“Kamala [Harris] leaning all in on starting many new bloody wars in the Middle East,” wrote Stephen Miller on X, adding in a different post: “Kamala’s closing pitch: INVADE THE MIDDLE EAST!” And again: “Trump will end and prevent war in the Middle East.” Laura Loomer — the 9/11 truther and Mar-a-Lago regular — warned that a Harris presidency would not only saturate the White House with the scent of curry, but risk triggering “WORLD WAR III.”

Yet MAGA today is arguably the most hawkish faction on the American scene. Its ideologues — not least Stephen Miller and Laura Loomer — braid a run of unrelated conflicts, foreign and domestic, into a single struggle against what the administration calls “Third Worldism”: a nebulous enemy category encompassing Iran and the Eurasian great powers, Latin American Leftists and drug-traffickers, Somali migrants, and the Zohran Mamdani wing of the Democratic Party.

The bitter truth, especially for those of us who once saw promise in conservative populism, is that the movement was always structurally vulnerable to this turn.

Eighteen months in office, the second Trump administration has waged a full-on war with Iran, while largely abandoning the diplomatic track on Ukraine. Team Trump, moreover, has racked up various “smaller” interventions: regime change in Venezuela (and, perhaps soon, Cuba); bombings in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, Ecuador; and a lawless campaign of strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific that has killed more than 200. 

More from this author

The triumph of Lindsey Graham

By Sohrab Ahmari

How did we get here?

Part of it has to do with the nature of the Republican Party and its mighty donor class. The “restraint” faction — conservatives who advocate a lighter footprint abroad, or who insist that Washington conserve scarce resources for the rivalry with China — locked down many national-security jobs in the new administration. But assistant secretaries of this-and-that don’t write checks, and they can’t get the commander in chief on the phone the way, say, Miriam Adelson, the casino heiress and pro-Israel mega-donor, can.

Then there is GOP coalitional politics. The South has been a party stronghold since the 1960s at the presidential level and, since the ’90s, down the ballot. As blue states and cities have declined, the region has drawn people, capital, dynamism, and, with them, political power. As the writer Michael Lind has noted, the South is also home to a more martial culture than much of the country (the late Sen. Lindsey Graham was no aberration).

Florida, especially, exerts an immense gravitational pull. It is no accident that Loomer — who has recently emerged as a champion of Ukraine after years of disparaging the country and its cause — is Florida-based. So are a host of other hawkish voices: The Babylon Bee, the satirical-ish evangelical magazine; the podcaster Dave Rubin; and many smaller stars in the pro-war constellation. And that’s not to mention Florida’s Cuban-exile population, whose omni-hawkish worldview the GOP must serve to win in the Sunshine State. For many of these figures, the “war” is one long front stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Black Sea, and from thence to the Caribbean. 

But the deepest factor is ideological. Populism, almost by definition, needs an enemy — a “hegemonic formation,” as the Left theorist Chantal Mouffe puts it, against which to organize mass political energy. During his first presidential bid, Trump aimed his followers’ oppositional energy mostly against the bipartisan elites who had plunged America into pointless forever wars in the Middle East, while abandoning the working class to the vagaries of corporate globalization.

All along, though, there was another side to Trump and MAGA — the one whose critique of porous borders, a perfectly legitimate populist issue, veered into talk of immigrants as “rapists.” Beginning in the first term, as Trumpism was translated into governance, the economic populism mostly fell by the wayside. His sole legislative achievement back then was a tax cut for corporations and the wealthiest Americans. This partly owed to Trump’s own plutocratic instincts, and partly to the familiar personnel and sheer inertia of the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, the Right’s best-organized institutions set about healing these ruptures — refitting populism to the old agenda of oligarchic economics and pro-Israel hawkery. The National Conservatism conferences, Project 2025, and the like: in retrospect, all served this purpose.

An example is MAGA’s treatment of Big Tech. The populist problem with Big Tech had once been its overweening market power and lack of accountability; but slowly that objection morphed into decrying the use to which the firms put that domination: namely, promoting “wokeness.” Once Elon Musk owned Twitter, renamed X, the lopsided power he exercised over the platform ceased to be a problem at all. And where the MAGA Right had once faulted the “pro-war uniparty” of the Bushes and the Clintons for diving head-first into Mideast quagmires, the rhetoric shifted beginning in the second Trump administration: the sin now isn’t the breaking of nations, but bothering to rebuild afterward or pretending to care about democracy in Muslim lands.

I encountered a version of the latter firsthand, while profiling Pete Hegseth, the then-newly confirmed secretary of defense, aboard his plane on a visit to migrant-processing operations at Gitmo. He and his closest aides were keen to have me know that Hegseth is a former soldier who had learned the lessons of the post-9/11 wars. At the time, I took this to mean opposition to ill-defined missions and overreach abroad. In fact, it meant no longer bothering with even the pretense to moral universalism that had guided the earlier conflicts. Now we just blow stuff up — this, it turns out, is the “new” in the “New Right.”

Suggested reading

Inside national conservatism’s civil war

By James Billot

If this newly reconstituted Right isn’t in the business of doing real populism — if it indeed enjoys the backing of the likes of Jeff Bezos and Musk — then against whom can it organize its energies? Already, in the early 2020s, one could see the pseudo-populist elements of the Right road-testing “woke communism”: a category that framed the assistant professor scraping by on $30,000 a year as a subversive “elite” (while Musk came across as a subaltern hero).

More recently, the Right has settled on “Third Worldism” — a term that appears no fewer than 40 times in a new State Department document on “Cuba: The Capital of 21st-Century Communism,” which elevates the puny and faltering Havana regime into a powerful enemy state that could endanger the American way of life at any minute.

The Third Worldist menace is vaguely brown, vaguely communistic, and much easier to “do” something about than confronting the internal contradictions that wrack working- and lower-middle-class America. To deal with Third Worldism abroad, you don’t have to marshal bills through Congress and strike careful compromises with Democrats. You can just fire off missiles — foreign and defense policy being the area in which the president and the executive branch enjoy a near-unchecked latitude, at least as the Constitution has been interpreted for the better part of a century. 

And it can justify a lot: brutalizing migrants almost as enemy combatants, calls to denaturalize the likes of Mamdani and Rep. Ilhan Omar, a grinding, aimless new war in the Persian Gulf — all while covering over the failure to shift the immigration system to a skills-based one, say, or to renew the industrial base.

There is only one problem. Taken to its logical terminus, this ideological agenda will bring the United States much closer to a total conflict — World War III, if we must use Trumpy language — than anything contemplated by even old-school hawkish strategists like Robert Kagan, William Kristol, and Max Boot. Let alone that warmonger of Miller’s and Loomer’s 2024-era nightmares — Kamala Harris.

Trump’s personalist rule over the MAGA GOP, meanwhile, is increasingly bound up with the pro-Israel cause. And indeed, it was just these two forces — MAGA and pro-Israel hard-liners — that came for Massie, a principled libertarian in the Ron and Rand Paul mold, who opposes the war with Iran and has called for cutting all foreign aid, including to the Jewish state.

The GOP under Trump has ideological underpinnings, but fealty to Trump comes first. That is the only tangible reality. As Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) put it on X, “This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party. The rest of us get the privilege of living in it.” Fine — who combines such utter servility to Trump with grossly anti-Muslim rhetoric (“the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one”) — fits in much better with the second Trump term than the independent-minded Massie ever could.

And Massie realized what he was up against. It wasn’t only that Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL, was personally recruited by Trump to run against him. It was the money: more than $34 million poured into the primary, much of it funding anti-Massie attack ads by pro-Israel groups, making this the most expensive House primary in US history. Combined with Trump’s frothing opposition, and anti-Massie messaging from the likes of Pete Hegseth, it was enough to easily sink him.

Rarely has a House primary been about one person (rather than an opposition between two of them). Several months ago, Trump said publicly that he just wanted a “warm body to beat Massie.” Gallrein made it clear he would happily serve in that role, promising to back Trump 100% of the time. That was all there was to it. He granted almost no interviews, and declined numerous debate invitations from Massie. Here was a foot soldier for Trump, going against a Republican who was willing, time after time, to go his own way.

More from this author

The Zohran Mamdani I know

By ross barkan

Trump reviled the Kentucky libertarian for holding up a Covid relief bill in 2020; for voting against the “Big, Beautiful Bill” tax-and-spending package; and for leading the bipartisan fight to force the Justice Department to release the Epstein Files. For Trump, that last was the point of no return. Massie would have to suffer for linking up with Democrats like Rep. Ro Khanna of California in a bid to seek the truth about the late convicted sex offender.

If, for the president, Epstein was the breaking point, Massie’s greatest political challenge was defying the traditional American foreign-policy consensus. Unlike most Republican politicians, Massie was willing to be a principled isolationist. His conservatism on domestic matters translated to a deep skepticism of foreign entanglements, and he was the rare Republican to criticize Benjamin Netanyahu. He voted against a House resolution condemning the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel and also opposed Iron Dome funding. Hence why AIPAC and Republican Jewish groups made it their priority to wipe out Massie. AIPAC gloated over his defeat: “Being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics!”

Why, exactly, were they so motivated? For Israel hawks, the Republican Party is their true last stand. The Democratic Party isn’t totally lost to them, but they can read enough polling data: in five or 10 years, there may not be any politicians like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer left: powerful Democrats who offer unstinting support for the Jewish state. Not very long ago, almost every top Democrat attended the AIPAC conference and delighted in landing a speaking slot. In 2016, when Bernie Sanders refused, his decision was considered mildly scandalous. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, had been a proud attendee.

Those days are over. Several potential presidential candidates have said already that they’d refuse AIPAC donations. Democrats have turned on the organization for its backing of Republicans and its willingness to bludgeon Democrats who deviate from the Netanyahu orthodoxy in any fashion and even to the mildest degree. Even more centrist-minded Democrats, like former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, have called for limiting military aid; California Gov. Gavin Newsom described Israel as an apartheid state before walking it back (sort of).

Many Democrats, too, see the triumph of Zohran Mamdani, a pro-Palestine mayor who supports BDS, as a watershed moment, and evidence that it’s possible to win elections while defying the Israel lobby. Mamdani won in New York, the most Jewish city in America.

With Republicans under age 50 turning against the Jewish state, the possible proliferation of Massie-esque Republicans is an existential threat to the Israel hawks, and they will continue to pummel politicians to ensure the GOP will keep sounding like Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton, and Ted Cruz. The defeat of Massie promises, at the minimum, that Republicans will think twice before breaking with Israel in any fashion. It’s not that regular voters care all that much — it’s the money, so much of it, ready to deployed at a moment’s notice to annihilate any Republican who steps out of line.

How long that lasts is the real question. For now, Israel hawks unquestionably dominate the Republican Party. What about 2036? 2046?

The hawks have proved, in Kentucky, that they can overwhelm a House primary with unprecedented amounts of cash. But they haven’t yet shifted the attitudes of young conservatives, many of whom are either isolationist — they take the slogan “America First” seriously — or veer into anti-Semitism, like the Groypers who follow Nick Fuentes. Anti-Israel or Israel-skeptical conservative commentators including Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, and Tucker Carlson are undoubtedly on the ascent, while traditional hawks like Ben Shapiro are seeing their enterprises shrink. The conservative grassroots, whether animated by old-fashioned hatred of Jews or straightforward opposition to foreign-policy entanglements, is not supporting the Shapiro-style Republican. If they still, largely, back Trump, they’re weary of the Iran war and don’t understand how America benefits.

Suggested reading

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s purity trap

By Sohrab Ahmari

It’s not obvious, yet, what the post-Trump Republican Party looks like. Neoconservatives and hawks have had a resurgence in Trump’s second term. Led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, they’ve emerged as true power brokers, while JD Vance, who used to represent the party’s isolationist wing, has been forced to accept a war in Iran he might not have backed were he president. Massie has, for the most part, been the outlier, playing the gadfly role occupied by the likes of Ron Paul in past decades.

But it’s Massie’s vision, as marginal as it is, that may point to the future of the Republican Party — or a future, at least. Not all GOP voters are as strongly libertarian as he is, but as the current cohort of Gen-Z ages, more will probably be receptive to his message in the coming years. A recent New York Times/Siena poll found that while a vast majority of Republicans still back Trump, 37% want to see the party’s next nominee “move in a different direction.” Notably, 45% of Republicans believe “it is best for the United States to be active in world affairs to maintain security and prosperity,” while half say that “they want the country to pay less attention to problems overseas.”

When Trump exits the scene, those viewpoints will remain. Trump won his first election, after all, excoriating the Republicans who’d championed the Iraq War. If he broke his campaign promises, he still retained control of the base thanks to his magnetism. But future Republicans won’t have the same power. One day, a vacuum will open up. Unfortunately for Massie, that day isn’t here yet. It’s Trump’s Republican Party. MAGA apostates don’t have a place in it. For now.

It has been a busy few weeks for Claude: its ever-improving coding capabilities were also credited with wiping trillions off software stocks (dubbed the SaaSpocalypse). Now, one of these developments Anthropic’s leadership was, presumably, very happy about. The other, rather less so. For months, Anthropic has been trying to maintain some say over how it is used. While the company is reportedly willing to loosen its usage restrictions, it still wants assurances that Claude wouldn’t be deployed for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons systems. These demands are not out of character. They are the founding commitments of a company whose CEO, Dario Amodei, has staked its identity on being the responsible actor in an industry not known for responsibility. Indeed, Anthropic is a company that has pushed for greater regulation at a moment when the White House has made deregulation the centerpiece of its AI agenda.

That tension has been building since last summer, when Anthropic was awarded a $200 million Pentagon contract, making it the first AI model developer deployed in classified military operations. But it was the Maduro raid that brought it to a head. First reported in Axios last week, the Pentagon’s response to Anthropic’s concerns has not been an apology, but an ultimatum. Grant us unrestricted rights to your models, or be designated a “supply chain risk” — a label normally reserved for foreign enemies like Huawei. This is the American state telling a private company that its ethics are a threat to national security. That its values are, in the language of trade policy, a hostile act. Not only would this see Anthropic’s contracts with the Pentagon voided, it would force other companies that work with the Pentagon to certify they aren’t using Claude in those workflows.

Suggested Reading

How Big Tech killed literary culture

By Nicholas Carr

The writing had been on the wall for weeks. Secretary of War Hegseth had already made this explicit at a January event announcing the Pentagon’s new partnership with Elon Musk’s xAI. Back then, he announced that the agency would not “employ AI models that won’t allow you to fight wars“. He was talking about Anthropic. This week, the rhetoric led to a physical confrontation. Hegseth has summoned Dario Amodei to the E-Ring for a Tuesday morning meeting that senior Defense officials described as a “sh*t-or-get-off-the-pot” moment. According to reports, Hegseth said: “The problem with Dario is, with him, it’s ideological. We know who we’re dealing with.”

In the meeting, Hegseth reportedly told Amodei that when the Pentagon buys a Boeing plane, Boeing doesn’t get to tell them where to fly it. He set a Friday 5pm deadline to sign away their “safety filters”. Officials have even discussed invoking the Defense Production Act, which enables the government to exert control over domestic industries during national security crises. This would move beyond a contract dispute into a form of digital nationalization, giving the government the authority to essentially seize control of the technology and strip away the guardrails themselves.

Regardless of Anthropic’s decision on Friday, the state is making it clear: AI is no longer a product; it is a requisitionable resource. Now, ideological clashes in AI are nothing new (rumor has it that Musk built xAI to stop “woke AI” from ruining his mission to Mars). But the transition we’re seeing is from a boardroom culture war to an existential test of state sovereignty. In the 2010s, tech CEOs were treated like heads of state. Today, they are being reminded that their “safety filters” and private ethics cannot dictate American foreign policy. The state has reclaimed the veto.

This is a far cry from the world Alex Karp himself pitched to the tech world last year in his bestselling book, The Technological Republic. In it, Karp argued that Silicon Valley had a civic obligation to re-engage with the American state. Not because it was forced to, but because liberal democracy required it. It was a rallying cry for voluntary partnership: from software to hard power.

Silicon Valley’s old California ideology — apolitical, libertarian and vaguely utopian — was dying. Karp wanted to replace it with something more serious. In his view, the world’s best minds were busy building phone apps and marketing algorithms. Brilliant people, Karp argued, wasting their talents on shiny new toys while China built weapons.

His diagnosis is correct, but it is not without its flaws. If you accept his premise that Silicon Valley must serve the state because the stakes are existential, then voluntary cooperation was always going to struggle. The higher the stakes, the less the state was ever going to ask nicely. When Oppenheimer told Truman he had blood on his hands after Hiroshima, Truman’s response was withering: “He hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it.” Dario Amodei is not Oppenheimer. But both the logic and the tension are the same. Like nuclear, the ability to deploy AI at scale is likely going to be the defining strategic capability of the 21st century. Karp wanted a new Manhattan Project. In many ways, he got one.

This is what the White House’s AI Action Plan makes plain. It mandates that the government will only contract with frontier AI developers whose models are deemed free from “ideological bias”. Anthropic’s safety filters are precisely what they had in mind when they wrote this. The Pentagon’s ultimatum is not a departure from policy. It is the policy. The truth is that Karp’s book never truly specified what voluntary cooperation would actually require. Now the Pentagon has filled in the blank. The answer is that cooperation need not be voluntary. Karp called it a republic because that’s what he hoped it would be. After all, his own company was already aligned with the state. But the republic is already dead. The strategic importance of AI means that it was always going to be an empire waiting.

Like the merchant-captains of the 18th century, frontier companies are granted the right to profit only so long as their prizes, compute and intelligence, serve the Crown. They can chase commercial success, attract investment, hire the best engineers, build the most capable models. But the moment their values conflict with the state’s requirements, they learn what they actually are: subjects. The Pentagon’s ultimatum to Anthropic is not an aberration. It is a message to the entire industry: you are either an instrument of the state, or you are a pirate ship to be scuttled.

Some have already read that signal. Meta bent the knee and rewrote its policies in 2024 to permit military and defense applications of its open-source models, after reports emerged that Chinese researchers had adapted them for PLA use. On Monday, Musk’s xAI signed an agreement to allow the military to use its model, Grok, in classified systems. Google and OpenAI have also been in talks to move into the classified space. This is the trajectory.

However the Trump administration’s recent launch of the US Tech Force, billed as America’s elite corps for the AI revolution, reminds us that the privateer era is transitional. States have always, eventually, built their own navies. But while that navy is still being built, the Crown still needs its privateers. And it intends to extract its due. When Trump approved H200 chip sales to China in January, he imposed a 25% tariff and a 50% volume cap. Just as the Spanish Crown demanded the Quinto Real — a royal fifth of every privateer’s plunder — Washington now claims sovereign royalty on the most strategic resource of the century: compute. But the Quinto Real was never just about the gold. The Crown controlled the ports, the licenses, the routes. Who could sail, where, and on what terms. Washington is doing the same. The tariffs and caps are not trade policy. They are the architecture of a technological empire: the terms on which the rest of the world gets to participate in the intelligence age.

Suggested Reading

Military drones will upend the world

By James Kingston

The strategic logic here is not new. Alfred Thayer Mahan argued that whoever controlled the sea lanes controlled the century — not just by sailing them, but by setting the terms on which rivals could access them at all. Britain didn’t just use the oceans. It ruled them by decree. Today’s sea lanes are chips, clusters, and the models trained on them. Washington is not simply trying to win the AI race. It is trying to become the power that decides who else gets to run it, and on what terms. As Trump’s AI Czar David Sachs has repeatedly stated, “I would define winning as the whole world consolidates around the American tech stack”.

But America is not the only technological empire. On the other side of the Pacific, Beijing is playing a similar game. Already its internet regulator has banned its biggest technology companies from buying Nvidia chips entirely, ordering ByteDance and Alibaba to switch to domestic alternatives. The message, as one executive put it, is “loud and clear“. That AI is a sovereignty project, not a tech one.  Data centers have been instructed to purge foreign components entirely. Beijing is calling it “algorithmic sovereignty” — complete control over its computing infrastructure by 2027. That logic is already visible in the behavior of Beijing’s so-called “Six Tigers”: Zhipu, Moonshot, DeepSeek, MiniMax and their peers — which in recent weeks have launched a flurry of highly specialized frontier models focused on coding, reasoning, and cost efficiency. The emphasis is not simply on capability, but on independence: training on domestic chips where possible, optimizing for lower computational footprints, and aggressively undercutting Western pricing in emerging markets. For China, the main aim is not to reach AGI, but to diffuse its technological sovereign stack around the world.

This is looking less farfetched than it did even just a year ago. In December, China built a working prototype of an EUV lithography machine — the technology Washington believed it had successfully ring-fenced. Beijing is building its own empire, on its own terms — and its frontier firms are integrated into that project from the outset. Both Beijing and Washington understand that whoever controls the compute, the models, and the political authority to deploy them will likely own the next century. Unfortunately for Anthropic, that framing leaves no room for negotiation. You are either an instrument of the empire, or you are an enemy to be managed. Karp wrote the right book. He just gave it the wrong title. The technological republic is dead — if it ever existed at all. The Anthropic saga shows that the technological empire, however, is well underway.

Right now, President Donald Trump’s policy towards Venezuela is running such a risk, and Trump, the consummate political stage director, knows it. His gun has been on the wall ever since he began his military buildup in the seas around Venezuela in late August. For the past several weeks, he has played for time by conducting a foreign policy reminiscent in its unpredictability of a fraternity hazing ritual. He has periodically threatened military strikes against targets in Venezuela, walked back those threats, claimed that President Nicolás Maduro’s regime needs to fall, and suggested a meeting with Maduro and brokering a deal. All the while, he has conducted periodic open-sea strikes on Venezuelan and Colombian drug boats.

But now, even from the perspective of an American public generally sympathetic to Maduro’s removal, the drama has gone on too long. Trump knows that in order both to save face internationally and to avoid American voters’ perception that he’s jerking them around, he needs to do something, soon. For Maduro, that makes the next few weeks exceptionally dangerous.

Trump’s first instinct is usually to use military threats to compel a deal — a deal that persuades a rogue state to follow a course better aligned with American interests. (In fact, the only case in which Trump has made public military threats and then followed through came this past June in his bombing of Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility.) But if Trump is still holding out for a deal that convinces Maduro to address his main concerns — to take a hard stand against drug and human trafficking — he will be disappointed. There is simply no peace deal that advances US interests to be had with the Maduro government. 

This is not primarily because the Venezuela of onetime bus driver Maduro, and his predecessor Hugo Chávez, is an untrustworthy partner, untrustworthy though it certainly is. The country expropriated ExxonMobil’s Venezuelan oil fields in 2007. A decade later, it compensated Exxon for a tenth of the fields’ worth, and only when compelled to by an international court. Given these circumstances, it would be reasonable for American leaders never to trust a Venezuelan Chavista regime again. But the main reason that no deal with Maduro can help the US is that he lacks the power to deliver on any of the promises Trump will be looking for.

Suggested reading

How Trump remade conservatism

By Michael Lind

In today’s Venezuela, significant swaths of the country, including those most involved in the distribution of drugs, are functionally outside government control. In the country’s West, the Colombian National Liberation Army runs cocaine across the Colombian border and distributes it using local airstrips. Much of the country’s South, along the Brazilian border, is held by megabandas — that is, large and armed criminal groups — like El Tren de Aragua, which distribute drugs internationally. Even many territories involved in mining, which is Venezuela’s largest legal industry after oil, are functionally ungoverned. 

None of this means, of course, that government officials are not involved in Venezuela’s illegal commerce. The opposite is true — it’s their lifeblood. But it does mean that the Maduro government is not in a position to put a stop to any of it, even if Trump were to make them a very attractive deal. A government crackdown on drugs would mean pitched military confrontations between the cartels and a Venezuelan army that is undersupplied, underfed, badly commanded, and old. The chances that Maduro would take a chance at being humiliated, whatever he promises Trump, are slim.

There are many in the US government and media who still believe Maduro can effectively address Trump’s concerns over drug trafficking and migration if he chooses to. After all, they say, he has effectively remained in power for almost a decade and a half; he can’t be totally ineffectual. But such optimism displays a confusion between regime stability and regime effectiveness. 

While it is true that stable regimes typically achieve stability through the legitimacy accorded by effective governance, Maduro’s is an exception. His is a regime that is totally ineffective but surprisingly stable. Venezuela’s public safety, order, and social welfare system have broken down almost entirely, to the point that 30% of the country’s population has left during Maduro’s reign– for Colombia and destinations further abroad, including the U.S. Its economy hasn’t been stable enough even to report an annual GDP figure since 2014. And yet, last year Maduro managed quite easily to remain in office despite losing an election, marginalising his opposition while consolidating power.

Why? Because since the mid-2010s, Maduro has been running a criminal enterprise rather than a state government, and he runs that enterprise well. He has achieved stability by tying the fortunes of Venezuela’s military and civil power brokers so tightly to the country’s endemic graft, corruption and drug trade that they know they can only survive as long as Maduro remains in power. Hanging the sword of Damocles over the heads of all one’s rivals can be as powerful a guarantor of regime stability as democratic legitimacy itself. 

In this sense, President Trump is correct to call the Venezuelan government itself a sort of cartel, which the administration did two weeks ago when it designated the Cartel de los Soles (a Venezuelan colloquialism for Maduro’s graft-ridden government) a foreign terrorist organisation (FTO). Maduro’s government is not a cartel in the same sense that El Tren de Aragua is, but it is one insofar as its existence depends upon illegal commerce. 

It might be tempting for Trump to meet with Maduro, receive a grant of oil or mining concessions, and declare victory. But such concessions, as we know from ExxonMobil’s experience, would not be worth the paper they are printed on. Neither would a promise to crack down on the drug trade. The only near-term Trump-Maduro deal that could serve American interests would not be peaceful. It would not involve sanctions relief or a decrease in military pressure. It would be a deal in which the US military has free rein to attack drug distributors in Venezuela, and in exchange for Maduro’s non-interference, we leave him alone. But if that’s going to be the deal, why make a deal at all?

If Maduro had a slim chance of convincing Trump otherwise, he might have bungled it on Sunday. It was then that the Venezuelan National Assembly (controlled by Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela) announced that it would be conducting its own investigation into the Trump administration’s alleged second strike to kill survivors on a drug boat carrying Venezuelan nationals. The war crime allegations, first reported in the Washington Post, have ignited a media firestorm and spurred a US congressional investigation. Trump and his Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, have claimed to have no advance knowledge of the strike and have dismissed the story as a distraction. Further reporting by the New York Times has cast doubt on whether the second strike was intended to kill survivors (which would have been a war crime), as opposed to fully destroying the boat and drugs on board (perfectly legal under the laws of war). 

More from this author

Venezuela has reached its nadir

By John Masko

It is tempting for foreign adversaries, when the transparency of American democracy brings to light some scandal favourable to their case, to press their advantage by piling on. Those weaker adversaries who know how to negotiate with President Trump, however, do not do this. They know that there is no surer way to provoke the president’s ire than to make him look bad on the world stage. Instead, they garner his sympathy with public shows of flattery, modesty, and deference, even while holding to their own bottom line. No one understands this better than Vladimir Putin, whose handling of the American president is usually virtuosic.

Until recently, Maduro seemed to be following Putin’s playbook. He made no attempt to fight the legitimacy of the strikes, and did not even acknowledge that any of the boat’s crews were Venezuelan until last week. But with this most recent strike, the temptation for him to piggyback on the US. Congress’s own investigation seems to have been irresistible. Venezuela’s government has now not only admitted that there were Venezuelans aboard the boat, but launched its own investigation into the US’s purported criminal activity. The presumptuousness of this gesture is likely to infuriate Trump and drive him further away from the negotiating table. 

With no desirable deal on the horizon, Trump faces a strategic quandary. If his opening gambit was to persuade Maduro to leave office peacefully, through an overwhelming show of American force, that effort has clearly failed. With the magnitude of the US military buildup and the FTO designation for the Venezuelan government (an unprecedented move that opens possible legal justifications for regime change), it is hard to imagine any means by which Trump could further turn up the heat without ordering an actual attack. He ran up against the limits of his foreign-policy-by-threat this past weekend, when he attempted to declare, via his social media app Truth Social, that the airspace over Venezuela was closed — an announcement that the Maduro government denounced and then ignored.

Now that Maduro has called his bluff, what is Trump’s next step? Militarily, he has a few options. He could initiate a land strike against cartels operating in Venezuela’s South or West. This would be a logical extension of the drug boat strikes. Such a campaign might compel Maduro into making a deal that provides for continued American anti-drug policing in Venezuela. Alternatively, it could draw Maduro’s army into direct conflict with American troops, giving Trump a pretext for forcible regime change. Trump could also skip the formality of attacking cartels and instead attack Maduro directly with airstrikes or a ground assault, working with opposition leaders to install a post-Maduro government. Either of these options carry some risk of an Iraq-style “forever war”, should Venezuela’s opposition government prove unable to consolidate power.

The other option is a covertly-led coup. This option would likely offer a higher likelihood of post-regime-change stability than a direct American attack, and would demand less future involvement from the US. But given Maduro’s tight control over his inner circle, Trump may have to wait a long time for such a plot to come together. One can’t help but wonder whether, if such a coup had been immediately possible, it would have happened already. Either way, it is Trump’s move. 

Over the last few months, Trump has orchestrated a crescendo worthy of Beethoven’s most powerful symphonic finales. But big crescendos must lead somewhere; they cannot simply peter out. To make narrative sense, Chekhov’s gun must be fired. If Trump acts against Venezuela, either with an attack on Maduro’s regime or on the cartels he protects, he introduces uncertainties. Uncertainty as to what will follow — an orderly restoration under the leadership of dissidents like Nobel Laureate María Corina Machado, civil war, or something in between; and uncertainty over what American resources will be required, and for how long. 

But politically, the consequences of inaction at this late date would be worse. Over recent months, Trump has declared a great reversion in American strategy — from the Wilsonian aspiration of making the world safe for democracy to the Rooseveltian one of making the Western Hemisphere safe for the United States. He chose Venezuela as that strategy’s first proving ground. And if all it takes to stop that strategy is the obstinacy of a single South American crime-boss caudillo, Trump will have shown his administration to be worse than impotent. It will take years, and a new administration, for any foreign adversary to take such American pressure seriously again.

Much of the criticism has centered on the role of Secretary of Defense — ahem, War — Pete Hegseth’s decision to “double tap” the alleged traffickers: hitting survivors a second time to ensure death — after they’ve already been incapacitated. Such conduct is indeed ethically troubling, however, the current controversy elides the larger issues.

I should know. After a stint in the army, I served as a targeting analyst attached to the Joint Special Operations Command from 2011 to 2013, helping to identify Taliban targets for elimination or capture. For all the flaws of what used to be called the Global War on Terror, my comrades and I acted according to tight restrictions, guided by the laws of war. Furthermore we conducted our operations against armed combatants and under the authority of an Authorization for Use of Military Force voted on by Congress.

The current controversy misses the bigger flaw in the administration’s hemispheric operations: contrary to Vance’s arguments, the extralegal operations against trafficking don’t repudiate “permanent Washington” — but offer it succor. The military-industrial complex and the hawkish security establishment want nothing more than to see the nation embroiled in yet another long and constitutionally dubious conflict with unclear goals and the potential to topple yet another government willy-nilly.

Suggested reading

How Miami hawks hijacked Trump’s foreign policy

By Juan David Rojas

In the two decades after 9/11, the Bush and Obama administrations launched several wars of this kind, wasting thousands of American lives and trillions of taxpayer dollars — for what, exactly? In 2016, Trump clinched the GOP presidential nomination by condemning this enormous waste. Now, by embracing a state of never-ending war and state of emergency, a condition declared by an omnipotent executive branch, the second Trump administration has embraced essential elements of the deep state, the very machine the Trumpians were twice elected to dismantle.

Once upon a time, American conservatives were deeply committed to resisting the expansion of presidential war powers. Indeed, “Mr. Republican” himself, Sen. Robert A. Taft, commenting on the state of American pseudo-belligerency in the North Atlantic in 1941, argued that “if the President can declare or create an undeclared naval war beyond [Congress’s] power to act upon, the Constitution might just as well be abolished”.

Conservative Republicans similarly balked at President Truman’s unilateral use of military force in Korea and other trappings of the early Cold War state, arguing that the condition of permanent emergency empowered their liberal political enemies, “the war party” at the expense of constitutional norms and limited government.

They lost that political fight, and a new paradigm of an empowered presidency, tasked with securing an ever-expanding set of “national-security” interests, was born. Over the course of the Cold War and afterward, presidents from both parties upheld this new model, one that sanctioned a massive, permanent military bureaucracy. Americans became inured to a chief executive who could order US troops into combat with little to no congressional input, seeing the empowered presidency as an essential component of a modern state. The imperial presidency, as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called it, became the core political supposition of postwar America, one that survived the interregnum of Watergate and the Fall of the Berlin Wall.    

Throughout the Global War on Terror, successive presidents from both parties leaned on this legacy to justify military action in Yemen, Somalia, and Syria — wars conducted without explicit congressional authorization or clear, achievable political ends. Indeed, the open-endedness of these “forever wars” made possible by unbounded executive authority provided an essential plank for the MAGA platform, one that the Trump administration is now ripping up. The White House is instead doubling down on the original endless war, on the assumption that attempting the impossible in one’s neighborhood — winning the war on drugs — is somehow more prudent than attempting “the impossible all over the world”.

Southern Spear, as with the War on Terror and the Cold War before it, conserves another component of permanent Washington: namely, a permanent emergency based on emotionalism and obfuscation. Under the imperial presidency, America’s wars have been sold via slippery language and amorphous geographical and conceptual boundaries. Washington inched its way into both world wars based, in part, on open-ended conceptions of neutrality and shifting boundaries of the Western Hemisphere. In both Korea and Vietnam, such quagmires were deepened through incremental escalation, crises that silenced debate and left tens of thousands of American dead.

More recently, the Global War on Terror, a quixotic war against a tactic — terrorism — yielded a 20-year morass without an achievable political objective, all the while furthering the growth of the security state at home. Throughout the War on Terror, the security state sold adventurism abroad by personalizing and inflating the threat of terrorism at home, making individual Americans unduly afraid that they could be the victims of terror. In all of these wars, the real winners were the Beltway bureaucrats — Vance’s permanent Washington — who administered them, often in careers that spanned eras, thereby preventing genuine national-security reform.  

Suggested reading

The triumph of the Trump Doctrine

By Heather Penatzer

In Latin America, the Trump administration is conserving the core interests of permanent Washington. The White House has not only preserved the imperial presidency, but expanded its powers. While Trump’s recent predecessors pushed the boundaries of existing Authorizations for the Use of Military Force, the Trump administration, through a novel interpretation of the terrorism designation, has given itself the authority to commit acts of war. The administration’s obscurantism about the strikes and its guiding strategy for them are another inherited facet of permanent Washington’s predilection for secrecy in the service of unachievable goals.

The Trump administration is employing the same narrative games used by previous administrations. The primary rhetorical vehicle, the fluctuating label of “narcoterrorism”, once applied to acts of terror in service of the drug trade, has been applied to the trade itself. Similarly, the administration and its supporters have spuriously compared overdose deaths — tragic as they are — to American combat casualties. Associating an overdose of American at home to the death of an American draftee in the rice paddies of Vietnam is an absurd conflation that strips the drug epidemic of its context. This narrative slippage is but the latest example of Washington’s shameless shifting of symbols to prep the public for another unwinnable war like the ones that defined much of my career as a soldier and intelligence professional.

Someday in the near future, the Trump era will end. Betraying its campaign pledges, the Trump administration has not served as a disruptive force for permanent Washington, the deep state, or whatever euphemism one favors for the suite of institutions and assumptions that guide American geopolitics in the postwar era. By remilitarizing the War on Drugs — to say nothing of a potential regime change in Venezuela — the White House is breathing new life into the political forces that it claimed to oppose.

Southern Spear is not a break with permanent Washington — it is its logical conclusion.

American men are generally taller than British ones, and tend to move in a different way. A student on a US campus once told me he knew I was English by the way I walked. Hegseth stands with his arms hanging loose but slightly bent like a gorilla. In the 19th century, Irishmen were taller than their British counterparts. We know this from the statistics kept by the British navy at the time, which had a fair number of Irish recruits. Many of them would have been brought up eating almost nothing but potatoes, and potatoes contain almost everything you need for a healthy diet. This was also a reason why the Irish made such good navvies, building Britain’s roads, canals and railways. Upper-class men are for the most part taller than working-class ones. In the gentlemen’s toilet at the Cambridge Union there’s a sign on a very high beam which reads “Mind Your Head”, but given the size of some of the young Rt. Hons who frequent the place it may not be intended as a joke. When I was a student at the place myself I felt like a stunted Northern prole scurrying among braying Brobdingnagians, of whom more in a moment. 

Suggested Reading

The making of a reactionary

By Peter Hitchens

As you grow older you may not grow smarter but you certainly get smaller. Just look at pictures of Prince Harry next to his grandmother. Jesus Christ is believed by some of his less theologically sophisticated followers to have been exactly six foot tall. One wouldn’t want a short guy as a savior. Given the age in which he lived, however, he was probably about the size of Ronnie Corbett. As for Shakespeare, you could probably have put him in your pocket. On the other hand, Napoleon, generally considered to be gnome-like, was actually the average height for males of his time. Seeing him as dwarfish was just British propaganda. I used to be exactly the same height as Mick Jagger, but this is no longer true unless we’re shrinking at the same rate.

There is a Lilliput Press in Dublin, run by a suitably diminutive publisher. It’s named of course after the pint-sized characters in the Dubliner Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels. During his stay in Lilliput, Swift’s protagonist is much too gullible, which is the reason for his name. He takes on the conventions and perspectives of his hosts far too zealously, hotly denying the charge that he has had sex with a Lilliputan woman without once raising in his defense the physical impossibility of doing so. By contrast, when he arrives in Brobdingnag, a land populated by giants, he refuses to adjust to their form of life and remains obtusely Anglocentric. He delivers a self-satisfied account of British customs and institutions to the king of the country, from which the king “cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl on the surface of the earth”. This isn’t quite the impression Gulliver intended to give.

The question is what distance you need to establish between yourself and what you confront in order to give a true assessment of it. Gulliver’s problem is that he’s either too close to a culture to criticize it, or too remote to do so adequately. As Bertolt Brecht remarked, only someone inside a situation can judge it, and they’re the last person who can judge. Swift was Anglo-Irish, and thus knew a good deal about living on the cusp between two civilizations. If he hated a lot about the British establishment, he also detested a good deal about the people of Ireland. His satire isn’t polished and urbane, but savage and polemical, shot through with fury and disgust.

More from this author

Does Trump read Shakespeare?

By Terry Eagleton

At one point in the novel, Gulliver wonders whether there’s a race of creatures somewhere in the world to whom the outsized Brobdingnagians appear as minuscule Lilliputans. Might there be an infinity of sizes? What is the “proper” height to be? The answer, of course, is that there is no such thing. Human beings like Gulliver think that they’re the right size; but this, as Ludwig Wittgenstein points out, is like a man exclaiming “But I know how tall I am!” and placing his hand on top of his head. This philosophical fall guy hasn’t grasped the fact that size is relative to a norm, which isn’t something purely subjective. Otherwise we would have to say that everything is just the size, weight and shape that it is, which is to say nothing at all. We are the right size for our world, sure enough, but that’s because we’ve shaped it to suit us.

The problem is that there are many different norms, as Gulliver’s Travels demonstrates. One of the book’s purposes is to show how at least some of one’s own norms and conventions may be universal, but not necessarily in ways we should find gratifying. The Lilliputans differ from humans in various ways, but there are also ways in which they are disconcertingly similar. They, too, are excessively ambitious, mean-minded, foolishly proud of honors, ridden by political rivalries and so on. In one sense, this lets humanity off the hook: if our own vices are to be found everywhere, this makes us less responsible for them. But it also brutally undercuts those utopian thinkers who hope to stumble upon an ideal society somewhere over the ocean. By ascribing all-too-human qualities to beings so physically alien to us, the Tory Swift maliciously unsettles the progressive thinkers of his time.

Like Gulliver before the king of Brobdingnag, colonialism comes face to face with civilizations very different from its own; but by remaking them in its own image it refuses to be disturbed by their difference. Gulliver has the chance to objectify his own way of life, seeing it for a moment through the estranging eyes of the horrified king; but he refuses to allow his identity as a chuckle-headed Englishman to be thrown into question, and the Irishman in his author invites us to smile at this obduracy. The joke, however, is finally on us. In the final part of the novel, Gulliver finds himself among the Houyhnhnms, a race of wise and virtuous horses; but instead of trying to see them judiciously, as he does the Lilliputans, he ends up yearning to be one of them himself. He begins to think of himself as a horse, chatting to his own horses for several hours a day and finding the human smell of his wife and children intolerable. He swings from a puffed-up pride in his own kind to a pathological hatred of them. He’s always either too deeply in or too far out, too close to judge or too distant to do so, too rigidly normative or too ready to throw norms to the winds.

Swift’s hero, in a word, finally goes mad. He has objectified his own culture to the point where he loses touch with it altogether. Either you refuse to have your identity called into question by a different way of life, or you idealize that way of life in an absurdly uncritical fashion. The sentimental liberal who refuses to breathe a word of criticism of female genital mutilation in Africa is simply the flipside of the bigot for whom cultures other than his own are naturally inferior. The liberal’s problem is one of cultural relativism: all societies do things in their own peculiar way, and that’s just fine. It’s a deeply condescending viewpoint: sex trafficking is okay for them but not for us. To claim that something is acceptable because it’s part of your culture is to claim that it’s alright to do it because it’s what you do. There have been more persuasive arguments. 

All human cultures are contingent. They arose and evolved in largely random ways, and none of them is based on any divine or metaphysical necessity. If God exists he has a special regard for absolutely none of them, not even the United States or Israel. Jesus was too busy reviling the Pharisees to walk on our own green pastures. There might just as well not have been an English or Malaysian people, and there might not be at some point in the future. History is littered with the husks of civilizations that believed they would last forever. Some British values in the past would be deeply objectionable to Britain in the present, and most of what’s claimed to be peculiarly British — honor, fair play, modesty, decency, a racist police force, and so on — can be found in a host of other societies as well. 

None of this implies that one shouldn’t value aspects of one’s own culture. It’s just that one should do so ironically. To live ironically is to commit oneself to a course of action or form of life while recognizing its fundamental contingency. The same is true of the individual life: you play tennis and stack the dishwasher while acknowledging that none of this will ultimately matter because in the end you will be dead. That’s no reason to stop doing such things, but it may prevent them from filling your attention to the point where you can’t see around and beyond them. Jonathan Swift was a supreme ironist; Gulliver’s problem is that he doesn’t know the meaning of the word.

The fact is American foreign policy no longer adds up, the commitments made by previous administrations exceed the American ability to meet them. American promises have been outrunning American supply lines. And worse, policymakers have been trying for decades to come up with a model for achieving their foreign policy aims extra-democratically. The use of air power, covert ops, drone warfare and promiscuous outsourcing to local proxies is their admission that the American people cannot be brought to support these foreign policy goals vigorously, taking on real risks and costs. Taken together it’s a recipe for launching idealistic policy and then leaving it marooned.

Consider when the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth promised an “unrelenting” campaign against the Houthis, who were harassing global shipping from Yemen. “The minute the Houthis say, ‘We’ll stop shooting at your ships, we’ll stop shooting at your drones,’ this campaign will end,” he promised. Despite expending hundreds of millions of dollars in munitions — dropping hundreds of 2,000-pound bombs, 75 Tomahawks, and perhaps more than 20 AGM cruise missiles — the Houthis have not relented, using their much cheaper weapons at hand. The mounting cost led to the US working out an agreement with the Iranian-backed group.

Far from being a novelty imposed by the Trump administration, the United States has been triaging its resources among existing conflicts for years. In late 2023, the US redirected tens of thousands of 155-millimeter artillery shells allocated for Ukraine to Israel. In early June 20,000 anti-drone missiles (APKWS) were diverted to the Middle East to protect US troops from potential Iranian retaliation.

More from this author

The day QAnon captured America

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Speaking of Iran, we used a significant portion of our famous “bunker busters”, or GBU-57A/B MOPs, in the raid on Iran’s nuclear facility. The Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell said the bombing raids had set back Iran’s nuclear program by one or two years. If that estimate is true, it means Iran may have its nuclear program back to where it was long before we have replenished the bombs used to set them back. The Air Force’s “Next Generation Penetrator,” the expected successor to the MOP, is due for initial prototypes within 18 to 24 months.

The American military-industrial base is simply not producing fast enough, and the consequences for American policy — and American allies — are serious. After aiding Ukraine, it will take years to replenish the country’s own supply of Stingers, a weapon Taiwan is also seeking. The AUKUS naval agreement, where the UK and USA stepped in front of France to provide Australia with naval ships, is also currently under review. The deal was already expected to delay the first ships from reaching Australia from the early 2030s to the early 2040s. But beyond that, the US is already experiencing multi-year delays and massive cost overruns in production of Virginia-class submarines, which are essential for the first phase of AUKUS.

Hawks in both parties have argued that the only way to prevent China from making an attempt at Taiwan, and from breaking US supremacy in the Pacific, is to back Ukraine and Israel to the hilt. Their theory is that we can deter Xi Jinping by demonstrating sheer will. (It is a theory of deterrence that obviously appeals to moralizing columnists whose stances risk them nothing.)

But surely, Xi Jinping is doing just what the Pentagon is now: seriously considering what the depletion of US weapons stockpiles means for him. His Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, made remarks just this week to European diplomats, implying that China sees strategic benefit in a prolonged conflict in Ukraine, because it keeps the US, its allies, and their resources tied up in Europe. Our grandiose promises — these supposed demonstrations of will — do not intimidate China. Not when they are followed up with delayed deliveries and decaying credibility.

Hawkish foreign policy advisors are correct that American will and willfulness matters. American credibility is built on matching our promises to our resources, and our people’s willingness to back them up. But US foreign policy-making is increasingly reserved to an insulated coterie around the White House court around the White House, which is disconnected from the people whose blood and treasure is ultimately on the line.

Suggested reading

The kings of the drone age

By David Patrikarakos

And that is why Biden’s Ukraine policy has fallen into a ditch. Large majorities of Americans, going back to 2022, said they supported Ukraine in its defensive war. This reflects their morally sensible belief that Russia was an unjust aggressor. But even then, at the start of the war, more granular polling showed that the American people’s appetite for involvement in the conflict was severely limited. Early surveys showed that only 26% of Americans thought the US should play “a major role” in the conflict. A Target Point survey in February 2022 asked Republican voters in Pennsylvania what their preferred response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was. Only 23% chose “Arm and support the Ukraine resistance so they can kill as many Russians as possible” — the preferred policy of the then-president and the foreign policy court. 45% said, “Impose the strongest possible sanctions on Russia and seek a diplomatic deal.”

The Biden White House built its Ukraine policy in the gap between America’s view of the war’s justice and the resources it was willing to contribute. That presented a huge moral hazard for Ukraine’s leaders, whose war calculus has been distorted by the fantasy of endless superpower backing.

Trump’s preference for a negotiated end to the Ukraine war matches his desire to refocus on China. It also takes more seriously the limits imposed by our current supply constraints, and the willingness of the American people to involve their honor, their weapons, and their treasure in foreign wars. Trump used to put his name on casinos where some men tried to save themselves by throwing good money after bad. But there are no blank checks in foreign policy. Trying to make good on promises for “whatever it takes” will lead to strategic exhaustion and moral collapse.

The Washington Post had just published a story in which migrants processed through Gitmo alleged mistreatment. The media, Hegseth told the service members, don’t appreciate what the joint task force is up to, and their coverage “frankly is, you know, full of a lot of bullshit”.

Between his salty language, camo hoodie, and the “We the People” tattooed across a forearm, the former Fox News anchor is unlike any previous Pentagon chief. To spend time with Hegseth is to remember that feeling of crashing parties on Greek Row as an undergrad.

His bro-y-ness — which gave rise to serious allegations of womanizing and hard drinking, some false or exaggerated, others harder to sidestep — made him Trump’s toughest confirmation battle. In the end, it took a tie-breaking vote from Vice President JD Vance to get him through. Tapping Hegseth to run the Department of Defense attested to the President’s utter disregard for DC convention, doubly so the second time around.

More from this author

Elon Musk is a danger to Trumpism

By Sohrab Ahmari

Yet the bro vibes can also be deceiving. The Ivy-educated Hegseth has a sophisticated grasp of the challenges facing the United States this century. He represents a generation of officers embittered by what used to be called the War on Terror, and is bent on ditching the bipartisan consensus that led America to take up regime change and nation-building. As one senior defense official in his inner circle told me: “Pete believes he was lied to, and he believes he has to shake up the [national-security] complex”.

The visit to Gitmo was a strange homecoming of sorts for Hegseth, who served as a National Guard lieutenant on the prison facility before volunteering to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, for which he earned the Bronze Star. “A lot of guys and gals of my generation started out just proud to be serving, proud to be contributing,” he tells me. “‘Hey, we were attacked, and we wanna be part of that collective response, and no questions asked, let’s go do it.’”

In Hegseth’s case, this meant not only personally fighting in George W. Bush’s wars, but making the case for expanding and escalating them. In 2007, in between military stints, Hegseth became executive director of Vets for Freedom, a Bill Kristol-advised group that advocated for the Iraq “surge” and assailed politicians of both parties — but especially Democrats, and one Barack Obama, for insufficient hawkishness.

Looking back on the post-9/11 wars now, Hegseth tells me “we would be foolish not to” notice that “they cost our country dearly: in blood, in treasure, in reputation. And the more you look at them, the more you realize the depth of the folly around what we thought we were gonna create in Iraq and Afghanistan”. The results: “Iran effectively controls Iraq, the Taliban effectively controls Afghanistan”.

Against that backdrop, you can see why the Trumpians’ repurposing of Gitmo — from a retirement home for aging al-Qaeda masterminds into a deportee-processing center — would be popular. “We’ve spent 20 years defending other people’s borders,” Hegseth told US troops. “It’s time to lock down ours on behalf of the American people. We deserve to know who’s coming into our country, what their intentions are, and where they’re coming from.”

Since 31 January, the migrant operation, drawing from every branch of the military except the Space Force, has constructed 195 tents to house deportees while they’re processed. Once the administration’s plans are fully realized, capacity will ramp up to as many as 30,000. I wasn’t permitted to view the high-security area used for 9/11-era detainees and the particularly bad hombres. The still-unoccupied tents in the non-classified area lack air conditioning, and even in late February, the Cuban climate was sweltering.

“I was like this for four months in Baghdad — no AC,” I overheard Hegseth telling an officer while inspecting the tents. “But fact is, you are safe, you are fed, you are not in the rain.” Fair enough. And then, too, the newcomers face much harsher conditions on the trek to the southern border, during which they are frequently preyed upon by smugglers, with women and girls routinely raped.

The question is whether all this is worth the expense. So far, Gitmo has processed a grand total of 177 deportees, according to one Department of Defense adviser I spoke to. Most have been “high-priority” cases, as determined by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) based on gang affiliation and criminal histories. The day I visited, a massive C-17 aircraft delivered nine more for processing. “The C-17 costs $25,000 an hour to operate,” I overheard one service member. “So those nine that came in, you could’ve given each of them a first-class ticket.”

Isn’t this all typical Trump showiness?

Hegseth disagrees. The Department of Defense “has sheer capacity that DHS and [Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)] don’t have. . .  If I don’t have a border wall, and I don’t have [barbed] wire everywhere, and I don’t have eyes everywhere. . . then how do you secure the border? Well, that becomes a pretty manpower-intensive effort at the beginning. Because you’ve got to flood the zone and interdict”. The armed forces can certainly do manpower. Border crossings are down 94% from the same period last year, according to the Border Patrol, “stupidly effective numbers” that Hegseth in big part credits to the military’s assistance to DHS and ICE.

Suggested reading

Trump's diplomacy won't bring peace

By Thomas Fazi

The fear associated with the very name “Gitmo” is part of it, too, something Hegseth didn’t shy from underscoring: “If you’re [a migrant] looking around going, ‘Hey, if I cross the border, I’m going to get immediately arrested, and instead of being facilitated and processed into the country, I’m going to be held temporarily, put on a C-17, and flown home — or flown to Gitmo?’ A lot of people start to say, ‘Meh, not gonna do it.’”

***

The US military is a miracle of state capacity, a fact showcased by the migrant-housing buildup on Gitmo. It should have taken 21 days on paper but was accomplished in a little more than a week. Such capacity doesn’t come cheap, however. The armed forces take up the largest non-entitlement share of the federal budget, $824 billion last year. And with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) squeezing the federal budget, is Hegseth worried about weakening capacity?

“Other than contingencies and our troops in the field . . . that’s the thing that occupies my mind the most,” he says. “We’re refocusing our priorities, we’re looking for efficiencies, we’re gonna pass an audit.” Still, “when I look at the budget, I’m always going to make recommendations to the president” — the emphasis here seemed to signal: not to Musk — “that we fund it in a way that ensures that we are always the biggest, the baddest, and most prepared for the next conflict. And I don’t care what the dollar amount is.”

Notably, Hegseth has directed the Pentagon not to comply with Musk’s recent ukase requiring all federal employees to write an email summarizing five things they achieved the previous week. Did he make that call on his own? Yes. “We made the call to say, ‘We’re going to do this process internally,’ because of the sensitivities of the Defense Department. But also respecting Elon and DOGE and what they’re doing. If there are people that can’t answer their email and reply with what they’re working on, then what are we doing here?”

One big driver of budgetary bloat is the Pentagon’s dependence on a handful of defense contractors: Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics, the so-called primes which have earned a lousy reputation for delivering late and typically billions of dollars over-budget. During his confirmation, Hegseth touted his independence from these mega-firms and vowed to shake up the procurement process.

“Get creative, disrupt the process, bring in people who are not part of the revolving door,” he says of his approach to procurement. “I don’t know how you can do this job properly, on behalf of the American people and under the guidance of the commander in chief, if you’re invested in one contractor or another.”

He adds: “I think we’ve had plenty of clouded judgment over the years: stacking the deck in favor of a company or [weapons] system instead of saying, ‘Clean plate, here’s what we’ve got, here’s what’s working, here’s what isn’t, here’s contractors that are bloated and out of control, and we’re going to use the Defense Production Act and emergency powers to renegotiate, because we’ve been bent over a barrel on this.’”

Under the existing procurement model, smaller firms have a hard time getting a foot through the door. “Your classic examples are your Palantirs and your Andurils,” a reference to defense-technology startups that integrate artificial intelligence into warfighting. Palantir and the like, says Hegseth, are “investing their own money in R&D, [and] have far more commercial business, so they’re not fully dependent on the DoD, but they’re patriots who want to invest.”

Hegseth is committed to making room for such innovators, yet it’s hard to pin him down on what, concretely, the procurement shakeup might entail: “We’re gonna do the same competitive processes, but we’re not going to play by the same bureaucratic rules that we have in the past. Obviously abiding by the law, but there’s a lot of things the president can do when you recognize the urgency of the moment.”

All this is unfolding amid a long-term shift toward the Asia-Pacific region as Washington’s primary zone of geo-economic rivalry in the 21st century, over and against an ascendant China. The change in emphasis was conceived in President Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia”, which remained largely unfulfilled. Hegseth credits Trump’s first-term national defense strategy for “operationalizing” the concept, and promised more of it for the second term.

Suggested reading

Who's funding DC's pro-war think tanks?

By Kelly Vlahos

“I also think we’ll see this keyword — in a world of finite resources, you have to prioritize,” Hegseth adds. Under ideal conditions, “the Department of Defense has a $2 trillion budget, and we can do everything, everywhere. That’s not what exists, so you have to look to allies and partners for burden-sharing.”

That message, delivered by Hegseth at a Nato gabfest and reiterated by Vance at the Munich Security Conference, has rankled America’s European allies. Yet Hegseth remains unsparing. “If your alliance is only flags, you don’t have an alliance,” he says. “You need armies. And if you have armies, that’s good for us and good for you in your backyard. And we’re having those same conversations with our allies and partners in Southeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific” who are alarmed by Beijing’s widening ambitions.

The reprioritization also involves curbing Chinese influence in America’s own backyard: “We’re also looking at areas where we’re under-resourced like South America, like Panama, where we’ve allowed the Chinese to move their way in, and that shit’s gonna stop under President Trump…America First means things that we’ve paid for and fought and resourced,” like the Panama Canal, “better be neutral in navigation, and if they’re not, we’re gonna make sure that they are.”

Still, can Hegseth put himself in the shoes of nervous traditional allies? “Look, if you talk to Israel, we’re not abandoning that fight. We’re right there with them. You talk to our allies that are investing in Europe, they get it. I just talked to Saudi Arabia — they get it.” There is no doubt, though, that everyone from Latin America to Kyiv to Beijing has to reckon with the realities of Trump 2.0: “There’s a new sheriff.”

Yet even with Trump’s electoral mandate and iron resolve, it remains to be seen if the new administration can break Washington’s addiction to unipolar hegemony. The avatars of the older consensus — those committed to fighting for “democracy” everywhere, all the time — are down. But they aren’t out.