Frida Ghitis, the author of the Substack newsletter Insight and an on-air CNN contributor, sees a parallel to the 2020 election: Trump will try to claim victory where he has plainly lost. Watch our conversation above, which touches on the details of the agreement, the role of Israel and Lebanon, and how it might affect the November midterms. We also discussed Ukraine’s drone barrage against Moscow earlier this week, which was the largest attack by Kyiv in the full-scale war as it seeks to deprive Russia of oil revenue and bring the war to Russia’s doorstep.

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On March 6, U.S. President Donald Trump said, “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” Some 15 weeks later, the United States and Iran are nearing a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to extend the April 7 ceasefire that falls well short of this goal, and would leave Tehran’s regime in a stronger position than when the U.S. and Israel began joint military operations on February 28.

To borrow Trump’s oft-used diplomatic phrase, Iran has the cards in this negotiation. After Israeli airstrikes killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war, the remaining Iranian leadership withstood a 37-day bombing campaign, and thus is in no mood to compromise. Meanwhile, Trump has no viable military options left that don’t involve putting U.S. troops on the ground, which he does not want to do.

The details of the peace agreement remain murky. However, according to Iranian and U.S. officials, the MOU includes a 60-day ceasefire including Lebanon, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and lifting of U.S. and Iranian blockades, and a pledge to continue negotiating Iran’s nuclear program. Iran also says that the U.S. will agree to waive oil sanctions during the negotiation period, and that some $25 billion in frozen assets will be released. Trump denies the latter; however, it’s hard to see Tehran agreeing to a deal without their release. The emerging agreement also contains none of the initial U.S. and Israeli goals of containing Iran’s ballistic missile program and reducing Iranian support for its regional proxies, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.

The MOU would allow Trump to claim that the war is over, but not much else. Looking at each of the points of the emerging MOU and the status quo before the war, Iran comes out ahead.

Beyond the paywall, I will address three questions:

1. Will Iran be economically stronger even if it does not charge tolls or service fees for the Strait of Hormuz?

2. Will the U.S. have less leverage against Iran’s nuclear program than under the 2015 Obama nuclear deal?

3. Could Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu scuttle an agreement between the U.S. and Iran?

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In 1998, Secretary of State Madeline Albright said that the United States was the “indispensable nation.” Not only could the U.S. defend itself with its formidable military power, Albright said, but with a web of alliances and a capable diplomatic corps, the U.S. could maintain global peace and security. Diplomacy, military power, and alliances were all more powerful in concert, Albright believed: in other words, the threat of military force was stronger because of alliances, and diplomacy was more stronger because it carried the threat of military force.

In his second term as U.S. president, Donald Trump has sidelined the diplomatic corps and torn up alliances, while its military power has failed to dislodge a weakened regime in Tehran. Diplomats with lifelong language and regional expertise have been replaced by Trump’s envoys, former real estate developer and Trump golf partner Steve WItkoff and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who maintains a web of private business interests. The U.S. still has the world’s largest military, but as the Iran war has shown, the Trump Administration has confused means with ends: showing technological prowess in the Iran war has not made up for the lack of strategic goals in starting the conflict. Trump has berated traditional U.S. allies in Europe for not helping reopen the Strait of Hormuz, while also maintaining that he doesn’t need their help. European and Asian allies are now de-risking from the U.S. by pursuing strategic autonomy and greater cooperation among themselves.

These trends have led the U.S. to become, well, dispensable. This dispensability is evident in the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, where U.S. allies have ignored Trump’s demands. Over the weekend, Iran launched missiles at Israel for the first time in two months, threatening the cease-fire that Trump announced in April. Iran said it was retaliating against Israeli attacks against the Iran-backed Lebanese militia Hezbollah, which has rejected the cease-fire; Israel has said its war in Lebanon is not part of the cease-fire. According to Axios, Trump told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to retaliate against Iran; Trump told the Financial Times, “I call the shots. I call all the shots. He (Netanyahu) doesn’t call the shots.” However, the possibility of Iran having a deterrent against Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon was intolerable, so Netanyahu promptly retaliated with airstrikes. On June 8, Trump called on both sides to cut it out: “Israel and Iran must immediately stop ‘shooting,’” he posted on Truth Social. Both sides seemed to be moving towards de-escalation on June 8, but only after Netanyahu rejected Trump’s first entreaty, and the structural problem remains: if Israel attacks Hezbollah in Lebanon again, then Iran will retaliate against Israel.

The U.S. has also become mostly dispensable in Ukraine, where Trump promised during his campaign to end Russia’s war in “24 hours.”

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Megan Garber is a staff writer at The Atlantic covering the intersection of politics and entertainment. She is the author of a new book: Screen People, How We Entertained Ourselves Into a State of Emergency. Screens, Garber, writes, have made turned many Americans into passive consumers of politics, while functioning democracies require active participation. While there was some optimism in the early 2010s about how technology could be harnessed for political change, this enthusiasm has given way to cynicism with the rise of doomscrolling. This pessimism accelerated with the political rise of Donald Trump, who first became known to many Americans as the star of the NBC reality-television show, “The Apprentice,” and has only gotten more acute as more and more parts of modern life have become mediated by screens. However, Garber thinks that screens are here to stay, and that they can bring about political engagement.

Garber and I spoke earlier this week. (The irony that our conversation was done through screens is not lost on me :) ) You can watch the video above or download it as a podcast.

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On May 23, U.S. President Donald Trump posted on social media that a peace deal with Iran was “largely negotiated” and that a memorandum of understanding would be announced “shortly.” Five days later, no agreement has been announced and the U.S. and Iran have traded tit-for-tat strikes in the Strait of Hormuz, demonstrating that Tehran can still threaten the vital waterway, where about 20 percent of the world’s oil supplies once flowed through. After Republican senators pushed back on a deal that might leave Iran in control of the strait, Trump backpedaled and said, “if I make a deal with Iran, it will be a good and proper one, not like the one made by Obama,” referring to the 2015 agreement made by his predecessor, which he withdrew from in 2018.

Trump keeps favorably comparing the Iran war to the Vietnam War, saying that the former is short by comparison. (However, Trump initially said that the Iran war would last between four to six weeks, and it has lasted longer than two months.) The comparison is apt -- but not in a way that is favorable to Trump. The U.S. eventually stopped fighting in Vietnam because it had no strategy for winning and even with a superior military, it couldn’t stay indefinitely; all the communist North Vietnamese regime had to do to win was not to lose. Similarly, even the mighty U.S. has limited military resources; all Tehran has to do is not lose.

Trump’s Saturday declaration that an agreement was “largely negotiated” seemed to echo National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger’s infamous comment a week before the November 1972 presidential election that peace in Vietnam was “at hand.” U.S. President Richard Nixon then won in a landslide, but it took another three months -- and brutal bombings that changed nothing on the ground -- before the administration hammered out a deal where the U.S. withdrew its forces, leaving the allied South Vietnamese government defenseless to resist an invasion by the North, which happened some two years later, handing the U.S. a defeat.

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Trump’s zigzagging over ending Operation Epic Fury which he started on February 28 with Israel illustrates an unavoidable problem that also echoes Vietnam: Trump can’t exit the war in a better place than he started it.

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It has become conventional wisdom that Americans voters do not care about the self-dealing that U.S. President Donald Trump has undertaken in his second term. Cryptocurrency dealings, stock trades in companies influenced by his policies, and the emergence of a pay-to-play pardon system have failed to gain significant public attention. Since as Atlantic Editor Jeffrey Goldberg put it, “every day is a Watergate,” many of these scandals are treated as if they are old news. Moreover, these dealings are done largely openly and Trump thinks there is nothing wrong with them. Since at least the uncovering of the Watergate conspiracy by the Washington Post, American journalism has tended to value secret information, so self-dealing done without concealment tends to get less notice.

However, the Trump Administration’s May 18 announcement of a $1.8 billion (or $1.776 billion, to use the administration’s symbolic value) fund of taxpayer money to compensate people who claim they were wronged by the Biden Administration and Democrats, coupled with a provision “forever” banning audits of Trump and his family, is in a different league than past scandals. The Trump Administration is now proposing to take taxpayer money and give it to its allies. Behind the paywall, I will outline three reasons why I think that this instance of self-dealing may be unlike past ones:

1. It is simple

2. Material conditions are worsening

3. Trump has expressed indifference to worsening material conditions

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During the scaled-back Victory Day parade in Moscow on May 9, Russian leader Vladimir Putin suggested that the war in Ukraine may be “coming to an end.” The remark indicated to some Western commentators that Putin might be looking for a way out. Simon Saradzhyan, who leads the Russia Matters project at the Harvard Kennedy School, said on X it was the “strongest signal he has sent so far that he wants to end the war soon.” Other reporters and analysts on X indicated that they thought it was a sign that Putin wanted to end the conflict, maybe even with a cease-fire beyond the three-day one that he had asked Trump for to protect the parade, which had no military hardware for the first time in 20 years.

However, a closer reading of the transcript shows that this was not a peace signal, and Putin’s demands for a victory remain unchanged. Elsewhere in the exchanges with Kremlin-friendly journalists, he said that the reason the parade was scaled back was to focus on the “decisive defeat of the enemy in the context of the Special Military Operation.” His comment about the war in Ukraine possibly “coming to an end” was in a long tract about how, in his view, “globalist elites” had broken promises not to expand NATO into former Eastern bloc states after the Soviet Union collapsed. This was another formulation of Putin’s desire that the war end only with a settlement of its “root causes:” the byzantine list of demands that would reverse the Soviet Union’s loss of its empire in Eastern Europe after the U.S.S.R. collapsed in 1991.

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On May 9, Putin also suggested that former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder could serve as a European representative to end the war and renegotiate the continent’s security architecture. This idea is ludicrous: Schroeder is a pariah for his pro-Russian sympathies. After being defeated in 2005, Schroeder was paid nearly $1 million a year by Russian energy companies and has never fully condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. (He stepped down from his advisory role a few months after the full-scale invasion.) Unsurprisingly, the EU quickly rejected this idea.

In any event, after the three-day U.S.-brokered cease-fire ended, Russia launched its largest drone and missile barrage ever at Ukraine lasting two days, killing at least 27 people. That alone should cause doubt to anyone that Putin wants the war to end. But the interpretations point to a broader pitfall that many Western commentators face when trying to analyze Putin: they think that he is getting the same information as they are. He is not.

For example, Russia wants full control of the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine, where Kyiv has its strongest defensive fortifications. According to a recent article in the New York Times, this conquest would take Russia over 30 years at its current rate of advance. However, according to the Financial Times, Russian military leaders promised Putin that they could take Donbas by this fall. Of course, the latter timeline is absurd, but it is what Putin is being told, and it’s highly doubtful that anyone brought the Times article to his desk.

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It’s official: Ukraine will not attack Red Square on May 9, as Russia celebrates the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. On May 8, Ukrainian President Voldoymyr Zelenskyy issued a decree “allowing” a parade to take place, and publishing the coordinates in central Moscow that won’t be targeted.

The cease-fire, announced by U.S. President Donald Trump, lasts until May 11. It came after Russian leader Vladimir Putin called Trump on April 29, who asked for a cessation of hostilities for the holiday, which has become the cornerstone of Russia’s state religion valorizing World War II. Trump then had to bring Zelenskyy on board, who acceded, getting a 1,000-for-1,000 prisoner exchange. (Ukraine refused to rule out attacking other targets, but said it would observe the cease-fire on a reciprocal basis, only responding in kind to Russian attacks.)

It’s worth stepping back to note how much of a humiliation this is for Putin. The Russian leader had to ask Trump, leader of what the Soviets called the Glavnii vrag, a.k.a. the “main enemy” of the U.S., to protect the parade that legitimizes his autocratic regime.

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On April 29, Russian leader Vladimir Putin called Donald Trump with an ask: he wanted the U.S. president to broker a cease-fire with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for May 8-9, when Russia would celebrate the anniversary of the Allied victory over the Nazis in World War II. The annual commemoration known as Victory Day has grown in importance under Putin’s quarter-century of rule, legitimizing an autocratic regime that promises a return to a glorious past, but offers no future. In the Kremlin, fears have grown that Kyiv could disrupt the May 9 parade with a drone attack.

Citing “Ukrainian terrorist activity” and “the current operational situation,” for the first time in two decades, there will be no military hardware rolling across Red Square to cheering crowds. Cadets from military institutions will also not take part in the parade. While the government has already cut off mobile access to Western apps like WhatsApp and Google Maps, on May 5, authorities entirely shut off mobile internet in Moscow and St. Petersburg. On May 4, CNN reported that a European intelligence dossier states that Putin fears assassination attempts by members of the Russian elite, and thus has sharply restricted his movements and those for staff who work closely with him, like bodyguards and cooks.

Without a doubt, Putin is paranoid. But, as Joseph Heller wrote in Catch-22, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. He has reason to fear. His approval ratings have dropped to 71 percent, the lowest since he began the full-scale invasion in 2022. As the war in Ukraine drags on with Russia having no strategy for victory, Putin is facing criticism both from those who want him to escalate in Ukraine and Russians who want him to stop. Pro-war commentators are increasingly vocal about Putin’s failures on the battlefield and the unexpectedly viral Instagram criticism by beauty influencer Victoria Bonya of wartime economic problems and internet restrictions illustrates that many Russians want the conflict to end. Putin has chosen neither to escalate or conciliate, instead muddling through.

Putin has conflated the full-scale invasion with World War II, depicting it as a fight to “denazify” Ukraine, despite the fact that Zelenskyy is Jewish. While this propaganda might have convinced some young men to enlist in a great patriotic struggle like their grandparents did, the comparison is just awkward now. The full-scale invasion has lasted over 1,500 days, longer than the Soviet Union’s 1,418 day war with Nazi Germany. While the Red Army reached Berlin in May 1945, according to the Institute for the Study of War, in 2026, Moscow’s advances slowed to an average of just 2.9 square kilometers per day. (The think-tank added that part of the decline could be due to changing Russian tactics.) In April, Russia suffered a net loss of territory for the first time since August 2024, when Ukraine invaded Russia’s Kursk Oblast. Ukraine has launched an increasingly daring series of long-range drone attacks on Russia’s oil infrastructure; while these attacks have failed to significantly dent oil revenues, the plumes of black smoke from billowing from burning refineries have brought the war home -- or at least to social media feeds -- for many Russians.

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The Victory Day celebration for 2025 was the first one to face restrictions due to fears of a Ukrainian attack. Putin announced a cease-fire, although none was reached. Disruptions to mobile internet were reported. However, it passed with no major incidents, and a number of foreign leaders attended, including Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

It is quite possible that this year’s parade will also pass with no major incidents. However, Putin’s call for a cease-fire for his parade is even more cynical this time around, as on the night of May 5, Russia launched a mass attack on Ukrainian civilians, killing at least 27. Zelenskyy had responded to Putin’s call -- which he said was never officially conveyed -- by proposing a cease-fire beginning at midnight on May 6; the Russian attack was hours before Kyiv’s proposed truce. According to The Insider, just four foreign leaders have confirmed to attend the parade, down from over 20 last year. Putin has turned Victory Day into the centerpiece of a state religion that uses World War II to justify present-day aggressive wars; however, as Putin muddles through in Ukraine, he has much to fear.

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Nobody should want the Strait of Hormuz to stay closed. The blockades by Iran and the U.S. of the vital waterway have caused global oil prices to rise to their highest levels since just after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. About 20 percent of the world’s oil and significant amounts of liquified natural gas and fertilizer flowed through the strait before the U.S. and Israel began the war on February 28; now, traffic is down to a trickle. The U.N. estimates that an additional 32.5 million people could be plunged into poverty as a result of energy and food price shocks; according to one of the biggest fertilizer producers, shortages could result in up to 10 billion fewer meals produced per week; and average U.S. gas prices have risen 44% since the war to $4.30/gallon, according to AAA. The International Monetary Fund has warned of a global recession if energy price shocks are not contained by the middle of the year.

Fortunately, the solution to this problem requires no negotiations and no deal: both sides could just drop their blockades. How this would happen seems clear: nine days after the April 8 cease-fire, Iran unilaterally announced that the strait was open. Oil futures dropped from triple digits to around $90/barrel. However, U.S. President Donald Trump said that Washington’s blockade would “remain in full force” until the two sides reached a peace deal. Tehran then reimposed its blockade. This would be a strategic defeat for Trump, as Iran will have proved that it can control the strait: however, the U.S. doesn’t have viable military options to reopen it, and to use Trump’s phrase, has no “cards.”

On May 1, Trump rejected Tehran’s proposal to discuss conditions for opening the Strait of Hormuz at the same time as the U.S. would guarantee to unwind its blockade of Iranian ports. The plan then called for discussing Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief -- the same formula that produced the nuclear deal under President Barack Obama. While it’s reasonable to be skeptical of Iran’s cunning negotiation tactics, it seems sensible to discuss the strait first and the nuclear issue second.

Trump’s refusal is grounded in the belief that Tehran will unconditionally surrender -- which he demanded in a March 6 all-caps social media post -- after the U.S. blockade inflicts enough pain on Iran. On April 29, Trump said the war would end after his “genius” blockade inflicted enough economic pain on Iran that it would “cry uncle.” Three days before, he told Fox News that Iran’s oil wells would “explode” in “three days” because Iran couldn’t export its oil. April 29 came and went and there were no reports of explosions.

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“I would have won Vietnam very quickly if I were president,” said U.S. President Donald Trump, calling into CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on April 22. The boast -- made by a man who dodged the draft for the conflict which killed some 58,000 Americans -- was revealing, in that it displayed Trump’s bottomless faith in his own talent and was a (likely unintentional) unintentional comparison to the joint U.S.-Israel military operation against Iran. However, as Operation Epic Fury passes the two-month mark, Trump has lost the Iran war strategically and militarily, and can only end the conflict by swallowing a dose of humility -- not a character trait he is known for.

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The war began on February 28 with vague strategic goals; none of them have been accomplished. There has been no resolution on Iran’s nuclear program. At the outset, Trump called on Iranians to rise up and overthrow their government after the bombing campaign stopped. However, after the April 8 cease-fire, the theocratic regime in Tehran has remained firmly in charge after its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed on the first day of the war. Trump has claimed that Iran’s new leadership is “much more reasonable.” However, according to reporting from the New York Times, hard-line generals from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) have taken charge of decision-making, as Khamenei’s successor, his son, Mojtaba, is in hiding, fearing being killed by the U.S. or Israel. In short, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

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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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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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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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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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