John Connally, a towering figure of American politics in the 1960s and 1970s, is these days remembered for two things. First, he was riding alongside President Kennedy when the latter was killed in Dallas in November 1963; an assassin’s bullet also severely wounded Connally, then the governor of Texas. As a result, Connally lived, becoming an iconic figure, a part of the breakup of the Solid South (the Democratic hegemony over white politics in the former Confederacy), and a figure in JFK assassination conspiracy theories.

Second, Connally became President Nixon’s Treasury Secretary, likely on account of his excellent hair and Nixon’s belief in his presidential prospects—Nixon saw in the former governor the future of a conservative party and a much more attractive political heir than, say, Spiro Agnew. For anyone involved in international finance, this latter service—coinciding as it did with the end of the gold standard and an earlier American shock to the system—has been Connallly’s more lasting legacy.

I’ll be teaching U.S. foreign policy and U.S. politics to undergrads here in Doha this term, a combination that I’m enthused by and depressed by: never have they been more relevant and never in my lifetime have they been more dismal. (The political scientists’ curse: may your research be relevant.) I think a lot about how to teach these subjects in a post-American world, a problem compounded by the catastrophe that the Trump administration has visited on the people and countries of this region.

When I seek to explain why students should take these courses, I’m careful to avoid any hint of a suggestion that other countries should become more like the United States—the sort of secular proselytization that Americans have habitually committed for two centuries and which is, at a minimum, unpropitious in these circumstances. Why, then, should anyone bother to learn about the United States in detail?

One answer comes, in an indirect fashion, from Connally. In 1971, during a meeting of the Group of 10 leading financial powers, Connally reportedly uttered the shocking but immortal line: “The dollar is our currency, but it’s your problem.” Not, perhaps, what the finance ministers of other countries that had built their economies on the basis of U.S. credibility had wanted to hear, but an unmistakable declaration nonetheless.

I return often to thinking of this moment of Nixonian honesty. The Connally Doctrine is simple: U.S. tools are wielded in the service of U.S. interests. Indeed, they always were—even the Bretton Woods agreements themselves were not, or at least were not intended to be, an act of U.S. magnanimity but the use of U.S. resources to order the world for the benefit of the United States, as wisdom gave policymakers the means to see the interests of the United States.

That U.S. institutions respond to U.S. politics matters; that U.S. institutions have global import defines the extent of their importance. Taking seriously how a great power wields its power, and what leverage matters most under what condition, is important; for those outside the United States, continually re-assessing why Washington acts as it does requires understanding that the system the U.S. built is not natural but artificial, its supports not laws of nature but acts of politics. The Connally quotation reminds us of why the United States can act as it does. Impunity has a quality all its own.

To understand what levers the U.S. will pull under what conditions, then, requires us to constantly go beyond the advertising and the superficial to think about the deep roots of power and what constraints matter when and to whom. U.S. power is Washington’s resource—and, under this administration, the world’s problem.

In my capacity as guy who talks on television (a capacity that’s left me with slightly less time for being guy who writes on Substack), I’m often called upon to explain why negotiations between Washington and Tehran are stuck. To get there, we’re going to talk about how time is a resource and a weapon, and how Ottawa and Tehran have incentives to use similar strategies at the moment.

First, time.

In one sense, time is universal: seconds tick forward for everyone at the same rate. In another sense, time is experienced differently depending on how you’re spending it. To people who live playing roles as employees, friends, and other ordinary roles (laudatory), time is something to be spent well by doing things. Annoying things should be minimized; diverting things should be maximized; important things should be handled expeditiously. We define a poor use of time as getting these wrong: spending more time tinkering with syllabi than meeting with students, for instance, or watching reruns on TNT instead of spending time with loved ones. Even the metaphor of spending time reveals that idea of time as currency, as a way to purchase specific increments of value.

Yet time in a negotiation works very differently. Have you ever noticed that there’s a tempo of negotiations? At first, there’s bold statements, followed by periods of boring recitations, punctuated by occasional crises, and then brought together in the last few ticks of the clock with exciting movements yielding a denouement. Every negotiation that matters follows this pathway, to the point that I’ve come to regard knowing this implicit schedule as a key delineator between an executive or negotiator and someone who insists that time must be linear. (The other great tell is that once you’ve decided to undertake a project, it’s almost always a good idea to complete it—but in negotiations failure must be an option.)

After all, if you compare the process of a negotiation with the process of, say, building a house, you’d drive yourself mad. If you built an agreement the way you build a house, you’d start with grand plans and architectural renderings, spend eight or ten months putting in flooring in the kitchen, argue loudly about the color of the paint in the guest bedroom for a week or two, and then do little for another month—until on the last day you somehow put up the walls, installed the plumbing, and materialized a roof from somewhere. Or it might be the opposite: you could work steadily and patiently to put in foundations, carefully build the frame, install the wiring and fit out the rooms, and then stall for a couple of years over whether the exterior should be painted yellow or gold while the entire structure sat without a roof.

The point of the analogy is to drive home the point that you can’t judge progress in a negotiation as you would in other projects because time can be a resource used to express power. We can grasp this intuitively: if I walk into a car dealer declaring that I need an automobile right now, it’s clear I’ll get a worse deal than if I stroll in, spend a few hours looking at everything in the showroom models, and say I’ll be back in a few weeks. Negotiations, after all, are intrinsically about finding how to reach the best bargain for each side on the points they care most about. Relative time pressures—if I need a deal faster than you—influence bargaining power (the ability to shape the outcomes) simply because one side will be hearing that clock tick louder and will be under greater pressure to concede to get a deal done.

This analysis explains why I think the likeliest outcome as of now for the U.S.-Iran conflict is continued stalemate. Those blowups and flare-ups that punctuate lengthy negotiations are tests of wills and resolve, but so too are the long periods where nothing seems to happen. As we’ll see, the general logic yields pretty clear predictions in this instance—and in others. (Usefully, it’s also the sort of insight you can communicate in a TV hit.)

Doing nothing for a long time can be a rational strategy. By demonstrating that both sides are under no eagerness to make a deal, both sides can demonstrate that they are willing to last as long as it takes to get the best deal for them. This works a bit better when the delay is a little costly—when it is clear that waiting is not just because of inattention or disinterest, for instance—because then you can show that you’re willing to tolerate pain. If you didn’t care at all about delay, of course, then there would be no reason to enter into negotiations, and past a certain point of seriousness everyone knows that both sides want a deal, but you want to avoid advertising you’re so keen on doing a deal fast that you’ll accept any terms.

But you also want to downplay the costs while bearing them. This is why Trump (who has been in lots of negotiations in his life, albeit with a mixed record) will say things that make little sense otherwise, such as declaring that he doesn’t care about the midterms (in May, in July, and more recently). Of course he does—he just can’t say that, because to admit it would be to concede weakness and to concede that others have direct power over him—not only in the present conflict but in any other.

Delay can be rational but it carries costs. These costs come in many forms (profits not realized, inefficiencies not addressed, and so on), but delay especially implies risk and uncertainty. The longer it takes to reach a deal, the more external factors beyond someone’s control can remove the conditions that made a deal possible or attractive. And this is where Trump’s strategy leaves him vulnerable to pressure, because he does not control the calendar.

The date of U.S. elections are fixed, and the outcomes of U.S. elections are determined in part by the conditions attaining when those elections are held. That’s not the only way to handle elections: in the United Kingdom or Canada, for instance, governments can decide to call elections when conditions are favorable or postpone them when they are not (subject to some broad deadlines). This offers obvious home-field advantages. Fixed-term calendars avoid this form of abuse but they invite others, such as letting short-term—and even manipulable—conditions be changed to influence elections. And to the extent that election outcomes can influence power, this can change the outcome of negotiations. (Maybe our patient car-buyer is replaced by a panicky one, for instance.)

So let’s say you’re setting policy in Tehran. You have some incentives to conclude a deal (like the economy, which really is bad and really would benefit from the restoration of external trade). But the deal you can reach in September is probably worse than the deal you could reach in December if Democrats win and Trump expects more domestic headaches and thus expects more pressure to give in later. (That’s aside from the fact that the Iranian hardliners care much less about short term economic pain than they do about long-term strategic gains for the same reason the Kim regime was willing to let famine run wild in the 1990s: it doesn’t threaten them.) Even knowing just this, what would you anticipate? No deal before the midterms, and probably some actions to humiliate Trump before then—forcing him to accept humiliation or escalate in an unpopular war. 1

Can Trump influence this calculation? Not in any way that matters on this time scale. Air power won’t do it; land power is unlikely and sanctions work on longer time frames and may not even have the juice to attain the desired U.S. outcomes at all. (Ask the Cubans and the North Koreans if decades of U.S. sanctions necessitate greater policy alignment with the United States.) Withdrawal would carry its own costs—even the guy who walked away from a bankrupt casino can sustain reputational damage—and would in any event make certain the midterm costs that Iran’s delay only threatens.

The funny thing is that Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada has much the same incentives, despite the obvious differences between Canada and Iran.

Carney is elected, but has years left to run on his mandate, so there’s little time pressure on him compared to Trump’s own foolish self-imposed deadlines. And although the U.S. aggression against Iran has been bloody and that against Canada “merely” economic (although with threats of much worse!), Carney has seen, just as Tehran has, that Trump is mercurial and difficult to sustain an agreement with. Put those together, as Democratic operative Dana Houle conjectured on Twitter, and you have a strikingly similar strategic situation in which Carney also has incentives to suspend talks until after the midterms. A more favorable balance on Capitol Hill could not only work to Ottawa’s long-term advantage but it could also help deliver a stinging blow to Trump personally.

The other similarity is that both Trump’s frustrated diplomacy with Iran and his floundering approach to Canada were wars of Trump’s choice. In neither case is it clear that Trump ever embarked on an analysis even as superficial as this one. In both cases, Trump seems to have assumed that U.S. military and economic resources would allow him to prevail without any need to take into account reactions of others. What will be the costs of these decisions? Time will tell.

The word Temu is synonymous, at least in some quarters, with low-quality, cheap Chinaslop. Nevertheless, over the last six months, I’ve found myself engaged in what I can only call my Temucal addiction. Like many addictions, it started under stress — stresses I think more folks are due to experience soon.

I didn’t even know what Temu was back in the early days of 2025, beyond the fact that they’d bought time during the Super Bowl to advertise how you could “shop like a billionaire.” I’ve only met a few billionaires, and I don’t exactly know how they shop, but my sense is that it doesn’t involve a lot of apps. It involves more personal shoppers and private viewings at Sotheby’s.

Temu is far from that. The Temu experience is mostly one of wading through a million different advertisements, most of them featuring what seem to be AI-generated photos, none of which give you a proper sense of scale for the actual product until you flip through to the ninth, tenth, or eleventh photograph, where they might deign to provide you with the item’s measurements. And if you think you can’t be trapped by this, you definitely will be—if not the first time, then no later than the fourth time you buy from Temu. It isn’t, in other words, like shopping like a billionaire, except in the sense that everybody is probably trying to defraud billionaires when they shop, too. Nevertheless, after an experience where I had to buy a bunch of things cheaply and couldn’t find them in any of the extensive outlets available in Doha, my hand was finally forced.

It turns out there are categories for which Temu is not just competitive but perfect. If you need things that are cheap, if you don’t particularly care if they fail, and if you’re able to purchase a second round of things very quickly, then Temu can save you a lot of money.

As I understand it from reading elsewhere, the basic Temu business model is fairly simple. The original idea was that factories in China making goods for external clients, whether Chinese or Western, would end up with what were essentially factory seconds. If you’ve ever done anything that involves a production run, you know that there are certain economies of scale. Producing 1,000 units of something may not cost that much more than producing 900. Well, once you’re doing 1,000, you may as well do 1,100. What do you do with those excess units? Temu offered a solution: you could sell them. This wouldn’t be something your original client would notice, or something they could really go after you for anyway. And because a lot of contract manufacturing just doesn’t involve high margins, it would let the factory sell as a white label or off-brand and keep its profit margins going.

You can see how this would be attractive to Chinese firms deep in the throes of involution, wanting to keep the lights on and squeeze another unit of profit out of what is essentially a commodity co-production business. And so it was, and so Temu was born: essentially factory-direct, out-the-back-door shipments.

You can also see how, once a market channel was established, it would grow. If you have been on Temu, then you probably know that there are some firms that seem to produce essentially for the Temu market. In other words, they’re skipping the entire marketing and distribution channel that competitors have to go through and producing things that are good enough for that market, instead of following the factory-second or excess-quantity model that Temu originally ran on.

That’s a major shift. It is basically what happened to outlet stores in the United States, which moved from being a way for established firms to dump their slightly imperfect goods to something else entirely: brands like Brooks Brothers and even Hugo Boss began producing *for* their outlets, using cheaper materials—single-stitch instead of double-stitch clothing, say—that could be sold at a discount to customers who wanted something that still felt name-brand.

Temu, in other words, is becoming a marketplace unto itself, just as Amazon has. Indeed, in a lot of ways, Amazon and Temu are converging. Amazon, of course, sells a lot of name-brand products, or at least products marketing themselves as name-brand. But Amazon also sells Amazon Basics and Amazon originals, its white-label lines. And then there are the things we self-consciously refer to as the Glorpdorp or Zeeblehop market: things sold by Chinese firms that have literally no brand names beyond the random combination of consonants and vowels needed to be listed on Amazon, and which frankly seem awfully similar to the same things you can get for slightly less on Temu itself. Some of that is dropshipping, some of it is firms selling on both marketplaces, and some of it is probably just convergent evolution.

What this all means is that the experience available to consumers around the world these days is exactly what used to be available on Alibaba. Alibaba was, as the name suggests, a kind of thieves’ den in which almost anything could be bought—legally, semi-legally, or illegally—but which was incredibly difficult to police. Temu is more or less a whitewashed version of Alibaba.

There are amazing and sometimes borderline legal finds on Temu. You can go on Temu and purchase those fun little balsa wood model airplanes that you used to be able to get only at museums in the United States. You can buy 30 of them for 30 QAR—well under $10. I did, and I certainly intended to play with them with kids, though I haven’t yet. One day. Mostly it was just fun to see that that factory remains alive and well, still producing the same things I used to buy. Of course, I also remember paying a dollar per airplane, and that is just not what I’m paying now. Temu is miraculous.

I should also note that if you want a nice bag from Harrods…Temu might have you covered.

As much as the frisson of buying name-brand goods for less can be appealing, there are also times when, frankly, you don’t need the name-brand equivalent. I use a kind of bookmark, a Post-it note equivalent that’s essentially a piece of tape with a little coloring on one side. This is something that I think 3M brought to market first—and if it wasn’t 3M, it was somebody a lot like them. But when you come down to it, it’s plastic, adhesive, and coloring. Nobody’s life is riding on it. I don’t care if it’s the best adhesive ever made or merely good enough. It just has to mark a place in a book long enough for me to put it into my notes later as part of my workflow. And if I’m going to pay somebody for it, should I pay 3M $5 or $10 when I can get the same thing on Temu for $1 or $2?

Consider razor blades. You can get five-razor blades that are serviceable, if not particularly comfortable, for 50 cents, instead of the (admittedly better) ones Gillette will sell you for $1.50 or $2.50 a unit.My beard—not to give you too much information—grows back really thickly, and I’m one of the few people who actually needs three or five blades to get a close enough shave. And I really like Gillette. It’s really great. But is it five times as great? No. Sometimes I want a really comfortable shave, but sometimes I just need a competent shave. For something where I need a good-enough shave most days, I’m happy to buy a slightly worse product at an 80% discount.

I don’t do that, by the way, with my shaving creams. Those are by Taylor’s of Old Bond Street; I recommend the oud scented cream.

But that’s just the thing. There are some products I will pay more for and some products I won’t. And that’s something consumers in the 21st century, well beyond myself, are happy to do. It turns out that a name brand isn’t something you always need. Having a name brand was originally supposed to guarantee quality. But you only need to guarantee quality if lives, or reputation, or at least some monetary damages are on the line. When goods become essentially disposable—and at Temu prices, they’re pretty damn disposable—do you need a name brand? Or do you just need functionality, plus the knowledge that if it fails, you can buy another one and you’re only out 20% of the name-brand price?

This is something I’ve been thinking about because the internet has had another round of discourse about the Vimes Boots Theory. The Vimes Theory—and if you’re not familiar with it, you probably haven’t been on the internet that long—comes from a passage by Terry Pratchett offering an explanation for why the rich are rich and the poor stay poor:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

—Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

It’s an argument that the poor have to buy cheap consumer goods, and so end up spending more—a form of poverty tax—for the same functions that the rich simply buy nicer things to serve.

This is, as many people have observed, a fundamentally British aristocratic way of regarding consumption—or, at least, a stereotype about far-sighted aristos. It’s a world in which the British nobility buy a wonderful, robust estate wagon and use it for generations while the rest of us make do with some cheap car that keeps breaking down.

As you may have noticed, this is a terrible description of what the contemporary aristocracy, or the true upper class in most parts of the world, actually does. If you’re actually shopping like a billionaire, you might be shopping for a piece of art that consists of a literal piece of fruit taped to a wall, for which you might pay $5.2 million. In other words, the real rich are not always buying, as Pratchett assumes, better-quality goods. They’re buying goods measured on dimensions that poor people don’t even think about—such as whether the display of wealth will impress people who are also incredibly wealthy.

This is something I see all the time in Doha. Consider cars, the closest equivalent to boots. There’s the car market for people trying to become delivery drivers or Uber drivers; the car market for professionals like myself, looking for something robust, reliable, and ideally respectable without being flashy; and then there are the people who buy Land Rovers because, even though it costs 10,000 QAR to change the oil and reliability might be iffy, they don’t care. Land Rovers look cool. People in the market for them don’t necessarily worry about reliability, because reliability isn’t a concern when you have six or eight or ten top-of-the-line cars. If you need a reliable Land Rover, buy another one. Sometimes price is a signal—and sometimes price for even a good that’s cool-but-not-reliable is a signal, too (like the Wall Street Journal-approved trend of hot girls with old Broncos).

Rich people don’t have to buy reliable cars. They may buy a Toyota, but they don’t have to. Peek into the garages of my more upscale neighbors and you will find … Multiple Bentleys. Multiple Land Rovers. Multiple BMWs and Jaguars. In other words, cars you might buy because you don’t really care if they’re in the shop—you have people to take care of that.

Vimes: eat your heart out. When people shop like billionaires, they shop like people who don’t have to worry about money—not people making far-sighted investments in durable goods.

I, on the other hand, am a humble decathousandaire. I bought a Mazda because it outstrips Toyota in reliability. But I have found that Temu is a place to get the things you just don’t want to spend a lot of money on, like plastic holders for Q-tips. There are times when you need a lot of those things, and you need them in ways that require you to just buy something; if I can buy them for 75 cents with free shipping, that’s where I’m going to go. Sometimes, it turns out, the disposable boots are the ones you buy because you don’t need them to last.

But none of this explains why I became, as I said, *addicted* to Temu. That has to do with the war.

The war was a little bit stressful, but not so much because of the physical danger, at least after the first few days. Rather, it was stressful in a way that made you go a little bit crazy—the same crazy everybody went during COVID. And I don’t mean that they became partisans of RFK Jr. I mean that you simply had a lot of time on your hands and not much desire or ability to go outside. To be fair, being in a place under contemporary forms of siege warfare was a little bit bizarre. Missiles were being shot at us, sure, but most of them were intercepted, and there was very little chance any of them would actually hit me. All the same, there were limits on what anyone could do outside. Nobody wanted giant gatherings that could inadvertently become targets for an errant Shahed.

And that meant you were kept inside for long stretches, working from home and playing from home—and, just like COVID, the lucky among us had money we weren’t spending on normal things like driving around or going out to eat. Combine that with a distinct loss of control over external circumstnaces and you start looking for ways to spend money as a way of exerting some control over your environment—some control over a situation in which you felt you had none. Experimenting with buying on Temu was really, really attractive under those conditions. There were lots of home projects to accomplish with the spare time and the nervous energy, and Temu furnished the tools to Konmari entire rooms. True Marie Kondo Thought requires putting things in boxes, and boxes in boxes, and guess where you can get nice-looking boxes that are robust enough but don’t cost much money?

There was also something, during the height of the conflict, about being able to engage in commerce with the outside world at all. Even now, you still can’t import things under normal parameters. Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz is closed off, and that’s where all the stuff comes from. Temu, on the other hand, ships by air, and they kept shipping when nobody else would. The U.S. Postal Service isn’t delivering direct to Doha. Temu is. And that actually matters.

Means, motive, and opportunity—that’s enough to start you off on turning to consumption as a satisfying if illusory means of exerting control. But once you become addicted to spending, you stay addicted simply because it becomes a hobby. That’s why I call my relationship with Temu a form of chemical addiction: the dopamine hit you get from buying productivity-enhancing Temu purchases really does begin to skew your desires. You begin buying things you never possibly would have bought.

So it’s an addiction not just to shopping, or to cheap stuff, but to what that cheap stuff represents: the kind of hits that allow you to pretend that normalcy is going on, even as you engage in the acts that deny normalcy is possible at all. And that, unfortunately, is a way a lot of people are going to experience the 21st century.

Of course, I’m also thinking about this because e-commerce is in the headlines for another wartime reason: the Ukrainians have decided to begin, for justifiable reasons, bombarding Wildberries. Wildberries is often described as the Russian version of Amazon; my guess is that there’s also a huge bit of the Russian version of Temu going on there too. Wildberries has had a phenomenal and crazy life, one that involved being at the center of a power struggle between the Putin circle and the circle of Ramzan Kadyrov, the dictator of Chechnya. These days, Wildberries is, per Ukraine, a strategic asset, because among the firm’s e-commerce customers were Russian military commands and others who liked to shop on its special segment for the “special military operation”—which means Ukraine has deemed Wildberries facilities fair game.

I assume there’s an academic somewhere in Russia trying to distract themselves from the way history has turned since 2022 by shopping on Wildberries, and that person is having their day ruined by a whole bunch of things—but especially by the blockage of the little hint of normalcy that Wildberries carried. At the same time, of course, ballistic missiles are raining down on Kyiv, where there’s no interception providing the security for me and mine that Patriot interceptors provided for Doha, Dubai, and elsewhere during the most recent conflict.

In the 21st century, we’re going to experience something very, very weird. We’re going to have available to us all the benefits of the internet, of artificial intelligence, of always-on communication—alongside the fact that data centers, LLM models, cybersecurity, and warehouses are going to increasingly become targets of war. That’s going to flip a lot of scripts. Whereas the 20th century had clear divisions between civilian and military, in the 21st century everything is going to be blurred together. A lot of folks’ ordinary habits—whether it’s using Amazon, or Netflix running through data centers in Bahrain that become targets, or ordering from your favorite local e-commerce site—are going to be at risk of being upset.

What a strange world that’s going to be to live in. I feel like the future really is already here, just unevenly distributed—and I’m in a group of unwitting early adopters. It isn’t about shopping like billionaires: it’s about shopping like the end times.

Donald Trump grew up and started his career in New York City construction and real estate, two industries that are, as we say, organized crime-adjacent. It’s no surprise, then, that he continually reapplies the lessons of small-time Queens grifters to geopolitics—most recently with his announcement that the United States, not the Iranians, will be levying a 20 percent tariff on goods passing through the Strait of Hormuz:

This is, quite literally, a protection racket. Before Trump’s war in February 2026, passage through the Strait was free; the security issues—Iranian aggression—that make U.S. Navy protection for vessels transiting the strait are thus of Trump’s own design. Nice little freedom of the seas you got there; shame if something were to happen to it.

I could go into the fact that freedom of navigation has been a core U.S. foreign policy objective since the 18th century, or that the United States once fought a war with Britain over the issue, or that it has consistently sought to justify its hegemony by reference to providing security of the commons—like the seas. Well, that’s all over; the declaratory policy of the United States is now that taxing seaborne trade is perfectly legal and perfectly cool.

(Donald the dove!)

I could equally point out that the United States has already been playing the role of a security guarantor and has been profiting by that role—there’s a reason why GCC countries invest in U.S. assets, for instance, and U.S. bases in the region are not in the main paid for by American taxpayers. (Indeed, over the past several months, U.S. partners and allies have borne immense costs of a war they asked the White House not to pursue.)

So, of course, it’s a disaster—the sort of unpredictability and ignorance that is dealing self-inflicted injuries on the United States at an accelerating pace.

What’s remarkable to me is that this is not the first time Trump has proposed literally this policy. Back in August 17, 1989, in a speech to a group of travel agents reported by the Tampa Bay Times, Trump proposed exactly this:

The relevant passage is here:

The speech is reportedly a hardliner’s dream. Trump rejected then-President George H.W. Bush’s vision of a “kinder, gentler nation” as a recipe for national disaster. Instead, he urged a tough approach that bypassed traditional paradigms in pursuit of unilateral, neomercantilist goals. Comparing this speech with his second inaugural address reveals a striking degree of continuity and suggests that Trump’s views, although radical, possess, at least, the value of consistency. He prescribed dealing with U.S. trade imbalances with Europe and Japan by implementing huge import duties—tariffs—to force concessions: “First you say to Japan, ‘You come to us. We don’t go to you.’ Then you say, ‘Get your a-- over here or we’re going to drop a 20 percent tax on all your products.’”

The news report lauded Trump’s “acerbic patter of a street-smart Queens native”. And it landed ill with an executive, but well with the security guard.

There are a few interpretive rules that perform well with Trump. Is an action traditionally masculine? Will it play well on television? And, less obvious but no less true, how does it slot into President Trump’s boundless nostalgia for his policy proposals from the 1980s? It’s his fan-fiction; we’re just living in it.

^[1] Philip D Stern, “Foreign Policy, Courtesy Trump,” St. Petersburg Times, August 17, 1989.

A bit of a diversion, for me at least; we’ll get back to politics soon.

We love to say our preferences are universal.

OK, see what I did there? Logicians might say I committed a logical fallacy—a hasty generalization; advocates might point out that I offered no evidence at all; rhetoricians might more charitably describe what I’ve done as a handshake. I want to add at least a fourth: I spoke in the phony universal.

The phony universal is ubiquitous on the Internet. (Yes, logicians and critics, I know—but spend some time on the Internet and see if you disagree that this is a widespread phenomenon.) It’s not an invention of the Internet—people have been using the construction forever—but online communication helps it flourish. Indeed, because the natural case of the phony universal is the first-person-plural—”we”—it’s a great tool for audience-building (and audience capture), because if you don’t accept the premise, you stop subscribing.

Despite its ubiquity, however, the phony universal is both harmful and easy to avoid. It’s harmful because, well, it’s a phony claim about something that isn’t universal. Too often, online discourse collapses into Flanderization, in which quips or memes substitute for analysis. Phony universalism accelerates this by collapsing varied phenomena (U.S. foreign policy, Republicans, gender roles) into plausible and unchallenged stereotypes. (Plausibility, remember, is a result of audience expectations.) That can lead to superficial and even wrong predictions—witness the seeming inability of many Blueskyers to understand that Trump isn’t (just) a stooge for Putin on Ukraine, for instance. And it avoids making an argument by simply asserting a truth.

It’s also just darn annoying. The impetus for this essay comes from an unusual place: the exuberant love for books and librarians that a lot of online folks express. I’m no enemy of either, to be clear—they’re great! I like books and waffles!—but the fetishization of both online is a prodigious engine for phony universalism. Books make you a good person! Libraries are essential for democracy! Eh, probably not—there’s lots of bad people reading books and lots of good people who don’t; there’s some fine libraries in autocracies and some good democracies without dead-tree warehouses. Of course, that’s not what anyone means; what they mean is unobjectionable (reading books cultivates intellect and taste; the free flow of information matters to free societies) but eventually what you say, literally, becomes what you mean, figuratively, even if you didn’t mean to. Even phony universals meant for good are bad.

The good news is that it’s simple to get away from the phony universal: just change “we” to “I”. Instead of “We love X” or “X is important for everyone!!1!” you can just say “I love X” or “X is important for me”. The bad news is that what is simple isn’t easy.

The phony universal has always existed, but the Internet is a hospitable environment in which it flourishes.

The phony universal is an adaptive reaction to the structure and tone of online discourse. The structural story is simply told. The platforms on which we publish reward engagement, and a phony universal drives engagement of both the me-too and the reverse phony-universal kind (“What! Nobody does that!”). By contrast, legacy media editors, God love ‘em, would routinely strike out those sorts of claims with the same objections I described earlier. (Marshall McLuhan totally vindicated—the medium is the message.)

The tonal story is more complicated. The arc of the Internet bends toward the conversational, and conversations don’t come with footnotes—they exist in sloppy generalizations, imprecise descriptions, and invocations of the inarticulable. (I urge you to follow and learn from David Gibson on how conversation, and the analysis of conversation, differ from formal argumentation.)

Sermo Interruptus Substack

The Coveted Last Word

On Friday, June 5, 2026, President Donald Trump sat down for an interview with Kristen Welker from “Meet the Press.” The interview was conducted inside a barn in Wisconsin, and was repeatedly interrupted by loud rain on the metal roof. The first thirty-four minutes were cordial enough, with Welker pressing Trump on his strategy in Iran and the consequen…

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3 months ago · David Gibson

In general, online discourse is more informal, more iterative, and less internally complete than print culture . Sometimes this is obvious—conversational podcasts and video podcasts enshrine parasociality-as-discourse-production—and sometimes it’s less so. When I write a newsletter, for instance, I don’t expect it to stand on its own the way I expect my academic journal articles to be self-contained; if someone objects or if I explain myself poorly, I can always return to it as part of the broader online conversation.

The consequence is that generalization and sweeping claims fit within the tenor of online discussion. Any claim I advance in this medium, then, carries a lower expectation on the part of audience and producer that it’s meant to be taken strictly literally. That allows me to dispense with a lot of throat-clearing and scene-setting that I would need in other registers; it allows audiences to have material they read rather than cite.

Of course, there are dangers and annoyances. There’s the pancake-waffle collapse where people read too much into silences. There’s the subtler misreadings caused by audiences who haven’t updated expectations about form. If you grew up with (traditional, American) print culture, your habits of relating to online conversations will be ill-adapted, just as people from ask-cultures struggle with guess-culture interactions.

Aside: Ask and Guess Cultures In Ask Cultures, people just ask what others want; in Guess Culture, people seek to avoid embarrassment or difficulty for their partner, and hence seek to infer what others want to avoid directness. To speak in stereotypes, contrast a New Yorker and a Japanese style.

More grievous are the frictions that come up when people assert a phony universalism that someone rejects. Objection and response might be the warp and woof of online conversation, but they’re still acts that can be perceived as (or just be) hostile in ways that produce harms superfluous to purpose. You can make an enemy when you just wanted to make a point.

And then there’s the long-term harms to thinking. Speak freely in generalizations and you’ll soon tolerate too much sloppiness—not only in your presentation but in your internal thinking. We tend to think to the level that we’re invited, and thinking too much in Internet degrades organic intelligence.

What can we do to avoid these problems?

First, stop speaking in universals. Just speak your truth, in the demotic sense: I like pancakes is truer than Everyone likes pancakes. It takes hardly a moment to turn a reaction into a thought. If the reaction can’t survive the translation it doesn’t deserve to be expressed. And as a bonus, you’ll have a lower chance of catching strays (even the dullest troll can’t dispute your pancake-liking) and a higher chance of making a dent in the discourse by providing a point of view rather than a reiteration.

The other half is to stop consuming and encouraging slop. Slop existed before AI; it is not only dangerous because of online users, from Boomers to Gen Z, being memed into support for one of the 31 flavors of extremism. Even worse, however, is how slop-consumption leads to slop-production. You have to set higher standards for yourself—and to avoid phony universalism here I will recast this in exemplary fashion: I have to set higher standards in what I write and consume for myself, and I’ll bet this rings true for you as well.

In Internet argot, “The Cool Zone” is a period that’s fun to read about and crap to live through. For many leftists, for instance, there’s the French Revolution—bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, pants-wetting was it in that afternoon to approach the guillotine. I’m not sure what the paradigmatic rightist Cool Zone would be (the Crusades?) but you can fill in the blanks. For Americans, the classic U.S. Cool Zone is, almost certainly, the Second World War, a conflict whose death grip on our cultural imagination continues even as the ranks of those who remember it firsthand dwindle. The war, based as it seems if you only watch the winners’ highlight reel, was awful to live through, even for Americans, whether they fought or not.

To live through, rather than to read about, a moment that’s apt to become fodder for future historians—those deified future entities to whom intellectuals pray for eternal, if textual, salvation—is to realize how hard it is to capture in words the feeling of being there, not least because so often one is being there in the same way that one has been in every other moment of one’s life. We are all on the train of mortality, catching glimpses of history as we hurtle down the tracks, glimpsing the passing world with the detachment passengers have for the scenery outside. We segment our personal histories neatly from the future textbook images, which arrive on screens: a fifth birthday party, a glimpse of the Wall coming down on the television, a T-ball game, hours of the Persian Gulf War on television, moving into college, seeing the World Trade Center collapse on television, a flight to a new country,—and then suddenly history sounds its arrival with a thud as an Iranian missile is knocked out overhead.

Every happy moment is boring in the same way, but every disaster unfolds in particulars. Yet living through, even peripherally, such a moment offers what I imagine is a proper degree of empathy for those who have lived through other moments: you do not know the rupture is coming until it comes, and then it comes and you are conscious of it, but unless you are truly unfortunate it will come and yet you will still have to make dinner and shave and use the bathroom. Historical transformations offer no respite from chores.

I am not sure that what has happened to me here recently is a Cool Zone but it’s certainly been chillier than my life to date. It is, to be sure, something of stolen valor to compare what I’ve been experiencing the past few months to a war war. The delta between what people texting me in the early days thought we were going through and the banality of what it actually entailed—running out to the mall for an enormous platter of grocery-store sushi on the second day, for instance—makes me question whether I really experienced anything to write home about, even though the folks back home have not had their houses shook by intercepts. I have too many Lebanese colleagues and acquaintances to compare what I went through with a hot war—but even there, I know, people pay rent and go shopping and mark time in ways that resemble what they were doing before. And there’s further stations to encounter past that on the path to real war, the kind they sanitize in Hollywood. Yet this is my war, so far, and what a strange time it has been.

Our experiences of any calamity are shaped by what we bring to the moment, just as what the moment brings to us will shape us henceforward. Paul Fussell, an infantryman in the Second World War and thus someone whose war-experiencing credentials are beyond doubt, was an aspiring aesthete and critic, and his recollections of his war show that cast plainly:

The scene was less apocalyptic than shabbily ironic: it sorted so ill with modern popular assumptions about the idea of progress and attendant improvements in public health, social welfare, and social justice. To transform guiltless boys into cold marble after passing them through unbearable fear and humiliation and pain and contempt seemed to do them an interesting injustice. I decided to ponder these things.

Fussell was talking about waking up from a night-time bivouac to a morning sun revealing he had slept next to the corpses of German boy-soldiers. My experience to date is less gruesome and much less smelly—but there is certainly something to be said for the fact that in early February I was giving an impromptu lecture on missile defense systems to students in a course on nuclear diplomacy and weeks later I was watching those same systems in action as part of a war mostly about nuclear weapons. Good-bye to world orders, rules-based or even just velvety-imperialized; khalas to a notion of a U.S.-led progressive international system. Abstractions like “alliances” and “hegemony” and “regional security architectures” make for ethereal corpses, yet there I was, waking up to see them dissolve. I decided to ponder these things.

Fussell struggled after the war to convince others that his unit really had seen action in the last few weeks of the European war, that the fighting hadn’t dissolved into a pleasant mist but had continued to splatter guts all the way to the surrender. He grew annoyed at innocent interlocutors’ ignorance of his experience. So, too, I grow annoyed with authorities assuring me that, as they did in the early days, the State Department stood ready to assist or, more recently, that the United States won the conflict on points. Simply eyewitnessing events doesn’t make your analysis more credible—but when cheerleaders in the country waging the war seem to lack any comprehension of how the war is actually unfolding, one does begin to understand why the boys at the front hurl invectives not at the enemy but at their comrades back in the comforts of headquarters.

Theory can be, and has been, a comfort. Watching and hearing and feeling the missiles has provided me with ample grist for teaching Schelling (as readers of this newsletter will recall). Theories of bargaining and signaling have helped me parse what each side might be trying to say to one another—and to think about how those theories might suggest ways that negotiations might even work, in some narrow sense. Certainly, teaching these concepts has also been far more rewarding—my contribution to a better world even as the current one falls apart—because it turns out you really need to pack your brain now with the tools you’ll need in a crisis. A crisis is no time to read a textbook—but it’s probably a good idea to have read one before the crisis hits. 1

But it has also bred a certain ironic detachment. What in the hell was Schelling, who never saw combat even to my limited extent, talking about when he assumed that combatants could simply understand the message that targeting choices were sending? “Say it with flowers,” say the ads, but if one is saying it with missiles the message is apt to be lost. Faced with a concrete application of his beautiful theory in the early days of the U.S. war in Vietnam even Schelling couldn’t figure out how to negotiate kinetically. (Well, at least I’ll make sure to add some Jervis to the syllabus next time.)

There has also been the dread served up by theory, of course, like how nuclear programs and control of maritime chokepoints are exactly the sort of hard-to-divide issues that make peaceful resolution of conflicts difficult. As a social scientist rather than a historian, I appear to be fated to experience my Cool Zone as a theoretical construct of the present rather than the past. Living at once in both the normal world of emails and Temu deliveries and the hyperworld of theory makes for double vision. The hyperworld shows me that my online shopping is delivered in the midst of a strategic situation in which we are just stuck with pain that forces neither combatant to real negotiations; another surface of the theory-world shows me scenarios in which the relevant leader is so flighty that we will be suddenly unstuck in the worst way.

To be in a cool zone, or a space adjacent to one, teaches lessons I receive while I grind through routines during the exception. Being a scholar of the topics I am living through creates a superposition of the mundane and the dreadful. It is intellectually stimulating—clarifying, even. It is nurturing my empathy for those in situations that, however dissimilar in the particulars, are identical in the dullness of the anxieties. Fussell observes that after his war he joined “thousands of veterans [who] swarmed to graduate schools to study literature, persuaded that poetry and prose could save the world, or at least help wash away some of the intellectual shame of the years we’d been through.” After this is all over, maybe I too will grasp for meaning.

Preface

A few years ago, as part of a project that still hasn’t come to fruition (I’m stealing some time from it to write this up, in fact), we surveyed some Americans about what they thought made countries high or low status in international politics. This wasn’t scientific or extensive—it was a genuine pilot—but nevertheless pilots can be informative if your goal is to get low-resolution images of public opinion and you’re not sampling on something that’s clearly biasing your results. I mention this to preface a result I might later walk away from but suspect is true: respondents really thought fat countries were low-status.

By whatever name, obesity is notable by its absence in political science. Taboos operate at the level of not naming or discussing an issue, and they are most obvious when there’s a gap between what is acceptable to discuss and what is unmentioned in polite company.

Social scientists are usually, despite their pretensions, very interested in being part of polite society, and refrain from addressing many subjects because of a sense that those subjects just aren’t fit for study—or that addressing them will associate the researchers with some trait. There is, in other words, a strong desire to associate yourself with high-status topics, regardless of scientific interest. I’m going to exaggerate here for rhetorical effect but I am definitely kidding on the square. Every researcher worth their salt is defined in a vector space of topics associated with them; do you want your personal keywords to be “money, power, status” or “drugs, laziness, obesity”? Market positionality is real, especially when you’re fighting for one of the last planks on the raft of the Medusa-style job market in academia. If there’s no cluster of researchers working on something, then it’s awfully sus to be interested in something deviant—what, do you think that science isn’t faddish or cliquish or prudish? And so many topics that, to a Martian, might seem equally deserving of study go unaddressed in favor of contextually-desirable discussions. (This is one reason why the tastes of a handful of researchers at top institutions can be influential: they can signal high-status interest in topics and create clusters of interest around given topics, and often they even deploy this power in responsible, scientific ways!) I’m not immune: I haven’t done anything with that enlightening point from the pilot, after all.

All of this is context-loading for why there isn’t really much political-science discussion of obesity, even though obesity would seem to merit discussion. (There is some but this isn’t the post to do a literature review.)

The Argument

Obesity is a defining fact of contemporary American life. There are politics around obesity, including submerged conflicts in every doctor’s office where someone with a suboptimal BMI presents with an unrelated condition, sotto voce discussions about class and government assistance, discussions around policymaking and elections in which the attractive win more often, and much more overt manifestations over the politics of bodies themselves. There’s a reason why r/fatpeoplehate was banned and there’s a reason why it was popular. On university campuses in the United States, radical pro-fat scholars share territory with facilities dedicated to making the body as fit as scientifically possible. The body is political and thus so is obesity. The fat-acceptance people, then, are right that the personal is political, even if—as I suggest below—they might not actually like what could come of making obesity an overtly political topic.

Indeed, public interest in obesity is high. I went to the Roper database of polls and grabbed some representative data; on a skim of earlier surveys, it looks like the USA is approaching something like Peak Obesity Worries. When you ask Americans what the biggest health care problems the country faces, obesity always comes up, and usually (post-Covid) leads other things that look like “health” issues as opposed to “health access” issues. For instance, a 2025 Gallup poll on the most urgent health problem puts obesity at #3:

A different measure from Axios puts obesity at number one (and this seems about representative in similar lists that don’t mix policy and health issues, at least in the past several years):

And the public is latently sympathetic to the idea that adults with a weight-related condition, like obesity, can use weight-loss drugs like Ozempic—but not those without a weight-related condition1. (In survey results not shown here, there’s a lot of opposition to teens and children using them, too.)

There is also a substantial reservoir of support, if not an overwhelming degree, of sympathy for the position that the government should pay for Ozempic etc through Medicare and Medicaid:

What does this point to? Well, it suggests that there’s at least latent sympathy not only for viewing the use of Ozempic and other drugs in the GLP-1 class as acceptable for treating weight-loss but also that the public is at least public policy-curious on this issue. That might reflect some self-interest, by the way; at least 37% of Americans are obese or overweight (and you can find estimates that are much higher), so if you ask Americans if someone else should pay for medicines they are likely to want to take, well, of course you should expect to find some support.

Once something becomes defined as a political subject—that is, something that you can subject to governmental action, that is no longer “private”—then it becomes possible to imagine governmental action. This gets tricky, however, because making something “political” may not always lead to the results that activists want it to have. For instance, asserting that bodies are political might indeed put body size on the agenda—but once something is on the agenda, deliberation and the piercing of the veil separating private actions from public ones might lead to other outcomes. That can especially be the case if other circumstances change.

In the case of obesity and overweight, for instance, the advent of drugs that may make those conditions be seen as the result of personal choice could radically change what the “politics” of the body are. If there is a treatment that can radically reduce BMI, for instance—and there is, many of them, in fact—then the arguments around bodies will revolve not around the bodies but around the choices.

Which leads me to the question implicit in the title of this Substack essay: will obesity become illegal?

Yes, like all such questions in the headline, my answer is “no”. But let me sketch something:

1. Pressure for public subsidies for GLP-1s (or quasi-public, including health insurance) succeeds, widening access to the drugs even more (this could also take the form of negotiated discounts etc—don’t get hung up on the access mechanism)

2. GLP-1 adoption becomes even more widespread than it is now (a minimum of 12% of Americans are or have used GLP-1s)

3. The treatments work—indeed, it is likely that just as the AIs available to you are the least powerful AIs you will ever see, the GLP-1s available now are much less powerful than next or second-next generation treatments like reta.

4. Obesity becomes relatively less common and, because of wealth effects continuing to moderate access to GLP-1s, much more concentrated among lower-income (and hence lower-status) folks

5. Obesity doesn’t become illegal but it becomes triply stigmatized: not just as a condition on its own but one that is a condition of choice (symbolizing the rejection of mainstream views) and a marker of poverty/deprivation.

I think it is very possible that the United States is within 3 to 5 years of this tipping point. That might sound absurd to you but these drugs are falling in price and becoming far more potent—clinical results from trials put the power of reta, the next-generation Lilly drug, at essentially on par with bariatric surgery; many people appear to be dropping out of the clinical trials because the drug is too powerful and study participants are losing weight too fast.

This will appear like a revolution in body politics. It will, to be clear, have many undesirable side-effects: imagine the collision of body dysmorphia and anorexia etc with widespread pills that really do let you choose your own weight. But it will also fundamentally change the terms of engagement on this issue—even, perhaps, to much greater regulation than I have sketched here; if obesity leads to worse life outcomes and greater health problems, much like cigarettes, then there may be still greater political pressures to make treatments less than wholly voluntary.

There’s a wide world between banning a condition (requiring it to be treated) and coercing people to assent to treatments. You can imagine, for instance, that weight-loss treatments could become a part of welfare programs in a very coercive fashion; you might also imagine that corporations and other employers aggressively market this. And if there’s a physical attractiveness element to job-matching, and there is, then you can also imagine that the competitive pressures to reduce will be intense as others do the same. If the Cold War brought policies like the presidential fitness award and the British Empire brought “muscular Christianity” (and let’s not even mention the Turnverein), you can imagine that the optimization pressures of our current digital global order will similarly produce physical effects.

I want to make plain that with this my aim isn’t to herald or ward off the future; I’m a realist to the degree that I think that base social instincts ultimately condition politics, and the degree of literal hatred obesity attracts is a reflection of a pretty deep social drive (even if the precise ideal body type really has varied over time and with other factors). I know American society tolerably well, and I know that its deepest beliefs are not always welcoming—and that if there’s a pill to address a condition as despised as obesity is, then that will change society greatly.

What follows is an edited transcript with selected slides. This is too long for email — my gosh, this is long — so at some point you’ll need to click through.

I’m writing from, in some ways, the literal front lines — or at least near them — of places where political science has come under direct pressure. Today I want to do three things: say what’s happening, ask why we ended up in this series of crises, and think about whether and how we can get out.

What’s happening

Shifting baselines

If you talk to folks who’ve been around a long time, their sense of what has gone wrong will be very different from mine. We’re all seeing this crisis through our own viewpoint, so I want to start by being clear about mine.

One concept I use in my course on the politics of the end of the world comes from environmental studies: shifting baselines. Every generation has something it views as normal. If you’re in your 50s or 60s, your idea of what’s normal for U.S. academia is going to be very different from mine, or from a graduate student just starting out.

My baseline is not the 1960s or 1970s, when I’m told public budgets were large and support for higher education was high. It’s not even the 1980s or 1990s, when I was around but wasn’t involved in academia at all — I was still learning how to walk. People in the academy then thought things were pinched. Compared to now, that baseline looks generous.

My baseline starts in 2008, when I decided to go to graduate school. I remember very clearly being a TA in a course on the politics of the former Soviet Union at Georgetown, watching one of my students monitor his stock portfolio crashing in September 2008.

I had no idea then what the Great Recession would mean for academia. It was a sharp shock with long-lasting results. Even Harvard cancelled job searches mid-year and undertook other cutbacks, like eliminating cookies at faculty teas. At other institutions, the cuts were larger. That baseline tempered my optimism — for instance, the expectation that academia is cosseted or stable.

So I’m not defining today’s crisis relative to some good old days. For me, there were no good old days.

Table stakes

Before we address the current crisis, we need to acknowledge some structural conditions I won’t dwell on but want to name. The education industry has been dealing with adjunctification of its instructional faculty for decades — no longer a crisis but a structural condition. Public universities have faced declining state investment, even in true-blue states like Massachusetts. Faculty turnover has been low since the end of mandatory retirement, with concomitantly fewer opportunities for junior scholars. And there is now extraordinary competition for jobs and even graduate-school admission. The career I had — applying to PhD school with an idea of what I might like to study — doesn’t really exist anymore at competitive places. Juniors and seniors today have more research experience than I had as a second-year PhD student.

Even given that context, what is going on right now is astonishing.

A many-sided assault on U.S. higher education

U.S. higher education is experiencing a tremendous assault. Entire disciplines are in the crosshairs of state governments. In Florida, sociology has been removed as a general education course. College professors have left jobs in Texas because they dared to teach woke radicals like Plato. In Indiana, where I grew up and went to university, the state legislature has enforced almost-draconian laws about what public institutions can teach.

Everyone is affected. Nobody wants to have sympathy for the Harvards and Yales of the world — if you’re at a more workaday institution, it can be hard to empathize with the travails of wealthy ones. But our wealthier colleagues are facing genuinely serious crises, and that matters for all of us. Wealth, prestige, and reputation are no longer guarantees of safety; they paint a target on institutions’ backs.

Under the One Big Beautiful Bill, the wealthiest universities are being targeted to an unprecedented degree. The bill imposes up to an 8% wealth tax on the largest endowments — not about leveling the playing field but a tax on research universities. It turns out you can get Republican Congresses to pass a wealth tax, as long as it targets universities. Endowments may be things “other universities” have (I think I can say without endangerment that Georgetown wishes it had a bigger one), but they generate positive spillovers across the sector — Harvard’s underwrites services like Dataverse. Penalizing Harvard like this doesn’t lead to a braver, more equitable future. It simply weakens institutions that, love them or hate them, are pillars of higher education.

If life is bad at the summit, it’s awful in the trenches. I put together this chart about university closures yesterday before news broke that one of my former neighboring colleges, Hampshire College, would be closing. Like Hampshire, many nonprofit institutions are simply closing. What’s happening now is much worse than during the Great Recession. The generous COVID aid Congress passed in 2020 patched over a lot of problems, but as enrollments shrink, we’re seeing an increasing number of institutions shuttering.

Adding to all this are structural changes in the research enterprise. COSSA — the Consortium of Social Science Associations — is not a group of wild-eyed radicals. And yet their evaluation of changes to the National Science Foundation describes what’s happening at NSF as potentially existential for the social and behavioral science community.

The NSF has not only formally requested the closure of the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) directorate; it is already administratively moving to dismantle it. This isn’t inside-the-Beltway gossip. It will have tangible effects on graduate education and basic-research funding in the United States, with ripple effects worldwide.

Targeting students and faculty

The assault is also specifically targeting students and faculty. Some states are ahead of the curve. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has spearheaded specific assaults on how public universities can conduct international program activities, including a Florida law that blocks Chinese students from taking part in academic research.

Chinese researchers are finding it extremely difficult to be in Florida — even though, before DeSantis’s law, they made up a substantial part of Florida’s higher education system. And Florida’s higher education system is a gem; the University of Florida is one of America’s greatest public research universities.

Imagine being cut off from one of the world’s greatest sources of talent — not because of any genuine concerns, but because Ron DeSantis wanted an issue (and the record is pretty clear on this) on which he could run as a China hawk in the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. That ended badly. The law remains on the books.

In other ways familiar to anyone joining a virtual conference like this one, the U.S. role as a cornerstone of research has come under assault. Even at the level of getting visas, U.S. higher education is suffering because international visitors no longer want to come. Individual researchers are being targeted too. Just the other week, a University of Washington graduate student was questioned and removed from the United States when returning to Sea-Tac.

We’re all familiar with last year’s abuses — including the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts graduate student arrested on suspicion of being pro-Hamas because she wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper. She was eventually released, and the immigration judge who allowed her release was later fired.

Disrupting the U.S. as a preeminent global force

Other connections between U.S. academia and the world are being severed. The Cato Institute recently put out a report showing how many visas have been denied for folks who want to come study in the United States.

It might be hard to see how dramatic the shift is — your eye goes first to the orange line — but you have to look all the way at the bottom of the chart to see the 2026 projections. Visas for international students are down tremendously, and they keep going down. Visa rejection rates are also trending upward across practically every continent except South America.

This has effects beyond the United States. Coincidentally, a colleague who studies Saudi Arabia sent me tweets about a Saudi academic controversy while I was preparing this talk. They discuss recent — like, past few days — changes at King Saud University, one of the leading institutions in Saudi Arabia, which is closing entire faculties: history, geography, sociology. Defenders of the move — and Saudi Twitter is, for lack of a better expression, lit — point to the fact that leading U.S. institutions are also reducing low-enrollment programs.

What happens in the U.S., because of its traditional role as a cornerstone of international higher education, is taken as a guide to what is acceptable. The battles we fight and lose in American institutions have global effects.

This has also directly impacted graduate education and folks who wanted to come to the United States. Last year, I wrote for Slate drawing on my experience as an American at an American institution in the Global South, about how I have started advising students from the Global South not to go to the U.S. for their PhD programs. It’s not a viable path given the difficulties they could face — including potentially being deported or worse. The risks that things get worse over the next three years are large enough that it’s hard to ask anyone to make a five-to-seven-year commitment.

Meanwhile, Chinese universities are moving up the ladder. They are pursuing talent. They are welcoming talent. They have a government that’s investing. What a contrast.

I don’t mention this out of some Cold War, beat-the-Chinese instinct. Years ago, when colleagues and I talked about these dynamics, we all assumed great-power competition would lead to increased — or at least preserved — funding in U.S. institutions. Instead we’re observing the opposite. The U.S. is dismantling its institutions of higher education rather than investing in them. If even a new Cold War isn’t going to save higher-ed investment, what could?

Technological and geopolitical upheavals

We’re dealing with all of this at the same time that technological and geopolitical upheavals are reshaping our day-to-day experience.

Some political scientists have had measured takes on AI. A lot of this has focused on research. Andy Hall at Stanford has written about how incorporating LLMs into workflows might increase our ability to do good social science. He’s demonstrated that for relatively straightforward data papers, LLMs may match or exceed junior researchers.

I’m not an AI optimist, but I have no time for people who believe LLMs are at the same level they were in 2022 or 2023. If you’re not using frontier programs, you may not know just how scary good they’ve gotten — even though they can also screw up royally.

You can go too far. I’m not sure it’s fair to say AI can already do social science research better than most professors. But I do think Alexander Kustov — who has attracted a lot of vitriol online for some occasionally exaggerated takes — is generally right when he says that if you’re not paying attention to this sector, you’re not contemplating the profundity of what we need to do.

Even without AI, we’d be grappling with the second-order effects of technology on how students process the world. Reliance on AI can reduce the very skills that make it possible for someone like Andy Hall to be a productive researcher who uses AI. Going in expecting the machine to do everything means you’re getting nothing out of it.

(I transcribed this speech using AI and had Claude edit it. Did Claude replace anything I would do? No. Did it let me publish faster? Yes. Could I have let it do more? Yes — but that’s past my ethical AI use line. Suffice to say this post, this Substack altogether, wouldn’t exist without AI. If you’re not using the tools, well, I salute your commitment to an alternative lifestyle.)

There are other challenges. Before AI was a major part of our lives — three years ago — we were already dealing with something that looked like a literacy crisis, a term I do not use lightly, and an attention-span crisis to the point that even film studies majors cannot be relied upon to independently watch movies. I used to think it was hard enough to get college students to read Tom Schelling. If you can’t get them to sit through Dr. Strangelove, we have a crisis of a different order.

Put it together and we have a profound crisis.

The Challenges for Political Science

Political science faces its own problems. Thomas J. Wood put together data from APSA eJobs showing that not only have job postings declined but also that, in 2025–26, at every stage of the academic year, postings ran well below average. Political science is doing relatively better than, say, history, perhaps even sociology — but we’re facing a rapid erosion of our ability to recruit and sustain habits I’ve taken for granted since 2008.

For some of us — not just in Qatar, but in Iran, in Israel, elsewhere — the attack on academics has been far more literal. Universities on all sides of the recent war have become targets, sometimes direct ones. There have been times when my university, Georgetown in Qatar, was named as a specific target of missile attacks by the IRGC. The U.S. and Israel have carried out airstrikes on Iranian academic institutions. Sometimes you look up and see that the war has come to the skies over your head.

Look at all of this, and you begin to think: we’re in a crisis.

An era of crises

In a crisis, what we knew to be normal is no longer reliable. As a good quantitative political scientist, I sought to formalize my intuition, so I went to APSA’s statements page. Sometimes on social media people say, “What is APSA doing about this?” Often APSA has actually issued, or is about to issue, a statement on exactly that thing. I tallied, for each year back to 2003 (the earliest on the website), how many statements and letters APSA had issued. They sometimes deal with state and federal laws, with international concerns, with political scientists under threat for their lives or freedoms, with abuses of academic freedom, with the quality of democracy in the United States, Turkey, or elsewhere.

There’s a clear time trend. I broke out non-U.S. statements, and statements that were petitions for redress or congratulations. Subtracting those and looking just at U.S.-focused statements, it’s clear political science is in crisis. It’s not entirely a crisis of President Trump’s making — but the Trump era has plainly led to a new era in which APSA is putting out a lot of crisis statements. Since 2017 there has been a structural break. We’ve been living through uncharted territory, with APSA issuing in some years more statements than in entire prior five- or ten-year periods.

Fraying everywhere

If you’re a researcher or graduate student, if you’re feeling anxious or depressed, if you feel like something is just not right — you’re not alone. Dave Karpf, a political scientist at GW, put it well in his Substack . His baseline, ten years earlier than mine, was that you could still make a career as a political scientist in the academy — but every year has felt more precarious, even for someone with a good job at a solid institution:

My peers and I … ran across a crumbling bridge. We arrived at the tail end of American government treating higher education as if it were a priority worth investing in. Tenure-line professorships aren’t cheap. Once you start treating academia as a business and trying to identify cost savings, you’ll eventually decide to try to educate those student-consumers cheaper-and-worse via a more precarious workforce. … And the job itself is, well, fraying.

It’s not your imagination. The infrastructure on which our practices depend is crumbling. If you’re a journal editor or author, peer reviews are harder to get — people say no more often. (For crying out loud, I have three reviews on my desk. I swear, editors, I’m going to get to them.) Journals are under pressure from AI-enabled submissions. And as political science has become a more global discipline — a genuinely unalloyed good — there has been a rise in submissions worldwide. It is harder to get published, harder to find stability, harder to climb the rungs we know we’re supposed to climb, even as competition becomes fiercer just to reach the ladder.

There’s also been surprising resistance to investing in disciplinary public goods. Some is voluntary — perhaps a function of declining trust generally — with folks less willing to defer to or participate in organizations like ISA or APSA. It’s easy to find wedge issues and use them as an excuse to reject associations in the name of solidarity. There are also more direct assaults: state legislatures in some red states are wondering why public institutions should fund membership in or travel to conferences. We have resistance both voluntary and politically motivated, all undermining what we know as the discipline.

Even as the world crumbles around me, I’m still going to try to understand why this is happening. Ruat caelum, fiat scientia.

Why is this happening?

A collapse in confidence in higher education

So why is this happening? Part of it is simply a general collapse in confidence. Gallup put out a chart recently in an effort to suggest that confidence in higher education was rebounding.

Man — if that’s a rebound, I hate to see what Gallup thinks bad news is.

It’s not that everybody thinks we’re doing a terrible job; a plurality still finds higher education worthwhile. But there’s a lot more dissatisfaction than there used to be.

There are basically three broad stories. Part of the dissatisfaction, predictably, is concern about political agendas. Another is loss of confidence that universities are teaching what they should — that academics aren’t teaching real-world skills. If you’ve been on a campus in the last 40 years, you know this is ridiculous: the most popular majors are business, nursing, direct practical things. For all the hullabaloo about gender studies majors — and the rhetorical use those tropes have had — hardly anybody majors in those subjects. But the perception is widespread. More directly and materially, people worry that college costs too much. Defensively, we might reflexively say none of this matters, but tuition costs a lot. Exactly how is anybody supposed to pay for even a degree at a relatively inexpensive school?

Polarization and sorting

Polarization is everywhere. This used to be a contested finding, but if you’re still contesting it in 2026, I just don’t know. There’s a great article in Political Behavior from a few years ago using a conjoint experiment to show that the most important criterion for college roommate preference was political affiliation match — even more than sexual orientation, even more than religion. There’s a working paper from the Annenberg Institute — and it drives me crazy that I have to cite economists on this — showing that students are willing to pay substantially more in tuition to be at a university where peers share their politics.

Some of this points to division, but there’s also surprising consensus. Three economists (again, three economists — political scientists, we need to do a lot more research on the politics of higher education) surveyed people and compared how they viewed the proper mission of corporations and universities. They found real interest in universities taking on social missions like global understanding, free speech, and open dialogue. There was skepticism about universities engaging in political engagement — though, notably, less than for corporations.

Break it apart by ideology and there’s plenty of dissensus. Conservatives really don’t want universities involved in politics; they want universities to inculcate patriotism and traditional values. There’s the culture war being expressed. The researchers also ran an allocation experiment: people emphasized academic achievement and, surprisingly, environmental sustainability, while predictably polarizing issues like DEI emerged as flashpoints. That meshes with real-world pressures and decisions.

Ideological and interest-group politics

Higher education is also under attack because of specific interest groups and political-economic considerations. There’s a reason folks like Peter Thiel — Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur, although probably we should just say oligarch — have engaged in ways to rhetorically and directly undermine universities’ position in the status hierarchy. Institutions and their independent credentialing model are seen as a threat to how capital, especially capital associated with Silicon Valley, wants society to be organized.

There are also pressures from less directly identifiable interests. High school students in the trades are getting offered pretty good jobs; the Wall Street Journal News Desk has no particular reason to undermine universities, but the dearth of skilled trades means you can do well coming out of high school. And it’s not just Peter Thiel offering alternative routes to highly paid jobs in tech — there are now market-driven opportunities for trading firms and investment banks to identify talent earlier.

And then there is the way classrooms themselves have become battlefields. This is happening on both left and right. There is a move — Austin Sarat at Amherst College terms it bluntly — to turn students into informants ratting on their instructors. Political scientists, as well as folks in sociology and other sensitive disciplines, are well aware of these risks, because we have all experienced second- or firsthand the sense that what is said in the classroom is subject to potential disciplinary action on a student’s initiative. As a result, folks in the academy report more and more self-censoring with students.

In my own newsletter, I’ve been writing about how organized interest groups — in this case, the Goldwater Institute — have specifically targeted not just political science as a discipline but individual editorial decisions at the American Political Science Review, as part of a larger political project. Right-wing groups like Goldwater have figured out how the mechanics of the academy function. And since they want to change how those mechanics function — in a weird Marxian way, the point is not to understand the world but to change it — they have begun looking for pain points and ways to change the incentives, the very economy, of political science and other disciplines, so as to advance their agendas.

Because peer-review decisions at APSR loom large in disciplinary self-governance, right-wing groups and activists are finding ways to promote ideologically driven boards of trustees, state-government employees, and state legislatures to change how the discipline functions — to remove academic freedom by changing disciplinary self-governance.

This is framed as a way to reduce waste, but the point is to provide alternative means of staffing and directing academia, an alternative well-funded path for ideologically aligned scholars (and ideologically neutral people just looking for a job in a straitened economy) to produce institutions closely aligned with their goals.

Reports like these are trial balloons — searching for ways to shape how the academy is governed. Because this is happening at the state level, there is vast scope for many dozens of U.S. states to come up with alternative ways to manage academia.

The shredding of norms

This sort of interference is a shattering of norms we have all come to view as normal. We can no longer rely on a bipartisan consensus about academic freedom, the role of academics, or the place of U.S. higher education as a strategic resource. That has gone away — even if it was only ever a truce rather than a consensus.

Initiatives like requiring syllabi to be posted online mean it’s not just folks in classrooms who can become informants; anyone motivated and with access to LLMs can run their own private DOGE initiative targeting individual scholars for what they teach. This is a startling development, and I’m not sure people have given it the attention it deserves. Even the syllabus — which we used to joke nobody reads — has become a battlefield of political contestation.

In my own research, I’ve also been studying how shifting attitudes toward higher education have led to assaults — like DeSantis’s — on the ability of U.S. institutions to participate in international exchanges. In a recent article in Foreign Policy Analysis, I looked at how Republicans and Republican publics view with favor initiatives like DeSantis’s that sunder links between the United States and countries it deems threats. Public opinion data show independents and Democrats much more likely to support international students enrolling in U.S. universities; Republicans much less. Chinese students in particular were singled out by Republicans as justifiable targets for exclusion.

Moves like DeSantis’s may still be extreme, but I would not be surprised if states like Texas — currently in the middle of a legislative session in which combating Sharia is a major priority — continued their turn away from internationalization. That turn has already included shuttering Texas A&M University in Qatar, just down the road from me, as a way of politicizing what we have all come to believe should be the province of educational self-governance.

What is to be done?

What the heck are we supposed to do? This is where my point about shifting baselines comes back with a vengeance.

We all have reflexive answers. People have called on associations to issue more statements; the associations have done so (even if people are resistant to hearing that!), but the situation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. There have been calls for institutions to resist — and in some cases, like Harvard’s resistance to specific Trump administration policies, this has worked. But it has also been inefficient and largely ineffective at reversing things, because so many pressures are being applied to so many pain points that no university or association can win every battle.

We might say internationalization can save us. But internationalization is no silver bullet. It comes with its own risks and may amount more to launching lifeboats for a few than to saving the ship. Others have suggested political scientists need to get directly involved in the fray — to bridge the gap between what we research and what we do. But if an entire political party is hostile to political science, that may not work either. If even vaccines can be politicized, it’s hard to see how a frontal assault is anything but a potential disaster. Maybe we don’t need bridges but moats.

We have to ask: do we have the leverage right now to win the kind of battles we’re being forced to fight? An honest accounting is that in some cases, yes — and in other cases we’re talking about grand structural changes where PR campaigns or individual volition cannot arrest the tide. It’s one thing to resist this or that policy; it’s impossible to win every challenge we face. That doesn’t mean victories are impossible. It does mean being clear-eyed about where the lines can be drawn, what can be defended, and what needs to be restrained until another day.

What do we want?

The bigger question is: what do we want? In a sense, we are all trying to recapture what we view as normal. Political socialization tells us that the way the world was when we were 18-year-olds represents how we view the world as it should be: Our baseline. It is natural to want to restore a world we only began to see as under threat a few — or ten — years ago. But in many ways we cannot rebuild what has been lost. Damage has been done. Entire generations of scholars have been affected. Entire generations of potential scholars are being affected: if even Harvard is cutting back on PhD admissions, imagine the strains on institutions without Harvard’s resources. If NSF is pulling back on basic research, we can’t all set up a GoFundMe and hope ANES continues as before.

The past is gone. Recovery can be only partial. No matter how much money a hypothetical Democratic Congress throws at higher ed, we can’t just restore institutions and careers, much less intenrational trust.

Accepting that the past is past might be healthy. I’m not an accelerationist, but I’m open to the critique that the baseline of a couple of years ago wasn’t all that great either. Remember: the table stakes include precarity, adjunctification, and systemic disparities. We wouldn’t even want to restore everything we could. We’d want to build something better.

So we don’t want to go back, even if going back would be preferable to where we are. While you might optimistically say one day President Trump will pass from the scene, this crisis is not just about Trump. It has deeper roots and casts longer shadows than any individual, even the president. There will be no catharsis. There will be no moment when the scales fall from everybody’s eyes and they realize, ah yes, higher education, that’s the gem of American society—whyever did we smash it? Public opinion, elite opinion, and the array of institutions we face are not going back to where they were in 2005, much less 1965.

That’s dispiriting, on top of everything else. But of course it’s dispiriting. We’re facing a structural crisis unlike anything American higher education has ever faced. What did you think the end of our institutions would look like? Vibes? Essays?

Don’t mourn. Build.

It’s natural, looking at the scale of these challenges, to wonder how we will get through.

At times like this, I think about how W. E. B. Du Bois carried out scholarship under conditions vastly less favorable than what I face now, what you face now, what the sector faces now. You can do good work. You can’t give up the faith — because if you do, you’ve already lost.

In Indigenous studies, there is the concept of survivance — offering resistance simply by surviving and continuing to persist.

I don’t want to equate what we face as relatively well-off, well-situated professionals — as grave as our challenges are, let’s be frank about our positionality — to the challenges Indigenous communities face. But I do find the concept intriguing and insightful.

What we have to do is conserve what we have, and think about a future not just in our own lifetimes but afterward. As dispiriting as everything is, we can’t mourn. We have to build. That means we need to think about what we want to build.

Some of the things we can build are immediate.

Build rapport with students. If you’re like me, you were trained as a researcher. But one of the great joys of my work — at Dickinson, at UMass, here at Georgetown in Qatar — has been connecting with students. We need to view that as a way of dispelling lazy stereotypes: both the stereotype that professors are lazy, and the lazy stereotypes about what we do all day. Rapport means demystifying our work — explaining what we do, why, and how — while sincerely sharing why craft matters, why studying matters.

View academic freedom as contested. Our core values are, it turns out, not widely shared. We sometimes appeal reflexively to the virtues of faculty self-governance, autonomy, and academic freedom as self-evident. We can no longer do that. We have to explain why these values matter — constantly, patiently, earnestly, ad nauseam. We must also behave like those values matter, weighing in on important topics responsibly and with a sense that any intervention might reverberate more broadly.

Defang objections, and recognize concerns. Everybody wants to believe what they’re doing in class is valuable. We can also be clearer, as many of us already are, about why what we do is valuable to students. It’s not that learning political theory will help you get a job — I don’t want to turn us into a workforce development program. But we need to keep, persistently and earnestly, discussing why what we do matters: through experiential learning and other transformational experiences, why studying any discipline seriously can make you better at other forms of living. I don’t want to fall prey to the idea that intoning the words “critical thinking” will save us. I mean in class: discussing why what we do matters, inviting students to reflect, then making clear how what they have done has transformed what they do.

Pursue and value distributed scholarship and evaluation. If infrastructure is a target, we need to fix the infrastructure. That means not just relying on journals — and this is not just about commercial journals. Research published in journals cannot be the only way we measure influence. Andy Hall published one of his methodological interventions on LLMs as a LinkedIn post. How are you going to talk about a major intervention — which led to hundreds of comments and got a lot of attention — if it doesn’t fit within the boxes we accept as scholarship? We can change how we measure productivity. That starts with letter writers and tenure-file reviewers, with asking whether the practices we track are convenient or actually measuring something essential. It may require associations like APSA to develop principles-based evaluation standards rather than impact-factor ones.

Emphasize conservation and independence, not just productivity. We need to think about how we’ll preserve scholarship, disseminate it, share it — and maintain (this is crucial) the rigor, openness, and commitment to dialogue that distinguish scientific communication from other forms. Not everything I write is scientific. But some of what I write that is scientific isn’t being published in peer-reviewed journals — even though that means it has a much wider reach. We should persistently emphasize our role in conserving and sharing knowledge, taking our role as independent — not even necessarily as the best researchers in the discipline. There will come a time when private-sector or government applications once again seize the leading role in knowledge production, as they did long before the sunny 20th century of U.S. higher education, just because they have money and access. We need to conserve our role as scholars and explain the benefit of independent analysts.

In 2024, a prominent politician embraced the slogan “we’re not going back.” She lost. But the slogan is accurate. We aren’t going back — to a realm of unquestioned U.S. predominance (maybe we shouldn’t even want to), or to an era in which we governed ourselves without any sense of pressure (maybe that wasn’t a great equilibrium either). Maybe we can make something out of the pressures we face.

No nostalgia for lost worlds. We need to move forward — and to think about, maybe not even a single shared vision of a future, but many futures, that capture the variety of what we value and how we can make those productive.

We’re not going back. We must move forward.

As in earlier installments (see below), I have been taking my reading notes for my Nuclear Weapons and World Politics course and turning them into Substack essays. This week, in light of President Trump balancing nuclear strategy and attending the ur-macho UFC event in Florida, it seems apposite to share today’s notes on Carol Cohn’s “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals”.

Today we are talking about Carol Cohn’s landmark article, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” This piece is now almost forty years old, which is staggering to think about.

It’s startling to notice that, temporally, Cohn’s article is now closer to the world of Thomas Schelling and Herman Kahn and all the other defense intellectuals we’ve read about than her article is to us. Another way to think about this is that we are as far from this piece as Cohn was from the bombing of Hiroshima. She is talking about an era in which all those ideas were still fresh, in which you would go to a seminar and Tom Schelling himself might be leading the discussion.

At times, as we’ll discuss below, this makes the piece feel almost vintage. At other times, it remains startlingly fresh because the tendencies and structures she describes remain present. One of the things that really stood out to me is how venerable the language of privilege is. Cohn is using the terms in exactly the same way that we would use them now. Her discussion of how her membership in the summer workshop entitled her to the Temporary Privilege Card is just one of those moments of astonishing irony and insight.

Carol Cohn is still around, at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. As the New York Times essay I sent around shows, she is still active, still writing. Her goal is not only to dismantle weapons systems, but to dismantle what she sees as a strictly patriarchal and oppressive system of international relations that makes militarism not only a part of the world but the dominant discourse through which people see the world. For Cohn, the emphasis on language and socialization is not accidental. It comes from how she views the world. It comes from her academic and political project of trying to change it.

For somebody like Carol Cohn to be in this world really must have been jarring — and also scintillating for her as an observer.

What Kind of Article Is This?

I want to situate this piece by thinking about what kind of article it is, because it is different from the other genres we have read. We have read books of history. We have read synoptic guides about how nuclear politics operates. We have read forceful works of theory like Thomas Schelling. We have read pieces that sought to bring us up to date about specific developments or to survey the academic literature. What we’re reading here is something that lies in between autoethnography, ethnography, and critique.

I define this article as a mix of ethnography and autoethnography because it is about trying to understand the habits, the relations, the worldviews, the codes, and the desires of a particular group of people. That’s clearly ethnography. It’s autoethnography because Cohn is narrating her own introduction to and enculturation into — literally her assimilation into — the mores, the worldviews, the habits, and the language of that group. But it is also critique, because all of this academic labor is done in the service of what she delivers throughout, but especially in the last few pages: a discussion of how she and others can use her observations to combat what she sees in these circles.

That is why this is not just any one particular genre of article. It mixes description and observation with her own experiences, but in the service ultimately of not just describing or theorizing the world, but using her descriptions and theories to change how the world is made. That should make you think about how her approach will complement and challenge the other voices we have heard from, and how it makes her stand out.

A Radical Voice in Context

You should be thinking about this article not only on its own terms but in the context of all that has gone before — not just in history, but in this course.

I hope this feels like a change from what we have discussed previously in the semester. I want to note at the beginning that this piece is not being given to you at this point in the term accidentally. This is about the moment where I think it should hit with maximum impact, because you now have some understanding of the context in which Cohn was thinking.

I tried to arrange the syllabus so that Carol Cohn was not the first female voice we heard from in this class. You might remember that we’ve heard from, among others, Caitlin Talmadge and Rose McDermott. But Cohn is the first stridently radical voice that we have encountered.

Cohn describes her own experience as being somebody who walked in fervently anti-nuclear and anti-militarist, interested in how bombs have effects on bodies, how the physical properties of these weapons make their use — to her — unthinkable. She wanted to understand how it could become thinkable. Not just for any given set of defense intellectuals, but for the people who decide whether or not these weapons will be used: how they are acquired, how they are designed, how they are employed, how plans for their use are drawn up.

Some will say, loosely, that the use of nuclear weapons is unthinkable, but clearly that is false. People do think about using them. For ordinary folks, we think about them as a kind of lingering background fear — a fear that can come to the forefront during moments like this past week, or during moments of persistently elevated crisis like the 1980s or the 1950s. But for others, nuclear weapons are thinkable all the time. If you work for a nuclear missile command, if you are actually one of the people in the silos, if you are a B-2 bomber pilot, if you work in command and control in Islamabad, in New Delhi, in Washington, in Omaha, in Beijing — nuclear weapons are thinkable.

And they are thinkable more generally. Every country has at least some kind of nuclear policy. Every country has to decide whether or not to pursue nuclear weapons, and what stance to take regarding their status in world politics. Not everyone has reacted to the advent of nuclear weapons by developing them. North Korea has them, but Vietnam, as far as I know, doesn’t have an active program. Iran has the rudiments of what could come together for a nuclear program, but Saudi Arabia is not yet as far along. Whether you have weapons or not, everybody’s thought about how they relate to them, at least to some extent. These weapons are not unthinkable.

The question is: what does it mean to be thinkable? What terms are thinkable? Who gets to think about them and how? Those are Cohn’s questions.

Language, Discourse, and the Power to Exclude

What Cohn does on one level of this essay is to discuss how language and discursive markers are related to power — power to exclude certain perspectives, and power to control what is legitimate and therefore, if not thinkable, at least sayable in the rooms where decisions are made.

Cohn moves from and contrasts her life thinking about and discussing nuclear weapons for their effects on people, putting herself in the role of a potential victim of nuclear use. When we think about nuclear weapons and ourselves, I think it’s more natural to view ourselves as victims. For many of us, it is easier to identify with the hibakusha, the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, than with the aircrew who dropped the bombs or the scientists who made them. We may think of ourselves as potential survivors; we may think of ourselves as potential non-survivors, as straight victims. We almost certainly think of how nuclear weapons can be used to change our bodies and the bodies of people we know, of people we love, even the people we hate — because that is our immediate and most likely relationship to a nuclear weapon should it be used.

Cohn contrasts the description of the Hiroshima weapon left us by survivors with the sterile, clinical ways in which strategic discourse makes thinkable the use of nuclear weapons. And she notes how that language entails a shift in positionality — in who the language invites you to associate yourself with, in what view you take regarding the weapons and their effects. With the strategic discourse, our perspective is shifted from the people who would be victims to identifying with the people who would use the weapons, and in a sense, the weapons themselves. Even in language, the relationship of weapons to other weapons—fratricide, footprints—take center stage. In this language, there is no way to make prominent the effects on human bodies — to center those effects in nuclear discourse. If you use discourses of pain, of hurt, of grieving, of carnage, of bodily harm, you are excluded from the discourses that are hegemonic within the rooms where decisions are made.

The discourses of those rooms tend to be, as she says, domestic. You have shopping lists and Christmas tree farms. These all have to do with nuclear weapons—a shopping list is the president’s directive for stockpile management; Christmas tree farms are the forest of SLBMs on a ballistic missile submarine—but they become ordinary, domesticated, tame through language. And that, to me — even more than the occasionally puerile and sometimes exaggerated way in which gendered imagery is prevalent in nuclear discourse — is a real shift in habitus, in how your body and mind react to the existence of nuclear weapons. Not only does strategic discourse render nuclear use thinkable, but it becomes natural.

Seductions of Power

This is not the only way of thinking about nuclear weapons. Different discourses inhabit different rooms. As Cohn moves from being somebody who is feminist and anti-militarist to somebody who is invited to be part of this world of privilege and hegemonic discourse, she finds herself attracted by the power of the privilege.

She gets a kick out of using terms like SLCMs and ALCMs — sea-launched cruise missiles, air-launched cruise missiles — of being in the know and being able to decode the hidden texts of, in a sense, joining the nuclear priesthood, of being somebody able to understand the mysteries of deterrence. She calls the acronyms sexy.

It’s at this point that the gatekeeping aspect of nuclear discourse becomes most prominent. There are people who are on the inside and people who are on the outside. If you want the privileges of the inside, you adopt a certain code — but that code will reflect how you are socialized, with whom you identify, from what vantage point you see the world.

For what it’s worth, I think that it is not the language that is controlling. I think it is the socialization and the desire for power — the desire to be part of an in-group — that changes how language is used. You transform, and then your language follows. You could use any language you chose, but doing so would mean being kicked out of the club. And the club is great.

(You can imagine similar dynamics taking place among people who want to abolish nuclear weapons, because they too must have some insight into nuclear mysteries. They too might find themselves using particular jargons, particular ways of meaning, in an effort to naturalize and privilege certain forms of discourse that elevate their own stature. Using that for the purpose of saving lives rather than threatening them is morally better, but I think we can see that this is a behavior meant to shape, discipline, and control not just thought itself, but how thoughts can be expressed.)

That’s why I’ve been using the term “discourse” rather than “language.” Discourse is how we communicate, but it’s shaped within and shapes the power relations about what language can communicate. You can think for yourself all you want, but as long as those thoughts are kept private, they have no public meaning — or at the very least, their public meaning is kept domiciled, domesticated.

So that’s why I think you can read Cohn and realize it’s not just who uses what language, but who uses what language to whom.

Sex, Death, and the Drives Beneath

On another level, this is not an article about language. It is an article about how language relates to fundamental drives. This is, in many ways, an article about psychology — different from how McDermott used psychology, because this is, if anything, Pop Freudianism, in which our deepest desires as humans, as animals, are made manifest in our social relations.

Cohn mentions at different points how the sterility of language is used to obfuscate, to hide from the participants themselves what they are really feeling. She identifies those feelings as basically the sex drive — which is not a drive for reproduction, but a drive for power — and the death drive. Dealing with our mortality, dealing with how we have the power to cause others’ mortality, and reacting, in the case of the men in the room, to the fact that men cannot create life, but want to, feel cheated of the ability. And so the men in the nuclear discourse have adopted a perspective in which they are fathers of the bomb, and therefore fathers of death.

This is, I think, a little more speculative. You have to buy into a lot of Freudian — maybe Jungian — archetypes about the world. But the notion that there is more going on in nuclear use, threatening, and behavior than simply relating to nuclear weapons themselves is quite likely valid. The way people relate to nuclear weapons isn’t just about the bomb; it is about what possessing, taming, or controlling the bomb means for you.

There’s a great novel from the early 1960s called Fail-Safe, which birthed not just the movie Fail-Safe but also Dr. Strangelove, which is kind of an unofficial adaptation. In Fail-Safe, one of the characters is a political science professor — I should mention that Fail-Safe was co-written by a political science professor — and there’s an erotic element that the book deals with in terms of how having control over the life and death of humanity plays out in people’s self-conception and their relations to others.

Cohn at the end — and one great way to read this article is to read it back to front, to read the conclusion and then everything else — mentions how there’s a homoerotic element, but also a heterosexual dynamic and, of course, a mortality dynamic. You can see all of this coming together. This is an article about gender. This is an article about sex. This is an article about death. But it is also an article about how all of those motivations are laundered into a scientific, or if you like, pseudoscientific, language about deterrence and nuclear use. How dealing with these fundamental properties of the bomb and being in touch with our deepest desires — but trying to hide those because they are, in a sense, shameful — plays out into the highest levels of national strategy.

This is a very different way of accounting for how nuclear deterrence, compellence, threat, and possession come about. Again, this is one person’s experience of one sliver of nuclear life. It is not a large-scale investigation — Hugh Gusterson, an anthropologist, has a very good book about this. But it leads us to many different points about how, for instance, nuclear possession and use are gendered, about how countries that don’t have nuclear weapons are seen as less than, as immature, not able to understand these drives or cope with them. You can see that in how countries relate to aspiring nuclear states and in the dismissive attitudes that some adopt toward countries that choose not to pursue nuclear weapons.

Limitations and Extensions

Cohn’s article isn’t perfect. Most clearly, this is an American article about Americans. It might be interesting to see how these sorts of discourses are naturalized and perpetuated in other spaces. You can imagine a transnational effect here, not just because of the dominance of the United States in strategic language, but because if you’re talking about arms control — accepting the existence of nuclear weapons but, in a very Schelling-esque way, trying to put limits on how they can be threatened — then a global or at least more-than-American shared discourse becomes necessary. People on all sides of a negotiating table have to be able to understand what’s going on.

You can imagine that different national discourses exist. The Israeli discourse is different from the Russian discourse, is different from the Pakistani discourse. In the Russian discourse, priests bless nuclear weapons. That strikes Americans as a little funny, but I reckon it wouldn’t necessarily strike others as strange in the least. For some, these weapons represent national power and manhood. Why wouldn’t they be celebrated, even to the point of being gifts from the divine?

I think you want to be thinking about this in a complicated way and unpacking these elements of Cohn’s arguments in ways that bring up potentially different answers. Cohn might be right that language is important, but language might be a result of how countries and people define their interests. I want to warn you against a naturalization of interests — especially countries’ own reports of their interests — in which strategic interests are taken as given. Cohn invites us instead to think about what interests are really in play, what motivations, what desires are really shaping how we define our interests. Is it about specific military or political logics, or is it about a feeling of power, of dominance, and how those feelings are refracted through culturally specific scripts?

In doing that, we should remember that not every country has chosen to pursue nuclear weapons — and not just because of technical possibilities, not just because of overriding strategic interests, but because of how different cultures and individuals react to the possibilities of possessing or not possessing them. I also want to guard against a technological determinism in which simply having or potentially having the bomb determines how we view our interests. Everybody has to react to the fact of the bomb and its potential, but you can react in different ways. We see this within the article itself, where even though the men in the rooms of power are reacting in one way, there are people outside reacting in very different ways. Alternative discourses are possible. The question is whether people in the rooms that matter are always going to have a particular view and discourse and habit, or whether others can amend that.

Something I also think is worth considering is that Cohn, as an academic — somebody whose life is governed by words, by the printed word, by the spoken word — is very interested in words. But discourses and imaginaries are also constructed out of visual elements. Does our world right now invoke nuclear weapons through visual or textual elements? And does that affect how we experience and imagine nuclear war? If we think about nuclear war visually, we immediately think of photos or videos of a mushroom cloud. But that means you are already positioning yourself as a survivor or a user. Because if you are a victim, you aren’t going to see the mushroom cloud from a distance. You might not see it at all, or you might see it unfolding over your head. Hiroshima witnesses talk about seeing the fires, seeing the black rain, seeing the cloud towering over them — but that’s not the perspective we see most of the time in media, because you can’t tell a story about somebody who’s dead. Most nuclear stories are post-apocalyptic, because otherwise you couldn’t get past the first minute.

This matters for us right now, because last week we talked about whether deterrence is eroding, whether fear of nuclear weapons is eroding. In our discussion today, we’ve talked about how we have moved from the sterility of Cohn’s world into a cruder, blunter world — a world in which presidents make threats about ending civilization on social media. It’s hard to avoid noticing that the crudity of social media compared to the erudition and wit—albeit paternalistic and patriarchal—of the defense intellectuals makes it much easier to see what Cohn assumed would be hidden. If you think about the Trumpian relationship to nuclear weapons—which is complex; he is a Cold War kid from New York—then it’s pretty clear that some psychosexual discourses are at play. This isn’t exactly defense intellectualism: it’s more like defense id.

I want to invite you to think about how you can think with Cohn in addition to thinking alongside Cohn — and what insights you can come up with here, in the Global South. How might you amend, challenge, and refine her thinking? Because I think there is much more to be said about the varieties of reactions, of discourses, of ways of relating to the bomb, and possibly how those could lead to alternative discourses—in power, or ready to take it.

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?

Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.

What’s the point of senators making laws now?

Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

— “Waiting for the Barbarians”, Constantine Cavafy

There are many posts I would like to write and share with you, but tonight I would like to share this one, because the others are less urgent and because my emotions are too shaken at the moment.

Over the past few days, President Trump’s statements have been shocking: vulgar, angry, berserk, profane. Threatening to wipe out an entire civilization—did he merely mean to say regime? does he grasp the difference between one word and another?—and raging at the Iranian power structure to open the f’ing strait in the same desperate tones as a Hollywood robber whose plans are going awry telling the bank clerk to open the f’ing safe—these are the sorts of statements that one would expect from, say, a Gadhafi, although I cannot recall the Libyan leader being quite so coarse. (Putin, for what it’s worth, did once threaten Chechen terrorists in terms redolent of Trump’s Easter missive: “If we find terrorists in the shithouse, then we’ll waste them in the shithouse.”)

At the moment, we are all waiting for the Americans. The center of gravity is not here but in the Situation Room, where the illusion of control bewitches the king and his court. Waiting to see how Trump will make good on his deadline for Iranian action—whether the escalation will be a movement against Abu Musa & the Tunbs; against nuclear facilities with a commando raid; against the energy and water infrastructure of a country of 90 millions; or whether it will take some other, unspeakable form—or whether Trump will announce at the last moment that a ceasefire has been imposed because sufficient progress has been made. That latter scenario would be cinematic: a reprieve granted the condemned by a generous governor—exactly the sort of cliffhanger resolution and playing against type that Trump glories in.

We are also waiting for those Americans beyond Trump and his circle. What will Congress do? an anchor asked me on television the other day, and I stumbled—I am a putative expert on American politics and Congress, and I worked on the Hill, and all I can say is that Congress is on vacation and the leadership seems reluctant to recall that they have an independent constitutional role. (Perhaps the problem with presidential systems is not presidentialism as a structural trait but presidentialism as a habitus, as a practice of deferring to the first among equals that becomes a bodily rejection of the possibility of wielding one’s own authority. Perhaps the senators were waiting for the barbarians eagerly.)

What, then, of the American people? They have spoken through their surveys and they are unhappy with the war—but they cannot register their voice in full until November and their words will not take effect until January. There is a better chance that the war will bring down the prime minister of the UK before it substantially crimps the powers of the American president. Waiting for public action, the sort of dramatic coup de main that could shake the body politic, seems unlikely. Even the great protests of the Vietnam era could only gradually mobilize opinion against a war bloody not only for the Vietnamese (and the Cambodians and Laotians) but for the Americans to a degree unfathomable for a country that was scandalized that a single flyer was trapped behind enemy lines for three days. Even the fastest organizers on record could not get a rally assembled before the deadline of 8 Eastern (3 am local time).

And the Iranians, of course, are waiting for the Americans—the Iranian public indoors, under much the same sort of stairwells we huddled beneath during the first few days, when the emergency alerts were a novelty; the Iranian military and militia throughout the country, waiting to receive a blow and perhaps strike one of their own.

I have memories only of a couple of moments when history seemed to pause: the moment when I saw the second tower of the World Trade Center crumble on television, for instance. This is not yet that moment but it is pregnant with that possibility. And what is grimmer is that there will be no catharsis, or at least no lasting one: we will be back here in six months or a year, fighting over the Strait or the missile programs or something else. In the meantime, we all await the Americans. What can we do until then?

A classic international relations argument highlights the risks of “chain-ganging”.1 If your security is tied to that of an alliance partner, then a risky action—like starting a war—by that partner might cause you to enter into a war:

In multipolarity, the approximate equality of alliance partners leads to a high degree of security interdependence within an alliance. Given the anarchic setting and this relative equality, each state feels its own security is integrally intertwined with the security of its alliance partners. As a result, any nation that marches to war inexorably drags its alliance partners with it. No state can restrain a reckless ally by threatening to sit out the conflict, since the demise of its reckless ally would decisively cripple its own security.

Note that chain-ganging is premised on relative equality of alliance partners. There is, however, no reason why equality should be so important. Nor is it important, except as a special case, that the interdependenc should be symmetrical. It is, instead, a question of security dependence on the part of at least one party that creates incentives for some state (we’ll call it State A) to take actions that leave State B with no choice but to join State A and no leverage over State A’s decision in the first place. In other words, very similar dynamics can confront State B even if State A is not beholden to State B for its own security so long as State B is reliant on State A.

It makes sense why theorists would have focused initially on a condition of relative equality; the original article dealt with the origins of the First World War, a cataclysm that preoccupied (and in some traditions, began) international relations scholarship for many decades. For that reason, the classic statement dismisses the possibility that superpowers in bipolarity would exhibit risky behaviors that would endanger their allies: the superpowers would not hesitate to cut loose misbehaving allies, the theorists (if not always the facts) suggested, while the superpowers could not be dragged into conflict by the actions of their subordinates due to the restraints imposed by bipolarity itself. “The behavior of Cold War policymakers has sometimes violated these prescriptions, but we believe that this had more to do with perceptual or domestic political factos than with the structural properties of bipolarity,” the authors write.

But this is to dismiss what would be more interesting if we view the world from State B’s perspective. If State B is weaker and depends on State A for its security, then could it not be forced to participate in some actions that it would rather avoid should State A require it? The trump card, so to speak, is that State A may be able to credibly threaten withholding at least some measure of protection for State B should it refuse to join in some venture led by State A; further, this might be made more credible should State A require collective effort to bail out some misadventure it had undertaken that at least temporarily risked calamity for all of its proteges.

In this circumstance, weaker partners might not feel that they had been chain-ganged into conflict. The image is not that of peers linked together (albeit, in this clumsy and carceral metaphor, by an outside power). Rather, it is more like the old Royal Navy practice of impressment—the application of superior power to coerce the participation of weaker powers in the pursuit of State A’s goals. The term press-ganging might well capture both the naked application of force and the feeling of resentment on behalf of the subordinate, dependent powers who might find themselves, as it were, shanghaied.

China’s nuclear arsenal, long kept at modest levels, is growing rapidly. The Pentagon estimates that the PRC will be near-parity with the United States and Russia, long the world’s leading nuclear powers, by 2030. Do Americans care?

I set out to answer one part of this question thanks to an unusual opportunity. Verasight, a survey research firm I have worked with previously, offered previous clients a chance to field one or two questions on a nationally representative omnibus survey. I was curious about how Americans viewed latent Chinese threats, and also pretty confident nobody else would ask about this, so I sent in a couple of questions. They chose them for the survey, which was fielded between March 6 and March 16, 2026, using Verasight’s proprietary pool of respondents (N = 1,000 U.S. citizens, weighted for national representativeness; margin of error +/- 3.5%).

Specifically, I asked:

• Question 1: Currently, the United States has about 1,800 deployed nuclear weapons. Russia has about the same number and China has about 600. Do you support or oppose expanding the US nuclear arsenal?

• Question 2: Many experts believe that China is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal and will have over 1,000 nuclear weapons by 2030, a few years from now. Given this, do you support or oppose expanding the US nuclear arsenal?

By asking these questions in order, I hoped to establish both a baseline level of concern about Chinese weapons and whether being provided with new information would change respondents’ views.

The answer is that, in isolation, Americans are not particularly predisposed to favor new nuclear weapons development: just shy of 28 percent of Americans favored such programs in isolation. The partisan cross-tabs on support for building nuclear weapons are stark: 44 percent of Democrats strongly oppose nuclear weapons, while only 9 percent of Republicans oppose them and 48 percent somewhat or strongly support building them.

As the figure above also shows, however, these levels are changeable. When told about growing Chinese arsenals, however, support jumped to a smidgen over 40 percent—a really substantial change!

The direction of change in support was pretty consistent as well: very few people saw the growing Chinese arsenals and became convinced of nuclear restraint. Indeed, in general, those who changed their minds moved one notch toward supporting weapons on the five-point response scale (Strongly support to strongly oppose).

I used multinomial logistic regression analysis to evaluate what produced support for U.S. nuclear expansion in the abstract and changes in support after providing information. The most consistent predictors of support in general were between Republicans and Democrats, with Republicans hugely more favorable toward nuclear expansion and Democrats substantially more opposed. Similarly, Republicans were much more likely than Democrats to increase support for building weapons when told about China’s buildup; interestingly, older respondents also became more favorable. (All of these predictions hold education, race, ethnicity, and gender constant.)

The figure below illustrates the size of these changes from the first to the second question. Republicans became about 35% more likely to support building more weapons, while Democrats and Independents were only about 21 to 24 percent more likely respectively. (For this analysis, I have combined independents who lean D or lean R with their avowed partisans.) The youngest and oldest respondents also became markedly more likely to support building arsenals (again, keeping other factors constant).

What does this mean? Hawkish policies—even at the level of building more nuclear weapons—have more support than one might suspect (I certainly did not suspect this!), and Republican thirst for great-power competition is a strong latent force. Democrats, however, are much less interested in rearmament baseline and comparative terms, although they generally resemble Independents in this regard. Indeed, although the changes in relative support might look similar, overall support for nuclear armament among Democrats was comparatively low, with only 8 percent strongly supporting expanding U.S. arsenals and 17 percent somewhat supporting expansion when told of China’s trajectory. That’s compared to 50 percent somewhat or strongly (mostly strongly!) opposing a U.S. buildup in response. Meanwhile, 65 percent—nearly two-thirds—of Republicans surveyed favored a U.S. buildup in response, compared to just 16 percent opposed. And all of this, remember, was in response to a single data point, meaning that it’s plausible that a larger argument might sway more people. (Hey, if you give me money, I can research this for you!)

Arms control is, at the very least, a latently polarized issue. Overt Chinese displays of strength might provoke support for much stronger U.S. responses—and at the very least, there may be more of a lane for a hard China hawk than I would have suspected. The future may look more like the past than those of us who grew up in the post-Cold War assumed.

Normally, one criticizes a Paul Krugman argument at some risk to oneself. Given that I earned one of my lowest college grades in macroeconomics—Krugman's specialty—I rarely have occasion to do anything but nod along when he writes on his core topics. But his most recent column is so off-base that it deserves a response.

Krugman argues that the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain) leveraged their immense oil wealth, and concomitant potential to invest in the U.S. economy and the Trump family dynasty, to persuade Trump to attack Iran.

This is not a serious argument—or, as we say, a reality-based one. It ignores the many pieces of contrary evidence and ends up weakening the case against Trump’s culpability for the war.

On the investment point, Krugman argues that GCC countries’ pledges to invest in the United States have bucked up Trump’s vaporware claims about trillions of investment pledges in the United States. That part is accurate—many of these deals are so far paper commitments, rather than actual movements of funds. (It’s also not clear how far into the future they stretch, making it harder to value them.) To be sure, GCC countries do invest a lot overseas, and one does hear that lower-level commitments, in the billions or tens of billions annually, were actually being made with earnest money. I also wonder whether many of those commitments involve investments in U.S. firms, particularly AI and data centers, which would be more explicable. But this is quibbling: yes, Trump inflated the GCC's investment commitments, and he clearly coveted the opportunities to announce DEALS with superlatives and dollar figures attached.

Now, let’s look at the tape. What’s the current status of those investment pledges? Does it look like GCC countries are thrilled with a war Krugman asserts they used their influence to bring about? Publicly, there’s no change to sovereign wealth fund activities—but privately, as Reuters reports, you can bet that the guys in green eyeshades are taking tough looks at their spreadsheets.

That should be unsurprising. Economically, the war has been a heavy blow for Gulf states. Cutting off the flow of oil and gas is obviously a major setback to Gulf economies; for Qatar and the Emirates, losing transportation flows via Qatar Airways, Etihad, and Emirates is another hit. And those aluminum, sulfur, and fertilizer plants weren’t being run as charities, either. In all, the conflict might shave up to 14 percent of GDP from Kuwait and Qatar this year (and multiple percentage points off the UAE and Saudi). Not that any of this was a surprise to anyone around here: cutting off the Strait of Hormuz is one of the scenarios that anyone with a map expected in a conflict like this one.

Militarily, of course, it’s also been a blow. The Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar have taken some knocks in the war (especially, the UAE, a particular focus of Iranian ire). Now, it’s possible governments might advocate for wars that turn out to be trickier than expected—that seems to have been the case for the United States, for instance! But if there's one thing Gulf countries have been united on recently, it's been opposition to a war with Iran—and especially not wanting the United States and/or Israel to start one. (This was a particular goal for Qatar, which now finds itself on the front lines of a bombing campaign for the third time in less than a year.)

The second pillar of Krugman’s argument fares little better. He quotes a Washington Post article as stating that the Saudi crown prince lobbied Trump to bring the war about—but this is reporting that, to put it mildly, many people are skeptical about. More persuasive is the Financial Times assessment that the Iran war is a knock (gift link) to MBS, who wanted regional stability to buy time to execute his Vision 2030 economic diversification plans. Over the past several years, Riyadh has tried hard to lower the temperature in its relations with Iran precisely because the Kingdom would prefer to work on domestic ventures in relative peace.

And it's especially odd that Krugman attributes MBS's influence over Washington partly to things like the Qatari gift of a new Air Force One—Qatar and Saudi Arabia, you may have heard, are different countries, which cooperate in some spheres and compete in others. In fact, it makes a lot more sense if you view those gifts, those pledges, and the general red-carpet treatment that the Gulf has rolled out for Trump since even before the second term began as constituting in larger part a strategic campaign against the sort of reckless, heedless campaign that Trump has begun.

The search for “who lost Iran?” is already beginning. From the right, the charge is that Netanyahu made Trump do it—and there’s no shortage of audiences for that charge on the left, as well. But it’s best to keep accountability for Trump’s war where it belongs. This war wasn’t manufactured in the Gulf: it was made in the USA.

China Wins

details how China is benefitting from the U.S. war in Iran.

Dov’s Notebook

The bystander benefits: The Iran war and China

Shortly after the bombs began to fall in Iran, claims that the Iran war is really about China quickly emerged. Some American uber-hawks, as well as a large contingent of the social media four-dimensional chess strategists, claimed that the quite erratic and confused behavior of the Trump administration in the run up to the conflict is actually part of a…

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6 months ago · 2 likes · Dov H. Levin

Different Perspectives

looks at public support for the war from Israel’s point of view.

INSIGHT by Frida Ghitis

Why Americans and Israelis See the Iran War Differently

Please subscribe or upgrade your existing subscription to support my work. Thanks…

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6 months ago · 16 likes · 1 comment · Frida Ghitis

Prices on Their Heads

speculates about how uneasy will lie the heads that wear the crown in a world of decapitation strikes.

Eight by Seven

Being a Hard Target on an Assassination Planet

Following on yesterday’s newsletter, I want to envision the direction that the United States, Israel and Russia are all in their way pushing us towards, namely an international system in which there are no inhibitions against kidnapping enemy leaders or targeting them for assassination both during times of active hostilities and otherwise…

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6 months ago · 21 likes · 4 comments · Timothy Burke

No Checkmates

analyzes the data and expects stalemate in Iran.

Foreign Figures

How will war with Iran end?

Thanks for reading or listening! You can support Foreign Figures by liking, sharing, buying me a coffee, or subscribing…

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6 months ago · 2 likes · 2 comments · Miles Williams

Broken Axis

on splits between China and Iran, and Russia’s interest in the conflict (smash hydrocarbon infrastructure).

China-Russia Report

China-Iran relations showing strains

This update focuses on oil market developments, especially pertaining to China. Iran’s targeting of Omani crude oil will upset China. Significantly, it suggests that an increasingly desperate Khamenei regime judges that the risks of angering Iran’s most important economic partner are outweighed the need to inflict pain on the United States and its Arab …

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6 months ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · China-Russia Report

A Real Place

reflects on growing up in Dubai and seeing the emirate under siege.

The Price of Power

dispatches from voluntary exile

I was not planning to write this post. I have a bunch of stuff in the pipeline - something on why elites fell for Epstein despite the obvious warnings, another on the anthropic fight, a belated thank you to Henry Farrell for discussing my work - but none of them feel right at the moment…

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6 months ago · 26 likes · 2 comments · Nikhil Kalyanpur

Who’s Next?

looks at Vice President Vance’s foreign policy adviser.

Down the Hall: The VP Weekly

Vance’s Kissinger?

Politico ran a lengthy profile of Deputy National Security Adviser Andy Baker, who had previously been the Senate aide and Vice President’s National Security Adviser (VPNSA) to JD Vance. Baker’s rise and his close relationship to Vance illuminates Vance’s position within the Trump administration, Vance’s worldview, and the potential future of GOP foreig…

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6 months ago · 2 likes · Aaron Mannes

You Break It …

calls for greater congressional action regarding the Iran war.

Policy Matters

Rogue Nation Goes to War

I don’t know Farsi, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Tehran radio broadcast tomorrow a speech by a senior Iranian official that goes something like this…

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6 months ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Charlie Stevenson

How We Got Here

on the recent history of U.S. pressure campaigns to bomb Iran.

Looking Through the Past

Iran Delenda Est

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6 months ago · 28 likes · 12 comments · George Dillard

The second part of my reflections on teaching Thomas Schelling’s Arms and Influence here in Doha during the ongoing war.

The international relations scholar Robert Vitalis diagnosed the discipline of International Relations with what he termed the “norm against noticing”: a pattern to avoid discussing race and racialized subjects, to maintain a fictitious claim that race and international relations had nothing to do with each other—the sort of claim that evaporates upon first contact with the writings or speeches of, well, just about any pre-Second World War statesman or scholar from Europe or its settler offshoots.1 That norm operated at least in part from the reading around of unsettling or bluntly racist passages in canonical works, a process by which young scholars were socialized into letting major authors’ observations pass without further comment—a strategy familiar to anyone with an uncle prone to making certain kinds of jokes or remarks at the Thanksgiving table.

Of late, that norm has crumbled a bit as the discipline has become more diverse in its intake, as the generation that wrote those canonical works has passed on from making career-shaping decisions, and as broader currents in American and global society have made it intolerable to not notice what is being said. And yet, it can still come as a shock to re-read canonical stories and suddenly notice what was there all along.

So it is with Schelling and his discussion of Mohammad Mosaddegh, the prime minister of Iran overthrown by a British-American operation in 1953.

Of that incident, Schelling writes (p. 38)

Recall the trouble we had persuading Mossadegh in the early 1950s that he might do his country irreparable damage if he did not become more reasonable with respect to his country and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Threats did not get through to him very well. He wore pajamas, and, according to reports, he wept. And when British or American diplomats tried to explain what would happen to his country if he continued to be obstinate, and why the West would not bail him out of his difficulties, it was apparently uncertain whether he even comprehended what was being said to him. It must have been a little like trying to persuade a new puppy that you will beat him to death if he wets on the floor. If he cannot hear you, or cannot understand you, or cannot control himself, the threat cannot work and you very likely will not even make it.

So, this passage hits different—as the kids no longer say—when one reads it as Iranian missiles are blasted apart overhead.

It should be noted that, as far as I know, this is a comically oversimplified portrait of interactions between Mossadegh and the West; portraying “the West” as seeking to “bail him out” seems particularly slanted. Nor does Mossadegh appear to have been so puppyish as this account holds. In short, this paragraph—which really does not need to be in the book! the puppy example by itself is crude but effective!—severely mars the chapter.

I’m annoyed and even embarrassed that I did not catch how sloppy it was the first time I read it, nearly twenty years ago. (I have the same copy I read in graduate school with me.) Should it have taken my relocation to the Middle East to perceive the slapdash nature of this argument? It bespeaks a casual denigration of the rest of the world. And it reads especially oddly in the present context because if you were going to describe a leader two weeks ago who was unable to understand the stakes of a confrontation—well, would it be the Iranian one?

Indeed, throughout Schelling, there’s a constant drumbeat of assertions that the United States is reliable, responsible, and unlikely to act rashly. For Schelling, this is a disadvantage. Much of Arms and Influence revolves around the idea that one must credibly signal an ability to lose control in order to make threats of nuclear use believable—a threat so self-defeating that no rational leader would make it, but so powerful that no rational leader could abjure it. To be fair-minded, evenhanded, and cool-headed may well be a disadvantage, Schelling argues: “We have not the character of fanatics and cannot scare countries the way Hitler could.”

Oh, to live in a world where the consensus knock against the United States was that it was not rash enough!

That world died in the Vietnam War within months of the book’s publication, along with the bipartisan confidence that the Cold War was worth waging at the levels that Schelling took for granted.

The cozy Cold War consensus was not the only victim. Within a generation, arguments and voices that had been marginalized would seize the commanding heights of intellectual production, seemingly making breezy claims like Schelling’s distasteful. That victory was never total—Samuel Huntington could assert in print that Mexican-Americans inclined toward secessionism, for instance—but a passage like Schelling’s discussion of Mossadegh would have at least required more syllables.

And yet a great deal of that attitude toward those who resisted the West remained. The analytical presumption of U.S. rationality and Others’ emotional nature is deeply embedded in how American scholars see the world — and beyond academia it is even more entrenched. How many people describe North Korea as “irrational,” for instance, as though a regime that has survived for seven decades through calculated brinksmanship simply cannot think straight?

To dismiss one’s adversaries as flighty or incomprehensible is not just uncharitable. It is a cardinal intellectual sin — the kind that wrecks analysis before it begins. Getting this right is not a matter of politeness or political correctness. It is a matter of flinty, steel-eyed realism: you will not bother to try to outthink an opponent you have decided is incapable of thought.

But first you have to notice that these prejudices exist. And then you have to stop reading around them.

My course on Nuclear Weapons and World Politics was scheduled to read Arms and Influence by Thomas Schelling before the crisis came, but reading it while we are involved in perhaps the most intense brinksmanship since … the 1960s? … lends this 1966 book uncanny contemporary relevance. I will be sharing my notes and reflections on this book over the coming few days.

Before we begin, I have to admit something. About four and a half percent of my reaction right now is that of the scientist in Independence Day underground in Area 51 where he studies crashed alien technology: “Since these guys started showing up, all the gizmos inside turned on. The last twenty four hours have been really exciting!”

Four and a half percent. Which is really high.

The remaining 95.5 percent of my reaction, of course, is: How do we deal with this? What does this mean? How do we get through it?

I want you to understand not just the gravity of the situation for us personally, but for the future of politics in Western Asia, in the Middle East more broadly, and for the question of how countries will deal with — or relate to — other countries developing nuclear weapons. If the most recent numbers are right, more than a thousand civilians have died in Iran and elsewhere. Given my belief that this war was ill-conceived, that is simply tragic.

But then there is also the interest — the need, even — to understand what is going on. How did we get here? And how do we get through it?

A lot of how I and others understand the current conflict is shaped by the book and by the author we are reading now: Arms and Influence, by the American economist Thomas Schelling.

Schelling was born in and grew up in San Diego, California, as part of a Navy family. When war broke out between the US and Japan, Schelling didn’t go into the military. Instead, he drifted into working with the FBI in Chile, which had responsibility for counterintelligence in the Western Hemisphere. Let go because of ulcers, he enrolled in UC Berkeley and then joined the Bureau of the Budget for the Roosevelt (and then Truman) administration. I mention this because it’s interesting that Schelling, who would become so influential in military analysis, had no military experience.

After the war, he completed a doctorate in economics at Harvard — a fairly straightforward technical dissertation on labor policy and wages — and got a job as a staff economist with the Marshall Plan, participating in the rebuilding of Europe. After the Korean War, he left government and pursued a career in academia, landing at Yale.

Like many civilian intellectuals at this time, Schelling became increasingly interested in the Cold War and the logic of nuclear deterrence. This was the era, as Friedman and Michaels have documented, when a new class of defense intellectuals emerged. These were people who might have had some experience in uniform, but who were distinguished from generals and traditional military strategists by a conviction that the advent of nuclear weapons had changed the very nature of war. When one starts thinking about mutual nuclear annihilation, one starts to wonder whether one needs new ideas about how to wage — or avoid — wars. There was also a genuine belief among this community that war was too important to be left to the generals. When weapons no longer decide the fate of battles but the survival of civilization itself, people who view these contests through strictly military means may not be competent to make decisions about national — or civilizational — survival.

There’s a term that came later that describes Schelling’s role: policy entrepreneurs, or idea entrepreneurs — people who seek to spread ideas and who benefit from doing so through fame, prestige, and influence. Not only is the prospect of finding out new ideas attractive for scholars, developing ideas that apply to policy and meet the needs of policymakers is a route to influence for people whose business it is to understand and propagate ideas. Defense intellectuals like Schelling challenged the military’s monopoly on expertise. They challenged the legitimate monopoly of knowledge about how to use nuclear weapons. And they viewed their real clients not as the generals, but as the political overseers of the military — presidents, civilian defense officials, the people who control budgets and procurement. These were not academic debates. They had immediate policy relevance. Many of these thinkers talked to Senator John F. Kennedy. When Kennedy became president, he appointed many of them to senior policymaking roles.

Among this breed of thinkers — Bernard Brodie, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport — Schelling stands apart. I have read a great deal of the writings of the others. They’re fine. Competent. Kahn is funny; Rapoport is probably right (and is skeptical of many of the perspectives here). But from his very first articles in the 1950s, Schelling was concerned with factors and relationships that nobody else saw. Schelling is not divine but his emphasis on strategy, credibility, relationships, and communication—above all, on seeing bargaining and violence as linked—has been transformative.

Intentionally or not, Schelling rode this wave—and his connections with the Kennedy administration in particular would cement his role as a leading intellectual. Arms and Influence, along with The Strategy of Conflict, would become standard on the syllabi of courses like this one—it is, I think, a touchstone of American thinking about strategy. Even if someone like President Trump has not read it, you do not have to go too far down in the ranks of his advisers and implementers to find people who rely on at least a caricature of the book.

Schelling’s Big Idea

What underlines Schelling’s approach is one big idea:

Coercion is bargaining.

From this postulate, several corollaries emerge. First, if you are bargaining over something, you have shared interests with your adversary. That’s counterintuitive! Most of the time, we assume that if you are fighting someone, you share nothing with them. But Schelling observes that there’s often some range of alternatives that both adversaries will prefer to continuing the conflict—if there were none, then only brute force—only eradication—would be an outcome. Yet that is simply not war is about.

This points to a second corollary. Coercion isn’t force. Obviously, actual brute force will be involved, but the overt use of brute force is not what represents the most important part of coercion. Rather, it is the manipulation of the possibility and the expression of violence as part of a way to both drive an adversary to the negotiating table and to make sure that whatever emerges from the bargaining process is maximally favorable to one’s own side.

From this, we can derive a third corollary. The manipulation of actual and potential violence is a political process in which military tactics and capabilities play a secondary role. They are important—you can’t credibly threaten violence unless you have the capability to wield force—but war is essentially, as in its essence, political. Therefore, at higher levels of abstraction, the details of weapons systems and tactics—the stuff of sergeants, colonels, and even generals—become less important than the relationship of the power to hurt to the pursuit of political objectives. Wielding the potential to hurt becomes the basis for negotiation because the military art creates not victory but the real and future harms that drive people to reach alternatives to fighting.

Finally, all of this implies that violence is not just about smashing the other side, even if that is how it feels to those engaged in any particular engagement, but is rather about expressing intentions, credibility, goals, and acceptable outcomes. Violence is a form of communication within the bargaining process of conflict. Conflict, being interactive (as it requires more than one side to be in conflict, but two sides to bring it to a close), thus must involve not just studying violence but how the use of force changes relationships, expectations, and understandings—all within a framework that continually seeks to bring a termination to the conflict.

This means Schelling is not going to write in a manner that is immediately understandable if you think a military strategist is always concerned with how to use weapons to inflict harm. Even the term violence has a very precise meaning for Schelling. It is not brutality. It is the power to hurt. It is not just inflicting pain, but being able to credibly threaten that you will inflict pain. And it is this structural possibility — this latent capacity — that makes violence strategic and entwined with bargaining.

How to Read the First Page

Open Arms and Influence to the first page of Chapter One. Schelling writes: “The usual distinction between diplomacy and force is not merely in the instruments, words or bullets, but in the relation between adversaries.” There is an important trick to reading an academic work. Whenever an academic says that something is the usual fashion of approaching something, that scholar is about to say that it is wrong. And Schelling is similarly going to efface the distinction between the conventional views to show that diplomacy and force are not as distinct as they appear.

In the first two paragraphs, he lays out the conventional views: diplomacy as bargaining, force as something separate. Schelling here is setting up what he is about to dismantle.

“Diplomacy is bargaining. It seeks outcomes that, though not ideal for either party, are better for both than some of the alternatives.” Schelling agrees— that is what negotiation is. He contrasts this—again, citing the conventional view—with the ordinary view of force:“With enough military force, a country may not need to bargain.” This, too, is the conventional view — and Schelling is about to say it’s wrong.

Think about how we experienced recent events. A surface-level or experiential view would confirm the conventional view. Last week, the United States was negotiating with Iran. This week, the United States is bombing Iran. Negotiations before; violence afterward. We all experienced this as a sharp division between two phases. Schelling would say: yes, that is how most people think about it—but they are wrong

His entire chapter argues that bargaining, diplomacy, and violence are the same thing—that we should approach them not as distinctive phases but as parts of a continuum in which similar theoretical approaches continue.

The Power to Hurt

On the second page, Schelling lays out his views: “There is something else, though, that force can do. It is less military, less heroic, less impersonal, and less unilateral; it is uglier … military force can be used to hurt.” You might pause at this point and say that this is obvious. Of course force can be used to hurt. We can’t think of the events of this week and the coming weeks without thinking that many people, most of them probably noncombatants, will be hurt. So what does Schelling mean?

I think the list of adjectives gives away Schelling’s game. He is saying that the power to hurt is not about victory or anything honorable but simply about being able to squeeze an opponent to the point they would prefer submission, retreat, or an agreed outcome to some other course of action. There’s no valor here. When Schelling talks about violence or the “power to hurt,” he is not even limiting himself to military force or interactions between countries. He is talking about any way you can hurt the other party. A commercial transaction. A relationship between social equals. Famously, he has a discussion about how toddlers can bargain with their parents — not by hurting them physically, but because they can put themselves in danger or cause distress.

This is a non-military view of military force. And it is radical. Schelling says the power to hurt in military contexts is not, at its root, different from the power to hurt in a labor dispute between a union and an employer. Not different from the power to hurt in a civil war. Not different from the power to hurt in the campaigns of Genghis Khan.

Consider the protection racket. When a mafioso walks into your shop and says, “Nice place. Shame if something happened to it,” he is not saying he’s going to burn the shop down today. He wants money from the shop. You want the shop to keep running. You have a shared interest. So you pay protection money. Schelling places nuclear war on a spectrum that runs from corporate negotiations to the mafia shaking down merchants on a street. In all of these cases, the power to hurt matters not because hurting is the point, but because exploiting that power becomes the basis for social relations.

For Schelling to draw on these kinds of examples is to challenge, directly, the idea that the military should have pride of place—to challenge, directly, that there is something honorable or professional about this. He wants to break down our existing ideas about grand strategy and nuclear politics and all the rest. He want us to be prepared to view forms in their fundamentals to be unromantic about what is really happening when one side or another threatens to use nuclear weapons. There is nothing glorious happening here; it is just a stick-em-’up on a grand scale.

“Pain and shock, loss and grief, privation and horror are always in some degree, sometimes in terrible degree, among the results of warfare; but in traditional military science they are incidental, they are not the object,” Schelling writes. Exploiting the power to hurt, however, consists of putting this power at the center of conflict analysis and showing how dangling that prospect can change victims’ motivations to avoid it. In that regard, as Schelling writes, what matters is the prospect of anticipated pain in the future. Not the actual pain inflicted, but the possibility that you will inflict (or suffer) pain—and an understanding of the actions that will lead to avoiding that pain. That is how the exchange of force and the prospect of violence generates bargaining power.

Reading Schelling While the Bombs Fall

Reading this chapter in the Global South — reading it in the Middle East — hits different than when I first encountered it in an apartment in Rosslyn, Virginia, two blocks from Boeing’s military and space headquarters.

Right now, the United States is engaged in a campaign in which violence is being used to hurt Iran. That hurt is being used to say to the Islamic Republic: If you don’t come to terms on nuclear weapons and the rest, we will keep hurting you. The Iranians are not trying to defeat the United States militarily. They can’t. What they are trying to do is, first, show they can endure this suffering indefinitely. And second, inflict pain — hurt and threaten additional hurt — to Israel, to the United States by inflicting casualties, and most of all to the Gulf states. (Subsequently, by closing the Strait of Hormuz, they are seeking to widen the circle of hurt to bring an end to U.S. military campaigning.) They are demonstrating that they are not bound by niceties like the idea that diplomatic facilities should be beyond targeting. They are implicitly threatening oil infrastructure, natural gas infrastructure, the shipping lanes through which the lifeblood of the regional and global economy flows.

The violence on our screens is part of this story, but so are the economic costs. When natural gas prices spike 40, 50, 60 percent in Europe in a matter of hours, that is the power to hurt. When the Korean stock market tanks 13 percent in a day because of energy costs, that is the power to hurt. When China calls on all sides to stop fighting — the war that the Americans and Israelis started — it is because China’s energy costs are being driven up. It doesn’t matter if a single tanker is sunk, so long as actors believe there is a chance tankers will be sunk, because then the energy will not flow.

President Trump tried to address this by announcing the US government will insure tankers for any damage and possibly have the Navy escort them through the straits — a very risky move, putting naval vessels directly at risk in confined waters, raising the chance of severe military casualties. But why? Because he is trying to mitigate costs on others, to remove Iran’s power to hurt.

All of this is classic Schelling.

Iran has to demonstrate its capability to hold out until the United States is too weak — or too unwilling — to continue inflicting damage. Why is Trump saying he might put boots on the ground, that the war might last four or five weeks, however long it takes? Why is he bragging about American munitions stockpiles? To convey to the Iranians that they will continue to be hurt for a long, long time.

What we are witnessing is a military campaign, but it is also a diplomatic campaign in which the counterproposals and acceptances are framed not in terms of emails or position papers or draft treaties, but exchanged by Shahed drones and ICBMs and missile defenses. That is the diplomacy of violence. Grasp this, and you understand not just the book — you understand what is happening over our heads right now.

In the future, we'll continue our reading of Schelling — covering more than a page or two! — and thinking about what all of this means for analyzing a crisis that isn't nuclear but which is about nuclear weapons. It is also a crisis that, for its stakes for the Gulf and the world economy, is about raising the prospect of calamity at a global scale — or an existential one for small states. That sort of apocalyptic power to hurt is what preoccupies Schelling, and absorbs our attention now as well.

“We have something to tell you. You can’t go to school for a few days or maybe a few weeks.”

A few weeks? That’s a very long time.

“I know, it really is!”

Why not?

“Well, some countries are fighting and it’s not safe to go to school right now. Your teachers will give you some activities that you can do here at home.”

What countries are fighting?

“Some of them. They aren’t fighting here.”

Why can’t I go to school?

“When countries fight, sometimes people get hurt. And they’re not fighting here, but sometimes the fight comes here.”

Oh. Well, I guess I get to spend more time with my family!

“That’s right, and we’ll make sure you have lots of things to do here. Now, there’s some chance that the fight could come here and we might have to go away soon.”

Go to another country where it’s safe?

“Yes, we would go somewhere safe. But that’s probably not going to happen. We just don’t want you to be surprised.”

What if the fight comes here and one of you gets killed?

“That’s really, really not likely. We just want to keep you safe.”

Why are they fighting?

“I don’t know, sometimes countries fight. Sometimes they just fight.”

You get used to the booms—soft, loud, soft, soft, loud again, as the interceptors stop the missiles overhead. Soft booms can be mistaken for someone slamming a car door or a water truck making deliveries (or, I should say, the reverse, which makes for jittery moments). Loud booms can’t be mistaken for anything else: they rattle the windows and the doors. But it’s a welcome feeling because if the explosion is overhead that means that the system worked.

There’s an expression: “staying left of boom”. It means acting to prevent a catastrophic or at least kinetic outcome. Imagine there’s a timeline and one possible future is, well, boom. In ordinary circumstances, you want to make sure you stay to the left of that line—keeping the violence at bay.

Well, here I am at the right of boom. Am I confident that the U.S. government did everything it could to stop this from coming about? No. Am I even confident that they wanted to? Certainly not beyond a reasonable doubt. We can talk about that later.

An unintentionally recurring theme of this newsletter has been what it feels like to be in situations that become construed as rhetorical objects: academia, campuses during the Palestine protests, and now “the war-torn Middle East”, a description that doubles as a thought-terminating cliche.

When I’ve discussed the other topics, I’ve wanted to make plain that the experience on the inside just isn’t what the outside view flattens it into—a cube viewed from one angle is just a square, without depth. Inside that rhetorical space there’s surprises, eddies, and dullness—all the complexities that good rhetors simplify in the service of their point, not of the truth.

So what does it feel like to be here, now? Tense and anxious in the first moments—I’ve seen one missile barrage before, last June, and that was a remarkable time but one we all thought would be a one-off. In the past 36 hours or so, I’ve heard eight or ten more salvoes—more than 60 inbound missiles, per official statements.

It’s surreal. Yesterday evening, I was driving to the Al Jazeera studios while I had 97.5 FM QBS on, when it was interrupted to broadcast the evening call to prayer (they have a pretty good muezzin!), and just as it finished boom boom boom overhead as I made the U-turn to get into the gate.

This morning’s round came while I was in the shower, boom boom boom boom, and when I opened the window to peer out for a better look I saw the Chinese guy in the house abutting ours doing the same, both of us trying to see the battle over our heads. By now, counting them is automatic, a wartime rosary.

But that’s been it now for hours, perhaps because the Israeli and U.S. air forces have gotten better at finding the launchers or perhaps because the air defenses here have changed their tactics, or maybe both. Everyone remains a bit on edge—some more than others.

For my part, I’m surprised to find how blasé I have become, perhaps the result of superior insights granted by my years of education in vaguely related topics or perhaps as an intellectualized defense mechanism. Nevertheless, the reprisals have been less severe than I had anticipated, even if more may be coming. I’m also feeling pretty grateful to Qatar’s air defense corps and to the Raytheon (RTX) corporation—great work, everyone! If Toby Keith had written a ballad about Patriot interceptors, I’d sing it at karaoke in your honor.

Not everyone is so sanguine. Some people want out, or want to know how to get out, just in case. Others are nervous but gamely carrying on. Still others are angry—and anger doesn’t get directed at the targets that casual online posters might expect; yes, there’s a lot of folks upset (to put it mildly) with the United States and Israel over this war, but the missiles exploding over our heads are Iranian, and that does tend to direct your anger toward the other side of the Arabian Gulf too.

(I hasten to add that I have no animus toward the Iranian people, and my heart has broken over the deaths of dozens of schoolgirls, as well as those killed in the synagogue in Beit Shemesh and the 16 reported wounded here in Qatar.)

People are carrying out their daily routine here, more or less; the schools are closed, and so are the banks, but coming home yesterday from the Al Jazeera studios I stopped at a McDonald’s (four hours of studio time is a lot!) and I was behind an internal security force SUV. Traffic is lighter, I suppose, and the parking lot at the nice mall (not the nicest mall, which I’m not rich enough to go to, and not one of the two nicer malls, but the nice mall) was pretty empty, but there were other people picking up groceries too, and by 10 a.m. it was becoming closer to normal; when I went to the hypermarket at 11:30 a.m. to ensure I had Coffee Mate for the duration, the store was close to packed.

By the end of the day, the U.S. State Department raised our threat level to Level 3, one short of the maximum (Afghanistan-equivalent) and well above the ordinary. The irony is that yesterday sure felt a lot more dangerous. In fact, although I’m pretty sure the news channels are reporting on this neck of the woods (er, sand) like it’s a constant struggle, the astonishing thing about this war from this home front, at least, is how sporadic it has been—boom boom boom and then nothing for an hour.

This is how I experience the war? It feels like stolen valor to even use the term.

Orwell’s description of London under the ceaseless bombardments of the war with Eastasia (or was it Eurasia?) in 1984 has echoed in my head—you hear it and then move on with your day, checking social media feeds to find that people are freaking out over something that you barely even note now.

Explosions in Doha, the posts say—real news sites, bottom-feeders click-farming, and ordinary people trying to keep up. Explosions in Doha.

No, no, not in Doha, over Doha. The preposition is everything in these cases. Just like the difference between before and after.

The United States and Israel have launched a war against Iran with the explicit goal. of regime change in Tehran.

This will go poorly; it is stunningly unlikely to achieve its objectives; it will undermine the U.S. position in the Middle East and elsewhere; it will be unpopular at home in the United States; and it runs the risk of catastrophe for limited upsides at a certain cost in Iranian, Israeli, American, and possibly Arab lives.

An Offer You Can’t Accept

Let’s start with why this is happening. Standard international relations theory holds that war is a possible outcome of a (failed) bargaining process. Generally, you hope to reach a negotiated outcome that both sides prefer to the costly lottery of war, which could leave both sides worse off. There’s many exceptions to this—some leaders might be made privately better off by war, for instance—but it is actually hard to get to war if you have any interest in avoiding it simply because war is costly and uncertain.

Some of the most important factors thus involve what the goals of each party is, and in particular whether you can negotiate over these at all. (There’s a long debate over how you can split these goals, but I do increasingly think there are some goals that you can’t easily compromise on to the point we can treat them as indivisible.) And if one party’s favored resolution is something the other side can’t easily accept, or can’t accept without losing every subsequent interaction (that is, showing you’re vulnerable to being bullied or bluffed), conflict becomes much more certain.

I’ve mentioned before Phil Haun’s book Coercion, Survival, and War, which addresses the puzzle of why the United States—a very powerful country—only rarely gets its way when it issues threats of military force. Haun argues that many of these threats fail because the United States is so powerful that it jeopardizes the existence of the (government of the) threatened state, making it impossible for the other side to give in. More than that, some of those threats are issued not to be successful but merely to give a pretext—a fig leaf that negotiations have taken place—precisely because those threats are unacceptable to the other side, leaving the impression that talks have fallen through. Cynical strategy, but plausible.

In the case of the United States and Iran, over the past few months practically every goal that the Trump administration has floated for its interactions with Tehran has been one that Tehran can’t accept. Those include protecting protesters against the government (admirable in some ways but obviously a call for regime change), making Tehran not only give up its nuclear stockpile but forswear nuclear proliferation, and, of course, regime change itself. Governments simply cannot agree to terms like these unless they are already defeated.

It is, by the way, notable that the Trump administration has adopted a maximalist goal—regime change—that is not clearly in U.S. interests and is far from achievable via the means (airstrikes) that are being employed. A limited strike on conventional and military targets might have signaled a goal of something less than regime change and more like pulling the regime’s teeth—humiliating for Tehran and costly for both sides, but not existential. And indeed you can imagine that violently reducing Tehran’s stocks of short and medium range missiles might have been quietly welcomed in European and Middle Eastern capitals threatened by them. Taking advantage of Tehran’s weakness to achieve that goal would have been brutal and unfair but more calculable. Regime change, by contrast, is a goal likelier to have originated with American extremists and the government in Israel, and it is one that risks perennial frustration unless U.S. and Israeli ties to an opposition in Iran are far greater than they appear in public.

The Consequences

By beginning hostilities in a joint operation with Israel, the United States has guaranteed that the war will be almost maximally unpopular. Iran is likely to retaliate against American and Israeli targets, which will not exactly be unpopular with regional publics given the circumstances (and it’s not like the Iranian government is super popular, to be clear, but acting against Washington and Tel Aviv is a cheap way of gaining popularity). Expect regional governments to hedge or even outright protest this, especially if they suffer directly via Iranian retaliation.

And we should expect some forms of retaliation. Iran is not a military superpower but it is also not a paper tiger. Iranian doctrine privileges asymmetric and distributed warfare against a variety of targets using drones, anti-ship missiles, proxy war, and ballistic missiles. These are all hard to defend against, and just as Golden Dome proved less capable over time we should expect some of these missiles to hit. In extremis, we might even see a Falklands War-esque successful strike on a U.S. naval vessel—this is not inconceivable. More likely (if sadder) is that civilians in oil facilities and in airliners will suffer, as during previous rounds of U.S.-Iran confrontation. Israel, of course, will be a more prominent target, especially Ben-Gurion Airport which has become (incredibly) a staging ground for U.S. military air assets.

The U.S. reputation as a fair dealer and reliable partner will be in shambles. Yet again, the Trump administration has apparently used peace talks as a pretext for striking at an adversary, making it pointless for future adversaries to engage in negotiations. If negotiations are a way of resolving disputes without overt conflict even if “all options are on the table”, then scuppering your own reputation for negotiating is folly—and harmful in the long term. Other countries will also now be vastly more wary of letting the United States place bases on their soil, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see U.S. forces evicted or substantially limited in the future.

U.S. military prowess is also being risked. A lucky Iranian Silkworm missile could deal a blow to the Navy’s reputation (how close were navy vessels to being hit by the Houthis?); attacks on Al-Udeid or refineries in Saudi Arabia or elsewhere (should they be allowed to be publicized) could become iconic images of America’s inability to protect its allies from aggression.

And, of course, people will die.

Europe, Australia, Japan, and other “Western” powers will probably actually, finally accelerate their move toward security self-reliance rather than engaging with an erratic, dangerous superpower that shows little regard for its partners. De-risking America will become a priority. By contrast, outside the region, China will look awfully sensible and reliable. (What of their military purges? Well, what of them—it’s not like the United States isn’t also purging its military for political reasons, just by terminating contracts with colleges and corporations.)

On a deeper level, a war of this magnitude and these objectives entirely bypassing not only the UN system but also the Arab League or other regional organizations will strain the fabric of international order and make the United States, for all its might and wealth, an incipient pariah.

And what if regime change were to succeed? Regime change may sound desirable—Trump has clearly bought this farm—but it is neither easy nor durable. The history of U.S.-backed regime change operations in Iran in particular is, well, not great. And foreign-induced regime change is also, well, not likely to be particularly stable at all.

It is cold comfort that this war is being conducted under circumstances that will make it maximally unpopular in the United States. Congress has not blessed it; international organizations have not blessed it; there are not even any U.S. allies participating (and given Israel’s newfound unpopularity in the United States, it’s likelier that this partnership will make the war less popular than a fully unilateral one).

As I write, missiles are inbound to Qatar.

One of my goals for this newsletter is to acquaint Americans with the world, and how fast the world outside of the United States is changing. As part of that mission, this past week I rented a Jetour T2—one of the most popular models of Chinese SUVs currently on the road in Qatar. You can think of this as a direct sequel to my earlier betrayal of America when I bought a Chinese smartwatch:

The Background

Qatar is a modern country with astonishingly well developed infrastructure capable of supporting not just the needs of its ~3 million residents but surge capacity related to hosting major world sporting events (and, yes, I’m all in for Qatar’s bid to host the 2036 Olympics). In practical terms, that means Qatar has a decent metro system and an extensive road network—some might even say occasionally overbuilt.

On those roads travel automobiles from around the world. Here’s the list of brands for sale in Qatar

Yes, the iconic automobile in Qatar remains a white Toyota Land Cruiser, but there’s a lot going on here—and most of the action is in the Chinese car sector. Infamously, tariffs and other barriers keep Chinese cars from the United States and much of Europe, but outside of these islands of protectionism the market is speaking: Bestunes, Cherys, and BYDs are outpacing traditional Western and Japanese brands. Even during the two years I’ve been here, the number and range of Chinese marques on the road has increased tremendously.

I’ve written about this elsewhere—in, of all things, an article for the Journal of Political Science Education about my experiences teaching statistics in Qatar. One of the commonly available “toy” datasets for testing and teaching stats involves car prices and specs from the 1970s: lots of Plymouths, lots of AMCs, lots of cars that cost a few thousand U.S. dollars. That’s been outdated for a long time, but it’s really outdated when you’re using American cars measured in feet and gallons to teach undergraduates from dozens of countries where they use kilometers and liters. Working with my class, I developed a replacement dataset based on cars in Qatar (R version, thanks to Andrew Heiss; Python version, thanks to Peter Licari)—and as a result, I’ve taken a much keener interest in what I see around here.

The Rise of Chinese Car Manufacturing

There’s lots of reasons why Chinese cars have become so prominent here and elsewhere. Upstream, there’s the fact that Chinese automakers have firmly displaced foreign brands in China itself, even as China’s car market expands; having a big market at home can underwrite aggressive expansionism overseas (it’s not like anyone is gearing up for the Qatar market alone; rather, this is just spillover from domestic fixed costs). Some of this has to do with home-grown industrial policy at the provincial level, as local governments seek to promote and expand their own carmakers. There are also some sharp practices that involve … aggressive accounting and loading risks onto suppliers and others, letting the companies keep their prices low in a cutthroat environment.

But a lot of the Chinese advantage—more than I think has percolated into the ordinary American’s consciousness—is just that the fierce competition and engineering focus in China has produced manufacturing processes that make good cars cheap. As the Rhodium Group argues, this is something that will be difficult for Western (and Japanese) carmakers to cope with. Although brands provide a moat, it’s also hard to imagine that the moat is deep enough to save incumbent carmakers from being underpriced by 20 percent or more. And brand loyalties can develop—what else is marketing (like giving away cars at supermarkets and malls?) than building a name for a brand?

Chinese cars are cheap. They are marketed aggressively. They are winning over petrolheads. And they are everywhere but in the United States and Western Europe.

It was time to drive one.

Choosing a Car

I was going to rent a Jetour T2. This is, as a valet once said to me, the “Temu Defender”—that is, it’s an aesthetic copy of the Land Rover Defender, which is itself pretty popular around here. Whereas the Defender retails for about 232,000 QAR (about 63k USD), however, the T2 costs 129,000 QAR—about 35,000 USD.

The T2 was the first car I really thought of as being a hit on Qatar’s roads. Unlike lower-end MG and Chery models that have been proliferating on the roads, this was a relatively expensive car that also has clearly targeted a niche between budget- and value-conscious buyers. It’s a toy, but it’s a toy that people will either splurge on or will add to their collections for.

And there is data to support this: Jetour (known in China as Jiétú, and formerly a sub-brand of Chery) has surged in Qatar and the Middle East generally, with sales allegedly up 80% year-on-year (I don’t trust anyone’s press releases, but it is plausible that the brand isjust behind Toyota and Nissan).

Just as important, it only cost 450 QAR / day to rent—and with a Ramadan special (buy two, get one free) it was the perfect car to start off testing what Chinese vehicles are like.

The T2 is, judged on its own, a nice-looking car. (I was, I think, in a higher trim so I avoided the excessively plasticky-looking versions.) It’s an SUV but it’s a small one (it had trouble comfortably fitting three suitcases)—but it is also tall inside.

Driving the T2

The book on Chinese cars is that they are a little underpowered in the engine department and really overpowered in the tech department. That fits my experience. I’ve owned—I do own!—laptops with smaller screens than the T2:

I haven’t checked this but my recollection is that early T2s didn’t have Apple CarPlay standard; well, this one does—another bridge over another moat—and its wireless charging was way more powerful than in my usual car (it actually charged up instead of not losing power while running). The technology just works, you might say—indeed, my biggest complaint was that it worked too much, with too sensitive alarms for proximity and an annoying habit of throwing the screen into a 360-degree video mode if I drove down a street with other cars on it. Still, I would say that the tech was at least comparable to what wowed me on a Tesla several years ago, and in advance of what I’ve seen on comparably priced Japanese cars.

The ride was incredibly … fine. The seats were comfortable and the windshield was huge—no problem with visibility on the road, although I wouldn’t trust myself with trying to find toddlers in front of the car. The T2 idles a little slower than I’m used to and it took a little bit—a little bit—longer to accelerate than my usual Mazda sedan, but there was sufficient power for driving on Doha’s relatively short and sedate expressways. I didn’t take it offroad because it was a rental and because I am a wimp, but I did get the impression that this was more a car that looked like it could go offroad than one that really wanted to go offroad. The emergency (automatic) brakes did deploy once, and correctly so (well, maybe a touch aggressively). The sound system (Sony) was actually pretty good.

Was it the most exciting car I’ve ever driven? No. Was it the smoothest ride I’ve ever had? No. Was it a luxury experience? Not really, although I did rent from the luxury desk at Strong Rent-a-Car (tell them I sent you!)—that was a nice experience, and it was jarring to see my car parked behind a Rolls (which costs 10x/day to rent).

What it was was … incredibly competent. It drove fine. The tech worked fine. People gave me a little more space than they would if I were driving a sedan, so that was fine. It was absolutely fine. And it cost 45 percent less than the Land Rover it was copying. Forty-five percent less.

What’s Coming

Brands like Hongqi, Xiaomi, BYD, Great Wall (especially the sub-brand Tank), and BAIC are not household names in the United States, but they are getting familiar to global customers. Chinese cars do not yet, as far as I can tell, have the ability to go toe-to-toe with established luxury or premium brands—but I’m going to continue testing:

but that seems like a matter of time—not just “years” but maybe like “a couple of years”. In the meantime, if tariff barriers remain high in the US and Europe, incumbents in those car markets will eventually come to look like Ladas and ZAZs—what you buy because it’s what you can, not because it’s what would win in a free market. At the same time, the rest of the world will continue to associate Chinese manufacturing with ample consumer surplus—and be more closely wedded to China-centric corporate supply chains. (Ironically, as wages rise in China, some of the actual manufacturing will be offshored from China.)

What should be done? I know there are risks to letting Chinese firms come into established markets, and those extend from further job losses to further losses of industrial potential to exotic (and I think unlikely) scenarios like cybersubversion that shuts down all Chinese cars in the USA. On the other hand, cars are expensive and electric cars are currently a made-in-China show (one of the other reasons why Chinese petrol cars are flooding the Qatari and other markets is simply that they are being shunted off while China’s EV transition goes ahead full steam). So there are reasons to seriously consider allowing Chinese imports.

For my informal take, I think that the right way is to perfectly mirror Chinese industrial policy. If Chinese manufacturers are great at making cars, then it’s time to couple market access with technology transfer and co-production. Ford is rumored to be considering a joint venture with a Chinese carmaker; that seems like a good starting point. Alternatively, setting up national or even alliance champions with German, Korean, and Japanese manufacturers could follow a similar model, but with additional support to make the transition. Indeed, that’s not too far from the playbook that the United States actually followed with Japanese carmakers in the 1980s.

The new generation of the China shock needs to be managed, not denied or succumbed to. That’s going to require different policies than Cobdenite free trade or the “voluntary export restrictions” of the Reagan era. But it’s going to unfold faster—much faster—than you might think. Right now, it’s still strange to me to travel around and see a Changan or Foton vehicle. In a couple of years, or even sooner, it will be strange to return to the United States and see Fords instead of Exeeds.