Revisiting Peter Hegseth from Thursday: This is the appropriate format for the modern post-literate age:

<https://youtu.be/n9u_LlJOpYg?si=OPGZzd5KNH3MjLn6&t=126>

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Well done, Morning Joe!

Well, I suppose that that this “Ezekiel 25:17” from Trump acolyte cabinet member Peter Hegseth is both worse and better than “Straits of Vermouth” from Trump acolyte cabinet member Scott Bessent. But it is worth noting that we have gone far beyond chaos-monkey-land now: this is Marx Brothers quality governance:

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<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKTT-sy0aLg> <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/the-trump-tanakhthat-is-the-law-the> <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/scott-bessents-llm-system-prompt>

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I was going to write “words fail me”. However, it turns out they do not:

If you ran the Julio-Claudian Roman imperial dynasty in its decline as a cable show, gave Nero a Twitter account, and let Petronius buy the Praetorian Guard’s IT department, you would get something like the United States in 2026.

How will some future Suetonius—call him “Suetonius II: This Time It’s Digital”—going to explain to his readers the state of our current American “governance”? A daily farce of performative cruelty, ostentatious ignorance, and improvisational authoritarianism conducted on live television and whatever replaces the social network formerly known as Twitter.
Take Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars off the shelf and skim the chapters on Claudius and Nero. I at least am struck by how much both the public and the inner workings of the Roman imperial court fell like a grotesque parody of rule: a place where institutions existed, in some sense, and where decisions were indeed made, but always under the shadow of one man’s obsessions, one family’s feuds, and one faction’s hysterical fear that if they are not on top they will be devoured. Now the empire as a whole functions: the grain ships arrive, the aquaducts flow, the army guards and maneuvers, taxes are collected, local élites obey the provincial governors. But at the top—things are very weird and very dangerous indeed.

Our own moment, I think, is going to look, to future historians, like an American attempt to run a 21st–century hyperpower as if it were a cable-television version of that same imperial court, with Fox News and FaceBook algorithms playing the role of the Praetorian Guard, and Elon Musk playing a truly bizarre role as a TechnoPetronius.

Suetonius tries. Suetonius, after all, does not just say: “Nero was crazy, lol.” He catalogs, meticulously, what he believes to have been the case about the habits of mind and the structures of power that made Nero’s madness politically consequential: the flatterers, the fear, the court rituals that redefined reality for everyone who wanted to keep their head attached to their neck. Our future chronicler will ask: what systems of media, patronage, and partisan identity made it possible—indeed, made it natural—for a large chunk of the American elite to treat a Tarantino monologue as sacred scripture ,and a reality–television demagogue as God’s anointed messiah?

They will point, I think, to at least three overlapping features of our moment.

1. Te hollowing-out of institutional seriousness. Claudius was, to Suetonius, the learned fool: a man who had read all the books but could not translate his learning into stable governance, who oscillated between pedantic fussiness and pathetic credulity. Contemporary cabinet secretaries, judges, columnists, and university presidents who still know how things ought to work find themselves presiding over institutions whose formal procedures remain intact, but whose substantive authority has been eaten away by a political movement that treats every norm as an obstacle to loyalty and every constraint as an affront to sovereignty.

2. The emergence of a Nero-like politics of spectacle: governance as theater, with cruelty as the principal special effect. Nero ran the Roman state as a one-man show, and insisted that people treat his musical artistry as if he were Taylor Swift. Our present leader and his circle are similar: aiming for the right clip for the evening lineup, the right humiliation of enemies, the right image of power deployed without apology, and the right claque applauding it all as genius. The Tarantino-prayer episode fits neatly here. It is not about theology; it is about vibes—fusing pop culture, militarism, and pseudo-Christian nationalism into a single emotionally satisfying tableau in which we are righteous and they are vermin, and God is on the side of our airstrikes.

3. The corrosion of the informational environment. Suetonius wrote for an audience that understood that he was relaying rumor, gossip, and imperial propaganda. Our future historian will write about a society in which the filtering goes beyond that to a machine–learning–amplified feed of outrage, grievance, and fantasy, trained to maximize time-on-site and ad impressions. FaceBook, X, and company have turned and are turning mental “system prompts”, day after day, to expect betrayal by shadowy elites, invasion by sinister others, and redemption by a single strongman. Then of course a fake Bible verse from a gangster movie feels more “true” than anything in the actual text. It is emotionally on–model with respect to the embeddings vector space inside their heads.

Suetonius II might well ultimately cast this as a hybrid of Claudius and Nero: Claudius in the sense of institutional senescence and elite cowardice—people who knew better, but did not act as if they knew better—and Nero in the sense of a politics that made spectacle and vengeance the core of the regime’s legitimacy. The governing coalition could not pass a budget on time; it could, however, stage a prayer service in which the Pentagon was momentarily recast as the pulp-fiction throne of a God whose “call sign is Sandy 1”.

The remarkable thing is not that such a régime emerged—history is littered with such dysfunctional courst—but that it emerged in a polity that had, for two centuries, prided itself on being the Roman Republic and not the Roman Empire.

And, if he is honest, he will also note that this was not done to Americans by some external invader but was done by right-wing Americans, to themselves and to the rest of us, for reasons that remain incomprehensible to me.

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It is definitely what is happening. Mind you, that Trump is losing his Pearl-Harbor-in-reverse war with Iran does not mean that Iran is winning its war over Trump: both sides are and can be losers. And I would argue that Israel is a loser too: the odds that Tel Aviv becomes radioactive glass in half a century are definitely up. The winners are Bibi Netanyahu as an individual—his likely tenure in office is longer, and his chances of escaping jail are greater—and Iran’s IRGC as an institution, because their ability to say “we told you so” gives them overwhelming strength within the Iranian government for the forseeable future, and their newly-promoted honchos have more power, status, authority, and wealth if they wanted it than they ever expected, albeit at some additional personal risk.

The very sharp Dan Drezner has a piece this morning giving the state-of-play:

Dan Drezner: The Trump Administration Is a Loser in Iran <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-trump-administration-is-a-loser>: ‘If you squint real hard, there is a way to view the Trump administration’s pressure on Iran trending in a positive direction. As Bobby Ghosh pointed out in Foreign Policy, Iran has lost an awful lot of capabilities…. As crazy and illegal as the Trump administration’s decision to impose their own blockade in the Strait of Hormuz might sound, it also might be something the U.S. Navy could actually accomplish with its current capabilities…. There is a scenario in the Persian Gulf in which the U.S. finds itself in a stronger position than Iran in the coming weeks.…

But… the costs of the collateral damage of the war to the United States are rising…. Russia has provided intelligence to Iran. China has aided Iran’s missile program…. Both countries… [can] ratchet up their assistance…. Iran is… regenerat[ing] its ballistic missile forces program'“… An even more radical regime [is] cementing its power in Tehran…. As residents across the world feel the economic pain, they are likely to blame the countries that instigated this particular round of the conflict—which happen to be the United States and Israel…. The best-case outcome for the United States is many, many more months of economic and geopolitical pain, and continued evidence of the rest of the world pushing back aggressively against the Trump administration…. This does not look like winning…

Drezner’s World

The Trump Administration Is a Loser in Iran

If you squint real hard, there is a way to view the Trump administration’s pressure on Iran trending in a positive direction. As Bobby Ghosh pointed out in Foreign Policy, Iran has lost an awful lot of capabilities during this war…

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3 days ago · 30 likes · 6 comments · Daniel W. Drezner

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American foreign policy is indeed, as Dan wrote last month, “being run by the dumbest motherfuckers alive” <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/american-foreign-policy-is-being>, and the result has been the profound self-inflicted “strategic defeat of the United States” <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-strategic-defeat-of-the-united>.

And, meanwhile, a correspondent emails me a link to a proposal from Niall Ferguson and company about how to make things better, and asks me what I think:

Niall Ferguson, Richard Haass, & Philip Zelikow: How to Stop Iran From Winning the War <https://niallferguson.substack.com/p/how-to-stop-iran-from-winning-the>: ‘The Strait of Hormuz must reopen, but not on Iran’s terms…. The Iranian regime must not be allowed to turn the seven other states that border the Persian Gulf… into its vassals. Nor should the rest of the world submit to Iran’s extortions…. Iran must fail in its bid to become the master of Hormuz…. The U.S. and those who support the effort to reopen the strait must offer a positive vision for how commerce through the strait will be regulated in future—with incentives for all, including Iran, to keep it open….

Step one: Iran should be in no doubt about our readiness to force safe transit through the strait on our terms… insurance and compensation… military escorts, extensive deployments… counter-drone interceptors…with Ukrainian help… combined U.S.-Israeli efforts…. Transits from our allies may be limited and hazardous. But Iran would get none. This would flip the narrative: The strait should be open to all or closed to all…. Important roles for Arab, Asian, and European partners… without having to align themselves with ongoing Israeli or U.S. military action….

Step two: A back-channel understanding… that allows transits… while conversations proceed toward a formal public agreement. If the Iranians face a credible threat of a blockade of their oil exports, they will agree to this….

Step three:… A new Strait of Hormuz Company (SOHCO)… [with the] principal shareholders in the company… the eight coastal states, including Iran, plus the United States… [and] voting rights on the principle of majority rule. The company could administer a regulated fee system for passage… [with] funds would be held in a SOHCO trust to pay for collective goods such as mine clearance and navigational infrastructure…. Any violation of the Hormuz Convention could lead to exclusion of the offending country from use of the strait, on the basis of a two-thirds majority vote by SOHCO shareholders….

This three-step strategy to restore and govern open commerce through Hormuz does not depend on overthrowing the governing regime in Iran. It can work with whoever governs Iran…. It would be in the net interest of Iran…. It is designed to be done with Iran rather than to it…. [But] the crucial thing is that [Iran] cannot dictate the terms of peace…

Niall Ferguson's Time Machine

How to Stop Iran From Winning the War

This Saturday, delegations from the United States and Iran are slated to head to Pakistan to try to negotiate a lasting end to the war between them. Among the bones of contention will be the Strait of Hormuz: the crucial waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied gas normally passes. Iran’s closure of the strait since the conflict…

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2 days ago · 27 likes · 1 comment · Niall Ferguson, Richard Haass, and Philip Zelikow

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Backing up: Turkey does not get to use the Dardanelles Strait as a major profit center because its not doing so pleases Russia (and Ukraine), removes potential threats to its territorial integrity, and has been part of its adherence to the post-WWII Western Alliance from which it has benefitted substantially via security guarantees and integration into the régime of open commerce. Panama does get to use the Panama Canal as a major profit center—half of Panama’s exports, if I recall correctly. Egypt gets 15% of its exports from Suez-Canal services, behind only worker remittances and tourism in export earnings.

In the past, it would have been very, very expensive indeed for Iran to try to tax the flow of commerce through the Strait of Hormuz. The Saudis would have been willing to pay for 600,000 Egyptian and Pakistani soldiers and military police to object to any such tax. They would have been backed up by the US military for the same reason that the US committed itself to the first Gulf War of 1991. Thus an Iranian régime would run immense potential losses by trying.

Now, however, the costs of having the U.S. Air Force undertake its gigantic fire dance across Iran have already been inflicted. Saudi willingness to spend the money needed to get Egyptian and Pakistani occupation forces into the theatre in order to pull Donald Trump’s out of the chestnuts out of the fire is limited, even though an Iran-provocation transit tax would have greatly solidified a broad and deep “freedom of the seas” international coalition with serious teeth. “We will do worse to you if you don’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz!” says Trump. “How could it be worse?” says the IRGC.

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We have paid the costs of the war that any attempt by us to impose taxes on traffic through the Strait of Hormuz would have launched, the IRGC says. So, since we have paid the price, we might as well take the goods, the IRGC says.

And Ferguson & al., I think—agree with the IRGC here?:

This… does not depend on overthrowing the governing regime in Iran. It can work with whoever governs Iran…. It would be in the net interest of Iran…. It is designed to be done with Iran rather than to it…

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The natural reading of this is that: yes, henceforth Iran will collect transit tariffs; and our proposal for SOHCO is a way to whitewash that, and to negotiate over terms.

Look again at Ferguso & al. The focus is not on what will the state of things be going forward that will produce a ceasefire in this war? The focus is on:

Not on Iran’s terms… [Not] turn the seven other states… into its vassals. Nor should the rest of the world submit to Iran’s extortions… Iran must fail in its bid to become the master of Hormuz… Terms Iran does not set… A back-channel understanding… [that] need not depend on a political settlement… [Iran] cannot dictate the terms of peace…

and on how Iran is not the responder but the actor here:

Iran is attempting to claim the tollkeeper roll…

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Now I know and you know and Niall Ferguson knows and Richard Haass knows and Philip Zelikow knows that Iran did not set out to “claim” anything, and know as well that one side dictates the terms of peace only after complete conquest of the space at issue and either unconditional surrender or total withdrawal. Almost all of the time terms of peace are negotiated, not dictated. And it is so understood. So where does all the “Iran cannot dictate”, “terms Iran does not set”, “fail in its bid to become the master”, “[not] submit to Iran’s extortions”, “[not] vassals”, “not on Iran’s terms” language come from.

Well, as I read them, there are three possibilities:

• This is Boob Bait for the MAGA Bubbas: yes, Trump should accept Iran’s terms for the transit tariffs it will collect in the future, but this needs to be whitewashed through the SOHCO so that Trump, Hegseth, Rubio, Vance, Bessent, and the others can claim that they deprived Iran of a victory.

• This is willful self-delusion: Ferguson, Haass, and Zelikow can see where this is going, but they do not want to admit it to themselves—and do not want to admit to themselves how much Trump’s playing 11-dimensional chess involves using one of your pawns to take your own queen and remove it from the board.

• Three—I don’t really see a third possibility. Do you?

My correspondent closed by asking me to take a look at this, from three short months ago:

Niall Ferguson: How Trump Won Davos <https://niallferguson.substack.com/p/how-trump-won-davos>: ‘I have never before seen a single individual so completely dominate this vast bazaar of the powerful, the wealthy, the famous, and the self-important…. Trump won Davos, hands down. And not only did he win it; he owned it…. Trump ever seriously meant to annex Greenland or to impose new tariffs on the Europeans. Why would he[?]… That Trump carries out only around half the threats he makes on social media is a feature, not a bug—and it’s certainly not a sign of weakness. It is a deliberate tactic designed to leave counterparties uncertain….

But why did he threaten it? Just for the lolz? Certainly, there was much hilarity among U.S. government staffers… [who] certainly were in on the joke. But… more… here than mere presidential trolling…. kKep European leaders from meddling in America’s Middle Eastern and Eastern European policy…. The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and its strike group are currently in the Indian Ocean en route to the Persian Gulf and are preparing strike package options on Iran…. Witkoff expressed optimism that… peace between Russia and Ukraine… [was] “down to one issue”… likely… territorial cessions by Ukraine…

Niall Ferguson's Time Machine

How Trump Won Davos

Donald Trump attends the signing ceremony of the Peace Charter for Gaza in Davos, Switzerland, on January 22, 2026. (Harun Ozalp/Anadolu via Getty Images…

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3 months ago · 81 likes · 3 comments · Niall Ferguson

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Ah. I remember: I did see this, and commented on it at the time <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/do-those-dominating-a-situation-truly>.

IIRC, my major points were:

• Ferguson’s “Trump was bluffing on purpose” framing functions as a Xanatos‑Gambit story: every outcome is spun as proof of Trump’s strategic genius.

• Henry Farrell’s institutional, game‑theoretic reading (rituals, common knowledge, bargaining power) shows Europe had more leverage than it realized and used it.

• Public meaning about events like Davos is shaped by such narratives; intellectuals like Ferguson are actively contesting how history will remember Trump’s power.

• Trump did make his Greenland and tariff threats, got no concessions on anything, and those threats did then collapsed into retreat, undercutting the claim that he “won” or “dominated” Davos.

• Most important:

  • Thoukydides’s Melian Dialogue is commonly misread as it is here by Ferguson.

  • Appeals to “realism” and dominance that celebrate raw power often miss that arrogant overreach can be strategically disastrous, as with Athens in the Peloponnesian War, as it willed into being a countervailing Grand Alliance against it.

  • Indeed, pointing out that might-overrides-right arrogance is the opposite of a realistic means-ends policy is the reason that Thoukydides put the Melian Dialogue into his book.

I would add one more: succumb to the temptation that Donald Trump has a long-run plan, that he is not an impulse chaos-monkey, and you had better hope that everyone who reads you has a short memory.

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The work DefSec Peter Hegseth regards as Holy Scripture:

Quentin Tarantino: “Pulp Fiction” Screenplay <https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/pulp_fiction.html>:

JULES: Now describe to me what Marsellus Wallace looks like!

Brett does his best. BRETT: Well he’s… he’s… black—

JULES: —go on!

BRETT: …and he’s… he’s… bald—

JULES: —does he look like a bitch?!

BRETT (without thinking): What?

Jules’ eyes go to Vincent, Vincent smirks, Jules rolls his eyes and SHOOTS Brett in the shoulder. Brett SCREAMS, breaking into a SHAKING/TREMBLING SPASM in the chair. JULES: Does-he-look-like-a-bitch?!

BRETT (in agony): No.

JULES: Then why did you try to fuck ‘im like a bitch?!

BRETT (in spasm): I didn’t.

Now in a lower voice. JULES: Yes ya did, Brett. Ya tried ta fuck ‘im. You ever read the Bible, Brett?

BRETT (in spasm): Yes.

JULES: There’s a passage I got memorized, seems appropriate for this situation: Ezekiel 25:17. “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.”

The two men EMPTY their guns at the same time on the sitting Brett…

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<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2WK_eWihdU>

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The actual Ezekiel 25:17 (KJV) <https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ezekiel%2025&version=KJV> is:

And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them…

At the Pentagon, DefSec Peter Hegseth led the congregation in saying this, that he said was called “CSAR 2517”, for “Combat Search And Rescue [Ezekiel ]25:17:”

The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of camaraderie and duty, shepherd the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother. And you will know my call sign is Sandy 1 when I lay my vengeance upon thee, and amen… <https://publicwitness.wordandway.org/p/hegseth-borrows-violent-prayer-from>

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As seamusmcduffs says <https://www.reddit.com/r/Christianity/comments/1smo7ah/pete_hegseth_quotes_fake_pulp_fiction_bible_verse/>: ‘I would say if you’re version of Christianity feels in line with a fake verse from “Pulp Fiction”, you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere…’

The context of Ezekiel 25 is that Ezekiel is writing from Babylon, to which he has been carried as an exiled prisoner after -586 when Babylonian Emperor Nabû-kudurrī-uṣur had dealt with the rebelling King Zidkiyahu by destroying the Kingdom of Judah, leveling its capital of Jerusalem, scattering the population, and carrying at least its élite into the Babylonian captivity. The Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, and Philistines had joined Nabû-kudurrī-uṣur’s punitive suppression of the Judahite rebellion. And so Ezekiel is reassuring his audience that they will, at God’s hand and in God’s time, be properly punished for this. Ezekiel is much more “nobody’s aggressive violence will escape divine judgment in the end”, and not “we are powerful righteous winners whose violence is itself the divine judgment”.

I mean: what is supposed to say about this? Quentin Tarantino makes very good, very violent, very cathartic movies. But he is not the voice of God. And he is in no sense a preacher of the Gospel. And there is great confusion in what Hegseth said toward its end: Is Hegseth really saying that God’s call sign is “Sandy 1”? Is Hegseth saying that the US military is God, or at least the Bearer of the Divine Name, executing the great vengeance and furious anger of the Divinity?

Quentin Tarantino wrote a brilliantly stylized gangster monologue, not a liturgy, yet Trump’s DefSec just treated it as if it were holy writ. That isn’t a cute pop‑culture mash‑up; it is a revealing window into who the rulers America elected in November 2024 really are.

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The Pearl-Harbor-in-reverse surprise attempted decapitation strike against the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran is, I think, one of those conflicts in which every major actor can plausibly claim a tactical success, while all of them suffered dire strategic defeats.

The United States and Israel have shredded much of Iran’s conventional military capacity, assassinated a horrifying number of senior officials, and repeatedly demonstrated the ability to reach into Iranian territory at will.

Yet the Iranian régime has survived, has bloodied U.S. allies, and—most important—has weaponized the Strait of Hormuz, making the extreme interdependence of the world globalized value-chain economy work for it. Oil, gas, and fertilizer prices are up; global supply chains are jittery; the world now has vivid evidence that the premier maritime choke point for hydrocarbons can, in fact, be choked. And Iran will now tax the oil flow. Plus I would be surprised if part of the price for fertilizer for Indus River valley farms will be charged to Pakistan in the form of its assistance in Iran’s building a nuclear weapon.

Perhaps the only real winners are the newly-promoted IRGC honchos, who now have more power, more status, much more secure positions within Iranian politics, and have discovered that Hamas and Hizbollah were much weaker than is Hormuz.

There was nothing that passed for “strategy” in Washington. There were improvisations driven by presidential ego and domestic politics unbridled as the US military again demonstrated that it was extremely strong and could carry out immensely destructive missions. The question of whether those missions were being carried out at a resource-consumption ratio that attritted our actual and potential adversaries rather than ourselves was never asked. The answer is clear: while we may have attritted Iran more than it attritted us, add in Russia, China, and Denmark to the list of potential adversaries who might shoot at us and it is clear that we are weaker and they are stronger before our Pearl-Harbor-in-reverse attempted decapitation strike.

Without a coherent theory of victory, America’s vast military and economic advantages were translated into very little durable leverage at a high price in terms of our preparedness and stockpiles for other emergencies, and high prices paid by our Gulf ex-allies for choices that they did not meaningfully shape.

And Israel—Israel has, impressively, “mowed the grass” once again. But here in America the unpatriotic Republican Party has learned that Binyamin Netanyahu puts a 0% weight on being an ally of and 100% weight on exploiting his influence inside the Republican Party for his benefit and his benefit alone. And the patriotic Democratic Party has been, again, taught the lesson that Jabotinsky’s Likud Israel is no friend of America’s, whatever Ben-Gurion’s Labor Israel once was, now two generations ago. The chances that Tel Aviv is a sea of radioactive glass in fifty years has gone up significantly.

It is against this backdrop that you should read Paul Krugman’s “Ignorance and Ignominy”. Krugman’s core point is that the debacle at Hormuz was not an unlucky break in an otherwise competent policy, but the almost inevitable outcome of a government staffed at the top by men who are proudly ignorant, ideologically intoxicated, and convinced that divine favor will compensate for the absence of planning. The humiliation is not just military or diplomatic; it is moral. A superpower that flirts so casually with massive war crimes, then calls its own retreat a victory ordained by God, is advertising not strength but decay.

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<https://paulkrugman.substack.com/cp/193630576> <https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/ignorance-and-ignominy>

Paul Krugman

Ignorance and Ignominy

So the world’s greatest military power went to war with a poor, medievalist theocracy. It was an incredibly uneven match. Here’s are the GDPs of Iran and the United States in 2024…

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10 days ago · 2584 likes · 679 comments · Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman: Ignorance & Ignominy <https://paulkrugman.substack.com/cp/193630576>: ‘Iran won. The Iranian regime has emerged far stronger than it was before, controlling the Strait of Hormuz and having demonstrated its ability to inflict damage on both its neighbors and the world economy. The U.S. has emerged far weaker, having demonstrated the limitations of its military technology, its strategic ineptitude and, when push comes to shove, its cowardice. We’ve also destroyed our moral credibility: Trump may have TACOed at the last minute, but he threatened to commit gigantic war crimes — and for all practical purposes our political and civil institutions gave him permission to do so…. God help us.

MUSICAL CODA

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To sum up: the corrupt neofascist majority on the Supreme Court declines to summarily bless the nationwide injunction against the EO when it could, spends a term remaking the law of remedies in Trump’s favor in CASA, and then, when the ACLU exploits the Kavanaugh-crated doctrinal gap with a class action, reaches down and pulls that case up before the only hostile appellate court in the chain can strengthen it. Meanwhile, Trump’s allies in the legal academy have been reversing their previous intellectual commitmenst and spent time frantically inventing “pseudo-originalist” just-so stories to justify making American-born children stateless. The Court’s choice to indulge this nonsense—rather than kill it on day one—is a real constitutional crisis.

And thus it is today, April Fools Day, that is Supreme Court birthright-citizenship Trump v. Barbara Supreme Court oral argument day.

My take: The war against birthright citizenship isn’t constitutional interpretation: it’s a disciplined project to build a serf class of people who need to be quiet and accept lowered pay or be harassed by ICE. As part of this project, the corrupt neofascist majority on the Supreme Court stalled, rewrote remedies, and handed Trump his best shot at dismantling birthright citizenship. By dragging their feet the Court opened a door for Trump to try to create facts on the ground. But the Trump administration was not disciplined enough to take advantage of them. And now it looks like—unlike NFIP v. Sibelius—the shifting political tides make a 6-3 or 5-4 overturning of birthright citizenship very unlikely. Thomas will vote for Trump because Trump is a king who can legislate by executive order and the 14th Amendment applies only to ex-slaves. Alito will vote for Trump because otherwise American-citizen Iranian sleeper agents born here will kill him in his bed. But at least three of Barrett, Kavanauh, Gorsuch, and Roberts would have to find a way to claim that not just those with diplomatic immunity but all illegal immigrants are not “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States”. And while one or two might well find such a way, it is unlikely that three will.

But I could be wrong. These are crazy, corrupt people who have little fear for God or man.

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The first thing my feed brings to me are the malevolent, misleading, and mendacious screechings of the Trumpists Randy Barnett and Ilan Wurman:

Randy E. Barnett & Ilan Wurman: Trump Might Have a Case on Birthright Citizenship <https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/15/opinion/trump-birthright-citizenship.html>: ‘The children of people who are present in the United States illegally…. The parents… did not come in amity. They gave no obedience or allegiance to the country when they entered—one cannot give allegiance and promise to be bound by the laws through an act of defiance of those laws…. They and their children are therefore not under the protection or “subject to the jurisdiction” of the nation in the relevant sense...

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I must say that illegal immigrants definitely do come in amity: they come here to work, to trade, to contribute, to learn, to teach. They do give obedience to and are bound by the laws. They are under the protection of and also, should they be suspected of civil or criminal tresspassor offense, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States of America. And so are their children,

The Trumpy claim behind their op-ed—one that they do not dare express aloud—is that illegal immigrants have come here to steal and cheat. That is simply false. And they should be ashamed of the company that they have chosen.

Dia-AI tells me that I should highlight the sharp and honorable Jamelle Bouie’s response today:

Jamelle Bouie <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/01/opinion/birthright-citizenship-supreme-court-14th-amendment.html>: ‘Backing Trump as he tries to rewrite the Constitution by executive fiat is much of the Republican Party and a collection of conservative legal scholars who rushed, in the wake of his decree, to try to give substance to the president’s thin, unpersuasive argument…. [Ilan] Wurman… [who had] argued previously that his originalism compelled the traditional reading of the birthright clause…. Randy Barnett… despite [previously] co-writing a book that [had] never challenged the consensus view.…

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Jamelle sums up:

Jamelle Bouie: ‘The drafters wrote the citizenship clause to repudiate… Dred Scott v. Sandford[‘s]… notion that citizenship was a privilege bestowed by the dominant class rather than a natural right…. The revisionist case rests less on new evidence than it does on Trump’s claim to embody the nation and its desires. If he is ascendant, then the people must want a closed, cloistered society. We know this isn’t true…

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Step back: The purpose of Trumpian ICE deportation policy is not, in any serious economic sense, to safeguard “native” jobs or to protect public finances; it is to generate and preserve a labor force whose legal precarity can be weaponized at will. Decades of workplace immigration enforcement—from the post‑IRCA raids of the 1980s through the Swift meatpacking raids in 2006 to the new wave of large‑scale worksite operations under Trump—show a consistent pattern: the state periodically descends on workplaces, selectively terrorizes unauthorized workers, and then leaves the underlying production structure intact. Plants keep running, employers adjust their hiring channels, and the local economy quickly re‑equilibrates around a different, often more vulnerable, workforce—refugees today, visa‑holders tomorrow, always people who know that one phone call to ICE can upend their lives.

The net macroeconomic effect is not an enduring increase in wages or employment for citizens; it is a shift in bargaining power away from labor and toward employers, especially in low‑wage, high‑turnover sectors like meatpacking, agriculture, construction, and services. Studies of worksite raids and deportations document how these operations destabilize communities and firms in the short run but ultimately entrench a segmented labor market in which a “deportation‑proof” workforce is prized precisely because it is easier to exploit, not harder. See, for example, recent reporting on how the 2006 Swift raids in Greeley and elsewhere led meatpackers to rebuild around ever more vulnerable refugee labor, reshaping small‑town economies and politics in the process (High Country News).

This pattern is reinforced by the way the federal government allocates its enforcement resources. Over roughly the past decade, Washington has spent on the order of ten‑plus times as much on immigration enforcement as on enforcing labor standards, even though the latter is supposed to protect more than 140 million workers across nearly 11 million workplaces. Immigration enforcement agencies—CBP, ICE, and their siblings—are large, well‑funded, and politically salient; the agencies charged with policing wage theft, safety violations, and union‑busting are small, underfunded, and perennially overwhelmed. The result is an enforcement regime that makes it rational for some low-wage employers to regard immigration law as their primary personnel tool: hire people whose status is fragile, keep them compliant by credible threats of deportation, and rest easy knowing that the probability of being investigated for wage or safety violations is low. The state thus helps construct and maintain a serf‑like labor caste—often including mixed‑status families and U.S.‑citizen children—whose fear of immigration enforcement suppresses wages and deters organizing, dragging down conditions for everyone working alongside them.

That is the real function of Trumpian ICE policy in the political economy of the United States; the rhetoric about sovereignty and “illegals taking jobs” is, for the most part, after‑the‑fact justification for a system that works very well for employers who prefer a frightened workforce to a free one (Economic Policy Institute).

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In this context, the right view of Barnett, Wurman, and company is, I think, well set-out by Ken White, over on BlueSky:

A New And More Reasonable Popehat: <https://bsky.app/profile/kenwhite.bsky.social/post/3mih5lrzrec2m>: ‘It’s a very bad sign how many absolute amoral shameless hacks are willing to conjure up bullshit to support it…. Advocacy does have a moral component. Lying about law and history in an effort to make millions of people stateless is not “doing law the right way.” The notion that advocacy is morally neutral or even inherently good if performed according to cultural ritual remains vapid and harmful. To expand…: the enemies of democracy and freedom are not just hacks like Wurman and Barnett, it’s also the people who demand that we treat Wurman and Barnett as good-faith commentators because they talk in law review articles or NYT editorials. Call evil evil…

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My key puzzlement: Why did the Supreme Court not nip all of this in the bud fourteen months ago? That was, literally, its primary job: to keep the government for doing the unconstitutional things that the government has been doing for a year. Was the majority’s thinking last June: “let’s push this off—maybe something will happen to create facts on the ground so that then we can rule for Trump when it comes back”? That is an ungenerous interpretation of the view of the neofascist Supreme Court majority. But that does not make it wrong. The generous interpretation is that the justices were trying to avoid detonating a political bomb while Trump was still arguably the recipient of majority support.

But I do incline to the ungenerours interpretation: they were deliberately letting the clock tick to assist Trump. This Supreme Court has a history of dragging things out so that Trump can create facts on the ground that alter realities, and that may allow them to later issue pro-Trump rulings that they do not dare issue immediately.

Or maybe I am a paranoid psycho.

But I am just doing the normal thing economists and historians do when confronted with repeated asymmetric outcomes: infer that revealed preferences may differ from the Court’s stated ones—in this case, putting as many thumbs on the scale as they dare on Trump’s behalf.

And we have:

Jay Willis: <https://bsky.app/profile/jaywillis.net/post/3migzxixv422z>: ‘Sam Alito asking an extended hypothetical question about whether members of an Iranian sleeper cell would get U.S. citizenship is only lending further support to my theory that season 5 of '24' pickled the brains of an entire generation of Republican voters…

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With:

ElieNYC: <https://bsky.app/profile/elienyc.bsky.social/post/3migtyovlw22u>: ‘My friend just said "Shorter Sotomayor: 'Daniel Webster called you a fucking idiot. Thoughts?'" That's the best description available for what's happening here…. Alito is now talking about microwave ovens. Hopefully later he’ll to custome kitchen deliveries. He’s gotta move refridgerators. He’s gotta move color tvs. Sorry, uhh, *legal* analysis is “I have no idea what Alito is talkign about but it’s probably evil in some way I haven’t thought of yet.”…

Amy Coney Barret asks an extremely relevant question. Sauer/Trump's point is that birthright citizenship only counts for parents who have *allegiance* to the US. ACB points out that CAPTURED SLAVES.. had no "allegiance" to the US, and arguably wanted to escape. But their childrens were citizens. She’s talking about people “illegally trafficked” here. Which, obviously, blows up the whole “allegiance” argument. We have ACB. Sauer just had to say that slaves had an “intent to remain” in the US. Motherfucker WHAT??

Roberts again: "You mention in your briefing about 'birth tourism.' Do you have any... information about how... common that is... how much of a problem that is?" Sauer: uhh... media reports... from China. Roberts: "Having said all that, you do agree it has no impact on the legal analysis.”…

Evil Clarence Thomas. He asks how much any of the debate about the 14th A has to do with immigration. His point here, is gonna be, that the 14th A only applied to freed slaves and NOBODY else. That’s what MAGA wants him to say, and he seems inclined to say it….

Alito is now bringing up Iranians. He’s basically asking about “sleeper agents,” the conservative belief that babies of immigrants can be raised as Manchurian Americans who will somehow turn on us when they are *activated* at a later date. And while I know that sounds like crazy pants bullshit to come up at a Supreme Court hearing... remeber that Alito watches Fox News all the time and is NO DIFFERENT than your racist uncle who does the same.

Wang hits him back with "that means that children of Irish, and ITALIAN immigrants would also not be a citizen." Alito is the son of Italian immigrants….

What I *don't* think is a possibility is 5-4 Trump wins. We have ACB. We have Roberts. We almost certainly have Gorsuch (possibly as a concurrence). I CANNOT count to 5 on a Trump win here. So... good. I mean TERRIBLE that it's gottent his far. But good…

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And Ken White’s view of the actual Supreme Court proceedings:

A New And More Reasonable Popehat: ‘Lots of good coverage of today’s [birthright-citizenship Supreme Court[ argument to choose from…. A few points. First: it looks good for the rule of law winning, but I thought that before the [presidential] immunity decision, so I am not 100% sure. Second: it’s a travesty this bullshit was treated this seriously — and it did real harm to the nation and democracy that it was indulged…

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While off in the side ring of the chaos-monkey circus:

Donald Trump claims that Indianapolis is a city in Minnesota, shortly after turning on Somali-Americans as “low IQ. I can generalize. They’re low IQ people. They’re bad people…” <https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4llrhdclvdlmmynkwsmg5tdc/post/3mihqo2kdj225?ref_src=embed>

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In that context, I think we can see what this attempt at rewriting the law has really been about. See the birthright-citizenship fight inside a broader Trumpist project: using immigration enforcement to construct a compliant, rightless labor caste. The administration’s ICE policies are not about jobs-for-Americans or border-control. They are, rather, about creating a second-class citizen serf population that can be underpaid, ignored, and threatened with deportation at any moment—even when its members are American citizens by any sane reading of the 14th Amendment.

The corrupt neofascist Supreme Court majority’s pattern of delay and indulgence is best understood as assistance to that project—but actually ruling that “not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” applies not just those with diplomatic immunity but to all illegal immigrants—or possibly illegal immigrants plus student- and H1-visa holders plus maybe even those with green cards—is something that gets at least two but is unlikely to get five votes, even with current court membership.

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Never forget: This is what happens every day in terms of communications from the U.S. government. This morning we have:

Q: You had offered that 15-point plan to Iran, did they ever come back?

Trump: They came back on the 15. They gave us most of the points. Why
wouldn’t they?

Q: You make it sound like they made some concessions. Can you identify
those?

Trump: Well, they’re agreeing with us on on the plan. I mean, we asked for 15 things, and for the most part, we’re going to be asking for a couple of other things. And just to prove that they’re serious, they gave us all these boats. When I talked about four days ago. A present. I said they gave me a present. But I didn’t think I was at liberty to say what it was. What it was was 8 plus 2. It’s 10 massive boatloads of oil. And today, they gave us another present. They gave us 20 boatloads of oil that’s being shipped tomorrow. We’re having very good meetings both directly and indirectly, and I think we’re getting quite a lot of very important points…

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And

Donald J. Trump: The United States of America is in serious discussions with A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME to end our Military Operations in Iran. Great progress has been made but, if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately “Open for Business,” we will conclude our lovely “stay” in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet “touched.” This will be in retribution for our many soldiers, and others, that Iran has butchered and killed over the old Regime’s 47 year “Reign of Terror.” Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

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Nava Freiberg and Jacob Magid, writing for The Times of Israel <https://www.timesofisrael.com/trump-says-he-expects-deal-shortly-with-iran-threatens-to-blow-up-power-plants-if-not/>, explain that Trump believes—or at least says—that the replacements for the Iranian leaders led by Khameini killed by the Israeli decapitation strike are and constitute the “new and more reasonable régime” ruling Iran. Rubio, however, says that although Trump says that the current negotiating time, apparently headed by hardline Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, is:

talking to us in ways that previous people in charge of Iran have not spoken to us in the past… [their having] a more reasonable vision of the future… would be good news for us, for them, for the entire world…. [But] we also have to be prepared for the probability, that that is not the case…

And Bessent declares that:

Over time, the US is going to retake control of the Straits, and there will be freedom of navigation, whether it is through US escorts or a multinational escort…

What the other straits are besides the Strait of Hormuz that Bessent believes the U.S. needs to and will retake control over is not clear.

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A clearer-eyed view, in my mind, comes from the extremely sharp:

Bret Devereaux: Miscellanea: The War in Iran <https://acoup.blog/2026/03/25/miscellanea-the-war-in-iran/>: ‘Thoughts… I need to get them out of my head and on to the page before it burns out of the back of my head…. First, none of this is a defense of the Iranian regime, which is odious.… Second, this is a post fundamentally about American strategy or the lack thereof…. Finally… this isn’t an academic exercise: many, many people will suffer…. The Middle East… has exactly two strategic concerns of note: the Suez Canal (and connected Red Sea shipping system) and the oil production in the Persian Gulf and the shipping system used to export it. So long as these two arteries remained open the region does not matter very much to the United States…. Iran is very big and not very important,….[Thus] it would both be very expensive to do anything truly permanent about the Iranian regime and… impossible to sell that expense… as being required or justified or necessary. So successive American presidents… tried to keep a ‘lid’ on Iran at the lowest possible cost. The eventual triumph of this approach was the flawed but useful JCPOA (the ‘Iran deal’) in which Iran in exchange for sanctions relief swore off the pursuit of nuclear weapons (with inspections to verify)…. My own view is that the Obama administration ‘overpaid’ for the concessions of the Iran deal, but the payment having been made, they were worth keeping. Trump scrapped them in 2017 in exchange for exactly nothing….

The current war is best understood as the product of a fairly extreme gamble, although it is unclear to me if the current administration understood…. The gamble here was that because the regime would simply collapse on cue, the United States could remove Iran’s regional threat without having to commit to a major military operation that might span weeks, disrupt global energy supplies, expand over the region, cost $200 billion dollars and potentially require ground operations. Because everyone knew that result was worse than the status quo and it would thus be really foolish to do that…. I think this was a bad gamble: it was very unlikely to succeed but instead always very likely to result in a significantly worse strategic situation….

Iran did not… during the Twelve-Day War in 2025… treat the United States as a real co-belligerent…. And then the United States executed a ‘bolt from the blue’ surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 22, 2025, catching Iran (which had been attempting to negotiate with the United States) by surprise…. By bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities in June of 2025, the Trump administration created a situation where merely by launching a renewed air campaign on Iran, Israel could force the United States into a war with Iran at any time. It should go without saying that creating the conditions where the sometimes unpredictable junior partner in a security relationship can unilaterally bring the senior partner into a major conflict is an enormous strategic error….

20% of… liquid natural gas and around 20% of the world’s fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz…. Well over half of the oil and effectively all of the natural gas and fertilizer ingredients are trapped if ships cannot navigate the strait safely…. Even something like a 50% reduction in shipping in the Gulf… would create strong global economic headwinds… high energy prices and a general ‘supply shock’ that has, historically at least, not been politically survivable for the party in power…. While the United States can exchange tit-for-tat strikes with Iran without triggering an escalation spiral, once you try to collapse the regime… Iran would have to respond… need a ‘lever’ … [to] inflict costs on the United States…. For forty years everyone has known this was the strait…. And once the strait was effectively closed, the United States could not back off out of the war….

The result is a fairly classic escalation trap…. Every day this war goes on make both the United States and Iran weaker, poorer and less secure but it is very hard for either side to back down because there are huge costs connected to being the party that backs down…. Neither party can back down unilaterally and survive politically, [so] there’s practically no amount of pain that can force them to do so…. For the United States, a purely military solution is notionally possible: you could invade. But as noted, Iran is very, very big and has a large population, so a full-scale invasion would be an enormous undertaking, larger than any US military operation since the Second World War. Needless to say, the political will for this does not exist. But a ‘targeted’ ground operation against Iran’s ability to interdict the strait is also hard to concieve…. Any American force deployed on Iranian soil would end up eating Shahed and FPV drones….

Escort operations in the strait itself are also deeply unpromising…. Iran possesses modern anti-ship missiles (AShMs) in significant quantity and American escort ships (almost certainly Arleigh Burke-class destroyers) would be vulnerable escorting slow tankers in the constrained waters of the strait. It isn’t even hard to imagine what the attack would look like: essentially a larger, more complex version of the attack that sunk the Moskva…. Iran… has been planning for this exact thing for forty years certainly can. Which is why the navy is not eager to run escort…. The United States spent more than a year hammering the Houthis and was never able to fully remove their attack capabilities…. There is a very real risk that this conflict will end with Iran as the de facto master of the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, having demonstrated that no one can stop them from determining by force which ships pass and which ships cannot. That would… be… an enormous strategic defeat for the United States….

The Trump administration has offered a bewildering range of proposed objectives… initially… regime change or at least regime collapse… Iran’s supply of roughly 500kg of highly enriched uranium… ‘fixing the mess we made:’ [by] getting Iran to stop shooting and getting the Strait of Hormuz reopened…. Now it is possible that Iran blinks and takes a deal…. But I don’t think it is likely. And the simple reason is that Iran probably feels like it needs to reestablish deterrence…. Iran is thus going to very much want a deal that says ‘America blinked’ on the tin, which probably means at least some remaining nuclear program, a de facto Iranian veto on traffic in the strait and significant sanctions relief, along with formal paper promises of no more air strikes…. Just because the war is painful for Iran does not mean the regime will cave quickly: so long as they believe the survival of the regime is at stake, they will fight on. There is a great deal of ruin in a nation…

The United States is… going to bear diplomatic costs…. When the dust settles… countries… will remember that the United States unilaterally initiated by surprise a war of choice which set off severe global economic headwinds and uncertainty…. Of course the war, while quickly becoming an expensive, self-inflicted wound for the United States has also been disastrous for Iran…. It is the Iranian people who will suffer the most from this war and they had no choice in the matter. They tried to reject this regime earlier this year and many were killed for it….

You may then ask, here at the end: if I am saying that Iran is being hammered, that they are suffering huge costs, how can I also be suggesting that the United States is on some level losing? And the answer is simple: it is not possible for two sides to both win a war. But it is absolutely possible for both sides to lose…

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I have not views so much as notes:

A reckless, senile or non compos mentis prince, no adult supervision: Start with the internal dynamics in Washington. A sane administration, confronted with the current situation, would be looking for an avenue to de‑escalate and slink home. That is simply what prudence dictates. But we do not have a sane administration. We have a “prince” whose preferences are volatile, who can be worked by whoever last got him on the phone, and whose senior staff behave—at best—like courtiers guessing which way he will jump this afternoon rather than officials executing a stable strategy.

Plus there are Trump whisperers like, Stephen Miller, who simply call people on the phone to tell people: never mind what he said yesterday; do what I say, because I know what he will say after I talk to him.

The traditional realist admonition is: do not look at the prince’s preferences, look at his constraints.

But this advice assumes the prince is at least minimally rational and goal‑directed. If the prince is not, constraints are a much weaker predictor of outcomes. Institutions can buffer some madness, but they cannot fully neutralize it. And this administration has no figure who can say: this is the line, this is the plan, we are not doing anything crazier than this.

The current military and political situation is unknown: What is happening militarily in and around the Persian Gulf? We do not really know: -How many of our air bases in the Gulf are still fully functional. - How badly we have been attrited by Iranian missiles, drones, and sabotage. - Whether our aircraft and support assets are in hardened shelters or sitting vulnerably in the open. One would hope. But then one sees an E‑3 AWACS parked outside, visible to satellite reconnaissance, and wonders what on earth is going on. There are reports that “everyone’s working from home” at some of the bases—a striking image of a great power supposedly in theater, yet trying to run a war partly over Zoom. That may be exaggerated, but even the rumor points to a serious degradation of operational confidence and resilience.

Meanwhile, the Israeli government is in its “mow the lawn” mode: systematically degrading Iranian capabilities and regional proxies, treating this as a kind of ongoing maintenance of deterrence. There is no long‑term political strategy visible from the outside. Should one ask, “What is your long‑term plan?”, the likely answer is to maintain control for the the next 15–20 years; after that it’s the next guy’s problem. That is not a strategy. That is a rolling postponement of strategic thinking. To Netanyahu’s people, this probably feels like a success. They have hit targets, inflicted real damage, and demonstrated capability—with the United States, at least nominally, behind them. Are there senior figures who think this has gone badly wrong, who would desperately like to get back to something like the Obama‑era Iran nuclear deal (the JCPOA), and see this escalatory path as a strategic failure? Or is the internal mood mostly triumphalist, viewing this as a necessary and successful round of “mowing the lawn”?

The strategic bind: slink away, escalate, or blow things up: Given this setup, what happens next?

(1) Trump (or whoever turns out to be deciding for him) might, at some point, “unleash a nuke”—and then we see how much civil disobedience there is at STRATCOM.

(2) Trump (or whoever turns out to be deciding for him) might order U.S. boots-on-the-ground to Kargh Island or to all territory within artillery range of the sealine Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. military is institutionally conservative. Its default is: you give us a mission, we salute, and we carry it out. It is not designed to say: this is strategically idiotic, we refuse. It relies on civilian leadership to set sane objectives. Perhaps U.S. airpower is so overwhelming that Iranian forces cannot mass without being smashed from the air. That is the optimistic operational scenario. But even then, what does “attack” mean in this environment? Iranians sit in tunnels and bunkers, fly drones, launch missiles, rely on asymmetric harassment and mining, and try to keep communications sufficiently low‑signature to avoid being obliterated. A long limited war over control of the global oil chokepoint.

(3) Trump (or whoever turns out to be deciding for him) might try to slink away, effectively cutting losses and de‑escalating, accepting Iran’s collecting $3/barrel for oil shipment through the Strait of Hormuz in return for no oil price shock, and leaving the Iranian nuclear program for future “negotiations”. Cutting losses, declaring some kind of mission accomplished, and reducing the visible footprint in theater. Financial markets are currently pricing a high likelihood that, under constraints, decision‑makers will ultimately choose the least insane path.

None of these paths is in any sense “safe”.

Consider the third: The regime’s high command will have suffered grevious losses. But everyone still surviving will have been promoted, hardened, and empowered. Surviving elites in such a system tend to be more radical and more confident, not less. If and when the dust settles, Iran is left with more resources to pursue its nuclear program than it had before. It is very hard to see how this sequence leaves us better off than we were under the Obama‑era JCPoA, which seriously constrained enrichment and gave us intrusive inspections. Trump and company should now be desperate to get back to something like the Obama Iran deal. But the deal they torched is now so far outside the attainable set that they are trapped. They cannot admit error domestically; they cannot reconstruct international trust; and they have empowered exactly the Iranian hardliners who argued that the U.S. would never keep its word—and were proven correct

What is the real state of our military in the drone era?: We sent two carriers into a theater dense with anti‑ship missiles, drones, and asymmetric maritime threats. One of them has exited the theater—the story is of a laundry fire. Or is it that while carriers are cool, were the symbolic centerpiece of American power, and had Top Gun a recruiting tool for a generation, they were always too fragile for any world in which something like the USN’s 1944 force superiority ratios were lacking. And in a world of precision anti‑ship missiles and cheap, smart drones, these floating cities are becoming even more large, vulnerable targets. Were the carriers always a bluff—symbols of resolve rather than practical assets in a high‑end fight? Were they always a non‑starter operationally, but no one could admit that without jeopardizing careers? Was it really a laundry fire? Or is what we are seeing now is a genuine strategic surprise to the Navy?

The upshot is grim: We see:

• The “prince” unstable and manipulable.

• No adult in the room.

• Key institutions (the Navy, the national security bureaucracy) struggling to process and act on the information they have about their own vulnerabilities.

• Allies pursuing short‑term “mow the lawn” strategies that defer rather than solve the underlying strategic problem.

• Adversaries—especially Iran—likely to end up with more resources and more freedom of action than before.

• And tail risks—nuclear use, catastrophic regional war—are uncomfortably large.

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###confused-notes
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If you want to know what is happening to the world trade system these days, pay very close attention to Richard Baldwin. Here Baldwin treats Trumpian tariffs as they semi-scripted reality-TV theater that they are. He treats them as performative: a performance for a domestic audience animated by grievances that it cannot verbalize. Tariff announcements are thus a way of producing “happy headlines” for voters who listen to Trump and Fox News telling them that they are the victims of cosmopolitan elites. And TACO rules: Either “Trump Always Chickens Out” or “Tactical Adjustment, Climbdown, and then Oblivion” The result is a world in which headline US tariff aggression is enormous, but effective short-run disruption is minor. And the gullible press corps floods the zone with Trump’s desired optics.

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<https://rbaldwin.substack.com/p/why-didnt-trumpian-tariffs-wreck> <https://rbaldwin.substack.com/cp/192412851>

Richard Baldwin Substack

Why Didn’t Trumpian Tariffs Wreck the World Trade System?

Factful Friday by Richard Baldwin, Professor at IMD Business School. 27 March 2026…

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21 days ago · 8 likes · Richard Baldwin

Richard Baldwin: Why Didn’t Trumpian Tariffs Wreck the World Trade System? <https://rbaldwin.substack.com/p/why-didnt-trumpian-tariffs-wreck>: ‘Because World War Trade didn’t spread…. If you think of Trumpian trade policy as economic policy, it will look chaotic, irrational and self-defeating. The policy looks erratic because it is not organised around standard economic goals such as efficiency, competitiveness or even a coherent mercantilism. It is organised around what I called the “Grievance Doctrine” in my 2025 book, The Great Trade Hack.[1]… Trump is using tariffs to show that America is finally standing up for the forgotten men and women. In short, Trumpian tariffs are all about generating ‘happy headlines’ that fulfil his campaign promise to restore American pride, stand up to global elites, and put America first….

On tariffs, the Trump administration was shooting from the hip: firing off tariffs and recalling any bullets that hit its political base. This was most definitely not conventional US trade policy. It was fire, flinch, retreat, while spinning it all in the media as a victory. The most unexpected part was how the administration managed to portray both the imposition of tariffs and their suspension as victories…. Trump…found a new way to do American trade policy. The exemptions avoided most of the economic pain, while the headlines provided most of the political gain….

It was a strange but instructive thing to watch this unfold in the spring of 2025. His first attempt was to claim that China was the one who was desperate to lower US tariffs…. Trump claimed Xi had called; Beijing denied it. Bess[e]nt asserted the Chinese were pushing to get a deal; Beijing denied it…. Trump blinked first… gave President Xi the face-save he needed…. After just two days of negotiation, the two sides agreed to shift from 125% to 10%…. The US partner with the largest trade surplus now had the lowest tariffs….

Headlines of “US caves to China” would not have been a good look…. Bess[e]nt…. matched the retreat with a recast of history to make a withdrawal look like a win. The Secretary told the press that the US had kept 30% while China only got 10%, thus demonstrating that America still had the upper hand. Yes, it had been a tough match, but US won on points. Much of the media dutifully transcribed Bess[e]nt’s backcasting of history, creating a widely held impression. The New York Times, which fell for the spin, inadvertently illustrated the sleight of hand….

In my forthcoming book (did I mention I’ve got a book coming out?), I tell it as a tale of four TACOs… the Rust Belt TACO… Canada and Mexico… the [Financial] Market TACO… the China TACO…. the Affordability TACO…

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The incompetent reporters on this one are: Daisuke Wakabayashi, Amy Chang Chien, and Alan Rappeport.

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Foreign governments, for the most part, understand this Baldwinian logic. Thus they chose restraint.

China, uniquely exposed and uniquely powerful in US supply chains, pushed back just enough to demonstrate that it had true escalation dominance—and then, too, stopped short of blowing up the system that has served it so well.

What Baldwin offers here, therefore, is not just a narrative of one more Trumpian tantrum, but a useful analytic template: The world trading system survives a shock that ought, in the textbooks, to have been fatal. Why did it survive? Look first to domestic politics in the post-literate age of not policy but spectacle. Look second to institutional inertia. Pluso: also look, third, to the quiet, often self-interested prudence of everyone else.

I do, however, think that Baldwin’s story as told here is massively incomplete as we move from the short- into the medium- and the long-run.

The rest of the world—the United States too—is in a configuration in which its prosperity depends on the extremely deep and integrated global division of labor: The world is still 30% in the Globalized Value-Chain mode of production, after all. (It is 20% in the Attention Info-Bio Tech mode, 30% in the Mass-Production mode, 10% in the Applied-Science mode, 5% in the SteamPower mode, and 5% in the Mercantile-Imperial mode.)

The rest of the world knows that Trump is eager to weaponize that interdependence for the sake of gaining domestic headlines for his reality-TV spectacle.

And the rest of the world knows that Trump is an uncontrolled chaos-monkey: that the fewer and fewer reality-based people around him may not always be able to get him to TACO when the random trade-tariff bullets he fires threaten to hit either powerful economic actors who have Republican senators on speed-dial, or his political base.

Hence the rest of the world has begun to take every step it can to decouple from America, as Trump is making the United States an intolerably unreliable counterparty, Large economies look deceptively self‑sufficient in the aggregate. Yet they are, at the micro level, riddled with choke points in specialized intermediates, logistics, and knowledge. Enter “weaponized interdependence”. Baldwin makes it clear that Trump is not weaponizing interdependence to pursue a coherent mercantilist strategy. Baldwin makes it clear that Trump is staging performative tariff theatre. But from the standpoint of everyone else, intent matters little. A White House that treats 25 percent or 125 percent tariffs as TV props, and supply‑chain disruption as a backdrop for rallies, is a White House that cannot be trusted as a long‑term anchor for your production network. You do not want your factories, or your national security, wired through a chaos‑monkey in the Oval Office.

So partners do the logical thing. They begin, cautiously but steadily, to re‑route. Canada and Mexico look east and west rather than north; Europe doubles down on intra‑EU resilience and leans toward Asia; Asian manufacturers hedge by building capacity that bypasses U.S. territory and U.S. law.

Britain chose to step away from its deeply integrated neighborhood and is now poorer, less influential, and more peripheral.

The United States, under Trump, is achieving much the same outcome from the other direction: by convincing the rest of the world that it is too erratic, too performatively bellicose, and too eager to weaponize interdependence to remain at the center of the system. The damage will accumulate slowly—lost investment here, diverted trade there—but over a decade it looks to me likely to add up to at least the equivalent of a cis-Atlantic BREXIT.

Please keep the magnitude of the likely long-run disaster in the front of your mind.

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References (by AI):

• BALDWIN, RICHARD. 2026. “Why Didn’t Trumpian Tariffs Wreck the World Trade System?” Richard Baldwin Substack, March 28, 2026. <https://rbaldwin.substack.com/p/why-didnt-trumpian-tariffs-wreck>.

• BALDWIN, RICHARD. 2026. “Why Didn’t Trumpian Tariffs Wreck the World Trade System?” Crosspost version. Richard Baldwin Substack, March 28, 2026. <https://rbaldwin.substack.com/cp/192412851>.

• BALDWIN, RICHARD. 2025. “How Does the Trade War End? The Result Could Be an ‘Armed’ Trade Truce Where Escalation Is Avoided Because the Costs of Total Confrontation Are Too High.” Richard Baldwin Substack, October 26. <https://rbaldwin.substack.com/p/how-does-the-trade-war-end>.

• BALDWIN, RICHARD. 2025. The Great Trade Hack: How Trump’s Trade War Fails & the World Moves On. London: CEPR Press. <https://www.amazon.com/Great-Trade-Hack-Trumps-trade/dp/191217992X>.

• BALDWIN, RICHARD. 2025. “Teaching Trumpian Tariffs.” LinkedIn, June 2025. <https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/teaching-trumpian-tariffs-richard-baldwin-ksjce>.

• DeLONG, J. BRADFORD. 2025. “NOTE TO SELF: TrumpChaos in a BREXIT Mirror.” DeLong’s Grasping Reality: Economy in the 2000s & Before, February 6. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/note-to-self-trumpchaos-in-a-brexit>.

• DeLONG, J. BRADFORD.. 2025. “The State of Trump’s Trade War: Short‑ & Long‑Run Consequences of Optics vs. Economics.” DeLong’s Grasping Reality: Economy in the 2000s & Before, October 26. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/the-state-of-trumps-trade-war-short>.

• DeLONG, J. BRADFORD. 2025. “Trump Is Losing All His Trade Wars, Badly.” DeLong’s Grasping Reality: Economy in the 2000s & Before, August 21. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/trump-is-losing-all-his-trade-wars>.

• DeLONG, J. BRADFORD. 2025. “Just What Do Trump’s ‘Trade Deals’ Consist of? Nothing.” DeLong’s Grasping Reality: Economy in the 2000s & Before, November 19. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/just-what-do-trumps-trade-deals-consist>.

• FITCH RATINGS. 2025. “U.S. Effective Tariff Rate Monitor.” Fitch Ratings, April 23, 2025. <https://www.fitchratings.com/research/corporate-finance/us-effective-tariff-rate-monitor-23-04-2025>.

• GRAMM, PHIL, & LAWRENCE H. SUMMERS. 2025. “A Letter on Tariffs From Economists to Trump.” Wall Street Journal, January 30. https://bit.ly/Gramm-Summers

• KLEIN, MATTHEW C. 2025. “The U.S. Is Not ‘Winning the Trade War’.” The Overshoot, July. <https://theovershoot.co/p/the-us-is-not-winning-the-trade-war>.

• PENN WHARTON BUDGET MODEL. n.d. “Effective Tariff Rates & Revenues Data.” Excel data file. <https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/legacy/excel/Effective_Tariff_Rates_and_Revenues_Data.xlsx>.

• SPRINGFORD, JOHN. 2022. “The Cost of Brexit to June 2022.” Centre for European Reform, December 21. <https://www.cer.eu/insights/cost-brexit-june-2022>.

• TYSON, LAURA, & GEORGE PAPACONSTANTINOU. 2025. “Who Really Wins in the US‑EU Trade Deal?” Project Syndicate, August. <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/us-eu-trade-deal-who-really-wins-by-laura-tyson-and-george-papaconstantinou-2025-08>.

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There is, however, quite a lot that we do know:

We know that it is appalling that there is even a single vote against 25th‑Amendmenting Trump right now—let alone that his continued occupancy of the Oval Office is treated as a normal parameter of American politics rather than as an ongoing dire national emergency:

Dan Drezner: Welcome to the Lax Americana <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-lax-americana>: ‘When a lazy, incurious administration starts doing things with a deconstructed state…. 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.¹ This comes through most clearly in hearing Trump zigzag his way through various frustrations and policy reversals:

[No 1: March 19-21: God Is a Comedian <https://no01.substack.com/p/march-19-21-god-is-a-comedian>:] “Trump asked NATO to send ships to help secure the Strait of Hormuz. Every. single. ally. refused. Trump called them ‘cowards’ and said NATO has a ‘very bad future’. He then announced that the United States doesn’t actually need the Strait of Hormuz. He then said countries that do need it should police it themselves. He then told China to police it. He then sent 5,000 Marines toward it.

“This sequence of statements was delivered, as far as the public record shows, by the same person, using the same mouth, within roughly 24 hours. The allies are cowards for not helping with the thing he doesn’t need, which is why he’s sending Marines to die for it, unless the countries that do need it do it themselves, which they won’t, because they’re cowards.

“Trump told reporters the strait could be opened with a ‘simple military maneuver’ that is ‘relatively safe’ but requires ‘a lot of help”’ Help. From the cowards. Who he doesn’t need. For the strait. That he also doesn’t need…

Instead of caring about, you know, implementing competing policies, Trump administration officials seem more keen to cash in on their official connections or their insider information, secure in the knowledge that they will not be prosecuted for any corrupt act…

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And:

No 1: March 19-21: God Is a Comedian: ‘This is simply the news, and nothing but the news. Told straight, in a universe that has clearly stopped taking its medication. The United States is sending 5,000 Marines into the Persian Gulf to seize Kharg Island, a speck of land 15 miles off the Iranian coast that handles 90% of Iran’s oil exports.…. The Marines aboard the USS Tripoli and USS Boxer must first sail through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has mined. The strait is also, as of this week, a toll road. The IRGC verifies vessels on VHF radio and charges up to $2 million per transit, payable in cash, cryptocurrency, or barter. At least eight ships have paid. Iran’s parliament is legislating the arrangement formally, because even revolutionary theocracies require a compliance department…. A White House source told Axios they need “about a month to weaken the Iranians more” before attempting this. One month. Of a war Trump described as ‘winding down’ on Friday - three weeks in, which by his count is basically four days… Both statements were made, as far as anyone can tell, by people who occupy the same government and occasionally share a building….

The USS Gerald R. Ford, meanwhile, the most expensive warship in human history, is retreating to Crete. The official reason is a “laundry fire”. 266 consecutive days at sea, 28 days short of the Vietnam-era deployment record, and the crown jewel of the US Navy is fleeing the theatre, not because of being damaged in combat, not because missiles are flying around it… But because someone's skivvies got too hot.

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And:

No 1: March 19-21: God Is a Comedian: ‘This week, the US Treasury lifted all oil sanctions on Iran. For 30 days. 140 million barrels of Iranian crude, sitting on ships at sea, may now be sold freely on the global market. Including to the United States itself. In yuan. The United States is purchasing, with Chinese currency, oil from the country it is currently bombing?! The same oil that funds the missiles that just shot down an F-35 for the first time. The same missiles that are redecorating allied oil infrastructure. Treasury Secretary Bessent called this “narrowly tailored”. Narrow like in white, and tailored as in card, apparently. In the same OFAC filing, Russian oil sanctions were lifted as well. And Belarus potash too, because apparently the universe was running low on irony and needed to top up.

The logic, insofar as there is any, goes like this: the war has crashed the global oil market so hard that the administration needs the enemy’s oil to keep gasoline prices from eating the midterms. They are unsanctioning the people they’re bombing because the bombing is working too well at the thing they didn’t want it to do. The sanctions were necessary to stop Iran funding the war, but the war made the sanctions too effective, so the sanctions had to be lifted to fund the war effort against the country that no longer needs sanctions because the oil revenues that sanctions were preventing are now required to prevent the economic damage caused by preventing those revenues, which is itself a consequence of the military campaign designed to make the sanctions unnecessary by making Iran the kind of country that doesn’t need sanctioning, which it would be, if the sanctions hadn’t been lifted to pay for making it that…

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And:

No 1: March 19-21: God Is a Comedian: ‘Two F-35 stealth fighters have been hit by Iranian air defences. The first was confirmed by CENTCOM, which used the phrase “emergency landing” in the way that a funeral director might describe death as “a permanent change of address”. The pilot had shrapnel wounds. The aircraft, they said, “will not return to service”, which is the sort of thing you say about a car that hit a bridge abutment at speed, not about a plane that landed. A Chinook helicopter was subsequently tracked conducting an extensive search pattern over eastern Saudi Arabia. This is what you do when something has come apart in the sky and you need to find the bits. It is not what you do after a landing, emergency or otherwise. The entire F-35 doctrine, the single most expensive weapons programme in human history, rests on the assumption that the aircraft is invisible to radar. Someone forgot to tell the Iranians the planes were invisible.

Then there’s Diego Garcia. The B-2 bomber staging base in the Indian Ocean, roughly 4,000 kilometres from Iran. Iran sent two intermediate-range ballistic missiles. One failed mid-flight. An SM-3 intercepted the other. The outcome is beside the point. Iran had publicly claimed a maximum missile range of 2,000 kilometres. They were lying by a factor of two, which, in the context of ballistic missile capabilities, constitutes what experts call “a very bad surprise”. Rome, Paris, and London are now within the theoretical strike envelope. The British gave permission for Diego Garcia to be used for strikes against Iran and discovered that the Iranian response could, if Tehran felt creative, arrive at Heathrow…

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And:

No 1: March 19-21: God Is a Comedian: ‘Friday’s press gaggle. Barely exaggerated: at 12:03 PM, President Trump told reporters he wanted a ceasefire with Iran. At 12:05 he declared victory. At 12:07 he announced he was sending Marines. At 12:08 he said no boots on the ground. At 12:11 he said he did not want a ceasefire. At 12:16 he declared victory again. At 12:17 he asked for a ceasefire. At 12:23 he told NATO they were cowards. At 12:29 he said Iran was begging for a ceasefire. At 12:31 he said everything was perfect. At 12:36 he said $500 oil was a good thing. At 12:37 he demanded Iran open Hormuz. At 12:39 he said Hormuz was never closed. At 12:41 he said the US was not at war with Iran. At 12:42 he declared victory in Iran. By 3:43 PM he told CBS he doesn’t want a ceasefire. By 5:13 PM - 13 minutes after futures markets closed for the weekend, in a coincidence that should be studied in every securities fraud textbook - he posted on Truth Social that the US is “getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great Military efforts”. The S&P reversed more than 1% in seconds. QQQ had already surged 1.1% in the 80 minutes before the announcement, with call options flowing in at a pace that suggests someone, somewhere, had an itinerary…

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We know that it is even more appalling that J. D. Vance has decided that his road to power lies in doubling down on “Great Replacement Theory,” thereby implicitly declaring his own mother‑in‑law, father‑in‑law, wife, and children to be at best second‑class citizens in the America he wishes to build. We know that most appalling of all is the fact that there is not a single Republican office‑holder in the country willing to stand publicly and say that Trump and Vance are unworthy standard‑bearers for their party.

We know, further, that nobody inside the Trump administration appears willing to take any career risk at all—much less the sort of risk that used to be associated with the phrase “public service”—to try to make American policy sane, or even to do anything other than profit from the opportunities for grift that a deconstructed state presents.

Into this hall of mirrors steps “No1” (pronounced “no one”). No, I do not know whether rhiu No1 to whom Dan Drezner, Charlie Warzel, Bill Kristol, and Jonathan Last subscribe is, in the long run, reliable and grounded in his judgments about geopolitics and precious metals. But I do know that he is certainly not less reliable and grounded than everyone currently engaged in sanewashing Donald Trump and the Trump administration. That, today, is a very low bar—and a very telling one.

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I believe Dan Drezner knows more than I do about what is currently going on with the Epstein-Netanyahu-Trump War on Iran, so I turn the microphone over to him.

Briefly: In the Persian/Arabian Gulf, Tehran has escalation dominance over the Strait of Hormuz, Trump has talking points on Fox, the global economy has a bill to pay, the decapitation strike was botched—replaced an elderly shy-of-nukes Supreme Leader with a young, angry nuke-curious one whose entire family we have just killed—the Trumpists tried to buy a media photo op, and appears to have bought a grinding war instead. One in which the U.S. is burning through $10 billion of military hardware a week and looks as likely to be the side attrited here as the side doing the attriting…

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<https://danieldrezner.substack.com/cp/190720523> <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/im-sick-and-tired-of-all-the-winning>

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Dan Drezner: I’m Sick & Tired of All The Winning <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/im-sick-and-tired-of-all-the-winning>: ‘Another few days, another raft of stories indicating that Gulf War Three is not going exactly as the Trump administration expected… all the ways in which Trump and his cabinet did zero advance planning and have subsequently been surprised by how this war has played out: “U.S. officials have had to adjust plans on the fly, from hastily ordering the evacuation of embassies to developing policy proposals to reduce gas prices…. Senator Christopher S. Murphy… said… the administration had no plan for the Strait of Hormuz and did “not know how to get it safely back open.” Inside the administration, some officials are growing pessimistic…. But they have been careful not to express that directly to the president, who has repeatedly declared that the military operation is a complete success. Mr. Trump has laid out maximalist goals like insisting that Iran name a leader who will submit to him, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have described narrower and more tactical objectives that could provide an off-ramp in the near term….

A Bloomberg Economics analysis suggests that it is easier and cheaper for Iran to build more drones than for the United States to build more interceptors that defend against such attacks…. It should be stressed that almost all of this was eminently predictable…

What did they think would happen? Kill as much of the top Iranian leadership as possible, and then the new leaders would make noises about wanting to play ball with us, and then everybody would stop?

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On the general line of spitting against the wind, or rolling the Sysiphean boulder uphill, I have found Dan Drezner to be the best despairing man yelling at clouds and keeping my head in the right place with respect to Trumpian chaos-monkey foreign and security policy.

This AM he argues the Trump administration joined Israel’s war on Iran with maximalist goals but no coherent strategy, driven by alliance entraoment and wishful thinking rather than serious planning. In Dan’s view the situation was this: Netanyahu was going to strike, and Trump decided that he would rather appear to lead the parade rather than appear weak, on the back foot, and struggling to catch up to events. Senior Trumpian officials appear to have latched onto an implausible best‑case CIA scenario of a more “pragmatic” IRGC leadership, ignoring far more likely, worse outcomes. Overall, he concludes the internal thinking is chaotic, the regime remains resilient, and the administration is essentially improvising in a high‑stakes war. Washington has no credible opposition partner or successor élite in mind, the Iranian regime’s coercive apparatus is largely intact, and hopes for popular overthrow are fanciful.

Piss‑poor crisis decision‑making.

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What do I think? Again: far outside of my wheelhouse here. But: Appearing strong and in control on social media by blowing stuff up is an ethos. The U.S. way of war since Grant has been to blow stuff up, and then see what is left.

Given the amount of stuff we have been blowing up, casualties so far have been mercifully light: only 1000 or so. This is not carpet‑bombing of entire cities, but it is not pinprick strikes either. In Iran, we have confirmed devastation of senior‑leadership compounds (including Khamenei’s), IRGC command-and-control, air bases, air-defense sites, missile and drone launch facilities, and key military airfields—plus hits on civilian infrastructure: hospitals (Gandhi Hospital), emergency-services HQ in Tehran, residential buildings in Sanandaj and other cities, the Minab school, and damage around major squares and near airports like Kermanshah. In Israel, Iranian missiles have hit populated areas (e.g., Beit Shemesh) and forced repeated use of shelters; in the Gulf, repeated Iranian salvos against airports, ports, hotels, and towers have produced a pattern of punctured cityscapes—very localized severe damage, widespread disruption, but not yet city‑levelling.

All so that Trump does not appear weak on social media where Netanyahu appears decisive. (Or possibly, possibly, to get social media talking about something other than Jeffrey Epstein.)

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Dan has put his piece <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/on-iran-there-is-no-strategy-there#footnote-anchor-1-189723814> behind his paywall, so I will just give brief excerpts:

There Is No U.S. Plan on Iran

Maybe, just maybe, the Trump Administration does not know what it is doing in Iran.

Daniel W. Drezner :: Mar 03, 2026 :: Paid….

The more we learn about Trump’s decision-making process to bomb Iran, however, the clearer it becomes that there is no real strategy or end goal. Consider the talking points… the Trump White House provided to congressional Republicans…. “The objectives are clear: 1. Destroy their missiles, and raze their missile industry to the ground. 2. Annihilate their Navy. 3. Ensure the regime’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces, and no longer use their IEDs or roadside bombs, which have gravely wounded and killed thousands and thousands of people, including many Americans. 4. Ensure that Iran can NEVER obtain a nuclear weapon. While Operation Midnight Hammer obliterated Iran’s three major nuclear sites, the regime was committed to enriching and rebuilding their nuclear program, and they REFUSED to make a deal, despite months of extensive talks and good faith efforts by President Trump’s top negotiators.”… “Régime change” is not listed… despite Trump talking about regime change constantly….

These are pretty maximalist goals!… [of the] “nuke the sitr from orbit” kind….

Marco Rubio basically confirmed Israel’s role in forcing Trump’s hand…. The imminent threat was the Iranian response to an Israeli attack?!… [This is] the textbook definition of entrapment, in which an ally drags a great power into a conflict… [plus] obvious wishcasting on the part of Trump’s advisors….

I don’t know how this conflict plays out over the next dew weeks. The one thing I am certain about is that the Trump administration does not know either…

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The most important thing this morning, Sunday March 1: The chances that in fifty years Tel Aviv, Damascus, and more are seas of radioactive glass. Have those fallen or risen as a result of the unconstitutional war against the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran launched this weekend?

I cannot judge. But that is the most important thing people should be thinking about this morning.

Meanwhile—and far out of my wheelhouse—my notes so far:

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In the early hours of 28 February 2026, U.S. and Israeli forces began a substantial coordinated air and missile campaign against Iran with the declared U.S. objectives, according to Donald Trump, (i) of toppling the Islamic Republic government, (ii) destroying its nuclear and missile capabilities (which had, Trump claimed, already been destroyed), and (iii) crippling its navy <https://www.cfr.org/articles/gauging-the-impact-of-massive-u-s-israeli-strikes-on-iran>. Perhaps 900 strikes in the first twelve hours.

Let’s pause on that (ii). The White House was still, as the attack went on, calling “fake news” on reports that Iran still had a nuclear-weapons program:

Secretary Marco Rubio (Jun 25, 2025) <https://twitter.com/SecRubio/status/1937879123285663831>: ‘This is the game these intelligence leakers play. They characterize and spin the intelligence the way they want to because they have an agenda. Here’s the truth: Iran‘s nuclear sites are destroyed…

@RapidResponse47 (Jun 25, 2025) <https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/1937932160146772449>: ‘@PressSec: “That CNN story does not change the facts: There was a TOTAL and COMPLETE obliteration of Iran‘s nuclear facilities, and because of @POTUS‘ strike... Iran no longer has the capability to produce a nuclear weapon...”

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Of course, Donald Trump is not a reliable narrator. No one in the Trump administration is a reliable narrator. Plus the U.S. these days cannot be understood, even as shorthand, to be a unitary actor with coherent objectives. It is chaos monkeys all the way down.

Trump has offered no endgame: there are no articulated conditions for success beyond the fall of the regime, no explanation of what follows if Iran fragments or descends into civil war, and no domestic debate rallying support comparable to 2002–03. <⁠https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/experts-react-the-us-and-israel-just-unleashed-a-major-attack-on-iran-whats-next/>. Every sortie, carrier deployment, and Patriot battery shifted to the Gulf is something not available for deterring Russia in Eastern Europe or China in the Western Pacific. How big will the strain be on U.S. readiness in Asia <https://mickryan.substack.com/p/the-new-iran-war-trajectory-of-the>? This war is a gamble, taken with incomplete information and in the teeth of historical experience that suggests such gambles often go badly—above all for the people living under the bombs. As Michael Hirst wrote the line in the screenplay for the 1998 Elizabeth for Queen Elizabeth I: “I do not like wars. They have uncertain outcomes”.

U.S.–Israeli operational coordination appears exceptionally tight: target lists, sequencing, and timing suggest a jointly conceived decapitation campaign <https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/experts-react-the-us-and-israel-just-unleashed-a-major-attack-on-iran-whats-next/>. Initial waves focused on: (a) command-and-control, (b) leadership compounds, including the supreme leader complex, (c) nuclear and missile infrastructure, and (d) air defenses, IRGC bases, and naval facilities. The Iranian Red Crescent and human‑rights monitors report several hundred killed and many more injured, with a very high civilian share because of strikes near or on dual‑use and urban targets <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Israeli%E2%80%93United_States_strikes_on_Iran>.

The most dramatic event is that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has been killed. The U.S.–Israeli campaign has already achieved a central decapitation objective. But here, history leans over our shoulder and coughs politely. Regimes do not always die when leaders do. The Islamic Republic is a system, not a one‑man show:

• It has overlapping elite networks in the IRGC, clerical establishment, and bureaucracy.

• It has, despite all the protests and repression of recent years, a residual base of loyalists willing to use force.

• It has long anticipated precisely this contingency and built redundancy into its command structure <​⁠https://www.cfr.org/articles/gauging-the-impact-of-massive-u-s-israeli-strikes-on-iran> <https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/experts-react-the-us-and-israel-just-unleashed-a-major-attack-on-iran-whats-next/>.

So the decapitation gamble creates, perhaps:

1. Replacement of the current leadership with a more openly military‑security junta—what one analyst dubs the risk of “IRGCistan”: fewer turbans, more uniforms, and an even harder line at home and abroad;

2. A drawn‑out internal power struggle in which multiple factions—IRGC commanders, clerics, technocrats, and street‑level protesters—compete in the shadow of an ongoing foreign air campaign; or

3. Rapid collapse of the regime and some form of opposition‑led transition—what the more optimistic U.S. hawks implicitly hope for.

The structural odds do not favor (3).

The Iranian response? Consider the UAE. The defense ministry reports 165 ballistic missiles and 541 drones launched at the country, with most intercepted but some getting through, leaving three dead (migrant workers) and dozens lightly injured; debris has hit Dubai and Abu Dhabi, including the Etihad Towers complex and Jebel Ali port. Civilian air travel is in chaos, with Dubai and Abu Dhabi airports damaged and airspace closures cascading through the regional network. ​⁠ ​The war is now a multi‑node regional air and missile war. Inside Iran, the regime has moved—remarkably quickly, given the shock—to institutionalize succession. The system has flipped to “continuity mode.” The rhetoric from President Masoud Pezeshkian is maximalist—condemning Khamenei’s killing as a “declaration of war against Muslims” and pledging retaliation as a “duty”—but the institutional move is conservative: preserve the system, then sort out who wears which turban (or uniform) later.

The Islamic Republic government has immediate aims: to survive the onslaught, impose enough costs on the United States and Israel to complicate further attacks, and maintain internal control. The Islamic Republic government has medium‑term aims: inflict politically painful casualties on U.S. forces, and raising the global economic price of war—principally via threats to Gulf oil infrastructure and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz <https://www.cfr.org/articles/gauging-the-impact-of-massive-u-s-israeli-strikes-on-iran>.

Pause for the Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the Persian/Arabian Gulf. 1000 miles to the west-southwest, the Houthis succeeded in their operational aim: closing the Bab el-Mandeb at the southern end of the Red Sea and convincing the U.S. Navy that continued retaliatory strikes attrit the U.S. Navy more than Houthi capabilities. They did this for nearly two years until the October 2025 ceasefire. They exploited the asymmetry between how much it cost them to keep shooting, how much it cost the U.S. Navy to suppress their capabilities, and how much it costs everyone else to keep sailing. The Houthis are now doing again, as MAERSK reroutes away from the Suez Canal to the Cape of Good Hope. Only a sliver of the 20 mb/d of oil that transits the Strait of Hormuz has pipeline alternatives. An Omani-via-land bridge is OK for high-value but not for bulk commodities. Thus adding enough stochastic risk to effectively close the Strait of Hormuz may be possible even for a substantially degraded Islamic Republic military.

From an arms‑control perspective, this is catastrophic. It signals to Iranian elites—and many other governments—that engaging in negotiations with the United States does not insure against force; it may even be a prelude to it. It teaches future leaders everywhere that nuclear forces are the only reliable deterrent against regime‑change campaigns. It complicates non‑proliferation norms globally: why would other regional actors trust complex deals if they can be swept away by a change of administration and a few high‑octane speeches? The combination of “we destroyed their nukes” rhetoric from Washington and clear evidence that this is not, in fact, true, is exactly the kind of thing that will teach every future regime: if you are going to rely on nuclear capability as a deterrent, build more, spread it out, harden it, and never trust U.S. claims about what they have taken out.

By killing Khamenei in a foreign strike, Washington and Jerusalem have made a particular kind of example: a long‑serving leader, deeply invested in the nuclear program, dies under bombs rather than in his bed. The “lesson” for medium powers is to grab whatever nuclear leverage they can, as fast as they can, before the next Epic Fury. That is likely to be read in Pyongyang, Islamabad, New Delhi, and elsewhere as a case study in why you want not just a program but an operational deterrent in place before you cross certain political red lines.

And the death of Khamenei may transform what the human social practice of war becomes in the rest of the century of the 2000s. Deterrence may begin to start taking the form of personal threats—whether by bomb, missile, drone, or assassin—against the lives of leaders and their families. I recall Thomas More’s Utopia <https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/415992b4-9019-427c-a6d3-e16b842c319d/content>:

As soon as they declare war, they take care to have a great many schedules, that are sealed with their common seal, affixed in the most conspicuous places of their enemies' country. This is carried secretly, and done in many places all at once. In these they promise great rewards to such as shall kill the prince, and lesser in proportion to such as shall kill any other persons who are those on whom, next to the prince himself, they cast the chief balance of the war. And they double the sum to him that, instead of killing the person so marked out, shall take him alive, and put him in their hands.

They offer not only indemnity, but rewards, to such of the persons themselves that are so marked, if they will act against their countrymen. By this means those that are named in their schedules become not only distrustful of their fellow-citizens, but are jealous of one another, and are much distracted by fear and danger; for it has often fallen out that many of them, and even the prince himself, have been betrayed by those in whom they have trusted most; for the rewards that the Utopians offer are so immeasurably great, that there is no sort of crime to which men cannot be drawn by them. They consider the risk that those run who undertake such services, and offer a recompense proportioned to the danger—not only a vast deal of gold, but great revenues in lands, that lie among other nations that are their friends, where they may go and enjoy them very securely; and they observe the promises they make of this kind most religiously.

They very much approve of this way of corrupting their enemies, though it appears to others to be base and cruel; but they look on it as a wise course, to make an end of what would be otherwise a long war, without so much as hazarding one battle to decide it. They think it likewise an act of mercy and love to mankind to prevent the great slaughter of those that must otherwise be killed in the progress of the war, both on their own side and on that of their enemies, by the death of a few that are most guilty; and that in so doing; they are kind even to their enemies, and pity them no less than their own people, as knowing that the greater part of them do not engage in the war of their own accord, but are driven into it by the passions of their prince.

If this method does not succeed with them, then they sow seeds of contention among their enemies, and animate the prince's brother, or some of the nobility, to aspire to the crown. If they cannot disunite them by domestic broils, then they engage their neighbours against them, and make them set on foot some old pretensions, which are never wanting to princes when they have occasion for them. These they plentifully supply with money, though but very sparingly with any auxiliary troops; for they are so tender of their own people that they would not willingly exchange one of them, even with the prince of their enemies' country…

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Is this a pivotal moment in the global security order? It undermines negotiation for arms‑control credibility. It incentivizes nuclear proliferation. It risks severe energy and economic disruption via Hormuz. It upends the U.S. military bandwidth vis‑à‑vis Russia and China. It normalizes leader‑targeting and preventive decapitation strikes. These are changes that will shape strategic behavior, nuclear choices, and the odds of catastrophe for decades.

Wars are stochastic processes with fat tails. The first 24 hours of this one have not closed off the worst tails; they have thickened them.

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##neofascism
##killing-khamenei-regime-change-roulette-in-a-powder-keg-world
#regime-change-roulette
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There are many people worth respecting and following writing about the current state of the Supreme Court and its right-wing neofascist turn.

I recommend:

• Steve Vladeck <https://www.stevevladeck.com/>

• Adam Feldman <https://empiricalscotus.com/>

• Amy Howe <https://www.scotusblog.com/author/amy-howe/>

• Erwin Chemerinsky <https://www.scotusblog.com/author/erwin-chemerinsky/

• Ian Millhiser <https://www.vox.com/authors/ian-millhiser>

• Leah Litman <https://michigan.law.umich.edu/faculty/leah-litman>

• Kate Shaw <https://crooked.com/podcast-series/strict-scrutiny/>

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But they—all of them, overwhelmingly—clothe what is going on in the drapery of legal doctrine and argument. They thus pretend that justices are law-abiding and law-respecting. And that is—except for Sotomayor, Jackson, and Kagan—a mistake.

We need more Legal Realism Freak Flag Flying here. So let me—stepping far indeed away from my wheelhouse—try to provide some:

• There are two on the Supreme Court—Alito and Thomas—who are fascists in the strict sense: believe that the United States is under dire threat from Wokeism, the U.S. Constitution is thus suspended: Trump, in the words of the late-Roman Republic’s senatus consultum, ultimum, is free to act as he wishes: videat præses ne quid res publica detrimenti capiat, let the president see that the republic suffers no harm.

• There are two on the Supreme Court—Gorsuch and Kavanaugh—who will almost always vote with Alito and Thomas that Trump gets to do what he wants.

• These two will, however, occasionallywant to put a time limit on it—allow Trump to move fast, break things, and establish facts-on-the-ground that then shape the future, but only for a limited time—perhaps a year or so. (Although do note that Kavanaugh dissented and joined the true fascists on Learning Resources v. Trump.)

• Then there is Justice Barrett—her vote will almost always drag Roberts’s along. (The only significant exception I can recall is the two EPA cases Ohio v. EPA (shadow docket) and San Francisco v. EPA (merits docket)).

• Roberts will follow Barrett, except where the EPA is concerned

• And there are three Supreme Court justices—Justice Jackson, Justice Sotomayor, and Justice Kagan—who have their heads screwed on tight, and are law-abiding, -respecting, and -fearing.

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With the current alignment, therefore, “Supreme Court Majority” = “Justice Barrett”, overwhelmingly.

Properly reporting and analyzing what the Supreme Court has done, is doing, and will do therefore requires a deep understanding of what Justice Barrett thinks she is doing and why, and of the somewhat different what Justice Barrett is doing, and why.

As I see it—and, I repeat, I am well out of my wheelhouse here, but I believe someone should say this—Barrett sees herself as attempting to apply but also rescue Scalia’s vision of the constitutional order from the danger generated by the Trumpists’ weaponization of it in the interests of kleptocratic fascism.

The surface story she may tell herself is that judges apply law as written; judges are not policymakers; originalism and textualism are the neutral algorithms that prevent courts from becoming mini‑legislatures. Her Federalist Society talks are about interpretive method, not about how to entrench a one‑party regime.

But somehow, on the architecture of power and the shadow docket, the recurring reality is that when Trump’s White House needs an emergency stay to keep some sweeping policy in place—deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, mass firings of civil servants, wholesale grant cancellations, aid freezes—Barrett is there for him. The four‑step kabuki is by now familiar: district court issues a skeptical injunction; appeals court mostly affirms; DOJ sprints up the marble steps; right-wing majority says “yes, you may proceed,” usually in a paragraph. Facts on the ground are created.

This is driven by the bomb‑throwing Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch. The modern administrative state is constitutionally suspect. “Independent” agencies are a New Deal mistak. Deference to expertise is judicial cowardice. Emergencies justify maximal deference to a friendly executive. They write as if they have been waiting since 1937 for precisely this kind of president to blow things up. Barrett goes along—but not as a true believer: rather, as an anxious technocrat of the right, worrying about how to keep some category of “independent” agencies while trimming doctrine around the edges.

But when the Trump administration says: “Freeze $2 billion in USAID reimbursements; we want to dismantle the program first, then litigate later,” that is fine with Barrett. When the NIH wants to terminate hundreds of millions in health grants because they smell of DEI and “gender ideology,” again the emergency stay majority includes Barrett. When the administration wants to delay or prevent reinstatement of independent‑agency heads or block nationwide injunctions against its more extreme domestic policies, the stay is granted, the lower‑court brakes are lifted, and the merits get “fast‑tracked.” Barrett is either in the majority or, at most, registering a carefully hedged partial dissent that doesn’t actually stop Trump from getting what he wants on the ground.

Perhaps Barrett, by being the “reasonable” one in this coalition, makes the architecture function. Her presence allows Roberts to tell himself that this is a 3‑3‑3 Court with an institutionalist middle, not a 6‑3 wrecking crew. But from the point of view of the people on the losing end of these orders, that nuance is metaphysical. The grants vanish all the same.

What, then, does she think she is doing? My guess is that she is profoundly invested in the story that textualism and originalism are the right way to do law, and not merely partisan cloaks. The nightmare scenario for her is that Trump’s abuses discredit those methods for a generation. Thus she uses the big merits cases to show constraint: siding with the liberals on San Francisco v. EPA in part; hinting that Humphrey’s Executor might survive; occasionally joining a liberal majority in some apolitical statutory case. These are, in her mind, exhibits for the proposition: “I am not Trump’s judge; I am the law’s judge.”

On structural questions, however, her view is that a Trump White House that can purge independent commissioners, reverse long‑settled agency policies overnight, and avoid universal injunctions is not a partisan horrorshow but a rebalancing of the separation of powers in the right direction: away from bureaucracy, toward elected control.

Trump is obnoxious, but he is an elected executive; the grant‑writers at NIH are not. If a choice must be made between empowering the sloppy democracy of elections and the technocracy of bureaucracies and lower courts, she picks the former and enables Trump. In her worldview, at least as I infer it, these expansions of presidential power are not supposed to be Trump‑only. A future, more palatable president could in theory use the same doctrines to do “good” things: rapidly expand regulation, protect rights, shovel money into public health. She writes as if doctrine is symmetric.

But we legal realists know that in practice, enforcement, standing, and “major questions” mysteriously become more rigorous when the president is a Democrat.

Inside her own head, however, she may very well believe she is strengthening the office, not merely this occupant.

The Roberts‑Barrett conceit: that you can keep Trump’s agenda mostly intact while occasionally drawing a bright line—Learning Resources on IEEPA tariffs; Trump v. Illinois on National Guard federalization; perhaps Slaughter on FTC removal—and that these isolated acts of resistance will suffice to preserve “the rule of law.” Barrett’s votes, especially in the shadow‑docket cases, are the lubricant in that machine. She is the one who makes it possible to say: “This isn’t lawlessness; this is just textualism, faithfully applied.”

That is the most charitable legal‑realist reconstruction of her self‑conception I can come up with.

Moving further into CrazyTown, what do Kavanaugh and Gorsuch think they are doing?

My guess: In Kavanaugh’s head, he is the Court’s responsible Republican: the one who will give you 90% of the movement’s wish‑list but insists on doing so in full sentences, with citations, and with at least a hand‑wave toward precedent, administrability, and the long‑run legitimacy of the institution. He is not Alito, gleefully bayoneting Roe and affirmative action and Section 2 of the VRA while taunting the losers. He is na Reagan‑Bush lawyer who believes in a strong presidency, weak agencies, deregulatory instincts, and a certain residual concern that the Court not look too obviously like the RNC’s legal department.

But on the emergency docket architecture, Kavanaugh is almost always in the same place as Thomas and Alito. When Trump wants to: purge the Education Department and NSAIDs‑funded civil servants; freeze USAID or NIH grants that offend the anti‑DEI crusade; end Temporary Protected Status or parole programs; cut off foreign aid as bargaining chips against Congress; Kavanaugh almost never provides the fourth vote to deny Trump interim relief. He writes separate opinions now and then—“we should be careful,” “this is only about forum,” “this doesn’t prejudge the merits”—but, on the ground, the policy goes forward. The people deported, fired, or de‑funded do not experience his caveats as meaningful.

Why? Because:

1. The president gets a very long structural leash: Kavanaugh has always been a maximalist on Article II power. He does not experience this as “enabling Trump,” but as vindicating his long‑held view that the modern presidency was over‑judicialized after Watergate.

2. Being the technocratic hammer, not the ideological bomb: His merits opinions are couched as “we must clean up doctrine,” “we must align practice with statute,” and “we must stop lower courts from going rogue.”

3. The institutionalist in the mirror: Kavanaugh is signaling to elite legal audiences—Harvard, the D.C. bar, the New York Times editorial board—that while he is a conservative, he is not a crazy conservative. But these breaks are carefully rationed. When it comes to the cases that structure Trump’s ability to break the administrative state and purge the civil service he is with the wrecking crew.

4. The “not as bad as Gorsuch” self‑comfort: Perhaps there is a final psychological layer here. In the internal conservative ecology of the Court, Gorsuch has become the avatar of the full‑bore anti‑administrative crusade—no deference, no patience for agency expertise, no tolerance for broad delegations. Kavanaugh is, comparatively, a moderate within that camp: That allows Kavanaugh to tell himself that he is the one preventing things from going completely off the rails. even as he signs onto outcomes that cripple agencies.

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Kavanaugh sees himself as the tribune for:

• Hyper‑empowered presidency;

• Shrunk and disciplined administrative state;

• Expanded corporate and property rights;

• Narrowed civil‑rights and regulatory enforcement;

• Occasional high‑profile nods to voting rights or institutional legitimacy when the Court is staring into the abyss.

Trump is simply the first president in decades willing to drive that project at full throttle. Kavanaugh thinks he is there to keep the car nominally on the road: preserving what he sees as a principled, technocratic conservative constitutionalism from being discredited by Trump’s ugliness—while signing onto almost every structural decision that makes Trump harder to constrain.

And Gorsuch? My guess: He sees the administrative state as original sin, a mistake—legally, morally, and economically. He believes the Court has both the duty and the opportunity to dismantle it: cf. Chevron deference, non‑delegation, “major questions,” and standing. Broad delegations are not practical necessities but constitutional evasions. The dense web of environmental, labor, and financial regulation is not an evolved response to market failure but a slow coup against the separation of powers.

He likes people he imagines as standing alone before the state: an individual believer facing a bureaucracy; a defendant facing a prosecutor; a tribe facing the federal government. They are not the diffuse beneficiaries of environmental rules, workplace protections, or civil‑rights regulations. Those he tends to treat as abstractions marshaled by “lawyers and activists” who want to get in the way of the elegant, simple constitutional order. Protect concrete, individualized rights; strip away the elaborate procedural machinery that lets groups and institutions gum up government action. In practice, it means he is far more sympathetic to a sole proprietor challenging OSHA than to the millions of workers OSHA protects.

I do not think Gorsuch experiences himself as Trump’s enabler. He experiences Trump as an inconvenient plaintiff—a deeply flawed avatar through whom these structural questions are arising. He is a structural revolutionary first; Trump is simply the chaos‑monkey president providing him with opportunities.

From the outside, however, the effect is hard to distinguish from straightforward class and partisan politics:

• Business and the wealthy get a Court ready to gut regulation on textualist and historical grounds.

• Presidents of his faction get a Court ready to bless unilateral action, especially when framed as “emergency” or “foreign affairs.”

• Workers, consumers, and marginalized groups get eloquent dissents from the liberals and occasional libertarian crumbs, but structurally less protection.

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Thus Gorsuch is not the Court’s eccentric libertarian uncle; he is its most coherent revolutionary. The others improvise. He has a plan.

So hold on to this:

• the neofascist two—Alito and Thomas

• the structural Lochner counterrevolutionary: Gorsuch

• the “responsible Republican” poseur: Kavanaugh

• the decisive vote: Barrett, with her worries that Trumpian overreach will cripple her Scalia-student legal transformation project.

• Roberts as partisan Republican soldier along for the ride—unwilling to vote with Democrats when there are no Republicans to provide cover (except when the bright line was crossed that is wholly pretextual Trumpist impoundments).

• Three actual justices with judicial temperament, rather than partisan-ideological projects: Justice Sotomayor, Justice Kagan, and Justice Jackson.

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##neofascism
##understanding-the-state-of-the-corrupt-supreme-court-today
#supreme-court
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Martin Mycielski, back in 2017, gave us some important advice about how we should be thinking and behaving today:

Martin Mycielski: The Authoritarian Régime Survival Guide: ‘1. They will come to power with a campaign based on fear, scaremongering and distorting the truth. Nevertheless, their victory will be achieved through a democratic electoral process. But beware, as this will be their argument every time you question the legitimacy of their actions. They will claim a mandate from the People to change the system. Remember – gaining power through a democratic system does not give them permission to cross legal boundaries and undermine said democracy.

2. They will divide and rule…. Don’t let them divide you – remember you’re one People, one Nation, with one common good. 3. They will subjugate state media…. Fight for every media outlet, every journalist…. There’s no hope for freedom where there is no free press. 4. They will create chaos…. See through the chaos, the fake danger, expose it…. 5. They will distort the truth, deny facts and blatantly lie…. Always think critically, fact-check and point out the truth, expose ignorance with facts. 6. They will incite and then leak fake, superficial “scandals”…. See through superficial topics… and focus on what they are actually doing.

7. They will propose shocking laws to provoke your outrage… [then] seemingly back off…. In the meantime they will push through less “flashy” legislation…. Focus your fight on what really matters. 8. When invading your liberal sensibilities they will focus on what hurts the most…. Women and minorities have to be ready to fight the hardest… and you must fight together with them. 9. They will try to take control of the judiciary…. Preserve the independence of your courts at all cost…. 10. They will try to limit freedom of assembly…. Oppose any legislation attempting to interfere with freedom of assembly….

11. They will distort the language, coin new terms and labels, repeat shocking phrases until you accept them as normal and subconsciously associate them with whom they like…. Fight changes in language in the public sphere, remind and preserve the true meaning of words. 12. They will take over your national symbols…. Show your national symbols with pride, let them give you strength, not associate you with the tyranny they brought onto your country. 13. They will try to rewrite history to suit their needs and use the education system to support their agenda…. Guard the education of your children, teach them critical thinking…. 14. They will alienate foreign allies and partners, convincing you don’t need them…. Don’t let them build walls promising you security instead of bridges giving you prosperity. 15. They will eventually manipulate the electoral system…. Oppose any changes to electoral law….

And above all, be strong, fight, endure, and remember you’re on the good side of history. EVERY authoritarian, totalitarian and fascist regime in history eventually failed, thanks to the PEOPLE.

– With love, your Eastern European friends… <https://verfassungsblog.de/the-authoritarian-regime-survival-guide/>

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With respect to (1), (3), (5), (6), (11), and (13), you should—every day—be grounding your mind in reality by surfing over to Daniel Dale <https://www.cnn.com/profiles/daniel-dale> at CNN—his “Fact Check” series. And you should be boosting and reposting it and its conclusions, spreading it as far as possible through your own network.

Today, you should be boosting:

Daniel Dale: Fact check: 33 times Zelensky thanked Americans and US leaders: ‘During a remarkably combative Oval Office meeting on Friday, both President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he was insufficiently thankful. “You have to be thankful. You don’t have the cards,” Trump said, adding a bit later, “You gotta be more thankful.”… It’s worth noting that Zelensky has thanked the United States on numerous occasions since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022 – expressing gratitude to Trump and President Joe Biden, to members of Congress from both parties, to US defense companies and their employees, and to the American people. After Zelensky left the White House on Friday, he wrote on X: “Thank you America, thank you for your support, thank you for this visit. Thank you @POTUS, Congress, and the American people. Ukraine needs just and lasting peace, and we are working exactly for that.” Here are 33 previous examples of Zelensky thanking or expressing gratitude toward the United States, its officials or its people for their support. This is not a comprehensive list. Notably, we did not review Zelensky’s many domestic remarks in Ukrainian… January 21, 2022, on X: “Thank you @POTUS for the unprecedented (American) diplomatic and military assistance for (Ukraine)”… <https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/28/politics/volodymyr-zelensky-thankful-us-fact-check/index.html>

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References:

• Dale, Daniel. n.d. "Daniel Dale." CNN. <https://www.cnn.com/profiles/daniel-dale>.

• Dale, Daniel. 2025. "Fact Check: 33 Times Zelensky Thanked Americans and US Leaders." CNN. February 28. <https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/28/politics/volodymyr-zelensky-thankful-us-fact-check/index.html>.

• Glasius, Marlies. 2018. "What Authoritarianism Is … and Is Not: A Practice Perspective." International Affairs 94 (3): 515–33. <https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiy060>.

• Mycielski, Martin. 2018. “The Authoritarian Régime Survival Guide”. Verfassungsblog. March 26. <https://verfassungsblog.de/the-authoritarian-regime-survival-guide/>.

• Siegle, Joseph. 2024. Winning the Battle of Ideas: Exposing Global Authoritarian Narratives and Revitalizing Democratic Principles. Washington, DC: National Endowment for Democracy. <https://www.ned.org/winning-the-battle-of-ideas-exposing-global-authoritarian-narratives-and-revitalizing-democratic-principles/>.

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CROSSPOST: JOSH MARSHALL: Don’t Be Fooled By the Corrupt Court’s Tariff Decision

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The depth of the Supreme Court’s corruption has forced us to find new language to describe its actions. Today’s decision, undoing Trump’s massive array of tariffs that upended the global financial system, is a case in point.

We say the Court “struck down” these tariffs. But that wording is inadequate and misleading. These tariffs were always transparently illegal. Saying the actions were “struck down” suggests at least a notional logic which the Court disagreed with, or perhaps one form of standing practice and constitutional understanding away from which the Court decided to chart another course. Neither is remotely the case. There’s no ambiguity in the law in question. Trump assumed a unilateral power to “find” a national emergency and then used this (transparently fraudulent) national emergency to exercise powers the law in question doesn’t even delegate. It is, among other things, an example of the central tenet of current conservative jurisprudence: to determine what law or constitution would require if words had no meaning. We could go into the further digression over whether Congress could “delegate” such powers, given the Constitution’s clarity on congressional authority over tariffs or whether any purported ambiguity in the law invokes yet another of the corrupt Court’s made-up doctrines. But doing so would be nothing more than ceding to the Court an authority to compel us to expend time exploring the vaporous logical intricacies of its bullshit doctrines.

It’s tempting to see this decision as some big win. And it is a win to the extent that it’s better that a rogue president be barred from illegal acts than permitted to continue them. But it’s a mistake to imagine that the Court is any less corrupt on the evidence of this decision.

This is a case where the legal merits of the President’s action were just too transparently bogus even for this Court to manage and — critically — his actions and the theories undergirding his claims to the power were, for the Corrupt majority, inconvenient. The architect of the current Court — the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo — was behind the litigation that undid the tariffs. That tells you all you need to know. In this case Trump’s claim to power was neither in the interests of the Republican Party — the Court’s chief jurisprudential interest — nor any of their anti-constitutional doctrines. So of course they tossed it out. This may sound ungenerous. It’s simple reality.

Indeed, today’s decision is actually an indictment of the Court. These tariffs have been in effect for almost a year. They have upended whole sectors of the U.S. and global economies. The fact that a president can illegally exercise such powers for so long and with such great consequences for almost a year means we’re not living in a functional constitutional system. If the Constitution allows untrammeled and dictatorial powers for almost one year, massive dictator mulligans, then there is no Constitution.

Part of the delay of this ruling is the fact that most major corporations were afraid to bring litigation because they didn’t want to go to war with the president. But that’s also an indictment of the Supreme Court’s corruption. Because they made clear early on that there was little, if any, limit they would impose on Trump’s criminality or use of government power to impose retribution on constitutionally protected speech or litigation. So that’s on the Court too. But it’s only part of the equation. The Court also allowed the tariffs to remain in place while the government appealed the appellate decision striking down the tariffs back in August. Let me repeat that: back in August, almost six months ago.

In other words, most of the time in which these illegal tariffs were in effect was because of that needless stay. The logic of the stay was that deference to President’s claim of illegal powers was more important than the harm created by hundreds of billions in unconstitutional taxes being imposed on American citizens. It’s a good example of what law professor Leah Litman — one of the most important voices on the Court’s corruption — earlier this morning called the Court’s corruption via “passivity,” empowering anti-constitutional actions through deciding not to act at all or encouraging endless delays it could easily put a stop to in the interests of the constitutional order.

The Court is corrupt. There’s no future for the America republic without thoroughly reforming it of its current corruption. Today’s decision is simply one of those cases where the Constitution happens to coincide with the Court’s partial and illegitimate self-interest.

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The most important things to hold on to, as this opinion for Learning Resources vs. Trump <https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1287_4gcj.pdf> floats into the discourse.

1. People are wasting their time on the dissents—Kavanaugh, Alito, Thomas.

2. There is only one legal doctrine in the dissents. That doctrine is this: The dissents say: “It’s OK if you are a Republican president”, and only that. There are only three mental commitments in their dissents: to (a) fascism, (b), partisan Republicanism, and (c) resentment, that their faction does not have untrammeled charge of everything. Does anyone doubt that all three of these “judges” would have smacked down a Democratic president who attempted a similar magnitude power grab by the first weekend? Nobody does. Time spent analyzing the dissents is time wasted once you have noted them as enunciations of ““it’s OK if you are a Republican president” driven by commitments to fascism, partisanship, and resentment.

3. The corrupt and craven middle of the Supreme Court was too corrupt and craven to do the right thing a year ago—that’s the big bottom line with respect to Roberts, Barrett, and Gorsuch—. Back then they could see that justice and equity would lead to this day, for both meant that a pro-Trump opinion simply would not write, save as a naked denial that there is such a thing as the rule-of-law. Perhaps they think now is the opportunity to strike a blow for the principle of rule-of-law that their previous actions have placed on life support. Perhaps they are, well, craven—scared in a way that they have not been in the past, and that the majorities in Bush v. Gore and in NFIB v. Sibelius were not. I cannot tell

4. But it is a secondary issue whether they were more craven then or are more craven now.

5. The corrupt and craven middle of the court gave Trump a full year to create facts on the ground. That is the primary thing to note about Roberts, Barrett, and Gorsuch. They gave Trump a full year for cementing this principle: any productive business value chain or other societal actor that incurs the wrath of a Republican American president for any reason, does so at the grave risk of its immediate destruction as a surplus-generating, and perhaps as a sustainable organization.

6. Tim Cook of Apple does not bend the knee to Trump at very opportunity for no reason, after all.

7. Roberts, Barrett, and Gorsuch—along with Kavanaugh, Alito, and Thomas—have given the plainest possible demonstration that nobody’s property rights have force in the face of any fake declaration of “emergency” by any Republican American president. Not in any time frame of less than a year. It is Cook’s knowledge that that holds for the shareholders for whom he is a fiduciary that drives his actions.

8. The corrupt and craven court majority’s actions have consequences: their destructive demonstration will ramify for decades, if not centuries.

9. Actual effects of decision? Yale Budget Lab: effective tariff rate is still ~9% pre‑substitution (highest since the 1940s), and long‑run GDP is ~0.1% smaller, versus ~0.3% hit had IEEPA been upheld. <http://budgetlab.yale.edu>.

10. Emergency statutes demystified: “emergency” + “unreviewable” + “tariff” is branded structurally dangerous: Roberts’s description of a President who can declare an emergency, claim courts can’t second‑guess it, and then rewrite the tariff code indefinitely is deliberately designed to sound like the usurpation it is—and that Roberts knew it was a year ago, but, as I said, he is corrupt and craven.

11. A possible straw in the wind: Gorsuch’s cutting back the Major Questions Doctrine as just the old clear‑statement rule rebadged—that the fake claim it was more was just a one-off to eliminate Chevron Deference, which fake claim will now be dropped. : His concurrence is a historical essay: he argues there has always been a rule that extraordinary delegated powers require clear statements, and MQD is just that tradition applied to Congress–Executive delegations.

12. A possible straw in the wind: Thomas’s privilege vs right move: Thomas contends that trading with foreigners is a privilege, something granted to us by our autocratic lord and master in the White House, not any sort of vested property right; conditioning that privilege on duties doesn’t trigger due‑process/legality concerns in the way domestic criminal or tax law does.

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Things open in my browser about Donald Trump’s long-time ex-best friend, Jeffrey Epstein:

Start by anchoring with:

Katie Martin: <https://bsky.app/profile/katie0martin.ft.com/post/3mdxhctc7vl23>: ‘exactly. this is not difficult <as.ft.com/r/58ed1b23-d...>:

Edward Luce: THe Epstein Rot Goes Deep <https://www.ft.com/content/3f8277cd-2b47-49ff-b264-fd7ce89c924f>: ‘The idea that anyone did not know about Epstein’s conviction as a sex abuser is absurd…. Invited in 2010 to an Epstein dinner with Woody Allen and then Prince Andrew in New York, the magazine editor, Tina Brown, replied: “What the fuck is this . . .? The paedophile’s ball?” Brown’s reaction should have been everyone’s. So should that of Melinda Gates… who stepped into Epstein’s home once and immediately regretted it. Alas… more common, to anyone with the stomach to sample this trove, is that of Sarah Ferguson, “I have never been more touched by a friends [sic] kindness …”, she wrote to Epstein. Epstein’s most stupendous feat was to become a powerful New York insider after being registered as a sex offender. In 2012, four years after his conviction, Elon Musk asked Epstein for an invitation to the “wildest party on your island”. In 2013, Richard Branson requested Epstein to “bring your harem” the next time they met. A striking quality of these exchanges is that Epstein lets his correspondents state plainly what he keeps elliptical—the tone of one who deals in favours…

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That is what you need to hold on to. Do not let yourself be pulled away from that reality. Not by anyone. Not for a second.

And I also find:

Izabella Kaminska: <https://x.com/izakaminska/status/2018648268465475762/>: ‘Looks like Peter Mandelson set himself up with a $1m annual retainer from Deutsche Bank to be their man giving them access to "governments, families and corporations" on an international basis. But, also, he then reported the relationship to Epstein, who replied "good first step".
Mandelson, seemingly wanted more positive validation and replied "That all you can say?!!" "Good petey, well done petey"…

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And:

Moira Donegan: <https://bsky.app/profile/moiradonegan.bsky.social/post/3me34wg6uws2q>: ‘Really nuts how many men were like “Me Too went too far, and I need to email Jeffrey Epstein about it”…

And:

Chris Hayes: <https://bsky.app/profile/chrislhayes.bsky.social/post/3mdyswxuz4s2d>: ‘My favorite genre of Epstein emails are powerful people emailing WITH JEFFREY EPSTEIN about how MeToo has gone too far and the woke mob must be stopped…

And:

Jamelle Bouie: <https://bsky.app/profile/jamellebouie.net/post/3mdxzst2ad22g>: ‘holy shit: Jerad Walker‬: “In an interview with NPR, Melinda French Gates confirmed that she ended her marriage with Bill Gates because of allegations contained in the Epstein files…

And:

Jeet Heer: <https://x.com/HeerJeet/status/2018455887514681349>: ‘This 2016 exchange between Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Thiel is so essential, really gets to the heart of Epstein’s project. Epstein: brexit, just the beginning. Thiel: Of what? Epstein: return to tribalism, counter to globalization. Amazing new alliances. You and I both agreed zero interest rates were too high, and as i said in your office. finding things on their way to collapse , was much easier than finding the next bargain. What Epstein wrote to Thiel in 2016 lines up with what he wrote to his business partner Ehud Barak in 2014: “with civil unrest exploding in ukraine syria, somolia [sic], libya, and the desperation of those in power, isn’t this perfect for you.” In other words, social collapse is a business opportunity. Epstein was a fixer, someone who made money connecting different parts of the elite together. In this case, he was very interested in hooking up Thiel and Barak in project of selling new surveillance tech to autocrat regimes. For this business project, breakdown of global order was good…

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Plus:

Elizabeth Lopatto: How the men in the Epstein files defeated #MeToo <https://www.theverge.com/tech/874721/epstein-thiel-musk-trump-metoo>: ‘The emails show the “anti-woke” crusaders are afraid of accountability: e might be dead, but it sure seems like Jeffrey Epstein won. Sure, Epstein was arrested on charges of sex trafficking minors. Sure, he died in jail. (I am not going to wade into the debate about how.) But he subscribed to a racist, misogynist ideology that meant rich white men like him could do whatever they liked. And it seems he took measures to spread it. The latest tranche of Epstein documents made it obvious. Consider all the “contrarians” and “anti-woke” warriors who show up…

Bringing up the caboose is:

Asher Boiskin & Jerry Gao: Yale Professor Wrote to Epstein About Women, Including Undergraduate <https://yaledailynews.com/articles/yale-professor-wrote-to-epstein-about-women-including-undergraduate>: ‘ <>: ‘Computer science professor David Gelernter exchanged emails with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein between 2009 and 2015. In one message, Gelernter referred to a Yale student as a “v small goodlooking blonde.”… Gelernter also scheduled visits with Epstein in New York City and discussed the scent of women in Paris…. In an October 2011 email to Epstein in which Gelernter appeared to discuss his software startup, he wrote: “I have a perfect editoress in mind: Yale sr, worked at Vogue last summer, runs her own campus mag, art major, completely connected, v small goodlooking blonde.” It was not clear what role Gelernter was envisioning for the student.

Yes, it was clear what role Gelernter was envisioning: in this context “small” would mean “looks younger than her age”; “v small” means “looks much younger than her age”.

Continuing:

Leo Nyberg: Gelernter tells dean he stands by praising student’s looks to Epstein <https://yaledailynews.com/articles/gelernter-tells-dean-he-stands-by-praising-student-s-looks-to-epstein>: ‘Asked whether he regretted any part of his association with Epstein… Gelernter wrote in a separate email to the News on Wednesday morning…. In the Wednesday afternoon email to Jeffrey Brock ’92… Gelernter [wrote]…. “I was recommending her for a job I thought she’d like. When you do that--when you actually care about a rec letter--you keep the potential boss’s habits in mind,” Gelernter wrote in the email to his colleagues, seemingly referring to Epstein. “This one was obsessed with girls (like every other unmarried billionaire in Manhattan; in fact, like every other heterosex male), and if I hadn’t said what I did in that letter ten-odd years ago, he would certainly have called me & asked for a lot more aesthetic detail. (This is how men behave.)… I’m very glad I wrote the note.”… Gelernter previously told CT Insider he did not know Epstein was a sex offender…

“v small goodlooking blonde.” Gelernter would not have written that had he not known that Epstein had a serious kink for underage girls. Capisce?

I am, genuinely, genuinely, genuinely, flummoxed.

In my experience, heterosex mails writing and reading professional letters of recommendation do not act like David Gelernter says we do. The closest thing I have ever, ever, ever seen come across my screen to what Gelernter insists he would have been “called… & asked for a lot more aesthetic detail” if he had not been forward in providing it is Yale Professor Jed Rubinfeld’s warning[?] a student that now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh “hires women with a certain look”—and Rubinfeld has a colorable claim that he was describing the world we live in as it is rather than endorsing this as a way he likes the world to be.

Yes: I know that there are men who can no more keep from constantly chasing inappropriately much younger tail than I can consistently maintain myself at a weight less than 240 pounds. But we regard them as having a problem.

And, in most cases, in my experience at least, they regard themselves as having a problem too. They recognize that they bounce between being sinister and pathetic, that neither is a good look, and that they ought to take steps to at the very least not lean into this propensity of theirs

After all, as Performative Bafflement correctly notes, the background probabilities are such that “75%… of male cheaters are sad opportunists who nuke their marriages over a single body added to their count…” <https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/cheating-much-more-than-you-wanted>. To have a good and happy life what we all need more than anything else is what J.R.R. Tolkien called our “partner in shipwreck”. Obnoxiously chasing inappropriately younger tail is perhaps the single best way to keep from finding such a partner, or to lose the one you have.

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Reässessing the “West” from John Winthrop to Marco Rubio…

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I see in my feed this AM that Marco Rubio is a moron. Excellent! I am always for a good Trump grifter smackdown.

The smartest and most incisive things I skimmed were by Dan Drezner: <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/five-thoughts-about-marco-rubios> <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/frank-talk-and-limited-action>.

But the most interesting, however, was by the extremely sharp Arthur Goldhammer:

Arthur Goldhammer: <https://arthurgoldhammer356783.substack.com/p/inventing-tradition>: ‘[Rubio’s] was an artful portrait, slyly conceived to obscure crucial features…. The history… would have taken the story too far from the Plato-to-NATO fairy tale that our national mythmaker hoped to fob off…. There once was a Western alliance. Its roots can be traced not to Solon’s or Socrates’ Greece or the garden of Gethsemane but to the aftermath of World War II. An exsanguinated Europe needed the aid of the United States…. The triumphantly ascendant United States needed Europe as a market for its wares and a bulwark against its erstwhile Soviet ally…. A similar confluence of interests could plausibly be invoked to underwrite Rubio’s apparent desire to perpetuate the postwar alliance under somewhat altered terms. His mythification of the past is unlikely to result in a new understanding, however. He might begin by asking himself whether the people he ought to be consulting about Europe’s future are Fico and Orban or Merz and Macron, Meloni and Starmer. In the MAGA… such questions cannot be asked…. Trump’s America swaggers abroad demanding fealty from its former allies, despite having proven itself to be completely untrustworthy and unreliable. To escape from this abyss will require more art than Secretary Rubio or his master is capable of…

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So I find I have four points to make, dissenting in part and concurring in part:

First, I have a bone to pick with Arthur, with respect to “markets for its wares”. This phrase here is a badly thought a contemporary intellectual echo of a not-very-good theory of Belle Époque imperialism, which was a horse saddled by John A. Hobson, promoted by Rosa Luxemburg, and then ridden to exhaustion and collapse by Vladimir Lenin. This horses was then revved by not very careful and ideology-driven American new leftist historians feeling their oats, and desperate to somehow argue that evil Amerikkkan capitalism was responsible for staging the Cold War in order to turn western Europe into its-neocolony. (And I do hear a further echo of this in the sparse and spare description of Stalin’s Soviet Union merely as America’s “erstwhile… ally”, rather than as the aggressive super-genocidal totalitarian dictatorship ruled by paranoid psychopathic madman that it was.)

This line of argument i s largely false. Keynesian arguments that Marshall Plan and other aid would redound to America’s prosperity were made to try to make the political coalition against an isolationist post-WWII American policy viable. But they were a tertiary add-on to further justify a policy path overwhelmingly chosen for other reasons, not something to be listed first among the reasons that the post-WWII U.S. “needed” western Europe.

That makes me reach, not for any metaphorical revolver—well, let’s put it this way: when I was learning to drive, we had a Chevy Impala with a faulty electrical system that would deliver a nine-volt shock every time I used the horn; I used not to overuse the horn, a valuable thing to have learned.

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Second, I do wish Rubio knew enough American history to understand that our American Errand Unto the Wilderness was not undertaken not because we here in the New World want to share “the deepest bonds that nations can share” with the Old World.

It was, rather, undertaken because we wanted to break them.

I do not think Rubio has ever bothered to read my ancestor John Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity” sermon describing how he hoped things would be different in Massachusetts: that it would be a City upon a Hill:

John Winthrop (1630): A Model of Christian Charity <https://minio.la.utexas.edu/webeditor-files/coretexts/pdf/163020model20of20christian20charity.pdf>: ‘The work we have in hand… is by a mutual consent, through a speciall overvaluing providence and a more than an ordinary approbation of the Churches of Christ, to seek out a place of cohabitation and consortship under a due form of government both civil and ecclesiastical….

The end is to improve our lives to do more service to the Lord; the comfort and encrease of the body of Christ, whereof we are members; that ourselves and posterity may be the better preserved from the common corruptions of this evil world, to serve the Lord and work out our salvation under the power and purity of his holy ordinances…. The work and end we aim at… are extraordinary…. Whatsoever we did, or ought to have done, when we lived in England, the same must we do, and more allso, where we go….

We must love brotherly without dissimulation, we must love one another with a pure heart fervently. We must bear one another’s burthens. We must not look only on our own things, but allso on the things of our brethren. Neither must we think that the Lord will bearewith such failings at our hands as he doth from those among whom we have lived….

When God gives a special commission he looks to have it strictly observed in every article…. Thus stands the cause between God and us. We are entered into [a] covenant with Him for this worke. We have taken out a commission…. We have hereupon besought Him of favour and blessing. Now if the Lord shall please to hear us, and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath he ratified this covenant and sealed our commission, and will expect a strict performance…. If we shall… fall to… prosecute our carnal intentions… the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us; be revenged of such a [sinful] people and make us know the price of the breach of such a covenant.

Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck… is to followe the counsellof Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God…. [Then] the Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as his own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our wayes. So that wee shall see much more of his wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly wee have been acquainted with…. He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, "the Lord make it like that of New England." For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us…

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And consider:

Noble_Devil_Boruta (2019): <https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/hkfbsj/what_did_john_winthrops_city_on_a_hill_phrase/>: ‘The expression… inspired by… the Parable of Salt and Light (Matthew 5:14-16), that… John Winthrop… [knew] as… “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works…”

But the idea of the city or a kingdom on top of the hill that would welcome all the worthy people is far older…. Isaiah (Is 2:2)…. “In the last days… the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it…”.

Winthrop speaks clearly, that “So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world… [by doing so] we shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses…”…

The term… was used by at least one American president before Reagan…. Kennedy in 1961 precisely in the context… [of] Winthrop…. “‘We must always consider', [Winthrop] said, 'that we shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us'. Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us—and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state and local, must be as a city upon a hill - constructed and inhabited by men aware of their great trust and their great responsibilities…”

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This hope and dream of John Winthrop indeed came true to an astonishing and unlikely degree—although in a way and in a form that would certainly horrify him in many of its particulars—cf. <http://onlyfans.com>, for example. America, starting in 1776, did indeed find a way while Europe was losing it. And by the end of 1940 continental Europe, at least, had decisively lost its way:

But from 1942 to 1945 and after we came, highly effectively, to the rescue. Yes, Winston Churchill and his Britons (and Charles de Gaulle and his Free French) can grumble that we arrived very late to the picnic that was World War II, but when we did arrive we brought a hell of a lot of refreshments. And we kept bringing additional tranches—financially, politically, ideologically—for decades after.

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Third, Arthur Goldhammer correctly notes that the “NATO” part of the Plato-to-NATO arc was made in post-WWII Washington DC, and that the Plato-to-NATO arc itself was largely invented out of whole cloth by tame propagandists for the good cause of containing Stalin’s Soviet Union who, in the words of my old teacher Judith Shklar:

Judith Shklar: A Life of Learning <https://www.acls.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Haskins_1989_JudithNShklar.pdf>: ‘I knew what had happened in Europe between 1940 and 1945…. Most people at Harvard also were aware of the physical, political, and moral calamity…. A look at the famous "Redbook"… is very revealing. Its authors were determined to immunize the young against fascism and its temptations so that "it" would never happen again. There was to be a reinforcement of The Western Tradition… to show up fascism as an aberration, never to be repeated. I would guess that in the pre-war Depression years some of the young men who devised this pedagogic ideology may have been tempted by attitudes that eventually coalesced into fascism, and now recoiled at what they knew it had wrought. They wanted a different past, a "good" West, a "real" West, not the actual one that had marched into the First World War and onward. They wanted a past fit for a better denouement. I found most of this unconvincing…

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But this was in a good cause.

Picking out heroes from the past whom you admire, retrospectively adopting them as your ancestors, and then trying hard to live up to their virtues is a very human practice, and a virtue-enhancing one, even though it is not a rational one. One of the best and weirdest novels I have read this past decade—Graydon Saunders’s The March North—has a very nice putting of this. The first-person protagonist is dismissing his troops—a bunch of militia who have just been to a hell from which some of them have come back:

Graydon Saunders: The March North <https://books.apple.com/book/id1003510474>: ‘“If you want to go forward with the [professional army that is the] Line [of the Commonweal], great. The Line’s going to need you. If you figure it’s time for another job, you did this job better than anybody had a right to expect.”

This next bit is a Sergeant-Major thing, but I’ll have to do.

“Sometimes, when it gets bad, you’ll hear the Part-Captain or the Sergeant-Major say that it’s time to fight so we do not shame the Foremost.”

Who didn’t have anything to do with the Line of the Commonweal, and, if they still exist, might not know we do, but never mind. Hardly anybody’s standing in the Line for the sake of facts.

“It got more than that bad.” Much more.

“In, or out, or just don’t know, you’ve all served the Line so the Foremost would call any of you comrades, and be proud. Remember that”…

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Mythmaking in a good cause is a different human social practice than history, but it is a useful (and valid?) social practice. Historians do the second. Politicians are supposed to balance off the two. Good ones succeed. But mythmaking in a fascist cause? No thanks. No thanks indeed. And shame on those who put and keep that on the menu.

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Fourth, as I said, Arthur Goldhammer correctly notes that the “NATO” part of the Plato-to-NATO arc was made in post-WWII Washington DC. But Europe—especially Britain—was not without agency here. Step back, and it is valid historically to interpret U.S. foreign policy from 1939 to 1953 as largely made in the Palace of Westminster over the previous near-century, and the actual policy choices made in Washington DC then as the turning-over by the British Empire of the hole cards that it had dealt itself from the bottom of the deck, revealing that it had hidden wired aces and so would decisively win the poker game of 1900s great power politics. What were those hidden wired aces? That somehow, between 1861 and 1939, Britain had effectively reäbsorbed the United States into the British Empire as a late-mobilizing but by far the most powerful part, in the sense that it could draw on all of its resources when the chips were truly down.

This did not happen purely by accident.

I have not, however, seen the history well-told. Back in 1861 the Jacksonian American élite loathed Britain—who, after all, had Andrew Jackson won his great victory over?—and at the mass level the political juice was and long would remain generated by Irish-Americans memories of the genocidal British Empire of the Potato Famine. (Ask yourself where the FBI deployed its counterterrorism resources in the 1980s, and realize that it was in South Boston against the funding channels for the Irish Republican Army.) On the other side, the realpolitikers in Westminster saw dividing the U.S. into two or more as a great source of potential benefit; the Tory landlord-and-professions élite saw the hierarchy-loving plantation slave-owning wannabe gentry of the American South as much more their kinds of people than the commercial-industrial Yankees of the American North, and only the Liberal Party’s commitment to antislavery keeping Britain from intervening on the side of the South in the Civil War to support the noble principle of Free Trade.

Yet eighty years later it had all profoundly shifted. Why? How?

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References:

• Drezner, Daniel W. 2026. “Five Thoughts about Marco Rubio’s Foreign Policy Speech.” Drezner’s World. February 15. <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/five-thoughts-about-marco-rubios>.

• Drezner, Daniel W. 2026. “Frank Talk and Limited Action.” Drezner’s World. February 16. <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/frank-talk-and-limited-action>.

• Goldhammer, Arthur. 2026. “Inventing Tradition.” The Sense of an Ending. February 16. <https://arthurgoldhammer356783.substack.com/p/inventing-tradition>.

• Noble_Devil_Boruta. 2019. “What Did John Winthrop’s ‘City on a Hill’ Phrase Originally Mean?” Reddit. <https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/hkfbsj/what_did_john_winthrops_city_on_a_hill_phrase/>.

• OnlyFans. 2026. Accessed February 16. <http://onlyfans.com>.

• Saunders, Graydon. 2014. The March North. <https://books.apple.com/book/id1003510474>.

• Shklar, Judith N. 1989. A Life of Learning. Charles Homer Haskins Lecture. New York: American Council of Learned Societies. <https://www.acls.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Haskins_1989_JudithNShklar.pdf>.

• Winthrop, John. 1630. “A Model of Christian Charity.” <https://minio.la.utexas.edu/webeditor-files/coretexts/pdf/163020model20of20christian20charity.pdf>.

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<https://paulkrugman.substack.com/cp/187458196>

Paul Krugman

Seduced by the Louis XIV Treatment

Charts and numbers are my comfort zone, and even my political writing is usually analytical in style. But today I’ll take a break and write something looser and more self-indulgent: Some meditations inspired by JD Vance’s visit to the Olympics in Milan…

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2 months ago · 2236 likes · 464 comments · Paul Krugman

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The Federalist Society made a fateful strategic choice a generation ago: it wanted appellate judges who distrusted judging itself—who saw reasoned, good-faith application of law to facts not as the core of the judicial craft, but as an obstacle to be smashed in service of a larger ideological project. Now a great many of its rank-and-file members are flummoxed to discover that the judges they elevated, and the academics who flattered them, are locked in a grim competition to be as lawless and as indifferent to justice as possible, on the theory that if they push far enough, five corrupt Supreme Court justices will eventually come along for the ride. We saw the template in Bush v. Gore. Steve Vladeck details just one of the many fresh hells that this template has now produced:

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<https://www.stevevladeck.com/cp/187199535>

One First

208. The Fifth Circuit Jumps the Immigration Detention Shark

I’ve written before about the deeply contested (and contestable) reinterpretation of federal immigration law that the Trump administration adopted last summer, under which any non-citizen who was never lawfully admitted to the United States is subject not just to arrest, but to mandatory detention with no opportunity for release on bond for the duration…

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2 months ago · 91 likes · 9 comments · Steve Vladeck

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<https://snyder.substack.com/cp/186526917>

Thinking about...

Ethnic Cleansing in Ohio?

In the schools and churches of Springfield, Ohio, people are making hasty preparations for a “large deportation” promised by the president. To all appearances, and according to local sources, the city is two or three days away from a federal ethnic cleansing, grounded in a hate campaign organized by the vice-president and American Nazis. The destined v…

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3 months ago · 1425 likes · 71 comments · Timothy Snyder

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