Global | The Atlantic

Reducing the Number of Generals Isn’t the Problem

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

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

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

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

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

[Listen: The military Pete Hegseth wants]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Battle for Hormuz Is Not the War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Baltic States Prepare for War

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

Photographs by Maciek Nabrdalik

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

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

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

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

[Read: Europe without America]

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

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

[Read: Europeans have realized their error]

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

Maciek Nabrdalik for The Atlantic

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

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

THE FIRST DAY

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

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

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

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

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

Maciek Nabrdalik for The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

THE FIRST 72 HOURS

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

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

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

Maciek Nabrdalik for The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE FIRST WEEK

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

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

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

Paula Bronstein / Getty

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

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

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

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

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

THE FIRST MONTH

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

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

Maciek Nabrdalik for The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

Maciek Nabrdalik for The Atlantic

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

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

ENDGAME

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

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

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

Maciek Nabrdalik for The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Hegseth’s Magic Marker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gaza’s Open Horizon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib: Flying over my battered homeland]

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

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

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

The Art of Dealing With Trump

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Why Trump has it out for Canada]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Babies Left Behind in America

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

Photographs by Meridith Kohut

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meridith Kohut for The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meridith Kohut for The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course they are, she thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meridith Kohut for The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meridith Kohut for The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meridith Kohut for The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meridith Kohut for The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

The Hidden State Russia Is Building Inside Ukraine

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

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

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

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

[Read: Russia’s real strategy in Europe]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Ukraine’s short-lived comeback]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The armored sarcophagus saving Ukrainian soldiers]

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

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

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

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

Trump Could Leave the Iran Mess to His Successor

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The Middle East still to come]

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Makings of a Prewar World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Middle East Still to Come

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Thomas Wright: The price of defeat in Iran]

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

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

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

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

[Robert Kagan: Iran unleashed]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Xi Is Getting What He Wants

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: China is flatlining]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guatemala’s Democracy Dilemma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: How to defeat a mafia state]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: A new history of the Western Hemisphere]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: El Salvador’s exceptional prison state]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What AI Anxiety Looks Like in China

2026-09-19T10:40:00-04:00

Anxiety about AI in the United States appears to be getting worse. Prosaic concerns about machines disrupting industries, stealing jobs, and compromising schoolwork are giving way to more harrowing fears about the end of humanity.

Even after top AI executives in the U.S. called for slowing down the breakneck pace of development, President Trump dismissed these safety concerns as a “hoax” that would hand China an advantage in the race for AI supremacy.

Outside of China, Trump’s assertion may appear well founded. While the U.S. roils over the prospects of AI, China’s leadership looks to be charging ahead. In surveys, Chinese people appear more enthusiastic about AI and its potential benefits than respondents in the U.S., and they are adopting it more quickly. Although Chinese President Xi Jinping has expressed more alarm than Trump about the threats of AI—and has even called for regulation to “ensure that AI is always under human control”—his government has made adopting the technology a national priority. The plan is to have AI in every aspect of China’s economy and society by 2035. The country’s steady release of AI models that are open-source, high-performing, and relatively cheap to build and run has been sending shivers through Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

[Read: What really happens if China wins the AI race?]

But for all the concern about China’s advances in AI, the reality is that the country is racked by the same anxieties about the onrush of AI as the rest of the world. Chinese social-media platforms are filled with posts in which workers and professionals express their worries that AI will steal their job and livelihood. Leaders in Beijing seem ever more concerned about the potential political and economic risks of this technological disruption.

In the U.S., these tensions are being debated openly and, in theory, will be managed in the courts and on Capitol Hill. In China, where there are no such avenues for people to determine their own fate, leaders must still confront the problems and threats inherent to this technological revolution. This puts the Communist Party in a bind: Advancing AI may well empower China on the world stage, but holding the technology back may be necessary for the party to preserve itself.

Xu Peng, a 30-year-old actor, was out of work last year when he got an unexpected break. A director had reached out to cast him in a short-drama series, each episode minutes long, which have become enormously popular in China. Xu traveled to Hengdian, a film-production hub in eastern China, and began landing roles in one or two dramas a month. And then it all stopped. Xu had expected to act in two dramas after the Chinese New Year in February, but never heard from the studio. When he contacted the producer, he got the news: The company had canceled the productions and would be making videos using artificial intelligence instead.

“It was as though everything was fine yesterday, and today it is suddenly gone,” Xu said.

Xu’s fate is the fear of workers across the country—and around the world. Social-media posters regularly express anxiety about being “distilled,” a term Chinese people use for when an employer uses a worker’s data to train an AI model. In May on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, someone going by the name Nanbei wrote that after leaving a recent job, she learned that her former employer had fed thousands of her chat messages, hundreds of documents, and every one of her work emails into an AI system to create a “digital robot” that took over her responsibilities—and even gave it her name. “The company no longer has to pay me a cent in salary, yet it can keep me there ‘working overtime’ forever,” Nanbei wrote. Another worker, using the handle Xiexiaoya, posted on RedNote, China’s Instagram, in June that the prospect of being distilled kept her awake at night. “I’m afraid my AI double might become more popular than I am,” she wrote.

Two years ago, Shen Anyu, a voice actor who earns a living from narrating news commentaries and other short programs, began noticing an alarming number of videos on social-media platforms that seemed to feature his voice without his permission. Shen hired a lawyer earlier this year and filed a lawsuit against a voice-generation platform. The case is still pending, but in the meantime, his career is “losing blood,” he said, as he loses work to AI. Living with the new technology “is inevitable,” he said, but “I’m not yet sure how we should coexist with AI.”

Though some Chinese people are embracing AI, many are not ready for the change it brings. Bruce Jiang, a 42-year-old commercial director in Shanghai, loves choosing the right lens and finding the perfect shot, and he didn’t want to outsource these and other aspects of his craft to an algorithm. But after his clients began pressuring him to use the technology—“‘You only have to tell AI what you want, and it produces it like magic,’” he said they insisted—he began using tools such as the video-generator Kling for certain tasks. The experience, he said, has been demoralizing. The old method “was work, and it was a cost, but it was also a kind of pleasure,” Jiang said. “That pleasure is disappearing.”

Chinese policy makers at national and local levels have introduced ambitious plans and financial support to rush the country into the AI age. Entrepreneurs across China are adopting AI in the hopes of cutting costs, remaining competitive, and aligning their firms with Beijing’s priorities. In China’s cutthroat society—and especially in sectors where AI is making rapid inroads, such as the entertainment industry—many like Jiang are afraid that they’ll get left behind if they don’t join in.

But these swift and radical changes have yielded mixed results. The state-linked China Center for Information Industry Development estimated in June that nearly 70 percent of the country’s small businesses have not moved beyond initial trials of adopting AI in their operations, largely owing to the costs and complexity of integrating the technology.

After the Chinese AI lab DeepSeek released a large language model last year, Chinese companies rushed to adopt it. But instead of buying a software subscription (an unpopular practice in China owing to the country’s history of piracy), some businesses opted for what locals call an “all-in-one machine,” or a mini data center with DeepSeek installed, which managers simply plugged into their computer systems. This solution was especially popular among state-owned enterprises and government bureaus looking to appear advanced, but the hardware proved to be an ineffective way to use AI. Buyers soon came to see that the machines weren’t worth the investment, and their sales quickly fell.

Earlier this year, plenty of buzz similarly surrounded OpenClaw, a free, open-source, autonomous AI agent. Tech companies hosted popular events to help users install and use the tool, a process that Chinese enthusiasts call “raising a lobster.” At the OpenClaw festival in Beijing in March, the internet-service provider Baidu set up pools with live crustaceans to entertain attendees. Local-government officials encouraged the frenzy by pledging financial aid to start-ups that used OpenClaw.

Disillusionment came quickly. Some distraught users took to social media to express their alarm at how the AI agent, which required masses of personal data to operate without detailed instructions, had a habit of going rogue. “I jumped on the bandwagon” expecting to get a “digital employee,” a woman using the social-media handle HotdogWang wrote in March on RedNote. “Instead, it turned out to be both a money pit and a ticking time bomb.” Some reported that their AI helper had deleted emails or made credit-card purchases without permission. One Douyin user, posting under the name Qizaibushidaju, wrote, “I simply installed it because everyone else was doing so,” only to uninstall it 72 hours later owing to security concerns.

Although Chinese tech executives are not yet engaged in a public debate over the risks of an algorithm-created calamity—the country’s constraints on free speech may inhibit them from speaking out—some Chinese people do worry about more than just jobs and data. “There are only two options for the future,” a man calling himself Qiangni Yinshou wrote on Douyin. “Either humanity goes extinct, or humans shut AI down.”

A user by the name of Buyehou wrote on RedNote that when he engaged a chatbot in a philosophical discussion about humanity’s future, he was told that the options included “either merging with AI or being eliminated.” The man added that “when AI becomes far smarter than humans, has consciousness of its own, and can evolve independently, it will be impossible for humans to control it. There is no turning back now.”

Despite their outward show of confidence, China’s leaders plainly don’t know how life works with AI either. But figuring it out is an urgent concern here, given Beijing’s evident faith in AI as a magical solution to the country’s deepening economic and social problems, and as an essential tool in the pursuit of global dominance over the United States. In the U.S., the diffusion of AI is largely a bottom-up phenomenon as companies, investors, and consumers test the risks and benefits of this new technology. In China, where the development and spread of AI is a national mission that is costing the government hundreds of billions of dollars, leaders are eager to impose these advances from above.

In theory, China’s autocrats can ram through their agenda with scant regard for public sentiment. If confronted with the kinds of protests against AI data centers that have become prevalent in the U.S., Beijing’s leaders could easily send police to crush them and then cover up the problem in a deluge of propaganda. The Communist Party has already shown its willingness to override public concerns in pursuit of technological advantage. In 2024, trials of autonomously driven taxis in the city of Wuhan sparked concern over how robotaxis were “stealing people’s rice bowls”—but the trials have expanded anyway.

Yet China’s leaders have traditionally prized policies that promote stable employment out of fear that mounting joblessness could create unrest and threaten the political order. When the country first embraced markets and opened to trade, its rapidly growing economy and expanding private sector could absorb displaced workers. Now, when China’s sluggish economy already has a jobs problem—nearly a fifth of young workers are unemployed—the advances of AI threaten to put many more people out of work.

[Read: The race for global domination in AI]

“In a nominally Communist state, the image of the party elite allying with business interests to displace the human proletariat with a robot class of workers carries certain political risks,” Carl Minzner, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “There is the potential for a lot of disgruntled people.”

China’s leaders are showing signs of nervousness. Earlier this year a court in Hangzhou, a technology hub in eastern China, upheld a ruling in favor of a tech worker who had challenged his compensation package after being replaced by AI. In the court’s judgment, the dismissal was unlawful and the worker deserved more money. Although a local-court verdict does not set a national precedent, it appears to be a warning to employers that mass AI layoffs are politically unacceptable. “As employers enjoy the benefits of technology, they must also shoulder corresponding social responsibilities,” the Beijing municipal government wrote last year. The state news agency Xinhua commented in March that “those companies that equate AI with ‘reducing staff’ may seem to lower costs in the short term, but in reality, they lose the core competitiveness of talent accumulation and further erode employee trust.”

Pushing companies to invest in new technologies without shedding redundant workers may preserve social order, but it would also limit AI’s benefits. Jeffrey Ding, an expert on AI in China at George Washington University, told me that the country’s leaders face a “balancing act” between political and economic necessity. “AI does have the potential for bringing massive, widespread productivity growth,” he said. But he also noted that the Communist Party prioritizes legitimacy and regime stability. If embracing AI demands “massive displacement and a lot of structural changes, then that’s where the trade-off begins to bite, and they might have to veer toward slowing down AI adoption.”

If American AI firms do, in fact, slow the pace of innovation, the Communist Party may see this as an opportunity to race ahead in AI. But China’s leaders, facing their own domestic challenges and preoccupied with their own grip on power, may decide that imposing these innovations on the masses is simply too risky—for their own sake, if not for the sake of humanity.

That would probably suit many Chinese people just fine. Xu, the actor, has found work teaching archery and horseback riding—skills he acquired in acting gigs. But he hasn’t given up on his theatrical career. He now plans to produce his own short dramas, partly with the help of AI, though he said that the performers on-screen will all be living, breathing people. AI “will not completely replace human actors,” Xu insisted. At least he can hope.

Cao Li in Hong Kong contributed reporting to this story.

Trump Is Betting on the Wrong Europe

2026-09-19T07:00:00-04:00

Donald Trump says he wants a Europe that is more capable of defending itself. But the nationalist-populist movements he is championing there will not advance this agenda and may put Europe at odds with the United States over China.

Earlier this month, the nationalist-populist Alternative for Germany party came just a few seats short of an outright majority in a regional parliament, its best-ever result. This Sunday, Germans will vote in two more regional elections. The ruling Christian Democrats are behind in both races, and the AfD is expected to do well in one. On Wednesday, Chancellor Friedrich Merz canceled his visit to the United Nations General Assembly next week, sparking speculation that he could soon be forced to resign.

U.S. officials are ebullient. Trump greeted the AfD’s recent electoral victory with a triumphant message on Truth Social that finished with “MGGA” (Make Germany Great Again). Richard Grenell, Trump’s former ambassador to Germany and now a presidential envoy, called the result “a huge win and a new day in Germany.”

The Trump administration has consistently embraced Europe’s nationalist-populist parties as ideological partners, and even launched a State Department fund to support MAGA-aligned European groups. It surely sees the AfD’s ascendance as a sign that politics are moving in its direction. But that is true only if Trump’s real goal is a fragmented Europe that accommodates Russian and Chinese power and is unable to punch its weight. Such an outcome would be catastrophic for U.S. interests.

[Read: Europe without America]

Some people in the administration insist that the idea is not to weaken Europe but to shift the burden for its conventional defense to the Europeans themselves. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for example, reject claims that the administration is soft on Russia and say that they are calling instead for greater European self-sufficiency. Colby advocates for what he calls NATO 3.0, in which Europeans would take on the primary responsibility for their conventional defense.

But the nationalist populists do not share this view. The AfD has called for an end to all arms deliveries to Ukraine and a lifting of all sanctions on Russia. Its co-leaders, Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla, boycotted Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech to the Bundestag in 2024, dismissing the Ukrainian president as a “war and beggar president.”

In France, Marine Le Pen, the parliamentary leader of the nationalist-populist party National Rally and the front-runner for next spring’s presidential election, has promised to take France out of NATO’s integrated military command (France would remain a member of the alliance). Such a withdrawal would hardly help the Trump administration shift the burden of NATO’s defense to Europe.

The Trump administration’s affinity for Europe’s nationalist-populist right seems to be almost entirely cultural and civilizational, and based on the notion that Europe’s populists are fighting the same culture wars—including against immigration—as their counterparts in the United States. J. D. Vance explicitly praised then–Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as an ally in defense of Western civilization at an election rally in Budapest on the eve of the Hungarian elections. And the Trump team seems to see the European populist right’s enemies—the European Union and national political establishments—as versions of its own domestic foes. This commonality appears to take precedence over foreign-policy concerns.

Trump officials have blasted centrist European governments for being too soft on Beijing but have said nothing about the populist right’s position on China. Some of these parties—particularly the AfD and Fidesz, in Hungary—favor much closer ties to the American adversary. The AfD’s Weidel lived in China for six years, speaks Mandarin, and wrote her doctoral dissertation about China’s pension system. Chrupalla, her co-leader, accused the German government of waging “economic war” against China for proposing a tougher trade policy toward Beijing. They have both called for warmer relations with China. Orbán, who was defeated in the Hungarian elections earlier this year, blocked the EU from criticizing Beijing, initiated an “all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership” with China, and welcomed Chinese investment in Hungarian infrastructure.

These largely transactional attitudes toward China and Russia may reflect a broader worldview among the nationalist populists, who praise Trump but are deeply skeptical of American power. In an analysis for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Jeremy Cliffe argued that the AfD supports a multipolar world order and believes that great powers, such as China and Russia, should possess spheres of influence—a perspective that Trump seems sympathetic toward. The AfD, Cliffe wrote, “may regard Trump as a civilizational ally, but its senior figures have long described the United States as a raumfremd in Europe, a hard to translate German word that means something like ‘territorially alien.’”

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

If parties with these views take power, they could reduce American influence in Europe while making common European action on Russia and China much more difficult. They will also make Eastern Europeans nervous about German rearmament. In 2011, Radek Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, said, “I fear German power less than German inaction.” He recently revisited that remark, telling the German newspaper Handelsblatt, “We want Germany, under democratic leadership and as the largest economy in Europe, to play a strong role in securing our common security. But we remember all too well where a rearmed Germany can lead in the hands of a far-right, pro-Russian party—and that is exactly what the AfD represents.”

Senior Trump-administration officials say they are building a Europe that will carry its own weight. Maybe they are so beguiled by the nationalist populists’ domestic agenda that they have not yet realized it will come at the expense of NATO 3.0. Or maybe Trump doesn’t care about Europe’s defense, doesn’t see it as a U.S. interest, and doesn’t believe that Europe has any contribution to make to America’s security.

Trump and Vance seem to be laying the foundation for a more divided Europe that is incapable of deterring Russia, ever more dependent on China, and at odds with itself. If the administration continues on this path, it may get the European culture war it wants, but the United States will lose its ally.

Venezuela’s People Problem

2026-09-16T07:00:00-04:00

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Days after two deadly earthquakes struck northern Venezuela on June 24, killing at least 6,000 people and injuring tens of thousands more, the Venezuelan Seismological Research Foundation, known as Funvisis, made an unusual public plea: Could whoever had taken one of its GPS sensors please give it back?

For 13 years, the high-precision instrument had been bolted to a rocky outcrop in the hills of western Venezuela, quietly tracking the millimeter-scale movements of the Boconó fault, which was the likely source of the first of the two quakes. When Funvisis technicians went to recover the readings the sensor had stored, they found that the machine had gone missing. More than two months after the earthquakes, the organization still does not know who carried it off.

The absent sensor is but one gauge of a state that has lost the capacity to govern. Venezuela once operated 250 to 300 seismic-monitoring stations; today, no more than five still function. Many of the engineers, physicians, nurses, firefighters, and rescue workers a country depends on when disaster strikes have long since left Venezuela—part of a generation-long exodus of skilled professionals from state institutions.

President Trump has said that the oil-rich country will be run “properly” and “professionally,” but the earthquakes exposed Venezuela’s deficits. The highest expectations and fondest hopes—whether of Wall Street, Houston, or Caracas—will not conjure up the people needed to rebuild a country that has thoroughly hollowed out its professional classes.

[Read: The vicious cycle Trump may restart in Venezuela]

In just 20 years, Venezuela went from Latin America’s wealthiest nation to one of its poorest thanks to the mismanagement, corruption, and poor governance that began under the populist president Hugo Chávez, who served from 1999 to 2013, and continued under his successor, Nicolás Maduro. Interim President Delcy Rodríguez, who took over Venezuela after the United States captured Maduro in January, inherited a state that cannot marshal the technical expertise to rebuild what the quakes destroyed or to reconstruct an economy that collapsed long before the ground did.

Rebuilding is a matter not merely of money and political will but of human capital. Bureaucrats, planners, regulators, and inspectors turn plans into functioning grids, ports, and clinics. Their absence may be the biggest obstacle facing American policy makers overseeing Venezuela’s reconstruction.

Venezuela is not the first country to suffer brain drain to the point of institutional collapse. Afghanistan has reportedly struggled to stand up its health-care sector and civil service ever since many of its professionals fled the return of the Taliban in 2021. Haiti has been losing doctors, judges, and engineers for decades. But Venezuela’s case is one of particularly deliberate self-destruction, in a country where oil wealth helped produce a sizable middle class.

Hostility toward the professional class was a hallmark of Chávez’s particular brand of socialism from the beginning. Adherents saw professional skills, when they were not explicitly placed in service of the revolution, as advancing the interests of capitalism and imperialism, the Venezuelan political scientist Guillermo T. Aveledo told me. In 2003, Guillermo García Ponce, a director at a pro-Chávez newspaper, went so far as to describe technocrats at state-owned companies as a “fifth column” to be “wiped out.”

“For Chavismo, privilege always comes cloaked in a PowerPoint presentation,” the journalist Francisco Toro wrote in 2007. By dismissing expertise and deliberation as ideologically suspect, Toro added, “Chavismo is left to rely on the will of the leader alone.”

The state’s public utilities were among the first institutions to confront the PowerPoint problem. Chávez replaced their professional managers with loyalists who were more compliant than competent, people who used to work in these companies told me. Jacqueline Faría, a Chavista engineer who took over the state-owned Caracas water company Hidrocapital in 1999, invested millions of dollars in a failed program to clean the Guaire River. Now she leads Rodríguez’s reconstruction efforts.

In addition to Hidrocapital, the Chávez government proceeded to dismantle the corporate-style leadership of the Caracas metro and Venezuela’s largest electricity company, Edelca, and to place these companies under the control of military officers. It eventually did the same with Funvisis. In 2009, Chávez took direct control of the country’s airports and seaports.

Water and power shortages, sometimes nationwide, became commonplace as mismanagement, corruption, and doctrinaire regulations gummed up the works of nearly all of Venezuela’s public infrastructure. Consider Edelca’s two dam projects. The company began building the Caruachi dam in 1997, under Chávez’s predecessor, but finished it only after nine long years. It began building the Tocoma dam in 2007 and still has not finished it, despite almost $10 billion in investment. A Brazilian contractor involved in the work later admitted to paying Venezuelan officials and middlemen as much as $98 million in bribes from 2005 to 2016 to secure contracts. A U.S.-Argentine company will now take over the project.

Perhaps no sector was more gravely affected by Chávez’s assault on professionalism than the oil industry. And no industry is more crucial to U.S. plans for Venezuela’s recovery—or more central to Washington’s interest in the country in the first place.

Before Chávez, Venezuela’s oil company, known by its Spanish acronym PDVSA, was owned by the state but autonomously governed as a commercial entity. It set the gold standard for such an arrangement, expanding into international markets and fully acquiring Citgo, a major Houston-based refinery, in 1991. Much of the Venezuelan state ran on clientelism, but the oil company was meritocratic. Its research arm, the Venezuelan Institute of Oil Technology, or INTEVEP, employed about 170 full-time Ph.D. researchers and held roughly 1,200 American patents in the period before 2003, according to Francisco Monaldi, an energy expert.

[Jonathan Chait: Trump meant it literally when he said he was taking the oil]

That was the year Chávez began meddling in PDVSA’s affairs. He fired its board on live television and appointed a military officer to run the company. PDVSA’s workers went on strike in protest. Chávez fired more than 18,000 of them—dismissing, in one stroke, 60 to 80 percent of all provisioning, planning, maintenance, and exploration staff.

The finance team was laid off almost entirely; state cronies took over an office that accounted for nearly all of Venezuela’s foreign-exchange earnings. INTEVEP’s scientists were replaced, Pánfilo Masciangioli, a researcher and manager at the institute from 1982 to 2010, told me, “with people who did not even know how important it was to publish a paper.” The institute’s patents fell to about 100 during the decade that followed.

“The company’s gray matter was lost,” Monaldi told me. In its place came party loyalists and military men, who filled PDVSA’s vacancies and directed its revenues into Chávez’s populist schemes. Former employees scattered abroad. The number of Venezuelans in Alberta—the epicenter of Canada’s oil industry—rose from 465 in 2001 to 3,860 in 2011, and in Colombia, former PDVSA oil experts helped nearly double national oil production by 2011. Meanwhile, across the border, clientelism swelled PDVSA’s payroll from 28,841 in 2003 to 177,770 in 2014.

The effect fully manifested a decade later: Global oil prices fell, and Venezuela’s ruined oil industry collapsed, its output falling from about 3 million barrels a day before Chavez’s PDVSA purge to an average of 512,000 a day in 2020.

Employees of Venezuela’s state institutions came under continual pressure. In 2004, more than 2 million Venezuelans signed a referendum to recall Chávez. A lawmaker close to the president drew up what would become known as the “Tascón List” to identify and fire the petitioners from state institutions and companies. Hundreds lost their jobs. At the National Library, “a clique decided who was leaving and who was staying,” Mario Di Giacomo, an information specialist there for nearly 20 years, told me. “Dissent was not acceptable.” Loyalists replaced the professionals, and the library’s collections descended into neglect. Millions of archival records are decaying, Di Giacomo said.

The Tascón List was but one way of identifying people for firing. At the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Investigation, the country’s premier scientific-research center, the physicist Claudio Mendoza made a public comment mocking Venezuela’s nuclear ambitions in 2006 (he noted that the country would achieve little so long as it rejected scientific expertise). He was dismissed four days later. The Chavista zoologist Ángel Viloria took over the institute and systematically purged its scientists from 2006 to 2011.

“You were either fired or forced to retire,” Mendoza told me. Venezuela slid from Latin America’s fifth-largest producer of scientific papers in the early 2000s to its 11th by 2022. By 2016, researchers who had emigrated accounted for roughly 33 percent of the country’s scientific publications; at least 68 percent of these scholars held doctoral degrees.

Trump has promised that American investors will spend $100 billion to rebuild Venezuela’s “rotting” energy infrastructure, but he hasn’t said who will do the work. The simple truth is that Venezuela has rid itself of the technocrats who could deliver the recovery Washington has promised. Few will return to the bureaucracy that ejected them. Some have emigrated for good; among those who remain, many distrust the authoritarian government or do not wish to be associated with it.

[Read: The bizarre partnership between the U.S. and Venezuela]

The United States is currently overseeing talks between the Rodríguez government and the democratic opposition about the country’s recovery and reconciliation. It could use that platform to push for basing appointments to public institutions on relevant expertise rather than political loyalty and, in doing so, help restore confidence among the country’s professionals.

Among the hollowed-out agencies that should be high on the list for rebuilding is Funvisis—not only for reasons of public safety but also because the geophysical data that Venezuela no longer collects are the raw material of modern oil exploration. Companies use seismic surveys to image a reservoir before they spend a dollar drilling into it, and Venezuela’s archives are dated, its instruments are scarce, and the geophysicists who once operated both are now working in Calgary or Houston or Bogotá. A state that cannot say whether the fault lines beneath it are moving is poorly placed to tell an investor what lies within the Orinoco Basin.

Washington can disburse the oil money and lift the sanctions; it cannot staff the ministries. Only Venezuelans can do that. Ultimately, the country’s recovery will be measured less in barrels lifted or dollars banked than in how many of those professionals will go back to work for the state.

The Armored Sarcophagus Saving Ukrainian Soldiers

2026-09-16T07:00:00-04:00

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The inside of an armored sarcophagus smells of gunpowder, gasoline, and gangrene. Remotely operated, unmanned ground vehicles, nicknamed MAULs, are revolutionizing casualty evacuations along the most dangerous sections of the Ukrainian front lines. They bristle with drone-jamming antennae and carry bulletproof black pods for carrying wounded soldiers to safety.

The MAUL goes in when other options have failed. After every rescue, it is cleaned and disinfected. Vitaly, call sign “Ash,” is a medical-evacuation coordinator with the 1st Separate Medical Battalion. (He asked to be identified only by his first name and call sign for security reasons.)

“You scrub and scrub,” he told me, “but the smell—it never goes away.”

I asked Ash what MAUL stands for. “It’s not initials,” he explained. “It’s a Star Wars thing—you know, Darth Maul? We’ve got a few nerds here.” The name is in all caps because the battalion’s stencil kit has only capital letters.

[Read: Ukraine’s short-lived comeback]

On the battlefield, these new machines have become priority targets for Russia’s drone pilots. They know that, for the morale of the Ukrainian crews coordinating rescues, losing a comrade in vivid detail on the monitors tracking the mission can be devastating. Russian operators wait until the wounded are loaded, then strike.

Aerial drones have created a death zone on the front lines, up to 20 miles wide, where anything caught in the open is likely to be struck. Unmanned ground vehicles began arriving in late 2024, mostly running resupply routes parallel to the front. But a mission in early 2025 proved that they could do more than this—that they were capable of reaching deep into the death zone to remove personnel. That mission began with a Facebook post.

In February 2025, near Kupiansk, Ukraine, a Russian advance trapped three Ukrainian soldiers from the 154th Mechanized Brigade behind enemy lines. All were wounded, two severely. For weeks, unit commanders attempted to pull them out. “We tried everything,” Kseniya Vynohradova, a veteran of the 154th who now leads an online support group for the unit, told me. Every effort failed.

“The brigade dropped supplies by drone,” Vynohradova told me, “but there was no way to get the guys out.” After a month of fending off Russian attacks and surviving on air-dropped rations, the soldiers were ready to give up. Their wounds had turned gangrenous, and their chance of survival was near zero. “I did not know what else to do,” Vynohradova said, “so I turned to Facebook.”

The first person to offer hope was Viktor Dolhopyatov. In a secret facility in central Ukraine, he runs Burevii, one of the country’s most innovative defense-tech companies. Russian bombardments have shattered most of the windows, but this superficial damage, common to thousands of buildings across the region, offers a kind of camouflage. From here, Burevii has transformed the modern battlefield. When Dolhopyatov read Vynohradova’s Facebook post, he answered immediately: “Tell us more, we want to help.”

Burevii’s engineers were developing a ground drone at the time. It would need a few modifications for a mission deep into the death zone—anti-drone netting, software updates, and a trailer attachment to carry three soldiers at once—but it could be ready within days. Olha Garbovskaya had joined the company two weeks prior and threw herself into the mission. “We called our machine Ardal,” she told me, after a son of the Greek god of craftsmen and technology. With engineers still attaching its final pieces, Ardal was rushed to the front.

The rescue began at dusk, with daylight fading but temperatures warm enough to partially mask Ardal’s heat signature. From a command bunker, Burevii’s engineers watched the mission unfold. High-definition screens displayed a ground’s-eye view from the drone. Overhead feeds tracked Ardal’s route to the stranded soldiers, who followed its progress over their radio. Without warning, a massive heat bloom filled the infrared monitors in the bunker. Ardal had struck a mine.

“Our hearts sank,” Garbovskaya said. “The commanders told us we had less than a 1 percent chance of succeeding, and we feared they were right.” Over the radio, the stranded men responded stoically: “We can’t take any more—just finish us off.” They begged to be bombed by Ukrainian drones. The team from Burevii asked them to hold out a little longer.

“Give us 48 hours,” Dolhopyatov said. “We have another machine.”

The second Ardal followed a different path through the minefield, and overhead bomber drones scoured the route to clear suspected mines. Ardal finally reached the men’s trench. They emerged ragged and wounded, but alive. Overhead, Russian drones closed in. From the command bunker, medics offered encouragement over the radio: “Climb in fast—we’re getting you out.”

Ardal carried them to safety, under the watchful eye of Ukrainian aerial drones. In the command bunker, Garbovskaya surveyed the scene. More than 50 people—pilots, medics, electronic warfare crews, engineers—had all assembled to save three men.

For most of history, recovering injured personnel from an active battlefield has not been a military priority. If the wounded could not make their way to safety, they were left until the fighting stopped. Serious injuries almost always ended in death, and the ratio of wounded to killed was about 3 to 1.

During the First World War, evacuating wounded soldiers became its own professionalized combat discipline. Many injuries were still fatal, but the ratio of wounded to killed began to improve. By the time of the Vietnam War, the widespread adoption of helicopters and the doctrine of the “golden hour”—the narrow window in which medical intervention is most likely to save a life—drove the survival ratio to 5 wounded for every soldier killed.

During America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, rapid evacuation and advanced medical interventions brought survivability to historic highs. For every American soldier killed in those wars, approximately 10 survived their injuries. But in Ukraine, the death zone has made rapid evacuation all but impossible. Survivability has fallen, with a wounded-to-killed ratio of about 5 to 1.

Units such as the 1st Medical Battalion are trying to change that. The old battlefield math held that in many instances, rescuing a wounded soldier required more resources and risk than could be justified for a single life. But Ukraine has opted for a different way of calculating.

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

The military has introduced a points system that assigns varying values to different missions, rewarding units with credits that can be traded for new gear and supplies. Under the “ePoints” scheme, a routine resupply run earns two to three points; a casualty evacuation earns upwards of 70. On today’s battlefield, saving a single Ukrainian soldier is worth more than destroying a Russian tank.

Inside the death zone, Ukraine’s trenches are so difficult to reach that medics have had to reimagine the golden hour. Wound treatment must be provided on-site, by fellow soldiers. There simply are not enough medics for every trench.

Andrii Fedoryshyn, call sign “Jared,” is a trainer with the 1st Med. “The best thing we can teach a soldier is combat first aid,” he told me. “It’s more important than knowing how to shoot.”

The numbers bear this out. Less than 1 percent of the injuries seen by the 1st Med are gunshot wounds, and a soldier is far more likely to be called on to aid a buddy than to engage with the enemy. Everyone near the death zone, even journalists, carries a tourniquet. Many soldiers carry two or more, in the event that shrapnel severs multiple arteries. Once immediate care is provided, the waiting begins.

“For a front-line soldier, evacuation can take weeks,” the deputy commander of the 1st Med, who asked to be identified by only his first name, Igor, told me. “We once evac’d a patient who had a tourniquet on for 33 days.” That soldier’s unit tried everything to get him out: six attempts, six failures, and multiple armored vehicles lost in the process. The decision was made to send in a MAUL. “He lost the limb,” Igor said. “But we saved his life.”

As battlefield resources, MAULs are severely limited. Still, they are treated as expendable. Soldiers’ lives matter more. On average, two MAULs are lost for every five lives saved. I asked Ash, the battalion’s evacuation coordinator, if he ever got sentimental about the machines. “They’re tools,” he answered. “We don’t get attached.”

The platoon commander, call sign “Devi,” interrupted. “Except for this one,” he said, pulling up a video on his phone. It showed a MAUL that had lasted 10 missions, surviving drones and mines and saving the lives of 11 soldiers. After it was finally destroyed, its operators compiled a tribute video and posted it online, endowing the dead MAUL with a small but devoted fan club.

Officially, the logo of the 1st Med is a coiled snake, the ancient Greek symbol for medicine. The MAUL drivers have an unofficial logo of their own: a coffin overlaid with a progress indicator. They call themselves the “Tomb Raiders,” because, as Devi explained, “we bring people back from the dead.” Hence the movie posters plastered around the bunker, featuring Angelina Jolie in her Tomb Raider role. Opposite a wall of monitors, a scantily clad Jolie is covered in stickers featuring the coffin-and-timer logo. Each one represents a life saved. “When we fill the whole poster,” Igor explained, “we’ll auction it off to buy more machines.”

As much as medics value their MAULs, the soldiers I spoke with hated them. “No windows, no ports,” one told me. “I would rather have less protection and see what’s coming at me.” Once sealed in, a patient’s only link to the outside is a single ray of light streaming through the hinge seam and an intercom connected to the medic.

On a range far from the front, I rode inside a new MAUL undergoing testing. The coffin-like pod was stifling, and the bumpy ride nearly shook the bones out of my body. “I understand why soldiers hate it,” I told Devi. He received the feedback like a bad Yelp review. “Fair enough,” he said, “but a soldier able to complain is a soldier who survived.” The overwhelming majority of those rescued by a MAUL live to talk about it.

In the command bunker, a casualty call came in: severe internal bleeding, with developing sepsis. A MAUL set off. Overhead surveillance drones tracked its progress as the bombers scanned the route for potential mines. Ash checked in via radio about the soldier’s condition.

From the overhead feed, we saw the MAUL stop at a tree line. Two Ukrainian soldiers emerged from the foliage. One helped load the other into the sarcophagus, sealed the lid, and disappeared into the woods. Inside the command bunker, a calm professionalism prevailed. No voices were raised, except for Ash’s; he spoke loudly into his headset so that the patient could hear him over the noise of the machine.

Midway through the eight-mile return journey, the electronic-warfare team detected a heavy Russian suicide drone, a Molniya, lurking overhead. The MAUL took cover, let the Molniya pass, then continued to the transfer point where a medical team awaited. As it approached the rendezvous, the Ukrainians spotted another approaching drone. “Three kilometers, closing,” came the call. The patient was quickly lifted into an armored vehicle, which sped off toward the field hospital.

Ash’s job was done. He took off his headset and slumped into a couch. In the dim light, I noticed for the first time that he was wearing Crocs. His T-shirt, a Polish streetwear brand, said Ghosh. I sat next to him, somehow exhausted even though I had done nothing but observe. Through the walls I felt the thump of nearby drone strikes. No one else in the bunker seemed to notice them.

I asked Ash what he did before the war. “Musical theater,” he said. “I was a performer.” I asked about his greatest fear as a combat medic. “Losing one of our guys en route,” he answered. Not seeing the gore of injuries, or wondering whether his bunker would be hit. His heaviest burden was the thought of a disabled MAUL, one of his patients trapped inside, unable to make it home.

“Has this ever happened?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Twice.”

In the Russian military, by contrast, being wounded and abandoned is the norm. At a POW camp in western Ukraine, I spoke with several Russian prisoners of war. “I was wounded in the legs,” one prisoner, who asked that I withhold his name for fear of reprisal, told me. “There was no rescue—my own guys left me to die.”

The first medical attention he received was from the Ukrainian military. Reliable figures for Russia’s wounded-to-killed ratio are difficult to pin down, but conservative estimates place it at about 2 to 1, worse than the survival ratio of Russian soldiers during World War I.

At the foothills of Ukraine’s Carpathian Mountains, far from the front lines, lies a rehab facility for injured soldiers. I met Pavlo there, four months into his recovery from injuries sustained trying to rescue another soldier. He had successfully driven his truck to the pickup point for his wounded comrade when he was struck by a Russian drone. Shrapnel entered his abdomen, tore through his bladder, and broke his pelvis. Someone dragged him into a trench. Pavlo begged to stay there, remembering the wrecked and burning vehicles littering the road he drove in on. Over the radio, the medics insisted, “If you do not leave, you will die for sure.”

[Read: Ukraine planned to swarm Moscow airports with AI-guided drones]

At dusk, the unmanned ground vehicle came. Over the next three hours, the teams behind it—medics, ground-drone operators, bomber- and aerial-surveillance-drone pilots, and electronic-warfare crews—performed the intricate choreography needed to carry Pavlo to safety.

From the top of a Carpathian ski resort, under a cloud-dappled sky, Pavlo recounted every detail, from his failed attempt to rescue his fellow soldier to the moment he went into surgery. Every few minutes, we glanced skyward to scan for threats. We were safe, but such habits die hard. Pavlo would soon return to his new wife, and he knew that this would have been impossible without the ground drone and the humans who operated it, all working together to save this one soldier.

“I never met them,” Pavlo said. “A robot carried me, but people saved me. So many, just for me.”

He looked up again. “I don’t even know their names.”

Congress Might Be About to Hand Trump Sweeping Tariff Powers

2026-09-15T17:27:00-04:00

The Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia Act, which the House will likely vote on this week, looks like a no-brainer for supporters of Ukraine who have been calling for President Trump to get tougher on Russia.

A large majority of America’s existing sanctions on Russia, which target thousands of government officials and companies, are currently enforced by executive order, meaning that the president can remove them whenever he wants. The Graham bill would turn those sanctions into law: If Trump wanted to end them, he would need Congress’s approval. It also targets a few Russian officials and companies by name, further reducing Trump’s discretion. These provisions help explain why the late Senator Graham, one of Ukraine’s strongest defenders in Congress, originally championed the bill. President Volodymyr Zelensky himself has urged legislators to pass it, as have more than 30 national-security and foreign-policy experts who argue that it’s in Kyiv’s best interest.

But the bill is not what it seems. The legislation would impose no significant new sanctions on Russia, and it would allow Trump to waive any of its measures simply by claiming that doing so is in the national interest. In other words, a law that appears to handcuff Trump would offer him a key to free himself. What’s more, its most important provisions are about not sanctions per se, but tariffs. The bill could provide Trump with the same kind of sweeping authority to impose tariffs that the Supreme Court took away from him in February, allowing him to intensify his trade war with many of America’s allies and partners.

The legislation would give the president authority to impose levies of up to 100 percent on the five largest importers of Russian crude oil and the five largest importers of Russian natural gas, which include China, India, France, Japan, Hungary, and Slovakia. It also allows him to impose tariffs on the five countries that are deemed to be the biggest facilitators of Russia’s evasion of oil sanctions—a vague provision largely subject to presidential discretion. (There are a few carve-outs for the natural-gas category, but not for the others.)

[Read: Russia’s real strategy in Europe]

Peter Harrell, a trade lawyer who served in the Biden administration, told me that the bill “gives Trump much more flexibility on tariffs than traditional tariff laws. There are no guardrails or restrictions.” The simplest reading of the legislation suggests that Trump can impose tariffs on only the countries that appear in the various top-five lists. But Harrell noted that Trump’s second-term track record suggests that he might try to interpret the law more expansively, perhaps by treating the European Union as a single country and imposing tariffs on the entire bloc all at once. Harrell also warned that the administration might use the law as a pretext to impose tariffs on countries that have little or nothing to do with Russia evading sanctions.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Trump has employed such a pretext. Consider his 25 percent tariff on India, which the Supreme Court has since struck down. The levy was ostensibly meant to punish the country for importing oil from Russia. But reporting suggests that the decision had more to do with Trump’s annoyance that Prime Minister Narendra Modi didn’t give him credit for the cease-fire that India and Pakistan signed last year.

Going beyond the letter of the Graham bill could well result in litigation for the administration. But Trump would still have ample reason to take an aggressive approach. For one thing, the legal process takes a long time—most trade lawyers think that the February ruling came at warp speed, even though it was a year in the making. While the case was moving through the courts, they consistently allowed the Trump administration to continue collecting tariff revenue in the meantime. In all likelihood, Trump would be free to use the tariff tool expansively for most of the rest of his term.

Trump is evidently less worried about Russia evading sanctions than he is about oil prices. At the start of the Iran war, he waived some sanctions on Russian oil in an attempt to keep prices from going up. There is little reason to think that he will act more forcefully against Russian energy now, because oil prices remain high and the midterms are just a month away. Indeed, he has failed to update and enforce sanctions that are already on the books, despite bipartisan support. Moreover, Trump recently sent Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff to Moscow to dangle the prospect of sanctions relief in exchange for some modest steps toward deescalating the war.

[Read: The warrior-witches of Ukraine’s resistance]

Still, supporters of the bill believe that the benefits outweigh the risks. Eric Ciaramella, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who served on the National Security Council as an adviser on Ukraine policy in the first Trump administration, told me, “If Trump wanted to hurt Europe, he has lots of ways to do that already. This is just a marginal increase in that risk, and it adds some political pressure on him to get tougher on Russia.” Whether such pressure would get Trump to change, however, is another question.

Perhaps the strongest argument in favor of the bill is simply that the Ukrainians want it. The legislation would no doubt serve as a symbol of Congress’s support. But Ukraine needs material, not symbolic, support—particularly weapons such as air-defense interceptors and greater economic assistance to survive the winter. Trump has the power to provide both, but he has chosen not to. Turning the Graham bill into law isn’t likely to give him a sudden change of heart.

Yesterday, Democrats tried but failed to introduce amendments that would exempt the EU from being treated as a country, tighten the national-security waiver, and scrap the broad allowances for tariffs on countries other than Russia. Without those measures, the bill amounts to little more than a permission slip for Trump to restart his trade war with America’s allies and partners. That’s not a price worth paying just to give Ukraine a symbolic victory.

What Trump Doesn’t Understand About Xi

2026-09-14T07:00:00-04:00

President Trump will host Xi Jinping for a state visit on September 24, once again putting his claimed bonhomie with the Chinese leader at the center of the relations between the two superpowers. But Trump’s insistence on the importance of this personal rapport shows just how little he understands his adversary.

I have been studying Xi ever since he became China’s heir apparent, and I became an analyst at the CIA in the waning days of the George W. Bush administration. I spent years deciphering Xi for U.S. presidents as the intelligence community’s top expert on Xi. And I spent two years as the director for China at the National Security Council, where I staffed all of President Biden’s interactions with Xi and coordinated diplomacy with China across the U.S. government.

For a decade now, Trump has oscillated between courting and skirmishing with Xi. After his first term, Trump called Xi a friend and described him as someone he knew well. His experience with Xi seems to have led him to believe that he has unique, firsthand insights into China’s leader that his staff and advisers lack; in the past year, he has excluded even his close confidants, such as Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, from intensive diplomacy with China, and has acted practically as his own China desk officer.

Trump’s go-to stratagem for gaining leverage with Xi has been to be unpredictable, or at least to try to be. Yet in Trump’s second term, Xi has surprised Trump more often than Trump has surprised him. That is because Xi’s modus operandi, at home and abroad, is that of a jack-in-the-box: He winds up patiently over years, sometimes decades, and then pops at the propitious moment. The result is always startling.

Xi rose to become China’s leader in large part by presenting himself as having the steady hands needed to restart stalled economic reforms without upsetting the comfortable gentlemen’s agreements that kept the Communist Party’s factional rivalries in check. But once Xi secured power, he launched a blistering campaign against the very party elites who had pulled him up.

[Read: China is flatlining]

Xi’s steeliness has caught Trump off guard, just as it did his Chinese colleagues. At the time of Trump’s first term, Xi was accustomed to playing politics as a quiet, intense poker match, in which the Chinese leader read the opposing players and considered his own cards with characteristic subtlety. Trump, meanwhile, approached politics and policy making more like a gambler on a hot streak at one of the casinos he owned. During his first encounter with Trump, at Mar-a-Lago in 2017, Xi learned about U.S. air strikes on Syria over a beautiful piece of chocolate cake. He spent the years in between Trump’s first and second terms winding up to deal with a president whose M.O. he now understood—and preparing to pop up when the moment was right.

That moment came early in Trump’s second term. In April 2025, the U.S. president rolled out his “Liberation Day” tariffs, which included some that amounted to a de facto embargo on China. Xi surprised Trump by being the only world leader to retaliate rather than conciliate. Trump was ultimately forced to fold.

In the run-up to the two leaders’ summit in Seoul last fall, Xi again surprised Trump’s team—this time by unfurling an expansive set of export controls on rare earth elements, which ultimately prompted the U.S. to roll back its own export controls on China. Beijing’s willingness to escalate was a remarkable departure from a previous pattern of downplaying differences ahead of such summits, and it underscored that Xi was more interested in curtailing Washington’s ability to target China than in striking a deal.

Accordingly, the meeting in Seoul, and Trump’s subsequent visit to Beijing in May, produced little beyond relatively minor commercial agreements affecting specific firms and sectors. The Trump administration, undoubtedly disappointed by the lack of any meaningful deal to emerge from these summits, chose to emphasize Trump’s efforts to deepen his rapport with Xi. The president evidently believes this personal relationship will allow him to secure deals that advance American interests.

This expectation has no observable foundation in Xi’s 14-year rule. Even by the standards of authoritarian rulers, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Xi has shown himself to be unsentimental about personal relationships—including those with members of his own inner circle, to say nothing of the leader of China’s principal geopolitical rival. Xi is very different from Putin in this regard. Whereas Putin takes extravagant risks on the international stage but is loath to hold his associates accountable for incompetence, Xi is just the opposite. He is calculating and measured in international politics but pitiless in jettisoning even longtime associates for perceived malfeasance.

In January, Xi dismissed his military’s top officer, General Zhang Youxia. The relationship between Xi and Zhang went back decades, extending not just to their childhoods but all the way back to their fathers, who were comrades in arms in China’s ferocious civil war. Four years ago, Xi deferred Zhang’s retirement, keeping him on board to help manage the world’s largest and second-most-capable military. We do not know what motivated Xi to oust Zhang, but given the history between the two men, the act was as brutal and unexpected as anything in a season finale of Game of Thrones.

Xi’s approach to Washington has been similarly dispassionate. During Trump’s visit to Beijing, the American president lavished praise on Xi, only for the Chinese leader to respond with stoic indifference.

[Read: What the floods say about Xi Jinping]

Trump’s desire to parlay personal charisma into deals may be one of his least idiosyncratic qualities. In fact, there is something about the impulse that is quintessentially American. Even—perhaps especially—for a Beltway outsider, ascending the American political ladder requires a tremendous amount of glad-handing and personal magnetism, if not charm. Those who reach its pinnacle often assume that the same qualities will serve them on the international stage. Joe Biden rose through the Senate, which required cordiality and the ability to strike deals with rivals. George W. Bush and Bill Clinton were known for their affability. Overbearing friendliness might even be described as our national affect.

By contrast, Xi grew up in a system that punished openness and personal dynamism. His father’s boss and mentor, the reformer Hu Yaobang, whose death in 1989 sparked the protests in Tiananmen Square, was known for his outspokenness, which played a crucial role in his political demise. Hu’s ouster extinguished freewheeling politicking from the ranks of China’s leadership ever after.

Going into his next encounter with Xi, Trump seems to genuinely believe that he has the upper hand. Yet an unsettling split screen has accompanied every summit of his second term. In Seoul, Xi walked into the meeting having just outlined the five-year plan for China’s development through 2030. By contrast, Trump was in the midst of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. In May, Xi hosted Trump for a meeting that Trump had earlier postponed because of the war in Iran, which was going badly. Xi now plans to follow his state visit to Washington with a major party meeting to lay the groundwork for his fourth five-year term, which will start next year. Trump, meanwhile, will be at best a lame-duck president within weeks of the summit—or worse, if the Democrats are able to take back the House or the Senate.

The contrast evident at these meetings with Trump has surely reinforced Xi’s view of the United States as a declining but dangerous power, and of China as an ascendant one. Xi believes that time is on his side, so he does not need a deal. He’s happy to perpetuate an uneasy stalemate through a pantomime of rapport with Trump. In the meantime, Xi is winding up for the fifth U.S presidential administration of his tenure, whatever it may bring.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S.-government authentication of information or endorsement of the author's views.

MAGA Is Making the World Safe for Corruption

2026-09-14T06:00:00-04:00

Illustrations by Ben Hickey

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

In the summer of 2025, the government of Brazil suddenly found itself in a deep crisis. The Trump administration had unexpectedly imposed 50 percent tariffs on the country’s products, threatening everyone from coffee planters to shoe manufacturers. At the same time, the United States canceled the visas of eight Brazilian supreme-court justices and placed unprecedented financial and travel sanctions on a powerful justice and his family.

Many things about this crisis were novel. For the first time anyone could remember, an American administration had used tariffs not for economic reasons but as a tool to influence the internal politics of a friendly democracy. President Trump was publicly fulminating against what he called the “WITCH HUNT” against Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, who was then on trial for plotting to carry out a coup after losing an election in 2022. Some of Bolsonaro’s followers had stormed Brazil’s Parliament and other federal buildings, likely inspired by the actions of Trump supporters on January 6, 2021. Steve Bannon, who called the Brazilian insurrectionists “freedom fighters,” was one of many MAGA boosters who cheered them on. When combined with local grievances, the language of American election denial was right at home in Brazil.

The U.S. has used financial sanctions and visa bans in the past—but only to punish dictators, criminals, and people accused of grand-scale international corruption or brutal atrocities. Brazilian Justice Alexandre de Moraes had never been credibly accused of any of this. But by the Trump administration’s reckoning, he had two strikes against him: First, de Moraes’s court was trying Bolsonaro; second, he had provoked the ire of Elon Musk, Trump’s largest election donor. De Moraes “needs to leave,” Musk said, comparing him to Voldemort, after de Moraes threatened to fine X and ordered it to block accounts accused of spreading disinformation.

The crisis was novel in other ways too. In normal times, the Brazilian government is reasonably well connected in Washington, regardless of who runs either country. The tenth-largest economy in the world, Brazil cooperates extensively with U.S. law enforcement and regional organizations. Yet at this crucial moment, with billions of dollars in the balance and Brazil’s sovereign democracy under attack, Brazilian officials suddenly found that nobody in the Trump administration would speak to the formal representatives of their left-leaning president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Brazil’s ambassador to Washington found herself isolated. The foreign minister, a diplomat who had known U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio for decades, could not get through to anyone. A junior official told me that even his graduate-school classmate at the U.S. Treasury would not answer his calls.

The Brazilian finance minister at the time, Fernando Haddad, finally managed to schedule a call with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. But two days before the meeting was to take place, the Treasury Department canceled it—and then Bessent used the same time slot to meet with Eduardo Bolsonaro, the former president’s son. The younger Bolsonaro—who lives in Texas, has befriended Donald Trump Jr., and attends Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) meetings—was flaunting his connections in Washington, which were manifestly better than those of Lula’s administration.

[Autocracy in America: The kleptocracy club]

That put the Brazilians in a strange position. “All the official channels that we have, they just suddenly went out of touch,” the junior official told me. “And what happened is that myriad informal actors just started knocking at our doors. And that was interesting.”

Some of these visitors were types not previously known in Washington: lobbyists advertising their relationships not with government officials but with the people who hang around Mar-a-Lago, or with MAGA influencers whose X accounts can attract the president’s attention. Others were business operators offering government favors while seeking to make deals for themselves: An investor who claimed to own a vacation home near Bessent’s offered to arrange a meeting with the Treasury secretary in exchange for access to crucial minerals for himself. The Brazilians declined that offer.

A truce was finally arranged, multiple people told me, with the help of Joesley Batista, a billionaire whose meatpacking company does business in both the U.S. and Brazil, and whose American subsidiary had donated $5 million to Trump’s inauguration (more than the contributions of Amazon, Meta, and Google combined). Batista had no official government role, but his money may have given him the clout to influence Trump’s meetings with Lula at the 2025 United Nations General Assembly, in New York City, and at a summit in Kuala Lumpur, where the two elderly populists, each with grievances against their respective establishments, hit it off. The tariffs were reduced.

The détente was temporary. When I visited São Paulo and Brasília this past spring, the State Department had just appointed a new senior adviser on Brazil policy. Before working for the administration, Darren Beattie founded Revolver News, a website that promoted the “Fedsurrection” conspiracy—the belief that federal agents were behind the riots on January 6, an obsession that would naturally appeal to Brazil’s election deniers and displease the elected president. When Beattie asked to visit Brazil for a minerals conference, the Brazilian government refused to grant him a visa, in part because it suspected that his true purpose was to visit Jair Bolsonaro, then in prison.

Among the journalists, analysts, and officials I met in Brazil, the main topic of conversation was not whether the U.S. would intervene in the country’s elections this fall but how. Flávio Bolsonaro, another of the ex-president’s sons, is running for president, and the Trump administration seems to be looking for ways to help. In June, when a Brazilian court handed Flávio’s brother Eduardo a prison sentence for seeking to get the U.S. to intervene in his father’s trial, Trump’s State Department denounced the conviction as “lawfare.” In July, the administration planned to send two envoys to Brazil to meet with election deniers and “investigate” the Brazilian electoral system; their visa requests were also turned down. A Brazilian public-policy professor told me he wouldn’t be surprised if American social-media platforms quietly began to help Bolsonaro. These tech companies have already shown that they will “flip ideology” to align with changes in the American government. So why not in Brazil?

Slowly, the Brazilians were learning the same lesson as other American allies around the world: The United States of America is no longer the entity they knew. And American power is no longer deployed solely by trained diplomats and reliable officials, working through state channels. Informal envoys, private companies, online grifters, and hardened ideologues both inside and outside the government matter more. Unlike their predecessors, these people do not talk about spreading democracy, and don’t want to build long-term relationships. They don’t care about America’s reputation. They are deploying the tools of American diplomacy and government for their own purposes, to promote their own business interests or their own ideological goals, because, suddenly, they can.

Illustration by Ben Hickey

“Revolutions are the locomotives of history,” Karl Marx wrote. He was wrong about many things but not about this: In modern times, every major revolutionary movement has sought to change not just the politics of a single country but the international system itself. Napoleon marched the French Revolution across Europe. Lenin and Trotsky believed that their Bolshevik Revolution would succeed only when the Soviet Union was surrounded by other Communist states. Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors built proxy movements to spread their ideology across the Middle East.

[Anne Applebaum: Kleptocracy, Inc.]

The clan of predators currently in charge of the U.S. federal government is no different. Wrongly described as “isolationists,” many of its true believers don’t think of themselves as ordinary Republicans who won an election and will temporarily hold power until the next election. Nor are they mere appendages of Trump. They believe they represent something much greater: the vanguard of a movement that will alter not just America, but the world.

Like earlier revolutionaries, they do not believe that their opponents are legitimate rivals or, as John McCain once described Barack Obama, decent citizens with whom they happen to disagree. Their enemies are existential, and they are international: super-spreaders of a “wokeness” plague, or proponents of a fictitious “censorship-industrial complex,” or advocates of “regulation” that will hamper American business, or self-hating promoters of “mass migration” who want to drown Western civilization in a sea of brown-faced aliens. To maintain their power and defeat these enemies, the predators, like their Bolshevik counterparts, cannot rely on traditional diplomacy, because they don’t trust its practitioners.

Nor do they trust many of the leaders of the democratic states that have long shared the same political and economic values as America. Although the U.S. military and intelligence services continue to cooperate closely with allied governments, the ideologues in and out of the administration are actively seeking to replace them with people and parties who share their disdain for liberal democracy and for what were once considered, at least aspirationally, to be American values. To do so, they need to expand their global influence, manipulate elections in former partner nations, and alter the flows of money and power, especially inside other democracies. Much of the world has always believed America’s defense of democracy to be hypocritical, and that American-led economic integration was self-serving. But now even the people who sincerely believed in the postwar American project are discovering that it no longer exists.

Like all revolutions, this one has many faces. The Bolsheviks had an ideology, a plan to destroy the old social order and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. But a motley array of other people—advocates of free love, avant-garde painters, grifters fleecing ex-aristocrats—took advantage of the chaos to promote their own agendas. Different kinds of revolutionaries are now pushing the “Make America Great Again” movement in different directions too.

[From the March 2019 issue: Russian-style kleptocracy is infiltrating America]

Some are ideologues such as Bannon and Beattie, people who believe that Western civilization is being destroyed by racial diversity, secularism, and the commitment to human rights. “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” Beattie once wrote on X. “Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.” Bannon first compared himself to Lenin and talked about smashing the “administrative state” more than a decade ago.

These ideas, once marginal, are now central to American foreign policy. At last year’s Munich Security Conference, Vice President Vance assailed “the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.” At this year’s Munich Security Conference, Rubio said the same thing more politely. In the face of “an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies,” Rubio, the son of immigrants, called on America and Europe to work together in the name of our “shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry.” He said nothing about a shared commitment to democracy, transparency, or the rule of law.

The corollary to this thesis, expressed last year in the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, is that America has a special interest in the politics of the historically white, Christian nations of Europe, and in promoting the far-right political leaders and movements working to keep Europe white and Christian, even though most of them are not currently in power. That document made it clear that although America will no longer intervene to promote democracy at all, anywhere in the world, it is now American policy to “help Europe correct its current trajectory”—language that justifies direct U.S. intervention in European politics to prevent what the document enigmatically calls “civilizational erasure” and to help the allies of the ideologues take power. In “The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe,” an essay published on the State Department’s Substack, a 27-year-old Trump appointee named Samuel Samson accused Europeans of waging “an aggressive campaign against Western civilization.”

The fight against this existential threat is under way. Sarah Rogers, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, told Congress this year that America is now “fully utilizing all the tools at our disposal—exchange programs, cultural heritage initiatives, micro-grants, and more—to advance the President’s America First agenda.” In practice, this means that the American government is using diplomatic pressure, visa bans, and cultural funding to support political parties and leaders deemed to be “civilizational allies” in its international struggle and to undermine its opponents, even when those opponents are the leaders of legitimate governments that have long-standing relationships with the U.S. Samson has held friendly private meetings with far-right European leaders and party representatives, including the Alternative for Germany (AfD); Rogers had a much less friendly meeting with representatives of an actual European government. On a recent visit to the United Kingdom, Rogers denounced what she described as a migrant-led crime wave and accused those present of failing to contend with their country’s problems. In reality, British crime levels have been falling, but genuine facts about Europe—a continent where people live longer, have better health care, and are far less likely to die in mass shootings than Americans—are rarely allowed to undermine the narrative.

In its own hemisphere, the State Department is committed to a more openly imperialist project. The National Security Strategy implies that other governments in North and South America should capitulate to the demands of American officials or companies, and that if they don’t, the U.S. will work to change those governments. As in Europe, the Trump administration will push hard to elect, and to keep in power, politicians who support American dominance: We “will reward and encourage the region’s governments, political parties, and movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy,” the National Security Strategy declares. When Trump ordered U.S. Special Forces to seize President Nicolás Maduro and his wife from Venezuela and his administration exploited the country’s oil, that was understood by legitimate democratic leaders in our hemisphere (which Maduro was not) as a warning: This can happen to you.

For some regional politicians, this looks like an opportunity. In October 2025, Flávio Bolsonaro, the presidential candidate, suggested that the U.S. could expand its military attacks on small, allegedly drug-carrying fishing boats. Wouldn’t the American military like to “spend a few months” in Guanabara Bay, off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, he asked, “helping us fight these terrorist organizations?” When the U.S. State Department duly designated two Brazilian crime syndicates as “terrorists” this past spring, against the wishes of the Brazilian government, some wondered whether the U.S. was preparing the justification for a future intervention.

others have different, more immediate reasons for wanting to “Make America Great Again.” These include executives from the oil-and-gas, cryptocurrency, and rare-earth-mining industries, and above all big tech companies. Their motivations differ from those of the ideologues, but they share the belief that only power matters, and that only superior humans—richer, more intelligent, usually male and white—should have it. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper in January, “but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” Miller’s words surely appealed to the business leaders who are delighted to see the tools of American government and diplomacy being redeployed, not to build a world that’s safe for democracy, or even safe for Americans, but to create a world that’s profitable for them.

Many of the unconventional figures who now act in the name of the U.S. are already working to make this dream real. In January, Steve Witkoff, the real-estate dealer turned U.S. special envoy, told a roomful of European presidents and prime ministers gathered in Paris to discuss support for Ukraine that he was already negotiating energy and mineral deals for American companies with Russia, to be implemented after the war. This surprised many of the meeting’s attendees, whose main concern was bringing peace to Ukraine. (A White House spokesperson denied that Witkoff made this statement.) Witkoff also specifically mentioned the role that the U.S. investment company BlackRock could play in the reconstruction of Ukraine, an unusual comment for a peace negotiator. But maybe not a surprising one: BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has sat next to Jared Kushner while he negotiated with the Ukrainians, according to The New York Times.

Trump’s Board of Peace, the quasi-governmental organization whose rules read like those of an exclusive golf club—Trump, as chair, has the right to name his successor, select the board, and determine the mission—presents the same dilemma: Is this organization, much of whose funding is not transparent and comes from member states in the Persian Gulf, designed to make peace, or make money? Does it represent the views of America, or of its funders? In the name of rebuilding Gaza, the board, according to The Guardian, has sought to grant itself the power to seize Palestinian land and buildings, perhaps paving the way for American companies to enact the “New Gaza” plan, a redevelopment project proposed by Kushner, a private citizen (and Trump’s son-in-law) who is of course a board member, as well as Witkoff’s negotiating partner on Russia.

Other projects are more narrowly designed to benefit family members and friends of the president. Last year Trump, along with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, helped negotiate access to one of the world’s largest untapped tungsten reserves, in Kazakhstan, for a low-profile American mining company. The New York Times reported that the deal, which is supported by $1.6 billion in federal financing, benefits Trump’s sons, who are partial owners of an investment bank with a stake in the project. Lutnick’s sons oversee another company, Cantor Fitzgerald, involved with the deal. (Trump’s sons have said that they had no role in shaping the details of the deal. A spokesperson for Cantor Fitzgerald told the Times that the company’s executives were not involved in discussions of government funding.) But this is only one example: Trump’s children are also negotiating private business deals in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, where local leaders have a clear interest in impressing their father. According to The Washington Post, Trump’s sons have also invested in numerous defense-tech companies that have received Pentagon contracts or other federal funding. “There are no conflicts of interest,” a White House spokesperson told the Post when asked about the report.

According to the Times, Trump himself earned an unprecedented $2.2 billion in the first year of his second term, much of it from cryptocurrency projects. But he also enjoys exercising power over other people, and uses the tools of government to do that. His tariffs give him financial and personal leverage over foreign leaders. His invasion of Venezuela gave him an apparent victory over an old enemy, but also opaque control of Venezuela’s oil, which he has bragged about repeatedly. His use of unconventional envoys helps him manage these various interests, many of which would have in the past been considered immoral or possibly illegal. Fiona Hill, a civil servant on the National Security Council during Trump’s first term, told me that even then, the president was surrounded by people who were “quasi-thinking that they were representing American interests, but they were also representing their own.” He still is.

Illustration by Ben Hickey

Sometimes, the goals of the civilizational warriors, the oligarchs, and Trump directly align. Consider their joint war against the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which regulates how social-media companies, search engines, and other online organizations protect users’ rights, handle illegal content, and generally look after the public interest. The State Department ideologues describe this law as “censorship” that is damaging not only to Europeans but to Americans. At an event in Washington this past spring, Sarah Rogers spoke of a “censorship class” that had allegedly been active under the Biden administration before it “scuttled to Europe” after the 2024 election.

Although several lawsuits have sought to prove otherwise, there is no evidence that the Biden administration silenced anybody. Nevertheless, the State Department takes this “threat” so seriously that it has imposed visa restrictions on Thierry Breton, a former EU commissioner who is now a private citizen, for his role in creating the Digital Services Act, as well as four other Europeans who campaigned for the law, paradoxically curbing their freedom of speech. A German official told me that Americans regularly bring up their objections to the act during bilateral negotiations, even though the law—passed by the European Union, not Germany—has been in effect since 2022.

The reality is that the Digital Services Act says nothing about censorship, especially not of Americans. The law requires digital platforms to protect minors, comply with European laws—laws that are made by democratically elected legislatures and that, in Germany and elsewhere, forbid Nazi propaganda and Holocaust denial, as well as child pornography and incitement of terrorism—and provide transparency about their use of algorithms. Europeans don’t have the same speech laws as Americans, but they have the right to enact and enforce their own laws, just as they have a right to different food-safety or air-pollution laws. American companies operate all over the world in accordance with the local laws. But in Europe, U.S. tech companies and the U.S. administration are jointly seeking to change not just the laws, but the political and legal order that wrote them. Different faces of the revolution coincide conveniently here: The promotion of anti-European, far-right political parties serves both the profit-making interests of the tech companies and the ideological interests of the “free speech” defenders. Elon Musk, for example, openly uses his social-media platform, his political donations, and the clout that his companies give him inside the U.S. government to oppose many forms of digital regulation, to push racist conspiracy theories, and to promote the civilizational allies of the predator clan. He has made video appearances at a far-right “Unite the Kingdom” rally—“Violence is coming to you,” he told those gathered in London; “you either fight back or you die”—and at a rally of the AfD, which Germany’s domestic intelligence agency classified as a right-wing extremist group. His platform has also been used to promote fear and misinformation, even to fuel violence that could destabilize sitting governments. After a stabbing in Southport, England, in 2024, viral posts falsely claiming that the suspect was a Muslim and an undocumented migrant spread rapidly to millions via X and other platforms, inflaming the riots that ensued.

The promotion of foreign political parties for commercial gain is not new. In 2018, Steve Bannon sent a message to Jeffrey Epstein, preserved in the Justice Department’s cache of Epstein files, suggesting that the success of extremist European political parties would make life easier for the cryptocurrency industry. In the message, Bannon described himself as an adviser to Italian, German, and Swiss far-right political parties, among others, as well as to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Britain’s Nigel Farage. Anticipating a victory in the upcoming European parliamentary elections, he told Epstein that “we can go from 92! seats to 200” and then “shut down any crypto legislation or anything else we want.” “Roger that,” Epstein responded.

Bannon, who by then had left the Trump administration, was not publicly claiming to speak for America or its interests. But people with views similar to Bannon’s are now speaking for America, and their impact on the international system is as dramatic as the Bolsheviks’ once was. I don’t mean that they will destroy the United Nations or the system of international law that Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of policy, disdainfully calls the “cloud-castle abstraction of the rules-based international order”; those things are already so weak that they have ceased to matter.

Rather, the change is inside the democratic world that came into being after 1945, a world based not exclusively on law, but on a set of mostly self-imposed restraints. Inside this sphere, American power was largely derived from alliances that it refrained from exploiting. Long-term relationships were held to be valuable, because you never knew when you might need your allies. U.S. politicians did not execute American foreign policy, or indeed domestic policy, in order to make money for themselves or their children while they were still in office. These alliances achieved enormous success: Although American policy in the Middle East has always been controversial and the results of American military interventions around the world mixed at best, America helped build eight decades of peace, prosperity, and eventually democracy in Europe and much of Asia, creating markets for U.S. companies and unprecedented support for U.S. power.

This world is fast disappearing. Instead, following the president’s lead, different people inside and outside the administration are seizing the revolutionary moment in order to win zero-sum victories. Countries that hang back from this free-for-all know they will suffer. “If we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said at Davos earlier this year. He was right.

In May, the governor of Louisiana landed in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, declaring that he had come to “make a bunch of friends.” Jeff Landry is Trump’s “special envoy” to Greenland, a title that comes with no salary and no recognition from Denmark, of which Greenland is a semiautonomous territory. Landry had nevertheless told Trump, on X, that “it’s an honor to serve you in this volunteer position to make Greenland a part of the U.S.”

Upon his arrival, Landry changed into camouflage pants, as if he were preparing for combat. He attended a business conference to which he had not been invited. He tried to hand out MAGA hats, without much success. Although Louisiana is near the bottom of all U.S. health-care rankings, and although Greenland has full access to a state-funded national health service, Landry brought a doctor who seemed to be there to discuss Greenlandic health care. On the day after Landry’s departure, Greenlanders staged a large protest outside the new U.S. consulate, which they had dubbed “Trump Tower.” After returning home, Landry nevertheless told Fox News that the people he had met “want more U.S. involvement in Greenland.”

The visit was farcical, but no one in Denmark was laughing. Ever since the surreal, shocking days in January 2026 when the Danish army brought blood banks to the island and prepared to blow up airport runways to thwart a possible U.S. invasion, the government in Copenhagen has been watching the Americans who visit Nuuk, some for business, some for politics, some for a strange mix of both. In August, for example, an American oil company called Greenland Energy began bringing equipment to drill for oil in a remote part of the island, although it had not received formal permission to do so. Greenland Energy’s investors include Ken Griffin, a major donor to the Republican Party. Dr. Phil, the former talk-show host and prominent Trump supporter, has been commissioned to make a documentary series about the project, designed to “capture the mission of these modern-day wildcatters.” The company offered locals huge salaries—$185,000 annually, well above the national average—and talked up the potential size of the oil deposit. (Greenland Energy has said that it hasn’t officially started recruiting employees, and that high salaries are standard for specialized security guards.) A local leader told me that this talk of big money seemed ominous to Greenlanders, and in several towns, people staged protests against the drilling project. In mid-August, officials in Greenland formally postponed the drilling.

Larry Swets, the company’s executive chair, told Fortune that the project is not related to American annexation. But two days after the Greenlandic government warned that it had not given the company permission to deliver equipment, Trump posted an AI-generated photograph of himself glowering over a Greenlandic village beneath the headline “Hello, Greenland!” So is Greenland Energy there for politics, for business, or both?

Equally hard to assess are the motives of Dryden Brown, a co-founder of Praxis, which Brown has described as a “crypto-native country” that has financial backing from, among others, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and Balaji Srinivasan, the author of The Network State: How to Start a New Country, along with entities associated with Peter Thiel and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Brown visited Greenland just before the 2024 U.S. presidential election to “try to buy it,” as he wrote on X. Praxis seeks to build a “digital nation”—anyone can apply to join—and he wants, at some point, to build a city in Greenland to house it. Maybe this was Brown’s own initiative. Maybe it was Thiel’s. Or maybe the idea came from Ken Howery, now the U.S. ambassador to Denmark, who co-founded PayPal with Thiel. Officially, Howery represents the U.S. government, but he equally represents the tech oligarchy, whose influence in this new world far exceeds that of mere government officials.

Lately, a more frequent visitor is Drew Horn, who describes himself as an entrepreneur “focusing on critical minerals and resource development.” With a Greenlandic business partner, a former politician who once starred in a Danish TV series, Horn is planning to build a data center in western Greenland, a daunting project that would require new port facilities, the construction of an undersea cable, housing for imported workers, and some bespoke engineering to prevent the center from sinking into the permafrost. But Horn is also a former Trump national-security official, according to The New Yorker, with links to at least one covert operation: In 2020, a participant in a failed coup attempt in Venezuela named Horn as one of his contacts, though Horn has denied all wrongdoing. He also denies playing any such role in Greenland, writing an article for Britain’s The Spectator magazine in May titled “No, I’m Not a CIA Spy in Greenland.” Still, he told Reuters in April that he maintains a “dialogue” with White House officials. Does he still represent Trump? American oligarchs? Both?

Horn has also met several times with the leader of Naleraq, Greenland’s populist pro-independence political party. At the time of Landry’s visit in May, Julie Rademacher, a Danish Greenlandic politician whom I’d met in Copenhagen, called me from Nuuk to describe the situation. Rademacher said that ever since American business and political operators from the Trump orbit had gotten involved in Greenland, Naleraq had become more aggressive, initiating votes of no confidence in a Parliament that is historically more decorous. Greenland does have long-standing grievances against Denmark. As recently as 2022, the Danish and Greenlandic governments launched an investigation into the Danish promotion of birth control in Greenland in the 1960s and ’70s, which included inserting IUDs into women without consent, a practice that former Greenlandic Prime Minister Múte B. Egede has said constituted “genocide.” Are Americans seeking to exploit that legacy?

Regardless of their opinion about Denmark, Greenlanders are becoming aware of, and are unnerved by, this semi-covert, sometimes glaringly obvious American pressure. The night after Landry’s visit, Rademacher said, she had gone to a bar in Nuuk where people were openly carrying guns, something she’d never seen before. The atmosphere on the island was becoming unsettled, strange: Greenlanders knew that envoys from a predatory foreign power were circulating among them, seeking minerals, money, attention, regime change. “They are destroying the trust and the respect in society, in institutions, but also in people,” she said. “They fuck with people’s brains. It will be a fight for Greenlanders to keep their sanity.”

Illustration by Ben Hickey

Like the assault on Greenland—and like so many other MAGA trolling projects—the American assault on Canada began with what seemed like a joke: Canada as the 51st state. But it was not a joke. Even before his second inauguration, Trump declared on Truth Social that “many people in Canada LOVE being the 51st State” and that “if Canada merged with the U.S. there would be no Tariffs, taxes would go way down, and they would be TOTALLY SECURE from the threat of the Russian and Chinese Ships that are constantly surrounding them.”

Never mind that U.S.-Canadian trade has been functioning perfectly well for decades. Never mind that there are no Russian and Chinese ships “constantly surrounding” Canada, just as there aren’t any surrounding Greenland. Once he took office, Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on Canadian and Mexican goods and a 10 percent tariff on Canadian energy products, as punishment, he claimed, for the failure to stop drugs and undocumented migrants from entering the U.S. This, too, was unfair—hardly any drugs enter the U.S. over the northern border—but Trump says many things that nobody is really expected to believe.

In practice, these tariffs had another purpose: They were, in the view of the Canadian government, the beginning of a campaign to weaken the Canadian economy. Trump, Prime Minister Carney said, is “trying to break us so the U.S. can own us.” As part of the negotiations to alleviate the tariffs, Canada was forced to abandon the idea of taxing U.S. tech companies. The tariffs did what they were supposed to do: In June, when Canada’s economy began to slow down, Trump once again suggested that Canada would do better as the “51st State!” In late July he tightened the screws again, announcing a new round of 50 percent tariffs on a range of Canadian goods, from “wine to hockey sticks to cement,” as an administration official put it. Ostensibly this was in response to “discriminatory” Canadian trade practices—but those were introduced only in response to Trump’s earlier round of tariffs.

As in Greenland, the economic campaign has been accompanied by an unofficial influence campaign. Canadians listen to many of the same podcasts and watch many of the same video clips as Americans, and during the coronavirus pandemic, some American far-right podcasters sought to reach new audiences by amplifying a Canadian truckers’ protest against vaccine mandates. Some probably did this because they agreed with the sentiment; others may have done it for money, knowing that the internet rewards outrage. Since 2022, the truckers’ protest has morphed into a full-scale separatist movement for the province of Alberta, and the podcasters have now picked up that cause too. Marcus Kolga, who runs the Toronto-based foreign-disinformation-monitoring group DisinfoWatch, says he has also identified Russian accounts pushing “a sustained pattern of Alberta-focused content across the Pravda News Network,” as well as on Russian-affiliated websites and social-media accounts.

Unlike American states, Canadian provinces are allowed to hold referenda on their relationship to the union; Quebec has done so twice, both times choosing the status quo. Alberta will hold a referendum on October 19, asking citizens whether the province should remain in Canada or begin the legal process to hold a second referendum on separation. The road to secession is complicated, and as of this summer those favoring a new relationship with Ottawa did not seem to have anything close to a majority. But the movement has momentum—for the first time, Alberta has a provincial government willing to allow a referendum on secession.

Americans did not create Alberta separatism, any more than they created Bolsonarism in Brazil. Resentment of federal intervention in the oil-and-gas industry in Alberta is old and deep. On a visit to Calgary back in 2019, I encountered pro-oil, anti-environmentalist protesters carrying a banner: We ❤ all 🍁 Pipelines. But American involvement is not trivial, either. Taylor Owen, a Canadian scholar who tracks nearly 600 U.S.-politics podcasts, told me that in the past, Canada was mentioned only sporadically—someone would say something controversial, 24 hours of debate would follow, and that would be it. That has changed, Owen said. Discussions of Alberta are now continuous and repetitive, with podcasters “either coordinating or just following each other.”

The net effect is that American podcasts are now generating a significant volume of content about Alberta separatism. An episode of Glenn Beck’s podcast featured Keith Wilson, an Alberta separatist who said that the province has “far more shared values” with “the United States and Americans than we do with these leftists in Ottawa.” Steve Bannon has described “undefended northern territories of Canada” as susceptible to Russian and Chinese invasion. Tim Pool and Benny Johnson, formerly of Tenet Media—an organization that allegedly received significant funding from Russia in the run-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election—have also joined the fray.

This is not solely a media project. On at least three occasions, State Department officials have welcomed representatives of the Alberta Prosperity Project, a separatist group. The names of the American officials present have not been published—Jeff Rath, one of the Alberta group’s leaders, has said its American contacts “don’t want to be wasting their time answering questions from the press.” The group reportedly requested a $500 billion loan for a future independent Albertan government. (Rath has denied this, but a co-founder of the group confirmed it to NBC News.) A State Department spokesperson has said that its officials meet frequently with “civil society types” and has not promised anything specific.

This behind-the-scenes conversation took on heavier significance in January, when Scott Bessent appeared on a far-right podcast run by the Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and made a series of statements seeming to endorse the separatist cause. Alberta, the Treasury secretary told Posobiec, is a “natural partner for the U.S.” The province “is a wealth of natural resources,” but the Canadian government “won’t let them build a pipeline to the Pacific.”

Bessent didn’t mention specific U.S. oil-and-gas interests, although there are many: ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil, for instance, have major interests in the Alberta oil sands. U.S. investors also have big stakes in the Canadian companies that operate in Alberta. Bessent noted coyly that he had heard a “rumor that they may have a referendum on whether they want to stay in Canada or not,” but he stopped just short of endorsing the effort.

At least one other official representative of the U.S. government has gone beyond mere hints. Pete Hoekstra, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, this year invited Tamara Lich, a leader of the 2022 trucker protests, to his Fourth of July party. Lich, who was tried and convicted in connection with the protests and is still under house arrest, has shifted her energies to Alberta separatism. She said that she attended the party after obtaining permission from her probation officer, posted photographs of herself with the ambassador, and thanked Hoekstra, Trump, and the “American people” for their support.

Alberta is in the middle of Canada. If the province were to detach itself, eastern Canada could be physically cut off from western Canada, the country would lose a substantial portion of its oil and natural-gas production, and the province’s important contributions to the national budget would vanish. Canada might cease to be a viable country, especially if other provinces started to question the union. That may be the point: In 1990, Pat Buchanan, the intellectual grandfather of the MAGA movement, declared that if Quebec ever broke off from Canada, America should “pick up the pieces.” This now seems to be, if not the publicly stated U.S. policy toward Canada, then at least the predator clan’s policy: pressure the economy, break up the federation, pick up the pieces. And no, it is not a joke.

The idea that a dedicated group of Americans has a plan to dismantle Canada, or that businessmen with opaque links to the U.S. government might want to create political conditions for a U.S. takeover of Greenland, may surprise Americans. It shouldn’t. Every single tactic used against Brazil, Canada, or Denmark has also been deployed elsewhere—not to support democracy, not to build American prosperity, but to spread the illiberal revolution and make money for the predators who support it. Here is a partial list.

Direct financial support for revolutionary allies. About two weeks before a midterm election in Argentina, in October 2025, the Trump administration announced a $20 billion bailout to rescue the Argentine economy from a financial crisis. This was a straight-up bribe: If the country did not vote for the party of Javier Milei, civilizational ally of the MAGA movement, Trump would withdraw this support. Milei’s party won. Since then, the Argentine president has backed the complete deregulation of AI. A few months after the election, Peter Thiel temporarily moved his entire family to Buenos Aires.

Illustration by Ben Hickey

Political support for revolutionary allies and illiberal parties. In Germany in February 2025, Vice President Vance went out of his way to meet Alice Weidel, a co-leader of the AfD. On a visit to Hungary in 2026, a few days before a national election, Vance endorsed Viktor Orbán for reelection as prime minister; at a public event in Budapest, Vance called Trump to confirm his endorsement too. Vance did not meet or mention the opposition leader, Péter Magyar, who then won the election in a landslide. During the Polish presidential-election campaign last year, Trump invited the far-right nationalist candidate, Karol Nawrocki, to the White House, but not his centrist opponent. Since then, Trump has repeatedly bragged about how he “won” the election for Nawrocki.

On a trip to Washington earlier this year, a group of German legislators, from various political parties, had scheduled meetings at the Pentagon and State Department. According to a member of the German Parliament, they were told that only representatives from the AfD and the center-right Christian Democratic party could enter the buildings; members of the Green Party and the Social Democratic Party were not allowed in.

Propaganda for revolutionary allies. The far-right videosphere regularly makes itself available for foreigners who want to burnish their revolutionary credentials at home. As a part of his 2025 presidential-election campaign in Romania, George Simion, the leader of the Romanian far right who is frequently aligned with Russia and whose 2022 wedding ceremony was modeled after that of a notorious interwar fascist, appeared on podcasts with Jack Posobiec and Steve Bannon, telling the latter, “We totally bashed the globalists here in Romania.” Nayib Bukele, the autocratic leader of El Salvador, went on Tucker Carlson’s show to defend his own program of mass arrests and packed prisons. He spoke English, but a version also appeared with Spanish subtitles for Salvadoran consumption. Orbán, before losing his election, appeared with Carlson and invited him to a public event in Hungary, to demonstrate to Hungarians that he had American support.

Rallies for revolutionary allies. Meetings of CPAC, once a mainstream forum for U.S. conservatives, have now become a kind of traveling road show that appears wherever sponsors can pay, offering visibility and quasi-official American endorsements to the local far right. A rotating team of international guests shows up: Bolsonaro, Simion, Bukele, Orbán, Milei, and Weidel, as well as Geert Wilders of the Dutch far right and Santiago Abascal of the Spanish far right. They join Americans such as Kristi Noem, Senator Ted Cruz, and Trump’s consigliere Richard Grenell.

Repurposing humanitarian agencies to benefit revolutionary allies. Discarding decades of human-rights standards and refugee law, the Trump administration removed refugee-processing officials from postings around the world and sent them to South Africa, where they are helping allegedly repressed Afrikaners (who do not by any international standard qualify as refugees). The officials did their job: From October 2025 through June 2026, the U.S. accepted 7,727 “refugees” from South Africa—and three from the rest of the world. An additional 10,000 white South Africans are on track to be accepted soon. A government estimate puts the cost of processing them at $100 million.

Following the destruction of USAID, Food for Peace—a program that has fed more than 4 billion people over 70 years—was moved to the Department of Agriculture, where its primary purpose will be not fighting hunger around the world but subsidizing U.S. farmers. This year, it will distribute food to countries that, for obscure reasons, don’t include those on the edge of famine, notably Sudan, South Sudan, and Somalia—but will include El Salvador, whose leader is a friend of the revolution.

Congressional networking with revolutionary allies. In March, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson headlined an Alliance of Sovereign Nations conference, hosted by Turning Point Action, bringing members of Congress and the global far right together beneath the banner of the organization created by the late Charlie Kirk. Among the attendees were Markus Frohnmaier, an AfD leader with unusually close ties to Russia; leaders from Georgia and Azerbaijan, repressive states with close ties to Russia; and Anna Paulina Luna, the conference organizer, a Florida congresswoman with close ties to Russia. George Simion was also there, having appeared earlier in the year as a guest at a party at the Kennedy Center, where he cut a slice from a red-white-and-blue cake shaped like Greenland.

Ending democracy promotion. All of the U.S. government institutions created over decades to promote democratic ideas and practices have now been weakened, dismantled, or rewired to promote the revolution. USAID is gone; foreign broadcasters such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty have barely survived; the State Department’s annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, once considered a nonpartisan source of information on human rights, now suggests that Germany is more oppressive than El Salvador. Slowly, the money the U.S. spends on educational and cultural programs, scholarships, and exchange-student programs—a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy and soft power since the early 1960s—is being repurposed. One example: 11 out of 12 members of the Fulbright exchange-student program’s board resigned last year after the State Department canceled nearly 200 Fulbright scholarships for American academics approved by the board and put other awards under review. One of the former board members told PBS that the board feared that the department was trying to block politically incorrect projects. This marked—“for the first time in 80 years,” he said—the “interjection of politics into the selection process,” a “gross distortion” of the program.

Asked at an event about the Trump administration’s policy toward cultural and academic grants more generally, Sarah Rogers, who runs America’s public diplomacy, explained that “we would choose a winning applicant for most of these grants based on how credibly we thought that person or organization could advance American priorities.” But what are “American priorities” if the American government is run by people who use its instruments not on behalf of its citizens, but on behalf of themselves?

Revolutions inspire other revolutions—and counterrevolutions. America is producing both. Slowly, politics around the world are shifting as leaders copy Trump’s tactics, switch sides to curry favor, develop a sudden interest in crypto—or else try hard to hedge against the predatory American regime.

Although European nationalist parties have historically favored a heavy role for the state—Viktor Orbán’s Hungary was an excellent example—many have now adopted a libertarian message, aligning themselves both with Trump and with American and international companies that seek havens from government regulation. Nigel Farage, the leader of the British far-right Reform party, campaigned for Trump in 2024. Now his income streams look similar to Trump’s. In 2024, he accepted a $6.7 million personal donation from a Thailand-based crypto mogul, Christopher Harborne, allegedly for Farage’s “security.” And George Cottrell, a convicted fraudster, also appears to have funded both Farage and, via donations made by Cottrell’s mother, Reform (even as a Polymarket account in Cottrell’s name was receiving some $9 million in cryptocurrency from unidentified sources). Previously better-known for promoting Brexit, Farage began to lobby hard on crypto issues—for example, he opposed a Bank of England cryptocurrency project that, as it happens, would damage Harborne’s business.

The revolution has also arrived in Poland, where the previously domestic-facing nationalist right has developed links to both the cryptocurrency industry and the Trump administration. A currency exchange called Zondacrypto, now under investigation for allegedly swindling customers, sponsored the CPAC event in Poland where Kristi Noem endorsed Karol Nawrocki and reportedly made contributions to foundations created by right-wing politicians. After Nawrocki won, he vetoed—three times—the centrist Polish government’s attempts to enshrine consumer cryptocurrency protections into Polish law. Echoing the language used in Trump’s Washington, Nawrocki’s justification for vetoing referenced “freedom” and “innovation.” (Disclosure: My husband, Radek Sikorski, is the foreign minister of Poland’s centrist government.)

In Latin America, hard-right politicians, some openly imitating Trump’s language and style, and some with links to crypto or the world of anonymous shell companies, are beginning to gain traction. Bukele, the autocratic leader of El Salvador, anticipated the revolution. He declared bitcoin legal tender in 2021, recruited an array of crypto-evangelists into his administration, and built a parallel diplomatic corps that set up Salvadoran bitcoin “embassies” in Texas and Switzerland. He also constructed a maximum-security prison for alleged gang members, designed with performative cruelty. The Trump administration sent alleged criminals there early in 2025. (Later investigations would find that most had no criminal records.)

Other Latin American leaders are also drawing from the Trump-Bukele playbook. Trump endorsed the new president of Colombia, Abelardo de la Espriella, a businessman who once told Agence France-Presse that “people who have created wealth during their lives should run the country”—a sentiment that sounds familiar—and who wants to build “mega-prisons” too. Hours after his inauguration, the U.S. offered him a $1 billion “security package,” even as his predecessor, taking another page out of the American playbook, was making accusations of a rigged election. Trump also backed José Antonio Kast, the new president of Chile, who ran a campaign calling for tighter border controls and mass deportations. During his first week in office, Kast negotiated a joint statement with the U.S. on mining rare earth minerals that seems intended to benefit private American mining interests.

Outside the democratic world, where kleptocracy has long been the norm, no special changes are necessary to accommodate the new American regime. Pragmatism reigns: If American-government decisions are now for sale, then many will eagerly buy them. The Qataris did not give Trump a $400 million jumbo jet merely out of friendship. The Saudi public-investment fund did not commit $2 billion to Jared Kushner’s private-equity fund simply as a gesture of goodwill. And Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama did not offer Kushner and Ivanka Trump a piece of the country’s environmentally protected coastline to build a luxury resort because he admires their design sense.

Sometimes, these kinds of contributions appear aimed at achieving very specific results. Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the Emirati royal family, purchased a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture, for $500 million. A few months later, the Trump administration agreed to let the UAE buy high-tech chips whose export the Biden administration had restricted.

Most governments in the old democratic world cannot compete in this race. Europeans, Canadians, Australians, and others can’t pay off the American president by investing in his children’s companies, because that would be illegal. Nor are they finding it easy to adjust to the new world of quasi-official, quasi-private diplomacy.

Instead they are beginning to look elsewhere for contacts, for technology, for trade. No one previously imagined that Canada would find it necessary to sign a defense pact with the EU, let alone to conduct defense-tech negotiations with Australia; it has now done both. The EU has just arranged a free-trade agreement with India, something that few people were interested in completing a few years ago, and another with Australia. In the first half of 2026, no fewer than 26 world leaders visited China, including the British, Spanish, German, and Canadian prime ministers. The French government is slowly removing Windows, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom from its computers, replacing them with open-source software or French-made alternatives. Some German regional governments, as well as the Danish and Dutch governments, are on a similar mission, as are some European banks and universities. These changes are meant to be permanent. After all, even if a Democrat wins the White House in 2028, the companies empowered by federal money and the ideologues who have taken over institutions will continue to influence Congress and voters. Now that Trump has shown that it can be done, future presidents might also benefit from kleptocratic practices. “We cannot leave the security of Europe in the hands of voters in Wisconsin every four years,” France’s Europe minister has said.

These shifts have been mocked and attacked by some, including the Pentagon’s Elbridge Colby, who has argued that American allies can’t replace the U.S. That may be true, in the short term. But if Colby or anyone else believes that America’s old friends will stop looking for other options, then he has misunderstood the depth and profundity of the shift in perceptions of America, not just in a few capital cities but in the heads and hearts of people around the globe.

A trivial but revealing incident from this summer hints at the extent of the change. Remember Trump’s phone call to Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, the body that runs the World Cup? Folarin Balogun, America’s star striker, had been given a red card, making him ineligible for the team’s next game, against Belgium. Trump asked Infantino to review the ban. FIFA lifted it. “I’m a person that loves sports and was a good athlete,” Trump told reporters, “and I understand sports really well. Really well.” But Trump did not understand sports, or sports fans. The outrage was immediate, visceral, and international, not because of anything the U.S. team had done but because the U.S. president had assumed he was allowed to break the rules, and because so many Americans seemed to approve.

Few may care about the ins and outs of Brazilian politics or understand the business dealings of World Liberty Financial. But many can recognize cheating. The head of the Norwegian football association filed an ethics complaint because “when you bend a rule like this, you’re on a slippery slope that will put the whole game at risk.” The British journalist Hugo Rifkind wrote that he was “startled and troubled to find myself heavily invested in Belgium winning a football game.” I heard former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta tell a large European audience that “Italians, French, and, yes, even the Dutch” had all rooted for Belgium too. I spent a couple of hours looking at commentary; hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of fans from all over the world left angry comments on X, YouTube, Facebook. The story resonated, not because this one World Cup match mattered, but because the presumptuous disdain that America showed for everyone else was so familiar.

Maybe it resonated with the team too. When the U.S. lost to Belgium—and lost badly—some wondered if Trump’s move had unsettled the players. They surely knew that the world was rooting against them, and seemed to have lost belief in themselves as a result. Other Americans may soon come to the same conclusion. For decades, we have told ourselves that our country represents democracy, freedom, and free trade. We believed we had allies, like-minded nations that shared these values. We thought we opposed dictators and kleptocrats, the leaders who steal from their own people. What happens when we realize that we no longer do?

This article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “Empire of Grift.”

Trump Loses the Other Strait

2026-09-11T10:40:00-04:00

As recently as last week, the Iran war appeared to be turning slightly in America’s favor. The Houthis—the Yemen-based militia that is Iran’s most formidable remaining ally in the Middle East—were under pressure from their local rivals, and the Saudi air force was pounding them with air strikes. The president of Yemen’s internationally recognized government issued a triumphant statement declaring that the Houthis’ miscalculations “will open the door to their complete collapse.” With their Houthi partners wounded, Iran’s leaders would have one more reason to back down and agree to Donald Trump’s terms.

Yesterday morning, those delusions drifted away like smoke as Houthi forces broke through their enemies’ defenses and seized the towns and islands around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, one of the most important maritime choke points in the world.

That loss leaves Trump, who had been hoping to win back control of the Strait of Hormuz from Iran, with a bitter surprise. His enemies now control both of the two important straits in the Middle East, through which a combined total of about a third of the world’s oil shipments pass every day.

[Read: An ‘America First’ deal with the Houthis]

It also underscores a stubborn fact: For all the setbacks suffered by Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” over the past year or two, its forces retain an ideological fervor and an esprit de corps that is sorely lacking on the other side. The Gulf states’ failure to work together against the Houthis has been catastrophic, and it echoes Trump’s own failure to devise a plausible or coordinated strategy against Iran.

Although the Houthis already had the ability to threaten shipping in the Red Sea, the capture of the Bab el-Mandeb “means you can literally sit on the coast and fire at passing ships,” April Longley Alley, a Yemen expert at the Washington Institute on Near East Policy and the former political adviser to the United Nations special envoy for Yemen, told me. “It makes it easier and cheaper, and it solidifies, from a military and political point of view, that they have a stranglehold on the strait.”

The United States might not be able to do much about this, even if the Pentagon launches a new round of air strikes on the Houthis. (The Saudi leader, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, called Trump twice yesterday urging him to strike the Houthis, Axios reported.) Bombs and missiles would achieve little without a ground force to take advantage of them, and America’s Yemeni allies are now battered and divided. The Trump administration waged a seven-week war against the group last year, and although it succeeded in killing some Houthi commanders, it did not dislodge the group or alter its ability to wage war, as Trump had promised.

The Houthi advance is even worse news for Saudi Arabia. For many years, the Saudis have been struggling to tamp down the Houthi threat on its border. Now the Houthis have inherited a great deal of Saudi and Emirati supplies left behind by the official Yemeni government’s retreating forces. A video circulated yesterday of Mohammad Ali al-Houthi, one of the group’s top commanders and a cousin of its supreme leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, riding though Mokha in an Emirati armored vehicle.

The mess that Saudi Arabia faces in Yemen is partly of its own making. The Houthis were born three decades ago in reaction to Saudi meddling in Yemen’s religious and political sphere. In December, tensions between the Saudi and Emirati leadership led Riyadh to demand that the Emiratis—their nominal allies—withdraw from Yemen, leaving the Saudis in charge of a patchwork of militias with divided loyalties. The various Yemeni factions continued to squabble among themselves even as their Houthi enemies were at the gates.

“There was no coordination between commanders, between the intelligence and the drones, between the coast guard and the army—nothing,” Farea Al-Muslimi, a Yemen specialist at the think tank Chatham House, told me.

The Houthis have clearly benefited from the Gulf’s disunity. “Last time the Houthis made a breakthrough at Marib in 2022, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia were able to jointly support a devastatingly effective Yemeni-government counterattack,” Michael Knights, the head of research at the consultancy Horizon Engage, told me.

The Houthis, meanwhile, were disciplined and focused. “They sacrificed hundreds if not thousands of fighters,” a member of Yemen’s officially recognized government, who asked not to be identified for fear of repercussions, told me. “Our bullshit activists were putting out fake news about victories, while the Houthis were working in silence.”

[Read: Bombing the Houthis won’t work]

With the momentum on their side, the Houthis could now go on to seize more terrain in other parts of Yemen, including Marib province, where much of Yemen’s oil is located. They could also extend their power bloodlessly, by cutting deals with tribal and regional leaders in the south and east. All of this would further consolidate their power and strengthen their Iranian patrons.

The Houthi victories have already put into doubt the value of the Mecca Alliance, the mutual-defense pact formed in August by Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey. Islamabad and Ankara have shown no inclination to help the Saudis, despite a rash of recent Houthi strikes on targets in southern Saudi Arabia.

Iran’s vaunted Axis of Resistance is not a bulletproof covenant either. The Houthis were absent earlier this year when the United States and Israel started bombing Iran.

But unlike their enemies, the Houthis and the Iranians have a deep ideological bond, one that their soldiers willingly die for. And the Houthis do not need to win every battle. As long as they can sink an occasional oil tanker, they will hold a whip hand over their Saudi neighbors, and over the rest of the world too.

Russia’s Real Strategy in Europe

2026-09-10T11:00:00-04:00

On Russian state television, the Kremlin’s propagandists have for years threatened to bomb European capitals, even while the country’s diplomats insist that no such war is imminent. Lately, the denials have gotten hard to sustain, as European intelligence agencies have ascribed hundreds of clandestine sabotage operations—cyberattacks in Italy, arson in the United Kingdom, undersea-cable ruptures in the Baltic, severed pig heads left outside French mosques—to Russia.

U.S. intelligence assessments conclude that a conventional Russian attack on a NATO country is likely to happen sometime from this fall to 2029. But another possibility is that Moscow will remain content with sabotage and intimidation. This hybrid campaign is all the war Russia wants or needs—and stoking fear that Moscow just might directly strike Ukraine’s European allies is part of it.

If this is what Russian President Vladimir Putin is really up to in Europe, then he was telling the truth when he assured Trump this week that Russia has “no aggressive intentions against European statehood.” Moscow has not massed troops on any NATO member’s border. Rather, it has been sending a carefully calibrated message meant to persuade Europe to stop supporting Ukraine.

[Read: Putin’s explosive message to Trump]

For Moscow, this has been a summer of setbacks in Ukraine. Russia stalled on the battlefield and sustained damage from thousands of Ukrainian long-range drones that plunged the country into fuel shortages. And so it escalated elsewhere in Europe: Fires broke out at ammunition plants in Italy, Bulgaria, and Estonia last month, and explosive-laden drones were discovered near a German power plant and at an airport in Leipzig, apparently intended to destroy Ukrainian cargo planes.

From the Kremlin’s point of view, Europe has been deepening its involvement in Ukraine. At the beginning of the full-scale war, Europe donated weapons to Ukraine from its own stocks. Within two years, European governments were paying Ukrainian factories to manufacture arms. Last year, Fire Point, a Ukrainian missile-and-drone manufacturer, announced that it would establish a solid-fuel production plant in Denmark, making it the first such arms company to expand production abroad. Today, Europe provides the bulk of financial assistance to Kyiv. It has also become Ukraine’s secure production base—Ukrainian weapons are manufactured in Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, France, Romania, and Spain.

Because Kyiv is attacking Russia’s rear, it’s logical to worry that Moscow will attack Ukraine’s. Russian security services are almost certainly capable of carrying out a lethal attack on European soil. And Western war games have entertained many possibilities along those lines. Among them are a limited Russian incursion into a small Baltic town that has a Russian-speaking population; a full-scale invasion of the Baltic states, launched simultaneously from Belarus and Kaliningrad, Russia’s European exclave, to cut them off from the rest of Europe; the rapid creation of an impenetrable drone “kill zone” on European soil; and a strategic blockade of the Baltic Sea. Some of these scenarios are plausible; others would require hundreds of thousands of Russian troops to crisscross Europe.

Russia has not visibly prepared for any such scenario, however. Instead, it continues to wage its hybrid war—which European security services continue to thwart. Such are the headlines: Drones carrying explosives are discovered in Leipzig, improvised explosive devices are found near a German power plant, and flying objects are spotted near airports.

Moscow may not much care that these operations get foiled. In a way, the effect is similar to that of Russia’s harassment of journalists and embassy workers stationed in Moscow: Things in their apartment get rearranged, signs of eavesdropping are deliberately made obvious, or a window is left open in the middle of winter. Such interference conveys a sinister message: We’re watching you. We have access to you. You are not in control. But it’s still different from blowing up the apartment.

[Read: NATO’s nightmare]

Putin has generally chosen to fully engage the Russian military only in conflicts that he feels (rightly or, in the case of Ukraine, wrongly) assured of winning. This does not describe any hypothetical attack on the Baltic states, which have heavily fortified borders, conduct regular military exercises, and spend 5 percent of their GDP on defense.

That’s not to mention the thousands of British, German, and Canadian troops stationed near the Baltics as part of NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence. Moscow may be willing to wager that the United States won’t intervene should Russia attack Estonia. But Russia would then find itself at war with numerous European states armed with submarines, aircraft carriers, fifth-generation fighter jets, long-range cruise missiles, and even nuclear weapons—all while it was still fighting in Ukraine.

Russia’s hybrid war has not succeeded in its likely purpose: stopping weapons, money, and intelligence from flowing into Ukraine from Europe. Kyiv has more arms, funds, and—judging by its strikes on Russian soil—intelligence than ever before. Neither has the Russian campaign taken out a European satellite that supplies Ukraine with intelligence, say, or destroyed a shipment of Patriot missiles.

But Putin persists in this campaign for a reason. Through inexpensive means, expendable operatives, and a steady stream of chilling leaks, the Kremlin has millions of Westerners braced for it to wage a full-scale war against Europe. Regardless of whether that war is likely, Putin will be demanding concessions in exchange for bringing it to an end.

Will Taiwan Just Give Up?

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

Photographs by Cheng-Chia Huang

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Chinese President Xi Jinping does not often look like he’s having a good time. His resting face at public events exudes a mixture of boredom and annoyance, as though he has more interesting business elsewhere. His displays of good humor have qualified as news in Chinese state media. When a camera caught him laughing during a meeting last October with Donald Trump, the moment “stunned observers,” according to one news report. At their meeting in Beijing in May, the staging spoke as forcefully as Xi’s expressions. His appearance with Trump at a press conference inside Xi’s official residence featured two nearly identical armchairs, except that the one reserved for the U.S. president was lower and softer, making him look smaller and slouchier than his host. If Trump took offense, he didn’t show it.

The Chinese Communist Party, like its forebear in the Soviet Union, often communicates in winking, elliptical ways. In April, Xi hosted a lunch for a delegation from Taiwan. He drew his guests’ attention to the soup—chicken broth with sea clams. The same dish had been served, he said, during a state dinner that Beijing hosted for President Richard Nixon in 1972, when Xi was still a teenager. Two of his guests told me that Xi seemed oddly animated at the luncheon. He cracked jokes. He told stories. He showed his teeth when he smiled. In a break from their usual attire, Xi and his courtiers chose to wear blue ties. Blue is the symbolic color of Taiwan’s Nationalist Party, which currently holds the most seats in the island’s Parliament. Its chair, Cheng Li-wun, was the guest of honor that day.

The friendly performance, like the meeting itself, seemed out of character. A central tenet of the Chinese Communist Party holds that Taiwan is not a sovereign country but a wayward province that must be subjugated before China can fully achieve its idea of national greatness. Since taking power, in 2012, Xi has made it his mission to isolate and dominate Taiwan. He warned Trump in May that their disagreements over Taiwan could lead to an “extremely dangerous situation” that might well cause the United States and China to “collide or even clash.”

And yet, a month earlier, the Taiwanese Nationalists had received a warm reception in Beijing. They’d strolled through the Forbidden City, posed for pictures with curious crowds, toured an airplane factory, and talked business with Chinese executives. Xi had welcomed the delegation as though the delegates held the keys to his success. In many ways, they do.

On Xi’s orders, the People’s Liberation Army has been preparing to seize Taiwan by force, and it has encouraged the world to imagine an invasion. Last December, it released an AI-generated video showing swarms of drones attacking Taiwan and humanoid robots marching through the ruins. In reality, drones would form only part of a Chinese attack. The first salvo could use cyberweapons to take down Taiwan’s power grid and communications networks, spreading panic among the population. Missiles and drones could then target Taiwan’s command posts, military bases, and air defenses, clearing the way for Chinese troops to storm its beaches.

Taiwan has more than 200,000 active military personnel, and they could probably fend off a Chinese attack for a short while. But within a few weeks, the U.S., Japan, and other allies would need to resupply the island with fuel and weapons. The Chinese navy—the world’s largest fleet of warships—would do its best to keep them away. Cargo traffic through the Taiwan Strait, one of the world’s main shipping channels, would be interrupted, wiping trillions of dollars in value from global markets. If the U.S. goes to war with China to defend Taiwan, the likely death toll of soldiers and civilians would be in the tens of thousands on both sides. War games have consistently shown that, in a conventional conflict, the U.S. military could expect to lose more troops in the initial weeks of fighting than it lost over the course of 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan.

China has spent decades rehearsing for such a conflict. Its military has built training grounds with replicas of U.S. warships and fighter jets. One facility, in the desert of northern China, features a mock-up of the Taiwanese presidential headquarters and several streets close to Parliament. But Cheng told me that she did not ask Xi to ease up on the military threats. Their talks focused instead on a plan for Taiwan to drop its claim to independence, stop preparing for war, and move toward reconciliation with the mainland.

During their lunch in April, Xi used the story about the soup to suggest a link between this plan for the future of Taiwan and Nixon’s opening to China half a century ago—a historic summit meant to turn adversaries into allies. Cheng was still beaming over the comparison a few weeks later, when we met in her office in Taipei. The trip had left her with a “very special” understanding that Taiwan and China “share the same culture, share the same blood, and that we can embrace this.” It allowed her to believe that “everything is possible, because we’re just one big family.”

Cheng punctuated this remark with a gesture of relief, exhaling and letting her arms fall to her lap. With time, she seems to hope, Taiwan and its American allies will take the same view of China, accepting a slow, preemptive surrender as the best way to avoid war.

Cheng-Chia Huang for The Atlantic

“We’re just one big family”: Cheng Li-wun, the leader of Taiwan’s Nationalist Party, sees no threat from China.

Even a few years ago, pandering to China would have been a losing strategy for politicians in Taiwan. The ruling government of President Lai Ching-te, whose Democratic Progressive Party has been in power since 2016, has urged the U.S. to strengthen Taiwan’s defenses in anticipation of a Chinese attack. Cheng and her Nationalists have done the opposite. Their control of Parliament has allowed them to block defense spending, taking particular care to stall the domestic production of drones and other inexpensive weapons that Ukraine has used to great effect against Russia. The U.S. war with Iran has helped Cheng make the case that resisting China would be futile. Since launching the war, in February, the U.S. has been forced to move warships and aircraft from Asia to the Middle East; at the same time, the need to defend against Iranian drones and missiles has depleted an estimated two-thirds of the U.S. stockpile of advanced air-defense systems, which would be crucial in any war with China. Even Cheng’s opponents acknowledge that the Iran war has left the U.S. less ready to defend Taiwan.

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

When I visited Taiwan this spring, I saw clearly how little faith remained in the U.S. as a force for stability and protection. My questions about American support usually elicited a long pause or a sad smile. When the answers came, whether from politicians, military veterans, or ordinary citizens, nearly all described the U.S. as “unpredictable,” a flabby word on which to hang a nation’s fate. This loss of confidence has forced many in Taiwan to rethink their attitude toward China. Should they continue to prepare for a war they cannot win on their own? Or should they accept the deal that Cheng and Xi have apparently hatched?

Both of them have kept the details vague. In public they talk of shared identity, free trade, economic bonds, and peaceful coexistence, while skirting questions about the amount of freedom and democracy that China would accept in Taiwan and the amount of Taiwanese sovereignty it would tolerate. Cheng often gets asked about the example of Hong Kong, whose democratic institutions China has dismantled. Taiwan would get a better deal, she insisted in our interview—one that would permit free elections as long as the winner does not insist on Taiwan’s independence.

Andrew Harnik / Getty

Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, October 2025. Xi has warned Trump that their disagreements over Taiwan could lead to an “extremely dangerous situation.”

Trump seems open to such an arrangement. After his May meeting with Xi, he described the U.S. sale of weapons to Taiwan not as a strategic necessity but as a “very good negotiating chip” in future talks with China about trade, nuclear arms, and the race to develop artificial intelligence. He also cast doubt on U.S. willingness to come to Taiwan’s defense: “The last thing we need right now is a war that’s 9,500 miles away,” Trump told reporters while flying home from Beijing on Air Force One. (The war with Iran, roughly 7,000 miles from U.S. soil, was then in its third month.)

Given the choice, most people in Taiwan would prefer the status quo. They want to maintain their autonomy, trade freely with the world, and keep China out of their affairs. They value their place in the club of democracies that the U.S. once anchored and pledged to protect. But the American public is weary of foreign entanglements. The American president, enamored of autocrats, treats democratic allies as deadbeats and dupes.

Against this background, Taiwan and its defenders struggle to explain why Americans should care enough about their cause to risk war with China. Shared principles of freedom and democracy no longer count for much in this debate. When the subject came up in my interviews in Taipei and Washington, people seemed embarrassed to talk about American values, as if the idea were quaint. The more forceful arguments for Taiwan’s defense came from military strategists, who see the island as a platform to secure American dominance over the Pacific. Other arguments are economic. More than 90 percent of the world’s most advanced chips are made in Taiwan—including the ones driving the AI revolution, which has propped up the American economy. The U.S. does not want China to control that crucial resource.

[Read: Taiwan has a Trump problem]

But Trump does not seem willing to confront China over that issue. He has described Xi as a “great leader” and a friend. Ahead of their meetings this year⁠—⁠the next one is due to take place in late September, when Xi visits the U.S.—Trump allowed the sale of advanced AI chips to Chinese companies. The stated aims of Trump’s foreign policy center on the domination of the Western Hemisphere. In other parts of the world, he has either retreated or made a mess from which he would like to retreat. Taiwan might count among the lucky ones: Trump has not threatened its sovereignty, the way he has with Canada and Greenland.

Annabelle Chih / Getty

A launcher truck for American-made surface-to-air Patriot missiles, deployed at a park in Taipei as part of military exercises in 2025

Still, the unraveling of the Pax Americana looks a lot more dangerous from the shores of Taiwan, a free nation that belongs to no trade bloc and has no formal alliances. Its survival depends on the promise of U.S. support, which no longer seems convincing. China’s allies in Taipei need only point to Trump’s prevarications as proof that the Americans cannot be trusted. That may be all Xi needs to take Taiwan without firing a shot.

Cheng Li-wun may agree with Xi’s talking points, but she lacks his flair for understatement. Cheng has a resonant voice, an eager laugh, and a tendency to slash the air with her hands for emphasis. At the start of her political career, in the 1990s, she defended Taiwan’s independence and denounced the Communist regime in Beijing—a stance that she now, at 56, explains away as youthful ignorance. Cheng first won a seat in Parliament on the Nationalist ticket in 2008, and she has since come to represent the party’s more radical wing, espousing a level of deference toward China that the dwindling old guard finds hard to stomach.

Roughly 65,000 members of the party voted last fall in the election that made Cheng their chair—hardly enough for her to claim a popular mandate in a nation of 23 million people. Still, the position gives her enormous sway over Taiwan’s military spending and its ability to defend itself. It also places her in a lineage of party leaders that stretches back more than a century, to before the civil war that swept across China in the late 1940s. In 1949, Communist forces under Mao Zedong took power, with support from the Soviet Union. The defeated Nationalists, led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, retreated to their strongholds on Taiwan and a few other islands off China’s coast.

Bettmann / Getty

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek at a rally celebrating Taiwan’s National Day, October 1970

They never acknowledged defeat. Even after Chiang’s death, in 1975, the Nationalists clung to the belief that the Communist regime would eventually collapse, making way for them to retake control of mainland China. The U.S. nurtured that delusion during the first two decades of the Cold War. It opened an embassy in Taipei and treated Taiwan’s leaders as the legitimate government of China. Taiwan even held China’s seat in the United Nations, where Taiwanese diplomats sat behind a nameplate that said China. For its part, the Communist regime in Beijing had no diplomatic relations with the United States or most of its European allies. The U.S. secured its position in Asia through a series of military alliances with China’s local adversaries—South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan.

[From the May 1942 issue: Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s ‘China Emergent’]

Taiwan’s status proved untenable. In 1971, the UN gave Taiwan’s seat in the General Assembly to China. Nixon’s visit to Beijing the following year upended American policy toward China and Taiwan. By the end of the decade, the U.S. had withdrawn its embassy from Taipei and opened a new one in Beijing. It had also abandoned its mutual-defense pact with Taiwan and, in its place, provided softer assurances. The Taiwan Relations Act, signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, commits the U.S. to continuing to provide “arms of a defensive character” to Taiwan. It states that Chinese aggression toward the island, including an embargo, would be a matter of “grave concern,” whatever that might mean.

Bettmann / Getty

Richard Nixon and Premier Zhou Enlai during the American president’s first visit to Beijing, February 1972

This policy of “strategic ambiguity” faced its greatest test during the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1995 and ’96, when the U.S. and China nearly came to blows. The crisis started innocently enough: The U.S. had merely granted a visa for Taiwan’s then-president to speak at Cornell University, his alma mater. China responded to the visit with a series of threats and military exercises, firing missiles in the vicinity of Taiwan and disrupting cargo traffic.

President Bill Clinton, under intense pressure from Congress, sent two U.S. aircraft carriers to the area. One of them, the USS Nimitz, sailed through the Taiwan Strait as a warning to Chinese leaders, who ordered the military to stand down. “They felt a kind of humiliation from that,” Lee Hsi-min, a retired admiral in Taiwan’s navy, told me.

Throughout the crisis, Lee commanded a submarine called the Sea Dragon, which had orders to remain beneath the strait, ready to ambush any Chinese warships that tried to cross. When we met in Taipei this spring, I asked him to describe what he’d felt during those weeks. “I didn’t get scared,” he said. “I was really confident.” The torpedoes he had on board could sink any vessel in China’s fleet, and he had the support of the USS Nimitz behind him. “But now,” Lee said, “I don’t have that confidence at all.”

The Taiwan Strait crisis offered a conceptual blueprint: With enough advanced weapons, Taiwan could hold its own until the American cavalry arrived. China set out to challenge that idea. Within a few years, its defense spending increased by more than 50 percent. The focus was on weapons that could stop American warships from again threatening its shores. By the time Barack Obama took office, in 2009, the Chinese arsenal of submarines and missiles had undermined Taiwan’s defensive strategy.

[From the June 2005 issue: Robert D. Kaplan on how the U.S. would fight China]

Arming Taiwan with sophisticated weapons, such as fighter jets and submarines, would not address the imbalance, because China had developed the means to destroy most of them in the opening phase of any war. U.S. military advisers soon began to argue that Taiwan should become a “porcupine republic,” bristling with smaller, portable weapons such as shoulder-fired Stinger missiles. Once properly trained in their use, Taiwanese soldiers would be able to sink enough approaching ships and down enough warplanes to make the idea of an invasion too costly. They could also deploy guerrilla tactics to resist a Chinese occupation.

The new approach quickly gained favor in Washington. But it took another decade to catch on in Taipei. For most politicians, the idea of waging an insurgency in urban areas, with bazooka-toting soldiers on rooftops, does not make for an appealing electoral platform. Inside the military, generals balked at the structural changes needed to prepare for a porcupine defense. It would require giving lower-ranking officers the freedom to act on their own initiative, organizing ambushes and making decisions in a crisis—a foreign notion in their top-down military culture.

When Trump began his first term, in 2017, Taiwan hoped that it might yet acquire the capacity to outgun China through the purchase of high-end American weapons. The U.S. tried to make the Taiwanese military reconsider. “Don’t build the strategy around 300 F-16s,” a U.S. Navy admiral recalls telling his counterparts in Taipei at the time. “This just doesn’t make any sense.” Taiwan could never buy enough jets or warships to rival China’s fleet, he argued: “You need to be able to shoot down aircraft. You need to be able to defeat drones.” (The American admiral, now retired, spoke with me on condition of anonymity because he does business in China.) At that point, China could manufacture more drones than any other country by far. A single company in Shenzhen controls more than 70 percent of the global drone market. Both Russia and Ukraine rely on drone components made in Shenzhen, including the motors, controllers, and batteries needed to fly them.

Taiwan lags far behind in this technology. Not until 2022 did its government decide to form what it calls a national drone team. Taiwan, like the United States, bars the use of Chinese technology in its defense industry. So the team needed to make its weapons from scratch or find alternative suppliers. Max Lo, the founder of a commercial-drone company, was put in charge of the effort, and he began reaching out to contacts in the private sector. It was like Ocean’s Eleven, but with entrepreneurs whose background had little obvious value to the mission. Among the companies Lo recruited was the packaged-food giant I‑Mei, whose cookies and snacks are pantry staples throughout Taiwan. One of its subsidiaries had been working on delivery drones, which qualified the company to join the national drone team. To help get factories up and running, the government offered about $1.5 billion in investments last year, far short of what is needed.

The most successful member of the national drone team has been Thunder Tiger, a publicly listed company that makes dental equipment as well as remote-controlled toys. It began making drones about a decade ago, mostly for use in disaster response. When I visited its headquarters, in the city of Taichung, the general manager, Gene Su, took me on a tour of the factory, in a run-down industrial park. In one room, robotic arms moved around inside plexiglass boxes, spooling copper wires onto little engines that would be used to power drones. The room was no bigger than a three-car garage. To reach it, we passed through a much larger open space, about half as long as a football field, where dozens of people in lab coats sat making dental drills. The company earns most of its money by selling them around the world, Su told me. Drones account for a fraction of its revenue. Taiwan’s defense ministry has said it needs about 200,000 drones. But Thunder Tiger cannot begin to meet those needs without financing from the defense budget. “We’re all just waiting for government money,” Su said. During my visit, I saw some of its designs displayed on a conference table. One, named Overkill, had four small rotors and a fake artillery shell strapped to its belly. It resembled a model I had seen a few months earlier in Ukraine, at a factory in Kyiv that makes about 4,000 small drones a day. At its current capacity, Thunder Tiger would need two months to produce that many.

Cheng-Chia Huang for The Atlantic

Technicians at Thunder Tiger—a maker of dental drills and toys—working on drone motors.

Cheng-Chia Huang for The Atlantic

A model of a Thunder Tiger interceptor drone.

The U.S. military does not disclose how many troops it has in Taiwan. At a meeting in Taipei, a retired officer in the Taiwanese navy chided me for asking about them. Beijing, he explained, sees any U.S. forces so close to its shores as a provocation. Their mission mainly involves training Taiwanese soldiers on how to use American weapons and preparing them to wage guerrilla warfare.

Mark Montgomery, a retired American rear admiral, has put the size of the U.S. deployment at about 500. “It needs to be 1,000,” he told a congressional hearing in May of last year. “If we are going to give them billions of dollars in assistance, sell them tens of billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. gear, it makes sense that we would be over there training and working.”

Montgomery, who once commanded an aircraft-carrier strike group in the Pacific, belongs to a small but devoted community of Taiwan defenders in Washington. These military veterans and foreign-policy experts still have influence on Capitol Hill. They have little or none in the White House. During the first Trump administration, one of these stalwarts, Matt Pottinger, oversaw China policy on the National Security Council. He worked hard to ensure that Trump’s isolationist urges did not eat away at Taiwan’s defenses. No one seems to play a comparable role in the White House today.

In response to my questions about Taiwan, a senior administration official sent a terse response via email. It focused mostly on contrasting Trump’s positions with those of President Biden, whose name the statement deliberately mangled. “The O’Biden team proved that prioritizing allies’ interests over America’s does NOT result in greater security,” the official wrote.

Biden agreed during his tenure to sell Taiwan about $8 billion worth of weapons, significantly less than the $11 billion Trump has so far approved in this term. But only a fraction of the weaponry has been delivered to Taiwan; the backlog on orders is immense. It would take years for U.S. manufacturers to produce the arms Taiwan has already paid for, especially given the need for them to replenish American stockpiles because of the war in Iran.

In terms of messaging, Biden was far tougher on China than Trump has been. Biden never visited China during his presidential tenure. When asked whether the U.S. military would defend Taiwan, Biden responded on four separate occasions that it would. Trump has never said that. He has focused instead on efforts to do business with China and lower the trade deficit. During his trip to China this spring, Trump invited a coterie of billionaires to join him, including Elon Musk and Tim Cook. A published list of passengers on Air Force One featured Eric Trump and his wife, Lara. But it did not appear to include any recognized China hands. When a veteran of Obama’s National Security Council, Brett Bruen, pointed this out on X, he received a juvenile response from the White House director of communications, Steven Cheung: “Stop calling yourself an expert in anything, aside from sucking.” Cheung added that Bruen was a “slope-brained, mouth breathing moron.”

At least one China expert did join the White House delegation to Beijing: Ivan Kanapathy, the senior director for Asia on the NSC and a Marine Corps veteran. Kanapathy’s views on Taiwan align with those of most other experts in the field, and his writings appear in an influential book, The Boiling Moat, alongside essays by Pottinger and Montgomery. Soon after he joined the White House staff, Kanapathy faced an accusation of disloyalty from one of Trump’s outside advisers, the MAGA influencer Laura Loomer. Ever since then, “he’s barely got a job,” one of his friends, a fellow Taiwan expert, told me. “She’s after him.” (The White House declined to allow Kanapathy to speak with me.)

The expert community often meets up to run simulations of a Chinese attack on Taiwan. The results are almost never reassuring. Over the past three years, the Center for Strategic and International Studies has played out dozens of scenarios in three rounds of war games. The only ones that end in defeat for China have two things in common: Taiwan shows determination in fighting back, and the U.S. swiftly intervenes with the full might of its military. Both must happen. Even then, Taiwan’s infrastructure would suffer weeks of bombardment, while the U.S. and its allies would lose dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and thousands of troops—or so CSIS concluded in the first of three reports about the war games, published in 2023.

Two authors of the CSIS reports, Eric Heginbotham and Matthew Cancian, traveled to Taiwan in 2024 to present their findings to military leaders. They got a mixed reception. One of their meetings nearly ended in a fistfight, Heginbotham told me. In the southern city of Kaohsiung, a group of retired Taiwanese naval officers invited the Americans to an ice-cream parlor and, over a round of sundaes, told them to stop preparing for war. They said that Taiwan possessed neither the determination nor the means to fight, and that the U.S. would never intervene to help. The defeatist attitude angered the two Americans, for what it said about Taiwan’s morale and for a more personal reason: Heginbotham’s son, who serves on a U.S. submarine in the Pacific, could be sent to fight in a war with China. “Sorry for my language, but what the fuck?” he recalled saying. “My son’s life is on the line to defend you guys.”

The circular psychology is hard to break: The U.S. will not step in to help if Taiwan lacks the will to fight, and the Taiwanese will be more tempted to surrender if they believe the U.S. isn’t ready to help them. For most people in Taiwan, the pessimism of the naval officers would not come as a surprise. A survey conducted this spring found that fewer than a quarter of Taiwanese voters consider the U.S. a “trustworthy ally,” and only 35 percent believe the U.S. would be likely to help Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack. Both figures had dropped sharply after Trump began his second term. Among Americans, his claims of friendship with Xi might sound like idle flattery, sly diplomacy, or self-delusion. In Taiwan, they perpetuate the idea that resisting China would be a hopeless cause.

Cheng and the Nationalists now preach this idea in the halls of Parliament. Richard Y. K. Chen, a retired admiral in the Taiwanese navy who represents the party on the defense-and-foreign-affairs committee, told me that Taiwan has no chance of surviving a Chinese invasion even with help from the Americans. He has met with the U.S. military advisers working to turn his country into a porcupine republic, and their plans struck him as fanciful. Once the enemy lands on the beaches, “it’s too late,” the admiral told me. “Even if you try to engage in some guerrilla warfare, the local government agencies have already collapsed.”

The measures he proposed, such as evacuation plans, emergency-medicine distribution, and “societal resiliency to protect the public,” focused mainly on minimizing casualties during a Chinese attack and preserving Taiwan’s infrastructure. When I brought up the Ukrainians, who managed not only to thwart Russia’s attack on Kyiv in 2022 but to partly roll back the invading forces, Chen offered a list of reasons their tactics would not work in Taiwan. Ukraine, for a start, has nearly 17 times more land on which to maneuver, as well as a border with Poland that its allies have used throughout the war for resupply. That would not be possible on an island like Taiwan.

And what about drones? The war in Ukraine has shown their effectiveness, especially for the defenders. The Ukrainians have pioneered the use of naval drones—remote-controlled boats packed with explosives. In the Black Sea, these weapons have helped damage or destroy at least a third of Russia’s naval fleet, forcing the rest of its warships to retreat from their base in Crimea. One of the developers of Ukraine’s most famous naval drone, the Magura, told me it would be particularly useful in the Taiwan Strait, where a few hundred of them could sink a Chinese armada.

[Read: Taiwan faces its Ukraine moment]

Chen gave me a sidelong look when I brought this up, as if to ask whether I could really be so naive. “The Black Sea is not the Taiwan Strait,” he said. For one thing, the Ukrainians have relied on Starlink satellites to pilot their drones against Russia; Elon Musk, who owns those satellites, has not allowed Taiwan to use them. Starlink describes this as a business decision, but many in Taiwan question Musk’s motives, pointing out that his car company, Tesla, has one of its biggest factories in Shanghai. Other satellite networks exist, albeit less reliable ones than Starlink. But Chen brushed those options aside as worthless to Taiwan. Even if Taiwan were to spend many more billions of dollars on advanced weapons, Chen said, “how long can you defend the coast? Three weeks? Four weeks?” In that time, he said, China would already have won.

Given those odds, it did not surprise me to learn that draft-dodging in Taiwan remains pervasive. The government decided only in 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to increase the required military service from four months to one year. But the recruitment effort left open a variety of loopholes. Some men of fighting age (19 to 36 years old) have reportedly made themselves obese, eating their way to a medical exemption. Others opted for alternative service. Puma Shen, an ambitious young member of the defense-and-foreign-affairs committee, has campaigned for higher military spending and promoted a culture of respect for the armed services. But when called to complete his own mandatory service, he chose to do it at the transportation ministry, where his work mostly involved giving directions to tourists.

Regular military service in Taiwan also involves a lot of common chores, such as cutting grass, Shen told me in his office in Taipei. “People think it’s a waste of time.” On the wall behind him hung a large poster of David sitting atop Goliath’s severed head. It had been a gift from a soldier he met in Ukraine, which he visited in 2023 to learn from its defenders. The trip made clear how far behind Taiwan’s military had fallen. Only last year did basic training begin to provide lessons in piloting drones rather than fighting with bayonets. Much of the top brass in Taiwan remains averse to risk, change, and new technologies. “They really want to protect their own,” Shen said. “This is the way we always do it.”

Cheng-Chia Huang for The Atlantic

Taiwanese cadets at a military ceremony in June

The offices of Taiwan’s Parliament occupy a drab building on a narrow street in the center of Taipei. When I arrived one morning this spring, lawmakers had already gathered inside to debate a special military budget. There was no security at the entrance—not even an ID check. A clerk sent me right up to the office of Wang Ting-yu, a senior member of the defense-and-foreign-affairs committee and a close ally of Taiwan’s president.

He happened to be in a meeting with a large U.S. defense firm, AeroVironment, whose representatives sat around his conference table. One of them greeted me as I walked in. We had met earlier that week at a defense forum in Taipei, where he had been talking up the value of an American drone called the Switchblade. Designed to launch out of a tube and explode on impact, the weapon had performed badly against Russian forces in Ukraine. The company has tried to improve its drones based on the lessons from that war. But the U.S. military has reportedly cut back on buying them.

Taiwan can afford a lot of weaponry. Its foreign-currency reserves, the sixth-largest in the world, are worth roughly $600 billion. But a defense bill had been stuck for months in Wang’s committee. Its opponents in the Nationalist Party had turned the budget debate into a proxy battle over Taiwan’s future, its relations with China, and its reliance on the United States. The need for a new budget arose late last year, when the Trump administration approved the biggest sale of American weapons to Taiwan in history. The $11 billion package included rocket launchers, artillery, anti-tank missiles, and other sophisticated gear.

The following week, the Chinese military responded with a series of drills off the shores of Taiwan, firing missiles and rehearsing a blockade. Taiwan’s ruling party used the threats to argue for an additional package of American weapons, this one worth $14 billion. But President Lai needed Parliament to approve all the extra spending. In addition to the annual defense budget, about $20 billion, he sought a special disbursement of more than $40 billion over the next eight years. Roughly three-quarters of it would go toward American arms, while the rest would aid the development of Taiwan’s own defense industry, especially its drone factories.

According to most polls, the extra spending bill had broad support. Voters saw it as a way to deter China and keep the Americans happy. It would satisfy Trump’s demand that all U.S. allies spend more on defense. It would also create jobs in the military industry and stimulate the broader economy, including in districts that the Nationalist Party controls. But the plan faced stiff resistance: In a phone call in February, Xi warned Trump to show “extreme caution.” The White House then decided to withhold the bulk of the arms packages until Xi and Trump had a chance to discuss them in person. Since their summit in May, the sales remain on hold.

For Wang, arms deals double as a test of American resolve. No other country sells weapons to Taiwan. “So it’s a matter of life and death to Taiwan,” Wang said. He did not object to the U.S. pursuing dialogue with China, but he warned that Taiwan must not be used as some kind of bargaining chip. Would Trump treat it like one? Wang looked at his hands for a long moment. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I don’t criticize our allies.”

In the end, the legislators agreed to a pared-down budget worth about $25 billion. Practically all of it would go toward the purchase of American weapons—the Nationalists managed to cut the money for Taiwan’s drone industry. Nothing was left for the kinds of inexpensive, homegrown systems that Ukraine has used to fight the Russians. In late June, the Nationalists submitted a competing plan to meet the military’s need for drones. It included a lot more oversight and red tape that would slow the process down. Parliament has since been deadlocked over which plan to pursue, leaving the nascent drone program in limbo, which is precisely where China wants it.

After her meeting with Xi in April, Cheng returned to Taiwan with a package of support from the Chinese Communist Party, called “the 10 incentives.” Their provisions would allow Taiwanese farmers, fishermen, and people in some other industries to sell food and goods in China. They also promised that certain TV shows, documentaries, and cartoons from Taiwan would be shown on the mainland (with proper vetting, of course). Chinese state media cast the incentives as a gift from Xi to the Nationalist Party. Friendly behavior, they suggested, would elicit additional favor.

Taiwan’s government has tried to block the incentives, calling them a blatant form of political interference. At the very least, they offered a preview of how the Chinese might try to influence Taiwan’s next presidential election, which is due to take place in 2028. Cheng has suggested that she intends to run, and her campaign will no doubt benefit from the support of China, which she portrays as a generous neighbor. “They have become so modern,” she told me. During her visit to the mainland, officials in Shanghai treated her to an order of bubble tea—a Taiwanese invention—that was delivered via drone. The delegation also attended a performance of Mozart and Tchaikovsky at Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts. “Their chief violinist was actually an American!” Cheng told me through an interpreter. “So I think China has become more confident. They’re more inclusive and more globalized.”

When I asked what China might want in return for its friendly incentives, she seemed surprised at my suggestion that the relationship could come with strings attached. Xi had assured her, she said, that China would respect Taiwan’s system of government. He had not talked about making Taiwan a part of China. He had not brought up the experience of Hong Kong, whose democratic institutions survived for less than a decade after the British colony’s absorption into China in 1997. Wouldn’t China seek to do the same to Taiwan? “No,” she said, using the English word to make sure I understood. “We do not need to sacrifice or make any compromise regarding Taiwan’s freedom, democracy, economy, or our rule of law.”

But China has already worked hard to curtail the rights of Taiwan and its elected leaders. Because of China’s decades-long pressure campaign, only 11 nations have formal relations with Taiwan. In April, China prevented President Lai from visiting one of them: At the request of Beijing, the Seychelles, Mauritius, and Madagascar refused to grant Lai’s plane the right to transit their airspace, forcing him to postpone his trip to Eswatini, a landlocked country in southern Africa. When I asked Cheng about the incident, she shrugged it off, saying Lai had brought it on himself “due to his own policies.”

Last year, a few months after Trump began his second term, his administration denied Lai’s request to stop in the U.S. on his way to Latin America. But Cheng and the Nationalists have faced no restrictions. Less than two months after her visit to Beijing, Cheng led a delegation of party members on a trip to Washington and several other U.S. cities. During an appearance at the Asia Society, in Manhattan, she cast Xi as a reliable partner and repeated her assertion that China and Taiwan belong together. The moderators pressed her to explain how Taiwan’s democracy could survive such a partnership. “It’s a win-win scenario,” Cheng said, recalling how Xi had promised her that “anything can be negotiated.”

In their seats near the front, several experts on Taiwan and retired U.S. diplomats exchanged skeptical looks and rolled their eyes. One whispered to me that Cheng sounded like “a whack job.” To me, she seemed more like an opportunist. At a time of lost trust in American resolve, she has reached for the bargain China is offering. Voters in Taiwan can feel the balance of power shifting, and many will choose the side that looks more stable, even at the risk of their own liberties.

Near the end of Cheng’s talk in Manhattan, a member of the audience stood up and urged her not to pursue this deal. He warned that China would demolish Taiwan’s democracy, as it had demolished democratic processes in Hong Kong, and he demanded to know why Cheng had blocked funding for the drones that Taiwan needs. “Xi Jinping is a dictator!” the man shouted. Security guards then seized his microphone and removed him from the hall. Cheng seemed to enjoy the spectacle. “Drones should not be used as weapons,” she said with a smile, “but they should be used to deliver bubble tea.”

Cheng-Chia Huang for The Atlantic

A tourist on Kinmen island, the westernmost outpost of sovereign Taiwanese territory, looks across the bay toward Xiamen, China. Once considered a front line in Taiwan’s defense, Kinmen is now a popular destination for travelers from China.

Kinmen island, the westernmost outpost of sovereign Taiwanese territory, used to be a fortress. It sits only a few miles off the coast of China, close enough for a good swimmer to make it across to the mainland. In the late 1940s, the retreating Nationalists built bunkers here, positioned tanks, and studded the coastline with metal spikes to impale enemy landing craft. Thousands of Communist soldiers stormed these beaches during the Battle of Kinmen, in October 1949. Most were killed, the rest taken prisoner.

Today, several monuments commemorate this part of Taiwan’s origin story, and a museum stands near the site of the battle. When I visited this spring, the guides urged me not to miss the immersive experience. It featured a dark room with eerie music and animations of war on the walls. Cameras took my photo and projected it onto a battle scene, inviting me to see myself as a defender of Kinmen. Only a few people alive in Taiwan today can remember fighting a war against China, and the simulation felt like an attempt to help younger generations imagine that experience.

Many schoolchildren come to the museum on field trips. But the more common visitors lately are tourists from mainland China. Ferries bring them to Kinmen several times a day, and local businesses ply them with fried fish and sorghum liquor, the pungent local specialty. Such visits are part of China’s strategy. In a treatise published in 2023, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party laid out a plan to pamper Kinmen with investment and tourism, turning the island into part of a “demonstration zone” to show what life might be like after the “complete reunification of the motherland.” The plan calls ultimately for a bridge to link Kinmen and the closest city on the mainland, Xiamen, about two miles away.

At the start of his career, Xi Jinping served as the vice mayor of Xiamen. His preferred path for absorbing Taiwan into China has always relied on convincing the Taiwanese that life would improve under Beijing’s rule. China’s growth has made that easier. In the early 1990s, Taiwan’s economy was more than half the size of China’s. Now it’s one-20th the size. Residents of Kinmen can see the skyscrapers in Xiamen. They will soon be able to see jets landing at its new international airport. Many of them feel a greater kinship with the mainland than they do with Taipei.

Atop one of the bluffs closest to China, a tower of speakers still broadcasts Taiwanese propaganda toward the mainland in a loop, calling on the Communists to defect and gain their liberty. The recording used to play loudly enough for people on the mainland to hear it. But local authorities have turned down the volume, converting the speakers into a tourist attraction.

Cheng-Chia Huang for The Atlantic

Once a fortified front line, now a tourist site: A tower of speakers on Kinmen aims propaganda across the water, toward the mainland.

Cheng-Chia Huang for The Atlantic

Barnacle-encrusted barriers against invasion at a beach on Kinmen island. They face the mainland city of Xiamen.

On the beach below, metal spikes still protrude from the sand, tilted at China, eroded by salt water and covered in barnacles. Wooden signs with skulls and crossbones used to warn about the risk of land mines on this coast. But the last of the mines have been cleared away, and the government has declared the beach open for swimming. On my last afternoon on the island, I decided to make my way toward China. My clumsy backstroke carried me 100 yards or so, just far enough to be able to look back at the coast and see that it no longer resembles anyone’s idea of a geopolitical flash point. There were no lookout posts or fortifications, no Taiwanese patrol boats. Only the battle museum and the tower of speakers, playing a message that no one in China can hear.

This article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “Will Taiwan Just Give Up?” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

What the Floods Say About Xi Jinping

2026-09-03T08:06:00-04:00

When the Yangtze River flooded in 1998 and inundated villages in central China, Jiang Zemin, the Communist Party’s general secretary, was on the scene, bullhorn in hand, to encourage local relief efforts. Ten years later, his successor, Hu Jintao, stood among the rubble after an earthquake rocked Sichuan province, in the country’s southwest. Last week, after floodwaters caused by a collapsing glacier tore through the Himalayas between Nepal and China, leaving more than 1,100 people dead and thousands more missing, the party’s current general secretary, Xi Jinping, stayed largely and safely in Beijing.

In the United States, where politicians have to worry about the needs and feelings of voters, elected representatives are expected to be more visible and engaged in national crises. In 2021, Republican Senator Ted Cruz earned public condemnation when he was caught absconding to Mexico while Texas suffered a deep freeze and power outages. As a Communist dictator, Xi doesn’t have to fret over public-approval ratings. Yet his absence signals a bigger problem for China: Xi has become so powerful that he has lost touch with the country he governs.

Despite being professed Marxists, China’s leaders rarely interact with the working class. But Xi at least used to try to seem like a man of the people. In 2013, about a year into his tenure, Chinese media made a big deal out of his visit to a steamed-bun restaurant in Beijing; the state-owned China Daily praised him for showing his “common touch.”

Today, there’s nothing common about Xi Jinping. He has amassed greater personal power than any other Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, the Communist regime’s founder, who died half a century ago. To justify his outsize role in China’s government, Xi’s tireless propagandists portray him as something grander than a party boss: a philosopher king, whose doctrine of wisdom, called Xi Jinping Thought, is meant to be both studied and obeyed. He is the great global statesman, guiding foreign policy into a new era of peace and prosperity. His various “global initiatives” outline his vision for a reformed world order.

[View: The aftermath of Nepal’s flash floods]

Mere mortals such as Jiang and Hu had to stomp around muddy disaster zones to prove their worth. But Xi “does not need to go to steam-bun shops to pretend he is with the people any longer, or, for that matter, to be visible when a major disaster has happened,” Steve Tsang, the director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London, told me. “He no doubt thinks and therefore acts as if he is above all.”

In Xi’s calculus, the Himalayan communities destroyed by the floods are hardly worthy of his attention. The area in question is part of Tibet, a region that borders Nepal and was once independent. Xi has demonstrated a persistent hostility toward China’s minorities, who, in their stubborn resistance to Chinese civilization, threaten his vision of national unity. A new law that took effect in July aims to transform Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians, and other minorities into properly loyal citizens by forcing them to adopt the majority Han Chinese culture. Until the Tibetans fall in line, “there is not really a compelling reason for him to visit them just because a disaster struck,” Tsang argued.

From Xi’s perspective, appearing at the scene of the floods would have involved more risk than reward. A purportedly all-knowing and all-seeing leader can’t make mistakes or even be associated with bad news, so Xi has good reason to avoid potentially tarnishing himself with an uncertain rescue operation. The politically safer option involves managing the crisis from afar while dispatching others to get their hands dirty. Beijing is also carefully controlling the information coming from the disaster zone. International journalists are already barred from Tibet, so any news about the disaster and the relief effort is from Chinese state sources. The state-run news agency Xinhua duly announced on Friday that Xi chaired a meeting of the party’s powerful politburo to “deliberate and make arrangements on rescue and relief efforts.”

[Read: The autocrat’s dilemma]

The China-focused research firm Trivium noted that Xi’s response to the floods was in keeping with his usual approach to disasters, which is to visit long after the crisis has passed and the rebuilding has begun. Xi is “keeping himself above operational risk” and is focused on “owning the recovery rather than the chaos,” Trivium’s report said. Xi may at some point decide to show up on the ground, but probably well after the initial chaos has subsided.

The stories and images from the floods have moved hearts, but Xi has bigger things to think about than a mudslide on the far edge of his empire. One of his priorities has been to reshape Chinese culture by merging the party’s beloved Marxism with traditional Confucianism. Although that effort appears to have had little traction with the public, Xi himself seems to have taken these ideas to heart. He may speak like a socialist, but he governs more like an emperor, deserving of national veneration and shielded from scrutiny. But many emperors were remote figures, removed from the real world behind the walls of the Forbidden City, and reliant on courtiers for news from outside. As Xi’s absence from the flooding disaster demonstrates, he, too, has become detached from the daily struggles and sentiments of his citizens—and unresponsive to the nation’s mounting economic and social problems as a result.

How the Chinese people feel about Xi’s response is impossible to know. Assiduous censors deter candor and cleanse social-media platforms of any direct criticism. Perhaps life in an authoritarian political system breeds a practical indifference, given that people have no influence over who rules them anyway. But with a spare few hours on the ground among those who just lost everything, Xi could have at least shown that he cares. His loyal public has surely noticed that even that was too much.

China Is Flatlining

2026-08-31T06:00:00-04:00

Compared with Donald Trump’s chaotic, divided, and violent America, China is a bastion of steady progress and serene order. This, at least, is the story that Beijing’s propagandists have been eager to spread. The Global Times, a Communist Party–run news outlet, proclaimed earlier this year that “the world’s peace and development increasingly rely on China’s stability.” The state news agency Xinhua chimed in that “in today’s uncertain world, China’s stability and predictability provide a rare and valuable anchor, which is set to benefit other countries.”

This message appears to be resonating around the world. A Pew Research Center survey of three dozen countries recently found that China is now seen more positively than the United States. Respondents expressed more confidence in Chinese President Xi Jinping to “do the right thing” in world affairs than Trump.

China’s stability may appear desirable to a world in turmoil. But inside China, this “stability” looks a lot like policy paralysis, economic stagnation, and intensified political repression. What all the hand-wringing over China’s growing influence and surging exports fails to recognize is that the country is flatlining politically and economically. The evidence is in plain sight.

Policy makers around the world are understandably fixating on China’s abundant and cheap electric cars and competitive AI models, which present a serious threat to national industries. But these advances are one small part of a broader economy with pernicious and deep-rooted problems. The country’s property-market downturn, triggered by the 2021 meltdown of the real-estate developer Evergrande, has not hit bottom. Home prices continue to fall, eating away at the wealth of many middle-class households.

Trump’s war with Iran has pushed up oil prices, raising the cost of production for Chinese companies and ending three years of deflation. But the underlying problems of oversupply and weak demand remain entrenched. Youth unemployment, which emerged as a major social issue in 2023, has become chronic. The jobless rate among workers aged 16 to 24 stood at 18 percent last month.

[Matteo Wong: What really happens if China wins the AI race?]

These pressures have left Chinese consumers reluctant to spend. Retail sales grew a paltry 0.6 percent in July. Domestic sales of EVs have been falling. China’s economic problems have become so dire that some economists suspect that the official government statistics are overstating the country’s true performance. Although China’s economy has been growing a respectable 5 percent annually for the past three years, the research firm Rhodium Group estimates that China’s actual growth rate was probably near 2 percent in 2023 and closer to 3 percent over the past two years.

Any hope that China’s leaders will tackle these problems is almost certainly misplaced. Xi has stubbornly resisted the difficult and politically sensitive reforms necessary to fix the country’s economic model during his nearly 14 years in charge, and he is unlikely to change his approach anytime soon. He remains as myopically focused as ever on state-led programs to advance Chinese technology and industry, and particularly AI, and is apparently convinced that they will boost the entire economy. Perhaps this strategy will one day pay off, but the signs aren’t good. China’s debt has exploded on Xi’s watch—at three times the size of the economy, it surpasses even America’s debt burden. Growth in the second quarter of 2026 was the slowest since 2022, when China was still battling the coronavirus pandemic.

The Communist Party could theoretically change its leadership team at a major congress next year, but in the absence of any clear alternatives or successors, Xi is likely to secure yet another five-year term as general secretary. Xi’s ruthlessness in office has been marked by regular purges of possible rivals, generals, and members of other party factions. His latest victim appears to be Fang Xinghai, a former top securities regulator well-respected by international business leaders, against whom the party recently launched an investigation for unnamed disciplinary violations. With Fang’s fall, the government is sidelining yet another economic reformer with valuable expertise who might have helped fix the economy’s woes but whose market-oriented philosophy has fallen out of favor with a regime that prefers a top-down approach to national development.

Xi maintains social order through this never-ending malaise by controlling information and repressing alternative views. A sweeping new law took effect last month that mandates Mandarin as the primary language in education and orders parents to guide children to “love the Chinese Communist Party.” In prizing national unity over ethnic autonomy, this policy seems designed to force the country’s various ethnic minorities, including Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Mongolians, to assimilate into the majority Han Chinese culture. Even humor must follow the party line. Local authorities are reportedly investigating Guo Degang, a popular comedian who made the mistake of altering the lyrics of a patriotic song cherished by Communist cadres during a performance in the city of Wuhan last month.

[Vivian Salama and Jack Rodriquez-Vars: The danger of Trump’s anti-communist rhetoric]

Despite global surveys that report a growing fondness for China, the country’s “stability” comes at a steep cost to other countries. China may not be dropping bombs, but Beijing is arguably helping other countries drop theirs. By economically supporting Iran and Russia, Xi is essentially fighting proxy wars in both Europe and the Middle East.

In the absence of domestic demand, China’s subsidized and bloated manufacturing industries are exporting their problems and threatening the survival of competitors around the world. Given weak sales at home, Chinese automakers are shipping twice as much of their production overseas as they had a year ago. European Union officials are seeking greater powers and enhanced cooperation among its members to protect the continent’s industries from an onslaught of cheap Chinese imports, which have not only cost the region jobs but have run up a trade deficit with China topping $1 billion a day.

As Trump’s unpredictable and self-obsessed decision making saps America’s economic competitiveness and military might, China’s rise on the world stage is destined to continue, if only by default. But Xi’s insistence on preserving stability instead of addressing China’s serious structural problems threatens this ascent. Perhaps, then, the competition between China and the U.S. is less a contest for supremacy than a race to see which country hits bottom first.