“I think it’s a dark day for democracy. It’s a dark day for those of us concerned about concentrations of wealth and power,” Chuck says. He points to what Musk has already done with his fortune as a preview of what’s to come: “He bought Twitter, the town square of the internet. He was the largest political contributor in the last election, and he essentially bought himself an office that dismantled U.S. foreign aid and all kinds of programs. This is just the beginning of the power that he has the potential to wield, which is very concerning.”

On the valuation of SpaceX, still unprofitable yet valued at more than $2 trillion, Chuck warns of a deeper risk to ordinary people’s financial security: “I think there’s a concern that SpaceX is highly overvalued, and if it becomes part of the mix of many people’s retirement security, that could be highly risky. We’re seeing at the very top among these tech billionaires huge amounts of speculation in AI and these new technologies, and I think that’s highly risky.”

He’s equally skeptical of the framing around retail investor access to the IPO as a form of financial democratization: “The richest 10% own 90% of the stock market. People think, ‘Gee, I wish I could have been an early investor in Apple, maybe SpaceX is the new Apple investment.’ But again, we’re seeing a tremendous speculative bubble, potentially a bubble in AI and some of these new technologies, that could actually erode the retirement security for many working-class people.”

Asked to respond to defenders who credit Musk with job creation and technological progress, Chuck reframes the debate entirely: “The real concern here is not about his wealth, but the power: the considerable power to warp our political system, warp the markets, distort everything that we care about. There’s a lot of innovators out there that don’t have the level of rewards that Elon Musk has.”

He closes with a stark warning about the broader trend Musk’s milestone represents: “There are now 20 billionaires, plus Musk, who have over a hundred billion dollars in wealth, many of them 200 billion. We’ve seen the gains of US billionaires go up just 26%, their wealth has increased 26% in the last year. It’s the power to rig the rules, capture our political systems, lobby for tax cuts and tax breaks. That’s really why the red light should be flashing on the dashboard here. This is a serious, serious moment we’re in.”

Watch the whole interview here:

The post VIDEO: Elon Musk Becoming the World’s First Trillionaire is ‘A Dark Day for Democracy’ appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

Notoriously dismissive of history, American leaders don’t understand why the two countries can’t just overcome their past differences. For these Americans, the imperative of strengthened security in the region is so much more important than the legacy of colonialism, disputes over textbooks, or the territorial squabble over Dokdo.

From an outside perspective, Japan and South Korea do seem to have a lot in common. The two countries have military alliances with the United States. Both are democracies. Both are worried about North Korea’s nuclear weapons and wary of China’s economic hegemony. They both have advanced economies and overlapping cultures of aeni/anime, manhwa/manga, and K-Pop/J-Pop. Even the languages share a huge number of Chinese-origin words.

It takes a very strong force to overcome the polarizing impact of history. Also, a very conservative prime minister is in charge in Japan and a liberal reformer is in his second year of power in South Korea. Those politics don’t mix.

But now a force seems to have come along that can unite Japan and South Korea.

That force is Donald Trump.

The U.S. president has made it clear that all traditional alliances are up for renegotiation. He wants U.S. allies to pay more for their own defense. He has slapped punishing sanctions on virtually all countries, including Japan and South Korea. And he has negotiated with adversaries—China, North Korea—over the heads of his supposed friends.

Trump, in short, is unreliable. In general, countries crave predictability and will go to great lengths to secure it. Only because Trump leads a powerful country do world leaders take him seriously.

As such, very few countries have openly defied Trump, for fear of higher tariffs or other forms of retribution. So, the leaders of Japan and South Korea have treated the U.S. president cordially despite his crudity.

But there are other, more indirect ways of responding to the erratic policies of the Trump administration. One of those is for middle powers to work together more closely to reinforce what remains of the rules-based order.

At the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos this year, Canada’s Mark Carney called on middle powers to adjust to the rupture in this rules-based order—which Carney implicitly blamed on the United States—and establish a measure of “strategic autonomy.” Although widely applauded for its candor, Carney’s speech was also dismissed as impractical in a world dominated by the United States and China. And, indeed, a Middle Powers Club has not emerged in the wake of the speech.

But new world orders are not conjured suddenly into existence by speeches, no matter how eloquent.

What has happened instead is a subtler shift in international relations. European countries, all of them certifiably middle powers, have begun to explore greater military, energy, and technological independence from the United States. As a result of tariffs, powerful countries like Brazil are reorienting their trade away from the United States even as economic interactions within the Global South have been steadily increasing. African nations, too, have been hedging their bets by reducing dependency on the United States and relying more on regional integration.

Meanwhile, in Asia, Lee Jae Myung broke with tradition by visiting Japan before going to the United States. Lee and Japan’s current leader Sanae Takaichi have now met four times in the last six months to discuss energy, explore ways of diversifying the supply chains of critical minerals, and play drums together.

Lee and Takaichi are not united by ideology. The Japanese leader has taken a much stronger pro-containment position toward China, and Korean progressives are unhappy with her efforts to rip up Japan’s “peace constitution.” But just as pragmatism dictates that the two countries coordinate their efforts in the face of tsunamis, the unnatural disaster of Donald Trump requires joint crisis management.

The U.S. foreign policy elite welcomes the meetings that have taken place between Japan and South Korea. But the consensus is the two countries should come together not to hedge against Trump but to unite against China.

This is a mistake, if only because China is relatively predictable and close while the United States is unpredictable and far away. As Trump presides over the global decline of the United States—its power reduced by wars, political corruption, self-inflicted economic wounds, and the destruction of the international system that has long sustained U.S. hegemony—China has steadily expanded its global influence. Korea and Japan ignore that reality at their peril.

But there are two Chinas. One China upholds the global order and exports renewable energy to the world. The other China clings to its fossil fuel imports and wants to absorb Taiwan and all the riches of the South China Sea.

Middle powers can nudge China in the first direction by collaborating on the rules of the road and research into new climate technologies. Middle powers by themselves cannot create a new world order. But by working together, they can gradually shift the center of gravity away from the unpredictable geopolitics of the United States and toward a more stable order.

It would seem, at first glance, that Korea and Japan are not the best middle powers to lead this effort. Both remain hesitant in their transition to clean energy. Both are increasing their military spending. Both are dependent on outside suppliers of critical minerals. But if they are now overcoming their historical differences to work together—in the face of Donald Trump’s unreliability—surely they can find common cause on clean energy, diversified supply chains, and non-military security.

Is this a pipe dream? Perhaps.

But if, just a few years ago, I’d written that the leaders of Korea and Japan would sit down one day behind twin drum sets and play pop music together, I would been called a dreamer. And yet Lee Jae Myung and Sanae Takaichi have done just that and more. Now it’s time for the two countries to take the next step and establish a middle-power compact to push the region much faster toward clean energy and cooperative security.

The post Japan and South Korea: An Alliance of Middle Powers? appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

Based on an analysis of arbitration claims filed against the country, the report shows who is bringing the lawsuits, how much in damages and future lost profits investors are seeking, which economic sectors account for the majority of these cases, and how this rigged system exacerbates the disparities between private corporations and the communities affected by their projects. 

The report highlights how ISDS tips the scales in favor of private investors and corporate interests. While companies can resort to this powerful mechanism to seek millions in compensation when they believe that a government’s protection measures could negatively impact their investments or profit expectations, communities harmed by these projects lack effective access to justice and reparations.

The report also documents the so-called “chilling effect” of ISDS: the pressure that threats of arbitration exert on governments when they attempt to address environmental, social, or human rights issues. 

Guatemala’s experience shows how this system can become an obstacle for communities defending their land and environment, and to public policy decisions aimed at protecting the environment and Indigenous rights.

Some key findings from the report:

• Since 2007, Guatemala has faced 13 arbitration claims, 9 of which were initiated under Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) and Free Trade Agreements (FTAs).
• Investors have sought nearly $1.7 billion from the Guatemalan government. 
• Arbitration tribunals have already ordered the government to pay more than $160 million to investors, an amount equivalent to more than three times the budget of the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources in 2025.
• Over fifty percent of the claims are concentrated in the energy sector.
• Guatemala received its first arbitration claim from the mining sector over the suspension of the Progreso VII Derivado mine operated by U.S. company Kappes, Cassiday & Associates (KCA).

The full report can be downloaded here: https://isds-americalatina.org/guatemala-eng/ 

More information about ISDS in Latin America and the Caribbean:
https://isds-americalatina.org/en/ 

For interviews or more information:
Jen Moore, Associate Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies – jen@ips-dc.org

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Lea este aviso de prensa en español.

The post REPORT: Defending Water and Land, Facing Million-Dollar Lawsuits: The Cost of Investor Protection in Guatemala appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

Guate, Guatemala – Un nuevo informe del Transnational Institute (TNI) y el Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) analiza cómo el sistema de arbitraje entre inversionistas y Estados (ISDS por sus siglas en inglés) ha sido utilizado por empresas mineras y energéticas para demandar a Guatemala por cientos de millones de dólares en medio de conflictos vinculados a la defensa del agua, los territorios y los derechos de los pueblos indígenas.

A partir del análisis de las demandas presentadas contra el país, el informe muestra quiénes demandan, cuánto dinero reclaman, qué sectores económicos concentran los casos y cómo este sistema profundiza las asimetrías entre las corporaciones privadas y las comunidades afectadas por sus proyectos. 

El informe destaca cómo el ISDS inclina la balanza a favor de los inversionistas privados y los intereses corporativos. Mientras las empresas cuentan con un mecanismo poderoso para reclamar compensaciones millonarias cuando consideran afectadas sus inversiones o expectativas de ganancias, las comunidades afectadas por los impactos de esos proyectos carecen de herramientas efectivas para exigir justicia y reparación.

El informe también documenta el llamado “efecto disuasorio” del ISDS: la presión que ejercen las amenazas de arbitraje sobre los Estados cuando intentan responder a reclamos ambientales, sociales o de derechos humanos. 

La experiencia de Guatemala muestra cómo este sistema puede convertirse en una amenaza para los procesos de resistencia comunitaria y para las decisiones públicas destinadas a proteger el ambiente y los derechos de los pueblos indígenas.

Algunos datos destacados del informe

• Desde 2007, Guatemala ha enfrentado 13 demandas arbitrales, de las cuales 9 fueron iniciadas bajo Tratados Bilaterales de Inversión (TBI) y Tratados de Libre Comercio (TLC).
• Los inversores reclamaron casi 1.700 millones de dólares al Estado guatemalteco. 
• Los tribunales arbitrales ya condenaron al Estado a pagar más de 160 millones de dólares a los inversores, equivalente a más de tres veces el presupuesto del Ministerio de Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (MARN) en 2025.
• Más del 50 % de las demandas se concentran en el sector energético.
• Guatemala recibió su primera demanda del sector minero por la suspensión de la mina Progreso VII Derivado de la empresa estadounidense Kappes, Cassiday & Associates (KCA).

El informe completo puede descargarse aquí:
https://isds-americalatina.org/guatemala/ 

Más información sobre el sistema ISDS en América Latina y el Caribe:
https://isds-americalatina.org/

Para coordinar entrevistas o solicitar más información:
Jen Moore, Associate Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies – jen@ips-dc.org 

###

Lea este aviso de prensa en inglés.

The post NUEVO INFORME: Defender el agua y territorio, enfrentar demandas millonarias: el costo del arbitraje internacional en Guatemala appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

Why did the two candidates who advanced to the runoff succeed, and what explains the poor performance of the other candidates in the first round of elections?

There were 13 candidates who threw their hat in this year’s presidential race, but only three contenders were seen as viable.

The first was Iván Cepeda, a current Senator for el Pacto Histórico (the Historic Pact). He has a strong history in Colombia’s left-wing movement and is an internationally recognized champion for human rights. He represents continuity and is expected to deepen Gustavo Petro’s social democratic reform agenda.

There is now a strong progressive constituency in the country who support social justice-oriented policies, so it was no surprise to anyone that Cepeda easily advanced to the second round with 41 percent of the vote. However, the polls consistently had him as the favorite, so the fact that he failed to get a plurality of the vote was a shock to many observers and has filled many sectors on the left with a bit of panic.

The second was Abelardo de la Espriella, a lawyer by trade and a complete political outsider. He recently founded his own party, Defensores de la Patria (Defenders of the Homeland), and his political program is a mix of economic libertarianism, Nayib Bukele-style punitive populism, and anti-left nationalism. The polls always had him in second place, hovering around 30 percent, but platforms like Polymarket had him as the favorite weeks before the first round.

And the prediction markets guessed correctly. Abelardo earned 44 percent of the vote, 675,000 more votes than Cepeda, and outperformed all the opinion polls. The right-wing base decided to consolidate behind him because they feared that Cepeda had the possibility of winning the election outright if they split their vote. They felt that a hard right candidate who promised to eviscerate the left and go after organized crime with an iron fist best represented their interests.

The final candidate who was seen as viable was Paloma Valencia. She is a Senator for el Centro Democrático (Democratic Center), a party that has been the standard bearer of conservative politics in Colombia for the past 12 years. She polled in a distant third, but there existed a small chance that she could rally support and eke out a surprise second-place finish.

However, after she chose Juan David Oviedo as her running mate, Valencia’s campaign was criticized for “centrist-washing.” The selection of a political moderate as her VP was expected to expand her appeal, but she soon hit a brick wall. Both Valencia and Oviedo appeared together in a couple of very awkward interviews where they could not agree on some very basic principles like reproductive rights, marriage equality, and who will be the next defense minister. This ideological incoherence torpedoed her campaign and led right-wing voters to unite behind de la Espriella.

With Cepeda and de la Espriella advancing to the second round, what are the key factors that could determine the outcome on June 21?

There are two factors that will determine who wins the presidency. The first is turnout. An impressive 58 percent of the electorate participated in the first round of elections, and it is expected that this threshold will cross the 60 percent mark in round two. It will be interesting to see who can mobilize voters who stayed home and who can activate new ones. But the more crucial second factor will be who can win the centrist vote on June 21.

Since the vast majority of Centro Democrático voters already shifted to Abelardo in the first round, the majority of the 1.6 million people who cast their vote for the Valencia-Oviedo ticket appears to be up for grabs. Two centrist mainstays, Sergio Fajardo and Claudia López, both ran independent campaigns for president in the first round and combined for 1.2 million votes. The candidate who can win the vast majority of those 2.8 million will win the election.

Which of the two candidates is doing a better job of winning over these centrist voters?

It is hard to say. Cepeda has made some public overtures to the political center by admitting that some of their critiques of the Petro administration are valid, and that he is open to engaging in a dialogue to come up with a program that unifies both factions. He has already dropped the idea of convening a constituent assembly, which has been a great source of distress to moderate voters. It is no surprise that this announcement was well-received.

However, I do think the Cepeda campaign has made some critical mistakes. His campaign has been underwhelming, especially compared to his opponent, and Cepeda may have believed that he could win with name recognition plus the fact that he is the continuity candidate. This led him to not seek alliances nor expand his electoral coalition before May 31st, and his overtures now can be seen as coming a little too late. Another critical mistake he made was not initially recognizing the electoral results when they were announced. He later distanced himself from this position, but the fact that he did so could potentially be off-putting to some centrists.

De la Espriella is also appealing to the political center, but he is doing so without making any compromises to his program. This has the potential to backfire because Abelardo is rightfully seen as someone with an authoritarian streak who has associated himself with some of the country’s most controversial figures.

As an attorney, de la Espriella represented businessmen and politicians with links to right-wing death squads. Plus, he employs an aggressive and bellicose rhetoric that views the political left as an internal enemy that needs to be eradicated. He has explicitly called Iván Cepeda an enemy of the country. The discourse here is very dangerous, especially considering that Cepeda’s father was murdered by a right-wing death squad in collaboration with the state as part of an exterminationist campaign against Union Patriótica (Patriotic Union) in the mid-1980s and 1990s.

Every election serves in some way as a referendum on the incumbent’s performance as head of state. How has Gustavo Petro fared these past four years?

As the country’s first left-wing president, it was expected that Petro’s ambitious reform agenda would encounter significant hurdles in the Colombian Congress, yet he was still able to produce some legislative victories.

Petro’s two great successes are the two bills he passed to reform the country’s tax code and labor relations. The largest incomes and fortunes in the country are now subject to a more progressive tax regime meanwhile workers’ rights and benefits were expanded. Petro can also proudly boast that his administration set a record in public education investment, and his government allocated more resources to smaller departments and regions compared to his predecessors.

Petro also prioritized the redistribution of unproductive land to peasant organizations and families, which resulted in greater agricultural output throughout his term — even though his proposals were met with some legislative and judicial obstacles that slowed down the pace of redistribution.

From a macroeconomic perspective, the country seems to be on solid footing — there’s economic growth, there’s expansion in the formation of small businesses, the minimum wage has increased, the exchange rate is stable, and poverty, unemployment, and the number of people in the informal sector have all decreased.

But there are still many areas that need to be urgently addressed. The country has a very high debt burden, foreign direct investment fell in 2025 (though was starting to rebound in the first quarter of this year), and the healthcare sector is undergoing an insolvency crisis that negatively affects the delivery of an essential service. Petro’s proposals in the Congress to try to solve the problems in the healthcare system went nowhere.

Petro’s biggest shortcoming as president has been his failure to negotiate a peace deal with a myriad of guerrilla organizations and other groups involved in organized crime. The failure of his “Total Peace Plan” has led to the deterioration of public safety and territorial expansion of illegal armed groups.

The lack of public security guarantees — in addition to a backlash to the left’s victory — led to a further radicalization and mobilization of the right. It is very reminiscent of the hard right’s reaction towards the failed peace process with the FARC in 2002, which directly led to the emergence and dominance of the right-wing president Álvaro Uribe Velez.

Abelardo is simply riding that wave — and if he wins the presidency, he may attempt to weaponize the state’s institutions to go after his political opponents. He may even invite the Trump administration to directly intervene in the country to conduct lawfare against the left.

As my colleague Sanho Tree has pointed out, there is a direct connection between the propagation of lies about the drug trade and U.S. aggression towards Latin America. The U.S. State Department and the Treasury Department already got the ball rolling last year by placing sanctions on President Gustavo Petro under false pretenses.

Who will win Colombia’s presidency?

Political predictions are the art of getting things wrong. Over the past couple of years, political influencers on social media, especially those on the Latin American right, have given a lot of weight to prediction markets. Polymarket has Abelardo as the overwhelming favorite, and the latest polls now have him winning, but I believe Cepeda can cause gamblers to lose their money and pull off an upset.

The post Who Will Win Colombia’s Presidential Election? appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

Commentators across the Middle East and beyond debated whether Netanyahu would abide by Trump’s demand. What virtually none of them mentioned was that Trump had refused to even mention his most important pressure point: that if Israel resisted his order to stand down, the US would simply stop sending tons of weapons and tens of billions of dollars to the Israeli military. The close but sometimes divergent interests of the Middle East’s two powers, the global and the regional, was on full display.

It’s now been 106 days since Trump launched his preemptive and illegal military attack on Iran. On February 28, 2026, the world awoke to the fury of a new war in the Middle East after the United States and Israel had launched their joint assault against Iran, with President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu standing shoulder to shoulder against their common foe. Claiming unbridled hegemony was on the agenda for both.

Today, with yet more fresh promises of a so-called “peace deal” that is nearly ready to be signed by Trump and Iranian leadership, the Israeli military is bombing the suburbs of Beirut despite ongoing claims of a “ceasefire.” Trying to understand the current doom loop, it’s vital we remember how we got here.

In the opening salvo of the US-Israeli attack, Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei, along with an unknown number of other top military and political leaders, was assassinated with a ballistic missile. Just an hour later, the US fired a Tomahawk missile directly at the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in the northern Iranian city of Minab—killing 156 people, 120 of them children, and destroying the school. The war’s official reasons, initially, were to eliminate the ostensible threat of Iran creating a nuclear weapon, and to destroy its conventional military capacity. The no-daylight US-Israeli partnership, Trump and Netanyahu as BFFs, the collaboration between the US and Israeli warplanes, bombers, drones, missiles… all seemed seamless and perfect.

Three months later, and half a dozen or so “ceasefires” announced, renounced, ignored and denounced, headlines around the world gleefully recounted a Trump phone call with Netanyahu. Focused on Israel’s escalating bombing of Lebanon threatening to derail the latest US-Iran ceasefire, the June 1 call reportedly started with Trump telling Netanyahu “you’re fucking crazy—you’d be in prison if it weren’t for me.“ The US president then went on to his ”Everybody hates you now“ remark. ”Everybody hates Israel because of this,“ he reportedly said.

Trump acknowledged saying it, and then, as is his usual style, moved on, quickly reclaiming his friendship with the Israeli prime minister. As was true with so many earlier ceasefires, Israel continued its massive bombing and its brutal occupation of south Lebanon, making a US-Iran ceasefire impossible. In the meantime, throughout the months of the war, commentators, politicians of all stripes, journalists and analysts across the globe were struggling to figure out what that war was actually being fought for.

War for What?

Real fear of an actual nuclear bomb was certainly not the answer. After all, US intelligence agencies have agreed for years that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”

Despite that clear assessment, US B-2 stealth bombers still dropped 14 of their 30,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs on Iran’s civilian centrifuges at Fordo, Isfahan and Natanz at the end of Israel’s 12-day war in June 2025. Trump and his supporters bragged of having “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities. And then, eight months after that, in the early days of the US-Israeli 2026 war, those B-2s were back in the air, dropping more 30,000-pound and some smaller versions of the bunker-busters on Iran. Seems they don’t believe even their own intelligence agents.

Rationales for the sudden war in 2026 (launched in the midst of US negotiations with Iran for a long-term ceasefire) were tossed around like confetti, ranging from stopping a nuclear threat (which of course didn’t exist because Iran didn’t have, wasn’t trying to make, and hadn’t even made a decision to try to build a nuclear weapon), to ending Iran’s support for its regional allies, to destroying Iran’s navy, to crippling its missile capacity, to protecting Iranian civilians or maybe encouraging a popular uprising, or perhaps even full-scale regime change. Later, once Iran had responded to the attacks by closing the Strait of Hormuz, Trump shifted to trying to justify the war as a means of forcing the reopening of the Strait, in effect waging the new war to get back to the situation that had existed until the US and Israel launched the war in the first place.

Not a Senseless War

None were very convincing arguments. The popular view emerged that this was a pointless war, being fought for nothing. But that was wrong—there was a purpose. Actually, there were several. The Israeli prime minister has shaped his political career, for more than 35 years, around the claim that only he could bring down the Iranian regime, falsely claiming it as an “existential threat” to Israel. (In fact, even if Iran changed its internal decisions and decided to try to build a nuclear weapon some day, it would not represent an existential threat to Israelis but only to Israel’s 47-year-old nuclear weapons monopoly in the Middle East.) Netanyahu needed the war to continue—any ceasefire, under any conditions, would weaken him politically.

On the US side, some of the war’s goals had to do with the personal obsessions of the president and his minions. Trump’s fixation on expanding US power around the world, and more importantly being seen as presiding over a return to the glory days of unchallenged US global domination, remain a driving force—as does his determination to “get a better deal” than Obama did with the successful Iran nuclear deal in 2015. For his self-defined “secretary of war” Pete Hegseth, the pageantry of a powerful military—not only “the most lethal” force in the world but more white, more male, and even more slim than any other army—could compensate for Hegseth’s lack of experience. For Secretary of State Marco Rubio, all roads lead to regime change in Cuba—and supporting all of Trump’s military assaults, including attacks on fishing boats in the Caribbean, kidnapping the president and seizing the oil resources of Venezuela, bombing Yemen, Somalia and Nigeria, all help set the stage for his life-long goal of destroying the Cuban revolution.

The Search for Hegemony

All those personal obsessions likely played some roles. But the US-Israeli war on Iran is also rooted in longstanding US imperialist strategy and Israel’s national goals. While Trump has shown himself for years as far more committed to maximizing his own and his family’s wealth and power than he is accountable to any particular faction of US capital or US elite power (except perhaps “the billionaires,” writ large), the trajectory of imperial expansion, especially in an era of greater and rising powers around the world, continues to shape much of US policy.

That is where the search for hegemony comes to the fore. For Israel—and especially for its longstanding prime minister—the attack on Iran both demonstrates and reinforces its role as unchallenged regional hegemon. That means asserting its power—a derivative power, given its strategic dependence on the United States, but power nonetheless—to seize land, dispossess and expel whole populations, and exert permanent control over countries, economies, and people—whenever, wherever, and for however long it chooses. Without being held accountable.

To be recognized as the regional hegemonic power in the Middle East, Israel needs to not only “mow the grass” in Lebanon and in Gaza (as well as arming and empowering ideologically driven settlers in the West Bank to escalate their violent seizure of Palestinian land and ethnic cleansing of its population), it needs to continue to weaken, threaten, and when possible (with US backing) go to war against Iran, its sole challenger for regional control.

Mowing the Grass

Israelis—military and government officials, academics, journalists and others—routinely use the term “mowing the grass” to describe Tel Aviv’s consistent attacks against Israel’s neighbors. The phrase was first coined to describe Israel’s brutal 22-day assault on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, that began the day after Christmas 2008 and killed more than 1400 Palestinians, most of them civilians and including 300 children. Since then, it describes the frequent attacks on Gaza or Lebanon—ostensibly aimed at militant organizations but designed originally to kill massive numbers of civilians, displace hundreds of thousands or millions from their homes, and destroy huge swathes of homes, schools, churches, mosques, businesses—to remind everyone who it is who actually holds power.

Iran has historically been the main obstacle preventing Israel from consolidating that regional hegemonic role, and part of Netanyahu’s political power depends on his ability to keep the US-Israeli “special relationship” strong and to deal effectively with Iran. So going to war against Iran in complete and willing partnership with the United States serves to strengthen his still-shaky political position. What’s different now is that Israel is saying that it will not allow Iran to remain an obstacle to Tel Aviv’s claim of full-blown dominance of the region. Netanyahu is making good of the threats he’s issued for the last 30 years.

So Netanyahu remains committed to continuing this war against Iran, opposing ceasefires regardless of their terms—and most recently, escalating attacks against Lebanon precisely because they could prevent or shatter any ceasefire. Following the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire in 2024, UN peacekeepers on the ground documented more than 10,000 Israeli violations of the agreement in just the first year. When a wobbly US-Iran ceasefire was announced on April 8, 2026, Israel responded with massive force against Beirut, launching more than 100 airstrikes within 10 minutes across the capital and killing 357 people, many of them civilians and at least 101 of them children and women.

Back in the USA…

For the United States, going to war against Iran could strengthen Washington’s longstanding commitment to maintaining global domination—a goal particularly relished by its power-obsessed and erratic president. The war was designed to both demonstrate and bolster the US role as unchallenged global hegemon. And doing so arm in arm with Israel, the regional version.

What a team they thought they would make. What they didn’t reckon with was the reality of Iran—its military, its government, its people. While there is no question US-Israeli military might massively outstrips that of Iran, it turned out that Tehran was able to use its not-insignificant drone and missile capacity in ways that maximized its power.

For example, Iran’s relatively few strikes on US bases and sometimes domestic facilities in the surrounding US-backed Gulf states had political consequences beyond their comparatively low levels of casualties. They showed how “protection” in the form of US military bases, weapons and troops in those countries did not keep their people safe, but rather laid a target on their backs. Most especially, Iran’s few direct attacks on ships attempting to cross the Strait of Hormuz early in the war, had the much broader effect of shutting down the vital waterway entirely, as shipowners and insurance companies refused to take the risk.

Miscalculations

When Israel carried out its guided missile attack on the first day of the war, killing the supreme leader and a number of other top officials, the cheering in Washington and Tel Aviv reflected the assumption that the decapitation of the government would lead to chaos and its inability to function. The cheerleaders were wrong. As Narges Bajoghli and Vali Nasr noted in Foreign Affairs, the US and Israel “expected a quick victory through targeted assassinations of Iran’s leadership. But decapitation did not produce regime collapse. Instead, it opened the door for a new generation to take over.” Not only did Khamenei’s son take over his father’s position, but younger military, political, and business leaders filled in the gaps across the structures of power.

And while the Iranian leadership had been significantly weakened by public mobilization against both governmental inability to solve the escalating economic crisis and its increasingly repressive attacks against protesters, it appears it was not further weakened by the US-Israeli assault. As Nasr and Bajoghli describe the situation, the public anger of January 2026 in response to escalating repression of the mass uprisings, didn’t disappear with the US-Israeli assault. They wrote:

The war’s destruction has been vast: public infrastructure, factories, schools, hospitals, historic monuments, and even entire neighborhoods lie in ruins. As Israeli and American bombs and missiles pummeled the landscape, Trump threatened to arm separatists, redraw Iran’s borders, crush its economy and annihilate its civilization. Together, these military and rhetorical assaults provoked a nationalist reaction that cut across political divisions. Public anger has not disappeared. The grief, frustration and accumulated resentment of decades of misrule and repression remain. What has changed is the political landscape in which those feelings find expression. Dissent is now refracted through a national struggle against a foreign enemy that Iranians compare to Alexander the Great, who conquered the Persian empire in the 4th century BC; the Arab armies that invaded in the 7th century AD; and the Mongols, who came six centuries after that.

Contrary to American and Israeli expectations, the war has not sparked street demonstrations. The longer it went on, the less the regime appeared threatened by public uprisings. Iranian society mobilized not against the state but alongside it, holding daily rallies across the country, forming human chains and gathering on bridges threatened by Trump. The sharp divide between state and society that had characterized Iran in January blurred—not through persuasion or repression, but through the shared experience of living through the bombing and witnessing its destruction.

Palestine

There was another reason for the US-Israeli war, that explains at least the timing, if not the overall rationale—Palestine. Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza for two years and eight months. There are now more than 73,000 known, identified, named Palestinians in Gaza who have been killed by Israeli bombs, tanks, bullets, drones, missiles, almost all paid for (and to a large degree produced) by US taxpayers. Thousands more lie dead under the rubble of what were once the cities, towns, refugee camps of the decimated Gaza Strip. The statistics belie the lives lost—babies, elders, children. Journalists and health workers in staggering numbers. And Israel’s genocide continues, people are still being killed by Israeli bombs, tanks and drones, as well as deliberately-imposed shortages of water, food, medical supplies, shelter.

The Gaza genocide is not unrelated or incidental to the US-Israeli war in Iran—it is a primary enabler. It is precisely the level of impunity, the absolute lack of accountability for any of the perpetrators of this crime against humanity, that has given Israeli and US leaders the confidence to go ahead with what many have called the “Gazafication of Iran” and the “Gazafication of Lebanon” without fearing there might be a price to be paid.

The international arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court against Israeli leaders (Israel assassinated the Hamas leaders who were similarly charged) are ignored in most of the US-allied countries that Netanyahu and his former defense minister might want to visit. South Africa’s unprecedented effort to hold Israel accountable at the International Court of Justice for its violations of the Genocide Convention resulted in a powerful preliminary ruling that Israel’s actions plausibly do constitute genocide. Israel was ordered to carry out specific actions—starting with an end to killing people in Gaza—but it has yet to face any consequences for ignoring those orders. And no one knows when the final ruling might be issued—or if it will lead to some level of enforcement, either in the United Nations, by a coalition of governments, or, most likely by a newly-enraged, newly-engaged global civil society ready to move with ever greater energy, strategic clarity and political power to impose serious consequences on the governments and individuals responsible for the first genocide in history to be carried out openly, proudly, and visible to the world.

War Over War

For now, while the war against Iran continues, it looks like both Israel and the United States are moving into a different phase. They are still looking to claim power, still working to reshape political relations and consolidate regional and global power across the middle east. But rather than simply escalating again, as Israel still is in Lebanon, or continuing a grinding daily assault as it still is in Gaza—both actions armed and paid for by the US—they are facing some changed circumstances. Just maybe Washington and Tel Aviv are finding that it’s harder than they thought to re-order the whole Middle East—and to do that in tandem is harder than ever.

Trump seemed to think he could accomplish something dramatic and “beautiful” in Iran—encourage a popular uprising, maybe seize the oil and replace the leadership’s political orientation as if it were Venezuela—but then found that wasn’t so likely. Turns out Iran is not Venezuela. Netanyahu has massive public support among Jewish Israelis for continuing the war in Iran, though support for the war in Lebanon is not so popular. (It should not be forgotten that after 18 years of occupying South Lebanon, Israeli troops were finally pulled out in 2000 primarily because the government could not survive the mobilization of Israeli mothers angry that their sons in the IDF were occasionally being killed by Hezbollah’s retaliation actions..)

At home Netanyahu may be able to get away with claiming victory over Iran even if a ceasefire is imposed, by continuing Israel’s longstanding practice of assassinating Iranian scientists and political/military leaders, and occasional bombing raids. But Israel’s plummeting losses in the war of global legitimacy are certainly not likely to be reversed any time soon. The most recent Pew survey indicates sky-high majorities holding negative views of Israel and Netanyahu around the world—up to 95% in Pakistan, 78% negative in Sweden and Spain.

The global Palestinian rights mobilizations and the even broader movements for ceasefire and an end to genocide of course play a major role. Social movements and civil society activists around the world will continue to hold up the ICJ decisions and the UN General Assembly resolutions requiring governments to impose arms embargoes, boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel.

And as the Strait remains closed and food shortages mount in the poorest countries, as Arab governments fearing public opposition at home reduce their ties with Israel and reject expansion of the Abraham Accords, and as Israel continues to kill Lebanese and Palestinian families, Trump’s claims will be less likely to be believed. With the mid-terms only a few months off, his claims of “We’re the winner, we won” are already ringing increasingly hollow. It doesn’t mean he won’t make the claims, it just means they’re not going to work.

For Trump, given the unexpected level of resilience in Iran, Tehran’s access to a virtually unlimited supply of cheap drones that are doing real damage to Gulf Arab states hosting US bases and troops, and its willingness to close the Strait as a pressure point with global ramifications, it’s going to be difficult to claim this war as a victory.

The search to consolidate regional and global power continues. It’s a big part of the reason the US and Israel are launching new wars and escalating longstanding attacks. People are still losing lands and lives as these hegemons rely on war to consolidate their positions. But neither Israel in the Middle East nor the United States in the world are unchallenged. They thought they could impose imperialism on the cheap—but it turns out not everyone is playing that game. The search for hegemonic power is far from settled.

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This time around, however, Hegseth veered off into controversial territory.

Not that you can figure this out from the War Department’s anodyne summary of Hegseth’s speech. Unlike last year, the U.S. government hasn’t seen fit to provide a transcript of Hegseth’s remarks. You have to nose around the Internet to find out what Hegseth said that raised so many eyebrows.

Did the Pentagon chief use the D-Day commemoration to denounce the current specter of fascism that is haunting Europe?

No.

Did he warn of the threat that Russia poses to the continent?

Hardly.

Hegseth denounced an invasion of an entirely different sort. “Today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies,” he said. “Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late?”

Between his speech last year and the one this year, Hegseth has evidently gotten his marching orders. Ever since JD Vance lectured his elders and betters at the Munich summit last year, the Trump administration has united around the theme that immigrants threaten European “civilization.” Vance wasn’t even being original. Both his and Hegseth’s talking points come straight out of the mouths of the European far right. Unlike the usual game of telephone, where the message is garbled through misheard repetition, the fulminations of Trump’s henchmen are loud and clear.

The Trump administration is all about defending white “civilization” from the impertinent contributions of Black and brown people. At home, that means scrubbing all government websites, National Park inscriptions, and federal grants of any reference to “woke” ideologies, which used to be known as anti-racism, diversity, or just plain common sense. It has meant restricting refugee policy to the only group the Trump administration perceives as meeting the need-based criteria—white South Africans. It has meant an industrial-strength deportation campaign.

Abroad, the Trump administration is trying to “save” Europe from the immigrants that are in reality keeping European societies afloat in the face of demographic decline. In this effort, it has joined hands with the most repulsive extremists on the continent. Greg Bovino, who headed up Trump’s immigration crackdown in the United States as the commander-at-large of the U.S. Border Patrol, recently showed up in Europe to headline an event in Portugal populated by white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The era of covert alliances and dog-whistling is long past.

But the D-Day speech was something different: a historical commemoration that has usually avoided contemporary politics. Prompted to reflect on present-day “invasions,” the European heads of state listening to Hegseth’s speech might have been thinking of an entirely different group of men and boats. The Trump administration has talked about the possibility of storming the beaches of Greenland to seize the island, an eerie echo of Nazi Germany’s blitzkrieg seizure of Poland in 1939. On this anniversary of D-Day, Americans in boats are the last thing Europeans want to see approaching the fringes of the continent.

“Different dangerous ideologies, indeed,” the Europeans in the audience must have been thinking. Having been warned on numerous occasions, European capitals are certainly doing something to prepare for the impact of the ideologies dominating the Trump administration. It’s hard to know if Europeans really take seriously the prospect of an invasion coming from the West. But they are certainly worried about the failure of the United States to honor its D-Day commitments in the future.

The Immigration Obsession

The European far right has made its name by playing up the “threat” of immigration. Keeping out immigrants was a central plank in Viktor Orban’s platform in Hungary as well as that of Law and Justice Party in Poland, both of which have subsequently lost power. No matter: other parties are on the ascendant. The far right Alternative for Deutschland, having weaponized the issue of immigration, is on the verge of taking control of its first German region in elections in September in Saxony-Anhalt. Similar anti-migrant far-right parties are in coalition governments in Finland and Croatia and dominate the parliament in The Netherlands.

Then there’s Italy. Although she has diverged from the Trump administration on a number of issues, including their views of the current Pope, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni remains vehemently anti-immigrant, pushing ahead with the country’s expulsion of migrants and asylum-seekers to detention centers in Albania, despite legal pushback from Italian courts and EU bodies.

What might have once been a fringe opinion has now moved front and center in Europe. As a result of rising far-right influence, the EU is now using Italy’s detention centers in Albania as a model for “detention hubs” planned for Africa. “This deal will give governments much broader powers to detain and deport people,” Marta Welander of the International Rescue Committee told PBS. “It looks set to normalize immigration raids, expand the use of detention in prison-like facilities outside EU territory that are essentially legal black holes, and increase the risk of people being deported to countries where they could face persecution, torture or worse.”

So much for Europe stepping forward in the Trump era to uphold the rules-based order. At least on immigration policy, the EU is instead following Trump’s lead. Hegseth, in addition to his other failings, didn’t even read the newspaper before giving his D-Day speech. Even as he was channeling the rhetoric of the European far right, European capitals have already been channeling Trump’s immigration policies.

The Real Threats

It’s frankly astonishing that an American politician could discuss D-Day and invasions at this historical moment without mentioning the single most destabilizing invasion since World War II.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a deliberate attempt to remake the European order. Violating international law by disregarding Ukrainian sovereignty was unsettling to be sure, but that was just a means to an end. The incorporation of as much of Ukraine as he could digest was designed to expand Russian power at the expense of the European Union and its cohesiveness.

Although Putin and his mouthpieces have droned on about the threats of NATO expansion—and, to be sure, rapid NATO expansion eastward was a mistake—the real threat to Putin’s dominion has always been the accession of Eastern European and then post-Soviet states into the European Union. A model of economic prosperity, democratic governance, and unrestricted travel, if extended to Ukrainians, Moldovans, and Georgians, would inevitably get Russians to thinking: why not us? Putin has always worried more about the threat from within, like a color revolution, than threats from without, like NATO expansion.

Against the liberalism of the EU, Putin has offered instead a vision of ethnic counter-expansion that appeals to the aggrieved Russian sense of self. Adoption of the euro, the right to work in Paris, the freedom to gather outside the Kremlin to protest: none of these can compete against toxic masculinity, blood and belonging, and the appeal of an iron fist.

Putin’s alternate conception of illiberalism, with its emphasis on conservative values and ethnonationalist triumphalism, is now threatening Europe in turn. Some of Putin’s allies have gone down for the count, but his rhetoric still resonates in the speeches of far-right figures throughout the continent. A number of leaders are scrambling to be the next Viktor Orban—Robert Fico of Slovakia, Andrej Babis of the Czech Republic, and, most ominously, the frontrunner in next year’s French presidential race, Jordan Bardella of the National Rally.

Putin is not so dumb as to double down on his Ukrainian blunder by sending military forces into Poland or even the Baltic states. Cyberattacks and clandestine operations can be more effective since they don’t cross the threshold that mandates a NATO counterattack. Meanwhile, influence operations—disinformation campaigns, strategic political alliances, and the marketing of illiberalism—are even more effective in undermining the ideological underpinnings of the EU.

This latter campaign has more than double the impact when it’s mirrored on the Atlantic side by the actions of Trump, Vance, and Hegseth.

European Response

Europe is not in full-fledged revolt against Trump. The shift in EU immigration strategy demonstrates that some European leaders don’t want to just flatter Trump; they want to imitate him as well.

Still, there are pockets of resistance. A number of European countries defied the Trump administration in 2025 to recognize Palestine. Spain’s Pedro Sanchez refused to toe the U.S. line on Iran. Denmark has led the charge to beat back the administration’s efforts to secure Greenland.

European capitals are preparing in more institutional ways to address the much larger threat of Americans in boats, this time the ones that don’t arrive for a future battle as their counterparts did so reliably on D-Day. Trump has variously threatened to leave NATO or ignore U.S. Article 5 commitments to defend fellow NATO members in the event of an attack. This month, the Pentagon announced a decrease in the forces that the United States will make available—aircraft, ships—during a crisis in Europe.

Europeans have gotten the message. They’re not just increasing their military spending. They’re building up their capacity to produce their own weapons rather than rely on the U.S. military-industrial complex. They’re talking about creating an autonomous European army. They don’t want to be caught flat-footed by American ambivalence.

In the wake of Trump’s decision to go to war against Iran, Europeans are also eager to wean themselves of dependency on U.S. fossil fuels. Fresh from their campaign to reduce imports of Russian fossil fuels, more far-seeing Europeans want to make sure that they’re not yoking themselves to American gas and oil. The better option: full speed ahead on home-grown renewables.

“The European Union can’t fully trust US President Donald Trump to keep Europe out of the cold next Winter,” writes Linda Aziz-Rohlje of Renew Europe. “We are risking our democracy, our prosperity and our security if we do not take action. That’s why liberals and democrats call for an energy-independent Europe, with a more integrated energy market.”

Finally, Europeans are worried about their reliance on U.S. technology. “European leaders have become increasingly alarmed by the reliance on American technology in areas like artificial intelligence, cloud computing and semiconductors,” reports Adam Satariano in The New York Times. “Many worry the dependence creates a ‘kill switch’ that the Trump administration or future U.S. presidents could exploit to block access to essential tech services.”

On weapons, energy, and tech, Europe is groping toward a declaration of independence from America.

Against this background, Pete Hegseth has attempted to remind Europeans of how much the United States came to their aid during a time of crisis. And he has attempted to warn them of grave threats lying beyond their borders.

Mr. Hegseth: you are that threat.

Hegseth and everything he stands for, from the effort to grab Greenland to the attacks on European liberalism, should persuade the French to rescind any invitation to next year’s ceremonies in Normandy.

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The parents of a 16-year-old from California sued OpenAI in the fall of 2025 alleging that ChatGPT encouraged him to take his own life. A 76-year-old retiree never made it home from a New York City trip to ‘visit’ an AI persona developed by Meta. A father of three became convinced he had discovered a major threat to Canadian national security.

Despite these examples of delusions or even psychosis connected to chatbot use, there is still a lot the public, mental health practitioners, and policymakers don’t know about the impacts of artificial intelligence use on the human psyche.

…

Read the full article on Tech Policy Press.

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On Trump’s widely reported warning to Netanyahu — “Be careful or you’ll be on your own very soon” — Phyllis cuts through the noise:

“I think the words could be significant if they were matched by actions. What we see now are a set of words that are not backed up by actions. As long as the United States continues to send tens of billions of dollars to Israel, as it has since the genocide began against Gaza back in October of 2023, and as long as they’re sending billions of dollars directly to the Israeli military, and as long as they’re protecting Israel from being held accountable in the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court, as long as those actions don’t change, the words just don’t mean very much.”

She argues this pattern is not new:

“This is very much the same thing that we saw during the first years of the genocide under President Biden, and then later under President Trump, where they would say, ‘Please stop killing so many Palestinians,’ but continuing to send virtually unlimited bombs and bombers and weapons of all sorts, as well as huge amounts of money from the U.S. taxpayers. As long as that continues, there’s really no reason that Netanyahu should assume that he has to worry about the words that sound very good to a U.S. domestic audience.”

On Iran’s decision to launch ballistic missiles at Israel, Phyllis says Tehran was making a deliberate point: “Iran wants to be taken seriously when it says we have red lines. One of the red lines is that any ceasefire that’s signed off on between the U.S. and Iran must include a ceasefire in Lebanon. It must prevent Israel from continuing its assault on South Lebanon.” Iran’s measured response — 11 missiles, all intercepted, no casualties — was itself a signal: “They’re showing that they can control the amount of weaponry, but that they are not going to simply sit back and abide by somebody else’s word.”

On Israel’s Dahiya doctrine and whether it retains its deterrent power against Iran, Phyllis is direct:

“The so-called Dahiya doctrine is based on the idea not just of deterrence, but overwhelming force that will kill civilians, that will be deliberately disproportionate, in complete violation of international law. That’s the notion of what they call mowing the grass — that at any time in any of the surrounding countries, Israeli troops can steal land, can kill civilians, can settle new settlers there.”

She argues Netanyahu is now caught between two competing pressures: his political credibility at home depends on continuing to go after Iran, while Trump wants to declare victory and move on. “In the past, those two things merged pretty easily. Right now, they don’t.”

On whether any ceasefire can hold without including Palestine, Phyllis is unequivocal: “There has been no ceasefire in Gaza. There is still a genocide in Gaza — that is what we are seeing.” She notes that the impunity Israel has enjoyed over two and a half years of the Gaza genocide directly enabled the broader regional war: “The fact that they had not faced any serious accountability — that has led to the war that we’re now seeing between the US, Israel, and Iran.”

The U.S. has sent close to $33 billion to Israel since the genocide began in October 2023, she points out. “As long as the money continues to flow, as long as the arms continue to flow, there’s no reason in the world that anyone should expect Netanyahu or anyone else in Israel to stop the war against Iran, to stop the war against Lebanon, to stop occupying more land.”

Her demand is simple — and grounded in international law: “When he says there should be an end to the shooting, that has to mean, if he is serious about wanting a ceasefire, he has to stop sending weapons.”

On the broader regional picture, Phyllis warns that a U.S.-Iran deal alone will not bring peace: “It’s not going to be enough to have the US and Iran sign off on a ceasefire deal of their own, allowing Israel to go ahead and continue to escalate its occupation. There has to be a regional solution here.”

Watch Phyllis’s full interviews below:

Gaza and the Question of a Region-Wide Ceasefire

No Ceasefires Right Now Are Dependable

Trump’s Warning to Netanyahu: Words Without Actions

Al Jazeera news bulletin interview, June 9

The post VIDEO: Trump’s Words Mean Nothing Without Action on Israel appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

On the significance of tunnel seizures, Sanho puts the numbers in stark perspective: “This is a drop in the bucket.” He notes that a single tunnel discovered in Tijuana in 2011 had 40 tons of cannabis on the Mexican side alone waiting to come through. “Once they build these tunnels, they can operate them 24/7 if they wanted to,” he explains. “And by the time they do discover them, we have no idea how many months or years they’ve been in operation.”

The $45 million seizure, he argues, represents only what authorities found on hand. “Most of it has already probably gotten through to the U.S.”

Sanho is equally skeptical of the broader enforcement strategy. “We only seize anywhere from 3 to 10 percent of the drugs coming into the United States,” he says. “I compare it to the way astrophysicists talk about dark matter in the universe. We know it’s there. We can’t see it.”

Meanwhile, decades of escalating law enforcement have produced a perverse Darwinian effect: “The people we typically capture are the people who are either dumb enough, clumsy enough, or poor and vulnerable enough to get caught. Conversely, the people we tend to miss, year after year, decade after decade, are the people who are the most adaptable, the most innovative, the most cunning.”

On the Trump administration’s push for ever-more militarized drug enforcement, Sanho is direct: “You cannot use a military solution to solve what is fundamentally an economic problem.” He argues that prohibition itself is the core issue — functioning as a price support for traffickers. “The drug war is essentially producing a price support for drug traffickers. Think of it that way. It’s a crop subsidy.” The more risk built into the system, he explains, the higher the profit margin for everyone in the smuggling chain.

His prescription is regulation. “You can’t control a substance you deliberately drive underground,” he says, pointing to Switzerland’s decades-long prescription heroin program as a model that works. “We don’t call them alco terrorists the way Donald Trump calls these drug traffickers narco terrorists — because it doesn’t help us understand the phenomenon of drug use and addiction and it doesn’t tell us anything about regulation. It’s just a recipe for more war.”

Watch the full interview below:

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