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.

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Today I attended the Space Investment Forum in DC, which brought together government, industry and national security leaders to advance American leadership in space through public-private partnerships. My main takeaway was that space isn’t a niche anymore. Listening to the speakers, it became clear space isn’t just “important” - it now touches every lever of state power at once.

The forum was co-hosted by journalist and space enthusiast and Jake Matthews of Potomac Database Systems, who used it to launch Cabeus Explorer, a new space intelligence platform connecting U.S. space policymakers with companies building the lunar economy. The moon, as they put it, is “an emerging market.”

Strategists have a shorthand for the instruments of state power: diplomatic, information, military and economic, or DIME. Built for embassies, broadcasts, battalions and trade, it now applies just as well to orbit. That convergence, not any single satellite or moon mission, is what should worry, or excite, anyone watching the space economy from Washington.

The most understated fact about American space policy is also the most consequential: the U.S. has spent six years building a coalition, one signature at a time. The Artemis Accords, a voluntary set of norms rooted in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, counted 70 signatories by mid-July, spanning every populated continent.

That’s diplomacy in its purest form: setting norms - on transparency, debris, safety zones, resource extraction - before rivals set their own. China hasn’t joined, and Russia calls it an end-run around the UN, which is itself telling: the Accords have become a dividing line in how nations align on the rules of the next frontier. State Department officials no longer treat it as an ancillary NASA program - it’s now core to how Washington conducts foreign policy. Call it soft power with a launch schedule.

If diplomacy sets the rules, information power is about who controls the plumbing beneath modern life. Space-based systems don’t just power your Uber driver - they underwrite financial transactions, emergency communications, precision navigation, agricultural monitoring and military command and control. Nearly every panel returned to the same warning: a serious outage wouldn’t just kill a map app - it would disrupt the systems that keep money moving, planes landing and first responders coordinated, all invisibly, until it’s gone. It’s the least glamorous form of power there is - right up until it’s gone.

The same constellations that give the U.S. and its allies unmatched situational awareness are also contested terrain: spy satellites, and the ability to jam or protect them, are leverage as real as a listening post once was. Beijing understood this early, declaring space a war fighting domain a decade ago and building what U.S. officials call the second-most capable remote-sensing architecture on Earth, growing from under 100 satellites in 2013 to roughly 1,900 today.

For most of the Space Age, orbit was a sanctuary - a place great powers watched each other but didn’t fight. That’s eroding fast. Space Force leadership has been blunt this year: the “Race to Resilience” initiative aims to build battle-ready architectures, and at least one senior general has said publicly that the U.S. needs to be able to “turn around and punch” if adversary systems threaten American satellites.

China dominates this conversation. A congressional commission concluded this year that Beijing is “aggressively positioning itself” to displace the U.S. as the world’s premier space power, and a Space Force outlook - bluntly titled “Future Operating Environment 2040” - describes prolonged, hard-to-detect competition rather than decisive battles, comparing the coming years to the tense buildup before World War I.

Perhaps the starkest indicator: outside researchers are urging the Space Force to prepare for an “in-person” lunar conflict, arguing China’s goal of landing taikonauts - the Chinese term for astronauts - on the moon by 2030 raises the odds of a real dispute over lunar territory and resources. Whether or not that materializes, the fact that it’s being war-gamed at all marks a real shift in how the Pentagon thinks about the high frontier. Give the planning cycle a few more years, and someone will pitch a moon combat readiness briefing with a straight face.

Retired Brig. Gen. Damon Feltman, CEO of the Space Force Association, put it starkly at today’s forum: space governance will be set either by authoritarian powers or by liberal democracies, and “there is no middle ground in this.” Treating today’s space environment as benign, he argued, is itself a risk - pointing to Beijing’s disregard for international norms in the South China Sea as an example of why we should expect the same playbook on the moon.

None of this happens without capital, and capital filled the room today. At bottom, the space economy is a story about American jobs - no longer the exclusive domain of astronauts, scientists and engineers. Industry data puts the sector’s growth at close to seven percent a year for the past two decades, with private capital now driving most of that growth. It’s striking how much of the emerging workforce doesn’t look like traditional aerospace at all. Finance, law, cybersecurity, insurance, logistics and policy roles are expanding alongside engineering, creating what some call “space collar” jobs: work that enables and governs the space economy without requiring anyone to strap into a rocket.

Jim Bridenstine, the former NASA Administrator who now runs Quantum Space, put it by way of an old military comparison: just as NCOs are “the MacGyvers” of the Army, the space economy needs its own class of do-everything technicians, not just PhDs - and panelists ran with it, describing everything from hybrid nuclear-maritime-space job titles to a coming need for “space geologists” who can read alien terrain the way oil-and-gas geologists read the ground on Earth.

The panel that stuck with me most, though, wasn’t about rockets - it was about weightlessness as a manufacturing input. Merck spent years growing crystals of its cancer drug Keytruda aboard the space station, chasing a uniform crystal structure gravity won’t allow on Earth. That work fed last year’s FDA approval of an injectable version of the drug - meaning a patient getting a shot instead of an IV may owe a small debt to zero gravity. A handful of newer companies are already turning that into an actual production line, growing semiconductors and drug crystals in orbit on a semi-routine basis. Researchers, meanwhile, are looking seriously at 3D printing components and habitats - livable structures, not just scientific equipment - out of materials already in space, rather than launching every component from Cape Canaveral.

It’s the closest thing space has to a punchline: humanity’s most advanced medicine and materials science may increasingly be, quite literally, made in space. That matters strategically, not just economically - the U.S. should be investing in the talent pipeline that will determine whether American firms or Chinese state-linked ventures dominate everything from satellite servicing to lunar supply chains.

How do we pull this all together? Bridenstine pointed to the National Space Council he worked under in the first Trump administration. That authority has since folded into the National Security Council, which he suggested isn’t accomplishing much these days - a reminder that DIME only works as a coherent strategy for space if someone in Washington is actually coordinating all four letters at once.

What today’s forum made clear is that space can no longer be assessed on its own terms. It’s a domain where all four instruments of state power now operate simultaneously and interdependently: the treaties that govern it, the data that flows through it, the weapons that can threaten it, and the capital that builds it.

Any serious accounting of American strategic competition with China - or Russia’s more asymmetric ambitions - has to treat orbit and the lunar surface the way it treats the Indo-Pacific or the Arctic: contested space where diplomatic, informational, military and economic power is impossible to separate. The countries that recognize this fastest, and organize their institutions accordingly, will set the terms for whatever comes next.

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For half a century, Israel was the water’s edge issue — the one place bipartisan consensus actually held, even as everything else in Washington came apart. That’s over. And what’s ending isn’t support for Israel. It’s the assumption that support for Israel could sit outside the realignment reshaping everything else in American politics.

Michigan is the clearest case. Haley Stevens, running as the establishment pick in the Democratic Senate primary, spent a debate this month distancing herself from Netanyahu — “it is very clear that Mr. Netanyahu has not made us safer” — the standard mainstream-Democrat move of separating the man from the alliance, the same move the party has been making since the Gaza war. Bibi’s own drift toward the Israeli far right gave them cover to do it.

Her opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, isn’t interested in that distinction. He’s made Stevens’s AIPAC backing — nearly $11 million from its super PAC in this race alone — the entire frame of his campaign, and gone further than Netanyahu criticism into territory Stevens can’t follow him into: “every definition of a Jewish state ends up in some articulation of illiberal values, every single one,” he told CNN. Neither of them is actually litigating Gaza. They’re litigating who gets to define authenticity in the party, with Israel as the proxy battlefield.

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New York was starker. Dan Goldman — Trump’s first impeachment manager, one of the most prominent Jewish Democrats in the House — lost to Brad Lander, a self-described liberal Zionist who also calls Gaza a genocide, by 65.8 to 34. Before the vote, a Brooklyn coffee shop announced Goldman belonged among “racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide-enablers or anyone in between” and said they wished they’d refused him service. Goldman was never a hardliner. Didn’t matter. The message wasn’t that he supported Israel too much — it was that supporting Israel at all is now read as complicity. That’s not a policy dispute. That’s a sorting mechanism.

Ro Khanna’s trajectory tells you how far the center has actually moved, not just where the flank is. Three trips to Israel, a 2024 bipartisan delegation that sat down with Netanyahu himself — and now one of the most vocal genocide-accusers in Congress, campaigning on Iron Dome cuts, using ninety minutes blocked by settlers in the West Bank as the evidence for why the old policy needs to be rethought from the ground up, not managed at the margins. This is a congressman who once needed the credential of an Israel trip to be taken seriously on foreign policy. Now the credential is the opposite trip.

For years the Netanyahu-not-Israel distinction was the pressure valve — it let Democrats vent without touching the alliance itself. October 7 and three years of war broke it. What started as criticism of one prime minister’s conduct of one war became, for a growing number of Democratic lawmakers, an argument for conditioning or ending aid outright. The debate stopped being about Bibi. It became about Israel.

Which is why Rahm Emanuel’s Tel Aviv speech last week mattered more than most Netanyahu-bashing does. This is a man who nicknamed former Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes “Hamas” for caring too much about Palestinians — Obama’s own chief of staff, about as establishment as Democrats get — and he stood in Tel Aviv and called Netanyahu’s Israel “a modern-day Sparta,” called for sanctioning officials over settlement expansion, said flatly that “the alliance is at a crossroads. It cannot stand or survive as it has been.” Emanuel criticizing Netanyahu isn’t news. Emanuel arriving at what used to be J Street’s floor — the dovish, “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobby that’s spent two decades to AIPAC’s left — is. Yesterday’s left flank is becoming today’s center.

For a real slice of the younger progressive coalition, it does: the occupation sits inside the same buy-the-bundle framework as policing, immigration, structural inequality. That’s a genuine intellectual current, not just vibes.

The polling backs up that this isn’t a blip. Gallup found Americans sympathizing with Palestinians over Israelis for the first time since it started asking. Democratic sympathy for Israel: 58 percent in 2014, 17 percent now. AP-NORC has roughly half of Democrats calling Gaza a genocide — and 30 percent of Jewish Americans right behind them. This isn’t a youth phenomenon anymore either; older Democrats are closing the gap fast.

None of that collapses into one story, and it shouldn’t. Much of this is a serious argument — occupation, settlements, statehood, the civilian toll — that plenty of American Jews and Israelis are having themselves. Calling every critic an antisemite is as dishonest as calling every Israel supporter indifferent to Palestinian suffering. But the same environment has given room to rhetoric that isn’t criticism anymore. Take Chris Rabb, a Pennsylvania congressional candidate whose campaign implied the gunmen in Australia’s Bondi Beach Hanukkah shooting were “likely Zionists themselves” — a false-flag insinuation Rabb later disowned and blamed on a staffer. Or Maureen Galindo, a Texas candidate who promised to build a “prison for American Zionists.”

Both campaigns were DSA-aligned, and DSA leadership hasn’t exactly rushed to disown either one. Zohran Mamdani, the most prominent Democratic Socialist officeholder in the country, has made his own genocide accusation against Israel a centerpiece of his politics — sharper company for that rhetoric than it used to keep. The movement against Israeli policy is real and growing. So is the tolerance for rhetoric that would have ended a career five years ago. Both are true, and neither cancels the other.

The Republican version comes from a different place entirely — not human rights language, but “America First” nationalism deciding Israel doesn’t get a permanent exemption from the skepticism the movement applies to every other foreign alliance. A recent Pew poll has nearly four in ten Republicans unfavorable on Israel, six in ten among those under fifty.

Thomas Massie’s defeat this spring wasn’t really about Iran — he’d spent years opposing aid to Israel and tried, in his campaign’s final days, to force AIPAC to register as a foreign agent, which is exactly why pro-Israel money had been circling him long before Iran gave everyone else a reason to care. Tucker Carlson going after Netanyahu during the Iran war and Marjorie Taylor Greene breaking with her own party over it — that’s a different flavor of the same erosion, and it shades, in places, into the same antisemitic and conspiratorial territory the left has its own version of.

Neither party is arriving at the same place. But both are unwinding an assumption that used to feel permanent. For decades Americans argued about foreign policy in the language of strategy — alliances, deterrence, interest. Now it’s the language of identity: who belongs, what institutions still deserve trust. Israel didn’t create that shift. It just became the place where it could no longer be contained.

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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 support my work by subscribing.

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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 support my work by subscribing.

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NATO summits are supposed to be historic. This one was, in the words of , “a nothing burger.”

That’s exactly why it mattered. After years of Trump-era drama, Ankara was carefully designed to produce...almost nothing. No blowups. No walkouts. No alliance-ending crisis. Success.

But underneath the carefully managed boredom, something much bigger is happening.

Daalder, who served as U.S. Ambassador to NATO under President Obama, argues the real story isn’t whether Europe is finally spending more. It’s that Europe is gradually taking on more responsibility—and, inevitably, more influence. For decades, Washington wanted burden-sharing without power-sharing. That bargain is getting harder to sustain.

We also talked about why Trump deserves some credit—but perhaps not for the reasons his supporters think; why Ukraine has gone from NATO’s student to one of its most important teachers; whether Turkey is becoming indispensable again; and why a more European NATO should not be confused with an American exit.

The summit itself may have been boring. The future of the alliance isn’t.

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NATO turns 77 this year, and the coverage out of Ankara reads like another obituary in progress: Trump doesn’t believe in the alliance, Europe can’t defend itself, the whole arrangement is coming apart. This genre shows up every few years, usually around a spending fight, and it’s usually wrong.

It’s wrong this time too, but not for the reason the optimists think. NATO isn’t ending. The pretense is.

The pretense wasn’t that America would always defend Europe—nobody outside a few fringe corners ever seriously doubted Article 5, though President Trump has made a habit of keeping everyone guessing about whether he’d actually honor it. The pretense was narrower and more useful: that the post-Cold War model could run indefinitely.

That model is what’s ending. Not the alliance itself.

Radek Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, has a useful way of describing NATO’s evolution. NATO 1.0 was built to contain the Soviet Union. NATO 2.0 was the post-Cold War alliance searching for a new mission, eventually finding one in Afghanistan as Russia receded from view. NATO 3.0, as he describes it, is an alliance in which Europe assumes primary responsibility for the conventional defense of its own continent while the United States becomes, in his words, more of a “cavalry over the hill” ally.

Whether “NATO 3.0” sticks as a label is almost beside the point. All alliances evolve, and NATO has reinvented itself before. The question in Ankara isn’t whether it survives. It’s what version emerges next.

Trump’s skepticism of NATO didn’t begin with his presidency. In 1987, he bought a full-page advertisement in the New York Times arguing that wealthy allies were exploiting American defense spending. That’s four decades of consistency, which is more than you can say for most of his positions.

Nor was Trump the first American president to make the argument. Every administration since at least Eisenhower has pressed Europe to shoulder more of its own defense. Obama renewed that pressure after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Trump didn’t invent the pressure, but he did change its character. He made it personal, transactional, and very public.

That matters less because it weakened NATO than because it weakened the assumption underneath it: that American leadership was politically automatic, a permanent feature of the landscape rather than a policy subject to renegotiation every election cycle. Once a country says its commitments are conditional—out loud, on camera—it’s very hard to unhear it, whichever way the next election goes.

When NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte arrived in the Oval Office carrying cardboard charts documenting how much Europe has spent since Trump’s first term—what he called, gamely, “the Trump trillion”—it became an oddly revealing image. The head of the most powerful military alliance in history was effectively presenting poster boards to convince one American president that Europe had finally listened.

His broader point, however, was more important than the performance. Europe may finally be spending more, but spending is only the beginning. As Rutte wrote recently in the Washington Post, “Cash is crucial, but you can’t stop a missile or a tank with a dollar or a euro.”

It isn’t there yet, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of pretense. A British Army smaller than at any point since Waterloo doesn’t become a serious land force because politicians announce bigger defense budgets.

What Europe is actually doing is more modest—and, in my view, more interesting. It’s buying insurance. Not replacing the United States, but preparing for a future in which Washington may be less willing—or less able—to play the role it has played since 1949.

Germany is borrowing hundreds of billions of euros for defense. Canada is buying German submarines instead of American ones. Seven frontline states meeting in Gdańsk pledged to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense and security. Poland’s foreign minister put the objective with refreshing clarity: Europe doesn’t need to match America. It simply needs to be stronger than Russia.

Even those numbers deserve a measure of skepticism. Military pensions count toward many countries’ defense totals. Infrastructure spending intended to improve military mobility often serves broader domestic purposes as well. Britain’s own defense leaders argue current funding still falls well short of what they believe is required.

More importantly, money doesn’t create military capability on demand. Defense industries take years to build. Production lines don’t expand overnight. Command structures evolve even more slowly. NATO’s own supreme allied commander in Europe has described the alliance’s dependence on American capabilities as an “unhealthy co-dependence” that needs to end. Yet even as Europe spends more, the United States continues reducing refueling aircraft, maritime patrol assets and fighter squadrons assigned to the continent. You can announce a rebalancing long before you achieve one.

The hardest problem isn’t money. It’s command. For seventy-seven years, NATO has been built around an American supreme commander. Even many of the Europeans arguing most forcefully for greater strategic autonomy have little interest in changing that. Nobody has drawn up a serious plan for a NATO that isn’t ultimately led from Washington.

There’s a third shift underway that receives far less attention. Ukraine has quietly become one of NATO’s most valuable strategic assets—even without becoming a member.

Twenty years ago, NATO talked about training Ukraine. Today, it studies Ukraine—having gone from exporting military expertise to importing some of its most important lessons from the battlefield.

The alliance is learning from Ukraine in drone warfare, electronic warfare, logistics, dispersed command structures and industrial mobilization—lessons drawn from a country fighting the largest land war Europe has seen since 1945. The flow of expertise increasingly runs in both directions. Ukraine is still receiving Western weapons, training and intelligence. But it is also reshaping how NATO itself thinks about modern war.

Ankara won’t resolve any of this. Summits rarely do. They usually ratify changes already underway and package them as breakthroughs. There will be new spending pledges, carefully negotiated language on Ukraine and declarations of allied unity. The real negotiation—how quickly Europe assumes greater responsibility, how much the United States steps back, and what kind of alliance emerges on the other side—will continue long after the cameras leave.

NATO isn’t dying in Ankara. The pretense that it could run forever on the settings it adopted in 1991 is. Washington will remain the alliance’s indispensable capital. It just won’t be the sole driver of what comes next.

Join me TODAY at 12:30 for a discussion of the NATO summit and the future of the alliance with . We will break down all of the above, President Trump’s flirtation with Turkey’s President Erdogan and more. Hope to see you there.

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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 support my work and subscribe.

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As America marks its 250th birthday, I’m also celebrating the community we’re building here at Cosmopolitics. This has always been a place for people who want to think beyond the headlines and have smarter conversations about America’s role in the world—where we’ve been, where we’re headed, and why it matters. In honor of America 250, I’m offering 25% off an annual subscription through Sunday. I’d love for you to join us. It’s also a great time to give a gift subscription and invite a fellow traveler into our community.

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Ask ten Americans what they feel about the country turning 250 this year, and you’ll get eleven answers. At least nine of them will really be answers about Donald Trump.

That’s not an accident. America’s semiquincentennial was supposed to be one of those rare moments when the country paused long enough to reflect on where it has been and where it is going. Instead, even the celebration became polarized. Congress created a bipartisan America250 commission nearly a decade ago to organize the anniversary. The Trump orbit responded with Freedom250, a parallel effort that has competed for donors, sponsors, and attention while House Democrats allege contributors were quietly steered away from the official celebration.

The result was almost inevitable. A national birthday became yet another referendum on one man. Before the candles were even lit, America at 250 had become a Rorschach test, revealing less about the country’s history than about how exhausted Americans have become by its politics.

The real missed opportunity isn’t that Americans can’t agree on what to think about themselves. It’s that they never really got the chance to try.

But there is a larger audience watching this anniversary unfold. For much of the past century, the rest of the world has treated America’s story as more than America’s story. Whether they admired it, resented it, or competed against it, countries measured themselves against an idea the United States projected: that democracy, openness, alliances, and individual liberty were not simply American values but aspirations with global relevance. America’s founding became part of the world’s political imagination.

Which makes this birthday worth asking a different question: What has America meant to the world—and what does it mean now?

The architect questions its own blueprint

For eighty years, America did more than dominate the international system. It helped design much of it. From the alliances, institutions, and security guarantees to the global financial architecture and the dollar’s central role, the assumption was that, whatever Washington’s mistakes, the United States intended to remain the indispensable power behind the system it built.

That assumption is now under review—not only in Washington, but everywhere else. The Economist recently described Trump’s foreign policy as a “wrecking ball revolution,” arguing that the United States is dismantling much of the order it spent generations constructing. The Trump administration itself makes much the same point, albeit approvingly. Its National Security Strategy declares that “the days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.”

But the more interesting story isn’t simply that America is stepping back. It’s what decades of American leadership taught everyone else.

Washington often described globalization as a force for peace and prosperity. In practice, it also demonstrated something else: interdependence creates leverage. Through sanctions, tariffs, dollar dominance, export controls, and its privileged access to the global financial system, the United States showed that if other countries depended on you, they could also be pressured by you.

The rest of the world took note. China has spent years building alternatives to American economic dominance. Russia has searched for ways around Western financial pressure. Iran uses shipping lanes and regional proxies to create its own forms of leverage. The lesson America taught the world wasn’t simply that interconnectedness creates stability. It was that interconnectedness creates power.

Today’s debate isn’t just about whether America still wants to lead the system it built. It’s about what happens when other countries begin applying the same logic.

Allies updating their emergency contacts

The evidence is no longer anecdotal. America’s allies are preparing for a future in which Washington may be less predictable, less engaged, or simply less interested.

A committee of Britain’s House of Lords concluded this year that the United Kingdom can no longer assume the United States will guarantee European security in the way it has for generations. A Pew survey across 36 countries found that roughly half of respondents no longer see the United States as a reliable partner, while nearly two-thirds believe it contributes little or nothing to global peace and stability.

Perhaps the clearest assessment came from former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, writing for the George W. Bush Institute’s own America250 series. The democratic world, he argued, is already preparing “Plan B” in case the United States abandons its traditional leadership role.

Notice who is saying this: Not Beijing or Moscow, but America’s allies. This isn’t triumphalism. It’s contingency planning—the geopolitical equivalent of quietly updating your emergency contacts, not because you want the relationship to end, but because you’re no longer certain someone will answer the phone.

Trump’s answer has largely been transactional. Partnerships become deals. Security becomes something closer to a subscription service. Loyalty is measured less by shared purpose than by immediate returns. But rejecting the role of Atlas does not require abandoning the principles that made America’s leadership attractive in the first place. Those are different choices.

A country can ask allies to shoulder more responsibility while still defending democracy. It can reduce military commitments without abandoning human rights. It can stop trying to solve every international crisis without surrendering the belief that liberty and accountable government matter beyond its own borders.

Washington increasingly sounds as though it has decided to quit the first job before deciding whether it still wants the second.

America’s self-correcting mechanism

It’s tempting to read this anniversary as evidence of irreversible decline. History suggests something more complicated.

America has never been defined by the absence of contradictions. It has been defined by its willingness—however unevenly and painfully—to confront those contradictions. Slavery gave way to abolition. Segregation yielded, imperfectly, to the civil rights movement. Vietnam forced a reckoning over presidential power. Iraq prompted another over intelligence, intervention, and accountability. The point isn’t that America gets everything right. It’s that the country has repeatedly proved capable of arguing with itself, correcting course, and moving forward.

Nadia Murad, the Yazidi genocide survivor who later became an American citizen and won the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize, captured that idea beautifully in an essay for the Bush Institute’s America250 project. America, she wrote, is “not a nation without contradiction, but one with the courage to confront it.”

For generations, America convinced the world that ideas matter and that democracies are capable of confronting their failures, arguing with themselves, and changing course. Perhaps that’s the better definition of American exceptionalism—not perfection, but the ability of a democracy to wrestle with its own contradictions and keep moving forward. Whether that remains true is the real question of America’s 250th birthday.

Happy birthday, America. The party may have been hijacked, but the idea hasn’t. It endures.

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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 take advantage of our holiday discount and subscribe.

Claim your America250 25% discount

Every few years, someone declares the U.S.-Israel relationship broken. Usually they’re wrong. This time I’m not so sure—though not for the reason you think.

The media is treating this as a personality clash—with Trump and Netanyahu at odds over Iran, and Vance reminding Israel it has one friend left and should act like it.

I’ve sat through enough of these spats to know the choreography: they fight over settlements, over Lebanon, over whichever war happens to be current, then paper it over with whatever metallurgical metaphor for the relationship—”ironclad,” “unbreakable” or “no daylight”—is fashionable that year.

Those fights were never the story, and the latest ones between Trump and Bibi aren’t either. The alliance isn’t ending, but the assumption that Israel doesn’t have to make its case the way every other ally does may be.

For decades, Israel was exempt from the same questions Washington asks of Germany, Saudi Arabia, South Korea—or just about anyone else receiving $3.8 billion a year. That exception is expiring, not because Trump and Netanyahu finally ran out of patience with each other, but because America changed, Israel changed, and the coalitions holding the old arrangement together changed with them. This isn’t an obituary. It’s a recalibration.

Washington broke the bipartisan consensus before the American people did. Netanyahu struck the match in 2015, bypassing Obama to address Congress and torch the Iran deal—a breach so brazen at the time it turned “support for Israel” from a reflex into a partisan cudgel. Obama answered by letting the U.N. settlements resolution pass. Trump finished the job, embracing Netanyahu more closely than any president before him, right up to Mike Pompeo addressing the Republican convention from Jerusalem, making a foreign capital a campaign backdrop.

By October 7, Israel wasn’t an ally anymore. It was a jersey—and which one you wore said less about the Middle East than about which side of America’s culture war you’d already picked. Support for Israel stopped being a foreign policy position and became a loyalty test.

Israeli officials saw some of this coming. I remember interviewing Israel’s then-deputy foreign minister, Idan Roll, in Washington in 2022. I expected to hear about Iran and Hamas. Instead, he wanted to talk about Tel Aviv’s tech scene, its Pride parades, and its climate startups—all things he assumed would resonate with younger American progressives.

But younger Democrats didn’t grow up on Entebbe or Oslo. They grew up watching the occupation calcify and Netanyahu cozy up to the GOP like a second marriage.

Then came Gaza. Everyone wants a clean causal story: October 7 happened, the war followed, American opinion collapsed. It was tidier than the truth. Gaza didn’t cause the shift—it accelerated one that had been building since the Obama years and made it impossible to look away from.

Which is how you get Chuck Schumer—yes, Chuck Schumer—calling for new Israeli elections from the Senate floor in March 2024. In three decades covering this relationship, I can’t think of a stranger sentence. But when I called Israeli officials and former diplomats that day, the outrage wasn’t what struck me. Even Schumer’s harshest critics heard the subtext. This wasn’t an enemy turning on Israel, but an old friend worried Israel was turning on itself.

The Democratic shift has received most of the attention, but the Republican shift may ultimately prove even more consequential. Republicans were supposed to be the exception’s last reliable guardians. They still are, mostly: 70 percent sympathize more with Israelis than Palestinians, according to Gallup, though down 10 points in two years.

The Reagan Institute’s own polling keeps finding Republicans want America engaged in the world by wide margins.

Engagement, yes. Blank checks, no—not even for the ally you like best. A growing slice of the coalition has stopped believing any ally, however beloved, deserves a permanent exemption from the same standard Washington claims to apply to every other ally: Does this serve American interests?

That is, ironically, the exact argument Israeli governments have made about themselves for seventy years. Israel insisted on acting in Israel’s interests, whether Washington approved or not—bombing Iraq’s nuclear facility, expanding settlements and lobbying against an American president’s Iran deal. Americans are increasingly asking why they shouldn’t do the same. That isn’t anti-Israel. In many ways, it’s Israel’s own logic applied back to the United States.

Vance said the quiet part out loud: “Donald Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment.” Israeli officials were rattled—not because American leaders have never criticized them, but because a sitting vice president said, on camera, what used to stay in cables: support for Israel isn’t a given. It has to be re-earned. My quarrel with Vance isn’t the diagnosis. It’s the delivery—Tehran has spent forty years trying to sell the region on a fraying American-Israeli lifeline, and he just handed them the pull quote for free.

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The war with Iran brought all of these tensions back into view. Over the past few months, I’ve come to think we’ve been arguing about the wrong thing since October 7—or rather, three different things at once, thrown into one political blender.

One is about Israel’s conduct of the war—its proportionality, humanitarian access, and methods. Trump stumbled into this debate when he questioned whether Israel needed to level a Beirut apartment block to eliminate a single Hezbollah operative. He wasn’t making a legal argument about proportionality or the laws of armed conflict. He was giving voice to a question a lot of Americans had already started asking: Was there really no other way? Curiously, Trump was much slower to ask that question about Gaza.

The second debate is about antisemitism—real, rising, and increasingly mainstream. The third is about American interests: whether any ally, however close, should be exempt from the question Washington asks of everyone else—does this serve us?

These are not the same debate.

Each side just prefers fighting one battle with the other’s ammunition.

The tragedy is that both sides have made it harder to confront the real thing. Genuine antisemitism has surged since October 7 in ways that should alarm anyone who believes in a pluralistic democracy. At the same time, Netanyahu and many of his supporters have too often treated criticism of Israeli policy as evidence of antisemitism itself. One cheapens the accusation. The other exploits it. Both leave Jews less safe.

I feel all three of these most days, sometimes in the same hour, and it makes me like most American Jews I know. We are still not through October 7. I don’t think we are supposed to be. We ache for the hostages, for the dead, and for a country that lives minutes from people openly committed to its destruction. Many of us are heartbroken for Gaza—for children who had nothing to do with Hamas and lost everything in this war, and for Lebanese families who’ve spent decades living with Hezbollah the way Gazans have lived under Hamas: trapped by forces they neither chose nor control.

And most of us are exhausted by the expectation that we answer for decisions made by a government we didn’t elect, don’t vote for, and often criticize ourselves. That’s not solidarity. It’s just another form of collective guilt.

So here’s what I think we have all been missing: what’s actually collapsing isn’t one relationship. It’s a set of assumptions at once.

The assumption that Democrats would support Israel reflexively is gone. The assumption that Republican support was automatic is weakening—especially among younger voters. The assumption that criticism of Israeli policy is inherently antisemitic is collapsing under its own weight, cheapening the charge when the real thing appears. And the assumption that this relationship exists outside normal politics is ending too.

I still believe Israel should remain one of America’s closest allies. I just don’t believe close allies should be treated as exceptions. The strongest alliances are built on shared interests, shared values, and enough resilience to survive honest disagreement.

The question isn’t whether America should keep standing with Israel. It’s whether both countries are ready for a relationship that no longer runs on habit or assumption, but on trust—and whether Israel is ready to be treated like America’s closest ally instead of our exception.

are back later today with a special holiday Hot Takes Happy Hour and we hope to see you there. Note our new summer time - 5:00pm ET/2:00pm PT. Let’s get our America 250 grove on!!

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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.

There’s a fiction being maintained in Washington right now, and it’s getting harder to sustain by the week.

The fiction is this: that the Lebanon-Israel talks happening in Washington this week - the fifth round since April - are somehow separate from the broader U.S.-Iran framework. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said as much on Tuesday, arguing that the Lebanon track is distinct because Lebanon is a sovereign country with its own government, and that’s who Washington is dealing with.

That would be fine, except the actual text of the Iran memorandum doesn’t agree with Rubio. The agreement explicitly declares “the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon.” That’s not a side issue. It’s item one of the deal.

So which is it? Is Lebanon separate, or is it part of the foundation of the U.S.-Iran agreement? The answer, inconveniently, is both - and that contradiction is exactly the problem.

Iran’s insistence on including Lebanon wasn’t generosity toward an ally. It was leverage. Tehran gets to claim it secured protection for Hezbollah, its most important regional asset, as part of a deal with Washington - without actually giving up the thing that makes Hezbollah valuable in the first place.

That’s the part Iran has no intention of surrendering. Iran provides Hezbollah with most of its funding, training, and weapons. Since the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, the group has reportedly been managed even more directly by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Hezbollah isn’t a freelance militia. It is Tehran’s most important regional proxy and one of its primary sources of leverage against Israel.

Which makes the entire framing of these Washington talks - Lebanon and Israel, two sovereign states negotiating bilaterally - somewhat beside the point. Hezbollah isn’t at the table. It has explicitly told the Lebanese government it would rather bet on Iran’s negotiating track than on direct talks with Israel. And it has made clear it considers any agreement reached without Iran’s blessing to be, functionally, irrelevant.

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President Trump is half right about Israel. He has pushed back on Israel’s conduct in Lebanon in ways that are, on the merits, correct. He’s reportedly told Prime Minister Netanyahu directly that Israel needs to stop picking fights with Lebanon and publicly called recent strikes in Beirut “vicious” and “too much.” Vice President Vance has been even blunter, telling Israeli officials that a country of nine million people “can’t just kill your way out” of every national security problem.

That’s a fair critique. Israel’s pattern of leveling apartment buildings to target individual Hezbollah operatives - often on the grounds that the buildings may also contain weapons or fighters - raises serious questions about proportionality. Civilians are not interchangeable with the militants Israel says it’s pursuing, and the theory that more force automatically produces more security has a mixed record at best.

This is, notably, the same playbook Israel ran in Gaza - flatten broadly, sort out the rubble later. Trump didn’t seem especially troubled by that version of the strategy. The difference is that Lebanon sits next to a fragile Iran deal, shipping lanes, and oil markets.

But here’s where Trump’s framing breaks down. He keeps talking about this as a Netanyahu problem - a temperament problem, an Israel-needs-to-calm-down problem. What he’s not saying is that Hezbollah is not an independent actor making its own strategic choices. It is an Iranian proxy.

The Israeli military announced this weekend that it had uncovered a large underground Hezbollah tunnel complex near the border - stocked with anti-tank missiles, explosives, and drones reportedly capable of reaching deep into Israeli territory, not just the border towns. That’s the kind of discovery that makes “just trust the process” a hard sell in Netanyahu’s cabinet, and it’s why every time Trump suggests Bibi will simply fall in line with Washington, the answer from Jerusalem is effectively: not while that’s still being dug thirty minutes from the border.

Iran could constrain Hezbollah’s behavior tomorrow if it decided that was in its interest. It hasn’t. Tehran’s preferred response is to threaten the thing that actually moves markets: the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has repeatedly suggested it could close the strait, or walk away from negotiations altogether, whenever Israel strikes Hezbollah targets in Lebanon - without mentioning that many of those strikes are responses to Hezbollah attacks. It’s a convenient omission.

Iran gets to outsource the appearance of moderation to Washington’s frustration with Jerusalem while changing nothing about Hezbollah’s arsenal or position inside Lebanon. Israeli officials see this clearly, even if they’re not always saying it diplomatically. Israel’s ambassador to the talks, Yechiel Leiter, described the process as a “train wreck” and suggested Hezbollah has been emboldened by the broader U.S.-Iran framework rather than constrained by it.

Leiter is probably right about the emboldening part. Hezbollah’s leverage has only grown since Iran successfully inserted Lebanon into its own negotiations with Washington - the opposite of what was supposed to happen if the goal was de-escalation.

There’s a deeper asymmetry here that Israel may not have fully priced in when it went to war. Israel’s aim was never just to degrade Hezbollah for its own sake - it was to dismantle Iran’s broader capacity to threaten Israel, including the network of proxies built precisely to do that. For Trump, the win conditions look different: the Strait reopening, a nuclear deal closing, and the war ending, on a timeline that lets him claim credit.

If Tehran offers Washington a clean exit on those fronts in exchange for leaving Hezbollah’s arsenal largely intact, there’s little reason to assume Trump says no. Israel went to war to remove Iran’s ability to threaten it by any means available. Trump may be negotiating toward an outcome where one of those means - arguably the most immediate one - gets quietly left off the table.

Lebanese officials, meanwhile, are stuck in an impossible position. They’re trying to negotiate directly with Israel while simultaneously watching Iran negotiate over their heads. President Joseph Aoun has said Lebanon will accept nothing less than an end to Israeli occupation and “the simultaneous collapse of all foreign tutelage” - a pointed reference to Tehran as much as Jerusalem.

To his credit, Aoun has shown more willingness than any recent Lebanese leader to challenge Hezbollah: backing efforts to restrict its military activities, targeting Iranian arms routes, and pursuing direct talks with Israel. But intent is not capacity. Disarming a force that outguns the Lebanese army is not something Beirut can accomplish through presidential statements alone.

What’s striking is that this is no longer just Israel’s complaint. Increasingly, it is Lebanon’s. A growing number of Lebanese political leaders, business figures, and civil society organizations are arguing that their country cannot recover so long as decisions about war and peace are made in Tehran rather than Beirut.

That doesn’t mean they support an indefinite Israeli occupation. Most don’t. It means they’re tired of Lebanon functioning as everyone else’s battlefield. Five rounds of Washington talks and there is still no durable ceasefire because the negotiations are built on a contradiction nobody can resolve.

The United States wants to treat Lebanon as a separate issue between two sovereign states. Iran wants credit for ending the war in Lebanon without giving up Hezbollah. Israel wants security guarantees without trusting either Hezbollah or Tehran to provide them. And Lebanon is left trying to reclaim sovereignty while everyone else negotiates over it.

Hezbollah remains the central fact that nobody can quite agree how to discuss. Iran treats it as a Lebanese political movement. Israel treats it as an Iranian military asset. Washington tends to alternate between the two depending on the conversation. But Hezbollah cannot simultaneously be important enough to include in an Iran deal and irrelevant enough to exclude from the negotiations meant to secure it.

For now, that contradiction remains unresolved. Which is why, after five rounds of talks, everyone is still negotiating Lebanon while pretending they’re talking about something else. Expect the same in round six.

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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.

As laborious as the recent negotiations with Iran were (although probably not as exhausting as following President Trump’s play-by-play on social media), reaching the Memorandum of Understanding was the easy part.

Before the hard part - the actual nuclear negotiations - start, I have a number of questions that this framework doesn’t seem to address.

The first is embarrassingly basic: what exactly is in the MOU?

Nobody seems entirely sure because nobody has actually seen the text. That may sound like a minor detail, but it isn’t.

At the moment, Americans are describing one deal. Iranians are describing another. The White House says the Strait of Hormuz will reopen without restrictions. Iranian officials are talking about management arrangements and possible fees. American officials talk about disposing of enriched uranium. Iranian officials talk about future discussions.

Perhaps both sides are simply selling the same agreement differently to domestic audiences. Or perhaps they have negotiated what diplomats politely call “constructive ambiguity” and what the rest of us call “finding out later.”

Until the text is released, (will it be?) we don’t actually know whether Washington and Tehran agree on what the agreement means. Which is usually something you like to establish before announcing you’ve solved the crisis.

That leads to the second question: who is actually running the next sixty days?

We’re told there will be a signing in Geneva. Pakistan and Qatar were involved in mediating the initial talks. There are reports also involving Oman and Switzerland. At some point, someone may need to print a seating chart.

When and where do the negotiations start? Who is mediating? Are these direct negotiations or indirect negotiations? Signal messages? Snapchat?

Will people who actually have experience negotiating nuclear agreements - scientists, inspectors, sanctions experts, and the Europeans be in the room? What about the IAEA?

Then there is Iran’s nuclear program

If negotiating the ceasefire was difficult, the nuclear issues are considerably harder.

When officials say Iran will “dispose” of its highly enriched uranium, that sounds reassuring until you realize everyone appears to have a different definition of the word dispose.

Does it mean destroy? Ship it out of the country? Dilute it? Store it somewhere and promise not to touch it?

These distinctions matter.

The same goes for Iran’s nuclear facilities. Many have been heavily damaged. Are they gone forever? Can they be rebuilt? What role will the IAEA play? Will inspectors have anytime-anywhere access, or are we heading back toward years of arguments over monitoring and compliance?

And what about the Strait of Hormuz?

Everyone agrees it should reopen. Nobody seems to agree who controls it afterward.

Trump says nobody. Iran says Iran and Oman. The shipping companies seem to be saying, “Call us when you’ve figured it out.”

Will there be tolls? Service fees? Navigation fees? Some new category of fee invented by people who insist it is definitely not a toll?

And even if the politics are resolved, how long will it take to clear mines, restore confidence, and persuade insurers and shipping companies that the waterway is actually safe?

Then there is the question that will likely dominate Washington the moment the details emerge: what exactly is Iran getting?

When does sanctions relief begin? When do frozen assets get released? Is there reconstruction assistance? How much?

And what happens if Iran receives the economic benefits and then violates the agreement?

We can’t forget Israel

Iran says Lebanon is covered by the agreement. Israel says it is not bound by it.

Iran wants military operations in Lebanon to stop. Israel says it intends to remain where it is and preserve freedom of action against Hezbollah. Those seem difficult positions to reconcile.

Can Trump persuade Netanyahu to go along? What happens if Israel launches another major operation in Lebanon? What happens if Hezbollah attacks first? Can the deal survive if one of its most important regional players never signed onto it in the first place?

What exactly is Iran agreeing not to do?

The discussion has focused heavily on uranium, sanctions, and shipping lanes. Fair enough. Those are important.

But is Iran agreeing to stop supporting Hezbollah? What about the Houthis? What about the various militias that have attacked American forces and U.S. allies throughout the region?

Is support for proxies prohibited, reduced, monitored, or simply ignored because the negotiators have enough problems already?

The distinction matters because a deal that addresses Iran’s nuclear program but leaves its regional activities untouched is a very different deal from one that attempts to reshape the broader security landscape of the Middle East.

My understanding is that precious little of this is actually addressed in the current memorandum of understanding.

Which brings us to another awkward question: what exactly happens in sixty days?

Because unless someone has discovered a revolutionary new way to negotiate nuclear agreements, sixty days is not a lot of time.

The original Iran nuclear deal took roughly eighteen months to negotiate. These talks involve many of the same issues, plus a war, plus sanctions relief, plus regional security arrangements, plus the future of the Strait of Hormuz.

So what happens when Day 60 arrives and everyone is still arguing about uranium stockpiles, inspections, sanctions relief, Hezbollah, and who controls what?

Do we get an extension? Another extension? A framework for extending the extension? At what point does a temporary agreement simply become the agreement?

And if there is no deal, then what? Do sanctions snap back? Does military pressure resume? Do American troops stay in the region indefinitely?

Does everyone simply return to threatening each other on social media? Which, to be fair, may be the one part of this process that is already fully operational.

There is an old diplomatic rule that if both sides leave a negotiation claiming victory, the agreement is probably workable. If both sides leave describing entirely different agreements, the interesting part is still ahead of us.

At this point, I realize this column is starting to resemble one of those conspiracy boards in detective shows, where the protagonist has covered an entire wall with index cards, red string, and increasingly alarming facial expressions.

But seriously, the list of unresolved issues is getting impressively long.

We don’t know what the framework deal says. We don’t know whether both sides agree on what it means. We don’t know who is negotiating the next phase, what happens to Iran’s uranium, who controls the Strait of Hormuz, what Iran is getting, whether Israel is bound by any of it, whether support for regional proxies is addressed, or what happens when the sixty-day clock runs out.

At some point, a deal stops looking like a solution and starts looking like a syllabus.

That’s a lot of questions for a deal that everyone is already describing as historic.

Last, but not least

After months of war, thousands dead, energy markets rattled, shipping disrupted, and the global economy held hostage by a narrow stretch of water, are we actually ending up in a better place?

Or are we spending the next sixty days negotiating our way back to something that looks suspiciously like where we started?

That may be the question that matters most.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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 …

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

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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 bec…

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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.

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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 co…

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