I don’t know what to think about the Semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps it’s just me; I find it hard right now to celebrate this country that I love. Too much is going wrong in our government, economy, society and culture. On top of it all there is Trump, who keeps debasing everything with his name, guise and toxic spirit. Tomorrow is Trump’s White House cage fight extravaganza, which somehow rolls the President’s 80th birthday and signature grift into our national anniversary events. That is only the beginning. It is encouraging that Trump’s name has been removed from the Kennedy Center; that’s one down. Still, we’re losing ground. The coming month(s) will be rough.

I vividly remember the Bicentennial back in 1976, and even though it fell at a time of national troubles - the oil shock, the end of the Vietnam War, the Watergate Scandal and Richard Nixon’s resignation - it carried a sense of national renewal, of finding strength in our roots and moving forward on a healthy and more human basis toward a positive future. I love travel literature, and to me, two wonderful travel books captured the Bicentennial zeitgeist: Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins (1979) and Blue Highways by William Least-Heat Moon (1982). Blue Highways, in particular, remains a true classic of the genre.

50 years ago, back in 1976, there were complaints that America’s birthday celebration was overly commercialized. In retrospect, I’ve just gotta laugh at how innocent we were. It was really so wholesome, so rosy-cheeked and wide-eyed. If we had only known …

It is not easy to find such a sense of renewal and optimism in 2026. I still look for books, especially travel books, to capture the moment and help me focus my thinking. This time, I had to look backward well beyond the Bicentennial to find what I was looking for: The American Guides Series. As Trump does his best to distort our history, degrade our memorials, commercialize our natural treasures and cheapen our national life in countless ways, The American Guides are a monument from the 1930s and 1940s that he cannot touch, a kind of light to shine through our present disillusionment.

I first encountered The American Guides as a graduate student in Washington, DC, in the early 1980s. Roaming used bookstores (as I still love to do), I picked up a copy of Washington, D.C.: A Guide to the Nation’s Capital. Published in 1942, it was a minor revision of the second volume in the Guides Series - Washington: City and Capital, which appeared in 1937. It was already long out of date in some ways when I first cracked it open, but I was enchanted all the same. The book was exhaustive and detailed, like the famous Blue Guides in Europe, or even the old Baedekers. As in Baedeker, the pages were packed with all sorts of practical information - stores, post offices and their hours, bus routes, train timetables - along with a good deal of well considered commentary. Reading the book involved time-travel, not just sightseeing and practical advice. Still, four decades and more after publication, Washington, D.C.: A Guide to the Nation’s Capital was the best guide to Washington back then. It probably remains so today, almost 50 years after I encountered it, and almost 90 years after it first appeared.

Another volume in the Guide Series has captured my imagination since I retired from the Foreign Service and returned home in 2015 - Washington: A Guide to the Evergreen State. Published in 1941, it includes amazing descriptions of the major cities, towns and sights of Washington State along with numerous Tours, i.e., itineraries along roads that sometimes no longer exist. It fires lots of synapses in my memory and family history and conjures places, events, terms and customs that I half-way knew. The book is an illuminating and nostalgic guide to exploring my home state, whether from an armchair or behind the wheel.

I will have a lot to say about this book over the coming months (and maybe years). Let’s begin, though, with the thing about it that charms me the most: it’s proud embrace of the egalitarian spirit. Or, more properly, the worker’s spirit and elan.

It is worth noting that the authors of Washington: A Guide to the Evergreen State are anonymous. As with most of the books in The American Guide Series, the authors’ names were omitted and are in fact very hard to find - anywhere. Some famous authors contributed to other books in the Series, writers like John Steinbeck, Richard Wright and Saul Bellow. Their role was later uncovered and recognized. All were members of the Federal Writers Project, part of the Work Projects Administration (originally the Works Progress Administration) and FDR’s New Deal. But none of the writers who compiled the 687 pages of the Guide to the Evergreen State are recognized or even, to my knowledge, known. They are credited collectively, on the Guide’s title page: “Compiled by workers of the Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration in the State of Washington.” I like that phraseology: “workers of the Writers’ Program”. It speaks to me of the dignity of labor - all labor. (I plan to search the archives from the Guide project, stored in Tacoma at the Washington State Historical Society, for more about the authors. They were paid; there must at least be receipts, with names and possibly other clues.)

Curiously, the photographs in A Guide to the Evergreen State are duly credited, including to individual photographers. The Writers Program and the Federal Writers Project ran in parallel to the Dust Bowl-era Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration (FSA), which employed the photographers who produced what is sometimes called New Deal Photography. They created many of the most evocative and haunting images of America ever made; some of their works are famous and truly iconic. Among the FSA photographers were several big names, including Dorothea Lange, who worked in Washington State. It is odd to think that individual attribution was given to the relatively small group of photographers but not to the far more numerous writers; one has to wonder why. (The photographic archives of the Washington Guide project are also stored in Tacoma.)

The egalitarian spirit of Washington: A Guide is most evident in the 150 introductory pages, which review the history of the Evergreen State and key aspects of its economic, social, and cultural life. Perhaps the most characteristic chapter in the story is the one on “Industry, Commerce and Labor”, a total of 27 pages. First and foremost, seen from our present perspective, it is startling that “Labor” is included in this chapter, or in the introductory section at all. But it is very much included, eight lively pages about the struggles of working people to organize and advance their interests in the face of serious and sometimes deadly pushback from business interests, the conservative press, and local and state authorities. The text covers grassroots organizers, the Wobblies, strikes, riots, massacres, maneuvers between the AFL and CIO. It showcases workers’ demands, resolve and achievements. It is an uplifting, expansive story. Indeed, belief in worker rights bleeds over into the sections on “Industry” and “Commerce”, as well, and pops up intermittently throughout the entire book.

Thus, in important ways, A Guide to the Evergreen State shows how much ground we have lost on critical issues over the past eighty years. It demonstrates how we have grown desensitized to core economic dimensions of political and social life, how truncated and unbalanced our national discourse has become. It lays bare the cynicism which clouds and obstructs open and constructive discussion of contesting economic interests in today’s America and Washington State.

Missing from Washington: A Guide to the Evergreen State, however, is an appreciation of racial and other forms of discrimination and the struggle for civil rights and equality. There is a patronizing and sometimes disrespectful treatment of minorities and, to a degree, women. It is an everyman sensibility that marginalizes the marginalized. In that sense, the book is backward - blind or at least insensitive to principles and issues that are very important today. That, too, is illuminating.

In other words, reading the Guide to the Evergreen State is a good way to understand what we have lost and what we have gained - in Washington and America - over the course of my lifetime. It gives cause for hope and for faith in the possibility of renewal. In the depths of the Great Depression, our system changed and centered the perspectives and interests of working people - or at least came close. It brought them out of the shadows, even while others remained in darkness. If we did it then, however imperfectly, we can do it again, and perhaps rather better this time. The arc of history is long indeed; who knows where it leads. Perhaps, through consciousness and struggle, we can nudge it in the right direction.

There is an American Guide Series guide to every state in the United States. Even Alaska and Hawaii were added on at the end, before statehood. You can probably find the Guide to your state in the local library, in a used bookstore, or online. Give it a look. Most follow a similar pattern, but for me, there is nothing like Washington. I was born here and now I am back; I feel a profound allegiance to this state. I truly love it. For me, exploring the 84-year-old Guide to the Evergreen State is not a bad way at all to mark the Semiquincentennial in the beautiful place where I live - Bellingham, The City of Subdued Excitement. Our unofficial mascot is the sloth, but people work hard here. We are a city where working people deserve more. They deserve to be centered.

Bellingham is a fine American place in 2026. It wants to be so much better. It tries. I like to think that is true of all American places at the Semiquincentennial. In this difficult present, there is hope to be found in looking backward as well as forward.

The Blob - the American foreign and security policy establishment - is generating ever more slop. Writing the same article over and over again, from the same worn-out perspective of “great power competition” and “American exceptionalism”. Tweaking a phrase here and a sentence there, throwing in a new metaphor. And managing to do it all without much help from AI!

Peter Beinart has written an excellent piece in today’s New York Times that calls out America’s foreign policy hawks for failure to learn any lessons from our disastrous wars over the past 25 years. Beinart also highlights the failure of our system (such as it is) to hold the hawks and jingoists to account. Here is a link:

Beinart NYT Foreign Policy Failure

Beinart could have gone further. He does not explore the reasons for the astonishing and persistent impunity of our most aggressive foreign policy blowhards - people like Lindsay Graham in the Senate, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, Bret Stephens at the New York Times, and, more recently, Matthew Kroenig at the Atlantic Council. One gets the sense, to be honest, that the “system” is designed to deliver impunity for warmongering. Much has to do with our oligarchic neoliberal economic system, as I see it, and the pervasive delusion of American exceptionalism, on which generations of American children have been raised. Aggressive foreign wars are integral to our economic and political system.

I fault The Blob for fostering and serving this system, but it is in the nature of the foreign and security policy establishment to serve power. Beinart’s op-ed notwithstanding, the New York Times and other major publications are a big part of the problem. It was only today, for example, that the NYT pointed out that Trump’s claim to have achieved a great breakthrough by securing Tehran’s promise not to develop a nuclear weapon - a claim Trump has been boasting about for two months already - is total bullshit. Iran has made the promise repeatedly in the past, and experts do not believe it matters very much. (One might ask, in light of Trump’s cancellation of the JCPOA and U.S. behavior more generally, why these “experts” lend more credence to American promises than to those made by Iran.)

The corruption of think tanks, in particular, is just like the profound and all-pervasive corruption of our political system in general. It is inseparable from the concentration of money and power among an increasingly oligarchic elite. The Blob repays its patrons through what it says and what it doesn’t say; what it highlights and what it ignores.

But there is a deeper problem for The Blob and especially for the Washington think tank world. It is out of ideas, and the endless repetition of the same nonsense and misdirection is ever less persuasive and more off-putting. I used the Groundhog Day metaphor in the title, but The Blob is also more and more like a hamster wheel. Running in place, meaninglessly, generating content for itself and a narrow audience inside the Beltway (and in Brussels and other capitals).

There are still some excellent analysts out there. I have to say that Phillips O’Brien has impressed me greatly over the past year, and I am still a big fan of Van Jackson and a few others with a broader or adjacent field of analysis, including Paul Krugman and Adam Tooze. There are still credible think tanks, though they generally have a lower profile than the Council on Foreign Relations or Brookings, and are more “niche”. But they are the exceptions.

Foreign Affairs (affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations) and Foreign Policy, the flagship journals and websites of The Blob, are drowning in slop. They regurgitate the same essential articles day after day, week after week, with very little analytical variation or innovative perspective. The bylines change but the content remains the same. The same themes and conclusions repeat themselves in an endless loop. It is always Groundhog Day. China does not seek to replace the U.S. as global hegemon, exactly, but it is still both very dangerous and much weaker than most of us think. Europe needs to build out its strategic autonomy but remains dependent on the United States for now and for some years into the future. An Iranian nuclear weapon would be a colossal problem for the Middle East and the globe. International law is irrelevant, a gauzy anachronism that serious countries ignore. We all need to devote more and more of our resources to defense.

Guns over butter is the flavor of the day/week/year/decade.

It reminds me of what NATO Secretary General George Robertson used to say of the North Atlantic Council when I worked at NATO Headquarters in Brussels: “Everything has already been said, but not everyone has said it.” I don’t know whether Robertson coined the phrase, but it was totally on target. Amid the sea of words, it was hard to discern much that had any real meaning or significance. It was all performative. What stood in for deliberation when all the direction was coming from Washington.

Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy are models for the degrading effect of our current information environment, characterized by senseless immediacy and sensory overload. They are both - but especially Foreign Policy - invested in their online presence. Their monthly or quarterly print editions have faded into the background as the so-called “journals” are busy chasing exactly the same audience as the New York Times or CNN or BBC. But they are not good at it (al Jazeera and the BBC are much, much better). They generate slop. I scroll through their menus and tune into their webinars and find nothing - NOTHING - of any marginal value. It’s a dreary slog through repetitive junk.

I know that FP and FA still get clicks and that a few folks follow their online conversations, but the whole endeavor is such a waste. A waste of the audience’s time and a waste of whatever the contributors might produce if they took a moment - maybe a week or two - to reflect. To ask themselves what the hell they are doing. If they took a break from generating content to think more deeply and apply their expertise - which is often real - to generating, now and then, a useful insight, novel perspective, or helpful recommendation.

There is opportunity cost to running on the hamster wheel, to feeding Groundhog Day. I want to call it Ground Blob Day.

For now, however, they are “flooding the zone”, to use Steve Bannon’s famous phrase. Creating fog and distraction. Feeding AI training day after day with the same bad ideas and superficial analysis - probably climbing up the ladder of search results. All in all, just wasting our time. Wasting my time. And wasting my money - I eagerly look forward to the day when I have taught my last class and can cancel my subscriptions to Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy. When I won’t need to know what appears there in order to seem au courant with what’s happening in The Blob.

In their small and wonky way, the think tanks and “journals” and foreign and security policy establishment are propping up the oligarchic system based on defending American primacy and elite impunity which they are disposed to serve. I have better things to do than watch them bow and scrape and consume their slop.

Jamelle Bouie’s column this morning in the New York Times lays out the ongoing transformation of the United States into a new Regime under Trump, one guided by Project 2025 in both vision and execution. Bouie highlights the Democrats’ lack of any such unifying program of action or even thought. Indeed, in Bouie’s analysis, the thought must precede the action. It must be based on a clear ideology (even if Bouie does not use that word, which has come to be regarded as a pejorative in American political discourse). Bouie suggests a set of goals that would entail major adjustments to our governing laws and constitution, driven by a clear concept of the relationship between the individual and the state and of the social and economic underpinnings of government. Without such an ideology (my term), Democrats’ drives for national renewal will inevitably come up short. They will be about restoration rather than “reconstruction”.

Bouie takes down current Democratic thinking about a possible Project 2029, a proposed response to Project 2025. In Bouie’s words: “A Project 2029 cannot be a collection of Democratic Party agenda items. It must articulate a broad new conception of the nation’s political order — one that will guide the way a future Democratic-led government might wield power. Above all, Democrats must have a plan for reconstruction — for building something new on the wreckage of what President Trump, MAGA and the Republican Party have wrought — not restoration of what was.”

Here is a gift link to Bouie’s article. Give it a read:

NYT Bouie America Broke Something

I fully agree with Bouie’s column, but I would go further and deeper. To my mind, even “reconstruction” is a dangerous, backward looking term. It is the wrong frame of mind. We should be talking about a revolution. A “political revolution” as Bernie Sanders has called it. I would also apply Bouie’s ideas at the personal level and suggest that they help to define the conditions for effective political engagement by individuals.

National Security Technocrats Are Not the Answer

Here is where I part ways with many of my former colleagues in The Blob.

I am a member - though an inactive one - in a couple of networks of former national security officials which engage very actively in public debates and even partisan political contests. There are a few other, similar networks out there that I am aware of. To their credit, they frame their political engagement very much in terms of reconstruction and renewal. The networks wear their (purportedly) non-partisan character on their sleeves, proudly, asserting that their record of public service under both Democrats and Republicans bolsters their claim to a special role in saving and restoring our Republic.

I think this is admirable in a way. These are networks of good citizens, with a strong sense of civic responsibility. These people show up. But their appeals and their claims have always made me uncomfortable. They do not embrace an ideology, they have no unifying vision of the fundamental shortcomings of the American state and what is needed to overcome them. They are united, instead, by devotion to the constitution and its governing institutions. To restoration (even though they protest otherwise). They take a managerial approach to politics and government.

This is one reason I don’t really engage with these groups (the other being that I doubt their effectiveness). Don’t get me wrong - I value experience and expertise and believe they should inform our politics and policy. And I share with these non-partisan crusaders their outrage at the behavior of the Trump Regime. Many of them are my former colleagues and friends (in some cases former friends). But I am much more inclined than they are to trace our present crisis to long-term, systemic rot under both parties. And also to our economic system; especially to our neoliberal system, which is increasingly characterized by primitive accumulation. I am inclined to regard the whole paradigm for ex-Blob public engagement - as exemplary former non-partisan civil servants and guardians of our republic - as a delusion, as a kind of technocratic gambit.

The groups of foreign and security affairs veterans that I know would deny that they believe in technocratic rule. But they - we - can’t really escape our own past, and they don’t even want to do so. They embrace it. It is the foundation of their claim to an enlarged role in our national debate. At a time of blatant corruption and mind-boggling incompetence, technocratic rule undeniably has a certain appeal, potentially broader than it ordinarily would. And - if we’re being honest with ourselves - I think American national security officials have always been attracted to the notion that technocrats should be in charge in the United States and other countries. In other words, that “people like us” should have more authority to manage affairs.

I don’t think “new management” is what America needs. Technocrats are not the answer. America needs a new system. Our current system is not just morally bankrupt and facing insolvency; it is terribly destructive both at home and abroad. The constitution is part of the problem, but the roots of our grinding self-destruction go much deeper.

Ideology and the Two-Party System

To be honest, the majority of these self-proclaimed non-partisan national security veterans side openly with the Democrats these days, and for obvious reasons. What choice do they have? Trump and his Regime-in-Becoming are a mess, an outrage. A large swath of Democrats, including the core Democratic Party establishment, are institutionalists. They value the form of government as much as the substance, and believe playing by the rules is the essence of good governance. They have a managerial approach to politics, and this appeals to folks like us. Folks from the foreign and security policy establishment. In other words, The Blob.

I also vote for Democrats. In the American two-party system, there is really little alternative for anyone who cares about policy and our national life. I am happy to see national security alums get elected on the Democratic ticket. (I have real problems, though, with the security state alums who are being elected with the GOP. More on this in an upcoming article.) Still, I am not sure I have more in common with these foreign and security policy engagement networks than that - my voting pattern.

The thing is, I have an ideology - I am a leftist. Even though I was scrupulous in serving faithfully both Democratic and Republican administrations as an American diplomat, I never stopped being a leftist. Not a communist, for heaven’s sake - that is a political identity that became too closely associated with Leninist parties and authoritarian regimes over the course of the 20th Century for me to support. I lived in East Germany; how could I possibly be a communist? For Americans, communism - 35 years after the end of the Cold War - is still the “great satan.” But I am a kind of socialist, a person whose views on socio-political and economic developments have been shaped by Karl Marx and the rich tradition of philosophy, historical analysis, and policy ideas that grew up around Marxist thought. In other words, I embrace the “small satan” in American political parlance: socialism. I am particularly attracted by world systems theory and, as I have lately come to realize, Antonio Gramsci.

Some of my former colleagues have expressed surprise bordering on astonishment that I have such an ideology, and that I held it while serving in the Foreign Service. They could not detect it in my work. That is a good thing. And they suspect - correctly - that my ideological viewpoint has sharpened since I retired in 2015. My circumstances have changed, the world has changed, and I have changed.

Even though I did not flaunt my ideology as a diplomat, it has never stood in contradiction to my loyalty as an American, either during my Foreign Service career or today. I think the American system is profoundly flawed, and that fundamental change is needed to better protect and advance the interests of the American people. The Trump Regime is trying to silence alternative ideologies and impose individual political and ideological “fidelity” on the Foreign Service and other groups. This is an ideological assault from the right. I believe we all should resist it, and our prospects in this struggle will be much better if we have - as groups and individuals - a clear ideological basis.

I do not regret that I served both Democratic and Republican administrations loyally and to the best of my ability. It was a condition for my employment, not something to boast about or be particularly proud of. During my time as a diplomat, it was sometimes complicated or awkward but never all that difficult. I always had in mind a set of tripwires that would cause me to resign from the Foreign Service if sprung. When colleagues went off to work at our diplomatic posts in Iraq during the U.S. occupation of that country, either out of a sense of duty or curiosity or ambition or simply succumbing to the pressure of our HR system, I just scratched my head. Iraq was a tripwire for me. I would not go, even if ordered to do so. I managed to avoid it, and when it loomed large at one point, I temporarily left the Foreign Service.

Those tripwires were tied to my personal integrity and ethics - which in turn are tied to my ideology more than the words of the U.S. constitution. I always upheld the constitution, but what does that even mean? Constitutional issues rarely landed in my inbox. The constitution is a flawed document, and hardly a guide to personal ethics and behavior. Ideology is both broader and deeper. For some that ideology is religion. For me, it is leftist social and political thought. It is there that I find my sense of right and wrong, my sense of ethics. My sense of justice. The rules tell us to serve. My ideology tells me to think.

The Managerial Class

It is the devotion to the constitution and non-partisan service that, to me, renders the networks of former national foreign and security policy officers so ineffectual. They can claim some electoral success, though their distinct contribution - apart from the usual mechanisms of writing checks and knocking on doors - is debatable. Governor Spanberger in Virginia is their most prominent success story and their hero. But they are, as a group, unfit for the role of rebuilding America. They are devoted to form. If they have an ideology, it is liberalism, a relic of the past that has, in recent decades, provided an ideational framework for neoliberal economics. Rather than deal with the messiness of that ideology, they prefer to speak of patriotism. I believe their intentions are noble in that regard, but patriotism is a shape-shifting chimera. It defines nothing.

What unites them is experience in the national security state that the United States built over the past 30 years. The individual participants bring their own distinct experience, point of view and even ideology to the mix. But the foundation of their engagement is what they have in common. And what they have in common is the national security state. Uniting under this banner, they do not eschew the national security outlook or label; they embrace it. They are mainly managers, institutionalists. They market themselves as exemplary national security officials, unswerving in their patriotism and loyalty to the constitution.

This bothers me. It is a point of failure for foreign and security policy veterans as a sort of vanguard of national renewal. We all share - myself included - the imprint of, and even some responsibility for, America’s disastrous foreign policy over the past three decades and the metastasis of our national security state. The definition of national security that we imbibed over many years is an albatross around our necks.

Patriotism is the Last Refuge of a Scoundrel

As Samuel Johnson said, “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” He was inveighing against imperialism and slavery, not just the cynical manipulation of nationalist feeling to evade responsibility for misdeeds and corruption. Like Samuel Johnson, my concerns about the centering of patriotism as an organizing principle are moral. They focus on imperialism and oppression - American imperialism and oppression.

It is crucial, in my view, that those entrusted with authority have a firm, personal ideological or moral foundation - especially those in the national security field, including the American security state. But that ideology is exactly what we DO NOT have in common. It does not exist in the constitution and cannot be reduced to patriotism. They surely do not need to hold my leftist ideology, but they should have core principles in some form that underpin and focus a perspective on social and economic relations and “values.” It should be systemic and conscious. It should be an ideology.

The very concept of the managerial approach, non-partisan loyalty to the constitution and unwavering patriotism and faithful obedience to legitimate leaders, is the negation of all that. It stands in great tension to ideology and individual conscience. It is the wrong banner for effective and meaningful engagement toward a different future. It is the very embodiment of restoration.

Oliver Kornetzke, in his outstanding Substack, has written an incisive takedown of the Democratic Party elite based on class allegiance and dependence on donors. I highly recommend it and share most of Kornetzke’s judgments (though I lack some of his impressive blue-collar credentials):

Kornetzke All Performance

I believe that most of what Kornetzke says about the Democratic Party elite applies to the networks of ex-Blob types who have organized to support, by and large, the Democratic Party in opposition to the Trump Regime. But foreign and security policy veterans have a special responsibility, a kind of collective guilt in my opinion. We were part of the problem. We had roles - large or small, central or peripheral - in the unfolding of a colossal, long-term national failure. And unless we change our outlook, we will remain part of the problem, not part of the solution.

One can argue, of course, that we were just taking direction. We were just following orders - legitimate, legal orders. And that it wasn’t about ideology, really, just the law and the constitution. But were we really so powerless? The disavowal or compartmentalization of ideology and partisanship does not actually mean the absence of ideology or partisanship. It means the instrumentalization of the individual in the service of some ideological or partisan purpose. Are we really ok with that?

Loyalty is a limited and very conditional virtue. It depends crucially on the object of ones devotion, of the program in which ones loyalty is engaged. Morality should never be “above my pay grade”. I will write more about that in another article in the next week or two. For now, each of us should be responsible not only for obeying lawful orders and rejecting illegal ones, but for understanding and even foreseeing the moral consequences of the actions we take. We should not elevate loyalty - to an individual, an institution, or the constitution - to a more exalted place than it deserves.

Foreign and security policy alums have as much right as anyone to a voice in our national debate and a role in our national life. This is (still) a free country. But ask yourselves: Having followed orders with discipline, fired by a sense of patriotism and national purpose, have we really demonstrated a capacity for leadership? Especially now, as our country is in crisis. Is our shared experience a source of ideas for a new era in American life? Have we shown that we have what it takes to guide America on a new path - or even see where it might lead? Are we and our former colleagues really the best candidates, the ones who deserve support for elective office?

They are like us; isn’t that a problem?

Have you watched any of the Lego videos that Iran and Iranians are posting to make fun of Trump and America? If not, you really should. They are very fluent, very “inside baseball”, often very funny, and in some cases small masterpieces of propaganda. There is no comparison to the brainless, testosterone-soaked AI slop that the Trump Regime is churning out. If this is a contest - and I suppose, considering we’re talking about war, it very much is - the Iranians are beating the Americans at their own game.

(We, of course, are scoring one own-goal after another. So much winning!)

For some reason, this has come as a surprise, even a shock, in some quarters. Quite predictably, really, it has sparked a kind of hysterical alarm in parts of The Blob and the American security state. Take this utterly overwrought op-ed from this morning’s New York Times, which calls for all sorts of urgent countermeasures to protect us from Lego videos:

NYT Brandt Iran Is Trolling Us

As so often with the major corporate media these days, the most cutting responses came in the most popular reader comments. The dominant sense: the videos are funny, and they’re true, and the last thing we need is some whack-a-mole security response from the USG.

But the Lego videos are just the tip of the iceberg, and the main story is not about the Iran war. It is truly about the world and the place that American pop culture holds in it. Or I should say “used to hold in it.” Because the world has moved on, and it is the New York Times-reading demographic that is, to an extent, the last to know.

Exorbitant Privilege

The status of English as the de facto lingua franca across the entire globe is a huge bonus for America, Americans and American companies. It is a kind of “exorbitant privilege”, a term that was coined by a French finance minister in the 1960s to describe the unique economic benefit the United States receives because the U.S. dollar is the world's primary reserve currency. This dollar-related exorbitant privilege is actually even bigger than the reserve currency element; it also derives from the dominance of the U.S. dollar as a medium of exchange and other financial transactions.

The role of the English language still seems pretty secure. I am always impressed by the quality of English spoken by so many people I meet around the world, especially young people. And the role of the U.S. dollar in the world economy is also still pretty strong, though it is showing signs of erosion and maybe even a bit of wobbling.

For many decades, there was also another kind of “exorbitant privilege” that benefited America and Americans: pop culture. I was reminded just last week, during Stephen Colbert’s last broadcast of The Late Show, of just how powerful this once was. When Colbert asked Paul McCartney what it was like visiting, America, New York and the Ed Sullivan Theater for the first time in 1964, McCartney’s response was simple: All the music he and the Beatles loved and drew upon in their work was American. He half knew what America would look like before he arrived - he had been surrounded and inspired by American culture back in Liverpool.

Perhaps England was a special case, but I had much the same experience in Mayen, a little town in the Eifel Mountains of West Germany, when I was an exchange student there in 1975. Everyone knew American pop music. Sure, they knew German pop music, British pop music and even some French and Italian pop music. But they liked American pop most. The favorite song of my German teenage friends was Superstition by Stevie Wonder. I heard it all the time.

Maybe music was a special case. It is probably more “exportable” than other elements of pop culture. But what about movies? The domination of Hollywood started earlier and lasted longer, perhaps, than any other form of pop culture. In every place I lived abroad, as a student and a diplomat, American movies were ever present in theaters. OK, not East Germany. But everywhere else. Television was a different matter. But movies? Hollywood was the model, the fashion-setter. It took more time, effort and money to go to a movie than to turn on the TV, and when people did that, they often “bought American.” Surprisingly often.

The same holds true for fast food. For Coca Cola. McDonald’s. For essentially every element of American pop culture.

Pop Culture and Soft Power

In a way, America invented pop culture back in the middle of the 20th Century, and we were the main source of global tastes and trends for many decades. Rampant consumer culture, made in the USA. It was, to my mind, the most basic element of our soft power, our ability to attract the voluntary support or sympathy of others around the world.

For some reason, pundits and politicians and the whole chattering class tend to equate America’s soft power with ideals, noble aspirations, liberty and democracy and openness and inclusion. Those are my ideals, too. But I think they are missing the point. Those ideals, as we lived them here in America, found expression in our pop culture, and that is one of the main ways they reached foreign audiences. Remember the “American lifestyle”? It was once pretty distinctive and pretty widely admired abroad. The cars. The lawns. The freedom. The romance lives on in middle-aged Harley riders from Europe who come to America for “the open road” (with their middle-aged American counterparts).

Paul McCartney did not love Chuck Berry’s music because it embodied those ideals, he just loved the music. The ideals came along for the ride. Lady and the Tramp and Ben-Hur did not gain massive international audiences in the 1950s because they conveyed America’s deliberate soft power messages. They were great movies in which those messages were embedded. The same for Stevie Wonder’s Superstition. The same for Coca Cola and the Big Mac or McNuggets and Starbuck’s.

I think this era of America’s “exorbitant privilege” in pop culture is over. It has been waning for years, and I think it is ending.

I have seen it in young people around me, here in the U.S. and abroad. Taylor Swift is still huge, but maybe BTS and BLACKPINK are bigger, and Luis Fonsi’s Despacito and Pinkfong’s Baby Shark are the most viewed YouTube videos of all time. Each has more than 10 billion views. I would like to claim Despacito as American, since it is from Puerto Rico, but I think its appeal is essentially separate from U.S. pop culture, strictly speaking. Same for Bad Bunny. Maybe not. But look at the controversy surrounding Bad Bunny’s half time show at the Super Bowl this past February.

Disney used to dominate the children’s cuteness factory, but no more. Disney is still in the mix, but East Asia is replete with contending cute creatures and human characters with enormous cult-like followings that stretch across much of the planet.

The “Hottest Country”? South Korea

Trump says America is the “hottest country” now, but that is just classic Trumpian nonsense. If I had to choose a “hottest country”, it would be South Korea. I have alluded to the music. There is also the food, the television, the movies. My kids know ten Korean dishes that I have never heard of, because they eat them regularly. I posted on Substack about K-Pop Demon Hunters a while back. It is not just South Korea, of course. There are other contenders. But I am thinking of visiting South Korea in large part for the pop culture. Yep, even an old fart like me. And that - apart from a visit to Akihabara in Tokyo a few years ago - is not something I usually do.

I am not saying another country has displaced America as the pop culture hegemon of the 21st Century. Certainly not Iran, but not even South Korea. As in so many other fields, the 21st Century is evolving as a time of multipolarity. Hegemony is over. American primacy is over, and we should not cling to it and seek to reimpose it in any domain - cultural, political, military or economic.

So why the surprise that Iran is better at propaganda than the U.S.? Why worry whether Big Bunny is American enough for the Super Bowl? Why pretend that American pop culture continues to resonate most powerfully around the world?

Did we ever really believe that America had cornered the market on creativity, on appealing to a mass market, on “hotness” (or “cool”)? We kind of had that attitude during our unipolar moment in the 1990s, and it has been slow to die, but it was always wrong. Now, as prosperity and connectivity expand around the world, we are seeing a very natural evolution toward multipolarity in all domains. Human creativity and human diversity are simply amazing.

I wonder how America will rebuild its soft power in the post-Trump era; I think the next couple years are hopeless. But now that the world is multipolar, and America has come down so far in so many ways, lost so much that it cannot easily recover, how will we come back in soft power terms? Not to hegemony, but at least to producing something more appealing than the Trump Regime’s repulsive AI slop showcasing arrogance, brutality and destruction? Who knows, really? First we have to get past the Trump Regime. We need to survive this.

In the meantime, I am enjoying this moment in many ways. We may have lost something in terms of soft power, but both we and the rest of the world have gained. I celebrate every time a new restaurant with good international food opens in Bellingham. Even here in Bellingham, where a visiting friend remarked a few years back “This town is SO white.” I have been won over by Bad Bunny’s music - in part because it plays all the time at the pilates studio I visit. In the competitive context of propaganda, it is natural, I suppose, to worry that Tehran is beating Washington hands down. But it’s fine with me. It’s a wonderful, diverse, creative world. A world my kids are much more rooted in than this Boomer can ever be. But it’s the world that I want to live in, too.

There are huge differences between China during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and MAGA America (2016-28?, with a short and partial interlude during Biden). But it's the similarities that worry me.

Mao’s Last Revolution by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals was published twenty years ago and remains the definitive Western history of the Cultural Revolution. Reading it in America in 2026 has been a real experience. I can’t recommend the book too highly. The differences between Trump’s America and Mao’s China are extensive and expected. They are interesting but recede into the background. The parallels are startling; they leap off the page.

We have not reached the stage of profound destructive egotism and cult of personality that ruined so many lives in China for a decade. Do I need to say "yet"? Maybe; hopefully not. And China in the mid-20th C existed on a relatively narrow material margin. It could not afford to squander lives and resources as it seems that America can. The Cultural Revolution was an episode in mainly domestic destruction; MAGA is more "balanced", with destruction both at home and abroad (Americans are sadly quite comfortable with the latter).

There are many points of convergence. The denial of reality - economics, science, basic humanity. The overwhelming brutality in language and action. The rampant ad hoc-ism and destruction of institutions, law and accountability. The recriminations among a narrow clique of ambitious but deeply flawed sycophants. The religious devotion to a mercurial, self-absorbed leader in physical and mental decline. The almost comical nonsense of ideological debates and "campaigns" - comical apart from the colossal human cost.

The Cultural Revolution was what Mao said it was on any given day. Just as MAGA is whatever Trump says it is on any given day. That's a powerful similarity.

Contrary to his bottom-up rhetoric, Mao relied on the institutions of coercion - mainly the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) - to impose his shifting will on the populace. He nearly destroyed the PLA over the course of a decade. He used violence nonchalantly, lacked any sense of human empathy or loyalty, and repurposed institutions to pursue bizarre personal vendettas. Sound familiar?

There were no heroes during the Cultural Revolution. The system caved and values collapsed. Even those who were later rehabilitated or revered - Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping - were either victims or perps or, in Deng's case, a bit of both. And there are no heroes I can see in MAGA America - at least not at the leadership level, among our so-called "elites". At the grassroots, though, there is still decency and heroism. I think of Minnesota first and foremost. More than was possible in the China of the Cultural Revolution. Should I say "still more, at this stage"?

And it seems young Americans are not like the Red Guards, even if Turning Point USA is still a thing. (TPUSA really reminds me of the Red Guards.) By and large, young Americans are more aware, more resistant, more independent-minded than their counterparts in 1960s China.

Yes, there are many differences. But the parallels are also real. It is interesting to read the best Western book on the Cultural Revolution during the MAGA Revolution. China's historical experience informs my understanding of America today. And America's experience today informs my understanding of China's history.

Xi Jinping didn’t deliberately shame Donald Trump. The Chinese leader rolled out the red carpet and went through his talking points and agreed to buy a few Boeings and soybeans. But the Trump Regime set itself up for disappointment, floating wild ideas about Chinese help on Iran and rich trade gifts. The American delegation was an elite rogues’ gallery of pugnacious officials and heartless oligarchs. You could tell this was not going to turn out the way they wanted. It took Trump’s nonpareil buffoonery, however, to turn the visit into a true humiliation. With carefully managed spotlights and all the world’s eyes focused on him, Trump stumbled and babbled and behaved inappropriately. He made a fool of himself.

We are really very used to that, or we should be. It is what happens when Trump meets someone who is more powerful than him or has the goods on him. American media outlets, keen to retain access and avoid Trump Regime reprisals, always approach Trump’s summits with a serious, sunny set of disingenuous reports about the White House’s aims for the meeting, the deliverables that never materialize. Remember the Helsinki summit with Putin way back when? Even Kim Jong-Un seemed to put Trump in his place in Hanoi. How much more predictable could it have been that Trump - diminished politically and mentally - would leave Beijing looking even more washed up?

We also know what comes next.

“Daddy” is home and it’s best to stay in your room. He’s gonna kick the dog.

Masha Gessen had a piece in the New York Times yesterday about the similarities between autocrats and domestic abusers. It is worth a read. In fact, it’s a devastating, sobering read, but I still recommend it.

NYT Gessen There's a Pattern

I am writing here about an aspect of this same phenomenon, in a way, focusing on foreign affairs and what we might expect from “Daddy” (as NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte called him last year).

Before the Beijing summit, I had started writing a piece called “Appease and Squeeze” about what I expected would be coming over the next several weeks and even months. It is the pattern we have seen from Trump - he is, after all, rather predictable as he threatens and abuses those around him in order to establish his personal dominance. Trump, I thought, will appease Xi and then tighten the squeeze on Europe and others whom he perceives as being weaker. He is a bully and a coward. It is truly a classic combination, and Trump exemplifies it “like no one has ever seen”.

I got sidetracked and dropped it. But here I am, back on the topic.

So what are we seeing now? Leaving aside what I expect domestically - a doubling down on Trump’s work on repression, fraud, corruption and lawlessness - what are we seeing in the Trump Regime’s foreign engagements (I hesitate to dignify them with the word “policy”)?

Nothing new on Iran and Ukraine. Trump is trapped in his own ineptitude and weakness on both of these key fronts, and he appears to be intent on doing further harm to those countries and the United States out of sheer, obdurate idiocy. Putin and Netanyahu seem to have something on Trump - perhaps it is criminal, perhaps it is just personal. It is certainly persistent, whatever it is.

Yet somehow, despite the disastrous commitment to an illegal war of aggression in Iran, Trump wants to shame Cuba, perhaps in the coming weeks and months, subjecting the country to an inhuman blockade and what looks for all the world like a mafia-style squeeze. Meanwhile, the illegal killings of random guys in boats off the South American coast have not stopped. And we keep hearing about Trump’s “brilliant success” in Venezuela, the greatest US military victory since WWII.

And what about Europe? Even before Trump traveled to his predictable humbling in Beijing, he was trash-talking NATO and Europe, threatening and blustering, and even made a big show of drawing down US forces in Germany by 5000. Then came yesterday’s news: the unexpected cancellation of a US force deployment to Poland that was part of NATO’s program of reinforced capabilities and deterrence along the eastern flank. People are scratching their heads, as this latest cancellation has not been explained to the public (if at all), and Poland is generally regarded as a model NATO ally.

I would note that Polish PM Donald Tusk is serious and tends to talk straight about defense matters, and this is unlikely to please Trump. And, despite helping to make Poland the ideal NATO ally that it is, Tusk has successfully opposed Poland’s rightwing ethno-nationalists, the folks the Trump Regime supports across Europe in order to save “Western civilization”.

Serious allied leaders cannot do their jobs and still get along with Trump. We should all realize that by now.

But honestly, I don’t think there is any such rational explanation for Trump’s cancellation of the deployment to Poland. And there won’t be a rational, policy-related explanation for Trump’s bullying of Cuba or the next move his Regime makes to undercut Europe, whether in the security, economic or political domain. Trump needs to demonstrate dominance, especially when he is feeling diminished. Like most abusers, he will turn his anger on those who are near to hand, who are vulnerable, and unlikely to strike back.

After ten years of national life with this vicious bully, none of this is a surprise. It does not explain why so many Americans accept and even support this abuser and his enablers. That baffles me and reflects something deeply depressing about American political culture and maybe even our society and “national character”, if such a thing exists. Masha Gessen’s piece has more to say on that score. I think it is also rooted in our economic system.

So what do we do? On this side of the Atlantic, we need to work hard to contain and constrain Trump and his Regime. Hopefully the November midterm elections will help.

On the other side of the Atlantic and the rest of the world, you also need to work hard to contain and constrain Trump and his Regime. I understand that this means working against the United States in a sort of containment policy. That will help you. And that will help us, too.

Finally, we need to stop expecting something more rational, more policy-driven, more understandable in terms of public or national interest from this man and his enablers. The media could help by finding ways to report more forthrightly on what the Trump Regime is doing and what is happening here and abroad. But mainly it is up to us - all of us - to stop pretending that there is more to Trump than we see. A small, vindictive bully, a kind of cosplay mafia don, seeking to demonstrate personal dominance, rip us all off, and somehow get away with it.

Trump the grifter is the dog who caught the car. He is doomed. I still believe that he and his co-conspirators and enablers will end badly, poor and humiliated. But before Trump’s through with us, he’s gonna kick a lot more dogs, and it’s best to stay in your rooms and barricade the door.

• First, an impulse to focus on a “critical capabilities gap” arising from the increasingly evident reduction and even withdrawal of credible American defense commitments, including Article 5 of the Washington (NATO) Treaty. This is leading to a perversely exaggerated and warped level of ambition in terms of procurement as Europe contemplates the path toward defense and deterrence autonomy.

• Second, an impulse to state - publicly, persistently, and to my mind foolishly - that Europe is not, at present, able to defend itself without the active support and perhaps leading involvement of the United States. Not only that - that Europe will not be able to defend itself on its own for some years to come, perhaps a decade. Perhaps even never. This leads to casting the present and near future as a time of great - and exaggerated - vulnerability, thereby undermining deterrence.

The “Perfect” Is the Enemy of the Good - and of Common Sense

This corrosive combination has created a political and strategic muddle where the perfect is the enemy of the good. By “perfect”, I mean the current, U.S.-supported and indeed U.S.-led defense and deterrence model for Europe, though that model’s severe shortcomings are apparent for all to see. Let’s just say there is really nothing remotely perfect about U.S. defense planning, however robust it purports to be; the examples run from Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya to Yemen to Iran and surely many points in between. American tactical proficiency is high; so what? We have lost a series of wars and near-wars stretching back well over two decades. Now we are losing tactically, operationally and strategically to Iran. Nor is there anything remotely perfect about the reliability of American defense and deterrence commitments in Europe, a situation that has been exacerbated and highlighted by the Trump Regime but originated far, far earlier.

And let me be clear where I stand on another point: I believe Europe’s perception of the threat of Russian aggression beyond Ukraine is exaggerated. Russia is weaker than much of the “Russia threat” discourse suggests. Moscow’s intent is clearly hostile. There is no discounting the devastation that Russia has wrought in its illegal and immoral invasion of Ukraine, nor the potentially destabilizing impact that war could still have for the broader region. Nor can one discount Russia’s aggressive posture toward Europe, its campaign of sabotage and disruption in the Baltic and much more broadly. I would simply argue that Moscow is in no position to launch a war of conquest against a NATO or EU member state. It is too weak and Europe is too strong.

But I would also argue that the way in which many Europeans discuss the Russia threat, and their readiness to deter and if necessary repel it, is creating its own set of vulnerabilities and invites more Russian meddling.

The Critical Capabilities Gap

It seems you can’t read anything about European defense and deterrence without encountering discussion of the “critical capabilities gap” that Europeans must cover should U.S. commitments to European defense disappear. These capabilities generally include what are now called “long-range fires”, air defense and missile defense, ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance), electronic warfare, sometimes heavy airlift and even, on occasion, command and control. The list is long, the cost of replacing it is high, and the timetable for doing so is measured in years.

And then there is nuclear deterrence.

I don’t have a big problem with the details of the list. I think they are rather outmoded and misguided, but many experts would insist they comprise a sensible “to-do” list for Europe. Still, I have serious reservations about the concept of the list, the outlook on national defense and defense planning that underpins what looks to me like an obsession with the “gap”.

• First, it seems to ignore what recent wars, most notably the Russo-Ukrainian War and the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, have revealed about the nature of modern warfare: that it is not in line with American defense doctrine, and that the Pentagon seems slow and perhaps even unable to adapt. On the one hand, there is widespread discussion of the transformative lessons of these two recent wars. Nobody has done more than Philipps O’Brien to bring these discussions to a wide audience regarding both Ukraine and Iran. On the other hand, the tradition of U.S.-led defense planning in Europe endures, even when the role of America is increasingly unclear.

• Second, the “gap” obsession seems to rest on the assumption that deterrence can be perfected to such a degree - even conventional deterrence - that perceived or expected resilience under attack is somehow eliminated from the equation. In other words, there is no real need for political resolve. Of course, the best wars are those that never happen. But Ukraine’s and Iran’s resilience under attack by more powerful foes has driven home the lessons from their wars; resilience coupled with a revolution in technology and cost-benefit, bang-for-your-buck calculations, a transformation in the advantage of defense over offense. I would argue that the failure of deterrence in the cases of Ukraine and Iran has rewritten the book on deterrence going forward. It has elevated the prospects for successful defense, thereby transforming what is needed to deter a potential aggressor, lowering the price tag and shifting the focus. It is about political resolve and of course innovation as well as technical capabilities. The human factor is tremendously important.

• Finally, nuclear deterrence should be center-stage for Europe, much more than “long-range fires” or strategic lift. Non-proliferation advocates argue strenuously against the notion that Ukraine, Iran, and even Libya show that North Korea was right. Their caution on this point is understandable but unpersuasive. Breakout to even a minor nuclear deterrence capability is transformative in facing down potential aggressors. It is hard to believe that Ukraine or Iran would have been subjected to the horrors of aggression that they now face had they possessed a nuclear deterrent capability. While one can argue that proliferation is dangerous, and that each situation is different and needs to be addressed separately, the case for a credible, common European nuclear deterrent seems clear to me. Perhaps even more than one, nationally-based deterrents. Developing such a deterrent/deterrents will be costly and politically difficult, but the rest of the world should not worry. Least of all the United States. I have no doubt that Europe will behave much more responsibly with its own nuclear deterrent(s) than Israel has with its nuclear capability over the past five decades.

The Central Place of Germany and Merz

The past two weeks have seen a lot of reporting and handwringing over the collapse of the Atlantic Alliance - perhaps even more than usual. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has taken center stage, with a good deal of back and forth over his critical remarks to high-schoolers in the German provinces about Iran’s “humiliation” of America and the instant fallout in relations with Washington: a rushed announcement of a previously planned draw-down of U.S. forces in Germany, and an increase in tariffs on European auto imports to the United States. Some of the reporting noted that Merz’s polling numbers are in the tank, inviting the usual media handwringing over the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland and far-right populists across Europe. Was it worth it for Merz to say such a thing? Was it a sign of his penchant for miscues? Was it inevitable? Was it strategic?

Here is a fairly representative article, taken from The Guardian, on the Merz situation:

Guardian Merz Stuck

Much of the angst over Merz’s falling out with Trump and the grim polling numbers that he and his CDU/CSU-SPD coalition government face, at least on this side of the Atlantic, arises from hopes that Merz and Germany will lead European defense efforts over the coming decade, moving the Continent toward greater capability and potentially even strategic autonomy. It is hard to reconcile those hopes with the challenges that the Merz government is facing in economic policy, electoral politics, and foreign affairs. This disconnect is prompting a lot of worry - as is very often the case among Germany-watchers both inside and outside Deutschland.

It will come as no surprise to readers here that I find such hopes for Germany to be exaggerated. But they are not entirely misplaced: Merz and Berlin have indeed moved out on a more serious effort to bolster Germany’s (and Europe’s) defense capabilities than one might have expected a couple years ago. They have broken taboos from the Debt Brake to nuclear deterrence and channeled massive resources to Ukraine in its war with Russia.

The potential is there.

The huge defense build-out undertaken by the Merz government and Germany is important and impressive. It is also very German, heavy on method and domestic investment focus. It is natural that the government and German taxpayers want procurement plans to support domestic producers, even if this tends to complicate the development of an integrated European defense industrial complex (with crucial economies of scale) and provoke some of the security dilemma concerns that are inevitably connected to German rearmament. Timothy Garton Ash has written a fine piece for The Guardian on the questions surrounding just how “European” Germany’s defense plans really are:

Garton Ash Germany Europe

These are important issues. But my present concern lies elsewhere, with the timetable for both Germany and Europe, how they talk about it, and what it means for European dependence on the U.S. and effective deterrence.

Here, too, Germany plays a central role. I want Germany and Europe to succeed. Germany’s timetable is ambitious, as it should be.

Talk Defense and Deterrence Like You Mean It

What would I like to see change? For one thing, perhaps most importantly for me, the way Germany (and Europe) talks about the project of increasing self-reliance or autonomy in defense and deterrence. Merz, Berlin, and other Europeans should say they can defend themselves right now. Because they can. They have the capacity to repel any attack, to defend themselves against any potential adversary. With our without the United States. It will be easier if Washington lives up to its promises, however unlikely that may now appear. But it will only be harder, not impossible, for Europe to defend itself without the U.S. Europeans’ proclaimed objective should be to reinforce their deterrent, build out their autonomous capability, to achieve full autonomy as soon as possible on the foundation of the defense and deterrent capabilities that exist today.

This is about more than window-dressing or talking points. It concerns how national - or in this case both national and European - defense and deterrence are conceived and discussed. It is about treating both responsibilities and threats seriously. Right now.

In this sense, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte’s behavior and statements - his creepy deference to Trump, his derisive approach to his fellow Europeans - are more than just humiliating. They are destructive and damaging to Europe’s defense and deterrence. His dismissive statement to the European Parliament in January distills his misguided position at a time of profound strategic transformation:

“If anyone here thinks that the European Union, or Europe as a whole, can defend itself without the US, keep on dreaming,” he scoffed. “You can’t. We can’t.”

Rutte is not just wrong. He is a dangerous fool.

European defense is a project that is still under construction. There is no question that it requires further work, work on decision-making structures and procurement arrangements and capabilities and a nuclear deterrent to replace the U.S. But Europe’s need to deter potential aggressors, and defend itself if attacked, with or without the U.S., already exists. It begins now.

Over the coming years, Europe should enhance its autonomous defense and deterrence capabilities. Germany should be central to these efforts, and can contribute very seriously to advancing this agenda. There are obstacles in the way - practical, defense-industrial, budgetary, political. This is only to be expected in such an important undertaking.

But Europe can defend itself today. With or without the United States. Europeans need to say so. Otherwise, they undermine their own deterrence. And believe me, they cannot rely on the Trump Regime or the United States.

As an instructor in international affairs with a focus on transatlantic relations and European security, I try to challenge my students to think realistically about the present and creatively about the future. After all, this is a period of rapid change, the collapse of norms and institutions that have underpinned transatlantic relations for decades, and the redistribution of power on a global scale. Our understanding needs to keep pace with the changes around us, and our aim should be to develop ideas that look beyond the present - to see alternative futures and plot alternative paths to achieve them. This is what empowering students means to me.

I look for publications - articles, essays, reports and books - that support my objectives in teaching. Accepting received wisdom suits neither my nature nor these times; I favor revisionist thinking, even iconoclasm, over the shibboleths and orthodoxies of the recent past. The last twenty-five years of American foreign policy have been a disaster; this is where a fair treatment of our present and future needs to begin. Interrogating assumptions, exploring different frames for understanding, seeking innovative approaches to anticipated developments. This is where I want to go in my classes.

I am having a hard time finding materials.

It used to be possible - even easy - to find numerous short readings to relieve some of the time pressure on students that comes with the assignment of entire books. Many of those readings were journal articles or think tank publications, which often had a policy focus that appealed to me and my students. They were adequate for their time. Ten years ago, I was less critical of The Blob, not fully aware of what a policy dead-end we were in. Neither my colleagues nor I quite realized that we were in the midst of a pivotal juncture in world affairs. Something much larger than the problems of the G7 or the WTO or NATO or the European Union. More pivotal than the end of the Cold War or any particular war since. I have called it the end of the long Atlantic era, but it describes a global and not just regional phenomenon. An old order is dying, and, as we observe events and trends around us, we try to discern what might take its place. We still do not know; we might not even have a clue. But, in the midst of our ignorance and confusion, we want to nudge events in a positive direction.

That’s it. The human condition. But my issue here is more particular than that.

My problem is with the products of The Blob - the articles and papers and many of the books of the foreign policy establishment, mainly in Washington and the U.S. but also in parts of Europe. They do good tactical-level analysis. In my field, for example, they can evaluate various programs for European defense in the framework of NATO or the European Union, note challenges for their realization, estimate costs and timing. They are good at examining those nuts and bolts of policy. But they are working on the wrong machine. The vast majority of establishment analysis and recommendation is trapped in a procrustean bed of entrenched interests, bureaucratic structures and habits, and patterns of thinking that were developed for a different world. One that is collapsing around us, in some ways, but also simply shifting. A world that is moving away from Washington and the West. The Blob is being left behind.

I am especially grumpy about the work being published by some of my old stalwarts, the true war horses of the DC think tank establishment: Brookings, Carnegie, the German Marshall Fund and the Atlantic Council. I look over their offerings and see nothing of interest except to the expert, the insider, those who share in the basic framework of policy analysis and recommendations that have brought us to our present, confused state. There is ample detail, a lot of facts and superficial assessments tailored to the stale bureaucratic world of the policy professional. What Van Jackson calls the “lanyard class.” Washington claims to be an international and sophisticated city, but it seems terribly closed-off when it comes to analyzing and even perceiving the outside world. What I find is a fairly dense network of policy wonks talking to each other, a kind of quasi-real world gaming universe whose ideas, regrettably, sometimes escape and influence policy. A community that serves power and exists to serve power, and wants to speak the language of its masters. Most mainstream media organizations, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, are similarly blinkered and enthralled.

Academia is better. I have highlighted a few papers on my Substack, especially Further Back to the Future: Neo-Royalism, the Trump Administration, and the Emerging International System by Stacie E. Goddard and Abraham Newman. There are quite a few others, produced by professors or the increasingly common independent researchers, public intellectual entrepreneurs who rely on blog and podcast subscriptions and the occasional book contract. Some are journalists or former journalists; their backgrounds are diverse. Never have I had such a strong sense that think tanks are so isolated from the academy and independent thinkers. So divorced from the actual locus of thinking and ideas. Cross-fertilization between these worlds would be helpful, but the main problem is with the think tanks and foreign policy establishment.

So I can’t find the papers I need, and I am forced to search more widely, rely more on my own experience and judgment, and constantly innovate in class. Come to think of it, that’s not all bad, but it’s far from ideal.

You might say that I am focusing on the most trivial dimension of what is in fact a much larger and more serious problem. My worries over composing a good reading list for upcoming classes are indeed meaningless in the grand scheme of things when compared to the atrocious real-world impact of policies based on our outmoded ways of thought and the hammer-lock of vested interests. To name a few of these consequences:

• the headlong race toward weaponizing artificial intelligence;

• a new arms race, including the abandonment of nuclear arms control and the increasing militarization of space;

• the genocide in Gaza;

• the war of aggression against Iran;

• the drive toward competition and confrontation in the Western Pacific; and

• most generally, the prioritization of “national security” over human needs, both domestic and international.

This is discouraging. But one of the reasons I teach is because I believe in the future, and I believe in the creativity and energy of young people. I invest a lot of myself in the classes I teach, the workshops and seminars I lead. One reason is because I am a part-timer, and can devote more attention to each course, each student, each lecture than is the case with full-timers. Another is pent-up desire to share my perspective, and the joy of engaging with diverse young minds. But I also invest a lot in the hope that it will pay off somehow in better thinking, better understanding, effective engagement and better policies. I wish I did not have to push back against the deadening hand of The Blob at every turn. To be honest, though, my students have helped me along the way, and have lifted me up when pessimism and even cynicism close in.

I sometimes think the best thing for my mental state would be to turn off the news, ignore frightful trends and just tend my own small garden here in the Pacific Northwest, living locally and trying to shield this relatively happy corner of the planet. But how could that possibly work? I spent almost my entire adult life living abroad. And then there is the classroom, which I so enjoy. I loved school as a student, and I love it as a teacher. Once I think of engaging again with sharp minds and challenging points of view and new ideas, I want to jump right back in.

I am ready to take the plunge. I just need to fill out my reading lists!

Two weeks ago I got home from a great visit to China with my wife and older son, who lives in Hong Kong. This time we visited new places and had a wonderful time. Once again I was impressed by the remarkable ease of travel in China - provided, it must be said, you can access Chinese internet sites and apps, conform to local cashless payment methods and have the help of a fluent Chinese speaker or two.

As our trip approached back in March, we were alert to how it might be affected by President Trump’s planned visit to China, which had already been postponed at least once. But Trump did not make the trip. He postponed again, this time because of the Iran War that he had launched together with Israeli PM Netanyahu. Today’s New York Times carries a good op-ed on Trump’s upcoming summit with Xi Jinping, an article that puts the relationship as a whole in its proper perspective imho:

NYT Dreyer China Moved On

The title of the article says it all: “Trump is Coming to a China That Has Moved On”. So we didn’t really need to pay attention to Trump and U.S. policy during our stay in China, and it seemed our Chinese hosts really weren’t paying them much heed, either.

I snapped the photo at the top in Shenzhen North station during our short stop there. Several high speed trains were in the station at the same time, but each for just a few minutes. They would soon be followed by others. The three of us were on our way from Xiamen to Guilin without needing to transfer in Shenzhen or Guangzhou, and this was indicative of just how dense China’s high speed rail network has become. Our route made a long bend from north-south to east-west, and we did not need to change trains in the huge cities along the way. The Chinese high speed rail net is fast, comfortable, clean and efficient; it carries many millions of passengers smoothly, without delays, with low fares. As we passed through the rugged landscapes of Fujian, Guangdong and Guangxi provinces, on elevated track, over long bridges and through countless tunnels, we often saw construction on new lines that will carry more trains and tie more areas of China more closely together. This is the work of just two decades, coming fairly late in China’s economic rise. It is absolutely amazing.

Throughout our three weeks in China, we were treated courteously, as individuals, not as representatives of the U.S. government or examples of American-ness. We encountered remarkable levels of honesty and accommodation. I lost an expensive set of eyeglasses in Yangshuo and an iPad on our Air Canada flight home. Without going into detail, the glasses were recovered and returned within 30 minutes with the aid of our guide, who made a couple calls to the venue of a major event where I had accidentally left them in my seat. My iPad, which I also left in my seat and reported missing within an hour or so, finally materialized after more than 10 days, repeated queries to Air Canada and the provision of ever more detail about its appearance, the serial number, etc. It had never left Vancouver International Airport. What took so long? I take this as evidence of the gulf in customer service between China and Canada. Perhaps I am being unfair, but if the airport had been SEA rather than YVR, I doubt I ever would have seen my iPad again.

The three of us did not encounter much curiosity about who we were or where we came from. Student groups in the Xiamen botanical gardens occasionally mobbed us, flashing peace-signs and Korean heart signs and shouting “how are you?” and “where are you from?” A few asked to have pictures taken together, but not many. They were the exception. Very friendly. For the most part, we were not the object of much interest, just random foreigners visiting places with vibrant lives of their own. Folks didn’t hold the Trump Regime against us, any more than they would hold Putin against Russians or whoever is the South Korean prime minister this month against South Koreans. It can hardly be said that Chinese are free of anti-foreign prejudice or nationalist fervor, but it is also natural for people who have such limited control over their own system to give foreigners a pass on the systems from which they come. The Chinese we encountered just seemed very accommodating, very normal, like people with their own lives and interests getting by or getting ahead.

There were not a lot of Americans around, as I noted in an earlier Substack post. Not even in Guilin, where we saw more Americans - in this case Chinese-Americans - at the Sheraton Hotel than we did throughout all the rest of our tour. As Americans we may have been a bit distinct from other foreign visitors - slightly different dress and tastes, perhaps, a bit more squeamish and security-conscious. But not particularly special in any way.

I asked our guides in Fujian and Guangxi about the small number of U.S. tourists, and their answers were similar and simple: Americans stopped coming during COVID and haven’t really come back since, even as the rest of the world has returned. I think we all knew that the number of U.S. visitors had begun to taper off well before COVID, as the atmosphere between Beijing and Washington cooled. There is no doubt that they had opinions about Donald Trump - is it possible for anyone on this planet to ignore our petulant and predatory blowhard-in-chief? But our guides skipped over all that lightly, and I don’t think it was mainly to avoid giving offense or raising a controversial topic. They just didn’t care all that much.

It all gave me the strong impression that Americans think a lot more about China than the other way around. Especially in competitive terms. We talk endlessly about the “China threat”, while they - to my knowledge - think America creates problems, behaves strangely and rather unpredictably, but is not really a threat to be feared. They remain impressed by American technology and still like Disneyland. They know they live in a one party state with extensive and intrusive surveillance capabilities. Still, I suspect they share the view of Xi, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the PRC Government, that the “East Is Rising” and its corollary, the “West Is Declining”. They heard this from Mao Zedong too, of course, but this time there is more genuine reason to believe it, more evidence that it is true.

Yet they were not dismissive of us, or unkind in any way. There is no doubt that information is more rigorously controlled in China than in America. The Great Firewall does exist, and even if use of VPNs is easy and widespread, it is not universal. America and China live in different digital universes, and state censorship is a powerful force on the Chinese side. But a certain perspective often comes with the awareness that information is subject to official manipulation, a healthy skepticism and a tendency to reserve judgment. I know about Wolf Warriors and the rabidly nationalist online communities in China. But by and large, the Chinese may do better than we do in retaining a healthy perspective and detachment from the prevailing elite narrative. Such detachment and perspective are shockingly missing in America, to my mind. Large segments of our population seem to be as easily manipulated as the most fervent Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.

So, despite the greater openness in the United States - the first amendment and all that, the vast range of opinions shared in every forum, including traditional and social media - I do not believe Americans are better informed about China than the Chinese are about America. We are just more alarmed about what we know, and we perceive the other side through more of a zero-sum lens. I don’t think most Americans even try to understand China. This is manifest in two main factors that I have seen again and again, including on my last trip: a tendency to demonize China here, to exaggerate the negative and externalize our own fears; and a depth and diversity of experience in China, both historically and at present, that defies our conventional stereotypes.

Americans and others in the West (especially the UK) seem to search out and enjoy books and articles about China that paint a highly critical image and are full of foreboding. I would say they favor material that is overly critical, commercially-oriented and unbalanced. Back in 2001, my father urged me to read a best-selling book on China that he had enjoyed: The Coming Collapse of China by Gordon C. Chang. That was obviously an erroneous assessment or forecast, even if the analysis was not entirely unfounded. But I was recently saddened to find that the Empire podcast by William Dalrymple and Anita Anan - one of my favorite weekly listens - showcased two deeply biased and sloppy “experts” on China in their series on the life of Mao Zedong: Jung Chang and Frank Dikoetter. Dikoetter and the Changs (Gordon and Jung, to my knowledge unrelated) are fervently anti-Communist. I know that Chang’s and Dikoetter’s books have outsold those of much better scholars and analysts. That is, in fact, the problem. They are feeding a prejudice that they share that portrays Mao and the CCP as cartoonish monsters rather than complex historical phenomena that deserve to be understood on their own terms. Judged, perhaps, on our terms if we like, but first studied objectively and understood in proper perspective.

Americans also need, in my mind, to appreciate what the people of China have been through over the past century. China’s experience is not at all like our own. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were the worst of several hugely damaging campaigns imposed by Mao and the CCP. For the most part, these ended with Mao’s death in 1976 - fully fifty years ago. The suffering and cost of these campaigns should not be forgotten, despite official efforts to minimize or even erase them, as in the case of the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre. But the achievements of the CCP and the PRC are also undeniable and worth noting, as are the bitter experiences of China during the “century of humiliation” that preceded the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949.

My point here is a simple one: Xi may indeed be the most authoritarian Chinese leader since Mao, but that does not mean that Xi is like Mao or becoming like Mao. We forget that Deng Xiaoping, while different from both Mao and Xi, was totally opposed to the political liberalization of China. It was Deng who ordered the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, which set China so dramatically apart from the Soviet Union/Russia and Eastern Europe and so strongly affected the PRC’s subsequent development. Deng favored quiet engagement and relatively humble diplomacy, but he also launched the “punitive” invasion of Vietnam. Xi favors a more assertive posture in foreign affairs, especially toward America and the West, and has led the build-up of Chinese military capabilities. That said, Xi is more like Deng than like Mao. There were also others who led China in between, each an individual as well as a creature of the CCP system.

Simply put, the experiences of the Chinese people over the past decade, as Xi has consolidated his more authoritarian rule, cannot reasonably be compared to their suffering during the Cultural Revolution, or the Great Leap Forward, or the Sino-Japanese War, or the era of warlord rule that followed the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. In my view, it is reasonable for the Chinese to look back on their recent history and see order emerging from chaos and prosperity emerging from poverty. Compare that to how Americans see our recent history.

This will be Nobody’s Century. Too many Americans want it to be a contest, with a clear ranking, a winner and a loser. They want America to win in a zero-sum game, to be Number One, without really reflecting on what that means. Maybe Xi and the CCP and even many Chinese see things this same way, but I doubt it. In my experience, rising countries and individuals do not embrace zero-sum thinking the way that declining and decadent countries and individuals do. In any case, the reality is that we are not so much competing against each other as contending with the challenges we all know, including existential ones like climate change, pandemic disease, AI and other disruptive technologies, and global imbalances.

This century will not be owned by one country or another, one cabal of oligarchs or another. If that is the story of the 21st C, we all lose. We are in this together; we need to find ways to cooperate in the face of the gravest threats facing humanity. As Benjamin Franklin said 250 years ago, at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we will all hang separately.”

Illustration by Milo Winter, 1919 edition

In case you have forgotten the parable or missed it entirely, here is a short and to-the-point summary courtesy of Google AI:

The Story

• A man discovers his goose lays a golden egg every day, making him rich.

• He becomes greedy, believing the goose’s insides must be full of gold.

• He kills the goose to get all the gold at once but finds it empty.

• He is left with nothing, having destroyed the source of his fortune.

The Moral

• Greed leads to loss.

• Be content with what you have, or you risk losing it all.

Aesop is the epitome of “a dead white man”, those traditional figures in the history of Europe who allegedly imposed a deadening hand on our understanding of the past and the present. This is obviously a crude characterization of the post-modern critique of “Western Civ”, but in the case of Aesop, it has some relevance. First of all, there is no proof that Aesop ever existed, though the fables have been attributed to him since antiquity. He was purportedly a slave and storyteller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE. Second, and more importantly, many of us - perhaps even most - imbibed Aesop’s fables in childhood, at the most impressionable age. Their simple moral messages were, in a way, part of the foundation of our culture as individuals and societies. Aesop’s fables resonate with the Bible’s New Testament, not the Old. They are unlike the gruesome fairy tales of the Grimm Brothers, which read so medieval, so focused on magic, suspicion and fear. Aesop’s fables are positive, sensible cautionary tales that foster community rather than prejudice.

Whether Aesop actually existed or not, he was really solid. Aesop was evidently a conservative. I am a progressive. But still I draw inspiration from this possibly mythic figure of antiquity and have since my childhood.

Have we forgotten what Aesop taught us? It’s called ethics. It’s called morality. It’s called responsibility and stewardship.

Some key folks seem to have missed this fable and most of Aesop’s others, like the “The Tortoise and the Hare”. America’s governing elite - the Trump Regime and its supporters, the tech bros and their admirers, the financial capitalists and their servants in the public and private sphere. They ignore or disregard Aesop’s lessons. Some seem to embrace the magical thinking of the Brothers Grimm, exploiting fear and small children for nefarious ends. “Secretary of War” Hegseth is openly medieval in his thinking (and I don’t mean Thomas Aquinas). “Move fast and break things” is the antithesis of Aesop. It is, in fact, the antithesis of morality and responsibility. But it seems to be the ethos of our time.

The examples are legion - seriously, too numerous to enumerate. Elon Musk’s salary at Tesla/X-AI is an obscenity. The Trump Regime’s illegal war of aggression in Iran has caused nothing but death and destruction, leaving all of us worse off than before. Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS is just one of countless cases of self-dealing at the expense of U.S. citizens and the republic. Crypto is just crap from end to end, a giant con. The pattern extends across the American political and economic elite. The entire Trump Regime is composed of grifters and conmen (rather few women are left) drawn from many quarters, including Wall Street. The Supreme Court majority is openly open to corruption, though they insist their opinions cannot be bought by lavish gifts from interested parties. Are there any billionaires to admire? Warren Buffet, I suppose. He’s 95 years old. Certainly not Jamie Dimon. None of the tech moguls. Bill Gates, who made a show of his devotion to humanitarian causes, has been shown to be a fraud in his personal relationships and his commitment to sustainability.

This morning I read two excellent essays on the short-sighted destructiveness of Trump and his Regime. Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times described the chilling loneliness of Trump, who has fostered an atmosphere of political violence in America that he is now using to justify his further abuses of office. And which has revealed his craven lack of courage.

NYT Bouie Loneliness

Mary Geddry, in her Substack, showcased the astonishing irresponsibility of the Trump Regime’s ill-planned and illegal war of aggression against Iran. (I cannot recommend a better daily read than Geddry’s Substack, btw.)

Geddry Unlimited Ammo

But I want to take the case to a more elementary level. To go back to what we have always known about Donald Trump, the most basic fact about the man:

Trump is a conman. A bullshit artist. And his behavior is, first and foremost, that of a grifter, gaming the system for his own benefit at the expense of others, his “marks”.

We are all his marks.

The Trump Regime is in this respect a pure grift. It is about fraud and extortion. It is also an authoritarian enterprise that undermines the rule of law and democracy and poisons our national life. It is also an exercise in destroying the social safety net and the system of regulation that preserves our health and environment. It is also an aggressive disruptor of international relations that employs the U.S. military for narrow, predatory, and ultimately futile ends.

It is all those things, but at base it is a huge con job.

And that is the essence of the problem. Trump is the proverbial dog who caught the car. He is the serial grifter who has played the system all his life, who has now attained a level of self-dealing and fraud so enormous that he is destroying the system that enabled the grift. He can’t contain his greed, no matter what it means. He needs the con, the fraudulent adulation and corrupt self-enrichment, just to live.

Systemic destruction is a by-product of the grift. Because con artists have total faith in the resilience of the systems they exploit. Without the system, their schemes collapse and they self-destruct. Sometimes one has to wonder with Trump: Does he care what happens to the world once he departs it? Does he even love his children? I think these are open questions, but let’s give Trump the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say he is an amoral con rather than an immoral monster. It makes very little difference in the real world. Trump is so solipsistic, so greedy, so unbounded that he is destroying the systems that sustain life in America and the world. Civic life. Social life. Physical life.

Of course, Trump is not acting alone. He is enabled, but not just enabled, by those around him in the White House, the U.S. Congress and Government, and the business community. They are accomplices, not just lieutenants. They embody the short-term-ism, the zero-sum-ism, the rapacious selfishness, self-regard and greed that so permeates American culture in this century.

This is nowhere more evident than in our unrestrained drive to “win” the AI race. Geo-strategic grifters claim we cannot afford any restraints based on public interest or reasonable caution, because restraint and caution might cause us to “lose” the race to China. More importantly, the big names in AI - Anthropic, Open AI, Google, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and (perhaps) Musk - are driven by pure ambition, arrogance and avarice. They seek domination, pure and simple, without any regard for the systemic consequences. After the first few billions, the whole thing has to be personal, untethered to wealth, more about measuring oneself against rivals and enjoying the sense of dominance. According to most outside AI critics, these tech billionaires are flirting with the destruction of human society and even humanity. They simply do not care.

So Trump and the Silicon Valley moguls have found common cause in gaming the system while destroying it. We should not be surprised. The bigger question is what we do to stop them, and how we prevent this happening again. The temptation will always be there. It always has been. America’s irresponsible, amoral elite is not more evil than others in the past who set out to dominate those around them. It’s just that technology and the scale of their selfish endeavors have rendered the impact systemic in ways it never could be before. And it seems that, to their minds at least, they are just getting started.

In addition to Aesop’s fables, Dr. Seuss drove home some very basic lessons of morality and sustainability that continue to guide my thinking. Not all the books; One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish lacks any real moral message that I can discern. Instead, I came across the most important of Dr. Seuss’s parables as an adult, reading to my small sons:

Copyright: Collins

According to Wikipedia: The Lorax is a children’s book written by Dr. Seuss and published in 1971. It chronicles the plight of the environment and the Lorax, the main character, who “speaks for the trees” and confronts the Once-ler, a business magnate who causes environmental destruction. The story is commonly recognized as a fable concerning the danger of capitalism and humanity’s greed causing destruction of the natural environment.

I don’t know how many times I have read The Lorax. 50 sounds reasonable, probably an undercount. I love the story, and my sons also loved it. One of them grew up to be an atmospheric chemist, an environmental scientist who studies pollution. They are both devoted to sustainability and social equity.

The main character, the Lifting Lorax, had an unforgettable line that recurs in the book: “I speak for the trees.” It is emblematic of the sad course of human events over the 55 years since the book was published that it is not enough now just to “speak for the trees.” The trees are important, essential even. Our forests are in grave danger, including the Amazon Rainforest, part of an entire, complex system of distributing energy over the face of planet Earth that is being stressed and potentially broken by global warming.

The potential - perhaps now likely - consequences are not small or temporary. They are grave and long-lasting.

It is not just “The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs” that we might kill. It is the forests that give us the air we need to breathe, the ocean currents that feed us and sustain life across vast swathes of territory in high latitudes and low.

Our great fossil fuel grift could kill the planet as we know it, greatly narrow the margin for human existence. If nuclear war and AI destruction don’t get us first, the stalking problem of global warming - which we have consistently failed to grasp and address - is coming for us. The resistance to environmental regulation and combating global warming is perhaps the most destructive, persistent grift of all. Little wonder that Trump and his Regime have embraced it with such fervor.

But there is hope. We need fundamental change, beginning here in America. We need to accept our responsibility for sustaining systems, for containing selfish exploitation and shutting down the conmen, grifters, and tech bros.

We need to read the simple stories and books of our childhood and embrace the lessons they taught us. Aesop’s fables. The Lorax. The New Testament parables and other religious texts. They are not childish things to be left behind. They are part of the system that sustains life in this country and the world.

This will be a short article, and I won’t be posting much for a while longer. I am currently traveling with my wife and older son in southern China. Now that we are midway through our journey, I have a very simple message that I feel compelled to convey:

America and China both suffer from the distance that we have put between us. We need to know and understand each other better. Even if our systems of government differ - indeed, because they differ - it is especially important that we establish and nurture interpersonal contacts and get to know each other’s countries first-hand. Both sides are responsible for pushing us apart, but our side bears most of the blame.

Visit China.

Most Americans I know who have visited China came here 10, 20, even 30 years ago. If that’s you, it’s time to visit again. If you have never been to China, you don’t know what you’re missing. And you might not be able to understand the world of the 21st Century.

I didn’t expect to see many Americans and other Westerners on this trip, but the reality has come as a shock. There were a fair number of Americans in Hong Kong, almost none in Macau, and - as far as I can tell - zero in Xiamen and the Tulou districts of Nanjing County, Fujian. These are all hugely popular tourist destinations. There are throngs of Chinese tourists and many foreign visitors. Just no Americans.

A caveat is needed for Xiamen, in particular. There may be Chinese-American visitors here that haven’t registered in my perception. Xiamen and Fujian Province sent the world, including America, more immigrants than any other part of China. These overseas Chinese communities generally maintain ties with their ancestral villages and clans. This is especially notable right now - today is the last day of the Qingming Festival, the time for cleaning the graves of ancestors and reinforcing clan ties. According to the Chinese news, almost 140 million people traveled home for the holiday this year, 17% more than last year.

Qingming was impossible to miss in the Fujian countryside. We saw many large gatherings in Nanjing County, where extended families - mainly Hakka - gathered to clean graves, venerate their forebears at ancestral temples, and hold communal feasts. These Hakka communities historically lived in large fortified communal structures of rammed earth known as “Tulous”. Natalie, Ted and I are inside a large, 800-year-old Tulou in the photo at the top of this article. It was all amazing to see.

Travel in China has its complications, but it is easier, safer, healthier and more comfortable than comparable destinations in Asia - for example, Vietnam or Thailand - and much easier in every way than India. China’s regime is not democratic, but nor are Vietnam’s or Thailand’s. Polls show that MOST Americans do NOT want war with China and are not even anti-Chinese. So why do Americans stay away? Ideology. Media coverage that to my mind is distorted, exaggerating risks here while ignoring greater risks elsewhere. The media and the foreign policy establishment - The Blob - also fixate on the China “threat” and portray our relationship as a rivalry, a contest, a zero-sum game. This is a terrible and potentially dangerous message to both sides of this vitally important relationship.

It’s not that I want to encounter a lot more Americans on my China travels. There is a surreal but somewhat pleasant glow that comes from the feeling of being far from America as Trump rages like a madman and America and Israel sow death a destruction in the Middle East. Still, Americans and Chinese would do well to work harder at knowing each other and building person-to-person contacts. Americans could do so much better on this score.

And guess what - you’ll learn a lot and have a wonderful time if you do.

Take the plunge. Visit China. Now.

Last night, as the clock ticked down on Trump’s Monday night deadline to destroy Iran’s civilian energy infrastructure unless Tehran “opened” the Strait of Hormuz - and ticked down more quickly toward the Monday morning opening of the markets in New York - Trump chose TACO. Whew!

Here is Trump’s post on Truth Social - a classic of the genre, our deranged dictator’s favorite means of sharing his boasts, memes, official acts, moods, white flags and random crap he finds online:

A few points. Trump “is please” and can’t spell “which”. He’s flaming again. The post closes with Trump’s signature “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”, like a Greek terrorist proclamation or a psychopathic ransom note in a Hollywood movie. The new “deadline” for the “success of ongoing meetings” falls after markets close on Friday.

And Trump’s obviously lying about the talks with Tehran. Iran immediately denied that any such “very good and productive conversations” between the US and Iran have taken place “over the last two days.” Everybody believes Tehran, not Trump, but we didn’t need to wait for Iran’s denial to know that Trump was lying, polishing the turd of his capitulation. Yes, we’re all breathing a sigh of relief. The mad king has decided - for now - not to take his war crimes to the next level and escalate his illegal and ill-planned war toward massive regional and global destruction. That’s a good thing, as far as it goes.

Trump obviously lacks credibility, and nothing he says can be trusted. Paul Krugman made this “credibility” point very nicely in a quick Substack post entitled “Adventures in Fantasy Diplomacy”:

Krugman Adventures in Fantasy Diplomacy

But the Trump Regime has once again shown something more profound and long-lasting then a propensity to lie: apart from the capacity to use brute force, “to move fast and break things”, the United States has been shown to be weak, unserious, unable even to think straight. There are no decision-making procedures that can be described to the public, no compliance with constitutional arrangements, no clarity of means and aims, no adherence to (or even acknowledgement of) domestic and international law, no attempt to enlist support of allies and partners except through extortion.

Trump has power but no authority. As a consequence of the Trump Regime’s arbitrary and blunt-force approach to everything from immigration enforcement to election rigging to extorting money from American universities and corporations and foreign partners, the US Government can only obtain compliance through using force or threatening to use force. It is a costly, self-defeating and ultimately self-destructive approach. With Trump spinning out of control in his second term as President of the United States, America has power but no authority.

I don’t use AI much, but here is how Google AI described the difference between power and authority:

Power is the raw ability or capacity to influence behavior, often through force or coercion. Authority is the legitimate right to exercise that power, granted by positions, laws, or social structures. AI

The word “authority” has many definitions, ranging from a person who is a credible expert on a given topic to the power under American law to execute a particular function. I am more concerned about a broader, political definition that is very closely related to the concept of “legitimacy”. I have been harping for years on the crisis of legitimacy confronting the United States and other Western polities. It is also a crisis - or a collapse - of authority. Still, I never expected the situation to intensify so rapidly and dramatically, nor to pose such an existential threat. The threat to the European Union is especially grave; I will take that up further in another post or two down the road.

Here I will focus on Trump and the United States. And, oddly, China. Before I do, I want to underscore that this is not the classic “credibility argument”, which I do not endorse in any way. Daniel Larison has trashed that flimsy prop used to justify entering into - and then doubling down on - stupid American wars in a fine Substack post from this morning:

Eunomia Dreadful Credibility Argument

My point is more fundamental: the Trump Regime represents a late and dramatic stage in the collapse of the legitimacy of America’s established order in domestic and foreign affairs.

Both “authority” in the sense that I use it here and the broader concept of “legitimacy” are vague, hard to pin down, difficult to measure in public opinion surveys or quantify by other means. They are perhaps easiest to grasp by studying history for patterns, for lessons that can inform our assessment of present conditions. This kind of wide-ranging and impressionistic historical analysis leads me to conclude that we are well past the tipping point - our system will not return to its earlier, admittedly imperfect equilibrium, but will be succeeded by something new and different. It has taken us decades to get here, in the scheme so often connected with the famous passage from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

In time, a new order will take hold in America and the world. The question is when, and after how much pain?

China and Chinese history may have something to say about this.

I have been fascinated by China since childhood. My first big school report, in junior high, was on China, drawing on the extensive coverage of the country at the time of Nixon’s historic visit and opening to Mao and the People’s Republic. I studied Chinese in graduate school and took many courses in Chinese and East Asian history. I intended to specialize in the country and the region in the Foreign Service. Things did not turn out that way, but my fascination with China remains.

That said, I am certainly no authority on China and Chinese history.

But I am intrigued by a classic concept from Chinese history that seems to capture this moment in America and America’s engagement with the world: the Mandate of Heaven. There was a strong cosmological dimension to what one might call the ideology of imperial China, which - particularly in ritual - located the emperor as the contact point between heaven and earth, with legitimacy granted, sustained and ultimately withdrawn from above, from heaven. In this vertical construct, proper imperial conduct - proper performance of ritual, proper social relationships, proper behavior in Confucian terms - was instrumental in sustaining the Mandate of Heaven, the mandate to rule on earth. This proper order would be reflected in the emperor’s subjects, in peace and prosperity. It was a system that enshrined legitimacy in a hierarchical scheme that many see reflected in the rule of Xi Jinping today. Across the millennia of Chinese history, it was generally quite stable.

The Mandate of Heaven was hard to pin down, like “authority” and “legitimacy”. It is a little like US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s 1964 definition of pornography: "I know it when I see it". It was natural for rebels in China to declare that a ruling dynasty had lost the Mandate of Heaven to justify their rebellion. This happened most notably in the mid-19th Century, when the Taipings rose against the Qing (or Manchu) Dynasty in one of the most devastating civil wars in human history (1850-1864). With some European assistance, the Qing eventually suppressed the Taiping rebels and survived for several decades, though the dynasty never truly recovered. In earlier Chinese history, however, some dynasties did recover from such serious disruptions, thereby gaining a new lease on life and demonstrating, it would seem, that they retained the Mandate of Heaven. Two of China’s greatest dynasties, the Han and the Tang, followed this pattern:

The Early (or Western) Han (202 BCE-9 CE) and the Later (or Eastern) Han (25-220 CE), separated by the Xin Dynasty (9-23 CE).

The Tang (618-907 CE), interrupted by an interregnum (690-705) and the An Lushan rebellion, a civil war that lasted from 755 to 763.

So the Mandate of Heaven is a sort of vibe thing, mainly evident in retrospect after a dynasty has collapsed and the Mandate has been lost. Next month I will visit a great monument to Koxinga in Xiamen, Fujian. His story illustrates the shape-shifting, ex-post-facto nature of the Mandate of Heaven. In the middle of the 17th Century, Koxinga fought valiantly on his own behalf and that of the embattled Ming Dynasty against the expanding Qing. He swore allegiance to the the Ming Longwu Emperor, only to abandon him and establish his own state based on the southeast coast of China and Taiwan, from which he expelled the Dutch. By the time the Longwu Emperor bestowed on Koxinga that title (meaning “lord granted with imperial surname”) in 1646, the Ming Empire had already collapsed before the Qing onslaught. In theory, the Ming, driven from their capitals in Beijing and Nanjing, had lost the Mandate of Heaven. But had they? Koxinga fought on, as did the Ming. In 1650, Koxinga pledged allegiance to the Yongli Emperor of the Southern Ming and was elevated to the status of Prince of Yanping. He ultimately died after many victories and a short illness in 1662, at the age of 37, having completed the conquest of Taiwan.

At what point did the Ming lose the Mandate of Heaven? History would ultimately set the date as 1644, when the Ming fled from Beijing. But it must have looked rather different at the time, at least for some like Koxinga. The Southern Ming, a collection of states ruled by descendants of the Ming imperial family, held on until 1662.

Just as the loss of the Mandate of Heaven was a process best analyzed and diagnosed once a dynasty expired, the assumption of the Mandate of Heaven was a process best recognized and evaluated once a new dynasty established its rule across large swaths of Chinese territory. The transition period was often violent and sometimes lengthy, with potential claimants to the Mandate of Heaven contending for supremacy.

What does this long digression about the Mandate of Heaven say about America’s current situation, and how does it relate to power, authority, and legitimacy under the Trump Regime? A few points come to my mind:

• The Trump Regime has lost the Mandate of Heaven, through its abuse of power, failure to act with proper authority and lack of legitimacy.

• This loss is about more than Trump or the current administration; it is the culmination of a process that began slowly with Reagan and then the end of the Cold War in 1991, galloped ahead in the Iraq War and the 2008 financial crisis, and has since been accelerating over the past decade.

• The established order that is failing is, domestically, the New Deal and the basic foundation of modern American democratic governance based on increasing equality and inclusion, and, internationally, the “rules-based order” of institutions and norms to regulate foreign relations that was created in the aftermath of World War II.

• We are currently in an an iteregnum, with no certainty when - or if - a new order will claim America’s Mandate of Heaven whether at home or abroad.

• The existential threats facing humanity - global warming and climate change, pandemic disease, artificial intelligence, etc. - render this interregnum particularly dangerous and potentially catastrophic.

These are almost random thoughts on, as I have noted, pretty vague and squishy topics and terms. The ideas need further work, that’s for sure. I would not be surprised if a reader with expertise in Chinese history took exception to my characterization of the Mandate of Heaven. I would be happy to hear from a real authority. It may or may not be a useful concept to apply to 21st Century America. As you can see, I think that it is. I have a feeling that it is. I will be giving this more thought and sharing my ideas as they develop. But for now, I believe we have passed a tipping point. The American regime as we have known it for almost a century has lost the Mandate of Heaven.

It’s like the end of almost every recent horror movie, from Get Out to The Menu to who knows how many other titles (I saw these two, but I generally hate the genre). A kind of mini-dystopian fantasy where sadistic elite low-lifes torture and kill countless others before torching themselves and all around them in a kind of Viking funerary ritual. Only this time it’s real and it involves all of us.

It’s the Shysterdämmerung of the Trump Regime. That’s the big story that scares me most of all. A version of Rick Wilson’s warning that now reaches back nearly a decade: “Everything that Trump touches dies”.

These days we’re all focused on the Iran War. It isn’t easy to claim that everybody is missing the big picture when we’re talking about war. No “forest-for-the-trees” discussion seems appropriate, and I don’t want us to stop focusing on the illegal and disastrous war of aggression that Israel and the US have launched in the Middle East.

But there is a larger leitmotif that pervades everything that the Trump Regime does both domestically and internationally. A short-term rush to self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment that amounts to an effective death wish. For all involved. For all of us.

The evidence of grifting and willful destruction by the Trump Regime is all around us. The Iran War is just the latest and most dramatic step in a loathsome march of corruption and cruelty. The extortion and self-dealing by Trump and his family with crypto, high-tech American exporters, foreign investors and Gulf sheiks and sovereign wealth fund managers, all while allowing loyal sub-grifters like Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick to line their own pockets. The Trump Regime’s crusade against renewable energy and climate science and voluptuous indulgence of petroleum-fueled fantasies. The radical authoritarian agenda of Russell Vought and Steven Miller. The constant warfare on our weak social safety net, combining frontal attacks like the Big Beautiful Bill Act and persistent guerrilla tactics in executive orders, regulations, and court cases to rob the poor to further enrich the already rich. The ongoing assault on undocumented migrants, documented migrants and even American citizens who come into the crosshairs of Trump’s masked DHS thugs.

Trump and his lieutenants lie constantly about each despicable thing they are doing, but they are not coy about their overall intent. Indeed, they are brazenly open in glorifying self-enrichment and killing. They especially love cruelty, killing and death. How many times has Trump threatened to rain down death and destruction on an entire country that defied his will? North Korea, Colombia, Nigeria, Yemen, Mexico, Iran. There are surely more. He doesn’t just love threatening others who are weaker and potentially vulnerable to his murderous intent. He seems to luxuriate in the vision of dominance, destruction and death.

Trump is not a man of religion or any moral principles, and most of his team of grifters and billionaires are similarly amoral. They live for the moment, snatching all they can while the snatching is good and figuring they can somehow escape the consequences without worrying a lot about the day after tomorrow. Everything is laced with bigotry and misogyny, on the (sadly) perhaps reasonable assumption that the weak and oppressed will never pose a threat to the rich and powerful. A few of Trump’s henchmen (and more of his supporters) seem devoted to distorted perversions of Christianity focused on Old Testament vengeance and the Book of Revelations. One of these is the so-called Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth. Hegseth’s combination of quasi-medieval religion, a sadistic animal-torturing-teenager vibe and a gamer’s detachment from reality are deeply creepy and highly dangerous. Hegseth and others, like Mike Huckabee, seem to embrace an end-of-days fervor and lunatic beliefs like the “Rapture”. Then there are the billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel who seek some kind of physical or perhaps techno-digital immortality that is entirely detached from the fate of whatever remains of humankind, holed up in some refuge on Mars or a well-armed and isolated island.

It is sort of unfair to compare these vile opportunists to the heroes and gods of Wagner’s Ring. There are some similarities, though. The Ring begins with the theft of the Ring of the Nibelungen, which imparts the power to rule the world. Even if Brünnhilde, Siegfried et al. are not driven by the same crude appetites as Trump and his hordes, the parallel is hard to miss. Wagner drew inspiration from Norse and Germanic myths and ancient Greek dramatic traditions. It is the stuff of tragedy. Complex, thoughtful, truly epic.

Götterdämmerung is a tragedy of hubris and betrayal and jealousy and vengeance. The music is dark but glorious, the themes and passions grand.

Trump’s Shysterdämmerung, on the other hand, is cheap and tawdry, like the man and his minions. More Toby Keith and Kid Rock than classic operatic sopranos, tenors and basses. The Shysterdämmerung is the story of careless nepo-babies, religious charlatans and confidence men reveling in cruelty and ripping off everyone and everything they can lay their fingers on. In a sort of late 20th Century American television way, Trump imagines he has the power to rule the world in short episodes with the best ratings - only the best. It’s the kind of Ring one might expect from Trump, with his bizarre fascination with Al Capone and Hannibal Lecter. It is a quintessentially American and terribly sad opera buffa.

But unlike Wagner’s Ring, performed over four days on the world’s grandest opera stages and closing with Götterdämmerung, Trump’s Shysterdämmerung is playing out in real time, in the real world, with real consequences and countless victims.

Just as the gods and heroes in Wagner’s Ring did not set out to destroy Valhalla and the world around them, Trump and his Regime have not set out to bring forth the apocalypse. At least not most of them, anyway. They just like to tease the end of days, nuclear war, death and gore and ruthless domination. Frivolously, absent-mindedly, with a constant smirk and a sense of impunity.

Trump & Co. set out to grab all they could, to humiliate those who stood in their way and then enjoy wealth and power untethered to accountability or any sense of morality. To take a measure of sadistic enjoyment from the suffering of those weak and “unworthy” without bringing the whole set and all the world crashing down in flames around them. But Trump and his minions are fools, the slaves of their passions, the characters of a kind of tragedia buffa that neither Wagner nor Verdi nor Bizet ever bothered to invent. It just wouldn’t make sense. But it is our reality.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Lifelong Learning is a great thing. The term is typically used to describe a program offered by a university or other institutions, aimed at the continuing education of seniors. I regularly take the opportunity to speak with groups of seniors in Bellingham and around Puget Sound, generally on topics related to transatlantic relations and European security. Just last week I participated in such a program in my home town, Gig Harbor. As usual, the audience was punctual, curious, well-informed and full of comments and questions. I have been asked to speak via Zoom to a Lifelong Learning group in the Washington, DC, area later this year, and I am looking forward to it - especially since many of the participants will likely have backgrounds like mine in government service.

Lifelong Learning is also a habit, one to be cultivated in parallel with another best practice: Unlearning. For someone like me, who spent more than three decades as an American diplomat, Learning and Unlearning are two sides of the same coin. I learned many things over my professional career, important lessons about places and people and the way things work. When I retired in 2015, I suddenly became free to express my personal views in public, building on the lessons I had learned as a public servant. In articles, classroom lectures and seminars, and public speaking appearances, I have conveyed my personal analysis along with recommendations and opinions that were purely my own. This, I believe, is also a form of public service - sharing assessments and judgments formed over the course of many years as a foreign policy “practitioner”.

Over the past decade, I have read more - more widely and deeply - than I could when I was busy as an American official. I have spoken to more people - and a wider variety of people - than I could as an American official, especially in the latter part of my career. I have listened more - more patiently and more openly - than I did as an American official. And I have thought more - more deeply and more critically - than I did as an American official. This is what Lifelong Learning has meant to me, and it has enriched my understanding of a wide range of topics, both policy-relevant and utterly niche or even trivial.

Unlearning - I would even call it Lifelong Unlearning - has been just as important as Learning, for two reasons. It’s not about freeing up disk space.

First, the more I learned through research, discussion, and reflection since leaving the Foreign Service, the more I realized I needed to discard certain assumptions and habits of thought that I had developed during my official career. Unlike many of my former colleagues, I had never been a “true believer”. More than most, I was skeptical of many of the aims and projects of American foreign policy throughout my time representing the United States abroad. I always worked effectively and honestly as a diplomat and carried out my mission faithfully. But as described in an earlier post on this Substack, I sought out assignments and roles that would minimize the cognitive dissonance and moral dilemmas posed by the disconnect between my thinking and Washington policy.

That said, upon leaving the Service, it took time to detect and evaluate my professional habits of thought and decide which to retain and which to discard, to examine the lenses that I had worn for three decades to understand how they had distorted my perceptions. Gradually I adjusted or abandoned more and more of the framework I had employed as a diplomat to analyze events and policies. The impulse was always to go further in revising my take on America and the world. To be more “revisionist” in my thinking.

Meanwhile, over these same years, America and the world were also changing rapidly. This is the second reason that Lifelong Unlearning has been so important to me. It was easier - indeed imperative - to change assumptions and habits of thought when they no longer fit rapidly evolving conditions in international affairs. This created a kind of positive feedback loop between re-examination of my beliefs about foreign affairs and the transformations underway in the outside world. I believe this is a virtuous cycle, even as I am aware of the need for a certain caution and balance.

The dialectic process of Lifelong Learning and Unlearning on a foundation of professional diplomatic experience is what produces the views I share on this Substack. I want them to be provocative - to provoke thought. This morning I went over my posts from the past two years, and I see that I return often to certain topics. One of these is the topic I discussed in Gig Harbor last week in a Lifelong Learning program on “Ukraine and the Future of European Security”. My thinking on these issues has generally been outside the mainstream and continues to evolve. This led me to set aside the video on the topic provided by the Foreign Policy Association and instead present my own PowerPoint, followed by a long discussion with the audience. It went well.

I take the same approach to Lifelong Learning programs as I take for my classes with undergraduate and graduate students. At this point I am no longer a “practitioner” but not quite a “provocateur”. I want to be poised somewhere between the two, to stimulate creative thinking about America and the world. I would define my aims as interrogate, integrate, imagine and innovate: interrogate assumptions, integrate ideas, imagine alternative futures and innovate recommendations. That seems to work with audiences of all ages.

Looking ahead to my presentation to the Lifelong Learning group near DC this fall, I intend to try out a topic that I plan to teach in Rome next spring, alongside my usual European security offering: “The Mediterranean in a Post-Atlantic World”. It weaves together disparate trends and ideas, exploring the links between them. I will swirl the longue durée together with the latest headlines, sketch out big ideas about change in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean spaces, trying to drive Lifelong Learning and Unlearning in a kind of double helix. It just might hang together coherently. I will try to be provocative, even iconoclastic, with what could be a tough audience with incisive questions and comments. That should help me prepare for my students in Rome.

That should be fun. Lifelong Learning and Unlearning should be enlightening, rewarding, enriching - and also good, clean intellectual fun.

Donald Trump loves talking about death. Killing others, that is, using the American forces at his disposal. His wild and vicious vocabulary often features threats or celebrations of death, and he also savors the irony, as he sees it, of just how many people he has killed. In speaking of his fabulist plans to negotiate a sweetheart Venezuela-type deal with Iran, Trump observed that “Most of the people we had in mind are dead,” mixing a tinge of potential policy regret with a ton of self-satisfied pride. He even used the State of the Union address - not always dignified but usually serious and G-rated - to preen and rant and cuss and wallow in gruesome tales of physical cruelty and death.

Trump is fascinated by deaths that he inflicts, but he is bothered by the deaths of American service members. They disrupt his schedule, they sully his achievements, they are just so inconvenient and distracting to him. As they were last week in Delaware when Trump refused to doff his BS baseball cap for the dignified transfer ceremony of the first Americans killed in the illegal war of aggression that he and Bibi Netanyahu unleashed against Iran. He is fascinated by killing, but more interested in the drapes he installed at the White House and his new big-box ballroom than in American casualties, whether military or civilian.

When he is embarrassed by the way in which the instruments of his power have killed innocents, or unsure of how to spin the killing to his advantage, Trump becomes evasive. His first instinct, of course, is to lie and blame the victims, as with Renee Good and Alex Pretti killed by US immigration agents in Minneapolis, or the hundred-plus elementary schoolgirls in Minab, Iran slaughtered by a negligently targeted US Tomahawk missile. When his transparent fabrications fail, Trump retreats to ignorance and blame-shifting. After falsely asserting that Iran had bombed the girls school in Minab, that they were just sloppy or everybody had Tomahawks, Trump landed on one of his favorites: “I don’t know about it.” He just wants to change the subject to focus on the killings he can celebrate and other features of his imaginary “new golden age”.

Trump is not the only voice in his Regime that celebrates killing. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who styles himself “Secretary of War”, sometimes outbids his boss in his grotesque glorification of death and brutality. Every day brings a new set of obscene testosterone-infused celebrations of killing and domination. Most recently, Hegseth declared that US forces would “give no quarter” in their illegal attacks on Iran, a clear violation of the Geneva Convention and the laws of armed conflict. Heaping war crime on war crime in his rhetoric and imagination. It is unclear whether Hegseth’s words are anything like an order - the Secretary of Defense does not directly command US forces - but it has not been hard for the Trump Regime to find commanders willing to carry out illegal orders. Blowing civilian boats out of the water off South America and killing survivors, leaving Iranian sailors to drown at sea off Sri Lanka after sinking their ship - these are clear violations of the laws of armed conflict that do not seem to bother Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Caine or the regional combatant commanders in charge of the forces responsible.

Whether or not Hegseth’s incitement to war crimes is carried out by American forces, he clearly savors the idea of killing and inflicting pain. This, coupled with the man’s embrace of a medieval mindset that glorifies the Crusades and a kind of debased, “warrior-ethos” Christianity, is repulsive and frightening.

So how is it that so many Americans - at least a substantial minority - are not repulsed? There is widespread concern that our war of aggression against Iran is unwise and poorly planned, that it will cost us in the end. I get that; I agree. But there seems to be a much smaller portion of the American population that believes such unprovoked violence and destruction is fundamentally wrong, especially when carried out with such debased and inhuman pleasure by such brutal and careless men. This is the kind of thing that leaves me feeling like a stranger in my own land. I was away for more than three decades, but I regularly came back and never lost touch with America and American culture. At least I didn’t think so. When did so many of us come to accept that powerful men would openly revel in the killing of others? When did inhuman delight in cruelty and death become a part of American Christianity? How can we get up each morning, set this kind of talking - and thinking - aside and just go about our day?

Trump is almost 80 years old, and seems to be decaying from the inside out. Look at his hands, look at his face. The dead look in his eyes. Trump has always used cruel and crude language to celebrate brutality. Yet as his own earthly demise approaches, I fear that his self-absorption and fascination with death - coupled with his huge power as the president of the United States - make him far more dangerous than anyone else on the planet. He surrounds himself with sycophants and sickos like Hegseth. What is to constrain this depraved madman from indulging his perverse fascination with death and destruction? Are we really just going to carry on and read about it in tomorrow’s news?

Americans are very sloppy with the words “ally” and “alliance.” We use them inappropriately to describe relationships among our adversaries, mirroring or projecting our own approach to international relations and maintaining global hegemony. This is a form of American solipsism; Trump and the Trump Regime are its grotesque fulfillment more than an aberration. At the same time, the US is very much bearing the cost of its bilateral alliance with Israel as Netanyahu guides the conduct and aims of the joint American-Israeli war of aggression against Iran. And Europe is feeling the cost of its multinational alliance with the United States as it gets drawn into a conflict it did not want to happen, let alone to fight.

BRICS - No Allies Here

The image at the top is the “family photo” of the 2025 BRICS summit in Brazil. None of the countries represented here are allies, with the exception of Russia and Belarus (Belarus was an observer and is not a BRICS member). BRICS is not an alliance. Bizarrely, American commentators love to belittle the BRICS forum for the lack of clear alignment among its members. Nor are the countries in this photo allies of each other in other ways. Despite their strong and growing partnership, Russia and China are not allies; China’s only real ally is North Korea (which did not attend). Russia and China were not and are not allies of Iran. Turkey and Thailand are allies of the United States, at least nominally, not of any of the BRICS countries. Washington has designated Brazil, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, and Kenya as “major non-NATO” allies, but that just describes a grab-bag of special privileges mainly related to arms sales: they are not really America’s allies.

Chas Freeman, a very distinguished former American diplomat and senior official, has been trying for years to prod Americans toward understanding the nuances of international relationships in the Confucian spirit that “the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.” Here is one of his broadest pieces on “Diplomatic Relationships and Strategies”; I would recommend reading any of the many other speeches and papers at his website, chasfreeman.net, as well:

Chas Freeman Diplomatic Relationships

As Chas notes,

Alliances are formal pledges by members expressing broad mutual strategic commitments to each other. In a multinational alliance, a challenge to one ally presupposes a sympathetic and supportive response by all the others. In a bilateral alliance, one ally protects the other.

Alliances are only one form of partnership that can exist between states to protect and pursue common interests, and indeed a rather rare one. Chas would call the relationship between China and Russia an “entente”.

So why do American pundits and the media, as well as American officials, always describe Russia and China as Iran’s close allies? Why do they always describe the US and Saudi Arabia as close allies? Why do they snidely ask what kind of allies Tehran has that don’t rush to its defense in the current war? They are repeating the same mistake as they made when Russia ultimately “failed” to intervene militarily on behalf of Assad. Or when China and Russia “failed” much more recently to rush to the defense of Maduro in Caracas. Or now Cuba.

Maduro did not have allies. Nor does Tehran have allies. It never did. That is one reason that the Iranian regime has behaved as it has in its region and beyond.

America’s Allies, America’s Enemies, and American Hegemony

The reason for this failure of analysis and even understanding is simple: the American foreign policy establishment is as American as apple pie, and if Washington believes (or used to believe) in the centrality of alliance relationships, that having allies was the key to effective foreign and security policy, then the same must hold true for others. Especially our adversaries. They used to be allied in the “axis of evil”. Now they are allied in the “axis of disruption” or whatever other axis the Washington commentariat has christened this year. Right?

No, actually wrong. This is a lie that many pundits, journos and officials must understand as such. They really must be too smart to believe it; I want to give them that much credit, at least. Yet they continue to peddle this simplistic pablum to the public and each other, year in and year out, through one crisis after another, as reality diverges ever further from this cartoonish fantasy. I find it in the New York Times and Foreign Affairs and broadcast news everyday, all over the place. It saturates discussion of the Iran War and every other confrontation and conflict.

Allies can be useful. Certainly external support in a war is useful. But true alliances are a rarity, especially in peacetime and even in war. They typically require a threatening adversary and a common threat perception, as they involve mutual accommodation among allies and shared obligations in the event of hostilities. Such conditions are especially hard to meet in peacetime. That’s one reason why US foreign policy in the post-Cold War period has prioritized defining adversaries rather than partners and focusing on threats rather than opportunities. This is the mindset baked into our national security state. Partnership is defined against common “threats”. It is in this framework that “peace through strength” becomes such a dead-end for others but such a boon to US hegemony. Security dilemmas flourish.

Valuing threats over opportunities and deterrence over cooperation feeds a security mindset and reinforces alliances. Allies become more useful, other kinds of partners less desirable, and cooperation with adversaries a kind of betrayal. This is why we always wrestle with the role of India, especially in the Quad - if India is not an ally, what can it be, and what kind of relationship do we have? Surely Delhi and Washington must be working toward a real alliance, right? (The disappointing answer is “no”.) America’s alliances were and still are a key element and mechanism of Washington’s global hegemony. Hegemony was and still is Washington’s overriding goal in international affairs, even under the predatory imperialist, Trump. (We need to ask whose interests are served by hegemony, but that’s too big a question to take up here.)

American Solipsism

Our refusal to understand alliances and their special place in American hegemonic policy is part of a general failure of imagination bordering on solipsism in the world view of the US foreign policy establishment. Over the last weeks and months, the effects of this failure have been increasingly dramatic.

As America and Israel propel the Middle East into a war that threatens to destabilize the region for years and cause severe harm to the planet in human, economic, and environmental terms, the Trump Regime, the American media and many Americans seem puzzled that foreign countries and places do not act the way they would expect. The course of events violates or even refutes their most basic (if often unstated) assumption: that the patterns of American thought and behavior hold true across the planet, unless they are somehow constrained by factors like poverty, political repression, or radical ideology. Swirling together a sound view of common humanity and the myth of American exceptionalism, Americans often assume that everyone wants what we want (whatever that is). Most importantly, the world wants to be like America; other countries are essentially little, poorer Americas in the making that have not yet reached our stage of perfection or at least achievement. Americans have little to learn from the outside world; the world follows us. There is a deep and (to my mind) immoral faith in some kind of grand convergence, where all the world realizes fulfillment in the mold of American aspirations. This mindset has something to do with religion, in my view. Countries that resolutely reject our way of doing things are victims of misguided leaders or fanatical ideologies; they should be contained and ultimately compelled to embrace “progress” and become more like us.

As with so much that is tawdry and destructive, the Trump Regime is more the grotesque fulfillment of American politics and policy rather than an aberration. While Trump himself is a fine (and exceedingly creepy) exemplar of American solipsism, my favorites these days have to be the Cartman and Kenny of American “diplomacy”, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Trump’s two “suits” (they always look well-groomed if a little dim-witted) shuttle from high-stakes negotiation on Ukraine to high-stakes negotiation on Gaza to high-stakes negotiation on Iran, exuding the essence of American solipsism in its purest, Trumpian form. Ignorant. Incurious. Fantasizing. Gullible. Demanding. Blackmailing. Unprincipled. Self-dealing.

If the consequences weren’t so dire, Witkoff’s remarks to Fox News about dealing with Iran on February 21 would have made me laugh rather than cry. Here is the story as it appeared in BBC:

"In his Fox interview, Witkoff said: I don't want to use the word 'frustrated'... because he [Trump] understands he's got plenty of alternatives, but he's curious as to why they haven't... I don't want to use the word 'capitulated', but why they haven't capitulated.

“Why, under this sort of pressure, with the amount of sea power and naval power that we have over there, why haven’t they come to us and said, ‘We profess that we don’t want a weapon, so here’s what we’re prepared to do?’”

The envoy added: “And yet it’s hard to sort of get them to that place.”

I think we all know that Trump would have capitulated under similar circumstances, and would have sold out America and even his own family to save his skin. It’s just so frustrating for Trump, Witkoff and Kushner to deal with these foreigners, so hard to understand them. They won’t be intimidated or bought off.

The Iran War and The Cost of Alliances

Alliances have benefits but they also have a cost. One reason that they are generally so rare in peacetime is that the cost usually comes due during wartime. As Chas Freeman puts it in the paper linked above:

Alliances are assets, but also liabilities of those who form them. Alliance members benefit from the deterrent effects of the expectation that they will not be alone in defending interests they share. But they are on call to assist each other in response to situations they may have had nothing to do with creating.

The US-Israeli alliance has never been as tight as it is right now. Chas Freeman has typically called the US-Israeli relationship a protectorate, and I don’t disagree, but for the past four years, at least, the tail has been wagging the dog. The US and Israel are now conducting a joint war of aggression against Iran, with coordinated military operations and drawing on closely shared intelligence. The execution appears to be fully joint, but it seems that Netanyahu and Israel have the lead in terms of strategy and strategic objectives.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that this war aims more at regime collapse than regime change. The scale of attacks against infrastructure, the large number of senior Iranian officials “decapitated”, the appeal to Kurdish and even Baluch separatists to join the fight: the aim seems to be the collapse of Iran and not just the Islamic Republic. As radical as regime change would be as an American objective, it might conceivably align with some articulated American interests in the region and those of our Gulf partners. Regime collapse would serve Israel and Israel alone, at high cost to all others in the Middle East and beyond.

Trump, always vain but always weak, can’t stand the suggestion that Netanyahu and Israel have the initiative and the lead in this joint war of aggression. It wounds his fragile ego and undermines his bid to appear strong. But just as Putin has “tapped Trump along” for well over a year in Ukraine, Netanyahu has played Trump in Iran. He did it last summer, and he is doing it now. The cost of America’s alliance with Israel greatly exceeds any benefit to the US and the American people - a fact that has been obvious for years, and became painfully apparent in Israel’s genocidal Gaza campaign.

And what about Europe? Why is Europe being maneuvered so easily into support for the illegal US-Israeli war in Iran? This, too, is a result of the weakness - political and personal - of most European leaders, their own lack of strategic imagination, and their long-standing dependency on the United States in NATO. There is something pathetic about watching Starmer, Merz, von der Leyen and others twist themselves into knots to appease and placate Trump on Iran for the sake of the pathetic and pointless “negotiations” being fronted by Witkoff and Kushner on behalf of an American Regime that couldn’t care less about the security of Ukraine or Europe.

The cost of alliances has never been more obvious than it is right now, on both sides of the Atlantic. At a time when alliances are increasingly unsteady and unreliable, and the decay of American hegemony increasingly obvious, this is a dangerous convergence of events. The implications for the Middle East, America and Europe could hardly be more serious. But all those countries gathered at the BRICS summit in Brazil? Some of them will probably come out ahead.

The link between America’s Middle East wars and European terrorism needs more attention. As America and Israel pursue an illegal regime-change war against Iran, the possibility of very direct terrorist repercussions in Europe, in particular, should be a major cause for concern.

Back in the early 2000’s, I happened to be seated in the US chair at the North Atlantic Council (NAC) table at NATO HQ in Brussels when we discussed two catastrophic attacks. The first came in Spain in March 2004, when ten coordinated bombs ripped through commuter trains in Madrid, killing 191 people and injuring more than 1800. The bombs had been planted by Islamic militants, but PM Aznar’s government, which very actively supported the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, tried to lay the blame on Basque separatists. This deception, along with Spain’s involvement in America’s illegal war in Iraq, soon led to the ouster of the Aznar government and Spain’s withdrawal from the Coalition of the Willing. What I remember most about that episode at NATO was the Spanish permanent representative announcing to the NAC Spain’s reversal of policy and his own firing.

Then in July 2005, Islamist terrorists set off three suicide bombs in the London Tube, killing 52 people and injuring nearly 800 more. Once again there was a discussion at the NAC table, and I was seated in the US chair. I was among many who offered solidarity to Her Majesty’s Government and the British people and expressed our shared resolve in the face of terrorism. In this case, there was no change in British politics or policy that I could see from Brussels. Ultimately, PM Blair’s role as Bush’s “lapdog” in Iraq contributed to Labour’s defeat and Blair’s departure from office, but that came much later, in 2007.

These events come to mind as Europe wrestles with how to deal with the war that Trump and Netanyahu have launched against Iran, a war which has quickly spread to involve the countries of the Gulf, the Middle East, and Europe. No leader in Europe is reprising the “lapdog” role of Blair, Aznar, or many other European leaders two decades ago. That was a bitter experience for those involved. But it is also in part because the Trump Regime didn’t ask them for support in advance, simply assuming that they would provide the bases, overflight rights and other support that were needed to conduct America’s illegal aggression. This assumption has proven correct, with the interesting exception of Spain. The views of European governments are now less relevant - to Washington and the world - than they were two decades ago. For now, the UK and others have been at pains to explain that they are not providing direct support for offensive operations, just logistical support and measures aimed at the defense of their own people and facilities and partners in the Gulf. But make no mistake: they are giving the US what it needs to drive this regime-change war.

Other things are also different this time around. Over the past twenty years, Europe has developed more sophisticated means to monitor potential terrorist attacks and thwart them before they take place. This reduces - though it certainly does not eliminate - the risk of large-scale, mass-casualty attacks such as those that occurred in Madrid in 2003 and London in 2005. It is also unclear whether Shiite Iran has the broad appeal among radicalized Muslims that al-Qaeda and other Sunni terrorist organizations had during the Iraq War, or whether Tehran retains a potent network of terrorist cells and capabilities to conduct international strikes at this time. There are many unknowns, and I no longer have access to the intelligence information that might enable me to make a more accurate assessment of the threat.

The threat is real, though. Of that I am sure. We have seen a small-scale but deadly Islamist attack in Austin, Texas, evidently prompted by our Iran war. It would be foolhardy to think that the Iranian regime and its allies are not looking for ways to exploit terrorism - in the region, in Europe, and in America - as part of Tehran’s existential struggle against the United States and Israel.

It is high time we had an honest debate, here and in Europe, about the links between our own policies and terrorism directed against Western targets. Just as "war is the continuation of politics by other means" in Clausewitz’s famous words, terrorism is also a manifestation or extension of politics and policy to employ violence for political ends. Terrorism is political. It makes sense for us - the targets of terrorism - to consider what motivates terrorists or potential terrorists to employ violence in this way against us. One of my great frustrations - as a former national security professional and now as an academic lecturer - is our persistent refusal to consider one entire, vital dimension of the terrorism matrix - our own behavior. Our policies. Terrorism is almost always a reaction of the weak against the actions of the strong. This is how I see anti-Western terror linked to the Middle East playing out over the past several decades.

I would never say - as many Greeks said of America after September 11, 2001 - καλά να πάθουν - “they deserved it”. That is an immoral position to take, as the victims of terrorism are indeed innocent and do not deserve their fate. But as a polity, should we not ask how we make such fervent, reckless enemies, prepared to cross a threshold to wreak death and destruction against innocents, and even sacrifice their own lives? This is not just a case of social pathology or individual madness. It is often organized and has a clear purpose. Shouldn’t the discussion of “root causes” - itself almost entirely neglected for many years now - include more than an analysis of such mechanisms as radicalization and alienation?

What about our own behavior, our own policies, our own decisions and actions? These are more subject to our control than the minds of anonymous individuals or the evolution of repressed societies where terrorist plots take shape. Why don’t we consider changes to our own policies as part of our response to terrorism? Why is this so often labeled as “surrendering” to terror, to letting the “terrorists win” or “have their way”? Are we really that convinced of our own rightness and righteousness when we invade and occupy Iraq, when we support Israel in Gaza or when we launch a regime change operation in Iran? Is it never on us?

In this sense, I believe the illegal aggression unleashed a week ago by the Trump Regime and Israel has made us all less safe. The greatest suffering will occur in the Middle East, in Iran and neighboring countries, but we are far from exempt from dire consequences. These will be felt in our economies, perhaps in refugee flows and perhaps terrorist attacks.

Will they also be felt in our consciousness? In our conscience? Will our common humanity prompt us, finally, to consider how our policy over many decades creates conditions that inspire terrorism? That we may now, as a consequence of our actions, face a more acute phase of such a reckoning?

I don’t mean to be alarmist. But when I look at how European leaders and countries are dealing with this US-Israeli war on Iran, I am worried. About many things, including terrorism. Especially in countries like Germany. Or Italy. Countries I know pretty well that are giving the Trump Regime all it needs to kill Iranians and try to destroy the regime in Tehran.

By launching an illegal war of brutal aggression against Iran together with Netanyahu’s Israel, Trump and the Trump Regime have shown they are the culmination of American post-Cold War foreign policy more than an aberration. The picture above shows women mourning the many dozens of young girls killed in an American bombing of a girls school in southern Iran that the Pentagon says - in classic Orwellian gaslighting - is “under investigation”. There are many images like it, not just from Iran, but from Iraq, from Afghanistan, from everywhere the US military has been used to inflict pain on our adversaries and “protect” Americans and American ideals. Surely we remember the many hundreds, even thousands of such images from Gaza, the genocidal campaign that Israel undertook against Palestinians with unwavering American material and diplomatic support from both Biden and Trump. So many of the attacks there on hospitals, aid workers, schools, journalists and temporary shelters remain “under investigation” by the Israeli authorities.

There is no question that others have inflicted and continue to inflict similar pain. Most notably Russia in its illegal and cruel invasion of Ukraine, but also the opposing sides - and their outside backers, generally Arab monarchies - in many conflicts in Africa and elsewhere that we hardly bother to notice. The aggressors, killers and abusers are like us, and we are like them. In fact, we destroy lives in more places and more often - and perhaps even more wantonly, more frivolously, more sportily. More, it seems, as TV spectacle and conflicting internet memes in feisty arguments on social media, with little evident regard for the cost in lives lost and ruined or families and communities destroyed.

In addition to the wars we wage on the world, America also loves to impose “crippling sanctions” on countries we don’t like. In this, too, Trump and the Trump Regime are the purest reflection of the sadistic, zero-sum calculus that has driven American foreign policy for the past 30 years. The distillation of our long-standing cruelty and meanness in its purest form, stripped of moralistic and policy ornamentation. The energy embargo we are now imposing with some success on Cuba is just a further step in the long-standing policy of deliberate immiseration of the Cuban people that we have carried out for decades - with one brief and highly controversial interruption under the Obama administration. It is the same story with Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran, implemented after Trump tore up the Iran nuclear deal in his first term and subsequently maintained by the clumsy, witless Biden administration. Trump has even mused (too polite a word for the man’s mafia-style rhetoric) about punishing Spain and other countries for not being “nice.”

Such “punishing sanctions” are acts of economic warfare. So often our officials and the media seek refuge in narrow, legalistic definitions of war. They call these sanctions “coercive measures” or even “muscular diplomacy” and link them to some imagined policy objective to justify their obvious cruelty. They pretend that they are a form of leverage to obtain some objective in a negotiation that never happens or yields results, that they are therefore preferable to war. That “punishing sanctions” are “peaceful means” of resolving some dispute. But they are a form of war.

I am not talking about narrow sanctions focused on individuals engaged in terrorist or criminal activity. Those often work, and can be understood as an element of legitimate law enforcement cooperation. Even here, of course, the Trump Regime has exploited legitimate tools to its own evil ends by imposing sanctions on, for example, officials of the International Criminal Court for daring to indict Netanyahu and investigate possible American and Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity.

No, my focus is on broad, “punishing” sanctions and “maximum pressure”, the intent of which is to inflict pain on an entire nation with the goal of … what? We always declare that our aims are to change the behavior of the “offending” regime, in the purported expectation that by hurting the people we will weaken their government. The targeted countries are almost always authoritarian, which we somehow use to justify the pain we inflict on entire societies. We often allow narrow and impractical carve-outs for “humanitarian” supplies and assistance, to ameliorate any qualms we might have about inflicting such wanton harm on so many innocent people. The people of these countries are usually not White - not by the American definition of Whiteness - and I believe that makes a difference.

In fact, none of this ever works in the way we expect, and our response - rather than to reconsider such an ineffective and cruel exercise in brute power - is to double down, to increase the pain and “close loopholes”. I admit that this approach may make some sense with regard to Russia, but even there it is still ineffective to a degree that one should ask whether the drive to close down additional sources of Russian revenue is sensible and worth the effort - especially as there is always a cost to “our side”, whether Orban’s obstructionism or the rise of the far-right in Germany and other countries. Generally, doubling down is self-defeating. It puts more power in the hands of the regime in question, weakens civil society, and never, with the possible, very partial exception of South Africa under apartheid, leads to any positive outcome.

Success is measured by the amount of pain inflicted. It is sadistic theater.

Doubling down through sanctions and military action also strengthens our regime in undesirable ways, putting more power in its hands. Including the Trump Regime.

I should note something positive (for once). We are not all in this cruel, zero-sum, smite-my-enemies mindset. Millions of Americans have begun to see through Orwellian terms like “peace through strength”, “punishing” sanctions and “preventive” war. The profound immorality of American foreign policy hit us hard in the many videos, images and stories that have come out of Gaza, despite Israel’s effort to suppress them and the American establishment’s desire to “contextualize” and marginalize them. Gaza is an extreme, even genocidal example of a much broader phenomenon, the rampant and even sadistic cruelty of American policy as reflected in a long march of “tightened” sanctions, “extended” authorizations of military force, and lives and societies destroyed around the world. As we see our elected representatives file in and out of Congress on CSPAN, passing one destructive measure after another and engaging in ludicrous theatrics in hearing rooms, I see “the banality of evil.”

So why do we do it? I believe it is a combination of things, including political expediency, ignorance, racism, faith in American exceptionalism, greed, conformism and cowardice. I could add idealism, I suppose, given the lofty intent that purportedly guides our sanctions-and-war machine, but after the disastrous experience of the past three decades, is anyone really so naive as to retain faith in the “ideals” of our system? I don’t think so. Far too many Americans have a zero-sum view of life and the world, wrapped in cynicism and low expectations. Not so much that what is good for me must be bad for my enemies - they don’t expect much that is good for them - but rather what is bad for my enemies is good for me. This is the leitmotif of American politics and policy-making in the 21st Century.

My hope is that more and more Americans will wake up to the pointless cruelty of so much US foreign and security policy over the past three decades, like the millions, mainly young people, whose consciousness and conscience have been ignited by Gaza.

But I have a more forlorn hope, as well: that perhaps now, as America slips into authoritarianism at home under an arbitrary and corrupt Regime, as our institutions falter and fail in upholding American democracy, we will realize just how pointlessly cruel and even sadistic our approach to countries like Cuba and Iran has always been. When we - the citizens of one of the world’s oldest democracies, endowed with a uniquely favorable geographic position and abundant national resources and wealth - when we Americans realize the limitations on our power to control our government and halt the march toward oligarchic dictatorship, perhaps we will appreciate how utterly mean and pointless it has been to inflict pain and misery on Cubans, Iranians and so many others over the years with the aim of changing the policies of their governments.

Americans - not just the American government or the Trump Regime - are often arrogant, moralistic, uninformed about the world and indifferent to the conditions of others around our planet. Zero-sum thinking is everywhere around us, a pervasive meanness. Maybe the experience of our own decline, our own (hopefully temporary) descent into authoritarian rule will remind us of our common humanity and all we share with others around the world. Including the mothers in Iran and other victims of American hubris. Maybe that will help us change our ways someday. Even someday soon.

I have always been against Taiwan alarmism, the rush to predict that Xi and the PRC will seek to take the island by force in the near future. 2027 has been thrown out there lately, but it has seemed pretty flimsy. The evidence regarding China’s intent was always slim and tendentiously presented. The whole thing smacked of a classic play by the Military-Industrial Complex and The Blob for more public resources, more share-holder value, more influence in Washington and, basically, more attention.

Now I am beginning to wonder. I am not a China expert, but I have been following the PRC and the region for a long time, and I keep up with the news and a lot of the analysis.

I still resist Taiwan alarmism. But I am beginning to wonder whether Xi might be more of an opportunist than I thought. I am more worried than I was about the opportunity he and Beijing are seeing:

- Trump is an inept fool with an utterly incompetent administration.

- The US is wildly overextended in a set of disparate and incoherent military operations, most notably a disruptive, destructive and illegal war in the Middle East. We are running out of munitions right now. Rick Wilson had a great piece on this on his Substack:

Rick Wilson Low on Ammo

- The American war machine has NOT kept up with the latest tech advances nor the innovations arising from the Russo-Ukrainian war.

- China still controls most of the production and supply of rare earths and associated products, which are crucial to US (re)armament and the broader economy.

- This all reinforces the clear sub-nuclear military advantage that China has in the region around Taiwan.

- Trump’s America has alienated its allies and partners, and has never had fewer friends.

- Trump’s attitude toward Taiwan is unclear; his commitment to intervention in the case of attack is hard to gauge.

- The American home front is an absolute mess. Trump’s fascist domestic ambitions are faltering, and the American public opposes war and has no will to fight.

That’s what I see, anyway, and I wonder what Xi sees. I still don’t think Xi and Beijing are keen on taking major risks. I don’t think Xi and the PRC have changed. But Taiwan looms large for them, and this situation could be tempting. A move by Xi and Beijing to take Taiwan by force, by blockade or assault, would still be a risky proposition. Their odds of prevailing have never looked better, imho.

I am a foreign policy realist who has long declared that history is not a morality play. The good guys don’t always - or even reliably - prevail. Policy often entails moral trade-offs as well as material and other choices. Recognizing the moral dilemmas inherent in foreign and security policy, my aim has been to debunk the notion of American Exceptionalism. The reason is clear: the same historic forces that condition the existence of all states, all societies, apply to America and American society. We have no “national purpose” beyond our domestic rights and liberties and the collective will of the American people as expressed through our Constitutional processes. Ideally, our government exists to serve the interests of the people, not to transform the course of human history or impose its will on others. If we are a “shining beacon on a hill”, that is a secondary effect, arising from the proper conduct of our own affairs. We should have no problem abiding by the UN Charter, which prohibits war and the threat of war except in self defense. America should accept the sovereignty of other states and - to the maximum extent possible - use only peaceful means to address their policies or behavior to which we might object.

In other words, as a realist, I recognize that chaos prevails in the international arena, as there is no recognized authority above the state with the power to enforce its will or its rules. At the same time, rules like the UN Charter are adopted and accepted to bring order to international affairs and protect all parties - including, most importantly, the weak. America is not weak, but our behavior should nonetheless be guided by rules and moral considerations, even in the international realm. The conduct of foreign and security policy, like the conduct of domestic policy, should be guided by ethics, by moral principles. It is one of the key tasks of foreign affairs professionals to endeavor to reconcile interest with ethics. This is more than simply pursuit of “enlightened self-interest” - it is, to my mind, a moral imperative. “Might makes right” is not just inefficient or unfair, it is also morally wrong. I think it is all those things at once.

History is NOT a morality play, but we should be moral players.

This is why I am so troubled by the reaction of most of the Liberal Blob to the illegal regime-change war against Iran that has been launched by Israel and the Trump Regime. For most of them, it seems that the heart of American Exceptionalism continues to beat, that history truly is a morality play, and America’s role as hero, as judge, and as executioner can be justified - as long as we plan well, work with allies, and observe a few other niceties. As long as our hearts are pure, our intentions noble, our sword sharp and strong, and we have checked the right Constitutional boxes, it seems we need not abide by any principles above our own collective conscience. It is chillingly close to Trump’s more personalized understanding of international law, norms, and restraints.

Take, for example, Nicholas Kristof’s piece in yesterday’s New York Times, “The Folly of Attacking Iran.” Here is the text:

NYT Kristof Folly of Attacking Iran

There is perhaps no more moralizing proponent of liberal interventionism than Kristof. To his credit, he seems genuinely devoted to noble causes such as human rights and political liberties, and has worked hard to raise awareness about abuses in places ranging from China to Sudan to the United States. As for his latest article on Iran, I share many of Kristof’s objections and concerns regarding the attack launched by the Trump Regime and Israel and the likely effects.

What Kristof evidently does not care about - not at all - is the UN Charter and International Law. Based on his judgment - hard to dispute - that the Iranian regime abuses its population mercilessly, destabilizes its neighborhood and supports terrorism, Kristof believes a policy aimed at regime change is justified. But he goes even further, suggesting that there is no need to abide by international law in pursuing regime change in Iran, and that the US might quite reasonably lead such an effort. No need for the niceties of the Responsibility to Protect or international authorization for sanctions. Kristof is fine with subversion and threats, though he hesitates to support military intervention to topple the Ayatollahs - at least right now. His objection is purely utilitarian. Regime change is a sensible and moral policy for the US to pursue, Kristof argues, but we should just do it better. More subversion, less guns. More multilaterally, more carefully - more efficiently, with less risk.

Kristof’s objections to our regime change campaign are mainly tactical or utilitarian:

• Air war is not effective for regime change; air campaigns have a “poor record” in terms of effectiveness.

• American military objectives, presumably to include overthrowing the Iranian regime, should be more clearly and precisely defined - as in our abduction of Venezuelan President Maduro.

• Military action is hard to justify at this time as there was no imminent threat from Iran, even though regime change is a proper objective for American policy; “war is not necessarily the best tool to deal with a brutal and hostile government.”

• This was a war of choice; a diplomatic solution to the nuclear issue may have been possible, and though that would have been an “unsatisfying solution”, the US had other tools available to address its concerns: subversion, tighter sanctions, other measures to destabilize Iran and topple the regime.

At the end of this presentation, Kristof bizarrely notes that “doves like me” have sometimes underestimated the effectiveness of force, citing the Iraq War surge as an example of his clouded judgment about force. But how is his presentation about Iran that of a “dove”?

I wouldn’t belabor Kristof’s presentation so much if I didn’t find it so fully representative of almost all liberal objections to the US-Israeli regime change attack on Iran. Including some put forward by close friends and former colleagues. There is a preoccupation with the methods but not the objectives. There is an implicit acceptance of the righteousness of efforts to topple the Iranian regime from the outside, perhaps in coordination with anti-regime elements on the inside, even if these are entirely contrary to the principles and dictates of the UN Charter and international law. We should worry, they say, that we may suffer unduly from having done all of this badly, and maybe now was not the best time. Maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t be using force to overthrow the Iranian regime. Maybe the Trump Regime, so inept, so crude, so bad at planning and diplomacy, will cause more harm than good with this misguided effort. But there is very little criticism of the objective, little discussion of whether the US should - under any circumstances other than those enshrined in the UN Charter - attack Iran.

I wouldn’t belabor this if it were not that I see this same amoral, utilitarian reasoning applied by many friends and colleagues whose views I ordinarily share. It is not a question of my naivete or their experience. I know as well as any of them, I think, what the US has undertaken in the past to advance its objectives without public knowledge, as well as the many ways in which our adversaries work against us in the shadows. It’s more a matter of principle, in my view. Do you believe in international law at all? What is the foundation of the rules-based order you so often lament and want to resurrect somehow, post-Trump? Bringing this down to a more domestic level, is theft or murder wrong if the victim is deemed morally unworthy, might have posed a threat to you somehow, or you just don’t get caught? What if someone in the neighborhood is dangerous, even a threat to their family and neighbors; under what circumstances is it permissible, even advisable in your view, to enter their house and shoot them dead? States are not people, and the international system is anarchic, but I really think the issue is as basic as that.

We can argue about good planning and bad planning, sound execution and inept fumbling. Those are proper policy discussions. But what, to you, is a legitimate policy objective in a rules-based world, a world that respects sovereignty and seeks to advance noble causes by peaceful means? And what is not legitimate, whether or not we can get away with it? Where does regime change fit in, in your mind, and what methods to achieve it might be legitimate in your view? Where is accountability if you prefer to operate in the shadows? Where is the national debate one might expect before undertaking policies that are morally - let’s say at least ambivalent.

I wonder whether my Liberal Blob colleagues realize that their approach to this war and Iran is often deeply tied to a faith in American exceptionalism. Would they accord any other state the same rights and powers that they implicitly cede to the US in attacking, sanctioning, and otherwise punishing other countries?

These are my thoughts this Sunday, the day after the Trump Regime and Israel attacked Iran in order to topple its regime. We may reap the whirlwind, but even if we don’t, the very purpose behind our actions was morally bankrupt. Absolutely wrong.