Dan brings me up to speed on a world governed by men who have discovered that blackmail works. Iran has told China that it will be charging tolls on the Strait, as if one of the world’s most important maritime chokepoints were a family parking lot. The United States, having never ratified the Law of the Sea Convention it regularly invokes, is left waving international law at Tehran with one hand and punching itself in the face with the other.
We also discuss America’s institutional decay: shootings, primaries, the vanishing center, and my grim expectation that the Democratic Socialists of America will do to the Democratic Party what Trump did to the Republicans.
Then to Israel, where Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has crossed the line into open defiance of the legal order. A technical fight over broadcast regulations, Dan thinks, is a rehearsal for ignoring the Supreme Court when it matters most. If Netanyahu tries to steal or delay the next election, I ask, who can stop him?
Finally, Ukraine. Bill Browder argues that the war won’t end in peace but in exhaustion: no summit, no handshake, no treaty, just a Korean-style frozen conflict, hardened by a kill zone of drones. Putin, says Browder, can’t back down without finding himself in a cell or a coffin. I suspect Browder is right. So does Dan. The statistics Browder cites are jaw-dropping.
Today’s theme was blackmail. Iran blackmails the world economy. Netanyahu blackmails Israel’s constitutional order. Putin blackmails his own people with prison-yard politics and everyone else with nukes. America’s lunatics blackmail the center because the center, though numerically enormous, has somehow misplaced its political party.
What happens when every chokepoint—Hormuz, the courts, the front line, the ballot, the party primary—falls into the hands of people who have learned that the system will blink first?
