Preface

A few years ago, as part of a project that still hasn’t come to fruition (I’m stealing some time from it to write this up, in fact), we surveyed some Americans about what they thought made countries high or low status in international politics. This wasn’t scientific or extensive—it was a genuine pilot—but nevertheless pilots can be informative if your goal is to get low-resolution images of public opinion and you’re not sampling on something that’s clearly biasing your results. I mention this to preface a result I might later walk away from but suspect is true: respondents really thought fat countries were low-status.

By whatever name, obesity is notable by its absence in political science. Taboos operate at the level of not naming or discussing an issue, and they are most obvious when there’s a gap between what is acceptable to discuss and what is unmentioned in polite company.

Social scientists are usually, despite their pretensions, very interested in being part of polite society, and refrain from addressing many subjects because of a sense that those subjects just aren’t fit for study—or that addressing them will associate the researchers with some trait. There is, in other words, a strong desire to associate yourself with high-status topics, regardless of scientific interest. I’m going to exaggerate here for rhetorical effect but I am definitely kidding on the square. Every researcher worth their salt is defined in a vector space of topics associated with them; do you want your personal keywords to be “money, power, status” or “drugs, laziness, obesity”? Market positionality is real, especially when you’re fighting for one of the last planks on the raft of the Medusa-style job market in academia. If there’s no cluster of researchers working on something, then it’s awfully sus to be interested in something deviant—what, do you think that science isn’t faddish or cliquish or prudish? And so many topics that, to a Martian, might seem equally deserving of study go unaddressed in favor of contextually-desirable discussions. (This is one reason why the tastes of a handful of researchers at top institutions can be influential: they can signal high-status interest in topics and create clusters of interest around given topics, and often they even deploy this power in responsible, scientific ways!) I’m not immune: I haven’t done anything with that enlightening point from the pilot, after all.

All of this is context-loading for why there isn’t really much political-science discussion of obesity, even though obesity would seem to merit discussion. (There is some but this isn’t the post to do a literature review.)

The Argument

Obesity is a defining fact of contemporary American life. There are politics around obesity, including submerged conflicts in every doctor’s office where someone with a suboptimal BMI presents with an unrelated condition, sotto voce discussions about class and government assistance, discussions around policymaking and elections in which the attractive win more often, and much more overt manifestations over the politics of bodies themselves. There’s a reason why r/fatpeoplehate was banned and there’s a reason why it was popular. On university campuses in the United States, radical pro-fat scholars share territory with facilities dedicated to making the body as fit as scientifically possible. The body is political and thus so is obesity. The fat-acceptance people, then, are right that the personal is political, even if—as I suggest below—they might not actually like what could come of making obesity an overtly political topic.

Indeed, public interest in obesity is high. I went to the Roper database of polls and grabbed some representative data; on a skim of earlier surveys, it looks like the USA is approaching something like Peak Obesity Worries. When you ask Americans what the biggest health care problems the country faces, obesity always comes up, and usually (post-Covid) leads other things that look like “health” issues as opposed to “health access” issues. For instance, a 2025 Gallup poll on the most urgent health problem puts obesity at #3:

A different measure from Axios puts obesity at number one (and this seems about representative in similar lists that don’t mix policy and health issues, at least in the past several years):

And the public is latently sympathetic to the idea that adults with a weight-related condition, like obesity, can use weight-loss drugs like Ozempic—but not those without a weight-related condition1. (In survey results not shown here, there’s a lot of opposition to teens and children using them, too.)

There is also a substantial reservoir of support, if not an overwhelming degree, of sympathy for the position that the government should pay for Ozempic etc through Medicare and Medicaid:

What does this point to? Well, it suggests that there’s at least latent sympathy not only for viewing the use of Ozempic and other drugs in the GLP-1 class as acceptable for treating weight-loss but also that the public is at least public policy-curious on this issue. That might reflect some self-interest, by the way; at least 37% of Americans are obese or overweight (and you can find estimates that are much higher), so if you ask Americans if someone else should pay for medicines they are likely to want to take, well, of course you should expect to find some support.

Once something becomes defined as a political subject—that is, something that you can subject to governmental action, that is no longer “private”—then it becomes possible to imagine governmental action. This gets tricky, however, because making something “political” may not always lead to the results that activists want it to have. For instance, asserting that bodies are political might indeed put body size on the agenda—but once something is on the agenda, deliberation and the piercing of the veil separating private actions from public ones might lead to other outcomes. That can especially be the case if other circumstances change.

In the case of obesity and overweight, for instance, the advent of drugs that may make those conditions be seen as the result of personal choice could radically change what the “politics” of the body are. If there is a treatment that can radically reduce BMI, for instance—and there is, many of them, in fact—then the arguments around bodies will revolve not around the bodies but around the choices.

Which leads me to the question implicit in the title of this Substack essay: will obesity become illegal?

Yes, like all such questions in the headline, my answer is “no”. But let me sketch something:

1. Pressure for public subsidies for GLP-1s (or quasi-public, including health insurance) succeeds, widening access to the drugs even more (this could also take the form of negotiated discounts etc—don’t get hung up on the access mechanism)

2. GLP-1 adoption becomes even more widespread than it is now (a minimum of 12% of Americans are or have used GLP-1s)

3. The treatments work—indeed, it is likely that just as the AIs available to you are the least powerful AIs you will ever see, the GLP-1s available now are much less powerful than next or second-next generation treatments like reta.

4. Obesity becomes relatively less common and, because of wealth effects continuing to moderate access to GLP-1s, much more concentrated among lower-income (and hence lower-status) folks

5. Obesity doesn’t become illegal but it becomes triply stigmatized: not just as a condition on its own but one that is a condition of choice (symbolizing the rejection of mainstream views) and a marker of poverty/deprivation.

I think it is very possible that the United States is within 3 to 5 years of this tipping point. That might sound absurd to you but these drugs are falling in price and becoming far more potent—clinical results from trials put the power of reta, the next-generation Lilly drug, at essentially on par with bariatric surgery; many people appear to be dropping out of the clinical trials because the drug is too powerful and study participants are losing weight too fast.

This will appear like a revolution in body politics. It will, to be clear, have many undesirable side-effects: imagine the collision of body dysmorphia and anorexia etc with widespread pills that really do let you choose your own weight. But it will also fundamentally change the terms of engagement on this issue—even, perhaps, to much greater regulation than I have sketched here; if obesity leads to worse life outcomes and greater health problems, much like cigarettes, then there may be still greater political pressures to make treatments less than wholly voluntary.

There’s a wide world between banning a condition (requiring it to be treated) and coercing people to assent to treatments. You can imagine, for instance, that weight-loss treatments could become a part of welfare programs in a very coercive fashion; you might also imagine that corporations and other employers aggressively market this. And if there’s a physical attractiveness element to job-matching, and there is, then you can also imagine that the competitive pressures to reduce will be intense as others do the same. If the Cold War brought policies like the presidential fitness award and the British Empire brought “muscular Christianity” (and let’s not even mention the Turnverein), you can imagine that the optimization pressures of our current digital global order will similarly produce physical effects.

I want to make plain that with this my aim isn’t to herald or ward off the future; I’m a realist to the degree that I think that base social instincts ultimately condition politics, and the degree of literal hatred obesity attracts is a reflection of a pretty deep social drive (even if the precise ideal body type really has varied over time and with other factors). I know American society tolerably well, and I know that its deepest beliefs are not always welcoming—and that if there’s a pill to address a condition as despised as obesity is, then that will change society greatly.

What follows is an edited transcript with selected slides. This is too long for email — my gosh, this is long — so at some point you’ll need to click through.

I’m writing from, in some ways, the literal front lines — or at least near them — of places where political science has come under direct pressure. Today I want to do three things: say what’s happening, ask why we ended up in this series of crises, and think about whether and how we can get out.

What’s happening

Shifting baselines

If you talk to folks who’ve been around a long time, their sense of what has gone wrong will be very different from mine. We’re all seeing this crisis through our own viewpoint, so I want to start by being clear about mine.

One concept I use in my course on the politics of the end of the world comes from environmental studies: shifting baselines. Every generation has something it views as normal. If you’re in your 50s or 60s, your idea of what’s normal for U.S. academia is going to be very different from mine, or from a graduate student just starting out.

My baseline is not the 1960s or 1970s, when I’m told public budgets were large and support for higher education was high. It’s not even the 1980s or 1990s, when I was around but wasn’t involved in academia at all — I was still learning how to walk. People in the academy then thought things were pinched. Compared to now, that baseline looks generous.

My baseline starts in 2008, when I decided to go to graduate school. I remember very clearly being a TA in a course on the politics of the former Soviet Union at Georgetown, watching one of my students monitor his stock portfolio crashing in September 2008.

I had no idea then what the Great Recession would mean for academia. It was a sharp shock with long-lasting results. Even Harvard cancelled job searches mid-year and undertook other cutbacks, like eliminating cookies at faculty teas. At other institutions, the cuts were larger. That baseline tempered my optimism — for instance, the expectation that academia is cosseted or stable.

So I’m not defining today’s crisis relative to some good old days. For me, there were no good old days.

Table stakes

Before we address the current crisis, we need to acknowledge some structural conditions I won’t dwell on but want to name. The education industry has been dealing with adjunctification of its instructional faculty for decades — no longer a crisis but a structural condition. Public universities have faced declining state investment, even in true-blue states like Massachusetts. Faculty turnover has been low since the end of mandatory retirement, with concomitantly fewer opportunities for junior scholars. And there is now extraordinary competition for jobs and even graduate-school admission. The career I had — applying to PhD school with an idea of what I might like to study — doesn’t really exist anymore at competitive places. Juniors and seniors today have more research experience than I had as a second-year PhD student.

Even given that context, what is going on right now is astonishing.

A many-sided assault on U.S. higher education

U.S. higher education is experiencing a tremendous assault. Entire disciplines are in the crosshairs of state governments. In Florida, sociology has been removed as a general education course. College professors have left jobs in Texas because they dared to teach woke radicals like Plato. In Indiana, where I grew up and went to university, the state legislature has enforced almost-draconian laws about what public institutions can teach.

Everyone is affected. Nobody wants to have sympathy for the Harvards and Yales of the world — if you’re at a more workaday institution, it can be hard to empathize with the travails of wealthy ones. But our wealthier colleagues are facing genuinely serious crises, and that matters for all of us. Wealth, prestige, and reputation are no longer guarantees of safety; they paint a target on institutions’ backs.

Under the One Big Beautiful Bill, the wealthiest universities are being targeted to an unprecedented degree. The bill imposes up to an 8% wealth tax on the largest endowments — not about leveling the playing field but a tax on research universities. It turns out you can get Republican Congresses to pass a wealth tax, as long as it targets universities. Endowments may be things “other universities” have (I think I can say without endangerment that Georgetown wishes it had a bigger one), but they generate positive spillovers across the sector — Harvard’s underwrites services like Dataverse. Penalizing Harvard like this doesn’t lead to a braver, more equitable future. It simply weakens institutions that, love them or hate them, are pillars of higher education.

If life is bad at the summit, it’s awful in the trenches. I put together this chart about university closures yesterday before news broke that one of my former neighboring colleges, Hampshire College, would be closing. Like Hampshire, many nonprofit institutions are simply closing. What’s happening now is much worse than during the Great Recession. The generous COVID aid Congress passed in 2020 patched over a lot of problems, but as enrollments shrink, we’re seeing an increasing number of institutions shuttering.

Adding to all this are structural changes in the research enterprise. COSSA — the Consortium of Social Science Associations — is not a group of wild-eyed radicals. And yet their evaluation of changes to the National Science Foundation describes what’s happening at NSF as potentially existential for the social and behavioral science community.

The NSF has not only formally requested the closure of the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) directorate; it is already administratively moving to dismantle it. This isn’t inside-the-Beltway gossip. It will have tangible effects on graduate education and basic-research funding in the United States, with ripple effects worldwide.

Targeting students and faculty

The assault is also specifically targeting students and faculty. Some states are ahead of the curve. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has spearheaded specific assaults on how public universities can conduct international program activities, including a Florida law that blocks Chinese students from taking part in academic research.

Chinese researchers are finding it extremely difficult to be in Florida — even though, before DeSantis’s law, they made up a substantial part of Florida’s higher education system. And Florida’s higher education system is a gem; the University of Florida is one of America’s greatest public research universities.

Imagine being cut off from one of the world’s greatest sources of talent — not because of any genuine concerns, but because Ron DeSantis wanted an issue (and the record is pretty clear on this) on which he could run as a China hawk in the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. That ended badly. The law remains on the books.

In other ways familiar to anyone joining a virtual conference like this one, the U.S. role as a cornerstone of research has come under assault. Even at the level of getting visas, U.S. higher education is suffering because international visitors no longer want to come. Individual researchers are being targeted too. Just the other week, a University of Washington graduate student was questioned and removed from the United States when returning to Sea-Tac.

We’re all familiar with last year’s abuses — including the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts graduate student arrested on suspicion of being pro-Hamas because she wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper. She was eventually released, and the immigration judge who allowed her release was later fired.

Disrupting the U.S. as a preeminent global force

Other connections between U.S. academia and the world are being severed. The Cato Institute recently put out a report showing how many visas have been denied for folks who want to come study in the United States.

It might be hard to see how dramatic the shift is — your eye goes first to the orange line — but you have to look all the way at the bottom of the chart to see the 2026 projections. Visas for international students are down tremendously, and they keep going down. Visa rejection rates are also trending upward across practically every continent except South America.

This has effects beyond the United States. Coincidentally, a colleague who studies Saudi Arabia sent me tweets about a Saudi academic controversy while I was preparing this talk. They discuss recent — like, past few days — changes at King Saud University, one of the leading institutions in Saudi Arabia, which is closing entire faculties: history, geography, sociology. Defenders of the move — and Saudi Twitter is, for lack of a better expression, lit — point to the fact that leading U.S. institutions are also reducing low-enrollment programs.

What happens in the U.S., because of its traditional role as a cornerstone of international higher education, is taken as a guide to what is acceptable. The battles we fight and lose in American institutions have global effects.

This has also directly impacted graduate education and folks who wanted to come to the United States. Last year, I wrote for Slate drawing on my experience as an American at an American institution in the Global South, about how I have started advising students from the Global South not to go to the U.S. for their PhD programs. It’s not a viable path given the difficulties they could face — including potentially being deported or worse. The risks that things get worse over the next three years are large enough that it’s hard to ask anyone to make a five-to-seven-year commitment.

Meanwhile, Chinese universities are moving up the ladder. They are pursuing talent. They are welcoming talent. They have a government that’s investing. What a contrast.

I don’t mention this out of some Cold War, beat-the-Chinese instinct. Years ago, when colleagues and I talked about these dynamics, we all assumed great-power competition would lead to increased — or at least preserved — funding in U.S. institutions. Instead we’re observing the opposite. The U.S. is dismantling its institutions of higher education rather than investing in them. If even a new Cold War isn’t going to save higher-ed investment, what could?

Technological and geopolitical upheavals

We’re dealing with all of this at the same time that technological and geopolitical upheavals are reshaping our day-to-day experience.

Some political scientists have had measured takes on AI. A lot of this has focused on research. Andy Hall at Stanford has written about how incorporating LLMs into workflows might increase our ability to do good social science. He’s demonstrated that for relatively straightforward data papers, LLMs may match or exceed junior researchers.

I’m not an AI optimist, but I have no time for people who believe LLMs are at the same level they were in 2022 or 2023. If you’re not using frontier programs, you may not know just how scary good they’ve gotten — even though they can also screw up royally.

You can go too far. I’m not sure it’s fair to say AI can already do social science research better than most professors. But I do think Alexander Kustov — who has attracted a lot of vitriol online for some occasionally exaggerated takes — is generally right when he says that if you’re not paying attention to this sector, you’re not contemplating the profundity of what we need to do.

Even without AI, we’d be grappling with the second-order effects of technology on how students process the world. Reliance on AI can reduce the very skills that make it possible for someone like Andy Hall to be a productive researcher who uses AI. Going in expecting the machine to do everything means you’re getting nothing out of it.

(I transcribed this speech using AI and had Claude edit it. Did Claude replace anything I would do? No. Did it let me publish faster? Yes. Could I have let it do more? Yes — but that’s past my ethical AI use line. Suffice to say this post, this Substack altogether, wouldn’t exist without AI. If you’re not using the tools, well, I salute your commitment to an alternative lifestyle.)

There are other challenges. Before AI was a major part of our lives — three years ago — we were already dealing with something that looked like a literacy crisis, a term I do not use lightly, and an attention-span crisis to the point that even film studies majors cannot be relied upon to independently watch movies. I used to think it was hard enough to get college students to read Tom Schelling. If you can’t get them to sit through Dr. Strangelove, we have a crisis of a different order.

Put it together and we have a profound crisis.

The Challenges for Political Science

Political science faces its own problems. Thomas J. Wood put together data from APSA eJobs showing that not only have job postings declined but also that, in 2025–26, at every stage of the academic year, postings ran well below average. Political science is doing relatively better than, say, history, perhaps even sociology — but we’re facing a rapid erosion of our ability to recruit and sustain habits I’ve taken for granted since 2008.

For some of us — not just in Qatar, but in Iran, in Israel, elsewhere — the attack on academics has been far more literal. Universities on all sides of the recent war have become targets, sometimes direct ones. There have been times when my university, Georgetown in Qatar, was named as a specific target of missile attacks by the IRGC. The U.S. and Israel have carried out airstrikes on Iranian academic institutions. Sometimes you look up and see that the war has come to the skies over your head.

Look at all of this, and you begin to think: we’re in a crisis.

An era of crises

In a crisis, what we knew to be normal is no longer reliable. As a good quantitative political scientist, I sought to formalize my intuition, so I went to APSA’s statements page. Sometimes on social media people say, “What is APSA doing about this?” Often APSA has actually issued, or is about to issue, a statement on exactly that thing. I tallied, for each year back to 2003 (the earliest on the website), how many statements and letters APSA had issued. They sometimes deal with state and federal laws, with international concerns, with political scientists under threat for their lives or freedoms, with abuses of academic freedom, with the quality of democracy in the United States, Turkey, or elsewhere.

There’s a clear time trend. I broke out non-U.S. statements, and statements that were petitions for redress or congratulations. Subtracting those and looking just at U.S.-focused statements, it’s clear political science is in crisis. It’s not entirely a crisis of President Trump’s making — but the Trump era has plainly led to a new era in which APSA is putting out a lot of crisis statements. Since 2017 there has been a structural break. We’ve been living through uncharted territory, with APSA issuing in some years more statements than in entire prior five- or ten-year periods.

Fraying everywhere

If you’re a researcher or graduate student, if you’re feeling anxious or depressed, if you feel like something is just not right — you’re not alone. Dave Karpf, a political scientist at GW, put it well in his Substack . His baseline, ten years earlier than mine, was that you could still make a career as a political scientist in the academy — but every year has felt more precarious, even for someone with a good job at a solid institution:

My peers and I … ran across a crumbling bridge. We arrived at the tail end of American government treating higher education as if it were a priority worth investing in. Tenure-line professorships aren’t cheap. Once you start treating academia as a business and trying to identify cost savings, you’ll eventually decide to try to educate those student-consumers cheaper-and-worse via a more precarious workforce. … And the job itself is, well, fraying.

It’s not your imagination. The infrastructure on which our practices depend is crumbling. If you’re a journal editor or author, peer reviews are harder to get — people say no more often. (For crying out loud, I have three reviews on my desk. I swear, editors, I’m going to get to them.) Journals are under pressure from AI-enabled submissions. And as political science has become a more global discipline — a genuinely unalloyed good — there has been a rise in submissions worldwide. It is harder to get published, harder to find stability, harder to climb the rungs we know we’re supposed to climb, even as competition becomes fiercer just to reach the ladder.

There’s also been surprising resistance to investing in disciplinary public goods. Some is voluntary — perhaps a function of declining trust generally — with folks less willing to defer to or participate in organizations like ISA or APSA. It’s easy to find wedge issues and use them as an excuse to reject associations in the name of solidarity. There are also more direct assaults: state legislatures in some red states are wondering why public institutions should fund membership in or travel to conferences. We have resistance both voluntary and politically motivated, all undermining what we know as the discipline.

Even as the world crumbles around me, I’m still going to try to understand why this is happening. Ruat caelum, fiat scientia.

Why is this happening?

A collapse in confidence in higher education

So why is this happening? Part of it is simply a general collapse in confidence. Gallup put out a chart recently in an effort to suggest that confidence in higher education was rebounding.

Man — if that’s a rebound, I hate to see what Gallup thinks bad news is.

It’s not that everybody thinks we’re doing a terrible job; a plurality still finds higher education worthwhile. But there’s a lot more dissatisfaction than there used to be.

There are basically three broad stories. Part of the dissatisfaction, predictably, is concern about political agendas. Another is loss of confidence that universities are teaching what they should — that academics aren’t teaching real-world skills. If you’ve been on a campus in the last 40 years, you know this is ridiculous: the most popular majors are business, nursing, direct practical things. For all the hullabaloo about gender studies majors — and the rhetorical use those tropes have had — hardly anybody majors in those subjects. But the perception is widespread. More directly and materially, people worry that college costs too much. Defensively, we might reflexively say none of this matters, but tuition costs a lot. Exactly how is anybody supposed to pay for even a degree at a relatively inexpensive school?

Polarization and sorting

Polarization is everywhere. This used to be a contested finding, but if you’re still contesting it in 2026, I just don’t know. There’s a great article in Political Behavior from a few years ago using a conjoint experiment to show that the most important criterion for college roommate preference was political affiliation match — even more than sexual orientation, even more than religion. There’s a working paper from the Annenberg Institute — and it drives me crazy that I have to cite economists on this — showing that students are willing to pay substantially more in tuition to be at a university where peers share their politics.

Some of this points to division, but there’s also surprising consensus. Three economists (again, three economists — political scientists, we need to do a lot more research on the politics of higher education) surveyed people and compared how they viewed the proper mission of corporations and universities. They found real interest in universities taking on social missions like global understanding, free speech, and open dialogue. There was skepticism about universities engaging in political engagement — though, notably, less than for corporations.

Break it apart by ideology and there’s plenty of dissensus. Conservatives really don’t want universities involved in politics; they want universities to inculcate patriotism and traditional values. There’s the culture war being expressed. The researchers also ran an allocation experiment: people emphasized academic achievement and, surprisingly, environmental sustainability, while predictably polarizing issues like DEI emerged as flashpoints. That meshes with real-world pressures and decisions.

Ideological and interest-group politics

Higher education is also under attack because of specific interest groups and political-economic considerations. There’s a reason folks like Peter Thiel — Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur, although probably we should just say oligarch — have engaged in ways to rhetorically and directly undermine universities’ position in the status hierarchy. Institutions and their independent credentialing model are seen as a threat to how capital, especially capital associated with Silicon Valley, wants society to be organized.

There are also pressures from less directly identifiable interests. High school students in the trades are getting offered pretty good jobs; the Wall Street Journal News Desk has no particular reason to undermine universities, but the dearth of skilled trades means you can do well coming out of high school. And it’s not just Peter Thiel offering alternative routes to highly paid jobs in tech — there are now market-driven opportunities for trading firms and investment banks to identify talent earlier.

And then there is the way classrooms themselves have become battlefields. This is happening on both left and right. There is a move — Austin Sarat at Amherst College terms it bluntly — to turn students into informants ratting on their instructors. Political scientists, as well as folks in sociology and other sensitive disciplines, are well aware of these risks, because we have all experienced second- or firsthand the sense that what is said in the classroom is subject to potential disciplinary action on a student’s initiative. As a result, folks in the academy report more and more self-censoring with students.

In my own newsletter, I’ve been writing about how organized interest groups — in this case, the Goldwater Institute — have specifically targeted not just political science as a discipline but individual editorial decisions at the American Political Science Review, as part of a larger political project. Right-wing groups like Goldwater have figured out how the mechanics of the academy function. And since they want to change how those mechanics function — in a weird Marxian way, the point is not to understand the world but to change it — they have begun looking for pain points and ways to change the incentives, the very economy, of political science and other disciplines, so as to advance their agendas.

Because peer-review decisions at APSR loom large in disciplinary self-governance, right-wing groups and activists are finding ways to promote ideologically driven boards of trustees, state-government employees, and state legislatures to change how the discipline functions — to remove academic freedom by changing disciplinary self-governance.

This is framed as a way to reduce waste, but the point is to provide alternative means of staffing and directing academia, an alternative well-funded path for ideologically aligned scholars (and ideologically neutral people just looking for a job in a straitened economy) to produce institutions closely aligned with their goals.

Reports like these are trial balloons — searching for ways to shape how the academy is governed. Because this is happening at the state level, there is vast scope for many dozens of U.S. states to come up with alternative ways to manage academia.

The shredding of norms

This sort of interference is a shattering of norms we have all come to view as normal. We can no longer rely on a bipartisan consensus about academic freedom, the role of academics, or the place of U.S. higher education as a strategic resource. That has gone away — even if it was only ever a truce rather than a consensus.

Initiatives like requiring syllabi to be posted online mean it’s not just folks in classrooms who can become informants; anyone motivated and with access to LLMs can run their own private DOGE initiative targeting individual scholars for what they teach. This is a startling development, and I’m not sure people have given it the attention it deserves. Even the syllabus — which we used to joke nobody reads — has become a battlefield of political contestation.

In my own research, I’ve also been studying how shifting attitudes toward higher education have led to assaults — like DeSantis’s — on the ability of U.S. institutions to participate in international exchanges. In a recent article in Foreign Policy Analysis, I looked at how Republicans and Republican publics view with favor initiatives like DeSantis’s that sunder links between the United States and countries it deems threats. Public opinion data show independents and Democrats much more likely to support international students enrolling in U.S. universities; Republicans much less. Chinese students in particular were singled out by Republicans as justifiable targets for exclusion.

Moves like DeSantis’s may still be extreme, but I would not be surprised if states like Texas — currently in the middle of a legislative session in which combating Sharia is a major priority — continued their turn away from internationalization. That turn has already included shuttering Texas A&M University in Qatar, just down the road from me, as a way of politicizing what we have all come to believe should be the province of educational self-governance.

What is to be done?

What the heck are we supposed to do? This is where my point about shifting baselines comes back with a vengeance.

We all have reflexive answers. People have called on associations to issue more statements; the associations have done so (even if people are resistant to hearing that!), but the situation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. There have been calls for institutions to resist — and in some cases, like Harvard’s resistance to specific Trump administration policies, this has worked. But it has also been inefficient and largely ineffective at reversing things, because so many pressures are being applied to so many pain points that no university or association can win every battle.

We might say internationalization can save us. But internationalization is no silver bullet. It comes with its own risks and may amount more to launching lifeboats for a few than to saving the ship. Others have suggested political scientists need to get directly involved in the fray — to bridge the gap between what we research and what we do. But if an entire political party is hostile to political science, that may not work either. If even vaccines can be politicized, it’s hard to see how a frontal assault is anything but a potential disaster. Maybe we don’t need bridges but moats.

We have to ask: do we have the leverage right now to win the kind of battles we’re being forced to fight? An honest accounting is that in some cases, yes — and in other cases we’re talking about grand structural changes where PR campaigns or individual volition cannot arrest the tide. It’s one thing to resist this or that policy; it’s impossible to win every challenge we face. That doesn’t mean victories are impossible. It does mean being clear-eyed about where the lines can be drawn, what can be defended, and what needs to be restrained until another day.

What do we want?

The bigger question is: what do we want? In a sense, we are all trying to recapture what we view as normal. Political socialization tells us that the way the world was when we were 18-year-olds represents how we view the world as it should be: Our baseline. It is natural to want to restore a world we only began to see as under threat a few — or ten — years ago. But in many ways we cannot rebuild what has been lost. Damage has been done. Entire generations of scholars have been affected. Entire generations of potential scholars are being affected: if even Harvard is cutting back on PhD admissions, imagine the strains on institutions without Harvard’s resources. If NSF is pulling back on basic research, we can’t all set up a GoFundMe and hope ANES continues as before.

The past is gone. Recovery can be only partial. No matter how much money a hypothetical Democratic Congress throws at higher ed, we can’t just restore institutions and careers, much less intenrational trust.

Accepting that the past is past might be healthy. I’m not an accelerationist, but I’m open to the critique that the baseline of a couple of years ago wasn’t all that great either. Remember: the table stakes include precarity, adjunctification, and systemic disparities. We wouldn’t even want to restore everything we could. We’d want to build something better.

So we don’t want to go back, even if going back would be preferable to where we are. While you might optimistically say one day President Trump will pass from the scene, this crisis is not just about Trump. It has deeper roots and casts longer shadows than any individual, even the president. There will be no catharsis. There will be no moment when the scales fall from everybody’s eyes and they realize, ah yes, higher education, that’s the gem of American society—whyever did we smash it? Public opinion, elite opinion, and the array of institutions we face are not going back to where they were in 2005, much less 1965.

That’s dispiriting, on top of everything else. But of course it’s dispiriting. We’re facing a structural crisis unlike anything American higher education has ever faced. What did you think the end of our institutions would look like? Vibes? Essays?

Don’t mourn. Build.

It’s natural, looking at the scale of these challenges, to wonder how we will get through.

At times like this, I think about how W. E. B. Du Bois carried out scholarship under conditions vastly less favorable than what I face now, what you face now, what the sector faces now. You can do good work. You can’t give up the faith — because if you do, you’ve already lost.

In Indigenous studies, there is the concept of survivance — offering resistance simply by surviving and continuing to persist.

I don’t want to equate what we face as relatively well-off, well-situated professionals — as grave as our challenges are, let’s be frank about our positionality — to the challenges Indigenous communities face. But I do find the concept intriguing and insightful.

What we have to do is conserve what we have, and think about a future not just in our own lifetimes but afterward. As dispiriting as everything is, we can’t mourn. We have to build. That means we need to think about what we want to build.

Some of the things we can build are immediate.

Build rapport with students. If you’re like me, you were trained as a researcher. But one of the great joys of my work — at Dickinson, at UMass, here at Georgetown in Qatar — has been connecting with students. We need to view that as a way of dispelling lazy stereotypes: both the stereotype that professors are lazy, and the lazy stereotypes about what we do all day. Rapport means demystifying our work — explaining what we do, why, and how — while sincerely sharing why craft matters, why studying matters.

View academic freedom as contested. Our core values are, it turns out, not widely shared. We sometimes appeal reflexively to the virtues of faculty self-governance, autonomy, and academic freedom as self-evident. We can no longer do that. We have to explain why these values matter — constantly, patiently, earnestly, ad nauseam. We must also behave like those values matter, weighing in on important topics responsibly and with a sense that any intervention might reverberate more broadly.

Defang objections, and recognize concerns. Everybody wants to believe what they’re doing in class is valuable. We can also be clearer, as many of us already are, about why what we do is valuable to students. It’s not that learning political theory will help you get a job — I don’t want to turn us into a workforce development program. But we need to keep, persistently and earnestly, discussing why what we do matters: through experiential learning and other transformational experiences, why studying any discipline seriously can make you better at other forms of living. I don’t want to fall prey to the idea that intoning the words “critical thinking” will save us. I mean in class: discussing why what we do matters, inviting students to reflect, then making clear how what they have done has transformed what they do.

Pursue and value distributed scholarship and evaluation. If infrastructure is a target, we need to fix the infrastructure. That means not just relying on journals — and this is not just about commercial journals. Research published in journals cannot be the only way we measure influence. Andy Hall published one of his methodological interventions on LLMs as a LinkedIn post. How are you going to talk about a major intervention — which led to hundreds of comments and got a lot of attention — if it doesn’t fit within the boxes we accept as scholarship? We can change how we measure productivity. That starts with letter writers and tenure-file reviewers, with asking whether the practices we track are convenient or actually measuring something essential. It may require associations like APSA to develop principles-based evaluation standards rather than impact-factor ones.

Emphasize conservation and independence, not just productivity. We need to think about how we’ll preserve scholarship, disseminate it, share it — and maintain (this is crucial) the rigor, openness, and commitment to dialogue that distinguish scientific communication from other forms. Not everything I write is scientific. But some of what I write that is scientific isn’t being published in peer-reviewed journals — even though that means it has a much wider reach. We should persistently emphasize our role in conserving and sharing knowledge, taking our role as independent — not even necessarily as the best researchers in the discipline. There will come a time when private-sector or government applications once again seize the leading role in knowledge production, as they did long before the sunny 20th century of U.S. higher education, just because they have money and access. We need to conserve our role as scholars and explain the benefit of independent analysts.

In 2024, a prominent politician embraced the slogan “we’re not going back.” She lost. But the slogan is accurate. We aren’t going back — to a realm of unquestioned U.S. predominance (maybe we shouldn’t even want to), or to an era in which we governed ourselves without any sense of pressure (maybe that wasn’t a great equilibrium either). Maybe we can make something out of the pressures we face.

No nostalgia for lost worlds. We need to move forward — and to think about, maybe not even a single shared vision of a future, but many futures, that capture the variety of what we value and how we can make those productive.

We’re not going back. We must move forward.

As in earlier installments (see below), I have been taking my reading notes for my Nuclear Weapons and World Politics course and turning them into Substack essays. This week, in light of President Trump balancing nuclear strategy and attending the ur-macho UFC event in Florida, it seems apposite to share today’s notes on Carol Cohn’s “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals”.

Today we are talking about Carol Cohn’s landmark article, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” This piece is now almost forty years old, which is staggering to think about.

It’s startling to notice that, temporally, Cohn’s article is now closer to the world of Thomas Schelling and Herman Kahn and all the other defense intellectuals we’ve read about than her article is to us. Another way to think about this is that we are as far from this piece as Cohn was from the bombing of Hiroshima. She is talking about an era in which all those ideas were still fresh, in which you would go to a seminar and Tom Schelling himself might be leading the discussion.

At times, as we’ll discuss below, this makes the piece feel almost vintage. At other times, it remains startlingly fresh because the tendencies and structures she describes remain present. One of the things that really stood out to me is how venerable the language of privilege is. Cohn is using the terms in exactly the same way that we would use them now. Her discussion of how her membership in the summer workshop entitled her to the Temporary Privilege Card is just one of those moments of astonishing irony and insight.

Carol Cohn is still around, at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. As the New York Times essay I sent around shows, she is still active, still writing. Her goal is not only to dismantle weapons systems, but to dismantle what she sees as a strictly patriarchal and oppressive system of international relations that makes militarism not only a part of the world but the dominant discourse through which people see the world. For Cohn, the emphasis on language and socialization is not accidental. It comes from how she views the world. It comes from her academic and political project of trying to change it.

For somebody like Carol Cohn to be in this world really must have been jarring — and also scintillating for her as an observer.

What Kind of Article Is This?

I want to situate this piece by thinking about what kind of article it is, because it is different from the other genres we have read. We have read books of history. We have read synoptic guides about how nuclear politics operates. We have read forceful works of theory like Thomas Schelling. We have read pieces that sought to bring us up to date about specific developments or to survey the academic literature. What we’re reading here is something that lies in between autoethnography, ethnography, and critique.

I define this article as a mix of ethnography and autoethnography because it is about trying to understand the habits, the relations, the worldviews, the codes, and the desires of a particular group of people. That’s clearly ethnography. It’s autoethnography because Cohn is narrating her own introduction to and enculturation into — literally her assimilation into — the mores, the worldviews, the habits, and the language of that group. But it is also critique, because all of this academic labor is done in the service of what she delivers throughout, but especially in the last few pages: a discussion of how she and others can use her observations to combat what she sees in these circles.

That is why this is not just any one particular genre of article. It mixes description and observation with her own experiences, but in the service ultimately of not just describing or theorizing the world, but using her descriptions and theories to change how the world is made. That should make you think about how her approach will complement and challenge the other voices we have heard from, and how it makes her stand out.

A Radical Voice in Context

You should be thinking about this article not only on its own terms but in the context of all that has gone before — not just in history, but in this course.

I hope this feels like a change from what we have discussed previously in the semester. I want to note at the beginning that this piece is not being given to you at this point in the term accidentally. This is about the moment where I think it should hit with maximum impact, because you now have some understanding of the context in which Cohn was thinking.

I tried to arrange the syllabus so that Carol Cohn was not the first female voice we heard from in this class. You might remember that we’ve heard from, among others, Caitlin Talmadge and Rose McDermott. But Cohn is the first stridently radical voice that we have encountered.

Cohn describes her own experience as being somebody who walked in fervently anti-nuclear and anti-militarist, interested in how bombs have effects on bodies, how the physical properties of these weapons make their use — to her — unthinkable. She wanted to understand how it could become thinkable. Not just for any given set of defense intellectuals, but for the people who decide whether or not these weapons will be used: how they are acquired, how they are designed, how they are employed, how plans for their use are drawn up.

Some will say, loosely, that the use of nuclear weapons is unthinkable, but clearly that is false. People do think about using them. For ordinary folks, we think about them as a kind of lingering background fear — a fear that can come to the forefront during moments like this past week, or during moments of persistently elevated crisis like the 1980s or the 1950s. But for others, nuclear weapons are thinkable all the time. If you work for a nuclear missile command, if you are actually one of the people in the silos, if you are a B-2 bomber pilot, if you work in command and control in Islamabad, in New Delhi, in Washington, in Omaha, in Beijing — nuclear weapons are thinkable.

And they are thinkable more generally. Every country has at least some kind of nuclear policy. Every country has to decide whether or not to pursue nuclear weapons, and what stance to take regarding their status in world politics. Not everyone has reacted to the advent of nuclear weapons by developing them. North Korea has them, but Vietnam, as far as I know, doesn’t have an active program. Iran has the rudiments of what could come together for a nuclear program, but Saudi Arabia is not yet as far along. Whether you have weapons or not, everybody’s thought about how they relate to them, at least to some extent. These weapons are not unthinkable.

The question is: what does it mean to be thinkable? What terms are thinkable? Who gets to think about them and how? Those are Cohn’s questions.

Language, Discourse, and the Power to Exclude

What Cohn does on one level of this essay is to discuss how language and discursive markers are related to power — power to exclude certain perspectives, and power to control what is legitimate and therefore, if not thinkable, at least sayable in the rooms where decisions are made.

Cohn moves from and contrasts her life thinking about and discussing nuclear weapons for their effects on people, putting herself in the role of a potential victim of nuclear use. When we think about nuclear weapons and ourselves, I think it’s more natural to view ourselves as victims. For many of us, it is easier to identify with the hibakusha, the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, than with the aircrew who dropped the bombs or the scientists who made them. We may think of ourselves as potential survivors; we may think of ourselves as potential non-survivors, as straight victims. We almost certainly think of how nuclear weapons can be used to change our bodies and the bodies of people we know, of people we love, even the people we hate — because that is our immediate and most likely relationship to a nuclear weapon should it be used.

Cohn contrasts the description of the Hiroshima weapon left us by survivors with the sterile, clinical ways in which strategic discourse makes thinkable the use of nuclear weapons. And she notes how that language entails a shift in positionality — in who the language invites you to associate yourself with, in what view you take regarding the weapons and their effects. With the strategic discourse, our perspective is shifted from the people who would be victims to identifying with the people who would use the weapons, and in a sense, the weapons themselves. Even in language, the relationship of weapons to other weapons—fratricide, footprints—take center stage. In this language, there is no way to make prominent the effects on human bodies — to center those effects in nuclear discourse. If you use discourses of pain, of hurt, of grieving, of carnage, of bodily harm, you are excluded from the discourses that are hegemonic within the rooms where decisions are made.

The discourses of those rooms tend to be, as she says, domestic. You have shopping lists and Christmas tree farms. These all have to do with nuclear weapons—a shopping list is the president’s directive for stockpile management; Christmas tree farms are the forest of SLBMs on a ballistic missile submarine—but they become ordinary, domesticated, tame through language. And that, to me — even more than the occasionally puerile and sometimes exaggerated way in which gendered imagery is prevalent in nuclear discourse — is a real shift in habitus, in how your body and mind react to the existence of nuclear weapons. Not only does strategic discourse render nuclear use thinkable, but it becomes natural.

Seductions of Power

This is not the only way of thinking about nuclear weapons. Different discourses inhabit different rooms. As Cohn moves from being somebody who is feminist and anti-militarist to somebody who is invited to be part of this world of privilege and hegemonic discourse, she finds herself attracted by the power of the privilege.

She gets a kick out of using terms like SLCMs and ALCMs — sea-launched cruise missiles, air-launched cruise missiles — of being in the know and being able to decode the hidden texts of, in a sense, joining the nuclear priesthood, of being somebody able to understand the mysteries of deterrence. She calls the acronyms sexy.

It’s at this point that the gatekeeping aspect of nuclear discourse becomes most prominent. There are people who are on the inside and people who are on the outside. If you want the privileges of the inside, you adopt a certain code — but that code will reflect how you are socialized, with whom you identify, from what vantage point you see the world.

For what it’s worth, I think that it is not the language that is controlling. I think it is the socialization and the desire for power — the desire to be part of an in-group — that changes how language is used. You transform, and then your language follows. You could use any language you chose, but doing so would mean being kicked out of the club. And the club is great.

(You can imagine similar dynamics taking place among people who want to abolish nuclear weapons, because they too must have some insight into nuclear mysteries. They too might find themselves using particular jargons, particular ways of meaning, in an effort to naturalize and privilege certain forms of discourse that elevate their own stature. Using that for the purpose of saving lives rather than threatening them is morally better, but I think we can see that this is a behavior meant to shape, discipline, and control not just thought itself, but how thoughts can be expressed.)

That’s why I’ve been using the term “discourse” rather than “language.” Discourse is how we communicate, but it’s shaped within and shapes the power relations about what language can communicate. You can think for yourself all you want, but as long as those thoughts are kept private, they have no public meaning — or at the very least, their public meaning is kept domiciled, domesticated.

So that’s why I think you can read Cohn and realize it’s not just who uses what language, but who uses what language to whom.

Sex, Death, and the Drives Beneath

On another level, this is not an article about language. It is an article about how language relates to fundamental drives. This is, in many ways, an article about psychology — different from how McDermott used psychology, because this is, if anything, Pop Freudianism, in which our deepest desires as humans, as animals, are made manifest in our social relations.

Cohn mentions at different points how the sterility of language is used to obfuscate, to hide from the participants themselves what they are really feeling. She identifies those feelings as basically the sex drive — which is not a drive for reproduction, but a drive for power — and the death drive. Dealing with our mortality, dealing with how we have the power to cause others’ mortality, and reacting, in the case of the men in the room, to the fact that men cannot create life, but want to, feel cheated of the ability. And so the men in the nuclear discourse have adopted a perspective in which they are fathers of the bomb, and therefore fathers of death.

This is, I think, a little more speculative. You have to buy into a lot of Freudian — maybe Jungian — archetypes about the world. But the notion that there is more going on in nuclear use, threatening, and behavior than simply relating to nuclear weapons themselves is quite likely valid. The way people relate to nuclear weapons isn’t just about the bomb; it is about what possessing, taming, or controlling the bomb means for you.

There’s a great novel from the early 1960s called Fail-Safe, which birthed not just the movie Fail-Safe but also Dr. Strangelove, which is kind of an unofficial adaptation. In Fail-Safe, one of the characters is a political science professor — I should mention that Fail-Safe was co-written by a political science professor — and there’s an erotic element that the book deals with in terms of how having control over the life and death of humanity plays out in people’s self-conception and their relations to others.

Cohn at the end — and one great way to read this article is to read it back to front, to read the conclusion and then everything else — mentions how there’s a homoerotic element, but also a heterosexual dynamic and, of course, a mortality dynamic. You can see all of this coming together. This is an article about gender. This is an article about sex. This is an article about death. But it is also an article about how all of those motivations are laundered into a scientific, or if you like, pseudoscientific, language about deterrence and nuclear use. How dealing with these fundamental properties of the bomb and being in touch with our deepest desires — but trying to hide those because they are, in a sense, shameful — plays out into the highest levels of national strategy.

This is a very different way of accounting for how nuclear deterrence, compellence, threat, and possession come about. Again, this is one person’s experience of one sliver of nuclear life. It is not a large-scale investigation — Hugh Gusterson, an anthropologist, has a very good book about this. But it leads us to many different points about how, for instance, nuclear possession and use are gendered, about how countries that don’t have nuclear weapons are seen as less than, as immature, not able to understand these drives or cope with them. You can see that in how countries relate to aspiring nuclear states and in the dismissive attitudes that some adopt toward countries that choose not to pursue nuclear weapons.

Limitations and Extensions

Cohn’s article isn’t perfect. Most clearly, this is an American article about Americans. It might be interesting to see how these sorts of discourses are naturalized and perpetuated in other spaces. You can imagine a transnational effect here, not just because of the dominance of the United States in strategic language, but because if you’re talking about arms control — accepting the existence of nuclear weapons but, in a very Schelling-esque way, trying to put limits on how they can be threatened — then a global or at least more-than-American shared discourse becomes necessary. People on all sides of a negotiating table have to be able to understand what’s going on.

You can imagine that different national discourses exist. The Israeli discourse is different from the Russian discourse, is different from the Pakistani discourse. In the Russian discourse, priests bless nuclear weapons. That strikes Americans as a little funny, but I reckon it wouldn’t necessarily strike others as strange in the least. For some, these weapons represent national power and manhood. Why wouldn’t they be celebrated, even to the point of being gifts from the divine?

I think you want to be thinking about this in a complicated way and unpacking these elements of Cohn’s arguments in ways that bring up potentially different answers. Cohn might be right that language is important, but language might be a result of how countries and people define their interests. I want to warn you against a naturalization of interests — especially countries’ own reports of their interests — in which strategic interests are taken as given. Cohn invites us instead to think about what interests are really in play, what motivations, what desires are really shaping how we define our interests. Is it about specific military or political logics, or is it about a feeling of power, of dominance, and how those feelings are refracted through culturally specific scripts?

In doing that, we should remember that not every country has chosen to pursue nuclear weapons — and not just because of technical possibilities, not just because of overriding strategic interests, but because of how different cultures and individuals react to the possibilities of possessing or not possessing them. I also want to guard against a technological determinism in which simply having or potentially having the bomb determines how we view our interests. Everybody has to react to the fact of the bomb and its potential, but you can react in different ways. We see this within the article itself, where even though the men in the rooms of power are reacting in one way, there are people outside reacting in very different ways. Alternative discourses are possible. The question is whether people in the rooms that matter are always going to have a particular view and discourse and habit, or whether others can amend that.

Something I also think is worth considering is that Cohn, as an academic — somebody whose life is governed by words, by the printed word, by the spoken word — is very interested in words. But discourses and imaginaries are also constructed out of visual elements. Does our world right now invoke nuclear weapons through visual or textual elements? And does that affect how we experience and imagine nuclear war? If we think about nuclear war visually, we immediately think of photos or videos of a mushroom cloud. But that means you are already positioning yourself as a survivor or a user. Because if you are a victim, you aren’t going to see the mushroom cloud from a distance. You might not see it at all, or you might see it unfolding over your head. Hiroshima witnesses talk about seeing the fires, seeing the black rain, seeing the cloud towering over them — but that’s not the perspective we see most of the time in media, because you can’t tell a story about somebody who’s dead. Most nuclear stories are post-apocalyptic, because otherwise you couldn’t get past the first minute.

This matters for us right now, because last week we talked about whether deterrence is eroding, whether fear of nuclear weapons is eroding. In our discussion today, we’ve talked about how we have moved from the sterility of Cohn’s world into a cruder, blunter world — a world in which presidents make threats about ending civilization on social media. It’s hard to avoid noticing that the crudity of social media compared to the erudition and wit—albeit paternalistic and patriarchal—of the defense intellectuals makes it much easier to see what Cohn assumed would be hidden. If you think about the Trumpian relationship to nuclear weapons—which is complex; he is a Cold War kid from New York—then it’s pretty clear that some psychosexual discourses are at play. This isn’t exactly defense intellectualism: it’s more like defense id.

I want to invite you to think about how you can think with Cohn in addition to thinking alongside Cohn — and what insights you can come up with here, in the Global South. How might you amend, challenge, and refine her thinking? Because I think there is much more to be said about the varieties of reactions, of discourses, of ways of relating to the bomb, and possibly how those could lead to alternative discourses—in power, or ready to take it.

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?

Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.

What’s the point of senators making laws now?

Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

— “Waiting for the Barbarians”, Constantine Cavafy

There are many posts I would like to write and share with you, but tonight I would like to share this one, because the others are less urgent and because my emotions are too shaken at the moment.

Over the past few days, President Trump’s statements have been shocking: vulgar, angry, berserk, profane. Threatening to wipe out an entire civilization—did he merely mean to say regime? does he grasp the difference between one word and another?—and raging at the Iranian power structure to open the f’ing strait in the same desperate tones as a Hollywood robber whose plans are going awry telling the bank clerk to open the f’ing safe—these are the sorts of statements that one would expect from, say, a Gadhafi, although I cannot recall the Libyan leader being quite so coarse. (Putin, for what it’s worth, did once threaten Chechen terrorists in terms redolent of Trump’s Easter missive: “If we find terrorists in the shithouse, then we’ll waste them in the shithouse.”)

At the moment, we are all waiting for the Americans. The center of gravity is not here but in the Situation Room, where the illusion of control bewitches the king and his court. Waiting to see how Trump will make good on his deadline for Iranian action—whether the escalation will be a movement against Abu Musa & the Tunbs; against nuclear facilities with a commando raid; against the energy and water infrastructure of a country of 90 millions; or whether it will take some other, unspeakable form—or whether Trump will announce at the last moment that a ceasefire has been imposed because sufficient progress has been made. That latter scenario would be cinematic: a reprieve granted the condemned by a generous governor—exactly the sort of cliffhanger resolution and playing against type that Trump glories in.

We are also waiting for those Americans beyond Trump and his circle. What will Congress do? an anchor asked me on television the other day, and I stumbled—I am a putative expert on American politics and Congress, and I worked on the Hill, and all I can say is that Congress is on vacation and the leadership seems reluctant to recall that they have an independent constitutional role. (Perhaps the problem with presidential systems is not presidentialism as a structural trait but presidentialism as a habitus, as a practice of deferring to the first among equals that becomes a bodily rejection of the possibility of wielding one’s own authority. Perhaps the senators were waiting for the barbarians eagerly.)

What, then, of the American people? They have spoken through their surveys and they are unhappy with the war—but they cannot register their voice in full until November and their words will not take effect until January. There is a better chance that the war will bring down the prime minister of the UK before it substantially crimps the powers of the American president. Waiting for public action, the sort of dramatic coup de main that could shake the body politic, seems unlikely. Even the great protests of the Vietnam era could only gradually mobilize opinion against a war bloody not only for the Vietnamese (and the Cambodians and Laotians) but for the Americans to a degree unfathomable for a country that was scandalized that a single flyer was trapped behind enemy lines for three days. Even the fastest organizers on record could not get a rally assembled before the deadline of 8 Eastern (3 am local time).

And the Iranians, of course, are waiting for the Americans—the Iranian public indoors, under much the same sort of stairwells we huddled beneath during the first few days, when the emergency alerts were a novelty; the Iranian military and militia throughout the country, waiting to receive a blow and perhaps strike one of their own.

I have memories only of a couple of moments when history seemed to pause: the moment when I saw the second tower of the World Trade Center crumble on television, for instance. This is not yet that moment but it is pregnant with that possibility. And what is grimmer is that there will be no catharsis, or at least no lasting one: we will be back here in six months or a year, fighting over the Strait or the missile programs or something else. In the meantime, we all await the Americans. What can we do until then?

A classic international relations argument highlights the risks of “chain-ganging”.1 If your security is tied to that of an alliance partner, then a risky action—like starting a war—by that partner might cause you to enter into a war:

In multipolarity, the approximate equality of alliance partners leads to a high degree of security interdependence within an alliance. Given the anarchic setting and this relative equality, each state feels its own security is integrally intertwined with the security of its alliance partners. As a result, any nation that marches to war inexorably drags its alliance partners with it. No state can restrain a reckless ally by threatening to sit out the conflict, since the demise of its reckless ally would decisively cripple its own security.

Note that chain-ganging is premised on relative equality of alliance partners. There is, however, no reason why equality should be so important. Nor is it important, except as a special case, that the interdependenc should be symmetrical. It is, instead, a question of security dependence on the part of at least one party that creates incentives for some state (we’ll call it State A) to take actions that leave State B with no choice but to join State A and no leverage over State A’s decision in the first place. In other words, very similar dynamics can confront State B even if State A is not beholden to State B for its own security so long as State B is reliant on State A.

It makes sense why theorists would have focused initially on a condition of relative equality; the original article dealt with the origins of the First World War, a cataclysm that preoccupied (and in some traditions, began) international relations scholarship for many decades. For that reason, the classic statement dismisses the possibility that superpowers in bipolarity would exhibit risky behaviors that would endanger their allies: the superpowers would not hesitate to cut loose misbehaving allies, the theorists (if not always the facts) suggested, while the superpowers could not be dragged into conflict by the actions of their subordinates due to the restraints imposed by bipolarity itself. “The behavior of Cold War policymakers has sometimes violated these prescriptions, but we believe that this had more to do with perceptual or domestic political factos than with the structural properties of bipolarity,” the authors write.

But this is to dismiss what would be more interesting if we view the world from State B’s perspective. If State B is weaker and depends on State A for its security, then could it not be forced to participate in some actions that it would rather avoid should State A require it? The trump card, so to speak, is that State A may be able to credibly threaten withholding at least some measure of protection for State B should it refuse to join in some venture led by State A; further, this might be made more credible should State A require collective effort to bail out some misadventure it had undertaken that at least temporarily risked calamity for all of its proteges.

In this circumstance, weaker partners might not feel that they had been chain-ganged into conflict. The image is not that of peers linked together (albeit, in this clumsy and carceral metaphor, by an outside power). Rather, it is more like the old Royal Navy practice of impressment—the application of superior power to coerce the participation of weaker powers in the pursuit of State A’s goals. The term press-ganging might well capture both the naked application of force and the feeling of resentment on behalf of the subordinate, dependent powers who might find themselves, as it were, shanghaied.

China’s nuclear arsenal, long kept at modest levels, is growing rapidly. The Pentagon estimates that the PRC will be near-parity with the United States and Russia, long the world’s leading nuclear powers, by 2030. Do Americans care?

I set out to answer one part of this question thanks to an unusual opportunity. Verasight, a survey research firm I have worked with previously, offered previous clients a chance to field one or two questions on a nationally representative omnibus survey. I was curious about how Americans viewed latent Chinese threats, and also pretty confident nobody else would ask about this, so I sent in a couple of questions. They chose them for the survey, which was fielded between March 6 and March 16, 2026, using Verasight’s proprietary pool of respondents (N = 1,000 U.S. citizens, weighted for national representativeness; margin of error +/- 3.5%).

Specifically, I asked:

• Question 1: Currently, the United States has about 1,800 deployed nuclear weapons. Russia has about the same number and China has about 600. Do you support or oppose expanding the US nuclear arsenal?

• Question 2: Many experts believe that China is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal and will have over 1,000 nuclear weapons by 2030, a few years from now. Given this, do you support or oppose expanding the US nuclear arsenal?

By asking these questions in order, I hoped to establish both a baseline level of concern about Chinese weapons and whether being provided with new information would change respondents’ views.

The answer is that, in isolation, Americans are not particularly predisposed to favor new nuclear weapons development: just shy of 28 percent of Americans favored such programs in isolation. The partisan cross-tabs on support for building nuclear weapons are stark: 44 percent of Democrats strongly oppose nuclear weapons, while only 9 percent of Republicans oppose them and 48 percent somewhat or strongly support building them.

As the figure above also shows, however, these levels are changeable. When told about growing Chinese arsenals, however, support jumped to a smidgen over 40 percent—a really substantial change!

The direction of change in support was pretty consistent as well: very few people saw the growing Chinese arsenals and became convinced of nuclear restraint. Indeed, in general, those who changed their minds moved one notch toward supporting weapons on the five-point response scale (Strongly support to strongly oppose).

I used multinomial logistic regression analysis to evaluate what produced support for U.S. nuclear expansion in the abstract and changes in support after providing information. The most consistent predictors of support in general were between Republicans and Democrats, with Republicans hugely more favorable toward nuclear expansion and Democrats substantially more opposed. Similarly, Republicans were much more likely than Democrats to increase support for building weapons when told about China’s buildup; interestingly, older respondents also became more favorable. (All of these predictions hold education, race, ethnicity, and gender constant.)

The figure below illustrates the size of these changes from the first to the second question. Republicans became about 35% more likely to support building more weapons, while Democrats and Independents were only about 21 to 24 percent more likely respectively. (For this analysis, I have combined independents who lean D or lean R with their avowed partisans.) The youngest and oldest respondents also became markedly more likely to support building arsenals (again, keeping other factors constant).

What does this mean? Hawkish policies—even at the level of building more nuclear weapons—have more support than one might suspect (I certainly did not suspect this!), and Republican thirst for great-power competition is a strong latent force. Democrats, however, are much less interested in rearmament baseline and comparative terms, although they generally resemble Independents in this regard. Indeed, although the changes in relative support might look similar, overall support for nuclear armament among Democrats was comparatively low, with only 8 percent strongly supporting expanding U.S. arsenals and 17 percent somewhat supporting expansion when told of China’s trajectory. That’s compared to 50 percent somewhat or strongly (mostly strongly!) opposing a U.S. buildup in response. Meanwhile, 65 percent—nearly two-thirds—of Republicans surveyed favored a U.S. buildup in response, compared to just 16 percent opposed. And all of this, remember, was in response to a single data point, meaning that it’s plausible that a larger argument might sway more people. (Hey, if you give me money, I can research this for you!)

Arms control is, at the very least, a latently polarized issue. Overt Chinese displays of strength might provoke support for much stronger U.S. responses—and at the very least, there may be more of a lane for a hard China hawk than I would have suspected. The future may look more like the past than those of us who grew up in the post-Cold War assumed.

Normally, one criticizes a Paul Krugman argument at some risk to oneself. Given that I earned one of my lowest college grades in macroeconomics—Krugman's specialty—I rarely have occasion to do anything but nod along when he writes on his core topics. But his most recent column is so off-base that it deserves a response.

Krugman argues that the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain) leveraged their immense oil wealth, and concomitant potential to invest in the U.S. economy and the Trump family dynasty, to persuade Trump to attack Iran.

This is not a serious argument—or, as we say, a reality-based one. It ignores the many pieces of contrary evidence and ends up weakening the case against Trump’s culpability for the war.

On the investment point, Krugman argues that GCC countries’ pledges to invest in the United States have bucked up Trump’s vaporware claims about trillions of investment pledges in the United States. That part is accurate—many of these deals are so far paper commitments, rather than actual movements of funds. (It’s also not clear how far into the future they stretch, making it harder to value them.) To be sure, GCC countries do invest a lot overseas, and one does hear that lower-level commitments, in the billions or tens of billions annually, were actually being made with earnest money. I also wonder whether many of those commitments involve investments in U.S. firms, particularly AI and data centers, which would be more explicable. But this is quibbling: yes, Trump inflated the GCC's investment commitments, and he clearly coveted the opportunities to announce DEALS with superlatives and dollar figures attached.

Now, let’s look at the tape. What’s the current status of those investment pledges? Does it look like GCC countries are thrilled with a war Krugman asserts they used their influence to bring about? Publicly, there’s no change to sovereign wealth fund activities—but privately, as Reuters reports, you can bet that the guys in green eyeshades are taking tough looks at their spreadsheets.

That should be unsurprising. Economically, the war has been a heavy blow for Gulf states. Cutting off the flow of oil and gas is obviously a major setback to Gulf economies; for Qatar and the Emirates, losing transportation flows via Qatar Airways, Etihad, and Emirates is another hit. And those aluminum, sulfur, and fertilizer plants weren’t being run as charities, either. In all, the conflict might shave up to 14 percent of GDP from Kuwait and Qatar this year (and multiple percentage points off the UAE and Saudi). Not that any of this was a surprise to anyone around here: cutting off the Strait of Hormuz is one of the scenarios that anyone with a map expected in a conflict like this one.

Militarily, of course, it’s also been a blow. The Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar have taken some knocks in the war (especially, the UAE, a particular focus of Iranian ire). Now, it’s possible governments might advocate for wars that turn out to be trickier than expected—that seems to have been the case for the United States, for instance! But if there's one thing Gulf countries have been united on recently, it's been opposition to a war with Iran—and especially not wanting the United States and/or Israel to start one. (This was a particular goal for Qatar, which now finds itself on the front lines of a bombing campaign for the third time in less than a year.)

The second pillar of Krugman’s argument fares little better. He quotes a Washington Post article as stating that the Saudi crown prince lobbied Trump to bring the war about—but this is reporting that, to put it mildly, many people are skeptical about. More persuasive is the Financial Times assessment that the Iran war is a knock (gift link) to MBS, who wanted regional stability to buy time to execute his Vision 2030 economic diversification plans. Over the past several years, Riyadh has tried hard to lower the temperature in its relations with Iran precisely because the Kingdom would prefer to work on domestic ventures in relative peace.

And it's especially odd that Krugman attributes MBS's influence over Washington partly to things like the Qatari gift of a new Air Force One—Qatar and Saudi Arabia, you may have heard, are different countries, which cooperate in some spheres and compete in others. In fact, it makes a lot more sense if you view those gifts, those pledges, and the general red-carpet treatment that the Gulf has rolled out for Trump since even before the second term began as constituting in larger part a strategic campaign against the sort of reckless, heedless campaign that Trump has begun.

The search for “who lost Iran?” is already beginning. From the right, the charge is that Netanyahu made Trump do it—and there’s no shortage of audiences for that charge on the left, as well. But it’s best to keep accountability for Trump’s war where it belongs. This war wasn’t manufactured in the Gulf: it was made in the USA.

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3 months ago · 28 likes · 12 comments · George Dillard

The second part of my reflections on teaching Thomas Schelling’s Arms and Influence here in Doha during the ongoing war.

The international relations scholar Robert Vitalis diagnosed the discipline of International Relations with what he termed the “norm against noticing”: a pattern to avoid discussing race and racialized subjects, to maintain a fictitious claim that race and international relations had nothing to do with each other—the sort of claim that evaporates upon first contact with the writings or speeches of, well, just about any pre-Second World War statesman or scholar from Europe or its settler offshoots.1 That norm operated at least in part from the reading around of unsettling or bluntly racist passages in canonical works, a process by which young scholars were socialized into letting major authors’ observations pass without further comment—a strategy familiar to anyone with an uncle prone to making certain kinds of jokes or remarks at the Thanksgiving table.

Of late, that norm has crumbled a bit as the discipline has become more diverse in its intake, as the generation that wrote those canonical works has passed on from making career-shaping decisions, and as broader currents in American and global society have made it intolerable to not notice what is being said. And yet, it can still come as a shock to re-read canonical stories and suddenly notice what was there all along.

So it is with Schelling and his discussion of Mohammad Mosaddegh, the prime minister of Iran overthrown by a British-American operation in 1953.

Of that incident, Schelling writes (p. 38)

Recall the trouble we had persuading Mossadegh in the early 1950s that he might do his country irreparable damage if he did not become more reasonable with respect to his country and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Threats did not get through to him very well. He wore pajamas, and, according to reports, he wept. And when British or American diplomats tried to explain what would happen to his country if he continued to be obstinate, and why the West would not bail him out of his difficulties, it was apparently uncertain whether he even comprehended what was being said to him. It must have been a little like trying to persuade a new puppy that you will beat him to death if he wets on the floor. If he cannot hear you, or cannot understand you, or cannot control himself, the threat cannot work and you very likely will not even make it.

So, this passage hits different—as the kids no longer say—when one reads it as Iranian missiles are blasted apart overhead.

It should be noted that, as far as I know, this is a comically oversimplified portrait of interactions between Mossadegh and the West; portraying “the West” as seeking to “bail him out” seems particularly slanted. Nor does Mossadegh appear to have been so puppyish as this account holds. In short, this paragraph—which really does not need to be in the book! the puppy example by itself is crude but effective!—severely mars the chapter.

I’m annoyed and even embarrassed that I did not catch how sloppy it was the first time I read it, nearly twenty years ago. (I have the same copy I read in graduate school with me.) Should it have taken my relocation to the Middle East to perceive the slapdash nature of this argument? It bespeaks a casual denigration of the rest of the world. And it reads especially oddly in the present context because if you were going to describe a leader two weeks ago who was unable to understand the stakes of a confrontation—well, would it be the Iranian one?

Indeed, throughout Schelling, there’s a constant drumbeat of assertions that the United States is reliable, responsible, and unlikely to act rashly. For Schelling, this is a disadvantage. Much of Arms and Influence revolves around the idea that one must credibly signal an ability to lose control in order to make threats of nuclear use believable—a threat so self-defeating that no rational leader would make it, but so powerful that no rational leader could abjure it. To be fair-minded, evenhanded, and cool-headed may well be a disadvantage, Schelling argues: “We have not the character of fanatics and cannot scare countries the way Hitler could.”

Oh, to live in a world where the consensus knock against the United States was that it was not rash enough!

That world died in the Vietnam War within months of the book’s publication, along with the bipartisan confidence that the Cold War was worth waging at the levels that Schelling took for granted.

The cozy Cold War consensus was not the only victim. Within a generation, arguments and voices that had been marginalized would seize the commanding heights of intellectual production, seemingly making breezy claims like Schelling’s distasteful. That victory was never total—Samuel Huntington could assert in print that Mexican-Americans inclined toward secessionism, for instance—but a passage like Schelling’s discussion of Mossadegh would have at least required more syllables.

And yet a great deal of that attitude toward those who resisted the West remained. The analytical presumption of U.S. rationality and Others’ emotional nature is deeply embedded in how American scholars see the world — and beyond academia it is even more entrenched. How many people describe North Korea as “irrational,” for instance, as though a regime that has survived for seven decades through calculated brinksmanship simply cannot think straight?

To dismiss one’s adversaries as flighty or incomprehensible is not just uncharitable. It is a cardinal intellectual sin — the kind that wrecks analysis before it begins. Getting this right is not a matter of politeness or political correctness. It is a matter of flinty, steel-eyed realism: you will not bother to try to outthink an opponent you have decided is incapable of thought.

But first you have to notice that these prejudices exist. And then you have to stop reading around them.

My course on Nuclear Weapons and World Politics was scheduled to read Arms and Influence by Thomas Schelling before the crisis came, but reading it while we are involved in perhaps the most intense brinksmanship since … the 1960s? … lends this 1966 book uncanny contemporary relevance. I will be sharing my notes and reflections on this book over the coming few days.

Before we begin, I have to admit something. About four and a half percent of my reaction right now is that of the scientist in Independence Day underground in Area 51 where he studies crashed alien technology: “Since these guys started showing up, all the gizmos inside turned on. The last twenty four hours have been really exciting!”

Four and a half percent. Which is really high.

The remaining 95.5 percent of my reaction, of course, is: How do we deal with this? What does this mean? How do we get through it?

I want you to understand not just the gravity of the situation for us personally, but for the future of politics in Western Asia, in the Middle East more broadly, and for the question of how countries will deal with — or relate to — other countries developing nuclear weapons. If the most recent numbers are right, more than a thousand civilians have died in Iran and elsewhere. Given my belief that this war was ill-conceived, that is simply tragic.

But then there is also the interest — the need, even — to understand what is going on. How did we get here? And how do we get through it?

A lot of how I and others understand the current conflict is shaped by the book and by the author we are reading now: Arms and Influence, by the American economist Thomas Schelling.

Schelling was born in and grew up in San Diego, California, as part of a Navy family. When war broke out between the US and Japan, Schelling didn’t go into the military. Instead, he drifted into working with the FBI in Chile, which had responsibility for counterintelligence in the Western Hemisphere. Let go because of ulcers, he enrolled in UC Berkeley and then joined the Bureau of the Budget for the Roosevelt (and then Truman) administration. I mention this because it’s interesting that Schelling, who would become so influential in military analysis, had no military experience.

After the war, he completed a doctorate in economics at Harvard — a fairly straightforward technical dissertation on labor policy and wages — and got a job as a staff economist with the Marshall Plan, participating in the rebuilding of Europe. After the Korean War, he left government and pursued a career in academia, landing at Yale.

Like many civilian intellectuals at this time, Schelling became increasingly interested in the Cold War and the logic of nuclear deterrence. This was the era, as Friedman and Michaels have documented, when a new class of defense intellectuals emerged. These were people who might have had some experience in uniform, but who were distinguished from generals and traditional military strategists by a conviction that the advent of nuclear weapons had changed the very nature of war. When one starts thinking about mutual nuclear annihilation, one starts to wonder whether one needs new ideas about how to wage — or avoid — wars. There was also a genuine belief among this community that war was too important to be left to the generals. When weapons no longer decide the fate of battles but the survival of civilization itself, people who view these contests through strictly military means may not be competent to make decisions about national — or civilizational — survival.

There’s a term that came later that describes Schelling’s role: policy entrepreneurs, or idea entrepreneurs — people who seek to spread ideas and who benefit from doing so through fame, prestige, and influence. Not only is the prospect of finding out new ideas attractive for scholars, developing ideas that apply to policy and meet the needs of policymakers is a route to influence for people whose business it is to understand and propagate ideas. Defense intellectuals like Schelling challenged the military’s monopoly on expertise. They challenged the legitimate monopoly of knowledge about how to use nuclear weapons. And they viewed their real clients not as the generals, but as the political overseers of the military — presidents, civilian defense officials, the people who control budgets and procurement. These were not academic debates. They had immediate policy relevance. Many of these thinkers talked to Senator John F. Kennedy. When Kennedy became president, he appointed many of them to senior policymaking roles.

Among this breed of thinkers — Bernard Brodie, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport — Schelling stands apart. I have read a great deal of the writings of the others. They’re fine. Competent. Kahn is funny; Rapoport is probably right (and is skeptical of many of the perspectives here). But from his very first articles in the 1950s, Schelling was concerned with factors and relationships that nobody else saw. Schelling is not divine but his emphasis on strategy, credibility, relationships, and communication—above all, on seeing bargaining and violence as linked—has been transformative.

Intentionally or not, Schelling rode this wave—and his connections with the Kennedy administration in particular would cement his role as a leading intellectual. Arms and Influence, along with The Strategy of Conflict, would become standard on the syllabi of courses like this one—it is, I think, a touchstone of American thinking about strategy. Even if someone like President Trump has not read it, you do not have to go too far down in the ranks of his advisers and implementers to find people who rely on at least a caricature of the book.

Schelling’s Big Idea

What underlines Schelling’s approach is one big idea:

Coercion is bargaining.

From this postulate, several corollaries emerge. First, if you are bargaining over something, you have shared interests with your adversary. That’s counterintuitive! Most of the time, we assume that if you are fighting someone, you share nothing with them. But Schelling observes that there’s often some range of alternatives that both adversaries will prefer to continuing the conflict—if there were none, then only brute force—only eradication—would be an outcome. Yet that is simply not war is about.

This points to a second corollary. Coercion isn’t force. Obviously, actual brute force will be involved, but the overt use of brute force is not what represents the most important part of coercion. Rather, it is the manipulation of the possibility and the expression of violence as part of a way to both drive an adversary to the negotiating table and to make sure that whatever emerges from the bargaining process is maximally favorable to one’s own side.

From this, we can derive a third corollary. The manipulation of actual and potential violence is a political process in which military tactics and capabilities play a secondary role. They are important—you can’t credibly threaten violence unless you have the capability to wield force—but war is essentially, as in its essence, political. Therefore, at higher levels of abstraction, the details of weapons systems and tactics—the stuff of sergeants, colonels, and even generals—become less important than the relationship of the power to hurt to the pursuit of political objectives. Wielding the potential to hurt becomes the basis for negotiation because the military art creates not victory but the real and future harms that drive people to reach alternatives to fighting.

Finally, all of this implies that violence is not just about smashing the other side, even if that is how it feels to those engaged in any particular engagement, but is rather about expressing intentions, credibility, goals, and acceptable outcomes. Violence is a form of communication within the bargaining process of conflict. Conflict, being interactive (as it requires more than one side to be in conflict, but two sides to bring it to a close), thus must involve not just studying violence but how the use of force changes relationships, expectations, and understandings—all within a framework that continually seeks to bring a termination to the conflict.

This means Schelling is not going to write in a manner that is immediately understandable if you think a military strategist is always concerned with how to use weapons to inflict harm. Even the term violence has a very precise meaning for Schelling. It is not brutality. It is the power to hurt. It is not just inflicting pain, but being able to credibly threaten that you will inflict pain. And it is this structural possibility — this latent capacity — that makes violence strategic and entwined with bargaining.

How to Read the First Page

Open Arms and Influence to the first page of Chapter One. Schelling writes: “The usual distinction between diplomacy and force is not merely in the instruments, words or bullets, but in the relation between adversaries.” There is an important trick to reading an academic work. Whenever an academic says that something is the usual fashion of approaching something, that scholar is about to say that it is wrong. And Schelling is similarly going to efface the distinction between the conventional views to show that diplomacy and force are not as distinct as they appear.

In the first two paragraphs, he lays out the conventional views: diplomacy as bargaining, force as something separate. Schelling here is setting up what he is about to dismantle.

“Diplomacy is bargaining. It seeks outcomes that, though not ideal for either party, are better for both than some of the alternatives.” Schelling agrees— that is what negotiation is. He contrasts this—again, citing the conventional view—with the ordinary view of force:“With enough military force, a country may not need to bargain.” This, too, is the conventional view — and Schelling is about to say it’s wrong.

Think about how we experienced recent events. A surface-level or experiential view would confirm the conventional view. Last week, the United States was negotiating with Iran. This week, the United States is bombing Iran. Negotiations before; violence afterward. We all experienced this as a sharp division between two phases. Schelling would say: yes, that is how most people think about it—but they are wrong

His entire chapter argues that bargaining, diplomacy, and violence are the same thing—that we should approach them not as distinctive phases but as parts of a continuum in which similar theoretical approaches continue.

The Power to Hurt

On the second page, Schelling lays out his views: “There is something else, though, that force can do. It is less military, less heroic, less impersonal, and less unilateral; it is uglier … military force can be used to hurt.” You might pause at this point and say that this is obvious. Of course force can be used to hurt. We can’t think of the events of this week and the coming weeks without thinking that many people, most of them probably noncombatants, will be hurt. So what does Schelling mean?

I think the list of adjectives gives away Schelling’s game. He is saying that the power to hurt is not about victory or anything honorable but simply about being able to squeeze an opponent to the point they would prefer submission, retreat, or an agreed outcome to some other course of action. There’s no valor here. When Schelling talks about violence or the “power to hurt,” he is not even limiting himself to military force or interactions between countries. He is talking about any way you can hurt the other party. A commercial transaction. A relationship between social equals. Famously, he has a discussion about how toddlers can bargain with their parents — not by hurting them physically, but because they can put themselves in danger or cause distress.

This is a non-military view of military force. And it is radical. Schelling says the power to hurt in military contexts is not, at its root, different from the power to hurt in a labor dispute between a union and an employer. Not different from the power to hurt in a civil war. Not different from the power to hurt in the campaigns of Genghis Khan.

Consider the protection racket. When a mafioso walks into your shop and says, “Nice place. Shame if something happened to it,” he is not saying he’s going to burn the shop down today. He wants money from the shop. You want the shop to keep running. You have a shared interest. So you pay protection money. Schelling places nuclear war on a spectrum that runs from corporate negotiations to the mafia shaking down merchants on a street. In all of these cases, the power to hurt matters not because hurting is the point, but because exploiting that power becomes the basis for social relations.

For Schelling to draw on these kinds of examples is to challenge, directly, the idea that the military should have pride of place—to challenge, directly, that there is something honorable or professional about this. He wants to break down our existing ideas about grand strategy and nuclear politics and all the rest. He want us to be prepared to view forms in their fundamentals to be unromantic about what is really happening when one side or another threatens to use nuclear weapons. There is nothing glorious happening here; it is just a stick-em-’up on a grand scale.

“Pain and shock, loss and grief, privation and horror are always in some degree, sometimes in terrible degree, among the results of warfare; but in traditional military science they are incidental, they are not the object,” Schelling writes. Exploiting the power to hurt, however, consists of putting this power at the center of conflict analysis and showing how dangling that prospect can change victims’ motivations to avoid it. In that regard, as Schelling writes, what matters is the prospect of anticipated pain in the future. Not the actual pain inflicted, but the possibility that you will inflict (or suffer) pain—and an understanding of the actions that will lead to avoiding that pain. That is how the exchange of force and the prospect of violence generates bargaining power.

Reading Schelling While the Bombs Fall

Reading this chapter in the Global South — reading it in the Middle East — hits different than when I first encountered it in an apartment in Rosslyn, Virginia, two blocks from Boeing’s military and space headquarters.

Right now, the United States is engaged in a campaign in which violence is being used to hurt Iran. That hurt is being used to say to the Islamic Republic: If you don’t come to terms on nuclear weapons and the rest, we will keep hurting you. The Iranians are not trying to defeat the United States militarily. They can’t. What they are trying to do is, first, show they can endure this suffering indefinitely. And second, inflict pain — hurt and threaten additional hurt — to Israel, to the United States by inflicting casualties, and most of all to the Gulf states. (Subsequently, by closing the Strait of Hormuz, they are seeking to widen the circle of hurt to bring an end to U.S. military campaigning.) They are demonstrating that they are not bound by niceties like the idea that diplomatic facilities should be beyond targeting. They are implicitly threatening oil infrastructure, natural gas infrastructure, the shipping lanes through which the lifeblood of the regional and global economy flows.

The violence on our screens is part of this story, but so are the economic costs. When natural gas prices spike 40, 50, 60 percent in Europe in a matter of hours, that is the power to hurt. When the Korean stock market tanks 13 percent in a day because of energy costs, that is the power to hurt. When China calls on all sides to stop fighting — the war that the Americans and Israelis started — it is because China’s energy costs are being driven up. It doesn’t matter if a single tanker is sunk, so long as actors believe there is a chance tankers will be sunk, because then the energy will not flow.

President Trump tried to address this by announcing the US government will insure tankers for any damage and possibly have the Navy escort them through the straits — a very risky move, putting naval vessels directly at risk in confined waters, raising the chance of severe military casualties. But why? Because he is trying to mitigate costs on others, to remove Iran’s power to hurt.

All of this is classic Schelling.

Iran has to demonstrate its capability to hold out until the United States is too weak — or too unwilling — to continue inflicting damage. Why is Trump saying he might put boots on the ground, that the war might last four or five weeks, however long it takes? Why is he bragging about American munitions stockpiles? To convey to the Iranians that they will continue to be hurt for a long, long time.

What we are witnessing is a military campaign, but it is also a diplomatic campaign in which the counterproposals and acceptances are framed not in terms of emails or position papers or draft treaties, but exchanged by Shahed drones and ICBMs and missile defenses. That is the diplomacy of violence. Grasp this, and you understand not just the book — you understand what is happening over our heads right now.

In the future, we'll continue our reading of Schelling — covering more than a page or two! — and thinking about what all of this means for analyzing a crisis that isn't nuclear but which is about nuclear weapons. It is also a crisis that, for its stakes for the Gulf and the world economy, is about raising the prospect of calamity at a global scale — or an existential one for small states. That sort of apocalyptic power to hurt is what preoccupies Schelling, and absorbs our attention now as well.

“We have something to tell you. You can’t go to school for a few days or maybe a few weeks.”

A few weeks? That’s a very long time.

“I know, it really is!”

Why not?

“Well, some countries are fighting and it’s not safe to go to school right now. Your teachers will give you some activities that you can do here at home.”

What countries are fighting?

“Some of them. They aren’t fighting here.”

Why can’t I go to school?

“When countries fight, sometimes people get hurt. And they’re not fighting here, but sometimes the fight comes here.”

Oh. Well, I guess I get to spend more time with my family!

“That’s right, and we’ll make sure you have lots of things to do here. Now, there’s some chance that the fight could come here and we might have to go away soon.”

Go to another country where it’s safe?

“Yes, we would go somewhere safe. But that’s probably not going to happen. We just don’t want you to be surprised.”

What if the fight comes here and one of you gets killed?

“That’s really, really not likely. We just want to keep you safe.”

Why are they fighting?

“I don’t know, sometimes countries fight. Sometimes they just fight.”

You get used to the booms—soft, loud, soft, soft, loud again, as the interceptors stop the missiles overhead. Soft booms can be mistaken for someone slamming a car door or a water truck making deliveries (or, I should say, the reverse, which makes for jittery moments). Loud booms can’t be mistaken for anything else: they rattle the windows and the doors. But it’s a welcome feeling because if the explosion is overhead that means that the system worked.

There’s an expression: “staying left of boom”. It means acting to prevent a catastrophic or at least kinetic outcome. Imagine there’s a timeline and one possible future is, well, boom. In ordinary circumstances, you want to make sure you stay to the left of that line—keeping the violence at bay.

Well, here I am at the right of boom. Am I confident that the U.S. government did everything it could to stop this from coming about? No. Am I even confident that they wanted to? Certainly not beyond a reasonable doubt. We can talk about that later.

An unintentionally recurring theme of this newsletter has been what it feels like to be in situations that become construed as rhetorical objects: academia, campuses during the Palestine protests, and now “the war-torn Middle East”, a description that doubles as a thought-terminating cliche.

When I’ve discussed the other topics, I’ve wanted to make plain that the experience on the inside just isn’t what the outside view flattens it into—a cube viewed from one angle is just a square, without depth. Inside that rhetorical space there’s surprises, eddies, and dullness—all the complexities that good rhetors simplify in the service of their point, not of the truth.

So what does it feel like to be here, now? Tense and anxious in the first moments—I’ve seen one missile barrage before, last June, and that was a remarkable time but one we all thought would be a one-off. In the past 36 hours or so, I’ve heard eight or ten more salvoes—more than 60 inbound missiles, per official statements.

It’s surreal. Yesterday evening, I was driving to the Al Jazeera studios while I had 97.5 FM QBS on, when it was interrupted to broadcast the evening call to prayer (they have a pretty good muezzin!), and just as it finished boom boom boom overhead as I made the U-turn to get into the gate.

This morning’s round came while I was in the shower, boom boom boom boom, and when I opened the window to peer out for a better look I saw the Chinese guy in the house abutting ours doing the same, both of us trying to see the battle over our heads. By now, counting them is automatic, a wartime rosary.

But that’s been it now for hours, perhaps because the Israeli and U.S. air forces have gotten better at finding the launchers or perhaps because the air defenses here have changed their tactics, or maybe both. Everyone remains a bit on edge—some more than others.

For my part, I’m surprised to find how blasé I have become, perhaps the result of superior insights granted by my years of education in vaguely related topics or perhaps as an intellectualized defense mechanism. Nevertheless, the reprisals have been less severe than I had anticipated, even if more may be coming. I’m also feeling pretty grateful to Qatar’s air defense corps and to the Raytheon (RTX) corporation—great work, everyone! If Toby Keith had written a ballad about Patriot interceptors, I’d sing it at karaoke in your honor.

Not everyone is so sanguine. Some people want out, or want to know how to get out, just in case. Others are nervous but gamely carrying on. Still others are angry—and anger doesn’t get directed at the targets that casual online posters might expect; yes, there’s a lot of folks upset (to put it mildly) with the United States and Israel over this war, but the missiles exploding over our heads are Iranian, and that does tend to direct your anger toward the other side of the Arabian Gulf too.

(I hasten to add that I have no animus toward the Iranian people, and my heart has broken over the deaths of dozens of schoolgirls, as well as those killed in the synagogue in Beit Shemesh and the 16 reported wounded here in Qatar.)

People are carrying out their daily routine here, more or less; the schools are closed, and so are the banks, but coming home yesterday from the Al Jazeera studios I stopped at a McDonald’s (four hours of studio time is a lot!) and I was behind an internal security force SUV. Traffic is lighter, I suppose, and the parking lot at the nice mall (not the nicest mall, which I’m not rich enough to go to, and not one of the two nicer malls, but the nice mall) was pretty empty, but there were other people picking up groceries too, and by 10 a.m. it was becoming closer to normal; when I went to the hypermarket at 11:30 a.m. to ensure I had Coffee Mate for the duration, the store was close to packed.

By the end of the day, the U.S. State Department raised our threat level to Level 3, one short of the maximum (Afghanistan-equivalent) and well above the ordinary. The irony is that yesterday sure felt a lot more dangerous. In fact, although I’m pretty sure the news channels are reporting on this neck of the woods (er, sand) like it’s a constant struggle, the astonishing thing about this war from this home front, at least, is how sporadic it has been—boom boom boom and then nothing for an hour.

This is how I experience the war? It feels like stolen valor to even use the term.

Orwell’s description of London under the ceaseless bombardments of the war with Eastasia (or was it Eurasia?) in 1984 has echoed in my head—you hear it and then move on with your day, checking social media feeds to find that people are freaking out over something that you barely even note now.

Explosions in Doha, the posts say—real news sites, bottom-feeders click-farming, and ordinary people trying to keep up. Explosions in Doha.

No, no, not in Doha, over Doha. The preposition is everything in these cases. Just like the difference between before and after.

The United States and Israel have launched a war against Iran with the explicit goal. of regime change in Tehran.

This will go poorly; it is stunningly unlikely to achieve its objectives; it will undermine the U.S. position in the Middle East and elsewhere; it will be unpopular at home in the United States; and it runs the risk of catastrophe for limited upsides at a certain cost in Iranian, Israeli, American, and possibly Arab lives.

An Offer You Can’t Accept

Let’s start with why this is happening. Standard international relations theory holds that war is a possible outcome of a (failed) bargaining process. Generally, you hope to reach a negotiated outcome that both sides prefer to the costly lottery of war, which could leave both sides worse off. There’s many exceptions to this—some leaders might be made privately better off by war, for instance—but it is actually hard to get to war if you have any interest in avoiding it simply because war is costly and uncertain.

Some of the most important factors thus involve what the goals of each party is, and in particular whether you can negotiate over these at all. (There’s a long debate over how you can split these goals, but I do increasingly think there are some goals that you can’t easily compromise on to the point we can treat them as indivisible.) And if one party’s favored resolution is something the other side can’t easily accept, or can’t accept without losing every subsequent interaction (that is, showing you’re vulnerable to being bullied or bluffed), conflict becomes much more certain.

I’ve mentioned before Phil Haun’s book Coercion, Survival, and War, which addresses the puzzle of why the United States—a very powerful country—only rarely gets its way when it issues threats of military force. Haun argues that many of these threats fail because the United States is so powerful that it jeopardizes the existence of the (government of the) threatened state, making it impossible for the other side to give in. More than that, some of those threats are issued not to be successful but merely to give a pretext—a fig leaf that negotiations have taken place—precisely because those threats are unacceptable to the other side, leaving the impression that talks have fallen through. Cynical strategy, but plausible.

In the case of the United States and Iran, over the past few months practically every goal that the Trump administration has floated for its interactions with Tehran has been one that Tehran can’t accept. Those include protecting protesters against the government (admirable in some ways but obviously a call for regime change), making Tehran not only give up its nuclear stockpile but forswear nuclear proliferation, and, of course, regime change itself. Governments simply cannot agree to terms like these unless they are already defeated.

It is, by the way, notable that the Trump administration has adopted a maximalist goal—regime change—that is not clearly in U.S. interests and is far from achievable via the means (airstrikes) that are being employed. A limited strike on conventional and military targets might have signaled a goal of something less than regime change and more like pulling the regime’s teeth—humiliating for Tehran and costly for both sides, but not existential. And indeed you can imagine that violently reducing Tehran’s stocks of short and medium range missiles might have been quietly welcomed in European and Middle Eastern capitals threatened by them. Taking advantage of Tehran’s weakness to achieve that goal would have been brutal and unfair but more calculable. Regime change, by contrast, is a goal likelier to have originated with American extremists and the government in Israel, and it is one that risks perennial frustration unless U.S. and Israeli ties to an opposition in Iran are far greater than they appear in public.

The Consequences

By beginning hostilities in a joint operation with Israel, the United States has guaranteed that the war will be almost maximally unpopular. Iran is likely to retaliate against American and Israeli targets, which will not exactly be unpopular with regional publics given the circumstances (and it’s not like the Iranian government is super popular, to be clear, but acting against Washington and Tel Aviv is a cheap way of gaining popularity). Expect regional governments to hedge or even outright protest this, especially if they suffer directly via Iranian retaliation.

And we should expect some forms of retaliation. Iran is not a military superpower but it is also not a paper tiger. Iranian doctrine privileges asymmetric and distributed warfare against a variety of targets using drones, anti-ship missiles, proxy war, and ballistic missiles. These are all hard to defend against, and just as Golden Dome proved less capable over time we should expect some of these missiles to hit. In extremis, we might even see a Falklands War-esque successful strike on a U.S. naval vessel—this is not inconceivable. More likely (if sadder) is that civilians in oil facilities and in airliners will suffer, as during previous rounds of U.S.-Iran confrontation. Israel, of course, will be a more prominent target, especially Ben-Gurion Airport which has become (incredibly) a staging ground for U.S. military air assets.

The U.S. reputation as a fair dealer and reliable partner will be in shambles. Yet again, the Trump administration has apparently used peace talks as a pretext for striking at an adversary, making it pointless for future adversaries to engage in negotiations. If negotiations are a way of resolving disputes without overt conflict even if “all options are on the table”, then scuppering your own reputation for negotiating is folly—and harmful in the long term. Other countries will also now be vastly more wary of letting the United States place bases on their soil, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see U.S. forces evicted or substantially limited in the future.

U.S. military prowess is also being risked. A lucky Iranian Silkworm missile could deal a blow to the Navy’s reputation (how close were navy vessels to being hit by the Houthis?); attacks on Al-Udeid or refineries in Saudi Arabia or elsewhere (should they be allowed to be publicized) could become iconic images of America’s inability to protect its allies from aggression.

And, of course, people will die.

Europe, Australia, Japan, and other “Western” powers will probably actually, finally accelerate their move toward security self-reliance rather than engaging with an erratic, dangerous superpower that shows little regard for its partners. De-risking America will become a priority. By contrast, outside the region, China will look awfully sensible and reliable. (What of their military purges? Well, what of them—it’s not like the United States isn’t also purging its military for political reasons, just by terminating contracts with colleges and corporations.)

On a deeper level, a war of this magnitude and these objectives entirely bypassing not only the UN system but also the Arab League or other regional organizations will strain the fabric of international order and make the United States, for all its might and wealth, an incipient pariah.

And what if regime change were to succeed? Regime change may sound desirable—Trump has clearly bought this farm—but it is neither easy nor durable. The history of U.S.-backed regime change operations in Iran in particular is, well, not great. And foreign-induced regime change is also, well, not likely to be particularly stable at all.

It is cold comfort that this war is being conducted under circumstances that will make it maximally unpopular in the United States. Congress has not blessed it; international organizations have not blessed it; there are not even any U.S. allies participating (and given Israel’s newfound unpopularity in the United States, it’s likelier that this partnership will make the war less popular than a fully unilateral one).

As I write, missiles are inbound to Qatar.

One of my goals for this newsletter is to acquaint Americans with the world, and how fast the world outside of the United States is changing. As part of that mission, this past week I rented a Jetour T2—one of the most popular models of Chinese SUVs currently on the road in Qatar. You can think of this as a direct sequel to my earlier betrayal of America when I bought a Chinese smartwatch:

The Background

Qatar is a modern country with astonishingly well developed infrastructure capable of supporting not just the needs of its ~3 million residents but surge capacity related to hosting major world sporting events (and, yes, I’m all in for Qatar’s bid to host the 2036 Olympics). In practical terms, that means Qatar has a decent metro system and an extensive road network—some might even say occasionally overbuilt.

On those roads travel automobiles from around the world. Here’s the list of brands for sale in Qatar

Yes, the iconic automobile in Qatar remains a white Toyota Land Cruiser, but there’s a lot going on here—and most of the action is in the Chinese car sector. Infamously, tariffs and other barriers keep Chinese cars from the United States and much of Europe, but outside of these islands of protectionism the market is speaking: Bestunes, Cherys, and BYDs are outpacing traditional Western and Japanese brands. Even during the two years I’ve been here, the number and range of Chinese marques on the road has increased tremendously.

I’ve written about this elsewhere—in, of all things, an article for the Journal of Political Science Education about my experiences teaching statistics in Qatar. One of the commonly available “toy” datasets for testing and teaching stats involves car prices and specs from the 1970s: lots of Plymouths, lots of AMCs, lots of cars that cost a few thousand U.S. dollars. That’s been outdated for a long time, but it’s really outdated when you’re using American cars measured in feet and gallons to teach undergraduates from dozens of countries where they use kilometers and liters. Working with my class, I developed a replacement dataset based on cars in Qatar (R version, thanks to Andrew Heiss; Python version, thanks to Peter Licari)—and as a result, I’ve taken a much keener interest in what I see around here.

The Rise of Chinese Car Manufacturing

There’s lots of reasons why Chinese cars have become so prominent here and elsewhere. Upstream, there’s the fact that Chinese automakers have firmly displaced foreign brands in China itself, even as China’s car market expands; having a big market at home can underwrite aggressive expansionism overseas (it’s not like anyone is gearing up for the Qatar market alone; rather, this is just spillover from domestic fixed costs). Some of this has to do with home-grown industrial policy at the provincial level, as local governments seek to promote and expand their own carmakers. There are also some sharp practices that involve … aggressive accounting and loading risks onto suppliers and others, letting the companies keep their prices low in a cutthroat environment.

But a lot of the Chinese advantage—more than I think has percolated into the ordinary American’s consciousness—is just that the fierce competition and engineering focus in China has produced manufacturing processes that make good cars cheap. As the Rhodium Group argues, this is something that will be difficult for Western (and Japanese) carmakers to cope with. Although brands provide a moat, it’s also hard to imagine that the moat is deep enough to save incumbent carmakers from being underpriced by 20 percent or more. And brand loyalties can develop—what else is marketing (like giving away cars at supermarkets and malls?) than building a name for a brand?

Chinese cars are cheap. They are marketed aggressively. They are winning over petrolheads. And they are everywhere but in the United States and Western Europe.

It was time to drive one.

Choosing a Car

I was going to rent a Jetour T2. This is, as a valet once said to me, the “Temu Defender”—that is, it’s an aesthetic copy of the Land Rover Defender, which is itself pretty popular around here. Whereas the Defender retails for about 232,000 QAR (about 63k USD), however, the T2 costs 129,000 QAR—about 35,000 USD.

The T2 was the first car I really thought of as being a hit on Qatar’s roads. Unlike lower-end MG and Chery models that have been proliferating on the roads, this was a relatively expensive car that also has clearly targeted a niche between budget- and value-conscious buyers. It’s a toy, but it’s a toy that people will either splurge on or will add to their collections for.

And there is data to support this: Jetour (known in China as Jiétú, and formerly a sub-brand of Chery) has surged in Qatar and the Middle East generally, with sales allegedly up 80% year-on-year (I don’t trust anyone’s press releases, but it is plausible that the brand isjust behind Toyota and Nissan).

Just as important, it only cost 450 QAR / day to rent—and with a Ramadan special (buy two, get one free) it was the perfect car to start off testing what Chinese vehicles are like.

The T2 is, judged on its own, a nice-looking car. (I was, I think, in a higher trim so I avoided the excessively plasticky-looking versions.) It’s an SUV but it’s a small one (it had trouble comfortably fitting three suitcases)—but it is also tall inside.

Driving the T2

The book on Chinese cars is that they are a little underpowered in the engine department and really overpowered in the tech department. That fits my experience. I’ve owned—I do own!—laptops with smaller screens than the T2:

I haven’t checked this but my recollection is that early T2s didn’t have Apple CarPlay standard; well, this one does—another bridge over another moat—and its wireless charging was way more powerful than in my usual car (it actually charged up instead of not losing power while running). The technology just works, you might say—indeed, my biggest complaint was that it worked too much, with too sensitive alarms for proximity and an annoying habit of throwing the screen into a 360-degree video mode if I drove down a street with other cars on it. Still, I would say that the tech was at least comparable to what wowed me on a Tesla several years ago, and in advance of what I’ve seen on comparably priced Japanese cars.

The ride was incredibly … fine. The seats were comfortable and the windshield was huge—no problem with visibility on the road, although I wouldn’t trust myself with trying to find toddlers in front of the car. The T2 idles a little slower than I’m used to and it took a little bit—a little bit—longer to accelerate than my usual Mazda sedan, but there was sufficient power for driving on Doha’s relatively short and sedate expressways. I didn’t take it offroad because it was a rental and because I am a wimp, but I did get the impression that this was more a car that looked like it could go offroad than one that really wanted to go offroad. The emergency (automatic) brakes did deploy once, and correctly so (well, maybe a touch aggressively). The sound system (Sony) was actually pretty good.

Was it the most exciting car I’ve ever driven? No. Was it the smoothest ride I’ve ever had? No. Was it a luxury experience? Not really, although I did rent from the luxury desk at Strong Rent-a-Car (tell them I sent you!)—that was a nice experience, and it was jarring to see my car parked behind a Rolls (which costs 10x/day to rent).

What it was was … incredibly competent. It drove fine. The tech worked fine. People gave me a little more space than they would if I were driving a sedan, so that was fine. It was absolutely fine. And it cost 45 percent less than the Land Rover it was copying. Forty-five percent less.

What’s Coming

Brands like Hongqi, Xiaomi, BYD, Great Wall (especially the sub-brand Tank), and BAIC are not household names in the United States, but they are getting familiar to global customers. Chinese cars do not yet, as far as I can tell, have the ability to go toe-to-toe with established luxury or premium brands—but I’m going to continue testing:

but that seems like a matter of time—not just “years” but maybe like “a couple of years”. In the meantime, if tariff barriers remain high in the US and Europe, incumbents in those car markets will eventually come to look like Ladas and ZAZs—what you buy because it’s what you can, not because it’s what would win in a free market. At the same time, the rest of the world will continue to associate Chinese manufacturing with ample consumer surplus—and be more closely wedded to China-centric corporate supply chains. (Ironically, as wages rise in China, some of the actual manufacturing will be offshored from China.)

What should be done? I know there are risks to letting Chinese firms come into established markets, and those extend from further job losses to further losses of industrial potential to exotic (and I think unlikely) scenarios like cybersubversion that shuts down all Chinese cars in the USA. On the other hand, cars are expensive and electric cars are currently a made-in-China show (one of the other reasons why Chinese petrol cars are flooding the Qatari and other markets is simply that they are being shunted off while China’s EV transition goes ahead full steam). So there are reasons to seriously consider allowing Chinese imports.

For my informal take, I think that the right way is to perfectly mirror Chinese industrial policy. If Chinese manufacturers are great at making cars, then it’s time to couple market access with technology transfer and co-production. Ford is rumored to be considering a joint venture with a Chinese carmaker; that seems like a good starting point. Alternatively, setting up national or even alliance champions with German, Korean, and Japanese manufacturers could follow a similar model, but with additional support to make the transition. Indeed, that’s not too far from the playbook that the United States actually followed with Japanese carmakers in the 1980s.

The new generation of the China shock needs to be managed, not denied or succumbed to. That’s going to require different policies than Cobdenite free trade or the “voluntary export restrictions” of the Reagan era. But it’s going to unfold faster—much faster—than you might think. Right now, it’s still strange to me to travel around and see a Changan or Foton vehicle. In a couple of years, or even sooner, it will be strange to return to the United States and see Fords instead of Exeeds.

The f-word is back. Witnessing, directly or through cell phone videos, masked men in black shirts and body armor seize some people—and children—on the streets had already put some people, not already convinced, in mind of fascism; seeing others shot for their defiant actions, or more properly actions taken as defiant, pushed others into viewing the label as fitting the present circumstances of the United States. Others resist it—some believing in, or resorting to, scholarly cavils; yet others viewing the term as a foreign import for a home-grown product; and then another camp, like the Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swaim, arguing that Trump simply cannot be fascist.

Swaim makes several major claims:

• Trump “sometimes acts and sounds like a strongman”, dismissing legal limits, engaging in spurious prosecutions, playing with constitutional fire, but most of the time he obeys court orders, and his strongman tendencies are limited to symbolic outbursts—“He likes to name buildings after himself, which is weird but doesn’t hurt anything but sensibilities,” Swaim writes of a president who renamed after himself a living memorial to a famously murdered predecessor. This does the Donald a disservice: the president has also shaken down allies and partners abroad for personal gain, used his office for immense personal enrichment, promoted the careers of friends and families, systematically dismantled expert checks and advisers, suborned corporate fealty, and, albeit just once, engaged in activity to overturn an election so brazen that the only major question is whether it was a coup or a self-coup. Toddlers eventually develop object permanence; one day, God willing, our opinion columnists will too.

• He moderates in response to public opinion, as in Minneapolis after the killing of two people and an incursion into an entire metropolitan area. I could point to the vast literature on how authoritarians measure their responses to public opinion as well, but I would instead prefer simply to point out that moderation has vanished in a blaze of TruthSocial posts and ongoing repression.

• To be a fascist is to be a Nazi, and hence un-American, and so to use the term is to place “its object outside the company of lawful American actors.” Swaim writes that when Trump calls his adversaries “radical left lunatics” his hyperbole “nonetheless places its targets on a spectrum of American politics”. “The U.S. didn’t fight a world war at the cost of 400,000 lives to rid the world of radical left lunatics,” Swaim contends. The logic is tortured but clear—Nazis are bad and foreign, but radical left lunatics must be purely American. Of course, in reality everyone knows that “socialist”, “communist”, and “radical left” are just synonyms. Swaim, perhaps, has never done much research into the Trumpian oeuvre, the reality of which is much different from the president’s higher-class defenders pretend. The first result for “Trump communist transcript” is to a 2023 speech in which the once and future president pledged to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” That was a reprise of a July 4, 2020, speech about “defeating the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, [and] the looters”. Or earlier this month when the president compared the American radical left to European social democrats who left their continent purportedly cold, hungry, and weak. It’s true the United States never fought a hot world war to oppose radical left thugs, but I do recall that there was a bit of a chilly one directed against Marxists and radical leftists—one that cost quite a few lives and which might have cost a billion or two more if things had gone poorly.

Swaim’s arguments cannot parry more than the weakest thrust. I am uninterested in them because of what they say. Rather, I am interested in his column because of what he uses these reeds as the foundation for: the claim that using the f-word is simply unthinkable:

American public figures have a duty to think better of their country than to believe it capable of putting a fascist in the White House. Some of them might ponder the possibility that he wouldn’t be there at all were it not for excesses they cheered at the time.

The logic is clear, even undebatable. The United States is good; fascism is bad; nothing bad can be good; therefore the United States cannot be fascist; therefore anyone who claims the United States partakes of fascism is bad. Given these axioms, it is all but tautological—and even the electoral argument, which might seem to be a non sequitur to the casual reader, follows from these premises: why would the American people vote for someone who thinks the American people would vote for a fascist? In that case, they’d vote for the other person, no matter, presumably, what their beliefs might be.

Well, all arguments can be shown to be true if you fix the premises right. Let me define terms and I will turn your grandmother into a toboggan; let me define an assumption or two and I’ll have you winning the Olympics with her.

The radicalizing moment in any social upheaval comes when the assumptions are called into question. This is the very quickening of new thoughts and perspective; it is when assumptions are scrutinized that we can see whether our mental frameworks promote reason or only rationalizations for comforting belief.

That moment is a fragile time. To have such questions raised is uncomfortable; to feel the ground shift under one’s feet is frightening. Comfort promises safety. A new perspective might be snuffed out.

Even those who pride themselves on rigor can fall prey. Those who defend a proposition with what they think is rigor might put themselves into a position in which their assumptions rather than their judgment make their arguments.

I think of Lord Denning, who presided over the case of the Birmingham Six. The Six, a group of Northern Irish Catholics who had settled in England, were arrested on suspicion that they had had something to do with the bombings of pubs, killing and wounding dozens, in Birmingham. They were interrogated roughly, beaten in some cases, and charged with murder; the confessions scared out of them by truncheon and dogs were the principal evidence against them. Convicted, they were sent to prison, where they were further abused.

They filed a civil suit for damages. Lord Denning, the judge in the matter, threw out the suit on the grounds the charges of official wrongdoing were so serious they could not be true:

Just consider the course of events if this action is allowed to proceed to trial. If the six men fail, it will mean that much time and money will have been expended by many people for no good purpose. If the six men win, it will mean that the police were guilty of perjury, that they were guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were involuntary and were improperly admitted in evidence and that the convictions were erroneous. That would mean that the Home Secretary would either have to recommend they be pardoned or he would have to remit the case to the Court of Appeal. This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say: It cannot be right that these actions should go any further.

If the men were right, then to have that uncovered would have thrown the legitimacy of the system into question. An appalling vista indeed. Guilty or innocent, the men could not pursue their claim.

Eventually, following journalistic inquiries and the intervention of a Conservative Home Secretary, the case was tried again, and then again; finally, in the early Nineties, sixteen years after their arrest, the convictions were overturned and the men compensated—somewhat—for their troubles. An appalling vista.

It would indeed be appalling if a society produced an execrable result. It would be more appalling to rule out the possibility that abuses and evils can exist because, should they exist, they would be abusive and evil. The appalling vista might be the view from our window. We should at least open the curtain.

There were two big puzzles confronting structural theories of international relations at the beginning of the 1990s. The first was straightforward: why had everyone been surprised by the dissolution of the Soviet Union? The USSR had been the second pole of a bipolar world order, and theories of world politics should probably be able to account for the advent, and the exit, of the superpowers that shape the world those theories purport to explain.

The second was more vexing—and more interesting, because it looked forward: why had the bipolar world been succeeded by a unipolar world? Why hadn’t Japan, Germany, or other countries seized the moment to balance against the United States and become superpowers themselves? After all, if countries are motivated by the prospect of maximizing their relative power and security, surely it’s better to be the leader of your own camp rather than a follower in another’s. How long could unipolarity last? And would what came afterward be as sanguinary as the multipolar world that had collapsed into the First World War?

And yet the world remained stubbornly unipolar for decades. The United States worried about rising powers and rogue states, but the major powers in the system—Russia eventually a notable exception—were largely content to let Washington take the lead. For some, this vindicated theories in which institutional legacies were most important; for others, it pointed to the importance of the full-spectrum power—soft, hard, smart, and dumb—that the United States could maintain.

A quieter camp pointed out that the United States was generally doing a lot—not all it could, but a lot—to make its leadership attractive to the other major powers: providing security, yes, but also shouldering a good share of global burdens in many fields while also linking its economy and society to the rest of the world. This approach, a few observers noted, managed to satisfy the range of potential powers who could actually undermine the United States and its order. One prominent theory noted that since the Second World War, the United States had engaged in practices of self-binding—generally asking for less than it could have taken and giving more than it needed to in order to make its leadership more attractive to others than the alternatives open to its rivals. For this group, there was an ongoing process of ratifying the U.S.-led order that relied on Washington realizing that its power conferred influence but its right to rule relied on the acquiescence of (most) other leading powers.

Well, all that is done now. Self-binding is over and Donald Trump killed it.

Trump does not believe in giving, only taking. The shadow of the future—the political science theory-speak for the simple idea that you cooperate now because you might benefit from others cooperating with you in the future—is very short for him. It always has been; like the scorpion who stings the frog, Trump has never dissembled about his personality, instincts, or drives. Whereas in the first years of his first term he was hemmed in by advisers who restrained his crassest drives, it has long since been the case that his closest followers seek to enable him and exploit his zigs and zags for their own ends—checked more by rivalries with each other and their own degree of skill than by an attentive chief or guardrails.

In a private organization, or in one’s personal life, this combination of power and reckless egoism is a recipe for a private disaster. In the leadership of a great power, it is the stuff that makes for legendary and needless ruination. Well, here we are, and the disassembly will be rapid, unscheduled, and explosive.

There was no particular reason why the United States might not have managed a gradual relative decline while still reaping the benefits of its privileged position over the course of the next decade. The great irony of “America First” is that the international order—every international institution—was designed to ensure that the United States would always be, if not first, at least never last, and almost always on the podium. It was a great gig, and the relic of a time when the United States was genuinely first—the aftermath of the Second World War, when the United States accounted for half of global output and was the last power standing with global reach. Any institutions that will be built from scratch today will either be less extensive in scope or less favorable to the United States, just as a function of global power realities.

Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, possibly the world leader with the greatest insight and problem-solving resume, has put the point well in a speech just now. As he observes, the degradation of international institutions means that other powers will have to work around the wreckage, collaborating in a way that reduces their reliance on the United States while ensuring that the minnows can join against the sharks. What he doesn’t say is that this world will be poorer than it would have been if they didn’t have to do that—defense is an expense, not a benefit—but he is right that it is necessary.

And it is necessary, despite the costs. Trump is chucking away the residual goodwill and confidence in the system that other powers had been willing to extend to it. They had done so for too long, out of some combination of hope and uncertainty, and like all self-interested players they have abandoned their previous course not out of altruism but self-regard.

The unipolar world, what was left of it, has died—of suicide, not murder. As I wrote several years ago, “the most successful blow to American primacy came not from external balancing, as realists long predicted, but from the free choice of American voters.” Twice, now, in fact.

What Trump has targeted, with a surgical precision belying his brutal efforts, is the confidence that the United States will not use its power to predate on the countries whose fealty makes an order. Some are aghast that the United States is seemingly contemplating military action against its allies. But Donald Trump does not believe in allies. For Trump, there are no allies, only enemies and marks—and of those, only enemies can deserve respect.

This is a rather poor theory of international relations but it is one Donald Trump has subscribed to for literal decades. (And, yes, I have got a chapter you can cite on this.) He will not change his spots; he will not be dissuaded. And he is the president of the United States.

The anomaly of the Nineties—why unipolarity could last so long—has been laid to rest. Unipolarity’s over, hegemony is ended, and what’s coming next will look entirely new. The world will be poorer, and probably bloodier, for it.

Think tanks are petri dishes for policy proposals. Policy entrepreneurs use these institutes and centers as places for rapid prototyping of ideas—and attracting patrons with the resources to turn slide decks into policy. Some proposals catch fire, others wither, some evolve resistance to criticisms, some become used to shift the terms of the broader debate, and still more combine with other proposals.

Although I personally can’t bear the roundtables, panel discussions and issue briefs that this ecosystem thrives on, I recognize that these are not (always) wasted efforts but one stage in the lifecycle of policy proposals. View these debates and discussions like Shark Tank for policies and activism—early proposals seeking backing from a group of wealthy backers who can bring them to market.

The upshot is that if you want to know what is coming down the pike, you should at least intermittently pay attention to the discussions in this universe. And if you’re a U.S. political scientist, you should be aware of conservative movements’ criticisms of political science journals. You should, further, understand that these arguments are laying the groundwork for a serious challenge to academic self-governance.

My goal here is not to rebut these claims but to bring them to greater attention. (I actually do take seriously my intellectual responsibility to understand and analyze!) Even if you dismiss those arguments on intellectual grounds, you must take them seriously politically. You may not take an interest in conservative think tanks, but they will take an interest in you.

The Goldwater Institute recently launched a broadside against the previous editors of the American Political Science Review, the flagship journal of the American Political Science Association. (Many non-political scientists read this newsletter, so I’ll note that APSA is the leading political science association in the English-speaking world and APSR is among the leading journals in the discipline globally.)

The report takes aim at the “Feminist Collective”, the group of editors who operated the journal from 2020-2024. Like many journals, APSR is operated by editors commissioned by a parent association to manage the review process and decision-making that leads to publication. (And also like many journals, it is increasingly hard to get anyone to bid for the management of journals—this is a lot of work and the upside is not great in immediate terms.)

As you might guess, the Feminist Collective sought to pursue “pursue substantive, representational, and methodological diversity”. (These descriptions are based on the Feminist Collective’s 2024 editorial report to avoid relying on the Goldwater Institute’s representations.) Some of these represent intra-discipline concerns, like increasing the variety of methodological approaches represented in the journal (which is notoriously hostile to qualitative work) as well as substantive topics (the journal is also not particularly welcoming to work in international relations, for instance). These goals represent the sorts of interests that members of a scholarly discipline have in ensuring that their community has a shot in being included in the leading journal—standard academic politics, in other words. A previous generation of scholars, upset that non-statistical work was being largely excluded from APSR, launched a rebellion against the journal’s management that was known as the Perestroika movement.

The representational aspect, however, was more than boilerplate. It represented a consistent effort of outreach to underrepresented communities and an editorial policy to promote topics and issues that—well, look, the team called themselves the Feminist Collective, and they were not shy about what they were going to promote. It was early 2020s DEI logic; we were all there; everyone knows what it means.

The 2024 editorial report shows that there was a shift in the demographics of who made it into APSR. The visualization is a little clunky (the y-axis is percent of approved submission, the labels are the total numbers) but you can pretty clearly tell that male-only (solo and team) submissions went from about 55% under the previous team to about 41% under the Collective and female-only (solo and team) submissions went from about 13% (kinda low, tbh!) to about 20% under the Collective.

And racial composition changed as well, from about 65% all-White authorship (kinda high, tbh!) to somewhat under 60% under the Collective.

About now you’re thinking that this is the setup for a “Lost Generation”-style complaint in which a middle-aged White dude laments these changes. Nope! Sure, I might look at the two APSR desk rejects I received from this team differently—how could I not? An APSR publication can make a career! It sucks when you get a desk rejection—a submission might represent a year to multiple years of work—and it’s natural to wonder if checking the “Male” box on my author ID made it more likely that my effort would be dismissed. But the odds of publication are so long that I’m not really able to say that any editorial policy actually influenced these outcomes at all.

So, now, this isn’t a lament. I wanted to present this background to the Goldwater Institute report. I want you to remember that everything above comes from the Feminist Collective themselves and so we can take these observations not as a hit job — this was what they wanted to celebrate about their leadership. But you can imagine, pretty easily, that these changes caused consternation within the discipline.

And they made a plum target for outsiders motivated to take on anti-DEI targets—and that the goal of these criticisms is to build a coalition for what they would describe as a radical overhaul of how academia functions.

The Goldwater report—calmly titled “Peer Review Gone Wild”—is written by a historian who goes long on the DEI angle. “Thanks to the APSR’s editorial manipulation, from 2020-25, only three APSR articles…specifically focused on the U.S. Constitution or the 50 state constitutions. The number of articles focusing on race, gender, and/or social justice was more than 40 times greater than the number focused on American constitutions,” one bullet point reads. The next bullet point continues the theme: “The APSR’s obsession with race- and gender-based political advocacy has led to a flurry of other ‘scholarship’ indistinguishable from left-wing activism, including published ‘research’ articles like ‘Violence in the American Imaginary: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Superheroes’”.

These are lemon-picked examples. First, as a political scientist, I’ve never seen “scholarship on constitutions” as constitutive (so to speak) of research standards—this is a meaningless ratio that plays on lazy stereotypes about what political scientists are supposed to research (laws n’ stuff) rather than what they research (political behavior, institutions, and so on). Any article on Congress, the presidency, voting outcomes, and so forth already involves the Constitution; if you want scholarship on the Constitution, well, you can go to other political science journals or ask the law professoriate. Similarly, the superheroes article is a tempting target but it’s telling that the Goldwater report mischaracterizes the article. The Goldwater report says “the author finds that the Marvel character ‘Punisher’s unrestricted violence valorizes white male grievance’”, but the article actually argues that the Punisher icon—the skull logo—symbolizes white male grievance for law enforcement officers. It is kind of puzzling to see Punisher skulls on LEO vehicles and elsewhere! Maybe you think this shouldn’t have been published in APSR, but it’s not obviously a trivial topic or wrong argument if you think that symbols communicate identity.

In the same way, the authors criticize an article about how Donald Trump’s career on The Apprentice helped him come to power. “Any minimally informed observer of American politics would likely not have needed a postdoctoral academic to explain that President Trump’s celebrity sped his political rise,” the report sneers. Yeah, but that’s not the point. First, there’s a difference between a guess and a test, and this is a test. Second, it’s not just about knowing whether but how much. Using an instrumental variables approach employing the fact that people rarely changed the channel in the live-TV era, the authors work hard to establish how much Trump’s celebrity era mattered for his later electoral performance in the GOP primaries:

[a] one standard deviation (4.83) increase in the (instrumented) Apprentice ratings would lead to a roughly 1 percentage point increase in county-level vote share for Trump. In the context of a competitive primary election with more than 10 candidates, these effects are not insignificant. In the Iowa caucus, the difference in vote share between Trump and Rubio was 1 percentage point. In Arkansas, Trump’s overall vote share was 33% whereas it was 31% for Cruz. Considering the winner-take-all delegate allocation in Republican primaries, these increases can lead to dramatic changes in primary outcomes

This is smaller than I would have guessed but, as the authors say, probably important—even decisive! I definitely think that the election of Donald Trump was so ex ante unlikely and ex post consequential that we should be pursuing more than armchair guesses about how his earlier career mattered. (And I also think these are lower bounds because I never watched The Apprentice but I saw a hell of a lot of ads for it.)

Again, however, my goal isn’t to refute this report point-by-point. (If you want to commission that, my fees are very reasonable!) Rather, I want to show that this is directly connected to a much bigger political agenda. The core of the report isn’t to criticize the Feminist Collective but to use that criticism to justify taking over peer review.

The Goldwater report is at pains to establish that peer review and journals should be treated as a legitimate target of political action. If a scholar received taxpayer funding (grants or salary), if an editor is employed at a public university, and even if taxpayer-funded research is judged by these entities—and if these decisions are used for hiring and firing decisions—the report argues that they should be brought to heel:

To reduce the waste of taxpayer resources for the corrupt academic research enterprise in non-STEM fields, state legislatures and/or boards of regents of public universities should reform faculty work expectations and create an alternate pathway for faculty advancement focused on instructional excellence rather than research. Such proposals are modeled in the American Higher Education Restoration Act proposed by the Goldwater Institute, Defending Education, and the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

Basically, this is a call for trustees, state legislators, and federal bureaucrats responsive to Congress and President Trump to wield their influence to undo DEI and promote MAGA. And this is no idle call! It really could be done—the legal authorities and pressure points exist to make this, or something like it, a reality!

Much of the report talks about how research is a waste of time, especially the woke kind, and how scholars need to go back to teaching; in particular, it argues that outlandish and extremist research is the result of the corruption of peer review. The obvious next step is an anti-corruption drive.

In this regard, the report singles out APSR and political science. Why?

The discipline of political science should be of particular interest to policymakers and citizens concerned with public universities. These institutions ought to prepare students to be thoughtful citizens of the American republic. Political science should provide students with essential knowledge of American government, including the institutions and ideals that shape our constitutional republic.

(Geez, and I thought APSR was hostile to International Relations! These guys don’t even want to regulate me!)

The pitch is clear: state legislators and trustees should rein in the silly but threatening leftist professors:

Public universities should make it clear that (non-STEM) faculty are paid by taxpayers primarily to teach, and that any reduction in teaching responsibilities for the purpose of research should occur only where it is actually advancing human knowledge.

How to accomplish this? Pass the new model legislation that the Goldwater Institute and the James G. Martin Center have put together for state universities:

• creating tenured teaching-track positions for Excellence in Americanism and Western Civilization

• enshrine student feedback (course evaluations) as the measure of teaching effectiveness

• mandate a standard 3-3 teaching load for non-STEM faculty and faculty teaching the Western Civ course (!)

• bar automatic taxpayer-funded support for non-STEM faculty

• restrict non-STEM course releases

• let trustees approve all new faculty job postings

Non-Goldwater initiatives along these lines include measures like federal encouragement to stop participating in DEI organizations and reviewing public institutions’ membership in other professional and scholarly organizations. See also coverage of similar actions at Ohio State University and, more notoriously, Texas’s inquisition of university classes.

The Goldwater report seems to have gotten some play—there’s a (remarkably fair, under the circumstances) write-up of the report in National Review, for instance, and a senior Harvard professor has given it an endorsement—but not a huge splash, yet. On the other hand, it’s still early days, and the well-funded institute can always provide seed capital for policy entrepreneurs as state houses around the country begin their legislative work.

2025 saw universities come under the greatest scrutiny and pressure from state and federal governments in my memory. The next three years (at least) will break those records even if the Goldwater report in particular leads nowhere (although if it gets action by even one state legislature, that’s still a nontrivial effect!). We should expect that political science, in particular, will be a convenient and frequent target (at least until someone reminds people that public policy schools exist or mandates pro-American history courses).

How should we understand the second Trump term’s effect on world politics? I contend we should view it as a global extension of the January 6 riots. It is a rupture of settled constitutional processes via made-for-streaming moments, a coming together of substantive change and online content via a performative rejection of normative and settled practices. Call it a coup, an autogolpe, a revolution from above—it is a sustained assault that is shocking to the senses and the expectations. It also has about it the quality of epater les bourgeois—shocking the established—and of pour encourager les autres—demonstrating the power and violence inherent in the new system.

Much as January 6 melded grasstops and grassroots activism (some drove RVs to the affair, others flew by private jet), and much as J6 rested on a feverish and cultivated mix of innuendos, disinformation, and crude lust for power, the first year of the second Trump administration (or, to be accurate, the first fifty weeks—it hasn’t even been a year) has seen a systematic dismantling of alleged safeguards and assaults on international decency. It differs from J6 in that now power centers are largely wired to respond to the White House’s directions rather than to put up resistance.

A storied tradition in international relations scholarship viewed the international order established by the United States as akin to a constitutional order.1 The metaphor is helpful, although not in the way John Ikenberry once intended it. Trump is forcing a constitutional crisis in the Western international order. By removing the self-imposed restraints on U.S. power that secured other great powers’ participation in the system, the Trump administration is unsettling expectations about future behavior—ruling through fear, not love. No more self-binding; now, self-aggrandizement.2

From global public health to Greenland, from Venezuela to Kyiv, the administration acts to profane the symbols and values of the liberal order. The analogy to J6 is even more precise. If American views of proper democratic procedure and substance constitute a civic religion of the United States, the Capitol, and especially its Rotunda, are places empty of politics but full of meaning, like the Holy of Holies. Governance does not, really, take place there, but the symbols of governance do—and they were sacked, vandalized, desecrated. Although international order cannot be said to reside physically anywhere, the practices and customs of the American imperium make up their analogue—and they are being gleefully, sophomorically, energetically shredded by every X meme and Truth Social retruth, every casual jibe at other countries, and, of course, every use of force not for a specific goal but to show that it can be done. The high priest is burning the temple.

Trump and his cadres believe that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power. For others, there is force. And so U.S. forces in Greenland and Europe, once a shield of allies or protectorates, have become a sword dangling over the Western heartland.

The dangers of January 6 were manifold but among them was the simple fact that shredding a constitutional order is dangerous for all involved. Many on the Trumpist side believed, sincerely, that right was on their side, and that justified extreme action—many may not have, but few act from a belief that they are the villains, rather than shaping their reality so that they are the heroes. What one intends is not what one receives. Once an order is shredded, the foundations for stability have been wrecked. Those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind.

It is possible, I think plausible, that Trump and his coterie believe what they are doing is putting America first—and if they line their pockets along the way, well, that’s just honest graft.3 Thus far, little of the response to their actions has dissuaded them from this view—trade keeps going, planes keep flying, the gold pours into Mar-a-Lago. Every beam in the order they kick over totters with a tremendous crash, but the building remains standing. Someone carts away the rubble to sell for pennies. Each clamor spurs them to knock over the next one to the cheers of their backers. What’s the risk in smashing one more support?

This weekend’s raid / incursion / invasion into Venezuela has raised more questions than answers. Chief among these questions is—what next? Not far behind is—why?

The former will be answered because history ineluctably tells us what comes next, and it inevitably tells us that what comes afterward is rarely what was intended. It is, to be sure, difficult to guess what was intended. In the case of the Trump administration, it seems uncomfortably plausible at the moment that this was the 2003 Iraq war as farce: a brilliantly executed military operation followed by a disastrous post-invasion muddle. Listening to General Caine describe the intricate planning and coordination that involved more than 150 aircraft and (plainly) major supporting roles for cyber techniques, I was struck by—in the archaic sense of the word—how awesome the operation was; not bodacious, but inspiring awe or dread. And then I was shocked at how lackadaisical the president and administration’s answers about what comes next were—“We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” the president said. These are weasel words, not standards but the utterances of a Schmittian sovereign who revels in pronouncing and being the exception. They are also the words of an undergraduate who didn’t do the reading or a debtor who swears the check really is in the mail.

“Millions for defense, not one cent for tribute,” was the slogan in one of the country’s first foreign-policy crises. Thousands of man-hours for planning kinetics, not one neuron for follow-up might as well be the Trump administration’s motto.

The other half is why the United States—and, more important, the people of Venezuela—are in this situation. (It hardly needs observing that the welfare of the people of Venezuela should weigh more here than hot takes or slams on domestic U.S. political rivalries. It’s been interesting to see how observers have reacted to the plain variety of reactions in Venezuela and the region to the ouster of Maduro, incidentally; the neat script that the bad Yankees removed a beloved leader doesn’t quite jibe with reality, and not a few communities and classes throughout the region seem more than happy to see a red-blooded socialist removed. In particular, the observation that many Venezuelans inside and outside the country find the ouster to be welcome seems to have surprised many anti-Trump Americans.)

It’s plain that the administration’s stated justifications for the raid—the drugs, the external threat, the election fraud, and so on—are less reasons than rationales. None of them explain why this raid had to take place in this manner with this target and with that degree of (lack of) consideration. Further, it’s simply an old rule that the more reasons you list, the less persuasive any of them are— “I hit him because he called me a wuss” is more persuasive than “I hit him because he called me a wuss, and I didn’t like his shirt, and I was in a bad mood, and Mercury was retrograde” (even if, in some sense, the latter might be more strictly true, because who among us has just one reason?). The U.S. invaded Venezuela because Maduro was involved with narco-traffickers, and because he was indicted, and because of outside powers, and because of the oil, and because and because and because… As rationales proliferate, it becomes clear that nobody could agree on the why, even if they could concur on the what.

I think it is a fool’s errand to find any single reason and claim it was the reason. Each reason clearly appeals more to some of the king’s men than to others, and each brick formed part of the wall. The core reason, however, is likelier to be found in something deeper and more primal. Partly, I suspect, there’s the masculinity of it all—the posse bringing the “outlaw dictator” (verbatim!) to justice, “the very long arm of American justice all on full display in the middle of the night”, as the secretary of defense said. “Don't play games with this president in office because it’s not gonna turn out well,” said the archivist of the United States (who is also secretary of state, and national security adviser, and now apparently proconsul for Gran Colombia). Tough! Strong! Daddy’s home! And he’s going to deliver a paddling—or a beating.

Even beyond that, however, is the likelihood that the drama of the operation was, itself, the point. “No nation in the world could achieve what America achieved yesterday,” Donald Trump said, in the truest sentence of the briefing. A country that can do this is a country that should not have to put up with that. This was not an operation of law, but one of order.

Several years ago, the scholar Ahsan I. Butt made a similar argument in Security Studies about the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The Bush administration similarly advanced a plethora of arguments for why Iraq had to be invaded: weapons of mass destruction, human rights, threats to neighbors, backing for terrorism, and so on. Butt argued that none of these were actually sufficient to explain the decision, even if each appealed to a particular group. Rather, he argued, the real issue was the U.S. need to “regain status and establish itself as an aggressive global power” after the shock and humiliation of 9/11, which required fighting and winning a war. “[T]he defeat of a recalcitrant foe like Saddam would serve this performative purpose,” Butt wrote. “Invading Iraq would allow the United States to reassert and demonstrate its strength in no uncertain terms to a global audience, crown itself king of the hill, and reestablish generalized deterrence.” As a result, there was no offramp for Saddam, no bargain that Washington would accept to accomplish its goals short of war—the war itself was the point: “states may be insistent on a fight because certain reputation- and authority-establishing benefits only accrue to violent actors.”

Viewed in this sense, General Caine’s just-the-facts description of the military operation makes more sense. Next to the images of the raid and the sheer fact of nabbing a head of state in his bedroom, being able to clinically describe the precision and layered effects of the raid—in pointed contrast to Moscow’s failure at the hands of the Ukrainians, or the apparent unwillingness to use force of the People’s Republic of China—was the Homeric epic of the Trump administration. Sing, muse, the wrath of Mar-a-Lago. Print the term Trump Corollary—or, heaven forfend, the Donroe Doctrine—in boldface in a million history textbooks.

“The cruelty is the point” went from insight to cliche without losing its truth. It is no less true to say of the weekend that the spectacle is the point. “What is next” matters less than What just happened—and I didn’t know you could do that, an expostulation that is both operational (the Tom Clancy-ness of it all) and normative (how shocking!). Above all, the raid was a flex.

Of course, that what comes next for Venezuela or the world at large matters less to Trump and his associates is not to say that it does not matter to thirty million Venezuelans or billions of others. But their lives are not spectacular, and caring for them is neither manly nor impressive to those who see only the mirror.

Butt, A. I. (2019). Why did the United States invade Iraq in 2003?. Security Studies, 28(2), 250-285.

A few points:

• The National Security Strategy and the Trump administration’s actions since last January have presaged the Western Hemisphere being back to the foreground of US concerns. The NSS promised that the “United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere” and in particular to “deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our hemisphere”. I think you should move your priors to believe the Trump Corollary does in fact apply—and that has significant implications for Cuba, Panama, and Greenland.

• There’s going to be a lot of hot takes about how the aftermath of the hostile takeover (which I think is the best term for today’s events) might lead to a new Iraq, a new Afghanistan, or some other bad thing from US (mis)adventurism. Don’t be seduced by familiar comparisons! It’s far from clear that Venezuela will fall apart like Iraq did (even after two decades of Chavismo, it’s not exactly a Baathist state, nor one riven by suppressed ethnoreligious cleavages), and unlike Afghanistan it has got plenty of practice at being a state. Indeed, although the results of its elections probably haven’t been obeyed, it has held elections even under the previous (?) regime.

• But don’t assume that just because “Venezuela” isn’t “Iraq” or “Afghanistan” or some other metaphor (US discourse really collapses complex histories into sugary and unsatisfactory morsels) that things will work out. It is altogether possible for this aftermath to fail in its own way.

• Although Venezuela doesn’t really register as a “greatest threat” to Americans, there’s still lots of ways that in the short term this could boost Trump. If the media spins this as a win and Democrats refrain from criticizing—both, I think, likelier than a convergence on framing this as a violation of sovereignty or a misuse of US power, especially given how fast and costless (to the USA) the operation was—then Trump will have a poll boost. (Grenada helped Reagan!)

• (Conspiratorial rambling) So, uh, exactly how did the Nobel Committee decide to award last year’s Peace Prize? It does seem a little convenient to have a government in waiting outside …

• I would not expect that the next set of US actions will look like those in Venezuela, but I would expect serious step-ups in political warfare and coordination with right-wing actors across the continent. (If you’re in Brazil, this reads differently than in Argentina…)

• Update after emailing: If you don’t recognize the title of this post, it comes from US Secretary of State Richard B. Olney, who wrote in 1895 that “the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition.” Olney was writing to the British government during a different spat involving Venezuela. The subsequent decades of US involvement in the Western Hemisphere would be dramatic but not always welcomed by the rest of the peoples in the hemisphere. The National Security Strategy’s Western Hemisphere statement is a pretty bold statement to China to “stay out”—backing up those statements will take a lot of effort and will generate substantial frictions.

• Ultimately, the weakening of the norm against changing regimes and governments will contribute to short-to-medium term instability, and not only in the Western Hemisphere.