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Venezuela’s People Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Armored Sarcophagus Saving Ukrainian Soldiers

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Ukraine’s short-lived comeback]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Has this ever happened?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Twice.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congress Might Be About to Hand Trump Sweeping Tariff Powers

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Russia’s real strategy in Europe]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Trump Doesn’t Understand About Xi

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: China is flatlining]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: What the floods say about Xi Jinping]

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

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

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

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

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

MAGA Is Making the World Safe for Corruption

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

Illustrations by Ben Hickey

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Autocracy in America: The kleptocracy club]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illustration by Ben Hickey

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

[Anne Applebaum: Kleptocracy, Inc.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illustration by Ben Hickey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illustration by Ben Hickey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illustration by Ben Hickey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump Loses the Other Strait

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Bombing the Houthis won’t work]

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

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

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

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

Russia’s Real Strategy in Europe

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

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

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

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

[Read: Putin’s explosive message to Trump]

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: NATO’s nightmare]

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

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

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

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

Will Taiwan Just Give Up?

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

Photographs by Cheng-Chia Huang

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheng-Chia Huang for The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Harnik / Getty

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

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

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

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

[Read: Taiwan has a Trump problem]

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

Annabelle Chih / Getty

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

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

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

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

Bettmann / Getty

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

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

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

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

Bettmann / Getty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheng-Chia Huang for The Atlantic

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

Cheng-Chia Huang for The Atlantic

A model of a Thunder Tiger interceptor drone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Taiwan faces its Ukraine moment]

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

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

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

Cheng-Chia Huang for The Atlantic

Taiwanese cadets at a military ceremony in June

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheng-Chia Huang for The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheng-Chia Huang for The Atlantic

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

Cheng-Chia Huang for The Atlantic

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

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

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

What the Floods Say About Xi Jinping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The autocrat’s dilemma]

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

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

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

China Is Flatlining

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Did John Ratcliffe Go to Moscow?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The German Far Right Is Poised for a Breakthrough

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Mojtaba Khamenei Dead?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Robert Kagan: Iran unleashed]

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

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

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

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

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

Iran Unleashed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Arash Azizi: Tehran has to make a choice]

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

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

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

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

Ukraine’s Long Shot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I Saw in Sinaloa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kevin Sieff / The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: A planeload of informants]

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

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

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

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

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

Kevin Sieff / The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Claudia Sheinbaum’s impossible dilemma]

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

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

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

Tehran Has to Make a Choice

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Iran goes looking for love in Jordan]

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

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

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

[Read: Trump’s new strategy of nothing]

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

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

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

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

A Silver Lining in Afghanistan

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

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

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

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

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

[From the October 2023 Issue: The final days]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ukraine May Be Just the Ally America Needs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iran Goes Looking for Love in Jordan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Happened to al-Qaeda?

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

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

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

Universal History Archive / Getty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ABC Photo Archives / Getty

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

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

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

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

Pete Souza / The White House / Getty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AFP / Getty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maher Attar / Sygma / Getty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

U.S. Department of Defense / Getty

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

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

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

[Graeme Wood: Why an ISIS propagandist abandoned Islam]

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

Mohammad Daher / Nurphoto / Getty

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

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

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

Mai / Getty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AFP / Getty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Far Right Is Distorting Ceuta

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Schengen’s greatest failure]

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

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

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

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

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

Schengen’s Greatest Failure

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

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

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

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

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

[Rogé Karma: The Spanish exception]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iran’s War Within

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The war that shall not be named]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ticking Clock on the Strait of Hormuz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Graeme Wood: Does Iran have a plan?]

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

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

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