One of the phenomena I like to talk about in life and international politics is something I have dubbed the Bad Boyfriend Benefit.1 It works something like this: a bad boyfriend dramatically lowers overall boyfriend expectations of whomever they are dating. This means that, after the inevitable breakup, the next boyfriend — even if he is perfectly average — looks great by comparison. The Bad Boyfriend Benefit fades with time — but the honeymoon period can last for a spell.

It is worth thinking about the Bad Boyfriend Benefit when pondering Marco Rubio’s mushrooming fortunes within the MAGAverse. In an administration that can do nothing right, the current national security adviser and secretary of state is having a moment.

Sarah Longwell’s Trump voter focus groups reveal that Rubio’s star is on the rise:

I run weekly focus groups, and the moderators regularly ask Trump voters whom they would like to see inherit the party in 2028 and beyond. More and more, what we’re hearing in response is a strange new respect for Rubio. Although Vance might seem like a more natural MAGA heir, many Trump voters see Rubio as a stabilizing force who comes off a lot better than many of his peers inside the administration, including the vice president….

The first line of thinking among Rubio’s fans goes something like this: Because he has so many different jobs, he must be competent. Rubio currently serves as secretary of state and national security adviser, and until recently he served as acting USAID administrator and acting archivist of the United States. Voters see the memes tweaking Rubio for having such a laughable number of important titles and think he must be doing something right.

“He’s wearing multiple hats right now,” said Dave, a two-time Trump voter from West Virginia. “I think he’s doing a good job in his role. I think he speaks well.” He went on: “I’d prefer to see him continue to stay in one of these State Department roles. Or if Trump makes him the new ayatollah or something, maybe he can do that as well.”

Another reason voters seem to like Rubio: They see him as the “adult in the room.” This is understandable. Looking smart and sober is relatively easy when you’re surrounded by the likes of Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Or, as she said on a Pod Saves America podcast about Rubio’s multiple appointments: "I think what people are taking away from that is like, there is one person in this administration who’s not a total clown.”

In this administration, “not a total clown” is akin to the “adult in the room” line — superficially appealing but damning with faint praise. Nonetheless, White House insiders totally not named Marco Rubio are speaking highly of Rubio as well, according to Politico’s Sophia Cai and Megan Messerly:

Some of President Donald Trump’s closest confidantes increasingly see Marco Rubio as a serious 2028 contender — an acknowledgement of the Floridian’s savvy handling of foreign conflicts and his ability to avoid political land mines….

Rubio has said he would not challenge Vance for the nomination and it remains to be seen whether his conversion to MAGA politics could win a majority of Trump’s base if he did run. For now, his growing number of admirers in the president’s inner circle describe Rubio’s belated embrace to Trumpism as a selling point. Trump loves the zeal of a convert and it’s a welcome contrast to some old-school Republican elites who shunned the party or avoided Washington rather than reconcile with the president….

A CPAC straw poll last month showed Rubio with a huge spike, to 35 percent up from 3 percent since last year. Vance, meanwhile, is down from last year’s 61 percent – though he still holds a commanding lead at 53 percent. YouGov polling shows a similar dynamic – a survey in April put Vance at the top of the list for potential Republican nominees at 63 percent, with Rubio at 42 percent – compared to a September poll that showed 65 percent for Vance and 33 percent for Rubio.

Rubio hasn’t displaced Vance on Trump’s shortlist, but conversations inside the West Wing include the secretary of state as a viable option to succeed Trump, according to two senior White House officials and five others close to the administration.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World thinks the best way to interpret Rubio’s rise is through the dynamic of the Bad Boyfriend Benefit. No doubt, compared to Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Howard Lutnick, Steve Witkoff, and the rest of Trump’s D-list crew, the fact that Rubio knows something about international relations and can speak with confidence about U.S. foreign policy on camera is a plus.

The thing is, the moment one begins to pay any attention to Rubio’s actual foreign policy role, the more his acts of omission come into focus — particularly with respect to the decision to prosecute a war with Iran. As I explained last month:

It’s not obvious at all that Rubio has provided any value-added over any other lapdog who would have occupied his position in his stead. Like everyone else, he has functioned as a yes man for Trump. Indeed, he has failed in both of his foreign policy roles. As national security advisor, he has administered no real policymaking process. As Secretary of State, he has failed to persuade any one about the wisdom of U.S. military action….

Marco Rubio is not the architect of the Iran clusterfuck. But he is most definitely the author of the conditions that make the clusterfuck possible. At some point, the reckoning for his negligence will come back to haunt him.

This is not just my opinion. Here’s Lawrence Freedman from last month as well:

It is hard to convey the gloom that has overtaken Washington. All the structures that are vital to crisis management have either been attenuated or disbanded. There is hardly anyone left on the National Security Council staff. A friend described an empty State Department where you could hear your own foot steps. Marco Rubio is involved in the decision-making but he has neglected to acquire the professional staff assessments that should inform such decisions.

This past week there have been multiple pieces observing Rubio’s studied absence from the Iran portfolio. The Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio asks the obvious question: “The Iran war is the most serious foreign policy crisis that Donald Trump will ever have to manage, God willing. So why hasn’t his most serious deputy—who, as it happens, is in charge of foreign policy—taken a lead role in solving it?”

And here is the New York Times’ Michael Crowley:

Mr. Rubio did not attend the last U.S. meeting with Iran earlier this month. Nor did he join several meetings held over the past year in Geneva and Doha. Mr. Rubio has also been absent from U.S. delegations abroad working to settle the war in Ukraine and Israel’s war in Gaza. Despite a long period of crisis and war in the region, he has not visited the Middle East since a brief stop in Israel last October.

In recent months, Mr. Rubio — consumed with his second role, as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser — has not traveled much at all….

As Mr. Witkoff, Mr. Kushner and Vice President JD Vance met with Iranian officials in Pakistan earlier this month, Mr. Rubio was at Mr. Trump’s side at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, noted Emma Ashford, an analyst of U.S. diplomacy at the nonpartisan Stimson Center in Washington. “Rubio clearly prefers to stay close to Trump,” Ms. Ashford said….

She echoed the complaints by many current and former diplomats that Mr. Rubio seems less like someone performing both jobs than a national security adviser who sometimes shows up at the State Department. “I do think it’s to the detriment of the whole department of State and to America’s ability to conduct diplomacy in general that we effectively have the secretary of state position sitting vacant,” she said….

Mr. Rubio divides his time between the State Department and the White House, often spending time at both in the same day. In an interview with Politico last June, Mr. Rubio said he visited the State Department “almost every day.”

I did laugh at the “almost every day” line.

The Financial Times’ Amy Mackinnon, Abigail Hauslohner and Ian Hodgson raises similar issues in their Rubio piece:

With two of Washington’s most powerful jobs, the secretary of state and national security adviser has been conspicuously absent from Donald Trump’s biggest international crisis: the war in Iran….

“Rubio may already sense that Iran is a complete loser, and the less he is associated with it, the better,” said Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University.

As Vance emerged this month from 21 hours of negotiations with Iranian officials in Islamabad with no breakthrough to show for it, Rubio was with Trump in Miami attending an Ultimate Fighting Championship match.

The paradox of Rubio’s dual responsibilities, coupled with his low profile on big issues, has been the source of both mockery and confusion….

Compared to his recent predecessors, Rubio is also spending less time overseas, according to an FT analysis of his travel schedule. During his first 15 months in office, Rubio has spent 71 days travelling — fewer than any other secretary of state this century over the same period.

One question is whether any of this will come up in a GOP primary when the other candidates — like JD Vance — manage to come across as more bumbling than Rubio. Of course, as TNR’s Greg Sargent points out, Rubio’s star is rising within a political movement that, “keeps purging itself down to its ever-more-molten core.” The real question is whether he can appeal to Trump’s broader 2024 electoral coalition — and one should be skeptical that anyone can replace Trump’s uniqueness in that way.

In some ways, the reward of running in 2028 is a poisoned chalice at best. At this point it seems highly unlikely that any Republican with strong Trump credentials will do well in the general election. Probably best for Rubio if JD Vance imploded in two years, clearing the field for him in 2032.

But if he is around in 2032, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World hopes that he is forced to address two important questions:

1. Why didn’t Rubio act like the grown-up in the room when it came to bombing Iran; and

2. When will Rubio admit that when it comes to his position on the deportation of international students, he is a lying liar who lies?

Until then, I will treat these trial balloons stories about Rubio as evidence that he is the least bad boyfriend in Trump’s cabinet. And boy is that not saying much.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World adheres to a few simple rules to help preserve staff sanity:

• Don’t expound too much about politics with my extended family.

• Don’t read too much about congressional primaries.

• Tune out the Red Sox when they embarrass themselves.

• Don’t comment on the crazy folks trying to assassinate a president.

I’m not going to violate any of these rules after the violence that overshadowed Saturday night’s attempt at a White House Correspondents Association dinner. But the violence and the reactions to it do underscore some disturbing trends in American society — and the ways in which president Trump is being hoisted by so many of his own petards that he is on the receiving end of an atomic wedgie.

Let’s start by recognizing that this is the third assassination attempt on president Trump that the public knows about, and the second one to directly impact a public event.1 Most of the firsthand reportage of this event stressed how rattled Trump’s policy principals seemed to be as they were whisked out of the room. Even though the shooter never got close to the actual dinner, the video from the event suggests just how unsettling this could have been for the attendees:

Still, Politico’s John Harris was in the ballroom, and he wrote afterwards, “At no time during the episode did I perceive myself or colleagues as in acute danger. Whatever had happened, it was clear that it had taken place just outside the ballroom. There was no indication of an active shooter or a terrorist act underway.” So I think it’s safe to look past the immediate trauma and consider the knock-on effects.

At the White House, Trump and his MAGA minions subsequently attempted to reverse engineer a rationale for building the White House ballroom from the assassination attempt, arguing (I think) that such a venue was needed for holding such events in a secure locale. That seemed, however, like a trial balloon that deflated almost as soon as it was launched.

Why? What is interesting — and somewhat more unsettling — is that the broader public reaction to this event has been either indifference or skepticism. On indifference, Puck’s Dylan Byers wrote, “The media is giving this the ample coverage it deserves. But it’s unnerving how desensitized so many people have become—to shootings, obviously, but also to political violence and the abnormality of the moment.”

Byers is correct: this is not just about the numbed reaction to political violence, but to mass casualty events more generally. A week ago a man in Louisiana killed eight children and wounded two women — and I don’t think it was even a 24-hour story in the news cycle.

As for the skeptical reaction, here’s just one example:

As Semafor’s Max Tani wrote:

This morning I got a call from a family member checking in to see how I was doing after attending the eventful White House Correspondents’ Association dinner last night. They asked what happened, and was I feeling shaken?

They also had another question: Having been there, did I think it was staged?

That uncertainty about what really happened — fueled, my family member said, by seeing numerous viral posts on X — was clearly shared and stoked by many people in the aftermath of Saturday’s shooting. Wired reported that the word “staged” exploded on social media immediately after the incident. On Sunday, outgoing Texas Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett said of the shooting: “Maybe it’s fake… who knows.”

Distrust in legacy media and the rise of unregulated social media have helped make conspiracy theories a routine feature of the discussion about major public incidents.

This builds on a recent MAGA conspiracy theory revival that the 2024 shooting attempt of Trump in Butler, PA was “staged.” As The Hill’s Matt K. Lewis observed, the Purveyor-in-Chief of conspiracy theories is now finding himself at the center of so many of these theories:

We have entered a new and possibly ironic phase of the timeline: Trump is finally discovering what it’s like to be on the losing end of a conspiracy theory.

Trump’s failure to release Epstein files was probably the inflection point. But more recently, the conspiratorial thinking about Trump has metastasized….

The beauty of conspiracy theories is that they are unfalsifiable. As such, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) framing of the assassination attempt — “I’m not calling the Butler assassination a hoax, but there are a lot of questions that deserve public answers” — is structurally identical to the rhetoric that has fueled past QAnon conspiracy theories….

It would be easy to lament all of this as evidence that Americans have lost trust in institutions and a common reality. And yes, that is a huge problem. But it is also difficult to ignore the cosmic irony: Trump spent years encouraging the very style of thinking that now has people claiming he is the Antichrist who faked his own assassination attempt.

As much as I want to savor the cosmic irony, the collapse of trust and emotional numbing of Americans are longer-term problems that will persist long after Donald Trump has exited the political stage.

What will hopefully end with Trump, however, is the belief that the world is so scary that the only safe option is to live in a fortress at great remove from the American public. In the short term, however, this event will accelerate what had already been a disturbing trend: Trump officials walling themselves off from the rest of the country.

The New York Times’ Katie Rogers wrote about this phenomenon last month:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are neighbors, living in a row of stately homes at Fort McNair, a military installation that sits on a peninsula where the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers meet. Their homes are usually reserved for high-ranking generals….

All told, at least a half-dozen senior Trump administration officials are living in military housing in the Washington area. They include Attorney General Pam Bondi — she is the one currently dealing with a flooded basement — as well as Stephen Miller, President Trump’s deputy chief of staff….

More could join them soon.

At least one more senior official has been advised to move by security officials who assess threats, according to people familiar with the arrangements and who were granted anonymity to discuss matters concerning security. Others, including Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, have browsed available military housing but have not yet made the move. Representatives for both did not return a request for comment.

The practice of moving public servants onto guarded military bases has no modern precedent. It raises some unsettling questions about the increase in violence against public figures, about the overall health of American democracy and, perhaps most obviously, about who is paying for this….

In their new neighborhoods, officials are finding a quieter and friendlier world than the one they faced in civilian Washington — a place where it is not uncommon for Trump officials to encounter protesters outside their homes, in restaurants and in other public spaces. In military housing, children can safely play outside. Families gather to watch sports and have dinner. Renters drop off checks at the property manager’s office each month. It is described as a suburban utopia — just on a military base, where everyone who enters needs a badge.

The shooting attempt over this weekend will likely spur more high-ranking officials to seek the safety and comfort of living on a military base if at all possible. And I have no doubt that doing so will cause these officials to become even more out of touch with the wants and hopes of the American people than current opinion polls suggest. In this way even Trump’s non-billionaire subordinates are adopting plutocratic behavioral traits.

Like most politicians, I think political violence should find no safe harbor in this country. But as much as Trump might want to capitalize on being a potential target, he has salted the earth too much to find any fertile angle of political exploitation. And while I don’t think that’s a healthy signal of the state of the union, it is Trump’s just desserts.

Last week I travelled to Washington, DC for a trade policy confab, which was notable for the actual attendance of Trump administration officials. They were certainly entertaining. One high-ranking Trump official repeatedly scolded his European counterparts for demonstrating insufficient zeal in reducing their economic dependence on China. And to be fair the Trump official had half a point. It is certainly true, as the Financial Times’ Alan Beattie has noted, that Europeans have had their issues with segmenting their economy from China.

Of course, so has the United States. It’s worth remembering that during the Great Trade Wars of 2025, the Trump administration backed down super-quick in response to Chinese trade threats. And while European officials in attendance largely (and probably wisely) decided to refrain from pushing back directly at the U.S. official, I felt no such compunction.

I asked why the Trump administration seemed so much more eager to pressure European allies than pressure China when it came to trade. And the Trump official — who had repeatedly stated that he was sticking to facts rather than emotions — got rather emotional and defensive in his response. He insisted that Trump had been really, really tough on China. His primary piece of evidence was that his Chinese counterpart told him he had been a tough negotiator.

Needless to say, it was an unconvincing response.

After the event, a former Trump administration official came up to me and explained the outsized response: for China hawks currently serving the Trump administration, this is a moment of severe cognitive dissonance.

That former Trump official ain’t wrong. Trump’s first term was marked by a dramatic ratcheting up of trade tensions with China. The trade war did not accomplish a whole lot — but one can acknowledge that Trump was onto something in identifying the threat that China’s foreign economic policy posed for the United States and its allies and partners. Of all of Trump’s foreign policy beliefs, his hawkishness towards China might have caused the biggest shift within the U.S, foreign policy community

With Trump’s second term, a lot of China hawks joined, surely convinced that they could articulate and implement a grand strategy that de-emphasized the European and Middle Eastern regions in favor of prioritizing the Pacific Rim. Indeed, this was Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby’s worldview — and his attempt to implement it led some folks to fret that he was exercising too much control over U.S. foreign policy.

That fear turned out to be spectacularly wrong. But it’s worse than that. In 2025 China hawks could semi-plausibly claim that Trump was simply rightsizing U.S. strategic priorities to allow for a greater focus on China. In 2026, that dog won’t hunt. Indeed, ever since he launched the war with Iran, Trump has been noticeably reticent in critiquing the PRC, despite multiple, ongoing reports that China is aiding Iran militarily.

These days — well, let’s just say that the tweet below resonated a whole lot within the U.S. foreign policy community:1

Earlier this month Politico’s Diana Nerozzi and Megan Messerly noted that Trump seemed to be doing everything in his power not to get tough on China:

The Trump administration is filled with China hawks who have spent the first 15 months in office pushing for a harder break with Beijing. But what President Donald Trump wants from his trip to China next month isn’t a confrontation — it’s a win.

It’s a goal so important to the president that administration officials are under orders not to rock the boat with China, especially ahead of the trip. Two officials are enforcing that edict: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, according to a former Trump official and another person familiar with the dynamic, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, according to a China analyst and a person close to the White House, all granted anonymity to discuss the matter candidly….

“The U.S. bureaucracy is very much under orders from the president not to disrupt this truce that they’re in” since Trump met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in South Korea in late October, the former Trump official said. “They’re all walking on eggshells. Bessent is effectively the one who has to enforce the truce.”

Bessent has focused on notching economic wins, including offering Beijing a path to a “big deal” if it agreed to rebalance its economy — in contrast to top officials like White House trade adviser Peter Navarro and Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby, who have historically pushed for a more aggressive and urgent posture toward China.

Imagine the difficulty China hawks must be having reconciling their vision of U.S. grand strategy and the clusterfuck that is Trump’s actual grand strategy. Because the latter has been a strategic boondoggle for the People’s Republic of China and a disaster for the United States.

Read more

I am proud to announce that this past week Drezner’s World reached over 25,000 subscribers and 1,000 paying subscribers. The hard-working staff here is most grateful to everyone who has chosen to read these musings. Thank you!

In celebration, I’m going to take a request from one of my readers: I’m gonna write something in response to a request from my Dad.

I am not joking — earlier this week he emailed me the following:

I have been waiting for you to blog about the Yale report on the failure of academic institutions to respond to the contemporary needs of students, and I am not talking about plush lounges and great food. It's time to move on from Washington for a short interval and get in to the weeds with students and the academic institutions that guide them. As an academic dean, you must have some thoughts on the subject.

My father is referring to the Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education, which was released with great fanfare earlier this month. The report addresses a variety of issues that have caused an erosion of trust in higher education over the last generation. Here’s a snippet:

Our committee identified three immediate factors behind the rise of public distrust. The first involves the soaring price of higher education in the United States, along with the perception that college, graduate, and professional school are no longer worth the money and sacrifice they demand. The second focuses on the college admissions system—specifically, the question of who gets in and why. The third includes an array of issues about what is said and taught on university campuses, including matters of free speech, political bias, and self-censorship. We also found important problems related to trust within the university itself, including concerns that grade inflation, new technologies, and bureaucratic expansion have undermined the university’s academic mission.

The range of topics revealed another challenge related to declining trust: widespread uncertainty about the fundamental purpose and mission of higher education. Trust is earned by doing what you say you’re going to do—and, ideally, doing it well. In recent years, however, universities have been expected to be all things to all people: selective but inclusive, affordable but luxurious, meritocratic but equitable. Rather than build public support, this diffusion of purpose has contributed to distrust. Without a clear mission and purpose, it becomes difficult to judge whether colleges and universities are living up to their fundamental commitments.

So what do I think? I think the report does a solid but incomplete job of analyzing the trouble with how universities are perceived in the United States. The key words in that previous sentence are “incomplete” and “perceived.”

Let’s start with “perceived.” If my father’s reaction is indicative of what others thought about the document — and I’d be willing to wager that it is — then that reaction is grounded in the press coverage of the report rather than the report itself. To be sure, the Yale authors acknowledge flaws within the university system — on grade inflation, for example, the report is quite forthright.

Mostly, however, what the report acknowledges is that the choices made on tuition and admissions have eroded the trust of the public — not that the policies themselves are intrinsically bad or fail to serve students. Consider, for example, what the report says about rising tuition prices:

A notable divide exists between public perceptions of ever more out-of-reach tuition prices and what many students pay, especially at a school like Yale. In recent decades, American universities have adopted a “high tuition-high aid” model, in which the tuition sticker price bears less and less relation to the actual cost for many individual students. This system has lowered the expense of college for individual students and families, which has not risen as much as the headlines suggest. But it has had a disastrous impact on public trust. By its nature, the system is complicated, unpredictable, secretive, and highly variable. These factors tend to reduce trust rather than increase it….

Under the high tuition-high aid model, Yale and its peer institutions have raised undergraduate tuition each year while increasingly subsidizing the cost of attendance for low-income and middle-class students. Today, approximately one in five undergraduate students attends Yale on a full ride, paying nothing for four years of education, including tuition, room and board, travel, books, and personal expenses. More than 55 percent of undergraduates receive some level of need-based aid, and almost 90 percent graduate with no student loan debt. Beginning with the 2026–27 academic year, all families with incomes under $200,000 will qualify for free tuition, and those under $100,000 will have all billed expenses (tuition, housing, and food) fully covered.

In that sense, the high tuition-high aid model has done what it was designed to do: make a college like Yale accessible to a wide array of students, from a range of incomes and backgrounds. From the perspective of building public trust, though, it would be hard to design a more ineffective system. The tuition sticker price may now be a fiction for many students, but it is the first thing most families see when they contemplate paying for college. The process of applying for aid is laborious, frustrating, and unpredictable. Indeed, many families do not believe such aid exists. According to a 2023 survey by the AAU, nearly half of Americans believe that colleges and universities demand the same payments from all students, regardless of income.

I applaud the authors of this report for explaining why the sticker price of higher education is usually not the actual price of higher education — and the deleterious effect this complicated pricing schema has had on public trust in higher education. The section on admissions makes a similar point about the opacity of higher ed.

That said, the Yale report largely would disagree with my father’s contention that universities like Yale or Tufts have failed to respond to the contemporary needs of students. Even the argument that recent college grads have not done well economically does not seem to be borne out.

The Yale report has received praise in conservative quarters like the Wall Street Journal editorial page — and it’s easy to see why:

The American academy isn’t known for its self-reflection,1 but maybe the political criticism of recent years is having a useful effect. A report last week by Yale University contains a surprising dose of self-examination that dares to agree with what many of its critics have been saying for years….

The best news here is the lack of defensiveness and arrogance that has been the typical academic response to criticism. The authors don’t indulge in the dodge of blaming Donald Trump. They essentially agree with the criticism about rising costs, admissions that lack transparency, and the failure to support free speech on campus and genuine academic freedom.

I’d quibble with whether the report agrees as much with the intrinsic critiques or the effect those critiques have had on public perception, but let’s table that for now. It’s the relief that the report did not blame Donald Trump that seems to please the WSJ’s editorial writers the most. To ignore that side of the equation, however, is to ignore half the story. And that is why the Yale Report is incomplete.

I’m not the only one to notice this — Wesleyan University president Michael S. Roth made this precise critique in a New York Times op-ed.

Amid the Trump administration’s ongoing attack on higher education, the [Yale Report’s] message is clear: Don’t worry, it says, we are staying in our narrow lane. That’s not a mission; it’s a defense strategy. And the retreat from public purpose will not enhance trust; it will further erode it. A lack of public engagement and an air of cloistered privilege are a big part of why so many people now view universities with suspicion. Retreating further behind the gates will make a bad situation much worse….

One can well imagine why a university committee might want to avoid provoking the ire of the Trump administration, which has hit higher education with more than a billion dollars of fines and has threatened schools whose campuses don’t seem to line up with its priorities.

But the ideals the Trump administration has been punishing are prerequisites for higher education to flourish — independent thought, a commitment to truth even when it’s inconvenient and a focus on the creation of truly democratic citizens. Endangering these ideals endangers the whole operation. Yale and other elite universities should find the courage to say so.

Roth is correct. The damage Trump and his conservative allies have wreaked on American higher education has been considerable. This is a point that the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World2 has discussed again and again and again and again and again. But as a pedagogical exercise it’s worth highlighting yet again.

The business model of American higher education rests in part on international students studying in the states. Both elite schools and state schools have benefited from international students matriculating in the United States. They help ensure that elite schools remain the magnet for global talent — a key pillar of soft and hard power in the United States. International students also help to lower tuition costs for in-state students at public universities. Higher education in the United States runs a trade surplus. It’s great for America and it would take a galactic-level own-goal to kill this golden goose.

Guess what the Trump administration is doing?

Inside Higher Ed reported on these numbers as well, warning that the long-term effects could be severe:

[Professor of educational leadership and higher education at Boston College Chris] Glass said that institutions shouldn’t treat this decline as a blip that will rebound naturally, similar to previous instances when international enrollment declined.

“It should be clear to people in the field that the policy direction of the United States is to reduce the number of international students in an effort to address concerns related to the growth in international students,” he said. “This is more of a structural shift than there is a cyclical shift. COVID—there was a pandemic, but we recovered. There was a recession, but we recovered. [Sept.] 11, there was a dip, but we recovered. But the policy direction, at least under this administration, foreseeable for the next three years, is one that is looking to have more scrutiny on student flows to the United States.”

Stephen Yale-Loehr, a retired immigration law professor at Cornell University, warned that the effects of these declines could be deleterious to the American economy and its status as a global leader of research and innovation.

“I don’t think Americans realize how this decline in international students will hurt them both in the short term, in terms of local economies … and in the long term in terms of stifling our innovation,” he said. “I think we’re shooting ourselves in the foot, and, unfortunately, I don’t think the Trump administration plans to change its war on immigrants.”

Let me just close with one data point that encapsulates that last paragraph. Last week Tufts Ph.D. Rümeysa Öztürk — you remember, the woman who ICE snatched off the streets of Somerville because she co-authored an op-ed and then Marco Rubio lied about it — returned to Turkey as part of a negotiated settlement with the Trump administration. Politico’s Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney explain, “The terms of Ozturk’s departure will likely end ongoing legal wrangling over her case and avoids the possibility of a 10-year prohibition on return to the U.S. if her deportation was ordered and upheld.”

The Boston Globe’s Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio reported Öztürk’s statement:

“I am choosing to return home as planned to continue my career as a woman scholar without losing more time to the state-imposed violence and hostility I have experienced in the United States — all for nothing more than co-signing an op-ed advocating for Palestinian rights,“ Öztürk said in a statement released Friday. “I invite everyone to recognize the privilege it is for any country to host international scholars, and the hole that is left in our society when that privilege is lost.”

Earlier this year, Öztürk earned her PhD from the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts, after working on her thesis from inside a detention center more than 1,000 miles away from her campus. Öztürk, a children’s media scholar, previously earned her master’s degree at Teachers College, Columbia University.

“As I start the next chapter of my life, I stand firmly in solidarity with academic communities in the U.S. and elsewhere who live in fear for nothing more than their scholarship,” Öztürk said in her statement. “I invite all universities to do better about listening and valuing all of their students as equal community members.”

Trump administration officials like to argue that universities are stifling dissent — but as the Globe report details, the administration’s actions have done far more damage:

Some legal experts said the lasting consequences of the Trump administration’s actions in arresting Öztürk, and others like Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, are already evident.

“That Rümeysa felt she had to return to Turkey to escape the shadow of state violence says everything you need to know about the state of free speech and academic freedom in this country,” said Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute….

Many foreign scholars and students remain fearful that speaking out on issues they care about could lead to their arrest and deportation, Krishnan said.

“The result has been a pervasive atmosphere of self-censorship,” Krishnan said. “One that has been corrosive not only to our college campuses, but to our democracy.”

This chilling effect, Krishnan added, “harms all of us.”….

In Massachusetts, Reyyan Bilge, a close friend of Öztürk’s who also taught her during her undergraduate years in Turkey, was relieved Öztürk was home with her family.

“The last year has been a nightmare for her,” Bilge said. “We never could shake fully the possibility that she could have been detained again.”

Bilge, now a psychology professor at Northeastern University, said she has seen many international students decide to leave the US out of fear of being targeted.

Bilge said she didn’t expect Öztürk would return to the US. “I wouldn’t advise her to either, at this point,” she said. “I’m really bitter and angry and sad for the future of the United States.”

If folks want to seize on the Yale Report as evidence that higher education needs to put in the work, that’s fine. Goodness knows American universities can do better. But the report doesn’t say precisely what conservatives are claiming that it says. More importantly, to analyze the state of American higher education in 2026 without acknowledging a federal government that is hostile to the very idea of higher education seems… what’s the word… incomplete.

So that’s what I think of the Yale Report.

Ever since researching and writing The Ideas Industry, I have felt an obligation to keep periodic tabs on how Silicon Valley founders attempt to engage the marketplace of ideas. See, for example, my critique of Marc Andreessen’s technological manifesto. Indeed, there’s now enough there there for me to publish journal articles about the topic.

I’m hardly the only one keeping tabs on this genre. TechDirt’s Mike Masnick has also written about, as he put it, “the disturbing trend of tech founders and VCs nodding along to the neoreactionary pitch that democracy is holding back innovation, and that what the industry really needs is a ‘tech-friendly’ strongman to sweep away institutional guardrails.”

So when I saw over the weekend that Palantir decided to publish a 22-point executive summary of co-founder Alex Karp’s co-authored book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, I knew I was gonna have to take a look at it.

The manifesto has prompted some searing critiques — see Masnick as well as Spencer Ackerman, for example. For the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World, the complicating fact is that, without any context, some of the 22 points are perfectly anodyne.

Consider, for example, point 8: “Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.” Sure, I think a lot of government employees deserve to be paid more — that sounds great! Though if this point really means that it’s cool for public employees to have private companies on the side, well, that sounds an awful lot like corruption — so maybe even this point isn’t so anodyne.

Let’s just focus on my wheelhouse, the international relations component of the manifesto. Here are the highlights:

4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software…..

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost….

12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

Okay so there is a lot going on in these points. In order:

• Pro tip: if someone writes about “the limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone,” it means they are relying on a caricatured definition of “soft power,” because it ain’t soaring rhetoric. Indeed, one could argue that the most important component of soft power is the perception of policy competence - which might be why the scholar who coined the term was so disdainful of the current administration.

• There are arguments for having the military develop AI, but the “come on, everyone’s doing it” line of reasoning sounds awfully high-schoolish. The better argument is that AI would greatly enhance military power — which might be true but there are a lot of kinks that still need to be worked out of the system.

• “National service” arguments feel very 1990s, and not in a good way. I am partially persuaded by the Kantian logic of having wars linked to a draft. In the end, however, this would mostly weaken a military that still represents one of the few remaining competent and trusted institutions in the country.

• The atomic age is not ending, and anyone who tells you differently is selling you AI something. Even an AI arms race fails to obviate the nuclear arms race.

• I mostly agree with points 13 and 14 — although I do worry that Karp seems to wish there was a world war so everyone could remember what one looked like.

Then there’s the batshit crazy stuff — like these last two points:

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

I don’t even think the ghost of Samuel Huntington would buy the crap that Karp is trying to sell in these last two points.

Having Palantir post this manifesto seems manifestly unnecessary — and yet, Palantir went and did it. Some of the other planks of the manifesto, like criticizing “the pervasive intolerance of religious belief” or claiming, “many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime,” sound positively Trumpian in their employment of truthful hyperbole. The whole manifesto is super-friendly to a Trump administration theory of state-corporate symbiosis that is definitely not fascist — if you read Niall Ferguson at least.

As Masnick warns:

When your value to the government is primarily ideological alignment with a specific political project, you become a clear and visible target the moment that project loses power.

One of the many problems with fascism as a business strategy is that it only works if the fascists stay in power indefinitely. It’s a woefully unpopular ideological position, especially in the US — betting on a temporarily ascendant horse that has no chance in a longer race.

But Karp and Palantir have bet the farm that either Trumpism will remain a powerful force within the government or that they will be so deeply buried in the systems that it would be effectively impossible to rip them out when more grounded leadership enters the picture.

That’s an incredibly risky bet, and one I doubt will pay off.

So, to sum up: The folks at Palantir think they’ve got it all sorted out in the marketplace of ideas. This half-based1 manifesto suggests otherwise.

The hard-reading subscribers to Drezner’s World are by now fully aware of the hard-working staff’s recent analysis of President Donald Trump, his foreign policy team, and the deleterious state of American grand strategy. This is on top of some more in-depth analyses of Donald Trump’s peculiar brand of immature leadership, his blinkered worldview, and his foolish faith in the madman theory of coercive bargaining.

While repetition can be a useful pedagogical tool, unrelenting repetition yields diminishing returns over time. So it is worth asking: what should I do when a deeply reported story comes out that pretty much confirms everything I have written about Trump over the years?

I ask because of Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey’s latest Wall Street Journal story, “Behind Trump’s Public Bravado on the War, He Grapples With His Own Fears.” Dawsey and Linskey provide plenty of details about how Trump is reacting to a war that is going far worse than he anticipated. And Dawsey and Linskey are hardly the only ones to produce a story like this. Earlier this month the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan wrote a deep dive into Trump’s decision to start the war. No doubt, there will be more stories to come in the weeks ahead.

To paraphrase Stefon, this WSJ story has everything — or, at least, everything about Trump’s leadership and decision-making pathologies that I have previously discussed. Consider:

• Short attention span. “The president sometimes loses focus, spending time on the details of his plans for the White House ballroom or on midterm fundraisers—and telling advisers he wants to shift to other topics.”

• Poor impulse control. “Aides kept the president out of the room as they got minute-by-minute updates because they believed his impatience wouldn’t be helpful, instead updating him at meaningful moments, a senior administration official said…. Trump’s top aides have taken turns telling the president that he should limit the impromptu interviews because they were only convincing the public he had contradictory messages.”

• Prone to temper tantrums. “It was Good Friday afternoon in a nearly empty West Wing soon after the president learned that an American jet had been shot down in Iran, with two airmen missing. Trump screamed at aides for hours…. He grew angry with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer for being slow to allow U.S. forces to use U.K. bases and derisively mocked the French President as ‘Emmanuel,’ dragging out the syllables in an exaggerated French accent.”

• Knowledge deficits. “Before the U.S. went to war, Trump told his team that Iran’s government would likely capitulate before closing the strait, and that even if Tehran tried, the U.S. military could handle it…. Trump has since marveled at the ease with which the strait was closed. A guy with a drone can shut it down, Trump has said to people, expressing belated irritation that the key waterway was so vulnerable.”

• Belief in the madman theory. “When one adviser later asked him about [one of his belligerent tweets], he said he came up with the Allah idea himself. He said he wanted to seem as unstable and insulting as possible, believing it could bring the Iranians to the table, senior administration officials said. It was a language, he said, the Iranians would understand…. top aides saw the move as a way to spur negotiations in a war the president was desperately ready to end. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told others privately it was language that might actually bring the Iranians to negotiate. What Trump really wanted, advisers said, was to scare the Iranians, and to end the conflict.”

Furthermore, there are other, more general defects in decision-making that Trump shows in the story. These include piss-poor analogical reasoning (“[Trump] said he trusted the military to pull it off. Look, he said to advisers, at how quickly they had ‘won’ in Venezuela) and gambling for resurrection when operating in a domain of loss (ordering the high-risk raid to rescue the down U.S. pilot inside of Iran).1 You get the point.

But I’ve said all of this before. It’s always nice to get a confirming data point from a deeply reported story, but is there anything else that can be gleaned from this kind of story?2

To the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World, there are four larger takeaways.

First, sometimes the repetition is the point. Sure, neither the writers nor the readers of Drezner’s World are learning much that is new in this story, but most voters and citizens are not so attentive to current events. A running theme of Trump’s second term are stories about former supporters sounding shocked or disillusioned about how his second-term presidency has played out. And, along the way, they are learning just how bad of a leader Trump has been.

I’m sure that must be frustrating for those who predicted such outcomes — but hey, better late than never!

Second, Trump’s staff is back to talking about him like he’s a toddler again. Remember, one of the reasons I didn’t want to resuscitate the toddler thread was because I was sure his more loyal second-term staff would refrain from characterizing him like a petulant three-year old. That has mostly held up — though the Greenland incident was one turning point. The fact that even these toadies are leaking about him now indicates that they know that the boat is starting to take on water and they need to find their lifeboat.3

Finally, the utility of madman theory will continue to be degrade. Again, the first rule of the madman theory is to never say that you’re employing the madman theory. And yet, that’s exactly what happens in stories like this one. To be clear, I have seen little evidence that the madman theory has generated anything useful for Trump in the past or in the present. But its future utility will be even lower. Unfortunately, because Trump and Rubio still seem to think it has value, expect even more belligerency in the months and years ahead.

If you squint real hard, there is a way to view the Trump administration’s pressure on Iran trending in a positive direction. As Bobby Ghosh pointed out in Foreign Policy, Iran has lost an awful lot of capabilities during this war:

It is true, as many (myself included) have argued, that in this particular conflict America loses by not winning, while Iran wins merely by surviving. But there is no gainsaying the fact that the Islamic Republic has been badly battered by the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign. Recovery will require not only time and money, but also an extended period of political and geopolitical stability. These are things over which Tehran has, at best, limited control….

Iran’s strategic calculation at the outset of the war was that lobbing missiles and drones at Gulf Arab capitals—Abu Dhabi, Kuwait City, Doha—would coerce those governments into pressuring Washington to stand down. It failed in precisely the opposite direction. Anwar Gargash, a diplomatic advisor to the United Arab Emirates’ president and one of the Gulf’s most respected strategists, did not mince words. Iran had “deceived its neighbors before the war about its intentions and revealed a premeditated aggression despite their sincere efforts to avoid it,” he told the National. Thousands of missiles and drones targeting civilian infrastructure and energy facilities were not strength, he added—they were “hubris and strategic failure.”

The result of this campaign has been the cementing of the Gulf states’ alignment with Washington—note the explicit willingness of the UAE to join a military coalition against Iran’s threat to Hormuz—and a unified Gulf Cooperation Council demand that any peace settlement permanently curb Iran’s missile and drone capabilities.

Furthermore, as crazy and illegal as the Trump administration’s decision to impose their own blockade in the Strait of Hormuz might sound, it also might be something the U.S. Navy could actually accomplish with its current capabilities. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) noted on Tuesday that, “The US blockade on Iranian ports does not have a defined geographic boundary, and the United States can interdict vessels almost anywhere in international waters until they arrive at their final port.” In other words, even if a ship gets out of the Strait, if the U.S. Navy detects it the interdiction can still happen. CNN’s analysts also think that U.S. naval forces can pull it off.

That’s not to say that opening up the Strait to non-Iranian ships will be easy — it won’t be — but I get why the administration thinks it can use a blockade to pressure Iran. Furthermore, the ability of Iran to maintain its own blockade in the Persian Gulf could be coming under increasing strain.

My point is that despite expert skepticism, there is a scenario in the Persian Gulf in which the U.S. finds itself in a stronger position than Iran in the coming weeks.

But — and you knew there was a “but” — a few weeks is a long time, and the costs of the collateral damage of the war to the United States are rising.

For example, the longer the war goes on, the more emboldened that Russia and China will be in assisting Iran. We already know that Russia has provided intelligence to Iran. China has aided Iran’s missile program and has allowed Iran the use of a spy satellite to target U.S. assets in the region. There are reports of additional kinds of assistance to Iran. The Trump administration downplaying these stories will just make it easier for both countries to ratchet up their assistance even further.

Furthermore, time also helps the Iranians in some ways. ISW warned yesterday that, “Iran is exploiting the current ceasefire to reorganize and regenerate its ballistic missile forces program on the tactical level by attempting to reopen tunnel entrances at missile bases.”

Additionally, contrary to the Trump administration’s claims of successful regime change, all of the evidence points towards an even more radical regime cementing its power in Tehran.1 The Wall Street Journal’s Margherita Stancati, Benoit Faucon, and Henna Moussavi explain the state of play with Iran’s theocratic regime:

Read more

After a major sporting event, The Ringer likes to publish “winners and losers” columns.1 The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World very much enjoys reading these analyses the morning after said major sporting event. They’re entertaining and informative.

I thought about writing something straightforward after Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán lost and lost badly following sixteen years of his illiberal Fidesz party staying in power, or how Peter Magyar and his Tisza Party put in the necessary sweat equity to defeat him with the veto-proof majorities to reverse a lot of Orbán’s structural illiberalism.

But versions of that have already been written — so let’s focus on all the fun winners and losers!2

LOSER: JD VANCE

I mean, come on, this one writes itself — almost everything Vance has attached himself over the past year to has ended badly. He’s had a much worse first year in office than Kamala Harris — and Harris did not have a great first year as VP. Vance campaigned for Orban in Hungary the week before Orbán trounced at the ballot box — and as a result the betting odds shifted even more in Magyar’s favor.

The headlines possibly written by AI almost wrote themselves:

• “Vance Bitterly Humiliated as Voters Turn Out in Droves to Reject His Pleas”

• “JD Vance mocked over weekend of failures in Iran and Hungary: ‘On a historic roll’”

• “Anything Vance touches ‘dies’? Viktor Orban’s loss triggers meme storm against VP”

Vance himself has tried to shrug off the loss — but as Brian Beutler points out, Vance’s “noble loser but loyal soldier” schtick has its political limits:

His goal all along has been to keep himself clean enough to all factions of the pro-Trump coalition that he remains heir to Trump by default. That of course entails being Trump’s errand boy, setting himself up for humiliation after humiliation. But he’s recently tacked on an aggressive public relations offensive to portray himself as a tragic hero, hard at work keeping things on an even keel. The only senior official with both the wisdom to suspect war with Iran would descend into quagmire and the courage to say so to the boss’s face. Allegedly….

This has already created a bunch of problems. By depicting himself as the lone voice of reason, Vance has managed to alienate almost all of his colleagues…. He’s thus positioned himself as the avatar of MAGA’s future at the exact moment when he’s failing most visibly. His pitch: Join our party, where the only worthy person is an arrogant loudmouth taking L after L.

Yep, he’s a loser.

WINNERS: EUROPEAN UNION AND UKRAINE

Vance repeatedly articulated that the reason was backing Orbán was because they shared a common antipathy towards the European Union.3 Orbán had been a thorn in the EU’s side for well over a decade. But now, as the New York Times’ Jeanna Smialek explains, that thorn has been excised:

Mr. Orban has often stood in the way of critical policy goals for the European Union, including blocking a loan to Ukraine and sanctions packages targeting Russia. His administration has also been viewed as a security risk at sensitive meetings because of its comparatively cozy ties to the Kremlin.

With the victory of Hungary’s opposition party, led by Peter Magyar, that could begin to change.

Mr. Magyar and his Tisza party have struck a friendlier tone toward both the European Union and NATO. As voting was underway on Sunday, he pointed out that it was taking place on the anniversary of a 2003 vote in favor of Hungary joining the European Union, a potential signal that he wanted to break with Mr. Orban’s animosity toward Brussels.

Most immediately, the new leadership is widely expected to clear the path for a 90 billion euro loan to Ukraine that has been frozen for weeks because of Mr. Orban’s objections.

While Magyar does not necessarily see eye-to-eye with Ukraine on every issue, he’s definitely going to be friendlier to that country than Orbán. So, winners!

LOSERS: DONALD TRUMP AND VLADIMIR PUTIN

Let’s just pause here for a second and recognize the absurdity of the United States and Russia backing the same horse in a European electoral democracy. That should not be happening like, at all in the year of our lord 2026. It’s a horrible confirmation of how low American foreign policy and American values has sunk during Trump’s second term in office.

Russia loses a valuable inside man within the European Union. Politico characterized Orban’s government as, “a key source of inside information” within Brussels. That pipeline will now be severely constricted.

As for Trump, he has boosted Orban for quite some time, even promising all sorts of economic goodies to Hungary if they re-elected him. And no wonder — the parallels between the fate of Fidesz and the fate of the GOP in the midterms and in 2028 are too obvious for even MAGA to ignore.

With the massive loss by Fidesz, Trump and his MAGA acolytes can’t ignore the harbinger of doom for their own political future. As the New York Times’ Kellen Browning and Shane Goldmacher write:

Mr. Trump and his MAGA movement have long shared DNA with Mr. Orban’s brand of right-wing politics, with both taking hard-line anti-immigration stances, working to curb press freedoms and expressing concern about falling birthrates….

Just days later Hungarians roundly rejected a fifth term for Mr. Orban. Now the scale of his defeat is setting off alarm bells for the American right, because many of Mr. Trump’s supporters have seen Mr. Orban as a kindred spirit and as an incubator of ideas that they embraced.”

Well, fortunately for Trump, under his leadership the U.S. economy will no doubt rebound soon as the war in Iran concludes quickly and cleanly- HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!! It feels good to laugh.

WINNER: DEMOCRACY — AND FRANCIS FUKUYAMA

A decade ago I wrote a Brookings paper entitled, “Five known unknowns about the next generation global political economy” that referenced Orbán:

One of the unspoken assumptions of the past generation was that free-market capitalism was the only viable economic model for generating economic growth. Another unspoken assumption that that for affluent countries, democracy was “locked in.” In other words, it was assumed that the advanced industrialized democracies would stay democratic and capitalist, and that the rest of the world would seek to emulate that model. But it is now at least possible to conceive of an alternative governance model of political economy….

Elected leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán have said explicitly that “liberal democratic states can’t remain globally competitive,” and that it is better to create “an illiberal new state” inspired by Russia and China. The issue is not whether Orbán is actually correct, but that he is publicly willing to articulate such an alternative. Such disdain among political leaders reflects populist trends across the developing world—including the United States— that show waning faith in democracy.

Orbán’s performance in office has helped put the kibosh on the allure of his illiberal democracy model. As Paul Krugman pointed out yesterday, “when Orbán took power, Hungary was roughly as rich as Poland and substantially richer than Romania. Since then Poland has pulled far ahead while Romania has caught up:” Voters noticed.

The fact that Orbán conceded so quickly shows that, as illiberal a democrat as he has been, he is still a democrat: he recognized and acknowledged the electoral results. A reminder: that puts Orbán one step above Trump, who refuses to acknowledge his 2020 loss to this day.

And who knows, maybe Orban’s loss will even encourage those who like to bash Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis to actually read his argument before glibly dismissing it.

Over the past few days the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World was enjoying a visit to Indiana University in Bloomington — specifically, the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. I was there to attend and speak at their 11th annual America’s Role in the World Conference on a panel entitled “Foreign Policy in an Age of Change.”

The conference was both interesting and informative. I learned a lot about the current American approaches towards global health and space governance. I learned that the Indiana University campus is awfully pretty when the trees and tulips start blooming in Bloomington. The picture above tells the obvious story. Here are a few more pics:

Back to the conference. I was impressed with the seriousness the Hamilton Lugar students brought to the event. Their questions at the panels were analytically sharp and earnest. Even for a crusty old prof like myself it was as inspiring as the Fletcher students I interact with regularly.

Before each panel, a Hamilton Lugar student would describe their own experiences studying international affairs or interning in a job related to the field. All of the student vignettes were interesting, but one student’s remarks stood out to me in particular. One graduate student had interned in Washington and discussed her sense of isolation at times because of where she came from compared to her colleagues in DC. She talked about fighting a strong sense of “imposter syndrome” while working as an intern, expecting it to subside as she proceeds with her career.

I empathized with the student, but she left before I could tell her something very, very important about a career in international affairs:1 for most people, most of the time, imposter syndrome never goes away.

I say this from experience. I’m now at the age where my bio sounds pretty solid. I’m a distinguished professor! I’m an academic dean! I’ve written books — many of them without any pictures!

Do I feel like an imposter? All the damn time! I’m supposed to be a dean now, which means I’m supposed to possess sufficient reservoirs of executive functioning abilities. Let’s just say that there are days when I’m not feeling those abilities all that much.

Even ignoring the dean role, imposter syndrome is still my constant companion. Even as a public intellectual — and remember, I wrote a book about this topic — professional success means one is asked to appear on bigger stages with folks who possess more impressive credentials. I am constantly surrounded by peers and colleagues who are either smarter or more experienced or both. Worse, the more one is asked to be a public intellectual, the greater the anxiety that one’s intellectual capital stock has been maxed out.

Heck, I felt like an imposter on the state at the Lugar Hamilton School, because I was paired with Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield. Here’s her bio from the ARW conference:

Thomas-Greenfield brings decades of diplomatic experience to the ARW stage. As U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, she served in President Biden’s Cabinet and on the National Security Council, shaping U.S. engagement on global security and humanitarian issues.

Her distinguished career includes service as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, an Ambassadorship to Liberia, and other leadership roles in the State Department’s Foreign Service. She has represented the United States in postings across Africa, Asia, and Europe, and her expertise spans diplomacy, development, and multilateral negotiations. Her global leadership and commitment to diplomacy have made her one of the most respected voices in international affairs.

After retiring from government service, Thomas-Greenfield led the Africa Practice at Albright Stonebridge Group and was a Distinguished Resident Fellow in African Studies at Georgetown University. She is currently a senior advisor to the founder and executive chairman of APCO Worldwide, and a member of the board of directors for the Council on Foreign Relations.

She holds a bachelor’s degree from Louisiana State University and a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin, where she also pursued doctoral studies. Her honors include a Presidential Rank Award, Secretary Distinguished Service Award, the American Foreign Service Association 2025 Award for Lifetime Contributions to American Diplomacy, plus numerous other awards. She has honorary doctorates from the University of Wisconsin and the University of Liberia.

That’s a pretty badass career — way, way more badass than my string of academic appointments.2 I thought that at least I had been a professor and Thomas-Greenfield had not. Even that slim reed was a mirage, however: she taught political science at Bucknell before entering the Foreign Service.

Did I feel like an imposter sharing the stage with Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield? I sure did.

But I still went on that stage and rambled for the appropriate amount of time. Because the dirty secret about imposter syndrome is that the only people who don’t have it are the people who should have it.

The rest of us just learn to live with it a little bit better as we grow older.

It looks like President Trump’s threat to commit war crimes by destroying Iran’s entire civilization will not, thankfully, be carried out in the short run.

A two-week cease-fire has been declared, although it looks awfully damn fragile as of this writing. There is considerable confusion over whether the cease-fire arrangement covers Israel’s incursion into Lebanon, and the Iranians are sounding like they might not be honoring the deal.

Of course, calling this a “deal” or an “arrangement” is an overly generous description — What actually happened sounds more like a series of coordinated social media posts. According to CNN’s Catherine Nichols, this particular cease-fire lacks the normal ingredients of such an arrangement — things like, you know, a formal, written document.

For right now, however, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World will give everyone the benefit of the doubt and assume some cessation of hostilities for the next few weeks. This is a far cry from where a lot of commentators thought things would be 36 hours ago..

Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric had unnerved people who have long grown inured to his bluster. Garrett Graff characterized the chances that Donald Trump would use a nuclear weapon against Iran as “non-zero…. I’d personally put the chance that Donald Trump uses a nuclear weapon against Iran at some point in the three percent range — which is a stunningly high number, given the history of nuclear weapons and the presidency.”

For Nate Silver — and every other sane human on the planet — three percent is three percentage points too many when it comes to brinksmanship:

I don’t think Graff’s take was “alarmist”. There were really three scenarios: 1) Iran would back down; 2) Iran wouldn’t back down, but Trump would chicken out anyway; 3) Iran wouldn’t back down, and Trump would follow through on his threat.

I’m not sure whether we just experienced Scenario #1 or Scenario #2….

But this certainly isn’t some sort of 13-dimensional genius move. It reflects an unchecked Commander-in-Chief who was erratic on his best days, who is 79 years old, who was boxed into a corner, who has sycophantic advisors who are mostly too afraid to challenge him, and who once bragged that he could maintain approval from his base even if he murdered someone.

States with nuclear weapons have the ability to make a lot of bluffs. The expected value of a 3 percent chance of an infinitely bad outcome is still negative infinity. That’s why many countries, including, of course, Iran, have pursued the bomb.

And it probably does help Trump in some ways that he could be plausibly considered an irrational actor under “Madman Theory”, the term popularized by Richard Nixon. I doubt that a President Romney or President Haley or President Biden or President Harris or President Ocasio-Cortez would have used the same rhetoric, but if they had, it would have read differently.

There were, however, various ways this could have gone very badly, or still could go very badly the next time the “game” is played, and inevitably will go badly if we repeat the scenario often enough.

Silver posits that Trump pursued an extremely risky gambit and was able to employ it more effectively than other U.S. politicians. Others have postulated something similar: that the cease-fire is an example of the Madman Theory in action. The New York Times’ David Sanger, for example, wrote a news analysis suggesting that the intimidating rhetoric contained in Trump’s madman rhetoric generated a tactical win:

Mr. Trump’s tactic of escalating his rhetoric to astronomical levels certainly helped him find an offramp he had been seeking for weeks. That success alone may fuel his belief that the tactics he learned in the New York real estate world — ignore old conventions, make maximalist demands — work in geopolitics as well.

Without question, it was a down-to-the-wire tactical victory, one that should, at least temporarily, get oil, fertilizer and helium flowing again through the Strait of Hormuz, and calm markets that feared a global energy shock would lead to a global recession.

But it resolved none of the fundamental issues that led to the war.

As someone who has written about Trump and the Madman Theory, at this point I have to ask a very basic question: what tactical victory?!

I’m serious: what tactical gain did the Trump administration secure by agreeing to the two-week cease-fire beyond the cease-fire itself? Sure, President Trump saved himself from committing war crimes, but that’s not exactly a tactical win. Iran’s military has been battered, but that has not stopped Iran’s regime from retaliating across the region and closing the Strait of Hormuz.

The most one could credit Trump with is that maybe his rhetoric persuades his base that he was employing the Madman Theory all along, thereby reducing his audience costs of backing down.

But for everyone else not named “Pete Hegseth” it remains the case that the United States has failed to achieve most of its stated war aims. Neither Israel nor the Gulf allies seem particularly pleased with the current status quo compared to the pre-war moment. The rest of the Arab world ain’t thrilled with the United States either.

Meanwhile, even a conventionally weakened Iran has managed to control the Strait of Hormuz chokepoint — a fact unaffected by the cease fire. Indeed, Politico’s Ben Lefebvre and Phelim Kine report that oil executives are keenly aware of just how the current status quo is worse than the pre-war situation:

Oil company executives are reaching out to the White House, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance to protest allowing Iran to charge tolls through the strategic Strait of Hormuz as a condition of peace talks, said one industry consultant granted anonymity to discuss relations with the administration.

“Hell yes,” this person said when asked if executives were contacting the White House to protest a toll on Hormuz. ”We didn’t have to do that before — and I thought we won the war. Any place you have access to the administration, you ask, what are you guys thinking?”

I have yet to read a credible analyst explain how the United States has won this clash with Iran. But I have seen a boatload of analyses that explain how the current U.S. situation is far worse than the pre-war status quo.

Jonathan Last concludes, “If the general contours of the ceasefire agreement hold, then America will have suffered a significant strategic defeat and Iran will have won a significant strategic victory.”

David Frum concurs, “Foreign leaders are surely willing to believe that Trump is ‘crazy’ in the sense that he is detached from reality. They have seen him miscalculate risk and bungle all kinds of projects, such as his trade wars with China and his attempted coup on January 6, 2021. But they also know that when push really comes to shove, Trump will flinch. TACO has become, like NATO, an acronym so familiar that it no longer needs spelling out….. Trump has taught the world that he has every quality of the madman except indifference to pain.”

Tom Wright warns:

The war has exposed the contradictions of the Trump administration’s geopolitical worldview. Under this president, the United States has rewarded Russia, ignored China, punished Europe, and abandoned its Asian allies and partners to an economic crisis that it helped set in motion….

The United States is nowhere to be found as Asian allies cope with the worst energy crisis in 50 years. There has been no G-20 emergency meeting. No visit by the Treasury secretary to the region. No acknowledgment of the problem. Just a lambasting of U.S. treaty allies for not joining in….

The Iran war has laid bare a new geopolitical reality. America’s adversaries are becoming more coordinated, sharing resources and capabilities in ways that amplify their power, while America’s global alliances, long its greatest asset, are neglected and fragmenting. The United States is, in effect, moving toward a world in which it faces more connected opponents with a less cohesive coalition of its own. This is a major shift with profound implications for U.S. national security—and it’s one that the Trump administration shows no sign of recognizing, let alone reversing.

Even Sanger, a few hours after he wrote the analysis excerpted above, wrote a follow-up piece suggesting that Trump’s post-cease-fire options were more constrained:

Just a few hours into the fragile cease-fire that President Trump announced on Tuesday, it was clear that while resuming combat operations may be a viable military option if negotiations go nowhere, it is not a particularly viable political choice for Mr. Trump. And, with talks scheduled to start in Islamabad on Friday, the Iranians know it.

If shipments actually resume through the Strait of Hormuz, the price of Brent crude oil, which has already dropped about 14 percent, hovering around $95 a barrel, could keep falling. Gas prices should follow, even if no one is expecting them to go back to where they were before the war broke out. Major stock indexes rose over 2 percent.

These are the measures of instant success that register with Mr. Trump. And he knows that even if the two-week cease-fire runs out on April 21 with no final agreement on the long list of issues that have divided Washington and Tehran for decades, the political risk of renewing hostilities is high — particularly with the midterm elections looming and an upcoming summit with China’s leader, Xi Jinping.

Trump’s last-minute cease-fire acceptance is an example of the Madman Theory only insofar as the madman gambit has a lousy track record of securing greater concessions — and this cease-fire also failed to gain anything for the United States. Meanwhile, the strategic losses caused by this war will continue to mount.

Historically, U.S. presidents — especially the iconic commanders in chief — have been well read. The founding fathers were all learned men who read and wrote a great deal. Abraham Lincoln was an extremely well-read man who composed some of the greatest oratory in American history. Harry S Truman did not attend college but was well known as a voracious reader of history. Barack Obama’s oratorical skills continue to be admired or envied by his contemporaries, and his book lists have certainly penetrated popular culture.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has already commented on the Trump administration’s unfamiliarity with basic political science. But this has not stopped Trump or his acolytes from trying to claim that they too are well-read. After all, Trump is the “author” of multiple books, although his role in actually writing them appears to have been pretty limited. And even now, in a moment when Trump prides his “gut” in making decisions, his staffers continue to insist he’s the most well-read person in the room:

The funny thing about the Trump administration is that they try to have it both ways on this: belittle any well-read opponent as an out of touch egghead unfamiliar with the cold realities of the world, while at the same time claiming that MAGA and only MAGA understand the deep truths about international politics.

As someone who literally teaches a course called Classics of International Relations Theory at the Fletcher School, it has been painful to watch Trump and his acolytes reduce the international relations canon into macho bromides in order to justify their bone-headed, poorly-thought-out strategic fiascoes.

Consider, for example, two classical thinkers that Trump and his acolytes like to embrace: Thucydides and Machiavelli.

Back in January, Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s most loyal acolytes, tried on his best Thucydides impression when talking to CNN’s Jake Tapper:

We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time…..

We're a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.

This sounds an awful lot like the most famous line in Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War — the proclamation by the Athenians in the Melian Dialogue that, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Indeed, this subsequent statement by the Athenians during the Melian Dialogue sounds awfully Trump-y:

Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do.

Given that the Athenians eventually got what they wanted at Melos, is this an example of Trumpsters recognizing the same iron laws of power that the Athenians recognized 2500 years ago?

Well, no. Because anyone who possesses a familiarity with Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War beyond the aforementioned quotes will remember three important things about Athens:

1. By that point in the history, war had so consumed the Athenians that their previous recognition of the virtues of honor and interest — on display in Pericles’ funeral oration and the Mytilenean Debate — had dissipated. Athenian exceptionalism as an idea had ceased to exist by that point in the conflict;

2. Athens failed to successfully coerce Melos into submission despite their overwhelming power advantage. Athens had to kill all the grown men and sell the women and children of Melos into slavery; and

3. Right after the Athenian victory at Melos, the city-state makes the ill-fated decision to invade Sicily. That ended… poorly.

The real lesson of Thucydides’ history is that while might can make right in the short term, over the long term the actors who believe in that principle overreach and hasten their nation’s downfall.

The other classical thinker that Trump and his minions love is Machiavelli. As Luke Hallam observed a year ago, “it seems natural that commentators turn to The Prince to explain the particular ruthlessness of his new administration. It’s not hard to find articles using The Prince to explain why Trump is the Machiavellian genius of our time.”

Trumpsters are particularly fond of Machiavelli’s dictum as stated in The Prince that, “it is much safer to be feared than loved.” Trump himself once told Bob Woodward, “Real power is – I don’t even want to use the word – fear.” As the Guardian’s Patrick Boucheron wrote back in 2020 about Trump’s statement, “This sentence could have been written by Niccolò Machiavelli.”

Again, however, anyone who has actually read all of The Prince knows that there additional passages that highlight the current administration’s unfamiliarity with the totality of Machiavelli’s thinking. For example, in the very same chapter that Machiavelli talked about it better to be feared than loved, he also cautioned, “a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well being feared whilst he is not hated.”

Machiavelli elaborated on that point in a subsequent chapter:

The prince must consider, as has been in part said before, how to avoid those things which will make him hated or contemptible; and as often as he shall have succeeded he will have fulfilled his part, and he need not fear any danger in other reproaches.

It makes him hated above all things, as I have said, to be rapacious, and to be a violator of the property and women of his subjects, from both of which he must abstain. And when neither their property nor their honor is touched, the majority of men live content, and he has only to contend with the ambition of a few, whom he can curb with ease in many ways.

It makes him contemptible to be considered fickle, frivolous, effeminate, mean-spirited, irresolute, from all of which a prince should guard himself as from a rock; and he should endeavor to show in his actions greatness, courage, gravity, and fortitude; and in his private dealings with his subjects let him show that his judgments are irrevocable, and maintain himself in such reputation that no one can hope either to deceive him or to get round him.

In his history of Florence, Machiavelli also offered a cautionary warning about the use of force: “Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please.”

As President Trump continues to careen from claims of negotiations to intemperate threats of, you know, war crimes, remember this: the folks running this war believe that they have pretty much figured out how the world works. But the cliches that they like to spout should remind everyone that they have no depth to their knowledge. And everyone will pay the price for their boastful ignorance.

To understand the strategic disaster that is unfolding in the Persian Gulf, let’s take a gander at the last two columns of one of the war’s initial optimists: New York Times columnist Bret Stephens.

A few weeks ago Stephens argued that the war was going better than the conventional wisdom suggested. Comparing this war with previous U.S. military interventions abroad, Stephens argued that the initial losses from Operation Epic Fury were rather light:

To hear the critics’ version of events, an unprovoked and unnecessary attack on Iran, launched at Israel’s behest, is already a foreign-policy fiasco that has put the global economy at risk without any clear objective or endgame. As Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, told NBC’s Kristen Welker over the weekend, “We’ve never seen this level of incompetence in war-making in this country’s history.”

Really? Let’s take a tour of some of the recent history….

[Paragraphs recounting the initial material costs of U.S. interventions in the Middle East, including protecting tankers in the late 1980s and the previous two Gulf wars — all of which were undeniably higher than the current operation.]

If past generations could see how well this war has gone compared with the ones they were compelled to fight at a frightening cost, they would marvel at their posterity’s comparative good fortune. They would marvel, too, at our inability to appreciate the advantages we now possess.

Last week, however, Stephens was sounding a slightly different tune:

Getting some of [the war’s] opponents to see the point may be the intent behind Trump’s reported musing to his aides that he may be willing to end the war without using force to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The president “decided that the U.S. should achieve its main goals of hobbling Iran’s navy and its missile stocks and wind down current hostilities while pressuring Tehran diplomatically to resume the free flow of trade,” The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. “If that fails, Washington would press allies in Europe and the Gulf to take the lead on reopening the strait.”

Maybe Trump is bluffing, to get more international support to open the strait. Or maybe (more likely) he’s flying by the seat of his pants. Either way, ending the war before retaking the strait would be a mistake for many reasons, even if it allowed the administration to wind down military operations in the next week or two.

Tehran would see it as victory and vindication, emboldening an otherwise fractured regime and making it less, not more, pliable in subsequent negotiations. The Saudis, Emiratis and other Gulf states would feel betrayed by a deal that forced them to bend the diplomatic knee to the Iranians after having been assaulted by them. The Europeans lack the means, the will and the nerve to challenge Iran if diplomacy failed — as it almost surely would. And the United States, despite being a net exporter of energy, would still feel the economic hit in a world in which the price of oil is essentially set globally.

When you’ve lost Bret Stephens….

Furthermore, Stephens wrote this before Trump’s prime-time, low-energy address to the nation this past Thursday. Contra Stephens’ hopes, Trump reiterated the point that European and Asian allies should take the initiative in re-opening the Strait of Hormuz, using language that sounded awfully rape-y:

We’ve beaten and completely decimated Iran. They are decimated both militarily and economically and in every other way. And the countries of the world that do receive oil through the Hormuz Straight must take care of that passage. They must cherish it. They must grab it and cherish it. They could do it easily. We will be helpful, but they should take the lead in protecting the oil that they so desperately depend on.

So to those countries that can’t get fuel, many of which refuse to get involved in the decapitation of Iran — we had to do it ourselves — I have a suggestion. No. 1, buy oil from the United States of America. We have plenty. We have so much. And No. 2, build up some delayed courage. Should have done it before. Should have done it with us as we asked. Go to the straight and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves. Iran has been essentially decimated. The hard part is done, so it should be easy.

And in any event, when this conflict is over, the strait will open up naturally. It’ll just open up naturally.

The NYT’s Helene Cooper aptly summarized that speech as, “a rehash of his Truth Social posts over the past month.” The market reaction to it was, how to put it, not good.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World could go on and on and on and on about how ineptly this war was planned and how unpopular it is with the American people and how neither Trump nor his principals comprehend how any of this works.

But what really needs to be stressed at this point — a point that experts have been making since the first weeks of the war — is just how much of a strategic fiasco this has been and will be.

The New York Times’ Edward Wong recently looked at how the United States was doing in achieving Trump’s five articulated goals from February 28th:

1. Destroy Iran’s missile-industrial complex. “The U.S. and Israeli militaries have destroyed many of Iran’s ballistic missiles and launchers in airstrikes. But a large number are undamaged, and Iran continues to fire missiles in the region.” A follow-on NYT report says that U.S. intelligence has concluded, “Iranian operatives have been digging out underground missile bunkers and silos struck by American and Israeli bombs, returning them to operation hours after an attack.” So clearly, this goal has not been achieved yet.

2. Destroy Iran’s navy. “The two militaries have destroyed much of Iran’s navy.” Let’s stipulate this one, although it hasn’t stopped Iran from closing the Strait of Hormuz. But this goal, narrowly defined, has been achieved.

3. Sever Iran from its terror proxies: “Mr. Trump was referring here to militias in the region that receive financial support and other types of backing from Iran. The militias are still active.” Indeed, particularly the Houthis. This goal has not been achieved yet.

4. Ensure Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon. “U.S. officials say they think some highly enriched uranium remains in tunnels buried under rubble. Sending ground troops into Iran to seize the material would be risky.” Sure, Trump no longer cares about the uranium, but this counts as a goal that has not been achieved yet.

5. Create the conditions for regime change. “The newly appointed supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the deceased cleric, is a hard-liner aligned with a powerful arm of the Iranian military. The current government remains theocratic, authoritarian and anti-American, and continues to wage a war of resistance.” Beyond the fact that the Trump administration doesn’t understand the concept of "regime change,” this goal has not been achieved yet.

Look, call me crazy, but a military campaign against an adversary that has failed to achieve four out of five objectives does not seem like a successful operation.

If anything, however, this understates the depths of Trump’s strategic clusterfuck. Despite a lot of chatter about negotiations possibly taking place, the administration has eliminated any chance at a coercive bargaining strategy working, as the New York Times’ Wong and Julian Barnes reported earlier this week:

Multiple U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed in recent days that the Iranian government is not currently willing to engage in substantial negotiations over ending the U.S.-Israeli war, according to U.S. officials.

The assessments say the Iranian government believes it is in a strong position in the war and does not have to accede to America’s diplomatic demands, the officials said. And while Iran is willing to keep channels open, they said, it does not trust the United States and does not think President Trump is serious about negotiations….

The intelligence assessments, which appear in multiple reports, have been consistent since the beginning of the conflict, one official said.

Senior Iranian officials continue to resist making the kinds of concessions on its nuclear program and ballistic missile production that the Trump administration has demanded….

Iranian officials think they are fighting for the government’s very survival, given the strength of the American and Israeli attack, according to current and former officials. Some Iranian officials are skeptical that any peace deal would be lasting. Their leadership fears Israel could carry out a new attack months later even if Iran were to enter into a deal, U.S. officials said.

So where does this leave the Trump administration? Nowhere good. Trump can try to sell the idea that the current difficulties are just a short-term hitch and a prolonged war is worth fighting, but he’s poorly positioned to sell that narrative. Plus, the longer this fight drags out, the more he alienates NATO allies, including the United Kingdom. And as much as he doesn’t like it, such estrangement carries strategic costs.

Time’s Eric Cortellessa reports that “[Trump] is searching for a way to declare victory, halt the fighting, and hope that economic conditions stabilize before the political damage hardens.” Trump certainly wants to try that gambit — but this strategy isn’t likely to work either. Multiple reports that suggest Iran thinks it is winning the conflict. Even if Trump declares victory, Iran will continue to exert a chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz, pocketing a lot of resources to rebuild itself.

At best, Trump seems to have locked the United States into a regional version of Benjamin Netanyahu’s “mowing the grass” strategy with Hamas: periodically launching attacks whenever the antagonist builds up its capacities. But as the Financial Times’ Neri Zibler reports, this is not working out quite as Netanyahu had hoped:

After Hamas’s October 7 2023 attack, Benjamin Netanyahu vowed “total victory” in the conflict that followed. Yet more than two years later Israel’s enemies — while unquestionably weakened — are still standing.

Hamas and its gunmen still rule over the ruins of half of Gaza. Hizbollah, which Netanyahu said was “crushed” in 2024, fires a steady stream of rockets from Lebanon on northern Israel. And less than a year after he declared a “historic victory” against Iran, Israel and the US are back at war with the Islamic republic.

Rather than promise decisive triumph, the prime minister now speaks of the long arc of history, rising and falling threats, and changing the region’s “balance of power” — all as he prepares Israelis for a future in which dangers are constant and conflict open-ended….

For many Israeli analysts and former officials, Netanyahu’s inability or unwillingness to turn the IDF’s operational achievements into a strategic victory or an enduring diplomatic resolution is his ultimate failure.

“Using the word ‘doctrine’ to describe this is incredibly generous,” said a second former Israeli official. “Wherever there’s a problem he sends the military in, and there’s no doubt that more damage was done to our enemies than us, but that’s not the goal.”

“The view by the region is that while Israel is clearly strong, it can’t be trusted to be a positive and stabilising player . . . none of that diplomatic work is happening,” the former official said.

Why yes, this sounds rather familiar.

The longer this war drags on, the greater the costs for the United States. Absent a full-scale ground invasion, Iran can hold out. But Trump can’t simply declare victory and tap out either. Which means he is stuck trying to sell a strategic defeat as a tactical victory. But inconvenient facts mean that not even Republicans are buying that pitch.

Trump has lost this war. The only question now is how bigly he loses it.

As Gulf War Three continues apace, it is hard to see where and how how the United States is winning. According to the Wall Street Journal’s Alexander Ward and Meredith McGraw, president Trump has decided that he can end the hostilities even if the Strait of Hormuz doesn’t re-open: “President Trump told aides he’s willing to end the U.S. military campaign against Iran even if the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed, administration officials said, likely extending Tehran’s firm grip on the waterway and leaving a complex operation to reopen it for a later date.”

Trying to end a war with a situation that is strategically worse than when it started sounds… not great, but Politico’s reporting sounds even worse:

White House senior staff and administration officials are discussing the possibility that oil prices climb to a record $150 or more per barrel as the Iran war drags into its second month, according to a person familiar with the conversations and two people close to the White House….

President Donald Trump has also heard from Treasury officials about the near-term outlook for energy prices, which the department now sees as likely to remain above $100 per barrel for some time. According to the person familiar with internal discussions, the administration sees that number as “a baseline” and isn’t ruling out the possibility of prices rising as high as $200 per barrel.

If you really want to get depressed, then go read Paul Krugman’s post suggesting a baseline outcome of $150 a barrel for oil.

Trump, meanwhile, has suggested that allied countries just go and clean up his mess to get their own oil. But this isn’t the own that Trump thinks it is — among other things, I bet way more countries would choose to pay Iran’s toll over taking military action — which enriches Iran and weakens U.S. allies. Again, not a great strategic move!

So that all seems bad — in fact, it looks like an outcome that is far worse than where things stood at the end of February. Surely the U.S. has accomplished something for all of this short-term pain, right?

It’s honestly unclear. The WSJ story describes Trump’s objectives as “hobbling Iran’s navy and its missile stocks.” National security adviser Marco Rubio has stated four goals: “1. The destruction of Iran’s air force; 2. The destruction of their navy; 3. The severe diminishing of their missile launching capability; 4. The destruction of their factories.” That is somewhat more ambitious than what Trump said but is decidedly less ambitious than what the White House articulated just a month ago at the start of the war — including no mention of ending Iran’s nuclear program. I don’t doubt that Iran’s military has taken its lumps, but there’s not a lot more than that in evidence.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World would like to serve up a hypothesis: part of the reason the Trump administration seems ill-equipped to prosecute this war is because no one in the upper levels of the administration has taken a political science course. And because they don’t understand the basics, they sure as hell do not understand enough to extricate themselves from their current policy predicaments.

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As Gulf War Three drags into its third month, it sure seems super-unpopular with both the foreign policy community and, more importantly, the American people. Nate Silver has created an Iran War tracker, and the numbers it’s spitting out are grim for Trump:

Donald Trump didn’t see the usual “rally-around-the-flag” boost to his approval ratings when the war started, and now, his net approval rating in our average is at a second-term low of -16.7….

The war has been unpopular since its outset (unless you’re a MAGA voter). Support for the war locked in quickly and has been steady at about 40 percent since the start of the conflict. However, opposition to the war has increased from about 48 percent to 54 percent.

This unpopularity is consistent with other polls about Iran, other poll roundups about the Iran war, poll trackers about Trump more generally, and even Politico-style insider baseball stories of Republicans desperately attempting to wishcast a better future.

Why is Trump doing so badly on Iran? There are the obvious reasons, of course:

• The obvious lack of any strategic planning or public appeal prior to launching a risky war;1

• The hints that a major escalation involving the use of U.S. ground troops is on the horizon — and the only thing less popular than the current Iran war is one involving U.S. boots on the ground;

• The fact that despite the Trump administration’s rhetoric, Iran sure is acting like it is winning the war — which means it is unlikely to end soon;

• Trump’s constant redefinition of war aims, to the point where the primary goal now seems to be re-opening of the Strat of Hormuz — which was, you know, open prior to the start of the war;

• The horrible, very bad, no-good economic effects of sustained higher energy prices on the U.S. and the global economy.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World, however, would like to suggest an additional reason for why the public is so sour about this war of choice: the way Trump is trying to sell the war relies on a narrative that is completely at odds with his normal political and rhetorical style. Trump usually promises instant gratification, and he can’t do that with Iran.

When it comes to politics, Donald Trump’s short attention span fits well with a large chunk of American voters, who also like the idea of instant gratification. And that is how Trump likes to campaign and govern. He likes to promise instant and easy solutions to wicked problems, like solving the Russo-Ukrainian War within 24 hours of taking office. Obviously, many of Trump’s promises went unfulfilled, but the point is that he promises immediate results. He is not a politician who tends to pledge pain now and gain later.

The thing is, that is how he has attempted to govern in his second term. Almost immediately after he won in 2024, Trump and his cabinet started suggesting short-term pain would precede long-term gain. Instead we have gotten short-term pain and incurred long-term malaise, but you get my point.

This is now the Trump team’s playbook to sell the war with Iran. The New York Times’ Erica Green recently wrote, “Mr. Trump has said he understands there will be short-term pain from the war, which he accepts as a necessary price to ensure that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.” This has been a running theme of the past five weeks — sure, there will be some temporary problems but that is worth the long-term reward of a neutered Iran.

Could Trump or his allies be correct that the long-term gain will be worth it? Perhaps, but I really doubt it. Absent successful regime change, it seems unlikely that Iran will voluntarily relinquish any element of its nuclear program. It’s looking to institutionalize its informal toll on crossing the Strait of Hormuz, which sure seems like a promising new revenue source for the mullahs in Iran.

More importantly, it is nearly impossible for a president and an administration that is obsessed with winning the meme wars to pivot to a “please just be patient” strategy. It’s incongruous and disjunctive with all of Trump’s standard presidential rhetoric.

It’s also completely at odds with Trump’s immature style of leadership. This is a man who is getting briefed about the progress of the Iran war with video montages that last less than two minutes. It’s impossible for him to think about the long run with Iran when he’s already bored and distracted with the short run.

There have been signs over the past week that Trump has grown bored with the war and just wants to move onto other topics. The Wall Street Journal’s Annie Linskey, Alexander Ward, and Alex Leary reported this out a few days ago:

President Trump has told associates in recent days that he wants to avoid a protracted war in Iran and that he hopes to bring the conflict to an end in the coming weeks.

Nearly one month into the war, the president has privately informed advisers he thinks the conflict is in its final stages, urging them to stick to the four-to-six-week timeline he has outlined publicly, according to people familiar with the matter. White House officials planned a mid-May summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing with the expectation that the war would be concluded before the meeting begins, some of the people said.

The problem is Trump has no easy options for ending the war, and peace negotiations are at a nascent stage.

In discussions with outside political allies, his attention has at times shifted to other topics, including the coming midterm elections, as well as his decision to send immigration agents to airports and strategies to move legislation to tighten voter-eligibility rules through Congress. Trump told an associate that the war was distracting from his other priorities, one of the people said.

The president appears ready to shift to his next big challenge, another person who spoke to him recently said, though Trump didn’t say what that might be….

Trump has for weeks sought to characterize the war as a temporary distraction, emboldened by January’s swift military operation in Venezuela. He has called the conflict an “excursion” and a “military operation.”

MSNOW’s Jake Traylor reporting echoes the Journal’s and has White House sources:

Trump calling the war already won is “mostly hyperbole,” said a senior White House official granted anonymity to speak candidly about the administration’s thinking. “It’s part [of Trump] just wanting to declare victory and move on.”

That impulse, the official said, has become more pronounced in recent days.

“[Trump] is getting a little bored with Iran,” the official said. “Not that he regrets it or something — he’s just bored and wants to move on.”

A second White House official who was granted anonymity for the same reason said that Trump has begun to “move on” from the conflict and has started shifting conversations and personal focus toward the economy, domestic issues and the upcoming midterm elections….

But for Americans to feel the war has ended, it very likely has to actually end — something that has proved difficult, as some top administration officials push for the military campaign to escalate, and as Iranian officials have publicly rejected any suggestion that they are ready to negotiate.

Trump can’t say the war is over because not even he can sell that Big Lie. And he can’t persist with the “short-term pain is worth the long-term gain” gambit because it contradicts everything about Trump’s brand of immediate gratification.

In short, the American people ain’t buying what Trump is trying to sell them on the war with Iran — not just because it’s plainly false, but because it contradicts Trump’s brand of immature leadership, which relies entirely on the sugar high of instant gratification. That dog won’t hunt.

Among Donald Trump’s cabinet, Marco Rubio stands out in a number of ways. He may have the lowest net worth of any of the cabinet secretaries. Even in an administration where some people double up roles, Rubio occupying both the secretary of state and national security adviser roles is extraordinary. And defying the expectations of many — myself included — Rubio has survived more than fourteen months in Trump’s cabinet with a minimum of abuse by Trump himself.

Indeed, at this point there is no denying that Rubio has thrived in the second Trump administration. He has gotten his way on U.S. policy towards Venezuela and Cuba. His weird Munich speech was nonetheless better received than that of JD Vance’s a year earlier. Sure, he is most definitely a liar, but despite or because of that, his star is on the rise within the president’s orbit. Trump has said that Rubio will “go down as the greatest secretary of state in history.”1

The Iran war — and Rubio’s relative silence about it — raises an interesting question, however. U.S. allies are confused about what the United States even wants out of this conflict. Congress is even more confused.2 The Trump White House keeps gyrating on its endgame, toggling between wanting a quick end and planning a massive escalation.

The abject lack of strategic and policy planning in Gulf War Three is manifestly obvious. Given that this is planning failure is within Rubio’s remit, why is he not the target of more ire?

As per usual, Politico’s Nahal Toosi asks that very question — and then serves up some possible answers in her latest column:

When I asked several lawmakers, U.S. officials and analysts why Rubio seems so protected from criticism over his role in the Iran war, I was told the following:

First, Trump is the easier, more important target. His jaw-dropping rhetoric aside, he’s the president, and the buck stops with him.

Another factor: The foreign policy establishment tends to think of Rubio as secretary of State more than as national security adviser. So while critics are quick to blame him for slow embassy closures, they often forget to hold him accountable for the whole national security apparatus.

Perhaps above all, even Democrats enraged by the state of affairs in Iran see Rubio as one of Trump’s more competent aides.

“He’s the least crazy,” one Democratic senator told me after I granted them anonymity, like others, to talk about a sensitive issue. “If he gets fired, Trump would replace him with someone a lot worse.”

As much as the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World would like to dismiss that answer out of hand, it’s not so simple. A lot of Trump’s first-term foreign policy advisors provided a variation of this justification for why they were working for Trump: if they didn’t things would be worse. This logic was often dismissed as an easy rationalization during Trump’s first term, but his second-term behavior does seem to validate the argument.

The thing is, for this argument to work, it has to follow that Rubio’s value above replacement Trumper is positive. And as Toosi observes in her column, Rubio’s only area of competency has been reducing the size of the foreign policy machinery:

In his role as national security adviser, Rubio has shrunk the National Security Council staff and limited their ability to convene government agencies for policy discussions, as I’ve chronicled before. Instead, the most sensitive conversations are held in the West Wing among Trump and a few aides who then tell agencies to implement his decisions, often without stress-testing the ideas.

That means many people who could have flagged or at least prepared for challenges related to Iran — such as the threat to the energy sector or the need to coordinate with U.S. allies — were left in the cold. And most such people have little incentive to act without orders from above, because after last year’s staff purges, everyone is afraid of being fired.

That includes people in the State Department’s Middle East bureau. One staffer there told me that until the war started, they had not been tasked with any actions related to it. “I had all sorts of people messaging me, like ‘Oh, you must be so busy,’ and I’m like, ‘Nope.’”….

Rubio despises Iran’s Islamist regime, but, from what I’ve gathered, he was not a major force pushing for a large-scale attack on Iran — not like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). That said, Rubio didn’t fight the idea, and he was open to the notion that the time to hit Iran was now because the regime was unusually weak. So one would expect him to have kicked planning and coordination into high gear.

It’s not obvious at all that Rubio has provided any value-added over any other lapdog who would have occupied his position in his stead. Like everyone else, he has functioned as a yes man for Trump. Indeed, he has failed in both of his foreign policy roles. As national security advisor, he has administered no real policymaking process. As Secretary of State, he has failed to persuade any one about the wisdom of U.S. military action. Instead, as I wrote earlier this week, “here’s the thing about the Trump administration: it’s not just that their policies do not make a ton of sense or that they failed to do any strategic planning. It’s that they don’t care that they haven’t put in the work.”

Marco Rubio is not the architect of the Iran clusterfuck. But he is most definitely the author of the conditions that make the clusterfuck possible. At some point, the reckoning for his negligence will come back to haunt him.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World is taking a brief sojourn to Columbus, Ohio for the tail end of the International Studies Association annual meeting. Wait, check that — I’ll be taking a brief sojourn there assuming I can navigate my way past long TSA lines and my plane takes off and lands safely. Unfortunately, these are not sure things at the moment.

I’m not sure I’m looking forward to attending a conference on international affairs that will likely have a dramatically reduced number of international attendees because they do not want to come to the United States. My point is, however, that posting will be a bit light for the next few days.

Meanwhile, the current administration is lurching from half-baked ideas culled from social media to articulating their postwar Iran hopes with the same vibe as a Pinterest vision board. To try to maintain the economic fallout from the war with Iran — which has received intelligence support from Russia — the United States has lifted oil sanctions on… Russia and Iran. The largest, most expensive aircraft carrier in the U.S. Navy has been knocked out of commission — and out of the Middle East theater — because of an out-of-control laundry fire. That’s right, I said laundry fire.

One gets the sense that things are starting to fall apart. Earlier this month Phillips Payson O’Brien made this point in the Atlantic:

When a complex system starts to decay, the first signs are usually subtle. In the third century, after the Roman empire had reached its geographic maximum, literacy began to decline across Roman society. Education levels fell not only among soldiers, but among officers, aristocrats, and even emperors. The Roman army still looked formidable for years afterward. It had good equipment and could march well. Yet it was no longer as advanced relative to Rome’s enemies as it had once been. It fought as hard as ever, but less effectively.

The capabilities of the U.S. military are still far superior to Iran’s. Yet certain developments in the American bombing campaign against Iran—a country seemingly rendered almost helpless after Israel destroyed most of its air defenses last year—are revealing what look like signs of strain….

Just as the Roman empire survived for two more centuries after it started to decline, the United States isn’t in danger of imminent collapse. But Trump’s rejection of planning, expertise, and diplomacy is beginning to have real-world consequences.

Here’s the thing about the Trump administration: it’s not just that their policies do not make a ton of sense or that they failed to do any strategic planning. It’s that they don’t care that they haven’t put in the work.1 This comes through most clearly in hearing Trump zigzag his way through various frustrations and policy reversals:

Trump asked NATO to send ships to help secure the Strait of Hormuz. Every. single. ally. refused. Trump called them “cowards” and said NATO has a “very bad future”. He then announced that the United States doesn’t actually need the Strait of Hormuz. He then said countries that do need it should police it themselves. He then told China to police it. He then sent 5,000 Marines toward it.

This sequence of statements was delivered, as far as the public record shows, by the same person, using the same mouth, within roughly 24 hours. The allies are cowards for not helping with the thing he doesn’t need, which is why he’s sending Marines to die for it, unless the countries that do need it do it themselves, which they won’t, because they’re cowards.

Trump told reporters the strait could be opened with a “simple military maneuver” that is “relatively safe” but requires “a lot of help”. Help. From the cowards. Who he doesn’t need. For the strait. That he also doesn’t need.

Instead of caring about, you know, implementing competing policies, Trump administration officials seem more keen to cash in on their official connections or their insider information, secure in the knowledge that they will not be prosecuted for any corrupt act.

So as I depart for ISA, please to read Carlos Lozada’s latest New York Times column,2 which coined the term that best describes the current situation in international relations:

We had a good run — some eight decades or so — but it is clear by now that the United States has ceased to be the leader of the free world. A successor for that post has not been named, and it appears unlikely that the European Union, or NATO, or whatever constitutes “the West” these days will promote from within. The job might even be eliminated, one more reduction in force courtesy of President Trump.

Rather than leading the free world, the United States is striding across the globe seemingly free of restraint, forethought or strategy, exerting its power because it can….

Launching a war with only one ally and then expecting everyone else to fall in line is a perfect example of the tensions inherent in America’s new approach. The United States wants the benefits of hegemony, but without accepting the responsibilities — ensuring collective security, promoting economic openness, nurturing vital alliances — that come with it. Trump doesn’t care to be a superpower; he just likes to wield superpowers. He wants to operate in the world constrained only by “my own morality” and “my own mind,” as he told The Times recently….

What does that mean for America’s role and purpose in a world that has been too long defined by what it is not (the post-Cold War era)? It means that what we once called Pax Americana, that U.S.-led system of alliances and institutions that promoted American interests and values and helped avoid major conflicts in the decades after World War II, is gone, and irretrievably so. In place of the Pax Americana we are seeing a sort of Lax Americana, a world in which a careless and uninhibited and incurious U.S. superpower struts across the chess board, threatening old friends and enabling old rivals, seeking short-term gains, heedless of the dangers it is creating for itself and for the world.

This is a historical aberration: a superpower that freely abdicates its leadership role, because it has concluded that leadership is for suckers; one that no longer promotes its values, because it’s decided that those values were fake anyway; one that gives up on the rules and institutions it spent so long building, because it assumes they’re no longer worth the hassle.

So… yeah. Read the whole thing.

The day after I published a newsletter noting, among other things, Israel’s apparent role in nudging the Trump administration towards launching Gulf War Three, I received an email from a Tufts colleague who is very concerned about anti-Semitism on campus. That professor pushed back on my empirical claim, arguing that Trump’s denial of any Israeli role definitively falsified my newsletter, and that “it is far, far more likely that Israel decided to join the United States in launching this strike at this time” rather than vice versa. Full disclosure: I found this completely unpersuasive. But my colleague added the following:

The wording that you used makes it seems like Israel pushed the US to do this furthers the perception that Israel (and therefore Jews) controls US politicians. This is certainly not what was meant by you, but it is exactly what Tucker Carlson and others meant when they say the same thing. As Carlson said this week: “The United States didn’t make the decision here. Benjamin Netanyahu did.”

This echoes sentiments I have seen from some commentators about the dangers of discussing Israel’s role in influencing U.S. foreign policy. For example, earlier this month MSNOW’s Michael Cohen wrote the following:

Make no mistake, there are certainly appropriate grounds on which to criticize Israel and, in particular, Netanyahu for pushing the U.S. to join it in attacking Iran. Criticism of Israel’s policies is not inherently antisemitic, but when that criticism promotes, even unintentionally, anti-Jewish tropes, it is a much more serious problem.

Those in the public sphere, whether they are the secretary of state, a senator or even political pundits with large platforms, need to better understand how their criticisms of Israel resonate with those who are antisemitic and play into antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Moreover, when Jews raise concerns about this kind of rhetoric, they should be listened to, not shouted down. When it comes to antisemitism and the horrible consequences of such toxic beliefs, we know of where we speak.

As someone who is Jewish, I’m willing to listen — but am finding it hard to be persuaded to not foster further conversation about this issue. Beyond the Times coverage, the Wall Street Journal, Time1 and Bloomberg also reported on the role that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu played in coaxing Trump to attack Iran rather than vice versa. Empirically, it is impossible to properly discuss why Trump decided to attack Iran without discussing Netanyahu.

[More generally, I find the line of argument “you must be careful of the argument you’re making because someone objectionable is also making it” somewhat wanting.2 Twenty years ago this week, when I characterized Mearsheimner and Walt’s “Israel Lobby” argument as “piss-poor, monocausal social science,” I also rejected the notion that their argument was anti-Semitic because of who endorsed it: “just about any argument out there is endorsed by one crackpot or another, so that does not mean the argument itself is automatically invalidated.” I am decidedly not a fan of the logic that if someone makes an argument and an Objectionable Person agrees with the argument, that renders the argument itself objectionable.]

That said, as time has passed I am beginning to appreciate their concerns. For example, the Israel lobby discourse resurfaced last week after National Counter-Terrorism Center Director Joe Kent resigned with a doozy of a letter, claiming that, “it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” He further decried a “misinformation campaign” by “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media.”

Sounds damning! The thing is, Kent is also a bigoted conspiracy buff who never should have been appointed to NCTC head also claimed that Israel was responsible for drawing the U.S. into invading Iraq in 2003, which is indicative of Kent’s conspiratorial and not-entirely-grounded-in-reality worldview. Kent’s letter is a data point supporting Cohen’s argument that debates about Israel’s influence over American foreign policy are easy to devolve into anti-Semitic conspiracy theorizing.

The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg offered a nuanced response to Kent’s letter:

Some Jewish leaders, alarmed by the backlash against the war, are trying to rule any discussion of Israel’s role in instigating it out of bounds. In a speech on Monday, Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, denounced those who “pointed fingers at the Israelis who — they claimed — whispered a few too many times in President Trump’s ear.”

Greenblatt’s heavy-handed attempt to police the discourse is bound to fail, because it’s asking people to overlook provable facts….

A major distortion in Kent’s letter is that it presents Trump as a naïve victim of the Israelis rather than an eager collaborator. Trump has always been more hawkish than the isolationists in his orbit admit; he ordered more drone strikes in his first two years in office than Barack Obama launched in eight. It wasn’t Netanyahu who made Trump abduct the president of Venezuela — an operation that seems to have both whetted his appetite for foreign adventure and convinced him that war can be easy. This week he boasted that he could “take” Cuba and “do anything I want with it.” Long obsessed with military might and displays of masculine aggression, Trump was enamored of the idea that he could rid the world of the anti-American regimes that bedeviled his predecessors. He went to war in Iran for his ego, not for Israel.

Still, Israel clearly encouraged him and now threatens to prolong the war, since unlike Trump, it seems determined to destroy the Iranian state. “Israel doesn’t hate the chaos,” a White House official told Axios. “We do. We want stability. Netanyahu? Not so much, especially in Iran.” I think this official is telling the truth while previewing the spin we’re going to hear if Iran spirals out of control: It was Israel’s fault.3

Between Kent’s letter and Mearsheimer crowing about the influence of the Israel Lobby again, it’s clearly a tricky time to talk about this stuff again. But as much as I’d prefer not to talk about it, that’s exactly why the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World feels compelled to sort through it.

So here’s my take about all of this: the more reporting about what motivated Trump’s decision to go to war, the clearer it is that this is less an Israel lobby story and more of a story in which a handful of elites — dare I say, neoroyalists, including Benjamin Netanyahu — had Trump’s ear and nudged him in the direction he wanted to go without any pushback from anyone in the current administration.

First, let’s dispense with the notion that Mearsheimer and Walt’s (and Kent’s) version of the Israel Lobby had much of anything to do with Trump’s decision to attack Iran. The most obvious problem is that a lot of the elements that they identified back in the day — like most neoconservatives — are never-Trumpers who have been harshly critical of Gulf War Three.4 Other elements, like AIPAC, have seen their clout diminished in recent years.

The other thing that has to be considered is that Netanyahu was not the only foreign leader who was advising Trump to attack Iran. The Washington Post reported that Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman urged Trump to attack Iran prior to the launch of Operation Epic Fury; the New York Times reported that MbS told Trump to, “keep hitting Iran hard.”

Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey and Nancy Cook report on other people who influenced — and chose not to influence — Trump:

Donald Trump’s decision to wage war on Iran was partly motivated by pressure from outside allies while his own White House team stayed more muted – underscoring how in his second term, guardrails have been traded for a green light.

Those privately pressing Trump to strike Iran included Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, media mogul Rupert Murdoch and some conservative commentators, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. The News Corp. founder communicated with Trump several times as he urged the president to take on Tehran, according to one person briefed on their interactions.

Meanwhile, some of Trump’s closest advisers were more muted about the prospect of an armed conflict, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, the people said.

Few, if any, told him directly it was an ill-conceived idea.

What emerges is not a story in which interest groups played much of a role. Mearsheimer and Walt’s Israel lobby is conceptually ill-defined — and yet, very little of it appears in this story. Instead, it’s about three things:

1. A handful of Trump-friendly leaders whispering in Trump’s ear;

2. Trump’s official national security advisors keeping their mouths shut;

3. Trump becoming more enamored with the use of force over time.

This fits a paradigm in which a few elites have privileged access to influence Trump. And Trump, of course, exercised agency to take a risky action that has played out quite badly.

So, to sum up: any decent conversation about Trump’s decision to launch a war in Iran has to acknowledge Netanyahu’s role. That is unavoidable. But the notion that this is the second coming of the Israel lobby is a misread of the drivers behind Trump’s foreign policy.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has been pretty forthright in concluding that the Trump administration decided to co-launch Gulf War Three with little in the way of strategic planning. Or, to be a bit kinder, Donald Trump simply ignored any advisors who offered any strategic foresight about how this conflict could play out.

This week’s news mostly bolsters my thesis. No doubt, the U.S. and Israel continue to inflict damage on Iran. The U.S. continues to destroy Iranian infrastructure, including the bombing of Iran’s oil facilities on Kharg Island. The Israelis report that they have killed Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council.

The thing is, the war still shows no signs of ending. Oil prices remain elevated, as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed to traffic without Iranian approval. Trump finally decided to ask U.S. allies and partners for assistance in opening up the Strait of Hormuz. It is safe to say that U.S. allies and rivals alike were cool to the idea, given that it was the United States and Israel that destabilized the situation.

Trump reacted to this news with the most jilted ex-boyfriend tone he has ever summoned:

U.S. senator Lindsey Graham said after speaking with Trump that he had, “never heard him so angry in my life.”

So no, three weeks into the war, it sure seems that the Trump administration had no idea what he was getting himself into.

But maybe I’m wrong! I didn’t think that Trump would bomb Iran back in the summer of 2025 — but he did. I didn’t think the Venezuela operation would work out well for U.S. interests — but if you apply a neo-royalist lens to the whole operation, it’s worked out well for Trump in the short run. As Nate Silver points out, Trump has repeatedly taken high-risk actions that would have obliterated other businessmen and politicians — and yet he has remained standing.

As an intellectual exercise, it is worth asking whether I could be wrong about how Gulf War Three plays out.

And the answer is that of course I could be wrong. Sometimes wars take unexpected turns. There have been examples of kinetic U.S. military actions in the past that seemed like they were stuck in the mud during the conflict but eventually broke in a way that favored the United States. The 1999 NATO bombing campaign in Serbia lasted close to three months, and for most of that time it was not perceived as going very well — until Serbia agreed to acquiesce.

Last week the New York Times’ Bret Stephens sounded a similar tune:

I’m flabbergasted by the relentless pessimism I’m seeing in much of the commentariat. We are less than two weeks into a war that will almost surely be over by the end of the month, and already there are predictions that it’s “another Iraq.” American casualties, heartbreaking as they are, have been minor for a conflict of this scale. Iran’s ability to threaten its neighbors diminishes by the day: We’ve seen this in the sharp decline in its ballistic missile and drone attacks. I have to assume that before this war is over, we will find a way to remove Iran’s remaining stores of highly enriched uranium, which greatly enhances global security over the long term. And Iran’s leaders, for all their swagger, now know they are not immune from reprisal, which will make them think a lot more carefully as they plot their retaliation. We may not see regime change now, but this regime is likely to become a zombie state before the next, all-but-inevitable, popular uprising.

Stephens went on to reference the bombing of Serbia as an example of a regime weakened by bombing that was subsequently toppled by mass protests.

So could this happen? Sure. Is it likely? Not really — at least, not without significant escalation.

For one thing, both American and Israeli intelligence are repeatedly saying that the Iranian regime is still very much in power and not going anywhere. Even if it’s been weakened by the removal of some top leadership, Iran’s basic coercive apparatus remains in place. Furthermore, this is a regime that has demonstrated minimal restraint in handling domestic dissent. There is little reason to think that will change.

Under these circumstances, a decapitation strategy has its limits, as the New York Times’ David Halfbinger explains:

Iran’s leadership — its “bench,” in sports terms — is too deep for Israel ever to bring its government to the point of collapse. After Ayatollah Khamenei was killed, Iran named his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, a fellow hard-liner, to succeed him as supreme leader.

“Decapitation has its limitations,” said Danny Citrinowicz, a former head of the Iran branch of Israeli military intelligence. “I don’t think we’ve scratched the surface in the ability of Iran to find replacements that can take over for the people that have been decapitated.”

Mr. Citrinowicz noted that Israel killed nearly all of Hamas’s leaders in Gaza, and both Mr. Nasrallah and his successor as Hezbollah’s leader. Yet both organizations are still functioning, if significantly weakened.

“It’s not that I don’t think decapitation is an important tool,” he said. “But we can’t build a strategy only on that.”

A healthy respect for the unknown — like unintended consequences — also argues against an overreliance on targeted killings, said Ami Ayalon, 80, a former commander of Israel’s internal security agency and of its navy….

“Let’s assume that Bibi is right,” he said, using Mr. Netanyahu’s nickname. “It will take months or years. There are millions of people who depend on the regime, and they understand that on the day after the war, they’re going to be slaughtered. And they will fight and kill in order to not see that happen.”

Absent a social revolution, Iran still has the ability to pressure the global economy by restricting access through the Strait of Hormuz — and it seems that the Trump administration is discovering that fact at the same time as everyone else.

This has caused Trump’s own allies to acknowledge to the press that this might not go the way the president believed, according to Politico’s Megan Messerly:

More than two weeks into the campaign, some [Trump] allies believe the president no longer controls how, or when, the war ends. They fear Iran’s attacks on oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, which have rattled global crude markets and threaten broader economic distress, are boxing Trump into a situation where escalating the conflict — potentially even putting American boots on the ground — becomes the only way to credibly claim victory.

“We clearly just kicked [Iran’s] ass in the field, but, to a large extent, they hold the cards now,” said one person close to the White House, who like others in this story was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the war. “They decide how long we’re involved — and they decide if we put boots on the ground. And it doesn’t seem to me that there’s a way around that, if we want to save face.”

The concern among some Trump allies is that ensuring the free flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz could require securing parts of Iran’s shoreline, a step that would almost certainly mean putting American troops on Iranian soil.

“The terms have changed,” said a second person familiar with the U.S. operation in Iran. “The off-ramps don’t work anymore because Iran is driving the asymmetric action.”

So could I be wrong? Sure — but for that to be the case, the political situation in Iran would have to be very different from what both global press coverage and intelligence agencies are saying. So I don’t think I’m wrong.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World intends to work a little less hard this week. No, let me rephrase that: the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World needs to work a little less hard this week. With the new job and the new international environment and a few other new things going on, this has been an extremely stressful academic year. My brain needs a break before the spring semester’s stretch run — I’m too close to the “fire bad, tree pretty” stage of comprehension.

So posting will be light this week. That’s because I’m gonna read some fiction, dammit! I tend to read nonfiction even for pleasure reading, but if there’s a good novel lurking out there, I save it for vacation so I can rip into it. Here are the vacation reads I have brought with me to an undisclosed location that is considerably warmer than my hometown at the moment:1

James S.A. Corey, The Mercy of Gods. Corey is the pen name for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, the authors of the science fiction series The Expanse, which in turn became one of the best science fiction shows ever put on television, which in turn was responsible for Ana Marie Cox and I to start our Space The Nation podcast. For the pod, Ana was the book reader and I was the one who encountered the show unburdened by the novels. This is the first post-Expanse effort by Abraham and Franck, and I figured this time around reading the novels might be a good idea. That it starts with the drudgery of being a graduate student doesn’t hurt.

Allegra Goodman, This Is Not About Us. When I wrote about Long Story Short last year, I compared the Netflix show to “Allegra Goodman’s early work, particularly The Family Markowitz, only with much more humor.” With her latest, it’s like Goodman has been reading Drezner’s World, because that’s the best description I can provide for This Is Not About Us. A collection of interconnected short stories about three generations of a “strange and estranged family—their unspoken expectations, silent feuds, exhausting birthdays” that is also riotously funny — at least it is to me. Also, any book that starts with a reference to where I buy my bagels is a book I will want to read.

R.F. Kuang, Katabasis. I’ve had a soft spot for supernatural academic fiction since reading James Hynes’ Publish and Perish. This novel — which Kuang wrote while pursuing a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale — is about two ABDs (“all but dissertation”) who decide to enter hell in order to save their mutual advisor. Do they do this out of the goodness of their heart? No, it’s in order to secure a good letter of recommendation. Combining the horrors of modern academia with the horrors of science fantasy produces some giddy anticipatory joy for this reader.

Eswar Prasad, The Doom Loop. While this sounds like a new Netflix show, it’s the one nonfiction book I brought on vacation. Prasad is the Tolani Senior Professor of Trade Policy and Professor of Economics at Cornell University, and also holds positions at the Brookings Institution and the National Bureau of Economic Research. The Doom Loop explores how the aspects of globalization that were believed to be stabilizing have become destabilizing. This book came out just before Trump destabilized the economy even more with his Gulf War Three — I imagine that Prasad’s doom loop just acquired an even more vicious circle.

Donna Tartt, The Little Friend. Tartt’s first book, The Secret History, is one of my favorite novels ever.2 I enjoyed her third book The Goldfinch so much that I felt sad as I was approaching its ending. As a completist, I am now reading her middle book, which reads an awful lot like a gender-flipped updating of To Kill A Mockingbird so far. It’s chock-full of Tartt’s exquisite prose, and that is what I need on my vacation.

Wishing everyone else a restful week!

The hard-working readers here at Drezner’s World has studied the demographics of its subscribers. It’s a very choice group, consisting of some of the savviest foreign policy professionals, Boston sports fans, and pop culture afficionados on the planet. Also I’m pretty sure Salma Hayek is an avid reader.1

This particular post, however, is targeted specifically for my colleagues who are international relations professors. Because the Fletcher School is looking to hire two adjunct to teach next academic year — one in security studies and one in global political economy.

If you’re not an international relations academic or an aspiring academic, well, congratulations, you’re ahead of the game in terms of mental health. If you are one of those things, please share this widely!

Announcements and Interfolio links below!

First, our IPE hire:

We are looking for an Adjunct Lecturer to teach Global Political Economy in the Fall 2026 semester in our MALD program. The course explores the major theories of global political economy, the historical evolution of the international economic system, and what current events might tell us about where things are heading next.

If you have expertise in international political economy, international relations, economics, or a related field, and experience teaching at the graduate level, we’d love to hear from you.

Please apply here via Interfolio: https://lnkd.in/erHTk-zS

Oh, and if you don’t want to work with me… please feel free to share with someone who does! We will start reviewing applications on March 30, 2026 on a rolling basis until the position is filled.

Second, our international security hire:

We're hiring an Adjunct Professor or Lecturer in International Security at The Fletcher School at Tufts University beginning in September 2026 to teach one of our foundational courses on the Role of Force in International Politics. Applications can be submitted via Interfolio at https://lnkd.in/eXVJkDVu. The search committee will begin reviewing applications on March 23, 2026 on a rolling basis until the position is filled. Please share widely!

So for IR colleagues who know of someone who will be residing in the Boston area next academic year and are looking to teach some of the best master’s students on the planet, have them apply!