tattoo of the Olympic rings on his wrist. After some research, they discovered that they had inadvertently kidnapped a world-class athlete—an Olympic runner who’d competed in Beijing, London, and Rio de Janeiro. This was serendipitous, Don Paco explained, because he happened to be in the market for athletes.

He said he was a leader of an organization called La Unión Tepito. Mau had heard about La Unión on the news. The cartel was relatively new, having risen to power in the past decade or so, but its tight grip on Mexico’s capital city had made it one of the country’s most notorious criminal syndicates. Don Paco told Mau that for all the attention paid to bloody turf wars and theatrical executions, organizations like his were an important part of the community—and Mexico was better off when its cartels got along.

Then Don Paco revealed something that would forever change how Mau saw his own country: For many years, Don Paco said, a secret tournament had been organized by Mexico’s biggest cartels. They each fielded teams in sports such as soccer, flag football, and boxing, and rival cartel leaders gathered to watch the games. He described the event as a civilized affair, where the bosses could place friendly wagers and do business without shooting one another.

Winning the tournament was a point of immense pride, Don Paco explained. And so he had a proposition for his new prisoner: He wanted Mau to coach and play on a flag-football team. The team would train at the facility and then represent La Unión at the tournament. If Mau won, he and his teammates would be released. If not, they would meet the same fate as anyone else who let down the organization.

Perhaps sensing Mau’s incredulity, Don Paco put it bluntly.

“If you win, you live,” he said. “If you lose, you die.”

Then the cartel boss flashed a broad smile. “But I’m sure you’ll win, so it won’t be a problem.”

Adriana Loureiro Fernández for The Atlantic

The left hand of Mauricio Morales, which he says was mangled during torture sessions by the cartel that kidnapped him off the street

The email arrived in my inbox on a Thursday evening in December 2024: “Are you free for a call?” the subject line asked. “Massive story.”

The message was from Robert Reynolds, a Las Vegas lawyer and talent manager whose clients included a collection of aughts rock acts, most notably the Killers. I barely knew Reynolds. We’d first spoken years earlier, when I tried unsuccessfully to get an interview with the band’s front man, Brandon Flowers. Reynolds had never given me a tip before, and frankly, I couldn’t imagine what “massive story” the manager of the Killers might be privy to. But my curiosity was piqued, so I gave him a call.

Reynolds picked up after one ring—“McKay!”—and launched into his story. He spoke in a throaty rumble, his bro-ish cadence punctuated, in moments of peak enthusiasm, with an emphatic dude. A few months earlier, he told me, he’d fielded an unusual ticket request from a high-ranking official at the United Nations. The official told him that a beloved volunteer at the UN’s refugee camps in Syria, Ukraine, and Mexico had recently been held captive for months by a cartel. He was now recovering from the ordeal, and his colleagues wanted to lift his spirits with surprise tickets to his favorite band’s sold-out show in Mexico City.

Reynolds obliged, and met the volunteer, whose name was Mauricio Morales, before the concert. After some coaxing, he got his new friend to recount his harrowing experience. The story floored Reynolds. “I was like, ‘Dude, this is a movie!’ ” he told me.

Reynolds was a fledgling filmmaker himself. He’d helped produce a few documentaries—including an Emmy-nominated HBO film about his brother Dan Reynolds, the lead singer of Imagine Dragons—but what he really aspired to was screenwriting. This story, he believed, was his way in. Shortly after their meeting, he purchased Mau’s life rights and began working on a film treatment for The Cartel Olympics.

The project was already generating buzz, Reynolds told me. The actor Michael Peña, of Marvel Cinematic Universe fame, had expressed strong interest in playing Mau. The darkness of the story was just the kind of thing that Oscar voters loved. So was the “body transformation” that would be required for Peña to convincingly play an Olympian. But the actor had a condition: He wanted a journalist to vet Mau’s account and publish it in a reputable outlet so that he and the filmmakers could say, with full confidence, that the movie was “based on a true story.”

That’s where I came in. Speaking in excited, hurried tones, Reynolds laid out his proposal. I would interview Mau and write a story about his captivity, and then sell the film option to Reynolds, who—with his industry connections and Peña’s attachment—could get the project fast-tracked at a major studio, and make us all a small Hollywood fortune.

I told Reynolds I’d think about it, but when I hung up the phone, I burst out laughing. The story seemed preposterous. An intercartel sports tournament? The hero’s life hanging in the balance? Flag football? It sounded like an overwrought episode of Narcos or something. “It would be an incredible story if it were true,” I told my wife that night. “But it almost certainly isn’t true.”

My opinion changed the first time I spoke with Mau, a few weeks later. I understood immediately why Reynolds found him so compelling. He was understated and self-effacing, politely answering my questions in good but imperfect English, and apologizing whenever he stumbled over a word. In a squawking, almost Muppety voice, he told me about his work in the refugee camps, how he organized intramural sports teams to keep the kids entertained while they endured their nightmarish limbo. I liked him right away.

When I asked him about the kidnapping, he told me the story in halting, disjointed fragments, pausing periodically to steady his emotions. He didn’t get flustered by skeptical questions—he simply explained what he’d seen as best as he could recall, sometimes admitting that certain bits were hazy. After a while, as I made him recount repeatedly the gruesome details of his torture, my skeptical-reporter persona began to soften. I found myself apologizing for my aggressiveness. “It’s okay, Mr. McKay,” he said.

To my surprise, Mau seemed credible. More important, he offered a list of sources who he said could vouch for him and verify parts of his story.

My first interview request went to James Winston, an aid worker and human-rights investigator based in London who worked for R4V, a UN-backed organization that supports migrants and refugees. Winston was the person who had initially contacted Reynolds and connected him with the UN official. He had also worked closely with Mau at the refugee camps, and spent years studying the atrocities committed by Mexico’s cartels. He was doing fieldwork when I first reached him, but he answered a list of questions by email. When I asked him if there was any reason I should distrust Mau’s story, his response was chiding. To uninformed outsiders, he told me, the depravity of Mexico’s cartel culture was difficult to comprehend. “Many stories may seem unbelievable,” he wrote. “But after years of immersion, I can assure you that they reflect a very real aspect of this society.” In fact, Winston said, he was writing to me from a rural outskirt of Guadalajara, in west-central Mexico, where he was investigating what appeared to be a clandestine crematorium operated by the Jalisco New Generation cartel. Authorities had discovered a pile of bones, bullet casings, and more than 200 pairs of shoes in a burned-out building on a remote ranch.

“If I may,” Winston wrote, “I’d suggest delving further into this culture to better grasp the reality and, potentially, write a more informed piece on Mau’s story.”

I felt like an idiot. I thought I’d been approaching this story with the clear-eyed wariness of a savvy reporter. But to Winston, I was exposing my sheltered-American naivete. He had a point. My sole experience in Mexico had been a week in 2011 at a resort, where I’d snorkeled with my wife, eaten coconut ice cream, and taken guided tours of some ruins.

But I knew Mexico was a real place, with real problems. The country’s past two presidential administrations had catastrophically failed to rein in the cartels, and the new president didn’t seem to be faring much better. If I was going to do Mau’s story justice, I would need to go deeper.

Before signing off, Winston warned me that pursuing this story would come with risks. Publishing Mau’s account “could very likely result in his death,” he wrote. And if I tried to report in Mexico, I would be putting myself in peril: “Mexico is currently a very dangerous country for journalists.”

In the cartel prison, training began daily at 7 a.m. sharp: laps in the courtyard, followed by push-ups and weight lifting with cinder blocks. Then the prisoner-athletes of La Unión Tepito were divided into groups and spent the rest of the day practicing for their assigned events. There were teams for soccer; a handball-style game called frontón; and tochito, or American flag football, which has become popular in Mexico.

Mau mostly kept to himself at first, interacting as little as possible with his teammates. Unlike him, most of the men in the prison were creatures of Mexico’s criminal underworld, and he found them frightening.

One, nicknamed El Diablo, was a dead-eyed ex-cop who’d worked for a rival gang and spoke about his body count in an unnerving monotone. He specialized in disappearing victims. “It wasn’t just drug dealers,” he volunteered. “I had to do 14 kids one time.” There had been nowhere to hide the bodies, he explained, so he’d meticulously dismembered each corpse and then dissolved the limbs in a vat of hydrochloric acid. Mau had trouble looking him in the eye.

Another teammate, Augusto, was a hulking lawyer who looked to be about 70. Augusto claimed that he was in the tournament as punishment for mishandling one of La Unión’s cases. But the rumor around the prison was that he’d actually raped and murdered a young assistant who turned out to be the girlfriend of a cartel leader. Augusto was an asset to the team: He was deceptively strong for his age, and skilled, too, having played American football when he was young. But he had a menacing air and a virulent misogynistic streak. One evening, the team was watching a movie in which a woman was strangled to death on-screen. Augusto, visibly aroused, began to masturbate.

Weeks passed in the prison, then months. Deprived of contact with the outside world, Mau lost track of time. He ran drills for his team and drew up plays. At times, the experience felt almost like summer camp: sports and exercise during the day, dinner and taped soccer games on TV at night.

But terror was never far away. Many nights, Mau would lie in bed, listening to agonized screams echoing from other wings of the prison, and try not to think about who was getting tortured this time, and for what, and whether he would be next.

As Mau got to know his teammates better, he was surprised to discover that they weren’t all irredeemable and depraved. Palomino was a taxi driver who had started running errands for the cartel to supplement his family’s meager income. Loquillo desperately missed his wife. Little Hugo was a skinny sicario in training who’d been lured into cartel life as a teenager with the promise of glamour and travel, and who peppered Mau with questions about what London and Beijing were like.

Mau became especially close with Mamers, a muscular hit man who was his first real friend in the cartel prison. They talked about their lives outside—Mau’s work in the refugee camps earned him the mocking nickname Samaritan—and traded workout routines. When the subject of ex-girlfriends came up, Mamers admitted that he struggled with jealousy in relationships, and Mau counseled him on how to relax and be less controlling.

The more time he spent with Mamers, the more Mau realized that they weren’t so different. They’d simply had different opportunities. Mamers—like Little Hugo, and Palomino, and so many more—had wound up on the Mexican conveyor belt that transports directionless young men into organized crime with ruthless efficiency. He had done terrible things, it was true, but how many choices did he really have? Mamers wasn’t a rotten person, Mau concluded. He was the product of a rotten country.

And unfortunately, Mau could now relate all too well to being trapped in a corrupt system. No matter how many kids his cellblock mates had killed or women they’d raped, his survival depended on working with them.

One night, after training was over, Don Paco gathered the prisoners in the courtyard. There was a chill in the air that reminded Mau of late summer, though he couldn’t say for sure what month it was. Don Paco announced that they would leave for the tournament the next day. Celebratory cervezas were passed around as the boss gave a pep talk on the importance of sportsmanship and clean play. He didn’t want to see his teams cheating, he told them—it would spoil the pride of La Unión’s victory.

Before he left, Don Paco reminded the prisoners of the life-and-death stakes of the event, and then added a further warning.

“Some of you will walk free tomorrow,” he said. “But you must swear never to speak of what you saw here. We know who you are and where to find you.”

I began talking regularly with Mau on the phone. It was clear to me that independently verifying his story would be difficult. If it had happened the way he said it had, there would be no public record and few living witnesses. But I wanted to get a sense of the story’s plausibility. Were Mexico’s cartel leaders really operating with such impunity that they could routinely force scores of kidnapped athletes into a Squid Game–style tournament for their own amusement?

Mau pushed me to expand my imagination. He was endlessly patient with my ignorance. Sometimes he would recommend movies for me to watch, as though I were an addled child who could understand how his country worked only by watching TV.

When I would express surprise at one of his assertions—about judges bought off by cartels; about celebrities and politicians with known narco connections—I could almost hear him stifle a sigh of exasperation. “The thing you need to understand about Mexico …” he would say, before launching into a lecture about how things work there.

A brief review of Mexico’s narco history confirmed that there was a lot I didn’t understand. For all their potency in the popular imagination, the country’s notorious drug cartels are only a few decades old—much younger than America’s crime families. But they have woven themselves into Mexican society. They raise money for churches and build health clinics in rural areas. They throw block parties and hand out toys to kids at Christmastime. And, yes, they host sporting events—see the boxing matches organized by Los Zetas.

In some parts of Mexico, the state has been effectively replaced by cartel rule. Extortion payments to organized crime are part of daily life—required to run a business, secure protection for your family, and retrieve abducted loved ones. In 2010, after a photographer was gunned down in a parking lot near his newsroom in Juárez, the newspaper El Diario published a front-page editorial pleading with the cartels: “What is it you want from us? What is it you want us to publish or not publish? Explain so that we can respond. You are at present the de facto authorities in this city.”

Even after the Mexican government declared war on the cartels in 2006, some of the most-wanted bosses were still able to roam the country freely, untouched by the law. El Chapo, the elusive leader of the Sinaloa cartel, was known to drop by high-end restaurants for dinner—gunmen politely confiscating patrons’ phones, El Chapo picking up everyone’s tab when he was done.

The more time I spent reading these stories, the more I had to admit that Mau’s, while still improbably wild, didn’t seem impossible.

One day, at the end of an unusually long phone call, Mau seemed dejected. The news in Mexico City was dominated by the broad-daylight assassination of two aides to the mayor, possibly by cartel sicarios. The shooting had taken place not far from where Mau lived, and though it had nothing to do with him, he seemed to feel like he was running for his life with nowhere to hide. He told me that he’d come to believe that corruption and violence were so deeply rooted in Mexico that, even if all the cartels disappeared overnight, the culture they’d created would outlive him.

For several months, I interviewed people in Mau’s life—friends, former co-workers, anyone who could vouch for his essential reliability. Some of them knew more about his captivity than others. Mau had evidently not been eager to talk when he was first released, and few had pressed him for details. It had seemed insensitive for them to ask too many questions—and besides, maybe not knowing was safer for everyone. But those I talked with could remember Mau disappearing one day in February and returning—shaken, scarred—many months later. “His gaze had changed,” Eduardo, a friend of Mau’s, recalled. “He was always looking around, very watchful of everyone.”

My reporting that spring was frequently interrupted by a stream of messages from movie producers. Word had somehow gotten out in Hollywood, and multiple studios and production companies were suddenly vying to option my forthcoming story. Each of them had its own angle. The head of a large film studio in Spain, who had served as a U.S. ambassador under President Obama, appealed directly to The Atlantic’s vice chair. A producer in Mexico claimed a loose personal connection to Mau—he had been friends with her college boyfriend, she said—but then referred to him by the wrong surname: Bermúdez.

How did all of these people know about my article? I had yet to write a word of the story—I still wasn’t even sure there would be a story at all. And out of concern for Mau’s safety, I’d told almost no one what I was working on. But when I asked the producers how they’d gotten my contact information, they all said the same thing: Mau had sent them.

Mau, for his part, seemed as mystified as I was. Reynolds was the only filmmaker he’d spoken with, he insisted, and the idea that he would be peddling this story around was lunacy. “I don’t want to get killed!”

When I told Reynolds about the inquiries, he was not surprised. People in Hollywood talk, he reasoned; everyone pretends to be more connected than they are. Maybe Peña or his team had been hyping the project, or maybe the leak had come from William Morris Endeavor, the agency that represented Reynolds. (Peña did not respond to requests for comment.)

But the prospect of competition clearly put Reynolds on edge. Soon after our conversation, he began pestering me to sign a contract giving him exclusive film rights to the story, and sending regular texts that sought to mask his anxiety with enthusiasm—How’s it going?? Just checking in :) So excited!

The morning after Don Paco’s speech, Mau and his team were awakened early. Hoods were placed over their heads, zip ties were attached to their wrists, and then everyone was loaded into vans like the ones that had first brought them there.

They drove for hours, Mau listening closely for clues about their location. City streets turned into freeways and then a winding, bumpy road. Eventually, the vans stopped, and Mau heard what sounded like a metal gate swing open. A few minutes later, he and his fellow prisoners were ushered out of the vans. When the hood was removed from his head, Mau was astonished by what he saw.

They were at some kind of vast, remote ranch in a mountainous region that Mau didn’t recognize. Armed men in uniforms—could they really be police?—were directing traffic and confiscating weapons and phones, while men in cowboy hats and women in flamboyant dresses milled around drinking and chatting. The atmosphere was upbeat, almost festival-like. On a nearby stage, a group of musicians played brassy banda music; elsewhere, a gaggle of spectators admired a collection of parked monster trucks.

Mau’s surprise turned to disbelief when he was escorted into an enormous gymnasium at the center of the property. In one section, magicians and clowns entertained young children. In another, a large board projected betting odds for the various tournament events, while men below clamored to place their wagers. Surveying the hundreds of attendees in the bleachers, Mau was shocked by how many people he recognized. The gym was filled with boldfaced names of Mexican society: celebrities, influencers, high-ranking politicians, TV-news anchors.

An emcee announced that it was time for the sorteo—a random drawing that would determine the first round of flag-football matchups. As Mau waited, Don Paco’s girlfriend sidled up to him. “Luck is going to be very important here,” she whispered. “You don’t want to play against Sinaloa.” Mau held his breath until the matchup was announced: La Unión Tepito would play Los Caballeros Templarios. “You got lucky,” the woman said.

The flag-football games took place on a field outside the gymnasium. A referee briefly ran through the rules and blew a whistle, starting a 40-minute clock.

Mau realized quickly they were in trouble. Flag football is supposed to be a no-tackle, limited-contact sport. But their opponents were openly trying to maim them—punching, kicking, gouging—without any objection from the referees.

After a few minutes, Mau called his teammates into a huddle. He told them to forget every rule he’d taught them. “There’s no fair play in here,” he said. If they were going to win, they’d have to play dirty.

The rest of the game was a violent scrum of chipped teeth and punctured skin. When the whistle blew, La Unión Tepito had defeated Los Caballeros Templarios, 14–7.

Spectators cheered while Mau and his teammates, bloody and panting, tended to their wounds. He barely noticed at first as the opposing team was led off the field, disappearing behind the gym. But then came a loud series of bangs that, amid all of the celebrating, sounded to Mau like firecrackers.

A sweetly acidic smell wafted toward the field, and Mau asked his teammates what it was.

El Diablo was the first to answer. “That’s blood.”

When summer came, I set out with an Atlantic fact-checker to confirm the details of Mau’s biography. With his account of the cartel tournament largely impossible to verify, Mau’s story would have to hang on his trustworthiness as a source. If he was telling the truth about the small stuff, I figured, he was more likely to be a reliable narrator.

Mau seemed eager to help. He offered to dig up any documents we might need and promised to put me in touch with colleagues at the various NGOs on his résumé.

We started with his athletic credentials. Mau spoke often about his experience in the Olympics—how he’d been shaped by sports, and how competing had given him the necessary resilience to endure his captivity. An accomplished middle-distance runner, he sometimes lamented that he’d never made it to the Olympic podium—his final chance for a medal, in Tokyo, had been derailed by the pandemic and a devastating injury to his Achilles tendon.

On June 19, the fact-checker and I emailed officials at the Olympic committee in Colombia, the country for which Mau said he had competed. (His mother was a native Colombian, he said, and he had dual citizenship.) We asked for confirmation that Mau had been on the team. The reply came back a few weeks later: They had no record of Mau competing on the track team. We scoured Colombia’s published results from the past five Olympic Games, and came up similarly empty-handed.

When I called Mau, he sheepishly admitted that he had fudged some small details in our interviews to protect himself. He had actually competed for Mexico’s Olympic team, he told me, not Colombia’s, and he promised to share his accreditation documents to prove it. But he was worried that revealing this to a reporter would put him in danger. “The thing you need to understand about Mexico is that the press is very different here,” he told me. Many reporters disregarded basic professional standards, Mau said, and some were actually on a cartel’s payroll.

Besides, Mau was starting to wonder if the real threat might come from the government, not the gangs. Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, was under enormous pressure from her voters and from the Trump administration to crack down on cartel violence. A former Olympic athlete from Mexico alleging an illuminati-style gathering where politicians mingled with murderous cartel leaders would not go unnoticed in the National Palace. Mau was consumed by images of the police dragging him from his apartment in the middle of the night and disappearing him again, this time for good.

He apologized repeatedly for lying. “I kept some information to myself,” he explained. “I didn’t want anything to happen to me. People around me are very much afraid. I’m afraid.”

The fear in his voice sounded genuine. And I had to admit that his paranoia was understandable. What reason did he have to trust me, really?

We talked about various ways of ensuring his safety; he even said he might leave the country before the story came out. I told Mau that I would take every reasonable precaution, but that I needed him to be completely honest with me going forward. He agreed. Before we hung up, I asked him if there was anything else I should know.

“No, Mr. McKay,” he said. “I promise.”

The next several rounds of the tournament passed in a macabre blur—violent and frenzied, yet oddly methodical. Each game ended the same way, with Mau’s motley team limping off the field in victory, and the losers disappearing behind the gymnasium. More firecrackers. More of that sweet, acidic smell.

As the tournament progressed, Mau became monomaniacally focused on doing what was necessary to win. With each round, the games got harder, and Mau got more ruthless—twisting limbs, stabbing at eyes, trying to inflict maximum pain with each illegal tackle. Some of the players he was assaulting were not even sicarios or drug traffickers—they were ordinary kidnapping victims like him. But his conscience had been numbed by a single-minded focus on staying alive.

By the time the championship game arrived, the sun was setting behind the distant mountains. The crowd on the sidelines had ballooned as word got around about La Unión Tepito’s unlikely run. Mau’s team had beaten cartels with more money and more manpower, and he got the sense that La Unión was the Cinderella story of the tournament. Even the guards, previously gruff and dismissive, were now treating them with grudging respect.

Their final game would be against the Tláhuac cartel—a team of tall, quiet, wiry men. As Mau studied his opponents from a distance, Don Paco’s girlfriend pulled him aside with some intel. She’d been watching Tláhuac all day, she said, and he should know that the players specialized in torture. “They are super dirty,” she told him.

The game, as predicted, was brutal. Mau broke a rib and two fingers; other players lost teeth, causing blood to stream from their mouths. At one point, a Tláhuac player threw Palomino to the ground and tried to strangle him while the refs looked on indifferently and the crowd roared its approval.

When regulation ended, both teams were still scoreless, and the game entered overtime—the first team to score would win. Mau called a play that they’d practiced often during their training. Mamers faked a handoff to Palomino, who scampered furiously toward the end zone, drawing the defense away. Mau, left open, sprinted to the opposite side and caught a short touchdown pass from Mamers.

The whistle blew. The game was over.

For a moment, there was silence. Then the sidelines erupted—cheers, banda music, firecrackers. Mau collapsed to the ground, sobbing. It didn’t feel like a celebration, but something closer to grief.

From the field, Mau was shepherded onto a stage in the gym, where he was greeted by a beaming Don Paco. Someone placed a gold-colored medal around Mau’s neck. It felt heavy and ridiculous. For a moment, the two men stood side by side—the cartel boss and his champion—as the whooping, chanting crowd bathed them in applause.

Then, without warning, guards grabbed Mau and shoved him into a van. His bloody clothes were ripped off his body; a hood was placed back over his head. Dizzy and dehydrated, Mau slipped in and out of consciousness. Eventually, a door was opened, his hood was removed, and he was pushed out onto some pavement. The van peeled off.

It was dawn, and he was in a quiet slum that he’d never been to before. Stripped to his underwear, bruised, barefoot, and bleeding from his face, Mau stood and began to walk. The medal was still hanging around his neck.

In the days after my come-to-Jesus meeting with Mau, he labored to reassert his trustworthiness. He sent me documents, screenshots, and references to prove that he was who he claimed to be. He wanted me to know that he wasn’t a dishonest person—that he’d lied only out of fear for his safety. But every piece of evidence he produced just raised more questions.

He sent me a medical report that he said was from his first doctor visit after his release from captivity; it showed high cholesterol and not much else. Where, I asked him, were the mentions of broken ribs, mangled fingers, and stripped fingernails? Mau seemed faintly amused by my question. “If you’re looking for something that says, ‘This guy was tortured by a cartel,’ it’s not going to say that,” he deadpanned. Fair enough.

The Olympic “accreditation” he’d promised to send, meanwhile, turned out to be a grainy photo of a laminated pass, attached to a lanyard, with his name printed on it and the familiar Olympic rings in the corner. At first glance it looked impressive enough. But when we shared the photo with a source at the International Olympic Committee, he said it was a guest credential—something issued to friends and family, not athletes. (By now I’d also heard back from the Mexican Olympic Committee, which said it had no record of Mau competing.)

Then there was Mau’s surreal Instagram profile. He had mentioned his account in passing more than once, but whenever I asked for a link, he would change the subject. Once I finally found it myself, I understood why. The account had nearly 400,000 followers but close to zero engagement, suggesting that his “fans” were mostly bots. The grid was filled with photos that seemed to slide in and out of reality: Mau posing with Mike Tyson, Mau posing with Lionel Messi, Mau shaking hands with Kofi Annan, and at least one apparently AI-generated image of a tuxedo-clad Mau at the Oscars.

There were plenty of Olympic photos, but those were confusing, too. Most of them were selfies, not action shots. In some pictures, he was in a Mexican uniform; in others, an American one. There was an image of a glossy 2008 spread from an English-language magazine in Beijing that featured a photo of a shirtless Mau alongside an article describing his preparations to compete for the Mexican national team—in volleyball.

There did appear to be one photo of Mau running in the Olympics. It was pinned to the top of his Instagram profile: a pack of middle-distance runners on a blue track, and a bright-red arrow hovering above one of them. But when I looked closer, I noticed that he was wearing blue instead of Mexico’s green and red. When I asked him about this over text, he insisted that the photo was from the 2016 Games in Rio, and that an Instagram filter had altered the color of his uniform. But a reverse image search quickly debunked this lie: The picture was from Paris 2024, and the runner was an Italian named Pietro Arese, who just happened to look a little like Mau from a distance.

Exasperated, I called Mau.

“I’ll be 100 percent honest with you,” he said, when I told him what I’d found. “I didn’t have a picture of myself running in the Olympics, so I posted that to keep people interested.”

“How can you possibly not have a photo of yourself running?” I demanded.

He hesitated. “The reason,” he finally said, “is because I didn’t run.”

The story tumbled out of him all at once, in a rush of righteous indignation—how he’d made it onto the national track team as an alternate in 2016; how he’d witnessed rampant corruption among Mexican Olympic officials, who sold off valuable credentials to politicians and businessmen instead of prioritizing athletes and training staff; how he’d been caught leaking evidence of bribery to the press and was blacklisted from competing.

Mau admitted, with some embarrassment, that his Instagram persona was embellished—but he insisted that it wasn’t as bad as it looked. (Didn’t everyone exaggerate their accomplishments on social media?) If the Olympic committee claimed to have no record of him, he told me, that was only because it had punitively scrubbed his name from its records. “People saw me there,” he said. “They know me.” This was just what happened when you tried to blow the whistle on corruption in Mexico.

I found this explanation dubious, but it didn’t matter all that much. Mau’s Olympic record per se was not essential to the story. His repeated lying, though, posed a clear challenge to his credibility.

James Winston, meanwhile, was proving strangely difficult to get on the phone. The London-based aid worker had been one of Mau’s most persuasive validators. We had corresponded at length over email and WhatsApp, but every time I asked him for a phone interview, he was unreachable—traveling in Honduras, or en route to Gaza. He always promised he’d call as soon as he could. He never did.

Hoping to at least confirm Winston’s expertise, I asked him to connect me with some of his colleagues at the NGOs where he’d worked. He gave me email addresses for two people, both of whom responded with warm notes about Winston’s knowledge and dedication; when I asked if we could talk on the phone, they grew skittish. One said she was too afraid of the cartels to be quoted. Both stopped responding. A subsequent Google search revealed that the websites for the organizations in their email domains didn’t exist. Both URLs led to identical “under construction” Squarespace pages. When I asked Winston for his LinkedIn profile, he said he would send it to me, but never did.

A few days later, however, I found a page for a “James M. Winston” that matched his purported résumé—and had been created that same month. The profile was sparsely populated, and parts of it appeared to have been written by a non-native English speaker. When we checked with the institutions he claimed to have an affiliation with—the London School of Economics, the UN Refugee Agency, R4V—none of them had any record of him. The James Winston with whom I’d been corresponding for months seemed not to exist.

By August, I was ready to give up. Investigating Mau’s story felt like trying to clutch an ice cube—every time I attempted to grab hold of it too tightly, it slipped out of my grasp.

Only one thing was keeping me from walking away from the story: I’d found Mamers.

At the outset of my reporting, Mau had told me that he was in touch with his sicario teammate—the two men had a soldiers-after-the-war bond that transcended their many differences. At first Mamers didn’t want to talk with me, but Mau finally persuaded him to give me a brief FaceTime interview. His account of the cartel games overlapped with Mau’s in ways that were hard to dismiss. He was nervous, but said he could go into more detail if we met in person. I had to decide if this story, whose chief narrator had a gaping credibility problem, was worth a trip to Mexico.

On August 14, Robert Reynolds texted me in a characteristic flurry of exclamation points. “How’s it going?” he wrote. “So excited for progress!! Michael Peña just called me. He’s really excited about this.”

Maybe it was the seduction of a Hollywood deal. Maybe I just felt like I’d gone too far to turn back now. But seeing this story through felt like the only option. I booked a flight to Mexico City.

I landed late on the night of August 24, and found the driver The Atlantic had hired waiting for me outside baggage claim. He was short and quiet, wearing a baseball cap and a serious expression. As we pulled away from the airport, he locked the doors and merged onto a wide, well-lit highway.

In preparing for the trip, I’d encountered a strange kind of narrative confusion when it came to American perceptions of Mexico City. As a tourist destination, the city had never been hotter; travel websites and influencers hyped its food scene and museums. At the same time, the Trump administration and its allies, seeking to justify a maximalist immigration crackdown, had cast the city as the apocalyptic capital of a failed state. The day after I arrived, Stephen Miller would make headlines by declaring, with his usual brittle certainty, that the Mexican government was “run by criminal cartels.”

There were legitimate reasons to believe that the Mexican capital was growing more dangerous. The broad-daylight assassination of the mayor’s aides in May had rattled the city’s political class and awakened fears that Mexico City was no longer considered a neutral zone in the cartel wars. Sales of armored vehicles in the city were up, and private-security details were becoming more common.

The Atlantic wasn’t taking any chances. Because the story involved cartels, my editors insisted on certain precautions. I would be traveling around the city with the private driver and accompanied, most of the time, by a fixer. A photographer would join us for some of the reporting, and when we ventured into neighborhoods considered especially risky, a security guard would come along. I’d shared my location with my editors on my phone and agreed to check in every three hours. I couldn’t decide if this was prudent or ridiculous.

As we drove toward my hotel in the verdant neighborhood of La Condesa, I watched the city roll past the van window: taquerias still open at midnight, couples walking dogs, clusters of young people outside bars lit with fairy lights. I thought about the Mexican TikTokers who made videos mocking American tourists for posting breathless dispatches about how “nice” and “safe” Mexico City felt—wide-eyed foreigners marveling that the streets were paved and the toilets flushed.

The next morning, I met my fixer, Ulises, in my hotel’s restaurant. He was impossible to miss: 6 foot 4, burly, and jovial, with a stubbly beard and a roguish demeanor. I’d been warned by a Mexican reporter before my trip that some local journalists resented being called “fixers,” but Ulises told me he didn’t mind. Fixing had been good business for him. And besides, why take yourself so seriously? “My secret is that I’m a shitty journalist,” he said, “but I know all the best restaurants in Mexico City.”

Over breakfast, I asked what he made of Mau’s story. He shrugged. He’d seen terrible things in his years as a cartel tour guide for foreign journalists, so he was open to the possibility that Mau’s story was true. But he also seemed uncomfortable with the image of his country that Mau was conveying.

“Mexico isn’t the Third World,” he said. “I mean, look.” He gestured toward the window, where a clean, tree-lined street stretched past the hotel. Cyclists weaved among cars; a woman in workout gear jogged by with headphones. “Isn’t it scary?” he said sarcastically.

There were parts of the country where the cartels had enormous power, he said. But it wasn’t accurate to suggest that Mexico as a whole was a dystopian gangland, or that the government was simply a puppet of organized crime.

I appreciated Ulises’s skepticism, but I wasn’t ready to write off Mau just yet. I would sit with him, in his own city, and let him tell his story one last time.

We drove to a quiet street in Ciudad de los Deportes and met Mau on the ground floor of his building. He looked as he did in his Instagram photos—handsome and fit, with a well-maintained coil of curly hair and a raglan T-shirt clinging to his shoulders and chest. But his smile was uneasy. As we climbed the stairs to his apartment, I noticed dark half-moons of sweat blooming under his arms.

“I’m nervous,” he admitted. He’d spoken with Reynolds, who had urged him to be totally honest. Mau assured me that he would be: “I don’t have anything to hide.”

We entered a sunlit one-bedroom, and Mau and I took seats on perpendicular couches. Ulises and the photographer, Adriana, remained on the room’s perimeter, quiet observers. Mau looked almost small sitting there, his muscular shoulders slouched, his hands fidgeting in his lap, a restive expression on his face.

I asked him to tell me the story of his kidnapping and captivity again, from beginning to end. The beats were familiar by now, and as I listened to him talk, I found myself thinking about all the people who benefited from narratives of cartel violence: American politicians; Mexican politicians; the journalists who hired Ulises to help them produce their sensational dispatches from narco land; the Hollywood executives monetizing movie treatments; the cartels themselves, who thrived on the fear. I almost pitied Mau. Even if his account wasn’t entirely true, so many others were profiting from stories like this—why shouldn’t he get a piece?

After finishing his account, Mau turned to what had become a persistent theme in our conversations: the metastasizing corruption in Mexico. He talked about the large number of people who were currently missing. When he rode the bus, the ads on the digital screens used to be for cellphone plans and soft drinks. Now they were almost exclusively for missing persons—grainy photos and cash rewards and phone numbers to call.

At my request, Mau FaceTimed his mother. I had hoped to interview her in person, but she lived too far away. She appeared on-screen in a modest living room, an older woman with careful makeup and a tight, anxious smile, sitting on a couch pressed up against a bare wall. I sat next to Mau as he held the phone, and he translated her narration of his disappearance from her perspective.

Recounting the story was clearly painful for her. At several points, she broke down in tears and had to stop, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue while Mau murmured reassurances in Spanish. She described the first call from the kidnappers, the male voice demanding money, the impossible deadline, the panic of scrambling to find the cash.

She also said something I’d never heard in Mau’s many accounts of the story. The kidnappers, she told me, had demanded nearly 1 million pesos, or about $60,000. To cover the payment, she said, Mau’s older brother had been forced to sell his house.

Mau had mentioned before that his family had made extortion payments, but he’d always presented this as a minor detail. The money was not, in his telling, what saved him; it was his own triumph on the football field. Taken aback, I asked her to repeat herself. I glanced at Ulises, who had an inscrutable look on his face.

After we hung up, Ulises spoke. “That’s a good brother,” he told Mau. “He saved you, man.” Mau seemed to stiffen at the comment.

Mau had promised to take us to the street where he’d been kidnapped. Before we left, he went to use the bathroom, and for the first time I looked around the apartment.

The walls were crowded with Olympic paraphernalia—selfies of Mau in branded warm-ups, medals hanging from nails, what appeared to be a framed letter from the International Olympic Committee certifying his participation in the Games. It was all perplexing. Hadn’t he already admitted to me that he had never actually competed, that his Olympian persona was a social-media performance? He lived here alone—whom was he trying to convince with all this stuff on the walls? In the kitchen, a framed race bib hung near the refrigerator, the kind marathon runners pin to their shirts. To my surprise, it said “Bermúdez”—the last name that the Mexican movie producer had used for Mau. I made a note to ask him about it later.

When we got into the van, Mau blanched. This, he said, was exactly like the vehicle he’d been stuffed into when he was taken. As we drove, he warned us that the neighborhood we were headed to was known “cartel territory”—we would have to be careful. But the street he directed the driver to was in a gentrifying enclave of expats and hipsters with man buns.

We got out, and Mau began narrating his kidnapping, pointing at various landmarks like a tour guide. But nothing about the scene he described made sense here. The street was too narrow and crowded with parked cars to accommodate the five vans he claimed had pulled up to snatch him and dozens of migrants. The block was lined with security cameras and bustling with pedestrians. In the 30 minutes we spent there, I saw multiple police cars roll by.

I kept thinking back to the conversation with Mau’s mother. She certainly didn’t seem like an accomplice in any hoax. Everything about her distress—the wobble in her voice, the tears—had felt sincere. While Adriana led a reluctant-looking Mau to a sunny corner of the street to take his portrait, I pulled Ulises aside and asked what he made of the mother’s testimony. Maybe Mau was embellishing his story, I said, but it certainly seemed to me that his family really had made those extortion payments.

Ulises responded by asking what I knew about “self-kidnapping.” The practice—people staging their own abduction to extract money from relatives—had become such an epidemic in Mexico, he told me, that the government had begun cracking down with tougher sentences and public-service announcements warning that it was a serious crime.

“I think he stole that money,” Ulises said quietly.

I looked over at Mau, who had dropped his coquettish act and was now preening for the camera. I wondered, for the first time, if I was dealing with a very different kind of man than I had allowed myself to believe.

Adriana Loureiro Fernández for The Atlantic

Mau’s girlfriend, Nancy, a physician who met him on Bumble, said her view of Mexico was transformed by hearing about the cartel tournament.

I met Mau’s girlfriend, Nancy, at a café near the clinic where she worked as a doctor. She was slim and pretty, with wavy dyed-red hair and an assortment of tasteful bracelets adorning her wrists. She’d grown up in the city in an upper-middle-class family, gone to private school, and spent a year living in the U.S. as a teenager, where she honed her English, before returning home for medical school at one of the country’s most respected public universities.

She told me she’d met Mau on Bumble a year earlier. She was drawn by the impressive claims in his bio—that he’d visited at least 100 countries and spoke seven languages. “I was captured by that,” said Nancy, an aspiring globe-trotter herself.

Early in their relationship, Mau told her that he’d been kidnapped by a cartel, but he didn’t talk much about his captivity at first. Details trickled out over time—the torture, the tournament, the VIP audience. Once, while she was watching her favorite news anchor, Mau pointed at the TV and said, “He was there.” She was shocked—she had always trusted the anchor’s reporting. “How could he be there? How could he know that, and not tell about it?” she remembered thinking. On another night, a well-known politician appeared on TV, and Mau told her that he, too, had attended the tournament.

Nancy came to feel as though she didn’t know her own city, her own country. The Mexico of her childhood had been replaced by shadowy figures and conspiracies of silence—a malevolence that lurked in places she’d passed a thousand times. She recalled driving one afternoon with Mau in the passenger seat when he’d suddenly tensed up. He told her this was the street where he’d been abducted.

“Here?” she’d exclaimed, in disbelief.

I asked her where it was. The neighborhood she named was miles away from the spot that Mau had taken us to.

It was clear to me that Nancy was genuinely in love with Mau. (When I conferred later with Ulises and Adriana, they agreed.) She said she was glad to be there for him as he processed the trauma of his captivity. They had built a tender and adventurous life together. She traveled with him around the world, and nursed his injuries. (One day, as she was running her fingers along his cheek, she felt the ridge of an old fracture that had never properly healed.) She also helped him work through old grievances with his family. Mau had never gotten along with them, she said. His mother had favored his brother, doting on him while treating Mau as an afterthought. “His mother is not very nice to him,” Nancy told me. She had not met his family and didn’t want to: “I can’t stand that someone is that mean to him.”

I asked Nancy what Mau did for a living—a question I’d somehow never gotten a clear answer to.

She responded as if the answer were obvious: He was a runner for the U.S. Olympic team. She went on to gush about his athletic accomplishments—how most runners retired well before their late 30s, and how, defying the odds, he was determined to make it to the Summer Games in Los Angeles. “If he can get to 2028, that would be almost a record at his age!” As her eyes gleamed with pride, my stomach sank.

Before we left, I asked Nancy what she thought about Mau’s prospective Hollywood deal. She said that Mau had told her all about Reynolds, and Peña, and the development of the script. Ulises asked: Would she be a character in the movie?

Nancy laughed self-consciously and cast her eyes downward. “Well, I don’t know,” she said, clearly embarrassed by how much the idea pleased her. “He told me yeah, I might.”

One thing that Mau had told me was undeniable: The missing-persons posters were omnipresent in Mexico City. Once you saw them, they were impossible to miss—on buses, on street corners, at subway entrances. At the center of the city, there was a traffic rotary known locally as “the roundabout of the disappeared,” plastered with hundreds of faces. The government, eager to project an image of calm and security, had begun scraping the posters off the wall, but mothers returned every day to put them back up. More than 130,000 people are currently listed as missing in Mexico, a number that has roughly tripled in the past decade.

Adriana Loureiro Fernández for The Atlantic

Images of missing persons, many of whom have been kidnapped by the cartels, are omnipresent in Mexico City.

One evening, Ulises, Adriana, and I drove to an upscale shopping mall, where Mamers had suggested we meet. I had messaged him on WhatsApp earlier that day to ask if I could bring a photographer. He agreed on the condition that she not take pictures of his face—for a former cartel hit man risking his life to tell his story, anonymity was essential for survival. To keep a low profile, he told me, he’d be wearing a hat and sunglasses.

But when I spotted him as we descended the escalator into the mall’s atrium, I almost laughed out loud: He was dressed like a caricature of a tough-guy sicario—oversize sunglasses, a tight blue tank top stretched across his bulging chest, a gold chain around his neck.

We sat down at a table outside a coffee shop, and I asked Mamers to tell his version of the story from the beginning. He related the events in a steady voice, without embroidery or visible self-regard. He recalled meeting Mau in the prison for the first time and taking pity on him—a soft, bewildered naïf who clearly had no idea what kind of world he’d been dropped into. He described the members of their team: El Diablo, the taxi driver, the perverted old lawyer. He recounted the day of the tournament, the gymnasium in the mountains, the bands and the monster trucks and the VIPs in the stands.

“People from different political parties, different criminal organizations in the same place hanging out,” he said at one point, switching briefly to English. “I was like, What the fuck? ”

I asked him why he was telling his story now—wasn’t he afraid?

Mamers said he’d taken precautions. He had moved to a different part of the city and grown a beard to avoid recognition. He was out of the cartel game, he told me, and now worked in construction. He wanted a different life.

He’d agreed to the interview largely out of loyalty to Mau. Befriending an innocent person who had been victimized by a cartel had forced him to reckon with his own complicity. For years, he said, he had done his employers’ violent bidding without giving it much thought. Watching Mau endure it had unsettled him—and he wanted people to know what was going on in his country.

“I’m proud to be Mexican,” he said, “but Mexico is sick.”

When the meeting ended, we said goodbye to Mamers and walked out of the mall in a quiet daze.

Adriana broke the silence. “That was a mindfuck,” she said. Ulises nodded. “I think,” he said carefully, as though he couldn’t quite believe what he was about to say, “that maybe something did happen to them.”

I agreed. Whatever else was going on with Mau, Mamers’s story seemed too detailed, too internally consistent, too mundanely specific to dismiss as a fabrication for my benefit. When I checked in with my editor that night, I told him that I wasn’t quite so sure anymore that this was all a hoax.

Before going to bed, I started watching The Maltese Falcon in my hotel room. I felt a certain self-aggrandizing kinship with Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade as he groped his way from one deception to another—each revelation rearranging the pieces without clarifying the picture, the truth always just out of reach.

But I couldn’t shake the sneaking suspicion—though I tried to repress it—that in Mau’s story, I was not the shrewd, enterprising detective, but a mark.

Adriana Loureiro Fernández for The Atlantic

Mamers, who describes himself as a former hit man, corroborated Mau’s account of competing for their lives together while imprisoned by the cartel.

Adriana Loureiro Fernández for The Atlantic

“Pedro,” a member of La Unión Tepito cartel, told grisly stories of kidnapping and mutilation—but said he’d never heard of any cartel tournament.

La Unión Tepito sprouted in 2009 from a massive open-air market in one of Mexico City’s most dangerous neighborhoods. It presented itself at first as a kind of neighborhood watch, in which young men from Tepito provided security, for a fee, to local vendors worried about larger cartels. The arrangement grew into a profitable protection racket, and La Unión Tepito soon expanded into narcotics and kidnapping. Ulises had told me that we’d need to be careful when we visited the market—no loitering, no pictures. But as we wound our way through the crowded maze of vendor stalls hawking counterfeit Gucci bags and black-market smartphones, I saw few obvious signs of organized crime. It wasn’t until we slipped some cash to a shopkeeper who let us climb a hidden ladder in the back to a secluded rooftop overlooking the market’s expanse that Ulises spoke freely: Those men zipping through the market on motorized scooters, he told me, were likely employees of the cartel.

Through one of Ulises’s contacts, we’d arranged to meet a low-level employee of La Unión Tepito, a young man who asked me to call him Pedro. We sat with him at a plastic table in an alleyway a few blocks from the market. He wore a flamboyant tracksuit embroidered with a gold dragon that belied his flat, affectless demeanor. He told me he’d started working for “the organization”—the preferred term for the cartel among its members—when he was about 16, following his father, a leader in La Unión, into the family business. He was now in his early 20s and served in a supervisory role.

I asked Pedro how a typical cartel kidnapping worked. He walked me through the logistics in a matter-of-fact monotone, as if he were explaining how to assemble a piece of IKEA furniture.

“First you study the person who is going to be kidnapped, then you go do the job,” he said. “They’re taken to a safe house. The family is contacted and a ransom is demanded. If the family doesn’t agree, then they start with the mutilation until the family complies.”

Mutilation? I glanced at Ulises to make sure I’d heard his translation correctly. He gave me a look that suggested I not seek elaboration.

I decided to tell Pedro why I was there. I’d heard a story, I told him—without using names or excessive identifying information—about a man who’d been kidnapped by La Unión and forced to compete in an intercartel sports tournament. I painted the picture for him as Mau had painted it for me—cartel bosses from Sinaloa and Jalisco in the stands, politicians and celebrities placing bets.

Pedro, who had been stone-faced throughout our interview, smirked. “Like a movie,” he said.

He told me that he had never heard of such a tournament, and that it went against everything he knew about how the cartel operated. Kidnapping, he explained, was a risky business. Hold on to a victim for too long, and the chances that he escapes or someone comes looking for him grow. La Unión rarely kept a victim for any length of time—if the extortion payments didn’t come, they’d simply get rid of him. Scooping up scores of people and holding them for months in some kind of remote training facility would be too dangerous.

As we made our way back to the hotel, my phone buzzed with an email notification from someone in New York. After I’d seen the Bermúdez race bib hanging on Mau’s wall, I’d done another round of Google searches on his name. Buried in an American court database was an opaque legal filing suggesting that a man named Mauricio Morales Bermúdez was involved in some kind of criminal case in Mexico. On a whim, I’d sent cold emails to several of the people named in the document. Now one of them wanted to talk.

When I reached him by phone later that day, he asked for anonymity to discuss ongoing proceedings. Then he told me the story.

Adriana Loureiro Fernández for The Atlantic

The area around Tepito market, in Mexico City, is largely controlled by La Unión Tepito cartel.

In 2010, according to several sources and allegations made in court documents, Mauricio Morales Bermúdez opened the Mexican office of the Non-Violence Project Foundation, a Switzerland-based nonprofit best known for its “knotted gun” logo. The foundation, with offices in multiple countries and a dazzling slate of celebrity “ambassadors” (Yoko Ono, Paul McCartney, Lionel Messi), made for an impressive résumé line. It also gave Mau entry into an elite segment of Mexican society.

Through a fundraising auction for Non-Violence Project Mexico in 2013, Mau met Alejandro Martínez, a wealthy, well-connected labor-union leader in Mexico City. Martínez, a trained musician and lifelong Beatles obsessive, was intrigued by some of the rare items up for bid: guitars signed by Eric Clapton and George Harrison, a ukulele bearing McCartney’s name, and—most tantalizing—a T-shirt that had belonged to John Lennon, signed by all four Beatles. Martínez submitted bids on multiple items, and won more of them than he’d expected. Soon after that, he received an email from Mau, who introduced himself as the organization’s director.

In 2015, Mau invited Martínez to an event in Arizona on Super Bowl weekend. There would be a flag-football exhibition featuring celebrities and former NFL players, and then, as a valued donor, Martínez would attend the big game on Sunday. Martínez, thrilled, accepted the invitation.

The exhibition was as advertised. Miguel Herrera, then the coach of Mexico’s national soccer team, ran plays in the huddle; TV personalities from Univision and Fox Sports posed for photos with fans. Mau moved easily among them all—hugging athletes, greeting journalists, navigating the game as if the stars were old friends. Martínez would later remember thinking that Mau was a natural salesman. He even joked that Mau should come work for him.

But when Martínez tried to claim his Super Bowl ticket, he was told there wasn’t one waiting for him; he ended up having to watch the game from a bar. He flew back to Mexico livid, and wrote to the organization to complain.

A few days later, Martínez began receiving contrite emails from an executive at Non-Violence Project Mexico. She apologized profusely for the Super Bowl mishap and said the organization wanted to make it up to him. Soon Yoko Ono herself was emailing him, on behalf of the foundation, offering him a special investment opportunity, available to VIP donors, that would guarantee a return of 50 percent.

The pitch was seductive. The union would receive not only a sizable return, but also anti-violence workshops for its members, and an array of perks for Martínez: a trip to the World Cup, concert tickets, and meet and greets with the foundation’s celebrity “ambassadors.” It sounded like an incredible deal. Martínez and Ono both signed the contract, and Martínez wired $200,000 to the organization.

At first, the arrangement worked as promised. Trainers led workshops for Martínez’s union in Mexico. Packages of memorabilia arrived—soccer jerseys signed by Pelé, Maradona, and Messi; NFL helmets covered in the signatures of Super Bowl MVPs; game balls from European championship matches. Martínez traveled with his family to a concert in California where McCartney and the Rolling Stones played on the same bill, and also got tickets to multiple Super Bowls.

Martínez ended up wiring about $700,000 to the organization. But the promised financial returns never materialized.

When Martínez began asking pointed questions about how the nonprofit planned to produce such returns, he got evasive answers about corporate sponsors and VIP boxes donated by FIFA.

Eventually, the perks dried up. The workshops ceased. In Russia for the World Cup, Martínez discovered that his hotel reservation was missing and his game tickets weren’t available under his name. By the time he flew home, he no longer trusted anyone associated with the organization.

He hired a team of lawyers and private investigators. Together, they pieced together an elaborate—and almost comically audacious—scheme. Those emails signed by Yoko Ono? They weren’t written by her; her signature on the contract was a forgery. That shirt signed by all of the Beatles? Almost certainly fake. And the union money Martínez had wired for its “investment”? It had landed in a bank account controlled by Mauricio Morales Bermúdez.

Martínez’s lawyers contacted the Non-Violence Project Foundation in Switzerland to alert the group that it had a con man in its midst. But instead of offering to help sort things out, foundation executives sent back a series of strange, contradictory responses. (The foundation later disavowed some of the people who had written to Martínez, and said that key signatures and emails appeared to be fake. The foundation did not respond to detailed questions from The Atlantic, but in a statement it said that Bermúdez was never an official employee and that Non-Violence Project Mexico was a “separate and independent” nonprofit entity.)

The more Martínez’s lawyers dug into the foundation, the more suspicious he became that it might be involved in Mau’s scam. The fake employees who had pitched the investment had all somehow managed to use official @nonviolence.com email addresses. Some celebrities featured on the foundation’s website, meanwhile, said they had not authorized the use of their names or images. And an outfit calling itself the Non-Violence Project USA had been linked in press reports to a Medicaid-fraud scheme.

Martínez filed a legal complaint on behalf of the union naming both Mau and Non-Violence Project Mexico. Mau, seeming to catch wind of the investigation, left the country. For several months, according to private investigators hired by Martínez, he traveled around Europe, apparently using some of the union money to cover the cost of his jet-setting.

Finally, Mau came back to Mexico, where authorities turned up outside his apartment with a warrant. They arrested him for fraud on February 9, 2023—the same day he would later tell his friends, his girlfriend, and me that he had been kidnapped by a cartel. According to legal records, he spent 18 months in prison awaiting trial; he was released after promising to repay hundreds of thousands of dollars, and to cooperate in a fraud investigation against the Non-Violence Project Foundation. (In its statement, the foundation denied responsibility for the alleged fraud and said that it is “not a party to any legal proceedings” connected to Martínez’s claims against Bermúdez. Martínez declined to comment.)

Mau did his time at Reclusorio Sur, a men’s penitentiary near the mountains on the southern edge of Mexico City. Also awaiting trial in the prison was a small-time businessman who’d been accused of fraud and the theft of a bicycle. His full name was Edgar Omar González Giffard, but most people inside the prison called him Mamers.

Adriana Loureiro Fernández for The Atlantic

Mau, photographed in August at the spot where he said he’d been kidnapped by La Unión Tepito

On my last day in Mexico City, I asked Mau to meet me at a park near his apartment. Given the conversation I knew we needed to have, it felt unwise to go back to his home. We chose a concrete table with a built-in chessboard, surrounded by trees and low shrubs. Mau wore a yellow track jacket with ROCKY stitched across the chest.

Shortly after we sat down, I pulled up his mug shot on my phone. Turning the screen toward him, I asked, “Is this you?”

Mau didn’t flinch or scoff or reflexively start making denials. He just paused as his eyes scanned the image. I could almost see him processing this new development—testing the angles, deciding how to respond.

Determined to maintain control of the conversation, I plowed ahead, reading off the details that accompanied the photo: the fraud complaint, the sums of money, the name on the arrest warrant.

“You were arrested the same day you told everyone you were taken by the cartel, right?” I asked.

Unflustered, he began to tell me a new story. Yes, he said, he’d been arrested—but my timeline was wrong. He’d been arrested in 2022, a year before he was taken by the cartel.

And the arrest warrant that stated clearly he’d been taken into custody in February 2023? I asked.

It must have been doctored, he told me. Very powerful people were involved. He was the victim of a conspiracy—caught between a politically connected union and a corrupt international NGO whose bidding he had been forced to do. He said he could explain everything, but it would have to be off the record—he couldn’t be sure of his safety otherwise. I heard the familiar refrain of his pitch returning: What you don’t understand about Mexico …

But I was tired of Mau’s stories.

I asked him if he had stolen the money his family had paid for his ransom.

“No, obviously not,” he said.

And James Winston—he wasn’t a real person, was he?

Mau insisted that he was.

Realizing that we weren’t going to get anywhere, I stood up to leave. Before we parted, I asked if he could send me the case file from his arrest—the documents that would establish the timeline and basic facts of what he’d been charged with.

“I don’t know, man,” he said. “I need to talk to my lawyer.”

Something in his demeanor had changed. It was as if he’d flicked off a switch. The likable, self-effacing man I’d been talking with for months had withdrawn, and in his place was someone colder, more distant. His mark had gotten wise—it was time to move on.

I said goodbye and made my way up the hill toward the park’s exit, looking back for one last glimpse at Mau. He was heading in the opposite direction, shoulders slightly hunched, staring down at his phone, his thumbs moving quickly across the screen.

When I got back to my hotel that night, I called Robert Reynolds to break the news that the story he’d wanted so badly to adapt for the screen wasn’t true after all. He sounded genuinely shocked.

“Wow,” Reynolds said, almost as if to himself. “He seemed like such a good guy.”

Did he? I found myself wondering about that now. Had Mau’s performance really been so compelling? Or was his story just exciting enough, just potentially profitable enough, just flattering enough to American sensibilities and preconceptions, that Reynolds and I and everyone else had simply wanted too badly to believe it?

In retrospect, it seemed absurd that I’d ever taken Mau so seriously. As more of the pieces fell into place following my discovery of his arrest and imprisonment, he looked less like a heroic survivor or even a mastermind hoax artist, and more like a low-level scammer with a talent for improvisation. That email from the high-ranking UN official asking Reynolds for Killers tickets for a beloved volunteer? It was signed by Filippo Grandi, then the UN high commissioner for refugees, whose office confirmed that it was a forgery. (Mau denied writing it himself.) Those messages from movie producers who had somehow caught wind of the story I was writing? It turns out Mau was stringing along multiple filmmakers—the producer in Mexico told me they were on the verge of signing an “exclusive” contract with him.

And yet, I still couldn’t say definitively that he’d invented his account out of whole cloth. In the course of my reporting, I learned about interprison sports tournaments, including a football competition, organized by the Mexico City penitentiary system. It is well established that the cartels have a presence in the country’s prisons—was it possible that Mau’s fantastical story of heroism and life-and-death stakes was rooted in his own less cinematic, less blood-drenched experience as a regular prison inmate? Then there was the mystery of Mamers’s “disappearance.” Late last year, Mamers went dark on social media and, Mau said, stopped responding to his messages. My own attempts to contact him were also unsuccessful. Mau told Reynolds that his old friend was dead, most likely taken out by a cartel. Maybe he’d just gone to ground. In a country with 130,000 missing people, I suspected I would never know for sure.

In the months after I left Mexico, the news in my own country would be dominated by ICE raids and mass deportations—a hard-line immigration agenda built on the stories we are told about crime and migrants and cartel bosses. When the death of a drug lord in February set off a brutal wave of cartel attacks, the United States canceled flights to resort cities and issued shelter-in-place alerts for Americans in Mexico. Mau’s account of the cartel Olympics fit neatly into the governing narrative of the age, one that imagines a permanent, untamable dystopia just beyond America’s southern border.

Some stories take on a life of their own because they show how things really are. Others spread because they tell us what we already believe. And sometimes a story that’s too good to be true is just that.

But a good story is a hard thing to kill.

Two weeks after my return from Mexico City, Reynolds called me.

“Dude,” he said breathlessly. “I just talked to Michael Peña.” He had filled the actor in on the latest developments—Mau’s deception, my investigation, the whole ridiculous misadventure—and Peña saw potential. “He said he loves this even more than the original story!” The movie was back on.

This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “The Incredible Story of the Cartel Olympics.”

Israel Is Missing Its Big Chance in Lebanon

2026-03-19T07:00:00-04:00

Suddenly, Israel has a remarkable opportunity for a diplomatic breakthrough in Lebanon. You’d be forgiven for not knowing about this, because both Israel and Hezbollah seem committed instead to a spiraling conflict.

Hezbollah apparently decided to plunge itself, and Lebanon, into the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran because it believes that it faces an existential crisis. Israel destroyed much of the organization’s missile arsenal in 2023–24, decimated its ranks of commanders, and wiped out most of its political leadership. Hezbollah seems to have concluded that it needs to act now to restore deterrence.

For its part, Israel has apparently reached an equal and opposite conclusion about Hezbollah: that now is the golden opportunity to reduce the organization to irrelevance. The war that ended in 2024 did not completely neutralize Hezbollah, and the organization was making some headway in rearming itself, despite the Lebanese government’s efforts to prevent this.

[Read: Something new is happening in Lebanon]

The chance to settle its unfinished business with the group presented itself on March 1, when Hezbollah launched some ineffective missile and drone attacks over the Israeli border. The Israeli military responded by bombing Hezbollah-related targets in Lebanon. Ominously, it called on Lebanese civilians to evacuate the south of the country and the southern suburbs of Beirut, where Hezbollah has its support base. Israel seems to be anticipating a long campaign in Lebanon, possibly including a renewed occupation of the south.

Israel, the United States, and other actors have long pressed the Lebanese government to do more to disarm Hezbollah in southern Lebanon; now Israel is demanding for this to be a priority throughout the country, saying that if the Lebanese state cannot or will not disarm Hezbollah, Israel will do so by means of war. In Gaza, Israel’s war involved the displacement of huge numbers of people and the thorough destruction of physical infrastructure. Israel has suggested it will pursue the same course in Lebanon. One official has said that until Israeli war aims are secured, the country’s almost 1 million newly displaced people will not be allowed to return to their homes, and another vowed to reduce Beirut’s southern suburbs to a moonscape comparable to the leveled city of Khan Younis, in Gaza.

But Hezbollah is not the adversary it was before 2023. It is also in a much worse position now inside of Lebanon, whose government has been maneuvering to transform the militia into a normal political party, rather than a quasi-state actor with power over war and peace.

So far, dragooning Lebanon into the current war does not seem to be doing Hezbollah any additional favors. Rather, it has led the Lebanese government to declare Hezbollah’s military activities illegal, and popular anger against the organization appears to have reached an all-time high. Israel’s actions, however, could throw the group a lifeline: A renewed occupation of southern Lebanon would give Hezbollah and other extremist groups a plausible rationale to remain armed.

In seeking to impose its will on its Arab neighbors, particularly the Palestinians and Lebanese, Israel has frequently made the mistake of failing to differentiate among its adversaries. For example, it has steadfastly refused to accept the fact that only the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization offer a practical alternative to Hamas. The equivalent in Lebanon is Israel’s failure to understand that the Lebanese state is the only viable alternative to Hezbollah’s domination. For Israel’s military campaigns to become political successes requires the adoption of policies that strengthen the Lebanese government and the Palestinian Authority. These would serve to counter Hezbollah and Hamas, respectively.

[Bilal Y. Saab: How Washington can help Lebanon]

The Lebanese government has said that it wants to negotiate with Israel directly, and France has reportedly proposed a grand bargain, whereby Lebanon would recognize Israel in exchange for Israel ceasing to bomb the country and withdrawing from areas it has held since 2024. Such an agreement could be a win-win for Israel and Lebanon, while leaving Hezbollah even more isolated and exposed.

Unfortunately, Israel has evinced little interest in such talks. That would be an astonishing missed opportunity. But it is also consistent with the mindset of a government that has reduced Gaza to rubble without eliminating Hamas as a political and paramilitary force.

A similar approach in Lebanon will not yield better results. It could even end up saving Hezbollah from its own miscalculations rather than finishing the organization off.

The Same War, on a Loop

2026-03-18T07:00:00-04:00

In Israel these days, unless your apartment has a blast-resistant room, it’s best to go to bed in something that you’re comfortable wearing in a bomb shelter. Your phone is likely to wake you with the clatter of an alert for incoming missiles: First comes a text message that says to be near a protected area. Several minutes later, a second screech brings a message to take cover.

The government has approved the reopening of workplaces that have shelters, but most children are home, attending school online. This is a burden for all parents, but particularly for those who are single or whose partner has been called up for reserve duty.

I live in Jerusalem. My adult daughters are in Tel Aviv, which is targeted much more often. On the phone one day, one daughter told me that she had been woken six times the previous night. A moment later, she said, “Gotta go, Dad. An alert.”

I’d spoken with her sister earlier. The Tel Aviv light rail isn’t operating, because underground stations are being used as bomb shelters, so she’d taken a cab to work. Mid-ride, her phone clacked a preliminary warning. She reached her job, and a shelter, moments after the second alert.

Hezbollah in Lebanon, supposedly vanquished in the fall of 2024, has resumed firing at our cities and towns. Two soldiers were killed on the Lebanese front by a Hezbollah anti-tank rocket on March 8. Seemingly, those were the first Israeli military deaths of the current war.

[Read: Why Israel struck now]

But only seemingly. In our lives, the current war has gone on for two and a half years, with intermissions just long enough to raise hope of normalcy that is shattered when fighting resumes. This morning’s siren is a replay of June’s siren, and the siren of autumn 2024, and that of autumn 2023. This is not a new war. It is the same war on a loop of exhaustion, adrenaline, and worry for your children. To those feelings I must add despair and frustration with the apparent determination of my government to maintain the loop endlessly.

The start of the war wasn’t Israel’s choice. It was the catastrophic decision of Hamas’s then-leader, Yahya Sinwar, to launch a wide offensive from Gaza into Israel on October 7, 2023, massacring civilians. At some point, however, the war became Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s choice, as he cleaved to his avowed goal of “absolute victory” over Hamas, in an effort to hold together a coalition with extreme rightists who wanted to conquer all of Gaza.

In June, Netanyahu, together with Donald Trump, made the decision to bomb Iran. Renewing the fighting there now was also his choice.

Throughout Netanyahu’s career, his signature sleight of mind has been to divert attention from the unresolved conflict with the Palestinians by shouting “Iran!” loudly and often. Then Israel was taken by surprise on October 7, and the prime minister avoided accountability for that intelligence failure by keeping the war going—in part by constantly changing the conditions for a cease-fire. Now he has combined both magic tricks.

In the middle of last month, Netanyahu flew to Washington for a meeting about Iran. The next day, speaking with reporters, Trump renewed his demand that Israeli President Isaac Herzog grant Netanyahu an unprecedented preconviction pardon, which would cut short the prime minister’s trial on corruption charges. Trump has since attacked Herzog twice for not paying immediate attention to the matter, most recently saying that the Israeli president is “full of crap” for following the required clemency procedure. Whatever happened in that White House meeting—whoever actually persuaded whom to attack—Trump has since escalated his effort to rescue the prime minister from the courtroom.

In his first press conference after the Iran campaign began, 13 days in, Netanyahu insisted that Trump was merely speaking from his heart. Then the prime minister demanded that Herzog “end this absurd circus” of the trial to “give Israel the time and me the time to do what’s needed to defeat our enemies.” In other words, the nation’s victory depends on his triumph over the legal system.

Netanyahu also seems to expect that during the fighting that he has reignited, he can banish criticism and constraints on his actions and those of his political allies. For example, on March 4, Israeli Attorney General Gali Baharav Miara filed a brief in a citizen’s suit that had come before the supreme court. The suit called for the dismissal of the far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on the grounds that he had illegally politicized the country’s police force. Baharav Miara’s brief supported his dismissal. Netanyahu’s office issued a statement saying that for her to take such a position was “inconceivable” while Israel was “in the midst of an existential war against Iran.”

[Read: The two extremists driving Israel’s policy]

“Existential war” is a great distraction from all kinds of ills—for instance, the fact that two of Netanyahu’s aides are being investigated for allegedly working in the pay of Qatar and leaking a top-secret document. Netanyahu has managed to evade police interrogation about an alleged attempt to cover up that leak. Then there is the prime minister’s corruption trial, and his government’s refusal to allow an impartial inquiry into who is responsible for Israel being taken by surprise on October 7.

War is three-card monte with Netanyahu as the dealer. Strikes on Tehran divert news coverage from the bills that the ruling coalition has introduced to disempower the attorney general and subject the broadcast media to government control. A mass protest against the government was supposed to take place on the night of February 28: It never happened, because missiles began falling that morning. Most dangerous of all, those missiles are driving to the far margins of public attention the escalating campaign of terror that West Bank settlers are carrying out against Palestinian villages, with the acquiescence, or worse, of the Israeli army.

Missiles falling on Israel have not, however, kept the cabinet from meeting one night to approve nearly $2 billion in pork-barrel funding for Netanyahu’s coalition partners. Most of these funds will subsidize the ultra-Orthodox community, many of whose men continue religious study into adulthood rather than serving in the military or working. Another chunk will go to West Bank settlers. With that, Netanyahu bought his coalition partners’ support for a national budget that must be approved in Parliament by the end of this month to avoid early elections. The payout comes at the same time as a nearly 30 percent boost in defense spending that will force across-the-board cuts to other government programs—including the reconstruction of communities on the northern border that are once again under Hezbollah fire.

Such callousness is the leitmotif of two and a half years of war under Netanyahu. It is also the opposite of the core value of Israeli society, weakly translated as “solidarity”: the conviction that each of us is in this not for herself or himself but for one another. That cohesion has always been a national strength not measurable in warplanes or divisions. Netanyahu has fractured it.

Surveys show high support among Israelis for the war with Iran. In my experience, which dates back to the 1982 Lebanon War, this is normal at the start of a conflict and is the product of reflexive patriotism, fear, and the government’s ability to shape the media narrative. With time, the initial burst of adrenaline fades, and questions grow.

I suspect that polls would more accurately reflect public opinion if they presented a series of sentences and asked which best reflected respondents’ mood. One statement might be “I’m glad Ali Khamenei is dead,” but others could include “I constantly think about my partner, who just got called up again” and “I can’t focus on work,” or “I’ve completely had it”—again, a weak translation of a Hebrew phrase, in this case much more vulgar, that I see on social media.

[Read: The Iran war has four stages. We’re in the second.]

A more objective indicator of the effect of the long war might be the sharp rise in emigration. Last year, according to the state’s Central Bureau of Statistics, nearly 51,000 more Israelis emigrated than returned from abroad. In the years before 2023, the number was about a third of that. A study by Tel Aviv University researchers found that emigrants tend to be young and well educated. In 2023 and 2024, nearly 1,000 physicians emigrated from the country of about 10 million people.

This does not mean that Israel is emptying out. But it does hint at malaise, at doubts about the future. It suggests that war without a perceivable endpoint has the same effect as a missile falling far enough away from a building to leave it standing but close enough to create thin fissures.

To distract myself, not very well, I turn from my screen to a book: The Art of War, by the fifth-century B.C.E. Chinese theoretician Sun Tzu. “It is best to keep one’s own state intact; to crush the enemy’s state is only second best,” he wrote. In this repetitive war, Netanyahu is aiming only for second best.

Trump May Not Be Able to End This War

2026-03-18T07:00:00-04:00

President Trump appears to careen between two opposing visions for victory in Iran: He has demanded Tehran’s “unconditional surrender” and also has signaled that he might abruptly declare victory and leave. Neither scenario is likely to end this war, because neither reflects any real understanding of the adversary.

Washington appears to have begun the conflict on the assumption that sustained military pressure would either collapse the Iranian regime or force its leadership to concede to fundamental political and strategic demands. But the Islamic Republic has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to survive crises. In fact, past crises have strengthened rather than weakened the regime’s internal cohesion.

The Islamic Republic was born in upheaval and has governed through confrontation for much of its existence. In the early years after the 1979 revolution, religious factions competed with secular and leftist movements for influence. The state’s security institutions were still consolidating power. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which today dominates much of Iran’s military, political, and economic life, had not yet developed the institutional strength it now commands.

The turning point came when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran in 1980. That external threat, and the eight-year war that followed, consolidated Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s domestic authority and dramatically expanded the role of the IRGC. In later decades, under Khomeini’s successor, Ali Khamenei, the IRGC evolved into far more than a military force. It became an economic network, a political actor, and a central pillar of regime survival.

Today the IRGC’s influence extends across large portions of Iran’s economy, including energy, infrastructure, and construction. Its commanders occupy key positions across the state apparatus. These institutional entanglements mean that the Islamic Republic is not simply a government that can be easily removed; it is a deeply embedded system of political, military, and economic power.

Recent developments appear to have reinforced this structure rather than weakened it. Khamenei’s son Mojtaba has succeeded him as supreme leader. The younger Khamenei has long been viewed as a key intermediary between the clerical leadership and the IRGC, and his elevation suggests continuity rather than disruption within the regime’s core power networks.

[Read: The Iranian regime doubles down]

The Islamic Republic knows that it is fighting for its life, and that all it has to do, as the saying goes about insurgencies, is not lose. The expectation that military pressure alone will produce the regime’s collapse under such circumstances is likely unrealistic. Even severe damage to military infrastructure will not necessarily translate into political disintegration. Instead, external threats could strengthen nationalist sentiment and encourage factions within the system to close ranks.

Trump’s oscillations—between maximalist calls for unconditional surrender and suggestions that he might unilaterally declare the conflict over—probably reflect competing pressures. Israel may prefer to keep tightening the screws on Iran, while Washington has to worry about global economic risks and domestic political opposition. The possibility of prolonged instability in the Strait of Hormuz—through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply flows—has already rattled energy markets and could lead to a global oil shock comparable to those of the 1970s.

The Iranian regime is aware of American vulnerabilities and will seek to exploit them. At the end of last week, the United States struck Kharg Island, which houses much of Iran’s oil infrastructure. Iran can be expected to retaliate against economic targets in the region, including ports and energy facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Oman. If the United States escalates in response, Tehran will expand that regional target list. These are moves that don’t require Iranian military superiority—just its will to survive and its willingness to spread chaos throughout the region and into the global economy.

[Read: The Iran war has four stages. We’re in the second.]

Even if its military capabilities are degraded, Tehran can keep disrupting maritime shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. It can activate proxies, as it has done in Lebanon, where Israel is battling Hezbollah. And it can make trouble through cyber operations and covert attacks. All of these are low-cost means by which a determined Islamic Republic can continue to confound a much more technologically advanced and powerful United States.

For this reason, the war may not end in a decisive victory or defeat, but with a transformation. The battlefield would not disappear in this scenario—it would simply move. Overt fighting could give way to a kind of subterranean conflict, defined by deniable actions, covert retaliation, and indirect pressure. Instead of visible military exchanges, the countries would engage in a shadow struggle of mutual sabotage, attacks on shipping routes, pressure through regional militias, and secret operations designed to impose costs without triggering a new round of full-scale war.

The Islamic Republic is ideologically and institutionally unlikely to declare its unconditional surrender. And so Trump may soon decide to cut his losses by saying that the United States has achieved its objectives and the war is finished. But wars do not always end when one side says they do. Iran’s leadership shows no sign of viewing the current conflict as a decisive defeat. As long as the regime believes it still has the capacity to resist, the confrontation may not cease.