It’s still the one question that unites almost everyone on this anniversary, no matter where they stand on anything else: where were you when the planes hit? Who did you call? That’s about the only thing left we all still ask each other the same way.

I decided to sleep in the morning of September 11 because Secretary of State Colin Powell was in Peru. I was walking out the door when the assignment desk called about the first plane, and my first instinct was that it had to be some kind of air traffic control failure - the idea that something so monumental could be happening simply hadn’t occurred to me. I heard about the second tower in a cab on the way to work. By the time I reached the State Department, people were evacuating, and because I was a reporter, I did what reporters do: I ran toward the building everyone else was running out of, until Diplomatic Security practically carried me out.

I spent hours trying to walk the half mile to the Foreign Press Center as the security perimeter around the White House kept expanding, then spent the next 24 hours there with the State Department press corps. We knew almost immediately that America had changed. We couldn’t know that a quarter century later, Americans would look at each other with more suspicion than they look at the country’s actual enemies.

The government’s response built an enormous security architecture - the TSA, intelligence reform, hardened cockpit doors, expanded surveillance, two wars, a homeland security bureaucracy - all of it requiring legislation, money and years of bureaucratic effort. The collective national response required far less: strangers trading knowing looks on the street and the subway, flags on houses that had never flown one, Bush’s approval rating hitting 90 percent within weeks, a level no sitting president has reached since.

We spent the next quarter century institutionalizing the security lessons of September 11, but never tried to institutionalize the resilience of September 12, and that resilience has since drained away. A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken just before this year’s anniversary found 61 percent of Americans now see domestic extremists as the bigger ideology-driven threat, versus 34 percent who point abroad - a sharp flip from a decade ago, when foreign terrorism still outranked domestic. The same poll found most Americans still regard 9/11 as a unifying moment, even as they say the country has grown less unified since.

Polarization and terrorism are not the same thing, and treating them as interchangeable is intellectually lazy - domestic terrorism is one ugly symptom of a much bigger disease. The real vulnerability is that Americans no longer trust each other, or their own institutions, enough to agree on what’s true, which makes political violence easier to justify and foreign manipulation almost effortless to execute.

In the days after the attacks, Bush went to a mosque in Washington and said Islam was a religion of peace, that the terrorists had perverted it - an effort to draw a line between the attackers and the millions of Muslim Americans who had nothing to do with it.

That instinct largely held for years. It holds less cleanly now. Rhetoric that treats an entire faith as suspect, once confined to one party’s fringe, is turning up closer to the mainstream, and so is rhetoric, mostly from the other direction, that flirts with the idea America had it coming. Neither view was remotely acceptable in 2001; now both get argued about rather than simply rejected, depending on who’s talking. This year, with the midterms approaching, that same partisan lens has been applied to the anniversary itself, with part of the official commemoration used to draw a line from September 11 to the current, contested war with Iran.

That drift is real. In 2001, most Americans processed the day through a shared American identity first. In 2026, a lot of us run it through a political filter first, and get to the American identity second, if we get there at all.

Abraham Lincoln asked, in his 1838 Lyceum Address, where America’s destruction could possibly come from. Not from a foreign army, he argued, since no power on earth could cross the oceans and march to the Ohio or the Blue Ridge. If America was ever destroyed, it would have to happen from within: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

Former Defense Secretary James Mattis has been a little obsessed with that warning. He spent four decades thinking about how America’s enemies might defeat it, commanded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ran the Pentagon - and keeps coming back to the possibility that the country he spent his life defending might do the job itself. In 2020, he invoked Lincoln to describe an America where “suspicion or contempt” was replacing trust and politics was paralyzing the country. A year later, on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, he returned to the problem from a national security angle: America had gotten better at defending the homeland even as the collapse of trust inside it created a vulnerability our adversaries could exploit.

We had a strategy for Al Qaeda and Afghanistan, reorganized the intelligence community, and built an entire cabinet department to protect the homeland - but never a strategy for the homeland turning on itself. That’s where the hand-wringing about national unity stops being sentimental and starts being strategic: societal resilience is a component of national power, not just a civic nicety.

Ukraine had roughly 196,000 soldiers before Russia’s full-scale invasion and, within a few years, nearly 900,000 including reservists, while civilians kept power plants running and companies built drones and fought off cyberattacks. Israel was tearing itself apart politically before October 7; after the attack, it called up 360,000 reservists, some of whom showed up before they were even summoned. Neither country stopped arguing with itself - they just didn’t let the arguments keep them from showing up when the country needed them.

None of this argues for a rerun of September 12. That unity was bought with 2,977 lives, and no one sane should wish for the invoice to come due again. Americans didn’t agree before the attacks or after them; democracy was never supposed to mean unanimity, and anyone selling that version of unity is selling something else too.

We are far better than we were on September 10, 2001, at hardening a cockpit door and tracing terrorist money. But every American who becomes convinced that half the country is stupid, evil or dangerous becomes that much easier to manipulate, and that is the harder question Lincoln left us with, the one Washington doesn’t much want to answer: what protects a nation from itself? Not enforced consensus, and not a grief-soaked memory of unity that catastrophe manufactured, but the discipline to argue fiercely, lose elections, shrug off propaganda and still know we’re on the same side.

Oceans don’t protect us anymore, not when a laptop in Shanghai or a troll farm outside St. Petersburg travels faster than any army could. But Lincoln’s point hasn’t aged: our adversaries don’t need to create America’s divisions, only to find the fault lines, press on them, and let us do the fighting.

We built a fortress after September 11 to keep America’s enemies out. Twenty-five years later, we need to remember that America’s greatest strength was always what’s inside it.

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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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Nine months after U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro, Trump announced what he’s calling the “biggest oil deal in world history,” giving Americans majority control over a venture involving some 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan crude. When American oil companies considered Venezuela too risky and failed to move, the administration apparently decided the U.S. government could become the investor itself, with the Pentagon helping to finance the venture.

This isn’t Chevron, currently the only major U.S. oil company actively producing in Venezuela, signing another production contract. The administration created an arrangement involving a private Venezuelan company through which the U.S. government would obtain a majority stake and access to oil from 17 strategic fields.

Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, said the agreement runs 25 years, with an initial goal of pushing production above 1.5 million barrels per day and turning the country “into an oil-producing power, for the benefit and happiness of the Venezuelan people.”

The federal government doesn’t normally own stakes in foreign oil ventures, nor does America have a national oil company the way Saudi Arabia has Aramco or Mexico has Pemex. The Trump administration reportedly turned to the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, an entity designed to finance national-security priorities, to help solve the problem.

So our president isn’t merely asking American companies to return to Venezuela. His government is trying to make Venezuela investable by putting the power and money of the American state behind them.

But reserves aren’t inventory. Trump talks about 65 billion barrels as though somebody just discovered a gigantic Strategic Petroleum Reserve beneath Caracas. The oil has to be drilled, pumped, transported and refined. Venezuela’s infrastructure has deteriorated after years of mismanagement, underinvestment and sanctions, and will require billions in investment to significantly increase production.

The consensus among oil analysts is that meaningful production gains are measured in years, not months, and the barrels capable of actually moving U.S. pump prices could be five to 15 years away. All of this is awkward because Trump needs cheaper gasoline before November, not sometime during the second term of President Whoever-Comes-Next.

There’s also the Iran problem, which Trump started and now needs Venezuela to help him solve. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve has fallen sharply amid supply disruptions from that very conflict, and Trump now says Venezuelan crude will help refill it. Call it vertical integration: start a war that drains the reserve, then launch a separate intervention to top it back off. It’s the foreign policy equivalent of borrowing from one credit card to pay off another - except the collateral is a foreign country’s oil fields.

Frankly, whether the oil ever arrives isn’t the deal’s biggest problem to me. I need gas and am going to fill my car regardless. I’m more concerned about whether America has the authority to take the oil and who in Venezuela had the authority to give it away.

Delcy Rodríguez wasn’t elected president - she became interim leader after U.S. forces removed Maduro. Yet before Venezuelans have elected his replacement, her government is locking in an enormous economic arrangement governing the country’s defining national resource, potentially for decades, with the country that put her in power.

That’s what makes the deal so revealing. We were told Maduro had to go because of drugs, security, authoritarianism and the threat his government posed. Well, Maduro is gone, but much of his governing apparatus isn’t. Rodríguez was his vice president; now she could arguably be considered Washington’s partner. And before Venezuelans have had a chance to choose their next president, the government left behind by Maduro has struck one of the largest resource agreements in modern history with the country that removed him.

The opposition understands the problem. You can’t build a durable oil economy without elections, rule of law and legitimate institutions. Why should the next government honor a generational agreement negotiated by an unelected predecessor, no matter how much has already been invested?

Now let’s widen the lens. The Pentagon becoming financially invested in foreign oil production raises another question entirely. The institution responsible for applying American military power would now potentially have a financial interest in an industry located in a country where American military power just removed the president. Meanwhile, our own secretary of state has emerged as the de facto power broker overseeing Venezuela’s transition, with the old president’s deputy serving as Washington’s partner on the ground. That doesn’t really need much editorializing.

For something Trump calls the largest oil deal in history, an astonishing number of basic legal and contractual questions remain unanswered - about how it was awarded under Venezuela’s constitutional framework and about the absence of a competitive process or meaningful transparency. We are still waiting for the administration to convincingly answer those questions.

Two years ago, I wrote that Latin America had become Washington’s overlooked wallflower - noticed only when migrants arrived at the border or cocaine arrived in Miami, while China understood that infrastructure, commodities, technology and trade made the region strategically important. Trump apparently agrees with me. I just wish he hadn’t taken the lesson quite so literally.

This is being sold as an energy deal, but it’s really another window into his emerging doctrine for the Western Hemisphere. Trump is correcting decades of American neglect of Latin America by resurrecting an equally old American mistake: confusing engagement with dominion. It’s the same spheres-of-influence logic Washington condemns when Russia applies it to Ukraine or China applies it to Taiwan.

Maybe Venezuelan oil eventually does flow in huge quantities to American refineries, and American investment helps rebuild a country whose leaders spent decades destroying its greatest economic asset. That would be good for Venezuelans and good for the United States.

But if Washington really wants Venezuela to become a stable American partner, the one commodity more important than oil is legitimacy. And we can’t drill our way to that.

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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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Donald Trump wants another date with Kim Jong Un, but not a channel through the State Department or months of working-level talks. He wants a summit, with cameras rolling and a red carpet somewhere in frame.

Eight years after Singapore, Trump is returning to a familiar delusion that his personal chemistry with an authoritarian leader can produce what conventional diplomacy hasn’t. His three meetings with Kim already put that theory to the test, as North Korea kept every one of its nuclear weapons.

More importantly, the Kim Jong Un he’d be meeting now isn’t the one from those photographs. This Kim has a bigger arsenal, better missiles, a much closer relationship with Moscow, and six months of watching what the United States does to a country that stays at the nuclear threshold instead of crossing it.

Trump went to war in February to keep Tehran from acquiring a weapon Kim already has several times over. He is now bombing and blockading the government that never built the bomb, while trying to schedule a summit with the one that did. Whatever lesson Washington hopes Pyongyang draws from that, giving up its weapons probably isn’t it.

Which leaves an open question: what would another summit actually accomplish? The first round collapsed because Washington wanted denuclearization and Kim wanted sanctions relief, and neither side moved. Full denuclearization is even less plausible now. A cap on the arsenal, limits on fissile material, and missile restrictions are real, defensible objectives, and South Korea has begun pushing for exactly that kind of narrower deal, one that treats a cap as a first step rather than a consolation prize.

But that requires Trump to say, plainly, that this isn’t Singapore II — that he’s negotiating with a nuclear North Korea rather than negotiating it out of existence. So far, the administration has offered little indication that it is prepared to say that plainly. The clearest objective on offer is still a summit, not a deal.

None of this makes talking to Kim foolish. A bigger arsenal is arguably a stronger case for diplomacy, not a weaker one. The problem is mistaking the summit for the strategy. Trump’s first three meetings with Kim produced striking photographs and warm letters. They produced zero fewer North Korean warheads.

He’s already making a down payment on the next one. U.S.-South Korean military exercises have been sharply curtailed, partly to entice Kim, while the move also comes amid Trump’s anger at Seoul for declining to back the Iran campaign. Those exercises aren’t atmospherics; they’re how the alliance maintains readiness against North Korea — the very country Trump is trying to court.

Pyongyang’s reaction so far has been a shrug — Kim Jong Un says the North has no interest in the smaller drills and denies any contact between the two leaders, while pointedly leaving the personal relationship alone.

Meanwhile the Iran war is pulling American military power out of the region where North Korea, and the much larger problem behind it, actually sit.

The USS Abraham Lincoln has been deployed in the Middle East more than 260 days, over 200 without a port call, after being redirected into the Iran war. The USS Gerald R. Ford spent 326 days deployed, the longest post-Vietnam carrier deployment on record, after moving straight from operations around Venezuela into the Iran campaign. At one point this spring, three American carriers were in the Middle East at once, something the U.S. hadn’t done since 2003.

The Lincoln finally needs relief. The Navy is sending the USS George Washington — from Japan. It’s the only forward-deployed carrier the U.S. has, the centerpiece of American naval presence in the western Pacific, and now it’s headed to the Middle East instead, leaving Asia without a carrier until another one shows up. This is the theater Washington has spent a decade calling the priority.

The Navy has eleven aircraft carriers, and that sounds like a lot until you learn that only two or three are ever actually deployed at once; the rest are training, under repair, or resetting from the last deployment. The longer a carrier stays out, the more maintenance it needs when it finally comes home. A carrier can’t be in two oceans simultaneously. Neither, it turns out, can American strategy.

Beijing is watching all of it. Washington has called China the “pacing challenge” for years — the adversary American military capability is supposed to be built around. Yet a regional power is now consuming the ships, munitions and maintenance cycles Washington says it needs for that competition. Every extended deployment gives Chinese planners another data point on how much pressure it takes to bend American force posture out of shape, and how quickly.

If China really is the priority, Washington can’t keep treating Iran, the Houthis, Russia, North Korea and China as five emergencies each deserving maximum military attention at once. That requires choosing. Trump is making those choices piecemeal — an exercise trimmed here, a carrier redirected there, a summit floated somewhere else — with no visible logic connecting them.

Talking to Kim isn’t the reckless part. Given how much his arsenal has grown, it may be one of the more sensible things on the table. The reckless part is spending exercises, carriers and alliance trust to chase a summit whose objective nobody has named — while Beijing gets to watch what all of it costs.

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and I hope to see you today at 5p for Hot Takes Happy Hour!

Since the war began, Hormuz has been the fear everyone named. The quieter threat is playing out in the Red Sea, thanks to the Houthis, who are emerging Iran’s strongest remaining surrogate. Washington still sees them primarily as a military threat and is missing their strategic evolution.

This is what you get with Cosmopolitics: reporting and analysis that challenges conventional wisdom and gets beyond partisan talking points. Isn’t that the kind of journalism you want to support?

The response to my birthday sale has been overwhelming, so I’m extending it through the week. I’ve heard you: everything costs more, money is tight and the subscriptions are piling up.

So $25 gets you a year of Cosmopolitics — forever. Just over $2 a month. You can’t even ride the Metro, subway or Tube for that!

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Last month, Yemen’s Houthi militia declared a maritime blockade of Saudi Arabia. Saudi tankers in the Red Sea rerouted north to Yanbu, and earlier this month, the group’s attacks reached them there.

But Yanbu isn’t just another Saudi port. It is the kingdom’s insurance policy: the terminus of a pipeline that carries Saudi crude to world markets without ever touching the Strait of Hormuz. That route now carries more than 80 percent of the kingdom’s roughly 4.6 million barrels of daily exports, and Riyadh is working to link other Gulf oil producers to the same line. Shippers have already fled both routes — proof that the Houthis are central to Iran’s ability to weaponize the global economy, even as Washington struggles to keep up.

Globalization depends on a small number of choke points — Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, Suez, Panama Canal, the Taiwan Strait — and none of them need to be seized to become leverage. Washington long assumed that if these vulnerabilities were weaponized, it would be by China or Russia. Instead, the Houthis got there first. Washington is still treating them as a military threat and missing their strategic evolution — under the mistaken assumption that insurgent groups don’t develop interests of their own, or the patience to act on them.

Before the war, Hormuz carried 130 to 140 ships a day; on Aug. 11, traffic fell to eight, according to Reuters. Bab el-Mandeb traffic fell from 20 ships to one. Days earlier, the Houthis had struck Red Sea facilities owned by Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company; striking Yanbu itself underlined the point. An informal understanding sparing Saudi ships has technically held since shortly after Oct. 7, 2023. But Houthi spokesman Yahya Saree now says operations against Saudi shipping will “continue and escalate.”

The Houthis inserted themselves into this war at the moment their leverage was greatest, but aimed most of it at Saudi Arabia, not the United States or Israel — a deliberate choice that keeps the fight contained to a war they believe they can win.

April Longley Alley of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy told me the timing reflects both Saudi Arabia’s new vulnerability and the Houthis’ own ambitions: With the peace process stalled, they see a chance to press Riyadh for concessions that would help them consolidate control at home and expand their reach beyond Yemen. “They know they have a strong hand to play,” Alley says, “so they’re going to see how much they can get.”

Gregory Johnsen, a nonresident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute who tracked Iranian arms shipments to the group on the U.N. Security Council’s Yemen panel, told me he considers the Houthis “more of a junior partner” to Iran, rather than a proxy. The distinction comes down to agency — Iranian support has expanded Houthi capabilities dramatically without ever buying control over their decisions. Years of war built a self-sufficiency the rest of Iran’s network never achieved: their own weapons production, command structures and political relationships, negotiating directly with Saudi Arabia and even Washington when it served their interests.

Hezbollah was long regarded as Iran’s most capable surrogate, largely on the strength of its arsenal. That’s no longer the only measure of influence: The Houthis command one of the world’s busiest maritime corridors, and geography can matter as much as firepower. The longer route around the Cape of Good Hope adds more than a week to each voyage, so the same ships can complete fewer trips — effectively shrinking global container shipping capacity by 15 to 20 percent, without a single vessel being taken out of service. Suez Canal tonnage, meanwhile, last year remained roughly 70 percent below levels from before late 2023, when the Houthis began attacking Israel-linked shipping in the Red Sea in solidarity with Gaza. All this was achieved by a group with no navy.

It’s a bitter pill for Riyadh. Saudi Arabia fought the Houthis for nearly a decade, and criticism of the civilian toll helped end that war in 2022 with the group still standing. Some officials gripe privately that had they finished it, the Houthis wouldn’t pose the same threat today.

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Saudi Arabia wants to finally break that leverage and strip away one of Iran’s last functioning sources of regional power. But Riyadh can’t do it alone. It’s playing this quietly and publicly at once: quietly, funding and pushing Yemen’s fractured anti-Houthi forces toward a ground offensive the kingdom won’t lead, while at the same time assembling a multinational maritime coalition to secure passage through the Red Sea. Washington has made clear to Riyadh that it sees Iran as the central threat and doesn’t yet consider the Red Sea a priority. By the time that changes, the Houthis may have made it one — and this time, there won’t be a backup plan.

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No filing and very little doom-scrolling. Just sand, old friends, wine and cake.

Today is my birthday. And for whatever reason, this one has me thinking a little more than usual about how I got here.

Earlier this week, I did an interview with my friend for her excellent podcast How She Led To Me. Thankfully, Kate didn’t want to talk about Iran or Trump or whatever crisis was breaking that morning. She wanted to talk about the women who shaped me.

Most of you who know me know I’m much more comfortable asking the questions than answering them. I’ve never really talked about myself publicly. And honestly, preparing for this wrecked me a little, but in a good way. Attached is the recording. If you ever wanted to know more about me, here is your chance!

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I didn’t grow up around people who were particularly interested in foreign affairs. My obsession with the world came later, thanks largely to a high school teacher who talked about places like Kazakhstan as if they mattered, back when most kids my age probably couldn’t have found it on a map.

But the people who built me weren’t diplomats or journalists or any of the presidents and secretaries of state I would later spend my career chasing around the world.

My grandmother Libby took me in when I was in my twenties. I was broke, making about $12,000 a year at a little local newspaper and wondering whether I had any business trying to become a journalist.

She fed me. She poured me wine. After dinner, I’d take the bottle into her bedroom and we’d watch TV while I complained about whatever terrible job or boss I had at the time. My grandmother always had a show tune, a pep talk and a home-cooked meal ready to make me — and everyone around her — feel special. She passed away in 2003, but left me with the lesson that you can be tough and still be funny and kind, and that it costs you nothing to look out for someone else.

My mother taught me something else. She has lived with MS for decades, and I’ve watched it steadily take things away from her. She just refuses to let it take everything. For her 60th birthday, I saved every point and airline mile I had and took her on a blowout trip to Paris. Then I saved up for another ten years and asked where she wanted to go for her 70th.

She wanted Vegas. She wanted the Bellagio. She wanted the shows. And she wanted to go to Chippendales. So we did.

At the end, she couldn’t get out of her wheelchair to go onstage for the photo, so the Chippendales came down to her. This is a fabulous picture of my mother surrounded by half-naked men that probably says more about resilience than anything I could write here.

Kate and I also talked about my friends who sustain me. You know from Hot Takes Happy Hour. I know her as my rock, who knows where all my bodies are buried — and even helped me bury some of them.

And there are the Diplobabes — the women who covered the State Department with me all those years ago. We traveled the world together and somewhere along the way became family. We’ve since been through layoffs, marriages, new jobs, grief, kids and now grandkids. We still get together and do a ridiculous white elephant Christmas every year.

Talking to Kate made me realize something I probably should have figured out years ago. When I think about the people who got me here, I don’t really think about my career. The people I think about now are the ones who picked me up, made me laugh and told me to keep going.

Maybe that’s why this birthday feels a little different. I’m building something again. Cosmopolitics is still a work in progress. Some things have worked better than I imagined. Others haven’t. I’m learning what you want more of, what I want to spend my time doing, and how to make the whole thing sustainable without turning it into something I never want it to be.

Which brings me to a quick update on my slightly crazy birthday experiment.

The $25 annual membership has been such a hit, I am extending it until tomorrow. If you sign up this weekend, that’s your rate for good.

That’s just over $2 a month. I honestly can’t think of much you can still buy for $2. And judging by how much you read, watch, share and argue with me, I’m pretty sure you’re getting your two bucks’ worth.

I still hate asking for money. But I do love the idea behind this experiment: maybe good journalism doesn’t need another expensive paywall. Maybe less is more. Maybe it just takes enough people who value the work to kick in a few dollars.

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I’m heading home tan, rested and, for once, actually glad I stepped away for a few days. I’ll be back on Monday. Hot Takes Happy Hour will be back too, with Danielle ready to debate me, cocktail in hand, about something before the week is out.

Thank you for being part of this — for reading, watching, arguing, pushing back and sticking around.

And here’s to another trip around the sun.

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I’ve written to you before about the community we’re building at Cosmopolitics. So I want to be straight with you about where things stand.

I’m not taking what I’m about to say as some verdict on the quality of this publication. I know Cosmopolitics is resonating. I can see it in the open rates, the engagement, how many of you watch the interviews and join me and each week for Hot Takes Happy Hour. You write to me about things I’ve written. You argue with me. Sometimes someone will mention a piece months later.

That said, fewer than 1 percent of you are paid subscribers.

I get it! Everything is more expensive and we are all inundated with people asking us to pay for things. I have a ridiculous number of subscriptions myself. And I’ve kept most of Cosmopolitics open because I want people to read it. I don’t want someone to see an interesting piece or interview and hit a paywall and leave.

But that also means this isn’t sustainable. And it isn’t only happening to me. Some of the top performers on these platforms are confronting the same problem. The economics are tough. And reporting, interviews, travel, production — all of it costs money.

I hate asking for money. I’d rather negotiate the Iran ceasefire. It might be less awkward.

The irony is it wouldn’t actually take that much to make this profitable. If even half of you contributed a few dollars a year, it would make a huge difference. I could write full-time, keep most of the work open, keep the price accessible and, ideally, not have to go find some soul-crushing day job to keep the lights on.

So let’s try an experiment

My birthday is August 15. Between now and then, an annual Cosmopolitics membership is $25. If you sign up during that window, you can keep that rate forever.

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Call it my birthday present to myself..and to you.

It goes without saying if you would like to contribute more by becoming a founding member or making a one-time donation, that would be amazing. I’m certainly not going to talk you out of it. It gives me more resources to report, travel, do more interviews and build this into what I think it can become.

But mostly I’m asking more of you to throw a little something into the pot because I do think what we’re doing here matters.

The world is beyond chaotic, bordering on insane. Wars that once seemed far away are affecting the global economy in ways that are increasingly impossible to ignore. Geopolitics is showing up in markets, energy prices, technology, supply chains and the things we buy. China and the United States are competing over everything from minerals buried in the ground to chips, AI and space.

This is not just foreign policy anymore. It’s life and I try to make sense of it without making it feel like homework.

I want Cosmopolitics to be informative and serious about the things that deserve to be taken seriously, but also irreverent, engaging and occasionally a little provocative. I want to question conventional assumptions. I want you to read something here and think, “huh, I hadn’t thought about it that way.”

I’m also writing more about the frontier industries that I think are going to determine whether the United States remains competitive — critical minerals, energy, space, technology, advanced manufacturing and whatever comes next. Because increasingly those stories are geopolitical stories too.

There are a million places to find out what happened. I’m much more interested in what it means for you.

So if you value Cosmopolitics and want me to keep doing it, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber. Twenty-five bucks. For a year. Forever. That’s just over $2 a month. I honestly can’t think of anything you can still buy for $2. And judging by how much you read, watch, share and argue with me, I will go out on a limb and say you’re getting your money’s worth here

Whether you become a paid subscriber or not, thank you for being part of this community — for reading, watching, arguing with me, pushing back and supporting what we are trying to build here. I don’t take any of it for granted.

I want to prove journalism like this doesn’t have to cost hundreds of dollars or disappear behind a hard paywall to survive. Maybe it just needs enough people who value it to throw a few bucks in the pot.

That’s the experiment. And happy birthday to me.

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Strategists have a shorthand for the instruments a state uses to compete and coordinate abroad - diplomatic, information, military and economic power, or DIME. It’s a framework built for embassies, broadcasts, battalions and trade - the same one that, as I’ve recently written, now applies almost line for line to the space economy. Turns out it applies just as well to the ground beneath it, and in a way that’s harder to wave off: the same rock that goes into a magnet for an F-35 also runs through a supply chain a rival government can switch off whenever it wants.

The special operations and irregular-warfare crowd has landed on this framing too, which is its own kind of tell. At a recent conference hosted by the Irregular Warfare Initiative and the Special Operations Association of America, SOAA’s Doug Livermore - currently Chief of the Irregular Warfare Division in the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Intelligence and Security - told the room that critical minerals aren’t “merely economic commodities,” but “national security vulnerabilities” central to irregular warfare and strategic competition. He called for a “private-public partnership,” which is a phrase you hear at basically every frontier-industry conference now. What’s different is who’s saying it. These are people who plan for gray-zone conflict for a living, and somewhere along the way they decided a smelter deserves the same attention as a chokepoint.

You can see the diplomatic push most clearly in February, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted representatives from 54 countries and the European Commission at a Critical Minerals Ministerial in Washington, alongside Vice President Vance and four Cabinet secretaries. Eleven new bilateral minerals frameworks got signed that day alone, and the U.S. announced the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement, or FORGE, a successor to the Obama-era Minerals Security Partnership that will rotate its chairmanship, starting with South Korea. Call it a mineral-world Artemis Accords: less about any one deposit than about who writes the rules before Beijing does.

What’s harder to see, and probably more important, is how China built the leverage it now has. Maura Burns, the CIA’s former Chief Operating Officer, told the conference that the dominance “did not happen quickly or overnight” - it came from decades of state subsidies, cheap financing and loose environmental rules that Western producers simply couldn’t match. Beijing has since learned to “weaponize” that position, in her words: export licenses and price moves used as foreign-policy tools rather than ordinary trade friction. When China tightened licensing on gallium and germanium in 2023, U.S. imports of gallium collapsed from roughly 6,900 kilograms in July to 227 by October. Nobody announced an embargo. Somebody just stopped signing paperwork, and a Beijing regulator got to feel like a Bond villain without raising their voice.

None of this is abstract for the people actually fielding equipment. Nearly everything an operator carries downrange starts as raw ore somewhere in the ground, and right now the U.S. can’t build those platforms without buying material from the same countries it’s competing against. Mike Kuiken, vice chair of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, put a version of this in blunter terms: modern weapons systems carry pounds of critical minerals, and Washington “cannot afford to depend on our primary adversary” for any of it. That takes me back to 2007, when a constituent asked Hillary Clinton why the U.S. couldn’t just get tough on China. Her answer - “how do you get tough on your banker?” - was about debt, not dysprosium, but the shape of the problem hasn’t changed.

One essay making the rounds in the irregular-warfare world pushes further: with zero domestic primary magnesium production - a metal used in missile casings and aircraft alloys - Pentagon estimates reportedly give Washington six months to decide whether to go to war if China cut off exports, and after that, it couldn’t. Whether that number holds up under scrutiny or not, the fact that people are circulating it says something on its own. Quiet infrastructure dependencies have a way of becoming combat contingencies.

Money is where Washington has moved fastest, and strangest. It isn’t just regulating this market anymore; it’s buying into it - taking equity stakes in rare earth and magnet producers, backstopping prices, financing new refineries the way it once financed highways. Between January 2025 and this June, the federal government put roughly $10 billion into the sector, by the Council on Foreign Relations’ count. Goldman Sachs’ metals team has a name for the resulting shift: a “mine-to-magnet” strategy, where companies integrate extraction through manufacturing to capture value that, for decades, simply left the country for processing. Washington spent forty years insisting it doesn’t pick industrial winners. It now owns a piece of several of them.

China refines roughly 91 percent of the world’s rare earths - a dominance it’s held since 1986, when it overtook the U.S. as the top producer. The ministerials, the equity stakes, the tabletop exercises the special operations community keeps running: they’re all, in their own way, a reaction to that single fact.

Critical minerals stopped being a commodities story a while ago. What’s happening now is a domain where coalitions, leverage, weapons and capital all draw on the same raw material at once, which is exactly why people who spend their careers on conflicts short of open war have started paying attention. A mine or a smelter is just the newest version of a battlefield, fought over supply agreements and export licenses instead of territory.

The countries that get the refining right, not just the mining, will set the terms of the next industrial era. Everyone else will be shipping their ore off to find out what it’s worth.

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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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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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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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and I hope to see you TODAY for Hot Takes Happy Hour at our new summer time 5p ET.

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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 optimi…

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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% o…

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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…

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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…

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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.

T…

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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…

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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 agree…

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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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