To Donald Trump and maga Republicans: Has Iran Surrendered Yet? Prepare for a long Iranian "Winter"

Donald Trump could try reading instead of wasting his sleepless nights ranting in slanderous screeds on his fake social media❗  This article published in the New York Review of Books by Christopher de Bellaiger would be excellent if he could understand it, but maybe he can find a bedtime 📘📕📖story reader to help❓

Apparently, according to de Bellaigue's report, Iranians would rather endure hardship, and suppression by their own Islamic Republic, than support a Trump-Netanyahu control over their 2,600 year old united Iranian nation. 

A billboard with an AI-generated portrait of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, Tehran, April 22, 2026

In 1953, Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, was toppled in a coup planned by MI6 and the CIA and carried out by Iranian army units and hoodlums supportive of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Mossadegh had nationalized Iran’s British-run oil industry and allowed Iranians more freedom than they had ever known; the constitutional monarchy he favored was a path between the extremes of royal tyranny and popular radicalism that had beset the country for the previous three quarters of a century. In the years after Mossadegh’s overthrow, as the Shah built a dictatorship backed uncritically by the United States, Iranian democrats and liberals sank into a despondency that was expressed in works of art, perhaps the most lasting of which, the poem “Winter” by Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, describes the insidious effect of political failure on the spirit of the individual and the cohesion of society:

They do not wish to return your greeting, their heads are buried in their collars,
No one dares raise their head to greet, to acknowledge friends,
They see no further than their own foot,
For the path is dark and slippery,
And if you stretch a kindly hand toward someone,
They withdraw their hand from their coat-pocket with reluctance,
So searing is the cold.
The breath that rises warm from the chest turns to a dark cloud,
Standing like a wall before your eyes,
So much for breath; what do you hope to gain from meeting the eyes of friends
Near or far❓

The revolution that swept away the Shah in 1979, was supported by the country’s liberals and leftists, but the government that replaced him was captured by hard-line theocrats and their followers in the Revolutionary Guard. Iran spent the next four and a half decades waging wars hot and cold, covert and declared, its hostility toward the West hardly wavering, regardless of the price to be paid in hardship at home and ostracism abroad.

The Islamic Republic was a pariah long before its latest war with the United States and Israel. Its economy has been crippled by sanctions and the corruption that is their concomitant, its middle class increasingly inured to privation, its workers crushed by inflation and the nonpayment of salaries, and life for all marred by the power outages, water shortages, and unchecked pollution that are the ambient signifiers of the failing state.

And yet the regime has repeatedly belied predictions of its demise, saved by revenue from the oil it sells to China and by a hard core of ideologues who retain a monopoly on force and a readiness to employ it against dissidents whom they view, without irony, as the agents of Satan. In January they suppressed mass protests with unprecedented savagery at the cost of thousands of lives. In the war that followed, Iran gained prestige around the world by defying its exponentially more powerful foes and not merely surviving the assassinations of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other military and civilian leaders but using them to inspire loyalists. My Iranian dentist in London was congratulated by his Malaysian, Pakistani, and Indonesian patients on the pluck exhibited by a regime he detests, which shows how cleverly the Islamic Republic wages the propaganda war.

During the war the US and Israel attacked not only military and nuclear targets but also steelworks, petrochemical plants, bridges, ports, railway lines, schools, universities, a bank, and a medical research center. Antique plaster and mirror fragments fell from the ceilings of palaces not designed to withstand bombs and missiles. With the cease-fire that came into effect on April 8, Trump stopped short of extinguishing “a whole civilization,” as he had threatened to do. But his hope, shared by Benjamin Netanyahu, that attacking Iran would embolden the people to rise up against their rulers and encourage the armed forces to mutiny was unfounded.

We are often told that the regime does not adequately represent its citizens. As US secretary of state Marco Rubio put it during his confirmation hearing in 2025, “I don’t know of any nation on earth in which there is a bigger difference between the people and those who govern them.” The Islamic Republic’s internal opponents are thought to amount to around 40 percent of the population, or 36 million people, with at most 20 percent being die-hard supporters and the remaining 40 percent floating between the two.

Between 1997, when Iran’s first reformist government was elected, and 2022, when many thousands braved truncheons and torture chambers to protest the killing of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, in police custody, Iranians tried every means short of armed insurrection to force the Islamic Republic to grant them personal and political freedom and to negotiate an end to some of the harshest sanctions in the world. Their efforts came to naught, and after January’s bloodbath Hatam Ghaderi, perhaps the country’s most respected political scientist and a man who usually chooses his words carefully, told an Iranian YouTube channel that “any eventuality, even war and annihilation, would be better than the survival of the Islamic Republic.” Since the war started Ghaderi has either withdrawn or been removed from the public scene.

Other than the severity of the regime’s response, what distinguished the January protests was that many of the participants flouted a taboo on expressing support for foreign intervention that had lingered since the 1953, coup. Thousands in the streets called on the United States and Israel to attack and topple the Islamic Republic, selecting as their white knight not one of the many reformists who languish in Iranian jails but Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last Shah and a US resident who is scathing about reform, flaunts his alliance with Netanyahu, and hasn’t seen his homeland in forty-eight years. Support for Pahlavi was always stronger outside the country than within, and his silence after a US attack on a girls’ school in southern Iran on February 28, in which 175 people were killed, condemned him in the eyes of many of his compatriots.

The yearning for foreign intervention among some opponents of the regime and the unease this caused in many others have opened a fissure that the Islamic Republic, adept at divide and rule, will exploit. I know people who, despite loathing their rulers, refused to leave the capital during the war because they felt it would be a betrayal of their country and their compatriots. (“Iran isn’t a hotel you leave for another if you don’t like the service,” one Iranian told me.) So they stayed, pushing beds onto landings, sleeping in their clothes, sweeping up shattered glass. They spoke witheringly of “supporters of the war,” especially those who at the first bombings quit Tehran for the safety of the hills or the coast. Iranian democrats who were “against the war” desire regime change no less fervently than those who petitioned Trump to attack. The difference is that they want Iranians, not foreigners, to do the job.

The current cease-fire resembles a pause for breath more than a prelude to peace, and it is informed on both sides by Trumpian exhibitionism. The Western media directs much attention at the negotiations and the Iranian officials who appear to control them: former and serving Revolutionary Guards, for the most part, with CVs as bloodstained as those of the martyrs they replaced, and the ambiguous, invisible figure of Mojtaba Khamenei, who has succeeded his father as supreme leader but who appears to be a plaything of the Guard. The agony of ordinary Iranians, meanwhile, is forgotten.

Iran is entering a new winter of political failure that will be harder than that of the prerevolutionary period, when the experience of being insulted and infantilized by a crowned despot was alleviated somewhat by rising living standards. There is no such comfort now. In March year-on-year inflation rose to 72 percent, one of the highest rates since the revolution. 

Food prices are rising much faster. According to Hadi Kahalzadeh, a former economist at Iran’s Social Security Organization, the war disrupted “supply chains, transport networks, and commercial services,” with many firms suspending operations “under the combined pressure of war, inflation, recession, and collapsing demand.” Kahalzadeh estimates that between 10 and 12 million jobs in Iran are under threat, “putting the main source of income for millions of households…at risk.”

The Islamic Republic no longer pretends to speak for all or even the majority of its citizens; it pours vitriol on the “scum, spies, and hirelings”—the national police chief’s phrase—who participated in January’s unrest. In Tehran armed boys of fifteen or sixteen stand on street corners searching cars and demanding phones so they can scroll through photos for evidence of espionage. 

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the parliament speaker and Iran’s chief negotiator in talks with the US in Pakistan, has urged loyalists not to surrender the public sphere to the opposition and has called attendance at the funerals, rallies, and religious ceremonies that succeed one another on the streets of Tehran and other cities an “obligatory jihad.”(IOW Arabic word “jihad” means struggling or striving)

The Internet remains blocked for most Iranians, the better, the authorities say, to defend against cyberattacks and to stop traitors from passing information to the enemy or disseminating antinational propaganda; the foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, justifies his own unimpeded access on the grounds that he is “the voice of the Iranians.” The Islamic Republic has even appropriated “Ey Iran” (O Iran), a monumental nationalist anthem that was composed as a response to the Allied occupation of Iran during World War II and is an opposition favorite.

Parliament recently passed legislation prescribing twenty-five years’ imprisonment for anyone who passes video footage of the war to a hostile TV station. The judiciary is confiscating the property of “treasonous and mercenary elements who supported the aggression.” On April 13, the chief prosecutor announced that expatriate Iranians will no longer be able to buy and sell property through their appointed representatives. This is punishment for their actions “against the Islamic Republic” and preparation, doubtless, for further expropriations.

That loot will need a home, and the authorities have been advising young people to “come into the system,” which is to say, don the uniform of a Basiji or the guise of an informer and accept the sinecures and perks that alone in a state-run “resistance economy” offer a measure of financial security. When the central bank introduced its most valuable banknote, worth 10 million rials—around seven (💲7❓) dollars*—in March, there was huge demand for this hedge against a possible crash of electronic payments. “I waited my turn,” an eighty-year-old Tehran resident told the Financial Times, “and the clerk told me he could only give me 10 million rials. But when I made a fuss, telling them I had no money and needed cash, I got 30 million instead.” This in an economy backed by the second-largest natural gas reserves and third largest crude oil reserves in the world.

On April 19 Ghalibaf told state TV, “In the field [of battle], the street and in diplomacy, we are in control.” The number and diversity of the issues that divide Iran and the US—from Hezbollah and the Strait of Hormuz to Iran’s stock of highly enriched uranium and the Houthis of Yemen—militate against the kind of agreement that would bring the Islamic Republic sanctions relief comprehensive enough to save the economy. 

So do Iran’s new leaders, who are happier than their predecessors to talk to the enemy, but also bolder—the elder Khamenei never actually closed the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile Iran’s relations with its neighbors on the far side of the Persian Gulf have returned to the bad old days of the 1980s, when the nascent Islamic Republic fought an eight-year war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and was all but encircled by his Arab allies.

As long as the country remains on high alert and public discourse is dominated by warnings of spies, sabotage, and treachery, the opposition will struggle to reemerge. War breeds tyrants. The Terror that followed the French Revolution drew much of its ferocity from fears of invasion. In the 1980s, the young Islamic Republic decided that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iranian youths on the battlefield with Iraq and the immiseration of the economy were prices worth paying to entrench its power and eliminate its domestic opponents. Like Eisenhower and Churchill when they ordered Mossadegh’s overthrow in 1953, Trump and Netanyahu have set back the cause of Iranian freedom. Their responsibility for the political winter that follows will not be small.

—April 30, 2026

*❗1 Iranian Rial equals
0.00 United States 💲Dollar

Donald Trump unilateraly declared a cruel World War in Iran causing international chaos without any definable purpose.

'This excellent essay published in the New York Review of Books by Fintan O'Toole is a brilliant review about how Donald Trump unilaterally decided to put Americans into another unwinnable and unjustified Middle East war.  It is like Mr. O'Toole is able to sit inside of Donald Trump's demented unconsciousness.  A brutal review about the horrible decisions (like a "crazy historical pageant") made by past administrations reminds us about how this Trump World War in Iran is doomed to fail. Nevertheless, even in failure, Israel is achieving the goal to disable its enemies while the United States is paying the bills, with U.S. military blood, to fund an unwinnable war. 

Signifying Absolutely Nothing

Mr. O'Toole writes:  In Donald Trump’s World War against Iran, everything is meta except the bombs. At the point of impact, where buildings shatter and flesh is shredded, the war inhabits the material world of awful human consequences. But, up to that point, as it exists in Trump’s mind, it seems to be a crazy historical pageant in which disconnected scenes from past American imperial misadventures are randomly reenacted.

It is apt that Trump’s declaration of war was disembodied: a prerecorded video message announcing a major combat operation that had yet to begin. Time in that video is completely distorted; events that are about to happen are referred to in the past tense. Throughout it gives the feeling of being in a time warp: Trump cited as a casus belli “the marine barracks bombing in Beirut that killed 241 American military personnel” in 1983. The forty-three-year gap between provocation and retaliation is a void between cause and effect into which all temporal logic vanishes.

In that eight-minute video, Trump performed what could be regarded as unconscious parodies of three different scenes from past wars. First, he defined his objective “to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” This replays, of course, the buildup to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The George W. Bush administration carefully avoided the word “imminent,” but its rhetoric projected the illusion of clear and present danger. The UK government of Bush’s ally Tony Blair produced an infamous dossier claiming that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons against the West within forty-five minutes of an order from Saddam Hussein.

The second parody was Trump’s message to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and armed forces: “I say tonight that you must lay down your weapons and have complete immunity. Or in the alternative, face certain death. So, lay down your arms.” This echoes Bush’s warning in 2003: “I urge every member of the Iraqi military and intelligence services, if war comes, do not fight for a dying regime that is not worth your own life.” The film running in Trump’s head is a newsreel of Iraqi conscripts surrendering in droves to American forces, having decided that a rotten regime was not worth dying for.

Third, Trump evoked the idea of a mass insurrection by the Iranian people in the aftermath of a bombing campaign by the US and Israel: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.” This too was an act of mimicry. In February 1991, during the first Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush urged “the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” Aircraft from a coalition of countries led by the US dropped leaflets calling on Iraqi soldiers and civilians to “fill the streets and alleys and bring down Saddam Hussein and his aides.”

To say that these are reruns is not to deny the novel elements in Trump’s warmongering. His boldest innovation is to invoke not past glories but past disasters, summoning the ghosts of the United States’ catastrophic interventions in Iraq. In the Republican primary debate in December 2015, Trump declared American and Iraqi deaths in that conflict to have been pointless:

We have done a tremendous disservice, not only to Middle East [sic], we’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have wiped away [sic], and for what? It’s not like we had victory.

It is hard to think of any precedent for a leader stirring the memories of a war he regards as a colossal waste in order to justify starting a new one.

More profoundly, Trump’s rhetoric diverges from its Iraq War templates in signifying absolutely nothing. It is in itself (though of course not in its consequences) entirely free of external referents in the real world. Trump, with that strange honesty of his, indicated this himself by the manner of his declaration of war. Such announcements have an established visual language of solemnity and moral magnitude: the live address to the nation and the world from the White House, the rows of five-star generals in the Situation Room, the military briefings, the sense of historic moment. Trump’s video and his schmoozing of guests at Mar-a-Lago on the night of Friday, February 27 (“Have a good time, everybody…. I gotta go to work,” he told the attendees), seemed as deliberately flippant as his dismissal of the likely deaths of Americans: “We may have casualties. That often happens in war.” (“That’s the way it is,” he said later, after the first US soldiers were killed.)

The word “important” was used the following evening: Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, described the MAGA fundraiser that Trump attended on Saturday night as “more important than ever.” It was certainly more important than providing any rationale to the American people for their embarkation on another war. This is a war of choice, but it was presented to the American people more as a war of caprice, initiated in the festive atmosphere of a Florida resort and announced in cut-and-paste phrases from half-remembered conflicts.

The casual nature of the declaration of war matched the unmoored nature of Trump’s imperial cosplay. The rhetoric he seemed vaguely to be recalling had relationships to actual events. The “imminent threat” motif was, in 2003, a reckless and dishonest exaggeration. But there was at least the truth that Saddam had previously developed and used chemical weapons. The idea of enemy soldiers surrendering en masse was not fanciful—it happened in both Gulf Wars. The call for the people to rise up against their oppressors in 1991, had some substance: Kurdish and Shia opponents of Saddam had rebelled in the recent past and did so again.

But, what recurs now is pure linguistic gesture—the second time as empty effigy. The idea that Iran poses an imminent threat to the US is not merely not credible—credibility is entirely irrelevant. In 2003, the George W. Bush administration went through the motions of presenting a case that Saddam might have weapons of mass destruction and might wish to use them against the US. It was a bad case, concocted to provide the pretext for putting into action a preconceived plan: violent regime change in Iraq. But, some people in the American and British administrations at least half believed it, and more importantly, they wanted other people—their own citizens and foreign governments—to believe it too. Some effort at persuasion seemed to be an accepted precondition for war.

This time, Trump can’t be bothered to lie, if by lying we mean stating a claim that is intended to deceive. No one in his administration believes in the imminent threat, and no one outside it is expected to believe in it either. “Imminent threats” here functions like a TV trope, a corny catchphrase—it might as well be “Follow that car!” or (in words Trump has actually used, in his belligerent demands that Greenland be ceded to him) “The easy way” or “the hard way!” It signals only that Trump is going through the motions of wartime leadership and that, at best, his followers should likewise go through the motions of being led into war.

Even while declaring war, Trump made a mockery of the supposed Iranian threat: “We obliterated the regime’s nuclear program.” Now its missile industry will “be totally again obliterated”—the “again” suggesting that he believes he had wiped it out before. And his characterization of Iran’s alleged intentions to rebuild its nuclear weapons program dissolved into bathos:

We warned them never to resume their malicious pursuit of nuclear weapons, and we sought repeatedly to make a deal. We tried. They wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. Again they wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. They didn’t know what was happening. They just wanted to practice evil.

The imminent threat, then, comes from Bond movie villains who love doing evil but are crippled by chronic indecision, less Dr. No than Dr. Maybe. Trump made the ayatollahs sound risibly inept and hopelessly out of touch. The childishness of his expressions infantilized a genuinely vicious regime, painting it as more peevish than petrifying. Compared with the hair-raising language Trump has habitually used about immigrants in the US, his evocation of the Iranian menace was notably underpowered. He is good at conjuring monsters—this time he barely tried.

The idea that the Revolutionary Guard and Iranian armed forces should surrender their weapons in return for immunity is equally free of any objective correlative. It harks back to 1991 and 2003, when there were huge numbers of American and allied forces on the ground, in Kuwait and Iraq, to whom Iraqis could surrender. Whom now are they supposed to surrender to? A bomber pilot 50,000 feet above them? And who has the authority to grant members of the regime’s forces, who have committed atrocities against Iranians and foreign civilians, immunity from future prosecution? Trump told the Iranian people that their country is “yours to take.” How could they possibly take it without being free to act against those who have murdered and tortured with impunity, and how could it be theirs if crucial decisions about their future have already been made by Trump himself?

The most cynical of Trump’s retreads of the neoimperial past is his incitement of the Iranian people to rise up against the Islamic Republic. In echoing Bush’s call to the Iraqis in 1991, Trump was recycling a moment of great betrayal. Those Iraqis who believed America’s implied promise of support against Saddam paid for their naiveté with their blood. The US refused to give the rebels arms captured from the Iraqi regime’s forces, instead opting to destroy the weapons, return them to the regime, or (in a grotesque irony) give them to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. 

Although the Americans had total dominance over Iraqi airspace, the decision was to stand back as Saddam unleashed helicopter gunships on the rebels. Somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 Shias were killed, along with some 20,000 Kurds.

Even if young Iranians don’t remember what happened in Iraq thirty-five years ago, they certainly remember what happened in their own country earlier this year. On January 13 Trump posted a message to those engaged in mass protests against the regime in Tehran: “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!… HELP IS ON ITS WAY.” He warned that there would be “very strong action” if the regime executed protesters. There was no action, and help was not on its way. The government massacred an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 protesters. This is the most gaping vacancy of all—Trump gestures toward two American incitements, one historic, one extremely recent. Both deployed words that were fatally empty of meaning.

These vacuities are part of a greater absence: there is no story. America’s wars beyond the Western Hemisphere have always been underpinned by grand narratives: making the world safe for democracy (World War I), defeating fascism (World War II), saving civilization from communism (Korea and Vietnam), upholding international law and the sovereignty of nations (Kuwait), responding to the atrocities of September 11 through the “war on terror” (Afghanistan and Iraq). Each of these stories had sufficient purchase on reality to command widespread initial (if by no means universal) consent. There seemed to be a cause large enough in its historic import to be worth killing and dying for. Even when, as with the invasion of Iraq, the stated rationale was quickly exposed as fraudulent, the drama of retaliation for September 11 and the reassertion of American power after the exposure of terrible vulnerability held their grip.

Insofar as Trump’s imperial posturing has a story line, it is supposed to be written in the National Security Strategy published in November. The tale it wants to tell is one of hemispheric hegemony: the US must control all of the Americas.
Where does Iran fit into that script? Nowhere. Its significance is, in fact, dismissed in a few lines:

Conflict remains the Middle East’s most troublesome dynamic, but there is today less to this problem than headlines might lead one to believe. Iran—the region’s chief destabilizing force—has been greatly weakened by Israeli actions since October 7, 2023, and President Trump’s June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer, which significantly degraded Iran’s nuclear program.

Given that Trump never knowingly engages in understatement, this is a rare example of verbal deflation. The fake news to be discounted is those hyped-up headlines portraying Iran as anything other than a decisively weakened foe. Not only, moreover, is Iran less troublesome, but the whole region is becoming steadily less important to the US: “As this administration rescinds or eases restrictive energy policies and American energy production ramps up, America’s historic reason for focusing on the Middle East will recede.” The broad scenario is one in which Iran is, at best, a minor blot in the rearview mirror as America’s interests move elsewhere.

There is no American narrative for this war because it is not primarily an American story. It belongs to Benjamin Netanyahu. He has long sought to frame the Iranian regime in the most extreme terms imaginable—as the successor to the Nazis. “As the Nazis strived to trample civilization and replace it with a ‘master race’ while destroying the Jewish people,” he said in a speech at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in 2015, “so is Iran striving to take over the region and expand further with a declared goal of destroying the Jewish state.”

As a political fable this is potent stuff. Doing a deal with a Nazi-like state in which it promises not to develop nuclear weapons—as the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, together with Germany and the European Union, did that year—is delusional, since the supposed purpose of the Iranian state is, like Hitler’s Germany, the mass extermination of Jews. That deal had to be torn up, and in 2018 Trump duly withdrew the US from it.

But vile as the Islamic Republic may be, it is not remotely like Nazi Germany. The allegory serves a specific purpose: to preserve Israel’s monopoly on the possession of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Trump clearly doesn’t believe it, since his stated goal has been to make precisely the kind of bargain with Iran that the Nazi analogy is meant to preclude. The incoherence of Trump’s war aims is rooted in this gross discrepancy between his desire for a settlement with Iran—“We sought repeatedly to make a deal”—and Netanyahu’s vision of an apocalyptic battle in which the only possible outcomes are the binary opposites of absolute triumph or utter extinction. Trump’s playbook is The Art of the Deal; Netanyahu’s is the Book of Joshua.

There are, as a result, two different endgames for this war, one ultimately bureaucratic and diplomatic, the other existential. Trump started to threaten Iran again in recent months as a tactic for achieving the first. He has collapsed into the second, adapting Netanyahu’s existential dread as if it applied to the United States as much as to Israel. This means getting into a much more unbounded conflict than he seems to have imagined.

This is, in a sense, a proxy war, but one in which America is the proxy. It manifests overwhelming military strength but also stark political weakness. Marco Rubio’s admission that the US attacked Iran because it knew that Israel was about to do so—and thus feared that America would be a target of Iranian retaliation—depicts Trump not as a mighty leader but as a helpless follower. Instead of leaning on a rival boss, he is being led by Netanyahu into a generational conflict to remake the entire Middle East.

The dramatic first act of the war—the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and (according to Trump) another forty-seven senior officials “in one shot”—is a spectacular success that also exemplifies these contradictions. From an Israeli point of view, the more Iranian leaders killed, the better. Yet, Trump told Jonathan Karl, ABC News’ chief Washington correspondent, that his administration had identified possible leaders to replace Khamenei, but “the attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates. It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.” 

On March 3, Trump’s account tipped further into morbid farce: “Most of the people we had in mind are dead…. Now we have another group. They may be dead also, based on reports. So I guess you have a third wave coming. Pretty soon we’re not going to know anybody.”

In this telling, the war’s opening act was a literal overkill. Combined with self-styled secretary of war Pete Hegseth’s bizarre statement that “this is not a so-called regime-change war, but the regime sure did change,” it suggests that from the very beginning America’s war stumbled over its intended limits. It was supposed to be a Venezuela-style operation in which the enemy leader was eliminated and replaced by a more compliant figure within the same regime. This new leader (of another oil-rich nation) would have been placed on notice that the US could and would kill him at any time if he disobeyed. Essentially, the Islamic Republic was to remain intact, except that now it would operate on license from Trump.

The terms and conditions of such a license most definitely do not include democracy or human rights. Hegseth has insisted that the objective of the war “doesn’t include nation-building or democracy building goals.” A free Iran is no part of the envisaged outcome. If the people were to rise up at the risk of being slaughtered, they would be doing so merely to put in place a government that would be free to maintain the same levels of internal repression and theocratic control, so long as its foreign policy remained acceptable to Washington. That is hardly a cause worthy of martyrdom.

Yet even this contradictory approach seems to have unraveled as soon as the war started. The old adage that no military plan survives first contact with the enemy has been given a new twist: first contact was not chastening but excessively efficacious. From the American point of view the almost instant wiping out of so much of the senior Iranian leadership raised the stakes beyond what Trump initially wanted. The limited goal of bringing the regime to heel expanded immediately into its unconditional surrender and potential annihilation. And this escalation occurred without the administration giving any prior thought to what the implosion of Iran might mean, either for its own citizens or for the wider region. Or what an unchecked air war directed by Netanyahu looks like: Gaza.

Here we see how the current problem of American military power lies not in its limits but in its virtual limitlessness. It is not just that the US military is vastly superior to that of any immediate battlefield opponent. It is that it’s untethered from the need to place a set of actions within a comprehensible story. For the first time in US history, American physical dominance is being fused with American political anarchy. Freed from all the entanglements that come with having to launch a ground invasion, air war can overfly not just morality and law but arguments, rationales, the calibration of risks to rewards and of suffering to satisfaction. Military might under Trump is all power and no purpose, all tactics and no strategy, all violence and no vision, all means and no ends. Having ditched any larger claims (building democracy, fighting tyranny, advancing freedom), it is its own justification.

This cutting of the bonds that tie war making to grand geopolitical narratives is a kind of liberation. The agony of America’s post-1945 wars has been their gradual inducement of a sense of futility. The wars stop making sense, and thus the human and financial sacrifices come to seem pointless. What’s happening now under Trump is one sort of answer to the anguish and humiliation of defeat in Afghanistan in his first term. Wars can stop making sense only when they are supposed to make sense in the first place. They become pointless only when there is meant to be a clear point. Futility arises only when a stated goal is not being achieved in spite of all the anguish and effort. If there is no goal—or if, as now, there are so many contradictory objectives that they cancel one another out—nothing can be futile.

This negative logic is reinforced by Trump’s own psychological condition. The attack on Iran is what war making looks like in an authoritarian state: not politics by other means but the absence of politics by other means. It is another stage in the working through of a disinhibition that is both institutional (the Republican-dominated Congress refusing to fulfill its constitutional obligation to restrain executive power) and personal (the president’s combination of inherent narcissism with the effects of old age). As Trump told The New York Times in January, he regards himself as unfettered from all constraints except those of “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

One constraint that used to operate within Trump’s own mind was a squeamish reluctance to get blood on his hands, a fastidiousness about actual killing somewhat akin to his notorious germophobia. We know that this extended in his first term to the idea of bombing Iran. After the Iranians shot down an unmanned American surveillance drone in June 2019, he ordered retaliatory strikes. But when he was told there would likely be 150 casualties, he called the planes back. As he posted on what was then Twitter, “We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights [sic] when I asked, how many will die.” Now the specifics of how many will die are no longer of concern to him: unnumbered deaths often happen in war.

It is obvious that making war is a useful distraction—for himself as well as for the world—from the Epstein scandal. But it is also now the purest form of self-pleasuring. Usually a president going to war is taking on burdens. Trump is shrugging them off, entering a state of weightlessness where all thought of consequences and all concern for mundane irritants like inflation and affordability are left behind. He declares war from his vacation home at Mar-a-Lago because it is a kind of leisure activity. Strikingly, in rebutting allegations that he will lose interest if the Iran adventure goes on too long, he used a term from his favorite hobby, golf. “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground,” he told the New York Post. The yips are a sudden onset of nerves that cause a golfer to miss an easy putt.

What is weightless for Trump lies very heavy on the American republic. The anarchic nature of his war does not make it merely aberrant. The lurch from declaring fears about Iran to be mere media exaggerations to invoking imminent threat, from demanding the Nobel Peace Prize to luxuriating in lethality, is the essence of the autocrat’s monopoly on unpredictability.
Self-contradiction is a test of loyalty: the sycophants will fall over themselves to justify the leader’s wisdom even when it is the opposite of yesterday’s wisdom. When the leader can make up a war as it goes along, his whims have become law.

Extreme violence is now a large part of this repertoire of arbitrariness. Trump has pushed domestic terror to the point where his agents can murder American citizens on the street without accountability. He is now pushing the use of overwhelming force abroad into a terrain where accountability becomes impossible because there are no clear objectives by which to distinguish purpose from pointlessness, right from wrong, success from failure. But what happens abroad does not stay abroad: one of the things Trump has never lied about is that for him the real war is on the home front. He is showing that he can declare it however and whenever he feels like it. 💢❗😡😢

—March 12, 2026

Donald Trump and maga Republicans do not see oil revenues after illegal attack on Venezuela and no "regime change" either!

A More Pliant Chavista published in the New York Review of Books by  Alma Guillermoprieto: Donald Trump’s decision to support Delcy Rodríguez as Venezuela’s new leader makes clear that oil, not democracy, is his main concern.

This essay by Alma Guillermoprieto describes, in easy to understand prose, what happened when Donald Trump made the illegal decision to kidnap the Venezuelan dictator president Nicolás Maduro. 

Absract: Alma Guillermoprieto's article "A More Pliant Chavista" in the February 12, 2026 issue of The New York Review of Books explores the political landscape of Venezuela, focusing on the U.S. government's oil-driven support for Delcy Rodríguez as a new leader. The piece highlights the shifting alliances in the region, examining how power dynamics evolve from the Chávez era.

History sometimes repeats itself out of sheer malice. 

For example, in 1898, the United States stepped in to help Cuba in its long struggle for independence from Spain, and won. Cubans were grateful but not yet free. American troops were in control of the island, and the US refused to remove them until Cuba accepted eight conditions presented to Congress in 1901, by Senator Orville Platt. The most important provisions of what became known as the Platt Amendment were that Cuba was required to lease land indefinitely to the US for naval stations (thus Guantánamo), that it could not make treaties with other nations, and that to preserve Cuban independence or maintain a stable government, the US retained the right to intervene on the island militarily, which it did four times before the humiliating provisions (but not the lease on Guantánamo) were repealed in 1934. Secretary of State Marco Rubio—the child of Cuban émigrés—must know the Platt Amendment well: the text was burned into every Cuban’s heart, fomented Cubans’ fervent nationalist sentiment, and for decades contributed to the willingness of many of them on the island to put up with Fidel Castro, the great defier of the United States.

Until last year, those provisions were the baldest formulation of America’s imperialist ambitions, but Donald Trump has refashioned and extended the terms under which subject countries can expect to live. Moments before 2:00 AM on the third day of the New Year, explosions and the roar of aircraft were heard over Caracas. The US, claiming the right to depose at will the leader of an independent nation, captured the de facto president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro Moros, and his wife, Cilia Flores, and in doing so shredded the principle that makes peaceful international coexistence possible. It was still January 3, when the couple was tran

A buffoonish man to begin with, Maduro was perp-walked wearing something hat-like on his head that Goofy might have loved. Reporters who gathered in haste at Mar-a-Lago hardly knew how to formulate their questions about an act of war unauthorized by Congress that amounted to a kidnapping. (The administration called it “an extraction.”) The whole thing was grotesque and stupid and horrifying in equal measure, and gaspingly unbelievable, until one remembered what the Platt Amendment revealed about America’s sense of itself.

For weeks we had been watching as the US assembled the largest display of naval and air power in decades around the sunny islands of the Caribbean, with the intention, one foolishly thought, of sticking around for a bit, playing superpower at the expense of American taxpayers, and cowing Maduro into resigning. But no, the Trump administration was both dead serious and reckless. The proof was Maduro in his ridiculous headgear.

María Corina Machado, the stubborn leader of the Venezuelan conservative opposition and 2025, Nobel Peace Prize winner, contributed to the disaster. In the months before the July 2024 presidential elections, she was polling so strongly that the Venezuelan government thought it prudent to ban her candidacy. Never one to give up, Machado appointed the aging politician Edmundo González to run in her place. According to virtually all qualified observers, on election day he won easily over Maduro, former president Hugo Chávez’s appointed successor, who had been in power since 2013, and who proclaimed himself the winner.

This was openly fraudulent but not surprising, and it seems to have reinforced Machado’s long-held belief that a bloodless transition to democracy was not feasible. In the first days of the second Trump administration she spoke with Rubio, an old acquaintance who was the brand-new secretary of state. Rubio is a foreign policy wonk and an old-style anticommunist with a special hatred for the collapsing socialist regime in Cuba and for Venezuela, Cuba’s longtime ally and provider of fuel. Maduro would never allow fair elections, Machado insisted; he was an illegitimate president, he was ruining Venezuela, and he should be kicked out—by force, if necessary. After the election she had prudently gone into hiding, but if she were president, she said in online interviews and meetings, she would open the country to foreign investment and especially to foreign oil companies, most of which had been expelled by Chávez in 2007.

Her argument coincided with the thinking of the new Trump administration, which in its previous incarnation had appeared to care little for Venezuela or adventures abroad. In February 2025, shortly after Rubio’s meeting with Machado, in what no longer seems like an unrelated event, the US designated eight Latin American drug cartels—three of them with members operating in Venezuela—as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. 

In August, the US military parked three guided-missile destroyers just off the Venezuelan coast and soon added assault ships, an aircraft carrier, thousands of troops, and large and small planes. In September the Department of Defense was renamed the Department of War, three days after eleven people—name and nationality unknown—were killed in their motorboat in the Caribbean by a US air strike. More than a hundred others were sadly killed since then.

Machado approved these actions. She called the administration’s strategy “absolutely correct” and said that “Maduro started this war, and Donald Trump is ending it.” This was after she received the Nobel Peace Prize and gushed that he was the one who really deserved it. (Rubio and seven other Republican lawmakers had actually promoted her nomination.) But, Trump, who inexplicably thought he was in the running for the Nobel, was not amused: the administration’s communications director, Steven Cheung, regretted on social media that the Nobel Committee had put “politics over peace” in failing to give him the prize. 

On January 3, during an eerie morning press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump made it clear that neither Machado nor González would be taking power: “She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country.”

To give Machado credit, she fought Chávez and his designated successor from the start, and even if it meant going into hiding she never left her country for Miami or Madrid, unlike so many of her light-skinned, well-off supporters who called Chávez “monkey.” (In turn, he took grinning pleasure in describing himself as un poco indio, un poco negro.) 

Machado, the daughter of an industrialist, could have had an easy life, but she chose instead to shout herself hoarse at endless protest marches and to live with intimidation and threats for more than twenty years, sensing that Chávez, the left-wing populist who was first elected president in 1998, did not want just a one- or two-term presidency and would ruin Venezuela. She was brave, but it was foolish to expect that by calling for the invasion of her own country she would earn the invader’s gratitude.

“They stole our oil,” Trump told reporters that day. Perhaps his most entrenched belief is that everything he wants—Greenland, the Nobel Prize, a woman—belongs to him, even if it is deep underground in a nation some thousand miles away. A gripping moment came when Trump made it clear that the invasion of a nonbellicose country had not much to do with human rights or freedom or anything else with no monetary value.

Would he see to it that the Maduro regime’s political prisoners were freed? “We’re going to take back the oil,” he said. “They stole our assets like we were babies.” Oil was always at the forefront. “We’re going to get the oil flowing the way it should be.” “We’ll be selling large amounts of oil to other countries.” Members of his administration listed other riches Venezuela could provide: diamonds, rare earths, gold. But those diamonds and rare earths are found in hard-to-reach, jungle-bound areas virtually ruled by the continent’s oldest guerrilla group, the Colombia-based Ejército de Liberación Nacional, together with assorted other gangs.

How about democracy and free elections❓ “We’re going to run the country,” Trump answered blandly. Run the country, as in an occupying force❓ But who was in charge there now❓ It transpired that the person the United States had chosen to tolerate or support as the new president of Venezuela—“I understand she was just sworn in,” Trump noted casually—was Maduro’s vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez. Really❓ But then…wait❗ Just one more question❓ If Maduro was about to be replaced by the politician closest to him, who was an equally hard-line and corrupt Chavista, then why had all the corpses and terror and fighter jets and hoopla involved in extracting him even been necessary❓

A partial answer is that the Trump team doesn’t care who the ruler of Venezuela is right now as long as she or he keeps everyone quiet and provides access to the oil, and their view so far is that Rodríguez appears to fit the bill. When he was dying of cancer, Chávez chose Maduro—his amiable vice-president and a devotee of the guru Sathya Sai Baba—as his successor. Maduro, a former bus driver and union leader and not, by all accounts, a brilliant man, was soon floundering as the markets and agriculture collapsed, food disappeared from grocery shelves, inflation spiked so high it made people weep, and the oil industry that Chávez had run into the ground simply refused to start up again. Some eight million people—nearly a quarter of the population—left the country, many on foot and with little more than the clothes on their backs.

To stay in power, Maduro relied on the huge network of grassroots organizations that Chávez left behind, systematic repression—a network of spies embedded in those organizations came in handy—and a web of corruption and influence that tied every enterprise, government agency, and illegal source of income back to him. He distributed corruption like largesse wherever there was money to be made. Still, throughout the years, he remained faithful to the legacy of Chávez, the man who gave him his destiny.



The Rodríguez siblings, Jorge and Delcy, are not typical I-come-from-the-pueblo Chavistas. Their father was a member of a militant group that kidnapped an American businessman in 1976. He died while Jorge and Delcy were children, after being tortured in prison, and they were old enough to remember. They became talented professionals (he’s a psychiatrist, she’s a lawyer); she learned French and English, acquired a taste for fine clothes and travel, and is cosmopolitan but also radical. Both belong to what Venezuelans call the Caviar Left. Delcy has been, among other things, the minister of foreign affairs, the head of the intelligence services, and the president of the Constituent National Assembly. Jorge now runs the National Assembly and knows how to talk to foreigners, notably Trump’s special envoy Richard Grenell, with whom he negotiated all last year about how Venezuela could avoid invasion.

Maduro appointed Delcy as his vice-president in the 2018 elections and put her in charge of the state oil industry. At once she began to reorder its finances, opened Venezuela to the free market, and indicated that the country would not be averse to some foreign investment in the oil industry. It could be that she is a Chavista though not a socialist, but Maduro kept her close because he saw that she was producing results. The Trump team noticed too. Apparently, while Jorge was talking to Grenell, she was talking to Rubio.

In an interview with The New York Times, Donald Trump said they talk constantly. Do they talk about whether she really is in power or if that’s just a façade❓ Maybe their chats are about the 30 to 50 million barrels of oil that Trump says Venezuela has promised to “give” the US. Or maybe Rubio is trying to figure out, like Venezuelans everywhere and all the rest of us, who Delcy Rodríguez really is, because on one day she will “extend an invitation to the US government to work together on a cooperative agenda” and on another she will claim that drug trafficking and human rights “were an excuse” for the US intervention, “because the real motive is Venezuelan oil.” Rumors are everywhere that Rodríguez, the daughter of a radical socialist who refused to bend under torture, a woman who is known for getting her way and trying to barge into meetings she has explicitly been disinvited from, has signed a two-year Platt-like agreement to let the United States take over Venezuela’s oil industry while she runs the country’s day-to-day business with a bureaucracy and security apparatus that will be left mostly untouched. If so, she can hardly still be thinking of herself as a Chavista at all, for Chávez was nothing if not antiyanqui.

Who knows how long she will last or where her real loyalties lie. Who knows what sector of the armed forces or which generals are willing to support her in the coming months or whether the hundreds of political prisoners will be freed or their numbers multiplied. Who can even tell what Chavismo is at this point, other than some two million individuals linked by state jobs and self-interest. It is possible to read news sites and search the Internet for hours without understanding what happened on January 3.

Trump’s long-term plan for Venezuela has yet to be formulated. He has repeated that the US will be in charge of the country for at least the near future, or “much longer” than a year, he said in the Times interview. But Trump is supposed to leave office in three years. The longer the US is involved in the country, the harder it will be to disengage. Who will have to face at last the chants of “US out of Venezuela”❓

January 3, marked the end of Soviet socialist–style governance, not only in Venezuela but in Nicaragua and Cuba, too; the end of US efforts to be a good neighbor; the end of the ability of democratically elected presidents throughout the hemisphere to trust that they can govern freely. An entire world order is in question, but there is nothing to fill the void, not even a realistic plan to bring back the Venezuelan oil industry. Again: What was it all for❓

—January 15, 2026

All American with an ethical conscience ask the same political question? How did our nation get to this terrible place?

In "Who Speaks for Us?" (March 2026), Marilynne Robinson argues in The New York Review of Books that true democracy, not "populism," is the essential response to corruption and the abuse of power. She emphasizes the dignity and authority of the people, warning against the degradation caused by arrogance and avarice.

An echo essay published in New York Review of Books:

The political leaders and elected representatives of our two-party system have made it into a weapon that works against the people.

• Core Argument: Robinson contends that modern two-party politics often weaponizes systems against the people.
• The Solution: She advocates for a return to genuine democratic principles and warns that populist movements often merely reflect the "inchoate" - not yet fully developed or in the process of becoming- resentments of a subordinated class.
• Perspective: As a novelist and essayist known for her Christian, Calvinist-influenced perspective (e.g., Gilead), she often critiques contemporary political culture from a moral and intellectual standpoint.
  
  When Donald Trump was first elected to the presidency, a British friend asked me if his authoritarian tendencies were a real threat to America. No, I said, because the country had so many autonomous centers of power to constrain him—the press, the unions and professions, the universities, the courts, the states, and, of course, various types and sources of political opposition. Not all these supposed checks on his power have capitulated absolutely, but enough of them have capitulated to raise fundamental questions about the country we thought we had and the country we have now. It will always be true that we have seen the Constitution effectively brushed aside by a superannuated game show host who galvanizes his base with talk of showerheads and windmills and the demonic nastiness of the other party. All this is so strange that it is hard to imagine how history will take any lessons from it. It would seem grossly improbable that a billionaire—rich from birth and repeatedly bankrupt yet still a billionaire—could lead a movement of angry “populism.” But here we are.
  
  There are too many answers to the question “What went wrong❓I turn to the two-party system because, although it is at present its own worst enemy, there is still hope that it can allow the great public to make decisions about the course of government. It has gone wrong, too, but it can change, almost passively, if it happens to channel the decisions of an impassioned electorate. 

Insofar as it gives voters power, it is imperiled. It can thwart the intentions of very powerful interests and individuals. This is an assertion of democracy, wonderful or regrettable and benighted, but in any case essential if the historical character of the country is to be preserved.

Our elections have been based on there being two great factions that alternate in roles of power without much conflict. The problems of the system have been largely manageable. Three or more parties lead to the rule of a minority able to provide or deny the numbers necessary to produce a ruling plurality. Government by a group few people actually voted for, that can always threaten to withdraw their support if its interests are not looked after, is not an improvement. One-party government is synonymous with dictatorship.

Any free election is, in effect, a referendum. Our binary system can be taken to express either a Yes or a No. More granular interpretations are left to commentators or the opinion polls, or the parties themselves. This leaves the public voice vulnerable to being misread, or to being tendentiously misinterpreted. To the extent that this takes effect, the public has been denied its voice.

Recently there was a Democratic sweep of a series of special elections. What did this mean? In a moment as fraught as this one, it would be good to know what the people are thinking. An issue that supposedly decided these various contests was settled upon immediately—affordability❗

This six syllable word assumes that the problem is not that income has stagnated but that certain grocery items, lettuce and eggs, are too expensive. Higher wages would transform the economy. It would be a redistribution of wealth, however modest. Fiddling around with the price of a few groceries would be cheap and easy. An added, much more significant advantage, it would preempt and dismiss the possibility that the great, sovereign electorate might have anything serious, anything relevant to the well-being of their country, anything generous, on their minds.

• billfold and 
• kitchen table.

These are the two terms used to express the condescension that entraps the voting public, in the way they are addressed by politicians and campaigns, and in the way they and their views are understood and brought to bear on public life. I was instructed by a Democratic candidate for state office on the mesmeric power of the word “affordability,” recently demonstrated so effectively. So the meaningfulness of a solid No to the present regime is reduced to an issue Trump can neuter by waving his (the Treasury Department’s) checkbook.

At one time, the two-party system fit fairly nicely within the structure of our government. The U.S. House and the Senate were deliberative bodies with important constitutional authority, which meant that there were differences within the parties as well as between them. 

Then came Newt Gingrich, a Roman Catholic convert and the creation of GOP party discipline. Republicans discovered the wrongminded power that came with sticking to the party line, however this tactic disempowered individual lawmakers and their constituencies, not to mention the institution of Congress itself. Constitutional obligations lost out to partisan power. Then came the next evil inspiration. They could change the constitutional order by simply playing dead. When they controlled the House, they could refuse to govern, leaving it to the president to fill the void, to do by executive order what should be done by legislation. This strengthens the president, weakens the law by circumvention, and defeats the intentions of the Founders with consequences they insistently predicted. And, it excludes opposition influences and radically minimizes public discussion.

So, now we have a grotesquely 🤢empowered Donald Trump. 

Because of Trump's hubris, great institutions are diminished and humiliated, the House of Representatives being first. 

The No available to the people in our binary system is associated with the Democratic Party, whoever they are. 

The great issues of these days must be confronted by the people. Whatever their (our) shortcomings are, we are figures of shining integrity compared with those who now presume to govern. 

A braver press would educate us better, certainly, but we know enough to be appalled at the grave threats to freedom and justice we see in our streets.

Only consider: Donald Trump claims that many billions of dollars have come in as a result of his tariffs. He speaks of this as a sort of slush fund that he can use as he sees fit, maybe reducing taxes or just mailing out checks to the public, benevolently repairing injuries done by his government to those he thinks will vote for him. But the fact is,  Americans are paying the cost of those tariffs. 

So, it is Americans’ money💲 that is being siphoned into this vast pool, with inevitable consequences for “affordability.” They never voted for tariffs, and in the recent special elections they might well have voted against them. If all this money were collected by taxation, at least the public might have some input into the use of it, especially if they had a functioning House. If Trump extracts $10 billion from his suit against the IRS, where will that money go? This bizarre super-economy of ultra-wealth can create self-protective arrangements neither the laws nor the Founders anticipated, together with a culture of cynicism ready to exploit its worst possibilities.

Money and power corrupt. The proper response to this ancient truth is not “populism,” which expresses the inchoate resentments of a subordinated class, and which has shown itself to be helpless against gross abuses. The one thing needed is democracy. We have seen the people speak and act from a deep awareness of their uniquely legitimate authority. We have seen their humanity, their dignity, and their wisdom. At the same time we have also seen the degradations that follow from arrogance, avarice and impunity. The contrast is as stark and instructive as any moral fable.

Vladimir Putin may have been a formidable spy but proving to be inept as a military strategist- Ukraine Resists!

Maine Wroter: Donald Trump hardly mentioned the Ukraine during his long and boring "State of Delusion" speech to Congress on February 24, 2026. *See my note below.

Maybe a literate person in the White House can read this excellent essay to Donald Trump and also explain who Winston Churchill was.....just sayin'.:😟😧😠  "A Bitter Winter in Ukraine" by Tom Judah published in The New York Review of Books.

In August 2014, I went to see the Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov in Kyiv. Ukraine was emerging from the pro-Europe Maidan Revolution the previous winter; Russia had seized Crimea and was aiding and abetting pro-Russian rebels in the east of the country. Kurkov had just published Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev,
in which he imagined digging up potatoes at his country house in September, “regardless of the military situation,” and asked:

Where will I be❓ Where will my wife and children be in September❓ I want to believe we will be at home in Kiev, going to our country house every weekend like we usually do—grilling shashlik, gathering the harvest, making apple jam and spending the evenings in the summerhouse with a glass of wine, talking about the future.

He added, “It’s funny, but the future we talk about never seems to come.”

On the night of February 23, 2022, Kurkov invited me to dinner with friends at home in Kyiv. “I will cook borscht,” he said. The atmosphere was febrile. We made toasts “to victory” but had no idea of what was about to happen. A few hours later the Russians began their full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

For a while Kurkov set aside fiction. He wrote essays about the war, and last year he published Three Years on Fire: The Destruction of Ukraine, his fourth nonfiction book chronicling the revolution and then the war. The essays in Three Years on Fire accurately reflect the atmosphere of the Ukraine I know and have been reporting from for many years. In one he writes about a soldier who campaigned against the country’s predatory gambling industry—in the last few years gambling addiction has become a serious problem among soldiers who place bets on their phones—until he was killed in battle. In another essay we learn about the owner of the tropical fruit farm close to Kyiv who developed miniature banana trees that Ukrainians have been buying. At the beginning of the war, shelling cut the gas and electricity that kept his greenhouses warm, but he found that the trees were frost-resistant. Kurkov comments, “You could say the astonishing survival of these trees mirrors the unexpected staunchness with which Ukrainians are facing adversity.”

In January I was back in Kyiv. Kurkov and his wife had just returned from their country house. “Does the future still not come❓” I asked. Well, he said, reflecting a common feeling of resignation, “the future is just too far away. We live every day only in reality and we wait for the next morning and then we take that as reality.”

In the first part of the war in 2014–2015, it was easy for people in Kyiv to think of the fighting in the east as very far away, but four years into this second part it is anything but. In 2022 the Russians reached the outskirts of Kyiv before being driven back. 

Now Vladimir Putin and the Russians are trying to freeze Ukrainians into submission by relentlessly attacking the country’s energy grid. For much of the day there is no electricity in Kyiv or most of the rest of the country. Some 60 percent of Ukrainians get their heat and hot water from power stations, which have also been under attack. Kurkov’s radiators were cold, but he said his apartment was still warm because the building was old and took a long time to cool down. However, in many districts radiators are only lukewarm even when they are on.

When Russia began the full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukrainians at first could not believe that it was launching a war to conquer the entire country rather than a more limited operation in the Donbas region in the east. Then came fear, followed by euphoria, as the Russians were driven back that summer and winter. Many in the West admired the Ukrainians’ resilience—so many volunteered to fight that the armed forces had to turn people away, and civilians mobilized in huge numbers to help their soldiers and refugees. Later came admiration for the drone technology Ukrainians have developed, which has transformed warfare. Now things are different again. “People are changing,” said Kurkov. “Attitudes are changing, dreams and hopes are changing.”

In Kyiv it was −17 degrees Celsius (roughly 1 degree Fahrenheit), and the trees, with their bare branches coated in glistening ice, looked as if they had been turned to glass. 

Streetlights were on in some places, but others were completely dark. Kurkov described the mood as “like when you get an overdose of bad news. You stop reacting, you just accept it.” He said he had stopped counting the children of friends who had been killed in the fighting and people he knew who had died after they had stopped seeking care when they were ill, “because they think that doctors should be paying attention to wounded soldiers, not to civilians.” The nation, he said, was living through amassive nervous breakdown because people don’t see the exit from this situation. People don’t understand how it can end. And they can imagine only a very bad ending to this story, because you cannot stop the war. I mean that is not up to Ukraine.

One night, in the southeastern city of Dnipro, I was in bed working on my laptop when I heard explosions. At first I ignored them, and then I sent a WhatsApp message to my Ukrainian colleague Taras Semenyuk: “Did you hear that❓❗” He replied:

Yes- News reporting about Shaheds
It’s a massive attack going on

Shaheds are Iranian-designed drones that are now produced in Russia and are much more sophisticated, powerful, and destructive than earlier models. I checked local Dnipro channels that report where drones are and where they are heading and replied:

Yes, I can see on Telegram.  Strange my air alert did not go off.

And that was it. I went on working. For the first two years of the full-scale war Semenyuk, like many Ukrainians, was extremely anxious and always went to a shelter when there was an attack. That was not surprising. In the first weeks of the war, his apartment in Kyiv had been destroyed by a missile aimed at a nearby heating plant. It was only by chance that he was not there, and his wife and child had already left for Poland. But now, like millions of others, he just shrugs. This is not to say that people are not frightened by major drone, cruise, and ballistic missile attacks but simply that the chance of being killed or injured in one is actually quite small. According to the UN, in government-controlled territory in 2025, 2,395 civilians were killed and 11,751 injured, but 63 percent of all civilian casualties on both sides were in frontline areas. The attacks in Dnipro that night were aimed at energy facilities, and the next day there was no electricity in the city.

Russian drones and missiles are often inaccurate, says the military analyst Ivan Stupak. Between 60 and 80 percent of them are shot down, though falling debris from them also causes damage, as do Ukrainian antiaircraft misfires. For civilians it is often hard to know what hit their building. Stupak says it is possible that 10 percent of attacks target residential blocks in order to strike terror, which has the intended effect. “I don’t want to pretend we are all Rambos❗”

From Dnipro, Semenyuk and I went to Zaporizhzhia, a major industrial city on the Dnieper River. In 2022 the Russians seized roughly 75 percent of Zaporizhzhia province, including its nuclear power plant, which is the largest in Europe. It used to supply about one fifth of Ukraine’s electricity and is now shut down. The Russians failed, however, to take the city of Zaporizhzhia. Many of its people fled, but they were replaced by refugees from occupied areas. Like all big cities it has been subjected to missile and Shahed attacks, and now the Russians are creeping closer from the south. In November a southern district of the city was hit by its first FPV (first-person-view) drone attack. These are short-range drones with a video feed that are controlled by a pilot using a screen or goggles and that can chase and target individuals, unlike Shaheds and other long-range drones whose target is preset.

The telltale sign that you are within range of FPVs is netting, which snarls drones that fly into it. We drove to the village of Balabyne, a few minutes south of the outskirts of Zaporizhzhia, and found that a net tunnel had been erected to protect the entire main street. People were beginning to leave, we were told by Tetiana, who works in a local shop. The drones attack civilians and their cars for no reason, she said. There is a reason, of course: to terrorize. On social media there are endless films from FPV drones released by both Russian and Ukrainian military units that like to show off their prowess. You see the drones carefully maneuvering through windows and buildings and zeroing in on soldiers who see them and run or try to bat them off. The last image is someone’s face a split second before the drone explodes and kills them.

In towns in the east of Ukraine from which I have reported, FPV drones are an increasing menace. In Kramatorsk, which was held by pro-Russian rebels in 2014 for almost three months, people have begun to leave because of them. After Bakhmut fell in 2023 and then Avdiivka nine months later, then Pokrovsk was next. As the Russians crept closer the drones made ordinary life impossible, and now it has all but fallen. Kostyantynivka, another town I have reported from but did not name because the unit I was with did not want me to identify their location, has now become part of the drone-terrorized zone and is gradually being reduced to rubble.

Anti-drone netting protecting the main road from the Kharkiv provincial border to Sloviansk, Ukraine on January 6, 2026.

The center of Izium, southeast of Kharkiv, has also been netted up to protect people. Much of the twenty-eight miles of road from the Kharkiv provincial border southeast to Sloviansk and neighboring Kramatorsk has been turned into a net tunnel.

It is wise to take other precautions as well. Just over a year ago I wrote about traveling with soldiers with a drone detector.
That was the first time I had seen one. Now they are commonplace. The Journalists’ Solidarity Center of Kharkiv, organized by Ukraine’s journalists’ union, loaned us one. It was handheld and the screen fizzed like an old-fashioned television with no reception. If it suddenly came to life with a picture, though, that meant it had locked on to a nearby drone and we could see what its pilot was seeing. It could, of course, be flying somewhere else, but if it was flying toward us, we would have just a minute or two to find cover. At the checkpoint-cum-junction where the net tunnel between Izium and Sloviansk begins, some cars, like ours, drove straight on while others, including delivery trucks, turned off to take a detour out of Russian FPV drone range.

All these towns, except for Izium and Kharkiv, are in the Donbas, which has become a major point of contention in the peace talks among Ukraine, the US, and Russia. Vladimir Putin wants this entire rust belt region, which consists of the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk. In the military campaigns of 2014–2015 and 2022, Russia took 99 percent of Luhansk, and it now occupies about 75 percent of Donetsk. Taking the rest is Putin’s “minimum plan,” said Major Viacheslav Shutenko, the commander of the Legion North drone battalion of Ukraine’s 44th Mechanized Brigade, as he showed me the massive fortifications of razor wire, anti-infantry wire, and anti-tank ditches and berms that snake as far as the eye can see around Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. Putin desperately needs an achievement to show off to Russians, he said. After all, in the time it took the Soviet Union to recover from its initial defeats by the Germans in World War II and its men to raise their flag above the Reichstag in Berlin, Putin’s troops have failed to retake even little Kramatorsk.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has resisted ceding this territory to Russia, and there has been vague talk of turning it into a “free economic zone” and of “demilitarization.” Since the biggest local industries have always been mining and old-fashioned heavy manufacturing, it is hard from here to see why anyone would invest in the Donbas in the future, although clearly things look different from Mar-a-Lago. Yet it is obvious why handing it over to the Russians or demilitarizing it without rock-solid security guarantees is a trap. Major Shutenko and I stood on the crest of a hill from which, beyond this so-called fortress belt, Ukraine is as flat as a pancake for more than six hundred miles, all the way to the Polish border. The Dnieper, which flows from the north down to the Black Sea, divides all of Ukraine, including Kyiv, into two parts and is the only natural barrier after these soft, rolling hills.

No one I have met in Ukraine believes that a cease-fire will come this year or would be anything other than a limited truce, as the one in 2015 was, rather than part of a full peace deal. If Ukraine were forced to accept a truce that included handing over to Russia the last bit of the Donbas that Ukraine controls, which is what the US has been reported to have demanded, it would be akin to Czechoslovakia being forced by France and Britain to hand over the Sudetenland to Germany in 1938, despite the fortifications it had built in those border areas. As a result the Czechoslovaks could not defend themselves when Hitler proceeded to take over the rest of the country a few months later. Yevhen Hlibovytsky, the director of the Frontier Institute, says, “Russia won’t want a deal unless it becomes really vulnerable, and if it does, then Ukraine won’t want one.”

Hlibovytsky may be right, but Ukrainians are struggling to survive the slow erosion of their economic and military capabilities. They lack men, they lack energy, and their economy is being ground down. The Russians are advancing very slowly and tens of thousands of them are dying in the process, but there is no evidence that Putin cares. Apart from the energy grid, says Stupak, the Russians are now choosing high-value targets like ballistic and cruise missile plants rather than trying to take out the hundreds of small drone companies. Although such matters are a tightly guarded secret, it is likely that the Russians have caused significant damage to military production, but thus far he has not heard of any disruption of drone and ammunition deliveries to the front. And the Russians have not broken Ukrainian morale.

At the front both Ukraine and Russia have been making up for flagging numbers by recruiting thousands of foreigners. Ukraine does this because its mobilization system is inefficient, nontransparent, and sometimes corrupt. Clips on social media of men being chased, caught, and bundled into vans by recruitment officers are a boon for Russian propaganda, and grabbing people off the streets who don’t want to fight is a poor way of replenishing the ranks. Putin, meanwhile, does not want to risk unpopularity by drafting people rather than offering recruits huge salaries compared with what they can earn in their often far-flung and poor provincial regions. Today 30 percent of Russian troops captured or surrendering to Ukrainian forces may be Africans and other foreigners, depending on the location. On the Ukrainian side, one of the largest contingents of foreigners fighting for money is from Colombia.

Ugandans and other Africans, who are derided on social media as “disposables” by Russians filming them, are unlikely to change the course of the war, though North Koreans did help eject the Ukrainians from Russia’s Kursk region, which they had briefly occupied in the summer of 2024. In any case, Putin now seems to be counting on the winter to swing things in his favor, just as it helped Russia defeat Hitler and Napoleon before him. But Ukrainians are used to winter combat, so the result may be different this time.

Just before the full-scale invasion started, Ukraine had 33.7 gigawatts of electrical generation capacity; in early January it had only fourteen gigawatts, and if the winter remains as exceptionally cold as it has been, it will need seventeen gigawatts to keep electricity flowing 24/7. Not all the loss of generation capacity can be attributed to destruction. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which has been another point of dispute in the peace talks, used to provide six gigawatts and could again.

In the past Ukraine produced more electricity than it needed and even exported some. Now its surplus capacity has been destroyed, and its energy officials are scouring the rest of Europe and farther afield for replacement equipment. Russia, meanwhile, is changing its tactics. Previously it concentrated its attacks on large power plants that had relatively good air defenses. Now it has switched to targeting some 3,500 smaller substations that are the essential links between the power plants and consumers.

From the news coverage, one might have the impression that all Ukrainians are hapless victims freezing in the dark. In fact, extremely difficult though this winter is proving to be, four years into the war most Ukrainians have made some sort of preparations to help them get through power outages, especially if they have some money. Power companies publish schedules showing when districts will have power, which allows people to plan their days, although in mid-January this system broke down in Kyiv, and on January 20 many in the capital woke up to find that temporarily they had no water either.

Shops have generators, small industries have invested in battery capacity, and larger companies have installed their own electricity production facilities using natural gas. Everyone has power banks, rechargeable lamps are common, and those who can afford them have bought large portable batteries commonly known as EcoFlows, after the best-known brand. In apartment buildings residents have often joined together to buy generators to keep elevators and heat pumps working. Getting stuck on higher floors is a real problem for the elderly and families with small children.

“We are holding on, but people are getting angrier and angrier,” said Valentina, a kindergarten teacher I met, along with her five-year-old daughter, as she was charging her phone and power banks in a well-heated orange tent erected by the emergency services in Rusanivka, a neighborhood of Kyiv. In the next tent I met a couple of cheerful pensioners who told me it was only 13 degrees Celsius (around 55 degrees Fahrenheit) in their apartments. When I asked why there were not many people in the tents trying to keep warm, they said it was not necessary because everyone in the area had gas stoves and if you kept them on then you could at least keep your kitchen warm.

Ukrainians might be resilient, but attacks on the energy system and other targets are harming the economy. According to Andrii Dligach, who heads a coalition of business associations, attacks and power outages shaved 0.6 percent off Ukraine’s GDP in the last quarter of 2025. When sirens sound in the center of Kyiv, for example, McDonald’s loses business, as does the Globus Mall next door, because its scores of shops and cafés close. Many other shops and restaurants stay open, though. The McDonald’s at the Lukianivska metro station opposite the Artem defense complex, which has been targeted several times, has installed shatterproof windows. The plate glass windows of the metro, long since blown out, have just been boarded up. Dmytro, the owner of a chain of shoe shops, said that all his colleagues agree that the last few months have been the hardest since the full-scale invasion began: “When it is cold at home and when you have no power, you are just not in the mood to go shopping.”

Some are also not in the mood to stay in the country. Dmytro said that in the last few weeks two of his shop assistants had decided to leave. One was going because her entire family was already abroad, and another was taking her twenty-two-year-old son out of Ukraine. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion men age eighteen to sixty have not been allowed to travel abroad without an exemption. In August the lower limit was changed to twenty-three. Men can be mobilized at the age of twenty-five. While I was writing this in Lviv, in Ukraine’s west, I was asked to give a talk to journalism students at the city’s Ukrainian Catholic University. Journalism courses have always attracted more girls than boys there, I was told, but among the twenty students in the room, there was not a single boy. The last few had left when the travel age limit changed. Tens of thousands of young men are estimated to have gone since August.

An opinion poll published at the end of January found that 65 percent of Ukrainians were willing “to endure the war” for “as long as it takes.” But Ukraine cannot fight alone. The US is no longer supplying much equipment directly; instead it is selling it to NATO countries, which then pass it on to Ukraine. “The war costs us nothing,” boasted Donald Trump in an interview with The New York Times in early January. “We make money with the war now.” What the US does continue to supply, though, is satellite military intelligence. It is crucial for the guidance of Ukraine’s deep-strike drones, which are inflicting heavy damage on Russia’s oil installations.

Still, Ukraine could become collateral damage from utterly unrelated events. On January 9 Trump provoked the worst crisis in transatlantic relations in our time by insisting that if the US could not acquire Greenland “the easy way,” it would have to get it “the hard way.” On January 21 he said he would not use force, but his demands helped accelerate the loss of the Europeans’ trust in the US as an ally. In the preceding weeks Britain and France thought they had received assurances from Washington that it would participate in security guarantees for Ukraine in the event of a cease-fire, though it would not send troops. Kurkov remarked of Trump that “nobody believes he is willing to do anything” about Ukraine because he was trying to “copycat [Putin] by going into Venezuela and with his desire to take over Greenland.”

After the Greenland crisis erupted, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, (in a not so well veiled threat).... “The European leaders will come around…. What would happen in Ukraine if the US pulled its support out❓ The whole thing would collapse.” 

No. In fact, Ukraine would probably not collapse, but defending it and shoring up its economy, military, and morale would certainly become harder, and anti-Western sentiment there would grow if defeats were ascribed to a stab in the back by the US and weak Europeans.

As the Arctic crisis unfolded, the glee in the Russian press about Trump’s demands and the damage done to NATO could hardly be contained. But Hlibovytsky said that Ukrainians do not have the luxury of worrying about all that: “We accept these things the same way we accept the weather.” Then he cautioned:

There is an error in the calculus of many Western politicians that the alternative to not helping Ukraine is the status quo and that if they don’t help then everything stays the same. No, it doesn’t. If they don’t help Ukraine, the hidden cost that they will have to face is so tremendous that if their societies would be aware of that cost, they would probably wish that the governments of the Western countries did more.

Those hidden costs could include, for example, open Russian attacks on NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) countries such as the Baltics and Poland.

In gas stations across Ukraine you can buy the Ukrainian translation of former British prime minister Boris Johnson’s biography of Winston Churchill. It does not take much imagination to connect the historical dots. After the Czechoslovaks were betrayed in 1938, Churchill famously told Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, “You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.” When you stand on a hill in the Donbas it is very easy to see that, as Mark Twain is reputed to have said, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

—February 11, 2026

*Pope Leo XIV sent 80 generators to Ukraine to help citizens battle the freezing temperatures, according to Vatican News. The Pope responded to appeals from several bishops, with temperatures dropping to -15C and some families having to find warmth in heated shelters with the help of generators. Feb 13, 2026