Six months in, the war’s most consequential achievement may involve something Trump never set out to do and is unlikely to claim as a victory: it has turbocharged a global push toward clean energy.

That’s not only a win for the champions of clean energy. It may mark a significant step forward in the struggle against climate change – one that could actually help save the planet.

Call it Trump’s accidental victory.

The world learns a lesson

Trump launched the war at a moment when much of the world (the U.S. being a notable exception) was already moving in the renewables direction, driven by faith in clean energy, concerns about climate change and – in Europe especially – a desire to reduce dependence on Russian oil and gas.

But the Iran war has added a powerful catalyst to the shift, by demonstrating the vulnerability of any oil- and gas-dependent economy to a single chokepoint. That, in turn, has taught much of the world a basic lesson: No nation can blockade the sun. Or the wind. Clean energy can save us.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), governments have responded to the war by diversifying their energy supplies or pledging to do so. The IEA now forecasts that renewable-energy generation will rise by 8.5 percent in 2026, making this the first year in which renewables will be the world’s largest source of electricity.

Reuters reported this week that governments in Europe and Asia are accelerating renewable-energy investment in direct response to the war’s disruption of oil and LNG shipments. The shift has been particularly pronounced in Southeast Asia, which has suffered an estimated $3.4 billion-per-month increase in energy costs, sending much of the region into what the Associated Press has described as a state of “energy triage.”

In some cases, citizens aren’t waiting for new government policies to take hold. In the Philippines, purchases of rooftop solar panels have tripled, according to the IEA. Africa, meanwhile, is headed for a record year of solar panel imports,according to the energy-focused think tank Ember.

Other signs of the shift include the acceleration of an already rapid growth in electric vehicle sales, particularly in China and Europe. As diesel prices have soared, China has doubled its exports of electric trucks – with huge spikes in sales to South and Southeast Asia. Last month, in an effort to cut oil imports and encourage the shift to electric vehicles, Laos banned the import of fuel-powered vehicles for the rest of 2026.

Old worry: climate. New worry: security

The war in Iran hasn’t just boosted sales of renewables; it has also altered the global argument for clean energy.

It used to be: Invest in renewable energy to reduce carbon emissions, ease the impact of climate change and, in the long term, save money. Now there’s another case to make: renewables reduce exposure to foreign suppliers and shipping chokepoints, and offer a hedge against price shocks that come with conflict in the Middle East.

You don’t need to be a think-tank analyst to understand that the latter argument will do more to move the needle. In countries most affected by the Iran war, energy policy is now discussed less as a long-term effort to save the planet, and more as an urgent matter of national security.

The World Economic Forum put it this way: “The US-Iran crisis is shifting the case for renewables from mostly cost and sustainability to a powerful additional security driver.”

Shocks to the global energy system have happened before. The 1973 oil crisis (sparked by the Arab-Israeli war and an OPEC embargo) led to the creation of the IEA and an early push toward alternative energy sources. The IEA itself says the 2026 disruption is reshaping investment priorities in ways reminiscent of the 1970s-era oil shocks.

The current shifts come with a catch.

While many countries rush to find alternative energy sources, some are also turning back to the old ones. Coal generation is expected to rise by 1.4 percent in 2026, and global greenhouse-gas emissions are still projected to reach a record high this year.

But the growth in renewables has far outpaced the increase in coal investments, and the IEA and others see trend lines that favor cleaner sources of energy. For all its other consequences, the war in Iran has set off a global scramble for renewables – while forcing governments to think more seriously about energy security. And in the long term, that could be a very big win for the planet.

Champions of clean energy can thank Donald Trump.

Who am I?

A few clues:

• I started a war against a sovereign nation – a war that is ongoing.

• I gave several different rationales for launching the war; the main one was that I was responding to a threat to my country.

• I believed the war would be won and ended quickly.

• The global media didn’t buy my explanations for the war; neither did most European countries. (That hasn’t bothered me much).

• As the war has continued, it has caused trauma in many other parts of the world. (That hasn’t bothered me much either).

• While I won’t say so publicly, I now want to end the war as soon as possible; that’s because it’s hurting my country, and it’s not good for my popular image (I won’t say that publicly either).

• I believe the press has unfairly characterized my war as a failure.

• What I need now is a way to declare victory.

• The problem is that I have yet to meet the objectives I laid out.

Again, then: Who am I?

The Answer(s)

If you answered Vladimir Putin, you are correct.

If you answered Donald Trump, you are also correct.

If you answered Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, you are correct — and you understand the point of the exercise.

The wars these two leaders are waging are of course fundamentally different – Iran and Ukraine are utterly unalike, as are the nations supporting them, and the regional and global implications of the two conflicts.

But in both cases, a powerful global leader launched a war with a muddled idea of its purpose and the ease with which it could be executed. And today, each man is eager — desperate, perhaps — to deliver a “mission accomplished” speech, but finds himself stuck in a box of his own making: It’s hard to declare victory when so much has been sacrificed and there is so little to show for it.

Vladimir Putin has faced this conundrum every time “Victory Day” — Russia’s annual May 9 celebration of victory over Nazi Germany — rolls around. Victory Day is a holiday meant to celebrate military conquests, and for the past five iterations, Putin has struggled to articulate any triumphs — small ones, even — achieved in Ukraine.

Donald Trump faces the conundrum more regularly – though his war is only six months old. That’s because he has already declared victory several times.

On March 8, barely a week after he ordered the first attacks against Iran, Trump claimed the U.S. had “already won.” Two days later, he called the war “very complete,” and a day after that he said, “We won, we won. In the first hour, it was over.”

He repeated the claim several times before the war was one month old. On March 15: “Militarily, we’ve essentially defeated Iran.” March 24: “We’ve won this war. This war has been won.” March 26: Iran had been “decisively defeated.” Following the April ceasefire, Trump called the war a “total and complete victory. 100 percent. No question about it.” And most recently, on August 16, Trump said, “We’re winning big with the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

But the fact is that Donald Trump is no closer to victory — or to achieving his stated aims of a non-nuclear, non-threatening Iran, with new leadership and a better life for its people — than Vladimir Putin is to throwing out what he called the “Nazi” regime in Kyiv and reasserting Russian control of Ukraine.

And so we have two increasingly global wars, one five and a half years old (twelve years, if you include Russia’s seizure of Crimea), the other at the half-year mark. And two stubborn leaders, struggling to find a way out.

To begin with, some reaction from republicans who backed the war.

Here’s Senator Roger Wicker (R-Miss.):

Since day one, I have supported President Trump’s efforts to end Iran’s 47-year threat to the United States and our partners. I am concerned that the memorandum of understanding negotiates away the victories of Operation Epic Fury in ways that are completely out of step with the President’s goals. Specifically, the $300 billion fund for the reconstruction and economic development of Iran – though not funded by U.S. taxpayers – would make Iran’s payoff under President Obama’s 2015 deal look like a pittance by comparison.

From Senator Bill Cassidy (R-La.):

(Ronald) Reagan is rolling over in his grave. Iran’s nuclear ambitions were not curbed, and they have learned that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works and will undoubtedly leverage it in the future. Iran gets to build brand-new infrastructure under this deal. Before the war, the Strait (of Hormuz) was open, Iran was being crushed by sanctions, and 13 service members were still alive. Now, 13 Americans are dead, families have paid billions at the pump, sanctions will be lifted, and the bombing has stopped. This is the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.

Then there was retired General Jack Keane, a former acting Chief of Staff of the Army, advisor to President Trump and staunch supporter of the war.

Gen. Keane told a radio program Wednesday that his “gut reaction” was “more about what’s not in there than what’s in it,” referring to a lack of restrictions on Iran’s missile capabilities and inspections of its nuclear facilities.

“I was really expecting a little more meat on the bone,” Gen. Keane said. “We’re a long way from accomplishing the objectives that the president wants to accomplish here with the Iranians.”

I don’t know Spencer Hakimian (he’s a founder of Toulou Capital Management) but the graphic he posted today, comparing the 2015 Iran nuclear deal with this week’s agreement, looks about right:

Unfrozen Iranian assets

2015: $1.7B • 2026: $25B

Uranium stockpile

2015: Reduced by 98% • 2026: No agreement

Uranium Enrichment

2015: Capped at 3.67% • 2026: No agreement

Sanctions

2015: Largely remained in place • 2026: Lifted

Strait of Hormuz

2015: Open without tolls • 2026: Open under Iran/Oman control with tolls

American deaths

2015: 0 • 2026: 13

Americans injured

2015: 0 • 2026: 543

Direct U.S. cost

2015: Cost of diplomacy • 2026: >$100 billion

U.S. weapons stockpile

2015: No change • 2026: Depleted

A critic might argue (some already have) that these statistics fail to acknowledge damage done to Iran’s weapons stockpiles and setbacks to its nuclear program. On the other hand, not listed here – perhaps because these are far less tangible metrics – is the damage done to U.S. credibility, and the fact that the war has produced no real regime change or relief for anti-regime protestors (who President Trump buoyed in January when he pledged that “help is on its way.”)

Sometimes it’s a smart person far from the foreign policy epicenter who nails the analysis. Michael Vatis is a lawyer and a friend, and yesterday he read the text of the MOU and offered what was basically a fleshed-out version of Hakimian’s chart:

Iran merely promises to use its best efforts to ensure safe passage of commercial vessels with no charges for 60 days, reaffirms its longstanding commitment not to procure or develop nuclear weapons, and agrees “to resolve the disposition of stockpiled enriched material” in a manner TBD…but no percentage of enrichment is stated. Nothing about stopping its support for terrorist groups.

In exchange, Iran gets:

• The termination of military operations by the U.S and its allies on all fronts, including Lebanon;

• Respect for its sovereignty and territorial integrity and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon (meaning Israel has to withdraw its troops);

• The immediate removal of the U.S. blockade and of U.S. forces “from the proximity” of Iran (to be completed in 30 days);

• $300 billion in reconstruction and economic development money (no source identified, but presumably a lot from Gulf states and perhaps China);

• Tacit recognition that Iran can impose charges on commercial traffic after 60 days and can define, with Oman, “future administration and maritime services” in the Strait;

• The U.S. will lift all sanctions, primary and secondary, as part of the final deal. This may be the biggest thing of all. The Obama deal left all non-nuclear related sanctions in place;

• The U.S. will issue waivers allowing the export of Iranian oil – so no more need to use ghost ships;

• And the U.S. will “make fully available for use the frozen or restricted funds and assets” of Iran. This is huge. Trump was extremely critical of this when Obama did it.

Well said.

Finally, a pair of voices from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) – two experts on these matters who are as sharp and experienced as they come.

Ray Takeyh, CFR’s Senior Fellow for Middle East Studies:

Trump’s deal reflects Iran’s priorities, not the United States’…The Iranians have succeeded in setting the agenda. The nuclear issue is not part of the agreement but Israel’s conduct in Lebanon is. Tehran has already made clear that it will not ship out its highly-enriched uranium and it does not view the International Atomic Energy Agency as a neutral arbiter. If they stick to this position, any nuclear accord cannot be adequately verified. Nor has the Islamic Republic given up on monetizing its geography. Tolls can come in various forms, fees for transit or payment for not attacking the Gulf sheikhdoms. The first is a formal arrangement; the second is the prerogative of a tributary state. There is a reason it is called the Persian Gulf.

And then Steven Cook, a longtime CFR expert on U.S.-Middle East policy, weighing in on the view from Persian Gulf nations:

The Gulf states did not advocate for this war, but they are now forced to confront the fallout...They will likely have to contend with the aftermath without help from the United States.

The Omanis may actually benefit by joining Iran in collecting a toll. The Saudis and Emiratis have options to go around the Strait, but Kuwaitis, Qataris, and Bahrainis do not. They will be forced to comply with Iranian demands or experience economic dislocation. The conflict will likely lead to additional Gulf hedging in the form of non-aggression pacts with Iran.

Few Gulf states believe the war should have happened in the first place, and they are all concerned that the United States empowered Iran as a result. Now these countries’ leaders are left to put on brave faces over the MOU.

Today, Vice President JD Vance, peppered with some of the above criticisms, said that “words don’t matter…we’re about verification.” He said that “if (the Iranians) do change their behavior, then they are going to have a transformative relationship with the Middle East, and the Middle East will have a transformative relationship with the people of Iran.”

That’s a glass-half-full perspective. It’s hard at this moment to find many who share it.

As for President Trump, he said yesterday that his deal was far better than the 2015 agreement brokered by the Obama administration – a deal he eviscerated as a candidate in 2016 and abandoned during his first term. “You know what the Iranians did?” Trump said Wednesday. “They laughed at Obama, and they said, ‘He’s a stupid son of a bitch.’”

I’ll leave it there, with two questions:

In what way is this agreement better than the 2015 deal? And what do you think the Iranians are saying now?

I was seven years old that spring, and Dad’s tip is the reason I have a nice (if blurry) memory of the Knicks’ Game 7 win over the Los Angeles Lakers that earned them their first championship. It’s also why, in shootarounds at Playground 3 in Manhattan’s Peter Cooper Village, I took to imitating Dave DeBusschere and Bill Bradley and Walt “Clyde” Frazier (there was no point trying to mimic Willis Reed or Dick Barnett, as they were lefties). I did the same in countless Nerf Ball adventures in my room, imaginary games which the Knicks always won in clutch fashion. On more than one occasion, Dad ducked in while I was mimicking a crowd roaring over some amazing shot that one of my heroes had made.

Mom and Clyde

In the years that followed, my hoop dreams were joined by some nice hoop realities.

There was the day my mother, who worked as a secretary at the United Nations, came home and said she had a surprise for me. I saw no bag or package, and I suppose I was skeptical. Then she produced a small scrap of paper. It took me a moment to make out the scrawl.

“To Thomas

Walt Frazier”

I didn’t get it at first. I saw the name, but – Clyde Frazier? How in the world…?

Mom had been shopping at a produce market a few blocks north of the U.N. when she saw a tall man in “a gaudy outfit” – and while she couldn’t summon a name, she was pretty sure this was one of her son’s heroes.

“Are you who I think you are?” she asked.

The man who had willed the Knicks to victory on that glorious May 1970 night (36 points, 19 assists and 7 rebounds) nodded quietly. Mom said the scratchy signature had to do with the fact that he had steadied pen and paper on the cantaloupe she was holding.

Mom teased me for years about my reaction; apparently I grumbled about how hard it was to read the handwriting – as if that made the gift any less wonderful. What I recall feeling was a blend of gratitude and amazement that my mother had done that. She hadn’t known a thing about Walt Frazier – only that her son loved him.

Soon after, it was Dad‘s turn to produce a glorious gift. Long before StubHub and corporate luxury boxes, you could actually get affordable tickets to big games. I know this because somehow my father, who never had much in the way of money or VIP connections, scored a pair of seats in what was then Madison Square Garden’s “orange section” – nowhere near courtside but not that bad – for Game 2 of the 1973 Eastern Conference Finals. The Knicks against the Boston Celtics. The Celtics! By then I was imitating those guys too, enemies in my make-believe Nerf games – John Havlicek, Dave Cowens, JoJo White and the rest.

What a night that was. Seismic, in a literal sense – as in, the ground under the Garden appeared to be shaking.

The Knicks had absorbed a 134-108 Game 1 drubbing in Boston (unlike today’s series, the teams alternated home court for each game). I was still only 10 years old, but by then I was a decent student of the game, and of my beloved Knicks, who had retained their 1970 core and added Earl “The Pearl” Monroe and the great backup center Jerry Lucas. I spent some of that night describing the players and other things for my Dad, and no doubt hollering and contributing my small share to the Garden roar.

The Knicks stormed out of the gate that night and never let up. A purist might have wished for a more competitive game – it was 92-61 after three quarters – but we Knick-lovers loved every minute and every possession. The tremors never stopped. Clyde had 24 points and 10 assists, DeBusschere 19 and 8 rebounds, numbers that would have been higher had the game been closer. (I checked the box score and discovered this footnote: Phil Jackson – the Knick substitute and future Hall of Fame coach – got lots of minutes, hit all seven of his shots, and finished with 16 points.)

I walked out of there in a state of bliss. Thanks to Dad‘s cleverness or generosity or whatever else it was that got us to that game, I could hold that memory and know that I had seen the ‘73 Knicks on their second run to glory. Less than a month after that magical night, the Knicks took down the Lakers again.

Another championship. More bliss.

And then, for Knick fans, the wait.

“Sports Fan Pain”

Not that there haven’t been memorable moments in the 53 years since.

My friendship with John McEnroe’s brother Mark brought close-to-courtside tickets on a couple of occasions – including one during which the 1990s workhorse Charles Oakley (6’-9”, 245) dove for a loose ball and landed a seat away from my wife. In 2003, when I was working at ABC News, the anchor Peter Jennings and I landed sensational seats for the Garden debut of the Chinese phenomenon Yao Ming. Peter peppered me with questions; he was endlessly curious, and – like my father – a devotee of other sports. In 2009, when my son was seven, I took him to a game, got to the Garden early, and wangled a pre-game hello and photo session with Jared Jeffries, the Knicks backup center.

It’s a reflection of the Knicks’ dog days that I remember little about those games. Thanks to Google, I’ve learned that Allan Houston carried the Knicks on the night of Yao’s debut – 28 points, to Yao’s 24 – with a roster that included Latrell Sprewell, Clarence Weatherspoon, Kurt Thomas and Shandon Anderson. Nice players all, but they would finish 39-43 that year – the third season in a nine-year run of sub-.500 performances. In 2014-15 and again in 2018-19, this once-mighty franchise won 17 games and lost 65.

There were the Patrick Ewing years and all their promise, when hopes were dashed by Michael Jordan and Reggie Miller and – in the team’s last visit to the finals, in 1999 – by San Antonio’s magnificent giants Tim Duncan and David Robinson.

And after that – another era of futility. Taken together, the Knicks spent more than half a century in a swamp of ineptitude, poor management and bad luck – “the very definition of Sports Fan Pain,” as Will Leitch put it recently.

The weirdness of fandom

All of the above may help explain (for those who need explaining) the frenzy of the current moment – the reason why blue-and-orange Knicks baseball caps are a five-borough fashion craze, or why strangers in my Brooklyn neighborhood holler and offer high-fives when I wear my old Allan Houston jersey. It’s why Knick fans seem to have forgiven (or forgotten) the notoriously unpopular owner James Dolan, and the fact that the cheapest Finals tickets at the the Garden are selling for close to $10,000. (Those tickets my Dad bought 53 years ago would probably go for $30,000 today. I don’t think he made $30,000 in salary back then.)

Fandom is a strange thing, with all its emotional highs and lows and the passions some of us carry for a certain squad or player. Adam Gopnik captured this well in a recent New Yorker article: “I have spent an inordinate amount of time caring about professional sports teams that do not care about my existence,” he wrote, “and rooting for the well-being and success of men often a quarter my age who make thousands of times more money than I do.” All I can say is, Me too. The actress Edie Falco, a longtime Knicks fan, admitted the other day to feeling “a little embarrassed at my positivity and joie de vivre” about the team. This season’s playoff run, she said, “is some whole other thing. It’s intense.”

Later this month, one of the wildest manifestations of fan fervor – the quadrennial World Cup – will kick off, and if you want a true, raw example of team worship, look no further than the legendary broadcaster Andres Cantor and his joyous, tearful call of the moment his native Argentina won the 2022 cup. If you’ve never seen it, consider this a gift:

NBA teams are different of course – they play every year, they’re not quite as global, and the New York Knicks are not a country. But what’s happening here at the moment feels like World Cup-level mania.

Much of this has to do with that agonizing and seemingly endless wait. The last time the Knicks hoisted a championship banner, Richard Nixon was in the White House, gas was 38 cents a gallon, and ATMs were a new thing. I was ten years old; I’m 63 now.

So if you aren’t a sports fan, or you happen to be visiting New York for non-basketball reasons, and you find yourself wondering about that sea of orange and blue, or the street closures near Penn Station, or the seemingly normal people hollering in the city’s streets and bars and even out their windows, please understand: We’re just a little out of our minds right now. Happily so.

My Mom and Dad would understand.

This year’s edition will be different.

A shrinking economy and setbacks in Ukraine are the big-picture traumas for Russia at the moment, but beyond the casualty counts and inflation rate there are subtler signs of trouble. And while tea-leaf reading in the Putin era is almost as fraught as Kremlinology was in the Soviet time, consider the following:

• According to a European Union intelligence report, Russia’s Federal Protection Service (FSO) has boosted security around Putin, fearing that he may be targeted by an outside power or members of Russia’s own elite;

• The report also said the FSO has blocked Kremlin aides from using cellphones or laptops and banned them from traveling on public transportation;

• Rare protests have sprung up against a series of blackouts and other restrictions on mobile internet use, measures the Kremlin said were needed for security reasons;

• Over the past two months, the state pollster VCIOM found Putin’s approval rating had dropped eight percentage points to 66% – still an enviable (if accurate) figure for a world leader, but the lowest since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine – and confidence in the future has fallen 20 points since the start of the year, to 41%;

• A chorus of high-profile voices – longtime Kremlin cheerleaders who one journalist referred to as the country’s “Sean Hannitys and Tucker Carlsons” – has started speaking out against Putin.

That last item may be the most significant. Since 2022, Putin has clamped down on dissent while nurturing an ecosystem of influencers who regularly praise his war and bash the West. Now some of these propagandists are publicly criticizing the Kremlin.

On April 13, Viktoria Bonya, a former reality TV star and now a social media influencer with 13 million followers, posted a video questioning whether Putin understands the nation’s economic pain and the plight of ordinary Russians.

“Vladimir Vladimirovich, the people are afraid of you,” she said, using Putin’s patronymic. “I am not afraid.”

Bonya’s video has been seen more than 25 million times – enough, apparently, to prompt Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, to acknowledge that she had raised legitimate concerns.

Soon after, the Moscow-based journalist and lawyer Katya Gordon – another big influencer – complained about a “divorce” between the Russian state and its citizens and warned of a possible “women’s revolt.” And the actor Ivan Okhlobystin, until recently another staunch regime loyalist, called the internet clampdown a “huge mistake” and accused the government of sending Russians “back to the USSR”.

“None of these figures are opposition activists,” Stanislav Kucher, a former Russian TV journalist who now lives in the U.S., told me this week. “Something dangerous for the Kremlin has begun to emerge – frustration from within the regime’s own loyalist camp. People who spent years supporting the system, amplifying propaganda, attacking the opposition, or at least carefully avoiding open criticism of the president.”

Most curious of all is the case of Ilya Remeslo. Remeslo is a lawyer who served for years as a Kremlin hatchet man, building bogus cases against opposition figures. Among other things he helped run a smear campaign against the late dissident Alexei Navalny. Now Remeslo hasn’t just changed his tune; in March, he posted a call for Putin to resign and urged that he be brought to justice as “a war criminal and a thief.”

Remeslo was seized and taken to a St. Petersburg psychiatric hospital – the treatment you might expect for someone who said such things in Putin’s Russia. But then, after just 30 days, he was freed. And he has picked up where he left off, going so far as to predict publicly that Putin “would not remain president by the end of the year.”

“The scale of dissatisfaction is colossal,” Remeslo told The Washington Post this week. “I have the impression that part of the system is already starting to work against Putin.”

What’s going on here?

Some believe that the Remeslo story alone – in particular the fact that he hasn’t been more severely punished – suggests high-level divisions inside the Kremlin. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oil tycoon who is now a Russian opposition figure based in London, told the Post that Remeslo’s release is proof that at least some powerful people in the Kremlin support him. Beyond the Remeslo case, Kucher sees a struggle between officials who oppose further isolation for Russia – “fearing economic collapse, technological backwardness, and social instability” – and the security services, who are “pushing for even tighter censorship and a more closed, militarized society.”

The disaffection with Putin may have many sources. The European intelligence report spoke of “internal tensions, battlefield setbacks, and economic strain.” Russia’s economy contracted in early 2026, and inflation (5.9 %) and interest rates (14.5 %) are high. As for the war, the toll of Russian dead and wounded soldiers is believed to have reached a staggering 1.2 million, and Ukraine has shown an ability to strike deeply and into Russian territory – there have been regular attacks against Russian oil infrastructure recently, and a drone hit a 54-story apartment building near the Kremlin on Monday.

“Something in the air has changed in Russia,” Alexander Baunov, a political analyst with the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote this week in Carnegie Politika. “Putin is losing his magic.”

“The real shift is psychological,” Kucher told me. “Putin is no longer perceived as an untouchable, sacred national figure whose criticism automatically places someone outside the system.”

As for Victory Day, it looks to be a shadow of the old glory days. A celebration that usually involves months of rehearsals and a huge military parade has had no rehearsals and will feature no military hardware – all the result of security concerns. For the same reason, Putin himself will spend less time on Red Square.

Does all this suggest that revolution, or even a quiet end to the Putin era, is imminent? It’s impossible to say. What is clear is that apart from the Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin’s brief and ill-fated rebellion in 2023, the tea leaves haven’t looked this bad for Putin since he launched his war.

One final tea leaf, courtesy of the French paper Le Monde: It’s the story of a kiss on the forehead. Two of them, to be exact.

“Whenever Vladimir Putin’s popularity wanes, he resorts to the same image,” the correspondent Benjamin Quenelle wrote this week. “Every time, the Russian president summons the cameras and kisses a child in public.”

Quenelle cited an April 27 event in St. Petersburg at which Putin met with young ballet students and kissed one of the dancers, a 10-year-old, on the forehead. The Kremlin quickly disseminated the video. Quenelle noted that the last time this happened was during a June 2023 visit to Dagestan, when Putin, surrounded by a crowd of locals, kissed a teenage girl on the forehead. The Dagestan event came just days after Prigozhin’s failed mutiny against Putin’s regime.

The paper quoted Farida Rustamova, editor-in-chief of the Russian website Vlast, saying that the latest kiss was a sign. Just as he had been back in June 2023, when he planted the kiss in Dagestan, she said, “Putin is worried.”

Recent history offers a stirring example of such help. On September 12, 2001, as Americans reeled from the trauma of the previous morning, support and sympathy poured in from around the world. Candlelight vigils were held in foreign capitals, American flags appeared on street corners and in store windows, and in a memorable headline published on September 13, the French daily Le Monde pronounced, “Nous Sommes Tous Américains.” We are all Americans.

The day after the terror, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for the first (and still only) time in its history, invoked Article 5, the clause compelling all members to respond to an attack on another. The following month, nearly 50 nations – including every NATO member – joined a U.S.-led war to drive Al-Qaeda and the Taliban from Afghanistan. Even the broadly unpopular U.S. war against Iraq, launched in 2003, drew a “coalition of the willing” of more than 30 countries. In Afghanistan and Iraq both, young men and women from allied armies fought and died for what were largely American causes.

It’s almost impossible to imagine such responses today. A slow erosion of pro-American sentiment that began in the early 2000s now looks like a rupture. If, God forbid, terrorists were to once again strike the U.S., or a different crisis moved Washington to ask other countries for troops or supplies or even financial aid, where would we turn?

It’s hardly an idle question. On the day the current war began, the Department of Homeland Security issued a warning that Iran and its proxies might respond to the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei with attacks against Americans. Three weeks later, Reuters reported that the FBI had warned state and local law enforcement that Iran “poses a persistent threat” to U.S. military and government personnel, among other targets. In some ways, the official warnings weren’t necessary; common sense suggests that jihadists could use Trump’s threats against the Iranian “civilization” as a recruiting tool, and a way of inspiring anti-U.S. violence.

As recently as 2024, the answers to the “who would we ask” question were straightforward. The U.S. would call, first, upon the NATO alliance. Presumably we wouldn’t even have to ask; they would understand instinctively, as they did in 2001, that the U.S. is a friend and essential ally, and well worth defending.

We live today in an utterly different world. Here’s a short list of what the U.S. has said and done vis-a-vis NATO over the last 16 months:

• Imposed 10-15 % tariffs against NATO members – along with ad hoc sanctions tied to political disputes;

• Criticized Europe and NATO repeatedly – beginning with JD Vance’s scathing assault on European democracy at the 2025 Munich Security Conference;

• Negotiated with the Kremlin about its war against Ukraine – absent any consultation with NATO – and shifted sharply away from U.S. support for Ukraine;

• Demanded that NATO member (and stalwart American ally) Denmark hand over Greenland;

• Threatened to leave NATO;

• Launched a war against Iran without consulting NATO, demanded after the fact that NATO allies help secure control over the Strait of Hormuz, and vented publicly when they refused to do so.

Taken together, these actions constitute a pileup of disrespect that has turned an uneasy truce (at last summer’s NATO summit, Trump and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte appeared to have smoothed over tensions) into a gaping wound. Not surprisingly, America’s European allies have concluded that flattering and appeasing the U.S. president are no longer worth the effort. The answers to Trump’s Strait of Hormuz request ranged from blunt “No”s to “Maybe, when the war is over” to “We will take it under advisement.” The prevalent view was expressed by Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius: “It’s not our war.”

That response dovetailed with a poll taken by Politico last month, in which citizens in six NATO countries were asked whether they viewed the U.S. as a “close ally,” “partner,” “competitor,” or a “threat.” The results were stunning: Only 12 percent chose “close ally”; the runaway winner was “threat” – 36% now see the U.S. that way. So much for “We are all Americans.”

Reports from other parts of the world are equally dispiriting. In the much-watched State of Southeast Asia report – an annual survey of regional leaders – more than half the respondents named U.S. global leadership as their biggest geopolitical concern. That’s another staggering data point – and this survey was taken before the war against Iran that has punished that region’s economies. It found that tariffs were to blame, along with “anxiety about inconsistencies in policy and the credibility of long-term commitments under Trump’s leadership.” Meanwhile, Politico reported this week on State Department cables warning that the Iran war is eroding U.S. influence and trust across key Muslim-majority regions – “straining security relationships, and potentially constraining cooperation with local governments on regional stability and defense initiatives.”

In all too many nations that have been friends of America for decades, the U.S. is no longer seen as reliable, credible or fair-minded. Would they answer an urgent call for help from Washington?

Consider the experiences of two longtime U.S. allies – now, and in the post-9/11 time.

President Trump has mocked Canada as the “51st State,” and at this year’s World Economic Forum at Davos Trump said that “Canada lives because of the United States.” A quarter century ago, Canada answered the call and then some; 457 Canadians died in support of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

In that same Davos address, Trump chastised Denmark for not handing over Greenland and failing to defend itself against Nazi Germany. “Without us, right now, you’d all be speaking German and a little Japanese, perhaps,” Trump said. “We gave Greenland back to Denmark. How stupid were we to do that?...How ungrateful are they now?”

Those comments infuriated Danes, enough to provoke widespread anti-American protests in subzero temperatures. They were angry in part because Trump mangled the history; Greenland has been under continuous Danish control since the 1720s, and while it’s true that Washington took over the defense of Greenland against Germany, it was never America’s to “give back.” But it was the “ungrateful” swipe that really stung, given that after 9/11, Denmark didn’t just answer the call to help the U.S.; it sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the latter war it lost more soldiers, per capita, than any U.S. ally.

None of this is to say that past deployments or sacrifices should forever insulate allies from criticism. And some countries may choose to help Washington if they see such aid as fulfilling their own national interests. But it’s hard to see why these and other nations that have spilled blood and treasure for the United States would go out of their way to do so now, having been alternately ignored, punished and pilloried by the current administration.

“President Trump has done everything he can to isolate the United States from the rest of the world,” Chuck Hagel, a former defense secretary, Republican senator and Vietnam War veteran, told The New York Times. “He’s about to learn that wars have consequences.”

One consequence may involve the nightmare scenario described here. Of course we all hope that there will never be another 9/11, or any national trauma that will compel the U.S. to call for allied help. But the questions remain: If and when such a moment comes, how will America’s old friends respond? What in the current atmosphere suggests they will stand with us again?

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the Army Chief of Staff, General Randy George, along with two other senior officers – the latest in a purge of top generals since President Trump’s return to the White House. The difference this time is that the dismissals came in the midst of a war.

Gen. George was three years into a four-year term as the U.S. Army’s most senior officer. Another four-star general, David Hodne, who had been promoted last October to lead the army’s Transformation and Training Command, was ousted, along with the Army Chief of Chaplains, Major General William Green, Jr.

In one fell swoop, Hegseth sacked the leader of the U.S. Army, the general in charge of the army’s modernization efforts, and the general whose job description includes serving as the Army’s principal advisor on religion, ethics and morale.

Why were they fired? Neither Hegseth nor anyone else in the administration would say. Gen. George “will be retiring from his position as the 41st Chief of Staff of the Army effective immediately,” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell posted on X. “The Department of War is grateful for General George’s decades of service to our nation.”

Into the vacuum came reports citing unnamed sources. CBS News quoted a “senior official” saying it was “time for a leadership change” and that Hegseth wanted someone who would carry out his and the president’s “vision for the Army.” Axios reported on a blunter assessment of Gen. George’s firing, also via an unnamed U.S. official: “Here is a four-star general who is actively working to get equipment and people into theater — to protect U.S. forces — and you fire him? In the middle of a war?” Writing about all three dismissals, The Atlantic said that “likely they are the latest victims of Hegseth’s vindictive struggles with the Army, which he feels treated him poorly—the service ‘spit me out,’ he said in his 2024 book—as he struggles in a job for which he remains singularly unqualified.”

For its part, the military leadership was effusive in thanking ⁠Gen. George for his service.

“Since 1988, General George and his family have consistently answered the nation’s call with honor and dedication,” the Joint Staff said in a statement. West Point joined in paying tribute. “Through candid insight and experience, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George challenged [cadets] to lead with integrity—even when it’s not easy,” the academy said. “Thank you, Gen. George, for investing in the next generation of Army leaders.”

The phrase “military purges” conjures sweeping actions taken by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and China’s Chairman Mao Zedong – or, in a modern variant, the recent house-cleaning carried out by Xi Jinping, who has been getting rid of People’s Liberation Army officers at a rate not seen since Mao’s time.

To be clear, what Secretary Hegseth has done – nearly a dozen top officers fired in a 15-month period – doesn’t come close to the scale or ruthlessness of Mao or Stalin. But it’s also rare in U.S. history. Michael Cembalest, Chairman of Market and Investment strategy for J.P.Morgan Asset & Wealth Management, offered a useful perspective in his Eye on the Market newsletter Monday, which I borrow from here. Cembalest cited eleven instances in a 156-year period – between 1860 and 2016 – in which top American commanders had been fired.

Five were the result of failed military campaigns:

• President Abraham Lincoln’s firing of General George McClellan after the Battle of Antietam, for McClellan’s failure to pursue General Robert E. Lee’s retreating army. (As Cembalest notes, “There was no small dose of politics in play as well, since McClellan was highly critical of Lincoln and ran against him in the 1864 election.”)

• President Franklin Roosevelt’s dismissals of Admiral Husband Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short, for “dereliction of duty” in failing to anticipate and defend the attack on Pearl Harbor.

• FDR’s firing of Lieutenant General Lloyd Fredendall after his forces were badly beaten in the Battle of Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, the first major engagement between U.S. and Axis forces in World War II.

• And President Barack Obama’s dismissal of General David McKiernan for a failed military strategy in Afghanistan.

The six other incidents, Cembalest writes, involved either “Insubordination, public statements disagreeing with the Commander in Chief, Article 88 violations under the Uniform Code of Military Justice or public disclosure of confidential information.”

• FDR fired Admiral James Richardson in 1941, when Richardson argued against positioning the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. (Richardson’s warning would of course prove prescient; his replacement, Admiral Kimmel, was one of those fired by FDR after Pearl Harbor).

• After World War II, General George Patton criticized U.S. cooperation with the Soviets and defied General Dwight Eisenhower by using former Nazi Party members in administrative jobs. Gen. Patton was charged with insubordination, and dismissed from his command of the Third Army.

• General Douglas MacArthur was fired by President Harry Truman for publicly disagreeing with Truman’s efforts to keep the Korean War limited and avoid a shooting war with China.

• Admiral Louis Denfeld was fired by Truman for opposition to U.S. defense cuts and military unification during what became known as the “Revolt of the Admirals.”

• General Michael Dugan was fired in 1990 by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney for disclosing confidential information regarding Iraq air-strike plans.

• And General Stanley McChrystal was fired by President Obama for comments – picked up by a Rolling Stone reporter – that were critical of Vice President Joe Biden.

That’s a very diverse set of wars and specific circumstances; the link is that in each case a reason was given for the dismissals. Those reasons may have been controversial, and some would prove unfair or misguided, but neither Secretary Hegseth nor others in the Trump administration have offered more than vague explanations for any of the firings – which, beyond the three generals dismissed last week, include the following: Air Force General Timothy Haugh, who served as NSA Director; General James Mingus, Vice Chief of Staff of the Army; General Jim Slife, Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force; General David Allvin, Chief of the Air Force; Commandant of the Coast Guard, Admiral Linda Fagan; Admiral Lisa Franchetti, Chief of Naval Operations; the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse; and most notably the Chairman of Joint Chiefs, Air Force General C.Q. Brown.

When the current war against Iran began, I posted a couple of pieces here that were nothing more than lists of questions for the president. I’ll finish this one with a few basic questions for the secretary of defense:

• Why did you fire Generals George and Hodne?

• Did you have any issues with their conduct or competence?

• If so, why haven’t you said what those were?

• If it was something else, what was it?

• Why did you feel comfortable pushing aside two senior officers in the midst of such a critical campaign?

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Here are eight ways in which the war has impacted the world – starting in the place where the bombs are falling.

1. A Battered Country

For all the Trump administration’s confused and exaggerated public statements about the war, this much is clear: it has profoundly denigrated Iran and its regime. Iran’s Supreme Leader is dead, as are the heads of its navy, intelligence services, and the powerful and influential Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iran’s air defenses have been decimated, its ballistic missile capabilities degraded, and at least some of its nuclear facilities have been set back as well.

A decades-long paradigm has already shifted: Iran is no longer a major threat to Israel and the region, given the damage done to its own assets and its “axis of resistance“ – the triumvirate of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. As the Council on Foreign Relations’ Ray Takeyh and Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Reuel Marc Gerecht put it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “The degradation of the Islamic Republic as a military and nuclear power has been enormous and is likely irreversible.”

2. Still Standing, Still a Threat

Despite all that damage, and all the bombast of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Trump himself, Iran still holds significant leverage.

Iran’s missile capability may have been degraded – by more than 90 percent, the Pentagon says – but it takes only a few Iranian missiles or Shahed drones to freeze tanker traffic, strike a U.S. military base or damage a Gulf oil facility. All of that, together with its choking of the Strait of Hormuz, have made clear that even a battered Iran can upend regional security, roil markets and threaten the global economy.

3. The Kremlin Cashes In

One month ago, the Russian economy looked to be on the ropes. Revenues were falling, production was shrinking, and Russia was reportedly selling oil to some customers at just $22 per barrel, about a third of the pre-war market rate.

Then the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran.

In short order, the price of oil rose by more than 40 percent and the U.S. lifted sanctions on Russian oil sales — one of the Trump administration’s attempts to bring prices back down. The boon to Kremlin coffers is already estimated at between $5 and $10 billion.

4. NATO and Ukraine

More good news for Moscow: The Iran war has opened a new fissure between the U.S. and its NATO allies, over their refusal to send ships to the Strait of Hormuz – a “very foolish mistake,” Trump called it.

As he has before, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has tried to smooth things over. To mollify Trump, he said he “applauds” the war and recognizes the importance of reopening the Strait; at the same time, Rutte stressed that NATO members will need time to coordinate their efforts – given that they weren’t consulted prior to the war.

Meanwhile, those same NATO nations worry that the Iran war will further erode support for Ukraine. The U.S. is burning through weaponry — missile defense batteries and ammunition in particular — that could otherwise be sent to Ukraine. And reports suggest the Pentagon is already considering diverting air defense interceptors from Ukraine to the Middle East.

5. China (1): Lessons

Just five days into the war, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) posted an unusual message on social media: “Five Lessons From U.S.-Israeli Strikes On Iran.” In its entirety, just 27 words – but the post spoke volumes.

1. Deadliest Threat: The Enemy Within

2. Costliest Miscalculation: Blind Faith in Peace

3. Cruelest Paradox: The Illusion of Victory

4. Coldest Reality: The Logic of Superior Firepower

5. Ultimate Reliance: Self-Reliance

I wrote a piece for The Cipher Brief about this. China experts said that taken together, the PLA “lessons” amounted to a critique of the U.S. (“Blind Faith in Peace” being a reference to Washington’s launching the war while negotiations were underway); a warning against complacency within PLA ranks (don’t underestimate that “Superior Firepower”); and a message for the rest of the world: you also shouldn’t underestimate China’s strength and resolve (that, the experts said, was the point of stressing “Self-Reliance”).

And the #1 “lesson – “Deadliest Threat: The Enemy Within”? That reflected a fear that China might suffer – as Iran clearly had – from foreign infiltration.

“There must have been traitors inside Iran, an ‘enemy within,’” Shen Dingli, a Shanghai-based international relations expert, told me. “So that is a lesson for China. If the U.S. can so easily target the Iranian leader [Ali] Khamenei, would the U.S. know where all the Chinese leaders are?”

6. China (2): Fears of Distraction

Remember the U.S. “pivot to Asia,” and all the reminders that China was the “pacing threat” to U.S. power and influence? And that the Middle East would no longer dominate U.S. foreign policy?

To refresh the memory, here’s an excerpt from the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy — issued just four months ago:

“The days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over…Conflict remains the Middle East’s most troublesome dynamic, but there is today less to this problem than headlines might lead one to believe. Iran—the region’s chief destabilizing force—has been greatly weakened by Israeli actions since October 7, 2023, and President Trump’s June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer, which significantly degraded Iran’s nuclear program.”

That paragraph hasn’t aged well.

The war against Iran has led to U.S. military assets being redirected from the Indo-Pacific. Analysts are warning that a prolonged war will weaken Washington’s ability to deter China. Meanwhile officials in Taiwan — citing renewed Chinese air activity near the island and intensified propaganda — worry that China is already exploiting a shift in U.S. focus to increase pressure in the Taiwan Strait.

7. A World of Hurt

While Americans worry about “pain at the pump” and the knock-on inflation that comes with high oil, gas and diesel prices, the economic impacts are being felt more profoundly in other parts of the world.

Many Asian economies import more than 50% of their energy from the Gulf. That’s led to business closures in Japan, a national emergency declaration in the Philippines, and fuel rationing in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. The South Korean government is asking citizens to take shorter showers and use bicycles instead of cars. Vietnam has introduced tax cuts and energy subsidies and is looking to cut energy deals with Russia (more good news for Moscow).

There are examples almost everywhere you look. In Africa, fuel retailers in Kenya are running low on supplies; tuktuk drivers in Somalia have stopped working as their margins erode, and Brazil’s agricultural exporters are being forced to reroute shipments.

Aid shipments have been disrupted as well. For Afghanistan alone, the war has stranded food for hundreds of thousands of children.

“In a matter of weeks, the Iran war has…rocked the global economy,” say the CFR’s Joshua Kurlantzick and Annanbel Richter. “A drawn-out war could cause inflation to spike and undermine economic growth worldwide.”

8. Not Just Oil and Gas

Oil and gas get the headlines, but the global supply chain for fertilizer – a critical building block for the global economy – is getting hammered as well. The Strait of Hormuz handles nearly a third of global fertilizer trade, meaning that the war is a huge problem for farmers in developing countries and the millions of people they serve. The disruptions are hitting just as spring planting begins, and they are already being felt across Africa, where many farmers rely on fertilizer imported from the Middle East; Ethiopia, to take one example, gets over 90% of its nitrogen fertilizer from the Gulf.

The World Food Programme cites the fertilizer crisis in its warning that 45 million people are at risk of falling into “acute food insecurity” if the conflict doesn’t end soon.

It’s also created another windfall for Moscow: a spike in demand for Russian fertilizer.

Is this a “world war”? In some ways, the answer is an unequivocal “yes”.

Over the past year, many analysts and scholars have criticized the administration for its treatment of longstanding U.S. allies. In November I wrote a piece for Time about this, focusing on two countries: South Korea – which had been hammered by U.S. tariffs and humiliated by an ICE raid that shackled more than 300 South Korean workers at a Hyundai factory in Georgia; and Canada – as steadfast a friend as the U.S. has had – which Trump had also punished with tariffs and belittled repeatedly as the “51st state.”

“An obvious question arises,” I wrote then. “In the next global crisis, when the U.S. seeks a new coalition or military deployment, will any Canadian leader be quick to raise its hand?”

Now the “next global crisis” has come. And the Trump Administration is asking – or demanding – that several countries come to its aid.

Faced with a metastasizing global energy and economic crisis, President Trump is in search of a “Hormuz Coalition,” a group of nations that would help secure the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of all global oil travels. Iran has responded to the U.S.-Israeli war by effectively closing the Strait; while a small number of vessels have been cleared to transit through, more than 1,000 tankers and other ships are stuck. And as of this morning, oil is trading at more than $100 a barrel (the price was $72 on the eve of the war).

In a social media post over the weekend, Trump said he hoped that France, Britain, China, Japan, South Korea and others would join his coalition – contributing warships, drones, command-and-control support and other assets. In an interview with The Financial Times, he suggested that NATO as a whole should also help secure the vital waterway.

“We are talking to other countries about policing the straits,” Trump said. “It will be nice to have other countries policing with us.” As for NATO, he warned that “if there’s no response or if it’s a negative response, I think it will be very bad for the future of NATO.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump planned to announce the coalition this week.

You don’t need a masters degree in international relations to guess how these countries – none of which support the war, and many of which have been flogged regularly by Trump over the last fourteen months – have responded to his plea.

“This is not Europe’s war,” said the European Union’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas.

The United Kingdom will not be “drawn into wider war” – British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

“This is not our war; we did not start it” – German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius.

“We won’t be sending a ship to the Strait ​of Hormuz,” Catherine King, a member of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s cabinet.

And on it went, a parade of polite rejections and hard “No”s.

Officials in South Korea and Japan were noncommittal, noting that constitutional limits on overseas military deployments would make it difficult for either country to join the coalition. “We have not made any decisions whatsoever about dispatching escort ships,” Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi told the Japanese Parliament.

Asked about a NATO commitment, Germany Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s spokesperson said, “This war has nothing to do with NATO . . . there will be no involvement, not even to keep the Strait open by military means.”

Perhaps most interesting was Trump’s request that China – America’s top strategic adversary – be involved.

“After 10 years of dark American warnings about the need to constrain China’s global ambitions, we’re now in a bizarro world where the president actually appears to be begging Beijing for an expeditionary naval deployment,” Evan Feigenbaum, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, said in a social media post.

“They hardly need to do anything to appease Trump on this, especially when nobody else is doing so either. Because from Beijing’s perspective, Trump started the war and so Trump owns the war.”

Indeed, China has rejected the proposal, along with everyone else. Officials in Beijing are calling instead for an immediate cease-fire.

Not surprisingly, President Trump isn’t happy about the response to his “Hormuz Coalition” plan.

“We don’t need anybody; we’re the strongest nation in the world,” the president said Monday. “You mean for 40 years we’re protecting you and you don’t want to get involved in something that’s very minor?”

Having said that, he insisted that “numerous countries have told me that they’re on the way,” though he wouldn’t name those countries.

The dynamic in play here isn’t hard to understand. “We don’t need anybody” is exactly the wrong way to understand the Hormuz mess. Friends matter. Alliances have been a great source of American power and influence. And if you treat your friends with arrogance and disdain, you shouldn’t be shocked when they don’t come running to help.

It’s worth remembering the recent precedents for American coalition-building – even when the causes were unpopular. 34 nations joined the U.S. in its 1991 war to reverse Iraq’s aggression against Kuwait; roughly 40 were with Washington in the post-9/11 move to remove the Taliban from power in Afghanistan; and more than 40 countries joined the “Coalition of the Willing” — if not all in combat capacities — to invade Iraq in 2003.

This time around, no asks were made before the first bombs were dropped. And rather than laying the groundwork for coalition-building, the Trump Administration had poisoned the well.

“In 2003, we worked the alliance, with President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell working the phones,” Nicholas Burns, a former U.S. Ambassador to NATO and to China, told The New York Times this week. “If you prepare the ground diplomatically before you go in, even if they don’t want to fight alongside you, they understand your strategy and you get so much more buy-in.”

So President Trump will have to try another route to end the Hormuz crisis. In the meantime, this week brought another reminder of the perils of dissing your friends: A Politico poll found that even key allies in the West now consider China more dependable than the United States.

The Iran war is a win for Russia and huge boost to the Kremlin’s war chest.

The Iran war is giving Ukraine crucial “cards” to play in negotiations over its future.

The answer is that both are true. And both are examples of the geopolitical aftershocks of a war that is barely two weeks old.

To take the nightmare first – Russia has already gained significantly from the war, thanks to the conflict’s profound impact on global oil markets. Russia is a major oil producer, and the spike in prices from $72 to $103 per barrel translates to an estimated $150 million in additional daily revenue for Moscow. It’s a sudden windfall – a jolt to Russia’s moribund economy of more than $2 billion and growing.

The boon for Moscow doesn’t end there. Among a series of White House measures to slow the oil-price spike, the Treasury Department has ordered a 30-day easing of U.S. sanctions on the sale of Russian crude currently at sea. That frees up hundreds of millions of barrels of Russian oil. In the first week of the war, the U.S. also gave India a 30-day reprieve from tariffs it had imposed on Delhi’s purchases of Russian oil – and this week The Financial Times reported tanker tracking data that showed increasing volumes of Russian oil moving toward Indian ports.

All these “wins” for Vladimir Putin add up to a major blow for Ukraine – just when it appeared that Russia was finally feeling significant pain from Western sanctions and a relatively low price of oil. It is, as the FT put it, “a stark reversal in fortunes.”

Ukraine’s opportunity

The good news for Ukraine is that a very different reversal of fortunes is playing out in its favor.

The U.S. is coming to Ukraine for military aid. And they’re not the only ones.

It’s a development that would have been hard to fathom when Russia attacked Ukraine in early 2022. After nearly four years spent pleading for U.S. military support – and having recently seen most of that support dry up – Ukraine is now fielding requests to help the U.S. and Persian Gulf nations beat back Iran’s Shahed exploding drones. The Shaheds have been Iran’s primary weapon in attacks against American military installations, Gulf oil facilities and shipping lanes – and no one knows their devastating power better than the Ukrainians.

Russia now manufactures its own version of the Shahed – with Iranian help – and it typically launches thousands of them at Ukrainian targets each month. Ukraine has used its difficult experience to develop an unparalleled ability to counter the Shaheds; its burgeoning defense sector now produces highly effective interceptor drones, and at roughly $1,000 to $2,000 apiece, they are vastly cheaper than the THAAD and Patriot interceptors the U.S. military has been using.

For these reasons, some of the world’s richest nations are asking Ukraine for help. The New York Times reports that at least eleven countries have requested Ukrainian technology or guidance on how to shoot down the Shaheds, and Ukraine has already sent battle-proven interceptors and the teams to operate them to Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. It’s a remarkable turning of the tables, a result of Ukraine’s evolution from battered nation to Europe’s leading defense technology juggernaut.

“Ukraine asked the U.S. and Europe to protect our skies” with air defense systems, Anatolii Kharpchynskyi, director of business development for Fly Group UA, which makes drone jamming systems, told the Times. “Now, we are being asked to protect them.”

For the U.S., a missed opportunity – and a “tactical error”

According to a new report, U.S. officials rejected a deal last August to buy the Ukrainian technology that it’s now eager to have.

Axios reports that Zelensky offered interceptor drones to President Donald Trump last year, as a tool to help the U.S. defend its Middle East assets against Iranian attack. Ukrainian officials gave a PowerPoint presentation to a closed-door White House meeting on August 18 – a pitch that included a map of the Middle East and a suggestion that Ukraine and the U.S. collaborate to create “drone combat hubs” in Turkey, Jordan and the Persian Gulf states.

The Ukrainian PowerPoint (via Axios)

The Trump administration dismissed the offer.

“Somebody decided not to buy it,” a U.S. official told Axios. “If there’s a tactical error or a mistake we made leading up to this [war in Iran], this was it.”

Now, Iran’s Shaheds have been linked to the deaths of seven U.S. service members and extensive damage to infrastructure in the Gulf. And U.S. officials want the technology they spurned last summer.

In the week prior to the war, Pentagon officials visited Kyiv to study Ukraine’s counter-drone operations. It’s not clear that the visit was linked directly to the then-simmering crisis with Iran, but Brig. Gen. Matt Ross, director of Joint Interagency Task Force 401, said the aim was to learn from Ukraine’s experience in beating back the Shaheds. “I did it to understand the TTPs — the tactics, techniques and procedures that they’re employing very effectively,” Ross said.

Five days into the Iran war, Zelensky told The New York Times that the U.S. requested anti-drone help, and a day later Ukraine sent interceptor drones and a team of experts to help protect U.S. bases in Jordan.

Even Saudi oil giant Aramco is reportedly in discussions with Ukrainian manufacturers to acquire the interceptor drones to defend its energy infrastructure from Shahed attacks.

“This phone has been ringing off the hook,” Oleg Rogynskyy, CEO of Uforce, a conglomerate of Ukrainian defense technology start-ups, told the Times.

Some analysts have noted an unfortunate incongruity in U.S. policy: Just as the U.S. was pushing for more Ukrainian help, it joined Russia and China in vetoing an IAEA resolution condemning Russian attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure.

As Timothy Snyder, a longtime scholar of Russia and Ukraine, noted in post on X, “It’s fine for Russia to use drones to freeze out your population — by the way, can you give us your drone defenses? This is the actual U.S. position.”

The problem for Ukraine is that the oil windfall for Russia is an immediate and incontrovertible victory for Putin, whereas the global demand for Ukrainian weapons and technology – remarkable and impressive as it is – won’t necessarily lead to gains on the battlefield. Ukraine’s best hope may be that it can leverage this suddenly in-demand technology in its relations with Washington. Zelensky has already suggested that Western and Gulf nations trade the expensive weapons they’re using to shoot down Iranian drones for the much cheaper Ukrainian alternatives.

A “card” for Ukraine

It was one year ago that Zelensky traveled to Washington, eager to convince Trump to continue support for his country; what he got instead was a tongue-lashing, including Trump’s infamous warning – “you don’t have the cards.”

Now the hope in Kyiv will be that the oil shock is temporary – and that the war’s lasting impact may include an understanding, in Washington and the Gulf and around the world, that Ukraine is now a key player in global defense technology. In short, to use Trump’s formulation, Ukraine now has some cards.

Last week in Kyiv, an Irish journalist asked Zelensky, “Do you think Ukraine has the cards now?”

“Now everyone understands, we have them,” Zelensky replied. “It’s a good feeling. This is thanks to our soldiers, our talented people, and the many industries that we have developed since the start of the war. We have reached a high level now.”

I wasn’t planning to make a habit of it, but sitting here a few days later, I’m struck by the fact that the initial questions really haven’t been answered, and – as will happen in the early days of any war – a host of new questions have arisen. I pose them here, in the same spirit of the other day. Namely, not trying to score points, or garner “clicks,” or to bash the president. Just hunting for answers.

On Day 5, 10 new questions for President Trump:

1. Is it a “war”? Is this what we should call it? Many of your top aides are avoiding the word.

2. Israel says it would kill the successor to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The Defense Minister’s words: “An unequivocal target for elimination.” Would you support such an assassination?

3. Does Israel have a free hand to act as it wishes against Iran, as far as the U.S. is concerned? Or is the U.S. reigning in Israeli actions in an way?

4. When you were asked about the apparent absence of a plan to evacuate American citizens from the Middle East, you said that it “all happened very quickly,” and that “I could ask Marco,” referring to Secretary of State Rubio. Are you satisfied with the planning for evacuating Americans from the region? If not, what could have been done better?

5. You’ve said that the U.S. has a “virtually unlimited” munitions stockpile, but there are several reports suggesting that U.S. stocks of missile interceptors are low enough so that the U.S. may be ”days away” from having to prioritize which targets to shoot down. Is this a concern – and will it affect the prosecution of the war?

6. More than 160 children were killed in Saturday’s bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in southern Iran. Have you conveyed regrets or sympathy to the Iranian people for the incident?

7. You said that the U.S. strikes may have killed the people who could lead Iran in the event of a change in the regime. How did that happen?

8. There are reports that the U.S. is arming Kurdish militants in Iran and Iraq with the goal of fomenting an uprising against the Iranian regime. Will U.S. forces be involved in these efforts?

9. Does it matter to you that some very influential supporters of your presidency are adamantly opposed to the war against Iran? Tucker Carlson called the attack “absolutely disgusting and evil.” Steve Bannon said that this sort of intervention “was not pitched in the 2024 campaign. It just wasn’t. We’re going to bleed support.”

10. And finally, a follow-up to the questions posed here on Saturday, because the answers to this one have only grown more confusing: What was the mission you asked the U.S. military to execute?

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10 Questions for the President

1. What was the mission you asked the U.S. military to execute?

2. How will you determine that the mission has been accomplished – when the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has been killed (as you say he has been)? When Iran’s nuclear program has been set back? When Iran’s missile program has been set back or destroyed? Some combination of the above? Something else?

3. Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month that “No one knows who would take over” if Khamenei was driven from power. He called it “an open question.” If the regime is removed, does it matter to you who - or what - replaces it?

4. Reuters reports that before the strikes, the CIA assessed that in the event of Khamenei’s ouster, hardline elements of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) would likely take charge. Is that your understanding? Would that be an acceptable outcome for the U.S.?

5. Would a Venezuela-style version of “regime change” suffice? As in, Khamenei and President Masoud Pezeshkian out, and some Delcy Rodriguez-like figure in?

6. True “regime change” involves operations to install and support a new leader. Is the U.S. working towards that goal – and if so, is the deployment of U.S. ground forces on the table?

7. Experts have warned of chaos and violence in the event of regime change in Iran – political infighting, uprisings by minority groups and even the possibility of an oil-rich failed state in the world’s most volatile region. If the U.S. action does remove the regime from power, do you feel responsibility for any internal upheaval and violence that follows in Iran?

8. You said last year that the U.S. had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program in a series of military strikes. Now you say Iran was on the verge of a nuclear capability. Which is it?

9. You said in Tuesday’s State of the Union address that Iran would “soon” have missiles that could reach the U.S. The Defense Intelligence Agency’s determination is that Iran has not yet pursued that capability – and that if it did, it would be 2035 before it would have the capability to hit the U.S. homeland. Were you provided that information before the State of the Union?

10. You have urged the Iranian people to “take over your government. It will be yours to take.” What are you suggesting that Iranian civilians do?

In January 2022, when I was serving as Global Editor for the about-to-launch publication Grid, our National Security Reporter was working on a long, ambitious piece about how a U.S.-China war over Taiwan might unfold, if it came to that. It was the sort of deep-dive coverage that would be Grid’s calling card, and the reporter – Joshua Keating – had done a superb job reviewing a range of war-game scenarios and laying out the possibilities with detail and clarity. We figured it would make for a strong piece on our first day.

But as the launch date neared, the news kept piling up from another potential war zone that looked far more likely to erupt – and soon. Russian President Vladimir Putin had deployed more than 100,000 troops to the Ukrainian frontier, along with tanks and ballistic missile systems. Perhaps, I suggested to Keating, he should file instead on a looming war in Europe?

Josh’s initial reaction was, basically, I’ve worked really hard on this Taiwan piece – to which I replied that the story would hold, and we could run it a few days later. His second response: Honestly, I can’t imagine that Putin’s really going to do this. But then, on reflection, Keating shifted gears and went on to write what would prove to be one of the more prescient pre-invasion pieces about Putin’s war, published January 12, 2022 under the headline, “Invading Ukraine Would Be a Terrible Idea for Putin. He Might Do It Anyway.”

I revisited that headline and Keating’s story the other day, as I considered the coming anniversary of the war (February 24). His piece opened this way:

Would Vladimir Putin really order Russian troops into Ukraine? From an outside perspective, the idea seems irrational: the ultimate high-risk, low-reward proposition. The Russians would face a determined adversary that’s had plenty of time to prepare. Casualties would be high. Moscow would be hit with more Western sanctions and potentially lose access to lucrative European energy markets. The Russian president would risk all this to punish a smaller, weaker neighbor that — while perhaps an ongoing irritant — poses little real threat to Russia’s security or sovereignty. More than that: Putin’s aggressive stance has to date been counterproductive, only pushing Ukraine closer to his adversaries.

None of this means he won’t do it.

You couldn’t write a better opening to a January 2022 story today, even with the benefit of four years of hindsight.

As for the fighting itself, there was this:

Any military incursion beyond already-occupied areas wouldn’t be an easy fight. The Ukrainian military, while much smaller than Russia’s, is in far better shape than it was in 2014 [when Russia seized Crimea], and the Russians wouldn’t have the benefit of surprise this time.

Why, then, was Putin willing to press “Go” on his “terrible idea”? Keating, once more:

This wouldn’t be the first time that robust warnings from the West failed to prevent Putin from rolling the dice. And Putin would hardly be the first world leader to delude himself into an ill-advised war.

Four years later, for all that’s being said about Ukraine’s troubles on the battlefield, its weakened position at the negotiating tables, and even President Volodymyr Zelensky’s somewhat diminished status at home, it’s worth looking at the other side, and asking the questions that arise from a re-reading of Josh Keating’s piece.

Four years after Putin launched his “Special Military Operation” (he’s never acknowledged that it’s a “war,” and punished many people for saying so), what has Russia gained? And at what cost?

I did a deep-ish dive of my own over the past week, hunting for metrics that might help answer those questions. And if anything, it looks like “ill-advised war” – to use Keating’s phrase – was an understatement.

The human toll seems a good place to start. For years, analysts have said that Russia could withstand a high rate of casualties, because internal dissent was stifled (no chance for angry families of dead soldiers to cause much trouble) and because the country had a limitless number of conscripts to throw at the war. But today Putin’s cannon-fodder strategy shows signs of strain.

Last month, European officials and a leading think tank said that Moscow was failing to recruit enough soldiers to keep up with the losses; in January, Russia sustained 9,000 more casualties than it could replenish via recruitment. The Kremlin’s big payouts for conscripts had kept the flow intact – signing bonuses worth $4,600 and monthly salaries ranging from $3,000-5,000, in a country where the average monthly wage is under $1000. Now there were fewer takers, either because there weren’t enough would-be fighters, or because too many families understood the carnage that awaits. As the Carnegie Endowment Russia expert Michael Kofman put it, “Russia is trading previous losses in equipment for much higher losses in personnel,” and the country risks running out of “individuals for whom the money is worth it.”

The overall Russian toll – according to a recent assessment by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) – now stands at more than 1.2 million casualties, 325,000 of them killed in action. As CSIS notes, “No major power has suffered anywhere near these numbers of casualties or fatalities in any war since World War II.”

Surely Putin’s idea of a renaissance of Russian power didn’t include going to war with foreign mercenaries, but now it’s come to that. Beyond the well-documented recruitment of North Korean troops (roughly 14,000 at last count), Russia has brought thousands of soldiers to the battle from other parts of the world, wooing them with big payoffs or what The Diplomat described as “systematic deception.” Last week Kenya’s intelligence service accused Russian embassy officials in Nairobi of luring 1,000 people to join the war under false pretenses – promising them civilian jobs and sending them instead to the front lines. The Kenyan report alleged that 39 Kenyans had been wounded in Ukraine, at least one had been killed, and 28 more were missing.

As for the battlefield itself, the operative word is “slog.” The war has been an unprecedented hybrid of trench battles and ultra-high-tech drone warfare, and since late 2022 the needle hasn’t moved much in terms of territory. Today, for all those Russian dead and wounded, the Kremlin holds slightly less Ukrainian territory (19.5 percent v. 20 percent) than it did in mid-2022 – and recently it was the Ukrainians who won a round, retaking a 160-square-kilometer swath of land from the Russians.

Here it’s worth recalling what was said in the runup to Putin’s invasion. Western military analysts – many of the same people who were proven correct in assessing the size and scope of the assault – said then that Russia’s strategy included capturing Kyiv and ousting the Zelensky government within ten days, a rout that would be followed by mopping-up operations. Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the Russian state broadcaster RT and a highly influential Kremlin propagandist, said during a 2021 debate, “In a hot war, we would defeat Ukraine in two days. What is there to defeat? My God, it’s Ukraine.” Putin’s closest geopolitical ally, the president of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko, said in early February 2022 that a Russian invasion “would last a maximum three or four days.”

Then there’s the metric that may matter most to the Kremlin: Russian oil revenues – Putin’s main source of cash – have fallen by 50% in the past year. That’s a result of several factors – Europe’s recent clampdown on Russia’s “shadow fleet” of tankers, a drop in Indian purchases of Russian oil (a rare case of Trump administration pressure making a difference), and Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign against Russian oil industry sites, which are believed to have caused more than 100 billion rubles ($1.29 billion) in damage.

Despite the huge stimulus of wartime funding, the Russian economy grew by just 1% last year. And the oil-price pressure will make things worse.

Alexandra Prokopenko, who once worked at the Central Bank of Russia and is now a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, used an elegant metaphor in a recent column for The Economist: Russia’s economy, she said, has entered what mountaineers call the “death zone, the altitude above 8,000 meters at which the human body consumes itself faster than it can be repaired.” Like a mountaineer’s body, she said, the Russian economy “is metabolizing its own muscle tissue for energy. This is not a cyclical downturn that monetary or fiscal policy can fix. A recession is like fatigue: rest and you recover. Russia’s condition is like altitude sickness: the longer you stay, the worse it gets, regardless of how much rest you get.”

Does any of this mean Ukraine will win the war? No. On the eve of the war’s anniversary, Russia launched a torrent of missiles and drones, killing at least one person in Kyiv and injuring more than a dozen others, and damaging the nation’s already-reeling power grid. And if there’s one thing Josh Keating (and just about everyone else) got wrong in 2022, it was an assumption that the United States would hold the line against rewarding Russian aggression. “The U.S. and its allies are not going to formally endorse a Russian sphere of influence or definitively rule out Ukraine ever joining NATO,” Keating said back then.

In fairness, not many people in January 2022 could imagine a world in which an American president would consider cozying up to Putin, and throwing the Ukrainians – and even NATO to some extent – under the proverbial bus.

All that said, a Russia reality check makes clear: the country and its people have paid an enormous price for Putin’s “terrible idea”: an immense human cost, an economic mess, and – to a lesser extent – a geopolitical price as well. The latter would have been much worse had Trump been more willing to punish the Kremlin, but the fact remains that Russia today isn’t anything like the superpower of Putin’s dreams. Beyond the domestic troubles, Russia has lost influence in the Middle East and Latin America, and grown increasingly reliant on China, Iran and North Korea for military technology, drone weapons and those cannon-fodder troops. And with the ascension of Finland and Sweden, NATO is now larger and its frontiers closer to Russia’s – precisely the opposite of what Putin wanted. (And by the way, precisely what Keating said would happen. Keating, in January 2022: “Putin’s aggressive stance on Ukraine … has made it more likely, not less, that NATO forces move closer to the Russian frontiers; and it has even driven longtime neutral states Sweden and Finland to say they would consider joining NATO were Putin to attack Ukraine.”)

All of which reminds me of another story from 2022, one I wrote in May about how Putin might frame his “Victory Day” speech that year. Victory Day (May 9) has been something of a holy occasion for Moscow since the Second World War; think Memorial Day, July 4, and Veterans Day rolled into one, with long patriotic speeches and North Korea-style military parades.

Putin tried mightily, on the holiday’s 2022 edition, to do it justice – but it was a muted affair. He had no triumphal message, and said almost nothing about the war – and certainly nothing about the powerful Ukrainian counterpunch Russia had suffered – preferring instead to suggest (as he had before) that the current enemy was much like Nazi Germany. Russian troops, Putin said, were “fighting for the motherland, for her future, and so that nobody forgets the lessons of World War II.”

As much of a reach as that was, it may be even harder for Putin to craft a “Victory Day” speech now. As Prokopenko put it, sticking with her mountain-climbing metaphor, “Russia can probably continue waging war for the foreseeable future. But no climber can survive the death zone indefinitely—and not all climbers who attempt the descent survive it.”

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The Council on Foreign Relations doesn’t leap to mind when you think about click-worthy, viral content – but its recently-published “Best and Worst Foreign Policy Decisions in U.S. history” is interesting and provocative and sure to start lots of arguments (the survey’s release sparked debate – the polite kind – at a January event at the CFR headquarters). It’s also a fascinating document to consider, given our country’s current approach to the rest of the world.

The CFR partnered with the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and asked its members to rank the country’s best and worst moments in terms of foreign policy – the decisions that “did the most to advance U.S. national interests and values,” and those that “did the most to harm U.S. national interests and values.”

You can find the full results here, but here’s a quick review:

The Marshall Plan — the breathtaking, huge-scale American effort to fund aid and reconstruction in the ashes of post-World War II Europe, was the big winner, drawing praise for its scope and long-lasting strategic value for the U.S.; the runaway loser, as it were, was the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which survey responders chose not only for the war’s faulty premise, but also the disastrous American occupation and nasty geopolitical domino effects that followed.

Some of the leading items in the “best decisions” column involved crisis management – the resolution of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis (which landed at #10), and the 1948-49 Berlin Airlift (#13). But most were selected for the same reason historians chose the Marshall Plan – namely, their long-term benefit for U.S. interests: hence, the 1778 Treaty of Alliance with France (#3), the 1803 Louisiana Purchase (#4), and the creations of NATO (#6) and the Bretton Woods system (#7). Christopher Nichols, Chair of National Security Studies and Professor of History at Ohio State University, said these weren’t just smart decisions – they were policies that “sent a message to the world about the meaning of America and its ideals.”

Not surprisingly, debates abounded among the CFR audience – a foreign-policy wonks’ version of sports fans bickering over, say, Hall of Fame ballot decisions involving Bill Belichick or Barry Bonds. Some asked what the creation of the United Nations was doing in the positive column – and up there in second place, no less. Nichols, the historian, was surprised that the 1778 Treaty of Alliance with France hadn’t topped the “best” list, given that without French support the American Revolution likely would have failed – in which case there would never have been such a thing as “U.S. foreign policy.” Surely President Richard Nixon’s opening to China, which utterly changed the U.S.-China relationship – and, one could argue, led to China’s opening to the rest of the world – deserved a higher spot than number 14? (Perhaps, said Mary Dudziak, an Emory University historian, anything with a Nixon association remains problematic.)

Someone asked: Wasn’t the U.S. action in Vietnam worse than its invasion of Iraq? The project’s director, James Lindsay, a CFR Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy, explained that two Vietnam-era decisions – the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution and the following year’s deployment of combat forces – had landed in the top ten (# 9 and # 2, respectively), but that even taken together, votes for those hadn’t matched the number of historians who judged the Iraq folly worst of all.

Moderator and CFR board chair David Rubenstein couldn’t understand what the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis was doing down at number 10 in the “best” column. How, he wondered, could you beat the Kennedy team’s diplomacy that pulled the world back from the brink of nuclear war? Rubenstein bolstered his case with an anecdote: he’d been in the 8th or 9th grade at the time, and he recalled his teacher telling the class, “I’m not going to give you any homework tonight, because we’re not going to be here tomorrow.” (That resonated with me; my mother was a secretary at the United Nations in October 1962, and she went into labor when the state of the world was on a knife’s edge; she came home with a baby – me – just as the news came that Soviet ships were veering away from Cuba. It left her and my Dad thinking there might be hope for their newborn child.)

If there was one key takeaway from the survey results and the conversation that followed, it was this: great decisions come when you leverage your alliances and power in equal measure, and do so with intelligence and foresight. Things fall apart when hubris, bullying and vested interests come into play.

What about Trump?

The elephant in the room, and the obvious question for even a casual reader of the survey’s results, involved the present moment. The survey had gone to the field before Donald Trump’s second inauguration, and every one of the decisions in the “winners“ column was a triumph either of multilateralism, global partnership or highly sophisticated and visionary diplomacy – or some combination of all three. And you didn’t have to be a Trump-hater to think that these weren’t exactly MAGA principles, or to wonder whether his administration, with its disdain for alliances and transactional approach to foreign policy, could ever land anywhere on the good side of such a ledger. Put differently, it’s hard to imagine Trump and his national security team orchestrating a multi-billion dollar project to rebuild Western Europe, or backing the creation of NATO as a bulwark against Moscow.

Equally, it was depressingly easy to imagine Trump 2.0 cracking the other side of the ledger. The jury is still out, of course, but several actions from the past year alone might merit a nomination: Trump’s evisceration of USAID, his plans to annex or seize Greenland, the drug-boat missile strikes in the Caribbean and takeover in Venezuela, embrace of Vladimir Putin, and the rupturing of America’s relationship with NATO and gutting of other longstanding U.S. alliances.

It was only towards the end of the CFR event that someone raised the question.

“Have we lost our touch?” one attendee asked. Another – the International Crisis Group’s Alexandra Starr – was more blunt. “When we look at this list of the best decisions,” she said, “it’s pretty obvious that the current administration is not following the underlying principles that undergirded those decisions.”

There was one other thing about the survey winner – the Marshall Plan – which certainly wouldn’t fit with the Trump approach: it was, as the historians on the CFR panel noted, an ego-free enterprise. The idea to rescue and rebuild post-war Europe had been President Harry Truman’s idea, but he didn’t want his name on it, because he thought it might hurt the project’s chances of winning approval on Capitol Hill. Again, hard to imagine President Trump driving a large-scale, successful foreign policy endeavor, and then giving the name and credit to Marco Rubio.

Ultimately, we will have to wait for some future survey to see where the second Trump administration might land on a future best-worst survey. We can all form our own opinions, and have our own arguments about the rankings. As I said, everyone loves a good list.

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During World War II, the United States used a facility in Narsarsuaq, in southern Greenland, as one of its most important North Atlantic air bases. Then as now, this was Danish territory, but Nazi Germany had occupied Denmark in 1940, and in 1941 Danish authorities in exile negotiated an agreement under which the U.S. built and operated several bases on Greenland. The one at Narsarsuaq – known then as Bluie-West 1, or BW-1 – would prove valuable to the allied war effort in many ways: the U.S. ferried fighter jets, bombers and transport planes to Europe via BW-1; the base was home to meteorological stations that fed data to allied forecasters – a key asset for naval operations across the North Atlantic; and it served as a hub of logistics support for the Battle of the Atlantic.

As it grew in size and importance, the BW-1 base required a steady flow of troops and supplies. And that’s where the family story comes into play.

On January 23, 1943, the USS Dorchester, a coastal passenger steamship that had been requisitioned as a troop ship for the Army, set sail from New York for Narsarsuaq. Her mission was to transport soldiers, military equipment and other supplies to support BW-1, and she sailed for Greenland with a crew of 904 on board.

My wife’s great-uncle was among them – Private Elijah Hanes Ayres, Jr., a 29-year-old from Columbia, Tennessee who went by his middle name, Hanes. He had attempted to enlist in the Navy after Pearl Harbor, been rejected for his poor eyesight, and ultimately gotten into the Army Air Corps in April 1942. He trained in Texas as a navigator on a B-17, spent a few months at bases in Missouri and Maine, and received orders to deploy to Europe in January 1943. He boarded the USS Dorchester at Staten Island, NY on January 22.

During a January 29 stop at St. Johns, Newfoundland, Hanes Ayres sent a “Victory” telegram, or “V-Gram”, as they were known, to his family in Tennessee. The ship then made for Greenland.

At 12:55 am on the morning of February 3, 1943, as the Dorchester was transiting through the Labrador Sea, it was torn open by a torpedo fired by a German U-boat. It was a direct hit – the ship was badly damaged and sank less than half an hour after impact. It was a nightmarish half hour; a loss of power prevented the crew from sending radio distress signals, no rockets or flares were launched to alert the Dorchester’s escorts, and the lowering of its lifeboats was hampered by the ship’s severe list.

Many crew members managed to reach the lifeboats – but the boats had been launched into the dark of a winter night. The water temperature was recorded as 34 degrees, the air temperature 36.

Fewer than one in three crew members survived.

I had heard the outlines of the story some years ago from Hanes’ nephew, my father-in-law, who was five and a half years old in February 1943. More recently he shared detailed accounts of the attack on the Dorchester, along with his own limited memories of his uncle. Mostly he recalled what others said of him: a strikingly handsome young man – “debonair” was the word his mother often used – who had graduated from Vanderbilt, begun a career in banking, and was by all accounts a kind and much-loved member of the family. Some went so far as to say that Hanes was one of the more sought-after eligible bachelors in Middle Tennessee.

Elijah Hanes Ayres, Jr. was one of 672 Dorchester crew members who died that morning in the North Atlantic. It was the worst single loss of personnel in any American convoy during World War II.

The attack drew additional attention because of the sacrifices made by four religious figures on board the ship, four men from different faiths – a Methodist Chaplain, Catholic priest, Dutch Reformed minister and a Jewish rabbi – each of whom gave their life jackets to others as the ship went under. Congress established February 3rd as “Four Chaplains Day”, and a postage stamp was issued honoring “These Immortal Chaplains.”

USS Dorchester “Immortal Chaplains” stamp, issued May 1948

Strange as it was to learn these details as the current Greenland controversy raged, there was another odd coincidence: I, too, had a great uncle who had been on board a ship that was torpedoed by the Germans. In September 1940, Bohdan Nagorski had been a paying passenger on the SS City of Benares, an ocean liner sailing from Liverpool to Halifax. The sinking of the Benares gained notoriety because it carried 90 child evacuees from Great Britain, part of a program that was meant to ferry children to safer shores. That ship also sank in roughly half an hour, on the other side of the Atlantic; and many on board – including 77 of the evacuee children – perished in the icy waters. But my great uncle was among those who survived, against terrible odds. I wrote a book about the ordeal several years ago.

Elijah Hanes Ayres, Jr. was given a burial at sea just two months shy of his 30th birthday. The Defense Department’s website listed his place of death as Greenland – the closest land to where he breathed his last.

“When Hanes was lost at sea in a convoy en route to Greenland, I went through a terrible time,” his sister Susie May Ayres wrote, years after the attack. “I finally made my peace with myself – finally realizing that God gives and God taketh away. This was a terrible blow to us all and one which is never overcome.”

The family took some comfort in their belief that Hanes must have died instantly – “I had made myself think that [he] never knew what hit him,” his sister wrote. It was much later that a survivor of the Dorchester tragedy appeared at the bank in Columbia, Tennessee, where Hanes’ father worked, and introduced himself as a friend and fellow crewmate of his son’s. He had been there in the lifeboat, he said, and he could – if the family wished – share the story of what had happened.

Together they went to Hanes’ parents’ home in Columbia, and there they learned that Hanes had survived the attack and been in the frigid water for some time before making it to a lifeboat. The men in the boat sang songs and held one another close, doing what they could to keep warm, but at some point, Hanes cried out in pain; the assumption was that he had suffered a heart attack brought on by hypothermia. He died soon after a rescue vessel found them.

The friend who had been with him in that lifeboat, and survived, had vowed to find his family. And so he had.

Today, Elijah Hanes Ayres, Jr.’s name can be found on a memorial marker in a cemetery in Franklin, Tennessee; at the Maury County War Memorial in Columbia, Tennessee; and on the East Coast Memorial in New York City’s Battery Park, at the tip of Manhattan, which honors the 4,601 missing American servicemen who lost their lives in the Atlantic during World War II. The main inscription reads as follows:

1941 – 1945 
Erected by the United States of America
in proud and grateful remembrance
of her sons
who gave their lives in her service
and who sleep in the American coastal waters
of the Atlantic Ocean

Into Thy Hands, O Lord

Elijah Hanes Ayres, Jr. - 1913-1943

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They’ve also got me thinking about conversations I had last year with two Americans who know Greenland well – former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Douglas Lute, and Phillip Breedlove, a four-star general who served as NATO Supreme Allied Commander. Those positions involved regular engagement with Greenland, given that the island is a self-governing territory of Denmark and thus part of the NATO alliance.

They made two basic points: Trump is absolutely right to call Greenland vital to U.S. national security; and dangerously wrong in his approach.

“We’re kicking on an open door here,” Lute said, noting that Greenland and Denmark would welcome greater American investment, trade, and more robust security arrangements – and with all those things, a lessening of Russian and Chinese influence. “It doesn’t require anything like full-fledged American control.”

Gen. Breedlove, who made regular visits to Greenland as Supreme Allied Commander, and before that as the U.S. Air Force Commander in Europe, said diplomacy could deliver what the U.S. wanted – and a heavy hand might boomerang.

“We have been working with this country and these people for a long time, and they are wonderful people, hospitable people,” Breedlove said. “We need to have the ability to work with the people of Greenland in a way that assures that they will remain on our side. That’s incredibly important.”

Trump had mused openly about a Greenland takeover before he returned to office, but Trump was saying and posting a lot of things then (The New York Times counted 83 occasions on which he said he’d end the Ukraine war on day one of his new term). And when it came to Trump 2.0 priorities, Greenland wasn’t on many radar screens. But on the eve of his second inauguration, Trump ratcheted up the rhetoric; he called U.S. ownership of Greenland an “absolute necessity” for economic and national security, and he wouldn’t rule out the use of force to make it happen.

That’s when I interviewed Gen. Breedlove, who – like many top brass – doesn’t like to criticize sitting presidents. But the Greenland question appeared to have touched a nerve.

“I really don’t like to do politics, so I’ll try to cast this answer in a non-political way,” he told me. “I would have preferred that we would be having these kinds of conversations with the people of Greenland and Denmark in a more reserved way, out of the public eye, but it’s in the public eye now. It’s hard to see that we’re having this sort of rough public conversation with people who are friends.”

For a general who prefers not “to do politics,” that sounded like harsh criticism.

I reached out to Breedlove again this week, as the administration’s Greenland rhetoric reached a fever pitch, and asked whether his views had changed. He referred me to comments he’d given to Fox News.

“We can cooperate with NATO and Denmark and get this job done,” he told Fox on Monday. It was the open-door point; ownership of Greenland wasn’t necessary, he said, and even hinting at military force was a bad idea. “Taking land from a NATO ally by force is an absolute non-starter.”

Why Greenland matters

Neither Lute nor Gen. Breedlove questioned Greenland’s strategic value. The U.S. has maintained military facilities there since the 1950s, at the invitation of Greenland and Denmark, and the territory is home to the Pituffik Space Base (known previously as Thule Air Base), which functions as an early warning station and forward operating base for the U.S. military. Greenland is rich in coveted rare earth minerals, holds considerable offshore deposits of oil and natural gas, and the territory’s importance has grown as the Arctic ice has melted, and northern waterways have become increasingly viable.

“Fundamentally, Greenland’s important because of location,” Lute said. “This is a reminder to all of us that geography still counts, in a world where a lot of things span international borders and blur borders – such as pandemics, cyber, information technology, and so forth.”

China and Russia are interested in the territory for all the reasons that have drawn U.S. interest. Gen. Breedlove stressed the importance of the GIUK Gap, the body of water to Greenland’s east (“GIUK,” as in Greenland, Iceland, UK), from which NATO monitors Russian naval movements in the Arctic and North Atlantic.

“Russia is extremely keen to be able to use that gap to their advantage,” Breedlove said, “and certainly not have somebody like America sitting on top of that.”

But Breedlove and Lute kept coming back to that “open door” point; Greenland, they said, presented a challenge that could be met without rattling the proverbial saber, and threatening a rupture of America’s most valuable alliance.

“The door is wide open for expanding American access on the security front,” Lute said. “Greenlanders are open, Denmark is open to expanding American military access to the island, but also on the economic front. The Greenlanders state clearly that they would much prefer U.S. investment in, for example, the critical minerals field, rather than Chinese investment.”

What comes next

There is no precedent for an act of aggression by one NATO ally against another. This week another former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, Admiral James Stavridis, argued that Trump’s military option would “break NATO, and it won’t come back.”

But the other, non-military ideas floated by the White House are fraught as well. Buying the territory would require the consent of Greenland’s population – which at the moment looks like another nonstarter. Denmark cannot legally “sell” the territory over the objections of Greenlanders – and in any case it has shown no interest in doing so. The Trump administration has discussed a deal-sweetener – lump-sum payments to the people of Greenland ranging from $10,000 to $100,000 – but that’s been met with scorn in Greenland itself. Then there’s the notion of a campaign to convince the territory’s inhabitants to declare independence from Denmark and turn toward the U.S. – an option that may have been palatable before the White House took its aggressive posture, but looks like fantasy now.

“Threats, pressure and talk of annexation do not belong anywhere between friends,” Jens-Frederik Nielsen, the Prime Minister of Greenland, said. “That’s not how you talk to a people who have repeatedly shown responsibility, stability and loyalty.”

The loyalty point has been raised in Denmark as well – along with a profound example: The Danes lost more troops in Afghanistan, per capita, than any NATO nation other than the U.S.

For the moment, the threats from Washington keep coming. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “the president and his team are discussing a range of options…and of course, utilizing the U.S. military is always an option.” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller repeated the no-options-off-the-table point in an interview with CNN, and added a don’t-mess-with-America jab: “Nobody is going to fight the U.S. militarily over the future of Greenland.” Miller’s wife Katie, a former Trump administration official, posted a map of Greenland in the colors of the U.S. flag, along with a one-word caption: “SOON.”

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the NATO alliance (minus its most powerful member) finds itself in the remarkable position of contemplating a response to American aggression.

NATO leaders have held meetings to boost security measures in the Arctic, and last week several NATO members signed a declaration stating that “Greenland belongs to its people. It is for Denmark and Greenland, and them only, to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland.” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned that “if the United States chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops…including our NATO and thus the security that has been provided since the end of the Second World War.”

Another way?

Among the less aggressive, more promising options for the U.S., Lute suggested a change in the basing arrangement that would allow for an increased U.S. military presence in Greenland – something he and Gen. Breedlove both believe is achievable, and which could be presented as a win for President Trump. Lute also said an economic deal could give the U.S. a preferred position with regard to future investments in critical minerals.

“Frankly,” he said, “it’s not a heavy lift.”

And that, really, was the core of their argument: This doesn’t have to be a fight. You don’t need to “own” Greenland, or to bully Greenlanders or Danes. The door is open.

Adm. Stavridis echoed the point, urging a blend of “diplomacy, soft power, (and) economic engagement” instead.

“Pull Greenland toward us,” Stavridis said, “in a way that doesn’t crack NATO and drive the Greenlanders away from us and turn this into a kind of poisoned chalice by the time we get it.”

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Listening to Donald Trump talk about “running Venezuela,” I’ve been reminded of a moment more than two decades ago, when another foreign dictator was in the White House’s crosshairs, and another U.S. administration was asked what would happen after the dictator was gone.

In March 2003, as American troops massed along the borders of Iraq, the ABC News anchor Peter Jennings interviewed General Tommy Franks at a U.S. base in Qatar. Gen. Franks was preparing to command the American invasion, which by then was all but inevitable. Along with questions about the looming war, Jennings had a question about what might come after.

“Do you have enough men to win the war,” Jennings asked, “and do you have enough men to win the peace?”

Franks seemed puzzled by the latter half of the question. Winning “the peace” wasn’t his concern; he had a complex road ahead – quite literally, the road to Baghdad – and his priority was to get there, topple Saddam Hussein’s regime, eliminate its weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and to do it all with a minimum of American casualties.

“We have sufficient military capacity to do the job that America’s military would be asked to do,” Gen. Franks said.

“Enough to win the peace?” Jennings asked again.

Franks dodged once more. Back and forth they went. I had worked with Jennings for many years, and I knew that as an interviewer, particularly when it came to global affairs, he was uncommonly well informed and often dogged in pursuit of an answer. He repeated the day-after question in different ways, and each time Gen. Franks answered by saying, essentially, they were ready for the invasion.

Later we received a call from the Pentagon complaining that Jennings had “badgered” the general. (Later still, the press itself would be badgered for having failed to be sufficiently skeptical about the White House’s claim about WMD.) But Jennings had been right to press the what-next question. Among others who did so were The Atlantic’s James Fallows and The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, who wrote that “the first rule of any Iraq invasion is the pottery store rule: You break it, you own it. We break Iraq, we own Iraq — and we own the primary responsibility for rebuilding a country of 23 million people.”

The rest, as they say, is history. On May 1, less than six weeks into the invasion, President George W. Bush stood on the deck of an American aircraft carrier, under a banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished.” Soon after, a ferocious rebellion erupted in Iraq, U.S. commanders moved to a whole new mission of counterinsurgency, and eight years would pass – with more than 4000 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis killed – before the reckoning was complete.

In a quirk of history, it was also on May 1, 2003 – just hours before Bush’s carrier speech – that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared an end to major combat operations in Afghanistan. That war would continue for another 18 years.

I thought of all this, as President Trump spoke in the aftermath of the mission to capture Venezuelan strongman Nicholas Maduro. Of course the circumstances are utterly different from the Iraq experience, but it’s worth considering the similarities: in both cases, a highly complex military mission succeeded in removing a dictator from power; with Saddam and Maduro both, many inside and outside their countries celebrated their ouster; and in both instances, U.S. officials struggled with the what-happens-next questions.

Back in 2003, beyond Gen. Franks’ non-answers, U.S. officials gave rosy forecasts: Vice President Dick Cheney told NBC’s Meet the Press that the streets of Baghdad and Basra were “sure to erupt in joy” after Saddam’s fall; Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defense Secretary, said Iraqis would “greet us as liberators”; asked how long the war would last, Rumsfeld said “six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”

In the wake of Maduro’s capture, the White House has given several answers to the “day-after” questions – and you don’t need to be an expert on Venezuela (I’m certainly not one) to receive them with skepticism.

“We’re gonna run it,” Trump said in the post-mission news conference. Later he told The New York Times the U.S. stewardship could last for years – “only time will tell,” he said. Maduro’s Vice President Delcy Rodriguez would stay on and do the White House’s bidding. “She has no choice,” Trump said, given the U.S. armada sitting off her country’s shores and Trump’s threat of putting “boots on the ground” if Rodriguez doesn’t play ball. Trump and his secretaries of state and energy said that U.S. oil companies that had been driven from Venezuela would return and plow billions of dollars into rebuilding the country’s battered oil infrastructure, enriching the companies and – in Trump’s words – “making Venezuela great again.” He gave no timeline for elections, no metrics for success, no plan or even words of support for the Venezuelan opposition. As the Times account of their interview put it, “Mr. Trump appeared far more focused on the rescue mission than the details of how to navigate Venezuela’s future.”

The statements made for a depressing mix of swagger and arrogance, and a diverse parade of experts – Venezuelans and Americans alike, including many who cheered Maduro’s ouster – have raised profound concerns about what lies ahead. It’s the day-after question on steroids.

Beyond the oil extraction, is the U.S. prepared to undertake a major nation-building project in Venezuela? How will Rodriguez navigate the political minefield of appeasing Trump while maintaining the support of other regime leaders – all of whom remain in their posts? What will the White House do if Rodriguez refuses (or fails) to comply with a Trump demand? How will the U.S. compel the cooperation of the Venezuelan military – crucial in even a brief interim period – and reign in the power of the country’s drug gangs? What might trigger the deployment of those American “boots on the ground”?

And – not to pile on – but what milestones would signal an end to the interim period? Will there be any role for the opposition? When will elections be held – and does “running” Venezuela mean that the U.S. would guarantee a free and fair vote? And absent any assurances of stability, how will Trump et al convince the American oil giants to come rushing back to Venezuela?

Overall – as the Times’ Ezra Klein asked on his podcast – “What are we doing in Venezuela?”

The truth is that in its long history of missions to oust foreign leaders, the United States has rarely done well with the day after. Every episode has its different elements – and this is hardly a comprehensive list – but a brief history:

1953: Iran’s nationalization of its oil industry was a catalyst for the 1953 coup orchestrated by the U.S. and Britain to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. The coup bolstered the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and led ultimately to the revolution that brought an Islamic theocracy to power in Tehran in 1979. We are still living with the consequences.

1963: The Kennedy administration backed a coup against South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem; Diem was later murdered, widespread unrest followed, and in his memoirs, President Lyndon Johnson blamed the coup for the escalation of the war, and many of the nightmares that followed.

1989: In an episode cited often in the last few days, the U.S. military seized Panama’s dictator General Manuel Noriega on drug charges. (As it happened, the Maduro mission came 36 years to the day after Noriega’s surrender.) That operation had its detractors, but in the history of U.S. regime-change missions, it’s a relative success story – not least because there was a day-after plan: the U.S. quickly installed Panama’s rightfully elected ruler; elections followed, as did an economic recovery. And President George H. W. Bush never evinced any interest in “running” Panama.

Surveying many of America’s day-after debacles, the former deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes has identified a cause – and given it an elegant name: the “tradition of historical forgetting.”

Rhodes wrote an Op-Ed this week in which he called the Venezuela operation “both shocking and familiar in its assertion of superpower will. So was the absence of any clear plan, legal justification or timeline for this de facto takeover of another country and its oil resources.” To the above list of messy outcomes he added one he’d been involved in: the 2011 U.S.-led mission to overthrow Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, which led to Qaddafi’s death but also to violence between rival militias that punished the country for years. Barack Obama later called that operation his “worst mistake.”

Our “historical forgetting,” Rhodes says, has meant that “time and again, we have left broken places to others who must put them back together, absorb refugees and manage political instability.”

I think he’s right. And I think we are at risk of exactly such an outcome now.

On Sunday I spoke to Miguel Tinker Salas, a Venezuelan historian who is Professor Emeritus of Latin American history at Pomona College. Stunned as he had been to hear the news of Maduro’s capture, he said it was when Trump uttered those four words – “We’re gonna run it” – that his “jaw dropped.”

“Even at the height of U.S. influence in Venezuela, in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, they never said they wanted to run the country,” Salas said. “And I don’t think the Trump administration comprehends the complexity that they’re dealing with for a country as diverse and as big as Venezuela.”

In his assessment of the Venezuela operation, the Times’ Friedman reflected on his “you-break-it, you-own-it” formulation about Iraq, more than two decades ago.

“It is hard not to ask that same question today,” Friedman wrote. “The Trump administration just broke the leadership of Venezuela; Trump now owns responsibility for what comes next there.”

James Fallows, writing now on Substack, noted that while in wars of necessity, countries don’t have the luxury of planning for the day after, this was a military mission of choice.

“‘Wars of choice’ depend fundamentally on assessing what will happen the day after the fighting stops,” Fallows wrote. In the Venezuela case, he said, “There is no evidence that anyone on the Trump team has thought about what will happen tomorrow, or next week, or next year, in the glow of their ‘success’ today.”

Even Steve Bannon blasted the White House, for what he called “the lack of framing of the message on a potential occupation.” On his War Room podcast, Bannon praised the military operation but warned that the absence of a clear plan was “harkening back to our fiasco in Iraq.”

Given all the uncertainties in Venezuela, there are probably dozens of potential outcomes – but it’s hard to find scholars of the country or the region or American military history who share the Trump administration’s optimism. And if Venezuela’s “day after” brings violence or unrest or a long slog of continued deprivation, then the reason will have been clear: There was no good plan for the day after, beyond the triumphant We-got-him news conference. To use Rhodes’ phrase, we will have fallen victim – again – to our “historical forgetting.”

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But I also thought there might be room for a regular offering under the heading of “Gratitude.” I have spent much of my writing and editing life covering global conflict and trauma, but somehow (in my seventh decade now) I’ve retained an optimism and faith — call it naive, glass-half-full, polyannish, etc — that there are better days coming. This first essay looks for those proverbial silver linings, at the end of a difficult year.

My father and mother were immigrants from Europe (Poland and Norway, respectively), and no doubt that had much to do with their regular expressions of gratitude for the gifts life had given them, in their adopted country. Thanksgiving was a new holiday for them, and Dad – who had arrived in America in 1951 as a refugee with less than $100 to his name – used the occasion to remind us that we should be thankful every day. At year’s end, he’d urge us to take stock of whatever had transpired since the last turning of the calendar, always with an emphasis on the good fortune that had come our way.

My father’s exhortation comes naturally to mind at this time of year – particularly now, given various global conflicts and the political divisions in our own country. Some may find it harder this year, to find those reasons to be thankful.

I’ll take a stab.

As a new year lands, I’m grateful for relative peace in Gaza. Fraught and fragile as the ceasefire appears, and miserable as life remains for so many Gazans, it’s worth recalling how things were before the truce took hold – more than 2,500 Palestinians killed each month, and only trickles of aid reaching those most in need. Now the daily barrages have stopped, and attention has turned to the next phases of the peace deal – chief among them a massive reconstruction project and new system of Palestinian governance. The tripwires are there, of course, but at least the people of Gaza have some reason to hope that a better year lies ahead.

I am grateful for – and often amazed by – the bravery of Ukrainians on the frontlines and their innovation on the assembly lines. 2025 saw a strange twinning of courage in World War I-like trenches with high-tech ingenuity that not only kept Ukraine in the war, but also led to the manufacture of Ukrainian drones that the West wants to buy, and made-in-Ukraine long-range missiles (see the newly-minted Flamingo) that pose threats to Russian oil refineries and military barracks. It also saw Volodymyr Zelensky rise from the ashes of a February Oval Office nightmare, during which he endured the now-infamous tongue-lashing from Donald Trump – You don’t have the cards. 2026 may hold fresh nightmares for Zelensky and his country, due chiefly to Trump’s reluctance to pressure the Kremlin, but at least the Ukrainians hold some cards. And the example of their resistance carries valuable lessons for the rest of us.

I am grateful, too, for all those Americans – bold-faced names and lesser-known citizens alike – who showed a spine in the year’s last months. In this category, thanks go to Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, architect of a remarkable Capitol Hill turnabout on the Jeffrey Epstein files; to Marjorie Taylor Greene, who turned against the president on a number of specific policies and what she called his “toxic culture”; and to the four Republican House members – Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Mike Lawler (R-NY), Rob Bresnahan (R-PA) and Ryan Mackenzie (R-PA) – who broke with their party to support an extension of health care subsidies. None of these acts were game-changers in terms of substance, but taken together they cracked open a window for at least some in-party second-guessing of the commander-in-chief.

Speaking of “spines,” a note of gratitude for the rock-solid resolve and powerful voice that belong to Radoslaw Sikorski, the Foreign Minister of Poland. All too often, the response to Russia’s “gray-zone” warfare has been bland or overly softened, for fear of escalation. Here, by contrast, was Sikorski at the United Nations in September, following Russia’s unprecedented drone incursion into Polish territory: “If these were accidents, why not immediately acknowledge them and apologize?” he asked. “We have not heard any apologies, only lies.” And then, staring at Russia’s U.N. Ambassador, he finished with a historical flourish.

“By ordering mobilization in 1914, you precipitated the start of World War I, which bled Europe white and led to your Bolshevik revolution,” Sikorski said. “By signing the Hitler-Stalin pact, you helped launch World War II, the bloodiest in history. By Sovietizing Central Europe, you caused the Cold War. Don’t start another one…And if another missile or aircraft enters our space without permission, deliberately or by mistake, and gets shot down and the wreckage falls on NATO territory, please don’t come here to whine about it. You have been warned.”

In this same vein, a nod to David Remnick (The New Yorker) and to Anne Applebaum (The Atlantic), for their written and spoken words about the perils of authoritarianism. They have plenty of company of course – but I can think of no others who have addressed the subject with such clarity, eloquence and consistency.

Having recently seen a New York production of Richard II, I am grateful for the reminder that William Shakespeare seems always to have a word or two (or a thousand of them) to match the trauma of the moment. From Richard II we have Sir John of Gaunt telling the monarch that “a thousand flatterers sit within thy crown,” and warning of Richard’s abuse of justice. “Thy state of law,” Gaunt says, “is bondslave to the law.” Both lines drew murmurs of understanding from the audience at the Astor Place Theater.

I am thankful for other excellent diversions. For Ken Burns’ The American Revolution – which managed somehow to be both soothing and engrossing; for neighborhood bookstores – and the fact that they are thriving, decades after their obituaries were written; for The Daily Show, which doles out its regular blend of outrage, humor and razor-sharp commentary; and – as a New Yorker and a basketball fanatic – I’m grateful for the fact that the Knicks are (for the first time in decades) “in the conversation,” as they say.

A big thank-you to Patti Smith, for the life wisdoms shared following the publication of her memoir Bread of Angels – in particular her musings on what it means to live and work in this moment.

“Despite everything that’s happening in the world, and everything around us and any frustration or helplessness or betrayal we feel,” Smith told The New York Times’ Ezra Klein, “we have to remember it’s also all right to feel the joy of being alive and feel the joy of your own possibilities, even in the face of the suffering of so many people around us. I have the same calling I did when I was young: to nourish and to do the work that I believe I was given the possibility to do. I’m not going to let anything shake that faith, no matter what kind of rubble and debris of our time I have to walk through.”

The joy of your own possibilities. Amen to that.

Finally, I am grateful for community. For the polyglot neighbors on our Brooklyn block: the quiet and unassuming narcotics prosecutor; the college student who leads a movement to get her fellow Generation Z-ers to ditch their cell phones; the daughter of a Bangladeshi diplomat who fights for social justice here in her adopted city; and the many others, most of whom I know only by the nod and smile they offer as we pass one another.

And of course I am thankful for family. Which brings me back to where this essay began. I am grateful for the model and lessons imparted by my mother and father, now long gone. And for the fact that I can still hear Dad saying, gently but firmly: We should be thankful, on every day that we are here.

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