Articles

President Trump announced at 9:03 p.m. on Friday night: “At my direction, the United States Southern Command delivered a swift and lethal kinetic strike to successfully execute Niño Guerrero, the infamous leader of Tren De Aragua.”

On May 23, President Donald Trump said a deal to end the war with Iran was almost finalized and would be “announced shortly.” Yet more than two weeks later no deal has been unveiled, and U.S. and Iranian forces continue to exchange fire regularly. Last week, an Iranian drone attack heavily damaged Kuwait’s international airport. On Sunday, Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israel, and Israel struck back. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed for all but a trickle of traffic.

Almost every day, Pete Hegseth offers fresh proof of why he should never have been appointed secretary of defense (or, as he prefers to call it, secretary of war). The latest example came on what should have been a solemn and sacred occasion: the commemoration of the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944.

The “secret sauce” of American power in the post-1945 era has been the country’s network of alliances. The Soviet Union had satrapies in Eastern Europe, but few real friends. Russia doesn’t even have satellite states anymore, aside from Belarus. It does have an increasingly warm but still wary relationship with China. Beijing, in turn, is close to just a handful of other countries; North Korea is its only treaty ally.

“First of all let us rid ourselves of the foolish error that with the Army alone we can maintain the security of the State,” warned Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, in 1951. “Security rests on a foreign policy of peace: a sincere intention to be at peace with our neighbors, and with all the nations.”

There are few sensations more pleasurable than having one’s prior assumptions confirmed with new evidence. It has always seemed to me that a prime imperative behind revolutionary regimes is the desire of marginalized individuals who were not succeeding in the ancien regime to find better career prospects by defenestrating the old elites (sometimes literally so).

The war with Iran has revealed the strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. defense establishment and suggests how the U.S. armed forces can be reshaped to fight the wars of the future. Specifically, the war has laid bare a number of vulnerabilities that urgently need to be addressed in order to prepare for conflicts against adversaries even more dangerous than Iran.

President Donald Trump predictably returned from his summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping without having secured help in reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Now Trump must figure out how to exit a war he touted as lasting “four to five weeks” that is in its third month. Lots of armchair generals are telling him to “finish the job” by returning to bombing Iran. But the hawks overestimate what U.S. airpower can accomplish and underestimate what Iran can do in response.

John Culver is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Chinese military, a subject he began studying as a CIA analyst in 1985. From 2015 to 2018, he served as national intelligence officer for East Asia. Since retiring from the CIA in 2020, he has been a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. In advance of the summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, I spoke with Culver about China’s military capabilities and what lessons the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is drawing from the U.S. conflict with Iran. The conversation has been edited and condensed.

When the U.S. armed forces began blowing up suspected “drug boats” on Sept. 2, 2025, it was widely seen as a way not just to fight the war on drugs but also to put pressure on Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, who was in league with drug traffickers. Many expected that the lawless strikes — which amount to killing suspected criminals without trial — would end after U.S. forces captured Maduro at the beginning of the year.

Trump has tried bombings, a blockade, and now a vaguely defined escort operation—and Iran still controls the Strait of Hormuz. Only diplomacy can lead to a true resolution.

Given all the well-regarded generals and admirals sacked by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in his political purges, it’s hard to work up much sympathy for the latest Pentagon casualty: Navy Secretary John Phelan. He is a billionaire investor and major donor to President Donald Trump who had no business getting the job in the first place.

More than two months before President Donald Trump announced that the Navy would interdict shipping to and from Iranian ports, he quietly launched a blockade of fuel shipments to Cuba. It’s hard to know exactly when the Cuba blockade started, because the president, in his usual autocratic fashion, made no public announcement and offered no explanation for his actions. He simply acted.

Pressing economic concerns should compel the United States and Iran to decouple their blockades of the Strait of Hormuz from the complex and likely lengthy negotiations needed to reach a settlement on Iran’s nuclear program.

The Trump administration has declared a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, betting that Iran will buckle under economic pressure before the global energy crisis forces the United States to back down. The outcome of this standoff is far from certain.

What’s the biggest danger facing Europe? I would argue it’s not Russia, China, Iran or even the United States. It’s the threat of homegrown illiberalism — of right-wing populists who will mismanage economies, undermine democracy, victimize minorities, corrupt the government and cozy up to dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” I thought of that famous line (often misattributed to Mark Twain) when I read Central Command’s overblown claims of what the war with Iran—”Operation Epic Fury”—supposedly achieved.

Tuesday was one of the more bizarre days in U.S. diplomatic history. It began with President Donald Trump warning that, should Iran not reopen the Strait of Hormuz, “a whole civilization will die tonight.” It ended with Trump proclaiming a two-week ceasefire and opening negotiations with Iran based on Tehran’s “10 point proposal.” There is rampant confusion about what those 10 points are, but the version released by Tehran calls for, among other things, Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. military withdrawal from the region and acceptance of Iran’s right to pursue nuclear enrichment — all conditions that should be utterly unacceptable to any U.S. administration.

I don’t always agree with John Bolton, but I have a lot of respect for him. He’s been a foreign policy insider for decades, and a consistent advocate of hard-line positions. He was advocating regime change in Iran during the first Trump administration when that position was anathema to Trump and his MAGA toadies. Bolton is still advocating that position today, when it may (or may not be) the official position of the Trump administration.

In the early morning hours of Feb. 28, President Donald Trump announced the biggest U.S. war in more than two decades. What was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth doing the day before? Announcing a settlement with Scouting America, formerly known as the Boy Scouts of America, to discontinue some diversity initiatives. Hegseth did not succeed in getting the group to kick out girls or revert to its earlier name, but he did convince it to end its “Citizenship in Society” merit badge, earned by scouts who “realize the benefits of diversity, equity, inclusion, and ethical leadership.”