The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is supposed to be a celebration - of the First Amendment, of a free press, of the uneasy but essential relationship between power and those who cover it. Saturday night, it became something else entirely. And the way everyone responded to that - journalists, yes, but also the public watching in real time - reveals something worth examining about the moment we’re all in together.

More than 2,500 journalists, politicians, and public figures were inside the Hilton ballroom when word spread that a gunman had breached the security perimeter. For several moments, no one knew exactly how close the danger was.

My first thought was for the many friends and colleagues I knew were in that room. Several told me later they had never been so scared - that in those seconds, their minds went immediately to their families, to whether they would make it home. President Trump was evacuated along with senior officials. A Secret Service agent was injured. The knowledge of how much worse it could have been is part of what lingers. And above all, there is relief that it wasn’t.

And in the middle of all of it, journalists pulled out their phones and started filming.

I was a few blocks away at the Substack gathering at the Renwick Gallery, effectively locked down because of our proximity to the White House and the president’s movement back to the residence. Conversations stalled. People reached for their phones. And then - reflexively, almost involuntarily - the journalists in that room did the same thing the journalists inside the Hilton were doing. They started reporting. Comparing notes, texting sources, refreshing feeds, trying to understand what was unfolding in real time.

Different rooms, different levels of danger. Same reflex to move quickly and get it right. That discipline, applied to a genuine crisis, is exactly what a free press is for.

But even as the facts were coming in, the cycle had already restarted - the instant analysis, the partisan framing, the reflexive blame on all sides. Even in spaces like Substack, meant for more thoughtful discussion, the pull toward outrage proved stronger than the call for reflection.

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Every time there is an act of political violence in this country, we go through the same cycle. The shock is real. The fear is real. The calls for unity are sincere, at least in the moment. After Saturday night, President Trump struck the familiar tone: “We have to resolve our differences,” he said, noting that in that room were “Republicans, Democrats, independents, conservatives, liberals and progressives.” It is exactly the right message - and it is one we have heard before — after Butler, after the murder of Charlie Kirk and other moments that felt like they might finally force a reckoning.

This violence is reflective of the environment surrounding it. Politics in this country no longer feels like a contest of ideas. It feels like identity. It feels existential. And when that happens, disagreement hardens into something more dangerous - something that leaves little room for restraint.

This isn’t random. It is the product of a system where shared facts are eroding, where every event is instantly weaponized, and where anger has become a kind of currency. In that environment, the distance between rhetoric and action starts to shrink. We begin to lose the ability - or the willingness - to see one another as anything other than opponents to be defeated.

And increasingly, that dynamic is seeping into the media itself. Not all journalists, but enough that it’s noticeable: righteous indignation hardening into snark and cynicism, mistaken for rigor, clarity, or accountability. And the audience, already primed for outrage and looking for confirmation of what it already believes, rewards the performance over the reporting.

There is a difference between holding power to account and feeding the very cycle that is corroding the public square. It is still possible to do the former with discipline, context, and nuance - without inflaming the latter.

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you know I don’t pull punches. I’m not shy about calling out policies or people I take issue with. But I always try - however imperfectly - to do it with a measure of respect, and with the awareness that serious disagreements don’t have to come at the expense of basic understanding. Lately, that can feel like a lonely place to stand.

I had planned to write today about the strange choreography of this weekend - the WHCD itself, and what it reveals about the relationship between this press corps and this president. That piece can wait. What can’t wait is the harder question: not whether we move on from Saturday night, but how?

Moving on cannot mean returning to instinct - to the easy, performative outrage that fills our feeds and reinforces our divisions. If anything is going to change, it has to be more deliberate than that. It requires a conscious effort to step outside the reflex, to resist the pull of immediate judgment, and to engage with a level of empathy that feels increasingly unnatural in this environment - even, and especially, toward those we disagree with most.

That’s not a soft standard. It’s actually a harder one than outrage. And it falls on all of us - not just the people with bylines.

If we don’t choose differently, we already know what comes next.

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Three decades covering foreign policy has taught me one thing: the story is almost never as simple as your side wants it to be. That’s why I call balls and strikes without keeping score.

That means you get reporting and analysis that makes partisans on both sides a little uncomfortable. Clear-eyed, fact-based, and beholden to no one.

If that’s the kind of coverage you want to read- I hope you will subscribe.

For the first time in decades, Lebanon and Israel sat down together in Washington this week and talked. Directly. No back channels, no polite fiction that they weren’t actually in the same room. Two countries that have technically been at war since 1948 — and practically been at war on and off ever since — looked at each other across a table and began to negotiate.

That alone is worth pausing on. Because in the Middle East, the distance between “unprecedented” and “irrelevant” can close very quickly.

Last Thursday, President Trump announced a 10-day ceasefire — posting on Truth Social, in characteristic fashion. The ceasefire was framed as an agreement between Israel and Lebanon. There was one notable problem with that framing: Israel isn’t fighting Lebanon. It’s fighting Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group that operates inside Lebanon, dominates parts of its government, and was not formally party to the agreement.

Hezbollah’s response was roughly what you’d expect from a terrorist organization that wasn’t invited to its own peace deal: non-committal, conditional, and shot through with implicit threat.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who reportedly didn’t have time to brief his cabinet before Trump went public, said Israel agreed to the ceasefire — but that Israeli troops weren’t going anywhere. The security zone Israel has carved out in southern Lebanon, stretching roughly 18 miles along the border, stays.

That position puts Lebanon’s government in an immediately awkward spot — having agreed to a truce while Israeli forces remain on Lebanese soil, with Hezbollah calling that presence an occupation and invoking the right to resist.

Meanwhile, more than 70,000 Israelis who were forced from their homes in the north — some for over a year — are still waiting to find out if it’s actually safe to go back. For them, the ceasefire isn’t a diplomatic milestone. It’s another promise from a government that has made this promise before.

So — cautious optimism, emphasis on cautious.

The Hezbollah problem, explained simply

To understand why this moment matters and why it’s so fragile, you have to understand what Hezbollah actually is, what it isn’t, and why Lebanon has been both unwilling and unable to disarm it.

Hezbollah is not simply a militia. It is an army, a political party, a social services network, and a foreign policy instrument, all at once. It holds seats in Lebanon’s parliament. It runs hospitals and schools across the Shia south. It built an arsenal once estimated at over 150,000 missiles, hiding them in residential neighborhoods, behind UN posts, in people’s homes. And it has always answered not to Beirut, but to Tehran — functioning as Iran’s most powerful proxy and the crown jewel of what Iran calls its Axis of Resistance.

Hezbollah is the most formidable of Iran’s network of armed proxies — a network that also includes Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and Shia militias across Iraq — each one cultivated over decades to extend Iranian influence, bleed its adversaries, and ensure that any war with Iran would never be fought on Iranian soil alone.

Those multiple identities — service provider and armed force, political actor and terrorist organization — are what has made Hezbollah so impossible to dislodge. You can’t simply vote it out. You can’t legislate against it without risking a sectarian crisis. And you certainly can’t send the Lebanese army after it — Hezbollah outguns the Lebanese Armed Forces by almost any measure, and any attempt at forced disarmament would risk triggering exactly the kind of civil war Lebanon spent fifteen years trying to recover from.

Voluntary disarmament is no more realistic: Hezbollah defines itself as a resistance force, its weapons are its identity, and Iran has no interest in surrendering its most valuable regional asset without significant concessions in return.

The United States has spent decades subsidizing both the Lebanese government and the Lebanese Armed Forces hoping to build a counterweight to Hezbollah. It never worked — not because the Lebanese army lacks soldiers, but because deploying them against one of the most powerful constituencies in the country risks doing what decades of Israeli bombardment hasn’t: tearing apart Lebanon’s sectarian balance and triggering a new civil war.

This dynamic has produced a predictable cycle. Ceasefires get negotiated — in 1996, in 2000, after the 2006 war when UN Security Council Resolution 1701 explicitly called for Hezbollah’s disarmament south of the Litani River. Each time, the agreement held just long enough for Hezbollah to regroup, rearm, and resume. The fault lines were never resolved. They were managed, imperfectly, until they weren’t.

And yet. Something may have shifted.

What’s actually different this time

The damage Israel has inflicted on Hezbollah in this war — degrading its leadership, its weapons stockpiles, its command structure — has changed the calculus in ways that previous ceasefires didn’t. Hezbollah is not destroyed. But it is weakened, politically exposed, and facing something it hasn’t confronted in a long time: criticism from within its own community.

Lebanese Shia who once supported Hezbollah’s confrontation with Israel have watched their villages demolished, their families displaced, their country carved up. More than 1.2 million people — roughly a quarter of Lebanon’s entire population — have been forced from their homes in this round of fighting alone.

Lebanon’s new government, under President Joseph Aoun, has moved more decisively than its predecessors. It has banned Hezbollah’s military activity. It has targeted Iranians supplying the group with weapons and intelligence. And it went directly to Israel — over Hezbollah’s explicit objections — for this week’s talks in Washington.

That is a significant statement from a Lebanese official. Whether it translates into action is the question that every previous Lebanese government has answered the same way.

The Iran dimension

None of this happens in isolation from the broader US-Iran negotiations, which are running on a parallel track that keeps intersecting with Lebanon in complicated ways. Iran insisted Lebanon be included in the initial ceasefire — a reminder that Hezbollah’s fate is still, ultimately, an Iranian decision as much as a Lebanese one. Tehran may be negotiating its own terms with Washington, but it has not surrendered its most valuable regional asset and is likely to throw Hezbollah a lifeline.

Trump’s announcement that Iran had agreed to hand over its stockpile of enriched uranium — which he weirdly likes to call “nuclear dust,” a formulation Iran has not confirmed — added another layer of uncertainty to an already murky situation. Are we negotiating the Strait of Hormuz? The nuclear file? Both simultaneously? The answer seems to be yes, in a way that is either brilliantly leveraged or dangerously improvised, depending on which day you ask.

What is clear is that the pressure on Iran is designed to extract concessions. What is less clear is what happens to Lebanon if those broader negotiations collapse. A deal that works for Tehran might or might not include meaningful constraints on what Hezbollah does next.

Aoun’s tightrope

Trump wants to meet with Netanyahu and Lebanese President Aoun at the White House within the next week or two — the first direct talks between Israeli and Lebanese leaders in decades. The agreement they are seeking to finalize requires Lebanon’s government to prevent Hezbollah and other armed groups from attacking Israel. That language sounds decisive. In practice, it is an enormous undertaking for a state that has never successfully enforced it.

None of this means the current ceasefire is meaningless. It may give civilians on both sides temporary relief, allow displaced populations to return, and create space for diplomacy that wouldn’t exist otherwise. That’s not nothing — in Lebanon, it’s often the most you can hope for.

But none of this resolves the underlying contradiction. Hezbollah is not at the table. Israel is not leaving southern Lebanon. And a million displaced Lebanese are still waiting to find out whether it’s safe to go home.

Here is what ten days might accomplish that previous ceasefires didn’t: it puts the Lebanese government formally on record as the party claiming responsibility for asserting sovereignty over its own territory. That shifts the political burden in ways that matter — and sets a standard against which Beirut can be held accountable.

Whether this Lebanese government has the courage, capacity, and support to sustain that effort — not for ten days, but for the months and years it would take to actually change the facts on the ground — is the only question that matters. Every previous government answered it the same way. This moment can be different, if Aoun can walk the tightrope — and the US and Israel help him.

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The easiest play in media right now? Pick a team. Tell them what they want to hear. Watch the clicks roll in.

I’m not doing that.

Three decades covering foreign policy has taught me one thing: the story is almost never as simple as your side wants it to be. That’s why I call balls and strikes without keeping score.

That means you get reporting and analysis that makes partisans on both sides a little uncomfortable. Clear-eyed, fact-based, and beholden to no one.

If that’s the kind of coverage you want to read- I hope you will subscribe.

Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz standoff continues to be both entirely about nuclear leverage and somehow also not about that at all — depending on which hour of the day you’re reading the president’s Truth Social feed. The Saudis, bless them, are quietly rerouting their pipelines and taking the wind out of Iran’s sails. Literally.

And Orban lost! The man who turned Hungary into MAGA’s favorite field trip destination — who got CPAC, JD Vance, and a Trump phone-in rally — got voted out. Turns out gutting democratic institutions is fine until the economy tanks and people actually have to live there. Who knew.

Bottom lines: Lebanon has a window, but don’t redecorate yet. Iran negotiations are murky and the Strait is murkier. Orban is out, but the MAGA-Hungary romance tells us something interesting about where Vance wants to take this party by 2028. And Pete Hegseth quoted Pulp Fiction thinking it was scripture. We can’t make this up.

A final note for this week

We know a lot of people spend their days doom-scrolling and venting about the politics of the moment — and honestly, sometimes we do too.

What we try to offer here is something different: a dispassionate look at the administration’s foreign policies, the week’s news, and the geopolitical forces shaping what comes next. Despite having plenty of our own outrage, we’ll leave that to everyone else — understanding the forces at play feels a lot more useful than preaching to the choir.

We don’t always agree, but we disagree agreeably — with respect, some experience, and occasionally some humor. We hope our community appreciates what we’re trying to build here. And if this isn’t your thing, no hard feelings — there are thousands of other Substacks out there to scratch your particular itch. We do hope to see you next week!

Preamble, A slap in the face for the right

Cosmopolitics Live with Steven Cook

#WTH The Hormuz blockade, and podcast with Miad Maleki

#WTH A ceasefire with Hezbollah, for now,

Cosmopolitics, Ceasefire selfies in the Strait,

For those interest in energy, read this Substack by

Vice President JD Vance speech to Turning Point

Hegseth quoting the “bible” sure does sound a lot like the Pulp Fiction version

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Having failed to get Iran to capitulate on the battlefield, the United States is now trying to squeeze Tehran into submission financially. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent this week called the naval blockade “the financial equivalent of the bombing campaign.” Iran’s answer was to threaten to shut down trade across the Persian Gulf, Gulf of Oman, and Red Sea entirely. Both sides are turning the screws. Neither is blinking. And somehow, in the middle of all this, the two countries are also trying to negotiate a nuclear deal.

I sat down with , one of the sharpest Middle East analysts working today, to make sense of the current moment — the collapsed talks in Islamabad, the blockade, the nuclear negotiation that has somehow materialized in the middle of a war about a strait. His bottom line was not reassuring. Trump backed himself into this war convinced Iran would fold in days. When it didn’t fold on the battlefield, he sought negotiations. When those broke down, he escalated.

The problem with the blockade is that it cuts both ways. Yes, it puts economic pressure on Iran — whose economy was already teetering after six weeks of bombardment. But it also keeps the strait closed, which means oil prices stay elevated, which means Americans keep feeling it at the pump. Trump needs a deal before the midterms. Iran knows that. And Tehran has a long history of using negotiations not to reach agreements but to buy time — getting adversaries to ease military pressure in exchange for talks that go nowhere. The new old regime will run the same play.

The nuclear talks, ostensibly the reason the US went to war in the first place, only complicate matters. The U.S. wants a 20-year suspension of enrichment. Iran offered five years. Those positions are far apart. But the deeper problem is that Washington is now asking Tehran for two concessions simultaneously: give up the nuclear program and relinquish control of the strait.

Before this war, the nuclear program was Iran’s primary leverage. Now Iran also controls Hormuz — not hypothetically, but actually, with mines in the water and ships turning back. A negotiated settlement that leaves Iran with any formalized role over the strait puts Tehran in a stronger position than it was on February 28, before the war started. As Cook put it: who would take that deal?

The ceasefire expires April 22. Three aircraft carriers are now in the region and thousands of additional troops are en route to the region. At the same time, Trump is telling Fox Business the war is “very close to over” and gas prices will be down by the midterms.

Maybe. Or maybe this is what a stalemate looks like when one side needs an exit and the other side knows it.

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Friends: is back this afternoon to discuss the latest developments in Iran. If you’ve joined us before, you know Steven always delivers incisive analysis with supreme wit — and we might even have a laugh or two along the way. We hope you’ll join us TODAY at 4pm ET. Send us your questions in the comments.

There’s a certain perverse genius to what Donald Trump tried to do at the Strait of Hormuz. Iran spent months turning the world’s most important oil corridor into a cash register — extorting ships a toll to pass through a minefield of Tehran’s own making, pocketing reconstruction money from a crisis it created. And Trump looked at it and thought: I want that.

For a brief, strange moment, the logic almost held. If you can’t clear the mines fast enough — and the Navy, embarrassingly, cannot; it has no serious mine-clearing capability to speak of and the Europeans aren’t helping — why not beat Iran at its own game? Stand up a competing safe corridor. Force buyers to pick a side: Tehran’s route or Washington’s. Winner takes the oil market.

It was the kind of move that makes sense for about thirty seconds, until you remember that America’s entire strategic position in the world was built on the opposite premise.

We are in a new phase of this war. The dramatic chapter — the strikes, the escalation, the moment when an American-Israeli operation changed the geography of Iranian power — is over. What comes next is grimmer and less legible: a blockade, a throttled strait, a slow squeeze on a global economy that was already limping. The question is no longer whether the U.S. can break Iran’s military capacity. It’s whether Washington can force open a waterway that Iran has effectively colonized through cheap, asymmetric pressure that didn’t exist before the war started.

Iran’s hold on the Strait was never really about military dominance. It was about psychology. You don’t need to sink tankers when you can spook the insurance market into refusing to cover them. You don’t need to fire missiles when a few mines and a toll booth are enough to redirect global shipping. Iran figured out, years before this war, that the cheapest form of leverage is uncertainty.

The ceasefire deal codified that arrangement. Under the peace plan brokered with Pakistani mediation, Iran and Oman retain the right to charge ships transiting the strait. Let that sink in: a month of American and Israeli bombardment, the death of the Supreme Leader, the closure of Hormuz to global commerce — and the settlement includes Iran keeping a tolling system that the U.S. Secretary of State, just weeks earlier, called “illegal” and “dangerous for the world.”

Yes, dear reader. Marco Rubio said that. Out loud.

The oil picture is what makes the politics almost impossible to manage. Markets are pricing in optimism. The analysts are less sanguine. The crude deficit runs to roughly 7 million barrels a day, with another 4 million in products. Every week the strait stays functionally closed, that gap compounds. The LNG crunch hitting Europe will arrive in the United States as inflation, not as a news story about someone else’s crisis. Trump keeps saying that when this is over, oil prices will come down. He’s not wrong. He’s just describing a scenario that could be a year or more away.

And yet, somehow, nuclear talks are back on the table. There’s a version of this you could tell charitably: the diplomatic track never fully dies, maximalist positions are opening bids, and Trump’s zero-enrichment demand is just leverage before a deal. Vance was already softening it in Islamabad — “maybe you can have the right but not enrich” — before Trump slapped it back to zero. The optimists say that’s negotiating theater.

Maybe. But here’s the question worth sitting with: what exactly is Iran negotiating from now?

Before this war, Iran’s nuclear program was the leverage. Centrifuges spinning, enrichment at 60 percent, a breakout timeline that kept Washington up at night. Iran’s leadership understood something the hawkish case for military action never fully grappled with: a nuclear program you haven’t weaponized yet is more valuable as a bargaining chip than as an actual weapon. The moment you test a bomb, you’ve cashed the chip. The moment the U.S. destroys your facilities, someone else has cashed it for you.

What Iran holds now is more immediately coercive. The Strait of Hormuz isn’t a theoretical future threat — it’s a live throttle on the global economy, one that doesn’t require enrichment timelines or IAEA inspections or arguments about breakout capacity. It requires a minefield and a willingness to hold the line. Iran has both.

Trump may genuinely believe he has Iran on the ropes. The list of targets hit, weapons destroyed and officials killed reads like victory if you don’t look too closely at the terms. But the terms matter. And the terms say that the country that just absorbed a month of American and Israeli bombardment gets to keep charging ships to pass through the world’s most important oil corridor while it rebuilds. If that’s losing, Tehran will take it.

Here is what the new phase actually requires. A credible multinational force to escort commercial shipping — not just U.S. destroyers trying to look confident, but a genuine coalition with standing and legal backing. Economic pressure calibrated to change behavior, not just to hurt. And a day-after plan for what Iranian governance looks like if the regime collapses under pressure from its own people — which is, at this moment, not a fantasy.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration has spent the better part of a year weakening the alliances and institutions that would generate it. NATO is managing its own trust deficit. Gulf partners are watching Washington and hedging. China, which buys most of Iran’s oil, has every incentive to keep the tolling system alive.

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So what we have is a blockade that depends on resources America doesn’t fully have, enforcing rules the administration can’t consistently articulate, in a strait that Iran has already proven it can hold at a fraction of the cost.

Trump said on Truth Social that “big money” would be made by the U.S. “hangin’ around” the Strait of Hormuz — that it could be “the Golden Age of the Middle East.” That’s the verbal equivalent of a ceasefire selfie, a way of declaring victory before the conditions for victory exist.

The strait is not open. The mines are not cleared. The oil is not flowing. The peace plan being discussed gives Tehran a reconstruction fund and a tolling concession. The United States gets a pause in the bombing. That’s not a Golden Age. That’s a breather.

The question for the next phase — the slower, harder, less televisual phase — is whether the administration can build the coalition and the credibility to actually reopen the strait on terms that don’t simply transfer Iran’s leverage to the next crisis.

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After a day of escalating threats — including a warning from President Trump that “a whole civilization” could be wiped out — the United States and Iran agreed to an 11th-hour cease-fire. The deal, brokered through intermediaries including Pakistan, pauses hostilities for two weeks and allows conditional passage through the Strait of Hormuz, the artery through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil flows.

Markets rallied. Oil prices dropped. The immediate crisis passed. But the larger question remains unresolved: What, exactly, was this war meant to accomplish?

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That question sat at the center of my extensive conversation with former National Security Adviser John Bolton — a longtime Iran hawk who supports regime change but is sharply critical of how this war has been executed. His critique is not that the United States acted. It’s that it acted without clarity.

“It was just a big jumble,” he said of the administration’s objectives.

Tactical success, strategic drift

By conventional military measures, the United States and Israel have been effective. Iran’s military infrastructure has taken significant damage. Senior leadership figures have been killed. Its nuclear and missile programs have been degraded.

But wars are not scored on damage alone. Six weeks in, Iran has demonstrated something more consequential: it can still shape the strategic environment. It has disrupted global energy markets, imposed costs on U.S. allies, and turned a long-hypothetical threat into reality — closing the Strait of Hormuz. That shift, Bolton noted, matters more than any single airstrike.

The cease-fire appears to accept a version of that reality — one in which Iran retains influence over the flow of commerce through the Gulf. The United States may be winning tactically while conceding strategically.

The missing objective

From the outset, the administration’s goals have been fluid — sometimes expansive, sometimes contradictory. At various moments, the war has been framed as eliminating Iran’s nuclear threat, degrading its military capabilities, deterring regional aggression, reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and even regime change. Each objective implies a different strategy, a different timeline, and a different level of commitment. Pursuing all of them simultaneously risks achieving none fully.

Bolton, who has consistently argued that regime change is the only durable solution, was blunt: without a clearly defined objective, military gains are inherently temporary. He points to the Israeli habit of “mowing the lawn” — a cycle of degrading capabilities that can be rebuilt. As long as the regime survives, it adapts, rebuilds, and returns.

Despite weeks of bombardment, Iran continues to operate, negotiate, and project leverage. Its leadership may be weakened, but it is not gone — and may be hardening.

“If regime change was ever part of the plan,” Bolton said, “three weeks to put it together wasn’t enough.” A serious effort would have required months of groundwork: organizing internal opposition, encouraging defections, and coordinating pressure from within as well as outside.

“That’s how you do regime change,” he said. “Nobody thought this through.”

A cease-fire, but no resolution

The cease-fire is not a negotiated settlement. It is a pause mediated through intermediaries, with each side interpreting its terms differently. The United States sees it as a step toward reopening global commerce. Iran presents it as a validation of its demands — including its role in managing access to the Strait.

Even the mechanics remain unclear. Is passage through the Strait truly free, or contingent on Iranian approval? Early indications suggest the latter — a development Gulf states view with alarm. The cease-fire buys time. It does not resolve the underlying conflict.

The cost of improvisation

The president’s rhetoric has oscillated between declarations of victory, threats of overwhelming destruction, and appeals for negotiation — sometimes within the same news cycle. At one point, Trump warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” Hours later, he announced a cease-fire.

Bolton’s assessment was direct: there was no strategic communication behind it.

“Presidents… should speak only in aid of a larger strategic plan,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any strategic thinking behind what is being said.”

That inconsistency is not just stylistic. In a conflict where signaling shapes escalation, it creates real risk — of misinterpretation by adversaries, of misalignment within the administration, and of undermining U.S. credibility abroad.

“There’s no filter between Trump’s brain and his mouth,” Bolton said, describing a pattern he observed during his time in the White House.

Bolton argues that Trump’s domestic political considerations — fuel prices, political fallout — may now be driving decisions as much as strategic ones. The cease-fire, in that sense, may be less an endpoint than a pivot.

The alliance problem

Unlike previous major conflicts, the United States did not build a broad international coalition before launching military action. Allies were not meaningfully consulted. European partners kept their distance. Gulf states, while aligned against Iran, now find themselves exposed to the consequences of a partial outcome.

You have to make the case,” Bolton said. “If you don’t… it’s going to cost us. It already has.”

That absence of alignment limits leverage, complicates enforcement, and raises a fundamental question about U.S. leadership in a conflict with global implications.

“The United States does think in global terms. We don’t have any choice,” he said. “What happens in the Gulf means a lot to the Europeans, even though they don’t take much oil directly from it… Iranian terrorist attacks have occurred all over Europe… Europe is within range of Iran’s intermediate-range ballistic missiles.”

Both sides, he suggested, misread the moment — Washington by failing to consult, Europe by failing to engage.

“They should have gritted their teeth,” he said, “and not responded to Trump’s juvenile taunts in a juvenile fashion.”

The war that continues

The cease-fire may pause the fighting. It does not end the war. The core issues remain: Iran’s nuclear ambitions, its regional posture, and its demonstrated ability to disrupt the global economy. The regime — weakened but intact — continues to calculate its next move. Regional actors are recalibrating. China and Russia are watching.

And the United States faces the same unresolved dilemma it did at the start: What is the objective?

Bolton says until that core question is answered — clearly, consistently, and credibly — the risk is not just that the war will continue. It is that it will continue the way it began: without direction or an endgame.

It is hard to win a war when you are not entirely sure what winning looks like.

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As promised, here are few of Ambassador Bolton’s latest pieces:

Regime change in Cuba is different to Venezuela and Iran, The Australian Financial Review

Nato is in peril. Europeans must stay calm in the face of Trump’s baiting, The Sunday Telegraph

Finish the Job: How Trump Can Still Win in Iran The New York Times

And don’t forget to join me and for Hot Takes Happy Hour tomorrow at our regular 5:30 time. LOTS to discuss!

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Nancy has covered wars in the Middle East for two decades. While she brings encyclopedic knowledge of the region and the U.S. military from her years at the Pentagon, she notes that the war in Iran is unlike any she has covered - in large part because of the Trump administration’s tight control over information coming out of the military. Still, her perspective is nuanced, sober, and essential.

There is simply too much happening in real time - including a possible two week ceasefire - to fully make sense of it in any credible way tonight.

Join me tomorrow 9am ET for a special live conversation with Ambassador John Bolton, former National Security Adviser during President Trump’s first term.

Ambassador Bolton is as hawkish on Iran as they come and a longtime proponent of regime change. Yet he has serious concerns about the direction and conduct of this war.

You won’t want to miss it.

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That’s why it was worth talking to him this week, at a moment when the conversation around the war with Iran is increasingly dominated by noise, rhetoric, and a striking lack of clarity about where this is actually going.

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By any conventional military measure, the United States has done what it set out to do in the opening phase of the war. Air and naval dominance are firmly established. Hundreds of strike missions have been carried out. Iranian military infrastructure has been significantly degraded. Not a single U.S. aircraft has been lost.

On paper, it looks like a clean success. In reality, it looks like the beginning of a much more complicated problem. Because for all that operational progress, the central question remains unanswered: where is this headed?

Kimmitt’s answer is telling. So far, he says, the war has been defined by Israel’s attempt at leadership decapitation and a massive U.S. bombing campaign. What we are entering now is something far less defined — a transition point where military pressure continues, but strategic clarity does not.

That uncertainty isn’t a sideshow. It’s the story.

The administration has been careful — almost to the point of semantic gymnastics — in how it describes the deployment of ground forces. They provide “options.”

At a certain point, though, you wonder if “options” are flexibility or a placeholder for a decision that hasn’t been made.

To Kimmitt, what makes this conflict particularly difficult is that the United States and Iran are not fighting the same kind of war. America is fighting a war. Iran is playing for time.

The U.S. approach is familiar: degrade capabilities, destroy infrastructure, reduce the adversary’s ability to fight until it concedes. Kimmitt describes it as a war of “annihilation” — in its reliance on overwhelming force. Iran, by contrast, is fighting something closer to a war of endurance, or what he calls a war of “exhaustion.

“They don’t have to win,” Kimmitt said. “They win by not losing. By living another day.”

That distinction matters more than any individual strike. It explains why the destruction of targets does not necessarily translate into strategic progress — and why the idea of a short, decisive war may be more aspirational than real.

There is a familiar trap in wars like this: the belief that if you can measure it, you’re winning.

In Vietnam, it was body counts. Today, it may be the number of strikes, missiles intercepted, or facilities destroyed. But Kimmitt warns these metrics are a “fallacy.” Tactical success, he notes, can create the illusion of progress without changing the underlying dynamics.

None of this is to discount the military campaign itself. By Kimmitt’s assessment, it has been extraordinarily effective — one of the most precise bombing efforts he has seen. But breaking things, as it turns out, is not the same as achieving something.

That disconnect becomes most visible when you look at what “success” is supposed to mean. For Kimmitt, the answer is straightforward and consistent with decades of U.S. policy: no nuclear capability, no ballistic missiles, and no network of regional proxies.

“All this other stuff is noise,” he said.

Overlaying all of this is a messaging environment that is, at best, confusing.

Kimmitt is careful here. There is a case for unpredictability in war — for keeping the adversary off balance. Confusing the enemy can be useful. But there is also a second audience: the American public and U.S. allies.

“It’s okay to confuse the enemy,” he said. “It’s not okay to confuse your own country.”

Right now, both may be happening at the same time.

For now, the United States is winning the part of the war it knows how to fight. Iran is playing the part it knows how to endure. How this is supposed to end is a question neither side seems in a hurry to answer.

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Then there’s the fog of spin. There’s an enormous amount of disinformation out there right now, and some of it is coming from inside the administration itself. Is Trump quietly looking for an off-ramp? Is there real daylight between him and Netanyahu? Here’s a reality check: the 15-point framework Trump presented to Iran amounted to unconditional surrender. There is no diplomatic ladder being quietly constructed. What you see is what you get.

The honest answer — the part no one in the foreign policy establishment wants to say out loud — is that we don’t really know where this ends. We are spitballing. The administration has been searching for an Iranian Delcý Rodriguez: a pragmatic insider willing to deal, to pivot, to be the face of a transition. That person doesn’t appear to exist in Tehran in any position to act on it. So the goal may be something more modest for now — setting the conditions for an organic transition, fracturing the regime’s internal coalitions, creating space for something different to emerge from within Iranian society. Achievable? Possibly. On what timeline? Nobody knows.

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As Dany put it — channeling Churchill in that way she has — “We are at the end of the beginning. We are not, at the beginning of the end.”

Check out our conversation below with…..🎶 shownotes.

We’ll be back next week, and yes — we are taking reservations for Dictator’s Café. Recipes welcome. See you there.

• The UAE stands up to Iran – Ambassador Yousef al-Otaiba (Wall Street Journal)

• No, Trump is not losing his nerve on Iran – Marc Thiessen (Washington Post)

• #WTH: The Iran War: All the details

• #WTH: Trump’s Iran endgame: podcast with retired General Jack Keane

• Cosmopolitics: Iran is fighting a war - and itself: podcast with Arash Azizi

and…as promised..

• Iran war – the movie trailer

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In Washington and much of the media, the war is framed through the lens of US decision-making: what President Trump wants, what he might accept, what comes next. That focus obscures something more fundamental — Iran is not simply reacting. It is making its own calculations, shaped as much by internal politics as by external pressure.

Right now, Iran is fighting a war while simultaneously trying to figure out what it is becoming. And that tension is shaping everything. Iran is not just resisting — it is regrouping. That distinction helps explain both the trajectory of the war and why it may not end as quickly or cleanly as some expect.

A system without a center

The death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei did not produce a clear succession. It produced diffusion.

Power is now spread across a range of actors — from the Revolutionary Guards to political figures like parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf — navigating a system that is more decentralized and uncertain than it has been in decades. Even if someone wanted to strike a deal with the United States - and it is far from clear anyone does - it is not certain they could bring the system with them.

Ending the war now, Arash argues, would mean turning inward at a moment of profound instability. The population is exhausted. The leadership is in transition. The economy is strained. A ceasefire would force all of those pressures to converge at once. Continuing the war, by contrast, buys time. It allows the regime to project resilience and to frame survival as success, while postponing harder internal questions about leadership and legitimacy.

This war, he notes, is not fundamentally about nuclear capability or territory. It is about the survival of the Islamic Republic as a system. In that context, enduring the conflict can be cast as victory.

The country behind the headlines

What often gets lost is how this looks from inside Iran.

Arash describes a population grappling with a stark contradiction: many fear the war, but they also fear what comes after it. There is a growing concern that a regime that survives this level of external pressure could emerge more entrenched and more willing to turn inward.

At the same time, early hopes that outside pressure might produce change have faded. The war has not created a clear path to transformation, and the idea that external actors will drive political change inside Iran now feels increasingly unrealistic. Iranians currently feel a mix of fear, resignation, and cautious hope for something gradual rather than sudden.

The narratives most commonly predicted assume either imminent regime collapse or decisive transformation. Neither is likely. The opposition remains fragmented, without the leadership or organization needed to translate dissatisfaction into a political alternative. The security apparatus remains intact. There is no obvious force waiting to step in.

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Iran in transition

For all the uncertainty, Arash sees this moment as part of a larger shift.

Iran, he argues, is in a transitional phase — a period between what was and what comes next. The system shaped under Khamenei is already changing, even if its successor is not yet clear.

That does not mean Iran is on the verge of democracy. Far from it. Arash believes the more likely outcome, at least in the near term, is a system that remains authoritarian but becomes less ideologically rigid and more pragmatic — particularly in how it engages the region. In time, that could open the door to a more normalized role for Iran, even potentially a different relationship with the United States.

What stands out in Arash’s analysis is not just the structural argument, but the human one. His view of Iran is grounded in the lives of Iranians navigating this moment with fear, fatigue, and determination.

He speaks not only about democracy, but about dignity — about the possibility of a more stable, more livable future. He wants Iran to be free, democratic and prosperous.

Arash does not expect that future to come quickly. But he believes this moment — as violent and uncertain as it is — may be part of a longer process moving the country in that direction.

For now, the war continues. But it is unfolding inside a system already in transition, shaped as much by internal change as by external pressure. And that is the part of the story that is too often overlooked: Iran is not just the target of this war. It is an actor in it — and a country in the midst of becoming something new.

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What also struck him was Khamenei’s utter ack of charisma. That stood in sharp contrast to Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime Hezbollah leader whose commanding personality had frustrated Feltman during his years as US Ambassador to Lebanon. Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut in September 2024 - ending a 32-year reign at the helm of one of the region’s most powerful armed movements.

Few people understand the Middle East’s fault lines - and America’s complicated role within them - quite like Jeff, who has spent decades navigating the region’s most volatile moments from the inside. In our conversation, he shared his unvarnished read on the current war, Iran’s strategic calculus, and what kind of Middle East may emerge on the other side.

Jeff - who oversaw the largest non-combatant evacuation in US history during the 2006 Lebanon war - had little patience for the Trump administration’s failure to evacuate Americans before this war began, calling it a flat-out “dereliction” of duty.

If you missed the live interview, the recording is below. It runs a bit longer than usual, because Jeff had that much to say, and frankly, we could have kept going.

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and I are back in business later today with Hot Takes Happy Hour. Much to discuss. Hope to see you at 5:30p ET. Same bat channel, same old bats. 🦇🦇

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That was the focus of my conversation , founder of Allegro Public Affairs and author of the Substack . Horne spent more than two decades in national security communications, including two tours on the National Security Council under Presidents Obama and Biden. She helped lead the Biden administration’s “declassify and share” information strategy ahead of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine - a communications effort designed to prepare the public and allies for what was coming.

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Which is why the rollout of President Trump’s war with Iran has struck her as so unusual.

“I’ll be generous and say the messaging has been inconsistent and messy,” Horne said. “But honestly, that’s the most charitable description I can offer.”

Going to war is usually accompanied by a deliberate effort to explain the stakes. Even when administrations disagree about whether to seek formal congressional authorization, they typically attempt to level with the American people about the threat, the objective, and what success would look like.

None of that clarity has emerged here. In a line I plan to borrow forever, Emily wrote in the lead up to the war that the administration shouldn’t be able to “yada-yada its way past” the prospect of attacking Iran.

Instead, the administration has offered a series of shifting explanations - regime change, eliminating Iran’s nuclear capability, countering proxy militias, supporting Israel, backing protesters. Each may be part of the picture. But delivered piecemeal by different officials emphasizing different priorities, the result is confusion.

“The American people don’t know what this war is actually about,” Horne said.

She describes the problem in Spin Class using what she calls the “Underpants Gnomes theory of foreign policy.” The reference - borrowed from South Park - describes plans that leap from step one to step three while skipping the difficult middle.

In this case, the logic looks something like: strike Iran, destabilize the regime… and then somehow arrive at a peaceful outcome. The missing piece is everything in between.

Part of the problem, Horne argues, is the absence of the policymaking process that normally precedes a war. In previous administrations, proposals are stress-tested through an interagency process designed to anticipate second- and third-order effects before a president acts.

“When you work at the National Security Council or the State Department, your job is to poke holes in ideas,” she said. “You stress-test them so that by the time a decision is made, you’ve thought through as many ways as possible that it could go wrong.”

That process appears largely absent today.

The communications environment has also changed dramatically. Most Americans no longer receive their news from traditional briefings or presidential speeches. They get it from social media and algorithm-driven platforms. A modern messaging strategy must meet audiences where they are.

But that only works if there is a coherent policy to communicate.

“A good comms strategy requires a good policy,” Horne said. “And right now we don’t have a clearly defined one.”

At the same time, Trump has been conducting a steady stream of brief phone interviews with reporters, often offering new claims about the war or about Iran’s future leadership. The interviews may produce five minutes of exclusive headlines. But they also underscore the absence of something more important: a direct, sustained conversation with the American people about the road ahead.

And some of those comments risk undermining the administration’s own stated goals.

If the objective is to give Iranians the chance to determine their future, publicly speculating about who should replace the country’s supreme leader is counterproductive.

If Trump wanted to give the Iranian people the best possible chance at something new, he would say nothing about who leads Iran next. Every time he opens his mouth about succession, he makes the reformers’ job harder and the hardliners’ job easier.”

In other words, the problem may not just be that the administration is misreading Iran. It may be that the messaging itself is actively working against the outcome it claims to want.

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Look forward to seeing you all tomorrow for some more important Iran discussions.

If you missed my conversation with veteran Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr, you can watch the recording here. As always, Barbara’s analysis of the conflict with Iran — and its potential consequences — is sharp and clear-eyed.

Tomorrow Congress will vote on a war powers resolution, and much of the debate has focused on whether such authorization is even necessary. I’m less concerned about that question — administrations of both parties have often declined to seek it — than I am about the administration’s shifting rationale for war, and even more so about the endgame.

A lot of this comes down to mixed messaging from the administration — which will be the focus of my next conversation, with Emily Horne, author of the whip-smart Substack Spin Class on messaging, communications strategy, and the politics that shape them. I highly recommend subscribing.

In a recent column, Emily unpacks the messaging around the decision to go to war with Iran through what she calls the Underpants Gnomes Theory of Foreign Policy (yes, it’s a South Park reference). In a line I plan to borrow forever, she writes that the administration shouldn’t be able to “yada-yada its way past” the prospect of attacking Iran.

Cosmopolitics depends on reader support. If you value independent foreign policy journalism that treats you like an adult, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

I hope you’ll join us tomorrow at 1pm ET / 10am PT.

Danny will be sending out today’s special Hot Takes edition on Iran, and we’ll be back tomorrow at our regular time — 5:30pm ET / 2:30pm PT.

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Thank you Emily Horne, David Galinsky, Lana, Courtney Busby, Maria I. Puerta Riera, and many others for tuning into my live video with Danielle Pletka! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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Let’s start with what everyone is thinking: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death, like those of Hassan Nasrallah, Muammar Gaddafi, and Saddam Hussein before him, was earned. Karma, eventually, is a bitch. The man presided over the murder of thousands of his own citizens, funded terrorism that killed Americans across decades, and built a regional empire of destabilization and proxy violence. There are no tears here.

But satisfaction and strategy are different things. And right now, the United States has one without the other.

Iran has now confirmed what Israeli and American officials began signaling within hours of the opening strikes: the Supreme Leader is dead, killed in a joint American-Israeli operation targeting leadership gatherings across Tehran. It is an earthquake — the longest-serving dictator in the world, eliminated. For Iranians who have been shot, imprisoned, and tortured under his rule, and for the families of Americans killed by Iranian-backed terrorism, this is a moment of undeniable significance.

It is also not the end of the story. Not even close.

There will be plenty of time to examine how we got here and whether the threat was truly imminent enough to justify it. That accounting matters and it will come. But right now, with a window that will not stay open long, the most urgent question is not how we got here. It’s what we do next.

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This is not the Wizard of Oz

Reports of celebrations in Tehran are real. So are reports of Revolutionary Guard forces firing on those same crowds. That split screen is your answer to anyone expecting a “ding dong the witch is dead” moment — where the regime simply melts away, Iranians join hands in the streets, and the Islamic Republic dissolves because its leader is gone.

It won’t happen that way. And anyone telling you otherwise hasn’t been paying attention.

When Gaddafi was killed, his regime collapsed with him — because Libya was a personal dictatorship built around one man. When Maduro was captured, Venezuela’s government was thrown into crisis for the same reason. Iran is different. The Islamic Republic is a revolutionary system, forty-six years old and institutionally entrenched. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps controls the guns, the money, the oil, and the repressive apparatus of the state. It was built explicitly to outlast any single leader.

The CIA reportedly assessed before these strikes that even if Khamenei was killed, hardline IRGC figures were ready to step in — though, frankly, that is a scenario serious Iran experts have been predicting for years. Names like Ali Larijani — former head of the Revolutionary Guard, senior security official — are already circulating as potential successors. What fills the vacuum could be a more pragmatic figure. Or it could be a military junta with none of the theological constraints the ayatollahs nominally observed. An IRGC dictatorship replacing the clerical system is not regime change. It is a new problem.

The head of the snake may be gone. What grows back is an open question.

The missing piece

Trump called on the Iranian people to rise up. “Let’s see how you respond,” he said. “America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force.”

But backing who, and with what, exactly? There is no credible, organized opposition force waiting to fill a vacuum. The civil society activists, the women’s rights organizers, the ethnic minorities, the monarchists rallying around Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former Shah — these groups exist but are fragmented, unarmed, and have not been meaningfully supported. The Trump administration spent the past year actively dismantling the tools that could have helped: defunding Iranian human rights groups, gutting Radio Farda, installing partisan leadership at Voice of America’s Farsi channel.

When Trump called on Iran’s military leaders to lay down their weapons, there was an implicit hope behind the request — that some within the IRGC and armed forces might break ranks and side with the Iranian people. It has happened before in other revolutions. It is not impossible here. But it doesn’t happen on its own. It requires cultivation, back-channel contact, and years of groundwork with potential defectors.

Bottom line: Trump told Iranians help was on the way. There is little evidence that the work has been done to make that promise real.

And for Iranians, American promises carry a very particular weight. In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence orchestrated a coup that toppled Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, and restored the Shah to power. That intervention became the founding grievance of the Islamic Revolution — the original wound around which the entire theocratic system was built. For nearly half a century, the regime has justified every act of repression by pointing to American interference. When an American president now promises liberation, Iranians hear it through that history. They want to believe it. They have reason to be cautious.

America’s record on regime change is zero for three. Iraq. Libya. Lebanon. In each case the military operation worked and the political plan didn’t exist. In Iraq, we disbanded the military and exiled the entire administrative class. The void was filled by sectarian militias and eventually ISIS. In Libya, we helped topple Gaddafi from the air, declared victory, and walked away. The country has been in civil war ever since. Iran is two and a half times the size of Iraq, with 92 million people, multiple ethnic groups — Kurds, Baluchis, Azerbaijanis, Persians — and competing visions for what comes next. The question is not only whether the regime falls. It’s whether Iran holds together as a country when it does, or whether it fragments into something even more dangerous.

Trump has shown little interest in the slow, unglamorous work of supporting democratic transitions. A “win” here could mean the same as it has in Venezuela so far: regime management that leaves Iranians to face whatever comes next largely alone.

A narrow window

Iran made a catastrophic miscalculation in its retaliation. Rather than confining its response to Israel and American targets, it struck six nations in the region, hitting civilian targets in Dubai and Doha. The Gulf states were never enthusiastic about this operation — Iran had a chance to drive a wedge between Washington and its Arab allies. Instead it attacked them. That is not strategic thinking. That is panic. And panic at the top creates cracks.

Those cracks are a window. A narrow one that will not stay open long. This is the moment to work urgently with the Iranian opposition — to help credible voices find each other, communicate, and organize. Only the Iranian people can ultimately change this regime. It cannot be done with airstrikes. But the outside world can create conditions that give Iranians a fighting chance. The United States has not done that work. It needs to start now, today, while the window is open.

Was this necessary now?

That question deserves an honest answer, and the honest answer is: not obviously. The threat posed by Iran is real, no question. But it was not presenting an imminent threat to the United States. The most alarming intelligence claim floating around — that Iran could have an ICBM capable of hitting the American homeland — was a straight-line projection to 2035, not an imminent danger. Secretary of State Marco Rubio spent weeks laying the rhetorical groundwork for “preemptive” strikes, but preemptive implies a ticking clock that the intelligence did not entirely support.

What appears to have actually happened is that diplomatic talks in Geneva collapsed. Trump’s envoys came back from nuclear talks last week empty-handed — the Iranian proposal was insulting and nowhere near acceptable to the Americans — and the diplomatic off-ramp closed. “My preference is to solve this problem through diplomacy,” Trump said at the State of the Union, just days ago. When diplomacy failed, he went to the maximalist option.

When asked weeks ago what his endgame was, the President said simply: “To win.”

That is not a strategy. Winning means something different if the objective is nuclear disarmament, something different if it is degrading Iran’s missile capability, something different again if it is regime change. Each carries a different price, a different timeline, a different definition of success. Right now, those objectives are being conflated - and that conflation is dangerous.

“I have several off-ramps,” Trump told Axios’ Barak Ravid on Saturday. “I can go long and take the whole thing. Or I can go on for another two or three days and tell the Iranians: we’ll see you again in a few years if you try to rebuild.” It suggests Trump is thinking about this less as a war with a defined endpoint and more as a demonstration of consequences, with the terms still being written in real time.

What comes next

The strikes are not over. The Strait of Hormuz remains at risk — 20 percent of the world’s oil moves through that corridor, and Iran still has the ability to threaten it. Hezbollah retains significant missile capabilities to Israel’s north. Terrorism against American citizens and diplomatic targets abroad is a live possibility. The USS Gerald R. Ford is positioned in those waters for a reason. Fifty thousand Americans are in harm’s way. Whatever your politics — say a prayer.

Khamenei’s death is significant. His removal, like Nasrallah’s before him, does real damage to the architecture of Iranian power and has the potential to result in a dramatic reshaping of geopolitics in the Middle East.

But the Revolutionary Guard is still armed. Nuclear material is still somewhere underground. The opposition is still fragmented. And the United States — with Israel as its only declared partner, no coalition, no congressional authorization, and no public strategy for the morning after — is at the beginning of the beginning.

The Iranian people deserve the world’s support. The brutal regime they have lived under deserves to fall. That much is clear. What is not clear is whether Trump’s approach will help them or harm them. His rhetoric has raised expectations he may not meet.

The history of American promises to Iran is not a happy one — and Iranians know that better than anyone.They’re hoping this chapter ends differently.

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Folks: and I hope to see you tomorrow at Hot Takes Happy Hour. My take on President Trump’s marathon State of the Union below, but Dany and I promise some more spicy takes on the speech!

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Larry has spent his career studying how democracies die. He’s watched authoritarianism creep into Venezuela, Turkey, Hungary, and India. Now he’s applying that same analytical lens to the United States . Nobody wants to think of America in that light. But Larry tells me he is seeing patterns that should concern all of us, regardless of party.

In our conversation, Larry walks through what he calls “the autocrats’ 12-step program” - the playbook used by leaders around the world to consolidate power: weaponizing state institutions, purging watchdog agencies, intimidating independent media, and manipulating electoral rules. He explains where we are on that trajectory and what he’s most worried about right now.

This isn’t a conversation about despair. Larry talks about how authoritarianism has been reversed in Poland, Brazil, and Senegal. He explains what actually works - and what role each of us can play.

As he says: “This is not a one-party problem.” This is about defending institutions that belong to all Americans. And this is not a time to sit around being outraged. It’s time to reclaim our civic agency, regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum.

On that note, we hope to see you Thursday for Hot Takes Happy Hour. don’t always agree on the issues, but we debate them respectfully an effort to understand the complex challenges facing the country beyond the partisan noise. That’s the work!

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Friends: please join me TODAY at 4p ET/1p PT for a special Substack live with of Stanford University. There’s a particular kind of expertise that comes from watching democracies unravel in real time across multiple continents. Larry has that expertise. And right now, he’s seeing the same patterns playing out in America. “A rapid slide to authoritariani…

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If you haven’t already, subscribe and join us. This community only works because you show up.

Steven and I tried to map the region the way it actually is - not the way press conferences describe it. And here’s where I think we landed:

Everything right now looks like diplomacy. Everything right now also looks like war prep. Both things are true at the same time, which is… not exactly calming.

But first: Iran

After his three-hour meeting with Netanyahu this week, President Trump posted:

Preference. Not commitment. Not strategy. Preference.

Meanwhile - and this is the part people in the region notice - the United States is massing serious hardware in the Gulf. Carrier groups, destroyers, air defenses. The kind of posture that says: we’re talking, but don’t mistake that for hesitation.

It’s classic leverage politics: talk softly, park an armada offshore.

The problem is that leverage has a shelf life. You can’t keep tens of thousands of troops and billions of dollars’ worth of assets floating there indefinitely. At some point you either use it or you don’t, and everyone knows it.

Still, it’s unclear what Trump’s bottom line is. That uncertainty is supposed to scare Iran, but it also scares allies - and occasionally, U.S. officials.

Because here’s the quieter truth beneath the rhetoric: a big war with Iran would be hard, much harder than the slogans suggest.

Tehran may be politically fragile - protests, sanctions, a battered economy - but militarily it still has teeth. Missiles, drones, proxies. Plenty of ways to make life miserable for U.S. bases and Gulf energy infrastructure.

So Washington is threading a needle: threatening war while quietly rediscovering how complicated war actually is. And in the meantime, negotiations themselves may be giving the regime breathing room - which is exactly what makes Israel nervous.

Netanyahu’s position hasn’t changed: a narrow nuclear deal isn’t enough. He wants missiles and proxies on the table too. Tehran has already said no. So the two leaders are aligned on pressure, but not necessarily on what “success” looks like. And when the objectives aren’t clear, leverage starts to look a lot like drift.

Meanwhile: the West Bank

While everyone watches Iran, something quieter - and potentially more combustible - is happening closer to home for Israel.

The West Bank story isn’t dramatic. No aircraft carriers, no summits. Just paperwork, permits, jurisdiction tweaks, expanded enforcement. Incremental steps that, taken together, look a lot like annexation without anyone wanting to use the word annexation. Call it bureaucratic geopolitics.

At the same time, the administration is talking up diplomacy - Gaza stabilization, regional normalization, Trump’s nebulous “Board of Peace.” It’s a very Washington phrase that sounds great on a panel but is less clear on the ground.

Publicly, Netanyahu is playing along. Privately, many in his coalition still believe force, not frameworks, is what actually changes facts.

So again: diplomacy on top, pressure underneath. Same pattern as Iran. Talks in the daylight, tanks idling in the background.

The throughline: Everyone is negotiating. No one fully trusts negotiations.

Trump prefers deals but likes threats even more. Iran wants sanctions relief without real concessions. Israel wants guarantees that probably aren’t negotiable. The Gulf wants everybody to please calm down because they live inside the blast radius.

It’s less a strategy than a standoff, and it produces this strange, unstable middle ground where talks continue right up until the moment they don’t.

Which is why moments like yesterday matter. The headlines make everything sound binary - deal or war, diplomacy or strikes. The reality is murkier, more incremental, more human. It’s officials hedging, allies whispering, militaries planning for things leaders hope never happen. It’s uncertainty dressed up as strategy.

Thank you

One reason I’m so grateful for this community is that we get to have these conversations without pretending there are easy answers. We can say: this is complicated, this is risky, nobody really knows, and still keep reporting, asking, pressing.

If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do. Cosmopolitics runs on readers who want depth, along with some hot takes. Speaking of which, and I will be back next week with Hot Takes Happy Hour.

Thank you for showing up yesterday. For reading. For caring about foreign policy when it’s easier not to. We’ll keep convening smart people, keep asking uncomfortable questions, and keep trying to figure out – together - whether all this “diplomacy” is headed somewhere real… or just buying time before the next crisis.

More soon …

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Friends: With the exception of Hot Takes Happy Hour with , I took a beat last week. After the seizure of Maduro, the showdown over Greenland, the Davos dumpster fire, and the upheaval in Minneapolis - which has consumed the country and captured global attention - I needed to step back, do some reporting, and talk to people smarter than me about where e…

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Friends: You don’t want to miss today’s Hot Takes Happy Hour. Me and will be breaking down all the developments out of Davos, the latest on Iran and more. We are starting a bit earlier today at 5:00 pm ET. Hope to see you there. Check out Dany’s fantastic piece beforehand about Trump’s “imperialist agenda” and some of his Machiavellian advisers trying …

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