Blaming the Jews, Again

By James Kirchick

Thursday, April 16, 2026

 

In his letter of resignation as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, sent to President Donald Trump on March 17, Joe Kent declared that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” The rationale for Operation Epic Fury, he wrote, was cooked up by “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” who “deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran.” This “echo chamber,” Kent continued, “was used to deceive” the president just as it had been employed two decades earlier “to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war.” Kent told the president that he had “lost my beloved wife Shannon” — a U.S. Navy intelligence chief killed in a 2019 ISIS suicide bombing in Syria — “in a war manufactured by Israel.”

 

Kent is hardly the first person to blame the Jewish state and its American supporters for personal or national misfortunes, and he won’t be the last. His variant of antisemitic incitement — that Jews start wars for their own material benefit — has a long and ignominious history. In 1919, Henry Ford told a group of friends sitting around a campfire that the Jews caused the Great War; this idea and others like it featured prominently in the weekly newspaper he went on to publish, the Dearborn Independent. More than 20 years later, Charles Lindbergh infamously said that “the three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.” When an inebriated Mel Gibson was pulled over for speeding in Malibu and arrested on a drunk-driving charge, he demanded to know whether the officer was of the Hebraic persuasion and then flat-out declared that “the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.”

 

With his allegation of Jewish warmongering designed to drag the United States into a Middle Eastern war, the figure whom Kent most resembles is Pat Buchanan, the political commentator who worked in the Nixon and Reagan administrations. “There are only two groups that are beating the drums . . . for war in the Middle East,” Buchanan said in an August 1990 appearance on the political TV talk show The McLaughlin Group, as the United States assembled a global coalition to reverse Iraq’s usurpation of Kuwait: “the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.” Later, in his syndicated column, Buchanan identified four prominent members of that choir: New York Times columnist A. M. Rosenthal, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Continuing with the portentous surname theme, Buchanan in a subsequent column contrasted these Jewish cheerleaders for war with the poor Gentiles who would actually have to fight it, “kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown.”

 

Buchanan was widely denounced for these comments, most prominently by William F. Buckley Jr. in these pages. Though Buchanan furiously denied the charge of antisemitism, he went on to prove his critics right by publishing a series of books of revisionist history that soft-pedaled Hitler. Three and a half decades later, Buchanan’s message has found new adherents, with an array of commentators across the spectrum parroting a former senior government official’s claims of Jewish perfidy at the highest echelons of American power.

 

Buchanan was right that the Gulf War was fought, in part, to advance the interests of a foreign country. But that country wasn’t Israel. It was Kuwait, which Saddam Hussein had annexed as Iraq’s 19th province. It was Kuwaiti (and possibly Saudi) independence — and the larger goal of preserving the international order — that Americans were fighting and dying for, while Israel endured Scud missile attacks from Iraq and, at the behest of Washington, refrained from responding. And while Buchanan tried to portray those in favor of military action against Iraq as limited to Israel and its American supporters (a constituency that included, as he put it, the “Israeli-occupied territory” of Capitol Hill), at the time he made these statements over 70 percent of Americans backed the use of force. Forty-two nations — not only most of Europe but non-Western countries including Egypt, Syria, Turkey, and Pakistan — ultimately joined the Washington-led coalition against Saddam. The run-up to the First Gulf War was a model of international coalition-building yet to be repeated.

 

George H. W. Bush didn’t need convincing from anyone that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the world order, and the notion that Donald J. Trump, of all people, was unduly pressured into bombing Iran is even more absurd. One does not need to be an especially keen observer of the American political scene or a psychiatrist to recognize that the 47th president of the United States is not the type of person who goes against his own will. This obduracy applies to matters of international importance and personal pique, whether refusing to back down on tariffs or on the demolition of the East Wing. Intelligent people must have advised Trump not to broadcast the cockamamie idea of annexing Greenland. He didn’t care.

 

***

 

Rather than confront the disturbing possibility that the man they have supported unconditionally doesn’t agree with them, much less listen to them, the isolationists on the right have undertaken a hunt for scapegoats. In this fantasy, someone, or some entity, other than the commander in chief must be to blame for taking the nation to war. It’s a coping mechanism reminiscent of the adage spoken by Russian peasants suffering under the yoke of a cruel and decrepit monarchy: “If the tsar only knew!”

 

Take the podcaster Megyn Kelly. Last summer, when Trump bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, she was exultant: “This required massive balls. The guy’s got a very steely spine and zero F’s to give. He can’t be pushed around; he can’t be scared.” Fast-forward nine months to Operation Epic Fury: “We need to know exactly who talked him into it, and what representations were made to convince the president that this was a good idea. Who? Who specifically?” She rattled off a list of names that began with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. If the president only knew!

 

A day after quitting his job, Kent appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, where he revealed himself to be even more of a conspiratorial crackpot than was apparent in his resignation letter. As Carlson sat in exaggerated shock, Kent told a disturbing story in which Charlie Kirk stopped him in a West Wing hallway to “very loudly” tell him, “Joe, stop us from getting into a war with Iran.” Three months later, the youth activist was assassinated, and while Kent did not explicitly accuse Israel of the crime, he made clear where his suspicions lay. Seeking to explore “foreign ties” to the alleged killer Tyler Robinson, Kent claimed that the FBI prevented him from doing so. (Some of Kirk’s friends worry that such musings about a government cover-up could prejudice the jury in Robinson’s upcoming murder trial.) Kent also insinuated that the Israelis may have been involved in the assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pa., as a demonstration of their ability to kill him if he does not carry out their orders.

 

Another way in which right-wing critics of the war have been pinning the blame on Israel is by claiming that Trump’s base opposes it. “The attack on Iran is so wildly inconsistent with the wishes of his own base, so diametrically opposed to their reading of the national interest, that it is likely to mark the end of Trumpism as a project,” predicted Christopher Caldwell in The Spectator. What power could have overcome the special bond between the president and his most devoted followers? Caldwell doesn’t explicitly say, preferring to ventriloquize through what he describes as a sort of MAGA group consciousness. “For a growing part of Trump’s own base,” he writes, “while Iran remains the bigger threat to America’s global position, Israel is the bigger threat to America’s democracy.” Yet polling has shown as close to total support for Operation Epic Fury among self-described MAGA voters as one is likely to find in a free country.

 

Oddly, for people who claim to adore the man, the right-wing isolationists blaming Israel for the war have clearly not listened to Trump all that much. Aside from his enthusiasm for tariffs, there is no issue on which Trump has been more consistent during his five-decade career in public life than opposition to the Islamic Republic. In a 1980 television interview, Trump endorsed putting troops on the ground to rescue the hostages held at the American embassy in Tehran. Seven years later, talking to ABC’s Barbara Walters, he made the same sort of imperialist noises that he does today, threatening to “take” the country’s oil. In his 2015 presidential-campaign announcement, Trump promised that he would “stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons,” a vow that became a constant refrain over the ensuing decade. Figures like Kent, Carlson, and the other influencers can’t seriously claim to have been betrayed by Trump. They either weren’t listening or pretended to hear something else.

 

Many of the right-wing podcasters and online conspiracy theorists spinning tales of Israeli skullduggery are too young to remember the Iran hostage crisis of 1979–81, a national trauma that had a profound effect on Trump. The era of the late ’70s through the ’80s shaped his views on everything from international affairs and economics to architecture and media relations. Just as Trump still acts like the New York tabloid fixture he was circa 1986, he has always been wary of the Islamic Republic and its leaders — and rightly so. The same cannot be said of his critics on the right, who are often too cowardly to criticize him by name and who see Israel, not Iran, as the main agent of destabilization in the Middle East.

 

To understand the intellectual caliber of Kent and his promoters, just consider the fact that Kent has said, with a straight face, that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons because the (now dead) Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa against it, a fiction long peddled by the regime’s fellow travelers in the West. At one point during his interview with Carlson, prefacing a claim that the ayatollah was “moderating” Iran’s nuclear program, Kent said that he was “no fan of the former supreme leader.” Christopher Hitchens once noted a similar impulse among critics of the Iraq War who would rush to acknowledge that Saddam was a “bad guy” before sermonizing about how George W. Bush was the real threat to international peace and security. The rhetorical throat-clearing, Hitchens said, was a “dead giveaway” that “someone didn’t know what they were talking about.”

 

Compare the domestic political debate surrounding the Iran conflict with the 2011 American-led NATO intervention in Libya. During the early stages of the uprising against Moammar Qaddafi, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron started pressuring Barack Obama to intervene against the Tyrant of Tripoli. The famously conflict-averse Obama was skeptical, viewing the unrest in Libya as primarily a European problem. It was Sarkozy who first declared that Qaddafi “must go,” and when Obama finally came around to supporting military strikes, he did so by, in the confusing words of an administration official, “leading from behind.” While Obama later blamed the Europeans for the “mess” and “sh** show” Libya had become, one did not see the sort of wild accusations of deception, venality, and blackmail that swirl around the relationship between Trump and Netanyahu.

 

***

 

There is one striking difference between the Buchanan and Kent episodes. When Buchanan made his accusations about Jewish dual loyalty, he found very few allies on the left. Today, many prominent progressives have been receptive to Kent’s message, which they point to as yet further confirmation of Israel’s pernicious hold on the United States. Portraying Trump as the cat’s-paw of a foreign power isn’t much of a stretch for Democrats, considering how long they touted the theory that Vladimir Putin was blackmailing him with a video involving prostitutes at the Moscow Ritz. But the claim that Netanyahu is Trump’s puppet master presents a problem for the left, as it contradicts another narrative they’ve spent the past decade propagating: that the twice-elected president is a dictator. If it’s true that Trump is an autocrat, how could the leader of a country of 10 million people force him to do something as serious as launch a major war in the Middle East? Is Trump an authoritarian in every arena of presidential responsibility save the one in which the Jewish state has an interest?

 

Hardly anyone on the left cares to reconcile the dueling narratives of Trump-as-dictator and Trump-as-Israeli-patsy. Acknowledging that “Kent and I don’t agree on much,” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders nevertheless averred that Kent’s theory of Israeli puppeteering was “right.” A year to the day before praising Kent for being “willing to acknowledge the truth” that Iran did not pose “an imminent threat,” Virginia Senator Mark Warner condemned Kent on the floor of the Senate, stating that he had “aligned himself with political violence, promoted falsehoods that undermine our democracy and tried to twist intelligence to serve a political agenda.” Doggedly seeking to put himself at the center of attention, Congressman Ro Khanna of California used Kent’s resignation to tauten the imaginary connection between the war and his own twilight struggle against what he terms the “Epstein class.” Khanna’s blasé denial that this term, evoking a shadowy group of international sex criminals, has any antisemitic connotations was rendered moot once Iranian regime propagandists started using it. In one AI video posted on the official Telegram account of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a young girl standing on the late financier’s island looks to the sky with hope as an intercontinental ballistic missile hurtles its way toward the Statue of Liberty. It was a preposterous visual, stupid and malevolent in equal measure, and a perfect encapsulation of the deranged political moment we’re in.

 

It says something about their growing hatred of Israel that the one issue for which some liberals are willing to absolve Trump of full responsibility is the war against Iran. That, they’re blaming on the Jews. In a joint statement, four Democrats running for a Chicago-area congressional seat criticized Trump for dragging the United States “into an unnecessary and illegal regime change war fully backed by AIPAC” — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, an American lobbying group like any other. Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego, a purported moderate and likely 2028 presidential candidate, asked, “So Netanyahu now decides when we go to war?” Representative Joaquin Castro of Texas alleged that “Israel put U.S. forces in harm’s way.”

 

The belief that secret, sinister forces from afar are in control of one’s country is a feature of the third world. To see such mental habits grow among American citizens, left and right, is a depressing development, one that does not bode well for our politics or our society.

Outlawing Israeli Self-Defense

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, April 16, 2026

 

Yesterday’s Senate vote on Israel highlighted the utter uselessness of the term “defensive weapons.” It also shows why pro-Israel good faith is no match for anti-Zionist opportunism, especially in an era saturated with political propaganda.

 

Almost all Senate Democrats voted against the sale of bulldozers and anti-tunnel munitions to Israel. And the specifics here matter a great deal. Hamas’s battlefield innovations (and those of the wider net of Palestinian terrorist groups) have always been aimed at ballooning the death toll. Israel has been forced to innovate methods that would counteract Hamas’s ghoulish calculation.

 

Casualty reduction is the reason Israel wants the weapons at issue in yesterday’s vote. They are not, however, defensive weapons. And because they are not defensive weapons, Israel’s congressional opponents have a better shot at killing the sale—a fact to which last night’s roll call readily attests.

 

So: What does Israel need bulldozers for?

 

Their most common use by the IDF is to clear mines and IEDs (like homemade roadside bombs) and other deadly boobytraps. They are also useful in uncovering and destroying the tunnels used exclusively by terrorists and the hostages they kidnap.

 

And although obviously not a primary use, the bulldozers are also helpful during wildfires, when a nimble armored earth-mover can help stymie the flames’ path. All of these uses will be improved as Israel continues to make these vehicles more reliably remote-controlled.

 

Is it a “defensive weapon of war?” No, but it’s a bulldozer, not a fighter jet.

 

But the debate over the word “defensive” largely misses the point, because it was never about defensive weapons in the first place. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez expressed her opposition to Iron Dome funding, which is undeniably purely defensive, she was responding to a DSA member who phrased it this way (emphasis added): “If the moment presents itself in Congress, will you commit to voting ‘no’ for any spending on arms for Israel, including so-called ‘defensive capabilities?’”

 

“So-called defensive capabilities” was a telling phrase, and AOC’s willing submission to the DSA’s demands foreshadowed last night’s vote on bulldozers and anti-tunnel munitions. The new talking point is that there’s really no such thing as purely defensive weapons.

 

Iron Dome is an umbrella. When Ocasio-Cortez walks under an umbrella in the rain, are we unsure who is protecting themselves from what? Only a lunatic would say the umbrella is an offensive capability deployed against the raindrops.

 

But that’s where we are. Those of us who have tried to find common ground with Israel’s critics have made a  serious mistake: We allowed for the division of offensive and defensive categories thinking it would at least protect the anti-missile system that stops rockets from falling on the heads of little children as they walk to school in Israel. We didn’t imagine that members of Congress would suggest those children are the aggressors in the conflict and therefore anything that protects them is an offensive weapon.

 

We should have seen it coming. The progressive idea of “colonialism” bears no relation to actual colonialism; it’s usage is solely to justify the killing of Jews in Israel no matter where they live. They’re considered occupiers even in Tel Aviv. Academic and NGO activists have been arguing that Israel has no right to defend itself—so how could anything Israelis deploy be considered defensive? “Defense” doesn’t exist for the Jewish state, according to this line of thinking.

 

Once you concede that non-defensive weaponry is on the table, Bernie Sanders and AOC and Elissa Slotkin and Chris Murphy merely adjust the category so that all arms are non-defensive.

 

In a broader sense, this simply means that Israel is deprived of the rights we usually accord to all other states. It’s another way of saying Israel has no right to exist, therefore anything that enables it to exist is evil, including mine-clearing and wildfire-fighting vehicles. Welcome to the Twilight Zone.

 

The worst part is that the trend is clear: Unless something changes, this shameful moment in American history will be surpassed by an even more shameful moment next time this vote is taken. And anti-Israel Democrats will continue trying to chip away, bit by bit, at the Jewish state’s ability to defend itself from mass-casualty terrorism.

Catholic University Demands ‘Both Sides’ on Antisemitism

By William S. Harris

Saturday, April 18, 2026

 

Apparently, the Catholic University of America thinks opposition to antisemitism is too one-sided. This semester, Students Supporting Israel sought school approval for two campus events, one featuring Congressman Randy Fine speaking about antisemitism on American campuses and the other featuring Dany Tirza, a retired Israeli colonel, speaking about the West Bank barrier that he helped build. University administrators said no to both. Their reason? The events did not include speakers representing “both sides.” The school justified its decision by pointing to a requirement in the school’s policies for a “balanced presentation” of views.

 

But a political student group exists to advance a viewpoint, not to perform ideological hostage exchange on command. Students Supporting Israel is not a university office. It’s not a debate commission. It’s not a faculty symposium where professors have chosen to curate a perfectly symmetrical discussion for public consumption. It’s a group of students with certain views who want to hear from aligned public figures. Isn’t that also part of education? They’re seeking mentorship and intellectual leadership in areas that matter to them, no differently from when they choose courses. Should we also force students to take a men’s studies seminar for every feminist workshop they attend?

 

At CUA, the rules of student life appear to change when the group in question is Students Supporting Israel. Even just a cursory glance at recent campus events shows that other student organizations have hosted partisan and ideological speakers, including Democratic officials and pro-life advocates, without being forced to stage a counter-program. CUA even approved an event with Dr. Martin Shaw, whose scholarship posits that Israel has committed genocide — without requiring the pro-Israel side to be presented. Clearly, CUA is not neutrally applying a principle but selectively burdening one group, on one issue, under one of the oldest bureaucratic disguises for censorship in higher education: false balance.

 

Other school policies say the institution values and defends the right to free speech, especially the freedom of its community members to express themselves on university property. The university professes a commitment to the free and open discussion of ideas and opinions on its campus, making big promises about freedom but with an asterisk next to the word — *pending administrative approval. This doesn’t square with CUA’s accreditation requirement to demonstrate “a commitment to academic freedom, intellectual freedom, and freedom of expression.” As the Middle States Commission on Higher Education assesses CUA for re-accreditation (currently underway), CUA’s inconsistency on free speech should be penalized.

 

Universities often claim they want more dialogue — and that’s fine. Civil discourse is a good thing. But Students Supporting Israel is not a debate society or a BridgeUSA chapter. It’s an advocacy group dedicated to a single cause, and that cause is being undermined when “more dialogue” becomes “you may not speak unless you also make your opponents’ arguments for them.”

 

The university’s “balanced presentation” policy applies only in limited circumstances in which a speaker promotes views contrary to official Catholic Church teaching. But CUA did not explain how a talk on rising antisemitism, or a presentation by the designer of a barrier, fit that category. That raises an open question: Does CUA believe advocacy against antisemitism is contrary to the teachings of the church?

 

After the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression wrote to CUA over its abandonment of its free speech promises, administrators doubled down on their position that Students Supporting Israel needed to present both sides. Not only that, but CUA went behind its own students’ backs, communicating directly with the national Students Supporting Israel organization rather than CUA’s student chapter — all to try to reschedule a “balanced presentation.”

 

At a time when antisemitic incidents are at their highest levels in almost 50 years, CUA should reverse course, approve the events as submitted, and make clear that student organizations may invite speakers of their choosing without being compelled to furnish ideological opposites on demand. A campus committed to free expression does not force students to engage in ersatz balance. It lets them speak.

Britain Is Dying Under Keir Starmer

By Noah Rothman

Friday, April 17, 2026

 

British Prime Minister Kier Starmer’s initial reaction to the outbreak of the war against Iran was schizophrenic.

 

He seemed wholly unprepared for a scenario in which Donald Trump would actually use the forces he had spent the previous two months flooding into the region, confounding the former Royal Navy officers and opposition lawmakers who somehow understood that Trump’s ultimatums weren’t just talk.

 

At first, Starmer was appalled, and he blocked the Pentagon from using U.K. bases to launch sorties against Iranian targets. But the impracticality of that protest sapped his resolve, and his government swiftly changed course. After all, British interests were under attack by Iran as well.

 

So, under pressure, Starmer committed his nation to a show of force — one more visible than his deployment of defensive airpower to the Middle East. The Royal Navy’s HMS Dragon would lead the way, but it would do so alone. Britain’s five other Type 45 Destroyers were not fit for deployment. The Dragon set sail on March 10 and finally arrived at its destination, a Royal Air Force base in Cyprus that had been targeted by Iran, 17 days later. But within days, the Dragon succumbed to a “technical” issue and had to retreat to port for repairs.

 

This attempt at a demonstrative display of force — the sort of mission that used to be standard fare for the once mighty British Navy — had the opposite of its intended effect. The Dragon’s misadventure serves as a metaphor not just for the decline of British naval power but the deterioration of Britain’s role in the world.

 

Critics of the British social contract in the post–World War II era have long scolded London for relying on Washington to meet its essential needs, as profligate politicians sank ever more taxpayer-provided sums into unsustainable welfare programs. That criticism can be overstated, but it is inarguable that British readiness has cratered over the last 15 years. And in a strategically incomprehensible turn of events, it has cratered even as Westminster has allowed the “special relationship” with the U.S. on which it depends to atrophy.

 

“If the U.K. is simultaneously more distant from the U.S. and failing adequately to fund defense commitments in our own near neighborhood,” wrote the British historian and longtime foreign policy adviser to 10 Downing Street, John Bew, “then two of the principal pillars of our enduring national security strategy are in danger.” It’s an existential dilemma, but it’s one that the U.K. chose for itself. And Britain’s problems extend to the home front, too.

 

“The International Monetary Fund on Tuesday lowered its forecast for U.K. growth this year to 0.8% from 1.3%,” the Wall Street Journal reported this week, “the largest downward revision for an advanced economy.” True to form, the Starmer government responded to the news by blaming the United States and Israel for its predicament, with Exchequer Rachel Reeves mourning the impact of “a war that we did not want” on Britain’s bottom line. Of course, London’s financial hardships were much longer in the making.

 

The U.K.’s current fiscal crisis stems from both its reliance on foreign energy sources and its central bank’s decision to keep interest rates steady to avoid an inflationary shock. But Britain’s energy shortages are a result of both Westminster’s decades-long war on nuclear energy and London’s more recent hostility toward shale-gas extraction.

 

“As a result, gas production in the U.K. has declined 70 percent since 2000,” The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson wrote last year. Indeed, Thompson observed that the U.K.’s commitment to “self-imposed scarcity” extends to the British housing market, where anti-growth policies, environmental regulations, and lawsuits artificially limit inventory. “Europe has an energy problem; the Anglosphere has a housing problem,” Sam Bowman, the co-author of a 2024 report on “why Britain has stagnated,” told Thompson. “Britain has both.”

 

There’s little hope for a British recovery under Starmer, if only because his government refuses to acknowledge his nation’s many woes. The birthrate in parts of the U.K. has fallen to record lows, well below the replacement rate. One in five Britons sees immigration as the country’s biggest national problem, and not because there isn’t enough of it. That’s the highest rate of discontent over immigration of any of the 107 countries Gallup surveyed in 2025. Crime has become a source of increasing concern for British adults, with “a majority saying they have little to no faith in the system’s ability to reform offenders, investigate minor crimes, hand down appropriate sentences, or even keep prisoners locked up,” YouGov’s pollsters related last month.

 

More than one-quarter of working-age citizens are economically “inactive,” neither working nor seeking work. Twenty percent of Britons between the ages of 16 and 64 claim social welfare benefits — a fact that produces much consternation in Westminster but little else beyond complaints. “By the end of 2007, Britain had a higher GDP per capita than the United States, though this was partly a product of a strong sterling,” the American Conservative’s Azeem Ibrahim wrote last month. “Today, GDP per capita at purchasing power parity is back down to 71 percent of the U.S. level.” If somehow absorbed into the United States, British citizens tell pollsters they believe the U.K. would rank among the top ten wealthiest states in the Union. In fact, it would be the poorest.

 

Charles Krauthammer famously said that “decline is a choice,” and the British have chosen it. These trends didn’t begin with the Starmer government, but they have accelerated under its hapless leadership. To placate the restive British public, Labourites channel their discomfort into hostility toward America. But the United States military underwrites the U.K.’s profligacy, and the value Britain once brought to that arrangement is steadily eroding.

 

The United Kingdom is on a trajectory toward slow-motion collapse. Unless its voters make different choices and prioritize prosperity over mere comfort, Britain’s greatness is destined to be discussed in the past tense.

Kicking Out the Crazy

By Noah Rothman

Friday, April 17, 2026

 

Washington Post reporter Brianna Sack’s interpretation of Cameron Hamilton’s reportedly forthcoming nomination to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a bureau he was forced out of last year after he publicly opposed FEMA’s dissolution, is probably correct.

 

“Hamilton’s potential return suggests that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin is moving away from previous efforts to undercut the autonomy of the nation’s emergency management and response system championed by his predecessor, Kristi L. Noem,” she wrote.

 

Whether she was acting on the president’s orders or not, defenestrating Hamilton probably seemed like a good idea at the time — especially to the figures in this administration who have their ear closest to online chatter. After all, as Donald Trump said early in his second term, “I think we’re going to recommend that FEMA go away.”

 

A predictable sequence of events followed: Democrats objected in emotive and theatrical ways; Republicans reacted to that melodrama by embracing with equal zeal FEMA’s dismemberment; and when Hamilton contradicted the president, he became a figure of contempt among the very-online right, perhaps convincing the equally very-online Homeland Security director to prosecute the issue.

 

But Noem is gone. And, with the help of a federal judge who put a halt to some preliminary efforts by the administration to scale back FEMA programs, so, too, are the political incentives to which she unwisely responded.

 

Perhaps something similar is taking place inside the Department of Health and Human Services.

 

“President Trump has selected Dr. Erica Schwartz, a physician and vaccine supporter, as his nominee to become the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” the New York Times reported Thursday, “the clearest signal yet that the White House is veering away from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine skepticism in the lead up to the midterm elections.”

 

Kennedy himself expressed perfunctory support for Schwartz’s nomination. Still, the secretary’s anti-vaccine associates were nevertheless comfortable providing the Times with on-the-record quotes castigating Trump’s selection to head the CDC. Deep down, Kennedy may object. But, once again, the Trump administration seems to have decided that advancing an anti-vaccine agenda was more trouble than it was worth.

 

“Last month, a federal judge ruled that Mr. Kennedy and his advisers had made “arbitrary and capricious” changes to the schedule that were not backed up by scientific evidence, the Times notes. And while the report contends that HHS has “taken other steps” that “might allow” the secretary to “skirt the ruling,” it nevertheless concedes the most crucial point: “The Trump administration has not appealed the ruling,” the dispatch read.

 

It’s easy to overstate what is, at best, a nascent trend. And yet, while it may be a result of duress, on the margins, the Trump administration is pivoting away from the fringes of American intellectual life to which it was once so attracted.

Hezbollah: The Final Act

By Brian Stewart

Thursday, April 16, 2026

 

In the modern Middle East, if any group could claim the mantle of revolutionary Islam, it is Hezbollah. And no country, with the exception of Syria and Iran itself, has suffered more from the Iranian Revolution than Lebanon, where Hezbollah, the Party of God, operates outside state control. The story of Hezbollah’s rise is central to understanding Lebanon’s current plight, in which decisions of war and peace are made by a fanatical and bellicose militia rather than the sovereign state. Its fall would not only restore Lebanon to its full stature but, by virtue of Lebanon’s position as the strategic gate to the Levant, restore balance to the region as a whole.

 

It is often forgotten that the war provoked by Hamas’s murderous assault on Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, was joined one day later by Iran’s other jihadist surrogate on the Mediterranean. On October 8, while Hamas continued to wreak havoc against Israeli civilians in the Gaza envelope, Hezbollah launched a volley of rockets into northern Israel. In conflict with Israel since the group was founded nearly half a century ago, Hezbollah made a fateful decision to strike at the Jewish state in its hour of maximum danger.

 

The rapid deployment of two U.S. carrier strike groups to the Eastern Mediterranean along with three Israel Defense Forces brigades to Israel’s north helped stave off a larger conflagration. A scenario in which Hezbollah had mounted a full ground campaign to complement the Hamas onslaught in the south would have given the war a truly existential dimension — a reasonable fear anyway, given the long-standing ambition of Israel’s enemies to destroy it. Although Hezbollah’s leaders (or their Iranian masters) were dissuaded from launching an all-out assault, they maintained periodic rocket barrages across Israel’s borders, ensuring that the furies of war would burn the ground in Beirut and across Lebanon’s Shiite heartland for years to come.

 

Beginning on October 8, Israel made a series of audacious and successful wagers on economizing violence: though it was tempted to strike Hezbollah first to eliminate the threat from its more formidable foe, Israel decided to focus on Hamas in Gaza. When it eventually turned back to the north, the Party of God did not fare well in its skirmishes with Israeli power. In September 2024, in a move since nicknamed “Operation Grim Beeper,” Israel eliminated the Hezbollah leadership in Dahiya, the part of southern Beirut where the group is headquartered. Thousands of Hezbollah operatives were taken out of action in one fell swoop by means of exploding pagers. The terror group’s fearsome arsenal, in excess of 100,000 rockets and missiles, has been relentlessly attacked and is now dramatically reduced. A substantial fraction of Hezbollah’s reserve power has been laid to waste.

 

Despite these enormous and bloody setbacks, it is not evident that Hezbollah has lost popular support among the Shiite community of Lebanon, and it has certainly not lost its appetite for violence. On March 2, 2026, a few days after the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in U.S.-Israeli strikes on Tehran, Hezbollah launched missiles and drones at Israel. As a result, Lebanon has once more begun to suffer the effects of military retaliation brought on by the decisions made by the terrorist organization operating freely within it.

 

Before the fragile cease-fire agreement, there were strong indications that Israel was poised to invade Lebanon and lay siege to the Iranian proxy. Should Israel manage to establish a “security zone,” clearing Hezbollah out of territory south of the Litani River, the Shiite militia has made clear that confrontation with the Lebanese state will be “inevitable.” “The government in Lebanon is no longer fit to run the country,” said Mahmoud Qamati, deputy head of Hezbollah’s political council. To deter their compatriots from collaborating with a foreign occupier, Hezbollah has threatened to “hang them like Vichy.”

 

For years, in Israel’s towns and kibbutzim along the border with Lebanon and as far south as Tel Aviv, its second-most-populous city, people have lived in the shadow of Hezbollah. Its formidable arsenal of rockets and missiles has disrupted Israel’s economy and civil society, tingeing normal life with an ever-present threat. Israel’s patience with Hezbollah has run out.

 

The war to extinguish Israel’s nationhood instantly shattered Israel’s deterrence — a near-fatal wound in a region as treacherous as the Fertile Crescent. But now that precious asset has been painstakingly restored, and it is the Iranian axis that is nursing its wounds. At this strategically plastic moment, the Israeli governing class has resolved to confront what remains of the Hezbollah menace in the hopes of uprooting it from Lebanon for good. The bounty that once sustained the Party of God may now belong to an irretrievable past, and thus, for the first time, it will be forced to expend military capital without the prospect of replenishment. But after years spent as complicit spectators in their own national drama, the Lebanese people remain Hezbollah’s most fearsome enemy and must ultimately decide its fate.

 

***

 

In Lebanon, as in much of the Sunni-dominated Arab world, the Shiites long constituted a despised underclass — one of the “compact communities” in the Levant and the Gulf that the ruling classes could repress with impunity. Relegated to the margins of Lebanese society, not least in cosmopolitan Beirut, these Shiite stepchildren in the capital’s southern suburbs discovered a sense of self-confidence from the example of their brethren in Iran, who had pulled off an improbable revolution and infused their common faith with muscle and sinew.

 

In 1979, Iran staged a revolution that possessed the ideological potential of the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the first time in history that an Islamist clique had taken control of a state and put its vast resources in service of undermining the international system. For nearly a half century, the Islamic Revolution has spurred sectarian violence, from the Middle East to the Indian subcontinent.

 

After Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini proclaimed himself a supreme leader, a faqih, his theocratic regime summoned those excluded from Arab politics to make a new bid for power, and Hezbollah, in answering this call, was the most significant and lasting result. The Shiites of Lebanon, seeing the “armed imam” as their great avenger, were suddenly done with quiescence. “The symbols and rituals of Shiism,” the Lebanese scholar Fouad Ajami wrote in Beirut: City of Regrets, “once invitations to submission, had been reinterpreted, turned to an ethos of martyrdom and zeal.”

 

In the early 1980s, in the Bekaa Valley east of Beirut, zealous Shiite militias bent on martyrdom officially coalesced into Hezbollah and, through Syria, drew extensive Iranian support in the form of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps operatives, clerical guides, and military armaments. In the tumult of a country at war with itself, Hezbollah turned away from the “vanished” Imam Musa al-Sadr and his commitment to a common national identity for all Lebanese. The Shiite militants looked instead to the militant cleric Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, who emphasized loyalty to the transnational ideology backed by Iranian power. At the same time, in place of the doctrine that clerics should refrain from activism in government pending the reappearance of the hidden Twelfth Imam (the Mahdi, an Islamic messianic figure, in occultation), Khomeini conceived the velayat-e faqih, the “rule of the jurists,” to legitimate absolute theocratic rule under a single supreme leader.

 

This revolutionary revision of Shiite theology, and its potent fusion of spiritual and political authority, gave Iran’s grand ayatollah unlimited power over his followers. Hezbollah, with a ceaseless supply of manpower and matériel from its Iranian patron, has been the Islamic Revolution’s branch on the Mediterranean, creating a political world of its own in multi-confessional Lebanon.

 

During a recent visit to Lebanon, I saw a variety of garish tributes to Hezbollah’s shahid, or martyrs, who fell in Syria. They died by the thousands, fighting for more than a decade in defense of the Assad dictatorship. This was nothing new. Any visitor in the past decade or so would have seen such macabre displays along roadways, outside Shiite mosques, or in the odd café. But in communities where Hezbollah exercises a stranglehold, I also witnessed a greater profusion of Iranian flags and posters than ever before. Perhaps this heavy foreign imprint on Shiite Lebanon is why the wider Lebanese public, which once welcomed Hezbollah as a necessary defensive force, has now largely forsaken it.

 

The vast majority of Lebanese are understandably weary of war and wish only to tend to their vineyards. The widespread impulse to transform Lebanon back into a place of merchants and migrants (to reprise the title of Leila Tarazi Fawaz’s history of 19th-century Beirut) is what makes Hezbollah’s latest rocket attacks on Israel so infuriating to Lebanese who understand that culture and commerce cannot easily coexist with an interminable fight against the “Zionist entity.” In an extraordinary step, following the latest Hezbollah rocket barrages into Israel, Lebanon’s cabinet moved on March 2 to prohibit Hezbollah’s military activities. The question is whether the feeble and corrupt Lebanese state can enforce its writ and push the outlaw Islamist outfit toward oblivion.

 

The perpetual dilemma for Lebanon is that any attempt to constrain Hezbollah by decree risks inflaming sectarian tensions, particularly if it draws the Lebanese military into direct confrontation with an armed and heavily embedded Hezbollah. The trauma and travails of history run deep in Lebanon, and these exert a powerful gravitational pull against tinkering with the fragile established order. But the political class has signaled that it will no longer support and live with the Hezbollah exception. Now that the Lebanese have taken this stand for freedom, the United States and its European allies, especially France, must oblige them — and help them — to hold it. The alternative would be an unduly punitive, and probably counterproductive, Israeli military campaign.

 

***

 

Ever since the outbreak of their long and bloody civil war in the 1970s, the Lebanese have been complaining that a host of cynical outside powers and hostile forces have used their nation as a battlefield. In recent decades, that grievance has been especially apt given the nefarious influence of Iran’s radical theocracy, which has summoned Lebanon’s traditional Shiite underclass, “the oppressed of the earth,” to claim a dominant position in — or, better put, above — the Lebanese state. Propelled by Iranian largesse and a sense of messianic purpose, the Shiite revolutionaries have conscripted Lebanon into their wars of faith.

 

This is why the Lebanese have watched the war in Iran, and the prospect of the destruction of its Islamist imperium if not the Islamic Republic itself, with breathless anticipation. Hezbollah’s military capacity, financial networks, and ideological legitimacy are inextricably linked with Tehran, and any fundamental transformation inside Iran would break the organization’s grip over the Levantine state. For this reason, the cunning Druze warlord Walid Jumblatt has long maintained that the solution to the problem of Hezbollah “is not in Lebanon.” It thus involves little exaggeration to say that the integrity of the Lebanese state will largely be decided by the success or failure of American and Israeli arms on the Persian frontier.

 

The path that has led to this potentially epochal shift in the balance of power in the Middle East is a fitting reminder, as Herodotus observed, that “war is the father of all things.” By now it’s clear that the war initiated by Iran’s so-called axis of resistance more than two years ago has backfired dramatically. Instead of setting the stage for an apocalyptic multifront assault on Israel’s existence, brazen deeds of jihadist terror reaped a terrible whirlwind across Iran’s sphere of influence, devastating Hamas in Gaza while inflaming Lebanon’s border zone, the Bekaa Valley, and Beirut’s southern suburbs. Not even the Houthis in Yemen, who attacked ships in the Red Sea and fired ballistic missiles at Israel, have been spared. The longtime Iranian policy of proxy warfare, which allowed the Shiite clerisy to inflict relentless pain on its adversaries without using its own forces or endangering its territory, has been undone.

 

***

 

The conflict is now climaxing in a battle royale against the Islamic Republic itself. The clerical regime in Tehran was an accessory to Operation Al-Aqsa Flood — the Hamas code name for October 7 — which produced the most lethal pogrom against the Jews since the Holocaust. But its Revolutionary Guards were not content merely to activate a “ring of fire” around the “Zionist entity” and watch it burn. From its inception in 1979, the Islamic Republic has been a font of irrevocable hostility toward the United States, directing attacks on American soldiers and civilians, as in the Khobar Towers bombing of 1996 in Saudi Arabia, and aiming, ultimately, to extirpate the power and presence of the liberal superpower in the Middle East.

 

This is why thwarting Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapon has been of the utmost importance. Iranian hegemony would be far easier to achieve with a nuclear deterrent. But until it acquired that ultimate power, Iran’s primary safeguard had always been Hezbollah, whose substantial firepower was meant to deter Israel from attacking Iran and to exact a colossal cost if it did.

 

It should therefore come as no surprise that, with Hezbollah reeling, and after years of ineffectual efforts at containment of Iranian power, Israel and America — the “little Satan” and the “great Satan” — chose to strike at the head of the axis, working in tandem to decapitate Iran’s political and military leadership and knock out its ballistic missile capabilities along with its nuclear facilities. The Islamic Republic posed not so much an imminent threat as a permanent one. Despite the abiding menace of the theocratic regime, it was the regime’s weakness and fragility that made this an opportune time for the custodians of American and Israeli power to strike against, and potentially strike down, a sworn foe of the established international order.

 

Despite the confused rhetoric coming out of the White House and the Pentagon, it became clear once the war began in earnest that the only real choices were regime change or an unsatisfactory — and impermanent — truce. Once closing the Strait of Hormuz became the linchpin of Iran’s strategy, it meant that anything short of absolute victory would do lasting damage to America’s substantive and psychological deterrent power. A wounded and vengeful revolutionary regime in Tehran that remains in power while commanding the approaches to the Persian Gulf (and thereby able to shut down global oil supply) would double down on domestic repression and shore up its now-battered ideological offshoots in the Arab world.

 

But whatever the fate of the ayatollahs’ regime in Iran, the greatest tentacle of the Iranian Revolution will be confronted in Lebanon — by the Israelis and, with any luck, by the Lebanese themselves. From the standpoint of American interests as well as of American ideals, the outcome of that struggle is not a matter of indifference.

Hostage Swap

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, April 15, 2026

 

“What they have done is engage in this act of economic terrorism against the entire world,” J.D. Vance said of Iran on Monday. “They’ve basically threatened any ship that’s moving through the Strait of Hormuz.

 

Well, as the president of the United States showed, two can play at that game.”

 

To beat terrorists, we must out-terrorist them is a strange thing to hear from the second-highest-ranking official in the federal government. But it’s undeniably true to the spirit of Trumpism.

 

The “game” the U.S. military is now playing is a targeted blockade of ships entering or exiting Iranian ports. Iran has made it impossible for American allies to export oil through the strait so America is making it impossible for Iran to do the same. Hostage for hostage: With its cash cow cut off and its economy crippled, the regime will now hopefully have no choice but to capitulate and release its chokehold on Hormuz.

 

Under the circumstances, this move strikes me as uncharacteristically not-insane by the president and his team.

 

In the first place, it functionally accomplishes the same thing that an invasion of Kharg Island would have but without putting American troops in harm’s way. Instead of fighting a bloody ground battle to seize that island’s oil infrastructure, the White House has neutralized it from afar. Iran can keep processing crude, but that crude isn’t going anywhere.

 

And by one estimate, that could become a major crisis for the regime in as little as 13 days. Once it runs out of storage capacity for the oil it’s no longer exporting, it will need to begin shutting down wells, “which can cause severe damage and cost it billions of dollars in annual revenue” indefinitely. That would be a heavy blow to the Revolutionary Guard, which reportedly skims about half the proceeds of oil sales for its own uses.

 

Given the diplomatic posture of the current moment, the blockade also seems less likely to cause a new round of escalation than it would have, say, three weeks ago.

 

Iran’s military is talking tough, threatening to “completely block exports and imports across the Persian Gulf region, the Sea of Oman and the Red Sea” if the blockade isn’t lifted, but the country’s negotiators have quietly made notable concessions in talks with the U.S. According to the New York Times, they offered to suspend nuclear activity entirely for five years (the White House demanded 20), the kind of complete freeze that Barack Obama’s 2015 deal with Tehran failed to secure. And they’re willing to dilute the enriched uranium that’s momentarily buried under rubble at sites like Isfahan, rendering it—temporarily—unusable in a bomb.

 

It’s uncharacteristically not-insane of the White House, I think, to believe that economic hardball paired with the olive branch of a ceasefire might nudge the regime toward further concessions aimed at ending the conflict rather than away from them.

 

One can even begin to imagine what the endgame of the war might look like. Both sides agree to free their hostages, with Iran reopening the strait and the U.S. ending its blockade. Some sort of middle ground on a nuclear freeze (10 years?) is reached. And the White House agrees to release billions of dollars in frozen Iranian funds to help with “rebuilding,” which it may or may not already be willing to do. Numbers being kicked around by Iran range from $6 billion to $27 billion, dwarfing the $1.7 billion involved in Obama’s infamous “pallets of cash” deal.

 

It is very much not not-insane that a war fought for regime change and denuclearization might end with us paying a fat bribe to an enemy that’s more fanatic than it was six weeks ago, but it’s also the least bad plausible outcome at this point. Call it the art of the deal.

 

Hopefully the blockade will get us there sooner rather than later. There is one wrinkle to consider, though: What about China?

 

Beijing’s leverage.

 

Our blockade is primarily directed at Iran, of course, but secondarily at Beijing.

 

That’s because China has a near-monopsony on Iranian crude, purchasing more than 80 percent of the country’s annual output. Xi Jinping’s government has stockpiled reserves to last at least three months, so there’s no near-term danger of a Chinese oil shock. But a long embargo in the strait would eventually bite a nation that gets more than 13 percent of its oil by sea from Tehran.

 

And it would sharply raise the risk of a confrontation between the United States and China, needless to say. If Chinese tankers try to run the blockade, the U.S. Navy will be forced to intercept them.

 

Beijing isn’t thrilled about it. “Dangerous and irresponsible,” China’s foreign ministry called the White House’s new tactical gambit on Tuesday. Xi himself scolded certain unnamed nations about reverting to “the law of the jungle” abroad, warning that “to maintain the authority of international rule of law, we cannot use it when it suits us and abandon it when it doesn’t.” That appeared to get the president’s attention. “China is very happy that I am permanently opening the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump wrote this morning, not very convincingly. “I am doing it for them, also - And the World.”

 

He claimed to be “working together smartly, and very well” with the Chinese—before ending with this: “BUT REMEMBER, we are very good at fighting, if we have to - far better than anyone else!!!” Considering the degree of strategic deftness he’s demonstrated with Iran, I’d lay the odds of nuclear war with China before the month is out at, let’s say, 65 percent.

 

More seriously, though, there’s an uncharacteristically not-insane case for believing that dragging China deeper into this war might accelerate the endgame, not escalate it.

 

Beijing was already nervous about Iran’s stranglehold on the strait. Sure, Iranian oil was still safely making its way to China, but an economic slowdown driven by soaring gas prices across the rest of the world is very bad news for an economy that depends as heavily on exports as theirs does. So when the U.S. reached out to the regime proposing peace talks as Trump’s deadline to, er, end Iranian civilization approached, the Chinese reportedly told their Iranian counterparts that it was time “to show flexibility and defuse tensions” by taking the off-ramp. Which those counterparts dutifully did.

 

The strategic math here isn’t complicated. China has an enormous amount of leverage over the regime, economically and militarily, and will doubtless gain more after the war as Iran seeks help from its patrons in rearming and rebuilding. By exerting our own naval leverage over Chinese oil imports, the U.S. is pressuring Beijing to use its influence over Iran to force a peace settlement—i.e., getting it to reopen the strait so we can get the hell out of there.

 

Risky! But not insane. The Revolutionary Guard might be willing to destroy the global economy in the name of defying America, but China is not.

 

Xi might even see value in playing peacemaker. China would enhance its prestige by settling a conflict that American military might have started yet failed to solve, a feather in Beijing’s cap with the president scheduled to visit next month. Much of the world has already concluded that being led by Chinese totalitarians is preferable to being led by a depraved, predatory America; cleaning up Uncle Sam’s mess in Iran and ending a frightening economic crisis in the process would only grow that number.

 

I did not expect to live long enough to see communism semi-plausibly sell itself as the sober, stable alternative to what the West has got cooking, but here we are. Congratulations to postliberals on an almost unimaginable accomplishment.

 

A scenario in which China helps broker peace in Iran before any civilization-ending occurs isn’t an entirely happy one, though. Xi will expect something in return for bailing the president out of the momentous economic and political jam in which the Hormuz standoff has ensnared him.

 

And we can all guess what that something might be.

 

The price of peace.

 

We don’t need to guess, actually. Sources close to China’s leadership told the Wall Street Journal last month that Taiwan is on the menu when Xi and Trump meet in May.

 

“Xi sees Trump as unwilling to come to Taiwan’s defense, the people said—especially if America’s involvement in the Middle East, which has led the U.S. to redirect major military assets away from Asia, continues to distract Washington,” the paper reported. “Xi is working under the assumption that, while Washington still supports Taiwan, Trump’s attitude toward the island is so uncertain that he has an opening.”

 

He does have an opening. As a candidate in 2024, Trump complained, “Taiwan should pay us for defense.” Once back in office, he halted military aid to the island more than once. He accused the Taiwanese of having “stolen our chip industry” as recently as February, and he blitzed them last year with a 32 percent tariff, which he reduced only after squeezing their government to pledge hundreds of billions of dollars in investments in the U.S. and credit for Taiwanese businesses to follow suit.

 

That’s not the stuff of which sturdy alliances are made.

 

As a rule, postliberal America doesn’t do sturdy alliances anymore. That’s another reason Xi has to suspect Trump might be willing to abandon Taiwan: Someone who hints daily about quitting NATO and whose vice president boasts about his pride in weakening Ukraine’s ability to defend itself from Russian degeneracy clearly isn’t someone who will feel pulled by tradition to protect a longtime ally for whom he has little regard.

 

But the reality is even worse than that. In case you hadn’t noticed, the president has gone from being an outspoken China hawk during his first run for office to a China accommodationist in his second term.

 

No one should find that surprising, as postliberals obviously see more to admire than abhor in how Chinese totalitarians conduct business—and it was always preposterous to pretend otherwise. Trump’s grievances against Beijing were and are entirely grounded in protectionism, a matter Taiwanese sovereignty has little to do with. Now that he’s no longer accountable to Congress, the American electorate, or, really, anyone, he’s dropped the facade of treating China as an enemy and begun to approach it as a potential partner for “deals.” From the Wall Street Journal:

 

Since Trump met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in the South Korean city of Busan in October, the administration has paused hefty tariffs planned on Beijing’s most prized industries; abandoned plans to penalize Chinese companies determined to be security risks to the U.S.; curbed investigations into Beijing-linked hackers; waved through Chinese investment in the U.S. with little scrutiny; and told officials to tone down their comments on China, current and former U.S. officials familiar with the changes said.

 

He went as far as having a draft of the National Defense Strategy rewritten because it cast China, accurately, as the top security threat facing America, according to the Journal. “President Trump seeks a stable peace, fair trade, and respectful relations with China,” the revised version read.

 

That sure does sound like a man who’s willing to hear Xi out about a new understanding on Taiwan—and Xi probably had it in mind when China leaned on Iran to accept the White House’s invitation for a ceasefire. “Beijing’s diplomacy is designed to send a message to the White House,” one former senior national-security official told the Journal. “If China can be reasonable on the Taiwan Strait and the Strait of Hormuz, Trump should be equally supportive of issues of paramount interest to China.”

 

There’s no interest more paramount than Taiwan. At next month’s summit, the Chinese will likely ask for slight semantic changes to U.S. policy that mean little to the average joe but hold great symbolic importance diplomatically. If they want the White House to say it “opposes” Taiwanese independence instead of “not supporting” it and favors “peaceful reunification” rather than “peaceful resolution,” it’s hard to believe that our deal-minded yet not very detail-oriented president will drive a hard bargain about it.

 

A guy who went from calling Iranian leaders “deranged scumbags” to wanting to turn control of Hormuz into a “joint venture” with them in the span of a few weeks is more than capable of deciding that communist China is a worthier ally for the United States than liberal Taiwan. It’s bigger, wealthier, more powerful, and more ruthless: To a mind like his, what possible argument to the contrary could there be?

 

Successful Chinese mediation to end the Iran war before Trump and Xi meet would be the icing on the cake, earning the president’s favor and incentivizing him to make concessions to Beijing in case its help is needed again someday to make Tehran behave. All Xi would have to promise to get some U.S. cooperation on Taiwan, I think, is that if “reunification” happens—peacefully or otherwise—the semiconductors on which the U.S. heavily relies will continue to flow across the Pacific.

 

And if the great Taiwan sellout does happen, I doubt there’ll be much of a fuss domestically. Ironically, the president’s unpopular Middle Eastern adventure has likely sapped whatever will the public may have had to use military force to contain our foremost international rival. Americans will be in no mood anytime soon for a conflict with a behemoth like China, with all the death and economic misery that promises.

 

Think of the potential deal at May’s summit as a sort of hostage swap, then: In exchange for the Iranians agreeing to release the strait, we tacitly agree to hand over Taiwan. There may be some question whether Xi has enough juice with Iran, and enough will to use it, to make that happen. But there’s no question, I think, that Trump will be receptive if he can.