US President Donald Trump, who came to power promising no new foreign military entanglements, especially in the Middle East, has now launched a potentially riskier one than the Iraq War a generation ago, and with even flimsier justification. But his use of state power to crush a private company may have even more far-reaching effects.

BOSTON – Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s former dictator, won the big prize in the country’s national lottery in 2000. And he won for a simple reason: because he could. Once you destroy institutions constraining your power, as Mugabe did during his 37-year reign, you can rule for personal enrichment, personal aggrandizement, or simply personal entertainment. What better way to demonstrate unconstrained power than showing that the existing system of rules is a farce? The damage such behavior can do to norms and institutions is part of the design.

Mugabe’s lottery echoes through two recent decisions taken by US President Donald Trump’s administration, both of which advance an agenda that seeks to remove all constraints on Trump and his allies’ future behavior.

The first decision was to launch a joint US-Israeli attack on Iran and kill the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Leaving aside the loss of life and the immediate chaos, it should be obvious that the attack will trigger a long period of instability in the Middle East.

To be sure, the Iranian regime was repressive, murderous, and bad for Iranians’ economic and social well-being. Khamenei, leading elites, and the feared Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had blood on their hands, including the killing and arrest of tens of thousands of protesters just since the beginning of the year.

But none of this justifies initiating a new war in the Middle East that lacks support from international allies or any kind of domestic buy-in. The US is still considered a democracy where people’s views should in principle matter, but with Trump risking region-wide carnage, the democratic veneer appears thinner by the day.

No matter how awful Khamenei’s track record was, he was no Nicolás Maduro, who had only a few diehard supporters even in Venezuela’s military by the time Trump intervened to capture him in January. There will be no puppet regime in Iran, where state institutions and nationalist feeling are strong. When the Shah’s regime collapsed in the face of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the state apparatus remained largely intact and transferred its allegiance to the new Islamic Republic.

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That state apparatus now will defend Iranian interests and seek to use the country’s proxies to destabilize other countries. This may even give a new lease on life to proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas, both of which have been gravely weakened since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack against Israel.

Moreover, by virtue of his religious role, Khamenei enjoyed respect and authority among Shia Muslims at home, where they constitute a huge majority of the population, and abroad. For many, his killing makes him a martyr – the last thing Iran or the region needs.

Trump’s other dangerous and destabilizing decision, which immediately preceded the first, was to designate the AI company Anthropic as a supply-chain risk. That designation, typically reserved for companies from foreign adversaries, such as China’s Huawei, bars federal contractors from using Anthropic’s models and heralds major restrictions on what the company can do in the future. “Effective immediately,” announced Secretary of “War” (Defense) Pete Hegseth, “no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.”

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The reason? Anthropic wanted safeguards against its models being used for mass surveillance of Americans and autonomous weapon systems. Neither provision would have placed meaningful restrictions on the defense department in practice. Indeed, mass surveillance of US citizens is illegal under US law and autonomous weapon systems are not a near-term possibility. But for Trump and Hegseth, it is the showdown and intimidation of Anthropic that matter. They must demonstrate that they can do as they please, just like Mugabe.

But unlike Zimbabwe’s rigged lottery, the Anthropic decision will have major consequences, perhaps more far-reaching than the attack on Iran. Regardless of what one thinks of current AI capabilities, there is little doubt that who controls AI in the future will have momentous implications for democracy, business, communication, and privacy. Many in the industry may interpret the Anthropic ban to mean that the US government, not the private sector, will control AI.

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Winner-take-all dynamics (whether real or perceived) had already driven the competition between OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to fever pitch. Within hours of the Anthropic announcement, Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, rushed to cut a deal with the defense department – a deal signaling that this competition is about to reach dangerous new heights. Altman is willing to give Hegseth everything Anthropic refused, including capabilities to violate US law and willingness to work on autonomous weapon systems.

The implications of the action against Anthropic could be even more far-reaching. This administration, and perhaps future administrations, can now impose hugely disproportionate penalties on any contractor they disagree with. The security of private property rights is now looking much shakier. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has signaled to the world that it is intent on mass surveillance and the development of autonomous weapon systems (why else bother about these two ineffective provisions in the contract?).

Trump has arguably achieved Mugabe-level absurdity with his military attack on Iran and legal attack on Anthropic. A president who came to power promising no new foreign entanglements, especially in the Middle East, has launched a potentially riskier one than the Iraq War a generation ago – and with even flimsier justification. A president who rails against “socialism” and “far-left Democrats” uses the state to crush a private company.

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But in both cases, the absurdity is the point – as it was for Mugabe. The shock value and trampling of norms embody Trump’s personal and political credo: Rules are for suckers.

NEW YORK – There is much that can be said about the United States’ decision to attack Iran – and about what could result from the joint US and Israeli strikes against military and political targets throughout the country. Unfortunately, little of it is reassuring.

First and foremost, this is a war of choice. The US had other policy options available. Diplomacy appeared to hold promise as a means to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Increased economic pressure had the potential over time to precipitate regime change.

Moreover, this is a preventive war, not a preemptive one. Iran posed no imminent threat to vital US interests. Iran was not on the verge of becoming a nuclear weapons state or using what weapons it did have against the US. At most, the threat posed by Iran was a gathering one.

This distinction is important. A world in which countries believed they have the right to undertake preventive strikes against those they judge to be threats would be a world of frequent conflict. That is why such actions have no standing under international law.

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US President Donald Trump has chosen an objective – regime change – that is political rather than military. But while military force can destroy and kill, on its own, it cannot bring about regime change, which requires the regime to collapse. It is possible that the US attack will trigger defections from Iran’s political leadership and armed forces, but this cannot be counted on. Hamas and Gaza are a reminder that regimes can absorb incredible punishment yet cling to power. And even if the clerics fall from power – there are reports that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been killed – the security forces are arguably best positioned to take their place.

In any case, using military force to kill select leaders as a means of triggering regime change – a tactic often called decapitation – is unlikely to succeed in Iran, where the leadership has institutionalized itself since taking power nearly a half-century ago. Moreover, the leadership has had time to improve succession planning over the past few weeks as the possibility of war increased.

During its January incursion into Venezuela, the Trump administration limited itself to replacing one leader (all but ignoring the internal opposition), while in much of the world, it has avoided pressing for democracy. In the case of Iran, though, Trump has called for regime change – but without preparing the ground for it. The political opposition is not united or functioning as a government in waiting, which means that it is unable to accept defections, much less provide security.

History suggests that regime change requires a physical, on-the-ground presence. This is the lesson of Germany and Japan after World War II, and Panama, Iraq, and Afghanistan more recently. And even with a ground presence, such efforts often come up short. In Iran, occupation is inconceivable, given the country’s size and ability to resist.

All of which is to say that the Trump administration has chosen to accomplish the most ambitious of foreign-policy goals with limited means. It seems to have rejected a war of choice with narrower goals, such as degrading known Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities, even though it could credibly claim to have achieved these ends. If there is a recent parallel to what is taking place in Iran, it is Libya, where just over a decade ago Western forces ousted the leadership using air power but then withdrew, leaving the country in chaos.

In the Iranian case, it appears that assembling a massive military presence – what Trump called an armada – ended up putting pressure on the administration to act, because US forces could not be maintained in a high state of readiness on location indefinitely. As a result, the means of policy (military force) may well have played a large role in determining the ends of policy, namely, the decision to attack. This is obviously the reverse of how policy should be decided.

Taking a step back, the US has opted yet again to make a massive strategic commitment in the Middle East. This is at odds with the Trump administration’s own National Security Strategy and with the reality that the greatest challenges to US interests are to be found in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. Here, the parallel is to the 2003 Iraq War, another preventive war of choice in the region that cost the US enormously.

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The American people are unprepared for this war. Nor is Trump’s political base, as it will unsettle markets, cause a spike in energy prices, and could go on for some time. America’s allies are unhappy as well, as Iran has already attacked several neighboring countries and could take steps that damage their economies. Trump did not use his State of the Union speech Tuesday night to make the case for attacking Iran, and much of his statement in the immediate aftermath of Saturday’s attack emphasized past actions by Iran rather than new or emerging threats.

It is possible that last year’s cost-free bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites and the more recent intervention in Venezuela made Trump and those around him highly confident that they could achieve ambitious ends with limited means at a low cost. He may also have been tempted to achieve something historic in Iran – regime change – that eluded his predecessors. He may still succeed. But as a rule, regime change is easier called for than successfully carried out. While it takes only one side to begin a war, it takes two to end it. Iran now has a vote in how big this conflict becomes and how long it continues.

NEW YORK – In authoritarian systems, national interests and objectives often conflict with the leader’s beliefs, desires, and insecurities. The more centralized power is, the more likely it is that the latter will win out. Versions of this dynamic are currently playing out in China – where President Xi Jinping’s paranoid purges recently claimed the two most senior officers of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) – and in Russia and the United States.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 perfectly illustrates this tension. Just a few years earlier, Russia was emerging as a global force in financial technology, with Brand Finance Banking 500 ranking the majority-state-owned Sberbank as the world’s strongest banking brand. In 2019, the Russian Direct Investment Fund reportedly raised $2 billion from foreign investors to support domestic companies developing AI solutions – part of Russia’s broader effort to strengthen its start-up ecosystem.

As Putin put it in 2020, “high-level technology” was vital to secure the future of Russia’s “distinct civilization.” But technological innovation cannot flourish without intellectual freedom and access to global knowledge. The Ukraine war – a product of Putin’s great-power fantasies – has led to the destruction of both. It also exposed the corruption of Russia’s military industries and officer corps: the war’s early months were defined by shoddy equipment and incompetent battle plans. This incited a purge of military officers and corporate bosses unseen in Russia since the fall of communism.

Today, Russia remains locked in a grinding war of attrition. And while Putin still emphasizes the importance of technological leadership, Russia is undergoing “reverse industrialization,” with high-tech industries largely taking a backseat to the more labor-intensive sectors of the military-industrial complex.

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Like Putin, Xi lets his personal whims and weaknesses – including a historical chip on his shoulder and dreams of an imperial legacy – shape his policies, not least his “unstoppable” plan to deliver “reunification” with Taiwan. But his apparent obsession with eliminating threats to his own power, whether from powerful generals or corporate titans like Jack Ma of Alibaba, might be his Achilles’ heel.

Since coming to power in 2012, Xi has culled more than 200,000 officials, including many PLA officers, under the guise of an anti-corruption drive. Last October, nine generals were removed for “disciplinary violations” and “duty-related crimes.” Some 29 of the country’s 42 most senior military leaders have been sacked, and some disappeared, since 2023. Add to that the recent removal of Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, who are now being investigated for “serious violations of discipline and law,” and the PLA is now all but devoid of senior officers with actual combat experience.

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China could pay dearly for Xi’s paranoia – as could Xi himself – because creating a power vacuum in the military is risky business. Josef Stalin learned this after the Great Terror of 1936-38, when 80 out of the Red Army’s top 100 admirals and generals, and as many as 30,000 of its members, were executed. The purged officers – including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the Red Army’s modernizer, as well as Vasily Blyukher and Alexander Yegorov – were accused of conspiring with Germany to oust Stalin.

So desperate was the Red Army for competent military leadership as war in Europe erupted that one purged commander, Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, was released from the gulag in 1940 and subsequently returned to high command. He would go on to lead one of the Red Army’s pincer arms in the 1945 march to Berlin. When Nikita Khrushchev delivered his bombshell “secret speech” to the highest-ranking Soviet communists in 1956, he said the quiet part aloud: Stalin’s desperation to protect his own power had left the Soviet Union vulnerable to the Nazi invasion and likely prolonged World War II.

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This lesson is lost on US President Donald Trump. There was a time when Trump (who avoided service in Vietnam) delighted in surrounding himself with respected generals. During his first term, he named James Mattis as secretary of defense, John Kelly as secretary of Homeland Security and then chief of staff, and H.R. McMaster served as a national security adviser, often referring to them as “my generals.” But Trump soon became frustrated with their commitment to maintaining US alliances and upholding the military’s apolitical norms, and fired them.

When Trump returned to the White House last year, he was determined not to make the same “mistake.” He selected a defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who is fully committed to the MAGA cause, including eliminating diversity initiatives, ousting many senior military leaders (many of them black or female), and erecting new barriers for women and racial minorities. Never mind that Hegseth, a former Fox News talking head, is woefully unqualified. Devotion to Trump absolves mistakes that would get an intern fired – like accidentally adding a journalist to a Signal chat in which senior officials are discussing the details of an impending military strike.

Putting a smarmy loyalist in charge of the US military means there is no one to caution Trump against his pursuit of an increasingly aggressive foreign policy, including an attack on Venezuela, threats to annex Greenland, a blockade of Cuba, and preparations for an assault on Iran. The Trump administration now refers to the Department of Defense as the Department of War (though Congress has yet to approve a name change).

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But, like any good authoritarian, Trump is as concerned about projecting power at home as he is about doing so abroad. So, he has sent poorly trained Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, decked out in military gear, to sow terror in US cities. The peaceful protesters ICE agents have beaten, pepper-sprayed, and shot dead have been branded domestic terrorists, and citizens who so much as complain about ICE’s actions online are reportedly being put on a watch list. MAGA is an ideology of domination, enacted by loyalists of varying competence.

This hardly scratches the surface of all the ways Trump’s loyalty tests and insecurity are undermining America’s interests. The difference between him and his authoritarian counterparts is that midterm elections are approaching fast in the US, and, with his approval rating at just 37%, he may not yet have the ability to purge the country of the majority of voters.

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CAMBRIDGE – US President Donald Trump has been remarkably candid about his plans for Venezuela. In an interview with Fox News, he vowed to rebuild the country’s oil infrastructure, adding that the United States would be “in charge” and that he expects oil companies to invest at least $100 billion. He also made his approach explicit: reconstruction first, elections at an unspecified future date.

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Asked when Venezuelans would be able to vote for new leadership, Trump dismissed the premise altogether. “They couldn’t have an election,” he insisted. “They wouldn’t even know how to have an election right now.”

Never mind Edmundo González’s landslide victory in the stolen 2024 presidential election, and that recent polls show broad support for opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado. The implication was not merely that elections must wait, but that Venezuelans are incapable of self-government until a foreign power has “rebuilt” the country.

Others in the administration have echoed Trump’s statements. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has derided the “neoliberal frame” of demanding immediate elections, advocating a “judicious, thoughtful, careful transition process.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for his part, has outlined a three-stage plan: “stabilization,” followed by “economic recovery and reconciliation,” and only then a democratic “transition.” Laura Dogu, Trump’s envoy to Venezuela, has also described a final stage culminating in “a friendly, stable, prosperous, and democratic Venezuela.” In this framework, democracy is not the source of political legitimacy; instead, it is the last – and least important – goal.

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For Venezuelans at home and abroad, Trump’s rhetoric is deeply unsettling. It suggests that democracy is merely window dressing for control of Venezuela’s oil wealth. “Stabilization” and “recovery” have no clear finish line; they can drag on indefinitely. And if elections are perpetually postponed, they may never happen.

This is a classic signaling problem. In economics, commitments become credible when they involve costs that only a sincere actor would be willing to bear. A transition that puts oil first and elections last imposes no such costs. It is easy to announce and even easier to prolong.

Moreover, delay is not neutral. It gives incumbents time to consolidate power, rewrite the rules, intimidate opponents, and normalize the idea that democracy is a privilege to be granted later, once authorities decide the country is “ready.” In the meantime, the dictatorship retains its power and further enriches itself.

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Ironically, the same logic applies to the oil industry itself. Oil investment is not humanitarian aid. It is a long-term contract. Companies commit capital in exchange for decades of expected returns, predicated on stability and institutional continuity. The US cannot plausibly seek $100 billion in private investment while signaling that political legitimacy is negotiable. Without credible institutions, Venezuela is as ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods put it, “uninvestable.”

If the US was serious about eventual Venezuelan democracy, it would not be announcing vague commitments. Instead, it would be acting now to fix what needs to be fixed, of which there is plenty. Doing so would be a credible signal of real democratic intentions. Not acting to address these issues suggests lack of commitment to democracy and the rule of law.

What needs to be fixed? Venezuela’s National Electoral Council, which has long been captured by the regime and presided over the stolen 2024 election, is the obvious place to start. Restoring credibility requires appointing a new Council through a transparent process that involves jurists and civil society, ensures participation by all major political forces, and establishes robust safeguards against partisan capture. Appointing referees the incumbent cannot control sends a clear signal that the game will not be rigged.

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Another step would be to reopen and update the voter registry. In 2024, illegal requirements blocked millions from voting, Venezuelans overseas were effectively disenfranchised, and many young citizens were unable to register. A short registration period – say, four months – should be established, accompanied by an expansion of consular registration sites, secure online access, and international monitoring. If Venezuela’s eight-million-strong diaspora and the three million eligible voters – mostly young people – who were unable to register, cannot participate, the legitimacy of the process will be questioned, and so will that of any major economic decisions made in the name of “reconstruction.”

Political pluralism must also be restored. Under Chavismo, courts and regulators have hollowed out opposition parties by removing their elected leadership and installing regime proxies. Reestablishing a level playing field means reinstating legitimate party leaders, unbanning movements, guaranteeing equal access to the media, and barring the use of public resources for political campaigns.

Pluralism presupposes an end to political persecution. Hundreds of political prisoners remain behind bars, and many exiles cannot return safely. Paper amnesties are not credible signals. Prisoners must be released, and exiled opposition leaders – including Machado – must be provided with enforceable security guarantees so that they can return, travel, and campaign without fear of arrest or violence. The totalitarian laws that criminalize legitimate political activity must be repealed. A genuine democratic transition requires protecting dissent.

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An election date must be announced now to provide a clear timetable for reforms and anchor society’s expectations. Elections require rules and security, not a perfect economy. Venezuelans have repeatedly shown they can mobilize politically amid hardship; what has been missing is an incumbent willing to concede defeat. A national election should be held this year under independent international observation, with full vote tallies published immediately and a pre-agreed mechanism for resolving disputes.

Lastly, oil profits must not become a substitute for democracy. Resource revenues should be placed in escrow on behalf of the Venezuelan people, and their disbursement should be conditioned on meeting these democratic benchmarks. Using those funds to promote institutional reform would help counter claims that Trump’s plan amounts to taking Venezuelan oil at “gunpoint.”

Credibility matters as much in politics as in financial markets. If the US wants Venezuela to be a reliable partner and a country that investors can trust, democracy must be the organizing principle of US policy. That means putting in place the legal and institutional guarantees that ensure free, fair, competitive elections. Anything less will be viewed – correctly – as cheap talk.

ANKARA – Last March, a Turkish court jailed Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu pending a trial on corruption charges. While Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s regime has denied any political motivation, arguing that the judiciary is independent, many have recognized it as a classic example of democratic backsliding: detain the popular opposition leader and dress it up as law enforcement. The move triggered nationwide protests on a scale not seen in more than a decade.

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Using legal institutions and procedures to shape who can run, who can speak, and who can organize has become the preferred method for limiting political competition while still retaining the veneer of democracy. The prosecution of İmamoğlu, who defeated the Istanbul mayoral candidate from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the 2019 election (and its court-mandated rerun) and the 2024 election, was only the beginning in Turkey. Since then, other mayors from the Republican People’s Party (CHP) have been detained as part of a campaign to weaken and dismantle the opposition.

Sowing uncertainty by applying judicial and administrative pressure depends not only on prosecution. Right before İmamoğlu’s arrest, Istanbul University annulled his degree based on alleged irregularities, disqualifying him from running for president. This came only days before the CHP was set to pick İmamoğlu as its presidential candidate for the 2028 election. The impact is clear: narrow the electoral field by incapacitating the only viable challenger. The Council of Europe rightly condemned the move as an “assault on democracy.”

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Pretrial detention adds another layer of uncertainty. In principle, detention is meant to protect judicial proceedings; in practice, however, it is a way to sideline a political opponent indefinitely, especially as investigations and trials are increasingly extended over years. The prosecutor overseeing the graft case later demanded a prison sentence of more than 2,000 years for İmamoğlu, a show of force that aims to present his exit from politics as inevitable. Whether or not a court accepts these claims, the process itself will likely drain the opposition’s attention, money, and leadership capacity, while also deterring other challengers.

İmamoğlu has been targeted because he is a non-polarizing, service-oriented centrist who wins without resorting to the identity politics that Erdoğan relies on to maintain the support of his base. Serving as Istanbul’s mayor has burnished that image. Municipal office often gives opposition leaders visibility, administrative experience, and a track record showing that there is another way to govern. That is why cities tend to be the front line in the fight for maintaining democracy.

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This pattern extends far beyond Istanbul. In late 2024, the Turkish Interior Ministry removed elected mayors in Kurdish-majority provinces like Mardin and Batman, replacing them with state-appointed trustees. The message to voters is clear: you may vote, but the state reserves the right to correct your choice.

In Turkey, the silencing of politicians was accompanied by internet censorship. During the protests following İmamoğlu’s detention, the Turkish authorities clamped down on social-media platforms, throttling messaging apps and ordering content blocks to prevent the opposition from organizing. When the digital public square is shuttered at the government’s whim, any hope of fair competition vanishes.

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Venezuela offers a sobering parallel. In January 2024, Venezuela’s Supreme Justice Tribunal upheld a ban preventing the opposition leader – and now Nobel Peace Prize laureate – María Corina Machado from holding office. This disqualification was an act of democratic nullification routed through the courts, removing voters from the equation.

The political logic is the same in both countries: preserve enough formal legality to claim rule-based governance, while using institutions to preclude a genuine alternation in power. Around 811 political prisoners remain locked up in Venezuela after US President Donald Trump removed Nicolás Maduro from power and decided to preserve the Chavista regime. The road to deeper authoritarianism is paved with selective prosecution, administrative exclusion, and pretrial detention – techniques that determine political outcomes before a single ballot is cast.

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Western countries often tolerate democratic backsliding in their strategically important partners for the sake of stability. Turkey is a NATO ally with an important role in regional security, while Venezuela is an energy power. In both cases, the prospect of securing short-term gains encourages foreign leaders to downplay the erosion of democratic freedoms.

But when incumbents can neutralize their rivals through lawfare, public institutions lose credibility, and politics hinges on the survival strategies of those in power. That is personalization, not stability. Policy commitments are less predictable because they are anchored in regime security rather than accountable bodies. A country where the rule of law has collapsed cannot be a bulwark of NATO’s eastern flank. It is a constant source of friction and could become a source of fragility.

The imprisonment of İmamoğlu is not only about one politician. It serves as a warning. A democratic country can retain its outward form even as its leaders use the courts to engineer political outcomes. While voters in such countries fight to choose their candidates without interference from the state’s legal machinery, foreign leaders must pressure these regimes to allow for elections that are both free and fair.

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MUNICH – As soon as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio rose to address this year’s Munich Security Conference, it was evident that the Trump administration intended to change its rhetoric toward America’s longstanding European allies. While Vice President JD Vance used his remarks last year to hector and insult European leaders, Rubio seemed eager to flatter. After paying homage to European history and culture – highlighting various achievements, from the Sistine Chapel to the Beatles – he acknowledged that the United States is itself a child of Europe.

It all sounded very nice to European ears after a year that had horrified everyone committed to the transatlantic relationship. Not only has the administration Rubio represents accused Europe of inviting “civilizational erasure.” It has even threatened to seize Greenland, the sovereign territory of a fellow NATO member (Denmark). Was Rubio signaling a change?

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On the contrary, after the applause died down, it soon became obvious that the Trump administration’s basic message remains the same. Both in its substance and its perspective on the world, Rubio’s speech revealed a deep gulf between the Trump administration and the Europeans in the room. Notably, Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine was mentioned only in passing, and with nary a hint of criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Yet with casualties around 1.2 million, a front line stretching 1,200 kilometers (746 miles), and more than 400 Russian attack drones targeting Ukrainian infrastructure and civilian centers the previous week, one would think the horror show playing out on NATO’s eastern flank would merit some mention.

The threat that Russia poses is a dominant concern for Europeans, because they recognize that the defense of Ukraine today is vital to European security tomorrow. For the Trump administration, however, the issue does not even bear mentioning. In terms of basic threat perceptions, the gulf between the US and Europe could hardly be wider.

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NEW YORK – The countries and peoples of the world have coexisted with nuclear weapons for eight decades. These unimaginably destructive weapons have been used only twice, when the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to hasten World War II’s end.

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There were subsequent scares, of course, most notably the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. For the most part, however, nuclear weapons largely remained in the background during the Cold War. The US and the Soviet Union (followed by Russia) built robust arsenals that minimized any advantage to striking first. In addition to deterrence predicated on mutual assured destruction, arms-control agreements provided both governments with the transparency and predictability they needed to avoid costly and dangerous arms races.

This has all taken on increased relevance as New START, the final nuclear arms control accord limiting the arsenals of the US and Russia, expired last week. It was Russian President Vladimir Putin, of all people, who offered to extend it informally (it was already extended once five years ago), but US President Donald Trump has been cavalier, saying “If it expires, it expires.”

One reported explanation for the US stance is its unhappiness that China is not included in the formal architecture of arms control. Yes, China possesses the world’s third-largest and fastest-growing nuclear arsenal, but its desire to achieve parity with the US and Russia means it won’t sign any pact limiting it to second-class status.

Moreover, China, thinking about Taiwan, may well believe that a principal reason the US has not directly come to Ukraine’s defense is respect for Russian nuclear strength. But there is a strong case for bringing China into arms control a decade hence – and a reasonable chance of doing so.

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In the meantime, the non-extension of New START, however unfortunate, is not the end of the world. Neither the US nor Russia wants a new, costly and dangerous arms race. Yes, there will be some modernization and expansion of arsenals, but it is quite possible a degree of transparency, signaling, and even stability will remain in place – and that a new, formal pact will ultimately be negotiated.

Interestingly, limiting the so-called vertical proliferation of existing nuclear-weapons countries – the expansion of existing arsenals – might not be the biggest challenge we face in the nuclear realm. Of course, it is worrisome in cases like North Korea, India, and Pakistan, India’s arch-rival, because the conditions that have underwritten US/Soviet and US/Russian deterrence will not be easily replicated.

But arguably more troubling is horizontal proliferation: additional countries seeking to join the nine countries that currently comprise the nuclear club: the five (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the US) formally recognized as “Nuclear-Weapons States” under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea.

One would-be nuclear-weapons state is Iran. Israeli and US military strikes last year set Iran’s program back but did not reduce its ambitions. On the contrary, the inability to deter the attacks may well have increased Iran’s determination to press ahead.

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It remains to be seen what the current talks underway in Oman or quite possibly further military action can accomplish. It is essential that Iran’s ambitions continue to be frustrated, as a nuclear-armed Iran might be more aggressive in its use of proxy forces throughout the region. And it would almost certainly prompt several countries in the region, including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, to develop or acquire nuclear weapons of their own. The prospect of the world’s least stable region bristling with nuclear weapons is chilling.

For countries in Europe and Asia, two other factors are increasing their interest in nuclear weapons. One is concern about the threats posed by Russia, China, and North Korea. Russia has initiated a brutal war of aggression against Ukraine and has talked menacingly about using nuclear weapons and altering the political map of Europe. North Korea has never given up its aim of gaining control over the entire Korean Peninsula. China seeks to assert its control over Taiwan and its primacy in the region.

Growing concern about the ambitions, intentions, and capabilities of countries that seek fundamental changes to existing geopolitical arrangements dovetails with increasing doubts about whether the US will continue to provide deterrence against such threats. Alliances have been a successful nonproliferation tool for decades, but the Trump administration has called into question US commitments. The alternative to dependence on the US for many – for South Korea and Japan in Asia, and for any number of countries in Europe – will be nuclear self-reliance.

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The main risk is that a country developing or acquiring nuclear weapons might provoke a preemptive attack by a neighbor that is not prepared to see a perceived adversary become so threatening. And even if such a transition can take place without leading to war, small nuclear forces may invite an attack in a crisis – or their early introduction (“better to use them before you lose them”) before they are attacked and destroyed.

We need to alter our thinking about nuclear weapons. We have grown too comfortable with them. The time to become uncomfortable has arrived.

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COPENHAGEN – When people ask me how I am doing, I generally reply: “I’m fine, but the world is a mess.” Still, as a Dane, the past few weeks have been particularly difficult, and incomparably worse for the people of Greenland. With his assertion that might makes right, his threats to Danish sovereignty, his undermining of the United Nations through a so-called Board of Peace, and his commercialization of humanitarian aid, US President Donald Trump has made his worldview plain, and it is deeply troubling.

Trump’s Waterloo?

Harold Hongju Koh thinks the US president’s imperial ambitions and performative militarism could prove to be his undoing.

But the uncomfortable truth is that the world order was already broken before Trump’s first presidency. He didn’t create the dysfunction. He just poured gasoline on the fire and accelerated the decline. The UN had long failed to function effectively, and the World Trade Organization had ground nearly to a halt. Major regional powers such as India, Brazil, and South Africa were openly questioning the legitimacy of an international system that remained wedded to a Western perspective, and that too often failed to reflect their standpoints or accommodate their interests.

The real danger now is that Trump-incited chaos will be used as an excuse for paralysis; that we will be so busy defending the old order that we fail to build a better one. It is all too tempting to circle the wagons, to defend existing institutions as a matter of principle or out of a sense of duty. But this defensive approach misses the essential point: the alternative to a dysfunctional order isn’t the same order functioning better. It is a better order – or no order at all.

When international institutions lack legitimacy, countries pursue their interests unilaterally. When the WTO can’t resolve disputes, governments eventually resort to tariff wars. When the UN Security Council is paralyzed, conflicts metastasize, and the costs fall most heavily on smaller countries and the global commons. We have seen this time and again when it comes to tackling climate change, pandemics, cyber security, and other collective challenges.

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Trump’s might-makes-right approach only works because our institutional constraints have already failed. Now that he is gleefully destroying what remains of the old order, a strategy for reform and renewal is not a luxury that we can afford to defer. The erosion of institutional legitimacy creates the very conditions that allow leaders like Trump to thrive.

For proof that reforming global institutions is no longer an option, look no further than the challenges posed by AI. These technologies – with their extraordinary potential benefits and equally extraordinary risks – cannot be governed by any single country, no matter how powerful it is. Effective governance requires exactly what we are missing: legitimate, effective global cooperation.

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That means we have an opportunity. Unlike reforming institutions burdened by decades of accumulated dysfunction and resentment, we can build governance frameworks for AI from the ground up, and what we build can properly reflect today’s multipolar reality, rather than yesterday’s Western dominance.

The Hiroshima AI Process, launched under Japan’s G7 presidency in 2023, offers a model that we can build on. It brought together major economies to establish voluntary guidelines for AI development and deployment. But, of course, voluntary guidelines among a limited group of countries are not enough. What we really need is a global framework that includes the Global South, that strikes an optimal balance between innovation and safety, and that has functioning enforcement mechanisms.

This is not about creating a new bureaucracy. It is about establishing clear principles regarding safety, transparency, legal liability, and the rights of affected populations. That is how all countries can be confident that AI will develop in ways that serve humanity, rather than narrow national or private interests.

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The comparison to nuclear weapons is instructive, even if it is imperfect. AI won’t be contained by non-proliferation treaties, because the technology is simply too distributed for that. Instead, we need something closer to the frameworks governing aviation safety or pandemic surveillance. These function through technical cooperation grounded in shared self-interest, with mechanisms for rapid information sharing and coordinated responses to emerging risks.

We need frameworks that are inclusive, practical, and genuinely empowering. Establishing effective AI governance could demonstrate what a reformed multilateralism looks like, as well as restoring confidence that international cooperation delivers real value. And it could establish a template for tackling other challenges that do not stop at national borders.

The world is indeed a mess. But defending institutions that have lost their effectiveness and legitimacy is not the answer. We can and must build something better, starting with AI. The alternative isn’t preserving the status quo. It is watching it collapse entirely.

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CAMBRIDGE – Since US President Donald Trump entered the political scene as a presidential candidate over a decade ago, observers have been scrambling to find some explanation for his bizarre words and deeds. Whenever we think we have exhausted the search, he says or does something even crazier, and the hunt begins again.

The first conclusion, popular during Trump’s first presidency, was that his assertions were never meant to be taken literally. But as he has followed through on a growing number of threats, from seeking revenge against political opponents to attacking Venezuela and kidnapping its president, this explanation has lost favor.

Another interpretation, advanced mostly by Trump’s supporters, focuses on his “America First” mantra: everything Trump does, however unexpected, is guided by America’s interests. But this claim is easy to dismiss. Regardless of what Trump believes, the United States has always acted in its own interests: while the open, liberal, rules-based order that the US has led since World War II was broadly good for the world, it benefited the US most of all.

Trump’s Waterloo?

Harold Hongju Koh thinks the US president’s imperial ambitions and performative militarism could prove to be his undoing.

Despite significant flaws, the post-WWII order delivered an unprecedented 80 years of relative peace and prosperity. This enabled the US to become an economic and geopolitical superpower, including by facilitating the US dollar’s rise as the premier international currency. If the system collapses, the US will be among the biggest losers.

In this sense, Trump is actively working against America’s interests. After all, unlike smaller countries, the US cannot free-ride on the international order. It must participate actively in maintaining and strengthening it by supporting free trade, preventing rogue actors from changing national borders by force, and contributing to shared solutions to global challenges like climate change and pandemics. Otherwise, the system may not survive – at least not in a form that serves the US. Europe is probably too disunited to fill the leadership vacuum left by the US, and China, should it step up, will not uphold America’s privileges.

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In the same vein, some have argued that Trump’s actions reflect the frustrations and aspirations of the American workers who feel “left behind” by globalization, technological progress, and social change. But, far from helping this group, Trump’s policies tend to worsen their economic plight.

A good example is the ongoing Republican campaign to reverse former President Barack Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, which dramatically expanded access to health care, not least for voters who would go on to form Trump’s base. Either Trump’s supporters do not see how the ACA benefits them – perhaps convinced by his efforts to paint it as a disaster – or they consider the ideological and cultural values Trump purports to represent to be more important. In any case, helping working Americans is clearly not Trump’s guiding principle.

The fourth popular explanation for Trump’s actions reflects his background in business. This is a “transactional” leader committed to negotiating deals that will bring narrow short-term benefits, even if it means undermining America’s credibility and long-term prospects. But most of his supposed victories have brought no discernable benefits at all for the US.

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The argument that Trump’s deals are really about lining his own pockets, and those of family members and allies, is more compelling. But even seen through this lens, his behavior remains largely – and increasingly – incoherent. In fact, Trump increasingly evokes the memory of Caligula, the third emperor of Rome.

Though Caligula appeared reasonably rational when his reign began in AD 37, he seemed to descend into madness rapidly. He had sex with his three sisters, among many others. He built opulent villas and hosted lavish parties, thereby bankrupting Rome. He reversed all the actions of his predecessor Tiberius, while continuing to blame him for anything that went wrong. He declared war on the English Channel.

Caligula also grafted busts of his own head onto statues of gods, and demanded that people worship him as one. During a gladiatorial spectacle, he had a whole section of the audience thrown into the arena to be attacked by the lions. He humiliated senators by making them kiss his feet or run ahead of his chariot for miles. He tried to make his horse a consul.

The parallels with Trump are legion. The US president has a long history of sexual misconduct, and has repeatedly expressed interest in having sex with his daughter, Ivanka. As ordinary Americans struggle to make ends meet, he hosts extravagant parties at his Mar-a-Lago resort. He has added gold embellishments to the Oval Office and razed the White House’s historic East Wing to build a massive ballroom. And he blames his predecessor, Joe Biden, for America’s every woe.

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Trump has built monuments to himself, affixed his name to memorials to others, and compared himself to God. He has sent armed forces to terrorize American cities. He makes Cabinet officials, CEOs, and foreign leaders pay obeisance to him, and attacks anyone deemed “disloyal.” He has debased Congress.

Trump has also insulted, alienated, and bullied America’s closest allies. In a letter to Norway’s prime minister, he explicitly linked his threats to invade and annex Greenland (which he repeatedly confused with Iceland in a January 21 speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos) to the decision not to award him a Nobel Peace Prize. Meanwhile, he rambles incoherently about windmills, sharks, and the fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter.

Observers have been largely reluctant to pass judgment on Trump’s mental health, partly because calling him “crazy” or “demented” can seem like a casual insult tossed at a public figure with whom one disagrees. Be that as it may, I now join those, including former supporters, who can no longer avoid the obvious conclusion: Trump is America’s Caligula.

WARSAW – The European Union was created as an antidote to power politics. But to survive, it must become a superpower, contradicting the very principle on which it was founded. The reason is US President Donald Trump, who is forcing it to transform itself almost against its will.

The EU does not need to turn its back on the United States; but it must recognize that it can rely only on itself, and that means acquiring hard (military) power. Although Trump’s time in office is limited, Trumpism could endure. Despite his transactional approach and rapidly fluctuating positions, Trump may represent a more lasting doctrine. After all, many of his first-term policies – from tariffs to his confrontational stance toward China – survived his defeat in 2020, and he was hardly the first US president to demand greater contributions from other NATO members.

Moreover, the Republican Party is now fully under Trump’s control, having ousted or forced out anyone who did not embrace the president’s MAGA movement. Trump has also subjugated the US financial, legal, and tech elite, and developed a deep bench of potential successors. Safe in his position, he can now focus on establishing a dynasty and securing his legacy, including through territorial expansion.

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Although Trump did step back from his threat to use force in pursuing a US takeover of Greenland, that crisis is not over. He dropped his demand for US sovereignty over the island only after Europe signaled a willingness to respond – finally – with something other than appeasement. The European Parliament suspended work on a trade agreement with the US. Many EU leaders called for the bloc’s anti-coercion mechanism (the “trade bazooka”) to be used, while most refused to join Trump’s bizarre pay-to-play Board of Peace.

As long as the EU’s most serious problems were Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Russian President Vladimir Putin, it could more or less accept the status quo. But the emergence of another Putin in Washington leaves the EU in a completely different position.

Fortunately, the EU has all the assets it needs to be one of three or four superpowers. Its common market surpasses any other economy in size, and it can match anyone in terms of its alliances and soft power. While Western Europe is reckoning with anemic GDP growth, Central and Eastern European economies are developing rapidly. No US state has grown as fast as Poland in the last 25 years.

Yes, the EU lags behind the US and China in terms of innovation and access to raw materials, but they face difficult challenges, too. China is struggling with inauspicious demographics and very low consumption. US power is being hollowed out from within through the Trump administration’s war on scientific research, higher education, immigration, the rule of law, and international institutions. And Russia has pretty much nothing going for it, other than a fully committed war economy.

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If Greenland, Canada, or even Venezuela had to choose between being part of the US or joining the EU, they would obviously opt for the latter. There are good reasons why Ukraine and a dozen other countries dream of joining the bloc. Taking inspiration from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s statement the night after Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022: half a billion people are here; a huge industrial base is here; one-sixth of the world’s GDP is here; and allies are here (on every continent).

In other words, Europe has massive latent power, and it is beginning to do more to unlock its potential. In the short and medium term, it must fight for time and resolve the “Ukrainian question,” just as the West resolved the “Eastern European question” in the 1990s. Trump has already shifted this problem to Europe by refusing to finance the Ukrainian army and state. Five years ago, it would have seemed absurdly optimistic to predict that the EU would be able to issue joint debt, buy weapons, and make key decisions without unanimity. No one could have guessed that Sweden and Finland would finally abandon their neutrality and join NATO, significantly strengthening the alliance’s European pillar.

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Yet all that has happened, and more. European defense companies are now growing much faster than their American counterparts. The fastest-growing European company today is the German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall. While the US is dismantling mutually beneficial trade agreements, the EU is concluding new ones, most recently with India. If the million-strong Ukrainian army – as battle-hardened and innovative as any in the world – remains on Europe’s side and does not fall into Russian hands, Europe will have everything it needs to be a military superpower in the age of drone warfare.

The EU has proven over and over that it is capable of reforming itself, despite resistance from enemies within and outside its borders. To paraphrase Zelensky again: Europe does not need a free ride; it needs arms.

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ATHENS – Imagine that the fascists we thought we had vanquished for good in the mid-20th century had deposited a blueprint in some vault – a plan bequeathed to their spiritual heirs determined to make fascism great again. What would it say?

It would begin with a strategy of plagiarizing the left. Start by taking aim at crony capitalism, it would recommend. Copy the leftist arguments against the corrupt financial sector and the central banks’ role in supporting it. Then criticize the electoral system relying on two factions of the same oligarchic regime or “uniparty.”

After that, target the state for doing Big Business’s bidding. At the same time, repeat the neoliberal mantra, presenting yourselves as more neoliberal than Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan combined. Call civil servants lazy freeloaders leeching off the working class, thus driving a wedge between public- and private-sector workers.

To forge a movement, unite the victims of neoliberalism with people who maintain a fond memory of Thatcher or Reagan. To turn them all against the neoliberal centrists, portray those who cut their political teeth fighting and neutering the left – leaders like former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and former US President Bill Clinton, along with the political parties they remade – as Marxists. To solidify this alliance, promise a return to some fictional Golden Age. Wax lyrical about a national rebirth that requires defeating both the decadent bourgeoisie and the treacherous left.

Above all, never underestimate the power of the cult of racial purity. No one, of course, is “pure.” We are all mongrels. But people can be excited into a frenzy of enthusiasm if you portray their cities as crawling with foreign, dangerous influences (US President Donald Trump prefers the word “vermin”) and promise to purge the impurities that spread like viruses in their communities.

The “impure” to be targeted may be Jews, Muslims, trans people – whoever can be stigmatized at little cost. This requires that you infect the souls of society’s dispossessed with a moral panic that they are being replaced by people even more wretched than themselves. Then and only then promise to make them great “again.”

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As your new fascist coalition takes form, animate it with misogyny and promises that a Great Leader – a wise Daddy – will put the national house in order. As you do this, be sure to hint at white men’s current inability to put their own homes in order, but take great care to blame “woke” feminism, and never mention the true causes (austerity, securitized housing, and savage cuts in public education and health).

Offer, instead, a simple social contract: We shall look after you, make you proud again. You, in return, must grant us absolute power so that, released from the restraints of the liberal state, we can purify the body of the nation, reach into the halcyon past, and retrieve your sense of power and superiority.

Make sure you tell people that this is not a one-off, momentary rupture. Portray the nation as a battalion at war, where insubordination and opposition pose an existential threat to the collective body. Proclaim that your movement is planning a never-ending process of militarizing society, and advocate immediately for a huge defense budget.

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At the same time, denounce the left-liberal cabal’s fixation with global government. Signal that deterrence is your game, but also imply that your army will be as adept at protecting the nation from domestic “terrorists” and defending the newly electrified border fences as it is at managing external threats.

To join or lead a government, exploit the fact that conservatives and centrists are more afraid of the left than they are of you. Espouse ultra-Zionism to whitewash your Nazi legacy and make yourselves more palatable. Forge an alliance with them, exploit their delusion that they can beat you in the contest for popular support with their fascism-lite and, once they feel safe, shove them to one side, take over fully, and put them in the same concentration camp (perhaps in posher cells) as the leftist rabble that they feared more than you.

Once in power, you should first ban all migrants (except white supremacists from failed apartheid states). To show you mean business when promising to hunt the most impure, marginal people, declare there are only two genders. Create a Praetorian Guard of masked men to whisk people off the streets and transport them to domestic concentration camps as well as in virtual colonies or occupied lands. To advertise your unconstrained power, send stormtroopers into your major cities to shoot and terrorize.

Behind the scenes, get into bed with the financial and tech oligarchs you rebuked while in opposition. Send a techlord and his minions into government offices to emulate Gleichschaltung, the Nazi policy of firing public-sector employees, and install flunkies to siphon off citizens’ personal data to be used for future surveillance and control. Pardon your felonious allies, attack universities, take over cultural centers, and use the courts to pursue the people who opposed you.

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Most importantly, prepare for the moment your base grows impatient, seeing your promises to look after them go up in smoke amid the cacophonous enrichment of a ruling class you were meant to rein in. It is then that you must turn to the geopolitical version of the “flood the zone” strategy. Withdraw from multilateral organizations. Abrogate treaties. Wreck what remains of international law. Call your regime-change wars what they are: imperial takeovers. Luxuriate in vile displays of unbridled power. Above all else, keep escalating.

And if it all blows up, make sure you leave an updated blueprint for the next generation of fascists. After all, as long as the wealth of the few depends on the poverty of the many, fascism will always be necessary.

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NEW HAVEN – The United States and China have long been the most prominent representatives of two opposing systems: democracy and socialism. But they increasingly share one crucial characteristic – personalized leadership – that blurs the otherwise sharp distinction between the two. This raises the important question: which country is truly exceptional?

American exceptionalism is, of course, taken for granted. There is no formal definition of this lofty state of national supremacy, nor are there any qualifying metrics. To borrow from former US Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, “I know it when I see it.” Personal freedoms, the rule of law, and economic primacy are often cited as the main reasons why America is the world’s “shining city upon a hill,” as former US president Ronald Reagan famously proclaimed.

By contrast, China hardly comes across as exceptional, at least as it is understood in the West. Notwithstanding its mounting economic strengths, China is quickly disqualified by its lack of personal freedoms – not just of expression, but also those associated with a democratically elected representative government.

Leadership is also an important element of American exceptionalism. That’s not because US presidents have been unusually brilliant or decisive, with magnetic personalities and extraordinary communication skills, but because they have embraced, if not celebrated, democratic principles. The very concept of American exceptionalism is predicated on the belief that US leaders are wedded to a free and open society, the rule of law, and a capitalist economy.

Until now.

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President Donald Trump has abandoned many of these values, raising the distinct possibility that the US is no longer as exceptional as it might think. By contrast, Chinese President Xi Jinping has risen to the status of “core leader” – a designation last given to Mao Zedong. Yes, Xi is an authoritarian president in a one-party system. But from China’s perspective, he is just as exceptional as the generic American president used to be.

The role of leadership bears critically on the Sino-American relationship, and especially on their growing conflict. One problem is that the onerous task of managing the relationship has been left to personalized leadership and diplomacy. This forces us to think about US-China leadership in relative terms – not merely comparing Trump and Xi, but also assessing more generally how each country understands the leader’s role in the opposing system.

This is particularly difficult for Americans, who have been conditioned to abhor anything with a whiff of socialism. Few in the West dare think otherwise. Scathing Marxian critiques of capitalism as a system of exploitation disguised as freedom have gained little purchase, and the former Soviet Union’s appalling disregard for humanity cemented the aversion.

The Chinese people, unlike their ideologically conditioned Communist Party leaders, appear more accepting of the US system. But they stop short of recognizing American exceptionalism, owing to a growing sense of nationalism fueled by Xi’s espousal of the Chinese Dream. This growing patriotic fervor has brought China’s citizenry close to believing in some form of Chinese exceptionalism.

The Chinese understand the recent about-face of American leadership and the hypocrisy underpinning it. Unfortunately, so do many of America’s most steadfast allies. That became glaringly evident at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, where Western leaders pushed back against Trump’s ridicule, hostility, and condescension.

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Many Americans, especially the MAGA-controlled Republican Party, were inclined to shrug off his performance at Davos as “Trump being Trump.” Such indifference to a potentially seismic shift in the character of American leadership may come back to haunt the US. While the case for one exceptional country is compelling in a unipolar world, it is less so in a bipolar or multipolar world.

A big question for American exceptionalism is whether Trump is an aberration or a sign of where the US is headed. Ultimately, only Americans can answer this question, expressing their preferences through the free and fair elections that are the cornerstone of US democracy (and yet surprisingly fragile, as demonstrated by Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election). For China, the question of its exceptionalism may ultimately hinge on that same electoral process.

All this could be decisive in shaping the trajectory of the US-China relationship. Steeped in denial, America is unwilling or unable to differentiate between the personalization of conflict-prone policies and the moral underpinnings of democratic values. A deep-rooted intolerance of other systems, as well as their leaders, makes it even more challenging for the US to navigate the complex dynamics with China.

Chinese leaders are also guilty of personalizing the Sino-American conflict. They constantly frame the superpower rivalry in Marxian-like terms: “the East is rising, the West is declining.” Xi was more direct at the National People’s Congress in 2023, explicitly blaming the US for embracing a policy of Chinese containment.

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Trump, fixated on striking a deal with China at the upcoming summit in April, has turned the other cheek, touting his personal friendship with Xi. Yet Sino-American conflict resolution requires more than superficial claims of camaraderie between leaders of two different systems.

In the end, history asks far more of exceptional nations. Nothing is more important than a willingness to understand and tolerate other countries with different systems.

TORONTO – The moral horror wrought by US President Donald Trump’s second administration is incontrovertible. The execution of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive-care-unit nurse and US citizen, by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents on the streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota, was recorded from all angles by brave observers and seen by people around the world.

It follows the public killing of Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis mother and fellow US citizen, earlier this month, and an untold number of unseen deaths and disappearances in American concentration camps like “Alligator Alcatraz.”

Given this, the radical has become the pragmatic. Trump, and everyone else responsible for these outrages, should be impeached and convicted. ICE should be disbanded, as should its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security. And the people who have killed – both publicly and privately – should be investigated and hauled before judges and juries.

But the logic of the killings is as important as the killings themselves. While a truth in itself, the moral horror is also a sign of the administration’s lies and lawlessness, a political logic known from 20th-century Soviet and Nazi totalitarian regimes, and from attempts to replace the rule of law with personal tyranny.

In a constitutional regime like the United States, the law applies everywhere and at all times. In a republic like America, it applies to everyone. For that logic of law to be undone, the aspiring tyrant looks for cracks in the system that can be pried open.

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DAVOS – Commentators have largely framed the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as a US-orchestrated attempt at “regime change,” or as an effort to preserve the country’s existing political order, minus Maduro. But these interpretations overlook the more consequential development: the emergence of a new, more discreet form of imperialism.

The Economic Roots of Iran’s Protests

Djavad Salehi-Isfahani sees a society caught between internal reform it does not trust and external pressure it increasingly fears.

Rather than installing an American colonial governor in Miraflores Palace, this system operates through subtler means that are, in some ways, more cynically effective. Venezuela still has ministries, security services, courts, and ceremonial symbols like the presidential sash. Yet its economic lifeline – the ability to sell oil and access the proceeds – has been placed under the United States’ control. As President Donald Trump told reporters, “We need total access. We need access to the oil and to other things in their country that allow us to rebuild their country.”

Unlike traditional sanctions, which seek leverage through external punishment, this arrangement functions like an informal receivership. The US government markets Venezuelan oil, deposits the revenues into accounts it controls, and uses access to these funds to discipline local authorities.

The nearest historical precedent is not the postwar reconstruction of Europe and Japan but colonial-era indirect rule. Under such a system, a local government remains in place to administer daily life, maintain order, and manage dissent, while the imperial power retains the core attributes of sovereignty, including trade, foreign policy, and control over the principal sources of state revenue.

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Contrary to many outside observers’ expectations, the vast majority of Venezuelans welcomed the apparent end of their sovereignty, according to a recent Economist poll. That response is less an endorsement of American imperialism than a devastating indictment of Chavismo. For years, many Venezuelans believed sovereignty had already been lost, effectively outsourced to powers like Russia and Cuba through dependence on foreign intelligence services and opaque financial entanglements.

The January 3 raid to capture Maduro and his wife only reinforced that perception. Cuba later reported that 32 members of its armed forces and intelligence services were killed during the US operation, a striking indicator of how deeply Cuban personnel had been embedded within Venezuela’s security apparatus.

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Venezuelans must thus confront a bitter irony. Long perceived as a client state, their country is now being recast as an American protectorate through control of its oil exports and revenues rather than through formal annexation or a ground invasion.

This is where narratives, often dismissed as mere rhetoric, become strategically imperative. Empires have always relied on stories not only to legitimize coercion before domestic and international audiences but also to shape expectations in ways that make power predictable and enforceable.

European empires in the 19th century understood this well, often cloaking imperial domination in uplifting narratives of moral duty and civilizational progress. France spoke of its “civilizing mission” (mission civilisatrice), while British imperial ideology found its most notorious expression in Rudyard Kipling’s exhortation to “take up the White Man’s burden.” In 1884, French statesman Jules Ferry articulated the imperialist logic with striking bluntness, writing that “the superior races have a right because they have a duty” to “civilize the inferior races.”

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By contrast, postwar America advanced a different narrative. President Harry Truman emphasized support for “free peoples” resisting “attempted subjugation,” while John F. Kennedy pledged to “pay any price” and “bear any burden” to “assure the survival and the success of liberty,” explicitly linking US power to shared purpose rather than imperial plunder.

That self-image was later inscribed in stone at the World War II Memorial in Washington, which declares that “Americans came to liberate, not to conquer, to restore freedom and to end tyranny.” In a farewell statement shortly before his death, Senator John McCain drew on the same tradition, describing America as “a nation of ideals, not blood and soil” that was at its strongest when it helped “liberate more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history.”

Far from being mere rhetorical flourishes, these narratives helped shape America’s postwar foreign policy, making US commitments more credible and strengthening alliances built on shared values. Crucially, they also raised the reputational cost of predation.

Trump’s emerging narrative breaks sharply with that tradition. Whereas earlier forms of imperialism relied on moral justification, he dispenses with such alibis, reducing the exercise of power to an entry on a balance sheet. Trump himself made that shift explicit in a recent New York Times interview, brushing aside international law altogether. Asked what, if anything, constrained his actions, he replied, “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” He also spoke of rebuilding Venezuela “in a very profitable way,” adding, “We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil.”

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The implications for Venezuela and the international order are profound. Rules-based narratives bind power to institutions, generating and sustaining trust. Personalist narratives, on the other hand, tie power to temperament, making it unpredictable and ultimately unreliable.

If the US wants Venezuelans – and the world – to regard its intervention as temporary and legitimate, it must impose clear structural constraints: a credible, time-bound path to elections; transparent, independently audited management of oil revenues; and a firm commitment to human rights, including the release of political prisoners. Above all, the US must recognize that its power is not self-justifying.

Absent those constraints, Venezuela will not be moving from dictatorship to democracy. Instead, it will simply be trading one form of tutelage for another.

STANFORD – US President Donald Trump’s ongoing efforts to control Venezuela’s oil rest on the assumption that the United States can successfully “run” a country twice the size of Iraq. Rather than projecting strength abroad, however, this military overreach reveals the growing vulnerability of a president whose once-firm grip on American politics is steadily weakening.

The Economic Roots of Iran’s Protests

Djavad Salehi-Isfahani sees a society caught between internal reform it does not trust and external pressure it increasingly fears.

Against this backdrop, the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro signals the beginning of a shift toward a more militarized global energy market. It also lays bare the consequences of deliberately destabilizing an oil-dependent economy. Far from resolving Venezuela’s ongoing crisis, Trump’s actions threaten to make it far worse.

Regime change in Venezuela is unlikely to end with a clear “Mission Accomplished” moment. Iraq alone required at least nine years of sustained US involvement that plunged the country into a civil war, claiming the lives of more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians and costing American taxpayers roughly $2 trillion – an expense the US can hardly afford today. This conflict would also unfold much closer to home, less than 600 miles (965 kilometers) from Puerto Rico.

Trump’s intervention raises two critical questions: Who will govern Venezuela? And who will benefit, at least in the short to medium term, from its oil wealth? In petrostates, these questions are inseparable, as the survival of their regimes – whether democratic or authoritarian – depends on their ability to capture profits generated by oil exports and distribute them to key constituencies.

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The current Venezuelan crisis sets several troubling foreign-policy precedents. Most notably, it is the first US military intervention to dispense entirely with humanitarian and security justifications in favor of an explicit resource grab.

It is also the first US military incursion into mainland South America. If past interventions in Central America and the Caribbean are any guide, it will likely result in the emergence of a criminal regime and new waves of mass migration. As with other resource-rich countries like Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, vast oil reserves will not protect Venezuela from a similar fate.

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Maduro’s removal has left Venezuela with no good options. Its divided opposition may seek a power-sharing arrangement or elections, but a civilian government led by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado is unlikely to survive for long.

That is why the Trump administration may seek regime continuity through a negotiated settlement with the most powerful elements of the Chavismo coalition. Such an arrangement would leave the armed forces, security services, and civilian militias intact. Senior military officers, handsomely rewarded for preserving the status quo, would likely remain deeply embedded in key sectors such as construction, food distribution, and petroleum.

A second, more dangerous scenario is that Maduro’s removal creates a power vacuum, fueling political and military fragmentation and triggering territorial struggles among competing armed groups and criminal organizations.

A violent struggle over territory and illicit markets could transform Venezuela from a corruption-plagued but relatively stable country into a fractured battleground resembling contemporary Libya. With its jungles, mountains, dense urban centers, and porous borders, Venezuela is particularly well suited to guerrilla warfare.

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Political fragmentation and prolonged fighting would turn the country into a center of regional instability, perhaps drawing the US into another “forever war” that air and naval forces would be unable to contain. And the allure of gaining control of Venezuela’s oil reserves would probably keep more armed groups in the fight longer.

These reserves – larger than Saudi Arabia’s and more than five times those of the US – represent enormous potential, especially for a relatively small economy with a large and dispersed population. But the operative word is potential. Even during its earlier democratic period, Venezuela’s oil sector was crippled by chronic inefficiencies. Since 1998, production has collapsed by 75%, owing to a toxic mix of low oil prices, US sanctions, corruption, and economic mismanagement.

Who, then, will benefit from what’s left of Venezuela’s oil industry? Trump has announced that Venezuela will transfer up to 50 million barrels of oil to the US, and that the revenues will remain under his personal control. He has also urged major US oil companies to enter – or re-enter – the country, promising to reimburse them for the billions of dollars required to repair its broken infrastructure. In his telling, these investments would allow Venezuela to return to major-exporter status within 18 months.

But this timeline is pure fantasy, since rebuilding Venezuela’s oil industry would require an estimated $100 billion in investment over a period of 7-10 years. As ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods put it (much to Trump’s chagrin), high levels of economic and legal uncertainty make the Venezuelan market effectively “uninvestable.”

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Herein lies the petrostate dilemma. Global oversupply, low oil prices, and a shortage of investable capital mean that Trump’s approach poses an existential risk to any Venezuelan government. Even without Maduro, the Chavista coalition remains bound together by access to oil rents, criminal networks, patronage systems, the threat of repression, and the emigration of nearly eight million potential dissidents.

Given that Chavismo’s ideological core is oil nationalism, Trump’s rhetoric could unite Venezuelans against what is widely perceived as the plundering of their country’s natural resources. That backlash is already evident, with Maduro’s opponents and allies alike condemning the US.

Venezuela’s staggering social and economic collapse during Maduro’s rule underscores the dangers of Trump’s approach. Between 2013 and 2021, the country’s economy shrank to one-quarter of its previous size; inflation is projected to exceed 680% in 2026; and 80% of the population lives in extreme poverty. Diverting Venezuelan oil revenues to the US would necessarily deprive any government of the funds needed to tackle this crisis.

Trump could, in theory, declare victory and abandon his quest to seize Venezuela’s oil. Such an outcome is of course unlikely. Trump came for the oil, and he is determined to get it. But contrary to his expectations, Maduro’s removal may push that goal further out of reach, destabilizing the region and accelerating Trump’s own domestic decline.

MOSCOW – Russia’s patriotic bloggers and war correspondents – the group most supportive of the country’s “special military operation” in Ukraine – are outraged. US President Donald Trump’s administration has sent forces to attack Russian ally Venezuela, kidnapping its president, Nicolás Maduro, and seizing an oil tanker flying the Russian flag. Russia should be sinking American ships, they cry, or even launching nuclear missiles at its enemies. But Russian President Vladimir Putin has not even issued an official statement.

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To be sure, the foreign ministry – without a hint of irony – condemned America’s “armed aggression” against Venezuela as an “unacceptable violation of the sovereignty of an independent state.” Moreover, Putin rarely reacts immediately to major events, preferring to observe how they unfold and calibrate his response accordingly. This approach sometimes comes across as shrewd and confident, though in this case it may betray a sense of weakness – or at least profound uncertainty.

Before the attack on Venezuela, Putin appeared rather confident about Russia’s position in Ukraine. Trump was promoting a “peace plan” with a clear bias toward Russia and putting considerable pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to withdraw Ukrainian forces from territories they control. Add to that Russia’s repeated strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, which have led to constant power outages in the dead of winter, and Putin was convinced that Ukraine would soon be ready to accept its peace terms.

But the Trump administration’s recent actions have cast doubt on Putin’s assessment. The US still says that peace in Ukraine remains a priority, and its recent promise of security guarantees for Ukraine will not involve US boots on the ground – something that Russia would strongly oppose. While intercepting a Russian tanker can be interpreted as an attempt to humiliate Putin, the Trump administration claims that it was actually a Venezuelan ship, which flew a Russian flag to evade capture, and the US released the two Russian crew members.

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Nonetheless, the Trump administration is undoubtedly unhappy with Russia’s refusal fully to embrace the peace plan it put forward in November. Trump has now reportedly “greenlit” long-delayed legislation that would impose tough new sanctions on Russia and raise tariffs on countries that knowingly purchase Russian oil or uranium as high as 500%.

While Putin certainly does not relish any appearance of weakness, nor does he want to risk exacerbating tensions with the US – hence his silence. But his willingness to be pushed around has its limits. The question is whether the Trump administration will prove pushy enough to find out what those limits are.

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Many Western observers think that now is the time to tighten the screws on Russia, not only by ramping up sanctions, but also by supplying Ukraine with more weapons and targeting Russia’s “shadow fleet,” a network of oil tankers that use deceptive tactics to evade Western sanctions. Zelensky has gone so far as to encourage Trump implicitly to replicate his Venezuelan playbook not only in Russia, but also in Chechnya.

While the idea that Trump would send US forces into Russia is fanciful, the apparent success of the operation in Venezuela has emboldened the hawks in his inner circle. “We’re a superpower,” Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, recently insisted, and “we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”

This bullying mentality increases the chances that the US will cross a line that Putin deems unacceptable – say, by targeting large numbers of Russian oil ships, attempting to impose draconian peace terms on Russia, or encouraging unrest, as it is doing in Iran.

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Putin has few options for retaliation against the US. If the US Navy wants to seize an oil tanker, having Russian armed guards on board, or even positioning Russian warships nearby, will not stop it. Russia’s only real leverage is its nuclear arsenal. And while Putin can always issue a nuclear ultimatum to Trump, it might not be taken seriously. Russian threats could carry more weight if they were issued in concert with a military power like China, but China has plenty of other levers – including control over the global supply of rare-earth elements – that it can use against the US.

Nonetheless, Putin has already resorted to nuclear saber-rattling. If he is pushed to the point that he decides that his only option is to launch a nuclear attack, the US will undoubtedly respond in kind. As long as the Ukraine war continues, the risk of an apocalyptic scenario will remain elevated.

As for Zelensky, he should watch his back. Putin might not want to confront Trump, but following the US capture of Maduro, he might decide to show that Russia has the skills to do the same to its enemies, especially after the alleged drone attack on Putin’s residence in the northern Novgorod region. While Ukraine has denied any involvement in that assault, accusing Russia of attempting to derail peace talks by emphasizing it, Russia has pledged to retaliate. In any case, Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure will continue – as will Putin’s silence on Venezuela.

WASHINGTON, DC – Iranians have taken to the streets to protest the collapse of the country’s currency and surging inflation, with many calling for an end to the Islamic Republic. Yet the government’s response has differed from earlier waves of unrest. Whereas Iran’s rulers were quick to suppress the 2009 Green Movement and the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, the security forces were slow to react as the current protests intensified. Rather than brutally cracking down, President Masoud Pezeshkian initially responded with belt-tightening reforms to free up funds for subsidies to the poor.

The Economic Roots of Iran’s Protests

Djavad Salehi-Isfahani sees a society caught between internal reform it does not trust and external pressure it increasingly fears.

But this stopgap didn’t hold. While the poor may have been mollified, those in the middle rungs of society bore the costs and joined the protests in greater numbers. What started as an expression of economic discontent soon became a political uprising. Only after protests erupted across the country on January 8 did the regime clamp down in earnest.

Why was the reaction to political dissent so different this time? The current protests are taking place in the shadow of Iran’s 12-day war with Israel last June. Iranian officials are still reeling from the conflict and operating on the assumption that it could resume at any time. That threat looms larger than domestic political unrest, because Israel’s battering of Hezbollah and the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria have left Iran with little deterrence against foreign intervention.

Adding insult to injury, Iran is no longer able to prevent foreign actors from boosting popular discontent at home. During the June 2025 war, Iranians did rally to the flag, and the regime reacted by relaxing its enforcement of religious rules, most notably regarding hijabs. But the current protests pose a dilemma: cracking down too hard could undo the fragile understanding that the regime forged with the population after the war, while letting them grow could invite foreign intervention.

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Iran’s worsening economy has also been a decisive factor. A combination of mismanagement, corruption, and crippling sanctions has caused rampant inflation and unemployment, steadily weakening the middle class and expanding the ranks of the struggling poor. The June war accelerated these trends. In the six months following it, the rial lost over 40% of its value and inflation surged by as much as 60%. With many assuming that the hobbling of Iran’s nuclear program had reduced its leverage to negotiate sanctions relief, capital flight soon followed.

Thus, as Iran’s rulers see it, the economic plight that has brought protesters to the streets is deeply intertwined with the external threat facing the country. They remember that during last year’s war, Israel called on ordinary Iranians to revolt. The Israelis calculated that eliminating dozens of senior military commanders and battering military and security institutions would encourage Iran’s restless population to rise up and overwhelm the beleaguered state. When that didn’t happen, Iran’s leaders were the first to acknowledge that they had survived the war thanks to their people. But it also became clear to them that a popular uprising was part of Israel’s war strategy, and this realization informs their view of the current protests.

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These suspicions were confirmed when US President Donald Trump recently took to social media to declare that the United States is “locked and loaded,” ready to intervene to “rescue” Iranian protesters from a violent crackdown. The real threat of the protests lies not in what Iranians can achieve on their own, but in whether they can serve to justify US military action against Iran.

The obvious parallels are to Libya and Syria during the Arab Spring, when the US and some European governments invoked a “responsibility to protect” protesters to justify military intervention. These popular uprisings quickly morphed into foreign-led regime-change efforts, ultimately leading to civil war and state collapse. Notably, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is filled with veterans of the Syria conflict. They witnessed firsthand how quickly peaceful protests with external support can precipitate civil war. The imperative to avoid Libya and Syria’s fate is the driving force behind Iranian decision-making today.

Yet another factor in Iranian leaders’ thinking is the US capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Like everyone else around the world, Iran’s rulers were stunned. This was not the kind of regime change that America had carried out in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s, and pursued in Libya and Syria a decade later. Rather than committing troops or advocating nation-building, the Trump administration has left the Chavista power structure in place, demanding that it submit to American imperial control or face economic strangulation.

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Could the US pursue a similar strategy against the Islamic Republic? If so, it might try to launch a precision military strike to kill Iran’s Supreme Leader and key political and military leaders, capture Iranian oil tankers on the high seas, and then demand that whatever is left of the Islamic Republic accede to its demands (which would include abandoning its nuclear and missile programs and handing over control of its natural resources). Even short of killing Iranian leaders, an American strategy of bombing and oil-export interdiction could bring the regime to its knees.

Faced with these scenarios, Iran’s immediate response was to point to the potential costs of US aggression. On January 6, the Iranian Defense Council revised its strategic posture, announcing that Iran may pursue “preemptive measures” if faced with “objective signs of threat.” Although a preemptive strike on US targets in the Middle East would surely invite a war that Iran does not want, and could well be the end of the regime, the Islamic Republic cannot afford to give the impression that defeating it would be cost-free.

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Even if Iran can avoid a direct confrontation with the US, however, and even if the current wave of protests subsides, the country’s economy is in a downward spiral. That means public anger will only grow over the medium and long term. The Islamic Republic is in a vise, squeezed by the external threat from the US and Israel and the internal threat of a mass uprising. There is no easy escape from this impasse. A total collapse of the Islamic Republic is not necessarily imminent, but Iran’s revolution is now nearing its end.

BOSTON – The Trump administration’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro marks a watershed for international law and the global order. Of course, this isn’t the first time that the United States has intervened in another country’s internal affairs. Such moves were not uncommon during the Cold War. Even as that era was nearing its end, in December 1989, the US toppled Panama’s de facto ruler, Manuel Noriega, who was also charged with drug trafficking.

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But in all these previous cases, there was a critical difference from Maduro’s capture. Past US actions, even when cynical and driven by nothing but realpolitik, had a different veneer. During the Cold War, American democracy and institutions, however imperfect, were preferable to Soviet repression. Before Donald Trump, US presidents could plausibly claim to be defending democracy and supporting a “rules-based order,” and the US itself still had functioning institutions to check the executive and authorize foreign interventions.

Yes, the veneer was always thin. In several cases – such as the 1960 toppling of Patrice Lumumba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the 1953 coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, and support for brutal dictatorships across Latin America (from Nicaragua’s Somoza regime to General Augusto Pinochet’s government in Chile) – the defense of democracy was little more than a euphemism.

But in these cases, the CIA’s unlawful activities were ultimately investigated by the Senate, such as in the famous Church Committee hearings of 1975. Because US institutions and political norms were far more robust than they are today, congressional oversight could not be stopped or defanged. The CIA was reined in, at least for a while.

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Maduro’s forceful extraction represents something new, partly because US institutions have become much weaker and less democratic, but also because the veneer of legitimacy has been stripped off. All that remains is selfish, narrow self-interest.

To be sure, Maduro was a brutal dictator who repressed the Venezuelan population, wrecked the economy, rigged elections, and jailed and killed political opponents. Human Rights Watch (certainly no mouthpiece for the US government) and the United Nations have both documented a significant number of extrajudicial killings sanctioned by Maduro. Almost eight million people have fled Venezuela to escape his reign of terror and economic incompetence.

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Still, it remains to be seen what evidence the Trump administration actually has to support its claim that Maduro was a drug kingpin. Trump’s frequent talk of Venezuelan oil and of the money that US companies supposedly stand to make signals to everyone that this wasn’t about helping ordinary Venezuelans or bolstering democracy. It was about nakedly advancing US and American corporate interests. The fact that the administration has provisionally backed Maduro’s own vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, rather than opposition politicians who commanded the most public support in past elections, further confirms this interpretation.

Of course, fighting communism during the Cold War was about US interests, too, as was the cultivation of client regimes such as in the DRC (under Mobutu Sese Seko) and Chile (under Pinochet’s military rule). But the equation changes once arguments about improving the lives of a country’s people have been fully abandoned and only financial motives remain.

All this is happening, moreover, at a time when the US is suffering its own crisis of democracy. Trump’s gutting of institutions makes it even more difficult to imagine that he and his henchmen will ever be held accountable for their lawlessness. Yet when a country is capable of unilaterally deposing foreign leaders at its discretion, the only constraints on it must be self-imposed.

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So much for the “rules-based order,” then. Implicit in this term was that the rules would be set and largely enforced by the US, which was playing its natural role as the world’s hegemon. But the US today is not a hegemon. Its soft power has declined considerably over the last several decades, especially after Trump arrived on the scene, and China has emerged as a credible economic, military, and technological rival. That means a new approach must underpin any vision of a rules-based order.

The philosopher Michael Walzer has suggested one possibility. He argued more than 45 years ago that in international relations, one should start with the presumption that rulers in every state are “legitimate.” The very fact that a people are putting up with their government, and that the government has emerged from a country’s own history and culture, should lead outsiders to presume “that there exists a certain ‘fit’ between the community and its government.”

Of course, there will be cases where the presumption proves untenable, such as if a government carries out genocide against its own people. But the point is that there should be a high bar for rejecting the default position. Moreover, the process of concluding that a government has lost legitimacy should be multilateral, and preferably carried out through some well-specified supranational institutional structure. The matter should not be unilaterally decided by a single country. And the judgment itself should be independent from whatever decisions (military or otherwise) follow from it, so that no single institution can act as prosecutor, judge, and executioner.

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The UN General Assembly or Security Council may or may not be up to this task. If they are not, a new international institution would be needed. Either way, the pre-Trump equilibrium was untenable because it allowed the US unilaterally to judge other governments’ legitimacy and move against them. Trump has taken off the mask and pushed this reality to the limit. If and when we get to a post-Trump world, we should remember these lessons and strive to create a global order that rests on sound philosophical foundations and fairer institutions.

NEW YORK – Last November, US President Donald Trump’s administration declared in its National Security Strategy that Europe stands on the brink of “civilizational erasure.” It was an odd claim to make in an official strategy document. Even stranger was the overarching argument that Europe, not China or Russia, is the main problem for the United States today. Europeans are apparently committing societal suicide by allowing in immigrants: “Certain NATO members” are destined to become “majority non-European,” the document portends.

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Trump is not just alarmed by what he thinks is going on in Europe. He previously warned that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the US.

Neither the fear that Western civilization might soon be lost, nor the concern about the purity of bloodlines, is new. German reactionaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were obsessed with these topics.

The West, in their eyes, was weak, decadent, shallow, materialistic, and undermined by “racial chaos.” The vital German people, on the other hand, were rooted in blood and soil and prepared to sacrifice material comforts and even their lives for the sake of the nation. That spirit, the thinking went, could save Europe from its civilizational downfall by purging the continent of the noxious ideas associated with French republicanism, as well as British liberalism and commercialism. They saw Germany as a nation of warriors at odds with nations of shopkeepers.

These radical German nationalists viewed the US as the worst offender in the West: a country where liberalism, shallow materialism, addiction to comfort, commercialism, and, above all, “racial chaos” reigned. They believed that Jews and other “inferior” and “undesirable” races could buy US citizenship for a fistful of dollars.

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What is happening now is a peculiar shift of perspective. America’s current leadership defines itself in opposition to Europe’s liberalism, relative openness to immigrants, rule of law, and lack of a warrior spirit. And just as some early-20th-century German nationalists regarded Russia (later the Soviet Union) as a useful ally against more liberal European countries, the Trump administration views Russia and Hungary as friends united against a common enemy.

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There are several reasons for this role reversal. Even though America symbolized everything German and other European chauvinists hated in the early 20th century, similar strains of anti-immigrant, antisemitic nativism existed in the US, too. Aviator Charles Lindbergh espoused an isolationist and racialist America First agenda in the 1930s, as did the reactionary radio priest Father Charles E. Coughlin and several Republican politicians. But US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the horrors of Hitler’s Third Reich, brought such ideas into disrepute.

Trump’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement has, however, turned that once-discredited ideology into Republican Party dogma. That is why Trump feels more comfortable with Russian President Vladimir Putin than with democratic European leaders like German Chancellor Friedrich Merz or French President Emmanuel Macron. He admires Putin’s exercise of raw, unconstrained power, and shares his ideological hostility to liberal ideas.

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MAGA’s anti-Europe fervor is also a populist reaction to educated American elites’ affinity for European style and high culture. This inclination is regarded, not always without reason, as an expression of snobbery, of looking down on “ordinary Americans” who – like the current president – prefer a hamburger to foie gras.

But there is an older, more profound reason why Europe is particularly loathed, not just by the MAGA crowd, but by Trump’s far-right admirers on the continent. German nativists, as well as like-minded nationalists in other countries, used to associate Franco-British-American liberalism with Roman imperialism, which was regarded as an attempt to foist common rules onto disparate European tribes. Such supranational empires aspired to a kind of universalism, where people were defined by citizenship, not blood.

The European Union is, in some ways, the natural heir to the Roman Empire. And so was Pax Americana – the “rules-based international order” imposed by the US – whose values were regarded by many Americans as universal. But the informal US empire is backed by overwhelming military force, whereas the EU, under the protection of American warriors, is a union of merchants.

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The raison d’être of postwar European unity has been to prevent another war by replacing nationalist passion with commercial interest. The EU is nothing if not a rules-based community. Law, not ethnicity, is at its core. This is why right-wing politicians such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom hate the bloc. While Trump is trying his best to undermine the rule of law in his own country, his foreign policy aims to cultivate “patriots” – namely, the far right – to do the same in Europe, in the name of stopping its “civilizational decline.”

As a result, liberal Europe confronts a paradox. To protect a community of nation-states built on the rule of law and a common trade regime, the EU must be able to defend itself against outside attempts to destroy it. This means that a community of merchants must inject itself with some of the warrior spirit it was designed, after 1945, to erase.

TORONTO – The United States has now extracted Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela and detained him in New York, with President Donald Trump claiming that the US will “run” the country. While shocking, nothing about this calamity is new: it recalls four precedents that can help us see elements of the present that otherwise may be shrouded by propaganda or emotion.

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For starters, there is the long history of US intervention in Latin America, based on an implicit, if self-proclaimed, right to choose the region’s leaders. During the Cold War, installing a leader or government approved by US officials was typically dressed up as a pro-democracy crusade, with the logic being that America’s main motivation was to stop communism, which was anti-democratic.

This time around, there is no pretense that democracy is the goal. Maduro and his allies stole Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election. But instead of punishing him for that very real crime, the Trump administration prefers the essentially fictional charge of “narco-terrorism.” And while Venezuela has a legitimately elected president, Edmundo González, there is no sign that he, or the opposition more generally, figures into the US administration’s plans.

Consider that after Maduro’s capture, Trump dismissed the courageous opposition leader and 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado as a “nice woman” who lacks support and respect in Venezuela. Given this, it is worth revisiting the US-backed extraction last month of Machado, who had been living in hiding in Venezuela since the 2024 election. At the time, many thought that the Trump administration was helping her attend the Nobel ceremony in Oslo. Now it looks much more like an effort to neutralize a popular politician and clear the way for a form of American imperialism directed against Venezuelans.

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But this particular imperialist project is even more ill-conceived than most. Trump appears to be offering Venezuela’s oil to American energy firms (similar to how past US administrations chose leaders in Latin America who supported US business interests), explaining the whole operation in terms of the money to be made. But there is little profit in Venezuelan oil in the short run; tapping its potential would require huge long-term investments – which in turn depend on political stability.

Another obvious precedent is the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a turning point for US power. The invasion was predicated on the idea that defeating an army, deposing a bad ruler, and dismantling compromised institutions would be enough to create the conditions for a better, more democratic government. As a result, President George W. Bush’s administration barely planned for the country’s political future, and the American occupiers were reduced to cooperating with the people they claimed to have overthrown. By the end of the US occupation of the country, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and around 4,500 Americans, had been killed, and US credibility was in tatters.

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In the case of Venezuela, there is a similar belief that simply removing a dictator will bring about the desired outcome. But the Venezuelan army has not been defeated, and Maduro’s government remains in power. Insofar as the Trump administration has a plan, it is that Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez can run the show for the Americans, even though she is no more legitimate when backed by US violence. For her part, Rodríguez has denounced Maduro’s kidnapping as illegal and claimed that it had “Zionist overtones.”

The third precedent is more recent: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It was striking to hear Trump describe the snatching of Maduro as an “extraordinary military operation,” because Russian President Vladimir Putin used eerily similar language in his speech announcing the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

Putin deliberately exploited and ridiculed international law, claiming that Russia’s aggression was justified by the United Nations Charter. Russia has worked hard to create a world in which every country treats the UN Charter as a joke, so the fact that the Trump administration made no effort to justify its actions in Venezuela in terms of international law is a victory for the Kremlin, even if it is displeased by this particular case.

It is worth noting that the US intervention, although clearly an act of war, seems to have been a long-term CIA plan that was implemented with support from the US military. Trump’s portrayal of this intelligence operation as “an assault like people have not seen since World War II” is absurd. It also points to the last precedent: The wars that legitimized fascist regimes before their defeat in 1945.

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Fascists in Germany, Italy, and Romania justified their dictatorships on the grounds that their political opponents were acting in the service of foreign enemies and international conspiracies. Moreover, these regimes fought wars to bring the external and the internal enemy into alignment – it was much easier to oppress domestic dissidents when the population was at war.

By charging Maduro with drug-related felonies, rather than for more serious (and far easier to prove) crimes like extra-judicial killings and torture, the Trump administration is uniting the external and the internal enemy. Because the drug trade involves foreign and domestic actors, Trump can spin a story about his political opponents being pawns in an international plot. A Trumpian “war on drugs” might be used to create a larger domestic security apparatus, much like the panic over migrants has led to a massive expansion of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

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Trump wants the political gains of fighting a war without actually having to fight one. In his telling, the US military performed magic in Venezuela, and the story is over.

But where Putin understands that fascism requires real combat, Trump seems unwilling or unable to go that far, not least because he is weak at home. Americans can take action to prevent Trump’s “extraordinary military operation” – which is more about regime change in the US than in Venezuela – from accelerating their country’s slide toward authoritarianism, so long as they recognize the domestic political logic behind Trump’s foreign intervention.