Global | The Atlantic

The Crisis Iran’s Leaders Can’t Ignore

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

The war between Iran and Israel and the United States has been an economic catastrophe for Iranians. Their country has lost at least 1 million jobs—possibly 2 million—since the war began. In the same period, almost 300,000 eligible Iranians have signed up for unemployment insurance, and job-seeking websites are so inundated with new applications that they keep crashing.

U.S. and Israeli strikes over the winter degraded Iran’s industrial capacity. At the same time, the blockade that the U.S. imposed on the Strait of Hormuz, in response to Iran’s seizure of control of the waterway, has made life difficult for businesses that rely on imports. So has the continued fall of the Iranian currency: A U.S. dollar now sells for 1.75 million Iranian rials.

The regime compounded these effects with its total shutdown of the internet, first during the mass protests in January and then during the war. Access is now mostly restored, but for many Iranians who relied on the internet for their work, the damage is already done. Iran might end up experiencing a double-digit economic contraction this year—a calamity with little precedent in its modern history.

[Yeganeh Torbati and Bozorgmehr Sharafedin: How Iran killed its economy]

Many Iranians I spoke with last week were acutely suffering. I have withheld their full names to protect them from reprisal for speaking to an American media outlet.

Sara, a 33-year-old graphic designer in Tehran, told me how she was faring economically: “Let me be honest with you,” she said. “I have no idea how I’ll survive.” Until last year, she made something of a middle-class living illustrating and designing book covers and restaurant menus. She had more customers than she had time for, and even though Iran’s currency was continually depreciating, “I had no problem affording the basics and even an occasional vacation,” she said. Now wartime uncertainty has meant that few Iranians are thinking about publishing books or opening restaurants.

“It’s the same news almost everywhere,” Majid, a 27-year-old computer engineer who was laid off during the war, told me. “No jobs and massively increased prices. It basically means we are fucked.” Alireza, a 33-year-old worker at a dairy factory in southern Iran, told me he was let go last month when his factory closed, and he has applied to collect unemployment.

I spoke with a man named Sadegh who sells laptops and other electronic goods. His sector depends heavily on products that pass through the United Arab Emirates. Since the war began, Iran has attacked the UAE repeatedly, including during the cease-fire, and Sadegh told me that the flow of imports from there has stopped. “We used to import 8 to 9 million mobile phones a year, but it has now dwindled to less than 50,000,” he told me. “Obviously this will lead to higher prices.”

The U.S. and Israel struck steel-production complexes in central Iran and petrochemical facilities on the Persian Gulf, putting tens of thousands of workers immediately out of work. The downstream effect of these strikes is even broader. Manufacturers of car parts and building materials, for instance, relied on domestic steel and can’t operate without it. Other industries, including those involved in producing food and medicine, relied on petrochemicals to produce crucial components, such as plastic pipes, an engineering expert told me.

Iran’s inflation is now near 85 percent, according to official data. But the rate is much higher—130 percent—for food products. For edible oils, the inflation rate is 266 percent; for meat and chicken, 169 percent; and for eggs and dairy products, 161 percent. Bread, cigarettes, cars, and furniture have seen a similar triple-digit rise. Public transportation in Tehran has been offered for free during the war, but this is likely to end soon, and taxi and intercity bus fares are up 21 percent. This is not surprising, considering that gas, tires, and car parts have become ever scarcer and pricier.

The price increases have transformed people’s lifestyles. The unemployed dairy worker told me he had trouble affording even the most basic provisions, such as eggs and bread. A retired teacher I spoke with said she’d given up on cooking meat or chicken. Sara and Majid both said that they had considered canceling their phone plans or selling their furniture. Across Tehran, billboards now advertise installment plans to pay for basic goods. Many consumer products cost roughly what they might in the United States, but the mandated monthly minimum wage in Iran (after a recent 60 percent increase) is now about $100, and many workers earn much less than that because they rely on part-time and contract work.

The government has offered little relief, even to Iranians whose homes were destroyed in the war. It has extended loans to small companies (those employing fewer than 50 people) amounting to $125 per worker. But this hardly offsets the drop in consumer demand and the increase in the cost of doing business.

Some analysts outside the country emphasize Iran’s military resilience and downplay its economic vulnerability. Just last week, the anthropologist Narges Bajoghli and the political scientist Vali Nasr argued in Foreign Affairs that Iranians’ economic woes are less salient than they were before the war—that the Islamic Republic has succeeded in reducing the gap between regime and society in part because popular economic complaints have been “subordinated” to the exigencies of conflict.

[Karim Sadjadpour: The vulture’s advantage]

But economists and ordinary citizens inside Iran seem to see this rather differently—and to know that unless Iran takes measures to reverse its economic decline, it will continue to face political crises.

Writing in the Iranian press, many economic experts acknowledge the hole the country finds itself in and advocate that Iranian negotiators strike a deal with the U.S. that not only ends the American blockade but also promises to lift international sanctions on Iran. They point out that the country also needs structural economic and political reform to address its endemic corruption and economic mismanagement. The economist Mohammad Mehdi Behkish wrote in a Tehran daily about the urgency of getting the U.S. blockade lifted and restoring relations with the UAE, if Iran is to regain access to basic goods and avoid social unrest. Another economist, Zahra Karimi, made a plea in an op-ed earlier this month for regular trade with advanced countries so that Iran can access the technology and machinery it needs for its growth.

Iran has withstood immense military pressure for months and claims triumph on the battleground. But its tattered economy remains its Achilles’ heel.

How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi

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

Illustrations by Joan Wong

Who broke Britain? Someone—or something—must have. The past 18 years, enough time for a whole lost generation to be born and brought up, have yielded nothing but stagnation and mass disillusionment. In 2007, before the global financial crisis, Britain was at its postimperial zenith. Median household income had just surpassed that of Germany. A pound was worth more than $2, and London was arguably displacing New York as the center of international banking.

But since then, Britain has been left behind. The country’s output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi, America’s poorest state—and that slight lead is only achieved thanks to London. Outside the capital, in places where tourists do not visit, living standards fall well below Mississippi’s. Brits visiting the United States find that their currency has depreciated to the point where the pound today buys only about $1.35. British wages have lagged well behind those in the U.S., and also those in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark; once you account for inflation, they’ve barely grown at all. Within the next decade, the typical Pole will have a standard of living equal to the typical Brit, if current trends continue.

[Douglas Carswell: Is Mississippi really as poor as Britain?]

One generation ago, Britain was a major global power; today, it is a middling one, gripped by sclerosis. Taxation is at the highest level since World War II, yet public services have deteriorated. The National Health Service, the celebrated pillar of the British cradle-to-grave welfare state, has a backlog of 6 million patients—almost a tenth of the population—waiting for treatment. The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.

Incomes can be shockingly low: Junior doctors recently went on strike for the 15th time in three years over their salaries, which start at just £38,800; the median salary for British civil servants is £35,680. In April, amid the Iran conflict, the Daily Mail pounced on Prime Minister Keir Starmer for vacationing in Valencia, Spain, at what the tabloid described as a luxury hotel, costing £200 a night.

Some in Britain blame rotten luck—the 2008 financial crash, the coronavirus pandemic, an energy crisis after Russia invaded Ukraine. But other countries endured these challenges too. What differentiated Britain was its self-sabotaging responses to these and other problems. Brexit is the most famous example, but hardly the only one. Bad choices, beginning just after the financial crisis, begot worse ones. As public disillusionment has grown, politicians have been rotated swiftly in and out of power, abruptly terminating whatever policies they had started. Six different prime ministers have governed since the 2010 general election. They do not seem to be getting more talented over time. Less than two years after Starmer’s Labour Party took power, his net approval rating has plunged to minus 42 points. He is widely expected to resign this year, and may have done so by the time you read this.

The country’s downward slide has been consistent in one respect: As Britain has become more and more aware of its diminishment, it has retreated ever more fully into a defensive crouch. Politics have become zero-sum, descending into fights over who has robbed whom. Suspicion has fallen, above all, on immigrants, whom both major parties have turned against. There is still an enduring strain of British exceptionalism, quieter and more understated than the American version, which suggests that by retreating inward, Britain can make itself great again. Astonishingly, or perhaps predictably, it is growing stronger as the country’s problems get worse.

In fairness, the 2008 financial crisis hit Britain especially hard. In the 1990s, both the Tories and Tony Blair’s “New Labour” Party made the same bet: Britain was to be a postindustrial, services-based economy, anchored in finance. Tax receipts from a booming London would be redistributed to lagging regions in the old industrial heartland, helping to renew them. Then came 2008, and London’s financial industry cratered.

But the government’s actions during and after the crisis compounded the damage. Rather than increase spending to revive depressed demand, as modern Keynesians would counsel, the government, then led by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, opted to slash budgets as revenue plunged. The theory was that fiscal discipline—cutting spending more sharply than Britain’s peer countries—would inspire confidence and spur growth. At the time, deficits and debt were seen as immoral; unlike profligate Greece, Britain would manage its affairs prudently.

The promised growth did not materialize, and austerity left scars that linger still. Funding for day-to-day NHS operations was maintained, for instance, but only by cannibalizing the capital budget. A 2024 government report found that, as a result of austerity, Britain has “crumbling buildings, mental health patients being accommodated in Victoria-era cells infested with vermin with 17 men sharing two showers, and parts of the NHS operating in decrepit portacabins.”

[Read: Britain’s unbridgeable divide]

After austerity cuts to welfare benefits took effect, the share of children who grew up in long-term poverty, meaning half their childhood or more, shot up from about 14 percent to 23 percent. Nutrition appeared to suffer, and doctors reported increased cases of diseases stemming from vitamin deficiencies, such as rickets and scurvy.

Local governments, called councils, saw their grants from the central government fall by 40 percent from 2010 to 2020. In 2023, Birmingham City Council, which is responsible for more than 1 million residents, effectively declared bankruptcy. One-third of all English councils could do the same within five years.

Austerity was felt most harshly by those who were already suffering after deindustrialization. The welfare state had partially compensated the losers from globalization. When it abruptly shrank—because the masters of the universe had miscalculated—anger erupted upward, at British elites, and also outward, at European migrants, who were competing for jobs and public services. It was because of this political pressure that Cameron made another fateful decision: to hold the Brexit referendum in 2016. This was a gambit; Cameron expected the vote to fail. He did not want to leave the European Union, but he wanted to arrest the rise of figures such as Nigel Farage, the longtime gadfly of British politics, who had been campaigning for withdrawal from the EU for decades. Left-behind Britain, the places especially harmed by austerity cuts, voted overwhelmingly to leave. The morning after he lost the referendum, Cameron resigned, ushering in a period of political instability that has now lasted a decade, and shows no sign of ending.

[David Frum: The costs of Brexit are undeniable now]

Settling the formal Brexit deal took almost four years of negotiations between Britain and the EU. The resulting uncertainty took a toll on British businesses even then. In 2018, one year before his ascension to prime minister, Boris Johnson was asked by a European diplomat about these adverse effects. He replied, “Fuck business.” And indeed, something like that happened. A recent paper on “The Economic Impact of Brexit,” by five economists, calculated that Brexit caused business investment to drop by 12 to 18 percent, productivity and employment to decline by about 3 to 4 percent, and, most striking, GDP per capita to fall by 6 to 8 percent—twice as much as earlier estimates. The harms weren’t all immediately visible. As with austerity, they accumulated over time.

Outside London, the consequences of almost two lost decades are unignorable. Stoke-on-Trent, in the West Midlands, about 150 miles north of London, was once the ceramics capital of Britain, and quite probably the world. It was geologically blessed by rich seams of both coal and clay; its wares were transported by canal to Liverpool for export. The whole area became known as the Potteries. Stoke once held some 2,000 bottle kilns—huge, bulbous structures in which crockery from companies such as Wedgwood were fired.

Today only 47 remain; the industry employs perhaps 5,000 people—down from some 300,000 in 1984. And because of Britain’s extraordinary energy costs, this number is still declining. Depleted oil drilling in the North Sea and a failure to invest in alternative energy sources have left the country reliant on imported energy, staggering consumers and industry alike. From 2004 to 2024, electricity costs for British businesses more than tripled (even after adjusting for inflation), and are now the highest in the world.

Hulton Archive / Getty

Bottle kilns, used in the manufacture of dinnerware and other pottery, in Stoke-on-Trent, circa 1948

In March, I visited Middleport Pottery, the last remaining ceramics factory that has operated continuously since the Victorian era. A charming elderly guide named Phil Knott showed me around, pointing out the ceramics and crockery that the company supplies to the private residence of King Charles III. In most rooms we entered, he introduced me by saying, “This man here is from Washington to write an article about the ceramics industry.” Though the factory once employed some 400 workers, it now has only 18. Middleport uses smaller gas ovens today, but its last bottle kiln (there once were seven) still sits outside, a vestige of a bygone time. All along the kiln’s exterior—where heat and smoke and ash once escaped—small trees and plants have taken root in the dormant structure.

The deindustrialization of Stoke began a long time ago. In the 1980s, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ushered in her “supply side” revolution, emphasizing privatization and breaking the trade unions. This improved the country’s fortunes, but not those of all its parts. Thatcherism hit Stoke hard, causing closures of factories, steelworks, and mines. Lisa Healings, who runs the charity Voluntary Action Stoke-on-Trent, lived through that as a young girl. VAST works with a network of charities to provide food, job training, and counseling, but the group is fighting economic gravity. “There’s now a third generation almost coming through,” Healings told me, whose “parents were unemployed, their grandparents were unemployed, and they don’t see any future for themselves other than living on benefits and being unemployed.”

Austerity was particularly brutal to places like Stoke, where a large share of the population was already dependent on government benefits. Two out of every five children in Stoke live in poverty, one of the highest rates in Britain, and in 2022, the city had one of the highest rates of infant mortality in the country.

Since the turn of this century, successive governments have tried and mostly failed to correct basic problems. In 2003, John Prescott, Blair’s deputy prime minister, started a policy called “Pathfinder,” which aimed to demolish and replace worn-down housing in postindustrial places such as Stoke. Cameron’s government abruptly defunded it in 2010, leaving empty eyesore lots where demolition had finished but building had not yet begun. In 2019, Johnson promised that a new economic-revitalization plan called “Leveling Up” would “answer the plea of the forgotten people and the left-behind towns.” But few specifics were forthcoming until three years later, only months before Johnson resigned. The funding it provided was a pittance compared with the support withdrawn from local governments under austerity.

It is in places like Stoke where discontent with London and Brussels is highest. During the 2016 referendum, 69 percent of residents voted to leave the EU—the highest share of any city in the country. Afterward, Stoke was branded “the capital of Brexit.”

My train north from London was, like many, seriously delayed—in this case because of a loose panel on a front car. “Hopefully it’ll hold on until we get to Manchester,” the conductor announced. This information left me, rather like the panel, flappable, but it had no discernible effect on my fellow passengers. Although Americans should generally not cast aspersions on the rail services of other countries, the episode was yet another reminder of Britain’s degraded state.

Recent plans to transform the country have rested in no small part on High Speed 2, a superfast rail line intended to connect London with Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester. But since HS2 was proposed, in 2009, its costs have tripled, to more than £100 billion. It is the most expensive rail line in the world. (A special structure to protect a rare bat species near the rail line in Buckinghamshire required 8,000 permits and was built at a cost of £216 million.) The most important sections of the proposed route have been lopped off. The rump line—going from Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city, to not-quite-central London—may be finished by 2040.

In Birmingham, a local named Gerry Moynihan walked me from the city center to the benighted HS2 terminus. Moynihan—a pleasant, white-haired former lawyer with a dyspeptic X account often focused on his hometown’s troubles—was eager to show me what had gone wrong. He pointed out a large site called Smithfield, formerly the location of grocery wholesalers whose warehouses had been vacant for many years. We passed a few film studios along the canal, some of the more promising businesses that have sprouted up in recent years. Moynihan admitted that their existence poses some challenge to an oft-repeated remark of his—“I see nothing of merit in this city”—but then redirected my attention to the gargantuan potholes in the road, gouged so deep that you could see the Victorian-era cobblestones below; to the trash piled up in vacant lots; and to the discarded boxes for extra-large canisters of nitrous oxide, which is routinely abused in Birmingham.

To get to the HS2 terminus, at Curzon Street Station, Moynihan and I walked along the route of an attempted Birmingham-metro-rail extension, which has itself been beset by delays and cost overruns: a localized version of the HS2 debacle. I could see crawler cranes and excavators moving busily around; huge Y-shaped piers that will, perhaps in a decade, hoist the high-speed rail stood disconnected from each other. HS2 has been delayed for so long that two swiftly built towers near the terminus now themselves look derelict and in need of demolition. “If you’re a developer, why would you invest here? The only reason is HS2, and it is moribund,” Moynihan said.

Illustration by Joan Wong

Building infrastructure, or much of anything else, has become all but impossible in the United Kingdom. In addition to having the world’s most expensive (not yet built) train line, Britain also hosts the world’s most expensive (not yet built) nuclear-power plant, Hinkley Point C. Its environmental-impact assessment ran 31,401 pages; the plant will feature a £700 million “fish disco,” which will pulse sounds underwater to deter animals from its intake pipes. The government spent 32 years and £179 million planning a tunnel beneath Stonehenge to relieve traffic, only to officially scrap the plan this year. Even basic tasks, such as obtaining power, can be nightmarish. “In the U.K., you can be waiting for five years to get any kind of energy-intensive project connected to the grid,” Sam Bowman, a founding editor of the magazine Works in Progress, told me. These failures are all self-imposed. Parliament, by design, could exercise broad authority over these matters—yet rather than wielding this power to confront Britain’s problems, it has chosen instead to smother the state with veto points, proceduralism, and endless reviews.

Britain suffers from a housing crisis significantly worse than America’s. The problem cannot even be blamed on zoning, because Britain does not have a zoning regime to speak of. Rather, every attempt to build is a painful, ad hoc negotiation with local government councils and NIMBY residents. As a result, housing costs per square foot are among the highest in Europe. In the words of one report, “Our housing stock offers the worst value for money of any advanced economy.” France has roughly the same population as the U.K., but almost 50 percent more homes. And yet, since the financial crisis, the U.K.’s rate of housing production has only fallen.

Britain’s building problems are not limited to the periphery. In London, the typical house sold in 2024 cost 11 times median earnings. And although London remains an alluring global city, it, too, is stagnating—since the financial crisis, worker productivity there has been essentially flat. Even so, London today is almost 50 percent more productive than the West Midlands, which includes both Stoke and Birmingham. Anna Stansbury, an economist at MIT, told me that the gaps between London and other British cities are comparable to those between cities in West and East Germany. In regional terms, the problem of the past two decades is essentially that London has hardly grown, yet Britain’s smaller cities remain so far behind it.

There are some exceptions to the general pattern of British malaise: Oxford and Cambridge, world leaders in science for centuries, are belatedly becoming hubs for start-ups, though they are close enough to London to share its housing afflictions. The most optimistic place I visited outside London’s orbit was Manchester, where growth has consistently been double the U.K. average. Downtown Manchester was once almost totally depopulated; today, approximately 100,000 people live there. After working hours in the city’s pubs, you will hear conspicuous southern accents: In 2024, more Londoners moved to Manchester than vice versa.

Manchester has succeeded in part because it gained some independence from the shambolic central government in London. In an experiment in devolution begun in 2011, London granted the city more power over taxes and transportation. The bus network was brought under public control, and a local £1 billion “Good Growth Fund” was set up to distribute investments across the city. Manchester, as a result, is now better able to set its own economic course. “You can’t order growth from the top down,” Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester since 2017, told me. “The U.K., for most of our lives, has been an overly centralized country.”

Many Labour supporters wish that Burnham, rather than the hapless Starmer, was prime minister. But for that to happen, Burnham would first need to return to Parliament (where he had previously served for 16 years). He attempted to do so in January, when a parliamentary seat became vacant in Greater Manchester, but he was blocked by Starmer’s allies, who did not want to elevate a potential rival (already called the “King of the North”). In May, after Starmer’s grip on power had loosened even further, a Labour member of Parliament in Makerfield, another Manchester seat, voluntarily resigned to offer Burnham another avenue to challenging the party leader. He will not be blocked this time.

Yet Burnham’s path to power is not guaranteed. Even Manchester is not immune to the country’s anti-establishment mood. In Makerfield, recent elections have seen significant improvement for the Green Party, the populist left party on the rise in Britain. The Greens are run by Zack Polanski, a former hypnotherapist and a self-described “eco-populist” who wants to legalize drugs and implement a wealth tax. But the strongest performance has been put up by the Reform Party, the populist hard-right party that’s rising nationally even faster than the Greens.

[Idrees Kahloon: Political parties have disconnected from the public]

Both of these parties, once relegated to the fringe of British politics, have done exceptionally well in recent national surveys. Reform has in fact been out-polling all the others for months—the first time in more than 40 years that neither Conservatives nor Labour has led. No matter who in the Labour Party replaces Starmer, presuming he resigns, Britain must hold another general election within the next three years. The odds-on favorite to be the next prime minister after that election is Reform’s leader. His name is Nigel Farage.

How could the prime instigator of Brexit now find himself in a position to be promoted to prime minister?

Farage is ascendant because he has an enticing answer to the question “Who broke Britain?”: the feckless elites, the ineffective civil servants, and the unwanted immigrants. Even if the country’s problems are beyond his capacity to solve, he at least can promise their reckoning.

I met Farage in March, right before he took the stage at a campaign rally in Milton Keynes, a commuter town outside London most famous for its many roundabouts. He and his merry band of insurgents were touring the country ahead of the local elections in May, in which Reform would gain some 1,400 municipal-government seats (30 percent of the total seats contested), while Labour would lose about 1,400 and the Tories about 500. Farage was in character: besuited, with a pink-and-purple tie immaculately matched to his shirt, and sporting his trademark Union Jack socks. When he leaned forward, I smelled tobacco and possibly a faint whiff of the pint of lager that he is so often pictured holding. He sunnily told me how he was preparing, upon his election, to wrest power from the deep state and deploy it to enact the will of the people. “We have to make sure within the civil service that we have people who are not willful obstructors,” he said: His government would not be like Donald Trump’s first administration, initially unsure of how to wield power, but like the second, ready to go from the start.

Carl Court / Getty

Nigel Farage, campaigning in Romford in April. His Reform Party has surged in national polls.

Several hundred people had come to see Farage speak. Political rallies in England are more civilized than the American ones I am used to: People drink pints before the event, sit patiently in chairs during it, and leave in an orderly queue afterward. After everyone took their seat, Farage delivered his speech, which was a rhapsody of declinism. “It is a period of complete political failure; economically, we’re going down the drain,” he said. Every current and recent political leader was to blame. The Conservatives had delivered Brexit too slowly, allowed mass migration anyway, agreed to net-zero-emissions commitments. Labour was responsible for Britain’s humiliation on the world stage, through its weak response to the war in Iran and its general dithering. The message was clear: Only Farage could fix it.

Farage’s plans to consolidate power, through a defanged civil service and constitutional reform, are detailed. Cuts to the civil service are not just being promised in a general way; a “Project 2025”–style ministry-by-ministry road map is being discussed by Reform’s allies. Quasi-constitutional laws that have restrained the power of the central government, such as the 1998 Human Rights Act and the 2010 Equality Act, will be redrafted. So will the 2008 Climate Change Act, which enshrined Britain’s net-zero commitments. Danny Kruger, a Conservative MP who defected to Reform last year and is now a part of its brain trust, told me that fixing the country’s problems requires first restoring parliamentary sovereignty. That would mean limiting the ability of independent government bodies to direct policy, and of courts to exercise judicial review on acts of Parliament.

Greater power for Parliament could indeed enable needed reforms. The accumulation of legal clutter is in no small part responsible for the country’s inability to build housing, infrastructure, and industry. And Parliament’s ability to self-govern, after decades of delegation to EU committees, has atrophied. Even after Brexit, a sort of learned helplessness has prevailed within the political class, Fred de Fossard, a former Tory political adviser now at the Prosperity Institute, told me. If Farage is elected, perhaps that will change. But Brexit proved that a sweeping assertion of sovereignty is by itself insufficient to ensure growth—and, indeed, can be self-harming.

Many of the details about how Farage would restore Britain’s place among wealthy nations, and a sense of opportunity for its people, are hazy. I asked him how he would spur the kind of strong economic growth that the Conservative and Labour Parties had failed to achieve. He answered by saying that he and his future ministers were successful businesspeople, unlike the current lot, and would therefore do better. The Reform Party has promised to slash government spending and national deficits, though it has promised to cut some taxes too. Farage told me that shock therapy for the British state would be necessary. “There is no question the state has to shrink in size, and this is going to be very, very tough,” he said, adding that he anticipates protests when he unveils plans to cut welfare benefits. “But if we don’t do it, we are going to go bust.”

Because of such statements, Reform is often accused of being austerity rehashed, or Thatcherism rewarmed. But Reform’s most specific economic pronouncements have largely been of the crowd-pleasing, non-Thatcherite variety: cutting fuel taxes, keeping the NHS free at the point of service, and preserving the “triple lock”—a policy effectively ensuring that state pensions increase faster than ordinary wages.

Being cryptic about hard economic choices is electorally advantageous, particularly when the general election could be years away. This was in fact the strategy that Starmer employed in his election campaign, repeating the word growth like a mantra without revealing how he would achieve it. His political capital proved fleeting. Reform may ascend to power only to find itself snared in the same trap. Still, even well-connected Westminster types who served in prior governments told me they did not really dread a Reform government. Reform, in their view, is the only party iconoclastic enough to attempt major structural repairs on the foundations of the British state and economy. “To believe that something is broken doesn’t mean that it’s irretrievably broken,” James Orr, a Cambridge theology professor who leads policy for Reform, told me. “But we think it’s becoming increasingly obvious that we’re the only political movement with a chance.”

The most detailed plans released by Reform involve immigration—the one issue that evokes as much anger among voters as living standards do. The Conservatives broke their pledges: Johnson promised to reduce the net inflow of migrants, but his policies, meant to bolster health-care staffing and stabilize falling university enrollment, led to the legal arrival of more than 3 million non-EU immigrants, who now amount to one out of every 25 people in Britain. Later, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak struggled to deal with the arrival of more than 150,000 migrants who’d crossed the English Channel on small boats. Even the current Labour government, sensing the anger in the electorate, has pledged to reduce migration.

It is on immigration that Farage offers the starkest choice. He has put Zia Yusuf, a wealthy businessman and the son of Sri Lankan immigrants, at the helm of his immigration agenda. Yusuf’s major policy pitch is “Operation Restoring Justice,” which calls for the deportation of all unauthorized migrants in Britain (through a new ICE-style agency called UK Deportation Command). Yusuf is the kind of zealous and paradoxical convert whom Reform, and other parties of the global New Right, revel in—a practicing Muslim who strenuously campaigns to keep churches from being converted to mosques. He is to Farage what Stephen Miller is to Donald Trump: a hard-faced nativist, always aware of the latest heinous offense committed by an immigrant and always warning of impending civilizational collapse—next to whom the boss looks moderate and relaxed. “Never again will British people be a second-class citizen in their own country,” Yusuf declared in a speech on the night I saw Farage in Milton Keynes. “Under a Reform government, His Majesty’s Parliament will be sovereign once again, and the rights of the great British people will reign supreme!”

Given the anger over broken border promises, it’s no surprise that Reform’s clearest message has been on restricting migration. It resonates because Britain’s economic failures have contributed to a growing cultural precarity, too. But unwinding migration is unlikely to solve Britain’s deepest woes—most of which are domestically manufactured, not imported.

With every disappointing year, with the failure of every backfiring government policy, the nostalgia for British exceptionalism has grown stronger. Restoration to global hegemony is impossible. Stabilization is achievable, but only if Britain’s next ruling class does something that its governments over the past two decades have not managed: stop choosing the self-harming option. Arresting the current trajectory of decline will require the recognition of a hard truth. What broke Britain was not Brussels, bad luck, or bankers. The British broke Britain. To mend it, they must first stop breaking it further.

This article appears in the July 2026 print edition with the headline “How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi.”

The Americans Shelling Out Five Figures for a Coat of Arms

2026-06-09T07:00:00-04:00

The first thing you notice upon entering the College of Arms, in London, is a small and incongruously blue statue of a kiwi, clutching a gold axe in its right claw. Sorry, let me try that again: In the odd historic language of heraldry, this is “a kiwi Azure grasping in the dexter foot an ice axe bendwise Or.”

The bird belongs to the coat of arms of Sir Edmund Hillary, a New Zealander, who was part of the first team to conquer Mount Everest. (Penguins are also involved in Hillary’s arms, as is the hearty if ungrammatical motto Nothing venture nothing win.) No one could tell me why the kiwi statue ended up in this beautiful brick building around the corner from St. Paul’s Cathedral, but the college is a magnet for this sort of historical detritus. Next to the kiwi is the cushion on which Queen Elizabeth II sat during her coronation. I lean in closely to see if any impression of the royal buttocks remains visible. It does not.

Founded in 1484, the College of Arms operates as part of the Royal Household, answering to the monarch. Its main functions are determining whether someone is entitled to use an existing coat of arms, and granting new arms to individuals and corporations. In Britain, having a coat of arms is still part of public life; you cannot join the Order of the Garter, a personal club of worthies curated by the sovereign, without one. For a fee of about $12,000, the college will perform the genealogical research and design work necessary to grant you arms. But the college also caters to an unlikely group of would-be knights-errant: Americans. “We get so many genuine inquiries—it’s a huge amount,” Dominic Ingram, a herald at the college who conducts such research, told me. Of the 120 or so arms the college grants each year, it estimates that up to 10 percent are honorary grants for non–British citizens, and the bulk of those go to Americans.

“I loved how the application and vetting process was essentially the same protocol that has been used for centuries,” Angelo Sedacca, from the Bronx, told me. He was granted his honorary arms—which feature castles and a lion on the shield, and a swan resting atop a pair of scales—when he was working as a sergeant in the New York Police Department, and he hopes that his descendants will appreciate using them.

During the Middle Ages, heraldic disputes could become so animated that a Court of Chivalry was called upon to resolve them. You know the sort of thing—your noble house of Scrope is using a blue shield with a gold diagonal stripe in battle, and then some arriviste dorks called the Grosvenors roll up and do the same. (This really happened: The court ruled in favor of the Scropes, and the Grosvenors had to change their arms.) The college’s workload expanded after the Industrial Revolution amid demand from the newly rich mercantile and professional classes. A coat of arms meant tradition and legitimacy.

[Read: Where do flags come from?]

Today, if you can find an ancestor who was “armigerous”—noble enough to bear arms—then you have an inherited right to their coat of arms. Otherwise, you can design your own, complete with chevrons, castles, and all the heraldic animals that you desire. Ingram said his heart “sinks a bit” when someone wants a lion: “There’s so many lions already.” He appreciates those who choose something unusual, such as a frog or a flamingo. A more traditional choice might be a mythical beast, such as a unicorn, a griffin, or an enfield—“sort of like a fox but with the legs of a chicken.”

The demand for arms is so high that scammy companies have sprung up online, claiming to award arms and even titles. “I went to several different vendors on the internet only to be let down in the process,” Harry Rossander, a retired Army Corps of Engineers lieutenant colonel in Rapid City, South Dakota, told me. He eventually ended up with a design of a bald eagle perched on a tower, registered with a college of heraldry in America.

As a Briton, I sometimes find the American mania for our island’s history baffling. Then again, growing up in a place that’s lousy with old stuff will do that to you. One of the most important battles of the English Civil War was fought in what is now a park near my parents’ house in Worcester, England. In 1786, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson visited the site to see where, almost a century and a half earlier, their forebears had fought to dethrone a king, showing the world that another system of government was possible. “Tell your Neighbours and your Children that this is holy Ground, much holier than that on which your Churches stand,” Adams later wrote. “All England should come in Pilgrimage to this Hill, once a Year.” Sadly, it does not; instead, teenagers go there after school to smoke weed.

The college currently consists of 11 officers of arms, who undertake the genealogical research and act as custodians of the records. (They include kings of arms, heralds, and their apprentices, who are called pursuivants.) When I emailed the college to request an interview, the response came from Ingram, who was then the herald on call. I found this concept as amusing as the other Friends find Ross having a pager, given that he’s a paleontologist. (“Is it, like, for dinosaur emergencies?” Monica asks. “ ‘Help, come quick, they’re still extinct!’ ”) Ingram is 33; he joined the college after completing a doctorate in history at Oxford. Why did he choose this profession? I asked. “Lack of common sense?” he replied at first, but later acknowledged that “the main advantage is you don’t really answer to anyone—well, apart from the King, I guess.” The heralds operate like independent contractors, with their own caseloads. Most of their income is from research fees, but each herald also receives an annual salary of £18 ($24) from the King.

When the design process is complete, the precise form of the arms is recorded in giant leather-bound books. Turn to almost any page in the college’s records and an intriguing human story will jump out. Ingram showed me the legendary Admiral Horatio Nelson’s arms and family tree, which features his left-handed signature—his right arm having been lost in the Battle of Santa Cruz, in Tenerife. As a baroness, Margaret Thatcher was entitled to “supporters,” figures on either side of her design. She chose the scientist Isaac Newton and a generic Falklands War admiral, who bears a passing resemblance to Colonel Sanders.

PA Images / Getty

Margaret Thatcher’s coat of arms

The first American arms began to be drawn up hours after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In a gesture reflecting the move from monarchical privilege to democratic consulting, a committee was convened in the new country to create the Great Seal of the United States. (Like most committees, it took ages to come to any decisions. A finalized version, involving an eagle, an olive branch, and stars, was presented for approval six years later.) Even after the unfortunate incidents of 1776, many Americans, including George Washington, still looked to the college back in London for validation. In 1791, it confirmed that the hero of the American Revolution could use the heraldic arms of the splendidly named de Hertburn family—three red mullets and two red bars on a silver background.

Ingram also showed me the arms of the Hollywood actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who was such an Anglophile that he trained with the Royal Navy during the Second World War and received an honorary knighthood in 1949. His blue-and-gold—sorry, azure-and-or—shield has a ribbon connecting its two halves, presumably to indicate his appeal on both sides of the Atlantic. Incidentally, in case you are ever quizzed on this, the other heraldic colors are purpure (purple), gules (red), sable (black), and vert (green). The entire language of heraldry is “a sort of pseudo-abstract, corrupted northern French,” Ingram said, reflecting its creation soon after the Norman Conquest of England. The drapery or scrollwork around a shield is called a lambrequin, a five-petaled flower is called a cinquefoil, and an emblem or animal that puns on the bearer’s name is called a rebus. Heralds are very into puns, which presumably provided endless amusement during cold medieval nights. The arms of the late Queen Mother’s family, the Bowes-Lyons, feature bows and lions. The royal arms of Princess Beatrice—the former Prince Andrew’s daughter—have three bees on them: Bee-thrice.

[From the June 2026 issue: Helen Lewis on the men who don’t want women to vote]

Until the mid-20th century, Ingram told me, the college took a relaxed attitude toward Americans who wanted arms, and typically trusted their claims to English ancestry. But the rules have gradually tightened. When Joe Rudé, from Atlanta, was granted arms in 1995, he had to prove direct male descent from a British citizen, including those who lived in the American colonies. He came up with one Thomas Rood, an attorney from Glastonbury, in the west of England. “We don’t know a great deal about him, except that he had an unfortunate end,” Rudé, 82, told me. “His wife died, and so he was left with several kids. After a long, hard winter, his oldest daughter turned up pregnant, and he was arrested.”

And Thomas was the father? “That’s what was decided by the very religious people back then,” Rudé said. “And he was hanged. He is the only person hanged for incest in the history of the United States.” Everyone wants to find an ancestor who’s remarkable, but they don’t tell you which flavor of remarkable you’re going to get.

In my experience, some Americans with an overly keen interest in English aristocratic traditions seem motivated by disdain for their fellow citizens who are not descended from white Europeans. In March, the White House anti-immigration czar, Stephen Miller, posted in disgust after Britain removed the remaining 92 hereditary peers from the House of Lords. Sir, I wanted to reply, your country rebelled against being governed by noblemen like the 12th earl of Dundee and the 24th earl of Erroll !

But the American arms holders I interviewed cited only a sincere and nerdy interest in history, plus a passion for graphic design. “My last Simons ancestor in England was a master of the horse for one of the dukes of Rutland,” Brenton Simons, from Boston, told me. He had blended the dolphin and scallop shells of the Simons arms with elements from the arms of his mother’s family, the Fitches: “three leopards’ heads and a chevron in gold against a green background.” He had also commissioned a heraldic badge, of a fox with a sprig of strawberries in its mouth. “Some people try to squeeze too many things into their arms,” said Simons, who used to be the president of the genealogical society American Ancestors. “Or create arms that look like steampunk designs. Simpler is better.”

George Cobb of Gastonia, North Carolina, told me that his arms represented ancestors from Scotland who had immigrated to Appalachia. He had chosen a green background to represent “the mountains of both Scotland and North Carolina, geologically the same mountain chain separated eons ago.” He also has a golden lion and the North Star beneath a flame, which symbolizes the search for truth. “My wife’s initial response was to ask where her family was represented, which led to an explanation that arms are granted to an individual rather than a couple—so now I know I will one day be designing arms for her as well,” Cobb told me, adding that his best friend immediately asked if Cobb would design arms for him. “He is of Mexican and Spanish descent, and the final arms became a beautiful representation of both Aztec and Spanish ancestry.”

The ancient traditions of heraldry evolve with the times. Women can bear arms, although unmarried ones traditionally display them on a diamond (known as a lozenge) or oval shape, rather than a shield. Before joining the Royal Family, Kate Middleton was granted her own lozenge, featuring three acorns (representing her and her two siblings) bisected by a gold chevron (for her mother’s maiden name, Goldsmith). Many married women squish their arms onto a shield alongside their husband’s, although this is not obligatory. Britain’s legalization of same-sex unions in 2013 did not faze the heralds; in fact, Ingram told me he is eager to do a joint design for a gay couple.

Once someone has been granted arms, what do they actually do with them? “I have a vast number of paintings of my arms, but I also display them in carvings on my gateposts, on custom ties, cuff links, my cars,” Brady Brim-DeForest told me. “Pretty much anywhere I can integrate them, I do!” He is such a heraldry obsessive that he petitioned for arms as a 15-year-old, only for the college to tell him to come back when he was 18. Brim-DeForest, who splits his time among Texas, Maine, and a castle in Scotland, now serves on the Committee on Heraldry at American Ancestors.

Courtesy of Brady Brim-DeForest

The coat of arms of Brady Brim-DeForest, a heraldry obsessive who serves on the Committee on Heraldry at American Ancestors

As I listened to stories of men searching for their roots, it occurred to me that even white Americans who can trace their forebears back to England are part of a diaspora. Irish Americans who have never set foot in Cork or Donegal may find themselves tearing up on St. Patrick’s Day, so why wouldn’t the descendants of an incestuous lawyer from Glastonbury or the duke of Rutland’s servant want some connection to the old country?

By the end of my time at the college, I had begun to wonder whether a coat of arms was just an extremely upmarket version of a social-media bio. We love to put labels on ourselves, to take personality quizzes, to ruminate on what it means to be an ENTJ or a Scorpio. Creating a coat of arms is an attempt to distill your heritage, hopes, and hobbies into a striking visual form: Here’s where I came from—and what I’ve made of myself.

* Illustration image sources: Andrew Holt / Getty; Heritage Art / Heritage Images / Getty; Courtesy of Brady Brim-DeForest; Roberto Machado Noa / Getty; Baron / Hulton Archive / Getty; College of Arms; John Springer Collection / Corbis / Getty

This article appears in the July 2026 print edition with the headline “So You Want a Coat of Arms.”

Iran’s Next Internet Blackout Is Inevitable

2026-06-05T07:00:00-04:00

Starting May 26, a tsunami of posts flooded social media from Iranians, who had largely not been heard from since the war began on February 28. Video calls reunited diaspora families who had spent three months staring at a single checkmark on WhatsApp—the app’s signal that a message has been sent but not yet received. One Iranian user captured what many felt: “Hello from Iran’s prison after three months. We came from solitary confinement to the general ward.”

Internet blackouts have become routine in Iran, imposed during anti-regime uprisings and now two wars. But this one—Iran’s fifth—was the world’s longest, according to NetBlocks, the global internet monitor. Some online connection is now restored, but for many Iranians, the partial reopening feels like the removal of a few bricks from the digital wall the Islamic Republic has built: Enough for Iranians to glimpse the outside world, but not enough for them to enter it, and the opening comes with the knowledge that the regime can brick the wall back up at any time.

This is a problem that Iranians will need international cooperation—and new technology—to solve. During the 2022 protests that became known by the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom,” smuggled Starlink kits brought some reprieve. Today at least 50,000 Iranians are estimated to use Starlink. But this year, Iranian authorities have cracked down on that technology, charging users with spying on behalf of the United States and Israel. At least one owner of a Starlink terminal appears to have been beaten and killed as a result.

A technology called direct-to-cell (D2C) offers a promising alternative. It would allow the next generation of cellphones to connect to the next generation of satellites in space without needing to pass through a physical terminal on the ground. Starlink’s terminals have proved to be its vulnerability in Iran, as they have to be smuggled over borders, paid for, and concealed from a punitive state; D2C would be much harder for the authorities to stanch, as it would effectively be disseminated among millions of users on their indistinguishable personal phones.

[Read: The online world where Iranians were free]

A group of international human-rights and technology advocates called the Direct-to-Cell Coalition has been campaigning for the expansion of this technology, which seems on track for release in 2027. “The question,” Mahsa Alimardani, who established the coalition and works on technology-related issues for the human-rights organization Witness, told me, “is whether it develops in a way that protects populations during internet shutdowns, or whether authoritarian governments succeed in blocking it by design.”

An internet kill switch is not a problem only for the very online. The latest blackout in Iran had economic consequences so severe that even the regime eventually could not ignore them. One Iranian business leader estimated that the outage cost the country $80 million in losses every day. Iranian businesses that rely on apps such as Instagram, the most popular social-media platform in the country, were hit especially hard. Many Iranian women use Instagram to build small businesses from home, whether through online commerce or by becoming influencers. During wartime, roughly 20 percent of Iranians who depended on the internet for their jobs were out of work. Hundreds of jobs were lost at major Iranian e-commerce companies, including the Iranian versions of Amazon (Digikala), DoorDash (Snappfood), and Netflix and YouTube (Aparat).

For their own purposes, Iranian authorities made several end runs around the outage they imposed. They kept a domestic internet (or intranet) functioning, which allowed basic services such as banking, food delivery, and ride hailing to operate. In order to burnish their desired image of the country, they continued to offer “white SIM cards” to preferred journalists, officials, and Western social-media influencers doing propaganda tours inside Iran. And they introduced a state-regulated, tiered service known as Internet Pro, which was prohibitively expensive for most ordinary people, in addition to being unstable and insecure. Some students and content creators boycotted Internet Pro and demanded fair internet access for all. Others refused to use domestic apps, which are known to be monitored by the security apparatus.

Iranian officials claim that communications blackouts are a national-security necessity, but in practice the Islamic Republic uses them to control its public image and conceal human-rights violations. The first time Iran turned off the internet, in November 2019, security forces killed about 1,500 protesters, according to Reuters. This January, the Islamic Republic imposed a communications shutdown just before massacring thousands of protesters. Even in ordinary times, the Islamic Republic blocks news outlets, websites it deems harmful, and all the social-media platforms that Iranians could use to raise their voices internationally. Iranians normally access these only through circumvention tools, such as VPNs.

The most recent blackout was gutting not just for Iranians inside Iran but also for the estimated 4 million to 10 million people in the Iranian diaspora. This population has grown accustomed to texting friends and relatives inside Iran about daily life, sharing memes, trading jokes, and checking in over FaceTime and WhatsApp video. Members of the diaspora lost contact with those inside Iran at exactly the moment when their loved ones’ fates were most in doubt.

[Read: How Iran killed its economy]

Noshene Ranjbar, an Arizona-based psychiatrist, co-leads a network of more than 100 professionals inside Iran trained in large-scale trauma-healing work. Her group provides services through Zoom and Google Meet to more than 7,000 adults and children coping with stressors such as cancer and chronic pain, as well as with anxiety, depression, and PTSD. Those videoconferencing applications were rendered useless during the wartime blackout. Her group was afraid to use Iran’s intranet with clients, as it is known to be monitored by the government.

“For therapy to work, the person needs to be able to share what is bothering them,” Ranjbar told me. “But without free private internet, no one feels safe to go to therapy.”

The war has left Iranians under the boot of a regime that is bolder, more hard-line, and more repressive than before. The systemic mismanagement, corruption, and repression that have fueled anti-regime protests for years remain unaddressed, and U.S.-Iran tensions are far from settled. Domestic unrest and foreign conflict both carry the same implication: another shutdown.

With a little effort, the infrastructure for D2C could be in place by 2027 (the technology will take years to reach people at scale, however). But the project will first need to clear some international regulatory hurdles. China and Iran will likely lobby to keep an off switch in the hands of states; countries that value open communications may work to counter those efforts. The Direct-to-Cell Coalition is pressing for the companies developing D2C—Starlink is one of them—to make populations affected by state-imposed shutdowns part of the technology’s design from the outset, in order to build in the features that will make it usable in such a crisis.

In Iran, the partial restoration of internet access is a relief, but it has also left many Iranians more conscious than ever of what they lost during the months of total shutdown.

“I have a strange feeling; I’m happy but also really angry,” a young Iranian told me shortly after coming back online. “They took our rights away from us, and that was very degrading.”

The Iran Problem Trump Can’t Defer

2026-06-04T10:00:00-04:00

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A U.S. official told Axios that on Monday that Donald Trump read Benjamin Netanyahu the riot act for wanting to launch strikes on Beirut, which could collapse American negotiations with Iran. The message, the official said, was “You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.” Later that evening, the official White House account posted “TRUST IN TRUMP. ‘Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end—It always does!’”

The spectacular bust-up, which Trump confirmed today, reveals a deeper problem. With a nuclear deal with Iran out of reach, Trump seems content to defer the problems he faces instead of squaring up to them. There may be an end to violence, but any peace will be temporary and inherently unstable. The war will likely resume at intervals over the next few years, with grave consequences for all concerned.

Trump clearly does not want to go back to all-out war at the moment. According to the Washington Examiner, a senior administration official has attested to Trump’s belief that the only way to secure meaningful change in Iran is through substantial escalation. This presumably means ground operations, which could result in considerable American casualties, or infrastructure strikes, which could lead Iran to retaliate against similar targets in the Gulf.

“You could, of course, exert more pain,” the official said, but the question is whether this would yield anything worth the cost. He argued that the Iranian regime has experienced “significant” change, and that pragmatists “have more influence than they did before.”

But one of those supposed pragmatists, Iran’s top negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, posted on X: “We seize concessions not through dialogue, but with missiles; in negotiations, we merely make them understand.” He added, “The winner of any agreement is the one who is better prepared for war from the day after.”

In other words, Tehran appears to view negotiations not as an alternative to confrontation but as a phase within it. It has no intention of giving up in negotiations what could not be taken from it in war.

[Read: Trump dreads an Iran deal worse than Obama’s]

In Washington, some Iran hawks agree. Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies has argued that Trump should use the cease-fire to get the American economy back on track, and then only later, in the fall, to “start to think about returning to major military operations but not doing it before the midterms, when the knock-on effects could be very difficult for him politically.”

The U.S. and Iran are too far apart for the distance to be bridged with a lasting settlement. Instead, they are moving toward a narrow deal: the U.S. lifting its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and Iran allowing ships to transit in exchange for economic compensation. The nuclear issue—including what to do with Iran’s highly enriched uranium—would be deferred to later negotiations, which few expect to succeed.

The U.S.-China trade war may offer a clue for how this will end. Trump imposed an initial tariff on China in early 2025. Over the next couple of months, both sides escalated, resulting in a fully blown trade war by April. Then, as now, Trump knew that the economic cost would rise over time—in the case of the trade war, because inventories of necessary goods from China would be depleted.

In mid-May, Washington and Beijing agreed to a pause and to kick the issues into a protracted negotiation. Some small announcements have come out of those talks, but a major deal remains elusive. However, the negotiations have allowed Trump to say that relations with China are in good shape and that both countries have exercised restraint. National-security hawks meanwhile worry that Trump is accommodating China and failing to undertake the actions necessary to protect U.S. interests.

Something similar seems to be happening with Iran. Deadlines can be extended. Small steps can be packaged as major progress. As long as Iran doesn’t humiliate Trump by restarting its nuclear program, the president can call it a win.

But what happens next is not entirely up to Trump. Washington had a partner in its war in Iran—Netanyahu’s Israel—and Israel has experienced the conflict as a strategic setback. Jerusalem may reluctantly accept a temporary cease-fire with Iran out of necessity, but it is unwilling to let Tehran reconstitute its missile program or its proxies. It also will not want to be constrained in its fight with Hezbollah—or to guarantee that it won’t attack Iran again in the future. When Iran starts rearming in preparation for a resumption in fighting, Israel may well take preventive action.

When Trump started his second term, Iran was weaker than it had been since the early 1980s. It was willing to make significant concessions in negotiations beyond anything it had previously agreed to, although still short of completely dismantling its enrichment capacity. The 12-day war, in June 2025, set back Iran’s nuclear program by years. Trump could have then struck a deal, or he could have decided to simply bide his time and let the pressures on a vulnerable regime build. But instead he and Netanyahu saw an opportunity to deal the Iranian regime what they thought would be a devastating blow from which it would never recover.

[Read: The war Trump can’t end]

The effort to permanently solve the Iran problem has made it less solvable. Iran is now strategically strengthened, even though its military assets have been degraded. Having seen that it can close the strait at will, Tehran now knows that it has leverage in the Gulf and a powerful deterrent to use against the United States. The regime, previously led by an elderly and ill dictator, had been facing a succession crisis but has now consolidated its power and found new revenue streams.

Israel will not accept the Iranian regime’s remilitiarization. And the Iranian regime seems to believe that it needs to escalate in order to put a stop to Israeli and U.S. strikes. Yesterday, for example, it launched missiles against Kuwait and Bahrain in retaliation for American strikes on the island of Qeshm. If Israel hits Iran in the next few years, Iran will likely respond by closing the strait—and by hitting the Gulf states if they or the U.S. facilitates Israeli operations in any way.

Further conflict appears to be structurally inevitable. Trump won’t be able to muddle through with a pretend-and-extend approach to the cease-fire. The war began as a demonstration of extraordinary U.S.-Israeli military cooperation, but as the fiery Trump-Netanyahu call portends, managing its consequences will be a perennial source of tension between Washington and Jerusalem.

China’s Economy Is Taking Everyone Down

2026-06-03T09:55:00-04:00

Some economists assumed that the buying power of China’s expanding middle class would ultimately fuel global growth. China has instead become a destabilizing force in the global economy. Chinese President Xi Jinping is running the country as a government-subsidized, export-driven manufacturing juggernaut. This policy is not just bad for whole industries around the world; it’s also distorting China’s economy and alienating trading partners.

Chinese manufacturers would be competitive without Xi’s help. He provides massive aid anyway—directly, with handouts and tax breaks, and indirectly, by suppressing the wages of factory workers and the value of China’s currency to make the country’s exports artificially cheap. The result is an economic model that favors producers, restrains consumers, and floods international markets with supercheap exports, including steel, solar panels, and electric vehicles. Foreign companies simply can’t compete. Chinese competition is costing Germany 10,000 manufacturing jobs a month and could strip Indonesia of hundreds of thousands of garment-worker jobs. China’s trade surplus ballooned to a record $1.2 trillion last year. As a share of the global economy, China’s surplus in manufactured goods is the largest amassed by any country ever.

President Trump used to regularly complain that China was “ripping off” the United States and duly slapped tariffs on cheap Chinese goods. But lately Trump has seemed less concerned about the particular threat that China poses to America’s economic future. In Beijing last month, Trump fawningly called Xi a “friend” and agreed to work with China to create a mutually beneficial “board of trade” to help manage their economic relationship. At risk are industries that are vital to American growth, jobs, and national security, including the automotive, robotics, heavy machinery, and semiconductor sectors. “It’s going to be pretty catastrophic,” David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me. Xi’s policies are spurring “the forced deindustrialization” of advanced economies worldwide.

[Michael Schuman: All the sad young Chinese professionals]

China’s leaders don’t seem to care. Pan Gongsheng, the governor of China’s central bank, recently dismissed concerns about undue state support driving an export boom as a “lingering misconception.” Job losses in Ohio or Stuttgart are not his problem.

Yet China’s economic policies aren’t great for China, either. Its economy has been floundering. Private investment and consumer spending remain weak, property values have been slumping, and the competition for jobs is fierce. Xi’s industrial programs encourage too much investment in factories, which often lose money and require yet more state aid to survive. Taxpayer funds that could be spent on social services and welfare programs are instead propping up a glut of assembly lines.

As a result, Chinese families are essentially subsidizing shoppers around the world while their own quality of life suffers. “Chinese policies would not be viable in a democratic country,” Autor said. This system requires submission, he added, which means no one is asking, “Why aren’t we consuming the fruits of all this investment? Why are we exporting everything to the world and yet we’re getting poorer, or at least we feel poorer?”

Xi is far less interested in the needs of Chinese people than he is in gaining an advantage in strategic industries, such as electric vehicles and humanoid robots. China hopes “to lead the world in innovation and manufacturing,” Craig Allen, a senior counselor at the consulting firm Cohen Group who previously served as president of the U.S.-China Business Council, told me. “The Chinese have a strategy here that has worked magnificently for the last 12 years, and they don’t see any reason why that will change.”

In a speech in 2020, Xi called for making other countries more reliant on China so that they can’t stand up to Beijing. “We must tighten international production chains’ dependence on China,” he declared, “forming a powerful countermeasure and deterrent capability against foreigners who would artificially cut off supply.” Last year Beijing suspended rare earth exports to the U.S. to press Trump to back away from ratcheting up tariffs on Chinese goods. In April China’s policy makers introduced measures that give Chinese authorities more power to investigate and punish foreign companies that shift their supply chains out of the country.

With the global success of Chinese EVs and other products, Xi’s plans may appear unstoppable. But they rest on the assumption that other countries will continue to absorb China’s exports. Yet some governments are starting to protect their industries and workers. In March, the European Union introduced legislation to decrease its reliance on China by encouraging the manufacturing of green-energy products in Europe. “Trade does create efficiencies, but there is supposed to be something in it for everyone,” Jens Eskelund, the president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, told me. “We are in a situation now where trade with China destroys value rather than creates value. Then the big question becomes: Why trade?”

Some lawmakers in Washington are attuned to the dangers and have begun promoting a more aggressive approach. President Biden slapped steep tariffs on Chinese EVs, computer chips, and other products in 2024 and boosted government support for crucial industries such as semiconductor manufacturing to defend U.S. industries and reinforce national security. Ro Khanna, a Democratic representative from California, advocates for more government support for essential American industries. “They can’t hold us hostage,” he told me.

Trump’s approach has been more confused. The administration has worked to curb U.S. reliance on China’s supply of rare earths but has still pushed Beijing to purchase American aircraft and produce—which could reduce the trade deficit and generate revenue for certain businesses but increase the U.S.’s dependence on China. During his recent visit to Beijing, Trump also agreed to work with Xi to reduce tariffs on nonstrategic goods, even as the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative pursues an investigation into China’s industrial overcapacity that could result in more tariffs.

[Ryan Hass: China believes America will flame out]

No country may be able to completely end its reliance on China, the world’s largest manufacturer, which churns out everything including car parts and Christmas trees. That means Beijing will continue to wield immense political and economic influence. But Beijing’s bloated, loss-generating, and debt-burdened industrial system can be pressured through concerted action by its trading partners. If policy makers around the world raise serious trade barriers against Chinese imports, China’s many factories will need even costlier infusions of taxpayer money to survive. China’s growing dependence on export demand “for normal growth should concern them, especially as geopolitical relations deteriorate across the world,” Raghuram Rajan, an economist at the University of Chicago and a former governor of India’s central bank, told me. “I don’t think that’s a good place for China to be,” he said.

Xi could alleviate tensions with trading partners and pressures at home by reforming the economy to stimulate more domestic demand, so that Chinese households could buy more Chinese goods. But Xi has avoided these reforms, perhaps because they would compromise his grip on the country by forcing him to cede power to markets. To resolve China’s structural economic problems, the Chinese Communist Party “will have to give up its political levers and control over the system,” Daniel Rosen, a co-founder of the research firm Rhodium Group, told me. But the CCP “doesn’t want to admit it’s at the mercy of the market.”

In this way, the two most powerful leaders in the world, both of whom are pursuing nationalistic economic programs, could be on track to make their respective countries economically weaker. American workers and Chinese families may soon pay the price. The risk is that China inspires its trading partners to resort to a protectionism that depresses prosperity for everyone.

Why Iran’s Leaders Think They’ve Won

2026-05-27T07:46:59-04:00

An interim agreement to end the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran looks likely, and it may very well find Donald Trump acceding to Iranian demands he has long resisted. Many in the Iranian regime are feeling triumphant, and understandably so, despite the exchange of some strikes in the Persian Gulf this week. But an end to the war will leave the Islamic Republic with a host of unsolved problems.

The deal is expected to open the Strait of Hormuz, lifting the blockades imposed by both Iran and the United States. But it may also include language asserting that sovereignty over the waterway is to be shared among Iran, Oman, and other countries in the region, a political consultant close to the Iranian side who is not authorized to speak about the negotiations publicly, told me. Iran won’t get away with charging passing ships a toll per se, but it may be permitted to levy an environmental-protection fee and split the proceeds with Oman and perhaps other regional countries. The source also said that a portion of Iran’s billions of dollars in frozen assets may be released.

The initial deal is to be followed by talks on the war’s supposed casus belli, Iran’s nuclear program. On that, too, Trump has publicly signaled a significant concession. The president has said that he might accept a commitment to dilute Iran’s highly enriched uranium inside the country, as opposed to shipping it outside. (The consultant in Tehran told me two weeks ago that the United States had budged on this issue—Trump may now be making public what he had already agreed to privately.)

These are not unreasonable parameters for a compromise between the two countries. But if accurately conveyed, they are also a triumph for the Islamic Republic. The regime will not only have survived a major military onslaught from the U.S. and Israel but emerge with a deal better than any on offer before the war. No matter what happens, the Islamic Republic will not have an easy time reigning over its exhausted populace and rebuilding its economy and infrastructure. But its officials reportedly feel that Iran has won the war, or at least not lost it.

[Read: Why Trump keeps getting rolled in negotiations]

The security elites currently leading the country appear to have prevailed over the ultra-hard-liners, who coalesced around the conservative politician Saeed Jalili to oppose diplomacy with the United States. Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the leader of the Iranian negotiating team, was this week overwhelmingly reelected as speaker of Parliament. The anti-deal faction had hoped to remove him, and tried to delay the vote, but ultimately failed. According to an Iranian news outlet, Jalili has been so sidelined that he no longer attends the national-security-council meetings. (His team has denied this claim.)

As the regime finds some breathing space through its diplomacy with the U.S., it might well ease up on some of its most draconian wartime measures. Since January, when it killed tens of thousands of Iranian protesters in cold blood, the regime has blocked the internet. But the reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian said this week that the internet will be reopened soon, and he appears to have made a bureaucratic end run around a pro-censorship body dominated by hard-liners in order to enact this policy. On Wednesday, millions of Iranians reconnected to the internet.

None of this suggests that the regime is softening, however. It continues to prosecute dissidents and rough up political prisoners, dozens of whom have been executed in recent weeks on flimsy grounds. Four protesters arrested in 2022 were sentenced to death this week.

Iran’s foreign-policy stance does not appear to be moderating, either. Almost three months after he was appointed as supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei has still not been seen publicly, nor has he released a single video or audio recording. He also hasn’t used his wide-ranging constitutional powers to dismiss or appoint new officials—not even to fill vacancies, such as for the military’s chief of general staff, or for his office’s representatives on the security bodies. But in one message, published online and read on state television, Mojtaba warned neighboring countries that Iran would continue to target U.S. bases on their soil. He also reaffirmed the regime’s eliminationist stance toward Israel: “The precarious Zionist regime, this cancerous tumor called Israel, has neared the end of its heinous life,” he wrote. He repeated a 2015 boast by his father that Israel would be destroyed by 2040.

[Read: Trump’s endgame is surrender]

But professing hatred for the U.S. and Israel won’t solve Iran’s problems. Neither will the interim agreement to end the war, even if it is as favorable to Iran as my sources project. Iran was apparently unable to secure a provision to end Israel’s war on Hezbollah; instead, Israel has engaged in direct talks with Lebanon, much to Tehran’s chagrin. And to get the sanctions relief that it will need to reconstruct its economy, Iran still has to come to a nuclear agreement with the U.S. Meanwhile, Iran has further alienated its Arab neighbors by attacking them, and Israel will not rest easy alongside an adversary committed to its destruction.

The Islamic Republic’s leaders may soon learn that the problems of peace are the hardest to solve.

The Magician of the Kremlin

2026-05-25T07:00:00-04:00

For the past 18 months, Vladimir Putin’s efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine have been led by a man with no diplomatic background or expertise. Kirill Dmitriev, a banker who is under sanctions for his role in financing the war, has been shuttling from Moscow to Florida to meet with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in and around the exclusive island known as Billionaire Bunker. His pitch during these rendezvous is that the United States should sell out Ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for glittering billion-dollar projects for Russian and American companies—digging for precious minerals in the Arctic, say, or joint missions to Mars.

These fantasies are rooted in the idea that the Americans can be talked into ignoring some of the most salient facts about contemporary Russia. What sane investor would put long-term money into a country where the law is a facade, where the intelligence services can expropriate your business as soon as it looks profitable, and where another neo-imperial war might flip the chessboard at any given moment?

Putin chose Dmitriev for this job not only because of his reassuring American credentials—degrees from Stanford and Harvard Business School, work experience at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs—but because his profile matches that of his two main American interlocutors. He is an oligarch whose glamorous blond wife is close friends with Putin’s younger daughter. That makes him a virtual son-in-law of the ruler, and it may be the reason his real-estate holdings alone have soared from some $5 million to $100 million over the past decade.

But Dmitriev is more than just a gifted Kremlin illusionist. He is living proof that if you squint hard enough, you can blur out the difference between a free society and one ruled by fear. You can convince yourself that everything Ukrainians have been fighting for since 2014—democracy, civic rights, a European future—is meaningless.

[Anne Applebaum: Putin’s war comes home to Moscow]

Not so long ago, Dmitriev was making a very different pitch to Western investors. He was among the most prominent spokespeople for economic reform, a man who talked up Russia as a place where the rule of law would prevail, where corruption and Mafia tactics would be tamed, where foreign capital would be safe from the oligarchs. He wanted what the Ukrainians want.

Dmitriev seems to have willed himself to forget all of this, just as he has willed himself to forget that he was born and raised in Ukraine, and that some of his former schoolmates are among those fighting and dying on the front lines. And he wants Witkoff and Kushner and President Trump, and the rest of us, to forget it all too. If Alexei Navalny is the defining figure of what it takes to resist tyranny in our time, Dmitriev may someday be remembered as his opposite: the man who will do anything to stay close to power.

Matthew Murray, an American lawyer, recalls that Dmitriev approached him at the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in 2011. Murray lived in Moscow at the time and was representing a nonprofit called the Center for Business Ethics and Corporate Governance, which he had co-founded a decade earlier.

Dmitriev wanted Murray’s advice. He had just been given the job of running a new sovereign wealth fund, and he wanted to hold it to the highest international standards, he told Murray. The fund would lead efforts to modernize and diversify the Russian economy away from its dependence on oil and gas, partly by investing in public health and manufacturing.

Luring big investors may have been Dmitriev’s primary motive. But he also seemed interested in improving Russia’s dilapidated roads, airports, and hospitals while making the system more transparent. He asked Murray if he would draw up a model ethics code for use at the new Russian Direct Investment Fund, saying that he also hoped to promote other Russian companies.

Dmitriev got some of America’s biggest private-equity figures to sign on as advisers: Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group, David Bonderman of TPG, and Leon Black of Apollo Global Management. One of the early joint investments with American firms was in a chain of well-run hospitals in Russia called Mother and Child.

Dmitriev wasn’t doing this because he was brave, or had principles. He preached economic reform because the wind was blowing that way. Everyone I spoke with about Dmitriev emphasized his sheer ordinariness, his bland charm, his ability to adapt to the moment. “He was so invisible,” one former business partner said (like many people who still have dealings with Russia, she asked for anonymity). Dmitriev appears to have had the full support of Russia’s then-president, Dmitry Medvedev, who was sitting in for Putin, and who often struck the same notes about honesty and transparency. Russia was on the verge of joining the World Trade Organization in 2011, an effort that had taken almost two decades.

In other words, Russia’s current degree of kleptocratic tyranny wasn’t necessarily preordained; the country might have moved in a somewhat more liberal direction. Dmitriev would no doubt have been very happy with that, and he would have been able to keep his American friends and investors.

But the protests that began in Kyiv in late 2013 seem to have touched a nerve with Putin. The dream of an open economy—what the Ukrainian protesters were demanding, and what Dmitriev was preaching in Moscow—was ever more clearly a threat to the Kremlin’s control of Ukraine and other former Soviet lands, because that control depended on maintaining a rigged system dominated by Moscow-friendly oligarchs.

So Putin made his choice. After he annexed Crimea and began sending his proxies into eastern Ukraine, the United States and the European Union imposed sanctions. That scared off the illustrious Western advisers at the Russian Direct Investment Fund, and Dmitriev’s moment as an apostle of ethics and transparency came to an end.

He then deftly retooled the RDIF into a political vehicle that would serve two purposes for Putin: placating oligarchs at home and charming autocrats abroad. Dmitriev became a frequent visitor to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, where he persuaded Mohammed bin Salman and Mohamed bin Zayed to pledge billions in investments to the RDIF. The fund provides almost no information about its investments, so whether any of its projects made money is impossible to know.

It may not have mattered. For the Emiratis, the largesse “was about political overlay and optics more than money,” a source familiar with the Emirati leadership’s thinking but not authorized to speak about it publicly told me. “The idea was partly to put some guardrails on the Iranian regime, via Russia and China.” In other words, the Emiratis hoped that investing substantial money into those two countries—which have important relationships with Iran—might lead them to restrain Iran from harming Emirati interests.

That did not pan out. Instead, Russia provided Iran with targeting information on U.S. military assets in the Middle East during the recent war. Most of these are located in the Gulf countries.

Back home in Russia, Dmitriev was dutifully transforming the RDIF from a vehicle for economic reform into a slush fund. In 2015, it moved $1.75 billion of pension money from Russia’s National Welfare Fund to Sibur, a petrochemical giant controlled by oligarchs, including one who was Putin’s son-in-law at the time. Later, Dmitriev shared information about the fund’s upcoming deals with that same son-in-law, according to leaked documents published by the Latvia-based Russian reporting platform iStories.

Dmitriev was becoming part of the Putin family circle. His wife, the TV presenter and onetime model Natalia Popova, is both a friend and a business associate of Putin’s daughter Katerina Tikhonova, who is listed alongside her on the boards of a number of companies. That may help to explain Dmitriev’s sudden acquisition of a large personal fortune: According to an investigation by Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, his $100 million in real estate is far more than what he has made from his salary and board positions.

By 2016, Putin trusted Dmitriev so much that he sent him on a diplomatic mission that had nothing to do with finance. On the day after Trump’s election, Dmitriev flew to New York, where he planned to attend the World Chess Championship final. On the way, he sent a series of urgent texts to George Nader, a Lebanese American political fixer and convicted sex offender who had strong ties to the Trump campaign.

Dmitriev texted that if there was “a chance to see anyone key from Trump camp,” he “would love to start building for the future.” In another text, Dmitriev writes: “My boss sends you his warmest regards.” He meant Putin. The trip went well, and two months later—still before the inauguration—Dmitriev sat at a hotel bar in the Seychelles, talking to Erik Prince, the Blackwater founder and Trump ally, about how the United States and Russia could drop their differences and make money together.

We know about Dmitriev’s texts because they were published in 2019 in the Mueller report on Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. That high-profile investigation put a damper on Dmitriev’s efforts, but he never lost Putin’s confidence.

In 2020, Putin assigned Dmitriev to lead the production and export of Sputnik, Russia’s COVID vaccine. A financier with no experience in public health was an odd choice for that position. Dmitriev worked hard on a flashy publicity campaign, with very mixed results. Sputnik was ultimately provided to several dozen countries, but its rollout was plagued by accusations of profiteering and broken promises. In a number of countries in Africa, Asia, and South America, Dmitriev gave exclusive distribution rights to a brand-new company, registered in the United Arab Emirates to a member of the Dubai ruling family, which made a fortune by doubling the price for each dose. The government of Ghana canceled a contract to buy Sputnik amid accusations of corruption and nondelivery of doses; Kenya blocked use of the vaccine for similar reasons.

When Trump regained the presidency in 2024, Putin again sent Dmitriev—now part of his inner circle—to the United States. Dmitriev had prepped for his reentry by adopting an online persona that was pure MAGA: frequent snarky posts on X about the idiocy of the “globalists,” obsequious praise of Trump and Elon Musk. His pinned tweet as of this writing is a link to an interview on Fox News in which he declares that the Trump team “stopped World War Three from happening.”

This time Dmitriev was working on a larger canvas: He was in effect Russia’s lead diplomat on the “peace talks” with which Putin hopes to advance his takeover of Ukraine. Dmitriev appears to have had a hand in drafting the 28-point plan that Trump urged Volodymyr Zelensky to sign last November, and that would have required Ukraine to cede large territories to Russia and drastically shrink the size of its army. The icing on this cynical proposal was Dmitriev’s specialty: a host of “mutually beneficial corporate opportunities” for the United States and Russia.

Dmitriev has an unusual qualification for leading these diplomatic talks, though it is one he rarely ever mentions: He grew up in Kyiv, the son of prominent scientists. The family was not rich, but Dmitriev’s father, a cell biologist, held high positions in the Communist Party of Ukraine in the 1980s. Two former friends at the Kyiv Natural-Scientific Lyceum No. 145—one of the most competitive secondary schools in the former Soviet Union—told me that Dmitriev was likable, if a little arrogant. He was a good student and athlete who stood out mainly for his ambition.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Ukraine has finally given up on Trump]

“He talked all the time about how to get away from this gray Soviet reality and get a good education in the U.S.A.,” said Volodymyr Ariev, who was in the same class and is now a member of Parliament.

Dmitriev’s family connections got him a place on a school trip to the United States, where he later returned and spent almost a decade, earning his degrees from Stanford and Harvard before moving to Moscow in 2000.

Dmitriev’s father still lived in Kyiv in early 2022, when the Russian army was massing on the Ukrainian border. Many prominent people in Ukraine and Russia—including Zelensky—thought Putin was bluffing. It may be a measure of Dmitriev’s closeness to the Russian leader that he was not fooled. A few days before the invasion, his father abruptly left the country, most likely at his urging, according to neighbors of the family who spoke with the Ukrainian channel TSN last year.

When I spoke with Dmitriev’s former classmates, I thought they would express some surprise at what has happened to their old friend. Instead, they responded with a weary familiarity. “We have a name for people like this,” Ariev said. The word—yanichar—originated centuries ago, when the Ottoman officials who controlled parts of what is now Ukraine would kidnap boys to indoctrinate and train in the imperial capital before sending them back as men to crush local rebellions by their former compatriots. “Traitor” is probably too weak a translation.

Oleksandr Lisnichenko, another former classmate, said that one of Dmitriev’s closest childhood friends was seriously wounded at the front. That friend refused my request to speak.

“He said, ‘I don’t want to talk about Kirill,’” Lisnichenko told me. “‘I just want to shoot him in the knees.’”

The Ahmadinejad Option

2026-05-22T16:10:00-04:00

Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that at the outset of the war, the United States and Israel sought to install former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran’s leader, after the anticipated fall of the Islamic Republic. The inauspicious first step in this brilliant plan was to blow up part of Ahmadinejad’s compound in an air strike on February 28 in the Narmak district of Tehran. Days later, I noted that the attack—then assumed to be an assassination attempt—may have been intended to free him from house arrest imposed by the Iranian regime. The Times confirms this interpretation. It says that Israel and the United States had “consulted” Ahmadinejad about this plan, but that he “became disillusioned” with it after the strike.

The idea that Israel and the United States might back Ahmadinejad in a coup has drawn guffaws from several different groups. The first is people who stopped paying attention to Ahmadinejad in 2010. Americans and reform-oriented Iranians reviled then-President Ahmadinejad for his Holocaust denial, his backward attitudes about gay people, and his advocacy of a strong, nuclear-armed, expansionist theocratic state. For Israel to support him in 2026 is ironic, even hilarious. But Ahmadinejad began breaking with the hard-liners in 2011, and the government kept him under guard because they knew his dissent was real and potentially significant.

The second group to scoff at this plan is much better informed. Fully aware of Ahmadinejad’s turn, they note instead his irrelevance. Reformists still despise him because he blocked them as president. The regime despises him because of his dissent. He has not held office since 2013. “It is difficult to understand how anyone could have believed that Ahmadinejad might become Iran’s next ruler,” the Iran analyst Raz Zimmt wrote on X, “given his complete lack of an organizational support base upon which he could rely to serve as a genuine alternative to the Islamic regime.”

This second group is correct: Backing Ahmadinejad as a coup leader is like backing a coup against Donald Trump led by Al Gore. If the United States and Israel believed that Ahmadinejad could storm the headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and subdue tens of thousands of armed men, then the intelligence directorates of both countries should be closed and replaced by drunken baboons, or the Quincy Institute. But I doubt the plan was as foolish as that.

[Graeme Wood: Why Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still useful]

Immediately before the war, I spoke with a longtime supporter and associate of Ahmadinejad, Jaber Rajabi, who described two potential outcomes for a regime-change operation, depending on how Iran’s enemies went about it. The method he warned against was wiping out the whole government and handing the country to the former shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi, to oversee the mass imprisonment or even execution of those who worked for the former regime. Rather than acquiesce to this fate, Rajabi told me, the regime would fight to the last man. But he contended that regime change was not only possible but potentially achieved with just a few killings—he suggested the number might be as small as a dozen—using a different approach: amnesty for almost everyone else. Ahmadinejad’s value as a leader depended on which plan Iran’s enemies chose.

Rajabi’s politics are influenced by having fought against the United States in Iraq, and having watched his enemy founder there because it wrecked Saddam Hussein’s government rather than preserving and reforming it. To change the regime in Iran, he said, one would have to leave it basically intact. The new government would need a caretaker figure with broad popular support to declare that the war was over, that the new Iran no longer wants to destroy any other country, that it welcomes investment and relations with most or all of its former enemies, and that it would soon hold internationally monitored elections. Rajabi did not say that Ahmadinejad would be that caretaker, but he did say that networks closely aligned with Ahmadinejad were ready to put such a plan into action.

Explosions in Tehran, Iran in February 2026 (Arash Khamooshi / The New York Times / Polaris / Redux)

In the early phases of the war, had the regime buckled as some thought it might, Ahmadinejad would indeed have been a handy option for Israel and the United States. But quickly it became clear that the actual strategy would be the devastation of the government and economy on all fronts. Instead of killing a few, Israel and the U.S. killed many. Instead of leaving most of the Iranian government and security forces intact, they aimed for obliteration. Instead of Ahmadinejad being freed so he could preside over a transition like South Africa’s, he was freed in the midst of a war that looked more like an Iraq-style regime change that would leave the state in shambles.

If Ahmadinejad had signed on not as the leader of a coup, nor as the ruler of a dystopian kingdom of rubble, then his disillusionment after the war’s early phases would be expected.

[From the May 2026 issue: Someday in Tehran]

Finally, one should consider the story itself and its confirmation by U.S. officials. If they were once fond of Ahmadinejad, these officials’ attitude must have changed, because the predictable consequence of their reporting will be grim for Ahmadinejad and anyone tied to him. The story says that he recently traveled to Hungary and Guatemala, two countries friendly to Israel. Working with Ahmadinejad was until recently grounds for suspicion by the regime. Now that he is an accused foreign asset, it might become grounds for much worse, possibly even execution.

Whoever leaked or confirmed this report must be at best indifferent to this possibility. The two groups most threatened by Ahmadinejad (or indeed by anyone who might be part of a third way, between total regime change and total regime preservation) are the regime itself—which can now justify the most severe persecution of its opponents—and regime opponents who would be glad to see eliminated a rival who would, if permitted, have let much of a hated regime survive. Life is tough when you have enemies on all sides.

Trump’s Endgame Is Surrender

2026-05-21T16:00:56-04:00

The outlines of President Trump’s endgame in the Iran war are now emerging. In a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday, Trump reportedly explained that the United States was negotiating a “letter of intent” with Iran that would “formally end the war and launch a 30-day period of negotiations” on Iran’s nuclear program and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The purpose and effect of such an agreement should be clear: The United States is walking away from the crisis. Trump may launch another limited strike to look tough and satisfy the demands of the war’s supporters, but it would be a performative gesture. Endgame in this case is a euphemism for “surrender.”

Trump has blinked many times in the confrontation with Iran—ever since March 18, when Israel attacked the Pars gas field and Iran retaliated with a strike against Qatar’s most important natural-gas-production facility. Trump then called for a halt on U.S. and Israeli targeting of Iran’s energy infrastructure, and the war effectively ended.

Trump’s repeated threats to resume attacks since then have proved to be bluffs. The leaders in Tehran have been calculating for two months that Trump would not launch another attack, and for this reason they have made no concessions despite the damage they suffered from 37 days of relentless strikes. On the contrary, their terms for a settlement are those of a victor: They demand war reparations, no limits on uranium enrichment, recognized control of the strait, and an end to sanctions.

[Robert Kagan: Checkmate in Iran]

For Trump to respond to this defiance by now calling for another 30 days of cease-fire and talks is a tacit admission of defeat. If he does launch a performative attack in the next few days, the Iranians will understand it for what it is. No one believes that he is going to resume a full-scale war a month from now. Among other reasons, with 30 more days to heal, rearm, and fill its coffers with tolls, Iran will be a more formidable adversary.

In 30 days, moreover, the new Iranian strait regime may already be firmly in place. As the Institute for the Study of War reports, Iran has been using the cease-fire period to “normalize” its control over the strait by “compelling oil-importing countries” to establish transit agreements with Tehran and charging fees on vessels from nations without such deals. According to Iranian officials, the new strait regime will give Iran’s strategic partners, such as Russia and China, priority and allow nations friendly to Iran, such as India and Pakistan, to negotiate their own transit agreements. Vessels associated with nations that Iran regards as an adversary will be denied access to the strait entirely.

Several nations, including South Korea, Turkey, and Iraq, are reportedly already negotiating at least temporary transit agreements. Now that Trump has made clear he has no intention of fighting to reopen the strait, the stampede to get good terms with Tehran will begin. All nations heavily dependent on energy from the Persian Gulf will want to cut their deal quickly to get the oil and gas and other commodities flowing and rescue their battered economy. Those nations currently allied with the United States and friendly to Israel will feel pressure to distance themselves and make their peace with Iran. The international sanctions against Iran will collapse, and even more money will pour into the country’s accounts as its newly central role in the global economy becomes normalized. By the end of 30 days, most of the world will have a stake in the new arrangement and will oppose any resumption of hostilities, even in the unlikely event that Trump wanted to go back to war.

Trump no doubt hopes that he can slip away without Americans noticing the magnitude of this defeat. The financial markets may stabilize if it is clear that oil will eventually start flowing again through a reopened strait, even if under the new Iran-controlled system. A major strategic setback for the United States need not affect Wall Street. The president may also hope that he can change the subject by launching another military operation, this time against the government in Cuba. And the news media have indeed begun writing more about Cuba than about the unfolding disaster in Iran.

[Missy Ryan: Trump ditched hearts and minds in the Iran war]

According to one U.S. official, Netanyahu’s “hair was on fire” after the call with Trump—for good reason. The Iran war may end up as the single most devastating blow to Israel’s security in its brief history. On the present trajectory, Iran will emerge from the conflict many times stronger and more influential than it was before the war. It will exercise leverage with dozens of the richest nations in the world, all of which will have an acute interest in keeping Iran happy. They will be unlikely to take Israel’s side in any conflict that it has with Tehran or with its proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, because Iran will have the means to punish them if they do. Israel will emerge more isolated than it has been at any time in its history—and not least from its only reliable protector, the United States. When Trump turns his back on Israel, as he must do to implement this policy, MAGA will gladly follow. The bipartisan anti-Israel consensus in the United States will grow and harden.

Will Israel go gentle into this good night? That is the wild card that may disrupt the financial markets’ dreams of a new stability in the Gulf. A stronger, richer, more influential Iran will mean new life for Hamas and Hezbollah. It will mean the end of the Abraham Accords, as the Gulf States will have to make their own peace with Tehran so that their economies can survive. Trump says that Netanyahu “will do whatever I want him to do.” But can Israel stand by while Iran replaces the United States as the arbiter of power in the region?

Most likely, the new normal in the Persian Gulf will be chronic instability and frequent disruptions in shipping. That’s what happens when the hegemon cedes hegemony.

Donald Trump’s Nixon Moment That Wasn’t

2026-05-18T16:01:29-04:00

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In 1971, Richard Nixon announced his plan to visit Beijing—marking a geopolitical turning point, as the trip would be the first for a U.S. president in 25 years. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield offered an observation that has since become a Washington commonplace. “Only a Republican, perhaps only a Nixon,” he told U.S. News & World Report, “could have made this break and gotten away with it.”

This notion entered the political lexicon to denote a particular kind of calculation: that on certain issues, only a hard-liner has the credibility to pursue a softer line and survive politically.

Last week in Beijing, Donald Trump had his Nixon moment. He scrapped a policy that combined hardheaded diplomacy with action to protect U.S. interests and check Chinese power. In its place, he embraced the notion that a personal bond with Chinese leader Xi Jinping can ensure stability.

Trump is getting away with this move politically. Geopolitically, he will not. His new stance imperils Americans and emboldens China, which makes a future crisis likelier than ever.

[Read: A checkers player meets a three-dimensional-chess master]

In recent decades, Republicans and Democrats have largely agreed to treat China as a strategic competitor. The United States has tightened export controls on advanced technology, reduced its economic exposure to China, and thickened its web of alliances across the Indo-Pacific. That shift began during the first Trump administration; the Biden administration intensified it.

Trump has long been a vocal critic of China. He began his second term with a trade war that pushed tariffs on Chinese goods to 145 percent. He reversed course after China retaliated and demonstrated, through its grip on rare earth processing, that it could inflict real pain in return. Then he began speaking of his great personal relationship with Xi and of the advent of a U.S.-China G2.

In Beijing last week, he praised Xi in terms he seldom uses for America’s democratic allies: “a great leader,” straight out of “central casting.” Trump took with him an extraordinary delegation of American CEOs, including Apple’s Tim Cook, Tesla’s Elon Musk, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, whose company has spent the past year lobbying to keep its most advanced chips flowing to the Chinese market.

China announced that the two countries had agreed to establish a “constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability.” Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, framed the new concept as one of “respecting each other’s core interests and major concerns.” Beijing is almost certainly suggesting, with this language, that it expects the U.S. to limit its competitive measures. Trump, for his part, announced modest trade deals on aircraft and agriculture.

Were a Democratic president doing any of this, Republican hawks would be unsparing in their criticism. Cowed by Trump, they are largely silent. Trump’s shift raises deceptively simple questions that may define the coming China debate and even reshape American policy: Why are we competing with China at all? What’s wrong with a little peace and quiet?

Some experts see an opportunity to persuade Democrats to soften their position on China. Jessica Chen Weiss, a former Biden State Department official who broke with that administration over what she viewed as excessive hawkishness, used the occasion of the summit to write in the Financial Times that Trump had “created real breathing room in U.S.-China relations,” and to argue for a posture that embraces interdependence and cooperation and abandons strategic competition altogether. Hers will not be the last such argument.

The trouble with this posture is that it fails to account for the Chinese actions that threaten the livelihood and security of the United States and its allies. Consider trade. Beijing uses the full weight of the Chinese state—subsidies, financing, regulatory protection, industrial policy at a scale that no Western country can match—to dominate the high-end industries of the future. It has reduced its imports to make itself less dependent on other states, and increased its exports to gain leverage over them. China’s trade surplus in manufacturing goods is now more than $2 trillion. As Robin Harding of the Financial Times has put it, Beijing is “making trade impossible.” It has effectively given Western countries a choice between deindustrialization and protectionism.

Trump’s tariffs reduced China’s surplus with the United States, but the excess goods simply rerouted to Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, where they are now hollowing out the manufacturing bases of America’s allies. A serious U.S. response would involve coordinating with Europe, Japan, and Korea on common tariffs and pressing Beijing on the underlying imbalance. Trump is doing the opposite. He treats the European Union, which is on the brink of a trade war with China, as a rival rather than a partner, and he has signaled that he sees America’s economic relationship with allies as no more privileged than its relationship with its rivals.

The most striking signal of last week, though, was on cybersecurity. For several years, a Chinese state-affiliated group that U.S. intelligence calls Volt Typhoon has been pre-positioning itself inside the IT networks of American water utilities, transportation systems, electric grids, and the like. Should the U.S. and China come into conflict—say, over Taiwan—Volt Typhoon could unleash destructive attacks on American infrastructure. China has similar capabilities in states allied with the U.S. in the Indo-Pacific.

Asked aboard Air Force One whether he had raised China’s cyber campaign with Xi, Trump offered something close to a shrug. “What they do, we do too,” he said. “We spy like hell on them too. I told him, ‘We do a lot of stuff to you that you don’t know about.’” Pressed on the specific question of pre-positioning for attacks on civilian infrastructure, he allowed: “Well, you don’t know that. I mean, I’d like to see it, but it’s very possible that they do, and we’re doing things to them.”

Espionage—intrusions for the purpose of intelligence collection—is ubiquitous and, within limits, accepted. The pre-positioning of cyber weapons inside the civilian infrastructure of a country with which one is not at war is something else entirely. To conflate the two in public, alongside Xi, is to tell Beijing that one of the most aggressive components of its peacetime posture against the United States carries no political price.

The cyber-penetration also signals a larger problem: China is building the military capability to make a war over Taiwan winnable. John Culver, a former CIA analyst of China’s military, recently told The Washington Post that “it’s hard to point to an area other than submarines and undersea warfare and say the United States still has an advantage,” and that China is leading in “air-to-air missiles, surface-to-air missiles, counter-space capabilities and electronic warfare.”

China’s engagement with U.S. companies has helped it build the industrial and technological base that underwrites these military advances. In his book, Apple in China, the journalist Patrick McGee notes that Apple’s annual investment in China’s technology sector exceeded the Biden administration’s once-in-a-generation investment in domestic chips manufacturing. The high-tech China of today, he writes, would not be what it is without Apple. This “transfer of technology and know-how” was “so consequential as to constitute a geopolitical event, like the fall of the Berlin Wall.” Apple’s CEO was, of course, on the plane to Beijing last week.

China needs advanced U.S. chips to power artificial intelligence. Restricting Beijing’s access to these has been one way for the U.S. to interfere with China’s growing military capability in recent years. But Trump has systematically relaxed those controls over the past year, for example by approving sales of Nvidia’s H200 to several major Chinese tech firms.

With regard to Taiwan, Trump said, rightly, that the United States just seeks to maintain the status quo. But he also needlessly raised doubts about the U.S. commitment to helping Taiwan defend against a Chinese attack, and he seems to have bought into Xi’s narrative that the problem is that Taiwan is seeking independence.

In the past, the U.S. has sought to deter a Chinese assault on Taiwan by strengthening the island’s defenses. Since 1982, the U.S. has made an explicit policy of selling arms to Taiwan without consulting Beijing on the timing or content of the shipments. But last week’s meeting suggested a weakening of this American posture: Trump dismissed America’s long-standing assurances to Taiwan in this regard as something from “a very long time ago” and accused Taiwan of stealing America’s chip industry. He acknowledged that Taiwan had been Xi’s most important issue and said that an American arms package authorized in December and not yet delivered was “a significant bargaining chip” with Beijing.

[Read: The Hippocratic summit]

To watch some of the coverage of Trump’s visit to China, or to listen to the administration, one could be forgiven for thinking that he inherited a relationship on the brink of war. He did not. The Biden administration, in which I served, had a strategy of managed competition. That blended close and frank diplomatic contact among senior officials with “competitive actions” to strengthen America’s strategic advantage over China.

Relaxing the competitive policies toward China in favor of warmer leader-to-leader engagement reflects a fundamental misreading of Xi’s intentions. Xi’s preferred strategy toward the United States is exactly the one on offer in Beijing last week: engage Washington to buy a period of stability, then use that time to pursue longer-term objectives in relative comfort. China hopes to emerge with decisive advantages that will allow it to finish its harder business at a moment of its choosing.

Jon Czin, a former CIA analyst of Xi and now my colleague at the Brookings Institution, said in a podcast interview that the key thing to know about the Chinese leader is that “he is not a dealmaker”; nor is he “sentimental about his personal relationships.” He’s “a jack-in-the-box,” Czin said, “who will wind up for years, sometimes for decades, and then pop when he thinks the moment is right, startling everyone around him.”

The Beijing summit was the first of as many as four meetings between the two leaders set to take place this year. Xi is scheduled to visit the United States on September 24, and the leaders may meet again at conferences scheduled for November and December. That frequency gives Trump every incentive to seek to maintain good terms with Xi, even if it means suppressing impulses inside his own administration toward a more competitive approach to China.

Nixon went to China because he understood that relations with Beijing would help the United States in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Trump went there to abandon the strategy of managed competition and replace it with a leader-to-leader bond. His new posture is one that strengthens America’s top rival, leaves its vulnerabilities unaddressed, and makes a U.S.-China crisis more likely rather than less.

A Checkers Player Meets a Three-Dimensional-Chess Master

2026-05-15T14:01:00-04:00

In the centuries when dynasties ruled China, kings and chieftains across Asia sent “tribute missions” to the imperial court to pay homage to the emperor in exchange for access to the empire’s riches and favors. Donald Trump’s trip to Beijing this week recalled those missions. The United States president arrived hat in hand, seeking money and promises from China’s latter-day emperor, Xi Jinping. The visit, meant to establish stability after a decade of trade wars and acrimonious one-upmanship, instead highlighted how the balance of power is tipping away from Washington. Despite America’s economic, military, and diplomatic heft, Trump’s missteps have put him and the country on the back foot in dealings with the far more disciplined Xi.

Trump opened the proceedings with his usual kowtowing. “You’re a great leader. I say it to everybody,” Trump told Xi at a welcoming ceremony yesterday at the Great Hall of the People. “Sometimes people don’t like me saying it. But I say it anyway because it’s true.” The fawning didn’t get him very far. In the meeting that followed, Xi promptly issued a stern warning about Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its own. Stressing that the “Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-U.S. relations,” Xi warned the U.S. to handle the matter with “extra caution,” according to a summary of his comments from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. If not, Xi said, “the two countries will have clashes and even conflicts.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio later told NBC News that the administration’s policy on Taiwan has not changed, but Trump himself—who still needs to sign off on plans to sell $14 billion in weapons to Taiwan—seems less committed. Trump said today that when Xi asked him whether he would send troops to defend Taiwan, he did not offer an answer. Washington’s position on defending Taiwan has long been ambiguous, but Trump added to reporters that “The last thing we need right now is a war that's 9,500 miles away.”

Trump’s sycophancy didn’t change Xi’s mind on Iran either. Trump had delayed his trip to China by six weeks for fear that the Iran war would overshadow what he hoped would be a big diplomatic win. But the unresolved conflict still intruded on the dealmaking. The U.S. has been troubled by China’s support for Iran through supplies of weapon components and as the top buyer of the country’s oil. Shortly before the summit, Trump’s team turned up the pressure on Xi to curtail this aid by sanctioning refiners and companies in China and Hong Kong involved in these deals. Yet Xi ordered the refiners to ignore Trump’s edicts, uncowed by a president who often folds under pressure.

[Vivian Salama and Jonathan Lemire: The hippocratic summit]

In a Fox News interview yesterday, Trump crowed that Xi had promised not to arm Iran. But Trump had said in April that Xi had already assured him that Beijing wasn’t sending arms to Iran, yet the findings of U.S. intelligence officials suggest otherwise. Instead of pressing Xi on Beijing’s arms sales or oil purchases, Trump said that he was considering lifting sanctions on the Chinese oil companies in question. He even seemed to defend Xi’s position. “Look, he’s not coming in with guns. He’s not coming in with rifles. They are not coming in shooting,” Trump said. “He’s been very good.”

Perhaps Trump has merely recognized that expecting Xi to help solve his Middle East mess is a nonstarter. Tuvia Gering, a fellow at the Atlantic Council who tracks China in the Middle East from Jerusalem, told me that Xi’s geopolitical vision “imposes a definitive ceiling on China’s willingness to facilitate Trump’s objectives in Iran.” China’s goal seems to be to weaken U.S. power in the region, so helping “to secure a decisive U.S. victory would be strategically self-defeating.”

Trump made only slightly more progress on trade. He came to Beijing as a traveling salesman, hawking American products in pursuit of his long-running goal of closing the U.S. trade deficit with China. Though he didn’t get the firm purchase commitments he wanted, he did not leave empty-handed. Trump said that Xi pledged to purchase about 400 General Electric jet engines and 200 “big” Boeing airliners, though the details remain hazy and no formal agreement seems to have been set. This is far less than the deal for 500 737 Max jets that Trump had been touting, but if the orders do come through, they’d be Boeing’s first major order from China in about a decade.

These pledges have allowed Trump to spin this summit as a success, but Xi has an emperor’s appreciation of the role a few choice gifts can play in securing leverage over a foreign power. What Xi offers, he can threaten to take away. Xi has already exploited American dependence on Chinese rare earths and supply-chain components to keep Trump in line. Last year, he halted purchases of soybeans from American farmers, a key Trump voting bloc, to pressure the president to stand down from his trade war. Getting more American businesses and constituents hooked on Chinese cash promises to be yet another way to assert China’s power over the U.S.

These tough tactics seem to have taught Trump that China has become too powerful to push around. “The U.S. has realized that China has achieved mutually assured deterrence status,” Wang Huiyao, the president of the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing-based think tank, told me. He argues that this has brought about “a big paradigm shift” in Washington’s approach to China, and has curbed the hawkishness of Trump’s messaging. Wang suggests that a new pragmatism may now prevail between the U.S. and China, one in which U.S. leaders no longer try to get China to adopt Western values but “respect the differences and find a way to work together.”

Trump seems to have embraced this change of heart. “Having a good relationship is a good thing, not a bad thing,” Trump told Fox yesterday. “It’s great when you have good relationships with very powerful countries.”

The disputes over Taiwan, Iran, and trade suggest that a more stable U.S.-China relationship rests mainly on Trump’s reluctance to press Xi too hard. Trump has duly brushed aside a number of contentious issues that have soured relations, such as China’s continued support for Russia’s war in Ukraine and its export-heavy economic policies that threaten U.S. industry. This could prove politically risky. China hawks in Washington still advocate for a tougher line on Beijing to protect American interests, and the midterms could usher in a more hawkish Congress. But watching Trump swan around Beijing with an entourage of prominent American CEOs, including Elon Musk and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, left the impression that the American president sees China as a business opportunity rather than as a security threat.

Despite being at war with a China partner, Trump seems content to simply sell some Boeings and beans. The Trump administration doesn’t have “any great ambition for this relationship,” Bonnie Glaser, the managing director of the Indo-Pacific program at the German Marshall Fund, told me. Trump has set his priorities to merely “keeping the relationship from going off the rails” and “ensuring that America’s needs are met,” at least when it comes to trade.

[Michael Schuman: Trump’s head-scratching turn toward China]

Xi, however, has great ambitions. Trump may now see China as a mutually beneficial economic partner, but Xi’s policies are designed to change the world order at America’s expense. Beijing is working to engineer China’s technological and industrial dominance, backing Russia in a destabilizing war in Europe, and generally setting the stage to achieve global supremacy when the United States flames out. Trump, with his disdain for global alliances and liberal values, doesn’t seem interested in contesting Xi on these fronts. “Xi Jinping has the long plan, about dominating the world and putting the United States in its right place,” Joerg Wuttke, a partner at the consulting firm Albright Stonebridge Group, told me. “Donald Trump doesn’t look that far.”

A couple of trade deals have apparently made Trump happy enough to step aside and let Xi pursue his global agenda. Like the Chinese emperors of old, Xi has used the lure of Chinese wealth to reinforce China’s power. Beijing has sought to find “the minimum price point to keep Trump invested in the process,” Jonathan Czin, a foreign-policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me. This is how a U.S. president who has long insisted on American strength and a tough line on China consigns the country to a weaker future.

The Mystery of the Golden Coffin

2026-05-13T07:30:00-04:00

In November 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron traveled to the United Arab Emirates to inaugurate a new museum—and a new relationship between East and West. The Louvre Abu Dhabi was to become the Arab world’s first “universal” museum, filled with art from around the globe that spanned thousands of years of history. The Emiratis were paying the French $1 billion for the rights to the Louvre name, guidance on what art to buy, and loans of masterworks by Da Vinci, Matisse, and Van Gogh. The kings of Morocco and Bahrain joined Emirati royals at the celebrations, which included a spectacle of costumed dancers and pyrotechnics worthy of an Olympics opening ceremony. In his speech, Macron pitched the museum as an antidote to global conflict and the legacies of imperialism. Instead of taking the greatest works of art from the lands it conquered—as Napoleon’s armies had—France was now bringing its treasures east.

“Beauty,” Macron declared, “will save the world.”

Two days after the museum opened, one of its beautiful objects began drawing attention from scholars, but not in the way that Macron might have hoped. It was an immaculately preserved rose-granite slab, or stele, inscribed with a royal decree from the pharaoh Tutankhamun. The stele dated to about 1318 B.C.E., closer to the boy-king’s death than any other surviving monument. It stood at five and a half feet, and the engravings—Tut offers wine to the god Osiris on one side of the slab, and accepts bouquets from a priest on the other—were unlike anything scholars had previously seen.

What puzzled experts was that a Tut stele this astonishing could emerge, as if from nowhere, a century after the British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered the pharaoh’s tomb. “Does anyone know ANYTHING about this?” a Giza-based Egyptologist tweeted. The museum’s label for the stele, she added, was “a masterclass in saying almost nothing.”

Marc Gabolde, an acclaimed Tut scholar at France’s Paul Valéry University, in Montpellier, pressed the museum’s French advisers for an explanation. They told him that a German merchant-navy officer named Johannes Behrens had bought the stele from a little-known Egyptian dealer, Habib Tawadros, in 1933. It had remained in Behrens’s family until shortly before the museum acquired it, in 2016, for more than $9 million.

AFP / Getty
Dignitaries at the inauguration of the Louvre Abu Dhabi in November 2017 included French President Emmanuel Macron (center); Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (left of Macron); and Jean-Luc Martinez, the president and director of the Paris Louvre (right of Macron).

Gabolde received the museum’s permission to write the first scholarly paper on the stele, but something about its provenance continued to bother him. Germany’s economy was in shambles in 1933. Gabolde wondered how a merchant-navy man could have afforded a monument of Egypt’s most celebrated pharaoh. He searched historical records but found no evidence of Behrens’s existence.

Events in America soon deepened his concerns. In February 2019, a Manhattan prosecutor seized a golden mummy coffin from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, concluding that it had been looted in Egypt in 2011, during the Arab Spring—and that papers documenting its provenance had been forged. Gabolde noticed that the coffin’s sales history partly resembled that of the stele: Habib Tawadros was again listed as the original owner. If Tawadros had never actually owned the coffin, might the stele’s history also be a lie? Gabolde came to a disturbing conclusion. “Whole stories,” he wrote in his research notes, “seem to have been made up to hide the exact provenance of the artefacts.”

In their billion-dollar agreement with the Emiratis, the French had pledged to “pay careful attention to the ethical rules regarding acquisitions, in particular regarding provenance.” Helping guide those acquisitions was the most powerful museum official in Europe: Jean-Luc Martinez, the president and director of the Paris Louvre. The year before the stele’s purchase, Martinez, an archaeologist, had written a 50-point plan for protecting antiquities in conflict zones, and he’d warned of traffickers who “invent a story” for looted objects to disguise their illicit origins. They could “claim it was found by a great-grandfather who was a diplomat, fabricate fake notary documents to lend credibility to the lie,” Martinez wrote.

Could a bogus story about the Tut stele have duped him just months later?

Alamy
The Louvre Abu Dhabi bought a marble head of Cleopatra for about $40 million, the highest known price a museum has ever paid for a single antiquity.

In 2021, Gabolde stepped off an airplane in Paris to find the national police waiting for him. They took him to their headquarters in Nanterre, where officers interrogated him for hours about his research into the stele’s origins. “They told me it was a huge affair,” Gabolde recalled, “something far beyond my understanding.” The police had begun to unravel a criminal network stretching from the deserts of Egypt to the largest museums in the world. From 2013 to 2018, traffickers had sold the Met and the Louvre Abu Dhabi some $65 million worth of allegedly looted artifacts. Among them was the Tut stele, the golden coffin, and a colossal marble head of a Ptolemaic queen, purported to be Cleopatra, purchased for about $40 million—the highest known price a museum has ever paid for a single antiquity.

At the center of the deals, mostly hidden from sight, was a family with warehouses full of magnificent artifacts and a knack for outrunning the law.

One day in the 1960s, a little boy entered a jewelry shop in Cairo and held out an ancient scarab amulet. “You want to buy it?” he asked the proprietor.

Simon Simonian, who ran the shop with his brother Hagop, dealt in modern jewelry but was intrigued enough by the ornament to accept the boy’s offer. “My father purchased it for little and he sold it for a big profit,” Simon’s son Kevork told me. Sensing a financial opportunity, Simon called one of his younger brothers, Serop, who was studying business at a university in Germany.

Study Egyptology instead, Simon told him.

Serop was one of Simon’s five siblings, a bookish middle child who collected stamps and lived in the shadow of his eldest brother. Their father, Ohan, had fled Turkey on foot as a boy, after his parents were murdered in the Armenian genocide. When he arrived in Egypt, a relative told me, he begged for food and slept in trash bins before getting a job as a busboy, buying a truck, and eventually founding his own transportation business. Losing his parents at such a young age caused him lifelong anguish. But Ohan gave his children chances he’d never had, and they learned to seize them.

When Serop got Simon’s call, he did as he was told. He switched to Egyptology, wrote a dissertation on coffin design, and received his doctorate from the University of Göttingen in 1974.

Gibson Moss / Alamy
Jackie Kennedy inaugurated the first major tour of Tutankhamun artifacts, in the early 1960s, helping fuel a popular fascination with ancient Egypt.

It was an ideal time to be in the Egyptian-antiquities business. In the early 1960s, Jackie Kennedy, as first lady, had inaugurated the first major tour of Tutankhamun artifacts, a small collection that attracted giant crowds. It was soon followed by a far bigger exhibition, “Treasures of Tutankhamun,” which showcased the pharaoh’s gold death mask and fueled a craze that critics called “Egyptomania.” The show’s nine-year world tour, which began in 1972, would draw about 7 million people in the U.S. alone. During its four months at the Met, museum goers poured $500 million, in today’s dollars, into hotels, restaurants, and other New York businesses. Steve Martin’s 1978 single, “King Tut,” which parodied the era’s obsession with the pharaoh, sold more than 1 million copies.

Serop Simonian wasn’t an extraordinary Egyptology student, a teacher in his program recalled, but it didn’t much matter: He was now Herr Doktor Simonian, and had a network of influential scholars and museum directors. He hadn’t even finished his degree when, in 1970, through a Paris broker, he sold the Louvre a 4,000-year-old acacia statue of the Egyptian high priest Hapdjefai.

In 1976, he opened a shop called Galerie Antiker Kunst in a wealthy district of Hamburg, and began loaning antiquities to German universities. He knew that professors would relish the chance to publish papers on previously unknown artifacts. Their articles, in turn, increased the value of his objects. An Egyptologist named Jürgen Horn described a papyrus bearing verses from the Book of Isaiah as “breathtaking,” writing to Simonian that he hoped “this information will help you in your difficult negotiations.” Another German professor called the papyrus “a sensation.” These endorsements, an American scholar of early Christianity wrote to a colleague, “explain why the price doubled.”

Serop had become precisely what his older brothers had hoped: a respectable figure, with the ties and training to sell the family’s artifacts, at staggering prices, to insatiable Western markets.

One of the first people to notice anything amiss was an American art historian named Eleni Vassilika. It was the summer of 2000, and Vassilika—who’d spent a decade as an antiquities curator at the University of Cambridge—had just started a new job as the director of the Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum, in the provincial German city of Hildesheim. She quickly discovered that dozens of Egyptian relics the museum presented to the public as its own were in fact the merchandise of a dealer named Serop Simonian. Two of his artifacts—a 4,000-year-old model boat and a 2,300-year-old coffin—had even appeared on the covers of exhibition catalogs for the museum’s traveling shows.

It wasn’t uncommon for museums to display objects from collectors, with labels identifying the pieces as loans. But to exhibit the stock of a dealer—and to do so without disclosure—struck Vassilika as a form of laundering. It allowed a dealer to hide his ownership of potentially dubious antiquities from the public and law enforcement, yet quietly present them to buyers as museum-worthy. (Lara Weiss, the Roemer and Pelizaeus’s director since 2023, told me the museum would not approve such a relationship today and “would consider it laundering.”)

The state of some of Simonian’s wares made the arrangement all the more bizarre. An ancient statue of Osiris “had been restored from head to toe,” with “large parts” added that “did not correspond to its original condition,” a conservator at the museum later told investigators. Coffins, meanwhile, appeared to have been reassembled from modular pieces; the conservator suspected that they’d been sawed apart in Egypt so that government inspectors wouldn’t recognize them as protected artifacts.

Jamie Salmon for The Atlantic
As a museum director in Germany and Italy, Eleni Vassilika, pictured here in her London home, was among the first people to question Serop Simonian’s antiquities.

By then, the West’s fascination with ancient Egypt had fueled waves of looting. In just the first three months of 1973, as the giant Tutankhamun tour got under way, Egyptian tombs were robbed of millions of dollars’ worth of antiquities. Egypt had so many buried artifacts and so few guards, the Associated Press reported, that “99 percent of all lootings go undiscovered.” To fight the trafficking of cultural property, UNESCO had adopted a major treaty in 1970. Then, in 1983, Egyptian lawmakers fully criminalized the antiquities trade, barring all sales and exports.

Yet there had been no discernible interruption in the Simonians’ business. The brothers had a ready explanation: They’d acquired their antiquities in the ’60s and early ’70s, they said, from the heirs of Habib Tawadros and another Egyptian dealer, Sayed Pasha Khashaba. “Everything,” Serop later told investigators, had been shipped to Switzerland by 1973, a full decade before Egypt outlawed the trade. A family member described this cache to me as an “infinite supply.”

Simonian’s relationship with the Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum, which began no later than 1990, was off the books: There was no contract, no insurance, no notification to the city, which owned the museum. When city officials finally learned of the arrangement, in 1999, they grew alarmed. But Vassilika’s predecessor, who was a friend of Simonian’s, talked them down. He told them that the dealer was best seen as a quiet benefactor whose antiquities were drawing visitors and helping fund the museum’s new building. The city’s leaders seemed appeased, and soon agreed to Simonian’s demand that the museum buy some of his artifacts, in return for his loans to the traveling shows. When city administrators questioned Simonian’s prices, the museum director again allayed their concerns—by obtaining appraisals from Ursula Rössler-Köhler, a former classmate of Simonian’s who’d become head of the Egyptology institute at the University of Bonn. Of the help that she gave Simonian, Rössler-Köhler later told investigators, “We were happy to do this and were then able to keep some of these pieces on loan for our own small exhibition.”

Vassilika was appalled by the city’s naivete. She ordered the removal of Simonian’s objects—about 100 of them—from the museum’s warehouse and tried, in vain, to halt the purchases.

When she left the museum in 2005, at the end of her five-year contract, Vassilika hoped never to think about Simonian again. She’d been offered a job as the director of the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy, whose 40,000-piece collection was regarded as the most important outside Egypt. The city was preparing to host the 2006 Winter Olympics, and a local banking foundation, the Compagnia di San Paolo, had pledged about $30 million for the museum’s renovation. With the encouragement of Italy’s culture minister, the Compagnia had also acquired an eight-foot papyrus roll from the first century B.C.E. It appeared to contain the only known copy of a work by the Greek geographer Artemidorus and the oldest surviving map from the Greco-Roman world. The foundation planned to exhibit the Artemidorus at a nobleman’s palazzo during the Olympics, then donate it to the Egyptian Museum.

Paco Serinelli / AFP / Getty
An Italian foundation paid Serop Simonian about $3 million for a papyrus that appeared to contain a lost work by the ancient Greek geographer Artemidorus.

Vassilika was fascinated by the papyrus, which she’d never heard of. Who was the seller? she asked her boss.

Her boss called the Compagnia and handed the phone to Vassilika.

“This piece was legally exported from Egypt by an Armenian family in the 1970s,” she recalled a foundation official telling her.

She felt her ears ring and the blood drain from her face. “You don’t mean Serop Simonian?”

He did. The Compagnia had acquired it from the Hamburg dealer for $3 million—the highest known price ever paid for a papyrus.

By the 2000s, the Simonians had amassed tens of thousands of artifacts in warehouses across Europe and North America. So numerous and varied were the objects that the family could serve nearly every market, from multimillion-dollar deals with museums to two-figure bargains on eBay. Most elite dealers shunned cheap objects, but for the Simonians, a sale was a sale. The range of price points was “unprecedented for a single network,” an American law-enforcement official told me.

The only bar to still greater profits, it seemed, was Serop himself. With his degree and connections, he’d supplanted his brothers as the de facto head of the family business. But he had little in the way of glamour or charm. Plump, shabbily dressed, and unshaven, he lived in what another dealer described to me as “kind of your grandmother’s apartment in the 1950s.” He was so loath to spend money that he stayed in budget hotels and had a habit, according to a business associate, of “re-toasting old bread so as not to waste it.” He was still haunted by the poverty of his first years in Germany, when he’d lived in a building with shared bathrooms and had little to eat. “He didn’t want to go back to the same place,” Simon’s son Ohan told me.

The one time Vassilika met him, to discuss his antiquities, Serop showed up at her museum office disheveled, slouching, and smelling of cigarettes—a manner wholly unlike that of the urbane, well-groomed men who dominated the trade. “He just looked shaggy,” Vassilika recalled. “He didn’t look like an art dealer, you know, an upmarket art dealer.”

Of his reputation as a salesman, Gabriele Pieke, a German Egyptologist and museum official, recalled, “Tricks and tricks, like someone who wants to get more money out of you.” She likened him to sellers in a souk or bazaar. “If it’s not in your character to bargain, then it’s really annoying.”

Simonian was prickly and easily aggrieved, which made dealing with him even more challenging. “He didn’t really feel people respected him enough,” Noele Mele, a Connecticut dealer who brokered pieces for him, told me. Buyers would sometimes agree to Simonian’s asking price, only for him to suddenly raise it, out of spite for some perceived insult. “He’d say, ‘It’s your fault; you should have gotten it in writing,’” Mele recalled. “The next time, we did get it in writing. He said, ‘So what?’ and tore it up.” He eventually grew estranged from his wife and children, while forming what the business associate said were emotional attachments to the antiquities in his storerooms. “My babies,” he called them.

In 2011, Simonian reached an agreement with the Reiss Engelhorn Museum, in Mannheim, Germany, to display thousands of his artifacts, apparently including the Cleopatra bust, for up to 30 years. But by 2013, the museum had backed out, citing Simonian’s failure to supply provenance paperwork and his refusal to allow laboratory testing to determine the age of his objects. “No one wanted to deal with him,” Mele told me.

To sell to the world’s greatest museums, Simonian needed help. In the early 2000s, a pair of Lebanese antiquities dealers introduced him to their son Roben Dib, who was studying biomedical engineering at the University of Hamburg. Dib was in his 20s—nearly four decades Simonian’s junior—but he’d collected coins since he was a boy and had a natural savoir faire. Several years later, Simonian offered him a job, and Dib accepted, thrilled by the idea of turning his hobby into a career.

In 2011, Dib traveled to the Paris auction house Pierre Bergé and introduced himself to its archaeological expert Christophe Kunicki, one of France’s foremost authorities on Egyptian art. Kunicki moved among museum-world Brahmin. “When he’s not organizing sales,” the French newspaper Libération wrote, “he scours major international fairs and rubs shoulders with the elite of the art market, between Paris, New York, London, and Geneva. Always at his side, his husband and collaborator, Richard Semper, perfectly bilingual in English.” The couple regularly hosted dinners for Louvre and Met curators, who were “always delighted to be the first to discover new treasures.” Dib brought small artifacts to Kunicki, gaining his trust, before offering him larger and more legally questionable ones.

In 2015, Kunicki grew smitten with a spectacular coffin Dib showed him in a warehouse in Cologne. Sheathed in gold and covered in hieroglyphs, it had once contained the mummified corpse of Nedjemankh, a first-century-B.C.E. priest of the ram-headed fertility god Heryshef. Kunicki had the coffin professionally photographed, and in May 2016 he emailed the pictures to Diana Patch, the chief curator of Egyptian art at the Met. Might the museum be interested?

Mahmoud Khaled / AFP / Getty
The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired the gilded coffin of Nedjemankh in 2017. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office alleged that it had been looted in Egypt in 2011, during the Arab Spring.

When Patch asked for provenance documents, Kunicki sent a scan of what he said was an Egyptian export license, issued to Simon Simonian in 1971. Janice Kamrin, a curator on Patch’s staff, emailed the Egyptian government that the license had “all the proper stamps” and “looks right to us” but that the museum wanted to confirm its authenticity “as part of our due diligence.” When an Egyptian official requested “all the data and pics,” Kamrin asked if sending just the license number and year would suffice. It didn’t: The Egyptians wanted a copy of the license that Kamrin had claimed looked right. According to an official summary of a Manhattan grand-jury investigation, Kamrin puzzlingly replied that she didn’t have copies, “electronic or otherwise”—despite the fact that Kunicki had emailed Patch a scan of the license months earlier.

Patch, meanwhile, pressed the dealers. She insisted in an email that for the sale to proceed, “we of course will require the original export license.” But Patch never got the original—the dealers made a series of baffling excuses—and Egyptian officials stopped answering Kamrin’s emails. Still, in May 2017, Patch and Kamrin recommended the coffin’s purchase to the Met’s director. When senior Egyptian officials learned of the museum’s plans to go through with the acquisition, they again requested a copy of the export license. The dealers had sent Patch two copies of it—one in which Simon Simonian’s name was visible, and another in which it was blacked out. Kunicki asked Patch to send Egypt “the copy without the names.” According to the summary of the grand-jury investigation, Patch complied—depriving Egypt of a key detail about the coffin’s origins. Soon after, in July 2017, the Met acquired the coffin, for about $4 million.

The gilded coffin of Nedjemankh became a sensation. Kim Kardashian, in a gold Versace gown, posed for photos beside it at the 2018 Met Gala. Two months later, the museum made the coffin the centerpiece of an exhibition that drew nearly half a million visitors.

If museum directors had wanted the truth about the Simonians, they could have gotten it from Egyptian officials—or done some basic research. On microfilm at the Library of Congress, I found a series of disquieting articles in Egypt’s Al-Ahram, one of the Arab world’s oldest and most influential newspapers. The first, from January 1975, was headlined “Armenian Jeweler Killed on the Bank of a Canal in Saqqara.”

The dead jeweler was Serop’s younger brother, Abraham Simonian. His bloodied, half-naked body had been found with bullet wounds near a hut where he’d parked his Mercedes. The newspaper reported that although Simon, Hagop, and Abraham were nominally in the jewelry business, their primary activity was “buying stolen artifacts and selling and smuggling them abroad.” Abraham, who was 28, “had frequented numerous archaeological sites throughout the republic,” seeking “antiquities wherever they might be found.”

A colleague of the Simonians told me that Serop, wanting more business for himself, had Abraham make deals behind their older brothers’ backs. At one point, Abraham gave Serop a photo of a Book of the Dead, a collection of spells for the afterlife, which Serop showed to a professor in Germany. “The professor told him, ‘It’s important—go and buy,’” the colleague said. The Simonians paid the Egyptians who had dug it up the rough equivalent of $7,000. Then, according to Al-Ahram, the Simonians sold the book in Germany for more than 30 times that amount. After the diggers learned of this profit—and of how little of it they’d gotten—a fight erupted, and they shot Abraham with his own gun.

By then, Egyptian law enforcement had known of the Simonians for perhaps a decade. In the 1960s, a relative told me, Simon spent two years in prison for alleged antiquities crimes, and lost teeth in an attack by fellow inmates. In 1971, he was stripped of his antiquities license after registering in his own name the shop of Habib Tawadros, the dealer the Simonians would later claim owned both the Met’s gilded coffin and the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s Tut stele.

Simon and Hagop left Egypt for Los Angeles and Montreal, respectively, in the early-to-mid-’80s, around the time the country abolished its antiquities trade. In 1989, Canadian authorities seized about 60 illicit antiquities from Hagop—some “taken” from excavations, according to Al-Ahram. Six years later, an Egyptian court sentenced Simon in absentia to five years of hard labor for trying to smuggle at least 100 antiquities out of the country with forged government documents.

In 2005, a Berlin judge halted a shipment of Simonian artifacts to a buyer in the United States, after Egyptian authorities linked the objects to dealers who’d bribed a senior official in Egypt’s antiquities ministry. But the judge’s decision was soon reversed, and the artifacts—funerary relics exhibited at the Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum in the 1990s—were sold, for more than $2 million, to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, in Kansas City, where they remain today. (The Nelson-Atkins declined to comment on Egypt’s allegations.)

For eight years, Eleni Vassilika had kept the Artemidorus papyrus out of Turin’s Egyptian Museum, her intransigence infuriating her superiors. In 2018, four years after her departure, Italian prosecutors declared both the papyrus and a key provenance document fake. Serop Simonian, they alleged, had committed aggravated fraud, a crime made easier by the carelessness of the Compagnia and of the scholars who’d facilitated the purchase. But it was too late to charge Simonian, they said: The statute of limitations had lapsed. (The Compagnia did not respond to requests for comment.)

The Artemidorus remains the only known Simonian relic deemed a forgery. Some others were crudely restored, with slapdash handiwork or ill-fitting parts cannibalized from other antiquities. But by and large, the family’s objects are seen as genuine. The problem is not their authenticity, but their origins.

Behrouz Mehri / AFP / Getty
Matthew Bogdanos, the chief of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit, served as a Marine colonel in the Iraq War, when he led a team that recovered artifacts looted from the Iraq Museum.

In the fall of 2017, a Lebanese collector named Georges Lotfi was strolling through the Met’s Egyptian galleries when he noticed a new acquisition: the gilded coffin of Nedjemankh. The more closely he examined it, the surer he became that he’d seen it before. About five years earlier, Lotfi told me, a Jordanian trafficker named Mohammed “Abu Said” Jaradat had offered it to him for $50,000. Lotfi had passed. But after his visit to the Met, he called Jaradat and asked what had become of the coffin. Jaradat said he’d sent it to a German dealer named Roben Dib, who had promised to split the proceeds of any sale. Jaradat had heard nothing since.

“Abu Said,” Lotfi responded, “it’s in the Metropolitan Museum.”

Jaradat was livid. The Met had paid $4 million, and Jaradat hadn’t gotten a penny. “He wanted to take revenge,” Lotfi told me.

In March 2018, Lotfi tipped off Matthew Bogdanos, a prosecutor who leads the Manhattan District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit. Bogdanos recognized the names Dib and Jaradat. About five years earlier, he had come across emails from them in the inboxes of several New York collectors and museum officials he was investigating in a different case. The emails contained what Bogdanos called “dirty photos”: images of dirt-encrusted antiquities, the sort that thieves send to buyers to prove that a relic is fresh from the ground and thus not a fake; the mindset, as Bogdanos describes it, is If it’s looted, it’s real. To investigate further, Bogdanos’s team served search warrants in 2013 on Dib’s and Jaradat’s email accounts, obtaining thousands of messages. But he couldn’t seize the antiquities in their “dirty photos” without knowing where the objects were.

Not until Lotfi’s tip, five years later, did Bogdanos get a break. Lotfi introduced Bogdanos to Jaradat, and the prosecutor found corroboration for Jaradat’s golden-coffin story in the seized email accounts: In late 2011 and early 2012, a looter had sent six dirty images of the coffin to Jaradat, who forwarded them to Dib. Metadata showed that the photos were taken in Egypt’s Minya region in autumn 2011, just months after a rash of antiquities looting during the Arab Spring. A photo emailed to Jaradat appeared to depict one of the traffickers: a man in a hoodie, crouched on a sand dune, with an assault rifle across his chest.

“When is the big yellow one going to get here?” Simonian asked Dib in a September 2012 Gmail chat, using their code name for the golden coffin, according to the summary of the grand-jury investigation.

“Early October it will be ready for the EU,” Dib replied. The coffin was smuggled from Egypt to Dubai, then sent by FedEx to an old friend of Simonian’s, a shipping agent who lived near the Cologne warehouse where the relic would be stored. The FedEx label, found in Dib’s email, described the multimillion-dollar Egyptian coffin as a “gypsum Wooden Box and lid” from Turkey, with a value of 5,000 euros.

From speaking with Simonian’s associates and reading court papers and other legal documents, I got the sense that Simonian had a system. He put almost nothing in writing. He used intermediaries and an offshore shell company to obscure his role in sales. He had artifacts shipped to friends, freight forwarders, and small museums such as the Roemer and Pelizaeus, where—a museum official there told investigators—he had her go into a customs office to complete paperwork on his behalf, while he stayed in the car and smoked. He once bragged to a colleague of his near invisibility: “I run beside my shadow.”

[From the December 2021 issue: Ariel Sabar on the Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit]

When Bogdanos reviewed the Met’s internal communications, he was dumbfounded. By the time Diana Patch, the Met’s chief curator of Egyptian art, recommended the purchase, the Paris dealers had given the museum no fewer than three provenance stories: one in which the current owner was a “Mme Chatz” of Switzerland, another in which it was an “M.D.” of Germany, and a third in which the owner was Serop Simonian. Still more suspicious, one date on the license suggested that it had been issued in May 1961, while another suggested May 1971. Neither could be reconciled with a government stamp that said Arab Republic of Egypt, a name Egypt didn’t adopt until September 1971.

Manhattan prosecutors didn’t charge anyone at the Met, but in February 2019, Bogdanos’s team convinced a judge that the museum likely possessed stolen property in the first degree. Agents seized the coffin with a search warrant and, with the Met’s cooperation, returned it to Egypt. Then they found and repatriated five other antiquities that the Met had recently acquired, for more than $3 million, from the same network. Two had bogus Khashaba or Behrens provenance; another was described as having been sold by a Dutch gallery nine years before the gallery opened. A fourth piece—a Roman-era portrait of a woman—was looted from Egypt in the 1990s, according to Manhattan prosecutors, but the sellers evidently needed another story. “Hehe, it should come from you, the Simonian family,” Dib allegedly wrote in a Gmail chat. “No,” Simonian replied. So they attributed it to a friend, who they claimed purchased it in 1968 from a Munich gallery.

A Met spokesperson told me that the museum was “the victim of a fraud” and had “filed a complaint in the criminal legal proceedings in Paris.” Asked about the conduct of Patch and Kamrin, the spokesperson described the coffin’s acquisition in 2017 as a “museum decision, supported by a multi-step institutional process in place at the time.” After the coffin’s repatriation, in 2019, the Met “undertook a thorough review of its process for verifying documentation and approving acquisitions, and then strengthened requirements for acquiring antiquities.” The spokesperson declined to answer more detailed questions, citing the “ongoing, strictly confidential proceedings in France.”

This was hardly the Met’s first provenance scandal. The museum returned a cache of relics to Turkey in 1993 and a stunning Greek vase to Italy in 2008—each of which it had purchased, for at least $1 million, months after they’d been excavated by tomb robbers. The Manhattan D.A.’s office says that it has seized more than 200 antiquities, valued at more than $54 million, from the museum since 2023. In 2024, the Met hired its first-ever head of provenance research, who oversees a team of 12 analysts that in partnership with outside experts, including the D.A.’s office, is reviewing objects in the museum’s collection from problematic dealers.

So would the Met continue to buy antiquities—as it had the gilded coffin—without original export licenses and without the country of origin’s confirmation that relics were legal? The museum spokesperson told me that the guidelines the Met follows do not include those “conditions” but that it would make every effort to verify documents, including by contacting people connected to them. Diana Patch and Janice Kamrin did not respond to requests for comment.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi had made an even more enticing target for Simonian’s network than the Met. The Emiratis had allotted hundreds of millions of dollars to building a world-class collection within a decade. Antiquities worthy of their ambitions had proved difficult to find, according to internal documents seen by Libération, because of “heightened sensitivity” about provenance. This tougher environment didn’t deter traffickers so much as inspire them: If they faked legal provenance, they could command astronomical prices—precisely because of how few legal objects were on the market. From 2014 to 2018, Simonian’s network sold the Louvre Abu Dhabi at least seven Egyptian antiquities for more than $50 million, among them the Tut stele, the Cleopatra head, and a hippopotamus figurine originally displayed by the Roemer and Pelizaeus. (The Louvre Abu Dhabi declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigations.)

European police discovered that Simonian and his associates had allegedly fabricated early-20th-century sales records with an old typewriter—the same one Simonian used to write his dissertation—and blank invoices from long-dead dealers such as Tawadros. The traffickers then paid friends and other “witnesses” to claim, in notarized letters, that they’d inherited the objects from ancestors such as Behrens, the supposed merchant-navy officer. Simonian’s two adult children, meanwhile, had their own provenance story: that they owned the Cleopatra head and the Tut stele, and had gotten the artifacts from their grandmother. Their story, which appears in certain back-end sales paperwork, made it possible for 30 million euros in sales proceeds to flow directly into their accounts, bypassing their elderly father and effecting a massive, intergenerational transfer of wealth.

Kunicki and Semper, the Paris middlemen who’d brokered the sale of Simonian objects to the Met and the Louvre Abu Dhabi, were charged in 2020 with fraud, money laundering, and forgery. French journalists, quoting confidential police files, reported that Kunicki admitted to using forged paperwork to fill in “missing links” in ownership. In the antiquities world, Semper suggested, due diligence was a kind of knowing pantomime in which “everyone is putting a bag over their head.” He alluded to a French schoolyard game in which children stare into each other’s eyes and try not to be the first to laugh. (Kunicki and Semper deny wrongdoing, their lawyer told me.)

To determine how high the conspiracy went, French police scrutinized the conduct of the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s advisers. Among them was France’s most prominent critic of archaeological looting: Jean-Luc Martinez, whom French president François Hollande had appointed in 2013 to lead the Paris Louvre. In his 2015 report on safeguarding antiquities in conflict zones—commissioned by Hollande and submitted to UNESCO—Martinez urged museums “to systematically refuse any proposal to acquire works whose provenance is not certain.” He described nearly all the “laundering techniques” that traffickers used: fake ownership histories, middlemen, attempts to exhibit looted objects in prestigious museums “to enhance the artwork’s reputation and reassure potential buyers,” long waits before stolen relics appear on the market to give “dealers time to fabricate provenance.” Yet in helping the Louvre Abu Dhabi acquire antiquities, Martinez, along with other French advisers, apparently missed, or ignored, these very problems.

The police concluded that the Agence France-Muséums—the body that France created to advise the Emirati museum—had become “a formidable tool at the disposal of traffickers.” Though Martinez isn’t thought to have personally profited from the deals, the Emiratis’ payments to France helped fund major renovations at the Paris Louvre, including a roughly $60 million project to improve the flow of visitors through the reception areas beneath the glass pyramid. Martinez was charged in 2022 with complicity in fraud and money laundering. (Martinez’s lawyer, François Artuphel, told me that Martinez was one of six members of the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s acquisitions committee, which made decisions collectively and was not expected to verify the provenance documents provided by sellers. Artuphel called Martinez a victim of “alleged counterfeiters,” and believes his client will be “fully exonerated.”)

Roben Dib was charged in France in 2022 with criminal conspiracy, organized fraud, and money laundering. His attorneys didn’t respond to a list of questions, but Dib has previously professed his innocence. A French defense lawyer associated with the trafficking cases told me that the dealers were being asked to prove legal ownership from the day an object was unearthed through the present, an almost impossible standard, particularly for discoveries that precede modern record-keeping practices.

Serop Simonian was 81 years old in September 2023 when he was extradited from Germany to France and charged there with criminal association, money laundering, and organized fraud. Detained in Paris’s La Santé prison, he made statements to investigators that were by turns boastful, contemptuous, and self-pitying. Simonian hinted that his family had sold a statue to John Lennon. He called Bogdanos “the greatest art thief of all time,” mocking the prosecutor’s seizures from dealers and museums. He suggested that missing sales paperwork simply reflected an earlier era’s looser standards of documentation. He denied possessing illicit antiquities, then taunted his inquisitors: If they really cared about illegal provenance, he said, “I could empty half the Louvre.” Finally, he asserted that he was suffering from dementia and that Dib had become the decision maker: “I trusted him more than I trusted my children.”

Simonian’s French attorney, Chloé Arnoux, visited her client in prison in late 2024. She told me that he struggled to speak without losing his breath, used a walker, and slept in a cell with two young inmates, “who were not really that sympathetic to him.” That December, after more than a year in detention, he was released by a judge, who cited the octogenarian’s declining health. Prosecutors successfully appealed, calling Simonian a flight risk. But he had already left France, by bus, and checked into an assisted-living center in Hamburg. He’s unlikely to be re-extradited to France until his trial, lawyers close to the case told me. (For their roles in antiquities sales, Simonian’s son, Abraham, is being prosecuted in Germany on charges of fraud and receiving stolen goods, and Simonian’s daughter, Alice, on a charge of money laundering. Their lawyers deny the charges, saying their clients had no awareness that the provenance provided to buyers was allegedly false.)

In many months of trying to speak with Serop Simonian, I received just two responses: a completely blank message from his email address, and a WhatsApp call from a number associated with him in which someone breathed heavily for a few seconds before hanging up. Days spent looking for him in Hamburg yielded only dead ends. His lawyers didn’t respond to detailed lists of questions.

Serop’s brother Simon died in 2020, and Hagop didn’t respond to interview requests, but I found Simon’s son Ohan, who is in his early 50s, in California. We spent part of an afternoon together in the Coachella Valley. His arms were sleeved in tattoos: an Egyptian ankh, an Eye of God inside a pyramid, the face of Jesus over the words In God We Trust. Growing up in Egypt in the 1980s, he told me, he’d been teased by the Armenian kids he played basketball with. “You guys robbed a pyramid,” they’d say. “You stole half of Egypt.” In truth, Ohan insisted, his father was not a thief but a rescuer, saving the marvels of his homeland “for the world to see.”

Unlike his brother Serop, Simon openly enjoyed his money, frittering it away on parties, vacations, trips to Las Vegas. Where Serop wanted to be “the elite behind the curtain,” Ohan told me, “my dad was, Look at me! I’m Simon!” Ohan and his brother, Kevork, both went through bankruptcy in recent years and have driven for Uber to support their families. They’ve spent years seeking the $11 million they say Serop still owes them for their late father’s share of the $40 million Cleopatra head. Simon once flew all the way to Hamburg to collect his cut, refusing to believe that his own brother would steal from him. But Serop pretended to be out of town, and Simon died soon after.

Talking about this debt made Ohan so furious that he began loudly cursing his uncle. Death, Ohan fears, will be Serop’s final escape. “If I had the choice to be a god,” Ohan told me, “I’d be the god of the afterlife, so I could go after him.”

In December 2020, Eleni Vassilika was weathering the pandemic in her London home when she received an email from Germany’s federal police. “We are sorry you had to wait so long before being contacted by us,” the agent wrote. Vassilika was thankful for their interest in Simonian. But what about the Egyptologists who had blithely endorsed his objects? What about the museums that had rushed to buy them? Germany, France, and the United States were among the nearly 150 countries who signed the 1970 UNESCO treaty to fight the illicit antiquities trade. Museums had promised reforms and hired provenance sleuths. Scholars had adopted ethics codes to constrain their contacts with dealers. Yet tens of millions of dollars in loot were still making their way into the world’s most illustrious museums.

“The story is the enablers—it’s us,” Vassilika told me. “Museums and scholars are the moral compass of art history and the art world. We should be, at least.”

The Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum still owns all five of the antiquities it bought from Simonian, for some $325,000, a quarter century ago. Lara Weiss, its current director, told me that three of the artifacts were about to go on display in the museum’s new permanent galleries.

Ralf Brunner / laif / Redux
The Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum, in Hildesheim, Germany, allowed Serop Simonian to store about 100 of his antiquities in its warehouse, and displayed dozens of them—without attribution—in exhibitions around the world.

After Simonian’s arrest, I asked, did she and her staff discuss whether to continue exhibiting his objects? “Of course,” Weiss said. But the museum was in such financial trouble, she said, that it nearly closed in 2022, and “the important thing” was to survive. The museum had no plans to identify Simonian as the objects’ prior owner. The new galleries, she said, were designed for families and children, and “in this context, there is not really room for long labels about provenance, because we want easy texts, few texts, and not long and difficult academic narratives.

“I mean, I see this can be criticized,” she continued, as if suddenly realizing how this might sound. “But this is the decision we have taken at the moment because we really need more visitors.”

China Believes America Will Flame Out

2026-05-11T07:30:00-04:00

Now that the United States is riven by internal politics, alienating allies, and once again consumed by a war in the Persian Gulf, this seems like an opportune moment for China to wrest the mantle of global leadership. Yet Beijing has avoided capitalizing on these conflicts with a strong public position. Instead of confronting the United States by defending Iran, a longtime strategic partner in the region, China has provided only indirect support and has largely stayed on the sidelines.

China’s restraint should not be seen as a sign of weakness. Instead, the country is biding its time, positioning itself as the ready choice to fill a leadership vacuum when the United States flames out. China’s leaders are working to shape a world in which their dominance emerges not as a climactic victory over Western interests but as a fact on the ground.

In private conversations and public writings, China’s leaders and their advisers often describe America as “declining but dangerous”—a late-stage power prone to bursts of aggression in the hopes of arresting its slide. As early as the 1990s, the height of the United States’ unipolar power, Chinese thinkers were already theorizing about America’s decline. Wang Huning, then a little-known academic, was moved by his travels through the U.S. to write the book America Against America, in which he described a nation beset by social fragmentation, inequality, and political dysfunction. Shocked by the country’s problems of homelessness, drug addiction, racial violence, social divisions, and low education standards, Wang concluded that America contained the seeds of its own destruction.

[Read: All the sad young Chinese professionals]

Wang is now a member of the seven-person Politburo Standing Committee, the pinnacle of power in the Chinese Communist Party. He is also a close adviser to Chinese President Xi Jinping and a key architect of the country’s strategic plans. The themes that Wang identified decades ago—America’s social decay, economic inequality, and political paralysis—are essential to China’s official narrative about the United States.

This is why China believes that the surest path to international power is not through a direct confrontation but through patience. Why should Beijing risk entering a hot war or challenging American leadership in the Middle East or elsewhere when the United States is plainly wearing itself down, militarily, fiscally, and politically? China’s mission, then, is not to seize the moment but to lay the groundwork for its preferred future.

That means fortifying the Communist Party by reducing the country’s vulnerability to outside pressure. Self-reliance is the clear through line of the party’s latest five-year plan. China is working to ensure that it depends less on the world—and that the world depends more on China. Thanks to heavy state investment and subsidies, Chinese firms are duly climbing the industrial value chain in various sectors, including electric vehicles, clean energy, and telecommunications infrastructure. The state is also bolstering domestic alternatives to foreign technologies, such as semiconductors, software, and airplanes. The ambition is not merely to gain market share but to thwart foreign efforts to hobble China’s rise by curbing access to crucial resources and materials.

China is quietly preparing for a time when its economic weight and technological prowess make it the center of gravity in global affairs. China’s leaders are working to engineer a world that runs largely on Chinese artificial intelligence, is powered by Chinese clean-energy technologies, and in which Chinese computer applications improve medical, educational, vocational, and governance outcomes across the globe.

This economic strategy is all part of a grand geopolitical vision. Instead of overthrowing the post–World War II international order outright, Beijing is trying to nudge it to better reflect Chinese preferences. Chinese leaders have long argued that the existing international order narrowly reflects Western priorities—that the rest of the world is far more interested in economic growth than so-called universal values and individual liberties. As both a major power and a country that still identifies with the developing world, China plainly sees itself as well placed to lead a new global order.

Similarly, Beijing chafes at America’s network of security alliances, seeing them as coming at China’s expense. China’s leaders have instead been arguing that security alliances are Cold War relics that do more to divide and inflame tensions than to solve security challenges. Instead of navigating a world in which Washington sits at the center of a web of alliances in Asia and elsewhere, Beijing is keen for countries to prioritize material interests over ideological affinities. This, Chinese leaders believe, would allow China to displace the U.S. at the center of a new map of practical partnerships.

China has heeded this strategy with impressive discipline. Yet the plans rest on assumptions that could easily prove incorrect. China is betting that America’s decline will continue. But the United States has rebounded from dire periods of division and self-doubt before (such as after the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War) and could very well do so again.

Beijing’s export-driven economic agenda may also run up against its limits. As Chinese firms displace competitors across a growing range of industries, foreign governments are responding by raising barriers to shield their domestic producers—in the U.S., the European Union, India, Indonesia, and Mexico, among other places. Instead of acting as a magnet to pull other countries closer, China’s export juggernaut could end up destroying industries across the developed world and fueling resentments and anger toward China in the process.

Beijing’s assumption that neighbors will grow more deferential as they become more economically dependent on China also merits scrutiny. Despite Beijing’s bristling military capacity and growing economic weight, Tokyo and Taipei remain resistant to China’s vision for controlling Taiwan, the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, and surrounding waters. If other Asian countries similarly defy Beijing’s demands for deference, China’s patience strategy starts to look a little less sound.

[Read: What China just learned from the Iran war]

Meanwhile, much of China’s domestic economy is floundering. Beijing’s aggressive investments in manufacturing and technology have enabled dominance in these industries but have also created a deflationary spiral in which the supply of goods well outpaces demand. Growth is slowing. Domestic debt is mounting. The transition to a more advanced, technology-intensive economy is producing social strains, including a record-high youth-unemployment rate. The country’s longevity gains and declining fertility rate also promise a demographic crisis in which fewer working-age adults will be supporting ever more pensioners. These trends complicate China’s plans for economic growth and national security.

Yet China’s leaders remain confident that America’s challenges are more severe than their own. They are making a long-term bet that the United States is hastening a decline that will necessitate a more central and powerful role for China in a new world order. Whether this gamble pays off rests in no small part on what the United States does next.

Checkmate in Iran

2026-05-10T07:00:00-04:00

It’s hard to think of a time when the United States suffered a total defeat in a conflict, a setback so decisive that the strategic loss could be neither repaired nor ignored. The calamitous losses suffered at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and throughout the Western Pacific in the first months of World War II were eventually reversed. The defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan were costly but did not do lasting damage to America’s overall position in the world, because they were far from the main theaters of global competition. The initial failure in Iraq was mitigated by a shift in strategy that ultimately left Iraq relatively stable and unthreatening to its neighbors and kept the United States dominant in the region.

Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done. The Strait of Hormuz will not be “open,” as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world. The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished. Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.

President Trump likes to talk about who has “the cards,” but whether he has any good ones left to play is not clear. The United States and Israel pounded Iran with devastating effectiveness for 37 days, killing much of the country’s leadership and destroying the bulk of its military, yet couldn’t collapse the regime or exact even the smallest concession from it. Now the Trump administration hopes that blockading Iran’s ports will accomplish what massive force could not. It’s possible, of course, but a regime that could not be brought to its knees by five weeks of unrelenting military attack is unlikely to buckle in response to economic pressure alone. Nor does it fear the anger of its populace. As the Iran scholar Suzanne Maloney noted recently, “A regime that slaughtered its own citizens to silence protests in January is fully prepared to impose economic hardships on them now.”

[Read: The YOLO presidency]

Some supporters of the war are therefore calling for the resumption of military strikes, but they cannot explain how another round of bombing will accomplish what 37 days of bombing did not. More military action will inevitably lead Iran to retaliate against neighboring Gulf states; the war’s advocates have no response to that, either. Trump halted attacks on Iran not because he was bored but because Iran was striking the region’s vital oil and gas facilities. The turning point came on March 18, when Israel bombed Iran’s South Pars gas field and Iran retaliated by attacking Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, the world’s largest natural-gas-export plant, causing damage to production capacity that will take years to repair. Trump responded by declaring a moratorium on further strikes against Iran’s energy facilities and then declaring a cease-fire, despite Iran’s not having made a single concession.

The risk calculus that forced Trump to back down a month ago still holds. Even if Trump were to carry out his threat to destroy Iran’s “civilization” through more bombing, Iran would still be able to launch many missiles and drones before its regime went down—assuming it did go down. Just a few successful strikes could cripple the region’s oil and gas infrastructure for years if not decades, throwing the world, and the United States, into a prolonged economic crisis. Even if Trump wanted to bomb Iran as part of an exit strategy—looking tough as a way of masking his retreat—he can’t do that without risking this catastrophe.

If this isn’t checkmate, it’s close. In recent days, Trump has reportedly asked the U.S. intelligence community to assess the consequences of simply declaring victory and walking away. You can’t blame him. Hoping for regime collapse is not much of a strategy, especially when the regime has already survived repeated military and economic pummeling. It could fall tomorrow, or six months from now, or not at all. Trump doesn’t have that much time to wait, as oil climbs toward $150 or even $200 a barrel, inflation rises, and global food and other commodity shortages kick in. He needs a faster resolution.

But any resolution other than America’s effective surrender holds enormous risks that Trump has not so far been willing to take. Those who glibly call on Trump to “finish the job” rarely acknowledge the costs. Unless the U.S. is prepared to engage in a full-scale ground and naval war to remove the current Iranian regime, and then to occupy Iran until a new government can take hold; unless it is prepared to risk the loss of warships convoying tankers through a contested strait; unless it is prepared to accept the devastating long-term damage to the region’s productive capacities likely to result from Iranian retaliation—walking away now could seem like the least bad option. As a political matter, Trump may well feel he has a better chance of riding out defeat than of surviving a much larger, longer, and more expensive war that could still end in failure.

Defeat for the United States, therefore, is not only possible but likely. Here is what defeat looks like.

Iran remains in control of the Strait of Hormuz. The common assumption that, one way or another, the strait will reopen when the crisis ends is unfounded. Iran has no interest in returning to the status quo ante. People talk of a split between hard-liners and moderates in Tehran, but even moderates must understand that Iran cannot afford to let the strait go, no matter how good a deal it thought it could get. For one thing, how reliable is any deal with Trump? He all but boasted of replicating the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by approving the killing of Iran’s leadership amid negotiations. The Iranians cannot be sure that Trump won’t decide to attack again within a few months of striking a deal. They also know that the Israelis may attack again, as they never feel constrained from acting when they perceive their interests to be threatened.

And Israel’s interests will be threatened. As many Iran experts have noted, the regime in Tehran currently stands to emerge from the crisis much stronger than it was before the war, having not only retained its potential nuclear capacity but also gained control of an even more effective weapon: the ability to hold the global energy market hostage. When the Iranians talk of “reopening” the strait, they still mean to keep the strait under their control. Iran will be able not only to demand tolls for passage, but to limit transit to those nations with which it has good relations. If a nation behaves in a way that Iran’s rulers don’t like, they will be able to exact punishment merely by slowing, or even threatening to slow, the flow of that nation’s cargo ships in and out of the strait.

The power to close or control the flow of ships through the strait is greater and more immediate than the theoretical power of Iran’s nuclear program. This leverage will allow the leaders in Tehran to force nations to lift sanctions and normalize relations or face penalties. Israel will find itself more isolated than ever, as Iran grows richer, rearms, and preserves its options to go nuclear in the future. It may even find itself unable to go after Iran’s proxies: In a world where Iran wields influence over the energy supply of so many nations, Israel could face enormous international pressure not to provoke Tehran in Lebanon, Gaza, or anywhere else.

The new status quo in the strait will also occasion a substantial shift in relative power and influence both regionally and globally. In the region, the United States will have proved itself a paper tiger, forcing the Gulf and other Arab states to accommodate Iran. As the Iran scholars Reuel Gerecht and Ray Takeyh wrote recently, “The Gulf Arab economies were built under the umbrella of American hegemony. Take that away—and the freedom of navigation that goes with it—and the Gulf states will ineluctably go begging to Tehran.”

[Read: America is now a rogue superpower]

They will not be the only ones. All nations that depend on energy from the Gulf will have to work out their own arrangements with Iran. What choice will they have? If the United States with its mighty Navy can’t or won’t open the strait, no coalition of forces with just a fraction of the Americans’ capability will be able to, either. The Anglo-French initiative to police the strait after a cease-fire is a bit of a joke. French President Emmanuel Macron has made it clear that this “coalition” will operate only under peaceful conditions in the strait: It will escort ships, but only if they don’t need an escort. Yet with Iran in control, the strait is not going to be safe again for a long time. China presumably has some influence over Tehran, but even China cannot force open the strait by itself.

One effect of this transformation may be an expanding great-power naval race. In the past, most of the world’s nations, including China, counted on the United States to both prevent and address such emergencies. Now the nations in Europe and Asia that depend on access to the Persian Gulf’s resources are helpless against the loss of energy supplies that are vital to their economic and political stability. How long can they tolerate this before they start building their own fleets, as a means of wielding influence in an every-nation-for-itself world where order and predictability have broken down?

The American defeat in the Gulf will have broader global ramifications as well. The whole world can see that just a few weeks of war with a second-rank power have reduced American weapons stocks to perilously low levels, with no quick remedy in sight. The questions this raises about America’s readiness for another major conflict may or may not prompt Xi Jinping to launch an attack on Taiwan, or Vladimir Putin to step up his aggression against Europe. But at the very least America’s allies in East Asia and Europe must wonder about American staying power in the event of future conflicts.

The global adjustment to a post-American world is accelerating. America’s once-dominant position in the Gulf is just the first of many casualties.

The Real Cost of Withdrawing U.S. Troops From Germany

2026-05-09T08:00:00-04:00

While the high-security corridors of Washington and Berlin are occupied with a frantic, transactional debate over NATO burden sharing and the fallout of the Iran blockade, a far more profound rupture is occurring in the quiet streets of the Rhineland-Palatinate.

President Trump announced last week that the United States will remove 5,000 troops from Germany, possibly as the beginning of a larger drawdown. Pentagon planners anticipate a phased reduction over the next 12 months that could see the total U.S. presence in Germany drop significantly. Some analysts believe that the administration ultimately favors rotating troops in and out of Europe rather than permanently basing them there.

Americans have been stationed in Germany by the tens of thousands since the end of World War II. Some 50,000 Americans—including military personnel, civilian employees, and their families—populate the Kaiserslautern Military Community, which includes Ramstein Air Base. The remainder of the U.S. presence is concentrated in strategic hubs such as Wiesbaden, the headquarters of the U.S. Army Europe and Africa, and the training grounds of Grafenwoehr and Vilseck in Bavaria, where thousands of soldiers maintain a rotational readiness. The initial 5,000-troop reduction will likely be drawn primarily from forces stationed around Vilseck and Grafenwoehr.

[Read: Europe without America]

Pundits in the United States are framing the move as a strategic rightsizing or a punitive diplomatic strike. But to view the exodus from Ramstein and Landstuhl through the narrow lens of defense budgets is to miss that it portends the tragic collapse of an 80-year-old social contract. The withdrawal from Germany is a step toward the liquidation of the shared West—a cultural and human project that was never written into a treaty and, once lost, can never be reacquired.

For eight decades, the American presence in Germany was the bedrock of Western stability, not only because of the nuclear warheads or the C-130 transport planes, but also because of the bakeries, the playgrounds, and the cross-cultural marriages that formed a “Little America” in the heart of Europe. As the first 5,000 troops depart over the next few months, the conversation between two cultures will fade into silence.

The dominant media narrative suggests that Germany is ready—or at least being forced—to finally embrace strategic autonomy. This is a polite fiction. When a stabilizing power withdraws, it rarely leaves behind a robust local alternative. It leaves a vacuum that is filled less often by autonomy than by resentment and predatory external influences.

In the towns surrounding Ramstein Air Base, the “divorce” is a visceral economic and social shock. These bases were never just logistical hubs; they were also among the largest employers in rural regions that have known no other reality since 1945. Thousands of German nationals work directly for the U.S. military in this corridor, and many more jobs are indirectly tethered to the American consumer. When Washington pulls the plug on a brigade combat team, it will eviscerate a middle-class ecosystem. The local German Bäckerei (“bakery”) that tailored its recipes to American tastes for three generations isn’t going to pivot to a new European security architecture. It is simply going to close. The tragedy of the Ramstein withdrawal is that it kills the most important conversation of all: the one between neighbors.

The “Little Americas” of Kaiserslautern, a bustling hub known as K-Town that serves as the gateway to Ramstein, and Wiesbaden, the sophisticated Hessian capital that hosts the Army’s continental command center, provided the U.S. with something that trillions of dollars in diplomacy could never buy: ground-level affinity. For 80 years, a young German growing up in the Rhineland didn’t view America as a distant superpower on a screen; they viewed it as the family next door that shared its Thanksgiving turkey. This human integration was the soul of the alliance.

[From the January 2026 issue: The new German war machine]

The U.S. administration has suggested that the troop withdrawal was meant to punish German Chancellor Friedrich Merz for criticizing Washington’s Iran policy. But in fact it punishes the pro-American German middle class. In 10 years, a generation of German leaders will have grown up without an American neighbor. They will view the United States as a distant, volatile landlord: transactional, unreliable, and, ultimately, foreign.

Washington claims, not for the first time, that it is pivoting to the Indo-Pacific. But gutting the European garrison in this pursuit is counterproductive. As the U.S. seeks to build new “latticework” alliances in the Philippines, Vietnam, and across the South Asian rim, it is simultaneously destroying the only successful blueprint it has for long-term influence.

Influence is not a commodity that can be switched on like a light bulb when a crisis erupts in the South China Sea. It is a slow-growing crop. The Ramstein model is one of deep, messy social and economic integration, and it is exactly what the U.S. will need if it hopes to stay relevant in an Asian century. By discarding it in a fit of pique, Washington is signaling to every Asian ally that American commitment is now a seasonal product, subject to the vagaries of the current election cycle.

Over the next year, departing troops will leave behind ghost towns that will stand as monuments to a lost era of American leadership. Washington is trading hard-won cultural capital for a momentary win in a diplomatic spat. The silence in the Rhineland won’t just be the absence of jet engines; it will be the sound of the American century drawing its final, lonely breath.

The Iranian Royalists’ Thuggish Edge

2026-05-08T07:00:00-04:00

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In early February, while much of the world was focused on a looming war in the Persian Gulf, an outspoken Iranian exile named Masood Masjoody disappeared in Canada. Days later, 10 other well-known diaspora figures were tagged in a menacing anonymous message on X: “Soon you’ll have to find the corpses of many.”

But when Masjoody’s body was found in March, the investigation did not point toward the Islamic Republic. Instead, the Canadian police brought murder charges against two followers of Reza Pahlavi, the 65-year-old son of Iran’s last shah and the most prominent leader in the Iranian opposition. Masjoody, a fierce critic of Pahlavi’s, had been denouncing the prince’s movement for months and had singled out the two suspects by name, saying that they were plotting to silence him.

The murder, in other words, appears to have been part of a war within the Iranian opposition—one that pits Pahlavi against a growing host of critics who see him and his movement as dangerously autocratic.

This rift has revolved in part around Pahlavi’s decision to hitch his movement to Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In late February, well before the American and Israeli military campaign against Iran began, Pahlavi and his supporters telegraphed their eagerness for war, claiming that more than 100,000 defectors were waiting to help the former crown prince usher in a new era. Pahlavi seemed almost to expect the kind of welcome granted to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who flew back from exile to Tehran in 1979 and was greeted by millions of adoring people and the banner headline, “He Has Returned.”

Pahlavi has not returned. More than two months into the war, the Strait of Hormuz is still blocked, and the Iranian regime is still firmly in place. Pahlavi and many of his supporters have made clear that they feel betrayed by the peace talks now under way and are hungry for more air strikes.

“The war didn’t go according to my liking,” one prominent Pahlavi supporter who is on the board of the prince’s nonprofit posted on X, adding that the regime’s people were “animals” and that Tehran “should have been bombed with 5,000 targets daily.”

The prince’s critics, meanwhile, have lashed out more angrily than ever, calling him an Israeli stooge, a fascist, a dullard presiding over a noxious, warlike cult. “A man with inherited privilege, no serious achievement, a talent for drifting with the wind, and a remarkable ability to keep millions emotionally invested while delivering little beyond contradiction, illusion, and disappointment,” Nik Kowsar, a well-known journalist and cartoonist who was once close to Pahlavi, wrote in April.

These bitter judgments are the expression of a split that has been widening for years. Some say that Pahlavi stands out from a feckless opposition movement as the only viable alternative to the Islamic Republic. In the past decade, Pahlavi has employed young advisers who have adopted MAGA-style tactics and openly embraced Israel. The prince’s acolytes credit this approach with elevating him from a quixotic royal aspirant to a real contender for leadership in a future Iran. And it does seem to have made a difference: Thousands of protesters inside Iran chanted Pahlavi’s name during the enormous protests that began in late December.

[Arash Azizi: The Iranian opposition’s urgent task]

But Pahlavi’s campaign, like the populist movements it emulates, has a thuggish edge that is alienating many potential supporters even as it energizes his base. Although Pahlavi continues to say that he favors a diverse and democratic opposition, his advisers and followers, many of them committed monarchists, routinely threaten and insult anyone who is not entirely loyal to the man they see as a future king. “You are either with Prince Reza Pahlavi or with the Islamic Republic,” Saeed Ghasseminejad, the prince’s economic adviser, posted on X earlier this year.

“They’ve been inciting hatred against Pahlavi’s critics for years now, and they’ve been warned this would result in something bad,” Alireza Nader, a policy analyst who was once close to the prince, told me. Masjoody’s killing appears to have vindicated those warnings.

It has also sharpened the contradiction at the heart of Pahlavi’s movement: The former crown prince says that he wants a democratic future for Iran, but his aides and supporters treat him like a monarch whose word cannot be questioned. One prominent Iranian American in the tech industry who, like several others, asked not to be named because of the climate of online harassment, told me of a stark division in the wealthy networks in which Pahlavi has tried to raise money: “Some say Pahlavi’s the only one. Others say, ‘Why replace one dictator with another?’”

Demonstrators in Washington, D.C., wave American and pre-1979 Iranian flags in March, 2026. (Amid Farahi/ AFP / Getty)

Some of Pahlavi’s older associates told me that they are baffled by the belligerent rhetoric of his aides and supporters. They speak of Pahlavi as a kind and decent man whose political brand was always rooted in nonviolent resistance. He was a devotee of Gene Sharp, an American theorist of nonviolence whose work helped guide democracy movements around the world. Pahlavi’s motto for decades was “Today, only unity,” signaling his belief in a cohesive opposition front against the regime.

The makeover appears to have begun about 10 years ago, when Pahlavi brought on two new deputies—Ghasseminejad and another young adviser named Amir Etemadi—who were openly aligned with autocratic movements in the United States and abroad. Ghasseminejad spent eight years as an economic analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a right-wing think bank based in Washington, D.C., that has for years been closely allied with Netanyahu and his government.

The younger men had a flattering message for their new boss. They grew up in Iran under the Islamic Republic; Pahlavi, by contrast, has not set foot in his native country since 1978, before the revolution that overthrew his father. They knew firsthand that Pahlavi’s brand was changing inside Iran. The hatred of the Pahlavi dynasty that fueled the 1979 revolution had faded, and a nostalgia for prerevolutionary Iran began to spread. The London-based satellite-television channel Manoto, founded in 2010, broadcast gauzy images and documentaries about the zaman-e shah—“the era of the shah”—featuring carefree Iranians at parties and on beaches, with rarely any mention of SAVAK, the shah’s brutal secret-police agency.

Pahlavi’s new advisers believed that the prince was poised to capitalize on this nostalgia, and on a newly revolutionary mood that came alongside it. Ghasseminejad declined to meet with me, but in emailed responses to my questions he told me that Iran has gone through a “fundamental political transformation” over the past decade because Iranians have lost faith in the idea that the regime could be reformed. A movement to overthrow the ruling clerics has spread, he wrote, and Pahlavi has “actively represented and cultivated” those insurgent forces, using a patriotic language rooted in “Iran’s glorious heritage.”

Some former members of Pahlavi’s circle seemed to endorse Ghasseminejad’s comments. “Saeed is a smart guy, and he understood the dynamic of what motivates Iranians, at least the Persian majority,” one person who knows Pahlavi and the advisers well told me. He asked not to be named, saying that he did not want to become a target of the prince’s supporters.

But Pahlavi’s advisers also appeared to be anointing him as a king—the heir to Iran’s “glorious heritage” of a 2,500-year-old monarchy. And that seems to have entailed going to war against anyone who did not acknowledge his primacy. One person who has worked with Ghasseminejad and Etemadi told me that these advisers to Pahlavi believe that “crushing the opposition is as important as fighting the regime. They really believe Pahlavi can’t be effective unless he’s the only voice.”

Ghasseminejad and Etemadi did not take long to start making enemies. In 2018, Kowsar, who was close to Pahlavi at the time, clashed with the two new advisers. They were behaving like “Rottweilers”—obsequious to Pahlavi, and hostile and rude to everyone else—he told me. “I fled Iran to save my life and spare myself further harm, but the conduct of your associates has only brought back memories of the Islamic Republic,” Kowsar wrote in an email to Pahlavi in July of that year. Soon afterward, Pahlavi’s associates began attacking him online, Kowsar told me, calling him corrupt and a lackey of the Iranian regime, and demanding that he “shut up.” When Kowsar’s elderly father died in Iran, in 2024, some of the same people posted insults about the dead man, even though he had suffered for years at the hands of the regime.

[From the May 2026 issue: Someday in Tehran]

Another opposition figure who fell afoul of Pahlavi’s young advisers was Masjoody, a mathematician and an activist based in Canada. He, too, started off as an admirer of the prince. He belonged to an Iranian exile network called Iran Revival, together with Ghasseminejad and Etemadi. But Masjoody soon became disillusioned, and before long, he was one of the Pahlavi movement’s most forceful and outspoken critics, frequently posting and relaying scornful comments about the prince and his entourage. (One sample, translated roughly from Farsi: “With the genitalia of Trump and Netanyahu, you cannot become the nation’s bride in politics, and even if you did, you wouldn’t make it to the end of the honeymoon.”) Eventually, Masjoody became convinced that Pahlavi’s two young advisers were secretly working for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He filed dozens of lawsuits and made some claims that could seem unhinged—among them, that two Pahlavi supporters, Mehdi Ahmadzadeh Razavi and Arezou Soltani, were plotting to kill him.

Masjoody’s body was found on March 6, and the Canadian police charged Razavi and Soltani with first-degree murder soon after. One of the affidavits in the case suggests that the accused pair met with a naturopath in Vancouver in an effort to procure a deadly substance to “get rid of” Masjoody.

Masjoody was last seen alive on February 2. On February 5, the X post menacing diaspora figures with a reference to “corpses” went out. One of the recipients was Kowsar, who had been in touch with Masjoody in the weeks before his murder. “It wasn’t like those online attacks I’ve received all these years,” Kowsar said. “This one was scary.”

There is no reason to think that Pahlavi or his advisers are linked to Masjoody’s murder, and I could not find any evidence for Masjoody’s claims that the IRGC is secretly supporting the prince. But the killing has left a legacy of fear and bolstered the sense that Pahlavi’s movement includes its own share of fanatics.

Reza Pahlavi (right), meets with Israeli Minister of Intelligence Gila Gamliel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in West Jerusalem in 2023. (Israeli Ministry of Intelligence / Anadolu Agency / Getty)

Pahlavi’s new advisers appear to have pushed him to a decision that would further set him apart from the rest of the Iranian opposition. In April 2023, he went to Israel, where he was received warmly by government officials, including Netanyahu and the intelligence minister, Gila Gamliel. Pahlavi conducted himself like a prospective head of state, vowing that a post–Islamic Republic Iran would instantly recognize Israel.

“That put him on the map,” Mehrdad Marty Youssefiani, a political consultant who worked with Pahlavi until 2015, told me. “It broke a taboo, and it did a lot to propel him to a different stage.” Many Iranians seem to have assumed that Pahlavi’s aspirations now had the backroom blessing of the world’s power brokers.

The visit was also intensely divisive. The Iranian opposition was asking itself hard questions because the regime had just successfully quelled some of the largest demonstrations in the country’s history, in late 2022. Pahlavi’s message was clear: He now seemed to believe that he spoke for the opposition, and he was firmly allied with Netanyahu, despite the fact that in 2023, much of the Israeli population was protesting Netanyahu’s autocratic agenda, in the largest demonstrations in that country’s history.

One result of Pahlavi’s Israel trip became apparent within months. In mid-2023, an expert on social-media manipulation named Geoff Golberg published a report for the National Iranian American Council documenting a widespread, coordinated social-media campaign that involved inauthentic accounts praising Pahlavi and demeaning people and organizations (including NIAC) that favored American diplomacy with the Islamic Republic. The report identified 4,765 accounts that were posting more than 100 times a day, producing 843 million tweets. Golberg found links among some of these accounts and official Israeli government accounts. Last fall, the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz published an investigation that amplified Golberg’s conclusions and documented the existence of a “private entity that receives government support” in Israel, which was dedicated to promoting Pahlavi and had recruited native Farsi speakers to help.

Pahlavi has other powerful patrons. Iran International, a satellite-television network set up under Saudi auspices in 2017, has heavily promoted him. The network appears to have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years and has kept its ownership and finances a secret.

Some of Pahlavi’s critics—including Trita Parsi, the co-founder of NIAC—have labeled him an astroturf candidate who has cynically courted political sponsors instead of building grassroots support. But the border between the online and real worlds is permeable, and Pahlavi does appear to be genuinely popular in Iran. Measuring opinion is notoriously difficult in police states, but a 2024 survey by the Group for Measuring and Analyzing Attitudes in Iran found that 31 percent of respondents supported Pahlavi, more than three times the level of support for any other figure. Iran’s supreme leader at the time, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was tied with former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at 9 percent, and Narges Mohammadi, the imprisoned human-rights activist, rated only 5 percent.

[Thomas Wright: The real reason Iran hasn’t struck a deal]

By far the greatest test of Pahlavi’s support came in late December, when the value of the rial collapsed and protesters began flooding the streets of Tehran and other major Iranian cities. For the first time, large numbers of people began chanting Pahlavi’s name and asking for his return. A week later, Pahlavi issued a call for nationwide protests on January 8 and 9. The demonstrations expanded dramatically on those days, possibly in response to Pahlavi’s claim that more than 50,000 members of Iran’s security forces and government had contacted him to defect from the regime (he later claimed the number was more than 100,000). As the protests went on, Pahlavi continued to urge people to come out, saying that the ruling system was “on the verge of collapse.”

The regime’s apparatus did not collapse. The authorities cut off all internet access on January 8, and in the days that followed, the IRGC and other armed forces began the bloodiest crackdown in Iran’s modern history; estimates of the death toll range from 7,000 to more than 36,000 (Pahlavi has recently begun saying that 50,000 were killed).

Afterward, Pahlavi came under widespread criticism for having encouraged people to protest and for the flimsiness of his claims about defectors, which may have given people a false sense of safety. There was never any verifiable evidence for Pahlavi’s assertion, and critics have said that the system he set up to log defections using QR codes and Google Forms was ripe for infiltration by Iran’s security services, which may have artificially inflated the results or even used the platform to identify and punish those who used it in earnest.

Oddly, Pahlavi’s own team has at times undermined the strategy of luring defectors by signaling their hunger for revenge. Ghasseminejad has repeatedly posted about his desire to go after regime officials once they have been overthrown, and even to see them hanged. Some critics have suggested that these threats may have served to unify the security services and wed them to their campaign of repression at a moment when they could have been vulnerable to doubt or division.

Pahlavi’s supporters have not been daunted by criticism. More than 200,000 people rallied in Munich in February to call for regime change, and many chanted Pahlavi’s name, some of them using nationalist slogans. Pahlavi was there for that city’s annual security conference, and the CNN host Christiane Amanpour asked him during a televised interview if he would repudiate the aggressive behavior of some of his loyalists. Pahlavi responded by saying that he was against any kind of intimidation. He added, “I think the regime is behind a lot of these campaigns.”

Evidence indeed suggests that the regime’s cyberarmy has tried to fuel tensions within the opposition, sometimes in the guise of monarchists. But Amanpour’s point was proved just after she made it, when a group of Pahlavi supporters approached her at the Munich event and began shouting angrily and accusing her of collaborating with the regime.

Reza Pahlavi addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference in Grapevine, Texas, in March, 2026. (Desiree Rios / The New York Times / Redux)

After Trump declared a cease-fire with Iran on April 7, Pahlavi posted a speech to his supporters, saying that he knew the decision “has disheartened many of you.” He embarked on a tour of Europe, preaching regime change and accusing the British government (which did not participate in the war) of appeasement.

But his critics in the opposition are now louder than ever, and late last month, one of the most prominent monarchists inside Iran, a political prisoner named Manouchehr Bakhtiari, joined them. “Among those who claim to support monarchy, it is you who, more than anyone, have turned your back on what you swore to uphold and on the institution of monarchy itself,” Bakhtiari said in a lacerating audio message addressed to Pahlavi.

Pahlavi’s appeals for more bombing have taken on a desperate sound now that Trump is visibly fed up with the war. I asked one prominent Pahlavi supporter how he would propose to deal with the Islamic Republic now that so many strategies seem to have failed.

“If the U.S. military could secure a landing for the crown prince within a city in Iran, that would make the difference,” he told me. “I think it would be over for the IRGC.”

I was taken aback, and not just by the implausibility of this scenario. Pahlavi might well be unwilling to make such a risky trip. This is the man who told an interviewer back in 2023: “My life has been for the past 40 years here in America. My children live here, my friends live here, everybody that I know is here. If I was to go back, what do I go back to?”

As for the people of Iran, they may now be more vulnerable than ever to the hard-line forces this war was meant to weaken. One Iranian who fled his country earlier this year told me that he believes Pahlavi retains some popularity inside the country, but only as a kind of phantom, “an absence of something rather than an existence. People, desperate in confronting the authoritarian regime, were seeking someone or something who could fill the void of a person or thing that could set things in order, like a Second Coming.”

They are still seeking to fill that void.

No One Knows What to Do About Britain’s Exploding Anti-Semitism

2026-05-07T10:13:55-04:00

The surveillance video begins with a seemingly innocent scene: A Jewish man stands next to a bus shelter, adjusting his yarmulke. Suddenly, he is pummeled by a passerby and stabbed repeatedly until he is propelled off-screen. The victim’s skullcap, which had fallen into the street, slowly wafts away in the wind.

This assault was the culmination of a violent spree that has shocked many in Britain. Last Wednesday, according to authorities, a man named Essa Suleiman allegedly attacked Ishmail Hussein, an acquaintance he’d known for decades, in South London. He then traveled eight miles to Golders Green, one of the most Jewish areas in the United Kingdom, and stabbed two random Jewish men in religious garb whom he did not know, including the one at the bus stop, before finally being apprehended. The two victims, ages 34 and 76, were hospitalized but survived.

On its own, this incident would be disturbing. But the Golders Green onslaught was just the latest in a series of escalating anti-Semitic attacks across Britain, and the third one in five weeks in the same Jewish community. This past month, multiple synagogues in Golders Green were targeted by arsonists, as was another Jewish institution. The month prior, four ambulances owned by Hatzola, the local Jewish-run charity-ambulance service, were set on fire and destroyed. Last week, Hatzola medics used their remaining resources to treat the victims of the Golders Green stabbing attack. And yet, despite pious protestations from politicians, the country appears to have no idea how to prevent any of this from happening.

[Yair Rosenberg: ‘The more I’m around young people, the more panicked I am’]

Last October, a man named Jihad al-Shamie drove his car into a Manchester synagogue and began stabbing worshippers, one of whom was killed in the subsequent crossfire with police. In February, the Community Security Trust, which tracks anti-Semitic activity in Britain, announced a grim milestone: “For the first time ever, CST recorded over 200 cases of anti-Jewish hate in every calendar month in 2025.” One of Britain’s oldest minorities now feels itself under siege. “British Jews are super concentrated in NW London,” wrote Ben Judah, the author of This is London and a former adviser to the British government, on social media. “There are only 250k of us. Roughly around 100k of us live in this area and surrounding areas. It’s like a small town that’s now under sustained attack.”

The responses to the stabbings in Golders Green help explain how this predicament arose—and why it continues. Even as the victims were still in the hospital, an array of online apologists associated with Britain’s ascendant hard-left explained away the incident and its implications. Some pointed to the reported mental-health issues of the assailant, as though this somehow excluded an anti-Semitic motive. Whatever the alleged perpetrator’s internal demons, he didn’t travel across London to attack Presbyterians. He went to a historic Jewish neighborhood and attempted to kill Jews. The initial altercation with his acquaintance was a common crime; the knifings in Golders Green were hate crimes.

Other commenters attempted to change the subject from the attacker’s treatment of his Jewish victims to the police’s treatment of the attacker. “Contemptible abuse of police power,” read a representative post on X. “Why kick him in the head several times when he’s already tasered & in your control?” Some called for the suspension or imprisonment of the police officers. In reality, as the full video of the confrontation showed, the police were not gratuitously roughing up the alleged assailant; they were attempting to disarm him as he was actively refusing to relinquish his knife despite repeated instructions.

These deflections were soon distilled into a single post that was addressed to Britain’s police commissioner, Mark Rowley, and reshared by Zack Polanski, the leader of the country’s Green Party: “So essentially [Rowley’s] officers were repeatedly and violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head when he was already incapacitated by taser.” (Polanski, who is Jewish, later apologized in a statement “for sharing a tweet in haste.”)

Some seemed inclined to shift blame from the anti-Semitic attacker to Jews themselves. Suleiman made no reported claims about Israel during his London rampage. But this did not stop some commentators from attempting to make the story about Israel, and implying that British Jews played a role in their own persecution because they were not expressing the right opinions about Israel at the right volume. “The UK Jewish community could help to damp down the likelihood of such outrages by making it clear that it is as appalled by the brutality of Israeli policy as almost everyone else is,” wrote Sir Tony Brenton, a former British ambassador to Russia.

“Jews, like everyone else, are entitled to protection from attack and murder without having to agree with Sir Tony’s analysis of foreign policy,” retorted two members of the House of Lords. “He overlooks the facts that the Jewish community in this country has a wide range of opinions on Israel and that the antisemites responsible for recent outrages do not care about the views of the people they are trying to kill. All that matters to them is that they are Jewish.”

The refusal to acknowledge overt anti-Jewish prejudice in Britain is one reason the prejudice persists and proliferates. But the responses to Golders Green that do recognize the problem have also fallen short.

Before and after the assault, many politicians called to ban pro-Palestine protests—which have at times featured anti-Semitic iconography and chants—in the country’s capital. “It pains me to say this, but I think we may have reached a point where we need to have a moratorium on the sorts of marches that have been happening,” Jonathan Hall, the U.K.’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said last week. “It’s clearly impossible at the moment for any of these pro-Palestine marches not to incubate within them some sort of anti-Semitic or demonising language.”

Chants such as “Globalize the intifada” certainly continue to age poorly as Jews are stabbed, firebombed, and shot around the world by bigots purporting to act in the name of Palestine. But many participating in pro-Palestine marches do not harbor violent hate for Jewish people, and throttling their free expression in order to punish a mendacious minority will sweep up innocents and stoke resentment.

Speech policing is particularly perilous in the case of anti-Semitism, because anti-Semites claim that a powerful cabal of perfidious Jews is covertly controlling society behind the scenes. Efforts to castigate anti-Jewish bigots are thus easily twisted into confirmation of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. As the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland put it, “We will be blamed for censoring free expression, cast as the shadowy string-pullers who put a gag on everyone else.” Big Government cracking down on speech is quickly refashioned as the machinations of the Jews.

Heavy-handed tactics can also make offending speech seem more transgressive and alluring, and turn malign actors into martyrs. But such approaches are being championed by the country’s rising hard right, just as the deflections from the problem are being promoted by the hard left. The result: The most energized voices in British politics are the ones with the least serious solutions.

[David Frum: Anti-Semitism is becoming mainstream]

Meanwhile, the historically unpopular Prime Minister Keir Starmer has so far resisted shutting down the pro-Palestine protests, even as he has condemned slogans such as “Globalize the intifada” as “calling for terrorism against Jews.” Instead, the British police have allocated 25 million pounds in emergency funding to secure Jewish communities. But there are some things money can’t buy.

“We want normal to be like normal is for everyone else,” said Barry Frankfurt, a synagogue president who was interviewed by BBC Radio alongside his daughter. “But it’s not. Normal for us is that when Libby was 5 in primary school, she was told what the code word was that meant she had to hide under the table. Now she’s 16 and she says she goes to a school and her bus is checked routinely.”

“The response broadly is: ‘We know we have a problem, and the answer we’re gonna give is that we’re gonna spend more money on making sure that there can be Jewish buildings which have even higher gates and even more security guards,’” Frankfurt continued. “And that isn’t solving the problem.” Across the political spectrum in Britain, no one seems to know what will.

The Real Reason Iran Hasn’t Struck a Deal

2026-05-01T09:42:49-04:00

On Monday, Iran made Donald Trump an offer: It would open the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for lifting the U.S. blockade while nuclear negotiations continued. On Wednesday, Trump rejected this offer, promising to keep the blockade in place until Iran agrees to America’s terms on the nuclear issue. The blockade “is genius,” he said, and “now they have to cry uncle. That’s all they have to do. Just say, ‘We give up.’”

The Trump administration’s explanation for this standoff is that there is an “absolute fracture” in the Iranian regime between the military and the negotiators. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News that “unfortunately, the hard-liners with an apocalyptic vision of the future have the ultimate power in that country,” especially because the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is “untested” and “has not been seen.”

The administration now appears to be gaming out a new course of action: strikes targeting not Iran’s military capacity but the faction inside the regime that it believes is blocking a deal. The president recently reposted a video of the Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen calling for an aerial campaign to do exactly this. According to Axios, the military has prepared options for a “short and powerful” wave of strikes, which General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, briefed to the president yesterday.

The timing of such a move is complicated because of Trump’s state visit to China scheduled for mid-May, which has been postponed once before. Strikes could happen within the next few days, so as to precede the trip, or they could come immediately after it.

But the assumption underlying this approach is almost certainly wrong. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has proved far more resilient than either Washington or Jerusalem anticipated. An institution that has survived multiple rounds of air strikes, international isolation, and the death of much of its senior leadership does not capitulate because a few more names are removed from the org chart. And hard-liners are spread throughout the regime, not just in the IRGC.

Iran and the United States have failed to come to an agreement not because hard-liners are blocking pragmatists inside Iran, but because both sides seem to sincerely believe that they have won the war.

According to Trump, the United States has destroyed Iran’s navy and air force, many of its missiles, and much of its military and industrial capacity. But the Iranian regime sees mainly that it has withstood a war that has aimed to topple it, has demonstrated its ability to attack the Persian Gulf and Israel, and has succeeded in controlling the Strait of Hormuz.

[Read: Iran had a doomsday weapon all along]

During talks in Islamabad, the U.S. negotiating team, led by J. D. Vance, found that Iran was entirely unresponsive to American demands regarding its nuclear program. Instead of going back to war, Trump opted for a blockade, which Vance reportedly believed would cause Iran to give in after a few days.

But Iran has resisted U.S. demands to completely cease enriching uranium, and to curb its missile program, for years. It has gone to war with the United States and Israel twice rather than concede those points. The Iranian regime is not likely to give away at the negotiating table what it believes America was unable to gain through war.

The Trump administration seemed to expect that the blockade would collapse the Iranian oil industry in a matter of weeks. On April 27, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent posted on social media: “While the surviving IRGC Leaders are trapped like drowning rats in a sewage pipe, Iran’s creaking oil industry is starting to shut in production thanks to the U.S. BLOCKADE. Pumping will soon collapse.” But the Iranians have endured decades of sanctions: They have experience in adjusting their oil industry to cope with reduced demand. They also benefited from a financial windfall at the start of the conflict, when the U.S. lifted sanctions on their oil exports.

Tehran likely calculates that it can outlast the United States in absorbing economic hardship, especially because Trump will face domestic political pressure in the run-up to the midterm elections in the fall. Nor is Iran likely to wait for an economic crisis. If the United States appears to be hunkered down for the long haul, Iran’s leadership may set its sights on blocking off other choke points—for instance, getting the Houthis to close the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and is essential to traffic through the Suez Canal.

Earlier in the war, the U.S. president seriously considered escalatory moves, such as attacking Iranian infrastructure and sending ground troops to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Now Trump seems reluctant to take these steps, perhaps recognizing that they could lead to retaliatory strikes on infrastructure in the Gulf States and a bloodier and more protracted conflict. He may see a limited wave of strikes as less risky, but Iran will retaliate against these too.

[Read: The Iran war’s ramifications have only just begun]

Should Trump restart the war and actually succeed in limiting the fighting to a couple of days, the likelihood is that he will end up back where he is now—with Iran rejecting his demands. And if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed for most of May, the costs will accumulate globally. The World Bank estimates that the current supply shock on oil may already be the largest ever. It’s about to get much worse.

Energy and refined-petroleum products from the Gulf have continued to reach the market over the past couple of months, via ships and tankers that transited the strait before the war began. Now that traffic has stopped. Stockpiles have been drawn down. Refined products such as fertilizer and petrochemicals will soon be in short supply. This will affect the rest of the world much more than it will the United States, so the Trump administration may be tempted to shrug it off. The United States may even try to introduce limits on the export of oil, but the pressure on gas prices and inflation will undoubtedly take a toll.

If Trump doesn’t foresee continuing the blockade into the fall, he will confront a choice. He could try to strike a deal with Iran that offers sanctions relief and is stronger than the 2015 nuclear deal—with a longer timeline and more restrictions on enrichment—but that would not fully abolish Iran’s nuclear program and would not address its missiles. The strait would be fully reopened, but Iran would retain the capacity to close it in the event of more Israeli strikes.

Alternatively, he could accept an arrangement like the one the Iranians offered this week, in which the strait reopens but nothing else is settled. The U.S. would give up its embargo without securing a deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program or limit its missiles, and the Iranians would reopen the strait without getting sanctions relief.

Some of America’s allies in the Middle East, particularly Israel and the United Arab Emirates, may prefer the second option over the first if they can’t persuade the United States to resume the war against Iran and stick with it for as long as it takes. These countries care a great deal about Iranian missiles and regional power. They know that the country’s nuclear program has already been significantly set back, and they may not wish to see a deal that lifts sanctions without limiting Iran’s missile program or preventing it from reconstituting its proxy network. They may also worry that a nuclear deal would prevent the U.S. from restarting the war so long as the strait remains open and Iran does not breach its nuclear commitments.

The Israelis may calculate that without a nuclear agreement, they can retain the option of striking Iran again in the coming years, and that the Iranian regime, without sanctions relief, is likelier to face an economic crisis that could lead to its collapse.

The United States went to war to deal the Islamic Republic a devastating blow from which it would never recover. The war has damaged Iran’s military capacity, but it also has handed Tehran more leverage over global energy markets and the Gulf States than it has ever possessed. A wave of limited strikes won’t reverse this outcome, and it would not help Trump avoid the difficult choice he still faces between bad options.

Iran’s Leaders Mostly Want a Deal

2026-05-01T07:00:00-04:00

According to the Trump administration’s latest messaging, talks between the United States and Iran are deadlocked because of infighting in Tehran. The military hard-liners of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps must be stopping the civilian diplomats from making a deal. Or, to put it in President Trump’s words, “Iran is having a very hard time figuring out who their leader is!” (This supposition conveniently makes sense of the president’s claim that Iran has “agreed to everything” alongside Iran’s denial that this is so.)

The explanation, which has gained some currency in U.S. media, is at best half-true. Quite a bit of infighting is indeed happening within the Iranian regime. However, it does not map neatly onto a military-versus-civilian divide, and it does not suggest that Iran’s negotiating team is disempowered to speak for the country. Such theories reflect a misunderstanding of Iran’s complex system and do little to advance American diplomatic aims.

Consider the role of Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the man who led the Islamabad talks with Vice President Vance. His American interlocutors can’t quite decide where to place him in their schema of Iran’s internal politics. That might be because the sources of, and limits on, his authority range across the military-civilian binary.

[Nancy A. Youssef and Jonathan Lemire: The Iran war’s ramifications have only just begun]

Qalibaf is the speaker of Iran’s Parliament, but he has amassed power mostly through his membership on the Supreme National Security Council and its smaller subsidiary, the Defense Council. The Defense Council was founded last summer to consolidate Iran’s military leadership, and though it has nine members, Qalibaf is effectively the first among equals, which means he is all but running the war effort. He owes this to the broad authority he carries within the IRGC: He was one of its top regional commanders during the war with Iraq in the 1980s, and he later headed its construction wing and air force and helped build up its missile program.

Qaibaf is also a power-hungry technocrat. He is known to be competent but brutal. He was national police chief in the early 2000s, during which time he played a part in imprisoning dissident writers and intellectuals, and he has bragged about his role in suppressing protests in 1999 and 2003, among other occasions. He has a reputation for corruption, having been accused of using his three terms as Tehran mayor to enrich himself, his acolytes, and his family.

Iran’s newly minted supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is reportedly in a medically precarious position, and has thus remained outside public view. The extent of Mojtaba’s ability to direct decision making is therefore in question. But Qalibaf is known to have well-established ties to the security circles around the new leader, and some speculate that he is acting either with Mojtaba’s blessing or without need of it.

Under these conditions, Qalibaf has become the face of diplomacy with the United States. This has historically been a controversial role in Iran, where conservative Islamist hard-liners have long opposed and sought to sabotage dealings with the United States. But “conservative Islamist hard-liners” is in no way synonymous with the IRGC. That organization is now so sprawling and decentralized—it controls much of Iran’s economy, as well as its political, military, and security institutions—that the whole of it is not likely to take any single position.

Still, Qalibaf is thought to have considerable sway within the force. No IRGC commander has publicly come out against his handling of the talks—in fact, the IRGC’s main media outlet, Tasnim, has criticized the hard-liners who have tried to undercut diplomacy.

That said, some of Iran’s political elites do oppose talks with the United States. Chief among them is Saeed Jalili, a senior member of the National Security Council who took a similarly hard-line position against the talks that led to the 2015 nuclear deal. Jalili counts as his allies two prominent members of Parliament, Ali Khezrian and Mahmoud Nabavian. Khezrian has declared that “all kinds of exchanging messages with the U.S. must stop.” Nabavian took part in the Islamabad talks but called them “unsuccessful and undesirable” and accused his own negotiating team of making “strategic mistakes in setting the agenda.” These men appear to have limited influence even in the legislature, where their hard-line faction is dominant: On Monday, 261 of 290 members of Parliament published a statement in support of Qalibaf and the negotiating team. Khezrian signed it, though Nabavian did not.

The idea that the IRGC has set itself against the negotiating team stems from a misinterpretation of a single incident. On April 17, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, declared the Strait of Hormuz “completely open for the remaining period of cease-fire, on the coordinated route as already announced.” The IRGC’s media outlets rushed to clarify that this didn’t mean a full-on opening of the strait. That’s when Trump made his pronouncements on infighting in Tehran, but in truth the Iranian statements were in accord with each other. The hubbub in Iranian circles had less to do with Araghchi’s tweet than with Trump’s presentation of it as a more serious concession than it really was—part of a flurry of celebratory statements from the U.S. president, to which the Iranians took exception. Qalibaf accused Trump of having “made seven claims in one hour, all of which are false.”

Since then, the regime has tried hard to project an image of unity. Qalibaf gave an extensive television interview in which he insisted that he would not trade away anything the regime held sacrosanct. He joined officials from an array of political factions in publishing a joint message on X: “In our Iran we don’t have extremists and moderates,” the post said. Rather, all Iranians were revolutionaries united behind “one god, one leader, one nation and one path.” The supreme leader himself published a short message on X warning against the “media operations aimed at disrupting national unity and security.”

[Arash Azizi: The Iranian opposition’s urgent task]

Iran’s hard-liners seem to lack the institutional leverage to thwart diplomacy. But if they are determined to do so, they can always try to mobilize their grassroots base. For weeks now, the Iranian regime has been calling on its backers to throng the streets by the thousands every night, as part of an effort to rally support for the war and intimidate the opposition. These advocates are a minority in a country that has largely soured on its regime. But they are real—when Jalili ran for president in 2024, he got 13.5 million votes—and many of them oppose diplomacy. When a former Iranian foreign minister published a piece in Foreign Affairs calling for a new deal with America, demonstrators burned his picture in the streets.

But negotiations, too, have a base of popular support. The Iranian Reformists Front, which has faced repression in recent months, has signaled backing for talks with the U.S. So has the centrist former president Hassan Rouhani. Even some opponents of the Islamic Republic have come out in favor of diplomacy. Maulavi Abdulhamid, Iran’s top Sunni cleric, has called for “a just agreement” and protested against “extremists who are standing in the way with their obstinacy.” Those behind former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi and some other opposition groups are against talks with the United States, but others in the non-monarchist opposition have declared support for them.

So yes, there is infighting in Tehran. Competition and compromise will undoubtedly affect the nature and extent of the concessions negotiators are able to accept. The same is probably true on the other side of the negotiating table. But that doesn’t mean that hard-liners who oppose talks altogether are likely to sink them. If anything, the momentum and institutional power appear to lie on the side of diplomacy.

All the Sad Young Chinese Professionals

2026-04-30T08:10:00-04:00

Earlier this year, one of the most popular apps in China was called Are You Dead?. This was not a game, but a handy way for the many young people who live alone across the country, mostly in cities, to keep tabs on one another. Users needed to check in with the app every 48 hours by pressing a big green button. If a user did not check in, the app promptly notified a designated contact. Designed as a source of comfort to those who worry about dying alone, the app became the top paid download for the iPhone in China in January.

Then it vanished. Apple said in a statement that China’s cyberspace watchdog ordered the company to remove it from its Chinese store. The app seemed to challenge the Communist Party’s insistence that the Chinese people are content beneficiaries of economic and social progress. Instead, Are You Dead? exposed the unease felt by many Chinese urbanites, and it highlighted the depths of a major social problem facing China today: loneliness. In suppressing the app, China’s authorities have made plain that they are watching the public mood and not liking what they see.

[From the February 2025 issue: The anti-social century]

In a country of 1.4 billion people, many of them crammed into densely packed cities, loneliness may seem like an unlikely concern. But China’s rapid economic progress and adoption of new technologies have transformed the country from an agrarian, family-based society to an urban, industrial one, and many young workers live far from the small villages and provincial towns where they grew up. The alienating pressures of city life—the overall urban population has swelled by about 400 million people over the past two decades—together with a culture that often encourages competition and status obsession have created a prevailing sense of uncertainty, insecurity, and isolation.

Newcomers to big cities anywhere feel lonely, but “the fact that Chinese people used to have much more traditional and much more tightly knit family structure is contributing to the feeling much more strongly,” Xuemei Bai, a professor who specializes in urbanization at the Australian National University, in Canberra, told me.

Hang Nan’s story is typical. Originally from the city of Linfen in Shanxi province in north China, the 29-year-old relocated to Beijing in 2021 for a job at an advertising agency. She hardly knew anyone in the capital when she arrived, and she has struggled to make friends ever since. Ten-hour days at work leave her little time or energy to socialize. “When you choose life in a big city, you’re choosing more possibilities and more opportunities,” Hang said. “But you also have to accept loneliness as part of the price.”

Hang tried finding friends by posting on the social-media platform Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, saying she was seeking people to join her for talks over coffee or walks in parks, which helped a bit. Last year she also began attending something called “blind-box dinners,” which involves paying a fee to dine among strangers. The Beijing-based entrepreneur Lu Ming organizes these evenings for groups of about six people, who then split the bill. Lu said he began planning the events in late 2024 and now arranges them regularly in big Chinese cities, including Shanghai and Guangzhou. People “feel isolated and they desperately want to break out of their own circles,” Lu said, “but they simply lack the channels and resources to do it.”

In many ways, the loneliness problem in China looks like the loneliness problem everywhere else. Going out in pricey Beijing or Shanghai can quickly pinch tight budgets, especially for young people on starting salaries. The sagging economy and sluggish job market have made nearly everyone more cautious about spending. Social media has also changed how people interact, creating a semblance of connection and relationships in the absence of actual connecting. After a long day at work, many Chinese are perfectly happy to gaze at their phone on their couch, but then wonder why they sometimes feel desolate.

One Shanghai resident, who asked to be identified by his online persona A Ze, told The Atlantic that, beyond occasional after-work outings with colleagues, he rarely meets people socially. He can’t afford many nights out on the $1,000 he earns monthly as a warehouse manager for a sportswear store, after paying rent and sending a portion to family back in his hometown. So he spends much of his free time on his phone at home instead. “In real life, relationships only become interesting when they reach a certain level where you can really communicate,” A Ze said. “Being online is better, because you can speak freely and there’s less pressure.” He does, however, admit to bouts of loneliness.

A Ze is not alone in shying away from intimacy in China. Overwhelmed by work and the pressure to succeed, many young people seem wary of taking on additional burdens, emotional and otherwise. A 2023 online survey by the networking app Soul found that nearly 60 percent of respondents said they had no more than two close friends. Many young people are finding ways to alleviate their loneliness through superficial and temporary relationships. One solution that has emerged in recent years is something called a dazi, a no-strings companion for various activities, such as playing video games and going to the gym. In a dazi relationship, there are no expectations that the person will turn into a true, long-term friend.

[From the May 2014 issue: A Chekhov from China]

Yadan, a 23-year-old who asked to be identified by her given name, moved to Beijing two years ago for a job in finance. She said that seeking new friends beyond her limited social circle is “exhausting,” so she sometimes posts requests for a dazi on RedNote. A dazi is “free from the expectations that come with a regular friend or a partner,” she said.

The rise of dazi culture makes sense in a country where finding a romantic partner feels out of reach for many. Chinese women tend to prefer partners with higher education, income, and social status, and they can afford to be picky. The Communist Party’s policies to contain population growth, which restricted most couples to a single child for 35 years, contributed to a skewed balance in which men well outnumber women—largely because families were quicker to abort girls. This has condemned many men to solitude. “Large numbers of lower-income or lower-status Chinese men feel that they want a relationship but simply can’t find one,” Zheng Ying, the brand director of Taqu, a Chinese dating app with 200 million registered users, told The Atlantic.

Another inhibition to intimacy in China may be the way social interactions tend to be motivated by a transactional pragmatism. “There is a very strong emphasis on payoff,” Zheng said. “People are constantly encouraged to think in terms of returns: What am I going to get out of this? But loneliness or companionship isn’t really something that can be measured in purely numerical or visible terms.”The costs of marriage can also be prohibitively high, especially for young people not yet established in their career. Some families still expect men to buy a home and car ahead of marriage, which renders quite a few suitors ineligible in China’s big cities, even as property prices have slumped. And with the country’s economic outlook looking more uncertain, owing to deflation, trade tensions, and the looming threat of AI, couples have become even more reluctant to commit. In 2010, 22 million people in China got married for the first time; in 2024, only 9.2 million did.

“Before, people just thought that they had a good future—the economy, everything was good—so they had the confidence to get married,” Fuxian Yi, a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies China’s demographic trends, told me. “But right now they are very pessimistic about the future, so they are scared to get married and have children.”

Yet marriage is no panacea for loneliness. Lionel, who asked to be identified only by his first name, grew up in a small town in the southern province of Guizhou, and now works as a video-game developer in the eastern tech hub of Hangzhou, where he lives with his wife. But he admitted that regular bouts of loneliness still often reduce him to tears. He attributed these feelings to his sense of insecurity in an economy in which professional success determines social status. “Conversation often turns to income prospects, to assumptions about future earnings,” Lionel said. This makes him reluctant to socialize, because he feels that he’s being judged. “In the past, being a programmer at a big firm was a glory,” he said. “But now, with layoffs and AI, your social identity can collapse so easily.” His fear of being perceived as a failure has made him cut off “links with others to avoid the pain when that identity eventually breaks,” he said. Lionel is so ashamed of these feelings that he doesn’t share them even with his wife.

Some Chinese people find it easier to simply pay for companionship. Salome, as she calls herself in English, is a 30-year-old who works as an English translator for a trading company in Beijing. On the side, she is a cosplayer, or “coser,” who dresses up as male characters from anime, manga, and video games, then hires herself out for private meetings for about $35 an hour. Her clients are mostly women in their 20s who hope to chat with a favorite character and in some cases practice their English. Some prospective clients plainly hope to engage in romantic role-play, which Salome tries to avoid because it makes her uncomfortable. But she understands the impulse, suggesting that these meetings are safer substitutes for more complicated—and often disappointing—relationships with actual men. These women are “very resistant to real-life men, and very unwilling to let real men enter their fantasy space,” she said.

[Faith Hill: The bots that women use in a world of unsatisfying men]

In this way, China’s young professionals resemble their similarly isolated, commitment-phobic peers in other developed countries. Perhaps widespread feelings of loneliness can therefore be seen as a sign and price of progress—but one that the Chinese people may wonder about paying. This is why the Communist Party saw the Are You Dead? app as such a threat. The party’s implicit promise to the Chinese people in recent decades has been that as long as they give up their rights, they will be rewarded with prosperity. If citizens are learning that this wealth is, in fact, a mixed bag—mentally, socially, even economically—then this bargain doesn’t work.

Cao Li in Hong Kong contributed reporting to this story.

Israel Could Have What It Most Wants in Lebanon

2026-04-23T13:56:03-04:00

Parallel to the shaky truce between the United States and Iran, a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah has temporarily stopped the fighting in Lebanon, but without settling any of the important questions behind it. That’s a shame, because prospects for a lasting resolution in Lebanon are better than ever—if only Israel would embrace the Lebanese government as the indispensable partner it could be.

Both Israel and the Lebanese government seek to free Lebanon from the excessive influence of Hezbollah and Tehran. When the latest conflict began on March 1, many Lebanese I spoke with across the country were horrified to be yet again plunged into a conflict with Israel that serves no Lebanese national interest whatsoever. Hezbollah had sent a barrage of projectiles into Israel as a show of solidarity with Tehran after an Israeli air strike killed Iran’s supreme leader, and Israel responded with predictably aggressive military action.

The previous round of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, in 2023–24, devastated the militia, destroyed much of its missile and drone arsenal, and killed most of its senior battlefield commanders and political leaders. It also left the Lebanese government with the task of disarming the group in the south of the country, which it did not do very effectively. Indeed, the most recent exchanges of fire have demonstrated just how disturbingly successful Hezbollah has been in rebuilding its capabilities. The result is that Lebanon, against the will of its government and most of its society, is now suffering through yet another war with Israel.

[Read: Israel is missing its big chance in Lebanon]

The day after Hezbollah’s barrage, Lebanon’s prime minister, Nawaf Salam, made a historic announcement: Hezbollah’s arsenal and paramilitary activities were officially designated illegal, by a near-unanimous decision of the government. Lebanese President Joseph Aoun reiterated this policy to foreign diplomats, adding that it was permanent and irrevocable. The military was duly instructed to disarm the organization, but General Rudolph Haykal, the commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces, has not yet issued a general order to confront and disarm Hezbollah fighters throughout the country. That’s because Lebanon’s political and military leaders are divided. Civil authorities believe that the overwhelming public backlash against Hezbollah presents a unique opportunity to defang and control the group; the country’s military brass fears that an order to disarm the militia could split their troops and even lead to civil conflict.

Israel would be advised to be patient with this delicate situation. But ever since the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, the country has taken a hyperaggressive approach toward armed nonstate actors on its borders. Israel’s latest military operation in Lebanon appears to be modeled on the one it undertook in Gaza. As soon as the fighting began, Israel ordered the evacuation of most of southern Lebanon, and within days, more than 1 million refugees poured into Beirut and other parts of the country from the south and the southern suburbs of the capital. Much of southern Lebanon has been both devastated by military strikes and depopulated.

In recent days, refugees have begun returning to wrecked villages and towns. Over the weekend, the Israeli military released a map delineating an area that runs deep into Lebanon—a so-called yellow line where five Israeli divisions will continue to operate during the cease-fire. Israel may well hope to control this territory for the foreseeable future, as a buffer to protect northern Israel from Hezbollah. And it may prefer for much of this region to remain essentially uninhabited. Indeed, the Israeli military reportedly told Christian and Druze villagers in southern Lebanon that they could remain there only if they declined to harbor refugees from Shiite villages (the latter are apparently presumed to support Hezbollah).

The map also outlines a new maritime buffer zone that conflicts with the borders that the two countries agreed on with the United States in 2022. Enforcing Israeli control of this zone would cut Lebanon off from its Qana gas field. The map also opens the possibility that Israel might divert waters from the Litani and Wazzani Rivers, which flow down from the Golan Heights.

History strongly suggests that any Israeli attempt to occupy Lebanese territory in the name of security will backfire. In 1982, Israel launched a war to drive the fighters and political leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization out of Lebanon. The ensuing occupation, which lasted until May 2000, led directly to the creation of Hezbollah, a far more dangerous and entrenched enemy on Israel’s northern border. Today Hezbollah’s best shot at rebuilding its forces, along with its popularity and political viability within Lebanon, is to return to its origins fighting Israeli occupation in southern Lebanon.

[Jonathan Chait: Israel moderates are losing the Democratic Party]

The Lebanese government sincerely wants to take control of the south and disarm and contain Hezbollah. To do that, it will have to persuade the army to move systematically through the region, ridding each targeted area of militia fighters until the job is done. That’s a long, slow, risky endeavor. Under a peace agreement, Lebanon might consider allowing Israel to do the heavy lifting in pulling it off.

For its part, Israel would have to accept that the only alternative to a Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon is a strengthened and sovereign Lebanese state, which cannot emerge in the context of a new Israeli occupation in the south or an effort to force Lebanon into an Israeli sphere of influence in the Levant. That sort of overreach could give Hezbollah new life by lending credence to the political rationale behind its paramilitary activities.

The Israeli and Lebanese governments don’t want to admit this, but they need each other. Both would like to subdue Hezbollah and transform it into a relatively normal Lebanese political party. To make that happen, both will need to take risks. They will also have to avoid undermining each other—and to even work together, tacitly and delicately, toward their common goal.

The Iran Talks Are Making India Feel Small

2026-04-22T09:33:30-04:00

Pakistan is having a diplomatic moment, and India’s political elites are not enjoying it.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spent the past decade promoting the notion that India is the leader of the global South and, as such, is indispensable to world affairs. Now a conflict in the Middle East has thrown the global economy, and, with it, India’s, into crisis. On top of that, Islamabad, not New Delhi, has hosted at least one round of talks between the United States and Iran and is preparing to mediate others, leaving the Indian government to ponder its irrelevance.

Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar first dismissed Pakistan’s role in the U.S.-Iran talks, using a pejorative Hindi word for a kind of unsavory middleman. But in Indian political circles, particularly after the April 8 cease-fire was announced, criticism has been trained on the Modi government. Jairam Ramesh, a spokesperson for the opposition Congress Party, wrote on X that Pakistan’s role was “a severe setback to both the substance and style of Mr. Modi’s highly personalised diplomacy.” Ramesh mocked the Indian prime minister for calling himself vishwaguru, meaning “teacher of the world.” Asaduddin Owaisi, the country’s most prominent Muslim politician, lamented that India would have been the natural venue for the U.S.-Iran talks, if not for the Modi government’s missteps.

Modi’s troubles with the Trump administration began last spring. A terrorist attack in Indian-administered Kashmir sparked a four-day conflict between India and Pakistan. President Trump announced a cease-fire that ended the fighting. But this unilateral declaration embarrassed Modi, who likes to project a strongman image. The Indian prime minister could not bring himself to acknowledge the American role in brokering the cease-fire. After that, his relationship with Trump steadily worsened. The U.S. president slapped 50 percent tariffs on India, among the highest anywhere in the world.

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

Pakistan, meanwhile, saw a window to repair its relationship with the United States. The war on terror had driven a wedge between Islamabad and Washington, as the American government came to suspect Pakistan of evasions and double-dealing. Last year Islamabad profusely thanked Trump for his role in the cease-fire with India, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif nominated the U.S. president for the Nobel Peace Prize. Embracing Trump’s transactional style, Pakistan signed a rare-earth-minerals deal with the U.S. and joined the president’s Board of Peace.

The first round of Islamabad talks ended without an agreement a little more than a week ago. No one was apparently happier than the members of New Delhi’s power circles. “To all those who were hailing the Pakistan mediation and calling it a diplomatic coup. Hope the cake on your face was tasty,” Priyanka Chaturvedi, a former member of Parliament, posted on X. But Pakistan has not abandoned the role, and a second round of talks in Islamabad is still possible this week.

Ordinary Indians have reason to want to see the U.S.-Israel-Iran war resolved, regardless of who does the mediating. The country procures half of its oil and 60 percent of its liquid petroleum gas from the Middle East, and much of both transits the Strait of Hormuz. The war has caused an oil shock that has rattled India’s economy. Restaurants have been closing early, or closing altogether. Rural migrants who eke out a fragile existence in India’s cities now flock to railway stations to return to their villages, on the grounds that living on farms and cooking on wood fires may be a decent alternative to starving in the city. Factories have closed because of the uncertainty around energy supplies. A scarcity of fertilizers imperils the country’s food security. And the Indian rupee has been in free fall. A United Nations report warned that the Iran war could push up to 2.5 million Indians into poverty.

One humid afternoon early this month, I spoke with Irfan Ahmed, a 56-year-old electrical worker, as he emerged from a gas dealership in central Delhi with a bulky red cylinder of the sort that’s a fixture in most Indian homes. Piped gas is still restricted to elite neighborhoods; most Indians rely on portable cylinders that they hook up to stoves. Procuring this one had taken Ahmed more than five hours and cost him the day’s wages.

Before the Iran war, he would have placed a request online, and the cylinder would have been delivered to his home within three days. Since the war, the online process has been discontinued, and the government, ostensibly to stanch the black market, demands that people present identity documents when buying cylinders. Ahmed had spent the morning in a two-hour queue for bureaucrats to verify his documents before directing him to the gas dealership. Then he and his brother hoisted the container, which weighed more than 50 pounds, onto a scooter and drove home with the cumbersome vessel perilously perched between them. Many others around them were similarly trying to balance cylinders on their motorbikes.

At the start of the U.S.-Israel-Iran war, the Indian government apparently did not envision such far-reaching consequences. In fact, when a February 28 air strike killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the Indian government maintained a pointed silence for several days before sending a diplomat to sign the condolence book at the Iranian embassy in New Delhi. Many observers, including in the Congress Party, concluded that Modi approved of the strike. But if New Delhi had imagined that Iran’s regime would fall, and that no complications would arise for India, it was sorely mistaken. Instead the war escalated, and Iran blocked the Strait of Hormuz.

India managed to make some temporary arrangements for itself. On March 12, Modi spoke with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and secured passage for a few Indian ships through the strait. The U.S. waived some sanctions on Iranian oil, and in April, India received its first such shipment in seven years. But shortly afterward, on April 18, Iran shot at two Indian-flagged vessels crossing the Strait of Hormuz, forcing them to turn back. The incident broke the fragile detente; India summoned the Iranian ambassador to convey New Delhi’s “deep concern.”

Before the Modi years, India’s policy in the Middle East had been one of strategic balance. It maintained strong, civilizational ties with Iran that went back more than a millennium; at the same time, it pursued a relationship with Israel. But Modi has tipped that balance by drawing closer than ever to his counterpart in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Indian leader paid a friendly visit to Israel in the days immediately preceding the war, and this likely destroyed any possibility of New Delhi emerging as a mediator in the conflict.

“India has been pretty irrelevant in the war,” Aakar Patel, a prominent writer and columnist, told me. “Except that we are taking the punishment quietly.”

India’s inability to influence global events has much to do with the way Modi has managed domestic ones. Modi has empowered a virulently anti-Muslim Hindu nationalism that has helped diminish his country’s standing in the Middle East. And the lack of a constructive and serious public reckoning with the government’s missteps during this crisis or any other largely owes to Modi’s suppression of the Indian media. For the past decade, Modi has preferred to rule by spectacle, forbidding the country’s problems to be acknowledged, let alone confronted and solved.

[Read: Iran had a doomsday weapon all along]

On April 18, the same evening that Iran attacked the Indian-flagged vessels, Modi gave a prime-time address to the nation. He might have used that speech to lay out the government’s response to India’s geopolitical and economic predicament. But he didn’t: He devoted its entirety to attacking his political opponents, in the hope of swaying an upcoming election in West Bengal that has become a particular fixation for him.

Meanwhile, the Hindu-nationalist propaganda machine has carried on creating an alternate universe. Shortly after the Iran war began, the film Dhurandhar, about an undercover Indian spy in Pakistan who metes out brutal punishment to his nation’s enemies, became one of the highest-grossing Bollywood movies in history. The hypernationalist blockbuster is typical of India’s current public discourse in its detachment from reality and profound unseriousness about the real challenges India faces.

A country that once imagined itself a great power in waiting—a regional hegemon, dwarfing Pakistan, and a counterweight to China—now struggles to project power even within south Asia, having fought Pakistan to a draw last summer. The Iran crisis further suggests that India remains stuck as a middle power, defined by events rather than shaping them.

“The ambition that India would be this global power is gone,” Patel told me. “It’s only the pageantry that remains.”

Iran Had a Doomsday Weapon All Along

2026-04-17T14:26:31-04:00

President Trump has said that he went to war to stop Iran from ever having a nuclear bomb. Unfortunately, the war he launched led Iran to discover that it already had an extremely effective doomsday weapon—one that promised the economic equivalent of mutual assured destruction. The Strait of Hormuz has always been vulnerable; the United States has always known that Iran might try to close it if attacked. But neither Washington nor Tehran imagined how easy it would be for Iran to do so, how hard it would be for the U.S. to reopen it, or how widely and rapidly the economic effects of a closed strait would fan out.

Fossil fuels are to modern industrial civilization what air is to the lungs: About 80 percent of the global economy is powered by oil, coal, and natural gas. Much of this comes from the states along the Persian Gulf: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain. About 25 percent of global seaborne oil trade and 20 percent of global liquefied natural gas transits the Strait of Hormuz, between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.

[Amos Hochstein: The Hormuz war will end]

Iran has two navies—one that is part of its national armed services and one belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—but it is not a maritime power. Its naval forces were quickly decimated once the American military operation began. General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at an April 8 briefing that the U.S. had sunk more than 90 percent of Iran’s regular fleet, leaving 150 ships at the bottom of the ocean along with half of the IRGC navy’s small attack boats.

Nonetheless, Iran closed the strait at the beginning of the American military campaign, and it wasn’t all that hard to do. Even without much naval capacity, Iran could threaten passing ships with mines, missiles, and cheap Shahed-136 drones. By attacking a few merchant ships and laying a few mines, it created an atmosphere of such pervasive insecurity that global marine-insurance markets, risk-averse by nature, either stopped providing coverage for transiting vessels or gave prohibitive rates.

So the strait turns out to be easy to close. It is also difficult to reopen—and, more important, to keep open. Even if the U.S. were to invest the time and resources needed for this task, the effort would likely yield far more body bags than Trump is willing to meet at Dover Air Force Base. Iran could well retaliate not just against U.S. forces, but also against vital energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf countries. Naval convoys would be needed, which would require an international coalition, something Trump has proved uniquely unqualified to assemble.

The bitter reality is that getting maritime traffic through the strait back to the prewar level (about 130 vessels daily), and keeping it there, is essential to the global economy—and this can almost certainly not be done without Iran’s cooperation. The U.S. blockade of Iranian ports promises to inflict significant economic pain on Iran, but it doesn’t change this reality.

So why is Iran so keen on keeping the strait closed? The answer lies in strategic deterrence—the ability to prevent attacks on its homeland. Because its conventional military is underwhelming, the Islamic Republic has historically focused on asymmetric capabilities. The first pillar of Iran’s strategic deterrence was long understood to be its extensive armory of short- and medium-range missiles; the second was its proxy network, and the third was its advanced nuclear program, which gave it the capability to surge to nuclear-weapon-state status.

But events set in motion by Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel—or, more precisely, Israel’s counterattack, culminating in the June 2025 12-day war with Iran—toppled these pillars. After that, Iran found itself largely defenseless and facing the threat of subsequent Israeli attacks should it seek to rebuild its deterrent potential. Once Operation Epic Fury began at the end of February, the Iranian regime, fighting for its life, sought a riskier, yet potentially more powerful form of deterrence: control of the Strait of Hormuz. Yes, shutting down traffic also hurts Iran, but the regime is gambling that it can endure more short-term pain than Trump can, especially in an election year.

In addition to weaponizing the strait, Iran is also seeking to monetize it, to generate funds for postwar reconstruction. Iran has announced a toll on all friendly ships passing through, payable in either cryptocurrency or Chinese yuan. Unfriendly ships (such as those belonging to the U.S. or Israel) will not be allowed to transit. Iran has claimed that such tolling is the new normal and will continue after the war is over, international law be damned.

The Gulf countries find such an arrangement unacceptable. It not only decreases their profits, but also requires them to give money to an enemy that just attacked them. Even China, which has significant influence over Iran, could wind up opposing the toll, because it depends heavily on commodities that pass through the strait. As for Trump, who knows? At one point he said that the U.S. could jointly administer a toll system with Iran. What matters most to him is that traffic through the waterway resumes as soon as possible, so as to minimize economic pain ahead of the November midterms.

But even if the strait were to fully reopen, months would likely pass before the economic damage would lessen and shipping flows would resume. On April 14, the International Monetary Fund warned that the extent of the economic shock from the closed strait, including inflation and reduced growth, “will depend on the conflict’s duration and scale—and how quickly energy production and shipment normalize once hostilities end.” The stoppage of oil and gas shipments is bad in itself; it also affects the flow of goods such as nitrogen fertilizer (essential for growing crops), sulfur, and helium (essential for the semiconductor and medical sectors).

[Missy Ryan: Trump ditched hearts and minds in the Iran war]

The history of war, the scholar Norman Ricklefs has noted, “is also the history of unintended consequences.” This war’s supposed proximate cause was Iran’s nuclear program. Trump conjured improbable images of Iranian nukes raining down on American cities. Then, like something out of Jorge Luis Borges’s Garden of Forking Paths, the conflict sent us all lurching in a new, darker, and more ominous direction.

Tehran might well modulate its grip on the strait as part of the negotiations. Indeed, today Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi announced that the strait will be “completely open for commercial ships for the remainder of the ceasefire.” But Iran’s performance has fallen short of its pronouncements before. According to hard-line Iranian media, Iran is now routing traffic to a new transit lane through Iran’s territorial waters (formerly the route went through Omani waters). Using this passage will require coordination with the IRGC Navy.

Regardless of whether Iran allows maritime traffic to increase during negotiations, the reality is that Iran continues to “hold the key to the strait,” as the Iran expert Danny Citrinowicz, formerly of Israeli military intelligence, put it on X. Tehran may have relaxed its choke hold on this vital waterway, but the Islamic Republic, battered and seeking a way to stave off future aggression, is unlikely to release it for the foreseeable future.

The High-Risk, Low-Reward Blockade of Hormuz

2026-04-15T07:28:50-04:00

The Trump administration’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has made the waterway one more testing ground in a battle of wills. The question isn’t whether Iran or the United States has the more powerful navy, but which country can endure economic pain and military casualties longer—the United States, which has been waging an unpopular war of choice in the Middle East, or the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is fighting for its survival.

Since the beginning of the war, Tehran has allowed vessels of its choosing to pay a toll to pass through the strait. In this way, it has been able to continue selling its oil at a high price while also profiting from the tolls. Iran is now demanding that any ship that wants to transit the strait must also deviate from the normal lanes into Iranian waters near Qeshm Island and be inspected by members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

In its counterblockade, the United States is stipulating that no ship that pays a toll will be allowed through. It is also denying transit to ships that enter or leave Iranian ports, which would presumably include those that deviated from the normal routes so as to be inspected in Iranian waters. Ships that comply with U.S. demands risk being attacked by Iran, and ships that comply with Iranian demands risk being detained by the United States. Complying with both is impossible. And on top of that, Iran has likely laid mines in the channels most commonly used for passage.

[Read: Trump pivots to ‘least bad option’ on Iran]

Enforcing the blockade could be complicated and risky for the United States diplomatically. The U.S. may have to decide, for instance, whether it will detain a Chinese-flagged vessel, or even one escorted by the Chinese, Pakistani, or Indian navies. If the United States were to board such a ship, the Chinese or other powers could retaliate economically, including through tariffs or by stepping up military or economic assistance to Iran.

Enforcement could also put American service members at risk. Visit, board, search, and seizure (VBSS) teams are tasked with inspecting vessels. They tend to use small, inflatable boats with a rigid hull, which are deployed from larger ships, such as destroyers and frigates. Vessels being boarded are supposed to come to a complete stop. But some ships attempting to run the blockade might refuse to be boarded and instead continue speeding ahead. The U.S. Navy would then have to decide whether to board the ship without the crew’s cooperation, which requires special training, or to disable the vessel by firing on it.

Other vessels might attempt to avoid capture by staying close to Iranian waters, which would expose the destroyers, and especially the VBSS small-boat teams, to enemy fire. Iran still reportedly possesses most of its “mosquito fleet” of small boats, which could swarm American assets that come near its coast. The Iranians could lay ambushes for VBSS teams onboard certain vessels, thereby turning seemingly compliant boardings into deadly firefights in hostile territory.

The U.S. has also pledged to disable mines that Iran has placed in the strait. This is a painfully slow process that will require teams in small boats to operate underwater drones in search of mines and then send divers to deactivate them. Mine-clearing teams may be even more vulnerable to attack than those seeking to board ships.

The U.S. warships from which all of these missions will be dispatched will have to operate much closer to Iranian territory than they did before the blockade. Iran has unmanned surface drones that can cause immense damage to warships, as Ukraine has repeatedly demonstrated. The best defense against Iran’s mosquito fleet and drones is airpower—using the MH-60R helicopters onboard Navy destroyers, say. But China has reportedly sent modern shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to Iran. Those could be used to shoot down helicopters. Just one drone, one cruise missile, one mine, or one suicide boat that gets through American defenses could put a billion-dollar guided-missile destroyer out of action for years. This has happened to U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf in the past.

[Missy Ryan: Trump ditched hearts and minds in the Iran war]

Those are the risks. They must be measured against the uncertainty of the blockade’s rewards. Iran has proved adept at evading sanctions for decades, and it will undoubtedly attempt to continue moving goods over land, via airlift, and potentially via pipelines to Pakistan. The Iranians may also avoid sanctions by using ships flagged by other countries, or those that lie about their destinations inside the Gulf. They could use small craft such as a dhow, the traditional boat in the region, which are difficult to track and impossible to stop when they travel in large numbers. VBSS teams would have to board each one.

If, in spite of all of these obstacles, the blockade does successfully shut down Iranian oil revenue, the U.S. and Iran will find themselves racing against an economic clock. Iran entered the war with a precarious economy. Oil revenue accounts for 9 percent of the country’s GDP. Total Iranian exports through the strait amount to $435 million a day—roughly a third of Iran’s GDP. An extended, successful blockade would jack up the country’s inflation rate within weeks. But it would also raise the price of gas, food, pharmaceuticals, and electronics globally. Oil futures have been held down by President Trump’s repeated hints that an end to the conflict is just around the corner. But those statements can’t indefinitely postpone the consequences of removing 20 percent of the world’s oil from the market.

The American public was never sold on the war with Iran, and Trump’s popularity has taken a hit in the lead-up to the 2026 midterms. How the blockade ends may depend on just how many casualties and how much economic pain each country and its leaders can endure. The advantage in this contest belongs to Iran—because it is not a democracy, because it is fighting near its own territory, and because its regime will do anything necessary to survive.