Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

The question that nobody wants to talk about – not even Congressional opponents of Trump’s potential war against Iran – is why the Iranians can’t have a nuclear weapon if they want one. This is not discussed because Americans have been taught to believe that there are good and evil nations and regimes, and that Iran is an evil, “rogue” state that only wants nukes so that the Ayatollahs can use them to destroy Israel.

What a crock!  Iran is a state like most others, vesting the power of an elite while calling itself a republic.  They have their Ayatollahs and we have our Oligarchs.  The actual reason Iran wants nuclear weapons (or at least the right to threaten to develop them) is so that their country – an industrialized, middle-income nation of more than 90 million people – can hold its own with Israel and avoid becoming another dependent subject of the American Empire.

It is not as if possessing nukes were a privilege reserved to a few peaceful do-gooder nations.  Pakistan and India have them, as do Russia, China, and North Korea.  The United States used them against an already-prostrate Japan.  And the State of Israel, which has repeatedly attacked and invaded neighboring nations, is estimated to possess between 200 and 300 nuclear warheads that can be delivered anywhere in the region by airplanes, submarines, or ICBMs.  A nuclear or near-nuclear Iran would have the ability to deter possible doomsday strikes by Israel, and could negotiate about military, political, and economic issues on a plane of equality rather than being subjected to U.S.-Israeli domination.  As the largest, most “developed” nation in the region other than Israel, it could compete with the Jewish State for regional and international influence.

That, and not some future military threat by the Ayatollahs, is the situation that Israel aimed to “preempt” with its recent attacks.  The current bombing campaign against Iran is an elaborate, wildly destructive diversion of attention from this question: If you want Iran to give up its quest for nuclear parity with Israel, why not insist on Israeli nuclear disarmament as a quid pro quo?  Wouldn’t putting Israel’s Dimona complex out of business resolve the whole issue?

The U.S.-Israeli response, of course, is that the Jewish state requires nuclear dominance to avoid being attacked and liquidated by Iran.  But this makes no sense.  The idea that if the Iranians had nukes, they would commit national suicide by using them to attack Israel is farcical.  Their quest for a deterrent to Israel’s overwhelming military superiority may be mistaken, since it is far from clear that deterrence actually deters, but it is neither irrational nor aimed at annihilating Jews.

Let’s be clear about this.  An unconventional war between Israel and Iran has been going on for decades, with each side committing violent acts and making bloodthirsty threats against the other.  But Israel and the U.S. have always had a choice.  They can assume that hostile acts and threats by Iran indicate a permanent, existential danger to their people and resolve to “destroy them before they can destroy us.”   Or they can recognize that such actions and threats on both sides are part of a vicious cycle of aggressive acts, and that pacific action can blunt or eliminate the apparent threat.  Yasir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization threatened for years to annihilate Israel – and ended by recognizing it in exchange for promises (never fulfilled) of national autonomy.  Iran entered into the JPCOA nuclear agreement with the U.S. and five other countries and adhered to it until Donald Trump tore it up.

The Israelis’ “tunnel vision” when it comes to Iran is at least understandable.  They and the regime in Teheran have distrusted and menaced each other for a long time.  But Trump has absolutely no excuse for his deliberate misreading of Iranian intentions.  Iran constitutes no danger whatever to the American people – that state is a threat only to the empire-builders who seek to control the entire region and its mineral wealth by setting Jews against Muslims, Sunnis against Shiites, nation against nation, and tribe against tribe. The Iranians and their allies dare to stand up to the United States and its allies –- that is why Trump hates them as much as Bush hated the Iraqis and Biden the Libyans.

Should Iran have nuclear weapons?  Of course not!  No nation should possess nukes – least of all the imperialists who use their near monopoly of weapons of mass destruction to force poorer and weaker peoples to do their will.  Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the other nuclear oligarchs need to give us all a break.  They need to stop bombing Iran and calling for its disarmament when they have absolutely no intention to disarm themselves.  

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Image Source: US Government – Public Domain

The release of the 2025 Social Security Trustees Report led to lots of hyperventilating in the media as well as dire warnings about the program facing insolvency. While people can earn a good living pushing scare stories on Social Security, they have little basis in reality.

To be clear, the most recent trustees report does show the program facing a shortfall so that in nine years it will not be able to pay full scheduled benefits. But it is important to get a clear picture of what this means.

First, let’s look at the numbers on their face. Under current law, the government cannot pay out benefits if the money is not in the Social Security trust fund. The projections show that in 2034, after the bonds held by the trust fund have been sold off, the program will have enough money to pay 82 percent of scheduled benefits.

While a benefit cut of 18 percent would be a terrible thing for most beneficiaries, 82 percent is still very far from zero. So, the idea that the program will just go away is a complete invention. Congress can vote it out of existence, but that doesn’t seem very likely given the share of the population that either are currently beneficiaries or expect to be getting benefits in the near future.

Another point about these numbers that deserves to be attacked head on is the idea that Social Security in its current structure is a major cause of generational inequality. While the retirement of the baby boom cohorts substantially reduced the ratio of workers to retirees, there is little change projected in later years in this century. This means that the share of scheduled benefits that could be paid, absent any action from Congress, falls only modestly in subsequent decades.

Going out to 2065, when today’s 25 year-olds will be turning 65, the program is projected to be able to pay 74 percent of scheduled benefits. This would mean that if Congress never touches the program and the projections prove correct, a lifetime medium earner would get a benefit of $30,900 in 2065, more than 20 percent higher than the $25,200 a medium earner would get retiring today (all numbers are in 2025 dollars). Where’s the generational inequality?

The fuller picture would be somewhat more complicated. We expect a retiree’s income to bear some relationship to their income while working. The benefit the program would be able to pay in 2065, absent any changes, would be a lower share of lifetime earnings than is the case today. But then again, why are workers in the next forty years expected to have higher lifetime earnings? It’s because we have given them a larger capital stock and better infrastructure and level of technology than what we had when we entered the workforce.

We can have serious debates about whether the rate of increase in real wages and living standards is as rapid as it should be, but there is no doubt that the direction of change is positive, at least on average (an important point I will return to shortly). If we want to concern ourselves with generational inequality, we should look to the condition of the planet we are handing down to our kids. If we don’t do more to address global warming the earth will be a much less pleasant place in 30 or 40 years than it is today. That is a real and serious harm to young people.

How Big is the Social Security Funding Gap and How Did We Get Here?

There are two important points about the projected funding gap. First, it is more of an accounting problem than an economic problem. Second, it is not especially large relative to other expenses the country has faced.

The first point is simply that when the trust fund runs out of bonds, as is projected in 2033, it does not create a new economic burden for the country. The government will not be paying substantially more in benefits in 2034 than in 2033, it just won’t have bonds in the trust fund to cover part of the expense.

That is an accounting issue. The increase in spending on Social Security from 2033 to 2034, measured as a share of GDP, is just 0.03 percentage points. That would be less than 1.0 percent of the Pentagon’s budget. This is the extent of the increased economic burden in the year the trust fund faces depletion.

If the goal is to fully fill the annual funding gap, the projections imply that it would require increased revenue and/or a cut in spending of a bit more than 1.0 percent of GDP (one-third of the Pentagon’s budget). The reason for this gap is that the program has been spending more than its income for more than a decade with the annual gap growing continually larger over this period. The bonds accumulated in the trust fund had been filling this gap.

There is nothing nefarious here. This was all by design and fully public. The last major adjustment to the program in 1982 structured it to build up a large trust fund while the baby boomers were in the workforce, to be spent down when they retired.

If the point is to fill the gap by committing additional revenue to the program, we could raise the cap on wages that are taxed (currently $176,100), we could increase the tax rate, or we could assign other government revenue to the program. The last change would literally just be accounting. If we said that $300 billion a year of general revenue (roughly 1.0 percent of GDP) would be paid into the Social Security fund, it would reduce or eliminate the shortfall in the Social Security trust fund, but it would have no effect on the budget deficit as it’s usually reported. In short, we can easily come up with the money to pay all scheduled benefits.

If the government decides to raise additional tax revenue to cover the Social Security shortfall, it makes sense that the bulk of it would come from rich. They have been the big winners in the economy over the last half century.

But the logic for taxing the rich goes even further. The upward redistribution over this period was a major factor in creating the shortfall in the program. In 1982, the last time Congress made major changes to the program, only 10 percent of wage income was above the cap and escaped taxation. Currently close to 18 percent of wage income is above the cap.

In addition, in the years since 2000 there has been a major shift from wages to profits. In 2000, profits were 18.2 percent of corporate income. In 2024, they were 28.3 percent. If profits had remained at their 2000 share, the average wage in the corporate sector would be more than 12 percent higher than it is today. The combination of the upward redistribution of wage income, from ordinary workers to highly paid professionals, Wall Street types, and corporate executives, and the shift from wages to profits, explains much of the shortfall the program is now projected to face. That makes a good argument for changing the program so that the winners from this upward redistribution pay more to support the program.

There is one other point worth making about the prospects for additional tax revenue. We could raise the tax rate. While any additional payments to support the program should come mostly from the rich, it is not absurd to think that ordinary workers can pay a higher tax rate. After all the program is designed to support a considerably longer retirement than was the case in 1990, the last time there was any increase in the tax rate.

From 1966 to 1990 the tax rate on wages rose from 5.8 percent to 12.4 percent, an increase of 6.6 percentage points over 24 years. By contrast, there has been no increase in the last 35 years. If the tax were to increase, say by 2 percentage points over the next two decades, it hardly seems like a major crisis. The average real annual wage is projected to be 32 percent higher in 2045 than it is today. It would be hard to make a case that workers in 2045 would be suffering a major hardship if we took back 2.0 percentage points of this increase in the form of higher taxes for Social Security. We do have to worry about inequality, but for the last decade, workers at the bottom have been roughly keeping pace with average wage growth.

It is understandable that politicians running for office don’t like to talk about tax increases, but in this respect, Donald Trump can perhaps offer a useful lesson. He is imposing import taxes (tariffs) that could well reach $400 billion a year. This is equivalent to a 4.0 percentage point increase in the payroll tax. He is doing this without even getting approval from Congress. To date, this tax hike has prompted only limited public complaint. It is hard to believe that a tax increase, half this size, phased in over twenty years, to support the country’s most popular social program, would be an impossible political lift.

Social Security is a Great Program

On this last point, it is worth reminding everyone how incredibly popular Social Security is. It enjoys overwhelming public support across the political spectrum, with even supermajorities of Republicans expressing support for the program.

The reason is obvious. For more than 80 years Social Security has provided a substantial degree of economic security to the country’s working population and their families. It provides this security even to high-income workers who may not think they need it, because even a highly paid doctor or lawyer may find they are no longer highly paid after a serious illness or car accident.

It also is incredibly efficient, with administrative costs for the retirement program that are less than 0.4 percent of the benefits paid each year. By all measures the amount of fraud in the program is minimal. Elon Musk’s DOGE team actually helped to confirm this basic story. While they went in with grand promises to root out waste and fraud, they essentially found nothing and instead pushed absurd lies like 20 million people with birthdays putting them over age 120 getting benefits or 40 percent of the phone calls to the agency were people trying to commit fraud.  (The small grain of truth in the 40 percent figure was that 40 percent of the identified instances of fraud were initiated through phone calls, which means 60 percent were either initiated on-line or through in-person visits.)

In short, Social Security does what it is designed to do in providing retirement security, as well as security against disability, for workers and their families. As much as the media and its political enemies like to hype the scare stories, there is no reason it should not be around long into the future and paying out full scheduled benefits.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

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Photograph Source: Anthony Crider – CC BY 2.0

The Neocon logic for needing to defeat Iran and break it into ethnic parts

Opponents of the war with Iran say that the war is not in American interests, seeing that Iran does not pose any visible threat to the United States. This appeal to reason misses the Neocon logic that has guided U.S. foreign policy for more than a half century, and which is now threatening to engulf the Middle East in the most violent war since Korea. That logic is so aggressive, so repugnant to most people, so much in violation of the basic principles of international law, the United Nations and the U.S. Constitution, that there is an understandable shyness in the authors of this strategy to spell out what is at stake.

What is at stake is the U.S. attempt to control the Middle East and its oil as a buttress of U.S. economic power, and to prevent other countries from moving to create their own autonomy from the U.S.-centered neoliberal order administered by the IMF, World Bank and other international institutions to reinforce U.S. unipolar power.

The 1970s saw much discussion about creating a New International Economic Order (NIEO). U.S. strategists saw this as a threat, and since my book Super Imperialism ironically was used as something like a textbook by the government, I was invited to comment on how I thought countries would break away from U.S. control. I was working at the Hudson Institute with Herman Kahn, and in 1974 or 1975 he brought me to sit in on a military strategy discussion of plans being made already at that time to possibly overthrow Iran and break it up into ethnic parts. Herman found the weakest spot to be Baluchistan, on Iran’s border with Pakistan. The Kurds, Tajiks and Turkic Azeris were others whose ethnicities were to be played off against each other, giving U.S. diplomacy a key potential client dictatorship to reshape both Iranian and Pakistani political orientation if need be.

Three decades later, in 2003, General Wesley Clark pointed to Iran as being the capstone of seven countries that the United States needed to control in order to dominate the Middle East, starting with Iraq and Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan, culminating in Iran.

Fast forward to today

Most of today’s discussion of the geopolitical dynamics of how the international economy is changing is understandably (and rightly) focusing on the attempt by the BRICS and other countries to escape from U.S. control by de-dollarizing their trade and investment. But the most active dynamic presently reshaping the international economy has been the attempts of Donald Trump’s whirlwind presidency since January to lock other countries into a U.S.-centered economy by agreeing not to focus their trade and investment on China and other states seeking their own autonomy from U.S. control (with trade with Russia already heavily sanctioned). As will be described below, the war in Iran likewise has as an aim blocking trade with China and Russia and countering moves away from the U.S.-centered neoliberal order.

Trump, hoping in his own self-defeating way to rebuild U.S. industry, expected that countries would respond to his threat to create tariff chaos by reaching an agreement with America not to trade with China and indeed to accept U.S. trade and financial sanctions against it, Russia, Iran and other countries deemed to be a threat to the unipolar U.S. global order. Maintaining that order is the U.S. objective in its current fight with Iran, as well as its fights with Russia and China – and Cuba, Venezuela and other countries seeking to restructure their economic policies to recover their independence.

From the view of U.S. strategists, the rise of China poses an existential danger to U.S. unipolar control, both as a result of China’s industrial and trade dominance outstripping the U.S. economy and threatening its markets and the dollarized global financial system, and by China’s industrial socialism providing a model that other countries might seek to emulate and/or join with to recover the national sovereignty that has been eroded in recent decades.

U.S. Administrations and a host of U.S. Cold Warriors have framed the issue as being between democracy (defined as countries supporting U.S. policy as client regimes and oligarchies) and autocracy (countries seeking national self-reliance and protection from foreign trade and financial dependency). This framing of the international economy views not only China but any other country seeking national autonomy as an existential threat to U.S. unipolar domination. That attitude explains the U.S./NATO attack on Russia that has resulted in the Ukraine war of attrition, and most recently the U.S./Israeli war against Iran that is threatening to engulf the whole world in U.S.-backed war.

The motivation for the attack on Iran has nothing to do with any attempt by Iran to protect its national sovereignty by developing an atom bomb. The basic problem is that the United States has taken the initiative in trying to pre-empt Iran and other countries from breaking away from dollar hegemony and U.S. unipolar control.

Here’s how the neocons spell out the U.S. national interest in overthrowing the Iranian government and bringing about a regime change – not necessarily a secular democratic regime change, but perhaps an extension of the ISIS-Al Qaida Wahabi terrorists who have taken over Syria.

With Iran broken up and its component parts turned into a set of client oligarchies, U.S. diplomacy can control all Near Eastern oil. And control of oil has been a cornerstone of U.S. international economic power for a century, thanks to U.S. oil companies operating internationally (not only as domestic U.S. producers of oil and gas) and remitting economic rents extracted from overseas to make a major contribution to the U.S. balance of payments.[1] Control of Near Eastern oil also enables the dollar diplomacy that has seen Saudia Arabia and other OPEC countries invest their oil revenues into the U.S. economy by accumulating vast holdings of U.S. Treasury securities and private-sector investments.

The United States holds OPEC countries hostage through these investments in the U.S. economy (and in other Western economies), which can be expropriated much as the United States grabbed $300 billion of Russia’s monetary savings in the West in 2022. This largely explains why these countries are afraid to act in support of the Palestinians or Iranians in today’s conflict.

But Iran is not only the capstone to full control of the Near East and its oil and dollar holdings. Iran is a key link for China’s Belt and Road program for a New Silk Road of railway transport to the West. If the United States can overthrow the Iranian government, this interrupts the long transportation corridor that China already has constructed and hopes to extend further West.

Iran also is a key to blocking Russian trade and development via the Caspian Sea and access to the south, bypassing the Suez Canal. And under U.S. control, an Iranian client regime could threaten Russia from its southern flank.

To the Neocons, all this makes Iran a central pivot on which the U.S. national interest is based – if you define that national interest as creating a coercive empire of client states observing dollar hegemony by adhering to the dollarized international financial system.

I think that Trump’s warning to Tehran’s citizens to evacuate their city is just an attempt to stir up domestic panic as a prelude to a U.S. attempt to mobilize ethnic opposition as a means to break up Iran into component parts. That is similar to the U.S. hopes to break up Russia and China into regional ethnicities. That is the U.S. strategic hope for a new international order that remains under its command. 

The irony, of course, is that U.S. attempts to hold onto its fading economic empire continue to be self-defeating. The objective is to control other nations by threatening economic chaos. But it is this U.S. threat of chaos that is driving other nations to seek alternatives elsewhere. And an objective is not a strategy. The plan to use Netanyahu as America’s counterpart to Ukraine’s Zelensky, demanding U.S. intervention with his willingness to fight to the last Israeli, much as the U.S./NATO are fighting to the last Ukrainian, is a tactic that is quite obviously at the expense of strategy. It is a warning to the entire world to find an escape hatch. Like the U.S. trade and financial sanctions intended to keep other countries dependent on U.S. markets and a dollarized international financial system, the attempt to impose a military empire from central Europe to the Middle East is politically self-destructive. It is making the split that already is occurring between the U.S.-centered neoliberal order and the Global Majority irreversible on moral grounds as well as on the grounds of simple self-preservation and economic self-interest.

Trump’s Republican budget plan and its vast increase in military spending

The ease with which Iranian missiles have been able to penetrate Israel’s much-vaunted Iron Dome defense shows the folly of Trump’s pressure for an enormous trillion-dollar subsidy to the U.S. military-industrial complex for a similar Golden Dome boondoggle here in the United States. So far, the Iranians have used only their oldest and least effective missiles. The aim is to deplete Israel’s anti-missile defenses so that in a week or perhaps only a few days it will be unable to block a serious Iranian attack. Iran already demonstrated its ability to evade Israel’s air defenses a few months ago, just as during Trump’s previous presidency it showed how easily it could hit U.S. military bases.

The U.S. military budget actually is much larger than is reported in the proposed bill before Congress to approve Trump’s trillion-dollar subsidy. Congress funds its military-industrial complex in two ways: The obvious way is by arms purchases paid for by Congress directly. Less acknowledged is MIC spending routed via U.S. foreign military aid to its allies – Ukraine, Israel, Europe, South Korea, Japan and other Asian countries – to buy U.S. arms. This explains why the military burden is what normally accounts for the entire U.S. budget deficit and hence the rise in government debt (much of it self-financed via the Federal Reserve since 2008, to be sure).

The need for alternative international organizations

Unsurprisingly, the international community has been unable to prevent the U.S./Israeli war against Iran. The United Nations Security Council is blocked by the United States’ veto, and that of Britain and France, from taking measures against acts of aggression by the United States and its allies. The United Nations is now seen to have become toothless and irrelevant as a world organization able to enforce international law. (Its situation is much as Stalin remarked regarding Vatican opposition, “How many troops does the Pope have?”) And just as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are instruments of U.S. foreign policy and control, so too are many other international organizations which are dominated by the United States and its allies, including (relevantly for today’s crisis in West Asia) the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran has accused of having provided Israel targeting information for its attack on Iran’s nuclear scientists and sites. Breaking free of the U.S. unipolar order requires a full spectrum set of alternative international organizations independent of the United States, NATO and other client allies.

Notes.

[1] To cap matters, the power of U.S. ability to disrupt adversary countries by cutting off their oil supply was demonstrated already in mid-1941 when its blockage of Japan’s access to oil became a major catalyst for its desperate attack on Pearl Harbor. Most recently, the devastation effect on Germany’s economy of blocking its oil and gas imports from Russia shows the role of oil as the key to national energy and GDP.

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The Negev Nuclear Center, near Dimona. (Source: Google Maps)

Israel, like many other colonial projects, was established through violence and has relied on the use of force to occupy Arab territory ever since. Understanding that its existence depended on having a superior military in a hostile region prompted Israel to initiate a nuclear weapons program soon after its founding in 1948.

Even though Israel was a young nation, by the mid-1950s, with the aid of France, it had secretly begun the construction of a large nuclear reactor. That two allies had teamed up to launch a nuclear weapons program without the knowledge of the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower turned out to be a colossal (and embarrassing) American intelligence failure.

Not until June 1960, the final year of Eisenhower’s presidency, did US officials catch wind of what was already known as the Dimona project. Daniel Kimhi, an Israeli oil magnate, having undoubtedly had one too many cocktails at a late-night party at the US embassy in Tel Aviv, confessed to American diplomats that Israel was indeed constructing a large “power reactor” in the Negev desert—a startling revelation.

“This project has been described to [Kimhi] as a gas-cooled power reactor capable of producing approximately 60 megawatts of electric power,” read an embassy dispatch addressed to the State Department in August 1960. “[Kimhi] said he thought work had been underway for about two years and that a completion date was still about two years off.”

The Dimona reactor wasn’t, however, being built to deal with the country’s growing energy needs. As the United States would later discover, it was designed (with input from the French) to produce plutonium for a budding Israeli nuclear weapons program. In December 1960, as American officials grew more worried about the very idea of Israel’s nuclear aspirations, French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville admitted to US Secretary of State Christian Herter that France had, in fact, helped Israel get the project off the ground and would also provide the raw materials like uranium the reactor needed. As a result, it would get a share of any plutonium Dimona produced.

Israeli and French officials assured Eisenhower that Dimona (now known as the Negev Nuclear Center) was being built solely for peaceful purposes. Trying to further deflect attention, Israeli officials put forward several cover stories to back up that claim, asserting Dimona would become anything from a textile plant to a meteorological installation—anything but a nuclear reactor capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium.

Atomic Denials

In December 1960, after being tipped off by a British nuclear scientist concerned that Israel was constructing a dirty (that is, extremely radioactive) nuke, reporter Chapman Pincher wrote in London’s Daily Express: “British and American intelligence authorities believe that the Israelis are well on the way to building their first experimental nuclear bomb.”

Israeli officials issued a terse dispatch from their London embassy: “Israel is not building an atom bomb and has no intention of doing so.”

With Arab countries increasingly worried that Washington was aiding Israel’s nuclear endeavors, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission John McCone leaked a classified CIA document to John Finney of The New York Times, claiming that the US had evidence Israel, with the help of France, was building a nuclear reactor—proof that Washington was none too pleased with that country’s nuclear aspirations.

President Eisenhower was stunned. Not only had his administration been left in the dark, but his officials feared a future nuclear-armed Israel would only further destabilize an already topsy-turvy region. “Reports from Arab countries confirm [the] gravity with which many view this possibility [of nuclear weapons in Israel],” read a State Department telegram sent to its Paris embassy in January 1961.

As that nuclear project began to make waves in the press, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion moved quickly to downplay the disclosure. He gave a speech to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, admitting the country was developing a nuclear program. “The reports in the media are false,” he added. “The research reactor we are now building in the Negev is being constructed under the direction of Israeli experts and is designed for peaceful purposes. When it’s complete, it will be open to scientists from other countries.”

He was, of course, lying and the Americans knew it. There was nothing peaceful about it. Worse yet, there was a growing consensus among America’s allies that Eisenhower had been in on the ruse and that his administration had provided the know-how to get the program off the ground. It hadn’t, but American officials were now eager to prevent United Nations inspections of Dimona, fearful of what they might uncover.

By May 1961, with John F. Kennedy in the White House, things were changing. JFK even dispatched two Atomic Energy Commission scientists to inspect the Dimona site. Though he came to believe much of the Israeli hype, the experts pointed out that the plant’s reactor could potentially produce plutonium “suitable for weapons.” The Central Intelligence Agency, less assured by Israel’s claims, wrote in a now-declassified National Intelligence Estimate that the reactor’s construction indicated “Israel may have decided to undertake a nuclear weapons program. At a minimum, we believe it has decided to develop its nuclear facilities in such a way as to put it into a position to develop nuclear weapons promptly should it decide to do so.”

And, of course, that’s precisely what happened. In January 1967, NBC News confirmed that Israel was on the verge of a nuclear capability. By then, American officials knew it was close to developing a nuke and that Dimona was producing bomb-worthy plutonium. Decades later, in a 2013 report citing US Defense Intelligence Agency figures, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists revealed that Israel possessed a minimum of 80 atomic weapons and was the only nuclear power in the Middle East. Pakistan wouldn’t acquire nukes until 1976 and is, in any case, normally considered part of South Asia.

To this day, Israel has never openly admitted possessing such weaponry and yet has consistently refused to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit the secretive site. Nonetheless, evidence suggests that a “major project” at Dimona was underway in 2021 and that Israel was by then actively expanding its nuclear production facilities. The absence of UN or other inspections at Dimona has resulted in no public acknowledgment from Israel regarding its nuclear warheads, leading to a lack of accountability. This situation renders their illegal bombing of Iran for its alleged nuclear program all the more hypocritical.

A longer version of this piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

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Luis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalu, 1928. Screenshot (public domain).

Cataracts

About a month ago, and then again two weeks after that, I had surgery at the NHS to remove cataracts – those are clouded or yellowed lenses behind the iris and pupil. I’m a bit young for this common procedure, but sun exposure hastens cataract formation, and I lived for fifteen years in Southern California and five more in Florida. I didn’t know I had them until my optician told me, but I should have known – I hadn’t needed sunglasses in years and my night vision had gotten bad.

Cataract removal is simple. The surgeon starts by anaesthetizing the eye with drops and propping open the lid, like with young Alex in A Clockwork Orange. A scalpel slices and dices the cataract, and then a sort of vacuum cleaner sucks it away. After that, the doctor inserts a new lens. It sounds grim but wasn’t. In fact, it was like an acid trip. Lying back in the chair, I saw at first a fuzzy quatrefoil of lights, then tides of water, followed by a squeegee wiping my eyeball clean, and then the insertion and unfolding of a lens that was initially a kaleidoscope, and then a spyglass revealing the crisp contours of the lights and surgical equipment above me. It’s been 50 years since I last took LSD; I made a mental note to try it again sometime.

After each operation, I was a bit wobbly, but my wife Harriet steadied me, and we easily walked the mile or so back to our hillside flat in Norwich. That night and for the next two days I experienced what doctors euphemistically call “discomfort” as well as fuzzy vision. After a few more days, and with the help of eye drops, the symptoms passed.

In the two-week interval between my first and second surgeries I experienced an optical revelation. What was dull in my left, untreated eye, was blazingly bright in my right! What was grey in one was white in the other. It wasn’t just light and tone; colors changed too. A yellow that appeared dun-colored in my left eye, was lemony in the other. A green that was bronze in my left was grassy in the right. Navy blue became azure; Earth-red, fire engine red, and so on. After the second surgery, the contrast between the two eyes disappeared. But I knew I was seeing different than before.

Everybody who has cataract surgery notices the change – that’s the whole point. But because I’m an art historian, and a significant part of my work consists of observing subtle distinctions of color in works of art, the change in my vision felt especially dramatic. I have in my 45-year career written at length and taught about Delacroix, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Seurat. All were great colorists. Had I for the last decade or so – when my cataracts were worsening – misunderstood their works, and seen them mostly as drawn rather than painted and colored? Had I been blind to them? Was that why I’ve been writing so much about politics lately, instead of art? I resolved to go to Paris–Delacroix is badly represented in British museums – to begin to find out.

Visiting the Louvre

I first went to the Louvre in 1974 when I was 18. I took the night plane from JFK to Reykjavik via Icelandic Air — the Hippie express — then changed planes for the flight to Luxembourg, followed by a train to Pairs. The round-trip fare was $250; the train about $20. I stayed at the Hotel des Grandes Ecole on the Rue Cardinal Lemoine, near the Pantheon. It cost 35 francs a night (seven dollars), croissant breakfast included, with an extra franc for a hot water shower in a closet off the stairwell. The place was a picturesque fleabag – today it’s picturesque and luxurious. The Louvre, in my recollection, was half empty in those days. You could enter the museum at any number of places – this was pre-I.M. Pei’s Pyramid — and wander for hours undisturbed by guides and tour groups. Some galleries were dimly lit, many of the pictures were dirty or poorly conserved — it was glorious.

In the subsequent five decades, I probably visited Paris and the Louvre about 15 times, though with decreasing frequency in recent years. The crowds and queues, especially in warm weather months, are daunting. But the trip from Norwich to Paris via the Eurostar is cheap and fast, and I was determined last week, to perform my eye test.

Michelangelo’s marble Slaves (or Captives) were no different than I remembered them; the marble was whiter, but the pathos the same. Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Titian’s Le Concert Champêtre were also familiar – they are afflicted with their own, internal cataract. The yellowed varnish of the latter makes it appear as if the orgy was taking place on a smoggy day in San Bernardino. Veronese’s Wedding at Cana was just as grand and arresting as I remembered. Jacques Louis David called it “the greatest picture in the world” and Delacroix said he never missed a chance to see it when he was in the Louvre. They rhapsodized most of all about Veronese’s colors, which included ultramarine made from semi-precious lapis lazuli, red from cochineal, and green made by layering copper resinate on verdigris on lead white. Delacroix likely had the Wedding in mind (among other works) when he created The Death of Sardanapalus in 1827. The latter was my chief destination, where I would test what I remembered against what I now saw.

A word of caution: Perception of color is notably inconstant. Light, distance, and color adjacencies impact recognition of hue. So does biology. Dogs, bumblebees, and owls perceive colors differently than people. My Harriet is slightly colorblind – she calls a pistachio colored, plastic chair in our house white, and a plastic blue bench purple. (She’d say it was me that was colorblind.) In addition, colors are notoriously hard to remember, as you’ll know from the many movies where police detectives are frustrated by witnesses asked to name the color of a perp’s getaway car. Could I even remember how paintings by Delacroix looked before my recent surgeries?

There are in fact three, very large (in subject and scale) works by Delacroix in the Grande Galerie of the Louvre: Scenes of a Massacre at Chios (1824), The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), and Liberty Leading the People in 1830 (1831). All are history paintings, but with each, subject recedes before style, especially Sardanapalus; that painting announces the possibility – sometime in the future — of a fully abstract art based solely upon line, color, gesture and expression. When the arch classicist, Étienne-Jean Delécluze saw the picture at the Salon exhibition of 1827, he said

One tried in vain to get at the thoughts entertained by the painter in composing his work; the intelligence of the viewer could not penetrate the subject, the elements of which are isolated, where the eye cannot find its way within the confusion of lines and colors, where the first rules of art seem to have been deliberately violated.

Another critic at the time saw the picture as a product of “delirium.” In fact, the color in all three paintings by Delacroix appeared more delirious than I remembered. The Chios was dominated by the discordant, but patriotic trio of blue, white and red; Sardanapalus by yellow, orange, and red; and Liberty (recently cleaned) by the tricoleur once again, made more vivid by the greys and browns below and in the distance. Several questions crowded my mind: Had I underestimated the formal radicalism of the paintings, and only now, as the result of two cataract surgeries, seen them correctly? Did Monet, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Seurat learn more from Delacroix’s color than I realized? Was Matisse’s vibrant orientalism less a response to his trip to Tangier and more his visits to the Louvre?

Before I could engage these questions at length, however, the paintings before me dramatically changed. Their light and color dimmed and muted, painterly exuberance diminished, and exoticism receded. In place of Chios, I saw Gaza; Sardanapalus on his bed became Trump in the Oval Office; and Liberty was a Los Angeles Chicana carrying a Mexican flag, confronting armed, and masked thugs from ICE and Homeland Security. Was it now politics, not cataracts, that occluded my vision? Was I once more blind to art?

Eugene Delacroix, The Massacre at Chios, Louvre, Paris, 1824. Public domain.

Delacroix’s three big pictures

The Massacre at Chios was inspired by reports of the indiscriminate killing of civilians by Ottoman Turks in the Greek war of independence. Like many French and European liberals, including the English poet Lord Byron, Delacroix supported the Greek cause, believing it to be an expression of the emancipatory ideals of the French Revolution of 1789, and a resurgence of ancient Greek democracy. (Byron died at Missolonghi, while planning an assault upon Turkish troops at Lepanto.) Delacroix’s painting is a vast (more than 13 feet tall) and ambitious tableaux composed of multiple scenes that, however, fail to add up to a single coherent vision of either imperial violence or guerilla resistance.

Critics at the time admired the exotic costumes, daring horsemanship of the Turk, and affecting expressions of the suffering Greeks, but little else. Today, the picture recalls the long history of Orientalism – an ideology that underlay the European expropriation of land and exploitation of people in Southern Europe and the Middle East. It also conjures the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Since October 7, 2023, residents there have suffered more bombings than the population of Dresden during the “carpet bombing” of World War II. They have witnessed destruction that’s the equivalent of six Hiroshimas. At least 55,000 people in Gaza have been killed, two-thirds of them women or children. That number excludes tens of thousands of people still buried in rubble and many more that that died or will die from illness, disease and starvation.

It should go without saying that such killing of non-combatants is illegal as well as immoral, but most Israelis and some Americans appear to think retribution on that scale is justified by Hamas’s original act of killing or kidnapping about 1100 Israeli civilians and soldiers. Polls indicate that about as many Americans approve (27%) as disapprove Israel’s actions (29%). Nearly half have no opinion. The killings and deaths in Gaza, may now exceed those committed by the Ottomans on the island of Chios. In 1822, Greek resistance to the Turks was limited to a few hundred troops, but reprisal against the 100,000 or so Greek residents on the island was merciless. At least half were killed, another third enslaved, and the rest forced off the island. Victor Hugo wrote a poem in 1828, “L’Enfant” dedicated to the child victims on Chios. Here’s a snippet of it:

Oh poor child, barefoot on these sharp-edged rocks!
Oh to stop the crying of your blue eyes,

blue like the sky and like the sea,

so that in their shine the light of laughter
and joy might evaporate this storm of tears…

(Hugo’s emphasis on the child’s “blue eyes” may have been the expression of an emergent racism. The Greek were supposed more European and thus racially superior to the Asiatic, Ottoman Turks.)

In 2014, during an earlier period of Israeli bombardment of Gaza, the Palestinian poet Khaled Juma wrote “Oh Rascal Children of Gaza”. Here’s an abbreviated passage from it:

Oh rascal children of Gaza,
You who constantly disturbed me with your screams under my window,
You who filled every morning with rush and chaos….
Come back,
Just come back.

Delacroix’s two-hundred-year-old rendering of genocide in Chios, unlike photos and videos of death in Gaza, is remote enough that we can see it without flinching. Its violence is filtered through a lens of stylization and metaphor that is unavailable to today’s photographers and videographers: A horseman rears at right, while a nude woman strains against her binds; a sprawling infant seeks his dying mother’s breast; and a languid couple in the left foreground peacefully expire. Figures in the canvas are grouped into stable pyramids, in good, academic style. Yet for all its artifice, the work is still affecting. Chios should be exhibited during the war crimes trial of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant at the International Criminal Court of Justice in The Hague – not as proof of guilt, but as evidence that such outrages have been condemned for generations and that no sophistry about Israel’s “right to exist” can change what is plain for all to see.

Eugene Delacroix, Death of Sardanapalus, 1827, Louvre, Paris. Public domain.

The origin of Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus is Byron’s verse-tragedy, Sardanapalus (1821) about an ancient, luxury-loving Assyrian king who fails to recognize the treachery of his retinue. By the time the perfidy is exposed, it’s too late, and he resolves to destroy himself and his lover in a great pyre. “Kiss me,” the king says: “Now let them take my realm and life!/They shall have both, but never thee!” Delacroix however, reached beyond Byron to ancient sources that depicted Sardanapalus as a brutal tyrant who preferred to destroy everything and everyone around him rather than surrender his crown. The artist shows him reclining on his massive bed, propped up on his elbow, watching with dispassion – perhaps even pleasure — the destruction of his slaves, concubines, horses and palace.

The painting’s glut of props – jewels, weapons and armor, glass, golden metalwork – and general air of topsy-turvy, combined with the riot of colors, suggest the governance of a greedy and misogynist narcissist. While decorating the White House with gilded kitsch, Trump has set fire to the fundamental bulwarks of capitalist democracy: due process, habeas corpus, an independent judiciary, a disinterested civil service, and self-governing institutions of science, medicine and higher education. He has demanded the fealty of top law firms, and undermined environmental protection and consumer safety. Though the U.S. political system has long been corrupt – corporations write their own laws and legislators select their own voters – Trump has openly traded his name and position for vast wealth. Since the election, his net worth has increased by billions.

Like Sardanapalus, Trump is a sexual predator. He boasts about it and was convicted of sexual abuse. He was then found liable for defaming his accuser. Trump openly calls for violence against his rivals, while pardoning hundreds of his followers convicted of storming of the U.S. capitol to overturn the presidential election. Where Sardanapalus destroyed his kingdom with spoken words, Trump is doing it with executive orders and the blind fealty of congressional Republicans. It’s unclear if the nation – of indeed the planet – can survive the onslaught.

Liberty Leading the People in 1830 arose from exceptional circumstances. On July 28, 1830, a cross section of Parisians rose up in rebellion, angry at King Charles X for his corruption, curtailment of press freedoms, and failure to extend voting rights. The revolt ended after just a few days when the former King’s cousin, Louis-Philippe, took control of what was quickly named the July Monarchy. Little changed, however. Within months, press and expressive freedoms were once again curtailed, and police were authorized to crush Republican and socialist clubs.

Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People in 1830, 1831, Paris, Louvre.

There’s little in Delacroix’s background or education that should have led him to produce the single, paradigmatic picture of modern, revolutionary struggle. Nor is there much evidence that he was a committed democrat in 1830. Instead, it was the wider, cultural dynamic of artistic dissent and critical resistance that created the conditions for an art of political opposition to the established political and cultural authorities. Though ostensibly affirming the legitimacy of the new regime of the “bourgeois king” Louis-Philippe, Liberty, exposed its shaky popular basis. The crowning personification of Liberty holding the tricoleur, is a figure of revolutionary virtue and militant resolve. She has bared breasts like allegorical figures of Marianne (France), and wears the Phrygian cap of freed Roman slaves and the radical sans- culottes of 1793. She recalls the mythic figure of Athena as well, in the cella of the Parthenon on the Acropolis, or the Winged Victory of Samothrace, signifying the idea that warfare and revolution are legitimate tools of national politics. Finally, her soiled and worn dress suggests she is a proletaire (the word itself was first used in the modern sense in 1832 by the French socialist August Blanqui). She spoke to French audiences about the power of a new and dangerous class, and of revolutionary purpose unfulfilled and untamed.

Protester and burning Waymo taxi during an anti-ICE protest, Los Angeles, California, June 8, 2025 (photographer unknown).

Though purchased by the state, the picture proved too incendiary for extended exhibition. By 1832, it was shunted to the storerooms of the Louvre and not seen again until 1849 (and then only briefly) during another period of revolution. It was finally put on permanent display in the Louvre in 1874. There is no comparable single image from the Los Angeles protests or the nationwide (indeed global) “No Kings Day” protests, but widely distributed photos of men and women waving Mexican flags beside burning Waymo taxis follows Delacroix’s template. Like the figure of Liberty, anti-ICE protesters carried flags, generally Mexican ones. These represent solidarity and collectivity more than nationalism, and function apotropaicly, warding off the evil-eye of an oppressive state. Waymo taxis – driverless vehicles produced by a subsidiary of Alphabet (parent company of Google) – are cameras on wheels, sometimes deployed by police and perhaps ICE to identify criminal suspects, undocumented workers or protest leaders. That’s why they were seized and burned by protesters holding flags.

Thirty-five percent of the 9 million residents of Los Angeles County are immigrants. About 800,000 are undocumented. They are everywhere. Rich or poor, you either are, know, work with, are related to, or employ an immigrant. If you are rich enough to hire a gardener, babysitter, home health care worker, or day laborer, you have employed an undocumented person. And because non-citizen immigrant wages are low, many working-class people are rich enough to hire them themselves. If you eat in a restaurant, you are eating off plates they’ve bussed and cleaned. If you enjoy take-out, they have delivered your food. If you are a meat eater, they have slaughtered the animal on your plate. If you are a vegan, they have picked your fruit and vegetables. If you are resident of a nursing home, they have cared for you. During Covid, they worked so others could stay home. After the fires in Altadena and Pacific Palisades, they helped clean up the debris, some of it toxic. They also lost their homes in the fires.

That’s what I saw in the Louvre Museum, last week, looking through my new, cataract-free lenses at Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People in 1830 and his other big pictures. I feel no embarrassment or sense of loss about what I saw and didn’t see. But was I really seeing the paintings, or was I blinded by politics?

I’ll reconsider the question in Part 2.

The post Does Politics Make Us Blind to Art?  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“You know what November 5 was?  It was the election of a president that loves you.”

– Donald Trump to applause and cheers from soldiers at Fort Bragg, June, 2025

President Richard Nixon told chief of staff Bob Haldeman that his secret strategy for ending the Vietnam War was to threaten the use of nuclear weapons.  Nixon believed that President Eisenhower’s nuclear threats in 1953 brought an end to the Korean War, and Nixon  suggested using nuclear weapons to bail out the French in Vietnam in 1954.  Nixon defended the principle of threatening maximum force.  He called it the “mad man theory,” getting the North Vietnamese to “believe..I might do anything to stop the war.”

Ironically, Daniel Ellsberg, who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers to stop the Vietnam War, introduced the theory in his lectures in 1959 to Henry Kissinger’s Harvard seminar  on the political use of irrational military threats.  Ellsberg, a Cold Warrior in the 1950s, called the theory the “political uses of madness,” arguing that any extreme threat could be more credible if the person making the threat were perceived as being not fully rational.  He believed that irrational behavior could be a useful negotiating tool.

Speaking of mad men, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell gloated on June 11, 2025 that “There are now more U.S. troops  deployed to Los Angeles than serving in Syria and Iraq.”

A day earlier, Donald Trump told a military audience at Fort Bragg that Marines were needed in Los Angeles to deal with the “radical left lunatic” politicians and “flag-burning” protesters, once again falsely claiming that the 2020 election was “rigged.”  He told his Fort Bragg audience that the National Guard and Marine forces were “heroes.  They’re fighting for us.  They’re stopping an invasion, just like you’d stop an invasion.”

Trump has broken domestic law in his misuse of the National Guard and the Marines in Los Angeles.  He has defied the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 by using the military to suppress legitimate protests, and has castigated the political leaders of California.  In politicizing the military, it’s fair to ask if a path is being created to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, which he has previously threatened.  And it isn’t far-fetched to anticipate the possibility that he might invoke martial law.

(Judge Charles Breyer, a federal judge in San Francisco, ruled last week that Trump had unlawfully federalized the National Guard and sent them onto the streets of Los Angeles. The Trump administration immediately appealed his decision. Then, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals promptly entered an administrative stay, which means that control of the Guard, which Judge Breyer had restored to California Governor Newsom, is back in Trump’s hands, while a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals considers the case.)

There is considerable evidence that Trump is psychologically unfit, and that his cognitive decline puts us all at risk.  His so-called address at Fort Bliss was marked by incomplete sentences, pathetically unsophisticated vocabulary, and simplistic thought.  Trump cannot seem to finish a sentence or a thought without derailing into some kind of irrelevancy.  His claim to be a “stable genius” would be laughable, if current times weren’t so perilous.  While the mainstream media was focusing on the health of Joe Biden last year, Trump’s cognitive abilities were in serious decline, but essentially ignored.

Trump’s malignant narcissism was marked by a recent interview in the Atlantic magazine when he trumpeted his claim to rule the United States and even the world.  He requires fealty from everyone around him, and his empathy has been saved only for himself.  Trump’s paranoia was worsened by the assassination attempts in 2024, and his demonization of immigrants, journalists, jurists, and virtually everyone who disagrees with him leads to greater hostile language.  Trump’s cruelty and heartlessness were manifested in his Oval Office sessions with the Ukrainian, El Salvadoran, and South African heads of state in the past several months.

Trump’s ideas get zanier with the passing of time, such as turning Gaza into the “Riviera” of the Middle East or the displacement of two million Palestinians from their homes.  And as his ideas become more incoherent or aberrant, we are reminded that there is no one around him who will challenge him.  As former Senator Bob Corker once said “There are simply no adults in the White House day care center.”  What can be said for Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, Tulsi Gabbard, J.D. Vance, Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth, and on and on, the malevolent sycophants who surround him?

There is madness—even nuclear madness—everywhere.  Russian President Putin’s saber-rattling against Ukraine; Prime Minister Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians as well as the current so-called strategic campaign against Iran’s nuclear capabilities; and Trump’s first term threats against North Korea that included references to U.S. nuclear capabilities as well as the “red button” threats.  Trump had ample support in his first term from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, who endorsed the use of force and regime change.  And now Trump wants a “Golden Dome” to save the United States from nuclear forces.

Nuclear weapons have no real utilitarian value, unless one is willing to risk an apocalyptic ending to a crisis.  Nuclear saber-rattling increases the risk of miscalculation in decision making.  This was true in Cuba in 1962, the October War in 1973, and South Asia in 1999 and 2025, when India and Pakistan were involved in armed conflict.  There has never been a greater need for a substantive discussion of the dangers of nuclear threats and the need for a return to arms control.  And there has never been a time when there appears to be no one to step forward and take a statesman-like position in the direction of disarmament.

As Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said, “It’s time to stop thinking we can reason or negotiate with a mad man.”

The post The Mad Man Theory Has Its Mad Men appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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A shelter-in-place warning in downtown Minneapolis. Photograph Source: SavagePanda845 (Elliot F) – CC BY 4.0

The cold truth is this: political violence works. The assassination and attempted assassination of two Minnesota state legislators remind us again that violence is not just a tragedy—it is a tactic. In democratic societies, people are taught to condemn such actions and to see them as aberrations. Yet the historical record tells us something far more uncomfortable: political violence is effective, and that is why it continues.

People cling to the idea that political violence is not only immoral but counterproductive. If it were truly ineffective, rational actors would abandon it. But they have not. Too often, political violence delivers results—through intimidation, disruption, or the outright removal of opposition.

Consider the 20th and 21st centuries: the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge’s massacres in Cambodia, Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the ongoing repression of Uyghurs in China, and the violent persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar. Each was a brutal campaign to eliminate a people, and though they did not achieve total eradication, they succeeded in redrawing borders, consolidating power, and annihilating political threats. Some argue that Israeli actions in Gaza amount to genocidal violence. These acts were not random; they were strategic, calculated, and tragically successful.

The September 11 attacks rewired global security and surveillance infrastructure overnight. The 1917 Russian Revolution dismantled a monarchy and birthed a global communist empire. The Spanish Civil War set the stage for fascist dictatorship and served as a rehearsal for World War II. The violence surrounding the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan created two nations and left behind scars that shape South Asia to this day.

Pinochet’s 1973 military coup in Chile crushed socialism and ushered in decades of neoliberal authoritarianism. North Korea remains one of the most repressive regimes on Earth, its power preserved through political terror. The Taliban’s violent resurgence in Afghanistan after twenty years of war is further proof that force can undo democratic aspirations. Violence does not just challenge democratic systems—it often replaces them.

In the United States, political violence has shaped the arc of history. Lincoln’s assassination ended Reconstruction before it truly began. The killings of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X decapitated movements for civil rights, justice, and reform. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the deadliest act of domestic terrorism before 9/11, was aimed squarely at undermining trust in the federal government.

The 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was not a fringe fantasy—it was an attempted insurrection. The January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol did not just rattle windows; it shattered illusions. It proved that political violence is not a relic of the past. It is here, now, and dangerously normalized.

From the lynchings and burnings by the Ku Klux Klan to the systemic destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa in 1921, white supremacist violence operated with impunity. These acts were not random—they were designed to crush Black political and economic advancement. Native Americans were massacred, displaced, and stripped of sovereignty. The Wounded Knee Massacre, Indian Removal, and the reservation system were all forms of state-sponsored political violence.

These campaigns depopulated, demoralized, and disenfranchised entire peoples—and they worked. Political violence was used to maintain power, suppress democracy, and preserve racial hierarchies. Whether through mob rule or official policy, it has long been a tool of dominance in American political life. The results are still visible in the disparities and structural inequalities of today.

Some argue that violence only provides fleeting success. But in politics, a year can reshape a lifetime. A decade can redirect a nation. Even a single act—an assassination, a bombing, a riot—can reconfigure the structures of power so deeply that nothing returns to its previous state.

In democracies, political violence is supposed to be unnecessary. People are taught to believe in elections, deliberation, and law. But when violence succeeds—when it silences opposition or disrupts government—it sends a chilling message: the rule of law is optional. For those willing to kill, threaten, or destroy, the system can be manipulated or broken.

The international order claims to be rule-based, founded on diplomacy and legal norms. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, its 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, China’s militarization of the South China Sea, and the United States-led war in Iraq all demonstrate that violence remains a tool of statecraft. These actions, regardless of justification, reshaped borders and geopolitics through brute force.

Political violence is still a currency of global power. It is not merely the weapon of the weak, but also the preferred instrument of regimes and elites seeking control. The world has not outgrown violence as a political strategy. It has simply become more selective and sophisticated in its application.

Make no mistake: this author condemns political violence. It is destructive, anti-democratic, and morally corrosive. Yet pretending it does not work is self-deception. History’s harshest lesson is this—while political violence is almost always wrong, it is also, disturbingly, effective.

The post The Tragedy of Political Violence: It Works appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Small dairy, near Hope, Indiana. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Uncertainty is nothing new for farmers.

Freak weather changes and fluctuations in the market make planning for the future a gamble, never a sure thing.  Dairy farmers have to deal with the additional issues of needing to keep their herds healthy and well-fed, as the price farmers receive in part depends on bacteria counts, and also the fat and protein content of the milk.  If things weren’t hard enough, milk is a highly perishable product, which unlike grains, cannot be stored and then sold when prices improve.

Giving farmers even more headaches these days is Trump’s on-again, off-again trade war.  Specifically, farmers have to endure even more uncertainty than normal as prices for inputs like seed or fertilizer may rise with tariffs, while their export markets abroad are endangered.  In this mix of the President’s ongoing trade spats, he’s ridiculing Canada for protecting its dairy farmers with their supply management system, alleging that it harms US farmers.

But here’s the reality – Trump’s plans don’t work for US farmers. In fact, his intention to increase exports and enter the Canadian market fails both American farmers and our partner to the North.

Mexico has long been the main customer for our dairy exports and is regularly the number one importer of all US goods.  This is a mutually beneficial arrangement as Mexico is a milk deficit country and meeting their domestic consumption needs requires imports. That’s how trade should work — when one country has stuff to sell that another country wants to buy, everyone wins.

With our neighbors to the North, the story is much different.

Canadians do not want our products forced into their market.  Actually, Canadians want their system to stay as it is. It’s not difficult to see why. The Canadian supply management system ensures dairy farmers a fair price for their milk by tying domestic dairy production to consumption. Prices are negotiated in periodic meetings between farmers and processors to assure a baseline cost of production for producers and an adequate supply for domestic needs.  Unlike the US system, in which price controls were lifted for dairy in the 1980s, Canadian dairy farmers have a semblance of certainty year after year.  US dairy producers must fend for themselves, adopting a ‘get big or get out’ mentality and increasing production whenever they can to maintain some kind of financial security.  This push to constantly increase production leads to chronic overproduction and price volatility.  Also unlike the US system, Canadian farmers do not rely on tax-payer financed bailouts, or inadequate insurance payments that keep American farmers hanging on by a thread.

Furthermore, the production treadmill promoted by US government policy has caused the loss of small farms and the hollowing out of rural communities. Trump continued this ‘get big or get out’ mantra the first time he was in office, targeting Canadian dairy much like he is doing now.  During the renegotiation of NAFTA into the USMCA, the Canadian market was slightly opened to U.S. dairy exports.

Heralding this change a ‘win’ for farmers, it has proved to be anything but.

Specifically, even though exports to Canada have nearly doubled since 2018, US farmers continue to exit the industry at alarming rates.  At about 34,000 operations in 2020, the year when the USMCA was officially passed, that number fell to just about 26,000 by 2023 – a 25% decrease.

The moral of the story is that exports don’t keep farms in business, but instead allow larger operations to capture market share for themselves while driving out the smaller operations that have long defined US dairy.

Particularly as we celebrate June Dairy Month, we should learn from the Canadian system instead of denouncing it.  Granted, Canada’s supply management is not perfect – few government policies are. But their system provides for fair returns for farmers and certainty in a profession already marked by so many challenges.  A similar production management system in the US could ensure farmers a fair milk price thereby eliminating the need for taxpayer subsidies, while providing consumers with fairly priced locally produced dairy.  Let’s stop championing an economic vision for agriculture that has already been shown to be a failure.

The post For June Dairy Month, Trump Should Celebrate the Canadian System Not Denounce     appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Image courtesy of Left Voice.

On June 18, Anasse Kazib, a French railway worker, trade unionist and socialist leader will stand trial for the charge of  “apologia for terrorism.” His supposed crime? Tweets posted to the social media platform X in support of the Palestinian people in rejection of Israel’s campaign of genocide. France concedes that Kazib has no ties to terrorist organizations nor has he engaged in terror-related actions and is persecuting him simply on the basis that his speech offends the Israeli state and its supporters. With this campaign against Kazib and other activists, the French state, led by president Emmanuel Macron is attempting to chill the movement for Palestine as a whole and to ensure the continued impunity of Israel.

A Worldwide Campaign to Chill Any Speech Against Israel

In recent history, few social movements in the Western world have been as widely repressed as the movement against the genocide underway in Gaza. And as Israel’s brutality against the Palestinians has intensified, the silencing of dissent internationally has increased in direct proportion. Western governments are scrambling to contain the fallout from the horrors that are unfolding on television screens and livestreams viewed around the world, horrors that these same governments have enabled, whether through weaponry or “diplomacy.”

In the United States, police have beaten and arrested peaceful demonstrators — in some cases entering college campuses to do so. Universities have expelled student activists and fired faculty members who have spoken out. Far-right Zionist groups have harassed and doxxed young people. And immigration authorities have explicitly targeted and detained immigrants, even those like Mahmoud Khalil who hold permanent residency and who have expressed opposition to Israel’s murderous campaign. Various Western European nations have followed suit and, in some cases, have taken restrictions on democratic rights even further.

In France, the Macron government is currently carrying out a major rollback on the right to speech. In April 2024, various figures of the French left including Rima Hassan, a member of the European Parliament, Mathilde Panot, the president of the France Insoumise group in the National Assembly, and Anasse Kazib, a railway worker and leading member of the political organization Révolution Permanente— the sister organization of Left Voice— were summoned by anti-terrorism police for the inscrutable charge of “apologia for terrorism.” None of the accused were alleged by the French government to have participated in or planned terrorist acts, nor even to have materially supported terrorist groups. The evidence presented against Panot was a written communiqué put out by her party, France Insoumise. Hassan was investigated for an interview she gave with the media outlet Le Crayon. In Kazib’s case, the only “crime” amounted to a series of tweets denouncing Israel’s longstanding aggression and dispossession of the Palestinian people.

Though the investigation into Panot and Hassan was later dropped, the French state has continued to prosecute Anasse Kazib, A conviction carries the possibility of jail time and a fine of up to €100,000.  France has already convicted hundreds of people since this highly undemocratic amendment was added to the legal code in 2014. And as Human Rights Watch has noted, “the cases do not typically involve direct incitement to violence,” but rather “provocative statements” made to police, in schoolyards, or online. The European Court of Human Rights also denounced France in 2022 for its application of the apologia for terrorism law to  repress speech.

An International Campaign in Support of Annase Kazib 

For over a year, Kazib has been fighting back against the charges. And struggle is not new for the trade union organizer, socialist militant, and son of Moroccan immigrants to France.  He was born in Sarcelles, a working-class suburb of Paris, and for over a decade he has worked as a train switchman for the SNCF, the largest rail company in France.  He organized fellow rail workers when, in 2018, the French state attempted to privatize large portions of the state-owned rail network. He has also participated in historic struggles such as the Yellow Vest movement and the 2019 and 2023 strikes against Macron’s pension reform measures. In 2022 he attempted to stand in the country’s presidential elections, representing Revolution Permanente in order to serve as a tribune for the country’s working class, immigrants, communities of color, and youth.

Needless to say, if the French state succeeds in convicting Kazib or any activists for speaking out, it will have a chilling effect on the movement for Palestine across the country and very likely across Europe. If  France can prosecute pro-Palestinian figures in this way, it will only be a matter of time before anti-racist activists, environmentalists, or others face similar persecution.

The French state will not be able to carry out this persecution of activists for Palestine under the cover of darkness, however. An international signature campaign in support of Kazib has already garnered the names of more than 1,000 people around the world, including the Nobel Prize winners Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Annie Ernaux, internationally renowned writers, artists, and activists like Angela Davis, Tariq Ali, Pablo Iglesias, Adele Haenel, Steven Donziger, Yanis Varoufakis, Nancy Fraser, Brian Eno, Ken Loach, and Chris Smalls. Other signees include leading figures in the Palestine movement such as Mohammed el-Kurd, Rashid Khalidi, Noura Erakat, Ilan Pappé, Chris Hedges, Abby Martin, and Norman Finkelstein.

A demonstration outside the French Consulate will be held in New York City on June 17, the day before Kazib stands trial, to demand an immediate end to the persecution of Kazib and all activists for Palestine in France. The rally is organized by Left Voice along with Socialist Alternative, CUNY4Palestine, Tempest, PAL-Awda NY, Partisan Defense Committee, and others.

In May, Anasse spoke to more than 2,000 members and friends of Revolution Permanente who gathered in Paris. Despite the serious charges that hang over him, he was unbowed in the continued fight against the genocide in Gaza and for the freedom of the Palestinian people. “Of course, friends, it’s a fight against the current,” he declared. “But history teaches us that those who went against the grain yesterday are the ones who will lead the way tomorrow. As you can see, friends, the time for passivity is over.”

This piece first appeared on Left Voice.

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Image by CODEPINK.

On Monday, June 16, Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) introduced legislation, a War Powers Resolution, to prevent President Trump from using military force against Iran without Congressional authorization. This will force all Senators to go on record supporting or opposing the following: “Congress hereby directs the President to terminate the use of United States Armed Forces for hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran or any part of its government or military, unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or specific authorization for use of military force against Iran.”

Sen. Kaine, a longtime advocate for exerting congressional authority over war, blasted Israel for jeopardizing planned U.S.-Iran diplomacy. “The American people have no interest in another forever war,” he wrote.

When Israel launched a surprise military strike on Iran last week, it did more than risk igniting a catastrophic regional war. It also exposed long-simmering tensions in Washington—between entrenched bipartisan, pro-Israel hawks and a growing current of lawmakers (and voters) unwilling to be dragged into another Middle East disaster.

“This is not our war,” declared Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), a Republican and one of the House’s most consistent antiwar voices. “Israel doesn’t need U.S. taxpayers’ money for defense if it already has enough to start offensive wars. I vote not to fund this war of aggression.” On social media, he polled followers on whether the U.S. should give Israel weapons to attack Iran. After 126,000 votes (and 2.5 million views), the answer was unequivocal: 85% said no.

For decades, questioning U.S. support for Israel has been a third rail in Congress. But Israel’s unprovoked attack on Iran—coming just as the sixth round of sensitive U.S.-Iran nuclear talks were set to take place in Oman—sparked rare and unusually direct criticism from across the political spectrum. Progressive members, already furious over Israel’s war on Gaza, were quick to condemn the new offensive. But they weren’t alone.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) called Israel’s strike “reckless” and “escalatory,” and warned that Prime Minister Netanyahu is trying to drag the U.S. into a broader war. Rep. Chuy García (D-IL) called Israel’s actions “diplomatic sabotage” and said, “the U.S. must stop supplying offensive weapons to Israel, which also continue to be used against Gaza, & urgently recommit to negotiations.”

Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) was even more blunt. “The war criminal Netanyahu wants to ignite an endless regional war & drag the U.S. into it. Any politician who tries to help him betrays us all.”

More striking, however, were the critiques from moderate Democrats and some Republicans.

Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, warned that strikes “threaten not only the lives of innocent civilians but the stability of the entire Middle East and the safety of American citizens and forces.”

Some pro-Israel Democrats are feeling comfortable speaking out on this conflict because it fits their anti-Trump critique. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) said: “We are at this crisis today because President Trump foolishly walked away from President Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement under which Iran had agreed to dismantle much of its nuclear program and to open its facilities to international inspections, putting more eyes on the ground. The United States should now lead the international community towards a diplomatic solution to avoid a wider war.”

Adding to this diverse chorus of opposition are some Republicans from the party’s non-interventionist wing. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) declared, “War with Iran is not in America’s interest. It would destabilize the region, cost countless lives, and drain our resources for generations.” Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) lamented that “some members of Congress and U.S. Senators seem giddy about the prospects of a bigger war.”

And in a rare show of agreement with progressive critics, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) blasted the hawks in both parties. “We’ve been told for the past 20 years that Iran is on the verge of developing a nuclear bomb any day now. The same story. Everyone I know is tired of U.S. intervention and regime change in foreign countries. Everyone I know wants us to fix our own problems here at home, not bomb other countries.”

Of course, many in Congress rushed to support Israel. Senate Republican leader John Thune said, “Israel has determined that it must take decisive action to defend the Israeli people.” Democratic Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) voiced full support for the strike and urged the U.S. to provide Israel “whatever is necessary—military, intelligence, weaponry.” The most crass was Senator Lindsey Graham, who posted: “Game on. Pray for Israel.”

But these crude pro-war responses, once guaranteed to go unchallenged, are now being met with resistance–and not just from activists. With public opinion shifting sharply–especially among younger voters, progressives, and “America First-ers” – the political calculus on unconditional support for Israel is changing. In the wake of Israel’s disastrous war in Gaza and its widening regional provocations, members of Congress are being forced to choose: follow the AIPAC money and the old playbook–or listen to their constituents.

If the American people continue to raise their voices, the tide in Washington could turn away from support for a war with Iran that could plunge the region into deeper chaos while offering no relief for the suffering people of Gaza. We could finally see an end to decades of disastrous unconditional support for Israel and knee-jerk support for catastrophic wars.

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Photograph Source: Meghdad Madadi – CC BY 4.0

The neoconservatives who orchestrated the disastrous wars with Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya — and who were never held accountable for the profligate waste of $8 trillion taxpayer dollars, as well as $69 billion squandered in Ukraine — look set to lure us into yet another military fiasco with Iran.

Iran is not Iraq. Iran is not Afghanistan. Iran is not Lebanon. Iran is not Libya. Iran is not Syria. Iran is not Yemen. Iran is the seventeenth largest country in the world, with a land mass equivalent to the size of Western Europe. It has a population of almost 90 million — 10 times greater than Israel — and its military resources, as well as alliances with China and Russia, make it a formidable opponent.

Iran launched retaliatory attacks today on Israel following waves of Israeli strikes that hit nuclear facilities and killed several top Iranian military commanders and six nuclear scientists on dozens. There have been explosions over the skyline in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. There is video footage of at least one large explosion on the ground in Tel Aviv from an apparent missile strike and reports of other explosions in some half dozen sites in and around Tel Aviv.

“Our revenge has just started, they will pay a high price for killing our commanders, scientists and people,” a senior Iranian officials told Reuters. The official added that “nowhere in Israel will be safe” and that “our revenge will be painful.”

“They think it’ll be an easy war,” said Alastair Crooke, a former British diplomat and member of British intelligence (MI6) who spent decades in the Middle East, told me of the neocons when I interviewed him. “They want to reassert American power and leadership. They feel that every so often throwing a small country against the wall and smashing it up is good for this.”

These neocons, bonded with the Israeli leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, he went on, “will not tolerate any rival power, any challenge to American leadership and American greatness.” They will create facts on the ground – a war between Israel and Iran – that will “pull Trump into a war with Iran.”

You can see my interview with Crooke here.

While Iran’s air force is weak, with many of its fighter planes decades old, it is well supplied with Russian air defense batteries and Chinese anti-ship missiles, as well as mines and coastal artillery. It can shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important oil chokepoint that facilitates the passage of 20 percent of the world’s oil supply. This would double or triple the price of oil and devastate the global economy. Iran has a large arsenal of ballistic missiles it can unleash on Israel, as well as on American military installations in the region. While initial waves can be intercepted, repeated attacks would swiftly deplete the Israeli and U.S. air defense stockpiles.

Israel is not equipped to endure a war of attrition, such as the eight year conflict between Iran and Iraq that ended — despite U.S. support for Saddam Hussein’s regime — in a stalemate, or as in Israel’s 18 year occupation of southern Lebanon that eventually forced it to withdraw in May, 2000, after repeated losses suffered from Hezbollah.

When Iran, in its Operation True Promise, launched over 300 ballistic and cruise missiles at Israel’s military and intelligence sites on April 13 and 14, 2023, in retaliation for an Israeli strike on the Iranian embassy in Damascus, the U.S. intercepted the vast majority.

“Israel cannot fight off an Iranian missile attack,” John Mearsheimer, a West Point graduate and a professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago, told me. “You have this very interesting situation where not only can Israel not win these wars, but they’ve turned [them] into protracted wars” in which “Israel is heavily dependent on the United States.”

“We have lots of assets in the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean, as well as in Israel itself and in the Red Sea,” he said. “These [are] designed to help Israel in its various wars. This includes not just Iran. It also includes the Houthis. It includes Hezbollah. So we are deeply involved in helping them fight. That was not the case in 1973 or any time before this war.”

Israel and its neocon allies believe they can eradicate Iran’s nuclear enrichment program by force and decapitate the Iranian government to install a client regime. That this non-reality-based belief system failed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, eludes them.

Israel, at the same time, wants to divert world attention from its genocide and mass starvation in Gaza and the accelerated ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Internet connection has been completely shut down in Gaza. The West Bank has been placed under a total blockade.

“The Israelis understand that if you have a general conflagration, people will not be paying much attention to the Palestinians,” Mearsheimer said. “People will be willing to give Israel more of a pass than they would in peaceful times. So let’s really ramp things up. Let’s have a general conflagration, and the end result will be that we can cleanse, on a massive scale, in Gaza and hopefully in the West Bank as well.”

You can see my interview with Mearsheimer here.

Iranian attacks would eventually leave hundreds, then thousands dead. Iran will appeal to Shi’ite Muslims through the region in what the Iranian leadership will describe as a war against Shi’ism, the second largest branch of Islam. Saudi Arabia — which condemned the attacks on Iran — has two million Shi’ites who live in the oil-rich Eastern province. There are significant Shi’ite communities in Pakistan, Bahrain and Turkey. Shi’ites form the majority in Iraq.

The Shi’ite-dominated government in Baghdad will side with Iran. Yemen will continue to disrupt maritime traffic in the Red Sea and hit Israel with drone attacks. Hezbollah, however crippled, will renew attacks on northern Israel. Expect terrorist attacks on U.S. bases in the region and perhaps even U.S. soil, as well as widespread sabotage of oil production in the Persian Gulf.

Iran will soon have enough fissile material to produce a nuclear weapon. A war will be a powerful incentive to build a bomb, especially with Israel possessing hundreds of nuclear weapons. If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon Saudi Arabia will be next, with Turkey, Iraq and Egypt not far behind. The efforts to blunt nuclear proliferation in the Middle East will evaporate.

A war, as Mearsheimer points out, will also solidify the alliance between Iran, Russia and China.

“The United States has pushed China, Russia, North Korea and Iran very close together,” he noted. “They form a tight knit bloc. Largely as a result of the Ukraine war, the Russians and the Chinese have been driven together, and given what’s happening in the Middle East, the Iranians and the Russians have been drawn together. The United States may be helping Israel, but it’s important to understand that the Russians are helping Iran. It’s not to America’s advantage to have China and Russia aligned closely against Washington. It’s not in America’s interest to have Russia and Iran working together against Israel and the United States.”

“There’s always the possibility that if a war heats up involving Iran on one side and the United States and Israel on the other side, that at some point down the road that the Russians will get dragged into that war, because the Russians now have a vested interest in supporting Iran,” he added.

A war could last months, if not years. It will be an aerial duel, one largely between Israeli warplanes and missiles and Iranian missiles. But to subdue Iran it will require perhaps a million U.S. troops being deployed to invade and occupy the country. An occupation of Iran will end with the same humiliating defeat the U.S. experienced in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The fantasy of Israel and the neocons is that they can break Iran with aerial assaults, an updated version of Shock and Awe, the bombing campaign in Iraq in 2003. But the amount of ordinance required, especially to pulverize Iran’s underground nuclear facilities, will be massive. Israel, in its decapitation of the leadership of Hezbollah in Beirut, including Hezbollah’s General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah, had to employ Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) 2,000-pound bunker-buster bombs.

“If you’re going to fly F-35’s with JDAM missiles, each of those is about 14 tons,” Crooke said. “It’s not just the weight, but the fuel they use. So you have to refuel maybe once, refuel twice, then you’ll have to fight your aircraft to suppress their defenses. You’re talking about a huge performance. Is America going to be able to do this? The Iranians have multiple air defense systems and good radars, over the horizon radars as well.”

So why go to war with Iran? Why walk away from a nuclear agreement that Iran did not violate? Why demonize a government that is the mortal enemy of the Taliban, along with other Takfiri groups, including al-Qaeda and Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL)? Why further destabilize a region already dangerously volatile?

The generals, politicians, intelligence services, neocons, weapons manufacturers, so-called experts, celebrity pundits and Israeli lobbyists are not about to take the blame for two decades of military fiascos. They need a scapegoat. It is Iran. The humiliating defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq, the failed states of Syria and Libya, the proliferation of extremist groups and militias, many of which we initially trained and armed, along with the continued worldwide terrorist attacks, have to be someone else’s fault.

The chaos and instability we unleashed, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, left Iran as the dominant country in the region. Washington empowered its nemesis. It has no idea how to reverse this other than to attack it.

International law, along with the rights of almost 90 million people in Iran, is ignored just as the rights of the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria were ignored. The Iranians, whatever they feel about their leadership, do not see the United States as allies or liberators. They do not want to be attacked or occupied. They will resist. And we, and Israel, will pay.

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

The falling out between Donald Trump and Elon Musk would make a grand opera. Two titans of business who entered a political marriage of convenience have had a predictable clash of egos and, instead of parting company privately, have flung mud at each other in public. Coming to the Met in 2026: Philip Glass’ monumental Musk v. Trump.

Don’t mistake this affair for mere entertainment. The deeper issue here is corruption and what happens when collusion goes awry, as it so often does.

The ostensible reason for the rift was Musk’s criticism of Trump’s budget bill, which the industrialist rightly pointed out would add trillions to the national debt. With the bill in danger of foundering in the Senate, Trump can’t afford to have a high-profile critic like Musk standing in the way of what might be his only serious legislative initiative.

This disagreement could have remained at the level of policy debate but instead quickly devolved into something closer to a schoolyard squabble. Musk claimed credit for Trump’s election. Trump pointed to Musk’s consumption of drugs during his DOGE rampage. The South Africa-born tycoon asserted a connection between Trump and infamous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and went so far as to champion Trump’s impeachment. The president threatened to sever all relations between the federal government and Musk’s enterprises. Musk countered with a proposal to stop running flights for NASA, which would effectively end the transportation of U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station.

Both men have since stepped back from the brink (for the time being). Musk removed his Epstein and impeachment tweets from X and even acknowledged that they “went too far.” Trump stopped threatening massive retaliation (except in the case of Musk financially supporting Democrats). And Musk has approved of Trump’s dispatch of the National Guard to California to quash anti-ICE demonstrations.

Trump is famous for forgiving the worst examples of disloyalty—such as J.D. Vance’s comments that Trump was “America’s Hitler” and a “moral disaster—as long as that person has political/financial clout and is willing to grovel at his feet. Though he certainly meets the first condition, Musk is no groveler. So, don’t expect a reconciliation any time soon.

In fact, if contemporary parallels hold true, Musk should be either hiring more security guards, taking on more accountants to thwart an IRS audit, or preparing to relocate overseas.

The Fate of Oligarchs

If you fall afoul of Viktor Orban in Hungary, you might get frozen out of business deals, but you generally don’t have to fear for your life. Hungary is a member of the European Union and a popular tourist destination. However corrupt and autocratic Orban might be, he’s not a contract killer.

The same can’t be said of Vladimir Putin, who uses murder as a principal mode of dissuasion. The Russian leader arranges the assassination of political rivals (like Boris Nemtsov) to discourage serious electoral challenges. He facilitates the elimination of journalists (like Anna Politkovskaya) to ensure that the media doesn’t poke holes in Kremlin narratives. He oversees the removal of human rights activists (Stanislav Markelov) to send a message to civil society that Russia no longer tolerates “independent” spaces.

The business community initially thought itself safe. Most Russian oligarchs were on board with Putin because of the obvious benefits of doing business with the Kremlin. Of course, if you changed your mind about the Russian leader, as did oligarch Boris Berezovsky, you could expect retribution. He survived two apparent attempts to kill him with car bombs before fleeing to the UK where, in 2013, his death was ruled a suicide.

Even if Berezovsky did in fact kill himself—he was involved in an expensive divorce at the time—the Kremlin still managed to communicate its message: bad things happen to those who cross Vladimir Putin. Putin even created the new category of “death by association.” Several of Berezovsky’s associates—Georgian businessman Badri Patarkatsishvili (heart attack), former deputy director of Aeroflot Nikolai Glushkov (strangled with a dog leash)—were also found dead in London.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, oligarchs started dropping dead left and right. John O’Neill and Sarah Wynne write in The Hill:

Vladislav Avayev, an immensely wealthy banker and government official, was found dead in his Moscow apartment, gun in hand, alongside the bodies of his wife and young daughter, all shot to death. He was described by neighbors as a “happy nerd.” Within 24 hours, Sergey Protosenya, a Russian natural gas oligarch, was found hanged in a Spanish villa. Nearby, his wife and young daughter were hacked and stabbed to death with an axe and a knife, both wiped of fingerprints. Much evidence suggests these were murders at the direction of Putin.

The list goes on: an aviation industry exec died after falling off his yacht in Vladivostok, a sausage magnate died after falling out of a hotel window in India, an oil company CEO died after falling from a hospital window in Moscow. Even non-Russian oligarchs who criticized Putin ended up dying in mysterious circumstances, like Latvian-American financier Dan Rapoport, who perishedafter falling out of a building in Washington, DC.

If you’re an oligarch and you criticize Putin, you should probably move into a ranch house.

Should Musk Worry?

Authoritarian regimes routinely dispatch their enemies. Kim Jong Un famously eliminated his uncle, who’d been possibly plotting to take over. Mohammed bin Salman’’s henchmen took a bone saw to prominent Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In the Philippines, under Rodrigo Duterte, more than a dozen outspoken journalists were killed.

Corrupt, semi-democratic states, meanwhile, go after their critics in other ways: squeezing their assets, taking them to court, forcing them out of the country. At the moment, Donald Trump is going down this road. As his dispatch of National Guard troops to Los Angeles demonstrates, he is certainly interested in quashing dissent. But he is generally doing so in more bureaucratic ways—firing federal workers, eliminating funding for NPR and PBS, leaning on universities.

When it comes to the corporate world, Trump has demanded fealty and, in return, has distributed administration positions like expensive party favors. Billionaires Howard Lutnick, Linda McMahon, and Scott Bessent serve in his cabinet. Several billionaires were given plum ambassadorial positions (Warren Stephens to the UK, Charles Kushner to France). Through the power of his office, he has made lapdogs of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. In the wake of the feud between Trump and Musk, Bill Gates visited the White House, hat in hand, to plead for the resumption of USAID funding.

Musk is perhaps the first high-profile, high-assets apostate. Given the resources at his disposal and his desire to influence elections, an anti-Trump Musk could pose a risk to MAGA Republicans. Ro Khanna (D-CA) even reached out to Musk’s people to see if he could help the Dems in the mid-terms. But bringing the most hated man in America into a party that has its own problems coddling the rich is not going to win any elections.

The Musk Affair is useful in other respects. It is the most prominent example of the corrupt practices of the Trump administration. Trump rewards his loyalists with power and money. He has fired the federal workforce not only to decimate the “deep state” but also to have thousands of new opportunities to distribute favors. The flip side of this patronage system is the punishment of defectors. Putin communicated the price of disloyalty very clearly to the oligarchs who dared to protest the war in Ukraine or the business practices of the Russian government. He has been careful, however, to maintain plausible deniability. Other leaders similarly punish their powerful opponents behind the scenes.

Trump prefers to make his threats in public no matter how unethical the actions might be. The cancelation of federal contracts with Musk’s companies would be as corrupt as the awarding of them in return for his political favors. Because he is an autocrat, Putin can act with impunity when he kills his challengers. Trump also aspires to act with impunity—indeed, his lawyers have argued before the Supreme Court that he has immunity for practically anything he does as president.

Corruption, however, has taken down many a ruler—Ferdinand Marcos, Viktor Yanukovych, Jacob Zuma. This could be Trump’s Achilles’ heel. Citizens tolerate a certain amount of corruption if they themselves are doing okay economically. But once the cuts in government services begin to bite, they will be newly appalled at the politically motivated contracts, the naked grab for money through pyramid scams like meme coins, and all the other pay-to-play games of access in Washington.

Trump can do a lot of damage to Musk and will do so in order to send a message to anyone contemplating disloyalty. But Musk can also do a lot of damage to Trump by amplifying an anti-corruption message through his social media platform. Musk himself is no Alexei Navalny. But if the Musk-Trump war goes hot again after the current ceasefire—and if Musk decides to go public with an insider’s account of the administration’s corrupt practices—it might cause some real damage to the administration.

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Smoke from Israeli airstrike on Iran. Screengrab from video posted to X.

Israel’s consistent attacks on Iran since 2023 have all been illegal, violations of the United Nations Charter (1945). Iran is a member state of the United Nations and is therefore a sovereign state in the international order. If Israel had a problem with Iran, there are many mechanisms mandated by international law that permit Israel to bring complaints against Iran.

Thus far, Israel has avoided these international forums because it is clear that it has no case against Iran. Allegations that Iran is building a nuclear weapon, which are constantly raised by the United States, the European Union, and Israel, have been fully investigated by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and found to be unfounded. It is certainly true that Iran has a nuclear energy programme that is within the rules in place through the IAEA, and it is also true that Iran’s clerical establishment has a fatwa (religious edict) in place against the production of nuclear weapons. Despite the IAEA findings and the existence of this fatwa, the West – egged on by Israel – has accepted this irrational idea that Iran is building a nuclear weapon and that Iran is therefore a threat to the international order. Indeed, by its punctual and illegal attacks on Iran, it is Israel that is a threat to the international order.

Over the past decades, Iran has called for the establishment of a Middle East Nuclear Free Zone, a strange idea coming from a country accused of wanting to build a nuclear weapon. But this idea of the nuclear free zone has been rejected by the West, largely to protect Israel, which has an illegal nuclear weapons programme. Israel is the only country in the Middle East with a nuclear weapon, although it has never tested it openly nor acknowledged its existence. If Israel was so keen on eliminating any nuclear threat, it should have taken the offer for the creation of a nuclear-free zone heartily.

Neither the Europeans, who so often posture as defenders of international law, nor the United Nations leadership have publicly pushed Israel to adopt this idea because both recognise that this would require Israel, not Iran, to denuclearise. That this is an improbable situation has meant that there has been no movement from the West or from the international institutions to take this idea forward and build an international consensus to develop a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East.

Israel does not want to build a nuclear-free zone in the region. What Israel wants is to be the sole nuclear power in the region, and therefore to be exactly what it is – namely, the largest United States military base in the world that happens to be the home to a large civilian population. Iran has no ambition to be a nuclear power. But it has an ambition to be a sovereign state that remains committed to justice for the Palestinians. Israel has no problem with the idea of sovereignty per se, but has a problem with any state in the region that commits itself to Palestinian emancipation. If Iran normalised relations with Israel and ceased its opposition to US dominion in the region, then it is likely that Israel would end its opposition to Iran.

Israel and the United States Prepared the Way

In January 2020, the United States conducted an illegal assassination at Iraq’s Baghdad Airport to kill General Qassim Soleimani, the leader of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Soleimani, through the Quds Force, had produced for Iran an insurance policy against further Israeli attacks on the country. The Quds Force is responsible for Iranian military operations outside the boundaries of the country, including building what is called the ‘Axis of Resistance’ that includes the various pro-Iranian governments and non-governmental military forces. These included: Hezbollah in Lebanon, various IRGC groups in Syria that worked with Syrian militia groups, the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, several Palestinian factions in Occupied Palestine, and the Ansar Allah government in Yemen. Without its own nuclear deterrent, Iran required some way to balance the military superiority of Israel and the United States. This deterrence was created by the ‘Axis of Resistance’, an insurance policy that allowed Iran to let Israel know that if Israel fired at Iran, these groups would rain missiles on Tel Aviv in retaliation.

The assassination of Soleimani began a determined new political and military campaign by the United States, Israel, and their European allies to weaken Iran. Israel and the United States began to punctually strike Iranian logistical bases in Syria and Iraq to weaken Iran’s forward posture and to demoralise the Syrian and Iraqi militia groups that operated against Israeli interests. Israel began to assassinate IRGC military officers in Syria, Iran, and Iraq, a campaign of murder that began to have an impact on the IRGC and the Quds Force.

Taking advantage of its genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza, Israel, with full support from the United States and Europe, began to damage the ‘Axis of Resistance’, Iran’s insurance policy. Israel took its war into Lebanon, with a ruthless bombing campaign that included the assassination of the Hezbollah leader Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah on 27 September 2024. This campaign, while it has not totally demolished Hezbollah, has certainly weakened it. Meanwhile, Israel began a regular bombing campaign against the Syrian military positions around Damascus and along the road to Idlib in the north. This bombing campaign, coordinated with the US military and with the US intelligence services, was designed to open the roadway for the entry of the former al-Qaeda fighters into Damascus and to overthrow the government of al-Assad on 8 December 2024. The fall of the al-Assad government dented Iran’s strength across the Levant region (from the Turkish border to the Occupied Palestinian Territory) as well as along the plains from southern Syria to the Iranian border. The consistent campaign by the United States to bomb Yemeni positions further resulted in the loss of Ansar Allah’s heavy equipment (including long-range missiles) that fundamentally threatened Israel.

What this meant was that by early 2025, the Iranian insurance policy against Israel had collapsed. Israel began its march to war, suggesting an attack on Iran was imminent. Such an attack, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows, would help him in a domestic political fight with the ultra-orthodox parties over the question of a military exemption for their communities; this will prevent his government from falling. Cynical Netanyahu is using genocide and the possibility of a horrendous war with Iran for narrow political ends. But that is not what is motivating this attack. What is motivating this attack is that Israel smells an opportunity to try to overthrow the Iranian government by force.

Iran returned to the negotiations brokered by the IAEA to prevent such an attack. Its leadership knew full well that nothing would stop a scofflaw such as Israel from bombing Iran. And nothing did. Not even the fact that Iran is still at the negotiation table. Israel has taken advantage of Iran’s momentary weakness to strike. And that strike might escalate further.

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Photo by Jon Tyson

There are various reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but there is one important factor that has not been sufficiently explored.  The Soviet Union in the 1980s had become increasingly irrelevant.  The irrelevance was particularly obvious in international economics, where the Soviet ruble was not a convertible currency; in international diplomacy, where the Soviet Union played no major role in the Middle East or the Global South; and in international ideology, where the Soviet model was a non-factor.  Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze understood that one of the major tasks of the Soviet Union was to restore Soviet relevance in all of these areas.  They had to grapple with the troglodytes in the Soviet leadership to reach this goal.  They tried, but they never achieved their goal.

We have our own troglodytes, although the United States is not facing the threat of dissolution.  Donald Trump’s executive actions are clearly weakening the international standing of the United States and begging the question of U.S. relevance in terms of its political, diplomatic, and even economic standing.  A strong case can be made that the U.S. role in international diplomacy is already weakening.  The United States is no longer a major factor in  the diplomacy of arms control and disarmament.  In fact, the U.S. emphasis on a national missile defense (the so-called Golden Dome) will worsen the strategic environment, and encourage many others to enhance their strategic offensive arsenals to overwhelm a Golden Dome or simply pursue their own nuclear weapons.  The Golden Dome will never be able to achieve its objective of providing strategic stability..  I will address the flaws of the system in a future article.

The Trump administration has made many mistakes in the past several months, but picking a fight with China is certainly the worst of them.  The Trump national security team is dominated by China Hawks who can’t tolerate the increased power and influence of China.  But China controls the global supply of many important rare earth metals and magnets.  The United States has limited exports of software for making semiconductors, gases such as ethane and butane, and components for nuclear and aerospace systems.  The Chinese have responded to Trump’s challenge  by placing limits on their export to the United States of the rare minerals needed for U.S. fighter aircraft, aircraft carriers, and strategic missiles.  Ford Motors has already had to close a factory in China because of a lack of magnets from Chinese producers.

Trump’s plans for a $175 billion antimissile shield, designed to shoot down ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles, wouldn’t protect the United States from drone technology, which has already changed the nature of war between Ukraine and Russia.  The Pentagon is overly wedded to piloted fighter aircraft, and has not invested in the types of small drones used so effectively by both Russia and Ukraine.  America’s adversaries will not try to emulate the United States regarding a national missile defense, assuming that a less costlier investment in offensive weaponry will be sufficient.  The United States will be a loser on all of these fronts as arms control becomes irrelevant.

China holds leverage in every aspect of Trump’s trade war.  Tariffs, moreover, lead to higher prices at home for businesses and consumers, and reduced economic growth.  Trump’s xenophobia and his campaign against U.S. elite universities and research institutions will encourage the best of our international students to return home, We will suffer from lost technological innovation as we lose the “best and the brightest” of our international students.  This happened in the Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s, and it happened in Russia in the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Trump’s tariff war not only marks the decline of U.S. global influence, but it will weaken the value and influence of the American dollar. There are already indications that U.S. tariffs are hurting our relations with Southeast Asian nations, and that China is gaining from U.S. losses.  This is true in the global south as well.  There are signs that global investors are avoiding U.S. treasury bonds and pursuing alternatives to the American dollar,

Trump’s campaign of America First, which resembles the isolationism of Charles Lindburgh’s campaign against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 is creating setbacks on the international front.  While Trump ignores the genocidal military campaign that Israel is fighting against Palestinians, Europeans and others are stepping up their protests of the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu.  The foreign ministers of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom have announced sanctions and “other measures” against two far-right Israeli cabinet ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, for “inciting violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.  New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman warned that their “ugly, nihilistic policy in Gaza” will endanger Jews everywhere.

China is also gaining from U.S. withdrawal from full participation in the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization, which the United States did so much to create in the first place.  China immediately announced that it would compensate for any losses that occur due to the reduced role of the United States.

Since the end of World War II, the United States has been a global leader, but has spent too many resources and too much energy in pursuing global supremacy.  The depressing state of our domestic political system can’t be addressed because the Republican-led Congress will not challenge the authoritarianism of the Trump administration.  The absence of a seasoned national security adviser and a fully-staffed National Security Council have ensured the absence of diplomacy needed to address international problems.

Our efforts to divide Russia and China have only driven Moscow and Beijing closer together.  But neither Russia nor China represents the threat or challenge that Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once represented.  It’s time for diplomacy to find a way to open talks with both Moscow and Beijing instead of pursuing a feckless dual containment that is only worsening tensions.  Both President Putin and Xi Jinping have signaled an interest in opening bilateral talks.  We have neither a plan nor a process for doing so, and the absence of a serious national security team guarantees a missed opportunity.

U.S. military supremacy has wasted resources and achieved nothing internationally and promises to create havoc at home in the wake of National Guard and Marine deployments that only serve the interests of the president.  Trump’s contempt for constitutional democracy represents the existential threat that demands the serious political opposition that is lacking.

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Photograph Source: @zelamine – instagram

Many years from now, long after Gaza has been obliterated and its unwanted survivors have been dispersed to whatever hellish limbo awaits them, in that distant future when everyone will have always been against this, I suspect what I will remember most from our end of the genocide is not the butcherers who have rotated through the White House and Downing Street and das Bundeskanzleramt, nor the savages-in-suits of AIPAC and the rest of the Israel lobby, nor even the supposed realpolitik behind it all—the oil-mad demand of Western powers for a beachhead in a West Asia that is too rich in combustible carbon.

No, what I will remember is my neighbors in Boulder, Colorado, and their reaction to the recent attack here on a group of peaceful protestors. In that reaction I have come to a better understanding of how easily the couple next door or the friends around the block become Hitler’s willing executioner’s—Bibi’s at any rate. The specific form of good German I have in mind are those who haven’t quite cheered on the genocide but have abetted it almost as insidiously by their obeisance to the authoritarians who tell them what to think and say about the slaughter. Their weakness of character—make that their abandonment of character—is the bulwark against which the genocidaires in Washington and Jerusalem place their backs, the surety that enables them to carry out the darkest of deeds in the broadest of daylight.

But first, a thumbnail of the events of June 1: On that sunny Sunday a group of protestors held, as they have each week for the last year and a half, a peaceful 18-minute vigil in downtown Boulder calling for the immediate release of hostages held by Hamas. The protestors were part of a group called Run for Their Lives, which has been holding similar weekly protests in a scattering of cities around the world. But on that Sunday, as you of course know, the Boulder group was set upon by an Egyptian immigrant, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, who burned fifteen people and one dog with homemade incendiaries while shouting “Free Palestine!” Elsewhere he had issued calls to “end Zionists.”

(It should go without saying that attacking peaceful protestors is abhorrent and intolerable, but because I will inevitably be tarred for this article as a supporter of violence, let me say here that I have no truck with it whatsoever.)

After an outpouring of sympathy for the victims—all to the good there—Boulder went off the rails. Or rather, it stayed on them, chugging blindly along on tracks that had been carefully laid, tie by tie, league after league, over many a long year. Three aspects of my neighbors’ response may be of interest beyond the parochial confines of Boulder.

First, virtually every public official, every civic group of note, every rabbi or business owner or passerby whom a reporter could scare up for a quote condemned the attack as “antisemitic.” Many of them declared that “Boulder’s Jewish community” had been attacked. The Boulder Daily Camera, the town’s pale imitation of a newspaper, flatly declared in article after article (typically in the lede, no less) that the attack was antisemitic, and the independent Boulder Reporting Lab did no better. Many Boulderites went still further and condemned the rampant and rising antisemitism in Boulder, and more than one said the attack was the predictable culmination of such hate. (Never mind that the attacker came from 150 miles away.)

What was lacking in these many declarations was proof the attack was antisemitic. Anti-Zionist, certainly; the attacker declared as much. Antisemitic? I know of no shred of evidence. While I’m not privy to every utterance of the unhinged Mohamed Soliman, from those that have been made public he seems to have been outraged by the genocide in Gaza and thought he was striking a blow against Israel and Zionism, not a word about Jews or Judaism.

It matters, of course, whether his crime is described as “anti-Zionist” or “antisemitic” because antisemitism is the brush with which Israel and the White House have long tarred critics of Israel’s many barbarities. Do you condemn Zionist settlers who brutalize Palestinians and kick them off their land in the West Bank? You’re an antisemite. How about the slaughter of infants and toddlers by the thousand? Antisemite. The slow starvation of two million people? The murder of those who seek aid at food stations? The destruction of their homes and hospitals and universities and mosques and anything else rising more than a meter or two above the Gazan soil? Antisemite, antisemite, antisemite.

Among Boulder’s broad spectrum of civic, business, and political leaders, just one refused to play along. A city councilor named Taishya Adams declined to sign a statement by the city council that declared “in the strongest possible terms that this was a targeted, antisemitic attack.” Adams asked the council to add “anti-Zionist” to its description, and her reward was multiple sharp, public dressings down from her fellow councilors and a sound pillorying by Zionist journalists as far off as Europe and Israel.

Until now Adams has not been a leader who has evinced—how to put this delicately?— notable acuity or dogged devotion to progressive values. (She has voted, for example, against a tepid 15-percent increase in the minimum wage, apparently having been dumb enough to fall for the Chamber of Commerce canard that paying workers fairly is bad for business.) But she had the intelligence to see through the lies about Gaza, and she had the courage of her convictions, and this show of spine stirred such horror among Boulder elites—“one of ours” had broken ranks!—that there followed a whole new round of inveighing against the rise of antisemitism locally.

Such was the frenzy that civic leaders, including the mayor (a man as weak of principle as he is of chin), got together with a far-right outfit called the Combat Antisemitism Movement to host what they billed as an “emergency summit” on antisemitism at the University of Colorado. The merits of this “summit” I think we can deduce from the fact that in eight hundred words telling us about it, the Daily Camera’s sympathetic scribe couldn’t find a single example of antisemitism in Boulder worth noting. He did, however, report that many summiteers were offended—offended, I tell you—by student protests against Israel’s genocide and, further, that the Combat Antisemitism Movement has called for legislation to outlaw the wearing of masks at such protests.

Lest there be any doubt about what “antisemitism” means in all the foregoing, let’s look briefly at another gathering, a vigil for the victims of Soliman’s attack, held at the Boulder Jewish Community Center. The organizers of this confab pitched it as a healing occasion but somehow saw fit to invite as speaker an envoy of the genocidaires: Israel Bachar, one of Israel’s consuls general to the United States. Bachar, not incidentally, is a political hack who was among those responsible for returning Bibi the Butcher to power in 2009. Inviting Bachar to your town’s therapeutic session doesn’t quite rise to the level of inviting, say, Steve Bannon, but the difference is one of degree rather than kind.

“Israel is facing a seven-front war,” Bachar railed to the crowd of twelve hundred people. “It is not a war that we initiated, but it’s a war that we are going to win. We cannot afford to lose this war.” This sort of talk isn’t even code anymore. Everyone by now knows its plain meaning: We will obliterate Gaza. Yet I found no sign of any Boulder leader who condemned this call to erase Gaza. Perhaps they were taking their cues from their constituents. When Bachar said, “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” the crowd applauded. To some sizable number of Boulderites, to criticize Israeli genocide is to be an antisemite.

My second observation is that in the many reports on Run for Their Lives, I’ve yet to come across one locally (or, come to that, nationally) that mentioned one salient and hard-to-miss fact about the group: its leaders and some share of its participants—I would hazard a majority of those—are squarely comfortable with genocide. This does not mean they deserve to be set on flame. But in our rush to sympathy, why must we omit this truth? If a bunch of Klan sympathizers were set on fire by a black man, wouldn’t their racist beliefs get a mention in the reports? And if the attacker had said he attacked them not because they were white but because he objected to their racist views, wouldn’t we think this might be so? Certainly we wouldn’t say this was an attack on “Boulder’s white community.” Most of us would say it was an attack on people who sympathized with the Klan.

But of course, to talk of such things—to acknowledge that some of the victims of Soliman’s attack likely favor genocide (and certainly that the group behind their rally does)—is the last thing a good German wants. It would, among other things, get in the way of hopping into bed, under cover of sympathizing with the victims, with some of Run for Their Lives’ more noxious bedfellows, like Consul Bachar.

Why do I say Run for Their Lives is at ease with genocide? For a start, at their protests in Boulder (and in other cities as well, to judge from photos online) participants commonly fly the genocidal flag, the avowedly Zionist standard of Israel, which all decent people surely now regard with the same revulsion that was once reserved for the swastika-emblazoned flag of Nazi Germany. But to say they fly the flag understates the case. Many of them, as I have seen in town, literally wrap themselves in the genocidal colors, swaddling their bodies in a flag that by now positively drips with Palestinian blood. The second-most-common flag at these affairs is the Stars and Stripes, banner of the genocide’s chief underwriter. To Palestinians and those who sympathize with them, these are not unsubtle messages.

Additionally, Run for Their Lives manages to lament the plight of the hostages on their website without breathing a syllable of concern for the genocide being undertaken in their name. “Innocent children, women, the elderly, and young people,” the site’s statement of purpose says, “should not be living in tunnels 20 meters underground for over a year—they should be in their homes with their families.” This is inarguably true. I couldn’t agree more. But what deformity of conscience allows a group to say such a thing without acknowledging that twenty meters above the heads of those few dozen innocents, millions of other innocents are being driven from their homes and are daily terrorized, with untold numbers of their families being maimed and murdered? Only people who have made peace, if that’s the word, with genocide could call for compassion for one set of innocents while ignoring the far greater devastation to innocents literally steps away.

By the same token, I know of no prominent person or group in Boulder (Councilor Adams excepted) who has used the word “genocide” in a statement condemning Soliman’s attack—nobody who has said, “No matter how appalled we are by Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, we unequivocally condemn Sunday’s attack.” Even the Boulder Progressives, the town’s softly left-of-center voice, put out a windy statement that couldn’t get past the attack’s “antisemitism.” So conditioned are my neighbors to the lie that to stand against genocide is to stand against Jews, they dare not even name the crime. Silence does not always signal consent, but it does always damn the silent.

For a final example of Boulder’s failure to name the truth, consider this sentence from a bookseller at the Boulder Bookstore, writing in the store newsletter after the attack: “Whether you need a book to help you cope with grief or stress, a journal to help you meditate and reflect, a history book to help better understand the complicated history of the Israel & Palestine conflict . . . we can help you find what you need.”

The complicated history, you see. That is of course how Israel’s ruthless settler colonialism has always been—and, now, its final solution no doubt will also be—obscured. It’s complicated.

It’s not, of course. But how many customers would the bookseller have lost had she written, “The history of Israel and Palestine is actually quite simple. Israel stole land that the Palestinians were living on and ever since has been brutalizing them and forcing them onto smaller and smaller parcels.”

My third observation is that what is remarkable about these two responses from Boulder—the rush to label the attack antisemitic rather than anti-Zionist, and the refusal to name the crime of genocide or the genocidal sympathies of Run for Their Lives—is that these sins are being committed not by elites but by what amount to commoners: two-penny town politicians, small-minded Rotarians, the corner-lot developers who populate the Chamber, even local liberals who fancy themselves small-bore, truth-to-power types. From the national elite, these responses would of course have been expected. Whatever they may personally believe, a congressperson or a governor, the president of an Ivy League university, a talking head or the editor of all the news that’s fit to print must either get on the Zionist bandwagon or risk losing their cushy perch, their government funding, their next primary, or their “relevance” among the nation’s other shapers of opinion.

But none of those motives applies in Boulder, which is why I find my neighbors’ responses so remarkable. Nobody in Boulder is going to be targeted above the table by AIPAC money or beneath it by Adelson money. Nobody is losing a hundred thousand X followers for a humane tweet against genocide. There is simply no structural incentive of this sort to go along with the madness. And yet Boulderites do.

Why? I believe it’s because like Holsteins at the trough, they have simply slurped up the propaganda about antisemitism that the New York Times, MSNBC, Chuck Schumer, the DNC, and all the rest of them have slopped out for so long. Boulderites, I gather, half-digest this swill in their own homes and then regurgitate it as cud to be chewed in coffee-shop conversations and text threads with friends and family. I’ve never thought much of the political insight of my townspeople (last time out they nearly elected a Republican mayor, for Christ’s sake), but I thought them marginally brighter than this. Up to two weeks ago I’d have wagered that a large number of them could see through such obvious lies. Apparently no. At any rate, if great masses do, they are silent or have been silenced.

A last observation: Back when this was Biden’s genocide, Boulder’s liberals found it convenient to buy the propaganda that Israel needed to defend itself by decapitating infants and strafing medics and torturing teachers. Not to swallow the agitprop would have meant confronting the “news” that the Democrats were genocidaires and, consequently, that to cast a vote for them was at best morally dubious. With Trump looming, my neighbors couldn’t abide such facts.

That it is now Trump’s genocide changes nothing. After all, were Boulderites now to call the genocide by its name, they would be admitting that they themselves have long been good Germans who abetted the butchery. To accuse themselves would also be to simultaneously accuse their like-minded friends and family—with unpleasant impacts on dinner-party invitations and serendipitous sidewalk chats. The cartwheels that people will do to avoid such psychic and social difficulties are really quite something.

This, I’m sure, is what I will remember years from now. The slaughterers in Washington and Jerusalem along with their abettors in high places like the Times editorial board may be the chief culprits of this genocide. But it is my neighbors—and, I suspect, many of yours—who are their willing executioners. By mindlessly parroting the lie that to oppose genocide is to be an antisemite, they make themselves the playthings of Netanyahu, Biden, and Trump, and those tyrants take their stupidity for the license it is to commit the gravest of crimes against humanity.

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Who Pays to Stop a Pandemic? Image: Sue Coe.

Throughout human history, zoonotic diseases, illnesses that jump from animals to humans, have shaped civilizations, triggered pandemics, and rewritten the course of economies. The Black Death, which ravaged Europe in the 14th century, originated from bacteria transmitted by fleas that lived on rats. Ebola, HIV, and SARS-CoV-2, which caused COVID-19, all had animal origins. As humanity’s relationship with animals has become increasingly industrialized through factory farming, the risk of zoonotic spillover has escalated.

Some diseases are transmitted through direct contact with animals, such as rabies from a bite or tuberculosis from infected cattle. Others spread through the consumption of poorly cooked meat, contaminated dairy products, or wet markets that sell live animals. Vector-borne diseases, where insects like mosquitoes and ticks act as intermediaries, transfer pathogens from animals to humans.

Factory Farms and the Growing Threat of Zoonotic Pandemics

The intensification of industrial agriculture has amplified these risks. The crowded, high-density conditions of factory farms create a breeding ground for disease. Animals raised in confined spaces experience high levels of stress, which weakens their immune systems and increases their susceptibility to infections. When a pathogen emerges in this environment, it can mutate rapidly and spread with alarming efficiency.

This is particularly concerning with influenza viruses, which frequently originate in birds and pigs before adapting to humans. Bird flu has been detected in sheep, raising concerns about the virus’s ability to cross species boundaries. Such a discovery underscores the unpredictability of zoonotic diseases, particularly in terms of cross-species transmission and the potential for rapid evolution of health threats.

Philip Lymbery, author and global CEO of Compassion in World Farming, thinks the danger is serious: “Factory farms are a ticking time bomb for future pandemics,” he says. “Hundreds of coronaviruses are in circulation, most of them among animals including pigs, camels, bats, and cats. Sometimes those viruses jump to humans.”

Antibiotics, widely used in industrial farming to promote growth and prevent disease, exacerbate the issue. Overuse has led to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which can jump to humans through direct exposure, contaminated food, or environmental runoff from farms. The World Health Organization has repeatedly warned that antibiotic resistance could become one of the greatest threats to human health, rendering common infections untreatable. COVID-19 was a wake-up call, but it was not the first time a zoonotic virus wreaked havoc on global health. The HIV/AIDS epidemic, which originated from nonhuman primates, has killed over 40 million peoplesince it emerged in the 20th century.

The 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic, which was linked to pig farming, spread globally within months. Bird flu strains continue to pose a significant threat, with highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1) causing sporadic human infections, resulting in a fatality rate of over 50 percent.

Reimagining Protein: Innovations That Could Prevent the Next Pandemic

Despite these risks, the global demand for animal protein is surging. Humans now eat 350 million metric tons of meat annually, nearly “a thousand Empire State Buildings in carcass weight,” according to academic and writer Tim Searchinger. The United Nations estimates that meat production will increase by more than 70 percent by 2050. This trajectory presents challenges not only for climate change, deforestation, and water pollution but also for the likelihood of future pandemics.

However, emerging innovations in food technology present possible solutions. Precision fermentation and cultivated meat are being explored as methods to reduce dependence on traditional livestock. Precision fermentation, which is used to produce dairy-identical proteins without the need for cows, utilizes engineered microbes to create compounds such as whey and casein.

Cultivated milk, bio-identical to cow milk but grown in a bioreactor rather than in a cow, is expected to enter the market soon. Cultivated meat, grown from animal cells in bioreactors, provides real meat without the need for slaughterhouses or crowded factory farms.

These technologies have the potential to transform global protein production, significantly lowering the risk of zoonotic disease spillover. Because they bypass live animals, they eliminate the risks associated with confined feeding operations, antibiotic resistance, and cross-species viral mutations. Studies suggest that precision fermentation and cultivated dairy could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 96 percent compared to conventional dairy farming.

Jeff Tripician, who has worked in the meat industry for 40 years, recently moved to head a cultivated meat company based in the Netherlands. He told the Future of Foods Interviews podcast that, “Cultivated meat is the only solution on the table.” In regard to bird flu, he went on to say that, “Livestock disease could wipe out huge areas of herds. We’re seeing that in the U.S. with egg-laying hens. Eight percent of the supply has been euthanized.”

Challenges for alternative proteins remain, including regulatory hurdles, production scaling issues, and consumer acceptance barriers. Governments worldwide are still determining how to classify and approve these products for sale, with Singapore leading the way in regulatory approval for cultivated meat. The U.S., Israel, and UK regulators are following closely behind, but widespread commercialization is still a few years away. Affordability is also a concern. Although costs are declining, cultivated meat remains significantly more expensive than conventional meat. However, as production scales, prices are expected to fall.

A Turning Point: Reducing Pandemic Risk Through Food System Reform

The transition away from industrial animal farming will take time, but the need for change is apparent. If the world continues down its current path, the risks of future pandemics will only grow. Addressing this problem requires serious attention, including government policies that promote alternative proteins, investment in food technology, and increased public awareness of the health impacts of factory farming.

Experts in epidemiology, virology, and food innovation continue to examine the intersection of food production and disease risk. Dr. Michael Greger, physician and author of Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching, has long warned about the pandemic potential of factory farming. Dr. Rob Wallace, an evolutionary biologist and author of Big Farms Make Big Flu, examines how industrial agriculture fuels the evolution of viruses.

Journalists covering the relationship between food, health, and climate change will need to monitor closely how food production impacts disease risk. There is no single solution, but reducing reliance on industrially farmed animals could significantly lower the likelihood of the next global pandemic.

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Photograph Source: Defense Dept. photo by Helene C. Stikkel – Public Domain

Former CIA director Robert M. Gates was on “Face the Nation” last month and demonstrated that there has never been a better truckler in the federal bureaucracy over the past four decades.  “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan gave Gates ample opportunity to separate himself from the Trump administration, but he used these opportunities to legitimize the actions of Donald Trump.

The worst of these examples took place when Brennan asked Gates to comment on Trump’s purge of the National Security Council and his appointment of Secretary of State Marco Rubio as acting director of the NSC.  Gates defended the purge by glibly remarking “be loyal or be gone,” which was his credo over the years.  Indeed, it was how he operated.

But the role of the national security adviser is probably the second most powerful position in any administration, since he or she must ensure that the president has received all policy options from the national security community and then to ensure that the chosen policy has been implemented.  The issue of “loyalty” is secondary; expertise and experience are paramount.  At this moment, the NSC lacks experience and has no leadership.  It plays no role in policy making.  As a result, there is no foreign policy process in the Trump administration.  It’s unusually random.

Gates ignored the opportunity to assess the role of real estate oligarch, Steve Witkoff, who actually performs as secretary of state in dealing with Iran, the Middle East, Russia, and Ukraine.  Witkoff is overmatched in dealing with the experienced counterparts that he is facing.  Gates truckled once again by endorsing Witkoff and favoring the role of “new faces” and “fresh eyes” in conducting sensitive negotiations.  When asked about the firings throughout the intelligence community, Gates punted and said he “didn’t know enough” to comment.

Gates, a former secretary of defense, made sure not to respond to any question regarding the current secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, who is incompetent in terms of the skill set needed for the job.  The same dance was conducted with respect to the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who is not hiding her role in politicizing intelligence prepared for the president on sensitive matters.

Gates even defended Trump’s style of negotiations as a tactical approach to ascertain what is possible from an ally or an adversary, and then switching tactics when faced with opposition.  The lambasting of Ukraine’s President Zelensky and the praise for Russia’s President Putin pointed to the random nature of policy making. There was also the one-day policy for turning Gaza into the “riviera” of the Middle East; the following day the policy was dropped and Israeli President Netanyahu had his free hand for pursuing the genocidal policy against the Palestinians.  He even praised Netanyahu’s military campaign for “changing the strategic equation” in the Middle East, and thanked Trump for getting the U.S. military back in the Middle East.

I’ve known Gate for more than 50 years so nothing in the interview surprised me.  I also learned from my military sources at the National War College that no secretary of defense in recent history was more brutal in crushing alternative views than Gates.  He did the same thing at the CIA in the 1980s as the deputy director for intelligence.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media has praised the actions of Gates.  MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who conducted her own obsequious interview of Gates, described the former CIA director as a “public intellectual.”  Gideon Rose, then editor of Foreign Affairs, enthused that Gates was “cut from the same cloth” as the soldier-statesman George C. Marshall, and argued that Gates was “involved in making history over the last 30 years.”

Maddow and Rose and so many others from the media may be unfamiliar with Gates’ central role in politicizing intelligence on behalf of President Ronald Reagan and then CIA director William Casey.  Or they may simply be choosing to ignore one of the worst cases of politicization in CIA’s history.  Gates was of course totally wrong in exaggerating the Soviet threat in order to advance Reagan’s record peacetime spending on defense.  He made the entire CIA wrong in failing to report the Soviet decline in the 1980s that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the fall of the Warsaw Pact in 1990, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.  Some of the agency’s worst analytical failures.

Reagan nominated Gates to be CIA director after Casey died in 1986, but the director of the Senate intelligence committee, Senator David Boren, told Gates that he couldn’t get his committee to advance Gates’ nomination to the entire Senate for confirmation.  Gates withdrew his name from the process.  President George H.W. Bush nominated Gates five years later; Gates was confirmed but with more than 30 senators opposing the confirmation.  At the time, this was the most resistance to a confirmation of a CIA director since the creation of the agency in 1947.

Gates continued to defend Casey from the charges of politicization but, long after Casey’s death, he acknowledged watching Casey “on issue after issue, sit in meetings and present intelligence framed in terms of the policy he wanted pursued.”  I sat in on some of these meetings, and flinched as Gates passed notes to Casey to support the entire politicization effort.  Over the years, Gates’ recommendations to Casey included support for the use of force against Nicaragua and Libya in the 1980s, which is the very policy advocacy that CIA leaders must foreswear.

I can only suggest two possible explanations for CBS giving Gates a full hour interview that allowed for the one-sided assessment of the Trump presidency in national security matters.  Both explanations involve truckling.  First, CBS is truckling to the Trump administration so that its parent company, Paramount Global, can benefit from a merger between CBS and Skydance Media, which requires regulatory approval.  Second, Gates may believe that there will eventually be an opening for him at the NSC because Rubio can’t be an absentee landlord forever.  Gates, the windsock, is certainly always ready to serve…his master.

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Photo by Sunguk Kim

The US has a long history of not knowing how to end or peacefully resolve vexing international crises and conflicts with less powerful nations. 

A triumphalist attitude in the national character is partly to blame, but in part, at least, it is also likely the result of our history. 

The country was founded through an act of violence — a long war of independence which the rebels ultimately won. The new country was then enlarged through further acts of violence and the genocidal destruction of indigenous inhabitants. The new United States then established itself as a global industrial power by first a civil war that the Union won through application of overwhelming force and the destruction of a rival economy based upon slavery.  

Finally, there was the USA’s participation in two global wars in the 20th century in which the nation emerged unscathed itself, leaving rival powers, including its erstwhile allies, all battered and weakened, 

Through all that time the United States has had little experience with or interest in the art of negotiation. 

This preference for war and for the use of force to have its way around the world was only reinforced when both World Wars ended with the unconditional surrender of the losing side. These two unusual conclusions to wars led to an assumption in Washington and among the broader public that all conflicts should end that way. 

The Korean War should have disabused America of that notion. In that incredibly bloody conflict, three million Koreans — mostly civilians — and 38,000 US soldiers died and yet there was never any peace treaty. This was thanks to the  stubbornness by the US, Rather than seek peace once US and UN forces had pushed North Korean Forces out of the South, America instead pressed on toward the Chinese border, leading the new Chinese Communist government to send its own war-tested People’s Liberation Army flooding into battle, which led to a stalemate on the Korean Peninsula that has endured now for three-quarters of a century. 

Vietnam is another example of where the US slaughtered millions of civilians because it was unwilling to allow the people of a small country, Vietnam, that had struggled to free itself of French colonial rule, to be an independent country. Even though, during WWII,  Vietnam’s Viet Minh peasant army had helped the US and its wartime allies defeat the Japanese in the Indochina theater of WWII. they were prevented from  choosing their own path to independence.

The world thankfully has changed significantly since Wold War II. Not only is the US no longer the pre-eminent military power in the world, losing its war on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, but unable to win the war in Afghanistan,  but the proliferation of nuclear weapons to eight other nations means that even a relatively small power like North Korea can stand up against US or international pressure by simply threatening to use its nuclear weapons. 

And when It comes to the big powers — those with large military forces and nuclear stockpiles that could totally wipe out a rival or lead to global destruction — the idea that military force is the answer to conflicts, and that negotiation is weakness is nothing short of madness. 

Far too many of our leaders in the US and of late in Europe, don’t get this though (They are, that is to say, certifiably mad.) 

In the US, the country with the most powerful and globe-encircling military the world has ever known, promotes the idea of itself as a noble nation of Spartan “warriors” able to defeat any enemy (despite all the contrary evidence that no amount of military might can defeat  even a ragtag irregular force of fighters armed with assault rifles, homemade mines and a willingness to die for a cause). They also dream that American technology will eventually create a military so overpowering and perhaps automated, that Washington will be able to dictate the terms of its rivals’ submission. 

And so we have Donald Trump’s upcoming $50-million military parade spectacle in front of the White House next week to celebrate his 79th birthday and America’s military might, and we also have his hair-brained call for a hugely expensive “Golden Dome” of orbiting anti-missile weapons, to protect America from any and all nuclear threats. 

At the same time,  Russia’s Vladimir Putin is boasting about his country’s development of new hypersonic nuclear missiles. Instead of flying to targets thousands of miles away following easily predictable and perhaps intercept-able ballistic arcs, his new missiles autonomously hug the ground and are able to maneuver to avoid defenses or even switch to different targets, all while moving at speeds in excess of 15,000 miles per hour.

As the risk of big-power nuclear war rises to a level not seen since the darkest days of the Cold War in the late 1950s to 1970s, NATO countries, including the US, are providing Ukraine with long-range missiles made by NATO nations, missiles capable of striking deep inside Russia, perhaps eventually even hitting targets in Moscow and other large cities.  That is something that never happened in the last 80 years since the wartime detonation of two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Sanity seems to be in short supply. This is a problem in governments and among the public at large.

The US began this new nuclear brinksmanship back when the Bush-Cheney administration pulled the US out of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which banned the stationing of missiles located just minutes’ flight time  from the borders of each others’ borders. Obama later made things worse by approving a $1-trillion (now $2-trillion), 30-year program to refurbish, modernize and add new versions to its strategic nuclear stockpile. That program includes developing new delivery systems too. It was that program that has led to the Russians developing as a counter-measure almost impossible-to-stop hypersonic missiles that zip to their targets at close to grand level. (Note: these are not first-strike weapons as they would take far too long, coming all the way from Russia, to catch the US unawares with its  ICBM missiles still in their silos.)

 Now, we are hearing many of the world’s nuclear nations’ government leaders and military strategists talking as if war between nuclear powers is likely or unavoidable!  There’s Russia’s Vladimir Putin musing about nuclear weapons and saying “I hope they will not be required.” He says this even as the US and Nato nations like Britain and Germany provide ever longer-range missiles that the Ukraine military is  using to strike targets within Russia (something that never happened throughout the whole Cold War!). 

Last week, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that Britain must be put on a “war footing” because of Russia’s hypersonic missiles and increasingly long-range and powerful drones. Meanwhile, General Sir Roly Walker, new head of the UK Army, is warning that because of “converging geopolitical threats” of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, the British army has three years to “prepare for war.”  

Starmer’s response to that terrifying prediction, instead of looking for a way lower the temperature, is proposing that the UK purchase 36 US F-35A Lightning stealth fighter bombers, each adapted to carry two B61-12A thermonuclear bombs that can be set to explode with an explosive power ranging anywhere between 0.3 kilotons (300 tons  of TNT), and 50 kilotons, which is three times the power of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. 

As if that weren’t terrible enough, some US military leaders are similarly predicting that China and the US could be at war over Taiwan by 2027 — a war that would likely spiral to a full-scale strategic nuclear war  within days once started, especially if the US decided to honor its commitment to defunct Taiwan. 

Then too, there  are US experts saying that if the US and Iran don’t succeed I renewing the agreement the Obama administration reached for Iran to stop further enrichment of uranium to a point where it could be used to quite quickly produce a simple nuclear bomb, Israel would likely attack Iran to destroy its nuclear facilities, and probably much of its military and industrial sites — a development that could also spread, given Russia’s and China’s support for Iran. 

(Trump dropped out of that deal, refusing to lift sanctions on Iran late in his first term of office.)

War fever is getting so crazy that when a spy satellite took a photo of several rows of large tents numbering several dozen in a snowy field in Russia about 20 miles distant from the Finnish border north of the Arctic Circle, papers like the NY Times and the right-wing British Telegraph speculated about whether it means that a Russian invasion of the newest NATO member state (which during the Cold War had remained neutral) is imminent. Not mentioned is the fact that the US has long been conducting joint military exercises with new “front line” NATO countries — not just  Finland, but Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia etc.—all of which share borders  borders with Russia. 

Nobody in the West or in the western media is  suggesting that perhaps the US and NATO might be preparing to launch a war against Russia, but it’s worth considering that possibility, or looking at such joint exercises through Russian eyes. After all, the US is the country with first-strike weapons like the 400 super-accurate Minuteman missiles in hardened silos in North Dakota and other states, and the hundreds of Trident missiles in giant Trident nuclear subs off the coast of Russia. There is no purpose swerved by pinpoint accuracy for nuclear delivery systems except destroying unlaunched weapons in a surprise first strike. 

The same war fever is evident in the Asia, whereUS military and political  leaders meanwhile say that a war with China is “inevitable” within a few years. Why inevitable?  Because China is building an imposing modern military that could rival the US, at least in the western Pacific and South China Sea. Okay but why should that make war with the US inevitable? 

One might reasonably ask such question, since the US has had nuclear missiles and aircraft ringing China and Russia since almost since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, but hasn’t launched a war. However as I document in my book Spy for No Country (Prometheus Books, 2024), US nuclear war plans as early as 1950 for launching a first-strike on the USSR also included nuclear targets in China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and other major metropolises.  

British Philosopher Bertram Russell, back in the dark days of the Cold War, sparked a mass international anti-nuclear movement by declaring “Better Red than Dead!”  I remember back then, as a pre-teen thinking that it sounded like a pretty self-evident concept, but many Americans — and the politicians they elected, rather incredibly saw the saying as outrageous. “Better dead than Red!” they’d boldly counter, perhaps not realizing their braggadocio was condemning their children and grandchildren to death, not just themselves. 

Looking back at the history of wars back to the beginning of the global war era, when mass killing on a heretofore unimaginable industrial scale became a feature of all wars, it’s hard to justify any conflict that has occurred. 

Let’s start with WWI. Europe stumbled into that war because of a network of bi-lateral mutual assistance pacts in which countries promised to come to the aid of each other.  In the event, one lone Croatian student anarchist assassinated the Archduke Ferdinand, heir-apparent to the Austrian-Hungarian empire throne, and that web of promises caused most of Europe to end up going to war lest their credibility be lost. 

There was no real purpose or clash of ideologies involved. Some15-22 million people died in that war, 9-15 million of them civilians. Many more were severely injured. That conflict had nothing to do with defending democracy — there were democracies and autocracies and even monarchies among the combatants on both sides. Could a better alternative have been found than a five-year war that left Europe in ruins and that dragged in a lot of other parts of the world too? Certainly!

Then there’s World War II. There, the monstrosity of Hitler’s Third Reich with its elevation of the Aryan race and oppression and hatred of the Jews, the Roma people, Communists and Socialists and the disabled, is often cited as a reason the war was necessary or at least justified. But consider this: The allies did almost nothing to save those millions of oppressed minorities who were tossed into concentration camps, shot in mass killings on the streets or burned in their shtetls during the Wehrmacht’s march into the Soviet Union. Even the US turned away boatloads of Jewish refugees during the war, and rejected pleas to bomb the dead-end rail lines that brought more doomed Jews to the camps and crematoriums. Japan for its part committed mass murder in its invasion of the Korean Peninsula, Manchuria,Nanjing and later Southeast Asia and the Philippines, but the US did nothing about it until the Japanese made the mistake of attacking the US Pacific fleet docked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. It was three years into the war before the US even began to fight, and not until the last 11 months that D-Day in Europe was launched. 

By the time that six-year war was over, including the incineration of two entire Japanese cities by America’s two new atomic bombs in three days in early August 1945, between 60-85 million people — civilians and military personnel — but the vast majority ordinary men, women and children, had died of bullets, bombs execution, starvation or disease. As for the over six-million Jews and Roma people who were killed by the Nazis, does anyone really believe that Hitler — even HItler! — could have carried out such a massive genocide had he not been able to conduct it inside of a police state that was entirely cut off from the outside world during the war? Could many of those people, and many of the millions of civilian victims and military draftees who died, as well as the millions who died in the Pacific Theater,  have been spared had the world taken collective action to prevent Hitler’s rise in the first place — for example by denying Germany’s industry and government credit as soon as Hitler set out to begin rebuilding Germany’s arms industry and military? 

Of Course it could have been done! But there was money to be made in Germany. So US industrialists like Henry Ford, George W. Bush’s grandfather Prescott Bush, and  many other of the of America’s financiers and banks, all through the 1930s until the Nazi invasion of Poland were happy to help with Hitler’s efforts by investing in the growing German economy and in making profitable loans to German arms-makers. And no politicians in the US wanted to allow millions of poor Jews into the as refugees.  

Honestly confronting these difficult questions becomes more than just a debating point and gains urgency because in a world of nuclear weapons, the scale of slaughter in any major war will dwarf what happened in the last bloody century. As Einstein once said , when asked what he thought of the future for a nuclear world, replied, “I don’t know how a  World War III will be fought, but I do know how World War IV will be fought: with sticks and stones.” 

My view is that my country, the United States, as clearly the most powerful nation in the world militarily, and for the moment at least, economically, and its people, have to assume the responsibility of making the first bold move of stepping back from disaster. What the world needs is not more and ever deadlier arms, not an endless cycle of one-upmanship in new weapons and new counter-weapons, but rather fewer weapons, better treaties, a revitalized world government with enforcement powers  and no Security Council vetoes.

When a weaker country tries to stop a war by trying to appease a strong aggressor, it only invites more aggression. It is only when a strong nation, confident in its power, calls for negotiations to achieve more peaceful relations, that a climb-down from hostilities can happen.  

We had a glimpse of how such a thing might work when President Ronald Reagan, an avowed enemy of Communism and a staunch Cold Warrior, knowing that the US, with its far stronger economy,  was winning the competition in terms of weapons development and acquisition, but he was willing to sit down with his counterpart in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, and to talk about to reduce both countries’ nuclear weapons and delivery systems and the risk of their being used. And the two leaders did make concrete steps in that direction. 

The problem is that once that was achieved and once Gorbachev freed the Warsaw Pact countries to to go their own ways, Reagan’s second term ended. He was succeeded by George H.W. Bush, a former CIA Director. Bush didn’t reverse what Reagan had done, but he did nothing to advance the detente either and build on it. 

Bush was defeated when he ran for a second term only to be replaced by Bill Clinton, who then undid much of the developing new friendship and sense of trust between the new smaller Russia Federation and the US, by inviting a number of former “frontline” states that before 1990 had been Soviets (states) of the USSR or former captive states of eastern Europe, like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Rumania, to join NATO.

After surviving an attempted military coup, in which he was briefly detained, Gorbachev resigned from politics. He was succeeded as Russia’s leader by former Moscow Mayor Boris Yeltsin,  a former Communist who had gained considerable popularity for standing squarely against the attempted coup against Gorbachev, was elected president. He won a second term but his presidency was plagued by corruption and by his alcoholism. He resigned early in his second term and was succeeded by his chosen successor KGB veteran Vladimir Putin who was appointed to replace him.   

It’s difficult to guess whether the course of events from that point could have gone differently. Clinton, with his expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders, clearly wasn’t interested in seeing Russia become an integral part of Europe. The same is true for the Bush-Cheney administration.

The Obama administration came into office in 2009 looking to develop stronger economic relations with Russia but difficulties arose because his policy towards Ukraine was to leave eventual NATO membership —a non-starter for the Russians—up to popular opinion in Ukraine. And eventually, by 2013-14 his State Department, headed by Hillary Clinton and Undersecretary for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, two Cold Warrior relics who helped foment a coup to oust the elected pro-Russia president of Ukraine in a coup.  That pretty much finished any hope of a detente or a restoration of any trust between the US and Russia.  

From there things went spiraling downwards in the relationship. Any chance of a friendlier relationship and especially of a denuclearization by the two largest nuclear powers was over.  

That of course brings us to Trump’s first election as president in 2016. During that campaign, Trump made no secret of his favorable view of Putin as a ‘strong’ leader who had restored his country after years of economic decline following the collapse of the Communist government and the break-up of the Soviet Union. In his campaign he once famously publicly called on Putin to hack his primary opponent Hillary Clinton’s phone to learn what she was up to in trying to beat him in the coming November election. 

The Putin-Trump relationship is certainly warm, but it is very unusual too, because establishment military and national security people in the Washington bureaucracy and in Trump’s first-term cabinet kept him on a short leash in his dealings with the Russian leader. 

Trump’s loss to Joe Biden —  anther Cold War relic— further chilled relations, as a civil war raged in eastern Ukraine between the coup government in Kiev and ethnic Russian rebels in the Donbas region, who were being supported by Russia. 

Once Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, it effectively made  the US and Russia enemies, with the US supplying Ukraine with massive amounts of advanced arms. 

As Biden Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin admitted during a stealth visit to Ukraine in early May 2022, the US goal, which initially had been to help Ukraine halt the Russian invasion, had just two months later shifted. At that point, the  goal became a shameful strategy of actually prolonging the conflict, using Ukrainian soldiers to so “weaken” Russia that it could never again have the power to invade a a border state.

Others in the Washington national security establishment spoke of using the war to “bleed Russia” without involving American troops.

It was and remains an outrageous abuse of Ukrainian draftees who think they are risking death for their country, but are actually risking death for America’s geopolitical benefit. But it’s also a hugely dangerous game Washington is playing. Trump has at this point a much more pliant staff. At the same time, his relationship with Putin is not one between equals: Putin clearly understands Trump’s narcissism and knows how too play him by plying him with compliments, while not giving an inch on his goal of wearing down Ukraine to the point where that country and its people give up any idea of joining Europe and NATO. But if the US and NATO were to push too hard to the point that Putin faced rebellion or palace coup, the possibility of his turning to a ‘tactical “ nuke can not be ruled out. 

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Photograph Source: Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office – CC BY 2.0

At least 27 Palestinians were killed after Israeli soldiers opened fire near an aid distribution hub in Rafah, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. It was the third such incident around the Rafah hub in as many days. What we are witnessing in Gaza is not merely a humanitarian crisis or a logistical misstep. It is a man-made catastrophe. It is a calculated design, turning aid into a lure that controls and displaces.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, backed by the U.S. and Israel, promises to feed a starving population. Yet its setup—centralized hubs in Israeli-controlled zones—feels less like salvation and more like a trap. My argument isn’t just about pointing fingers; it’s about unmasking how aid, sold as a lifeline, can morph into a tool of power. These hubs don’t just distribute food; they reshape Gaza’s social and spatial fabric, forcing people into perilous journeys and military choke points under the guise of relief. This isn’t charity—it’s control dressed up as compassion.

Gaza’s crisis is a global flashpoint, a place where 2 million people teeter on the edge of famine after a year of war and an 80-day Israeli blockade that ended in May 2025. The world watches, assuming aid is a neutral good, a bandage on war’s wounds. But when aid becomes a magnet for violence—31 killed on Sunday, three on Monday, 27 on Tuesday—it demands we question its deeper purpose. Are these hubs saving lives or reshaping them to fit a geopolitical agenda? The stakes are human: survival, dignity, and the right to stay on one’s land.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s system is new, launched May 27, 2025, to bypass traditional aid groups like the UN, which Israel accuses of letting Hamas siphon supplies. Yet the UN and others call this setup unethical, a “death trap” that forces Palestinians to trek long distances through war zones to reach food.

Witnesses describe chaos: gunfire from tanks, drones, and helicopters at the Al-Alam roundabout, a kilometer from the Rafah hub. The Red Cross reported 184 casualties there on Tuesday alone, many with gunshot wounds to the head and chest. The Foundation denies violence at its sites, claiming incidents happen “well beyond” their perimeters. Israel says its troops fired “warning shots” at “suspects” deviating from designated routes. But the pattern is undeniable: crowds gather, shots ring out, bodies pile up.

History shows aid as a tool of control, from colonial powers doling out bread to pacify restless subjects to modern refugee camps that segregate and monitor populations. In the 19th century, British rulers in India used food rations to quell dissent, tying relief to loyalty. During the Irish famine, soup kitchens doubled as conversion hubs, pushing Protestantism on starving Catholics. Today, refugee camps in Jordan or Kenya often serve as de facto holding pens, keeping displaced people in limbo while governments exert oversight. Gaza’s hubs echo this: centralized, militarized, and inaccessible to many, they dictate where people go and who survives. The UN warns this setup risks mass displacement, funneling northern Gazans south, potentially clearing land for Israeli control. It’s not hard to see the chessboard: aid as a pawn in a larger game.

The Foundation’s defenders argue it’s a necessary fix, delivering 21 truckloads of food on Tuesday alone. But the cost is clear—102 dead in eight days, per Gaza’s health ministry. The system’s flaws aren’t accidents; they’re structural. Armed U.S. contractors guard the sites, and Palestinians must navigate Israeli military zones, risking detention or death. The UN, boycotting the program, says it violates humanitarian principles by tying aid to military objectives. When Jake Wood, the Foundation’s ex-Marine head, quit days before the launch, he cited its failure to uphold those principles. His replacement, a Trump-aligned pastor, suggests politics, not neutrality, drives the operation.

Aid in Gaza isn’t just failing—it’s weaponized. It lures the hungry into kill zones, reshaping lives and land under the pretense of help. This isn’t about one tragedy; it’s about a system that makes tragedies inevitable. We must demand aid that reaches people where they are, not where power wants them to be. Otherwise, every box of food risks becoming bait in a deadly game. Gaza’s starving deserve more than a trap disguised as hope.

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Palestinian children on the streets of Deir al Balah. Photo: UNICEF.

A ten-year-old boy hasn’t spoken or eaten in days. When our psychologist finally gets him to talk, he asks a question that stops her cold: ‘Everyone says my friend went to heaven, but I didn’t see his head. How can he go to heaven without his head?’ This is mental health work in Gaza today.

How do you provide mental health care to people being annihilated? It’s a question I’m asked constantly as a psychiatrist in Gaza, and one that haunts every interaction I and other clinicians have with the children and families we serve. The answer, I’ve learned after 20 months of genocide, is both simpler and more complex than anyone imagines.

In my 20 years as a mental health professional in Gaza, I thought I understood trauma. Then came October 2023, and everything I knew about healing, resilience, and hope was tested against a machinery of annihilation that operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Mental Health and Forced Starvation

Nowadays, when we speak about mental health in Gaza, the main concern is the extreme worry of parents about their children’s general health after almost 20 months of deprivation of essential nutrients and now the absence of basic food. Families now prioritize who will eat today and who will not. At best, children receive one meal per day, and that meal lacks basic necessities like fruits.

Flour, the main ingredient in our daily meals throughout the Middle East and Palestine, is almost unavailable. Bread has become a memory. Now, families attempt to make bread from pasta. At least they put something in their mouths simply to cut hungry feelings.

The mental health impact of this long exposure to multiple traumatic experiences extends far beyond the catastrophic continuous bombardment that keeps children terrified and feeling on the brink of death at any moment. Multiple displacements, as families are forced to move from one unsafe area to another add new layers of hardship. In a harsh environment where 80 to 85 percent of houses and infrastructure lie destroyed, a child looks around and sees only destroyed homes, destroyed schools, and everything around them in ruins. How can they walk around? How can they think about a better day?

People say our children look numb – they are not responsive. For months we have heard about children becoming aggressive, having problems with each other, a form of expressing rejection. We are all rejecting the reality we live in, we are not happy, we are angry. And children, who are half our population, express this in very different ways.

There is a new symptom arising among adults. They feel not only angry and isolated, but unfortunately, they have begun feeling guilty. Guilty because they cannot help their children, they cannot even find food for their children. This is a strange feeling we are witnessing almost for the first time.

We add this to the usual symptoms: children being scared most of the time, problems with sleeping, nightmares, bedwetting, parents experiencing trauma like PTSD but also depression, severe anxiety, and physical pains. Those physical pains affect men, women, children, adults – everyone. It represents a variety of complex issues affecting people who have been exposed to this for 20 months, but also not for the first time. We do not speak about the third or fourth or fifth time, but multiple times since 2008, and even earlier because we have always lived under blockade, under occupation. Our lives were never peaceful, and we wake from one disaster only to fall into another.

Care in Impossible Circumstances

One thing we consistently see in people during emergencies and atrocities is their need to maintain a sense of agency – that they are accomplishing something. That is why now you see men and women constantly active: women do whatever they can to cook something for their children, men try to find any source of food here and there. And at the community level men and boys race towards every new bombed area to dig out the wounded and carry the victims to hospital on foot or any donkey cart or car. It is not an individual issue – the entire population of Gaza Strip experiences this collectively. That is why nearly every family member has a task, which somewhat masks the psychological impact on the population while simultaneously giving children roles they should not have. Kids who are six or seven years old should not be carrying bags of water and walking two or three kilometers to provide their families with drinking water or to recharge mobile phones.

This sense of agency alleviates the psychological impact. This is key when we meet people in the community – we currently have about 30 staff visiting shelters and tents, talking to men, women, and children, helping them express themselves, discuss their feelings, and receive counseling and stress management help. When there are urgent symptoms, we refer people to our community centers.

In those cases, we first ask people to look around and think about how they can help themselves and help those around them. In a way, this creates some feeling of agency that helps people move forward and think somewhat positively, if there is a chance for positive thought about what they can do.

Our teams take toys and stationery when possible, and this is a game changer. When children suddenly find they can express themselves through drawings and play, talking about the problems they face, they begin acting out – showing or discussing their fears when they draw destroyed houses, wounded people. Sometimes they draw blood, sometimes tanks. They draw what they feel, and this makes a big difference.

But of course, it is extremely difficult to help people while attacks continue. Ideally, psychological interventions begin when disaster ends or when people reach safety where mental health professionals can function like other healthcare workers or emergency workers. This is not the situation in Gaza.

Power of Expression and Healing

We emphasize that it is always important when experiencing stress to find someone to talk to – this is the simple truth. People must talk to friends, family members, colleagues, and discuss things. People can open their hearts if they can speak. For instance, if I had a terrible dream yesterday which reminded me of a house destroyed before my eyes, I talk to someone in the family or a neighbour in a nearby tent, and they share the same experience. Then there is a sense of a collective healing process.

But when it comes to children, they have different ways of expressing themselves. They are not yet mature enough to express themselves as we adults do. For example, they sometimes cannot say “we are scared, we are terrified,” but instead the child jumps from place to place, shaking or unable to stand still, becoming very irritable. Girls become very shy and isolated. Children become more aggressive – another example of how trauma expresses itself.

Here’s a story from a colleague. She visited a camp, and people told her, “Go to that tent, there is a lady whose son has not spoken for the last three or four days.” She went to that family and the mother told her, “Yes, well, it’s not only that he hasn’t talked for the last three or four days, but he hasn’t eaten anything either.” This story happened about two or three months ago when food was available – and when we say food was available, that means people had something to eat, not that they had real food.

Our colleague went and sat next to the child, who was ten or eleven years old. She had crayons and papers for drawing. She put them down and told the child, “I am a health professional, I’m here to listen to you. I heard you haven’t been talking for a while, but I am here to listen. Whatever comes to your mind, just talk to me.”

The child did nothing, said nothing. She waited, then told him again, “I am here for you.” After a few minutes, the child said, “I saw children I was playing with. They were killed in front of my eyes.”

He started to cry. A little later, she told him “they went to heaven” – something we say to children to calm them. This is what everyone says: they are in heaven, in a better place.

The child replied, “Everyone tells me that, but I didn’t see the head of my friend I was playing with. Only his body was there. How could he go to heaven without his head?”

She responded, “It’s God’s business. He is almighty and can do what is needed, and of course he can reunite the head with the body of that child.” She began comforting the child, saying, “I also heard you haven’t eaten anything. Can I bring you some food? And here are some crayons, and this bag is yours. It has toys and crayons. You can draw whatever you want.”

The mother brought food – a piece of bread with something in it – and the child started eating. He began not only to talk, but to play with the crayons and to eat.

When the psychologist shared this story at our community center, she was extremely happy because she had succeeded in getting a child to speak and eat. She spoke about how happy the mother was that the child was eating. They followed up with the child two days later and he was doing better, and they continued providing the care he needed.

Sometimes these small things you provide are very important. Sometimes you don’t realize how important they are until you see the significant change they create. With such a child, if he had not expressed what he thought about how a child could not be in heaven without his head, that would have remained a trauma with him forever.

We know trauma. Once you are exposed to trauma, the trauma remains in your psyche. You cannot erase it, but the question is: can you continue with your life? Can you process it somehow? Can you overcome it and move forward, or will it continue to harm you, to impact how you think, your capacity to concentrate, to learn new things, to continue with your life?

Today we discuss evidence-based transgenerational trauma. This is why we fear that what is happening will impact Gaza’s people not only for years, but for decades to come.

The Staggering Scale of Loss

The numbers now: the Gaza Health Ministry cites more than 60,000 people killed and more than 112,000 wounded, though research published in The Lancet suggested the death toll was 40% higher than that, taking into consideration those missing and under the rubble . Usually, not only this time but from previous attacks, at least one-third of the injured or killed are children.

We speak about 39,000 children who lost one parent. Among them, 17,000 lost both parents. The number of unaccompanied children who are the only surviving family member exceeds one thousand. Children who lost an arm or leg – children with amputations – number more than 800.

These statistics are staggering. They are for a society where before October 2023 half the population lived below the poverty rate because of Israel’s long occupation and subsequent blockade.

Imagine that those children have had no education, no schools for a year and a half, except the miraculous improvisations of Gaza’s teachers against all odds. They have not enjoyed any normal daily life during those 20 months. They live in tents, walk around destroyed places, are psychologically impacted, and see no positive signs for a better future. Not only that – bombardment continues almost every night.

Gaza Strip is about 40 kilometers in length and 8 to 12 kilometers in width. When bombardment happens in one place, everyone hears it. This is continuous exposure to traumatic events without a break that would allow healing, while living in appalling conditions not having adequate food – that enables you to stand up and walk around or run like children, to have healthy physical well-being. Nor do they have the support of the health system now suffering acutely and in crisis mode only.

Personal Losses

In 2014 our family was struck by tragedy. It was at sunset when the building was bombed, during Ramadan. It was when people sat to break their fast – around 6:00 PM after a long day of fasting for 13 or 14 hours. We were hearing the Adhan, the call for sunset prayer, the same moment when people begin eating.

We heard two large explosions simultaneously, and we knew where the bombing occurred. Later we heard the news and understood that the building with three stories had been leveled with 28 people killed, including three pregnant women and 19 children.

We spent the entire night trying to find people’s bodies. Even when we went to the mosque the next day to pray the funeral prayer, there was a large bag of bodies that were not identified or could not be separated – like everyone else, body parts were put together and placed in one grave.

It is something you can never forget. Something you must live with. I was blessed then by having many GCMHP colleagues around me, many colleagues from the international community calling, and of course family members and extended family relatives. It was one of the most reported events because of the high number of people killed in that single attack.

Then in 2023-24, many attacks killed hundreds of people. In another Ramadan, on March 18th when the ceasefire was broken by Israel and they began attacking again, they did so at 2:30 am. That was about an hour before dawn, when people were about to wake up to prepare for Suhur, the last meal before sunrise when people stop eating. Mothers were preparing whatever food they had when suddenly the loud sounds of bombardment – countless jet fighters struck Gaza at that moment, over that small geographical area simultaneously, terrifying everyone. Reports say that more than 400 people were killed during that attack, some as they slept.

Like any other family, some of my family members were also killed since October 2023 – in smaller numbers, different circumstances, but we are like any other family in Gaza Strip. Among those killed, missing under the rubble are members of   each family or extended family.

In April last year, two of my cousins from my mother’s side decided to return to their house to fetch something and collect some clothes. People had nothing when they fled their houses, and there were moments when they thought they could go back and grab something. These two children – one was 17, the other 16, who were cousins – decided to return to their house just to get a few things. One was particularly interested in getting his laptop.

They entered their house which was still standing in East Khan Younis near an area called Abasan. It seems they got inside their house, collected whatever they needed for their parents and siblings, each with a backpack filled, then headed back to Rafah to the tent area. A drone killed both.  Their parents could not go to say goodbye. People staying in a nearby school took the bodies and buried them.

A few weeks later, another tragic event involving people from my extended family were killed – another two young children, two brothers, one was 12, one was 15. Their only mistake was wanting better internet access, and they were in a building with internet access. The building was destroyed, bombed, and their bodies were in the rubble for hours. When they were pulled out, we went to the hospital in preparation for the burial.

I saw one of the fathers of the two children whose bodies were in the school, and he said, “Doctor, I don’t know what to say, but at least they saw the bodies of their children.” At least Ahmed (the father of the two killed brothers) could see the bodies of both his children and say goodbye to them, but my brother and I couldn’t say goodbye to our sons.

Trauma manifests in many ways, and the way people are exposed to trauma is different, but the impact is always unbearable, and we have to live with those stories. You have to survive, and that is why everyone living now in the Gaza Strip or who managed to leave Gaza Strip – is a survivor.

We speak about a survivor who spent 20 months running from one tent to another. We speak about a survivor who for 20 months only had the chance to shower five or six times – and for women this is extremely shameful. We speak about a child who has not had the chance to eat any kind of fruit for 20 months. We speak about a child who has never seen yogurt in his or her life.

Managing Anger

People are incredibly angry. I am also very angry, but over the years I learned how to manage my anger because you need to, one way or another – mental health workers mission is to help others. My other mission is to lead an organization that has the vision of a leading organization in the field of mental health and human rights in Palestine.

To continue that, we need to support our colleagues, support ourselves, know what to do, what to say, how to react. It is a very difficult job, in a very challenging context, but you learn how to do that. You learn it because there is no other way. We need to help the community, help people overcome difficult realities – I wouldn’t say cope because it’s beyond coping – but at least do something that would allow people to continue with their lives, prevent and minimize the psychological impact as much as possible. We try to work on resilience if any resilience remains. For that, you need to control yourself. That is how things are.

Mental Health and Human Rights

How can you be psychologically well when you are oppressed, when you do not exercise or practice your basic rights, when your right to health is absent, when your right to education is absent, when your right to safety is absent, when your right to peace is absent, when your social rights are not respected, when you experience daily violations of your basic rights, when your right to life is threatened daily. How can you survive that?

 You cannot live a healthy life or lead a healthy life when you are under oppression. We see this in victims of gender-based violence, domestic violence, in people living under oppression. But in Palestine it is unique that we speak about something happening for decades now. We are a nation not allowed to have its own state. We are people living in the 21st century under occupation, that destroys people’s daily lives, sometimes slowly and recently often in a flash.

These continuous violations of rights impact on how people live, how they think. As mental health professionals, we deal with the implications of those violations. Some violations are clear – they are visible like what happens now when people are killed or hear bombardment. Sometimes they are subtle.

For example, look at the West Bank. There are hundreds of checkpoints dividing the West Bank into segregated areas. People who work in one city, will take sometimes hours to reach their village or small town. There are uncertainties about everything. Schools sometimes in the West Bank close because of new settler or military violence, or road closures, or town closures.

When people go to pick their olives, this is now an annual ordeal for people. Throughout the world, farmers, when it is time to collect their farm production, it is a cheerful moment – everyone is happy. But not in Palestine. People are afraid that they can be harassed by settlers, their trees burned to the ground by settlers.

How can you psychologically survive such living conditions?

The Concept of Resilience

Resilience was something nice that I talked about twenty years ago, that I was proud of – that despite all difficulties, despite closures, despite blockade, despite the second Intifada. Despite growing up in such harsh conditions, Palestinians continue with their lives. We have the highest number of educated people, the lowest illiteracy in the Middle East, the highest number per population of master’s and PhD holders. These achievements are against the odds, and the explanation for that was “resilience” – young people are resilient.

Later, I started questioning what this means. Resilience means that despite all stresses, people do not develop mental disorders. They continue to psychologically survive. Well, we are surviving psychologically, but we are enduring so many difficulties, stressful events and times that this cannot continue. That resilience will not be able to continue forever. It cannot cover the reality or make us overlook the fact that we deserve to lead a normal human life like any other humans. We are entitled to moments of joy, to days of peace, and to lead a normal life.

Palestinians are very productive people. We deserve to live like any normal people, to thrive and see our children play, see our children have fun, and move on with our lives. The word resilience is like a reminder of how many difficult days we already went through.

Hope in the Darkness

The story of my colleague psychologist who told us about her visit to the tent – and we have many such stories – these are sources of hope. The mother of that child when she saw her son speak again and eat again is another story of hope. The story of 2 million people still surviving in Gaza Strip, despite all the horrors, is a story of hope.

Hope is present everywhere. When we had the two-month ceasefire, there were many groups of children whose families started arranging some education classes in tents. That is a source of hope.

When you see people who say “okay, we lost our house, but we are staying near our home and we are going to build it again,” that is a source of hope. When you see people sitting on the roof of their destroyed place saying, “Here we are present,” that is another sort of hope.

When you see how much solidarity exists in the international community, that is another source of hope. When you see people trying to call you to check on you, that is a sort of hope.

When you see a child who lost everyone in his family but lives with another family and thinks, “Okay, I am the survivor,” and continues with his life, that is a sort of hope. Just not being broken is a sort of hope.

That is what we try to do when we meet our people in the community – we help them identify good things around them, despite cruelties and challenges, and this becomes a source of hope. Our main source of hope is how miraculous our people are and that they are standing in front of that killing, massive killing machine, and they continue trying to survive.

A Misconception

We have seen that whenever a bombing occurs, Gaza is in the spotlight, people understand what is happening. When bombing stops, people think it ends the harsh living conditions and that people continue living in peace. This is not reality.

Between 2014 and 2023 – those nine years – the blockade on Gaza Strip with movement restrictions was always present. Drones flew in the skies constantly, reminding people of disasters. At least five large-scale operations took place between 2014 and 2023, reminding everyone of what disaster meant. Thousands of people with serious health illnesses could not get healthcare outside Gaza Strip because of movement restrictions.

This life under such human rights violations is not seen by the international community. People think life is continuing, like a disaster area where once war ends, recovery happens, and people continue with their lives. That is never the case, unfortunately, with the Gaza Strip.

In one month, two months, three months, one week – another ceasefire will be reached. That is what I pray for, what I hope for. But it does not mean our life will improve immediately. The immediate threats will stop, the bombardment sounds will stop, but our children will continue living for years with the rubble. For years to come we will not be able to rebuild all the schools and houses that were destroyed. Throughout those years we will have triggers that will keep reminding us of the traumatic conditions, of the displacement and attacks, the people we have lost – our beloved people, colleagues, friends, family members who were killed during the attacks.

The International Community Must Act

In every place where war takes place, there are rules and regulations that must be followed by law. For example, the right to health, evacuation of people who were wounded or killed, hospital safety, safety for healthcare workers, allowing food in, allowing water in. These basic things – allowing things needed for women and children, hygiene items – these very basic things are never respected and were never respected during those 20 months.

Rules are universal, and Palestinian people are not an exception. It is not acceptable that leaders of the international community are just watching and just talking. They do nothing besides making announcements or statements or sending reports and taking no serious action.

 It is beyond understanding. They need to be proactive; they need to take on-the-ground actions. Food is a very basic right. Medication is lifesaving.

As they fail with this, then why do we need them? What is the need for the international community, for INGO workers, if they cannot manage for two months now to get flour or milk into the Gaza Strip? What is the use of their presence?

 The international community has the power to act, but they must have the will to use it.

The international community has perfected the art of watching and making statements. But children can’t eat statements. Families can’t shelter under reports. If you cannot ensure that flour and milk reach Gaza’s children, then what exactly is your purpose? Mental health professionals understand this: healing requires action, not just words. The world’s mental health depends on it, too.

So, how do you provide mental health care during genocide? You do it by refusing to accept that any people deserve to live this way. You do it by helping a child speak again, by sitting with a parent’s guilt, by finding hope in the simple act of survival itself. But mostly, you do it by demanding the world remember that Palestinians are not resilient by choice—we are resilient because we have no other option. And that must change.

When this ends—and it will end—Gaza’s children will carry these traumas for generations. But they won’t be the only ones marked by this moment. History will ask what you did when you knew. Mental health, it turns out, isn’t just about healing trauma—it’s about preventing it. The question isn’t just how we provide care during genocide. It’s why the world allows genocide to continue.

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Fine (right) being sworn in as a U.S. Representative by House Speaker Mike Johnson (left), April 2025. Photograph Source: Office of Speaker Mike Johnson – Public Domain

On May 22, Sarah Milgrim, 26, and Yaron Lischinsky, 30, were gunned down outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC as they were leaving an event for young diplomats. The alleged shooter is thirty-one-year-old pro-Palestine activist Elias Rodriguez of Chicago. Video taken at the scene by an eyewitness shows Rodriguez, shouting “Free Palestine” as he was taken into custody.  “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza,” Rodriguez told the arresting officers.

The day after the shootings, Randy Fine, a Republican who represents Florida’s 6th congressional district, appeared on FoxNews.[1]  Fine, who describes himself on his personal page on X (formerly Twitter) as “Jewish and proud. Zionist,” said:

“This is what globalizing the intifada looks like. Palestinianism is built on violence. … This is a culture built on violence and we need to start to treat it that way. … We need to start to call evil for what it is, and not make excuses for it. And the fact of the matter is, the Palestinian cause is an evil one. …”

Asked about the possibility of a cease-fire in Gaza, Fine said:

“The only end of the conflict is complete and total surrender by those who support Muslim terror. In World War II, we did not negotiate a surrender with the Nazis, we did not negotiate a surrender with the Japanese. We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender. That needs to be the same here. There is something deeply, deeply wrong with this culture and it needs to be defeated.”

Tucker Carlson, of all people, called Fine’s May 23 remarks “evil” and wondered why Fine has not been expelled from Congress.

In fairness to the congressman—fairness that Fine does not extend to Palestinians and Muslims—and in order to avoid a possible lawsuit for defamation[2] it is barely possible that when Fine said, “We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender. That needs to be the same here,” the word that refers to unconditional surrender, not to “nuk[ing] the Japanese. If that is the case, then all Fine was calling for was Hamas’ unconditional surrender, not nuclear war on Gaza. However, every news story and commentary I have seen takes the position that Fine was calling for nuclear weapons to be used on Gaza. I think that’s a more likely interpretation.

Fine has embraced the nickname the “Hebrew Hammer,” which will be a terrific stage name if Fine ever joins the WWE (perhaps Education Secretary Linda McMahon could arrange an interview). Fine has a history of hateful rhetoric toward Muslims and Palestinians. Of Michigan Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, a Muslim and Palestinian American, Fine said: “She’s not a terrorist sympathizer, she’s a terrorist.” (Speaking of defamation, since Fine made this remark on a podcast and not on the floor of Congress, he may have opened himself to an action for defamation by Tlaib.)

I like to think that Fine is just grandstanding and not inciting genocide. Fine could be trying to distract his constituents from his enthusiastic vote for Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which among other horrors, would eviscerate Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP for millions of Americans.

+++

As yet, few public figures are promoting a nuclear strike on Gaza. President Donald Trump endorsed Fine’s run for Congress, but to my knowledge, has said nothing about Gaza and nuclear weapons. That’s not surprising considering that Trump wants to turn Gaza into a luxury resort (but not for Palestinians). In any event, the president has his hands full trying to dissuade Israel from launching a nuclear attack on Iran.

The most prominent advocate of a nuclear strike on Gaza is Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Graham is no friend to Palestinians. Recently, Graham turned his attention to the Madleen, a civilian vessel carrying 12 unarmed activists from the pro-Palestinian Freedom Flotilla Coalition. Up until June 9, the Madleen was en route to Gaza; its aim: to break the Israeli blockade and deliver desperately needed humanitarian aid to Gaza. Responding to a rumor that Swedish activist Greta Thunberg was on board (she was), Graham posted on X: “Hope Greta and her friends can swim.”

It turns out they did not need to swim. On June 9, the Madleen was intercepted and boarded by the Israeli military. The Madleen‘s passengers are now in Israeli custody. Israel says it expects to return them to their home countries.

Israel’s Minister of Defense Israel Katz smeared Thunberg and her fellow passengers as “antisemites” and “propagandists for Hamas.”

Returning to Senator Graham: during a May 12, 2024 appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Graham told Kristen Welker that Israel is facing an existential threat. That’s nonsense. It’s the people of Gaza, not Israel, who are locked in an existential struggle. Gaza has never been able to destroy Israel. Most of Gaza’s population is in flight and Gaza can’t even adequately defend itself against an enemy that is armed to the teeth.

Graham asked: “Why’s it OK for America to drop two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end their existential threat war?” But it wasn’t “OK,” Senator. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civilian population centers, not military targets, which made bombing them a war crime. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki do not justify using nuclear bombs against Gaza. That did not stop Graham from advising Israel to “do whatever you have to do to survive as a Jewish state.” Graham repeated: “whatever you have to do” twice.

Two lawmakers in the House have also trotted out the supposed Hiroshima/Nagasaki precedent. Representative Greg Murphy (R-NC-3) did so during a May 14, 2024 Newsmax interview. So did Representative Tim Walberg (R-MI-5).  At an invitation-only townhall on March 25, 2024, Walberg told constituents that “We shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid. It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick.” Congressman Walberg said later that his reference to Nagasaki and Hiroshima was only a “metaphor” for the need to bring the war in Gaza to a “swift” end.)

In Israel, Knesset member Tally Gotliv demanded in an October 9 post on X that Israel use its nuclear-capable Jericho Missile, which she called a “Doomsday Weapon.”

Not to be outdone, Amihai Eliyahu, a minor cabinet minister who represents the far-right Jewish Power Party, caused a stir during a November 5, 2023 radio interview. Eliyahu said that using nuclear weapons “to kill everyone [in Gaza] is one way to go.” Using nuclear weapons was acceptable because, Eliyahu said, there are “no non-combatants in Gaza.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded that Eliyahu’s remark was “not based in reality” and that Israel would continue to follow international law (sic). Two months later, on January 24, 2024, Eliyahu reiterated his call to use a “nuclear bomb” n Gaza.

The truth of the matter is that Israel does not need to use nuclear arms in order to destroy Gaza. It’s doing just fine with conventional weapons alone. 54,700 dead Gazans can attest to that.

Ever since the US dropped an atom bomb on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 there has been an unofficial taboo on the use of nuclear arms in warfare. It would be an inestimable tragedy if that taboo were broken now.

Notes.

[1]  Representative Fine’s comments begin at 12:54.

[2]  Fine wrote on X that he is “exploring taking legal action” against Ynet News for quoting him as saying “we should nuke Gaza,” which Fine calls “a fabricated quote.”

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Photograph Source: Jaber Jehad Badwan – CC BY-SA 4.0

This is the end. The final blood-soaked chapter of the genocide. It will be over soon. Weeks. At most. Two million people are camped out amongst the rubble or in the open air. Dozens are killed and wounded daily from Israeli shells, missiles, drones, bombs and bullets. They lack clean water, medicine and food. They have reached a point of collapse. Sick. Injured. Terrified. Humiliated. Abandoned. Destitute. Starving. Hopeless.

In the last pages of this horror story, Israel is sadistically baiting starving Palestinians with promises of food, luring them to the narrow and congested nine-mile ribbon of land that borders Egypt. Israel and its cynically named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), allegedly funded by Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the Mossad, is weaponizing starvation. It is enticingPalestinians to southern Gaza the way the Nazis enticed starving Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to board trains to the death camps. The goal is not to feed the Palestinians. No one seriously argues there is enough food or aid hubs. The goal is to cram Palestinians into heavily guarded compounds and deport them.

What comes next? I long ago stopped trying to predict the future. Fate has a way of surprising us. But there will be a final humanitarian explosion in Gaza’s human slaughterhouse. We see it with the surging crowds of Palestinians fighting to get a food parcel, which has resulted in Israeli and U.S. private contractors shooting dead at least 130 and wounding over seven hundred others in the first eight days of aid distribution. We see it with Benjamin Netanyahu’s arming ISIS-linked gangs in Gaza that loot food supplies. Israel, which has eliminated hundreds of employees with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), doctors, journalists, civil servants and police in targeted assassinations, has orchestrated the implosion of civil society.

I suspect Israel will facilitate a breach in the fence along the Egyptian border. Desperate Palestinians will stampede into the Egyptian Sinai. Maybe it will end some other way. But it will end soon. There is not much more Palestinians can take.

We — full participants in this genocide — will have achieved our demented goal of emptying Gaza and expanding Greater Israel. We will bring down the curtain on the live-streamed genocide. We will have mocked the ubiquitous university programs of Holocaust studies, designed, it turns out, not to equip us to end genocides, but deify Israel as an eternal victim licensed to carry out mass slaughter. The mantra of never again is a joke. The understanding that when we have the capacity to halt genocide and we do not, we are culpable, does not apply to us. Genocide is public policy. Endorsed and sustained by our two ruling parties.

There is nothing left to say. Maybe that is the point. To render us speechless. Who does not feel paralyzed? And maybe, that too, is the point. To paralyze us. Who is not traumatized? And maybe that too was planned. Nothing we do, it seems, can halt the killing. We feel defenseless. We feel helpless. Genocide as spectacle.

I have stopped looking at the images. The rows of little shrouded bodies. The decapitated men and women. Families burned alive in their tents. The children who have lost limbs or are paralyzed. The chalky death masks of those pulled from under the rubble. The wails of grief. The emaciated faces. I can’t.

This genocide will haunt us. It will echo down history with the force of a tsunami. It will divide us forever. There is no going back.

And how will we remember? By not remembering.

Once it is over, all those who supported it, all those who ignored it, all those who did nothing, will rewrite history, including their personal history. It was hard to find anyone who admitted to being a Nazi in post-war Germany, or a member of the Klu Klux Klan once segregation in the southern United States ended. A nation of innocents. Victims even. It will be the same. We like to think we would have saved Anne Frank. The truth is different. The truth is, crippled by fear, nearly all of us will only save ourselves, even at the expense of others. But that is a truth that is hard to face. That is the real lesson of the Holocaust. Better it be erased.

In his book “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” Omar El Akkad writes:

Should a drone vaporize some nameless soul on the other side of the planet, who among us wants to make a fuss? What if it turns out they were a terrorist? What if the default accusation proves true, and we by implication be labeled terrorist sympathizers, ostracized, yelled at? It is generally the case that people are most zealously motivated by the worst plausible thing that could happen to them. For some, the worst plausible thing might be the ending of their bloodline in a missile strike. Their entire lives turned to rubble and all of it preemptively justified in the name of fighting terrorists who are terrorists by default on account of having been killed. For others, the worst plausible thing is being yelled at.

You can see my interview with El Akkad here.

You cannot decimate a people, carry out saturation bombing over 20 months to obliterate their homes, villages and cities, massacre tens of thousands of innocent people, set up a siege to ensure mass starvation, drive them from land where they have lived for centuries and not expect blowback. The genocide will end. The response to the reign of state terror will begin. If you think it won’t you know nothing about human nature or history. The killing of two Israeli diplomats in Washington and the attack against supporters of Israel at a protest in Boulder, Colorado, are only the start.

Chaim Engel, who took part in the uprising at the Nazis’ Sobibor death campin Poland, described how, armed with a knife, he attacked a guard in the camp.

“It’s not a decision,” Engel explained years later. “You just react, instinctively you react to that, and I figured, ‘Let us to do, and go and do it.’ And I went. I went with the man in the office and we killed this German. With every jab, I said, ‘That is for my father, for my mother, for all these people, all the Jews you killed.’”

Does anyone expect Palestinians to act differently? How are they to react when Europe and the United States, who hold themselves up as the vanguards of civilization, backed a genocide that butchered their parents, their children, their communities, occupied their land and blasted their cities and homes into rubble? How can they not hate those who did this to them?

What message has this genocide imparted not only to Palestinians, but to all in the Global South?

It is unequivocal. You do not matter. Humanitarian law does not apply to you. We do not care about your suffering, the murder of your children. You are vermin. You are worthless. You deserve to be killed, starved and dispossessed. You should be erased from the face of the earth.

“To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library,” El Akkad writes:

To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures. To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, food. Banks. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized world might win.

There are people I have known for years who I will never speak to again. They know what is happening. Who does not know? They will not risk alienating their colleagues, being smeared as an antisemite, jeopardizing their status, being reprimanded or losing their jobs. They do not risk death, the way Palestinians do. They risk tarnishing the pathetic monuments of status and wealth they spent their lives constructing. Idols. They bow down before these idols. They worship these idols. They are enslaved by them.

At the feet of these idols lie tens of thousands of murdered Palestinians.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Most coverage of the May jobs data said the picture was pretty good, an assessment with which I largely concurred. The economy added 139,000 jobs and the unemployment rate remained at 4.2 percent, a historically low level. Wage growth also continued at a healthy 3.9 percent year-over-year pace, with the annualized rate over the last three months, a nearly identical 3.8 percent. All looks pretty good.

But it is possible to tell a more negative story. To be clear in what follows I am 100 percent guilty of cherry-picking. I am looking for evidence of a weakening labor market and ignoring factors that could go in the other direction.

The reason is that we have seen many data points elsewhere, notably indexes measuring consumer and business expectations, that paint a very negative picture of the economy. The reality and threat of massive tariff hikes has clearly scared people, as have the threatened and actual cuts in federal spending and employment.

It also has changed behavior in measurable ways, notably the surge in the trade deficit following the election and then the plunge reported for April. The deficit went from $74.3 billion in October to a peak of $138.3 billion in March and then fell back to $61.6 billion in April. People stockpiled items they expected to be subject to tariffs in these months and then cut back sharply after they had made their purchases and the tariffs started to take effect. So, the negative story is not based just on people’s speculation about the future, it can be seen very clearly in real world data.

I’ll also make an important point about the sort of recession we should be expecting. It will not be a cataclysmic collapse like our last two recessions. The 2008-09 recession was triggered by a collapse of an unprecedented nationwide housing bubble and then a subsequent financial crisis. The 2020 recession was the result of the economy shutting down due to the Covid epidemic.

The best comparisons for the sort of recession we are likely to see are the 1990-91 recession, which came on gradually, and the 2001 recession, which didn’t even feature the standard two consecutive quarters of negative growth.

Going back to prior recessions may also not be terribly useful since the economy was very different. Specifically, the highly cyclical manufacturing sector accounted for more than 21 percent of employment just before the double-dip 1980-1982 recessions compared to less than 8 percent at present.

The Bad Story for May

The start of the bad story is that the 139,000 jobs number reported for May is not as strong as it appears on its face. The jobs numbers reported for March and April were revised down by a total of 95,000. To be clear, there is nothing nefarious about these downward revisions, as conspiracy-minded folks had claimed during the Biden years. We simply got more complete data as more establishments responded to the survey.

The job growth was also highly concentrated in the healthcare sector. Healthcare has been leading job growth throughout the recovery, but the 62,200 gain reported for May accounted for almost 45 percent of job growth for the month. Given the likely cuts to the sector in the 2026 federal budget, it seems unlikely the rapid pace of job growth in the sector will continue.

Most of the rest of the job gains came from the local government sector (also being hit by cuts) and hotels and restaurants. Construction added just 4,000 jobs and manufacturing lost 8,000.

There is also some evidence of slowing wage growth. As noted above, the standard year-over-year measure shows no slowing, nor does annualizing over the last three months, but we do see a somewhat different picture if we compare the average of the last three months with the average of the prior three months. I had been using this measure for years because it gives us more recent data than the year over year number and also avoids the erratic movements we get from using data from a single month. I eventually gave it up when I realized I was literally the only person using it.

However, if we do look at the old Baker wage measure, we see that the hourly wage grew at a 3.5 percent annual rate, comparing the average of the last three months (March, April, May) with the prior three months (December, January, and February). That is a definite slowing.

If we look at the story with production workers in the low-paying hotel and restaurant industry, the annualized rate of increase was just 3.3 percent. Wages in this sector are highly sensitive to the tightness of the labor market. They rose rapidly in the tight labor market years of 2022 and 2023.

The household survey is also showing some signs of weakness. While I would not complain about the 4.2 percent unemployment rate, it is worth noting that the employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) fell by 0.3 percentage points as 625,000 people reportedly left the workforce.

This was not just baby boomers opting to retire. The EPOP for prime age workers (ages 25 to 54) fell by 0.2 percentage points.

We also saw some weakness looking at specific demographic groups. The unemployment rate for workers between the ages of 20-24, which is highly erratic, remained at the 8.2 percent rate reported for April. This is 2.2 percentage points above the low hit in January of 2024. Their EPOP fell to 65.4 percent in May, 2.8 pp below the peak hit last January.

Young workers tend to be hit hardest and first in a downturn for the simple reason that they are the ones most likely to be looking for jobs. The unemployment rate for workers between the ages of 20-24 had risen from a low of 6.5 percent in 2000 to 8.1 percent in April of 2001, just as the recession was beginning. It eventually peaked at 10.6 percent in 2003, a total rise of 4.1 percentage points

By comparison, the overall unemployment rate had risen from a low of 3.9 percent in 2002 to 4.4 percent in April of 2001 and peaked at 6.3 percent in 2003. The total increase was just 2.4 percentage points. In the 1990-91 recession, the unemployment rate for young people rose by 3.6 percentage points compared to a rise of 2.8 percentage points overall.

There is a similar story with the unemployment rate for Black workers. The unemployment rate for Black workers actually fell slightly in May to 6.0 percent, but that is still 1.2 percentage points above its low of 4.8 percent in April of 2023. The unemployment rate for Black women edged up to 6.2 percent in May. This is the highest unemployment rate since February of 2022.

The unemployment rate for Black workers rose by 4.0 percentage points in the 1990 recession, with the low actually hit just after the official start date for the recession. In the 2001 recession the unemployment rate for Black workers rose by 4.5 percentage points.

Another item that is highly cyclical and clearly pointing in the wrong direction is the percentage of unemployment due to voluntary quits. This measure reflects workers’ confidence in their labor market prospects since it indicates their willingness to quit a job before they have a new job lined up.

This fell to 9.8 percent, the lowest share since May of 2021, when we were still in the early phase of recovery from the Covid recession. By comparison, the share averaged 13.2 percent in 2018-2019, when the unemployment rate was roughly comparable.

The share of unemployment due to quits fell from a peak of 15.2 percent in 2000 to 13.3 percent in March of 2001, eventually bottoming out at 8.8 percent in 2003. The peak before the 1990 recession was 17.2 percent in 1989, falling to 15.3 percent in March of 1990 and eventually bottoming out at 9.5 percent in 1992. (The survey question for this was slightly different before 1994.)

So, does all of this mean a recession is on the horizon? I don’t think we can look at the May data and make any strong claims like this. However, we can say there are some clear warning signs in this report. It is far from unambiguously positive.

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It is clear that Donald Trump has been hoping for a protest that he can use to expand his use of the military and other militarized units.  A protest, no matter how modest, involving people of color and the issue of immigration presents the perfect opportunity.  Los Angeles may be that opportunity, although there is no evidence of a threat to public safety.

Trump has little understanding or appreciation for American history, so it is safe to assume that he also has little or no understanding of German history.  He might not appreciate a comparison of his activation of the National Guard to deal with a small street demonstration in Los Angeles, and Adolf Hitler’s handling of the Reichstag Fire in Berlin nearly 90 years ago.  Nevertheless, just as there was no justification for Hitler’s response to the fire, the Reichstag Decree, there was no justification for Trump’s federalizing of the National Guard to deal with dozens of U.S. citizens protesting the actions of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In 1933, Hitler was bent on intensifying the violence on the streets in Germany.  He received his opportunity in February, when a lone Dutch radical, Marinus van den Lubbe, burned down the Reichstag building to protest the injustices of unemployment.  Hitler used this opportunity to persuade his cabinet to suppress the Communist Party and to arrest Social Democrats and trade unionists.  There were hundreds of deaths in the streets of Berlin.

Van den Lubbe was guillotined shortly afterwards, and the German Supreme Court falsely concluded that the German Communist Party was responsible for the fire.  A special People’s Court was established with several judges from the Nazi Party to handle political offenses.  The head of the Communist Party, Ernst Thalmann, was imprisoned, and the Court made sure that defendants had few rights in defending their innocence.  Thalmann himself never got to court and never was formally charged, but he remained in prison.

It is far from certain how far Trump will go in exploiting the modest protest activity in Los Angeles, but it appears that many in the White House, including the president, are poised to exploit the situation, and were prepared to move forcefully if given the opportunity.  Unlike Trump’s first term, when he was denied the opportunity to activate the military to deal with domestic protests, there is no one in the current administration who can persuade Trump to apply the brakes.  In fact, the provocative rhetoric of subordinates such as deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and immigration tsar Tom Homan, provides every reason to believe that Trump will be encouraged to federalize National Guard forces and deploy active duty military forces as well.  This is the first time that National Guard forces have been federalized since 1992, when there were serious civil rights protests.

The most dangerous step that Trump could take would be the invocation of the Insurrection Act of 1807 that empowers the president to nationally deploy the U.S. military and  federalize National Guard units of individual states to deal with civil unrest.  The Posse Comitatus Act prevents the use of the military in domestic situations, but it also declares that threats to national security would be an exceptional situation justifying the use of military forces.  We have already observed that the Supreme Court defers to the executive branch in any situation that could be labeled a threat to national security.  The American public would probably be supportive as well if a perceived threat to national security is declared.

The Insurrection Act has been modified twice to make it easier to declare an emergency.  During the civil war, the federal government was allowed to deploy the National Guard and armed forces in “anticipation of continued unrest.”  In the 1870s, the Act was expanded to protect African-Americans from attacks by the Ku Klux Klan, which was cited in 1992 when the National Guard was federalized to deal with desegregation fights during the Civil Rights era.  Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy used the Act to deal with political leaders who were fighting court-ordered desegregation.  Ironically, the last time the Insurrection Act was applied was also in Los Angeles, but that was a case that involved serious riots, unlike the pathetically modest and non-threatening activity currently taking place.

Just as the Reichstag fire was exploited to restrict civil liberties such as intercepting the mail and tapping phones, it is possible that expanded protest activities and the use of force, however modest, will lead to further restrictions on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.  We know from Trump’s first term as well as the writings of Project 2025 that the MAGA movement has no interest in guaranteeing the constitutional rights of Americans, let alone immigrants.

One thing we know for sure is that the administration is doing nothing to deescalate  the situation or to bring the situation under control, which should be the primary objective.  Trump is bleating that “they spit; we hit,” and  that the bar to deploy military force is “whatever I say it is.  To make matters worse, Secretary of Defense Hegseth is talking about deploying the Marines.  Trump and Hegseth are obviously willing to politicize the military that would compromise public confidence in our armed forces.

We have been far too complacent thus far in responding to the illegal and unconstitutional activities of the Trump administration in its first five months.  We must continue to engage in civil disobedience against the illegal and unconstitutional actions of the Trump administration, although the current face-off will make it more difficult to do so if there is violence.  We can only hope that the citizens of Los Angeles will heed Governor Gavin Newsome’s request to avoid violence and make sure that Trump is not given the opportunity that he apparently seeks.

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