Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing perhaps the most precarious moment of his political career. He knows it. His allies know it. And his rivals—both within his coalition and across Israel's political spectrum—are preparing to capitalize on his growing weakness.

Former Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon, who also served as deputy prime minister between 2007 and 2009, is among the latest Israeli political figures to join a growing chorus of criticism directed at Netanyahu.

“In the final result,” Ramon said in an interview with Radio Galey, cited by the Israeli outlet Srugim, “we did not win.” He then broke down that failure in blunt terms: “We did not win in Lebanon, we did not win in Iran, and we did not win against Hamas.”

Another prominent critic is former Israeli army chief Gadi Eisenkot, who joined Netanyahu’s emergency war government following the events of October 7, 2023, before resigning with Benny Gantz in June 2024.

Arab and Muslim countries, along with their allies in the international community, must not wait for Israel to launch a much larger assault on the West Bank before responding.

Beyond accusing Netanyahu of failing to protect Israel on October 7, Eisenkot argues that the prime minister has effectively surrendered Israel’s political decision-making to US President Donald Trump, thereby strategically weakening Israel.

Ironically, Netanyahu’s coalition partners have often been even more opportunistic than the opposition.

Since the formation of the current coalition government on December 29, 2022—widely regarded as the most right-wing government in Israel’s history—figures such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich have repeatedly used Netanyahu’s political vulnerability to expand their own influence. Whenever Netanyahu needed political support to remain in power, they demanded concessions in return.

For Israel’s far-right extremists, Netanyahu’s inability to secure decisive strategic victories has often translated into opportunities to advance their own agendas. Every setback on the battlefield became an opening for greater settlement expansion, harsher measures against Palestinians, and deeper entrenchment of extremist policies.

Unable to deliver "victory," Netanyahu turned perpetual war into a political strategy in its own right. The result has been a genocidal war in Gaza, widespread devastation in Lebanon, and a dangerous confrontation with Iran that has repeatedly brought the region to the brink of a wider catastrophe.

For a time, this formula proved politically sustainable. Netanyahu successfully enlisted unwavering US support to keep the fires of war burning. At the same time, the failure of Europe and much of the international community to hold a wanted war criminal accountable provided him with the political space necessary to continue his bloody calculations.

Yet that formula may be nearing its limits. While this possibility may appear encouraging, it comes with a serious warning. If Netanyahu can no longer sustain the wars that have prolonged his political life for nearly three years, he may escalate where resistance is weakest: the occupied West Bank.

Regarding Iran, there is growing recognition that the current confrontation is unsustainable indefinitely and that some form of arrangement will eventually emerge. Likewise, regardless of whether Lebanon is formally included in any future agreement, Israel’s ambition of permanently occupying parts of Lebanese territory remains untenable.

Historically, when Israel fails to secure a strategic breakthrough on one front, it seeks compensation on another—typically where Palestinians are most vulnerable and where international scrutiny is weakest.

As Israeli elections approach, it is therefore reasonable to fear a further escalation of the genocide in Gaza, pushing both the death toll and the level of destruction to new heights. According to Gaza health authorities, nearly 1,000 Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire agreement was announced in October, bringing the overall death toll of Israel’s genocide in Gaza to 73,000 Palestinians.

Though Israel's war has already failed to break Palestinian steadfastness, the broader objective remains unchanged: the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza and the transformation of the strip into a space that can no longer sustain Palestinian life.

The West Bank, however, presents a different challenge.

There, Israel faces a fragmented political landscape and a Palestinian Authority that refuses to develop an effective strategy for confronting accelerating Israeli violence, ethnic cleansing, home demolitions, land confiscation, and the relentless expansion of illegal settlements.

This vulnerability has enabled Israel to move from discussing annexation to implementing it in practice. The strategy rests on two interconnected pillars: extreme violence and displacement on the one hand, and rapid settlement expansion on the other.

According to an Oxfam International study published on June 12, Israel has killed 1,244 Palestinians, including 268 children, in the occupied West Bank since 2023—more than the total number killed during the previous 17 years combined.

This bloodshed has been accompanied by large-scale displacement that has already uprooted nearly 46,000 Palestinians, many of them from refugee camps and vulnerable communities across the northern West Bank.

An Amnesty International report published on June 10 documented the full or partial displacement of at least 117 Palestinian Bedouin and herding communities between January 2023 and April 2026.

Expectedly, the violence, displacement, settlement expansion, and land seizures are not isolated developments but components of a coherent political project. In September 2025, Smotrich openly proposed the annexation of 82% of the occupied West Bank. What was once presented as a political vision is now steadily being translated into facts on the ground.

The era of Netanyahu may be nearing its end, but before this bloody political chapter closes, countless more Palestinians may be forced to bear the cost.

Arab and Muslim countries, along with their allies in the international community, must not wait for Israel to launch a much larger assault on the West Bank before responding.

The matter demands urgent attention and immediate action.

This Juneteenth arrives at a moment when many of the hard-fought gains of the civil rights movement feel undeniably fragile. The Supreme Court’s recent Louisiana v. Callais decision gave state lawmakers the green light to reduce Black voting power by redrawing congressional maps. Meanwhile, the SAVE America Act and other proof-of-citizenship efforts propose new burdens for millions of eligible voters—especially voters of color who are more likely to face difficulty accessing required records.

As Black Americans, this should concern us deeply. For years after the ratification of the 15th Amendment, our ancestors had to overcome poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and constant threats of violence to participate in our democracy. When Fannie Lou Hamer attempted to register to vote in Mississippi, she was fired from her job and forced from her home; Amzie Moore endured years of harassment and retaliation for helping Black Mississippians register to vote and build political power. But despite these hardships, they persevered.

Which is why one question continues to trouble me as a Black pastor and grassroots organizer: How did we move from a generation willing to risk everything for political participation to an overwhelming number of people believing participation doesn't matter?

Research shows that most Americans feel political leaders are out-of-touch with ordinary people, reflecting a deep and widespread sense that politics is reserved for an elite few. But we must remember that politics is simply the process of shaping the world around us—and by that definition, we are all politicians.

Organizing reminds people that change has always come from ordinary people deciding they have a stake in their own future.

At my organization, Live Free Illinois, we embrace our identities as politicians in our own right. For instance, in January, we successfully organized Gov. JB Pritzker to sign the Clean Slate Act, a transformational public safety bill that removes barriers to employment, housing, and education opportunities for people with past convictions. It took nearly five years of tireless organizing, but our bill crossed the finish line—and became a law with $5.6 million in funding to implement it. This victory makes clear that politics does not only belong to some unreachable class of leaders; it belongs to the people willing to organize and demand change.

Our ancestors did not organize because they believed the government was perfect. They organized because they understood that power would not listen unless it was confronted. They built churches, mutual aid networks, civic organizations, and political movements because they knew that liberation required disciplined collective action. That lesson is just as relevant today. The authoritarian forces seeking to diminish our democratic participation are counting on our exhaustion, our cynicism, and our disengagement. We cannot afford to give them any of those things.

That responsibility does not begin and end at the ballot box. It lives in church fellowship halls where neighbors gather to address violence in their communities, in voter registration drives after Sabbath, and in the courage of ordinary people who demand better from those in power. This may not look like the politics we’ve been taught to disdain, but they are among the most powerful political acts we can undertake. It is how our communities can transform shared concerns into lasting change.

I have spoken with many parishioners who have felt overwhelmed by the challenges facing our community. But when I encourage them to organize—to gather their neighbors, advance shared priorities, and demand accountability—something shifts. They begin to recognize that the power they were searching for was already in their hands. Organizing reminds people that change has always come from ordinary people deciding they have a stake in their own future.

Juneteenth is a timely reminder that our democracy demands more than participation; it demands organization. As corrupt leaders advance efforts to weaken democratic oversight and centralize power, we must activate our own agenda—and hold elected officials accountable to it. The future of our communities depends on whether we are willing to embrace that responsibility.

When I was little, I’d wake up when I heard my dad getting ready for work. I’d run downstairs hoping to catch him before he left so I could hug him goodbye. My father, an immigrant from India, came to the United States as a child with my grandparents in search of stability and opportunity. They worked hard to build a life here, and I grew up watching my dad do the same—out the door early, home late.

Sometimes I cried if I missed him before he left. Sometimes I cried even after a hug, because the day felt so long without him. But there was one thing I never questioned: He would come home.

Too many children in immigrant families don’t have that certainty today. In recent months, high-profile cases have shown how quickly stability can disappear, as families are swept into immigration enforcement and children are separated from their parents, often with little warning. New research from the Brookings Institution estimates that more than 100,000 children have been separated from a parent during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, and that most of those children are likely US citizens. Researchers also warn the true scale may be even higher because the government does not consistently track whether detained immigrants are parents.

A father can leave for a shift and not come back, not because he chose to abandon his family, but because immigration agents arrested him on his way to work, during a scheduled court check-in, or even in everyday places like airports. In recent weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been deployed in airports across the country, where travelers have witnessed arrests unfold in real time. We are already seeing the consequences in deeply troubling ways, including the case of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos in Minnesota, whose detention alongside his father drew national attention.

For years, politicians have lamented a “fatherlessness crisis.” We should name what we are doing when we detain and deport fathers without regard for their children. We are actively manufacturing it.

When parents are detained, children are often pulled into the system with them, or families are left scrambling to stay together. Recent court filings describe hundreds of children held in family detention facilities beyond court-ordered limits, often without adequate food, medical care, or mental health support. Many other children are left with relatives, neighbors, older siblings, or informal caregivers while parents remain in detention or face deportation proceedings, forcing children to navigate sudden loss and uncertainty.

According to federal data compiled by TRAC, more than 60,000 people are currently held in ICE detention, and nearly three-quarters have no criminal conviction. The Trump administration claims that ICE targets “the worst of the worst,” but the data tell a different story. Because immigration arrests disproportionately target working-age men, many detained are likely fathers. That gap matters deeply in a country where more than 4 million US citizen children live with an undocumented parent. That omission makes it easier to debate immigration enforcement policy while overlooking the children who are directly impacted. Even if only a fraction of those detained are parents, that still means thousands of children losing a caregiver, a provider, or both, frequently overnight. They are neighbors and community members, often fathers who were actively raising their children until the day the government took them away. I know this not only from policy data, but from listening to fathers talk about their children.

As a senior policy researcher at Children’s Rights, I study how family stability shapes a child’s well-being and how quickly it can be shattered by the government. We have found that current immigration policies are not only separating families but causing measurable harm to children, including mental health challenges, developmental delays, and disruptions to their education. Federal data show children being held in immigration custody for months at a time, often averaging more than 150 days, exposing them to prolonged instability and stress.

In a qualitative study published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies, my co-authors and I interviewed 85 Latino fathers raising young children in the United States. Many were immigrants, primarily from Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala. They spoke about love and connection, wanting to be present, witness milestones, and serve as role models. They reflected on their own parents and their hopes for their children. They described the burdens of responsibility, but also of joy. They sounded like parents everywhere, underscoring how universal these parenting motivations are.

That is why detaining fathers is not just harsh, it is shortsighted. Decades of research show fathers play a unique role in children’s emotional well-being, behavior, and learning. When the government removes a father without warning, holds him for weeks or months, and ultimately deports him, children do not experience it as “policy.” They experience it as a profound loss.

As Father’s Day approaches, I am thinking about the fathers who show up for their children every day, who work long hours, provide stability, and try to build better futures for their families. Across the country, many children are already missing fathers they were unfairly separated from. Not because those fathers failed their children, but because of a failed immigration system that is increasingly willing to separate families.

For years, politicians have lamented a “fatherlessness crisis.” We should name what we are doing when we detain and deport fathers without regard for their children. We are actively manufacturing it. If we truly care about children’s health and well-being, we must treat family integrity and stability as essential.

Congress and the administration should require ICE to collect and publicly report whether those it detains are parents of minor children, and ensure children are not left without safe caregiving arrangements. This is especially urgent given recent reporting that ICE is failing to follow its own policies designed to protect family unity, including requirements that agents ask whether someone has children and allow parents to make decisions about their care. ICE should use detention more sparingly for parents and expand community-based alternatives that allow people to keep working and caring for their children while their cases proceed.

I still picture my younger self at the top of the stairs, running toward my father’s morning hug. Every child deserves to believe, with confidence, that a parent who leaves in the morning will come home at night.

As Juneteenth approaches, I find myself thinking about anniversaries.

Not because I am particularly sentimental about dates, but because anniversaries reveal something about how societies remember. They tell us which stories we choose to elevate, which contradictions we learn to live with, and which truths we have become comfortable leaving unresolved.

This year, those questions feel particularly urgent.

Communities across the country will gather to celebrate Juneteenth, commemorating the moment enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas learned they were free more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed. At the same time, the nation is preparing to commemorate its 250th anniversary, renewing familiar conversations about liberty, democracy, independence, and freedom. There is something meaningful about those two anniversaries sitting so close together. One asks us to remember the promise of freedom. The other asks us to remember the distance between a promise and its fulfillment.

Every democratic gain we now celebrate exists because ordinary people organized, challenged existing systems, imagined alternatives, and demanded that the nation become more than it was.

For many people, Juneteenth is understood as a story about delayed freedom. That is certainly true. But the older I get, the more I think it is also a story about delayed meaning. The people in Galveston were legally free long before they knew they were free. The law had changed. Their status had changed. On paper, their relationship to the nation had changed.

Yet their lived reality had not. The declaration existed, but the meaning had not yet reached them. That distinction matters because we often talk about freedom as though it becomes real the moment it is declared. We assume that once a law is passed, a court issues a ruling, or a right is recognized, the work is complete. History tells a different story.

Again and again, America has demonstrated that there is often a gap between what institutions proclaim and what people experience. The abolition of slavery did not end racial hierarchy. The passage of the Voting Rights Act did not end voter suppression. Legal victories did not eliminate the need for organizing, education, resistance, or vigilance. Rights may be secured in law, but they must still be carried into communities, institutions, and everyday life. Juneteenth reminds us of that reality. It reminds us that freedom is not simply a legal condition. It is also a social condition, a cultural condition, and a lived condition. It becomes meaningful only when people can actually experience it.

That lesson feels particularly relevant today.

Across the country, we are witnessing renewed debates about democracy, citizenship, rights, belonging, and power. We are watching efforts to restrict voting access, weaken public institutions, narrow how history is taught, and redefine who gets to participate fully in public life. At the same time, many Americans are being encouraged to believe that these concerns are exaggerated, that racism and inequality belong primarily to the past, and that the nation's democratic project is largely complete. What concerns me is not simply the political debate itself. It is the historical amnesia that often accompanies it. Too often, we remember progress while forgetting the struggle that produced it. We celebrate outcomes while ignoring the generations of people who fought to make those outcomes possible. We remember milestones but forget movements. We remember victories but forget the conditions that made those victories necessary in the first place.

In doing so, we begin to mistake progress for permanence. Juneteenth offers a corrective.

It reminds us that democracy has never been self-executing. Freedom has never expanded automatically. Rights have never sustained themselves. Every democratic gain we now celebrate exists because ordinary people organized, challenged existing systems, imagined alternatives, and demanded that the nation become more than it was. That is why I find myself thinking differently about the conversations surrounding America's 250th anniversary. I am less interested in celebrating a polished national mythology than I am in wrestling honestly with the tension at the center of the American story. The United States was founded on extraordinary democratic ideals while simultaneously denying many people access to them. Those contradictions are not incidental to our history. They are central to understanding it.

Yet Juneteenth is not ultimately a story about contradiction. It is a story about persistence. It is a story about Black people who continued reaching for freedom even when freedom arrived late. It is a story about Black people who expanded democracy even when democracy excluded them. It is a story about generations of Black Americans who carried hope, memory, responsibility, and struggle across time so that future generations might inherit possibilities they themselves were denied. That is what I find myself celebrating this year.

Not a perfect nation, completed democracy, or a tidy story of inevitable progress.

I am celebrating the people who carried the work forward anyway. The people who understood that freedom does not become real simply because it is declared. It becomes real because someone carries it into the world. Someone teaches it. Someone protects it. Someone organizes around it. Someone refuses to let it disappear.

The lesson of Juneteenth is not that freedom finally arrived. The lesson is that even after freedom was declared, someone still had to carry the news.

And generations later, someone still has to carry the meaning.

I have spent years fighting against President Donald Trump’s push toward war with Iran, and I have the scars to prove it. When Trump withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, in 2018, I warned that it would eventually bring us to this moment. Ever since, I have consistently argued against the confrontational path he set the United States on. That record speaks for itself, which is why I can say what follows without any throat clearing.

Given the circumstances, President Trump’s decision to strike a deal with Tehran and bring this costly, unnecessary war to an end is the right one. It deserves support, not partisan second-guessing. As Rob Malley—a key member of Barack Obama’s team that negotiated the nuclear deal and later Joe Biden’s lead negotiator with Iran—noted on X, comparing Trump’s memorandum of understanding to Obama’s JCPOA misses the point. What matters is not how the agreement stacks up against past diplomatic achievements, but how it compares to the alternatives before us. And on that score, Malley argued, the MOU is “far preferable to any of the alternatives on offer. Period.”

I would go further. To examine the Memorandum of Understanding and ask, “Was the war worth it?” is nonsensical.

Of course it wasn’t. How could it have been? The premise itself is deeply flawed: that a failed war of choice would somehow strengthen Washington’s hand at the negotiating table and produce more favorable terms. History offers little support for such a proposition.

Trump currently owns this failed war, but if the Democrats help torpedo the MOU and war resumes, then they will co-own the next war. Trump’s disaster will become theirs as well.

The question is also flawed in another, more consequential way. It implies that a war should not be brought to an end until it has produced better terms—even when the war itself is failing.

Taken seriously, that logic leads to a dangerous conclusion: that a failed war must continue until the battlefield fortunes somehow improve and a more favorable outcome becomes attainable. Perhaps that day will come. Perhaps it never will. In the meantime, the costs—in lives, treasure, regional stability, and strategic credibility—are treated as secondary considerations.

This is how endless wars are born.

Wars become interminable when leaders convince themselves that ending them without victory is politically more costly than continuing them without hope. Once that trap is sprung, every setback becomes an argument for one more deployment, one more escalation, one more year. The objective shifts from achieving a realistic political outcome to avoiding the admission that the original objectives were unattainable.

American history offers more than a few examples. Presidents inherit wars they did not start, recognize they cannot be won on the promised terms, yet lack the political space to end them. So they postpone the reckoning. They kick the can down the road, handing the burden to their successor, who does the same. The result is a cycle of strategic drift in which the costs accumulate while the prospects for success steadily recede.

When victory is nowhere in sight, prolonging a conflict in the hope that reality will eventually conform to political rhetoric is not resolve. It is denial.

Remember Afghanistan. For years, American officials lied to the public that victory was just around the corner—six months away, perhaps a year at most. Yet the Afghanistan Papers later revealed that these officials privately understood that victory was nowhere in sight. They knew the war was adrift, but feared the political consequences of admitting it.

So the war continued. By the time the United States finally withdrew, nearly two decades had passed, and more than $2 trillion had been spent.

And what was the end result? After 20 years of war, thousands of American and allied lives lost, and hundreds of thousands of Afghan casualties, the United States arrived back where it had begun: it had replaced the Taliban with the Taliban.

That is the curse of endless war. The refusal to accept an unfavorable reality today merely guarantees a higher bill tomorrow.

Some credit must be given to Trump for breaking this pattern, even as he should be blamed for having started this war in the first place. Political leaders should be judged not only for the mistakes they make, but also for whether they have the courage to correct them.

Trump could have followed the well-worn path of his predecessors. He could have prolonged the conflict, spent more money, sacrificed more lives, destabilized more economies, and further depleted American power—all while insisting that victory remained just over the horizon. Recall the countless times he declared that the war had been won.

Indeed, the political costs of continuing the war would likely have been lower than the costs he is paying today for ending it. In American politics, there is often greater punishment for acknowledging failure than for perpetuating it.

That perverse incentive has trapped presidents for decades. In his testimony on the Vietnam War before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1966, George Kennan stated the following: “There is more respect to be won in the opinion of the world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound policies than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives.”

The criticism coming from some Democrats is particularly disappointing because it echoes the same bad-faith tactics Republicans deployed against the JCPOA in 2015. To be sure, Trump has invited some of this treatment. He spent years attacking Obama’s agreement with a barrage of misleading arguments and exaggerated claims.

But that does not make it wise for Democrats to return the favor.

Trump currently owns this failed war, but if the Democrats help torpedo the MOU and war resumes, then they will co-own the next war. Trump’s disaster will become theirs as well.

This isn’t rocket science. Several Democratic lawmakers have managed to criticize the war, hold Trump accountable for it, yet avoid attack lines that could sabotage the MOU. Their criticisms are primarily over Trump having started this war in the first place, rather than the terms for ending it.

Rather than attacking the terms of the MOU, Democrats should pressure the administration to protect it from those who are determined to see it fail. The main external threat is the Israeli government and Benjamin Netanyahu’s obsession with sabotaging any opportunity for Iran and the United States to bury the hatchet.

Instead of relying solely on angry phone calls and public rebukes of Netanyahu, supporters of ending the war should press Trump to act now: Suspend military aid to Israel and curtail military and intelligence cooperation. Such measures would limit Israel’s ability to reignite the conflict and dispel any notion in Tel Aviv that Washington will automatically follow Israel into another war. If Israeli leaders understand that the United States will not be drawn into a future conflict on their behalf, their incentive to start one in the first place will be significantly reduced.

The task now is not to reward Trump politically, nor to excuse the recklessness that produced this war. It is to prevent the war from returning. Democrats can condemn the decision to start it without sabotaging the agreement that ends it. They can hold Trump accountable without helping Netanyahu drag the United States back into conflict. The choice before them is not between opposing Trump and supporting peace. It is between learning from America’s endless wars and repeating them.

There are many lessons to be learned from the lates made-for-Israel war on Iran. The first and most damning is that the war resolved the very crisis it created. Donald Trump celebrated the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the lifting of the blockade against Iran. Two conditions that were fully in place before Benjamin Netanyahu dog walked Trump into this war. The agreement that concluded the war took us back to exactly where we stood before America spent $200 billion, and where Americans continue to pay Israeli surcharge tax at the pump and grocery stores.

As for Iran's nuclear program, the arithmetic does not lie. The 400 kilograms of 60-percent enriched uranium that Iran possessed were zero before Trump — pressured by his largest Israel-first donors — tore up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in May 2018. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran had fully complied not only with the IAEA non-proliferation agreement, which Israel has never signed nor accepted, but with the additional protocols governing verification and monitoring of its civilian nuclear program. Trump canceled the deal anyway, not because it failed America, but because it did not satisfy Israel’s veto.

The deepest irony is that Iran's nuclear knowledge and capabilities are more advanced today than when Trump discarded the JCPOA. Any new agreement—even one stricter in structure than the original—is therefore being negotiated from a fundamentally weaker position than the one that existed in 2018. No treaty can unlearn what Iran already knows.

On Monday, June 15, Trump heralded the end of war bragging that Iran agreed not to develop nuclear weapons. Item 8 of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), signed Wednesday, states: “The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons.” The word reaffirms is not incidental. It is a direct reference to Article III of the 2015 JCPOA, which Trump most likely never read, where Iran had already affirmed: “… that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.” Same commitment. Same language. Different signatures. Twelve weeks of a war that went nowhere to get here.

From “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” to celebrate an MoU to reopen a Strait that was open before $200 billion and countless American and Iranian lives were squandered. Trump's triumph is much ado about nothing. He canceled an existing deal that took years to negotiate, inflicted economic hardship on ordinary Iranians, and allowed Iran's nuclear advancement to leap forward. It is, in the most literal sense, like redefining water as H2O. The molecule did not change. Only the dressing did. Israel’s war took Trump back to the starting point, at twice the cost to American taxpayers.

The same special-interest group that pushed Trump to cancel the JCPOA, lobbied him long before the 2024 election. Israel-first donors poured hundreds of million into his campaign as a down payment for this war. Netanyahu visited Trump seven times in 13 months, manipulating, and scheming for another made-for-Israel war.

This war should also carry a lesson for the Arab Gulf states that long believed American military bases were a guarantee of their security. Instead, they found themselves sidelined and never consulted on a war waged, directly or indirectly, from their own soil, ultimately in service of an Israeli agenda. Foreign military presence does not deliver security. It delivers dependency. Lasting regional stability is built through regional cooperation, on terms beneficial to the region.

Foreign military presence does not deliver security. It delivers dependency.

More importantly, the region must now reckon with a pattern it can no longer afford to ignore: wherever Israel goes, instability follows. The so-called Abraham Accords brought Israel into the Gulf. What followed was bombs, drones and economic ruin not seen since the Second World War. I have lived in the Gulf. The only pop people could hear was the backfire of an aging car exhaust. In the last three months, friends shared recordings of ballistic missiles splitting the sky and drones buzzing overhead. Israel did not bring a defense shield; it brought a target. Its presence is a magnet for unrest. It is a carcass attracting wasps.

In fact, Israel is an agent of disorder and a parasite nurtured by chaos. It wraps itself in the language of partnership, mutual benefit, and shared values, deceiving others into believing the arrangement is reciprocal when it is entirely one-directional.

Israel record speaks for itself: a genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing across the West Bank, 1.3 million internal refugees in Lebanon, the occupation of Syrian land following Assad's fall, destabilization operations in northern Iraq and Sudan.

In Iraq, the American invasion and regime change did not satisfy Israel’s insatiable lust for total chaos. It targeted Iraqi scientists and waged war against knowledge itself. The blueprint, in this view, has not changed for Iran. Israel’s dissatisfaction over the MoU with Tehran is not that it fails to produce a non-nuclear Iran, but that it fails to wipe out knowledge. Its broader objective is the suppression of scientific and technological development across the region. Israel seeks neighbors unable to think independently. it wants consumers, not producers. It wants importers rather than innovators. It wants to maintain a monopoly over nuclear capabilities and control over regional scientific advancement.

Israel brought ruins to the US, too. The made-for-Israel Iraq war helped detonate the financial crisis of 2008, saddling future American generations with trillions in accumulated debt that has never been fully reckoned with. A war that Trump condemned, criticizing Democratic leadership for failing to impeach George W. Bush who “got us into the war with lies.”

The cost of Trump's made-for-Israel war on Iran requires no economist to explain. It arrives uninvited in every American home, at the meat counter, in every grocery bill, every gas receipt, every price that keeps rising without explanation. They may not realize its extent—not yet anyway. By the time they do, the damage to the US economy, as in 2008, will be too deep to reverse.

To undermine potential peace with Iran, the ungrateful Israel-first loyalists like Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin are already panicking and challenging Trump’s MoU. Israel will activate the constellation of media outlets controlled by Israel-first billionaires to shape what Americans see, read, and are permitted to question. The once-respected "60 Minutes," under a new Israel-first boss, Bari Weiss, allows Netanyahu to handpick his own interviewer. Who knows, maybe he submits his own questions, too.

Now, Netanyahu and American Zionists have 60 days to sabotage a final deal with Iran. Israel will mobilize its donors, lobby Congress, and if that fails, resort to what it has perfected. A false flag operation against American forces in the region, or another assassination in Lebanon. A conflagration ensues, and once again, it will be fought with American money and American lives. Because a Middle East free of American military entanglement is the one outcome Israel cannot tolerate—a prospect more threatening than any Iranian nuclear centrifuge.

Donald Trump’s second term has precipitated a tsunami of criticism from Democrats over his foreign policy. Yet when it comes to Washington's efforts to dominate Latin America and the Caribbean, the substantive dispute—if there is any substance remaining, once stripped of partisan bickering—is less about ends than means.

Beneath the rhetoric of inter-party conflict lies a broad bipartisan consensus in favor of promoting US hemispheric hegemony and crushing governments that resist it—with Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua at the forefront. While Democrats frequently portray Trump as reckless, they generally accept the underlying premises of economic coercion, political intervention, and regime-change pressure. Their objections mainly focus on the execution of policy rather than its legitimacy.

The Central Role of Sanctions in Projecting Imperial Coercive Power

Under Democratic administrations, the US forged and institutionalized what may be its most effective instrument of hegemony. Coercive economic measures, commonly called “sanctions,” were first deployed by Franklin D. Roosevelt against Mexico in the 1930s. They were used by Dwight D. Eisenhower to pressure Guatemala in 1954 and then—most drastically—against Cuba by both Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy in 1960. Today, one-third of the world’s nations are under US sanctions.

Sanctions—a form of collective punishment—are held by legal experts to be contrary to international law. Paradoxically, not only does Washington disregard international law in imposing sanctions, but the US then behaves as if they are applying the law when, for example, they pirate a ship delivering humanitarian supplies to a sanctioned country.

The shared strategic objective of the bipartisan Washington consensus is the projection of US hemispheric dominance.

Use of sanctions has accelerated because successive administrations have seen their unique advantages. Compared with “forever wars,” they are more easily justified to US voters as cost free and as not imperiling US lives. If sanctions are the precursor to military intervention—as in Guatemala in 1954, Cuba in 1961, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989 and, of course, Venezuela in 2026—the interventions have usually been limited, with few US casualties.

Yet sanctions are very potent: Between 2010 and 2021, they caused around 560,000 deaths globally each year—more than five times the number of people killed annually in direct armed combat.

While sanctions are made more palatable by being described as “targeted” at governments or individuals seen as undesirable by Washington, in practice the “targeting” is deliberately far wider. Sanctions do most damage to the poorest sectors of societies—the sectors most likely to support progressive governments. The barely veiled message is that only by withdrawing this support will such communities be able to prosper and avoid the threat of even greater US intervention.

The frequent description of sanctions as “targeted” carries another implication—that they are intended to have a precise and conclusive effect. However, while sanctions cause severe economic damage, there is little evidence that they achieve intended regime change. Even so, sanctions on countries which refuse to change are maintained and—very frequently—intensified. Democrats are as guilty of this folly as Republicans.

Indeed, US sanctions have imperial utility through their “demonstration effect”: attempting to cripple progressive alternatives to the neoliberal world order. Recently subjected to draconian sanctions, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel proclaimed, “Cuba is not a failed state; Cuba is a besieged state.” Still, infant mortality in Cuba is lower than among African Americans.

Transitioning to “Democracy” in Venezuela

In the case of Venezuela, the Democrats have criticized the Republicans from the right, complaining that the cudgel of imperial power against essentially defenseless small states has not been wielded with sufficient malice.

Washington has imposed illegal unilateral coercive measures on Venezuela since 2015 in efforts to asphyxiate its Bolivarian Revolution. The transparently false rationale for continuing sanctions is that Venezuela poses an “extraordinary threat” to the national security of the US. Although the threat is obviously the other way around, mainstream Democrats have not exposed this lie. How could they, when it originated with President Barack Obama and was subsequently echoed by President Joe Biden and then Trump?

Despite the horrific toll of an estimated 100,000 excess deaths attributed to US-imposed sanctions, Venezuela has resisted and maintained an unbroken continuity of leadership from Hugo Chávez to Nicolás Maduro and to now Delcy Rodríguez. And that’s the rub for the Democrats.

Ranking Democrat members of the House and Senate foreign affairs committees, Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (D-NY) and Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), issued a “request [for] a clear explanation” of Trump’s Venezuela policy. Their meek missive came a full five months after the abduction of the Venezuelan president, an operation that resulted in more than 100 collateral deaths. Meanwhile, more than 200 occupants of small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have been subjected to extrajudicial murder by the Trump administration.

Yet these inconvenient facts are absent from the June 8 Democratic Party congressional foreign-policy leadership’s statement on Venezuela. Their complaint is that Trump’s White House has failed to sufficiently “exercise its leverage.” As they put it, “As of today, the [state] department has yet to provide any evidence the Trump administration is doing any of this hard work.”

The contradiction of kidnapping a lawful head of state in the name of restoring democracy does not trouble the Democrats. Rather, they “strongly support the Venezuelan people’s right to choose their leaders”… after the US abducts their president.

These Democrat leaders are also troubled that Venezuelan authorities were allowed to appoint a new attorney general and defense minister without apparent US interference. In addition, they express impatience with Trump’s lethargy in not yet overhauling Venezuela’s supreme court and electoral council.

To the extent that they make any concrete demand, the putative opposition party wants Trump to impose an “electoral timeline” on Venezuela. Yet, the same party has no problem with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Ukraine who suspended elections after his legal term in office expired two years ago, banned opposition parties, shuttered critical media, and arrested political opponents.

Restoring “Democracy” in Cuba

Democratic Party policy toward Cuba is perhaps best exemplified by Biden’s retention of the State Sponsor of Terrorism designation, which he inherited from Trump. Then, just six days before leaving office, Biden rescinded the designation with full certainty that the incoming Republican would—and did—reverse his decision.

Former National Security Council officer Ricardo Zúñiga was Obama’s adviser for the Americas and Biden’s special envoy for the Northern Triangle. He writes in Foreign Affairs offering advice on, rather than criticism of, Trump’s Cuba policy.

Republicans may be more inclined toward overt confrontation, selective military assaults, and maximal pressure; Democrats typically prefer a combination of inhumane sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and multilateral coercion.

Zúñiga advocates achieving regime change in Cuba through “diplomacy” rather than “force.” Scare quotes are used because, for this Democrat, brute economic strangulation is regarded as diplomacy. Zúñiga would “forswear military action,” but only if Cuba submits to US dictates. And so long as “pro-market reforms” are adopted, “democracy” can wait.

Without a hint of opprobrium, Zúñiga casually references the US invasion of Iran and the kidnapping of the Venezuelan president as policy options that would not be effective in Cuba. Given these examples, he then complains that Cubans remain resistant to “American views on democracy and human rights.”

He acknowledges that even if Trump wished to selectively roll back the murderous sanctions currently imposed on Cuba, he would face opposition not only from Republicans but also from Democrats. Where this Democrat differs from Republicans is in his supremely hypocritical conclusion: “It is ultimately Cuban citizens who will determine their country’s future”… after the US overthrows their government.

Promoting “Democracy” in Nicaragua

Tiny Nicaragua is also labelled an “extraordinary threat” to the US. While the harshest and most successful sanctions against it were applied during the Reagan administrations, when an economic blockade and the US-financed Contra war eventually unseated the Sandinista government in 1990, economic pressure quickly resumed once the Sandinistas returned to power in 2007. Both the Bush and then Obama administrations made cuts in aid, and it was under Obama that Democrats joined with Republicans to launch the NICA Act, eventually implemented (under Trump) in 2018.

While Trump signed the NICA Act and sanctioned various Nicaraguan functionaries, Democrat senators took the lead in formulating stronger measures in the RENACER Act, signed by Biden in 2021. This led to an estimated loss of $500 million annually in development finance that would have been directed at Nicaragua’s poorest communities. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), with Marco Rubio, put forward new legislation in 2023 that was intended to strengthen the RENACER Act and ensure even greater damage.

Biden officials were consistently aggressive toward Nicaragua. In 2022, his nominee for ambassador to Managua, Hugo Rodríguez, promised the US Congress that he would “support using all economic and diplomatic tools to bring about a change in direction in Nicaragua.” As a result, Rodríguez was never accepted as ambassador and the post remains unfilled.

In 2024, Biden’s trade representative launched a hostile investigation clearly aimed at disrupting trade with Nicaragua and possibly at excluding it from the regional trade treaty, CAFTA. When it eventually reported in late 2025 it recommended punitive tariffs, but only relatively mild penalties were actually implemented by Trump.

Marco Rubio regularly imposes sanctions on individual Nicaraguans, including 100 more just this month. More than 2,300 have now been sanctioned by successive administrations. Nevertheless, hard-line Democrats, as well as Republicans, are pushing Rubio to do far more.

Two Parties, One Strategy

The shared strategic objective of the bipartisan Washington consensus is the projection of US hemispheric dominance. The two major parties differ mainly in messaging and, to a lesser extent, on tactics. Their theatrical contention is neither between intervention and nonintervention, nor between coercion and diplomacy. More often, it is between competing methods for achieving the same strategic objective.

Republicans may be more inclined toward overt confrontation, selective military assaults, and maximal pressure; Democrats typically prefer a combination of inhumane sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and multilateral coercion. But both approaches rest on the assumption that Washington has the right to shape the political future of other nations.

Despite differences in tone and tactics, the supposed opposition party offers not an articulated alternative to the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine but, at the very most, a variation of it.

The climate negotiations are beginning to feel like a masterclass in avoiding the obvious. Every year, negotiators arrive with new targets, new initiatives, and new buzzwords.

This year, one of the biggest announcements revolves around electrification. The incoming COP31 Presidencies have put forward a target to move from 20% to 35% electrification by 2035. At first glance, it sounds ambitious. Yet the key question is what will power that electrification.

An electric vehicle connected to a fossil fuel-powered grid does not necessarily deliver meaningful emissions reductions. Likewise, an electric factory running on gas-generated electricity cannot be considered evidence of a low-carbon transition. Electrification delivers climate benefits only when it is powered by renewable energy and accompanied by a clear road map to phase out fossil fuels.

Yet a fundamental contradiction persists. While governments celebrate record growth in renewable energy, they continue approving new oil, gas, and coal projects. Renewable energy capacity is increasing, but fossil fuel production is increasing too. Nearly 30 years after the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, negotiators are still struggling to confront the primary driver of climate change.

While developed countries point to existing contributions as evidence of progress, developing countries remain confronted with a widening gap between what is needed and what is being delivered.

The same tendency to search for new distractions is emerging in the agriculture discussions. Instead of prioritizing agroecology, which already provides proven solutions for adaptation, food security, biodiversity protection, and resilience, increasing attention is being given to artificial intelligence. While technology certainly has a role to play, farmers facing droughts, floods, soil degradation, and declining yields are not asking for algorithms. They are asking for secure access to land, water, seeds, finance, and support.

The adaptation discussions reveal a similar disconnect. While Bonn has spent considerable time debating indicators, methodologies, and reporting frameworks, developing countries continue to raise concerns about access to finance and the means needed to turn plans into action. Discussions under the Baku Adaptation Roadmap exposed broad agreement that major barriers continue to prevent finance from reaching countries and communities at the scale required. Yet when the conversation turned to solutions, momentum quickly faded. The same pattern resurfaced during discussions on the Global Goal on Adaptation, where developed countries showed far greater interest in technical discussions than in finance and implementation. Meanwhile, communities on the ground are left waiting for support that remains trapped in negotiation rooms.

And when adaptation falls short, those impacts do not simply disappear. They become loss and damage. Yet despite being recognized as the third pillar of climate action, loss and damage continues to be treated as an afterthought. During the opening plenaries in Bonn, Ghana, speaking on behalf of the Africa Group of Negotiators, and Timor-Leste, speaking on behalf of the Least Developed Countries, highlighted a striking contradiction: While countries repeatedly call for balance across climate action, there is still no comprehensive agenda item dedicated to loss and damage under the negotiations.

This diplomatic stalling now clashes directly with international law. In its landmark Climate Change Advisory Opinion, the International Court of Justice affirmed that states have a legal obligation to protect the climate system and cooperate to address climate harm. By clarifying that breaches of climate obligations may constitute internationally wrongful acts, the court strengthened the legal basis for responsibility, restitution, and compensation.

At the center of all these discussions lies a familiar issue: finance. The mitigation and adaptation ambitions embedded in the Paris Agreement were always contingent on the provision of climate finance under Article 9.1. Every ambition discussed in Bonn, from adaptation and resilience to renewable energy and implementation, ultimately depends on whether developing countries receive adequate support.

That tension is playing out directly in Bonn's finance negotiations. The two major finance discussions this year, the Climate Finance Work Programme and the Veredas Dialogue on Article 2.1(c), exposed a persistent divide. Developing countries continue to stress that climate finance is a legal obligation and the foundation for implementing climate action. Developed countries, meanwhile, continue pushing broader discussions centered on mobilizing finance from multiple sources, particularly private finance.

Ultimately, both processes highlighted the same reality: While developed countries point to existing contributions as evidence of progress, developing countries remain confronted with a widening gap between what is needed and what is being delivered.

Against this backdrop, the establishment of the Just Transition Mechanism at COP30 stands out as one of the few discussions focused on implementation rather than process. After years of dialogue under the UAE Just Transition Work Programme, Parties recognized the need for a dedicated mechanism capable of connecting ambition with delivery. Discussions in Bonn are now turning to how it can support countries navigating profound economic and social transformation.

For developing countries, this discussion goes far beyond climate policy. Energy access, industrialization, economic diversification, poverty eradication, and job creation are central to the transition many countries are trying to build. Whether the mechanism becomes a meaningful tool for support or simply another addition to the climate architecture will depend on the choices parties make in the months ahead. Without that shift from process to implementation, every year spent debating distractions is another year spent delaying the action we already know is needed.

For over six weeks now, Bolivia has been engulfed in a national revolt. What started as sectoral demands over public employee salaries, fuel subsidies, and land rights has metastasized into a full-throated cry for the resignation of Trump-aligned President Rodrigo Paz. The country is paralyzed by more than 100 road blockades that have severed the capital, La Paz, from the rest of the nation, cutting off food, fuel, and medicine. Ten people are dead, dozens more injured, and over 300 have been arrested. Journalists and activists have also been caught in the violence.

The government’s response has been a schizophrenic mix of hollow calls for peaceful dialogue and negotiation, and brutal repression. Paz has signed deals with some social sectors, and organized a Social Economic Council, while jailing the leaders of the groups he’s “negotiating” with.

Thousands of militarized police have been deployed, using tear gas, rubber bullets, and, according to persistent rumors the government denies, live ammunition. Leaders of various protest groups, including the Bolivian Workers’ Central (COB), the largest trade union in the country, and radical Aymara defense force Ponchos Rojos, have been jailed. The Wiphala, the sacred flag of Bolivia’s Indigenous majority, has been burned in public squares by counterprotesters while the state itself no longer displays it publicly.

As Argentinian President Javier Milei’s expatriated adviser Fernando Cerimedo put it, this government is fighting against “dirty leftists.” Cerimedo was reportedly crucial in deporting a human rights mission from Argentina this week. Protest leaders and politicians have been kidnapped in broad daylight, including one senator with the Movement Toward Socialism, taken by police in plain clothes.

When a government disregards the voting blocs that got it into office, blocks every avenue for democratic change, criminalizes dissent, and rules on behalf of a foreign-aligned racist elite, it leaves the people few political options for engagement and representation.

Far-right groups and “The Resistance” have re-popularized the slogan, “Make the homeland, kill an indian,” which had become a popular rallying cry in the 2019 coup. Those same far-right groups were also seen in San Julian, near Santa Cruz, using illegal weapons and explosives against protesters, alongside state security forces. The Paz government has not rebuked any of these figures, statements, or actions, and instead cracked down further on the left.

Internationally, the reaction maps perfectly onto the new ideological conflict dividing Latin America. The right-wing autocrats, from Argentina’s Milei and Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado to the Trump administration, have been unequivocal. They have labeled the protesters “narco-terrorists” threatening democracy itself, with the government applauding their solidarity.

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared that the US “will reject all attempts to overthrow the legitimate government.” President Donald Trump himself expressed solidarity for Paz at the Shield of the Americas, held at his very own Trump Resort in Miami. This support has emboldened the Bolivian far-right, which is openly pushing for a full “state of exception,” a euphemism for martial law that has been developed by various autocrats including Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, to crush democracy and opposition in the name of a “war on drugs.”

That scenario is likely for Bolivia, too, where protesters labeled “narco-terrorists” would be the subject of that war on drugs. Paz and the government coalition in the Plurinational Assembly have already passed and signed a law modifying the state of exception law. The old law was passed in 2020, after the pro-US unelected government of Jeanine Anez committed multiple massacres against opposition in that state of exception, to try to tamper state abuses.

Now, many safeguards have been removed, with the law giving carte blanche to state agents to kill, seize property, shut down telecommunications, and suspend political rights. The president has also declared a 90-day humanitarian emergency, which allowed for the deployment of militarized forces in El Alto, leading to the death of one protester and multiple injuries.

To understand why Bolivia is on the brink, we must understand a fundamental betrayal of the people by their political representatives. Rodrigo Paz ran under the banner of the Christian Democratic Party (PDC), a big-tent coalition with Indigenous currents previously aligned with the left, populist anti-corruption crusaders, and hard-right figures from the Santa Cruz elite. Voters, exhausted by the chronic crises of the Luis Arce administration and facing a nightmare choice against the far-right former president Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga (who was vice president to former pro-US dictator, Hugo Banzer), held their noses and voted for what they believed was the least destructive option.

They were promised “Capitalism for Everyone,” a softer, more competent alternative that would see public programs and social rights protected while opening up the country further.

Instead, Paz’s first months have been a masterclass in neoliberal shock therapy, looking to privatize energy, cutting public services and subsidies, restructuring debt with American financial institutions, and proposing to reform Indigenous land tenure, which communities correctly interpreted as a prelude to opening communal lands to private extraction. Key subsidies ensuring many citizens’ very survival, including fuel and food subsidies, have also been cut, jump kicking the cost of living for the most vulnerable.

The result is the political destitution of the Bolivian left, which represents the vast majority of the country. The old vehicle, Evo Morales’ MAS, is decapitated and adrift. Evo himself is practically in exile with an arrest warrant hanging over his head. His protege, Andronico Rodriguez, has been a ghost in public life, and his Alianza Popular has not been able to build much momentum.

Former President Luis Arce, Evo’s former minister and now sworn enemy, is in prison, in preventive detention. Other socialist leaders, politicians, and activists have been jailed, while the cabinet has ironically vowed to continue crackdowns “against lawfare.”

The Paz government has been jailing the key leaders of the socialist era while releasing convicted terrorists and far-right racists linked to the 2019 coup government and its subsequent massacres, like Jeanine Áñez, Luis Fernando Camacho, and leaders of far-right youth groups deemed the equivalent of the Proud Boys. It has also brought back the Drug Enforcement Administration, which had been kicked out by the Morales government over alleged election interference.

Despite running as the left’s only option, and as the counter to the right, since taking office, Paz’s policy proposals, rhetoric, and platform have mostly been directed at the white, Christian, conservative elite in the tropics, rather than to the Indigenous majority in the Altiplano.

This betrayal is creating a crisis of representation in a country where trust in institutions and democracy is already very low—and in the poorest country in South America. Most of the activists in the streets voted for Paz, while many unions endorsed the PDC, but are now expressing their discontent at their interests being disregarded. One protester in La Paz told me, “We have to remind these oligarchs who the Casa Grande del Pueblo is for, and reclaim it.”

The government and its allies have worked overtime to criminalize the rage that has come from this betrayal. In the face of this repression, some groups have decided to fight fire with fire, arguing Paz’s repression has made negotiation unviable. The COB itself said it would be willing to do anything, “as in a war,” and has vowed to “increase radical pressure measures.”

As Quya Reyna, a writer, activist, and social leader argued in a manifesto for the protest movements, repression will only bring further suffering, and, if the government refuses to negotiate, this is the social cost it will bring. Another manifesto signed by some indigeneist protest groups now explicitly endorses armed resistance.

When a government disregards the voting blocs that got it into office, blocks every avenue for democratic change, criminalizes dissent, and rules on behalf of a foreign-aligned racist elite, it leaves the people few political options for engagement and representation.

The state is using its monopoly on force not to protect its citizens, but to protect the privileges of the few against the many. It cannot, then, be surprised at the rage it engenders by doing so. As Reyna added, “if you want peace, listen to the people and negotiate, don’t repress.”

Faced with this brick wall, the social movements are left with little choice but to play outside the system. In the long term, this is a terrible development for peaceful, stable, social democracy, as it may create a vicious cycle between faith in political institutions, and political violence. As one piece of graffiti scrawled in La Paz by protesters declares, “Let there be no peace for the oligarchies if there is no bread for the majority.”

Vice President Edmand Lara, a populist former police officer who was crucial to Paz’s election, has broken dramatically with the president, condemning the repression and inviting the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to monitor the country.

The vice president has also denounced the cabinet’s own links to drug trafficking, though he has called for further crackdowns on crime, and Evo Morales. On the right, former president Tuto Quiroga, billionaire Marcelo Claure, Áñez allies, and others have pushed for Paz to step aside and allow security forces to rule, through a state of exception (essentially, martial law), while continuing economic “liberalization.”

Some reports have also indicated the military is interested in pushing Paz out, while embracing further right-wing figures. To satisfy them, Paz has given even more power to the hardliners like Ernesto Justiniano, the anti-drug czar, now minister of defense, while further alienating social sectors and moderate progressives within his cabinet, like José Luis Lupo, Lara, and billionaire Samuel Doria Medina, all of whom have urged for dialogue over repression.

This government is eating itself, while Bolivian democracy has perhaps never looked weaker.

The hard-fought promise of the Plurinational State, a multiracial social democracy with strong rights and constitutional protections, has been hollowed out by a new form of external rule for the elites, far-right racists, foreign states, and the security state. The majorities, meanwhile, have felt betrayed, and are using every means at their disposal to regain representation.

That popular movement now believes the only way forward is a fresh start—calling for Paz to resign, and for fresh elections. Until then, they will continue blocking the country, and forcing the government’s hands, to remind them of their power. Though, the right will continue blaming “dirty leftists” and “indians” for “destroying the country” and “stopping progress,” instead of blaming themselves.

To move forward, the country's leaders will have to realize that, whether in a democracy or dictatorship, they will have to govern with, and for, the Indigenous majorities, not without and against them.

We’ve been here before. When Dobbs came for abortion care in our states, we did two things: We opened clinics across state lines so our patients would still have a legal option. And we stayed. We kept our original clinics open, expanding the care we'd always offered or always wanted to offer. When Skrmetti came for gender-affirming care, we kept providing that too, because abortion care patients and transgender patients are not separate communities. The calculation patients make before they walk through the door is identical for both communities: Will I be seen? Will I be safe? Will the person across from me treat my body like a problem to be managed, or a life to be supported? June marks anniversaries of both Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health and US v. Skrmetti, and that conviction has never felt more urgent.

Long before Dobbs or Skrmetti, the intersection of abortion rights and trans rights was already living in our waiting rooms, in the patients who received reproductive care and gender-affirming hormone therapy (GAHT) under the same roof; in the person who drove hours across the state because we were the only provider they trusted; and in those who trust us with their whole-person care because their grandmothers, mothers, sisters, aunts, and friends have relied on our clinics for care for 50 years. Throughout that history, our organizations have been guided by a simple principle: When members of our community are targeted, excluded, or denied the care they need, we do not look away. We listen, we adapt, and we show up.

When abortion care moved across the border after Dobbs, the patients who remained still needed care they couldn’t access at home. The wall between reproductive healthcare and LGBTQIA+ healthcare that exists in policy language and funding categories has never existed in our exam rooms.

What connects every patient who walks through our doors, whether they’re coming in for an abortion or a hormone therapy appointment, is something our staff recognized long before we had language for it: the experience of arriving at a clinic while carrying the weight of a political target on your back. A clinic’s job of creating a space where people can receive care without shame or fear has always been exactly the same job regardless of why they came.

Bodily autonomy is the foundational principle of reproductive rights, and it only means something if it applies to everyone.

Marty had learned, growing up as a transgender person in rural Maryland, to brace himself before every medical appointment, because finding healthcare that was both competent and genuinely affirming had always required a fight. What he found at our clinic was a staff that met him without conditions, no justifications required, no explanations asked for. His mother has supported the Women’s Health Center (WHC) since its earliest days, and used to volunteer as a clinic escort. Watching the same clinic support her son in his gender-affirming care gave her, in her own words, a peace she hadn’t known she needed. When gaps in care left Ben, a transgender West Virginian, navigating painful dysphoric cycles and a transition that had stalled, he found his way to WHC West Virginia. Today, he says that every time he looks in the mirror, he sees more of himself looking back.

When one of our providers first interviewed to work for CHOICES, she didn't really know much about gender-affirming care. In the time she has been with CHOICES, she has cared for hundreds of gender-affirming care patients across the mid-South. "It's clear how important this care is for patients," she shared. "After patients start hormone replacement therapy, they come back as a much more energetic, vivacious person.” Since the state of Tennessee has restricted gender-affirming healthcare, including banning minors from accessing care, our patients are experiencing increased anxiety and fear about their privacy, safety, and continued access to care. CHOICES' provider shared, "Hormone replacement therapy is routine, like every other service we offer.” If something has such a profound impact on someone's life, why wouldn't we keep this care accessible?

The pattern behind Skrmetti is one reproductive rights advocates should recognize immediately, because it follows the same logic as the restrictions that led to Dobbs: They come for the most vulnerable first, in the states where the political ground is most hostile, and they build from there. Idaho passed the first transgender athlete ban in 2020, West Virginia followed with the Save Women’s Sports Act in 2021, and Tennessee’s restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors moved through the courts the same way abortion restrictions moved state by state in the years before Dobbs. Since abortion care moved across the border, thousands have received gender-affirming and LGBTQIA+ care at our clinics, even as the political, legal, and financial pressure on both organizations has intensified.

Bodily autonomy is the foundational principle of reproductive rights, and it only means something if it applies to everyone. When it becomes conditional, granted to some patients and denied to others, it stops being a principle and starts being a permission slip, and permission slips get revoked. The fights to protect abortion access and gender-affirming care are not parallel struggles that happen to share a difficult political moment. They are the same struggle, rooted in the same conviction, playing out in the same clinics with the same patients, and the forces working to end both of them have always understood that connection even when the rest of us have sometimes lost sight of it.

Between our two organizations, we’ve earned a century’s worth of experience at the practice of staying, enduring. CHOICES has kept their doors open for 52 years, and the Women’s Health Centers of West Virginia and Maryland will celebrate 50 years of care on June 24—the same day Roe v. Wade was overturned four years ago.

Support independent clinics in hard places keeping the doors open. And when the next fight comes, show up for the communities under pressure. Remember that those targeted first won’t be the last, but they will be the ones to lead the way.

The Memorandum of Understanding, which ostensibly ends the four-month war between the US and Iran, illuminated the profound US defeat. In addition, a Quincy Institute webinar on military lessons from the war, shortly before the MOU’s release, enumerated numerous ways in which the US failures in its misbegotten war reveal how drastically US military dominance has been undermined for the long term.

On the subject of the relative decline of US power and influence, the impacts of the war on world energy supplies—especially in Asia—will reinforce political and economic pressures for alternative—non-fossil—energy sources. China is already light years ahead of the US in clean energy production technologies, while President Donald Trump thinks only in the very short term as he maximizes oil and gas production and exports while attempting to revitalize filthy coal mining.

Bottom line: The US loss in this totally avoidable imperial war of choice was severe. That said, countries and territories as small and weak as Cuba and Greenland remain profoundly vulnerable.

The MOU’s commitments include:

• Immediate termination of military operations including in Lebanon.
• The US and Iran “refrain from the threat or use of force against each other.”
• Mutual respect of US and Iranian sovereignty.
• The US and Iran commit to negotiating a final agreement within 60 days, although this timetable can be extended by mutual consent.
• The US and regional partners will develop a $300 billion plan for reconstruction and economic development in Iran. The mechanism for implementation is to be finalized within 60 days.
• The US commits to “terminate all types of sanctions against the Islamic Republic” including United Nations sanctions.
• The US will fully remove its naval blockade within 30 days and will remove its forces “from the proximity of the Islamic Republic within 30 days after the final deal.”
• Iran will engage in dialog with the Sultanate of Oman “to define the future administration of maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz in discussion with other Persian Gulf littoral states in line with the applicable international law” and rights of coastal states.
• Iran “reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons” as was its stated policy before the war. Additionally, under International Atomic Energy Agency supervision, its current stocks of highly enriched uranium will be blended down, and enrichment for “Iran’s nuclear needs” will be agreed in the final deal.
• Pending the final deal, Iran will maintain the status quo of its nuclear program, and the US will not impose any new sanctions or deploy additional forces to the region.

Perhaps like the “decent interval” with which the Nixon administration sought to minimize the domestic political costs of the US defeat in Vietnam, by dragging out negotiations and agreeing to a remarkably vague framework, President Trump hopes to minimize the impacts of his lost war on the November midterm elections. Iran will dominate and ultimately control the Strait of Hormuz for the foreseeable future. How it exercises that power, with its global economic implications, will be a new feature of the emerging multipolar world disorder. The escape clause that allows for the extension of negotiations beyond the 60-day timeline should prepare us for a long, difficult, and drawn-out process. And in true Trumpian form, despite the commitment to “refrain from the threat or use of force against each other,” within hours of the MOU’s release, our president threatened to resume bombing if he was not satisfied with the outcome of negotiations. (This may have been more for domestic political consumption than a threat that Iran will take seriously.)

With 1,000 Gazans having been killed since the declaration of that ceasefire, and with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu more concerned with winning his nation’s October election and staying out of jail, the US ability to enforce the termination of Israeli military operations in or its occupation of its northern neighbor is in doubt. Iran’s confirmation that it will it not procure or develop nuclear weapons is nothing new. That was the case before President Trump withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement negotiated by President Barack Obama and was reiterated numerous times by Iranian leaders before the Trump-Netanyahu regime change attempt, which resulted in a harder-line government. Like Japan, South Korea, Sweden, and Poland, Iran will remain a threshold nuclear state, and the MOU allows for enrichment for medical and power generation use, as Iran has insisted for years.

But Trump’s defeat will reverberate globally. Elites in many nations will be taking a North Korean lesson from this and the Ukrainian wars: If you have nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons states won’t attack you. Diplomatically, between this globally disastrous war, Trump’s total disregard of allies in launching and fighting the war, the US cessation of military aid to Ukraine and its inability to facilitate either a ceasefire or peace negotiations in that war, the Euro-Atlantic alliance is on life support and solidarity among US people and Europeans is but a memory. And as we look to possible future crises, Europeans are overestimating Russia’s military power and are racing to create a European Union superpower—either within or independent of NATO.

Then there is the lesson from the Iran War for the US-Chinese competition for Asia-Pacific regional hegemony. The failure of Trump’s Iran war illuminated US-Chinese dynamics and realities at play over the last decade or more.

As enumerated in the Quincy Institute’s webinar with military analysts Brandon Carr, Jennifer Kavanagh, and Kelly Grieco, the war demonstrates that the US is not in a position to militarily defend Taiwan, nor will it be able to credibly threaten to defeat China in a non-nuclear war. (No one wins a nuclear war!!!)

• The destruction of infrastructure, warplanes, missiles, and more in US Persian Gulf bases demonstrated the vulnerability of the hundreds of US bases within the First Island Chain (Japan, Philippines, Taiwan) along China’s East Coast, and this could likely apply as far away as Guam.
• France, Spain, and Italy denied US use of its bases and airspace in their countries to attack Iran. This illustrates that the US cannot be assured of the ability to use its hundreds of bases and military assets in East Asia in a future war with China. Japan, which has its most militarist government since 1945, would likely consent to use, but use of bases in South Korea and the Philippines cannot be counted on.
• Iran’s drones and missiles established area deniability, albeit it at lower altitudes. China, with its much greater number of missiles and an industrial capacity much greater than that of the US, will be able to similarly dominate US forces within the First Island Chain.
• The draw down on US missile defense missiles to defend Israel and its Gulf bases was severe. Given the United States’ weak industrial capacity, it will take years to restore the arsenal to its pre-war levels, while China continues to build missiles and drones at levels unmatched by the US.
• China’s navy is already larger than the Pentagon’s, and the US shipbuilding industry is anemic.

Bottom line: If the war accomplished anything, it accelerated the decline of US power, influence, and economic security. Instead of wasting billions on White House human cockfights, futile efforts to regain military superiority, subsidizing the military-industrial-congressional complex, and turning the clock back to Jim Crow America, we would do better to take a page from President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and rebuild economic and human security for the US people.

The arrival of rain as a blessing is among the oldest human stories there is.

In Botswana, water and wealth are two names for the same blessing. Pula is the name of Botswana’s national currency, indicating the drought stricken land’s emotional relationship to water.

We see the emotional representation of rain in African American blues traditions, rainmaking rituals in West Africa, monsoon folk songs across South Asia, and Indigenous rain-dance ceremonies. Across cultures for millennia, rain has equaled relief.

But today, human-driven land degradation is rewriting that story.

What if instead of waiting for landscapes to collapse to pay the costs, we invested in the resilience of those very landscapes?

In many of the world's most arid and semi-arid regions, rain is no longer arriving as a blessing but as disaster.

To understand why, we need to look at the ground rather than the sky.

When the Sponge Hardens

If we look at the Earth's surface now, versus 100 years ago, we'll see that most of the land has been transformed from natural ecosystems to concrete, agricultural, and productive land. This is the process of desertification.

You may think of desertification through familiar cultural images such as advancing sand dunes swallowing settlements, cracked earth stretching to the horizon, and vegetation fading into absence. But the defining characteristic of desertification is not simply a lack of water. It is the loss of a landscape's ability to hold water.

Healthy soil functions like a sponge. Built from organic matter, fungal networks, plant roots, insects, and billions of microorganisms, it can absorb and store enormous quantities of water. When rain falls, much of it infiltrates the ground, replenishing soil moisture and underground aquifers. The water moves slowly through the landscape and across layers of soil, sustaining rivers and vegetation long after the storm has passed.

However, degraded soil behaves differently.

Decades of intensive cultivation, overgrazing, vegetation loss, repeated tillage, and use of synthetic inputs reduce soil organic matter and weaken the soil food web. As soil structure deteriorates, the ground becomes compacted and hardens. Pores that once allowed water to penetrate collapse. Rain can no longer soak in. So, when a heavy rainfall arrives, the water cannot penetrate the ground and flushes all that lays on the surface.

Instead of absorbing the water, the soil lets it run downhill. Small rivulets become torrents. Topsoil is stripped away. Gullies form. Streams rise rapidly, and rivers burst their banks. The same rainfall that would once have been absorbed by the landscape becomes a destructive flood.

Farmers and Communities on the Frontlines

At Commonland, we work with communities to restore landscapes that have been identified as degraded—places where decades of ecological decline have reduced the land's ability to support communities, livelihoods, and biodiversity. We aim to provide those communities and local organizations with the means to reverse the cycle of degradation and contribute to regenerating the landscapes they live in and depend on. However, reversing the effects of decades of landscape degradation is not an easy ride.

Over the past 18 months, two of those landscapes, on opposite sides of the world in Spain and South Africa, have delivered the same warning: Without healthy ecosystems, our social, economic, and financial systems collapse.

In the Spanish town of Grazalema, where around 1,500 people are nestled in the mountains of Cádiz, the 2026 January rains shattered records. The landscape, as a result of decades of intensive land use, had lost much of its ability to absorb and regulate water. Aquifers filled rapidly. Water began emerging through the ground itself, threatening the ancient karstic system on which the village sits. Gullies opened across farmland, roads disappeared, and the entire town was evacuated for 10 days.

We have funded the degradation of the systems that protect us, while calling it productivity. The rains are now sending the invoice.

For local farmers, the damage was not only immediate but cumulative. Fields were washed out or left waterlogged, making planting impossible. Topsoil was stripped away, taking with it both fertility and future yield potential. Livestock grazing areas were damaged or cut off, feed stores were lost or became inaccessible, and seasonal cycles were disrupted beyond repair for the year.

“The economic damages for all our activities have been very high,” says Carmen Bueno, owner of the regenerative farm Tambor del Llano. Bueno is also a member of Asociación Serranías Vivas, a local association that brings together farmers, land managers, and rural stakeholders working to restore and protect the Sierra de Cádiz landscape through more sustainable land use and coordinated landscape restoration efforts.

More than 8,000 kilometers away, another landscape faced a sadly similar story.

In May 2026, catastrophic flooding tore through the Langkloof and Baviaanskloof valleys on South Africa’s Eastern Cape. After months of droughts drying up the land, the floods washed everything away: from fields, to tarmac roads, as well as wetlands. For many households, this meant more than infrastructure loss—it meant isolation. Local communities could not move out of their house, let alone the valleys; food and water supplies could not be accessed; farm produce could not reach markets; and tourism bookings collapsed overnight. Repair work, where possible, became slow and costly, held back by washed-out routes and limited resources in already stretched communities.

“These are communities that were already living on the margins,” said Justine Rudman-Koekemoer, co-director and financial manager of Living Lands, an organization working to restore landscapes and support the rural communities who depend on them. "There are no easy routes in or out, no quick fixes. Recovery will be slow and expensive, and it will not happen without outside help." Today, fundraising efforts are underway to rebuild essential damaged infrastructure from the floods.

The hit associated with these events is felt across everyone living in the landscape, from the local communities whose houses were flooded, including the farmers who lost their harvests, to the public infrastructure that needs to be repaired and rebuilt.

However, those losses also have a ripple effect across the broader financial and private sectors, which often fail to account for the climate and nature risk they are exposed to. As a result of these events, loans from banks are likely to be delayed or defaulted, insurance payouts are likely to be requested, and investments into businesses lost.

These devastating events raise an essential question: What if instead of waiting for landscapes to collapse to pay the costs, we invested in the resilience of those very landscapes?

Landscape Restoration as Risk Mitigation

In the financial world, risk and return are two sides of the same coin; the rate of return is determined based on the risk of losing that money.

Over the past decades, investments toward nature were often framed as opportunities for investors to make a commercial return. However this rarely holds true, and most investments continue to flow toward extractive industries, outpacing investment in nature-based solutions by more than 30 to 1: In 2022, roughly $7.4 trillion was spent on extractive activities, and only $220 billion was spent on regenerative activities.

But what if we turned the logic for investing in nature on its head and started to present landscape restoration as a risk mitigation strategy for investors. Given that all the loans, insurance, and investments are tied to enterprises and people based in landscapes, they are directly exposed to the risk related to the health of these very landscapes.

The risk landscape desertification creates isn't abstract. Over 80% of Europe's natural habitats are now in poor or bad condition, leaving the continent more vulnerable to floods, droughts, and ecological instability. Restored wetlands, regenerated soils, and resilient forests aren't symbolic gestures—they're working infrastructure that slows water, stores carbon, and absorbs shocks before those shocks become disasters for people on the ground, and financial losses for capital providers.

Those who work degraded land understand this without needing the statistics. In Grazalema, southern Spain and in the Baviaanskloof, South Africa, farmers and land stewards have watched extreme rainfall turn bare, depleted soil into disaster—fields washed away, roads severed, local economies set back years by a single storm. They know, from direct experience, that land isn't just a commodity but a living system everything else depends on.

It’s now the private and financial sectors’ turn to recognize and value those risks by investing in mitigation solutions. In practice, they can begin by estimating the costs that climate change and environmental degradation could create in the landscapes where they invest or source products. This estimate can then help determine how much investment should be directed toward preventing desertification and restoring those landscapes. Landscape restoration could then become a risk mitigation strategy with an allocated budget for implementing the restoration of those landscapes.

The Invoice the Rains Are Sending

We have funded the degradation of the systems that protect us, while calling it productivity.

The rains are now sending the invoice.

What we are facing is not a choice between conservation and growth, but between repeatedly paying for destruction after the fact or investing in the systems that prevent it in the first place.

Restoration is not a cost to be minimized. It is the most reliable form of resilience we have and the only one that strengthens the system it protects.

Nature restoration is not a discretionary environmental cost; it is resilience infrastructure in its most fundamental form.

To recognize it as such, we need to move beyond fragmented, short-term funding and unlock access to large scale funding from the public, private, and financial sectors to the organizations and individuals on the ground that are on the frontline of landscape restoration.

Restoration is not a cost to be minimized. It is the most reliable form of resilience we have and the only one that strengthens the system it protects.

The task ahead is to ensure that we do not let degradation become the author of the story we tell about rain.

When the rains come, let us still look to the sky in relief.

The vote is the heart of democracy. Every two years, citizen organizations mobilize to register Americans and ensure they are on the rolls. That work is especially vital in poor and minority communities. The Ohio Organizing Collaborative is the leading voter registration group in the Buckeye State. In 2024, it registered 100,000 voters.

The group helped lead the fight for fair maps against an egregious gerrymander in Ohio. The Brennan Center represented it in court, where we prevailed repeatedly. When legislators simply ignored those court rulings, the activists went to Ohio voters. Together with a former chief justice of the state supreme court, Republican Maureen O’Connor, they supported a campaign to pass a state constitutional amendment to create a nonpartisan redistricting commission. They called the amendment Citizens Not Politicians. It would have benefited neither party but empowered voters. The ballot measure fell short in 2024, but it was an example of nonpartisan, cross-ideological civic activism at its best.

That’s why what happened late last week is so troubling. Indeed, so outrageous.

In a massive sweep, 100 FBI agents and other federal officers raided the Ohio Organizing Collaborative’s office and fanned out to the homes of volunteers, board members, and staff. Agents seized phones and computers, scooped up papers, and questioned startled citizens.

If citizens are afraid to register to vote, or to help others register, mission accomplished.

The rationale? According to a search warrant, the hunt for voter registration fraud.

This gives every indication of being an extraordinary abuse of power. It is part of a strategy that aims to intimidate voters and those who would help them exercise the franchise.

This is, after all, the same Justice Department that repeatedly has probed or prosecuted President Donald Trump’s critics, only to see those cases crumble before grand juries and judges. Combine that with an FBI led by Kash Patel, who wrote an election-denying children’s book about his fealty to the “king.”

This expanded strategy was mapped out in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for what became many Trump administration policies. Use the Justice Department, it urged, to go after state election officials and registration groups. Hunt the imaginary threat of widespread voter misconduct.

The Heritage Foundation for decades has been a principal purveyor of the myth that many voters are committing fraud. Now the entire federal government is in the grip of that conspiracy theory.

A reminder: The Brennan Center’s research shows that you are more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud.

What will be produced by this massive display of prosecutorial force? Probably not much of anything but—its progenitors likely hope—dread. If citizens are afraid to register to vote, or to help others register, mission accomplished.

In fact, the strategy seems focused not on enforcing the law but fomenting fear.

We saw that in January when the FBI raided the election office in Fulton County, Georgia, seeking to “prove” that Joe Biden did not win the 2020 election there. When the affidavit that authorized the raid was released, it turned out to be a collection of long-debunked claims. The raid sent a message to election officials everywhere: If you oversee an election where we dislike the results, you might be met by a knock on the door.

We saw it last week when Trump declared that California’s primary election was “rigged,” because a Republican reality show star did not finish in the top two for the mayoral election in deeply Democratic Los Angeles.

We saw it last year when armed, masked federal border patrol agents showed up in force at a press event held by California Gov. Gavin Newsom to announce a redistricting ballot measure.

What can we do to protect voters?

We should stand up for those working to register and mobilize voters and ensure they have the best legal advice and follow the rules. We should redouble efforts to protect election officials who face torrents of abuse. We should encourage states to step up, by passing legislation to make doubly sure that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal law enforcement agencies cannot wreak havoc at the polls. We should lift up the nonpartisan work of police, prosecutors, and sheriffs through the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, which brings together election officials and law enforcement to train officials around the country. And we should unite against efforts to interfere in elections or intimidate voters.

The Brennan Center honored the Ohio Organizing Collaborative in 2024 at our annual Brennan Legacy Award Dinner, together with Chief Justice O’Connor. I told the crowd, “This is kind of a buddy movie that I want to watch.”

Molly Shack, the group’s dynamic leader, told attendees about how it approached its work. “We are organizing people in communities around education and criminal justice reform and democracy issues and an ability to have a government that works, that can actually be responsive to citizens in all of our interests.”

She continued: “I think the idea that democracy is a partisan issue is something that I think we’re all trying to fight against. A functioning democracy shouldn’t be about right versus left. It should be about right versus wrong.”

On Sunday night, President Donald Trump brought the country to a new low. The question is whether the nation has finally bottomed out—and realizes it.

On the White House lawn, Trump hosted Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) mixed martial arts cage matches. Fighters attacked each other with their fists, feet, knees, and elbows. Blood spewed everywhere; that was the point.

It wasn’t boxing; the combatants wore gloves with much less padding. It wasn’t professional wrestling; the injuries inflicted were real. It was billed as a sporting event, but as commentators observed, it was really 21st-century cockfighting where the birds are human beings.

Follow the Money

The UFC said that private funding totaling $60 million paid for the event. But it’s not clear that any private money covered the monumental work of the hundreds of staff from seven federal government agencies, or the estimated $10 to $12 million in supplemental security that the District of Columbia incurred (to be reimbursed from federally appropriated funds for federal events).

Fighters used the Executive Office Building and rooms in the White House as locker rooms. If not sacrilegious, it was something close.

Beyond the abuse of taxpayers’ dollars, Trump’s profiteering was pervasive.

• “Ultimate Fighting Championship” is a promotional company owned and operated by TKO Group Holdings. Trump owns stock in TKO Group Holdings.

• A day before the fights, Trump’s super PAC MAGA, Inc. held a $1 million-a-plate fundraiser at Trump’s Virginia golf club.

• Trump sold a line of Trump-branded UFC medallions for hundreds and—in some cases—thousands of dollars.

• World Liberty Financial was an official sponsor of the event. It’s a Trump-family-created crypto company and issued the stablecoins that some fighters received as bonuses.

• Other corporate sponsors included Crypto.com (its name appeared on each step leading into the cage), Bud Light, Polymarket, Monster Energy, Starlink, EasyPost, and Stake.

• Paramount Skydance, the media company owned by Larry and David Ellison, who are friendly with Trump, live streamed the event (behind a paywall). A few days earlier, Trump’s Justice Department approved Paramount’s merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, thereby bringing CBS, CNN, Paramount+, HBO Max, and a vast film and television studio under David Ellison’s control.

In a post-fight interview, a UFC winner yelled: “Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right America?”

How Far We Have Fallen

Worse than the event itself and Trump’s profiteering is the fact that it happened on White House grounds. While construction was underway, Marine One—the presidential helicopter—could not land on the South Lawn, its usual location. Fighters used the Executive Office Building and rooms in the White House as locker rooms. If not sacrilegious, it was something close.

President Thomas Jefferson first opened the White House lawn in 1801 when he invited the US Marine Corps Band to perform. Since then, it has been the scene of children’s Easter Egg Rolls (begun by President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1878), a tennis court (President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902), a performing arts venue (President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965), Willie Nelson’s performance (President Jimmy Carter in 1980), the Beach Boys’ South Lawn Beach Party (President Ronald Reagan in 1983), youth T-ball games (President George H.W. Bush in 2001), and a collaborative arts festival (President Barack Obama in 2016).

The good news is that a recent Reuters poll revealed that only 16% of Americans—including one-third of Republicans—said that holding UFC events on the White House lawn was appropriate.

Determined to make his mark, Trump did not care that it would be an ugly blemish on White House history—or another reflection of how far the nation has descended into Trump’s abyss.

Big Oil and Gas CEOs are raking in obscene profits from the energy shock triggered by the war in Iran, in some cases rivaling the GDP of entire African nations. Meanwhile, ordinary people are left to shoulder the consequences: soaring energy bills, rising food prices, higher costs for medicine, and even the closure of schools. If this crisis does not expose who truly benefits from the world’s dependence on fossil fuels, nothing will.

Wealthy countries justify cutting aid budgets by pointing to fiscal constraints, yet continue to pour vast sums into supporting fossil fuel production. In 2024 alone, implicit fossil fuel subsidies amounted to an estimated $6.7 trillion. But when communities on the frontlines of climate impacts call for reparations or compensation for the losses and damages they have suffered, the conversation suddenly becomes politically contentious and financially unthinkable. The irony is not lost on ordinary people.

This double standard is at the heart of the climate justice debate. It is time to count the true cost of the climate crisis, and for those responsible to pay their fair share.

The International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) recent advisory opinion on climate change offers hope for environmental justice. The world's highest court affirmed what communities have said for decades: Countries have a legal obligation—not just a moral one—to prevent environmental harm, and those harmed may be entitled to reparations. It is telling that some leaders needed the ICJ to remind them of their duty to care for our common home. After 30 climate conferences relying on voluntary, unaccountable processes, we hope this opinion brings real accountability to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Reparations are not charity; they are a necessary investment in the future of people historically harmed by environmental destruction.

As the negotiations in Bonn continue, amid political tensions, a standing agenda item on loss and damage, a theme which has been missing from the majority of the negotiations, will ensure compliance with legal obligations, including on climate reparations, as clarified by the ICJ.

Developing countries must stand their ground. We need an honest, collective reckoning about who causes the harm, who is most affected, and who must pay for the damage. These principles underpin any fair legal system, and there is no justification for treating them as optional

I, along with many others, have argued that dependence on fossil fuels drives rising inequality. Just as importantly, climate change—caused by burning those same fuels—disproportionately devastates vulnerable communities. What happens in the Strait of Hormuz doesn't end there; it ripples through our global energy security. As the war looms in Iran, frontline communities worry about the impending fossil fuel crisis.

The world’s energy dependency is built on extraction, profit, and vulnerability. But who pays the price? It is always the same people on the losing end of this broken system—the very same communities brutally affected by the climate crisis. Those least responsible for conflict pay the price for disruptions to the fossil fuel supply chain, threatening agricultural access and food security. Similarly, those who contribute the least to the climate crisis pay the highest price for its impacts. The system thrives on their vulnerability.

Fossil fuels account for about 86% of global carbon emissions. They are not just an insecure energy source vulnerable to weaponized interdependence; they are the primary driver of climate breakdown. They have disrupted weather patterns and accelerated disasters like intense droughts and devastating floods, harming food systems, cultural heritage, water access, and critical infrastructure like hospitals. This continuous burning has escalated climate injustice in the Global South, Indigenous territories, and Black communities in the United States.

This unequal distribution of burdens is unconscionable. According to Oxfam, a person from the richest 0.1% produces more carbon pollution in a day than someone in the bottom 50% produces all year. Developed countries have already exhausted their carbon budgets, yet they continue expanding extraction. Nations like the US—responsible for over 20% of historical CO2 emissions—carry a massive climate debt that must be repaid.

Meanwhile, developing countries are paying a devastating price for a crisis they did little to cause. Africa is responsible for less than 4% of global historical emissions, yet a single climate disaster can wipe out 5-15% of an African nation’s annual GDP, leaving communities to rebuild alone. This devastation is a lived reality in the Horn of Africa, where millions face climate-induced malnutrition, and in Southern Africa, which is battered by an unending pattern of floods and cyclones.

At the same time, these nations are trapped under mounting debt burdens as they confront escalating impacts with little financial support. It is a harsh reminder that not everyone reaps what they sow. Those on the winning side often do not care, so long as the harm stays far from their doorstep. Someone once asked me if the world would respond to the climate crisis if there was a "major tragedy." My instant thought was that major tragedies are already unfolding in Indigenous territories and the Global South.

The question of reparations remains highly contested because it speaks truth to power and demands true justice. Climate harm has been primarily driven by corporations and Global North governments. The rich nations that benefited from burning coal, oil, and gas must pay their fair share for repair. Through movement assembly work led by Taproot Earth, frontline communities defined what climate reparations must entail: the restoration of healthy relationships, debt cancellation, and accountable systems grounded in Black and Indigenous sovereignty.

Reparations are not charity; they are a necessary investment in the future of people historically harmed by environmental destruction. Current climate finance systems perpetuate injustice by offering loans instead of grants. True climate reparations demand both the abolition of debt and the provision of grant-based finance.

I recently attended a webinar sponsored by the Working Families Party, entitled Winning Back the Working Class. Everyone attending seemed to share the view that the working class has drifted away from the Democratic Party and that Democrats must change their messaging in order to win these voters back and prevail against MAGA Republicans.

The presenters provided sophisticated polling analyses, looking closely at the issues that matter most to working-class voters and what turns them off about the Democratic Party. The bottom line was that the Democrats needed to put forward a strong, progressive economic-populist agenda.

While I share the desire to derail MAGA in the coming elections, I find the “winning back” framework problematic. For starters, why do Democrats need to be convinced that a progressive economic platform should be adopted? A party that was truly in tune with the working class should arrive there on its own. And clearly it has not. Why?

In this case, the obvious answer may be the right one: the Democratic Party establishment does not believe in progressive populism. It is not comfortable, for example, with forcefully attacking job insecurity by guaranteeing a job at a living wage for everyone who wants to work and cannot find employment in the private sector. It does not want to provide universal health insurance or dramatically facilitate union organizing in order to empower working people.

Ideologically, Democratic leaders are more comfortable with a liberal version of trickle-down economics—one that lets corporations play the central role in the economy. It expects rising prosperity to flow from government policies that enhance private investment and profits. Getting rich is shared value and woven into the party’s culture as thousands of consultants, pollsters, and operatives compete for a share of the billions of dollars spent during each election cycle.

At best, the populist economic messaging is just a tactic for gaining votes. Working-class voters know it and look elsewhere.

Given that the Democratic Party is not fundamentally a working-class party, how will the adoption of more populist messaging change its character? It won’t—and, again, working-class voters know it.

In fairness to these progressive analysts, they understand that much more is needed. They want Democrats to recruit and run more working-class candidates, which would demonstrate a deeper commitment to working-class concerns. Over time, more working-class candidates could help transform the party into something closer to a working-class party and help solve the “winning back” problem. But everyone knows it won’t happen anytime soon.

The Working Families Party has been recruiting and supporting progressive candidates in Democratic Party primaries for many years. The party sees its mission, as best I can tell, as transforming the Democratic Party by advancing a working-class agenda within the Democratic Party and in state legislatures. It has been effective in states such as New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey, helping secure increases in the minimum wage, paid family leave legislation, and higher taxes on millionaires.

But something important is missing from its reliance on polling-and-messaging. If the Working Families Party were a working-class party, then its working-class base—not pollsters—would be developing its platform through some kind of bottom-up, face-to-face process. One can imagine dozens of grassroots meetings during which working people discuss and debate the issues they want their party to fight for. Polling can certainly play a role in testing issues with a wider electorate and bringing new concerns to the base for discussion. But the workers in the Working Families Party should be shaping the agenda.

Perhaps I am being naive or nostalgic, but isn’t that what progressive populist parties should do?

There is also the question of where the “winning back” should occur. Transforming the Democratic Party is only possible where the party actually exists. In vast areas of the country, it has withered away, making “winning back” impossible.

I took a quick look at nine Great Plains and central states: Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho.

• In 1990, these states still retained elements of a progressive-populist tradition, and 10 of their 18 U.S. senators were Democrats. Today, none are.
• Of the roughly 1,400 state legislative seats in those states, Democrats do not even field candidates in approximately 40 percent of them.
• Nationally, there are about 130 U.S. House districts where Democrats routinely lose by 25 percentage points or more.

In these places, there is no party to win the working class back to.

One option is simply to concede roughly half the country to MAGA forces. But it would be a grave mistake to abandon the tens of millions of working-class voters who live outside blue and purple areas. Many of them may have voted red in the last election, attracted by populist rhetoric designed to attract them, but at the end of the day, they’re not going to be satisfied by what the Republicans deliver. Where do they go?

That leaves another option: build a new party of working people that concentrates on the red areas where Democrats have abandoned the field. Such an effort could begin with candidates like Dan Osborn, who has stepped into the working-class political vacuum in deep-red Nebraska. He ran well ahead of Kamala Harris in 2024 and is currently polling competitively against Pete Ricketts. There is room for many more candidates like him in these one-party states.

Building something new is a heavy lift, to be sure, and it will take time. But the discussion about why and how to do it must begin now. We need to remove the blinders that prevent us from seeing that an alternative to the Democratic Party must be built—a new party, of and by working people, is needed to fill this vast political vacuum.

The call to “win back the working class to the Democrats” needs to be turned inside out. The working class deserves its own political organization, independent of the Democratic Party, in order to win back its rightful place in our political system. Only then can working people speak in their own voice about how to build an economy that serves people rather than wealth—one that attacks runaway inequality and job insecurity.

****

The questions raised in this essay are explored in much greater depth in my new book, The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need One of Our Own: How Working People Can Build Independent Political Power.

The book examines why so many working people have abandoned the Democratic Party, why independents are now the largest political bloc in many states, what voters in the heartland actually want from politics, and whether a new working-class political organization can be built without acting as a spoiler.

Drawing on new polling and historical research, it argues that working people can build independent political power even in places where the Democratic Party has ceased to function as a competitive second party.

If these arguments resonate with you, I hope you’ll take a look at the book.

Simon Kuper is 56 now. His first memory of a World Cup, if not his first-ever vivid memory—for many of us who grew up outside the United States, the two are often the same—was the 1978 final between the Netherlands and Argentina. “I recall that night as vividly as almost anything else in my childhood,” he writes in World Cup Fever. “A World Cup is like Proust’s Madeleine. Each new World Cup reminds you of past World Cups, and the people you watched them with.” The book is a history of the World Cup through a few dozen madeleines.

For Americans, it’s as good a guide as any to a tournament of paradoxes, this too-big-to-fail quadrennial festival of corruption, cheating, profiteering, nationalist chauvinism, and mostly crappy soccer that nevertheless can hypnotize and transport to a utopia of competition as idealized and convincing as Pelé’s deification of the sport as “the beautiful game.” I think we watch not so much for the thrill—you have to admit that most games at this watered-down level are snoozfests (“such a party off the field but so dull on it,” as Kuper writes) but for the nostalgia of a game that never existed, but that we reimagine with every match.

“So much of a modern World Cup is repetition, especially as you grow older,” Kuper writes. “After decades of tournaments shown live on TV, each new France-Brazil or England-Argentina or Holland-Germany is just a repeat of earlier versions. Each victory or red card or controversy is a quotation of past ones. A match can never mean as much as it did the first time around. Win or lose this one, you know it isn’t the end of the story: At some point in the next few decades, there’ll be a replay. Repetition turns down the emotional dial of World Cups.”

He’s right, with a caveat: The World Cup is like Jorge Luis Borges’s idea that we rewrite every story every time we read one. The very same game will be remembered a billion different times in a way that the World Series or the Super Bowl or cricket’s World Cup never could be, because no other sport has the World Cup’s reach. No other event, short perhaps of a nuclear war or a comet strike, could bring the entire planet together.

It exists to transform illusion into reality. The illusion is that we are one world playing the same game, speaking the same language, respecting the same rules, existing on a level playing field regardless of origin, race, religion, even fifa ranking.

So just as the tournament is a paradox of beauty and foulness, we all have paradoxical relationships with it, even those of us who don’t follow it. Our refusal to follow it is itself a statement, like the citizen who snubs the ballot box on election day. They, too, are making a statement. Like it or not, the World Cup reminds us that we are on the same planet, that we all share the same blood that kicks a ball the same way, but with a billion splendid variations.

No two soccer fans will see the same game the same way or ever agree about anything soccer, just as I had my differences with Kuper’s book and some of his interpretations: “And once your country has won the World Cup once or twice, it’s generally enough. The more you win, the less it matters.” Tell that to the winners. But he’s better placed than most to guide us. His lineage reads like a demographic World Cup. He was born in Uganda to South African parents, spent his early years in England as a British citizen, moved to the Netherlands when he was 7, studied in England and the United States (Oxford, Harvard), was naturalized a French citizen, now living in Paris with his French wife and raising French children who identified as French, and spent most of his career covering soccer for the London-based Financial Times.

The 1978 World Cup was the first of his innumerable crushing disappointments, as World Cups always must be for 95% of fans. Every four years there’s only one winner out of 195 nations. That one stung Kuper more because the Dutch lost the final for the second time in a row, having lost to Germany in 1974. This time they were playing in Argentina, whose team had blatantly cheated its way to the final. It wasn’t unusual for a tournament stitched in fraud and corruption since its first edition in 1930. It still is, fawning to authoritarian regimes, from Benito Mussolini’s Italy to the junta’s Argentina, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, dictatorial emirs’ Qatar the last time around, and now Donald Trump’s diminished America. Thankfully Canada and Mexico are here to redeem this World Cup, which they also share.

The murderous military dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla showcased the 1978 World Cup the way Adolf Hitler showcased the 1936 Olympics, as a distraction masked in bogus legitimacy. Videla had the “disappearance” of some 30,000 dissidents to his name by the time he was done, and that night watched the final alongside Henry Kissinger, a fellow criminal against humanity, who had also helped Videla rig a match to ensure Argentina’s appearance in the final.

I remember that final too. It was my second. My first was Germany-Holland in 1974, my one and only memory of watching with my dad, who died two years later. We watched Argentina-Holland live, my mother, my grandmother, our Dutch Catholic priest, and me on our black-and-white TV in the dining room of our house in Hamlaya, a tiny village in the mountains of Lebanon where we thought we’d escaped the war and where the signal from Cyprus was always clear. Father Niederer didn’t have a TV. He spent the evening with us and his high hopes, especially after the Dutch managed to hold Argentina to a tie through the first 90 minutes. In the 90th minute a Dutch striker had almost won it, hitting the goal post instead. Extra time briefly ended Father Niederer’s faith as Argentina scored once, then again to take the title in a 3-1 match. The junta won. All those masses for nothing. Kuper had also watched with his grandparents when he was 8 in Leiden, the smaller town between Amsterdam and The Hague. For Kuper, the next two decades were all TV watching, then as an in-person spectator until he started reporting about the World Cup for the Financial Times in 1994, the first the United States hosted (with Kissinger’s help). This year will be his ninth. He now proposes to tell you A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments, as goes the book’s subtitle, by synthesizing four decades of his reporter’s notebooks. (The English edition calls it A Footballing Journey in Nine Tournaments: Snobs would have you believe that calling it anything but football is a misnomer. I don’t play that game and use the terms interchangeably.)

Wisely, Kuper is not interested in recounting matches. Football matches are like military battles and soap operas. “There’s nothing deader, for a writer, than a dead football match. I’m sorry, but you really had to be there,” he writes. Kuper is interested in the unexpected insights into national character that an improvised dance party might reveal; in the endemic corruption of a tournament that turns us all into addicts every four years; in the failed promise of economic booms that leaves the poor in host countries like Brazil, South Africa, Qatar, and Mexico as exploited as in colonial times. The colonist is fifa, the dictatorial soccer federation expecting to reap $14 billion from this year’s tournament.

Kuper describes the exploitation in South Africa, Brazil, and Qatar, the regressive, repressive American ally that spent more than $200 billion preparing for a 2022 tournament built on the graveyards of imported labor working in near-slave conditions and without rights. “Under Qatar’s traditional ‘kafala’ system, migrant workers were practically the property of their employers,” Kuper writes. “A boss could deport an employee for no reason, or hold their passport and keep them in Qatar against their will.” Qatar had promised to reform the kafala system. The moment Argentina hoisted the 2022 trophy at Lusail Stadium, all promises vanished. Now Saudi Arabia, an even more regressive, undemocratic country with its own kafala system, is set to host in 2034.

The book at first felt disheveled, jumping from one scant segment to another like so many rapid passes in a game, as if Kuper was eager to throw in every anecdote he could find in his notebooks. Kuper’s interview with Diego Maradona, one of the game’s greatest players and one of its most distasteful characters, is pointless other than to show Kuper scored the five-minute encounter.

European journalists have no problem buying access, either, or accepting lavish gifts: “I flew to the Chelsea-Manchester United Champions League final in Moscow as a guest of UEFA, the European football authority. I had a fabulous room in the five-star Marriott Grand Hotel. (Did UEFA corrupt me? I don’t think so.)” He never makes the connection between that sort of payola and the buying of referees and game-fixing he documents so well.

Some of his insights are no more penetrating than comparing Germany’s emerging prosperity on and off the pitch in 1990 to a bus driver’s “villa with a veranda in a spotless village,” or telling us that “A World Cup can’t change a country. But it can divert an individual’s life path,” as if there were anything comparable between France’s decline into riots, fading power, and economic stagnation after the 1998 World Cup with his decision to quit the Financial Times and become a French citizen. As all World Cup books must, this one pays homage to cheaters like Maradona, biters like Uruguay’s Luis Suárez, criers like Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo, and charisma-challenged virtuosos like Messi, now hobbling through his last show.

Soon you get used to the Kuper style. It has the verve of 1970s Dutch football—total football, as they called it—placing every element of the game in service of the story without letting judgments necessarily mar the exuberance. Yes, the game is corrupt—there’s a hint that even Nelson Mandela had a part in the $10 million bribe disguised as a cultural gift that bought the World Cup for South Africa—but there was that priceless moment when the Japanese let loose on their own soil at the Japan-Belgium match in 2002 and showed the world a joy we’d rarely seen. There may have been hooliganism in the past, but in pubs and on trains fans from opposing teams typically drink and dance together. Kuper unfortunately doesn’t venture into calculating the demographics of World Cup-conceived babies every four years. I suspect the cross-fertilization is as rich as during the Crusades. But he documents an alarming incidence of heart attacks during every tournament.

Another paradox: World Cup play is inferior to anything you’ll see in club football in top leagues in England, Germany, Spain, Italy, and France: Any of those countries’ top clubs could beat all but the four or five highest ranked national teams at the World Cup, if not even them. Any league match is technically more proficient and cohesive than a World Cup match. Any league match lacks those ridiculous disparities we’re going to see when, say, Spain plays Cape Verde or Germany plays Curaçao, that Caribbean Dutch protectorate with the population of Flagler County (think Ronald Reagan’s Marines invading Grenada).

Just 16 countries traveled to Germany when I watched my first World Cup in 1974. The format went to 24 in 1982, then 32 in 1998, and now 48 countries—a quarter of the planet’s nations. There’s really nothing wrong with that. Elitism is over. We can’t democratize the world. We can democratize the World Cup, though there’s no doubt fifa expanded the thing to shake down more cash even as it dilutes and cheapens play. The federation’s mercantilism handed Mexico and Canada only 13 games each, compared to 78 in the United States, an imbalance as insulting as our president’s attempts to destroy both countries’ economies while ridiculing one and reducing the other to a mass of criminals, and getting a fifa “prize” for it.

Still, we look past the absurd. “Most football fans took it for granted that FIFA was corrupt,” Kuper writes, needlessly capitalizing the federation’s acronym the way some media still capitalize “covid.” Diseases should not so blithely be respected. “They’d heard the stories of officials stashing bribes in secret bank accounts. However, fans care more about what happens on the field. Once we start to doubt that the matches we are seeing are real, the emotion we invest in World Cups becomes pointless.” In the spirit of magic realism, why not give Curaçao and Cape Verde a chance on the same stage as the greats? It’s not as if the American team belongs there, either, if it’s quality we’re looking for. But there they are.

We’re mostly missing the point if we watch the World Cup for quality. Like the Olympics but without the frazzle of a zillion sports scattered like so many pixels on our screens, it’s our quadrennial dreamland on these simple, perfectly groomed fields where cubism and leaves of grass meet so the world’s teams kick around a planet-shaped sphere as luck and fate outscores the best of them.

“The World Cup exists to transform reality into illusion,” the Mexican novelist Juan Villoro wrote in an article for The New York Times this week. I think of it more in reverse: It exists to transform illusion into reality. The illusion is that we are one world playing the same game, speaking the same language, respecting the same rules, existing on a level playing field regardless of origin, race, religion, even fifa ranking. The reality is that for those five weeks, away from the dingbattery of dignitaries and fifa’s sycophantry, away from the tensions between Canada, Mexico, and the United States—on the pitch, in pubs, in living rooms, in street parties, in the palmed stadiums of our smartphoned hands and maybe even in our hearts, despairing as we are the rest of the time—that illusion may well be true.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup has begun on American soil, the first time the United States has hosted the tournament in 32 years. When it concludes, the country will begin preparing for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. In exchange for the privilege of hosting the world’s two largest sporting events, and the enormous revenue they generate, a host nation should ease its visa policy to the fullest extent consistent with ordinary security interests.

Previous World Cup host nations made this the norm. South Africa in 2010 created a dedicated events visa and waived normal fees entirely for ticket holders. Brazil in 2014 created a fee-waived visa category tied directly to match tickets. Russia in 2018 abolished visa requirements entirely for Fan ID holders. Most recently, Qatar in 2022 created a universal entry document for all fans and loosened its terms further mid-tournament.

Instead, the United States has adopted the widest nationality-based exclusion policy since the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Nationals from 39 countries currently face US entry restrictions, ranging from partial limitations to outright bans. Among those 39 are 4 countries whose national teams qualified for the tournament. Haiti and Iran face complete entry bans; Ivory Coast and Senegal face partial restrictions. Although players are exempt from the presidential ban, fans have no pathway to acquire tourist visas to support their teams, player families cannot watch their loved ones play in the biggest match in the world, and local media cannot obtain visas to cover the games stateside.

President Trump has also barred the Iranian national team from sleeping on American soil, requiring the players to overnight in Tijuana and cross the border only to compete.

At the same time, the United States created a system called FIFA PASS, which gives World Cup ticket holders the ability to schedule a prioritized consular interview. So, while some are fully banned, those who are not can expedite their visa appointment. This pattern recurs throughout this administration’s approach: Those fully excluded receive nothing, while those who are not excluded receive an expedited benefit unavailable to the general public.

One might wonder how these bans are allowed in the first place. The legal vehicle is INA section 212(f), a provision historically invoked with restraint and for targeted purposes. Before Donald Trump, presidents used it for specific suspensions tied to specific conduct: Haitians intercepted at sea under Ronald Reagan, maritime interdiction extended under George W. Bush, senior Haitian government officials (affiliated with the 1994 coup) under Bill Clinton, and persons responsible for grave human rights abuses by the Iranian and Syrian governments under Barack Obama. Despite leading a country built by immigrants, Trump has used the same authority to ban ordinary people from large portions of the world. This is unlike anything seen among fellow Five Eyes countries.

Although nationality-based exclusion has historical precedent, the current bans appear to function as instruments of punishment rather than legitimate security measures. The justification typically rests on elevated visa overstay rates or insufficient governmental cooperation, meaning that individual nationals are effectively penalized for the conduct of others. This year’s World Cup will reflect that reality in diminished diversity, and the consequences extend beyond mere attendance. President Trump has also barred the Iranian national team from sleeping on American soil, requiring the players to overnight in Tijuana and cross the border only to compete.

No story captures this more sharply than that of Omar Artan. Named Africa’s best male referee in 2025 and selected by FIFA for the tournament, Artan was set to become the first Somali referee ever to officiate at a World Cup. He cleared the visa process, boarded his flight, and landed in Miami. US Customs and Border Protection denied him entry over unspecified “vetting concerns,” and FIFA removed him from the tournament. He returned home to a hero’s welcome in Mogadishu, received by thousands at the stadium and by Somalia’s prime minister, who wrote that Artan had “already won the hearts of millions.”

As in the first Trump administration, serious questions remain about whether these bans serve any genuine security purpose. Instead, they appear to function as diplomatic punishment aimed at governments this administration dislikes. Preventing fans and players from freely entering the United States, and forcing them to bear the personal cost of policies directed at their governments, produces no discernable security benefit. What it does produce is a steady stream of international criticism. On the opening day of a World Cup the United States is hosting, Omar Artan’s story is the image America has projected to the world.

The consensus is that this is the year for the Democrats. They have the political winds at their backs. Even with the gerrymandering and the voter suppression and everything Republicans have thrown at the wall, smart money says Democrats take the House and maybe the Senate. And anything that limits the power of this president is good. I’ll grant all of it. Net positive.

But what happens after a good cycle or two, if the winners don’t understand what they won? If they don’t see the pain that powered their victories?

We don’t have to guess because it already happened in Britain.

A year and a half ago, Labour won in a landslide. Imagine our centrist Democrats, the Newsom and Buttigieg wing, sweeping into power with the biggest majority in a generation. The Tories were finished, the same way a lot of folks think Republicans are about to be finished. But Labour walked in and decided the mission was better management. Be the adults in the room. Trim the spending. Talk tough on the border. The ship was fine, just needed a steady hand.

If Democrats get to Washington, take the gavels, and decide the job is just to clean up after Donald Trump and keep the machine humming, we know how this ends. We just watched it play out in Britain.

Now look at them. Reform is Nigel Farage’s party, which is their MAGA more or less. Reform is leading the polls, and Labour’s a distant second. Their MAGA has led just about every poll since late last year. Keir Starmer, the head of Labour, is one of the least popular leaders in the Western world. A year and a half ago centrists won everything. Now they’re watching the British version of Trumpism walk toward power.

When a party wins on the promise of change and then delivers management, the people who abandon ship don’t all come back. The ones who move, move right. The angry ones, the ones who feel lied to, don’t drift off to some nicer party on the left. They turn to the man burning it all down, which is always how the right takes power. Afterward, centrists throws up their hands, convinced the country is turning right, when in reality they’re turning desperate. If you promise change and deliver the status quo, things don’t get better; for a lot of people, they get worse.

Britain at least has a buffer. They build coalitions, so no single party runs the whole thing alone usually. The damage is scattered and slower. But the US doesn’t have that. We’ve got winner-takes-all, with gerrymandering stacked on top. Here, a centrist party that wins big and then governs scared doesn’t lose gracefully. It delivers the whole country to MAGA. The House, the Senate, the gavels, all of it.

Our centrists, the Newsoms, the Buttigiegs, the Slotkins, are on the rise right now. They aren’t leaders. They aren’t fierce advocates for structural change. In fact this is exactly the kind of compromise-driven, go-along-to-get-along Democratic Party that abandoned the working class and helped usher in MAGA. Hell, California Gov. Gavin Newsom can’t even bring himself to tax billionaires. These are folks who don’t get the depth of pain across our the country. And they certainly don’t get the ferocity behind the criminal administration wrecking our democracy. The Democratic Party and its faux leaders don’t see what’s coming, or they see it and don’t care. In the end it won’t matter which.

The cost of living is so far out of reach for young people that you can’t fix it with a tweak. There’s no tax credit, no rebate, no clever little program that closes that gap. It will take transformation. It will take building things again. The same is true for jobs. AI and robotics are about to come for human labor in a way this country has never seen, and Democrats have no plan for it. None. They’re not ready for the losses. They’re not ready for what happens to a person, to a town, to a whole generation, when the work goes away.

And they’re sure as hell not ready for what’s happening at the very top. Last week, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. I wrote on Thursday about how we built him, how public money and public research and public contracts carried him up the hill while we kept no ownership. Our tax dollars built SpaceX and then we handed over the deed. The pretenders in the Democratic Party, the ones about to take the reins, have no answer for that. They have no intention of stopping the next massive giveaway. Why? Because they don’t want to upset the interests who fund their campaigns.

Lack of accountability for guys at the top is the clearest indicator that we need systemic change. Forget for a second the question of genocide in Gaza. Forget the West Bank. You don’t have to know the answer for those to agree we should honestly investigate war crimes. The International Criminal Court already issued arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defense minister for using starvation as a weapon of war. Our government’s response? To go after the court. To sanction its officials, and defend the war criminals.

Here at home, we’ve got a Justice Department unit whose entire job is crimes against humanity. Did it ever investigate Joe Biden’s cabinet, the men who signed off on the bombs? It didn’t. It won’t. They go after small men in faraway places, and give a pass to the policy masterminds here. The impunity of the powerful doesn’t start with Jeffrey Epstein or end with him. It runs straight through the war machine, the financial machine, the whole arrangement. A justice system that can’t prosecute its most powerful people for their most serious crimes is broken. You don’t fix broken with better management. You rebuild it.

We’ve got from now until the end of primary season to pick the right people. The candidates who understand our fight is structural. The ones who are ready for what’s actually coming. The ones not owned, willing to take a real risk.

If Democrats get to Washington, take the gavels, and decide the job is just to clean up after Donald Trump and keep the machine humming, we know how this ends. We just watched it play out in Britain. The winners were supposed to be an alternative to right-wing crazy, but now are losing the whole country to their own MAGA because a real alternative takes work.

That’s the thing about the so-called adults in the room. The centrists, the moderates, the corporatists, they won’t do the hard work. In part because they’re bankrolled by entrenched interests who will use every weapon in the arsenal to maintain status quo. And in part because of fear. They’re terrified of blame, so they’d rather keep walking toward disaster than take a chance on something better. Real reform means changing the whole structure, the democracy, the social fabric, the economy itself, and that’s going to take fight.

People are desperate for a life that works, but it’s easier for Dems to keep their heads down, push gently for incremental change, and hope things will get better on their own.

They won’t.

China exported 435,000 electric vehicles in May, a 100% increase from its exports in 2025. Its total exports of cars was 809,000, an increase of 73% from last year. By comparison, domestic US vehicle sales in May were 1,470,000. That means China’s exports of cars were equal to 55% of US purchases in the month, while its EV exports were almost 30%.

President Donald Trump can legitimately take credit for the surge in China’s EV exports. As he might say, “Frankly, if it wasn’t for me, their EV exports would not be growing like that.”

Trump has lit a rocket under China’s EV industry. While EV sales by producers worldwide are rising, no one was better situated to benefit from the surge in demand created by Trump’s war on Iran than China’s producers. Chinese producers account for more than 70% of global EV sales. That share is likely to rise, even as the market expands rapidly.

Trump’s war helped to boost sales not only by raising the price of gas, it also created enormous uncertainty about future prices. With one of the world’s major superpowers run by a person who apparently gives no consideration to the impact his actions have on the world economy, driving a gas-powered car looks like a much riskier proposition.

The bottom line is that Donald Trump’s war in Iran has done far more to jump start the green transition that almost any conceivable policy than a Biden-Harris administration might have put in place.

What is neat about this surge in EVs is that it is irreversible. People who buy EVs rarely switch back to gas-powered cars, especially in countries that have the infrastructure and charging stations to support EVs. And more EVs on the road create political and economic pressure to upgrade the infrastructure to facilitate their use.

EVs can be thought of as being like a virus; the more that get sold, the more they spread. When a large segment of car users has EVs, governments and businesses set up charging stations and repair shops. Also, when people see their co-workers, friends, and neighbors driving EVs, and saving a fortune on gas and maintenance, they become interested in owning one themselves. Once EVs get a big foot in the door, their spread is pretty much impossible to stop.

That is one reason why some of us have argued for allowing at least some number of high-quality, low-cost Chinese EVs into the US market. People could then see the benefits of EVs. Ideally, we would work out an arrangement where China transferred the technology so that the cars could be produced here, with union labor.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration has zero interest in going this route. It would rather double down on archaic technology.

The story is actually getting worse. There has been legislation introduced in Congress that would prohibit Chinese cars from even entering the United States. This would prevent someone from Canada or Mexico from driving their car over the border for a visit.

Apparently, the bill’s sponsors, Sen. Elissa Slotkin and Rep. Haley Stevens, both from Michigan, are worried about allowing people in this country to even see Chinese cars. This shows that not all whack job stuff in US politics originates with Donald Trump.

But getting back to Trump and the green transition, it’s not just China’s EV exports that Trump sent skyrocketing. Its exports of solar panels are up 60% year-over-year. China’s exports of wind turbines to the European Union rose 66% over 2025, and its battery exports worldwide were up 42%.

The bottom line is that Donald Trump’s war in Iran has done far more to jump start the green transition that almost any conceivable policy than a Biden-Harris administration might have put in place. That is great news. The unfortunate part is that China is at the center of it, and that it had to come about through war.