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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy your weekends!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This touches on something I pointed out back in March:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The problem is that it cannot be replicated by Democrats.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least that’s my take.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Axios’ Neil Irwin explains the problem:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Developing…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colby: Well, it’s certainly awesomeness.

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

Colby: I just think we are, uh …

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

Colby: Uh …

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

Colby: OK.

That is a Chotiner-level deconstruction of an argument.

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

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

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has made little secret of its skepticism towards the Trump administration’s claim that the president is a great dealmaker and is negotiating great deals left and right. To put it gently, I’m… let’s say “unpersuaded” that any post-Liberation Day trade deals will amount to all that much. Trump is stuck in an unpopular war with Iran because he is unable to negotiate a peace that he can stomach. Trump’s recent summit with Xi Jinping produced at best a whole lot of nothing and at worst opened Trump up to some unanticipated pressure.

Indeed, Politico’s Phelim Kine and Ari Hawkins report that China is slow-walking the purchase of soybeans and Boeing aircraft because, as one analyst explains, “ Chinese officials believe that Trump wants and needs to maintain a strong rapport with Xi more than the other way around, especially with an eye to avoiding a fresh economic rupture ahead of the U.S. midterms.” That does not sound like other countries view the United States as playing a strong hand.

I mean, for f**k’s sake, not even the Canadians are ruffled by escalating trade threats from Trump.

None of this sounds like an administration that possesses any understanding of bargaining leverage and what to do with it.

This brings us to the bilateral U.S.-Saudi nuclear deal that was announced on Wednesday. The Washington Post’s Evan Halper provides some of the details and why this particular 123 agreement stands out:

The people familiar with the new agreement say it is designed with safeguards to keep the Saudis from enriching nuclear fuel to weapons-grade level. But they also acknowledge it includes a waiver that exempts the Saudis from the aggressive international inspections required in nuclear reactor deals with other countries, including the United Arab Emirates. Instead, sensitive inspections would be executed by American teams under terms spelled out in the agreement, which was initially worked out when the crown prince visited Washington in November….

Because the deal does not include conventional international inspections, President Donald Trump had to sign a separate national security waiver for it to go forward, according to the individuals familiar with it. Now that the agreement has been signed, the details will be sent to Congress, which has 90 days to act on it.

Even if Congress votes against implementing the deal, the president could veto that disapproval, and it is unlikely that opponents would have enough votes to block the deal from going forward….

Nonproliferation experts have long warned against such a deal, starting back when the Biden administration raised this possibility as part of efforts to establish diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. They continued to speak out as the Trump administration signaled it was heading down the same road, arguing that any safeguards the U.S. establishes will not hold.

“A bad U.S. nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia is coming for congressional review — inexplicably, carried over from the Biden administration,” wrote Andrea Stricker, a nonproliferation scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a national security think tank, in a post on X. “Congress should block it. If it does not, one hopes the policy will be reversed by a subsequent administration before too much damage is done in terms of watering down safeguards, setting negative precedents for other states, and failing to contain the spread of enrichment and reprocessing — which we just put back in the box in Iran via force.”….

Richard Nephew, who advised Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama on the Middle East, said in an interview that the sidelining of international inspectors would set a worrisome precedent. He said that while U.S. inspectors are capable of robust review of nuclear activities, adversaries of the U.S. are unlikely to trust their findings and may choose to abandon inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“The point is not that Americans can’t do a great job at inspections,” he said. “The point is if you were Iran, how much confidence would you have in American inspections of Saudi operations? How would we feel if the Iranians said, ‘Don’t worry. Russians will inspect us.’ We would not accept that.”

“What if the Russians told us not to worry about nuclear facilities in Cuba because they were inspecting them?” he said. “All of this just doesn’t work in a geopolitical environment with as much mistrust and uncertainty as ours.”

Who wins from this deal? Well, certainly Saudi Arabia, which is the rare ally the Trump administration has not alienated. As the U.S. firm that will provide a lot of nuclear technology, Westinghouse is also a big winner.

And… that’s pretty much it. Israel does not like the deal one little bit. The Emiratis are likely pissed; their 2009 deal does not allow them to reprocess nuclear fuel, unlike Saudi Arabia’s sweetheart deal. This could further exacerbate tensions between those two Gulf states. Other possible nuclear states in the region, like Egypt and Türkiye, are also gonna feel left out. Anyone interested in expanding the Abraham Accords will be disappointed, as a nuclear agreement was one of the carrots that the United States could offer the Saudis to normalize relations with Israel. Nonproliferation experts are also exasperated.

Even the United States Senate seems less than pleased about the deal — which matters given that they have a vote to take on it. Politico’s Felicia Schwartz, Jerry Wu, and Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing take the Senate’s temperature and finds it pretty damn chilly:

Some lawmakers in both parties are warning that the newly inked U.S. nuclear agreement deal with Saudi Arabia could ignite a Middle East arms race at a particularly dangerous moment — when the Iran war is already provoking conflict across the region.

While the deal is the culmination of a process that started before the war with Iran, announcing it now has an immediate effect on the fighting, argued Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who has been critical of Saudi Arabia.

“Everything that happens in Riyadh has a reaction in Tehran,” he said. “Part of the reason the United States has been reluctant to give this agreement to Saudi Arabia is because we knew it would end up pushing Iran closer to a nuclear weapon, and that remains true today.”

Even the potential of future nuclear enrichment by Saudi Arabia could swiftly shift the balance in the region and beyond, said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.).

“I worry about nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, Japan, South Korea,” Kennedy said….

Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, expressed concern that it could further derail the U.S.’ push to get Iran to commit to zero enrichment of uranium.

“I’m very concerned about nuclear proliferation in the Middle East that potentially might have the effect of causing that,” he said….

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said he was surprised that the administration reached a deal that could allow Riyadh to enrich, unlike past nuclear cooperation pacts.

“The thing that concerns me is about the potential for Iran to enrich or for Saudi Arabia to enrich. But I could envision that being totally under control, though, as well,” Johnson said.

Needless to say, folks like Kennedy, Barrasso, and Johnson are not exactly GOP moderates. If even they are voicing qualms about this deal, it’s a sign that maybe the Trump administration has not negotiated the best available terms.

Now is normally the moment in this newsletter when I try to get inside the headspace of someone who would be more supportive of these Trump deals. In this case, however, I confess I have nothing. This is the Jaylen Brown trade equivalent for U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

UPDATE: LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL:

A day after the United States signed a landmark nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, President Trump added a new condition to the sale of nuclear reactors to the kingdom, declaring that the entire arrangement now depends on the Saudi willingness to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.

The deal “is totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords,” Mr. Trump said in a post on his social media site…

There was no mention of any such condition in the administration’s announcement that the deal had been signed on Wednesday, and the text of the deal has not been released. But Mr. Trump’s social media post put the agreement’s immediate future in doubt. The Saudi government has made clear it has no intention of recognizing Israel without creating a pathway toward the creation of a Palestinian state….

In linking the deal to diplomatic recognition of Israel, Mr. Trump is veering back to the plan that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. attempted in the first years of his administration, making nuclear cooperation part of a larger diplomatic understanding that changes the dynamics of the Middle East. But the plan fell apart after the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks on Israel by Hamas, and Mr. Trump later divorced the nuclear agreement from the diplomatic effort.

He has now reversed himself, but only after his energy secretary, Chris Wright, signed the deal with Saudi Arabia’s energy minister.

My hot take is that Trump absorbed the news cycle criticizing the deal and decided to backfill with a social media post that either scuttles the deal or traps the Saudis into an agreement. Since there is no way that the Saudis will agree to these terms, Riyadh can return to the long list of allies that the U.S. is alienating.

Negotiating a piss-poor deal is bad; negotiating a piss-poor deal and then weaseling out of it is… also pretty bad.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World went to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey to see what all the hubbub was about. A movie written and directed by the most successful commercial director of the current moment, with an all-star cast that includes Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, John Leguizamo, Charlize Theron, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Jon Bernthal, Elliot Page, Samantha Morton, and Lupita Nyong’o among others?

Yeah, that’s worth a look-see:

With a filmmaker as ambitious as Nolan — ambitious enough to attract the malevolent attentions of Elon Musk — choosing to adapt one of the most ancient texts in Western civilization, there are three questions worth asking:

1. Is the movie any good?

2. Does the criticism of the film make any sense?

3. Is the movie anything more than entertainment?

My answers to these questions are pretty simple: yes, not really, and most definitely yes.

Is it a good movie worth seeing in the theater? God, yes. It’s beautiful on the big screen. Shots as simple as seeing a Greek trireme on the ocean are breathtaking. The Circe sequence is Nolan at his best: disturbing and arresting and I am still not sure how he pulled it off. The performances — particularly from Damon, Hathaway, Morton, Pattinson, and Leguizamo — are outstanding. The ending is thrilling, and at close to three hours I didn’t think it dragged in the slightest.

Is it perfect? No. As with all Nolan screenplays, there are some lines that are incredibly clunky. At one point a character says, “our Age of Bronze is ending” and I could not suppress a chuckle — and then another responds with, “so it’s true our civilization is collapsing.” Yikes. As with all Nolan films, the lady characters are often more symbols and archetypes than flesh-and-blood individuals.1

These are minor cavils. Nolan is also perfectly synched with the material. The second-most surprising thing about Nolan’s The Odyssey is that it took him this long to adapt Homer’s epic into a film. Homer’s version of The Odyssey hopscotches across time and place. Anyone familiar with Nolan’s oeuvre from Memento to The Prestige to Dunkirk to Tenet to Oppenheimer knows that Nolan likes to play with time. He has his fun with flashbacks and flash forwards.

Does the criticism of the film make any sense? There are so many ways to say no —and, to be fair, one way to say yes. The Musks of the world are decrying some of the casting choices, such as Lupita Nyong’o as Helen & Clytemnestra, Himesh Patel as Eurylochus, Travis Scott as a bard, and Elliot Page as Sinon. A lot of Musk devotees on X, like Matt Walsh, are declaring that the film is bad or woke, which for them is the same thing.

The silliness of these criticisms are only heightened by the film’s commercial success. Among other things the rank hypocrisy is wildly funny. Conservatives have bashed progressive critiques of casting like, say, Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell or Emma Stone in Aloha. Now, suddenly, they are declaring it’s Very Different when a brown actor is cast in a white role. In this case it’s particularly ridiculous, since none of the major parts are played by Greeks and everyone is speaking American English.2 When someone like the National Review’s Rick Lowry describes the criticisms as “miscast” you know things have gone too far.

That said, there is one valid critique, which is that Nolan’s version of The Odyssey takes the ultimate Greek fable and infuses it with a more Judeo-Christian sensibility. As Helena Hunt points out in The Ringer:

The straight-faced director excises the carnivalesque lineup of Zeus, Athena, Hera, Aphrodite, Ares, Apollo, et al. and replaces them with a distant deity who manages to show up only in sea storms and thunderbolts and comes with a distinctly modern set of virtues… Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey have their share of woe and divine retribution, sure, but they’re also filled with the bawdy, shifting moods of the gods, who bestow their favor unevenly and pursue their lust and vengeance to extremes. Nolan sands those gods down into a more moral, quasi-Judeo-Christian idea of monolithic power and then puts their divine weight behind some of his chosen themes. The effect is to re-create the gods after our own (or Nolan’s) ideas of remote and irreproachable moral authority, as if we couldn’t believe Odysseus would worship these gods if they didn’t measure up to our standards….

Nolan folds together the discordant values of the gods until there’s one message left: Practice hospitality, avoid war, and treat others how you’d like to be treated. That sentiment is nowhere to be found in Homer—it’s basically the opposite of how his selfish gods and heroes operate—but it does show up in a different religious text a few centuries later. It’s a more monotheistic ideal with a more contemporary aspiration: to urge us to welcome strangers into our gates, let up on all that warmongering, seek justice but show mercy, and humble our egos before the unknown powers that be.

So yes, Nolan departs from Homer’s text in significant ways — but to say he does so in a way that offends cultural conservatives is, well, blasphemous. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson is correct when he explains, “it's funny that Nolan made The Odyssey kinda Christian—accentuating the main character's guilt, trauma—and then many Christian conservatives, who decided that they were going to hate the movie because it had a Black actress in the wrong role, instead have to twist themselves into the pretzel of arguing that making the Odyssey Christian is ‘woke’ and they just really wanted to see a movie and hero that properly embodied the very same archaic and anti-Christian values that in any other context they would consider abhorrent.”

The fact that I’m writing about Greek mythology and Judeo-Christian values straightforwardly answers my last question: there is a deeper message to this film. Indeed, to answer Ana Marie Cox’s question before she even asks it on our Space the Nation podcast, there is a surprising amount of international relations (IR) in this film.

Read more

My last post on the uncertain future of liberalism sounded a touch more pessimistic than I intended. The truth is, at the Liberalism Conference I attended last week, there was a strong consensus — along with a healthy dollop of fury — that congressional Republicans have been particularly derelict in exercising their constitutional prerogatives of constraining unilateral presidential power.

As president Trump has ripped up the Iran “cease-fire” and decided on less jaw-jaw and more war-war, this has put these same Republicans in a tough spot. See, the war is super-unpopular — indeed, it is America’s least popular war in the history of modern polling. Oh and president Trump is also super-unpopular, and continues to trend in an unfavorable direction.1

This has put congressional Republicans in a rather awkward position, as the New York Times’ Robert Jimison reports:

The collapse of the cease-fire and resumption of hostilities has inflamed a debate on Capitol Hill over war powers just as the administration is seeking tens of billions of dollars to pay for the conflict.

That has presented Republicans with a political worst-case scenario months before midterm elections in which their majorities are at stake: They are being asked to vote to fund an unpopular war over which they have had no meaningful oversight, and which they have never voted to approve.

“The greatest fighting force on the planet, the last great superpower must be fully equipped, and that’s the job of Congress to make sure it’s done,” Speaker Mike Johnson told CNN’s Manu Raju last week at the Capitol. The administration last month requested $87.6 billion in supplemental funding that would include $67.1 billion in extra military spending this year.

Asked whether it wasn’t also the job of Congress to authorize the war, Mr. Johnson replied: “We’re going to supply the needs for America’s national security.”

The position amounts to the latest instance of Republicans ceding power to the executive branch, as they sidestep a debate over the conduct of the war and try to rally support within their ranks for a filibuster-proof, party-line bill to pay for it with no strings attached.

It is all the more remarkable coming weeks after bipartisan majorities in both the House and Senate voted to reassert Congress’s constitutional role over matters of war, a slap on Mr. Trump’s wrist four months into a conflict that he had said would last a matter of weeks.

This does raise the discomfiting question of how the Trump administration is going to get funding approval when majorities in both houses of Congress basically voted against the war last month. As previously noted, the war has gotten even less popular since June. More American troops have been killed, and the administration is keeping the full human and material cost of the war off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush.

House Republicans appear to be hoping that an administration briefing can rally the congressional troops. Good luck with that! But as the NYT’s Jimison reports, at least one House Republican has devised a more, shall we say, Orwellian strategy:

Republicans, by contrast, have largely sidestepped the renewed war powers debate, many of them echoing Mr. Trump’s justification for resuming the fight.

“The fact of the matter is, President Trump is the first president dealing with what has been the status quo for decades — which is Iran attacking everybody’s ships, everybody’s navy, everybody’s anything going through the Strait of Hormuz,” Representative Brian Mast, the Florida Republican who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, said on Friday during an interview on Fox News. “After this escalation from them, we are now the United States of America that says this is not going to be the status quo. It’s going to change.”

How to put this gently…. the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee is either a blithering idiot or attempting to convince Americans that we have always been at war with Eastasia Iran. Or, to quote Orwell directly from 1984, Mast is hoping that, “the past was alterable.”

To be blunt about it: Mast is engaging in some serious bullshitting. Iran has not been attacking everybody’s ships, everybody’s navy, and everybody’s anything going through the Strait of Hormuz for decades. Full stop.

To be pedantic about it: there was a period in the 1980s when the Iran-Iraq War meant that tanker traffic in the Persian Gulf was imperiled, and the Reagan administration did provide some escorting of tankers during that time. And the Houthis — one of Iran’s violent non-state allies — have imperiled shipping through the Red Sea on an intermittent basis since October 2023 — including right now. However, at no time in the 35 years prior to February 2026 — a time period that includes multiple skirmishes between Iran and Israel — has Iran ever attacked everyone’s ships and everyone’s navy anywhere near the Strait of Hormuz.

It. Did. Not. Happen.

No, the status quo that Mast wants reversed has only been the status quo for months, and it was the Trump administration that triggered the change, a change everyone could see coming if the U.S. launched a large-scale attack.

As the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Mast would be well-positioned to ask the Trump administration how this new status quo could be reversed. Unfortunately, he’s too busy leaning into doublethink to engage in that kind of oversight.

At the end of last year, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World noted that the MAGA movement was following the plot of Orwell’s Animal Farm in that Trump had ousted the neoconservatives from the GOP, only to embrace an even dumber brand of neoconservatism. With Mast’s quote, it looks like MAGA is now — wittingly or unwittingly — embracing Orwell’s other great novel as well.

Back in the 20th century there was a running joke that every other Foreign Affairs essay would have the title “Whither ________?” in which the author would unintentionally put the reader to sleep with less-than-scintillating prose that talked about a country or a concept without really arriving at a conclusion.

So, is this post gonna be something similar about the future of liberalism? Well… you, dear readers, can be the judge of that.

This past week the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World attended a conference on “Liberalism for the 21st Century,” also called LibCon 2026, sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism.1 The conference assembled some top-tier academics (Jacob T. Levy, Jan-Werner Müller, Francis Fukuyama, Manisha Sinha, and Danielle Allen among others) and columnists (Jamelle Bouie, Adam Serwer, David French, Ezra Klein, Anne Applebaum, Robert Guest, Quinta Jurecic, and William Kristol among others). The theme of this year’s conference was, essentially: “is there a viable reconstruction agenda for American liberal democracy?”

After listening to my betters for a day and a half, however, I am honestly unsure if an agenda exists.

Goodness knows the theme is timely. As with last year’s conference, it seems difficult to have a convening on the state of American liberal democracy without Donald Trump doing something that points out the “badly maimed” state of the republic, as Shikha Dalmia put it in her opening remarks. Last year LibCon happened as Trump took control of the DC Policy and deployed the National Guard. This time around the conference took place as Trump attempted to claim yet again that the 2020 election was rigged.

Looking over my notes, however, I think the conference did a far better job of diagnosing the problems than offering solutions. Many participants rejoiced in the fall of Viktor Orbán, for example, but Müller astutely noted that Orbán was constrained by the European Union, whereas the U.S. is unique unburdened by a concern for global public opinion.

Multiple participants agreed that there was a distinct gap between how ordinary Americans and elites had reacted to Trump’s illiberal efforts. The depth of citizen resistance was considerable: grand juries refusing to indict, marching at No Kings rallies, or or citizens taking to the streets in Minneapolis and elsewhere to resist draconian immigration policies. On the other hand, far too many American elites had acquiesced to the Trump administration’s illiberal pressures. The public turns out to have been a little more democratic and liberal than elites feared. But while mass resistance is certainly a good thing, a lack of leadership is a problem.

Is there a positive reconstruction agenda for the future? This is where the fissures started to become clear. LibCon attendees come from multiple intellectual streams. Some are exiled neoconservatives horrified by everything Trump has done. Some are the libertarians who actually stuck with the ideas of libertarianism rather than deciding Trump was cool because he likes crypto. Some are traditional liberals. Some are further to the left but really, really want to smash a system that seems rigged in favor of Trump and his GOP compatriots.

There were some areas of agreement among the many tribes at LibCon. Constraining the presidential pardon power was universally popular, as was the idea of more rigorous antitrust enforcement. Reforming the Insurrection Act and time-limiting the presidential use of emergency powers was also popular. A strong anti-corruption program got a lot of nods and claps.

Beyond that... well… not so much. Attendees were split on expanding the Supreme Court as a means to overcome the current conservative cabal. As for a positive agenda, I did not hear much in the way of reconstruction. For example, while the panel on historical reconstruction efforts was interesting, the obvious point that everyone raised was that large-scale reconstruction usually happens only after a war or revolution. Democrats winning in 2028 does not quite rise to that level.

Bill Kristol’s closing remarks were particularly sobering.2 He argue that although Trump’s Thursday speech wound up being a bit of a dud, Trump’s second term has been worse than expected. Illiberals have captured too many institutions — corporations, law firms, some universities — creating authoritarianism within the government, beyond the government, and projecting pressure from the government. He fretted that there had not been enough people who have expressed revulsion about Trump. Kristol was nonetheless pleased that 20% of Trump’s supporters have abandoned him, and that because Trump is 80 years old, any third-term ideas are unlikely to play out. He concluded that authoritarian efforts have been stronger than expected — but so has the resistance.

Kristol closed by quoting James Carville from an October 2020 Bulwark essay:

What this moment has done for all of us—for all those who have sat on the sidelines of history or never were presented with something that held as much gravitas—is that it has given us, for one fleeting moment—the moment we’re living right now—a sense of common purpose. Common purpose of which we will be able to recall forever: that when our country and our Republic were on the brink of collapse, when our fellow Americans needed us, we took a blow torch to our past differences, our former conflicts and our old rivalries, and we fought together.

The question Kristol was asking was whether that moment will happen again in 2028, in favor of small-l liberalism.

And here the preceding panel was sobering. Simply put, the conversation between Ezra Klein and Danielle Allen was a bit of a letdown. It took Klein and Allen about thirty minutes to get to their rather different definitions of liberalism.3 Klein further argued that liberalism had become too enmeshed in institutions and procedures rather than grander visions. That may be true as far as American political liberalism is concerned, but for guarding against authoritarianism, procedures and institutions are at least two-thirds of the ballgame,4 so I don’t think the conference’s focus on them was misplaced. But Klein might have a point in asking whether this kind of liberalism can inspire a mass movement.

So what do I think? I think that there were elements of a liberal reconstruction agenda, but I don’t know if they will get the blood pumping in the public sphere.

I was fortunate enough to procure Laura K. Field’s outstanding Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right just before I left. Field focuses on the intellectual movements that have supported Trump over the past decade. While it is mostly about conservatism, the last paragraph of her introduction stopped me cold. She warns against dismissing the ideas of the New Right as unserious:

Above all else, the naive view overestimates liberalism’s immediate appeal and underestimates liberalism’s fragility. Growing right-wing extremism has not emerged in a vacuum but in many instances is a response, however misguided, to real problems, and to the real vulnerabilities of liberal democracy. It reflects some of the actual failures of modern liberal politics and economics, of modern liberal culture, and of the corporate neoliberal academy. One of the major advantages of spending time with the New Right is that it allows us to see these challenges more clearly, and to think through future possibilities for a pluralistic liberal order more deeply. And with some urgency.

LibCon 2026 felt a sense of urgency. I don’t know if that will be enough.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World recently observed that Vice President JD Vance’s first 18 months as vice president had not gone terribly well: “His book tour has not gone well. He’s been stuck cheerleading for unpopular military actions that flatly contradict his 2024 campaign pledges. He keeps campaigning for losers like Viktor Orban and picking fights with popular figures like (checks notes) the Pope. He can’t even hold a football championship trophy without fumbling it. And Trump has openly mused about Vance’s political fortunes relative to Marco Rubio, all the while throwing Vance under the bus in public and in private.”

In other words, Vance is having at least as rough a time as Kamala Harris did four years ago.

Things have not gotten better for Vance in the weeks since I last checked in on him. He keeps trafficking in conspiracy theories. He suggested that most college graduates hold “fake jobs.”

And he has compared himself to Richard Nixon, going on to claim that Watergate was much ado about nothing. According to the New York Times’ Emily Davies:

Vice President JD Vance downplayed the significance of the Watergate scandal during a speech on Thursday, saying that the controversy that toppled President Richard M. Nixon would be “like a 12-hour news story” if it happened today.

“The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy,” Mr. Vance added, saying he had been joking backstage about the scandal before his appearance at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, Calif.

Mr. Vance, who is widely seen as a potential 2028 presidential contender, compared himself to Nixon, who resigned in disgrace after his administration tried to cover up its involvement in a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.

As provocative as Vance’s argument might have been, other New York Times writers suggested that he might have had a point. I, for one, am skeptical. The real scandal about Watergate was about the Nixon administration’s use of intelligence agencies to engage in covert and illegal surveillance of perceived domestic enemies. That still seems like a big deal today!

Part of me is beginning to wonder, however, if Vance decided to conduct his own political experiment to test his hypothesis. Because yesterday MS NOW’s Carol Leonnig and Vaughn Hillyard reported out a story that sure seems to portray Vance like an entitled asshole:

On Thursday last week, Secret Service agents groused among themselves as they prepared to deliver another perk to Vice President JD Vance’s family: join a military helicopter crew to fly his young son to his golf lesson.

The planned trip on Marine Two, the call-sign for the U.S. Marine Corps helicopter that carries the vice president, was canceled at the last minute due to severe thunderstorms and high winds in the Washington, D.C., area that day, according to two people with knowledge of the flight plans. Vance planned to travel with his son on the flight to Joint Base Andrews — which includes a secure, world-class golf center — according to two other administration officials with knowledge of his schedule.

But the Secret Service staff’s complaints about a planned chopper ride for an elementary school student reflects a building morale problem inside the team of agents assigned to shield Vance and his young family, according to the two people and another person familiar with the agents’ frustration.

Agents have shared concerns internally about Vance and his office pressing them for trips and assignments that some agents consider an inappropriate or even unprecedented use of government resources compared to prior vice presidents, they said.

The agents pulled in to protect Vance and his family have also become “fed up” with the last-minute travel demands that Vance and his wife, second lady Usha Vance, frequently place on the security team, according to the two people and an additional source with knowledge of their travel who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals….

Previous vice presidents and other protected administration officials traditionally warned the Secret Service of their intended travel days in advance, especially for their family, and sought to provide at least several hours’ notice of changes.

“They change everything,” one of the people said. “They don’t stick to their schedules, and that costs shit-tons of taxpayer money.”

How bad is it? According to Leonnig and Hillyard, the Secret Service has made patches and challenge coins “to mock the frequency of the vice president’s and his family’s last-minute travel.” That’s bad — so bad that the official White House response didn’t do the usual thing of bashing the reporters who asked the question.1

This is a variation on a theme: Vance’s previous travel — including an awful lot of vacations — has inconvenienced and annoyed locals.

This seems to me like Vance is testing whether his 21st century Watergate theory is true. Even in today’s saturated media environment, this story is juicy. It’s about a high-ranking official enjoying ridiculous levels of entitlement on the government dime. Even by Trump-era standards it’s easy to understand. And, of course, the narrative flatly contradicts the Yale Law School grad’s efforts to depict himself as a humble midwesterner.

Leonnig and Hillyard filed their story at 4:10 PM Eastern Daylight Time on July 15th. By the time you read this, it will have been more than twelve hours since the news cycle started. The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World is eager to see whether this story has legs or whether Vance’s thesis holds up and it fades away.

Thank you to Vice President Vance for being willing to run political science experiments in the field.

The Trump administration’s attempt to exercise direct political control over all federal grant-making reveals some trends that go beyond that particular initiative. They include:

• A rejection of any independent source of technical or professional expertise;

• The vesting of decision-making authority entirely in political appointees regardless of their knowledge of the policy issue in question;

• The elimination of any countervailing constraint or check on centralized decision-making among inner-circle appointees.

Want some more examples? You know you do!

Subscribe now

Consider this New York Times story by Devlin Barrett, William K. Rashbaum and Julian E. Barnes about the administration’s attempt to centralize all foreign espionage targets within a single master list:

The Trump administration is demanding that American intelligence officials turn over the names of all foreign espionage targets, including suspected spies and potential recruits, to create a master list that some officials fear will be misused or compromise operations, according to people familiar with the matter.

The effort by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has intensified in recent months, frustrating counterparts at the F.B.I. and C.I.A., who are skeptical of the claims that a master list is necessary to avoid inadvertent conflicts between agencies and to better track foreign intelligence threats in real time. The office was established in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks to streamline coordination among the intelligence agencies.

Senior counterintelligence officials at the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. have so far resisted those demands, the people familiar with the matter said, and the effort has been mostly unsuccessful. Officials still cannot agree on the most basic details, including how a list of what are known as foreign intelligence threat actors would be created, maintained and kept secure, the people said….

For the F.B.I., such a master list of espionage targets would include those the bureau wants to investigate and perhaps someday arrest. For the C.I.A., it would include a significant number of potential assets.

Some current and former intelligence officials fear that assembling identifying details about some of the most sensitive cases may fatally compromise long-running intelligence investigations and operations. The identities of those targets are carefully protected secrets, walled off from most personnel even inside their own agencies.

This degree of centralization is hardly unique to the intelligence community. There have been a raft of stories about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attempting to manage the Pentagon in areas big and small so that it reflects what appears to be a worldview rooted in racism, resentment, and male fragility.

Or consider how the United States — scratch that, it’s just Marco Rubio — is currently running the Venezuelan state. According to the New York Times’ Tyler Pager and Anatoly Kurmanaev:

In the six months since U.S. forces blew open Mr. Maduro’s bedroom door and snatched him in the dead of night, Mr. Rubio has become the de facto viceroy of Venezuela, holding sway over a sovereign nation in a way that no American official has since L. Paul Bremer III arrived in Baghdad in 2003 to run U.S.-occupied Iraq.

Mr. Rubio now effectively controls Venezuela’s finances, the distribution of its natural resources and its government, according to interviews with more than a dozen officials and people close to both governments in Washington and Caracas, who provided details about his involvement in steering the country’s policies. Many spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private interactions and internal discussions.

While he has not visited Venezuela in person since the U.S. took over, the secretary of state is deeply involved in the country’s day-to-day operations, keeping in close contact with Delcy Rodríguez, who was Mr. Maduro’s vice president and now leads her country on an acting basis, with the imprimatur of the United States. The two exchange messages in Spanish on WhatsApp, trading gossip, birthday greetings and selfies….

The direct control over Venezuela’s public revenues, in particular, distinguishes Washington’s influence there from most other countries beholden to its military and financial might.

The U.S. Treasury receives the revenue from most of Venezuela’s exports, then disburses it to Venezuela through the country’s banking system, a relationship akin to parents handing out allowances to children. Mr. Rubio and his team set the conditions on what that money can be spent on, and by whom….

When the Fox News anchor Bret Baier contacted Ms. Rodríguez about participating in an interview, she told him that Mr. Trump would have to approve. Mr. Trump loved that Ms. Rodríguez was deferring to him, and has repeatedly recounted the story to others when they ask about her, according to multiple people familiar with his comments.

These examples are entirely in keeping with a president who said in his first term that “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president” and when asked about the dearth of seasoned diplomats during his first term said, “Let me tell you, the one that matters is me. I’m the only one that matters, because when it comes to it, that’s what the policy is going to be.”

In theory — unitary executive theory if you want to be cute about it — there is a logic for this kind of streamlining and centralization. A populist would want government policy and government outputs to be the direct outcome of what elected officials and their political subordinates want to do. Centralizing authority and eliminating veto points on executive action enables governments to pivot more quickly towards the policy preferences of elected and appointed officials.

The problems are self-evident, however. Even if one assumes the best of intentions, disregarding professional expertise in the service of a shallow state is a recipe for making catastrophic error after catastrophic error. When Hegseth decided to do away with mandatory flu vaccines, for example, the result was the creation of human petri dishes at military bases, perfectly recreating the conditions of the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic. There are benefits to quick decisions and rapid implementation, but such an approach exacerbates the cost of bad decisions.

Furthermore, with this administration it is both impossible and ridiculous to assume the best of intentions. The assumption that the president is attempting to pursue the national interest rather than his own private interests would be absurd. Federal judges are now blasting arrangements that, “confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law.”

And, of course, all this presumes that the president and his political appointees actually know what they are doing, when the evidence is abundantly clear that most of his appointees either have no real policy knowledge or are simply enablers of Trump’s worst instincts.

Over the longer term, the result will be akin to Trump’s declaration yesterday that he’s going to charge a toll for the Strait of Hormuz; it upends the status quo, but there is no way that what is being proposed in its stead will serve anyone’s interests but Donald Trump.

In my Carnegie paper about the future of American network power, I warn about the the administration’s threats to the U.S. lead in scientific and technological research:

For example, one reason the United States has remained the epicenter of critical science and technology innovation networks is… the preeminence of U.S. higher education in the research ecosystem. The current administration’s immigration and research policies, however, are sapping that strength. In the fall of 2025, international student enrollment had declined by 17 percent; the decline in international graduate students was even higher, estimated to be 24 percent. At the same time, international enrollments in European and East Asian universities have increased. If critical masses of global talent establish bases of operation in other countries, the structural power of the United States in this area risks collapse.

Last month the administration released a sneak preview of another frontal assault on American research excellence, all under the innocuous-sounding plan to “revise the Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance to improve government-wide policies and requirements related to the management of grants, cooperative agreements, and other forms of assistance.”1

Even a quick scan of the proposed regulation rewrite, however, reveals where this administration is coming from. It claims that, “Federal awards were often used during [the Biden] years to promote a ‘woke’ policy agenda that did not reflect the values of the vast majority of the American public” and “far-left activists hijacked the critical work done by the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which was established to respond to the AIDS crisis in Africa. Due to wasteful spending, PEPFAR became a left-wing foreign aid entitlement that attempted to promote abortion and gender ideology.” The latter claim relies on a Heritage Foundation argument that the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World called bullshit on about three years ago.

Former NIH official Elizabeth Ginexi looked at the rule and immediately fired off a flare demonstrating how drastic the proposed change would be:

The rule explicitly states that peer review recommendations “remain advisory and are not ministerially ratified, routinely deferred to, or otherwise treated as de facto binding.” This directly dismantles the post-WWII system used by NIH, NSF, DOE, NASA, and nearly every science agency, in which independent expert peer review was the primary measure of scientific merit. Under this rule, a political appointee can simply override the scientific community’s judgment with no finding of cause.

The New York Times’ Tony Romm provides a clean summary of the OMB proposal:

Mr. Trump’s ambitions were made clear in a roughly 400-page blueprint that was released to little fanfare on Friday. If finalized, it would require all federal grants to be approved by the president’s political appointees, who must ensure that the money would “demonstrably advance the president’s policy priorities.”

For the agencies that issue those awards and the nonprofit groups, local governments, universities and other entities that receive the money, the Trump administration would also impose a set of highly prescriptive and political criteria….

Many researchers expressed particular alarm about the implications for their work, citing the risks in having political appointees, not subject-matter experts, deciding the merit of scientific pursuits.

“It means that all grants, not just science grants, are now subject to the rules that are defined by the White House, rather than by a technical agency,” said Cole Donovan, the director of science policy and advocacy at Stand Up for Science, a group that supports federal research spending. He previously served as an international technology adviser in the Biden administration….

“This is a major escalation in the Trump administration’s war on science and its efforts to choke off funding to whatever communities Trump decides to target,” said Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, who leads her party on the Senate Appropriations Committee. She added in a statement that “Republicans should work with Democrats to stop this rule in its tracks.”

Marginal Revolution’s Alex Tabarrok expands on the real dangers of this proposed wholesale rewrite of federal grant-making:

American science has long been state funded but not state directed. Since Vannevar Bush, money has flowed through many agencies to independent universities, allocated largely by peer review. The system has flaws—conformity, gerontocracy, waste—but it had one great virtue, the system was decentralized and not under state control. This rule proposes to bring science funding under top-down, state control.

Program goals must now be “aligned with administration policies and priorities” (§ 200.202). Merit review is subordinated to politics: “senior appointees must conduct these reviews,” ensuring “that discretionary awards advance the President’s policy priorities,” while “peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion” (§ 200.205). And every grant becomes terminable at will, whenever it “no longer effectuates program goals, Federal agency priorities, or the national interest *as they exist at the time of the termination*” (§ 200.340, emphasis added). Universities must even ensure their subrecipients don’t “significantly damage the reputation of… the Federal Government” (§ 200.332)—a loyalty clause for scientists.

All this is sold as cutting “burdensome conditions,” a goal I would support, but sadly that is bullshit. The proposed rules add more paperwork and many more layers of bureaucratic review. Payment requests must include written justifications. Every disbursement gets screened through Treasury’s “Do Not Pay” system. Every recipient must run E-Verify. Applicants must disclose any employee who worked at the awarding agency within two years. And on top of the existing review machinery sits a new pre-issuance review committee of “senior appointees” second-guessing the experts. Fixed amount awards—pay for outputs, not inputs—an innovative reward mechanism are *eliminated*, so every award now gets routine cost monitoring and financial reporting.

Political review of every award, peer review demoted, agency review promoted, termination whenever “priorities” change. Chilling. It’s a nightmare of petty low-trust review of the kind that is already drowning science. I must deal with this kind of nonsense all the time. More is not better.

The machinery is centralized too. OMB’s guidance becomes binding regulation, effective government-wide with no agency rulemaking. One dial in the White House now turns every grant program in the country.

The new rules will be sold as getting rid of DEI but that is an excuse to bring in the commissars. The new rules don’t depoliticize science they create even more politicization with the sign flipped, and the drafters admit it.

Yeah, if I was trying to ruin American leadership in scientific research this is pretty much the kind of rule I would write. Furthermore, the very act of issuing the rule and requesting comments means this is a more substantive shift than just another executive order. OMB Director Russel Vought’s goal here is a permanent shift in how funding is allocated. And I’d expect him to supervise this about as well as he supervised DOGE.

So is this a done deal? Not necessarily.

Inside Higher Ed’s Ryan Quinn explains that in requesting comments — which is required for this kind of proposed rule change — the administration is getting more than is bargained for:

Through social media, video calls, Substacks and petitions, scientists, universities and groups representing them have called for a flood of public comments. They’ve shared resources listing objectionable provisions they’ve identified in the more than 400-page proposal. They’ve provided online guides to the public on how to write comments pushing back on specific changes that would affect them.

The input might lead the White House to alter its proposal. But, even if that doesn’t happen, opponents say the comments could still slow implementation of the changes because the OMB must reply to them. And a monsoon could persuade Congress, which has repeatedly rejected Trump’s previous proposals to gut research funding, to use its power to stop these changes.

Comments also put into the public record objections that, if the government doesn’t address them, could be raised again in lawsuits to stop the changes.

The deluge opponents have called for has arrived: The proposal has already received roughly 90,000 public comments, and the comment period isn’t over until July 13….

LinkedIn has been a major forum for discussion of and pushback against the proposal. “Continue to flood the zone!!” Logan Spector, a University of Minnesota–Twin Cities pediatrics professor, wrote on the site last month.

Prestigious scientific journals are also speaking out in editorials.

“The scientific community needs to flood OMB with responses during the public comment period,” Holden Thorp wrote in Science, of which he’s editor in chief. He added that “universities and associations must speak out as a united front to mobilize Congress and be ready to file lawsuits once the regulations are finalized.”

“The red light is now flashing,” he wrote. “All hands, report to stations.”

The New England Journal of Medicine compared the proposal to Lysenkoism, when the U.S.S.R.’s political rejection of genetics set the country back in agriculture and other areas.

One of the genuine difficulties with observing the second Trump term is that the assault on state capacity and impartiality has been so multipronged that it is difficult to keep track of everything going on. But these proposed rule changes are monumental and catastrophic. Unfortunately, “monumental and catastrophic” are the perfect adjectives to describe what Trump will bequeath his successor, as well as the rest of us.