Donald Trump is illegally using naval blockades without cause but he cannot find an exit out of the Iran War

Blockades Don’t Work the Way Trump Thinks

Echo opinion essay published in The New York Times by 
By Jennifer Kavanagh,  director of military analysis at Defense Priorities.

It shouldn’t have been surprising when Donald Trump announced on April 12 that the United States would begin a blockade of Iranian ports to force Tehran to accept a peace deal.

Trump prides himself on being unpredictable. But he is a creature of habit, and blockades have quickly emerged as one of his preferred military tactics since his return to the White House. 

Unfortunately, he already used them against Venezuela and Cuba. Now his administration has expanded the Iran embargo, and started to seize Iran-linked ships on the high seas.

But, Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz was not the reason the United States started this war. Before the conflict, traffic passed freely through the narrow waterway. But Tehran’s effective closure of the strait since the United States and Israel attacked two months ago has emerged as the war’s most bedeviling problem and one Trump is desperate to fix. He hopes that by instituting a blockade of his own, he can choke Iran’s economy and force the country’s leaders to reopen the strait and accept Washington’s terms of surrender.

This is unlikely to work for the same reasons the United States finds itself facing strategic defeat by a weaker adversary: a mismatch of stakes and time horizons. While Iran has gained the upper hand in this conflict by extending and surviving what it considers an existential war, Trump wants a fast and decisive victory, something a blockade cannot deliver. A blockade may impose costs on Iran’s economy and population, but it will not deal the quick knockout blow the Trump administration seeks.


Blockades are designed to work slowly, with pressure accumulating over time. At the beginning of the American Civil War, for example, President Abraham Lincoln ordered a blockade of ports across the Confederacy, targeting some 3,500 miles of coastline. It had the desired effect, eventually cutting Southern cotton exports by as much as 90 percent and severely damaging the Southern economy. But it did not result in a rapid end to the war: Fighting between North and South continued for four years.

A similar story played out during the British naval blockade of Germany in World War I. Instituted almost immediately after the war began in 1914, it aimed to limit Germany’s access to essentials like food, medicine and materials that might support the war effort. 

The blockade imposed severe hardship on the German people, contributing to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, and hampered military operations. But Germany did not immediately surrender. The war endured until the end of 1918.

That blockades often fail to quickly change an adversary’s behavior is something Trump and his advisers should know. 

Earlier this year, the United States started interdicting oil shipments to Cuba in an effort to force Havana to make political and economic concessions. The island is now on the brink of humanitarian collapse, but the Cuban regime has yet to yield. The U.S. blockade of Venezuela’s oil exports was similarly ineffective: Trump announced it in December 2025, part of a monthslong pressure campaign to force President Nicolás Maduro to step down. When a few weeks of blockade failed to elicit any compromise, Mr. Trump had to escalate further, seizing Mr. Maduro and his wife in a dangerous military raid.

Iran may prove even more resilient. The blockade has reduced the country’s oil revenues to a fraction of their prewar levels, but it is likely to be some time before the consequences become untenable for Iran’s regime. In the near term, Tehran will continue to receive oil revenue from shipments that left its ports weeks ago, and at least 34 tankers with links to Iran appear to have slipped through the blockade. These and any future successful exports can be sold at higher prices, which may continue to rise as the war drags on.

To prevent this, the administration has said that the U.S. military will pursue any ship helping Iran, anywhere in the world, a move that is of ambiguous legality under international law. 

To meet the legal standard, any blockade must be deemed “effective,” meaning it is carried out with enough military power to be consistently and impartially enforced; has clearly defined geographic limits; and includes provisions for humanitarian relief. The expanded U.S. blockade meets none of these requirements. It has no geographic boundaries or humanitarian provisions, and the U.S. Navy’s limited capacity to interdict container ships and tankers means it will have to choose which cargoes to intercept or focus on specific regions. It cannot, therefore, be “effective.” 

In the end, most Iranian oil shipments that are already at sea will almost certainly make it to their destinations.

At home, Iran has other ways to mitigate the effects of the blockade. Recent estimates suggest Iran has about 90 million barrels of available oil storage capacity, enough for at least two months of production, before it must make production cuts that risk permanent damage to its oil infrastructure. 

Tehran also has reserves of food and other essentials, and land-based trade routes that it can fall back on if needed for imports of some commodities and even some oil exports. Iran can likely endure the U.S. blockade for months without facing economic collapse. Even then, its leaders might choose to fight on rather than agree to American terms they perceive as a compromise of Iranian sovereignty.

For Trump, this timeline is likely to be unacceptable. His impatience with the war is evident in his increasingly erratic Truth Social posts and near-constant crazy assertions that the war is already over.

His sense of urgency is understandable. Not only is the war deeply unpopular in the United States, but its effects on the American and global economies are real — and likely to grow. The longer the impasse lasts, the more severe fuel and fertilizer shortages will become across East Asia and Europe, and the more Gulf state oil exporters will suffer. A prolonged blockade will also push global oil prices higher, increasing U.S. inflation and torpedoing Trump’s affordability pitch in the upcoming midterm elections.

Instead of stripping Iran of its most important source of leverage — control of the Strait of Hormuz — Trump’s blockade may play into the Islamic republic’s hands. The blockade harms Iran’s economic future, but may lead to a longer, costlier war for the United States, severe and lasting damage to U.S. and global markets and further domestic political damage for Trump.

In a test of wills, Tehran has the advantage and a higher pain tolerance. With their survival on the line, Iran’s leaders can afford to be patient.

"Vaccinate your children against measles. The shots work and are safe and nobody needs to die from this disease," Dr. Paul Offit

"To some extent, vaccines have been a victim of their own success. They made many disease outbreaks a thing of the past, and people have forgotten how terrible those outbreaks were. We are at growing risk of experiencing that misery again." 

New York Times Editorial Board

Measles Is Back❗

The resurgence of measles — a terrible disease that can swell the brain and cause permanent disabilities or death — is alarming enough on its own. There have been more than 1,700 cases reported in the United States already this year, up from about 70 per year in the early 2000s. Three children died last year.

The rise of measles may also be a harbinger of something even worse, public officials say.

 “Measles is basically a canary in the coal mine for our entire system,” says Dr. Scott Harris, the state health officer in Alabama’s Department of Public Health. “When it surges like this, it signals that our vaccination programs are starting to fail, and that other diseases won’t be far behind.” Already, cases of whooping cough have surged, too. And after two Florida children died of Hib, a bacterial infection, epidemiologists worry that disease is resurgent.

The most maddening aspect of this situation is that it was almost certainly avoidable. It stems in large part from a yearslong scare campaign by vaccine conspiracists including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who now serves as President Trump’s secretary of health and human services. Since taking office, Mr. Kennedy has turned his damaging ideas into federal policy. He has downplayed the seriousness of measles outbreaks; promoted dubious treatments and prevention strategies; replaced an expert panel that shaped federal vaccine recommendations with people who share his views but, for the most part, lack relevant experience or expertise; and made substantial changes to the childhood vaccine schedule without even convening that same group.

There is some reason to hope that the political climate is shifting against RFKjr, the vaccine conspiracy theorist with no medical experience who is the Secretary of Health and Human Services. 

In March, a federal judge blocked his changes to the childhood vaccine schedule, calling them arbitrary, capricious and most likely illegal, and the Trump administration has not yet appealed. Last week, Donald Trump announced the nomination of Dr. Erica Schwartz, a well-qualified Navy officer who supports vaccines, to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Kennedy, appearing at several congressional hearings over the past week, tried to soft-pedal his views at times and even acknowledged that his department “has advised every child” to get the measles shot.

But, unfortunately Kennedy does not appear to have changed his actual views, and the threat to vaccines remains substantial. 

The military recently eliminated its flu vaccine requirement, for example. And the C.D.C. disingenuously canceled the publication of a study documenting large, continuing benefits from the Covid-19 vaccines.

Reversing vaccine skepticism will require a dedicated effort. State officials and members of Congress, especially Republicans, should speak up. So should doctors, nurses, religious leaders and corporate leaders. Protecting Americans from deadly, preventable diseases should not be a partisan issue, despite the attempts by opportunists like Kennedy to make it one.

Studies have suggested that only a small share of parents are hardened anti-vaxxers who refuse all shots. Many more are merely anxious and looking for trusted guides or good information. The key is to meet these families where they are. Health workers can listen empathetically and provide easily understandable information. They can be careful to avoid using too many statistics and jargon and instead tell human stories. Hearing about even one child who died from a preventable disease can sometimes be persuasive.

Skepticism about vaccinations began to grow in the early 2000s, in both the United States and some other wealthy countries. It sprang partly from a 1998, study that linked vaccines to autism and has since been discredited. 

In fact, the unfounded worries have been part of a broader rise in conspiratorial politics, fueled by a combination of partisan polarization, social media and other factors.

The Covid pandemic once seemed as if it might reinstall confidence. The virus was a new and terrifying pathogen for which scientists developed a safe, highly effective vaccine in record time. It offered a case study in the power of vaccination. But sadly Covid, too, soon became subject to political polarization.

Many conservatives questioned the vaccine in irrational and self-defeating ways. Liberals rightly embraced the vaccine but sometimes went so far as to be alienating — insisting that children needed annual boosters (which most countries did not), calling for the firing of unvaccinated people and more. The combination played into many Americans’ pre-existing uncertainty about how much to trust public health experts. In the years since, vaccination rates for other diseases have slipped further.

A vast majority of American children — more than 90 percent by most estimates — are still vaccinated for measles. 

Nevertheless, it takes a threshold of 95 percent to stop the illness from spreading, and in too many communities, the rates are lower than that already, or falling fast. In Idaho, just 78.5 percent of kindergartners were vaccinated for measles last school year. Nationwide vaccination rates for several other diseases, including flu, hepatitis B, rotavirus, Hib, polio and whooping cough, are also down.

A policy known as “shared clinical decision making,” which Mr. Kennedy put in place for some shots in January and remains in effect, has proved pernicious. The practice sounds innocuous. It involves doctors discussing options with their patients and then allowing the patients to decide which course to pursue. But doctors normally reserve it for cases in which a treatment’s benefits are unclear, which is not the case with standard childhood vaccines. “It implies that either decision, to take it or not to take it, is equally OK, and that’s not the case with vaccines,” Dr. Harris said.

Doctors now must spend more time rebutting misinformation and making the case for vaccines. Doctors report that hesitancy is spreading from vaccines to other medical staples. Last year, for instance, at least three infants died after their parents opted out of a routine vitamin K injection meant to prevent internal bleeding.

The fallout from declining vaccination rates will not be confined to those who choose not to get vaccinated. For one thing, newborns cannot be vaccinated against most diseases and rely on the rest of society to provide herd immunity. For another thing, no vaccine is perfect: About 3 percent of people vaccinated against measles remain vulnerable to infection, often without realizing it.

Immunocompromised people, like those on chemotherapy, can also be vulnerable. They, too, rely on herd immunity. A return of vaccine-preventable diseases would also strain hospitals and doctors’ offices and require quarantines, school closures and other disruptive safety protocols.

What can be done? So long as Kennedy remains health secretary and insists on making up his own facts, the options will be limited. The country needs vaccine policies based on scientific consensus and federal investments in both vaccine distribution and disease treatment.

Nonetheless, other leaders can step forward to mitigate the damage. Governors and members of Congress from both parties can issue clear messages about the benefits of vaccines. As Dr. Paul Offit of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia puts it: “Vaccinate your children against measles. The shots work, and are safe and nobody needs to die from this disease.”

States and local governments can also adopt helpful policies that counteract the RFKjr's pseudoscience. 

One tangible step would be to make vaccines easier to obtain by opening more pop-up clinics in schools and community centers. It would also be useful to tighten the requirements for vaccine exemptions. Several states require families to receive information about vaccines before they can receive nonmedical exemptions, and more should follow. Families should also have to apply individually for any exemption, rather than being able to receive a blanket exemption covering all shots.

The arguments against vaccines have been circulating for more than a century, even if social media has allowed them to spread more easily. The claims can seem compelling but can be debunked. Vaccines prevent three million to five million deaths globally each year. They are not toxic and they do not cause autism, full stop.

To some extent, vaccines have been a victim of their own success. They made many disease outbreaks a thing of the past, and people have forgotten how terrible those outbreaks were. We are at growing risk of experiencing that misery again.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are supporting maniac threats to destroy an entire Iranian civilization

Echo essay in The New Yorker magazine: In his April 2026 reporting, David Remnick frames the second term of Donald Trump as a profound global threat, characterizing the administration's actions as a "strategic failure and moral calamity". Remnick's analysis focuses on the degradation of democratic norms and international stability.

#ImpeachTrumpNOW❗

Trump’s Strategic and Moral Failure in Iran

From the first day of his failed administration beginning in 2016 and continuing the second term in 2024, Trump has posed an emergency to both his country and the world. April 10, 2026

Not many years ago, a ruthless man with an uneasy mind took power in his country and created a cult of personality. 

In the center of the capital, he erected a gold statue of himself that rotated with the sun. He stashed billions in a foreign bank. He closed the academy of sciences, the ballet, the philharmonic, the circus, and all provincial libraries. His autobiography became the nation’s spiritual guide. He banned dogs from the capital for their “unappealing odor.” He renamed the months: January for himself, April for his mother. He was fond of melons. The second Sunday of August became National Melon Day. Such was the world of Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan’s leader from 1985, until his death in 2006, by cardiac arrest. 

For the Turkmen people, there was nothing comical about life under his dictatorship. He barred dissent and packed his jails with prisoners of conscience. The only consolation was that he could not impose his grandiosity on the globe.

Donald Trump, by contrast, has, from the first day of his administration, posed an emergency to both our country and the world, even as he has ceaselessly invoked the language of “emergency” to inflate threats, suspend norms, and expand his own power. A decade ago, he was already making statements that flouted the ordinary standards of adult behavior. When it came to North Korea, for example, he alternated between cooing words of affection for Kim Jong Un and issuing taunts that mixed nuclear brinkmanship with masculine insecurity: “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

Trump embodies the notion that, with age, you become what you always were, only more so. In the final days of the 2024, campaign, he met with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board. When asked whether he would deploy the U.S. military if China, under Xi Jinping, were to blockade Taiwan, Trump replied, “I wouldn’t have to, because he respects me, and he knows I’m fucking crazy.”

The MAGA coalition has long countenanced Trump’s bigotry and cruelty. But now, with the repeated violations of an America First foreign policy, his poll numbers have plummeted. 

Since returning to office, Trump has ordered military strikes on Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, and Iran, and has felt little need to provide a coherent rationale for any of them. According to reporting by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, of the Times, Trump and his national-security advisers gathered in the Situation Room on February 11th to listen to the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, argue for a coördinated attack on Iran. 

Even though the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, made their reservations plain—Rubio called Netanyahu’s talk of regime change “bullshit”—Trump blundered ahead. And, as in the days of the Turkmen dictator, everyone fell into line.

But when the Iranian regime failed to collapse or capitulate, when Netanyahu’s prediction of a national uprising failed to materialize, Trump turned to threats of war crimes and genocide against the very people he claimed to be helping liberate:

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?

These were not the words of a strategist. They were the words of a maniac. And they had a galvanizing effect, though hardly in the way Trump might have intended. Some of his erstwhile acolytes—Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones—seem to have woken up to how dangerous he has always been. Yet around the Cabinet table, at Mar-a-Lago, and in the Republican caucus on Capitol Hill, it is gospel that his deranged threats forced a ceasefire and scored a major victory. The President’s war, though, seems poised to achieve little that was not already available through prewar diplomacy, or through some renewed version of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A., the Iran nuclear deal secured by the Obama Administration.

In fact, the original sin of this disaster was Trump’s 2018, abandonment of that deal. 

For all its limits, it had stalled Iran’s march toward an atomic weapon. But Netanyahu, long eager for a full-scale war against Iran—aimed not only at its nuclear program but at its proxies, such as Hezbollah—shrewdly played on Trump’s vanity and his contempt for Barack Obama. Trump destroyed the J.C.P.O.A. with nothing to replace it.

So the war stands as a strategic failure and a moral calamity. The ceasefire is already fragile. “The whole point of this exercise was supposedly to advance the cause of freedom in Iran,” Karim Sadjadpour, a Washington-based specialist on the country, said. “To go from ‘help is on the way’ to ‘we are going to wipe out your civilization’ is strategic malpractice.” According to Danny Citrinowicz, an Iran expert who formerly worked in Israeli intelligence, Trump’s principal envoys to the region, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, almost certainly misread Iran’s capabilities and intentions. “This is a colossal disaster and should never have happened,” Citrinowicz said, noting that it will “haunt the region and world for many years to come.”

In the opening days of the war, the United States and Israel killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and wiped out much of Iran’s defense and intelligence leadership, apparently believing that the regime would somehow give way to “moderates” and “pragmatists.” Instead, the theocracy and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps remain in place, equally radical, equally repressive, and more determined than ever to acquire the ultimate deterrent: a nuclear weapon. Why give up that pursuit, as Libya did, and leave yourself exposed, when you can, like North Korea, achieve it and deter attack?

Trump has gone far toward shattering what’s left of America’s global stature. His preposterous bluster about Greenland, Cuba, and NATO has undermined the postwar alliance. He has humiliated and betrayed the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky. And all the while Vladimir Putin, who aims to press Ukraine for still more territory, and Xi Jinping, who keeps Taiwan in view, watch the spectacle of Donald Trump for what it reveals about both his instability and the cratering credibility of American leadership.

In the midst of the war, Trump released plans for his presidential library. Its centerpiece will be an auditorium with an immense gold statue of himself. Whether it will turn with the sun 💥🤢 is not yet known. 

Published in the print edition of the April 20, 2026, issue, with the headline “Global Threat.”

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are losing the Iran World War because of cheap drones.

(Meanwhile, the cost of oil keeps going up because Donald Trump declared an illegal war without any plan about how to win or exit.)

Drones are blowing up old assumptions about US foreign policy.

#ImpeachTrumpNOW attention Senator Susan Collins

Echo essay published in the Boston Globe by Stephen Kinzer

America will find it harder to win arguments with military might alone. 

Waging war is one of humanity’s oldest pursuits. That is unlikely to end. Leaders seeking power or glory will always want to prove themselves on battlefields. The way wars are fought, however, changes over time. Today those changes are especially dramatic. Wars used to be won by the side that fielded the biggest, meanest, and best-equipped army. America’s misadventure in Iran is the latest proof that those days are over.

War is becoming democratized. Weaker powers can now resist
stronger ones in new ways. Revolutionaries, like those in Algeria, Vietnam, and Cuba, have often shown that smaller and more agile forces can triumph over larger ones.
Now governments are learning the same lesson. America’s failure to crush Iran, and Russia’s failure to impose its will in Ukraine, show that superior force is no longer enough to guarantee victory. In the new age of cheap drones, the value of expensive missiles, bombs, and fighter jets is suddenly limited. Today’s conflicts in Iran and Ukraine are opening a new era of warfare.

This is more than just an evolution in weapons technology. It is a paradigm shift that threatens the long-term power of countries that rely on military force to deter or resist enemies. The United States is the most prominent of those countries. 

That has profound implications for the course of American power.
The most immediate cause of this sudden reversal of fortune is the development of drones. They have become the poor man’s weapon of choice. That makes them the future of warfare.
Drones are cheap and easy to build. Depending on size and power, they can cost anywhere from 💲300 to 💲50,000. Compare that with the cost of American-made missiles that can shoot down drones: 💲3 million for each Patriot missile, at least 💲10 million for a THAAD interceptor. A drone factory can churn out hundreds in a week. Producing and delivering a Patriot battery takes a minimum of two years. Seeking to take advantage of this mismatch, Iranian leaders have sent swarms of drones to attack targets in Israel and the Persian Gulf. These are not intended to produce military victory. Iranians have realized that they can win simply by surviving. This is naturally unsettling to the United States, which is used to winning wars according to the old rules.
A similar dynamic shapes the war in Ukraine. Russia’s overwhelming military advantage should have allowed it to achieve its war goals in Ukraine just as easily as the Americans were supposed to achieve theirs in Iran. But as the Prussian general Helmuth von Moltke the Elder tartly observed more than a century ago, no war plan survives contact with the enemy. In the early stages of the Ukraine war, infantry charges and armored attacks were common. Now they are rare. The reason is simple: Any operation on open ground can be quickly spotted and attacked by drones.
One key difference between these two wars is the adaptability of the attacking power. Russia shifted its strategy just as Ukraine has. The two belligerents match each other drone for drone.
The United States has proved less willing or able to make such a sharp shift. Our lumbering and overfed defense industry is focused on making highly complex weapons systems that are also highly profitable. As Iran steadily churns out drones, the United States has scrambled to respond. Americans have even turned to their Ukrainian partners for advice on drone technology — a remarkable case of a student surpassing the teacher. 

In the future, if Iran and Ukraine are any indication, countries that adapt more quickly and imaginatively to strategic challenges will have an advantage over those that are slow-moving and tradition-bound.
This presents the United States with profound challenges. The most obvious is a challenge to our way of waging war. There was a time when a simple demand from Washington was enough to terrify a national leader into resigning. But obviously, that no longer works. If the United States wants to continue exercising military power over faraway lands, it will have to find new ways to do it.
The larger challenge for Americans is to decide whether exercising coercive power is what the United States should be doing in the 21st century. Our foreign policy is largely a matter of identifying enemies and finding ways to weaken or destroy them. The alternative would be to accept other countries as they are, and even seek to make them partners in a shared prosperity. Yet in Washington, it is an absolute taboo to suggest that compromising with Russia, China, or Iran could contribute more to our national security than any weapons system.
Raw power no longer brings either victory or stability. This is a gleeful moment for the underdogs. Superpowers do not seem so super anymore.
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans were overconfident about U.S. military power while cheap drones and A.I. are advancing war strategies

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Thomas L. Friedman: Trump Is the One Without the Cards at the Poker Table

Donald Trump often falls back on poker metaphors. 

He told President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine that he had “no cards” when it came to standing up to Russia. 

Trump told Iran’s leaders that they had “no cards” when it came to standing up to him.

Would somebody please tell me when it’s poker night at the Trump White House, because I’d really like a seat at that table❓🃏

Trump is betting that by blockading Iran to prevent it from exporting its oil he can force Tehran to negotiate on his terms. But some experts think Iran has enough income and can store enough oil to hold out for at least several months.

Meanwhile, Iran is betting that by choking off the Strait of Hormuz — and driving up gasoline and food prices for Americans and all their allies — Trump will eventually act in accord with his TACO label: Trump Always Chickens Out.

This is painful to watch. Trump and Tehran are each saying: “I will hold my breath until you turn blue.” We’ll see who gasps first.

The real question is: How in the world has Iran’s regime lasted this long — two months — against the combined military might of Israel and America? The answer: Trump does not understand how much asymmetric warfare has reshaped geopolitics in just the last few years.

Let's cut to reality. I don’t want to be too hard on Trump.  Afterall, he is not alone. Iran is to Trump what Ukraine is to Vladimir Putin, what Hamas and Hezbollah have been to Benjamin Netanyahu and — wait for it — what the next generation of cyberhackers will be to China and America and every other nation-state.

Think about it: Last June, Ukraine smuggled 117 cheap drones into Russia hidden inside trucks and destroyed or damaged about 20 of Russia’s strategic aircraft, including multimillion-dollar long-range, nuclear-capable strategic bombers.

This year, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps used $35,000 Shahed-136 drones to strike two Amazon Web Services data centers, costing tens of millions of dollars, in the United Arab Emirates (a third Amazon data center, in Bahrain, was damaged in a nearby strike), knocking them offline and disrupting banking and other services across the Persian Gulf region.

Previously, Hamas commanders said that they fashioned small rockets from piping from abandoned Israeli settlements, unexploded Israeli bombs and other munitions and even parts from a sunken British World War I warship off the Gaza coast. Israel was forced to use Patriot missiles costing $4 million each to intercept them.

In other words, we’re already in a new era in which small powers and small groups can leverage information-age tools — guided by GPS and digitally controlled — to gain asymmetric advantages.

“We have always thought of power in terms of the ability to create mass destruction,” John Arquilla, a former professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School and the author of the forthcoming “Troubled American Way of War,” told me in an interview. In an interdependent world, “the many and the small now have the ability to create ‘mass disruption’ in the physical or the virtual world” — from the Strait of Hormuz to cyberspace.

Trump recklessly started this war without allies, without any scenario planning and, obviously, without any real understanding of Iran’s assets in asymmetric warfare. Nevertheless, it would be a disaster for the region and the world if Iran’s malign regime emerges from this war intact and unreformed, because an even more powerful asymmetric tool kit for bad guys is just arriving.

Here’s what’s truly new and disturbing: We are rapidly moving from the age of asymmetric warfare based on “information-age tools” that can wreak mass disruption to what my technology tutor, Craig Mundie, a former head of research and strategy at Microsoft, calls an age of asymmetric warfare based on “intelligence-age tools” that can cheaply wreak disruption at a much larger scale anywhere on demand.

My translation: You’ve read a lot about how Iran has used cheap $35,000 drones to close the Strait of Hormuz. Wait until you see how it can leverage large language models and their A.I. agents at a very low cost.

How will Iran gain access❓ Just recall the story that broke a few weeks ago: The A.I. giant Anthropic announced that its newest artificial intelligence model, Mythos, was simply too good at finding vulnerabilities in the operating systems and other software programs that so many companies and utilities run on. Days later, OpenAI made a similar announcement about its own cybersecurity-focused model, GPT-5.4-Cyber.

As Bloomberg reported, the flaws Mythos has discovered are the kind that “often represent a gold mine for hackers because they offer a window of free rein inside vulnerable systems.”

Anthropic and OpenAI both elected to restrict the release of these A.I. systems to only the most critical and responsible software generators so they could find and patch their vulnerabilities before these tools might one day be released more widely. But guess what happened❓

Unauthorized users got hold of Mythos anyway.

Bloomberg reported last week that a few outsiders gained access but that Anthropic said it had no evidence that the access impacted any of its systems. The group of unauthorized users “is interested in playing around with new models, not wreaking havoc with them,” Bloomberg reported, based on information from an unidentified source.

It is hard to exaggerate how destabilizing these rapid advances in A.I. sophistication could become, and it is why Mundie and I have been arguing for a while now that the two A.I. superpowers — the United States and China — need to figure out how they can (and surely will) continue to compete strategically while also cooperating to neutralize these new asymmetric intelligence-age threats — not unlike the United States and the U.S.S.R. did to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Cold War.

Otherwise, neither of them will be safe. Nor will anyone else be.

Donald Trump is a magnet for danger. Everyplace he goes, including to his own golf course, is at risk for becoming a danger zone

The Loneliness of Donald Trump echo opinion published in The New York Times by James Boule.

(Maine Writer: IOW, bone spurs again❓)

On Saturday night, April 25, at the gala White House Correspondents Association Dinner (WHCA), held in the Washington Hilton hotel, a gunman made an attempt on Donald Trump’s life.

WHCA another failed assassination attempt

This was the third such attempt in roughly two years. The first was in 2024, during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania., where Trump — then still a candidate — sustained some minor injuries. A father named Corey Comperatore, age 50, was shot and killed when the gunman fired from a rooftop.  

Then, the next attempt took place the same year, this time at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., where the would-be assassin was stopped before he could get close. And then we have this most recent incident, at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington.

To add to the catalog of recent political violence, there was the assassination of the former Minnesota House speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband last summer, as well as the killing of Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk at an event in Utah later last year.

Predictably, in the wake of Saturday’s attempt on Trump’s life, the president’s allies immediately jumped to blame his political opponents for the incident.

“The deranged lies and smears against Trump, his family, his supporters have led crazy people to believe crazy things, and they are inspired to commit violence because of those words,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said on Monday April 27th.

Trump added his two cents in an interview with CBS News: “I do think that the hate speech of the Democrats much more so is very dangerous. I really think it’s very dangerous for the country.” So, the Republican argument is simple. The more Democrats criticize Trump — the more they condemn him as a malign force in American politics — the more they put his life in danger.

But this argument does not stand up to scrutiny.

To start, even the most heated language coming from Democrats over the past few years falls well within the boundaries of ordinary political discourse in the United States. No elected Democratic leader has called for violence against Trump or his allies. All have condemned such violence when it has taken place. And you would be hard-pressed to find anything different among Democratic Party officials and liberal activists.

The same cannot be said about the political right, where figures like Steve Bannon muse about putting “heads on pikes” on “the two corners of the White House as a warning.” And it certainly cannot be said of the president.

Trump has been the most high-profile purveyor of violent language toward his opponents since he stepped onto the national stage in 2015, as a political contender.

Fantasies of violence against political enemies are, in fact, a defining feature of Trump’s political language.

During his first campaign for president, he pointed to the “Second Amendment people” when he wondered, aloud, whether anything could be done about a President Hillary Clinton. As the George Floyd protests consumed the country in the summer of 2020, Trump threatened violence against protesters. “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen … when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” 

Trump called for the death penalty against Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and once compared his political opposition to “vermin,” calling them the “real threat” to the nation. On the eve of his second election victory in 2024, he floated the use of the military to handle “the enemy from within,” defined as “sick people, radical left lunatics.”

And then, of course, there was the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. “You’ll never take back our country with weakness,” he said to thousands of supporters at a rally outside the White House. “We fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” All of this is just a small sample of the president’s embrace of violence in his language.

Conservatives once understood that societies are complex systems, and that the reason to try to preserve certain norms and traditions was to avoid needless chaos and disruption as we change and progress. We cannot predict the full consequences of what we do, and so we should choose carefully and deliberately as we navigate the world. We should be modest in our ambitions, aware of our own fallibility and mindful of the way things can go wrong.

Of course, inasmuch as this perspective actually shaped American conservatism, it was mostly to defend existing inequalities and hierarchies. Consider William F. Buckley Jr.’s defense of the Jim Crow South or Ronald Reagan’s jeremiads against Medicare. What looked like wisdom was usually just a rhetorical trope used to justify the power that some held over others. Still, there is something to be said for that spirit of humility, especially as it relates to our politics.

So it goes with Trump’s embrace of violent language. If his predecessors in the White House did not speak this way, it was not because they lacked a killer instinct or were never frustrated by criticism and mockery. Rather, they understood the weight and power of the office, and the way that this language, if used, could spiral out of control into actual violence and disorder.

But, in Trump we have a person who isn’t concerned with the impact of his language and the consequences of his words — who delights in wielding them as a weapon against others, with no regard for what it might do or whom it might influence. He thought nothing, for example, of calling a group of Democratic lawmakers “traitors” who were “guilty of seditious behavior at the highest level” and who should be “arrested and put on trial” and even punished with “DEATH!” He thinks nothing of targeting individual critics with vitriolic social media posts and of threatening entire nations with total destruction.

Trump may not care about the power of his words. But those words still matter. They weigh on society. Ten years of violent language, 10 years of fanning the flames of discord and conflict, 10 years of calls to effect change through violence — all of these have had an effect.

It is not that Americans are new to political violence. It is one of the defining aspects of our national experience. But in the decades between the assassinations of the 1960s and the present, there had been a steady decline in incidents of such violence, broadly defined. Trump’s entry into American politics has corresponded with a reversal of that trend — with a growing sense among a number of people in society that the only way to make change is through the use of force.

Trump probably did not cause the attempts on his life. But, it would be dishonest to deny that he is responsible for shaping the environment in which we live — for creating an atmosphere in which these kinds of events are more likely. And as the single most visible politician in the country, an atmosphere where political violence is more likely is one in which he may find himself a target, for whatever reason the particular person happens to have.

Trump’s response to this latest failed attempt on his life was to tell his audience of journalists that this was the reason he needed a White House ballroom — a space where he could safely hold court. And there is no doubt that, in addition to his megalomania, the ballroom reflects Trump's selfish desire to make the White House a North American Versailles. But one should also consider the extent to which it reflects something else: a desire to isolate himself from the world.

This is a man who rarely travels beyond the confines of the White House compound or Mar-a-Lago. He rarely meets people where they are. Trump holds the occasional rally, but he does not move through the world the way most presidents have. More so than most who have held the office, he lives inside a bubble.

Some of this is vanity. Some of it is laziness. But some of it, I think, is fear. Trump is afraid of the world. Which in a way might mean he is afraid of the world he has helped to build.

Donald Trump invented the art of the conspiracy theory. Trump constantly lies it is difficult to determine fact from fiction

 We are all conspiracy theorists now

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe by Renée Graham

A decade of Trump has warped our sense of truth and facts. 

Frankly, that probably won’t end when his presidency does.

First came the gunshots. Then came the conspiracy theories.

Even before a California man who allegedly tried to assassinate Donald Trump at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association gala on Saturday April 25, was identified, social media was boiling over with speculation that what the Justice Department has charged as an attempt on Trump’s life was fake.

Within minutes, the word “staged” quickly trended on various sites.

It was the kind of spontaneous response that one usually expects from those internet corners where tinfoil is the headgear of choice and where denizens still bicker over the legitimacy of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.

But reactions to the shooting weren’t the sole province of the usual “Lone Gunmen” types, who steadfastly believe that the real truth is always lurking out there.

“Has there ever been a president have [sic] this many close ‘attempts’ on their life?” Democratic Representative Jasmine Crockett of Texas posted on Threads. “Maybe it’s lax gun laws, maybe it’s lack of mental health funding, or maybe it’s fake … who knows … ”❓

Despite no evidence, there is a pervasive sense that this alleged third attempt on Trump’s life in less than two years was concocted to draw attention away from the president’s quagmire of a war in Iran; gas prices averaging more than $4 a gallon; the files where he is named in the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein; and the lowest poll numbers in either of Trump’s White House terms.

As usual, Trump did nothing to tamp down the suspicions. It certainly didn’t help that in comments to the media after the rest of the dinner was canceled, he used the shooting to justify restarting construction on that ballroom/bunker that he demolished the East Wing of the White House to build.

Earlier this month, a federal judge allowed construction on the underground bunker to continue for “national security” but halted work on the ballroom, Donald Trump's very unpopular pet project.

“We need the ballroom,” Trump said. He also claimed without proof that the Secret Service and military “are demanding it.” But the only demands came from the MAGA minions on social media, who amplified Trump’s expensive ballroom blitz.

That right-wing offensive only churned even more conspiracies that the alleged assassination attempt was manufactured to promote the necessity of Trump’s 💲400 million ballroom.

This is life when myriad conspiracy theories feed biases and many Americans drift further from the truth. Political polarization has always challenged facts. But no one in recent memory has done more to gut the truth than Trump.

He called the deadly January 6, 2021, insurrection a “day of love” and the white supremacist supporters who pummeled police officers and defiled the US Capitol “patriots.” Trump incited that insurrection after he lied that the 2020, presidential election that he lost to Joe Biden was “rigged” and “stolen” from him.

In 2024, Trump falsely claimed that Biden took performance-enhancing drugs before his better-than-expected State of the Union address. He lied that Kamala Harris, then vice president and the Democratic presidential nominee, used AI-generated images of crowds at her rallies. During a presidential debate, Trump bellowed nonsense about Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio.

While what happened at the WHCA event is still being debated, this is unassailable: In a decade where Trump has sowed mistrust, we have all become conspiracy theorists.

As usual, Trump did nothing to tamp down the suspicions. It certainly didn’t help that in comments to the media after the rest of the dinner was canceled, he used the shooting to justify restarting construction on that ballroom/bunker that he demolished the East Wing of the White House to build.

Earlier this month, a federal judge allowed construction on the underground bunker to continue for “national security” but halted work on the ballroom, Donald Trump's expensive and unpopular pet project.

“We need the ballroom,” Trump said. He also claimed without proof that the Secret Service and military “are demanding it.” But the only demands came from the MAGA minions on social media, who amplified Trump’s ballroom blitz.

That right-wing offensive only churned even more conspiracies that the alleged assassination attempt was manufactured to promote the necessity of Trump’s 💲400 million ballroom.

This is life when myriad conspiracy theories feed biases and many Americans drift further from the truth. Political polarization has always challenged facts. But no one in recent memory has done more to gut the truth than Trump.

Trump called the deadly January 6, 2021, insurrection a “day of love” and the white supremacist supporters who pummeled police officers and defiled the US Capitol “patriots.” Trump incited that insurrection after he lied that the 2020 presidential election that he lost to Joe Biden was “rigged” and “stolen” from him.

In 2024, Trump falsely claimed that Biden took performance-enhancing drugs before his better-than-expected State of the Union address. He lied that Kamala Harris, then vice president and the Democratic presidential nominee, used AI-generated images of crowds at her rallies. During a presidential debate, Trump bellowed nonsense about Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio.
, Trump claimed that Iran bombed one of its own elementary schools, killing more than 170 girls, on the first day of the US-Israeli war against Iran, even though evidence points to US culpability.

It’s gotten to the point that even within MAGA, some don’t believe Trump. A recent story in Wired revealed how some of Donald Trump's followers now believe that the first assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania., in July 2024, was staged by Trump.

Without question, the proliferation of AI has blurred the line between what is and isn’t real. That’s an assault on truth, but so is a president who🤥  lies as easily as he breathes.

Like Trump, too many no longer seem to care about evidence before they spread conspiracies to foster their specific worldviews. With social media as an accelerant, measured voices of reason don’t stand a chance, and that won’t end when Trump’s final term ends.

Under the treacherous rule of the most mendacious president in American history, we’ve become Generation Trust No One. And while conspiracies may offer false comfort especially in times of strife, they also become a coffin for truth.

We’ve been polluted by a man hostile toward facts and immune to honesty. That’s what Trump wants. Authoritarians thrive as self-anointed arbiters of information that is skewed, false, and only serves themselves and their hunger for power and control.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans responsible for millions of preventable deaths because of USAID cuts

Echo interview published in New York Magazine The Intelligencer by Benjamin Hart.  

(Maine Writer:  President George W. Bush supported USAID, saving millions of lives but now Republicans are ignoring the tragic reality about the consequences of cutting funding for the humanitarian programs. All preventable deaths associated with the cuts to USAID are caused by the Republican's' ignorance.)

‘I’m Not Sure When I’m Ever Not Going to Be Angry Anymore’

During the last days of USAID,  (Agency for International Development) one Trump appointee told longtime agency official Nicholas Enrich that to sway skeptical overseers about the dangers of drug-resistant tuberculosis, he should create a slide show in the style of Barney the carton dinosaur. 

Another confessed that before being briefed on the agency’s disease-fighting efforts, he had thought USAID’s work consisted mostly of funding abortions — which it was federally prohibited from doing. 

As Enrich details in his new book, Into the Wood Chipper, the death of USAID was defined by such simultaneously distressing and farcical details. (The book takes its name from an infamous Elon Musk tweet in which he bragged about disemboweling the agency.) Enrich, a TB (tuberculosis) specialist who became head of USAID’S global health program amid a purge at the agency in early 2025, fought to save what he could, usually to no avail.

Musk wreaked havoc across the government, but he went after USAID — which he characterized as a subversive organization promoting leftist dogma around the world — with a vengeance. DOGE appointees and Trump officials, some of whom had long-standing grudges against the agency, blithely laid waste to it, firing seasoned bureaucrats and suddenly freezing funding for AIDS (Aquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome caused by Immunodeficiency virus- HIV) medication, clinical trials, education programs, and everything else in USAID’s vast, 💲35 billion-a-year remit. 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, once a USAID champion, issued a waiver for lifesaving aid to continue, but in practice little changed. Rubio accused agency staffers of “insubordination” and insisted, wrongly, that nobody had died as a result of the cuts he let stand. In the end, the agency was whittled down to almost nothing, then folded into Rubio’s State Department. Though exact figures are difficult to come by, researchers estimate that hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result of USAID’s destruction. Its demise blew a hole in the public-health infrastructure of many developing countries, particularly in Africa; in some places, AIDS is already making a comeback.

Last March, Enrich — whom, full disclosure, I went to high school with many years ago — issued a memo detailing the human toll of the cuts and was placed on administrative leave minutes later. 💥😡 He then gave a statement to Congress, becoming a rare public face for an agency that largely operated out of sight of the American people. I spoke with him about why USAID was so vulnerable to the chopping block, the anger he continues to feel over its destruction, and whether the agency might eventually get a second life.

Your book received quite a bit of press. Have you heard from a lot of your former colleagues at USAID❓ Do they appreciate that you wrote this❓
It’s been unbelievable, actually. It’s definitely not what my publisher was expecting — now they’re scrambling to get more books out. And my former colleagues are really jazzed about somebody speaking out and telling their story. I always get a little uncomfortable about that, because it’s very much not everybody’s story; it’s very much mine. And different people were going through all different kinds of hell, whether it was the workers posted overseas who were forced to pull their children out of school or cancel medical appointments after being told they had to leave immediately, or the contractors in D.C. who were just completely shut out one day and just told to go home. We all had our own stories. But the reaction has been very positive.

To be honest, I was kind of expecting that the USAID community would be excited about the book, but I think it’s getting some larger traction. People are really interested in getting a sense of what actually happened with the DOGE team that was at USAID, and how it was so much more incompetent and indifferent and cruel than they knew.

I’ve been trying to figure out exactly why USAID was hit so hard. One explanation is that Elon Musk was listening to Michael Benz, a former State Department staffer who was on Joe Rogan’s podcast spreading conspiracy theories about USAID. Then Musk became obsessed, and then DOGE came in and killed the whole thing. But is it really that simple❓ The agency faced a lot of problems in Trump’s first term, too. Do you think it would have been in trouble regardless once Trump won again, even without Musk and DOGE❓
I think it’s a confluence of events. The fact that Elon wanted to tear it down allowed the DOGE team to really go after it. But there were also people who came in as political appointees in Trump Two who had been at USAID during Trump One and had axes to grind. There was Pete Marocco, who was basically in charge of the agency. 

And, he brought his buddies, including Mark Lloyd, who ended up being my boss — really terrible guy. Marocco had been there during Trump One, and he felt like he was completely mistreated by the USAID staff, that they leaked everything about him including his long history of Islamophobic remarks, even though his role then was religious freedom adviser for the agency. 

I talked to him at the beginning of Trump Two, and I was like, “Look, did you think you were coming in to run an agency❓ Were you surprised that your job here is just to tear the place down❓” And he said, “I actually came in with a list of people I wanted to get rid of.” He told me that the USAID staff had actually killed his dog.

That seems unlikely, but I suppose it’s possible.
I’m sure they did not actually kill the dog. But it just goes to show the mind-set of a person who is coming into an agency to take revenge on the agency’s staff. There was the DOGE push from Musk, when he first decided he really didn’t like USAID because of what Benz was saying. But it was really the first agency where he started to dig in and see what he could do, and he started to get some pushback. And when he started to find out that his staff couldn’t go into the classified systems, for example, or fire civil servants who have civil-service protections, he dug his heels in and was like, “Well, I bet I can. Watch me."

Another pillar of this is the unique vulnerability of an agency whose primary impact is overseas. I think USAID is a national security agency that keeps Americans safe, keeps diseases at bay, and builds partnerships that help keep the world a secure place. The benefits don’t just happen overseas, but many people around the country question the idea of spending money there when we have real problems at home. And I think that that allowed USAID to be vulnerable in a way that maybe the Social Security administration wouldn’t be.To add to that, there was the problem of visibility. I pay close attention to the news and politics, and before all this happened, I didn’t have a great grasp on what USAID actually did. I knew about PEPFAR and I knew they were doing lifesaving work, but if you had asked me about specifics, that would probably be about it.

You’re 100 percent right. And in all the sad postmortem circles I participated in of former colleagues, that’s definitely one of the things we said we could have done differently, is tell our story better.

It felt like an unfair fight, where Elon would be spouting off, and nobody was really pushing back that hard. Probably in part because it was such a shock to the system to be dismantled so suddenly, and partly because USAID workers weren’t PR professionals. They were policy people and analysts.
And you’d have to dig into these long and tedious reports about data to understand the enormous impact that USAID had. For me, one thing that’s been really weird about all this is that before, people didn’t know what USAID was. I would tell them what my job was, and they’d be like, “Okay, so that’s the State Department❓” Close friends and family didn’t get it. And then this six-week period happens and I’ve got my head down. I’m panicking every day. The world is falling apart for me, and I actually wasn’t paying that much attention to the news.

Then I come out of it and suddenly, everybody has heard of USAID, and there’s protests in all 50 states to try to save us. I’m like, Where did this come from? And when I released these memos about what was actually happening at USAID, and how we were prevented from doing the lifesaving activities that Rubio was saying he had created this waiver for, I thought I was just compiling a record for my colleagues to protect ourselves from when we ended up getting blamed. I was really surprised that I was contacted right away by national media. And they seemed to care about it for the first time that I was aware of.

So you had these DOGE people who had no idea what the agency did and just wanted to smash it up. You had Musk, who believed all these conspiracy theories about it. Then you had people who are maybe a bit more sophisticated, like Jeremy Lewin, who was the administrator for policy and programs for USAID — though also affiliated with DOGE — and has an impressive pedigree. I heard him do a long interview with Ross Douthat a few months ago. His whole spiel was that many countries have become dependent on the U.S.; it’s an endless cycle of aid and nothing really gets better. We’d prefer to put the responsibility in those countries’ hands. This probably sounds reasonable to a lot of people, even if cutting off aid suddenly is cruel. Did Lewin’s justification, or others like it, make any sense to you?
I thought Lewin’s interview was infuriating, partly because there were kernels of truth in it. But before I can talk about whether there are ways to make aid better, more efficient, and less likely to foster dependency, it’s really important to recognize that that is not why they destroyed USAID. They destroyed USAID to satisfy the ego of Elon Musk, and the people who were tasked with destroying it were not aid reformers. You said that maybe Jeremy Lewin was somewhere in between the bozos and the conspiracy theorists, but the reality is he had absolutely zero experience in international development; he’s just good at picking up talking points later. 

There were some interesting and valid points he made in that interview, but that was all put together after the fact. And the people who were there were not trying to improve to more tightly align foreign aid with the president’s agenda or to make it less likely to foster dependency and become more self-sustaining. They were tearing it down.

And so to me, especially for an agency called the Department of Government Efficiency, to come in and talk about and tear down an agency that was allowing us to maintain global stability at a tiny fraction of the cost of what it costs to try to police the world via coercion and force … USAID had operated on less than one percent of the federal budget. And we created trading partners, lasting partnerships, with countries like Korea, Brazil, that didn’t exist before. We’ve saved 92 million lives over the last two decades alone. The return on investment is insanely efficient, especially when compared to other government agencies. To tear down that agency in the totally false name of eliminating waste and creating efficiencies is especially infuriating. I can feel the anger coming through. It still feels pretty raw for you, clearly.💥💢
Well then, I’m portraying my message correctly. Yes, I’m very angry. I actually wrote this book hoping it would allow me to put some of these feelings to bed, but I’m not sure when I’m ever not going to be angry anymore. I think that obviously there’s the personal piece — I lost my job and my career, and so did my colleagues. And watching an agency’s expertise be hollowed out and replaced by a group of completely incompetent and unqualified buffoons, then having to listen to them talk about how they’re actually improving things, when it’s just lies — it’s very, very upsetting.

It’s difficult to get an exact picture of what’s going on on the ground in many of the most affected countries, and local organizations are trying to fill the gap left by USAID. But of the programs that were cut, which ones have been particularly devastating in your eyes?
That’s a really big question. The first thing I’ll say is we don’t really know, because they have not reduced any of the data they’re required to by Congress. And I think that alone is a little bit nerve-racking and telling. In terms of what keeps me up at night, it’s the way that we have exposed ourselves in the United States to the spread of infectious diseases in ways we weren’t just a year ago. 

After COVID, we had invested hundreds of millions of dollars to build up early warning systems to detect and respond to outbreaks in communities before they could even spread to a hospital, much less spread internationally. And that was the first thing to go.

The few things that they have saved, I think — it’s hard to tell, but it sounds like — are continuing treatment for patients with HIV, and continuing to supply drugs for malaria and tuberculosis. But, all the surveillance, all the monitoring, all the prevention is gone. So I’m particularly concerned about what that means for our own vulnerability, as well as the billions of dollars that we’ve invested over the years. How far are we going to backslide before we get a handle on this❓

Along the same lines, they did release one-quarter of PEPFAR data. (President Bush's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief)

 It’s a weird single quarter in the middle of a time period, and who knows what monkey business was involved in deciding on that. 

But, the reason they did it was that it showed no major decline in the number of people total that were on treatment from pre-cuts to post-cuts, about six months in. Of course, the reason that it showed that was because treatment is often distributed in six-month batches, so you wouldn’t actually see the decline until just after that. But what that data did show was that they basically have stopped providing testing services. We’ve seen a cut of 4 million HIV tests year over year. Diagnosis is equally down, not surprisingly. And they have basically stopped all the prevention activities and stopped providing support to vulnerable communities. They call that DEI, but really it’s just standard epidemiology.

How bad is this for the fight against HIV and AIDS overall?
What it looks like from the data is that the U.S. government has abandoned its commitment to ending the HIV pandemic and is only looking at trying to preserve treatment of already diagnosed patients. We were getting very close to ending it as a public-health threat, and now we’re basically giving up on that and putting ourselves in a position that we’re always just going to be providing drugs without ever trying to actually get past the epidemic itself, or to help build health systems that can deal with this on their own. There’s talk about not fostering dependency, but the administration’s actions show that the activities that they’re continuing are the most likely to involve us providing drugs forever.

One other crushing thing is the end of our global immunization campaign, where we provided immunizations against a host of the world’s worst and most likely killers of children under 5. That just stopped in its tracks. We haven’t seen the impacts of it yet, but over the next five years, kids are going to die in massive numbers, and none of them had to.

Lots of other governments are also pulling back on foreign aid, and I know nonprofits can’t replace the level of funding that was lost. But have you seen any positive signs of other people or organizations stepping in to do any of this work?
No. The nonprofits are just as devastated as the government. They’re all going bankrupt or getting rid of their staff because they were very much either tied in with or dependent upon U.S. government funding to run their programs. And like you said, other countries haven’t stepped up to replace the U.S. — weirdly, it’s been the opposite.

Over the long term, this administration talks a lot about countering threats from China, but what we’re actually getting is a situation where all the goodwill, all the trust that we’ve built over all these years … it’s kind of similar to what’s happening with NATO and other alliances. When we break our promises so profoundly and the resulting damage is so immediate and devastating, how can we expect countries to come back to the table in the future and want to be our partners? It makes me wonder where they’re going to turn instead for support when they need it.

USAID also did a lot of work that wasn’t lifesaving treatments. They also funded news outlets and political opposition around the world, and not all of it was savory. Let’s say there’s a revamp of the agency. Should it focus more narrowly on the issues we’ve discussed in this interview, like immunization and medicine?
There are definitely things that are outside of lifesaving treatment that should be continued in a new agency for international development. I think maybe the easiest example of that is education. The support for increasing literacy and for having girls and women stay in school longer is one of the most effective and long-term efficient ways that we build stability and build economic development in countries, which actually ends up benefiting the United States.

Specific to democracy and government stuff — this is a little bit outside my expertise, but I will say that when at the beginning of the Iran war when Trump stood up and said he wanted the grassroots pro-democracy protesters to take over the regime, it was frustrating to hear because those were some of the groups that USAID had supported. And a year before, he had abruptly cut off support to them and made them extremely vulnerable to retaliation by the regime. That investment may have been able to pay off, but we’ll never know.

What do you think of the prospect that USAID could come back under a Democratic president? Do you think anyone would spend the political will on actually doing it❓ And perhaps make it leaner or more efficient❓
I don’t know if the will is there, but I think it needs to be, and I hope Americans will demand that the agency be brought back. Again, it doesn’t have to be the same. There are ways USAID could be made much more efficient. And in that sense, there is an opportunity to redesign it in a way that breaks through some of the bottlenecks we faced and the very real inefficiencies of USAID. There are ways to do that when it’s been torn apart so completely.

But I think we do need to have an independent agency for international development. Having an independent agency that is the face of American generosity means something to the world. The way it’s being run out of the State Department, with these transactional and exploitative partnership agreements, where basically we’re dangling the prospect of providing treatment for lifesaving diseases to countries in exchange for them to give us access to their mineral rights or to send our deportees to their countries — it’s like forgetting all the lessons we’ve learned about what works in international development over the last 60 years, which is that if you build your foundation of partnership on goodwill and trying to do good, you will actually be able to build more long-lasting trust.

The other thing I’ll say about this is that people didn’t know about USAID — that’s true. But now, they’ve actually heard of it, and they’re really mad about the way it was torn down. Pew came out with some good polling about what people think of foreign aid and about what DOGE did to it. I think politicians will see that it actually is not going to cost them a lot of political will to restart USAID. I think that’s actually what people want and expect.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.