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The President and the Pope

2026-04-18T11:19:33-04:00

Editor’s Note: Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss growing opposition to President Trump’s attacks on Iran and what winning a war with unclear objectives could like.

Donald Trump attacked Pope Leo XIV earlier this week for his comments about the war in Iran. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss the president’s remarks, and what they may signal about Trump’s messaging on the conflict.

Pope Leo has become more vocal about his concerns over what’s happening in Iran, Michael Scherer, a staff writer at The Atlantic, explained last night. But in response to Trump’s backlash, Leo has “talked in even more aggressive terms … about how military leaders should not use religion to justify their actions,” Scherer said.

“Catholic voters are a real swing group in this country,” Scherer continued—and yet, “Trump has not backed down; he says he won’t apologize.” The president, Scherer argued, is not “operating from a position of strength.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Leigh Ann Caldwell, the chief Washington correspondent at Puck; Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch; Jonathan Lemire, a staff writer at The Atlantic and a co-host of Morning Joe on MS NOW; and Scherer.

Watch the full episode here.

The Iran War Is Putting Pressure on Europe

2026-04-11T11:00:23-04:00

President Trump’s war in Iran is putting economic pressure on many European countries. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss the effects of the conflict on America’s allies, and more.

“It’s a very strange moment because, on the one hand, actually, U.S. and NATO allies are cooperating an enormous amount,”Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, said last night, referencing the logistical and intelligence support that some European countries have provided the United States since Trump launched the war in Iran. The president, however, is also “looking for scapegoats, and he’s landed on Europeans,” Applebaum added.

Throughout Trump’s second term, America’s European allies have “been insulted, they’ve been tariffed, they’ve been attacked,” Applebaum argued. “And there does come a moment when people do start to say, What are we getting out of this relationship?”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Applebaum; Gillian Tett, a columnist at the Financial Times; Karim Sadjadpour, a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Nancy Youssef, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

What Trump’s Address to the Nation Revealed

2026-04-04T10:11:14-04:00

Earlier this week, Donald Trump delivered his first national address since the war with Iran began more than a month ago. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss the president’s remarks, and more.

“It’s always better for a president in a time of war to go to the public and explain what he’s trying to do, to explain the goals, to explain why it’s worth American treasure and lives,” Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times said last night. But Trump’s address on Wednesday “did not feel like a speech a month into the war saying where we’re going to go from here, and I think it left a lot of people confused.”

Joining guest moderator Vivan Salama, a staff writer at The Atlantic, to discuss this, and more: Idrees Ali, a national-security correspondent at Reuters; Baker; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; Michelle Price, a White House reporter at the Associated Press.

Watch the full episode here.

Trump’s Mixed Messages About Iran

2026-03-28T12:38:39-04:00

President Trump continues to offer different answers to what victory in Iran may look like. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined last night to discuss this, and more.

“In a tactical sense, there’s no question that overwhelming military power is brought to bear and Iran is being degraded,” David Ignatius, a foreign-affairs columnist at The Washington Post, said last night. But “the more I watch this process of a weak enemy being pounded and pounded, I’m reminded of the Gaza war.” After two years of fighting, “Hamas still controls most of the Palestinians in Gaza,” Ignatius argued. “Even with all that power, Israel wasn’t able to win—and I think that’s what we’re all worrying about.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; Ignatius; and Missy Ryan, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

How Does Trump Define Victory in Iran?

2026-03-21T12:19:00-04:00

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.

Opposition to President Trump’s continued attacks on Iran is growing—not only from resentful European allies and Democratic Party leaders, but also from parts of his MAGA base. This week, a top counterterrorism official resigned from his role in protest. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss this and more.

What does winning a war with unclear objectives look like? Panelists examined what it would take for Trump to declare victory in the war with Iran.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, this week: Idrees Ali, a national-security correspondent at Reuters; Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch; Vivian Salama, a staff writer at The Atlantic; David Sanger, a White House and national-security correspondent at The New York Times.

Watch the full episode here.

How the Conflict in Iran Is Impacting the Global Energy Market

2026-03-14T10:51:18-04:00

The conflict in Iran has begun to impact the global energy market. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss rising oil prices, potential shortages, and more.

As the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran continues, oil shortages will likely result in rising prices, Steve Inskeep, the host of NPR’s Morning Edition, explained last night. Americans tend to “support their country in times of urgency and war, and I’m sure that Americans would put up with a degree of sacrifice,” Inskeep continued. “But nobody has asked them to do so.” The president “has yet to address the nation in a formal way,” Inskeep argued—and, as a result, “the public is being asked to pay a higher and higher price, and they were not given a reason” for why the U.S. is at war.

Joining guest moderator Vivian Salama, a staff writer at The Atlantic, to discuss this and more: Inskeep; Nancy A. Youseff, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Mark Mazzetti, a Washington correspondent at The New York Times; and Felicia Schwartz, a diplomatic correspondent for Politico.

Watch the full episode here.

A Dating-App Nightmare

2026-03-09T13:02:04-04:00

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Timothy Valentin found his dates the way so many people find each other nowadays: Hinge. Plenty of Fish. Bumble. Match.com. He had a profile you might swipe right on some dull Tuesday night—well groomed, fit, and happy to meet in a reassuringly public place, like the neighborhood bar. Nothing heavy, nothing untoward. In person, he told tales of his work with the FBI. He was professional, even reassuring, and gentlemanly, insistent on buying the drinks.

Except Valentin would then offer just one more drink and drug his dates senseless, officials familiar with a widening investigation into his behavior claim. As the women drifted into oblivion, they have alleged to cops, he would help them into his car with an offer to grab a nightcap, then film himself raping them. He left little trace: His victims rarely had any recollection of what had happened, officials claim. They simply thought that they had met a nice man in a crowded, public place and drank more than they should have.

Last April, one of Valentin’s alleged victims awoke with the conviction that something was wrong, according to court documents. The night before felt blurred and disorienting. She had left the bar with Valentin and recalled getting in his car—the place that officials claim was the locus of his crimes. Believing that she had been violated, she went to Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department. There she learned that Valentin was no FBI agent. He was a former decorated officer of the very department now tasked with investigating him.

In December, authorities in Alexandria, Virginia, arrested Valentin on charges including rape, sodomy, and altering food or beverages. As investigators pursued the case, they uncovered a huge amount of evidence—digital records, personal effects, and testimony—that suggests that Valentin may have carried out similar crimes across the mid-Atlantic, people familiar with the case told me. Today, Valentin was charged or indicted in multiple additional cases in Virginia and Maryland, and investigators asked for more potential victims to contact law enforcement. Authorities believe that they have identified more than a dozen victims to date, the people familiar with the case said. Based on the evidence gathered so far, authorities project that the ultimate number of victims could exceed 50—which would make the case one of the most extensive drugging and sexual-assault investigations in U.S. history.

“I want to acknowledge the enormity of this moment,” Tarrick McGuire, Alexandria police chief, told reporters this afternoon, offering sympathy and support to the alleged victims. He said Valentin could be described as a serial offender.

Valentin’s defense attorney, Gretchen Taylor Pousson, said that Valentin is “presumed innocent, and we will vigorously defend his constitutional rights at trial.” She added that the first Virginia trial is set for August and that “we will take all appropriate steps to protect Mr. Valentin’s right to a fair and impartial jury.”

Valentin has pleaded not guilty and maintains his innocence, telling the court that he is eager to return to his job as an insurance-fraud investigator (the company says that he no longer works there). The alleged victims, he has maintained, consented to his advances.

About 80 million Americans use dating platforms, according to statistics from eHarmony, a dating company. Three in 10 Americans say they have used a dating site or app, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center study. That rises to half of adults aged 18 to 29. But online dating rests on a quiet faith that the person on the other side of the screen is who they claim to be.

The apps promise agency. Not interested? Just swipe left. Yet anyone can portray themselves any way they want, and predators have repeatedly used dating apps to find victims. “Who wants to start out on a date being suspicious and wary?” Mindy Mechanic, a clinical and forensic psychologist, asked me. Most violence against women is committed by people they know and trust, Mechanic added, because those are situations where women expect to be safe. But charming strangers can create that atmosphere too, leaving women potentially vulnerable, especially when partying is involved. “One thing to think about is not to drink alcohol,” Mechanic said.

Representatives for Match Group, the parent company of Hinge and Match.com, and a spokesperson for Bumble said that their companies maintain dedicated teams that work with law enforcement on investigations. Bumble said that it continues to enhance the app’s help center and has introduced new safety features such as ID verification and mandatory photo verification. Both stressed the element of trust as a feature paramount to their business models.

My reporting at The Atlantic usually focuses on national security and the White House. But earlier this year, as I was working on a story, I reached out to an old friend and colleague, Scott Weinberger. A former Florida deputy sheriff turned investigative journalist, Weinberger specializes in covering complex criminal cases; his investigative work on the podcast Cold Blooded helped solve a murder after more than four decades. Weinberger was looking for his next crime-documentary project and told me that he had caught wind of something unfolding in Washington: A former D.C. police officer had been arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting women he met online and recording his attacks.

I felt a chill. Nearly everyone I know has swiped, matched with, or messaged a stranger. Several years ago, I met my husband on a dating app. Weinberger and I began to look into the case.

For some of the women, the first indication that something had gone wrong was the knock of detectives at their door. Investigators obtained surveillance video from a popular Irish pub in Alexandria where Valentin took the woman who first reported him to the police. The footage shows the two of them chatting, laughing, and drinking, investigators told us. But when the woman went to the bathroom, Valentin removed a small sandwich bag from his pocket and poured a powdered substance into his date’s drink, mixed it around, and either sipped or blew on it, according to court records describing the surveillance footage. Prosecutors allege that Valentin was ensuring that the taste of the drug was undetectable; his defense attorney says that he couldn’t possibly have put a drug in the drink if he was willing to taste it himself.

The victim, according to court documents, told investigators that she’d felt sleepy, “similar to being placed under anesthesia for a surgery.” She told investigators that she recalled waking up to find herself lying on her left side with her head toward the driver’s side of the vehicle, her underwear pulled down and her dress pulled up. Valentin, according to the court records, was allegedly in a kneeling position over her. She had hazy recollections of being raped and forced to perform oral sex.

Court records show that after the victim reported the events of that night to police, she had a toxicology screening. In her urine, medical examiners detected bromazolam—a sedative with no approved medical use, although it is among the dozens of drugs known to be used in rapes. Male DNA was also detected in the victim’s mouth and vaginal area, according to court records.

Illustration by Lucy Naland. Source: Getty.

After Valentin’s December arrest, investigators cracked open his phone, laptop, and online accounts, uncovering what they described as a trove of recordings. His phone alone allegedly contained dozens of video files, some depicting multiple recordings involving the same victim, according to people familiar with the investigation. The quality of the videos varied. Some were grainy. Some obscured the victims’ face, but the women could be heard trying to resist.

Afterward, these people said, Valentin often removed driver’s licenses from purses and photographed them, though investigators can’t say why: to know where to drive them home? To revisit them? To extort them? (Pousson, Valentin’s defense attorney, stressed to the court that he’d never attempted to contact the alleged victim after their date.)

In recent weeks, investigators seized at least a gigabyte of data, and more may still be pulled from Valentin’s Dropbox and Google Cloud accounts, the people familiar with the probe told us. The GPS metadata embedded in the videos have helped authorities track where the alleged crimes took place.

Police searching Valentin’s car also found a cache of condoms and lubricants, and several individually packed baggies of powder, which they believed to be the substance used in the drinks, the people familiar with the investigation told us. (The powder has been sent to a lab for testing, a process that can take several months.) Pousson told a court that the bags contained Adderall, a prescribed stimulant that the attorney said Valentin takes to treat ADHD.

Valentin joined D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department in 2017. He was a 22-year-old with a college degree and the earnestness of a young man who, his attorney told the court, believed in public service. During the coronavirus pandemic, crime rates in the District jumped—homicides rose almost 20 percent in 2020 from the previous year—straining the department. In 2021, Valentin was awarded the Ribbon of Valor, an internal commendation for those who serve with honor and distinction during special details. Valentin resigned from the force a year later. (The MPD referred questions about Valentin’s case to jurisdictions where he’s been charged. None of the charges date back to his time on the force, officials familiar with the investigation told us.)

Valentin has PTSD stemming from a shooting he was “involved in” while on duty, court records said (without providing any details), as well as ADHD. Last year, he joined the Maryland Insurance Administration, an independent state regulator, as a fraud investigator. The company told us that he’d stopped working there as of December 31, after his arrest.

On a recent afternoon, Weinberger and I drove to Fort Washington, Maryland, a quiet, middle-class D.C. suburb, where Valentin, now 30 years old, lives with his mother. A neighbor, Malinda Battle, describes Valentin as polite and reserved—the sort of neighbor who keeps to himself but shows up when needed. He and Battle share a love for cats; at least a dozen could be seen wandering back and forth between their adjacent properties. Battle told us that she would tease Valentin about his speedy driving, telling him that he’ll “miss the garage” one day. She mostly noticed him taking out the trash or pausing to pet the cats. “I’m surprised to hear that he’s gotten in trouble,” she said, with a look of disappointment. “He’s just the kind of guy you want as a neighbor.”

Serial offenders are rarely driven by impulse alone. Over time, their crimes tend to evolve into a ritual—one that serves not just their desires but also their ego. N. G. Berrill, a forensic psychologist who has studied the psyche of repeat offenders, told us that repeat predators often develop a sense of psychological elevation and an endorphinlike rush tied to their ability to manipulate others. Success breeds a kind of intoxicating confidence. “There’s usually a kind of grandiosity to serial criminals,” Berrill said. “There is arrogance, and there’s also a kind of a high. This is what excites them: the chase.”

Serial offenders tend to rely on small but consequential transitions during an encounter—a sinister choreography that moves a potential victim from relative safety to isolation. An invitation for one more drink, a suggestion to change locations, a casual proposal to continue the evening somewhere quieter: Each step is a calculated test of trust. Persuading someone to leave a public setting—for instance, to get in a car—can be the crucial threshold. The predator has effectively reshaped the environment and can dictate terms.

“These are often men who have the opportunity to have consensual sexual relationships with women,” Mechanic said. “But the excitement, the thrill, is taking something from somebody who’s not willing to give it, and using tools like drugs, alcohol, to get it.”

But pinpointing an exact drug used in an instance of date rape is seldom straightforward. Trinka Porrata, a former Los Angeles Police Department narcotics supervisor who now leads Project GHB (a nonprofit dedicated to sexual assault and date-rape awareness), told us that the public fixation on a single “date-rape drug” obscures a far broader and more troubling reality. “It’s a big myth that there’s one or two,” Porrata said, noting that more than 50 substances—from prescription medications to over-the-counter antihistamines—can be weaponized to diminish a victim’s control or awareness. “Any drug that impairs your ability to control yourself and your environment can be used,” she explained, adding that these are better understood as “predatory drugs,” often used not only for sexual assault but also for robberies.

Alcohol frequently intensifies the effects, Porrata said, including with bromazolam—the substance found in the urine of the first alleged victim. The size of the woman also makes a difference—a more petite woman might be harder-hit with a lower dose.

Modern social habits have, in some ways, made this process easier, Berrill and Mechanic said. The culture of digital introductions—dating apps, spontaneous meetups—means that people meet “under the most dubious circumstance” with someone they don’t know, Berrill said, creating an ambiguous space for individuals skilled in deception to exploit. Predators, he added, relish the ritual of identifying a target, deploying charm or persuasion, and carefully lowering the intended victim’s guard.

What makes Valentin’s case especially unnerving is that many of the women whom investigators allege he victimized likely still have no idea a crime occurred. Detectives are working to identify all of those they believe he may have targeted. Valentin’s filming and photographing of driver’s licenses has given investigators a place to start. They are also reconstructing identities from digital breadcrumbs: exchanges on a dating app, stray messages.

For many of the women who have been contacted by investigators, their fuzzy memory of the night carried a simpler explanation: They assumed that they’d simply had too much to drink. They woke up disoriented—sometimes ashamed—unsure of how they had gotten home. And despite the evidence that has accumulated, officials say that many potential victims remain reluctant to press charges: wary of police, skeptical of authorities, or stunned by the possibility that what they remember as an overindulgent night out was something much worse.

Had it not been for the hazy recollections of one alleged victim, investigators say, Valentin’s alleged crimes would not have come to light. But her account allowed detectives to retrace her steps to the Alexandria bar and the surveillance footage. There on the screen, the investigators told us, was a man stirring something into a drink, patient and methodical, in a crowded room where no one noticed a thing.

Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isabel Ruehl contributed reporting for this story.

What Are the Trump Administration’s Objectives in Iran?

2026-03-07T13:18:16-05:00

After the U.S. and Israel launched a war with Iran, questions remain about the Trump administration’s objectives. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss this, and more.

“My view is there’s probably no country on Earth with a greater gap between its rulers and its citizens than Iran,” Karim Sadjadpour, a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argued last night. “If you’re able to change the leaders in Iran and empower the people into some kind of a representative government—or, at a minimum, a government which represents its own national interests rather than this revolutionary ideology of 1979—that would be a geopolitical game changer for the United States, and a huge victory for President Trump.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; Sadjadpour; Nancy Youssef, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

The Fallout From the Epstein Files

2026-02-28T12:05:18-05:00

The Department of Justice is facing scrutiny this week after it was revealed that records involving President Trump were missing from the public release of the Epstein files. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss the ensuing political fallout for the Trump administration, and more.

“The key thing to remember about the Epstein story is that it is a case that has been mishandled for decades. The reason that we’re hearing about this now and why it’s exploding into public view is because, for the first time, Republicans in Congress and Democrats in Congress were willing to openly defy their leadership and call for the release of these files,” Sarah Fitzpatrick, a staff writer at The Atlantic, said last night. “That has never been done before, and I think it really is changing the political landscape in ways that we’re still just starting to learn.”

“What’s been so striking is how many of those very same Republicans who were calling for the release of those files, who had promised to get to the bottom of them, are now saying things that are just the opposite,” Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch, argued.

Joining guest moderator Vivian Salama, a staff writer at The Atlantic, to discuss this and more: Andrew Desiderio, a senior congressional reporter at Punchbowl News; Fitzpatrick; Hayes; and Tarini Parti, a White House reporter at The Wall Street Journal.

Watch the full episode here.

What to Expect from Trump’s State of the Union Address

2026-02-21T13:44:32-05:00

On Tuesday, President Trump will deliver the first State of the Union address of his second term. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to examine what to expect from the president’s speech as his poll numbers fall, and more.

The economy is one subject that is expected to feature heavily in Trump’s upcoming address. Many Americans are feeling a sense of anxiety, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times, said last night, whether because of “the advent of AI” or “because prices haven’t gone down”—and both are exacerbated by the president’s “inability to stick to that disciplined message” of affordability.

Joining guest moderator Vivian Salama, a staff writer at The Atlantic, to discuss this and more: Baker; Eugene Daniels, a senior Washington correspondent and co-host of The Weekend on MSNOW; Lisa Desjardins, a congressional correspondent for PBS News Hour; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Watch the full episode here.

The Rise of Stephen Miller

2026-02-14T11:18:50-05:00

Since Donald Trump’s first term, Stephen Miller has risen into an architect and enforcer of some of the president’s most controversial policies. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss the senior aide’s rise, and how he’s become one of the most powerful figures in the Trump administration.

Miller “has always believed that there is a role for provocation and performance in politics,” Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins, who has previously written about how Miller’s childhood and college experience influenced his work, argued last night.

Between Trump’s first and second terms, Miller’s “ideology has been rather consistent. It’s that he’s more visible, more powerful, in this second term,” Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent at The New York Times, continued. But whereas Miller was once limited to “being the architect in overseeing immigration policy in the Department of Homeland Security,” Young said, he is now “trying to change the perception in the nation toward immigrants … and there’s more of a tolerance for the policies he’s trying to implement.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Leigh Ann Caldwell, the chief Washington correspondent at Puck; McKay Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent at The New York Times; and Ashley Parker, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

Trump’s Election Fixation

2026-02-07T10:49:04-05:00

This week, Donald Trump called for Republicans to “nationalize” the upcoming elections—even though state and local officials are charged with this role. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss this and more.

When Trump came into his second term, he tried to “get rid of mail voting, he tried to change machine technology, he tried to impose voter ID—almost all of that has been thrown out by the courts,” Atlantic staff writer Michael Scherer said last night. “What we’ve seen in the last couple weeks, though, is something else: He’s using the full power of the federal government … to suck up information to try and confirm the debunked theories that he has about the 2020 elections.” The president, Scherer added, is acting “in the hope that he might find a spark in all the smoke that’s been created by his allies.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Jonathan Lemire, a staff writer at The Atlantic and a co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe; Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News; Scherer, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Liz Landers, a White House correspondent at PBS News Hour.

Watch the full episode here.

Trump’s Relationship With the Media

2026-01-31T12:10:27-05:00

The former CNN anchor Don Lemon was arrested yesterday for covering a protest inside a church in Minnesosta. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss what implications this may have, Donald Trump’s relationship with the media, and more.

“It’s true that Donald Trump has gone after the press” before, Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker, said last night. But “this is the first time he’s ordered the arrest of a journalist—so I do think a line has been crossed here.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch; Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent at The New York Times; Toluse Olorunnipa, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Watch the full episode here.

Trump’s Rift With American Allies

2026-01-24T11:01:50-05:00

Earlier this week, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a speech in Davos in which he spoke about the end of the American-led, rules-based world order. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss the remarks, and what they may signal about Donald Trump’s rift with American allies.

“What Carney did is he took the mask off,” Atlantic staff writer Idrees Kahloon said last night. “There’s a new world order—and if Donald Trump wants to act like the hegemon in North America, China in Asia, Russia in Europe, then countries like [Canada] have to pivot, and they have to deal with the multipolar world as it exists.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this, and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Leigh Ann Caldwell, the chief Washington correspondent at Puck; Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch; and Kahloon, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

America vs. the World

2026-01-18T11:51:00-05:00

The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy made it official: The American-dominated liberal world order is over. This is not because the United States proved materially incapable of sustaining it. Rather, the American order is over because the United States has decided that it no longer wishes to play its historically unprecedented role of providing global security. The American might that upheld the world order of the past 80 years will now be used instead to destroy it.

Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II, one that will make the Cold War look like child’s play and the post–Cold War world like paradise. In fact, this new world will look a lot like the world prior to 1945, with multiple great powers and metastasizing competition and conflict. The U.S. will have no reliable friends or allies and will have to depend entirely on its own strength to survive and prosper. This will require more military spending, not less, because the open access to overseas resources, markets, and strategic bases that Americans have enjoyed will no longer come as a benefit of the country’s alliances. Instead, they will have to be contested and defended against other great powers.

Americans are neither materially nor psychologically ready for this future. For eight decades, they have inhabited a liberal international order shaped by America’s predominant strength. They have grown accustomed to the world operating in a certain way: Largely agreeable and militarily passive European and Asian allies cooperate with the United States on economic and security issues. Challengers to the order, such as Russia and China, are constrained by the combined wealth and might of the U.S. and its allies. Global trade is generally free and unhampered by geopolitical rivalry, oceans are safe for travel, and nuclear weapons are limited by agreements on their production and use. Americans are so accustomed to this basically peaceful, prosperous, and open world that they tend to think it is the normal state of international affairs, likely to continue indefinitely. They can’t imagine it unraveling, much less what that unraveling will mean for them.

And who can blame them? According to Francis Fukuyama, history “ended” in 1989 with the triumph of liberalism—even the primal human instinct toward violence was “fundamentally transformed.” Who needed a powerful America to defend what was destined to prevail anyway? Since the end of the Cold War, influential critics have been telling us that American dominance is superfluous and costly at best, destructive and dangerous at worst.

Some pundits who welcome a post-American world and the return of multipolarity suggest that most of the benefits of the American order for the U.S. can be retained. America just needs to learn to restrain itself, give up utopian efforts to shape the world, and accommodate “the reality” that other countries “seek to establish their own international orders governed by their own rules,” as Harvard’s Graham Allison put it. Indeed, Allison and others argue, Americans’ insistence on predominance had caused most conflicts with Russia and China. Americans should embrace multipolarity as more peaceful and less burdensome. Recently, Trump’s boosters among the foreign-policy elite have even started pointing to the early-19th-century Concert of Europe as a model for the future, suggesting that skillful diplomacy among the great powers can preserve peace more effectively than the U.S.-led system did in the unipolar world.

As a purely historical matter, this is delusional. Even the most well-managed multipolar orders were significantly more brutal and prone to war than the world that Americans have known these past 80 years. To take one example, during what some call the “long peace” in Europe, from 1815 to 1914, the great powers (including Russia and the Ottoman empire) fought dozens of wars with one another and with smaller states to defend or acquire strategic advantage, resources, and spheres of interest. These were not skirmishes but full-scale conflicts, usually costing tens—sometimes hundreds—of thousands of lives. Roughly half a million people died in the Crimean War (1853–56); the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) resulted in about 180,000 military and up to 250,000 civilian deaths in less than a year of fighting. Almost every decade from 1815 to 1914 included at least one war involving two or more great powers.

Today’s equivalent of 19th-century multipolarity would be a world in which China, Russia, the United States, Germany, Japan, and other large states fought a major war in some combination at least once a decade—redrawing national boundaries, displacing populations, disrupting international commerce, and risking global conflict on a devastating scale. That was the world as it existed for centuries prior to 1945. To believe that such a world can never return would seem to be the height of utopianism.

[From the January 2025 issue: David Frum on America’s lonely future]

Precisely to escape this cycle of conflict, the generations of Americans who lived through two world wars laid the foundations of the American-led liberal world order. They were the true realists, because they had no illusions about multipolarity. They had lived their entire lives with its horrific consequences.

After 1945, instead of reestablishing a multipolar system, they transformed the United States into a global force, with responsibility for preserving not just its own security but the world’s. Doing so meant checking the rise of regional hegemons, especially in Europe and East Asia. They did this not because they wanted to re-create the world in America’s image, but because they had learned that the modern world was interconnected in ways that would ultimately draw the United States into the great-power conflicts of Eurasia anyway.

No country had ever before played the role that the traditionally aloof United States took on after 1945. That is partly because no other power had enjoyed America’s unique circumstances—largely invulnerable to foreign invasion, because of its strength and its distance from the other great powers, and thus able to deploy force thousands of miles from home without leaving itself at risk. This combination of geography and reach allowed the United States after World War II to bring peace and security to Europe and East Asia. Nations scarred by war poured their energies into becoming economic powerhouses. That made global prosperity and international cooperation possible.

Perhaps more extraordinary than America’s ability and willingness to play the dominant role was the readiness of most other great powers to embrace and legitimize its dominance—even at the expense of their own potency. In the decades after 1945, almost all of the countries that had fought in the world wars gave up their territorial ambitions, their spheres of interest, and even, to some extent, power itself. Britain, France, Germany, and Japan not only relinquished centuries of great-power thinking and conduct but placed their security and the well-being of their people in the hands of the distant American superpower.

This was truly aberrant behavior and defied all theories of international relations as well as historical precedent. The normal response to the rise of a newly predominant power was for others to balance against it. Coalitions had formed to check Louis XIV, Napoleon, both imperial and Nazi Germany, and imperial Japan. Yet far from regarding the United States as a danger to be contained, most of the world’s powers saw it as a partner to be enlisted. America’s allies made two remarkable wagers: that the United States could be trusted to defend them whenever needed, and that it would not exploit its disproportionate might to enrich or strengthen itself at their expense. To the contrary, it would promote and benefit from its allies’ economic prosperity.

This was the grand bargain of the American order after 1945. And it was what allowed for the extraordinary peace and stability of the subsequent decades, even during the Cold War. The American order established harmony among the great powers within it, and left those outside it, Russia and China, relatively isolated and insecure—unhappy with the global arrangement but limited in their ability to change it.

All of that is now ending. Trump has openly celebrated the end of the grand bargain. His administration has told Europeans to be ready to take over their own defense by 2027 and suggested that allies and strategic partners, including Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, should pay the United States for protection. Trump has launched aggressive tariff wars against virtually all of America’s allies. He has waged ideological and political warfare against European governments and explicitly threatened territorial aggression against two NATO allies, Canada and Denmark.

Meanwhile, the administration’s National Security Strategy regards Russia and China not as adversaries or even competitors but as partners in carving up the world. With its significant emphasis on restoring “American pre-eminence” in the Western Hemisphere, Trump’s strategy embraces a multipolar world in which Russia, China, and the United States exercise total dominance in their respective spheres of interest.

rump and his supporters seem to believe that the rest of the world will simply accommodate this new American approach, and that allies, in particular, will continue to tag along, subservient to a United States that cuts them loose strategically, exacts steep economic tribute from them, and seeks to establish a “concert” with the powers that directly threaten them. But the radical shift in U.S. strategy must force equally radical shifts among erstwhile friends and allies.

What does Europe do, for instance, now that it faces hostile and aggressive great powers on both its eastern and western flanks? Not only Russia, but now the United States, too, threaten the security and territorial integrity of European states and work to undermine their liberal governments. A passive Europe could become a collection of fiefdoms—some under Russian influence, some under American influence, some perhaps under Chinese influence—its states’ sovereignty curtailed and its economies plundered by one or more of the three empires. Will the once-great European nations surrender to this fate?

If history is any guide, they will choose rearmament instead. The task will be monumental. To mount a plausible defense against further Russian territorial aggression while also deterring American aggression will require not just marginal increases in defense spending but a full-scale strategic and economic reorientation toward self-reliance—a restructuring of European industries, economies, and societies. But if Germany, Britain, France, and Poland all armed themselves to the full extent of their capacity, including with nuclear weapons, and decided to forcefully defend their economic independence, they would collectively wield sufficient power to both deter Russia and cause an American president to think twice before bullying them. If the alternative is subjugation, Europeans could well rise to such a challenge.

[From the January 2026 issue: Isaac Stanley-Becker on the new German war machine]

Asian partners of the United States will face a similar choice. Japanese leaders have been questioning American reliability for some time, but Trump’s posture forces the issue. He has imposed tariffs on America’s Asian allies and repeatedly suggested that they should pay the United States for their protection (“no different than an insurance company”). Trump’s National Security Strategy focuses intensely on the Western Hemisphere, at the expense of Asia, and the administration ardently desires a trade deal and strategic coordination with Beijing. Japan may need to choose between accepting subservience to China and building up the military capacity necessary for independent deterrence.

The recent election of a right-wing-nationalist prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, suggests which of these courses the Japanese intend to take. Trump and his advisers may imagine that they see fellow travelers seeking to “Make Japan Great Again,” but the upsurge of Japanese nationalism is a direct response to legitimate fears that Japan can no longer rely on the United States for its defense. South Korea and Australia, too, are reconsidering their defense and economic policies as they wake up to challenges from both East and West.

The consequence of a newly unreliable and even hostile United States, therefore, will likely be significant military buildups by former allies. This will not mean sharing the burden of collective security, because these rearmed nations will no longer be American allies. They will be independent great powers pursuing their own strategic interests in a multipolar world. They will owe nothing to the United States; on the contrary, they will view it with the same antagonism and fear that they direct toward Russia and China. Indeed, having been strategically abandoned by the U.S. while suffering from American economic predation and possibly territorial aggression, they are likely to become hotbeds of anti-Americanism. At the very least, they will not be the same countries Americans know today.

Consider Germany. The democratic and peace-loving Germany of today grew up in the U.S.-dominated liberal international order. That order helped make possible West Germany’s export-driven economic miracle of the 1950s, which in turn made the country an engine of global economic growth and an anchor of prosperity and democratic stability in Europe. Temptations to pursue a normal, independent great-power foreign policy were blunted both by economic interest and by the relatively benign environment in which Germans could live their lives, so different from what they had known in the past. How long Germany would be willing to remain an abnormal nation—denying itself geopolitical ambitions, selfish interests, and nationalist pride—was a question even before the present liberal world order began to unravel. Now, thanks to the American strategic shift, Germany has no choice but to become normal again, and quickly.

And just as American strategy forces the Germans to rearm, it is ensuring that they do so in an ever more nationalistic, divided Europe. The founders of the American order worked in the postwar years to dampen European nationalism, in part by supporting pan-European institutions. The Cold War–era American diplomat George Kennan believed that European unification was the “only conceivable solution” for the German problem. Yet today those institutions are under pressure, and if the Trump administration has its way, they will disappear altogether. At the same time, the administration is trying to inflame European nationalism, especially in Germany, where it may well succeed. The right-wing nationalist Alternative for Germany is the second-largest party in Germany’s Parliament, just as the Nazi Party was in 1930.

Whether or not it succumbs to the far right, a rearmed Germany without an American security guarantee will necessarily take a more nationalist view of its interests. All of its neighbors will too. Poland, squeezed between a powerful Germany on one border and a powerful Russia on the other, has over the centuries been repeatedly partitioned, occupied, and at times eliminated as a sovereign entity. With no distant superpower to protect them, the Poles are likely to decide to build up their own military capability, including nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, France is but one election away from a nationalist victory that will hit Europe like an earthquake. French leaders have already told the country to prepare for war against Russia. But imagine a rearming, nationalist France facing a rearmed, nationalist Germany. The two nations might find common ground against mounting threats from the United States and Russia, but they also have a complex history, having fought three major wars against each other in the 70 years before the United States helped establish a durable peace between them.

Japanese rearmament will have similar ramifications. It will heighten the nervousness among Japan’s neighbors, including South Korea, another ally now unsure of Washington’s commitment to its defense. How long before the Koreans decide that they, too, need to rearm, including with nuclear weapons, as they face a hostile and nuclear-armed North Korea and a rearmed, possibly nuclear Japan, which has invaded and occupied Korea three times in the past?

Ben Hickey

n a multipolar world, everything is up for grabs, and the flash points for potential conflict proliferate. The American order for eight decades provided not only security commitments to allies and partners but also common access to vital resources, military bases, waterways, and airspace—what theorists call “public goods.” In the absence of the United States playing that role, all of these once again become targets of a multisided competition.

That competition won’t be limited to Europe and East Asia. Until now, Germany and Japan have been content to rely on the United States to preserve naval access to Persian Gulf oil, for example. Now they and other rearming powers, including India, Britain, and France, will need to find new ways to take care of themselves. China has shown how this can be done. It had no navy to speak of two decades ago and no bases in the Persian Gulf. Today it has the largest navy in the world, a base in Djibouti, and cooperative arrangements with the United Arab Emirates and Oman to build facilities for China’s use.

In a multipolar world, spheres of interest become important again. For centuries, the ability to maintain and protect a sphere of interest was part of what it meant to be a great power. It was also among the most common sources of war, as the spheres often overlapped. The seemingly endless three-way struggle among Russia, Austria, and the Ottoman empire for control of the Balkans was the source of numerous conflicts, including World War I. The desire to regain or create spheres of interest was a leading motive of the three “have not” powers that helped produce World War II: Germany, Japan, and Italy.

The conclusion of that war led to a global shedding of spheres of interest. Part of what made the liberal world order liberal was the principle of self-determination enshrined in the Atlantic Charter and United Nations Charter. This principle was sometimes violated, including by the United States. But in past multipolar orders, great powers never even had to consider the rights of small nations, and they didn’t. By contrast, the liberalism of the American order pressured powerful countries to cede sovereignty and independence to smaller ones in their orbits.

The British gradually dismantled their empire, as did the French. Germany was compelled to give up its dreams of Mitteleuropa, just as Japan accepted the end of its sphere of interest on the Asian mainland, for which it had fought numerous wars from 1895 to 1945. Under the American-led order, these powers never attempted to regain those spheres. China after World War II was so bereft of a sphere of interest that it could not even lay claim to Taiwan, a nearby island filled with people who were once its citizens. The only remaining sphere, other than America’s, was the one the Soviet Union won at Yalta in Eastern and Central Europe. But that, too, was under pressure from the beginning, and the effort required to retain it ultimately exceeded the Soviet Union’s capacities, leading to its collapse.

The mere existence of the United States and the liberal order it supported offered small and medium powers an opportunity denied them by centuries of multipolarity. Moscow’s satellite states in Eastern and Central Europe would not have been so bent on escape had there been nothing to escape to. The American order promised a higher standard of living, national sovereignty, and legal and institutional equality. This gave nations living under the shadow of the Soviet Union an option other than accommodation, and when given the chance to leave Moscow’s control, they took it.

Various self-described realists in recent years have called on the U.S. to accept a return to spheres of interest as an alternative to unipolarity. But they have mostly acknowledged only Russian and Chinese spheres. These are problematic enough. Do we know how far China’s perception of its rightful sphere extends? Does it include Vietnam? All of Southeast Asia? Korea? How about what China calls the First Island Chain, which includes Japan? Russia’s traditional sphere of interest from the time of Peter the Great always included the Baltic states and at least part of Poland. Vladimir Putin is openly emulating Peter and is frank about his desire to restore the Soviet empire as it existed during the Cold War.

To recognize Russia’s and China’s spheres of interest would mean accepting their hegemony over a swath of nations that currently enjoy sovereign independence. And in this emerging new world, Russia and China will not be the only ones seeking to expand their spheres. If Germany and Japan need to become great powers again, they will have spheres of interest too, which will inevitably overlap with China’s and Russia’s, leading to numerous conflicts in the multipolar future just as in the multipolar past.

Which brings us to the much-trumpeted idea of a new accord among the United States, China, and Russia, equivalent to the 19th century’s Concert of Europe. A successful arrangement would have to settle on boundaries for their relative spheres of interest. Is such an agreement possible?

The answer is no, because the new multipolar world will not have the same qualities as the one that prevailed two centuries ago. Metternich’s Austria was a status quo power, interested only in protecting a conservative order against its liberal challengers. Bismarck regarded his newly unified Germany in the late 19th century as “satiated.” They both sought an equilibrium to hold on to what they had, not to get more.

But China and Russia are not at all satiated, status quo powers. They are dissatisfied, have-not powers. Since the end of the Cold War, they have been chronically unhappy with American global supremacy and sought to restore what they regard as their natural and traditional regional dominance. Even today, China exercises only partial mastery over Southeast Asia, and it doesn’t control Taiwan, much less enjoy what it would deem the proper subservience from Japan and South Korea. Russia, too, is only in the early stages of rebuilding its traditional sphere in Eastern and Central Europe. Ukraine is not the end but the beginning of Putin’s envisioned order.

What kind of arrangement with the United States could satisfy these ambitions? Not one that simply codifies the status quo, as the Concert of Europe attempted to do. It would have to accommodate the radical geopolitical transformation of Europe and Asia that Russia and China each view as essential, and for which Russia, at least, has been willing to go to war. Such a transformation will not be a pleasant process for the small and medium powers forced to give up their independence and accept domination by Beijing, Moscow, or Washington—and perhaps eventually by Berlin, Tokyo, or who knows who else. If the first four decades of the 20th century taught us anything, it is that achieving a stable peace with have-not powers is hard. Every nation or territory conceded to them strengthens and emboldens them for the next demand.

In fact, Beijing and Moscow have neither the desire nor the need for any restraining accord with the United States. On the contrary, they have every reason to believe that this is the moment to press on. Xi Jinping has spoken of “great changes unseen in a century,” which offer China a “period of strategic opportunity.” For Putin, Trump’s destruction of the transatlantic alliance is such a “great change.” Why shouldn’t he seize this opportunity? He can’t know how long the Trump phase will last in the United States, and if the Europeans rearm, the Kremlin’s window of opportunity may close. Until now, Putin has moved slowly, waiting six years between invading Georgia and annexing Crimea, and then another eight years before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which was severely hampered by America and its allies. The Americans have now shattered that solidarity, and Putin could well believe that this is the moment to speed up his plans for conquest.

This means that the first years of the new multipolar era will not be marked by adroit, mutually accommodating diplomacy, but by intense competition and confrontation. The world will look more like the brutal multipolar era of the early 20th century than like the more orderly, if still brutal, world of the 19th.

his is the new world that America is entering, voluntarily shorn of its greatest assets. The influential Chinese strategic thinker Yan Xuetong once observed that the most important gap between the United States and China was not military or economic power, both of which China could amass. It was America’s global system of alliances and partnerships.

When Russia or China went to war, it went alone. When the United States went to war, even in an unpopular conflict like Iraq, it had the support of dozens of allies. American military-power projection has depended on bases all around the world, provided by nations that trusted the United States as a partner and have been willing to overlook the inconveniences of hosting American soldiers. But they may reconsider if the U.S. no longer guarantees those nations’ security and instead wages economic warfare against them and makes political and ideological demands that they find offensive. Trump officials seem to expect European and Asian countries to join the United States whenever Washington needs or wants them—to put pressure on China, for instance—even as the U.S. offers them nothing in return. But can you ditch your allies and have them too?

It would be one thing if the United States really was retreating within its hemisphere, reverting to its 19th-century isolation and indifference to global affairs. But among the most remarkable things about this administration’s foreign policy is that, for all the talk of “America First,” Trump evinces seemingly unlimited global ambition. He enjoys wielding American power even as he depletes it. In his first year back in office, he launched strikes against Iran and Syria; threatened to seize Canada and Greenland; decapitated Venezuela’s government and promised to “run” the country; meddled ineffectually in wars in Southeast Asia, Central Africa, and the Middle East; and even proposed construction projects in the Gaza Strip that would have to be defended by American forces.

Is this what “restraint” looks like? Trump’s intellectual cheerleaders extol him for abandoning the “nonsensical utopian goals” of “clueless elites,” but in the next breath praise him for seeking nothing less than to “reshape” the entire world. Reshape it to what end? To line Trump’s pockets and bring him glory?

Trump’s megalomania is transforming the United States from international leader into international pariah, and the American people will suffer the consequences for years to come. Germany’s chancellor in 1916, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, worried that his nation’s behavior risked making it “the mad dog among nations” and would provoke “the condemnation of the entire civilized world.” He was right. German leaders were proud of their unflinching “realism,” and believed that the frank and brutal pursuit of self-interest was simply what nations did. But as the historian Paul Kennedy noted, Germany’s constant appeal “to the code of naked Machtpolitik ” helped unite the world’s great powers in bringing about Germany’s defeat.

The Trump administration revels in the pursuit of self-interest and the exercise of strength for its own sake, with gleeful disregard for the interests of others. As Trump’s first-term national security adviser H. R. McMaster put it in an essay co-written with the economist Gary Cohn, the world is not a “global community,” but “an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage,” and in this world of Machtpolitik, the United States enjoys “unmatched” power. But for how long? McMaster’s formulation, like Trump’s exaltation of selfishness, rests on profound ignorance of the true sources of American strength. So much of America’s influence in the world has derived from treating others as part of a community of democratic nations or of strategic partners.

Others see this, even if many Americans don’t. Yan, the Chinese thinker, observed that one of the elements holding the American order together was America’s reputation for morality and respect for international norms. Theodore Roosevelt, often regarded as the quintessential American realist and no slouch in the wielding of power, believed that great nations ultimately had to be guided by an “international social consciousness” that considered not just their own interests but also “the interests of others.” A successful great power, he observed, could not act “without regard to the essentials of genuine morality.”

For decades, much of the world supported a United States that acted on these principles and accepted America’s power, despite its flaws and errors, precisely because it did not act solely out of narrow self-interest—much less in the narrow, selfish interest of a single ruler.

That era is over. Trump has managed in just one year to destroy the American order that was, and he has weakened America’s ability to protect its interests in the world that will be. If Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive, wait until they start paying for what comes next.

This article appears in the March 2026 print edition with the headline “Every Nation for Itself.”

Trump’s Mixed Messages

2026-01-17T10:41:48-05:00

Foreign ministers from Greenland and Denmark met with the Trump administration this week amid the president’s bid for the island nation. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss.

Although “Trump campaigned on fixing the economy” and “removing illegal immigrants from the country,” Atlantic staff writer Nancy Youssef said last night, “at the start of 2026 we’re focused so much on foreign policy and intervention and the U.S. military might overseas.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, last night to consider this, and more: Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent at ABC News; David Sanger, a White House and national-security correspondent atThe New York Times; Nick Schifrin, a foreign-affairs and defense correspondent at PBS News Hour; and Youssef, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

Trump’s Greenland Threats

2026-01-10T11:37:21-05:00

Following the Trump administration’s intervention in Venezuela, Donald Trump and his senior aide Stephen Miller have escalated threats to seize Greenland. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss what this may mean for the United States’ relationship with its NATO allies, and more.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch; and Vivian Salama, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

Trump’s Reality

2025-12-20T10:19:50-05:00

During an address to the nation earlier this week, Donald Trump spoke about the state of the American economy, and attempted to claim that consumer prices have fallen under his administration. Panelists joined Washington Week With The Atlantic to discuss the president’s speech, and more.

Although “Donald Trump is actually great at willing his own reality,” Atlantic staff writer Ashley Parker argued last night, the president is realizing “that you cannot will an economic reality into existence.”

Regardless of what the president may suggest about the economy, “everybody gets a paycheck or, worse, doesn’t get a pay check,” Parker added. It doesn’t matter how Trump “screams it or how much he says it, this is one of the few areas where reality collides with that often quite effective rhetoric.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent at The New York Times; Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent at ABC News; Franklin Foer, a staff writer at The Atlantic; and Parker, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

Trump’s Pressure on Ukraine

2025-12-13T10:17:05-05:00

Donald Trump continues to put pressure on Ukraine to accept his administration’s peace proposal, despite how the plan favors Russia. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss what this may suggest about the administration’s shifting international priorities, and more.

If the Ukrainians were to stop fighting today, “they don’t have any kind of security guarantee,” Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, explained last night. Without that, “their country is unviable—because who will want to live there or invest there if they know that the war is going to start, you know, next year or next month or in six months?” Ukraine needs a reason to believe that the war with Russia is “really, really over,” she argued.

“The only way you achieve that is to put pressure not on Ukraine, but on Russia,” Applebaum said. “It’s almost as if the Trump administration doesn’t want to admit, or can’t understand, that the war only ends when the pressure is put on Russia.” This is “the most obvious solution to the problem, and it’s the one they just won’t take,” she noted.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; Amna Nawaz, a co-anchor at PBS News Hour; and Vivian Salama, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

Fallout From the Signal Report

2025-12-06T10:27:21-05:00

This week, the acting inspector general of the Department of Defense released a report that found Secretary Pete Hegseth could have put U.S. troops and national security at risk with messages sent in a Signal chat about strikes in Yemen. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss what the report may mean for Hegseth, and more.

In response to the report, the defense secretary and his spokesman, Sean Parnell, denied the findings: “The Inspector General review is a TOTAL exoneration of Secretary Hegseth,” Parnell wrote on X earlier this week. “The bottom line is the official leadership of the Department of Defense is at war with reality,” Susan Glasser, a staff writer for The New Yorker, said last night. The question that remains unanswered, Glasser added, is: “Where is the oversight and accountability?”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; and Nancy Youssef, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

What Is RFK Jr. After?

2025-11-29T09:49:31-05:00

Over many interviews, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the Atlantic staff writer Michael Scherer about how he plans to remake America’s public-health system. Scherer joined Washington Week With The Atlantic to discuss his story, and what the Health and Human Services secretary may be after.

“What we do know about RFK is the caricature he’s caught in—this daily battle between people who think he’s destroying science or people who think he’s taking on the establishment,” Scherer said last night. Less known, however, is how “he got from being at the edge of the Democratic Party” to becoming HHS secretary in the Trump administration.

“I think the answer is he’s a fiercely determined person who is on a quest,” Scherer continued. “He has been able to plow through enormous obstacles and enormous detractors to really not lose faith in his own vision of what he’s doing.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Scherer, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Dan Diamond, a White House reporter for The Washington Post; and Julie Rovner, the chief Washington correspondent and host of the podcast What the Health at KFF Health News.

Watch the full episode here.

Trump Under Pressure

2025-11-22T10:38:28-05:00

Earlier this week Donald Trump told a journalist “Quiet, piggy,” and later lashed out at another reporter in the Oval Office. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss what could be behind the president’s comments, and more.

November has been “a really tough month for Trump,” Toluse Olorunnipa, a staff writer at The Atlantic, said last night. A year ago, Trump was “at the peak of his political power,” and his first 10 months in office “were pretty much signs that there was very little that” could be done to stop him. But then, Olorunnipa noted, “we had the elections in the first part of this month.”

Following major victories for Democrats in New York, New Jersey, and Virginia, Trump is beginning to realize “that he’s going to be a lame duck very soon,” Olorunnipa argued—and “people within his own party are starting to look past him.”

Meanwhile, Trump has signed legislation ordering the release of the government’s Jeffrey Epstein investigation files. “My sense is that he’s rattled,” Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent at ABC News, said last night. “Republicans who have been entirely supplicant to him” are “suddenly standing up and going in a different direction.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Leigh Ann Caldwell, the chief Washington correspondent at Puck; Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; Karl, the chief Washington correspondent at ABC News; and Olorunnipa, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

The End to the Government Shutdown

2025-11-15T10:24:02-05:00

This week the government reopened after the longest closure in the nation’s history. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss how moderate lawmakers brokered a deal with Senate Republicans—and what it may mean for the Democratic Party going forward.

There is a lot of frustration among Democratic lawmakers following the end of the shutdown, which is now spilling out into public view, Nancy Cordes, the chief White House correspondent at CBS News, said last night. “There are Senate Democrats who feel that the whole point of this risky enterprise in the first place, triggering a shutdown, was because eventually, over time, they felt that they would gain enough leverage over Republicans.”

Although “the pain was mounting; yes, flight delays were mounting; yes, SNAP beneficiaries were starting to lose very crucial food assistance,” Cordes noted, “they felt that they were getting closer to putting Republicans in a very uncomfortable situation.” She added: “We’ll never know if they were right or not, because these eight Senate Democrats said that they weren’t willing to find out.”

Joining the guest moderator and a staff writer at The Atlantic, Vivian Salama, to discuss this and more: Natalie Andrews, a White House correspondent at The Wall Street Journal; Cordes, the chief White House correspondent at CBS News; Andrew Desiderio, a senior congressional reporter for Punchbowl News; Jeff Mason, a White House correspondent at Reuters.

Watch the full episode here.

How Lawmakers Are Responding to the Shutdown

2025-11-08T09:37:52-05:00

The government shutdown is now the longest in history. Panelists joined Washington Week With The Atlantic to discuss how voters and lawmakers are responding, and more.

Three weeks before Thanksgiving, “the administration has chosen to not find money to fund the food-assistance program for some 42 million Americans,” Jeff Zeleny, the chief national-affairs correspondent at CNN, said last night. “But they have found money for military payments and ICE officers and others. That choice, he added, “is beginning to catch up with the administration and Republicans.”

Meanwhile, “Democrats seem to be much more dug in than they were before Tuesday,” Atlantic staff writer Mark Leibovich noted. “I think they seem emboldened by Tuesday’s elections.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Leigh Ann Caldwell, the chief Washington correspondent at Puck; David Ignatius, a foreign-affairs columnist at The Washington Post; Mark Leibovich, a staff writer at The Atlantic; and Jeff Zeleny, the chief national-affairs correspondent at CNN.

Watch the full episode here.

Mounting Pressure to End the Shutdown

2025-11-01T11:05:54-04:00

Many Americans may soon lose crucial federal assistance, leaving some lawmakers asking whether it’s time for Donald Trump to begin negotiating with Democrats. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined last night to discuss the mounting pressure to reopen the government, and when—or if—the president will get directly involved.

Trump tends to become “involved when there’s a need for him,” Seung Min Kim, a White House reporter at the Associated Press said last night. “That need is going to come when Republican leaders tell him, ‘Okay, you need to come and do something about this.’” Still, Kim continued, messaging from Republicans has been fairly consistent: To end the shutdown, Democrats will have to vote for the existing funding bill. “That calculus—that line from Republicans down—hasn’t changed as of this point,” she added.

Joining the guest moderator and Atlantic staff writer Vivian Salama to discuss this and more: Paul Beckett, a senior editor at The Atlantic; Jeff Mason, a White House correspondent for Reuters; Kim, the Associated Press White House reporter; and Andrea Mitchell, the chief Washington and foreign affairs correspondent at NBC News.

Watch the full episode here.