The philosopher Karl Jaspers coined the term criminal state (Verbrecherstaat) to describe the Nazi regime, arguing it was not merely that individuals employed by the state who committed crimes, but that the entire state apparatus was mobilized to commit crimes. The political theorist Hannah Arendt expanded on this concept in Eichmann in Jerusalem, arguing that the Nazis transformed the commandment “thou shalt not kill” into “thou shalt kill.”

Lawrence Douglas, a professor and legal scholar at Amherst College, is the author of a new book, titled The Criminal State; War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice. He describes how international law has struggled to deal with the specter of the criminal state. He weaves history with political theory and law to trace the shifting legal response to state aggression and atrocities, from Leopold’s rule over the Congo to Putin’s war in Ukraine. He shows how the Nuremberg trials challenged centuries of thought that shielded sovereigns from legal scrutiny. Yet Nuremberg’s bid to frame aggression as the cornerstone of a new order of international criminal law largely failed, giving way to a system now centrally concerned with crimes against humanity and genocide—while leaving unresolved the legality and effectiveness of using force to stop the worst violations of human rights.

In this conversation, Douglas discussed how the crime of aggression has largely fallen by the wayside in international law, amid Putin’s aggressive full-scale war in Ukraine, and wars of choice by U.S. President Donald Trump in Venezuela and Iran.

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On April 7, U.S. President Donald Trump made an apocalyptic threat against Iran. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he posted on Truth Social. However, minutes before Trump’s deadline, he announced that the two slides had agreed to a two-week cease-fire, which is set to expire on April 22. However, the threat underscored Trump’s readiness to use extreme violence in the joint U.S.-Israel military operation against Iran.

While the world breathed a sigh of relief that Trump didn’t carry out his threat, the air campaign against Iran has, from the start, exhibited extreme violence against civilians. Information is difficult to gather because Iran’s leaders have shut off the internet and few Western journalists have been able to report from inside the country. However, according to the independent human rights group HRANA, in the 40 days of the conflict, at least 1,701 civilians were killed, including 254 children. The group recorded 1,201 military deaths and 714 additional deaths that it could not classify as military or civilian. (These numbers are all minimums, and the total numbers are likely higher.)

On the first day of the campaign, February 28, a bombing on a girls’ primary school in southern Iran, killing at least 175 people, many of them children. The New York Times analyzed images from the scene that showed fragments from a U.S.-made Tomahawk missile. Trump has claimed without any evidence that Iran did it; a preliminary inquiry by the Pentagon held the U.S. at fault. On the same day as the school attack, a U.S.-made missile hit a sports hall in Iran, killing at least 21 people. The U.S. military initially denied the sports hall attack, but Times reporting confirmed that the missile was American. Later, Iran’s premier health facility, the Pasteur Institute, and its top technical university, the Sharif University of Technology were also bombed.

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The military analyst Phillips O’Brien wrote on Substack that the number of casualties in the air campaign has vastly exceeded Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s against Ukrainian civilians in all of 2025. He added that the brutality of the air campaign “is not being acknowledged anywhere...We have normalized many terrible things recently—and deceiving ourselves is one of them.”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is claiming two contradictory things about the campaign: that the U.S. has disbanded the laws of war in favor of lethality, and that the U.S. targets with precision. Hegseth said on March 6 that the U.S. does not fight anymore with “stupid rules of engagement.” He has said that the U.S. only targets precise military targets, unlike Iran, which indeed has hit civilian targets in the Gulf, like luxury hotels in Dubai. On April 16, he said, “We only target military targets.”

Under Trump, the U.S. has done away with Pentagon initiatives to reduce civilian casualties. ProPublica reported that Trump’s DoD axed the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, created under President Joe Biden to reduce the harm done by U.S. strikes. Sarah Yager, who was a civilian protection advisor to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the first Trump administration and now is Washington Director at Human Rights Watch, wrote of the Iran war, “I know what it looks like when civilian protection works. This isn’t it.”

Reducing civilian casualties is not a matter of “political correctness,” as Hegseth has claimed. There are moral, strategic, and legal reasons to reduce civilian casualties. The moral reasons are obvious. From a strategic perspective, recklessly killing civilians undermines the Trump Administration’s initial goal of regime change, as it alienates the very people that are supposed to overthrow Iran’s theocratic government, which itself killed an estimated 7,000 civilians in protests in January. As Gen. Stanley McChrystal observed in Afghanistan, recklessly killing civilians is counterproductive: he coined the concept of “insurgent math,” which holds that, for every innocent civilian killed, ten new insurgents are created.

Legally, the U.S. may be opening itself up to war crimes charges. Even if the targets are not intentional, recklessness is a standard in international humanitarian law, just as a drunk driver can be charged with manslaughter even if he had no intent of killing another person. Akshaya Kumar, crisis advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, wrote in Lawfare: “If U.S. forces failed to take the necessary measures to avoid civilian casualties…they could be considered in violation of international humanitarian law (IHL)—and, if individuals acted sufficiently recklessly, they may be guilty of a war crime.” (Strikes against legitimate military targets that incidentally kill civilians are not war crimes, provided all feasible precautions are taken.)

In his April 16 press conference, Hegseth repeated Trump’s threat of attacking Iran’s civilian infrastructure if the cease-fire fails after its expiration next week. This could amount to war crimes. Even if Trump doesn’t make good on its threat, the U.S. conduct to date should prompt a reckoning about its moral and legal obligations in fighting wars -- but it’s barely a topic of discussion.

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Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s ouster after 16 years in power is a political earthquake. Much as Cuba’s Fidel Castro did for communism, Orbán punched above his weight in the global far-right movement, becoming a template for how an authoritarian leader could hollow out a democracy from within by changing election rules, manipulating the independent judiciary, and controlling the media.

His rule has come to an end. The results of April 12 elections show Orbán’s party, Fidesz, on track to win just 55 out of 199 seats in parliament, a massive loss from the 135 it currently holds. The Tisza Party and its leader Petér Magyar are on track to secure a two-thirds majority, meaning that it can undo the constitutional changes which Orbán made to weaken checks and balances. Fidesz won just 37% of the popular vote to Tisza’s 53%, and lost much of its rural, conservative base.

Before the election, Orbán had set the stage for a rigged election. He claimed a campaign of Ukrainian election interference, wherein his rival, Magyar, had been in cahoots with Ukrainian President Voldoymyr Zelenskyy to oust his government with a new slate of leaders that would be friendlier to Kyiv, putting Hungary at risk of getting drawn into a war with Russia. Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, had largely replaced the erstwhile enemy of the Orbán government, billionaire George Soros, who also happens to be Jewish.

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This campaign was a psychological projection on the part of Fidesz: Orbán’s party had been getting assistance from Moscow -- which was not very secret -- even with Russians proposing to stage a fake assassination against the Hungarian leader. However, a few days before the election, Russian government sources told Meduza that even they couldn’t save Fidesz from defeat, with one telling the Latvia-based news portal: “Even with our help, they couldn’t accomplish anything.”

On election night, some observers expressed surprise that Orbán conceded defeat early and did not try to steal the election. One reading of the concession — espoused by far-right French politician Marine Le Pen, among others — was that Orbán was always more democratic than commonly understood, but this is false: in 16 years in power, he did everything he could to forestall losing. For example, after winning the election fair-and-square in 2010, his party changed the electoral rules so that in 2014, his party won a two-thirds constitutional supermajority with just 45% of the vote.

By contrast, the April 12 results were too big to rig. It is easier to steal a close election than a landslide. Orbán conceded because he had no other choice. Dictators like Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela and Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus stole landslide losses in 2024 and 2020, but they only were able to do so with a lot of violence. This option was not available to Orbán, who still governed in the confines of a hollowed-out democracy. It’s impossible to say whether a plot to steal a close election in Hungary -- possibly aided by the Trump Administration and Russia -- would have succeeded, but the loss was too big for him to even attempt.

The Hungarian election has implications for U.S. midterm elections in November, as the Trump Administration has also created a conspiracy theory wherein the opposition will steal the election with foreign help.

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Earlier this week, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte traveled to Washington to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump, in an effort to soothe tensions after Trump has been berating the mutual-defense alliance for not helping in his war with Iran. Afterwards, Rutte characterized the April 8 meeting as “a discussion between two good friends.” Trump, however, had a different take on the closed-door summit. Afterwards, he posted on social media: “NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN. REMEMBER GREENLAND, THAT BIG, POORLY RUN, PIECE OF ICE!!!”

In Trump’s second term, Rutte has tried to keep the U.S. president from making good on his threat to leave the alliance with flattery, even referring to him as “daddy.” Rutte has defended his strategy as necessary, because, in his view, Europe can’t defend itself without the U.S.; in January, he told critics to “keep on dreaming” if they think that Europe can defend itself alone. While the brown-nosing strategy might have been defensible had it actually achieved its goal of keeping Trump on Europe’s side in case of a Russian attack, it seems unlikely that Trump will come to Europe’s aid because of a charm offensive. And while it seems unlikely that Trump will actually call on the U.S. Senate to authorize NATO withdrawal, casting doubt on whether the U.S. will defend Europe is equivalent to leaving, since the alliance is based on the presumption of mutual defense.

Trump has only backed off of threats against Europe when the continent has shown that it actually can defend itself.

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There have been a lot of news developments since I wrote my last post on the Iran cease-fire yesterday morning. Here, I offer a video update outlining two problems with the cease-fir…

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On April 7, President Donald Trump said the U.S. had won a “total and complete victory” after getting a two-week ceasefire deal with Iran. “100 percent. No question about it,” he told the AFP news agency.

However, strategically, the U.S. is worse off and Iran is better off since Trump joined Israel in a joint military operation that began on February 28. Considering that the U.S. is the world’s strongest military power, Israel is the strongest regional military power, and Iran had been badly weakened by Israel’s 12-day war in June, this would not seem to have been a likely scenario. But wars are not simply a contest of who has the better “cards” -- as Trump would say -- and this stronger player winning the game. They are a contest of achieving strategic goals -- reconciling means, ways, and ends -- set at the beginning of the war.

The U.S. has achieved almost none of its goals. At the outset of the war, Trump called for regime change. Iran’s military-backed theocracy remains in power, with the population that had revolted earlier in the year now weary after weeks of relentless bombing.

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You are reading Public Sphere, an independent publication which is 100% funded by readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. I do not have a paywall today. You can read this site for a week or a month or six months, to see if you like it. If you do—if you think this is a worthwhile place, and you would like to help it survive—I ask that you take a moment to become a paid subscriber yourself.

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In 2005, the comedian Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” to describe President George W. Bush’s obfuscations over the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Some 21 years later, truthiness doesn’t quite cover U.S. President Donald Trump’s constantly-shifting goals and false updates about the joint military operation with Israel against Iran. Iran is not only post-truth, but it is the first war conducted by the U.S. in a different reality.

At the start, Trump outlined a clear goal: regime change. In a February 28 video announcing strikes, Trump urged Iran’s people to “take over your government” after strikes end, adding that “America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force.” Immediately, top U.S. officials began walking this back. On April 1, Trump gave his first primetime Oval Office address since the conflict began. He said, “Regime change was not our goal. We never said regime change, but regime change has occurred because of all of their original leaders’ death.”

But regime change hasn’t happened. The son of Iran’s supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, was named as his father’s successor after he was killed in an Israeli airstrike on the first day of the war. In an April 1 social media post, Trump said that Iran had a “new regime president” who was “much less radical and much more reasonable.” However, Iran has had the same president, Masoud Pezeshkian, since before the war. Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is considered a hardliner and seems to be in no mood for compromise given that his father, mother, wife, and son were all killed by the Israeli airstrike.

On the diplomatic front, Trump’s updates are not credible. On March 23, Trump called off an ultimatum to strike Iran’s power plants -- expiring that day -- claiming that negotiations with Iran were showing progress. Markets rose at the news. Iran immediately denied it. Trump was likely referring to messages passed indirectly between the U.S. and Iran via Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan. On April 1, Trump claimed on social media that Iran’s supposed “new regime president” had asked for a cease-fire, which Iran again denied. Later that day in the Oval Office address, Trump made no mention of negotiations. On April 3, mediators said the efforts to reach a cease-fire between the U.S. and Iran had reached a dead end.

The reality is that Trump, much more than Iran, is likely looking for a quick exit. In the U.S., Iran’s seizure of the Strait of Hormuz -- where about 20 percent of the world’s oil flows through -- has caused average gas prices to rise to over $4/gallon, signaling trouble for Republicans ahead of midterm elections in November. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump has told aides that he is willing to end the war without reopening the narrow strait.

Trump has claimed that high oil prices are a good thing for the U.S. because the country “make[s] a lot of money” when prices rise. He also has claimed that the U.S. doesn’t “need” the oil that transits the strait because most of it is bound for Europe and Asia. These claims are dishonest: high oil prices may be good for oil companies, but not for Americans driving to work or taking their kids to school. Even if most of the U.S.’ oil comes from elsewhere, oil is bought and sold globally, so a supply crunch in one region drives up the world price.

In one sense, it shouldn’t be surprising that Trump has carried out the war by seeming to invent facts on the spot, which Trump has done before during grave catastrophes. In April 2020, he suggested in a nationally-televised briefing with health officials that injecting bleach would cure coronavirus, which was then raging through the U.S. population without a cure. But the U.S. president has awesome -- and almost unlimited -- powers as the commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful military, so it is astonishing to see a very real kinetic campaign carried out with statements that have no bearing in reality.

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The most startling example of this has been Trump’s false claim that Iran -- not the U.S. -- bombed its own girls’ school on the first day of the war, killing some 175 people, many of them children. When asked by a reporter why nobody else in the administration echoed his claim, he said: “Because I just don’t know enough about it. I think it’s something that I was told is under investigation.”

Part of Trump’s disconnect with reality stems from the fact that advisers aren’t giving Trump a complete picture of the war. On March 25, NBC News reported that the U.S. president has been watching a daily two-minute video compiled by military officials of the biggest, most successful strikes of “stuff blowing up” over the previous 48 hours. Trump tends not to handle bad news well: on social media, he has raged at European nations for not reopening the Strait of Hormuz after they declined to help in a war that they weren’t consulted on prior.

On April 3, Trump posted, “With a little more time, we can easily OPEN THE HORMUZ STRAIT, TAKE THE OIL, & MAKE A FORTUNE. IT WOULD BE A ‘GUSHER’ FOR THE WORLD???” Only a few days earlier, Trump had told other countries to “get your own oil.” Again, it seemed unlikely that this was less a policy change, and more the ramblings of a 79-year-old president who has stumbled into a self-imposed crisis that he cannot evade.

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A war between the U.S. and Iran is the last thing that Europe needed. Tehran’s throttling of the Strait of Hormuz has caused global energy prices to soar, threatening Europe’s stagnant economies with inflation and fuel rationing. The war that U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started on February 28 also distracts Washington from Europe’s primary strategic concern, Ukraine, and makes valuable Patriot missile interceptors more scarce. Trump has been badgering NATO countries to get involved to help the U.S. reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but so far, the response has been a resounding no. As much as Europeans are loath to help Trump, they also have a strategic interest in keeping the strait open, where about 20 percent of the world’s oil flows through.

I discussed this summit with Dave Keating, who writes the Gulf Stream Blues newsletter. He is a Brussels-based journalist who focuses on European politics, and is also the author of a new book about Europe’s reliance on the U:S., The Owned Continent.

You can watch the conversation above or download it as a podcast.

You are reading Public Sphere, an independent publication which is 100% funded by readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. I do not have a paywall today. You can read this site for a week or a month or six months, to see if you like it.

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On the evening of March 21, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an ultimatum to Iran: he would bomb its power plants if Tehran didn’t fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz. He wrote on social media, “If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!” Tehran warned that it would respond in kind. Ebrahim Zolfaghari, an Iranian military spokesman, said that if Trump followed through, Tehran would attack U.S. and Israeli energy infrastructure, as well as desalination plants operated by U.S. allies in the Gulf. Tehran also vowed to keep the strait closed until Iranian power plants were rebuilt.

So far, this threat has not had the intended effect. Iran won’t reopen the strait because that is its leverage over the United States: by shooting cheap drones at oil tankers, Tehran can cause global oil prices to spike, which puts pressure on Trump to end the war ahead of midterm elections. Iran’s retaliation would likely cause a humanitarian crisis: lacking significant rainfall and permanent rivers, desalination accounts for more than 90 percent of the drinking water in several Gulf states.

UPDATE: On March 23, Trump backed down. He posted on social media that he had told the Pentagon to delay possible energy strikes for five days, “SUBJECT TO THE SUCCESS OF THE ONGOING MEETINGS AND DISCUSSIONS” between the U.S. and Iran, which he said have been going on for the past two days. Iran denied that the two sides had spoken.

Destroying Iran’s energy infrastructure as Trump has vowed would likely constitute a war crime. According to the Geneva Conventions, attacking civilian objects like power plants “wantonly” and “unlawfully” is prohibited. Under customary international law, launching an attack expected to cause damage to civilian objects “excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated, is prohibited.” In other words, while striking a power plant used by a weapons factory and some civilians would be permissible, Trump’s threat of “STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST” doesn’t sound lawful.

Trump’s threat also echoed Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s strategy of targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.

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Well, Zelenskyy may have drawn an ace.

The war in Iran has created a diplomatic and economic opportunity for Ukraine and its president. As swarms of low-cost Iranian drones have caused havoc across the Gulf, hitting oil infrastructure and U.S. bases, Ukraine’s low-cost drone defense technology is suddenly in high demand.

Zelenskyy told the British Parliament on March 17 that 201 Ukrainian anti-drone experts are in the Middle East and another 34 “are ready to deploy.”

What can Middle Eastern countries learn from these experts? And what can Zelenskyy gain for Ukraine by helping the Middle East?

To help answer these questions, I spoke with Frida Ghitis, a global affairs analyst and opinion writer. She writes the Substack newsletter Insight. Frida is also senior columnist for World Politics Review. She is an on-air CNN contributor, who worked for the network as a producer and correspondent in more than 60 countries. During her 18 years at CNN she worked in the major events of the times, including wars, revolutions, and presidential summits, with multiple stints in Moscow, Havana, Jerusalem, Buenos Aires, and dozens of places in between. Watch or listen to our conversation above.

You are reading Public Sphere, an independent publication which is 100% funded by readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. I do not have a paywall today. You can read this site for a week or a month or six months, to see if you like it.

Unlike YouTube, this video doesn’t have ads, so I rely on paid subscribers to help keep it free.

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It’s hard to overstate just how much of a reversal of fortune Russia has had since U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched military strikes against Iran on February 28. I last wrote about how much Vladimir Putin has gained from this conflict on March 9, and in the past few days, he has gained even more.

Before February 28, Russia’s economy was in serious trouble due to falling oil and gas prices, rising budget deficits, and needing to keep the war machine against Ukraine funded. Economist Alexandra Prokopenko compared the situation to what mountaineers call the “death zone” -- the altitude above 8,000 meters wherein the human body consumes its own muscles for energy to survive. In other words, the war has had the effect of cannibalizing the wider economy.

In the first two months of 2026, Russia’s energy revenues fell by nearly half and overall revenues fell by 11%, leading to a projected GDP deficit of 1.6% for 2026. (While its deficit is lower than Western countries, Russia is cut off from Western capital markets by sanctions, so it cannot easily borrow.) To alleviate the fiscal crisis, Reuters reported that the Russian government is considering a 10% across-the-board spending cut to “non-sensitive” programs. However, that cut is now on hold -- depending on what happens with global oil prices.

According to an analysis published on March 12 by the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), Russia has made an additional 6 billion euros in the two weeks of fighting between the U.S. and Iran. Russia’s 2026 budget deficit is about 38 billion euros, so if oil prices stay high, the deficit could be wiped out. The analysis found that the additional oil revenue could also purchase 17,000 Shahed drones -- which are launched at Ukraine on a near-nightly basis -- every 24 hours at a cost of $35,000 each.

One of Putin’s long-term strategic goals in the war in Ukraine has been to weaken Western sanctions by dividing the U.S. and Europe, which have sought to maintain a united front against Moscow. Trump obliged.

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After U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began military operations against Iran on February 28, officials and journalists predicted that Russia would suffer as a result. In a March 4 interview with Newsmax, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said, “Now that Iran is facing this full onslaught of Israel and the U.S., [that] will also degrade their capacity to export their chaos even to Russia and, therefore, to Ukraine.” On March 6, the New York Times published an article arguing that while Russian leader Vladimir Putin would reap a windfall from a rise in global oil prices, “Putin is also grappling with the arrival of a new world of unbridled American power under President Trump, which is checking Russia’s global influence and ripping up Moscow’s playbook for partnerships abroad,” including Iran.

However, Russia isn’t very reliant on Iran for drone production, as it can produce Iran’s Shahed drone domestically, which it calls the Geran. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in January that Russia can produce 500 Geran drones per day. While it’s true that Iran -- like Venezuela -- is a partner of Russia, Russia doesn’t have alliances in the sense that the U.S. has built (and now are on the brink) with European and Asian countries. Moscow has long viewed Middle Eastern and Latin American partners as fair-weather friends, and that existed before Trump. For example, while Russia could whisk Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad to Moscow for a comfy exile during Joe Biden’s presidency in December 2024, it didn’t spend any military or political capital to save his regime from falling to Turkish-backed Syrian rebels.

Here are three reasons why the war is good for Russia:

The Iran War Creates Leverage Against the U.S. The revelation, first reported by the Washington Post, that Russia is providing Iran intelligence to target U.S. forces in the Middle East, has created a new pressure point that Putin can use against the U.S. Trump has refused to condemn Russia for providing Iran this intelligence.

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Anand Gopal is a writer for The New Yorker covering wars, revolutions, and democracy. He is the author of a new book, Days of Love and Rage: A Story of Revolution. Based on seven years of research and over 2,000 interviews, the book follows six Syrians and their experiences in the city of Manbij during the Syrian revolution. Gopal also wrote a book about the Taliban in Afghanistan, No Good Men Among the Living, and has reported throughout the Middle East and conflict zones for publications including The Atlantic and the New York Times Magazine. Gopal and I spoke last week. Our conversation follows, condensed and slightly edited for clarity.

Luke Johnson: Can you talk about the city of Manbij and how you came across it?

Anand Gopal: I had been reporting on various conflicts including Iraq and Afghanistan for several years, and in 2011, I was covering the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war. I was interviewing people who had suffered from airstrikes committed by the Syrian regime, kidnappings, and the proliferation of militias -- stories of destruction and devastation. In the midst of this, I heard about a city named Manbij, which is in northern Syria and has a population of about 200,000 people. They had managed to overthrow the dictatorship in their city and tried to build a democracy from scratch. I was very intrigued to see how that would look, especially in the context of one of the world’s deadliest civil wars.

LJ: Before the Assad regime fell in 2024, journalists were routinely taken hostage and killed in Syria. Can you explain how you have been able to travel to the country and do your reporting?

AG: The first time I went, I snuck into the country under a fence between Turkey and Syria in the middle of the night, as that was the only way to get in. At that point, the Assad regime was controlling most of the country, and there were just a few hamlets that were controlled by protesters. We met some protesters at the border, and they smuggled us in. Eventually, the protesters were continually shot at by the regime, and they militarized. Armed factions began to appear, and these factions seized a few border crossings between Turkey and Syria. Then, one was able to go through these border crossings. Over time, it became more and more difficult to get into the country, in part because the Assad regime reclaimed large parts of territory. In reporting on this book, I had to go through Iraq, and then make a 15-hour drive across the Iraqi border, through Syria, to get to Manbij.

LJ: So when you got to Manbij, what did you find?

AG: I first arrived in 2016 after the democratic experiment had finished, but I tried to track down people who had been involved in it. A team of researchers and I did over 2,000 interviews with people from the city in the 18-month period beginning in July 2012 when they tried to build a democracy.

LJ: How did this window emerge for a democracy?

AG: During the Arab Spring between 2011-2012, there were protests around the country, and the Assad regime was trying to suppress them everywhere. The government forces were shooting at protesters. Manbij was one of the cities that had a protest movement, and the protesters were shot at, but the regime was simply unable to suppress all of these uprisings simultaneously. Assad’s forces were forced to withdraw from the city. Almost overnight, there was no government: the mayor’s office was empty and Assad’s forces had taken the money from the bank. The protesters formed what they called a Revolutionary Council to take power in the city and to begin to think about how to run the city.

LJ: Myself and I think most of the people reading this interview have never been to Syria, yet they’re concerned about the state of democracy in Europe and the United States. Are there any lessons we can learn from this democratic experiment?

AG: Absolutely. The reason I was drawn to this story is because in a way, it tells us less about Syria, and more about democracy and authoritarianism. In the 18 months that the city was run by this Revolutionary Council, there were two ideas of freedom. There were believers in freedom, which for them, meant freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and also freedom of markets. However, there began to be an affordability crisis. The cost of food started to rise. Rents were rising because the population was increasing from displaced people from outside the city. There began to be clamoring from working-class people demanding price controls, rent control, and more progressive taxation.

There began to be a divide in the city between these two different conceptions of freedom: the freedom to be left alone, which was being put forward by the leadership, and another kind of freedom, which was the freedom to be given the things you need to live your best kind of life.

Into that divide, a far-right group, ISIS (the Islamic State), inserted itself and began to wage what was essentially a populist campaign, saying that the leadership of the revolution were out-of-touch elites that didn’t care about the needs of ordinary people. They began to promise to working-class people that they can deliver them from their anxieties, and they connected their vision to an extreme version of Islam. They used a lot of distortion; they lied; they were duplicitous. But in everything they did, there was a kernel of truth in their messaging, which was that ordinary people were suffering from unbridled free-market policies. The elites in the city refused to take this seriously until it was too late.

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LJ: And how was ISIS ousted?

AG: In 2016, the U.S. supported a group of Kurdish-majority fighters called the Syrian Democratic Forces, who invaded the city, destroyed half of the city, killed lots of people, and ultimately ousted ISIS.

LJ: You interviewed a lot of people. Can you talk about somebody who you got to know very well, Abel Os?

AG: Abel Os was a shopkeeper who was also very adept at Karate--that was his sport. Growing up from a very poor family in Manbij, he had grown up with the promise that many Syrians grew up with, which is that if you work hard and play by the rules, that your children will have a better life than you have. For a couple of generations in Syria, that was actually true, even under the dictatorship of Hafez al-Assad, the father of Bashar al-Assad. The promise of Syria -- and across the entire Middle East -- was that the regime will give you basic economic security. In exchange for that, you have to surrender all political rights.

For Abel Os’ father, that meant moving from very poor to being lower-middle class. However, by the time Bashar al-Assad came to power in 2000, the state-supported economic policy was scrapped for a free-market approach. As a result, the cost-of-living started to rise, and Syrians’ ability to imagine a better life for their children compared to themselves vanished.

Abel Os is an example of this. He became a roadside vendor and then opened up a little shop in the city, and he was trying to make ends meet. He ended up having to take out lots of loans. He got himself in debt with loan sharks, and ultimately, he found himself bereft of the shop and he was forced to work as a migrant worker in Lebanon. When the Arab Spring started in 2011, he was at the front lines of the protests, because he didn’t see a future for his or his children’s life under Assad. He then became a leading revolutionary figure in the city during the 18 months.

LJ: How did you get to know him?

AG: I first met him when I started researching the book in 2016, and I got to know him very well over the next several years. We would meet about every two months, and he told me his life story. After becoming the leader in the democratic period, ISIS took over the city, and he was imprisoned by ISIS and suffered greatly in prison. I met him shortly after he was released from prison and ISIS had collapsed, and so he still had those memories fresh with him.

LJ: You didn’t get to meet everyone. There’s a character in your book, Oday, who goes missing, but you were able to talk to his family members and friends. Can you tell the story of what happened?

AG: Oday threw himself into the protests and became one of the leaders of the protest movement. He was arrested by the Syrian regime and brutally tortured through the course of the 18-month democratic experiment, and he was one of the activists who tried to hold the Revolutionary Council to the promises that they had set forth about freedom and democracy. When ISIS took over the city in 2014, the democratic experiment was dead. But there were some revolutionaries who still wanted to keep fighting, and Oday is the leader of that group. He led a resistance against ISIS. He organized a general strike, I believe, the only example of mass civil disobedience against ISIS anywhere, and it was successful in that the strike shut down the city. But Oday was arrested after the strike, and imprisoned in 2014. By the time I arrived in 2016 after ISIS had fallen, I talked to Oday’s parents, and he was missing. His parents believed that he was being kept somewhere in the desert.

In looking for him, I realized that there’s a much broader story. In the Syrian War, 600,000 people were killed, and around 100,000 people went missing. Their families are still waiting to hear from them. They still believe their loved ones are out there. And in searching for him, I found that there’s many other people in the same circumstance.

LJ: Can you talk about the role of women in this revolutionary government?

AG: Manbij is a fairly conservative, even tribal city. In the book, I profiled a woman, Mina, who was a housewife, and never thought much about politics--she was vaguely supportive of the Assad regime. But her brother got involved in the protests, and he was arrested and tortured. This switched something in her, and she wanted to take a stand. She led a group of women to start protesting against the regime. Once the regime was overthrown in the city and the democratic period began, she realized that her struggle was on two fronts. On the one hand, it’s against the Assad regime and its remnants, but on the other hand, it’s also against prevailing patriarchal attitudes. She created a group called the Women for Freedom, which is fighting to combat sexism in the city, as well as to further the goals of the revolution and democracy. This is just one example of several women’s groups that appear in the revolution, and all of them are fighting this two front battle, sometimes against their own husbands, brothers, and fathers as well as the regime.

LJ: You write:

International law does not consider the slaughter of Syria a genocide, because people were primarily targeted for their political activity--something we normally understand as a free choice…but putting it this way seems to miss something important about the human condition.

What does it miss?

AG: We tend to think of genocide as the worst possible crime because it targets people based on their ethnicity or religion, which people don’t choose. But there are many other instances in history where people have been slaughtered en masse, for example, the killing of leftists in Indonesia. In international law, that’s usually not considered a genocide. It’s not the crime of all crimes.

Syria is a similar case where up to 600,000 people were killed. But it’s not considered a genocide, because the people who were killed were targeted because for their opposition to the regime. Manbij shows that, one day the government collapses, and the next day, people come out and create all these assemblies, newspapers, and councils. They didn’t do it because they were political theorists, but because people have to cooperate to secure the essentials, like bread, electricity, and water.

In the book, I draw on Aristotle for a definition of what politics is. Politics is the art of collectively making alliances to pursue the goods that are needed for life. In that definition, civil society, unions, media, are needed and humans have no choice but to form them when given the chance, and when these things don’t exist, it’s as if some essential part of our own human nature has been stifled.

LJ: What is life like for the people whom you profiled now?

AG: Abel Os unfortunately passed away before the Assad regime fell. Mina is in exile in Turkey. She has not come back to Syria yet, even though she’s thrilled that Assad is gone, but she lived through the overthrow of the dictator in her own city for a year and a half, and saw all of these grand promises that ultimately didn’t come to fruition. She is waiting and wants to know: what will the economic policy be? Will there be jobs for her kids? However, I also profiled someone named Ibrahim, who was a son of a farmer and then became a rebel fighter. He lives in Manbij, and he has a lot of optimism. He feels like now, for the first time, there’s a future for him and for his family. Regardless, the overthrow of the dictator was a great victory for all of them.

You are reading Public Sphere, an independent publication which is 100% funded by readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. I do not have a paywall today. You can read this site for a week or a month or six months, to see if you like it. If you do—if you think this is a worthwhile place, and you would like to help it survive—I ask that you take a moment to become a paid subscriber yourself.

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In announcing military operations against Iran on February 28, U.S. President Donald Trump outlined an explicit goal: regime change. In the eight-minute video posted to social media, Trump urged Iran’s people to “take over your government” after the bombing ended. He went on: “No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want, so let’s see how you respond. America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force.”

Since then, he has been far less clear. In telephone interviews with The Atlantic and the New York Times and in a press conference on March 2, Trump did not unequivocally endorse regime change. He declined to tell the Atlantic whether he would continue bombing if a popular uprising began, and told the Times that the operation in Venezuela was a “perfect scenario” for Iran, while later contradicting himself that the people would “have an opportunity” to rise up. What happened in Venezuela was not regime change: while dictator Nicholas Maduro was abducted by U.S. forces to stand trial in New York, the autocratic regime stayed in place and the country’s vice-president, Delcy Rodriguez, took power.

Administration officials have further backed off regime change as being a goal of the operation. U.S. Vice President JD Vance told Fox News on March 2 that regime change was “incidental” to the president’s goal of making it clear that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon. However, this rationale strains credulity because Trump declared last June after the U.S.-Israel bombing campaign that Iran’s nuclear program had been “completely and totally obliterated.” Trump’s claims of Iran posing an “imminent threat” to the U.S. also don’t hold water as U.S. intelligence estimated that Iran wouldn’t possess a missile that could reach the U.S. until 2035. U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth further muddied the waters by saying in a March 2 press conference: “This is not a so-called regime-change war, but the regime sure did change.”

Try as they might to backpedal, once regime change is called for, it is like the proverbial bell that cannot be unrung.

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On February 28, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a joint military attack with Israel against Iran with the goal of devastating its military, eliminating its nuclear program and overthrowing the regime in Tehran. In an eight-minute video, Trump urged Iran’s people to “take over your government” after the strikes end. “For many years, you have asked for America’s help, but you never got it,” Trump said. “No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want, so let’s see how you respond. America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force.”

Trump’s goal seems to be to use U.S. and Israeli airpower alone -- there was no mention of U.S. ground troops -- to trigger a popular uprising to bring down a regime that has been in power for nearly 50 years and rules over some 92 million people. This seems like a fanciful and dangerous plan that is likeliest to result in a hardline military government.

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There’s no question that Iran’s government has been significantly weakened in recent months by U.S. and Israeli strikes on its nuclear program, economic collapse, and popular unrest opposing the theocratic, brutal, and misogynist regime. Earlier this year, Iran’s people protested en masse against the regime, only to be met by the government killing an estimated tens of thousands of people. Yet, the largest armed force in the country is the regime’s hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), possessing some 200,000 members and a vast, sophisticated arsenal of weapons.

Trump’s bombing is aimed at degrading their capabilities, yet airpower alone has limits. Trump promised the IRGC “total immunity” if it lays down its weapons. However, since there are no ground troops, there is nobody for them to surrender to, take them as prisoners, and implement the promised immunity. While it’s possible that this is just an attempt to sow confusion among the corps, it looks more like an empty promise, similar to Trump saying last month to Iran’s protesters that “help is on the way” for only thousands of them to be subsequently killed by the regime.

Meanwhile, the political opposition to the regime is fragmented and operates mostly outside of the country. It’s not clear who Washington would back in place of Iran’s theocrats. Trump has declined to meet with Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last shah of Iran, who has been touting himself as a possible successor.

Thus, the likeliest scenario seems to be some sort of military government led by remaining IRGC forces, who will be prepared to use unlimited force and brutality to stay in power. It’s unclear how Trump would respond to this, but the likeliest outcome would seem to be more escalation, which will further endanger the region: Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates -- which have U.S. military bases -- have already faced retaliatory strikes from Iran in the hours following the attack. Israel has also faced counterattacks. (Earlier this month, I spoke with Middle East journalist Jo-Ann Mort about the consequences for Israeli civilians of an attack on Iran.)

U.S. Vice President JD Vance, speaking on February 26 to the Washington Post aboard Air Force Two, promised that the U.S. would not be drawn into a wider war: “the idea that we’re going to be in a Middle Eastern war for years with no end in sight — there is no chance that will happen.” Yet, Trump’s military intervention against Iran -- launched with virtually no public discussion or congressional approval and false justifications of Tehran allegedly posing “imminent threats” to the American people -- seems like it could trigger the kind of long Middle Eastern war that he campaigned against.

In 2003, the Bush Administration overthrew Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein with hundreds of thousands of U.S. and allied troops, resulting in the deaths of over 4,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, only for a pro-Iranian government to take over. Iran is also not Venezuela, where U.S. forces last month were able to quickly capture Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro and a more pliant leader, Delcy Rodriguez, took power. Trump’s military intervention in Iran seems likely to lead to something protracted, deadly, and unpredictable -- and we are only in the opening hours of it.

You are reading Public Sphere, an independent publication which is 100% funded by readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. I do not have a paywall today. You can read this site for a week or a month or six months, to see if you like it. If you do—if you think this is a worthwhile place, and you would like to help it survive—I ask that you take a moment to become a paid subscriber yourself.

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I spoke about Ukraine’s drone war with Olena Kryzhanivska, who writes the newsletter Ukraine’s Arms Monitor. She is a Ukrainian defense analyst currently based in Canada. She began chronicling Ukraine’s arms developments in January 2024, and moved to Substack in 2025. Currently, she is a Senior Editor at the NATO Association of Canada. Listen to the conversation above!

You are reading Public Sphere, an independent publication which is 100% funded by readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. I do not have a paywall today. You can read this site for a week or a month or six months, to see if you like it. If you do—if you think this is a worthwhile place, and you would like to help it survive—I ask that you take a moment to become a paid subscriber yourself.

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During his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to end the Russo-Ukrainian War in “24 hours.” Over a year into his presidency -- and as the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion approaches on February 24 -- the war is still going on with no end in sight. One major reason is that the U.S. has halted funding Ukraine’s weapons buys, depriving Kyiv of sophisticated weaponry and giving Washington less leverage over how the war ends.

Beginning in 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden delivered military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine -- albeit too haltingly -- and rushed more out as he was preparing to leave office. But according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, U.S. support for Ukraine stopped in the second quarter of 2025 -- the first quarter that Trump was president for the entire period. European countries have filled the financial gap left by Washington and still buy U.S. weapons and send them to Ukraine. The message coming from Washington is clear: the Trump Administration is okay with U.S. weapons manufacturers making money off of the war, but it doesn’t want to contribute to the pot itself.

With Trump in office, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s attempts to secure more advanced American weapons have been fruitless. In October, he traveled to the White House to try to get long-range Tomahawk missiles. However, according to the Financial Times, this private meeting didn’t go well: Trump said that Putin would “destroy” Zelenskyy if he didn’t agree to a deal and tossed aside maps of the frontline in eastern Ukraine, reportedly saying, “This red line, I don’t even know where this is. I’ve never been there.” Zelenskyy traveled back to Kyiv empty-handed.

The October meeting was reminiscent of the February Oval Office upbraiding of Zelenskyy by Trump and Vice President JD Vance before television cameras. I was in Kyiv when that happened, and it struck me how irrelevant the U.S. had made itself by cutting off funding. The next day, a colleague told me about a protest outside the U.S. Embassy against Trump, but when I arrived, there were more journalists than the half-dozen protesters there, and most of the picketers were American. Ukrainians are fighting for their very existence as an independent state, and they still are going to fight regardless of what Trump says or does. On a trip the following September to Ukraine, I interviewed the Ukrainian writer Arterm Chapeye for the New Republic. He told me: “We do need support, but nobody’s playing the cards given by America, adding “Nobody gives a flying fuck about JD Vance’s opinion.”

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Ukraine is doing the best it can without U.S. support; Washington does still provide intelligence support to Ukraine, but the Trump Administration briefly cut it off after the Oval Office meeting. It is surviving with European financial support (in doubt now because of Hungary’s block on a crucial €90 billion loan) and its homemade weapons industry.

Trump has shown no inclination to use the leverage he could gain to get Putin to end the war. If Trump were to send Tomahawks to Ukraine or slap tariffs on China for its purchases of Russian oil if Moscow didn’t agree to a ceasefire, then it might get Putin’s attention. But Trump backed down on sending Tomahawks after speaking with Putin. The Trump Administration punished India for its purchases of Russian oil, but the oil just flowed to China instead.

U.S.-made air-defense systems such as the Patriot are vital for protecting critical infrastructure, which has been hammered by Russian attacks during the coldest winter in years, leaving millions of Ukrainians without power, heat, and water for hours and days at a time. Ukraine is running low on supplies: Kyiv’s air force spokesman recently said that one joint U.S.-Norwegian air defense system was operating with two interceptor missiles instead of the usual six. Under U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Washington has never chaired the meeting that the Biden Administration created to coordinate Western arms deliveries to Ukraine. Prior to this year’s Munich Security Conference, this group agreed to send $38 billion in arms to Ukraine, including air defense and a few increasingly scarce Patriot interceptors; no U.S. deliveries were announced. A few days later, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio skipped a meeting in Munich with European allies on Ukraine, instead meeting bilaterally with Zelenskyy.

According to the U.N., Ukrainian civilian casualties increased by about 31 percent in 2025, the deadliest year since 2022, the year the full-scale invasion began. Ukrainian Nobel Prize Winner Oleksandra Matviichuk asked why this was the case in a Facebook post that has since gone viral: “Why did Putin not allow himself such brutal strikes on civilian infrastructure under Biden, whom Trump calls ‘weak,’ but totally destroys peaceful cities and disregards the ‘strong Trump’?”

You are reading Public Sphere, an independent publication which is 100% funded by readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. I do not have a paywall today. You can read this site for a week or a month or six months, to see if you like it. If you do—if you think this is a worthwhile place, and you would like to help it survive—I ask that you take a moment to become a paid subscriber yourself.

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I spoke to Jo-Ann Mort, who is the author of the newsletter, A Precise Chaos. She is a journalist with deep experience in Israel, Palestine and the Middle East who often writes for The New Republic, Prospect Magazine, and The Guardian. She is also the author of a book of poetry, also called “A Precise Chaos.” We talked about Trump’s threats to Iran, the possible Israeli role in an attack, as well as her recent reporting trip in Israel and the West Bank.

You are reading Public Sphere, an independent publication which is 100% funded by readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. I do not have a paywall today. You can read this site for a week or a month or six months, to see if you like it. If you do—if you think this is a worthwhile place, and you would like to help it survive—I ask that you take a moment to become a paid subscriber yourself.

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Dear subscribers,

I’m starting a feature where I share what’s left on the cutting room floor from my reporting. Reporting is kind of like an iceberg: what you read is undergirded by a lot of observations that don’t make it into print. This feature will be for paid subscribers only. The first one will be about discussions about the United States and Ukraine at this year’s Munich Security Conference.

As an American, I fielded a lot of questions about how Americans look at Europe. To me, the dynamics have seemed like an unequal, and now possibly abusive, marriage, where, after 80 years, the more powerful partner is taking advantage of the weaker one.

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MUNICH--A hot topic at this year’s Munich Security Conference is the question of “Can Europe defend itself without the U.S.?” However, this question is being framed by U.S. President Donald Trump and European leaders as a resource problem, and that is problematic: Europe, on its own, is wealthy enough to defend itself against Russia, which has a sputtering economy a fraction of the EU’s size. It isn’t a question of the U.S. needing to bear the economic burden of defending Europe: European countries account for almost two-thirds of the defense spending in the North Atlantic theater, while the U.S. accounts for the other third.

Rather, Europe cannot defend itself without the U.S. now because of how the money is being spent. Trump and German Chancellor Friederich Merz have both been emphasizing that NATO countries in July agreed to spending 5 percent of their GDP on defense (a number which includes related spending on securing infrastructure), but they haven’t talked much publicly about where the money is going.

On the sidelines of the MSC (and in a decidedly less fancy room of the ornate Bayerischer Hof), I attended a briefing by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy on a new report detailing how European countries can get the best “bang for the buck” on defense. According to Prof. Dr. Moritz Schularick, the president of the institute, this isn’t happening now: European legacy defense manufacturers are still focused on “artisanal production of single, expensive pieces of military equipment” and not the kinds of mass production that Russia and Ukraine have moved to as the war has increasingly been defined by the use of drones and other unmanned systems.

Since Russian leader Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale attack on Ukraine nearly four years ago, European production of artillery and air defense has been remarkably sluggish. According to Estonian intelligence, Russia now produces 7 million rounds of artillery annually -- a factor increase of 17 from 2021. European countries produce around 2 million rounds annually. Production of Germany’s IRIS-T air defense system -- crucial for protecting Ukrainian civilians from drone and missile attacks -- has only increased from about three per month to six.

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Rodrigo Carill, an economist at the University of Barcelona and the author of the Kiel Institute’s new report, estimates that European countries will spend around a whopping €830 billion annually on defense. However, European defense manufacturers only have the incentive to deliver orders with existing factories -- and not to build the capacity to build more. Consider a hypothetical order for 200 tanks. A defense manufacturer might be able to fill that order in two years, but it has no incentive to build the capacity to make 200 tanks in one year, which would also deter Russia from attacking. As Schularick put it, “Maybe we have filled our shelves again, but then what happens when these shelves empty again?” (This is a problem that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is trying to solve with his ‘Arsenal of Freedom’ defense procurement strategy, even if it raises transparency questions about private companies currying favor with Trump.)

Overwhelmingly, European countries buy weapons individually; however, if they were to join forces, this would mean economies of scale, greater interoperability, and increased competition. To use an everyday analogy, the 27 EU countries are like 27 shoppers individually buying groceries at 7-Eleven -- which can charge inflated prices for small quantities -- when EU members could join and create their own Costco for defense.

Doing so would not be easy, as European countries are distrustful of each other after being at war for hundreds of years, and European legacy producers are closely linked with their national governments. However, Schularick argued that there could at least be a start for joint production with the kinds of unmanned, autonomous systems that will define the future of war, especially for a continent with an aging population and a younger generation that is skeptical of fighting for their country. “At least, let’s start with the next-generation technologies. Otherwise we will just replicate these interoperability issues that we have,” he said.

I asked Schularick what political body this new procurement would happen under; he said that there could be a European Defense Union with the 27 EU countries plus the U.K. and Norway. This body could pool financial resources from member states, issue joint debt, and buy military assets that are owned jointly. “That could be the game-changer,” he said.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte recently excoriated Europeans by saying they should “keep on dreaming” to think that they can defend themselves without the U.S. However, it is possible. Things like joint procurement and improving command-and-control so Germans and Brits can talk to each other without American equipment are meant to be an insurance policy in the event that President Trump decides to walk away and not defend Europe amid a Russian attack. “In a nutshell, the current German plan is to spend 500 billion until the end of the decade, and in the end, be as dependent on the Americans as we are now,” said Schularick. “Doesn’t sound like a great plan to me.”

You are reading Public Sphere, an independent publication which is 100% funded by readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. I do not have a paywall today. You can read this site for a week or a month or six months, to see if you like it. If you do—if you think this is a worthwhile place, and you would like to help it survive—I ask that you take a moment to become a paid subscriber yourself.

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