Hello and happy Saturday. We had a lot of international news this week: President Donald Trump went to China for a highly anticipated summit with Xi Jinping, and CIA Director John Ratliffe visited Cuba for negotiations Thursday as the Cuban government announced it had run out of oil. The Trump administration is seeking regime change in the communist island nation and wants to indict former President Raúl Castro, brother of longtime Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
In the meantime, the ceasefire is holding—kind of—in Iran. The pause gives us a chance to look at where things stand for the United States as well as to ponder the long-term effects of the conflict.
The war has exposed two obvious weaknesses for the U.S. military. First: We might have the most advanced weaponry in the world, but even a few weeks of intense fighting have diminished important stockpiles. For example, as the American Enterprise Institute’s Mackenzie Eaglen noted, the U.S. fired off 1,000 Tomahawk missiles in the first weeks of fighting against Iran, yet we add only 90 to 100 Tomahawks to our arsenal each year. During the 12-Day War with Iran last summer, when the U.S. heavily damaged Iran’s nuclear facilities, we used 150 THAAD interceptors (a defensive weapon designed to take out ballistic missiles), but we build about three dozen of those a year. She writes:
Our shallow magazine depth has laid bare the fact that Washington has allowed America’s defense industry to size and scale for just one war at a time. Modern wars of mass precision, at range and at scale, are proving long and violent. They demand a primed industrial base, a large and ready force, and a suite of statecraft tools in conflicts that merge economic defenses with intelligence, cyber, space, and homeland defenses.
But the U.S. faces another problem. Those high-tech weapons aren’t just hard to produce, they’re expensive. Meanwhile, the nature of warfare is changing, and we’re behind. We’re using Patriot missiles—averaging $3.7 million per intercept—to stop Shahed drones that Iran produces for $50,000 or less. As it happens, Russia has been deploying Shaheds against Ukraine for more than four years, and the undermanned Ukrainians have been developing their own anti-drone industry in response. In fact, in the early days of the Iran War, the U.S. turned to Ukraine for expertise. And Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky responded—immediately. He sent experts to advise on how to counter the Shaheds.
Former military planner Micah Ables noted, with some irony, that the Iran War started a year to the day after Trump had welcomed Zelensky to the Oval Office only to berate him and say, “Without us, you don’t have any cards.”
Well, Ukraine has some cards now. And in fact the U.S. and Ukraine are negotiating a deal to work together on drones in return for U.S. assistance to Iran. Ables suggests this is an opportunity for Trump to remember the value of alliances:
More than a tactical problem, this drone issue is a strategic and political one—and it is the predictable result of devaluing and burning the very alliances and relationships that could help us most. It raises an uncomfortable question: If we hadn’t spent the last year burning our relationship with Ukraine, how much better could our drone-related capabilities already be?
There is not a lot of good news here for the United States, obviously. Little progress has been made in negotiations, and the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed. Contributing writer Mike Nelson thinks there might be something to salvage, but it’s going to require President Trump to step out of his comfort zone.
Optimistic claims about the imminence of regime collapse or capitulation have not willed either into being. Whether the president is lying to the public or to himself, he must snap out of it and recognize that the current approach of hollow threats followed by limitless offers, proposals, and overtures has resulted in nothing of value. In fact, it has had the opposite effect, weakening our negotiating position and diminishing the value of American promises and threats. Someone close to Trump should force him to face reality: The current approach makes him look foolish and weak. Even after continued extensions and second chances, the president described the ceasefire as “on life support.” Why not pull the plug?
Mike’s piece got Nick Catoggio thinking: Is there any possible good outcome to the war in Iran? In Boiling Frogs, Nick considered a few possibilities—the success of the military strikes in taking out Iran’s leadership might make the bad guys think twice before messing with us; the damage to Iran’s military will keep it from causing trouble for a while; attacks on our Gulf allies might prompt them to align more closely with Israel; and, well, any deal has to include some kind of moratorium on Iran enriching uranium, right? But then Nick talks himself out of most of those possibilities. That makes the benefits of this adventurism dubious, but he observes that the costs are very real. He writes:
The war began with Trump vowing, sincerely or not, that all he wanted in the end was freedom for Iranians. Not only was that mission not accomplished, postwar Iran might plausibly be more oppressive than the pre-war version. A wounded regime led by Ali Khamenei’s fanatic son and Revolutionary Guard hardliners will move quickly and ruthlessly to suppress nascent uprisings. It will treat its survival amid a U.S.-Israeli onslaught as divine validation of the Khomeinist project. And it will resolve to take all necessary measures to ensure that it never again finds itself in a position as vulnerable as the one it’s in now.
I will leave you with one more piece on Iran that is at turns amusing and depressing. President Trump is nothing if not a social media aficionado, but contributing writer Jeremiah Johnson writes that we’re losing the meme war, as Iranian accounts “have spent much of the war s—tposting about the president’s ineffectiveness, insulting him, calling the war a distraction from domestic troubles like the high cost of living and the Epstein files, and in general refusing to take Trump’s threats seriously.”
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The vast bulk of authenticity-mongering in our culture is not only inauthentic, it’s insincere. René Girard is profoundly useful on this point. What started in Rousseau as an (allegedly) sincere argument about authenticity being a rebellion against the false pieties of the church, or what was later dubbed “the system”—by a sprawling variety of nihilists, existentialists, Marxists, radicals, bohemians, hipsters, populists, and poseurs—became its own conformity. The tech billionaire who wears a hoodie and sneakers to seem authentic is just wearing the uniform of the authenticity industrial complex. The $100 (or $10,000) T-shirt is a conformist accessory for the well-dressed “rebel.” The tradwife influencers, the professional rebels, the “true-to-themselves” “just asking questions” table pounders work tirelessly to seem effortlessly authentic, because that’s what sells in this capitalist system—that so many “authentic” radicals get rich by denouncing. How many hours at the gym, how many Botox injections, how many expensive unguents does one have to endure in order to seem authentically natural? How much prep time is required to look unconcerned with how you look? How many viral videos do you need to film inside your car in order to “keep it real”? How hard do you have to work to claim you’ve been censored? The French poet Gérard de Nerval famously walked his pet lobster in public, telling people, “It does not bark and it knows the secrets of the deep.” That kind of shock-the-bourgeois nonsense is at least funny. But it wasn’t and isn’t authentic, nor is it even sincere. It’s a performance.
Many of these departments that began during the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s as “women’s studies” programs have since evolved alongside broader academic debates about identity, sexuality, embodiment, and power. To illustrate this, take a quick look at Yale University’s current Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies offerings, which include courses such as “Latine Queer Trans Studies,” “Gender and Transgender,” “Technology, Race and Gender,” and “Feminist and Queer Theory.” … These developments are real, and they have undeniably recalibrated the field. But they are not the whole of it by any means. Women’s and gender studies has not abandoned the study of women; the made-for-TV version of women’s and gender studies presented in political debates is not usually what’s happening in the typical classroom. For every program like Yale’s, there are others at smaller institutions—such as Benedictine University, a Catholic institution like the one where I teach—that offer courses such as “Great Women Theologians” and “Marriage and the Family” alongside more contemporary theoretical work. And, yes, you can study many topics like female theologians, marriage, motherhood, sexuality, labor, law, and family life in isolation. But without a setting that brings them into relation—one that asks, explicitly, how women and men encounter one another and how gender informs ordinary life—we lose something important. We lose the ability to see how these forces intersect—and, just as importantly, to ask what they mean. And if you’re a human being reading this, they have affected your life in some way, whether you’ve chosen to study them or not.
The 1980 presidential election was one of the very few elections in history, along with 1968, when foreign policy appeared to weigh as heavily in voters’ minds as domestic issues. Although Reagan had little direct experience in national security affairs, he had been thinking, writing, and commenting on foreign policy for years. His 1976 challenge against sitting Republican President Gerald Ford had ended in failure, but had set the stage for what was to come. At the close of the 1976 Republican National Convention, Ford, in a bid for party unity, invited Reagan to the dais to address the delegates. Reagan, in a totally extemporaneous talk, gave a powerful address about the decline of freedom and the prospect of nuclear war bringing an end to civilization as we know it, leading many at the convention to develop an instant case of buyer’s remorse over having nominated Ford. Those remarks instantly made Reagan the favorite for the Republican nomination in 1980, and his supporters’ success at the 1976 convention in Kansas City in pushing through a platform plank on “morality in foreign policy” served as a repudiation of Henry Kissinger’s détente policy with the Soviet Union. As Robert Kagan and William Kristol have observed, although Reagan lost the battle to unseat Ford, “ultimately, he succeeded in transforming the Republican party, the conservative movement in America, and, after his election to the presidency in 1980, the country and the world.”
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