Yesterday President Trump threatened to hit Iran “VERY HARD TONIGHT,” floated seizing Kharg Island and taking “total control” of Iran’s oil and gas industry, canceled the strikes, and announced that a peace deal could be signed in Europe as soon as this weekend. All before lunch ended in Washington.

And it was only the latest whiplash. For days now, U.S. forces have been shooting down Iranian drones over the Strait of Hormuz - the same strait Trump keeps promising will reopen any day - while the president swings between deals, threats, and victory laps.

Other presidents took months to move through deterrence, escalation, and de-escalation. Trump now runs the entire cycle between breakfast and the closing bell. It is less a strategy than a mood ring.

Aesop got here first. The shepherd boy cried wolf so many times that when the wolf finally came, nobody ran. Trump has spent four months crying in both directions at once - wolf and deal, annihilation and signing ceremony, sometimes in the same news cycle - and the audience that matters most stopped running long ago.

Since mid-April, Trump has claimed something like thirty times that an agreement was imminent, that Iran had “agreed to everything,” that all significant differences were bridged. On Thursday he told a Georgia tele-rally that “we ended the war with Iran today” and that “we got everything we wanted.”

Tehran’s reply came from Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei: “So far, Iran has not reached a final conclusion on the agreement.”

It’s all what former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Leon Panetta has called “a kabuki dance.” Which seems unfair to kabuki, an art form that at least follows a script.

Consider what Tehran sees: a president eager for a deal, a war that has become politically draining at home, and a pattern in which every Iranian counterpunch is followed less by escalation than by renewed declarations that peace is just around the corner.

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Every drone launched toward the Strait. Every missile fired at a Gulf base. Every provocation is met not with the promised hellfire but with another announcement that negotiations are making progress.

To be fair, Trump has not simply talked. Over the past week, the United States launched new strikes after Iranian attacks, and Iran responded with strikes of its own. But listen carefully to how the Pentagon described them: not as an escalation, but “defensive strikes” - a phrase that does for bombing roughly what “pre-owned” does for used cars.

That’s what Tehran notices. Even when Washington uses force, it simultaneously signals restraint. Even when Trump escalates, his own administration is explaining why the escalation is limited. The message is not “we are prepared to widen this war.” The message is “we are trying very hard not to.”

The Iranians can read that as well as anyone. The regime absorbed an air campaign that killed senior commanders and crippled military infrastructure. It absorbed defensive strikes. It absorbed threats of overwhelming retaliation. And the lesson it appears to have drawn is simple: the threats Trump is willing to execute, he’s already executed. The ones that would fundamentally change the conflict, he does not want to execute.

Which brings us to Thursday’s entry in the catalogue: Kharg Island, the small island that handles roughly 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports. Thursday morning, Trump was publicly discussing the possibility of taking it. By Thursday afternoon, asked whether the idea was off the table, he replied: “It would be. If we sign this agreement.”

That sentence is the whole problem. A military operation announced in advance and then dangled as leverage is not really a threat. It is a bargaining chip. If a reporter published the timing and target of a pending U.S. military operation, the Justice Department would be drafting indictments. When the commander in chief does it on social media, it’s called negotiating.

So if Trump is serious, he has telegraphed an operation whose success depends partly on surprise. If he is not serious, he has reinforced Tehran’s belief that the loudest threats are negotiating theater.

The Iranians can do the same math as the Pentagon. Seizing an island twenty-one miles off the Iranian coast means American forces holding territory under missile and artillery fire in a war that much of the public already wants to end. Tehran is betting Trump will never take that risk and, so far, the bet keeps paying.

Only the markets still seem to flinch. Every social media post moves oil prices, and Thursday’s deal talk sent crude tumbling on cue. Somewhere on Wall Street, there is now a trader whose entire job is refreshing the president’s feed at 2 p.m. But even there, the faith is beginning to erode. One petroleum analyst went on CNN yesterday and wondered aloud whether Trump had become “the boy who cried wolf.”

When the oil analysts are quoting Aesop, the spell may be breaking. Though the lesson of the fable was not that the boy lied. It was that eventually nobody listened.

Maybe the deal really does get signed this weekend. I’d welcome it. But after four months of imminent breakthroughs, final ultimatums, last chances, and almost-there agreements, Tehran seems to have concluded that Trump’s threats are negotiable and his deadlines movable. Coercive diplomacy runs on credibility, and credibility is a currency you cannot print.

Wake me when there’s a signature. Better yet, wake me when the deal holds.

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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.

Which is why veteran foreign correspondent Conor Powell spent years investigating the people who control it. He joined me Tuesday to discuss before the start of the tournament.

What began as a podcast about FIFA became something much bigger. His series Lords of Soccer traces how a relatively obscure governing body became one of the most powerful institutions on earth - one that negotiates with presidents and kings, influences national policy, and shapes how entire countries see themselves.

After reporting the story, Conor arrived at a simple conclusion: FIFA is not really a sports organization, but a political institution that happens to run a sport.

The popular mythology presents soccer as a game that transcends politics. As Conor argues, politics has been in FIFA’s DNA from the start. Founded in Paris in 1904 - by, as he puts it, “the same old European men who ran everything else” - FIFA made a habit of working with whoever held power. He calls the organization “probably the biggest political backer of South African apartheid outside of the British government,” and the pattern held for decades: military juntas in Latin America, monarchies in the Gulf, democracies seeking prestige.

The clients changed. The business model didn’t.

Then television turned the World Cup into one of the most valuable properties in global entertainment, and the money poured in. So did the corruption - bribery, vote-buying, kickbacks, patronage networks stretching across continents. When the U.S. Justice Department unveiled its sweeping case in 2015, many casual fans were stunned. Conor Powell was not.

Development funds and tournament slots doubled as political tools, dispensed by an organization that is, on paper, a Swiss nonprofit. Yet FIFA survived. If anything, it emerged stronger.

Enter Gianni Infantino, who inherited an organization facing an existential credibility crisis. To his credit, real reforms followed: more transparency, sturdier governance, and a harder environment for the old envelope-passing culture. Conor doesn’t dismiss those changes. He just declines to confuse reform with the disappearance of power.

Infantino may be cleaner than previous FIFA presidents - a low bar, but a real one. He is also the most politically connected, having cultivated relationships with world leaders across continents, including Donald Trump, to whom FIFA presented its own freshly created peace prize last December.

That relationship matters now. The upcoming World Cup, spanning the United States, Canada, and Mexico, will be the largest ever held. It promises record revenues, record audiences, and record attention - which to FIFA are three ways of saying the same thing.

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It also faces a uniquely geopolitical environment. Iran has qualified - and reports suggest its team may stay in Mexico and fly in for matches rather than risk complications entering or remaining in the United States. FIFA’s promise of universal participation may collide with national security considerations beyond its control.

Nor is Iran the only problem. In a tournament built around global inclusion, access itself is becoming political. A World Cup referee from Somalia was denied entry into the United States days before the tournament because of what U.S. officials called “vetting concerns.”

Then there is the cost. Ticket prices are pushing ordinary supporters further from the world’s biggest sporting event, and fans will not be allowed to bring their own water into stadiums in the summer heat.

That is an irony FIFA can live with, because it has no competition and knows it. “The problem with FIFA,” Conor told me, “is that there is just no amount of money they won’t chase.” Complaining about FIFA is itself something of a global pastime, and it has never once dented the ratings.

The larger question hanging over 2026 is whether the World Cup can still bring people together. It is a cliché of international sport, but it feels unusually relevant today.

And yet every four years, billions of people gather around the same event. For a few weeks, citizens of rival nations share a common experience. The same goals, wins and upsets become collective memories.

After years spent cataloguing FIFA’s flaws, Conor remains fascinated by that paradox. The organization may be political, commercial, and imperfect, but the world’s game endures anyway. That may be FIFA’s greatest achievement - and its greatest source of power.

You can listen to Lords of Soccer wherever you follow your podcasts. It is an excellent series worthy of your time.

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Let’s start with what President Trump actually accomplished in Iran.

He set out to eliminate the Islamic Republic’s nuclear threat — the thing that had kept American presidents up at night for three decades, survived the Obama nuclear deal, survived Trump’s first-term maximum pressure campaign, and survived endless rounds of diplomacy that produced agreements nobody fully trusted and timelines everyone knew were temporary.

Trump sent in the bombers. He hit the enrichment facilities. He killed the Supreme Leader. He did what each of his predecessors debated, deferred, and ultimately refused to do.

And then Ali Nikzad, deputy speaker of Iran’s parliament, offered perhaps the clearest articulation yet of how some in Tehran now view the conflict. Speaking after last week’s maritime confrontations in the Gulf, he declared: “The Strait of Hormuz is Iran’s atomic bomb.”

Sit with that for a moment. Because if Nikzad is right, then the war may have produced an unexpected result. Trump set out to eliminate Iran’s most important source of strategic leverage. Instead, he may have accelerated Tehran’s shift toward a form of leverage that is both more usable and, in some respects, more effective.

The odd thing about Iran’s nuclear program is that its greatest value was never necessarily the bomb itself. A usable nuclear weapon would almost certainly trigger the very confrontation Tehran spent decades trying to avoid. The real value was in remaining perpetually on the threshold of a bomb — close enough to keep the world, particularly the United States and Israel, awake at night, not quite close enough to trigger the apocalypse. For years, Iran turned nuclear ambiguity into a foreign policy asset.

The Strait of Hormuz operates differently. A bomb is a latent threat. Hormuz is an active one. Iran does not need to enrich uranium to weapons grade, evade inspectors, or build underground facilities to remind the world of its importance. It simply needs to create uncertainty in a narrow waterway through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes. During this war, Tehran discovered that mines, insurance premiums, nervous shipping executives, and strategic ambiguity could produce economic shockwaves that traveled much farther than any missile.

None of this means nuclear weapons suddenly do not matter. A nuclear capability still changes military calculations in ways a shipping lane never can. It deters attacks, reshapes alliances, and alters the regional balance of power. But deterrence and leverage are not the same thing. A bomb is a threat Iran may never use. Hormuz is leverage Tehran is already using and can exercise again tomorrow morning. One threatens future catastrophe. The other creates immediate pain. And immediate pain tends to concentrate minds.

None of this should be confused with an Iranian victory. Tehran has absorbed enormous damage. The Supreme Leader is dead. Key military infrastructure has been degraded. The economy, already struggling before the war, is under even greater strain. The blockade is biting. A regime facing those realities cannot reasonably be described as operating from a position of strength.

Yet weakness and leverage are not mutually exclusive. Iran may be weaker than it was before the war while simultaneously possessing more negotiating leverage than it did before the war.

American debates about Iran often collapse into a false choice. Either Tehran is on the verge of collapse or it is ten feet tall and strategically brilliant. Reality is more complicated. Iran remains a difficult problem for the same reason it has frustrated multiple administrations. The Obama-era nuclear agreement bought time but never resolved the underlying question. Maximum pressure failed to produce capitulation. Trump didn’t create that menu. He ordered from it badly.

The frustration surrounding the latest negotiations reflects this reality. Just weeks ago, both sides appeared to be inching toward a limited understanding that would freeze the conflict and create space for broader nuclear talks. Then some form of diplomatic Groundhog Day kicked in. New demands emerged. Old disagreements returned. The goalposts moved. And anyone trying to follow the process woke up each morning to a slightly different version of the same demands, denials, and strategic leaks masquerading as progress.

What didn’t change was the underlying problem: Washington is no longer negotiating only over centrifuges and enrichment levels. It is negotiating over leverage, and Tehran believes the war left it with more of it than many in Washington are prepared to acknowledge.

Which brings us to Trump’s problem. The administration appears to be searching for a Goldilocks deal on Iran: tougher than Obama’s, acceptable to Tehran, and straightforward enough to survive the trip from the Situation Room to the campaign trail.

The difficulty is that the war may have changed the negotiating landscape. Before the conflict, Washington was asking Iran to negotiate over one source of leverage: the nuclear program.

Hormuz has become a bargaining chip as well. Unlike uranium enrichment, Tehran has already demonstrated a willingness to use it. That changes the negotiation fundamentally. Washington is no longer trying to roll back one source of Iranian leverage. It is trying to roll back two.

A deal that ignores Hormuz is incomplete. A deal that formally acknowledges Iran’s ability to influence traffic through Hormuz risks leaving Tehran with greater regional leverage than it possessed before the war. Neither outcome is particularly attractive.

Which is why the perfect deal Trump keeps describing may not exist.

“The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it,” Trump wrote in *The Art of the Deal.* One suspects Tehran’s negotiators have highlighted that passage.

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For three decades, the world treated Iran’s nuclear program as the central fact of Middle Eastern geopolitics. Entire administrations were built around slowing it, monitoring it, sanctioning it, negotiating it, or threatening to destroy it.

Trump went to war to solve that problem. He may yet succeed. But in the process, he may also have awakened a sleeping source of Iranian leverage — one that does not require enrichment facilities, underground bunkers, or IAEA inspections. One that sits in plain sight on every map of the Persian Gulf.

Wars have a habit of solving the problem everyone is talking about while creating the one nobody anticipated. The nuclear question brought the United States and Iran to the brink of war. The negotiation now is about leverage — who has it, who gives it up, and what each side is willing to pay to keep it. That conversation looks very different than it did before the war.

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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.

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The Trump administration has spent months methodically squeezing Cuba — cutting off its oil supply, sanctioning the military conglomerate that controls much of the island’s economy, and now indicting 94-year-old former president Raúl Castro on murder charges connected to the 1996 shootdown of two civilian planes flown by Miami-based exiles.

The message from Washington is unmistakable: Cuba is next. But the deeper question is not whether Cuba can be squeezed harder. It’s what happens if the pressure actually works.

The administration appears to believe Cuba is simply Venezuela with better cigars and worse WiFi: another brittle authoritarian state that can be pressured, isolated and pushed toward collapse. But collapsing governments and replacing governments are not the same thing — something Washington has spent the better part of two decades relearning from Baghdad to Caracas.

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And what’s striking about this moment is not simply the escalation itself, but how familiar the rhythm suddenly feels. Washington spends its mornings talking about AI competition with China and semiconductor supply chains and its evenings floating regime change 90 miles off the Florida coast like it’s 1962 with Starlink.

Somewhere along the way, “America First” started sounding a lot like “back to the hemisphere.”

The indictment of Castro, announced Wednesday at a ceremony in Miami timed to coincide with Cuban independence day, follows a by-now familiar Trump administration script. In January, U.S. special forces seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a raid on his Caracas compound after a secret grand jury indictment. The legal charge created the pretext; the military operation executed it. The administration has been signaling ever since that the same logic could apply to Havana.

But the differences matter enormously. When Maduro fell, there was a ready-made successor structure willing to cooperate with Washington. Cuba has no equivalent. Raúl Castro, despite formally retiring years ago, still appears to function as the regime’s final veto point. His grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro — known as “Raúlito” — has emerged as Havana’s backchannel to Washington, quietly meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and later CIA Director John Ratcliffe. But he is a gatekeeper, not a successor. Not only is there no obvious Cuban equivalent of the post-Maduro arrangement Washington engineered in Venezuela, the government is warning Washington a military assault on Cuba would cause a “bloodbath with incalculable consequences.”

And then there’s the optics problem. Removing Maduro allowed the administration to present the operation as a kind of hemispheric counter-narcotics mission wrapped in regime change. Dragging a 95-year-old revolutionary across the Florida Straits in handcuffs is something else entirely. Even some of the indictment’s loudest supporters tacitly acknowledge the real target is not Castro himself, but the survival of the regime he represents. “Real justice,” Republican Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis said this week, would mean “seeing the regime ending, being brought to its knees.”

That is not really a prosecution. It is an endgame. And endgames are much easier to announce than to manage — especially when the target is a collapsing island of 10 million people sitting one short boat ride from Florida.

Meanwhile, the humanitarian pressure is becoming impossible to ignore. Since Washington effectively cut off Venezuelan oil shipments to the island — Cuba’s primary energy lifeline — the country has descended into what increasingly resembles a slow-motion systems failure. Blackouts in Havana can last up to 22 hours a day. Hospitals are postponing surgeries. Refrigerators fail. Families charge phones whenever electricity briefly flickers back to life like campers spotting civilization after days in the wilderness. Cuba’s own energy minister has acknowledged the island has exhausted its diesel and fuel oil reserves. Two major European shipping firms have suspended Cuba-linked operations in response to expanded U.S. sanctions.

And yet Havana is still refusing the one thing Washington most wants: political surrender.

In interviews over the past month, Cuban officials have been remarkably consistent. They say they are open to talks, open to investment, even open to broader economic reforms. What they are not open to is negotiating away the structure of the state itself. “The nature of the Cuban government, the structure of the Cuban government, and the members of the Cuban government are not part of the negotiation,” Vice Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío told NBC’s Meet the Press recently.

That position may sound rigid. But it is also internally logical. The Cuban leadership increasingly appears to believe that meaningful economic opening is indistinguishable from regime suicide. And from Havana’s perspective, the administration’s rhetoric hasn’t exactly reassured them otherwise.

The irony is that some American officials once believed precisely the opposite. The theory behind the Obama administration’s rapprochement was not that engagement would save the Cuban system, but that exposure to American tourism, investment, information and consumer expectations might gradually erode the revolutionary model more effectively than isolation ever had. The bet was that normalization, over time, could delegitimize the revolution from within.

That experiment was never really given time to mature. Trump reversed the opening before its long-term political effects could fully play out, and Biden largely maintained the architecture of Trump’s harder line. Now the administration appears to be betting once again that deprivation, rather than integration, is the faster route to transformation.

Even some figures connected to the Cuban elite have hinted at the contradiction. Raúl Castro’s black sheep influencer grandson — which in itself feels like an accidental metaphor for modern Cuba — suggested in a recent CNN interview that Cubans are “capitalists at heart.” The comment was partly performative, partly provocative, but it reflected a longstanding assumption among engagement advocates: that the revolutionary state may ultimately be more vulnerable to normalization than to siege.

Because pressure can weaken a regime. But it can also reinforce the regime’s oldest and most durable narrative: that Cuba is a small island under permanent assault by the United States.

CIA Director Ratcliffe’s recent trip to Havana suggested Washington still sees some negotiated path forward. But the public messaging coming from elsewhere inside the administration often sounds less like diplomacy than psychological warfare.

Rubio — a Cuban American who has spent decades politically and emotionally invested in the Cuban question — now speaks less like a secretary of state managing a bilateral dispute than the avatar of Miami’s unresolved Cold War memory. Cuba, for him, is not just a foreign-policy file. It is the last unfinished chapter of a political inheritance that shaped modern Florida Republicanism. And in today’s Republican Party, successfully engineering the end of the Castro system would not just reshape Rubio’s foreign-policy legacy. It could look a lot like a presidential credential.

What makes this moment different is that Rubio appears to believe history has finally handed him the endgame. And Trump, meanwhile, appears increasingly willing to indulge it.

What’s strange about all of this is where Trumpism has landed on foreign policy. The movement that once defined itself against forever wars, nation building and interventionism has now authorized a war in Iran, seized a foreign leader from his capital, imposed a wartime-style blockade on a neighboring island, and openly discussed military planning for another potential regime confrontation in the Caribbean. Trumpism increasingly looks less like isolationism than a highly personalized version of selective imperial management.

Not everyone inside MAGA seems comfortable with that evolution. Some Trump allies have quietly questioned whether the administration is opening too many fronts simultaneously. Others appear to see Cuba less as a strategic necessity than a politically useful spectacle — another high-drama geopolitical confrontation at a moment when the Iran conflict has become more complicated than many inside the White House anticipated.

But the deeper problem is simpler: what happens if this adventure actually works Washington has become very good at applying pressure. What it still lacks is a theory of aftermath.

Failed states do not politely remain inside their own borders. They leak — through migration crises, organized crime networks, black markets, intelligence vacuums and geopolitical opportunism. And terrorism. Unlike Iran or other distant geopolitical flashpoints, Cuba is not a crisis Americans would experience abstractly through oil prices and cable news graphics. A Cuban collapse would arrive directly on America’s shoreline — politically, economically and physically.

The administration may ultimately be right that Cuba’s current trajectory is unsustainable. The island is running out of fuel, running out of cash and increasingly running out of time. But history’s uncomfortable lesson is that weakening a regime and replacing a regime are two entirely different projects.

Toppling governments is often treated as the climax of American foreign policy. In reality, it is usually the beginning of a much messier story.

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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.

and I are back TODAY at 5:30 - told you there would be plenty more to talk about (and reasons to drink 🤦‍♀️)

Note: and I will have a special edition of Hot Takes Happy Hour. We hope to see you TODAY at 5:30 pm ET.

And now onto Taiwan:

President Donald Trump returned from Beijing this week having accomplished something genuinely rare in American diplomacy: he managed to unsettle both sides of the Taiwan Strait simultaneously. That takes a certain talent.

The headline from Trump’s first Beijing summit in nine years was the one he handed Fox News on the flight home. Asked whether he would approve a $14 billion arms package to Taiwan - missiles, anti-drone equipment, air-defense systems, the kind of hardware that keeps a small island from becoming a fait accompli - Trump was refreshingly candid.

“I’m holding that in abeyance and it depends on China,” he said. “It’s a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly. It’s a lot of weapons.”

He’s not wrong that it’s leverage. But real leverage doesn’t need to be announced on television.

The logic is pure Trump: you have something the other side wants, you hold it until you get something back. In real estate, that’s called a closing. In Indo-Pacific security, it’s called a concession.

Beijing doesn’t need to buy what it already believes it owns. Chinese officials have long maintained that American arms sales to Taiwan are non-negotiable - asserting that the U.S. and China already reached an understanding in the third joint communique of 1982 that Washington would reduce such sales over time. From Beijing’s perspective, Trump is dangling a concession it believes it previously secured.

There’s also the small matter of U.S. law. The Taiwan Relations Act - reinforced by Reagan’s “Six Assurances” in 1982, which explicitly pledged the U.S. would not consult Beijing in advance on arms sales to Taiwan - doesn’t contain a clause for “unless the president finds it handy as leverage.” Trump waved that history off on Air Force One: “I think the 1980s is a long way. That’s a big, far distance.”

Far enough, apparently, that four decades of bipartisan deterrence can be renegotiated over two days.

It is ironic that Trump spent months pressuring Taiwan to spend more on its own defense. Taiwan listened. Its parliament recently approved a $25 billion defense spending bill earmarked for U.S. weapons. Taipei did the homework, bought the textbooks, showed up early. Now the teacher is holding the homework hostage for lunch money.

Then there’s the chip problem, and not just the metaphorical kind. Trump accuses Taiwan of having “stolen” America’s semiconductor industry. He wants chipmakers to come home. And they are. TSMC has committed $165 billion to a campus in Arizona; Taiwan pledged $250 billion in broader U.S. microchip investment.

And yet Trump is simultaneously undermining the security of the island that produces over 90% of the world’s most advanced chips - the ones powering American AI, defense systems, and every smartphone in your pocket. The chips that would be essential to fighting a war with China come from the island China wants to take over.

You cannot covet Taiwan’s technology while telegraphing indifference to Taiwan’s survival. That’s not strategy. That’s wanting the eggs while negotiating away the chicken.

Trump didn’t specify what he wanted in return for delaying the weapons package, though he’s been pressing Beijing on American farm goods, aircraft, and help with Iran. So the offer on the table appears to be: Taiwan’s security, in exchange for soybeans and a maybe on Tehran.

As more than one China analyst put it this weekend, Taiwan is no longer at the negotiating table. It’s on the menu.

Reducing Taiwan to a transaction also strips away the larger case for why any of this matters. America defends democracies. We defend allies. There is a strategic interest in the line running from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines - a chain that is not merely geographical but existential to American power in the Pacific.

Once allies become line items and democratic solidarity becomes a rounding error, the architecture that would allow an American president to make the case for action, if it ever came to that, quietly begins to collapse.

Trump says he’s not interested in a war nine and a half thousand miles away. That’s understandable. It’s also precisely the calculation Beijing has been running for years.

In many ways, this has been China’s strategy all along: not necessarily to defeat the United States militarily, but to convince Washington that Taiwan is ultimately not worth the cost. That American commitment is conditional. Transactional. Fragile.

Trump may not realize it, but he is reinforcing exactly the worldview Beijing has spent years hoping would take hold in Washington. By any honest measure, it is an even weaker posture than Biden’s was, and that was already a fairly low bar. Trump speculated that China probably won’t attack Taiwan while he’s in office, though he suspects it might after he leaves. Reassuring!

The summit did accomplish something. Temperatures are lower. Both sides agreed Iran shouldn’t have a nuclear weapon - a bar so low it barely qualifies as diplomacy. Xi didn’t need a joint statement - there wasn’t one. He got something more valuable: a public window into how the American president actually thinks. And what he saw apparently pleased him enough to agree to a return visit to the US in the fall.

Beneath the children and the flags and the flattery, Xi came to this summit with one message: Taiwan is Chinese territory. If you’re sitting in Beijing right now, you could be forgiven for concluding this American president would not lift a finger to defend the island.

The main deterrent against Chinese military action has always been uncertainty - or, in diplospeak, strategic ambiguity - backed by credible arms and credible will. One of those pillars just got considerably shakier.

Trump’s instinct to avoid a war with China is the right one. But the way you avoid a war with China is not to signal that deterrence is negotiable. It’s to make absolutely sure Beijing believes it isn’t.

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President Donald Trump arrived in Beijing looking for something he has always valued almost as much as leverage: optics.

The red carpets. The military bands. The carefully choreographed images of two strongmen seated across from each other deciding the future of the global order over tea and translated pleasantries.

Trump loves this kind of stagecraft because it reinforces the story he tells about himself — the lone dealmaker who can bend history through force of personality and instinct. And to be fair, Chinese President Xi Jinping understands the value of spectacle too. Beijing has long treated summit diplomacy as political theater wrapped inside strategic signaling.

But beneath the pageantry of this visit sits a more uncomfortable reality for Washington: China increasingly believes time is on its side.

This summit was originally supposed to unfold under very different conditions. Trump wanted the war with Iran stabilized — if not fully resolved — before sitting down with Xi. Instead, he arrived in Beijing still navigating a fragile ceasefire, oil markets rattled, and the Strait of Hormuz hanging over the global economy like a loaded weapon.

That matters because Beijing is watching more than the diplomacy. It is watching the strain.

Chinese strategists have spent decades studying American power with almost anthropological obsession: how Washington projects force, sustains alliances and manages crises. Now they are watching a United States once again pulled back into the Middle East, burning through munitions and losing patience while trying to convince the world the Indo-Pacific remains its top strategic priority.

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Publicly, Trump is trying to project confidence. Before departing for Beijing, he insisted the United States did not need China’s help on Iran and claimed the situation was “very much under control.”

But like most things with Trump, saying something — even in front of cameras — does not necessarily make it strategically true.

China is Iran’s most important economic backer and one of its few remaining major diplomatic lifelines. Beijing buys the overwhelming majority of Iranian oil exports. It has helped cushion Tehran from sanctions pressure for years and quietly positioned itself as a critical node in any future economic off-ramp.

Which means Xi arrives at this summit knowing something Trump does not want to publicly admit: if Washington wants a durable resolution in the Gulf, China will almost certainly have to be part of it.

The looming question is what Beijing might want in return. Because this is how Xi tends to operate — not through dramatic public ultimatums, but through accumulated leverage, patient pressure and long timelines. If China decides to help stabilize the Iran file more aggressively, Washington will inevitably wonder what price comes attached to that cooperation: trade concessions, technology access, tariff relief, softer language on Taiwan, or simply more strategic space in the Indo-Pacific.

And that is where this summit becomes potentially far more consequential than the choreography surrounding it.

Trump has always believed personal chemistry can overcome structural rivalry. Xi appears to believe structural rivalry eventually overwhelms personality. And unlike Washington, Beijing does not appear especially rushed.

That difference showed clearly during last year’s rare earths confrontation. When Trump escalated on tariffs, Beijing didn’t fire back rhetorically. It went after America’s technological pressure points — restricting exports of critical minerals embedded in everything from missile systems to smartphones to AI infrastructure. China had been quietly building dominance over those supply chains for decades, treating globalization not as a law of physics but as a strategic opportunity. When the moment came, Beijing didn’t need to threaten. It just reminded Washington who owned the choke points.

Beijing is not trying to win every news cycle. It is trying to shape the underlying architecture of dependency.

Trump, by contrast, often approaches geopolitics the way a casino approaches a hot streak — press the advantage, dominate the headline, improvise later. Sometimes that unpredictability creates genuine leverage. But it also produces an American foreign policy that can feel less like long-term strategy than a rolling series of tactical impulses stitched together by presidential confidence.

The Chinese have noticed. Online, Trump earned the nickname “Trump the Nation Builder” — a darkly comic acknowledgment that many Chinese commentators believe his disruptions have weakened America’s global standing while inadvertently strengthening China’s. Even News York Times columnist Thomas Friedman argued last year that parts of Trump’s economic agenda risked inadvertently “making China great again” by ceding ground in industries Beijing has spent years strategically cultivating.

It is not hard to see why some in Beijing feel emboldened. While Washington oscillated between engagement and economic warfare, China expanded its industrial dominance in batteries, solar panels, critical minerals, electric vehicles, robotics and advanced manufacturing. At the same time, Beijing has been steadily building the military architecture to protect that rise — expanding its navy, modernizing its missile forces, investing heavily in cyberwarfare, AI and space capabilities.

None of this means China is ten feet tall. Its economy is slowing. Debt is rising. Youth unemployment is serious. The property market remains shaky. Demographics are a long-term problem. But Beijing still appears to believe the broader trajectory favors them — especially if America continues exhausting itself politically and strategically.

Trump arrived in Beijing with some of the most powerful figures in American business, including Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook, Meta President Dina Powell McCormick and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang was added late — a last-minute inclusion that signals how central the advanced chip question has become. His presence is the clearest symbol of the summit’s central contradiction: despite years of decoupling rhetoric, the American and Chinese economies remain deeply entangled, nowhere more uncomfortably than in AI.

Then the two men sat down — and the dynamic the piece had been building toward played out almost on cue.

Xi opened the formal session at the Great Hall of the People without mentioning Iran or trade. He reached instead for history, invoking the Thucydides Trap — the theory that a rising power and a ruling power are almost fated to collide. “Can China and the United States overcome the Thucydides Trap and establish a new paradigm for relations between great powers?” he asked. It was a signal: China sees itself in a civilizational competition, not a transactional dispute.

Trump’s opening was something else entirely. He lavished praise on Xi — “you’re a great leader, I say it to everybody” — and described their relationship as phone calls and problems quietly worked out. Xi framing the relationship in decades and historical forces. Trump framing it in personal chemistry.

Then came Taiwan. Xi warned that if the issue were handled poorly, the two countries could “collide or even clash,” pushing the entire relationship into “an extremely dangerous situation.” The Trump administration had already quietly delayed a $13 billion arms package to avoid antagonizing Beijing before the summit. Trump told reporters he planned to discuss arms sales with Xi — a notable departure from the longstanding American position that such decisions are not subject to Chinese input..

Xi called on the two countries to be “partners rather than adversaries” — a phrase that lands differently now, when China is negotiating from a position of considerably more confidence than the last time a U.S. president came to Beijing.

Xi increasingly looks like a leader betting on historical patience. Trump still looks like a leader betting on personal instinct.

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Because while Washington is busy arguing over whether a naval skirmish in the Strait of Hormuz counts as a ceasefire violation, a “love tap,” or the opening act of World War III, Arash is focused on something more useful: what Iran actually wants.

And right now, that may be the most important question in the region.

When we spoke this week — a follow-up to our conversation last month about Iran as a regime in transition — Arash argued that despite the missile exchanges, maritime confrontations, Trump Truth Social posts written in what increasingly feels like ALL CAPS diplomacy, and the general fog-machine atmosphere surrounding this conflict, both Tehran and Washington are moving toward the same conclusion: Neither side actually wants to go back to full war.

That does not mean peace is imminent. It means reality is beginning to intrude. The latest sign came this week as reports emerged that the United States and Iran are inching toward a short memorandum of understanding that would effectively freeze the conflict and open a 30-day negotiating window on the harder issues: Iran’s nuclear program, sanctions relief, frozen assets, and future security arrangements in the Strait of Hormuz.

In other words: after months of maximalist rhetoric, threats of capitulation, and military escalation, everyone may be slowly rediscovering diplomacy. Which, awkwardly, is where this probably was always headed.

That tension — closest to renewed fighting and closest to a deal at the same time — has become the defining feature of this moment. The military phase of the conflict has not produced decisive victory for either side. Iran absorbed enormous damage but did not collapse. The United States demonstrated overwhelming military superiority but failed to force capitulation. And “Project Freedom” — the Trump administration’s latest attempt to reopen the Strait of Hormuz through naval escort operations — now appears suspended after only a few days of operation amid continued confrontations in the Gulf.

Trump, meanwhile, continues to oscillate between threatening Iran with devastating force and hinting at imminent breakthrough agreements. One day the ceasefire is under strain. The next day the latest exchange of fire is merely “a love tap.” It is all very confusing. Which, to be fair, may not entirely be an accident.

But underneath the chaos, Arash sees a more coherent logic emerging. “Success for Iran,” he said, “looks like preservation of the regime, but also recognition of Iran’s role in the region.”

That word — recognition — came up repeatedly in our conversation. Not domination. Not conquest. Not some endless revolutionary project stretching from Tehran to the Mediterranean. Recognition.

Iran wants sanctions relief. It wants economic normalization. It wants acceptance as a legitimate regional power with acknowledged interests and influence. And, crucially, Arash believes significant parts of the Iranian leadership — including elements of the Revolutionary Guards — may be willing to make meaningful concessions on the nuclear issue to get there.

That is not how this conflict is typically framed in Washington. American debate tends to oscillate between two poles: either Iran is on the verge of collapse, or it is an irredeemably expansionist power that only understands force. What gets lost is the possibility that parts of the Iranian system may actually want integration more than permanent confrontation.

“I think they want integration,” Arash said. “They want to be recognized as a major power in the region.”

He is careful to note that this in no way makes the regime benign. Iran has backed militant proxies, fueled regional conflicts, and helped sustain Bashar al-Assad’s brutal war in Syria. He describes the Islamic Republic as containing contradictory impulses — part ideological revolutionary project, part traditional nation-state seeking stability and influence — and argues the second is now ascendant.

One theory — increasingly visible in some parts of the Gulf — is that integrating Iran into a more stable regional framework could actually moderate its behavior over time. Another theory is that normalization would simply empower Tehran to pursue the same destabilizing policies with more money and legitimacy. As implausible as it sounds, Arash leans toward the former as the best way of restraining Iran.

That argument will make many people deeply uncomfortable, particularly in Israel and among hardline Iran hawks in Washington. But it also reflects a reality becoming harder to ignore after months of war: Iran is not Libya. It is not Iraq. Despite immense economic pressure, assassinations, sanctions, cyber operations, and sustained bombing, Iran has not folded. Which raises an uncomfortable possibility for the Trump administration: maybe Iran cannot simply be bludgeoned into submission.

That does not mean Tehran is winning. Far from it. Iran’s economy remains under severe strain. Inflation is soaring. The currency continues to weaken. Regional proxies like Hezbollah have been degraded. The regime itself remains deeply unpopular with much of its own population.

But Arash argues that many in Washington fundamentally misunderstand how the Islamic Republic absorbs pressure. The question is not whether Iran is suffering — it clearly is. The question is what suffering produces politically.

For years, American policy has operated on the assumption that enough pressure would eventually force either regime collapse or unconditional surrender. Two months of war appear to have complicated both theories.

“What led to this particular war,” Azizi said, “was this temptation Trump had that he could dramatically change everything through military action. And that’s proven not to be the case.”

Which helps explain why diplomacy — however chaotic, contradictory, and half-denied by all involved — is creeping back into the picture. The emerging framework reportedly under discussion would pause enrichment for more than a decade, require Iran to move highly enriched uranium out of the country, and create a broader negotiating process tied to sanctions relief and maritime security.

It is not a peace treaty. It is barely even a roadmap. It is, essentially, an acknowledgment that nobody has found a military solution to the underlying problem. And perhaps that is the real story here.

Not the skirmishes. Not the Trump posts. Not even the endless speculation over whether the ceasefire technically still exists. The real story may be that after all the fire and fury, everyone is slowly arriving back at the same uncomfortable conclusion: this ends with negotiation.

The question is whether the politics — in Tehran, Washington, and across the region — will allow anyone to admit it out loud.

As promised, Arash’s latest:

Iran War -- deal or conflict

Iran’s Leaders Mostly Want a Deal

Is a Militia Running Wartime Iran?

and don’t forget to subscribe to Arash’s Substack

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There’s no shortage of shows built around people confirming what their audience already believes. That’s good for engagement. It’s not always good for understanding the world.

What I try to do here is something different: conversations with people like Arash Azizi, whose understanding of Iran comes not from cable news panels or think tank groupthink, but from deep historical knowledge, real sourcing inside the country, and a willingness to challenge easy narratives.

You may not always agree with what you hear. But ideally, you’ll come away thinking about these issues a little differently. That’s the point.

If you value that type of coverage, I hope you will consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Thank you , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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CNN founder Ted Turner died Wednesday at his home near Tallahassee, Florida. He was 87, and had been living with Lewy body dementia for years. Ted invented 24-hour news, built a broadcasting empire from nothing, and changed forever how the world understands itself. But the idea he pioneered - that news itself could be the star - has already been gone for a while.

I spent most of the day watching CNN as everyone paid tribute to the man who turned me into a news junkie. They brought out the legends - anchors and correspondents I grew up watching, some I had the privilege of working alongside - as they described how Ted Turner ushered in the golden age of news. The tributes poured in from across the industry, leaders praising his vision and his courage, even as many of them have spent years working toward the fullest expression of everything he stood against.

I became a journalist because of CNN. In my senior year of high school, I took an honors class called Global Studies - learning about international relations, reading Foreign Affairs magazine, the whole thing. My teacher would come in every morning talking about stories from faraway places he’d heard about on CNN. Countries I’d barely heard of. Conflicts I didn’t know existed. I thought: I want to work for this CNN one day.

It was the late ‘80s, and cable was just getting started. Watching CNN’s coverage of the Gulf War from my college apartment only deepened that resolve.

What drew me wasn’t the anchors. It was the news.

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Ted built something radical on that premise - but to understand what CNN really was, you have to understand who Ted Turner really was. He was a disruptor before the word existed. A risk-taker who mortgaged everything, repeatedly, on bets nobody else would make. A blue-sky thinker who saw around corners. But underneath the bravado and the brashness was something rarer: moral courage and a genuine commitment to making the world better.

CNN wasn’t his most profitable venture - it lost $2 million a month in its early years. But Ted kept faith with it because he believed, fundamentally, that an informed citizenry was the foundation of a functioning world. He donated a billion dollars to support the UN’s work around the world. He founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative to reduce the danger of weapons of mass destruction. He bought two million acres of land and turned it into nature preserves. These weren’t the hobbies of a rich man. They were the actions of someone who actually believed the world could be improved - and that he had an obligation to try.

CNN was his philanthropy too. Bringing the world to people’s living rooms in real time, from Baghdad to Tiananmen Square to the Berlin Wall, wasn’t a business strategy. It was a calling. News as a public good. Journalism as a form of citizenship.

That’s why I joined. And for 18 years, I tried to live up to it.

A few years after the AOL-Time Warner merger effectively pushed Ted out of the company he’d built, I ran into him in a New York elevator during UN General Assembly week. It was the first time I had met him, and talk about a celebrity sighting! I told him CNN wasn’t the same without him. He smiled and told me to keep the faith - that he was going to make a comeback.

Too bad he didn’t.

Because what came after him - at CNN and across the industry - was the slow substitution of performance for reporting. Personalities became the star. Then outrage became the star. Now influencers who have never broken a story, knocked on a door, or sat across from a difficult source aggregate the work of actual journalists and call it journalism - and often attract larger audiences than the reporters who did the work.

I knew it was time to leave CNN when a manager told me, flatly, that “nobody cares about issues and analysis.” That was the eulogy - not for my career, but for the ethos Ted had instilled in us. The idea that explaining the world carefully and honestly was itself a service worth providing.

And increasingly, legacy media is learning the wrong lessons from what replaced it. Not every journalist - but enough that it’s noticeable. Righteous indignation hardening into snark. Cynicism mistaken for rigor. Anger performing as accountability. The audience, already primed for outrage and hungry for confirmation of what it already believes, rewards the performance over the reporting. Clicks follow heat, not light.

There are journalists - some I came up with at CNN, some who came after - who still carry Ted’s ethos. Who still believe the story is the point. But they are fighting against a current that runs the other way, shaped by people brought in over the years who turned the network into something Ted Turner scoffed at.

His vision is needed now more than ever. We are living through wars, accelerating climate emergencies, the rise of artificial intelligence, and a great power competition that will define the next century. In that environment, facts aren’t a luxury - they are the architecture of any response. We need to know what is actually happening, reported straight, without the filter of performance or the distortion of outrage.

Ted Turner believed a better-informed world would be a better world. It was considered naive. It was also correct. And it is, in the current media environment, almost countercultural.

What died this week isn’t just a chapter in media history. It’s a particular faith - that news, done right, could be enough. That facts delivered straight would find their audience. That the story was the point.

News is no longer the star. But it should be. And if we return to the values that drove Ted - and why - it can be again.

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Ted Turner believed journalism was worth investing in.

In that spirit, I am extending my World Press Freedom Day discount through Thursday- 25% off annual premium subscriptions.

This is a straightforward way to support reporting, analysis and conversations that are not driven by political alignment or algorithmic incentives. If this kind of work matters to you, subscribing makes a tangible difference.

If you are already a paid subscriber, a gift subscription is a great way to bring another foreign policy enthusiast into our community.

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If you’ve been following me for a while, you may have seen this photo before.—one of my favorites from my CNN days, snapped in a Blackhawk heading to the Green Zone in Iraq. The flak jacket and helmet capture the real risks journalists take to get the story. The smile captures why I’ve never stopped loving this work.

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May 3rd was World Press Freedom Day—an annual observance the UN established more than three decades ago to highlight the importance of a free press. Over the past few years, it’s become less of a celebration than a warning.

The threats to journalism are real and growing. It’s also harder to ignore how much the profession itself is under strain.

According to UNESCO, 310 journalists were killed between January 2022 and September 2025, many in conflict zones from Ukraine to Gaza to parts of Africa. Reporting the news is increasingly dangerous work. And when those attacks are not investigated or punished, it reinforces a system where silencing the press carries little consequence.

The broader environment is deteriorating as well. The 2026 World Press Freedom Index from Reporters Without Borders shows more than half the world’s countries now fall into “difficult” or “very serious” categories. Less than one percent of the global population lives in a country where press freedom is considered “good.” The global score is now at its lowest level in 25 years.

The United States is not exempt. This year, the US dropped to 64th out of 180 countries—its lowest ranking ever. The reasons are familiar: political hostility, economic pressure on news organizations, weakening legal protections, and growing safety concerns. Press freedom rarely disappears all at once. It erodes over time, through sustained pressure and changing incentives.

That pressure is becoming more direct. Trump has continued to harass media outlets that criticize him: lawsuits against outlets whose coverage he dislikes, threats to revoke broadcast licenses, the removal of independent journalists from access, and a constant effort to delegitimize the press as an institution.

This doesn’t require formal censorship to be effective. The pressure reshapes behavior on its own.

At the same time, the information environment itself is becoming harder to navigate. Outlets that present as legitimate are increasingly blurring the line between reporting and advocacy, or aligning with those in power rather than holding them accountable. The result is a landscape where propaganda and journalism can be difficult to distinguish.

That confusion has consequences. When people are no longer sure what to trust, the role of journalism weakens—and so does accountability.

The echo chamber problem

Compounding this, much of the media ecosystem has narrowed into partisan framing and reflexive dismissal. We are less engaged with competing ideas and more inclined to sort ourselves into positions that reinforce what we already believe.

I’ve seen that dynamic play out directly. I’ve lost subscribers because they disagreed with the politics of some of my guests. This saddens me, but it reflects a broader trend—we’re reverting to our corners and rejecting other points of view, seeking only confirmation bias just as we do on other social media platforms.

None of this is an argument for pulling punches or softening coverage. The stakes are too high for that. But it does point to the need for a more serious way of engaging—one that prioritizes understanding and context over reaction.

Why Cosmopolitics exists

Foreign policy and international issues are complex by nature. They require context, historical grounding, and a willingness to sit with uncomfortable or competing truths. After nearly two decades at CNN, I went independent in part because that space for deeper, more nuanced coverage was shrinking. Too often, the range of topics—and the way they are framed—is driven by assumptions about what audiences will engage with. In foreign policy, that range can be surprisingly narrow.

Now, I am accountable only to you. That means reporting, researching, and drawing on experience to provide analysis that cuts through the noise rather than reinforces it. It means serious interviews that don’t paper over the problems but aren’t whining sessions either—conversations focused on solutions, not just complaints.

There is enormous pressure in today’s media environment to pick a side, tell audiences what they want to hear, and move quickly to the next story. That approach may drive engagement, but it rarely leads to clarity.

Three decades covering foreign policy has taught me that the story is almost never as simple as any one side would prefer. My goal is to reflect that reality—clearly, directly, and without tailoring it to a particular audience.

Why your support matters

That kind of work does not fit neatly into the current media ecosystem. And it does not sustain itself without support.

I have been keeping most Cosmopolitics content beyond the paywall because access matters. At the same time, this is a reader-supported publication, and maintaining that independence depends on the people who find value in it.

That is why, in recognition of World Press Freedom Day, I am offering 25% off annual premium subscriptions through Tuesday.

Claim your 25% discount

It is a straightforward way to support independent reporting and analysis that is not driven by political alignment or algorithmic incentives.

If this kind of work matters to you, subscribing makes a tangible difference. It’s how independent journalism survives. If you are already a paid, subscriber, a gift subscription is a great way to introduce another foreign policy enthusiast into our community.

With gratitude,

Elise

P.S. If cost is a barrier to joining premium, please reach out. I never want finances to prevent anyone from being part of our conversation.

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We had an audio glitch at the very end of the last question, but by then the essential point was clear: Lebanon is not just another front in the Iran war. It is where that war’s contradictions are most exposed — and where any real resolution will be tested.

In a wide-ranging conversation with former U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Jeffrey Feltman, one theme kept resurfacing: across the region, there is motion without clarity. Ceasefires, negotiations, military pressure — all of it suggests activity, but not direction. Nowhere is that more true than in Lebanon.

The war with Iran has settled into a strategic stalemate. Both Washington and Tehran face the same constraint: compromise looks like weakness. So nobody is compromising. Meanwhile, Iran has discovered leverage it didn’t know it had. The Strait of Hormuz — long a theoretical choke point — is now central to the conflict. As Feltman put it, the nuclear file concerned a handful of countries. Hormuz concerns the world. Tehran has noticed.

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It is against that backdrop that Lebanon matters — and why President Trump’s push for a ceasefire there is about more than Lebanon. Feltman’s read: the president didn’t want an additional reason for Iran not to negotiate. Whether that’s grand strategy or triage is an open question.

What’s not in question is that this moment has produced something genuinely unusual: direct talks between Israel and Lebanon, conducted openly and over Hezbollah’s explicit objections. One Hezbollah spokesman reminded President Aoun of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s fate after talking to the Israelis. Aoun proceeded anyway. For decades, that would have been unthinkable. That alone marks a shift.

And while the Lebanese state is negotiating, it does not control the forces driving the conflict. Hezbollah is not simply a militia and a terrorist group. It is a political party, a social services network, and a military force whose capabilities rival the Lebanese Armed Forces. It answers to Tehran. And since its leader Hassan Nasrallah’s death, even more so — his successor Naim Qassem is, in Feltman’s words, essentially a fully owned subsidiary of Iran, without Nasrallah’s ability to balance Lebanese politics against Iranian demands.

But Israel’s continued occupation of southern Lebanon risks handing Hezbollah back the resistance narrative that made it powerful in the first place. This is the same ground Israel occupied from 1982 to 2000 — and Hezbollah was born in the rubble of that occupation. It knows how to tell that story. It’s been telling it for forty years.

There is one shift working against Hezbollah from within. The war has displaced more than a million people from the Shia south — the very constituency Hezbollah claims to protect. The group no longer has the deep pockets it had after the war in 2006 to rebuild and buy back loyalty. That erosion of support is real. Whether the Lebanese government can translate it into political movement before the moment passes is another question entirely.

The Aoun government is attempting something genuinely difficult: asserting sovereignty without triggering collapse. Push too hard against Hezbollah and you risk fracturing Lebanon’s sectarian balance. Move too slowly and you hand Israel and Washington the argument that Lebanon cannot act — which, Feltman notes, they are already making.

The Lebanese Armed Forces are part of the problem. It is not just capability — though a soldier earning $200 a month is not rushing into a fight with Hezbollah’s drone units. It is cohesion. Any direct confrontation risks the army splitting along sectarian lines.

The opportunity, if there is one, exists not because these problems have been solved but because the political space for incremental movement may briefly exist. The Aoun government’s best path, Feltman argues, is not sweeping declarations but tangible steps that are hard to dismiss — replacing Hezbollah’s social services with state services, implementing the goverment’s security plan and eroding the political narrative that sustains the group’s legitimacy.

None of it will happen quickly. None of it without significant support. And the risk, as always in Lebanon, is that pressure outruns capacity — that Israel and Washington lose patience before Beirut has had time to show what it can do.

If this effort fails, the outcome is unlikely to be a return to the status quo, but could be a broader, more destructive conflict. If it succeeds — even partially — it could begin to shift the balance toward a Lebanese state that actually governs its own territory.

For now, Lebanon remains suspended between those two outcomes. Balanced, precariously, on a line that has broken before.

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There’s no shortage of podcasts where two people who already agree sit down and spend an hour being outraged together. It’s good for the algorithm. It doesn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know.

That’s not what we’re doing here.

I’m convinced the people worth talking to are the ones who make you reconsider something — not the ones who confirm what you already think. That means serious conversations with diplomats, intelligence officials, and policy architects who’ve actually been in the room. People like Jeff Feltman, who was there for the 2006 war in Lebanon, survived an assassination attempt by Hezbollah, met with the late Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and has spent twenty years watching the same dynamics repeat themselves.

You might not always agree with what you hear. You’ll probably learn something anyway.

That’s the point. If it sounds like your kind of show, I hope you’ll subscribe.

Please join me TODAY at 4pm ET for a conversation on Lebanon with Jeffrey Feltman — former Assistant Secretary of State, U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon, and UN Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs.

We’ll unpack Lebanon’s role in the Iran war, the Israel–Lebanon talks, and what the fragile ceasefire may — or may not — change.

If you caught our last conversation — where Jeff recounted his rare meeting with Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei — you know the level of insight he brings, along with a dose of dry humor that makes even the most complex dynamics accessible. Hope to see you there.

And now… onto the King’s speech to Congress:

There was a moment, somewhere between the Oscar Wilde joke and the invocation of Abraham Lincoln, when the House chamber did something it almost never does anymore: it settled.

Not into polite attention, or choreographed bipartisanship, but into something closer to ease. For a brief stretch, the noise that usually defines that chamber — the parsing, the positioning, the anticipation of the next line as a political weapon — receded. In its place was something rarer: a shared recognition that what was being said was not quite politics, even as it carried political weight.

King Charles’ speech came at an awkward moment in the relationship it was meant to celebrate. The war with Iran has exposed real strains between Washington and London. Donald Trump has publicly pressed Britain to do more, while Prime Minister Keir Starmer has resisted being drawn into what he has made clear is not Britain’s war. There are disagreements over NATO, over burden-sharing, over the broader direction of Western policy. None of that was named directly, but all of it was present.

No diplomat could have delivered this message without sounding like he was pressing a case. No elected leader could have done so without inviting immediate interpretation through a partisan lens. The absence of overt positioning became its own form of authority — and it explains why King Charles could pull this off when almost no one else could.

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“Ours is a partnership born out of dispute, but no less strong for it,” he said.

That line quietly reframed the entire relationship. The break between Britain and its former colonies, the foundational moment of American independence, is not treated as estrangement but as the beginning of a pattern: conflict, followed by convergence. Divergence, followed by alignment. Not seamless, but sustained.

The speech was full of these moves — arguments embedded in prose that did not sound like argument. A reference to NATO’s invocation of Article 5 after 9/11 was, on its face, a historical reminder and a subtle recalibration of the current debate about alliance commitments: when America was attacked, its allies did not hesitate to stand with her.

His rebukes were delivered with empathy. A passage on Magna Carta doubled as a quiet affirmation of limits on executive power. A reflection on the Royal Navy served, in part, as a defense of British military credibility at a moment when Trump has publicly dismissed it. A call for support for Ukraine, framed in the language of shared resolve, reinforced continuity without confronting U.S. policy directly.

Even the line about security stretching “from the depths of the Atlantic to the disastrously melting ice-caps of the Arctic” did more than sketch geography. It folded together alliance, environment, and geopolitics in a single sentence — the Arctic as a shared domain of responsibility, not a prize to be claimed, as President Trump recently tried to do with Greenland.

That was the King’s pattern: acknowledge the landmine, avoid the trigger words, and expand the frame.

The same approach shaped his treatment of issues that have become flashpoints in American politics. Faith was presented not as a dividing line but as a source of shared moral language, immediately broadened to include “all people, of all faiths, and of none.” Nature, an issue close to his heart, was framed not as the ideology around climate change, but as an asset — tied to prosperity and national security rather than politics.

Even political violence — which he referenced in the wake of the recent White House Correspondents’ Dinner attack targeting President Trump and members of his cabinet — was not politicized. “Whatever our differences, whatever disagreements we may have, we stand united…” It is not that the King avoided politics, but that he refused to be confined by it.

Part of that authority is institutional. The British monarch, who is head of state but not head of government, speaks across longer timelines, less tethered to the immediacy of policy debates. But part of it is also particular to this moment — and to the dynamic surrounding President Trump.

The White House posting an image of the two men and calling it “two kings” was more than a throwaway line. It revealed how the encounter was being framed — not as a negotiation between governments, but as something closer to a meeting of stature.

That framing gave the King room to invoke NATO and reaffirm the alliance’s foundations without having to argue for them. And room to speak about Ukraine without triggering defensiveness. The same lines, delivered by another figure, might have sounded like criticism. Here, they registered as continuity.

That’s a harder argument to make — and easier to dismiss when the tone is wrong. Here, it was simply stated, then reinforced, politely, through history, security, law, and culture.

It did not resolve the current tensions or pretend they were insignificant. It placed them in proportion.

Maybe that is why it felt so striking in that room — not just because of the delivery, or the writing, but because nobody in American politics, from either party, speaks this way anymore. The language of shared purpose has been replaced by the language of positioning — of blame, of reflex, of scorekeeping in real time.

For half an hour, that was set aside. The King’s argument was not about who was right, or which side would prevail. It was about what has held over time — and what might hold again.

In a chamber that rarely allows for that kind of perspective, it was a quiet shift. And for a moment, it was enough.

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The easiest play in media right now is to pick a team and tell them what they want to hear. I’m not doing that.

Three decades covering foreign policy has taught me one thing: the story is almost never as simple as one side wants it to be. That’s why Cosmopolitics calls balls and strikes without keeping score — 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’re looking for, I hope you’ll subscribe.

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.

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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!

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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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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