This past week NBC News reported that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was considering a presidential run in 2028. Hegseth quickly denied the story, but it could explain why he chose to go on the campaign hustings in Iowa earlier this month, a somewhat unorthodox move for a defense secretary who is allegedly managing a naval embargo and other combat operations in the Persian Gulf.

I recognize that we live in a world in which Donald Trump was elected to the presidency twice. Clearly the link between actual records of accomplishment and political success has been weakened just a wee bit. At least Trump, however, spent a generation manipulating the media into presenting him as a successful businessman. So I guess my question is: how much is Pete Hegseth drinking to make him think he’s a viable 2028 presidential contender?

There is the obvious problem of the war in Iran. The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has documented time and again and again and again that the United States is not winning that war and the strategic costs have been massive.1 As the biggest booster of that conflict, how is Hegseth possibly going to hang his hat on that abject lack of accomplishment?

I suppose Hegseth could herald his management of the rest of the Pentagon. The thing is, the war in Iran has obscured the fact that he’s running the Department of Defense right into the ground. The combined military operations of the past twenty months have badly depleted the Pentagon’s munitions stock. Hegseth appeared to keep from president Trump, prompting a shouting match between the two earlier this month, and causing reports to surface that Trump was eschewing Hegseth’s advice on Iran in favor of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Then there are the ways that Hegseth seems to be preventing the Pentagon from adapting to 21st century warfare. He disbanded a new battalion that was intended to specialize in drone and autonomous weapons combat, which seems like a super-odd choice given the evolution of combat operations in Ukraine and the Persian Gulf. He has not resisted Trump’s extremely expensive order to install antiquated catapult technology on U.S. aircraft carriers. It would seem that the only areas where Hegseth wants to get with the times is to hire an online troll army and facilitate the corruption of the Trump family.

Hegseth’s ongoing disputes with Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll — and fear of Driscoll waiting in the wings as Hegseth’s replacement — have led Driscoll to announce his departure before the end of this year. Hegseth’s disputes with the rest of the Army brass led him to fire the Amy’s chief of staff back in April and block the promotions of officers who served with him. The uniformed services have clearly not been thrilled by these moves. Hegseth, demonstrating the rampant insecurities that has defined his term of office, responded by firing much of the Army’s top leadership and promoting his own flunkie.

As the New York Times’ Greg Jaffe, Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper, and Adam Entous report, the Army is facing some severe leadership issues as a result:

A series of firings and feuds initiated by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has left the Army essentially rudderless as it struggles to deal with the threat posed by cheap, deadly drones and missiles that have pounded U.S. bases in the Middle East.

The Army has not had a chief of staff, the service’s top officer, since Mr. Hegseth fired Gen. Randy George without explanation in April,2 and there are no signs that he is close to filling the position, said current and former officials speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.

Mr. Hegseth has forced out at least three senior officers who had been viewed as potential successors to General George.

Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll, the service’s top civilian leader, is also expected to leave the administration in the next few months and has already moved out of the large family house that he was renting in Fort Myer, outside Washington, officials said….

Beyond General George, Mr. Hegseth has fired or forced out a half-dozen senior officers — a generation of the Army’s most combat-hardened leaders — thinning the service’s top ranks for the next several years, officials said.

“Hollowing out the most battle-tested and most lethal, proven leaders in a time of war means troops are less safe and we’re less likely to win,” said Representative Pat Ryan, Democrat of New York and a former Army intelligence officer.

A long-term worry is that the firings send a message that officers who provide frank military advice or fail ideological litmus tests have no place in a force that is supposed to be nonpartisan, military and congressional officials said….

One measure of the vacuum at the top of the Army is the number of four-star generals serving in its ranks. As recently as January 2025, when Mr. Hegseth took office, there were 10 four-star generals on active duty. The service currently has five, the fewest in decades.

Now, the Washington Post’s Alex Horton and Tara Copp report out a doozy of a story: senior military leaders are making it clear in internal memoranda that any ongoing deployment in the Persian Gulf will erode U.S. security across the globe:

Several U.S. military leaders have advised Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable and risks weakening their ability to confront threats elsewhere, including the U.S. homeland, according to people familiar with a recent assessment prepared for the Pentagon chief.

The warnings — detailed for Hegseth by the heads of the Army, Navy and Air Force and the four-star commanders overseeing U.S. operations throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America — appear in the Aug. 14 edition of the Secretary of Defense Orders Book (SDOB), these people said. They described the assessment to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity because the document is classified….

The Aug. 14 orders book directs some troops deployed in the Middle East to remain there through September and some others into 2027, said those familiar with the document. The prospect of extending those forces further compelled military leaders to voice their concern, these people said.

Leaders of the U.S. European Command, the U.S. Pacific Command and the U.S. Southern Command, along with the Navy’s top admiral, responded with what is characterized in the SDOB as a “non-concur,” those familiar with the assessment said — meaning they disagree with the secretary’s order to extend their forces but will execute it nevertheless….

It’s common for commanders to discuss risk, said the one person familiar with the recent assessment. But the outlook now is “more dire” overall, this person explained, adding that certain generals and admirals were more expansive and frank than is usual in telling Hegseth they disagreed with orders to keep providing equipment and personnel when the operation’s trajectory remains uncertain….

As The Post and others have reported previously, the Iran war also has drained U.S. supplies of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors — vital not only to the protection of American assets in the Middle East but to regional allies as well — and long-range Tomahawk missiles. About 25 percent of the Pentagon’s Reaper drone fleet has been lost, and U.S. bases there have sustained billions of dollars in damage.

The WaPo story is damning for Hegseth in two ways.

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As the summer of 2026 comes to a close and as students head back to their campuses, there will be yet more consternation about whether we have reached a post-literate age and the contested role of artificial intelligence in the ivory tower.

As Fletcher’s Academic Dean I have had to wrestle inconclusively with these issues. I am still struggling to arrive at concrete policies. As the technology keeps changing, however, I am increasingly of the opinion that:

1. AI can be an extremely useful tool for all kinds of academic research and tasks;

2. AI can also be a tempting shortcut for a lot of the necessary work that goes into quality research and writing;

3. Without a well-developed set of critical thinking skills, AI outputs will yield variegated results at best;

4. Professors are increasingly wary of students using AI to complete assignments and are therefore switching to other modes of grading (bluebooks, oral exams);

5. I am extremely concerned that this trend will eliminate paper-writing as an assignment, and that is a core function of most professions requiring a graduate degree.

Before thinking about how students should use artificial intelligence, however, I want to note two recent Ideas Industry instances in which a writer used AI — and the very different reactions these two cases provoked.

The first involves Harvard Kennedy School professor Ricardo Hausmann. Two weeks ago he published a Financial Times op-ed criticizing the Trump administration’s recent tariffs, arguing that they interfere with what Hausman calls the “dark matter” that yields invisible returns on U.S. private investments abroad: “A tariff on those imports is therefore, to a first approximation, a tax levied by the US government on the foreign earnings of US companies. The likelier corporate response — redomiciling the intellectual property to America — would narrow the measured trade deficit without moving a single factory. The same bad accounting that started this fight would then declare victory in it.”

This op-ed built on work that Hausmann has done on dark matter in the global balance of payments for more than 20 years.

A few days after the op-ed ran, however, the FT added a statement at the beginning of his essay:

It has come to our attention that AI was used to condense a longer draft of this column prior to submission to the FT and our own editorial involvement. The FT editorial code of conduct specifically prohibits the use of AI in the writing process.

This generated a whole raft of critical stories about the brouhaha. The New York Post’s coverage serves up the typical framing, quoting one social media post stating, “'Gotta be the worst AI slop I’ve seen in a major publication,” and then tut-tutting for a few paragraphs:

At a time when many in academia are fighting back against growing numbers of students relying on AI for their work, the idea of a top Harvard Kennedy School of Government academic using the technology for their work was particularly dispiriting.

“It’s going to be very difficult this academic year trying to encourage students to write persuasively with creativity, individuality, and style… when a star Econ professor at Harvard Kennedy School publishes such easily ID’ed AI slop in the Financial Times,” bemoaned Michael Socolow of the University of Maine in a social media post.

No doubt, Hausmann’s failure to adhere to the FT’s stated guidelines represents a clear ethical foul. The scope of the foul, however, is less clear cut. Poynter’s Ren LaForme asks a valid question: “If Hausmann did the reporting, developed the argument and wrote the original column, but AI was then used to make it shorter, how different is that from using AI to tighten a sentence or cut 200 words from a draft? When does an editing tool become a writing tool?”

The immediate calumny heaped on Hausman provided its own answer: as far as the Ideas Industry was concerned, a professor — even a professor of the practice1 — leaning on AI for public intellectual work represents an unpardonable sin.

Fast forward a week or two and another op-ed critical of the Trump administration appeared on the scene. This one ran in the Wall Street Journal, and carried more bite because Stanley Druckenmiller wrote it. Druckenmiller is the chairman and CEO of Duquesne Family Office and former mentor to U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Entitled “Let the Bond Market Speak,” Druckenmiller blasted Bessent’s intervention into the long-term Treasury market last week:

The long-term Treasury yield is the most important price in the world. It is also the only fiscal disciplinarian the U.S. has left. Neither party will run on entitlement reform. Both have spent the past decade expanding commitments while ignoring arithmetic. Democracies don’t repair their finances because a budget office publishes a table. They repair them only when the cost of inaction becomes visible and immediate, when mortgage rates bite, when auctions tail, when the political price of a rising long bond finally exceeds the political price of touching spending.

Every basis point of artificial yield suppression is a subsidy to procrastination. Suppressed long rates sugarcoat the interest-cost projections, shrink the apparent urgency, and let incumbents assure voters the debt is someone else’s problem. If Congress and the administration are unlikely to touch entitlements even with the market’s signal, they are certain not to touch them without one. Whatever this operation saves in basis points, it will cost multiples in delay.

Yield management always begins as a technical operation and ends as a policy commitment….

Governments defending prices against fundamentals always lose. The only variable is how much they spend before conceding. The U.S. shouldn’t put itself on the wrong side of that trade, not with the most important price in the world, and not when that price is trying to say the one thing Washington most needs to hear: Let the bond market speak.

As with Hausman, however, AI played a role in composing this op-ed. After a bunch of folks on social media suggested this possibility, NOTUS’ Jeff Stein interviewed Druckenmiller. He didn’t just cop to it but gloried in it:

Druckenmiller said “of course I used AI” when writing the column, and argued he didn’t see a problem with doing so.

“There’s a reason I moved from an English major to being an economics major,” Druckenmiller said. “I’m not embarrassed by it … I write everything using AI now for the same reason I use a calculator when I do math problems.”

Furthermore, the WSJ op-ed page reacted differently than the FT, as Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré reported:

In a statement to Semafor‘s Max Tani calling AI a “fact of modern life,” WSJ opinion editor Paul Gigot agreed that because the op-ed reflected the trader’s “genuine opinion,” it was alright to publish the article without AI disclosures.

“People will use it to assist in their work and their writing, including with research, checking grammar, editing and more. The question for us is whether what we publish from contributors reflects an author’s original argument, and if the author has the standing and credibility to make it,” said Gigot. “In Stan Druckenmiller’s case, we have had a relationship with him for many years, and nobody can doubt that his op-ed is his genuine opinion.”….

Whereas the NYT took a more restrictive path in the face of AI use by non-staff writers, the WSJ has drawn a very different line in the sand — and in the process, has given a thumbs-up on extensive AI use to other contributors to the paper’s competitive opinion section. As Tani remarked, it’s a “precedent-setting moment in news media.”

“The editor of the second most important opinion page in the country greenlights the use of AI for drafting pieces,” Tani added, “no disclosure necessary.”

The follow-on press coverage of Druckenmiller’s AI use was far less critical of his use of AI. For example, Axios’ Emily Peck wrote a piece titled, “Stanley Druckenmiller makes AI writing a billionaire flex,” suggesting, “The moment could mark a real cultural shift where AI writing is basically all good, at least among a certain set of influential elites… Many folks on ‘fintwits,’ the finance community on X, formerly known as Twitter, not only seemed willing to overlook the method, but praised it… For the most part, plenty of billionaires already employ ghostwriters to spin up their op-eds, LinkedIn musings and social media posts. Transitioning to AI seems like a natural progression.”2

Peck, Dupré, and other writers all noted the Hausmann example when discussing Druckenmiller’s case — but none of them explained why the reaction was so different for the Harvard professor versus the billionaire financier.3

I could ask ChatGPT or Claude to condense my Ideas Industry-length explanation of the marketplace of ideas into a few pithy paragraphs, but I think the explanation for this variance in reactions is pretty simple.

First, there is the simple fact that Hausmann failed to adhere to the FT’s guidelines, whereas it seems Druckenmller did commit the same infraction for the WSJ.

That is a factor but not the factor in the different responses. The factor is that Hausman is a professor and Druckenmller is a plutocrat, and the 21st century Ideas Industry favors the latter over the former. What seems like an ethical no-no for academics is viewed as a neat efficiency trick for billionaires.

Is this fair? It would seem not, but… maybe?! The comparative advantage of professors in the Ideas Industry is supposed to be their ability to take complex ideas and nuanced research and distill their body of knowledge into arguments that lay readers can comprehend. If this is their primary job, readers expect them to put in the work. The same standard is not expected of the tycoon class, who can hire folks to convert their utterances into prose.4

The thing is, though, that this is actually something of a double standard. The dirty secret is that many professors do not write their own op-eds. Bigwig profs — especially economists and physical scientists — have research assistants and university comms professionals who can help with that.5 Is relying on AI really all that different than a plutocrat relying on a ghostwriter?

As with AI’s overall role in higher education, I do not have a neat and clean answer. But I do think that, for now, expecting a higher standard of academics is both unfair and nonetheless a good thing. Professors should be held to a higher standard. When they weigh in on public affairs, they should exercise influence because of their scholarly expertise and not the size of their bank account. And as a fellow public intellectual, I’d like to zealously protect the brand of academics writing for a public audience.

Plutocrats are welcome to use AI in the drafting of their WSJ op-eds. But if professors think that same gambit is available to them, the events of the past few weeks should disabuse them of that notion.

That is a double standard. For now, however, I think it’s a norm worth preserving.

One of the inherent assumptions — or biases, depending on your point of view — contained within U.S. foreign policy analyses is the presumption that policymakers must know what they are doing. Even decision that seems counterproductive or misguided at first blush might have a hidden rationale that makes some kind of sense. Most political analysts, reporters, and political scientists assume some base level of rational choice among decision-makers. Even if a leader’s policy preferences might seem questionable, those preferences can usually explain the ensuing decisions.

You can see this kind of thinking in Jim Sciutto’s CNN interview with economist Mary Lovely, in which Sciutto desperately searches for a rational motivation to explain Trump’s trade war:

Why am I making this point? Because it highlights the stupidity of the Trump administration’s decision to launch a trade war with Canada. It’s not just economically stupid. It is also politically and strategically stupid. When the Wall Street Journal editorial page describes something Trump does as “The Dumbest Trade War in History” not once but twice, you know it’s a really dumb policy move.

Indeed, as Zeteo’s Aawin Suebsaeng points out, “The simple but correct answer is that for the past year and a half, America has been ruled by an astonishingly violent airhead who likes starting wars that pretty much no one asked for – even if those wars mangle the U.S. economy.”

In a weird way the economics of the trade war are the least stupid part of it. To be clear, the tit-for-tat increase in tariffs will badly damage the auto industry and raise the prices on a bevy of consumer goods. The deadweight loss from continued economic uncertainty will be appreciable. And yet, financial markets were largely copacetic with the escalating trade dispute. Again, none of this is economically positive news, but the financial fallout for the moment remains limited so far.

Politically, launching a trade war with Canada does not make much sense, as even right-leaning pundits acknowledge:

The latest polling shows that despite Ttump’s best efforts to blame Canada — okay, maybe not his best effort but some half-hearted social media posts — Americans still hold very positive views of Canadians:

The same cannot be said of Canadian attitudes about Americans. This might explain why Carney could break off talks — a move supported by 75% of Canadians, by the way.

I’m confident that this kind of American douchebaggery will further bolster Carney’s standing and resolve:1

As Axios’ Rebecca Falconer reports, the latest standoff has generated a significant rally-round-the-flag effect for Mark Carney.

Carney was already popular before his latest clash with Trump. His approval rating rose 3 points to 60% last week, while a poll conducted during the same period showed most Canadians wanted a tougher approach to U.S. trade talks, days before the talks collapsed.

He has also won broad support from provincial premiers across party lines, including Ontario conservative Doug Ford, who has aggressively pushed back against Trump’s tariff threats, and Manitoba social democrat Wab Kinew, who said he’s “100%” behind Carney.

In contrast, Politico reports that Americans are not nearly as united, a fact that will hurt Trump and the GOP come the midterms:

Poll after poll shows Canadians across the political spectrum are willing to accept those impacts in order to stand up to the U.S. government.

The opposite is true in the U.S., where even many in the president’s own party oppose Trump’s trade agenda — particularly his tariffs on Canada. And unlike Carney, the president faces a voter referendum in November, in the form of midterm elections.

As the two countries settle in for a long-term standoff, the outcome is likely to be defined by each government’s ability to endure pain: economic in Ottawa and political in Washington.

“I think right now the U.S. has more to lose because we have the election coming up in November, where the economy and tariffs are already an issue,” said one former official at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive talks. “If it spirals, Congress would be the one to feel the impact.”….

POLITICO polling in December found just over a third of voters believed Trump’s tariffs would eventually benefit the U.S. economy and a June poll by The New York Times and Siena found that 54 percent of likely voters in battleground states disapproved of the duties, including 59 percent in Maine, home to a key race in the battle for control of the Senate….

The fallout could hand Democrats in Maine and Michigan, another 2026 battleground, a prime example of how Trump’s policies are hurting their communities, said one person close to the Trump administration who met with senior officials last week — particularly if Canada’s retaliation hits politically sensitive U.S. industries or the trade war expands to a broader range of goods.

See TNR’s Greg Sargent for the specific House districts that the trade war tips towards Democrats.

The Trump administration’s political tactics have made securing a deal harder while providing powerful political incentives for Canada to stand firm. But that understates the strategic fiasco of this trade war. A hidden source of American power through the years has been that in contrast to every great power rival, the United States faces minimal security threats near its borders. This holds with particular force for Canada. And yet, in pushing for this trade war, Trump is also pushing our closest neighbor into diversifying its trade and strategic relationships as much as possible. This seems… how to put it… really dumb.

Furthermore, I’m not sure where things go from here. If this New York Times account by Matina Stevis-Gridneff and Ana Swanson is accurate Canada has little incentive to agree to a deal with the Trump administration:

The Canadians also pressed the United States for a level of certainty that the deal would not be scrapped overnight by the Trump administration. But the United States maintained that it would retain the power to change tariff policy against Canada at any time, irrespective of the agreement, officials said. Mr. Carney would say in his seething Saturday address to Canadians: Sometimes, the United States signature is “written in pencil.”

Even if the U.S. still holds an asymmetric bargaining advantage over Canada, the Trump administration’s negotiating style has been so counterproductive that it has become easy to tell a narrative of growing resistance — as Peter Baker did in the New York Times:

[Mark Carney’s] refusal to buckle in the face of Mr. Trump’s trade ultimatum even at the cost of retaliatory tariffs has flipped the narrative of the president’s second term. Instead of giving in, Mr. Carney is testing whether defiance is a viable strategy against Mr. Trump.

The age of capitulation that defined Mr. Trump’s return to office may be starting to fade. World leaders and domestic institutions are, in some cases at least, showing less willingness to submit to Mr. Trump’s will. European leaders have refused to join his war with Iran. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel flatly rejected his Gaza plan. Gulf Arab states forced him to abandon plans to charge a shipping toll in the Strait of Hormuz.

Universities and law firms are rebuffing his directives rather than signing on the bottom line. Bond markets are rebelling against his fiscal policies. Even the ABC network, whose $16 million payment to settle a Trump lawsuit was seen as an early example of yielding to the president, has discovered that it did not buy peace and is now suing his administration for threatening its broadcast licenses….

Leaders across the world are watching [Canada]. Mr. Shapiro said they “mostly now believe that backing down in the face of Trumpian aggression or insults only encourages more demands.” He added: “I think Carney is setting the template for how they will respond to future Trumpian tariff threats.”

To sum up: there is no secret plan. There is no five-dimensional chess. This is just an idiotic, senseless trade war that the United States will lose even if Canada makes any concessions. Because Trump is turning a friendly neighbor into something far more hostile to U.S. interests.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World knew that the Trump administration was preparing another round of economic sanctions on Iran but was not terribly interested in the announcement. The Trump administration’s first-term sanctions against Iran were a classic example of how not to sanction — which was emblematic of lessons that Trump and his team have repeatedly refused to learn. My hopes for anything new and/or innovative were not high.

Sure enough, the announcement played out mostly as expected. Over the weekend U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent talked some mighty tough talk in the pages of the Financial Times about how the United States was not only going to sanction Iran, but sanction every country doing business with Iran:

Iran’s enablers purchase and transport its petroleum. They facilitate the flow of its finances through exchange houses and free trade zones. They welcome Iran’s flights and maintain registries on its behalf. They turn a blind eye to seaborne fuel transfers and the illicit use of their banks, all while concealing the extent of their complicity.

In short, these countries calculate appeasement of the regime to be the safer course. But they would do well to consider the consequences of sustaining it….

Nations that, in courting reprieve from Tehran, continue to replenish the very regime from which they seek protection — and now exceed the limits of America’s tolerance….

The alternative for those who tether themselves to Tehran is the foreclosure of any path to lasting prosperity. Illicit finance will flourish, as it so often does, where confidence has collapsed. And any nation that serves as a financial artery of a withering regime should expect to share in its isolation. To become a sanctuary for terror is to become, in the eyes of the United States, a global pariah….

As a great wave of American resolve comes ashore, are Iran’s enablers willing to wage their future against it?

This is very tough talk from an administration that has lost the ability to negotiate and compromised its ability to coerce and does not seem to be trying too hard on either front anyway. Sure enough, Iran reacted in predictable fashion and an awful lot of experts are skeptical that this will move the needle much in Tehran.

However, Bessent’s announcement of Operation Economic Outcast did trigger some very interesting press questions about whether the United States would sanction every country that traded with Iran — like, you know, one that rhymes with Fina.

The New York Times’ David E. Sanger gets to the heart of this challenge for the United States:

The effort raises a series of questions that the White House has not answered. First among them is why, if sanctions as airtight as these are possible, they were not employed before Mr. Trump ordered the U.S. military into battle, exposing shortages of key munitions and the limits of American military power? And now that the military has, in Mr. Bessent’s words, “laid the groundwork” for success, what about China — which purchased more than 80 percent of Iran’s oil exports in 2025? Is the administration willing to risk another direct confrontation with Beijing, with which it is already at odds over artificial intelligence, Taiwan, a rapid nuclear expansion and a huge production overhang that threatens the global economy?

The original D-Day, on the shores of Normandy, did not require Chinese participation. This economic D-Day does, and there is no indication so far that it is forthcoming, a month before President Xi Jinping is scheduled to arrive in Washington for his first state visit in more than a decade.

“This will be tricky,” Peter Harrell, a visiting scholar at Georgetown Law School who has written extensively on the limits of economic sanctions, said on Monday.

Earlier this year, in deciding how to bring Iran to its knees, Mr. Trump “had a choice to really come down hard on the Chinese, which he didn’t want to do because of his own economic agenda with Xi, or put the naval blockade on the Iranian tankers,” Mr. Harrell noted.

Sanger and Harrell and every other sanctions expert might view this skeptically, I see it as a great test, however, of the Trump administration’s refurbished relationship with China.

As noted again and again in this space, over the past year the Trump administration has prioritized stable relations with China over everything else in the Pacific Rim. Remember, this summer Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby bragged about this in an interview as a serious policy accomplishment:

I feel very confident that I’m not being conniving or dissembling at all when I say that our posture is designed for strategic stability and the status quo and a balance of power. It’s not the kind of capabilities that you can use reasonably to conduct aggression against military power.

So if everybody just stays to their side, everything will be fine. And I think that’s a very realistic objective. It’s not easy. That’s why we’ve focused a lot on it. But it’s viable.

I think it’s very consistent with the president’s diplomacy and policy — all of our policy — toward China, which is respectful and speaks respectfully of China. This is different from some members of the president’s last administration, talking about regime change in China. That’s not what we talk about. Nobody’s talking about it….

Right now under [Trump’s] leadership, you have a policy of realism, which is a respectful, positive relationship at the top where you can make deals, but also an understanding that we need to operate from a position of strength.

Operation Economic Outcast represents an ideal test of Colby’s assertions. If he is correct that Trump’s brand of “flexible realism” has facilitated a solid working relationship with China, then surely sanctions will be unnecessary and China will cut off its economic relationship with Iran. Alternatively, as Colby implies, the U.S. will operate from a position of strength and resolve and sanction China for defying U.S. preferences.

Do I believe either of these outcomes will actually happen? Of course not — only a fool would take this administration’s word at face value. No, my bet would be that China will politely ignore U.S. entreaties — and the United States will refrain from imposing any new secondary sanctions.

Maybe I will be wrong. We will see how Operation Economic Outcast pays off. But only a sucker would take anything this administration says at face value from now until the end of time.

[UPDATE: How interesting that Paul Krugman and Shawn Donnan arrived at very similar conclusions to my own. Oh well, we’re only experts, what could we possibly know?!]

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World was not a big fan of the Trump administration’s 2025 foreign policy. My professional opinion was that most of it was dumb, counterproductive to the national interest, and ineptly implemented.

The funny thing is, people will now look back on 2025 as if it was the golden age of Trump’s foreign policy. The reason for that is not because 2025’s foreign policy was better —it wasn’t. Rather, it was due to the fact that U.S, power remained sufficiently fearsome such that even Trump’s gang of dipshits could still coerce and bluster some other actors in world politics into making some concessions. Trump’s willingness to use force occasionally yielded tangible results. It turns out that even utter buffoons can achieve a few of their ends if they control the world’s most powerful military.

As the war in Iran continues to not be won, however, the cracks in the foundations of American power are showing. Whether it’s guns or butter, the America is coming up short. The U.S. has badly depleted its stockpile of missile interceptors, eliminating the ability to deter Russia and China. Members of the U.S. military on extended deployment are starting to fray at the seams. Total U.S. federal debt just exceeded $40 trillion. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s recent efforts to intervene in the bond market have failed miserably.

That last failure led to some questions for president Trump and a truly insane response:

When I first saw that link I assumed Trump had heard “intervention” and mistakenly assumed the question was about Iran — but nope, he heard the question in its entirety and still said that the ultimate intervention in the bond market was through military force.

This kind of blinkered thinking is going to lead to more humiliations to come for American foreign policy. As I noted last week, “Iran has so exhausted American power that Trump’s remaining grand strategy option is one of retrenchment…. If he can no longer bully his allies, then he can take the U.S. ball and go home.”

That seems to be consistent with this reporting from the Washington Post’s Rachel Chason, Susannah George, Riley Beggin, and Mohamad El Chamaa:

Trump’s incendiary missives this week were a symptom of growing frustration, analysts said, as the president does not appear to see a way out of the war that he started. Nearly six months after launching attacks on Iran with Israel and 75 days before elections that will determine whether his party retains control of Congress, Trump faces the kind of open-ended conflict he once claimed he would end.

Unable to force Tehran’s surrender and declare the victory he sought, Trump is increasingly lashing out at allies. He also seems worried of a potential side deal between Iran and other Persian Gulf countries that would open the strait, analysts said.

“He’s in a situation that he can’t get out of — and unlike so many other things that Trump has gotten himself into, he cannot get bailed out,” said Andrew Leber, a Middle East scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Washington-based policy institute.

And that leads us to the administration’s other great bargaining failure of the past week — the breakdown of trade talks with Canada. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney addresses the nation and sounded pretty defiant:

Canada was “at war” over trade with the US after President Donald Trump “miscalculated” by escalating his tariff attack, Prime Minister Mark Carney said.

Carney delivered a defiant address to the nation on Saturday after suspending trade talks with the US overnight, saying the Trump administration had demanded a “bad deal”.

The collapse of talks ushers in a new wave of tariffs on $20bn-worth of Canadian exports on top of existing levies on steel, aluminium, lumber and vehicles.

“You’re at war when you’re attacked, and we got attacked,” Carney told reporters in Ottawa.

Trump underestimated Canada’s resolve to stomach economic hardship in a “miscalculation” that escalated the trade war, he said.

“We cannot accept what they’ve offered and we will not give what they’ve asked,” he added.

Politico’s tick-tock on how negotiations broke down suggest that, as per usual, Trump’s negotiating team was disjointed and making demands that no Canadian PM would have ever agreed to:

Interviews with more than a dozen current and former Canadian and U.S. officials, lobbyists and business groups suggest the deal President Donald Trump had touted just three days earlier ultimately buckled under a combination of last-minute demands and political constraints on both sides. U.S. officials blamed Canada for introducing new asks late in the talks, including seeking lower tariffs on heavy trucks, while Canadian leaders — including Prime Minister Mark Carney — pointed the finger at turf wars within the Trump administration over who controlled key pieces of the deal.

The result: A dramatic escalation into a trade war between two countries with deeply integrated supply chains, one that could threaten more than $1 trillion in North American trade and, with it, could continue to raise economic pressure ahead of U.S. congressional elections in November. A 50 percent tariff on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods kicked in on Saturday, Canadians have promised to respond in kind and Mexico, which does business with both, could be caught in the crosshairs….

The negotiations also exposed friction between Greer and U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s respective public policy spheres. While the White House has been adamant officials are in lockstep, two people familiar with the talks said Lutnick felt the deal framework hammered out by Greer’s trade office was “sprung on” his agency, despite involving a number of policy issues he oversees….

Lutnick, who has been one of the Trump officials who have been most openly dismissive of Canada and its interests, spoke to Carney directly via text and phone multiple times in the last week, according to three people familiar with the negotiations. One of them said the two spoke as recently as Friday.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if that is the reason for the disconnect and why both sides blame the other for changing the terms at the last minute,” said one person familiar with the talks….

Canada, meanwhile, chafed at what it described as requests on the U.S. side that would have threatened “the French language and our culture,” as well as compromise its ability to strike third-party trade agreements. The White House official said the latter request was related to “economic cooperation and security,” not precluding Canada from making third-party deals. The official pointed to economic security language in a trade agreement the Trump administration inked with the United Kingdom last year as a corollary.

No doubt, a trade war will hurt Canada more than the United States. With an economy ten times that of Canada’s, one would think the Trump administration capable of pressuring Canada into concessions.

Of course, by that logic the U.S. should have already forced Iran into submission, and that sure as hell has not happened. Indeed, there are areasons to think that U.S. officials will bollix this up as well. For one thing, as the clip below suggests, U.S. officials seem offended and surprised at the very thought of other countries retaliating with coercive efforts of their own:

If Greer was not expecting Canadian retaliation, this means he was not prepared for it. With an administration already buckling on tariffs over beef prices, even a mild price spike from this trade war could cause the U.S. to back down or find a face-saving compromise.

Trump has so degraded the U.S. reputation for resolve and negotiation prowess that even if his administration does not wish to back down, Canada’s expectation of that possibility sabotages U.S. coercive efforts. Which means a painful trade deadlock less than 90 days before the midterms.

I have said it before and I will say it again: I am sick and tired of all the winning. I would very much like the Trump administration to simply tread water for the next two years or so.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World is on a vacation that involves lakes, extended family, heated board games between said members of the extended family, and at least one delightful foray to the Norman Rockwell Museum.

This is the perfect setting to rest and recuperate from a pretty bad cold caught during recent travels. It is a very bad setting to serve up commentary on, oh, I don’t know, what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent thinks he is doing (see Paul Krugman for more on that sticky wicket) or just how much Pete Hegseth’s wife is running the Pentagon.

No, while on vacation the hard-resting staff here at Drezner’s World would like to tackle a much more serious question: should men be able to wear shorts to the office?

I ask because last month the New York Times’ David Coggins weighed in rather emphatically on this matter:

The long, hot summer can drive men to strange places. The stifling weather tests our collective powers of reason, like air-conditioners taxing the power grid. The latest idea, which would mortify Oscar Wilde, George Plimpton or your grandfather, is for men to wear shorts into the office. Yes, dress codes are frowned upon by the casual generations, but do you really want to see your boss’s knees?….

Your suit looks singularly uninviting. Maybe you gave up the suit years ago, but even your drab “business casual” options feel oppressive. Instead of a grinding commute, you want freedom, air circulation and thermal relief. You want, in other words, to wear shorts to the office.

Of course you do. Shorts are leisure, shorts are release, shorts are pleasure. Shorts are not on deadline, making stock trades or writing quarterly reports.

But the man who wears shorts to the office is telling everybody that he wants to be somewhere else. The fact that he really does want to be somewhere else does not excuse this. I know this is a time of perspired need, but please reconsider….

Did Don Draper, exemplar of midcentury Midtown chic, wear shorts to the office? Of course not. Did Gordon Gekko, corporate raider and breakfast abstainer, wear shorts to meetings with companies he was about to liquidate? No, he slicked his hair back, snapped his suspenders into position and feasted on insider information. What about a kinder office denizen, Jack Lemmon in “The Apartment”? Brooks Brothers-style suit, shirt and tie and a smile for Shirley MacLaine….

Is this a superficial, old way of thinking? You think that clothes are simple self-expression and this is all arbitrary? Then ask yourself if you’d hire a lawyer who wears spandex shorts in the courtroom. An accountant or agent who showed up to a meeting looking as if he stepped straight from a pool cabana? Clothing still has the power to convey expertise and to reassure. That’s why pilots wear uniforms. And you’d be turning right around on the jet bridge if you looked into the cockpit and spotted madras, bare legs and flip-flops.

But wait, you say, these are nice shorts, of tobacco linen made by a company that shot its lookbook on Ischia. Well, that’s great — save them for when you’re wearing espadrilles, nursing a Negroni and having lunch at three in the afternoon far from the imperatives of capitalist enterprise. But today we’re in the city, getting work done and possibly loathing our lives. At least we’re wearing trousers.

That self-sabotaging last paragraph makes me wonder if Coggins was merely taking the piss out of New York Times readers. As a fun late summer exercise, however, let’s take his argument at face value. Is he right? Should gentlemen sitting at desks be clothed completely below their necks?

As someone who likes to wear shorts during the summer but usually wears pants to work almost every day, this is an interesting conundrum to ponder while on vacation. Goodness knows my knees are not exactly eye-catching, so I am sensitive to the idea of wearing clothes that do not raise the eyebrows of my co-workers. At the same time, being overheated is not exactly a spur for greater productivity.

With this in mind, a few thoughts:

1. Let’s acknowledge what this is really about: the overwhelming advantage women have in the workplace over the summer months. Sure, women have endured countless millennia of violence and misogyny and discrimination — but sundresses are a godsend for the summer and men do not really have an comparable article of clothing. The fairer sex clearly has a sartorial advantage and this cannot stand is all I’m saying here.

2. Coggins fails to offer a viable alternative to suffering in sweltering suits during the summer — which is, duh, wearing copious amounts of linen. Linen clothes are great — light, breathable, and casually elegant. Most of my summer wardrobe consists of linen shirts and slacks. Linen is no longer all that expensive either. My sartorial advice to men is to wear linen during hot summer days.

3. Even in downtown offices, the summer months usually operate on a slightly different rhythm than the rest of the year — and clothing can reflect that shift. Shorts every day for the summer might be a bit much, but just as there are casual Fridays, shorts Fridays — a signal of a beach weekend to come — seems perfectly appropriate. No one wants to be at the office late on a Friday during the summer — dressing as such should not be a mark of shame.

And now the hard-resting staff here at Drezner’s World will take another well-earned nap. Debate this fashion question amongst yourselves.

The hard-working readers here at Drezner’s World have probably noticed that in my commentary about the Trump administration, a disproportionate share of my ire is targeted towards those who are perceived as the more “normie” Republicans: folks like Scott Bessent or Elbridge Colby or Marco Rubio. One can ask: why not aim more at someone who is manifestly unqualified for their job — someone like, say, Pete Hegseth?

I have a short answer and a long answer. to this question.

The short answer is simple: it is more troubling to see folks with some degree of acumen willingly ben the knee to Trump’s whims just to have some measure of power and status. Pete Hegseth is a malevolent, buffoonish clown; I expect absolutely nothing from him and am therefore unsurprised that he’s acting like a clown who is spectacularly out of his depth. Once that recognition is made, there is really little point to making it again.

The likes of Rubio, on the other hand, are rather different. He is clearly intelligent enough to know what (and who) he is enabling and does it anyway. To the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World, that is the more contemptuous behavior, and therefore merits more comment and derision.

The longer answer, however, is that Trump’s myriad transgressions require an entirely new typology of contemptible individuals — and it is sometimes difficult to keep track of all the different subcultures of sycophancy.

For example, what should I make of the MAGA faithful, the likes of Tucker Carlson or Steve Bannon or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Nancy Mace, folks who actually believed the MAGA bullshit that Trump and his team have spewed out over the past decade? They’re all genuine bigots, which is certainly contemptible. At the same time, they also genuinely believe in at least some of the foreign policy ideas that Trump embraced over a decade ago. I can’t get exercised by them all too much — mostly because, in the end, I think they’re a marginalized group with minimal political power.

Then there are the Stormtroopers — the folks working in the federal government who have enthusiastically embraced what Trump is selling. You know these are the weak-minded guys who Obi-Wan handles in this scene:1

There have been a raft of recent stories about the degree to which low-level thugs have taken advantage of their government positions to revel in their ability to bully and surveil citizens. For example, Wired’s Yulia Almazova recently reported on what U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers have been doing on their computers: “In one case, a CBP officer allegedly used government databases to contact a flight attendant. In another, an officer was accused of pulling information from trusted-traveler applications to ask people out. Other CBP employees were accused of providing border-crossing data to someone involved in a ‘heated divorce.’”

Another example is DHS more generally. In the wake of organized resistance to their Minneapolis incursion, DHS decided to investigate progressive organizations. According to the New York Times’ Alan Feuer and Ernesto Londoño:

Homeland security officials used an array of invasive tactics during the first half of this year to gather information on many groups and individuals who were never accused of crimes, crossing the line that has traditionally stood between investigating criminal activity and political dissent.

In one instance, officials used administrative subpoenas to obtain more than three years of financial records from the Sunrise Movement, an environmental action group, and a labor union, the Communications Workers of America. That time frame went well beyond the civil unrest in Minnesota, which was prompted by the deployment of thousands of immigration agents to the state during the winter.

In another, investigators scrutinized three years’ worth of wire transfers made by the nation’s biggest health care workers union, the Service Employees International Union, in what they referred to as an inquiry into “domestic terrorist financing.”

All of this is pretty vile, and the folks doing it at DHS appear not to care about how vile it is.

And yet, it is also worth noting that abuses of government power by career employees span most administrations. That Wired story, for example, examined CBP actions from 2009 to 2022. Stormtroopers are an endemic problem. Clearly, the Trump administration is not helping, but this is not a new phenomenon.

Then there are the Trump emulators, the aspiring politicians who see Donald Trump as their political lodestar and think that behaving like him, they will acquire power. The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg wrote an excellent column about the likes of U.S. Representatives Max Miller and Cory Mills, Republican House candidate Brandon Herrera, and other kindred spirits. As Goldberg notes, “Thanks to President Trump, misogyny and extremism among Republicans have become what journalists sometimes call a dog-bites-man story, something so ordinary and predictable that it breaks through only when it reaches an absurdly high threshold.” It is actually worse than that — in Miller’s case, the Trump White House overtly intervened to tell Republicans to back off their criticisms of Miller.

These folks are infuriating, and a sign of how Trump has normalized the idea of GOP candidates running despite serious scandals that would have forced a previous generation of candidates to drop out.

And yet, to the hardworking staff here at Drezner’s World, the group that is even more infuriating are the allegedly normie Republicans. These are the folks who have held their noses and continued to vote Republican despite all of… this… for the past ten years.

For example, Brandon Herrera has made remarks that are clearly sexist and anti-Semitic. Despite all of this, House Speaker Mike Johnson is attending Herrera fundraisers. And as Goldberg notes in her column, “I haven’t seen much public hand-wringing about the decision of the pious Johnson to raise money for Herrera, nor debate about what his candidacy means for the Republican Party’s attitude toward women, Jews or seniors.”

Or consider this paragraph from Politico about GOP thinking regarding Max Miller: “Some Republicans argue they have no choice but to close ranks around a candidate accused by his former father-in-law, Ohio GOP Sen. Bernie Moreno, of being unfit to serve and needing psychological help; Ohio’s other Republican senator, Jon Husted, has also said Miller should resign and not run for reelection. Miller has remained defiant amid the calls to resign.” My point is that they absolutely have a choice.

Furthermore, they keep making their choice in a way that empowers the worst elements of their party. G. Elliott Morris recently explored the gap between Trump’s high disapproval polling and the Democrats smaller margin in the generic congressional ballot. His conclusion: “Voters who pulled the lever for Trump in ‘24 and call themselves Republicans but not conservatives stay Republican…. The pattern is hard to miss. The subgroups that keep “Republican” in their identity stay Republican by 37 points or more in the generic ballot even while disapproving of the man leading their party, — while both subgroups without it defect to the Democrats by a margin of 30-plus points. Party identity is doing a lot of work, even among Trump voters.”

Here’s a helpful chart:

It’s this group that, in the end, are the pivotal Trump enablers. Senators like Chuck Grassley or, even better Bill Cassidy.

When I see someone like Brandon Herrera or Max Miller pop up in the news, it does not take long to conclude that there’s no point condemning someone who has already lost their soul. Mike Johnson and Bill Cassidy, however, likely think that they have only rented theirss temporarily.

These are the folks for whom calumny has been sparser — but dear God do they deserve it.

Last week Politico’s Nahal Toosi correctly observed that “no one seems to have a solid strategy to win the war in Iran.”

The thing is, though, that Toosi’s assertion is actually an understatement: not only does the Trump administration lack a solid strategy to win the war in Iran, they have no capacity to handle any of the second or third-order effects of the war. And the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World really does not think anyone — not U.S. allies, not U.S. adversaries, not U.S. foreign policy commentators — appreciate the scope of Trump’s clusterfuck.

Let’s start with the situation in Iran. Toosi ably summarizes the state of despair within the administration about where things currently stand:

When I asked current and former U.S. officials what had to be done to win, the most common first response was a primal scream of sorts that translated into, “We never should have started this war.” That was followed by: “What do you mean by ‘win’?”

It’s a fair question, and one the White House has failed to answer as it keeps shifting its goals. Trump launched the war bent on ending Iran’s nuclear program, destroying many of its military capabilities and hinting at regime change. Now he seems most intent on freeing the strait from Iran’s grip.

Among some at the lower levels of the administration, there’s a sense of despair.

“I don’t see a way out of this,” one U.S. official familiar with the administration’s Middle East strategy told me. The official argued that the Trump team “fundamentally misunderstands” Iran’s rulers. Trump and his aides “have always felt like they can just keep applying pain and Iran will crumble, but the regime is not going to crumble.”

Toosi then outlines three different schools of thought on the war: the hawks that would escalate the application of military force to include ground troops, the restrainers who would deescalate pretty much on Iran’s terms, and the sanctioners, who want to ratchet up maximum economic pressure even more in the expectation that Iran’s economy will eventually buckle. As Toosi notes, all of these approaches “seem grounded more in hope than reality.”

It seems that by default, the Trump administration has settled on the sanctions option. According to the Atlantic’s Jonathan Lemire, “Trump’s new strategy is to try doing nothing, and see whether that works. The president is de-emphasizing both diplomacy and military action, and instead placing his faith in economic pressure, in the hope that time can accomplish what force could not. This wait-and-see approach is meant to allow stepped-up financial sanctions and a U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports to inflict economic pain.”

The problem, as Lemire notes, is that “this new tack will require the president to show patience,” and as I’ve previously noted, president Trump lacks patience to a pathological degree. The only virtue this approach has for Trump is that because it is a continuation of the status quo, it is the laziest and easiest approach.

But it is worth stepping back for a second to appreciate the degree to which the Trump White House is losing in Iran and elsewhere because of this stalemate.

Read more

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World is taking a quick jaunt to Hamburg, Germany to give a talk and maybe stroll along the Alster. Posting will likely be very light over the next couple of days, unless stories like this one or this one or this one prompt me to draft a lengthy rant about how the United States is currently governed by the dumbest motherfuckers alive.

In the meantime, however, I thought I would share the nonfiction that I am reading right now. One of these books I have already referenced in multiple posts already:

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. Credit where due: Trump’s second term has been staffed by folks who are much more loyal to Trump than during his first term. This means that good sources are a bit scarcer to come by. That did not deter Haberman and Swan. They clearly worked their sources to produce a compelling chronicle of Trump’s first fourteen months in office. It starts off as a story about the Trump White House not giving a flying fig about laws and norms and discovering that they can bully an awfully large slice of American institutions. And then, of course, this eventually leads to Trump’s ruination. This book is a must-read to understand what happened during the first year of Trump’s second term.

One side note: I don’t entirely buy Haberman and Swan’s argument that had Trump won in 2020 he would have exercised less power than he did in 2025. By 2020 Trump had stumbled onto the formula of how he wanted to govern: prioritizing loyalty above all else. In essence, if he’d been re-elected in 2020 I suspect we’d have just been dealing with what happened in 2025 back in 2021.1 The only virtue of that would be that Trump’s time in the presidency would have come to an end.

Audrye Wong, Subversion and Seduction: China’s Economic Statecraft. There has been a large literature about how China practices economic diplomacy differently than the United States. Over the long run I have my doubts about whether this divergence will persist, but there is no denying that Beijing practices a different style of economic statecraft. Wong’s book — which I’ve read in article form — does a great job of delineating China’s different ways of using its economic power to pursue its foreign policy ends. It is well worth the read.

Tina Fordham, Mad World: A Geostrategy Survival Guide for Leaders. There are a lot of people who will say that geopolitical risk has reached unprecedented heights and that we need a new paradigm to think about it. There are very few people I would trust to provide much in the way of explanatory leverage. Fordham, who has been working on geopolitical risk for more than a quarter-century, is one of those people. She declares in her introduction that, “geopolitical volatility is now the central scenario and should become a core planning assumption rather than limited to being considered a risk factor.” That’s a sobering declaration — but as current events demonstrate, she’s not wrong.

Enjoy your weekends!

It would be hard to overstate how much the Boston Red Sox stunk during the first three months of the 2026 season. I watched some of their games during those months. They were a decent ballclub — so long as you ignored the hitting, the fielding, and the baserunning.

Manager Alex Cora and most of his coaching staff were fired after a 10-17 start — but it’s not like the team really started playing better after that. It didn’t help that the team was riddled with injuries. Garrett Crochet, their best pitcher, was placed on the injured list in late April; Roman Anthony, their most promising rookie, was put on the IL a week later. Other players like Brayan Bello and Jarren Duran seriously regressed. Some data, like their run differential, suggested that they were underperforming their fundamentals. But that was cold comfort watching a squad that seemed destined to be sellers at the trading deadline after improbably making the playoffs in 2025.

The team’s atrocious record at Fenway generated very loud fan chants of “sell the team!” night after night. The nadir was in late June when the Red Sox lost in a walk-off to the Colorado Rockies, leaving them at 31-45. WEEI’s Rob Bradford’s assessment after the loss was brutal:

To begin with, they lost to the worst team in Major League Baseball. Secondly, the Red Sox now share the inglorious honor of possessing the fewest wins in MLB with those same Rockies….

Even though the American League is trending toward combining for its worst collective winning percentage, the Red Sox are one of the very few teams that seem hell-bent on not taking advantage of the mediocrity. Only two A.L. teams, the Angels and Royals, are further out of a wild card spot than the Red Sox, who stand seven games away from the final wild card position.

There is also zero evidence that it is a team capable of rattling off the kind of win streak that will change the narrative, having claimed just two three-game win streaks and never winning four in a row.

If you’ve paid any attention to baseball over the past two months you know where this is going. Against all odds the Red Sox rattled off the kind of win streak that changed the narrative, going 27-3 in one thirty-game stretch. Late last month FanGraphs’ Jay Jaffe explained what was going on:

The turnaround began on June 25, when the Yankees came to Boston for a four-game series with the AL’s best record (48-31). The Red Sox ripped off a rousing four-game sweep of their division rivals, capped by Jarren Duran’s 10th-inning walk-off single on June 28. After dropping two out of three to the Nationals at Fenway Park, the Red Sox embarked upon the nine-game road trip that kicked off their winning streak, taking three apiece from the Angels, White Sox, and Mets before the All-Star break. They began the second half at home with a four-game sweep of the AL East-leading Rays (56-38 at the start of the series), then edged the Orioles 6-5 on Tuesday night thanks to Caleb Durbin’s eighth-inning homer off Tyler Wells….

As with many a stretch of this caliber, Boston’s run owes to major improvements on both sides of the ball. Through June 24, the Red Sox were scoring just 3.94 runs per game, last in the AL; they’ve improved that to 5.17 per game since, the league’s second-best rate. Through June 24, they were holding opponents to just 4.03 runs per game, third fewest in the AL, but since then, they’ve trimmed that to 2.91 runs per game, the best in the league by more than a third of a run….

Barring another slide over the next 10 days, the Red Sox are presumed to be in the market for a right-handed bat, with a catcher, a middle infielder, and/or a DH the obvious areas of need. A late-inning arm and an extra starter are probably on their shopping list as well, as they are for virtually every contender; in a rotation that currently has three members of its projected starting five on the IL, and rookies who are heading into uncharted territory, workload-wise, this team can’t have too much pitching. Still, three weeks ago, few people thought the Red Sox would be in a position to desire such luxury items in early August.

The Red Sox went on another winning streak after Jaffe wrote his column, improving their playoff odds even more, according to FanGraphs:

Sure enough, the Red Sox were aggressive buyers at the trading deadline, securing All-Star catcher Adley Rutschman from the Orioles among other reinforcements.

ESPN’s Bradford Doolittle crunched the numbers to explain how much better the team has been playing:

Invariably, any time a team gets this hot, it’s not hitting or pitching but both. This has been the case for the Red Sox. At the same time, their pitching was pretty good to begin with. It’s the batsmen who have really leveled up for Boston of late.

At the start of the blazing streak, when things looked bleak, Boston was on pace to score 635 runs while allowing 664, for a minus-29 differential. The Red Sox are now on pace to score 719 runs and allow 605, for a plus-114 differential. They improved their on-pace projections by 84 runs on the offensive side and 59 on the defensive side, adding up to the incredible 143-run leap in differential pace….

The revamped rotation, just so-so earlier in the season, has been one of baseball's best. Since the June 18 nadir, the starters rank second with a 3.05 ERA while leading MLB in quality starts….

And the offense has been blazing. Before the spree, Boston’s .694 OPS ranked 25th in baseball. Since June 18, that number is .764, the seventh-best. As a team, the Red Sox have hit for much more power. Boston hit 61 homers in its first 72 games (29th) but has clubbed 57 homers in 46 games since.

This doesn’t just appear to be happenstance. Boston, as an offense, has walked more, chased less and been more willing to absorb a few strikeouts. The collective exit velocity is exactly the same (88 mph) but the launch angle has increased by 2 degrees. The Red Sox have morphed into much more of a take-and-rake club -- and it has worked.

What has changed? Lots of things. Everything. And in a sense nothing, because the Red Sox have more or less ended up where they were projected back in March. What we did not see coming was the path they took to get here. Indeed, no one could have seen it coming, because it's just so darn rare.

The Red Sox did not just start playing better — their games became ridiculously exciting. I mean, look at the highlights from this win against the Chicago White Sox, which was just ridiculous:

Here’s the thing, though: I’m not sure I am completely sold on this team.

I’ve been to two games at Fenway and watched multiple others during their hot streak, and three things stand out to me. First is that they’ve been remarkably proficient at two-out scoring. That is a good thing but it is also kind of a lucky thing — and if their luck runs out, that’s a problem.

Second, their infield defense has not looked great.1 The data confirms my eye test: according to ESPN’s Doolittle, Baseball Savant, has the Red Sox at plus-16 fielding runs above average before their hot streak; they have been at zero since. I have seen multiple run scored against the Sox due to sloppy play and limited range from their fielders.

Third, and most important, however, the Red Sox have been the beneficiaries of sloppy play by their opponents. For every Red Sox miscue I have seen during this hot streak, I have seen their opponents make two mistakes. Credit to the Red Sox — they’ve taken advantage of their opponents mistakes. But luck is not a strategy to win in October. Or August — the Red Sox have lost four straight this week to under .500 teams.

I might not be sold on the team, but I can’t quit them either. I was at Fenway when the Red Sox 15-game winning streak came to an end. They were down 5-1 in the bottom of the ninth — and yet the park was still packed, the fans were on their feet, cheering the Sox in the fervent hope that they could will the team into another comeback. It was not to be, but that’s not the point. The fun of being a sports fan is believing in your team enough to convince yourself that they can come back when they are down, that they can pull off the improbable. And these Red Sox are good enough and spirited enough to justify that kind of fandom.

I doubt the 2026 Boston Red Sox will win the World Series. I’m still not completely convinced that they will make the playoffs. But I am grateful to them for their recent run of domination. It convinced me that there is at least one conceivable future in which they go on a hell of a playoff run. I have no idea if that is their actual future — but a fan can hope.

Over the weekend I finally finished Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change. I had seen some highlights in myriad excerpts but the effect of reading it all in one book was sobering, to say the least. It was like reading a concentrated excerpt of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, only with even dumber and more arrogant people making all of the important decisions.

Equally sobering was the way that Haberman and Swan described the Trump White House’s attitude towards corruption:

The overlap of business relationships and government work, once a source of consternation for first-term Trump officials, was now an accepted part of Trump’s new administration. White House officials generally shrugged off news accounts of conflicts of interest….

To the extent anyone in the White House thought about the overlapping public and private relationships in the first year of the term, they were seen as an asset….

In the years between his presidencies, Trump had come to believe he had been too accommodating of long-established norms….

“I prohibited them from doing business in my first term, and I got absolutely no credit for it,” Trump complained in a New York Times interview in early 2026, talking about his sons. “I didn’t have to do that. And it’s really unfair to them.” He added, “I found out that nobody cared, and I’m allowed to.”

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World wrote last week about the massive corruption during Trump’s second term. And yet that column might have missed the most egregious example to date, which is the Trump family’s effort to legitimize the monetization of inside information.

Last month the AP’s Bernard Condon reported that Trump’s media company was considering a new and uniquely corrupt way to monetize Truth Social posts:

President Donald Trump’s media company is planning to charge for special high-speed access to Truth Social posts, including possibly his own affecting national security and financial markets.

The move announced Thursday would allow Wall Street trading firms and other institutions to get news from top Truth Social contributors in milliseconds so they could profit off subsequent moves in stocks, bonds and interest rates.

Called Truth PSI, the new service comes amid a flurry of other deals by Trump and his family company that critics say are exploiting the presidency for profit. It follows similar offers of paid access on rival platforms, though with one key difference: The most popular Truth Social poster is the president himself and, as the biggest shareholder of the public traded parent company, would directly benefit.

“He’s selling expedited, privileged access to information about what he is doing as president,” said Kathleen Clark of Washington University School of Law and an expert in government conflicts of interest rules. “It’s yet more brazen corruption, an improper exploitation of government power to enrich himself.”….

Conflict of interest laws would bar U.S. government officials from owning a company that profits off their office by selling access to their decisions through public posts, says Washington University’s Clark. But the president and vice-president, she notes, are excluded from the provision.

Despite that, all presidents since the law was passed decades ago have acted as if it applied — selling individual stocks, dumping business holdings or putting their financial assets in a blind trust so they wouldn’t know what was being bought and sold on their behalf while they wielded power — but Trump has refused.

The only thing Condon got wrong in his reporting is that the new service wound up being called Trump API instead of Trump PSI.

Whatever it’s called, it sounds like the literal auctioning off of insider information to investors. This raises the question of whether it’s illegal as well as blatantly unethical. Reuters offers some analysis on this question:

The ⁠Truth API arrangement would be “wildly unethical,” said Donald Sherman, president of the nonpartisan watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, because the president ⁠stands to benefit from payments for faster access to his posts. However, it is difficult to determine from publicly available information whether it ⁠is illegal, he said.

Sherman and other experts note that the Constitution’s emoluments clauses, designed to thwart corruption, would not apply in this case. They bar federal officials from accepting gifts from foreign governments without congressional approval, and the president from receiving gifts from states.

And ​while federal regulations broadly prohibit the buying or selling of a security based on material, ‌non-public information, that restriction would not apply if potentially hundreds or thousands of people receive earlier access to his posts, Sherman said.

“I don’t think Congress or any regulatory body ever contemplated that a president or a market-mover would engage in this kind of paying-for-access type arrangement,” he said.

PBS’ News Hour Bobby Allyn also asked around, and I’m just gonna quote what he said:

I talked to the spokeswoman for the Trump Media Company, and she says all these accusations of insider trading, all these accusations that we’re offering material nonprofit information to traders are completely false because it’s public information.

But, again… I talked to many people who study Wall Street and former SEC enforcers who said, no, this is not public information because the very service is offering it to people before the rest of the world. I mean, that is the value add. You can get Trump’s posts before anyone else.

So experts told me that is the definition of material nonpublic information, and one executive at a very large Wall Street firm told me, if this was any other administration, this would be considered criminal. And I put that to the Trump media spokesperson, and she said that is absurd.

Just so we’re clear, at this point Trump’s family is approving something that is blatantly unethical and possibly illegal. Because he’s not hiding anything about it, however, Trump and his team clearly believe they can brazen their way through this.

The thing is, if this New York Times story by Matthew Goldstein is accurate, then Trump is in financial and legal hot water:

Last month, the overall number of monthly visitors to Truth Social was down about 36 percent from a year ago, according to estimates by the online tracking firm Similarweb. Monthly visitors to the site fell by a slightly greater amount in June, compared with last year. By contrast, much bigger social media platforms such as X and Threads have posted higher numbers of visits this summer….

“I have been following traffic to Truth Social for years, and I am really struck by the steepness of the plunge,” said Howard Polskin, who publishes a newsletter called theRighting, which tracks the right-wing news media. “When you think of how much Trump uses Truth Social as a megaphone you would think the numbers would be skyrocketing.”….

In a conference call on Monday, Kevin McGurn, the company’s interim chief executive, said Trump Media had signed up more than 10 customers, mostly trading firms, for the fast feed of the Truth Social posts. But he said the company was also having conversations with several new organizations.

Mr. McGurn said the criticism of the fast feed product was misplaced. He said customers were simply getting access to “publicly available posts” but “fractionally” faster than everyone else. He said this was a “well-established business practice.”

Trump Media is betting that more trading firms will want faster access to Truth Social given the ability of the president’s posts to move markets.

That last paragraph is perfection, because it puts the lie to McGurn’s claims about this being a “well-established business practice.” And if the number of customers stays at only 10, then it sure seems like it would be illegal.

But the story also reveals that Trump’s family is taking this likely illegal action because his company is facing the same challenge all of conservative media is facing right now: a hemorrhaging of the audience. And the only comparative advantage that Truth Social can offer is temporary inside information.

Beyond Trump’s business difficulties, one has to wonder whether this kind of attempted corruption will affect his party’s midterm performance. Recently, Axios reported that despite the approaching midterms, Trump was persisting in prosecuting the Iran war, levying tariffs, and building monuments in his own honor: “These three topics chew up much of Trump's time and attention. All three are widely unpopular in polls.”

As it turns out, Trump has more unpopular moves up his sleeve, like his ridiculous revisions to children’s vaccines.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World is disgusted by pretty much all of these moves. The brazen corruption described above, however, may wind up being the thing that sticks with voters the most.

Full disclosure: whatever my disagreements with him, I fundamentally like Ross Douthat. We have occasionally commented on each other’s work. We have had a coffee or two in person. The same people in the national conservatism ecosystem irritate both of us. Some of Douthat’s columns infuriated me, but others had a valuable nugget of insight.1

For my money, Douthat’s greatest strength as a columnist was to take conservative ideas seriously and to serve up the most benign possible interpretation for conservative motives. The value in this exercise was that it caused readers — myself included — to move past an easy dismissal of beliefs that might otherwise be dismissed out of hand and consider the possibility that they might have some staying power.

Unfortunately, Douthat’s greatest weakness was also his belief in benign conservative motives, because it created blind spots when it came to Trump and his movement. On the other hand, Douthat applied a harsher view towards liberal ideas, including the one that declared Trump to be a threat to American values. Douthat pooh-poohed the notion that anything untoward would happen on January 6, 2021. For most of Trump’s time in power, he assumed that Trump’s incompetence sabotaged his malevolence. In 2017 I probably agreed with Douthat on that point, but with each passing year the malevolence has become harder to ignore. That reduced Douthat’s value over replacement columnist with each year Trump was in power.

Late last month the news broke that conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat was leaving for Bari Weiss’ 60 Minutes. This past weekend Douthat penned his last column, one that acknowledged the ground that had shifted under his feet over the past decade — but nonetheless put all of his faults on display:

Watching this crisis unfold, I find that I’ve lost my sense of which contemporary worldview is most in need of criticism or opposition, where the good guys and bad guys are. Each major faction seems potentially dangerous, tempted toward the dark side in some unique way, contested or cross-pressured to a degree that makes me uncertain where the side of the angels really lies.

Start with the populism that has risen to power because of the elite consensus’s failures. For many conservatives who shared my critique of the Obama-era establishment, the populist rebellion has been the vessel for their hopes. But in Donald Trump’s second term populism has displayed most of the vices that its critics anticipated. It has been corrupt and bullying and destabilizing. It has rewarded hacks and cronies. And it stumbled into a Middle Eastern war with even less preparation than its establishment predecessors.

For many liberal readers, these sins make populism the maximum danger, the singular emergency. But as Trumpism has flailed and failed, it hasn’t consolidated the kind of authoritarian power anticipated by its most alarmed opponents. At the moment, Trump 2.0 has no great popularity, no legislative capacity, no policy legacy that a Democratic successor can’t easily roll back. The president himself might still be a dangerous figure, there might be darker forces waiting in the wings — but I don’t think that justifies making anti-populism the measure of all things.

It is the “Trumpism has flailed and failed, it hasn’t consolidated the kind of authoritarian power anticipated by its most alarmed opponents” sentence fragment that is the perfect kind of trolling. Trump’s most alarmed opponents probably thought he would declare martial law, and he hasn’t done that. Still, the deployment of National Guard troops in Washington, DC, the massive increases in the DHS budget, the mass deportations without much in the way of due process, and the abject corruption of the Department of Justice are all: a) real bad; and b) pretty institutionalized. So I think it absolutely justifies making anti-populism the measure of all things.

Furthermore, even failed Trumpism has long-lasting consequences. Indeed, it’s a shame Douthat failed to read the NYT’s detailed story of the Reflecting Poll fiasco before publishing his final column. Although a minor story in the grand scheme of things, the Times’ reporters provide an excellent explanation for why it merits coverage: “the pool, which was supposed to reflect the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, became a striking reflection instead of the second Trump administration’s willingness to skirt laws, expend millions of dollars, ignore facts and punish truth tellers in service of the president’s demands to put his mark on the capital.” Well, yes.2

Still, perhaps the saddest aspect of Douthat’s departure is what his decision to join Bari Weiss at 60 Minutes reveals about his thinking. Douthat, a man of letters well-versed in the classics, is leaving the world of print for the world of video. It’s almost like he read Rose Horowitch’s Atlantic essay about the decline of reading and decided to follow the trend:

The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most—retirees, women, and college graduates—have seen a collapse….

Americans also get much less of their news through reading than they once did. In 1975, about half of 20-somethings said they read the newspaper every day. Today less than 10 percent do. Most Americans now get the news on their phones and laptops, and 40 percent say they prefer to watch or listen to online news rather than read it….

Cultural and economic power tends to flow to people who are skilled at using the most popular communications technology. Today, those people are streamers, podcasters, and influencers.

In pivoting to video, Douthat believes he can exert greater influence — a belief that he shares with some of his colleagues on the left I might add:

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World, which is really, really into text, hopes that Douthat is wrong about the future of text. Beyond that, however, I wish his the best of luck at raising the bar at his new locale.

The recent shift in Russian public opinion towards the war in Ukraine has been revealing.

Back in 2022, after a brief wave of urban protests, followed by a brief but brutal crackdown of said protests, most Russians supported Putin’s war. As one November 2023 Carnegie report phrased it, the “limited impact the war in Ukraine has had on the day-to-day lives of most Russians go some way to explaining continuing high levels of support for the war among Russians.” Even after the fall 2022 partial mobilization, “most Russians… were able to resume their regular routine and block out any news from Ukraine, concluding once again that events there didn’t directly concern them.”

Fast forward to 2026, and more aggressive Ukrainian tactics — including attacks on Russian energy systems — have likely had a direct effect on Russian public opinion. That is because the consequences of the war are no longer limited to Ukraine. The attacks on Russian soil are both military in nature but also have economic effects on ordinary Russians. A CSIS report from this July explains:

Ukraine’s ongoing long-range drone strikes on Russian oil refineries combine both aforementioned mechanisms: They are military attacks imposing tangible economic costs. Ukraine’s self-described “long-range sanctions” campaign against Russia therefore has greater potential to erode public support for the war than military strikes alone….

As illustrated by long lines to gas stations from Moscow to Irkutsk in Siberia, the economic and social impact of this campaign is already visible despite being only weeks old. The Ukrainian strikes were the most frequently cited as the most notable event of May and June, mentioned by 16 percent and 24 percent of respondents respectively. The effects will spread to other sectors, as diesel shortages are likely to disrupt agricultural machinery and supply trucks, potentially threatening Russia’s crucial mid-summer harvest and fuel deliveries to remote regions. They also add upward pressure on inflation, one of the Russian public’s core economic concerns, as the government struggles to contain price growth amid high wartime spending. These factors are likely to further erode support for the authorities and increase public preference for ending the war.

While a cross-border incursion is externally caused and clearly framed as enemy aggression, a fuel queue is different: a banal, recurring inconvenience that is experienced as one of the domestic costs of a war Russia chose and continues to wage. Casualties can be hidden, renamed, and ritualized, and after four years, the Kremlin is well practiced in doing so. The regime can mobilize people against an attacker. It is far harder to mobilize them against a shortage.

I suspect the hard-working readers of Drezner’s World are nodding their heads in satisfaction at reading the previous few paragraphs. After all, Russia started this war, thinking it would be over in a few weeks. Even as the war bogged down, most Russians were secure that the conflict would not touch their daily lives. As that has changed, however, so has Russians’ opinion of the war.

Why am I bringing this up? Because it is difficult not to notice the parallels between Russia and the United States right now.

As with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. decision to attack Iran has proven to be an epic strategic miscue. Even now, it is clear that Donald Trump does not understand his adversary at all, and any recent deal that has been proposed represents a serious setback for freedom of navigation — and, by extension, U.S. interests.1 Most Americans feel the economic cost of the conflict through price increases, most obviously in gasoline.

As for U.S. public opinion, a majority of Americans already oppose the war. The American sense of invulnerability, however, remains pretty rock-solid. Even after six months, fewer than two dozen U.S. troops have died. There have been no military attacks on American soil.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has a question, however: is that sense of invulnerability about to come to an end?

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The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has not written about Marco Rubio in more than two months. That seems unfair — in that time I’ve written not one but two columns about JD Vance. Heck, I’ve even opined about Elbridge Colby. Rubio, the man who is both Trump’s national security advisor and his secretary of state, deserves a column of his very own every once in a while!

The reason I have not written much about Rubio is that, to be blunt, he hasn’t been in the news all that much. He seems to be focused primarily on Cuba right now. One Trumpworld source told Politico’s Dasha Burns and Nahal Toosi that Cuba is a “huge priority of Rubio’s,” which might explain why the administration has surged intelligence assets into the country.

In an administration in which frenetic media activity is usually correlated with destructive or dysfunctional behavior, maybe Rubio’s monomania about Latin America is a good thing. After all, folks like Bill Pulte and Pete Hegseth have been far more prominent, and all they seem to do is make strategic messes.

The thing is, Marco Rubio is not the Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America; he’s the president’s chief foreign policy advisor. He is supposed to be running the interagency policy process as well as the State Department. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that he’s not running a damn thing.

Consider the State Department. Rubio’s draconian budget cuts have midwifed a clown car of a department. At the largest AIDS conference in the world, for example, the team at State produced an AI-generated map that, as Reuters put it, “mislabeled every country.” Health expert Emily Bass provided even more embarrassing details:

A senior US State Department official displayed a map of Africa that was completely wrong before high-level officials from African nations, including some whose countries had been mislabelled. The map mishap occurred during a presentation at “Transforming health assistance: Implementing U.S. government MOUs for sustainable HIV programs,” a pre-conference event at the largest AIDS conference in the world, held this year in Rio de Janeiro.

The map mis-identified the locations of Cote d’Ivoire, Mozambique, Nigeria by enormous margins—making Nigeria landlocked, Mozambique an east African nation and Cote d’Ivoire a southern African state. The map put Uganda and Malawi in the right vicinity, but with the wrong borders. And it nope’d out altogether for Cameroon, which doesn’t have a line connecting the name to a country at all.

Look, this should be basic Diplomacy 101 stuff, and yet Rubio’s State Department keeps screwing it up. It’s amateur hour at Foggy Bottom.

Meanwhile, Rubio’s approach to human rights has also been a disaster. Writing in Foreign Policy, Amnesty International USA’s Amanda Klasing provides a grim assessment:

With so much focus on the administration’s militarized and often unlawful foreign policy—including the invasions of Venezuela and Iran and hundreds of extrajudicial killings in airstrikes at sea—it’s easy to overlook the destruction that Rubio has caused to the diplomatic system that offers alternatives. But over the past nearly 18 months, Rubio has led an all-out assault on human rights in U.S. statecraft, mostly bypassing Congress to do so.

Rubio has slashed foreign assistance and humanitarian aid, decimated human rights programs addressing everything from torture to atrocity prevention, politicized the department’s annual human rights reports, gutted key human rights offices and bureaus, withdrawn or disengaged from global human rights systems at the U.N. and elsewhere, and threatened international justice mechanisms, all while promoting a vague “natural rights” framework to supplant the concept of international human rights.

At this point, he must be seen as the chief architect and implementor of dismantling the State Department systems that were designed to uphold and engage the rules-based order that protects human rights and promotes global peace and security….

Under Rubio, the State Department appears to be very near to giving up on human rights entirely. Despite a few instances where policy decisions have aligned with human rights advocacy asks—such as, for many groups, sanctions against various bad actors in Africa and Latin America—Rubio has contributed to large-scale erosion of U.S. human rights leadership, weakened global human rights mechanisms, undermined cooperation abroad on human rights, and hamstrung Washington’s capacity to respond to abuses.

Taken together, Rubio’s most enduring legacy may end up being the collapse of U.S. capacity to shape and enforce global norms and policies at the U.N. and other spaces.

Little wonder that more people in more countries view the U.S. more negatively than China.1

Now, one could argue that Rubio has to prioritize his battles. He has made a conscious decision to spend more time in the White House than in Foggy Bottom or traveling overseas because he needs to be in the room with Trump to influence policy. This is a point that Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan make in Regime Change: Rubio recognizes that he’s been derelict in his State Department duties because proximity to Trump is what matters on the big foreign policy issues.

Fair enough. But it seems awfully telling that on the Iran war — easily the administration’s biggest foreign policy challenge right now — Marco Rubio is still nowhere to be found.

Indeed, Rubio’s distance from Iran has been so noticeable that the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman commented on it to Ezra Klein. “Marco Rubio had a lot of capital with Trump for a long time. I think he still does, but he is really not that involved in the Iran issue,” she told Klein. When asked if that was Trump’s preference, she replied, “I think that Trump would welcome his involvement more.”

This touches on something I pointed out back in March:

It’s not obvious at all that Rubio has provided any value-added over any other lapdog who would have occupied his position in his stead. Like everyone else, he has functioned as a yes man for Trump. Indeed, he has failed in both of his foreign policy roles. As national security advisor, he has administered no real policymaking process. As Secretary of State, he has failed to persuade any one about the wisdom of U.S. military action. Instead, as I wrote earlier this week, “here’s the thing about the Trump administration: it’s not just that their policies do not make a ton of sense or that they failed to do any strategic planning. It’s that they don’t care that they haven’t put in the work.”

Marco Rubio is not the architect of the Iran clusterfuck. But he is most definitely the author of the conditions that make the clusterfuck possible. At some point, the reckoning for his negligence will come back to haunt him.

So, to sump up: Marco Rubio is not really running the State Department, and the erosion of State’s ability to do much of anything is becoming readily apparent. Rubio is instead sticking close to Trump to advise him — except on important things like Iran.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Marco Rubio does not provide any value-added above a generic Trump flunkie.

One of the ways that the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World tries to stay sane is tuning out debates and disagreements about the future of the Democratic Party.

In part this is because I’m not a Democrat; it’s literally not my party. For me, it is the party of Not Donald Trump, which means it’s the perfect vessel to oppose Trump, his misbegotten and illiberal policies, and the enablers who now constitute the overwhelming bulk of the GOP. In part this is because whatever the merits of such a conversation, these debates tend to bring out the worst qualities in most of the participants. In part this is because I find other stories to be more important and more interesting.

Over the past eighteen months, however, I have interacted with enough Democratic Party elites and wonks to realize that something about their intramural discourse has been nagging at me. It was difficult to identify it exactly it was until MS NOW’s Chris Hayes posted this:

Yes, this is the precise way to frame this question. So let me share my attempt at an answer.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World was unimpressed with Trump’s first term and is even less impressed by Trump’s second term. But clearly some Democrats believe that they’re re-living a season three episode of Star Trek, viewing Trumpism as successful political and ideological project that can be harnessed for their own policy purposes. A lot of Democratic Party trade wonks, for example, sound envious when they discuss Trump’s myriad initiatives. I have heard elected Democrats marvel at Trump’s ability to attract populist support, hoping to copy his formula as a program for campaign success.

This grudging admiration hinges on whether Trumpism should be viewed as a political and ideological success. And while I am pessimistic about Trumpism, I acknowledge that there are valid reasons to see if lessons can be learned. As a political project, Donald Trump has won two presidential elections and consistently exceeded his polling numbers. He has survived two impeachments, four criminal indictments, and a variety of civil suits and has been undeterred in remaking the executive branch in his own image.

Ideologically, Trump has undeniably shattered a variety of policy and political norms. There was a functioning liberal international order when Trump was inaugurated in 2017; that has been shredded. The Beltway consensus on trade liberalization, democracy promotion, and human rights is no more. Trump succeeded in fostering a new hawkish consensus on China, even if he is not adhering to that worldview himself. Trump has successfully deconstructed much of the administrative state.

These are all significant outcomes. So I get why some Democrats think Trumpism might be worthy studying to see if it can be replicated.

The problem is that it cannot be replicated by Democrats.

I don’t mean that the Democrats are not organized or ruthless enough to execute Trumpism with a human face.1 What I mean is that the Democratic Party’s approach to government is antithetical to a Trumpist approach.

Consider that Trump’s political success has largely been his two elections and not much else. In 2016 he lost the popular vote by close to 3 million votes and eked out an Electoral College victory. In 2024 he improved on his 2016 run but still failed to crack 50% of the popular vote despite Democrats changing nominees. It is politically impressive that he won despite his political inexperience and flouting of norms. But these political wins have mostly been to service Donald Trump himself.

Furthermore, within the GOP there is no obvious political successor to his mantle. I’m unconvinced that the Democratic Party takeaway from this is to try to copy what this guy has been doing.

Furthermore, Trump’s effect on the GOP has also been corrosive. Politico’s Kathy Gilsinan recently interviewed senior Republican policy wonks about the current state of the GOP policy project, and came away with this take:

To conservative critics in and out of government, many of whom ascribe to more traditional, pre-MAGA Republican beliefs, some such institutions have spent the last decade selecting for rigid conformity to Trumpist ideology over more typical markers of expertise. Maybe that helps for enforcing the party line in the new GOP. But these critics fear a decline of merit and skill, along with a tolerance for darker ideologies that could cripple the party’s ability to govern in the long run.

Conversations with four senior Republican congressional staffers, as well as think tank scholars, Heritage expats, academics who study think tanks and up-and-coming young Republicans reflected a widening generational split and mutual distrust over the issue.

“Everyone knows what the problem is: The organizations that bring young staffers to Washington, D.C. have spent the last decade prioritizing blind ideological loyalty instead of competence or intelligence,” said a senior GOP congressional staffer, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel issues. “We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.”

Maybe I am overestimating the Democratic Party, but I don’t think any political project that yields a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots is one with much chance of sustainable success.

This holds with particular force when evaluating Trumpism as an ideological project. The thing about Trumpism is that it is very good at destroying norms and institutions and abjectly incompetent at creating new structures. None of Trump’s new organizations have done much of anything beyond enrich Trump and his family. Most of his foreign policy initiatives have amounted to nothing — or worse than nothing. Attempts to apply any kind of intellectual coherence to Trumpism inevitably founder. At the beginning of the year some folks were worried that Trump’s Board of Peace would supplant the United Nations. That notion seems laughable today.

Back in 2019 I pointed out the asymmetry of Trump’s politics. During his first term he was very good at destroying things but could not create:

Trump’s brand of populism has succeeded more in the enervation of existing institutions dedicated to liberal internationalism than in the creation of populist alternatives. Through a mixture of intention and incompetence, the Trump administration has succeeded in weakening foreign policy bureaucracies. While the institutional foundations for populism are likely to remain weak in the future, this administration appear poised to succeed in eroding the capabilities of existing institutions, making any post-Trump restoration of liberal internationalism more difficult. This suggests that the literature on bureaucratic control cannot treat all ideas equally. Some ideas are more likely to thrive in a de-institutionalized environment than others.

If you won’t believe a political scientist, believe the reporter who has covered Trump the longest. The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman spoke to Ezra Klein last week about Regime Change, and articulated what Trump actually wants to achieve:

I could answer that pretty clearly in 2019 and 2020 — there were things that he still wanted to achieve. If there are things that he wants to achieve beyond just sort of not being Herbert Hoover, as he would say — meaning, with a giant global crisis — not really.

Look, he has resumed his trade war, as you said. I think he’d like to achieve getting out of Iran. I think he would like to figure out an end to the war that he started. But that’s not an achievement. That’s a reaction to his own behavior, as we had started this episode….

It was quite clear when we were sitting with him — and we write about that in the epilogue of the book — but he is playing for history, capital-G great man of history — to be remembered by one name, to have left a mark on the world that is just different than a typical president, or what he would say is a normal president.

That doesn’t involve the boring work of trying to pass a bill. That doesn’t involve the boring work of going to Iowa to talk about X, Y, Z, although his numbers are not great in Iowa now, either. This is fundamentally less interesting to him.

The fact that Trump cannot comprehend that historical policy shifts are more likely with legislation than without gets at the core of Trumpism’s problems. He can implement a slapdash policy that embodies his gut instincts. Those policies can easily be reversed, however.

The thing about Democrats is that they want to create new policies and new structures. There is nothing in Trumpism that will help then do those things better. So even if one views it as a political and ideological success — which I don’t — it does not translate into anything useful for Democrats.

At least that’s my take.

When Donald Trump announced his intention to nominate Kevin Warsh to be his next Federal Reserve chair, I was underwhelmed with the pick, reasoning, “Warsh was probably the best nominee that someone like an uninhibited Trump could have picked, and that is truly damning with faint praise. While I don’t think Warsh will do any real short-term damage, I do worry about the long-term ‘debasement trade’ on the dollar if Warsh succeeds in compromising Fed independence.”

Six months later — two months after Warsh was confirmed and took the job — my assessment may have been too optimistic. Because there is increasing evidence of short-term damage.

This is partly due to perceptions that Warsh is sacrificing Fed independence to please Trump, who always wants low interest rates when he is president. After sounding like a super-inflation hawk when Biden was in the White House, Warsh has been less hawkish since Trump became president. This remains true since becoming Fed chair. Despite inflation being at 3.7% — well above the 2% goal — Warsh has voted to keep rates constant. Some market experts anticipate Warsh might actually cut rates just to stay in Trump’s good graces.

Warsh’s apparent about-face on inflation is a problem, but it’s not the problem.1 That would Warsh’s radical redefinition of what a Fed chair should do:

So far Warsh’s biggest move as Fed chair has been to announce five outside task forces to examine inflation frameworks, the effect of AI on employment, data quality, balance sheet management, and communications, suggesting a serious rethinking of the Fed’s role in managing the economy. While most of his task force members are solid picks, one or two have raised some eyebrows.

The task forces are… fine I guess, so long as they don’t paralyze Fed decision-making in real time. The problem is that the Fed under Warsh is not providing much in the way of guidance, and that appears to be on purpose. As the Wall Street Journal’s Nick Timiraos explained recently, Warsh is acting on his longstanding belief that the Fed had been saying and doing too much:

Warsh, a Fed governor from 2006 to 2011, has argued for more than a decade that the Fed’s forecasts breed conformity and its data are stale by the time policymakers see them. In a 2016 speech to economists, he questioned the precision the Fed claims in measuring inflation. After an external review he led of the Bank of England’s operations in 2014, Warsh lamented how the Fed’s decision-day discussions had become stilted recitations of prepared remarks—a shift that followed the Fed’s agreement to publish verbatim transcripts in 1993….

[Warsh] has said almost nothing about how the Fed reads the shocks now hitting the economy, or how policy should respond. Nor has he been more forthcoming in private: officials who sat through his first meetings came away without a clear sense of how he would approach the trade-offs ahead, according to people who have spoken with them. And where his colleagues describe a trade-off, at least in the short run, between fighting inflation and protecting jobs, Warsh denies there is one.

Several changes the task forces might steer the Fed toward—a modest reduction in its asset holdings, or retiring officials’ quarterly interest-rate projections—are “not a big deal either way” compared with the “more radical” step of declining to describe how the Fed responds to what it sees, said Jon Faust, an adviser to the last three Fed chairs.

For Warsh, saying less is a virtue. It protects the committee’s judgment. If policymakers issue a forecast, they start crediting evidence that confirms it and discounting evidence that doesn’t. He also believes a quieter Fed gets a cleaner read on what investors think about the economy, rather than hearing an echo of its own guidance. Investors “are upset with me already that I’m somehow not feeding them all the information they’d gotten before,” he told lawmakers. “My message to them is, ‘Play the ball, don’t play the Fed.’”

The thing is, so far Warsh’s results don’t seem to be validating his thesis. This week the bond market freaked the f**k out after Warsh’s last post FOMC meeting press conference, sending U.S. government borrowing costs to their highest level in nearly 20 years. That is, to use the argot of economics, real bad.

Axios’ Neil Irwin explains the problem:

In his press conference Wednesday, Federal Reserve chairman Kevin Warsh started by asserting that the central bank will not waver in its pursuit of 2% inflation. Then, he repeatedly declined opportunities to connect that commitment to any concrete action.

The result was a steep bond market sell-off, driving longer-term interest rates higher as global investors questioned the Warsh Fed’s willingness to raise the short-term interest rates it controls….

Warsh has long offered gauzy, high-level critiques of how the modern Fed operates. On Wednesday, he described candid discussions of the biggest conceptual issues for monetary policy. But he was elusive and vague on central banking basics….

Asked, for example, the Central Banking 101 question of whether the best remedy for stubborn inflation is rate increases, Warsh replied: “Is that the dominant remedy? If inflation continues to be elevated through the forecast period, interest rates could well be part of that solution, but I wouldn’t say it’s in isolation.”

When asked what inflation measure he is targeting, he began by offering the “proper, standard” answer that the goal is 2% inflation in the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index, before ruminating about “who knows” what may come after January….

“In Warsh’s press conference, he once again failed to specify how he intended to achieve his stridently asserted inflation resolve,” Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at JPMorgan, wrote in a note.

“He also cast doubt on whether PCE inflation will remain the Fed’s inflation target in the medium run,” Feroli added. “Both of these points raise questions about the new chair’s credibility in delivering lower inflation.”

The combination of Warsh talking but trying not to commit to anything is, well, weird. As Paul Krugman explained earlier this week, Warsh is spooking the most important audience he has: the bond market.

The bond market, the ultimate reviewer, really didn’t like Warsh’s performance. As the chart at the top of this post shows, the 30-year Treasury rate spiked and the dollar fell slightly. In plain English, this was the equivalent of bond market traders running for the exits….

Its reaction indicated that traders believe that there is a good chance that the Fed is going to keep rates too low for too long and thereby feed inflation. As a result, the Fed will eventually be forced to raise future rates to a higher level than if it acted to rein in inflation now.

So it’s clear that the bond market reaction wasn’t a judgment on the rate decision itself. It was, instead, a judgment on Warsh. In other words, Warsh’s remarks on Wednesday led the market to distrust his commitment to fighting inflation.

What could make things even worse is if rising levels of disagreement within the Federal Open Market Committee injects even more uncertainty into financial markets. And there is already some dissent. At this past week’s FOMC committee meeting there were three dissenting votes who wanted to raise rates — the most in over a decade. The WSJ’s Timiraos notes that Christopher Waller — a finalist for Warsh’s job — has already been challenging him on his task forces.

Warsh’s response to all of this has been to lean even more into opacity. According to the New York Times’ Colby Smith and Ben Casselman:

Kevin M. Warsh is considering reducing the number of regularly scheduled meetings at which the Federal Reserve sets interest rates, a potentially seismic move that would mark the most significant change in how the central bank operates in years.

The Federal Reserve’s 12-person policy committee meets eight times a year and votes on whether to lift, lower or hold borrowing costs. Mr. Warsh raised the idea of changing the frequency of those meetings at the Fed’s gathering this week, according to four people with knowledge of the discussion who were not authorized the speak publicly….

Reducing the cadence of the meetings — and, in turn, votes on rates — would be by far the most consequential change of Mr. Warsh’s tenure so far. It would mark a break from decades of precedent, reshaping the way the Fed steers the economy and potentially making it less responsive to changes in inflation and the labor market.

Meeting less often would also reduce the information available to Wall Street and the broader public about the Fed’s thinking about the path for interest rates, reversing a decades-long trend toward greater openness.

There is an internal logic to reducing the number of opportunities Warsh has to open his mouth if he’s not going to say anything that reassures jittery markets. Given the slow processes through which some monetary policy actions take to affect the real economy, however, this seems unwise. And, again, bond markets are not reacting like Warsh thought they would, which creates even more uncertainty.

Global political economy scholar Erin Lockwood explains the consequences of Wasrsh’s actions with a nifty 2x2:

Maybe this is all a transition phase. Markets might eventually adjust to Warsh’s approach. Or maybe markets will predictably react by trying to read Warsh’s tea leaves, leaving even more gyrations in monetary policy.

Developing…

Back in November 2024 I warned about, “the inevitable corruption that will compromise U.S. policies” in Trump’s second term, suggesting, “it will not be surprising if foreign benefactors approach Trump’s coterie of advisers with implicit and explicit promises of lucrative deals after their time in office—as long as they play ball while in power.”

The corruption radiating from the second Trump administration was apparent from the the first hundred days. The administration made zero effort to conceal its corruption under the theory that acting shamelessly renders corruption moot. By last November I had concluded, “Credit where due: during his second term Trump has really innovated, developing new and exciting ways to get bought off.”

And yet as it turns out that my November 2024 warning was too circumspect. Foreign benefactors and domestic firms alike have not restricted themselves to Trump’s advisers. They have explicitly focused on Donald Trump and his family.

Indeed, I have heard from multiple sources that the difference between Trump’s first term and his second term is the degree of personal corruption. This time around, anyone lobbying the White House for a particular policy is asked how the Trump family will prosper from acceding to such a move. The palms couldn’t be greasier.

The Wall Street Journal’s Josh Dawsey, Dana Mattioli, Annie Linskey, and Emily Glazer have a gangbuster story that basically confirms the depth of Trump’s corruption:

Almost every night in the White House, President Trump calls his fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke, for an update.

Trump asks O’Rourke which companies and donors have cut checks and which haven’t, and for how much. He often asks her to make much larger financial requests than she was planning—for some donors the ask is $5 million, for others it is $50 million. And the president gives her names to call, often including people who have recently met with him, according to people with knowledge of the calls.

“This is very important to the president. He’s asked me to call you and ask you for this donation,” O’Rourke has relayed on phone calls with companies, persistently following up with them. In some calls, she has referred to Trump as the boss, saying “the boss wants this money.” In turn, Trump has called her the “princess of darkness” because she is such a “killer” with donors, according to people who have heard his comments.

SoftBank donated $50 million toward Trump’s presidential library. Apple cut a check for around $25 million toward his White House ballroom project, while Microsoft gave around $10 million and Amazon chipped in around $5 million, according to people familiar with the contributions. Meta Platforms recently gave $10 million to a Trump-aligned political committee, people familiar said, on top of a multimillion donation to the ballroom and a prior $22 million payment to the planned presidential library.

Trump stands out for taking personal control of the fundraising, and no sitting American president has ever raised these amounts for his pet projects. At the same time, companies have paid new attention to the White House as Trump has gotten involved in regulatory decisions that once were made by independent agencies, dramatically shifting the balance of power across Washington….

All told, the second-term president has raised more than $800 million since returning to office, according to an updated Wall Street Journal analysis….

When some donors have been put on the phone with Trump after giving millions, they expected to receive thank yous, but instead were asked for more money, people familiar with the calls said. In one case, O’Rourke asked an executive to cut a $1 million check to a Trump entity just days after he’d attended a thank you dinner for a separate multimillion-dollar donation he’d made to the president’s ballroom, according to a person familiar with the exchange….

O’Rourke isn’t a government employee, although she is often at Trump’s side in the White House and elsewhere. She sometimes sits in on meetings, including when Trump meets with corporate executives about issues that affect them. O’Rourke also travels with top officials on Air Force One. She often posts photos of herself with Trump, including in the Oval Office, on her social-media accounts and has referred to Trump as a mentor….

Executives said Trump is one of the most accessible presidents in recent times. In private, they acknowledged that this administration is much more transactional than prior ones. If a company encounters an issue with the federal government that comes to Trump’s attention, he will want to know how much money the company gave, according to a person familiar with the matter. At times he’ll rib the corporate leaders who haven’t met the goals he set, the person said.

Several CEOs and board members said they believe there is a link between their contributions and their access to the president. One chairman of a publicly traded company said that if you give the money, you know you are either checked on a list, or crossed off a list if you don’t.

Trump’s shift towards a more statist brand of economic policymaking creates even more opportunities for grift. For example, the recent effort to maintain high tariffs have generated fierce lobbying from foreign exporters for exemptions. According to the New York Times’ Ana Swanson and Jeanna Smialek, the U.S. exempted tariffs on diamonds after negotiations with European officials — but also after Trump received, “an 18-karat gold ring the size of a watch. The ring was encrusted with 321 diamonds and dozens of sapphires, emeralds and rubies, and it was a gift to Mr. Trump to mark America’s 250th anniversary. The ring features two large diamond ‘Ts’ on either side, and ‘45’ and ‘47’ — references to Mr. Trump’s presidential terms — ringed in diamonds in a Superman-style logo. On its interior is engraved, ‘Crafted in Antwerp for Donald John Trump.’” Now imagine what domestic firms might offer Trump in return for federal equity stakes in their businesses. Heck, even Senator Ted Cruz has warned that the leaders of economies with heavy state intervention enrich themselves by stealing and robbing from those they govern.

The Trump family’s corruption is massive, leading Trump himself to extract more than $2.2 billion in 2025 alone from a variety of shakedowns and grifts that include foreign gifts, insider trading, bogus legal settlements, and cryptocurrency investments.1 As one presidential historian told the New York Times’ Eric Lipton, “It is the openness, the flagrant nature of what they are doing, almost with pride — cashing in on the office itself. That’s what makes it dramatically different.”

Trump basking in his corruption is not really a surprise at this point. What is a bit more surprising is the degree to which others have been willing to pay to play with Trump. They are acting as though the new Trumpian levels of corruption are the new normal in American political economy — and I’m not sure if they have thought through the implications of whether they are right or wrong about that.

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It’s been a little more than a year since I started my gig as Academic Dean at the Fletcher School. Looking back the biggest surprise — and let me stress here that it should not have been remotely surprising, given that I’m a political scientist, but sometimes I can be a bit thick — is how even a minute amount of power and status affects how colleagues treat you. Conversations that a year earlier would have been candid and blunt have become a bit more clipped. I don’t think I cut a particularly intimidating figure, but my administrative title matters, and my colleagues have reacted to that by being more circumspect.

This shift is understandable, but there is a danger that comes with it. Even within the academy, speaking truth to power can be a difficult thing. And without people willing to tell me that I have made/will make a mistake, a very scary feedback loop emerges. If no one tells me if I’ve made a mistake, that makes it easier for me to persuade myself that I am doing a great job, which in turn makes me more confident that I can take on more responsibility and power, which makes it even tougher for colleagues to offer constructive criticism, and then the cycle recurs.

The phenomenon I’m describing does not just apply to middle management. As I explained in The Ideas Industry, if you think speaking truth to power is hard, try speaking truth to money. Henry Farrell recently emphasized this point as well: “Old style princes were notorious for their tendencies to deranged behavior, which came not just from their inbreeding, but their power, and the unwillingness and inability of others to contradict or check them. So too, modern princes.” In other words, the dangerous feedback loop that I have encountered is several orders of magnitude worse for the wealthiest and most well-known people on the planet: Elon Musk and Donald Trump. And this past week each of their psychic self-confidence bubbles popped.

The evidence for the flatter that Musk and Trump receive is not hard to find. The 2022 Twitter lawsuit revealed a trove of text messages directed to Musk from other powerful people sucking up to him. One CEO tells him that he’s Batman. An investor tells him, “You are totally right. I 100% agree with you.” As the Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel concluded at the time, “What is so illuminating about the Musk messages is just how unimpressive, unimaginative, and sycophantic the powerful men in Musk’s contacts appear to be.”

As for Trump, the first chapter of Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change captures the post-2024 transition vibe: “Every day he was receiving obsequious phone calls and visits from world leaders, dignitaries, and business tycoons…. Close aides could not recall Trump ever being so contented as he was in those two warm winter months in Palm Beach after the election. His victory was broadly accepted as legitimate—in a way that it never had been the first time…. Trump was also getting something that he had never had before: a grudging acknowledgment of legitimacy from the small club of former presidents.”

The thing is, their positive feedback loops have now crashed into reality. As much as they try to distort things they are being confronted with negative feedback that simply cannot be wished away.

Trump is confronting this problem along multiple dimensions. There’s his approval rating, which continues —as predicted — to trend downward. The Economist has Donald Trump’s net approval rating falling to a new record low of 25 points under water. Then there are his policy failures, which Jonathan Lemire summarized in the Atlantic:

Recent months have delivered a reckoning for Trump, who has crashed hard against some real limits. The war in Iran, a conflict that he’d once thought would take only a few weeks, hit the five-month mark today. The U.S. casualty count is growing, weapons stockpiles are running low, and gas prices are again surging. Trump desperately wants the war to end. He is receiving conflicting guidance from his advisers—escalate, some urge, as others tell him to cut and run—and has become just the latest U.S. president to be humiliated by hard-liners in Tehran.

Trump is also flailing domestically. His approval numbers have sunk, and Republicans are finally, in small doses, beginning to defy him. Trump has demanded that the Senate blow up the filibuster to pass the SAVE Act, which would make voting more difficult and require voters to provide proof of citizenship. But Republicans have refused. Although the legislation seems dead, Trump called yesterday for Republicans to stay in Washington to work on it, potentially saddling them with unpopular (and doomed) votes while also preventing them from returning home to campaign ahead of the midterms. Strategists from both parties predict that at least one chamber of Congress will flip to the Democrats, allowing the party to stall whatever is left of the president’s legislative agenda and open investigations into his administration and allies.

Perhaps the biggest negative feedback that Trump received over the past week was his widely panned speech at the rescheduled White House Correspondents Association. CNN’s Kaitlin Collins told Jon Stewart that, “What was most surprising to me was the room was filled with a lot of his staffers, his cabinet, his allies, Republicans in Congress… it was so quiet in the rook during the president’s remarks.”

Trump, in trying failing to tell jokes, left himself wide open for actual comedians to roast him mercilessly:

As for Musk, well, his efforts to influence the culture have not worked out well as of late. He is still extremely wealthy but his companies are hitting some rough patches in the stock market.

It is his sit-down interview with the Economist’s Zanny Minton Beddoes, however, that has been the catalyst for him revealing his own bubble. You can watch/listen to the whole thing here, but this clip is particularly revealing:

Note that when Beddoes pushes back on Musk’s assertions, he slows down and stumbles through his answers, falling back on the same fake, unpersuasive talking points.

Now maybe my observations are wrong. TNR’s Greg Sargent and Toby Buckle see the interview as an example of Musk flexing his power: “as he sits there smugly abusing Beddoes in his edgelordy leather jacket, you can see something remarkable unfolding in real time…. he’s visibly sensing his growing power to communicate with fascistic tropes to like-minded Western- and white-civilizational warriors everywhere.”

I guess I see it differently: the negative feedback that Musk received after the interview caused him to lose it over on his hellsite:

I have no illusions that either Trump or Musk will ever face a true reckoning for the their actions. But I do think the self-knowledge that they’ve gained over the past week will haunt them more than they will ever reveal. A part of them has become aware that they might not be the strategic geniuses that their sycophants had proclaimed. And no matter how much they’ll deny it, that recognition of fallibility will trouble them for the rest of their days.

In my previous post on Elbridge Colby’s weak strategic tea, one commenter suggested I was “being a bit hard” on Colby:

Sure, everything you say is correct. But as you concede, he’s the most significant legitimate strategist in the administration, and we know he’s a smart serious professional, whether we agree with all his positions or not. So the biggest question is, “do we want someone like Bridge relatively high up in this administration, or do we want Trumps and Hegseths all the way down?” If the answer is “we want Bridge, because he presumably is generally a voice of sanity in a field of idiots, nuts, and grifters,” then we should cut him some slack. Working inside the system requires sacrifices, and one of them is your intellectual pride—because at times you will have to defend stupid bad policies that your team is enacting.

The “voice of sanity” logic is akin to the “adults in the room” logic that many Trump administration first-termers made about why they served — and one could argue that the more erratic and counterproductive foreign policy of Trump’s second term is evidence that honorable service for a dishonorable president is possible.

In Colby’s case, however, the company he keeps even when he’s not serving the current administration is a red flag. The other red flag is one that I raised a few months ago about how to evaluate Marco Rubio’s service to this president: “for this argument to work, it has to follow that Rubio’s value above replacement Trumper is positive…. It’s not obvious at all that Rubio has provided any value-added over any other lapdog who would have occupied his position in his stead. Like everyone else, he has functioned as a yes man for Trump.”

Colby is a rung lower than Rubio, so the odds are even lower that he is speaking truth to power or improving what would otherwise be an even worse American foreign policy.

This matters, because it sure seems as though the Trump administration has not just lost the Iran War — it is losing the war multiple times over.

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I know this because I keep having to write posts like “The Strategic Defeat of the United States” or “The Trump Administration Is a Loser in Iran” or “Donald Trump Has Lost the Iran War.” And what is remarkable is that no matter what Elbridge Colby has advised Trump, the president keeps on losing — to the point where he has exhausted his exit options.

This summer the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has given the occasional talk about the current state of American foreign policy. Mostly I have been using Operation Epic Fury as the synecdoche of the larger issues in the Trump administration’s conduct of U.S. foreign policy.

Here are two slides that I’ve been using for the past several months — before, during, and after the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding was signed. I think they hold up pretty well:

Does this seem like an exaggeration? I don’t think so. If anything, it understates the current problem. Multiple press accounts reveal the degree to which Trump finds himself boxed in on Iran. Despite renewing air attacks against the country, the law of diminishing marginal returns has kicked in. Axios’ Barak Ravid reports that, “the top U.S. military commander in the Middle East, Adm. Brad Cooper, recommended stopping the bombing campaign around the Strait of Hormuz because it has reached the limit of its effectiveness.”

That seems like a bad sign. Trump could opt for a serious escalation of major combat operations, but the New York Times’ Eric Schmitt and Jonathan Swan report that he and his advisors have ruled that out as well for reasons that, oh, I don’t know, could have been considered back in February:

President Trump has set aside, at least for now, plans to sharply escalate the American military assault against Iran, with particular concern that intensifying the war could dangerously drain the Pentagon’s already diminished stockpile of Patriot antimissile interceptors and other air defense munitions in the Middle East.

The threat to interceptor stockpiles is one of many considerations that have made a return to major combat operations a hugely risky endeavor, administration officials say. Mr. Trump and his top aides are also uneasy about the prospect of a widening war in the Middle East, the alienation of key Gulf allies who are vulnerable to Iranian attack, a global economic crunch, and growing energy and refugee crises…. (emphasis added)

Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has cautioned privately that resuming major combat operations against Iran was doable but that it would dangerously deplete interceptors available to the military’s Central Command, which is responsible for operations in the Middle East, the officials said. A spokesman for General Caine declined to comment on advice the general gives the president….

Mr. Trump has been wrestling with how to proceed in his nearly five-month war against Iran and specifically with how to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, as gas prices climb again amid the resumption of hostilities over the past two weeks. Diplomacy has broken down, and the latest round of extensive U.S. attacks do not seem to have deterred Iran militarily.

“Uneasy” is such an amazing word choice, it covers up all kinds of sins.

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Remember when Trump’s defenders said that he had restored America’s deterrent power? Not so much, as it turns out.

Furthermore, the New York Times’ David Sanger points out that Iran is symbolic of this president’s increasing inability to alter the course of events in America’s favor:

[Trump] has been unable to control surging oil prices, or their effects on the stock market. The shipping that crawled to a stop in the Strait of Hormuz, then was opened for a few short weeks, is back to a trickle, with a second choke point, between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, now threatened. And while the president has threatened to take Kharg Island, where Iran ships oil, or to seize its underground stores of enriched uranium, he has said publicly that he knows there is no appetite for sending in ground troops.

Those limits have left him deeply frustrated, his aides say, and have made him more erratic, even by Trumpian standards. Last week alone, Mr. Trump’s energy secretary signed a historic pact with Saudi Arabia to provide civil nuclear power to the kingdom, before the president undercut the deal less than 24 hours later, stunning the Saudis by declaring that the agreement, negotiated over 18 months, was dead unless the country joined the Abraham Accords and recognized Israel….

Not all of Mr. Trump’s frustrations, people close to the president say, are driven by the war, now so unpopular that only 29 percent of Americans polled by The Washington Post and Ipsos approved of his handling of the conflict. But much of it is. And the angst is clear as he promises to stop Iran’s nuclear program at any cost, while his allies at home want out….

U.S. officials now worry that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China could be factoring the shortages [of missile interceptors] into calculations of their next moves, in Ukraine and Europe for Mr. Putin and perhaps against Taiwan for Mr. Xi.

This is all infuriating for anyone who pointed out five months ago that attacking Iran was a bad idea. These stories also reveal something else, however: the futility of advising Donald Trump in 2026. American foreign policy largely remains the purview of Donald Trump’s whims.

In this political moment, I am no longer sure it is possible to honorable serve this dishonorable leader — because no matter how one advises, Trump will make the situation worse.

Look, grand strategy is hard, okay? A lot of attempted U.S. grand strategies have been incoherent, kitchen-sink arguments in which everything becomes national security. A few have been more coherent, but often by prioritizing the weirdest stuff imaginable.

The second Trump administration has a national security strategy, but it’s an open question just how much Trump is actually following that script. A president who values unpredictability above all else may lack the psychological capacity to develop any strategy that isn’t slapdash, jerry-rigged, or improvised.

This can frustrate American foreign policy watchers. The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin filed a report from the Aspen Security Forum that reflects the consensus of the U.S. foreign policy community at the current moment:

On the main stage, news about China, Iran and Ukraine was top of mind. But, in the hallways and in the restaurants downtown, much of the conversation turned to a deeper question: how the United States can map out a long-term strategy that allies, and the industries that work with or depend on the U.S. government, can understand and act on. In discussions about artificial intelligence, critical minerals, drones and space, the consistent refrain was that Washington must move faster by fixing how the Pentagon buys things, whom it buys them from, and, above all, how quickly those things can be built and put on the battlefield.…

The administration’s inconsistent trade policy, its unclear endgame in Iran, its uneven treatment of allies in Europe and Asia, and its generally chaotic operating style are making planning beyond tomorrow even more risky, many participants said. Even supporters of the administration’s overall drive to rectify imbalances in the international order admitted there’s no way to predict how it will end up….

Even the architects of the new system concede they are improvising, which means the rules will keep moving.

This brings us to an actual strategist in the employ of the current Trump administration: Elbridge “Bridge” Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy. The extent of Colby’s influence over U.S. grand strategy has been the subject of considerable debate. The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has been super-skeptical that Colby the China hawk would be a big fan of the administration’s strategic retreat from East Asia.

Colby recently sat down with the New York Times’ Ross Douthat to discuss and defend Trump’s foreign policy. Let’s check his strategic acumen!

Colby describes himself as an adherent of “flexible realism,” which he elaborates by explaining that, “realism is definitely the major explainer [for foreign policy], especially in stressful or transitional situations.” At the same time, Colby acknowledges that realism is, “not a total explanation of human behavior.” In other words, Colby is a realist unless it's inconvenient to be one.

How well does this hold up in his interview with Douthat? Honestly, not very. Most realists would say that the most important thing is knowing the international distribution of power. Colby brags to Douthat that, “one of the areas where I think I’ve been very consistent is focusing more on the reality of the situation — the structural elements — rather than the rhetoric”

But here’s Colby on the current state of play:

Douthat: What, then, is the structural reality, in terms of the actual balance of power? And how is it different from 2016?

Colby: There’s a couple things, and there are some areas where my own views have changed. I remember having a debate about whether the Chinese economy would ever pass the American economy in nominal G.D.P. — I thought it would — and I think the president deserves tremendous credit for ensuring the growth of the American economy.

You see the United States hopefully pulling away — obviously, there’s investments in A.I. But our problems relative to those of China, let alone other countries, are much more manageable in terms of the structural economic factors.

Douthat: So you’re more optimistic about America’s economic advantages than you would have been eight years ago?

Colby: Yes, I am. I think that’s borne out by the performance. And for those who anticipated it, kudos. That’s one where I’ve altered my view.

Colby is partially correct — the U.S. economy has done pretty well macroeconomically over the past eight years.

Any claim that the U.S. is pulling away from China during this period is delusional, however. This is particularly true on AI. As Rogin noted in his report, “The United States still leads the world in the most advanced AI models, but the margin is now measured in months. Chinese developers are closing it with cheaper, open-weight systems and, American officials and companies allege, by copying the capabilities of U.S. models outright. Meanwhile, China’s advantages are in manufacturing, robotics, energy and the physical applications of AI, where it is scaling faster.”

So right off the bat, Colby’s grasp of where things stand seems off.

He doesn’t help matters by insisting to Douthat that the war with Iran is not “stalemated” despite increasing evidence that Iran’s capacity to hit U.S. targets in the region remains robust. Whenever Douthat raises that point, Colby uses it as a justification to keep attacking Iran rather than acknowledge the, you know, stalemate. Or he says “at least it’s not Vietnam or Iraq,” which is damning with the faintest praise imaginable. The only thing Colby can really say is, “you just wait and see.” Which is exactly what we will have to do.

Then we get to Colby’s theory of how to manage alliances:

I think that’s one thing that’s really important at a structural level that this administration is doing differently, in what is perhaps a tough way sometimes, but also in a rational and common sense way, which is to accurately price the partnership and relationship with the United States, both in terms of access and things like A.I. or energy, but also in terms of leverage things like burden-sharing issues or tariffs, etc.

If I were going to put it in a common sense one-liner, it’s that people can no longer take the United States for granted. And I think there was an element during the era of the international rules-based order when people did take the United States for granted….

My feeling about allies is that you want to reassure allies enough so that they don’t fall apart or in some circumstances defect to the other side, but you want to keep them sufficiently on their toes so that they do their part. That’s just human behavior.

One problem with this is that it cuts both ways. The lack of NATO support for Operation Epic Fury, for example, also reveals that the United States can’t take its allies for granted either.

The bigger problem is that there has been very little reassurance coming from this administration. Colby’s strategic blindspot here is rather significant. Early in the interview he brags, “Measure what the United States and the United States Department of War is doing by actions and not what we call ‘peacocking,’ which I think is really different from the last administration.” But as the exchange below demonstrates, Colby can’t help himself from peacocking and not comprehending why it’s a strategic miscue:

Colby: I think the president, as I understand it, is communicating that the United States needs to be secure and have our interests respected in the hemisphere, and he communicates it in that way.

Douthat: So you interpret the image of the stars and stripes flying up past Hudson Bay as just the Monroe Doctrine?

Colby: Well, I think the stars and stripes should be flying high above anywhere. It’s great. We’re proud of it. It’s 250 years and—-

Douthat: Flying anywhere as a statement of sovereignty or just as a statement of awesomeness?

Colby: Well, it’s certainly awesomeness.

Douthat: What do you mean you think the stars and stripes should be flying anywhere?

Colby: I just think we are, uh …

Douthat: You don’t think it’s reasonable for a proud Canadian to look at that image and say, at the very least, that the U.S. is trying to vassalize us?

Colby: Uh …

Douthat: Because that’s the reaction that I think you’re getting and that’s driving Mark Carney’s speech.

Colby: OK.

That is a Chotiner-level deconstruction of an argument.

Look, I get that Colby is hardly a free agent. He agreed to serve president Trump, which means he needs to defend all of his administration’s policies. The problem is that he winds up contradicting himself and doing a piss-poor job of providing a cogent defense.

I will be curious to see how the Elbridge Colby of 2029 squares his years in government with what he said out of government. His interview with Douthat, however, reveals his inability to offer a viable defense of Trump’s grand strategy.