In the six months since American commandos carried Nicolás Maduro out of Caracas in January, Marco Rubio has not set foot in the country. He has not needed to. Most of Venezuela’s export revenue now flows first to the United States Treasury, which releases it in installments and on condition. Sanctions relief, the firms allowed to operate, the reordering of the oil sector, and appointments reaching down to the defense ministry — all of it runs through him. On the evidence, what governs Venezuela is not Venezuelan.

Rubio came to this by conviction, not appetite. The son of Cuban exiles, he built a public life on a single proposition: that the people of Latin America should govern themselves, against the strongmen who would not allow it. The authoritarian grip on the hemisphere was his subject before it was anyone’s assignment. No one arrived at the Venezuelan dossier with a longer or more sincere record of wanting its people free.

He arrived with a three-part plan, the same one the president announced from Mar-a-Lago on the day of the raid: run the country until a proper transition could be arranged, stabilize the economy, and return it to democracy.

The first part met the ground in June, when an earthquake killed more than four thousand people. Washington sent soldiers and money, with cash handed straight to the government it was already funding. Rubio called it a setback. The second part, stability, carries a narrower meaning than the word admits. It means the army and the security services, the apparatus Maduro built, kept intact and calm. The men with guns are not to be disturbed.

That leaves the third part, the one the first two were meant to serve. Each phase is complete when he judges it so. Recovery, stability, and the readiness of a people to be trusted with their own ballot are conditions he sets and certifies. A transition measured that way can always be shown to need a little longer.

María Corina Machado is the most popular political figure in Venezuela. The 2024 vote went to the opposition and was never honored; she won the Nobel Peace Prize for her struggle to secure the peaceful transition that the vote was supposed to bring about. Two weeks after the raid, she carried the medal to the White House and gave it to Trump, on behalf of the Venezuelan people, in recognition of what she called his commitment to their freedom. She has coordinated her return through Washington. She has no date for an election, and the man who now runs her country has publicly questioned whether she is fit to lead it.

The committee that awarded the prize noted that it cannot be shared or transferred. The medal changed hands; what it marks did not. A laureate can give away the gold. The legitimacy behind it stays where it was earned, or it stays nowhere. What is true of the medal is true of the country. Rubio holds the symbol of governing Venezuela. The right to govern it was never his to be handed.

Maduro sits in a New York cell on narco-terrorism charges. No treaty produced the government that replaced him; no vote authorized it; the House had already refused, weeks before the raid, to require even advance notice. The secretary called the operation a law-enforcement function, a couple of hours of action, not an occupation. Six months later, he runs the country. The gesture in the Oval Office dressed a seizure as a liberation, and the dressing has held.

The proconsul was thought to be retired. A century ago, American officials sat in the customs houses of Santo Domingo and Port-au-Prince, collecting those countries’ revenue and returning it to them on a schedule — the same arrangement the Treasury uses today for Venezuela’s exports, by wire. The last time Washington reached into this hemisphere and carried off its ruler was thirty-six years earlier, on the same January day, when it took Panama’s strongman. The office returns and instructs every smaller capital in the region that sovereignty is now a favor, extended or withdrawn by Washington; the rightward tilt of these governments buys quiet, not consent, and quiet has a shorter memory than resentment. It instructs every larger power as well. Beijing has already called the operation a violation of a state’s sovereignty. The lesson it draws is that a head of state can be removed and his country administered by telephone, by whoever is strong enough to try. A precedent does not expire when the administration that set it leaves office.

A country that governs another this way does not leave the habit at the water’s edge. Power that answered to no vote in Caracas answered to none in Washington either: the operation was launched without one, and the legislature had already declined to demand a role in the decision. A Treasury that releases a foreign nation’s money on one official’s word has rehearsed a discretion it can exercise closer to home. Congress was given the power to take the country to war so that war would be the people’s choice, not one man’s; the same premise underlies every ballot. Two votes stand behind this story. Venezuela’s, cast in 2024 for the opposition and never honored. And America’s, which was never called at all — no authorization sought, no debate opened. The first was overruled. The second was never held.

It was a local election, the unglamorous kind — school board, county offices, the contests that decide more of a life than the ones that make the news. I had gone principally to vote for my next-door neighbor, who was running for county council. I gave my name at the table. There was a pause, the small frown of someone reading a screen that isn’t telling them what it should. A question about my registration. Then a form, with the word ‘provisional’ printed across the top. I would be allowed to vote. My ballot would be set aside and counted later, if everything checked out. No one was unkind. I was waved along to make room for the next person in line.

I want to be precise because the temptation is to make this seem larger than it was. I was not turned away. I was not disenfranchised in any way that survives scrutiny; the provisional ballot exists for mornings like this, and mine, I assume, was counted. The system did roughly what it was built to do. What I felt was not the loss of my vote. It was smaller, and I have come to think it more telling: the first time in my adult life that the machinery of an American election did not, in my own hands, work.

I noticed because of how I spent my working life. For the better part of two decades, much of it with the National Democratic Institute, I helped other countries build the thing that stuttered at my table — the rolls, the trained workers, the chain of custody, the unglamorous competence a citizen is supposed to be free to forget. I did this in Ukraine, Poland, Cambodia, Haiti, and across East Africa, where the machinery had to be assembled from nothing or salvaged from wreckage. I have stood in other people’s precincts and judged whether their version of the morning I had just lived through was free and fair. I graded democracies on it. That morning, I was grading my own, and it had not come back clean.

Our country turns two hundred and fifty in a week, at the opening of a long electoral season — this November’s midterms and every contest that follows, through the vote that will choose the next president in 2028. I had thought I would spend this anniversary on large things: the creed we wrote down and have never finished keeping, and the place this country holds in a world rearranging itself around us. Instead, I keep returning to that folding table and the plain lesson on it. The apparatus a democracy runs on is not a fact of nature. It is built and maintained, or it is not.

What happened to me was almost certainly the ordinary kind of failure — a stale record, an overworked office, a clerk with too little training and too little time. That is the part worth sitting with. Most small mistakes in an election, the people who study this will tell you, are due to human error, and the humans are being asked to do more with less. Federal support for election security runs well below 2020 levels; the administration has ended the help Washington once gave states to defend their systems and has proposed deep cuts to the small agency that sends them the remaining funds. Experienced officials are leaving in droves, worn down by threats and abuse, so that county after county will enter this November with fewer staff and shorter memories than it had a few years ago. None of this is dramatic. It is the slow decay that announces itself one provisional ballot at a time — each survivable, each a small withdrawal from the trust that lets the whole thing work. I felt one of those withdrawals. The sting was in knowing what it might be the first of.

The first kind of failure is accidental. The second is not. The Department of Justice has demanded the complete, unredacted voter rolls of nearly every state — including names, addresses, birthdates, driver’s licenses, and partial Social Security numbers — and has sued more than two dozen states that refused to hand them over. For the first time in the nation’s history, the federal government is trying to consolidate the voter records of all fifty states into a single system under its own control. The legal ground is thin to vanishing: the Constitution assigns the running of elections to the states and to Congress, not to the President. He has claimed otherwise — that the states are “merely an agent” of the federal government, bound to do as Washington instructs. They are not, and they need not. And the same administration that says it must seize the rolls to protect the vote has moved to starve the offices that keep those rolls accurate and those polling places secure. The machinery is to be commandeered and defunded in the same breath.

Here is the part I did not expect to be able to write. So far, the structure has held. My provisional ballot, I assume, was counted because someone long ago built a fail-safe against the certainty that clerks and databases sometimes fail. The larger seizure has been turned back at nearly every step: the courts have rejected the administration’s voter-roll suits without a single win, and election officials of both parties have refused to surrender what the law does not require them to give. The system bent and caught itself — at the table and across the country. But it caught itself the way such things always do: by the design and the nerve of people who assumed the worst and prepared for it, never by some law of history that owes the American experiment a happy ending. It is an old insight and a hard one — that our worst impulses are why the institutions exist, and our better ones are why they can be made to work. The backstop does not renew itself. It holds as long as enough people judge it worth holding.

I came to that conviction the long way around, by a route that belongs to the months ahead rather than this page. It runs through Warsaw as Poland climbed out from under the Party, through Phnom Penh after the killing fields, through Port-au-Prince and the capitals of East Africa — places where I watched citizens build the rolls, the protocols, and the habits of trust from almost nothing, where their absence had lately meant something far worse than a form at a desk. As this country moves through its own long season of elections toward 2028, I mean to tell those stories because they are the measure of what boring competence is worth. For now, it is enough to say I have seen the price of its absence and would not wish the lesson on anyone.

The country turns 250 next week. I find myself less interested in predicting how this ends than in deciding how to stand while it unfolds. I cannot promise that the machinery will hold, or that the creed we have never finished keeping will be honored in our turn. No honest person can. But the form at the folding table did not, in the end, leave me in despair. It left me a task: to notice the tremor and name it, to insist on the unglamorous competence a free people depends on, and to refuse the shrug. The hope worth having is not the belief that the country rights itself. It is the conviction that keeping it is worth the work, whatever the odds.

By mid-June, the dead numbered more than 7,000, split roughly evenly between Iran and Lebanon, with dozens more across the Gulf and in Iraq. Then came the rest: the oil shock, the Gulf food emergency, the desalination plants run down, the fertilizer chains broken. None of it comes back because a deal was posted on Truth Social. That is the measure. Against it, the deal offers sixty days.

Yesterday, President Trump declared the deal complete and authorized lifting the blockade and reopening the Strait of Hormuz. It is less than that. An interim memorandum, to be signed on Friday in Geneva, lifts the naval blockade and extends the ceasefire. The nuclear talks begin after the signing, not before. The war was fought over the very thing the deal postpones.

The deal arrives this week at a table full of people who told him not to do it. The war was launched with almost no consultation. President Macron warned in February that the strikes risked a regional catastrophe and that force used outside the law would not hold; France closed its airspace to the weapons. Germany’s defense minister said his country would not be a party to it and that wars are easier to start than to end — the Americans, he added, had no way out. Prime Minister Starmer refused British bases for the first wave, calling it a war Britain would not be dragged into, and was mocked for it, as being ‘no Winston Churchill’. When the allies would not join, the president pulled thousands of troops out of Germany to make the point.

Now those same leaders meet him at Evian, and they greet the deal with relief rather than anger, because they are the ones who have been paying for it — the energy, the shipping, the food. After the summit, the president will be at Versailles, hosted by Macron, to mark 250 years of American independence on the grounds tied to the treaty that first recognized it—the ally whose airspace he was denied, toasting the founding, the week the war pauses.

A war of choice does not end. It converts. The framework shifts the fight to a table much like the one that stood on February 27 — enrichment, sanctions, passage through the Strait — minus the men, women, and children killed and the cities emptied to get back to it. For the sixty days to mean anything, four conditions must hold. The deal leaves all four open.

The Stockpile

The enriched uranium is not in the agreement. Tehran has not committed to giving it up and says the nuclear question sits outside the preliminary deal. Washington describes dismantlement, with the material destroyed on-site; Iran describes a renewed pledge not to build a weapon. Both cannot be true. Macron, hosting the summit, lists the conclusion of a nuclear accord as work still to be done, which tells you where it stands. Sixty days from now, the stockpile is either under control or still in the mountain, and nothing announced so far decides which.

The Strait

Iran closed the Strait, and the world felt it. The deal reopens it through coordination with Iran’s own forces — the same forces that closed it. The capacity to shut it again is not given up. It is leased back, for as long as Tehran finds the lease worth keeping. The people who price the risk are not convinced: the shipping trade is treating the reopening as a fragile reprieve, not a return to normal, with the danger now built into every long-term decision. Nothing in the text takes the option away.

The Regime

Regime change was a stated war aim. The Supreme Leader was killed on the first day. His son now holds the office. The protests that preceded the war were crushed, and the government that sits down for the next sixty days is the one the war set out to remove — intact and steadier than before. The deal is reported to free billions in frozen Iranian assets — twelve billion by one count, twenty-four by another. The question is not whether it signs. It is what it does with the money: rebuild or stand down.

The Front

The deal claims to quiet Lebanon. The one belligerent still firing has refused to be bound by it. Israel has told Washington it will not accept the Lebanon clause, struck Beirut’s southern suburbs again on the eve of the signing, and called the deal in its current form a disappointment. The thread most likely to snap runs through Lebanon, and the hand on it belongs to a government that is not at the table and does not consider the agreement its own.

Look at the shape of it. The war was American and Israeli. The peace is American and Iranian. The aims for which it was fought were long Israel’s aims. Israel drew the red line in April — no ceasefire that covered Hezbollah — and has held it through every round since. Israel is striking now, against the president’s stated wishes, and tells him the terms do not bind it. The one front the deal must close to mean anything is the front Israel will not release. A principal who can open a war on another government’s timeline may find he cannot close it on his own. That is where the president stands this week, and the deal does not move him.

None of this is impossible to fix. The problem is that all four conditions must hold simultaneously for sixty days, and the deal is designed to avoid touching any of them. The forecast is not a date when the war resumes. It is that the path is neither peace nor war but the space between — the guns quiet, the question open, the clock reset and reset again, the stockpile where it has been all along.

This was all on the table in February. The war did not change the terms, only the number of dead and the date the question comes back.

This is the part most Americans do not see because it does not look like a crisis. There is no rupture, no expelled ambassador, no headline. There is only a quiet reallocation of trust — the slow, deliberate work of partners who have concluded that what they relied on can no longer be trusted and are getting on with the business of relying on themselves. The French have a composure about it that an American might mistake for indifference. It is not indifference. It is the calm of people who have already made up their minds.

The accelerant

It would be too simple to lay this at the door of the Iran war. The recalibration was underway before the first bomb fell on February 28. The pieces were already in motion: a National Security Strategy, published last November, that named Europe less as a partner than as an economic competitor. The pressure on Denmark over Greenland, which Europeans watched with disbelief that curdled into something colder — a NATO member threatened with tariffs and denied any guarantee that force would not be used — over territory belonging to another member. The tariffs themselves, applied to allies with the same instrument used against rivals. By the time of the Munich Security Conference in February, the German chancellor was speaking openly of a deep rift across the Atlantic, and roughly a fifth of the publics in Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Poland had come to regard the United States itself as a major threat to their security.

What the Iran war did was end the argument. A war of choice, launched without a vote in Congress, without consultation with the Gulf states whose waters it would inflame, and without so much as a courtesy call to the European capitals whose economies the closed strait and the spiking oil price would punish — this was the demonstration that settled the internal European debate. The optimists, those who had counseled patience, lost. You do not consult people you regard as principals. You inform people you regard as dependents. Europe understood which role it had become, and it has declined that role.

What moving on looks like

At first glance, it looks like money. In February, before the war, the euro zone’s finance ministers met over a European Commission paper to discuss something unthinkable a few years earlier: a coordinated plan to make the continent less dependent on the dollar. The specifics are technical — euro-denominated digital currencies, a deeper market in jointly issued European debt — but the intent behind them is not. The paper’s own language gave it away. The bloc had to act, it said, against the rising weaponization of the international monetary and financial system. That is the sound of an ally deciding that its reliance on American financial power has become a danger to be managed rather than a comfort to be assumed.

It looks like defense procurement turning inward — European money increasingly spent on European systems, not because they are always better or cheaper, but because a supplier who might one day withhold spare parts, software, or satellite access is no longer a supplier a serious country wants to depend on. The Europeans now speak of strategic autonomy not as an aspiration, the way they did for two decades, but as an obligation. The distinction matters. An aspiration can be deferred. An obligation gets funded.

And it looks like the quieter decoupling underway in technology — the push for “digital sovereignty,” the migration of public data and cloud contracts away from American firms, driven by a fear that European officials now state plainly: that access to critical systems could become a lever of American coercion. The word they use, privately, is “kill switch.” That a serious German or French official now plans for the possibility that Washington might one day flip such a switch tells you how far trust has fallen and how unlikely it is to return.

The bill comes home

Here is what I wish more Americans understood, and what almost none of the discourse here explains. The advantages the United States has enjoyed for eighty years are not laws of nature. They are the accumulated dividend of confidence — the world’s willingness to hold dollars, buy American debt, and treat the United States as the safe center of the financial system. That willingness lets Washington borrow cheaply, run deficits financed by the rest of the world, and keep interest rates lower than its fiscal behavior would otherwise allow. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, when he was France’s finance minister in the 1960s, called it America’s exorbitant privilege, and the phrase has stuck because nothing better has come along to describe it. The privilege is not free. It is paid for in trust, and trust is now being withdrawn.

None of this means the dollar is about to fall. Its share of the world’s reserves has drifted down over the years — from around seventy percent at the start of the century to just under sixty today — and even that slow decline owes as much to the currency’s swings in value as to anyone deliberately backing away. I am not an economist, and I will not pretend the dollar’s primacy is in immediate danger. The point is simpler and, I think, more troubling. A privilege that rests on confidence erodes in increments, and every reckless act spends a little of it: a reason to hold slightly less, to settle slightly more trade elsewhere, to build the alternative a little faster. None of it topples the dollar. All of it raises, by degrees, the cost of being American.

And that cost lands on people who never followed any of this. When the world holds fewer dollars and buys less American debt, the government pays more to borrow, and the higher rate works its way into everything that money touches — the mortgage, the car loan, the credit-card balance, the interest line in a federal budget already straining under it. The bill for the rift does not arrive addressed to the people who caused it. It arrives, years later, in the monthly payments of Americans who were told that none of this concerned them.

After the stage empties

The comforting American assumption is that this is about one man and that the relationship reverts when he leaves the stage. I heard no version of that assumption in France. Europeans have priced in the man, but they have also priced in the system that produced him and the electorate that returned him — and they have concluded that an ally subject to such reversals every four years is not an ally to be depended on. The whole value of the American guarantee was its constancy. Once an ally has to ask whether the next election will revoke it, the guarantee is already gone, whatever any future president says.

This is the durable cost, the one that outlasts the administration that incurred it. The next president will engage with a Europe that has spent these years learning to do without — building the funds, the systems, the supply chains, and the habits of mind that an autonomous power requires. Those habits will not dissolve on inauguration day. You can rebuild a tariff schedule with a signature. You cannot rebuild confidence that way, because confidence is precisely what cannot be restored by decree. It is earned slowly and lost quickly, and Europe has watched it be lost.

So, the Europeans are moving on, with a composure that ought to alarm us more than anger would. They are not slamming a door. They are quietly building another house, and furnishing it, and learning to live in it. And the Americans who do not care, or do not see, will find out what it costs them the way one always finds out about a withdrawn privilege — not in a headline, but in a bill, arriving later than expected, for more than they thought they owed.

The first visit to China by a sitting American president in nearly nine years begins Wednesday evening in Beijing. There will be a welcome ceremony on Thursday morning, a bilateral meeting with Xi Jinping, a stop at the Temple of Heaven, and a state banquet. A delegation of American chief executives, including Boeing and Mastercard, will travel with the official party. A reciprocal visit by Xi to the United States is expected later this year.

Trump arrives in Beijing needing more than he can give. He will press Xi on China’s purchases of Iranian crude. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News last week that “China has been buying 90 percent of their energy, so they are funding the largest state sponsor of terrorism.” Trump will seek assurances that Beijing will not transfer dual-use goods to Tehran, building on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s April commitment that China would not provide surface-to-air missiles to the Iranian military. According to the administration’s own pre-summit briefing, he will try to enlist Chinese cooperation in managing the economic damage from a war the United States chose and Beijing opposed. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Energy prices remain elevated. The fragile ceasefire holds -- for now.

Nine years ago, the relationship was described in Washington as a competition between near-equals, with the United States holding the structurally stronger hand. The instruments of that hand were taken for granted: a hub-and-spoke alliance system that disciplined regional behavior, a forward military presence that set the terms of escalation, and a technology stack in which American firms set the standards others followed.

Each of those instruments still exists. None of them is operating as they were assumed to then. The alliance system has been under sustained strain from a Washington that treats allies as transactional counterparties rather than as the load-bearing structure of regional order. Tokyo and Seoul have, by all observable measures, accelerated their hedging behavior over the past eighteen months. The forward presence has been thinned by the diversion of forces to the Gulf, a point analysts have made publicly and the Pentagon has acknowledged privately. The technology competition continues, but Chinese self-sufficiency in batteries, electric vehicles, and certain biotech segments has hardened in response to decoupling. In contrast, Chinese standards have continued to spread across the markets where most of the world’s infrastructure is being built.

These are not arguments. They are observations. The relevant question is what the cumulative effect is when an American president arrives in Beijing in May 2026 with a list of asks.

— — —

Consider what Trump is bringing and what he is asking for in return. On the offer side, tariff relief, export-control flexibility, and a willingness to keep the trade-war truce in place. On the ask side, Chinese commitments to purchase American goods — Boeing aircraft and agricultural products — market access for American firms, restraint on Iranian oil purchases, dual-use limits on transfers to Tehran, and Chinese cooperation in managing the economic damage from a war Beijing did not want. The CEO delegation traveling with the official party is itself a list of asks: each name on it is a firm seeking access that Beijing controls.

The asymmetry is the argument. Washington has come to Beijing asking for almost everything, with little to offer in return that Beijing particularly needs. Beijing has refused to recognize Washington’s “unilateral” sanctions on Iran’s oil sector. It hosted Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi the week before Trump’s arrival.

This summit is to be conducted as if leverage were the same as in 2017. As if Boeing orders carried the weight they once did. As if a bilateral trade board were a serious answer to a structural question. As if the United States could set the terms of a conversation it has come to Beijing to have.

— — —

Beijing’s strengthened position is real, but it is also constrained. Xi wants the Hormuz disruption to end as well. Higher energy import costs are hitting a Chinese economy already absorbing deflationary pressure, grappling with a property-sector overhang that has not resolved, youth unemployment that the government has stopped publishing, and slower growth that the regime’s legitimacy formula was not designed to accommodate. The demographic decline is structural and accelerating. The internal picture is not one of confident dominance. It is one of a state managing real constraints with discipline.

Beijing is not stronger in absolute terms than it was in 2017. It is stronger relative to a Washington that has spent the past sixteen months degrading its own instruments faster than Beijing has been able to close the gap. The beneficiary, in this sense, is not the one whose hand has grown. It is the one whose hand has shrunk less.

Regional actors are interpreting the visit on these terms. Tokyo and Seoul are not waiting for the readout to draw conclusions. New Delhi has its own assessment underway. ASEAN states, as is their habit, will say less in public than they conclude in private. The summit is data, not destiny, for any of them. But it is data of a particular kind: a first presidential visit in nearly a decade, prepared without a discernible interagency process, conducted by a president traveling with a delegation of CEOs, asking a counterpart for help managing the consequences of a war chosen ten weeks earlier.

— — —

There will likely be announcements on Thursday and Friday. There may be Chinese commitments to buy American goods, along with language on stabilizing the relationship, avoiding miscalculation, and the importance of leader-to-leader communication. The Board of Trade will likely be unveiled. Trump will say the visit was the most successful in history. Xi will say the relationship is on solid footing. Bessent will appear on Fox to describe the Iranian oil understanding, whatever it turns out to be.

The announcements are not the story.

The story is that a war chosen in February has, by May, made the United States the supplicant in a relationship it continues to describe as a competition between equals. The story is that the deliverables on the table are the same instruments Washington brought nine years ago, applied to a balance of structural conditions that have shifted beneath them. The story is that no one in the administration appears to have asked, before scheduling this visit, what it would communicate to the region for an American president to fly to Beijing in May 2026 with that list of asks and that list of offers.

A presidency that took office promising to discipline China has, in sixteen months, created the conditions under which Washington arrives in Beijing seeking help. The visit will be remembered, if it is remembered at all, as the clearest evidence we have yet that the shift has happened.

The harder questions begin on Friday. Xi is to visit Washington later this year, and the terms of that visit are now being set by this week’s developments, not by what Washington would choose. The Taiwan question, for which the administration appears not to have prepared seriously, will enter the room in some form regardless. The allies who are watching — in Tokyo, Seoul, Canberra, and Manila — will draw their conclusions about the United States from what they see, not from what Washington tells them they should see. Each of these is a problem that the diagnosis above makes harder, not easier, to manage.

The alliance system, forward presence, and technology stack remain in American hands. Whether they will, and on what terms, is a question the next sixteen months will answer. The cards are not the ones the president thinks he holds.

It was the second time in history that a British monarch had addressed a joint session of Congress. The first was Elizabeth II, in 1991, in the afterglow of the Gulf War coalition, speaking to a chamber that took the postwar alliance for granted because no one was yet contesting it. Her son spoke to a chamber where the alliance is contested daily, and the side seeking its dismantlement is winning.

The speech was, by all accounts, well received. Members of Congress applauded warmly. According to several reports, the loudest ovation came when Charles said, “checks and balances.” Republican enthusiasm was muted when he turned to climate. The president, observing protocol, watched from the White House. Vice President Vance and Speaker Johnson sat on the dais and applauded.

This is the part of the story that has been told. It is the wrong part. The right part is the question of why a king had to give the speech at all.

The address covered British foreign policy, NATO, Ukraine, multilateralism, the rule of law, and the value of allies. None of it was new or secret. All of it has been the official position of every British government for eighty years, including the current one. Twenty years ago, a British prime minister could have stood at the same lectern and said the same things, and the speech would have been unremarkable. Tony Blair did so in 2003. Gordon Brown did so in 2009.

Keir Starmer did not give this speech because he could not. The president of the United States has spent the past two months publicly vilifying him over the United Kingdom’s refusal to participate militarily in the United States’ war with Iran. Trump has called the Royal Navy’s aircraft carriers “toys.” He has accused the British government of cowardice and ingratitude. A speech by Starmer to a joint meeting of Congress, in this environment, would not have been a speech. It would have been a confrontation, and the confrontation would have been the story.

So the British government sent the king instead. The constitutional monarch, by tradition and by law, does not speak for the government. He represents the nation. He cannot be accused of partisan interference because he is constitutionally forbidden from engaging in partisan politics. The president cannot vilify him without violating a set of diplomatic conventions older than the United States itself. The Foreign Office vetted the text. The prime minister approved it. It was, in every sense that matters, a statement of British foreign policy delivered through the only mouth in Britain that the American president cannot easily attack.

Consider the applause line. The loudest ovation in the chamber, on a day full of applause lines, came when a foreign monarch — the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of George III, the king against whom the American republic was founded — reminded American legislators that executive power is subject to checks and balances. They applauded loudly. They applauded bipartisanly. Senators turned to each other and grinned.

Members of Congress know which institution is empowered by the Constitution to check executive power. It is the institution they sit in. They applauded a foreign monarch for reminding them of a duty they have largely declined to perform. The applause was not affirmation. It was relief that someone had said it for them.

Charles is seventy-seven years old. He has been treated for cancer. He acceded to the throne late in life, after seven decades of waiting, and his reign has so far been brief and constrained. His mother addressed Congress in 1991 with the unhurried authority of a sovereign with three more decades ahead of her. Her son spoke with the cadence of a man aware that he may not have many more such occasions. The closing line — “let our two countries rededicate ourselves to each other in the selfless service of our peoples and of all the peoples of the world” — is the language of a valedictory, of someone delivering an inheritance to those who will outlive him, in the hope that they will care for it.

The wars of choice impose costs we have only begun to count. One of those costs is the slow conversion of a political alliance into a ceremonial one, sustained by gestures rather than by the working trust that once made gestures unnecessary. On Tuesday, the gesture was magnificent. He delivered the message. What the king said on Tuesday, the United States used to say for itself. That it now requires a foreign monarch to say it is the measure of the distance traveled, and the direction.

The students in my classes this term came from everywhere—different countries, different faiths, different starting points, different politics. In one class, the women outnumbered the men. In both classes, a meaningful share of the contributions came from outside the United States. None of this was a diversity statement. It was a working condition — the thing that made learning possible. When a student from the Gulf and a student from the Midwest argue about what American retreat looks like from where they sit, they are not engaging in perspective-taking. They are doing the slow, unglamorous work of seeing a problem from more than one side at once — the kind of work no lecture can substitute for. I had the easier job. I just had to stay out of the way.

What we studied this semester was not abstract. We studied an America in selective retreat — from the alliances it built, the institutions it led, and the commitments it made. We studied wars of choice, those a country launches because it can rather than because it must, and the long tail of consequences those choices drag behind them. We studied humanitarian emergencies on a scale difficult to hold in mind: displacement in the millions, food insecurity across regions, and economic shocks that travel through supply chains faster than policy can respond. The backdrop was not a seminar construct. It was the morning news, read before class.

The students knew this. They are not naive about the world they are preparing to enter. Many of them are frustrated — with the choices being made in their name, with the institutions that are supposed to check those choices but are not, and with the gap between what they were told about American leadership and what they are now witnessing. Their frustration is earned. I did not try to talk them out of it. You cannot do serious work on foreign policy without first being honest about its state.

And yet. What I saw in those rooms was not despair. It was more like a clear-eyed resolve. It was a group of young people who had looked clearly at the wreckage and, anyway, decided to prepare themselves for service. They asked better questions than I did at their age. They challenged each other and me with a rigor that would not tolerate sloppy thinking. They wrote papers on Iran, the Kurdish question, alliance management, the humanitarian architecture, and the politics of sanctions, and the work was good. Not just for students. Good.

I have been in this field long enough to know that talent is not a scarce resource. What is scarce is the willingness to do the work when it is hard and the rewards are thin. These students have that willingness. They are choosing public service at a time when it is undervalued, underfunded, and often publicly disparaged, yet they are choosing it anyway. That is a fact worth stating plainly.

I do not want to overclaim. One classroom, one semester, cannot reverse a trendline. The generation coming up will inherit problems decades in the making that good intentions or sharp analytical skills cannot undo. Some of what has been broken will remain so. Some of what has been lost will not be recovered. Realism must come first, or the optimism is just sentiment.

But here is what I keep coming back to. The bench is deeper than the headlines suggest. The people who will be called on to rebuild what this moment has damaged are already in the room. They are in graduate programs, in junior roles at agencies and NGOs, and in the early years of careers they chose with their eyes open. They are more diverse than any cohort that has come before them and more clear-eyed about American power — its uses, its limits, and its costs — than the generation that deployed it in the wars we are now studying as cautionary tales.

They will make mistakes. They will inherit constraints they did not create. They will have to rebuild trust, at home and abroad, that others have eroded. None of this will be quick, and none of it will be clean. But they are coming. And watching them this semester, across every line that is supposed to divide them, do the hard work of learning from one another — that is what keeps me in this. On the days when the easier thing would be silence — when the temptation is to close the laptop and let the arguments go on without me — it is the memory of those classrooms that brings me back to the desk.

The bench is there. The question is whether our country will have the sense to call on it.

This is the price of a war of choice.

The immediate concern is the Strait of Hormuz. This hundred-mile waterway between Iran and Oman handles about twenty percent of the world’s oil, twenty percent of its liquefied natural gas, and nearly a third of its seaborne fertilizer trade. On March 4, four days after the initial strikes, Iran announced the Strait’s closure. Tanker traffic dropped to nearly zero. The International Energy Agency has called it the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.

The administration’s response has been to claim that this is someone else’s problem. “The United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait and won’t be doing so in the future. We don’t need it,” the president said in his address on April 2. He urged countries affected by the closure to “build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT.” When asked about a plan to reopen the waterway, he offered none. “When this conflict is over, the strait will open up naturally,” he stated.

It will not open naturally on its own. Analysts at Rystad Energy have observed that even after hostilities end, restoring tanker traffic will take weeks, depending on security guarantees and insurance coverage. War risk premiums have already increased four- to fivefold. The Strait was a vital route for global trade five weeks ago. It is not functioning now, and the president who ordered the operation that caused its closure says it is not his concern.

The numbers reveal the full story.

Brent crude, the global benchmark, has soared past $107 a barrel. West Texas Intermediate reached $111. Oil prices have increased by over fifty percent since the war started — marking the largest single-month gain in Brent futures history since 1988. The Dallas Federal Reserve estimates that the closure of the Strait will push the average oil price to $98 per barrel and cut global GDP growth by an annualized 2.9 percentage points in the second quarter alone. Bloomberg Economics projects that if the Strait stays closed into the second quarter and oil hits $170 — a scenario analysts now see as plausible — the outcome would be a stagflationary shock impacting every major economy worldwide.

The inflation is already here. Bloomberg’s real-time price tracker shows the U.S. Consumer Price Index for March at 3.4 percent year-over-year, up a full percentage point from February’s 2.4 percent, mainly driven by rising fuel prices. Gasoline prices in March were twenty-one percent higher than in February — the largest monthly increase since October 1990. The thirty-year mortgage rate increased to 6.38 percent. The ten-year Treasury yield rose to 4.46 percent. An economy that had been gradually recovering from the post-pandemic inflation cycle is now being pushed back into it, not by market forces or monetary mistakes, but by a military operation launched without congressional approval.

And gas prices are, in a way, the easiest part. The part most Americans can see. What they haven’t yet noticed is the chain of consequences spreading from the Strait’s closure into the global food system, the water supplies of entire nations, and farmers on three continents making planting decisions while running out of time.

* * *

Start with fertilizer. Nearly half of the world’s traded urea—the most widely used nitrogen fertilizer—is exported from Gulf countries through the Strait of Hormuz. The Gulf produces roughly twenty percent of global phosphate fertilizers and forty-five percent of the world’s traded sulfur, a key input for converting phosphate rock into usable form. When the Strait closed, these shipments stopped. Urea export prices from the Middle East have risen by about fifty percent. At the New Orleans import hub, the price of a ton of urea jumped from $516 the day before the war to $683 within a week. According to one industry estimate, the cost of corn in bushels has nearly doubled: seventy-five bushels per ton of urea in December, now one hundred and twenty-six.

This matters because the war started at the worst possible time in the farming calendar. In the Northern Hemisphere, spring planting depends on peak fertilizer deliveries in March and April. Ships from the Persian Gulf to the U.S. Gulf Coast take about thirty days. Disruptions now cause shortages exactly when farmers are making planting decisions — decisions that cannot be reversed. As the deputy executive director of the World Food Program has warned, in the worst case, this could lead to lower yields and crop failures next season.

The United States, despite its agricultural strength, imports about a third of its nitrogen, phosphate, and potash fertilizers. It is not self-sufficient. However, the real impact is felt elsewhere. In East Africa, where farmers operate on very tight margins and rely on imported fertilizer from the Gulf, the disruption has come just as the early rains have created a small window for field preparation. Fertilizer use in sub-Saharan Africa decreased by twenty-five percent after the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022. It has not fully rebounded. Now a second shock has occurred, and several analysts say this one could be worse — not because the volume is greater, but because the timing is more damaging.

Carnegie’s Noah Gordon has pointed out a structural imbalance that makes the fertilizer crisis more difficult to resolve than the oil crisis: G7 countries keep strategic petroleum reserves, but no one holds strategic fertilizer reserves. The pipeline Saudi Arabia built to bypass the Strait transports oil, not ammonia. A ship captain willing to risk drone strikes through the Strait would carry oil, not fertilizer. The market ranks the crisis in hierarchy, with fertilizer at the bottom. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization warned that there is no more than a three-month window before the consequences become irreversible for the 2026 growing season.

* * *

Then there is water. The Gulf region is one of the most water-scarce areas on Earth. More than four hundred desalination plants line the shores of the six Gulf Cooperation Council states, producing roughly forty percent of the world’s desalinated water. These plants supply ninety-nine percent of Qatar’s drinking water, more than ninety percent in Bahrain and Kuwait, eighty-six percent in Oman, and seventy percent in Saudi Arabia. They are not just a convenience; they are the infrastructure on which urban life in the Arabian Peninsula depends.

They are now under attack. In the first two weeks of the war, desalination plants in Kuwait and the UAE were damaged by missile and drone strikes. Iran accused the United States of bombing a desalination facility on Qeshm Island that supported thirty villages. Bahrain reported an Iranian drone attack on one of its plants. So far, the damage has been contained. However, the precedent has been set, and tensions are rising. On April 1, the president posted on Truth Social that without an agreement to open the Strait, the United States would “blow up and completely obliterate” Iran’s power plants, oil wells, and “possibly all desalinization plants.” Iran’s parliament speaker vowed to retaliate against Gulf water and energy facilities.

A leaked U.S. diplomatic cable from 2008, now declassified, estimated that if the largest desalination plant serving Riyadh were seriously damaged, the city “would have to evacuate within a week.” Saudi Arabia is more dependent on desalination today than it was then. The GCC states are home to sixty-two million people whose drinking water relies on facilities within striking distance of Iranian missiles. This is not a minor concern. It is the most vital vulnerability in the region — more critical than oil, because oil is an export commodity and water is essential for survival.

The Strait’s closure has also caused what analysts call a “grocery supply emergency” throughout the Gulf. These countries rely on over eighty percent of their caloric intake from the Strait of Hormuz. By mid-March, seventy percent of the region’s food imports had been disrupted. Prices for essential goods surged between forty and one hundred twenty percent. The war’s economic impact is not just theoretical in the Gulf; it means people can’t afford food and are unsure if the taps will keep flowing.

* * *

The concentric circles continue to expand. European gas prices have increased by more than seventy percent since February 28. The continent’s gas storage levels were already historically low—around thirty percent capacity following a tough winter—when the war started. An Iranian attack destroyed seventeen percent of Qatar’s LNG production capacity at the Ras Laffan complex, with damage expected to take three to five years to repair. European officials have specifically warned about shortages of jet fuel and diesel. The conflict has triggered what amounts to Europe’s second energy crisis in four years, this time not caused by Russian aggression but by an American war of choice.

In Asia, the risk is even greater. China, India, Japan, and South Korea represent seventy-five percent of the oil and fifty-nine percent of the LNG that usually passes through the Strait. Asian LNG spot prices have jumped more than 140 percent. Airlines worldwide are rerouting flights to avoid closed airspace in the Middle East, increasing flight hours and fuel costs. The global shipping industry is steering ships away from both the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea amid expectations of Houthi attacks, which are lengthening transit times and worsening the disruption.

And then there is the aspect that receives the least attention but could be the most destabilizing. Fertilizer shocks don’t impact immediately as oil shocks do. Gas prices change overnight. Crop yields become clear months later. However, the decisions that influence those yields are being made now, in March and April, by farmers in India, Kenya, Brazil, and the American Midwest, who are deciding whether they can afford to plant at levels necessary to meet the world’s food needs. If they cannot, the consequences will be evident at harvest and irreversible.

The UN Secretary-General has appointed an envoy to address the crisis. The FAO has issued its three-month warning. The World Food Program has raised the alarm. None of this was necessary. None of it was inevitable. Every barrel of oil not flowing through the Strait, every ton of fertilizer not reaching a port, every desalination plant under threat, every percentage point of inflation, every dollar added to a mortgage payment — all of it traces back to a single decision made on February 28 to launch a military operation that no one was compelled to launch.

Richard Haass made a distinction twenty years ago. A war of necessity is one where the threat is immediate, options are exhausted, and the costs of not acting are greater than the costs of fighting. A war of choice is one where the threat isn’t immediate, other options are available, and the decision to go to war is based on the belief that fighting will lead to a better outcome than the alternatives. The key feature of a war of choice is that its costs are elective—they are chosen, not imposed.

Operation Epic Fury has now caused the largest oil supply disruption in history, reignited American inflation, destabilized the global food system, threatened drinking water for sixty-two million people, and pushed the world toward a stagflationary shock that could reshape the global economy for years. The president says the Strait will open naturally. The vice president claims there is a rough road ahead, but it is temporary. The administration has offered no plan to reopen the waterway that it caused to be closed.

This is the cost. Not of defending the nation. Not responding to an attack. This is the cost of a choice made without a vote, without a plan, and without anyone being required to tally the bill before it comes due. It is being paid at gas pumps in Ohio, at fertilizer docks in New Orleans, and on farms in Kenya, where the planting window is closing, and the seed is not in the ground.

Polgreen traced this idea to a 1952 essay by D.W. Brogan, a Scottish political scientist at Cambridge, published in Harper’s under the title “The Illusion of American Omnipotence.” Brogan’s diagnosis, offered during the Korean War and the McCarthyist panic over “Who lost China?,” was accurate: Americans find it hard to believe that a policy executed with American resolve can fail. And when it does, the explanation is always internal—stupidity, betrayal, treason. The notion that the world is more complex than American power alone can account for it does not enter the picture.

In the same year, Reinhold Niebuhr published The Irony of American History, arriving at a parallel insight from a different direction. Niebuhr argued that man is “an ironic creature because he forgets that he is not simply a creator but also a creature.” Applied to nations, the irony is structural: the United States built the postwar international order, then convinced itself that, because it had built these institutions, it could dismantle or ignore them without consequence. The creator forgot he was also a creature.

Two thinkers. The same year. The same diagnosis. And seventy-four years later, the illusion is not a relic of the early Cold War. It is the operating logic of Operation Epic Fury.

* * *

On February 27, 2026, Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Al Busaidi—the neutral mediator in three rounds of nuclear negotiations between the United States and Iran—told CBS News that a peace deal was “within our reach.” Iran had agreed never to stockpile enriched uranium and to full verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Technical teams were scheduled to meet the following Monday.

Less than twenty-four hours later, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury. Nearly nine hundred strikes hit Iranian targets in the first twelve hours. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and dozens of senior officials were killed on the first day.

The question I have been asking across four previous installments of this series—whether this was a war of choice or a war of necessity, in Richard Haass’s formulation—still holds. But Polgreen and Brogan point to a prior question: what kind of thinking makes a war of choice feel like a war of necessity to the people who launch it?

The answer is the illusion of omnipotence. The conviction that American military power will produce the desired outcome because American military power always produces the desired outcome. You don’t need diplomacy to finish when you believe force finishes better. You don’t need allies when you believe unilateral action is self-validating. You don’t need a plan for what comes after the bombs stop falling, because the illusion does not accommodate an “after” that isn’t American success.

* * *

Each installment of this series has documented a specific manifestation of the illusion without naming it.

In “Operation Epic Fury Has No Act Two,” the absence of a post-conflict plan was not an oversight. It was a logical consequence. You don’t plan for what comes after if you believe American action is self-completing. The administration had objectives—destroy Iran’s missiles, annihilate its navy, prevent a nuclear weapon—but no theory of what happens when the shooting stops. This is not strategic incompetence. It is omnipotent thinking. Act Two is unnecessary when the power of Act One is assumed to be sufficient.

In “The Abdication,” Congress had the constitutional mechanism to check a war of choice and chose not to use it. The Founders built the declare-war clause precisely because they understood the temptation of unchecked executive confidence—what James Madison and Elbridge Gerry reframed at the 1787 Convention by substituting “declare” for “make,” reserving to the legislature the deliberate act of choosing war. The Senate voted 53–47 to stand down. Senator Curtis of Utah captured the abdication in a single sentence: “I wish I had been consulted… But the president did act within his legal bounds.” The wish was genuine. The surrender was total.

In “The Excursion,” Trump’s repeated use of the word “excursion” to describe the war was not a verbal tic. It was the illusion made rhetorical. You can only call a war an excursion if you believe the outcome is already determined. The word miniaturizes a conflict that has killed more than two thousand people, displaced millions, effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, sent Brent crude above $112 a barrel, and drawn retaliatory strikes across six countries. The gap between the word and the reality it describes is the gap between the illusion and the world.

In “The Wait,” the broader political class—Congress, the opposition, the policy establishment—chose passivity in the face of consequences that were visible, documented, and accelerating. Waiting is the illusion’s silent partner. If American power always corrects itself, then patience is a strategy. If the system always self-repairs, then no one needs to act. The Wait was not prudence. It was the illusion operating at the institutional level.

* * *

Brogan’s most penetrating insight was not merely that Americans believe in their own omnipotence. It was that the illusion is a closed epistemological loop. When American policy fails, the explanation cannot be that American power has limits—that conclusion is excluded in advance. So the explanation must be internal: someone betrayed us, someone failed to execute, someone lacked the will.

We are already seeing this loop activate. When asked to justify the war, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt offered what may be the most revealing statement of the entire conflict: “The president had a feeling that Iran was going to strike the United States.” A feeling. Not intelligence. Not an imminent threat assessment. A feeling—which is what remains when the illusion of omnipotence has displaced the need for evidence. If American power is always justified, then justification itself becomes an afterthought. The administration has offered confused and contradictory rationales for the strikes, with Secretary Rubio at one point suggesting the United States was effectively bounced into war by an imminent Israeli attack, and Trump later insisting he was the one who pressured Israel into acting. The explanations do not cohere because they do not need to. The illusion supplies its own warrant.

This is the “Who lost China?” logic applied in real time to a war that is less than a month old. Trump told CNN that Iran’s attacks on American allies in the Gulf were “probably the biggest surprise”—even though virtually every country in the region had warned his administration this would happen. Seated in the Oval Office alongside Germany’s chancellor, he mused aloud: “The worst case would be we do this, and then somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person. We don’t want that to happen.” He appeared to be considering this possibility for the first time. This is not a president grappling with complexity. It is a president discovering that complexity exists—and the discovery itself is evidence of how thoroughly the illusion had insulated the decision from the world it would affect.

The Chinese Communist revolution—a forty-year struggle involving hundreds of millions of people—could only have succeeded, in the omnipotence framework, because someone in Washington sold us out. The complexity of the Iranian response—retaliatory strikes across six countries, Hezbollah’s barrage of more than three thousand missiles into Israel, the effective closure of one of the world’s most critical energy chokepoints, drone strikes that hit Dubai’s airport and hotels in Bahrain and Manama—cannot, within the framework, be evidence that the operation was misconceived. It can only be evidence that someone didn’t do their job.

* * *

Libya remains the most instructive precedent, and the most damning. In 2011, the United States and its allies intervened to topple Muammar Gaddafi with no post-conflict plan. Libya descended into state collapse, civil war, a migration crisis that destabilized European politics, and the emergence of ISIS affiliates in North Africa. Not one of these outcomes was addressed by the coalition that launched the intervention.

If Libya had been understood as evidence that the illusion of omnipotence produces catastrophic results when applied to regime change in the Middle East, Operation Epic Fury might never have been launched. But the illusion does not permit that kind of learning. In the omnipotence framework, Libya was not a failure of the interventionist premise. It was a failure of execution, of follow-through, of will. The lesson drawn was not we cannot do this. It was that we didn’t do it hard enough.

Brogan would have recognized the pattern instantly. Niebuhr would have called it irony: the nation that built the international order to constrain the recklessness of great powers dismantled those constraints and then acted recklessly. The creator forgot he was also a creature.

Iran is not Libya. It is a nation of more than ninety million people with a disciplined military, a network of armed proxies across four countries, and a nuclear infrastructure that has survived decades of sabotage and sanctions. The administration killed Khamenei and dozens of senior officials on the first day and called it progress. But decapitation without a succession plan is not a strategy. It is the illusion performing its most dangerous trick: the belief that destroying a regime’s leadership is the same as resolving the problem that the regime represents. Libya taught that lesson. The lesson was not learned.

* * *

Twenty-six days into this war, the diplomatic option that was within reach on February 27 is gone. Thirteen American service members are dead. More than two thousand people have been killed across the region, including at least 217 children in Iran alone. More than a million people have been displaced in Lebanon. The UN estimates that up to 3.2 million Iranians have been driven from their homes. The WHO’s logistics hub in Dubai—which processed 500 emergency orders for 75 countries last year—has been forced to suspend operations, leaving $18 million worth of health supplies stranded in warehouses while people die. The World Food Programme has warned that if oil prices stay above one hundred dollars a barrel through June, forty-five million additional people could be pushed into acute hunger—not by the war itself, but by what the war does to global food and energy markets. Sub-Saharan Africa is heading into planting season with fertilizer supply chains in disarray. A quarter of the world’s fertilizer supply transits through a strait that is effectively closed.

The Haass framework asks: was this war necessary? The answer, supported by the diplomatic record, is no. A war of choice was launched less than twenty-four hours after the mediator said peace was within reach.

But Brogan’s framework asks the prior question: why did anyone believe it would work? Why did the administration assume that American military power, applied with overwhelming force and no post-conflict strategy, would produce a stable outcome in a country of more than ninety million people, in a region that has punished every such assumption for the past two decades?

The answer is seventy-four years old. The illusion of American omnipotence is not a policy failure. It is a way of seeing the world that makes policy failure invisible—until the consequences become so large that they can no longer be explained away by betrayal, incompetence, or insufficient will.

We are approaching that point. The question is whether we will recognize it when we arrive—or whether we will, once again, find someone to blame.

• • •

Everyone is waiting.

The opposition is waiting for the next election. Its leaders forced war powers votes they knew would fail, then praised themselves for getting colleagues “on the record.” On the record, doing nothing, but on the record. They held shadow hearings because they do not control the real ones. They critique the president’s process but not his policy. They will tell you the war is unauthorized. They will not tell you whether it is wrong. One is a position. The other is a caveat.

Congressional war powers votes have failed eight times since June. Eight times, the legislature has been asked whether the executive should be allowed to wage war without its consent. Eight times, the answer has been: carry on. The Constitution’s most consequential clause has become a procedural courtesy. Senators vote no and then fund the war anyway. The performance of the opposition has replaced the practice of it.

• • •

The public is waiting for someone else to go first. The president’s approval has dropped to its lowest point of his second term. Most Americans oppose the war. Sixty-five percent of true independents disapprove of his performance. And yet the response has been muted—no sustained mobilization, no political movement proportionate to the moment. People are angry and exhausted in equal measure, and exhaustion is winning.

This is the politics of the waiting room. Everyone has taken a number. Nobody is seeing the doctor.

• • •

Here is what makes the waiting so dangerous: it is not symmetrical.

One side is not waiting. One side is acting—every day, on every front. Wars are launched. Agencies are gutted. Personnel are purged and sometimes rehired when it turns out the government still needs them. The president’s name is affixed to an iconic national center for the celebration of American culture and artistic achievement, a peace institute, a class of warships, a prescription drug program, national park passes, and children’s savings accounts. His face is draped on the facades of federal buildings. Democracies do not do this. It is the iconography of a cult of personality, happening in plain sight while the opposition debates messaging strategy. Power does not wait. Power moves.

The waiters, meanwhile, calculate. They hedge. They poll-test their outrage. They position themselves for the aftermath without having shaped it. They keep their powder dry. But powder kept dry long enough becomes inert.

• • •

Waiting is a choice. It does not feel like one—it feels like prudence, like strategic patience, like the mature recognition that politics is long and power is cyclical. The system will self-correct. The pendulum will swing. Someone, somewhere, will do something.

But the cost of waiting is not deferred. It accumulates in real time—in lives lost, in institutions degraded, in precedents set that will not be easily unset. Every war powers vote that fails makes the next one harder. Every agency hollowed out takes a decade to rebuild. Every norm shattered becomes the new baseline. The damage does not wait for the waiters to be ready.

The question is not whether the pendulum will swing. Perhaps it will. The question is what will be left when it does.

The system will not save us. Systems are not self-correcting—they are corrected by people who decide the cost of action is lower than the cost of inaction. That decision is overdue.

An excursion. As of now, more than 1,300 Iranian civilians are dead, including roughly 175 schoolgirls killed by what mounting evidence suggests was an American Tomahawk missile. Eight U.S. service members have lost their lives. Brent crude has soared past $100 a barrel for the first time in four years. The Strait of Hormuz—through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil supply passes daily—is effectively shut to commercial shipping, with Maersk, MSC, and Hapag-Lloyd all suspending vessel transit. Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG plant, the world’s largest liquefaction facility responsible for 20 percent of global LNG production, has declared force majeure. Asian LNG spot prices have more than doubled. The Dow dropped over 400 points in the first days of trading. NATO allies are publicly stating that the operation is illegal. And Trump is calling it an excursion.

The word carries more weight than the president realizes. Or as much as he intends. In the hierarchy of wartime euphemisms—“police action,” “kinetic military action,” “limited engagement”—“excursion” might be the most casually bold. Each previous term was meant to prevent the public and Congress from treating a war as a real war. “Excursion” goes even further: it eliminates the very idea of consequences. An excursion is something you return from unchanged. It suggests that the world will be waiting just as you left it.

The world is not waiting.

I. The Price of the Ticket

As I argued in “The Abdication,” Operation Epic Fury is a war of choice—launched without congressional approval, without a serious public debate, and less than 24 hours after Oman’s foreign minister briefed on significant negotiating progress and reported Iranian agreement to eliminate its enriched uranium stockpile. That framing matters now more than ever because the costs of this choice are no longer just theoretical. They are arriving on loading docks, fueling stations, and trading floors around the world.

Begin with oil. During the first ten days of the conflict, Brent crude jumped from about $70 to over $100 per barrel. The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, has effectively become a war zone. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard attacked oil tankers in the Gulf and declared the waterway closed to most commercial traffic. Every major global shipping line has stopped transit. The outcome is not a supply disruption; it is a supply crisis. About one-fifth of the world’s oil passes through that strait. When it stops, the impacts spread quickly, like a futures contract.

The knock-on effects have been immediate and severe. Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG plant—responsible for a fifth of global liquefied natural gas production, mainly serving customers in Asia—declared force majeure. LNG spot prices in Asia more than doubled to three-year highs. Egypt’s Suez Canal traffic has dropped sharply, costing the country an estimated $10 billion in lost revenue, according to the World Bank, pushing Cairo toward a near-state of emergency over price gouging. Airspace closures across the Gulf grounded thousands of flights, with Dubai International Airport—one of the world’s busiest—affected by drone strikes and operating at limited capacity. Stock markets across the Gulf traded lower. The Dow fell over 400 points.

Europe faces specific risks. Early economic models suggest that Eurozone growth could decline by 0.1 percent if inflation rises by 0.5 percent. South Korea immediately ordered a full review of potential economic impacts and the safety of its citizens in the region. Singapore’s government saw the conflict as a clear reminder of how vulnerable small, open, trade-dependent countries are to geopolitical shocks from beyond their borders.

Trump’s response to this cascade has been to assert that rising oil prices “don’t really affect us.” At the same time, he acknowledged that Iran cannot “hold the world hostage and attempt to stop the globe’s oil supply.” The tension between those two statements—it doesn’t affect us, but we won’t tolerate it—is central to this entire situation. It reflects a president who chose a conflict and now wants to deny its consequences.

The early cost estimates are staggering. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated the first 100 hours of Operation Epic Fury at roughly $3.7 billion—about $890 million a day. The Center for American Progress pegged the total cost at over $5 billion within the first week, including the loss of three F-15 jets shot down by Kuwaiti air defenses in a friendly-fire incident, with CSIS estimating replacement costs at $309 million. The post-9/11 wars collectively cost over $8 trillion, including veteran care. At its peak, the Iraq War’s daily expenses were a fraction of what Operation Epic Fury is currently consuming.

II. The Alliance That Wasn’t

If the economic fallout shows what an “excursion” costs, the diplomatic fallout shows who is willing to pay it. The answer, more and more, is almost no one.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte was clear: “This is obviously a campaign led by the Americans and the Israelis.” He emphasized that NATO is not involved. When asked about collective defense, he bluntly stated that “nobody’s talking about Article 5.” This is notable—an American-initiated war in which the alliance the United States built and leads has publicly opted not to participate. But it becomes even more revealing when you consider why.

Article 5—the principle that an attack on one member is an attack on all—cannot be invoked because the United States was not attacked. It initiated the strikes. This is the structural result of a war of choice: you cannot claim collective self-defense when you threw the first punch. The allies know this. Several have said so publicly.

Spain has been the sharpest edge of the fracture. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez refused to allow the use of Spanish bases for the operation, framing the U.S.-Israeli strikes as illegal under international law. This was not symbolic: 15 U.S. aircraft—including 9 KC-135 aerial refueling tankers—were relocated from Rota and Morón in southern Spain to Ramstein in Germany and to bases in southern France and Italy. The operational impact is real: longer sortie times, higher costs, additional logistical friction. Trump’s response was typical: “Spain has been terrible… cut off all dealings with Spain.” A poll by El País found that 68 percent of Spaniards opposed the U.S.-Israeli operation.

Spain is not alone in its discomfort. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz publicly warned about the lack of a clear exit strategy. The UK initially hesitated on base access, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer questioning the legality of the conflict and calling for a negotiated settlement—drawing Trump’s ire for taking “far too much time to reverse course.” France adopted what analysts described as a posture of strategic ambiguity, expressing concern about the unilateral scale of the strikes while maintaining its diplomatic independence. Canada emphasized prudence and international legitimacy.

The pattern is clear. For decades, NATO’s greatest strength has been political unity— the idea that when the U.S. identifies a strategic threat, its European allies generally follow. Operation Epic Fury has broken that trust. What’s emerging is an alliance analysts are calling two-tiered: one group of members willing to join U.S. global efforts, and another limiting its involvement to defending its own territory and regional stability. All still commit to Article 5, but the alliance’s political unity is shrinking quickly.

This is not Iraq redux, where allies complained but largely went along or remained silent. This is more structural. The combination of the Greenland threats weeks earlier, the unilateral approach to the operation, and the lack of coalition-building before the strikes has left European governments genuinely blindsided—and responding accordingly. The memory of Iraq and Afghanistan is strong. The desire for another long U.S. military venture in the Middle East is not.

III. The Human Ledger

There is a final aspect to this “excursion” that defies the language of barrels and basis points.

According to the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights, at least 4,300 people were killed in the first ten days of the war. Of these, 390 were civilians—roughly 10 percent of the total. The highest concentration of civilian deaths was in Hormozgan province, where many of the dead were elementary school girls at Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab. The Iranian Red Crescent Society has reported that over 6,600 civilian structures were targeted. Iran’s UN ambassador has accused the U.S. and Israel of deliberately striking civilian infrastructure, including homes and healthcare facilities. These figures include the usual caveats of wartime reporting: Iranian government figures tend to be higher, independent verification is difficult, and the fog of war makes certainty hard to achieve. But the broad outlines are not seriously in dispute.

The school strike in Minab has become the defining image of the war’s civilian toll. About 175 students and staff were killed. Increasing evidence, including video footage, suggests it was an American Tomahawk missile. When asked about it at his press conference, the president said he hadn’t seen the video. He then made an extraordinary claim: “A Tomahawk is very generic. It’s sold to other countries.” Iran does not have Tomahawk cruise missiles. When a reporter pointed this out, Trump said, “Because I just don’t know enough about it.” He added, “Whatever the report shows, I’m willing to live with that report.”

One wonders if the families of 175 schoolgirls share that equanimity.

Beyond the death toll, the war has caused a humanitarian crisis of staggering proportions. In Lebanon alone, nearly 700,000 people—including about 200,000 children—have been forced from their homes, according to UNICEF, adding to the tens of thousands already displaced by previous escalations. The rate of displacement exceeds levels seen during the 2023–24 Hezbollah-Israel war. Five Lebanese hospitals are out of service, four are partially damaged, and 43 primary healthcare centers have closed. Across the region, more than 43,000 American citizens have been evacuated. Hundreds of thousands of travelers remain stranded due to airport shutdowns. Iranian cities reportedly resemble ghost towns, with civilians afraid to leave their homes. Prisoners in Evin Prison have been receiving limited bread and water since the war began. Several UNESCO World Heritage sites, including Golestan Palace and Naqsh-e Jahan Square in Isfahan, have been damaged. On March 9, strikes on Isfahan damaged the Shah Mosque, Chehel Sotoun, and Ali Qapu. The International Rescue Committee has emphasized the situation bluntly: the war is burning approximately $1 billion daily, while the entire global humanitarian appeal has received less than $5 billion this year—about five days’ worth of fighting.

Eight American service members have died. All seven initial casualties were Army soldiers — the first six reservists killed in a March 1 attack on a command center at a Kuwaiti port. About 140 U.S. service members have been wounded. These figures will increase.

IV. No Act Two

The most revealing remark from the president’s Monday press conference was not “excursion.” It was this: asked whether the war signaled an end or a beginning, Trump replied, “It’s the beginning of building a new country.”

Building a new country without ground forces, a coalition, congressional approval, or an exit strategy. There’s no plan for what happens after the IRGC’s conventional forces are weakened. The administration has laid out four military goals—stop nuclear development, destroy the missile stockpile, weaken proxy networks, and wipe out the navy—and one political goal: regime change from within. However, as CSIS points out, air strikes alone can’t remove a government. The appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei—the son of the late supreme leader, a hardliner closely tied to the Revolutionary Guard—as Iran’s new supreme leader indicates Tehran is digging in, not giving up.

Iran’s foreign policy adviser, Kamal Kharazi, told CNN that Iran is prepared for a prolonged conflict and sees no “room for diplomacy anymore” unless external pressure compels Washington to halt. The vice president, according to the president’s own words, is “maybe less enthusiastic about going” and “philosophically a little bit different.” When even your own number two is hesitating, the claim of strategic clarity sounds hollow.

There is a historical echo here, and it is not Iraq—it is Libya. In 2011, the United States and its allies intervened to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi. The operation was presented as limited, humanitarian, and decisive. It was none of those things. Gaddafi was ousted, and Libya became a failed state—a vacuum filled with militias, human trafficking, and regional instability that continues to this day. No one anticipated what would happen afterward because the premise of the intervention was that “after” would take care of itself.

Iran is Libya on a civilizational scale. It is a country with over 90 million people, a sophisticated military, extensive regional proxy networks, and a succession crisis that has already led to a hardline replacement instead of a reformist opening. The idea that American airpower alone will cause regime change, that regime change will bring stability, and that stability will follow without a plan, allies, or a force capable of holding ground — this is not strategy. It’s magical thinking that costs $890 million a day.

Trump told Republicans that the operation would be a “short-term excursion” that caused only a “little pause” in the economy. He said the military’s “brilliant work” would bring it to a quick conclusion. He has stated that this war is “ahead of schedule” and could end “very soon”—but not this week. He also mentioned that the United States has “already won in many ways” but added that “we haven’t won enough.”

There is a word for a military operation that has no definitive end, no clear victory, no coalition, no congressional authorization, rising costs, increasing casualties, splintering alliances, and a president who simultaneously says it’s nearly over and admits it’s just started. That word is not “excursion.”

It is war. And wars of choice have a way of outlasting the confidence of the men who chose them.

The vote was almost perfectly along party lines. Only one Republican, Rand Paul of Kentucky, supported the measure. Only one Democrat, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, opposed it. The resolution, introduced by Tim Kaine of Virginia and Paul under the expedited procedures of the 1973 War Powers Act, would have required the president to halt hostilities against Iran absent a congressional declaration of war or specific authorization for the use of military force.

It failed. And with it, something larger failed too.

* * *

Last week, I argued that Operation Epic Fury has no Act Two—that the United States started a war of choice against Iran without a clear strategic endgame or plan for what happens after the bombs cease. The diplomatic timeline supported this: three rounds of increasingly productive negotiations in Geneva throughout February, with both sides claiming “significant progress,” and Oman’s foreign minister—the neutral mediator—telling CBS News on February 27 that a peace deal was “within our reach.” Less than twenty-four hours later, the strikes began.

If that piece was about the absence of an endgame, this one is about the absence of a check. The Constitution provides one. The Founders designed it for exactly this scenario, and this week, both chambers of Congress chose not to use it.

* * *

The Constitution does not leave the question of war to ambiguity. Article I, Section 8 grants Congress the power to declare war. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, James Madison and Elbridge Gerry specifically moved to change the draft language from giving Congress the power to “make” war to the power to “declare” war—a deliberate distinction. The president could repel sudden attacks. Only Congress could commit the republic to a war of its own choosing.

A war of necessity—responding to an imminent threat or armed attack—may justify executive action without prior deliberation. In contrast, a war of choice involves situations where alternatives were available and consultation was possible. The diplomatic record clearly shows which category Operation Epic Fury falls into. Three rounds of negotiations led to what the Omani mediator called “significant progress.” Technical discussions in Vienna were scheduled for the following week. The talks were set to continue, but instead, bombs fell.

Whatever anyone thinks of Iran’s nuclear ambitions or its history of supporting proxy forces, the truth is that this war was not started as a response to an immediate attack on the United States. When asked about the reason, President Trump said: “We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first. I felt strongly about that.”

That is the legal basis for a war Congress just voted not to question.

* * *

The 53-to-47 result was not surprising. War powers resolutions have failed before—on Venezuela, on earlier Iran votes, on Libya. What makes this vote different is what it ratified.

Consider what the Senate knew when it cast its ballots on Wednesday. Six American service members had been killed. More than a thousand Iranians had been killed in five days of strikes, according to both Iranian state media and independent monitors, including children in a girls’ elementary school that the White House could not confirm was not hit by American forces. Iranian retaliation had struck targets across nine countries, including a NATO ally. The Strait of Hormuz was effectively blocked, gas prices had surged twenty cents in a week, and the defense secretary was publicly vowing to deliver “death and destruction from the sky, all day long.” The administration had offered, in the Times’ words, “varying and at times conflicting explanations for the war.” The president’s own letter to Congress cited no prior authorization and no specific or imminent threat.

This is the war the Senate voted not to check.

The most revealing statement came not from the resolution’s supporters but from one of its opponents. Senator John Curtis, Republican of Utah, said on the Senate floor: “I will say very clearly: Yes, I wish I had been consulted. I wish my vote had been asked for before this. But the president did act within his legal bounds to do what he has done.” Voting to halt the operation, he added, “is not the right answer to this.”

Read that again. A United States senator publicly acknowledged that he should have been consulted before the country went to war—and then voted against the mechanism that would require such consultation. That is not a profile in defiance. It is a constitutional surrender dressed in the language of pragmatism.

Curtis was not alone in this stance. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri said his support could weaken if the operation expanded to ground troops, as if the constitutional issue depends on the type of weapon rather than the lack of authorization. Several Republicans who opposed the resolution nonetheless warned that their position might change if the campaign “dragged on”—a concession that the constitutional principle is negotiable, based not on law but on convenience.

* * *

The pattern is familiar. In 2011, the Obama Administration argued that U.S. military operations in Libya did not constitute “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution—a position that Yale’s Bruce Ackerman said “lacks a solid legal foundation.” Congress rebuked the president but did not follow through. Libya set the precedent. Every subsequent presidential military action has taken place in its shadow.

Operation Epic Fury is vastly larger. This isn’t a limited air campaign against a weakened state. It’s a joint U.S.-Israeli assault that has killed Iran’s supreme leader, struck targets across two dozen Iranian provinces, prompted retaliatory strikes on a NATO ally, expanded into a renewed Israeli ground campaign in Lebanon, and already resulted in American casualties—with the defense secretary warning more may come. If Congress doesn’t assert itself on this, the question isn’t whether the war powers have eroded anymore. It’s whether they exist at all.

Kaine recognized the importance of the issue even in defeat. He referred to a previous war powers vote on Venezuela that “fell short, but when the resolution was getting some Republican votes, the president canceled the second invasion and then ended up finally agreeing to have the first public hearing about the operation.” A vote, even a losing one, creates a record. It forces members to take ownership of their position. And it maintains the principle for the next time—because there will be a next time.

The House followed suit today, defeating the Massie-Khanna concurrent resolution along similar lines.

* * *

I wrote last week that Operation Epic Fury is a war of choice. The war-of-choice framework has a second part. If a war is chosen rather than forced, the Constitution clearly states who makes that decision. It is not a president acting on just his gut instinct. It is not a small group of congressional leaders pulled into a classified briefing the night before. It is the elected representatives of the people, in a recorded vote, after open discussion.

Six Americans have died in a war Congress never authorized. This week, both chambers had the opportunity to reassert the principle that it should have been. In the Senate, fifty-three senators—including some who openly wished they had been consulted—voted to let that principle go. The House did so as well.

The Founders’ biggest fear wasn’t a president going to war without asking; it was a Congress that effectively said, ‘I wish you had asked, but I won’t insist that you do.’

This week, that fear came to pass.

“A peace deal is within our reach,” he said, “if we just allow diplomacy the space it needs to get there.”

Less than twenty-four hours later, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury — the largest military operation in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. By Sunday morning, Iran’s Supreme Leader was dead, its capital was ablaze, and missiles were flying in both directions across the region.

Whatever one thinks of the Iranian regime — and there is very little good to say — that timeline demands serious scrutiny.

A War of Choice

Let us be precise about what this is. Operation Epic Fury is not a response to an attack on the United States. It is not a reaction to an imminent threat that left no time for alternatives. It is a war of choice, launched at a moment when, by the mediator’s own public assessment, the diplomatic track was producing unprecedented results.

This distinction matters enormously because wars of choice carry a fundamentally different burden of proof than wars of necessity. When a nation is attacked, the decision space narrows — you respond because you must. When a country chooses to initiate military operations, a set of questions must be answered convincingly beforehand. What is the theory of victory? What is the acceptable end state? What is the cost tolerance? Who governs the target country when the shooting stops? On Sunday, Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he had seen “no intelligence” to suggest Iran was planning a preemptive strike on the United States — undermining the administration’s framing of this as a defensive action.

President Trump’s own words reveal how unseriously these questions have been treated. In an interview with Axios, he described his “off-ramps” as either going “long and taking over the whole thing” or ending it “in two or three days and telling the Iranians: see you again in a few years if you start rebuilding.” This is not strategic planning. It is improvisation dressed up as flexibility.

The Chatham House analysts put it more formally but no less damningly: the American strategy “appears wholly predicated on the untested proposition that the Iranian people will quickly rise — a huge gamble.” Should that revolt fail to materialize, the administration faces what they describe as a fork in the road: fold or double down. We have encountered that fork before. We know which direction the momentum is pushing.

The Regime Deserves No Defenders

Let me be clear before going further. The Islamic Republic of Iran is a theocratic authoritarian state that brutalizes women, executes dissidents, and sponsors proxy violence across the Middle East. In January, its security forces massacred protesters on a staggering scale — the Iranian government itself acknowledged over three thousand dead, while independent monitors and leaked hospital data suggest the actual toll was many times higher. The protests that swept more than a hundred cities represented the most significant challenge to the regime since 1979, and the government’s response was overwhelming, indiscriminate violence. There are no tears to shed for this regime. It has earned every ounce of the contempt directed at it.

But acknowledging all of that does not answer the question that actually matters: does this action, at this time, conducted in this way, make things better? For Iranians? For the region? For American security?

There is a recent precedent that should haunt anyone who answers yes. I admit I was wrong about this one. In 2011, the United States and its allies intervened militarily against Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya. The regime was universally reviled. The military operation was tactically successful. Gaddafi was killed. And then — nothing. No functioning state emerged. Libya fractured into competing militias, descended into civil war, became a transit point for human trafficking, and a breeding ground for extremist groups. It remains broken today, fifteen years later. Gaddafi was horrible. Libya is worse.

The more complex the regime, the harder the day after. Totalitarian states do not collapse into functioning democracies. They collapse into power vacuums. And power vacuums are filled — rarely by the people we hope will fill them.

The Day-After Problem

Reports are already emerging that undermine the narrative of a clean, regime-targeted operation. According to Iranian state media and local officials, an airstrike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in the southern city of Minab during school hours, with death tolls ranging from over a hundred to 148 — though these figures have not been independently verified. Iran’s state media reports strikes across 24 of the country’s 31 provinces, with over 200 killed nationwide. The Iranian government — which could never rally genuine public support based on its own legitimacy — now has something far more potent: images of a destroyed school to broadcast to its population and the wider Muslim world.

This is what happens when you launch a war without a theory of the aftermath. The tactical successes are real — Khamenei is dead, along with senior IRGC commanders and security officials. But decapitation is not a strategy. The IRGC, Iran’s most powerful institution, remains intact as an organization. Succession crises in authoritarian states do not reliably produce reformers. They produce power struggles among hardliners competing to prove who is toughest.

Meanwhile, the regional picture is deteriorating by the hour. Iran has launched retaliatory strikes against Israel, US bases across the Middle East, and Abu Dhabi and Dubai, where strikes hit the principal port of Jebel Ali. On Sunday morning, CENTCOM confirmed that three American service members had been killed in action and five were seriously wounded, marking the first US combat deaths of the operation. The IRGC has declared all American assets in the region legitimate targets. The conflict is widening, not narrowing — exactly the pattern that “war of choice” skeptics predicted.

And the broader strategic damage extends beyond the immediate battlefield. As the Chatham House analysis observed, the decision to strike while negotiations were producing results “reduces the likelihood that other states will be willing to enter into negotiations with the US in the future, if there is always a risk of the US escalating to military attack.” What rational adversary would negotiate with Washington now? What mediator would risk their credibility? Oman put its reputation on the line and received a barrage of bombs in response. That lesson will not be lost on the rest of the world.

Three Things to Watch

Events are still unfolding, and certainty is impossible. But three indicators will tell us in the coming days and weeks whether this operation yields anything resembling a positive outcome.

First, the protest question. The entire strategic logic hinges on an Iranian popular uprising materializing to fill the void left by the regime’s decapitation. The mass protests of December and January showed that the appetite for change is real. But appetite and capacity are different things, especially when a foreign power is bombing your cities. Nationalism has a way of complicating revolution. Watch whether Iranians take to the streets against the regime — or rally to defend their country.

Second, the escalation trajectory. Iran has already retaliated across multiple fronts. The critical question is whether its remaining proxy network — Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi militias — enters the fight in a sustained way. The Houthis face a dilemma: intervening on behalf of Tehran doesn’t carry the same legitimacy as their Red Sea campaign, which was framed around Palestinian solidarity. But Hezbollah has signaled it would view an attack on Iran as an attack on itself. Regional contagion is the nightmare scenario, and the conditions for it are already in place.

Third, the coalition question. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, for all its flaws, at least assembled a coalition. Where are the allies on this one? The Gulf states, whose security calculations are now dramatically more complex, have been conspicuously cautious. European reaction has been muted. This matters not just diplomatically but also operationally — if the “day after” requires stabilization, who provides it?

On Friday, a mediator said peace was within reach. On Saturday, a president chose war. The burden now falls entirely on those who made that choice to show that what comes next is better than what diplomacy might have delivered.

As I write this, that demonstration is not going well. The missiles are still flying. The school in Minab remains in ruins. And nobody in Washington has explained what happens on day sixty.

We may never know what the Omani breakthrough could have become. In the end, that may be the most significant cost of Operation Epic Fury — not just what it destroyed, but what it foreclosed.

It didn’t, but not in the way I expected.

I had assumed these themes would be absent — ignored in favor of the usual choreography of defense spending pledges and communiqué language. What I didn’t anticipate was that the conference would stage an inadvertent, real-time demonstration of the very vulnerabilities I described. The vehicle was a standing ovation.

* * *

On Saturday morning, Secretary of State Marco Rubio took the stage at the Bayerischer Hof and delivered what, by any measure, was the most consequential speech of the conference. The room rose to its feet. European leaders lined up to praise it. EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas called it “very reassuring.” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said she was “very much reassured.” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said the tone was “decisive.” The relief was palpable and understandable: a year earlier, Vice President JD Vance had used the same stage to deliver a combative lecture that left Europeans stunned and angry.

So the audience heard what it desperately wanted to hear — that the storm had passed, that the alliance endured, and that America still cared. The question worth asking, though, is what the speech said.

Start with what it didn’t say. Rubio never mentioned Russia by name. At a security conference dominated by the war in Ukraine, with trilateral peace talks scheduled to begin in Geneva the following morning, the top American diplomat delivered an address on the future of the Western alliance without once naming the country waging war on it. That is not an oversight. It is a choice, and a revealing one.

Instead, the speech offered a civilizational frame. Rubio spoke of “Western civilization” with the same frequency he used the word “democracy,” which is to say, not very often. In his telling, the alliance is bound not by shared institutions or rules but by “Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry.” Armies, he argued, “do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life.” The rules-based order — the very architecture Munich was built to defend — was dismissed as a “dangerous delusion” and a “foolish idea that ignored both human nature and lessons of 5,000 years of recorded human history.”

This is not a departure from the Vance speech of 2025. It is the Vance speech in a better suit. The substance is identical: the liberal international order is exhausted, Europe’s immigration and climate policies are existential threats, and the transatlantic bond rests on ethnic and cultural kinship rather than institutional commitments. What changed was the delivery — warmer, more historically literate, and laced with flattering references to Europe’s contributions to civilization. The Atlantic Council noted that Rubio “did not repudiate anything in Vice President JD Vance’s more pugnacious speech last year, but he presented the same themes in a more positive light.” Axios observed that the twin speeches, taken together, articulate a coherent doctrine: “national sovereignty, mutual self-interest, strong military power, and foundational civilizational values in a multipolar world.”

And a room full of senior security officials, diplomats, and heads of state stood up and applauded.

* * *

This is where my three themes from last week stop being abstractions and become operational problems.

Democratic erosion. The Rubio speech explicitly reframes the Western alliance away from institutions and rules and toward civilizational identity. That is not a defense of democracy; it is a replacement framework that can accommodate non-democratic governance so long as it claims the right cultural lineage. A conference hall full of leaders tasked with defending democratic security applauded a speech that quietly moved the goalposts away from democracy itself. If the alliance’s foundation is heritage rather than governance, then the internal health of member democracies becomes, by definition, beside the point. The erosion I warned about isn’t just happening offstage. It was celebrated from the podium.

Societal resilience. Europe’s threshold for “good enough” from Washington has collapsed. The baseline comparison is no longer what the alliance requires but what it feared. Rubio was measured against Vance, not against the alliance’s strategic needs. The fact that the Secretary of State didn’t insult his audience was treated as a diplomatic breakthrough. This is what an absence of societal resilience looks like in practice: a willingness to accept tone as substance and to confuse the relief of not being attacked with genuine partnership. A resilient political culture would have noted the omission of Russia, parsed the civilizational reframing, and asked hard questions about what was on offer. Instead, the room exhaled.

Leader fitness. This isn’t about any single individual — it’s about collective judgment under stress. The standing ovation was a group decision made in real time by some of the most experienced security professionals on the planet. They assessed the speech and got it wrong. Not because the speech was bad — it was, by most accounts, skillfully crafted and effectively delivered — but because they evaluated it against the wrong criteria. They asked, “Is this better than last year?” rather than “Does this advance our security interests?” That is a fitness-for-purpose failure, and it matters because the same leaders making that judgment in Munich will be making judgments about security guarantees, defense commitments, and peace negotiations in the weeks ahead.

* * *

Please think about the timing. The Munich Security Conference ended on Sunday. The Geneva peace talks — the third round of trilateral negotiations among the U.S., Russia, and Ukraine — opened on Monday. The handoff could not have been more direct or more consequential. Everything said at the Bayerischer Hof was, in theory, preparation for what would happen at the negotiating table.

By all indications, Geneva will be tough. Russia has replaced its delegation leader with Vladimir Medinsky, a hardliner and Putin aide whose previous contribution to the diplomatic process was citing fabricated historical quotes to justify rejecting a ceasefire. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, who publicly dismissed Medinsky as a “frivolous historian,” noted that Russia’s approach to the talks had so far lacked substantive engagement. Ukraine’s delegation head, Kyrylo Budanov — the former military intelligence chief now serving as Head of the Presidential Office — departed for Geneva, saying his team would use the trip to “reflect on history and draw the right conclusions,” and stressed that Ukraine’s interests “must be protected.” The previous two rounds in Abu Dhabi produced a brief truce on energy infrastructure that collapsed within four days under a renewed Russian barrage of 450 drones and 71 missiles, along with the first prisoner exchange in five months. Progress, but fragile progress — and the core territorial questions remain untouched.

Munich’s job was to strengthen the Western position ahead of those talks, signaling unity, resolve, and clarity of purpose, and demonstrating that the alliance knows what it is defending and why. What it produced instead was a weekend of collective relief that America’s top diplomat didn’t yell at anyone, followed by a standing ovation for a speech that redefined the alliance in terms that make its institutional commitments optional. If you are a Russian negotiator arriving in Geneva, the message from Munich is that Europe’s price for cooperation has dropped to the cost of a warm tone and a few references to shared heritage.

Meanwhile, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz — the conference’s opening speaker — delivered his own stark assessment: the rules-based international order “no longer exists.” Big-power politics, with its “harsh and often unpredictable rules,” has returned. It was the most honest diagnosis offered all weekend. But honesty about the problem is not the same as the capacity to respond to it, and the standing ovation that followed Rubio’s speech suggested that capacity is not yet there.

The Munich Security Report was titled Under Destruction. It diagnosed the rise of political forces that “favor destruction over reform,” building on “widespread disenchantment with the performance of democratic institutions.” It identified the problem with precision. Then the conference it was written for demonstrated that problem on live television, to applause.

I said last week that I hoped the conference would prove me wrong. It did something worse. It proved me right in a way I hadn’t imagined — not by ignoring the vulnerabilities I described, but by enacting them.

The question now is whether Geneva can succeed despite Munich. The talks need what the conference couldn’t provide: clarity about what the alliance is for, what it is prepared to defend, and what it will not concede. Those are more complex questions than whether this year’s American speech was nicer than last year’s. They are also the only ones that matter.

The conference’s own scene-setting document, the Munich Security Report 2026 — titled, with characteristic understatement, Under Destruction — frames the problem clearly. The post-1945 international order is being dismantled by the very power that built it. Political forces favoring destruction over reform are ascendant. Trust in democratic governance across the G7 is cratering. The report calls it “wrecking-ball politics,” and it’s right.

But here’s what’s likely to be missing from the Bayerischer Hof this weekend: any serious reckoning with the internal condition of the democracies that are supposed to be doing the resisting.

Munich, at its core, remains a conference organized around external threats — adversaries, alliances, weapons systems, and force posture. The assumption embedded in every panel and every communiqué is that the nations at the table are internally sound enough to meet the challenges being discussed. That their institutions are intact. That their populations are prepared. That their leaders are fit — in every sense — for the decisions the next decade will demand.

That assumption deserves far more scrutiny than it will receive this weekend. Three vulnerabilities in particular are likely to go unaddressed — not because they’re trivial, but because they’re uncomfortable in ways that defense spending pledges and procurement timelines aren’t.

I. The Threat Inside the Alliance

Munich will host extensive discussions about whether NATO allies can meet the new five-percent defense-spending target by 2035. Panels will cover European strategic autonomy, burden-sharing, and whether the transatlantic partnership can survive its current strains. These are important conversations.

But there is a prior question that the conference is almost certainly going to sidestep: whether the democracies pledging that spending will still be functioning democracies when the bills come due.

The Munich Security Report itself identifies the problem at the macro level — the rise of destructive political forces, the erosion of trust in institutions, and the sense across G7 publics that their governments are failing them. What it doesn’t do, and what the conference is unlikely to do, is treat democratic erosion within alliance countries as a first-order security threat rather than a political science observation.

Consider what’s happening inside the alliance’s most important member. This week, The Atlantic published a 7,000-word examination of the Democratic Party — the primary opposition force in the world’s most powerful democracy — and the portrait is striking. A party apparatus that can’t compel its own staff to come into the office. An internal review of its 2024 election defeat was commissioned, conducted, and then quietly killed. Approval ratings are at historic lows. A base that overwhelmingly believes its own leaders are ineffective. A factional ecosystem more focused on performing toughness than on exercising institutional power.

This is not a story about American domestic politics. Or rather, it shouldn’t be only that. When the opposition party in the country that underwrites European security is structurally dysfunctional, that is a security variable. It means the internal checks on executive overreach — the very checks that make alliance commitments credible over time — are degraded. A defense minister in Warsaw or Tallinn planning force posture for 2030 has to ask not only whether Washington will honor its commitments, but also whether Washington’s political system will be capable of making coherent commitments at all.

NATO has mechanisms for interoperability standards, defense spending targets, and intelligence sharing. It has no mechanism — none — to address the scenario in which a member state’s democratic institutions erode to the point that alliance commitments become unreliable. That’s not hypothetical. It’s a planning gap. And it’s not on the Munich agenda.

II. The Home Front That Doesn’t Exist

The defense conversations at Munich are almost entirely about capability — weapons systems, spending pledges, force posture, procurement timelines, and supply chain resilience. This year’s Innovation Night at the conference will showcase AI applications in defense. All of this is forward-looking and serious.

But capability without societal resilience is brittle. Western societies are staggeringly unprepared for the sustained disruptions that any serious security scenario would produce.

Sweden’s “If Crisis or War Comes” pamphlet — distributed to every household and covering what to do if water stops flowing, if power goes out for weeks, or if armed conflict reaches Swedish soil — is treated in European policy circles as a Nordic curiosity rather than a baseline standard. How many NATO member states have an equivalent? Effectively none.

European leaders in Munich will pledge, as they do every year, to defend every inch of NATO territory. But survey data consistently show that majorities in several EU member states couldn’t sustain themselves for more than 72 hours without functioning external supply chains. You can have the best-equipped military on the continent and still watch your society buckle within the first week of a crisis.

The pandemic was, in practice, a low-intensity test of societal resilience. Supply chain fragility, institutional trust collapse, information chaos, and political polarization under sustained stress — all of it previewed exactly what a larger crisis would produce. The lessons were there. Almost no Western government institutionalized them into a civil defense doctrine. COVID became a political memory rather than a planning baseline.

This matters specifically for Munich because the conference’s agenda assumes functioning societies behind the defense architectures under discussion. The unglamorous work of societal preparedness — water reserves, communication fallbacks, household-level food security, and the civic trust required for populations to cooperate under duress — receives no stage time at a gathering dominated by hardware, diplomacy, and grand strategy.

We are building twenty-first-century militaries atop societies with 72-hour resilience windows. That’s not a defense posture. It’s a façade.

III. The Question Nobody Will Ask

This is the most sensitive of the three silences and arguably the most consequential.

Western democracies have no effective mechanisms to ensure that the individuals making existential security decisions are cognitively, psychologically, and emotionally equipped to do so. There is a gentlemen’s agreement — across parties, across countries, and across the transatlantic relationship — not to discuss it.

The 25th Amendment in the United States has never been seriously invoked to address cognitive fitness. No NATO ally has an equivalent mechanism that has been meaningfully tested. The nuclear chain of command assumes rationality at the top. So do every alliance commitment, every treaty obligation, and every crisis-response protocol that will be discussed in Munich this weekend.

Meanwhile, the cognitive demands on heads of state have never been greater—simultaneous crises across multiple theaters. Information environments are designed to overwhelm. Decision cycles are measured in hours. Social media is a direct-to-public channel, operating without institutional filters. The job description has changed faster than any system for assessing whether someone can do it.

G7 leadership is currently older than at any point in the post-Cold War era. Cognitive decline is not a moral failing; it’s a biological reality that interacts with the demands described above. But the question isn’t about any individual leader. It’s about the absence of a system for assessing fitness across the alliance. The void is the vulnerability.

If a NATO member’s head of state makes an erratic decision in the small hours of the morning — any decision, on any topic — what institutional mechanism exists to assess whether that decision reflects considered policy, domestic political calculation, or something else entirely? The answer, across the alliance, is: nothing robust. At a conference dedicated to collective security, that void is extraordinary.

A conference that spends three days discussing the readiness of weapons systems and the reliability of supply chains will spend zero minutes debating whether the people with the authority to deploy those systems are reliably capable of sound judgment. That isn’t an oversight. It’s a taboo. And taboos make terrible security policy.

What to Watch For

I’ll be following the Munich proceedings closely this weekend. I suspect these three themes will surface, if at all, only in corridor conversations and off-the-record dinners — the places where officials say what they actually think rather than what the communiqué permits.

The conference’s own report has given them the opening. Under Destruction documents the crisis of confidence in democratic governance. It identifies the forces tearing at the international order from within. It stops just short of following those threads to their domestic conclusions.

If Munich is serious about the threats it claims to address, it would reckon with the possibility that the most dangerous vulnerabilities aren’t in the East, in cyberspace, or in the South China Sea. They’re in the cabinet rooms, the legislatures, and the living rooms of the nations that built the order now under attack.

I hope the conference proves me wrong. I’ll report back next week on whether it did so.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was present in Fulton County for the raid. Why the nation’s chief intelligence officer would attend the seizure of domestic election records remains unexplained. The FBI’s supporting affidavit remains sealed.

Every American who believes that elections belong to the people, not to the federal government, should be alarmed.

The Constitutional Framework Under Assault

The architecture of American elections rests on a foundational principle: states administer elections. The Elections Clause of the Constitution grants states primary authority to determine the “Times, Places, and Manner” of holding elections. Congress may alter those regulations, but the President has no such enumerated power.

This isn’t an arcane constitutional curiosity. It is the bulwark against precisely what we are now witnessing: the executive branch using federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies to intimidate local election officials, seize election materials, and demand access to the private information of millions of voters.

George Shultz, for whom I had the privilege of serving as Special Assistant, often reminded me that trust is “the coin of the realm” in international relations. The same principle applies domestically: when citizens cannot trust that their neighbors and fellow citizens will count their votes rather than federal agents pursuing a political vendetta, the foundation of democracy cracks.

The Pattern of Abuse

What we are witnessing is not isolated. It is systematic.

In March 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14248, directing the independent, bipartisan Election Assistance Commission to require documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration—a mandate federal courts have since blocked as unconstitutional executive overreach. The order also attempted to decertify voting machines across 39 states.

December 2025: The Justice Department sued Fulton County, seeking 2020 election records. When the county resisted, federal agents arrived with a search warrant. The DOJ has now filed similar lawsuits against 18 states—all states Trump lost in 2020.

January 2026: After ICE agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis during a weeks-long immigration crackdown, Bondi demanded access to Minnesota’s voter rolls as a condition for reducing federal enforcement activity. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon called it “an outrageous attempt to coerce Minnesota into giving the federal government private data on millions of U.S. citizens in violation of state and federal law.”

The president has openly mused that there “shouldn’t even be an election” and expressed regret that he didn’t have the National Guard seize voting machines in 2020. The pattern suggests the 2020 fixation is a pretext. The target is 2026 and beyond.

What Is at Stake

Robb Pitts, chair of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, put it plainly: “As long as those boxes were in the county’s control at this facility, they were safe and secure. I can no longer, as chair of this board, satisfy not only the citizens of Atlanta but also the citizens of the world that those ballots are still secure.”

Chain of custody matters. When federal agents remove original election materials without proper inventory and without notifying local officials of their destination, the integrity of the historical record is compromised. Even more concerning is what comes next: those same officials now possess the raw materials to manufacture whatever narrative serves their purposes.

The voter data demands are equally troubling. The DOJ has requested sensitive personal information—Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and driver’s license numbers—from 40 states. Officials have not disclosed how this information will be used, stored, or protected. In the wrong hands, it could be weaponized for mass voter challenges, discriminatory purges, or outright intimidation.

A Question of Backbone

I’ve spent over four decades in public service—across the Treasury and State Departments, the private and nonprofit sectors, and the intersection of policy and markets. In all that time, I’ve never witnessed such a brazen assault on the fundamental machinery of self-governance.

Commissioner Dana Barrett of Fulton County wrote this week that the Fulton raid is “not about 2020” but about “the future of our democracy; a future that depends on our ability to choose our leaders by casting our votes.”

She is right. She also asked Americans to stand with election workers and local officials under attack.

So I ask: Do we still have spines? Those of us who served in administrations of both parties, who believed that certain institutional norms transcended partisan competition, and who trusted that the constitutional order would hold—do we still have the capacity for outrage?

The courts have blocked portions of the election executive order. Fulton County is suing to recover its seized records. Thirty-one states have refused to turn over voter data. These are encouraging signs. But litigation moves slowly, and the 2026 midterms approach rapidly.

If the executive branch can seize election materials at will, coerce the disclosure of sensitive voter information, and deploy intelligence officials to domestic election offices without explanation, then the federalization of elections is already underway—regardless of what any court eventually rules.

This is not a partisan observation. It is structural. The question before us is whether elections remain the province of self-governing citizens and their local institutions or become instruments of federal power.

The answer should be obvious. That it now takes courage to say so tells us how far we have fallen.

I welcome your thoughts. If these reflections resonate—or if you disagree—I’d appreciate hearing from you in the comments.

The 28-point plan demands that Ukraine cede all of Donbas, recognize Russian control of Crimea, reduce its military from nearly a million to 400,000 troops, and permanently forgo NATO membership. The message from Washington is clear: accept these terms by Thursday or lose all American support.

Let’s be clear about what this is: Neville Chamberlain’s Munich playbook, updated for 2025. Territory for promises. Sovereignty for “peace.” The small nation’s interests were sacrificed to avoid confronting the aggressor. But this time, it’s America holding the pen, not trying to stop it.

American and Russian envoys drafted the plan with minimal input from Ukraine or Europe. This isn’t diplomacy; it’s diktat. The very allies who would have to live with Russian forces on their borders were excluded from discussions about their own security.

History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes with disturbing clarity. Chamberlain at least believed he was saving peace for his generation. Today’s proposals don’t even pretend to offer that—they include amnesty for all war crimes committed. They would return Russia to the G8, essentially confirming that territorial conquest works if you’re patient enough.

My students often ask what follows American exceptionalism. Here’s their answer: a world where might makes right returns as the guiding principle, where the strong prey on the weak while former champions of sovereignty set the menu. The “rules-based order” wasn’t perfect, but what’s replacing it looks eerily like Europe around 1938.

The most bitter irony? We spent decades teaching that Munich was a pivotal moment in history, serving as a great warning against appeasing aggressors. Now we’re drafting our own version, complete with deadlines and threats to the victim if they don’t comply.

This is what post-hegemonic America looks like: not a smooth shift to multilateral cooperation, but active involvement in dividing up smaller nations to avoid tougher choices. Chamberlain would recognize the pattern. So would the Czechoslovaks.

Legitimizing a War Criminal

This summit marked the first time Putin was invited to a Western country since launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Putin faces an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for war crimes, yet he received a red carpet reception on American soil—quite literally. The very decision to hold this summit was a strategic blunder that gave Russia's propaganda machine invaluable material.

Ukraine Sidelined

Most egregiously, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was excluded from talks about his own country's fate. How can you negotiate Ukraine's future without Ukraine? This exclusion sent a dangerous message: that Ukraine's sovereignty is negotiable and that Putin's imperial ambitions deserve a hearing.

Reports now suggest Trump has dropped his demand for a ceasefire and told Ukrainian officials that Putin wants Ukraine's Donbas region in exchange for stopping attacks—essentially rewarding Putin's aggression with territorial concessions.

Empty Theater

While Putin claimed an agreement was reached to "pave the path toward peace," Trump contradicted this, saying "there's no deal until there's a deal." Putin's parting suggestion that they meet "next time, in Moscow" revealed his true objective: normalizing relations while continuing his war of conquest.

Trump rated the meeting "10 out of 10" despite achieving nothing concrete. Meanwhile, Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities continued even during the summit.

The Real Consequences

Ukrainian lawmakers expressed dismay. One parliamentarian wrote, "It seems Putin has bought himself more time. No cease-fire or any kind of de-escalation has been agreed upon."

Putin walked away with enhanced international standing, no meaningful concessions, and the implicit message that his war of aggression might eventually be rewarded with territorial gains.

Real diplomacy requires respecting Ukraine's sovereignty, pressuring Putin rather than rewarding him, and upholding territorial integrity. Yesterday's summit failed on all counts.

The Alaska summit should never have happened. It legitimized an aggressor, sidelined the victim, and sent exactly the wrong message about the consequences of unprovoked war. Ukraine—and international law—deserved better.