In January, with the Trump administration considering war with Iran, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) published a piece under a headline that produced, for me at least, a post-traumatic flashback to 2013. “Don’t make the mistake Obama did, Mr. President,” the FDD warned, “enforce your red line.” Obama’s 2013 “failure” to enforce a red line over Syria that he himself had drawn, the argument ran, shattered American credibility and emboldened Moscow and Tehran; Trump should take care not to repeat it. In other words, having threatened war with Iran, Trump now had no choice but to follow through.

The red line incident, to mangle William Faulkner, is thus not dead; it is not even past. Obama’s refusal to use force against Syria is still weaponized to promote wars today and probably always will be. The lesson of September 2013 has become America’s version of the samurai myth: a US military sword once unsheathed must taste blood or the nation loses its honor.

As we wade through our current quagmire in Iran, in part based on that mythic code, we should probably understand how that red line lesson emerged.

The making of a myth

In August 2012, Barack Obama somewhat suddenly declared that Syrian government use of chemical weapons in the civil war there would cross “a red line” and “change my calculus.^” I was working on Syria in the State Department at the time and thought I understood the policy, but I was startled by his vehemence. Reporting later established that I was not alone. The phrase surprised his closest advisers, who had agreed on something rather vaguer.

A year later Syrian President Bashar al-Assad crossed that line, killing more than 1,400 people with sarin nerve gas in the suburbs of Damascus. A U.S. attack seemed imminent. US destroyers deployed to the eastern Mediterranean. Planners drew up targets. Secretary of State John Kerry gave a thundering speech.

Then Obama took a walk around the White House South Lawn with his chief of staff, Denis McDonough, and decided to ask Congress for an authorization he knew they would never grant. In the end, he never fired a shot. American credibility, we are told, died that weekend. Russia took Crimea a year later because of it. The Gulf countries gave up on America as a result. Grandmothers wept for lost greatness in Middle America.

The story enjoys remarkable bipartisan support, even among many of the people who were in the room where it happened. Leon Panetta, Defense Secretary until early 2013, later wrote that the reversal damaged American credibility and sent a mixed message to the world. Chuck Hagel, Panetta’s successor, who spent August 30, 2013 approving strike plans, said there was no question it hurt the credibility of the president’s word. Susan Rice, National Security Advisor in 2013, arrived at the same conclusion from the opposite direction. The administration, she concluded, should never have drawn a red line that raised expectations for actions which might not serve American interests. Even Obama eventually gave ground. In an interview in 2017, he allowed that if you put all the weight on that particular phrase, the complaint about how Washington read it was a legitimate one.

The only problem with this consensus is that none of that is right. The red-line incident is in fact a triumph of American diplomacy, a shining island of US diplomatic wisdom amid a sea of stupid wars. The fact that even many of those responsible for the decision see it otherwise tells us something genuinely unpleasant about how the American strategic community thinks about military force.

The real world matters

Let’s start with what actually happened. Faced with a credible American threat, Assad surrendered nearly his entire chemical arsenal. Inspectors hauled 1,308 tons of agent and precursor out of an active war zone. They finished the job by June 2014. The Syrian regime gave up a capability it had spent three decades building.

We should understand what that meant in Damascus. The stockpile was not a regime hobby. It was the Assad family’s answer to Israeli conventional and nuclear superiority, the poor man’s deterrent, the one asset that the Syrian government believed could prevent Israeli invasion and domination. To get them to give it up, the Russians, who wanted to avoid US intervention in the Syrian civil war, had to lean on the Assad regime hard and make plain that continued Russian protection depended on compliance. Assad handed over his crown jewels while fighting for his life. This was an extraordinary achievement.

But that is only the beginning of the victory. Imagine next what never happened. In 2014 the Islamic State overran a third of Syria. In 2015 the regime came close enough to collapse that Russia intervened to rescue it. Then came the sieges, the barrel bombs, the destruction of Aleppo, and eventually, in 2024, the fall of the Assad regime. What might we have expected from a desperate leader with so many tons of nerve gas, fearing for his own life, at such moments? The regime fired nerve agent into the suburbs of its own capital in 2013, when it was holding its own in the war; what do we think it would do in 2015 or 2024, when it is on the brink of losing? And what becomes of that arsenal in a country the Islamic State is busy occupying?

It is only a counterfactual. But any sober estimate of the lives that the deal saved runs into the tens of thousands, perhaps many more. A threat of force followed by a diplomatic breakthrough produced that: at a cost of zero casualties and zero munitions.

What would have happened if the US had used force in 2013? Again, a counterfactual, but we can have a pretty good idea. In September 2013, the United States had no military option that would have destroyed Syria’s chemical arsenal. Specialists warned that bombing chemical stockpiles might release a lethal cloud that could spread across Syria and beyond. It would have risked killing the civilians the operation claimed to protect (as well as many, many more).

Pentagon planners designed the strike package accordingly, around the stockpiles rather than at them. Then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, had already told the Senate that eliminating the weapons by force would require a no-fly zone plus thousands of special operations and other ground troops to assault and secure sites, with wider Pentagon estimates running past 75,000. No one was interested in that after the debacles of Iraq and Libya.

Of course, the deal was incomplete. Assad’s declaration omitted material, he continued to use readily available chlorine, and he retained enough undeclared nerve gas to attack the town of Khan Shaykhun in 2017. But those caveats indict the military alternative more heavily than the agreement. The proposed 2013 strike would have left not only the residual capacity Assad concealed, but also the 1,308 tons the agreement removed. The choice in 2013 was never between perfect disarmament and imperfect diplomacy. It was between incomplete disarmament and a punitive strike that disarmed Syria not at all.

The attack on Khan Shaykhun, in fact, produced the closest thing available to a real- world test of the alternative. In April 2017, after the Syrian regime attacked the town with chemical weapons, President Donald Trump — as people had exhorted Obama to do — responded with military force, firing 59 Tomahawks at a Syrian airbase. The strike killed some Syrian soldiers, wrecked some aircraft shelters, prevented no chemical attacks, and — most importantly — changed no Syrian calculation. Syrian aircraft flew from that field again the next day. A year later Assad gassed the city of Douma.

The value of performance

Regardless, Washington loved Trump’s performative show of force. Fareed Zakaria, who had once called Trump a cancer on American democracy, told CNN the next morning that “Donald Trump became president of the United States last night.” On liberal MSNBC, Brian Williams called the launch footage beautiful three times and reached for a Leonard Cohen lyric to give voice to his joy (“I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons”). Bret Stephens, another reliable Trump critic, saluted him in the Wall Street Journal and told him to go further and destroy the Assad regime for good. In the days after the strike the five top American newspapers ran eighteen editorials and op-eds about it, and not one of them opposed it.

Commentators who had spent four years lamenting American weakness reveled in the return to muscular stupidity. The applause outlasted the operational effect by at least a week.

It’s the credibility, stupid

So, why did the US strategic community record the operation that eliminated an arsenal as a humiliation, and the operation that didn’t even close an airfield for a full day as a restoration of American power?

The stock answer is credibility. Of course, a country’s credibility matters. But the more difficult question is what causes credibility. Washington implicitly assume that credibility reduces to a given leader’s reputation. That theory assumes that adversaries keep a ledger of a president’s past resolve and consult it before their next adventure. Political scientists have spent decades searching for that ledger, combing crisis archives for a case in which a leader who backed down in one place was tested for it in another. They keep coming home with thin gruel. (See Blue Blaze’s Jennifer Lind with Daryl Press critiquing reputational arguments about Obama’s red line in Syria. )

Instead, scholars find that a country’s credibility is quite local: states read the interests and capabilities in the case in front of them, not character references from old crises. Every state after all believes that it is special (or exceptional). Russia, thus, did not seize Crimea because Obama declined to bomb Damascus; the Russians invaded because Yanukovych fled Kyiv and their fleet at Sevastopol suddenly sat in a country turning west. They calculated the likelihood of a US reaction based on US relations and capabilities with regard to Russia, not based on Obama’s behavior in the distant backwater of Syria.

Russia, after all, had seen fit to dismember Georgia in 2008, a much closer partner of the US than Ukraine, while the White House was occupied by a man who had already invaded two countries. The evidence is clear that adversaries judge the case and the capabilities before them. They do not audit a president’s soul and apply the lessons of his conduct from Syria or Iraq to Ukraine or Taiwan.

But reputational arguments have huge currency within Washington. The consensus that Obama had failed hardened within seventy-two hours. The town graded the process when the bombs failed to fall and never reopened the file when the results of the diplomacy came in. Derek Chollet later asked why the foreign policy establishment insists on filing a massive success under failure. The apparent answer is that the effect on a President’s reputation is practically the only metric people in Washington use to measure success.

That disturbing conclusion has three clear consequences that illuminate the current U.S. troubles in Iran.

First, a scoring system that rewards ordnance and ignores outcomes makes violence cheap and diplomacy expensive. Fifty-nine Tomahawks buy a week of admiring coverage. Removing an arsenal of mass destruction buys a decade or more of sneering. Presidents can do that math, even Trump.

Second, allies also learn the currency of force and denominate their demands in it. The Gulf states were not grieving over American reliability in the autumn of 2013. They don’t care about performative uses of force in Syria. They wanted the United States to eliminate their Assad problem, and the threat of chemical weapons gave them their best lever for the job. Obama’s deal did not destroy their faith in American protection—it frankly told them nothing about what the US would do to protect them from Iran. It took the lever of chemical weapons away and settled the issue of US intervention in Syria.

The idea of credibility as reputation is a weapon for US allies in US domestic politics, and they use it skillfully. If an allied leader wants a US attack on his regional adversary, he knows to frame it as a test of American credibility. So, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki flew to Washington in April 2023 to warn that if a Russian victory in Ukraine would send Chinese President Xi that using military force against US allies works. Expect a Chinese invasion of Taiwan “the next day”. Similarly, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told the Council on Foreign Relations in in 2023 that if Russia wins in Ukraine, “the message to President Putin but also to President Xi is that when they use military force, when they violate international law, when they invade another country, they get what they want. So if the United States is concerned about China … then you have to ensure that Putin doesn’t win in Ukraine.” Emmanuel Macron, addressing the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in 2025, warned that “if we consider that Russia could be allowed to take a part of the territory of Ukraine … without any reaction of the global order, how would you phrase what could happen in Taiwan? What would you do the day something happened in the Philippines? … So, what is at stake in Ukraine is our common credibility.”

None of these leaders was offering inside information about Chinese war planning. All of them were telling the U.S. president that his credibility was at stake and that failure to support the cause of the moment would create instability that would eventually wash up on American shores. True to form, current commentators assert that somehow it is necessary to fight a war with Iran in order to prove we will defend Taiwan.

Third, the establishment teaches presidents to make cheap commitments and only later bills them for the consequences. Obama’s real error was never restraint. He was theatrically incontinent at both ends. He blurted out a threat he had not thought through, then won the resulting confrontation more completely than any airstrike ever could have, then refused to celebrate his own victory. He won the war, but lost the press conference.

None of this means the credibility talk carried no cost. It cost Obama plenty. He spent the rest of his presidency arguing about it with his own cabinet and the label has followed him into the histories. The red line damaged him in Washington beyond any dispute. But that is a fact about Washington. It is not a fact about Syria, and it is certainly not a fact about American power.

An establishment that cannot distinguish a president who eliminated a chemical arsenal from a president who fired 59 missiles at an airfield and accomplished nothing has not learned anything about credibility. It has instead told us something about itself.

The lesson for the war in Iran is that credibility is not a blood debt. Washington may believe that once a president unsheathes his sword, the objective automatically becomes drawing blood rather than obtaining the result for which the sword was drawn.

But the more pertinent question remains what course of action best advances American interests. If negotiation, a limited settlement, or simply declaring victory and going home, can deliver more than the next military strike, then refusing continued war is not weakness. It is the very soul of statecraft. At the moment, Trump’s attachment to this macho code and his apparent fear of the effect on his domestic standing of abandoning force options in Iran seems to be keeping him (and us) in a pointless war.

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Winona, Minnesota, my hometown, is best known for its beautiful scenery, high-quality root beer, and giving Winona Ryder her first name—a connection that briefly put the town in the national spotlight when Ryder returned to film a Super Bowl commercial in 2020. So I don’t expect Winona (the town) to make the news, especially at the intersection of high-tech surveillance and violence.

But at the end of July or early August, someone—or perhaps several people—sawed down this small town’s eight Flock Safety cameras along with two in nearby Buffalo County in a coordinated act of vandalism. (For the record, I was in town visiting my father, but I was enjoying a root beer the whole time.) Nor is Winona alone: other small towns and suburbs in Minnesota, and indeed the whole country, have also seen theft and vandalism against Flock cameras. The vandalism points to a larger problem: surveillance technologies that seem modest one camera at a time can become far more intrusive when they are networked, searchable, and widely shared.

Flock cameras are automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), and government agencies use the imagery to investigate vehicle theft and other crimes. Unlike a standard red-light camera, which activates when a vehicle runs the light, Flock cameras capture point-in-time images of all vehicles that pass within view. They help police solve crimes and may have even stopped a mass shooting. It is possible that they deter other criminals. As reported in The Atlantic, one convicted San Francisco felon declared, “Soon as you slide past that motherfucker with some stolen plates, they going to issue a warning to every SFPD station in that area, if not the entire city, and they going to start dispatching.” Flock claims that thousands of law enforcement agencies, businesses, and homeowners associations use its products.

From a privacy point of view, the problem is not any individual Flock camera but rather the network they create. Taken together, the cameras can create a far richer record than any one camera can, allowing law enforcement to search where a vehicle has been seen across time and place. Some individuals are photographed hundreds of times over a matter of months, leaving a detailed, searchable record of where their vehicles have been seen. A federal judge in Norfolk recently upheld that city’s 176-camera system but warned that the constitutional balance could change as ALPR networks expand.

Some law enforcement personnel have abused their access, using camera data for searches involving spouses and other personal matters. Concerns about ALPRs grew and became more political after reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) worked with local police to gain access to Flock camera data and that Texas officials used Flock data as part of an investigation into a woman who was believed to have had a self-managed abortion despite initial law enforcement claims that she was “being searched for as a missing person.” Criticism has crossed ideological lines: John Oliver devoted a segment to ALPR privacy concerns, while Tucker Carlson warned that Flock cameras were the “largest mass-surveillance operation in history.”

In Winona, police requests for information on the vandalism have not resulted in any leads, suggesting that skepticism toward the cameras is widespread. Comments on the police request included a few supportive of the cameras, but many ranged from the sarcastic (“It’s almost like Americans aren’t okay with living in a police state”) to the playful (“Whoever it is, was at Bible study with me”) to serious posts noting law enforcement abuses—as well as the obligatory antisemitic conspiracy theories.

The central privacy problem is aggregation. A single observation in a public place may reveal little; thousands of observations, linked across a network and made searchable, can reveal much more. That means the most consequential policy questions are not simply whether Flock cameras and other ALPRs should be legal, but how dense networks may become, who may search them and for what offenses, whether warrants are required, how widely data may be shared, how long records may be retained, and how improper searches are audited and punished.

People, including elected officials, expect companies like Flock to ensure privacy, but government should set the legal rules that govern government surveillance. Private companies naturally respond to the incentives and demands of their customers. Voluntary company safeguards can help, but they are not a substitute for enforceable standards on data retention, information sharing, permissible uses, auditing, and penalties for misuse.

The destruction of the cameras in Winona and other parts of the country is vandalism and should be treated as such. But the hostility it reflects should not be dismissed as mere paranoia. Federal, state, and local governments should establish clear rules on access, retention, data sharing, permissible uses, warrants, and penalties for misuse—and make those rules transparent to the public.

If officials cannot convince the public that surveillance networks are bounded, transparent, and accountable, the next camera that goes up may simply become the next one that comes down.

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In July, President Trump signed an executive order directing the National Park Service to put up signs on the federal sidewalks outside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The signs are meant to challenge what the White House calls a distorted, ideological view of U.S. history, and to direct visitors to a report, Saving America’s Story, released on July 4.

The controversy brought me back to my first book, Sorry States. Focused on how national memory affects reconciliation between countries, it also explores the domestic politics of remembrance – which are very much in evidence in the current dispute.

Many readers likely view the controversy as caused by the Trump administration’s inappropriate interference, in which ideological non-experts are trying to impose a triumphalist, America-first historical narrative on the venerable Smithsonian. Indeed, the administration has previously waded into historical debates, with its 1776 Commission and, during this 250^th anniversary year, “freedom trucks” touring the country with a mobile exhibition about America’s founding. More disturbingly, the administration has threatened Smithsonian funding and pushed for a museum director’s firing (leading to her eventual resignation).

While this indeed sounds disturbing, there’s another side of the story. What many Americans will see as a crisis is something else: people arguing, out loud, about their country’s story. This suggests not democratic decay, but strength.

The danger of the single story

In 2009, the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a TED talk called “The Danger of a Single Story.” She describes how her family spoke about one of their servants, Fide, entirely in terms of his family’s poverty. When she saw a beautifully crafted basket made by Fide’s brother, Adichie was surprised by his talent and creativity, which had not been part of her family’s single story of that family’s poverty.

After moving to the United States, Adichie herself later encountered a single story of Africa, when her college roommate assumed that she was poor and ignorant about technology. The roommate’s story about Africa wasn’t invented; it was simply the only one she had, making her unaware of the diversity of the African experience.

Indeed, Adichie argues that danger of a single story isn’t that it’s a lie, but that it is incomplete. She notes that single stories are a function of power – that as people compete to tell the story, they often silence competing interpretations.

Stories at the Smithsonian

The controversy at the National Museum of American History (NMAH) is about the struggle to tell America’s story. The story it tells matters; the museum attracts approximately 17 million visitors per year.

Despite widespread political polarization these days, museums remain a highly trusted institution in American life. Poll data show that not only do Americans value museums tremendously, 92 percent of them say they view museums as nonpartisan sources of information.

The Trump administration begs to differ—at least about the NMAH. “Museum leadership,” argues the White House report, “has explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”

The report lists several problems. It argues that in this 250th-anniversary year, the NMAH offers no major exhibit on the founding era, on Washington or Jefferson, on the Continental Congress or the Revolution. Benjamin Franklin makes an appearance because of his antislavery work. The report quotes NMAH director Anthea Hartig saying she views history as “a prime tool of social justice” and celebrating the museum’s “Decolonization Plan”; it indicts the museum’s exhibits and educational curricula for far-left politicization.

The report would go even further than Trump’s executive order, recommending “it would benefit most Americans, especially parents bringing their children for a tour, if the Smithsonian’s flagship history museum had a label at every entrance that reads: ‘Warning: the exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don’t want you to love your country.’”

This swipe at what the report calls unpatriotic curators lays bare its assumption that museums are places to emphasize national achievements and instill national pride. Although this is a defensible viewpoint (and a fundamental conservative value), it risks leaning into a single celebratory story.

Liberals, by contrast, value self-critical history as strengthening the country and celebrating its freedoms. As author James Baldwin wrote, “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Thus when the historians at the NMAH downplay stories about the nation’s founding and interpret American history through race, migration, gender, sexuality, hierarchy, and power, they believe they are engaged in a constructive, not destructive enterprise – indeed, an act of patriotism.

The dangers of a single history

Those choices may produce illuminating stories about the American past. But a virtue of the current controversy is that it remind us that they are not handed down from the heavens on stone tablets, but choices by museum curators and administrators. And importantly, this group has its own proclivity to tilt toward a single story.

We don’t have a party breakdown of NMAH curators, but we do have data on the pipeline from which they emerge. In a study of faculty at 40 leading universities, Mitchell Langbert, Anthony Quain, and Daniel Klein found that registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans in history departments by 33.5 to 1 — the most skewed of any of the fields they examined.

Thirty-three to one is a problem. Scholarly norms and priorities converge, and are transmitted to younger scholars, about what questions are appropriate and important, language one can and cannot use, and what counts as high-quality and “interesting” work. Young people who “get it right” are elevated, while others who challenge orthodoxy are excluded. Nobody at the NMAH experiences their work as ideology. It’s what a single story feels like from the inside.

We’ve done this before

The approach of August 6 – the anniversary of the U.S. nuclear bombardment of Hiroshima – brings to mind another tussle at the Smithsonian.

In 1994, the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) was planning a fiftieth-anniversary exhibit around the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the Enola Gay. The exhibit emphasized Japanese suffering on the ground and encouraged visitors to ponder whether the atomic bombings were necessary.

Veterans’ organizations revolted. The Air Force Association and the American Legion demanded that the exhibit be canceled. The Senate passed a resolution calling the script “revisionist and offensive” – a resolution that passed unanimously (can you imagine?). 81 members of Congress called for the NASM director’s resignation, and Rep. Newt Gingrich threatened Smithsonian’s funding.

In January 1995 the Smithsonian cancelled its planned exhibition, and that May, NASM Director Martin Harwit resigned. What finally opened the next month was a fuselage and a modest label. (Today the Enola Gay is exhibited at a Smithsonian annex near Dulles airport.)

Scholars usually lament this episode as politics interfering with scholarship. But this framing neglects the virtue of the debate itself. Smithsonian curators enriched the story of World War II’s end and the dawn of the nuclear age: pushing for inclusion of the effects of nuclear bombardment, and expanding the narrative to include the perspective of the victim. Others argued in newspapers, hearings, and kitchen tables. Historians published. Veterans testified. The Japanese weighed in too, with the prime minister and atomic bomb survivors (hibakusha) urging the museum to include victim artifacts, such as charred clothing, that showed the horror on the ground. Competing memories were forced into the same room. Nobody got the single story they wanted, which is exactly the point.

Today, if one visits the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque, NM (as I did recently—highly recommended), their story of the Manhattan Project is enriched by a section that discusses the effects on Japan. The exhibit also describes the science in transnational rather than American-centric terms: explaining the contributions of many scientists across time and space (and describing the nuclear programs pursued in Germany, Japan, and Russia). At this Smithsonian museum, then, many stories are on display.

The alternative

Contested history is sign of neither weakness nor authoritarianism. Authoritarian governments use censorship, coercion, and information control to craft a national story that serves the regime’s goals while suppressing other stories. In China, for example, a law prohibits “the distortion, defamation, desecration, or denial” of the deeds and spirit of ‘heroes and martyrs,” and such actions are punishable by up to three years in prison.

Democracies are messier. We have the freedom to access, share, and discuss information. We fight about the past in public, often noisily, sometimes unfairly. The point is that no curator, president, party, or professor gets the final word.

When democracies criminalize historical claims (Germany is the best-known case for its Holocaust-denial statute), people should debate the effects on scholarship and politics. Indeed, European historians have done so: in what was called the 2008 Appeal of Blois, signatories argued “it is not the business of any political authority to define historical truth and to restrict the liberty of the historian by penal sanctions.” Although Holocaust denial laws might seem straightforward and important, the danger is in the gatekeeping. Ultimately some person or party will have the power to decide what historical claims fall within the ban – a policy of exclusion that tilts a country closer to a single story.

So, when it comes to the controversy over the National Museum of American History, hold the hearings. Publish the rebuttals — the House Democrats already have. Hear from the professors and the Organization of American Historians. Summon the directors to hear why they think a national museum should “problematize” U.S. history, and decide if you agree with them. Step inside that “freedom truck,” take a look, and debate what you see. And refuse to be content with the single story.

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The Thinker has always challenged the conventional wisdom.

Challenging received wisdom is the first duty of a Thinker because, as everyone knows, the conventional wisdom is always wrong.

The Thinker stands outside the conventional wisdom, answerable only to evidence, reason, and the professional requirement to produce a counterintuitive argument by Thursday.

The problem is that almost everyone the Thinker knows also claims to oppose the conventional wisdom. Every article promises to challenge prevailing assumptions. Every conference seeks to move beyond stale orthodoxies. Every panel consists of four independent minds courageously disputing positions that none of them appears to hold.

The Thinker suspects that challenging conventional wisdom has itself become the conventional wisdom.

This poses a serious professional problem. How can you distinguish yourself in contesting a conventional wisdom that everyone already condemns?

It is a challenge worthy of the Thinker’s genius.

The Thinker could defend the supposed consensus. That would certainly be counterintuitive, perhaps even revolutionary. Few of his peers would expect a leading independent thinker to argue that government officials, mainstream analysts, and respected institutions broadly understand the issue correctly.

But this seems reckless.

The conventional wisdom might be right in some narrow, technical sense (which is probably how it became conventional in the first place). Yet saying so would leave the Thinker with no obvious role. Newspapers rarely commission articles titled “Officials Have Thought About This Carefully.” Policymakers do not need him to tell them that their policies are sensible; they have entire org charts full of deputies, special assistants, and deputy assistants for that.

The Thinker understands, however, that the conventional wisdom need not consist of propositions that are widely believed—or, for that matter, believed by anyone at all. It is better understood as a group of people no one actually likes. The conventional wisdom, in this view, emerges from the Blob, a vaguely defined establishment that dominates thought in Washington.

The Blob has a peculiar composition. It includes everyone in Washington except the person currently denouncing it. Like dark matter, the Blob cannot be observed directly; its existence is inferred from the energy devoted to opposing it.

The Thinker, by that definition, is not part of the Blob. Blob Thinkers attend the same conferences, appear in the same newspapers, circulate through the same institutions, and compete for the same grants. But they carry tired establishment ideas into the system. The Thinker, by contrast, carries fresh establishment ideas into it.

The Thinker’s greatest professional asset is identifying as an outsider who just happens to be located on the inside. His craft is the ability to present a familiar conclusion through a seemingly distinctive analytical lens.

Producing a small-batch, artisanal heterodoxy on a weekly basis, however, is not easy.

The Invention of Tradition

Surveying the current intellectual landscape, the Thinker quickly identifies the Blob’s latest consensus: the world has entered a new era of great-power competition. The Thinker sees what the tired establishment cannot. The world’s major powers are not competing so much as regressing. They remain trapped in adolescence. The United States seeks reassurance that it is still dominant. China craves recognition. Russia acts out. Middle powers test boundaries. Smaller states play one parent off against another.

What the international system needs is “Geopolitical Adulthood”.

The phrase is ridiculous, but only if you think about it. It sounds new but also instantly familiar and inevitable, like something history has been waiting to call itself.

His argument is that power now requires emotional as well as material maturity. Adult states accept limits, take responsibility for their neighbourhoods, and stop expecting the international system to validate their identities. The article’s real target is the establishment, whose talk of credibility, resolve, and leadership the Thinker diagnoses as textbook adolescence.

The Thinker titles the resulting article “The World Must Grow Up” and peppers it with references to Geopolitical Adulthood.

Foreign Affairs eats it up.

At first, colleagues resist. Some object that states do not possess childhoods. Others say the metaphor privileges Western ideas of maturity. One reviewer complains that the concept lacks clarity and asks whether China is an adolescent, a parent, or a civilisation-state. The Thinker regards this confusion as evidence of the concept’s richness.

Gradually, the phrase spreads.

A popular columnist writes that Washington and Beijing must “achieve Geopolitical Adulthood.” A foundation launches a Global Maturity Initiative. A thinktank conference asks whether the Global South has entered Geopolitical Adulthood. A consultancy produces a Strategic Maturity Index based on defence spending, diplomatic restraint, and a willingness to attend summits in other people’s capitals.

Eventually, a foreign minister announces in her new national security strategy that “Our country is ready to assume the responsibilities of Geopolitical Adulthood.”

The Thinker’s idea has escaped the narrow world of reports and seminars. He has “elevated the debate”.

The Thinker feels a small surge of pleasure, followed quickly by concern.

When the Heresy Becomes the Creed

Governments have turned a subtle framework into a hierarchy in which powerful states declare themselves mature and classify everyone else as adolescent. The language of adulthood now disguises coercion, condescension, and the desire to subjugate others. Worse, the foreign minister did not credit him.

Soon “Geopolitical Adulthood” appears everywhere. Lesser analysts use it casually on television. Journalists describe it as the emerging consensus. A university launches a Centre for the Study of Geopolitical Adulthood. People who once questioned the term now earnestly explain it to the Thinker.

The phrase becomes useful precisely because it can redefine any policy in a relatable way without actually changing it.

Intervention becomes adult responsibility; restraint becomes adult self-control. Joining an alliance demonstrates maturity, while refusing to join one shows adult independence. China invokes Geopolitical Adulthood to demand respect for its status. The United States invokes it to demand that China behave more responsibly. Every state proves its maturity by continuing to do what it had already intended to do.

Another Turn of the Wheel

The Thinker realises that his challenge to the conventional wisdom has become the conventional wisdom. He explains to his colleagues that the establishment has settled into groupthink. They nod and tell him they have reached the same conclusion.

It is time to challenge the conventional wisdom of his own idea. He writes a second article, “Beyond Geopolitical Adulthood.”

The problem, he notes, is not that his original argument was wrong. On the contrary, it was so right that others corrupted it. The problem lies not in the concept but in its vulgarisation by the Blob. Circumstances have changed. Evidence has accumulated. The policy debate has moved on, arguably full circle.

He explains that the adulthood metaphor has infantilised international politics. The Blob, he writes, has embraced adulthood the way it embraces everything: as a substitute for thought.

The moment demands a challenge to this new orthodoxy: Strategic Mindfulness.

The Thinker now finds himself in the odd position of opposing a consensus he has helped create. That is lonely work, but intellectual independence often is.

His new article attracts even more attention. Journalists praise it as a challenge to entrenched thinking. Officials invite him to discuss its implications. Other analysts begin using his latest formulation.

A few months later, a prime minister announces that his country will achieve Strategic Mindfulness by 2040.

The Thinker listens with mixed emotions. His ideas have challenged the conventional wisdom yet again. Already, he is starting to see their limitations.

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The rise of China, the spread of AI-driven weapons systems, the spread of authoritarianism, and other security challenges demand forms of knowledge that cannot be surged or improvised in a crisis: language skills, regional expertise, historical judgment, cultural understanding, economic statecraft, technological fluency, and a capacity to think rigorously about war, coercion, and political orders.

Universities produce this knowledge, yet they and government agencies have an uneasy relationship. At times in U.S. history, universities served as the country’s strategic brain trust; at others, they have viewed national security work as morally compromised, intellectually distorting, or politically dangerous. The Trump administration’s assaults on the academy have taken an already-troubled situation and made it far worse. The question today is whether the academy can preserve its independence and critical spirit while preparing the United States to understand and meet the security problems it now faces.

In the past, the U.S. academy often responded wholeheartedly to national security crises. During World War II, many leading academics joined government research labs, helped design propaganda campaigns, and served in intelligence. A former MIT professor, Vannevar Bush, who in World War I invented a way to detect German submarines, headed the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) in World War II. Bush and the OSRD coordinated defense research, including the Manhattan project. Outside of the hard sciences, anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and other social scientists played important roles in intelligence collection and analysis. Economists assessed enemy production and transportation networks, as well as contributing to wartime mobilization and planning. Universities themselves became training centers for soldiers in areas such as engineering, medicine, and foreign languages.

This partnership between government and the social sciences continued in the Cold War era. In their research, academics addressed important Cold War concerns like the robustness and spread of democracy, the transformation of traditional societies, and Soviet politics. The National Defense Education Act of 1958, passed after the Soviet launch of Sputnik, led to the development of Title VI programs for the study of foreign cultures and languages. The nuclear era led academics to develop game and bargaining theories to study deterrence, arms races, and escalation.

This cozy relationship began to shift in the 1960s, especially as universities became hotbeds of anti-war sentiment. During the height of the Vietnam War, Ramparts magazine published stories disclosing secret CIA funding of student groups. Other revelations about CIA-funded faculty research raised questions about academic integrity. FBI and CIA spying on civil rights and anti-war movements similarly produced a backlash both on and off campus. After Vietnam, many academics saw dual-use research—language training, area studies, behavioral science, psychology, anthropology, political development, and communications research—as potentially tied to counterinsurgency, surveillance, targeting, or propaganda.

Some of these suspicions declined in the 1980s as Vietnam shifted from memory to history. The post-Cold War holiday from history allowed the question of the role of the academy in national security to remain a subject of debate but one with no sense of urgency.

The drift away from national security showed up across the social sciences.

Area studies are vital for national security, and the need is great. The United States, despite being a nation of immigrants, has numerous foreign language and cultural expertise shortfalls across the federal government. Government funding for area studies was already small and uneven, and the Trump administration cut it further. Even if a future administration restores funding due to a crisis in one part of the world, such expertise is not something that can be quickly surged.

The study of history, too, often does not meet national security needs. Policymakers regularly draw on historical analogies in their decisionmaking – but they do it poorly. Universities, however, offer only limited help. For years, the U.S. academy has produced too little usable historical expertise on war, diplomacy, intelligence, strategy, and statecraft. The study of military history in particular has long been in decline. In general, enrollment in history continues to decline, and universities are cutting history programs as part of a broader turn away from traditional liberal arts. Although the Department of State and Defense employ hundreds of historians both to teach their leaders and to chronicle U.S. diplomacy and defense, these areas are given short shrift in the academy. Making all this worse, the Trump administration has tried to censor or distort history on federal government websites and other institutions, criticizing research that highlights America’s flaws and problems as unpatriotic.

Anthropology, like history and area studies, faces cuts, but in many ways its problems are even more acute. Understanding culture, local politics, kinship, identity, religion, and perception are all integral to success for many U.S. policies, and anthropologists can play a helpful role. Anthropology, however, has long emphasized a “do no harm” ethos that is a difficult fit with any government’s policy, especially that of a superpower that is often engaged in war or other policies that can lead to death, displacement, and other harms. The American Anthropological Association condemned the U.S. military’s Human Terrain Project, which in Iraq and Afghanistan embedded anthropologists with combat forces as part of overall counterinsurgency efforts. A lack of such knowledge from the academy leads the government to turn to other sources – or simply lack cultural understanding when they make decisions.

Economists study sanctions, industrial policy, war economies, and other issues vital for national security. The field, however, undervalues the study of economic instruments of national policy, with only a few programs emphasizing economic statecraft. In general, the field focuses on abstract models and causal inference, but many national security issues are hard to randomize and measure, and thus difficult subjects for top economics journals. More broadly, most of the field understandably focuses on a set of assumptions based on free markets, while security studies examines issues where markets and institutions are exploited by strong actors, wartime contingencies outweigh efficiency concerns, and other situations that do not fit traditional models.

Many issues at the heart of political science – the causes of war, alliances, and decision-making, among many others – are directly tied to core national security issues. James Goldgeier argues, however, that tenure and promotion often focus exclusively on peer-reviewed scholarship, neglecting the value of policy engagement. The field itself undervalues area studies in favor of more theoretically and methodologically robust sub-disciplines. The result is what Michael Desch describes as the “Cult of the Irrelevant,” where scholars pursue answers to questions of little value to the policy community.

Constructive ties between the academy and government are far more difficult in the Trump administration. Administration leaders have criticized universities as woke, unpatriotic, and useless. The administration has shown scorn for research and expertise. Often in the name of opposing DEI, it has cut university funding, especially at elite institutions, but many of the programs affected have little or nothing to do with DEI. It has tried to block international students, a source of financial support and intellectual energy for universities as well as invaluable expertise to ensure America’s technological leadership.

The Trump administration’s actions are likely to lead to the further decline of universities as part of the national security intellectual base. In addition to the decline in government support, scholars are understandably concerned that national security work can be a pretext for censorship or other threats to academic freedom. These were legitimate fears before Trump and now are much more real.

I fear the United States government will relearn the value of academic expertise only after a major failure. Unfortunately, rebuilding the national security intellectual base will require more than restoring budgets or issuing new calls for public service. A healthier relationship would be recognizing the abuses and compromises of the past (and present) while still accepting that an effective foreign policy requires centers of deep knowledge to navigate a dangerous world. The alternative is a country that enters the next crisis with fewer experts, weak historical memory, and a diminished capacity to understand the technologies and adversaries that will shape its future.

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On this occasion of the 250th birthday of the United States, Blue Blaze gathered some friends and asked them their thoughts and advice for the country.

What’s Right with America

Dan Reiter (Emory University)

Happy 250th birthday, America! My birthday wish for America on the occasion of its quarter-millennium marker is this: remember your virtues and strengths. It’s far too easy to bemoan everything America is doing wrong these days, its missteps, shortcomings, and failures. Let’s keep in mind everything we have going for us.

America is dynamic and optimistic. It sometimes feels like we are stuck in a downward rut we will never get out of. But remember that we have bounced back from challenging times in the past, the Civil War, the World Wars, the Vietnam/Watergate/oil crisis/recessionary mess of the 1970s, the 9/11 attacks, Covid, and others. We will again shake off challenges and get back on track.

Also remember that especially from a foreign policy perspective, we have so much going for us. Our borders remain secure, our military is powerful, our economy is robust and growing, and most of the formal structures that maintain American global influence remain intact. Our net dependence on foreign oil is historically low. The terror threat is more manageable than since the 1980s. One of our principal adversaries, Russia, is fighting the most self-destructive war waged by a great power since World War II. North Korea is staying in its cage. Instability-generating civil wars in Syria and Iraq have ended. It’s been twenty years since any state joined the nuclear club.

Many bemoan America’s abandonment of its core foreign policy values: advancing democracy and human rights, supporting international cooperation to address global challenges, welcoming immigrants, and standing by allies. But these are values that we can and will support again. The world has deeply regretted America’s retreat, and it cannot wait for us to reverse course and embrace these values anew.

We of course should not look past our problems, missteps, and challenges. But we should also not allow pessimism to become crippling, or to lose the grander perspective that the current moment is just that: a moment within a very long era of American nationhood.

Take inspiration in what President Bill Clinton declared in his first State of the Union address, “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.”

Happy birthday, America! Here’s to the next 250 years!

Act your Age

Jeremy Shapiro (European Council on Foreign Relations & Blue Blaze)

So, America, you wily bitch, you’re finally 250. And what a 250 years it has been. The last quarter millennium has made you the richest, most powerful , and most successful nation on Earth. You sent a man to the moon, won a bunch of wars, and invented the airplane, baseball, and online dating. You have everything you ever dreamed of in your heady revolutionary youth, from a transcontinental land mass to ample flush toilets.

And yet you are not happy. You complain bitterly that you’re not rich enough and frequently lash out against smaller countries for little or no reason. Let’s face it: you have anger issues.

It’s time to settle down a bit, embrace your advanced age and appreciate what fortune has given you. Have you considered yoga? Or maybe universal health care?

If You Like the Fourth of July, Thank a Frenchman

Joshua Rovner (American University)

Revolutionary Americans had a lot of big ideas about philosophy and government. They knew less about how to win a war. The first two years of fighting were characterized by poverty and retreat, and George Washington’s ramshackle army struggled to remain a coherent fighting force. At this time it was not clear how such a force could overcome the larger, wealthier, and more professional British army. Indeed, some of Washington’s lieutenants thought his strategy was a disaster in the making. Given the overwhelming imbalance of power, they pushed to transform a conventional conflict into a guerilla war. American prospects were dim.

All of this changed, of course, when France joined the war against Great Britain. The alliance with France meant a critical infusion of men and material. Suddenly the Americans could fight on something like level terms. The arrival of the French army, and the combined navies of Bourbon France and Spain, meant the end of lopsided British military dominance. “If you like the Fourth of July,” a colleague once told me, “thank a Frenchman.”

But France did much more than provide guns and ships. French strategy was excellent. French military leaders worked well with their American counterparts, accepting a subordinate position in key decisions about the war. In so doing they strengthened the prestige of the Continental Army and the nascent United States. Meanwhile, French diplomats brought along Spain and Holland, despite real reservations in both countries. These moves enabled extraordinary joint and combined efforts later in the war, culminating with the surrender of British forces at Yorktown.

French efforts didn’t come cheap, however, and the cost of fighting on the Americans’ behalf dramatically worsened France’s debt burden. The monarchy did not have the financial tools that might have helped manage the debt, and economic turmoil fueled a domestic political crisis leading to revolution. France had fought well to achieve victory, only to become extremely insecure.

What can we learn from this story? One lesson is that lethality is no substitute for strategy. Although the war was quite violent, France’s wartime triumph as not a product of its superior killing power. Instead, French strategy self-consciously married diplomacy and force. A second lesson is that strategy is not the same as grand strategy. Sometimes, in fact, these concepts can work at cross-purposes. France’s theory of victory undermined its postwar theory of security.

Today’s US military is as lethal as any in human history. Yet strategic success remains elusive, as the Iran War reminds us. And warfighting prowess, however impressive, may lead to hollow victories if it is disconnected from a broader approach to national security. Enjoy the fireworks on the fourth, but spare a thought for what comes the day after.

To America at 250

Tomohiko Taniguchi (University of Tsukuba, Japan)

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a remarkable experiment began on the eastern shore of a vast continent. It was founded on an audacious proposition: that human beings, equal in dignity, could govern themselves and secure liberty under the rule of law.

The experiment has never been perfect. It has known civil war, injustice, economic hardship and moments of self-doubt. Yet time and again, America has shown an extraordinary capacity for self-correction and renewal. That may well be the secret of its greatness.

For those of us in Japan, America has been more than a country across the Pacific. It has been an ally, a source of inspiration and, at times, a mirror in which we have reflected upon ourselves. The international order that America helped build after the Second World War brought unprecedented prosperity and freedom to millions, including my own countrymen. The principles of free trade, open seas and constitutional government owe much to American leadership and sacrifice.

Yet anniversaries are occasions not only for celebration but also for reflection. The world still needs an America that remains confident without being complacent, powerful without being overbearing and patriotic without turning inward. The world still needs an America that understands that its greatest strength has never rested solely on its military or economic might, but also on its ability to inspire hope and attract goodwill.

At two hundred and fifty, America is still young by the standards of civilization. May it continue to renew itself and remain faithful to the ideals that animated its founding. May it remain not only a great power, but also a good power.

From one of America’s oldest and most steadfast friends across the Pacific, I offer heartfelt congratulations and the hope that the next chapter of the American experiment will prove as consequential and as inspiring as the first.

Beware the Monsters

Jennifer Lind (Dartmouth & Blue Blaze)

At its founding and for more than a century beyond, the United States pursued a foreign policy that sought friendly political and economic relations with other countries — relations aimed at supporting the strength of the U.S. economy, polity, and people. This foreign policy was restrained —in the words of John Quincy Adams, mindful to “go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” The notion that the United States would build a massive military and wield it in service of an expansive global agenda had no basis in our country’s early strategic culture.

As the United States grew in power, many Americans still believed in that posture, but other people argued for moving beyond it. They argued compellingly that America’s ideas held great promise for the world—that American leadership could make the world a better place. To get around the mistrust of foreign adventures that were deeply rooted in the psyche of the American people, advocates of U.S. global ambitions sought to change public opinion: to create institutions that supported a more assertive foreign policy posture.

This ambitious America did indeed do much good in the world. Its economic leadership and the shelter provided by its military enabled countries to lift themselves out of poverty, and protected countries that may otherwise have fallen to authoritarian aggression.

Today, the choice before the United States is not (as many frame it) between internationalism and isolationism. America has always been a highly engaged member of the global community and should continue to be so. But over time American leaders decided that “internationalism” should include interfering in countries’ domestic politics, dominating (rather than just particpating in) alliances, assassinating foreign leaders, pursuing nation-building experiments, and bearing staggering military budgets. In the post-Cold War era, this highly militarized internationalism has served the United States poorly: leading to costly failures of nation-building in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, exhausting the American people, and contributing to soaring defense spending and executive overreach.

Today the United States, marking its 250th anniversary, confronts dramatic changes in international politics. As Americans contemplate how they want to respond, they should remember that in our nation’s early history we have an alternative to the aggressive posture that the U.S. has pursued for the past few decades. A less militarized version of internationalism offers a better alternative to the near-constant warmaking that has become the norm in U.S. foreign policy. A more peaceful, but still engaged, internationalism enables the country to be more supportive of her own people, as well as more true to American values.

What’s your birthday wish to America?

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I’m driving back to the hotel after the conference dinner and Mark Blyth in the passenger seat is pointing energetically, urging me to make the left turn in his Scottish lilt, “Go! Go!”

I’m thinking, who is this dude?, and during the conference I found out. Although I was not interested in his commentary about making a left turn in a dark Wellesley suburb while being blinded by oncoming headlights, I soon realized that I wanted to hear pretty much anything else he had to say.

Mark Blyth teaches at Brown University, where he is the William R. Rhodes ‘57 Professor of International Economics. He also directs the Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance at Brown’s Watson Institute. A political economist known for asking why people keep believing bad economic ideas in the teeth of the evidence, he is the author of many prominent books that include Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers (with Nicolò Fraccaroli, 2025), and Angrynomics (with Eric Lonergan, 2020). His new book project is entitled Burning Down the House: Carbon Politics, American Power, and the Almighty Dollar.

In 2016 Blyth coined the term “Global Trumpism”—the argument that Trump, Brexit, and the broader populist revolt were symptoms of macroeconomic story thirty years in the making. He has a record of calling outcomes early that the consensus got wrong, from the failure of European austerity to the victories of Brexit and Trump. If you haven’t heard him on a podcast before, look him up as he is, reliably, one of the most interesting and entertaining academics around.

In this conversation, Blyth lays out the argument that American power for the last thirty-five years has rested less on what the United States makes than on the dollar system—a global merry-go-round in which the world sells America goods, piles up dollars it doesn’t really want, and lends them back by financing American debt—and that Washington is now dismantling the very arrangement that underwrote its dominance.

From there Blyth turns to oil, the “carbon coalition” in U.S. politics, and the strategic gamble of pursuing continued carbon dominance at the exact moment China is racing toward the technologies of the future. We explore the argument that going green weakens U.S. hegemony and trades dependence on oil for dependence on Beijing—and discuss whether Trump’s clinging to a carbon economy has a coherent theory of victory, or whether an inevitable green transition means the party of U.S. hegemony is pretty much over.

–Jennifer Lind

The Dollar System

JL: You have a memorable way of describing the global economy as a merry-go-round: countries sell goods to the United States, get dollars they don’t really want, and lend those dollars back to us by buying US debt. Can you walk us through that cycle, and explain why it’s enabled Americans to consume and borrow far beyond we actually produce?

MB: Before I start let me apologize for the ‘turn left’ in the car comments. I just couldn’t figure out why you were not turning left. Sorry.

JL: No problem. We clearly got past it.

MB: Second, some background for the reader. We met at a workshop discussing the adequacy of IR theory to explain the current moment. Most of our colleagues took that to mean the following. How can a country as pure and lovely and well-meaning as the US produce a monster like Trump? And if it could produce such a monster, that shows IR theory is bunk. I’m quite willing to accept IR theory as being largely bunk and entered the conversation with that prior. But as the day wore on I got less concerned with the minor piano chords crashing in the background as Trump’s name was uttered and the general pearl clutching that went on and came round to thinking that maybe IR theory has a good handle on all this after all.

What, I think both of us reacted to was the notion that if mainstream IR theory can’t explain how Trump appeared, then all Trump outcomes are random: that there is no plan. It’s just the whims of the dictator. But I don’t think that’s right and neither do you. What the Trump administration is doing is to me quite explicable and expected if you think of the US as a declining hegemonic power with dollar-induced Dutch disease.

JL: Quick interjection, because this is really interesting. ‘Dutch Disease’ is when a natural-resource boom (e.g., oil or gas) actually harms a country’s broader economy. The resource windfall drives up the currency’s value, which makes the country’s other exports—especially manufacturing—less competitive abroad. And the booming sector absorbs labor and capital. The result is a withered manufacturing base and overdependence on a single (often volatile) commodity. The name comes from the Netherlands’ 1960s natural gas boom, which coincided with a decline in Dutch manufacturing.

MB: Yes, let me explain what I mean by dollar-induced Dutch disease.

The US has a trick it can play that relies on no one else being able to play it. It has no current account constraint. Really. It doesn’t. Normal countries (everyone else) need to pay for their imports with exports, at least over the long run. The US does not. Why? Because of the huge amount of USD credit generated outside of the US by non-US banks and other financial firms, and because the rest of the world (China, the rest of East Asia and the EU) all run export surpluses against the US.

To pay for those imports the United States (OK, US firms that do the imports) send dollars to the folks making the exports. But those folks have a problem. If they take those dollars and turn them into their local currency and hand them out to the workers making those exports their wages would rise, costs will go up, and those exports would be less competitive.

So those exporting countries do two things. They repress domestic consumption and they send those dollar earnings abroad. Why? Because they now have an asset-liability mismatch on their banking book and need to turn the liability (foreign cash) into an asset.

So how do you do that? Well, for a long time the easiest thing to do was to send those dollars back to the US (literally, hand the money back) by buying a Treasury bill with it. That lowered US interest rates and encouraged us to consume (import) more, while the exporters built up more USD assets as reserves on the other side of the trade. Rather than ‘China owns the US,’ China was bankrolling endless US consumption, as was the EU and East Asia in general. This was a great deal. The US got TVs and computers and meds and cars and the exporters got bits of digital paper bearing 2 to 3% that we can print an endless amount of.

But it turned out that the deal had some costs. Like a country that strikes oil, demand for your currency shoots up in such a world, which along with all those imports flooding your market, stresses your own manufacturers. And after 20 years of this you hollow out and forget how to make things. That’s dollar-induced Dutch disease. Yes, the deindustrialization of the US and elsewhere was driven by capital substituting for labor at the margin, but it was especially hurtful in the US.

The US gutted its manufacturing capacities in the Midwest and Southeast through import competition and a huge spike in interpersonal and interregional inequality––and MAGA was the result. The dollar gave the US a form of Dutch disease where the dollar was the commodity that eased the current account and erased the ability of the US to do broad spectrum manufacturing. Props to Brendan Greeley and Mark Schwartz for this argument. It’s really theirs. I’m just riffing off it. But that was the secret of US power. It was the only country that had no current account constraint. But the cost was to hollow out its domestic manufacturing capacity.

JL: Can you say more about this – after all, the US is still a major manufacturer. Where do you see vulnerability in practical terms — what can’t the US do for itself anymore?

MB: When the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act got up and running it was based upon tax credits that Tim Sahay likened to “bottomless Mimosas.” You want to open up a battery factory? You get a tax credit. You employ displaced labor in the battery factory – you get a tax credit. So companies from the US and abroad fell over themselves to invest in the US in green tech, knowing that in some cases over half their costs would be covered.

But there was a problem. When you haven’t made things for two decades because you have been importing them, you don’t know how to make them anymore. And what you did know how to do is twenty years out of date. And the labor that made those things twenty years ago is long gone. And the firms taking those tax credits soon began to find that yes, you could build a battery factory in Kansas. But you couldn’t find the skilled labor you need to actually run it in Kansas. And yes, Americans want more manufacturing jobs – eighty percent of them in fact. But only 25 percent would want to do the work themselves. And according to the last NAEP study on math performance, US 12^th graders math skills continue to decline. And there is a huge shortage of skilled trades. And when China is ahead in 66 of 74 critical technologies according the Australians who track these things, then you can have a large manufacturing based in weapons and aircraft and cars. But that does not translate into sectors that you either forgot or never knew how to do.

JL: If the dollar system has been so good for the United States, why would Washington want to walk away from it now —what do you mean when you’ve said the dollar is being “disowned”?

MB: Let’s say that the view I am putting out here is remotely plausible: that the US is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t. If the US continues to allow massive foreign holdings of Treasuries we get to continue to import everything basically for free. But if we do that we drop further and further behind the exporters and end up even more hollowed out.

If you want to do something about that, what might you do? Tariffs? Export restrictions? A preference for domestic firms? Yes. And who did all that? Joe Biden. He added to Trump’s tariffs and doubled down on green investment. Trump is that same, except the green is being disowned and a strategy of carbon dominance is being adopted instead

JL: It looks like it’s not just Washington “disowning” the system – that demand for U.S. treasuries is falling as central banks diversify their holdings of currencies. The Economist argued, “Foreign central banks have become more hesitant to invest in Treasuries after witnessing the freezing of the Russian central bank’s foreign assets in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine” – that in this move Washington “crossed a Rubicon.” What’s your view on this trend, and what are its implications?

MB: I think this is important but not significant. The global dollar is not the property of the US. For every $100 made in the US, $70 of USD credit is made in London, Singapore and a host of other places. Why? Because it’s easier for Malaysia and India to trade in USD than in each other’s currencies due to volatility and clearance issues, and so they do. And all those exporters still like their dollar reserves for that reason as well as the ‘savings asset’ reason. The USD is the only globally accepted currency that is deep and liquid enough that any individual trade, even by China, does not move the market. And everyone likes that.

So, you can have a bit of diversification. You can have alternative clearance mechanisms. But unless the Germans suddenly become massive importers (necessary to get Euros out in the system at scale) or China opens up its capital controls (which they will not for reasons of control) what you’re describing is important in that it marks a new trend, but it’s not significant as a change of the system. Same with sanctions. Annoying but survivable. Ask the Iranians.

The Carbon Economy vs Green Economy

JL: Let’s bring in energy. Liberals praise Joe Biden’s administration for investing in green energy, and lament Trump’s doubling down on the carbon economy. But in your view there’s much more going on here than “Biden was committed to addressing climate change and Trump is a climate denier.”

You argue that climate denial in the US isn’t really about science — it’s about money, geography, and politics. Can you explain, in other words, what you mean by a “carbon coalition” in US politics?

MB: Sure. So what is a declining hegemon to do? Well, what is the US play to keep up with China?

Sanctions? Tariffs? Small yard and a high fence? They innovate right around all of it.

Compete on green tech? Biden tried it and if the Democrats were still in power we would probably be trying to improve skills to make that happen.

But there is another way. Go with the US real comparative advantage, which is energy. Electrical power in the EU costs 2 to 4 times what it costs in the United States based upon almost limitless LNG and oil. The ‘carbon coalition’ are those core Republican states that have carbon-heavy growth models (from Alaska to Texas to Mississippi to West Virginia), with fuels, farms, fertilizer, food, feedstocks, plastics, petrochemicals, coal, mining, etc. Think about the fact that the IRA’s promise was the devaluation of their assets, as Jeff Colgan and others have argued.

So this is a fight between two viable growth models. One, based on carbon, sees the IRA and decarbonization as a mortal threat. And one, based on post-carbon sources of electricity, wants to ‘help’ the carbon-heavy states ‘transit’ to green jobs and investment.

The problem is the carbon states don’t trust the green states to not turn them into the next Midwest and the blue states lack the capacity to pull off the transition that they want to but will try anyways. The fight in the US today between the two growth models is playing in everything from anti-ESG and wind power legislation to the massive carbon riders attached to US tariff deals.

JL: You describe the Trump administration as pursuing an intentional push for “carbon dominance.” What does that strategy look like in practice, and who benefits and loses in the short term?

MB: At the Turnberry Agreement where the EU bent the knee to Trump over a year ago, the EU ‘won’ by getting a 15 percent tariff. Forget that. Far more importantly, look at the $750 billion it promised to import in US LNG and oil. Look at the $500 billion that Japan promised in energy investments and imports. Look at the $150 billion South Korea promised. Consider that US LNG imports to the EU have increased fourfold since 2022 and could rise to 80 percent of the total by 2030. Tariff deals are a distraction from where the real action is, which is tying allies down to import more carbon.

Ask yourself what happens when an aggressive imperialist hegemon has one chip left to play. (One might ask, is AI dominance another chip, but in my opinion that is not going to work for the simple reason that the Chinese, as usual, will give the world their AI, which is 90 percent as good, for free). So the hegemon’s one chip to play is tying folks into carbon dependencies, and you can see where we are.

We can see why Venezuela happened. Not because it was an easy win but because Venezuela was around eight percent of China’s oil supply. And was can see why the US war against Iran is not just about Israel — Venezuela + Iran were close to 30 percent of China’s oil imports. It’s the 1930’s oil spigot all over again: Roosevelt’s policy of controlling the Japanese by restricting their access to oil. This time around China chokes your rare earths, you choke their oil, and tie everyone else into long term oil and gas deals that halt their transitions. That is carbon dominance.

JL: How much of a future can carbon dominance have? Does the Trump administration have a long game when it comes to energy? If we assume that there is a logic here – which Trump’s critics loudly dispute – I see two possibilities.

• The first is that the Trump administration believes a green transition can be avoided: that the U.S. should thus sustain the domestic carbon coalition and the global fossil fuel economy. In this view, the administration has a theory that the green transition won’t occur or perhaps will be overtaken by a subsequent energy revolution.

• A second possibility is that the Trump administration believes that a green transition is inevitable, but that in the interim the US should sustain the fossil fuel economy as long as it can – because, even if you think the party’s over, propping up the carbon economy gets the GOP elected by the domestic carbon coalition, and sustains U.S. global dominance for as long as possible.

Which of those views do you think the Trump administration actually holds? Is there a compelling theory of victory here for U.S. hegemony, or is the party over?

MB: Why choose? They are not alternatives. They are better and worse versions of the same game – carbon dominance. And if the Democrats come back in, not all that much changes. US automakers spent hundreds of millions on the transition to EVs only for their own state to devalue their investments. Next time the Democrats come back in and try IRA 2, I strongly suspect the key firms will be ‘once bitten twice shy’ about the whole thing.

JL: Liberals emphasize a dire climate threat and praise Joe Biden’s push toward green technologies. But conservatives argue that shifting toward a green economy would be a disastrous mistake: ceding U.S. hegemony and worse, putting U.S. prosperity in the hands of a strategic rival, China. The Europeans made this calamitous decision when they shut down their nuclear plants and embraced dependence on Russian gas. Can you explain the argument that a green transition makes the United States vulnerable to China?

MB: That is pretty much why the US is doing what its doing. And from that point of view it makes some kind of sense. But geopolitics aside, ultimately the United States has to deal with the climate crisis. It’s not immune to warming. US insurance markets are close to breaking point due to climate damage. It’s in a multi-decade climate fueled drought that is pushing up food prices. Climate breakdowns elsewhere are fueling the migration crisis that it is trying to control. There is only one global carbon budget and we are tearing through it as fast as possible. As such, the notion that geopolitical vulnerabilities should drive our policy is really weird for me to get my head around. We are literally burning down the house and the US is worried about the neighbors having a better BBQ.

JL: While the US clings to carbon dominance, you point out that China, India, Indonesia, and others are racing in the opposite direction. What are the key technologies of the green economy; how dominant is China in them; and why do you think the US just can’t catch up?

MB: Because you need scale. You need massive manufacturing scale to do so. And the US hollowed that out. China has planet-altering capacity. Every single year China drops the equivalent of the French electricity grid into its power stack, mainly with renewables, and now with batteries. The US is nowhere with batteries, which solve the critical latency problem of solar and wind. You need engineers and skilled workers. Millions of them. You need subsidized capital, directed investment, state-backed venture capital funds and a central bank that underwrites all these investments. The US not only lacks such things, it is ideologically allergic to such things. It’s simply not in the same game. Yes, the US picking up batteries, mainly by importing Korean firms. Yes, it’s picking up more high-tech manufacturing. But its light years away from Chinese capacity and scale.

JL: You suggest the Trump administration’s emphasis on the carbon economy could end up pushing Europe closer to China. How might that realignment unfold, and what would it mean for America’s place in the world?

MB: The EU is internally divided and stuck between a carbon hegemon that publicly disparages, if not despises them, and a global manufacturing powerhouse that is gunning for its core industries.

It’s 40 degrees in the whole of France today as I write. It has been that way for a week. This is the second heatwave of the summer and it’s not even July. Europe is baking. Drying out. Burning. It knows it has to work on decarbonization, and the US wants to block it. China does not. China will in fact give them all the green hard tech they need to do so. But they want to make their own. So what happens? Joint ventures with Chinese firms. But this time with the EU and its firms as the junior partner in software, batteries and AI. They will talk a good game of tariffs but the EU is even more dependent on China than it is on the US. So they will ultimately get closer to China.

JL: If we assume that the green transition is inevitable, you’ve said that the US becomes “a carbon-commodity producer in a post-carbon world.” Can you paint a picture of what that future actually looks like for the United States’s global power and influence? And for ordinary Americans?

MB: The path is already clear. The US will be building and driving $80k Ford F150s as the rest of the world loads up on $25k Chinese and Chinese/Euro electric vehicles. The US will exist as a carbon empire from Greenland to Chile running its own energy, tech and standards stacks. The rest of the world will take the Chinese tech and end up in their stacks. “Petrostates versus electrostates” is the jargon. The Chinese control East Asia. India is their main rival. The US and China find a modus vivendi. The EU sits in the middle shuffling more towards China over time.

JL: You write that you do see an alternative path — betting on what America is genuinely good at, like breakthrough technologies. What would it take for the US to choose that road instead, and what’s standing in the way?

MB: What the US is really good at is financial engineering and financing frontier tech. The US doesn’t, and indeed should not, do wind and panels. Buy it from elsewhere and get the benefits. It should be doing massive investment into mini nuclear tech, into deep thermal, into fusion, into gas regeneration and recycling and carbon capture and storage at scale. Instead we are doubling down on coal and chucking everything at a technology (AI) that, if it works, will produce mass unemployment in an already fractured and unequal world. What’s standing in the way is hubris and a strange inability to see that this strategy is self-defeating.

JL: Many thanks, Mark, for contributing to Blue Blaze. We look forward to reading your new book when it’s out: Burning Down the House: Carbon Politics, American Power, and the Almighty Dollar. And meanwhile, check out Mark’s podcast at the William R. Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance.

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As the US-China competition intensifies, international security scholar Seth Jones warns that China is already well along the way toward mobilizing for war—while the United States remains on a peacetime footing.

Seth Jones is the president of the Defense and Security Department and the Harold Brown Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Before CSIS, he ran the International Security and Defense Policy Center at RAND, and he worked closely conducting field research alongside U.S. Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan.

In this edition of the Scouted podcast, we discuss Jones’s new book, The American Edge: The Military Tech Nexus and the Sources of Great Power Dominance, published by Oxford University Press.

The book takes a sweeping view — a century of how the industrial bases of great powers rise, fall, and ramp up again. Jones chronicles previous periods of U.S. mobilization that he shows were characterized by an intense synergy between the U.S. government and private sector – and the leadership of “rat catchers” intent on mobilizing the U.S. economy and technological power for victory. Going beyond statistics, Jones examines the stunning successes, and profound sacrifices, of the individuals led in these historic efforts—drawing broader lessons for the United States in its future geopolitical competitions.

We’re delighted to feature his book The American Edge on Scouted.

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The Democratic Party has begun its search for a new foreign policy. The goal this time is simple. It is not to remake foreign policy per se. It is to help win the presidential election, which everyone agrees, will be the most important election since the last one.

In such circumstances, foreign policy will certainly bend to the will of the next Democratic presidential candidate and serve his or her concept of what the public wants.

But alas, that observation only begs the question of what the great unwashed American masses actually want from U.S. foreign policy.

Foreign policy analysts, of which I am one, should begin every conversation about public opinion with humility, ideally bordering on embarrassment. We do not know the public. We know hotels in Munich, acronyms in Brussels, and which former deputy assistant secretary has just published an essay in Foreign Affairs. These are not the same thing.

Still, given the electoral imperative, ignorance cannot become paralysis.

Plus, people keep asking us.

We may not know exactly what voters want from American foreign policy in 2028, but we know in our hearts (and from polls, not to mention from our in-laws) that voters mostly want foreign policy to leave them alone. “American leadership” does not stir the masses. “The rules-based order” does not cause white working-class men in Michigan to raise a PBR in celebration.

They simply don’t care. And why should they? America is basically safe, which means its population does not experience foreign policy as a daily necessity. They experience it as something experts with fancy degrees and long titles periodically impose on them, usually with an urgent warning that this time the world really could end.

It also seems clear that the public doesn’t love the results. US foreign policy has not exactly covered itself in glory over the last generation or two in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Iran, the global war on terror, the China shock, the moral contortions over Gaza, the inability to end wars once started, the habit of calling every problem existential and every compromise appeasement.

The record does not require sackcloth and ashes at every campaign stop. But it does require a Democratic candidate to say something more credible than “please give the steering wheel back to the people who drove us into the ditch.”

Three words

So whatevs, I’ll give it a shot. Any modern foreign policy shouldn’t need more than three words to describe its core mesage. So here is what the next Democratic candidate needs to do in foreign policy. If you don’t like my three words, get your own Substack and tell me yours. But, for the love of god, don’t tell me that “it is more complicated than that.”

The first word is novelty, by which I mean repudiation of the past more than invention of the future. And not just repudiation of Trump’s car crash foreign policy. The next Democratic nominee should not run as the custodian of the Biden foreign policy, the Obama foreign policy, the Clinton foreign policy, or the bipartisan foreign policy consensus that stretches back to the 1940s.

Historians can sort out the nuances later. Campaigns do not exist to litigate whether the 1990s really could have produced a better Russia policy, whether Afghanistan went wrong in year one or year twenty, or whether Biden handled Ukraine brilliantly but Gaza terribly. Remember, voters rarely reward historical precision.

The public mood looks anti-institutional, anti-establishment, and anti-incumbent. The polling tea leaves point in this direction, though foreign policy analysts should sip that tea with modesty. Navigator found recently that 87 percent of Americans think democracy is broken and a majority say the political system needs major change. Voters consistently say they want major change, though they are less clear on what they want it to be. That implies that any Democratic candidate should run against both Trump and Biden on foreign policy.

The candidate should tell them that everything will be different: “I am not running to restore the foreign policy of the last administration or the one before that. I am not running to restore the foreign policy of the last thirty years or the last eighty. I am running to build a foreign policy for a country that needs to get stronger at home, more disciplined abroad, and more honest about what power can and cannot achieve.” The details matter, but they should serve the campaign, not bury it.

The second word is peace. Democrats should take the word back.

This should not sound radical. Peace, after all, is better than war in every way. Peace costs less money. Peace kills fewer people. Peace produces less chaos, fewer refugees, fewer veterans with shattered bodies and minds, fewer burning cities, fewer emergency supplemental appropriations that somehow become tests of national virtue.

Yet in 2024, Democrats largely ceded the language of peace to Trump, a man whose idea of peace usually involves threatening war crimes, abandoning allies, and then declaring victory without having bothered to win the war.

Ceding peace was a mistake. Trump appears to understand instinctively that voters do not like war. He lies about it, of course. He pretends that his misdirected belligerence equals peace through strength. He pretends that his transactional cruelty will spare America from entanglement. He pretends that he alone can end every war in one phone call, usually because all foreigners secretly admire his golf properties. But he keeps returning to the same promise: I will stop the wars.

A Democratic candidate needs his own version, and it cannot sound like a think tank panel after lunch.

Supporting peace would require strength, both political strength to say the word and military strength to make it work. A peace-focused foreign policy still needs a serious military, reliable alliances, and defence industrial capacity. But strength should serve peace. It should not become a machine for finding new enemies, new missions, and new reasons why the United States must remain permanently mobilised against the next Hitler, the next Munich, the next domino, the next axis, the next once-in-a-generation test that arrives every six months.

A Democratic candidate could say: “the purpose of American foreign policy is to keep Americans safe and at peace. Not peace at any price. Not surrender. But peace as the explicit goal, the organising principle, the measure of success.”

The third word is normalcy. The United States should become a normal country.

The foreign policy class tends to treat normality as decline. America must lead. America must shape the world. America must write the rules. America must defend civilisation. America must occupy the head of the table, even when no one remembers inviting it to dinner. American exceptionalism is more than just a slogan; it is a way of life and a career strategy.

Trump offers the mirror-image delusion. America needs no one. Alliances are scams. Institutions are traps. Other countries are either freeloaders, customers, or marks. He rejects leadership but not domination. He does not want America to become a normal country. He wants it to be alone.

Normalcy offers a middle ground that nearly every other country on earth already understands. A normal country protects its interests. It cooperates when cooperation helps. It bargains hard. It obeys rules when rules serve a larger purpose, which they usually do. It does not confuse compromise with humiliation. It does not assume that every problem in every region requires an American theory of victory. It does not need to describe every trade negotiation, naval deployment, or climate agreement as a chapter in mankind’s destiny.

Normal countries have allies. Normal countries make deals. Normal countries sometimes fight. But they do not need a messianic theory of themselves or a project of global transformation to justify every action abroad.

My fellow foreign policy experts hate this word even more than peace. But the idea might also appeal more than Washington assumes.

Younger Americans, in particular, seem more internationally minded than isolationist, but also more modest about America’s role. Carnegie’s survey of Gen Z found not isolationism exactly, but something more annoying for Washington: internationalism without missionary zeal. Young Americans do not want America to withdraw from the world. They want it to calm down.

A Pew poll, one of many, found that most Americans want the United States to compromise more with other countries and focus more on problems at home. They appear to want a government that can tell the difference between the national interest and a sermon.

The candidate should say: “We can be a normal country. We can defend democracy by making our own work better. We can support allies without treating them like children. We can oppose aggression without promising limitless war. We can compete with China without organizing American life around fear. We can pursue peace not as a favor to humanity, but as a duty to our people.”

Govern when you win

Foreign policy professionals will object that slogans do not solve hard problems. True. But the old slogans seemed mostly to create hard problems that America didn’t need to have. “Leadership” turned into hegemonic compulsion disorder (HCD). “Credibility” turned into sunk-cost fallacies. “Strength” turned into made-for-TV violence.

The next Democratic candidate does not need to choose between policy seriousness and public resonance. The campaign does not need a white paper for every issue. But it does need better words that people can understand.

A new policy. A peaceful purpose. A normal country.

Those words would not answer every question or define every policy. They would not end the wars, discipline the Blob, rebuild the defence industrial base, or persuade voters that deputy assistant secretaries have souls.

But they might inspire some confidence in the next Democratic leader’s approach to to the world outside our borders. After the last few decades, that would count as a foreign policy breakthrough.

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In May 2026, the Department of Justice announced the arrest of a leader of Kataib Hezbollah, an Iraqi group with close ties to Iran. The U.S. government claims that the man, Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, planned to target synagogues and Jewish centers in Arizona, Los Angeles and New York. Prosecutors tied al-Saadi to a number of arson attacks on Jewish targets in Europe, claiming he “coordinated a wave of attacks across Europe, including bombings, arson, and assaults targeting American communities and interests.” And he was recently accused of planning to assassinate Ivanka Trump to avenge Donald Trump’s killing of Qassem Soleimani in 2020.

Although the involvement of a state like Iran sets these plots apart, anti-Jewish violence is otherwise on the rise. The Anti-Defamation League reports that physical attacks on Jews have reached the highest level since 1979.

When looking at anti-Jewish violence, what is notable is the variety of ideologies and actors that, in perhaps their only moment of unity, target Jews. Neo-Nazis, anti-Israel extremists, jihadists, far-left extremists, and state sponsors like Iran all arrive at anti-Jewish violence through different ideological pathways but often with the same practical effect.

Neo-Nazis have long seen Jews as enemy number one. Robert Bowers, a neo-Nazi who perpetrated the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history when he killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, saw Jews as behind a plot to flood America with refugees among other evils. Recent months have seen individuals with similar mindsets plot attacks. Skyler Rose posted antisemitic threats on X, declaring he wanted to blow up a synagogue among other plots: after searching his home, authorities found six completed pipe bombs and an assault rifle.

The latest round of the Israeli Palestinian conflict sparked by the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack has sparked attacks on Jewish targets based on their association with Israel. This led to the deadliest terrorist attack in Australia’s history, with a father and son killing 15 people at Bondi Beach on December 14, 2025.

In the United States, the renewal of this conflict has led to a spate of attacks. In June 2025, Mohamed Sabry Soliman yelled “Free Palestine” as he attacked — with an improved flamethrower and Molotov cocktails —a “Run for Their Lives” event to support Israeli hostages: injuring more than a dozen and killing one person. In March 2026, Ayman Ghazali crashed his truck into a Detroit-area synagogue and began shooting, fortunately killing no one before he turned his gun on himself. Ghazali had lost relatives in Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon and, inspired by Hezbollah, sought revenge.

More traditional jihadists like those tied to ISIS have long targeted Jewish and Israeli targets, often seeing them as interchangeable. In September 2024, Canadian authorities, working with their U.S. counterparts, arrested Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, a Pakistani national who planned to cross into the United States to conduct a mass shooting on behalf of ISIS against Jewish targets in New York.

Left-wing terrorism is also rising in the United States. Although not inherently antisemitic like neo-Nazism, many on the left sympathize with the Palestinians, seeing the struggle as part of a broader anti-colonial struggle against an oppressive power structure. Casey Robert Goonan, for example, conducted several non-lethal firebombings in northern California in 2024. Goonan claimed he was inspired by Hamas, and his lawyer contended Goonan sought to end what he considered Israel’s genocide in Gaza and support Palestinian liberation.

The al-Saadi arrest suggests state-sponsored terrorism against Jewish targets is now an additional concern. Historically, state sponsors can increase groups and individuals’ capabilities, making them more dangerous through better weapons, training, and other assistance. At the same time, states often inject a note of caution, fearing retaliation or escalation. Iran so far appears to be working with criminals or otherwise simply offering money in exchange for attacks rather than training operatives for a massive operation. This may be because Iran’s own capabilities are limited or because Tehran is focusing more on deniability and avoiding escalation than on pulling off a spectacular attack. It also makes “soft” (i.e., less defended) Jewish targets like synagogues and community centers more likely to be attacked than harder targets, such as Israeli diplomatic facilities.

The particulars of anti-Jewish violence will change depending on world events and the zeitgeist: many terrorists are surprisingly trendy. War against Iran shapes one form of anti-Jewish violence, while the continuation, or especially the high-profile renewal, of Israel-Hamas violence shapes the perceptions of the far-left and jihadists. Neo-Nazis remain a constant threat.

This diversity complicates intelligence collection, prevention, and resource allocation, as law enforcement cannot focus on a single ideology, network, or profile of attacker. The myriad perpetrators make it harder to prioritize resources. There is no overwhelming threat, and counterterrorism resources were already stretched before the Iran war. Because local Jewish communities have little choice but to fall back on defenses, synagogues, schools, and community centers increasingly resemble hardened targets, protected by guards, cameras, barriers, and emergency drills once associated primarily with embassies or military facilities.

The burden of security is likely to remain permanent rather than temporary. Yet defensive measures alone cannot fully solve the problem, particularly when attackers range from lone actors radicalized online to operatives linked to hostile states. The rise in anti-Jewish terrorism is thus not simply a challenge for the Jewish community, but a broader warning about the fragmentation of the extremist landscape in the West: movements with radically different worldviews are increasingly converging around shared enemies, shared grievances, and a shared willingness to use violence.

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Have you read…?

Inflation has made a roaring comeback in the 2020s—as a political issue. Setting aside a one-year pandemic-driven outlier, widespread dissatisfaction with what, in historical perspective, were relatively modest increases in the rate of inflation – it touched 4.1 percent in 2023 – was an important factor in explaining the outcome of 2024 U.S presidential election.

This is in some ways puzzling. After all, in the quarter century from 1968 to 1991, the average rate of inflation was 6.1 percent and only in five years did it slip under 4.1 percent. Nixon would have killed for an inflation rate as low as 4.1 percent—and I don’t mean that as a figure of speech.

Don’t get me wrong: inflation is politics, full stop, and should always be understood as such. Money is not neutral; monetary policy is power. Every policy choice about the management of money, however polished by the sheen of technocratic rigor, will benefit some interests at the expense of others. In fact, back in the 1990s, when everybody was patting themselves on the back for how inflation had been tamed, I was out there in the wilderness, insisting to anyone who would listen (few did) that every level of inflation was the outcome of a pitched political contestation, one that that yielded distinct winners and losers. I even coined the clever phrase “inflation is always and everywhere a political phenomenon.”

Nevertheless, I can’t help but wonder if we’re mis-conceptualizing as a problem of inflation what instead may be more accurately described as a “cost of living” crisis—the economics and politics of which are a very different affair. This matters, because measures that might make sense as public policy to “fight inflation” might miss the mark entirely in a cost-of-living crisis—or even make the problem worse.

The standard story (and what it gets right)

Traditionally we think of inflation as a macroeconomic phenomenon, which is the right way to think about it, and which yields some back-of-the envelope theories and policy prescriptions that work pretty well (if with an inescapable, pointed political edge). Our theories of inflation are deductively sound, even if their implied guesses about what will happen next tend to underperform in practice. Letting the money supply expand too quickly can provide the economy with a short-term sugar high, one that feels good in the moment but soon dissipates, leaving only higher inflation as its legacy. In the politically charged seasons of 1971 and 1972, Fed chair Arthur Burns, who was in the bag for Nixon, put his foot on the gas (thank goodness we no longer have to worry about the president imposing his political will on monetary policy.)

Furthermore, we know that supply shocks work their way through the system by price increases, and such shocks explain most of the inflation of the seventies. And robust rates of economic growth can create inflationary pressures by bidding up the price of labor (which, really, ought to be coded as a good thing overall), and high rates of employment can put pressure on prices as workers have the income (and job security) to spend more.

In sum, even though the causal arrows are much more wiggly in practice (such as the relationship between the money supply and the inflation rate), we have a decent sense of where inflation comes from, and what macroeconomic measures will bring it down (raising interest rates and various measures of fiscal austerity, all of which slow the economy).

It Might Be Microeconomic

But what if, instead of related to the management of the macroeconomy, the current cost of living crisis is a microeconomic phenomenon, rooted in structural changes in the real economy? There are good reasons to think that this might be the case. One of them is an increase in the swaths of the economy characterized by oligopolistic competition, a rise abetted by regulatory capture that has facilitated the proliferation of anti-competitive carve outs—a pathology likely to be exacerbated by kickbacks to high officials in the most nakedly corrupt executive branch in American history. If the American economy is characterized by larger and larger islands of imperfect competition, consumers will routinely pay more. With perfect competition – or even pretty good competition – firms face pressures to keep prices down.

Under imperfect competition, however, prices are higher, not due to “inflation” but because of market power: firms able to extract more than the “fair share” they would receive under perfect competition (that difference is what economists call “monopoly rents”). Such concentrations of economic power are inefficient and bad for society. That’s why Teddy Roosevelt busted the trusts. (This is also one of the many reasons why Paramount’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros is a catastrophe that no public-spirited government would permit.)

Somewhat more speculatively, even more important than oligopolistic competition is the notion that changes to wealth and income distribution may be at the root of the contemporary affordability problem. Over the past few decades, the well-off, the rich, and the ultra-rich have gotten much, much wealthier: both in absolute terms but also relative to the rest of society, whose prospects, if they have improved, have done so much more modestly. And in ways we have not fully thought through, the wealth of the few might actually be immiserating the lives of the many—even those who are, in absolute terms, somewhat better off than they once were.

Front Row Seats and the Rest of Us

An important inspiration for this notion derives from Fred Hirsch’s 1976 book, The Social Limits of Growth, which stressed the significance of “positional goods”—products that are defined by their finiteness and exclusivity, which economic growth cannot provide more of. Hirsh emphasized the consequences of status-seeking behavior (thus the high prices for branded luxury goods with modest practical utility; to paraphrase Lou Reed, “does anybody really need a $60,000 watch?”) But the subterranean microeconomic consequences of positional goods might be more profound. There are only so many front row seats to a Bruce Springsteen concert, a championship basketball game, or a Broadway hit. (Admittedly, you can get great seats to see the Mets for a song.) Ever wealthier people will be willing to pay more and more for such things—and it seems likely that this bidding up of the price of positional goods at the high end will drag up the prices of the next best things, and so on down the line. If true, those price increases are not really “inflation” as we have traditionally understood and conceptualized it.

Why Cutting Inflation Won’t Fix It

This may speak to the great cost of living crisis of our time—the price of housing in our signature cities. Regular people used to be able to live in city centers; that is now increasingly a struggle and commonly impossible. There are surely many reasons for this, but good housing in cities has a positional element to it, and concentrations of wealth at the high end have bid up prices in a way that has put tremendous pressure on affordability, especially as housing costs are the single biggest expense that most people face.

If the cost of expensive, highly salient items like housing (and other big-ticket items such as health care and higher education) have “risen faster than the rate of inflation” – especially cumulatively, over years and decades – those higher costs reflect a microeconomic problem (an issue of relative prices) not a macroeconomic one (related to changes in the aggregate price level).

Similarly, the solution to such problems, and addressing the political consequences of people frustrated with what is described as inflation and “rising prices” but is actually a cost-of-living crisis, will necessarily be microeconomic, not macroeconomic in nature. Microeconomic maladies will not be much mitigated if the overall inflation rate was brought down from 3.3 percent to 2.3 percent.

Let’s not bring our macroeconomic knives to a microeconomic gunfight.

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War is, among its many other qualities, a tremendous professional opportunity for the Thinker.

This is not the first thing most people say about war.

It is not even, morally speaking, among the top hundred things anyone should say about war.

But it is undeniable that a war, especially a large and alarming one, creates a sudden and insatiable demand for expertise.

The bombs fall, oil prices twitch, the president says something insane, maps appear on television, and all at once the world rediscovers its need for talking heads who can explain, with proper gravity, the difference between Hormuz and Halibut to a geographically challenged public.

Editors begin circling. Producers develop an urgent interest in “regional context.” Op-ed pages, which for months published only articles on looksmaxxing, bloom like desert flowers after rain. Friends of friends who once regarded the Thinker as a faintly comic figure, known only for sucking the joy from dinner parties, now lean toward him with furrowed brows and ask, “So what do you think will happen next?”

For the Thinker, this is heady stuff.

The Thinker, after all, must endure innumerable indignities in peacetime. People accuse him of overcomplicating simple matters. Policymakers nod gravely at his long-term analysis and then ignore it in favor of whatever they already planned to do. Television bookers call only when they need “someone on Europe” after a summit nobody watched.

Then comes the war and it solves, for a brief and glittering moment, the Thinker’s oldest professional problem: relevance. This should be his hour.

And yet, for the Thinker himself, it often feels like exactly the opposite.

Because the moment when the world most wants the Thinker is often the moment when thinking seems least adequate to the thing itself.

The crisis moves too fast. Events outrun interpretation. Every hour produces new facts, new claims, new atrocities, new rumors of ceasefire or escalation, new declarations of resolve from men who will not pay the price of their fiery threats. The Thinker barely finishes one sentence before our peripatetic President invalidates it in a tweet.

The Thinker’s métier is perspective, but perspective requires time—and war eats time like fire eats oxygen.

Worse, war exposes the ghastly disproportion between the Thinker’s medium and the horror of the thing itself. He trades in words, concepts, historical analogies, and tidy formulations. The crisis deals in torn bodies, burning cities, and frightened leaders with poor information, fragile egos, and large arsenals.

The Thinker’s historically informed distinction between tactical success and strategic failure may be perfectly sound. It may even be useful. But when children are digging through concrete for their parents, or some colonel is making a split-second decision whether a radar blip justifies launch, the distinction feels offensive in its elegant detachment.

In practice, the more immediate the crisis becomes—and the more the Thinker is pressed into service to slake society’s hypoglycemic appetite for analysis— the less connected the Thinker is to actual policymakers. Governments at war narrow their circles. Decisions move upward and curl inward. A small group of leaders, generals, aides, intelligence officers, and political operators hunch over maps, screens, and half-truths, trying to manage fear, vanity, and events at the same time. The Thinker, for all his panels and podcasts, usually stands outside that room with the other supplicants. The only thing that sets him apart is his certainty that he knows a better way.

This is one of the profession’s quieter humiliations. War, in the end, turns the Thinker simultaneously into a public authority and a private irrelevance.

Naturally, he has found ways to cope with this contradiction. He confuses visibility with influence. After three television appearances in two days, the Thinker starts to imagine that he is not just commenting on events but participating in them. An op-ed published before lunch acquires, in his own mind, the dignity of a policy intervention. A successful dinner party performance starts to feel like track-two diplomacy.

He reorganizes his bookshelf for Zoom backgrounds by relevance to the current conflict. He sends three emails with the subject line ‘Quick thought’ to people who have not responded to his previous three emails with the subject line ‘The current situation‘. He updates his bio to note his long yet previously undisclosed expertise on the region in question.

Sometimes he retreats into the meta-world and begins to analyze the analysis of the war rather than the war itself. Soon he is no longer discussing air campaigns or diplomatic tactics, but the politics around air campaigns and diplomatic tactics. This allows him to preserve a sense of sophistication and detachment while avoiding the vulgar embarrassment of being wrong about actual developments.

But the most seductive option is to take refuge in moral theatre. The Thinker can denounce with clarity where he cannot advise with nuance. He strikes a pose—grave but measured; pained but necessary; outraged but realistic—where he cannot exercise power.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with moral clarity. War often demands it. But the Thinker often uses morality as camouflage for impotence. Moral clarity is less burdensome than responsibility. Outrage travels faster than judgment. If he cannot shape events, he can at least strike a moral pose beside them.

In the end, the Thinker is not useless. This is a conclusion he reaches approximately twice a day and clings to like a man on a very small raft. His value, he reminds himself, lies not in prediction or instant expertise but in something subtler: naming the pressures that others are too busy to see, distinguishing the urgent from the important, connecting the missile strike to the alliance structure, the oil shock to domestic politics. He can remind his audience that events have histories and choices have consequences. He knows this is modest work—it will not stop the horrors of war.

And so he will do what he always does. He will watch the war with a mix of horror, fascination, vanity, and helplessness. He will accept the television hit, attend the dinner, file the op-ed, and privately suspect that none of it amounts to much. He will enjoy the attention and resent himself for enjoying it. He will feel the old professional thrill rise in him as the world catches fire, and the old professional shame arrive a moment later. He will remain painfully aware that war shapes his career far more than his career can ever shape the war.

Then he will straighten his tie, clear his throat, and explain to the eager masses how to pronounce Hormuz correctly.

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The United States has long described Iran as “the leading state sponsor of terrorism,” using both the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC, the rare state entity the United States has designated as a terrorist group) and an array of terrorist groups, such as the Lebanese Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis in Yemen, as proxies. Iran and Iranian-backed proxies have conducted or attempted attacks in Argentina, Bahrain, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Germany, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United States, and other countries. This history spans decades and includes both spectacular international attacks and more limited operations designed to signal resolve without triggering full-scale war.

Given this track record, it would be reasonable to think that Iran would use terrorism in its 2026 war with Israel and the United States, both of which declared “regime change” as one of their goals – a truly existential threat to Iran’s leaders. Yet, so far at least, Iran has not used terrorism even though it has launched rocket, missile, and drone attacks on civilian as well as military targets in the region and closed the Strait of Hormuz.

What explains this surprising lack of terrorism? It’s difficult to know why something didn’t happen, but here I offer four, non-exclusive possibilities. Each points to a different constraint on Iranian decision-making, ranging from operational limits to strategic restraint.

Perhaps the simplest explanation is the best: Iran did not conduct terrorist attacks on the United States and its allies because it was not able to do so. The Israeli and U.S. attacks on Iran, especially the assassination campaign that killed over 250 senior Iranian political and military leaders, demonstrated a remarkable intelligence penetration of Iran. Although the intelligence required to target leaders differs from that necessary to disrupt operations, it is plausible that some of the techniques that led to the assassinations also revealed information on terrorist operations, allowing for disruption. Equally important, Iran itself was probably running scared, believing that its operations and networks might be penetrated even if they were not. It is also likely that the assassination campaign disrupted command and control, making it difficult to organize and direct operations while also hiding from U.S. and Israeli airstrikes. In this sense, the absence of terrorism may reflect not restraint but temporary incapacity—an intelligence-driven suppression of Iran’s external networks at a critical moment.

A second possibility is that Iran feared escalation and retaliation from the United States and Israel. That may seem an odd fear given the firepower unleashed in Operations Epic Fury and Lion’s Roar (the Israeli equivalent). The United States, however, could easily have inflicted more damage on Iran. Trump was already promising to unleash destruction on a “whole civilization” and target power plants and bridges, and the United States was also sending ground forces to the Gulf region. Terrorism, particularly against the U.S. homeland or high-profile civilian targets, risked transforming a limited war into a far broader and more existential conflict for the Iranian regime.

A related third possibility is the risk of blowback for Iran. The Iran war was unpopular in the United States, but a terrorist attack could bolster support, creating a casus belli where one was previously lacking. The conflict was even less popular in Europe and Asia, but terrorist attacks there might increase hostility towards Iran and thus support for U.S. and Israeli attacks. Rather than dividing Iran’s adversaries, terrorism might unify them — strengthening political will, legitimizing escalation, and undermining Tehran’s efforts to portray itself as a victim of aggression.

The fourth possibility is the most grim – that such attacks are in the pipeline but just haven’t happened yet. Revenge, like ice cream, is best served cold. Iran waited over a year to begin a plot to kill former National Security Advisor John Bolton because of his role in the U.S. assassination of IRGC Quds Force leader Qasem Soleimani. That US violence pales by comparison to the scale of the 2026 killings, including the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, intelligence chief, head of the IRGC, and many others. Iran may simply be looking for the right opportunity to exact revenge, perhaps waiting until the conflict is completely over and the risk of escalation is lower.

A fifth possibility is that Iranian leaders believe that they do not need to use terrorism because their current response has succeeded. Drone strikes, missile attacks, shipping disruption, and proxy warfare have already allowed Tehran to impose costs and create an effective deterrent for the resumption of the war. In this context, terrorism may have been redundant—offering limited additional leverage while carrying disproportionate risks.

Taken together, these explanations suggest that Iran’s restraint is contingent rather than permanent. Whether due to capability constraints, strategic caution, or timing, the underlying logic that has long driven Iran’s use of terrorism may simply be dormant—for now.

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For many years, a conventional wisdom reigned among international relations scholars, economists, and policymakers who were observing China’s spectacular economic rise: China’s growth would inevitably stop. Sustained economic growth requires innovation—and China woudn’t be able to innovate. Authoritarian regimes, the argument went, are structurally incapable of fostering innovation, so could not become technological leaders. They repress information, stifle creativity, engage in rampant corruption, and throttle the civil society that contributes to the development and diffusion of ideas in democratic economies. China might be the world’s factory floor, but the United States, and the rest of the free world, would always be the cutting edge of technology.

That consensus was wrong — and my new book, Autocracy 2.0: How China’s Rise Reinvented Tyranny (Cornell University Press, 2025), explains why.

The King’s Dilemma — and How China Escaped It

The skeptical case rested on impressive intellectual foundations. A Nobel Prize-winning economics literature has demonstrated a strong correlation between liberal institutions and economic growth and argued that “inclusive institutions” — the kind found in democracies — are essential for sustained growth and innovation.

Political scientist Samuel Huntington identified a structural trap he called the “King’s Dilemma”: autocrats could tighten regime control: strangling economic dynamism and seeing their country fall behind more liberal societies. Or, leaders might permit greater freedoms in order to foster growth and innovation—but risk being overthrown. Innovation, in this view, demanded freedoms that prudent authoritarian regimes could not allow.

China’s Communist Party found a way around the King’s Dilemma. In Autocracy 2.0, I call their approach “smart authoritarianism”: a model that combines firm political control with selective economic openness. Rather than choosing between freedom and repression, China’s leaders engineered a careful, constantly recalibrated balance between the two.

Seeds of Innovation

Innovation scholars identify several conditions and inputs that are important to foster innovation. Innovation, they argue, requires property rights (to incentivize inventors and entrepreneurs); it requires a great deal of capital. Innovation also demands a high-quality workforce (educated people). Innovation relies on openness and connectivity, so scientists, scholars, and businesspeople can collaborate and exchange ideas. A vibrant civil society promotes information exchange and diffusion: it also helps identify and broker the extensive societal reforms that economic growth requires.

Typically, however, these conditions were decidedly not associated with authoritarian rule. For example, authoritarians are known to tamp down on civil society; they’re known for high consumption (which fuels inflation, thus disincentivizing capital investment); they’re known to expropriate rather than protect property rights. Hence the skepticism about the potential for innovation in China and other authoritarian societies.

China’s Smart Authoritarianism

The late twentieth century, however, was a time of profound adaptation among some authoritarian regimes. Starting in the 1960s, Asia’s authoritarian “miracle” economies (e.g., Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan) startled the world by not behaving like typical authoritarians—instead following prudent economic policies that produced staggering economic growth. But of those countries, only Singapore – considered an odd outlier – has been able to sustain authoritarian rule and generate the innovation necessary for rising into the high-income category, as South Korea and Taiwan both liberalized along the way. (Autocracy 2.0 includes a chapter exploring smart authoritarianism in Singapore.)

Studying at the knee of Singaporean President Lee Kuan Yew, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and the CCP followed those examples. China’s smart authoritarian government invested massively in human capital — building a world-class base of engineers, scientists, and researchers, and allowing its professionals to circulate through global networks of universities and laboratories.

The CCP maintained stable macroeconomic conditions to attract foreign direct investment. FDI also became a critical vector for technology transfer into China’s industrial ecosystem. And of course the CCP itself dumped huge amounts of capital investment into innovation.

The CCP tolerated a bounded pluralism: a thriving private sector, an independent-seeming media, and increasingly prestigious universities — all operating under party oversight, but allowed enough room to breathe that ideas could circulate and combine.

Meanwhile, the party pioneered new methods of political control designed to inflict minimal economic damage. Rather than blunt censorship and mass repression, the CCP shifted toward low-intensity, targeted, and preemptive coercion. It employed what scholar Margaret Roberts calls “friction” and “flooding”: subtle tactics that slow access to dissenting information, drown it in noise, and desensitize the public to pervasive surveillance. With artificial intelligence and facial recognition, the party increasingly governs through algorithms rather than through force.

Smart authoritarianism is dynamic. When China’s leaders perceive that openness has begun to threaten the regime, they tighten the chain. When they feel secure enough to loosen it, they do. The crackdown on the tech sector in 2020 — which erased over a trillion dollars in market value — followed by Xi Jinping’s outreach to technology executives in early 2025, is a textbook illustration of this rhythm. These episodes look like policy chaos from the outside; from inside the model, they are calibrations.

The Results are Unmistakable

The results of this strategy are now undeniable. Across a range of metrics used to measure national innovation performance – patenting, highly cited science and technology research articles, value-added manufacturing – China has steadily risen to join the ranks of the world’s most innovative countries. This year, China placed in the top ten of the Global Innovation Index, overtaking France, Germany, and Japan.

Chinese firms have achieved commercial dominance in several high-tech sectors, such as electric vehicles, EV batteries, commercial drones, and solar panels. Companies like BYD, Huawei, ByteDance, and Alibaba are global household names. China is competing with the United States for supremacy in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, telecommunications infrastructure, and supercomputing.

A decade ago, asking whether the United States could keep pace with China technologically would have seemed like an odd joke. Today, journalists and policymakers ask that question in complete earnest.

Why This Matters Beyond China

The implications of China’s success extend well beyond the US-China rivalry. For decades, the democratic world operated under the comforting assumption that (because of the King’s Dilemma), free societies had an inherent, structural advantage in the competition for technological and economic leadership. That assumption underwrote foreign policy, shaped development aid, and informed predictions about the eventual liberalization of authoritarian states. China’s rise has shattered it.

Having imported the smart authoritarian model from East Asia’s developmental autocracies, China is now exporting it to other regimes eager to maintain tight control while enhancing their competitiveness in the global economy: e.g., Ethiopia, Morocco, Saudia Arabia, the United Arab Emirates. The implications for the global contest between democracy and authoritarianism are profound: the “democratic advantage” in innovation cannot be assumed. It must be earned.

The global economy has been transformed, too: previously technology flowed from Europe and the United States to China, and now the direction of technology flows has shifted. Europeans are taking a page from the CCP’s book: trying to lure Chinese firms to invest in Europe in order to transfer technology to Europe’s lagging firms.

China’s economic future remains genuinely uncertain. The country faces serious challenges — demographic decline, high debt levels, a troubled property sector — and no one can say with confidence how effectively the CCP will manage them. But whatever happens next, the past three decades have already accomplished something that most serious observers considered impossible: an authoritarian state became a technological superpower. Understanding how that happened is not merely an academic exercise. It is essential preparation for navigating a new technological, and geopolitical, era.

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America is at war again in the Middle East. It shouldn’t surprise us. The United States has been in almost continuous conflict in the region since 1990. We have stationed troops, bombed, or occupied nearly every country in the region in a succession of wars that never seem to end.

The strange part is that, like a hopeless addict, we keep claiming we are going to stop. Barack Obama ran against “dumb wars.” Donald Trump mocked nation-building in his first campaign. Joe Biden promised to end “forever wars.” Even George W. Bush in 2000 spoke the language of humility and warned against overextension. Yet the arc from Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden and back toward Trump bends not toward restraint but toward recurring conflict, especially in the Middle East.

In his second term, Donald Trump seemed poised to finally realize that oft-broken promise. Liberated from his more hawkish advisors, he purged his administration of primacists and neo-conservatives. He picked J.D. Vance, a well-known restrainer, as his Vice President and loudly declared his intention to be a president of peace. His base loudly cheered his intention to end America’s military involvement abroad and spend his days curing inflation and restoring American manufacturing.

It hasn’t worked out that way. He has in just more than one year in office bombed Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Iran, Venezuela and Nigeria. The last two are not even in the Middle East, but it seems he wanted to cover all his bases.

In January 2026, Trump sent a letter to Norway’s prime minister suggesting that, since Norway had not awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize, despite having stopped “8 wars PLUS”, he “no longer feel[s] an obligation to think purely of peace.”

In other words, peace was not working out for him as a political project, so war it is. Now, with his second attack on Iran, he has set a new standard for belligerent recidivism.

Maybe the problem is US

It is time perhaps to admit that we have a problem, and it isn’t our choice of presidents. Their stories all differ in ideology and scale, but they share key structural similarities. In other words, the problem is America, or more precisely the nature of the presidency.

The American presidency encourages boldness abroad, while limiting the potential for domestic gains. Congress stalls domestic reform. Courts slow executive ambition. Interest groups fragment coalitions. Presidents discover that building a durable majority for healthcare, climate, immigration, or fiscal reform demands grinding compromise. Foreign policy offers a different terrain. The Constitution crowns the president commander-in-chief. A single decision in the Situation Room can move carriers, deliver results and seize headlines.

And impressive U.S. military power tempts action. The United States maintains unmatched air, naval, and special operations capabilities. Precision strikes promise limited exposure. Stand-off operations promise minimal American casualties. Advisors often frame options as calibrated and reversible. When the hammer looks clean and cheap, more problems resemble nails.

The political incentives all point toward war. A successful strike can project strength. Rally-round-the-flag effects lift approval ratings, at least temporarily. The opposition struggles to criticize limited uses of force without appearing weak or unpatriotic. A president mired in legislative stalemate may find that a decisive foreign action resets the narrative. The Middle East, with its chronic volatility and almost cartoonish adversaries, presents repeated opportunities.

The office of the Presidency thus inclines its occupants toward war. Restraint requires not just public exhaustion with war, but sustained discipline in the face of crisis, institutional momentum, and political incentive. The modern presidency erodes that discipline.

Trump’s deathblow to Restraint

The limiting factor in US interventionism in recent decades has not been immediate public opposition, Congressional disapproval or military incapacity. It has been fear of the long-term effects of failed or stalled operations. Iraq metastasized into insurgency and sectarian war. Libya descended into chaos. Afghanistan consumed two decades and ended in withdrawal. Conventional wisdom now holds that military operations will often grow beyond their initial bounds, cause casualties that are impossible to explain, and weigh on a presidency in the long-term.

The “Pottery Barn rule,” famously articulated during the Iraq debate encapsulated this wisdom. It warned that if you break it, you own it. Presidents learned that even small interventions can create obligations that drag on. This made military force, despite all its immediate advantages, a risky long-term adventure for any president.

But now Donald Trump seems to have found a way around that rule.

His theory rests on speed, ambiguity, and exit. He favors sharp strikes, vague goals, and maximalist rhetoric. If the action produces visible success or domestic applause, he declares victory. If it bogs down, he reframes the objective, declares victory anyway, and moves on. He resists long stabilization missions. He shows little interest in democratization, governance or reconstruction. He treats engagement as transactional and reversible.

This approach rejects the idea that the United States must “own” the aftermath. It rejects the moral and strategic burden embedded in the Pottery Barn rule. In Trump’s version, you break it and someone else owns it. In this way, Trump has removed the final psychological barrier to intervention: the fear of getting stuck.

The anti-Houthi campaign in Yemen offered the prototype of this approach in practice. As US strikes failed to decisively halt attacks and the operation slid toward stalemate, Trump publicly framed the effort as a success, emphasized restored deterrence, and pivoted to other priorities. There was no clear victory on the ground, but the declaration of one sufficed for domestic politics. The Houthis continued their campaign in the Red Sea, but no one in America really noticed. The failure of the operation has no impact on the polls, Congress barely complained, and the media cycle moved quickly on. The episode suggested that narrative closure matters more than strategic resolution.

This formula can work in US domestic politics. It lowers troop commitments. It limits long-term entanglement. It avoids the grandiose projects that trapped earlier administrations. And it capitalizes on the fact that the US public doesn’t really care about the specifics of these foreign policy problems.

Of course, such wham-bam-wars don’t resolve underlying conflicts, or really produce any results at all besides a political sugar high. But sugar highs sustain most Americans’ diets and they can probably sustain Trump’s foreign policy for the rest of his term.

Restraint means War

The idea of restraint in US foreign policy was supposed to mean avoiding unnecessary wars. It required accepting that not every crisis demands an American answer.

But now Trump’s vision of restraint just means avoiding unnecessary obligations. Like modern dating, it offers the promise of satisfaction without the inconvenience of commitment. Trump swaps political transformation for spectacle. He replaces responsible governance with episodic coercion. He abandons the Pottery Barn rule in favor of rapid entry and rapid exit. In losing its pretensions of peace, restraint loses its very essence.

The long, strange death of restraint did not occur because presidents lied about their desire for peace. It occurred because the office, the power it commands, and the politics it rewards make restraint the hardest strategy of all, regardless of what the public claims to want. Restraint died not with a bang, but with a press release declaring victory.

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As negotiations to end the Russia-Ukraine war stumble on, it is important to consider the dangerous, second-order security concerns that might spread from that conflict to other parts of the world. In particular, if large numbers of experienced Russian and Ukrainian drone operators transition into mercenary roles after the shooting in Ukraine stops, it could make conflict more likely and deadly in other parts of the world.

Ukraine and Russia’s economies are already suffering tremendously due to the demands of war, and a ceasefire, especially if it resulted in a partial or near-complete demobilization, would send hundreds of thousands of fighters back into a civilian workforce that lacks the capacity to absorb them. After Russia ended its war in Afghanistan in 1989, drug addiction and alcoholism plagued veterans, and many turned to crime. Some demobilized veterans may seek opportunities abroad as mercenaries, mainly for a paycheck, but a fraction may also miss the excitement of war and feel unsuited for more humdrum civilian life. Some may serve as de facto extensions of the Russian or Ukrainian governments, while others may simply gravitate to whoever offers them the biggest salary.

A small number of technically competent operators built ISIS’s drone program; Ukraine has produced thousands with orders-of-magnitude more experience. As security experts Raphael Parens and Christopher M. Faulkner noted, “The war in Ukraine has not just generated a surplus of combatants. It has produced a surplus of specialized military expertise.” After almost four years of hard fighting, both Russian and Ukrainian drone operators are skilled at precision targeting, fusing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and conducting and adapting to electronic warfare. All this gives them the ability to execute rapid kill-chains, once a skill that few militaries possessed. Small teams of drone operators can now create effects on the battlefield – denying areas to enemy advance and conducting strikes beyond the front lines on logistics, critical infrastructure, and personnel and leaders – that used to require expensive aircraft or missiles.

The risks posed by the dispersion of fighters from the two countries are not identical. Russian veterans are more likely to be integrated into existing private military companies (PMCs) like the successors to the Wagner Group or state-tolerated gray networks. Russia has considerable experience with deploying PMCs around the world, using them in areas where it does not want to deploy its own forces or where the local government would prefer the illusion of non-intervention. Ukraine, which now has Europe’s largest military, may be more resistant to directly aiding repressive regimes and fomenting conflict, but veterans will still need jobs, and the government is not likely to prioritize stopping them from selling their skills abroad.

In contrast to fighter jets, tanks, or submarines, drone systems are portable, difficult to regulate, require only a limited logistical tail, and are affordable to employ. Making them even cheaper, Russian and Ukrainian operators are skilled at modifying commercial drones, enabling them to take cheap systems and make them lethal. Such operators will be in high demand around the world, including from poor states and non-state actors that would not normally be in the market for advanced weapons systems. The world already saw state-linked mercenaries like the Russia-linked Wagner Group deploy to the Middle East and Africa as well as Ukraine. Such groups offered governments a facade of deniability, individuals who would take on risky jobs, and expertise the local governments often lacked. Drone operators make such a model even cheaper.

Ukrainian and Russian veterans might also join transnational organized crime groups rather than state military forces or state-linked PMCs. There they might use drones to probe borders and smuggle narcotics, protect drug labs and smuggling routes (and target those of other cartels), and strike at judges, security officials, and rivals. In the longer-term, veterans might transfer knowledge to such groups, enabling them to spread the capability further on their own.

In addition to the spread of a lethal technology and skill set, the spread of drones changes conflict risk calculations. It may lead some states to become more aggressive, believing they can strike enemies abroad or foes at home at low cost and with a degree of deniability. Conversely, their enemies may assume ties to a state even when absent, leading to escalation.

Countries with active insurgencies and transnational criminal groups, weak air defenses, and porous borders are particularly vulnerable. The Houthis already use drones and missiles to harass maritime trade, and this could be stepped up considerably if they have access to more skilled operators and better systems. Sudan and the Horn of Africa already see drone use beyond the immediate battle area, with considerable infrastructure targeting, and Russian mercenaries are already running amok in West Africa. Closer to home, organized crime groups in Mexico and Central America have begun drone use, and the infusion of combat veterans could accelerate this.

Mitigating this risk is difficult, and success will be incomplete even if this problem receives high level attention. Jobs for veterans are vital, and outside aid from European states can assist job creation in Ukraine. In both countries, early reintegration of high-skilled individuals in areas such as robotics and electronic warfare is vital, and many will be wanted by both the Ukrainian and Russian militaries in case conflict resumes. Veterans might receive extra monitoring when they cannot be fully reintegrated, and selling skills abroad should be criminalized. In Ukraine’s case, the United States and its allies might also seek to hire some operators in order to integrate their skill sets into their militaries.

Looking ahead, the end of large-scale fighting in Ukraine should be treated not as a clean ending but as the beginning of a transition period with global implications. Whether this transition produces a generation of destabilizing entrepreneurs of violence or is partially channeled into regulated, civilian, or allied military pathways will depend less on goodwill than on early, coordinated policy choices. If states wait to respond until these skills have already migrated into criminal, insurgent, or deniable state networks, the opportunity for prevention will have passed. Managing the aftermath of the Ukraine war, therefore, is not only about borders and ceasefires, but about anticipating how the war will reshape the global labor market for violence.

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In the early 1950s, Jacobo Árbenz tested—disastrously—the limits of small-state autonomy in a great power’s backyard. Facing U.S. hostility and an arms embargo, Árbenz legalized Guatemala’s Communist Party, permitted growing leftist influence in government and labor unions, and in 1954 turned to the Soviet bloc for weapons, purchasing a shipment of arms from Czechoslovakia.

Though modest in material terms, Washington interpreted these actions as a Central American state tilting toward the United States’ superpower competitor. The US launched a CIA-backed covert operation that combined psychological warfare, diplomatic pressure, and a small proxy invasion to shatter Árbenz’s support within the Guatemalan military: leading to his resignation and exile. The United States rejected interim replacements whom it deemed insufficiently reliable (attn: Delcy Rodríguez) and installed a pliable, firmly pro-U.S. regime.

The lesson was unmistakable: during the Cold War, the United States would not tolerate countries in the Western Hemisphere making even limited overtures to a rival superpower.

That lesson has come crashing back into international politics, first with Washington’s brass-knuckle diplomacy with Panama last year, and more recently – and dramatically – with the Trump administration’s capture of Venezuelan leader Nicholás Maduro.

Yet at Davos last week, delegates rallied around a very different message, anointing a new hero in the form of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. In what TIME called “a speech bound for the history books,” Carney encouraged countries to recognize the fiction of the “liberal international order” – urging them to stop “living within a lie” and to assert their autonomy and cooperate in a hostile new era of great power competition.

Thinking among US partners has already shifted in this direction; whereas many diplomats and analysts spent Trump’s first term insisting that “we must go back” to liberal order; gradually the conversation has shifted to “it looks like we’re not going back.” Even so, observers praised Carney’s powerful distillation of this new reality and enthused about his message of (and performance of) middle-power agency in a new world.

Carney also recently traveled to China for the first official visit by a Canadian prime minister to Beijing in nearly a decade. The trip was explicitly aimed at resetting and expanding Canada-China relations. According to a statement from Carney’s office, in his effort to “diversify” and promote greater “independence” in Canada’s trade, “China presents enormous opportunities for Canada.”

Carney’s speech was indeed memorable, and there is much to admire here. But powerful rhetoric notwithstanding, both history and theory (not to mention recent Trump administration policy) tell us that Carney and Canada court disaster if in their efforts to exercise greater independence they cultivate closer political ties with China. As Justin Logan recently wrote, “Canada cannot get too crosswise with the United States, or they risk discovering what the Monroe Doctrine really means.”

GET OUT OF MY BACKYARD

IR scholars argue that the structure of world politics is anarchy, in that there is no overarching authority that can restrain predation and promote cooperation. Anarchy makes countries fearful, scholars argue, which encourages them to protect themselves through a variety of means. Some scholars argue that countries with the means to dominate their regions (the great powers) will seek to do so: because becoming a “regional hegemon” is the surest way to be secure under anarchy.

Examples of regional hegemony include the US “Monroe Doctrine” in the Western Hemisphere; the Soviet “near abroad” in the late twentieth century; and Japan’s early twentieth century attempt to create an East Asia “Co-Prosperity Sphere.” China’s tributary system (which ended in the nineteenth century) was also a version of regional hegemony.

Becoming a regional hegemon requires successfully evicting any extra-regional great powers. Once it succeeds at this, the dominant power will be vigilant for signs that an extra-regional rival might be gaining a foothold – which it could use to expand its regional influence and access, and to threaten the regional hegemon’s territory and interests.

Failing to keep rivals out risks disaster. In its region in the nineteenth century, China failed to manage a regional challenge (Japan’s economic and military rise) as well as external ones (incursions by European countries and the United States). China’s decline led to a “century of humiliation.” During the Cold War, Washington’s failure to dominate Cuba permitted that country’s continued ties with the Soviet Union: which allowed the Soviets to position nuclear-armed missiles there to threaten the United States.

TOOLS OF CONTROL

Regional hegemons rely on innumerable tools to pressure local governments to toe the line. In Latin America during the Cold War, the United States relied frequently on military force. It trained and armed exile forces for invasions, as seen in Guatemala in 1954 and the Bay of Pigs operation in 1961; the US equipped elite military units such as El Salvador’s Atlácatl Battalion to suppress leftist rebellions.

Politically, the CIA pursued a strategy of bribing military officers to orchestrate coups while funding opposition parties and candidates—spending $8 million in Chile alone between 1970 and 1973. In Ecuador, CIA networks became so extensive that one agent later boasted they “owned almost everybody who was anybody.” Washington also worked through multilateral forums, securing OAS resolutions condemning communist influence to diplomatically isolate targeted governments. The United States used its political clout in such forums to resist calls for investigations

Other tools were psychological and informational. The CIA resurrected oppositional radio stations, mass-distributed anti-government leaflets, and anonymously submitted articles to newspapers painting governments as communist. In Guatemala, clandestine radio broadcasting stations were established in neighboring countries to intimidate officials sympathetic to communism, while psychological operations deliberately exaggerated the size of invasion forces to create panic among defending armies.

And there were economic tools. Richard Nixon famously instructed officials to “make the economy scream” in Chile: denying foreign loans and using US influence in international banks to pressure allies to do the same. The trade embargo imposed on Cuba from 1960 prohibited all trade, travel, and financial transactions. Washington also wielded development aid as another coercive tool: the Alliance for Progress promised $10 billion over ten years to support Latin America’s non-Communist left, while simultaneously providing cover for extensive covert action programs including police repression in Mexico and union-busting in Bolivia.

Together, these methods created a comprehensive system of pressure that made a Latin American country’s tilt toward Moscow extremely costly.

DUST OFF THE TOOLKIT

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States enjoyed an enviable situation for a great power—it was the only regional hegemon in the world. With no superpower competitor, the United States could relax within its hemisphere. But those days have passed. China’s economic and military rise, its rivalry with the United States, and its cultivation of influence in Latin America has raised the hegemon’s hackles.

Some observers might argue for a bizarre Trump fascination with the Western Hemisphere (particularly with Greenland, which analysts are struggling to explain).1 But the bad news is that given the rise of a regional peer competitor, regardless of who sits in the White House, US vigilance and interventionism in the Western Hemisphere is back.

It’s unclear just how violent and coercive this new normal will be. Out of the many tools to promote US influence and undercut China, Trump has already shown that he is willing to reach for the maximal tool of military force against Venezuela—and Panama too. Indeed, in Marco Rubio’s 2025 visit there last winter, he demanded that Panama force the sale of key canal infrastructure owned by Hong Kong firms—or the U.S. would seize the canal. As British strategist John Bew writes, “Notably, these [threats] have receded, with the Panamanian government taking the heat out of the situation with the type of careful diplomacy Maduro was unable to perform.”

But Trump and future US leaders have, as noted, a wide range of tools. Future US leaders may be less willing to employ military force. And the world today — technology, the global economy, and the nature of the superpower competition — is very different from the days of Árbenz, Castro, and the Bay of Pigs. This creates different tools and changes calculations of interests. Namely, perhaps some of the old tools will be deemed counterproductive; perhaps leaders will prefer to rely on tools that didn’t previously exist.

If Canada and other countries seek to reach out to China, we’re not sure which tools — minimal, maximal, or everthing in between — Washington will choose in its response. But both history and theory tell us that it will not tolerate Canada allowing greater Chinese influence on the U.S. border.

The notion of a handcuffed and masked Mark Carney (Canada! Treaty ally! Did I mention—Canada!) shuffling through a Brooklyn jail seems inconceivable. Inconceivable that the American public would tolerate it; inconceivable that it wouldn’t destroy NATO and shatter other key US relationships; inconceivable that this paragraph should even exist. But perhaps that word doesn’t mean what I think it means.

Carney is right that middle powers have every right to cooperate and to assert their autonomy. Those countries are right to see dangers in world politics today, and were understandably inspired by Carney’s eloquence. But small and middle powers in Latin America (and in Asia too) must understand how the pressures of anarchy affect great power behavior —and how the US-China rivalry has brought us back to this kind of world.

If you’re thinking, this doesn’t seem very fair to the small and middle powers, you would be correct. To quote an accidental sage, Judd from Poldark: “T’aint right, t’aint fit, t’aint fair, t’aint friendly.”2 But it’s politics under anarchy.

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Recently at Blue Blaze:

The Thinker is always busy. He tells you this early and often. He complains about it and boasts about it, often in the same sentence.

Indeed, the Thinker’s busyness is explained, in no small part, by the time he devotes to describing how busy he is. But no matter, his overcommitted state is not a problem to be solved. It is a credential to be displayed.

If he were not busy, people might wonder what he does. Worse, they might wonder whether anything depends on him at all. Empty spaces on his calendar taunt him with the prospect of his own impending professional demise. He loses sleep at night fearing that a colleague might one day walk into his office unannounced and find him there. An unfilled afternoon feels less like freedom than like exposure to the elements.

In other words, the Thinker is like a shark. He must keep moving to stay alive.

So, he travels constantly because there is no better way to prove you are busy than taking a Zoom call on a plane. There are costs. Airports blur into one another; jetlag clouds his thoughts. But the value of being able to say, “I can’t make your seminar on supply chain resilience, because I will be in Ouagadougou” is beyond price.

Even when he’s not traveling, he takes meetings in cafés, hotel lobbies, and borrowed offices. Each conversation begins the same way: an apology for lateness, a casual remark about what a crazy time we live in, a shared acknowledgement that everyone is impossibly busy. The meeting ends with regret for having to leave early for the next appointment.

Follow-up messages circulate. Let’s pick up soon. After this trip. We’ll touch base when the NATO Ministerial wraps up. Once things calm down. Things do not calm down.

When he speaks to other Thinkers, the ritual intensifies. They compare calendars and itineraries the way the elderly compare ailments. They agree they should talk properly sometime. They mean it. Mostly. But alas their calendars do not align. They leave the conversation reassured, not by what was said, but by the fact that there was no time to say more.

Each is eager to demonstrate scarcity. Each quietly implies that their importance must be the cause. “If only I didn’t have to brief Senator Snodgrass, I’d have time to make that meeting.” The Thinker’s colleague nods in tacit comprehension. Mutual validation of busyness is the closest that many Thinkers get to collaboration.

The Contemplative Life

Busyness is peculiar, because the point of the Thinker’s profession is supposed to be contemplation. Think tanks exist to slow things down, to notice patterns, to reflect before reacting. Society invented government for knee-jerk responses and modern apparatchiks perform that task with utmost skill. Replicating the mindless groupthink of government is the very antithesis of thinking. Yet this is precisely the behavior that the system most reliably rewards.

The Thinker knows this. He would recite it as a mantra – if he had the time.

The professional incentives, alas, run in the opposite direction. Stillness produces nothing visible. Contemplation leaves no trace on the body politic. A day spent thinking looks, from the outside, indistinguishable from a day spent playing video games. A geopolitical crisis without his voice in the mix is an existential threat.

So, he avoids emptiness like a politician avoids an unscripted question at a town hall.

Much of his busyness is self-generated. No one urgently needs him in Helsinki. The world would have survived without his latest op-ed. No journalist needs his response. Many meetings exist because he accepted them to remain visible, consulted, in circulation. A thought becomes a talk. A talk requires a trip. A trip generates an article which leads to more conversations that create more meetings that demand attention.

The labor is real. The fatigue is real. The necessity is not.

Don’t miss these previous Thinker pieces by Jeremy Shapiro:

The Tyranny of the Calendar

There is an irony he rarely confronts. Because he fills his days so completely, he has no capacity or time left for either contemplation or improvisation. He lacks both deep thoughts and the flexibility to respond to the changes that are rocking the world.

The world today is moving too fast for the busy Thinker to keep up. News breaks while he is at 35,000 feet. Shifts occur while he is in meetings explaining yesterday’s patterns to people who are also too busy to absorb them. His response to each crisis is to fall back on yesterday’s truth because he lacks the time to imagine tomorrow’s.

He is busy, but unavailable. Active, but out of sync.

The Thinker runs from meeting to meeting not because the world demands it, but because stopping would require him to do the one thing his profession claims to value and quietly punishes: sit still long enough to think.

If he ever did stop long enough to question his perpetual motion, he might realize that a little stillness wouldn’t kill him, or his career. In the slivers of free time that he currently treats like a toxic biohazard, he might even rediscover the exhilaration of having an original thought. With practice, he could come to see a 60-minute empty calendar slot not as a death omen but as a small, accidental gift from the universe.

Think about what he might do with it.

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The U.S. Department of Defense has now, apparently, been renamed the Department of War. I say apparently because the Administration probably does not have the authority to make this change on its own, as the Department of Defense was established by Congress, via the National Security Act of 1947. But the current Republican-led Congress has shown little interest in asserting even its most basic prerogatives as a co-equal branch of government, so it’s safe to assume that this relatively modest executive encroachment on its authority is a done deal.

So what? Does this matter? I have gone through three stages of thinking about this, and have concluded, somewhat to my surprise, that it does. Initially my reaction was simply to shake off yet another embarrassed cringe about the ongoing moronification of our once great country. We are in the hands of deeply insecure masculinists, arrested adolescents whose idea of “toughness” has not much evolved past the middle school playground: “Defense” is for wimps. “War” is for tough guys. Sigh. At least they didn’t sell the naming rights of the Pentagon. Yet.

On further reflection, however, I was visited by the ghost of George Orwell, who suggested that I was being a bit hasty in my judgment. Maybe “Defense” was the wrong designation all along. As he wrote in “Politics and the English Language,” such word choices often have a sinister purpose. Orwell observed that “political language” consists “largely of euphemism,” because “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.” So perhaps there is something refreshing and honest about not hiding behind the skirts of decorum. Since its establishment, the U.S. Department of “Defense” has orchestrated many wars, several of which were of rank aggression. In that spirit, we might applaud abandoning the soothing euphemism of “Defense”.

The problem is, and here the third thought is definitive, if “Defense” is a problematic choice, “War” is much, much worse.

After all, why do we have a military? Well, for a number of reasons, including to defend the homeland from foreign invasion, to deter adversaries from engaging in certain types of behavior inimical to our interests, to provide support and reassurance for friends and allies, and, yes indeed, at times to introduce the use of force in the hope of achieving well specified political goals. But that would lead to a very long name for a government ministry. If we’re going to stick with tractable titles, Defense is vastly superior to War.

This gets to the heart of the matter. Despite the fact that the macho, macho men currently in charge are likely to insist that “actions speak louder than words” (as they go about changing the names of things), this particular word choice is telling—and is a harbinger of ruin. Pete Hesgeth, the least qualified Secretary of Defense in American history (you can look it up), simply does not understand what a military is for—not a welcome quality for a man in his position. In his words, the role of the U.S. Military (excuse me, of “our warriors”), is to “kill people and break things.” Moreover, the killing and smashing should be done without regard for civilian casualties, and, most important, with utter disregard for what Hesgeth calls “stupid rules of engagement.” Our top man at the Pentagon has been repeatedly and particularly dismissive of the Geneva Conventions against war crimes, stressing instead the need to “untie the hands of our warfighters,” in order to encourage “maximum lethality”. He’s the sort of guy who would order, or at the very least be quite comfortable with, the cold-blooded murder of survivors clinging to lifeboats. (There was a time, as seen in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944) when only Nazis resorted to such tactics.)

The boys in this band would have you believe that maximum, indiscriminate lethality is just “Realism” in practice, and, moreover, that it works. After all, didn’t Thucydides instruct that “the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must”? But those who would counsel unrestrained violence as wise practice are flat wrong, on both counts: It is not realism, and it does not work. Speaking of Thucydides, a brilliant but much misunderstood figure, actually, he never said that; he reports some Athenians saying that. And he was trying to show what arrogant chest-thumping jerks they had become, which was a major reason why Athens lost the Peloponnesian War, a once-mighty empire reduced to unconditional surrender.

Thucydides did have much to teach us—if not necessarily the lessons that are most commonly asserted in the public sphere. (I don’t know if he was much of a tea drinker, but the spit take forthcoming had someone described the “Thucydides Trap” to him would have been epic.) An accomplished Athenian General who unflinchingly led men into numerous bloody battles, Thucydides nevertheless well understood – and often paused to illustrate – that untying the hands of soldiers to achieve maximum lethality was counterproductive. It is for this reason that, throughout his grand work, he often lingers on such gratuitous horrors—with a sensitivity to their political consequences. Indeed, one of the causes of the rise of Athenian power before the war was the result of the brutal rampaging of one Spartan commander, whose “hatred he inspired” caused actors to recoil from Sparta and join the growing Athenian alliance.

It is not simply that the use of force has profound and at times unintended political implications. More to the point for untutored amateurs and would-be bullies: the use of force only has meaning in its political context. This was the essential teaching of Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian General and revered military strategist who fought in the Napoleonic Wars, despite being neither telegenic nor a regular on a cable TV chat show. As he explained, articulating what any good realist would recognize as an iron law, “the political objective is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation of their purpose.” The only metric of military success that matters, then, is not the level of mayhem unleashed, or even “victory” in a battle, but the achievement of those political goals.

It will invariably be the case that the use of force will involve killing people and smashing things. But contrary to the ethos of our current Secretary of War, those qualities do not well describe the purpose of a well-disciplined, professional military establishment. And very much in that context, following the rules of engagement is not stupid, and admonitions against committing war crimes are anything but misguided. Ignoring them might provide a transient advantage in battle, but will sow the seeds of geopolitical disaster. Something that will be all too easy to forget when one is strutting the hallways of the Department of War.

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Previous posts by Jonathan Kirshner:

Why do countries trade with their enemies during war? One might think they clearly don’t. After all, gains from trade provide the enemy with products, funds, and increased productivity, which can all be channeled into increasing the enemy’s military capabilities. Thus, in the midst of war, we would think that any rational state should prohibit all trade with the enemy. Indeed, many countries maintain automatic legal bans on trade with the enemy triggered by the start of hostilities. Likewise, direct bilateral trade between belligerents – to the extent that wartime years are accurately captured by existing trade datasets – typically drops significantly at the start of wars. Seemingly, wartime trade should not exist.

But it does.

Indeed, since the middle of the 19^th century, countries have crafted their wartime commercial policies with careful nuance, selecting which products to allow trade in and which to prohibit. For example, Britain entered World War I, one of the deadliest modern conflicts, with only 93 products prohibited from trade. Notably, selling machine guns to the enemy was allowed, while carriages for those machine guns were prohibited. Because Britain expected a war of movement but thought machine guns were useful only in a stationary war, trade in the guns themselves was deemed safe while trade in anything that could make them mobile was dangerous. That view changed a few months into the war.

Fast forward to today, and similar dynamics are observable in the Russia-Ukraine war. At the start, neither belligerent restricted wartime trade. Ukraine only began adjusting its policy in April and again in September 2022. Four years into the conflict, Russian oil still flows through Ukrainian pipelines to supply European customers.

Why Trade with the Enemy During War?

As I explain in my new book, Trade in War: Economic Cooperation Across Enemy Lines (Cornell, 2025), a state’s wartime commercial policy seeks to balance two opposing imperatives. On one hand, the enemy can use the gains from trade to increase its military capabilities, increasing its chances in the current war. This gives a state a security imperative to sever all trade. On the other hand, trade generates revenue which the state can invest into its long-term security. Lengthy or permanent interruptions in this investment damage the state’s ability to protect itself. Thus, the state has an economic imperative to keep all trade with the enemy. A wartime commercial policy has to reconcile these conflicting goals. The state has to permit as much trade as is militarily sensible, while prohibiting as much trade as is economically viable.

To accomplish this, the state sets its wartime commercial policy product by product. Although all products can be converted into military capabilities, the amount of time this process takes varies by product. Selling the enemy gunpowder can immediately increase the enemy’s battlefield capabilities. Raw materials, conversely, need to be transported to a factory, processed into military equipment, then transported to the battlefield before they can affect the outcome of the war. The longer it takes the enemy to convert the product into military capabilities, the more likely the state is to allow trade in the product.

While conversion time reflects the impact of trade on the enemy, the state also considers the impact of lost trade for its own ability to generate revenue, which can ultimately be invested into state security. In general, losing trade in any product affects the state’s revenue. Yet, the extent of that loss varies by product. Some products have close substitutes or sources of supply other than the enemy, thus severing trade does not affect the state’s finances too much. Individual firms might suffer, but the state’s coffers remain largely intact.

By contrast, other products are critical inputs for industries that generate considerable revenue for the state. When such products come only from enemy sources, losing this trade could cripple the entire industry, greatly affecting state finances and therefore the state’s ability to invest in its defense. The greater the state’s loss of revenue from severing trade in a product, the more likely the state is to allow trade in that product during the war.

For example, Germany had a virtual monopoly on dye manufacturing in the lead up to World War I, but the industry was also dependent on exports. Without foreign sales, the German stockpiles of already produced dyes would have supplied domestic demand for over two years. To keep the industry alive, Germany tightly controlled foreign sales. In 1917, the government even hatched a scheme to sell dyes, some with military applications, directly to enemy countries, but only at exorbitant prices.

Preparing for a Specific War

Product characteristics, however, only tell half the story. To design an effective wartime commercial policy, a state has to consider what kind of war it expects to fight. The expected length and expected stakes of the war work as thresholds, helping decision-makers determine which products are safe to trade with the enemy and which are too dangerous.

If it takes the enemy longer to convert the gains from trade into military capabilities than the war is expected to last, trade in the product is safe even during the war. Such transactions will not improve the enemy’s chances in the current war. A war expected to last only a few weeks – as was the case at the onset of the Russia-Ukraine war – is likely to see few trade restrictions, since only goods with immediate battlefield applications are likely to influence the outcome. It is only as expectations shift toward a more protracted conflict that prohibitions are likely to expand. It took Ukraine until April 9, 2022, to prohibit direct imports from Russia; it took until September 27, 2022 to prohibit direct exports. This forced bilateral trade to pass through third-party intermediaries before it reached the trade partner, in essence, extending the conversion time of all products.

The value a state attaches to the stakes of the war determine how much trade the state will protect during the war, even if such trade immediately benefits the enemy. In an existentially threatening war, a state is likely to prioritize its immediate survival over long term investments into its defense. It is, therefore, more likely to sever trade even in the key inputs on which its industries rely. However, when fighting for lower stakes, a state would be more willing to prioritize long term defense over the short-term battlefield benefits, protecting certain aspects of trade to ensure its domestic economy continues to generate revenue.

What Does this Mean for Our Understanding of Politics?

Uncovering the phenomenon of wartime trade challenges some of the conventional assumptions of politics. A core principle underlying many policies of economic engagement is the idea of the commercial peace – the more states trade with each other, the less likely they are to fight.1 Based on this argument, trade is considered to be forfeit in war, serving as an opportunity cost to starting a conflict, deterring states from war. As my book demonstrates, states often continue to trade with each other even after the start of hostilities. This complicates the notion that trade ties can serve as an effective deterrent to war.

The same decision-makers who determine whether a state goes to war are also responsible for setting the state’s wartime commercial policy. The very people assessing whether the costs of war are too high are the same ones who decide how much trade will continue in war and, therefore, what the opportunity cost of lost commerce will be. When a state exercises that degree of control over its potential losses, it is hard to see those costs acting as a deterrent.

Moreover, the structure of global trade has made the world increasingly interconnected. States are now more intricately linked through supply chains, such that one country makes fairly differentiated products suited mostly just for the continued production in the supply chain housed in a different state. The majority of global trade volume is made up of trade in these intermediate goods. According to the commercial peace argument, this should make the world more peaceful: if states cannot afford to give up the trade, they are less likely to go to war with their trade partners. My research presents a less optimistic view. The more interconnected two states are, the more likely both are to protect their trade even during wartime to ensure their domestic industries continue to generate revenue to be invested into the state’s long-term defense. In other words, deeper economic ties are more likely to increase wartime trade, making trade less likely to deter potential conflicts.

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