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In Praise of Toni Morrison’s Difficulty
New Republic • 6 days ago

In Praise of Toni Morrison’s Difficulty

In her prose poem, “Toni Morrison,” Nikki Giovanni imagines cooking a “Toni Morrison stew.” Among its ingredients are the heightened contradictions that characterize her novels: An exotic mix of tears and sympathy. Nothing grows except The Bluest eyes and a special shot of Pecola which flies over very quickly because no one can really embrace the fear and hatred. The best thing about The Bluest Eye special is the Marigolds. They didn’t flower but the seeds are there. Drop a few in the bowl and see what grows. Or doesn’t. Giovanni captures the extremes of emotion that course through Morrison’s best-known works, but also evokes the lightly worn wisdom of Morrison’s voice (“see what grows”). It’s an homage to a master, but one that also gives itself permission to play with a body of work that is often considered “difficult.”Namwali Serpell’s new study, On Morrison, takes a similar approach. “I believe that she remains woefully misread—even underread—in both literary and political ways,” Serpell writes. Although Morrison’s first several novels were widely praised, criticisms of her work circled uneasily around her themes of enslavement, homicide, and incest. A 1978 review of Song of Solomon in the Times Literary Supplement characterized the novel as “freakish, full of verbal gestures and fabricated horrors.” Others suggested that she needed to move beyond historical settings and Black provincial life, as one New York Times reviewer wrote in 1973: “If she is to maintain the large and serious audience she deserves, she is going to have to address a riskier contemporary reality.” The conceit: Writing too much about Black folks was niche and unrelatable to white Americans. Although Morrison primarily wrote about Black American women, Serpell notes that “she refused for her work to be reduced solely to her race and her gender, or to be forced to fit the expectations foisted upon it as a result.” Serpell leans into Morrison’s difficulty, noting that, despite the social costs many Black women face for being difficult, Morrison employed it in her art and its success. Serpell gracefully traces the complexity of Morrison’s literary catalog, explaining why you should read her in the first place: “Morrison doesn’t condescend to your level; she challenges you to rise to hers.” Don’t we all want good art friends who make us better?For Serpell, Morrison’s creative genius lies in the boldness of her work. Beloved and The Bluest Eye do not present their characters or subjects delicately—they insist on graphic portrayals of assault and torture, without softening or stinting. The language is American, the characters are American, and, through their unbearable, inscrutable moments, we must confront the ghosts and darkness of history. Morrison’s work was not meant to be a palatable salve. Instead, surprise and provocation are the ingredients of her fiction. Morrison’s work was not meant to be a palatable salve. Instead, surprise and provocation are the ingredients of her fiction. Crucial to Beloved’s plot is the spontaneity of life and the inevitability of death. The contest between vitality and annihilation is constantly in motion as the central characters—Sethe, her daughter Denver, and their friend Paul D—steer through the aftermath of slavery. One of the novel’s most tortured characters is Sethe, a mother who takes her child’s life so the child will not be enslaved, and finds herself haunted by the child’s ghost, Beloved. Years after chattel slavery has ended, Sethe is frolicking with the ghost while sitting in her home. During the dance, Sethe stutters when she sees Beloved’s wound—a slash that marks where she slit her deceased child’s throat.But once Sethe had seen the scar, the tip of which Denver had been looking at whenever Beloved undressed—the little curved shadow of a smile in the kootchy-kootchy-coo place under her chin—once Sethe saw it, fingered it and closed her eyes for a long time, the two of them cut Denver out of the games.The horror is not merely infanticide or probing the scars of your child’s ghost, but an institution so horrific that a mother would rather kill her child than see her child live as a slave. Yet the prose’s beauty lies in its ability to give Beloved specificity, character, and something resembling a life of her own.Morrison’s second novel, Sula, is a defiant celebration of difficulty. After escaping a small Ohio town to pursue an education and live in a big city, Sula asserts her freedom, declaring to her grandmother that she doesn’t want to have children, “I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.” Sula is considered treacherous for breaking through the small town’s veneer of civility, in part because she collects lovers rather than surrendering to matrimony. She is wilted, wise, and nobody’s lady. Sula is not only a clinical dissection of early twentieth-century Ohio but also a novel about how we can’t live without the people we revile. As Serpell observes:Sula is clearly a type, but she is the type of person who exceeds typology. She’s the kind of woman about whom you start to say, “She’s the kind of woman …” even though you know that any words that follow will twist like winter leaves before they hit the air, will fall to the ground, dry and dead wrong. She is that oxymoron we call a real character.Sula is an unfettered mercenary who has sex with her best friend’s husband, a betrayal that sets her undoing in motion. And yet, the husbands who committed adultery did not face retribution. Men can be forgiven; libertine women cannot. The town needs to loathe Sula: As Morrison writes, their “conviction of Sula’s evil changed them in unaccountable yet mysterious ways. Once the source of their personal misfortune was identified, they had leave to protect and love one another.” When she is gone, they don’t know quite what to do. Her death (spoiler alert) leaves people missing someone to hate. Her downfall wasn’t enough; people needed a living scapegoat to make them feel better. On Morrison also reminds us why she was so popular—Toni Morrison could craft lively dialogue. For Serpell, Song of Solomon is full of black humor in the ordinary, colloquial, and vernacular. Milkman Dead (real name Macon Dead II) was given that name because his mother breastfed him until he was 4. His Aunt Pilate Dead doesn’t miss a beat, cracking a joke about their name, “Ain’t but three Deads alive,” and Milkman inadvertently retorts, “I’m a Dead! My mother’s a Dead.” Gallows humor isn’t merely entertaining or therapeutic; it is a dress rehearsal for the oppressed, a way to withstand the constant insults or racial violence that mount over a lifetime. Serpell insists that Morrison invests in asking important questions: Why do Black people laugh? She draws a connection between the history (and present-day forms) of dark humor among Black folks, their fascination with “ya mama” jokes (which beckon to my middle school days), and their purpose. Gallows humor isn’t merely entertaining or therapeutic; it is a dress rehearsal for the oppressed, a way to withstand the constant insults or racial violence that mount over a lifetime. There is a philosophical layer to Serpell’s criticism, one that might leave the reader wondering: “What kind of a Dead do you want to be?” Any literary biography has its limits. Serpell explains that some gaps in her book stem from extraordinary events. In 1993, a fire at Morrison’s home in upstate New York destroyed many of her notes and early drafts of her novels, including those for Song of Solomon. Serpell witnessed the damage, which was memorialized and displayed in a Princeton University exhibition on her life. “Framed documents on the walls had burnt edges, lending a romantic air to misfortune.” As grave as it was for Morrison to lose her notes, she still witnessed her memorialization well before her death. She lived to see Princeton University’s Department of African American Studies renamed Morrison Hall and unabashedly commented, “I am not humbled.” May we all possess this confidence. There are times in On Morrison when I wanted more clarity about Morrison’s motivation for writing in the first place. After the success of her first three novels, Morrison notes that her motivation to publish had a lot to do with her misery—recently divorced, with two small children and a new job. In the emotional chaos, she had her “back against the wall” and used the time when her children were asleep to write, rather than socializing with friends. (As a writer who happens to be a mother to a toddler, I can relate, as both sleep and my social circle are shrinking.)In an interview with Thames TV in 1988, discussing her process for writing The Bluest Eye, Morrison made a distinction between being an author and a writer: Some writers really prefer to be authors. Those are people who write because that’s what they do or someone has asked them. They have a contract. I really call myself a writer because I only write when I can’t not do it, when I am so compelled to do it. And part of it is, what I presume will be—since I am a very good reader and a fastidious reader and a careful reader; I am picky about what I like—I would try to write the kind of book that I really want to read.Even in her recounting of a period of solitude and loneliness, she seemed to exude a cool confidence that emanates from her alto voice and from a deep understanding of the strong desire to trust her imagination. Morrison demonstrates that it is not enough to write in a familiar or beautiful language to convey betrayal or regret; one must work intimately with an editor, quarrel with them, and know how to work through a book’s structure by reworking and rewriting the text. Like Serpell, I was assigned Beloved in high school and learned to appreciate its African American vernacular in my English literature class—not because I was unfamiliar with it but because I was sensitive to how non-Black people might react when they heard us speak. Would they mock us for our verse, or would they take up the language as their own? Well aware of a more contemporary Southern variation with Afro-Caribbean inflections that my friends and younger relatives in Miami spoke, I found Morrison’s tone familiar. Yet I hesitated to engage with Morrison at first. I felt self-conscious about a Black author airing the trials of Black folk: domestic violence, mutilation, or slapstick humor.I hesitated to engage with Morrison at first. I felt self-conscious about a Black author airing the trials of Black folk: domestic violence, mutilation, or slapstick humor.It wasn’t until I moved to New York City and lived in Harlem that I could shed my adolescent misgivings, work through my insecurities, and appreciate what Morrison was doing in her literature. She revealed how she and many Black people loved and “luxuriated in language” through banter and shade. Even when others failed to comprehend, we could relish our many forms of speech. Serpell manages to ground Morrison within that framework, as an American writer who could move between satire and tragedy, implication and precision. By the time I moved to New York City in my mid-twenties, I plunged into the comforts of Black American literature: Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Octavia Butler held me firm when everything else felt hostile. Serpell was a bit more productive in her engagement with Morrison: She read and studied Morrison to find a way of being “as demanding and sophisticated as I want to be, and at the same time accessible.”In the fall of 2025, after a friend’s book reading in Berlin, a group of us gathered outside an Italian pizzeria to celebrate this friend’s achievements. One Trinidadian artist in the group made a firm assertion, “No one could touch Toni Morrison.” Although he had never lived in the United States, he said Morrison was like a cousin. That was when I knew Morrison’s words did precisely what Serpell highlights: “Morrison was an Afrodiasporic writer who deliberately braided African, Caribbean, Latin American, and black American influences in her work,” with a quiet, understated beauty that translated beyond the American context. The artist’s enthusiasm is a testament to Morrison being, and continuing to be, a global literary baddie, whose cool observation remains an inspiration.The poet Traci K. Smith once said, “Not only has Toni Morrison changed literature for the world, she has also changed the world for literature. Across her body of work, she’s given readers access to the complex and captivating inner lives of a wealth of black characters.” In other words, Morrison could be deemed “difficult,” yet, as Serpell shows, she produced an aesthetic oeuvre that more than justified its difficulty. She had no reason to feign humility.

Georgia Republicans Are Setting Up Their Midterm Elections to Fail
New Republic • 6 days ago

Georgia Republicans Are Setting Up Their Midterm Elections to Fail

In 2022, Margaret Messerlie went to vote in Houston County, Georgia. She selected her candidates on the machine, which then printed her ballot to be deposited in a scanner to count her vote. But first, having been swayed by conspiracy theories about rampant election fraud related to voting machines, she used a pen to scratch out the Q.R. code on her ballot that the scanner uses to tabulate votes. The scanner didn’t accept her ballot, so she was given a second one. She scratched out that Q.R. code too. When the machine didn’t accept the second ballot, Messerlie asked for a provisional ballot. Poll workers refused her request, and the county election supervisor filed a complaint with the State Election Board accusing Messerlie of ballot tampering. “I was just making a statement to myself hoping it might go through anyway, but of course it didn’t,” Messerlie said at the February 18 meeting of the State Election Board. She did not apologize for breaking the rule, instead insisting that the Q.R. codes were “illegal” and have been used to “flip” votes in past elections. The five-member board—dominated by three Trump-supporting election-denial activists—sympathized with Messerlie; rather than reprimand her, they gave her a letter detailing Georgia election rules that prohibit tampering with ballots. Messerlie and other Republicans in Georgia’s election-denial movement, along with their allies on the State Election Board and in the GOP-controlled state legislature, have been pushing for a complete prohibition on voting machines since President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden—a loss they falsely attribute to voting fraud, of course. These efforts culminated with the passage in May 2024 of Senate Bill 189, which prohibits Q.R. codes from being used to tabulate votes. That ban goes into effect on July 1. But state legislators, whose 2026 session ends a month from now, have yet to put forth a practical replacement system. Instead, Republican lawmakers have introduced three bills that seem expressly designed to cause chaos, if they could even be implemented in time for the fall elections; two of them call for poll workers—often low-paid temporary workers or retirees—to hand-count paper ballots in some or all cases.If any one of these bills became law, it would cause errors and delays, according to bipartisan election officials and experts. And this could have consequences well beyond Georgia’s borders. As many as eight million people there are expected to vote in the November midterms, on everything from local contests and voter referendums to House and Senate races that could decide the balance of power in the U.S. Congress—and thus whether Democrats will have any power to check the Trump administration. Joseph Kirk, the elections supervisor in Bartow County, conducts hand-count audits for each election. He knows how taxing the process can be even for small elections. “We see errors as the day goes on. The poll workers start out strong, but the longer they work, the more errors there are,” he said. “I can’t imagine trying to hand-count a double-sided ballot, densely packed with races, questions, and trying to get through it at the end of a long day, with folks watching who are anxiously wanting the results.“The most polite way I can say this,” he added, “is that it’s extraordinarily less than ideal.” But Sara Tindall-Ghazal, the State Election Board’s lone Democrat, didn’t mince words in explaining how elected Republicans willingly courted this looming disaster. The Republicans who introduced the aforementioned bills are “hostage to an extremist group that does not represent the majority of voters,” she said. “The only reason we’re in this position is because they insist on catering to the election-denier universe.”Georgia has become ground zero of MAGA’s conspiracy theories about voter fraud. In Fulton County, election deniers have homed in on poll-worker errors that led to more than 3,000 ballots being double-counted as possible evidence of an intentional effort to swing the 2020 election toward Biden. An election integrity official appointed by Trump referred the matter to the FBI, which in late January seized hundreds of thousands of ballots. No charges have been filed, and the bureau’s entire affidavit in the case was based on claims from some of the same election-denial activists who coordinate with the MAGA-dominated State Election Board.Those same forces are demanding that poll workers hand-count as many as eight million ballots this fall, logistics be damned. With the legislative session set to end on April 6, some election officials are sounding the alarm. At a February 9 meeting, the Cobb County election board in metro Atlanta requested that the legislature delay the implementation of S.B. 189 and its Q.R. code prohibition by a year. Board member Jennifer Mosbacher, a Democratic appointee, said she didn’t see how implementing a new ballot tabulation system “before the midterm is even remotely possible.” Just one board member voted against the measure, urging the legislature to stay the course on the Q.R. code deadline: Debbie Fisher, a Republican appointee who has supported Trump’s lies about election fraud. Supporters of hand counting point to other countries that do so, like France. But Kirk, Tindall-Ghazal, and others note that those countries have constructed their entire election administration systems around hand counts—not the machine counts that Georgia and most U.S. states have used for years. The only U.S. counties that counted ballots by hand in recent years—Nye County, Nevada, in 2022 and Gillespie County, Texas, in 2024—had results riddled with errors and took much longer to tabulate them than machines. In 2024, Spalding County, Georgia, experimented with a hand recount of local election results. The only errors in the recount came from ballots counted by hand, not machines reading Q.R. codes on ballots.Several Texas counties counted ballots by hand in this week’s primary elections. In all cases, the results took longer than machine counts. In Gillespie County, it took as many as 60 workers to count 3,000 ballots. The results came in nearly four hours after machine counts from elsewhere in the state. In Eastland County, workers were so exhausted from hand-counting ballots that they asked local officials if they could switch to machine counts. The switch would have required a court order. In Georgia, instead of introducing legislation that would narrowly address the Q.R. code issue, Republicans have written bills that invite the same problems those counties faced—but across their entire state. Senate Bill 214, which was introduced by state Senator Max Burns, the author of the bill banning Q.R. codes, would implement optical scanners to read ballots and tabulate votes. Another bill, Senate Bill 568, would utilize a similar optical system to scan hand-marked paper ballots, in addition to requiring recounts to be conducted by hand. The most extreme bill, according to Democrats, is House Bill 1108, which requires the use of hand-marked paper ballots and hand counts of all elections. All of the bills would require printers to print empty ballots for the hundreds or thousands of individual races that will occur in November—printers that the state does not have, since Georgians currently vote on machines which then print the filled-out ballots. S.B. 214 doesn’t provide funding for these “ballot on demand” printers but instead tasks Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office with procuring the technology and conducting a pilot program for their use. Raffensperger did not respond to a request for comment.The influx of new equipment, just a few months out from a crucial election, will require significant training for poll workers. “We need time to pilot these systems to work the kinks out,” Kirk said, noting that poll-worker training begins in September. He and other election officials would prefer the significant changes to election systems currently being considered by the legislature to occur in a nonelection year. Representative Saira Draper, a Democrat who represents parts of suburban Atlanta and served on a special legislative committee that met over the summer to workshop remedies for the Q.R. code ban, said there may not be enough ballot-on-demand printers available for purchase that meet federal and state election guidelines. She has also warned against such significant changes occurring in such a pivotal election year. “There are straightforward ways to comply with the Q.R. code law that don’t require election overhauls, and that’s what any legislator acting in good faith should be advocating for at this juncture,” Draper said. Instead, almost two years since the Q.R. code ban went into effect, “they’ve dropped the ball,” she added. “Now they want the public to believe, [at the] eleventh hour, unvetted changes are necessary to fix a problem of their own making.” Burns did not respond to a request for comment, nor did his co-sponsors on S.B. 214. None of the sponsors of H.B. 568 or H.B. 1108 responded to requests for comment. One of this year’s most closely watched midterm contests is in Georgia, where Senator Jon Ossoff is fighting to retain his seat; the balance of the U.S. Senate may depend on it. But if H.B. 1108 were to become law, the whole country might have to wait weeks after the fall elections, or even longer, to learn which party has won control of the chamber.“It’s silly to imagine that people can hand-tally all those votes, get all the right totals in all the right places, and report accurate results by precinct in every contest—much less that they can do it quickly,” said Mark Lindeman of Verified Voting, a nonprofit organization that works with bipartisan election officials to advocate for secure election equipment. “For anyone who craves more controversy and conflict after elections, full hand counts are a great idea—but for voters overall, absolutely not.”

Donald Trump Has Lit a Global Match
New Republic • 6 days ago

Donald Trump Has Lit a Global Match

By the time Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney left the stage at the World Economic Forum on January 20, observers understood his speech’s importance. In front of the elite audience at Davos, with which he is intimate as a former central banker for Canada and the United Kingdom, Carney said that “middle powers” such as Canada needed to cooperate to resist the weaponization of the global economy by the great powers. The rules-based international order, he admitted, had always been partially fictional, but now even the pretense of its existence was impossible. “The old order is not coming back,” Carney said. “In a world of great-power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice: compete with each other for favor or to combine to create a third path with impact.” Carney’s address was a rare one in Davos history to earn a standing ovation.At Davos, the speaker was the message. Carney’s remarks reverberated so profoundly partly because they offered a reality-affirming assessment of a disturbing international situation, but more because they were a suggestion for reorientation away from the United States—delivered by Canada. Canada. “For the last century and most of this one, especially the postwar period, the United States was a country with which we had a special relationship, arguably a privileged relationship,” said Carleton University political scientist Fen Hampson, co-chair of the Expert Group on Canada-U.S. Relations. Canada has long snugly positioned itself in the U.S. orbit, largely following the American lead on trade and global security and offering support and legitimacy in return.No longer. “The U.S. is now viewed by key allies, including Canada, as a hostile state actor—because of its president,” said Hampson. Notably, Carney’s speech was also backed by action. Days earlier, he announced a “new strategic partnership” between China and Canada, reviving relations between the two countries that had been strained for years. That included welcoming Chinese electric vehicles into Canada for sale, a potentially huge threat to the U.S. economy. As a rallying cry to smaller countries to unite against the great powers, Carney’s move “was a bit of David versus Goliath,” as Hampson put it.Carney’s call for middle powers to redirect their strategy was not well-received in the White House. “Canada lives because of the United States,” President Donald Trump said at Davos days later. “Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.” He threatened to levy more tariffs against Canada. Other officials in his administration made similarly dismissive statements.In the Trumpian worldview, weaker countries have little choice but to submit to U.S. demands. The New York Times’ Ezra Klein spoke to Trump’s advisers about the president’s theory of international politics at the outset of his second term and reported, “Every one said some version of the same thing: America has leverage it does not use. Under Trump, it is going to start using it.” In the president’s line of thinking, U.S. bullying of less powerful countries could never backfire because America is so powerful that, while other nations might complain about their shabby treatment, they would have little recourse but to bend. As Fox News host Jesse Watters put it in defending Trump’s threats to annex Greenland, “We don’t need friends…. America is not handcuffed by history.”Countries don’t abandon the pursuit of their interests in the face of coercion; they alter their approaches, including, eventually, perhaps even cooperating with one another in opposition to American hegemony.This Darwinian perspective is seductive because its ruthlessness appears superficially realistic in a harsh world. But ironically it is, in fact, deeply naïve. Countries don’t abandon the pursuit of their interests in the face of coercion; they alter their approaches, including, eventually, perhaps even cooperating with one another in opposition to what Carney called “American hegemony.” Wise ­policymakers have always known this to be true. George F. Kennan, the diplomat and founder of the Cold War strategy known as containment, said in 1999, after the Soviet Union’s collapse and during the supreme era of American power, “I can say without hesitation that this planet is never going to be ruled from any single political center, whatever its military power.” Even Republican hawks from previous eras understood that the world cannot simply be commanded entirely from Washington. In 2002, Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush’s national security adviser and secretary of state, spoke about securing “a balance of power that favors freedom.” The notion that other countries, if they feel threatened enough, can “balance” not with but against the United States seems mystifying to the Trump administration. But assuming that smaller countries will permanently allow themselves to be bullied by the United States is unrealistic.“States have a variety of options” in response to bullying by a greater power, said Stephen Walt, a Harvard University political scientist who fashioned the notion of countries balancing against perceived threats. Nations can diversify their economic and security ties; give lip service to acceding to U.S. demands while shirking their commitments; and, finally, simply defy the United States and endure whatever consequences arrive. Said Walt: “What is making such actions more likely is the growing awareness that trying to flatter and appease Trump doesn’t buy you any long-term goodwill or cooperation; he just comes back with more demands later.”Not everyone agrees that we are witnessing a return to a balance of power where countries unite against the superpower. Morten Andersen, an international-relations expert at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, conceded that Norway indeed views the situation “more on Carney’s line.” As a Northern European state that isn’t part of the European Union, Norway is more careful about signaling than Canada, he said, but it “more or less” has the same perspective. However, Andersen believes that, instead of hastening a return to a world where countries balance against hegemons, Trump is leading the world toward a system of “great power collusion.” While in his first term, Trump spoke about “great power competition,” Andersen said, now the president focuses less on the challenge China poses than on supposed transgression committed by countries like Venezuela, Denmark, and Canada. Trump states overtly that he makes decisions involving war and peace based on how many international prizes he receives.Trump may envision a world where powerful countries themselves cooperate to ransack weaker countries in “a new kleptocratic international order,” said Andersen. He mentioned “neoroyalism,” a term coined by two American political scientists, Stacie Goddard and Abraham L. Newman. They have argued that what drives Trump is not any grand ideas about the national interest but wealth and power for himself and his family. “Rather than compete with rivals, Mr. Trump is willing to collude with them in order to advance his court’s parochial interests,” they wrote. But, they also said, “A neoroyalist world is not inevitable. Countries—including America’s closest partners—now need to offer a coherent alternative, mobilizing their own sizable collective resources to counter Mr. Trump and support a system based on fair rules and predictable diplomacy.” Mark Carney’s rousing address might mark the beginning of this mobilization. But such endeavors will be difficult as countries are tempted to pursue their own separate strategies in dealing with an unshackled United States.Here, we look at how four of the most important global power centers are thinking about their security and positioning in the age of Trump.Beijing: Trump Gets Distracted, Xi Bides His TimeIt can be difficult to remember now, but there once was a time when Trump presented himself as deeply concerned with China’s ascension in Asia and its exploitation of the United States. “There are people who wish I wouldn’t refer to China as our enemy,” he wrote in his 2015 book, Crippled America. “But that’s exactly what they are.” As president, however, Trump supplemented his harsh actions against China with praise for leader Xi Jinping and the country’s illiberalism.And so China fretted about a second Trump term. “Beijing began in 2024 quite concerned that Trump would be difficult to manage because of his unpredictability and willingness to take huge risks,” said Scott Kennedy, trustee chair in Chinese business and economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But the Chinese have been pleasantly surprised. The Trump who once seemed obsessed by the threat China posed to the United States is now far less invested in such things—a transition that has not gone unnoticed in Beijing. “Over the last year, they figured out how to manage him and believe they have the upper hand,” said Kennedy. “They feel they know what moves him.”In China’s view, Trump is superficially aggressive and demanding, but when confronted with opposition, he settles for half measures or other face-saving compromises. In April 2025, he grandiosely announced tariffs on China as part of his “Liberation Day” campaign. But after China announced retaliatory measures by withholding rare earths, Trump soon reversed the tariffs that he had said were critical to saving the U.S. economy. “Their aggressive retaliation has worked,” as Kennedy said.What China never anticipated in its fondest fantasies of a second Trump presidency was the extreme hostility the president would engender with his closest allies. “Beijing can’t believe its luck,” said David Sacks, a China specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, or CFR. By not simply insulting but actually threatening the closest friends of the United States, the Trump administration has pushed them into the waiting arms of the rising power in Asia. Trump is “doing China’s work for it,” said Sacks. Prime ministers from Canada and the United Kingdom have both already visited Beijing in 2026, after years of their countries’ government leaders conspicuously abstaining from traveling to China. They followed leaders from France, Ireland, South Korea, and Finland in making such trips. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz visited China in late February. As Wendy Cutler, a longtime diplomat who is currently senior vice president of the Asia Society Policy Institute, said with considerable understatement: “China is welcoming the apparent strains and tensions in the Western alliance.”Notably, China has attracted these wealthy liberal democracies to its orbit without making a single concession around its human rights violations, designs on Hong Kong and Taiwan, or trade practices. When British leader Keir Starmer met with Chinese officials on his trip, he failed to secure promises to release Hong Kong democracy activist Jimmy Lai, a British citizen who has been detained for more than five years, much of the time in solitary confinement. Starmer reportedly raised the matter with Xi, but the Chinese leader didn’t feel compelled to acquiesce to releasing Lai, who will likely die in a Chinese jail. “Beijing’s playbook is working,” said Zongyuan Zoe Liu, a Chinese-born analyst at CFR.Trump’s two administrations have released very different National Security Strategy, or NSS, documents—a white paper delivered periodically by all administrations that announces their broad global priorities—and this illustrates the shifts in priorities. In the initial NSS document Trump released in late 2017, China was mentioned 33 times (nearly twice as many times as in the Obama administration’s final NSS), with nary a positive reference among them. The report accused China of trying to “displace the United States in the Indo-Pacific region, expand the reaches of its state-driven economic model, and reorder the region in its favor.” Chinese officials lambasted the paper, saying that the United States was contradicting itself by seeking to cooperate at times but portraying Beijing as an adversary at other points.In December 2025, by contrast, the second Trump administration released its first NSS, and it offered a markedly different assessment of China. Rather than treating great-power competition as the predominant reality facing U.S. foreign policy, this new analysis relegated China to the background. There was no reference to China being a “strategic competitor” or anything similar. Instead, the emphasis was on the alleged dangers to the Western Hemisphere supposedly sprouting from Latin America—ranging from “narco-terrorists” to drug cartels to immigrants.This shift occurred even though China was arguably stronger, wealthier, and better positioned globally in 2025 than it had been eight years earlier. The Chinese also had four years of dealing with Trump under their belt and had a better idea of what to expect with Trump 2.0. This time around, “Beijing is much better prepared economically, strategically, and politically,” said Liu.With Trump both less concerned with confronting China and more focused on the Western Hemisphere, Beijing is content to simply wait for the United States to expend crucial resources combating phantom dangers. China “feels very much time is on its side,” said Cutler. The country is highly confident in its technological capabilities and simply wants time and space to become stronger and more self-reliant, she said. Given this self-confidence, China is aligned with the second Trump administration in seeking to stabilize the bilateral relationship instead of being on a more adversarial footing.At the same time, China’s business community is less enamored of the Trump team, seeing it as too erratic to make investment a smart opportunity. And Beijing is not naïve enough to believe that American policymaking elites fail to see China as a competitor, even if it’s not seen as the menace Trump portrayed circa 2015. Said Liu: “They are confident they know how to handle Trump and see no need to make concessions without receiving benefits.”Brussels: So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, AdieuTrump routinely disparaged European allies on the campaign trail in 2015 and 2016, reserving expressions of fondness for Russian leader Vladimir Putin and various other autocrats, dictators, and tyrants. In 2016, he complained several times about NATO allies—all of whom are European, except for Canada—of free-riding on the United States and called the organization itself “obsolete.”Given that history, the U.S. relationship with the European Union and its 27 member-states proved surprisingly resilient in Trump’s first term, despite his invective about the immigration policies of countries like Germany. He did surprisingly little to destroy the alliance, as some had feared. And with the Biden administration all-in on boosting traditional allies and NATO, Brussels could be forgiven for having thought the crisis had passed.It is fair to say that, while much of the world is surprised by Trump’s behavior and rhetoric in his second term, the countries that make up the European Union are the most bewildered.That was then. It is fair to say that, while much of the world is surprised by Trump’s behavior and rhetoric in his second term, the countries that make up the European Union are the most bewildered. “While turbulence was expected, few were prepared for the scale of disruption that followed, more akin to a political earthquake than the manageable aftershocks many had anticipated in transatlantic relations,” said Kader Sevinç, a Brussels-based expert who was formerly a senior EU affairs executive.When Trump disparaged Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky in a White House meeting in full view of cameras in February 2025, he signaled not just a different approach to the Russian-Ukrainian War but to relations with Europe in general. The forced dustup illustrated not just the president’s scorn for Ukraine’s brave battle for independence but his willingness to disregard priorities, such as Russia’s incursions into Eastern Europe, that EU members see as essential to their security. Countries closer to Russia have more to fear from Moscow than those in the Western Hemisphere, after all, but they weren’t consulted before Trump’s shocking tirade. “Brussels is in a panicking mode and has been for almost a year now because of the unpredictability—I think they feel that the unpredictability is really something they can’t deal with because there’s so many issues that come up at, I wouldn’t say a short notice, but the issues come up when you least expect them,” said Engjellushe Morina, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.In 2019, Trump suddenly expressed interest in acquiring Greenland, which is semiautonomous and militarily protected by Denmark. “Essentially a large real estate deal,” he said, adding that the issue “came up,” and he was intrigued. Responsibility for Greenland cost Denmark oodles of money, he claimed, so he was open to buying Greenland. But when Danish leaders said its territory was not for sale, Trump canceled a planned visit. He said at the time about purchasing Greenland: “It’s not number one on the burner, I can tell you that.”It was on the burner when he returned to office, however. Even before his second inauguration, Trump in January 2025 wouldn’t rule out using force to obtain Greenland and threatened tariffs against Denmark if it refused to sell it. “We need Greenland for national security purposes,” he said, making similar claims throughout the year about the United States getting the territory “one way or another.”After invading Venezuela in early 2026, Trump seemed emboldened enough to want to make good on his pledge. France, Germany, and Norway promised to contribute troops to a multinational force to defend Denmark as the president refused to budge. Although a direct confrontation was avoided when Trump backed down and pretended an impressive agreement had been reached over Greenland, enormous, fatal damage was inflicted on Europeans’ trust not just in Trump but perhaps in U.S. foreign policy generally. “That was a threat of force used on a NATO ally,” said Simon Smith, an international-relations specialist at the Royal Danish Defense College in Copenhagen. “No one is going to forget that.”There is a contrast between what is said in public and what is said behind the scenes, stated Smith. Countries avoid provoking Trump and some speak publicly about the United States continuing to be a vital part of NATO. In private, however, leaders alternate between discussing NATO as an organization in which the U.S. presence is nominal—or even what it might mean to create a duplicate organization without the United States.But the reality is that it can take years before European countries are capable of defending themselves. “We are still heavily dependent on the United States,” said Jean-Louis De Brouwer, director of the European Affairs Programme at the Egmont Institute in Brussels. Coordinating among more than two dozen countries is difficult, a problem solved by having the United States provide most of the resources and direction for NATO and the Western alliance.The large partners of the EU seem determined to set the direction for continental security policy in a way that has not been true since World War II. Said Jean-Louis De Brouwer: “Call it decoupling.”Even so, the large partners of the EU seem determined to set the direction for continental security policy in a way that has not been true since World War II. Said De Brouwer: “Call it decoupling, good decoupling. Call it de-risking, I don’t know but that we should take for granted once and for all that the less dependent we are going to be to the United States, the better position we are in.”Moscow: Waiting for NATO to ImplodeDuring Trump’s first presidential campaign, his special affection for Vladimir Putin appeared baffling and deeply worrisome to anyone concerned about Russia’s subversion of liberal democracies, to say nothing of its designs on its immediate neighbors. But despite Russia’s interference in the 2016 election on behalf of Trump, his administration largely maintained an adversarial relationship in dealing with the country. “In his first term, he was surrounded by aides who were conventional in their thinking,” said Robert Orttung, a Russia expert at George Washington University. With Vice President Mike Pence, national security adviser H.R. McMaster, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Trump was guided by individuals who had typical conservative views on dealing with Russia. “What Trump was thinking was different than what was happening,” said Orttung. That led to disappointment and frustration in the Kremlin, according to Thomas E. Graham, a Russia adviser and diplomat during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. And so “Russia didn’t look at Trump’s second term with heightened expectations,” Graham said.In his second term, however, Trump is more confident in asserting himself, and he is surrounded by individuals who share his views or are simply more willing to do his bidding (“obsequious lackeys,” in Orttung’s words). The president seemed intent on betraying Ukraine during his infamous televised White House spat with President Zelensky, and he has repeatedly praised Putin as a reasonable man intent on peace. Trump has several times grandiosely announced that a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine was impending, and members of his administration have said that Ukraine must be prepared to relinquish some of its territory to Russia. Putin also understands that Trump is into “value-free diplomacy,” in the words of Anna Ohanyan, a Russia expert at Stonehill College.But while Trump might be willing to sacrifice Ukrainian territory, sovereignty, and interests for the sake of a peace deal, he is no more committed to doing so than to any other foreign policy objective. Given his short attention span and competing priorities such as maintaining domestic popularity, demonstrating strength, and projecting an image as a brilliant dealmaker, he has proved unwilling to follow through with pressure on Kyiv to completely surrender. “Russia continues to see Trump as a mercurial president and sees that he likes a large defense budget,” said Andrew Weiss, who previously served as director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian Affairs on the National Security Council staff and is currently with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. For all Trump’s friendly rhetoric toward Moscow, the Kremlin doesn’t look at him as a friend of Russia, said Weiss. He pointed to the National Security Strategy, which treats Russia as a minor, regional power, hardly an important country whose interests must be accommodated. While other critics felt that Russian malfeasance was absolved in the report, Weiss suggested that the Russians look “at what [Trump] is doing with apprehension.” He is simply too unpredictable and erratic to be relied upon.Aside from Ukraine, Trump denied Putin’s desire to extend the New START treaty, the 2010 pact that capped the number of deployed nuclear-capable missiles, bombers, and warheads both Russia and the United States could have. Trump has said he’s open to a deal but wants it to include China. “If it expires, it expires,” he said. “We’ll just do a better agreement.” That, of course, is similar to the language the president used in 2018 when he withdrew the United States from the agreement President Barack Obama had signed with Iran in 2015 to limit its nuclear program. Alas, no better agreement with Iran was forthcoming, and the country was ultimately bombed by the United States less than a decade later.At the same time, Trump has taken actions in Central Asia that undermine Russia’s claim to an exclusive sphere of influence. In the fall of 2025, his administration played a role in negotiating a peace deal between Azerbaijan and Armenia, part of which involved a withdrawal of Russian forces from the border between the two countries. An additional component of the agreement is the construction of a 20-mile transit corridor connecting Azerbaijan to an autonomous, mountainous region that is part of Armenian territory. The United States has rights to manage the territory for 99 years, which is now called the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity.” Unsurprisingly, Russia has reacted poorly to this assertion of U.S. power, downplaying the significance of the Americans in the region. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, “The current stage of Armenian-Azerbaijani normalization began with the decisive and central role of Russia.” Another Russian official told reporters that countries in Central Asia obviously could not ignore their Russian partners. But, as Ohanyan said, the reality is that “Putin is on the back foot as Trump is more active in the Caucasus.”In observing Trump destroy nato and the Western alliance, Putin is on the front foot. “[Trump] is doing what 80 years of the Soviet Union couldn’t do,” said Thomas E. Graham.However, in observing Trump destroy NATO and the Western alliance, particularly by denigrating European countries, Putin is very much on the front foot. “[Trump] is doing what 80 years of the Soviet Union couldn’t do,” said Graham. The administration has alienated not just countries like Germany and France but even ones like Poland and the Czech Republic, which, behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, looked to the United States as a beacon of resistance to Moscow. The Russians are “happy to sit back,” as Weiss put it, and watch NATO implode.And yet, Russia might be concerned with the apparent determination of Europe to rearm as America withdraws. With the United States abandoning its commitment to defend European countries from Moscow’s attempts to control parts of Eastern Europe and subvert the rest of the continent, Germany and other countries are unlikely to simply accept subordination to the Russians. “They’re more concerned with Russophobia in Europe than in the U.S. right now,” said Graham. He compared the situation to the end of the Cold War, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was confronted with the dilemma of facing either a united, unarmed Germany within NATO or an armed, united Germany outside of any alliance led by the United States. Gorbachev preferred Germany within NATO, believing the United States a lesser threat to Moscow’s interests than a powerful Germany might be. Now, said Graham, “Russia might not like what self-confident Europeans will do without U.S. restraint.”However, Europeans might not yet have the strength to prevent Trump from negotiating a peace treaty that is far more favorable to Russia than Ukraine. If Trump suspects a chance to win a Nobel Peace Prize and simultaneously please Putin by giving Moscow more than it has won on the battlefield, the president will not pass on the opportunity.Tehran: Taken by SurpriseNo country has suffered more because of Trump’s return to the White House than Iran. After being inaugurated for a second term in 2025, Trump announced he was reinstating the “maximum pressure campaign,” cutting off whatever talks Iran had held with the Biden administration over its nuclear program and other issues. This hostility was apparently a surprise to Tehran, which believed that Trump, portrayed by the White House and sometimes the media as a flexible negotiator, would be willing to make a better deal than Joe Biden had. “Iran miscalculated with the United States,” said Sanam Vakil, the Tehran-born director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House in London. The Stimson Center’s Barbara Slavin, author of a book on Iran, said that the regime believed Trump would just want a slightly better deal than the one Obama signed in 2015. That way, “Trump could get his Nobel,” she said, referring to Trump’s documented whining that he has not been awarded the Nobel Prize.Iran’s analysis initially seemed to be correct, Slavin pointed out. In April 2025, Trump dispatched an envoy to Oman to hold talks with Iranian officials. The next month, Trump announced that a deal was imminent, apparently believing that Iran would simply capitulate. But when that didn’t happen, he let Israel initiate a large-scale bombing campaign against Iran, and the United States joined in, striking Iranian nuclear sites. Iran, in turn, mustered a response that reached deep into Israel. “They proved that their missiles are more effective than people expected,” said Trita Parsi, the former president of the National Iranian American Council who now leads the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He pointed out that Israelis wanted the ceasefire that eventually emerged, while Iran had to be dragged into it. There is a school of thought among Iranian hardliners that believes the regime should not have agreed to the ceasefire, he said, a belief that became pertinent in February 2026.The Iranians overlooked Trump’s willingness to use military force to extract concessions. Having not had relations with the United States for nearly 50 years, the Islamic Republic is poorly informed about the various factions in Washington and how they differ. “There aren’t a lot of contacts between Iran and MAGA Republicans,” Vakil said, with understatement. Parsi said Iran made a “huge mistake because they wouldn’t agree to negotiate with Trump directly,” since the president likes the pageantry and power dynamics of face-to-face summits and believes he uniquely connects with foreign leaders.The Israeli-U.S. assault on Iran was only part of the destruction Tehran has suffered since late 2023. Israel pulverized Iran-supported groups—Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon. At the end of 2025, wide-ranging protests erupted after shopkeepers in Tehran’s bazaars called for a strike. On January 4, 2026, after a shocking military operation in Venezuela, the Trump administration put Iran in its sights. “If they start killing people like they have in the past,” Trump said, “I think they’re going to get hit very hard by the United States.” But he never intervened beyond encouraging Iranians to resist—a false encouragement that led them to be slaughtered, said Slavin.In the ensuing weeks, Trump moved an aircraft carrier, bombers, and fighter jets within striking distance of Iran. And in late February, he finally coordinated a massive assault on Iran with Israel. At press time, the attacks had killed the Iranian supreme leader and other senior political, intelligence, and military officials, and hundreds of Iranian civilians. The onslaught targeted Iran’s weaponry and military bases. For its part, Iran fired missiles into Israel, killing at least nine people, and launched weapons at U.S. targets and allies across the Middle East, killing four Americans. Hezbollah militants launched rockets from Lebanon, and Israel responded, killing 31 people at press time.The combined effect of all this pressure is to create the biggest challenge Iran has faced since the 1979 revolution brought the Islamic regime to power. It is weaker than ever domestically and globally, facing possibly existential threats at home and abroad.But that does not mean Iran is completely without options. “Iran is not Venezuela,” said Vali Nasr, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, who advised the Obama administration’s Middle East policy. It is unlikely to simply capitulate to U.S. demands to abandon its nuclear program or to absorb more attacks on its territory. For one thing, it isn’t clear exactly what Trump wants beyond having Iran abandon its nuclear program entirely, something the regime cannot do without losing what little internal legitimacy it retains. “U.S. objectives are not clearly spelled out,” said Nasr.If somehow Iran were to agree to forswear even a peaceful nuclear program, it cannot be sure that additional demands wouldn’t be forthcoming from the administration.In addition, if somehow Iran were to agree to forswear even a peaceful nuclear program, it cannot be sure that additional demands wouldn’t be forthcoming from the administration. Iran already restrained itself after the summer 2025 attack on its nuclear facilities, only launching a few missiles at a U.S. base in Qatar. This was a fraction of Iran’s possible retaliation, given its stockpile of short-range and medium-range missiles. Such restraint also followed the Trump administration’s assassination of Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani in 2020, when he was in Iraq. Iran has avoided confronting the United States directly, but that did not stop Trump from attacking the country. The regime has rejected U.S. entreaties to resume negotiations. “Their only card left is to react differently,” said Nasr. Iran is undoubtedly weaker than it was when Trump came into office. But, then, so is the United States.Trump’s political career has been preoccupied with projecting strength, including strength for the United States in the world. “From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world,” he promised in his second inauguration speech. “We will be the envy of every nation, and we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer.”Alas, in just over a year, Trump has squandered some of the country’s greatest sources of strength. By repelling nearly all of America’s allies—alliances that are among the best instruments of leverage Washington has in the world—he has paid China and Russia enormous dividends. His impulsive, economically illiterate tariffs, blatant corruption, and affection for authoritarianism have sapped the global economy and euthanized the U.S. order. Whatever its many flaws, that order looks preferable to the world he is constructing. Whether that is “neoroyalism” or a world balanced against the United States, the result for Americans is one they should not welcome. If Trump insists on steamrolling over other countries, the United States will eventually discover—like Napoleon’s France, Hitler’s Germany, and Stalin’s Soviet Union before it—that other countries always have options to resist. If, instead, he wants to team up with autocrats to share the spoils earned by plundering and coercing weaker nations, Trump will join Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin in ushering in a new age of corrupt authoritarianism unseen since the Middle Ages.

Netanyahu Finally Found a President Willing to Buy Into His Iran Dream
New Republic • 6 days ago

Netanyahu Finally Found a President Willing to Buy Into His Iran Dream

On September 12, 2002, Benjamin Netanyahu—then out of government and power—was invited to the U.S. House of Representatives to provide “an Israeli perspective” on a possible U.S. invasion of Iraq. With his usual hubris and swagger, Netanyahu made a confident prediction: “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.… I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots, is gone.”In March 2015, Netanyahu contrived an invitation from the then speaker, Republican John Boehner, to address a joint session of Congress behind President Barack Obama’s back, something unheard of in the annals of the U.S.-Israel relationship. Netanyahu, then prime minister, vehemently attacked the Iran Nuclear Deal, or JCPOA, after years of trying to convince the United States how critical it was to reach such a framework. It will never work, he claimed. In May 2018, he pressed President Trump to unilaterally withdraw from the agreement, explaining to him with conviction that if only the U.S. reimposes “crippling sanctions” on Iran, the Islamic Republic would beg for a new, improved deal. On all three assessments, Netanyahu was tragically and comprehensively wrong. That somehow did not diminish either his credibility with most American officials or his campaign against Iran. By June 2025, he persuaded Trump to join an Israeli attack and together “obliterate” (as Trump later boasted) Iran’s military nuclear program. As for Iran’s ballistic missile development and production, Netanyahu flaunted that after Israel’s military achievements, a historic change had taken place. Eight months later, there is neither obliteration nor historic change. Which leads to the three-part question: Who started the current war, why, and what is the strategic objective? Is it “regime change”? That would be a desirable outcome, but surely Netanyahu, a self-declared ardent student of history, knows that “regime change” has never been induced through aerial or missile power, with the unique and singular exception of Japan in 1945, but that was accompanied by a credible threat of invasion and, more importantly, two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If the objective was to defuse the nuclear threat supposedly posed by Iran, as Trump argued just before he argued something else, why hasn’t the U.S. attacked North Korea, which does in fact have both nuclear weapons and missiles that can reach the continental U.S.?If the idea is to exploit Iran’s geopolitical and military weakness since 2024–2025 and further isolate it, both are legitimate goals, but wasn’t that supposedly achieved in June 2025? So why risk being accused of dragging the U.S. into a war in which it has no vested interests or benefits? Answer: because that’s what Netanyahu does. Political critics and detractors will point to Netanyahu’s tedious fixation with Iran posing an imminent existential threat as a manifestation of his authoritarian, populist, and even quasi-fascist political character and persona. Authoritarians need an enemy; they need to stir existential anxiety in the public and unite it against that enemy; they habitually evoke existential threats; they demagogically fan fears and incite hysteria; they require and create a constant warlike atmosphere. For decades, Netanyahu grimly exuded “This is 1938 all over again” with respect to Iran, positioning and grooming himself as the Israeli Winston Churchill facing the Hitlers in Tehran, and playing on Israelis’ collective trauma of the Holocaust. His attitude was spurious, often manipulatively alarmist, and politically expedient, but it was not without foundations. Iran has been widely regarded as a dangerous nemesis threatening to “erase Israel.” The combination of an extremist and vociferously vile theocracy with nuclear weapons was a lethal geopolitical cocktail justifiably perceived as an existential threat not just by Netanyahu but by many in Israel’s defense, political, and diplomatic circles.This idée fixe about Iran has deeper roots in Netanyahu’s interpretation of the cycles and trajectory of Jewish history. This is a concept he seemed to have borrowed from his father, historian Ben Zion Netanyahu, who in his magnum opus on the Spanish Inquisition inferred adverse cyclical trends to Jewish civilization. Every few hundred years, a power rises and threatens to annihilate the Jewish people, either ideologically and theologically or physically. It begins with the Hellenistic period in the fourth century BCE, then under Roman rule, finally culminating in the rebellion of 66 C.E. and the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E.; the 200-year-long Crusader “Kingdom of Jerusalem” (1099–1291); the Spanish Inquisition (1478 to roughly the 1830s); rampant antisemitism, persecution, and pogroms in the nineteenth century, leading to fascism and shortly thereafter German Nazism, the systematic racial and ethnic extermination of Jews. By the late twentieth century, a new existential threat emerged, both Netanyahu senior and his son Benjamin concluded: Islamofascism, centered in Tehran and intent on destroying Israel. Iran became the defining feature of Netanyahu’s political life, despite Israel’s strength, military and technological superiority; its relations with the U.S.; and, most vexing and ominous, its unresolved conflict with the Palestinians. Iran was the be-all and end-all of Netanyahu’s political identity, career, and self-image. Furthermore, his histrionic depiction of Iran as a threat to the entirety of Western civilization led him to develop delusions of grandeur that he is in fact not only the Lord Protector of Israel but the Savior of the West. All he needed to do was convince a succession of American presidents that this is history’s inexorable trajectory and they had better heed his advice and policy recommendations, meaning engage Iran militarily. Enter the political rationale, and the dog-wagging aspects of the war. That President Trump was deflecting away from the toxic effects of Epstein files chaos, the Supreme Court decision on the illegality of his tariffs policy, his abysmal standing in the polls, and his swelling unpopularity on both the economy and immigration has been written about extensively in the days since the war began. That he lacks the constitutional basis to declare war when America was not attacked, that he contradicts himself and fumbles and jumbles with justifications for the war, is being dissected by American pundits and analysts. His statements have been bizarre even by his own erratic and incoherent standards. Iran was developing missiles that could reach the U.S.? There is zero evidence of that, other than Netanyahu telling him that. Iran was planning an attack on the U.S., therefore the war is preemptive, as Secretary of State Rubio said? That’s a spurious claim at best, and American intelligence sources dispute it. That he was surprised Iran didn’t capitulate to his demands during negotiations? That warrants a new edition of The Art of the Deal. That he expects the Iranian military and Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps to lay down their weapons? Really? Like the Vietcong did in Vietnam? The Taliban in Afghanistan? The Houthis in Yemen? ISIS in Iraq? Where on earth did he get this nonsense from?Unless he was prodded relentlessly and vigorously by Netanyahu, which he surely was. But while Trump’s rationale for an unprovoked war with Iran is unclear or inexplicable, with Netanyahu it is very simple: This is what he’s wanted for years, and in Trump he found the perfect accomplice. Trump is a narcissist eminently amenable to sycophancy, malleable when excessively praised, and susceptible to the “No president has done this before you” argument.Notwithstanding his historical compulsion with Iran, Netanyahu also has a major “wag the dog” compulsion. He is on an ongoing trial for corruption, bribery, and obstruction of justice. He is facing an election in 2026 with an upset, dejected, and restive electorate. More importantly, from Netanyahu’s perspective, the narrative has to change. The man responsible for the worst catastrophe and calamity in Israel’s history, October 7, 2023, the man who marketed himself as “Mr. Security” and a world expert on combating terrorism, was at the helm and accountable for the worst debacle since Israel was established. The only way to redeem himself was to turn that calamity into a region-altering strategic triumph. For that he crucially needed the U.S. But if he was wrong on Iraq, wrong on the original Iran nuclear deal, wrong on urging Trump to withdraw from it, wrong on his Gaza policy—relying on Hamas to avoid negotiations with the Palestinian Authority—and profoundly wrong on the Palestinian issue writ large, is it possible that he is right here? Whatever he whispered to Trump, the template is more likely Iraq 2003 than Venezuela 2026.

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