Paul Ehrlich Was Wrong About Everything

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, March 17, 2026

 

At what point must we be frank about the fact that Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb author who died last week at the age of 93, was not simply wrong about almost everything he ever wrote or said or thought, but positively and culpably dishonest?

 

If ever there were an intellectual grave that deserves pissing on posthaste, it is Paul Ehrlich’s. So let us commence.

 

Ehrlich was an intellectual fraud, something he had in common with many of the celebrated pseudoscientists, quacks, and cranks who became intellectual heroes to our era’s progressives, from Sigmund Freud to Noam Chomsky, Rachel Carson, Margaret Sanger, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. until about five minutes ago. (Right-wingers don’t go around reading books by crackpots—they put them into the Cabinet.) Like Karl Marx, another great prophet of the always-wrong-but-never-in-doubt school, Ehrlich believed that there is a kind of science of history and that, consequently, future events could be predicted with great confidence by those who were willing to—all together now!—follow the science. And so Ehrlich, whose academic specialty was the study of butterflies, was famous for his startling predictions—his hilarious, wrong-headed, unsupported, book-mongering predictions. For example:

 

The day may come when the obese people of the world must give up diets, since metabolizing their fat deposits will lead to DDT poisoning. But, on the bright side, it is clear that fewer and fewer people in the future will be obese!

 

And:

 

In 10 years [1980], all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.

 

And:

 

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.

 

And:

 

If our current rape of the watersheds, our population growth, and our water use trends continue, in 1984 the United States will quite literally be dying of thirst.

 

Ehrlich was also famous for refusing to own up to any of his errors in a serious way. He would later insist that The Population Bomb, published in 1968, had been “too optimistic,” and the overpopulation cultists—it is a religious phenomenon—who looked to him for direction would insist from time to time that he had been kinda-sorta, if you squint in the right way, vindicated.

 

That is not how you do the work of a public intellectual in a responsible way. It is, however, how you sell 3 million books in short order.

 

As publicity whores go, Ehrlich was a kinky kind—there was no public humiliation that he was above. In 1980, Ehrlich made his now-famous wager with Julian Simon, the libertarian economist and author of The Ultimate Resource. Ehrlich had said—in his usual all-hype-all-the-time mode—that “if I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Simon, who was in possession of a functioning nose and hence had a good idea of what Ehrlich was peddling, offered a wager: $10,000 that the price of “non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run.” Ehrlich chose a basket of commodities—chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten.

 

He lost on every count. The predictable apologists insisted that this was a fluke, that things would have worked out differently if different commodities had been selected or if a different time frame had been used. And there were versions of the bet in which Ehrlich would have done better, but the fact was that, in spite of the biggest decade of population growth in recorded human history, the price of market-traded commodities in general trended downward.

 

Ehrlich eventually paid up.

 

The outcome was, of course, precisely in accord with Simon’s view expressed in The Ultimate Resource: that human ingenuity and market incentives would work together to ensure that the material conditions of the future were more abundant than those of the past, rather than being overtaxed by a growing population. The same dynamic explained why Ehrlich had gotten it so wrong about food abundance and why semi-conspiracy-theory paradigms such as “peak oil” keep getting it wrong: Ehrlich insisted that he would have been right if not for Norman Borlaug and the “Green Revolution” in agriculture, just as the peak-oilers insist that they would have been right about waning petroleum supplies if not for hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling—all of which is true in the same sense that farm yields would be much lower if we were still plowing the fields with oxen. When goods become scarce, prices go up, and when prices go up, there are incentives for new sellers—new firms, new capital, new ideas—to get into the market. The Malthusians and their 20^th-century epigones always get it wrong because they make straight-line projections that assume increased demand in the future but no increased supply.

 

Everything you need to know about Ehrlich can be summed up by this: He published a memoir three years ago in which he makes no mention at all of the wager with Julian Simon, by far the most famous episode in his public life beyond his authorship of the thoroughly discredited The Population Bomb.

 

All of us involved in public life make mistakes. In 2012, I received a telephone call from a press spokesman for Donald Trump (in retrospect, I assume it was Trump himself), who told me that the reality-television star intended to run for president and asked whether I would be interested in interviewing him about his plans. Do you know what I did? I laughed out loud. I offered to do the interview, of course—it would have been a hilarious story. Or so I thought.

 

I’ve been wrong about a lot of things. Chances are, I’ll be wrong about something this week. But I have always tried to own up to my errors, misunderstandings, and occasional public displays of ignorance.

 

But hundreds of millions dead in the Western world instead of the economic boom of the 1980s? England disappearing from the map because of famine and drought? For Pete’s sake—Ehrlich wasn’t even right about obesity, and to the extent that the number of fat people seems to be on the decline, it is because of the blessings of modern pharmacology and not because of food scarcity. And no formerly fat person on Earth seems to have been poisoned by metabolizing DDT lurking in his fat cells.

 

Ehrlich’s arrogance, dishonesty, and neo-Malthusianism were bound up with another of his unfortunate tendencies: his racism. The genesis of The Population Bomb began when Ehrlich made his first trip to India and decided, first thing, that there were too many Indians in the world. “I have understood the population explosion intellectually for a long time,” he wrote. “I came to understand it emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi a few years ago.”

 

I lived in Delhi for a time, too, and it is a city-and-a-half in all directions, to be sure. It is hot at times, crowded in parts, and dirty in places, but much the same could be said of any major world city not located in Switzerland. Is India overpopulated? The country’s population density, at about 484 people per square kilometer, is significantly lower than that of the Netherlands (about 545 people per square kilometer), while the population density of Delhi itself is between that of New York City and Geneva—pretty high, but not off the charts. Where the Indian urban masses that so repulsed Ehrlich differed from their American or Swiss counterparts was not that they were so thickly planted but that they were poor. Do you know how modern residents of Delhi differ from the average residents of that esteemed city in the 1960s? They are a hell of a lot less poor, thanks in no small part to a series of liberal, pro-market economic reforms instituted by Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh running in the direction precisely opposite that imagined by such étatiste interventionists, planners, and would-be rationers of humanity as Paul Ehrlich.

 

In one of the great ironies of modern intellectual life, the problem now faced by such formerly teeming Asian nations as Japan and China—to say nothing of Western Europe and the United States—is population decline. China, where the “one child” policy reflected the essence of Ehrlich’s thinking as practiced by a ruthless police state (there may have been as many as 100 million forced abortions and sterilizations in a single three-year period), is entering a period of demographic crisis, offering new subsidies to encourage Chinese people to have more children. Japan is facing long-term demographic collapse. Most projections have us about 60 years away from a worldwide decline in human numbers, which will create all sorts of problems for practically all modern states with entitlement regimes based on traditional models. Will that create a catastrophe resulting in the deaths of hundreds of millions or billions of people? Maybe. But one suspects that even in a time of ubiquitous and highly effective AI, a shrinking global labor pool will put upward pressure on wages.

 

But I am not one for making wild, unsubstantiated predictions—which is one reason I probably won’t leave behind as large an estate as the late Paul Ehrlich, the arch anti-natalist (“by compulsion if voluntary methods fail”) who insisted that worldwide disaster was waiting in the wings but lived well into his 90s. That was long enough to meet his great-grandchildren, who were born into a world remarkably better than the one Paul Ehrlich prophesied.

A Failed Test of Leadership

By Jeff Flake

Monday, March 16, 2026

 

It’s a lot to ask of President Trump for him to show a little humility. But that’s exactly what the moment requires.

 

War is always tragic. When innocent civilians die, that tragedy is multiplied. Even disciplined militaries can’t eliminate the fog of war, faulty intelligence, or human error. Terrible mistakes happen. They have in every war the United States has fought.

 

The recent bombing of a school in Iran appears to have been carried out by U.S. forces. Tragic incidents like this are heartbreaking, but they are not unprecedented. What is more troubling than the possibility of error is the instinct to deny responsibility when the facts point clearly in one direction.

 

President Trump has so far shown a reluctance to accept blame for the strike. That response may feel politically convenient, but it misunderstands something fundamental about leadership and American strength. Great powers don’t strengthen their credibility by pretending obvious mistakes never happened. Acknowledging mistakes in war does not project weakness. It demonstrates confidence.

 

History provides many examples.

 

During the Vietnam War, U.S. soldiers killed hundreds of civilians in the village of My Lai in 1968. Even before the massacre became public, the United States investigated, prosecuted those responsible, and confronted one of the most painful episodes of the war.

 

Even during international crises, American leaders have acknowledged tragic mistakes. In 1988, during the Iran-Iraq War, the Navy cruiser USS Vincennes mistakenly shot down an Iran Air passenger plane, Flight 655, over the Persian Gulf, killing 290 civilians. President Ronald Reagan expressed deep regret, and the United States later compensated the victims’ families.

 

A decade later, during the NATO campaign in Kosovo, U.S. aircraft mistakenly bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade after relying on outdated intelligence about the building’s location—a failure that may resemble the kind of targeting error that led to the strike on the Iranian school. Three Chinese journalists were killed. President Bill Clinton publicly apologized. After conducting an investigation, a delegation from the State Department traveled to Beijing to explain that the strike had been a tragic error caused by faulty intelligence.

 

Similar acknowledgments occurred in Afghanistan and Iraq when U.S. operations mistakenly killed civilians, including the 2015 air strike that destroyed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The United States promptly investigated these incidents and accepted responsibility.

 

None of those admissions weakened the United States. Instead, they reinforced the truth that American power rests not only on military strength but also on credibility and moral authority.

 

Character matters most when events go wrong. Anyone can claim credit for success. The true test of leadership is how someone responds to failure. A leader who refuses to acknowledge mistakes does not project strength. He or she signals insecurity.

 

Our allies notice the difference. They trust nations whose leaders level with them about hard truths. Our adversaries notice it as well. Whether they admit it, they respect countries that hold themselves to high standards. And the American people deserve honesty from those who send their sons and daughters into harm’s way.

 

The U.S. military remains the most capable and professional fighting force in the world. Precisely for that reason, when something goes wrong, the United States should have the confidence to admit it.

 

So why did President Trump initially deny and deflect when U.S. culpability appeared obvious? Is it worth the hit to our credibility just to get through one more news cycle? In past experience, including some of the examples above, initial denial and deflection damaged America’s reputation and made the ultimate admission more painful.

 

Authoritarian regimes deny obvious facts and rewrite reality to protect their leaders. Democracies are meant to serve more than one man or a few egos. We investigate mistakes, learn from them, and, when appropriate, try to make restitution.

 

What defines a nation is not whether such mistakes occur. It’s whether its leader has the character to acknowledge them.

Iran’s War Is Not Only With the West

By Elizabeth Tsurkov

Monday, March 16, 2026

 

When Israel assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, one of the many people who celebrated the death of the supreme leader was a Syrian surgeon not far from Damascus. He had lived through four years of siege and bombardment by pro-Iranian militias. Over WhatsApp, he told me that, in the West, “the discussion of the war against Iran reduces it to merely being a geostrategic struggle between powers fighting for influence in the region, and this discussion usually ignores the direct victims of this regime,” like him. He added: “For us who lived under the siege of the Iranian-backed militias, this looks completely different, so our happiness for the death of Khamenei was immense.”

 

Western audiences and policy makers naturally take greater interest in Western victims and the threats Iran poses to the West. However, the imbalance of power between Iran and the West, as demonstrated in the 12-day war and the current conflict, means that Iran has caused relatively limited harm to Western interests since its 1979 revolution. Countries in the region experiencing civil war and foreign invasions have had it worse. They were weak enough to become breeding grounds for militias serving Iran’s expansionist project. Khamenei believed that these militias could serve as a component in his grand plan to destroy Israel. The militias failed on both counts. These militias, however, attained Iranian political domination through the immiseration and repression of the people of the region, and thus their hatred and schadenfreude.

 

Kataib Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia in Iraq, kidnapped me into one of its black sites in March 2023 and kept me in captivity for 903 days. Two Arab speakers were held in solitary cells next to and on top of mine and were subjected to even more horrific torture than I was. The Arabic writing on the walls in my cell indicated that the site had been used for years and occupied by multiple prior inhabitants.

 

Since its founding, the Islamic Republic has wished to export the Islamic Revolution beyond its borders. Early on, Iran established militias and operated cells in countries with a sizable Shia population—Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia—yet failed to overthrow the regimes. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had success only in countries debilitated by conflict, with weak state institutions. During the civil war in Lebanon, after an Israeli invasion in 1982, Iran established the Shia Islamist militant group that came to be named Hezbollah. After assuming the position of supreme leader in 1989, Khamenei oversaw the rapid expansion of the IRGC’s external operations, masterminded by the Quds Force led by Qassem Soleimani. Until being assassinated by the United States in 2020, Soleimani oversaw the creation of networks seeking to carry out attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets outside of Israel, to assassinate Iranian dissidents abroad, and to shepherd new militias across the Middle East.

 

In post-2003 Iraq, with its state institutions dismantled and a sectarian civil war under way, Iran again set up a series of pro-Iranian militias. In Syria, after the outbreak of civil war, Iran significantly increased its influence, as the Assad regime grasped for foreign assistance to remain in power. Assad welcomed Iran-run militias made up of tens of thousands of foreign Shia fighters from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. In Yemen, too, instability allowed the Houthi militia to take over large swaths of the country, including the capital, Sanaa. The Houthis have received significant financial and military support from Iran.

 

From Hezbollah’s inception, members have, at Iran’s orders, turned their weapons on fellow Lebanese. From 1988 to 1990, the group engaged in what came to be known as the “War of Brothers” against Amal, a Syrian-backed Shia militia. Hezbollah prevailed in this fratricidal war, which led to the deaths of hundreds of Shia civilians and militants. On May 7, 2008, following the decision of the Lebanese government to dismantle the independent communications network Hezbollah had set up, the militia stormed Beirut and took control of pro-government Sunni neighborhoods in the city, later clashing with Druze communities in the Chouf and Sunnis in the north and killing dozens of people. The Doha Agreement, which ended the conflict, cemented Hezbollah’s political dominance of Lebanon, granting Shia ministers a third of the cabinet.

 

Hezbollah carried out dozens of assassinations: politicians, intellectuals, journalists, and state officials. One of the recent prominent victims was Luqman Slim, a Shia intellectual and activist and critic of Hezbollah who was assassinated in 2021. A friend of Luqman, also a Lebanese intellectual, explained to me the chilling effect these assassinations have had on public discourse in Lebanon: “People are censoring themselves, particularly until the 2024 war,” which significantly weakened Hezbollah, he said. In private, individuals would be critical of Hezbollah, but when they were urged to be outspoken in media interviews, he recounted, they told him, “Do you want me to get killed?” That intellectual was granted anonymity, as were others I interviewed for this article, because of the legal prohibition in Iraq and Lebanon on “normalization” of relations with Israel, which in some court cases has been interpreted as a ban on even engaging with an Israeli citizen like me. The Syrian surgeon asked for his name to be withheld because of the political sensitivity of talking with me after the Israeli invasion of southern Syria that followed Assad’s fall.

 

In Iraq, pro-Iranian militias killed hundreds of American servicepeople, mostly through roadside bombs. But the number of Iraqi civilians they have killed far exceeds this. During the 2006–08 sectarian civil war, these militias murdered, raped, and tortured to death countless numbers of Sunnis. In 2014, during the anti-ISIS war, the militias kidnapped Sunni male teenagers and men and disappeared them into a network of torture sites. The militias also ethnically cleansed entire Sunni towns, such as Jurf al-Sakhr, and established military bases there, preventing the residents from returning to this day. The militias engaged in widespread looting of private property in Sunni areas, and stripped state assets such as the oil refinery in Baiji and multiple factories in Ninewa.

 

After years of abusing Iraq’s Sunnis, the militias turned their guns on the country’s Shia in 2019. Starting in the fall and continuing well into 2020, the militias violently repressed the mostly Shia anti-regime Tishreen (“October”) protest movement, spraying activists with bullets, as well as assassinating them or kidnapping them into their black sites. According to testimonies of survivors, in Baghdad the militias used the abandoned houses of Jewish residents as sites to torture and gang-rape female and male protesters they would kidnap from the city’s Tahrir Square encampment.

 

An Iraqi Shia seminary student was kidnapped by a militia for cursing Khamenei in front of a commander. The student was tortured, and then his father was kidnapped and tortured too. The student told me that when he heard of Khamenei’s killing, “I was happy as if it’s Eid al-Fitr,” one of the two main holidays in Islam. “He was part of the destruction of Iraq. He is the reason for sectarianism and extremism,” the student said.

 

Even the bloodshed caused by Iran’s proxies in Iraq and Lebanon does not compare with what they inflicted in Syria. Under IRGC command, the militias served as the ground troops in major offensives on rebel-held towns, usually augmented by Syrian soldiers and militiamen. The Iranian-backed militias imposed a series of sieges on rebel-held towns and neighborhoods, such as Zabadani and Madaya near the Lebanese border, the suburbs of southern Damascus, and eastern Aleppo, starving dozens, particularly children and the elderly, to death.

 

The Syrian doctor was the sole surgeon serving a population of about 10,000 people deprived of most medical help. He told me he carried out hundreds of amputations of limbs without anesthesia because of a shortage of staff, medical equipment, and medication. The Iran-run militias prevented all of these goods and personnel from entering the besieged enclave. The surgeon and the people around him would, he said, eat leaves and grass and drink water with spices to quench the hunger pains. He lost dozens of pounds under the siege.

 

The oppressive Iranian presence was evident in the surgeon’s daily life. “Khamenei lived among us through his proxies: in the checkpoints that besieged our city, in the militias that would storm our homes, in the kidnapped children and missing women, and in our villages that turned into ruins and mass graves,” he told me.

 

“Khamenei managed his colonial expansionist project from afar, but it was executed over our bodies and our cities.”

Hostage for Hostage

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, March 16, 2026

 

America’s history with Iran’s revolutionary regime is bookended by hostage crises. It began with Khomeinist fanatics seizing the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and now involves both sides holding each other’s economies hostage in the Persian Gulf.

 

The latest hostage crisis was one-sided until Friday, when the president ordered airstrikes on military—but not energy—targets on Kharg Island. The island is Iran’s main hub of oil commerce, exporting 90 percent of crude that leaves the country. If the Strait of Hormuz is the aorta of global oil markets, Kharg Island is the jugular vein of Iran.

 

The regime spent the last two weeks squeezing that aorta, so Donald Trump is now threatening to slit its jugular. “For reasons of decency, I have chosen NOT to wipe out the Oil Infrastructure on the Island,” he said in announcing the attack on Kharg. “However, should Iran, or anyone else, do anything to interfere with the Free and Safe Passage of Ships through the Strait of Hormuz, I will immediately reconsider this decision.”

 

Hostage for hostage. Iran blocked the strait to pressure the United States and Israel into withdrawing. Rather than pay that ransom, the president is holding a knife to the regime’s throat and demanding that it release the captive it’s taken.

 

That’s certainly in character for him. And it’s worth a shot, as scaring Iran into letting the strait reopen is surely the quickest and cheapest way to get oil flowing again.

 

I doubt it’s going to work, though.

 

For one thing, blocking the strait appears to be the only meaningful card the regime still has to play. Its conventional military assets have been pulverized and the uranium fuel it needs to build a nuclear deterrent is buried under rubble, according to the regime. Letting Hormuz reopen would forfeit its only leverage to force its enemies, which are bent on regime change, to end the war before achieving their goal.

 

Daring Trump instead to go ahead and cut the country’s jugular would be a show of resolve, signaling that Iran’s leadership is prepared to bear any hardship to win an existential fight. And it would place the White House in the awkward position of immiserating the Iranian people, our would-be allies in this mission, by following through on Trump’s threat.

 

Those Iranians are also hostages of the regime, after all. Visiting economic ruin upon Iran to punish the government would be a bit like cutting off food to a prison because you’re mad at the warden for abusing the inmates. The warden will be the last one to starve.

 

Calling Trump’s bluff over Kharg Island also makes strategic sense. “Destruction of [the island’s] oil infrastructure would take years to rebuild, leaving the country deprived of its most critical source of revenue,” one expert told CNBC, foreseeing elevated global oil prices indefinitely if the president pulls the trigger. Trump can’t blow up the island’s oil facilities without making the cost-of-living crisis that’s bedeviled his presidency durably worse.

 

If he wants to take Kharg off the table, he’ll need a less destructive way to do so—i.e. boots on the ground, which, at last check, was a 20-74 proposition among Americans. (Even a majority of Republicans oppose the idea.) The regime’s best chance of escaping this conflict intact is to make the war as painful as possible for the president politically; that makes it a no-brainer to ignore his hostage threat and force him to occupy the island, placing thousands of U.S. troops in harm’s way potentially.

 

The “hostage for hostage” gambit with Kharg Island is interesting but it’s not the only Iran-related hostage crisis in which Trump is involved right now. It might not even be the most consequential.

 

Taking NATO hostage.

 

“We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!” That’s how the president reacted to an offer of help eight days ago, after the conflict had begun, when the United Kingdom considered sending two aircraft carriers to the Middle East.

 

Never mind that many European leaders consider the war illegal under international law, that their enemy in Moscow is the prime beneficiary of America’s action, and that the White House did nothing to try to build a Western consensus in favor of attacking before the bombs fell. In sneering at the U.K.’s belated gesture of support, Trump behaved the way he always behaves toward European allies—with needless imperious arrogance.

 

Fast-forward to Saturday, when the state of his “already won” war brought him to Truth Social to plead for help in ending Iran’s hostage-taking. “Hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others, that are affected by this artificial constraint, will send Ships to the area so that the Hormuz Strait will no longer be a threat by a Nation that has been totally decapitated,” he declared.

 

Act unilaterally and aggressively to upend the economies of countries all over the world and then demand that those countries work with the White House to ease the crisis the president created: That was the administration’s playbook for its “Liberation Day” tariffs last year and it’s the playbook for ending the Hormuz standoff now.

 

This impromptu effort to bootstrap an after-the-fact coalition of the willing isn’t going well so far. Per Politico, Japan and South Korea are noncommittal while the U.K. and France are waiting for things to cool off (although Britain might send minesweeper drones). And China—really, what is there to say?

 

China and Iran are allies. The Chinese purchase 90 percent of Iran’s oil and tankers transporting crude to their country have been allowed to pass through Hormuz. Why on earth would they join Trump’s intervention? “That’s his war, not our war,” one surprised Chinese foreign policy expert said of the president to Bloomberg.

 

Trump demanding China’s help in reopening the strait because it gets oil from the Gulf would be like China demanding the U.S. Navy’s help in subduing Taiwan because of all the microchip business we do on that island. You can’t threaten an enemy’s supply of some critical resource and then expect its military cooperation in subjugating the supplier.

 

I mean, you can. But it’s stupid.

 

The president isn’t going to conscript China into the Iran conflict. But he might conscript some European countries into it—by taking NATO hostage, Axios reported:

 

Trump called on NATO allies to do “whatever it takes” to help the U.S. “We have a thing called NATO,” Trump said. “We didn’t have to help them with Ukraine....  But we helped them. Now we'll see if they help us,” he said.

 

“Because I’ve long said that we’ll be there for them but they won’t be there for us. And I'm not sure that they’d be there,” Trump added.

 

“If there’s no response or if it’s a negative response, I think it will be very bad for the future of NATO.”

 

“Whether we get support or not, I can say this, and I said it to them: We will remember,” he told reporters later on Air Force One, in case the threat wasn’t clear.

 

European diplomats were appropriately diplomatic in responding, mindful as ever not to poke a rabid bear that they’re momentarily forced to share an alliance with. But the foreign minister of Luxembourg couldn’t resist calling a spade a spade: “Blackmail is not what I wish for,” he said drily of Trump’s ultimatum.

 

Blackmail.

 

This isn’t the first time this year that Trump has resorted to blackmail in trying to get something he wants from longtime European partners.

 

In January he vowed to impose 10 percent tariffs on eight NATO members if they didn’t support America’s bid to acquire Greenland, before eventually backing off. That episode established that the president doesn’t view longtime European allies meaningfully differently from how he views other nations. If you have something that he wants, he’ll extort you—even if you’ve been a reliable U.S. partner for decades. NATO membership doesn’t make you special, not even in being spared from Putin-esque territorial grabs by the White House.

 

His threat this weekend about NATO and Hormuz can be understood as a sequel to that. If NATO membership is special, Trump seems to be saying, then members have a special obligation to comply when the alliance’s most powerful nation demands their help militarily—even if the conflict it needs help with was initiated by that very powerful nation.

 

To put that another way, Trump’s blackmail attempt is a bid to turn NATO from a defensive into an offensive alliance. “I want to remind that none of us has been directly attacked,” Luxembourg’s foreign minister complained in his comments on the war. “There are no grounds for now to invoke Article 5.” That’s correct. This isn’t the war in Afghanistan, where the U.S. enlisted NATO help to defend itself after a massive terrorist attack by jihadists based in that country. Iran is a preventive war in which the U.S. moved first to neutralize a prospective attack that might someday have come.

 

“But Iran has been waging war against America through irregular channels off and on for decades,” you might say. True, but Russia has done the same with European countries. If Poland launched a preventive air raid on the Kremlin to kill Vladimir Putin and his advisers so that they can’t invade Eastern Europe someday, I promise you that Donald Trump would consider that an offensive, not defensive, operation that imposed no Article 5 obligation on him to join the fight.

 

Why does the president even want European ships in the strait? What would they achieve?

 

Yesterday the New York Times reported that a “frustrated” Trump pressed Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine last week about why the strait remained closed. “Even one Iranian soldier or militia member zipping across the narrow neck of the strait in a speedboat could fire a mobile missile right into a slow-moving supertanker, or plant a limpet mine on its hull,” Caine explained to him, presumably not for the first time given how foreseeable the crisis was before the war. If the U.S. Navy can’t repel that sort of threat on its own or muster the number of ships needed to escort tankers through the strait in meaningful volume, why would a small and no-doubt token naval force from Europe be a gamechanger?

 

It wouldn’t. “What does Trump expect from a handful of European frigates?” Germany’s mystified defense minister wondered rhetorically.

 

In all probability the coalition of the not-very-willing would fail to secure Hormuz and then the president would try to extort them again into deepening their involvement in the conflict. It may be that the only way to secure the strait is to have troops occupy the coastline around it; on what grounds would members refuse if Trump said to them, “We need your infantry to help us hold the coast—and if we don’t get it, NATO is dead”?

 

It’s quintessentially Trumpy to turn America’s obligations into points of leverage against the parties to which we’re obliged. Threatening to tear up trade deals unless our partners in those deals obey the president’s wishes in other matters is one example; vowing to withhold appropriated federal funding from universities unless they meet his ideological demands is another. If the Trump administration owes you something under the law or under a contract, you actually owe it: Whether it keeps up its end of the bargain will depend on how willing you are to comply with new demands it might eventually make of you.

 

Having a legal relationship with Trump’s government makes it easy for him to take you hostage. Right, Anthropic?

 

That’s precisely what’s happened to NATO. The NATO treaty, a duly enacted federal law, obliges the United States to defend members in the event that they’re attacked. Trump has now turned that obligation into a lever of extortion: Whether he upholds his obligation will depend on whether European navies send vessels to assist in a conflict unrelated to the alliance’s common purpose. And probably not for any real tactical reason, as I doubt that the president expects Europe’s contribution to be decisive. What he wants, as usual, is to spread blame: If a multinational naval effort can’t force Hormuz open, then America’s failure to do so thus far will seem less embarrassing.

 

Nothing could be clearer after five years of Trump’s leadership than that he sees no value in NATO and actively disdains European culture. He likes getting to sit at the head of the table in summits and having the leaders of Britain, France, and Germany kowtow to him but he has no interest in containing Russia or preserving Western liberalism. One gets the sense that the president believes the United States and Europe effectively have no common interests anymore—especially with respect to Ukraine, a NATO non-member whose sovereignty seems to matter to him not a bit.

 

“We didn’t have to help them with Ukraine....  But we helped them. Now we’ll see if they help us,” he said this weekend about his request for help with Hormuz. For Trump, assisting Ukraine with weapons and intelligence is a favor we did for Europe, not something we did to protect our own strategic interest in limiting Russian expansionism. And needless to say, if the Europeans refuse to repay the “favor” in Iran, American intelligence aid to Ukraine and weapons sales to the continent for Ukraine’s benefit are likely the first hostages Trump will shoot in reprisal.

 

An obsolete alliance.

 

Postliberals are forever insisting that NATO is obsolete and that the United States gets nothing out of it. European liberals should consider their point from the other end. What are they still getting out of their alliance with the United States?

 

“Deterrence,” you might say. Oh? Deterrence toward whom?

 

In a world in which Trump consistently blames Volodymyr Zelensky, not Putin, for the prolongation of Ukraine’s war, it’s impossible to imagine the United States riding to Europe’s rescue in a conflict with Russia. It’s gotten harder for Europeans to imagine too: In France and Germany, more people now disagree than agree when asked if they thought their enemies would be afraid to attack them because of their relationship with the U.S. As recently as last year, the share who agreed easily outnumbered the share who didn’t.

 

With the White House favorably disposed toward Moscow, the NATO treaty increasingly looks like just another contract that Trump will keep threatening to break unless his partners agree to whatever new terms he seeks to impose on them. The Strait of Hormuz crisis is a sneak peek of Europe’s future—being asked to provide military reinforcements and force multipliers for the president whenever he decides “I just want to do it,” the words he allegedly spoke to nervous aides before the war who were trying to talk him out of attacking Iran.

 

When the day comes that the United States exits NATO, leaving behind a fully European alliance, there will be fewer tears abroad than many expect.

 

But for now, and until its defense industries are capable of meeting its needs, Europe will need to swallow hard and politely consider whatever dopey request American presidents make of it. The price of decades of free-riding on U.S. military power is not being able to so much as raise one’s voice in anger when Trump plays craps with the global economy, creates an oil bonanza for Russia’s war machine, and then turns around in a huff to ask NATO members, “Why aren’t you helping?” Such was Europeans’ faith in Americans that we would never elect an unbalanced authoritarian that they gambled not just their collective national security on it but, to a substantial degree, their independence. Oops.

J. D. Vance Learns What Mike Pence Already Knows

By David A. Graham

Monday, March 16, 2026

 

Mike Pence should have been a warning to J. D. Vance about the inevitable abasement in store once you join a ticket with Donald Trump. Before he became Trump’s running mate a decade ago, conservative Christian values were the center of Pence’s political identity, but in October 2016, he reluctantly stood by Trump after the release of the tape in which Trump boasted about grabbing women “by the pussy.” It was a sign of things to come. Pence became vice president, and for the next four years, he defended his boss through moral abominations and deficit explosions that cut against his fiscal conservatism, flinching only when Trump asked him to help steal an election. His reward? Trump did nothing while a mob threatened to hang Pence.

 

All of this was common knowledge when Vance agreed to run with Trump in 2024. No one lands on a presidential ticket if they’re not outrageously ambitious—nearly every veep for at least a century has fancied themselves a future president—but Vance is particularly brazen. Becoming Trump’s running mate required a yearslong effort to ingratiate himself with a guy whom Vance had, in the pages of this magazine, referred to as “cultural heroin” and elsewhere called “America’s Hitler.” Maybe Vance’s ambition blinded him to Pence’s lesson, but the war in Iran is teaching it to him the hard way.

 

For the first year of Trump’s presidency, Vance’s Faustian bargain looked like just that: a bargain. Though smart, Vance is not an especially talented politician. He won election to the Senate from Ohio only with Trump’s endorsement, and he lacks anything like Trump’s charisma. By signing on with Trump, however, he not only ended up one heartbeat from the presidency but also became the heir apparent to Trump’s political movement and the presumptive GOP nominee in 2028. Trump has often lavished praise on Vance, and Vance’s clearest rival, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, told Vanity Fair that he won’t run if Vance does. (Vance isn’t taking any chances. “I’ll give you $100 for every person you make look really shitty compared to me,” Vance joked to the magazine’s photographer. “And $1,000 if it’s Marco.”)

 

But Trump’s recent military policy has complicated this easy ascent. Vance has built a political profile around his opposition to foreign intervention, which he traces to his own disillusionment while serving as a Marine in Iraq. That meshed well with Trump’s first-term image (if not his reality), but it clashes with the imperial ambitions of his second. Vance was conspicuously missing when Trump launched the January raid to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. He’s also been scarce since the start of the Iran war, which threatens to turn into a quagmire with record speed.

 

The Iran campaign shows, as my colleague Idrees Kahloon wrote recently, that “within the Trump administration, Vance’s opinions seem to matter less and less.” Even worse for Vance, Rubio is ascendant. MAGA gadfly Laura Loomer noted that when Trump spoke in Vance’s home region last week, the secretary of state received gushing acclaim from the president. All Vance got was short shrift.

 

Vance has begun making public statements in support of the war, but they appear to emerge from clenched teeth. Bolstering this impression was what sure looks like an intentional leak to Politico on Friday that Vance “was skeptical of the U.S. striking Iran in the leadup to President Donald Trump’s decision to launch the war.” This report was greeted dismissively in some quarters as a frantic attempt by Vance to distance himself from a doomed war, or, as The New Republic’s Alex Shephard put it, “a Machiavellian and astonishingly self-serving maneuver.” One can never rule this out with Vance, but I think it’s just as possible that the story is less a strategic ploy than Vance reacting in frustration to being so ignored by the president.

 

Insofar as Vance has any sincere beliefs in anything other than himself, his opposition to military intervention seems to be one. Though he has changed many of his positions in the past decade, he has remained consistent on this, and he seems to say the same things in private that he does in public. When an administration official mistakenly added Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, to a Signal chat about a strike on Yemeni militants last year, Vance was dubious about American action. “I just hate bailing Europe out again,” he wrote. (Turnabout is fair play: Now Europe seems unenthused about bailing Trump out in the Strait of Hormuz.)

 

What Vance is learning now is that serving Trump doesn’t mean just compromising on some ancillary issues that you care less about, or keeping a straight face during his nonsensical digressions. Instead, Trump will humiliate you even—or especially—on your most deeply held views. Just as Pence found himself obliged to defend Trump’s least socially conservative tendencies, Vance is now defending his war in Iran. Vance may have thought he was getting a cheap ticket to the pinnacle of power. The price, it turns out, is much higher than he realized.

A Possible Upside to the Iran War

By Michael Schuman

Monday, March 16, 2026

 

Even as Donald Trump’s war roils global energy markets and runs down stocks of U.S. air-defense weapons, the president’s relentless assault on the Iranian regime has yielded at least one perhaps accidental achievement: It’s undermining the reputation of America’s chief global rival. China is proving to be an unreliable friend to Iran in this moment of crisis, and any authoritarian regime that’s counting on Beijing as its backstop should think again.

 

Beijing has grand plans to undermine American power by joining forces with other authoritarian states, including Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and North Korea. Until recently, this scheme appeared to be working. Beijing’s ties with Iran and Russia had blunted America’s efforts to economically isolate Tehran and Moscow, and granted China a ready supply of cheap energy and some well-located partners. At a meeting last year with Venezuela’s then-president, Nicolás Maduro, Chinese President Xi Jinping hailed the two countries as “good partners of mutual trust and common development.”

 

Trump’s use of a global trade war to alienate friends and abuse neighbors, and his spats with allies over the fates of Greenland and Ukraine, seem to have left room for Xi to grow his power. When Xi hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, and other representatives of the global South in Beijing last summer, he duly pitched a vision that gave autocrats a greater voice in world affairs.

 

Less than a year on, both Maduro and longtime Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei are gone, and Khamenei’s son Mojtaba is now struggling to hold the Islamic Republic together. More significant, Xi has hardly rushed to his friends’ defense. Beijing initially condemned Trump’s attack on Venezuela and called for Maduro’s release after his capture by U.S. forces, but then quickly softened, stating that China would continue to work and trade with Venezuela’s new regime. As for Iran, the strongest language China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, could muster to describe Khamenei’s killing was “unacceptable.”

 

Chinese foreign-ministry officials rarely comment on media reports, but they moved quickly to deny claims in late February that Iran was finalizing a deal to secure anti-ship missiles from China. Although some evidence supports that China has been supplying crucial weaponry components to Russia, Beijing clearly wishes to squelch any impression that China plans to offer military support to its so-called allies. Beijing remains an economic partner—China is the largest buyer of oil from both Iran and Russia—but Xi is otherwise reluctant to get dragged into a wider war or invite American or European sanctions by arming America’s foes in battle.

 

Xi’s unwillingness or inability to intervene in events so far from home seems to be harming China’s reputation as a geopolitical counterweight to the United States. Following Maduro’s capture, top political and military leaders in Latin America suggested that China’s lackluster support for Venezuela undercut Beijing’s stature in the region, according to research for a forthcoming paper by Santiago Villa, Thayz Guimarães, and Parsifal D’Sola, fellows at the Atlantic Council. Beijing’s response “exposed a gap between its rhetorical commitments and its actual capacity, or willingness, to defend political partners when confronted with hard American power,” Villa told me. Caught between an aggressive U.S. and an ineffective China, “Latin American countries feel they’re on their own,” he added. Some may respond by looking for new security partnerships, particularly in Europe.

 

Villa suggests that China’s leaders could burnish the country’s reputation in Latin America by fighting U.S. hard power with soft power, expanding aid and investment in the region. Yet this looks unlikely. Although China is a major trading partner for Latin American countries, Beijing’s generosity can be limited. Villa estimates that even after the Trump administration’s cuts to USAID’s budget, Beijing’s international aid amounted to only 5 percent of what Washington handed out around the world last year. “There’s no indication that China will close that gap,” he told me.

 

Trump’s attacks may have raised some doubts in China that Xi’s backing of autocrats is wise. Shi Yinhong, an international-relations expert at Renmin University in Beijing, told me that he believes that America’s recent military actions “strongly impressed the leaders here” by demonstrating “nearly overwhelming” U.S. military and diplomatic strength. Shi suggested that China could better protect its economic and strategic interests by seeking to “mitigate confrontation” with the United States and its allies. That could mean cultivating more “distance” from Russia and North Korea and taking a milder approach to China's other neighbors.

 

So far, Xi continues to favor struggling autocrats over powerful democrats, and has shown little inclination to change course. In recent visits to Beijing, European leaders seem to have failed to persuade Xi to help end the war in Ukraine. Xi’s continued support for Putin has been a major impediment to improved relations between China and Europe, but the Chinese leader has refused to budge.

 

Perhaps Xi recognizes that the long-term consequences of Trump’s aggressive foreign policy are less certain. The American president appears to have no clear endgame for his war against Iran, and his seemingly impulsive use of military force may in fact enhance Xi’s call for a more balanced, pragmatic global order. Jonathan Fulton, an Abu Dhabi–based expert on China’s relations with the Middle East, recently noted that Trump’s unprompted attack on Iran “creates space” for China “to build a consensus with other countries that share the view of the U.S. as the primary threat to global stability.”

 

Xi’s larger strategy may be simply to sit back and watch as the Trump administration gets tied up in costly and distracting far-flung conflicts. Support for Ukraine and operations in Iran are depleting American stockpiles of the advanced missiles and other munitions that the U.S. might need to deter or respond to a Chinese attack on Taiwan. Trump’s preoccupation with the Middle East also seems to have diverted his attention away from China’s threat to U.S. security.

 

Although some security analysts have suggested that Trump’s moves in Iran and Venezuela are part of a grand strategy to contain China by attacking the country’s friends, Trump himself has suggested otherwise. “We’re really helping China here,” Trump said recently about U.S. efforts to open the Strait of Hormuz. “We have a good relationship with China. It’s my honor to do it.” Although the trip may be delayed, Trump has been planning to visit Beijing later this month, where he is expected to prioritize trade deals over security concerns.

 

Perhaps Xi expects that an America divided at home and extended abroad will eventually recede, like history’s other overstretched empires. But patience can slip into complacency, and Xi’s reluctance to offer more than lip service and trade deals to allies may prove that China isn’t a suitable alternative to America’s global leadership.

Trump Is Learning That His Bullying Has Consequences

By Isaac Stanley-Becker

Monday, March 16, 2026

 

Two months ago, when President Trump was threatening to annex Greenland, I spoke with Danish and other European officials who warned of lasting damage to the system of alliances that the United States created after the Second World War, above all NATO.

 

At the time, this seemed like a theoretical proposition. Denmark and other allies had come to the aid of the United States after the September 11 attacks, sending soldiers to fight in the American-led war in Afghanistan; these same countries, officials and experts hypothesized, might be less inclined to help in the future. But the possibility that the United States would actually require European assistance, especially in the Middle East, appeared faint. After all, Trump had promised to curtail military adventures, in order to refocus on American interests in the Western Hemisphere.

 

The decision to wage war against Iran changed all that. Despite his earlier claims that the American military had already vanquished Iran and didn’t need partners to join the fight, Trump is now actively soliciting the help of other countries to reopen shipping lanes. And, sure enough, allies that once might have been eager to assist the United States in an area of mutual concern are reacting with, at best, a shrug—and in some cases with outright contempt.

 

As oil prices spike, Trump has called on a wide range of countries to assist in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, normally the passageway for a fifth of global oil output. Among the objects of his entreaties are China, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. “I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory, because it is their territory,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One over the weekend. “It’s the place from which they get their energy.”

 

True to form, he has saved some of his most belligerent comments for European partners. He named France and Britain in a Truth Social post over the weekend, insisting that “Many Countries” will be sending “War Ships” to help reopen the shipping lane. (No countries have announced any such plans.) He then told the Financial Times in an interview that there would be consequences for a failure to comply with his demands. “If there’s no response or if it’s a negative response, I think it will be very bad for the future of NATO.” In answer to a question about what he had in mind, a White House spokesperson pointed to additional comments the president made today that disparaged NATO. “We were going to protect them, but I always said, when in need, they don’t protect us,” he told reporters. “Now this is a need.”

 

It turns out that American bullying has consequences. “We’re now seeing the theory in practice,” Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard, a specialist in U.S. foreign policy at the Danish Institute for International Studies, told me. “Does the feeling of being poorly treated by the United States have any sort of consequence for European willingness to show up and help?”

 

In the past, Denmark and other European countries that viewed good relations with Washington as the foundation of their security would have been more willing to assist “even if they weren’t on board with the military mission per se,” Søndergaard said. “It’s pretty clear this is not the case anymore.” Proof of that came last night, when Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, gave a forthright answer to a question in a televised debate about whether she could still call the United States her country’s most important ally. “No, I can’t do that anymore,” she said, instead pointing to Europe, especially other Nordic countries, as well as Canada.

 

This recalibration has practical effects. During the Biden administration, in 2024, Denmark sent a frigate to the Red Sea as part of an American-led coalition to guarantee the security of maritime traffic in the face of attacks by Yemen’s Houthi militants. Denmark, home to the shipping giant Maersk, has significant interest, as well as expertise, in global shipping and logistics. But today, the Danish foreign minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, was guarded when discussing the possibility of backing U.S. efforts in the Strait of Hormuz, telling reporters that there should be a Europe-wide response as he suggested, elliptically, that Denmark would “keep an open mind.”

 

Other countries have been unequivocal. Germany, which is in the midst of a rapid buildup of its military capabilities, ruled out sending forces to the region. “This is not our war; we did not start it,” the defense minister, Boris Pistorius, said at a news conference today. “We want diplomatic solutions and a swift end to the conflict, but sending more warships to the region will likely not help achieve that.”

 

Germany’s position reflects a pragmatic response to a pattern of U.S. behavior. Roderich Kiesewetter, a member of the foreign-affairs committee in the German Parliament, ticked through the blows with me: downgrading Europe’s importance in annual national-security and defense strategies, dialing back support for Ukraine, and delivering a boost to the Kremlin’s war economy by lifting some sanctions on Russian oil. All of this, naturally, has repercussions. “It strains the transatlantic relationship,” Kiesewetter told me today. “We do not see Trump as a trustworthy ally anymore.”

 

Trump may end up getting the support he craves in the Strait of Hormuz. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said at a news conference today that his government was working with allies on a plan to reopen the sea passage, given the economic exigencies, while emphasizing, “We will not be drawn into the wider war.”

 

Read: Trump casually denigrates NATO’s war dead

 

No matter when the oil resumes flowing, this chapter in the broader Iran saga already has a clear conclusion. European countries have adapted to Trump’s transactional, and often fickle, approach to foreign policy. They will make decisions on the global stage based on shrewd assessments of their own interests, not magnanimity toward the United States. And perhaps that’s a good thing, said Søndergaard. “One could argue that the U.S. may be well served by allies that are willing to give critical feedback instead of a knee-jerk ‘Yes, sir’ reaction.”

 

You can only kick a dog so many times before it bites back. Trump, who is the first president since Andrew Johnson not to have a pet in the White House, is learning the truth of this proverb.