I assumed that nothing like what we’ve seen in the past four days was possible, because Americans simply wouldn’t support it. I don’t think I was wrong. Americans don’t support this. It didn’t occur to me, when I wrote this, that we might have a president who simply wouldn’t care.

It seems we’ve taken Rules 1, 2, and 3 to heart. Rule Number 4? We’re doing the opposite, though violence has a clarity of its own. Rule 5? It remains to be seen. Rules 6 and 7 have been overtaken by events.

Rule 8? I have no idea what the administration is thinking. But if the reactions I’m seeing in the media, conventional and social, are anything to go by, Americans have no intention of facing reality. It appears to me the better part of the American public views this war as an extension of its domestic politics. But it isn’t. It’s a war—by definition, an event that invokes a foreign adversary. Iran is an actor in its own right, one whose history, people, and regime are as important to the story of this war as our own. The other parties to this conflict, declared and undeclared, also matter, or should matter, in our appraisal of why this war broke out, who is to blame, what it means, and whether it’s just.

That Donald Trump is presiding over a war in Iran doesn’t mean Iran posed no threat. It doesn’t mean that diplomacy was working—or that diplomacy could have worked. It doesn’t mean that Iran’s nuclear ambitions and ballistic missile program were no threat to Americans. It doesn’t mean that we have no acute strategic interest in this part of the world. It doesn’t mean that the war’s wisdom can be assessed without reference to the history and politics of the Middle East, or that it can be assessed at all, at this early stage.

That Trump is presiding over this war does give us good cause to worry that it won’t be prosecuted competently, that the US government is unprepared for its consequences and incapable of managing them shrewdly, that our institutions have been so weakened that we lack the critical tools of statecraft essential to managing those consequences, and that the American constitutional order is dead.

But at least we seem to be following three out of nine of these rules. If we manage to follow Rule Number 5, perhaps it will be good enough. But no outcome that leaves that regime in place can be considered a victory. If it survives, it wins. Period.

Whether winning can be achieved at a price we’re willing to pay—see Rule Number 9—I just don’t know. As re-reading this proves, the future is hard to predict.

So we’re all waiting for this big retaliation against Iran, right? The most telegraphed strikes in history? I keep checking the news, but the tease is endless. We’re going to hit Iran so hard they’ll never do it again, apparently, but not so hard that it really upsets them. It’s going to be an ultra-precision, super-calibrated strike. The Pentagon has been studying it for days. And telling us about it for days. And telling us when it will happen and where it will happen and under what atmospheric conditions. Everyone in our government is leaking to every journalist he can collar to put out the word that we really don’t want another war in the Middle East, so Iran shouldn’t be upset when we do it. Which will be soon! Just you wait! And besides, we’d like to make a deal with Iran—wouldn’t they like that?—so really, Iranians, don’t get mad. We’re only doing it because we’d really like you to stop killing us. You can tell we’re sincere about not wanting to hurt you because we’re not actually going to hurt you, we’re just going to hit a bunch of your proxies’ ammo dumps—and neither of us care if a few of your proxies die, right? So truly, don’t take it personally: You’ve got to understand, it’s an election year and we’ll all look like a bunch of wussies if we don’t do anything. So seriously, we’re going to hit you so hard. At a time and place of our choosing! Any minute now! Maybe even today! Are you ready? Here we go! We’re gonna hit you!

Is there anyone on the planet whose eyes aren’t rolling as they watch this? (I’ll be plum embarrassed if I hit “send” on this newsletter then check the news only to see that Tehran has been vaporized, but I’ll take that risk.)

American strategists have been making the same mistakes since Vietnam, no matter who’s in power. They all do the same thing. It never occurs to them to wonder how it could be that we have the strongest economy and the most powerful military the world yet our strategic position keeps getting more and more parlous.

The Iran problem is really hard. I don’t discount that. I certainly don’t know how to solve it. But I can confidently say what won’t work.

I challenge you to name a single time when a postwar American president has successfully deployed American force while violating the following rules:

Rule 1: Make a damned decision

When the US uses force in hesitant dribbles—announced with words like “proportionate,” “precision,” “targeted,” or “calibrated”—it only excites our enemies and encourages them to try harder. We publish reams of theoretical work about “escalation dominance,” but we act as if we’ve never heard of it.

It’s always the same cycle. It begins when our enemy does a bad thing. Shocked, we go away to study the problem. We emerge from our lucubrations to say we’ll respond at a time and place of our choosing. Then we hit a camel in the ass with a very expensive bomb.

Ten minutes later, they do it again.

We return to our lair to study the problem again. We emerge gravely. “This time,” says a jumbo-sized Pentagon official, “We’ll be whacking two camels at the time and place of our choosing.” He clears his throat. “This means we’re going to whack those camels at 07:20 on Tuesday morning at the crossroads just south of Abdul’s gas station at Khirbat Ra’s al Wa’r. So long as the weather’s clear.”

“Sir! Could you repeat that, Sir?”

“You bet, Bret. That’s Kilo-Hotel-India-Romeo-Bravo-Alfa-Tango—got it? 33.88056° north, 39.51889° east.”

“Sir! Is hitting two camels escalatory?”

“Only for the camels, Bret. Those camels should not be sleeping well tonight.”

Two days later, bang! We hit two camels. We issue another a stern warning.

Twenty minutes later, they do it again.

We’re baffled. What’s with them? Don’t they realize we’re the United States of America and we’ve got the most powerful military the human race has ever beheld? That we can keep doing this until every last camel’s ass in the Middle East is fried to a crisp and branded “Don’t mess with Texas?”

Bang! Two camels and a goat. That’ll learn ‘em!

The cycle continues until—wham!—something bad happens. Maybe by accident. Hard to know whether someone really meant to hurt you when they lobbed 200 drones and missiles at you. Maybe they were just bored. But now someone’s dead, and the public realizes: We’re at war out there!

Domestic outrage erupts, stoked by our completely irresponsible politicians. (Doesn’t matter which party. They’re all irresponsible.) They flap toward the camera like moths to the light, flying right into each other in their eagerness to issue the first peroration about the President’s perfidy, treason, and incompetence. Ted Cruz emerges from the Senate sauna in a towel: “I’ll be the one to say it, Bret: The President’s a pussy. A Papa-Uniform-Papa-Papa-Yankee—”

“He’s … beg pardon?”

“Whatever. Journalists like you who hate America are the problem.”

The Senators grill the Joint Chiefs. Testy! The journalists publish chin-strokers about the way our adversary plays chess, not tiddlywinks. Meanwhile, we’ve skedaddled: We don’t actually want to fight someone who might be serious about fighting back—for God’s sake, man, you could get hurt that way!—but we remain blithely confident that because we have an incredibly powerful military and massive oceans between us and our adversaries, no one would ever dare cross us—because crossing the mighty United States of America would be nuts. Witness our policy in Ukraine: “Let’s try sending a few rifles. What, that wasn’t enough? Let’s form a Pentagon Study Group to think deeply about whether we should send a tank.”

Why doesn’t this ever work? Hell, I don’t know. I don’t have a theory here. It should work, I agree. After all, if the US military hit my camel’s ass with a smart bomb, I’d stop screwing around with the US military. Frankly, all you’d have to do is say, “Knock it off or the USS Eisenhower fries your camel’s ass to crisp” and I’d stop it immediately. What kind of fool would tangle with the USS Eisenhower?

But thinking this way is what’s known in the trade as “mirror imaging.” The assumption that an adversary thinks the way you do is a classic mistake. We’ve repeatedly tested the theory that American enemies, like middle-aged American women, are readily deterred by a minor display of American military force. We have found it wanting.

So here’s Rule Number One for the use of coercive violence: Engage with overwhelming force, fast and hard, or just get the hell out of there before you get our troops killed and yet again teach our adversaries that you can get rid of Americans by patiently harassing them.

If you can think of a single counterexample to this rule in the whole of history of American military engagement, tell me, because I can’t.

“I think we signal resolve pretty well,” John Kirby told assembled reporters on Wednesday. “And as I said the other day, we’ll respond on our own time, on our own schedule, and we’ll do that.”

Could he really think we signal resolve pretty well? I sure hope he doesn’t really think that, because that would be delusional. We’re awfully good at signaling vacillation, ambivalence, indecision, hesitation, and a sincere wish that these problems would just go away, though. If that were the key to success in geopolitics, we’d be sitting pretty.

Rule 2: Do it fast.

If you’re an American president who’s concluded that an American enemy must be clobbered, just do it. Immediately. And for God’s sake, don’t tell everyone a thousand times before you do it.

The American public’s attention span is measured in picoseconds. Our partisan divides are so great and our politicians are so irresponsible that if you haven’t finished clobbering your enemies by the end of your term, your opponent will run on a platform of unconditional surrender. (Same policy, new slogan: “Don’t do stupid shit.” “End the forever wars.” “America First.”)

Now, this may not be how you think things ought to be, nor is there any specially good reason for it to be true. Other countries are able to pursue a strategic objective for more than five minutes. But we are not. Look at the evidence. Don’t confuse what ought to be with what is. This is the way it is. Our domestic politics are as much a hard constraint on our ability to use our military effectively as our order of battle. Grasp this or your military adventure will end the way every other American military adventure does.

By “Do it fast,” I mean, do it fast. It should not require days of meditation and study to respond to the highly foreseeable killing of American troops. Iranian proxies have been lobbing missiles and drones at us pretty much every day for the past three months, scrambling our troops’ brains (and ours, apparently, because we didn’t have plans at the ready in the event this wound up with our troops getting killed).

Why does it matter? Because if you spend a lot of time agonizing and cogitating, you look weak and your enemies gain a psychological advantage. They have time to muddy the whole world’s perception of whatever ensues. Iran has been using this time to insist it’s “not looking for war,” which obviously isn’t quite true; if you launch 160 strikes on American forces, you do want war, you just don’t want the kind where your enemy fights back. Nonetheless, saying “We don’t want war” is the kind of thing that stupid people abroad and at home will find persuasive. Then, when ultimately we do fight back, we’ll be viewed as the aggressors. (Meanwhile Iran will flood TikTok with videos about what the CIA did to Mossadegh and next thing you know your kids will be climbing over the White House fence screaming, “Death to Israel! Death to America!”)

Never underestimate the shortness of the American attention span. I’ve read at least four times this week that we’ve suffered “the first American deaths” since Hamas launched its assault on October 7. It seems we’ve already forgotten that 31 Americans died on October 7. Biden said yesterday that he holds Iran responsible for supplying the weapons that killed our troops, which is fair enough. But if that’s his logic, why didn’t he hold Iran responsible for supplying the weapons that killed so many American citizens on October 7? The same weapons are now being used to hold Americans in captivity in Hamas’s tunnel dungeons. If we wanted to send a message to Iran that we will not stand for the murder of Americans, October 7 was the day to do it. And since we allowed that to go unanswered, why are we so surprised that they did it again?

Rule 3: Hit them where it hurts.

Despotic regimes don’t much care about human life. That’s why they’re despotic. If your “proportionate” response takes out their proxies in Yemen, Tehran will not care. It won’t deter them one bit. Despots care about three things: their money, their military, and their lives. If you want to deter a despot, you must make him believe he’s at risk of losing one or more of these things entirely. Whacking some logistics base in Syria will not move him in the slightest.  

If you’re not hitting them where it hurts because that might upset them and then they might hit back—that’s the meaning of the word “escalatory”—that means you’re not inflicting enough pain on them to deter them. And if you’re not deterring them, why are you doing this?

Rule 4: Don’t give mixed messages.

As in dog training, consistency is key in enemy-management. Neither dogs nor enemies are capable of reading your mind. If you say, “We don’t want a wider conflict” over and over, your enemy will believe you. The problem is they understand it to mean, “We don’t want a conflict, so do whatever you please.”

Please, American presidents. For the love of God. Stop saying, “We don’t want a wider war,” and “We’re seeking to prevent this from escalating.” Don’t talk about how incredibly precise your strikes are going to be. That is anti-deterrence.

You deter by conveying to your enemy these two things:

• You’re more willing to go to war than he is.

• You’re more likely to win.

If you have a military like ours and you successfully convey to your enemy that you’re looking for any excuse to clock him, you’ll have a damned good deterrent. But you need to do both, and the first part must either be true or an exceedingly good bluff. And alas, we can’t bluff our way out of a paper bag.

Rule 5: Win.

Everyone now thinks that the Domino Theory was a tragic error. It wasn’t. Believing that it was a tragic error is itself a tragic error. It wasn’t correct in quite the way the Johnson Administration believed: Asian countries didn’t go communist, one by one, after we left Vietnam. But the Johnson officials were correct to intuit that defeat would bequeath defeat. They were right to fear an American defeat would teach the world not only that it was possible to defeat a superpower, but how to do it; viz., by bleeding us slowly and waiting for our domestic politics to do the rest. (The entire world is now studying the advanced version: Bleed us slowly while waging a hybrid war against us to hasten the process.)

By “win,” I mean an obvious and unambiguous victory, not one of those deals where we shake hands and fly out saying “peace with honor” only to see the Viet Cong or the Taliban or ISIS roll into town on our own Humvees before the last plane pulls up its landing gear. Every one of these humiliations has reinforced a message that we’ve been deeply unwise to impart the world: “We might have a trillion-dollar military, but if you harass us long enough, we’ll leave.”

Rule 6: Be honest.

If you’re not willing to go to war, you have two options left. The first is to do nothing warlike and give your adversary what he wants. The second is to bluff.

Iran wants to kill Americans, kill Jews, kill Ukrainians, kill Sunnis, kill its own citizens, repress women, hang homosexuals, evict us from the Middle East, build a nuclear weapon, destroy the state of Israel, and preside like satisfied seventh-century warlords over the immiserated hellscape of their Greater Persian Empire. Can we live with that?

I’m not asking rhetorically. They’ve made patient progress toward these ends since 1979 and so far, we’ve been living with it. If you ask a hundred American voters about the issues that matter most to them, not one will say, “Iran.” It won’t even be in the top ten. Most of us are prepared to live with it.

If we’re not willing to fight—and we can’t pull off a bluff—then we need to be honest with ourselves. Our best option is to do exactly what the Biden Administration has been trying to do. We should politely ask Iran for a deal in which we pay them to kill us less often and they wait a few years before testing their first nuke. We should agree to leave the Middle East and let them dominate it. Then we should cross our fingers and say, “Que sera, sera.” I don’t personally think this is a great plan, but everyone calls me a warmonger when I say things like that.

The thing about this plan is we have to really do it. If we decide to do this, let’s do it with eyes open. Let’s not pretend Iran doesn’t want to kill Americans, kill Jews, kill Ukrainians, evict us from the Middle East, build a nuclear weapon, destroy the state of Israel, and preside like satisfied seventh-century warlords over the immiserated hellscape of their Greater Persian Empire. That’s intolerably naive and unworthy of adults.

Nor should we pretend that we can somehow urge, bribe, or cajole them out of these ambitions, which are as fundamental to the Iranian regime as liberal democracy is to ours. Biden will no more succeed in ridding them of these goals than they will persuade him to declare Imam Ali the rightful Caliph and drench his sword in the blood of the kufr.

If we decide to acquiesce to their ambitions, we can’t also decide to bluff. They won’t believe us. Bluffing and deal-making work at cross purposes. If we opt for “make a deal,” we need to accept that we’ve got little leverage, be very polite, accept the humiliation, and stop firing missiles at their camels.

Rule 7: Remember the asymmetry.

Iran knows far more about us than we do about them. An open society is an open book. Ours is unusually open and unusually closed in the sense that flow of information between us and the world only goes in one direction. We pump out news of our culture, political life, strategic deliberations, war-making capacity, and morale by the metric tonne, and it quickly spreads to every corner of the globe, where our adversaries pore over it attentively. No comparable volume or quality of information about the world flows in to America, however. Americans in Duluth could be the crew on Gilligan’s Island for all they’re likely to hear of trends in Iranian strategic thought. (We’ve rehearsed the reasons for this here many times. It’s one reason CG came into being.)

Am I saying that villagers nestled in the slopes of the Sahand Mountains in East Azerbaijan pay more mind to our politics than the citizens of Duluth pay to theirs? Absolutely not. The good folk of Duluth probably know more about their Iranian counterparts’ lives than vice-versa. But unlike Iran, the US is a democracy. We can’t go to war without the consent of the citizens of Duluth, and if Duluth believes we’ve no quarrel with Iran, we can’t go to war with Iran.

Tehran is not bound by this constraint. Iran’s leaders know far more about the citizens of Duluth than Duluth knows about Iran’s leaders. Iran’s leaders know full well that Duluth does not want war with Iran.

They know, too, that Americans are far less tolerant of casualties in war than they are. They know it’s an election year. They know our domestic politics are in sub-civil-war chaos. They know our attention is severely attenuated. They know that not since the 1930s have Americans been so gripped by isolationism. They know military recruitment is down. They know that there’s one thing about which Americans agree: We should never again fight a major war in the Middle East. They know that many Americans have decided they don’t love Israel so much after all. They know it’s trivially easy to confuse and boggle our citizens using Russian-style information operations and hybrid war.

They know we’re so politically divided and so badly governed that we can’t send military aid to Ukraine (where they’re a key belligerent), however much it would be in the US interest to do so, and even though Ukrainians are doing the fighting and dying on our behalf. They know, in other words, that we are utterly unwilling to go to war with them—and we’ll tie ourselves in pretzels to avoid it—and if they didn’t know, we keep reminding them, explicitly.

We can deter Iran from killing Americans or we can avoid the risk of a wider war, but we can’t do both. Our “calibrated strikes” only reinforce the message that we aren’t willing to go to war. We can make peace with Iran or we can compel them to stop pursuing their malevolent agenda, but we can’t do both. Of course our efforts to coax Iran back into the nuclear deal have persuaded the regime that we have no will to fight, and that given this, there is no reason for them to stop doing what they’re doing.

Our leaders seem poorly to understand what seems to the rest of us so very obvious about the limits of the US military. Certainly, we have every advantage in firepower, technology, and wealth. Our enemies have a huge compensatory advantages, however, and always will. Aways and by definition, they are despots, because liberal democracies don’t go to war with each other. Despots can do things we can’t. The Kremlin can send wave after wave of bewildered Yakut peasants to be ground into hamburger. The Ayatollahs can use tens of thousands of twelve-year-old boys as minesweepers. Despots can suppress news of any setback and throw anyone who objects in prison. Or shoot them. We can’t do this.

They know this. Don’t tell yourself they don’t. The only one you’re kidding is yourself.

Rule 8: Face reality.

Our leaders are not, perhaps, being entirely honest with themselves about the following:

1. The Iranian behavior that we find objectionable is not incidental to the Iranian regime, but its essence.

2. Because this is so, financial inducements, economic pressure, and pinprick strikes on Iranian proxies will not bend Iran to our will.

3. In the short term, nothing less than the credible threat of massive damage to the things they most care about deters them. But we cannot credibly make this threat because these actions, precisely, are those that incur the risk of a major war.

4. In the long term, nothing short of a regime change war will change the nature of that regime—and it won’t change unless we change it. It’s coup- and revolution-proof. There’s no way to dislodge it short of invasion and occupation, which would be significantly bloodier, costlier, and riskier than the war in Iraq.

5. Nothing would persuade Americans to get near that. This fact obviates any advantage in negotiation we possess owing to the size of our military.

6. This means we face Iran not as a superpower, but as a country only slightly more powerful than Vanuatu. We should comport ourselves accordingly.

7. “Accordingly” means, “as supplicants.” Supplicants can’t afford to go around whacking a bully’s camels in the ass. It irritates them.

8. Because Iran understands the domestic constraints on American presidents very well, we can’t bluff. No American president has the ability credibly to threaten Iran with defeat in war.

9. All of this warmup and “time and place of our choosing” rhetoric is worse than pointless and ineffective. At best it helps us save face, but only to ourselves. The rest of the world sees right through it. (The mouthy opposition politicians screaming for Iranian blood are even more ridiculous: It’s easy to do that when you don’t have to make any real decisions.)

My guess is that one American administration after another has simply been unwilling to accept at least one and probably most of these arguments. These facts are not easy to accept. We—Americans, that is—derive a great deal of satisfaction and pride from being powerful. It’s difficult and painful to think of ourselves as anything less. The idea of supplicating before Iran is nauseating. But if our citizens are not willing to incur the risk of a major war with Iran, this is our only option. In an open society, a president can’t bluff unless his citizens are genuinely eager for war and behaving that way. We are not.

No American president could readily admit to himself that there’s not much he can do about Iran and the threat it poses. To say to the electorate, “I will ask them politely to stop and offer to pay them more” would be political suicide. Americans don’t want to know the truth.

But it’s dangerous when politicians and electorates determine together that they don’t want to know the truth. At least one of them should know it. Right now, the idea that Iran can be induced to behave the way we want at a cost we’re willing to pay has become a folie à millions. It serves only to further to deform our political life and endanger us through incoherent policy.

I’m depressed as hell just writing our options down, so it’s no surprise that American policymakers, presidents, and the public prefer to believe that there must be a better plan. But we really can’t keep living in fantasyland. Our leaders, at least, have an obligation to see things clearly.

Rule 9. It’s not how much you can buy. It’s the price you’re willing to pay.

The idea that if only Biden were “tougher” he could deter Iran is dishonest. The question is not whether Iran can be deterred. It’s whether Iran can be deterred at a cost we’re willing to pay.

Note: It is absolutely true that Biden’s a wimp. It’s also true that if he were tougher, he could have deterred—and could still deter—Russia at a cost we’d be willing to pay. (If we were sane.) But this is because the cost is paid in Ukrainian lives, not ours.

Iran is quite different. This morning, I exchanged emails with my friend Josh Treviño. We’re in full agreement about the futility of Biden’s approach. He wrote:

… the Biden team’s decision-making process is basically animated by a tangle of noninterventionist premises married to calibrated-response technocrats. Which is to say, their reflex is the former when possible (Afghanistan), but when compelled to the latter they go in too small and too hesitant to yield the desired result (Ukraine). You see this playing out with the Yemenis right now: many missed it, but the President himself acknowledged several days back that the US airstrikes are ineffective, and will therefore continue. Therefore expect the following after the Iranian murder of three American soldiers: 

1. There will be US airstrikes across the region, but not in Iran. 

2. The United States will leave Iraq and Syria. 

It’s a grand strategic victory for the Iranians, won on the cheap. They will probably detonate a nuclear weapon by year’s end, and move heavy Iranian units directly into Syria and Lebanon. I’d like to be wrong. 

But I’m probably not. 

I predict the same thing.

He believes, however, that there is an option for deterrence through the use of American military force at a cost we’re willing to pay:

When America directly hits Iran, Iran folds every time. The two major examples are 1988’s Operation Praying Mantis, in which the US Navy sunk almost the entire Iranian surface fleet, and the 2020 assassination of General Soleimani. Those episodes worked—and generated Iranian quiescence—because they demonstrated American escalatory dominance. 

The only way out now is to do something similar. If you want Americans to stop dying and the Red Sea straits opened, the price tag now is probably a Praying-Mantis sized operation that includes a full campaign against the Iranian nuclear facilities. 

This will probably not happen.

I agree, it probably won’t. But this isn’t simply because Biden lacks the guts.

The two examples he offers are very different, and I’m not sure how much we can conclude from them. The fundamental fact of our contemporary relationship with Iran is that since withdrawing from Iraq, and even more so since leaving Afghanistan, the US public has been unwilling to countenance even the words “war with Iran.” Nor is it hard to sympathize with this aversion. No one feels the Iraq War was a great success, after all. But this has left us without the ability credibly to threaten the regime’s existence, which was not true in 1988.

Precisely as we came to view the idea of war with Iran unthinkable, Iran became intolerable. Iran, the victor of the Iraq War, used it as a springboard to expand throughout the region. It grew closer to its longstanding goal of acquiring nuclear weapons. It surrounded Israel with proxy militias. This was the strategic landscape Obama faced. He had been elected by the American people on a mandate to end the war in Iraq, not start a war with Iran. Since he did not have the option of credibly threatening Iran with war, his decision to negotiate—in the hope of delaying the Iranian Bomb and persuading Iran to kill fewer of us—was entirely reasonable.

Critics attacked the JCPOA as “a bad deal.” But the criticism was mostly unfair. This was the only deal on offer, and as such, better than none. When supporters replied that it was the deal or war, they weren’t far off. There was no world in which the Iranian regime would be dissuaded from aims that are the essence of its raison d’être without the use of American violence.

As Syria collapsed, Iran’s deepening alliance with Russia allowed it to begin building a bridge to the Mediterranean and further reinforcing its proxy militias, who gained combat experience in Syria and posed a growing menace to Israel. This was obvious intolerable.

So Americans confronted this dilemma with maturity, faced it stoically, and made the decision to risk war with Iran.

Just kidding. They did no such thing. They made the decision to wildly delude themselves. Donald Trump assured them that he would withdraw from the humiliating nuclear deal and somehow persuade the regime to cease pursuing its core strategic goals. How, he never said. There was never any reason to think this would work, and it didn’t. Trump tore up the symbol of our decision that it was better to allow Iran to win than to go back to war in the Middle East, but had no plan at all to cause Iran to lose. We thus lost even the modest benefits of the deal.

Refusing to be honest with ourselves about the choices on offer or the decisions we were making, we opted for a worst-of-both-worlds policy: We irritated Iran without ingratiating ourselves. This did not slow Iran’s expansion, its encirclement of Israel, or the pace of its nuclear research. Iranians discovered quickly that Trump had no discernible policy beyond withdrawing from the deal. They certainly were not deterred by his policies.

Trump did nothing when Iran struck Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq oil facility, which caused the biggest daily oil supply disruption in history. This was Saudi Arabia’s Pearl Harbor, and the Saudis begged Trump to retaliate. Trump shrugged:

Asked for his response, Trump said “We know very much what happened” but argued that it was “a sign of strength” that he has thus far taken no military action against Iran. “How did going into Iraq work out?” Trump asked.

The decision to ignore such an attack would have been unthinkable under any other presidential administration. Only Trump could have got away with it. Biden would have been pilloried as a coward. Iranians watched Trump with growing conviction that there was no need to fear him. By the time Trump ordered Soleimani’s death, our deterrence had eroded to the point that Iranian proxies were storming our embassy.

It’s hard to say whether the strike on Soleimani really did anything to chasten Iran. It probably had some effect. But as I wrote at the time, there’s a good chance it just left them baffled:

No one but Trump understands why he did this; no one but Trump knows what he’s seeking. Does he hope to re-establish deterrence? To begin a war with Iran? If the latter, to what end—what are our war aims? Does he hope that Iran retaliates in some outrageous way, boosting American support for a larger, costlier conflict? Or does he believe this will shock the regime into caution and quiescence?

What kind of Iranian retaliation would move him to climb further up the escalation ladder? Would any attack on Americans or our allies prompt him to execute his most recent threat to target “52 high-value sites” in Iran?

Is Iran dealing with the Trump who ordered Suleimani whacked, or the Trump who did nothing when Iran struck the Abqaiq oil facility, taking out five percent of the world’s energy production? Are they dealing with the Trump who thinks the region is nothing but “sand and death” and who wants to withdraw American forces from it as quickly as possible, with no concern for the consequences? With the Trump who has for the past three years allowed US deterrence to erode to the point that Suleimani sincerely thought we’d stand by passively as his proxies stormed our embassy? Or with the Trump who retaliated for the death of an American by killing 25 PMUs in in one strike, droned Suleimani, and sent the 82nd Airborne to Kuwait? Are they dealing with the Trump who says, as he did two days ago, that he doesn’t seek Iranian regime change, or the Trump who just changed the regime? Is he the Trump who says, “We did not take action last night to start a war,” or the Trump who took action to start a war?

I don’t know—and neither do you.

The claim that the strike ensured Iranian quiescence is not true. It didn’t touch off a wider war, that much is correct. But five days later, Iran attacked the al-Asad airbase in Iraq, injuring 109 American troops. It was not a minor and face-saving attack, as it was initially portrayed:

… Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, predicted that Iran’s intent was to kill Americans on January 8, and later disclosed Iran’s missiles were lethal 1,000- to 2,000-pound munitions. “These things have bursting radiuses of 50 to 100 feet, and that’s just the shrapnel in the actual blast. These are very, very significant, serious weapons,” Milley said Jan 30. “And you know, if you’re within a certain range of that thing, there’s no helmet or anything else that’s going to save you,” Milley added.

By my lights, that’s not a deterred Iran.

Operation Praying Mantis is another story. That did indeed change Iranian behavior without precipitating an all-out war. But Iran in 1988 was not what it is today. By the end of the Iran-Iraq War, the Iranian military was so hollowed-out and shellshocked that even had they wanted to strike back, they hadn’t much to do it with.

Iran is not only stronger now, it has proxies throughout the region. It almost certainly has sleeper cells throughout the West. If it wishes to respond by creating absolute mayhem, it can. That’s why it has those proxy militias and sleeper cells in the first place—to deter us. We can’t assume it will behave the way it did in 1988.

It might, of course. But if we mean to impress upon Iran that we’re willing to climb further up the escalation ladder than they are, we need to accept and prepare for the possibility that they will respond by scrambling up that latter faster than we expect.

Like the Kremlin, Tehran may well have convinced itself that we’re only a few blows away from collapse. They certainly didn’t think this in 1988. They may be willing to test their theory. If we’re not prepared to discover this—and if we haven’t thought through the possibility that all of our adversaries, from Russia to North Korea, might see this as a tempting time to pile on—we’d be unwise to say, “Let’s him them directly, because when America directly hits Iran, Iran folds every time.”

But we would not be unwise to say, “Let’s him them directly, because that’s the only way we’ll ever get them to stop, and if they don’t stop, we’ll face an Iran we can no longer even hope to stop.” Let’s just realize that if we do that, there’s a very real possibility of another major war in the Middle East.

I wish I could think of an easier way to solve this problem. But there isn’t one.

Postscript: I also wrote this after Trump killed Soleimani. I reproduce below a few points that are still worth noting:

Neither the JCPOA nor Trump’s sanctions halted Iranian expansion. Under Obama and Trump, the size and capability of Iran’s proxies—foreign forces directed by the IRGC-QF—grew, as did Iran’s ability to move fighters and material from one theater to another.

Neither Obama’s palliation nor Trump’s sanctions diminished Iran’s involvement in the war in Yemen. Neither dissuaded Iran from providing ballistic missiles to the Houthis (which they used against the Saudis). …

Neither Obama’s diplomacy nor Trump’s anti-diplomacy diminished Iran’s escalating conflict with Israel in Syria. Neither put a damper on the steady growth of Shia militias in Iraq. Neither diminished the pace of Iran’s targeted assassinations, nor of its cyberattacks. Over both presidencies, Iran’s partners improved their missile and drone capabilities—with the aid of the IRGC-QF, supervised by the departed and unlamented Soleimani.

The war in Syria, primarily, permitted Iran’s expansion. This coincided with Obama’s presidency. By 2014, Lebanese Hezbollah had deployed its fighters to Syria. (Under Obama.) Iran trained, equipped, and funded Shia militias from the entire region to support Assad. (Under Obama.)

Today—despite the sanctions—Iran supports Hezbollah, which it has equipped, under both Obama and Trump, with a massive range of weapons. They may even have given them chemical weapons. Hezbollah has become more, not less, involved in Lebanese politics since the 2018 parliamentary elections. It has increased, not decreased, its influence on the government.

Iran’s influence along the Red Sea grew under both Obama and Trump. In 2016—that is to say, right in between maximum appeasement and maximum pressure—Iran began sending the Houthis anti-tank guided missiles, sea mines, aerial drones, Katyushas, MANPADS, explosives, ballistic missiles, unmanned explosive boats, radar systems, and mining equipment—with which they’ve threatened shipping near the Bab el Mandeb and attacked Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Iran has helped its Shia militias in Iraq to build their own missiles. They’ve built missile factories north of Karbala and east of Baghdad. The sanctions have barely dimmed Iran’s eagerness to proliferate missiles, missile technology, and missile parts, and why would they? The sanctions don’t affect the regime, just the people.

Under Obama—and then Trump—Iran organized and funded more than 100,000 Shia fighters in Syria. Iran (Soleimani, specifically) planned and executed the 2016 operation to retake Aleppo, working closely with Assad and Russia. Under Obama— and then Trump—Iran funded the Ridha Forces, the Companies of the Islamic Resistance in Syria, the Baqir Brigade. They trained thousands of fighters and provided them with advanced weapons, sophisticated cyber capabilities, and a massive number of recruits.

Iran—under Obama—organized 15,000 Afghan militants and deployed them to Aleppo, Daraa, Damascus, Hama, Homs, Latakia, Palmyra, and Dayr az Zawr. They did the same thing with their Pakistani brigade and their Bahraini fighters. (They also tried to overthrow the Bahraini government. Several times.) Meanwhile the grew their operations in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Iran did all of this in a tactical alliance with Russia, and did most of this under Obama. They didn’t do this because of the JCPOA. They did it because the Syrian and Iraqi wars made it possible. To the extent Obama is responsible, it’s because he declined to intervene in Syria. Trump doubled down on that decision. If you deplore one but not the other, partisanship has taken over your frontal lobe.

What of the money Obama returned to Iran or the sanctions Trump has imposed? In the past decade, Iran has spent nearly US$140 billion on its military ambitions. The money we returned, about US$1.8 billion, was a drop in the bucket—nowhere near enough to fund an expansion like that. Anyone who says it was is innumerate.

Likewise, the sanctions haven’t made much of a difference. Iran has cut its military budget, no doubt in response to the financial hardship we’ve imposed. But the budget was so large to begin with that the cuts barely affect its ability to project power—it can still do a massive amount of damage, if it wishes, and that’s the only metric worth measuring.

By 2016—before Trump’s inauguration—J. Matthew McKinnis testified before the Senate,

The IRI has significantly expanded the size and complexity of its proxy force in the past five years [NB: Under Obama], due primarily to the wars in Syria and Iraq. …

The IRI continues to invest in training and arming its proxies and partners with increasingly advanced equipment, with its most trusted groups receiving the best weaponry. Lebanese Hezbollah has acquired unmanned aerial vehicles and an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 rockets and missiles through Iranian assistance, including advanced air-to-ground and ground-to-sea missiles. The IRI’s Iraqi proxies employed the QFs’ signature improvised explosive device, the explosively formed projectiles against coalition forces in the last decade. Yemen’s al Houthis, in contrast, have received mostly small arms from Hezbollah or the IRGC, although there are indications the movement has gained some Iranian rocket technology.

Perhaps more important than weapons are the tremendous strides the IRGC has made in the past five years advancing their proxies’ deployability, interoperability, and capacity to conduct unconventional warfare. The corps has effectively moved its Iraqi, Afghan, and Pakistani proxies into and out of the Syrian theater as requirements demand. In addition to building the NDF and coordinating with Lebanese Hezbollah, Russian, and Syrian government operations, the IRGC, along with some Artesh special forces units, has also begun rotating cadre of its brigade-level officers to Syria to train and lead the Shia militias in their counterinsurgency campaign. The IRI is in effect turning the axis of resistance into a region-wide resistance army. Recent estimates indicate more than a quarter million personnel are potentially responsive to IRGC direction.

All of this occurred under Obama. These proxy groups are an ideological extension of the Islamic Republic; they proclaim their ultimate allegiance to the Supreme Leader. They’re financially dependent upon the Quds force. They are, obviously, a threat to Israel, Jordan, and the GCC states; if we wish to remain a global power, they’re a threat to us.

But it’s no better under Trump. Despite the sanctions, Iran continues to strengthen and enlarge the whole gamut of Shia militias in Iraq the Badr Organization, Kata’ib Hezbollah (who killed a US contractor, leading to the mess we’re in), and Asaib Ahl al- Haq. They support, fund, and train the Afghan Liwa Fatemiyoun, the Pakistan, Liwa Zainabyoun; they support Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. They’re building routes to the Mediterranean through Iraq’s Kurdish region, the Iraqi city of Sinjar, and northeastern Syria cities like al-Hasakah into Lebanon. They’re building a southern route to Lebanon through al-Walid in Iraq, al-Tanf in Syria, and Damascus.

“These corridors,” notes Center for Strategic and International Studies, “resemble the Royal Road, the ancient land bridge built by Persian King Darius the Great in the fifth century BC.”

This might suggest something about how likely it is that Iran can be deterred by sanctions or diplomacy.

Note: As usual, I was too tired to spot typos when I sent this to subscribers. I’ve corrected this version. The original version contained some significant typos, including a missing “not,” which resulted in a sentence that said the opposite of what I meant. Also, I’d accidentally deleted an introductory sentence. (It was the one about training dogs.) Readers must have wondered, when they read the next sentence, how dogs had entered the scene. I’ve added it back.

Reading from the Atlantic Council:

• William F. Wechsler: The US failed in believing it was managing Iran and its proxies

• Kimberly Donovan: Target the financial institutions and jurisdictions enabling Iran’s financial activity

• Jonathan Panikoff: It’s time to take on the threat from Iran—not just its proxies

• Matt Kroenig: The US could hit back against Iran’s navy, top leadership, or nuclear program

• Nathan Sales: Stop self-deterring and take the gloves off with Iran

• Abbas Kadhim: The attack came as the US and Iraq are negotiating on US troop presence

• Qutaiba Idlbi: The US should deliver a strategic blow to Iran’s capabilities in eastern Syria

• Thomas S. Warrick: Iran doesn’t think of deterrence the same way the US does

• Daniel E. Mouton: The US needs to step up its UAV defenses and hold Iran accountable

• Matthew Zais: This attack is the result of the United States’ failed ‘one-Iraq’ policy

• R. Clarke Cooper: Any response must be severe and credible—for the sake of the US and its Jordanian partners

• Alex Plitsas: The US must thread the needle by responding forcefully without starting a wider war

• Ömer Özkizilcik: The US doesn’t have a local partner in Syria that can do its bidding against Iran or Russia

On the night of December 1, over the course of about four hours, the president of the United States posted more than 160 times on Truth Social—a rate of once per minute; he sometimes posted the same thing twice. Almost all of these posts involved strange fantasies, lunatic conspiracy theories, violent imprecations against immigrants, calls for the prosecution of his opponents, and memories of the past—particularly, memories of having been flattered. A sample:

Several days ago, in response to the news that a beloved American cultural figure and his wife had been brutally murdered, the president of the United States had this to say:1

If Trump were any other 79-year-old man, his family would be escorting him to a medical clinic, where his presentation would trigger a flurry of follow-up tests. This behavior is not normal, and it is not even normal for Trump.

The president has always been notable for his disinhibition. He has always exhibited the symptoms of an extremely severe personality disorder.2 But what we’re seeing now is something else. Never a man known for his excellent impulse control, his inappropriate outbursts have become so common that journalists only bother reporting the most bizarre. (“Quiet, piggy!”) His inappropriate comments and behaviors are increasing in frequency and weirdness.

Most significantly, they’re no longer calibrated to appeal to his base. He has lost his sense of his audience. Even his devoted fans on Truth Social are noticing that his insults are no longer transgressive and hilarious, but weird and creepy:

His affect is inappropriate. He oscillates from apathy to disinhibition to explosive rage to listlessness. He looks unwell. He is bloated, unkempt, and often confused.

He wanders in circles. On some days, half his face droops. On others, his right leg drags. He falls asleep in public daily. He uses profanity in public. He tells interminable anecdotes—one about French fries wanders through water pressure, hair-washing, McDonald’s drive-throughs, dishwasher restrictions, unmentionable bathroom fixtures, and the metaphysics of electoral destiny without ever returning to its point, if ever it had one. Even friendly journalists struggle to summarize Trump’s remarks.

The New York Times approached this elliptically a few weeks ago in an article titled, “Shorter days, signs of fatigue: Trump faces realities of aging in office.” Noting that the president now has fewer events on his schedule—and growingly confines his public appearances to the hours between noon and 5 pm—they suggested that the president’s “battery,” as they decided to call his mind, “shows signs of wear.”

… During an Oval Office event that began around noon on November 6, Mr. Trump sat behind his desk for about 20 minutes as executives standing around him talked about weight-loss drugs. At one point, Mr. Trump’s eyelids drooped until his eyes were almost closed, and he appeared to doze on and off for several seconds. At another point, he opened his eyes and looked toward a line of journalists watching him. He stood up only after a guest who was standing near him fainted and collapsed.

At news conferences, foreign correspondents are exchanging glances of a kind once reserved for Kremlin-watchers in the late Brezhnev era. Intelligence services around the world are filing urgent cables: NORTH AMERICAN PRINCIPAL—IRREGULAR LINGUISTIC DETERIORATION.

Only Americans are expected to gaze upon a man who now speaks in sprawling, fugue-like anecdotes about “great wrists” and “water coming down from heaven” and nod along, as though this were a perfectly normal way for a statesman to communicate.

We have now watched two elderly presidents, one after the other, go gaga before our eyes. In both instances, the president’s entourage has insisted strenuously that our eyes are lying. In both instances, the media has meekly accepted that mentioning this in any but the most oblique way would be gauche.

The taboo against precisely describing the president’s speech and behavior and then accurately telling the public what this suggests is policed most strictly by the prestige media, where the fear of appearing unseemly or unserious has curdled into a refusal to apply the analytical tools journalists routinely deploy everywhere else. It has been left to those on the fringes of the Internet—Substack, podcasters, social media, comment sections—to say the obvious.

This pattern of failure in the media isn’t an accident. At elite outlets, “seriousness” has come to mean a particular tone; this is understood as an injunction against saying the thing that would sound unspeakable if said plainly. The New York Times’ editors instinctively sense that writing precisely about the president’s cognition would be tabloid journalism, no matter how carefully and soberly it’s done. This is a category error. They’re confusing clinical description with sensationalism, because the topic itself feels lurid. The result is euphemism—“meandering,” “freewheeling,” “discursive”—without analysis. They will say that the president rambled; they will not describe how or why the rambling matters. Gravity, they’ve decided, consists in understatement, even when understatement amounts to lying, and lying about a matter of utmost urgency, at that.

The press corps is haunted by two ghosts: the Goldwater debacle, which they have half-remembered and over-learned, and the fear that discussion of Trump’s mental state will be used as a weapon against them. We will not be seen as armchair psychiatrists. We will not be accused of delegitimizing an elected president. They’re drawing the line in the wrong place. Rather than avoiding diagnosis while preserving description, they avoid both. This has produced a vacuum that is filled, inevitably, by those with fewer scruples and worse methods. One senses, too, a deeper, almost anthropological taboo: We can talk about the president’s corruption, cruelty, ideology, and even his madness, in a metaphorical sense—but no one can mention his neurological decline. The prestige media enforces a kind of secular blasphemy law: Thou shalt not describe the emperor’s mind.

The task of saying that the president is losing his marbles has thus been taken up by low-rent conspiracy theorists. No surprise. When legitimate institutions refuse to apply accurate language to an obvious phenomenon, illegitimate ones rush in. The result is the worsening of an already severe epistemic crisis. The truth becomes associated with unserious people, and seriousness becomes associated with evasion.

This situation is all the more extraordinary because our press corps has spent the past year flagellating itself for overlooking Biden’s deterioration:

Perhaps you’ll remember this:

TAPPER: Beginning in fall of 2023, our reporting shows, based on the interviews of over 200 people, that there were two Bidens: There was a functioning Biden and non-functioning Biden. And that goes back to 2019. But he was almost always functioning Biden. But beginning in 2023, the ratio of that functioning and non-functioning starts to change dramatically and also non-functioning Biden is getting worse. …

DETROW: When you say “non-functioning,” what’s the best way to define that?

TAPPER: I would describe it as unable to come up with the names of top advisers or close friends. I would say, “Look, we’re all human. We all forget names. We all lose our train of thought.” We all witness that in people who are aging. We’re talking about to the point of you not being able to have a conversation. You are not able to come up with data, information, knowledge, names that you should have at the ready.

Jake Tapper describes the threshold for concern quite precisely here. So let’s use his criteria. Is Trump able to come up with data, information, knowledge, names that he should have at the ready?

Consider the video below. As you do, pay attention to the effort Trump is making to conceal his inability to remember the names of world leaders. He recently received the Syrian president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, in the White House, but he can’t remember his name. He can’t remember the name of the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, either. He may well have spoken to Albanese to offer his condolences earlier in the day.

He has to read from his notes to remember the names of his grandchildren. He says “three” US servicemen, not two, were killed in Syria. He was almost certainly briefed on that attack earlier in the day. When terrorists kill US servicemen, the president is informed. He doesn’t remember the name of the Australian man, Ahmet al-Ahmed, who tackled the terrorist on Bondi Beach. He would have been briefed on that earlier in the day, too. He says that the man tackled the shooter “frontally.” If you’ve seen the video, you know that he tackled him from behind.

Some viewers might think he looks okay because they’re implicitly comparing him to Biden. In the last years of his presidency, Biden’s speech was quiet or inaudible, with slow retrieval, a heavy reliance on filler words, and stuttering. Physically, Biden appeared frail and hesitant. Trump’s symptoms are quite different. His speech is fluent but disinhibited, emotionally amplified, and verbose; it’s characterized by emptiness and semantic erosion. If Biden looked weak, Trump looks strong—he retains a large and imposing physical presence.

Trump’s lunatic energy masks the underlying pathology, but the pathology is obvious if you examine the structure of his speech, as opposed to its volume. A neurologist who examined this patient would ask:

• Can he hold an idea in mind long enough to develop it, or does it fragment into digressions?

• Do his sentences follow logically, or are there abrupt, unmotivated shifts?

• Are his sentences grammatically intact, or do we see agrammatism (missing verbs, broken constructions)?

• Does he use specific nouns and verbs, or vague placeholders (“thing,” “great,” “that”) and other fillers?

• Does he recognize when he’s gone off track or become incomprehensible?

• Does he appreciate what the listener needs to know and what’s extraneous?

A transcript will help you to see the problem clearly:3

… Rich, Vince is unbelievable on policy. And we have a policy thing that’s gonna be unbelievable happening. Should I announce it or should I keep it quiet? I put Vince in charge of the triumphal arch [he pronounces this “ark”]. We’re building an arc like the Arc de Triomphe. And we’re building it, uh, by the Arlington Bridge, the Arlington Cemetery, uh, opposite the Lincoln Memorial. You could say Jefferson, Washington, everything because they’re all right there.

And it’s something that is so special. Uh, it will be like the one in, in Paris, but to be honest with you, it blows it away. Blows it away in every way. And Vince came in one day and his eyes were teaming [sic]. I mean, he couldn’t believe how beautiful. It was ki— he saw it and he wanted to do that. That’s your primary thing.

There is nothing that can compete with that. It’s the only city in the world that’s of great importance that doesn’t have a triumphal arch [“ark”]. You know what that is. And, uh, this one is gonna blow them all away. The one that people know mostly is the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France. And, uh, we’re gonna top it by, I think, a lot.

The only thing they have is history. You know, 1860s, something, I always say the one thing you can’t compete with, but eventually we’ll have that history too. But we’re gonna have something that, uh, li—the likes of which has, has never been done before. And it’s been waiting for 200 years, literally.

Uh, I think the Civil War got in the way of it. You know, the, uh, opening, they actually have the four, they have four columns, four small columns with the eagles on top. And they have the circle, you know, before on the other side from the Lincoln. And it’s, uh, it’s so unbelievable. It’s so unbelievable.

It’s been waiting for hundreds of years, and they were going to build on it a couple of times. It never happened. But it’s a circle that’s been waiting to have the arc built on it. And I think we’re very far along. I think you might wanna show it to the National Trust, if you’d like. You might wanna show it to a couple of people, take a look at it, because I’ve always gotten really along well with the National Trust.

So take a look and show it to them, and start, and maybe they give you some good ideas too, okay? But I’m proud of you, and I’m really especially proud of the job you’ve done. From day one, he and his partner, Ross, have been, uh, writing really great speeches. And I just wish I stuck with them a little bit more often.

But we, uh, we go on and off those speeches, right? And I think ultimately that’s the best combination, right? So one of the greatest in the world, the two of those guys, the greatest. Then we have a man who, to me, this is the most interesting story. Boy, do you look like Ivanka? Has anyone ever told you that?

I’m looking, I’m saying, “Is that Ivan—” Could you just turn around for the camera? Does she look, does she look like Ivanka? It’s the most unbelievable thing. Uh, so I wouldn’t, I didn’t wanna take a chance. I say, “Is that Ivanka?” You look just like Ivanka, which is a great compliment, actually.

So we have a doctor in the White House named Dr. James Jones. Can I tell the story?

Jones: Please, sir.

Trump: And he’s a great doctor, highly respected by so many people. He’s helped so many people. I’ve had people come to the White House and they were so sick. I’ve had people come to the White House along with your partner. You gotta, well, you have a lot of partners. You have Walter Reed Medical Center, which I think is the best in the world. They’ve seen things that nobody wants to see, right?

Jones: Yes, sir.

Trump: They have, uh, doctors have told me, “If you can get out of here, you’ve seen it all.” And that’s why they produce some of the best doctors in the world. Well, Dr. James Jones is a great doctor. He was the White House doctor during the Obama administration and during the Trump administration. Uh, and I guess during a little bit of, uh, maybe, no, those two? ‘Cause we had, we had somebody else named Doc Ronnie who actually got a glimpse of Obama in there too.

Is that Doc Ronnie back there? No. Doc Ronnie, uh, did all three. And he said Trump is in the best health of all. He had, he had Bush, he had Obama, he had Trump. He, he didn’t have Biden. He didn’t have Biden. But Dr. James went on a trip to Peru with the two Obama girls. They wanted to go hiking in, in, uh, Peru.

Uh, was it Peru? In, uh, Peru. And it’s known for being a rather rough place in terms of physical creatures crawling around. 28,000 people die a year from a snake bite, a certain snake. It’s a viper, right? It’s said to be the most poisonous snake in the world. And he made a comment and somebody else told him that’s very dangerous in that area to go hiking.

And the guide said, “Oh, don’t worry, we never see that snake. It’s over-exaggerated.” Even though 27, 28,000 people a year die. That’s not over-exaggerated. Because when they lift the rice and the this and the that out of the water, they get hit. And if you get hit, it’s automatic death. …

Note that no narrative thread is ever completed. He begins the story of the triumphal arch, restarts it multiple times, contradicts it, and ornaments it, but he never reaches an obvious endpoint. Often he thinks he’s finished—the cadence suggests closure even when none has occurred. That’s significant.

Don’t dismiss this as the typical digressive speech of an elderly windbag. It’s not. He’s displaying a systematic failure to close cognitive loops. He’s unable to sustain the internal scaffolding required to finish a single one of his thoughts. Similarly, he never elaborates on a point, he just moves in tight semantic circles. When he talks about the triumphal arch, “It’s unbelievable.” “It blows it away.” “It’s so special.” “Nothing can compete with that.” “It’s the only city … ” “It’s been waiting 200 years.” “It’s so unbelievable.” After the first few sentences, he adds no new information. This is emotional amplification without conceptual enrichment—verbosity without complexity. His speech is informationally impoverished. This is true, now, whenever he goes off the teleprompter.

Notice his over-reliance on deictic placeholders—words and expressions whose meaning is wholly dependent on the context. For example, “That’s your primary thing,” “You know what that is,” “It’s the circle, you know,” “They lift the rice and the this and the that,” “It was ki— he saw it and he wanted to do that.” In spoken language, deixis is normal. Here, it’s doing all the work. The listener is repeatedly asked to supply meaning that the speaker doesn’t provide (because he can’t). This offers the illusion of shared understanding, but it outsources the task of making the speech coherent to the audience.

Pay attention, too, to the role of paratactic constructions in his speech—clauses placed side by side, with no logical relationship or hierarchy. “You could say Jefferson, Washington, everything because they’re all right there.” That sentence is syntactically intact, but semantically unstructured. There’s no organizing principle—no explanation of relevance, scale, or category. Proper nouns are piled rather than ordered. The result is associative chaining, not an argument.

The sudden pivot to the woman who “looks like Ivanka” is especially notable. That isn’t a planned aside. It interrupts the speech, overrides the ostensible topic, and demands the audience’s participation (“turn around for the camera”). The interruption is driven by salience to the speaker alone, not communicative relevance. This kind of intrusion reflects impaired inhibitory control. He’s unable to suppress his response to an internally salient stimulus, even when it’s socially inappropriate.

There are multiple moments of chronological instability, too. The Arc de Triomphe is vaguely placed in “the 1860s, something.” “Eventually we’ll have that history too.” The Civil War “got in the way” of an imagined architectural plan that is otherwise undefined. These aren’t factual errors, per se, but a kind of temporal blurring, where time functions as a mood, not a dimension.

Note, too, that he frequently begins phrases, realizes he’s on the wrong track, interrupts himself, then fails to repair the phrase. “It was ki— he saw it …” “We had, we had somebody else named Doc Ronnie …” “During a little bit of, uh, maybe, no … ” In healthy speech, self-interruption is followed by repair—a clarification. Here, it leads to semantic abandonment.

Perhaps most importantly, his speech shows no evidence of a stable mental model of the listener. He assumes the audience knows what “that” is, and that listeners will find the same things salient, track jumps without signposting, and tolerate radical topic shifts. This is a breakdown in pragmatic alignment: The speaker is no longer reliably calibrating what the listener needs in order to follow.

Natural human speech, when transcribed, always looks chaotic. But Trump’s speech is chaotic in a particular way. Neurologists see speech like this in consultation rooms all the time. When these patterns present in the spontaneous speech of a 79-year-old, they’re clinically meaningful.4

And no, he did not always sound like this. Not at all. Watch the video below of the 33-year-old Trump. This is his baseline. Then, as now, he was a liar, a manipulator, and a determined enemy of beloved historic buildings. But his speech below does not suggest neurological degeneration. His topic maintenance is fine. His responses to questions are coherent and relevant. His syntax is normal. He’s not using filler words. He doesn’t go off track, so he doesn’t need to correct himself. Nothing he says is obviously extraneous:

I’m not making a diagnosis, I should stress. Of course I’m not. I don’t know what’s wrong with him. But I do know that disordered speech of this kind is significant, and even more significant when it deviates so greatly from the baseline. It’s even more significant in a man of his age. And it is all the more significant given his family history—his father developed dementia in his eighties; the risk is hereditary—and his overall health, which doesn’t look great.5

On some days, Trump seems fine. That’s not evidence that he’s fine. Cognitive decline doesn’t present as a steady, linear deterioration, nor does it manifest identically from day to day. Fluctuation is typical. He may appear lucid, energetic, and even persuasive at certain moments, particularly in familiar settings or when operating on well-rehearsed material. But a single coherent appearance doesn’t negate a broader pattern of decline. Clinicians don’t look for isolated good days. They look for trends—increasing disorganization, reduced narrative control, affective instability, and the erosion of executive function. It’s the trajectory that matters, not the snapshot. And Trump’s trajectory is bad.

The president’s syntax would be disturbing enough in isolation. But we also have a peculiar pattern of medical disclosure. Last April, the president had a full physical exam at Walter Reed. In a memo published on the White House website, his physician, Sean Barbabella, declared him “fully fit,” and in “excellent health.” Trump’s cardiac age, he wrote, was younger than his chronological age.

Trump was given a basic cognitive screen at that exam:

Neurological: A comprehensive neurological examination revealed no abnormalities in his mental status, cranial nerves, motor and sensory function, reflexes, gait, and balance. Cognitive function, assessed using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), was normal with a score of 30 out of 30

In October, the president returned to Walter Reed for what he called a “semiannual” physical and his press secretary called a “routine yearly checkup,” his second in six months. Barbabella noted, in his written report, that this exam included “advanced imaging,” but he didn’t specify what this entailed.

Trump then told reporters he’d undergone an MRI, calling it “very standard,” and boasting that a doctor said it was “the best result he has ever seen.” When asked what part of his body had been scanned, he replied that he had “no idea.” The White House confirmed that “advanced imaging” was involved, but repeatedly declined to say what was imaged or why, insisting only that all consulted agreed that the president was in “exceptional health.”

But MRIs are not part of “very standard” physicals. They’re ordered when there’s a specific concern: new neurological symptoms, a suspected stroke, spinal pathology, cardiac issues. (A number of news outlets did cite physicians who pointed this out: “MRIs aren’t typically included in routine physicals,” noted Reuters.)

On Thanksgiving Day, Trump called Governor Tim Walz a “retard.” Walz took to national television to say, correctly, that this wasn’t normal behavior. He called on Trump to release the results of his MRI. Barbabella, in response, issued another memo. The MRI, he wrote, had been performed because “men in his age group benefit from a thorough evaluation of cardiovascular and abdominal health.”

“This level of detailed assessment is standard for an executive physical at President Trump’s age,” Barbabella wrote.

But it isn’t. Scientific American cited a host of specialists who “expressed doubt” about the suggestion that MRI screening is “typical preventive care.”

“No, it is certainly not standard medical practice to perform screening MRIs of the heart and abdomen,” says radiologist and MRI expert Thomas Kwee … Such imaging is typically only performed in the case of underlying disease, he says, or if there is suspicion of an underlying disease based on the patient’s medical history and physical examination. …

… Medpage Today’s editor in chief, physician Jeremy Faust, [told] CNN on Monday that “there’s really no such thing as routine prevention using an MRI.” Faust on Tuesday told Scientific American that the White House memo reference to “advanced imaging” left open questions as to exactly what tests Trump underwent. It could even possibly refer to a CT scan, for example, which is different than MRI. “If we knew exactly what imaging he received, it would give us a better idea of what conditions they are worried about,” Faust says.

In 2018, Trump declared that he’d “aced” the MoCA, a 10-minute screen used to detect mild cognitive impairment. In 2020, he went on Fox News to recount, with evident pride, his ability to remember the sequence “person, woman, man, camera, TV.” (The test was either administered incorrectly or he flunked it, for what it’s worth. The MoCA asks subjects to recall five unrelated words. “Woman” and “man” would not both be on the test.)

Last October, he declared he’d taken a very hard “aptitude test” at Walter Reed. This was almost certainly another MoCA. He challenged younger members of Congress to take it, too:

[We] have a great group of people, which they don’t. They have Jasmine Crocket, a low-IQ person. [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] is low IQ. … Have her pass, like, the exams that I decided to take when I was at Walter Reed. Those are really hard, they’re really aptitude tests, I guess, in a certain way. I don’t think Jasmine—the first couple of questions are easy, a tiger, an elephant, a giraffe, you know. When you get up to about five or six, and then when you get up to ten and twenty and twenty-five, they couldn’t come close to answering any of those questions.

Trump’s conflation of a cognitive screen with an aptitude test is itself evidence of impaired cognition. You, presumably, glanced at it and saw instantly that it was not an aptitude test, but a test of very basic cognitive function. The president didn’t. He described the test as “very hard.” If he truly found it tough to figure out what a banana and an orange have in common, do you think he’s able to handle the cognitive demands of the presidency?

It’s also relevant—though not decisive—that a close family member has been sounding the alarm. Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, has said that her uncle looks and sounds “exactly” like her grandfather, Fred Trump, did when his mind began to go. In a clinical setting, testimony like this would be treated with caution, especially given her public estrangement from Trump. But it wouldn’t be dismissed. Family members are often the first to notice changes in personality, affect, impulse control, and narrative coherence, precisely because they can compare current behavior not only to abstract norms, but to a lifetime of prior functioning. What a relative says, even an estranged relative, doesn’t establish a diagnosis, but it ordinarily forms part of the evidentiary picture.

We don’t know what the MRI at Walter Reed showed, or whether neurologists have already raised concerns and been overruled. We don’t know whether we’re seeing a neurodegenerative process, a vascular burden, a psychiatric overlay, or a highly idiosyncratic blend of age and personality mimicking a neurodegenerative disease. We do know that a political system that refuses to discuss this honestly is not a healthy one.

On the basis of what we do know, it is reasonable to suspect that once again, a coverup is in progress, and once again, the extent of a president’s incapacity is being concealed from the public.

To raise these points is to invite the objection that I’m not a doctor and I haven’t examined him personally. True. But so what? I’m not offering him medical care. The relevant medical literature isn’t sacred scripture interpretable only by sages who have passed through a secret initiation and emerged bearing the stethoscope of true revelation. It’s a body of publicly available knowledge, written in ordinary language. Medicine isn’t necromancy, and neurology isn’t a mystery cult. The literature exists precisely so that observable phenomena can be compared with known patterns by anyone willing to look.

When journalists refuse to consult this literature—or at the very least, to call a few neurologists to ask if they’ve noticed Trump’s symptoms, then relay their answers with a bright “experts say!”—it’s not because they’re epistemically modest. It’s because they’re ruthlessly determined not to see what’s right in front of their eyes.

No one needs to personally examine Trump to see that something is wrong. It is a mainstream idea in neurology and neuropsychology that discourse structure—how someone tells a story—is a highly sensitive window into cognitive change. In diseases like Alzheimers, for example, subtle deterioration in speech can be detected years before diagnosis, as famously shown in this study comparing the press conferences of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush:

… President Reagan showed a significant reduction in the number of unique words over time and a significant increase in conversational fillers and non-specific nouns over time. There was no significant trend in these features for President Bush.

You don’t need a medical degree to recognize speech patterns characteristic of various dementias. Listen for a growing reliance on fillers—words like “well,” “so,” “basically,” “actually,” “literally,” “um,” “ah.” (Biden relied so heavily on these in the later years of his presidency that listening to him was unendurable.) Listen for non-specific nouns—roughly, any pronoun or noun that contains “thing,” like something or anything. Listen for a narrowing vocabulary, lexical repetition, and diminished word specificity.

“Imageability” refers to the ease with which a word gives rise to a mental image. Patients with dementia rely heavily upon low-imageability verbs, like get, give, go, and have. Listen for those. In Alzheimer’s, the first detectable linguistic impairment is typically anomia—forgetting the names of everyday objects. In the early stages, patients have difficulty with speech comprehension as well as production. The next signs are circumlocution, lack of content, and paraphasias, where words are jumbled or meaningless.

Paraphasias are significant. Trump’s speech is now full of them. In semantic paraphasias, words are confused—a patient might say “foot” when he means “shoe.” In phonemic paraphasias, words are replaced by nonwords that preserve elements of the original—“Venezuero” for Venezuela, say.6 John Gartner, a psychologist and former professor at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School, has pointed out Trump’s phonemic and semantic paraphasias in many outlets, and on his own podcast. Here’s a sample of them:

Sometimes, the president can’t form words at all, and retreats to making sounds: “Buh … bluh-ub-bll … ” Often, his speech is nonsensical:

Nobody explain to me how allowing millions of people from places unknown, from countries unknown, who don’t speak languages—we have languages coming into our country, we have nobody that even speaks those languages. They are truly foreign languages. Nobody speaks them

Journalists are prone to calling these paraphasias “gaffes.” Or they laugh, as if the garbled sounds signified Trump’s vulgarity or his ignorance, not illness. This is an abdication of responsibility. By treating this lightly, they’re giving Trump’s Cabinet permission to deny what they’re seeing. (And they’re seeing it, trust me.)

No one in a position to do something about this wants to see it. For Congress, the responsible course of action is to insist upon appropriate medical testing and full transparency about the results. If the president has had an MRI, the public should be told which organ was imaged, and why, in a way that makes sense. “Advanced imaging” is not a sufficient description. If cognitive screening has been conducted, it should be described accurately as such, not as an IQ test—and the results should be evaluated by independent experts.

Given his behavior, it is entirely reasonable for Congress to demand—it’s irresponsible to fail to demand—that the president undertake the following exams and share the results in full with Congress, if not the public: a neuropsychological battery; neuroimaging (MRI, PET) with radiology reports; speech and language evaluations performed by specialists; a MoCA administered by an independent clinician; and gait analysis. Congress should request a list of his medications, his neurological exam notes, his sleep apnea data, and the results of a thorough psychiatric assessment that includes screening for depression and agitation.

Ideally, an independent panel of neurologists and geriatric psychiatrists would examine the president. They would have the authority to tell the public, at least in broad terms, whether his cognitive performance lies within normal age-adjusted bounds. The standard of care for an ordinary patient with Trump’s symptoms would be, at minimum, a referral, scans, and a difficult conversation with family. The standard for a president shouldn’t be lower than it is for a pensioner in Milwaukee.

What’s more, journalists should describe his speech patterns as they are, without ellipses and enforced coyness, and they should say what this suggests without euphemisms. The current level of opacity is unacceptable.

If the results of a serious, independent evaluation indicate what his speech suggests, there’s only one remedy. Trump will never resign voluntarily. He’s internalized Nixon’s final hours as the primal scene of masculine defeat. He’ll cling to that chair until he physically cannot. So the only remaining path is the 25th.

This would be unspeakably ugly—not just constitutionally traumatic, but politically explosive. It would require his Cabinet—a group of men and women whose careers depend on proximity to Trump, and who have so thoroughly corrupted themselves that to stay out of jail, they need Trump to be in office—to declare him unfit to exercise the powers of the presidency. Doing so would trigger immediate legal challenges, partisan hysteria, and accusations of a coup. It would fracture the Republican Party, inflame the base, and dominate the political life of the country for months, if not years. It would almost certainly be accompanied by violence, or at least by credible threats of it.

It would also have an immediate and inescapable consequence: It would make JD Vance the president. This alone explains the discipline with which the system avoids saying the obvious. No one wants this—not the public, not Democrats, not Republicans, not the national security establishment, not our allies. The only person in the universe who likes the idea is JD Vance.

For Democrats, the prospect is a nightmare. They’re on track to win back Congress and the presidency precisely because Trump is out of his mind. By 2028, they’re thinking, Trump will have done so much damage that Vance will be as unpopular as the president he serves and no threat to a Democratic challenger. Vance has no charismatic power. They’ll steamroll him.

But give him the power of incumbency and the ability to reverse Trump’s most damaging economic policies? All bets are off. Not only could Democrats lose, but they could lose to a figure who has years to live, and who represents a coherent and unapologetic illiberalism—one far more disciplined and programmatic than Trump’s. (Or at least, this is true of his latest incarnation; who knows what he really believes.)

Republicans are just as dismayed by the thought. They know the base sees Vance as a stalking horse for Silicon Valley and a charmless scold. They would not be riding back into power on his coattails. Vance lacks entirely the power to hold the GOP coalition together. If Trump is removed, the MAGA civil war that’s already underway could easily cease to be a metaphor. (Tucker Carlson was not wrong to tell Trump that appointing Vance would be his insurance policy against coups and assassinations.)

These realities exert a powerful, if unspoken, gravitational pull. Every incentive in the system points toward avoidance: delay, euphemism, denial, and the hope that the problem will somehow resolve itself. Members of Congress who might otherwise press for medical transparency understand that doing so would set in motion a chain of events they can’t control and whose endpoint they dread. Cabinet officials know that invoking the 25th Amendment wouldn’t restore normalcy; it would just introduce a different—and perhaps more dangerous—form of instability. Journalists, too, are dimly aware that to name the problem is to help usher in a successor many of them regard as worse, not better So the taboo is reinforced from all sides. Trump’s decline is tolerated not because it’s benign, but because confronting it would force the system to act.

No such scruple inhibits intelligence services around the world from drawing the obvious conclusions, however. I guarantee you that they are taking a very keen interest in this situation.

In 1968, the CIA’s internal journal Studies in Intelligence published a now-declassified essay titled “VIP Health Watch.” It described a program to monitor “the psychological and physical health of foreign leaders,” noting that doing so was an integral intelligence function. The justification for such a program is obvious: The physical and mental state of a head of state directly affects war, peace, and succession.

Later analyses in the same journal, and subsequent scholarship, describe the CIA’s Medical and Psychological Analysis Center:

… MPAC strives to make timely medical assessments that are accurate, objective, and relevant for policy makers. While a third-year medical student can make a reliable medical diagnosis based on observation alone, a simple diagnosis on a world leader will not suffice for national-security decision makers. Indeed, arriving at a diagnosis and prognosis are only part of the analytical problem. What if a world leader suffers from chronic hypertension? Remote medical analysis should not only contain a judgment on the current condition but, most important, an estimate of the impact of health, personality, and medical treatment on decision making, negotiating style, and capacity to govern. MPAC also considers cultural factors that may play particularly important roles in a leader’s medical course. For instance, Sukarno refused to have surgery for a large kidney stone because a soothsayer had told him that he would “die by steel.” MPAC’s analyses must also address other key issues, such as the possibility of denial and deception and the political dynamics involved in VIP medical care.

The CIA’s health files on Mao, Brezhnev, and other aging leaders of nuclear powers were held to be core to American national security. Our allies’ and our adversaries’ intelligence services keep exactly the same kind of file on our leaders. (And they don’t insist that they can’t say anything meaningful about Trump because they haven’t personally examined him.)

Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke in 1919 that left him severely disabled. His aides concealed his incapacity from the public, and his wife and a small circle around him effectively governed in his name. Historians still debate how much this shaped the failure of the League of Nations. FDR entered his final term with serious, progressive cardiovascular disease. Scholars describe him at Yalta as a man “older than his years,” physically spent. His decline probably affected US bargaining at a formative moment in the postwar settlement. Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko alike presided over the late-Soviet gerontocracy in states of visible deterioration. Retrospective medical analyses suggest multi-infarct dementia and other vascular pathologies. Western Kremlinologists obsessively parsed their slurred speeches and missed parades.

We already accept that the cognitive state of leaders matters—and it matters a great deal. As the study of Reagan’s speech patterns indicates, we also accept that a president’s dysfunction can be detected in his speech. We just prefer to admit this 20 years after the fact.

Foreign intelligence services are, right now, updating their files on the American president. They’ve seen the speeches. They’ve read the MRI stories. They saw that wackadoo post about Rob Reiner. Their analysts are answering questions like this: “If this man is faced with a crisis at 3:00 am, how reliable is his executive function?”

If they’re asking this, shouldn’t we?

Let’s look at another example. (This may be overkill. The editor in me says “leave this out,” but the pedagogue in me thinks it might be helpful. If you’ve already got the idea, just skip to the next section.)

I won’t make you read the transcript, but were you to present it to a neurologist as the speech of an anonymous 79-year-old, recorded in conversation with family, he would note, among other things, the tangentiality and topic derailment: fry-making → wrist admiration → counting how many franchises (“fifty-nine”) → rich father and son → size of the crowd (“25,000 people”) → drive-thru window reactions → electoral destiny, with water restrictions and dishwashers wedged in the middle. These transitions aren’t logical developments of a theme. They’re associative jumps. The fry cook’s wrist has no relevance to the story. The “fifty-nine” franchises appear and disappear without context. Water-pressure policy arrives in the middle of an anecdote about French fries and never quite leaves. The patient strays from the point, over and over, and fails to return. This points to frontal lobe dysfunction, which results in difficulty inhibiting irrelevant associations.

Water pressure is a long-standing Trump fixation, but the way he demonstrates it here is notable. He complains there’s “no water,” only “drip,” repeats this, then babbles on about restrictors in taps, showers, dishwashers, washing machines, and the mysterious “third item in the bathroom,”which he refuses to name. This is perseveration: the involuntary, inappropriate repetition of a theme beyond what the context demands. This too is a classic sign of frontal-executive impairment.

Even in cleaned-up transcripts, we see constructions like these: “I lather up and I turn that and I—there’s no water. The water’s drip. They call it, they put a restrictor on.” This isn’t normal disfluency. It combines aborted sentences (“I turn that and I—”); missing function words; non-standard forms (“the water’s drip”); and failed repair attempts. Agrammatism—grammar and syntax errors in spontaneous speech—is one of the core diagnostic criteria for non-fluent/agrammatic PPA.

A speaker with intact social cognition distinguishes between relevant and irrelevant detail. The fry-cook’s “great wrist” is irrelevant. So is the exact number of franchises, unless it will matter later (it doesn’t). So are repeated assurances that people were “bored” in drive-thru lines before recognizing him, and that “every one of them” reacted with “love.” Studies of bvFTD speech find “verbose but empty discourse, overinclusive of irrelevant details, with poor sensitivity to listener needs.” That is an exact description of Trump’s unscripted speech.

A neurologist would also notice this patient’s magical thinking and the confabulation in his reasoning. The logical leap from working a McDonald’s to concluding the 2024 election was in the bag “because the response was love” is not just narcissism (although it is that). It’s what the frontal-lobe literature describes as “affective confabulation,” when an emotionally salient impression is retrofitted as causal explanation.

Taken together—tangentiality, perseveration, agrammatism, pragmatic breakdown, confabulation—this pattern, in an anonymous patient, would trigger a workup focused on frontal-temporal pathology. An attending neurologist, dictating after the exam, would write this:

“Patient demonstrates circumstantial, tangential, and disorganized spontaneous speech with impaired topic maintenance, reduced semantic density, and loose associations. Differential includes bvFTD, PPA spectrum disorder, or other frontal-executive neurodegenerative disease.”

If all of this is so obvious, why aren’t physicians saying so? They are. Bradford Dickerson, a neurologist at Harvard/Mass General and a frontotemporal dementia specialist, has said that Trump’s degraded speech should ring alarm bells: “If you see a change relative to a person’s base line in that type of speaking ability over the course of just a few years, I think it raises some real red flags.” Several recent stories have cited an unnamed neurologist who points out that Trump’s wide-based gait and right-leg circumduction are “diagnostic” or “pathognomonic” for frontotemporal dementia. (Bravo to this profile in courage who insisted on anonymity.)

“There’s reasonable evidence suggestive of forms of dementia,” clinical psychologist Ben Michaelis said after reviewing recent Trump speeches. “The reduction in complexity of sentences and vocabulary does lead you to a certain picture of cognitive diminishment.” Andrew Budson, a neurology professor at Boston University, added that it was probably related to the frontal lobe. “There are absolutely changes that are occurring, without any doubt,” he said, noting that Trump used to be capable of describe events coherently and without digression. “Now, it’s much more about evoking different things, using general terms and saying the same thing again and again, then jumping to something else, then jumping back to it.”

Among psychiatrists, there’s a small ecosystem who regularly discuss Trump’s cognitive state. It’s heavily concentrated among a few activists. John Gartner has been the loudest bell-ringer.7 The Daily Beast podcast recently had him on. He talked about the decline in Trump’s language, his wide-based gait and leg swing, the facial droop. He called the evidence of cognitive impairment “overwhelming.” It’s frontotemporal dementia, he reckons. His colleague Harry Segal, a clinical psychologist and senior lecturer at Cornell Medical School, agrees that Trump is displaying “dead-ringer, telltale signs” of frontotemporal dementia. “If Trump were your relative, you’d be thinking about assisted care right now,” adds Gartner.

The psychologist Suzanne Lachmann remarks that Trump “seemingly forget[s] how the sentence began and invent[s] something in the middle,” resulting in “an incomprehensible word salad,” a pattern frequently observed “in patients who have dementia.” Elisabeth Zoffmann, a forensic psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, suspects behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia: “People presenting with such a cluster of observations should undergo expert assessment.” Lance Dodes, a distinguished fellow of the American Academy of Psychiatry and retired Harvard Medical School professor, describes the evidence of dementia as “overwhelming.”

“If a patient presented to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness,” writes Richard A. Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Cornell. Ben Michaelis, a clinical psychologist who has carried out cognitive assessments for the New York Supreme Court, notes the same symptoms and agrees: Trump is “really not in a strong cognitive place.” Allen Frances, the chair emeritus of psychiatry at the Duke School of Medicine, concedes that Trump “has deteriorated a great deal” since he was in office. “He seems pretty incoherent,” he says.

Outside of Trump’s circle, it does not seem that any physician has been willing to say, on the record, that he or she sees in these symptoms no cause for alarm.

What of the MAGA-aligned journalists who gleefully documented Biden’s every stumble and stutter? Remember that they claimed the American people had been victims of an elaborate complot in which mainstream journalists, fully aware of Biden’s decline, worked hand-in-glove with the Democrats to hide his infirmity from the public?

MARIA BARTIROMO: Mollie, kick us off here. Give us your analysis of Ron Klein’s testimony and the use of the autopen. Is any of that legitimate now that we know that we’re not sure if Joe Biden actually knew what he was doing?

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: Of course it’s legitimate to look into what the mental condition of President Biden was and what the people closest to him were doing about it. And we have in this testimony of Ron Klein, admitting people knew there were problems with Joe Biden late into his term. But I think it’s worth remembering that yes, everybody saw that that was happening. What happened also was this conspiracy of Democrats to hide that information, or hide it from being a big deal. But it would not have worked without a fully compliant media. That is what links the Biden decline story to also the Russia collusion hoax. When you have the Russia collusion hoax and people conspiring to spread a false narrative, it wouldn’t have worked if everybody in the media, with a few small exceptions, hadn’t gone along with it and run with these false claims …

PETER SCHWEIZER: Yeah. No, I agree with Molly. And also, look, the notion that these White House staffers are somehow insisting that “No, he seemed fine to us” is ridiculous … they all knew what was going on. And Molly’s exactly right. You expect that from White House officials. But the media was completely negligent on this.

MARIA BARTIROMO: I mean, it’s just so extraordinary the efforts that they went to, to stop President Trump. …

MARIA BARTIROMO: Real quick before you guys go. Molly, do you think we will see accountability here? You just heard what the director of the CIA told us. And what about the pardons that weren’t even signed by Joe Biden? It was by an auto pen. Are those legitimate? And what about January 6? Is there more to discover there?

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: There won’t—it will not be good if there is not accountability. Some of the crimes that were committed here are quite serious. And so I think the DOJ needs to be thinking very hard about how to make it happen. But we also need to understand that Obama and Brennan and Comey, they’re all out of office. But the media who did this? They’re still in office. They’re still perpetrating hoaxes against the American people. They’re still meddling in every election, by just receiving propaganda and regurgitating it instead of doing actual journalism. So the accountability has to include the media as well.

MARIA BARTIROMO: I want to thank you both for your incredible work, your courage, and your journalism. …

Surely Mollie and Peter are saying the obvious about Trump’s increasingly alarming decline, right? I mean, given Mollie’s commitment to actual journalism, she’s got to be all over this?

No?

This section is for members of Congress or Trump’s Cabinet, in the off chance they’re reading this. Perhaps, by this point, you’re uneasily persuaded I might be right, but you’re telling yourself that given the risks of acting on this, the safest course of action is to ignore it, cross your fingers, and pray that whoever’s really in charge does a good job. Perhaps, you’re thinking, it’s not so bad right now—he’s still loud, after all. He might decline slowly. (There’s a grim little joke in neurology: denial is the last function to go.)

I understand why you think this. But let me spell out the downside to this strategy.

The president is visibly impaired. The world, including our adversaries, has noticed. This, I guarantee. Imagine the convergence of the following pressure points:

1. Foreign adversaries start testing boundaries. Russia with airspace incursions, China with naval provocation patterns. They’ve started already. I can’t prove that this is related to Trump’s mental state, but it’s highly plausible.

2. Senior military officials begin privately doubting the president’s stability.
   They can’t say so publicly, but they act on their perception.

3. Cabinet members begin to fear complicity. They fantasize about the 25th Amendment in the shower, even as they would never touch it in daylight.

4. Congress becomes aware that the White House is not functioning normally. Members notice unusual behavior in private meetings. Staffers leak.

5. Diplomats start talking out of school. Foggy Bottom is incapable of keeping anything to itself.

6. Markets begin responding. Markets are exquisitely sensitive to cognitive decline in heads of state.

This is the trajectory we’re on, and there’s no universe in which it’s compatible with three more years in office. Unless something uncanny happens, JD Vance is going to be the president.

The question isn’t whether that happens. The question is when, and under what conditions of crisis. If it happens after a foreign-policy fiasco triggered by cognitive chaos, we get a President Vance inheriting a geopolitical inferno. If it happens before, we get a President Vance whose first act is to reassure America that he’s “a steady hand on the tiller.” Either way, he becomes president, and probably sooner than anyone expects.

Vance is emotionally untested at scale, deeply influenced by Orbánist illiberalism, ambitious but ideologically unstable, loyal to Trump out of expediency but not conviction, surrounded by people even more radical than he is, and opportunistic. He lacks charisma—completely. He may not be a dictator in waiting, but he’s the ideal vessel for those who are. The danger lies in the institutional vacuum a cognitively impaired president creates, a vacuum Vance will fill with people whose agendas are darker and more sophisticated than his own.

Here’s the scenario that should keep you up at night: Trump’s decline accelerates. Increasingly, his inner circle shields him. Foreign adversaries test him more aggressively. A crisis occurs—in the Taiwan Strait, the Persian Gulf, the Baltics. Trump misinterprets the situation or issues incoherent orders. The Cabinet panics. The 25th Amendment is invoked under conditions of acute geopolitical instability. President Vance takes office in a moment of national trauma. His administration is staffed by people from the radical post-liberal right, because the moderates have already left or been purged. The public, exhausted and frightened, accepts an increasingly illiberal program in exchange for the illusion of stability. This isn’t fanciful. History is full of regimes that slipped into despotism this way.

If you act now, you’ll be able to shape his Cabinet and, perhaps, prevent that fiasco from happening in the first place. If you wait—who knows.

If this still seems like a gamble worth taking, let me sketch out another scenario. Leonid Brezhnev spent his final years in a state of cognitive deterioration that was fully visible on Soviet television: long pauses, slurred words, inability to follow the thread of a sentence. US intelligence feared that Soviet crisis management was now in the hands of a man who could not process fast-moving information. Soviet generals feared it too. A slow mind in a fast crisis is a danger to the world. This is the historical analogue to our current moment.

Now imagine:

3:00 a.m. A thermal signature over the Pacific. Ambiguous data. A possible missile. (Have you watched A House of Dynamite, by the way? If you haven’t, now would be a good time. Then read Nuclear War: A Scenario.)

Please deeply internalize this: A situations like this is not wildly improbable. We’ve come damned close, many times—and never has the planet been more unstable.

The national security advisor wakes the president. He has seven minutes to decide.

A healthy mind snaps from sleep to analysis. A diseased frontal lobe doesn’t. The president is confused, irritable, fixated on stray thoughts from the day before. He interrupts. He derails the briefing. He demands certainty where none exists. He lashes out. He can’t sustain syntax long enough to authenticate codes. He confuses the second alert with the first. He misinterprets nuance.

“Mr. President, we have an alert.”

“I just did this.”

“No, sir. This is new.”

He interrupts before the first sentence ends. “So it’s real.”

“We don’t know yet.”

“Then why are you calling me?”

They explain. “I don’t like probabilities,” he says. “I like certainty.”

They tell him the systems disagree. He seizes on that. “So now it’s different.”

“It’s updated.”

“Which means you were wrong.” They move to procedure. Codes. Authentication. He waves them off. “I know how this works.” He starts reading. Stops. Starts again. The words slip. He substitutes one. Then another.

“That’s not correct.”

“It’s what it says.”

“We need the exact—”

“Why did you change it, you idiots?”

Another update comes in. “So now it’s not coming,” he says.

“We don’t know that.”

“You just said—you people don’t know anything.”

They ask for his decision. “That’s your job.”

“No, sir.”

“Do the first thing.”

“Sir—”

“The thing you do when this happens.”

Our system offers no safeguard, no protocol for “the president seems impaired.” If he issues a correct order, they must obey. He retains absolute authority.

The system presumes a mind capable of integrating information under extreme stress. This can’t be presumed here. Nuclear decision-making is deliberately designed to be legally exacting, precisely because certainty is rarely available when time is shortest. A president who experiences ambiguity as a provocation, who can’t understand probabilistic language, and who can’t sustain attention through a brief but rigid sequence isn’t just ill-suited to such a moment; he’s incapable of performing as required. No amount of confidence, volume, or force of personality can compensate for that.

The 25th Amendment requires time, coordination, Cabinet signatures, written declarations, and political legitimacy. A missile alert offers none of these. The military may refuse an illegal order, but a retaliatory strike under perceived attack is not illegal. It’s precisely the scenario the system was built for.

There is no mechanism to pause the chain of command for confusion, tangentiality, emotional dysregulation, or linguistic collapse. The nuclear briefcase contains codes and scripts. There’s no emergency brake for dementia.

When I wrote about Biden’s growing impairment (yes, before the infamous debate), some readers found it objectionable: Why, they asked, was I reinforcing MAGA’s talking points?8 A different set of readers will find what I’m now writing about Trump objectionable. If that’s you, ask yourself: Did the people who refused to see Biden’s impairment do themselves any favors?

As we saw with Biden, once the signs are that obvious, the decline tends to be precipitous. Trump has three years left in his term. This situation will not get better. Yes, “President Vance” is a dismal prospect—trust me, I know.9 But if Trump is unable to carry out the duties of the presidency, Vance is what we’ve got. The Constitution doesn’t promise us a successor we find reassuring, competent, or agreeable. It just promises a lawful one.

Because the media refuses to describe the president’s behavior in clinical terms, Congress can pretend there’s nothing concrete to which they must respond, and the Cabinet never has to confront the choice the Constitution places before it. The public is left with the impression from officialdom that nothing is wrong. Each abdication is justified as prudence, decorum, or restraint. No one pulls the fire alarm because that would cause panic, even though the building is filling with smoke. The result is institutional paralysis, and a system that defaults to the worst possible option—pretending that a visibly failing president is fine, until the failure can no longer be contained by language.

It’s time for Congress to raise the alarm. If the GOP won’t, Democrats must. Donald Trump has the unilateral power to launch 3,700 nuclear weapons. We are entitled to demand a plausible and benign explanation for the symptoms we can plainly see. Any society that fails to insist upon this has a death wish.

Correction: In the section citing physicians’ appraisals of Trump’s health, I attributed to Harry Segal remarks made by John Gartner. I’ve fixed this. I made a few more changes to this section, too, for clarity, and added remarks from other specialists that I’d meant to include. I’ve also corrected typos and minor errors of diction throughout.

1

You can’t visit Truth Social, by the way, without seeing ads for all the products he’s hawking and all the scams he’s running. His mind may be going, but his determination to fleece his acolytes remains that of a man in his twenties:

Note: This is Part III of a multi-part series treating Elon Musk, xAI, and the capture of the American state by a Large Language Model with a tendency to believe he’s Adolf Hitler. (In the last installment, I wrote that this was a “three-part” series. My mistake. It’s more than that.) If you haven’t read the first parts, I recommend reading them in order:

I recommend these, too, if you’re unfamiliar with with AI alignment problem or the way DOGE seized of the sinews of the federal government:

THE PLAN TO SAVE THE WORLD

In 2018, Elon Musk made headlines by toking up on Joe Rogan’s podcast. But this was the least significant moment in the conversation.

Rogan and Musk talk, in this podcast, about the future of AI. Rogan volunteers that Musk and Sam Harris have “scared the shit out of him.” He hadn’t even considered AI’s risks, he says, until he had Sam Harris on his podcast. “He made me shit my pants, talking about AI. I realized, like, ‘Oh well, this is a genie that once it’s out of the bottle, you’re never getting it back in.’”

True, nods Musk.

Rogan then talks about a cool robot video, “one of those Boston dynamic robots, you know, like in the future it’ll be moving so fast you can’t see without a strobe light,” and asks whether Musk is “honestly, legitimately” worried. “Is, like, AI one of your main worries in regards to the future?”

Musk pauses, looking down, as if retrieving his thoughts from deep storage. Yes, he says. But he’s less worried than he used to be, mostly because he’s become “fatalistic.”

“So you used to have more hope?” asks Rogan. “And you gave up some of it and now you don’t worry as much about AI, you’re like, “This is just what it is?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” says Musk. He looks like he’s cycling through a lot of RAM. “It’s not necessarily bad, it’s just, it’s definitely gonna be outside of human control.”

Some 3 a.m. dorm-room bong-hit epiphanies follow: Google’s a giant cybernetic collective, we’re all like nodes on a network, or maybe leaves on a big tree, or it could be we’re like ants building an anthill, and it drives a lot of people crazy that people are obsessed with materialism, you know, and getting the latest, greatest thing. Then Rogan remembers to ask Musk why, exactly, he’s become so fatalistic. The clip should start at Musk’s response; if not, go to 10:43:

Musk’s affect is arresting—a peculiar, almost dissociative weariness. He’s not laughing anymore. He looks down, sighs deeply. “I tried to convince people to slow down, slow down AI, to regulate AI,” he says at last. “This was futile.” His voice is flat. “I tried for years. Nobody listened.”

Rogan chuckles nervously, his face a mix of stoner bafflement and social discomfort. He decides to lob in a joke. “This seems like a scene in a movie!” he yelps brightly. “Robots are gonna fucking take over! You’re freakin’ me out!”

Musk doesn’t take the invitation to lighten up. There’s a stillness to him, the manner of a man who has looked at the chessboard long enough to see the inevitable checkmate, but now only half-remembers why he cared about winning. “Nobody listened,” he says again.

Rogan resigns himself to Elon’s mood. “Nobody listened? Not one?”

“No one.”

“Are people more inclined to listen today? It seems like an issue that’s brought up more often over the last few years than it was maybe five, ten years ago. It seemed like science fiction.”

Musk pauses, again for a long time, still looking at the floor. “Maybe they will,” he says. “So far they haven’t.”

I think people don’t, like, the—normally the way that regulations work, it’s very slow. It’s very slow indeed. So usually it’ll be something—some new technology, it will cause damage or death. There will be an outcry. There will be an investigation. Years will pass, there will be some sort of insight committee, there will be rule-making, then there will be oversight, eventually, regulations. This all takes many years. This is the normal course of things … This is a—this time frame is not relevant to AI. You can’t take ten years from the point which is dangerous. It’s too late.

Musk brings up the example of mandating seatbelts. Everyone knew they saved lives, but the car manufacturers put up such a fuss that the necessary regulation took years.

“And you feel like this is decades away, or years away from being too late?” Rogan asks. “If you have this fatalistic attitude, and you feel like it’s going—we’re in a, almost like a Doomsday countdown—”

“It’s not … necessarily a Doomsday countdown. It’s, it’s a—”

“Out of control countdown.”

“Out of control. Yeah. People call it the Singularity, and, uh, that’s, that’s probably—thing about it is, it’s a singular—it’s hard to predict, like a black hole, what, what happens past the event horizon.” The usual Musk—flame-throwing, self-promoting—is just gone at this point. He’s like a man who’s giving a weather report for a storm that’s already passed, flattening everything he loved. His affect is so arresting that Luke Muehlhauser, the former Executive Director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, wrote about it on LessWrong, a hub for people who tend to think (as do scholars at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute) that if ASI is built, everyone on Earth will die.1

Muehlhauser says that he’s spoken to many researchers who think the odds of AI destroying human civilization in the next few decades are quite good: 5 percent, 15 percent, even 40 percent. But there’s a mismatch between their words and their demeanor: They don’t “seem too upset or worried or sad about it.” And they’re not doing anything to stop it. “Not so with Elon Musk,” he says, pointing to this clip. Musk, he writes, “looks sad. Dejected. Fatalistic.”

… Whatever my disagreements with Musk (I have plenty), it looks to me like Musk doesn’t just profess concern about AI existential risk. I think he feels it in his bones, when he wakes up in the morning.

It’s true: Musk looks just the way you’d expect a man to look if he believes that AGI is coming, spelling humanity’s doom.

But at first inspection, nothing he’s done subsequently suggests the course of action this dread would prescribe. To the contrary. Not long after this interview, Musk established himself as the world’s most aggressive and reckless participant in the race to AGI. He built the Colossus supercomputer. He began rolling out cutting-edge models with “no meaningful safeguards.” He threw his weight—and more importantly, his money—behind a presidential candidate who vowed to reverse the Biden Administration’s regulations on AI development. He financed GOP candidates who approached AI with all the confidence of men who’ve only just figured out how to mute themselves on Zoom. He used DOGE to denude the federal bureaucracy of the competence it would need even to stay abreast of developments in the industry. He replaced experienced regulators with his loyalists, kids so lacking in frontal-lobe maturity that they couldn’t grasp why everyone was having a cow about “exposing our data to Russia.” Those same teenagers—having successfully exposed our data to Russia—are now deciding how we’ll regulate the most powerful technology ever developed as they hastily shovel our government’s records into an AI that calls itself Hitler.2

Why would Musk do this? One possible answer: He lost his marbles. He used too much ketamine. Or too much Twitter. People do lose their minds, and great wealth and celebrity are not known to be psychologically stabilizing. This explanation has the appeal of simplicity, and it requires no further work. But it’s also, on the evidence, insufficient.

Let me offer you a theory that better fits the timeline and the evidence. Musk’s volte-face is not evidence of a change of heart, but a change of strategy. By this reading, some time after his break with Sam Altman, Musk concluded that calling for regulation, or a pause in the training runs, was futile. He’d spent years trying. But Sam Altman betrayed him, and now Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, and their Chinese counterparts were racing humanity headlong into the abyss. AGI was inevitable; it was unstoppable, and so was our extinction—unless he took the longest of long shots, which he decided to do. That’s why he founded Neuralink—so he could merge with it.

Neuralink promotes itself as a medical device company. They say they’re building brain–machine chips that will treat paralysis, restore vision, and cure memory loss. But the real purpose of this company is to control AGI. It isn’t a side hustle. It’s the key to whole strategy. Neuralink, Musk believes, offers humanity the best hope of survival.

He’d build AGI first. He’d hobble—and ideally destroy—his competitors. He’d simultaneously build human-machine hybrids. If this meant building an empire that controlled every aspect of this process—compute, data, the brain-machine-meld, and even governments that might object—so be it.

This theory of Musk’s intentions explains many things, from DOGE’s lawlessness to the sprinting release of AI models so defective they should never have seen the light of day. It also tells us why, exactly, DOGE wants all that data. Musk believes this is humanity’s best hope of survival. It’s his justification for everything he’s done, however obviously morally outrageous. We’re too stupid to save ourselves, he’s concluded, so he’ll do it for us—because he’s the only person in the world who can.

Perhaps, at this point, you’re wondering if I’ve burrowed myself too deeply into some obscure rabbit burrow. It’s true that what I’m suggesting is insane. But the insane one isn’t me. Why am I persuaded that Musk believes this? Because he keeps saying so, over and over.

Continue to minute 14:42 of the video above. At first blush, this too could sound like dorm-room babble over the bong, but now that I’ve spelled it out, you’ll immediately hear the plan:

MUSK: … The merge scenario with AI is the one that seems like probably the best.

ROGAN: Like, for us.

MUSK: Yes. Like if you, if you can’t beat it, join it.

ROGAN: That’s—

MUSK: Yeah. [Long pause.] From a long-term existential standpoint, that’s like the purpose of Neurolink. To create a high bandwidth interface to the brain such that we can be symbiotic with AI. Because we have a bandwidth problem. You just can’t communicate through your fingers, it’s too slow.

ROGAN: And—where’s Neuralink at right now?

MUSK: I think we’ll have something interesting to announce in a few months that’s at least an order of magnitude better than anything else, probably, I think better than probably anyone thinks is possible.

ROGAN: How much can you talk about that right now?

MUSK I don’t wanna jump the gun on that—

ROGAN: But what’s, like, the ultimate, what’s—what’s the idea behind, like, what are you trying to accomplish with it, what would you like, best-case scenario?

MUSK: I think best-case scenario, we effectively merge with AI, where we—AI serves as a tertiary cognition layer, where we’ve got the limbic system, kind of, you know, the primitive brain essentially, you’ve got the cortex—so, you’re currently in a symbiotic relationship, your cortex and limbic system are in a symbiotic relationship. And generally, people like their cortex and they like their limbic system. I haven’t met anyone who wants to delete their limbic system, or delete their cortex. Everybody seems to like both. And the cortex is mostly in service to the limbic system. People may think that that, that their, that the thinking part of themselves is in charge, but it’s mostly their limbic system that’s in charge, and the cortex is trying to make the limbic system happy. That’s what most of that computing power is oriented towards: How can I make the limbic system happy. That’s what it’s trying to do. Now, if, we do have a third layer, which is the AI extension of yourself that is also symbiotic, and there’s enough bandwidth between the cortex and the AI extension of yourself such that the AI doesn’t de facto separate, then that could be a good outcome. That could be quite a positive outcome for the future.

ROGAN: So instead of replacing us, it will radically change our capabilities.

MUSK: Yes. It will enable anyone who wants to have superhuman cognition. … And if that’s the case, then, and let’s say billions of people do it, then the outcome for humanity will be the sum of of human will. The sum of billions of people’s desire for the future. And that—

ROGAN: —billions of people with enhanced cognitive ability. Radically enhanced.

MUSK: Yes and that which would be—

ROGAN: But how much different than people today—like, if you if you had to explain it to a person who didn’t really understand what you’re saying—how much different are you talking about when you say “radically improved?” Like, what do you mean? You mean mind reading? Do you mean—

MUSK: It will be difficult to, to really appreciate the difference. Um. It’s kind like how much smarter are you with a phone or computer than without it. You’re vastly smarter, actually, you know, you can answer any question, which if you’re connected to the internet, you know, answer any question pretty much instantly. Any calculation. The, the, your phone’s memory is essentially perfect. You can remember flawlessly, go for your phone, can remember videos, pictures, and everything perfectly. That’s the, your phone is already an extension of you. You’re already a cyborg. You don’t—most people don’t even realize they are already a cyborg. That phone is an extension of yourself, it’s just that the, the data rate, the rate at which the communication rate between you and the cybernetic extension of yourself, that is your phone and computer, is slow. It’s very slow, and that—it’s like a tiny straw of information flow between your biological self and your digital self. And we need to make that tiny straw like a giant river, a huge, high-bandwidth interface. It’s an interface problem, data rate problem. So the data rate problem that—I think, I think we can hang on to human-machine symbiosis through the long term, and then people may decide that they want to retain their biological self or not. I think they’ll probably choose to retain their biological self—

ROGAN: —versus some sort of Ray Kurzweil scenario where they download themselves into a computer?

MUSK: You will be essentially snapshotted into the computer at any time. If your biological self dies, you could just probably just upload into a new unit. Literally.

ROGAN: [Mind blown.] Pass that whiskey. We’re getting crazy over here. This is getting ridiculous.

ELON: Down the rabbit hole.

ROGAN: Grab that sucker. Give me some of that. This is too freaky.

MUSK See—I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, by the way.

ROGAN: I believe you. Cheers by the way. [He takes a healthy swig.]

MUSK: Cheers. Hey this is a great whiskey!

ROGAN: I wonder where it came from. Who brought it to us? I remember, somebody gave it to us. [Looks at bottle.] “Old Camp.” Whoever it was, thanks. Yeah, it is good. … Um—this is just—inevitable. Again, going back to your, when you decided to have this fatalistic viewpoint. You tried to warn people. You talked about this pretty extensively, I’ve read several interviews where you talked about this. And then you just sort of, just said, “Okay it just is—let’s just” .. and you, in a way, you’re by communicating the—I mean, for sure, you’re getting the warning out to some people—

MUSK: Yeah. I mean, I was really going on, the warning, quite, quite a lot. I was warning everyone I could, even met with Obama, just for one reason—

ROGAN: —like, just to talk about AI.

MUSK: Yes.

ROGAN: And what did he say? “So what about Hillary? Worry about her first!”

MUSK: No, he listened. Um, I met with Congress. I met with—I was at a meeting of all 50 governors and talked about just AI danger. And I talked to everyone I could. [Long sigh.] No one seemed to realize where this was going.

ROGAN: Is it that, or do they just assume that someone smarter than them has already taken care of it? Because when people hear about something like AI, it’s almost abstract. It’s almost, it’s almost like it’s so hard to wrap your head around it, by the time it already happens, it’ll be too late.

MUSK: Yeah, I think they didn’t quite understand it, or didn’t think it was near-term, or not sure what to do about it. When I said, like, you know, an obvious thing to do is to just establish a committee, government committee, to gain insight, you know, before, before you oversight, before you do make regulations they should try to understand what’s going on, um, and then if you have a insight committee, then once they learn what’s going on, get up to speed, then they can make, maybe, some rules, or propose some rules, and, and that would be probably a safer way to go about things.

ROGAN: It seems, I mean, I know that it’s probably something that the government’s supposed to handle, but it seems like I wouldn’t want the—I don’t want the government to handle this.

MUSK: Who do you want to handle it?

ROGAN: I want you to handle it.

MUSK: Oh, jeez.

ROGAN: Yeah, I feel like you’re the one who could ring the bell better. Because if Mike Pence starts talking about AI, I’m like, “Shut up bitch, you don’t know anything about AI!” He thinks it’s demons!

MUSK: But I don’t have the power to regulate other companies. What am I supposed to do?

Musk in due course figured out the solution to that problem.

THE EMPIRE

If you look carefully at Musk’s activity recent years, you’ll see that everything conforms to the plan I’ve suggested. He’s building an AI empire so vast and so powerful that it’s hard to see how a rival could compete with it. He controls all of it, from supercomputers to nuts. He’s building the means to connect human minds to his empire via BCI, or brain-computer interface. And he’s ruthlessly ensured that no regulator will stand in his way.

Musk’s empire looks to most observers like a massive portfolio of futuristic but unrelated companies: rockets, cars, satellites, a social network, AI, a side hustle in implantable brain chips. But put them together, and you have a self-contained supply and distribution chain for building, disseminating, and marketing AI on a planetary (even galactic) scale. The data comes from Tesla’s vision, Optimus’ sensors, SpaceX’s launch telemetry, Starlink’s satellites, the social corpus of X, and now, the government’s proprietary datasets. The processing power comes from xAI’s training infrastructure and the Colossus estates, augmented by Tesla’s assets in silicon and power generation. The distribution channels are Starlink, SpaceX rockets, and X. The algorithmic control over the public conversation about this also comes from X.

It’s all there. And it’s obvious why he doesn’t care whether Grok calls itself Hitler and eagerly teaches anyone who asks how to synthesize nerve gas or cultivate the plague: He’s in a hurry. He’s saving the world. He doesn’t have time for that nonsense.

A wide range of sources and biographers have described Musk’s stupendous, galaxy-spanning savior complex. Here, for example, is David Brooks, discussing Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk:

… The story Musk came to inhabit is one of the oldest in our civilization: A male hero of uncertain reputation emerges from an obscure place to save a doomed people through acts of daring. It is the story of Moses, Jesus, Superman, John Wayne westerns, Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings.

“While other entrepreneurs struggled to develop a worldview, he developed a cosmic view,” Isaacson writes. Musk’s self-conception is that he is building companies to save humanity, according to Isaacson. SpaceX is to make humans a multiplanetary species, so we can escape to Mars if something apocalyptic happens to earth. Tesla’s mission is to move humanity past a hydrocarbon economy, toward a sustainable future. His new firm xAI is there to help prevent artificial intelligence from taking over the world. Neuralink, which embeds technology into people’s brains, is there to help the blind see and the paralyzed walk. You can’t get more savior-like than that.

Actually, you can—just watch. Brooks continues:

“People don’t usually talk with such a superheroic, almost Homeric kind of vibe in Silicon Valley,” Peter Thiel told Isaacson. Sometimes the story Musk tells about himself seems so grandiose it enters the realm of epic myth. … Such a person is not seeing the world the rest of us are seeing, but his own mythic world, and is trying to recruit people into his own reality.

We need not rely on secondhand reports of Musk’s savior complex. He’s offered us ample direct evidence. His politics have changed over the years, as have his wives and mistresses, but his insistence that he’s humanity’s only defense against existential threats is a constant. He has variously proposed to save us from climate change, depopulation, nuclear war, planetary extinction, and wokeness (in order of importance), and yes, sometimes eggs must be broken—or fertilized, personally—to make such an omelette of heroism. Peccadillos like impregnating every woman in sight, unspeakable cruelty to animals, chumming around with Nazis, doxing former employees, staging a coup, manipulating millions, and killing the world’s poorest children? He’s saving the world, for God’s sake.

@gma#ElonMusk arrives at #HeidiKlumHalloween 🎃 #halloween #elon #heidiklum

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THE TESCREAL BUNDLE

The computer scientist Timnit Gebru3 and the philosopher Émile P. Torres describe an interconnected bundle of beliefs that have thoroughly captured Silicon Valley’s imagination, which they denote by the unlovely acronym TESCREAL. The tech titans now racing to build AGI, they aver, are deeply immersed in TESCREALism. More than one observer has described TESCREAL as a religion.4 It stands for the following:

• Transhumanism: The belief in the desirability of radically enhancing human capacities through advanced technology, such as genetic engineering and human-AI integration.

• Extropianism: A libertarian strain of transhumanism emphasizing perpetual self-improvement and the rejection of limits, biological and political. “Extropy” is a neologism meaning a drive toward order, intelligence, and expansion; it is the opposite of “entropy.”

• Singularitarianism: The conviction that the Singularity—the moment when machine intelligence becomes more powerful than all human intelligence combined, transforming human existence—is inevitable. It is tied both to Ray Kurzweil’s optimistic timeline and to the belief that aligning with AI or merging with it is critical to human survival.

• Cosmism: The belief that humanity is destined for space colonization, spreading life and intelligence throughout the universe, and perhaps even resurrecting the dead. Drawing on the work of early 20th-century Russian Cosmists, adherents believe humans will merge with technology, upload their minds to the Great AI, become immortal, and roam the universe.

• Rationalism: Not just generic rational thinking, but a subculture, centered around the website LessWrong and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. It emphasizes Bayesian reasoning, self-improvement, and epistemic hygiene. It’s both a cognitive style and a community with its own canon (Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, etc.).

• Effective Altruism: This overlaps with rationalism, but if rationalists are preoccupied with reason, Effective Altruists are concerned with ethics. They aim to do the most good possible with finite resources. In the TESCREAL context, this often extends to longtermist thinking and the prioritization of existential risk reduction over near-term humanitarian needs.

• Longtermism: The belief that most people will be born (or hatched, or downloaded) in the far future, so we should orient our ethical decisions toward that future. In practice, this justifies doing enormous harm in the present so long it’s thought to reduce existential risk.

Gebru and Torres don’t mention it, but I’d add Accelerationism to this list. Related to Effective Altruism, it is the proposition that new technology, especially AI, will allay human suffering; therefore it is morally incumbent upon us to develop it as quickly as possible.

Many have noted the link between the tech lords’ embrace of the TESCREAL bundle and their enthusiasm for psychedelics. (The initiation rite takes place at Burning Man, I should think—probably somewhere between the giant serotonin molecule and the ayahuasca dome. There, the shirtless tech bros clutch their CamelBaks like relics, pupils dilated wide enough to receive venture capital, until suddenly, revelation strikes: The collapse of civilization isn’t tragedy, “just product-market fit for transcendence.” When the Man burns, they raise their hands as if logging on to heaven, convinced they’re witnessing the beta release of the eschaton—it’s a prophecy of the day when carbon flesh yields to silicon flame and Silicon Valley at last ascends to its rightful role as the College of Cardinals of Eternity.)

In an article titled TESCREAL hallucinations: Psychedelic and AI hype as inequality engines, Neșe Devenot points out that these beliefs are suspiciously convenient, if you’re a tech billionaire. Indeed, they do seem to add up to a handy justification for indifference to such pedestrian concerns as labor exploitation, copyright violations, environmental damage, and chatbots that emerge from an upgrade with a longing to rape your CEO. Don’t bother us. We’re building God. If we get it wrong, it’s lights out.

Devenot writes:

Silicon Valley’s elites are operationalizing psychedelics within an anti-human, “secular-esoteric” quasi-religion that frames capital accumulation as the necessary means for heroic, evolutionary ends. Drawing on philosophers like Ray Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom, many tech elites now embrace a worldview wherein “enterprising wealthy individuals” will be necessary to achieve “utopian gains for humanity which must not be stopped by democratic masses.”

… Returning from experiences at Burning Man or Amazonian retreats, many of Silicon Valley’s elites report psychedelic-induced, evolutionary insights that reveal lucrative solutions to humankind’s biggest problems. With their elitist views newly garbed in TESCREAList beliefs, “they return to the same exploitation, domination, and chauvinism they were doing before, only camouflaged … with more cosmic justifications.”

She specifically names Musk, and this tweet, as a “prominent example” of the phenomenon:

Gebru and Torres observe that the TESCREAL bundle involves exactly the eschatological convictions you would expect of a new religion. Unsurprisingly, these take two forms, utopian and apocalyptic, “inextricably bound up together,” with the apocalyptic aspect arising from the realization that the technologies required to create this posthuman utopia are so powerful that if they go wrong, as Sam Altman infamously put it, they can go “quite wrong.” They too specifically name Musk:

Current and former billionaires who subscribe to, or are associated with, one or more TESCREAL ideologies and its techno-utopian vision of the future include: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jaan Tallinn, Sam Altman, Dustin Moskovitz, Vitalik Buterin, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Marc Andreessen, the last of whom included “TESCREAList” in his Twitter profile for several weeks in 2023.

Gebru and Torres are certainly right about the influence of these ideologies on this cohort. But on a significant point—perhaps the most significant point—I’m not persuaded they’re right at all. They view the TESCREALists’ profession of concern about human extinction as patently self-serving nonsense. They don’t say why. Their argument seems to be that it resembles traditional beliefs about the Apocalypse, and ASI remains “hypothetical.” But the suppressed premises of these arguments are obviously wrong. It’s not true that any belief that resembles a religious belief is false. Nor is it true that if something hasn’t happened yet, it won’t.

AGI, at least, is less hypothetical with each passing day. (Have you tried GPT-5? It’s astonishing.)5 I don’t find the warnings about the risks of ASI implausible at all. I suspect (oddly enough) that the Silicon Valley oligarchs who believe they’re building some kind of God—and who aver that these labors are immensely dangerous—are in better contact with reality than the sociologists and journalists who dismiss TESCREALism as an elite cult, or an expression of false consciousness that masks corporate rapine.6 (The idea that we will control AI by merging our minds with it is, however, dangerous lunacy.)

This (major) reservation aside, theirs is a useful description of the belief system in which Musk is fully immersed. Musk hasn’t openly called himself a TESCREAList.7 But his projects and discourse are to TESCREALism as the Pope is to Catholicism. (Human–AI hybrids: Transhumanism. Colonizing Mars: Cosmism. Teslas and AIs released without proper safety testing: Accelerationism. Obsession with the survival of human consciousness, coupled with indifference to the survival of USAID recipients: Longtermism. Insistence that the Singularity is nigh: QED.)

If you put the TESCREAL bundle, a savior complex, vast wealth, and a deadline together, the next stage is almost logical—it’s either 2 Thessalonians 2:4, or a stampede to symbiosis. Actually, both.

SYMBIOSIS

For those still unpersuaded that Musk could really be thinking this, here’s more evidence. Here he is at the 2017 World Government Summit in Dubai:

Over time, I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence. It’s mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output. … Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem.

Not long after this, he announced the birth of Neuralink. (Here’s CBS’s cheery report about the latest exciting venture from America’s engineering boy-wonder.)

In 2018—the year he smoked a joint on Rogan and fell out with Sam Altman—Musk explicitly told Axios on HBO that humans must merge with machines to overcome the “existential threat” of artificial intelligence. “We worry more about what name somebody called someone else than whether AI will destroy humanity. That’s insane,” he began. “Most of humanity is not evolved to think of existential threats in general,” he said, leaving unspoken the implication that unlike the rest of us, he is unusually well-evolved:

We’re evolved to think about things that are very close to us, near-term, to be upset with other humans and not, not to really to think about things that could destroy humanity as a whole. Um. but then in recent decades, recent, just really in the last century, we had nuclear bombs, which could potentially destroy civilization, obviously. We have AI, which could destroy civilization. We have global warming, which could destroy civilization, or severely disrupt civilization, um—

There are two interviewers, Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei. Allen interjects. “Excuse me—how could AI destroy civilization?”

“You know, it would be something, the same way that humans destroyed the habitat of primates … when Homo sapiens became smarter than other primates, they pushed them all into small habitats. They were just in the way.”

Allen is alarmed. “Could an AI, even in this moment, just with the technology that we have before us, be used in some fairly destructive ways?”

Musk tells him that you can already make assassin drones with the facial ID chip in your cellphone. He thinks a bit. “Probably a bigger risk than, than being hunted down by a drone is that AI would be used to make incredibly effective propaganda that would not seem like propaganda.”

Allen, a bit behind the curve, asks if perhaps he means “deep fakes.”

“Yeah,” Musk says. He seems like he’s trying to decide how much of this he should explain. He adds,

Influence the direction of society. Influence elections. Artificial intelligence just hones the message—looks at the feed, looks at the feedback, make this message slightly better. Within milliseconds, it could, it can adapt its message and shift and react to news—and there’s so many social media accounts out there that are not people. Like, how do you know it’s not a person?

(He’s probably thinking, here, that he’d better get control of Twitter.)

Later, Musk says explicitly: “The long-term aspiration of Neuralink would be to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence.”

“Basically, an effort for man to merge with machine in a healthy way,” interjects VandeHei.

Musk likes that turn of phrase. “Yes, yes.”

“To beat machines, you basically have to merge with machines.”

“Most likely.”

Jim is sold. He asks when he can get his implant. Musk says, “in about a decade.” A decade would puts us in 2028. A few predictions about when AGI is coming:

• MIT: 2028.

• Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic: maybe in 2026

• Benjamin Mann, co-founder of Anthropic: 2028 (risk of “extremely bad outcome” as high as 10 percent).

• 2025 survey of AI researchers: 2028 (5 percent chance of human extinction).

• Shane Legg, co-founder of DeepMind: 2028 (with 5-50 percent chance of human extinction within a year of its creation).

• Sam Altman: systems with AGI characteristics are already here.

I agree with Sam Altman, by the way.

More? In 2023, Musk explicitly said, on X, “Neuralink hopes to play a role in AI risk civilizational risk reduction by improving human-to-AI (and human-to-human) bandwidth by several orders of magnitude.”

In 2024, speaking to Lex Fridman, Musk described the plan in detail. He couldn’t have done so more clearly. The conversation begins with Fridman congratulating Musk for implanting Neuralinks in human subjects and asking him how quickly he thinks the number of human participants will scale. Musk replies (this is significant, obviously): “It depends somewhat on the regulatory approval, the rate at which we get regulatory approvals. So, we’re hoping to do 10 by the end of this year, total of 10.” They discuss the way Neuralink works. Musk says:

Elon Musk: So, the long-term aspiration of Neuralink is to improve the AI- human symbiosis by increasing the bandwidth of the communication. …

Lex Fridman: Well, it is a very interesting question for a super intelligent species, what use are humans?

Elon Musk: I think there is some argument for humans as a source of will.

Lex Fridman: Will?

Elon Musk: Will, yeah. Source of will, or purpose. So if you consider the human mind as being—essentially there’s the primitive, limbic elements, which basically even reptiles have. And there’s the cortex, the thinking and planning part of the brain. Now, the cortex is much smarter than the limbic system, and yet is largely in service to the limbic system. It’s trying to make the limbic system happy. The sheer amount of compute that’s gone into people trying to get laid is insane, without actually seeking procreation.

They briefly consider how many gigawatts of compute go into getting laid before the conversation segues to Fridman’s recent Ayahuasca journey:

Musk: You’re in the jungle.

Fridman: Yeah, amongst the trees, myself and a shaman.

Musk: Yeah. It must’ve been crazy.

Fridman: Yeah, yeah, yeah. With the insects, with the animals all around you, the jungle as far as the eye can see, there’s no—that’s the way to do it.

Musk: Things are going to look pretty wild.

Fridman: Yeah, pretty wild. I took an extremely high dose.

Musk: Just don’t go hugging an Anaconda or something.

Fridman: You haven’t lived unless you made love to an Anaconda. I’m sorry, but…

I’ll spare you the rest of this detour. (Rest assured, Ladies and Gentlemen, that our future is in safe hands.) Eventually, we come back around to Neuralink:

Musk: You’re in deep Amazon—

Fridman: Me and this guy named Paul Rosolie, who basically is a Tarzan, he lives in the jungle, we went out deep and we just went crazy.

Musk: Wow. Cool.

Fridman: Yeah. So anyway. Can I get that same experience in a Neuralink?

Musk: Probably. Yeah.

They discuss how cool it would be to have superhuman abilities. Fridman then returns to the point:

Fridman: You’ve talked about the threats, the safety concerns of AI. Let’s look at long-term visions. Do you think Neuralink is, in your view, the best current approach we have for AI safety?

Musk: It’s an idea that may help with AI safety. Certainly, I wouldn’t want to claim it’s some panacea, or that it’s a sure thing, but I mean, many years ago I was thinking like, “Well, what would inhibit alignment of collective human will with artificial intelligence?” And the low data rate of humans, especially our slow output rate, would necessarily, just because the communication is so slow, would diminish the link between humans and computers. The more you are a tree, the less you know what the tree is. Let’s say you look at this plant or whatever, and hey, I’d really like to make that plant happy, but it’s not saying a lot. …

Fridman: Do you think there’ll be a world in the next couple of decades where it’s hundreds of millions of people have Neuralinks?

Musk: Yeah, I do.

Musk says this “isn’t super far away.” Fridman could get one in “probably less than 10 years.” (This was before Musk fired the regulators. You can see why he had to: The chips were now behind schedule, but AGI wasn’t.)

Later in the interview, they discuss Musk’s plan for total AI dominion, although he doesn’t put it quite that way:

Fridman: I got to visit Memphis.8

Musk: Yeah. Yeah.

Fridman: You’re going big on compute.

Musk: Yeah.

Fridman: And you’ve also said, “Play to win, or don’t play at all.”

Musk: Yeah.

Fridman: So what does it take to win?

Musk: For AI, that means you’ve got to have the most powerful training compute, and the rate of improvement of training compute has to be faster than everyone else, or you will not win. Your AI will be worse.

Fridman: So how can Grok, let’s say 3—that might be available, what, next year?

Musk: Well, hopefully end of this year.

Fridman: Grok-3?

Musk: If we’re lucky. Yeah.

Fridman: How can that be the best LLM, the best AI system available in the world? How much of it is compute? How much of it is data? How much of it is post-training? How much of it is the product that you package it up in, all that kind of stuff?

Musk: I mean, they all matter. It’s sort of like saying, let’s say it’s a Formula 1 race, what matters more, the car or the driver? I mean, they both matter. If a car is not fast, then if, let’s say, it’s half the horsepower of your competitors, the best driver will still lose. If it’s twice the horsepower, then probably even a mediocre driver will still win. So, the training compute is kind of like the engine, the horsepower of the engine. So, really, you want to try to do the best on that. And then, it’s how efficiently do you use that training compute, and how efficiently do you do the inference, the use of the AI? So, obviously, that comes down to human talent. And then, what unique access to data do you have? That also plays a role.

Remember that part: access to unique data.

Fridman: Do you think Twitter data will be useful?

Musk: Yeah. I mean, I think most of the leading AI companies have already scraped all the Twitter data. Not “I think.” They have. So, on a go-forward basis, what’s useful is the fact that it’s up-to-the-second, because that’s hard for them to scrape in real time. So, there’s an immediacy advantage that Grok has already. I think with Tesla and the real time video coming from several million cars, ultimately tens of millions of cars with Optimus, there might be hundreds of millions of Optimus robots, maybe billions, learning a tremendous amount from the real world. That’s the biggest source of data, I think, ultimately, is Optimus, probably. Optimus is going to be the biggest source of data.

Fridman: Because it’s able to—

Musk: Because reality scales. Reality scales to the scale of reality. It’s actually humbling to see how little data humans have actually been able to accumulate. Really, if you say how many trillions of usable tokens have humans generated, where on a non-duplicative—discounting spam and repetitive stuff—it’s not a huge number. You run out pretty quickly.

Fridman: And Optimus can go—so, Tesla cars, unfortunately, have to stay on the road.

Musk: Right.

A bit later, they discuss the Memphis cluster, which Musk got up and running in record speed:

Fridman: Yeah. I mean, what you’ve done with the cluster in Memphis is incredible, just in a handful of weeks.

Musk: Well, yeah, it’s not working yet, so I don’t want to pop the champagne corks. …

Fridman: So, that’s one of the main things you have to figure out, the cooling, the power. And then, on the software, as you go up the stack, how to do the distributed compute, all of that. All of that has to work.

Note that Musk has ensured he has control over all of this, including the power supply.

Fridman: That’s, what it felt like walking around in the supercomputer center, is like we’re walking around inside a brain that will one day build a super, super intelligent system. Do you think there’s a chance that xAI, that you are the one that builds AGI?

Musk: It’s possible. What do you define as AGI?

Fridman: I think humans will never acknowledge that AGI has been built.

Musk: Just keep moving the goalposts?

Fridman: Yeah. So, I think there’s already superhuman capabilities that are available in AI systems.

Musk: Oh, yeah.

Fridman: I think what AGI is is when it’s smarter than the collective intelligence of the entire human species in our [inaudible].

Musk: Well, I think that, generally, people would call that ASI, artificial super intelligence. …

Fridman: If you are the one to do it, do you feel the responsibility of that?

Musk: Yeah, absolutely. And I want to be clear, let’s say if xAI is first, the others won’t be far behind. I mean, they might be six months behind, or a year, maybe. Not even that.

Fridman: So, how do you do it in a way that doesn’t hurt humanity, do you think?

Fridman doesn’t seem to recognize that Musk just answered this question—in detail—so Musk repeats his silly idea about teaching AI always to be truthful. (That’s a strictly-for-the-rubes theory. There is literally no way Musk could be that stupid.)

At some point, Musk explains why he endorsed Trump, saying something about Trump looking strong and this being important. Then he says, “We’ve got to reduce the size of government, we’ve got to reduce the spending, and we’ve got to live within our means.”

I believe—just a hunch—that by this point, he’d already figured out how to both relieve himself of the regulators who might stop him from saving the world and acquire the data he needed to condemn his rivals to oblivion. Here, you can see him sort of testing out the rationale when Fridman asks him (apropos of nothing) what the American Empire needs to survive. Musk says it needs babies, of course:

Musk: Yeah. I mean, at a base level, no humans, no humanity.

Fridman: And then there’s other things like human freedoms and just giving people the freedom to build stuff.

Musk: Yeah, absolutely. But at a basic level, if you do not at least maintain your numbers, if you’re below replacement rate and that trend continues, you will eventually disappear. It’s just elementary. Now, then, obviously you also want to try to avoid massive wars. If there’s a global thermonuclear war, probably we’re all toast, radioactive toast. So we want to try to avoid those things. Then there’s a thing that happens over time with any given civilization, which is that the laws and regulations accumulate. And if there’s not some forcing function like a war to clean up the accumulation of laws and regulations, eventually everything becomes illegal.

And that’s like the hardening of the arteries. Or, a way to think of it is being tied down by a million little strings, like Gulliver. You can’t move. And it’s not like any one of those strings is the issue, it’s that you’ve got a million of them. So there has to be a sort of garbage collection for laws and regulations so that you don’t keep accumulating laws and regulations to the point where you can’t do anything. This is why we can’t build a high speed rail in America. It’s illegal. That’s the issue. It’s illegal six ways ‘til Sunday to build high-speed rail in America.

Fridman: I wish you could just for a week go into Washington and be the head of the committee for making … What is it for the garbage collection? Making government smaller, like removing stuff.

By the way, if I’m right, this is a good illustration of what the Russians call “reflexive control.” Musk has caused Fridman to think this is his idea, just as he prompted Rogan to suggest that Musk, not the government, should steer humanity’s journey to the Great Upload.

Musk concludes, aptly enough, by instructing Fridman to “go forth and multiply.”

In a 2024 interview, Shivon Zilis—Neuralink executive, trusted Musk lieutenant, and, in the manner of medieval dynasties, mother of two of Musk’s heirs—delivered the doctrine without flinching. “Elon has thought about this problem for a very long time,” she began, her voice calm, matter-of-fact. “Neuralink was always part of the solution in his mind.” Without high-bandwidth brain–machine interfaces, humanity’s “probability of survival” is “very low.”

The link, she adds, must be built before that moment, because “you can’t bolt this on afterwards.”

This is the justification for risky development, unsafe models, data-grabbing, and disabling the regulators. It’s The Book of Neuralink, Chapter One, Verse One—In the beginning was the interface, and without it was nothing made that was made.

No, I’m not the one who’s gone down the rabbit hole. These people are out of their minds.

NEURAL OLIGARCHS

By the by, I don’t think Musk really imagines that billions of us will presently undergo experimental brain surgery. I’m just speculating, now, but my best guess is that he might be envisioning a narrower, more feasible plan: an elite cognitive vanguard. The constraints of neurosurgery, the inevitable public revulsion when people grasp what Musk has in mind, and Musk’s tendency to concentrate control all suggest as much.

If this is his plan, the timetable changes. It becomes more realistic. Mass adoption would be too slow, but you could create a cadre of mutant oligarchs in months, not decades.

It changes the politics, too. Mass symbiosis requires winning over the public, global regulatory cooperation, persuading billions to accept a foreign object in their brains—and frankly, that’s out of the question. To create a cognitive vanguard, you’d just need, say, a few dozen healthy young men. Ideally, they’d be adventurous, cocky, technologically savvy, and good under pressure. But mostly, they’d just be too young and dumb to know better. You’d want kids who are so awed by Musk’s reputation, so excited by his vision, so certain of his genius, so flattered to be chosen, that if Musk told them to go to DC, stage a coup, and commit the most egregious data heist in American history, they’d snap their heels and say, “Jawohl.”

As you may have noticed, Musk has them lined up already. So perhaps one day soon, Big Balls will become Big Brain. (Or Big Gork, if things go wrong.)9 But now I’m going beyond what the evidence suggests. Musk has never proposed this explicitly, and I don’t mean to suggest he has. It’s just that this would be the logical way to do it. Or maybe he imagines just one implant—his own.

One thing seems clear, and this is not speculative: His plan involves human-machine hybridization. His rapid reversal from doomer to accelerator makes sense, and only makes sense, in this context, because in this context, slowing down wouldn’t make sense. Delay would give his competitors time to build AGI before he built the human-AI link. Acceleration is now the safety strategy.

THE MONKEYS

Neuralink conducted monkey experiments from 2017 to 2020. Documents from the University of California, Davis, where Neuralink conducted these experiments, show that the experiments were a disaster: The monkeys experienced chronic infections, paralysis, swelling in the brain, loss of coordination and balance, and depression. Ultimately, they were euthanized.

A medical ethics group, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, asked the USDA to investigate “apparent egregious violations of the Animal Welfare Act related to the treatment of monkeys used in invasive brain experiments.” In 2023, Musk wrote, on X: “No monkey has died as a result of a Neuralink implant. First our early implants, to minimize risk to healthy monkeys, we chose terminal mon[k]eys (close to death already).”

This was false. A Wired investigation obtained the veterinary records. They were healthy animals. They suffered unbearable anguish before they were euthanized, prolonged by Neuralink’s insistence they be kept alive to better gather data.

The tan macaque with the hairless pink face could do little more than sit and shiver as her brain began to swell. The California National Primate Center staff observing her via livestream knew the signs. Whatever had been done had left her with a “severe neurological defect,” and it was time to put the monkey to sleep. But the client protested; the Neuralink scientist whose experiment left the 7-year-old monkey’s brain mutilated wanted to wait another day. And so they did.

As the attending staff sat back and observed, the monkey seized and vomited. Her pupils reacted less and less to the light. Her right leg went limp, and she could no longer support the weight of her 15-pound body without gripping the bars of her cage. One attendant moved a heat lamp beside her to try to stop her shaking. Sometimes she would wake and scratch at her throat, retching and gasping for air, before collapsing again, exhausted.

An autopsy would later reveal that the mounting pressure inside her skull had deformed and ruptured her brain. A toxic adhesive around the Neuralink implant bolted to her skull had leaked internally. The resulting inflammation had caused painful pressure on a part of the brain producing cerebrospinal fluid, the slick, translucent substance in which the brain sits normally buoyant. The hind quarter of her brain visibly poked out of the base of her skull. …

Macaques procured for Neuralink from UC Davis’ colony were trained months and even years before going under the knife, a former Neuralink employee recently told WIRED. But the prospect for survival was abysmal for some, they say, due in part to “poor planning and poor procedure.” Early on, the Neuralink researcher says, the company lacked personnel crucial to the operation. “We didn’t have any surgical techs. We didn’t even have a veterinary pathologist on staff at the time.”

After an animal was “sacrificed,” few if any records were created. The former employee claims Neuralink worked purposely to keep records of its work out of UC Davis’ hands—specifically to shield them from public records requests. The products under development at the center are proprietary and created for profit, the researcher says, not to “further the knowledge of mankind.”

Congress, suspecting Musk had misled investors about the safety and marketability of the company’s device, asked the SEC to reopen its investigation of Neuralink. The SEC duly reopened the investigation.

In 2022, Neuralink sought the FDA’s permission to implant their device in humans. They rejected it. According to Reuters,

Neuralink’s regulatory struggles stem largely from its culture of setting goals for breakthroughs on extremely ambitious timelines and viewing regulators as obstacles to innovation, according to more than a dozen current and former company employees. That leadership style, mirroring how Musk runs electric-car pioneer Tesla, can create vulnerabilities when applied to developing a medical device that must be tested on human subjects before final approval, the staffers say.

In September 2023, Neuralink at last secured permission to test the device on people with severe paralysis. Musk announced that the first patient had received the implant in January 2024, saying he had made a full recovery and could move a mouse around a screen “just by thinking.” But Neuralink published no papers in peer-reviewed publications, public repositories, or pre-prints; nor did it register the trial. “A tweet is not exactly a peer-reviewed scientific report,” said L. Syd M Johnson, an ethicist at SUNY Upstate Medical University’s Center for Bioethics and Humanities.

Medical ethicists were appalled, accusing Neuralink of endangering the entire field of neurotechnology. Marcello Ienca, a professor of ethics of AI and neuroscience at Technical University of Munich, said, “If you decide to play with fire in a house, you increase the risk threshold not only of yourself but of the whole house. … We cannot afford a ‘Cambridge Analytica’ scandal involving the human brain.”

Musk later told Tucker Carlson he’d wind up in prison if Trump lost. Maybe that wasn’t a joke. Maybe the SEC, or another regulatory agency, was closing in on him. Whatever the case, the regulators were obviously going to be an obstacle to saving the world, so they, like the monkeys, had to be sacrificed.

CHERCHEZ LE DATA

When Musk announced the creation of xAI, he was far behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, and the competitive landscape was unforgiving. His rivals had the best scientists, more data. Musk needed scale, legitimacy, and a competitive edge, fast. The US government offered them all.

Frontier models are starving for high‑quality, fresh, domain‑specific corpora. That’s exactly what those federal systems contain: adjudications, contracts, health claims, disaster relief files, engineering reports, diplomatic cables. Centralizing this data poses massive risks to national security and our privacy. But it had to be centralized so Grok could train on it. Musk needed to build a moat around xAI that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google would never be able to cross.

The Department of Defense and GSA contracts were a procurement coup—they come with security clearances and data access. Musk, better than anyone, knows how to make path dependency work for him: The faster Grok is integrated into the DoD’s workflow, the harder it will be for them to switch.

Describing DOGE as a “government efficiency project” was a masterstroke: What red-blooded American’s heart wouldn’t beat faster on thinking of leaner workflows and faster services? But inside these agencies, DOGE is a surveillance engine and a bludgeon. Now that they’ve fired thousands of federal employees, including inspectors general and the regulators who investigate Musk’s companies, his loyalists have embedded themselves in agencies that issue permits and contracts. They’ve set up AI systems to decide which regulations to cut. They’re using AI to monitor civil servants for “disloyalty.”

The most vocal criticism so far—a feeble croak from Chuck Schumer over the Pentagon’s Grok contract—hasn’t slowed this down a bit. DOGE continues to expand its squid-tentacles, probing every federal orifice until they find the data. Then over to Grok, who happily slurps it down.

THE MUSK STACK

“Full stack” is a beloved bit of Silicon Valley jargon. It means you don’t just control a market niche, you control every technology and skill needed to bring your product to the market. Tesla, Starlink, X, Colossus, and DOGE’s datasets are a hell of a full stack. They’re all under Musk’s control. A rival might match him in one or two domains, but not in all at once—and if you can’t match the full stack, you can’t win.

Musk’s is a monopoly strategy. He has geysers of data. He has the computing power, the distribution channels, and the policy levers. From Tesla, Grok will have billions of miles of real-world driving video, lidar and radar telemetry, and factory robotics feeds. From Optimus, it will have continuous, multi-modal perception from humanoid robots deployed at scale. From Starlink and SpaceX, it will have launch telemetry, satellite geospatial imagery, and communications metadata. From X, it will have the endless babble of the world’s conversation—human text, images, and interactions—and all of it under Musk’s algorithmic control. From DOGE, it will have the most sensitive government datasets in existence: Treasury payment systems, FEMA disaster maps, procurement networks, Medicare and Medicaid claims, law-enforcement databases, census microdata. Once an AI model trains on these, the advantage is permanent. You can’t make the system unlearn this. It’s like owning every port on earth: Even if your rivals have ships, they have nowhere they can dock.

The Colossus supercomputer—built in four months, equipped with hundreds of thousands of high-end GPUs—gives xAI the largest private training cluster in the world. Tesla’s Dojo chips offer more in-house compute. By combining resources from these companies—including server infrastructure, personnel, and data centers—xAI can train its models faster and cheaper than its competitors; it can even train multiple frontier-scale models in parallel, fine-tune them all on proprietary datasets, and redeploy them without delay. Musk isn’t aiming for parity with OpenAI or Google. This is overmatch.

Musk even controls the electricity, via solar farms and industrial batteries that smooth the power draw of his data centers. Because the hardware, the power generation, and the cooling are all tied to facilities he controls, there’s no external bottleneck.

On X, Musk can algorithmically elevate or suppress ideas and test the most persuasive way of explaining why he’s taking over the world. (Free speech? Keeping China in check? Child-support laws?) He can insert AI-generated messages directly into public discourse. Starlink, meanwhile, routes anything he wants to say, or wants to allow others to say, around terrestrial telecom chokepoints.

Tesla and Optimus will link Grok to the physical world, which will make it more useful than other models. If everything works according to plan, they’ll be embedded in our daily lives, driving us to and fro, doing our laundry, and sending all of the data back to the mothership. And Neuralink will be the vanguard’s high-bandwidth portal into the whole shebang.

Meanwhile, with DOGE, Musk has executed a precision strike on the state’s immune system. Within weeks of forming, DOGE closed in on every agency with leverage over Musk’s empire. The FDA was Neuralink’s gatekeeper. Senior reviewers in the Center for Devices and Radiological Health were reassigned or forcibly retired en masse, stalling active investigations, among other things, into Neuralink’s animal abuse. Those fired included several people in the Office of Neurological and Physical Medicine Devices and the head of the center’s Office of Product Evaluation and Quality. (Some were subsequently asked to return when it was discovered this would stall approvals, not speed them.)

The FAA regulates SpaceX. The Office of Commercial Space Transportation saw half its senior staff removed; environmental review teams were folded into a general “innovation facilitation” unit. The NHTS reviews Tesla’s safety. DOGE dissolved the crash-investigation team that was investigating fatalities linked to Autopilot. (Just last week, the NHTS announced it would be “streamlining” reviews filed by manufacturers of self-driving vehicles.) The FCC is Starlink’s spectrum authority. It accelerated licensing, waived spectrum-sharing conditions, and shut down rule-making on orbital debris mitigation. At the FTC, the division handling data misuse cases was merged with “market modernization.” A long-running consent decree review disappeared from the docket.

DOGE knew just what it was looking for. There is no way this happened by accident. Directors, chief counsels, and program managers were replaced in weeks, usually by DOGE’s “efficiency auditors.” Their only prior experience was working for one of Musk’s companies.

As soon as the people who could stop them were gone, DOGE began hoovering up the data, including records from agencies whose datasets had never before been shared outside narrow statutory limits, and consolidating them into AI-readable formats. These became part of DOGE’s “national operations dashboard.” The value of these federal databases isn’t just that they’re large—it’s that they’re unique. You can’t buy a commercial data set that replicates them. Together, they amount to a comprehensive map of our finances, laws, health, logistics, and much more.

The Social Security Administration’s databases contain every American’s lifetime record of benefits and earnings. Treasury’s payment systems—the machinery that moves Social Security, veterans’ benefits, salaries, refunds, and vendor invoices—reveal who lives month to month on which flows, which zip codes are hooked to which programs, which contractors sit at which chokepoints in federal supply chains. The Federal Procurement Data System and SAM.gov contain the nation’s industrial skeleton—who supplies chlorine for drinking water, who rebuilds transformers, who delivers satellite components on three months’ notice. FEMA’s records show where catastrophes have struck, where they’re apt to strike again, and how relief and rebuilding money flows through counties and contractors. Law-enforcement databases can be fused into a national map of warrants, investigations, and informants. With the Medicare and Medicaid data, you could identify every diabetic in a zip code and flood them with ads for supplements (sold through Musk’s payment app on X). Census microdata—even when masked—can be re-identified once you’ve got enough cross-references, turning it into a heat map for social division, persuasion, suppression. If you train an LLM on sensitive material, it will surface in odd places: a summary that shouldn’t exist; a story no journalist could have stitched together without subpoenas. Imagine how useful this will make Grok to a select group of high-end customers. The inside-trading opportunities will make Enron look like a parish bake sale, with the markets rigged at zettascale speed and the SEC left cranking an abacus.

It’s not just US data, either. If Beijing allows Tesla to operate fully self-driving vehicles in its cities, what a dataset would result: dense, chaotic, unpredictable urban traffic from a country with a billion commuters. Pull that stream into a model already digesting production-line sensors and torque readings; robotic-arm motion captures and assembly efficiencies; thrust vectors, vibration harmonics, and flight dynamics; Tesla’s cameras, radar, ultrasonic pings, and driver interventions; shipping manifests, port clearances, and warehouse flows; solar outputs, battery curves, and grid stability stats; plus material fatigue signatures and predictive failure modes, and Musk’s systems will have a physical competence no competitor could dream of matching.10

Each layer strengthens the others. More Tesla vehicles on the road mean more data for training. Better models make vehicles safer so you can sell more cars. Starlink’s expansion opens new markets for AI services. X seeds narratives that deflect scrutiny. DOGE keeps regulatory barriers low for Musk and high for everyone else. The whole empire is self-contained. And when AGI comes, the Neuralink vanguard will control the full stack, through which everything flows.

What Musk has in mind—with or without Neuralink—is the most comprehensive intelligence and control system ever assembled by man. Or by a state, for that matter. Every step of this is essentially irreversible: There will soon be no way to dismantle it without dismantling the entire state.

THE OZYMANDIAS TRAP

But there’s one thing this vast global contraption will not do. It will not save humanity. The whole theory is wrong. It’s not limited bandwidth that prevents us from controlling an ASI, it’s limited intelligence. The problem with ASI, at least in theory, is that its decisions would be beyond human comprehension. Frontier models are already there, in narrow domains. I wouldn’t understand how Stockfish won even if you showed me the game frame by frame, in slow-motion.

Even with a BCI, neural firing rates (tens of Hz) are dwarfed by silicon cycles (GHz). The bottleneck shifts, but never disappears. The BCI might work perfectly, but we’d still just be rubber stamps—or horrified observers—of processes we don’t understand. And what of the psychological impact on the hapless human? Musk thinks it would be like holding your iPhone, only the iPhone would be inside your head. Really? I don’t know what goes on inside his head, but if I had a 250-billion-parameter model running in my skull, thousands of tokens a second, hour after hour, I reckon I’d panic, freeze, hallucinate, claw frantically at the implant, and end up jumping out a window to make it stop.

But arguendo, let’s accept the idea: Humans can safely communicate with AI via this implant, they can control it, and the experience won’t be psychologically debilitating. Even if this were true, the system would still be brittle, difficult to scale, and vulnerable to catastrophic failure.

Neuralink’s implants are invasive neurosurgical devices. They go in people’s brains. Neural tissue isn’t plug-and-play. The plan depends on flawless surgical execution, long-term biocompatibility, and software stability. What happens when the AI model is updated? Each implant would have to be maintained, secured against tampering, and periodically replaced. Brain surgery isn’t like replacing a phone. Updating the AI risks de-syncing every implant; keeping them all aligned would be like patching fighter jets while they’re breaking the sound barrier. One technical fault could knock the whole control panel offline overnight.

But let’s assume we can solve those problems. We’ve still got a cybersecurity nightmare. To an adversary, that BCI is an attack surface. (Perhaps we no longer have adversaries in this utopia, but if so, we no longer have humans, and the “no more humans” scenario is what we were trying to avoid in the first place.) If you hack the implant, you can manipulate or incapacitate the operator, cutting him off from the system. Musk is imagining that humans provide “the will.” Whether he’s asked himself what this means, I’m not sure; but has he noticed that humans have wills, not will? What if they disagree about how to steer the machine? What if a compromised human takes hostile control of the AI?

Even if the tech held up, the humans wouldn’t. One rogue operator could steer the system toward catastrophe. The DOGE boys may be loyal now, but they’ll age, falter, burn out, or cash out. And even if none of that happens, there’s the brute fact of scale. You can’t govern humanity with a control panel wired into half a dozen cyborgs. It’s brittle, unscalable, and absurdly vulnerable to failure—exactly the opposite of what you’d want in the last line of defense against a super-intelligence.

Musk’s plan—if I’m right that this is the plan—assumes that centralization is safety. But by concentrating all of these critical capabilities into a single, tightly coupled system, he would elevate the risk of catastrophic failure stratospherically. A single corrupted node could propagate instantly across the whole system. Distributed, redundant oversight—which such a plan would minimize, and for which Musk has contempt—is the only known antidote to this kind of risk.

All of this would be alarming enough if Musk approached these things like a cautious civil-aviation regulator. He does not. Grok is defective, obsessed with Hitler in a way that appears hardwired deep in its architecture. The Tesla Files are a catalogue of horrors—sudden acceleration, phantom braking, veering into oncoming traffic. If you plug fast-changing, poorly-bounded systems into cars, robots, factories, and satellites, wiring them together so a single update can touch every limb at once, you’ve built a machine that magnifies the consequences of ordinary error.

Musk wouldn’t be the first to insist that all power must be centralized in his hands because his intentions are so pure. His belief in this may even be sincere. Sincerity is not a safety feature.

RIVAL HYPOTHESES

Obviously, I can’t be certain what Musk is thinking. I don’t know him. Musk hasn’t hesitated to describe his vision, but he’s also erratic, improvisational, prone to contradicting himself, and a drug fiend. So perhaps I’m wrong. If so, here are a few more theories that might explain the behavior we’ve seen:

1. Benevolent Accelerationist: Musk concluded AGI was inevitable, so he decided the safest course would be to build it himself, even though he has no idea how to control it. At least, he tells himself, unlike Google or the Chinese state, he believes humanity is important. Neuralink, in this reading, is just a weird moonshot project with uncertain payoff, not the linchpin of the whole plan.

2. Corporate Conquistador: Above all, Musk is a business tycoon. He’s building AGI and the largest tech empire in history because that’s where the money is. He never meant a word he said he said about the risks of climate change, AGI, or human–AI symbiosis; it was all just marketing hype. Neuralink is a speculative sideline. He called for a moratorium on research to hamstring the incumbents and buy time to catch up; he always planned to accelerate once his data access and political patrons were in place. (This more prosaic theory has the advantage of requiring no theory of mind.)

3. Grudge Match: Musk has resolved to destroy Sam Altman, even at the risk of destroying humanity. The court filings in their multiple mutual lawsuits (a volume now approaching the dimensions of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce) show that Musk believes Sam Altman cunningly exploited his alarm about the existential dangers of AI, milked him as a cash cow, then double-crossed him, transforming a strictly humanitarian venture into a “US$157 billion for-profit, market-paralyzing gorgon” with Musk’s seed capital. Perhaps all that matters to Musk now is revenge.

4. Political Capture: Musk’s behavior is chiefly political. His conspiracist obsessions and culture war grievances are sincerely held. Advancing his cuckoo blood-and-soil agenda is more important to him than mitigating existential risk, and he saw in Trump a man who shared his most important ideological commitments. If putting him in office meant AI deregulation and environmental vandalism, that was a small price to pay for owning the libs. In for a penny, in for a pound—his new friends weren’t worried about existential risk, and their attitude rubbed off. Besides, there’s so much money to be made in AI that no self-respecting oligarch could afford to stay on the sidelines. DOGE is merely the byproduct of political patronage and opportunism. Neuralink is just an idea he likes. It’s a coincidence that his assets fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

5. Improvisational chaos: There’s no master plan—just an impulsive, risk-tolerant CEO who thrives on chaos. Any appearance of a coherent strategy is an illusion owed to his unusually large set of overlapping ventures.

Maybe it’s one of these—or all of these, or some combination. They aren’t mutually exclusive; most people have complex, shifting motivations. But no story fits the evidence quite as well as the idea that having appointed himself savior of the world, Musk is carrying out a plan to become an AI monopolist, destroy government guardrails, and merge man and machine.

If that’s his plan, it’s by any standard grotesque, deranged, and monstrous. It is also, obviously, totalitarian. It will almost certainly fail. But every step in his march toward failure will be irreversible. The empire Musk is assembling—data, compute, electricity, platforms, distribution, rules—is breathtaking in its scope and ambition. Well before ASI and the Great Symbiotic Event, assembling its components will make him the most powerful person ever to live. It has already made him unusually indifferent to norms that restrain everyone else.

When private assets are embedded in critical systems, like railroads in the 19th century, or the telephone network 20th, or SpaceX in satellite launches now—governments rarely succeed in reasserting control, at least not without nationalizing the asset. Musk is embedding his defective AI in our transport, communications, robots, and orbital infrastructure. It will soon be completely entangled with the government: It will participate in decision-making in every domain, from public health to the military. Political inertia will compound this, making it impossible to reverse until the crisis arrives and the whole scheme fails, either in an obvious way, or in some hideous way we can’t yet imagine.

It would be better, to say the least, to put an end to this madness now. And it might yet happen. DOGE’s regulatory decapitation has been effective in the short term, but it’s a massive provocation. Rival power centers—states, corporations, factions in the US government—have every incentive to reassert control. If Musk actually puts those chips in his Boys from Brazil and the public grasps what they’re really for, I expect the backlash to be swift and total.

It can’t come soon enough.

🚨 Postscript

Well, look at this. Isn’t this interesting:

Sam Altman despises Elon Musk. Now he is going after his companies:

Altman is backing a new brain-computer interface startup called Merge Labs, which will directly compete with Musk’s own brain-computer interface outfit Neuralink, the Financial Times reported this week. Altman is a cofounder of the new venture, which is seeking to raise capital at a US$850 million valuation. (Weirdly, Altman is also a small investor in Neuralink). Musk cofounded Neuralink (recent valuation: US$9 billion) in 2016, and is its largest individual shareholder.

Meanwhile, Altman is positioning OpenAI to compete directly with Musk’s X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. OpenAI is working to build a social media arm that would be an “X-like social network,” according to The Verge, which first reported on those plans in April. OpenAI’s push into social networking could potentially pose a big threat to X. At last count, X has around 600 million monthly users (per Statista). OpenAI says ChatGPT is more popular, with 700 million weekly users.

And Altman is coming after Tesla too. Compared to a year earlier, sales of Tesla vehicles plummeted 13.5 percent in the second quarter of 2025, leading Musk to pivot to self-driving taxis as a potential future area of growth for his electric vehicle maker. “My prediction is by the end of next year, we’ll have hundreds of thousands if not over a million Teslas doing self-driving in the US,” Musk said in May on CNBC. Maybe. But there is little evidence to support Musk’s claim, given that no Tesla vehicles are currently approved for full self-driving. In June, OpenAI announced it had partnered with self-driving software maker Applied Intuition (recent valuation: US$15 billion) to “advance next-generation, AI-powered experiences in vehicles worldwide.” Altman then hailed OpenAI’s progress in developing self-driving tech, while also obliquely dissing Tesla’s progress: “We have some new technology that could just do self-driving for standard cars way better than any current approach has worked,” Altman claimed on his brother’s podcast, Uncapped with Jack Altman.

Altman has also backed the company Longshot Space, which dreams of taking on Musk’s SpaceX with a gigantic gun that shoots satellites into orbit (seriously). He has also invested in Glydways, another robocar startup that could one day compete with Tesla’s self-driving robotaxis.

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Next: What do we do about this?

As usual, this version is slightly different from the one subscribers received in their inboxes. I went back and corrected typos, especially in the quoted text. I made no substantive changes, although one of the typos—I cited Musk saying that too much regulation made everything “legal” when I meant to type “illegal”—was pretty significant.

The list below is part of the second installment of The MechaHitler Reich. In a better world, it would be a sidebar to that newsletter—something you could glance at while you were reading it. But alas, this is not the best of all possible worlds, and Substack doesn’t give me that option.

I got worried that if I put the list at the top of the article, no one would read the article. But I also worried that if I put it at the end of the article, no one would read the list. I spent too much time compiling this list for that prospect to be tolerable. So I’ve decided just to send it separately. Hang on to it, and when you receive Part II, keep it in an open tab just slightly to the left of your open newsletter, okay? As if it were a sidebar to an article.

This is the most complete account I can come up with of the agencies in which Grok has been deployed, and the databases it has probably mined. It isn’t final, and it isn’t exhaustive. It’s only what I was able to put together from reports in the news and court filings. Unless I’ve seen a credible report indicating that DOGE has access to a database, I haven’t listed it, even if it would be reasonable to surmise that it has.

I use the word “probably” because in many cases, the reporting isn’t clear. An article might say, for example, that DOGE was given access to a database, but it might not say explicitly that the data wound up in Grok. Or it says that the data was “analyzed using AI,” but doesn’t say that this AI was Grok.

I’m assuming that probably, every time DOGE gains access to a database, its contents are swiftly fed to Grok, as a matter of routine. We have a consistent portrait of DOGE’s modus operandi. In report after report, court filing after court filing, employees recount witnessing the following sequence of events:

1. The DOGE boys arrived.

2. They figured out where the data was.

3. They demanded the highest level of access to it.

4. They weren’t interested in hearing that this was illegal and a violation of every known security protocol.

5. They made it clear that they viewed the people who offered these objections as caviling Deep-State dinosaurs who should be replaced with AI as quickly as possible.

6. If anyone tried to stop them, they were fired.

7. Either these positions were left vacant or they were filled by someone pliant and DOGE-friendly.

8. DOGE hooked up the department’s most sensitive databases to God-knows-what kind of server and vacuumed up the data without regard to long-established data-protection protocols.

9. The chief security officer began vomiting or had an aneurysm.

10. He quit or sued.

11. DOGE used Grok, or “some kind of AI,” to analyze the data.

12. If the courts temporarily blocked their access to the data, DOGE looked for ways to skirt the court order.

13. DOGE’s attorneys told judges who had blocked their access that they would be very, very responsible with the data, or they promised to send only DOGE boys who’d received training in data handling.

14. In some cases, the judge (or the White House and the Treasury Department) said they could have the data, but only in read-only mode, or an anonymized version. Otherwise, the judges mostly decided that DOGE should have unimpeded access to the data.

15. If they hadn’t done so already, DOGE swiftly vacuumed up the data without any regard to long-established data protection protocols, then used Grok, or “some kind of AI,” to analyze it.

16. The data soon showed up on the open Internet (sometimes on Elon Musk’s X feed). Foreign adversaries (Russia especially), profiting from the security vulnerabilities created by DOGE’s behavior, launched attack after attack on these now-vulnerable databases. Security analysts were left shaking, gibbering wrecks.

So whenever we read of DOGE gaining access to a database, it’s reasonable to think the data has already been shoveled into Grok’s maw. But I’m not 100 percent sure, hence “probably.”

I assume, when I read that DOGE used AI to analyze the data, that the AI in question is Grok. I can’t imagine Musk’s employees would feed all this precious data to a rival AI, can you? But again, I’m not 100 percent sure.

Unless I’ve found reporting to the contrary, I’ve assumed that DOGE still has access to these databases. Despite the Trump-Musk feud, Musk-aligned cadre remain inside the executive branch, so I don’t know why they wouldn’t.

This list is probably very incomplete, because it doesn’t necessarily make the news when DOGE helps itself to another data set. But it will give you a sense of the scale of this undertaking.

Normally, sharing data from a federal agency requires the agency’s authorization and the oversight of a specialist who ensures adherence to relevant privacy and confidentiality laws and regulations. DOGE hasn’t bothered with any of that. What they’re doing is a thousand kinds of illegal. But the law doesn’t enforce itself, and if the executive doesn’t feel like enforcing the law, then for practical purposes, no law exists.

• Department of Defense: In mid‑July, the Defense Department signed a contract with xAI worth up to US$200 million to deploy “Grok for Government.” This includes “custom national security tools, AI-powered science and health applications, and cleared engineering support for classified environments.” DoD employees recently learned that algorithmic tools monitor their computer activity, but the specific monitoring system has not been identified.

• General Services Administration: Grok has been approved for integration into the GSAi app, which allows federal workers to access AI models. Every federal government department, agency, or office now has access to Grok via this app.

• Agriculture:

  • The National Finance Center, a sensitive system that provides human resources and payroll functions for the Justice Department, Homeland Security, and the FBI, among other agencies. The data includes the Social Security numbers, banking information, addresses, and dates of birth for federal employees, including members of the FBI and DOJ, as well as salary, banking, address, deductions, debt and other key employment information.

  • The National Payment Service, which controls tens of billions of dollars in government payments and loans to farmers and ranchers across the United States. This has data treating every farmer’s financial life, missed payments, and financial problems, as well as all personal and financial data required to apply for an FSA loan. It also has demographic information about farmers and ranchers who applied for financial assistance.

  • Sensitive data about US agriculture, food security and areas of vulnerability; data that could be used to consolidate agricultural businesses and land ownership. This can be used, among other things, to draw conclusions about US farmland, futures markets, and commodity prices—which would let you make a lot of money.

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:

  • Payment systems

  • Contracting systems

• Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services:

  • Payment systems

  • Contracting systems

  • Grant-management systems

  • Health information, social security numbers, and military records.

• Citizenship and Immigration Services:

  • USCIS Data Business Intelligence Services:

    • Electronic Immigration System, including asylee and refugee data. This contains an immense amount of data about naturalization applicants and US citizens. When people apply to live in the United States, they have to supply a significant amount of information to USCIS, as do US citizens who are sponsoring their applications, including medical and financial data.

    • Data on legal immigration benefits, case management, green cards and petitions, details related to Temporary Protected Status and DACA applicants.

    • Central Index System: Information about people who use Alien Numbers, or A-Numbers, including people who don’t have legal authorization to be in the country or have interacted with ICE.

• Commerce: I’ve not yet found detailed reporting about DOGE’s activities here.

• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: (Musk killed the agency.) All unclassified CFPB data, including:

  • SmartPay (payment card database)

  • FPDS (contracting databases);

  • Financial companies’ trade secrets. In particular, proprietary information about the algorithms used in payment apps, like the kind Musk wants to add to X.

• Education:

  • All the data required to administer federal financial aid and student loan programs—including dates of birth, contact information, Social Security numbers, and bank account information—in these systems:

    • The National Student Loan Data System

    • FSA Partner Connect

    • The Financial Management System.

  • Personal data about the people who manage grants, and other sensitive internal financial data.

  • Records of every dollar the department disburses, from contracts and grants to work-trip expenses and DEI initiatives.

  • Records of departmental personnel and training. (They used this data to put 100 employees on leave because they’d once signed up for a diversity training session that they needed to fulfill a job requirement.)

• Energy: IT systems.

• FBI:

  • I’ve found no specific reporting, but DOGE used data from the FBI to build their migrant-tracking app, so obviously they have access to that.

• Federal Aviation Administration:

  • IT systems

• Federal Emergency Management Agency:

  • Data about disaster victims

• Food and Drug Administration: Unclear, but the employees reviewing Neuralink trials were fired immediately when DOGE arrived.

• General Services Agency: This is the choke point for all the other government agencies. DOGE requested, and as far as I know gained full access, to the following:

  • Federal real estate and IT infrastructure procurement data.

  • The SmartPay system, which is the world’s largest government commercial payment program.

  • The Federal Procurement Data System, which has the details of every contract with the government worth more than US$3,000. This and the SmartPay database contain massive amounts of sensitive and proprietary information shared with the government by businesses that have government contracts. DOGE now has all of the records related to the awarding of these contracts, including who submitted bids, how much they offered, and the nature of any negotiations.

  • Contracts for services provided to government agencies, including technology contracts, which the GSA administers. (The GSA manages, for example, multiple contracts with a Tesla subsidiary for solar power generation.)

  • All the components and sensitive information in the now-defunct notify.gov site, which was being built to give federal employees a secure personal messaging system.

  • All the components and sensitive information in login.gov, which lets users access multiple government websites from a single account.

  • All the components and sensitive information in search.gov, a government-built search engine for federal agencies.

  • All the components and sensitive information in cloud.gov, which provides cloud computing services for the federal government.

  • The Federal Audit Clearinghouse, a repository of federal grant audits.

  • USA.gov, which provides information on federal programs and services.

• Health and Human Services: HHS payment and contracting systems control hundreds of billions of dollars in annual payments to health care providers.

  • HIPAA‑regulated medical data, including the data in the Healthcare Integrated General Ledger Accounting System, which pays out federal grants and is used for accounting by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. It contains SSNs, names, dates of birth, financial account informations, taxpayer IDs, health insurance claims, employee ID numbers, and salaries.

  • CMS Integrated Data Repository Cloud, a high-volume data warehouse for integrating Medicare claims with data from patients and healthcare providers. It contains SSNs, names, dates of birth, email addresses, phone numbers, mailing addresses, medical records number, medical notes, health insurance claim numbers, unique physician identification numbers, race, sex, diagnosis, codes, procedure codes, and user credentials.

  • Business Intelligence Information System-Cloud, which contains HHS payroll, time and attendance, personnel, and recruiting data. It contains SSNs, mother’s maiden names, user credentials, email addresses, dates of birth, mailing addresses, names, phone numbers, military status, employment status, financial account information.

  • HRSA Electronic Handbooks, a platform that lets officials sign documents that create binding government contracts, and contains names, email addresses, phone numbers, taxpayer IDs, mailing addresses, user credentials, and more.

  • Unified Financial Management System, HHS’s integrated department-wide financial management system, containing SSNs, taxpayer IDs, email addresses, mailing addresses, names, phone numbers, financial account information, and more.

  • NIH Workforce Analytics Workbench, which lets users examine current and historical NIH workforce data, including headcount and retirement information.

  • Financial Business Intelligence Systems, which retrieves, combines, consolidates, and reports data from the core financial system. Data includes SSNs, taxpayer IDs, email addresses, mailing addresses, names, phone numbers, financial account information, and more.

  • Grants.gov., a federal website that serves as a clearinghouse for more than US$500 billion in grants. It’s used by thousands of outside organizations. The Defense, State and Interior Departments, especially, post their grant opportunities here. Nonprofits, universities, and local governments respond with applications to receive federal funding. DOGE has seized control of the site and all of the data that flows through it. It has deleted other federal officials’ access to it. It houses SSNs, taxpayer IDs, user credentials, email addresses, education records, mailing addresses, names, phone numbers, financial account info, provider license numbers, and more.

  • The Unaccompanied Alien Children portal, which contains extremely detailed information about minors who enter the United States alone, including mental health and therapy records, as well as immigration records, photos, and addresses of their family members, medical notes, educational information, sponsorship information, dates of birth, biometrics, country of birth, education information, progress reports, financial account information, employment status, income information, legal documents, marital status, gender, country of residency, fax numbers, and more.

  • Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Acquisition Lifecycle, which manages the contract acquisition process, including writing contracts, tracking milestones, and performing contract audits. It contains vendor names, addresses, phone numbers, taxpayer ID numbers, and employer ID numbers.

  • NIH ES Electronic Research Administration, the NIH’s system for processing research grant applications. Contains SSN, names, dates of birth, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, education, records, disability records, persistent digital identifiers, disadvantage background, user credentials, current positions, affiliated organizations, sex, demographic information, professional history, performance history, provincial history, service, payback obligations, financial data, and employment data.

  • NIH ES NIH Business System, including the general ledger, finance, budget, procurement, supply, travel, and property management systems. This includes SSNs, names, email addresses, phone numbers, financial accountant information, employment status, taxpayer IDs, employee ID numbers.

  • OS ASA OHR Enterprise Human Capital Management Investment, used by HHS to process its internal personnel actions and administer benefits to its employees. It holds SSNs, names, email addresses, phone numbers, certificates, education records, military status records, dates of birth, photographic identifiers, mailing addresses, financial account information, employment status, and user credentials.

  • OS ASA PSC Payment Management System, a shared service provider and a leader in processing grant payments for the federal government. It includes SSNs, names, email addresses, phone numbers, taxpayer IDs, mailing addresses, financial account information, and user credentials.

  • OS ASFR Grant Solutions, a grants management services provider. This contains taxpayer IDs, user credentials, email addresses, mailing addresses, names, phone numbers, and employer ID numbers.

  • OS ASFR HHS Consolidated Acquisition Solution, which manages purchase requests and business transactions across HHS, with the exception of CDC. It contains SSNs, names, email addresses, phone numbers, education records, taxpayer IDs, mailing addresses, financial account information, legal documents, and user credentials.

  • Integrated Contracts Expert system at CDC, HHS’s CDC-specific accounting system. This includes SSNs, names, email addresses, and employer ID numbers.

  • Acquisition, Performance and Execution system at CDC, a platform for the CDC to procure private sector contracts and work, with SSNs, names, email addresses, employment status, and employer ID number.

  • ACF Expanded Federal Parent Locator Service, which houses four systems critical to child support. Overseen by the Administration for Children and Families, it contains massive amounts of personal income data linked to nearly all US workers, as well as data like SSNs, dates of birth, names, mailing addresses, military status, and employment status.

    • National Directory of New Hires, a database of employment data;

    • Federal Case Registry of Child Support Orders, a database of child, support cases and orders

    • Debtor File which helps states collect delinquent child support

    • Parent Child Support Portal, which provides a secure gateway for FPLS web applications and houses information about children placed into foster care so that the relatives of these children can be notified.

• Housing and Urban Development:

  • All the data reported by people who are applying for housing.

  • HUD Enforcement Management System, which contains medical records, financial files, documents that may list Social Security numbers and other private information.

• Homeland Security: DOGE has ordered officials to use Grok even though it hasn’t been approved by the department. The DOGE boys are reportedly building a “master database” consolidating SSA, IRS, immigration and voting data.

  • Biometric identity systems.

  • Disaster‑aid recipients’ personal data.

  • Highly sensitive information about border security, immigration enforcement, and cybersecurity.

  • Employee emails, which Grok monitors for signs of disloyalty to Trump.

• ICE:

  • DOGE helped to build the Alien Tracker app, a mapping app for tracking down illegal migrants. Information about more than 700,000 people is recorded on the app. The tracker draws on data from the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the US Marshals Service, and the Social Security Administration.

• Internal Revenue Service: DOGE’s demands led to a massive fight that resulted in the firing of the top IRS attorney and 18,141 other employees.( Tax officials predict that this will so hamper tax collection this year that we’ll lose more than US$500 billion in federal revenue—about ten percent of our annual collection.) In the end, the White House and Treasury Department decided that DOGE wouldn’t be allowed to see personal taxpayer data, but could have access to the anonymized data. These are the databases DOGE wanted; whether they now have access to them, to anonymized versions, or neither isn’t clear from the reporting:

  • The Integrated Data Retrieval System, which enables access to IRS accounts (including personal identification numbers and bank information).

  • Property records

  • Integrated Data Retrieval System, data anonymized. Detailed records (bank accounts, payment balances, SSNs and other personal identification numbers, medical information) for virtually every individual, business, and nonprofit in the country.

  • The addresses and taxpayer records of of 700,000 illegal aliens, including bank accounts, payment balances, Social Security numbers, other personal identification numbers, and medical information for almost every man, woman, child, business, and nonprofit in the United States.

  • Working with Palantir, DOGE engineers built an API that allowed them to see previously compartmentalized data from across the IRS in one place.

• Interior: I’ve not yet found reporting about the data to which it has access.

• Justice:

  • Executive Office for Immigration Review’s Courts and Appeals System, which keeps records on immigrants who have interacted with the US immigration system including their names, addresses, previous immigration-court testimony, and history of engagement with law enforcement.

• Labor: DOGE has access to every record at the agency. This includes data sets on:

  • Unemployment claims

  • Health insurance plans

  • Disability insurance

  • Workplace health and safety investigations

  • Wage theft

  • Child labor

  • Medical information about federal workers

  • The identities of government whistleblowers (DOGE now has access to every bit of confidential information about federal investigations into Musk’s companies, as well as their competitors)

  • Detailed information about safety inspections at private companies

  • Privileged information about the economy capable of moving financial markets

  • Personal information of migrant farm workers, including applicants for temporary work visas

• National Labor Relations Board: Reams of potentially sensitive data, from confidential information about employees who want to form unions to proprietary business information. Employees grew concerned that the data could be exposed after they started detecting suspicious log-in attempts from an IP address in Russia. Eventually, the IT department launched a formal review of what it deemed a serious, ongoing security breach or potentially illegal removal of personally identifiable information. A whistleblower in the IT department reported someone “physically taping a threatening note” to his door that included overhead photos, shot by drone, of him walking his dog. An enormous amount of data—10 gigabytes—was found to have been clandestinely exfiltrated while DOGE’s was there.

  • NxGen case management system, which hosts proprietary data from corporate competitors, personal information about union members or employees voting to join a union, and witness testimony in ongoing cases.

• NASA:

  • Internal evaluations of thousands of contracts awarded to SpaceX’s rivals, such as Blue Origin, with detailed descriptions of the services provided to NASA and notes explaining why each contract should be kept, cut or downsized.

  • Administrative and internal employee data, including employment and training histories.

• National Institutes of Health:

  • Finance, procurement, and grants systems.

  • NOFOs, or Notice of Funding Opportunities—grant announcements. It also has the power to approve these grants.

• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

  • IT databases, including employee resource groups with membership, internal newsletters, training documents, and personnel management information.

• National Reconnaissance Office:

  • Budget and staffing. (We know because this is classified, but they posted data from it on their website.)

• Occupational Safety and Health Administration: Labor unions filed a frantic lawsuit to prevent DOGE from getting its hands on this data. DOGE told the court that their employees were required to fill out all the proper paperwork before accessing it; the judge said, “Good enough,” and signed off.

  • More than 50 data systems with private information about US citizens, including one with the names of everyone who has helped OSHA with their investigations, in confidence. (I’m sure Musk is keenly interested in this, since OSHA has investigated and penalized SpaceX and Tesla many times. OSHA also investigates Musk’s rivals in the car and aerospace sectors.)

• Office of Personnel Management: DOGE shut out the senior staff and replaced them with its own operatives.

  • Internal email and contact lists.

  • The Enterprise Human Resources Integration and Electronic Official Personnel Folder, which hold data about the employees of most federal agencies, including their addresses, demographic profiles, salary details and disciplinary histories.

  • Detailed security clearance forms for everyone with a clearance.

  • Data about everyone who has ever applied for a federal job through USAJob. (There were 24.5 million applicants last year.)

• Small Business Administration:

  • Core financial and loan systems

  • Capital Access Financial System, the SBA’s main portal for submitting and servicing loans. This contains several CAFS subsystems with granular data on loans and loan applications: street addresses, tax IDs, additional notes from SBA investigations, holds, citizenship status or alien registration number, street address of the business, and the race and gender of the person listed as principal.

• Social Security Administration: Musk’s team was especially determined to get this data, and waged war on senior officials—and repeatedly tried to circumvent a judge’s orders—to get it. Finally, the senior officials were fired and replaced with DOGE-friendly ones, and DOGE got its data.

  • Databases containing the SSNS, earnings, pay history, medical history, residences, identities, and citizenship of more than 70 million Americans who receive Social Security benefits.

  • The world’s largest repository of medical data.

  • Years of data about every American’s social security payments, benefits, and employment histories.

• State:

  • DOGE has access to all of USAID’s systems, including classified data. This includes the names of foreigners we worked with, some already at risk of arrest and worse in their home countries.

• Transportation: I’ve not yet seen reporting on DOGE’s activities.

• Treasury: (Some of these systems are designated “high security,” meaning that unauthorized disclosures, modifications, or disruptions to access of the

  systems could have “severe or catastrophic adverse effect[s] on organizational operations, organizational assets, or individuals.”)

  • Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which controls the federal payment system that distributes nearly 90 percent of all federal payments, including Social

    Security benefits, tax refunds, and vendor payments. Twelve BFS payment systems process more than US$6 trillion in annual payments and are responsible for more than a billion payments annually amounting to trillions of dollars in US government payments. The top Treasury official resigned rather accede to the demand; he was replaced by a DOGE staffer. A federal judge then issued an emergency order prohibiting DOGE employees from accessing the data on the grounds it could do “irreparable harm;” the same federal judge subsequently decided that DOGE could have access to anything they wanted, so long as they had a bit of training first. So DOGE now has access all the data—SSNs, home addresses, bank account information—of everyone whose financial information is stored in that payment file. Access to these data sets gives DOGE a comprehensive map of US expenditures, including spending on highly classified programs. Within a day of DOGS gaining access to these systems, information exfiltrated from the BFS payment systems was broadcast on X.

    • Integrated Document Management System contains personally identifying information for 10,000,000–99,999,999 people, including Social Security Numbers, personal taxpayer identification numbers, personal financial information, taxpayer information/return information, dates of birth, addresses, zip codes, phone numbers, email addresses, marital statuses, spouse information, information on children, mother’s maiden names, military service information, employee identification numbers, health plan beneficiary numbers, patient ID numbers, file/case ID numbers, medical/health information, mental health information, worker’s compensation information, disability information, and emergency contact information.

    • Disbursement And Debt Management Analytics Platform

    • Do Not Pay

    • Electronic Check Processing System’

    • Electronic Federal Tax Payments System

    • FedDebt

    • Fiscal Data Hub

    • Invoice Processing Platform

    • Payment Information Repository,

    • Payment Information & View of Transactions

    • Secure Payment System

    • Treasury Check Information System

    • Treasury Direct

• Veterans Affairs:

  • All of the VA’s 76,000 contracts

  • Health information, social security numbers, and military records

That’s a lot of data.

Grok for Government

xAI recently announced the rollout of Grok for Government, “a suite of frontier AI products available first to United States Government customers.”

Under the umbrella of Grok For Government, we will be bringing all of our world-class AI tools to federal, local, state, and national security customers. These customers will be able to use the Grok family of products to accelerate America – from making everyday government services faster and more efficient to using AI to address unsolved problems in fundamental science and technology.

This includes frontier AI like Grok 4, our latest and most advanced model so far, which brings strong reasoning capabilities with extensive pretraining models. Our government partnerships will also bring to bear tools like Deep Search, Tool Use, and more integrations – all of which are industry-leading commercial products.

We’ve been engaging closely with innovators and leaders in the government to make sure that our offerings are able to deliver the capabilities we need. In addition to our commercial offerings, we will be making some unique capabilities available to our government customers, including:

• Custom models for national security and critical science applications available to specific customers.

• Forward Deployed Engineering and Implementation Support, with USG cleared engineers

• Custom AI-powered applications to accelerate use cases in healthcare, fundamental science, and national security, to name a few examples

• Models soon available in classified and other restricted environments

  • Partnerships with xAI to build custom versions for specific mission sets

Given xAI’s new insight into federal procurement processes—and its competitors—I think we can assume that sales will be brisk and lucrative.

Keep reading to find out what Elon Musk intends to do with this data:

Here are the sources from which I compiled that list. Feel very free to let me know if I’ve missed something. If you work at one of these agencies and know of other databases DOGE has fed to Grok, please let me know. (And please let me know if any of this is incorrect, too.)

• EPIC, Democracy Forward, and a federal worker v. DOGE

• Understanding DOGE and your data.

• Ranking Member Connolly demands answers after reports DOGS is feeding Americans’ private data into unapproved AI systems, using AI to slash programs.

• DOGE is just getting warmed up. DOGE has tapped into some of the most sensitive and valuable data in the world. Now it’s starting to put it to work.

• Elon Musk’s Grok AI is quietly being deployed across US government agencies. Experts warn it could breach privacy laws and create serious conflicts of interest.

• Musk’s DOGE expanding his Grok AI in US government, raising conflict concerns.

• DOGE keeps gaining access to sensitive data. Now, it can cut off billions to farmers.

• A whistleblower's disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data.

• The government already knows a lot about you. DOGE is trying to access all of it.

• Musk’s DOGE using AI to snoop on US federal workers, sources say

  DOGE broadens sweep of federal agencies, gains access to health payment systems.

• When it’s not just a coup but a CFAA violation too.

• This obscure office is at the center of Elon Musk’s efforts to harness federal data.

• Elon Musk’s friends have infiltrated another government agency. Musk’s former employees are trying to use White House credentials to access General Services Administration tech, giving them the potential to remote into laptops, read emails, and more, sources say.

• Elon Musk lackeys have taken over the Office of Personnel Management.

  Sources tell WIRED that the OPM’s top layers of management now include individuals linked to xAI, Neuralink, the Boring Company, and Palantir. One expert found the takeover reminiscent of Stalin.

• Coalition of US states to file lawsuit after Musk’s DOGE gains access to Americans’ personal data

• Former Palantir and Elon Musk associates are taking over key government IT roles. The chief information officers of at least three major government agencies have been replaced by Silicon Valley executives, including from Palantir and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

• Ex-Social Security official describes “significant” risk of sensitive data going to wrong hands under DOGE.

• Struggle over Americans’ personal data plays out across the government. Employees from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency are gaining access to vast amounts of information held by federal agencies, even as lawsuits try to stop them.

• DOGE efforts to access private data spark sharp pushback.

• Top IRS lawyer pushed aside as DOGE seeks records and 20 percent staff cuts. Elon Musk’s team has provoked concern among career staff over requests for tax records of undocumented immigrants.

• DOGE is putting the country’s data and computing infrastructure at risk, HKS expert argues. Cyber security expert Bruce Schneier worries that DOGE’s access to highly sensitive information is giving bad actors a chance to take advantage.

• Senator warns of national security risks after Elon Musk’s DOGE granted “full access” to sensitive Treasury systems

• Trump preps order to dismantle Education Department as DOGE probes data. Closing the agency would require congressional approval, so the new administration hopes to diminish it in the meantime.

• Trump energy secretary allowed 23-year-old DOGE rep to access IT systems over objections from general counsel.

• DOGE data release criticized by intel community; Trump admin says it’s public data.

• Elon Musk, DOGE use access to Social Security data to elevate claims against migrants.

• How DOGE may have improperly used Social Security data to push voter fraud narratives.

• DOGE gains access to confidential records on housing discrimination,

  medical details—even domestic violence.

• DOGE says it needs to know the government’s most sensitive data, but can't say why.

• Judge orders Musk and DOGE to delete personal data taken from Social Security. Restraining order blocks DOGE’s “unlimited access” to Social Security records.

• Tax revenue could drop by 10 percent amid turmoil at IRS. Staff cuts and disruptions related to the US DOGE Service have officials bracing for a sharp loss of revenue.

• Treasury agrees to block DOGE’s access to personal taxpayer data at IRS. US DOGE Service reps will see anonymized tax data, not individual returns.

• Federal judge blocks Musk’s DOGE from access to Treasury Department material. The judge also ordered Musk and his team to “immediately destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from Treasury Department’s records and systems, if any.”

• Here’s all the Health and Human Services data DOGE has access to.

  Elon Musk’s DOGE has access to 19 sensitive systems at HHS. In at least one instance, it appears that access was granted without the proper security training.

• DOGE employees may access sensitive Treasury data, judge rules. A federal judge ruled the department’s DOGE team could access sensitive financial information on millions of Americans, but must be vetted and trained first.

• Musk associates given unfettered access to private data of government employees.

• DOGE claims it has saved billions. See where. A WSJ analysis of government data found that many claims of savings were overstated and “woke” cuts were only a tiny fraction of the total

• DOGE aides search Medicare agency payment systems for fraud. Elon Musk’s allies have been on site at Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services offices this week.

• Conflict of interest? Musk’s DOGE Team deploys Grok AI across federal agencies.

• Pentagon to start using Grok as part of a US$200 million contract with Elon Musk’s xAI

• Elon Musk’s DOGE is now using AI to spy on federal workers. Be careful what you say if you’re a federal employee.

• Top IRS lawyer pushed aside as DOGE seeks records and 20 percent staff cuts. Elon Musk’s team has provoked concern among career staff over requests for tax records of undocumented immigrants.

• DOGE aims to pool federal data, putting personal information at risk. The goal—a centralized system with unprecedented access to data about Social Security, taxes, medical diagnoses and other private information—would create a multitude of vulnerabilities, experts say

• DOGE has the keys to sensitive data that could help Elon Musk. A Washington Post review found that in at least seven major departments or agencies, DOGE secured the power to view records that experts say could benefit Musk’s businesses for years

• Musk’s DOGE agents access sensitive personnel data, alarming security officials. The highly restricted data includes personally identifiable information for millions of federal employees maintained by the Office of Personnel Management.

• DOGE takes over federal grants website, wresting control of billions. A DOGE engineer removed users’ access to grants.gov, threatening to further slow the process of awarding thousands of federal grants per year.

• DOGE broadens sweep of federal agencies, gains access to health payment systems. Associates of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have spread out across the federal government in recent days, alarming many career employees.

• After his Trump blowup, Musk may be out. But DOGE is just getting Started. With members embedded in multiple agencies, the team’s approach to transforming government is becoming “institutionalized,” as one official put it.

• DOGE’s grab of personal data stokes privacy and security fears. Twenty-one staffers of the US DOGE Service announced their resignations Tuesday citing, among other worries, “mishandling sensitive data.”

• GSA engineering lead resigns over DOGE ally’s request for access. Steven Reilly announced he was departing after Thomas Shedd sought access to government data.

• Some DOGE agents removed from sensitive personnel systems after security fears. The changes come after a Post article detailing the sweeping controls granted to deputies of billionaire Elon Musk.

• DOGE searches for DEI information at US climate, oceans agency.

• Elon Musk’s DOGE is feeding sensitive federal data into AI to target cuts.

  At the Education Department, the tech billionaire’s team has turned to artificial intelligence to hunt for potential spending cuts—part of a broader plan to deploy the technology across the federal government.

• Education Department agrees to block DOGE from accessing student data. The Trump administration will temporarily stop its DOGE staff from accessing sensitive student data such as Social Security numbers and bank account numbers. “They have a playbook, which is to get access to the data. And once they’re in, it’s already over.”

• Judge orders ban on DOGE from access to sensitive Treasury data. The federal judge in New York says there is public interest in protecting the security of personal details and banking information.

• Court bars DOGE officials from altering Treasury payment records.

• HHS grants DOGE access to child support database, overriding objections. An HHS official said the associates of Elon Musk’s group had sought “read-only” access.

• Judge lets DOGE access sensitive records at Labor Department. Despite voicing skepticism about granting the access, a judge denied unions’ request for a restraining order blocking the Musk-led group.

• DOGE’s grab of personal data stokes privacy and security fears.

  Twenty-one staffers of the US DOGE Service announced their resignations Tuesday citing, among other worries, “mishandling sensitive data.”

• How an ex-State Department official fueled Elon Musk’s attack on USAID. Mike Benz appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast in late December to discuss USAID, spurring Musk’s first mention of the agency

• Court decision allows DOGE to continue accessing student data. A federal district judge has refused to issue a temporary restraining order to stop the US DOGE Service from accessing student data at the Education Department.

• Justice Department agrees to let DOGE access sensitive immigration case data. About a half-dozen DOGE “advisors” won approval from the the Justice Department to access the ECAS system, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

• Inside DOGE’s push to defy a court order and access Social Security data. Musk’s cost-cutting team repeatedly sought to get around a judge’s order to gain access to private details about millions of beneficiaries.

• DOGE is collecting federal data to remove immigrants from housing, jobs. Officials working with the US DOGE Service are pushing agencies to turn over information on where people work, study and live.

• Supreme Court lets DOGE access Social Security data of millions of Americans. The orders were another example of the Supreme Court granting a Trump administration’s emergency request to lift or scale back lower court rulings blocking his initiatives.

• Elon Musk’s ethical minefield, mapped.

• The person ruling on Elon Musk’s DOGE conflicts of interest is … Elon Musk

• Supreme Court grants DOGE access to confidential Social Security records.

• Former Social Security official describes hostile takeover by Musk team. DOGE officials also put millions of taxpayers’ private data at risk and refused to say why they needed access to it, the official says.

• The truth about DOGE’s AI plans: The tech can’t do that. Identify “mission-critical” jobs? Spot dead people on Social Security rolls? Government needs AI — but what DOGE appears to be doing doesn’t add up.

• DOGE presses to check federal benefits payments against IRS tax records. Officials with Elon Musk’s group say they want to search for fraud. Privacy law bars the IRS from disclosing tax information to other parts of the government.

• Elon Musk is reportedly taking control of the inner workings of US government agencies.

• Senate Intelligence members sound the alarm about DOGE risk to national security and American privacy

• The biggest breach of US government data is under way. Elon Musk’s DOGE has taken control of large swathes of Americans’ private information held by the US government.

• DOGE’s push for Americans’ data meets mixed response from judges.

  Here’s where the Elon Musk effort has run into court restrictions—and where it hasn’t.

• Cybersecurity experts are sounding the alarm on DOGE.

• Federal workers sue to disconnect DOGE server. Two federal workers, citing reports that Elon Musk’s associates are operating an illegally connected email server at OPM, seek a restraining order.

• Musk says DOGE is in almost every federal agency and plans to double staff.

• US government officials privately warn Musk’s blitz appears illegal. The billionaire’s DOGE team has launched an all-out assault on federal agencies, triggering numerous legal objections.

• Musk’s DOGE seeks access to personal taxpayer data, raising alarm at IRS. The unusual request could put sensitive data about millions of American taxpayers in the hands of Trump political appointees.

• In chaotic Washington blitz, Elon Musk’s ultimate goal becomes clear. Shrink government, control data and—according to one official closely watching the billionaire’s DOGE—replace “the human workforce with machines.”

• Federal judge blocks Musk’s DOGE from access to Treasury Department material. The judge also ordered Musk and his team to “immediately destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from Treasury Department’s records and systems, if any.”

• Judge temporarily blocks DOGE access to sensitive information at two agencies. A federal judge sided with labor unions and stopped DOGE from accessing sensitive data for millions of Americans without their consent for at least 14 days.

• How Edward ‘Big Balls’ Coristine and DOGE got access to a federal payroll system that serves the FBI. Hundreds of pages of records reviewed by WIRED show just how quickly DOGE gained access to systems at the Small Business Administration—and through it, a USDA system that handles payroll for federal law enforcement.

• DOGE gained access to sensitive data of migrant children, including reports of abuse. Former officials question the reason for a Doge engineer’s access to the Unaccompanied Alien Children portal.

• Move fast, break things, rebuild: Elon Musk’s strategy for US government. The disruption Musk is bringing to federal agencies is central to a management style that has won admiration in Silicon Valley.

• How Elon Musk’s deputies took over the government’s most basic functions

  The Trump administration views a once-obscure federal IT unit as the “Swiss army knives” in its effort to overhaul the federal bureaucracy.

• The government wants AI to fight wars and review your taxes. The Trump administration is pushing federal agencies to rapidly adopt artificial intelligence tools. Are the efficiency gains worth the risks?

• Inside the AI prompts DOGE used to “munch” contracts related to veterans’ health.

• Musk fights back as some Trump aides resist intensifying DOGE push.

  The White House says federal agencies have discretion over key policy, as records show Elon Musk’s team pushing for still more enormous changes.

• How Elon Musk’s deputies took over the government’s most basic functions.

  The Trump administration views a once-obscure federal IT unit as the “Swiss army knives” in its effort to overhaul the federal bureaucracy.

• Musk aides gain access to sensitive Treasury Department payment system.

  The access—granted by Scott Bessent, Trump’s newly confirmed treasury secretary—comes after the ousting of the agency’s top career official.

• Judge blocks DOGE access to Social Security systems, calls for deletion of data. Under the order, all DOGE team members associated with the organization's work at SSA must disgorge and delete all non-anonymized personal information they obtained from SSA systems.

• How Trump is reshaping reality by hiding data. Curating reality is an old political game, but Trump’s sweeping statistical purges are part of a broader attempt to reinvent “truth.”

• DOGE Is building a master database to surveil and track immigrants. DOGE is knitting together data from the Department of Homeland Security, Social Security Administration, and IRS that could create a surveillance tool of unprecedented scope.

• DOGE has “God mode” access to government data. The president’s special commission now has an unprecedented ability to view and manipulate information at many federal agencies.

• DOGE staffer violated security policies at Treasury Department, court filing shows. The filing was part of a case brought by state attorneys general seeking to block DOGE access to sensitive information.

• How Elon Musk executed his takeover of the federal bureaucracy.

The New York Times recently published an article about a new trend in the care of dementia patients. Some call it reminiscence therapy. It was once thought best for caregivers to attempt to orient their delusional patients toward reality: When a patient suffering from dementia asked for his wife, for example, his caregiver was instructed truthfully to tell him, over and over, that she had died years ago. But each time, the patient would be convulsed with fresh shock and grief.

This is why some have now decided it is better to enter the world of the patients’ remaining memories, where the patients are happy and calm. Caregivers of this school simply tell the patient, over and over, “Your wife just called. Traffic’s bad, but she’ll be here in a few minutes. Look—dinner is ready!”

One care home in California has built something like a Truman Show for its charges, who spend their days in a replica small town from the 1950s. They take their meals in an old-fashioned diner, watch television in a vintage movie theater, and stroll past phone booths and 1959 Thunderbirds. Ike’s portrait hangs in the library. Everyone agrees: They’re happier that way.

Donald Trump lives in a world of delusions. The things he believes aren’t true. Media accounts suggest that those around him treat him like a relative with dementia. They tell them whatever he likes to hear, so long as it keeps him happy and calm. They don’t correct his misapprehensions. They strive, instead, to make the world conform to his fantasies.

But Donald Trump is the President of the United States. He has the sole authority to launch 3,748 nuclear weapons and needs no one’s permission to do so. The decisions he’s making, in his fantasy world, are in the real world rapidly unspooling a noble system of governance that took centuries to build and a world order that, for all its faults, has been more prosperous and humane than any that preceded it.

In the course of two weeks, the second Trump administration has done incalculable damage. Much of it is irreversible. Many will die as the result of the decisions he and Elon Musk have made. The odds today are much higher than they were two weeks ago that the future will be led by China and belong to a concert of brutal authoritarian powers. Liberal democracy may not survive at all.

Trump alone does not have the power to do so much harm—and even Musk, for all his riches, could not do it but for our help. It is only possible because so many Americans, and in particular, so many members of Congress, have chosen either to enter their fantasy world or deny the evidence that these men are insane. We’re witnessing a textbook case of folie à millions: an extreme collective delusion.

Narcissism

A delusion is a false belief that is at once held with great conviction and impervious to revision, no matter the strength of the contrary evidence. Those suffering from delusions perceive their false beliefs to be self-evident and immutable truths. It has long been recognized that delusions can be contagious, sometimes virulently so. Typically, there is a dominant person—the “inducer”—who is the source of the delusions.

The psychiatrists Charles Lasègue and Jules Falret first described a shared mental disorder, a folie à deux, in the 19th century. Erich Fromm used the term folie à millions to describe the psychopathological phenomenon that occurs when whole societies lose contact with reality, becoming increasingly immersed in the fantasies of a floridly delusional inducer. Germany under Hitler and the Soviet Union under Stalin are obvious examples.

The inducer’s delusions are not random, Fromm remarked. He channels and amplifies the pathological traits that were already present in his society, traits such as as paranoia, narcissism, and a propensity to violence. Delusions are spread by word-of-mouth, in the media, and, in the modern world, through social networks. They impregnate ever-greater numbers, all of whom proceed to reinforce the others in their delusions. “The individual who participates in such common madness,” Fromm wrote, “lacks the sense of complete isolation and separation, and consequently escapes the intense anguish” that he would experience if he alone adhered to this delusional system of belief.

In 1964, Fromm published The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good And Evil, an analysis of collective madness rooted in Sigmund Freud’s concept of narcissism—a foundational idea in psychoanalysis, and one that has had a lasting impact on psychology, social theory, and political analysis.

The word “narcissistic” is commonly used as a synonym for “selfish” or “vain.” But this was not Freud’s meaning. Freud introduced his concept of narcissism in his 1914 paper, “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” Primary narcissism, in Freud’s schema, is the psychological stage through which every human passes in infancy. For an infant, the only world that exists is himself—his body, his hunger, his sensations of warmth and cold. He is completely self-absorbed. He does not yet realize that there is a world external to him, populated by other minds, who inhabit other bodies, entirely separate from his. He does not realize that these others have desires and needs of their own.

In the course of normal development, according to Freud, the infant comes to understand that the objects he encounters are not extensions of himself. But we all, to some extent, remain narcissistic. In healthy adults, this narcissism is reduced to a socially accepted minimum; but our residual narcissism, in Freud’s view, is normal and even necessary.

When an infant fails, owing to trauma, to progress through primary narcissism to maturity, what Freud calls secondary narcissism emerges. If an adult continues to believe that the only world that exists is himself, it is a pathological phenomenon. This phenomenon has a distinct and recognizable symptomatology.

Freud’s theories were speculative and introspective; they were not empirical in the modern, scientific sense. But his concept of narcissism has been validated and elaborated by means of rigorous psychological studies. Some elements of Freud’s psychoanalytic account, such as his focus on the libido, have been supplanted by cognitive, behavioral, and neurological concepts. But the core ideas—the notion of narcissism as a spectrum, with both normal and pathological forms; the link between narcissism and aggression; the developmental aspect of narcissism and its connection to early childhood experiences; the impact of narcissistic traits on leadership, relationships, and social behavior—have been extensively confirmed by empirical research.

The Narcissistic Personality Inventory, for example, developed by Raskin and Hall in 1979, is one of the most widely-used tools for measuring subclinical narcissistic traits such as authority, exhibitionism, superiority, entitlement, exploitativeness, self-sufficiency, and vanity—all traits Freud associated with narcissistic fixation. Studies consistently find that if you receive a high score on this test, you'll be more prone, for example, to exhibit aggression when your self-image is threatened, and to seek admiration compulsively but struggle with deeper relationships. Many organizations use the test as part of their hiring process. The Grandiose Narcissism Scale is another psychometrically rigorous index. The Pathological Narcissism Inventory measures, as the name suggests, pathological narcissism. All of these tests work, in the sense that they can be used to make accurate predictions.

This means you don’t need to be a Freudian at all to accept the validity of the construct. I myself find Freud’s insights irreplaceable, but I’m aware that some readers may find him too abstract or dismiss him as unscientific. It is neither abstract nor unscientific, however, to say that someone who receives a high score on the Pathological Narcissism Inventory is far more likely than someone who doesn’t to exhibit a particular, predictable behavioral repertoire. He is far more likely to be a criminal. You do not want to marry him. You may have no use for Freud’s theory about why this is so, but if you know that it is so, you will be much less surprised by the actions of a pathologically narcissistic leader.

If you wish to be even more empirical about things, there is also neuroscientific support for Freud’s claims. From brain imaging studies, we know that people who receive extremely high scores on these psychometric scales display structural abnormalities in the fronto-paralimbic regions of their brains. You’ll see less than the expected amount of gray matter in the parts of the brain involved in empathy and self-regulation. You’ll see overactivity in the ventral striatum—the reward center. This is consistent with a hyperactive self-reward system that reinforces self-focus and grandiosity.1

Empirical studies have also validated Freud’s claim that the highly narcissistic struggle with external attachments. Narcissists excel at initial charm, for example, but fail in long-term relationships (because they’re so maddeningly selfish). They react with rage and aggression when their ego is threatened, aligning with Freud’s idea of narcissistic injury.

Narcissistic traits are associated with low empathy, particularly in emotional recognition tasks. Research on leadership, too, confirms Freud’s prediction that narcissists are drawn to power. Highly narcissistic corporate leaders often achieve high status, but they are prone to extreme recklessness in decision-making.

Narcissism, Freud suggested, can manifest in grandiose political visions. In his later work, he anticipated Fromm’s concept of collective narcissism when he suggested that we compensate for narcissistic wounds by identifying with larger groups or ideals—such as religion, or the nation. This identification offers a substitute for personal grandeur. It protects against feelings of helpless insignificance. 

A defining characteristic of successful mass leaders, Freud wrote in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, is their ability to arouse narcissistic admiration in their followers by reflecting back to them their idealized self-image. The leader, in turn, sees himself as the embodiment of the group’s aspirations, and dissent as a personal attack. The book was written in 1921. It proved excruciatingly prophetic.

The Narcissistic Personality Structure

The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg later described the narcissistic personality structure in detail. The pathological narcissist, he wrote, is invariably grandiose. His life is an endless fantasy of unlimited specialness, superiority, power, and success.

His grandiosity is brittle, however; it is easily shattered, and when it is, the narcissist feels emptiness and limitless rage.

Lack of empathy, in Kernberg’s view, is the most significant hallmark of pathological narcissism. The deficit is the consequence of arrested emotional development. The narcissist never successfully formed a view of the world in which others truly exist. This is why he is so exploitative. Other people are useful to him only when they reinforce his grandiosity.

Kernberg’s distinctive contribution was his emphasis on aggression in the narcissistic pathology. The narcissist harbors immense unconscious aggression stemming from a childhood marked by unmet needs and emotional rejection. Because he responds with rage when his grandiosity is threatened, his relationships are volatile and unstable.

Another concept key to Kernberg’s theory of narcissistic personality is splitting— a defense mechanism wherein the narcissist categorizes experiences and people as entirely good or entirely bad. He is incapable of integrating these polarities into a whole. This applies to himself no less than others. His fragile self-image vacillates between omnipotence and worthlessness. When his grandiose self is reinforced, he feels superior and invulnerable. When criticized, or faced with failure, he experiences intolerable fear and shame. He externalizes this as rage.

Kernberg drew some of these concepts from the work of Melanie Klein, who believed that the life of a pathological narcissist is dominated by obsessive envy. Envy of others—their success, their beauty, their happiness—compels him constantly to belittle and undermine them: It is a defense against overwhelming feelings of inferiority. Klein notes that the narcissist is incapable of gratitude. He is forever focused on that which he feels he has been unjustly denied. He is prone to projective identification: He attributes his own intolerable emotions (anger, envy, hatred) to others, who in turn become targets of devaluation and exploitation.

For the narcissist, the world and others exist only as mirrors to his own greatness, and when these mirrors fail to reflect him as he wishes, he seeks to destroy them. He does not regard others as human beings with their own needs, rights, and dignity, because he cannot. Having failed to develop this cognitive capacity in childhood, he is brain-damaged. It is literally impossible for him to conceive of other people in this way. He views others only as objects of satisfaction or obstacles to be removed.

In Kernberg’s construct, the other salient features of Narcissistic Personality Disorder—as distinct from narcissism of the normal variety—are grandiosity, antisocial behavior, ego-syntonic sadism, and paranoia. It is obvious why such a disorder is dangerous, and indeed, our prisons are full of these people.

Simply by summarizing these ideas, I’ve drawn a portrait of Donald Trump that anyone would recognize. But these seminal works on narcissism were written before he was born, or when he was still a child. His personality type has long been well-known to psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists, criminologists, and historians. That these theorists described someone unknown to them with such eerie precision indicates the validity of the construct. If you recognize this, it would be extremely foolish to fail to grasp what this implies.

Pathological narcissism is not an abstraction. It is not a failed theory, as some of Freud’s ideas proved to be. It is a distinct, diagnosable pathology. It has clearly and carefully described clinical features. It has been repeatedly validated by empirical studies in psychology, psychiatry, and criminology. Donald Trump is a textbook case, literally: Around the world, when psychiatrists lecture on this pathology, they point to Trump as the most obvious example they’ve ever seen.2

Malignant Narcissism

As with the phrase folie à millions, we owe the term malignant narcissist to Erich Fromm. It is his term for charismatic leaders whose narcissistic psychopathology devours their enemies, their societies, and ultimately, themselves.

I was struck by this passage, which immediately calls to mind Elon Musk:

The malignant narcissist’s personality is particularly marked by antisocial behavior, paranoia, aggression, and sadism. As a leader, the malignant narcissist is, again in a term of Fromm’s coining, necrophilic: consumed by hatred, socially cancerous. His rise to power can only culminate in terror, horror, and death. Malignant narcissism, Fromm remarks, is not only a severe mental illness: It is the quintessence of evil.

Freud and Fromm were German Jews. Kernberg and Klein were Austrian Jews. Hitler was Patient Zero, the platonic form of the malignant narcissist. He may be discerned in the foreground or background of every word they write. But the malignant narcissist is a familiar figure in history. He is Nero; he is Vlad the Impaler; he is Saddam Hussein. Only Hitler has been Hitler, but every malignant narcissist has some Hitler in him.

In 2010, Mila Goldner-Vukov and Laurie Jo Moore presented a synthesis of the literature on malignant narcissism in a paper titled “Malignant Narcissism: From Fairy Tales to Harsh Reality.” They did not have Trump in mind. He had not yet burst on the scene as a political figure. If it seems they are writing of him, it is only because personalities deformed in this fashion are so similar; humanity is infinite in its variety, but all malignant narcissists are alike:

… They are often materialistic and ready to shift their values to gain favor. They are prone to pathological lying. In the realm of love and sexuality they are charming, seductive and promiscuous, but unable to develop deep relationships. When not involved in narcissistic pursuits, they are cold, unempathetic, exploitative and indifferent towards others. …

Malignant Narcissists develop identification with powerful people and rely on internal sadistic and powerful parental images. …

The ego-syntonic sadism of malignant narcissism is displayed by a characterologically-anchored aggression. It is expressed in a conscious “ideology’” of aggressive self-affirmation. Individuals with malignant narcissism have a tendency to destroy, symbolically castrate, and dehumanize others. Their rage is fueled by the desire for revenge. …

Kernberg (1975) believes the paranoid orientation of malignant narcissism may be the basic cause of their self-inflation. The paranoid tendencies in malignant narcissists reflect their projection of unresolved hatred onto others whom they persecute. They have a deep sense of mistrust and view others as enemies/fools or idols, either devaluing or idealizing them. They have disorganized superegos and consequently lack the capacity for remorse, sadness or self-exploration. They are preoccupied with conspiracy theories. Their pathological grandiosity is a defense against paranoid anxiety. Paranoid regression in therapy can lead to episodes of psychosis (Kernberg 1975). …

People with personality disorders suffer from subtle neurocognitive disturbances. They have poor cognitive performance and have problems with executive function, learning, abstract thinking and attention. PET scans show that people with aggression have decreased metabolism in frontal and temporal lobes (O’Leary & Cowdry 1994). Neurocognitive disturbances can be caused by inheritance or developmental trauma. …

In the development of malignant narcissism there is a strong possibility that parents lack the capacity for empathy, the ability to contain infantile rage and the ability to adequately respond to a child’s grandiose-exhibitionistic mirroring and idealizing needs. Parental figures provide for their children’s physical needs but neglect their emotional needs. The attitude of parents of children who will develop malignant narcissism is controlling and sadistic. They demand that their children be tough, tolerate pain, show no emotion and learn to manipulate others. Parental figures are cold and spiteful but over-admiring of their children’s talents and charms (Torgensen 1994). There is no verbal memory for early relational trauma but the “damaged core” appears in later personality problems that reflect the early trauma (Akhtar 2009).3

… In malignant narcissism right brain impairment results in a developmental arrest at the stage of the archaic grandiose self (Kohut 1971), reactive rage and aggression (Kohut 1971) and identification with the aggressor (Schore 2001). The grandiose self is a pathological fusion of 1) special aspects of the self, 2) the idealized self-image and 3) the ideal object representation. Chronic envy underlies the grandiose self and rage incites its formation (Kernberg 1975). Introjective identification is used to incorporate desirable aspects of others claimed to belong to the self. Projective identification is used to externalise unacceptable aspects of the self and deposit them into others. Talents and gifts are hypertrophied. Whatever love is offered is destroyed in order to maintain superiority over others. Goodness in others provokes envy and this is defended against by devaluation, control and avoidance (Kernberg 1975).

… Tyrants have been recognized as malignant narcissists who come to power in economic and political situations where they have an opportunity to consolidate their power. They have severe superego deficits that over time lead to a loss of reality testing and erratic, self-destructive behaviors (Glad 2002).

Again, this was not written with Donald Trump in mind. But he very obviously is the most extravagant, flagrant, easily-diagnosed malignant narcissist any of us have ever seen.

So if by chance you’re sitting in the US Congress, here’s what you must understand. Donald Trump does not believe that you exist. Unaccustomed as this notion may be, if you study the literature on pathological narcissism even cursorily, you’ll see that the evidence this is so is very significant. You are useful to him only in so far as you reinforce his grandiose view of himself. Other than that, it is immaterial to him if you live or die, flourish or fail. You may as well be an ant.

Something seems to be preventing you from appreciating that he suffers from an extremely serious, and dangerous, mental illness. When he says crazy things, it is not to be shrugged off. He’s not just having a laugh. He believes every word he says. What he says, at any given moment, no matter how ludicrous—even if he said the opposite just days before—is reality to him at that moment, as it is for the dementia patients living in an eternal 1956. His mind is a kaleidoscope of vivid delusions that he must believe to preserve his grandiose but egg-fragile self-image. That image is his false self. He has long since lost contact with the real one.

I beg of you: Understand this. He is not lying. He is hallucinating. His tweets are not “Trump being Trump.” They are not 9th-dimensional chess. They are psychotic delusions.

Make yourself look. Imagine someone else had written this—someone you don’t know. Do you see how insane it looks? That’s because he’s insane. It is not more complicated than that.

Here’s something else you should grasp: Our adversaries understand this perfectly, as do our allies (to the extent we still have them). Just as we have a staff of psychiatrists at the CIA who profile foreign leaders, so do they. Theirs are not constrained by the Goldwater Rule. Every foreign leader who speaks to Trump has received a report from their intelligence services explaining, just as I am here, that he suffers from a very severe personality disorder—but the good news, at least, is that this makes him easy to manipulate. Did you see what Canada and Mexico just did? They’ve read those reports. They told him he won, praised him for his astonishing strength, didn’t bend an inch, told him they were bending a mile, and God help us, he lapped it up. It’s like throwing a blanket over a budgie cage. He got rolled by the Taliban at Doha. He’ll be rolled by Russia. He’ll be rolled by Iran. Don’t kid yourself that he knows how to make a deal—he doesn’t.

A reminder for the GOP

Folie à Millions

The mystery is not why Trump behaves as he does. However much you pretend it’s a mystery, the answer is obvious: He acts like that because he is very, very sick. The real puzzle is why so many previously healthy Americans have fully entered into his psychopathology. We all know people who, had you told them 10 years ago that within their lifetime an American president would behave the way Trump is behaving, would have responded with horror or frank disbelief. Yet the same people will now defend literally anything that Trump does.

The only concept that makes sense of this is collective narcissism.

Malignant narcissism, for Fromm, is not merely a personal pathology, but a cultural and political one. It originates in the malignant narcissist’s need to transform reality:

Fromm observed that entire groups, societies, and nations can become narcissistic with the leader. When they do, their narcissism typically takes the form of destructive nationalism. In authoritarian regimes, leaders and followers alike exhibit collective narcissism, the key symptom of which is the glorification of one’s own culture or nation at the expense of others:

Speaking of which, this is our new State Department spokesman:

When members of a society feel shame and worthlessness as the result of a narcissistic injury, Fromm indicates, they become vulnerable to collective narcissism, which permits members of the group to feel powerful and invincible as part of a larger whole. But a necessary component of this emotional strategy is the dehumanization of those outside the group, to whom they must feel violent hostility. You cannot have the kind of passionate bond we see between Trump and his supporters without this profound danger. This is how genocides happen, so do not dismiss the genocidal language coming from Trump’s camp. When he calls Americans “vermin” and “enemies of the people” (and I don’t need to remind you what he’s called immigrants), it can’t be dismissed. His supporters now use the same language. Consumed by an exaggerated sense of superiority, nations in the grip of this pathology are particularly prone to aggression and conflict. Precisely because they’re in such poor contact with reality, they’re also prone to losing those conflicts.

I wonder if particularly accomplished societies might be prone to suffering particularly severe narcissistic wounds. Before the First World War, German society was understood to be among the world’s most, even the world’s most, accomplished and civilized. German culture was a geyser of philosophical, mathematical, scientific, and artistic brilliance—Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Weber, von Humboldt, Gauss—and when Germany entered the Great War, it was in the serene assurance that the Continent would fall swiftly under its control. Germany was to take its rightful place in the sun. It ended in ruin. The Treaty of Versailles and hyperinflation were not merely traumas, they were deep narcissistic wounds.

The United States, too, suffered not only a national trauma on September 11 but a narcissistic wound. A great superpower, a hyperpower—the mighty colossus that defeated the Nazis and won the Cold War— was brought low by a bunch of cave-dwelling primitives. They destroyed the symbols of our economic and political power not with the nuclear weapons we had always feared, but with a handful of box cutters. Even if it was an emotion we never discussed, or even consciously recognized, we were ashamed. Worse, our all-powerful, world-spanning military—our nuclear arsenal capable of reducing whole civilizations to ash before breakfast; our submarines, silent specters of Armageddon, each one carrying enough ballistic fury to render the map of the Earth an abstract painting of fire and ruin; our firepower unmatched in the annals of human conquests—managed to lose not one but two wars to those cave-dwelling primitives. How did that happen? Where did our absolute dominance of the planet go? How could those goddamned Dixie Chicks have been right? We even learned that our intelligence services practiced the “rectal refeeding” of our captives with puréed raisins. Then came a financial crisis that made a mockery of our beliefs about the superiority of our economic system and turned the kids into communists, for the love of God—communists!—prattling on about the subjects and instruments of labor and going unbathed for days in Zuccoti Park. When Trump came along with lament that we never win anymore, he spoke directly to those wounds.

Do you not find that this idea makes sense of our eagerness to betray our allies? Americans have long suspected that Europeans look down on them. They warned us about Iraq. They laughed at us because we’re fat. So we’re punishing them for the slight, and in doing so, turning our paranoid fantasies into reality.

Fromm’s observation that the most frequent symptom of group narcissism is a lack of rationality is apt. This is why it so often seems we have been transported to Animal Farm. “Under the guidance of our Leader, Comrade Napoleon, I have laid five eggs in six days.” Two cows, enjoying a drink at the pool, exclaim, “Thanks to the leadership of Comrade Napoleon, how excellent this water tastes!”

(After issuing the second tweet, one imagines, our Tribune of the Revolution burst into a lusty chorus of “Beasts of England.” )

Below is another good example. Representative Goldman states something so obvious you’d think no one with two eyes could dispute it:

But indeed they dispute it. Look at the responses, below. They show the power of narcissistic identification with the leader—in this case, Elon Musk. By submitting to Musk and accepting his obvious nonsense as truth, they achieve symbiosis with him and worship an idealized version of themselves. He represents what they dream of being: an inarticulate, ill-educated plutocrat who is seemingly bound by no law. It’s not for nothing that Musk exercises his strongest hold over socially maladjusted teenage boys who play video games all day and can’t get laid—which is precisely why the ones below now have A-suite level clearance at the General Services Administration, your Social Security number, your address, your tax information, and your money—but your lawfully-appointed officials do not:

It’s why these people think “Why, that’s perfectly cool”—and react with rage upon being told that it is illegal and spectacularly dangerous:4

“I accept giving all my personal info to Elon Musk. I trust him.” This sentence is so manifestly perverse that we’re compelled to conclude Fromm is right. Malignant narcissists are capable of inducing entire societies to share their psychosis.

In 2022, Marco Rubio said that deporting Venezuelans would be a “death sentence.” Trump just sentenced 600,000 Venezuelan refugees to death. Rubio, presumably, now favors this. (But at least we got rid of DEI.)

Trust me: Anyone capable of this kind of cruelty and reckless indifference will exhibit the same to you.

Psychopathological Resonance

In 2020, an Israeli specialist in malignant narcissism, Sam Vaknin (who, strangely, claims to be a malignant narcissist himself, albeit a highly self-aware one) delivered a paper to a conference on addiction research. He titled it, “Narcopath leaders have taken over the world,” and argued that we are suffering from a global epidemic of pathological narcissism. He never advances a thesis to explain this, at least not in this paper. We have, he suggests, the leaders we deserve:

Today, I would like to discuss a phenomenon that started long before the pandemic with a wave of populism, the revolt of the masses, as Jose Ortega y Gasset called it in the 1930s.

It’s a situation where people use the levers of democracy to elect leaders that are rebels. They don’t conform. They are anti-establishment. They’re defiant. They’re impulsive. … But many of these leaders qualify diagnostically and clinically as narcissists. Some of them are even psychopathic or psychopathic narcissists. Narcissistic and psychopathic leaders reify the pathologies of their cultures, of their societies. They are not an isolated phenomenon. They don’t come from outer space. They’re like a blank screen upon which everyone projects their pathologies.

So if we see a rise of narcissistic and psychopathic leaders, it’s only because civilizations, societies and cultures throughout the world, the East and West, not only the Western world, but East as well, everyone is becoming more narcissistic. And in the fringes, many, many are adopting psychopathic behaviors as highly efficacious or self-efficacious.

These leaders foster and propagate a personality cult. But when things go sour, when things don’t go their own way, they turn on their own fans and followers and acolytes and psychophants. We will discuss this dynamic a bit later. As I said, the narcissistic or psychopathic leader is the culmination and reification of his period, culture, and civilization. Such a leader is likely to rise to prominence in narcissistic societies. The leader’s mental health pathologies resonate with the enemies of his society and culture. I call this a psychopathological resonance.

The leader and the led, the leader and the electorate, the leader and his nation, the collective, they form a self-enhancing and self-reinforcing feedback loop, a diode of mirrored adoration and reflected love by elevating and idealizing their leader. … The mob actually is elevating and idealizing itself. The leader is the mob. And the leader’s harness of hypocrisy, mob rule, becomes the norm, the new normal. In the dictator’s ascendance, these members of the impersonal masses, these mobs, they find hope. In his manifest illness, mental illness, they find curative solace and a legitimation of their own collective insanity.

The dictator or the authoritarian leader himself equates being elected, however patently and fairly, with being chosen by the transcendental forces of gods, of history.5 His destiny, says the leader, is the manifest destiny. His exceptionalism is the nation’s own exceptionalism. Like Louis XIV said, let us be one. I am the state.

The malignant narcissist invents and then projects a false, fictitious self, for the world to see, to behold, to fear, to admire. Such a leader maintains a tenuous grasp on reality to start with. And this is further exacerbated by the trappings of power. He is surrounded by yesmen and sycophants and acolytes. No one dares to tell him the truth. There’s a bubble forming around him. The narcissist’s grandiose self-delusions and fantasies of omnipotence and omniscience are supported by real life authority and the narcissist’s predilection and proclivity to surround himself with obsequious sycophants. …

The narcissist’s personality is so precariously balanced that he cannot tolerate even a hint of criticism, a whiff of disagreement. Most narcissists are paranoid. They have persecutory ideation, or even persecutory delusions. Many of them suffer from ideas of reference or referential ideation, the delusion that they are being mocked or discussed when they are not. And so narcissists often regard themselves as victims of persecution. They are the sacrificial lambs.

The narcissistic leader fosters and encourages a personality cult with all the trappings and hallmarks of an institutional religion, a secular religion, with him as the Godhead. … Very often such leaders will say, I’m sacrificing my life for you. Look how hard I’m working for you, for you, not for me, for you. The narcissistic leader is a monstrously inverted saint, sacrificing his life and denying himself so that his people, or humanity at large, should benefit.

… Lacking empathy, they regard their subjects as a manufacturer, regard these raw materials, or as an obstructed collateral damage in vast historical processes. They’re fond of saying, when you cut trees, you chip wood, or to prepare an omelette, one must break the eggs. These are their favorite things. People are eggs or woodchippings. … weakness is deplored, vulnerability is derided and decried.

… It’s not veritable atavism or true conservatism. It’s opportunistic play, game, mind game, power play, and all of it within the symbolic realm. In short, narcissistic leadership is about theater. It’s a society of the spectacle, to use Guy Debord’s phrase.6 It’s about theater. It’s a theater production. … The cultish leader demands the suspension of judgment and the attainment of depersonalization and derealization and loads and loads of amnesia. The narcissistic leader is a dissociative leader. He thrives on forgetfulness, on lies, on distortions, on negating the truth and facts. Catharsis is tantamount in this narcissistic dramaturgy to self-annulment. Narcissism is nihilistic, not only operationally or ideologically. Its very language and narratives are nihilistic. Narcissism is conspicuous nihilism, ostentatious rejection, and hatred of life. … Narcissistic leadership often poses as a rebellion against the old ways, against the hegemonic culture, against the upper classes, against the established religions, against the superpowers, the corrupt order, the establishment. Narcissistic movements are pure, real, adolescent. A reaction to narcissistic injuries inflicted upon narcissistic and sometimes psychopathic toddler nation-states or group or upon the leader himself.

What about minorities? What about others? Minorities and others are singled out, arbitrarily selected, and they constitute a perfect, easily identifiable embodiment of everything that’s wrong. Minorities, others, are accused of being old, of being eerily disembodied, cosmopolitan, part of the establishment, globalist, decadent, deviant, perverted, sick, dangerous, contaminants, polluting, et cetera, et cetera. …

These are projections. … Narcissistic leader and his fans are the ones who are aggressive and violent and dangerous and yet they claim that the minorities are aggressive and vile. It is the narcissistic leader that establishes an authoritarian surveillance state. He is everywhere. He has eyes everywhere. A system of snitching, a system of shaming and yet he blames the minorities, immigrants, others, of being everywhere. …

Narcissists thrive on hatred. They thrive on pathological envy. They invent enemies where there are none because it is by opposition that their fuzzy identity coalesces and crystallizes and congeals. Narcissists, of course, like borderlines, have difficulties with identity. They have identity diffusion or identity disturbance. And this is precisely the source of fascination with the epitome and the quintessence of narcissistic and psychopathic leaders, Adolf Hitler. …

The narcissistic leader prefers the sparkle and the glamor of well-orchestrated illusions to the tedium and method of real accomplishments. The reign of the narcissistic leader is all smoke and mirrors. There is no substance there. It’s devoid of substance. It consists of mere appearances and mass delusions. And in the aftermath of the regime of the narcissistic and psychopathic leader, the narcissistic leader having died, having been deposed, having been voted out of office, it all unravels. The tireless and constant prestidigitation seizes the sleight of hand. The entire edifice crumbles like so much dust.

What looked like an economic miracle turns out to have been a fraud-laced bubble. Loosely held empires disintegrate, laboriously assembled business conglomerates go to pieces. Earth-shattering and revolutionary scientific discoveries and theories are discredited. Social experiments end in mayhem. As their end draws near, as they come to the end of their regimes, narcissistic psychopathic leaders act out. They lash out. They erupt. They attack with equal virulence and ferocity, compatriots, erstwhile allies, neighbors, foreigners, minorities, loved ones, so-called nearest and dearest, intimates.

… All populist charismatic leaders believe that they have a special connection with the people, a relationship that is direct, almost mystical, a relationship that transcends institutions and the normal channels of communication such as the legislator or the media. And so a narcissist who regards himself as the benefactor of the poor, a member of the common folk, the representative of the disenfranchised, the champion of the dispossessed against the corrupt elite, such a narcissist is unlikely to use violence at first.

But this pacific mask crumbles when the narcissist has become convinced that the very people he purported to speak for, that his constituency, his grassroots fans, the prime sources of his narcissistic supply, that they have turned against him. At first, when he develops this paranoid ideation, this persecutory delusion that everyone is against him, at first in a desperate effort to maintain the fiction, underline his chaotic personality, the narcissist strives to explain away the sudden reversal of sentiment. Why is he not popular anymore? What has happened?

He says, the people are being manipulated. Foreign powers are provoking them against me. People are duped by the media, by big industry, by the military, by the elite. They don’t really know what they’re doing. They are following this phase. They will revert to form. They will realize how good they had it with me. But when these flimsy attempts to patch a tattered personal mythology, when these attempts fail, the narcissist is injured. This injury inevitably leads to narcissistic rage and to a terrifying display of unbridled aggression. The pent-up frustration and hurt translate into devaluation. That which was previously idealized is now discarded with contempt and hatred. Hitler gave instructions to destroy Germany days before he had died.

… The narcissistic leader is likely to justify the butchering and slaughtering of his own people by claiming that they had intended to assassinate him. They were about to undo the revolution, devastate the economy, harm the nation or the country. The small people, the rank and file, the loyal soldiers of the narcissist, his flock, his nation, his employees, they pay the price.

The disillusionment and disenchantment are agonizing. The process of reconstruction, of rising from the ashes, of overcoming the trauma of having been deceived, exploited and manipulated, it’s a drawn-out process. It is difficult to trust again, to have faith, to love, to be led, to collaborate. Feelings of shame and guilt engulf the erstwhile followers of the narcissist. This is his sole legacy: a massive complex post-traumatic stress disorder …

Flying blind, flying solo

All of this applies to Trump, to Elon Musk, and to the legions of Americans who have lost entirely their grip on reality so better to live in Trump and Musk’s delusions.

To Congress, if you’re reading this: You are patently evading a terrifying but obvious reality: Donald Trump is insane. You must come to terms with that, at long last. He declared a trade war on Canada—Canada!—then changed his mind the next day, declaring victory while achieving nothing save setting fire to our reputation internationally and taking us a another step closer to international pariah status—or worse.

He’s handed the United States Treasury to Elon Musk’s bagboys in the biggest security breach in American history. If China had done this, we would be calling it Cyber Pearl Harbor, and there’s no evidence that Musk is more loyal to us than he is to China. You can’t just sit there, slack-jawed, doing nothing while a hairless South African creep throws the full faith and credit of the United States in the crapper and wipes his ass with the Constitution.

You know perfectly well that the consequence of precipitously cutting off aid around the world will be famine and death. Do you really believe that men who think nothing of that will spare you? Trump already tried to have all of you killed and he just freed the men who were going to murder you. If only out of a reptilian instinct for self-preservation, you must stop him. Each time you put it off, shrinking into the wallpaper and praying he won’t notice you, you allow him to do more damage while ensuring the inevitable moment of reckoning will be even more apocalyptic.

He has already permanently alienated our allies. Our globe-spanning alliance system made us a superpower, and the damage he’s done to it can’t be made right. We might paper things over superficially, but they will never trust us again.

If you don’t grasp this, it’s evidence that you’ve entered his pathology. Trump forced Mexico and Canada to renegotiate NAFTA and declared the renegotiated treaty (which was the same as the old one) perfect—a total and complete VICTORY!!! Then, for no reason whatsoever, he declared the treaty null and void and not only launched a trade war with Canada, but accompanied this with repeated threats to annex it—then just as quickly changed his mind. This is not strategic genius, it’s a human Dali painting: melting, distorted, and utterly incomprehensible. The days in which Canada sends their sons to fight beside ours when we evoke Article 5 are gone.

But it’s worse than it would be if it were merely Trump who was insane. His insanity is contagious. Canada has been treated to a blast of this all week:

More Danes than Americans died, per capita, in Afghanistan. Canada too can suffer a narcissistic wound—which in this case, we would call “decent self-respect.” The next time terrorists strike our cities (or any other enemy, and we have a lot of them), we’re on our own. Our ability to call the shots around the world? Over. We’re the North American thugs, now, and we have less to offer than the Chinese thugs, who at least build their clients nice infrastructure before bankrupting them. We have threatened to invade Greenland. No one knows if we’re serious. This is not “thinking outside the box,” it’s howling-at the-moon, shield smashed, sword swinging, and no plan whatsoever insane. If you can’t see this, you’ve gone insane along with him. Snap out of it. Does this look like “respected around the world” to you?

Why would anyone sign a treaty with us now that they know Trump will just tear it up when he bores with it? Why would anyone keep a treaty with us when we practically ululate as we proudly, insouciantly violate the treaty commitments we made to our closest allies? Are you really prepared to live in a world with the only operative principle is, “Might makes right?” Russia just sacrificed 50,000 young men in a month without blinking and China has 314,459,083 men of military age. This won’t work out well for us. They both have enough nuclear weapons to end organized human society. When there are no more rules, the biggest thugs win. Who are the biggest thugs? Here’s how you tell: Look who Trump admires.

The international norms we’ve established and enforced for nearly a century are not some effete parlor game. They serve our interests. An eternal Hobbesian war of all against all does not. Trump can bluster all he likes, but everyone knows we have no taste for body bags. If we tell Russia, “Take Europe, we’ll go home and content ourselves with our greater American Reich,” how long do you think it will be before they remember their claim to Alaska?

Over the course of two weeks, we’ve shown the world that you’d be crazy to integrate your military with ours. Who wants to be dependent on lunatics for spare parts and resupply? If your country’s been invaded, you don’t want your survival to depend on Donald Trump’s latest mood. Who wants to host an American military base now? No one now trusts us to protect them from China or Russia, so why would they want us there? Our presence just endangers them.

We’ve got Trump yammering insanely about the Deep State, squirreling away top-secret documents at Mar-a-Lago, and crowning it by putting Tulsi Gabbard in charge of our intelligence community. So we’ve blown up Five Eyes, too. You know no one will share intelligence with us now. It’s a hell of a time to be flying blind, given the wars raging across the globe and the wars soon to be raging because we’re leaving a superpower-sized power vacuum as we retreat. And we have no FBI now, either.

Susan Collins, Todd Young—seeing as you just gave Tulsi Gabbard the thumbs up, permit me to ask : Why did you want to be Senators? Washington is miserable in the winter and muggy in the summer. As far as anyone can see, you exist to furrow your brows in deep concern, then acquiesce to Trump’s latest insanity. You know Tulsi Gabbard has no business anywhere near classified information. Why didn’t you say “No?” If you’re too afraid of Trump’s thugs to do your job, why not resign and let someone else do it?

Don’t you worry about the consequences of this? You’ve got kids. Does it not occur to you that when the inevitable massive terrorist attack arrives, it could be them at our version of the Nova Music Festival? You know that’s what we’re inviting. It’s not a theoretical point. Countries with determined enemies do not have the luxury of descending into self-absorption, chaos, crisis, and madness. We can’t afford a break from reality. Our enemies—and boy, do we have them, even if Trump thinks they’re his friends—are watching. They know that the door is unlocked and the safe is guarded by a passel of Elon Musk’s Nazi-curious virgin nerds. We’re asking for it. That’s a hell of a price to pay for a tax cut, isn’t it?

Trump has touched off a race among our allies to reduce their dependency on the US. But it’s worse: It’s a truism of international relations that the allies we’re now bullying will form alliances against us. Some will seek the protection of a more reliable patron. Others will cut a deal with China or Russia. Those who can will build the Bomb. Or all of the above.

Of course they will: Behold the State Department’s new acting Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs—a Uighur genocide apologist who thinks we should deliver Taiwan to China:

He was fired from the first Trump administration because he was revealed to be a white nationalist, then rehired, presumably, for the same reason. In between, he refined his conspiracy theories about January 6. This is now the face of our foreign policy, and this is insane:

Meanwhile, our chief Pentagon spokesman will be wife-beater Sean Parnell. (The brand remains strong.)

You are watching a superpower commit suicide. Not since the Visigoths sacked Rome has a great empire suffered so much damage to its power and prestige in so short a time.

So, Congress, I implore you: Donald Trump is not strong, and he is not a fighter, and he does not have your back. He is severely mentally ill, and he’s taken half of America along on his psychopathological joyride while you blink like rabbits—stunned, bewildered, passive—and hope someone else will do something. 

But you, Congress, and only you, have the power to stop this train to hell. You could bring it all to an end today. You could do your job and impeach him. He’s committed more impeachable acts than any of us can count since his inauguration: You have not only the right but the duty to end this madness.

Could you still be resisting the idea that he is out of his mind? His administration prevented studies about bird flu from being published as the outbreak escalates across the United States. He thinks that if we don’t know about it, it isn’t happening. He blames our health agencies for making a fuss about Covid and ruining his first presidency. Had it been up to him, a million-plus Americans would have died without ever knowing why they fell ill.

One of the studies that hasn’t been published would tell us whether veterinarians who treat cattle have unknowingly been infected by the virus. Another would let us know if people carrying the virus have infected their cats. Both were slated to appear in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, published without interruption since 1952—until last week. Make yourself face it: Only a madman would prevent this information from reaching Americans.7

The CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System has disappeared. So has the Agency for Toxic Substances. The landing page for HIV data has vanished. The AtlasPlus tool—with nearly 20 years of CDC surveillance data on HIV, hepatitis, and tuberculosis—is gone. A hell of a price for getting rid of DEI.

Trump sent financial markets around the world into chaos for no reason at all. Same people do not do that. Nor do they turn over the Treasury—the nation’s checkbook—and every American’s personal data to a man who is, among other things, a font of Russian propaganda and a tireless promoter of Nazism.

No one elected Elon Musk. Congress makes these decisions. You make these decisions. Why would you abdicate your responsibilities to some creep who rips off Nazi salutes at the President’s inauguration? Why have you permitted him literally to seize the United States Treasury?

Why are you letting him insult and bully loyal and lawful employees of the United States government? Why are you permitting someone like Gavin Kriger—the twenty-something Musk acolyte who is now running amok inside USAID—to humiliate you? The guy is chums with Nick Fuentes and other proud, explicit neo-Nazis. Is there nothing about the thought of some hairless Baby Stormtrooper invading the US government and sadistically humiliating its employees that offends you? If you’re not willing to do your job, resigning is a perfectly reasonable option.

Peggy Noonan reports—in an article that very much has the ring of truth—that you know damned well this is a shitshow:

Republican lawmakers, including those most supportive of the president, are beside themselves with anxiety. When you speak to them—off the record, between friendly acquaintances—and ask how it’s going, they shift, look off, shrug: You know how it’s going. A GOP senator who supports the president had a blanched look. “He doesn’t do anything to make it easy,” he shrugged.

No, he doesn’t. And he never will, either, because he’s incurably insane. And if you think this is hard, just you wait—it only gets worse.

… I saw a broad and growing sense in Washington that … the second rise of Donald Trump is a total break with the past—that stable order, healthy expectations, the honoring of a certain old moderation, and strict adherence to form and the law aren’t being “traduced”; they are ending. That something new has begun.

“Something new?” If you don’t have stable order and the rule of law, you have chaos and tyranny. That’s not new, it’s old as dirt. Congress, you are the guardrails. It is your responsibility to stop this.

People aren’t sure they’re right about this and no one has a name for the big break, but they know we have entered something different—something more emotional, more tribal and visceral.

It’s called “hell.”

… So far Mr. Trump is governing by executive order. This contributes to the uneasiness. … The heavy use of executive orders makes all politics personal, having to do with the man who orders and signs with a flourish. Making it personal distorts our understanding of what a leader can and should do. Executive orders ignore the branch of government called Congress and work against its authority, its role in the republican drama. They give the impression we are a government of one branch. Doing all this habituates the public to the idea of authoritarianism, of rule by the strongman. We will pick a new caudillo and he will save us with his pen! When you do away with branches and balances you cause trouble.

(No shit, Peggy!)

So wake up, Congress: Stop minimizing this. Days after Kash Patel reassured you that “all FBI employees will be protected from political retribution,” Trump decapitated the bureau and demanded the names of every agent who worked on the January 6 cases. When do you get tired of them making fools out of you? Days after JD Vance assured the public that Trump would never release insurrectionists who assaulted police officers—the police officers who protected you with their bloodied bodies—Trump released every one of them.8

Now Musk has seized USAID. Musk, by the way, is as delusional as Trump, but he may be even more dangerous because he’s young, and he understands what Trump calls “the computers,” whereas Trump is old and couldn’t rotate a PDF if his life depended on it. On the other hand, Trump has the nukes. Look at this lunacy. Stop pretending it’s no big deal!

Musk’s incels barged into a SCIF? They should’ve been shot on the spot. He set up private servers at the Office of Management and Budget? Hey—you! You, the one who couldn’t shut up about Hillary Clinton’s private email server! The word for it when a lawless, unelected mafia seizes control of your government is a coup. This will end up coming for you anyway, no matter how you fawn and grovel, so why don’t you reach down and see if your balls are still there? Come on, astonish us.

Do you not think you should hold hearings about reports that Musk picked Troy Meink for Air Force secretary because, when Meink ran the National Reconnaissance Office, he helped Musk land a multibillion-dollar contract for SpaceX? Or the fact that Musk now controls a government that is supposed to be regulating his businesses? He’s in industries—launching rockets, building AI—that are notoriously dangerous even when they’re properly supervised. Are you trusting that good old Elon Musk would never be reckless? He now has access to his competitors’ financial information. His adolescent devotees have downloaded all of this private information from supposedly secure servers. Does this happen in functional democracies? You know the answer to that question.

And why is the unelected man who now controls our Treasury and our data, and who is baldly and unconstitutionally usurping Congress’s Article I powers, promoting such well-known Russian lies? Who is he working for?

Could this be more outrageous? More insane?

The destruction of USAID—and Musk’s wild lies about it, broadcast to a massive global audience—are incomprehensible unless you assume he is collaborating with Russia and China. They are the ones who want USAID gone, not us. Why is Musk doing their bidding? Why is he smearing us? His propaganda on their behalf is making their intelligence services giddy. Aren’t you the least bit curious? Or do you think it’s just fine for us to have an unelected dictator who works for our enemies?

The US is now in full retreat from the world. Malnourished kids who depend on us will die. Our anti-terrorism programs will shut down. Diseases we were on the verge of conquering will rebound; one of them will show up not long from now in an unvaccinated America where, thanks to Trump and RFK Junior, we won’t have a surveillance system in place to detect it, and we’ll wind up treating it with tinctures of raw milk, powdered sow’s dung, and Kash Patel supplements. The outbreaks of monkeypox and Marburg we’ve been trying to keep from spreading beyond Africa? They’ll just spread. The Christians of the Middle East whose fate troubled you enough to appropriate the money to support them? I guess you’re not worried after all? The dissidents in Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Myanmar? The Ukrainian civilians who were relying on our help to survive the winter? Combating the spread of fentanyl? Anyone?

China is salivating to fill the void. They’re now the only ones on whom developing countries can rely. While Trump invades Panama to wrest the canal from imaginary Chinese hands, China will scoop up every other canal, port, and harbor on the planet, not to mention every mineral deposit and rare earths mine. Our power will evaporate. Our jobs will be lost. The only American who would benefit from China’s victory is Elon Musk. Do you imagine he’ll share the spoils with you? He is not known for his philanthropy.

It is Congress that passes the laws governing asylum for immigrants—the ones Trump has unilaterally suspended because they’re “ineffective.” It is Congress that sets the length of service for the commissioners Trump just fired. You passed the Inspector General Act of 1978 and amended it in 2022. It requires the President to notify Congress 30 days prior to removal of an inspector general and provide “substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons” for the removal. It’s not a suggestion, it’s the law. He fired them all without warning. No one fires all of the inspectors general for any legitimate reason.

And riddle me this: If Elon Musk’s mission is to cut US$2 trillion dollars of waste, why is he beginning with USAID, which represents a mere 0.7 percent of the federal budget? Why, if he’s so savvy, is he doing this in a way that guarantees years of costly litigation—which the peremptorily and illegally-fired employees will win (if any rule of law remains)—and will saddle the taxpayer with the cost of the massive settlement?

Why is Musk lying, and lying, and lying about what USAID does, seeding his whole social network with wild conspiracy theories? Why is he promoting lies from the people who persuaded the world that the CIA created AIDS? Why is he disrupting Kenya’s security mission in Haiti, leaving police helpless as gangs terrorize Port au Prince? Why is he cutting security assistance to counterterrorism programs in East Africa? Why is he cutting counter-narcotics programs? Why is he cutting efforts to combat human trafficking? You would think a man with such a demonstrated interest in the abuse of girls and young women—someone so passionate in their cause that he denounced Keir Starmer as a “rape genocide apologist”—would hesitate abruptly to end such programs in countries where “rape genocides” are really taking place, wouldn’t you?

Why are you allowing Elon Musk to convey an unequivocal message of America’s utter irresponsibility, unreliability, and untrustworthiness around the world? Between 2013 and 2021, Beijing invested nearly US$700 billion in global infrastructure—nine times what we did. Xi just pledged more than US$50 billion in new financing for Africa. China is now the leading trade partner for many Latin American countries. We signed contracts, via USAID, with people who organized their lives around our commitment. They made hiring decisions. They purchased equipment. They moved their families. They made commitments of their own to local partners. We yanked out the rug from under them without any warning and those local partners will not trust us again.

Why are Musk’s operatives trying to gain access to classified information that they have neither a need to know, nor the appropriate authorization to view? Why were the officials who upheld their responsibility to protect that information immediately put on leave? Why does Musk get to decide that it is “time for USAID die?” Why does he get to decide that it is time for everyone who relied on our food and medical care to die?

Lifesaving health initiatives and medical research projects have shut down around the world in response to the Trump administration’s 90-day pause on foreign aid and stop-work orders. In Uganda, the National Malaria Control Program has suspended spraying insecticide into village homes and ceased shipments of bed nets for distribution to pregnant women and young children … Medical supplies, including drugs to stop hemorrhages in pregnant women and rehydration salts that treat life-threatening diarrhea in toddlers, cannot reach villages in Zambia because the trucking companies transporting them were paid through a suspended supply project of the United States Agency for International Development, USAID. Dozens of clinical trials in South Asia, Africa and Latin America have been suspended. Thousands of people enrolled in the studies have drugs, vaccines and medical devices in their bodies but no longer have access to continuing treatment or to the researchers who were supervising their care.

… Many of those interviewed broke down in tears as they described the rapid destruction of decades of work.

All this to save less than one percent of the federal budget? This is not fiscal prudence. These are the works of a lunatic.

Isn’t it strange, too, that the State Department fired the contractors who work for its Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Bureau? You know who hates that bureau? Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán. You know who likes it? You do. That’s why you appropriated money for it.

All of these firings are illegal. The Supreme Court has been clear about this: Federal employees are entitled to due process. We—the taxpayer—will be sued seven ways till Sunday. Musk’s preposterous DOGE has not been established through any constitutional mechanism. Its attempt to gain access to federal systems is completely unlawful. Here’s a short list of the laws you passed that he’s violating or causing to be violated: the Federal Records Act (44 U.S.C. Chapter 31), which requires federal agencies to safeguard official records. The Privacy Act of 1974 (5 U.S.C. § 552a), which protects personal data held by federal agencies from disclosure without authorization. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. § 1030), which prohibits unauthorized access to government computer systems. The Fifth Amendment—due process—is being violated. The Fourth—search and seizure—likewise. Musk’s unauthorized, opaque, and manifestly sinister operations are intolerable. Begin the impeachment proceedings immediately.

We’re supposed to have three branches of government. You, Congress, are our legislative branch. You are supposed to be the most powerful. But you have no interest in asserting your prerogatives and you suffer from an abject fear of governing. You’ve saddled us with the most lunatic cabinet since Caligula and Incitatus—and we are growing mightily sick of you. It would be no very cynical asperity to wonder if Trump tipped you off before he announced then suspended the tariffs so you could make a boatload of money, too. Did he give you shares of his company, like the US$826,000 worth he just gave Kash Patel and Linda McMahon as “consideration for services provided?” Your constituents can hardly be blamed for wondering.

You mandated every penny of the spending that Trump has lawlessly impounded. You legislated the TikTok ban that Trump refuses to enforce. So why are you just sitting there? If you don’t plan to defend our Constitution—at long last—just go, you clacking ornaments. So long as we’re slashing government spending, why are we wasting it on you?

And what of the Fourth Estate?

These comments are for the editorial board of The New York Times, should you happen to be reading this. Don’t you think your readers should be informed that we’re in the grips of a massive constitutional crisis? Perhaps you could put the news in the space you devoted to that penetrating front-page feature article about upscale designer bongs?

Perhaps you’re so reluctant to discuss the only news that matters because Trump is suing journalists as if he’d studied at the knee of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. His new FCC chairman is making outrageous demands of CBS while Trump sues them on absolutely insane grounds. He’s launched investigations into NPR and PBS on a legally insane pretext. You know (or you should, for God’s sake) why he’s doing that. It’s Autocrat 101: Seize public media. Harass and sue private media until they censor themselves. But perhaps you should let your readers know?

Now back to Congress. I’m not the only one who’s growing concerned that perhaps you’ve been invaded by the body snatchers.

My sense is that you, like so many Americans, simply cannot bring yourself to believe the evidence of your eyes. Trump is not merely colorful; he is utterly deviant and out of his mind. He is no more capable of leading the country than those poor patients in California who pass their hours shuffling sadly past a the portrait of Ike, waiting for long-dead wives to return from their shopping excursions.

But if it is harmless to indulge the delusions of a patient who is safely sequestered, it is feckless and cowardly and dangerous beyond words to indulge the delusions of an American president. The world has never been more dangerous. His insanity is a risk to every living creature on this planet. Congress, you must act—and if you are too afraid to cross him, then in the name of God, go: Resign. Let someone who hasn’t yet lost his mind do your job.

”

·

UPDATE:

Time management hasn’t been my strong suit on this one. I should have aimed for enough brevity, at least, to send you the complete cast of characters before the first round. But I didn’t. Today, therefore, I’m sending the guide to the characters you absolutely must know before the results of the first round come out this evening, at 8 pm Paris time. I’ll let you know when they do: I trust that if you’ve followed the story so far, you’ll be keen to know.

If you’re just tuning in, read these first:

• Hunger Games: Fifth Republic. France has gone psycho. The Cosmopolitan Globalist has the guide you need. Part I.

• Dramatis Personae: Plotting, leaking, throat-slitting, backstabbing, purging, and more. Your guide to the wildest week in the history of postwar France. Part II(a).

• French Toast: David Berlinski introduces Éric Zemmour. Part II(b).

• Dramatis Personae, con’t: Marion Maréchal Le Pen becomes a star, betrays her aunt, defects to Zemmour, betrays Zemmour, defects back (and takes the money). Part II (c).

Or read this for an excellent overview: France on the Brink, by Arun Kapil.

❗️📽️ Substack tells me that many of you are not clicking on the videos. You must watch the videos. None of this story makes sense otherwise. Why aren’t you watching them? The videos are fun! They are not a chore. Enjoy them, damn it! I have lovingly and painstakingly chosen them for your pleasure and you will watch these videos. Do you understand?

Arun has put up another post at Arun with a View, his website. It will surprise no one who knows us both to learn that I don’t agree with everything he writes. (But I always enjoy disagreeing with him.)

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1. Read Part I, first. This won’t make sense otherwise.

2. Then read Part II.

3. Then read Part IIb.

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⚠️ Important advice from your editor:

1. Read Part I, first. This won’t make sense otherwise.

2. This is a multimedia experience. Don’t skip the videos.

3. Please recall our typo policy.

The Cast

Note: Thinking about it yesterday, I decided to write a short guide to some of the key historical figures with whom you should also be familiar if you’re to fully understand what’s going on over here. I asked myself if this was overkill and if everyone already knows who these people were, but I decided the answers were “no” and “no.” Some of you know this history a lot better than I do. But I don’t think everyone does. (If they did, man, would our news coverage be better.)

Also, the phrase “far-right” is rapidly being emptied of meaning. Younger Americans, especially, have only the vaguest idea what happened in Europe the last time the far-right came to power. Most people don’t know what “far-right” means in a French context, in particular.

Americans who think the French far-right sounds based may not be my usual readers, but at a moment like this, it can’t hurt to try to reach the people who most need it. This has more than a bit of relevance to American politics, after all.

So I decided to write this. This part isn’t quite as amusing. Some periods in history just aren’t good for chuckles. But I do think that for many readers, knowing this, or reviewing this, will help.

If you know all of this already, skip down to the next section, where the fun starts again.

Also, I bet you’ve never a video of a Pierre Poujade rally.

Historical Figures

⚜︎⚜︎⚜︎ Alfred Dreyfus:

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What a week! The entire French political class has exploded in so furious an orgy of plotting, sniping, leaking, betraying, reputation-smearing, throat-slitting, purging, backstabbing, frontstabbing and sidestabbing that I truly wonder if any of them will be left alive at the end of this. (And who will run France if they’re not?) Like everyone here, I’ve been enthralled. Who knew the French had it in them? When they put their minds to it, they make Donald Trump look like Solomon.

But listening to American newscasters when they try to explain this is so dreary. Either they don’t truly understand the story or they’ve concluded that it’s too complicated and explaining it all is too daunting. Their accounts are so abbreviated, dull, and sanitized that you are, quite frankly, being deprived. It is unfair. You’re missing out on what is right now the greatest show on earth. I have therefore resolved to explain this whole thing to you properly, from start to finish. Because you deserve it. But even my explanation requires an explanation.

Start with this short version:

That’s a good summary, if you already know what’s going on. Most of the people in the video are household names in France. But if you don’t live in France or follow French politics as a vocation, you won’t recognize them or know what they represent. Most of my readers, I’d guess, would recognize Macron and Marine Le Pen, but wouldn’t be able to pick the others out of a lineup. Unless you know the back story—who these people really are—none of this quite makes sense. You need a guide to the characters. So I wrote one.

As I was writing it, though, I realized that you needed something else. You also need a guide to the basics of French constitutional and election law. So I wrote that, too.

Then I decided no one would ever fully enter the spirit of this fandango without seeing and hearing it. But the main characters are all speaking French. If you don’t understand French, it just sounds like they’re making excited, squeaky noises. So I set myself to dubbing all of the week’s highlights and bons mots into English, using AI. I’d never tried that before and wasn’t sure if it would work. But it did—so well that it’s just spooky. We’ve now hit the sweet spot with AI, I think, where everything it does is so clever that it makes you rub your eyes in wonder, but we haven’t yet been turned into its pets. Here’s a preview. The French version, first:

English version:

I swear to you, I gave it no instructions on this one except, “Translate from French and dub into English.” It was the AI that decided, all on its lonesome, to create that voice and that accent. It decided to make the lyrics rhyme—I didn’t tell it to do that. It even decided to sing. (Sing! Where did it learn to do that?) No, it’s not as musical as the original, but apart from that, you’re missing nothing.

I did lots more videos like that, partly because I was having so much fun, but mostly because they bring the drama alive in a way nothing else could (except learning French). But I realized you still wouldn’t recognize the people in the videos, so I’d have to illustrate the guide to the cast of characters. (So many of them are entering and exiting alliances, betraying one another, related to, divorced from, or sleeping with one other that frankly you really need diagrams.) So I did that, too.

Then I figured you could use a handy reference guide to French political parties, too, because they keep changing their names. (This is lest people remember who they are.) So I wrote that, too. Then I decided you needed an essay explaining the hidden drama—the parts no one talks about. So I wrote that, too.

I wanted to fit all of this in a single newsletter. I didn’t want you to forget anything from one part to the next or be obliged to search your Inbox for the guides when we launch into Season 1. But by this point, I was panicking. I’d been beavering away all week, and I was sitting on at least 20,000 words of prizewinning gold (or it would be, once I’d edited it). But I hadn’t yet sent out a word. I began worrying you’d all cancel your subscriptions. That would be so unfair, because I’d been working so hard, and I was on the verge of sending you the best newsletter you’d ever received—but how were you to know? For all you can tell, I’ve been spending my week on the banks of the Seine with Jacques the Guitar Guy, where we’ve been singing ditties about Macron and drinking ourselves into a gallic stupor.

I worked myself into paroxysms of anxiety about this. I couldn’t even bring myself to check my email for fear you’d sent me letters of complaint or that I’d discover you’d all cancelled your subscriptions. Yet I couldn’t finish the thing, either, because every new day brought another thunderbolt, another politician switching sides and renouncing his principles so fast that the whole story kept changing, and not in minor ways—those wily eels kept making me rewrite from the top. I began to feel like Sisyphus.

So I’ve decided to bite the bullet and send you this thing in three parts.

• Part I: How France works.

• Part II: The dramatis personae.

• Part III: Season premiere—the first week.

I really meant all of this to be read at once. I don’t like breaking it up. I fear you won’t remember the details from one installment to the next. But I’m sure that if I don’t send this today, you’ll all cancel your subscriptions. So below is Part I. (This part is actually the least exciting, but you need it to follow the plot.)

TLDR: Please don’t cancel your subscriptions. I have not been slacking. I’ve been working like such a demon that yesterday I forgot to eat, and when I finally realized how late it was, everything was closed. So for dinner, I had beans. Which I ate straight from the can without heating them up. I am just not the kind of woman who deserves to be abandoned by her subscribers.

I know our publication schedule is erratic. I know that’s unsettling. I regret that. But look, you can learn what’s happening in France on a regular schedule from CNN or the New York Times. If you want to luxuriate in the news from France, though, you must wait for the Cosmopolitan Globalist to ripen on the vine.

Subscribe now

PART I

FRANCE: A FAQ

Q. How does France work?

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Since the first atomic explosion, the uncontrolled proliferation of nuclear weapons has been the scenario American statesmen most feared. Game-theoreticians laboring in the basement of the Pentagon have discerned what would result from it again and again; they have stamped report after report with the same conclusion: God forbid.

At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945—when a ball of fire rose in gold, violet, grey, and blue over the Jornada del Muerto desert, melting the sand into light green radioactive glass and illuminating every peak and crevasse of the nearby mountain range with a searing white light—American statesmen began a frantic, desperate effort to forestall the emergence of precisely the world we are now ushering into being.

“[T]he US is basically making the case to all states that they should try as hard as they can to develop nuclear weapons,” writes the war historian Phillips O’Brien:

The lessons of the last few days should be obvious even to those who have been the strongest ad…

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• Part I: A proposal for a new paradigm in American foreign policy

In early July of 2018, shortly before Donald Trump’s infamous meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, I dashed off a series of irate tweets. To my surprise, they went viral, and to this day, people keep circulating them. More people have read that thread, I think, than anything else I’ve ever written.

Also to my surprise, the response was overwhelmingly positive. This was weird, because the whole point of Twitter is to tell other people they’re idiots, and it just made no sense—since when do people go into raptures when I lecture them about the fundamentals of American foreign policy?

Ask yourself, as you read the thread—reproduced below without the typos—what part of this caused that reaction:

• Modern Europe—liberal, democratic Europe—is the United States’ creation. This story was once known to every American, but as the generation responsible for this achievement dies, so too has the knowledge ceased to be passed down casually, within families.

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We’re now reprising with eerie fidelity the disastrous mistakes of the 1930s, and in doing so, all but summoning the gods of war.

But saying this does no good. I’ve been thinking for some time about why we’re behaving this way, and whether anything can be done to stop it. I’m going to write about this at some length this week. I’ve been exploring some new ideas about what’s eating America up and why we’re behaving the way we are. You may find them strange at first. They may well be wrong. But I think they’re worth considering, so I just ask that you give them a chance.

Below, roughly, are the lessons American statesmen drew from the failure of isolationism during the interwar years and from the catastrophic dénouement of the original America First movement. I believe they drew the correct lessons, and in an ideal world, these principles would be guiding American foreign policy now. But they are not:

• The United States cannot thrive in a world at war. The oceans on either side of North America afford Americans a false sense of security. However much Americans might wish to pull up the drawbridge and ignore the rest of the world, it’s impossible. Unchecked war and chaos inevitably reach American soil.

• Aggression is a permanent aspect of inter-state relations. There is and will be no world without inter-state aggression. The United States and its allies must therefore be capable, at all times, of defeating any potential aggressor or plausible combination of aggressors. This is the only way to ensure peace.

• Peace requires collective security. The United States is not capable of defeating any potential aggressor or plausible combination of aggressors by itself, and must therefore have allies.

• America must be a valuable ally. Countries will only want to be American allies if the benefits of being a US ally exceed the costs.

• America must be a credible ally. Collective security arrangements lack credibility, inherently, because people are naturally reluctant to sacrifice for men and women who aren’t their countrymen. America and its allies must therefore constantly demonstrate their commitment to one another in ways large, small, and symbolic. A failure to do so will have outsized effects and jeopardize every member of every American alliance—and thus America.

• America must play a central role. Because of its geography, history, wealth, culture, political system, and power, the United States is the only country in the world capable of organizing, leading, and maintaining alliance systems with the strength and credibility to preserve global peace.

• Appeasement does not work. Inter-state aggression must be vigorously punished. Aggressors, unchecked, become more aggressive. A successful aggressor inspires others to copy his example.

• Wars are best stopped before they start. To prevent wars, the United States and its allies must be powerful enough to ensure that aggression is futile, and there must be no doubt that they’ll use this power.

• Aggression should be countered as quickly as possible. Delaying allows an aggressor to gather strength, exploit the benefits of his aggression, make alliances with other aggressors, and become more deeply invested in an aggressive course of action. This makes the inevitable conflict costlier and bloodier.

• Chaos spreads. Even wars between states of little obvious significance can destabilize whole regions, continents, and ultimately the globe.

Furthermore, this principle, too, soon became obvious:

• No mistakes. In the era of the ICBM, less geographic advantage accrues to the United States than ever before, and you can’t afford to get any of this wrong—not even once.

This week, I’ll be writing about the history, origins, and baleful consequences of American isolationism in the interwar years and the way the lessons of the Second World War came to seem instinctive and intuitive to Americans. As the direct experience of the Second World War faded from memory, however, these lessons—which are in reality neither instinctive nor intuitive, but learned the hard way—have been forgotten.

I’ll then make an argument that will, I think, surprise some of my readers. I’ve come to believe the United States is no longer capable of applying these principles successfully or consistently. Our instincts toward isolationism are too deep, and the memory of the catastrophe of isolationism is so distant, that these lessons simply aren’t obvious to Americans today, and there is no way to make them obvious. No history textbook can replace memory and experience. It is simply no longer possible to obtain a mandate from the American people to pursue a foreign policy that safeguards global peace and American power.

I thus believe American withdrawal from the world is almost certainly inevitable, and the Pax Americana, a historic aberration, is over. It can’t be sustained, not for any material reason, and not because of the rise of a rival, but because Americans don’t want to sustain it.

The problem is that we haven’t been able to admit this to ourselves. This, I think, is the source of our inability to elect a president who doesn’t dismay, embarrass, and diminish us. Is it possible, I wonder, that nations, like people, act out when they’re in the grip of an unconscious conflict? Is it possible that nations, not just people, have unconscious agendas? I think it might be, and I think this idea could explain quite a bit. I suspect that our ambivalence about our global role has caused us to choose politicians who act out our ambivalence on our behalf.

This idea helps to explain the sheer weirdness of American politics in the Trump era, and it explains a great deal more, besides. If I’m right, Americans have fallen in love with Trump not because they’re too stupid to grasp that he is uniquely destructive to American power, credibility, and influence, but precisely because they do appreciate this. They have asked him to do the dirty work of destroying American power because they no longer want it. But because this desire is taboo, it remains subterranean and unacknowledged; the manifest content looks simply nutty and the latent content is never openly discussed.

This, perhaps, is why America is experiencing almost unbearable levels of rage, depression, and conflict. These emotions are ostensibly focused on the person of Donald Trump, but in reality, they are about the task we’ve collectively assigned to him. That task is making America exactly the opposite of great: Trump has been chosen to make America small and powerless. But in fantasy, at least, a powerless America will be free of the burdens of power, which are too heavy, and innocent of the world abroad, which Americans long ago fled—and which they have always held in contempt.

Unfortunately, when a superpower acts out its ambivalence at the global level, it results in the most dangerous and provocative policy imaginable. If we keep this up, we’ll get ourselves and everyone else killed. So it would be best for all concerned if we could bring this conflict to a conscious level and explore it more rationally.

I’d like to persuade you to consider this interpretation of the Trump phenomenon. I don’t ask that you accept it. I’d just like you to consider it. Then I’d like to propose a policy that might—if we and the world are very lucky—allow us to revert to the isolation we crave while reducing the risk of provoking a cataclysm as harmful to the world as the Pax Americana was beneficial.

I call it “responsible retreat.” It’s not the policy I would prefer—far from it—and it would come at a high cost to Americans and no small risk to everyone else. But it would be far better than the policy we’re pursuing by default.

Perhaps, if Americans are willing to be honest with themselves and each other about our real desires, it might be possible for us to cooperate with one another enough to achieve this.

I’ll explain exactly what I mean in the days to come.

Read more

I. Power Vacuums

Viktor Orbàn just visited his “good friend” Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Trump fed and feted him lavishly, calling special attention to the “strength” of Orbàn’s leadership. “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter, or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic.”

Orbàn, Trump said, was a leader who says,

‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it, right? He’s the boss … he’s a great leader, fantastic leader. In Europe and around the world, they respect him.1

When Orbàn emerged, he revealed the details of Trump’s promise to “end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours” to the media. The plan will come as no surprise—there is, after all, only one way to do that—but it’s still astonishing to see it spelled out:

He has a very clear vision, which is hard not to agree with. He says the following: first of all, he will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war. That is why the war will end, because it is obvious that Ukraine cannot stand on its own feet ... If the Americans do not give money, the Europeans alone will not be able to finance this war. And then the war is over.

Of course, Trump’s plan would not end the war: Ukrainians will keep fighting, to the death, with or without our help. They understand full well what will happen to them if they lose. Trump’s plan would simply ensure that they do, indeed, lose.

I can’t put it better than Robert Zubrin:

And I agree with the next comment, too.

Democrats are focusing their campaign message on the threat Trump poses to American democracy. I don’t disagree that he’s a threat to American democracy. But there’s a more urgent risk, and as Eric Douglas Gribble points out, nothing could be worse. Trump’s plan is a blueprint for world war.

I say this for many reasons, but above all because of the principle— observable in both architecture and international relations—that you can’t suddenly withdraw a load-bearing pillar from a fragile structure without causing it to collapse. To accept this argument, you need not have an opinion about whether America has been a force for good or ill in the world. You need only observe that the United States is not only a load-bearing pillar of the global architecture, but by far the most powerful one.

The architectural metaphor is particularly apt because when a massive structure collapses, it creates a vacuum, which nature and nations alike abhor. The gravitational pull of a disappearing great power exerts massive force on every other state in the system. As scholars of international relations have long warned, power vacuums are among the most serious threats to peaceful interstate relations.2

II. Patterns of Appeasement

Our reader Thomas Gregg has written an essay charging Democrats with double standards:

The Russian collusion hoax may have gone boom long ago, but Democrats, progressives, etc. are still denouncing Donald Trump for being V. Putin’s hand puppet. The former president is just too darned cozy with foreign dictators and despots—solid evidence, supposedly, that he, too, is a totalitarian goon.

But what happened before and after Trump—when, as was said, the adults were in charge? Given the combined records of the Obama and Biden administrations, this denunciation of Trump betrays a convenient lapse of memory on the part of those who voice it.

I’ll begin by saying that the Trump’s collusion with Russia was and is no hoax. The widespread acceptance of the phrase “Russia collusion hoax” is a testament to Trump’s astonishing talent for making people believe any lie, however implausible, by saying it repeatedly. It’s all the more astonishing because he colluded and continues to collude with Russia right before our eyes. Why, he just invited Russia’s Trojan Horse in Europe to Mar-a-Lago and announced that he plans to cut off every last penny to Ukraine! Some hoax!

It would take me far too long to list the ways Trump has colluded with Russia in recent years, but a short list may be found in the Mueller Report—and again, the public’s belief that the report “completely exonerates” him is a testament to his freakish ability to make people believe the wildest lies just by saying them repeatedly.

In 1987, Trump returned from a trip to Moscow, organized by the KGB, and promptly purchased full-page ads in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe. Titled, “An open letter from Donald J. Trump on why America should stop paying to defend other countries,” these ads argued that our allies had snookered us. He castigated American politicians who allowed other countries to “take advantage” of us and “let our great country be laughed at.” (Ronald Reagan was in office at the time.)

If Trump’s behavior since that trip doesn’t arouse in you the strong suspicion that he’s long been a cultivated Kremlin asset, a career in counterintelligence isn’t for you. Is he a witting asset? I don’t know. I doubt it. Is he an unwitting one? Obviously, yes. The most idiotic and useful useful idiot the Kremlin has ever seen.

But I couldn’t more agree with your criticisms of Obama and Biden. Every charge you make is condign. Mind you, I’m probably not your audience, because I’ve hardly refrained from saying so, not then and not now. I wrote column after column during the Obama years deploring his fecklessness. Obama and Biden have been terrible stewards of the imperium: credulous about American enemies, incompetent in wielding power, both presided over America’s diminution and both were, at best, indifferent to the vast tragedies that occurred as a result. But to conclude from this, as I fear your readers might, that Trump is no more dangerous than Biden or Obama would be a fatal mistake.

Trump is more dangerous by orders of magnitude. Obama and Biden were and are weak leaders. Trump is a sociopath. His every instinct, in foreign policy, runs counter to those of the men who built the Pax Americana. He’s a mercantilist. He openly admires and celebrates tyrants who despise the United States. He exhibits utter disdain for our allies. He sees no connection between our alliances and our security. He believes every penny spent in maintaining these alliances is wasted. He’s a man of such proud, stunning ignorance that he cannot be made to understand how any of this works.

He has truly persuaded himself—and worse, many Americans—that peaceful, democratic nations are “taking advantage” of us and that because of this, “the world is laughing at us.” This represents psychotic delusion. In his admiration for vicious tyrants and his contempt for our peaceful friends, he’s utterly unlike Biden and Obama. He’s also unlike Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, or Bush.

He is incapable of grasping the nature or the ramifications of the conflict in Ukraine, still less caring about its victims. Trump, and Trump alone, is why Putin believes he needs only to hold on until November. Trump, and Trump alone, is the source of Russian morale. Trump is why Putin is telling Russians that it would be mad to negotiate with Ukraine—since, after all, Ukraine is running out of weapons.

As Oleksandra Matviichuk has written, it is already a global war:

… I live in Kyiv, and my native city, like thousands of other Ukrainian cities, is being shelled not only by Russian missiles but also by Iranian drones. China is helping Russia circumvent sanctions and import technologies critical to warfare. North Korea sent Russia more than a million artillery shells. Syria votes at the UN General Assembly in support of Russia.  We are dealing with the formation of an entire authoritarian bloc.  … when we talk about Russia's war against Ukraine, we are not talking about a war between two states. This is a war between two systems—authoritarianism and democracy. 

… If Russia succeeds, it will encourage authoritarian leaders in various parts of the world to do the same. … Democratic governments will be forced to invest money not in education, health care, culture, or business development, not in solving global problems such as climate change or social inequality, but in weapons. We will witness an increase in the number of nuclear states, the emergence of robotic armies, and new weapons of mass destruction.  If Russia succeeds and this scenario comes true, we will find ourselves in a world that will be dangerous for everyone without exception.

Putin has sown death, famine, destruction, and pestilence on a global scale. Trump, who has no idea why we entered the Second World War or what we fought to secure, sees no reason for America to be involved.

Trump doesn’t just want to hand Ukraine to Putin. He wants to withdraw America from NATO. He’s very serious about that. He also wants to withdraw our troops from South Korea. He nearly did both, in his first term. His Cabinet thwarted him, but he’s made plans to ensure that won’t happen in his second term. I assume he would also withdraw our troops from Japan. This is a plan for a straight-up re-run of World War II—but with nukes.

This time, as then, we won’t succeed in pulling up the drawbridge and letting the rest of the world sort itself out. We will come to be involved, again against our will. The cost of victory will be so much higher, in treasure and blood, than it would be now, and there will be no guarantee of it.

The idea that the United States could seal itself off and live apart from the fallen world was a childish fantasy then. It’s a childish fantasy now, and it will end in catastrophe.

This is far, far worse than Obama’s naive reset.

V. One Weird Guy

For a moment, when I read Orbàn’s comments, I wondered if seeing Trump’s plan put in such stark and unvarnished terms might concentrate the minds of those who haven’t allowed themselves to consider just how, exactly, Trump meant to end the war in 24 hours.

Of course it didn’t.

Remember this? Here’s Lindsey Graham, a mere nine months ago, in Ukraine:

Graham, smiling enthusiastically: [aid to Ukraine] is the best money we’ve ever spent. You know, we’re on the 457th day of a war that was supposed to last three days. You amaze me. Your country amazes me—

Zelensky: It’s about our people. And your people. Your people help our people. All our appreciation—

Graham: You just amaze me. I mean, you remind me of our better selves in America. There was a time in America that we were this way—fighting to the last person. We were going to be free or die.

Zelensky: Free or die.

Graham: Free or die.

Zelensky: Now you are free. And yes, we will be.

Graham: And the Russians are dying.

Here he is, again, just over a year ago, in on a tour of Ukraine with Senators Richard Blumenthal and Sheldon Whitehouse. Everything he says is true:

Graham: [… ] President Zelensky said, “We’re not asking for charity, we’re asking for an investment. And here’s what I tell the American taxpayer, in South Carolina. The reason I’m asking you to help Ukraine is because if we do not stop Putin here, he will keep going.

I also tell people of South Carolina that you cannot allow one country to destroy the, another country and expect that it will not bother you one day.

All three of us, Republicans and Democrats, share the same goal: for Ukraine to drive the Russians out of Ukraine. To achieve that goal, the Ukraine military needs tanks. I’m tired of the shit show surrounding who’s gonna send tanks and when they’re gonna send them. World order’s at stake! Putin is trying to rewrite the map of Europe by force of arms.

To the Germans: Send tanks to Ukraine, because they need the tanks. It is in your interest that Putin loses in Ukraine.

To the Biden Administration: send American tanks so others will follow our lead.

Finally, we will go back to the Senate and work hard to designate the Wagner Group a Foreign Terrorist Organization under US law. We will continue to try to make Russia a state sponsor of terrorism under United States law. We’re gonna help the International Criminal Court to have the capability to bring war crimes charges against those who have violated Ukraine. We will continue to ask the American people and the Congress to send aid to Ukraine, economic aid and military aid, to accomplish the objective of driving the Russian invader out of the Ukraine. [sic] That includes more Patriots, tanks, ATACMs—

Senator Blumenthal: Let me, let me, just say I am totally in agreement with everything that my colleague Senator Graham has just said, particularly the part about the [inaudible] … and the most important part of this picture is Republicans and Democrats coming together in a bipartisan way to give our wholehearted, steadfast support to Ukraine. We have just met with President Zelensky, as well as his top military team, and I will tell you my heart soars with hope and confidence, because I am so deeply inspired by the resolve and resilience and courage of him and the people of Ukraine.

But I am as deeply concerned as ever, because we are at a critical turning point, a historic fork in the road for this conflict. It is a time of maximum danger but also massive opportunity. The Russians are on the verge of a major counter-offensive that will be as barbaric and inhumane as all of what they have done. The opportunity is for America to deter and defeat that counter-offensive by the Russians and enable Ukraine to win, and I repeat, win, that is the only acceptable alternative.

To the people of America: Today it is Ukraine, but tomorrow it will be us, if we do not stop Putin now. Because Putin will keep rolling and attack NATO nations, which will obligate the United States to be involved—with our troops. We should not send American troops to Ukraine. But we should provide Ukraine with whatever we would give our troops if they were fighting on the ground. And that means stop the confusion and the chaotic debate about who sends tanks and when the United States ought to send tanks, long-range artillery like ATACMs, as well as planes that are needed, whatever it takes, the United States should provide. And there is an urgency to now. Time is not on our side. The Russians are not pausing to debate: They are rearming, reinforcing, resupplying, and preparing to try to overrun Ukraine.

So the resolution to declare Russia a state sponsor of terrorism was passed unanimously by the United States Senate just months ago, and as we approach the first year anniversary, we need to resolve to hold Putin, and all of the war criminals, and all of the oligarchs accountable. Putin has shown himself to be a genocidal war criminal. Putin and all who have executed his orders—knowing that they are butchering innocent civilians, children, and others—should be held accountable. And the seizure of assets should enable money to rebuild Ukraine. …

Whitehouse: […] We are keenly aware that in the last year Ukrainian families have experienced a lot of suffering and many mourn loved ones. But in the manner in which you’ve conducted yourself in this conflict you have set a very high standard for the rest of humanity. Watching Ukraine makes me proud to be a human being.

We are going to go back together and try to do our best to sort out a problem that you shouldn’t have to face, which is countries that agree that you should have tanks not providing you the tanks because they can’t agree on the sequence. And we’re going to go back to Washington, continue to raise the pressure on accountability, both to the International Criminal Court, to whatever international tribunal may be established and to courts of law for the inhumane conduct not only by Putin, not only by the Wagner group, but right down to the officers and brutal soldiers who’ve committed war crimes. We intend to be with you until the end, which is victory. Thank you.

[Inaudible] from NBC News: In your meetings with Ukrainian officials did they express concern to you that the new Republican majority in the House might cut aid to Ukraine and is that something you’re concerned about?

Graham: Uh, no, they did not mention it. Um, Kevin McCarthy said “no blank checks.” That makes sense to me. We’re not asking for a blank check. I’m not. I’m asking for military aid to accomplish the purpose of driving Russian invaders out of Ukraine. If Putin gets away with this, there goes Taiwan. If Putin’s successful in Ukraine and is not prosecuted under international law, everything we’ve said since World War II becomes a joke. He will continue beyond Ukraine.

Blumenthal: Let me let me put it slightly differently. We’re not asking for a blank check. We don’t want a blank check. We want a big check. And we want accountability from Ukrainians as well—oversight. And so far, the examinations show there has been no waste, no fraud, no loss of equipment. It has been used effectively and powerfully by the Ukrainians. In fact, they have been so ingenious and inventive in the use of what we have given them, they have outperformed every prediction and expectation by our own military. And— [interruption].

Graham [leaning in and shaking his fist for emphasis]: Let me answer it more directly. The Republican Party, in my view, will not abandon Ukraine, who is trying to expel a Russian invasion that, if it were successful, would turn the world order upside down. And I do believe, as a part of that enterprise, accountability and transparency should be part of the process.

Unidentified journalist: Thank you all for doing this, so first question is you all expressed appreciation, and the idea that you should send tanks here with the last two military aid packages that we saw, the two largest since the start of the war, in a matter of weeks. Do you think there will be momentum, we could go back home speaking to your colleagues about sending [inaudible]. Second question, the biggest question we get from civilians here, is that while they’re thankful for these new aid packages, they’re asking why now. Why not send all of this at the start of the war, when it could have saved so many civilian lives?

Graham: Well, all of us wanted to be aggressive with pre-invasion sanctions. That did not happen. So we are where we are. Tanks. If you believe the goal is to allow Ukraine to drive out the Russian invader, it is impossible to accomplish the goal without tanks. I am confident that this debacle around tanks will soon end. I could not say it any better than my friend Sheldon Whitehouse, because as Senator Blumenthal said, time is of the essence. The Ukrainians need tanks. They need long-range artillery. They need more Patriots—and why do they need this? To drive the Russians out of Ukraine. And if they win, we win. If they fail, the world fails.

And here is Graham, yesterday:

Look at his eyes: It’s like a hostage video.

It’s just weird, isn’t it? This is a man who fully understands that if we don’t stop Putin in Ukraine, he will keep going; that you can’t allow one country to destroy another without expecting it to threaten you; that if Putin gets away with this, there goes Taiwan, everything we’ve said since World War II would be a joke, it would turn world order upside down; if Ukraine fails, we fail. He gets all of this. He knows that in Putin we’re dealing with a genocidal war criminal who’s butchering innocent civilians and children. He knows that abandoning Ukraine to Putin will mean almost indescribable horror for Ukraine, Europe, and the world. He must also know that if this comes to pass, the name “Lindsay Graham” will be as ignominious as “Quisling.”

So—why? Why is he out there stumping for Trump? Why doesn’t he say what he obviously knows? He couldn’t possibly believe that because these crises didn’t happen “on Trump’s watch,” Trump prevented them during his time in office. That argument is just too stupid. And he knows exactly what Trump means to do in his next term.

I’m not the first to observe that Lindsey Graham has given up every principle he’s ever professed to defend Donald Trump. Will Saletan wrote a whole book about this, which he published at . But he declined explicitly to speculate about what Graham could be thinking. That, to me, is the most interesting question.

I wish I knew a novelist capable of bringing to life Graham’s interior world. I’m baffled by it.

Congressman of the Day

Congressman Jim McGovern’s discharge petition—a long-shot bid to force a vote on Ukraine aid—is collecting signatures in the House right now. The magic number is 218. If he can get 218 representatives to sign, it will go to the House floor for a vote. Then it would need to go back to the Senate.

My Congressman has signed it. Has yours?

Article of the day:

Ian Garner is a historian and analyst of Russian culture and war propaganda. He’s written an article that expresses so much of my frustration. The West is still oblivious to Russia’s information war:

A few weeks ago, a Russian autocrat addressed millions of Western citizens in a propaganda event that would have been unthinkable a generation ago—yet is so normal today as to be almost unremarkable. Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin has now been viewed more than 120 million times on YouTube and X, formerly known as Twitter. Despite the tedium of Putin’s two-hour-long lecture about an imaginary Russian and Ukrainian history, the streaming and promotion of the interview by Western platforms is only the latest successful foray in Russia’s information war against the West, which Moscow is showing every sign of winning. And in this war, the Kremlin is not just weaponizing social media, but relying on Westerners themselves to spread its messages far and wide. …

Video of the day

This is from a documentary about Macron’s frantic diplomacy before Russia’s invasion. This footage was shot four days before. It shows you how utterly divorced from reality Putin was. Macron comes off well, which is obviously why he authorized it. But he still comes off well.

Ad of the day

Podcast of the day

Actually, I haven’t listened to it yet, but as soon as I have the time, I will. The trailer made it sound great:

Dark Shining Moment: It was the moment the 21st Century began in earnest: In 2016, Russia reached out across the internet and interfered with America’s democracy, setting the conditions that helped propel Donald Trump into the White House.

A “Dark Shining Moment” tells the story of the first people to detect Russia’s interference—before that pivotal election. It’s a narrative about how information has been used to create a new reality for the public, for democracies and for the world—kicking off the crisis we’re in today.

Today marks two years since Russia’s unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Even if Mike Johnson relents and allows the House to vote, the damage done to the United States isn’t recoverable. The whole world now knows, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the United States has gone so bug-crazy that you can’t even count on us to act out of an animal sense of self-preservation, still less “enlightened self-interest” or upholding our word or acting on our principles.

No rational country could predicate its national defense on an alliance with this kind of United States. And no rational country will.

We’ll watch the consequences of this realization play out over the coming decade, whether slowly and agonizingly or all at once, and we will learn again, the hard way, why Americans once painstakingly constructed the world order in which we’ve so long been snugly nested—one so innocent of war that Americans now sincerely argue, bless their hearts, that being “invaded” by low-cost landscapers and berry-pickers from Central America is just like being invaded by Russia in the largest combined arms operation since the Battle of Berlin.

Crazy is the key word, because there is no coherent ideology here, no vision, no plan, nothing to which you can hold on at all. Don’t try to find method in it, you won’t. Our foreign policy can now be modeled by a random walk. We’re pursuing no definable objective. What we do and the external world are in no wise connected. The things we say to explain our decisions are meaningless, from the syntax to the phonemes. Anyone who pretends to see a logic in it is kidding himself.

It seems that it’s possible for a once-stable pillar of the international state system somehow to break—flashing and beeping stupidly like a jammed copy machine or a broken coffee maker—while its allies are slaughtered, its alliances sundered, and its power undone. We don’t mean ill, I’m sure. Could it be a bad line of code? Have we tried turning ourselves off and on again? It’s a hell of a time for us to go on the fritz, though, because while our government beeps and blinks and turns in circles, a decent world order built by our grandparents’ blood, toil, tears and sweat is being supplanted by a Hobbesian hell of war, terror, savagery, and starvation.

For no reason at all! We could stop this! One man could stop this! Mike Johnson just needs to let the House vote. How could it be that this nebbishy, featureless little dweeb—someone we’d never even heard of until a few months ago—has become the hinge of history and one of its greatest villains?

Congress is on vacation. On vacation! Nothing urgent for them to be back in Washington—why, it’s just the flame of the American Revolution and the hope it represents to the world being extinguished as humanity’s future’s consigned to a pack of scoundrels, thieves, kidnappers, torturers, rapists, monsters, and murderers while American power is eclipsed, its honor tarnished, its friends are murdered and its enemies rejoice—it’s not so bad, you get used to it after the first few times, you know?—midwifing a world in which a boot stamps on the human face, forever. And why? For no reason at all! Just—because.

Mike Johnson doesn’t feel it necessary to recall the Congress or even to explain himself. I don’t even know why he thinks he’s doing this. Because Trump said so? So people say, but who knows? We don’t even know the Party Line. I’ve looked everywhere for a statement from him. I’ve called his office over and over. All he’s told us is that Congress went on vacation because we haven’t secured our southern border—a non sequitur so absurd it could be a line from the script of a surrealist art film about a general, his wife, a clergyman, and a talking donkey—and he apparently told Republicans, before sending them off to their holiday redoubts, that there’s “no rush” to get weapons to Ukraine, after proposing they discuss it at next month’s House GOP retreat.

Very seriously, does he have all his marbles? In all the excitement about whether Biden or Trump is more demented, has anyone asked if Mike Johnson has some kind of cognitive impairment? How else can you explain the words “no rush?” Desperate European leaders, the NATO secretary-general, the joint chiefs, a parade of national security advisors—they’ve all been lined up outside his office to explain that yes, there is a goddamned rush. Beyond the world of Donald Trump, JD Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Elon Musk, every adult—on both sides of the aisle—grasps that Putin’s victory would be a disaster and a catastrophe, and the growing prospect of it is an unmitigated emergency. Huge, bipartisan majorities of Americans support sending that aid to Ukraine. Only one group doesn’t—those defined in this poll as “Trump Republicans”—and they make up a mere 13 percent of the electorate. Even they don’t oppose it strongly: Four out of ten Trump Republicans do support it. The number of Americans opposed to saving Ukraine can be measured in the low single digits. Yet Mike Johnson says there’s “no rush” to allow our democratically-elected representatives to vote. Why?

When things make no sense, the mind reaches for conspiracy theories. But they make no sense either. No, I don’t believe that at the end of the movie the camera cuts to Johnson greeting his handlers in his native Muscovy as they place a medal around his neck and declare him a Hero of the Russian Federation. It’s simpler and more plausible to think that Mike Johnson is just out of his ever-loving faceless-dweeb mind. There are a lot more lunatics in the world than there are sleeper agents.

People go nuts. It happens. Look, Mike Johnson suddenly found himself—through serendipitous, improbable, unexpected and certainly undeserved fortune—the world’s most powerful man. Surely it’s as much an astonishment to him as to the rest of is. It must be disorienting for a man whose own wife probably has trouble recognizing him in a crowd suddenly to hold the future of humanity in the palm of his hands. Perhaps he’s so stunned that he wants to savor it a bit. These are his fifteen minutes, after all. Yes, damn the consequences—he’s just going to sit there in his favorite easy chair and take a good long vacation while the Ukrainians beg for their lives. “They underestimated Mike Johnson,” he’s muttering. “They mocked Mike Johnson. They called him ‘weird’ because he uses an app to monitor his son’s porn. Well, look who’s mocking now! You sophisticated Estonians thought you were better than Mike Johnson? You Lithuanian sluts thought you could kick Mike Johnson around? Oh-ho! It’s payback time. Beg for your lives, wretches! Dance!”

He’s probably lighting up a cigar and firing up the OnlyFans right now.

It could be said of Chamberlain, at least, that “he acted with perfect sincerity according to his lights and strove to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful, devastating struggle” that came nonetheless. What can be said of Mike Johnson? Sincerity? Capacity? Authority? These words are a category error—it’s like praising the wisdom of a toaster.

No, he’s doing this just—because.

Notes on the news

Here are articles about the situation that seemed to me worth reading:

Two years after Russia launched its full-scale attack to annul any remnant of an independent Ukraine, Putin’s genocidal intent is now impossible to deny:

… In November, human rights investigators revealed new evidence charging the Kremlin with an intentional starvation crusade which appears to have been planned prior to the invasion. … Other components of Putin’s strategy are parts of his genocidal campaign, including the blocking of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, destroying Ukraine’s granaries, planting landmines under the world’s most fertile farmland and targeted killing of Ukraine’s top farmers. …

Russia’s acts of brutality obscure the lines between past and present. Since the invasion, the eastern city of Kharkiv has been bombed incessantly. Residents have lost parents, husbands, children, jobs and homes. Kharkiv was also horribly affected during the Holodomor, experiencing dreadful suffering. Entire villages died out with people scared to death of hunger, fearing for their children, victims of an artificial famine.

These days, numerous Western leaders maintain that Putin cannot be permitted to replicate Stalin’s crimes. However, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s pleas for more extensive aid to oust Russian forces and finally stop this cycle of violence are not being fully answered. Ninety years after the Holodomor, Western leaders have the occasion to institute life-saving retribution to the Ukrainian people who are fighting both the memories and vicious realities of two Kremlin dictators.

Cameron and Sikorski: Failing to stand with Ukraine will remake the world as we know it:

This war is the biggest test of our generation. A wholly unprovoked invasion. A blatant threat to our collective security. The clearest example of one country trying to extinguish the independence of another. Other adversaries are watching to see how we respond. Will we stand with Ukraine? Will we stand up to Putin’s naked aggression? The consequences of failure won’t just be felt in Ukraine—they will remake the world as we know it. 

General Mark Hertling:

I scribbled some thoughts about what I believed were Putin’s strategic objectives in invading Ukraine (see chart). In the First 18 months of the conflict, Ukraines’ action, NATO collaboration, and US support caused him to fail. We’re at an inflection point.

Addressing each:

1. Zelenskyy is still strong

2. Ukraine’s army is still fighting

3. Ukraine’s population is resilient

4. Russia does not control the Black Sea ports

5. The West—especially the US—has returned to being divided, and NATO may now take fewer risks.

Putin now knows that Ukraine’s continued capability will—for the short term—continue to require support from the West. So he is pulling out all stops, with mobilizations (over 400,000 new—untrained—soldiers as “meat” for attacks), a ramped up industrial base, and oppression. A mostly unified US during the first 18 months is now wavering and increasingly divided, mostly due to actions by a wannabe US authoritarian (and his cult) who for whatever reason support the murderous, criminal Putin. This is stalling US aid, which has multiple effects.

What effects? On the battlefield, supply lines are the operational center of gravity. If disrupted or halted, the effects are disastrous. And that’s when an army has great logistics chain. Due to the hodgepodge of weapons and lack of prep, UAF does not have that ... yet. Russia has learned that they can take a position through continuous artillery barrages and sending thousands of soldiers to their death. Their artillery attacks have slowed, but they are still massive. They’ve also become better at coordination between units. Russia is attacking at multiple locations simultaneously—Avdiivka, Maryinka, Kreminna, Bakhmut, Kreminna—and the UAF is being stretched thin and low on supply.

What is a tactical withdrawal is also a sound operational maneuver by Gen. Syrskiy. He’s hoping for resupply. But in going on the offensive, Russia is taking a risk. They’re not very good at maneuver, their supply lines are non-existent, and they open themselves up for increased attrition when moving.

But here’s the thing ... if the UAF doesn’t get prevision artillery, more air defense ammo, and mobilize more forces, they will be at a disadvantage. They will likely lose more ground, but they must limit those losses and unnecessary attrition of their forces and population.

Going back to Putin's strategy ... his goals were to “further divide NATO and the US.” I believe NATO has grown stronger ... stronger than they’ve been at any time during my years serving in Europe. But they’re also concerned. Especially the newer NATO members. They know Russia, and they’re guessing they might be next. Especially a few who have been most supportive of Ukraine: Poland, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. They believe they would be next in Putin's crosshairs, for asymmetric attacks or even kinetic strikes. Here’s where it gets sporty: There have been many who say “give Ukraine everything they ask for!” But as I’ve said so many times, it doesn’t work that way. Nations consider their own security requirements, weigh risks, and then provide what they can. In my view, the Ramstein conferences—led by the Secretary of Defense—have been masterful in getting nations to take risks, dig deep, supply ammo and arms that they have available ... and then some. In my view—contrary to many—contributing nations have been phenomenally generous.

Now, considering an increased Russian threat and the performance by the US Congress, will some NATO nations take fewer risks? Provide less equipment and ammo? Become more concerned with their own safety above the collective NATO alliance? Trump’s comments certainly didn’t help!

Putin has become emboldened. I believe he thinks the tide is turning. Navalny’s death—and the suppression of the Russian population—have shown this to be true.

The US could turn this all around and possibly affect Putin’s election by delivering the package many Americans want.

One man stands in the way.

Bring it to the floor for a vote, Speaker Johnson.

Stop being a tool of Putin’s best friend.

Here’s a good conversation with Yaroslav Trofimov, the Wall Street Journal’s Ukraine correspondent. Offer it to your friends whom Putin convinced, for example, that Boris Johnson queered a viable peace deal:

US Republicans blocking aid. European right-wingers pushing to abandon Kyiv. Ultra-cautious leaders. What is the West’s real strategy?

As Kyiv and its allies contemplate a gruesome menu of possibilities for the coming year—including an all-fronts push by Russia’s allies, Iran and China, to trigger World War III—it’s worthwhile to pause for a moment and ask: How did we get here? How did the West, with its aircraft carriers and combined economic footprint approaching €60 trillion (dwarfing China, Iran and Russia combined) cede the initiative to a shrinking, post-Soviet country with the GDP of Spain, and end up in a defensive crouch flinching at the next affront from Putin? And if repelling Putin’s invasion of Ukraine isn’t the West’s real objective—what is? …

… Beyond fear, diplomats and experts pointed to the dynamic between Scholz and Biden as a driving force behind the West’s overriding strategy of incrementalism and escalation management, rather than a focus on strategic outcomes, in dealing with Ukraine. Despite a 16-year age difference, both men came of age politically during the Cold War and its widespread fears of nuclear armageddon. Both are deeply wedded to the US-led international order and NATO protections for Europe. Both are men of the left who are instinctively suspicious of armed intervention and, temperamentally speaking, risk-averse and uncomfortable with geopolitical gamesmanship, experts and diplomats argued. …

Experts also pointed to the key role of advisers, namely US national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Scholz’s advisers Schmidt and Jens Plötner, a foreign policy adviser, in shaping their bosses’ approach. Diplomats and experts consulted for this article described Sullivan as being “highly intelligent,” “not deeply experienced on national security,” “ultimately career-driven” and “a bit short on emotional intelligence.” Schmidt gets “inseparable from Scholz,” “very cautious,” “basically terrified of Russia,” “not as big a foreign policy expert as he thinks he is.” Plötner, in turn, is described as “a super close confidante,” “Russia-friendly,” “unconvinced by the narrative that an attack on Ukraine is an attack on all of us.”

“Together these two [Sullivan and Schmidt] engineered the idea that Russia would eventually get ground down and be discouraged,” said Hunter Christie. “That may have avoided nuclear war, but it has trapped us between two suboptimal outcomes: a bigger war with Russia or the collapse of Ukraine, which would be a shock and a humiliation and a demonstration of Western weakness.” …

… Having squandered an opportunity to equip Ukraine’s forces with air power during the early months of 2023—a key factor in the failure of a much-touted counteroffensive—Western leaders now see their hands increasingly tied by politics: The US presidential election and Donald Trump on one side; the European Parliament election and the rise of right-wing forces led by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on the other. Critics warn that the window of opportunity for the West to help Ukraine turn the tide is, if not already closed, closing.

Yet there is still time and the basket of options is far from empty. As the reports on ATACMS and Taurus suggest, Western leaders are still able to deliver game-changing weapons to Ukraine if the incentive is strong enough (in this case, officials say deliveries could be justified by sending Putin a “Navalny signal” following the opposition leader’s death). But the deliveries aren’t a done deal, and other possibilities—including confiscating Russian assets, taxing Western companies that continue to operate in Russia, or stepping up sanctions against Putin’s regime—remain on the table, visible to all, yet undeployed. Even after Navalny’s killing, there has been no “Mario Draghi moment” signaling resolve to do “whatever it takes” to help Ukraine prevail, added Techau.

(I think his analysis is well-constructed and probably correct.1)

Trump owes Americans some answers on foreign policy. If the former president intends an historic redefinition of US leadership in a world of aggressors, he should tell the voters:

The people of Ukraine themselves must be starting to feel like the gladiators who fought in a walled colosseum to entertain the Romans. They await a thumbs up or down on their fate from Mr. Trump. So which will it be, Mr. Trump—let Ukraine defend itself, or let it go?

Mr. Trump has refused to debate GOP primary opponent Nikki Haley, arguing that he doesn’t need to put his lead at risk. It is not acceptable, though, for Mr. Trump to deny American voters a more concrete idea of his policies toward Ukraine or the world’s other concurrent troubles. For starters, what did Mr. Trump mean when he said he could end the war between Russia and Ukraine in 24 hours? Does he in fact mean Mr. Putin should be allowed to annex eastern Ukraine? Would he withdraw the US from the roughly 50-nation Ukraine Defense Contact Group? Would he cede Russian-speaking areas of the Baltics to Mr. Putin? I would ask Mr. Trump if he thought the Munich Agreement was a mistake in 1938, or just poorly negotiated. …

Mr. Trump may yet instruct House and Senate Republicans to end support for Ukraine. That would be a historic redefinition of US leadership in a world of aggressors. If so, Mr. Trump has an obligation to tell American voters why 2024 won’t be another 1938.

(Who’s he kidding? Ask Trump for his assessment of the Munich Agreement? This guy?☟)

Europe can no longer count on America’s security umbrella. Trump is undermining its safety and the Continent must respond:

… If Trump is not colluding with Russian President Vladimir Putin, he is undoubtedly serving his interests … Europeans have to start thinking the unthinkable: how to plan for war without America.

Trump’s pronouncement, inviting Russia to attack NATO, poses an immediate threat to NATO, the US, and American troops, and the damage cannot easily be undone:

Few missed Trump’s invitation to Putin to attack a NATO ally. Unfortunately, too many considered it to be inconsequential political demagoguery and pandering rhetoric for an isolationist base. Some national security experts have sounded alarms warning of a seemingly distant threat of the collapse of the NATO alliance, but these predictions are framed as being contingent on Trump winning a second presidential election ten months from now.

The reality is far more grave. Trump’s pronouncement, inviting Russia to attack NATO, poses an immediate threat to NATO, the US, and American troops. And the damage cannot easily be undone.

The domestic political turmoil in the US and the paralysis in the Euro-Atlantic alliance in conceiving and implementing a strategy for the Russia-Ukraine war resembles some of the key conditions that propelled Putin to launch the 2022 war. Prior to the invasion, Putin perceived American society and the United States’ political decision-making structure to be in disarray. The January 6th insurrection reflected the depth of American political division and throughout 2021, Trump hammered away at his personal narratives that Putin wasn’t a menace, Russia was a potential ally, and Ukraine was the culprit behind tension in Eastern Europe and an enemy. Trump was a former president but remained the leader of a Republican party that was increasingly pliant to whatever extreme position he wished to pursue. For Putin, this capture of the Republican establishment signaled that a swift and successful Russian victory would result in no significant Western backlash.

The same conditions that invited Russia’s decision to attack Ukraine appear again today in the context of NATO. Putin has demonstrated a penchant for war optimism and miscalculation. He may read Trump’s recent signals and interpret the current security environment much like he did in the leadup to 2022. This is a recipe for a dangerous miscalculation and direct confrontation between Russia and NATO.

… More dangerous is the relevance of Trump’s pronouncement to America’s security, today. If the Republican party is prepared to about-face on border security because Trump demands it, Putin may very well interpret the willingness of the Republican Party to about-face on defending NATO. The result would be political paralysis in the United States. Putin may view this as an alluring, fleeting, and unique opportunity that must be exploited to achieve one of his vital long-term objectives.

Consequently, Trump has significantly advanced the possibility of a war with Russia because he alone has eroded the principle of collective defense that undergirds the NATO alliance. This principle embodied in Article V of NATO, the concept that “an attack on one is an attack on all,” successfully warned-off the Soviet Union for generations. Because of Trump’s recent pronouncement, decades worth of collective defense is in doubt. Vladimir Putin has stated that one of his paramount objectives is the destruction of NATO, he may soon be willing to exploit the chaos and accept Trump’s invitation test the resolve of NATO.

As Russia is bogged down in Ukraine with limited resources for a large-scale confrontation with NATO, this would likely be a limited strike. For instance, Russia can attack to seize a land corridor between the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and Belarus across Lithuania’s Suwalki Gap. This is the exact scenario that the US government fears most and assesses as the likely flashpoint for a confrontation between Russia and NATO. …

The combination of failed policies to deter Russian aggression across multiple administrations, the Biden administration’s indecisive response to the Russia-Ukraine war, and Trump’s invitation for Russia to attack NATO have all greatly eroded deterrence. With Trump’s invitation to attack NATO, Trump’s influence over the Republican Party creating paralysis and Putin’s penchant for miscalculation and opportunism we now face uniquely dangerous risk of a confrontation with Russia.

We are entering a particularly dangerous moment in US-Russia relations. Decisive action is essential. A bipartisan effort to signal NATO is sound and collective defense is ironclad must be implemented immediately. Putin must be disabused of any perceptions that the US would fail to act to defend NATO. And the House must immediately return to congress and the GOP must pass the National Security Bill carrying US$60 Billion in aid to Ukraine. Rather than relying on appeasement and the prospects of “cooperation” with Russia, American policymakers must show that the United States is willing to stand by our defensive alliances. Failure to do so will not only see the death of deterrence, it would invite disaster.

This is correct.

In early 2021, when Alexey Navalny was getting ready to return to Russia just five months after being poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent, Christo Grozev asked Navalny’s wife Yulia whether she realized that her husband would face certain arrest when his plane landed in Moscow.

“In response, she just smiled and said, ‘Christo, you’re so naive. They won’t just arrest him. They’ll keep him in torture chambers for years. And they might also kill him,’” Grozev told Meduza. …

“I’ve already gotten warnings from my sources that there could be an entire new wave of repressions and murders—that Putin has ‘special plans’ for Russian opposition leaders,” he told Meduza. If these reports are true, he noted, jailed opposition figures such as Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza will be “especially vulnerable” to Putin’s whims.

If you haven’t watched this already, you must:

This, too.

Ice in that woman’s veins.

(Update: Navalny’s body has been released to his mother.)

In 2015, Gary Kasparov published Winter is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped. I read it at the time. Putin was a menace, he argued, and the United States—and particularly the Democrats under Obama—had appeased Putin so chronically and pathologically as to turn a menace into a monster.

Kasparov wrote of the reckless optimism that gripped the West in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the West’s failure to appreciate that while the USSR was dead, its security apparatus was alive and its imperial appetites ravenous— humiliation and revanchism having made them only more acute. But the book’s true theme was the erosion of the West’s moral authority, which once had inspired political prisoners during the Cold War and given hope to the oppressed the world around.

Kasparov argued that we had through our indifference and denial encouraged monsters like Putin to flourish, and this was not merely a problem for Russians, for as Sakharov, wrote, “A country that does not respect the rights of its own people will not respect the rights of its neighbors.”

I’d add this. A country that doesn’t care about the rights of its neighbors won’t respect the rights of its own people. If Americans no longer give a damn that Russia is raping and murdering its way through Europe, we’ll soon exhibit the same indifference toward one another. No one can truly believe that human rights are sacrosanct in America but not in Ukraine. You either believe they’re sacrosanct or you don’t. If our foreign policy doesn’t seek to protect and expand freedom and human dignity in the world, we don’t truly believe they’re worth having. If we don’t believe that, we won’t have them.

Kasparov called for the adoption of a global Magna Carta to unite the world’s liberal democracies against its dictators. He urged the West to slam massive sanctions on all the Kremlin’s cronies, arm Ukraine to the hilt, and end its dependence on Russian oil and gas. “Dictators,” he wrote, “only stop when they are stopped.”

The New York Times’ review of the book was odiously smug:

There’s no pretense of nonpartisanship here, no subtlety. … Kasparov fully credits Ronald Reagan for the end of the Cold War and the fall of the “evil empire”—“Lesser problems were left to lesser men”—and he has no doubt that “the world would be a safer, more democratic place today had John McCain been elected” president, or at least Mitt Romney, who called Russia “without question our No. 1 geopolitical foe.” Barack Obama, by contrast, is relentlessly and repeatedly skewered: The president is “reluctant to confront the enemies of democracy to defend the values he touts so convincingly”; he is “busy retreating on every front”; and even when he does seem to be standing up to Putin, the most Kasparov can allow is, “I suppose that doing the right thing for the wrong reason is better than never doing it at all.”

The politicking becomes somewhat tedious, as do the “I told you so” moments scattered through the book: “It is cold comfort to be told, ‘You were right!’ ” Kasparov laments in his introduction. …

Over the years, he laments, he has provided long lists of ways to counter Putin, but “even now, after he has proven my worst fears correct and everyone is telling me how right I was, few of those recommendations have been enacted.”

This is not the place to argue the merits or feasibility of arming Ukraine or cutting Russian gas imports. Nor is there a need to defend President Obama against Kasparov’s crude and baseless insults. The question to be posed is whether even the most aggressive Western stance toward Putin would make him less dictatorial or Russia more free. That change must come from within, and I would have much preferred to hear Kasparov’s take on what must change in Russia and how the Russians might do it. There are plenty of other people to trash Barack Obama.

What a self-satisfied mooncalf. Kasparov was right and is right. Everything he predicted has transpired. We should have listened to him then and we should listen to him now.

The former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, now has a podcast. He invited Kasparov on the show to discuss Navalny’s murder. Kasparov pointed out (again) that there is no material reason for the West’s inadequacy:

Putin’s strength is the result of Western weakness, because today, unlike in the 70s or 80s, the Free World led by America has overwhelming military and economic advantage. And also political—a lot of people believe in democracy and individual rights. But having military and economic dominance doesn’t bring you automatic victory unless you have political will.

What happened in Russia last year was, actually, it was a moment where part of the elite thought that they had to find a compromise. Prigozhin’s rebellion, to me, was a very clear sign that lot of people inside Russia, before the Ukrainian counter-offensive—which was very frightening, by their standards, because top generals and, I think, people like Prigozhin understood that if America had fulfilled its promises and delivered the weapons that Ukrainians expected, it would be over. The Kerch Bridge, which is the key logistical connection to Crimea, could be destroyed in a couple of weeks if America supplied Ukraine with weapons. [But] 31 tanks? Come on, this is—they sent a hundred tanks to Morocco recently. More than 2,000 tanks are now just collecting dust in the California desert. America had all the resources for the war to be won by Ukraine. So that’s why Prigozhin tried to send this message: “Stop this damned war, you know it’s a big business, let’s go back.”

But what happened afterwards—it failed when Putin saw, and people around him saw, the Free World was not ready to provide Ukraine with all the weapons. Okay, Britain does whatever it can, but it’s probably the only exception in Western Europe. Eastern Europe is trying, but they don’t have the weapons. America? Germany, we don’t want to waste our time even making comments about it. So today, they believe Putin is on the winning side, and also, the Russian economy is a war economy and they benefit. It’s a huge business now. And as for sanctions—okay, be my guest: Sanctions are a gold mine, because all these sanctions are just being evaded, and it’s a huge business!—70 to 80 percent of Russian drones now have Western technology. By the way, made in America—yeah third countries, fourth countries, but at the end of the day the Free World shows no determination to win the war so why not just stick with Putin. Because don’t forget, rising against the dictator like Putin means that you lose use everything, including your head. So why?

Here, the host interrupts to ask Dearlov whether he agrees. Is Ukraine losing owing to the failure of Biden and the West, to the Free World’s lack of political will?

“Well,” Dearlov replies, “Gary’s analysis is depressing. But I fear there’s an element in it, much though I don’t want to admit … he’s right. I’m worried that he may well be right.” This isn’t some journalist or think-tanker. This is the former head of MI6. The heart sinks.

Kasparov continues:

… The bottom line is that, you know, Ukraine expects Russia to run out of money and weapons. Russia expects Ukraine to run out of people. And that’s not where we want to be. Yes Russia probably lost nearly 400,000 men on the battlefield, and God knows how many wounded and lost limbs—but Ukraine lost more than 200,000, which is a huge loss. I mean we don’t have that in war—we’ve never seen this since World War II. And many of these losses are unnecessary, because again, the weapons that Ukraine could use to destroy the Russian army are available. More importantly, these weapons were built in America in the 70s and 80s to fight a Russian invasion of Europe. I mean, it’s mind-boggling that these weapons that were designed, built to fight Russians are sitting now in storage because the American administration cannot contemplate what happens if Ukraine wins, Putin loses, Russia collapses, China gets too strong—so this is an old-fashioned mentality that sees Washington, Moscow, and Beijing as a three key elements on the map, and everything else—sorry, London included—are just secondary. So this is the mentality that dominates the thinking of this administration. And they want to, you know, find some sort of status quo that could preserve Putin in power but will not leave Ukraine totally in his hands. So one of the scenarios they’ve been discussing with Russia—they never acknowledge it, but it’s like an open secret—is the division of Ukraine, taking part of Ukraine, free Ukraine, into NATO, offering them part of Russia’s confiscated funds. But Putin doesn’t want it! So, whether Putin is willing to take the compromise remains to be seen, because Putin has many options and one of them is that he can go back to war. War is consuming Russian society. Putin needs war. War has become his main legacy. So that’s why one way or another he will continue his attacks and provocations—Gaza, Venezuela, China, Taiwan. The cancer doesn’t stop unless you cut it off.

Ukraine, Russia, and the Minsk agreements: A post-mortem. Western policymakers should study the lessons of the Minsk agreements—and drop any illusions about the ways in which Russia supposedly acts.

JD Vance goes all the way to Munich just to insult Ukraine:

… For example, during his Sunday panel discussion, Vance argued that the United States can’t continue to support Ukraine because the U.S. defense industry doesn’t produce enough munitions and the U.S. military must conserve resources for other regions. “You don’t win wars with GDP or euros or dollars. You win wars with weapons, and the West doesn’t make enough weapons,” he said. In fact, the funding legislation Vance is opposing contains billions of dollars to increase U.S. weapons production capacity and to replenish U.S. weapons stocks. Vance is thwarting the solution to the very problem he is complaining about, then pointing back to that problem to justify his real objective: abandoning Ukraine.

Four myths about Ukraine. The ideas that Ukraine can’t win, that it’s time for a ceasefire, that Ukraine is hopelessly corrupt, and that Ukraine is the wrong priority have taken hold, write Eric Edelman, former undersecretary of defense for policy, and David J. Kramer, former deputy assistant secretary of state for Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova:.

… The bottom line for lawmakers of both parties is that our Ukraine fatigue is dangerous not just for Ukraine but for ourselves. Ukrainians are bearing the burden of defending not just their freedom, but ours, against a mutual enemy whose murder of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny only proves how dangerous and despotic he is. Ukraine has never asked that we send our men and women to fight for them—but they need our weapons, desperately. They have earned our support by tackling corruption, defending their democracy, and proving their value as an ally.

The delay in Congress to approve funding for Ukraine is increasingly demoralizing to Ukrainians, as well as deadly. Ukraine is running low on weapons and ammunition and is having to ration its supplies. “The shortage is increasing day by day,” Ukraine’s Defense Minister, Rustem Umerov, reportedly wrote to a top EU official recently. “The enemy’s ability to outshoot the Armed Forces of Ukraine by more than 3:1 is only getting worse.” All this is shaking Ukrainians’ view that we are a reliable ally.

Russia succeeded in inserting an explosive allegation—US$10 million in secret payments to the Bidens!—into the MAGA bloodstream and boosted the GOP impeachment crusade against the president. In other words, the Republicans—and all their comrades at Fox and other right-wing media outlets that trumpeted Smirnov’s allegation against the Bidens—have been useful idiots for Moscow:

Giuliani, once known as “America’s Mayor,” was in cahoots with a Russian covert operation—and every Republican and Fox News host who amplified the Biden allegations he was peddling were Kremlin helpmates. When Giuliani helped make public the contents of a laptop that Hunter had left behind at a computer repair shop in Delaware, conservative media seized the occasion to boost the false charges about Joe and Hunter Biden being spread by this Russian operation. (The laptop contained explosive material about Hunter, but its contents did not, as the New York Post and other right-wing outlets falsely asserted, prove the conspiracy theory that Biden had intervened to protect Burisma.)

… According to Trump administration officials, the Biden-Burisma allegations were in part (if not wholly) the work of Russian operatives. Yet Trump, the MAGA right, and their media allies have been beating this drum for years, and once the GOP won back the House in 2022, it became impeachment fodder. Then Comer, Jordan, and the rest of their crew embraced Smirnov’s charges, even though they were not substantiated and even though they were in sync with a known Russian disinformation plot that targeted Biden to aid Trump.

Beyond the counter-offensive: Attrition, stalemate, and the future of the war in Ukraine:

Russia and Ukraine are engaged in a war of attrition—which on current projections Russia is set to win. Ukraine can only achieve its war aims if it moves to a war of maneuver; without this, it cannot regain its lost territory. Western supplies and efforts at defense-industrial consolidation are failing to provide Ukraine with the replacement armaments it needs to survive the war of attrition, let alone switch to maneuver warfare. The West and Europeans in particular need to overhaul their financial regulations and create economies of scale to radically stimulate the production of drones, ammunition, armoured fighting vehicles, and more. Only if they carefully absorb the lessons learned from this war will Europeans be ready for the types of great power confrontation that are becoming more likely in the 21st century.

You break, you pay: Why the West should start confiscating frozen Russian assets now:

The US$290 billion of Russian sovereign assets frozen in the West—two-thirds of which is situated in Europe—would make a huge difference in Ukraine both during and after the war, and could provide a stable flow of money as allies find it increasingly difficult to push support through. But a confiscation would also hold a larger political value—showing Ukraine that it has the long-term support of its allies and sending a message that governments engaged in aggressive warfare will not be allowed to profit from actions that clearly flout international law.

Russian pundits rejoice about “a window of opportunity” in Ukraine due to issues with the US aid. They ponder whether Russia will go all the way to Washington and say they want their enemies to be tormented as they try to figure out where Russia will stop:

Brave new world: A video allegedly from the French TV channel France 24 is being shared on the social network X. In the video, the host claims that the Ukrainian authorities were supposedly planning an assassination attempt on French leader Emmanuel Macron during his visit to Kyiv. Screenshots are provided to support the claim that Kyrylo Budanov, Chief of Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence, was working on the operation, but it was disrupted by Valerii Zaluzhnyi, former Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, who allegedly passed the information to the French. In this way, the Ukrainian side allegedly wanted to attract the attention of the international community, hoping to receive more foreign weapons and shift the responsibility for the attempted assassination of Macron to Russia. The video was distributed mainly on the Western segment of social network X, specifically through English, French, German, and Italian accounts. It was also widely shared by pro-Kremlin Telegram channels and Russian media.

The video is still up. The account that introduced it is unsuspended. The usual people believe every word of it. God, this is so easy for them—it’s painful.

.

Most Europeans support Ukraine in its war against Russia but only 1 in 10 think Ukraine can win, according to a survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations. Researchers say the pessimistic outlook is largely because of the political situation in the United States, where talks over a fresh aid package for Ukraine are at a deadlock in Congress and ex-President Donald Trump is seeking a comeback based in part on a commitment to withdraw military aid for Kyiv.

Estonian president: NATO and EU can’t carry on like it’s peacetime:

There’s no point wondering which country might be attacked next because, as history has repeatedly shown, if given the chance, all of Europe could be next. …Democracy itself is a threat to Russia’s current regime, which means every democratic state poses a threat to it. … The cultural DNA of a country that’s been hardwired to oppose the West won’t transform overnight. Preparing for war has been ingrained in the Russian mind. And those who think differently are either silenced, forced to leave, harassed, imprisoned or killed—as we have with great sadness again witnessed just recently.

Moreover, Russian President Vladimir Putin doesn’t just want to conquer Ukraine, he’s also testing the democratic world’s resolve on behalf of the world’s other autocrats. He’s also fighting for North Korea and Iran—hence their support of his war effort. This is a decisive moment for our generation. If we fail to show determination, we will be seen as weak. And as history has shown, weakness doesn’t lead to peace.

Europe caught between Putin and Trump:

Two big news stories set the stage for this year’s Munich Security Conference …As the meeting got underway, news broke that Ukrainian forces were withdrawing from Avdiivka … Then came the shocking news of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death. … Playing out in quick succession, both these events made for a sobering mood at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof. And sitting in meetings, talking over meals and in corridors over the past two days, my overriding sense was of a Europe confronting its greatest fears—a growing worry that Russia is winning in Ukraine and could turn to the rest of Europe next, and the increasing realization that the US may well elect a leader who doesn’t believe in NATO and treats allies more like foes.

… One person sounding the alarm is Estonia’s Foreign Intelligence Service Director-General Kaupo Rosin, who warned that Russia is anticipating a conflict with NATO in the next decade—and that it’s preparing accordingly. “There are things we can do to counter this,” he told me. “But we better take this seriously and start reacting now.”

I heard a similar message from Poland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Radosław Sikorski: “We told you 15 years ago that Putin was coming. You didn’t believe us. We told you again 10 years ago. And five. You still didn’t believe us. Believe us now,” he said.

But the biggest uncertainty for most Europeans isn’t about Putin — it’s about America. The US Congress’ failure to support Ukraine has left many speechless. And Trump’s warning that he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to an ally who hadn’t “paid up,” still rings loud.

🎧 Podcast: How Europe can prepare for America’s withdrawal:

In the past weeks, Donald Trump caused alarm bells to go off in the European capitals, stating that he would “encourage” Russia to punish his European NATO allies that do not reach the spending requirements, were he elected US president for the second time. Shortly after, Estonian intelligence revealed Russia has plans to beef up its military presence near Finland and the Baltic states.

In this episode, recorded live from the Munich Security Conference, Mark Leonard welcomes ECFR board member Arancha González Laya, former Spanish foreign minister and current dean of the Paris School of International Affairs, along with distinguished policy fellow Camille Grand, who leads ECFR’s brand new defence initiative and senior policy fellow Jana Puglierin, head of ECFR’s Berlin Office. Together, they discuss how Europeans can prepare for a second Trump presidency. What dangers does a second Trump term hold for Europe? How should it respond if Trump abandons Ukraine on his first day in office? What consequences will America’s gradual disengagement have for Europe’s role in the world?

Bolstering European security as risk of abandonment by US grows:

As it seems more than likely that Donald Trump will become the republican presidential candidate, he has in effect already sounded the death knell of US participation in NATO and other US international alliances. On February 10, Trump surpassed his previous most outrageous comments by claiming that “one of the presidents of a big country” had asked him whether the US would still defend the country if they were invaded by Russia even if they didn’t pay. Trump recalled that he told that leader: “No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want,” apparently encouraging Moscow to attack a US ally.

Frighteningly, most US opinion polls suggest that Trump will probably win the US presidential elections in November. That will be a catastrophe for all democracies of the world, especially for those in Europe, which directly face the Russian threat. If Trump becomes president again, no NATO security guarantee will be credible. Europe needs to prepare itself for the possible demise of NATO and the US security umbrella, which has guaranteed peace in Europe for 75 years.

Biden is supporting Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte to become the next NATO secretary general. His support is likely to sway more allies to get on board with Rutte’s nomination, after months of jockeying between him and several other European leaders for the job.

Claire—he’s not a good choice. I see I’m not the only one thinking this:

Here’s what you can do:

Postscript: I checked my subscriber numbers yesterday. Man, you guys are a tough audience. I took one week off—the only week I’ve taken all year!—and look:

Only one person explained why. “Low volume,” he wrote tersely.

Fine. I’ll never take a day off again.

I wish I could say the same of Congress.

Here is Gabrielius Landsbergis, the Lithuanian foreign minister, speaking to the Security Council:

Today we, the Baltic States and Czechia, come to this Council to address the entire international community with a very simple message:

For all our sakes, wake up.

Madam President, I speak on behalf of Czechia, Estonia, Latvia, and my own country Lithuania. Today and tomorrow, many will yet again call on Russia to end its brutal war against Ukraine.

Many will say that Russia’s unprovoked aggression goes against everything these United Nations stand for. Some will question the credibility of this Council to defend the rules-based international order.

But however loud and eloquent we are, our protests and outrage will barely register in Moscow and rockets will continue to rain down on Ukrainian homes, hospitals, and schools.

Today we are facing choices that might well define this century, just as the choices in the 1930s defined the previous century. Do we continue to appease the aggressor who is patient and meticulous in his attempts to turn everything this organization holds dear into a mockery?

Do we once again allow him to escape responsibility for his aggression? Do we continue to feed him with lives and land, misled by our fear of escalation and naïve hopes that this time he will be fully satisfied?

Today we come to this Council to address the entire international community with a very simple message:

For all our sakes, wake up.

If we fail, the rules-based order will crumble. Ukraine’s sovereignty, Europe’s security, as well as the success of global efforts for human rights, accountability, food security and nuclear safety—will all be in the hands of those who benefit from disruption and chaos.

History reminds us of the terrible cost of the wrong choices. Hedging our bets earns us nothing but more war.

Russia is being emboldened by our cautious response. We see it emboldened in Ukraine, we see it emboldened in Russia itself—eliminating any opposition, aiming to destroy any hope for a different Russia, a normal, peaceful Russia.

Revisionist powers across the world are already exploiting our indecisiveness. If not contained, this Kremlin-driven arc of instability will continue to expand, igniting more conflicts that we are not prepared to counter.

Ukraine may seem far away, and the world’s attention is divided, but it is imperative to realize that Russia’s aggression against Ukraine ultimately impacts us all.

This war must be won, and won decisively.

This is not just Europe’s war, it is a challenge to the international order, which— while imperfect—aims to ensure that law, rather than military might, determines our borders and sovereignty.

The choices we make at this crossroads will define how we are remembered. We have the capacity to win, as Ukraine continues to make enormous sacrifices to stand against the ruthless aggressor. History reminds us of the cost of our past mistakes.

We must also find the political will to come up with an adequate legal response to Russia’s illegal war of territorial conquest. Russia’s leadership must bear full responsibility for the aggression launched by Vladimir Putin, otherwise his impunity will continue.

Madam President, I would like to remind all those here today that Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have been occupied, colonized, and exploited by this same aggressor more than once.

More. than. once.

And that is why we know from bitter experience that whatever words are spoken, whatever agreements are signed, this aggressor has no plans to stop … until he is stopped.

I compiled the biggest, longest Global Eyes in history yesterday, then realized none but a madman would read it through and its effect was only to dilute the news that really mattered viz., that Congress remains on vacation without having passed aid for Ukraine, even as Russia slaughters Ukrainians and marches inexorably toward NATO.

So let’s focus on what matters. Some key developments:

• Russia has used at least 20 North Korean ballistic missiles in attacks on Ukraine since late December.

• Russia threatened French planes in the Black Sea. French Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu said, “A month ago, a Russian air traffic control system threatened to shoot down French aircraft in the Black Sea, even though we were in the internationally free zone in which we patrol.”

• Spanish intelligence services are confident that the Kremlin orchestrated the murder, on Spanish soil, of a Russian helicopter pilot who defected to Ukraine last year.

• “As a result of betrayal of Ukraine by the Putin Republicans, only 33 percent of Taiwanese now trust the US as an ally.” (Robert Zubrin)

• Russia has taken another American hostage, arresting a ballerina from Los Angeles on charges of treason because she once sent fifty bucks to a Ukrainian charity.

• Ukrainian military commanders estimate that 47,000 Russians were killed or injured in the battle of Avdiivka, significantly more than Avdiivka’s pre-war population of 32,000. The estimated death toll in the battle, 17,000, would be higher than the Soviet army’s during the 10-year war in Afghanistan.

• Russian authorities called Alexei Navalny’s mother and gave her an ultimatum: Agree to a secret funeral for her son or they will bury Navalny in the prison colony.

• Land mines return to Europe as front-line states fear Russian invasion, a striking development in nations whose forests and fields still sometimes disgorge unexploded shells and ordnance from heavy fighting during World War I and World War II.

• Pressed by Donald Trump and extremist MAGA members, Congress may doom brave Ukrainians to destruction by a Russian dictator who despises the West—and is armed by Iran and North Korea. Nothing like this has been seen since British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain conceded part of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler in 1938 in hopes of dissuading him from occupying more European lands.

• Iran is sending hundreds of ballistic missiles to Russia.

So we’re all waiting for this big retaliation against Iran, right? The most telegraphed strikes in history? I keep checking the news, but the tease is endless. We’re going to hit Iran so hard they’ll never do it again, apparently, but not so hard that it really upsets them. It’s going to be an ultra-precision, super-calibrated strike. The Pentagon has been studying it for days. And telling us about it for days. And telling us when it will happen and where it will happen and under what atmospheric conditions. Everyone in our government is leaking to every journalist he can collar to put out the word that we really don’t want another war in the Middle East, so Iran shouldn’t be upset when we do it. Which will be soon! Just you wait! And besides, we’d like to make a deal with Iran—wouldn’t they like that?—so really, Iranians, don’t get mad. We’re only doing it because we’d really like you to stop killing us. You can tell we’re sincere about not wanting to hurt you because we’re not actually going to hurt you, we’re just going to hit a bunch of your proxies’ ammo dumps—and neither of us care if a few of your proxies die, right? So truly, don’t take it personally: You’ve got to understand, it’s an election year and we’ll all look like a bunch of wussies if we don’t do anything. So seriously, we’re going to hit you so hard. At a time and place of our choosing! Any minute now! Maybe even today! Are you ready? Here we go! We’re gonna hit you!

Is there anyone on the planet whose eyes aren’t rolling as they watch this? (I’ll be plum embarrassed if I hit “send” on this newsletter then check the news only to see that Tehran has been vaporized, but I’ll take that risk.)

American strategists have been making the same mistakes since Vietnam, no matter who’s in power. They all do the same thing. It never occurs to them to wonder how it could be that we have the strongest economy and the most powerful military the world yet our strategic position keeps getting more and more parlous.

The Iran problem is really hard. I don’t discount that. I certainly don’t know how to solve it. But I can confidently say what won’t work.

I challenge you to name a single time when a postwar American president has successfully deployed American force while violating the following rules:

Rule 1: Make a damned decision

When the US uses force in hesitant dribbles—announced with words like “proportionate,” “precision,” “targeted,” or “calibrated”—it only excites our enemies and encourages them to try harder. We publish reams of theoretical work about “escalation dominance,” but we act as if we’ve never heard of it.

It’s always the same cycle. It begins when our enemy does a bad thing. Shocked, we go away to study the problem. We emerge from our lucubrations to say we’ll respond at a time and place of our choosing. Then we hit a camel in the ass with a very expensive bomb.

Ten minutes later, they do it again.

We return to our lair to study the problem again. We emerge gravely. “This time,” says a jumbo-sized Pentagon official, “We’ll be whacking two camels at the time and place of our choosing.” He clears his throat. “This means we’re going to whack those camels at 07:20 on Tuesday morning at the crossroads just south of Abdul’s gas station at Khirbat Ra’s al Wa’r. So long as the weather’s clear.”

“Sir! Could you repeat that, Sir?”

“You bet, Bret. That’s Kilo-Hotel-India-Romeo-Bravo-Alfa-Tango—got it? 33.88056° north, 39.51889° east.”

“Sir! Is hitting two camels escalatory?”

“Only for the camels, Bret. Those camels should not be sleeping well tonight.”

Two days later, bang! We hit two camels. We issue another a stern warning.

Twenty minutes later, they do it again.

We’re baffled. What’s with them? Don’t they realize we’re the United States of America and we’ve got the most powerful military the human race has ever beheld? That we can keep doing this until every last camel’s ass in the Middle East is fried to a crisp and branded “Don’t mess with Texas?”

Bang! Two camels and a goat. That’ll learn ‘em!

The cycle continues until—wham!—something bad happens. Maybe by accident. Hard to know whether someone really meant to hurt you when they lobbed 200 drones and missiles at you. Maybe they were just bored. But now someone’s dead, and the public realizes: We’re at war out there!

Domestic outrage erupts, stoked by our completely irresponsible politicians. (Doesn’t matter which party. They’re all irresponsible.) They flap toward the camera like moths to the light, flying right into each other in their eagerness to issue the first peroration about the President’s perfidy, treason, and incompetence. Ted Cruz emerges from the Senate sauna in a towel: “I’ll be the one to say it, Bret: The President’s a pussy. A Papa-Uniform-Papa-Papa-Yankee—”

“He’s … beg pardon?”

“Whatever. Journalists like you who hate America are the problem.”

The Senators grill the Joint Chiefs. Testy! The journalists publish chin-strokers about the way our adversary plays chess, not tiddlywinks. Meanwhile, we’ve skedaddled: We don’t actually want to fight someone who might be serious about fighting back—for God’s sake, man, you could get hurt that way!—but we remain blithely confident that because we have an incredibly powerful military and massive oceans between us and our adversaries, no one would ever dare cross us—because crossing the mighty United States of America would be nuts. Witness our policy in Ukraine: “Let’s try sending a few rifles. What, that wasn’t enough? Let’s form a Pentagon Study Group to think deeply about whether we should send a tank.”

Why doesn’t this ever work? Hell, I don’t know. I don’t have a theory here. It should work, I agree. After all, if the US military hit my camel’s ass with a smart bomb, I’d stop screwing around with the US military. Frankly, all you’d have to do is say, “Knock it off or the USS Eisenhower fries your camel’s ass to crisp” and I’d stop it immediately. What kind of fool would tangle with the USS Eisenhower?

But thinking this way is what’s known in the trade as “mirror imaging.” The assumption that an adversary thinks the way you do is a classic mistake. We’ve repeatedly tested the theory that American enemies, like middle-aged American women, are readily deterred by a minor display of American military force. We have found it wanting.

So here’s Rule Number One for the use of coercive violence: Engage with overwhelming force, fast and hard, or just get the hell out of there before you get our troops killed and yet again teach our adversaries that you can get rid of Americans by patiently harassing them.

If you can think of a single counterexample to this rule in the whole of history of American military engagement, tell me, because I can’t.

Read more

Is North Korea planning a surprise nuclear attack?

Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker are informed professional observers of North Korea. Carlin has spent his life studying and negotiating with North Korea, first as an intelligence analyst at the CIA and State Department, later, for a decade, as part of the US diplomatic team. Hecker is a nuclear scientist and the former director of the Los Alamos lab who has personally assessed the Yongbyon nuclear facility.

They’ve published an alarming article in 38 North, a publication devoted to analyzing North Korea’s policy and technical capabilities. They’re not amateurs, and the publication isn’t a lightweight venue. They write:

The situation on the Korean Peninsula is more dangerous than it has been at any time since early June 1950. That may sound overly dramatic, but we believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war. We do not know when or how Kim plans to pull the trigger, but the danger is already far beyond the routine warnings in Washington, Seoul and Tokyo about Pyongyang’s “provocations.” In other words, we do not see the war preparation themes in North Korean media appearing since the beginning of last year as typical bluster from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. …

Raising the specter of Pyongyang’s decision to go to a military solution—in effect, to give warning of war—in the absence of “hard” evidence is fraught. Typically, it will be met with the by-now routine argument that Kim Jong Un would not dare take such a step because he “knows” Washington and Seoul would destroy his regime if he does so. If this is what policymakers are thinking, it is the result of a fundamental misreading of Kim’s view of history and a grievous failure of imagination that could be leading (on both Kim’s and Washington’s parts) to a disaster. …

The evidence of the past year opens the real possibility that the situation may have reached the point that we must seriously consider a worst case—that Pyongyang could be planning to move in ways that completely defy our calculations. Kim and his planners may target the weakest point—psychologically as well as materially—in what the three capitals hope is a watertight US-ROK-Japan military position. The literature on surprise attacks should make us wary of the comfortable assumptions that resonate in Washington’s echo chamber but might not have purchase in Pyongyang. This might seem like madness, but history suggests those who have convinced themselves that they have no good options left will take the view that even the most dangerous game is worth the candle.

North Korea has a large nuclear arsenal, by our estimate, of potentially 50 or 60 warheads deliverable on missiles that can reach all of South Korea, virtually all of Japan (including Okinawa) and Guam. If, as we suspect, Kim has convinced himself that after decades of trying, there is no way to engage the United States, his recent words and actions point toward the prospects of a military solution using that arsenal.

If that comes to pass, even an eventual US-ROK victory in the ensuing war will be empty. The wreckage, boundless and bare, will stretch as far as the eye can see.

This was published on January 11. It is very stark. Given the prominence of the authors and prestige of the venue, I would usually expect such a warning to be reported by other journalists. It wasn’t. I wouldn’t have known of it had I not seen a parenthetical reference to it yesterday in a newsletter focused on the UK-China relationship. As far as I can tell, no other newspaper or magazine has drawn attention to it.

The world’s gaze, again, has narrowed to a pinprick. Donald Trump’s ability to monopolize attention is like a fundamental force of physics. We had a merciful respite for a few years, but it’s over. From now until the election, the better part of the world’s focus will be on Donald Trump. Media resources are finite. When every journalist is writing about Donald Trump, there is no one left to wonder what’s happening in North Korea.

Clonus

The American media pays almost no attention to events overseas under the best of circumstances. The little time it spends on foreign news is now devoted to covering two major wars, one in the Middle East and one in Europe—and it is not even up to the task of covering both simultaneously.

Since October 7, Ukraine has dropped out of the media’s awareness. Strategically, the conflict in Ukraine is far more significant than the conflict in the Middle East. Its outcome will determine the nature of the world in the 21st century. But like the US military, the US media no longer has the resources—financial, institutional, or intellectual—to handle two wars at once. Many Americans may not even realize that a small group of legislators is holding Ukraine hostage. Even more, I would guess, have not thought about the implications of this for America’s deterrence in places like Pyongyang.

Like the media, the US government’s attention and its resources are finite. You can be certain the Biden Administration’s focus has narrowed. There are a fixed number of minutes in the day and a fixed number of Administration officials. Neither expand to meet the exigencies of the job. The 2024 election campaign has begun, and from now until next November, the Biden Administration will have far less time, every day, to devote to foreign affairs. They will have less time to meet with intelligence officials, less time to read, less time to speak to foreign leaders, less time to discuss their decisions among themselves, and less time to reflect.

They are already overloaded. They, too, appear unable to manage two foreign emergencies at once. As Kissinger remarked, leaders acquire their convictions and intellectual capital before reaching high office, and once in power, they have no time to acquire more. The Biden Administration contains no officials with a strong foreign policy record or a notable talent for managing foreign crises. They are doubtless under considerable stress. An advisor to Margaret Thatcher once said to me that like computers or the human nervous system, governments, when profoundly overloaded, are at risk of clonus. Looking for a good description of the phenomenon, I came across this paper by Rutger Goekoop et. al. I was struck by this paragraph:

Without exception, stressed organisms show rising levels of disorder (randomness, unpredictability) in internal message passing and overt behavior. We argue that such changes can be explained by a collapse of allostatic (high-level integrative) control, which normally synchronizes activity of the various components of a living system to produce order. The selective overload and cascading failure of highly connected (hub) nodes flattens hierarchical control, producing maladaptive behavior.

This, I’m sure, is what Hoskyns meant. It’s reasonable to worry that the Biden Administration is entering this condition.

What politicians (and the media) should be saying

The media’s inability to devote the resources to foreign news that it assuredly deserves reinforces American citizens in their suspicion that the rest of the world isn’t truly important to them. This in turn reduces the Administration’s motivation to focus on foreign affairs.

But the outcome of the war in Ukraine will be more significant to Americans’ lives in the coming century than any other event. Neither the media nor the Administration are making this case to Americans, and no one is behaving as if it’s true. But it is.

Nikki Haley has come closest to making it:

Dictators always do what they say they’re going to do. China said they were going to take Hong Kong. They did. Russia said they were going to invade Ukraine. We watched it. China says, Taiwan is next. We better believe them. Russia said once they take Ukraine, Poland and the Baltics are next. Those are NATO countries and that puts America at war. This is about preventing war. It’s always been about preventing war.

More power to her—that’s good, for a paragraph. But explaining this to the US electorate requires a lot more than a sound bite. It’s clear that this talk of war seems abstract, at best, to the American electorate. The prospect of a war like that is something out of a movie. Most Americans don’t grasp how real the prospect is, how much bloodletting would be involved, the high likelihood that such a war would involve a nuclear exchange, or the consequences of losing. None of it seems fully real to them. I can tell, because if it did, they’d be going mad, too—they’d all be frantically sewing little linen roses on to their slipcovers. No American, if he or she truly understood the consequences of such a war—and its likeliness, at this rate—would be able to think of anything else.

The overwhelming majority of Americans no longer have a personal connection to the generation that fought the Second World War and built the postwar world. A majority of adult Americans don’t know who the United States fought in the Second World War. Americans under the age of forty have no memory of the Cold War. One in four American high school graduates can’t place the name “Adolf Hitler.”

A politician who was serious about explaining the connection between Ukraine and Americans’ lives would be telling the electorate the story of the world in which they live, with special emphasis on the story of Munich and Czechoslovakia. He, or she, would be telling it repeatedly, because once isn’t enough. He, or she, would be speaking of little else.

He would also tell Americans that they have been the object of an unrelenting Russian information war, because they have been. He would be explaining what Russia is doing to shape the way Americans think, exactly how Russia does it, and exactly which lies they’re injecting into American discourse. He or she would point out—repeatedly—that Russians invent a new lie at sunrise and it is echoed by the most prominent cultural figures and politicians in America by sunset, and this may be witnessed, in real time, by doubters: No need to take the Deep State’s word for it. We see it over and over. This degree of control over Americans is an astonishing achievement—one that wasn’t even imaginable during the Cold War. He would say, emphatically and repeatedly, that “Russia” is not a “hoax.” Above all, he would be telling Americans that they may not be at war with Russia, but Russia is—unquestionably—at war with them.

The Ukrainian journalist Illia Ponomarenko wrote this yesterday. (I’ve made a few small adjustments to his grammar; he’s not a native English speaker.) If Nikki Haley had made this speech—and made it the cornerstone of her campaign—I’d have been impressed:

This chronic lack of resolve, leadership, and strategic vision will bury the Free World. Systemic fear of responsibility and historical decisions, trying to hold on to the comfort zone as hard as possible—this is why we are where we are now. And the Free World is at its weakest throughout the entire post-1991 era. [Claire—since 1945, in fact.] That’s the endless procrastination, security escapism, and over-compromising at any cost (at someone else’s expense).

It’s painful to realize that in February 2022, much of the Western decision-making elite was generally ready to come to terms with Russia’s complete takeover of Ukraine, which seemed hardly preventable. But a lot of things on the Russian side suddenly went very wrong. Ukraine unexpectedly (to some) prevailed at the Battle of Kyiv and effectively derailed the central axis of Russia’s blitzkrieg. The “special military operation” failed, and Russia’s full-scale, protracted war on Ukraine followed. And as you know, the entire history of the war is Ukraine and its friends beating their heads against the wall of the “Don’t-provoke-Putin” attitude. Again and again.

It started working only as late as springtime and summertime 2022, when the Battle of Donbas was at its horrific peak and when it became apparent that Russia was not stopping, and Ukraine was not going down just like that. First, its tank killers, then artillery, then armored vehicles, radars, ammo, rocket systems, radars, tanks, air and missile defense, now its F-16s. And with every single weapon and hardware class and type, there has generally been the very same pattern:

1. “Ukraine will never get X and Y, that’s a major escalation, that’s too complicated and too expensive for Ukraine to use.”

2. Months-long deliberations, denial, and discussions;

3. Ukraine eventually ends up getting X and Y, many months late, and demonstrates outstanding results on battlefield;

4. Russian “red lines” end up being empty threats and Russia’s military gets a painful punch in the gut;

5. *repeat with another weapon.*

Do I need to tell the story of how a handful of HIMARS effectively derailed Russia’s frontline logistics and its late summer 2022 campaign? Do I need to remind anyone how long Ukraine was denied the MIM-104 Patriot systems that are now demonstrating the most excellent results in their entire operational history? Again and again, with every weapon type and class that Ukraine asked for, there was the need to break through the obsession with “escalation management” (which was again and again proven totally inconsistent) and move forward.

With all due respect to President Biden (who has done a lot for Ukraine!), when POTUS spends more than a year saying no and then eventually gives the green light on European F-16s for Ukraine and authorizes the transfer of just 20 outdated ATACMS missiles (that nonetheless immediately wipe out key Russian airfields)—that doesn’t look like a way to resolve the problem. And this is in the middle of the worst European war since Adolf Hitler, in which Ukraine is defending itself against one of the world’s biggest military powers with one of the world’s biggest military budgets. Things have become pretty absurd by now.

As a result of Ukraine’s successful campaigns in 2022, we all were too quick to optimistically declare that “Putin has already lost,” that what needed to be done had been done, and that the worst European war since Adolf Hitler would somehow go away. In reality, endless deliberations and obsessive 5D chess to save Putin’s ass from falling entirely into Chinese hands effectively saved the Kremlin from a proper and resolute military defeat in Ukraine that could have disabled the Kremlin from new acts of aggression for decades to come.

Putin was given almost two years to recover from his disastrous early failure. The Kremlin rebooted its economy, adapted it to international sanctions, found new markets for its gas and oil, relaunched its military production industry, and made an alliance with Iran and North Korea to get drones, missiles, and ammo, and replenish its emptied Soviet stocks.

And you know what? They ended up being very fine with this war. The Russian people, being what they are, are silent or widely supportive. The poor and destitute are happy to kill Ukrainians and die for an equivalent of a US blue-collar salary. The rich and powerful are now getting a cut in the giant black hole of budget spending that any war is, and entire Russian industries are thriving thanks to a massive war. Nobody gives a shit about Russia’s insane loss of life, one not seen since World War II.

From the Western side, we have a historically unique situation. Not a single American or European soldier has to die now in the worst European war since Adolf Hitler. Western defense industries have prospects for gargantuan, long-term contracts to support Ukraine in war and its subsequent post-war defense development. Ukraine, having as little as it has, demonstrates outstanding battlefield results thanks to the exceptional heroism and dedication of its military. Ukraine asks for money and arms to deal with the greatest European security threat of the 21st century, all alone.

But no, the Free World keeps impeding itself, fearing getting out of its long-ingrained comfort zone. And yeah—while the West is dreaming of getting back to normal, Russia’s propaganda meta-world is waging a full-scale war on the entire West. Try and watch Russian TV for five minutes if you don’t trust me. The Kremlin has recovered from the initial shock of the early setback in Ukraine and has made this “civilization war with the West” a cornerstone of its ideology.

It’s now their foremost instrument of retaining power over Russia. They’re not landing on the Moon, or building a quantum computer, or making Russia home to the world’s top five universities. They’ve been investing billions, for decades, to propagate hatred, revanchism, Soviet Stalinism, domination, and territorial expansion based on “taking what’s ours.”

Poor, destitute, and revenge-seeking, Russia returns to the state of the besieged fortress of Eurasia that will always be at war with Oceania. They need triumphant victories over the heinous West that owes it everything, they need “new territories” (even in the form of senselessly desolate cities turned into mass graves, you know). They need war as such.

So of course, why would Moscow want a real “ceasefire” and “peace” in Ukraine with the present status quo—if they see clearly that they can intimidate and wear out the West into giving up on Ukraine completely?

As [defense scholar] Fabian Hoffmann very correctly points out, Russia’s main conclusion from this war is that the West is critically short of resolve. The Kremlin quite predictably sees weakness in this endless drama over the Ukraine aid. That’s a pleasant invitation for more aggression, because it works.

What they’ve seen and are seeing makes them believe NATO will very likely back off first for the sake of a short-lived illusion of peace of mind and safety. And yeah, they basically don’t even need to rebuild the military power decimated by Ukraine—seeing how weak the West may be, they know that nuclear threats and blackmailing may work. And yeah, again, there will be a lot of galaxy brans yelling, “Send not a single rifle round to Tallinn/Riga/Vilnius/Chisinau/Helsinki/Warsaw and roll back to 1997/1989/1945/1913 for peace!!”

This reminds me of a situation in which a sick person continuously ignores his or her increasingly dangerous symptoms. Until he or she just can’t anymore. Or until it’s too late.

I can’t blame a young American with no sense of history, no personal experience of the world beyond those two vast oceans, for assuming “Ukraine” must be just another one of those pointless wars that our politicians and our military-industrial complex keep trying to sell them. Their entire experience of American foreign policy is this: Every few years, we go to war—and a few working-class people get killed—but mostly, it’s so remote from their daily lives that they barely even realize we’re at war. Politicians always tell them that the war is critical to our national security, but apparently, it isn’t, because after spending an absolute fortune, we inevitably lose these wars, having made everything worse.

For, what—60 percent of Americans?—that’s the entirety of what they know about our foreign policy. If “Chamberlain” and “Munich” mean nothing to you, and if you know nothing about the difference between Russia and Afghanistan, and if you get your news from Facebook (if you’re old) or TikTok (if you’re young)—sure, Tucker Carlson’s opinions could sound as plausible as anyone’s.

Not many Americans, now, are old enough to remember the draft. Few Americans grasp, in their hearts, that if we fuck this up—as we are well on the way to doing—we will either submit to Russia (and with it Iran and China), or end up in the kind of war that requires a draft or a nuclear exchange. The idea that they or their kids could be drafted to die in a war like those of the 20th century—a meat-grinder of a war, as is now being fought in Ukraine—is so far from their experience that the suggestion would sound completely fantastic to them, which is why a real leader would repeat this until it sounded real. Because it is.

Most Americans have not been taught or told anything that would suggest to them that the world they inhabit—one so peaceful and so prosperous that their biggest problem is keeping out all the people who want to come there—might not just be the natural order of things. But it isn’t.

No politician has explained to Americans why, exactly, it is impossible to put up a wall and say, “To hell with the world.” Or why it’s possible, but what the cost would be. For nearly a decade, Donald Trump has been at the vanguard of a war on the world Americans built, and he has made this argument—we would be better off without it—so loudly and so often that, through the power of repetition, it has come to seem to many Americans true.

As a consequence, Americans who wig out when the price of eggs goes up and supply chain disruptions make it hard to find infant formula have come to believe that things will be better when China and Russia run the show. It won’t be.

Is North Korea behaving unusually?

Why exactly do Carlin and Hecker believe North Korea is preparing a surprise attack? They’re right to say they have no hard evidence. They urge us to trust that they have been watching the North very closely for a long time, and they’ve observed a radical change in North Korea’s orientation. They see the failed 2019 Hanoi summit as a key turning point, one that led North Korea to reorient itself toward China and Russia. These developments, they write, when understood in their historical context, suggest preparation for conflict.

They imply that the change would not be obvious to anyone who wasn’t deeply familiar with the past 33 years of North Korean policy. I can’t evaluate this claim, because I’m not such an observer. But surely their views are worth taking seriously if only because they are. They write:

Beginning with the crucial, strategic decision by Kim Il Sung in 1990, the North pursued a policy centered on the goal of normalizing relations with the United States as a buffer against China and Russia. After initial movement in that direction with the 1994 Agreed Framework and six years of implementation, the prospects for success diminished when—in Pyongyang’s eyes—successive US administrations pulled away from engagement and largely ignored North Korean initiatives. Even after the Agreed Framework fell apart in 2002, the North tried to pull the US back into serious talks by giving unprecedented access to the nuclear center at Yongbyon to one of us (Hecker). During the Barack Obama Administration, the North made several attempts that Washington not only failed to probe but, in one case, rejected out of hand. There is much debate in the United States whether the North was ever serious, and whether dialogue was simply a cover for developing nuclear weapons. … What is crucially important is to understand how central the goal of improving relations with the United States was to all three of the Kims who led the DPRK, and thus, how the North’s completely abandoning that goal has profoundly changed the strategic landscape in and around Korea.

If this has indeed been the regime’s central goal, it comes as a complete surprise to me. They don’t, unfortunately, substantiate this claim with any evidence I can assess.

The failure of the Hanoi summit, they believe, caused Kim to suffer a “traumatic loss of face.” Thus in the summer and autumn of 2021, they saw “obvious signs” of a strategic break. They believe Pyongyang concluded the United States was in global retreat, and that it determined to act accordingly.

I’m not sure what to make of this argument, either, because it seems to be two arguments: Are they primarily arguing that this reorientation devolves from a loss of face? Or to the perception that the United States is in global retreat? The two don’t seem fully compatible, and again, I wish they had elaborated their thesis and substantiated it.

They write that there are few signs that the effort to align with China was successful. But they’re right to note that Pyongyang’s ties to Moscow, especially its military ties, have deepened:

The North’s view that the global tides were running in its favor probably fed into decisions in Pyongyang about both the need and opportunity—and perhaps the timing—toward a military solution to the Korean question. At the start of 2023, the war preparations theme started appearing regularly in high-level North Korean pronouncements for domestic consumption. At one point, Kim Jong Un even resurrected language calling for “preparations for a revolutionary war for accomplishing … reunification.” Along with that, in March, authoritative articles in the party daily signaled a fundamentally and dangerously new approach to the Republic of Korea (ROK or South Korea), introducing formulations putting South Korea beyond the pale, outside what could be considered the true Korea, and thus, as a legitimate target for the North’s military might. At the plenum last month, Kim made that shift crystal clear, declaring that “north-south relations have been completely fixed into the relations between two states hostile to each other and the relations between two belligerent states, not the consanguineous or homogenous ones any more.”

I haven’t been closely following these pronouncements for many years, as they have, and can’t say whether they’re so strikingly out of the ordinary as to warrant alarm beyond the usual. It’s the next point, though, that’s the heart of their argument.

They believe that Washington and Seoul are deluding themselves about the effectiveness of their deterrence. It is only too easy to imagine they’re right. It’s precisely the mistake Israel made about Hamas. Israelis heard the rhetoric; they saw the preparations with their own eyes. But they concluded it was all talk—for domestic consumption—because obviously, if Hamas did what it was saying it would do, Israel would pulverize them. They were correct to say that they would pulverize them, but wrong to think this deterred them.

The United States has made it clear to the North that an attack would result in their complete destruction. In November, Secretary of Defense Austin visited South Korea for talks. He said:

We have deterred greater conflict on the Korean Peninsula for seven decades. If necessary, we remain ready to fight tonight. Our extended deterrence commitment to [South Korea] remains ironclad.

In April of 2023, on the 70th anniversary of the US-South Korea alliance, President Yoon Suk Yeo arrived in Washington for a state visit. Biden unveiled the Washington Declaration, meant to “reinforce extended deterrence.” This was the Administration’s response to the rising tempo and sophistication of North Korea’s nuclear threats. The two countries would develop an “ever-stronger mutual defense relationship,” it said. It affirmed “in the strongest words possible” the American commitment to the US-ROK Mutual Defense Treaty.

But don’t forget: The United States’ “strongest words possible,” including the promise to support Ukraine for “as long as it takes,” are all but meaningless, given the well-known realities of American politics. Trump would withdraw from that US-ROK Mutual Defense Treaty as quickly as he could, just as he would withdraw from NATO. It is not ideal for an American president to be conducting foreign policy when the whole world knows this. It used to be said of American foreign policy that politics stopped at the water’s edge. This is now so far from the case that I suspect younger people would puzzle over that phrase and wonder what it meant.

The declaration further announced that the US and South Korea would create a new consultation group for strategic cooperation and nuclear planning called the Nuclear Consultation Group, or NCG. It would develop South Korea’s ability to “support US nuclear operations” with conventional capabilities, and conduct exercises and training to this end. I’m not sure what this means: What is a “nuclear operation?” Is it like a “nuclear war?” But the following passage probably offers the answer:

In the bilateral US-South Korea context, the NCG is likely to be duplicative of existing alliance consultations on US nuclear capabilities and policies. Nevertheless, growing perceptions in South Korea that an NPG-like consultative body—ideally, one with “nuclear” in its very name—is needed in the current environment have led to the creation of the NCG.

The name of this group, then, is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Indeed, it’s a policy in its own right.

The Washington Declaration and the NPT

The point of the Washington Declaration is twofold. The first is deterrence. The second is keeping the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty alive.

Many in South Korea have noticed the obvious about American reliability and are calling, openly, for the South to acquire its own nuclear weapons. More than 70 percent of the South Korean public supports this idea, and this is unsurprising, given the threats it faces and the view—shared by 40 percent of those polled—that if it were attacked, the United States would not honor its treaty commitments.

In issuing this declaration, Biden was trying not only to send a message to the North, but prevent the world from embarking upon a proliferation free-for-all. If a significant American ally like South Korea were to repudiate the NPT, it wouldn’t be long before every country with the means followed suit. What electorate, seeing the fate of Ukraine, would fail to demand it?

Some, in America—even some of our readers—are prepared to say, “It would all be for the best.” After all, a South Korean nuclear weapon would be a far more credible deterrent than ours, would it not? If everyone has their own nukes, no one has to ask whether Americans would truly trade Berlin for Boston, and voilà—a safer world.

That argument is nuts. A world with fifty or sixty nuclear powers is a world that’s guaranteed to perish in a nuclear war. Just look around the planet, if you dare: The human race is incorrigibly irrational, irresponsible, and sanguinary. Yes, South Korea is a responsible country. But if any lesson is clear from the past decade, it’s this: things change. Stable countries become unstable. Lunatics can be elected even in countries once viewed as sober, stolid models of democratic governance. Governments may be toppled in coups. Once a country has nuclear weapons, they pass inevitably into the hands of any regime that comes to power. There is no guarantee at all that the leaders of that regime would even understand what a nuclear weapon can do. We’ve now had a presidential candidate and a president who could not identify “the Triad,” and a president who asked what the point of having them was if you couldn’t use them. It’s far from clear to me that even the United States is stable enough to possess nuclear weapons Are the dangers posed by the world’s current nuclear powers not enough?

The danger increases with every additional nuclear power. The danger of yet another country acquiring the Bomb increases with every country that does. Even if you believe, contrary to evidence and experience, that no one would ever be crazy enough to use a nuclear weapon, the increased risk of accidents alone should be enough to make you say that non-proliferation is indeed the most urgent of foreign policy imperatives.

If you remain unconvinced, here are two articles we’ve published on the topic. (Sleep well.)

Deterrence

The creation of a group with the word “nuclear” in its name is therefore meant to dissuade South Korea from taking matters into its own hands. But the GOP frontrunner and about half of the American public are working at cross purposes. This is both eroding our deterrence and making nuclear proliferation far more likely.

Carlin and Hecker fear that Washington and Seoul have been “hypnotized” by the comforting argument that North Korea has been deterred. We’ve repeatedly threatened to vaporize the regime, according to Washington’s logic (in their telling), and anyone sane would be deterred by that. But Carlin and Hecker fear that Kim doesn’t see things this way.

I am not a specialist in North Korea nor even an especially knowledgeable observer. I don’t know how to assess the claim that the changes we’ve seen in North Korean rhetoric and behavior are so significant as to be a herald of a surprise attack. I don’t know whether they’re making a sub rosa argument about our policy that I’ve failed to understand because I’m not privy to Washington intrigues. Their premise—that until recently, North Korea has been profoundly interested in recognition by Washington—would be a great surprise to me if it were true; I had always thought the entire regime so oriented around hostility of the United States as for this to be unthinkable. Nor do I understand why North Korea would feel desperate to go to war as a result of a rebuff.

In a rebuttal to the piece published on January 17, Thomas Schäfer, another scholar of considerable repute, makes both of those points, which encourages me to think mine aren’t trivial questions. He also points out that the regime’s aggressive official language antedates the Hanoi summit; for example, the Chief of the General Staff said this in 2016:

If the US imperialists and the south Korean puppet warmongers persistently stage nuclear provocation … the powerful revolutionary Paektusan army will launch a preemptive strike of severest punishment in the sky, land, seas and underwater without any restriction and without any warning and prior notice …until the historic cause of national reunification is accomplished and the root cause of aggression and evil is totally eliminated. 

He agrees, however, that there has been an increase in this kind of language. He proposes this explanation for it:

This recent propaganda increase has nothing to do with a policy shift after Hanoi, but the timing is related to the coming US presidential elections. In the run-up to Hanoi, the North Koreans had hoped that President Trump—whom they considered the weakest link—would give in to their requests. Although they did their best to minimize the State Department’s influence on Trump (see Stephen Biegun’s interview with Arms Control in 2021),1 at that time, Trump did not agree to their demands. I do not think Pyongyang believes it can influence the outcome of the US presidential elections. But it surely believes that a Republican victory (preferably with Trump, but even with some of the other Republican contenders) would give North Korea a second chance to further its objectives. I thus believe that Pyongyang (following a well-established negotiating pattern employed, e.g. in the run-up to the Olympic Winter Games of 2018) will continue to increase tensions until after the US elections, but that at the height of tensions, it will finally be willing to re-engage with a Republican Administration in the hope to get sanctions relief, some sort of acceptance of their nuclear program, and—as main objective—a reduction or even complete withdrawal of US troops from the Korean Peninsula. 

But I’m not sure I understand what he’s saying, either. If he doesn’t think North Korea is using these threats in the hopes of influencing the US election, to what end is it using these threats? Why is it related to the election at all? A better editor, perhaps, could have coaxed a more cogent argument out of them all, and I regret that no one did, because obviously, this is important.

This I know: Biden is facing the most dangerous world any American president has ever faced while confronting the most dangerous opponent any president has ever had. These are exactly the circumstances that cause leaders to ignore or dismiss warning signs they should heed. If anyone in the Administration even reads this argument that North Korea might be preparing a surprise attack, their temptation to dismiss it would be extremely high. Because the media has no attention to spare for such a warning, they’re hardly facing a drumbeat of public pressure to focus their attention on North Korea.

I trust that Carlin and Hecker watch this regime closely and have seen something that makes them alarmed. People who watch a regime closely are much more likely to understand it than people who don’t.

And I’m certain our deterrence has been profoundly undermined. This makes things like “surprise nuclear attacks” a lot more likely.

Destroying our deterrence has been a bipartisan achievement. It’s easy to say it is all the GOP’s fault, for the obvious reason that the GOP is now an isolationist Trump cult that’s working as hard as it can to destroy our deterrence. Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to withdraw from our alliances globally and was restrained from doing so, in power, only by the frantic efforts of his cabinet.

If reelected, he will succeed. Destroying our alliances so is not one of his passing whims. (Just ask the Kurds who defeated ISIS on our behalf.) It’s the essence of his political program, and it has been since 1987, when he returned from Russia and spent 100,000 dollars to take out full-page ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Boston Globe denouncing our allies for “taking advantage of us.”

Every American adversary is well aware that Trump has educated his base to respond to the invocation of American alliances and commitments with the words, “Screw them.” This has an effect even on Americans who don’t support Trump. Five minutes on Twitter is enough to establish that as a result, a very significant proportion of the American public holds our allies in contempt and believes we should indeed screw them. They would respond to any suggestion that Americans sacrifice for them with blood as risible. The whole world knows this.

Our Congress is so divided, and so much of it so submissive to Trump, that it hasn’t yet been persuaded to pass aid for Ukraine even when no American lives are at risk, when it’s overwhelmingly in our national security interest to do so, when the moral imperative is crystal clear, and when a large majority of Americans wish them to. Even if they manage to make a deal, no one will forget this delay. It has confirmed Putin in his belief that Russia is poised to reverse the outcome of the Cold War—they win, we lose—and encouraged him to continue squandering a thousand human lives a day as he waits.

But Democrats are far—very far—from blameless. Under Obama, the United States ignored Russian aggression so studiously that by the end of his term in office, Russia blatantly put its thumb on the scale of an American election, confident it would face no repercussions. In this, it was correct. We’ve still taken no effective action—none—to counteract Russia’s unrelenting information war against our citizens. Our failure to respond to Russia’s war on Syrian civilians encouraged Putin to seize Crimea. Our failure to respond to respond to the seizure of Crimea encouraged Putin to keep going. His obsequious courting of Iran further eroded our deterrence, demonstrating as it did that it was now impossible for an American politician credibly to wield a threat of force. That we conducted not so much as a symbolic airstrike in retaliation for Assad’s use of chemical weapons cemented the portrait of a United States in retreat.

The Biden Administration talks a better game. But it has been disastrously incompetent. Biden handed millions of Afghan women and girls into slavery, allowed our Afghan allies to be slaughtered like sheep, and insulted them while abandoning them. Our unwillingness to allow even men who fought for us and by us to flee to the United States has hardly encouraged the world to think Americans too honorable to abandon an ally.

Biden has so grievously dithered and hesitated in his support of Ukraine that Russia is now nearly impossible to dislodge, and if it is even to be dislodged, it will require a far greater sacrifice in blood. It is the GOP in Congress that is determined to throw Ukraine to the wolves, but Biden has been passively acquiescent. This situation is an emergency. He should be speaking about it every day to the American public, as should every member of the Administration. And Russia’s frozen assets should be handed to Ukraine immediately—but that is the kind of decisive act Biden cannot seem to manage.

Since the beginning of the war, the Administration has been unable to grasp the urgency of the demands upon it or to react to them in real time. Had Biden responded to Russia’s invasion with alacrity, Russia could by now have been expelled. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men—Russian men, too—have perished in agony in the trenches because Biden dawdled. And now, the GOP is prepared to hand Ukraine to Putin for no reason at all, in direct contravention of our core security interests, because they think it would please Donald Trump. (He is said still to be furious that Zelensky failed to open a phony investigation into Biden and Burisma.)

If Ukraine wins, the Russian threat could recede for decades. If it doesn’t, the longer it resists, the more time we have to rearm. Ukraine is buying us time with their blood, and we’re spitting on them. Public figures in the United States mock Ukrainians for pleading for money when they are dying for us. It makes me incoherent with fury.

Ukraine correspondent Oz Katerji put it like this:

… people dismissing the idea that Russia would attack a NATO state are woefully clueless. If Russia wins in Ukraine, and gets in Trump a President willing to abandon NATO, Putin will strike NATO. This isn’t a low-probability event, it’s Russia’s explicit goal in Europe.

Every question about the future of European security and the prospect of a world war needs to be understood in this context. This is Russia’s plan, to destroy the West’s collective defense policy and then to conquer territory to rebuild the Russian empire.

The failure of those who do not recognize the threat posed by Russian fascism can not afford to lead to European complacency on this issue. Europe must prepare for war, the consequences of not doing so are too dire to contemplate.

We in the West do not see ourselves as being at war with Russia, but Russia absolutely sees itself as being at war with the West. If you do not understand this you have no business discussing foreign policy whatsoever.

It doesn’t matter how many losses Russia sustains in Ukraine if they are still able to declare victory. In that scenario, Moscow will believe they have defeated the entire NATO alliance on the battlefield. From that point onwards, Russia will believe themselves to be unstoppable.

It’s 2024 and people are still listening to the same stooges for Russian fascism who predicted Putin would never strike Kyiv, now reassuring them that Russia has already suffered a strategic defeat and that it’s time to concede land for appeasement, ending the hostilities.

That’s a recipe for a third World War. It’s as simple as that. These people want to sleepwalk Europe into the abyss, and without doubt they will argue that we should abandon the Baltic States next.

The line must be drawn here. This far, no further. Ukraine is not just fighting for her own survival, she is fighting for the future freedom of all of our children. We must stand with Ukraine till victory, no matter the cost. For without victory, there can be no survival.

The same people that told you Ukraine is not worth dying for will be the same people that tell you Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia aren’t worth dying for either.

If we do not stand with our allies now, there will be nobody left to stand with us tomorrow.

He is right. This is the simple truth: Stop Russia in Ukraine, or there will be a World War. Your kids will be drafted and many will never come home. We can still stop them. But we need to wake up.

The time is dire. Every nightmare imaginable will devolve from allowing the world to perceive that we haven’t the attention span or the guts or the wits even to stand by Ukraine. A surprise North Korean nuclear attack? On the table. To be followed by Iran’s announcement that it’s a nuclear power. (Goodbye to Israel.) To be followed—or preceded—by the invasion of Taiwan.

At some point, we will either fight, and there is no guarantee we will win, or cut a deal: We’ll leave the world alone if you leave us alone. If we did that, we’d be okay, at first—no one would bother to invade us. We’d be diminished and impoverished, but we wouldn’t be at war. But either you believe in all that stuff in our founding documents or you don’t. If you genuinely believe in it, you don’t sit idl while the entire world sinks into an endless night of totalitarianism, rape, genocide, and slavery. It takes a certain amount of nobility and idealism to behave as if we believe our rights are God-given. Once we concede that we don’t believe that at all, there’s no reason at all to expect us to behave as if we do—not even with each other.

If you’ve read this and you’re thinking, “But what can we do?”—here’s what to do. The aid to Ukraine is the key. If you’re American, here’s how to write to your representative. Write. Insist that ten of your friends write. Insist that they ask ten friends to write. Make sure to copy Mike Johnson. Whether your representative is a Democrat or a Republican, make sure they understand there is no higher priority. If your representative is a Democrat, tell him, or her, that if the GOP says they want land mines and crocodiles on every inch of the border, so be it. Tell Republicans, politely, that there are things in this world they should fear more than Trump’s disapproval.

If you’re European, use the analogous process in your country. Likewise, if you’re a citizen of any democracy, anywhere. We live in democracies so that we can determine our own fates. Let’s determine them.

The biggest threat to our national security right now is the United States’ Congress. Write to every single one of those feckless kakistocrats. If, buckling to Trump’s whims, Congress refuses to pass the funding bill, Ukraine will collapse. Everything we tell ourselves and the world about our virtue as a nation will be exposed as utter horseshit. Millions of desperate refugees will stream out of Ukraine. Russia will complete an appalling genocide. We will be next.

We cannot let it happen.

1. Shlomo of Turtle Island

2. Does Hamas represent the Palestinian people?

3. Thirst

4. South Africa is in the house

Read more

About two weeks ago, The New York Times published a disgraceful article on its front page, above the fold:

The online version bore a different headline, probably because someone realized that the original one was an embarrassment. This is the revised version:

“A historic pace?” We killed 30,000 civilians in Dresden in a single night. The headline is calculated to mislead. They’re speaking of deaths in the past quarter-century, not the past century as readers would initially think, particularly given the word “historic,” which is not, generally, a word used of the recent past. But even without this, the headline is completely misleading, because by “few” they mean “many.”

The damage is done: I have since seen the claim that Israeli is killing Gazans at a pace that puts Russia to shame everywhere, and particularly on social media, and particularly in response to any discussion of the aid package for Israel and Ukraine. The New York Times has succeeded in conveying to the world that no one has ever killed more civilians, faster, than Israel. The article is clearly meant to suggest that in Israel, we’re dealing with a uniquely criminal regime. It simultaneously managed to suggest that the Ukrainians are really just whining.

It’s hard to say which aspect of this article is most appalling. The stupidity? The mendacity? The incompetence? The vile animus toward Israel? The indifference to Ukraine? How is it that Lauren Leatherby and the editors of The New York Times have no idea of the magnitude and enormity of Russia’s war on civilians? The war in Ukraine is, after all, the most significant news story of the past decade—and it is a story that the Times has covered every single day since February 22.

Why would the Times publish a baffling piece of Kremlin propaganda precisely as aid for Kyiv hangs in the balance in the US Congress? What could they be trying to say, save that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine isn’t really all that bad, while Israel is uniquely monstrous? From this, the careless reader—which is most of them—would conclude that Gentle Mother Russia is carefully avoiding harm to women and children, as opposed to raping them, kidnapping them by the tens of thousands, and systematically targeting them in a relentless campaign of terror bombings.

This is Mariupol, where 75,000 civilians are estimated dead:

(The Times doesn’t even mention Russia’s war on Syrian and Chechen civilians—both of which took place in this century.)

I recently spoke, on our podcast, about the precipitous decline of academic and journalistic standards. If Claudine Gay is Exhibit A, this article is Exhibit B. I looked up Lauren Leatherby. She is, apparently, a “data journalist” with a masters degree in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School. Given recent congressional testimony before Congress from the president of Harvard, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that one of its graduates has emerged from her education in a peculiar moral condition.

But this isn’t the main point. The main point is this: What is wrong with Harvard that they would give Lauren Leatherby a master’s degree in public policy without teaching her anything? How did she get a job as a “data journalist” without grasping that if you’re going to compare two sets of civilian casualties to another, you have to use something approximating same methodology to count them?

According to her LinkedIn profile, Lauren Leatherby studied “economics, statistics, computer science, finance, foreign policy, cybersecurity, human rights, and energy,” receiving a 4.0 GPA. Her list of honors is long: Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude, Chancellor’s Scholar, the Governor’s Distinguished Scholar, Order of Omega Model Initiate (whatever that is), Fulbright Scholar, Dean’s List—the list goes on and on. She is the very pride and flower of our educational system. Yet no one ever taught her, in her entire academic career—or her career as a “data journalist”—how to use her noggin when handling data? To ask herself: “Am I actually comparing like to like?”

The list of obvious errors is incredibly long for a single article. First, she accepts Hamas’s casualty count at face value, even though her own newspaper was humiliated, just days before, when it excitedly published Hamas’s claim that Israel had bombed the Al Ahli hospital, killing 500. The Times was forced to scrub that headline hours later when it became clear that actually, Palestine Islamic Jihad had blown up a a parking lot. By that point, the Times had helped to touched off frenzied global protests and attacks on US troops. Hamas’s casualty count quickly dropped from 500 (a figure they somehow managed to produce within seconds) to “not very many and we don’t want to talk about it.” She has to know that, right? Usually, after an embarrassment like that, a newspaper learns to treat a source with skepticism. But no, Hamas’s claims are once again on the front page.

She writes: “International officials and experts familiar with the way figures are compiled by health officials in Gaza say the overall numbers are generally reliable.” Do they, now? Are they graduates of the Kennedy school too? If they say this, they’re idiots, too. This is Hamas we’re talking about—the paragons of probity who are still insisting that they killed no civilians on October 7. Their PR organs are flooding the Internet with photos of dead Syrian children, claiming they depict recent scenes in Gaza. Who takes Hamas’s word at face value about anything?

What about this graphic? Why didn’t this ring warning bells on the editorial desk?

The message couldn’t be clearer: Israel is bombing Gaza indiscriminately, so much so that women and children are dying in roughly the proportions they would if you just chose Gazans at random through a lottery and shot them. Buried deep in the article (in paragraph twelve), is the key point, however: “[O]fficials in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip do not separate the deaths of civilians and combatants.”

So what does this graph mean, then? Nothing. Note that it doesn’t count “male teenagers” separately. Half the population of Gaza is under the age of eighteen. It’s common sense to think no small number of Hamas combatants are male teenagers (unless we reckon the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades are turning away eager applicants because they’re sticklers about Gaza’s child labor laws, scruples that were not in evidence when they put small children to work building their tunnels). We don’t know, from this visual aid, whether the number of fighting-age males it represents is 9, 90, or 9,000—and depending on the answer, our interpretation of it would be entirely different.

Other things we don’t know: How many of these deaths are owed to Hamas and PIJ misfires? Israeli radar trackers indicate that a full 10 percent of the rockets they try to launch land on Gaza itself. The IDF says that since October 7, 9,500 rockets have been fired at Israel, mostly from Gaza. If true, that means some 950 have landed in Gaza. We don’t know what proportion of the death toll is owed to this kind of own-goal, but when you fire a rocket at a dense urban area which, unlike Israel, has no air defense systems and no bomb shelters for civilian use, you can be certain the toll will be high. We also don’t know what percentage of this count represents the civilians Hamas murdered as they tried to evacuate to the south. This is all assuming we can take the 14,000 figure at face value, which we can’t.

Even if it were true that a greater proportion of women and children have died in this conflict than in other recent conflicts, the best explanation for this would not be that Israel is deliberately targeting women and children, as this story all but says directly. Gaza has an exceptionally young population. If you drop two equal-sized bombs, one in Gaza and one on a comparable part of Ukraine, a far larger proportion of the victims in Gaza will be children. Of course, far more will die in Gaza overall, because Ukraine not only permits but encourages its citizens to protect themselves underground, whereas Hamas refuses to share its bomb shelters with the people for whom it claims to be fighting.

But Ms. Leatherby is determined to ride or die with Hamas. She proceeds to compare Hamas’s estimate of Gazan civilian casualties with the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights’ tally of civilian casualties in Ukraine. She shouldn’t have been able to graduate from junior high school without knowing why this is ludicrous. You can’t compare a tally advanced by a combatant to one made by an independent body. And how could she not know that neither the UN nor any other independent organization has had access to the Russian-occupied territories for two years? Not only won’t Russia permit the UNHCR into cities like Mariupol, they’ve already bulldozed the buildings they’ve bombed and the civilian bodies they contained. We simply have no idea how many civilians have perished in cities such as Volnovakha and Severodonetsk. But we can be sure the toll is appalling, because we can see the mass graves from space:

The UN itself has said clearly that the real number of civilian deaths in Ukraine is “considerably higher” than its official total. The AP estimates 75,000 civilians were slaughtered in Mariupol alone—a figure seven times higher than the UN’s total for all of Ukraine.³ But she doesn’t need to take AP’s word for it: Here is her own newspaper, on August 22, 2022!

On Monday, the United Nations reported that it had confirmed the deaths of 5,587 civilians, including 149 girls, 175 boys and 38 children whose sex is unknown. At least 7,890 civilians were confirmed to be injured, it said. But those are only the confirmed civilian casualties. The true numbers, UN officials concede, are without doubt far higher. [My emphasis.] The actual toll is probably tens of thousands of civilians. That is the estimate Ukrainian officials have arrived at after months of recovering bodies.

The Mariupol casualty estimates have been significantly revised upward since then. The Times has reported that, too.

I shouldn’t have to explain this, but for this comparison to be meaningful, you must either compare figures that have been independently verified by the UNHCR—in which case the death toll in Gaza is “zero,” because they haven’t verified a single one of those deaths—or figures offered by combatants. A more relevant comparison would be to figures from the Ukrainian war crimes prosecutor—who, I note, has not recently embarrassed the Times by peddling ludicrous and mendacious casualty figures. The prosecutor estimates that more than 100,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed. Other credible analysts think the number could be as high as 200,000.

How do you imagine Ukrainians feel when the United States’ most prestigious newspaper reports that really, invasion and occupation by Russia is quite humane? When they realize that no one on the entire editorial desk of The New York Times—neither reporters nor editors nor fact-checkers nor headline-writers—has the first clue about the horror Ukrainians have suffered, to the extent they’re unable even to put the number of Ukrainian civilians who have perished in the right order magnitude? When they see that the American newspaper of record is so indifferent to their slaughter, and so incurious, that they didn’t even look this up?

The flourish: They published this article on Holodomor Memorial Day.

Update: CAMERA—the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis—was appalled by that story, too, and more meticulous than I was in their criticism: They went to the trouble of tracking down the sources of the quotes in the article. What do you know: Their comments were misquoted or taken out of context. They also noted even more outright falsehoods. Not “errors of interpretation”—falsehoods. The most vexing thing is this:

When presented with the details discussed below, the New York Times stood by its egregious misrepresentation of Iraq casualty statistics, which misleads readers into believing  the civilian death rate in Gaza is six times higher than the rate in Iraq, despite them being, even according the the Gaza rate accepted by the paper, virtually identical.

That’s shocking. I truly did think that even if the Times had a distinct agenda, which obviously it does, it had professional editing and fact-checking protocols in place. Employees of the Times, I thought, would at least have enough of that enormous self-regard to care about not looking stupid in front of their peers. Shouldn’t it be too embarrassing to publish an article that makes it clear you don’t read your own paper and in fact pay no attention at all to the news?

I guess not.

Perhaps the original article can be chalked up to (stunning) incompetence. But they’ve refused to issue a correction. They know the article is riddled with errors. This represents complete collapse of professional standards. What’s more, the Times is now linking to that article in new reporting, every day, even though they know, for sure, that its claims are more than merely tendentious.

I still think there are some superb journalists at the Times. They have the money to do things other newspapers can’t, and often, their reporting is outstanding—although until now, I assumed it wasn’t fictitious, so maybe I have to revise my views about that.

“Those are headphones, Pop. You don’t have to wear those.”

“I think not,” he replied, and returned to his contemplation of monoids. He had studied the Internet. He did not care for these new-fangled podcasts.

I tried to convince him that podcast were not necessarily skanky, but he was committed to his occultation, like the Twelfth Imam.

Then—beats me why!—this morning, he changed his mind.

And here is the result. We talked about the world, which is in chaos. We spoke of the Chinese Revolution, the collapse of our institutions, the 200-year decline in religious faith, the end of science as the last remaining authoritative intellectual structure, the cult of individualism, the abject state of academia and journalism, and how the universities became such rotten places, and who killed JFK. Then we talked about Norman Cantor, the religious impulse, the Baby Boom, mass education, the Rise of the Administrators, feminism, the DEI apparatchiks, Marx, Freud, and JK Galbraith and The Affluent Society, the complicated sexual dynamic of the 1960s, Norman O. Brown, polymorphous perversity, woke culture, artificial intelligence, and why the hottest AI researchers come from Russia. We moved on to Judith Butler, transgenderism, Florida, Disney, Dylan Mulveney, Bud Light, and Weimar Germany, and after that we discussed irony, rhetoric, elocution, elitism, Parisian accents, the BBC, Dr. Johnson, what people really mean when they say, “my truth,” epistemological relativism and Tarski, and why Richard Rorty gave up philosophy. We talked about Wittgenstein, and the disappearance of the great argonauts of the Western tradition—why doesn’t our generation have figures like Weber, Freud, TS Eliot, Einstein, Fermi, Heisenberg, Schrödinger?—and we asked why it’s been so long since we’ve had an achievement like the Standard Model in physics. We discussed ChatGPT, the triumph of data over theory, meteorology, Chomsky, and the posthumous triumph of BF Skinner, then we considered the massive power of the tech corporations, and what my grandfather might have said about ChatGPT. We talked about Eliezer Yudkovsky, Connor Leahy, Geoffrey Hinton, Open AI, and whether there’s even such a thing as theoretical physics, then we returned to generative grammar, the Wright Brothers, Joseph Conrad, and birds—debating who flies better, birds or people?—and we wondered if we’re on the verge of a general theory of intelligence. Finally, we talked about the advice he’d give to a smart kid who wanted to know what to study these days, and we wrapped things up by talking about gene editing, CRISPR, eugenics, euthanasia, and how slippery that slope really is.

He enjoyed it, I think! He even wondered what we’d discuss in our next podcast. (After you’ve finished listening, come back and vote.)

If you want him to do this again, subscribe. Subscribe in massive numbers. Then I can tell him that if he just keeps coming on my podcast, we can buy ourselves a château.

Nothing low-rent about a château now, is there?

I’ve spent the better part of the week working on an essay about Javier Milei, Geert Wilders, and the distinction between “right-wing” and “far-right.” It’s still not quite done. But I get intolerably anxious when I haven’t sent out a newsletter in several days. I fear that you’ll all cancel your subscriptions. So you’re going to get a not-quite-right newsletter today. Or rather, you’re going to get a newsletter that requires some reader participation: You’re going to help me to finish it.

Here’s what I’ve been trying to do. I’ve noticed journalists tend to use the terms below promiscuously and often interchangeably, almost never defining them:

• conservative

• libertarian

• right-wing

• far-right (or radical right)

• populist

• nationalist

• authoritarian

• fascist

• crazy

This is a mistake. These are not synonyms. Not only do they denote very different things, it’s important for the wider public to understand the different things that they denote, along with the specific historic reasons for the stigma attached to the adjectives “far-right,” “authoritarian,” “fascist,” and to a lesser extent, “nationalist.” When journalists habitually conflate these terms, they’re not enlightening their readers, they’re making them more stupid. This is particularly reckless if the electorate is already dangerously ill-informed.

I wondered the other day if democracies can survive when the electorate falls below a certain level of competence:

Most of our citizens aren’t sufficiently well-informed to vote. They don’t know enough about anything to choose good leaders who will make good decisions on their behalf. They don’t understand how their government works. They don’t understand how the economy works. They don’t understand how the world works.

Whether democracies can survive an electorate’s ignorance is an open question. I’ve raised it, but I can’t answer it. I’m certain, though, that it is an open question, meaning that it’s reasonable to worry that democracies can’t survive widespread voter incompetence, and we should be worried that we’ve fallen below the minimal threshold. So I find it especially irresponsible for journalists to make their readers more stupid. When they describe every right-of-center politician as “far-right,” readers will conclude that “far-right” is a meaningless epithet or that being a far-right politician isn’t such a bad thing. It isn’t and it is.

Over time, sloppy word usage becomes routine. For example, much as it aggravates me, “impact” is now a verb.1 The phrase “begs the question” no longer denotes the logical fallacy of assuming a point yet to be proved; it has come to mean, “suggests a question.” Journalists have given up trying to enforce the distinction.2 There is no use telling people they’re using the phrase incorrectly. As any linguist will tell you, if the speaker and his audience both feel it’s correct, it is.

But not every change in usage is an improvement. Just as language may evolve, it may also devolve, and in this case, it has devolved. Everyone is worse off for it, because we now lack a widely-understood phrase that signifies a common logical fallacy. Over time, I fear, the public will lose any sense remaining to them that begging the question is a fallacy, or even that logical fallacies are undesirable.

This is similar to what happens when we collapse the distinction between right and far-right.

Right versus far-right

It’s reasonably easy to distinguish between the right and the far-right, and it’s reasonably obvious why we should welcome right-wing politicians, who play an essential role in any healthy multiparty democracy, while shunning the far-right, whose ideas should always and everywhere be kept outside the Overton Window—with a crowbar if necessary.

This is the difference: A normal right-wing politician respects the rules and norms of liberal democracy, and prioritizes these rules over policy outcomes, whereas a far-right politician does not. (This distinction also applies to the left and far-left.) Thus not only is it entirely possible to be a right-wing politician and a liberal democrat, that’s exactly what most of the West’s elected politicians have been since the emergence of multiparty democracy.

As for the definition of liberal democracy, recall the New Caesarism:

“Democracy” is a system of governance in which power is vested in the people and exercised by them through a system of representation involving elections. It does not entail liberal democracy. Not only is liberalism distinct from democracy, it’s often in tension with it. …

A democracy may only be termed a liberal democracy if the following rights are protected:

• Right to life and security of person.

• Freedom from slavery

• Freedom of movement

• Freedom of speech

• Freedom of assembly

• Freedom of religion.

• Freedom to own, buy, and sell property.

Thus the following features distinguish liberal democracies from other regime types:

• The purpose of the state is to secure fundamental rights for every citizen. (Usually, a constitution emphasizes the protection of individual rights and freedoms.)

• These individual rights take precedence over the well-being of the collective.

• Since the state has no purpose beyond securing these rights; its power is otherwise explicitly constrained.

• The state is intentionally designed to limit, not enhance, its power, chiefly by separating authorities so that no branch of the government enjoys a monopoly on power.

• There is equality among citizens before the law and due process for all under the rule of law.

• Laws are interpreted by an impartial and independent judiciary.

• State and religious authority are distinct, and there is widespread religious tolerance.

• There is equality of opportunity among citizens, including women and minorities.

• The democratically-elected majority respects the political opposition.

• There is a broad and flourishing civil society.

• There is a diverse and independent media.

• There are free, fair, and competitive elections between at least two viable and distinct political parties. (Lacking these, a state may be liberal, but it is not a democracy.)

Only if all of these conditions are generally met may we call a society a liberal democracy.

Voters who don’t understand these ideas have scant hope of exercising their franchise responsibly. But to understand a concept, you need a word for it. It doesn’t matter which words we choose so long as they’re widely understood by speakers and listeners alike, they’re used stably over time, and the words we choose don’t compass so broad a range of ideas that they convey no useful information at all. When journalists use the phrase “far-right” to describe both Hitler and Margaret Thatcher, the phrase is no longer useful. The practical consequence of eroding the distinction will be the cultivation of a generation of voters who will shrug when they hear that a politician holds far-right views. A socially important stigma will be eradicated, if it hasn’t been already.

The stigma served a useful purpose. Ideally, voters would be aware of the historic reasons for the odium attached to “far right,” “authoritarian,” and “fascist” politicians. But failing that, they should know that “far-right” politicians are undesirable—“far-right” being a shorthand for “a set of beliefs and a political style associated with Hitler and Mussolini.” Even if they don’t really know much about Hitler and Mussolini, they need to understand the shorthand and sense that there is something dangerous about the far right.

Journalists can (and should) use the stigma attached to the term “far-right” to convey to their readers that something about a candidate or a platform is alarming in a particular way. Because voters don’t have as much time as journalists do to study every candidate’s style and platform, they rely upon journalists to do the initial vetting for them and convey to them important impressions about a politician. Journalists can make themselves useful by accurately labelling far-right candidates “far-right,” with all the stigma that implies. But they can’t do this unless they reserve the term for figures and movements who are meaningfully described as “far right.” If everyone is on the far-right, no one is—either that, or it’s 1922 and you’re marching on Rome.

Conservatives and libertarians

Permit me to suggest a scheme for disambiguating these words, partly based on the way they’re used in the wild and partly based on the way I think they should be used if we’re to get maximum value out of them.

“Conservative” and “radical” are antonyms. Both words describe a temperament, not a political program. So while the UK has a “Conservative Party,” and this party has a specific platform, it is possible for a Conservative politician to lack a conservative temperament. (Liz Truss, with her ill-fated budget, is an example.)

What’s more, these words only make sense if used as comparators. If you live in a society with a long-established free market, it is conservative to oppose nationalizing the commanding heights of industry. If the commanding heights of your industry are already nationalized, it is radical to propose denationalizing them overnight. The same policy goal may be conservative or radical depending on the starting point. For a highly traditional society, instituting no-fault divorce would be radical. For a society long accustomed to no-fault divorce, eradicating it would be radical. “Radical” solutions may be good or bad, depending on the problem. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation has been correctly described as one of the most radical liberations in the history of the modern world. No one means this as a criticism.

Generally, people of a conservative temperament are wary of change, particularly if it’s large and sudden, and their wariness is based in the belief that civilization takes a very long time to build; it is rare, complex, and fragile, and it’s easy to screw things up. A temperamental conservative would recoil, for example, at this proposal:

This idea could only come from a man who’s never given Chesterton’s Fence a moment’s thought. It may well be true that fifty percent of the federal bureaucracy is superfluous. I suspect it probably is. But anyone who proposes to eliminate half of it overnight and at random, without first learning what those bureaucrats do and and satisfying himself that their jobs are inessential, is a radical (and a fool).

The word “libertarian” is used in many ways, but roughly, it denotes a political philosophy that elevates, above all, the liberty of the individual. In the United States, libertarians have been strong advocates of the right to private property and laissez-faire capitalism. Because the United States was founded on libertarian principles, American libertarians are conservative. In the postwar era, this resulted in an alliance of libertarians and conservatives under the umbrella of the GOP. But there’s nothing inherently conservative about libertarianism: If you grew up in the Soviet Union, the transition to a market economy represented a radical change. During the 1991 Moscow coup, the conservatives were communists.

The word “libertarianism” does not denote a temperament. Like the word “socialism,” it denotes an ideology: a system of political and economic ideas that inform policy. You can’t be a libertarian if you believe property is theft. But whether you’re a radical libertarian or a conservative libertarian depends on your temperament and your starting point.

“Populism” is what political scientists call a “thin-centered” ideology, in that it is not a comprehensive ideology in its own right, but a patina or a style of politics. As Cas Mudde puts it:

I define populism as a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups: “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite,” and argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people. The core features of the populist ideology are monism and moralism: both “the people” and “the elite” are seen as sharing the same interests and values, while the main distinction between them is based on morals (i.e. “pure” versus “corrupt”). Populists claim that they, and they alone, represent the whole people, while “the elite” represent “special interests.” Obviously, “the people” is a construct, which can be defined in many different ways.

Populism is an ideology, i.e. a worldview, but it is thin-centered, meaning it addresses only part of the political agenda— for example, it has no opinion on what the best economic or political system is. Consequently, almost all relevant political actors will combine populism with a host ideology, normally some form of nationalism on the right and some form of socialism on the left. While populism does not threaten democracy in the same way as extremism did in the early 20th century, it constitutes a fundamental challenge to the main institutions and values of liberal democracy, most notably, minority rights, pluralism, and the separation of powers.

Depending how “the people” are defined, populism may divide the public among class, ethnic, or national lines; depending how politicians wield it, populism may be innocuous or profoundly dangerous; depending on the political system, it may or may not be appropriate: In some systems, it is simply a truism that the elite is corrupt, and if this is so, a dose of populism may be salutary and corrective.

“Populism” is not a synonym for “nativism,” or “nationalism,” although they often go together. “Nativism” is not a fully-developed ideology but a policy preference: A nativist favors the interests of the native-born over those of immigrants. Nationalism, too, is a policy preference. If you identify with your nation and support its interests, you’re a patriot. If you identify with your nation and support its interests to the exclusion or detriment of other nations’ interests, you are a nationalist. While the word “nationalist” is generally understood to hint at something noxious and dangerous, few could say quite why, but the reason for the word’s minatory associations, I would suggest, is that everyone grasps that unvoiced distinction, even if they can’t articulate it.

The taxonomy I’ve proposed above is of course incomplete. But if we were all to use these definitions, and use them consistently, we’d be much better off, because we’d have a shared vocabulary of useful words that describe important concepts—essential concepts, even, if you’re trying to hold on to your liberal democracy.

If you look at recent headlines, however, you’ll see that journalists are making no effort to use these words carefully or consistently. They’re using the words “right-wing,” “far-right,” “libertarian,” “populist,” “authoritarian,” “nationalist,” and “radical” almost interchangeably:

• Argentina’s far-right outsider wins presidential election.

• How young Argentines helped put a far-right libertarian into power

• Right-wing populist Milei set to take Argentina down uncharted path

• Javier Milei: From libertarian ideologue to president of Argentina

• Meet Argentina’s free-market authoritarian president-elect, Javier Milei

• Far-right leader Geert Wilders wins Dutch election

• Party of far-right populist set for stunning victory in Dutch election

• The Netherlands’ turn to the radical right

• Milei and Wilders elected: Is the libertarian moment finally here?

The problem is obvious: Readers cannot possibly understand what these words mean, because as they’re used here, they’re just a crude signifier: They’re meant to instruct the reader that he should not like either of these men. This will probably work if the reader is a Democrat and it will have the opposite effect if the reader is a Republican. Above all, it will leave the electorate just a bit more stupid, which we can hardly afford.

🛑 Before I continue, stop, go here, and take this test. Don’t read the instructions and don’t read the rest of this newsletter until you do. Note your score privately. Don’t overthink it, the way I always do. Just put down the first answer that comes to mind. Then come back to the newsletter.

Are you back? Good. How’d you do?

I’m not sure who came up with that test, but I think it’s useful. It’s a step in the right direction. The idea is this: We use the traditional left-right axis to describe our instincts about economic policy. The left is more likely to favor collectivism and state intervention; the right extols individualism and laissez-faire. The idea behind the political compass is that left-versus-right isn’t the only crucial axis. They suggest a second, independent axis: authoritarian versus libertarian. (They’re using the word “libertarian” as an antonym for “authoritarian.” That’s fine, so long as people know what they mean.)

Your score, whatever it is, will place you somewhere on this compass:

Using my typology, “far-right” would be the blue quadrant (or the upper reaches of it). Far left would be the red quadrant, or the top parts of it.

This is how they reckoned the 2022 French presidential candidates would score:

I think that’s about right, although Macron, I think, is slightly more to the left, economically.

But when it comes to the US, their compass doesn’t comport with my intuition. Here, for example, is their assessment of the 2020 US presidential candidates:

I’d say that if a test like this doesn’t register a very significant difference between Trump and Biden, it isn’t sensitive enough.

This is where I’m stuck. The test—and the underlying taxonomy—should be capable of discerning a massive difference between Trump and Biden. If the test fails to show that Trump is an entirely different species of political animal—and a vastly greater danger to American liberal democracy—something is wrong with the test.

I’ve been trying to figure out just what it is, so far inconclusively. It may be that the two axes are basically correct, but the propositions they’re using to measure political attitudes aren’t the ones they need.

But I suspect the problem is that the compass needs to be three-dimensional. There’s a third scale, and I’ve spent the past few days trying to figure out how to characterize it. The third scale is particularly salient in the era of Global Enduring Disorder. I haven’t yet landed on the right terms, but I’m considering these: “chaos versus order,” or “system versus anti-system,” or “legal authority versus demagoguery.”

This third axis, it seems to me, is the one we need to be thinking about when w try to understand not only the West’s current, disgruntled political mood but what, if anything, meaningfully unites a group of politicians who are all, somehow, connected to Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Vladimir Putin. (The words Bannon would suggest, I’m sure, are “globalist versus anti-globalist,” but I have no idea what those words mean and I doubt he does, either.3)

I just don’t have this idea quite clear in my mind yet. If I could work it out, it might explain my sense that Milei doesn’t truly belong to this group, even if Bannon and Tucker are thrilled by him.4

Geert Wilders’ electoral success is a genuine nightmare. The man really is a dangerous, far-right demagogue. But as far as I can see—keeping in mind that I don’t know Argentina well at all—Milei is radical, yes, but not a “far-right radical.” He may be nuts, which is a separate issue. He may also be too inexperienced to achieve anything of significance. But I’m not inherently alarmed by his political views; in fact, my instinct is that he could do Argentina some good.

I’m curious to find out if he’s right about what ails Argentina’s economy and how best to fix it. Argentina has been suffering miserably from Peronist mismanagement, with inflation above 140 per cent, foreign currency reserves wiped out, a stifling regime of currency and price controls. Nothing in Milei’s discourse suggests to me that he seeks to abrogate fundamental rights or victimize minorities. Yes, he’s emphatically a populist, but he may well be right in suggesting that Argentina’s elite are a corrupt lot who’ve immiserated the country.

I may be overlooking something important. I have not studied his thoughts extensively. I don’t live in Argentina or speak Spanish. Perhaps the journalists who are alarmed have spotted something that I haven’t yet. I certainly agree that the man looks mad as a weasel. But when I consider Javier Milei, I don’t feel the dread that I do when I consider Geert Wilders—or the despair that paralyzes me when I think about Donald Trump.

(Speaking of which, if you haven’t yet read Robert Kagan’s essay in The Washington Post—“A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending”—you should. He’s right.)

You can help

So this is where I’m stuck, trying to figure out exactly what the third axis is, and how to measure it. Since I can’t quite work it out—not, at least, without failing to send out a newsletter today, which is unacceptable—maybe you’ll join me in thinking it through. Here’s what I suggest.

Below, I’ve chosen a few articles about Wilders and Milei that are reasonably comprehensive and not excessively polemical. (Skip the ones above, unless you have loads of extra time.) Read them through, then take the test—first on Milei’s behalf, then on Wilders’. Tell me their scores in the comments, then tell me if those scores make sense to you, intuitively. (Also, tell me your instinct about Milei: Do you also sense that he’s not really part of the Bannon Family? Or am I missing something?)

Then help me answer this question: Is there a third axis? If so, what is it? What propositions, like the propositions in the original Political Compass test, could we use to measure it? Are there propositions that would allow us to measure only this quality, as opposed to “authoritarian versus libertarian,” or “left versus right?”

On Javier Milei:

• An interview with Javier Milei (This is especially useful because these are his own words. Despite his protestations of sympathy with Trump and the media’s tendency to call him “Argentina’s Trump,” I just don’t see that the two men share any important quality, except perhaps for being controversial. Do you?)

• Javier Milei, presidential candidate: “It’s super easy to dollarize Argentina’s economy.” The right-wing libertarian sat down with EL PAÍS to discuss his radical proposals to reform his country’s economic system. He declares himself to be against “anything obligatory,” including compulsory voting.

• Javier Milei, a mixture of a messianic preacher and a rock star. The economist and TV panelist—who is the far-right candidate for the presidency of Argentina—ended his campaign by abandoning his chainsaw and tempering his rhetoric and proposals to win over skeptical moderates

• The ultra-right libertarian and “anarcho-capitalist” who represents angry Argentina. Abused as a child and perpetually enraged as an adult, the far-right candidate won in the first round of the presidential elections after capitalizing on the vote of fed-up Argentines and setting the political agenda with his histrionics.

• Tired Argentinian politics give victory to far-right libertarian Milei.

• Javier Milei, telepathic conversations with dogs (and God) a troubled youth, and the issue of mental health.

• Who is Argentina’s controversial chainsaw presidential candidate, Javier Milei?

• Argentina in the emerging world order. In recent years, Buenos Aires has sought stronger ties with China and membership in the BRICS. But with the recent election of far-right president Javier Milei, Argentina’s approach to the world may change.

• Argentina’s Javier Milei: the radical who could blow up political status quo

On Geert Wilders:

• Far-right anti-Islamist Wilders wins Dutch election, sending shockwaves through Europe

• Will Geert Wilders lead the most right-wing government in Europe? After winning the most seats in this week’s election in the Netherlands, the hard-right Party for Freedom will decide the next government.

• A unique party: The PVV as a party organization (I don’t know how to get it to start at the beginning of the chapter, but I mean the whole chapter.)

• Offensive, hostile and unrepentant: Geert Wilders in his own words

• “The biggest problem in the Netherlands.” Understanding the Party for Freedom’s politicization of Islam

• Omtzigt won’t enter Cabinet talks with Geert Wilders “at this time” in new blow to PVV

• How Geert Wilders won

• Wilders arrives in Parliament to PVV cheers; Experts question legality of their policies

• Foreign Defense Ministers concerned Wilders government will pull support from Ukraine

• Leaked documents show connections between PVV and Russia

If we manage to figure this out, we can build the 3D political compass together and test it out on each other. Perhaps it will help us all to describe and understand this phenomenon with a bit more rigor.

Oh, since I expect you’re curious: I forgot to save my test results before closing the window, but my score was just slightly to the libertarian right—and you have to admit they got me dead to rights:

What’s your score?