Global | The Atlantic

How the Elite See Rome

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

Photographs by Benedetta Ristori

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

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

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

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

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

Benedetta Ristori for The Atlantic

Fulvio De Bonis in the Oratorio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benedetta Ristori for The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benedetta Ristori for The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

Benedetta Ristori for The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benedetta Ristori for The Atlantic

An original 1493 edition of the Nuremberg Chronicle

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Megan Eckley, Imago Artis Travel

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

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

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

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

NATO Is Going Strong, Actually

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

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

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

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

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

[Isaac Stanley-Becker: Europe without America]

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

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

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

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

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

[Rosie Gray: NATO, meet Donald Trump]

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

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

Canada Should Start Talking With Iran

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The betrayal of the Iranian people]

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

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

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

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

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

China Is Abusing AI

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The race for global domination in AI]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: AI has broken containment]

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

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

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

The Foreign-Policy Debate Democrats Need to Have

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

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The debate over the future of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy has become intensely personal. In May, Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii posted on social media that although he did not favor “black listing,” he thought it nevertheless “fair to want a whole new crop of foreign policy staffers in the next democratic administration.” After all, he added, “it’s not like the same 120 people are the only people who know anything.”

His post followed a stream of stories and social-media commentary calling for many of the Biden administration’s senior foreign-policy officials to be excluded from future Democratic campaigns and administrations.

The focus on these individuals stands in for a more consequential argument about the Biden administration’s foreign-policy legacy and the alternative now emerging within the party. And the divide is between two very different accounts of the world Democrats will inherit. One envisions a globe defined by strategic competition and the erosion of the old order. The other rejects that framework as self-fulfilling and favors a foreign policy built around restraint and cooperation with China on shared global problems.

[Missy Ryan: What is the Democrats’ answer to ‘America first’?]

I served on Joe Biden’s National Security Council with responsibility for strategic planning, so I am perhaps not a wholly disinterested observer. But I have no doubt that a debate is necessary—and only natural after an electoral defeat as politically and psychologically devastating as 2024’s. That discussion, however, should rest on ideas rather than personalities, and on an accurate view of history.

Biden is often portrayed as a defender of the old liberal international order—a restorationist who tried to rewind history to a time before Donald Trump’s first term. Some Democrats who remember Biden this way believe that the party now needs an entirely new foreign policy, designed by a younger and more progressive generation. But although Biden often spoke like a restorationist—remember “America is back”?—he did not actually govern like one.

For decades, Democratic administrations had been guided by the belief that expanding globalization, integrating supply chains, and prioritizing free trade would naturally strengthen both American prosperity and international stability. This belief was based on an expectation of great-power cooperation, which would allow any country to get anything it wanted, no matter where it was produced, just in time.

The Biden administration left these neoliberal assumptions behind. Its wager was that domestic industrial strength, not global integration, would become the foundation of national power. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan gave clear expression to this shift in a 2023 speech at the Brookings Institution, in which he called for an active industrial policy, supply-chain resilience, export controls, and technological competition with China.

Biden’s approach to Russia and China was more confrontational and competitive than those of his Democratic predecessors. His administration armed Ukraine, through the largest American security-assistance effort since the World War II–era Lend-Lease Act, and provided Ukraine with extensive intelligence to help it fight Russia. At the same time, the Biden administration pursued a policy of managed competition with China. This meant that Washington limited the export of advanced semiconductor chips, regulated U.S. investment in Chinese firms, pushed diplomatically to limit the number of military bases China maintained globally, and deepened its alliances—even as it pursued high-level diplomacy to prevent this competition from escalating into conflict.

This was not, in fact, the Democratic foreign policy of the past. It was riskier and more ambitious, designed for a far more dangerous world. It was not simply a return to old alliances, following a post–Cold War template. Rather, it emphasized new agreements, including AUKUS, which encompasses Australia and the United Kingdom, and other accords with the Philippines, India, and Vietnam. Under Biden, Finland and Sweden joined NATO, and the United States held annual summits with Japan and South Korea.

Biden did seek to cooperate with China on issues of mutual concern, such as AI. But he insisted that this had to be done without preconditions. That’s because those of us who worked on these policies inside the administration knew the Chinese playbook well. Beijing had little interest in cooperating on climate or anything else. It would stall by demanding that the U.S. make a concession on some matter of strategic importance, such as Taiwan and export controls. If that demand was met, Beijing would start a dialogue that wouldn’t go anywhere. And whenever the United States did something to displease them, they’d cancel the dialogue and start again. So Biden’s position was to stand ready to cooperate with China wherever our interests overlapped but never to offer unrelated concessions in exchange. This approach did produce some breakthroughs, such as restricting chemical exports used in fentanyl and limiting the use of AI models in decision making around nuclear weapons.

In the 18 months since the Biden administration left office, we national-security alumni have tried to come to terms with our legacy. Many of us feel most uneasy about the policy toward Israel’s war in Gaza, where we failed to persuade or compel the government of Benjamin Netanyahu to do more to minimize civilian casualties and mass displacement. Biden could have conditioned aid to Israel on its actions, but with the one exception of the provision of 2,000-pound bombs, he did not do this. He also could have put more pressure on Netanyahu to limit settler violence and expansion in the West Bank. There is no consensus on the path forward, but many broadly agree that America’s relationship with Israel should look more like its alliances with other nations. That means that Israel would no longer automatically receive an aid package, Washington would show less deference to Jerusalem when the two countries’ interests diverge, and there should be a greater role for a reformed Palestinian Authority in Gaza.

Biden alumni are discussing a lot of other questions too, including whether and how to end Trump’s tariffs, whether technology export controls can be restored—and also how exactly to overhaul the defense industrial base, re-form alliances, balance climate change and energy needs, and rebuild American development aid after the dismantlement of USAID.

All of this falls under the category of building on Biden’s legacy. But a clear and coherent alternative to that is emerging from the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, which appears to be ascendant. This vision begins with criticism of Biden’s Middle East policy—particularly his refusal to condition military support for Israel during the Gaza war—but has grown much bigger and more consequential.

The progressives seek more distance from Israel, even if Netanyahu is no longer prime minister. They favor restricting arms sales as well as ending military assistance, significantly downgrading the strategic relationship, and reducing the broader American military presence in the Middle East. Some progressives also argue for a public reckoning with all aspects of Biden’s Gaza policy and for officials associated with it to be excluded from future administrations.

A more comprehensive worldview is emerging in the writings and arguments of figures such as Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser under Barack Obama; Matt Duss, who advises Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; and Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who served in the State Department during the Biden administration but broke with it over its China policy.

These experts generally argue that the foreign-policy establishment has treated military dominance as strategy and subordinated global cooperation to geopolitical rivalry. They hold that Democrats should, as Rhodes put it, “slash a bloated and out-of-control Pentagon budget” and move toward a more affirmative agenda focused on transnational concerns, such as climate change, public health, and artificial intelligence.

Underlying much of this critique is the belief that Washington has become excessively hawkish toward China. Weiss credits Trump with creating “real breathing room” in U.S.-China relations and recommends that the United States deepen its economic ties with China, stop talking about strategic competition, and nurture moderates in Beijing. Duss told Ezra Klein that progressives favor the economic shift away from neoliberalism but object to the emphasis on competing with China. The United States, he said, should make common cause with China on establishing a global minimum wage, among other issues.

These progressive ideas are likely to continue to develop as the primary campaign approaches. Not everything associated with Biden will be abandoned. Many progressives appear comfortable with Biden’s approach to Russia and Ukraine, which combined extensive support for Kyiv with a deliberate effort to avoid direct military conflict between the United States and Russia.

[Robert Kagan: America vs. the world]

The world has changed, and what comes next will be different from what came before. The international system is not deteriorating simply because Trump returned to office. Vladimir Putin launched the largest war in Europe since 1945. Xi Jinping has undermined core assumptions of the global trading system by using China’s national power to dominate the industries of the future. Wars are already under way in Europe and the Middle East. A conflict over Taiwan could quickly become global. The central foreign-policy question facing Democrats is what kind of strategy is best suited to an era of intensifying geopolitical rivalry.

Democrats could accept that the United States is in a long-term strategic competition with China and Russia and seek to manage this by modernizing America’s military, strengthening its alliances, advancing its technology, and selectively disentangling its economy from those of other states. Or Democrats could refuse the competition framework and seek to build a foreign policy around cooperation with other states on shared global problems.

Whatever one thinks of the Biden administration, it clearly chose the first path. Those who support it believe in competing strategically with China and others to deter aggression and shape the world in a way that reflects America’s interests and values. These thinkers worry that the progressive alternative does not recognize how the world has changed and become more dangerous, both because and independent of Trump. For their part, progressives believe that Biden’s approach fed a dangerous trend globally and that Americans must stop treating military primacy as the measure of their leadership. A clean break offers hope of a fresh start.

No Democratic candidate is going to run on Bidenism. But whether the candidates of the near future build on Biden’s break with the post–Cold War consensus and make it their own or repudiate it altogether in favor of a progressive alternative is shaping up to be the defining foreign-policy debate inside the party.

*Illustration sources: Justin Merriman / Bloomberg / Getty; mikroman6 / Getty; Roman Chekhovskoy / Getty; Yuri Gripas / Abaca / Bloomberg; Getty.

The Vultures Arrived Before the Rescue Teams

2026-07-01T07:00:00-04:00

Big earthquakes flatten buildings into rubble the same way everywhere. Last Wednesday, when back-to-back quakes of magnitudes 7.5 and 7.2 rocked a large part of my native Venezuela, I found some dark consolation in the thought that such tragedies are impartial to place. The tectonic plates deep below had exerted their formidable powers because this is what they sometimes do. The suffering would be acute, but its precedents were universal and as old as the Earth.

But Venezuela’s man-made disasters didn’t take long to exacerbate the natural one. For 28 years and counting, Venezuela’s rulers have stolen or squandered much of the oil revenue of the most oil-rich country in the world. Oligarchs pocketed the petrodollars of the late-aughts oil boom and left the nation somehow poorer and more indebted. In the hours just before the earthquakes struck, the regime released a total figure for the amount that it owed its creditors: $240 billion. The humanitarian consequences of this wastefulness were well documented before last Wednesday. Now they have acquired a fresh urgency.

In the crucial first 24 hours following the quakes, the government response was practically nonexistent. In an upscale neighborhood in Caracas, ill-equipped police officers illuminated the rubble with cellphone flashlights, and volunteers used their bare hands to clear debris. Elsewhere, people had to make do with even less. In La Guaira, a hard-hit coastal city near Caracas, some survivors waited days for help sifting through the wreckage to find out whether their family members were alive or dead. Some said they could hear the screams of their loved ones but were unable to reach them without heavy machinery, which did not come in time. An unusual number of vultures have been seen flying over what’s left of La Guaira in recent days. The birds appear to have arrived in some disaster zones before the rescue teams.

[Read: A search through the rubble of two towers in Venezuela]

The lack of preparation is unforgivable. Worse, the regime led by Delcy Rodríguez—under the heavy-handed management of the Trump administration—has taken active steps to make matters worse. The government deployed the military to the disaster areas not to help but to diffuse any expression of public discontent. “Here there are more rifles than shovels,” a volunteer reportedly shouted in despair. Civil-society groups pleaded for the government to unblock access to social media and censored news outlets, even if only temporarily, so that people could get information. Instead, Rodríguez announced that local and international journalists would be subjected to further restrictions.

International assistance has met with obstacles. On Friday, Caracas refused to authorize a rescue mission from the Dominican Republic. Spain and France, too, wanted to send first responders, but the Venezuelan government wouldn’t grant them visas. Eventually the authorities did allow brigades from the United States, Chile, El Salvador, and many other countries to enter, but these forces have received little support from the Venezuelan government, which now requires official authorization from anyone entering La Guaira.

On Sunday, as the possibility of finding people still alive under the rubble grew slimmer by the hour, Rodríguez decided to interrupt the rescuers’ work for a meet and greet: “We wanted to set you all aside from your tasks, which we know are so vital, just so that we could thank you on behalf of the Venezuelan people,” she said. “These hours are critical for saving lives.”

Nearly 44,000 of the people who have been reported missing on an online platform are still unaccounted for. The morgue that serves La Guaira is makeshift—a white tent on a dock lined with body bags and coffins. Some bodies have been covered in lime to slow down the rate of decay. The death toll has surpassed 1,700 and is still rising. And survivors are left with little recourse. The day after the earthquakes, some volunteers stumbled upon a 7-year-old boy named Mateo, shirtless and covered in debris, sitting by himself on a sidewalk in La Guaira. “The only one who survived the collapse was me,” Mateo calmly explained in a video shot by volunteers. “My mother stopped breathing at 7:30 in the morning.” Not far from where he sat, a woman showed reporters that she had hidden the bodies of her aunt and uncle behind some mattresses. She had been waiting for hours for the authorities to come and do something about them.

For many of us, this is a tragedy unfolding at a distance that carries its own kind of pain. In the past decade, one in four Venezuelans has left the country; nearly every family has been separated. And so millions of us around the world have been trying to reach family members, with no way of knowing whether certain calls go unanswered because of electrical outages, which are common even in ordinary times, or the unthinkable.

[View: Rescue and recovery in Venezuela]

Stephanie Fajardo, a Spanish teacher in Boston, told me she knew that her father was trapped in a collapsed apartment building in La Guaira, and she knew that he was alive, because people had heard him screaming the morning after the quakes. Neighbors managed to rescue his wife, but not him, and because the roads around his building were blocked, no rescue team was forthcoming. Stephanie made a guide on Instagram to assist anyone who might help her father. She posted his Google Maps coordinates and a picture annotated with a circle around the exact hole of rubble where her father’s screams were last heard. She posted insistently and even offered a reward. But by the time her father was found, 72 hours after the quakes, he was dead.

I have been lucky. My family members have lost property, but not lives. But like many other Venezuelans, I am riveted by the pictures of endless rubble, of buildings whose facades have collapsed, displaying the rooms inside like dioramas of life before disaster.

Every time there is an aftershock—and there have been many—my mother calls me. They were scary at first, but now they seem more like reminders of the instability deep below, and of what it means to live under a regime that values its own permanence over the permanence of anything else.

America’s Big Mistake in Iran

2026-06-23T07:00:00-04:00

When the United States and Israel launched the war on Iran in February, their plan was simple: bomb Iran until either the Iranian public rose up and overthrew the government, or the existing government capitulated to American demands. It rapidly became apparent that neither was going to happen. The Iranian people didn’t revolt against their oppressors. The Iranian government hunkered down, closed the strait, and gambled that the U.S. would be unwilling to invade or strike at crucial infrastructure.

So it seems U.S. planners made an obvious, if common, mistake: They assumed that a war could be won via aerial bombing alone.

Starting right after World War I, military theorists in the United States, Italy, and the United Kingdom rallied around the idea that airpower lessened or eliminated the need for armies and navies. Their central thesis was that wars could be won almost exclusively with bombers and bombing campaigns.

In his 1921 book, Il dominio dell’aria (“The Command of the Air”), Italian General Giulio Douhet argued that whichever nation claimed air superiority first would be able to bomb their enemies’ cities to ash, forcing capitulation. Marshal Hugh Trenchard, the so-called father of the Royal Air Force who pioneered strategic-bombing theory during World War I, thought that airpower could break an enemy’s will to fight rather than merely provide tactical support for ground troops. And General Curtis LeMay, an American champion of strategic bombing, believed that overwhelming, concentrated force was the best way to win a war. He favored the use of incendiary weapons against urban centers and of immediate, devastating strikes instead of gradual escalation.

[Read: The price of defeat in Iran]

When these theories of total war through bombing were put to the test in World War II and beyond, however, they failed miserably. The German Blitz on London did not induce the British public to give in. Allied bombing of Germany did not break the Nazis’ will to fight; the German collapse at the end had much more to do with the (justified) fear of being captured by the Red Army, and the opportunity to surrender to the Americans.

In the case of Japan, the combination of the naval blockade and firebombing of cities left millions of Japanese people likely to die if the war went on into 1946. However, it was not until the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, plus the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, that Japan sought a nearly unconditional surrender.

Strategic bombing failed in Vietnam as well. In that war, the U.S. dropped approximately 7.6 million tons of bombs, compared with the roughly 2.7 million tons dropped by the U.S. military across the European and Pacific theaters in World War II. The “Christmas bombings” of 1972 were not enough to persuade North Vietnam to offer favorable terms; rather, the Paris Peace Accords of 1973 were a result of U.S. exhaustion with the war. They paved the way for North Vietnam to conquer the south in 1974–75.

The advent of “true” mass precision bombing in the 1990s led some analysts to conclude that the rules of war had changed, and that airpower alone was at last sufficient. But the supposed examples of victory through aerial bombing aren’t what they seem. The first Gulf War ended only after U.S. troops went into Kuwait in a 100-hour-long charge. In Serbia in 1999, Slobodan Milošević’s capitulation to a united NATO’s demands was based on fears of regime survival and the credible threat of ground invasion. The air campaign in Afghanistan succeeded because the U.S. had allies on the ground willing to fight for, take, and hold territory in the form of the Northern Alliance. In each case, there were troops on the ground, or a credible threat thereof.

A study by the RAND Corporation in 1996 on the capabilities and limitations of the psychological effects of U.S. air operations cautioned leaders that airpower alone was unlikely to coerce an enemy to offer favorable terms, unless there were other factors at play. Those external influences include the enemy’s belief that they would be defeated on the battlefield, that continued fighting would not improve their position, that damage from air attacks would likely be worse than concessions, and that there would be no hope of mounting a defense or effective counterattack.

The U.S. plan for attacking Iran was doomed from the start because it relied on airpower without the benefit of external factors that would have made an air campaign successful. There was no credible threat of mass ground invasion to overthrow the Iranian regime. It was either internal revolution or nothing.

The U.S. was also unwilling to inflict the sort of mass casualties and suffering that might have caused Iran to decide that capitulation was less damaging than continued resistance. The administration generally avoided targeting crucial infrastructure such as water and electrical plants and ground lines of communication (bridges and rail). And it was unwilling to resort to something drastic, such as setting off a nuclear electromagnetic-pulse weapon to permanently disable the majority of Iranian infrastructure.

[Karim Sadjadpour: Trump’s second gamble on Iran]

Unlike Serbia or Afghanistan, Iran had the ability to fight back and inflict significant pain on the United States. Iran fully grasped, from the beginning, that the outcome of the war would be determined by who could withstand the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The regime always had a plausible theory of victory and pursued it logically and consistently throughout the conflict.

Senior U.S. military leaders have spent decades studying warfare from every angle and must have understood the possibility of a prolonged regional conflict. In fact, General Dan Caine reportedly cautioned the Trump administration against attacking Iran.

But President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth did not appreciate the need for caution. Hegseth gained his experience at the tactical level, as a junior officer in the field. He seems to believe that technological might and physical strength, rather than carefully thought-out strategy, win wars. An Army captain in the field might see dropping a 2,000-pound munition on a house as a self-contained solution to his troops taking fire; a flag officer understands the risk of it creating 100 more enemies next week.

The consequences of the botched war effort are nothing short of catastrophic. The U.S.’s munitions stockpiles are depleted, its military reputation is in tatters, its foreign relations are strained to the breaking, and Iranian leadership is in the best strategic position it has ever been in. It’s a hard way to relearn the old lesson that airpower alone doesn’t win wars.

The Warrior-Witches of Ukraine’s Resistance

2026-06-21T07:00:00-04:00

For several months last year, a Ukrainian housewife, 35 and lonely in a marriage that had gone cold, traded WhatsApp messages with a Chechen commander, Achmad, stationed somewhere in Ukraine’s occupied south. They wrote about their days, their disappointments, what they hoped to do when the war ended. She asked about the front. He told her.

“Send me a picture,” she said. “I want to see your life.”

One afternoon, he obliged—a photograph taken inside the barracks, of himself and another soldier grinning for the camera. Behind them, pinned to the wall, was a map of the compound showing the unit’s position.

The housewife did not exist. “She” was a middle-aged officer named Serhiy working for Ukraine’s military-intelligence directorate, part of a concerted effort to draw secrets from the men sent to occupy his country.

“Serhiy was great at flirting,” his commander told me. “Guys in our team started asking him for dating advice.” Shortly after Achmad sent that photograph, the coordinates it revealed were struck by a Ukrainian drone.

[Anne Applebaum: Ukraine is not losing. Russia is not winning.]

Ukraine’s resistance is alive and more lethal than ever. But it has changed dramatically since its early days. A man I will call Dmytro (he requested anonymity for reasons of safety) has served with a resistance team inside occupied Kherson from the first days of the full-scale invasion. “We took insane risks then,” he told me. “Nobody thought the Russians would be here long.” Partisan cells sprang up organically—people who knew one another, sometimes ex-military, improvising as they went. Symbolic acts of resistance happened daily. Ukrainians flew their flag and blared patriotic songs in public. The image of a grandmother pressing sunflower seeds into a Russian paratrooper’s hand—“so that sunflowers grow here when you die”—traveled around the world.

As it became clear the Russians intended to stay, such open defiance faded. Today, expressing support for Ukraine in Russian-occupied areas is likely to earn a trip to “the basement,” a euphemism for Russian torture chambers. Dmytro described Russia’s repression as a kind of machine: “It takes time to get spinning, then it has its own momentum.” High-resolution surveillance cameras now blanket city centers, and interrogations are a feature of daily life. Resistance leaders from Mariupol estimate that nearly half of the adult population there has been polygraphed by the Russian security service.

Even peaceful acts can meet with extreme repression. In 2022 and 2023, occupation forces in Mariupol effectively banned the colors blue and yellow. Residents describe receiving aid packages, including school supplies, with yellow and blue markers ripped out of their boxes. Today, Russia’s camera net is sophisticated enough to track individuals block by block, masked or not. Petro Andriushchenko escaped from Mariupol and now coordinates a cell still operating there. “Pro-Ukrainian graffiti can get you killed,” he told me. “Even disguised, your movements can be traced backwards to find where you live.”

The kind of symbolic resistance once waged by the general public has now given way to intelligence work, carried out by serious operatives. Managed by handlers in unoccupied Ukraine, these agents help identify targets, verify coordinates, and pass them to the Ukrainian military. The location of Achmad’s barracks, although traced through online subterfuge, was almost certainly confirmed by an agent on the ground. The result is a movement that has grown both quieter and deadlier. It now feeds the “middle-strike” campaign—a sustained drone offensive against targets deep inside the occupied territories, including air defenses, logistics hubs, command posts, and personnel. A crucial link in that kill chain is information from loyal Ukrainians behind enemy lines.

The partisans I spoke with included coordinators directing operations from free Ukraine, operatives working inside occupied territory, and volunteers scattered across Ukraine and abroad. Many have family members still living under Russian occupation and must closely guard their resistance activities. Inside the occupied territories, most agents work alone, their only connection via encrypted communication with their handlers. One operative, code-named Sestra, has no idea how far the network around her extends, except that it kills Russians almost every day. “What you do not know,” she explained to me, “you cannot betray under interrogation.”

The Russian military is a meat grinder. Commanders send infantry forward in waves that Ukrainian officers refer to as “human radar”: The piles of bodies reveal Ukrainian strong points. As crude as Russia’s infantry operations may be, its electronic countermeasures are very sophisticated and continually reshape how the resistance communicates and survives.

Until June 2022, Ukraine’s mobile carriers Kyivstar and Vodafone kept operating in the occupied zones, because the Russians had not yet stood up their own infrastructure. Then the Ukrainian networks went dark, and the resistance had to improvise. Early fixes were crude: VPNs, Wi-Fi nodes. Methods have since been refined, and the details are closely guarded. What is clear is that any phone purchased inside the occupied territories is useless for resistance work. Devices sold there come preloaded with monitoring software developed by Russian intelligence. That app is called Druge—Друг—which means “friend” in Russian.

Druge monitors communications, photographs, and location data, relaying all of it back to Russian intelligence. One woman who had recently escaped from an occupied zone told me that her mother, who still lived there, tried to delete Druge. The icon disappeared, but the app kept running in the background. At checkpoints, Russian soldiers examine every phone. Not having Druge installed is a red flag to them; having an encrypted app, such as Signal, guarantees a phone’s owner a trip to the basement.

Phones smuggled in from free Ukraine are the linchpin of resistance communications. For a time, one reliable route ran through Deutsche Post: parcels mailed from Germany, routed through Russia, delivered to innocuous addresses in occupied territory—a government office, a shop—and wrapped so that any tampering would be evident. That route is now closed. Others remain, though the specifics are closely held. In emergencies, a phone can be delivered by drone, which demands real-time coordination and carries its own risks. These “clean” devices do not have Russian spyware installed, and they lack SIM cards that would connect to the local mobile network. Because cell towers can detect when a new phone enters their coverage area, resistance members compose encrypted messages on a clean phone then send them via internet, using the hotspot of a second device already recognized by the network.

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

Few resistance agents have professional training. Most learn on the job. Partisans pass around hard-copy tradecraft manuals to avoid using vulnerable digital channels. Within Kherson’s partisan brigade, one of the most sought-after is a Soviet-era handbook describing CIA catfishing tactics in Africa during the Cold War. No online version exists, but a well-worn original circulates among the resistance.

“Your CIA was good at this,” Dmytro said. “You bastards knew how to use sex.”

Several Ukrainian print shops have developed methods for hiding instruction manuals inside best-selling books. A guard at a Russian checkpoint, thumbing through an artificially tattered paperback, will likely have no idea that some of the pages explain how to kill him.

Inside the occupied territories, women form the backbone of the resistance. Many hold positions in Russia’s civil administration—at clinics, schools, and government offices—and report to Ukrainian intelligence. They exploit the occupiers’ assumptions: Russian soldiers often fail to imagine that women can be combatants. Few suspect that a grandmother passing their barracks every morning, shopping bags in hand, is the first link in a kill chain.

Some women volunteer with Russia-based charities supplying aid to military units. Every interaction is a collection opportunity. In late May, a government-linked Russian aid organization circulated a warning about this over Telegram: It had identified individuals, the agency noted, “who offer to deliver humanitarian aid to the Special Military Operation zone” as “a tactic employed by hostile forces to gather intelligence regarding the deployment of Russian troops.”

The most valuable sources are the occupiers themselves. In free Ukraine, agents build online relationships with occupation soldiers. Most of the operatives are women—though some men, such as Serhiy, have a gift for it. Native Russian soldiers tend to be difficult marks; they are transactional, Serhiy’s commander told me. “They always ask in the first five minutes: ‘Are we going to fuck or not?’” Chechens, by contrast, are “much more likely to seek a real relationship” and are easier to manipulate.

Since its creation in the early 1990s, the National Academy of the Security Service of Ukraine has trained operatives to cultivate intelligence assets. There are rumors of a new course that requires students to develop online connections with real occupation soldiers. An instructor at the academy, who requested anonymity for security reasons, would not confirm the course’s existence but insisted that “every intelligence agency does this—even yours.” When pressed about a specific aspect of the rumor, that the highest grades go to students who deliver target coordinates by the end of the course, he smiled. “That would indeed earn high marks.”

Most instruction for resistance agents, however, remains unofficial. Olena Biletska runs the Ukrainian Women’s Guard, a volunteer organization launched after Russia’s initial assault in 2014 to train women to survive under attack or occupation. By 2022, training had been delivered to more than 60,000 participants, some of whom remained in occupied territory. Most courses cover basic self-defense and survival, but others apply to resistance work. Pipelines smuggle training materials behind enemy lines. One course focuses on defeating polygraphs; others cover urban surveillance and intelligence-gathering.

Outside Ukraine, a diaspora helps vet target coordinates obtained through these resistance networks. Refugees from the occupied territories, who have detailed local knowledge, provide insight for the middle-strike drone campaign. A woman I will call Roksana, who asked for her name to be withheld to protect her network inside Ukraine, served in a clinic near Kherson on the occupied south bank of the Dnipro River. She barely escaped with her life after refusing to work for the Russian military. Now, living abroad, she helps verify targets for Ukrainian military intelligence. “I know my village—every street, every farm, every warehouse,” she told me.

For Roksana and some of the other women operatives I spoke with, the determination to destroy the Russian occupation was forged in dark experience. “Almost every day, for the first few weeks after the invasion, we would hear about another body in the street,” Roksana said. “If it was a woman, they were often abused.” The doctor Tetyana Kostyantynivna runs the women’s center at one of Kyiv’s largest hospitals. In 2022 and 2023, her facility treated a steady stream of sexual-assault survivors from the occupied territories, ranging in age from 4 to 75. “Over the past four years,” she told me, “we have become a world leader in new methods for gynecological reconstructive surgery.”

During her own escape, Roksana passed through 33 Russian checkpoints, several of which were surrounded by dead bodies. Some of those corpses were of women and showed what she understood to be clear signs of sexual violence. At one checkpoint, a Russian soldier fired into the back of Roksana’s car while it sat parked, hitting a passenger in the legs. The soldiers did it for sport. But Roksana’s group made it through, and today, she has no reservations about guiding drone strikes against her own village, if doing so helps drive the Russians out. “We can rebuild warehouses,” she said, “but the Russians can’t rebuild Russians.”

[Read: Something is wrong with Russia’s children]

Women are crucial to the Ukrainian resistance. “They can go places, do things, that men cannot,” Andriushchenko, who runs agents inside Mariupol, told me. “Also, they are ruthless.” Several resistance leaders call their female agents vidma, a term that appears often in Ukrainian folklore. Its closest translation is “witch,” but it has a very different connotation here. The word derives from vidate, which means “to know.” Lesia Orobets, a former member of the Ukrainian Parliament, explained: “Vidmas were wise. They understood the secrets of the surrounding environment. Here in Ukraine, our vidmas were respected for their knowledge, not burned for it.”

These warrior-witches have become Ukraine’s most feared intelligence assets, moving through occupied territory like shadows. Orobets travels abroad often, where she is sometimes asked, “What happens if Ukraine runs out of men?”

“Be careful what you wish for,” she says. “If Ukraine’s women are in charge, there won’t be a Russian left alive.”

In the early months of the occupation, children played a role in the resistance. They slipped through checkpoints easily, took instantly to encrypted apps, and were extraordinarily brave. But the risks they took were no less grave than those faced by adults. An errant social-media post—or simply “liking” content supportive of Ukraine—was enough to get a child hauled in for interrogation. Those sessions could involve unspeakable violence, especially for girls. I interviewed one who was only 11 when her village near Kherson had been occupied. Implicated in “resistance” activities, she was dragged from her home. As we began our conversation, she apologized for her stutter. “I did not used to have this problem,” she told me, “until the Russians took me to the basement.”

The resistance says that it now enforces an absolute ban on children taking part. Dmytro, from the Kherson brigade, explained that “it’s not just about the risk to the kids. It’s about the risk to the whole unit.” The death of a child at Russian hands can devastate morale. Andriushchenko described the case of two teenage boys from Melitopol who had been interrogated by Russia’s security service. Their bodies were never returned, almost certainly because of how badly the boys had been tortured. “Their deaths hit us hard,” he said. “What they did to them.”

In practice, the ban on children helping the resistance has its limits. In one occupied city, teenagers have learned to move around the Russian camera network. For a while, they spray-painted Ukrainian colors on the sides of abandoned buildings. Now, given the risks of carrying blue or yellow paint, they chalk or scratch the Ukrainian letter Ї, which does not exist in the Russian alphabet, wherever they can get away with it. Even this, resistance leaders discourage. Sestra, the agent operating inside Mariupol, describes how “a single piece of graffiti can mean torture, a cellar, or deportation to Russia for the child, and arrest or the stripping of parental rights for the family.”

“It’s not worth it,” Andriushchenko said. “We need intel, not art. When they turn 18, they’ll get their turn.”

If resistance fighters are the first link in the kill chain, drone operators are the last. Iegor Kravchenko, whose call sign is “Ram,” commands a company in Ukraine’s 426th Unmanned Systems Regiment. Every night, his unit launches attack drones into the occupied territories. “A significant percentage of those missions,” he told me, “rely on intel provided by the resistance.”

Today, the middle-strike drone campaign is the main engine of partisan activity. It has become extraordinarily efficient. For a high-priority target—an air-defense system, a command post, a munitions dump—anywhere from 15 minutes to a few hours can elapse between the transmission of coordinates and the strike. There have been moments when an operative was still chatting online with a soldier as a drone hit his position. “Our goal,” Orobets said, “is to make sure Russian soldiers never reach the front line.”

[Read: Building tanks while the Ukrainians master drones]

I asked the partisans why they would talk with me at all, sharing intimate details of the war’s most dangerous operations. In part, they are sending a message to the occupier: You are hated here. Sestra put a finer point on this: “I want every Russian soldier who has set foot on our land to carry that paranoia with him—suffocating, relentless, every second of every day. I want him to look at the grandmother at the market, at the bus driver, at the doctor in the clinic, at the ordinary passerby on the street—and to see in each of them his own potential destruction.”

The Ukrainian operatives also want Americans to know that Ukraine is fighting for every inch of its land. Asked whether Ukraine would tolerate a peace deal ceding occupied territory, Biletska answered, “Have you seen Bucha? Kherson? Mariupol? That’s not peace.”

As for Achmad, the Chechen commander who revealed the location of his own barracks, Andriushchenko was blunt: “He’s gone dark online, but we suspect he still doesn’t realize he was flirting with a middle-aged chuvak,” meaning a dude.

I asked whether he worried about exposing Achmad as a source. “No. I hope his unit learns what he did,” Andriushchenko said. “And then I hope they cut off his balls.”

Trump’s Second Gamble on Iran

2026-06-20T07:00:00-04:00

Donald Trump’s war against Iran began with one gamble and ended with another. Initially, the president bet that he could stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions by bombing Iran’s revolutionary regime out of existence. So he spent tens of billions of dollars, and upended the global economy, only to sign a memorandum of understanding undoubtedly weaker than any deal he could have struck before the war. Embedded in this document is a new gamble: that if Iran’s revolutionaries can’t be dislodged by force, they might instead be bribed to abandon their identity.

The memorandum offers a bundle of American inducements so lopsided that it reads as if Tehran wrote the plan unilaterally. Of its 14 provisions, 13 either amount to diplomatic boilerplate or heavily favor Iran on their face. Tehran will receive military and economic concessions—and de facto acknowledgment of its control over the Strait of Hormuz—in exchange for a concession that it will not develop or buy nuclear weapons. Never mind that Iran has made and ignored such promises before, and the CIA doubts its sincerity now.

The humiliation of the memorandum is doubly egregious for Trump, who withdrew from Barack Obama’s multinational agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear programs. Trump called that agreement the “worst deal ever negotiated,” but it was less costly to America, was less generous to Iran, and offered more concrete nonproliferation guarantees. Trump is paying far more for far less.

[Graeme Wood: Iran has humiliated Trump]

He has acted like a poker player who believes his own bluffs. Trump vowed to raze Iran’s missile industry to the ground; defang its proxy militias, such as Hezbollah; unseat its regime; choose its next leader; and control the Strait of Hormuz. While none of his maximalist war goals were achieved, Trump celebrated the cease-fire, and lifting of the blockade, as if he had had no role in creating the whole mess in the first place.

The Islamic Republic, one of the world’s most brutal, isolated, and unpopular regimes, has emerged with its economy and military further decimated but its confidence restored. On the eve of the war, it was a bankrupt global pariah that had just massacred thousands of its own people—perhaps tens of thousands—to crush a national uprising. Today it celebrates having defied America and Israel, and basks in Western commentary that it is a rising power.

Virtually every American president since the 1979 Iranian Revolution has wanted to improve relations between Washington and Tehran. Doing so would be in the national interest of both America and Iran, but no administration has achieved this outcome. Iran’s revolutionary theocracy thrives in isolation and has made resistance against the United States and its ally Israel central to the regime’s identity, its internal legitimacy, and the cohesion of its security forces.

Having assassinated the regime’s top leadership, Trump is now trying not only to negotiate a new nuclear deal but to engineer a grand bargain that transforms U.S.-Iran relations. But he is hedging his own bet by putting J. D. Vance in charge of the effort. Vance recently told The New York Times that Tehran’s new elite are rethinking the revolution and coalescing around a new consensus that “47 years of Iran policy towards the United States has been a mistake.” Trump, however, has made no secret of his calculations. “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” he said earlier this week. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming J. D.”

[Jonathan Chait: All the sad hawks]

Vance’s political future may rest as much on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers as on Republican-primary voters. One of Vance’s hopes to lead Iran’s ideological transformation is Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a former IRGC general and the current speaker of Iran’s Parliament. The two men spent more than 20 hours together in Islamabad earlier this year and reportedly built a private rapport. Yet Qalibaf’s recent public speeches and interviews—mocking America, praising Hezbollah, threatening Israel, and hailing partnership with China—will likely prove to be a truer barometer of Tehran’s intentions than any private assurances of goodwill.

There are other major obstacles to normalization. The memorandum suggests that Iran could get $300 billion in investment, ostensibly from the same Gulf countries that were just on the receiving end of thousands of Iranian missiles. “It’s presumptuous for the U.S. to commit other people’s money,” Ali Shihabi, an adviser to Saudi leadership, told me. “Gulf countries should not be paying reparations for a war they did not want.” A Gulf diplomat was much blunter. “They’re not going to get a penny from us,” he told me.

The logic of Trump’s current gamble with Iran resembles his entreaties to the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un during Trump’s first term: The president is offering reintegration as a reward for denuclearization. In Singapore, Trump famously tried to entice Kim with visions of turning North Korea’s missile-testing coastlines into prime real estate, marveling at the country’s “great beaches” and envisioning “the best hotels in the world.” But for revolutionary dictatorships such as North Korea and Iran, Western-backed luxury hotels, foreign tourists, and open capital flows aren’t a triumph—they are a Trojan horse that would erode their total information control and ideological legitimacy.

The memorandum calls for 60 days of negotiations, but virtually no one expects a nuclear agreement—let alone the end of a 47-year U.S.-Iran cold war—to come about so quickly. So the war may not be over; it might merely be paused. Tehran will try to rebuild its missiles and proxies, which won’t be part of any agreement. According to reports, it still retains as much as 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile and its mobile launchers. It still produces large quantities of missiles and drones.

Tehran’s new leadership is not moderating the regime’s internal conduct. Parastoo Ahmadi, a 29-year-old singer, was recently sentenced to 74 lashes for performing a concert publicly without a hijab. Security forces have stepped up persecution of the Baha’i religious minority. And dozens of political prisoners have been fast-tracked to the gallows. In other words, there are no visible signs on the ground to bolster Trump’s argument that the regime has become “very rational” and is “not radicalized.”

[Read: The U.S. had no choice but diplomacy—yet again]

Aside from the Iranian people, the Gulf countries that sought to befriend Trump have been the biggest losers. Their previously vibrant economies were sabotaged by Iran’s $20,000 drones. Given the existential threat they feel from Tehran, they will have no choice but to rely more than ever on America’s security umbrella—while also being forced, at the same time, to cut their own side deals with Iran.

Trump has recently metamorphosed from an Iran hawk into an Iran apologist, defending the Islamic Republic’s missile program and lauding Mojtaba Khamenei—an ideological carbon copy of the hard-line father whom Trump assassinated—as respected and pragmatic. The president’s incoherence has become a source of gallows humor among Iranians. “Trump went to delete Ayatollah Khamenei,” one Iranian told me, “but he accidentally pressed ‘Update.’”

Perhaps the peace deal is just a tactical retreat. “If he doesn’t like where this is going, he will go back to the blockade or bombing them,” a senior administration official told me. “And oil prices will be much lower.” Yet Trump, who has clearly wearied of the economic disruptions that his war has caused, may not want to gamble on renewed hostilities with Iran.

U.S. presidents typically begin to understand the nature of the Islamic Republic only at the end of their term. Ever since the 1979 revolution and the subsequent hostage crisis ruined Jimmy Carter’s reelection campaign, Tehran has prided itself on sabotaging American chief executives. This time it may get a two-for-one: the presidency of Donald Trump, and the presidential ambitions of J. D. Vance.

Iran Got a Great Deal That It Could Still Squander

2026-06-20T07:00:00-04:00

The memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran appears to have ended the war on terms favorable to the Islamic Republic. It releases frozen Iranian assets, relaxes restrictions on Iranian oil sales, and lifts the American blockade of the Strait of Hormuz—in exchange for Iran ending its closure of the waterway. In other words, Iran receives things it didn’t have before the war in exchange for giving up something it wasn’t doing before the war.

But as good as these terms might look for Iran, they’ve still proved controversial within the Islamic Republic. In the days before the agreement, a loud coterie of hard-liners threw everything it had against the deal. A member of Parliament from Tehran said that signing the deal would make Iran “a colony of the United States.” Hard-line demonstrators wished “death” on the two men who led the talks with the U.S.: Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the speaker of Parliament, and Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister (respectively tagged as “the compromiser” and “the dishonorable”).

Hard-liners oppose the memorandum of understanding because they see any deal with the United States as normalizing contact with the Great Satan. They also fear an end to international sanctions: If Iran is no longer alone and under siege, what will become of its anti-Western ideology?

[Read: The war Trump can’t end]

Yet the deal went ahead because it had the support of most of Iran’s military and political leaders. About a dozen men sit on the National Security Council, the body that effectively runs Iran these days. Of them, reportedly only one opposed the deal, and this was likely Saeed Jalili, the former nuclear negotiator and unofficial leader of the ultra-hard-line faction. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps appears to have put its institutional weight behind agreement. Esmail Qaani, the head of IRGC’s external-operations wing, known as the Quds Force, went on state television to back it: “The negotiating team are no different than our boys working at the missile launchers,” he said.

The memorandum is seen as a victory for Qalibaf, Araghchi, and the man who actually signed it for Iran, the reformist President Masud Pezeshkian. The pro-diplomacy coalition includes reformist forces, such as the Unity of the Nation Party, which asked for the deal to be followed by “restorative justice” for the regime’s killing of protesters in January and an expansion of rights and freedoms. Two pro-reform former presidents, Mohammad Khatami and Hassan Rouhani, have also backed the deal.

But the Iranian regime has a long history of tug-of-war between two broad camps: the developmentalists, who are ready to move on from the Islamic Republic’s founding ideology in the name of economic progress, and the ideologues, who remain committed to anti-Americanism and the quest to destroy Israel. The struggle goes back to the 1990s, and the developmentalists have lost most rounds, not least because Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader for 37 years, sided with the ideologues. Khamenei sometimes green-lighted diplomacy with the West to gain economic relief, but he firmly opposed normalizing ties with the U.S. or holding high-level talks with Americans.

[Read: How Iran killed its economy]

His son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, is rhetorically committed to the same unforgiving worldview as his father was. In a message endorsing the deal, he said that he was “fundamentally of another opinion” but had been swayed by Pezeshkian’s guarantees. By signaling that the deal was not his preference, the leader empowered hard-liners to oppose it. But in this message, Mojtaba also approved face-to-face meetings with Americans, in a sharp departure from his father.

These dynamics among regime insiders matter because the tougher diplomatic task still lies ahead. The memorandum of understanding gives the U.S. and Iran 60 days to hash out a nuclear deal. This is the broader diplomatic arrangement that could lead to sanctions relief and be an economic game changer for Iran. (The memorandum of understanding has already proved beneficial in this regard: A U.S. dollar now sells for 1.56 million Iranian rials, down from 1.75 million last week.)

But we’ve been here several times before. In the 1990s, President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the grandfather of the developmentalists, sought to rebuild ties with the West and found himself stymied by Khamenei on one side and inconsistent partners in the U.S. on the other. Two decades later, when Rouhani was president, Iran painstakingly negotiated a nuclear deal with the Obama administration—only for the first Trump administration to sink it in 2018.

Iran’s current leaders are navigating the same duality within the regime and will surely face similar headwinds from without. And to some extent, they are still cautiously straddling the regime’s internal divide. Qalibaf presents himself as a statesman on the world stage, but last week also emptily pledged to “liberate Jerusalem.” But if he and the rest of Iran’s new leaders are really to change their country’s lot, they will have to change this mindset, prevail over the hard-liners, and make a clear choice: Do they want to perennially fight America and Israel, or to develop Iran’s economy and move on?

Soon Iranians will bury Ali Khamenei in a public funeral. They must also bury his revolutionary intransigence. Otherwise, they could well wind up squandering even this enviable deal with the United States.

Mark Rutte Needs to Stop Talking

2026-06-19T13:16:12-04:00

Can Mark Rutte please just stop talking? The NATO secretary general, who infantilized an entire continent last year by referring to Donald Trump as “Daddy,” continued his campaign of flattery at the most recent meeting of the G7: “The U.S. action to prevent the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran and degrade its ballistic-missile capability improves security for us all,” he told reporters.

Diplomats are paid to lie for their country, but this may be the greatest and most obvious falsehood ever uttered by a diplomat not named Sergey Lavrov. Even the most enthusiastic backers of Trump’s war do not believe this nonsense. The one thing we can be sure of is that the U.S. action did not improve security for anyone, except possibly for Iran, and certainly not for Europeans.

Not only have Europeans suffered from higher energy prices, but the result of the war is that Iran now controls the Strait of Hormuz and will for the foreseeable future. That means that European nations, like the Gulf States and every other nation dependent on access to the strait, will be at Iran’s mercy. Never mind the new “fees” that everyone is going to have to pay Iran for use of the strait. Any nation that currently maintains sanctions on Iran is going to have to drop them quickly. When Tehran tells, say, the U.K. that the queue to get in and out of the strait is awfully long, and that the paperwork it provided the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps–controlled strait authority is not quite right but could probably be fixed once sanctions are dropped, what is London going to do?

If Rutte’s self-debasing flattery of Trump actually worked, that would be one thing. To help save NATO: That is Rutte’s rationale for his toadying. Unfortunately, Trump takes servile flattery as his due. Giving it to him satisfies his need to feel superior and dominant, but it buys you nothing. Trump will turn on an “ally” or “friend” in a heartbeat and with stunning viciousness. The latest victim is, of course, Bibi Netanyahu, who had much more reason than Rutte or any European to believe that Trump was reliably on his side. Rutte’s latest fawning occurred just as practically the entire nation of Israel was crying out in shock at its sudden abandonment by Trump.

[Read: Netanyahu finally learns the truth about Trump]

And the Trump administration’s response to Rutte’s absurd flattery? The very next day, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, speaking at NATO headquarters, informed the allies that Washington was beginning a six-month review to “examine America’s force posture and basing in Europe” with the clear intention of continuing what has already been a significant and steady drawdown of U.S. forces on the continent. He took the occasion to chastise the Europeans, again, for failing to help in the Iran war that the Trump administration undertook without consulting allies and which has now turned into a debacle. Rutte’s response? “I’m happy he does this.”

We all understand the predicament Europe is in. It needs time to adjust to the fact that the United States is no longer a reliable security partner, to say the least. It doesn’t want to pick a fight with the United States, and possibly face even worse punishment, while making that transition and at a time when the risk from Russia seems to be growing. Above all, it doesn’t want to jeopardize what little remaining support the United States provides Ukraine. European leaders also live in fear of additional punitive tariffs.

Yet one thing ought to be clear by now: Trump tends to capitulate when faced with determined opposition—whether it’s China’s trade retaliation, Iran’s unbowed belligerency, or the resistance of ordinary American citizens in Minnesota. Those who appease him, however, find themselves on a never-ending treadmill of concessions and self-abasement, because whatever you did for Trump yesterday is forgotten today.

[Read: Europe without America]

Europe’s approach from the beginning has been appeasement. Instead of collectively lining up to retaliate against Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs last year, for instance, Europe, with an economy as large as China’s, caved. Instead of responding to the Trump administration’s bullying and insults with the defiant self-respect befitting proud nations, the European approach has been Thank you, sir. May I have another?

This strategy is not going to work. In fact, it’s having the opposite of the desired result, as Hegseth’s latest proclamation shows. Europeans need to understand that right now and for at least the next couple of years, they live in a world of three predatory empires. Trump is as likely to seize Greenland in the next two years as Xi Jinping is to take action against Taiwan. The Europeans will either become vassals of those empires or learn to stand on their own.

What Europe does matters to the rest of us. As the United States slips deeper into authoritarianism, likely culminating in the Trump administration’s attempt to nullify the results of this fall’s congressional elections, Europe right now may be the last best hope for liberal democracy. Those of us who care about keeping liberalism alive need Europeans to start defending it against all of its enemies—in Moscow, Beijing, and Washington.

Britain’s Next Leader Has Emerged

2026-06-19T12:10:31-04:00

Britain has a new prime minister in waiting. Andy Burnham has wanted to lead the Labour Party for more than a decade, and now the deep unpopularity of the incumbent, Keir Starmer, has created a path to Downing Street for the Manchester mayor. Yesterday in Makerfield, a constituency outside Manchester in northern England, Burnham won a special parliamentary election that basically everyone understood to be both a referendum on Starmer’s leadership and a test of his own ability to defeat the radical right.

He won the by-election in a blowout, and is expected to challenge Starmer almost immediately—by pressuring him behind the scenes to resign or, failing that, by triggering a leadership contest. Either way, Burnham is highly likely to come out on top. The question for Britain is whether his easygoing charm and gift for communication will be enough to successfully lead a grumpy, stagnant country that has already had six prime ministers since the Brexit referendum in 2016.

[Read: How Britain became as poor as Mississippi]

Burnham’s path to power is, funnily enough, more typical of American politicians than British ones. In 2017, after falling out of favor with the prevailing mood within Labour—he was seen as too centrist and pro-business—he left the proverbial swamp by quitting Parliament for a local position, much like a congressman leaving D.C. to run for governor. In Manchester, generally agreed to be a prosperous and revitalized city, Burnham has been able to build a strong personal following without the pressures of national government. Championing what he calls “Manchesterism,” an agenda that seized back power for the city from the bureaucrats and moneymen of London, he has become known as Labour’s King of the North.

To compete for party leader and prime minister, though, Burnham needed a parliamentary seat. Unfortunately for him, Starmer knew this too, and successfully blocked him from running in a special election in a different Manchester-area constituency in February. The seat went to the left-wing Greens, prompting bitter recriminations that Burnham alone could have held it for Labour.

And so Burnham engineered a special election of his own, by persuading the scandal-plagued member of Parliament in nearby Makerfield, Josh Simons, to step down. Recent polls predicted a Burnham victory, but far underestimated its extent. His 55 percent exceeded the combined total for the runner-up, from Nigel Farage’s populist right Reform, and the candidate from its new, even more hard-line challenger, Restore. By comparison, Labour is currently polling at just 19 percent nationally.

[Read: Britain’s unbridgeable divide]

The speed with which Starmer has become unpopular is notable, even by the attention-deficit standards of recent British politics. After winning a 174-seat parliamentary majority in 2024, albeit with an underwhelming 34 percent of the vote, he has struggled to connect with the public. His terrible job-approval rating is superficially hard to understand, since his government has achieved significant victories: The railways are in the process of being renationalized—long a preoccupation of the left—while the volume of legal immigration and the number of migrants arriving in small boats have both fallen, fulfilling a demand of the right.

But the British economy remains sluggish. He tried to pass significant welfare cuts but failed because of a backbench rebellion. And he alienated elderly voters early on by attempting to remove one of their taxpayer-funded perks, the £300 (about $395) winter fuel allowance. Above all, Starmer has failed to communicate any kind of vision for Britain. He prided himself on refusing to be confined by the in-fighting of Labour’s past: Tony Blair’s business-friendly disciples against Gordon Brown’s pro-distribution faction, then both groups against Jeremy Corbyn’s unabashed socialists. But he was completely unable to define what it meant to be a Starmerite.

Hence the reemergence of Andy Burnham. This will be his third attempt at winning the Labour leadership. In 2010, he was little-known, and came in fourth. In 2015, he was too associated with “New Labour,” Blair’s centrist project, just as the party turned left and embraced Jeremy Corbyn. Burnham came second and subsequently decamped to Manchester.

Cynics think that Manchesterism is a mirage and that Burnham is unduly hogging the credit for the regeneration of the city’s downtown. Some suggest his superficial charm is giving a false picture of his political talents. In a notably skeptical profile, Joshi Herrmann of the independent Substack The Mill identified “a fatal weakness on Burnham’s part: he wants to be liked and he’s not particularly ruthless.”

But Burnham was calculating enough. His posters in the Makerfield campaign mentioned his name, not his party affiliation; canvassers were instructed to say that they were “out campaigning for Andy Burnham” rather than Labour. His personal popularity helped win the seat, along with an Obama-style hopey-changey message. Both of those things will be hard to maintain if he becomes prime minister.

Still, Burnham has significant advantages over Starmer, who for now is insisting that he will not step down voluntarily. Burnham’s short-form videos are notably better than Labour’s current efforts. The popular image of Starmer is him standing stiffly at a lectern, while Burnham is comfortable walking and talking to camera, often to a soundtrack of ’90s soccer-dad classics. (The venerable Manchester band Oasis let him use their song “Some Might Say” for one ad in his parliamentary campaign.) He has been a capable frontman in moments of crisis: He was highly visible during Manchester’s response to the 2017 bombing at an Ariana Grande concert, as well as the city’s response to COVID.

Over the past decade, a repeated knock on Burnham has been that he is a political chameleon. As a Remainer campaigning in a Brexit-voting seat, he stayed vague on the subject of Britain’s future relationship with the European Union. Last year he argued that politicians paid too much attention to the bond markets; last month, he reassured them by committing to Labour’s current efforts to hold down government borrowing. He held a launch event for his 2015 Labour leadership campaign at the headquarters of the accounting firm Ernst & Young, to signal his business-friendly credentials. By 2022, however, he was describing that move as “tone-deaf,” and this time around, he has presented himself as an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez–style economic populist, arguing that ordinary people’s living standards have been eroded by money flowing “into the hands of people for whom life was already very good” and arguing for a top tax rate of 50 percent. That shift reflects Labour’s leftward movement, as well as the recent success of the left-populist Greens.

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

The British electorate has fragmented. Labour now competes for left-wing votes not only with the Greens but with nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales. In the middle sit the Liberal Democrats, who appeal to both anti-Brexit Conservatives and former Labour voters uninterested in the party’s leftward turn. Right-wing voters can now choose among the ailing Conservatives, Reform, or Restore. The last of these is backed by Elon Musk and traffics in language about race and immigration that has been absent from British electoral politics since the demise of the British National Party. That 7 percent of Makerfield voters chose Restore—even in the knowledge that doing so might deprive another anti-immigration party of victory—points to a deep well of racial grievance and anti-establishment anger that even Farage cannot command.

All of these dynamics make special elections particularly unpredictable: Reform lost two recent ones to the Greens and Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party. And on the same day Burnham triumphed in Makerfield, the Conservatives won a parliamentary seat in Scotland from the Scottish Nationalist Party. The next national election will occur no later than 2029, and which party ends up with the most seats is anyone’s guess.

The circumstances of the Makerfield by-election make it an imperfect bellwether for national politics. Both Burnham and the Reform candidate, Rob Kenyon, presented their campaign as a chance to give the Labour prime minister a kicking. Farage, Reform’s attention-grabbing but divisive leader, was a curiously low-key presence. Kenyon, a plumber whose past social-media posts prompted allegations of sexism, was an underwhelming candidate. None of that stopped lots of British journalists turning up in Makerfield to write about the irresistible lure of Reform to working-class voters. Somehow, these articles never get written the other way around: No one opines that British voters long for a guy who served in Gordon Brown’s government and voted for the Iraq War, as Burnham did.

But people are more open-minded and pragmatic than many political commentators assume, and Burnham has long since shrugged off his association with previous eras of Labour. In the end, his pitch was simple—he is the only man who can save Labour and, by extension, Britain. This, he told his supporters on election night, was Labour’s “final chance to change.” Now Britons will find out if that’s true.

The Price of Defeat in Iran

2026-06-19T07:00:00-04:00

Seventy-nine years ago this month, at Harvard University, Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced a plan for the reconstruction of Europe. The Marshall Plan, as it quickly became known, committed more than $13 billion for Europe’s postwar recovery—approximately $150 billion in today’s dollars. Donald Trump’s deal with Iran, which he signed yesterday in Versailles, commits the United States and its regional partners to ensuring that Iran receives “at least $300 billion” for its “rehabilitation and economic development.”

This is, in effect, a Marshall Plan for the Iranian regime, albeit not one funded with American taxpayer dollars. But whereas the original was designed to consolidate an American victory, this one is designed to manage the consequences of a defeat that pushes the United States closer to disengaging from the Middle East.

The text of the memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran is remarkably vague. Point one commits the United States and Iran to regional peace and stability. Vice President Vance told CNN that this means Iran will stop funding proxy forces and destabilizing the region; Tehran might well interpret that differently. The text does reiterate Iran’s commitment not to build a nuclear weapon, and it says that Iran agrees to “downblend” its highly enriched uranium on-site (which basically means diluting it). But the memorandum includes no other details regarding limits on enrichment. It says that Iran will not charge a toll for passage through the Strait of Hormuz for the next 60 days, but after that, nothing is specified.

When asked about the $300 billion, Vance claimed that the Gulf countries would supply it all. But the deal makes no such provision. It tasks the United States and its regional partners to develop the plan. Perhaps this is why a senior administration official told CNN that “people should not read too much into the language.” The official went on to describe the memorandum as a political document, saying, of the Iranians, “We came up with language that allows them to say what they need for their domestic politics.” But Iran will almost certainly demand that the United States stick to the letter of the agreement.

[Graeme Wood: Iran has humiliated Trump]

What we do know is that the relief for Iran is to come in stages. An immediate waiver of sanctions will allow it to export oil. This is a return to the arrangement under the Obama-era nuclear deal and is estimated to be worth up to $60 billion a year. Once the memorandum is implemented but before a final deal, Iran’s frozen assets will be released for it to spend as it seems fit. This reportedly consists of $24 billion held in banks in Qatar, Oman, and Iraq, although Tehran believes that its total inaccessible assets worldwide may exceed $100 billion. Only if a final agreement follows on this provisional one will Iran be provided with $300 billion and the lifting of all sanctions, including those linked to terrorism, its ballistic-missile program, and human-rights abuses. But Iran will already have received quite a lot up front.

The prospect of a final deal is remote, given the gap between the two sides. History is replete with wars that end in interim agreements, deferring difficult issues to future negotiations, only for the interim arrangement to become permanent. That is very likely to happen here.

When it does, Trump will face a choice. He can applaud the downblending of uranium and accept the new status quo. Or he can end the waivers and reimpose sanctions on oil. If he chooses the second course, Iran will, at a minimum, begin to charge a toll for transit through the strait, using the leverage it gained in the war. Things could spiral from there, but Trump has been clear that he wants out of the war and fears the economic consequences of a closed strait. That won’t change as the midterms approach. The Iranians surely know this, which makes it even less likely that they will compromise further.

The deal is a bad one. But Washington has no good choices at this point. Judged by the administration’s own objectives, the outcome is difficult to describe as anything other than a defeat. The United States entered the conflict seeking to eliminate Iran’s leverage, constrain its regional influence, and force it to accept strict limits on its nuclear program. Instead, Iran emerged with sanctions relief, a pathway to generous reconstruction financing, continuing ambiguity over key nuclear issues, and new leverage over the Strait of Hormuz.

The reason for this defeat was not a reluctance to use force. Many hawks advocated introducing ground troops, but doing so would have made matters much worse. The United States almost certainly would have wound up fighting the sort of casualty-heavy counterinsurgency campaign that has led it to costly defeats elsewhere. If the U.S. had attacked Iran’s civilian infrastructure, Iran would have retaliated against infrastructure in the Gulf, widening the war and exponentially worsening the global economic shock waves.

This was a war that should never have been fought. It was also fought foolishly. Beginning the campaign with a decapitation strike on the Iranian leadership made the conflict existential for the Iranian regime, which then had no reason to hold anything back. By contrast, the 12-day war last summer had the limited objective of destroying Iran’s nuclear program; knowing this, Tehran tempered its response to avoid a protracted all-out war with the United States. It did not do then what it did this winter: attack the Gulf States and close the Strait of Hormuz. Trump made no preparation to deal with these responses, even though they were widely predicted.

[Read: The betrayal of the Iranian people]

The memorandum of understanding may not even encapsulate the most important of Iran’s gains from this American blunder: The war could well mark the end of America’s will to play a security role in the Middle East. Domestic support for the U.S. alliance with Israel is in free fall. U.S. bases in the Middle East have been badly damaged, their vulnerability as targets exposed. Trump and his successors will be reluctant to use force against Iran in the future, knowing, as is now clear, that doing so will likely trigger the closure of the strait and an economic crisis. And Americans could be forgiven for feeling that they have tried every kind of policy in the Middle East over the past quarter century—war, diplomacy, working with civil society, building up regional partnerships, pushing various players to sign accords with one another—and watched them all fail.

No one should be under any illusion that an American withdrawal from the Middle East will make the region more peaceful or stable. The Israel-Iran rivalry would likely intensify, resulting in regular closures of the strait and possibly more wars. New rivalries, including one between Israel and Turkey, would no doubt fester and grow. The situation of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank would almost certainly worsen and become more hopeless. Russia and China would increase their influence and strategic presence.

But right now, those who favor American engagement in the Middle East have very little to work with. Israel is perceived as trigger-happy and indifferent to U.S. interests, and many Americans have come to see the region as a strategic black hole.

That might change if a new Israeli government comes to power, especially one led by a mainstream critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war policy, such as retired General Gadi Eisenkot, who has been rising in recent polls. Then the United States could possibly be persuaded to reengage: to help build energy infrastructure that circumvents the Strait of Hormuz and to return to the project of normalizing Israeli-Saudi ties, for which progress for Palestinians is a precondition.

But the window for such a shift is very narrow. For two decades, Washington has debated how to engage with this volatile region. Now many Americans question whether they should engage at all. If that sentiment hardens, Trump’s agreement with Iran may be remembered as the moment the United States began its withdrawal from the Middle East.

Netanyahu Finally Learns the Truth About Trump

2026-06-17T16:28:21-04:00

In 2019, Benjamin Netanyahu draped buildings with giant banners that depicted him shaking hands with a grinning Donald Trump. Captioned with the words Another League, the posters presented Netanyahu’s ties with the American president as an argument for the Israeli prime minister’s reelection. No one else, Netanyahu’s campaign implied, could deliver the mercurial man in the White House.

That was then. Today, Netanyahu’s boast has boomeranged, transformed from an electoral asset into an advertisement of his diminished influence. In June alone, Trump has labeled him “fucking crazy” and said that he has “no fucking judgment.” The reprimands have gone beyond rhetoric. According to Israeli and American reports, over the past week, the president forced Israel to abort imminent retaliatory strikes on Iran and demanded that the country restrict its response to Hezbollah fire from Lebanon that has pummeled the Israeli north. Trump also reportedly denied Israel’s request to view the memorandum of understanding that his administration negotiated with Iran until it was already a fait accompli. Desperate for a deal to wind down his ill-conceived war, the president effectively offered Israeli concessions to his Iranian interlocutors.

Trump has railed against Netanyahu in the past, most famously after the Israeli leader congratulated Joe Biden on his 2020 election victory. But the current contretemps has much higher stakes and comes at the worst possible time for Netanyahu. Israel’s elections are slated for either September or October, and Trump has placed the Israeli prime minister in a fiendish vise that jeopardizes his political future.

[Jonathan Lemire: Trump in defeat]

For years, Netanyahu has built his brand on two promises to the Israeli electorate: that he alone could withstand international pressure to compromise on Israeli security, and that he alone could handle Trump. Now the president is forcing Netanyahu to choose between the two. Either he defies Trump’s diktats about Lebanon and Iran to save his reputation as a stalwart security hawk, or he folds to preserve the perception of his alliance with the president. Whatever path Netanyahu picks, he will imperil Israel’s geopolitical standing and undermine his own case to Israeli voters.

Those voters already aren’t buying what Bibi has been selling. Netanyahu’s coalition of far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties received just 48.4 percent of the vote in Israel’s last election and obtained a parliamentary majority only due to a quirk of the country’s electoral system. Even before the horrors of October 7, 2023, polls had showed Netanyahu and his allies losing the next election. For years after, about two-thirds of Israelis regularly told pollsters that they wanted the prime minister to resign. A similar number today don’t want him to run for reelection. Israel’s opposition is leaderless and fragmented—but nonetheless projected to win markedly more seats than the current government. (Whether it can cobble together a viable coalition is another question.)

Israel’s failed forever wars in Iran and Lebanon have further eroded Netanyahu’s prospects. At the outset of the joint U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran, the Israel Democracy Institute found that some 70 percent of Israeli Jews believed that the operation could succeed in destroying Iran’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs, and 61 percent thought that it would topple the Iranian regime. These expectations, stoked by Netanyahu and his media allies, were always unrealistic and have predictably curdled into disillusionment. The institute’s most recent survey found that fewer than a third of Israeli Jews expected a U.S.-Iran agreement to dismantle the ballistic-missile program or the Iranian regime, and just 29 percent believed that ending the war under current conditions was compatible with Israel’s security interests.

According to Amit Segal, a journalist well sourced on the Israeli right, Netanyahu had hoped to host Trump in Israel before the looming election, in what would essentially have been a campaign rally in diplomatic disguise. Today, such festivities seem fantastical. After the interim Iran accord was announced, the Likud party reportedly canceled a planned electoral blitz meant to highlight its leader’s close ties to Trump. But as a student of power who has done everything he can to hoard it, Netanyahu should have seen this rug pull coming.

As the president has demonstrated time and again, the only person whose interests matter to Trump is Trump. Those interests have often aligned with Netanyahu’s, but this was always a marriage of convenience. Like many of his party and generation, Trump has long held generally pro-Israel inclinations. He cares little for the aspirations of the Palestinian people and has openly fantasized about invading Iran since the 1980s. Tilting toward Israel played to the president’s evangelical-Christian base, as Trump noted when he declared that he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital “for the evangelicals.”

[Yair Rosenberg: Netanyahu’s very useful war]

But Trump’s interests were bound to diverge from Netanyahu’s as the Iran war stretched on without resolution. Netanyahu needed military achievements to pitch to voters at the ballot box; Trump needed the markets to calm before the midterms. And so when the campaign failed to produce quick results, Trump pulled the plug, first acceding to a cease-fire in early April, then restraining Israel from bombing Iran and Lebanon this month, and today moving toward an interim accord that lifts sanctions on Iran even as it does little about its nuclear program and says nothing about its ballistic missiles or support for terrorist proxies. That 60-day accord is tentative and fragile and may yet collapse into renewed hostilities. But if the president chooses to see it through, the Israeli leader can do very little about it. As Trump put it today, “We’re the big partner, and he’s the very small partner.”

For Netanyahu, who is finally facing a reckoning before the Israeli electorate, this is a disaster on his doorstep. For Trump, it’s someone else’s problem.

The Betrayal of the Iranian People

2026-06-16T10:40:10-04:00

On the night of January 8, in the low-slung, industrial city of Karaj, just northwest of Tehran, a 17-year-old boy named Sam Afshari was killed by Iran’s security services. He and his friends were peacefully protesting when the streetlights suddenly went dark. Witnesses saw members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij militia on the beds of trucks charge up behind demonstrators, firing .50-caliber machine guns indiscriminately into the crowd. Sam was shot in the back, just below his kidneys, and brought to a hospital alive for surgery. He had a breathing tube in his mouth when, the family believes, IRGC agents visited the hospital and administered Sam a “finishing shot” to the back of the head.

I wish I could tell you that this was the end of the story of his family’s torment. It was not. Sam’s mother and uncle located his remains in the overflowing morgue of Behesht-e Sakineh, Karaj’s primary public cemetery. Sam’s face was mutilated beyond recognition; his mother identified him by a tattoo on his chest that read Mother, and promptly collapsed. The IRGC men running the morgue called her a prostitute and told her that her son was a terrorist.

Then they brought her a form to sign attesting that Sam had been a member of the Basij militia: The state would officially add him to its tally of “martyrs” killed by violent protesters, rather than honestly account for another nonviolent demonstrator killed by its own men. If she refused to sign it, they told her, they would not release the body to her for burial. They also demanded that she pay $1,400 for the bullet that killed her son. Otherwise, Sam would be buried in an unmarked mass grave, as hundreds of others collected at Behesht-e Sakineh reportedly were.

[Read: ‘You want to leave us alone with Mojitba?’]

Sam’s family did what they had to do to secure his remains. Even at that, they were permitted no funeral gathering, obituary, or public notice of any kind. They found a grave site for Sam to share with just one other slain protester, rather than hundreds, in a location that the family fears to name, lest it be desecrated. I heard this story from Sam’s father, Parviz, who lives in Germany. He spent the three weeks in a hospital on suicide watch after his son’s murder.

“My brain was just sending me error messages,” he told me. “It was not just a feeling that they killed my son. It was a feeling that they killed me as well.”

Iranians have plenty of experience with repression. But neither they nor anyone else has had an experience quite like the first half of 2026. Iran’s security services massacred protesters on a historic scale just weeks before Israel and the United States plunged the country into conflict. The war without has since compounded Iran’s war within, in ways that the world has hardly reckoned with.

In January and February, Mai Sato, the United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in Iran, was inundated with stories much like Sam’s. They came from families extorted and threatened at Iran’s morgues, where they’d gone to collect the remains of their massacred loved ones. The family members either submitted to the indignities—the false testimony, the obscene bullet fees—or were asked for bribes as high as $7,000 to avoid consigning their relatives to mass graves. On some days, Sato told me, she received more than 1,000 emails on this subject.

Shahin Milani, of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, told me of a report his organization had received from the family of a teenager who had been transported with the dead to a morgue in the town of Kahrizak. For three days, he hid among corpses, breathing the stench of death and listening to cellphones ringing. Anyone alive who made a bodily sound, the teenager reported, was dealt a finishing shot.

“There are so many open tabs in my mind,” Skylar Thompson, the deputy director of the Human Rights Activists News Agency, a nonprofit that documents human-rights abuses in Iran, told me by phone last month. Beyond even the massacre itself was the matter of “how the bodies were handled, and the desecration of those bodies, and the violation of dignity for the people and the families that had to identify them.” The war has been “almost like a gift to the regime,” Thompson said: “This terrible thing happened, and then everyone’s attention was directly drawn away to the conflict.”

The Islamic Republic has slaughtered demonstrators at random before. It has insulted and denigrated the families of the dead before, demanded bribes for corpses before, refused funerals before. But the sheer scale of the crimes in January was something new, and so was the level of fear among those reporting them. The human-rights groups I spoke with were still combing through it all months later. HRANA has so far identified close to 7,000 massacre victims. The human-rights groups are also tallying Iran’s civilian war dead—about 1,700, according to HRANA, 250 of them children—and tracking a campaign of domestic repression and intimidation that has escalated since the United States and Israel began striking Iran on February 28.

The January dead are not yet fully counted. The war dead, too, are not yet fully counted. And the killing of Iranians has not stopped. Iran has executed political prisoners at a rate of one roughly every other day since March 18. The total number is thought to be close to 40. Some are very young—18 to 25 years old. Many were arrested during the January protests. (I counted 16 as of June 3, but the numbers keep climbing.) In the past, Milani told me, any one of these death sentences would have been “big news.” But now, he said, “everything is overshadowed by the war and the Strait of Hormuz.”

[Anne Applebaum: Trump has no plan for the Iranian people]

In ordinary times, Iran carries out more executions per capita than any other country in the world, and in absolute numbers, it is second only to China. Amnesty International estimates that Iran executed 2,159 people last year; Sato puts the number more conservatively at about 1,600. Normally, only a very small proportion of those executed had been convicted of political crimes. In 2026, that pattern has reversed: Iran appears to have executed fewer people than usual, but 70 percent of them for political reasons.

The war has provided cover for human-rights abuses. It has also reinforced the rationale that the regime uses to justify them. The Islamic Republic has always claimed that its domestic opponents were stooges of Israel and the United States, even when those charges were plainly implausible. Now there is a record of activist figures, mainly in the diaspora, calling for American and Israeli strikes on Iran. And American and Israeli leaders have explicitly corroborated the regime’s most fevered narratives by promising—cynically, fecklessly—that their military onslaught was meant to benefit Iran’s domestic opposition.

Since the war began, according to the Center for Human Rights in Iran, Iranian officials “have made repeated, direct threats to the citizenry, warning of lethal violence against any individuals protesting or perceived to be ‘collaborating’ with the enemy. By ‘collaboration,’ the regime includes any form of peaceful dissent.” Hadi Ghaemi, who runs CHRI, worries that this kind of language is meant to desensitize the regime’s supporters—more numerous now, by many accounts, than before the war—to an imminent campaign of violence.

“Public communication channels are being used to excite the base and normalize what is coming,” Ghaemi told me. Among other posts and public announcements, he pointed to a statement that Salar Abnoush, an Iranian official, had made on state-run television on March 5: “Parents, if your son or daughter doesn’t listen, it’s not our fault. Anyone in Iran today whose voice echoes in line with the enemy, the ground beneath their feet is Tel Aviv and their head is Netanyahu. Their execution order has been issued. No one has spoken to you this clearly before. We don’t want your child to be killed. But your child is ignorant. Unaware.”

A new espionage law, which emerged out of last summer’s 12-day war with the United States and Israel and came into effect in October, has made such collusion easier than ever to charge and prove. The law criminalizes virtually all contact with the United States and Israel. Passing along information, seemingly of any kind, to American or Israeli entities, also seemingly of any kind, could incur a charge of “sowing corruption on earth,” which is punishable by death. Both Sato and Thompson suspect that the espionage law has had a chilling effect on their work. “People are more fearful of the consequences of communicating with us,” Thompson said, “even if they’ve been talking with us for 10 years.”

Political prisoners executed since the war began have routinely been accused of colluding with the United States and Israel. Officials and state media have labeled those arrested during and since the January protests “traitors,” “terrorists,” “agents of foreign powers,” and “enemy collaborators,” according to Amnesty International. HRANA representatives told me that some 350 forced confessions were broadcast on national television in January alone, and in them, detainees largely claimed, under duress, that they had been misled by foreign actors, had been paid by foreigners to participate in protests, or had provided Iran’s enemies with sensitive information.

No one who has observed the Islamic Republic’s treatment of dissent over the past four decades will find the language about foreign collusion surprising. What is remarkable is the scale—and the single-minded, systematic efficiency.

About seven years ago, Parviz Afshari—Sam’s father—lived in Karaj and worked for a conglomerate whose essential purpose was to confiscate private property from dissidents, ethnic minorities, and other people disfavored by the government. By Zoom from Germany, where he is now in exile, Afshari told me that after about three years of this employment, he raised objections to what he was being asked to do: Many of the people he was taking things from had nothing else. They were treated callously. Was all of this really necessary?

Afshari’s critique was apparently unwelcome. The fact that the conglomerate he worked for was directly managed by the supreme leader probably did not help. He spent a couple of months in temporary detention, and he learned that he could ultimately be sentenced to as many as 10 years in prison. He fled the country instead. His wife and son stayed behind for Sam to finish his schooling, but Afshari intended for them to follow him. To that end, Sam studied three European languages; he was fluent in German; he was working toward a degree in IT. But before Sam could get his European visa, he was killed.

[Read: Iran’s next internet blackout is inevitable]

In recent months, the Islamic Republic’s habitual seizure of property from those it has designated as its domestic enemies has been amped up and systematized. In March, the regime announced a new digital system, called Saham, that would help courts and prosecutors swiftly identify and seize the assets of those it deemed enemy agents. The main target here is the diaspora: The Islamic Republic can’t imprison exiled activists, but many still have real estate or bank accounts in Iran, or have family who do. “Those abroad who participate in gatherings will have their assets seized within 48 hours,” Amir Hossein Kalateh, a lawyer affiliated with the government, announced on March 11. Official sources claim that the Islamic Republic has seized property from more than 750 people inside and outside Iran since March.

Two decades ago, when I used to travel to and report from Iran, the penal system was a labyrinth of competing interests. Many political prisoners didn’t know who held them or had control of their fates: It could be the judiciary, or rogue elements within the judiciary; the intelligence ministry, or rogue elements within the intelligence ministry; the IRGC’s proprietary intelligence agency; the Office of the Supreme Leader; a secretive cadre of clerics; or an opaque, mafia-like network that webbed across them all. You might figure a few things out based on where you were held: the intelligence ministry’s section 209 or the IRGC’s section 2A, both in Evin Prison; another known prison; a holding pen at the airport; or a black site of indeterminate location. You’d pay attention to which judge was assigned your case. Sometimes the various agencies and actors disagreed; sometimes a powerful entity might even seek to protect someone a rival sought to condemn.

My contacts in the Iranian-human-rights world have told me that this friction is largely a thing of the past. According to Ghaemi, the IRGC’s intelligence agency has consolidated control over interrogations, detention centers, judges, and prosecutors, and the proof is in the lack of acquittals. “You can look at case after case. None is dismissed,” Ghaemi said. “A dossier is presented, and the judge accepts it.” Julie Heezius, an advocacy officer at HRANA, told me that the trend is one of significantly long standing. She noted “greater alignment and coordination between the IRGC and judicial authorities. This is evident in some of the statements, public messaging, and threats issued by both institutions, which suggest a closer relationship than before.”

Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are apparently disappointed in Iran’s storied opposition. They imagined, in all of their incurious arrogance, that decapitation strikes on Iran’s supreme leader and other high-profile officials would deliver the organs of state into the hands of the people. “Now is the time to seize control of your destiny, and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach,” Trump told the Iranian people the night he started the war. “This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.” What a misreading of the moment that was.

War has instead done what it usually does: empowered the powerful, rallied the faithful, and allowed an apparatus of repression to present its imperatives in terms of national security. Trump, of course, is as indifferent to the fate of Iran’s civilians as he is ignorant of their circumstances. But there is still one gesture he could make, in service not of the Iranian political opposition per se but of the forgotten cause of human decency, toward a population protected neither by its own regime nor by anyone else. The next time he shoots for the deal of the century, he could add to his list of pie-in-the-sky demands a few that would cost him and the Islamic Republic next to nothing: the release of those arbitrarily detained, an end to political executions, and a respectful burial for the dead.

The Crisis Iran’s Leaders Can’t Ignore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Karim Sadjadpour: The vulture’s advantage]

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

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

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

How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi

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

Illustrations by Joan Wong

Updated at 3:50 p.m. ET on June 24, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Britain’s unbridgeable divide]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hulton Archive / Getty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illustration by Joan Wong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carl Court / Getty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article appears in the July 2026 print edition with the headline “How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi.” The article originally stated that the economic gaps between London and other British cities are comparable to that between cities in West and East Germany. In fact, the economic gap between southeastern England, where London sits, and the rest of Britain is comparable to that between West and East Germany.

The Americans Shelling Out Five Figures for a Coat of Arms

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

Updated at 5:25 p.m. ET on July 14, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Where do flags come from?]

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

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

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

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

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

PA Images / Getty

Margaret Thatcher’s coat of arms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Brady Brim-DeForest

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

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

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

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

This article appears in the July 2026 print edition with the headline “So You Want a Coat of Arms.” The article originally gave the incorrect impression that Kate Middleton directly received her own coat of arms. The arms were granted to her father ahead of her royal wedding.

Iran’s Next Internet Blackout Is Inevitable

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The online world where Iranians were free]

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: How Iran killed its economy]

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Iran Problem Trump Can’t Defer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The war Trump can’t end]

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

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

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

China’s Economy Is Taking Everyone Down

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

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

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

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

[Michael Schuman: All the sad young Chinese professionals]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Ryan Hass: China believes America will flame out]

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

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

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

Why Iran’s Leaders Think They’ve Won

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Why Trump keeps getting rolled in negotiations]

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

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

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

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

[Read: Trump’s endgame is surrender]

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

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

The Magician of the Kremlin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ahmadinejad Option

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

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

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

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

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

[Graeme Wood: Why Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still useful]

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

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

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

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

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

[From the May 2026 issue: Someday in Tehran]

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

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

Trump’s Endgame Is Surrender

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

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

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

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

[Robert Kagan: Checkmate in Iran]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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