Editor’s Note: This is the second essay in a symposium on the Iran War and America’s role in the Middle East. You can read the first essay here.

“To the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand.” So spoke President Donald Trump when he announced the commencement of Operation Epic Fury on February 28. Fast-forward more than five weeks to April 7, when he threatened “a whole civilization will die tonight” unless the Islamic Republic committed to a ceasefire agreement with the United States—an ultimatum issued out of frustration after Washington failed to effect regime change in Tehran. This shift is striking, but shouldn’t be surprising: It’s perfectly in line with America’s regular role in the Middle East.

Of the many and often conflicting narratives swirling in Washington to justify this war, none beggar belief more than the claim that this was done to liberate the Iranian people. The notion that Washington actively supported Iranian self-determination contradicts the historical record of US Middle East policy—including in Iran.

For more than eight decades, Washington has rooted its regional strategy in the “myth of authoritarian stability”—the belief that select autocratic states are the best guarantors of regional stability and US interests in the Middle East.

Arguments in favor of supporting such actors have taken many forms, ranging from the belief that the region’s inhabitants are incapable of self-governance to the claim that support for regional dictators will lead them to adopt pro-US policies. But the basic logic has remained relatively constant: dictators are the best guarantors of regional stability and US strategic interests in the Middle East.

The United States has consistently sought to expand its authoritarian client network by acting against adversarial governments in the region with the objective of installing more compliant regimes. Since the end of World War II, Washington has pursued regime change in the Middle East on average once per decade. The governments residing within the US-led regional order also push the United States toward status quo policies to advance their own interests, echoing the same pro-authoritarian rationales used by Washington to justify continued American support.

Freedom, therefore, was never the objective in Iran. Washington initiated the war hoping to decisively subdue Iran—the chief antagonist operating outside the US-led regional order—and, if possible, co-opt Tehran into its network of authoritarian client states. Thus far, it has achieved neither. As the costs of this war become more evident, so too will the chasm between reality and the rhetoric used to justify it.

The myth of authoritarian stability has shaped Washington’s approach to the Middle East since it first became deeply involved in the region’s affairs beginning in the twentieth century. Such policies have helped sustain authoritarianism across the region.

During the Cold War, cooperation with such autocrats was deemed necessary in order to prevent encroachment by the Soviet Union and sustain the free flow of oil out of the Middle East, leading to both Moscow and Washington competing for client states while subverting attempts at self-determination. After the Cold War, the United States emerged as the unrivaled power in the Middle East and entrenched its authoritarian patron-client network to preserve American regional predominance.

The United States doubled down on its pro-authoritarian policies following the 9/11 terrorist attacks and invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, viewing these autocrats as essential partners in combatting global terrorism. Although talk of democracy promotion in the Middle East through regime change in Iraq was ubiquitous in the rhetoric of the Bush administration, this narrative only emerged in force after the decision to invade was already made. It was primarily a hollow legitimizing mechanism adopted by Washington to convince the public that such a war was necessary when other justifications proved fictitious. After the 2011 Arab uprisings, Washington depicted surviving autocrats as the only forces capable of reestablishing order following mass upheaval and state disintegration in Syria, Yemen, and Libya. Today, these authoritarian client states are thought to provide the United States with a comparative advantage in the region as Washington purports to pivot its focus toward China.

The myth of authoritarian stability gets things backward: rather than being the solution to the region’s problems, authoritarian regimes are responsible for producing and exacerbating some of the greatest problems in the region, and Washington’s resolute backing allows them to act with relative impunity both at home and abroad. These relationships are not necessary to protect US interests in the Middle East. In fact, they jeopardize US interests by reinforcing the root causes of unrest and conflict in the Middle East, entangling Washington in the region’s problems, and inciting hostility toward the United States.

US policy toward pre-1979 Iran epitomizes the myth of authoritarian stability and its deficiencies, while its policies since the Iranian revolution have relied overwhelmingly on coercion in the pursuit of compliance—often producing the opposite effect.

Before the 1979 revolution that established the Islamic Republic, Iran, under the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was central to US Middle East policy during the Cold War. Like elsewhere in the region, Washington viewed rising nationalist sentiment inside Iran as concerning, fearing it would create inroads for the Soviet Union to expand its influence. At the forefront of Iranian nationalism was the National Front, led by Mohammad Mosaddegh, who criticized foreign interference inside Iran, particularly external control of the country’s oil sector. After becoming prime minister in 1951, Mossadegh’s boldest initiative was nationalizing the Iranian oil industry, which at the time was dominated by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC)—later known as British Petroleum (BP).

Washington and London feared that Mossadegh nationalizing the AIOC would spark a wave of nationalization in the Gulf and boost pro-Soviet sentiments across the region. Though Mossadegh was not a communist, Washington believed deteriorating conditions and the weakening of the Shah within Iran could strengthen the communist Tudeh party domestically. Ultimately, the CIA and Britain’s MI6 orchestrated Operation Ajax, coupling a widespread propaganda effort to weaken Mossadegh with coordinating anti-government protests and orchestrating a military coup that ultimately overthrew him in 1953.

Once reinstated, the Shah’s Iran joined Saudi Arabia as the foundation of Richard Nixon’s “Twin Pillar” policy in the Gulf until 1979. Between Nixon and his successor, Gerald Ford, Washington approved roughly $17 billion in weapons to Tehran—approximately $120 billion in 2025 dollars. The Shah ruled Iran with an iron fist until the 1979 revolution, which removed Tehran from America’s sphere of influence. At the time, Jimmy Carter did not want to abandon the Shah, whom he referred to as “an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.” Carter’s special envoy to Tehran, General Robert Huyser, urged Iran’s military commanders to “kill as many demonstrators as necessary to keep the shah in power.” Ultimately, Washington could not save the Shah, and he was forced to flee the country in January 1979, after which the Islamic Republic of Iran, led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, replaced the monarchy, also ruling with an iron fist and animated by hostility to the United States.

Since 1979, Iran has operated outside the US-led regional order, and the relationship between Tehran and Washington has remained deeply antagonistic. Washington’s approach to Iran since the revolution has relied overwhelmingly on coercion, namely, trying to isolate and pressure Tehran politically, economically, and militarily into compliance. Paradoxically, this approach has often hardened Iran’s resistance to the United States and undermined attempts at reform.

At the core of the Islamic Republic is a “resistance culture” against external interference in Iranian affairs. Within the regime, there are two competing camps—pragmatists who favor more engagement with the West to alleviate sanctions and isolation, and hardliners who prioritize resistance through defiance and military power. Hawkish US policies have historically empowered regime hardliners by fueling their resistance narrative. Iranian foreign policy often reflects internal regime politics, namely, competition between these two camps. As Washington has increased its pressure on Tehran, so too has the balance of power inside the Islamic Republic often tilted in favor of hardliners, leading to a more militarized Iranian foreign policy.

The relationship between the regime and Iranian society is also fraught with tension. The Islamic Republic is a brutal dictatorship, and its legitimacy is fiercely contested by large segments of the Iranian population—particularly among younger generations. Yet, opposition to the regime remains bitterly fragmented, undermining its effectiveness. US policies have often further undermined the opposition, namely through sanctions. US sanctions have dealt great damage to Iran’s middle class, which has historically been a source of moderation and critical to the overall reform movement within the country. Ideologically divided and materially underequipped, the Iranian opposition has yet to coalesce into a coherent political force.

The current war should be viewed within this context of domestic and regional contestation. Operation Epic Fury is the culmination of decades of policy inertia and special interests pushing the United States and Iran toward confrontation. The series of blows to Iran’s strategic position in the more than two years since Hamas’ terror attack against Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel’s war in Gaza, and subsequent Israeli operations targeting Tehran’s regional partners and the Islamic Republic directly further accelerated this momentum. Both Israel and the United States hoped to capitalize on Tehran’s vulnerability and provided a host of fluid and often contradictory narratives to justify a pre-determined course of action.

One of these narratives was liberating the Iranian people. This narrative emerged following mass protests against the regime beginning in December 2025, spurred by a growing energy crisis inside Iran. Trump rhetorically embraced the protests—on at least eight occasions, he urged the Iranian people to continue their marches, claiming help was on the way. The regime ultimately crushed these protests via force by mid-January 2026. Trump seemingly hoped to rekindle them through war, telling the Iranian people, “Now is the time to seize control of your destiny, and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach. This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.”

There is considerable evidence that Trump hoped to eliminate Khamenei and replace him with a subservient authority, akin to what he did in Venezuela. Yet, after almost seven weeks of war,  the United States and Israel have failed to effect regime change in Tehran. Despite assassinating Ayatollah Ali Khamenei within the first 24 hours of the war, the regime has not collapsed, nor does US intelligence believe it would collapse even if Washington escalated to a full-scale war. Given this reality, Trump has had to walk back his claim that he must “be involved” in selecting the next Supreme Leader to guarantee they are “reasonable to the United States.”

The domestic balance of power inside Tehran has now shifted firmly in favor of regime hardliners—they believe they are creating a new status quo between Tehran and Washington, and that this is only possible by maintaining pressure on the United States until the mounting political and economic costs force the United States to retreat. Instead of eliminating the regime, the war has empowered a new, more hawkish generation within its ranks—one that is far more likely to use even greater force if Iranians return to the streets following the war.

For the Islamic Republic, this fight has been existential. For the United States, it was a war of choice. Tactical victories did not translate into strategic successes, which explains the threats (partially carried out) to expand the war to systematically destroy civilian targets.

The long-term ramifications of this war remain unknown. But reality continues to cast doubt on the notion that Washington initiated this war to liberate the Iranian people—US Middle East policy remains rooted in continuity, not change. It should go without saying that the Iranians, like all people, deserve to live free and determine their own future. But by exploiting domestic opposition to the regime to justify this war, Washington merely uses them as political pawns.

The United States cannot manufacture a new status quo inside Iran—it must be self-sustaining and come from within, not externally imposed via war.

The post It Has Never Been About Freedom appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Editor’s note: This is the first essay in a symposium on the Iran War and America’s role in the Middle East. You can find the next essay in this symposium here.

The US-Israeli war against Iran was fought for unclear purposes, with a vague strategy, towards an ambiguous end. That does not mean it contributed nothing to US interests. The world is safer with a weaker Iranian regime whose nuclear sites are buried under rubble and whose terrorist proxies are dead or hiding. There is still an opportunity to use the war—however foolishly started—to consolidate those gains, pry open the Straits of Hormuz, and achieve some measure of good.

Specifically, the United States should pursue a two-pronged approach. First, it should give a list of clear demands, safety guarantees, and realistic off-ramps to the existing regime to keep alive the possibility that the current Iranian leadership might adjust its behavior in ways more amenable to US interests in the region, especially about nonproliferation, terrorism, and freedom of navigation. The US’s interests in the region remain the same as they have been for decades: regional stability, the free flow of energy to the global market, and an end to terrorism that threatens the US and its allies. A weakened Iran conduces to each of these.

Second, and simultaneously, the US should help prepare the ground for a new regime by hosting a conference with opposition leaders outside Iran and providing communications equipment to dissidents inside Iran.

Together, the two approaches maximize the chances that the US will be able to use the aftermath of the war well and lay the groundwork for a postwar scenario that serves American interests.

List of Demands

The US and Iran are reportedly exchanging demands in negotiations to turn the ceasefire into a permanent settlement. But it is not clear that the US has approached the negotiations strategically. The US should deliver to Iran a list of maximal demands that could be bargained down to America’s most essential interests. These demands would communicate to Iran the terms for a stable postwar regional order.

The maximal demands should include that Iran: accepts unconditional, unlimited, indefinite IAEA inspections of all nuclear sites; signs and ratifies a verifiable arms control treaty limiting its ballistic missile arsenal; ceases attacks on shipping through the Straits of Hormuz and affirms the Straits as an international waterway; publicly condemns terrorism and terrorist groups, including Hezbollah and Hamas by name; disbands the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Basij militia; arrests and holds trials for the perpetrators of the January massacres; and signs the Abraham Accords.

This list goes far beyond the reported list of demands the US recently delivered to Iran. The current regime will never accept that list because it is tantamount to surrender. The list violates everything for which the regime has fought for nearly five decades. Agreeing to it would amount to an admission that the very nature of the regime—the foremost state sponsor of terrorism and most dangerous threat to the nuclear nonproliferation regime in the world—is guilty of international irresponsibility, and that it has forfeited the right to sovereign control over its foreign and defense policy.

The US should make those demands anyway.

Why make a list of impossible demands? For two reasons: first, it clarifies what the war was about. Demands help clarify how to prevent the war from restarting and what sort of peace we aim to build in the aftermath. Right now, during the tenuous ceasefire, the war has not truly ended. All wars must end, and to genuinely end this war, the US must communicate to the Iranian regime what war-ending conditions it must meet.

Second, a list of demands gives the United States something to bargain towards and something to bargain with—something the administration did not give itself with its existing list of demands. By starting with a maximal list, the US could give up its demands on human rights and the Abraham Accords, for example, in exchange for commitments on nuclear weapons and terrorism that most directly affect American security.

Risks of Ambiguity about Goals

The Trump administration seemed to want the opposite. It offered a series of shifting and inconsistent statements about their war aims. Is it regime change? Non-proliferation? Counter-terrorism? A humanitarian intervention? Preemptive defense against an imminent attack?

One advantage of keeping the goal vague is that Trump could declare victory whenever he wanted, by whatever standard he wanted. He can rightly claim that Iran’s military has been defeated; that it effectively no longer has a navy, air defenses, or ballistic missile launchers; that the regime’s infrastructure lies in ruins; and that its nuclear program is much closer to being truly “obliterated,” as he claimed last summer.

But the Trump administration is also running high risks by keeping the goal vague. There are four major disadvantages: low legitimacy, a chain-gang risk, a credibility trap (or mission creep), and protracted war and state collapse in Iran.

First, without clear goals, the operation had low legitimacy at home and abroad. Voters and international partners are confused about what the war was about, and the Trump administration has made surprisingly little effort to explain or sell the war. That is why, domestically, the war is unpopular. Moreover, Congress has not passed an authorization for the use of military force.

That is also how the US ended up going to war without a single NATO partner. This may be the first major US military action undertaken without active British participation since the Vietnam War. For those who care about the United Nations (I do not), there is also no UN Security Council resolution authorizing the war. Low international legitimacy constrains US options and hurts its ability to leverage cooperation in future endeavors.

Second, without clear goals, the US risks being “chain-ganged” into Israel’s goals. It is unclear if Israel is a party to the current negotiations between the US and Iran, and it is entirely possible that Israel may reject its terms and continue the war and drag the US back into the fighting unless the US is both clear and firm about the goals for which it is willing to fight. Israel’s goals are probably both more maximalist (regime change) and also more permissive, in that they would probably settle for state collapse in Iran. Regime change may become necessary, but the US should only fight that war on its terms and by its choice. State collapse has its own risks (see below). Regardless, the US cannot and should not let allied nations determine its war aims or foreign policy.

Third, and similarly, without clear goals the US may fall into mission creep out of concern for its credibility. Having staked time, money, manpower, and prestige on the operation, American leaders may find themselves digging in, looking for a satisfying conclusion, a sense of vindication, or a clear “mission accomplished” moment. Iran might be able to deny them such a moment by holding the Straits of Hormuz hostage to ongoing drone attacks while the regime leadership remains hidden, leading to a frustrating stalemate in which the US has complete air superiority and no political leverage. Sadly, given the shape of the ceasefire so far, this seems the most likely scenario. Analysts complain about the “sunk cost” fallacy, but Vietnam is an easy reminder that policymakers fall for it anyway.

Fourth, without clear goals, the war may resume, imposing high costs on all belligerents and the world economy. The US is best poised to bear such costs materially, but its political system is already straining, and war is never good for the health of a democratic system. The same is true for Israel, which has been in continuous war for nearly three years since Hamas’ 2023 attack. The global economy cannot easily weather months of oil supply shocks and escalating energy costs.

But the risk for Iran is the highest. A protracted war increases the possibility, not of regime change, but regime collapse. While Israeli policymakers might shrug at the possibility, Americans should take a longer view. Nothing good will result if Iran descends into anarchy, civil war, territorial fragmentation, or warlordism. That situation could result in a permanently constrained oil supply, mass refugee flows, organized crime and drug trafficking, and the loss or theft of Iran’s high-enriched uranium.

Worst of all, regime collapse could turn the IRGC into an enduring and metastasized terrorist threat. It is already one of the most professional and successful terrorist groups in history, having trained and used Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthi rebels, and a wide network of proxies in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. But even then, such groups have been constrained, somewhat, by their accountability to a regime that did not want to commit itself to a suicidal course of action. But with nothing left to lose, some IRGC remnants and proxies might turn to large-scale terrorism out of revenge and apocalypticism.

Offramps for Iran’s Leaders

The Trump administration should avoid these risks by communicating a clear list of war-termination criteria to Iran’s current leaders. But Iranian leaders have no incentive to agree to any list so long as they plausibly fear for their personal safety. Having already killed former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hassan Khamenei, the commander of the IRGC, the chief of staff of the armed forces, two defense ministers, and a dozen or more senior defense and intelligence officials, the US has made it hard for remaining leaders to feel they have any guarantees of their safety.

The US needs to make clear that it will work with Iranian leaders who negotiate in good faith, in the same way it has left in place and worked with remaining members of Venezuela’s government after capturing President Nicholas Maduro in January. Many members of the Venezuelan government are as guilty of corruption and drug trafficking as Maduro, but the US has sent a clear signal that it will work with them so long as they prove more amenable to American demands in the future.

Another possibility is to work out an arrangement for any Iranian leaders who desire to retire peacefully to Moscow or Beijing. Former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is currently enjoying his retirement in Russia alongside former Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych. Former Tunisian leader Zine El Abidine Ben Ali is doing the same in Saudi Arabia. Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharaff splits his time between London and Dubai. Examples abound. It is unsatisfying to the victims of their oppression, but exile is often the easiest route to transition.

Planning for Transition

And transition, not merely to new leadership, but to an entirely new regime, may be the eventual end state. Trump seemed to make regime change his goal in the opening days of the war, though he seems to have walked that back in subsequent weeks, claiming (falsely) that the new crop of leadership amounts to regime change. Nonetheless, the second prong of the US strategy should be planning for the possibility of regime change.

Regime change would be the most reliable way to secure the US’s most important interests. So long as the Islamic Republic of Iran exists and seeks to carry on the totalitarian and theocratic ideals of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, it remains a potential threat to the United States by supporting terrorism, pursuing weapons of mass destruction, threatening US allies, and holding a Damocles’ Sword over the global economy. Regime change is the only truly lasting solution to the problem that has wracked the Middle East for five decades.

Planning for regime change also puts additional pressure on the existing regime to capitulate, accept US demands, or at least participate meaningfully in negotiations. If the existing regime sees a viable opposition taking shape with international support and legitimacy, coupled with the threat of more airstrikes, it may feel it has no choice but to negotiate.

And planning for regime change ensures the US has a seat at the table among the dissidents and opposition leaders who have been planning and acting, without US support, for years.

To that end, the US—perhaps with the United Nations—should host a conference for Iranian dissidents and opposition leaders, akin to the Bonn Conference that brought together Afghan groups in December 2001. Such a conference would bring together Reza Pahlavi and other monarchists; Kurdish and Azeri groups; liberal and republican opposition leaders; women’s rights groups; and any credible spokesmen with ties to the protest leaders inside Iran. A broad umbrella ensures they will disagree on plenty, but also that any agreement would enjoy legitimacy among Iranian dissidents.

And the US can help organize dissidents with communication equipment and other covert support. The Iranian people have not risen against the regime or flooded the streets en masse because they can no longer talk to each other, coordinate action, or get reliable news. Protesters are the missing ground component of the campaign; helping reopen Iran’s information environment could completely alter the strategic picture by turning the fabled Iranian street from an idle hope to a strategic reality.

Endgame

The US should remain flexible on the final settlement within Iran. But to do that, it should be clear and firm about what American interests are. The message should be that the US looks forward to working peacefully with any regime in Tehran that foreswears nuclear proliferation, denounces terrorism, and respects freedom of navigation through the Straits. If the current regime can do that, regime change is unnecessary, and the war might end relatively quickly.

If the current regime digs in despite its diplomatic isolation, economic suffering, and military defeat, the United States will be on much firmer ground to push for regime change. But to do that, the US must be prepared for a longer, messier war, and a far more uncertain future. It is not clear to me that the US has the tools, capabilities, and strategic patience and acumen for that kind of war—which is something policymakers may want to consider in the future before going to war in the first place.

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Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719 and instantly became a bestseller, making Defoe famous far beyond his politicking circles—he was a journalist, pamphleteer, as well as spy and political agent. The novel started a genre of survival stories of which perhaps the only famous one nowadays is the 1812 novel Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss, which had a number of sequels by other authors (including Jules Verne), was adapted several times in Hollywood, and inspired a number of TV series, of which Lost in Space (1965–68) is most famous (and was recently remade by Netflix).

Eventually, this kind of survival story inspired Andy Weir, the author of science fiction novels including 2014’s The Martian, in which a scientist is spaceship-wrecked on Mars and has to survive there until NASA can retrieve him. (In reality, when two astronauts were stranded on the International Space Station in 2024—an eight-day mission turning into 286 days off-planet—NASA had to ask Elon Musk to send a rocket to get them.) The novel was very successful, and it was then quickly adapted to a similarly successful movie of the same name in 2015. So in 2021, Andy Weir came back to the survival story and offered a variation: Project Hail Mary. Now, it’s already on screens, and it’s a big hit, having made more than $160M in its first ten days.

A couple of aspects of the stories are reversed. The scientific protagonist of The Martian was stranded and in need of saving, whereas the protagonist of Project Hail Mary is himself on a mission to save the world and, instead of wrecking, he may be said to be marooned. Our world, and in fact a large part of the galaxy, is in danger because of an astrophage, which, as the name suggests, means “star-eater.”

The thing eating the stars is a life form, indeed a microorganism. A global scientific mission is needed to gather the resources, the scientists, and the plans to investigate and solve the problem before the sun goes dark and cold and mankind is extinguished. That global effort soon turns out to need Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a molecular biologist who turns out to be a very clever engineer, too. He’s our protagonist, of course.

Weir introduces another change from the earlier novel. The titular Martian was all by himself, whereas Grace finds a friend on his space mission, and they work together to save their planets. Grace dubs the alien Rocky, because he looks like a bunch of rocks put together by a kid who doesn’t quite know what a spider is supposed to look like. Together, the two Weir stories, which may also be the two most successful new sci-fi movies of the last decade, give us Robinson Crusoe’s 28 years on his island. At first, Crusoe survives by himself, but in the last couple of years, he saves a cannibal from other cannibals and dubs him Friday. They work together and so, once no longer alone, the trouble of escaping his fate becomes manageable for Crusoe.

Weir’s novels, just like Defoe’s, suggest what we have come to call rugged individualism, a distinctly American character, a quality of self-reliance that allows a man to defy his fate. It’s a mix of return to nature and the conquest of nature. For Defoe, Crusoe is a way to investigate the state of nature, the distinctive theory of human origins that underlies liberal politics. And if one wanted to exaggerate for the sake of example, one could say that Defoe wrote a novelization of his contemporary John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, or at least its famous fifth chapter: “Of Property.”

But then there is the problem of Friday. When Crusoe saves his life, he not only gives him a name, but also tells Friday to call him Master. This reminds us that Crusoe was himself a slave in Morocco, after which he saved a slave boy’s life only to sell him into slavery; and that he later got himself shipwrecked because he wanted to sail from his plantation in Brazil to Africa to buy slaves. Throughout his isolation on the island, Crusoe indeed dreams of getting a servant—and then that dream is realized in Friday.

Project Hail Mary, though, does not involve slaves! There is nowadays no need for it. All the work Crusoe gets out of slaves is done in our present age by technology. One of Crusoe’s impediments is that he cannot work metal, and so his tools are always quite bad. He is a hunter at first, then a farmer, rehearsing the stages of mankind. Weir’s scientific protagonist can take all that for granted. Grace, however, does need a technical assistant, and Rocky turns out to be a natural engineer and very docile. The two meet on terms of equality—or in a way, Rocky does more to help Grace, since he is more skillful. But Grace soon assumes leadership, because he’s more intelligent and imaginative, without instituting any inequality.

One could call the meeting of the two aliens providential or merely a matter of chance. Each interpretation has consequences for how one thinks about life and human life especially, which we’ll explore. First, let’s consider religion. Crusoe becomes a Christian in his time of isolation, reading the Bible, but more importantly reflecting on the miseries and suffering of his life, thinking himself to blame, and looking to set wrong things to right in his soul. So he also teaches Christianity to Friday, whose existence poses problems. How can God be God and yet allow cannibalism?

It goes without saying, Grace, despite his name, has no thought of God and doesn’t entertain the idea of explaining Christianity to Rocky, even as an amusing question. We may say Grace has to take a leap of faith when Rocky asks him to take off his spacesuit helmet. Grace is afraid he’ll suffocate, yet he puts his life in his new friend’s hands. We never find out what basis there is for that trust; perhaps there is none—perhaps because there is no ground of trust, whether in providence or nature or something else.

Now, Crusoe and Friday are of the same species, potentially dangerous to each other, but also able to think about life and human life in very similar ways. Grace and Rocky have the same enemy: the astrophage. They want the same thing: to save their respective species. So they somehow establish, to speak like Locke, the right to life, the fundamental part of modern politics. But Project Hail Mary is silent on whether that right depends on being human or perhaps any living being has it. Is a rock-like spider human if it is technically capable, able to communicate (through a translation device), and willing to live or die together in trust?

Put otherwise, does the form of the human being matter, or would any form do so long as one is able to manipulate matter for technical purposes? The very existence of the alien from another solar system—indicating there is no immediate competition or enmity between these two alien species, with another atmosphere and another biology—suggests that life is somehow a matter of chance. Project Hail Mary suggests we may all be creatures of circumstances, and we just have to make the best of them.

Self-reliance and the investigation of humanity in the state of nature have therefore transformed tremendously in the three centuries since Defoe wrote. The friendship of Rocky and Grace has replaced religion, even as technological advances have made incredible new powers available and a new knowledge of being alive in a dangerous universe. This is why Rocky and Grace are equals, whereas Crusoe thought of himself as master of Friday. Grace, unlike Crusoe, has nothing to teach his companion—neither civilization nor Christianity.

In other words, Project Hail Mary cannot give an account of being human through the encounter with the alien it depicts. This is a very worrisome transformation. Perhaps as a society we are not progressing after all. At least, it seems, our stories are not.

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