Where Have the Grown-Ups Gone?

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

There’s been a lot of “Where were you when … ?” And “9/11 changed everything …” talk this week. And that’s appropriate. Indeed, some of the finest samples of it can be found here at The Dispatch.

 

I’ve done a lot of that in the past, and I don’t want to do a lot more of it. Yes, the War on Terror succeeded if you define it as preventing another 9/11-scale attack; the pulverizing, if not quite eliminating, of al-Qaeda; or the killing of Osama Bin Laden. No, it didn’t succeed if you choose as your metric the defeat of Salafism, or sustaining the momentary sense of national unity 9/11 aroused.

 

But in the course of thinking—and talking—about all of this stuff, I’ve been noodling on not so much how 9/11 changed my life, but how much my life has changed since 9/11.

 

What I mean is, I don’t think I “grew up” because of 9/11, but I have grown up since 9/11. This is in no small part because I got married a couple weeks before the towers came down. When I left D.C. to get married out west, I left one world. When I came back from my honeymoon, I returned to another.

 

I bought my first house six months after 9/11. My daughter was born a year and a half after. These are the things that make people grow up—or should.

 

Also, on 9/11 the family I grew up in was alive. Now, they’re all gone. That, too, is part of growing up.

 

One of the things young people don’t understand very well about grown-ups, is that grown-ups never fully feel like they’ve grown up. The person we were when we were kids doesn’t go away, it just sort of shrinks inside us. It’s not another person or personality. It’s more like it’s one slice of the pie of who we are. It’s hard to explain, but I think middle-aged people know what I mean. We’re all a portfolio of commitments, passions, interests, perspectives, and theories of the world, and the stocks that make up our youthful personalities stay in the portfolio—they just become a smaller part of our holdings over time. This is why I often roll my eyes when young people claim that older people “just don’t understand” this or that. We know what it was—what it is—like to be young; we just also know what it’s like not to be, too.

 

Maybe the portfolio analogy is wrong, betraying the corrupting influences of Late Capitalism’s neoliberal colonization of my soul. Maybe a better analogy is an iPhone app. When we’re young, the youth app or apps dominate, but as we get older we acquire life management apps having to do with health, finances, etc. But anyone who’s seen a grandparent play with their grandkids knows that old people know how to access the youth apps when necessary.

 

Or maybe that’s stupid, too.

 

Regardless, one of the things I believed about grown-ups when I wasn’t one was that grown-ups are, almost by definition, serious and responsible people. For me, my father was the ultimate grown-up. If I had to guess, he had been a grown-up since he was 12. He was the most solid, rational, dependable man I’ve ever known. He, more than anyone else, defines being a grown-up for me. But I think his traits are generally what we mean when we call someone a grown-up. And when I was younger, I thought most adults with serious jobs and serious responsibilities were grown-ups, too.

 

The thing I can’t stop thinking about is how I got that wrong. Looking and playing the part of a grown-up doesn’t necessarily mean you are one.

 

I mean this in a bunch of different ways. One example that might get me in trouble is women. Three of the most impressive women I’ve ever known are my mom, my wife, and the late Kate O’Beirne. Each in their own way, they gave me an insight into women. When I was in high school and college, girls were very often cliquish and gossipy. I assumed that this was a function of their age. “Mean Girls” and all that.

 

What mom, Jessica, and Kate explained to me is that this tendency doesn’t really go away, it just becomes more sophisticated and the terms of the competition change. There are exceptions, of course. There are always exceptions. But they tend to prove the rule.

 

I don’t mean this in a misogynist way. I love strong, smart women. And I will happily concede that in the battle between the sexes, the ranks of the fairer sex have many more grown-ups among them than the ranks of the men.

 

Indeed, I’ve also learned that men really never stop being idiots the way boys are. They just learn to get better at resisting the seductions of idiocy that come with hormone poisoning. But the temptation is always there. If you give a keg of beer and some fireworks to a bunch of middle-aged bankers and accountants with some free time on their hands, don’t be surprised when the fire trucks or ambulances arrive. I’ve long argued that the story of civilization is largely the story of civilizing men to not be idiots. And that’s hard.

 

Anyway, I should get to the point.

 

The fabric of civilization.

 

Since Donald Trump came to dominate American politics, one of the major conversational pastimes among many of my friends is the question of “Was so-and-so always crazy or did they become crazy?” Rudy Giuliani was once one of the most grown-up people in American life. Indeed, his high-water mark was almost exactly 25 years ago, in the aftermath of 9/11, when he became “America’s Mayor” and Time’s “Man of the Year.” Since then, he’s gotten crazier and crazier. Or maybe he always was crazy, but the Trump era gave him permission to let that formerly checked part of his personality run amok.

 

I only bring this up because I think 9/11 had a similar dynamic that I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. Shocking events by definition shock us. But they also redefine our sense of the possible. I think we can all see that. What we sometimes miss is that redefining the possible also scrambles our theories of the plausible.

 

In the wake of 9/11, I was stunned to discover how some grown-ups were either revealed to be crazy or had been made crazy. Reagan’s former assistant treasury secretary, Paul Craig Roberts, a stalwart conservative in the pre-9/11 days, became obsessed with the idea that it was all an inside job. “There is no doubt whatsoever” that Building 7 was a controlled demolition. Morgan Reynolds, a very sober and serious economist I knew quite well in the 1990s, became convinced that no planes were used at all in the 9/11 attacks. There were many, many others, and not just on the right.

 

But the right-wingers disturbed me more because I naively associated being conservative with being more grown-up. At National Review, we kept a level head. But some readers and occasional contributors I was friendly with became quite unhinged. I’ll never forget when a prominent author on Islam who was irate about not getting the favorable treatment he thought he deserved reached out to me to ask if Andy McCarthy(!) and the editors had “gone dhimmi.” In War on Terror parlance, this was akin to accusing William F. Buckley Jr. of being a secret communist.

 

The analogy is deliberate, because it dawned on me that the response of some people to the very real threat of Islamism or Islamic terrorism was a post-9/11 version of the Bircher-style paranoia and overreaction to the very real threat of communism.

 

This is one of the lessons I’ve taken away from growing up since 9/11. Simply being an adult, even an accomplished one with impressive credentials, didn’t necessarily mean you were a grown-up or would stay one given permission to go a different way. Jesse Walker’s The United States of Paranoia taught me that elites—a fancy word for the people I used to consider grown-ups—were just as prone to the “paranoid style” of moral panics.

 

“Civilization” sounds so highfalutin, but if you simply think of it as the tapestry of rules, customs, institutions, and incentives that keep people civilized, you can appreciate how much more fragile and threadbare it can be. We tend to understand this about violent crime and pathological behavior at the margins of society. That’s fair enough. But thinking this way can be deceptive. If that stuff happens at the outskirts of civilized society, that implies for many of us that the fabric of civilization is thicker and stronger closer in. But it doesn’t work that way, because the sharp and pointy desires of the human heart can poke holes in that fabric anywhere. Jeffrey Epstein offers proof of that, but so do Tucker Carlson, Hasan Piker, and countless others.

 

I’m not saying that deranged “influencers” are guilty of the same transgressions as Jeffrey Epstein. I’m saying that, given the right opportunities and incentives, people can very easily resist, reject, or rend the civilizational fabric for their own satisfaction. The explosion of antisemitism these days is proof enough of that.

 

But I’ve come to appreciate that it was ever thus.

 

Henry Ford’s antisemitism is well-known, but his crackpottery isn’t. Inspired by the “Eternalist” philosopher Orlando J. Smith, Ford was a devout believer in reincarnation. He also wanted to eliminate cows and morally regenerate America by teaching it to dance properly. King Camp Gillette, the industrialist and inventor of the razor, was obsessed with a utopian scheme of creating a continental, even global, socialist megacity. Vice President Henry Wallace wasn’t just a communist sympathizer, he was a theosophist nutball. The number of prominent 20^th century Americans who were into seances and Ouija boards is too long to list here.

 

Now I recognize that I’m being a bit promiscuous here with my categories. Grown-up isn’t an exact synonym for sane, and civilization has a lot of room for eccentric views—and it should. But the thing I’ve learned since 9/11 is that a society run by grown-ups needs a thick cultural ecosystem that rewards grown-up behavior and grown-up decision-making, by which I simply mean making arguments and choices based on facts, reason, empathy, and a sense of responsibility for their actions. Such a system can tolerate a lot of eccentricity so long as the center holds. It requires leaders who care about consequences and it requires “followers” to demand responsibility and accountability of leaders.

 

What I’ve learned since 9/11 is that this asks more of people than many are willing to give. It should be obvious that this lesson has been driven home to me in the Trump era. Just this week, I’ve watched as elected officials rail against the left’s socialism while defending a president who wants to bribe Americans with a “dividend” we cannot afford and that will never be provided. A video at the faux convention in Dallas begins, “On June 14^th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump.” The “convention” ended with that “caretaker” asking the assembled faithful to repeat after him: “I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States that loves us so much he can’t even breathe …” That “caretaker” has taken a great deal of care in getting vastly richer while in office.

 

Shortly after 9/11 I gave a talk about the future of conservatism in the post-9/11 era and then wrote about it here. It’s an interesting read for me, because it drives home how some of my thinking has changed, but even more how much the world has changed.

 

I guess when all is said and done, what I really mean by grown-ups is good people. I don’t mean that in some Manichean, good-versus-evil sense. Good people can disagree on important things. Good people can have wildly divergent points of view about God, government, and what constitutes a good life. I mean reliable people, steady people, reasonable people. I mean good as in solid, dependable, responsible—the sorts of people we’re supposed to think of when we say, “this job is important, let’s make sure we get someone good for it.” And as I’ve grown up, I’ve learned not only that such people are rarer than I thought when I was younger, but also that you get far fewer of them in a system that doesn’t sufficiently reward being good. You get more of something when you subsidize it, and less when you tax it. We have been living in an era of heavy taxation on good people and massive subsidies for unserious people.

 

Edmund Burke never said all that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing, but he did say, “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” What is true of evil is also true of stupidity, irresponsibility, corruption, and immaturity. And that’s perhaps the biggest lesson I’ve learned since 9/11.

No Stone Unturned: Searching for Answers in the Wreckage of 9/11

By Jack Crowe

Saturday, September 12, 2026

 

The men and women who went to work at Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island in the fall of 2001 expected to be confronted by identifiable remnants of the lives that were consumed when the planes hit the towers: office furniture, computer parts, clothing. Instead, when they cleared the extensive security perimeter and arrived on “the hill,” as it came to be called, they were met by a great pile of undifferentiated grey-brown dirt and rubble.

 

It would take a team of roughly 1,000 workers, operating in shifts around the clock, until July 2002 to surface the objects and human remains that had survived the collapse and incineration of the towers in some recognizable form.

 

As the public fixed its gaze on Ground Zero in the weeks and months after the attack, sanitation workers transported 1.4 million tons of debris to Fresh Kills, all while continuing to make sure the trash was picked up across the city. Clad in white Tyvek suits and masks, workers representing private contractors and dozens of state, federal, and local agencies painstakingly sifted through the debris to find any identifiable human remains or pieces of personal property that might provide closure or offer some small measure of comfort to the bereaved.

 

Overnight, Fresh Kills Landfill became the largest forensic lab on earth.

 

ID Badges, Credit Cards, and Golf Balls

 

In his role investigating mass-casualty events for the FBI, Richard Marx had been exposed to some of the biggest and most complex crime scenes in the world. But nothing prepared him for the scope of the Fresh Kills operation. (The landfill’s grisly name comes from the Dutch word for a body of water.)   

 

Every day for months, sanitation workers would truck debris from Ground Zero to Pier 25 on Manhattan’s west side, where it would be loaded into waiting barges and brought to the docks at Fresh Kills. There, the debris would be unloaded into massive three-sided bins and eventually moved up to the top of the landfill for sorting. An average 650 tons of debris arrived each day, a feat of manpower, machinery, and coordination. None of the sanitation workers took a day off until Thanksgiving.

 

“There’s nowhere else in the world out of New York City that could have handled this,” Marx said.

 

Initially when the debris arrived, it would be spread out over a flat area at the top of the landfill, where teams of NYPD officers and FBI agents would comb through it with rakes, looking for anything that might be considered evidence, human remains, or personal property.

 

Sorting Shed, WTC Recovery, Fresh Kills, 2002 (Courtesy of Mark Schaming/Collection 9/11 Memorial Museum)

 

Eventually, the workers were provided with large sifters that sorted the debris into fine, medium, and large pieces and dropped them onto conveyor belts for examination by NYPD officers and FBI agents. The smallest pieces were just a quarter of an inch wide. Tents were constructed around the conveyor belts, and agents and officers working in 15-minute shifts sorted through it. Working on the conveyor belt was a monotonous task, punctuated by adrenaline spikes, hence the 15-minute shifts. When a worker spotted something worth collecting, they could slow the belt, tag the object, and place it in the relevant area.

 

The devastation was so total and all-encompassing that workers were struck by how little tangible evidence of the thousands of destroyed offices remained.

 

“We didn’t find a single freaking doorknob,” said retired NYPD Inspector James Luongo, who led the police department’s team at Fresh Kills. “Think about the World Trade Center. How many doors were there? And we didn’t see one doorknob.”

 

Articles recovered, WTC Recovery Operation, 2002(Courtesy of Mark Schaming/Collection 9/11 Memorial Museum)

 

But there were a few categories of items that did pop up regularly: laminated identification badges, credit cards, and, oddly, golf balls. Nearly everything else had been consumed by the flames and the compression of the falling towers. Some barely recognizable objects — like a service pistol that had melted into a pool and another firearm that had been sheared clean in half, along with the safe it was being stored in — testified to the ferocity of the heat and the violence of the collapse.

 

Mark Schaming, who went out to Fresh Kills in October to collect artifacts for the New York State Museum’s 9/11 exhibit, spent hours walking around on his first day at the landfill before spotting anything he could put a name to.

 

“I had expected to see some recognizable objects or something. And in all the hours I was there, the only recognizable thing I saw was a FedEx envelope. And that was it. It was just mountains of destruction,” Schaming said.

 

Occasionally, a piece of human remains would come down the conveyor belt. The item would be placed in a container and brought to the medical examiner’s trailer. In some cases, a piece of bone workers believed to be human was actually part of an animal that had been prepared in one of the World Trade Center restaurants.

 

“There was no training for it. You can’t get trained for seeing human remains out in the field. But they did it. And they did it with humanity. . . . I still get overwhelmed when I think about what they’re able to do,” Dennis Diggins, who led the Sanitation Department team at Fresh Kills, said in an interview for a 9/11 Museum oral history project.

 

The workers combing through debris required an incredible amount of logistical support. There were food trailers, heated tents around the conveyor belts, forensic trailers, and an entire team dedicated to ordering supplies. A thousand workers go through a lot of Tyvek suits and masks.

 

“We built a city out of absolutely nothing,” Marx explained.

 

‘A Different Planet’

 

Slowly, as the weeks passed, the workers began to impose some degree of order on the chaos. There was the flat area at the top of the landfill with all of the loose debris being sorted. At the bottom of the hill, sanitation workers lined up 1,300 cars that had been parked under or around the towers when they fell. Those cars acted as sponges, absorbing everything that had fallen from above, Schaming explained. Each of the vehicles told a story. In the trunk of one vehicle, workers found a birthday gift that a husband had purchased for, but would never give to, his wife.

 

Vehicle Recovery, WTC Recovery, Fresh Kills, 2002 (Courtesy of Mark Schaming/Collection 9/11 Memorial Museum)

 

The ruined fire trucks that were hauled to the landfill stood as a testament to the incredible bravery of the men who threw themselves headlong toward the danger — and the sheer randomness of the destruction they confronted. Mark Wagner, lead architect for the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, went out to Fresh Kills to select vehicles that would eventually be displayed in the museum. The burn patterns on the trucks revealed the razor-thin margin between life and death.

 

“I see one end of a fire truck, and it’s completely burnt. There’s not a speck of paint on the front end of the fire truck, and the back end almost looks intact,” said Wagner. “If I was standing at the front end of the fire truck, I may not be standing here today. And if I’m standing near the back, I could be totally fine. This loss of life was random. It was instant. It was unpredictable.”

 

Wagner, who had visited Ground Zero just days after 9/11, was struck by the sense of dislocation he felt upon arriving at Fresh Kills. It was like a “different planet.” Seeing the vast piles of debris that had been transported from Ground Zero truly revealed the scale of what had taken place.

 

“You know it wasn’t just this cleanup effort at Ground Zero, it was moving to other locations because of the enormity of the event and the sheer amount of material that had to be processed and understood,” Wagner said. “So, Fresh Kills in some ways was even more difficult emotionally.”

 

That sense of dislocation, the feeling that the items piling up at the landfill shouldn’t be there, was especially poignant at night, as activity at the site died down and the remaining workers could hear the crackle of fire and police radios still running in their destroyed vehicles.

 

Looking for Answers

 

Inspector Luongo said they never found any evidence relevant to their investigation, so ultimately, the months-long debris-sorting effort was really about bringing a measure of closure to the families of the deceased. Once a week, on Wednesdays, groups of family members would come out and tour Fresh Kills and witness for themselves all that was being done to identify their loved ones. Some of the family members were appreciative, while others demanded answers the workers could not provide.

 

“Families started coming there looking for an answer,” Gloria Coletti, who worked as an executive assistant to the Fresh Kills director, told an interviewer for the Memorial Museum’s oral history project.

 

“I don’t know how I would react if something happened to one of my children, and I had nowhere to go and nothing to show. I also knew — the logical side of me knew — that when those explosions happened, the people who they never found and never got nothing back from, they disintegrated. They went up in the air. They went straight to heaven. But I could never say that to these mothers. So I would just talk to them and grieve with them and hold their hands.”

 

Some family members were never able to accept that the remains of their son or father or sister could not be found and would ultimately be interred in a landfill. They kept showing up at the site until as late as 2006, some demanding to know what more could be done. A group of family members filed suit against the city in federal court in 2005 in an effort to force the city to relocate and continue sifting through the debris. A judge dismissed the suit.

 

When the Fresh Kills project began, “they did not trust us. They did not trust the process. They thought we were just burying stuff, and . . . that naturally was not true,” Luongo said of some of the families.

 

But the men who led the sorting effort are confident they did all they could to make sure no possible trace of human remains was missed. As the operation was wrapping up, workers went back through the debris that had been sorted first, when their procedures hadn’t been as reliable, just to make sure nothing was overlooked. Sanitation workers even power-washed the barges and collected the resulting dust. They also excavated the roadsides in the landfill to make sure nothing had fallen off the front-end loaders and trucks and been missed.

 

“We did the best job we possibly could,” Luongo said.

 

For some families, seeing the extraordinary effort being made in their behalf did make a difference. Some families arrived asking critical questions and left “our biggest fans,” Luongo said. One woman who had lost her husband arrived with a big bag of candy for Luongo and his team — a thank you from her young daughter.

 

The events of September 11, 2001, transfigured the most unlikely of places — a landfill in Staten Island — into sacred ground. Before the towers came down, Fresh Kills was an eyesore the residents of Staten Island had for years urged the city to shut down. The government eventually relented: The site was slated to close at the end of 2001. Instead, it became the final resting place for an untold number of New Yorkers, closing down in August 2002 as the work moved off-site. Today, the rubble from Ground Zero is covered by a grassy hillside, part of a city park that replaced the defunct landfill.

 

The Fresh Kills team would ultimately identify 4,500 human remains and 73,000 personal effects. Roughly half of those killed in the World Trade Center attack still have not been identified, and efforts to bring that closure are ongoing: Thousands of unidentified human remains are kept in a designated secure area in the 9/11 Memorial & Museum.

Russia’s Threats to Europe Extend Beyond Ukraine

By Elizabeth Kennedy Trudeau & David J. Kramer

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

Russia’s war against Ukraine, initiated in 2014 and then launched on a full-scale basis in 2022, is the gravest security crisis on the European continent since World War II.

 

But it’s not the only Russian threat on the continent. Russia’s gray-zone, or hybrid, war against the rest of Europe beyond Ukraine poses additional, serious challenges to NATO and U.S. interests.

 

Russia has been testing NATO’s resolve and solidarity since 2006, when ex-Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko died after being poisoned with polonium in downtown London. It continued the next year with a massive cyberattack against Estonia that left NATO unsure how to respond. And in the years since, this campaign has only intensified.

 

Russia has carried out or attempted assassinations on NATO territory, and its drones and missiles have violated member nations’ airspace. According to a senior NATO military official, NATO has scrambled fighter jets nearly 700 times in two years to intercept Russian aircraft. Russia has weaponized migration, manipulating migrant flows to destabilize and pressure NATO allies. It has threatened to attack NATO states that aid Ukraine, most recently the United Kingdom and Germany. Germany has blamed attacks aimed at critical infrastructure, including an explosion at a train station and two separate incidents targeting power stations, on Russia, as well as attempts to damage aircraft at Germany’s Leipzig airport with explosive drones. Even U.S. interests in Europe are not safe from Russia. In a September 3 Russian missile attack against Ukraine, Russia badly damaged a Coca-Cola plant.

 

In response to Germany’s claim of Russian responsibility for the drone threats at Leipzig airport, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared “the beginning of a real war with Germany.” This typifies Russia’s approach: Blame the targets and victims of its aggression. It does it with Ukraine by absurdly accusing the government there of being run by Nazis. It’s doing it with Germany and others who provide support to Ukraine to help Kyiv defend against Russia’s brutal war.  

 

Russia’s poke-and-prod approach also seeks to divide NATO and expose as hollow its Article 5 guarantee—the core NATO principle that means an attack against one shall be considered an attack against all. Its increasingly complex alignment with other autocracies like China, Iran, and North Korea adds to the level of danger.

 

And every day, as casualties mount and drones and missiles kill civilians in Ukraine almost four and a half years after Russia’s full-scale invasion, Vladimir Putin has repeatedly demonstrated that he has no interest in peace. Immediately after a brief ceasefire to enable U.S. envoys to visit both Moscow and Kyiv last weekend, Russian forces resumed their brutal aerial campaign against Ukraine.  

 

The Saturday visit to Moscow by U.S. special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner followed two other known meetings between U.S. and Russian officials. In August, CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Moscow, reportedly to warn his Russian counterparts against an attack on a NATO member state and to argue that Russia’s war against Ukraine was going poorly. Putin refused a meeting with Ratcliffe, perhaps because the CIA director was delivering a message Putin didn’t want to hear. By contrast, Putin warmly welcomed Witkoff and Kushner, whom he’s met on numerous past occasions.

 

In between the Ratcliffe and Witkoff-Kushner visits to Moscow, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent invited—over the objections of European members—Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov to North Carolina for a meeting of G20 finance ministers, the first time Russia was represented at such a gathering since its full-scale invasion.

 

We both served in the State Department with a combined three decades of experience (including stints at NATO and the Pentagon for Elizabeth). Experience has shown us, time and again, that adversaries pay close attention to what we say, as well as what we do. They notice divisions and hesitation; they exploit ambiguity. They play with words. Russia certainly does. We cannot give Russia reason to doubt our commitment to our allies.

 

We are past the warning stage. The lights are blinking on the dashboard. The Trump administration, together with NATO allies, needs to provide Ukraine with the military assistance it needs to win the war, not just defend itself. It’s also imperative that Russia and other adversaries understand that America is committed to freedom and stands in solidarity with all of our allies in Europe and beyond.

 

For nearly eight decades, NATO has symbolized the ideal of deterrence, ensuring that any adversary understands the consequences of aggression. That, for example, a country that attacked Estonia, Poland, or Finland knows it would not be taking on that country alone—it would be starting a conflict with NATO. This idea is the heart of Article 5, but Article 5 only has meaning if our adversaries believe the United States will honor it. One hopes that Ratcliffe’s visit to Moscow disabused Russian officials of their wishes that the United States will not follow through on its NATO commitments.

 

Any ambiguity about Article 5 isn’t leverage, but a weak link in that chain of solidarity. If Moscow assesses that readings of NATO obligations rest on political moods, deterrence simply crumbles. The probing and testing will become more frequent and may end in dire choices for the alliance.

 

On the anniversary of September 11, we should also clearly recall the one time in NATO’s history when Article 5 was invoked—in our defense.

 

After the devastating attacks in New York and Washington, and the crash in Pennsylvania, NATO was there. NATO aircraft patrolled American skies, and, in the years to come, our European and Canadian allies deployed thousands of their forces with us in Afghanistan. Men and women from NATO countries, large and small, fought shoulder to shoulder with us, and thousands died there.

 

NATO, of course, is changing: European allies are spending more on defense, building their own military capacity, and assuming greater responsibility for their own security, including assuming a leadership role in supporting Ukraine. These are certainly steps that needed to happen—and more should be done.

 

But Europe’s increasing investment in defense does not relieve the United States of its obligations. A stronger Europe, partnered with the ironclad American commitment to NATO, both makes the alliance stronger and reestablishes deterrence.

 

Russia and its malign partners must understand that starting a war with a NATO ally would be a terrible mistake. After all, Russia is no match for the United States and Europe if the latter two stick together and support each other.

 

A peaceful and secure Europe has been one of the United States’ great strategic advantages since the end of World War II. The greatest threat to such a Europe arose when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In defending its land and freedom from Russian takeover, Ukraine contributes to European security by standing between the rest of Europe and a Russian military on the march. During his visit to Moscow, Ratcliffe reportedly urged his Russian interlocutors to recognize that continuing the war Putin started would end badly for Russia.

 

While not a member of NATO, Ukraine is most deserving of Western support not just to stay in the fight but to help it win the war Russia started against it. Supporting Ukraine helps secure the rest of Europe, plain and simple.

Russia does not have to like NATO, but it must believe NATO and the United States when we say, with no ambiguity, that an attack on one will bring a response from all, and that the United States keeps its word. Russia should clearly understand what will happen if it attacks a NATO ally because, simply, that’s how we make sure it never does.

The U.N.’s Double Standard on Israel

By Zlatko Zigic

Saturday, September 12, 2026

 

Having worked for more than 20 years in senior management positions at the United Nations, I learned to navigate the complex realities of international diplomacy. Yet even for a seasoned insider, the U.N.’s treatment of Yahav Lichner is a damning display of targeting and selective enforcement.

 

Lichner, a respected senior international civil servant at UNICEF, is the target of a setup. He has been placed on administrative leave following the publication of allegations based on decade-old emails obtained through an Iranian state-backed cyber operation. His alleged “crime”? Sharing routine organizational context and deliberation notes with Israeli diplomats, dating back to 2014–15.

 

Earlier this month, Drop Site — a publication frequently hostile toward Israel — ran an article titled “Israel’s Mole,” emphasizing Lichner’s Israeli background and drawing from an Iranian-linked hack that fit a narrative aimed at discrediting Israel.

 

The article itself acknowledges that there is no evidence that the conduct described continued after 2015. Yet a decade of subsequent humanitarian and diplomatic service, including in support of the Palestinian people, is being overshadowed by hacked and manipulated emails.

 

The author of the piece, Murtaza Hussain, and elements within the U.N. are using common informal information-sharing practices to advance a broader anti-Israel narrative, blowing them out of proportion to set up Lichner and, indirectly, target and tarnish the reputation of Israelis and Jews working at the U.N.

 

The speed of Lichner’s placement on leave stands in stark contrast to the U.N.’s handling of terror within its ranks. When United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) staff participated in the October 7 massacres, the U.N. defaulted to bureaucratic paralysis, claiming it could not “independently authenticate” battlefield evidence captured from Hamas. By setting an impossible evidentiary bar, the U.N. shielded terror-linked operatives from accountability.

 

Where terror-linked personnel received every procedural benefit of the doubt, a highly respected senior Israeli civil servant faced instant condemnation over unverified, decade-old materials weaponized by an enemy cyber-warfare unit.

 

This hypocrisy also ignores a basic reality of U.N. culture: International civil servants routinely maintain robust and informal channels with many governments, including their own. Informal reporting is far more widespread throughout the U.N. than most people realize. This is simply how the organization functions. Senior directors and officials routinely brief even the main donors of major projects and programs on an off-the-record basis. Donors, for example, often expect and require this kind of ongoing informal reporting, and it happens constantly on complex programs, quite apart from the formal reports and analysis.

 

Lichner, with a track record of leadership on humanitarian causes, disclosed no operational security data; he engaged in the kind of routine networking and diplomacy that hundreds of U.N. officials perform daily. Yet merely because of his nationality, he was targeted and his alleged communications were weaponized into a scandal.

 

This double standard thrives in an environment notoriously hostile to Israelis and Jewish people working at the U.N. Many even hide their identity when they go to work. Israelis represent a tiny fraction of the U.N. workforce, and the organization has never appointed an Israeli as an assistant or undersecretary-general. For some, it now appears, even one senior Israeli within the U.N. system is one too many.

 

When the U.N. ignores mountains of evidence regarding actual terrorists on its payroll while dropping the hammer on an Israeli civil servant over decade-old, doubtful hacked emails, its moral authority is shattered. True international civil service requires impartial integrity, not selective prosecution to appease political blocs.

Do It for Charlie

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

Unless I missed something, Wednesday’s prediction turned out to be correct. We didn’t hear anything at this week’s Republican convention about the ruling party’s plans to keep artificial intelligence from going full Skynet.

 

The president did address it in an interview. A few hours after Anthropic revealed that it had shut down multiple lines of inquiry this year that may or may not have been aimed at building biological weapons, Donald Trump was asked what sort of “guardrails” are needed to stop AI from turning against humanity.

 

“It’s going to be fine,” he said, struggling to keep a straight face. “We’ll always have something to stop them. We’ll have a little gear. Boom. ‘I really don’t like that robot.’”

 

It will all work out in the end.

 

The second night of the convention was less eventful than the first and will be remembered mostly for its cultish flourishes. A hype video began with these words, a Paul-Harvey-by-way-of-North-Korea melange: “On June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump.”

 

Later the star of the show came onstage and half-jokingly goaded the crowd to raise their hands and pledge to “the greatest president in the history of the United States” that they’ll do whatever it takes to maximize GOP turnout in November, even “cheating like hell” as the Democrats supposedly do. It was peak Trump, the authoritarian menace safely diluted by Borscht Belt humor.

 

The closest thing to actual news was made by the vice president.

 

It felt significant that J.D. Vance was tapped to be the headline speaker for the convention’s final night rather than its first, as if the Trumpist torch were formally being passed. At points during his speech, the audience even interrupted with chants of “48! 48!”

 

And no wonder. The president reportedly has stopped quizzing confidants on whether they prefer the VP to Marco Rubio and now asserts that Vance will be the nominee. Rubio himself has supposedly said privately that he isn’t planning a presidential campaign, seeing no point to doing so. And Turning Point USA, the most influential activist group in right-wing politics, “intends to play a key part in getting [founder Charlie] Kirk’s close friend, Vice President J.D. Vance, elected president,” according to the Washington Post.

 

Ted Cruz’s presidential pipe dream will need to wait another four years, it seems. In 2028, it’s going to be J.D.

 

The newsy part of Vance’s remarks came when he dared to address the subject of the Iran war, a bitter point of contention between Trump and another prominent friend of the vice president’s, Tucker Carlson. Referring to the martyred Kirk, on the anniversary of his assassination, Vance said this:

 

He did not always agree with us. Let me just give you one example. Charlie hated war. Whether it was Europe or Africa, the Middle East, he didn’t care. He just hated war. That was his view.

 

Now, of course, there are people who love what we’ve done and people who don’t. I’m not here to litigate the disagreements between Charlie and some of the people that he disagreed with. But what I’m asking you to do is do what Charlie did. Do not throw the baby out with the bath water. Don’t give the country over to a bunch of crazy people because you happen to disagree with us on a policy issue here or there.

 

Look, I’m not asking anybody to agree with me on every single issue. I’m not asking anybody to agree on every single policy of the administration. What I am asking you to do is to recognize the contrast with the radicals and recognize the achievements of the last 18 months. We have done a lot, my friends, and we can do a lot more if we fight together.

 

So that’s how he’s going to make the case to the anti-war right to stick with Team GOP in 2028, is it? Do it for Charlie.

 

‘Hating’ war.

 

Let’s get something straight. Charlie Kirk didn’t “hate war.”

 

Vance is lying about that because he hopes to convert the right’s sympathy and admiration for Kirk into sympathy and admiration for his own isolationist preferences. Opposing war yet blindly supporting the GOP anyway was St. Charlie’s position, he’d have you believe—and therefore, conveniently for Vance and his party, should also be the presumptively correct moral position for any Kirk-loving anti-war Republican in 2028.

 

It’s nonsense on stilts. An example: Less than three months after he became president in 2017, Trump surprised everyone by bombing a Syrian airfield to punish Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons. He had run and won by promising to end America’s “stupid wars” in the Middle East, yet here he was immediately thrusting the U.S. into military conflict with another Arab nation that most voters can’t find on a map. Surely the war-hating Charlie Kirk must have been incensed at that betrayal.

 

He was not. “I hope the rest of the world is watching. War is a terrible thing, but allowing maniacs to go unchallenged is unacceptable,” he tweeted on the day of the airstrikes. The next day he doubled down: “Oh Assad’s regime is upset we didn’t notify them before we sent missiles? Maybe they should stop using chemical weapons.”

 

Three years later, Trump ordered the most dangerous military action of his first term when he had the head of Iran’s Quds Force, Qassem Suleimani, assassinated. Suleimani was immensely powerful and a national hero to the regime and its loyalists; the risk of Iranian retaliation followed by all-out war was real enough that Carlson used his primetime gig at Fox News to criticize the attack, albeit in more restrained terms than he’s come to be known for.

 

Here again was a chance for Kirk to follow Tucker’s lead and flash his war-hating bona fides. Instead he was exultant. “Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s most revered military figure has been killed in an airstrike in Baghdad. Don’t mess with America under [President Trump],” Charlie crowed. “Obama & Hillary are gone. We fight back now. America is back.”

 

Okay, you might say, but the Suleimani strike and the Syria bombing were small operations, not “wars.” Kirk would have opposed a more ambitious U.S. attack in the Middle East. Oh? A few months before he was murdered, he watched Donald Trump order an air campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities that “obliterated” (supposedly) the country’s bomb program. That was an act of war any way you slice it. Finally, Kirk could let his inner dove take flight.

 

He chose to keep it locked in its cage. “Iran gave President Trump no choice,” he assured his fans. “For a decade he has been adamant that Iran will never get a nuclear weapon. Iran decided to forego diplomacy in pursuit of a bomb. This is a surgical strike, operated perfectly. President Trump acted with prudence and decisiveness.”

 

Charlie Kirk didn’t hate war. What he hated was the thought of losing influence and market share, the same as every other MAGA-pandering hack in populist media. He recognized that most of his audience worshiped Trump, so he made sure that his opinions about the president’s actions, including his warmaking, remained agreeable to them. There’s no contradiction between believing that his murder was a horror and a horrendous human tragedy and understanding that he was a ratings chaser who helped accelerate the intellectual collapse of the American right.

 

If there’s any grain of truth in what Vance said about him hating war, it’s that Kirk might have ended up as a (measured) critic of the current conflict—not because it offended his supposedly dovish sensibilities but because it would have made him nervous to be out of step on the issue with ascendant postliberal demagogues like Carlson and Nick Fuentes. Kirk was obviously anxious about losing influence over young Republicans as they gradually became groyper-ized, enough so to have begun resorting to light groyper-ism himself to try to meet audience demand.

 

Had he lived and seen the litmus test for angry right-wing populism devolve into hating “Israel’s war,” my guess is that he would have grasped toward whichever position on Iran ended up costing him the least amount of influence with the president on the one hand and the grassroots right on the other. Which, ironically, in a way does make him a good example for Vance to cite to anti-war Republicans: Just as Kirk was seemingly able to subordinate his opinions about war to some grander priority (i.e., his own power), the vice president is asking Tuckerites to subordinate their own opinions about it to a different grand priority. That is, J.D. Vance’s and the Republican Party’s power.

 

War without end.

 

The other standout aspect of the “do it for Charlie” pitch for ignoring Iran, as The Bulwark’s Tim Miller noted, was that Vance chose to make it in lieu of defending the case for war on the merits.

 

Instead of using his star turn on primetime television to try to convince Americans that the conflict was warranted, the VP made a pure “Flight 93 election” argument for not letting one’s opinion of it affect one’s vote: Even if you dislike how this plane is being flown, it will crash unless the GOP remains at the controls.

 

One reason for opting not to make the hard sell for war is obvious. Vance is understandably jittery about voters taking their opposition to it out on him in 2028 and doesn’t want his fingerprints on it any more than they already are.

 

If anything, he’s trying to scrub them off. Presumably that explains how the New York Times came to know that Vance spoke to various military commanders about the conflict earlier this year and “came away from some of his conversations with deep concerns about the overall strategy and the prospects for success. … The assessments made clear the extraordinary amount of pain the Iranian government was prepared to endure in its fight for survival, and the limited supply of U.S. defensive weapons available to block Iran’s retaliatory strikes, or to deal with threats elsewhere.”

 

Donald Trump’s heir apparent can’t go around saying that he always thought his boss’s war was stupid and reckless—but he can have his allies in the administration whisper it to the Times on his behalf. And he can certainly avoid arguing otherwise in a televised forum that would make life easy for Democratic admakers in 2028.

 

Vance also can’t argue the case for war without antagonizing his friend Tucker and the untold number of “America First” Republican primary voters who might prefer a more charismatic and demagogic critic of the war as their leader in 2028. At the moment, the Carlson wing of the right seems prepared to tolerate Vance as the GOP nominee, if only as a far superior alternative to lapsed Reaganite Marco Rubio. The vice president’s efforts to signal to them that he privately shares their opinion about the war but is obliged by his position to bite his tongue is working.

 

If and when he lets his “good soldier” obligations to Trump lead him to become a public proponent of the conflict, though, that might change. “Vote Republican because righteous war-hater Charlie Kirk would want you to” is a much safer play for him with the right’s Lindberghians than “ackshually, the war is good.”

 

There’s a third reason for Vance to avoid making the case for attacking Iran, though, and it’s a doozy: All signs point to the war intensifying, possibly significantly, and sooner rather than later.

 

The good news is that the U.S. naval blockade is working, leaving Iran’s oil-dependent economy in a shambles. There’s also good news in the Strait of Hormuz, where American ships have quietly restored transit for a meaningful percentage of tankers. As of late last month, by one government estimate, roughly half the prewar volume of oil was now moving through the strait.

 

Economically and militarily, Iran is under immense pressure. That could lead it to capitulate—or it could lead it to do the opposite. The more desperate the regime becomes to regain leverage, the greater the risk that it will escalate, possibly in reckless ways.

 

In fact, reports have been circulating for more than a month that it’s planning to escalate in order to complicate life for Trump before November’s midterm election. Among the options being considered, according to a story published in August by the Wall Street Journal, are “sabotaging Internet cables in the Persian Gulf, creating political unrest in countries with Shia communities such as Kuwait and Bahrain, and potentially even ground operations in Kuwait.” Iran’s military is also hastily rebuilding its arsenal of ballistic missiles from components on hand.

 

“Some Iranian leaders … believe now is a good moment to act because Mr. Trump will return to war after the midterms anyway,” the Times reported on Wednesday. “The president will either feel vindicated by an unexpected electoral victory or feel that he has nothing more to lose by pursuing his own strategy, several of the analysts said.” That calculus is well founded: When Trump was asked yesterday why he hasn’t hit Iran hard lately, he answered, “Well, maybe I don’t do that because of the election.” It sounds like escalation is coming after November no matter what, in which case the Iranians would be foolish not to get a jump on it.

 

Maybe they already have. Yesterday Iran’s proxy in Yemen, the Houthis, captured a key port city near the Bab al-Mandab Strait, which Saudi Arabia uses for some of its oil exports. The prospect of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab being cut off generated multiple emergency phone calls to Trump by the Saudi crown prince, but the president declined to open a new front by ordering U.S. strikes on the Houthis. News of the crisis caused Brent crude oil prices to jump above $108 per barrel on Thursday for the first time since May and sent the price of diesel fuel in the U.S. on Friday past $6 per gallon, an all-time high.

 

Imagine being J.D. Vance and trying to defend the Iran war at a moment like this, with hostilities, gas prices, and inflation all set to spiral. Imagine assuring Americans that starting that war was a good idea when Pentagon officials are now admitting that Iran successfully “blew the hell out of” our base in Bahrain and will doubtless have an easier time targeting other American bases in the region going forward because of our munitions shortage.

 

And now imagine doing all of that amid headlines that the war could plausibly go on in fits and starts for the rest of Trump’s presidency, scrambling oil markets for years to come and sucking U.S. military personnel out of other theaters and into the region indefinitely. When Vance addressed the conflict last night, he did so knowing that it could still be a live issue when he accepts his party’s nomination in 2028. Defending it on camera would have been political suicide.

 

Under the circumstances, pointing to the spirit of Charlie Kirk as if he’s Yoda at the end of Return of the Jedi and insisting that he wants you to go on voting GOP in spite of everything was the least bad argument available to him.

 

Rigged or unrigged?

 

J.D. Vance sold his soul to Trumpism hoping to establish himself as a “serious” postliberal populist and instead finds himself saddled with Bushian Middle Eastern misadventures on the one hand and grotesquely unserious MAGA slopulism on the other.

 

That probably explains why he also didn’t waste time in his speech last night defending his boss’ inane plan for a $5,000 “dividend” for American adults if the GOP holds the House and Senate in November. The idea is so half-baked (“incredibly desperate” with “zero chance” of passing, even according to Republicans) that Trump resorted to arguing in an interview on Thursday that he doesn’t need congressional action to issue that “dividend.”

 

If he doesn’t need Congress, what the hell was the point of this bribe in the first place? There’s no need to vote Republican this fall if the president can cut a check on his own authority.

 

Of all the slopulism Trump has pushed on Americans, little of it has been as sloppy as that. “This entire incident exposes how completely out of ideas the entire Trump political project is,” Reason’s Eric Boehm wrote of the “dividend” proposal. “This is the inevitable end of all populist movements, which begin by promising easy solutions to complex problems and eventually collapse when those ‘solutions’ are revealed to be grifts or oversimplifications.”

 

That’s true, and it’s equally true of the Iran war. The White House promised an overly simple four- or five-week conflict after which the regime would capitulate à la Venezuela—despite many warnings to the contrary beforehand—and ran out of ideas almost immediately after “bomb harder” didn’t work. Vance will inherit a populist movement whose credibility will be completely shot by 2028, insofar as it isn’t already. Just deserts have rarely been so just.

 

I’ll leave you with this happy thought: Try as he might, the vice president won’t be able to avoid a conflict with his friend Tucker Carlson forever. Carlson is already signaling that he expects Republicans to lose in November, and that when they do he’ll blame—what else?—Trump’s alliance with Israel as the cause. The “rigged election” nonsense won’t fly with the far right this time, in other words. They’re keen to make the point that Americans hate war and so they’ll insist that the GOP lost fairly, and deservedly.

 

Vance won’t have that luxury. He’ll need to humor Trump’s conspiracy theories about Democratic cheating (Charlie would want him to!), which will pit him against Tucker in the crucial foreign policy debate over whether interventionism is an electoral loser for the GOP. Maybe their “friendship” can survive that, or maybe it can’t. Before they know it, they might be arguing about all sorts of things that are important to postliberals—whether the election was rigged, whether Israel controls the U.S. government, whether algebra is “fake math” that only “good little goy slaves” take seriously.

 

I didn’t enjoy the first iteration of “Stop the Steal” but the second promises to be much more entertaining. Bring on the blue wave.

Lone Star Turn

By Michael Warren

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

This week’s midterm convention in Dallas may have been conceived by and centered around Donald Trump, but Thursday night belonged to J.D. Vance. There were all kinds of indications that the 42-year-old vice president has reached a new level of popularity among the most faithful within his party.

 

It seemed that way when, during Vance’s keynote address, the crowd several times burst into chants of “J.D.”, which at one point shifted to chants of “48” (America’s next president will be the 48^th). “We’ve got to take care of business this November, then we’ll worry about what comes next,” Vance responded with a chuckle.

 

Vance’s stage presence felt markedly improved from when I saw him two years ago at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee after he got the vice presidential nomination. He now looks more confident and comfortable, suggesting that Trump’s own charisma may be rubbing off on his VP. (The president’s caustic style certainly has; in his speech, Vance adopted Trump’s insulting name for Senate candidate James Talarico, “Talafreako,” and suggested that the Texas Democrat had unsavory or even illegal web-browsing habits because Talarico is “obsessed” with “trans kids.”)

 

But there was one particular moment, about 15 minutes into his address, that appeared to elevate Vance’s position in real time. A protester began to walk down the aisle stairs, shouting and unfurling a Mexican flag and then a Palestinian flag. Vance paused his speech amid the commotion, and after the protester was quickly removed from the arena, he turned back to the crowd. “Well, my friend, if you love Mexico so much, get your ass over there. I’ll buy you the plane ticket,” he said as the crowd burst into the most deafening roar of the night. (A cynic might wonder whether the scene and Vance’s response were choreographed, given how perfectly it played in the room.)

 

If in two years Vance is back at a Republican convention accepting his party’s nomination, Dallas may be remembered as his true debut, his coming-out party as the next leader of the GOP and the MAGA movement. Indeed, the honorary delegates and superfans at the 2026 convention appeared quite willing to pass the torch to Vance and let him lead the party in its next evolution.

 

The week began with discussion of a New York Times report that the administration was considering adopting one of Vance’s top policy priorities, a change in how the federal childcare subsidy designed for single-parent households is administered. “Under the draft new rule, parents who stay home with their children could benefit from the program, which typically provides about $9,000 per child each year, potentially reshaping which families get federal child care money,” reported the Times, which also notes that Vance has “championed” the idea internally.

 

The idea to provide tax subsidies to stay-at-home moms isn’t inherently Trumpy, and it fits much more with the family-oriented welfare policy that Vance and his many acolytes are pushing their party to adopt. It’s also antithetical to the small-government approach that old-school conservative movement types would like to see reasserted in Republican policy priorities. But that’s a point in the proposal’s favor for Team Vance, since there’s nothing that pleases the party’s postliberals more than to see the zombie Reaganites hem and haw about right-wing big government proposals that the Vanceguard believe would be popular with a significant part of the GOP coalition.

 

The cadre of intellectuals, writers, and activists who make up the new right has greeted Vance’s subsidy idea with enthusiasm. In fact, many of them gathered on Wednesday in Irving, about 12 miles from the convention arena, at an event put on by Forum, a new group that organizes policy debates on the right. Forum was founded by Matthew J. Peterson, a longtime affiliate of the Claremont Institute, one of the leading institutions of the new right.

 

During one panel discussion, Terry Schilling—president of the American Principles Project, a pro-family advocacy group, and a leading voice among social conservatives—was effusive in his praise for the Vance-driven proposal, arguing the vice president is “reframing the debate” about the goals of tax policy when it comes to families.

 

“He’s making the argument that we shouldn’t be subsidizing corporations with childcare. We should be giving that money directly to families. Childcare subsidies are a direct subsidy for the biggest corporations in America,” Schilling said, referring to stakes that private equity has in some of the country’s largest daycare chains. “This is going to be a total realignment of the Republican Party and what its economic policies actually geared towards and should be working to support.”

 

In his speech, Vance offered rhetorical hints about how a Vance-led GOP might steer the party toward a more paternalistic conservatism that looks more like the Christian democratic parties of Western Europe. He offered a prescription for the life he would like his newborn son (the Vances’ fourth) to have, from eating “real food” to receiving a “real education” that teaches him to “love his country.” Then, he went a little further.

 

“What I want for my family, I want for your family too. That’s my job,” Vance said. “My job is to fight for every single person in this room, every person watching at home, as if they were my own family, as if they were my own kid.”

 

And a motif of Vance’s address was the “birthright” of every American child. By my count, he used the word eight times, always to describe a broad idea of what was owed to all of this country’s citizens. Americans were born, he said, with “the right to inherit the blessings of the greatest country on earth, not because of who their parents are, not because of what they look like or where they come from, but because they are Americans, and this is our country.”

 

But, he argued, under presidents of the past, rampant immigration, inflation, and misguided policies have wantonly spent down that birthright or worse—denied it to its rightful heirs. “Our nation became a place where you had to be rich to enjoy what used to be the birthright of every ordinary middle-class life,” Vance said. “It wasn’t just that things became more expensive; it’s that our country was stolen from us and then handed out to strangers.”

 

It’s a more sophisticated and more specific version of Trump’s own brand of populist critique of the political class in 2016. The country has been run into the ground not by fools and crooks, as the current president would put it, but by the corporations and libertarians who ran Washington and opened up trade and immigration at the expense of the American worker. Sen. Bernie Sanders might like a word with Vance about cribbing his ideas, but the vice president seems to be betting that this populist sentiment isn’t losing steam with his own side.

 

Among the MAGA loyalists in Dallas this week, that doesn’t seem to be a bad bet. Will the full Republican Party, let alone the country, be ready to double down on right-wing economic populism in two years? That’s a whole different game.

The Houthis Finally Open a Second Front in the Iran War

By Noah Rothman

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

The Iranians seem to have finally, after many unsuccessful attempts, dragged Yemen’s Houthis into the fight. Sort of.

 

From the outset of Operation Epic Fury, the Iranian regime lobbied the Houthis both publicly and in private to open a second maritime front — complementing Tehran’s efforts to block traffic in the Strait of Hormuz with a Houthi-led assault on the Bab el-Mandeb Strait on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula.

 

For months, the Houthis balked at the requests from their Iranian sponsors. Back in March, in a reflection of the internal disagreement over whether to reignite the war that the Houthis prosecuted in the Biden years, the Houthis fired a perfunctory drone and missile barrage at Israel. Analysts believe this was likely the compromise on which all sides of the debate could agree.

 

Months of relative quiet followed that exhibition, which revealed the Houthis’ diminished appetite for war. Even when the Houthis acquiesced to pressure and, in July, announced their intention to close the strait that leads to the Red Sea and toward the Suez Canal, the traffic continued to flow. It seemed that Sana’a was not eager for the fight.

 

That changed in early August, but it wasn’t the Iranians who changed it.

 

“The Houthis, increasingly frustrated with what they say is a blockade by Saudi Arabia, launched strikes on the Saudi state oil company and announced a blockade of Saudi ships passing through the Red Sea,” the Washington Post reported on August 2. An ongoing exchange of missiles and drones between the Houthis and the neighboring Saudi Kingdom intensified after August 20, when the Yemeni militia attacked a “sensitive target at ​Najran airport and an Aramco facility in Najran” as well as Saudi ships at sea. Riyadh pledged in the wake of that attack to do whatever it could to support the internationally recognized Yemeni government in Aden, possibly including direct intervention.

 

Meanwhile, pro-government forces launched a multifront offensive against Houthi positions. At the beginning of the month, government-aligned forces appeared to be holding their own. In the last 48 hours, however, a Houthi offensive has made significant strategic gains.

 

On Friday, regional sources confirmed that the Houthis had captured the port city of Mokha, which is situated on the coast of the Red Sea at the mouth of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. In addition, the militia mounted a maritime assault on Perim Island in the Red Sea, giving its forces greater control over commercial traffic flowing north toward the Mediterranean.

 

“The Houthi advance further threatens Saudi oil exports just as Iran is constraining shipments through the Strait of Hormuz on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula,” the Wall Street Journal reported. Consequently, global energy markets reeled at the prospect of a united Iranian-Houthi front designed to throttle all maritime traffic from the Indian Ocean.

 

Most disconcertingly, some militant group — the Houthis, perhaps, or an Iran-aligned militia in Iraq — has reportedly managed to strike a crucial overland oil pipeline inside Saudi Arabia. CNN confirms:

 

The pipeline has become key to Saudi Arabia since the outbreak of the US-Iran war. The kingdom has rerouted about 5 million barrels of oil per day that would have been destined for awaiting oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, as Iran effectively shuttered the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, that oil has traveled through its East-West pipeline to its port of Yanbu on the Red Sea.

 

According to Axios, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman telephoned Donald Trump twice on Thursday “urging him to launch strikes against the Houthis.” Trump reportedly declined, but the U.S. is providing intelligence and targeting support to the Kingdom in its military campaign against the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen, and hundreds of U.S. military personnel are already on the ground in Saudi Arabia. That may not prove sufficient given the effect of the Houthi offensive on the price of Brent Crude, but it’s not nothing.

 

While there are “hundreds of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps officers in Yemen,” as CNN reported, the full-scale activation of the Houthis seems attributable more to political dynamics within the militia and their long-running fight against the Saudi Kingdom than Iranian coercion. Still, the flare-up doubtlessly advances Iran’s objectives by putting upward pressure on oil prices. This development comes as cracks within the Iranian political class over whether to continue fighting the war at all have begun to spill into the public square.

 

While it has been widely reported that the IRGC favors escalation to force Trump back to the negotiating table, that view is not shared by the Iranian political class. For months, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has been having a prolonged and public nervous breakdown over the strain the U.S. blockade has placed on the Iranian economy.

 

This week, he was joined by two of his predecessors, Hassan Rouhani and Mohammad Khatami, both of whom called on the IRGC to find an “honorable” way to win the war. Other Iranian “moderate” elements fear that Trump’s recent strikes on Iran’s “ghost fleet” of indolent oil tankers idling in the Strait of Hormuz will ensure that the country never financially recovers from the war. “Iran needs realistic governance rather than radical idealism,” said the disillusioned reformer and one-time regime insider Hamidreza Jalaeipour.

 

The stakes in this already high-stakes game of chicken keep rising.