Maggie Haberman on Epstein

From a long interview with Ezra Klein in the NYTimes (July 31, 2026):

It started with Jeffrey Epstein last year, and we get into that extensively in the book. Right after the 12-day war is the Epstein crisis — and I’m calling it a crisis. What it actually is is a multi-administration failure to deal with a pedophile, whom people of both parties found entertaining or useful or whatever. But it was the MAGA movement leaders who had been talking about a need for transparency over many years leading up to Trump’s election in 2024.

Obviously there's more at the link.

The Boys [Media Notes 187]

David Colman, The Emmy Awards Are Afraid of This Vulgar, Gory, Brilliant Show, NYTimes, July 19, 2026.

Last week, a raft of intelligent, watchable, enjoyable shows were nominated for the Emmy Award for outstanding drama series, the TV version of the best picture Oscar. Each of these prestige TV shows made tart references to our current moment. “The Pitt” dealt with ICE in the E.R. “Slow Horses” and “The Diplomat” dramatized the dangers of cynical political expedience. “The Gilded Age” and “Paradise” produced two very different takes on oligarch-itecture. “Your Friends & Neighbors” wallowed in larcenous suburban finance dads in midlife crisis, while “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” jousted with how to transcend one’s “low birth.” The only show to truly depart from dramatic realism was “Pluribus,” a sci-fi show about a space virus that made virtually all humans highly agreeable zombies, making you wonder if this is what life will be like living in a world ruled by A.I. agents.

But in the end, none of them actually tried to capture the grand farce of a moment we’re in. They didn’t even come close. Each of them is too polite, too nuanced, too, in the end, moderate — centrist, even.

And then there’s The Boys, which captured our current moment, where it’s “as if we’re living in a burn-it-all-down age of greed, mayhem and corruption.”

There was one show, however, that hit this head-on — and it’s not “Industry,” HBO’s finance-and-cocaine drama that was also snubbed by the Emmys this year. It’s Amazon Prime’s “The Boys.” The superhero spoof, which ended its five-season run this May, received not a single Emmy nomination in a major award category. Despite the fact that it dared to land savage, serious and entertaining punches about everything warped in American culture — corporate greed, celebrity worship, moral hypocrisy and how they all fit together. [...]

For those unfamiliar, “The Boys” is set in an alt-present-day United States, where superheroes (“supes”) are real and abundant. But instead of renegades valiantly saving the world from doomsday plots, they’re more like substance-abusing superinfluencers: entitled, narcissistic pursuers of fame whose high-profile “saves” are frequently stage-managed photo ops. They often offhandedly end up killing bystanders. The supes — especially the elite supe group known as “The Seven,” a parody of DC’s Justice League — are controlled, weaponized and monetized by the company that came up with the chemical to create them: Vought International, a corporate octopus whose business interests range from Disney-style entertainment to pharmaceuticals to military contracts.

The gullible public laps up all the supe mythology — especially that of Homelander, the all-American, charismatic leader of the Seven whose authoritarian megalomania drives him to take over the Oval Office, having naysayers locked up in detention camps (or just laser-visioning them in half) along the way.

For what it’s worth, I was hooked from the first season in 2019, while the Trumposaurus was finishing off his first term.

This vulgar world of corporate-branded superheroes isn’t just an ironic conceit; it’s a brilliant, subversive lampooning of our politically divided, social-media-addicted, celebrity-hypnotized society — and, in the words of the “Boys” showrunner Eric Kripke, of the “powerful and selfish people using social media to intentionally tear people apart for their own selfish interests.”

It may not be subtle. But neither is the era we live in. The Shakespearean scramble of “House of Cards” or “Succession” (both repeat Emmy winners for outstanding drama series) seems quaint by comparison with what we get on newsfeeds every day. [...]

You might wonder why a show that focuses on the superheroes isn’t called “The Supes,” but that’s really the point here. The characters putting the plot into action aren’t the supes, but “the boys,” the four men, and eventually two women, who commit themselves to destroying the company and the supes who are making their world a living hell. Even if some have superpowers, they don’t know what they’re doing. They take insane chances. They fail over and over and keep getting outsmarted by Vought — until they don’t. The show’s real heroes, working outside the official system, pursue their impossible task no matter how the deck is stacked against them. And that is how they win.

There’s more at the link.

Killing the NSC with Julia Curlee

YouTube:

Wherein Ben and Mike Feinberg welcome Julia Curlee, former CIA analyst and NSC staffer, to discuss the Trump administration's destruction of the National Security Council.

An interesting discussion of the functioning of a relatively small government agency, roughly 200 people, by examining what happens when the agency was gutted early in the 2nd Trump administration. 

Note: The opening monologue, the first 3 to 5 minutes or so, is optional. Yes, I know, it's a "revolutionary" feature of this "revolutionary" approach to TV, but come on, gimme' a break. 

The men of Rushmore

😂😂😂 so funny but sadly true pic.twitter.com/UHnkUyEtNZ

— Chris Wheeler (@Gandhi41) July 9, 2026

Voting for the the craziest SOB

For the uninitiated https://t.co/vXaGmgziSI pic.twitter.com/2CDHNmhfeo

— Liam Donovan (@LPDonovan) January 4, 2021

Trump's accidental triumph in Beijing

That’s the title of the latest edition of Robert Wright’s NonZero Newsletter on Substack. Rather than summarizing and paraphrasing I’m going to reproduce most, but not all, of it in full below the asterisks. In particular, I’m omitting the very end, which is a series of charts showing bipartisan anxiety for AI. I share that anxiety. The title of one of recent columns at 3 Quarks Daily gives you my attitude: The Paradox of Contemporary AI: Engineering Success and Institutional Failure. The anxiety in Wright’s charts is one reflection of that institutional failure.

* * * * *

On Thursday the White House issued a social media post that said simply, “American strength back on the world stage.” You might expect such a post to be accompanied by military imagery—maybe an impressive-looking array of soldiers. And this one was. But the soldiers weren’t American. Smartly clad People’s Liberation Army troops, part of the pageantry that had greeted Trump in Beijing, were featured in the opening montage of a video that then showed Trump shaking hands with President Xi Jinping and ended with the two leaders walking side by side on a red carpet.

Apparently the unipolar moment is over. Being one of the world’s two main poles is, these days, the highest geopolitical aspiration of America’s president. “It’s the two great countries,” Trump proudly told Sean Hannity in an interview that aired on Fox News after the US-China summit ended. “I call it the G-2. This is the G-2.”

The US foreign policy establishment was less effusive than Trump about G-2 membership. A Washington Post headline said: “China summit yields Xi’s goal—equal footing with U.S.,” and the subhead added that “the image of peer superpowers during President Trump’s visit displayed a dynamic that analysts say the Chinese have long sought and Americans had resisted.” The analyst quoted by the Post, a Biden administration national security staffer, said that Xi, using “the opulent optics of the visit,” had managed to do something “Chinese leaders have been working toward for decades”—he had made it “clear to the world that China and the United States are the two dominant, equally matched superpowers. There is no going back.”

New York Times reporter David Sanger, the dean of Blob [foreign policy establishment] scribes, also depicted the summit as a kind of comedown for America. Whereas Trump was “conciliatory,” Sanger wrote, Xi was “quietly more confrontational,” projecting a “new level of confidence and authority.” In particular: Xi had, according to a Chinese foreign ministry statement, privately warned Trump that “the US must handle the Taiwan issue with utmost caution” if it didn’t want to wind up in a conflict.

Meanwhile, as Xi was drawing red lines, Trump, Sanger noted in a subsequent co-authored piece, was spending his time calling Xi a “great leader” and saying that a garden where the two men strolled contained “the most beautiful roses anyone’s ever seen.” All of this showed, according to Sanger, “how far he has shifted the foundations of American policy toward China in the wake of his humbling retreat from last year’s trade war. He has thrown aside the adversarial approach of his first years in office, the Biden administration, and the beginning of his own second term.”

Works for me! Then again, I’ve always been a sucker for peaceful coexistence. Besides, the non-zero-sum problems that the US and China need to solve are increasingly urgent, and a pleasant stroll in the garden can be conducive to cooperation. In fact, this week the two nations agreed to start a dialogue on AI safety. For now they’re focusing mainly on ways to keep non-state actors from putting AI to malign uses. That agenda will likely grow as the magnitude of the AI issue becomes more evident and the inherently international nature of many AI threats does, too. But for now it’s enough that, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it, “the two AI superpowers are going to start talking.”

I think I’d go even further than Sanger in stressing the magnitude of this moment. Trump has “shifted the foundations” not just of “American policy toward China” but of American foreign policy globally. And at the moment, at least, this shift looks auspicious.

Before elaborating, I should emphasize that I’m not calling Trump a visionary. The new and improved foreign policy that I hope is unfolding will, if it unfolds, be one that Trump has more or less stumbled into—and will be different from the one he was pursuing when he started stumbling. Contingency plays a big role in history, and reckless leaders like Trump are particularly good at illustrating that.

* * * * *

That’s not the end of Wright’s discussion of the implications of Trump’s accidental triumph. But it’s the main story. I’ll end by quoting Wright’s last two paragraphs.

One thing standing in the way of my dream scenario—a world where the US and China and the world’s other nations cooperate to solve problems they collectively face—is Trump’s aversion to international governance. China under Xi plays a more active role in international institutions than the US under Trump, and Xi talks more about “win-win” outcomes than Trump, who is famously inclined to see life in zero-sum terms.

Still, he emitted fewer zero-sum vibes this week than he often does. Indeed, inherent in the idea of “G-2” is sustained cooperation between the two superpowers. So maybe Trump has more in the way of non-zero-sum impulses than is commonly recognized, and they just need to be nurtured. And maybe it would help if the New York Times and the Washington Post and much of the foreign policy establishment quit giving him negative feedback every time he expresses them.

 * * * * *

BONUS: Check out Wright's recent discussion with Zhengyu Huang, author of the new book Rethinking China.

0:00 Teaser
0:34 Zhengyu’s tech background and new book, Rethinking China
3:00 What kind of threat is China, really?
10:06 How trading with China transformed America
16:51 The stakes of the chip war
22:02 Will tech war lead to real war?
30:33 The US-China escalation spiral and Taiwan
39:13 “Researching while Chinese”: the new Red Scare?
49:46 Heading to Overtime

Trump is hell-bent on nuking America back to the Stone Age

OK, OK, I get it. That statement is exaggerated and misleading. The Stone Age is too far back, 1960 will do. He’s not using nukes, he’s using oil and coal. And he’s doing considerable damage in the process.

Thomas Edsall has a long article on the subject – all his articles are long – in today’s New York Times, “Trump Is Fighting the World’s Stupidest Culture War,” May 12, 2026. His opening salvo: “On the day our oil-stained president returned to the White House, he began an all-out assault on clean energy. Today, 16 months later, he and his party are paying a significant political price while American consumers are stuck with the bill.”

Edsall goes on:

That bill, according to one scholarly estimate, totals $1,508 per household since President Trump took office for the second time (in after-tax dollars). And as the president does not need reminding, that’s with the congressional elections six months away and the cost of living the voters’ top concern.

As if that were not enough, these same voters, when they fill up their cars, are confronting the costs of Trump’s choice to go to war with Iran, at a national average of $4.52 a gallon — that’s $90.40 for a 20-gallon tank.

Trump has severely, but not fatally, wounded the American renewable energy industry, which is falling further behind China. At the same time, he is doling out tax dollars by the millions to keep dilapidated coal-fired power plants open.

That’s Edsall’s introduction. The rest of his article adds detail upon disgusting detail.

What’s it all about? According to one expert, Leah Stokes, a professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara, it’s all about the Benjamins:

The big story here is corruption. Trump is doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry and enriching his friends because they got him elected.

I cannot fathom why else he’s keeping open these old, dirty, expensive coal plants that were otherwise slated to close in places like Michigan. Someone is getting very rich off these decisions, and everyday Americans are paying the price.

That’s how it is with Agent 47, who has inverted John F. Kennedy’s exhortation from his inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” Agent 47’s revision: “Ask not what you can do for your country – grasp greedily for all your country provide for you.”

Well into the article, Edsall reports:

...not only is the United States falling way behind China on energy, but that the United States is becoming increasingly dependent on China. As a result, Atlas continued:

The strength of Chinese manufacturing and innovation in many parts of the clean energy supply chain, including battery components and solar components, means countries are increasingly reliant on China.

Policies that discourage clean energy manufacturing and deployment in the United States risk weakening the country’s position in the global clean energy supply chain, creating space for China to consolidate its market leadership.

As the old saying goes, with friends like this, who needs enemies. To quote that great philosopher, Pogo the Possum, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Edsall’s list of depredations and stupidities goes on and on. Here’s another:

A key element of Trump’s reward to oil companies for their contribution to his and other Republican campaigns has been his effort to cripple the electric vehicle industry.

In doing so, Trump is trashing free-market principles treasured by traditional conservative Republicans. He has adopted a MAGA industrial policy that goes beyond government propping up one group of special interests to include a deliberate effort to snuff out competing industries.

Julie McNamara, federal energy policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote by email that Trump, simply on the basis of personal grievances and political ideology, “is ceding opportunity after opportunity for the U.S. to be a leader in the global clean energy transition, and all the benefits such leadership can afford.”

Edsall’s conclusion:

Where does all this leave the country?

Stuck with a president committed to policies that amount to national self-sabotage, a man driven by personal grievance and reckless promises to campaign contributors, devoid of any real concern for America’s long-term energy needs.

The power of the Presidency has allowed Trump to become a prisoner of his appetites and grievances.

Trump’s transactional view of the world

David French, True Believers Blow Trump’s Mind, NYTimes, May 7, 2026.

At the core of Trump’s worldview is a belief that the world is a fundamentally transactional place, and that everyone has a price.

The Republican Party has done nothing to disabuse him of the notion. Even the religious leaders around him are fundamentally transactional. As they’ve demonstrated, they’ll put up with virtually any behavior from Trump so long as he delivers on a few, simple promises. And now — especially when it comes to abortion — he doesn’t even have to deliver on those. For some it seems as if access to power alone is compensation enough. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

The key to Trump’s power isn’t just that he accurately sensed that much of the Republican establishment paid lip service to principle but really cared about power — it’s that he knew millions upon millions of voters possessed similar values. Their commitments to character or ideology took a back seat to the simple desire to defeat their opponents. The most important thing was to win. Anything else was a luxury.

And, in a strange way, they appreciated him for his brazenness. In this cynical view, all politicians are, deep down, just like Trump. They were faking their dedication to principle. As for Trump, he was the honest crook. He was like the mob boss who didn’t insult our intelligence by pretending to be in the sanitation business.

Like calls out to like, and over time Trump has built one of the most purely transactional coalitions in politics. It should surprise no one that prosperity gospel pastors were among the first Christians to answer Trump’s call. Their entire religion is transactional — with God dispensing health and wealth in direct response to the financial donations of the faithful.

Nor should we be surprised that such a substantial proportion of the nation’s tech moguls found their way to MAGA. Forget culture, their politics are downstream of commerce, and Trump has promised crypto and A.I. riches to all those who fall in line behind him.

Alas, Trump is wrong about that:

Not everyone is transactional. Some people — for better and for worse — actually have beliefs that they’re willing to die for, and Trump is painfully, obviously baffled when he encounters belief like that.

It’s embarrassing, for example, to watch him flail his way through the Iran war, shifting strategies, objectives and timelines sometimes by the day. It’s obvious that he thought Iran would be another Venezuela. In Venezuela, he was able to capture the leader and then more or less bend the remaining regime elements to his will, at least for now.

But in Iran, he helped Israel decapitate virtually all of the nation’s senior leadership, and the rest of the regime seems to have become more intransigent and less willing to negotiate. Even worse, he also seems to have enabled the most fanatical elements of the regime — the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — rather than the slightly more moderate clerics.

In response, Trump plays the only cards he knows how to play — alternating between threatening death and destruction and proposing business deals.

And then:

Ukraine’s zealous defense of its own liberty and independence is heroic and deeply virtuous. So is Denmark’s defense of its own sovereignty in the face of Trump’s bullying. In fact, much of Western Europe was transactional with Trump until they realized the price of dealing with Trump was simply too high to pay.

They thought they could hunker down and weather another Trump term, but he created a crisis so grave that Europe had to stand if it wanted to preserve any shred of dignity and independence.

The pope’s steadfast adherence to Catholic doctrine is yet another example. One gets the sense that he’s almost amused at the idea that Trump’s bellicose rhetoric should have any influence at all on his public professions of Christian faith.

The messiness of American politics:

One of the most fascinating aspects of the last 10 years of American political life has been the way that Trump has exposed layers of differences in American life beyond right versus left. In fact, in many ways right versus left has been the least consequential aspect of the American divide. The Republican Party bears little ideological resemblance to the G.O.P. of even the very recent past.

Instead, it’s been between decent and indecent. Honest and dishonest. Transactional and principled.

There's more at the link.

The White House endorses research on psychedelics

Andrew Jacobs, A Long, Strange Trip: How the G.O.P. Came to Embrace Psychedelic Drugs, NYTimes, May 3, 2026.

Mindbending may be just the word to describe the Oval Office ceremony on April 18, when President Trump ordered federal agencies to speed up research into the potential therapeutic uses of illegal psychedelic compounds like LSD, peyote and MDMA.

Here was a law-and-order Republican and lifelong teetotaler championing the hallucinogenic substances that a previous Republican president, Richard Nixon, had condemned as “public enemy No. 1.” [...]

Mr. Trump’s bold efforts to soften the federal government’s stance on certain illegal drugs have been head-spinning — last month, the Justice Department, at the president’s behest, loosened restrictions on medical marijuana, too.

But experts in the field are not entirely surprised.

They note a steady easing of public opposition to psychedelics in recent years, much of it shaped by research that has chipped away at the stigma by demonstrating the drugs’ potential to treat intractable mental health conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and substance abuse.

There's much more at the link.

Presiding over a declining America, Trump hastens the descent

Two from today's (May 3, 2026) New York Times. First, China is on the rise and ready to move beyond America. Then we have the decline of the American empire.

China Rising

Jacob Dreyer, Trump Is Coming to a China That Has Moved On, NYTimes, May 3, 2023.

Deng Xiaoping, the former Chinese leader, once said: “If China wants to be rich and strong, it needs America.” But this isn’t the same country that once looked to a U.S. president’s visit as a moment of global validation. It is a country where the realization has dawned that it may have learned all it can from America and has begun to chart its own course.

This was bound to happen as China grew stronger and richer. But Mr. Trump has accelerated this shift. China’s people have watched with a mix of fascination and revulsion as the president — through his abortive tariff wars, the war with Iran and callow allegiance to financial markets — has completed America’s transformation from a model to emulate to a troublesome distraction to be managed. With sinking approval ratings and potential losses awaiting in the midterm elections, Mr. Trump will arrive in Beijing a more diminished figure in Chinese eyes than perhaps any visiting U.S. president. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

This matters, both for the visit itself and for the future of the relationship between the two countries. China’s leaders, aware of Mr. Trump’s weakness and perfidy, are unlikely to strike any meaningful bargains with him. His actions strengthen China’s Communist-ruled system at home by making it look superior by comparison.

Many Chinese people increasingly view the United States less as the lodestar it once was and more as a cautionary tale. Popular sentiment in China is of course state-managed, but it resonates because it mirrors what the Chinese see for themselves. I hear it in daily conversations: Chinese friends who return from America with tales of homelessness, dilapidation and political rancor, which contrast sharply with China’s clean and safe cities, gleaming infrastructure and political stability.

After a couple of paragraphs acknowledging that many Chinese “worry that China isn’t ready to fill [America’s] shoes” in the world and acknowledging that “China, after all, has its own problems,” Dreyer moves on:

Still, there is a clear sense about the need to move past America. Mr. Trump will be gone in two years, but Mr. Xi can rule for as long as he wants and has laid out ambitious plans that are likely to survive him. Those plans include a China that is at the center of new types of energy, the use of data and technologies like artificial intelligence for urban management, the delivery of public services, cheaper health care and better access to education. Chinese people also see that the world is increasingly open to adopting Chinese technology, products, investment and other solutions, maybe even its governance ideas.

There's more at the link.

An Empire in Decline

Christopher Caldwell, America Is Officially an Empire in Decline, NYTimes, May 3, 2023.

The American-Israeli attack on Iran was more than a bad idea; it has turned into a watershed in the decline of the American empire. Some might prefer the word “hegemony” to describe the world order the United States leads, since its flag does not generally fly over the lands it protects or exploits. But the rules are the same: Imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends. And with the Iran war, President Trump has overextended the empire dangerously.

A Middle Eastern military misadventure is one of the last ways a casual observer would have expected Mr. Trump’s presidency to go wrong. The problems he alluded to in all three of his presidential campaigns had mostly resulted from our leaders’ governing beyond their means. At home, proponents of wokeness underestimated the costs and difficulties of micromanaging interactions between groups. Abroad, the mighty American armed forces proved to have no particular talent for democracy promotion, and there was the recent debacle in Iraq to prove it. Overextension was a danger that President Joe Biden contemptuously dismissed. “We’re the United States of America,” he used to say, “and there’s nothing we can’t do.”

Mr. Trump, people thought, would be different. For all the grandiosity of the expression “Make America great again,” Trump voters did not expect him to take on new problems. The greatness would be mostly atmospheric — braggadocio, not adventurism. The United States could become greater even if it withdrew to a less expansive sphere of influence. When he proclaimed an updated Monroe Doctrine, refocusing American attention on the Western Hemisphere, retrenchment was what most people thought they were getting. In last November’s National Security Strategy, he added, “The days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over.”

And yet here we are, ankle-deep in a Middle Eastern quagmire, one that Trump himself laid the groundwork for when he withdrew from Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka JCPOA) in his first term. After two paragraphs in which Caldwell sketches out how Netanyahu suckered Trump into this quagmire, Caldwell has a paragraph in which he sketches out a parallel “with Britain a century ago: deindustrializing, overcommitted, complacent.” He concludes:

Mr. Trump was the perfect candidate for Americans who suspected something had gone wrong with their elites. His argument, basically, was that American-led globalism was so beneficial to politicians that once in power, they would defend it even against their voters, no matter what they said while campaigning. Events, alas, have proved him right.

Suckered again.

Moving Beyond Trump to a Brave New World

Some Young People Think No Kings Is Old News, NYTimes, April 24, 2026.

On April 14 Thomas B. Edsall published an op-ed entitled, Why Aren’t the Kids Out Protesting Against Trump?. It provoked a number of interesting responses. Here is one of them:

To the Editor:

Re “Why Aren’t the Kids Out Protesting Against Trump?,” by Thomas B. Edsall (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, April 14):

As a Gen Z participant in No Kings who has been dismayed to find myself quite alone, demographically speaking, at each protest, I have thought long and hard about how this came to be. I believe that Mr. Edsall’s essay accurately underscores many of the contributing factors. Here are two more to consider.

First, the protests evoke an America that my generation feels we don’t know. The No Kings movement centers largely on the idea of restoration — of democratic principles, political normalcy and American decency. Gen Z, having come of age in the Trump era of political discord and the erosion of democracy, has hardly known any of these things.

Second, precisely because the No Kings protests evoke the past, they fail to appeal to our appetite for change. Young people by nature desire to reform, rectify, reshape. We want to tear down the existing structures we deem unjust and build better ones in their place. To stand against apartheid, sexual harassment or police brutality is to dismantle the present and construct the future.

While the notion of restoration is a noble one, it simply does not motivate people my age in the same way the promise of radical change does. It implies a return to the status quo, and for a generation that considers the status quo one of great injustice, it is fundamentally unpalatable.

Juliana Birkenkamp Boulder, Colo.

I understand that response. A year ago I, when the depredations of the second Trump administration were becoming obvious, I published an article in 3 Quarks Daily, Why I am a Patriot: Vietnam, the Draft, Mennonites, and Project Apollo. That title alone makes Ms. Birkenkamp's point. Here are my opening paragraphs:

Sometime in the past two weeks I found myself feeling patriotic in a way I don’t remember ever having felt before. I accounted for this feeling by invoking that old adage, “you don’t recognize what you have until you lose it.” The current federal administration has stolen my country from me. The America to which I pledged allegiance every morning in primary and secondary school, that America is being pillaged, plundered, and sold off for parts to greedy megalomaniacs and oligarchs.

Now that the nation is being destroyed, I realize that I’ve been bound to America my entire adult life. If I hadn’t felt those bonds before – except perhaps for a moment in the mid-1980s when I played “The Star Spangled Banner” for 25,000 bikers at Americade in Lake George, me alone on my trumpet, without the rest of the band – that’s because I’d taken the idea of America for granted. To invoke another cliché, just as the fish is oblivious to the water in which it swims, so I was not consciously aware of the freedom and dignity, of the liberty and justice for all, which made our national life possible.

I understand her second point as well, and share it. I don't want to return to the world of my youth. That's gone, forever. I want to move forward. Just how we are to do that, that is not at all clear to me. The best I can manage at the moment is to imagine where we might be over a century in the future. Here's a glimpse of what might be: Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising, A Working Paper. Here is the abstract from that paper:

The advancement of AI offers us the choice between contrasting paradigms for organizing human life: Homo Economicus (where work is the defining activity) and Homo Ludens (where play is the defining activity). Drawing on Johan Huizinga's work and Kim Stanley Robinson's speculative fiction, I propose that humanity faces a critical juncture as AI increasingly dominates economic production. The document develops a theoretical framework for a "Fourth Arena" of existence-beyond matter, life, and human culture-that emerges through human-AI interaction. Through speculative narrative (first section) and philosophical dialogue with Claude 3.7 (second and third sections), I argue that play, rather than economic utility, will become the defining characteristic of human value and meaning in an automated future. As AI systems assume utilitarian functions, humanity's capacity for non-instrumental play becomes increasingly central to our identity and contribution. The manuscript represents preliminary work toward a larger project titled The Fourth Arena: Homo Ludens Rising, which envisions play as the essential bridge into a post-economic society where human flourishing transcends productivity-based value systems.

Ezra Klein and Fareed Zakaria discuss the moral degeneracy of Donald Trump and what that’s doing to America.

Ezra Klein and Annie Galvin, The Civilization Trump Destroys May Be Our Own, NYTimes, Apr. 10, 2026.

Here's the beginning of the interview:

Ezra Klein: Fareed Zakaria, welcome back to the show.

Fareed Zakaria: Always a pleasure.

I want to start with Trump’s now infamous post on Truth Social on Tuesday morning, when he wrote: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

What did you think when you saw that?

I was horrified. But it goes beyond that.

It felt like that tweet was the culmination of something that had been going on for a while — which was that the president of the United States was simply abandoning the entire moral weight that the United States had brought to its world role ever since World War II.

Not to sound too corny about it, because, of course, we made mistakes, and we were hypocritical and all that, but compared to every other power that gained this kind of enormous dominance, the U.S. had been different.

After 1945, it said: We’re not going to be another imperial hegemon. We’re not going to ask for reparations from the countries that we defeated. We’re actually going to try to build them, and we’re going to give them foreign aid.

That whole idea that the United States saw itself as different, saw itself not as one more in the train of great imperial powers — which, when it was their turn, decided to act rapaciously, to extract tribute, to enforce a brutal vision of dominance — all that was, in a sense, thrown away.

I realize it was just one tweet, but it was the culmination of something Trump has been doing for a long time.

It just left me very sad to think that the United States, this country that has really been so distinctive in its world mission — a country that I looked up to as a kid and came to as an immigrant — that its leader could threaten to annihilate an entire people.

And when you say something like that, it sounds very abstract: “civilization.” What we are talking about is the life and aspirations and culture and dignity of a whole people. You’re talking about 93 million people.

One thing that has always felt core about the moral challenge that Donald Trump and his view of geopolitics poses is it feels, to me, on a deep level, like a throwback to the 18th, 19th, early 20th century, when individual human lives were just understood as pawns in the greater game of dominance and strength and rivalries and conquests.

I’m not saying that there has not been disrespect or disregard for human life in the postwar era. That would be absurd.

But there was a commitment and a structure of values in which you didn’t threaten mass annihilation of civilians simply because you were trying to salvage face in a war you had started for no reason and were losing.

You see this in DOGE and its approach to U.S.A.I.D. — that there is something about how you treat or don’t treat, how you weigh or don’t weigh, the lives and futures of the people who are caught within your machinations and that he just wipes away, as a kind of weakness or liberal piety.

If you watch or listen to George W. Bush when he is essentially losing the war in Iraq, what is striking is the difference. Bush, for all his flaws — and he made many, many mistakes in Iraq — always looked at it as an essentially idealistic, aspirational mission.

We were trying to help the Iraqis. He never demeaned Islam. He always tried to see this as part of America’s great uplifting mission.

You almost miss that because, even in our mistakes, even in our errors, there was always that sense that we were trying to help this country do better, we were trying to help these people do better.

What you are describing, quite accurately, is that Trump approaches it not just from the point of view of the 19th century — because sometimes people talk about how he loves McKinley, and he liked tariffs, and he’s like McKinley in that imperialism.

No, Trump is more like a rapacious 18th-century European imperialist. McKinley said he went to the Philippines because he wanted to Christianize the place. There was none of that sense of uplift. Most of it was just brutal.

As you say, the individual was never at the center of it. Human life and dignity were never at the center of it. It was all a self-interested, short-term, extractive game. And Trump is hearkening back to that.

It’s interesting to ask where he gets it from. Because it really is probably fair to say that nobody else on the American political spectrum, if they were president, would speak like that. I don’t think JD Vance would speak like that. I don’t think Marco Rubio would speak like that.

There’s something that he brings to it — which is a callousness and a contempt for any expression of those values. For him, that’s all a sign of weakness, that’s the kind of [expletive] people say. But the reality is that’s the way he looks at the world.

It goes on from there.

Cosmic Waffles and Looney Tunes in the house that Trump built

Richard FAusset, No One at Waffle House Remembers FEMA Official Who Says He Teleported In, NYTimes, April 3, 2026.

In December, Mr. Phillips, 65, a former top health official in Texas, was appointed to head FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery. The office, with more than 1,000 employees and a budget of nearly $300 million, is central to FEMA’s job of responding to disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes and fires. Mr. Phillips was known, at the time, as a proponent of election fraud conspiracy theories, some of which were amplified by Mr. Trump.

Things got stickier for Mr. Phillips last month, when an investigative report by CNN detailed how, on podcasts and social media, he had propagated other conspiracy theories, used violent rhetoric in discussing former President Joseph R. Biden, and recounted how, on two occasions, he had somehow found himself being moved, by forces beyond his control, dozens of miles from two different starting points in Georgia.

“Teleporting is no fun,” he said on the podcast “Onward,” which is hosted by a conservative activist. [...]

On Wednesday, Mr. Phillips wrote on Truth Social, President Trump’s social media platform, that the incident took place while he was heavily medicated as part of a cancer treatment. But he also described it as a miracle performed by God.

“The word ‘teleportation’ was not mine,” Mr. Phillips wrote. “It was used by someone else in the conversation reaching for language to describe something with no easy name. The more accurate biblical terms are ‘translated’ or ‘transported’ — not new ideas for people of faith.”

But no one at any of the three Waffle Houses recognized his picture.

That's nothing. I once toured a waffle in an X-wing fighter from the Star Wars universe. See:

We are not alone:

Mr. Phillips’s claims are part of a growing trend among high-profile American conservatives to assert the physical presence of beings from the spiritual realm, or from provinces that are often reserved for science fiction novelists. In 2024, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, said that he was “mauled,” while sleeping, by “​​a demon or by something unseen.” Former Representative Matt Gaetz recently said that a U.S. Army official had told him about “hybrid breeding programs, where captured aliens were breeding with humans to create some hybrid race that could engage in intergalactic communication.”

The hegemon no longer, the USA as one nation among others

I've long thought that the situation of the post-Soviet collapse, with the USA as the dominant hegemon in the world, I've long thought that situation was unstable, a mistake. For one thing, it forces the USA to devote a huge chunk of its national resources to the military-industrial complex, which amounts to burying that wealth in the sand. There are better things to do with those resources, both here and abroad. And it forces other nations into perpetual obsequiousness, which is undignified.

But, how do we get out of that situation? The answer seems to be: Trump. In the process of attempting to enforce America's will on the world, that is, Trump's will, he's forcing other nations to abandon us and stand up for themselves.

Ana Swanson, Rival Nations Seize On Choke Points to Counter Trump, NYTimes, Apr. 2, 2026.

President Trump has unapologetically wielded the power of the United States on the global stage, taking a much more belligerent approach economically and militarily to try to dictate the actions of other countries.

From high tariffs to the war with Iran, Mr. Trump has claimed that this aggressive behavior internationally has only upsides, and that past leaders were fools for refusing to tap into America’s power.

But one clear drawback of the strategy is emerging. While many countries have acceded to the president’s demands, some have found a highly effective new way to fight back. Mr. Trump’s aggression has given them the opportunity to test their control over choke points, threatening the United States and the global economy.

One such choke point is the Strait of Hormuz. Iran, which accounts for less than 1 percent of global economic output, has control over the shipping lane that transports a fifth of the world’s oil and gas. Its closure since the United States and Israel began attacking Iran at the end of February has blocked shipments of fuel, fertilizer and other goods, sending gas prices sharply higher and spreading anxiety among U.S. farmers and manufacturers.

Another experiment in retaliatory coercion began one year ago on Thursday, when Mr. Trump walked into the Rose Garden and unveiled tariffs on what he called “Liberation Day.” While many governments — even powerful economies like the European Union — complied with U.S. demands, China was a notable exception. Beijing rolled out a licensing system for exports of rare-earth minerals and magnets that has given China unparalleled control over the global manufacturing system.

Whoops! Maybe the sheer complexity of the existing world system is making Trump's hegemonic dreams utterly impossible. It's like the mythical hydra, chop one head off and three more crop up. Are we actually moving toward a really new world order?

There's more at the link.

Will the Iran War change the world like the oil shocks of the 1970s did?

Jeff Sommer, The Oil Shocks of the ’70s Changed the World. Will the Iran War Do the Same? NYTimes, Mar. 28, 2026.

In January 1974, my dad lent me his old gas-guzzling Ford LTD to haul my clothing and books to college in Ithaca, N.Y. A couple of weeks later, when I tried to drive back home to Long Island, I realized that I couldn’t buy enough gas for the 250-mile trip.

The 1973-74 Arab oil embargo was well underway. The price of oil had nearly quadrupled; there were lines at gas stations, and drivers were allowed to queue up only on alternate days. I had picked the wrong day for my trip. No gas for me. So much for freedom of the road.

That was the first of the world’s big oil shocks. By the time of the second one in 1978-79, set off by the Iranian revolution, I was a reporter in New Jersey and it seemed I was constantly interviewing angry motorists stuck in interminable lines. Gas shortages and soaring inflation were just other aspects of life in the United States.

The gas lines ended as the crises ebbed, but it took two recessions, engineered by the formidable Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker, to bring inflation under control.

What’s less well understood about that period is that the oil shocks reshaped the world’s financial markets. Money flowed around the globe in new ways — and cemented the status of the dollar as the world’s core currency.

We are experiencing what could end up as the third great oil shock.

Then we get more history and analysis, to end with this:

“Duration is the key question,” he told me. “If this goes on for a long time, it’s a big deal. If the war stopped right now, we might not need to talk about it next year.”

Not every conflict in the Middle East necessarily changes global finance in profound ways. The United States fought two Gulf wars — one that started in the early 1990s, the other a decade later. The first was short. The second one, the U.S.-led war with Iraq, stretched from 2003 to 2011, caused scores of thousands of deaths and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. The second war was a big one, but in retrospect, it preserved the status quo in energy markets more than it transformed them.

In every Gulf conflict since the Iranian revolution, U.S. strategists have worried that Iran might one day disrupt the global flow of energy by closing a geographical choke point, the Strait of Hormuz. For the first time, despite the pounding it has received from enormous U.S. and Israeli bombardments, Iran has demonstrated that it can close the strait. Roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas usually flows through it.

Whether this desperate achievement alters geopolitics substantially may not be known for years.

Trump's war is heading into a quagmire, and the Republicans know it

Michelle Goldberg, Republicans Know This War Is Going Badly, NYTimes, Mar. 27, 2026.

The article begins:

It is not just Democrats in Congress who fear that Donald Trump’s war in Iran is going sideways. After a classified Pentagon briefing on Wednesday, Republican lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee appeared shaken.

“We will not sacrifice American lives for the same failed foreign policies,” said Nancy Mace, warning about the possibility of American troops in Iran. The committee chair, Mike Rogers, complained that members aren’t getting nearly enough information about war plans. Troop movements, he said, should be “thoughtful and deliberate.” The implication was that they might not be.

And it ends:

Never before, however, has America arrived at the threshold of a quagmire so quickly, with so much advance warning about the precise errors it was making. We have spent much of the past decade — in no small part due to Trump’s election — reckoning with the cost of the Iraq war to global stability and American cohesion. For the first time I can remember, both major parties have significant, influential antiwar contingents. Trump ran for president, however mendaciously, as the peace candidate, claiming that Kamala Harris would lead America into World War III.

And yet here we are, lurching toward a new version of a familiar catastrophe, suffering from some national form of neurotic repetition compulsion. “This is like the horrible, lame-dad cover band version of the worst of American foreign policy,” said Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy.

Someday, perhaps, when we’re picking up the pieces from yet another ill-conceived war, Republicans will explain that behind the scenes, they opposed it. One of the biggest problems in Congress, said Crow, is the gap between what people say privately and their willingness to demonstrate “the strength of their convictions” in public. “I’m always trying to close that gap with folks, and I always remind people that it’s never too late to do the right thing,” he said. He may be right, but the sooner the better.

This sentence caught me: “We have spent much of the past decade [...] reckoning with the cost of the Iraq war to global stability and American cohesion.” That feels right to me, but I would like to see it spelled out, especially that last bit, the cost to American cohesion.

Trump’s way: America, from leader of the Free World to biggest Thug on the Block

Carlos Lozada, The U.S. Is No Longer the Leader of the Free World, New York Times, March 24, 2026.

We had a good run — some eight decades or so — but it is clear by now that the United States has ceased to be the leader of the free world. A successor for that post has not been named, and it appears unlikely that the European Union, or NATO, or whatever constitutes “the West” these days will promote from within. The job might even be eliminated, one more reduction in force courtesy of President Trump.

I suspect, I fear, that this is so. If not yet, that’s certainly the direction in which things are headed, and by the time Trump’s term is over, the transition will be complete; the United States will have ceased being the leader of the free world. That may or may not be a good thing, depending of how the rest of the world is. Ideally, I’d like to see a world where there is no “reader of the Free World” because the world doesn’t need one. I’m pretty sure that’s not how the world will be in 2028. Lozada continues:

Rather than leading the free world, the United States is striding across the globe seemingly free of restraint, forethought or strategy, exerting its power because it can. In a matter of months, the Trump administration has captured Venezuela’s president and tossed him into jail in Brooklyn and has pummeled Iran’s theocratic leadership in a war that is ricocheting across the Middle East and upending the global economy; now the president says he will have “the honor of taking Cuba” next. Trump in his second term is like Michael Corleone in “The Godfather,” settling all the family business.

Nearly two decades ago, Fareed Zakaria, the international affairs columnist, published a best-selling book called “The Post-American World,” which predicted the United States’ relative decline versus other economically ascendant countries, what he called the “rise of the rest.” (Senator Barack Obama was seen carrying the book around during his first presidential campaign, affirming the volume’s elite sway.) The United States would remain militarily and economically pre-eminent, Zakaria argued, but it could take on a new political role, a sort of chairman of the board for the planet, relying on “consultation, cooperation and even compromise.”

Under Trump, the idea of U.S. leadership has indeed been remade — but from authority to domination, from persuasion to bullying, from nurturing alliances to wrecking them.

Later:

This is a historical aberration: a superpower that freely abdicates its leadership role, because it has concluded that leadership is for suckers; one that no longer promotes its values, because it’s decided that those values were fake anyway; one that gives up on the rules and institutions it spent so long building, because it assumes they’re no longer worth the hassle.

If Washington somehow still imagines itself the leader of the free world, that is because it is rethinking who belongs in that world, and because it is defining downward what it means to lead.

The article goes on, and is worth reading (a good deal of history), but I'm going to skip over a lot and come down nearer the end:

There have been plenty of episodes over the past decades that supposedly heralded an end to U.S. primacy. The launch of Sputnik in the late 1950s ushered in early Cold War paranoia that we were falling behind the Soviets. In the 1970s — with Vietnam and Watergate and an oil embargo and stagflation and the hostage crisis in Iran — the country was suffering a “crisis of confidence,” as President Jimmy Carter put it. A decade later, we were told Japan Inc. would overtake us. Then Sept. 11 demolished our sense of physical invulnerability; the Great Recession questioned the premise and the promise of American-style capitalism; and the Capitol riot of Jan. 6 laid bare the fragility of the democratic model we’d long sought to export.

It is possible that the hand-wringing today is just one more Sputnik moment, another instance when pessimists fret that America has lost its way. But it is also possible, as Daniel Drezner, the academic dean of Tufts University’s Fletcher School, has argued, that this is not just “the latest hymn from the Church of Perpetual Worry,” that this time really is different.

In the past, America’s isolationist, interventionist and multilateralist tendencies checked one another over time, thanks to competing visions of national security embedded throughout the American political system. But as foreign-policy powers became concentrated in the executive and Congress shrugged off its role in world affairs, America grew vulnerable to the rise of an impetuous and unconcerned president. “The same steps that empowered the president to create foreign policy,” Drezner said, “have permitted Trump to destroy what his predecessors spent decades preserving.”

Yada, yada:

Whereas U.S. leaders used to stridently deny that their military interventions abroad were motivated by the desire to secure oil supplies, Trump happily admits it. “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” he said after U.S. forces seized Nicolás Maduro, the president of oil-rich Venezuela. And if war is about seizing resources, so is peace: Countries wishing to become permanent members of Trump’s new Board of Peace must cough up $1 billion each.

If Pax Americana meant fostering an enduring American peace, Lax Americana means America getting a piece of the action. The world’s policeman is on the take.

“The American might that upheld the world order of the past 80 years will now be used instead to destroy it,” Kagan warned in January, some 20 years after publishing “Dangerous Nation.” A contemporary equivalent to the multipolar world of the 19th century, he writes, “would be a world in which China, Russia, the United States, Germany, Japan and other large states fought a major war in some combination at least once a decade — redrawing national boundaries, displacing populations, disrupting international commerce and risking global conflict on a devastating scale.” And he wrote that weeks before America and Israel began bombing Iran.

Say what you will about Obama – I thought he was disappointing – America was still leader of the free world when he left office. And he wore his suits well, even the tan one. Trump? His suits, it’s always the same cut, may be expensive; but they’re baggy. And he’s making America over in his own image, toughest thug on the block.

Why Trump's corruption is the single most disturbing thing about his presidency [+ Yazoo!]

A friend recently asked me for critiques of Trump’s performance. The first thing that came to mind was his corruption and, though I went on to say some other things, I kept thinking, “corruption, corruption, corruption.” Why? Can’t we just set the corruption aside as an unfortunate personal attribute and focus on the results of his policies? I thought about it and decided that, “no, we can’t.” Why? Because his corruption undermines the basis of modern institutional structures. It undermines democracy itself. 

The following conversation with Claude 5.4 explains. Also, there’s a bonus at the end, The Yazoo Land Fraud. It’s a whopper.

* * * * *

First, I want you to review the paper, The Evolution of Cognition, in the project area. Now, here’s a passage from a book [David] Hays wrote about the evolution of technology:

Let me begin, this time, closest to home, with New York. The most basic principle of organization here and now is that an officer of government must separate the rights and obligations of his office from those of his or her person. If the officer is given a budget of $10,000,000, the person must not take $1 of that--as numerous officers have learned only by going to prison. Giving special help to friends and relations is also forbidden. Nor may the officer look to daddy's college roommate, who now occupies a much higher office, for special help in solving a hard problem. This principle belongs to rank 3; violation is now said to be corrupt, but in rank 2 "corruption" is the way of life.

Now, that sense of corruption is consonant with the one you’ve been advancing in this conversation. But now it’s been placed in the larger context of the ranks account of cultural evolution. The separation of one’s own interests from the duties and obligations of one’s organizational role is central to modern society. Without it, it seems to me, modern society would be very difficult, but perhaps not impossible.

But it does seem to me that such separation is central to democracy. Without that separation, those at the top of the social order will feel and be free to maintain their position of advantage and those at the bottom would have no access to advancement.

Having now reviewed the paper, I can see how neatly the Hays passage places our entire conversation within the ranks framework — and it sharpens everything considerably. The key move Hays makes is identifying the separation of role from person as specifically a Rank 3 achievement. It's not just a moral or political norm — it's a cognitive-organizational one. Rank 3 is the rank of algorithms, of systematic procedure, of the impersonal rule applied consistently regardless of who is asking. The very idea that an officer's budget is not the officer's money requires a level of abstraction — the office as a distinct entity from the person occupying it — that Rank 2 organization simply doesn't sustain. In Rank 2, the person is the role, which is why what we call corruption was then simply the normal logic of how things worked. Daddy's college roommate in the higher office is not a bug in Rank 2, it's the system.

Your point about democracy is the crucial extension though, and I think it goes even deeper than access to advancement, important as that is. Democracy requires that losing be tolerable — that the party that loses an election accepts the result and peacefully transfers power. That is only possible if the institutional role of "president" or "minister" is clearly separable from the person occupying it. If power is personal rather than institutional, losing it is existential, not merely political. You can't peacefully hand over something that is felt to be constitutive of your identity and social existence. Which is why the collapse back into Rank 2 personal-relationship logic is so specifically lethal to democratic governance — it makes the normal mechanics of democracy feel like annihilation to those who lose.

And of course the peaceful transfer of power is a central problem of political organization. It was central to Shakespeare’s history plays, and is one reason for adopting a democratic form of government.

Yes, and it's one of those cases where the historical and the literary illuminate each other directly. Shakespeare's history plays are obsessed with exactly this problem — how does power move from one holder to the next without destroying the social order in the process? And the answer that medieval and early modern England kept reaching for was dynastic legitimacy: the king's body natural dies but the king's body politic — the office, the crown — persists and passes by hereditary right. Ernst Kantorowicz's great book The King's Two Bodies traces exactly this legal-theological construction, and it's directly relevant to Richard II and the Henriad.

But the dynastic solution is enormously fragile, as Shakespeare shows again and again. It depends on there being an unambiguous legitimate heir, on that heir being competent, on powerful barons accepting the arrangement, on the Church's sanction — any one of these can fail and the whole mechanism breaks down into civil war. The Wars of the Roses, which shadow the entire sequence of history plays, are essentially what happens when dynastic legitimacy becomes contested. And contested legitimacy means that power can only be settled by force, which is catastrophically expensive in lives and social order.

Democracy solves this — at its best — by separating the question of who holds power from the question of legitimate succession entirely. The procedure is the legitimacy. You don't need the right bloodline or divine sanction; you need a credible count of votes and an institutional framework that everyone accepts as binding. The office passes not through the body of the king but through the mechanism of the election.

Which is why attacks on the integrity of elections are so specifically dangerous — they don't just dispute a particular outcome, they corrode the procedural legitimacy that makes peaceful transfer possible at all. You're pulling out the load-bearing member, to return to your earlier metaphor.

And this connects back to the ranks framework in an interesting way. The democratic solution is a Rank 3 achievement — it requires the abstraction of legitimate procedure from personal authority. But it's perpetually vulnerable to Rank 2 pressures — the loyalty to persons over institutions, the feeling that my man losing means I have lost something existential. The democratic form sits on top of a substrate of human social psychology that was shaped long before Rank 3 cognition existed, and that substrate never goes away. 

* * * * *

The Yazoo Land Fraud

My friend Michael Liss told me about what may be the singled biggest act of corruption in America's political history. It's from the old days, The Yazoo Land Fraud. Here's what Claude had to say about it:

The Yazoo Land Fraud is a fascinating and somewhat underappreciated episode in early American history, touching on corruption, populist backlash, constitutional law, and the politics of the new republic all at once.

How humanitarian concern became perverted into a justification for war [Trump in Iran]

Amanda Taub, How Good Intentions Helped Pave Trump’s Road to Iran, NYTimes, March 7, 20226.

If Iran “violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue,” President Trump wrote on Truth Social in January as protesters flooded the streets of Iran in the largest anti-government demonstrations in the country’s history. “We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”

As it turned out, Iran did kill thousands of protesters. But the United States was not as ready as it claimed. It was not until Feb. 28 that the U.S. and Israel launched an attack on Iran’s government.

That's how Taub begins her article. She then goes on to list Trump's shifting justifications for the war before circling back to humanitarian concern:

Few believe that Mr. Trump is driven by a concern for human rights. He has also made clear his lack of interest in international law. And the war has already been catastrophic for many Iranian civilians, including dozens killed at an elementary school in an apparent U.S. missile strike on a nearby naval base. Yet the invocation of humanitarianism to help justify the war taps into — whether the president intends it or not — a powerful argument that has reshaped the global order since the end of the Cold War.

Under international law, force is permitted only in self-defense against an armed attack, or with authorization from the U.N. Security Council. There is no right to invade another country to protect civilians, even if their own government is the one harming them. That can often lead to governments or armed militias getting away with massacring protesters, torturing prisoners, committing ethnic cleansing or other atrocities. These rules of international law and the institutions that apply them have long been a source of anger.

The doctrine known as the “Responsibility to Protect,” often abbreviated as R2P by foreign-policy wonks, sought to change that. It emerged out of an era of liberal triumphalism, when the United States, its allies and some international institutions started to believe that sometimes, might could be a force for right — perhaps even if that meant violating international law.

But the effort to carve out a humanitarian exception, experts say, has left a weak spot in legal norms around the use of force — one that can now be exploited by leaders seeking to justify invasions of other sovereign states.

Nor is Trump the only leader to invoke "humanitarian logic" to justify war. Putin did so for Russia's 2014 invasion of Crimea and 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

“It’s more effective to pick up a tool that already exists than to create a new one,” said Kate Cronin-Furman, a professor at University College London and the author of “Hypocrisy and Human Rights: Resisting Accountability for Mass Atrocities.”

“There’s an academic conception of zombie norms, which are norms of international law that get sort of hollowed out, but still hang around with rhetorical relevance, even though they don’t seem to really constrain anyone’s behavior,” Professor Cronin-Furman said.

The fact that Responsibility to Protect once had considerable legitimacy, she said, means that Mr. Trump, or Mr. Putin, can still draw on it now.

The rest of the article goes on to discuss the origins of the Responsibility to Protect and how Putin and Trump have been able to exploit it for their own somewhat different ends and further harm is likely to follow.

International law is a funny thing. With no real means of enforcement, it’s essentially a set of reciprocal expectations. It only works if states believe others will follow the rules, too. Anything that departs from those expectations weakens that system. [...]

Another tragedy of the current situation is that civilians remain in urgent need of protection from mass violence — and solutions to that problem seem more remote than ever.

There's more at the link.

Government surveillance and AI (the Pentagon vs. Anthropic)

Ezra Klein, Why the Pentagon Wants to Destroy Anthropic, NYTimes, Mar. 6, 2026.

My guest today is Dean Ball. He is a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and author of the newsletter Hyperdimensional. He was also a senior policy adviser on A.I. and emerging tech for the Trump White House, and the primary staff drafter of America’s A.I. Action Plan. But he’s been furious at what they’re doing here.

Somewhat into the conversation:

Klein: Didn’t Pete Hegseth have posters around the Department of War saying: “I want you to use A.I.”?

Ball: [Laughs.] They are very enthusiastic about A.I. adoption.

Here’s how I would think about what these systems can do in a national security context.

First of all, there’s a longstanding issue that the intelligence community collects more data than it can possibly analyze. I remember seeing something from, I forget which intelligence agency, but one of them, that essentially said that it collects so much data every year that it would need eight million intelligence analysts to properly process all of it.

That’s just one agency, and that’s far more employees than the federal government has as a whole.

What can A.I. do? Well, you can automate a lot of that analysis — transcribing text and then analyzing that text, signals intelligence processing, things like that. That’s one area. Sometimes that needs to be done in real time for an ongoing military operation, so that might be a good example.

Then, another area is that these models have gotten quite good at software engineering. So there are cyberdefense and cyberoffense operations where they can deliver tremendous utility.

Klein: Let’s talk about mass surveillance here, because my understanding from talking to people on both sides of this — and it has now been fairly widely reported — is that this contract fell apart over mass surveillance at the final, critical moment.

Emil Michael goes to Dario Amodei and says: We will agree to this contract, but you need to delete the clause that is prohibiting us from using Claude to analyze bulk-collected commercial data.

Ball: Yes.

Klein: Why don’t you explain what’s going on there?

Ball: The first thing I want to say is that national security law is filled with gotchas.

It’s filled with legal terms of art, terms that we use colloquially quite a bit, where the actual statutory definition of that term is quite different from what you would infer from the colloquial use of the term. [...]

... this incident is in the training data for future models. Future models are going to observe what happened here, and that will affect how they think of themselves and how they relate to other people.

“Surveillance” is the collection or acquisition of private information, but that doesn’t include commercially available information. So if you buy something, if you buy a data set of some kind and then you analyze it, that’s not necessarily surveillance under the law.

Klein: So if they hack my computer or my phone to see what I’m doing on the internet, that’s surveillance.

Ball: That would be surveillance. If they put cameras everywhere, that would be surveillance.

But if there are cameras everywhere, and they buy the data from the cameras, and then they analyze that data, that might not necessarily be surveillance.

Klein: Or if they buy information about everything I’m doing online, which is very available to advertisers, and then use it to create a picture of me — that’s not necessarily surveillance.

Ball: Or where you physically are in the world. Yes.

I’ll step back for a second and just say that there’s a lot of data out there, there’s a lot of information that the world gives off — your Google search results, your smartphone location data, all these things.

The reason that no one really analyzes it in the government is not so much that they can’t acquire it and do so. It’s because they don’t have the personnel. They don’t have millions and millions of people to figure out what the average person is up to.

The problem with A.I. is that A.I. gives them that infinitely scalable work force. Thus, every law can be enforced to the letter with perfect surveillance over everything. And that’s a scary future.

Klein: We think of the space between us and certain forms of tyranny, or the feared panopticon, as a space inhabited by legal protection. But one thing that seems to be at the core of a lot of fear is that it’s, in fact, not just legal protection. It’s actually the government’s inability to have the absorption of that level of information about the public and then do anything with it.

Ball: Yes.

Klein: And if all of a sudden you radically change the government’s ability without changing any laws, you have changed what is possible within those laws.