Neoconservatism for Dummies

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, March 02, 2026

 

The thing to understand about America’s newest war is that it would be happening even if the opposition party controlled Congress.

 

Play it out. Imagine that Democrats held narrow majorities in the House and Senate, as narrow majorities are all the American electorate is able to muster anymore. How would the legislature have stopped the president from ordering a massive air attack on Iran, as he did late Friday evening?

 

A Democratic Congress might have moved a war-powers resolution before Donald Trump struck, forbidding any hostilities without legislative approval, but that resolution would have been filibustered by Senate Republicans. Democrats could have countered by eliminating the filibuster (at least in matters of war), assuming they managed to find 51 votes to do so. But had they succeeded and passed their resolution, the president would have vetoed it and begun bombing anyway.

 

The House and Senate would have been forced to try to override his veto, which requires a two-thirds majority in both chambers. They would fail.

 

Waiting until after the war had begun to move a war-powers resolution would have been even more futile for our hypothetical Democratic majorities. Some Democrats would be skittish about pulling the plug on a conflict that’s in full swing, with America’s armed forces in harm’s way. The realistic best that Congress could do under the circumstances would be to impose a deadline on Trump to end hostilities, essentially granting him a time-limited authorization to use military force retroactively.

 

And that too would be vetoed.

 

If you have a truly robust imagination, you might consider a scenario in which Congress does somehow supply the two-thirds majorities needed to overcome a veto. “Cease hostilities immediately,” the legislature declares. Do we think Trump would comply? Or do we think he and his team would mutter something about inherent authority under Article II and order the military to keep bombing?

 

The point of this thought experiment is to drive home to you that, with respect to the most awesome and frightening power that the government wields, America is a full-fledged autocracy. Trump might not be the first president to initiate hostilities without congressional approval, but he is the first to do so without any sort of excuse about how puny the enemy is or how limited American operations will be.

 

He’s not Barack Obama, “leading from behind” by lending U.S. jets to a multinational turkey shoot against tiny Libya, which was no threat to America in 2011. This is Iran, a nation of 90 million with real military capabilities and decades of expertise in international terrorism. If the president can start a conflict with an enemy as formidable as that on his own say-so, and the people’s representatives are so powerless to stop him that it doesn’t matter which party controls Congress, the age of America as a republic is truly over.

 

And I think Americans know it. A week or so before the attack, YouGov polled adults on whether they support or oppose military action against Iran. The result was 27-49. It also asked those same adults whether they believe military action against Iran is at least somewhat likely over the next month. That result was 56-12.

 

The people no longer expect their government to heed their opinion in matters as momentous as war. A mafioso with delusions of grandeur is using the world’s greatest military to reenact the end of The Godfather—Cuba is next, apparently—and not only have Americans been reduced to spectators, we’re resigned to the role. We’re an audience in a theater, watching a screen, aware that the scenes unfolding are completely beyond our control. That’s life under autocracy.

 

And so I think I owe Trump an apology. Two apologies, in fact.

 

Unaccountability.

 

The first is for believing that he’d pay a steeper political price for this war if he failed to make the case for it before attacking.

 

I stand by what I said in that earlier newsletter about the peril to him and his party in preoccupying Americans yet again with something other than the cost of living. Unless this conflict is over quickly, Republicans will be punished by voters who backed Trump in 2024 hoping he would restore the supermarket prices of five years ago and instead got tariffs, wars, goon-squad immigration enforcement, and a shiny new ballroom on the White House grounds.

 

But if the president is willing to run that risk for the sake of attacking Iran, he actually did the smart thing by declining to explain himself, no?

 

Explaining himself would have amounted to conceding that he should be accountable to the public for his decisions. He doesn’t believe that and Americans no longer expect it, as I’ve said. It would have been the height of foolishness for an authoritarian to risk rousing us from our stupefied civic paralysis by suggesting that his actions depend on our preferences.

 

If he wants the public to understand that it’s powerless to stop him from doing what he likes, the shrewder approach was to treat them like spectators. That’s what he did. And I think it paid off: Despite the putrid pre-war polling on a new attack on Iran, there’s been no great popular outcry since the bombs began falling on Friday night. 

 

He didn’t explain himself to Congress or seek that body’s permission to attack, presumably because he knew that a bill authorizing the use of military force would have failed in the Senate and possibly the House. Another way to put that is that the current war is less a case of the president acting without seeking the legislature’s approval than the president acting in a way that bypasses the legislature’s disapproval—an altogether more draconian form of autocracy.

 

Trump didn’t explain himself to Americans either, touching on Iran only briefly in his recent State of the Union speech despite the opportunity it presented to justify his thinking to a huge national audience. As I write this three days into the conflict, he and his team still haven’t managed a coherent justification for the operation. Were we preempting some sort of Iranian attack? No, according to U.S. intelligence. Was Iran on the brink of developing nuclear weapons? No, per Ted Cruz. Could Iran have been putting the finishing touches on ICBMs targeting the continental United States? Definitely not.

 

The Pentagon held its first public briefing in three months this morning, yet Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seemed vaguely offended that anyone would ask him to explain the White House’s war strategy. Some of the dimmer Republicans in Congress have gone as far as to insist that what’s happening shouldn’t be thought of as a “war” requiring explanation at all (a “special military operation,” perhaps?) although Hegseth and the president himself haven’t yet reached that stage of unaccountability.

 

It felt right that the first sorties were launched in the dead of night between Friday and Saturday, when most Americans were asleep, even though the timing was apparently driven by circumstance. If you want your constituents to feel like subjects, not citizens, let them discover that they’re combatants in a major new conflict in the Middle East when they wake up and grab their phones to scroll the latest NBA highlights.

 

So I was wrong and Trump was right. As a matter of pure Machiavellian politics, it’s in his interest to normalize the idea that wars might start without warning, simply because the king desires it. Nations operated that way for most of human history with relatively little popular disquiet. Now ours does too.

 

The fact that the president’s own stated rationales for war have been all over the place in his brief comments to reporters since Friday night feels like a sly joke in context—as if, by refusing to make a pretense of logical consistency, he’s mocking the idea of a monarch having to account for himself. Iran’s regime might need to go or it might not; the war will last for weeks or longer or perhaps no more than two or three days; we’ve identified three people who might become the next leader except they’re all dead.

 

When asked how the regime could feasibly be dislodged, he told reporters from the New York Times that its armed elements might “surrender to the people, if you think about it.” (The same fanatics who machine-gunned Iranians by the thousands two months ago are going to hand over their weapons to their victims? Not bloody likely.) Later the president told the same Times reporters that “What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario.” The Venezuela scenario would be the opposite of regime surrender, though: America let the Maduro thugs in charge in Caracas remain in charge in exchange for their cooperation on oil.

 

None of it makes sense because it doesn’t need to. In a postliberal country, Trump doesn’t owe anyone an explanation and Americans don’t seriously expect one. The probable truth is that he wanted to hit Iran to prove that he’s willing to do Big Things, even potentially catastrophic Big Things, that the weaklings who preceded him as president weren’t willing to do and he smelled vulnerability in Iran’s debilitation by Israel over the past two years. The regime was a target of opportunity to secure his own royal legacy. Everything that’s been said to backfill a justification for the war on traditional foreign policy grounds is designed to paper over that fact, a feeble half-hearted nod to America’s republican past.

 

Which brings me to the second apology.

 

Unprincipled.

 

I tend to take the president’s voters seriously while the president himself does not. Once again, he’s right and I’m wrong.

 

When I say that I take them seriously, I mean that I tend to take their stated beliefs at face value. That’s silly of me, as it’s been clear for a long time—witness the shockingly easy transition from the Tea Party to Trump—that most right-wingers believe in nothing except hating the left and resenting immigrants. But when a new right-wing faction springs up, like “America First” nationalism, it’s seductive to a writer to treat them as principled and coherent. Politics is about ideas, the naive commentator intones, and this new faction has new ideas.

 

Trump knows better. “Considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America First,’ and considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along, I think I’m the one that decides that,” he told The Atlantic last year amid criticism from right-wing isolationists shortly before his first attack on Iran. He was correct. He decides what “America First” means and, apart from a few determined isolationist ideologues like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, sheep-like Republicans eagerly assent.

 

This weekend he decided that “America First” means neoconservatism for populist dummies. 

 

“All I want is freedom for the people,” he told the Washington Post in a brief phone interview, offering one of his many different rationales for the war. “I want a safe nation, and that’s what we’re going to have.” To be clear, the “people” to which he was referring weren’t Americans but Iranians.

 

The idea that America’s security might depend on freedom for foreigners feels … familiar. Where have I heard it before? Ah, right: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”

 

That was from George W. Bush’s second inaugural address in 2005, an infamously idealistic ur-text of neoconservatism connecting America’s national interests to liberalism abroad—imposed at gunpoint if need be, as the then-president was attempting to do in Iraq. Now here’s Trump, the anti-Bush, resorting to a similar argument to justify attacking Iran in lieu of admitting the truth, which is that the war suits his sense of heroic grandeur.

 

It is certainly the case that genuine freedom in Iran would produce a regime less hostile to the United States and that replacing the regime with a friendlier one is the only way to solve the Iran problem durably. But Trump using the U.S. military to do so is as supreme a betrayal of the supposed principles of “America First” nationalism as one could imagine, literally antithetical to the movement and an astounding turnabout for an administration that sold itself as “the pro-peace ticket” in 2024.

 

How angry do you suppose America-First-ers will be at the president for that betrayal and for his very weird attempt to smuggle neoconservatism into Trumpism?

 

Not very, I’m guessing.

 

We’ll see what this week’s polling says, but in the past self-described MAGA Republicans have reliably supported the president’s bellicosity in foreign policy at a higher rate than other Republicans do. Various populist opinion-makers who’d dutifully criticized attacking Iran in the past dutifully pivoted this weekend to praising Trump’s new war, a likely sneak preview of what to expect from the wider right. A few members of the president’s own Cabinet who’d been outspoken about the recklessness of Middle East wars of choice years ago found themselves in the Situation Room on Friday night, overseeing the bombing of Tehran.

 

A ridiculous claque of fascist bootlickers suddenly has to act jazzed about fulfilling John McCain’s fondest foreign policy fantasy, and they don’t even get to pretend it’s in service to some made-up postliberal goal. It’s for freedom, says the president.

 

At moments like this, it falls to social media intellectuals like Will Chamberlain to try to define nationalism as meaning something other than “whatever Trump wants.” It’s not easy. “The point of being against regime change wars was not that regime change is inherently bad but rather that our political and military leadership couldn’t pull it off in an efficient and effective manner,” he wrote. “When the facts change you should change your mind.”

 

Regime change was bloody and difficult in the past but, after less than three days of combat with the most dangerous Islamic country in the Middle East, Trump has proven so deft at it that it’s fine for “America First” to support regime change now. See why I feel obliged to apologize to the president for taking his fans seriously?

 

The most remarkable reaction to the war that I saw came from Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who posted a tweet captioned, “President Trump is ending the FOREVER WAR that Iran has waged against America for the last 47 years.” It felt like taunting: The term “forever war” is commonly used by right-wing isolationists to deride whatever new military adventure the so-called “uniparty” is cooking up. By using such a loaded term, the tweet amounted to rubbing those isolationists’ faces in their credulity about Trump’s promises to stay out of foreign conflicts. Remember when he promised to end “forever wars”? He meant ending them via carpet-bombing, suckers.

 

Most Republican voters will buy it. And if you think they’re excited now, wait until the president undertakes the forever war that Castroists have been waging on America for nearly 70 years the same way. For freedom!

 

Conscience.

 

To say that the war is the biggest constitutional catastrophe since January 6 and that its MAGA supporters are frauds to their marrow is not to suggest that nothing good can come of it. One perk of having a mafioso as president is that he will, occasionally, whack someone who deserves it.

 

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one must have a heart of stone to read of the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei without laughing. It’s strange to think of a war being civically abhorrent yet morally just, but if ever there was such a thing, Trump going ham in trying to take out the terror mafia that runs Iran is it.

 

Have a laugh too at the expense of Vladimir Putin, who continues to lose thousands of men in his fight for inches of Ukrainian soil while the United States goes about knocking over Russian cronies like Khamenei and Nicolás Maduro with ease. Between their downfall and Bashar al-Assad’s ouster in Syria, the worthlessness of being a Kremlin proxy has never been clearer.

 

China might also have been chastened by this attack. Its missile systems don’t seem to have done much for Iran’s defenses, which will give their military something to think about as it eyes Taiwan.

 

And whatever else happens, we’re guaranteed to end up with a government in Tehran that’s much less capable of threatening America in the medium-term and, in all probability, considerably less willing.

 

There are upsides, you see. But I’ll remind you in closing of one more thing the president was right about. In January, when the Times asked him if he perceived any limits on exercising his power abroad, he replied, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

 

The military is at his mercy. Congress won’t stop him from doing what he likes with it, as Republican quislings in the House and Senate will prevent it. Republican voters won’t stop him either, as they have no beliefs independent of what Trump desires. For all intents and purposes, the American people have lost control of their armed forces.

 

Being ruled by a mafioso means that Big Things can happen, and happen quickly. Enjoy the upside of it this week. It won’t last.

The Fortress We Gave Away

By David Frum

Monday, March 02, 2026

 

During the planning for President Trump’s latest strike on Iran, Britain refused to allow the United States to launch air attacks from the U.S.-U.K. base at Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean. Only a few hours’ flying time from the Middle East, Diego Garcia offers airfields long enough for the heaviest bombers and has naval docks large enough for aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. It is British territory, left over from colonial times, but was jointly developed under a U.S.-U.K. agreement signed in 1966. Britain reversed its veto against U.S. use of British bases yesterday, but only for what Prime Minister Keir Starmer defined as “defensive” strikes. The delay and restrictions have dealt a blow to the U.S.-U.K. alliance. Unfortunately, Starmer’s Labour government seems bent on inflicting even harsher blows very soon.

 

Britain’s veto seems to have been what prompted Trump’s outburst on Truth Social on February 18, which ended with, “DO NOT GIVE AWAY DIEGO GARCIA!”

 

With this, Trump plunged into a controversy that has polarized British politics but attracted curiously little attention in the United States: the looming handover of Diego Garcia, the site of America’s most important military base in the Indian Ocean, to Mauritius, an African country that has become economically dependent on China and India. Impelled by postimperial guilt, the United Kingdom has insisted that this deal is an inescapable necessity, given that Mauritius has found support for its claim to Diego Garcia at the International Court of Justice, in The Hague. The treaty is signed but cannot take effect without the backing of the United States, which had at first accepted the British deal as a reasonable solution.

 

Yet the misgivings are well founded—even if they find an unhelpful voice in Trump’s decision to blast the treaty as an “act of GREAT STUPIDITY.” Escaping the trap that Britain and the U.S. have created for themselves will require far more than rage-posting.

 

***

 

Diego Garcia is the southernmost island in the Chagos Archipelago, which has been ruled by Britain since the early 19th century. The islands are also claimed by Mauritius, some 1,300 miles southwest of Diego Garcia. In May 2025, after decades of dispute and then years of negotiations following the 2019 ICJ ruling, the two sides came to an agreement. Britain would surrender sovereignty over the archipelago to Mauritius. Mauritius would then lease Diego Garcia alone back to Britain for 99 years. Mauritius would gain rights to use the other islands in the Chagos chain, but agreed not to lease any of them to a third nation without British approval.

 

Proponents say that the treaty protects the base and complies with international law. Opponents counter that Mauritius’s claim to the islands is weak and unenforceable. They worry that the little republic has been granted dangerous rights over U.S. security decisions—and that the country’s strong ties to China and India make it an unreliable security partner for the U.S. and U.K.

 

Britain has long accepted that the United States must agree to any change to the islands’ legal status. This means that Trump needn’t rant and rave on social media to stop the “give away” of Diego Garcia; he could kill the treaty himself. Yet Trump has not done that. Instead, the Trump State Department has repeatedly endorsed the deal to end British sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago. Trump himself has praised those negotiations too. Even his February 18 post is phrased as a personal opinion, as if the decision belonged exclusively to Britain. “Prime Minister Starmer should not lose control, for any reason, of Diego Garcia, by entering a tenuous, at best, 100 Year Lease. This land should not be taken away from the U.K. and, if it is allowed to be, it will be a blight on our Great Ally.”

 

The day of Trump’s online outburst, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt whether the administration now opposed the Chagos treaty it had previously supported. She explained that Trump’s post was the official policy of the U.S. government, “straight from the horse’s mouth.” She did not, however, clarify whether the post amounted to a U.S. veto. In other words, she seemed as baffled as everybody else.

 

***

 

While the world waits to learn whether Trump’s words amount to an actual change of U.S. policy, or are merely a disgruntled man’s opinion, Americans should understand the origins of the Chagos treaty—and its hazards.

 

Before the arrival of European settlers, both Mauritius and the Chagos islands were uninhabited by humans. Mauritius was named by Dutch explorers for their ruling prince, Maurice; the Chagos were named by Portuguese seafarers, probably for the Portuguese word for Christ’s wounds: chagas.

 

Mauritius was the home of the famous dodo bird, whose forest habitat would be destroyed by sugar plantations—first under Dutch rule, then French—worked by slaves from Madagascar and mainland Africa. The Chagos were used to farm coconuts, also by slave labor. The British seized both Mauritius and the Chagos islands during the Napoleonic Wars with France, then formalized their sovereignty at the peace conferences that ended those conflicts.

 

The British Parliament outlawed slave trafficking in 1807, abolished slavery outright in 1833, and then compensated slaveholders. Cash in hand, the sugarcane planters of Mauritius replaced their slaves with contract labor from the Indian subcontinent. As the sugarcane industry expanded, skilled workers and entrepreneurs from India came to manage the needs of the growing colony. When Mauritius became independent in 1968, a large and growing share of its nearly 800,000 residents were of Indian origin.

 

The atolls and rocks that made up the Chagos Archipelago offered more meager economic possibilities. When slavery ended, the coconut farms paid scant wages to the workers and their children. By the 1960s, fewer than 1,000 people lived in the Chagos Archipelago, almost all of them descendants of enslaved Africans. Whereas Mauritius was four-fifths Hindu or Muslim, the people of the Chagos were almost uniformly Roman Catholic.

 

For administrative convenience, Britain had ruled the Chagos Archipelago from the Crown colony of Mauritius, as France had done before it. But this presented an awkward problem in the 1950s and ’60s, when the British began decolonizing their African territories. The British had built an airstrip on Diego Garcia during World War II. The Americans now sought to lease and modernize that base. With the advent of long-range bombers, Diego Garcia’s location in the middle of the Indian Ocean was no longer remote, but central. The Americans wanted Britain, not Mauritius, as the landlord for the ambitious air and naval base they had planned. In 1965, the British detached the Chagos islands from Mauritius, then named the archipelago as the British Indian Ocean Territory.

 

Advocates for Mauritius now complain that this was an unjust act. At the time, however, Mauritius took a more relaxed view. According to an account by the former director of the Seychelles islands’ national archives, the Mauritius colonial government reacted to the British proposition by asking to swap the Chagos Archipelago for ownership of the Seychelles, then another British colony in the Indian Ocean. The British had ruled the Seychelles from Mauritius from 1814 to 1903, then severed it to form a separate colony. (The Seychelles gained independence in the 1970s.) If one severance was legal, why not the other? Upon being told that the return of the Seychelles was impossible, the Mauritius government accepted 3 million pounds in compensation for the Chagos chain, about $100 million today.

 

The Americans, worried about a future independence movement on the Chagos islands, insisted that the new British Indian Ocean Territory be emptied of its residents. The British duly closed the last of the coconut farms and, from 1967 to 1973, removed the Chagossians to Mauritius and the Seychelles, where many suffered extreme poverty. The constitution of the British Indian Ocean Territory specifies that no one has a right of abode on the islands. My Atlantic colleague Cullen Murphy has written movingly about the sense of displacement felt by the Chagossians and their descendants to this day.

 

In 1972 and 1982, the British government put millions more into a trust fund for the hundreds of Chagossians removed to Mauritius. (The Chagossians in the Seychelles got nothing.) The 1982 payment was presented by Britain as a “final settlement.” Mauritius at first took the view that the funds were meant to offset the government’s costs of absorbing the Chagossians. When payments did at last flow to Chagossian families, their value was much corroded by the inflation of the Mauritian rupee.

 

In time, Chagossians found ways to immigrate to Britain. They built a community in West Sussex, near Gatwick airport, where many found work. Because British Chagossians were largely concentrated in one parliamentary constituency, their plight became a political matter. In 2002, an act of Parliament granted British citizenship to Chagossians and their children in Britain, amounting to a few thousand people. Groups of British Chagossians have lately engaged in acts of civil disobedience to reassert a right to return to the outer Chagos islands, but as British citizens living under British law on British soil.

 

***

 

Mauritius is one of the most successful countries in the 55-member African Union. Its GDP per capita is second only to that of the Seychelles. Elections occur regularly, most recently in November 2024, and human rights are generally well respected. Yet Mauritius faces many of the familiar problems of a postcolonial society. For more than half of its independent existence, it has been ruled by two generations of a single family named Ramgoolam. Corruption is a serious concern: A former prime minister and a former chief of the central bank were arrested in 2025 on money-laundering charges.

 

Still, Mauritius’s domestic policies are more in line with American values than those of say, Qatar, which hosts large U.S. installations. Mauritius’s foreign policy is what makes the country an uncomfortable landlord for a major American military base. Mauritius signed a free-trade agreement with China in 2019, China’s first with any African nation. The Chinese communications company Huawei chose Mauritius as its African regional hub. China financed the modernization of Mauritius’s airport, financed and built the country’s most advanced dam, and covered much of the cost of Mauritius’s largest stadium and sports center in 2018. Tiny Mauritius is now one of the top five African destinations for Chinese investment, which is especially impressive given that it is the only one of the five with no mineral resources to develop. Mauritius has received two visits by Chinese presidents: Hu Jintao, in 2009, and Xi Jinping, in 2018. In February, The Telegraph reported that more than 6,000 Mauritian officials had received various forms of training from China.

 

India, too, has financed important infrastructure projects in Mauritius. Mauritius’s national security adviser and the head of its naval force are both Indian military officers. In 2015, Mauritius leased the island of Agalega—870 miles west of Diego Garcia—to India for development as an air and naval base. Although India is more or less a security partner of the United States and Britain today, that alliance may not always hold.

 

Mauritius’s deals with China and India may well make sense for a small country trying to succeed in a region where the two emerging powers loom large. But how much sway do Americans want to grant an island nation that is attempting to appease China and India over a territory that hosts the U.S. Navy and Air Force?

 

Although the agreement that Britain negotiated forbids Mauritius from leasing other Chagos islands to anyone else, nothing is stopping the country from building its own eavesdropping stations and selling the information to buyers in Beijing or New Delhi—among many other concerns raised by China- and India-watchers.

 

***

 

For a long time, Mauritius’s claims on the Chagos islands made only slow diplomatic progress. But in 2017, Mauritius was able to elevate a resolution about the matter to the United Nations’ General Assembly agenda, urging that the conflict over these islands be referred to the ICJ. The motion was well timed. Britain had voted the year before to leave the European Union—burning goodwill with many former partners. And Trump, America’s new president, had just scolded U.S. allies at his first NATO summit in Brussels. So when Mauritius made mischief, America and Britain discovered themselves short of friends. The UN resolution was adopted by a vote of 94 yeses, 16 no’s, and 65 abstentions. Among those abstaining: nearly every EU member state, plus non-EU NATO partners including Canada, Iceland, and Norway.

 

The matter duly went to the ICJ, which ruled in Mauritius’s favor in February 2019. The ruling was strictly an advisory one. But through a series of deft legal maneuvers—joined to the ever more ambitious self-concepts of some international legal tribunals—Mauritius was able to win a second legal victory at another international tribunal, for the law of the sea. The British government interpreted these trends as deeply ominous for its hold on the Chagos Archipelago.

 

In 2022, Britain announced that it would enter negotiations with Mauritius. The election of a Labour government in 2024 accelerated these negotiations. It probably did not hurt that the lead lawyer for Mauritius at the time, Philippe Sands, is a close friend of Prime Minister Starmer’s and a former law partner of Britain’s attorney general, Richard Hermer.

 

***

 

The ICJ advisory ruling condemned Britain’s severance of the Chagos islands as a “failure” of decolonization. Yet Mauritius’s ambitions are no less colonial. Heedless of the wishes of the Chagossian diaspora, Mauritius wants to reach across a thousand miles of ocean to claim territory to which it has few ties other than the clerical imperatives of a bygone imperial administration. Mauritius’s motive is not about peoplehood but about power: A Mauritian sovereignty over the Chagos will yield more income and influence than Mauritius would on its own.

 

In the past, the reach of international public law was limited by the ancient rule that no government can be bound by an international tribunal without that government’s consent. But some international jurists imagine international public law as a force that can and should evolve, apart from and even independent of governments. They imagine this evolution as a force that can replace grim power politics with ideals of justice, that can restrain the strong and empower the weak. For them, Mauritius’s maneuvers to adjudicate the status of the Chagos islands despite British objections offer a thrilling glimpse of a better future.

 

The Chagos Archipelago case also exposes the core weakness of the new approach to international public law. The methods used here would obviously be futile against China. China occupies islands across the South China Sea without even a figment of legal right. No court decision will pry loose any of those holdings. China holds Tibet without noticeable bother, commits crimes against its Uyghur Muslim minority with impunity, launches acts of aggression against its neighbors in the South China Sea, and growls off any court or tribunal that looks askance—which few do. As China gets stronger, illusions about what international public law can do become both more dangerous and more absurd.

 

The Chagos treaty demands considerable payments from Britain to Mauritius: 101 million pounds a year, on average, for 99 years, much more in the early years of the agreement, with complex adjustments for inflation along the way. The British government estimates the net present value of the payment stream at 3.4 billion pounds, but critics counter that the true cost will be much higher. Regardless, Mauritius has collected payments from Britain before, in 1965, 1972, and 1982, without feeling bound to stop asking for more.

 

The text of the agreement, which calls on each party “to ensure that in the implementation and application of this Agreement, including activities in relation to the Base, there shall be compliance with international law,” makes it easy for Mauritius to tangle the U.S. and the U.K. in litigation anytime Mauritius (or any future ally or patron of Mauritius) wishes to thwart U.S. military action from Diego Garcia.

 

Some may say that the U.S. has more than enough military and economic clout to enforce its rights against a tiny country like Mauritius. But 20 years from now, if and when China and India have grown only more powerful, the U.S. may find its clout diminished. The treaty essentially signs up the U.S. and U.K. for shakedowns forever. The British government is currently too naive to imagine Mauritius abusing the treaty this way. Trump, however, is cynical enough to foresee these future threats to the Anglo-American advantage of the status quo.

 

***

 

Which brings us back to Trump’s rage-posting. What does it accomplish? It does not veto the treaty. But Trump’s social-media opposition does create a domestic political problem for Starmer. The British prime minister’s net approval ratings have plunged in recent months to the lowest levels ever tracked by British polling. The beneficiary of this plummet is Britain’s right-wing Reform Party, a kind of MAGA proxy, led by Trump’s longtime ally Nigel Farage. Reform cites the Chagos treaty as proof of the fecklessness and weakness of not only the Labour Party but also the Conservatives, who began negotiations with Mauritius. In short, Trump’s outbursts are doing much more to boost the U.K.’s MAGA franchise than defend America’s strategic position in the Indian Ocean.

 

Yet Chagos still amounts to one of those rare cases where Trump may break something that actually deserves to be broken.

 

The goal of U.S. and U.K. diplomacy over Diego Garcia should be to end Mauritius’s pretensions over the Chagos islands, not legitimize them. The genuine wrongs to the exiled Chagossians should be righted, but not by accepting a territorial wish list to supposedly benefit people who never wanted to be governed by Mauritius in the first place. Guilt for European imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries should not become the permission structure for new forms of imperialism.

 

Most Chagossians say in polls that they want to be British. Some may wish to become Americans. Any money to be paid for the benefit of Chagossians should be paid to Chagossians directly. Any money for Mauritius should be paid to extinguish Mauritius’s claims—to make truly final the settlements reached in 1965, 1972, and 1982—while leaving the Chagos Archipelago securely and exclusively in British hands.

 

Under the American and British flags, Diego Garcia defends the Indo-Pacific region against aggressors who do not trouble their consciences about laws, pacts, or the rights of weaker nations. That’s more than enough moral justification to keep the old flags flying.

The Tears of The Tucker Wing

By Abe Greenwald

Monday, March 02, 2026

 

After American bombers took out Iran’s main nuclear facilities in June, the populist right’s anti-Israel contingent spread the rumor that neoconservatives were disheartened because the U.S. didn’t try to topple the Iranian regime.

 

This was a lie. Neocons were thrilled that what we had been advocating for 20 years or so had finally come to pass. We neither called on Donald Trump to go further nor did we think there was any possibility that he would.

 

So why did the neo-isolationists make up this story? Because they were distressed that Trump had delivered on a top neocon wish-list item. Even worse for them, it was successful, and we were happy. They wanted to drink neocon tears, so they manufactured them and soothed themselves with the fantasy of our discontent. It was what the kids call a “cope.”

 

Of course, Trump greenlit Operation Midnight Hammer not because neocons wanted it or convinced him to do it. He did it because of his long-held conviction that a nuclear Iran would pose an unacceptable threat to the United States and because Israeli military action against Iran and its allies had provided a unique window of opportunity that might soon close. 

 

Now that Trump has allied with Israel in a war for Iranian regime change, there’s no made-up story wild enough for the anti-neocon gang to pretend that either Trump is “with them” or neocons are in despair. They feel boxed out, and they’re enraged.

 

Tucker Carlson has called Operation Epic Fury “absolutely disgusting and evil.” Marjorie Taylor Greene responded by saying that the Trump administration was packed with a “bunch of sick f--king liars.” Nick Fuentes instructed his simian audience to vote for Democrats in the midterms. Blackwater founder Erik Prince said, “I don’t see how this is in keeping with the president’s MAGA commitment.” And on and on it goes.

 

As if we neocons weren’t happy enough.

 

There are legitimate reasons to be concerned about where the war leads and what it ultimately yields. But few of these critics cite them. Instead, they’re lost in their own fantasy roleplay game where motives are disguised or inverted, double agents are showing their faces, and state-backed cabals wield wizardly powers of influence—you know, it’s the Jews’ fault. Megyn Kelly simply confessed, “This feels very much to me like it is clearly Israel’s war.”

 

On X, Fuentes, Greene, and other unsavory figures I don’t wish to name are giving it to JD Vance with a vengeance. They feel betrayed by the vice president who made such a show of being on their side. Vance, after all, once assured a groyper at a live event that “Israel doesn’t control this president.” And in downplaying the rise of the right-wing Jew-haters he was courting, he claimed that the whole issue of anti-Semitism on the right was made up by pro-Israel conservatives to distract Americans from discussing the supposedly problematic U.S.-Israel relationship.

 

Three days ago, that relationship showed the world the most successful single day of warfighting in history. As ever, pro-Israel Americans are happy to talk about it. The real question is how Vance tries to explain to the hate-peddling right his own involvement in the most ambitious U.S.-Israel military effort we’ve ever seen. Another is how he tries to justify his association with the hate-peddlers to the rest of us. This is a dilemma of his own making. Vance thought he could court the right’s Tucker wing without losing conservatives. And he thought he could distance himself sufficiently from Trump’s pro-Israel stance to keep the Tucker wing happy.

 

The war in Iran could turn in any number of directions. At the moment, it looks far more promising than Vance’s battle for the future of the right.

The Israel of October 6 Is Never Coming Back

By Yair Rosenberg

Monday, March 02, 2026

 

Just about the only thing that the administrations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump have agreed on is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was too timid to pull the trigger. “The thing about Bibi is, he’s a chickenshit,” a senior Obama official told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in 2014, explaining that the Israeli leader was “scared to launch wars.” Nine years later, Trump would tell attendees at a campaign rally that Netanyahu had initially committed to join America’s 2020 strike on Qassem Soleimani, the notorious head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but backed out at the last minute. “I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down,” Trump told his supporters at the gathering, just days after the Hamas massacre in 2023.

 

That was then. Such assessments of Netanyahu sound absurd today, as Israel wages war on Iran for the second time, having dismantled the regime’s proxy armies—Hamas and Hezbollah—and assassinated its supreme leader. But in fact, Netanyahu’s American critics accurately characterized his conduct until October 7, 2023. For years, the Israeli leader spoke loudly and carried a small stick. Despite delivering numerous warnings about Iran’s nuclear ambitions—in Israel, the U.S. Congress, and the United Nations—Netanyahu never backed up his bellicose rhetoric with on-the-ground action.

 

That is, until 2024. The Netanyahu who is currently commanding a high-risk assault on Tehran is not the same Netanyahu who governed Israel for nearly two decades prior. And the country he leads is not the same, either.

 

Before this seismic shift, Netanyahu’s longevity as prime minister was built on a foundation of conflict avoidance. That posture appealed to a risk-averse electorate. Under his premiership, Israeli voters who were comfortable with the status quo could rest easy knowing that their leader would be unlikely to upset it.

 

“Despite his image, Netanyahu is not a warmonger,” Anshel Pfeffer, one of the prime minister’s left-wing critics and his biographer, wrote in 2018. “He is the most risk-averse of Israeli leaders, averse to making war or peace.” At the time, Pfeffer correctly predicted that Israel would not go to war with Iran, despite having a sympathetic Trump administration by its side.

 

Netanyahu was cautious by temperament and also by experience. His older brother, Yoni, was killed in a hostage-rescue raid in 1976. As the leader of the parliamentary opposition, Netanyahu saw a ruinous war in Lebanon destroy the standing of Ehud Olmert, his center-left predecessor as prime minister. A smooth-talking master of image management, Netanyahu understood that wars are hard to predict and impossible to script. Rather than tackle Tehran head-on, he moved the fight into the shadows, championing global sanctions in public while quietly unleashing a covert campaign to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program from within.

 

This preference for containment over open conflict was applied not just to Iran but also to another territory next door. For years, Netanyahu resisted agitation within his own right-wing government to invade Gaza and topple its terrorist rulers. In his 2022 memoir, Netanyahu wrote proudly about rejecting these calls to arms. “Ending these kinds of operations is much harder than starting them,” he noted. “The public invariably expects the government to continue the battle and ‘flatten Gaza,’ believing that with enough punishment the Hamas regime would collapse. Yet that would only happen if we sent in the army. The casualties would mount: many hundreds on the Israeli side and many thousands on the Palestinian side. Did I really want to tie down the IDF in Gaza for years when we had to deal with Iran and a possible Syrian front? The answer was categorically no.” Instead, Netanyahu opted to degrade Hamas with limited air campaigns and then attempted to buy quiet by funneling the group millions of dollars from Qatar.

 

The Hamas massacre of October 7—whose atrocities were broadcast online by its perpetrators and seared into the Israeli consciousness—upended and discredited this approach. With Israel’s borderlands in ruins and hundreds of its citizens taken hostage, the country’s voters could no longer countenance their leader’s quietism, which now looked like a historic blunder. An Israeli public that had elected Netanyahu to steward its security now felt profoundly insecure and demanded dramatic action. To respond to the attack was not enough; the government needed to ensure that others like it would never happen, by confronting threats at their source.

 

Netanyahu had not sent Israeli ground troops into Gaza since 2014. After October 7, that hesitation was no longer viable. He initiated the very campaign in Gaza that he had warned against. The cataclysmic and often chaotic conflict cost more Israeli and Palestinian lives than any war in their history, destroyed wide swaths of the enclave, empowered Israel’s extremists who sought to settle the territory, and sharply eroded Israel’s international standing.

 

Still, Netanyahu at first instinctively resisted the pull toward wider hostilities. When his defense minister and other security officials pushed right after October 7 for Israel to strike not just Hamas but also Hezbollah, Netanyahu demurred. The Lebanese militia was firing rockets into Israel at the time in solidarity with Hamas, but it was arguably the most fearsome nonstate army in the entire world, and a shaken Netanyahu was not eager to take it on.

 

But as in Gaza, the Iranian proxy eventually forced Netanyahu’s hand. Hezbollah continued shelling Israel’s north for more than 11 months, destroying towns and forcing the evacuation of nearly 70,000 Israelis. The devastation and displacement placed tremendous strain on Israel’s internal cohesion—and applied more and more pressure to its leader. Finally, in September 2024, after months of tit-for-tat attacks, Netanyahu launched a full-fledged campaign against Hezbollah, complete with exploding beepers and bunker-busting bombs. And then, something unexpected happened: Everything went according to plan.

 

Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was assassinated, along with nearly his entire chain of command. Hezbollah was decimated and soon compelled to sign a cease-fire agreement on Israel’s terms. Stripped of his enforcers, Syria’s pro-Iran dictator, Bashar al-Assad, soon fell as well. Total war turned into nearly total victory. And at the same time, another parallel engagement further emboldened Netanyahu. In response to Israel’s bombing of a consular annex in Syria and the subsequent killing of Nasrallah, Iran launched waves of missiles and drones at Israel by the hundreds, the largest such assaults in history. But Israel not only readily repelled nearly all of the projectiles—it also responded by easily penetrating and disabling some of Iran’s most sensitive air defenses.

 

With each successful escalation, Netanyahu’s willingness to use force to settle Israel’s scores increased. This growing confidence culminated in the 12-day war last June, in which Israel achieved air dominance over Iran, bombed its nuclear sites, and took out much of the country’s military and intelligence leadership, all without losing a single soldier. At the outset, Israel’s military planners had projected more than 400 casualties on the home front from Iranian ballistic and drone attacks; in the end, there were only 28.

 

Critics of Israel often rightly point out that Palestinian radicalization is less the result of inveterate ideology than of continuous Israeli occupation, violence, and dispossession. But this logic runs both ways. Netanyahu and the Israeli people would never have countenanced such extreme military actions if they had not experienced the unspeakable horrors of October 7, and the repeated, unrelenting assaults of Hezbollah’s rockets and Iran’s missiles.

 

This cycle has reached its zenith in Netanyahu’s latest and greatest gamble. Casting off his cautiousness, he has bet his political future—and his country’s—on Israel’s ability to confront not only the Iranian regime but also its Hezbollah and Houthi allies, all while managing a mercurial Trump who remains liable to declare a premature victory and exit the stage at any moment. Whether this gambit will succeed is unclear, and one should distrust anyone who suggests otherwise. But what is clear is that the Israel and Netanyahu of October 6, 2023, are never coming back.

Progressives Are Getting Bad Advice on Iran

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, March 03, 2026

 

Congressional progressives must be as disoriented as the Iranians as what remains of the Islamic Republic’s regime convulses in its violent death throes. After all, they seem to be getting their information about the conflict over Iran’s skies from the same sources as the outgoing regime in Tehran.

 

The Jewish Insider reported Monday that the Congressional Progressive Caucus organized an emergency briefing for its members on the war designed to rid the world of Iran’s terror masters. The figures they tapped to clear up their members’ confusion included the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi and Barack Obama’s controversial former national security adviser Ben Rhodes.

 

Presumably, the progressives who attended this briefing emerged from it no better informed about the nature of the conflict, the stakes involved, or its prospects for success than they were going into it.

 

In an amusing spectacle earlier this month, a political debate broadcast on Iranian TV criticized Parsi and the group he co-founded, the National Iranian American Council, for being an ineffective lobby for the Islamic Republic of Iran’s interests. Today, Parsi is still demonstrating his inefficacy by insisting that this war can only be understood as an Israeli project. As Phil Klein convincingly argued, that outlook is contemptuous of America’s 47-year history of conflict with Iran, takes no account of the precursors to this war, and ignores Trump’s record of holding Jerusalem in check when he deems it necessary.

 

All that must go by the wayside to maintain the narrative that Trump is under the mesmeric sway of the crafty Jews. But if you genuinely believed that falsehood to be true, you’d not take the world as it is. Rather, you’d force events to comport with your preexisting conspiracy theory. Presumably, the Democrats who took Parsi’s advocacy seriously are less informed as a result.

 

Likewise, Ben Rhodes — a figure whose anti-Israel bona fides were so sterling in the Obama years that his colleagues referred to the NSC analyst by the moniker “Hamas” — also foresees disaster ahead for the United States. But Rhodes’s track record of being wrong about the nature of events in the Middle East and their consequences is all but unrivaled. His misconceptions about Iran contribute mightily to that record.

 

Ushering the Islamic Republic in from the cold was Rhodes’s primary objective during his tenure in Washington. It was Rhodes who, among others, successfully convinced Obama to ignore the 2009 “Green Revolution” inside Iran. In even Obama’s estimation, that was a “mistake.” So, too, was Obama’s Rhodes-inspired contention that the Iran nuclear deal would transform the Islamic Republic into a responsible member of the international community. Iran could become a “very successful regional power,” Obama told the New Yorker in 2015. Perhaps Tehran could be persuaded to maintain an “equilibrium” in the Middle East in which it would take the power Obama was bequeathing to its military proxies in Iraq and Syria and not use it. There would be a new day in the Middle East — one in which “there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not active or proxy warfare,” Obama forecast.

 

It was not to be. Iran would remain as committed to the destruction of America and Israel as it always had been. Tehran would continue the practice it had perfected throughout this century — supporting insurgents and exporting terrorism throughout the Middle East, first in the form of Shiite and Sunni militants in Iraq and, later, the ISIS caliphate through its vassal, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.

 

Progressives are betting that the fall of the Islamic Republic will beget more chaos and instability in the Middle East. They have not accounted for how that chaos materializes in the absence of the foremost supporter, funder, and promoter of insurgent militancy and terrorism. Nevertheless, progressives remain assured that their pessimism is warranted. And why wouldn’t they be? All the smartest people agree.

No, Marco Rubio Didn’t Claim That Israel Dragged Trump into War with Iran

By Philip Klein

Monday, March 02, 2026

 

A large cadre of commentators have been arguing that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dragged U.S. President Donald Trump unwillingly into war with Iran. At first blush, this theory received a boost from comments made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday. But listening to Rubio’s full comments in context, it’s pretty clear that he wasn’t advancing this claim.

 

In his remarks, Rubio made two main points. One was about the purpose of the war against Iran, which he said was to eliminate Iran’s ballistic missile threat, attack drones, and the threat its navy poses to global shipping. He then said, “The second question I’ve been asked is, Why now?”

 

In answering this question, Rubio said, “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

 

This is the clip that is being taken as proof that Rubio said that Netanyahu forced the U.S. into war. But those making this argument are conflating the question “Why?” with the question “Why now?” In fact, if you watch the full press conference, Rubio makes this clear. At about the five-minute mark, he is asked explicitly whether he was saying that the U.S. was forced to attack Iran because of an impending Israeli action, and he responds “no.” He goes on to say:

 

That’s the question of why now, but this operation needed to happen because Iran, in about a year or a year and a half, would cross the line of immunity, meaning they would have so many short range missiles, so many drones, that no one could do anything about it, because they could hold the whole world hostage. Look at the damage they’re doing now. And this is a weakened Iran. Imagine a year from now. So that had to happen. Obviously, we were aware of Israeli intentions and understood what that would mean for us, and we had to be prepared to act as a result of it. But this had to happen, no matter what.

 

Rubio said that Iran was producing ballistic missiles at the rate of 100 per month and that missile interceptors could only be produced at a rate of six or seven a month. If Iran’s arsenal grew large enough, he said, it would be able to make it too costly to strike its nuclear program at a later date than it would be now.

 

Given the full context, it’s pretty clear what he was saying. Last June, the U.S. let Israel take the lead in striking Iran, and then joined later. This time, the U.S. made the determination that a simultaneous attack would better protect American lives. But on the higher order question of whether to launch an attack on Iran, the administration believed that it had to happen no matter what.

 

Israel and the U.S. have been sharing intelligence closely throughout this process. It was the CIA that obtained intelligence about when and where Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be meeting with top officials and provided it to the Israelis. Trump himself wrote on Truth Social that the supreme leader “was unable to avoid our Intelligence and Highly Sophisticated Tracking Systems.” Why on earth would the U.S. share intelligence as to the time and location of Khamenei if the U.S. was not on board with attacking Iran?

 

Trump isn’t exactly shy about pressuring people into doing what he wants. Last June, he had Israel pull back planes that were on their way for a bombing run on Iran just before the cease-fire took hold. He pressured Netanyahu into accepting a cease-fire in Gaza that forced a number of concessions on Israel’s part. Trump has, throughout his career in public office, said that he didn’t want Iran to get nuclear weapons. He spent the past several months arguing that if Iran didn’t willingly give up their pursuit, he would attack. How low does one’s opinion of Trump have to be to assume that he didn’t actually want to attack Iran but said all of this publicly and sent a massive amount of U.S. military hardware to the region because he simply could not tell Netanyahu no?

 

People are free to agree or disagree with Trump’s decision, but it’s patently clear that Rubio was not trying to argue that Israel dragged the U.S. into this war.

Terror in Austin

National Review Online

Tuesday, March 03, 2026

 

The jihadist whose shooting spree left two dead and 14 wounded at a bar in Austin early on Saturday — a day after American and Israeli forces began the aerial invasion of Iran — left so little to the imagination that, for the most part, we’ve been spared the media self-parody that habitually follows such attacks about how “we may never know the motive.”

 

This gunman had donned an Iranian-flag T-shirt, underneath a sweatshirt emblazoned with “Property of Allah.”

 

The suspect, who was killed in a shoot-out with responding police officers, has been identified as Ndiaga Diagne, 53, a native of the West African nation of Senegal, whose population of about 20 million is nearly all Muslim. In his SUV, he had circled the target location — Buford’s Backyard Beer Garden, a popular spot in Austin nightlife — before opening fire as he drove by, then parking and firing some more.

 

While the investigation is just getting underway, it has been confirmed that Diagne came to the United States in 2000 on a tourist visa but probably did not leave. He is said to have married an American citizen and, on that basis, was permitted to adjust his status to lawful permanent resident alien in 2006. Seven years later, he was naturalized. At the time of Saturday’s murders and attempted massacre, he was residing in Texas after having lived for a time in New York. He reportedly has a minor criminal history — a misdemeanor arrest in 2022 arising out of a car crash — and investigators are looking into past encounters with mental health service providers.

 

The FBI and local police are exploring whether Diagne had connections to overseas terrorist organizations. That is standard practice. That said, Trump administration law enforcement and security officials must resist the word games by which the government denies that a patent terrorist attack is a terrorist attack. Under these contortions, there is no terrorism unless a nexus can be established between the murderer and some foreign entity that the government has designated a terrorist group — say, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, or ISIS.

 

Such legerdemain obscures the threat to Americans, which is fueled by a virulent ideology — sharia supremacism, the belief that societies must be coerced into accepting a harsh interpretation of Islamic law. The challenge is to marginalize this alien, anti-American, anti-Western, and antisemitic ideology, not merely oppose the organizations it has spawned.

 

Policymakers resist focusing on the ideology because it is rooted in a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, one that is prevalent, if not dominant, in many Muslim-majority countries. Government officials rationalize that any set of ideas, taken to an extreme, can be dangerous and trigger violence. Hence the Obama and Biden administrations’ transmogrification of counterterrorism into “violent extremism” and the FBI’s sometimes tragicomic inability to describe terrorism as terrorism.

 

This consciously avoids the stubborn fact that jihadist terrorism is a uniquely pernicious global force. Our solemn commitment to religious liberty need not blind us to the threats animated by a forcible movement — not a religion but a political ideology masquerading as religion — that strikes viciously against all who oppose its totalitarian aims, very much including Muslims.

 

Sharia supremacism rejects our constitutional principles of individual liberty, equality, and antidiscrimination, as well as the peaceful resolution of policy disputes. A clear-eyed grasp of it would make it painfully apparent that would-be immigrants who adhere to the ideology will refuse to assimilate in our pluralistic society. Beyond that, some percentage of them will carry out violent attacks. That percentage, thankfully, is small, but the death and destruction they cause is outsized.

 

The Austin investigation is in its early phase. Our experience of jihadist violence, however, is decades old. The time to incorporate a focus on sharia supremacist ideology in law enforcement and intelligence investigations, and in immigration policy, is overdue.