The sunroof leaks when it rains and I’ve had to get the brakes replaced. But at over 100,000 miles, my 2011 Ford Escape Hybrid starts without complaint. I’ve depended on it for trips from Chicago to D.C., over Virginia potholes on the way to State and the Pentagon, and on long drives to South Carolina to see my in-laws. It fits Tommy’s golf clubs comfortably, even if he doesn’t like the hype music I play on its stereo before tournaments.

I’ve never been a car guy. Never will be. I grew up in the city, and at 16 found it more affordable to have a girlfriend from the suburbs drive me (thank you, Emily).1 I went to college in the woods and didn’t own a car until I was 24, a used Acura Integra covered by my first-year bonus in Boston’s financial district. Later, newly married, my wife and I moved to Abu Dhabi, where we rented a Nissan Tiida monthly, driving Sheikh Zayed Road alongside Lamborghinis and Maseratis. I took cabs; my wife drove the rental, ferrying me around the Emirates occasionally. Local men questioned why I’d have her drive. I told them they didn’t realize how good I had it — that they ought to try it.

The Ford Escape is the one new car I’ve ever had, graciously gifted by my in-laws, who didn’t want their daughter taking a cab to deliver their first grandchild at Northwestern. While I don’t treat the Ford nearly as well as I treat their grandchildren, it’s still my baby, a little mistreated, but now almost 15 years old. I hope to hand it off to my son or daughter in a few years.

Which is why I was curious about my Ford’s parentage. The car was assembled in Claycomo, Missouri, in the wake of the Great Recession, when the federal government was effectively running two of the three Detroit automakers. Perhaps I was a recipient of that bailout? When I took the keys, I was working for , and we were hammering Mitt Romney mercilessly (and understandably) for an op-ed he wrote under the headline, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”

But the story isn’t so clean. Ford took no bailout money. It was never partly owned by the U.S. Treasury. Ford’s CEO Alan Mulally saw the dark clouds gathering in 2006, mortgaging the company down to the brand itself, borrowing more than $23 billion before credit markets froze up two years later. His smart bet is why Ford never went through bankruptcy or had a government-appointed anything. Still, when Mulally sat beside Rick Wagoner of GM and Bob Nardelli of Chrysler, he told Congress that Ford’s better position would be worthless if the U.S. automotive supply chain had perished. Ford could survive only if its American rivals were still in business.

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The Energy Department’s $5.9 billion loan in 2009 to retool plants for fuel-efficient vehicles is another tempting story. Surely my hybrid came out of that? It didn’t. The Escape Hybrid launched in 2005 as the first hybrid SUV sold in the United States, engineered years before support came from the feds. Nor was there a tax credit; Ford had blown through its limit by the time my in-laws bought it. The clean anecdote falls apart, but what’s underneath is better.

During the last years of the George H.W. Bush administration, the Energy Department and the Big Three carmakers formed the United States Advanced Battery Consortium. It was a decade-long effort to figure out whether a battery could supply the juice to power a family car. Automotive-grade nickel-metal hydride came out of the research, and the battery pack in my hybrid is a descendant of their work. Bill Clinton and Al Gore followed it with the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV), which aimed to produce an 80-mile-per-gallon sedan. That car never materialized. Judging by the goal they set, PNGV was a failure. Judging by what it achieved, dragging hybrid technologies out of the labs and into Detroit’s engineering practices, it succeeded so well that we forgot about its value.

After President Trump fired me the first time, I worked for an aerospace company. Our CEO had worked at Ford, and visiting a rural plant where we made munitions, she asked everyone assembled if they drove one. More than a dozen hands went up. “I didn’t think you would drive a truck,” she told me afterward. She hadn’t asked about trucks, but apparently that was the implication. My Escape seemed Ford Tough enough for me. And since Washington rates automakers on fuel economy across an entire fleet, every Ford hybrid sold to a dad in the suburbs like me helped buy more space for Ford F-150s.2 The truck she assumed I’d never drive was subsidized by the hybrid I took to work every morning.

None of what built my Escape was a bailout. Still, much of what produced it was the result of public investment. And this is the part we are so bad at appreciating. Government rescues are great at making headlines: there are villains, votes, photographs of suits under fire, responding to sharp questions in somber hearing rooms. An R&D consortium doesn’t create the same heat. It runs for years, producing reports that few people read, and gets mocked when it misses ambitious targets. Its value emerges twenty years later, in the tank of gas I didn’t have to buy on the way to the Carolinas. The politicians, bureaucrats, and businesspeople responsible for it were mostly gone before the public could appreciate what they achieved.

Which brings me back to the quality I value most about my car: it is “trusty.” Trustiness is not an attribute that comes with a vehicle on the lot. It is more like an inheritance. It is something that endures after hundreds of invisible decisions by folks in different administrations, political parties, industries, and model years: the safety regulator, the program officer at DOE, the man on second shift at the plant in Claycomo, the engineer experimenting with a battery in 1996 that still runs in 2026. My car is trusty in many of the ways an institution becomes trusty. It’s a product of the public sector performing some of its most valuable work on a timeline that endures beyond a political career.

I didn’t pay for any of those benefits. And I’m still a bit embarrassed I didn’t pay for the car. It came as a gift from parents anxious about how their daughter would get to a Chicago hospital. It drives on an interstate system I inherited, powered by research conducted by strangers who knew they’d never see repayment, drawing against a future they might not be driving in.

Which is, I suppose, the case for handing Tommy or Betty the keys when the time comes. You can never really settle a debt like that. You just have to keep it moving.

It was meant to be a last hurrah for my time in the Middle East: a trip that began on the edge of the Empty Quarter in Rupert’s silver Mustang. We would travel from the Persian Gulf, through the Hajar Mountains, onto the Arabian Sea. Six hours from Abu Dhabi to Muscat overland: the Omani Route.

Rupert, an irredeemable Englishman and newspaper columnist, had secured what journalists call “a junket.” His assignment was to review the Shangri-La, one of Oman’s poshest hotels. I was leaving the newspaper, and soon the region, and Rupert asked if I wanted to join. We would talk about what I might do next, reminisce and reflect, perhaps take the temperature of the Arab Spring across the border.

Though what Rupert had planned was more Hunter S. Thompson than Wilfred Thesiger. Somewhere outside Al Buraimi, on the edge of the desert, the diplomatic realities kicked in.

I knew crossings in the Middle East could be hit or miss, having been detained and questioned at two the year before. We weren’t oblivious to the tensions of the moment. In fact, we wrote about them for a living (mostly). Oman had accused the United Arab Emirates two months before of operating a spy ring inside the country. Governments across the region were tightening their grip as the Arab Spring erupted. Still, we assumed we would enter Oman without trouble.

As we approached the crossing, Rupert slowed his sleek Ford, turning off the ignition, as instructed. It was only March, but by midmorning the heat was rising. The guard took his time with the four or five cars ahead of us, laughing with their drivers, lingering, then waving them through.

We finally reached him. “No journalists in Oman,” he said. Rupert produced the hotel’s welcome letter. The guard was unimpressed. “By the order of the Sultan, no journalists in Oman.”

Rupert then reached for history: centuries of Anglo-Omani friendship, the Dhofar rebellion, the British role in helping Sultan Qaboos defeat a communist insurgency in the 1960s and 1970s. The account was comprehensive, like something Rupert had prepared decades before for his interview at Cambridge. Invoking an empire’s old favors seemed unlikely to secure our passage, though I didn’t tell Rupert. After he came up empty, I tried a more American approach. “Can I speak to your manager?” I asked.

“He’s hunting,” the guard informed me. Houbara, I assumed: falconry. Only later did it occur to me that Oman’s bustards don’t migrate, that there was almost nothing to hunt. “We’ll wait,” I said.

Another guard escorted us to a carpeted room. But this was nothing like being questioned at Ben Gurion or in Beirut. Someone brought us mint tea and placed it on a table. We enjoyed it.

Maybe half an hour later, the boss showed up. His hunt, apparently, had not taken him far. “I was told you are traveling to the Shangri-La,” he said. “Yes, wonderful place.” He then pointed to Rupert. “You are an Englishman.” Then he looked at me. “And you, you are Irish?”

Rupert jumped in. “Yes, yes, Irish. Paddy’s Irish. Name says it all.” I felt him kick me under the table, a signal I shouldn’t correct the record.

“Ireland,” the official said. “I have taken my sons there for the rugby. So much green.” He spread his hands. “But like here, great hospitality.” We listened, nodded, and laughed as the boss continued for several minutes about his travels.

“Gentlemen,” the official concluded, “you will enjoy the beaches of Muscat before the day is over.” He told the guard to stamp our passports. He never opened them. “Welcome to Oman,” he said.

I didn’t know it then, but the encounter contained something instructive about the country. Oman can be idiosyncratic, stubborn about its sovereignty, surprisingly flexible about most everything else, and always skilled at providing a route away from direct confrontation.

This is part of what makes President Donald Trump’s recent threat against Oman so maddening. Trey Yingst of Fox News, relaying a phone call with the president on air, reported that when he asked Trump about Oman’s role in negotiations over the Strait of Hormuz, the president warned: “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.” No doubt Trump is frustrated, by a problem he created. More than a fifth of the world’s oil moves through the strait in normal times. Since the war began in February, vessel traffic has fallen by nearly 90 percent.

Trump was delivering a threat against an ally. Oman gave the US access to deepwater ports sitting well outside Hormuz, Duqm and Salalah, under a framework completed in Trump’s first term. And in negotiating with Tehran, Oman was performing exactly what Washington has relied on it to do for years: maintaining enough trust with Iran to explore a route to compromise that would otherwise be impossible.

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Throughout its history, Oman has existed across cultural, political, and geographic divides rather than hiding behind them. It sits on the Strait of Hormuz, its Musandam Peninsula facing Iran across one of the most important chokepoints in the world. The Omani people are Arab, Baluchi and East African; their families have roots across the Indian Ocean.

The country was shaped by monsoon winds and far-flung ties rather than any fixed position. It’s a history that has encouraged a distinctive identity and approach to diplomacy. Omanis are predominantly from the Ibadi tradition, separate from the region’s central sectarian division of Sunni and Shia. While the country is a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Oman’s foreign policy has never been subsumed by Riyadh’s or Abu Dhabi’s. Oman did not participate, for instance, in the Saudi- and Emirati-led blockade of Qatar in 2017. The country has strong ties with Britain and the United States, though it keeps Iran close, closer than many in Washington consider acceptable.

Oman does not avoid choices; it assiduously avoids surrendering the ability to make its own. That can be frustrating for an ally who is also a superpower, even if the United States has used Oman’s independence to its advantage.

When I was at the State Department, Muscat was hosting secret talks between American and Iranian diplomats. I knew nothing about them; almost no one in the building did. The discussions laid the groundwork for negotiations that produced the Obama-era nuclear agreement. Years before, the Omanis had shown important ways they could deliver. In 2010 and 2011, Oman bailed American hikers out of Iran’s Evin Prison, even flying them home on the Sultan’s plane. In 2020, Oman helped negotiate the release of American hostages held by the Houthis in Yemen. For years, the Omanis have provided one of the few reliable routes for Washington to communicate with its Middle Eastern adversaries.

The same dynamic is at work now in the strait. Iran and Oman have spent the summer drafting an arrangement to move ships through Hormuz again; on August 8, Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said the two sides were very close. But look at who isn’t part of these talks: Tehran says it isn’t negotiating with the United States at all, just speaking with Oman about shipping lanes. Trump has said talks with Iran are underway. They are describing the same conversation, one that runs through Oman's foreign minister, Badr al-Busaidi. It can survive because the Iranians are able to engage and say at the same time that they aren’t speaking to Washington at all.

The Omani channel also works because sometimes Oman says no. Muscat was widely expected to sign the Abraham Accords. Instead, its parliament moved to expand the country's longstanding boycott of Israel. Washington was looking for a yes but didn’t get one. That refusal, extended to the Saudis and the Emiratis as readily as to the United States, provides credibility underneath every message Oman carries.

The danger now isn’t that Oman will retaliate immediately or harshly to Trump’s threats. Oman doesn’t have a powerful military, and besides, that kind of approach would be completely out of character. The price for Trump’s bellicosity will not show up in news cycles but will accrue over months and years. Still, the absence of a quick or public response from Muscat shouldn’t be misunderstood as softness.

Sultan Qaboos bin Said, who ruled Oman for nearly fifty years, came to power in 1970 by deposing his own father. He then fought a brutal war against communist insurgents in Dhofar. Rupert had the history right: Qaboos won it with substantial British support. British officers who served alongside the Omanis reported that they fought hard and were almost impossible to command.

That same combination of partnership without submission remains alive and well in Oman. It was evident on my many visits to the country, but no more so than on that journey overland with Rupert. Coming into the country, we saw one side of the state. We weren’t really detained; it was a border stop where they served us tea in a carpeted room. We talked about rugby and travel, a bureaucratic barrier resolved after what the Brits might call banter.

But we saw another side to Oman driving north on our return to the UAE. As we entered Oman’s main industrial city, Sohar, we witnessed how the Arab Spring had arrived, its green shoots quickly trampled. Protesters had gathered in Sohar to demand jobs and an end to corruption. At least one of them, Abdullah al-Ghimlasi, had been shot dead by police shortly before we passed through. Armored vehicles were on the roads, and security forces were at every roundabout. Whatever ambiguity there might have been about the government’s willingness to tolerate discussion or dissent was now absent.

Oman preferred to advertise its mountains and calm seas. But it was not afraid to show a clenched fist. Oman’s quietness has never been weakness. Its idiosyncrasies should not be mistaken for a lack of strategy. Oman’s willingness to engage all comers should not be confused for a willingness to take orders.

The United States has benefited from these characteristics for decades. Oman will bring adversaries together. You might never know entirely whose side they’re on, but they’ll hear you out. They’ll give you space and time. There is almost always an Omani route. With his threats, Trump risks erasing it, and at the moment he needs it most.

Patrick Granfield was part of The National's launch team in Abu Dhabi, edited its opinion pages, and lived in the Gulf for four years. He later served as chief speechwriter to Rahm Emanuel during his first term as mayor of Chicago and as a speechwriter to Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Ash Carter.

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Ash Carter, the late Secretary of Defense, liked to compare security to oxygen. “If you have it, you don’t pay attention to it,” he would often say. “But if you don’t have it, it’s all you can think about.” I heard him deliver the line often when I wrote speeches for him at the Pentagon. I understood it then as a case for vigilance, never imagining it would become prophecy.

A professional military with global partners, a credible financial system, and a durable rule-of-law tradition have supplied the oxygen fueling American prosperity. Americans have benefited from them for so long that they have become as invisible as the air they breathe. These sources of American privilege were not gifts of history; they were built over generations. From the Iraq War to the 2008 financial crisis, they were not always earned. Still, after each policy failure, the United States appeared capable of absorbing lessons.

But what happens to American life when these privileges are no longer so powerful, when this oxygen becomes depleted? Donald Trump’s second term in office should force such a reckoning. What makes the moment so different is not a single failure but a simultaneous challenge to several pillars of American strength. We have no model or historical memory to prepare us for it.

Allies are hedging against America

We should remember one event above all, whose anniversary arrives next month: the September 11th attacks. And that, in the quarter century since, the United States has not suffered anything near that day’s horrors. That is not a coincidence. As U.S. counter-terrorism officials from across Republican and Democratic administrations have said, strong alliances and intelligence sharing have been decisive factors. Today, President Trump is actively weakening the partnerships that have protected Americans.

At the NATO Summit earlier this summer, Trump again made threats to take Greenland, sovereign territory of a NATO ally. Denmark, in turn, is now restructuring its armed forces, in part, because it can no longer dismiss territorial pressure from the United States. On August 3, Denmark began an expanded, gender-neutral conscription system, lengthening service from four to eleven months and planning eventually to deploy conscripts to Greenland.

Denmark is not alone. Canada has launched a roughly C$35 billion Arctic defense program explicitly intended to reduce reliance on the United States. It is building northern airfields and support hubs, joined the European Union’s SAFE defense initiative, and adopted an industrial strategy to shrink the roughly 70 percent of its defense capital spending on American products. While this is not complete abandonment, it is a strong statement, an insurance policy against an unreliable partner, one that comes at both a strategic and economic cost to the United States.

The erosion is much deeper than procurement. When the war with Iran began, France, Italy, and Spain refused military assistance and airspace. Trump’s recent military campaign has become a test case for what diminished trust from allies looks like, and what it costs.

The lack of trust has spurred open discussion among European intelligence services about alternative information-sharing arrangements that would route around the United States entirely. NBC News has reported how allies, including Five Eyes members, are reconsidering protocols for sharing information, worried that sources could be exposed by an administration that treats classified material as a personal asset.

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A not-so-reliable investment

Several allies are among many sovereign investors now reducing their financial exposure to the United States. The Dutch reduced their exposure to U.S. Treasuries by $12 billion, and the Swedes sold off an estimated $8 billion over the past year. Danish pension funds sold off $100 million of U.S. Treasuries in January, citing greater fiscal burdens in the United States. These are small moves individually, but the reductions in U.S. dollar holdings are having a cumulative effect. This spring, the European Central Bank reported that, for the first time since the mid-1990s, central banks held more in gold than in U.S. Treasuries — a shift driven partly by gold’s surging price, but also by deliberate diversification away from the dollar. Tokyo’s sale of currency reserves late last month raised fears that a continued liquidation of U.S. Treasuries would push American borrowing costs higher. In response, the United States joined Japan in supporting the yen, the first coordinated intervention to strengthen the currency in nearly thirty years.

All this, while a recent lack of transparency from the Federal Reserve is deepening doubts. After the Federal Reserve decided to hold rates steady on a divided 9–3 vote in late July, Chair Kevin Warsh gave a press conference so muddled that investors responded immediately. As noted, “The bond market freaked the f**k out after Warsh’s last post FOMC meeting press conference, sending U.S. government borrowing costs to their highest level in nearly 20 years.” Bank of America’s analysts identified the response as a signature price action of “credibility shocks faced by EM central banks.” In other words, analysts were pricing the credibility of America’s central bank the way they price Turkey or Indonesia’s.

The doubts in global markets run all the way down to the data itself. After the president fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner over an unfavorable jobs report, his replacement advanced through committee on a party-line vote. As Nathan Tankus has written, the firing was not an isolated act but part of a broader assault on the federal statistical system. There is no concrete evidence statistics have been falsified. Still, markets must now ask whether they might be. The Trump Administration is introducing the question at the Fed, in the Treasury market, and in the numbers themselves.

What happens at the Fed or Bureau of Labor Statistics is not an academic matter; it will eventually show up at kitchen tables. The independence of these institutions is critical to trust in the U.S. financial system, which allows capital to move cheaply, quickly, and confidently into American markets. Trust in the U.S. and the dollar allows the country to borrow more cheaply and run larger deficits, with Americans sharing in the benefits. They have access to lower mortgage rates and cheaper imports. Car loans and business loans are more affordable. These are hidden subsidies for American life. The more quickly they are removed, the more pain there will be for the middle class, already grappling with a crisis of affordability.

A rebalancing of the global financial system was already underway. Trump’s behavior is a destabilizing accelerant.

When enforcement is personal

The most invisible privilege in American life is the rule of law, which has long been a silent guarantee: contracts get enforced, courts remain independent, and no one wakes up wondering what the rules are because of one man’s mood. Armed federal agents patrolling the streets of several American cities over the past year are the most visible manifestation of the risk. Antitrust enforcement in the Trump Administration also appears to reward allies while targeting critics. Local prosecutors have faced pressure to drop charges or pursue them based on partisan loyalty rather than evidence.

The arbitrariness extends to enforcement against individuals. As has noted, “ICE frequently makes bad calls about who is and isn’t a U.S. citizen, and the rights of citizens have been routinely violated.” When justice under the law and individual freedom are subverted to the president’s whims, that is a danger to the entire concept of America.

This week, when U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro dismissed a vandalism prosecution on account of government records showing that rushed construction, not sabotage, caused the damage, the president publicly accused her of “choking.” A president pressuring a prosecutor to maintain charges after the evidence collapsed is the kind of corruption the State Department would often flag in other countries. Now it is our own.

Rare air, depleted

While more than six in ten Americans say the country is on the wrong track, the costs and consequences of the country’s eroded privileges have yet to completely sink in. It remains difficult to imagine a world in which the United States is not the world’s security backbone, its financial anchor, and, because of its legal protections, its innovation hub. Yet, this world should no longer be an abstraction. Trump is quickly putting this future into motion.

Americans know, in the abstract, that security partnerships matter, that dollar dominance has costs and benefits, that the rule of law is not self-executing. But knowing something in the abstract is different from having lived through its unraveling or absence. The generation that built these institutions knew the difference.

One president from that generation, Dwight Eisenhower, warned that “a people that values its privileges over its principles soon loses both.” He was right, though he may not have imagined the current danger. When America’s security alliances, financial system, and grounding in the rule of law are no longer recognized as privileges, it becomes harder to grasp what is being lost when our nation’s principles are discarded.

Ash Carter reached for a similar metaphor, comparing security to oxygen, invisible until it’s gone. A decade on, this is no longer a future warning. Trump is suffocating America's institutions — depleting the oxygen that has sustained American life. The question is no longer whether Americans will recognize what they’re losing but whether they will act before there is no longer enough air to breathe.

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Patrick Granfield served as director of strategic communications for the Secretary of the Army and as speechwriter to the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, and Mayor of Chicago. More recently, Patrick served as senior adviser at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC).

More than a decade ago, I was living in Abu Dhabi as the threat of an Israeli strike on Iran was rising. A Western diplomat described to me plainly the risks of summer in the Gulf and what would happen if Iran answered a strike by hitting desalination plants and power stations: “You might as well be on Venus without air-con and water,” the diplomat said. What was a hypothetical then is now a real danger.

Of course, the conflict that began in February was supposed to be well over by summer. The Administration has offered timetable after timetable for its end. First four weeks, maybe five or six. Then maybe two or three more. A preliminary deal, an MOU full of gaps and seemingly one-sided, was signed in June. It held a little more than a week, until an Iranian drone struck a cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz. Both sides have moved up the escalation ladder, with U.S. strikes on Iran now a nightly occurrence.

Close to nine of every ten Iranian missiles and drones have been intercepted, a testament to years of preparation across U.S., Israeli, and Arab defenses. But that is still only part of the story. U.S. military doctrine often calls for multiple interceptors against each projectile. Interceptors are costly, in short supply, and take months, sometimes years, to replace.1 Iran’s ballistic missile force is diminished, but its supply of cheap drones appears ample. Whatever Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and his team say from the press office, and they have been remarkably quiet lately, Iran retains the means to put power and water at risk for millions on the Gulf’s southern shore.

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It seems this threat would be obvious to the Administration. But already in this war they have overlooked geography. At the start, they discounted Iran’s ability to contest the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for the global economy that narrows to about twenty miles in places. Carriers and destroyers lose many advantages in close quarters, where Iranian mines, drone swarms, and fast boats make them more vulnerable. Control of the Strait is much more a matter of geography than superior technology, which is why it remains contested five months after Operation Epic Fury began. India, for instance, ordered a halt to any new voyages of its seafarers through the Strait. We shouldn’t presume that an Administration that didn’t account for the map will pay attention to the thermometer.

As Matt Damon’s character explained two decades ago in Syriana, “It’s 125… literally 125, and humid. I walked out of the airport, and it was like a wall fell on me.” It was Hollywood hyperbole, but not by much. The Gulf during summer sits on the edge of what is survivable without modern conveniences, with daytime highs reaching 110 or higher. Beside the world’s warmest body of salt water, the air thickens each evening. Gulf weather stations don’t regularly post a heat index, a combined reading of temperature and humidity that tells you what it actually feels like outside. Maybe because for long stretches of summer that number sits above 130 for hours at a time. Before oil and air-conditioning, even the desert-hardened families of Abu Dhabi could not bear it. They moved inland each summer, to the oases and higher ground near Liwa.

The Gulf’s cities stopped being remote outposts years ago; there is no moving millions of residents inland today. Dubai crossed four million in 2025. Add Abu Dhabi, Doha, Manama, Kuwait City, and the cities between, and some fifteen million people live along the Gulf’s southern shore, the great majority foreign-born. For many, summer in the Gulf moves between cooled homes and offices, hotel lobbies and malls, one air-conditioned cocoon to the next.

I learned a little of what that heat means on my commute to The National in Abu Dhabi. Each morning, I walked half a mile from my flat to a taxi stand and paid 20 dirhams for the ride to work. By the time I reached my desk, my shirt had soaked through. I had it far better than most. One of the paper’s first campaigns was to enforce a midday heat break for laborers, the many thousands building the malls, hotels, and infrastructure that helped make the Gulf a global hub. The rule dated to the mid-2000s; the question was whether anyone enforced it. I can’t claim the work changed labor policy on its own, but after a steady run of reporting and editorials, the ministry tightened the rules in 2010. Workers had to leave their sites during the break, and the requirement had to be posted in languages the workers could read. The break still runs every summer, June 15 to September 15, from 12:30 to 3:00 in the afternoon. The premise of the campaign was simple: in that climate, in that season, shade and water and air-conditioning are necessities.

Which brings us to the second essential: the Gulf’s summer cocoon runs on electricity and desalinated water. Qatar draws nearly all of its drinking water from desalination; Kuwait and Bahrain, close to ninety percent. The plants, and the power stations that feed them, sit on the coast, within Iran’s range. Iran has advertised the fact, circulating images of energy and desalination facilities across the Gulf as prospective targets. Some have taken damage already: a Bahraini desalination plant in March, power-and-water facilities in Kuwait and the UAE in April; and Kuwaiti plants repeatedly in recent weeks. Iran has so far stopped short of crippling them in a major city, but appears to retain the capability.

Gulf governments deserve credit for protecting their populations so far, and many have prepared for versions of this. Qatar built fifteen of the world’s largest drinking-water reservoirs; Saudi Arabia built the largest of them all. Whether those redundancies hold over weeks and months, through the most severe stretch of the year, no one can say for sure. Knock out power and water in Doha or Dubai in August, and you have a humanitarian emergency for Gulf citizens, laborers, and millions of other foreign residents.

It is fashionable to knock the glitz of places like Dubai and Doha and the influencers who flock to them. The mockery misses what these cities provide for most of the people making their lives there. Labor laws and legal systems fall short of what anyone would demand in the West. They need to improve. Still, the cities offer what many once found in New York or London: an opportunity and foothold for strivers whether from South India or the North of England. These people are not influencers in the usual sense. Many send money home, which is an influence of a much better kind.

If you listen to the podiums in Washington, it is hard to know where this conflict is going. The Trump Administration has left itself in a bind, without good options. But as they consider the path forward over the next ninety days, they can’t afford to ignore the calendar or season. The Administration downplayed the Strait’s geography at its peril. It would be even more foolish to escalate without taking the temperature.

Patrick Granfield was part of The National's launch team in Abu Dhabi, edited its opinion pages, and lived in the Gulf for four years. He later served as chief speechwriter to Rahm Emanuel during his first term as mayor of Chicago and as a speechwriter to Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Ash Carter.

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Ten years ago, signs began appearing on lawns across America: "In this house, we believe…" Science is real. No human is illegal. Kindness is everything. The signs were easy to mock, but where the sentiment was backed by action, the spirit was noble. This week, I made one of my own. You’ve seen it above, and it requires some explaining.

On Wednesday afternoon in Atlanta, England will play Argentina for a place in the World Cup Final. It’s the latest installment between two of football’s most grudge-laden rivals. And I will be cheering for England.

If my grandparents knew, they would have some questions. In parts of my family, anti-English sentiment has endured for as long as I can remember. In this, my family was unremarkable. Centuries of hardship and emigration made suspicion of the English less an opinion among the Irish than a birthright. It often crossed the Atlantic intact.

I came to appreciate my Irishness late and, like most converts, with fervor. As a young man, I always knew I was Irish, but I resisted making much of it. I learned to enjoy a drink from an early age, but St. Patrick’s Day seemed mostly to provide license for people who wanted to have too many. It did not help that St. Patrick’s Day was also my father’s birthday. He died when I was a boy. I understand much better now why my mother made a point every year of having a Mass said in his honor. Still, it was an occasion I connected far more with loss than inheritance.

It was in the Middle East, of all places, that I began to understand my roots differently, both the Irish and the American. Over several years working far from home, Irish journalists and diplomats adopted me without ceremony, as though I were one of their own.

At Dubai’s Irish Village, I watched France play Ireland in a World Cup qualifier with Seamus O’Buachalla, my good friend and fellow journalist. Ireland had dragged France to extra time and was minutes from penalties when Thierry Henry controlled the ball with his hand and set up the goal that eliminated them. I was gutted. Seamus had a different view. “Patrick,” Seamus said, “if you don’t know that your heart’s going to be broken, there’s no use in being an Irish person.”

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There is a line often attributed to W. B. Yeats: “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” It made sense to me. More than that, many Irish Americans I had grown up around were insular. The actual Irish I befriended abroad were far more open to the world. A history of emigration had made that openness necessary. As the Irish author Colum McCann once explained, “We seem to embrace a lot of different experience.” The Irish have “an ability to tell the story,” McCann said, “to live our lives out loud.”

As part of the Irish community in the Gulf, I understood what the Leeds-born Peter O’Toole described about connecting with his Irish roots. “I was a bit of a misfit, but I went into Kerry,” O’Toole explained, “and it all clicked. I wasn’t different at all. It was the other ones. They were very strange.”

By the time I left the Arab world for Chicago to write for Mayor Rahm Emanuel, I valued my roots so much that I took one of his criticisms too literally. “I mean, have you learned a single thing?” he asked me. “Why do you insist on using Elizabethan English?”

I was used to the mayor’s criticism, but this was a bridge too far. I had no attachment to Elizabethan English. It was Elizabeth’s armies that laid waste to Munster. Her planters settled what was left. The language’s finest practitioner, Edmund Spenser, was one of them. Between drafts of The Faerie Queene, he authored a tract arguing that the Irish should be starved into submission.

But my family was stubborn. They lived in remote County Kerry, on the western edge of the island, between rocks and bogs and a raging Atlantic. What little they had, they kept. As they held on to a difficult world, they clung to their stories, traditions, words and language. When Mícheál, my family’s original emigrant, came to America early in the twentieth century, he left one of the last strongholds of Irish speakers on the island.

And here was Mícheál’s descendant a century later, making his living crafting the Mayor’s English, criticized for using the language too properly. I did not tell any of this to Rahm. In truth, I was probably too verbose; his voice was more David Mamet than David Copperfield. Elizabethan, Victorian, Jacobean, whatever. Our work in Chicago was too urgent for me to press a generational grievance.

But the grievance traveled with me. My children have clearly noticed. They can sing “The Fields of Athenry” by heart, and I have taken them to Ellis Island to see the manifest that records our original emigrants.

A few months ago, my son paid me a compliment. “You don’t really have much prejudice,” he said. Then he stuck the knife in. “Except for the English.” He was not entirely wrong. If I expect other people to move beyond their prejudices, I should be willing to challenge my own.

That is why supporting this England team is more than a sporting indulgence. I want my children to see that we do not honor our dead by keeping their enemies. We honor them by carrying what they handed down, the stories, the faith, the words, so that the grudges carry much less.

It is worth remembering how much things have changed, and in England, how hooliganism, racism and ethno-nationalism once helped define the national team’s following. Far-right organizations recruited around England’s matches. Players of color endured racist abuse from the stands.

A generation later, look at who will represent England against Argentina. Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford, Eberechi Eze and Marc Guéhi, Englishmen whose family histories extend through Nigeria, Ivory Coast and the Caribbean. The team’s success is also a tribute to the strength of the Irish diaspora. Harry Kane’s family has roots in Connemara. Declan Rice, the beating heart of the midfield, has Cork in his blood. Jude Bellingham has an Irish grandparent and even wore the Irish kit as a boy. Anthony Gordon, who has been magnificent in this World Cup, could have declared for Ireland too.

Many of England’s starting XI are from families whom empire, hunger, or work pulled into England’s orbit. They are not appearing in the national shirt as guests. This week, they are England itself.

A football team cannot redeem the abuses of empire, and no one should have to reject their roots to join something new. England’s players carry histories that once placed their families on opposite sides of hierarchies and conflicts. Now they advance together, as part of one proud team. That’s worth admiring whether you are Irish, English, American or, God love them, Argentine.

England’s supporters will bring extraordinary passion to Atlanta on Wednesday and perhaps to the final this weekend. But the atmosphere will be far different from the old days. So will the men who define the national side.

Supporting them is not a repudiation of my inheritance. My family survived rock and bog, Elizabeth’s armies, and American tenements. Surely it can survive ninety minutes of goodwill toward England.

So here is my sign, staked in the front yard of this newsletter: In this house, we believe history is real, the grudge is unnecessary, and, for this week, God help me, football is coming home.

Patrick Granfield served as a national security appointee in the Obama administration, and, most recently, as senior adviser at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC).

This morning, ahead of the NATO summit in Ankara, Donald Trump repeated his claim to Greenland. It “should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark,” he said. Trump allowed that pressing the claim “would hurt my relationship with NATO.” Then he went ahead and made it anyway.

Set aside the strangeness of an American president repeating threats against an ally from inside an alliance summit. Pay attention to what Trump admitted: America’s relationship with NATO is a price he believes is worth paying. No one around him appears willing to tell him what the alliance has actually bought — not in the language of a communiqué but in the number of American lives the alliance has helped to protect.

What the Alliance Paid

I was working as a journalist in the Middle East when al Qa’eda in the Arabian Peninsula was at its height, planning audacious attacks against Americans and American interests. It was a Danish intelligence source who reportedly provided an early window into the operations of the terrorist group, whose plots against U.S. aviation were later foiled. Years before, Danish officials authorized American access to a fiber-optic node outside Copenhagen that became central to tracking terrorist communications across Europe and the Middle East. The arrangement was so extensive that it later cost Danish officials significant political pain at home. And yes, it was Danish forces in Afghanistan who suffered the highest casualty rate, per capita, of any partner in the U.S.-led coalition.

Trump’s threats to Greenland, Denmark’s sovereign territory, should be taken seriously. He has made them repeatedly over his two terms, and this week, after the impasse was supposedly resolved. At Davos this winter, Trump announced a framework with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte that left Danish sovereignty over Greenland intact. The off-ramp the United States and allies built, Trump has now driven past.

We just spent the 250th birthday of the republic with Trump celebrating himself in the shadow of the Washington Monument. In two months comes a harder anniversary: twenty-five years since September 11. Between those two dates sits a fact worth stating plainly, because almost no one in the Trump administration will. Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty — an attack on one is an attack on all — has been invoked exactly once in the alliance’s seventy-seven years. Not for Europe, but for us. On September 12, 2001, while the Pentagon still smoldered, our allies declared that the attack on New York and Washington was an attack on London, Paris, Ottawa, and Copenhagen. Danish soldiers went to Helmand because Americans died in Manhattan. Many did not come home.

The reward for these contributions has been a public pressure campaign over defense spending that Copenhagen has already budgeted to exceed, and a sitting American president laying claim, again, to sovereign Danish territory, sovereignty the United States itself formally recognized in 1916 as part of the price for acquiring the U.S. Virgin Islands. We have already been paid for accepting that Greenland is part of Denmark.

There is history here that Trump likes to cite and does not understand. The American military presence in Greenland, the foundation of every argument he makes on the issue, exists because of an act of Danish trust. On April 9, 1941, one year to the day after German troops occupied Copenhagen, the Danish envoy in Washington, Henrik Kauffmann, signed the Greenland Defense Agreement on his own authority. His captive government charged him with treason. He signed it anyway, because he trusted the United States. The agreement said the United States would safeguard “the eventual re-establishment of the normal relationship” between Greenland and the Danish government after the war. The United States kept the bases and kept the promise. Every American installation on that island, down to Pituffik Space Base today, stands on Kauffmann’s signature. Trump reads that history as a claim of ownership when it is, in fact, the opposite. It is a record of both a promise and a debt.

The Bill Comes Due

The rupture Trump has created with Denmark over Greenland now goes far beyond one bilateral partnership. Last fall, the directors of Dutch civilian and military intelligence took the extraordinary step of warning publicly, in De Volkskrant, about “politicized intelligence” coming from Washington. In January, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that France now provides two-thirds of the intelligence Ukraine receives from its partners. It was a quiet acknowledgment that, after Washington’s brief but stark suspension of support to Kyiv last year, allies had stopped assuming the United States would be a reliable partner. In April, after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz observed that the United States was being humiliated by Iran, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth responded by announcing plans to remove 5,000 U.S. troops from Germany.

European intelligence services are now openly discussing alternative information-sharing arrangements that would route around the United States entirely. The Financial Times has reported that the European Commission has begun setting up a dedicated intelligence cell inside its secretariat-general, staffed by officials seconded from member states, tasked with synthesizing what European agencies collect. A Commission spokesperson confirmed the unit is under active development. Building such an architecture at scale would be difficult, and major services like France’s are historically wary of sharing with Brussels, but the trajectory is unmistakable. Allies have watched this White House treat classified material as a personal asset. They are less confident that information shared with the United States will be handled with discretion, used as agreed, or that it can be insulated from the whims of an unpredictable president.

Information sharing will not unravel overnight or altogether. But partners are likely to become more selective and cautious — and at a time when threats are rising. The National Counterterrorism Center reported late last year that al Qa’eda is increasingly looking for opportunities to attack U.S. interests. , reporting from Iraq for The Washington Post this winter, detailed the resurgence and gathering strength of ISIS, an organization that once controlled vast territory and inspired attacks in the United States. Then there is Iran. Whether or not last month’s MOU with Iran holds, the country’s proxy networks and asymmetric capabilities remain a danger.

What “Homeland” Used to Mean

Listen to this administration and you might think these are not significant threats to Americans. Secretary Hegseth released a posture statement to Congress in May that included a single sentence acknowledging the threat of terrorism. Defending “the homeland,” though awkward and somewhat Teutonic in phrasing, once meant protecting Americans from those who would mass murder them on their own soil. It has now become the administration’s shorthand for ICE raids, deportation flights, and the spectacle of immigration enforcement. Migration can create real security vulnerabilities, including the risk that hostile states or terrorist groups will try to exploit migration routes. But a serious approach to national security cannot reduce every danger to the border while neglecting the foreign terrorist networks still planning attacks on Americans.

Alliances are not sentiment; they are the substance of our security architecture. For the last twenty-five years, the strength of that architecture has been a large part of why another massive attack on the country, once considered inevitable, has not occurred. A country that just spent the Fourth of July celebrating two and a half centuries should remember that our security has rarely been a solo achievement.

Trump named a price he was willing to pay this morning: the U.S. relationship with NATO. What he did not say, and what somebody must, is what that relationship has been worth. By dismantling alliances, we invite a world that is more dangerous for Americans. We should not need another attack on the United States to remember.

Patrick Granfield served as director of strategic communications for the Secretary of the Army and as speechwriter to the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, and Mayor of Chicago. More recently, he served as senior adviser at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC).

Comparisons between Trump’s failures and President Carter’s have been fashionable in recent weeks. Even after Trump’s about-face, turning his demand for Iran’s total surrender into something close to capitulation in the form of a 14-point MOU, some comparisons still track. Like Carter, Trump’s attention to Iran was episodic. He has preferred the gloss of his advisers to the harder work of understanding what is really happening on the ground. Like Carter, Trump’s presidency may now be undone by the same two forces: inflation at home and hardliners in Tehran.

But if Carter lacked focus on Iran, the same cannot be said of his diplomacy with the rest of the world: SALT with the Soviets, a warming with India, brokering peace between Egypt and Israel, and shaping China’s entry into the community of nations. Carter’s mistake was not hubris — the belief that he alone could solve what his predecessors had failed to address. Nor, when given the chance, did Carter show indifference.

No Such Excuse

Trump has no such excuse, as his agenda and performance at this week’s G7 summit made plain. Even his most sustained foreign-policy push, on Russia and Ukraine, the war Trump once promised to end in twenty-four hours, has mostly collapsed. Instead of energetic diplomacy, Trump is offering a fire sale: Europeans cut out and condescended to, Kyiv pressed to surrender its claims, the war grinding on. Or take ties between the U.S. and other consequential partners, India for instance. The U.S. relationship with the world’s most populous country is now defined mostly by grievance, Trump sulking that Narendra Modi will not credit him for averting war with Pakistan. As for China, can anyone really describe the policy? Not Elbridge Colby, whom Trump installed at the Pentagon to shape a China-first strategy.

Trump has spent his energies much closer to home, quite literally: a White House ballroom, a reflecting pool, a cage match on the South Lawn, even public golf courses in Washington. This week, he handed the nation’s eighteen intelligence agencies, responsible for monitoring global threats, to a friendly real-estate scion with no intelligence background.

Then There Is the Reckoning

Carter received his reckoning running for a second term. But well before, during the hardest stretches of his presidency, a deeper and more useful reckoning began from within American institutions. To break inflation, Carter installed Paul Volcker atop the Federal Reserve. Volcker’s brutal interest rate hikes eventually helped to cure it, though far too late for Carter. After Trump’s vigorous campaign to remove the Fed Chairman, he now has his own, hoping he will lower rates.

When Carter’s Iran hostage rescue failed at Desert One, the American people knew it immediately. The Pentagon convened the Holloway Commission, and its findings helped rebuild American special operations from the ground up, creating the architecture that made American special operators the envy of the world: Joint Special Operations Command, the Night Stalkers, SEAL Team Six, the culture of interservice coordination that proved decisive in later decades. The Pentagon’s response to failure in Iran was at their foundation.

Some of America’s elite forces were on the ground outside Isfahan in April. Many of the country’s most capable units, equipped with some of the most advanced technology, supported by more than 100 aircraft, found themselves in a fierce battle, reportedly to rescue downed airmen. Thankfully, there were no fatalities. Many questions remain about the operation, but we do know that many of our most elite service members were forced into a difficult extraction, several aircraft destroyed on the ground to keep them out of Iranian hands.

And what of America’s conventional forces? Trump has boasted that Iran’s navy is at the bottom of the sea. Yet Iran still managed to close the Strait of Hormuz for months. The USS Gerald R. Ford left the theater. Iranian drones and missiles hit American troops across the Gulf, killing and wounding U.S. troops, forcing many others from their bases.

Retreat, Dressed as a Deal

The memorandum of understanding Trump signed at Versailles promises an end to the conflict. As presented, its concessions run almost entirely in one direction. The United States lifts its naval blockade and pulls forces back from Iran. Sanctions ease and Iran’s frozen assets are tapped. A U.S.-backed reconstruction fund, reported at some $300 billion, is being readied should the process hold. Though if Tehran believes it will see those sums, it should make an inquiry into the balance of Trump’s Board of Peace.

The MOU is still very much an understanding of an understanding. It offers little precision and many ambiguities. None of them obscure Trump’s clear intent, which is retreat.

In exchange, Iran agrees to reopen the strait it had closed and keep talking about the nuclear program, the supposed reason for the war. The most difficult issues are deferred to technical negotiations that Tehran has every incentive to prolong. It is not just a bad agreement. Few agreements the United States has signed have been so lopsided. Going to war was a massive miscalculation, but given how badly Trump has managed it, a deal seems preferable to continuing the conflict with him as Commander-in-Chief.

Still, Trump’s supplication does not end the danger, and for two reasons. First, a Memorandum of Understanding presumes understanding. Trump has never understood himself as bound — not by his word, by agreement, or by principle. His position is always subject to change. At some point, negotiations may no longer serve him. While the war is paused, there is a real possibility it has not ended.

The Reckoning That Won’t Come

The second danger is more enduring: that the hard look that followed past failures is not arriving. A Republican-controlled Congress won’t demand it. Pete Hegseth is not about to support it. Avoiding scrutiny has been a top priority for the Defense Secretary. He has gutted review boards and sent scores of distinguished officers into retirement. The Pentagon’s capable press corps, Hegseth has locked out of the building. A reckoning like the one that followed Carter’s failed hostage rescue is not coming from Hegseth’s Pentagon.

It is not simply that Trump’s war has revealed several ways in which America’s ability to project power is more limited than advertised. Not learning from its failure exposes the diminishment of another source of America’s might: the capacity of institutions for self-correction. Trump and his enablers were not the inheritors of inevitable decline; they have been its most powerful catalysts. No memorandum can wish away what Trump has squandered in the Gulf or the damage he has done to the country’s institutions.

Carter answered for his failures during his own presidency and later in the election. Trump’s failures, once more personal in nature, have now led to systemic damage. This time, there is no one left to answer. President Trump has made America weaker and the world more dangerous. We will be reckoning with the cost long after he leaves the Oval Office.

Patrick Granfield served as director of strategic communications for the Secretary of the Army and as speechwriter to the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, and Mayor of Chicago. More recently, Patrick served as senior adviser at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC).

In the second summer of the president’s second term, the Secretary of Defense took the chairman of the Joint Chiefs aside for an oblique, off-the-record conversation, one the chairman would later describe to colleagues as the strangest of his career. The Secretary raised a preemptive flag about any orders for nuclear strikes coming from the president. Was he asserting an extra-legal veto over the president’s sole authority to make that order? Or was he, within his lawful authority, reminding commanders to verify the authenticity and lawfulness of any unusual direction with renewed vigilance?

Whatever the case, the Secretary was concerned enough about what was happening inside the White House, and about a president running out of time, that he felt compelled to take extraordinary measures. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs carried the Secretary’s message to the four-star commanders holding the keys to America’s nuclear arsenal.

That was 1974. The president was Richard Nixon.

One reason the episode is unsettling is because it sits somewhere between prudence and insubordination. There was no statute that created a veto of the president’s order. There wasn’t a clause in the Constitution that authorized the Secretary of Defense to substitute his judgment for the President’s. At the same time, the system depended then, as it does now, on lawful orders and competent judgment.

In 1974 it was James Schlesinger, who had headed the Atomic Energy Commission and the CIA before leading the Pentagon, who policed that grey zone. Today, it is Pete Hegseth, a weekend host at Fox News before leading the Department of Defense.

In 1974, the Attorney General was William Saxbe, known for his independence and record of military service, confirmed by a 75–10 vote in the senate with broad bipartisan support. Today, the Attorney General is Trump’s former criminal defense attorney, Todd Blanche, serving in an acting capacity, never confirmed by the Senate for the role he now occupies.

In 1974, the Republican leaders of Congress were Barry Goldwater, Hugh Scott, and John Rhodes, figures whose standing preceded the president’s rise, men with the courage to challenge him directly. Today, the Republican leaders of Congress act as if they serve at the pleasure of the president rather than according to their constitutional oath.

In 1974, the press was operating under fresh protections from the Supreme Court in the Pentagon Papers case and led by publishers willing to defy the Attorney General’s personal threats over Watergate coverage. Today, the AP has been stripped of White House credentials, and the Pentagon press corps has been evicted from its workspace. Last summer, Paramount paid $16 million to settle a presidential defamation suit weeks before its $8 billion merger with Skydance was approved by a Trump-appointed FCC chairman.

They are a product of the nearly six years Trump has spent dismantling the institutions that checked Nixon’s presidency. Trump’s effort arrived with full force late in his first term, when he signed an executive order stripping career civil servants, the nonpartisan professionals who staff every federal agency, of their job protections. It intensified in 2025 with DOGE, the inspector-general purges, and a series of loyalty appointments. It continues through every senior personnel decision since.

Nixon, for all his demons, tested the boundaries of the institutions he operated within rather than destroying them. He inherited a serious government and worked through its machinery. Despite the constitutional crisis his presidency precipitated, he negotiated SALT I and the ABM Treaty. He created the Environmental Protection Agency. He pursued a strategic agenda about real issues, not simply his own survival.

Still, in 1974, President Nixon was in a dark place, speaking to the presidential portraits on the White House walls and asking Henry Kissinger to kneel and pray with him on the carpet of the Lincoln Sitting Room. The country learned of these scenes only years later in accounts of close aides and reporting of Woodward and Bernstein. This week, the president was posting late at night on Truth Social, dozens of posts within a few hours, some promoting debunked conspiracies, others about theft at grocery stores, and he was still posting at 1:30 on Tuesday morning. The Bulwark’s Sam Stein, not given to alarm, described reading the evening’s accumulation of posts as “nerve-racking.” As Vivian Salama reported about the views of foreign officials in The Atlantic recently, “What once was viewed as strategic unpredictability now feels like destabilizing unreliability.”

In 1974, when the president was running out of time, the institutions caught up with him. Today, a vindictive president, more unsteady than ever, has spent five and a half years eliminating the checks that would constrain him. The next constitutional crisis is unlikely to end with the president’s resignation. What comes next belongs to no one party, but to all of us.

Patrick Granfield served as a national security appointee in the Obama administration, and, most recently, as senior adviser at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC).

Donald Trump began his political rise by attacking the legitimacy of America’s first Black president. More than a decade later, with his approval ratings testing record lows, Trump is attacking the credibility of the first American pope. In the year since Robert Francis Prevost became Pope Leo XIV, Trump has gone after him in every way short of demanding to see his baptismal certificate.

The pope, for his part, has stood firm. He has turned down an invitation to visit Trump, declined to attend the country’s 250th-birthday celebrations, and otherwise refused to bend the knee. Trump is dismissive but clearly rattled. Leo does not need to come to Washington to live rent-free in Trump’s head, a place once reserved for Barack Obama.

It did not start this way. When Leo became the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics last May, Trump called his election “a great honor,” a message that missed the point but, by Trumpian standards, qualified as cordial. Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio paid courteous visits to the new pope soon after.

In recent months, the relationship has gone another way entirely. Brian Burch, the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, previewed Secretary Rubio’s visit with Pope Leo today. He said it would be “a frank conversation about U.S. policy.” The diplomatic shorthand was both curt and telling. The meeting appears to have exceeded expectations. The Vatican allowed Rubio to pass through “the Arch of the Bells,” usually reserved for Heads of State and he spent more than two hours inside the Apostolic Palace. The State Department’s readout stressed a “shared commitment to promoting peace and human dignity.” Though if Pope Leo had shown any sympathy for MAGA, Trump and his appointees would now be calling him the greatest pope since St. Peter.

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The early read on Leo was that he would be a quieter pope: a scholar-administrator, more deliberate than his predecessor, Francis. At least where Trump is concerned, that prediction has not held. By last fall, Leo was openly criticizing the administration’s treatment of immigrants. When the war in Iran began in February, his critiques, rooted in the Gospel but not naming Trump personally, arrived with greater force.

When the war began, Leo was not caught off guard. A January meeting at the Pentagon between Trump officials and the papal nuncio, his representative in Washington, had served as a warning. According to reporting from Newsweek, CNN, and others, it was a meeting fraught with tension. The Nuncio left convinced the administration was seeking moral cover for the coming war. One official reportedly invoked the Avignon Papacy, the 14th-century episode in which the French crown bent the Holy See to its will. It’s not a reference one makes in passing.

As the war continued, Trump took to Truth Social, warning that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” Leo called the threat “unacceptable.” Trump responded by branding the pope “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” and claiming the College of Cardinals had elected him only because he was American, “and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump.”

Leo has not flinched. “I have no fear of the Trump administration,” he told reporters in April. “We continue proclaiming the Gospel message.”

Days later, J.D. Vance, who has named Augustine as his Catholic patron saint, told an audience at the University of Georgia that “it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” Leo’s order is named for the same saint, who is also the architect of just war theory. On the same day Vance was chiding Leo on Catholic teaching, the pope was on a pilgrimage to the seat of St. Augustine’s ministry in Algeria.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, one of Trump’s closest allies in Europe, came quickly to Leo’s defense. Trump scolded her publicly, saying he had been wrong to consider her brave. Then on April 13, Trump posted an AI image of himself as Jesus Christ, later claiming he had thought it depicted a doctor.

The polling has been brutal. According to a Washington Post–ABC News–Ipsos poll released this week, 87 percent of Americans disapproved of Trump’s depiction of himself as Jesus. Three-quarters disapproved of his threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” Two-thirds approved of Leo’s call for Americans to contact Congress to push for peace and negotiation with Iran. Trump’s overall approval has fallen to 37 percent. Pope Leo’s net favorability is +25 nationally and +47 among Catholics.

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Trump has picked many fights and made many enemies across two terms. Some of his targets have tried to repent and return to his good graces. Others retreated from public life or were forced from it.

Pope Leo stands in rare company with Obama, who has also stood firm and emerged unscathed from Trumpian barrage after barrage. It is far from the only thing they share. They come from similar places. Both came of age on the South Side of Chicago: Leo in the 1970s, Obama in the 1980s. Both spent years living or working in Chicago’s largely Catholic, working-class neighborhoods. Both were shaped, directly or indirectly, by the same intellectual and moral wellspring: Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, archbishop of Chicago from 1982 until his death in 1996.

Bernardin articulated his philosophy most famously in a 1983 lecture at Fordham University. He described “a consistent ethic of life” or what became known as the “seamless garment.” He believed that the Church could not be defined or dominated by a single issue like abortion, which many conservative Catholics had argued. From poverty to nuclear weapons, from immigration to capital punishment, the Church’s defense of human dignity required consistency across all issues. Pull one thread too tightly, Bernardin advised, and the whole cloth begins to tear. Bernardin’s thinking crystallized at the Catholic Theological Union in Hyde Park, where Robert Prevost was then studying as a young priest.

Obama is not a Catholic, though he was influenced by a similar geography and theology. Starting in 1985, Obama ran the Developing Communities Project from Holy Rosary parish in Roseland on Chicago’s South Side. His work was funded by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, a project blessed by Cardinal Bernardin. Obama’s earliest political training was in community organizing and efforts informed by Catholic social teaching: an emphasis on the dignity of work, a preferential option for the poor, and a belief that institutions exist to serve those they include.

Trump is unlikely to be familiar with Catholic social teaching by name. In practice, it is foreign to his approach to business and politics. But the biggest differences between Trump and his opponents, in Chicago or elsewhere, are much more personal than philosophical. What unsettles Trump is that Leo and Obama represent a rise he cannot easily explain and could never achieve. They began without inherited wealth or social pedigree, rising to become two of the most powerful men in the world. They built their careers working through institutions rather than rigging or destroying those that did not serve them. Their path to prominence was antithetical to Trump’s own.

The two men also offer a different model of what it means to be American, one that contradicts Trump’s idea of American greatness. Obama is Black and white, American and Kenyan, Hawaiian and Chicagoan. Leo is Chicago-born and a Peruvian citizen, French-Italian on his father’s side and Spanish-Creole on his mother’s, with ancestors described as “mulatto” as recently as two generations back. Both are rooted in several cultures and comfortable in their hyphenated identities.

Obama and Leo are at home in multiple cultures but also more at home in themselves. They do not demand devotion or fealty. But their cooler demeanor should not be mistaken for a lack of shrewdness. Neither would have advanced to his position without a keen sense of his environment and its operators. Whether in the Illinois statehouse or the Vatican Curia, these are shark-infested waters. Unless you know how to swim within them, you will not rise or survive.

At the same time, neither has organized his career around settling scores or weaponizing grievance. Their focus has remained on the long haul, content at times, as Obama once explained, to hit singles and doubles rather than always swinging for the fences.

They are both, as it happens, fans of the Chicago White Sox, a team that goes years without winning its division and decades without winning a World Series. Both remain White Sox fans anyway. Does anyone know what team Trump really roots for? Mostly himself, or whichever side is winning.

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It is by now an established subgenre of right-wing discourse: the speculation, on Tucker Carlson’s podcast and Joel Webbon’s livestream and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s social feed, that Trump may be possessed, may be channeling something demonic, may — sotto voce, just-asking-questions — be the Antichrist himself. The president’s own coalition has begun reading Revelation against him. Such theories are best left to conspiracy theorists and the comment sections of the right.

The clearer point is this: one year into his pontificate, Leo XIV is becoming the Anti-Trump. His strength rests within an institution; Trump depends on dominance and personality. Leo speaks many languages to a community of different cultures; Trump’s message is tribal. Leo is steady and disciplined; Trump is impulsive. Leo does not shout back at Trump because he doesn’t have to — because his authority comes from a place Trump cannot buy or bully.

If the past year is any guide, Trump has picked a fight with the wrong Chicagoan.

Of course, that calm was hard-won. The quiet there, and the free flow of energy and goods passing through the Strait, was never a given. It was secured by the U.S. Navy, working with a strong group of allies and partners committed to upholding international law.

I returned to Washington in 2013, working at the State Department. Then, the status of the Strait of Hormuz was not in dispute. It wasn’t on the agenda when I traveled with Secretary Kerry’s team as the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China sat down with their Iranian counterparts in Geneva. In fact, there was only one topic of discussion: Iran’s nuclear program. It took nearly two years of painstaking negotiations to reach an agreement, the JCPOA. Though constrained in scope, the agreement reckoned seriously with the problem it was trying to solve. It put a stop to Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon for at least 15 years, with buy-in from five of the world’s most powerful nations.

Even those with the least sympathy for Iran understood what had been achieved. As Donald Trump’s first Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis said in 2018 about the JCPOA, “It is written almost with an assumption that Iran would try to cheat. So, the verification, what is in there, is actually pretty robust.”

Trump abandoned the agreement later in 2018, saying he would get a better deal. He never did. The JCPOA put verifiable limits on Iran’s enrichment capacity; Trump’s leaving the deal meant there were none. Iran’s capabilities have now advanced significantly. What’s more, there is now less trust that the United States will keep its word, not only from adversaries, but from traditional allies and partners.

More Disputes, More Spoilers

Trump still speaks as though a settlement can be reached on his command, but what he now faces involves far more than what he once rejected. Consider all that is currently on the table: not only Iran’s nuclear program, but its support for regional proxies, its missile capabilities, its conventional military forces, and now, because of Trump’s poor planning, terms of passage through the Strait, which Iran now controls.

The number of contested issues in play is just one factor working against an enduring settlement. There are too many parties close to the negotiations with incentives to be a spoiler.

On the American side, Israel’s interests are now woven directly into the process in ways they were not during the P5+1 talks, when Israeli concerns were heard but their pressure applied from the outside. Prime Minister Netanyahu has significant reasons to prevent any workable agreement from taking hold and several options at his disposal to ensure one never does. On Lebanon alone, Pakistan’s prime minister said it was included in the ceasefire, while Netanyahu’s office said it was not. That discrepancy shows how quickly accounts of what has been agreed to can diverge.

Iran’s internal picture presents even greater complications. Trump is right in one sense: strikes on Iran’s leadership have been remarkably effective. But after six weeks of war, new factions have emerged, each vying for influence and legitimacy. In this environment, any concession they make during negotiations will diminish their internal credibility.

Then there is the nature of the American in charge of negotiations. Trump has made clear, both in his public statements and the posture of his administration, that he wants a deal, and wants it soon. The most eager to reach an agreement is usually in the weakest negotiating position. Here, he is more likely to take a bad agreement and call it a win. What’s more, Trump has never shown himself to be burdened by consistency. If at some point he believes an agreement no longer serves him, he has shown little compunction against changing his position or reneging on commitments.

What Comes Next

Hopefully the ceasefire will hold. Perhaps the talks getting underway in Pakistan produce an extension. But in the medium term, prolonged conflict is far more probable than any enduring agreement. Hostilities will likely rise and fall in intensity, with each side hoping to contain the conflict below a certain level. But the longer this lasts, the greater the damage to the global economy, and the greater the risk of escalation that neither side can fully control.

I remember driving along the Omani Coast up to the Strait, and how on a clear day, you could see Iran across those waters. Because of American power and its ability to bring partners together, it was assumed that Iran would never control them. Of course, the physical geography hasn’t changed; the political geography has now changed entirely. By disparaging allies and diminishing the legitimacy of American leadership, Trump has surrendered much of what he needs to take back the Strait. Restoring what Trump has lost will take far longer than what he has promised from two weeks of talks.

Patrick Granfield served as a national security appointee in the Obama administration, and, most recently, as senior adviser at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC).

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Friends,

Several years ago, I took my son to play golf at East Potomac, a public course on the Potomac River a short walk from the Jefferson Memorial. He lost his first tooth somewhere on the back nine. I nearly made my first birdie. We’ve been going back ever since.

I wrote about the place recently in The Bulwark. Trump wants to take over the public course, refashioning it according to his personal taste. It is a small story with much bigger implications. What’s at stake is more than a golf course, but whether public spaces, shared and accessible, are still ours to keep.

This is the first edition of a newsletter about politics, culture, national security, and what can bring us together. I spent years in government, writing for Rahm Emanuel in Chicago, working on national security issues in the Obama administration and, most recently, at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC). While I’ve written for The Atlantic, Politico Magazine, and Foreign Policy, what I want to do here is write the way I actually think — not for a particular editor, or a particular word count, but for you.

Strengthening What Remains, Taking Ownership of What We Cherish, and Building Our Country Anew

I’m sharing my piece in The Bulwark as a way of re-introducing myself and what I hope to do with this space. In the coming days, I’ll share a few more thoughts about how “Making Ethnicity Great Again” is critical to countering Trump’s new nationalism. I’ll write about what happens when the oxygen fueling American prosperity — the strength of our military, the centrality of our financial system, and our rule of law tradition — becomes depleted. There is no silver bullet that will allow us to take back our democracy. But I hope that piece by piece, I can give voice to some of what we can do: to strengthen what remains, to take ownership of what we cherish, and to build this country anew.

More to Come …

If these topics resonate, I’d be grateful if you’d follow along, and more grateful still if you passed it on to someone who might find it worth reading.

America is great not because we say it is, but because of what we do to reinvent it in each generation. I hope you keep the faith and join the fight for a country we can be proud of again.

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