Earlier this year the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World had the good fortune to visit the country of Oman — and very much enjoyed the experience. Oman has a rustic beauty and well-earned reputation for quiet diplomacy and mediation among other players in the Middle East, befitting a middle power in a volatile region.

Despite this reputation, Oman has recently found itself in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, as the New York Times’ Vivian Nereim reports:

When President Trump casually threatened last month to bomb Oman, a longtime American ally, it was so extraordinary that some people assumed he had misspoken. Surely he meant Iran?

Apparently, he did not.

As the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran inflames tensions across the Middle East, the sleepy sultanate of Oman has found itself in the cross hairs of the Trump administration and at odds with its Gulf Arab neighbors — perceived by some as too sympathetic to Iran, according to analysts.

“Sometimes standing in the middle is not easy,” said Abdullah Babood, an Omani academic. “For Washington, it is almost that you are either with us or against us — and Oman doesn’t want to do that.”

Beyond confirming the Orwellian evolution of the MAGA crowd, a “with us or against us” logic suggests ways that middle powers are finding themselves squeezed by both the United States and China.

This is a relatively new development. During the Cold War and much of the post-Cold War era, middle powers had considerably autonomy and flexibility. In some cases, pivotally-located middle powers could play great powers off each other as a means of preserving their freedom of action.

That was then. Now, according to my Tufts University colleague Michael Beckley recently argued in Foreign Affairs middle powers across the world will face the same crunch as Oman:

Middle powers are not becoming more visible because they are more powerful. They are becoming more visible because they are more exposed. The conditions that allowed many of them to flourish in recent decades are eroding. For years, they could shelter under U.S. hegemony, exploit an expanding global economy, and trade with rival powers without choosing among them. They could reap the benefits of scale without possessing it themselves.

That world is disappearing. Growth has slowed, globalization has become a contest over chokepoints, and great powers have grown more predatory. The United States is increasingly willing to use its dominance to extract concessions. China is using subsidies and export gluts to deindustrialize other countries, debt and infrastructure to make them dependent, and military harassment and economic sanctions to narrow their choices. The result is not a flatter world of ascendant middle powers but a harsher one in which the two top powers have more ways to bend others to their will….

Middle powers also can no longer extract great-power favors as easily as they once did. During the Cold War, ideological allegiance had value. Weaker states mattered as symbolic dominoes, military bases, or buffers along the fault lines between the U.S. and Soviet blocs, allowing them to bargain for aid, arms, market access, and diplomatic support. Egypt, India, Pakistan, Yugoslavia, and others played that game. The superpowers also subsidized core allied middle powers. The United States supplied Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and West Germany with capital, technology, and market access while tolerating the protectionist policies those countries enacted to shelter their infant industries. The Soviet Union sustained its bloc with cheap energy, preferential trade, credits, arms, and aid—transfers worth tens of billions of dollars a year.

Today’s U.S.-Chinese rivalry works differently. Washington and Beijing are not building rival worlds separated by an iron curtain; they are fighting for dominance within one global economy. Their goal is not to buy allegiance at any price but to control systems that others depend on: finance, technology, minerals, energy, shipping, and data….

If middle powers cannot stand alone, form a pole, or hide among ad hoc coalitions, they must choose a larger system to lean into.

The thing is, I’m not entirely sure I agree with Beckley’s assessment that the U.S. and China will force everyone else to choose sides. For one thing, even Beckley acknowledges that, “a few large middle powers, such as India, may preserve more room to maneuver than most.” So some middle powers will possess autonomy in any bipolar order.

The more important thing, however, is that the implicit assumption in Beckley’s article is that the U.S. and China are each attempting to maximize their coalition in a fierce global competition for power. And that…. is not what is happening, like, at all.

In some cases, this is due to simple disinterest or laziness. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, Jose Melendez Dan Kobayashi recently examined U.S. policy and concluded, “the U.S. government effectively signed a non-compete agreement in vast swaths of Africa,” leaving the field wide open for China.

Trump administration disinterest in sub-Saharan Africa is one thing. A disinterest in directly competing with China is something else, because it obviates the bipolar competition that drives Beckley’s argument.

The fact is, ever since China’s strategic victory in its trade war with the United States,1 the Trump administration has been awfully docile in its approach towards China. As I noted a few weeks ago, “What is striking over the past week is just how much the current administration has prioritized the bilateral Sino-American economic relationship over everything else. Which is not a terribly hawkish position.”

Earlier this week the New York Times’ Edward Wong provided some confirming evidence for this:

After meeting with China’s top diplomat in Malaysia last summer, Secretary of State Marco Rubio uttered a line that made few waves at the time but would later help pave the way for an abrupt change.

The United States and China, Mr. Rubio said, had an “opportunity here to achieve some strategic stability” and find areas of cooperation. He used the phrase again in February while talking about China in the Caribbean, also to little notice.

Chinese officials picked up on Mr. Rubio’s remarks and suggested to their U.S. counterparts even rosier language to describe ties between the two nations, according to two people with knowledge of the previously unreported diplomacy.

The new phrase — “constructive strategic stability” — was rolled out by both governments during President Trump’s meeting in Beijing last month with the leader of China, Xi Jinping.

Although the language sounds stiff and somewhat vague, such diplomatic terms serve as important guideposts. The new catchphrase signals to agencies in both nations, and to other powers, that the United States and China — the world’s two largest economies and most powerful militaries — are looking to work together or limit hostilities, notably on trade and Taiwan….

Current and former officials in the United States and Asia say the message is clear: Mr. Trump intends to accommodate China, and other countries should fall in line.

It seems clear that East Asian middle powers face a dilemma — but not the kind that Beckley identifies. Their dilemma is how closely they should yoke themselves to the United States as the United States yokes itself to China.

Last week Donald Trump and his social media team issued multiple posts basically telling Americans to calm the heck down about the war in Iran. One Trump post in particular stood out:

Iran really wants to make a deal, and it will be a good one for the U.S.A. and those that are with us. But don’t the Dumocrats, and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans, understand that it is MUCH tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate, when political hacks keep negatively “chirping,” at levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever. Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end - It always does! President DJT

Let’s put to one side the fact that it’s impossible for Trump to say, um, almost anything without sounding a little bit rape-y. The more intriguing question is: why does he think the negative chirping makes it tougher for him to negotiate? Why would any outside commentary affect negotiations that are going so well Trump has declared them almost done for weeks now? The Atlantic’s David Graham put it well: “For once in his life, Donald Trump wishes he was getting less attention.”

Graham and others likely believe that this is due to Trump’s immature brand of leadership leaving him “upset by their criticism.” But a bit later Graham also writes that Trump, “seems very reactive to GOP commentary. Last weekend, he seemed to back off a rumored deal with Iran after attacks from hawkish allies including Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Now he’s fretting about public criticism again.”

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World thinks there is a simple explanation for this: Trump is trying — and, more importantly, failing — to minimize his audience costs.

In the international relations literature, an audience cost is commonly defined as “the domestic political cost that leaders incur from their constituency if they escalate a foreign policy crisis and are then seen as backing down.” In this instance, Trump unquestionably escalated a foreign policy crisis with Iran, and definitely does not want to pay any political price from backing down.

Now it could be argued that Trump’s love of truthful hyperbole and his being in power during a hyper-polarized age might reduce his audience costs of backing down. Surely his MAGA base will buy whatever political explanation he offers, right? The hard working staff over at Spoiler Alerts suggested such a thing during Trump’s first term, and there is experimental evidence that presidents can affect public perceptions in ways that lower audience costs.

Furthermore, as Politico’s Nahal Toosi points out, a little diplomatic creativity could help grease the wheels of a cease-fire — and by “diplomatic creativity,” I mean some serious shaping of the truth. “it is hard to find successful major diplomatic negotiations in history that didn’t require some level of deceit or, at least, intentional confusion,” Toosi writes. “Such maneuvering isn’t just about public relations. It can be crucial to resolving or at least getting past what feel like irreconcilable differences.

Toosi makes a good point here — and she further argues that Trump is uniquely skilled at selling such deceptions:

Trump appears perturbed by the possibility that he might have to strike a similar deal with Iran and determined to come out ahead in any comparison.

Luckily, Trump is uniquely capable of the contortions such an agreement would require. He has, at best, a “situationship” with the truth. This is, after all, a man who still insists he won the 2020 election and claims to have ended wars that were not wars.

“Since when has truth-stretching been a deal-breaker in Trumpian diplomacy?” asked Rob Malley, who dealt with Iran in both the Obama and Biden administrations.

We’ve already seen the Trump team ignore the inconvenient when it comes to Iran. In the early days of the war, it effectively eased sanctions on Iran by issuing waivers that let Tehran sell oil already at sea. The administration’s goal was to calm energy markets roiled by the conflict.

Maybe Toosi is correct — but I have my doubts. In this instance, Trump finds himself in a unique political bind, because he cannot reframe the way any deal will be evaluated.

Read more

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World is currently in Talloires, France, nestled on Lake Annecy in the French Alps. The photo above is the view from my hotel. Even during a steady drizzle, this place looks gorgeous.

Why am I in Talloires? Well, it is home to the Tufts European Center and The Fletcher School’s annual Talloires Symposium. So I’m here to give a talk entitled, “What the War in Iran Tells Us About American Foreign Policy.” Spoiler Alert: contra Condoleezza Rice,1 I don’t think it’s been terribly productive for U.S. interests in the region.

But I am also here to relax a wee bit from a rather stressful academic year. The point is, over the next few days I’m going to busy discussing geopolitics and devouring as much raclette as humanly possible, so posting will be light.

While I’m away, however, can I interest you in some more musings about Donald Trump and the madman theory? I bet I can!

The hard-working-readers here at Drezner’s World may recall that just before the start of Trump’s second term I published “Does the Madman Theory Actually Work?” upon request for Foreign Policy. In that essay I concluded, for theoretical and Trump-specific reasons, that, “Trump’s attempt to reprise his madman approach to international relations is unlikely to work during his second term, but he will likely try it anyway.”

As the war in Iran continues its “frozen conflict” stage, the good folks at FP asked me to write a follow-up essay assessing how well Trump’s madman gambits have played out in his second term. It’s part of their special section entitled “The Trump Way” on how this particular president makes decisions.

The result is “The Madman Strikes Back.” And, well, let’s just say that I have not been terribly impressed by the yield: “after examining Trump’s second term to date, it is difficult not to conclude that his madman gambits have largely failed. Worse, his efforts to play the madman might have conjured up the one thing guaranteed to blow the theory out of the water: an actual madman for an adversary.”

You’ll have to read the whole thing to see the complete argument, but I’ll excerpt a section from the last few paragraphs here:

Iran’s response to Operation Epic Fury reveals a big flaw with the madman theory: It does not work against another state willing to act like a madman….

Trump, who usually assumes that he possesses escalation dominance, has encountered an adversary willing to escalate even more. The theocratic regime’s relatively extreme political preferences and willingness to tolerate economic pain make Iran a particularly difficult target for the madman gambit.

Iran’s responses have exposed other issues with Trump’s application of the madman theory as well. Negotiations with Tehran have been difficult for a number of reasons—but perhaps the biggest reason is that Iran’s leaders do not trust the Trump administration after twice being bombed in the middle of negotiations. Acting like a madman can make coercion more plausible, but it also raises the costs of conflict resolution.

At the start of Trump’s second term, I cautioned that “if Trump is unable to convince anyone else that he really is a madman, then the only way he can prove it is to follow through on his most outlandish threats. Maybe that would work, but it could also lead to a conflict spiraling out of control.” As the Iran conflict persists for longer than first suggested, the inescapable conclusion to draw is that, like Nixon before him, Trump is learning that the madman theory sounds better in theory than in practice.

As Trump would put it, just sit back and relax when you read the whole thing. See you next week!

Back in January of 2025 the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World expressed… let’s say “healthy skepticism” about the caliber of Trump administration cabinet nominees — particularly in foreign policy and national security:

Even thinking about whether Hegseth can white-knuckle his way through being Secretary of Defense without regular three-gin-and-tonic-breakfasts is unsettling. The transition team’s efforts to purge civil servants believed to be disloyal to president Trump personally exacerbates the problem. In other words, Hegseth isn’t the only one who is going to be white-knuckling it for the next few years — so is anyone whose job it is to pay attention to U.S. foreign policy and national security.

In the first term the hard-working staff over at Spoiler Alerts wrote at length about the beclowning of the executive branch. By the end of Trump’s first term, he was relying on D-list policy principals, scraping the bottom of the bottom of the barrel.

The D-list is the starting point for most of Trump’s second-term cabinet. Sure, there are a few nominees who would have served in any GOP administration of the last fifty years. Most of these clowns, however, would have been laughed out of the room in any prior administration.

Eighteen months into Trump’s second term, it’s becoming clear that the caliber of the administration’s foreign policy and national security team is devolving even further.

Consider, for example, the current state of the lawyers who have to staff all these agencies and advise them on, you know, what’s legal and what is illegal. According to the New York Times’ Eileen Sullivan and Andrea Fuller, the Trump administration is losing an awful lot of legal talent: “President Trump’s upheaval of the federal government has led to an exodus of more than 10,000 lawyers since the beginning of 2025, a striking loss of legal talent that has left some agencies pushing to find attorneys to carry out his agenda. Roughly one in five lawyers who worked in the government at the end of 2024 had left by March of this year.” This includes a 26% drop in Department of Energy, a 21% drop in the Department of Justice (with the greatest absolute decline in the number of lawyers), and a 15% decline in Department of Defense legal staff.1

The remaining lawyers are not exactly earning the trust of the judicial branch, as the NYT’s Mattathias Schwartz writes:

An increasing number of judges appear to be questioning the longtime assumption that Justice Department lawyers can be taken at their word, part of the “presumption of regularity” that experts say allows federal courts to operate swiftly and smoothly….

Judges have over the past year called out the administration for making dodgy legal arguments, filing dishonest testimony and failing to comply with court orders. Some of the earlier problems stem from the fact that Justice Department lawyers often represent other government agencies in court, including the Homeland Security Department, which has proved to be a difficult client, particularly in immigration cases.

But judges have taken a distinctly harsher tone in recent weeks, assigning responsibility directly to individual Justice Department lawyers for their own representations in court….

During prior administrations, a job as an assistant U.S. attorney was a coveted status marker for lawyers. Under the Trump administration, the department has borrowed lawyers from the Homeland Security Department and the military, posted job solicitations online and offered starting bonuses. Not only are applications down, but those who are applying are also generally less qualified, officials have said.

Then there’s the intelligence community. According to Reuters’ Erin Banco and Jonathan Landay, the CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence have apparently stopped cooperating in sharing intelligence and analysis. This seems like a big deal:

The CIA has stopped contributing to some intelligence assessments, including those related to the Iran war, produced by the office of the nation’s top spy as disputes over intelligence-sharing and areas of responsibility boil over, say people familiar with the matter.

The infighting between the CIA and ​the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has flared for more than a year, disrupting collaboration on national security analyses on which presidents long have relied to navigate complex foreign challenges, said a U.S. official and three people ‌with direct knowledge of the matter….

The CIA’s move to significantly pare back its contributions to assessments produced by Gabbard’s office is one ‌of the most ⁠serious consequences of the agencies’ mutual distrust.

The CIA has been one of the main contributors to the reports produced by the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the premier U.S. intelligence analytical body. The reports carry weight, especially during a war.

Two of the sources with direct knowledge of the matter said that assessments about Iran — where the U.S. military has been fighting since February — are among those the agency no longer regularly participates in.

The CIA and ODNI now operate largely as two separate analytical operations, the sources said.

At one point last year, the CIA, in response to friction between the two agencies, stopped publishing NIC reports on the internal intelligence community distribution service it controls, briefly limiting the accessibility of the analytical products, the sources said.

How to put this… the ODNI trying to put together any decent intelligence product without the contribution of the CIA would be like, oh, I don’t know, an NFL team deciding to run an offensive play without any offensive linemen. It ends badly.

Gabbard’s departure at the end of this month as DNI might provide a moment when the two intelligence agencies could mend the damage- HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!! I’m sorry, I couldn’t keep that in, because the White House has announced his interim replacement, and it is one of Trump’s dumber, scarier choices: “President Donald Trump named Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence on Tuesday, a surprise move that would elevate a political ally with no known background in intelligence to a key national spy post.”

Pulte’s primary claim to fame during Trump 2.0 has been to advocate that the DOJ prosecute Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook and New York Attorney General Letitia James over dubious claims of mortgage fraud that, so far, have not remotely panned out. This is the dipshit that Trump wants to put in charge of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Politico’s Daniela Cheslow reports that the Pulte announcement has not gone down well in the intelligence community:

“It will cause worry amongst IC professionals that the DNI will be fully weaponized in support of going after Trump’s political enemies, given Pulte’s track record,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired 26-year veteran of the CIA….

Brian O’Neill, a former CIA senior executive, said the practical impact of Pulte’s appointment may be limited, especially as CIA Director John Ratcliffe appears to be the president’s senior intelligence adviser.

Still, O’Neill said, “it is reasonable to worry that ODNI will continue its shift from an intelligence management organization toward a political instrument.” Pulte’s thin national security resume, he added, only deepened his concern.

Here is the tell about the decline in the quality of Trump’s second-term team: in most of these reports, Ratcliffe comes across as the sober, reasonable one. During Trump’s first term, however, Trump had to withdraw Ratcliffe’s nomination to be the Director of National Intelligence in 2019 due to skepticism in the intelligence community and the U.S. Senate about his qualifications. He eventually squeaked through a year later, but a brief glance at his Wikipedia entry shows that he was accused of using his position at ODNI to declassify documents that attempted to impugn Hillary Clinton.

This guy is now seen as the sober statesman of Trump’s intelligence community. Like Marco Rubio, he now only looks good by comparison — surrounded by the least competent clowns in America.

A running theme of Drezner’s World for the past few weeks has been the mystery of the current administration’s approach towards the Pacific Rim. A little more than a month ago I noted,

For China hawks currently serving the Trump administration, this is a moment of severe cognitive dissonance….

In 2025 China hawks could semi-plausibly claim that Trump was simply rightsizing U.S. strategic priorities to allow for a greater focus on China. In 2026, that dog won’t hunt. Indeed, ever since he launched the war with Iran, Trump has been noticeably reticent in critiquing the PRC, despite multiple, ongoing reports that China is aiding Iran militarily.

Both during and after the Trump-Xi summit, the president seemed more interested in preserving the Sino-American status quo than anything else. This included arming Taiwan, as Trump explicitly characterized a proposed $14 billion arms sale as a “negotiating chip.”

What is striking over the past week is just how much the current administration has prioritized the bilateral Sino-American economic relationship over everything else. Which is not a terribly hawkish position, like, at all.

On trade, for example, Council on Foreign Relations president Mike Froman recapped his conversation with U.S. Trade Representative Jameson Greer, which included this tidbit:

The administration is going to focus on negotiating pragmatic arrangements with China—through a Board of Trade—about lowering tariffs on a reciprocal bucket of non-strategic goods, and will no longer emphasize trying to get them to modify their economic strategy, despite the risks associated with their imbalances, which has proven difficult to achieve in the past.

This matches what Politico’s Ari Hawkins finds among U.S. businesses keen to expand their China operations:

K Street lobbyists are growing increasingly optimistic that the administration’s vague proposal for a body to oversee trade with China, an idea first teased by U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer in March, could evolve into a major channel for tariff relief between the world’s two largest economies.

It’s the latest signal the administration is pulling back from its all-out trade war on China that occupied much of Trump’s first year in office. Businesses and their lobbyists are now racing to capitalize on that opening.

“It’s pretty clear in our view that the posture in the administration has changed,” said one official from a major industry group, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about private conversations. “There is no longer that push to fundamentally overhaul China’s … economic modus operandi.”

Needless to say this represents a very different approach than Trump’s first term when the goal was to get China to reform its economic model.

To be fair, Froman is correct: these reform efforts have proven exceedingly difficult. A case can be made for lowering the temperature. Maybe one could argue that this is merely an exercise in economic pragmatism. But if China really is the highest strategic priority, then quantitative purchasing agreements seem like a concession to the Chinese way of conducting trade.1

On security, the strategic retreat is even more obvious. The U.S. paused a $14 billion arms sale to Taiwan this past week, infuriating China hawks. Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao claimed this was due to dwindling munitions from the Iran War, though Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth pushed back on that claim.

Hegseth made news in the region with his speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, in which he reiterated that an America First foreign policy means U.S. allies need to engage in self-help:

President Trump is setting the gold standard. We demand 3.5% from our allies and partners, and we are going well beyond that number. We expect every single ally and partner to match that kind of resolve. For those nations that rise to this challenge that embrace responsibility as true partners, the benefits will be clear. As our strategy states, we will prioritize working with model allies those nations who are most capable, clear-eyed and ready to defend their national interests. For those nations, we are moving them to the front of the line, expedited arms sales, deep industrial base collaboration, expanded intelligence sharing, the list goes on that benefits many.

But for those who believe they can continue to free ride on the generosity of the American taxpayer, hear us now. Those days are over. Allies who refuse to step up and carry their own weight for our collective defense will face a clear shift in how we do business. President Trump believes in helping countries that help themselves, and the United States Department of War feels the exact same way. That is the nature of burden sharing.

All well and good — except this message was also paired with mostly silence on China.2 And according to Politico’s Jack Detsch, Hegseth’s speech didn’t go down terribly well with U.S. allies and partners in the region:

The American retreat from the global stage hit home in Asia this week, as the U.S. increasingly demands that regional allies fend for themselves against China’s surging military power.

The shift toward a Trumpian style of arm-twisting diplomacy was laid bare at this year’s IISS Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, traditionally a forum for the U.S. and its partners to air their grievances with China — and project a unified front against Beijing….

[Hegseth] was largely silent on Beijing, only going as far as to validate the region’s “rightful alarm” with China. So American allies kept quiet, too, as they try to forge their own path ahead — and reckon with a future where they can no longer rely on the U.S. for protection against China’s expanding influence.

“It’s a very delicate dance for us and everyone knows it can’t last forever,” said one regional official, who, like others interviewed for this story, was granted anonymity to provide a candid view of the alliance. “Everyone is still giving voice to platitudes of being confident in the U.S. as an ally, but behind closed doors, contemplation of a post-American region has become more serious.”

America’s so-called hub-and-spoke relationship with a handful of treaty allies in Asia has been messy in the best of times. But as delegates crammed into 80 bilateral meetings, they expressed a sense that the world was “fragmenting,” as Italian Adm. Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, NATO’s most senior European military official put it during a panel discussion.

Some allies were desperate to pull the U.S. back into the fold. Koizumi, the Japanese defense chief, publicly urged Hegseth to signal a more solid U.S. commitment to the region after his remarks.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World confesses to some bafflement about Trump’s evolution of U.S. foreign policy towards China. Maybe it is an example of forging a G-2 entente. That said, U.S. allies in the region have not exactly been free riders in their own security. So it’s not obvious why the U.S. should not act like, you know, a decent ally. Instead countries like Japan are questioning the U.S. commitment to the region.

An intellectually respectable version of Trump’s grand strategy is easy to articulate: the U.S. should retrench from Europe and the Middle East to husband capabilities and focus more on strategically vital areas like the Pacific Rim and the Western hemisphere. But it is difficult not to look at the administration’s multiple quagmires and see more effort being expended on Iran than on China. And there is no version of American grand strategy in which that prioritization makes any sense.

None of this is worth a moderate amount of soybean exports. And yet it feels like that’s exactly how low the Trump administration is selling its strategic equities right now.

Exactly 24 hours prior to this newsletter being published, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World was holding a half-day retreat to discuss topics for future newsletters, including:

• What the hell has happened to international relations theory?

• What are the signs that Vladimir Putin thinks he is losing the war with Ukraine?

• Why is the Trump administration engaged in a full-fledged strategic retreat across the Pacific Rim?

• Hey, did a tree hit the house?

Okay, that last one was not originally on the staff agenda. The thing is, it really did feel like something pretty big had hit my house. After a loud boom and then a house shake, everything went back to normal.

The weather was absolutely wretched in the New England region yesterday, so my hard-working spouse speculated it was a thunderclap. But although it was raining, thunderclaps usually come in clusters, and that was not what this was.

Inspecting the perimeter of the house, I noticed neighbors also going outside and doing something similar around their domiciles. And that was when it occurred to me that maybe social media might prove some explanatory leverage.

This was an uncertain proposition. The fragmentation of social media and the rise of “truth decay” has been a persistent trend that seemed to accelerate when Twitter That Was partially imploded.

As multiple researchers have noted, there is a crowding-out effect on most social media networks, in which, “a given user's lower-quality news posts consistently attract more user engagement than their higher-quality content—even on left-leaning platforms.”

I am happy to report, however, that in this particular instance my social networks did come through, confirming that this was a phenomenon that stretched beyond my little hamlet:

Within the hour, “Boston Boom” was trending on Bluesky. It became clear that whatever had happened, folks all along the Massachusetts coast stretching down to Providence had heard something, And it also prompted a really good writer to corroborate my query!

Thankfully, links to mainstream media explanations diffused far more rapidly than any disinformation or conspiracy theory — at least on my feed:

Reports of an explosion from people across New England Saturday afternoon sent police agencies and others scrambling to understand what caused a double boom that shook buildings in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

The American Meteor Society said that the booms heard about 2:30 p.m. were actually caused by a meteor about 3 feet wide entering the atmosphere around the New Hampshire border with Massachusetts, north of Boston.

Robert Lunsford, the Fireball Program Monitor with the society, said the group received dozens of reports from Delaware to Montreal with people either hearing the double boom, feeling the ground shake or seeing the fireball — which he said looks like a shooting star in the daytime sky.

“It was definitely bigger than a normal fireball, about a yard wide,” he said….

People in a handful of states posted on social media about feeling the buildings they were in shaking. Several videos posted on X also captured what sounded like two quick booms, with no fire, smoke or other visual causes.

Indeed, even Xitter proved to be useful in explaining what had happened.

One of the selection effects in punditry — particularly in 2026 — is focusing on negative shocks and negative trends. And let’s be honest, there’s a lot of that going around in 2026. But there are good news stories as well, cases in which a system works. This was a case in which something mysterious happened and, via social media, it got explained.

So think of this post as like one of those instances in which your plane takes off and lands on schedule. Perhaps too rare these days — but worth valuing when it happens!

There’s a scene from All the President’s Men that has become an oft-deployed meme during both terms of the Trump administration. It’s the one where Deep Throat explains an essential truth about the Nixon administration to Bob Woodward — one that maybe, just maybe, applies to the current administration as well.

It’s worth remembering this line when contemplating the administration’s myriad attempts to coerce, browbeat, bomb, and negotiate with Iran in recent months.

For the record, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has been extremely skeptical of all of these efforts from the get go. Here’s a sampling of posts over the past three months:

• “How to Flunk Coercive Diplomacy 101,” February 24, 2026

• “There is No U.S. Plan on Iran,” March 3, 2026

• “‘Nobody Could Have Seen This Coming,’ Says Blindfolded Administration,” March 9, 2026

• “I’m Sick and Tired of All the Winning,” March 12, 2026

• “The Strategic Defeat of the United States,” April 4, 2026

A running theme in these columns? References to Trump officials being “frustrated” that their pressure tactics are not working on Iran. Which is a polite way of saying that the current administration does not understand their current bargaining situation

From the close of that last column:

The longer this war drags on, the greater the costs for the United States. Absent a full-scale ground invasion, Iran can hold out. But Trump can’t simply declare victory and tap out either. Which means he is stuck trying to sell a strategic defeat as a tactical victory. But inconvenient facts mean that not even Republicans are buying that pitch.

Trump has lost this war. The only question now is how bigly he loses it.

Nearly two months later, it remains unclear how bigly he will lose it. Sure, U.S. officials occasionally float that a deal is imminent to boost their Polymarket windfall, but the existing cease-fire is incredibly balky and Iran can likely hold out longer than U.S. officials expect.

For example, as the New York Times’ Aaron Boxerman explained earlier this week, Trump’s attempts to pressure the Iranian regime have not worked out well:

Since President Trump announced a cease-fire with Iran in April, he has sought to force Tehran to accept his terms for a peace deal with a mixture of threats and limited military operations.

But more than a month later, the contours of a deal emerging this week to end the war reflected how Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign does not appear to have decisively shifted Iran’s stance on its nuclear program.

The impending deal could reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the critical waterway for oil and gas, which Iran has blockaded since the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran began the war in late February. But it may delay big decisions on other thorny issues until later.

The Strait of Hormuz was already supposed to be open at this point. Free passage had been Mr. Trump’s condition for pausing the war in April….

Iran experts say the country’s leadership has emerged emboldened from the war, believing that the country had weathered an attempt to topple the Islamic Republic.

The leadership views time as on its side, analysts say, in part given their ability to rattle global energy prices.

Over the past week, however, more stories have come out demonstrating that the Trump administration is slowly, painfully, fitfully approaching the same conclusion that the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World — not to mention other analysts — knew going into the conflict.

As the administration pushed towards some kind of negotiated arrangement with Iran this week, Hawks like Mike Pompeo and Lindsey Graham started chirping about the crappy terms of the deal. In response, Washington Examiner columnist Byron York — probably the most articulate Trump apologist out there — relayed comments from a senior administration official background briefing to explain why the Trump White House was reluctant to escalate in Iran.

It’s an extraordinary read:

“We have to ask ourselves at any time we take an action, what does it accomplish for the American people?” the official answered. “And I think where the president’s view is right now is that you would need a substantial escalation in order to meaningfully change things that are on the ground.”

That appeared to be a frank assessment — the official emphasized the word “substantial” — of the amount of U.S. force that would be needed to “finish the job,” as some of the president’s critics define it. Which leads to the question: Would that be worth it?

“You could, of course, exert more pain, which is more pressure, which means more leverage,” the official said. “Maybe that allows you to have a better deal. But I hear some people saying we need to do this, or you can’t stop until the regime tips over. And my question on that is, well, what do you actually mean by that? Because the president of the United States has taken a lot of action.”….

So why doesn’t Trump just finish the job in Iran? The short version of this conversation was that it would take a substantial escalation of military force to change the current situation, and the president does not think it is worth it. The official did not detail just what a “substantial escalation” would involve, but the U.S. has already applied a lot of military force in Iran, so it would be a lot of force on top of force. It’s no surprise the president is reluctant to do it if there are other options available.

The Atlantic’s Jonathan Lemire and Nancy A. Youssef report something similar about Trump’s current thinking: “Despite his frequent threats, Trump is reluctant to resume hostilities; aides told us he is mindful of depleted U.S. munitions supplies and fears that Iran would retaliate against the energy infrastructure of its Gulf neighbors, worsening the world’s fuel crisis.”

Oh wow, so it only took three months for Trump and his policy principals to realize that all of the assumptions it had made going into the conflict were wrong.1

Meanwhile, there is still no guarantee that the U.S. can even negotiate a cease-fire. Lemire and Youssef also report that, “Trump has grown deeply frustrated with his inability to get Iran to fully capitulate, aides told us, and angry at the commentators who have said the persistent stalemate has left him looking weak.”

For the record, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World does not think the stalemate leaves Trump looking weak. Rather, it actually leaves him weak.

And, as the New York Times’ Michael Crowley and Eric Schmitt report, Trump keeps screwing things up at the negotiation table:

Three months after President Trump launched war on Iran, his seemingly haphazard approach to the conflict is bewildering allies at home and abroad as he veers between diplomatic dealing, military strikes and increasingly far-fetched ideas.…

At the Defense Department, military officials expressed bewilderment over the stop-start nature of the conflict. A senior defense official said that the more than 50,000 U.S. troops assigned to Iran who are scattered throughout the Middle East, Europe and the United States were “in limbo” as Mr. Trump swings from option to option.

For centuries, statesmen from Otto von Bismarck to Henry Kissinger have argued that diplomacy with adversaries is most effective when backed by force, real or threatened. “Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table,” Secretary of State George P. Shultz said in a 1986 speech.

But Mr. Trump’s pendulum swings on Iran have often seemed driven by mood and moment rather than any discernible strategy.

At the start of this year I told Politico that one of the obligations of being a foreign policy commentator is acknowledging that, “there comes a point where you just want to say this is a fucking stupid idea.”

On Iran, I know we reached that point even before the war began. And if you’ve read this far, it means that you likely know that we have reached that point. Unfortunately, it seems clear that it will take Trump a much longer time horizon before he internalizes that point.

In yesterday[‘s post on the Trump administration’s embargo and possible military action against Cuba, I expressed just a wee bit of skepticism about the current administration’s ability to get Cuba policy right:

Much as I would love to see democratic regime change come to Cuba, I have absolutely zero faith in this administration to pull off anything resembling “forcible and democratic regime change.” That the Trump administration does not comprehend what the current Cuban government is doing is certainly one tell. One would have hoped that the Iran fiasco would have injected some humility into the current administration, but no dice….

The thing is, this administration’s track record is so utterly abysmal that it is impossible to expect forcible regime change in Cuba to end well. It is unlikely that Trump officials have game-planned this out in any detail. And I am left wondering just how much more foreign policy chaos this president will unleash while he occupies his office.

Hopefully I’m wrong. But I don’t think I am.

Mulling over the situation, there is one additional point to make about how Cuba plays out: it will be the ultimate test of whether Marco Rubio’s policy competency is real or a mirage.

Read more

It has been a very busy 2026 in the world of international relations. And for most of this year, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has had a Post-It note saying, “write something about Cuba.” That is because I am genuinely baffled by what the Trump administration thinks is going to happen.

You see, back in January the U.S. imposed an oil embargo on Cuba soon after the Trump administration successfully grabbed Venezuela’s Nicholas Maduro. With their Venezuelan energy lifeline eliminated, the Trump administration clearly believed that Cuba’s communist regime was on its last legs and close to collapsing. This seemed like a debatable proposition; after all, Cuba’s regime has weathered previous periods of extreme economic distress without collapsing. Still, coasting on the momentum from the Venezuela operation, the administration opted for a maximum pressure campaign against Cuba.

A few months later, in mid-March, Trump expressed confidence that a “friendly takeover” of Cuba was just a matter of time. A few days later in the Oval Office he told reporters:

I think Cuba sees the end. All my life I’ve been hearing about the United States and Cuba. When will the United States do it? I do believe I’ll be the honor of — having the honor of taking Cuba….. Whether I free it, take it — I think I can do anything I want with it, you want to know the truth. They’re a very weakened nation right now.

It’s worth pausing here for a moment to note how extraordinary it is that the United States has been able to impose this embargo without much in the way of negative blowback from the rest of the world. An embargo is an act of war, but no other country has raised much of a stink about U.S. actions in the Caribbean. That could be because there are a whole bunch of other U.S. actions that have raised hackles and Cuba is literally in America’s neighborhood.

More than two months after Trump’s statement, the administration’s policy towards Cuba reminds me of a strategy that Jason Mendoza frequently advocated for in The Good Place:

The Trump administration might be floundering in the Persian Gulf, but it seems perfectly willing to throw a Molotov cocktail in the Caribbean. The indictment of former Cuban leader Raúl Castro last week certainly adds to the U.S. coercive pressure.

Would forcible U.S. regime change work? No doubt, the communist Cuban regime has long a distinguished history of repressing its citizenry and running the Cuban economy into ground. Peaceful regime change is a delicate, intricate task — but it would benefit both American foreign policy and the Cuban people in the long run.

And Cuba is definitely suffering right now. Earlier this month Cuba’s energy minister said the island nation had run out of diesel and fuel oil, triggering protests in Havana. According to the New York Times’ Ed Augustin and Lisette Poole González, the embargo, combined with the Cuban government’s longtime mismanagement of its economy, is imposing severe hardships across the island:

Today, some people can’t even afford charcoal, and resort to chopping firewood to cook in their homes.

Life here and across much of Cuba, already difficult because of an economy that has been in shambles for years, has become even worse since the Trump administration mounted its escalating pressure campaign against the country’s communist government….

The Cuban government says its oil reserves have run out and that its aging electric grid is becoming increasingly unreliable. The country produces some oil but far from enough to meet its needs.

Outside Havana, the capital, power outages now last 20 hours a day. The lack of energy has set off an enormous humanitarian crisis that has become deadly….

Residents are sleep-deprived. Because nobody knows when the power will come on, people leave lights and fans on. If the electricity kicks on, the sudden glare or cool breeze will wake them so they can do their chores before another outage.

So this seems like a fair amount of economic and mental distress.

At the same time, Cuba’s ability to defend itself against a U.S. attack also seems to be compromised. The Wall Street Journal’s José de Córdoba and Ian Lovett report that Cuba’s military — which was a formidable fighting force back in the days of Red Dawn the Cold War, is now a husk of its former self:

Cuba’s armed forces once fielded tens of thousands of well-trained soldiers during the height of the Cold War, deploying to conflicts from Angola to Syria.

Today, as the U.S. sends an aircraft carrier to the Caribbean in a pressure campaign to change the island’s Communist government, Cuba’s military is a ghost of its former self.

Until the decline and fall of its benefactor, the Soviet Union, Cuba had an army of more than 200,000 soldiers. Now that force is down to some 40,000 to 45,000 active-duty soldiers divided in three parts to defend the country’s east, west and center….

Morale and motivation also are factors. Cuba’s military has been living through a yearslong economic crisis that has exhausted the population. And those troops have been unable to train or maintain their weapons, said Craig Deare, who served early in Trump’s first administration as senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council.

“Maybe their rifles work and maybe they have bullets,” Deare said. “But when you’re going against the best in the world, you don’t have a chance.”

There is no indication that Cuba has any offensive capability, but it could fight a war for survival in the event of a U.S. invasion, said Evan Ellis, professor of Latin American studies at the U.S. Army War College.

“It would come down to how long they could hold out with guerrilla tactics,” Ellis said. “The core strategy of the Cuban Communist Party is survival.”

Ironically, the Trump administration has been busy hyping up the potency of the Cuban threat in order to justify the embargo and, quite possibly, an invasion. U.S. officials accuse Cuba of housing Russian and Chinese eavesdropping posts (likely true) and leaked to Axios that they might pose a drone threat to the U.S. mainland (likely BS). The point is that Cuba is not a serious national security threat but the Trump administration needs to claim it is in order to justify its actions.

The Cuban regime’s survival mode seems to be flummoxing Trump and his advisors. Negotiations have been ongoing, but as Politico’s Nahal Toosi explains, Trump is still not getting what he wants:

A U.S. official and a person familiar with the administration’s discussions on Cuba told me that President Donald Trump and his aides have grown frustrated that the U.S. pressure campaign, which includes starving the island of fuel, has not led Cuba’s leaders to agree to significant economic and political reforms. So they’re taking the military option more seriously than previously.

“The mood has definitely changed,” said the person familiar with discussions, whom, like others, I granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue. “The initial idea on Cuba was that the leadership was weak and that the combination of stepped-up sanctions enforcement, really an oil blockade, and clear U.S. military wins in Venezuela and Iran would scare the Cubans into making a deal. Now Iran has gone sideways, and the Cubans are proving much tougher than originally thought. So now military action is on the table in a way that it wasn’t before.”….

U.S. military planners are weighing an array of options beyond grabbing one or two individuals, I’m told. The military action could range from a single airstrike meant to scare the regime into concessions to a ground invasion meant to uproot it.

U.S. Southern Command has in the past few weeks “convened a planning series” — in other words, started drafting plans for potential military action — the U.S. official and the person familiar with the talks told me.

No action is imminent….

I would warn Cuba watchers against is believing that Trump’s struggles in Iran will hold him back from carrying out a military operation against Cuba.

The mess in Iran could leave the president impatient to score another win. He may see Cuba as an easy victory.

That could prove a miscalculation, former U.S. officials and analysts warned. “There are true believers there,” a former State Department official who dealt with Cuba said.

Much as I would love to see democratic regime change come to Cuba, I have absolutely zero faith in this administration to pull off anything resembling “forcible and democratic regime change.” That the Trump administration does not comprehend what the current Cuban government is doing is certainly one tell. One would have hoped that the Iran fiasco would have injected some humility into the current administration, but no dice.

As Politico’s Toosi and Daniel Desrochers explain, any regime change in Cuba would necessitate a massive amount of public investment into Cuban infrastructure and social support — and the likelihood of private sector buy-in would be low:

“You’re talking about a country that absolutely, 100 percent needs to be redone,” said Horacio Garcia Jr., a Cuban-American business leader based in Miami who is involved with the Cuban Liberty Council, which pushes for democracy in Cuba. “There’s no infrastructure for anything, for water, electricity, nothing, nothing. There’s not really a fair banking system. Everything needs to be done from the ground up. You’re talking about a country that’s in ruins.”

Unlike Venezuela, whose oil sector is the main economic driver, there is no single, dominant industry for Trump to tap in Cuba….

And the long reign of Havana’s communist regime has led to a far more atrophied private sector, as well as decaying public utilities. Any effort to open Cuba comes with the heavy burden of history, ranging from an expatriate community looking to recoup seized property to layers of U.S. policy that would need to be unwound to promote business development.

That includes unraveling decades of U.S. sanctions, a process that would likely need some approvals from Congress….

“Cuba is a complex, nuanced place,” said Mark Entwistle, the former Canadian ambassador to Cuba. “So every aspect of it has whole backstories to it and rabbit holes all over the place.”

A Trump administration move on Cuba would likely be less successful than the Venezuela operation and would likely spur a wave of migration into the United States — a cruel irony given this administration’s attitude about migrants.

Consider this column something of a marker. The Trump administration is intent on either coercing or forcing the end of the current Cuban regime. No doubt Trump wants to do this because a communist Cuba has bedeviled U.S. presidents for the last 65 years — and he could slice this Gordian knot when no president before him did so.

The thing is, this administration’s track record is so utterly abysmal that it is impossible to expect forcible regime change in Cuba to end well. It is unlikely that Trump officials have game-planned this out in any detail. And I am left wondering just how much more foreign policy chaos this president will unleash while he occupied his office.

Hopefully I’m wrong. But I don’t think I am.

One of the themes I stressed in The Ideas Industry was the role that plutocrats played in the cultivation of the marketplace of ideas. On the one hand, many of these billionaires take ideas very seriously. On the other hand, as Chrystia Freeland has previously documented, the increasingly insular experience of the daily life of billionaires skews their beliefs about what is important in the world. And as the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has documented on multiple occasions, this can lead to some rather bizarre worldviews.

This bring us to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post. I think it’s safe to say that he’s growing out of touch with the mass public.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has made no secret of its disappointment with Bezos’ heel turn, particularly his recent stewardship of the Washington Post. Yesterday he sat down with Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC and explained why he had decided to cull WaPo’s staff:

Now there are a few things about this clip.

• Bezos is right to prioritize the Post’s investigatory journalism. As per usual with these things, plutocrats usually get a few things right;

• I don’t know a ton about poetry, but declaring that it only has value if it rhymes seems… way off?!

• Conflating value with profitability is a classic plutocratic move, but it conveniently absolves the plutocrat from any bad business decisions.

It’s that last point in particular that stands out with Bezos, because his business decisions about the Post have been baffling. A year ago, the New York Times reported that when Bezos announced his intention to pivot the Post’s opinion section towards his own libertarian political and economic beliefs, opinions editor David Shipley explicitly warned him that this would cause the Post to lose subscribers. Bezos’ response? “I don’t care.”

Bezos should care if his goal is profitability. As the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World noted a few months ago, Bezos’ pivot towards a more right-leaning, Trump-friendly libertarian bent was a business choice as blinkered as Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to go all-in on virtual reality.

I’m hardly the only person to reach this conclusion:

• Status’ Natalie Korach recently documented one example of this misbegotten business strategy: investing a ton into a state-of-the-art podcasting studio for the opinion section’s “Make It Make Sense” podcast and attracting fewer than 700 subscribers.

• As TNR’s Parker Molloy explains, “Bezos laid off the people who win the Pulitzers. He’s funding the people who lose the subscribers. Traffic to the Post’s website was down 24 percent year over year in March, per TheRighting. The New York Times was down 0.6 percent over the same period. CNN was up 3 percent. The Post is in its own category.”

• Ross Douthat made a similar assessment yesterday: “The business issue for the Post isn't that Bezos made cuts; it's that he wants an ideological pivot into a market that's in the hands of rivals (WSJ, Free Press, Economist) during a time in the political cycle that's bad for right-leaning media brands.”

If Bezos wants to say that mainstream media outlets should be profitable, that’s fine. If he wants the Post to take a more libertarian bent because it reflects his worldview, that’s fine. But he can’t have both, not in 2026, because it’s clear that his editorial preferences have exacerbated his operating losses.

Unfortunately, it seems doubtful that anyone will make this point directly to Bezos. Last month director Noah Hawley wrote a doozy of an Atlantic essay describing his time at a Bezos-funded Campfire retreat in Santa Barbara, California — “an annual event in which the Amazon founder invites 80-plus guests—celebrities, artists, intellectuals, and anyone else he thinks is interesting—to spend three nights at a private resort.”

Hawley’s essay echoes some of my Ideas Industry observations: “It turns out there is a circuit of idea festivals. Many tech billionaires host one, and if you find yourself on the right list, you can spend much of the year traveling the world, eating Wagyu, and discussing how to make the world a better place with the most famous talk-show host in history.” Or “To be declared a genius at one thing is to begin to believe you are a genius at everything.”

Hawley went even further, however, in describing the psychological effects of being a centibillionaire,1 concluding with a description of his one interaction with Bezos at the retreat:

The closer I’ve gotten to the world of wealth, the more I understand that being truly rich doesn’t mean amassing enough money to afford superyachts, private jets, or a million acres of land. It means that everything becomes effectively free. Any asset can be acquired but nothing can ever be lost, because for soon-to-be trillionaires, no level of loss could significantly change their global standing or personal power. For them, the word failure has ceased to mean anything.

This sense of invulnerability has deep psychological ramifications. If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all….

It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark….

How was your Campfire? Bezos asked me an hour later, and because I am an honest person, and because I have been a host myself, I decided he would want to know that there had been a problem, but that his team had reacted quickly and been extremely helpful. To be clear, I was in no way blaming him, nor was I shaking down the richest man on Earth. Instead, I was simply offering Bezos, also a husband and father, a brief human connection.

But when I told him what had happened, Bezos looked horrified. He did not say “I’m so sorry.” He did not say “Do you need anything?” Instead, he made a face, and in an instant, an aide came and whisked him away. When presented with the opportunity for empathy, even performative empathy, he chose escape.

This helps to explain how, during his CNBC interview. Bezos said that Donald Trump is a, “more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term. Trump has lots of good ideas, and he has done a lot of — he’s been right about a lot of things. You have to give him credit where credit is due.”

CNBC noted that Bezos “did not offer specifics” on what Trump was right about; I’ll merely point out that a large and increasing fraction of the American people disagree with Bezos’ assessment.

Bezos, has become literally insensitive to public opposition to anything he says or does. He can no longer comprehend mass public opinion. He is insensitive to underlying political shifts. He exercises no empathy. And I strongly suspect that this baffles him.

Donald Trump has served sixteen months as president during his second term. He has proven to be ridiculously, historically unpopular president, and his party will pay the price in the November midterm elections.

It’s worth stressing these empirical claims, because there are various constituencies who refuse to acknowledge that basic political fact.

I’ll get to the constituencies in a second. First, where’s my proof? Well, let’s see — there is the Economist’s poll tracker:

Note that Trump is underperforming: a) both his first-term numbers; and b) Biden’s numbers. Furthermore, as the Economist explains about his -21 net approval rating: “that number masks an asymmetry. Of the Americans who approve of Mr Trump, half do so ‘strongly’ while the other half are ‘somewhat’ positive about him. Critics are more passionate: almost 90% of them disapprove of Mr Trump ‘strongly’.”

Then there is the New York Times….

For those readers suspicious of legacy media, let’s pivot to Nate Silver, who observed yesterday, “Donald Trump’s decline in the polls doesn’t seem to be slowing down.”

G. Elliott Morris has a smoother trendline but it points in the same direction, and he offers a similar takeaway to Silver: “not only is Trump’s rating at the all-time low for a president since 2009, and lower than that of any president at this point in their term, but it also shows no sign of slowing down.”

Even RealClearPolitics, which has a more conservative lean, shows a similar trendline:

All five of these aggregates reveal that Trump has fallen below the 40% line. This is important, because one piece of conventional wisdom about Trump has been that he has a low ceiling but a high floor when it comes to his polling numbers because of the loyalty of his MAGA base. It turns out that floor is getting lower by the day.

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s strategic blunder in Iran is taking its toll, as the latest New York Times/Siena poll demonstrates. According to the NYT’s Lisa Lerer, Ruth Igielnik, and Camille Baker:

Mr. Trump’s approval rating — a key historical predictor of how a president’s party will fare in an election — has sunk to a second-term low in Times/Siena polls of 37 percent amid the deeply unpopular Middle East conflict.

Nearly two-thirds of voters said that going to war had been the wrong decision, including almost three-quarters of politically crucial independents. Less than a quarter of all voters thought the conflict had been worth the costs.

Republicans broadly approved of Mr. Trump’s job performance and the war. But most other voters showed serious skepticism of his leadership on other top issues, including the economy and the cost of living. Sixty-four percent of all voters disapproved of his handling of the economy, long a strength for him, and majorities expressed negative views of how he was managing the cost of living, immigration and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

No doubt, the economy is dragging down Trump’s numbers. But it’s not just Trump — if the generic congressional ballot is any indicator, all Republicans are paying the price. RealClearPolitics has Democrats up by more than seven points. As does Silver Bulletin and Strength in Numbers. The New York Times’ latest gives the Democrats a ten-point lead. Given that the generic ballot poll usually trends towards the out party as the midterms approach, the Democrats are occupying very favorable political terrain.

The implications of Trump’s historically dismal approval ratings and the generic congressional ballot are pretty straightforward. Despite the gerrymandering reversals that Democrats have suffered at the Virginia Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court, they are still on track to have a good midterms come November.

Again, don’t take my word for it, just read the conclusions of folks who know more about polling and American politics than I do:

• G. Elliott Morris: “A 5-to-7-seat redistricting advantage is real, and in a neutral environment, it would matter a lot. Via partisan gerrymandering — legalized cheating — Trump has tried to change how big a wave has to be to flip the House. But even these serious GOP gains would not be enough to overpower the current caused by a pro-Democratic wave election this November. And on this front, Trump’s catastrophic approval rating is a strong positive indicator for the Democrats.”

• Seth Masket: “My look at some predictions suggests that Democrats are still likely to take control of the House this November, even while Republicans shrink their margin for error through aggressive redistricting.”

• Jonathan Bernstein: “While anything from break-even House to a somewhat smaller landslide are all still plausible, I’ll (somewhat) go out on a limb: While the most likely result is somewhere in between, it’s more likely that the Democrats will gain 30 seats than that Republicans will retain their majority.”

So, just to be clear, the data and analysis confirm that Trump is historically unpopular and said unpopularity will strongly favor a Democratic takeover of one or both houses of Congress this November.

In recent months I have made these points, either in person or on social media, and some of the negative responses have been fascinating. In particular, I have seen three constituencies that scorn, reject, or minimize these points.

The first group are the MAGA true believers. These are the folks who discount the very idea of polling because Trump has always outperformed his polling numbers at the ballot box. I have had more than one Trump supporter discount all the polling data on Iran based on that fact alone.

Part of what is going on here is that even in the latest New York Times poll 70 percent of Republicans support his decision to go to war with Iran, and 59 percent of Republicans strongly approve of his presidency. Furthermore, Trump’s command over the GOP base has been on abundant display over the past month, as his interventions in GOP primaries have ousted Indiana state senators who opposed his gerrymandering move there, as well as Senator Bill Cassidy. As Seth Masket concludes, “within his party, he is still the kingmaker. The most passionate Republican voters — the ones who turn out for primary elections — still follow his cues. That will likely be true as long as he lives.”

The thing is, Trump is not going to be on the ballot in 2026. And Trump’s command of his base does not have much of a multiplier effect. Indeed, according to the latest Politico polling, the effect of a Trump endorsement is a net negative: “When voters who supported Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 were told that Trump backed a candidate, they were 55 percent less likely to support that candidate. The much larger effect size among Harris voters outweighs the boost among Trump supporters. As a result, across all voters, a Trump endorsement was more detrimental than helpful.”

So much for the deluded MAGA folks. The second group are the international audiences. For them, 38 percent support of Trump is 38 percent too many Americans supporting Trump. As near as I can fathom, these folks are outraged that Americans are not more outraged and out protesting in the streets constantly at the string of policy abominations that Trump has unleashed over the past 16 months. I suspect this is also linked to the occasional mainstream media story about Trump supporters sticking with him.1

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World is unmoved by this sentiment. For one thing, even the most unpopular presidents in the past 60 years still commanded about 25 percent support. So this gripe is entirely about the sliver of the electorate between the 25 percent floor and the 38 percent that Trump commands for the moment. As previously noted, however, Trump’s support has been eroding at a reasonably steady clip. It’s not like his policies are going to magically yield results or his corruption is going to lessen. If he is going to trend in any direction, it is likely to be down.

It is always worth remembering that Trump was a bad president during his first go-around and he is way worse now — and while it might take longer than some folks like, the media coverage eventually catches up to this reality.2

Finally, there are progressives. Almost all of the polling cited above confirm Trump’s unpopularity — but they also reveal that Democrats are not popular either. And a lot of the frustration with Trump’s dismal polling numbers is premised on the fact that Democrats have not been able to stymie the president on all that much. I suspect some of the disbelief about the poll numbers is related to whether Democrats will actually benefit in November — and then whether they will do anything about it if they do win control of a chamber of Congress.

I understand this reaction the most — it echoes how Democrats felt before the 2018 midterms. But the one thing I am certain about is that Trump will be even less constrained if the Republicans continue to control Congress.

To conclude: Trump is a historically unpopular president, his party will pay the price in the November midterm elections, and those folks who do not buy this argument are ingesting large amounts of either copium or cynicism.

My initial take on the Trump-Xi summit was that the outcome might have been underwhelming but it could have been worse: “in 2026, we should be grateful for an event involving Trump in which not much happens.”

That assessment, however, omitted Trump being decidedly noncommittal about the previously arranged $14 billion arms sale to Taiwan. In a Fox News interview that aired as he was coming home from China, he was quite explicit about viewing the Taiwan arms sale as a bargaining chip vis-a-vis Xi Jinping. According to the New York Times’ Chris Buckley:

President Trump has described a potential multibillion-dollar weapons sale to Taiwan as a “negotiating chip” with China, raising new doubts about the pace and scale of American military support for the island democracy.

Taiwan’s government has been waiting for months for Mr. Trump to sign off on a $14 billion package of missiles, anti-drone equipment and air-defense systems intended to fortify the island against Beijing’s military threats.

Mr. Trump himself had pressured Taiwan to spend more on its own defense. Now he is using the very arms his administration had pushed the island to buy as leverage with China, the United States’ main adversary.

Mr. Trump told reporters on Air Force One after leaving China on Friday that he had discussed the weapons package with China’s president, Xi Jinping, during their summit this past week in Beijing….

“I’m holding that in abeyance and it depends on China,” he said in the [Fox News] interview, which was recorded in Beijing but aired after he left. “It depends.”

“It’s a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly,” he said. “It’s a lot of weapons.”

He did not go into details about what he wanted in return, but Mr. Trump has pushed China to make major purchases of American airplanes, ethanol, soybeans, beef and sorghum.

His comments appear to undermine the assurances to Taiwan from some in his own administration that U.S. support for the island is steadfast and nonnegotiable.

There is little doubt that Trump thinks linking arms sales to Taiwan to unrelated economic demands made on Beijing is just a smart bargaining ploy. If there is any consistent throughline in Trump’s first-term and second-term approach to China, it has been a willingness to engage in what international relations scholars might call “tactical issue linkage."

Trump has always cared the most about securing economic concessions from China — mostly in the form of quantitative purchasing agreements of U.S. goods. In return, Trump has also always displayed a willingness to acquiesce on either human rights or security matters: criticism of Chinese repression in Xinjiang or Hong Kong, for example, or selling weapons to Taiwan.

It’s not entirely new for a U.S. administration to engage in tactical issue linkage; the Nixon administration did so as well. Most postwar administrations have been more resistant, however, treating each many issue areas as discrete bargains with their own institutions and norms, and therefore should be negotiated separately. This is the right move to make if those institutions and norms seem to work.

As the clip below suggests, Trump does not give a flying fig about norms and institutions. He welcomes the issue linkage:

Tactical issue linkage isn’t the craziest idea in international bargaining. If the United States has a lot of leverage in a whole array of issue areas where another country is vulnerable, it might make sense to link them. This is what Trump has done by linking U.S. security guarantees to economic concessions from U.S. allies.

Still, the problem with unlimited tactical issue linkage is two-fold.

Read more

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has been a bit preoccupied this week with the important day job responsibilities of herding cats leading the faculty of the Fletcher School for Commencement Week. So it has been difficult to keep on top of current events.

I was dimly aware, however, that the President of the United States was going to visit the paramount leader of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing for a two-day summit. I also vaguely recall that it has already been postponed once due to, you know, the strategic clusterfuck that is Operation Epic Fury.

In the run-up to the summit, the New York Times’ Ana Swanson noted that Trump’s strategic ambitions on China had been downsized from both his first term and his 2024 campaign pronouncements:

When President Trump campaigned in 2024, he promised a trade agenda that would hit China harder than any other economic partner, expanding on actions he had taken in his first term.

Mr. Trump talked about imposing a tariff of 60 percent or more on the country, and proposed stripping China of the preferential trade relations given to it when it joined the World Trade Organization. The rest of the world would be subject to tariffs too, but they would be much lower, at 10 or 20 percent.

More than a year into Mr. Trump’s second term, the picture looks dramatically different….

Rather than pushing China for broader structural changes to its economy, as Mr. Trump’s aides did in his first term, the focus now is largely on maintaining stable relations between the countries, while restoring or increasing U.S. sales of products like airplanes, ethanol, soybeans, beef and sorghum.

The remarkable shrinking of Mr. Trump’s Chinese ambitions is the result of the events of the last year, when China responded to Mr. Trump’s tariffs by cutting off the supply of rare earth minerals and magnets needed by American companies making everything from cars and weaponry to power tools.

Facing the prospect of shuttered U.S. factories and widespread economic damage, the Trump administration appears to have given up the idea of a more ambitious deal with China — widely acknowledged as America’s most problematic trading partner — even as it presses less troublesome partners more aggressively than ever before.

Sounds like a low-but-well-defined bar: a soybean deal here, an aircraft deal there, and that would be that. Writing in the National Interest, Graham Allison sounded upbeat about this kind of outcome:

I am offering 4 to 1 odds that the summit will be, and will be declared by both leaders to be, a great success. My confidence in offering this bet is based on several judgments: each wants this to be a success; each is prepared to give the other what he needs to declare the summit successful; each has informed the other that he’s prepared to deliver; and the summit managers working for each team have laid the groundwork to ensure success.

Peering deeper into my cloudy crystal ball, I’ll hazard a further bet that this will be remembered as the “business” summit in which economics is elevated to a position of equality with geopolitics and “business statecraft” comes to play a larger role in diplomacy….

Last year, President Trump and his team made the mistake of choosing a course of action when imposing extreme tariffs without thinking carefully about how China would respond. As he has told colleagues, it is not a mistake he plans to repeat. Now when considering actions he pauses to ask: “What could China do in response?” As he says: “It’s a big chess game at a very high level. It’s very high-level chess, the highest, and I’m dealing with very smart players.”….

Seeing US-China relations through a business lens means analyzing relations between the two countries as one would assess relations between companies that are simultaneously fierce rivals and friendly partners. They are forced by circumstances to find ways to simultaneously compete and cooperate.

So now that the summit is over, how did the business summit go?

Well… if the Guardian’s Amy Hawkins is correct, not a whole lot got done:

Trump said on Friday he and Xi Jinping, China’s leader, “settled a lot of different problems that other people wouldn’t have been able to solve”. But he didn’t provide much detail on what those solutions were.

“My guess is that despite all the ceremony and summit theatrics, that at the end of the day, this summit will not be that significant,” said Amanda Hsiao, the China director at the Eurasia Group, an advisory and consultancy business. “The core of the relationship hasn’t changed.”

The Chinese readout of Xi and Trump’s final bilateral on Friday gave little concrete information on what had been achieved by the meetings, which have been called the “stalemate summit”.

But what about business deals? Did we see some business deals? The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin is, shall we say, skeptical:

President Trump departed Beijing a few hours ago, hailing “fantastic trade deals” struck during his two-day summit.

Still, many analysts and investors appear underwhelmed by a lack of details or breakthroughs on key issues like tariffs, Iran and tech restrictions. The summit seems to have fallen short of already diminished expectations.

For the 17 business leaders who accompanied Trump on the trip, the deal flow also appeared thinner than what was announced on his last presidential trip to China, in 2017.

The negative market reaction to the end of the summit bolsters Sorkin’s conclusions. And Swanson’s post-summit report pointed out the slight gap between Trump administration enthusiasm and Chinese chill about the summit deliverables:

President Trump departed Beijing on Friday, touting trade deals to sell American-made airplanes, farm goods and other products, the signature outcome of his two-day summit with Xi Jinping, China’s top leader.

Mr. Trump and his advisers said China had agreed to buy 200 Boeing airplanes, with the possibility to sell more, and more than $10 billion worth of agricultural products, as well as energy and medical devices. But few details were released, and Chinese officials said little publicly about the commitments….

Chinese officials struck a more cautious tone. Asked whether China had agreed to buy more Boeing airplanes or American agricultural products, Guo Jiakun, a spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, would not confirm any details. He said Beijing was willing to work with the United States “to implement the important consensus reached by the two heads of state.”

A Boeing official referred a request for comment to the White House.

Stephen Olson, a former American trade negotiator, said that “no major breakthroughs were expected and none were achieved, but both countries got what they needed from this summit: a bit of additional stability.”

The terrifying thing is that while “a bit of additional stability” might sound like the lowest bar possible, it is not the worst outcome from a president who clearly has the capacity to make much dumber decisions. With the possibility of a great power war over Taiwan, Jessica Chen Weiss points out in the Financial Times that a cold peace is a pleasant surprise:

The more surprising outcome was that Xi and Trump seem to have a genuine interest in stabilising US-China relations. If hawks on both sides of the Pacific can stomach it, stalemate could become the durable détente both countries need. There is now a window of opportunity for this….

The goal right now may just be a “cold peace”. Rather than trying to engineer a breakthrough, this is a moment to prevent deterioration. Keeping enough channels open so that a better relationship becomes possible, despite any bluster over Taiwan, is a modest mission, but it may be the only viable one.

So to sum up:

1. Yes, Trump and Xi had a summit;

2. No, not much happened at the summit;

3. In 2026, we should be grateful for an event involving Trump in which not much happens.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has long been wary of depictions of academic life in television and film.1 As I have lamented previously, it is a given in these shows and films that there will always be a male professor character who sleeps with a student. I suppose in the post-#MeToo era that plot can be varied to “male professor creeps on student” but that’s not much of an improvement. Some of these shows have been pretty good, like The Chair, but the truth is that most of them have been disappointing.

So when I saw the trailer for HBO Max’s Rooster, I felt a familiar sense of trepidation:

Rooster stars Steve Carell as Greg Russo, a successful Carl Hiassen-kind of author who never attended college. He agrees to serve as writer-in-residence at leafy Ludlow College, however, so he can help out his daughter Katie (played by Charly Clive), an art history prof at Ludlow in the throes of a crisis because her stupid git of a husband — a vainglorious Russian history professor named Archie (played by Phil Dunster) has gone and has an affair with grad student Sunny (played by Lauren Tsai), who turns out to be pregnant. Complications ensue.

So, yeah, a professor sleeps with a student — not a great start! Still, Steve Carell is usually fun to watch. And this show is a creation of Bill Lawrence (Scrubs, Ted Lasso, the criminally underrated Bad Monkey) and his frequent co-creator Matt Tarses, who — fun fact — was a college classmate of mine back in the day at the best leafy liberal arts college in the world.

So I started watching.

Rooster has received middling reviews but great ratings — and I think I understand both responses. Here is a short list of Comic Book Guy questions I had while watching Rooster:

• Is Ludlow a college or a university? The show is shot like it’s a prototypical liberal arts college but there is apparently also a business school and a biotech graduate program?! The show really needs to make up its mind here!

• What, exactly, is the academic specialty of college president Walt Mann (played by a mostly shirtless John C. McGinley2)? It seems like he’s an expert on Teddy Roosevelt but then Sunny, the biotechnology student, seeks him out as a mentor — which doesn’t make a ton of sense?

• Speaking of Walt, he has the most free time of any college administrator I have ever met. In 2026 no college president has that much unstructured time for coffee walks and plunge pools is what I’m saying here.

• Do the showrunners understand how the tenure track works? In one episode Katie talks about a “fast track” for tenure, like becoming tenure track is a choice. It was very confusing.

• For someone who is such a successful author, when does Greg actually write anything? We never see him writing!

So I can’t say that the show really captured college in 2026 all that accurately. Which is a point the AV Club’s Noel Murray also noted, “does [the] show have anything fresh or insightful to say about college life in 2026? Goodness no. Did we expect them to? Television has long been terrible at depicting what happens in schools—and in college in particular.”

And yet…. Rooster has charms that kept me coming back for more:

1. The show has a catchy theme song! “I Played the Fool” by Michael Stipe and Andrew Watt is a solid earworm. It perfectly captures Rooster’s vibe, and I never skipped the opening credits because I wanted to listen to it.

2. The cast is great. Carell is his usual stellar, awkward self. Connie Britton is fabulous as his successful and selfish ex-wife. Phil Dunster — who played Jamie Tartt in Ted Lasso — manages to breathe life into the insufferable cad of Archie. And Annie Mumolo, who plays Walt’s executive assistant Christle, steals every scene she is in.

3. The wokeness on college campuses is played for gentle laughs. I laughed every time Greg said something mildly inappropriate, which was followed by a smash cut to him apologizing to a code of conduct committee. It was an easy laugh — and no college committee works that fast — but a laugh is a laugh…

4. There’s a moment in the second episode when Walt explains to his friend Dylan (played by Danielle Deadwyler) why being the college president is so tough: “It just feels like this is my whole job now. People come and ask me for things that they really care about, I have to say no, and then they hold it against me.” As a lower-level administrator, let me just say that line cut to the bone.

5. The show has poetry professor Dylan actually want to become the Dean of Faculty. As someone who is wary of college administration I nonetheless welcomed the portrayal of a professor who decides that she possesses administrative ambitions and pursues them.

6. The supportive relationship between Sunny and her grad school roommate Mo (played by Robby Hoffman) was awfully nice to see.

7. In the season finale, after Greg tells his student Tommy (played by Maximo Salas) that he liked his chapter, there is a shot of Tommy — who has had a rough semester — looking happy, warm in the glow of Greg’s praise. Generating and then seeing those reactions is one of the best things about being a professor.

Rooster has already been renewed for a second season — and I’ll keep watching it. Because even if it doesn’t get everything right about working at a college in 2026, it gets some things right — and I can hope that it’s sophomore effort will improve upon its freshman entry.

Theories of International Politics and Zombies is now in its third edition.1 Based on a recent conversation with my editor at Princeton University Press, the odds are pretty good that a fourth edition will be coming out sometime in the next few years.2 As is the case with researching economic statecraft, when it comes to zombies, I feel like Don Corleone in The Godfather Part III: just when I think I’m out, the zombies pull me back in.

One of the things I argued in the book’s introduction is that a surge of interest in zombie flicks is tied to surges in international insecurity. After George Romero popularized the genre during the Cold War, zombies suffered a bit of a lull during the relatively peaceful 1990s. But the undead rose again after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks — the twin hits of Resident Evil and 28 Days Later encouraged a raft of new zombie flicks. The genre expanded even further after the 2008 financial crisis.

To be sure, some folks believed that zombie films were done back in the 2010s. But as I survey the slate of recent and forthcoming films, the growth in mainstream zombie productions suggests that reports of the death of the zombie genre were… well, certainly premature and possibly revealing a failure to understand the irony of declaring zombie stuff dead.

Consider that the 28 Days Later franchise has seen not one but two films3 released in the past year, and Sony has greenlit the third film in the trilogy. The film version of World War Z is the highest-grossing zombie film ever, and the sequel to that film has finally been greenlit as well. HBO is releasing season three of The Last of Us next year.

So there’s a lot going on in the zombie genre! But if it’s true that the state of undead cinema is a reflection of societal anxieties, well, then I confess that this is a bad sign for 2026 and beyond.

Consider the trailers for three forthcoming zombie flicks: First, here’s the latest from the director of Train to Busan, which might be the best zombie flick of the last decade:

Then, there’s the return of the Evil Dead franchise:

And finally, there’s the reboot of Resident Evil:

Now to some extent this is unfair, because I’m judging the tone of these forthcoming films from the tone of their trailers. As anyone who watched Shiva Baby based solely on the trailer knows, these two things are not always commensurate. Assuming, however, that the vibes of the films match the vibes of the trailers, well, that augurs poorly for the state of the world

With its criticisms of individualism and capitalism, Train to Busan was an acerbic, action-packed dystopic film that fit perfectly into the mainstream zombie canon. This looks…. just way grimmer and grosser.

The other two trailers that give me even more pause. Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead franchise has its horrors, but it also had a wicked sense of humor. This trailer gestures in that direction, but to be honest it just seems to amp up the horror even more.

As for Resident Evil, on the one hand this is the perfect franchise to reboot. The original film had one clever scene amidst a sea of silliness — and the franchise descended into schlock pretty quickly after that.4 This reboot, from the director of Barbarian and Weapons, suggests something potentially way better — but also way creepier.5

There are other leading indicators out there for thinking about the current and future state of the world. As someone who knows a thing or two about zombie flicks, however, I’ll be hoping that these films about the undead do not presage a turn for the worse in the world of the living.

Last week I wrote that the Trump administration’s half-hearted patience gambit — in which “actual hostilities do not recur, but the Strait of Hormuz remains closed until Iran’s regime feel pressured into is making the kind of deal that is at least better than the JCPOA’s terms” — was the best of a bad set of options. But I also expressed some skepticism:

There are multiple reasons to be skeptical that “blockade and wait” will work. The two most obvious problems have to do with Trump’s decision-making pathologies. As previously noted, Trump is lousy at playing a waiting game, and that’s what this strategy entails. Axios’s [Barak] Ravid has already reported that Trump is entertaining more aggressive military options, and that “the briefing signals that Trump is seriously considering resuming major combat operations either to try to break the logjam in negotiations or to deliver a final blow before ending the war.”

A second pathology is the administration’s wishcasting that Iran is just days away from collapsing…. energy and regional experts are not buying that argument.

In the week since, the reasons for skepticism are mounting. For one thing, president Trump tried to break the logjam with Project Freedom, a U.S. military effort to escort tanker and container ships out of the Gulf despite Iranian threats. And for like 48 whole hours, Trump, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio trumpeted this plan. And then, Trump abruptly called the whole thing off after Gulf allies rebelled against the plan and denied airspace access to U.S. planes.

That particular episode highlighted just how desperate Trump has been to break the current stalemate. But two news stories suggest that he’s going to have even more difficulty than he thought in ending this foreign policy clusterfuck.

First, it turns out that it’s not just outside experts who are skeptical that the blockade of Iran will trigger regime collapse anytime soon.

Read more

With Victory-in-Iran Day now in our collective rearview mirror — hey, readers, pay no attention to the missiles flying around in the Gulf this week — it is worth taking a beat to consider some winners and losers of the conflict so far.

Given the Trump administration’s decision to lift sanctions on some Russian oil as energy markets gyrated, back in March it seemed straightforward to think of Russia as a winner. By extension, therefore, Ukraine was projected to be a loser.

Here’s the funny thing, though: recent analyses of the Russo-Ukrainian war have concluded that Russia’s battlefield momentum has stalled out. Indeed, recent events highlight the degree to which the facts on the ground — and, in some cases, hovering right above the ground — have shifted in Kyiv’s favor.

Consider that Ukraine has inked ten-year defense export agreements with three Gulf states to share their defense technology to combat cheap Iranian drones. This certainly qualifies as a win for Ukraine. At the same time, Russia’s May Day parade this year will feature no military hardware for the first time in decades, “because of fears of a long-range attack by Ukrainian drones.” This does not sound like a country on the verge of winning.1

Vox’s Joshua Keating provides additional evidence that Ukraine’s security situation has materially improved over the last couple of months:

The war in Ukraine, and US diplomatic efforts to negotiate a ceasefire, have both been getting far less attention in the US in recent weeks, with the focus firmly on the crisis in the Middle East. It appeared initially that Russia might end up as the unexpected beneficiary of the Iran conflict, with global oil prices spiking, the United States lifting sanctions on some Russian energy exports, and crucial US munitions, including all-important missile interceptors, diverted from Europe to the Middle East.

But if Russia is reaping a windfall, you wouldn’t know it from events on the battlefield in recent weeks. The Russians made almost no territorial gains in March, and may have even lost a small amount of territory since mid-March, despite launching a widely anticipated spring-summer offensive. The Institute for the Study of War, a US think tank, assesses that Russia is unlikely to be able to take Ukraine’s “fortress belt,” the heavily fortified Ukrainian-held portion of the eastern Donbas region that has become one of Russia’s central war aims. Ukraine estimated Russia’s casualties at a record 35,351 per month in March, 96 percent of them caused by drones.

Russia continued to bombard Ukrainian cities throughout the cold winter months, but Ukraine has gotten better at defending against these attacks, with its air defense systems taking down a record 33,000 drones in March, according to the Ukrainian government. The Ukrainians have become more effective at launching long-range strikes deep into Russia as well. Lately, their attacks have focused on preventing Russia from reaping an energy windfall from the Iran war: In late March, Reuters estimated that 40 percent of Russia’s oil export capacity had been taken offline by Ukrainian strikes on pipelines, ports, and refineries.

Though Ukraine still relies on the fickle US government for key systems — like Patriot interceptors as well as targeting intelligence — European countries are now providing most of the country’s military aid, and Ukraine’s indigenous capacities are growing as well….

Certainly after years of slow but relentless Russian advance, which gave ammunition to critics of Ukraine aid who argued the country’s defeat was inevitable, there’s some more confidence from Ukrainian leaders and their supporters these days. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha recently argued that because of its advances in drones and air defense, Ukraine’s frontline position is now the “strongest” it’s been in a year. Mick Ryan, a retired Australian general and prominent military commentator, recently argued that “The strategic scales are beginning to tip in Ukraine’s favor.”

It’s probably too soon to say Ukraine is winning the war, but at the very least, it doesn’t appear to be losing.

The Bulwark’s Brynn Tannehill is even more upbeat about Ukraine’s chances of surviving and thriving as the war is in its fifth year — in no small part because the country is beating Russia at the drone game:

Russia has opted for producing large quantities of a few types of drones rather than investing in technical innovation, but at least for now, Ukrainian production of small drones appears to exceed Russia’s, with at least 3–4 million units produced in 2025 and a goal of up to 7 million in 2026. This is within spitting distance of the 10 million per year that Ukraine estimates it will need to completely overwhelm Russia and achieve decisive victory. It’s also a tremendous advantage. Drones are the dominant force on the lines today, causing approximately 75–80 percent of all casualties. Ukraine now has 1.3 drones at the front line for every 1 Russian drone, and they are of better quality. Additionally, Ukraine has reportedly begun operating AI powered small drone “swarms” that are semi-autonomous and coordinate their attacks….

Russia’s spring offensive seems to have stalled as soon as it began. Russian forces took only 23 square kilometers of territory in March. At that pace, Russia would finish conquering Ukraine in 1,775 years. They are at a standstill, and despite already having numerical superiority along the front lines, they have already begun to commit their strategic reserves for the spring–summer campaign.

Over the past few months, Russian casualties have been extraordinarily high. They averaged roughly 35,000 per month in 2025, and similar averages are continuing into 2026….

The recruiting shortfalls mean that Russia is slowly losing more soldiers than it’s gaining, and the quality of the new recruits is questionable at best. So great is the demand for soldiers on the front lines that a typical recruit’s total training amounts to just three weeks before they’re thrown into combat. On the other side of the ledger, Russia is facing its most severe labor shortage in decades, with a deficit of 2.4 to 3 million workers, potentially rising to 11 million by 2030. As the war drags on and the shortages get worse, its industrial and economic capacity will suffer….

Strategically, Ukraine has a theory of victory that looks increasingly plausible, while Russia’s is crumbling. There is a path to Ukraine achieving overwhelming drone dominance at all levels and inflicting the casualties required to cause a Russian collapse. Russia bet the farm on the theory that meat waves would overwhelm Ukraine while the United States and Hungary blocked Western support, and failed.

How did this come to be? No doubt, Viktor Orban losing power in Hungary has freed up more European Union support for Kyiv’s war effort. The New York Times’ Ross Douthat, however, argues that Ukraine’s success represents a policy success for the Trump administration’s crude pressure on Europe to lift itself up by its own security bootstraps:

The means of Ukrainian survival, where Europe steps up as the United States steps back, is not a sign of American failure. It’s what successful American adaptation looks like in a world where it’s conspicuously no longer the 1990s. Of all the areas of danger and crisis in the world, Europe’s eastern borderlands are the place where America should be able to rely on our allies as a first line of defense. The fact that Ukraine has held the line with more European support and less direct American aid is proof that this recalibration can succeed — and as such, it’s good news for our empire’s sustainability,2 not a sign that we’re about to cede global dominance to Brussels or Ottawa or Berlin.

Now, would it have been preferable to reach this point with a less chaotic policy approach, with less moral equivalence in American rhetoric toward Kyiv and Moscow, less bullying rhetoric toward our allies? Of course! Wrestling Trump toward an optimal policy is always an ugly business and often a close-run thing….

The case for Trump as a foreign policy president has always been that his harshness toward friends and allergy to idealism sometimes ends up delivering more for the United States than the smoother habits of diplomacy. If you think that we need a rearmed Europe to help police and stabilize its own corner of the world, then Trump’s crude bullying has been a geopolitical accelerant — a non-ideal but nonetheless effective mechanism, as Andrew Sullivan suggests, to force Europe to “break with its passive past.” A maximally adroit and more idealistic president might have done better. But some presidents might have just kept us in a quagmire and let our allies stay asleep.

Douthat’s analysis has some merit — from a certain point of view. The thing is, that view requires one to willfully ignore the Trump administration’s multi-pronged assault on Europe, ranging from its desire to annex Greenland to figuring out ways to punish NATO allies for not supporting a war in Iran to enabling 27-year old State Department flunkies to cozy up to the European far right. Forcing Europe to view the United States as an actual security threat is a bit of a distraction from incentivizing Europe to help arm Ukraine. Continually offering Russia generous cease fire terms also seems like another falsifying piece of data. Indeed, Trump administration officials actively campaigning for the Hungarian leader who has been vetoing more European support of Ukraine sure seems to contradict Douthat’s claim of successful American adaptation to a new world. It seems much more like dumb luck.

The merit of Douthat’s argument, however, is acknowledging that Ukraine is innovating under constraint in ways that helps its own security situation while augmenting cooperation with Europe. And it’s doing so in a moment when many expected that Russia would benefit from material windfalls due to the war in Iran.

This outcome is intrinsically good for Ukraine and bad for countries contemplating territorial land grabs through the use of force. For the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World, however, there has been particular satisfaction watching Trump administration officials sounding put out that Ukraine is doing so well and Russia is doing so poorly.3

Last year Trump berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, infamously declaring, “You don't have the cards right now.” In both his Iran and Ukraine policies, however, Trump is revealing that his cards are more limited than he previously thought. Neither conflict is turning out as expected.

This is bad news for Trump and for the United States, which has to pay the price of Trump’s geopolitical folly. It is good news for Ukraine, however — and given everything else going on in the world, it’s nice for there to be pleasant geopolitical surprises.

From long before the days of What’s the Matter With Kansas, politically engaged Americans have been flummoxed and frustrated by citizens voting against their own economic interests. During this second Trump term, however, particular attention has been paid to farmers. And this is driving some folks a little nuts.

Let’s stipulate that it’s hard out there for an American farmer. According to the New York Times’ Eli Saslow, “Farm bankruptcies across the country had risen 55 percent in 2024, 46 percent in 2025, and another 70 percent so far in 2026 as nearly a third of the world’s fertilizer exports were impacted by conflicts in the Strait of Hormuz.” In other words, things were tough under Biden — and absolutely brutal under Trump:

There are two striking things about the difficulties that American farmers are facing right now. First, the added stresses of the past eighteen months are entirely due to Trump administration policy shifts. This isn’t about macro forces like a pandemic or a global recession: almost all of it is about policies that Trump pledged to implement during the 2024 campaign. And yet, as the Economist pointed out last week, “few have suffered more than American farmers” when it comes to the policy shocks emanating from Trump’s tariffs, immigration restrictionism, and the Iran war:

Even before Mr Trump took office, they were grappling with record costs. In just five years, land prices had risen by 6%, seeds by 18%, labour by 50% and interest expenses by 73%. When the president announced sweeping tariffs on “Liberation Day” last year, farmers’ already fragile budgets became harder to balance. As the price of steel and aluminium soared, so did the cost of machinery such as tractors and sprayers. In a February earnings call, John Deere, the world’s largest maker of farm equipment, said it had absorbed $600m in tariff-related costs in 2025 and expected that to double this year. Dave Peters, a semi-retired corn (maize) farmer near Harlan, Iowa, reckons farmers now need four times as many acres to make the same profit. Watching his son and granddaughter ride a tractor across his field, he reflects on how much it takes to get a farm going: “It’s costing half a million just out the door.”

The Cato Institute’s Clark Packard and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon noted these problems back in January:

A new report from North Dakota State University’s (NDSU) Center for Agricultural Policy and Trade Studies quantifies what American farmers and ranchers already know from their own balance sheets: the Trump administration’s 2025 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariffs are inflicting serious damage.

The study finds that IEEPA tariffs extracted about $110 million from fertilizer imports between February and October 2025. More significantly, it calculates that tariff costs passed through to farmers at rates far exceeding the effective tariff rate. For widely used Diammonium Phosphate (DAP) fertilizer, for instance, the pass-through rate to wholesale spot market prices in the US Northern Plains region hit a staggering 342 percent in August 2025….

In October 2025, the gap between farmers’ production costs and the prices they received for their goods was the widest in a decade. There are multiple causes for these issues, but tariff policy deserves substantial blame. In an all-too-familiar pattern for farmers during Trump administrations, reckless tariffs on fertilizer, steel, aluminum, and other inputs increase production costs while foreign retaliation reduces exports and puts downward pressure on commodity prices. Erratic tariff policies squeeze farmers from both sides.

The second striking thing about the plight of farmers is that an overwhelming majority of them voted for Donald Trump in 2024. The NYT’s Saslow looked at Brad Watson, a family farmer who went out of business because he simply could not cover his expenses. You’ll never guess who Watson voted for in 2024:

Brad had supported Donald Trump in 2024 in part because Trump promised to change all that by becoming “the most pro-farmer president you’ve ever had.” Instead, new tariffs had cut into Brad’s potential export market and the emerging war in Iran had sent gas and fertilizer prices surging by as much as 70 percent. He was losing thousands of dollars each month and falling behind on his feed bill, until he made the call he’d been dreading his whole career. He dialed up an auction house to arrange the Watson family’s final dairy sale last month.

Saslow does not report on whether Brad has changed his mind. But what infuriates a lot of non-farmers is the degree to which rural voters continue to support Trump despite the carnage his policies have wreaked across the agricultural community. To get back to that Economist story:

It would be easy to blame Mr Trump for the downturn; after all, he campaigned on promises to bring down prices and revive the heartland. But rural America does not. The president’s favourability rating is higher among rural voters than among any other group in our survey. Most still think he is doing a good job. In interview after interview with The Economist, farmers said they trust the administration—but that they need help to recoup the losses its foreign policy is causing them. The American Farm Bureau Federation, a trade group, is pushing the federal government to ease regulations on cheaper fuel and pass another stimulus package. In the coming week the House of Representatives is expected to vote on the Farm Bill, which includes provisions that analysts reckon would help to nearly double cash subsidies to farmers by 2027, to $41bn. “I don’t know one farmer who actually wants a handout,” says Jayden Jorgensen, a 25-year-old who raises cattle and grows crops on her father’s land in Iowa. “But if we don’t take them, then we’re behind everybody else.”

The Trump voter regret that Brad expresses in the New York Times story — a sentiment that is hardly limited to him —has generated a lot of vitriol on social media from Never Trump folks.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World maintains the same general response to these kind of stories in 2026 as in 2025:

I cannot entirely share in the eagerness to heap calumny on these voters who are now regretting their choices, for a very simple reason: any scenario in which Republicans lose power in the coming years requires some of these regret voters to switch their allegiances yet again. And I just don’t think screaming at them is gonna work…

Well-informed voters preferred Harris over Trump last year, so maybe the key to the anti-Trump electoral future is to better inform voters rather than insult them.

I am going to be processing a lot of rage over the next four years due to inept and counterproductive Trump policies. Rage at Trump voters who realize that they made a mistake? No thank you — I’ll direct my anger towards the MAGA folks who have zero regrets about their ballot.

And this is the thing about rural Trump supporters. Some of them do seem to be expressing remorse over their 2024 choice. But an awful lot of them continue to support the president, convinced that they are uniquely deserving of government handouts.

For farmers who now feel disillusioned about the cost of Trump’s economic policies — I feel your pain. For farmers who still think that president Trump is the bees knees, well, I’m not going to be shedding too many tears as those bees keep stinging.

Have you heard the good word about Operation Epic Fury? According to the Trump White House, the war with Iran has ended!

According to the Guardian’s Lauren Gambino:

Donald Trump said in a letter sent to congressional leaders on Friday that hostilities with Iran have “terminated”, suggesting that the 60-day deadline to seek approval from the legislative branch no longer applied.

Friday marks 60 days since the US president notified members of Congress that the US and Israel launched strikes against Iran on 28 February. Under the War Powers Act of 1973, the president can deploy troops to respond to an “imminent threat” but must receive congressional approval within 60 days to continue military operations.

In the letter, dated 1 May, Trump said he initiated Operation Epic Fury against Iran and notified Congress on 28 February “consistent with my responsibility to protect Americans and United States interests at home and abroad, and in furtherance of United States national security and foreign policy interests”.

“On April 7, 2026, I ordered a 2-week ceasefire,” the letter, addressed to Republican House speaker Mike Johnson and Republican senator Chuck Grassley, the president pro tempore of the Senate, continues. “The ceasefire has since been extended. There has been no exchange of fire between United States Forces and Iran since April 7, 2026. The hostilities that began on February 28, 2026, have terminated.”

Did you read that last sentence? The hostilities have been terminated! The war is over!!

Okay, sure, some law dorks are claiming that this is not how war terminations work. Some other dweebs might argue that, you know, a blockade is an act of war and the United States is absolutely enforcing such a blockade on Iran right now.

But I don’t see why we can’t take this White House at its word — they never ever ever ever ever lie about anything. So let’s just assume that the war has been terminated. Hooray!

And the United States and Israel, which started this particular round of hostilities, must have won, right? I mean, that’s pretty much what President Trump asserted a month ago:

In these past four weeks, our armed forces have delivered swift, decisive, overwhelming victories on the battlefield. Victories like few people have ever seen before. Tonight, Iran’s navy is gone. Their air force is in ruins. Their leaders, most of them, terrorist regime, they led, are now dead. Their command and control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is being decimated as we speak. Their ability to launch missiles and drones is dramatically curtailed. And their weapons, factories and rocket launchers are being blown to pieces. Very few of them left.

Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating large-scale losses in a matter of weeks. Our enemies are losing and America, as it has been for five years under my presidency, is winning, and now winning bigger than ever before.

Sounds to me like the Trump administration should be planning Victory in Iran Day parades and festivities immediately! I mean, let’s review what I wrote in my apparently pessimistic post about whether the United States had achieved its stated military objectives in Iran:

1. Destroy Iran’s missile-industrial complex. “The U.S. and Israeli militaries have destroyed many of Iran’s ballistic missiles and launchers in airstrikes. But a large number are undamaged, and Iran continues to fire missiles in the region.” A follow-on NYT report says that U.S. intelligence has concluded, “Iranian operatives have been digging out underground missile bunkers and silos struck by American and Israeli bombs, returning them to operation hours after an attack.” So clearly, this goal has not been achieved yet.

2. Destroy Iran’s navy. “The two militaries have destroyed much of Iran’s navy.” Let’s stipulate this one, although it hasn’t stopped Iran from closing the Strait of Hormuz. But this goal, narrowly defined, has been achieved.

3. Sever Iran from its terror proxies: “Mr. Trump was referring here to militias in the region that receive financial support and other types of backing from Iran. The militias are still active.” Indeed, particularly the Houthis. This goal has not been achieved yet.

4. Ensure Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon. “U.S. officials say they think some highly enriched uranium remains in tunnels buried under rubble. Sending ground troops into Iran to seize the material would be risky.” Sure, Trump no longer cares about the uranium, but this counts as a goal that has not been achieved yet.

5. Create the conditions for regime change. “The newly appointed supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the deceased cleric, is a hard-liner aligned with a powerful arm of the Iranian military. The current government remains theocratic, authoritarian and anti-American, and continues to wage a war of resistance.” Beyond the fact that the Trump administration doesn’t understand the concept of “regime change,” this goal has not been achieved yet.

Gosh, do I sound like a Debbie Downer in that post!

But that was nearly a month ago — and if the Trump White House is saying that hostilities have now been terminated, it stands to reason that major progress has been achieved in the five stated aims, right?

Right?!

I mean, sure, there are reports that Iran can reconstitute up to 70 percent of its prewar missile capacity and that Iran’s regime is exploiting the current ceasefire to reconstitute its missile and drone capabilities. But that’s only one objective unachieved.

And, um, okay, yes, despite the destruction of Iran’s navy, the Strat of Hormuz remains effectively closed to almost all maritime traffic.

Anyway, all this ignores that Iran’s terror proxies have been further weakened from Israeli attacks — though that has not stopped those proxies from attacking U.S. and allied installations in Israel and Iraq.

And hey, Iran is no closer to developing a nuclear weapon —that’s because this conflict has not really affected Iran’s nuclear program one way or the other. And Trump himself told a crowd in Florida Friday night, “You know we’re in a war. Because I think you would agree we cannot let lunatics have a nuclear weapon.” So there!

But no one can deny that Iran’s regime has changed — unless one does not understand the meaning of the term “regime change.” If the goal of the regime change was to foster a more democratic and open Iran, um… er… well….

Victory?

When the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World last examined the state of the Trump administration’s war with Iran, America’s strategic situation looked — how to put this — not great.

But that was over two weeks ago! Stuff has happened since then. Has the situation come into focus?

The answer seems to be: kinda, sorta, yes — but there are a lot of reasons to think it won’t be sustainable.

The current strategy — best articulated in this Wall Street Journal story by Alexander Ward, Laurence Norman, and Summer Said — is that Trump wants to choke Iran into submission:

President Trump has instructed aides to prepare for an extended blockade of Iran, U.S. officials said, targeting the regime’s coffers in a high-risk bid to compel a nuclear capitulation Tehran has long refused.

In recent meetings, including a Monday discussion in the Situation Room, Trump opted to continue squeezing Iran’s economy and oil exports by preventing shipping to and from its ports. He assessed that his other options—resume bombing or walk away from the conflict—carried more risk than maintaining the blockade, officials said.

Yet continuing the blockade also prolongs a conflict that has driven up gas prices, hurt Trump’s poll numbers and further darkened Republicans’ prospects in the midterm elections. It has also caused the lowest number of transits through the Strait of Hormuz since the war began.

Since ending the major bombing campaign in an April 7 cease-fire, Trump has repeatedly walked back from escalating the conflict, opening space for diplomacy after earlier threatening to destroy the entirety of Iranian civilization. But he still wants to tighten the grip on the regime until it caves to his key demand: dismantling all of Iran’s nuclear work….

For now, Trump is comfortable with an indefinite blockade, which he wrote Tuesday on Truth Social is pushing Iran toward a “State of Collapse.” A senior U.S. official said the blockade is demonstrably crushing Iran’s economy—it is straining to store its unsold oil—and sparked fresh outreach by the regime to Washington.

Trump’s decision represents a new phase of sorts of the war and highlights the fact that the president, who always seeks a quick and salable victory, is devoid of a silver bullet.

This account jibes with what Trump told Axios’ Barak Ravid: “The blockade is somewhat more effective than the bombing. They are choking like a stuffed pig. And it is going to be worse for them…. They want to settle. They don't want me to keep the blockade.”

Under this sitzkreig approach, actual hostilities do not recur, but the Strait of Hormuz remains closed until Iran’s regime feel pressured into is making the kind of deal that is at least better than the JCPOA’s terms.

Could this work? As I noted two weeks ago there is an argument to be made that blockading Iran’s economy could weaken its capabilities further. That still seems to be the case. And the war has created other fissures in the Gulf — like the UAE’s exit from OPEC — that favor U.S. interests.

Still, there are multiple reasons to be skeptical that “blockade and wait” will work. The two most obvious problems have to do with Trump’s decision-making pathologies. As previously noted, Trump is lousy at playing a waiting game, and that’s what this strategy entails. Axios’s Ravid has already reported that Trump is entertaining more aggressive military options, and that “the briefing signals that Trump is seriously considering resuming major combat operations either to try to break the logjam in negotiations or to deliver a final blow before ending the war.”

A second pathology is the administration’s wishcasting that Iran is just days away from collapsing. As Politico’s Scott Waldman reports, however, energy and regional experts are not buying that argument:

White House officials insist that the U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s global oil and natural gas supplies are shipped — is crippling Iran and will soon leave the regime little choice but to meet President Donald Trump’s demands.

“If you look at the economic stress that the Iranian people are under right now, it should be unacceptable to any civilized leader,” White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett told reporters Thursday.

The regime, according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, is “days” away from running out of storage capacity and before “fragile Iranian oil wells will be shut in.” Trump, on Wednesday, told Axios that Iran’s storage facilities and pipelines “are getting close to exploding.”…

But energy experts such as Robin Mills, CEO of Qamar Energy and a former consultant for the European Union in Iraq, said Iran has far more storage capacity than administration officials are claiming and that the slow-burn blockade strategy only guarantees a prolonged energy disruption that will further crush the global economy.

“They’re not in a mood to surrender,” he said. “They know the clock is ticking not just for them, but for the U.S. and the rest of the world economy, too, and they think their clock is ticking slower.”….

While it’s clear that the U.S. blockade is crushing the Iranian economy, oil storage is a separate issue and one Tehran is not expected to deal with until late May and possibly even longer, according to Gregory Brew, a senior analyst at Eurasia Group, specializing in the geopolitics of oil and gas with a focus on Iran. Even then, Iran has a long history of enduring punishing conditions to achieve war objectives.

Meanwhile, even just a few more weeks of blockading the Strait of Hormuz will create additional policy externalities that do not help the U.S. strategic position. Consider that with each passing day of sitzkrieg, the following trends gather greater force:

1. America incurs rising diplomatic costs from being the author of so much global economic pain. And oil prices are likely to spike even further.

2. Iran has time to reclaim its missile arsenal that U.S. air power buried under rubble — up to 70 percent of its prewar capacity.

3. Trump’s poll numbers will continue to slide and more and more Republicans will oppose Trump’s continued prosecution of the war

4. Trump will find himself in a weaker bargaining position as his summit with China’s Xi Jinping approaches.

So the blockade strategy is not great — but it seems equally clear that the Trump White House does not have any other great ideas to guide them out of their policy conundrum. The New York Times’ David Sanger and Tyler Pager do a solid job of describing the current stalemate:

Mr. Trump has repeatedly expressed frustration that neither the bombing that the United States and Israel conducted for 38 days, nor the economic strangulation that he is attempting by having the Navy intercept ships leaving or bound for Iranian ports, is achieving the desired effect.

“Now they have to cry uncle,” Mr. Trump said. “That’s all they have to do, just say: ‘We give up. We give up.’”

Mr. Trump has used variants of his “cry uncle” test over the past month, despite warnings from his own intelligence agencies and outside experts that the White House has consulted that nothing in Iran’s history or the nature of its constantly competing power centers suggests the country would offer what Mr. Trump had earlier called “unconditional surrender.” It was more likely, they have said, that Tehran would double down in its resistance.

In fact, even as Mr. Trump has swung from praise of Iran’s new leaders as more “reasonable” than their predecessors, to threats to resume bombing, to the blockade, the Iranian strategy appears to have remained steady. It has imposed a blockade of its own, in the Persian Gulf, that has prevented Arab states from risking sailing their tankers through the straits.

It is hard to envision any kind of lasting bargain that reopens the Strait of Hormuz and resolves Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Trump’s blockade strategy does not look like it will work either — but it also seems like the best bad option among a basket of truly awful options.

Developing…