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We Can't Ignore the Insanity of Trump’s Threats to Annihilate Iran
It is not possible to excuse, justify, or condone this kind of rhetoric. The only question is what to do about it.
Oct 18, 2026
Of all of the things that President Donald Trump has said publicly since returning to the White House, his threats to annihilate Iran are arguably the worst. This is not only because the repeated statements are deeply immoral and illegal—deliberate killing of civilians is a war crime—but because they represent the kind of irresponsible rhetoric that will lead us into a global apocalypse and collapse of not just the Persian nation but human civilization as a whole. It is not possible to excuse, justify, or condone this kind of rhetoric. The only question is what to do about it.
As much as some well-meaning people might want to see nuclear weapons as instruments that ended World War II and have kept the peace ever since, the exact opposite has actually been true. Nuclear weapons brutally murdered a couple of hundred thousand civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and injured and sentenced to years and decades of illness and suffering many hundreds of thousands more. As we have written before, multiple alternatives existed to end the war in 1945. In many ways, the false narrative of the atomic bombings averting an invasion and saving lives has enabled the perpetuation of nuclear weapons, bringing the risks to humanity’s survival to levels previously unimaginable. Turning a brutally violent beginning of the nuclear age into something positive has managed to complicate and obfuscate an issue that should never have been complicated. Nuclear weapons are and have always been immoral. Their possession should be illegal.
Although the end of World War II coincided with the advent of nuclear weapons, and we have technically not fought another world war since, this is merely a correlation. Other significant changes in our world, including the founding of the United Nations, technological and scientific progress, and globalized trade, took place over that same time period. In addition, one has to wonder, whose peace we are talking about. Since 1945, over 20 million people have died in armed conflicts around the world, with up to 50 million more indirect deaths stemming from those conflicts. Today, there are nearly 100 armed conflicts across the planet according to the Geneva Academy, and 25 international armed conflicts involving more than one nation state.
It is not reassuring to have the US president talking about nuclear bombs exploding over American cities.
All along, in addition to the deaths and suffering in war zones across the planet and the horrific toll exacted by poverty and inequality, humanity has been waiting almost helplessly for another nuclear weapon to explode by accident, miscalculation, or intention, likely triggering a full-blown nuclear war in which tens or even thousands of nuclear weapons are used. The past eight decades have witnessed numerous incidents in which human wisdom and decency or just plain luck interrupted a course of events that seemed inexorably leading to nuclear war. Nuclear weapons have not brought the peace. Quite the opposite—they threaten what little of it we have each and every day.
And yet, for all of his threats on Truth Social and most recently in the halls of the United Nations, Trump has also stated that nuclear weapons “could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over,” calling for “denuclearization.” In fact, two days after his unacceptable statement to “drive [Iran] into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness” at the UN General Assembly in September, Trump suggested to President Xi Jinping in DC that there be a nuclear summit between China, Russia, and the United States.
Trump did so knowing full well that Xi’s government’s participation in arms control negotiations is contingent upon China achieving rough parity with the nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia. This should be pursued not by China continuing to expand its arsenal to the gargantuan size of the US and Russian arsenals, but by the US and Russia reducing theirs to the size of China’s, and adopting China’s demand for an across-the-board no-first-use policy.
Since his latest threat, delivered in the world’s premier diplomatic space unlike his earlier Truth Social rants, including the one on April 7 that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump actually seemed to welcome Iranian destruction of Los Angeles and San Diego at an election rally. Even if he now unconvincingly claims that the original clips, which suggested that such destruction was a small price to pay, were taken out of context and the small price to pay was about the price of gas, it is not reassuring to have the US president talking about nuclear bombs exploding over American cities. Never mind that Iran neither has the nuclear weapons nor the ability to send missiles toward US soil. Nuclear Armageddon seems to be on Trump’s mind.
Is the real estate developer who seemed to understand that a lot of effort, capital, and human ingenuity, not to mention time, go into building modern cities gone? What happened to the businessman who in 1986 “summoned Dr. Bernard Lown of the International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) to the Trump Tower for a meeting?” Trump sought advice from Dr. Lown on negotiating nuclear arms agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev just after IPPNW had won the Nobel Peace Prize a year earlier. Is that person no longer here or do his “denuclearization” comments offer some hope?
Among those refusing to be passive in all of this is Pope Leo XIV who has not only deplored war and called for nuclear disarmament but who recently decried leaders, presumably including Trump, who are “beginning to speak about nuclear weapons and wars that are becoming ever more destructive,” and urged leaders to “come together, sit down, engage in dialogue.” The Holy See was one of the original parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and remains a strong supporter of nuclear abolition. It is time for Pope Leo XIV, speaking for the planet, to use his unique moral authority to demand an emergency summit of, at a minimum, Trump, Xi, and Vladimir Putin to get us off this path of war and potential nuclear annihilation.
In addition to insisting on such actions from others, each of us needs to think long and hard about what we can do to address the insanity of Trump’s threats and the insanity of nuclear weapons.
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Trump Gives Putin an 'Economic Lifeline,' Waives Sanctions on Russia
"These waivers have nothing to do with our national security, and everything to do with sucking up to Vladimir Putin," said US Sen. Richard Blumenthal.
Oct 17, 2026
President Donald Trump on Friday signed an executive order that waived new sanctions on Russia that were set to take effect thanks to bipartisan legislation signed into law by the president last month.
Trump justified the decision by claiming the sanctions waiver "is in the national interests of the United States," without offering further details. The president said he submitted a report to Congress elaborating on his reasons for waiving the sanctions.
A Friday report in The New York Times described the waiver as "another economic lifeline to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin," as the sanctions had been designed "to target Russian officials, oligarchs, and financial institutions" and "squeeze the financial lifelines sustaining Russia’s war against Ukraine."
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the sanctions waiver, and urged US lawmakers and voters to speak out against the US president's actions.
"It is important that everyone in America... sees what is really happening," Zelenskyy wrote in a Saturday social media post. "At a time when the Russians have carried out such a massive attack on our energy sector, a decision was unfortunately made in America to completely disregard the [sanctions law], which was supposed to impose truly effective pressure on Russia to bring this war to an end."
Zelenskyy emphasized that the sanctions package could still do a lot of good, but "it needs to actually work, and every voice in support of it matters."
Trump in recent weeks has been pressuring Ukraine to stop its attacks on Russian energy infrastructure in a bid to lower global prices of gas and diesel, both of which have skyrocketed in recent months because of the president's illegal war with Iran.
In addition to pressuring Ukraine, Trump also struck a deal with Russia to import diesel into the US, drawing a bipartisan rebuke from lawmakers who accused the president of funding Putin's war machine.
Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) ripped Trump's decision to waive the Russia sanctions in a Friday social media post.
"Trump’s latest surrender to Putin again betrays our Ukrainian partners," Beyer wrote, "and defies clear congressional intent of legislation designed to punish Russia for its illegal war of aggression."
Beyer also pointed to flaws in the sanctions bill that he said gave Trump too much discretionary power to not only waive sanctions on Russia, but to impose further tariffs on US allies.
"Congress must fix this flawed law," he said, "to stop Trump from capitulating to Putin and ensure that it truly supports Ukraine."
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) on Saturday slammed Trump's sanctions waiver as "beyond irresponsible."
"What part of enforcing a law passed 86-11 by the Senate does the President and his advisors not understand?" Tillis asked. "It's unconscionable that this administration is capitulating to a Russian dictator who illegally invaded Ukraine and butchers innocent civilians every single day."
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who co-authored the sanctions law with the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), said Trump has shown "that he stands on the side of a bloodthirsty thug and the enablers of Russia's war machine and against the majority of Americans, their representatives in both houses of Congress, and our European allies."
"These waivers have nothing to do with our national security, and everything to do with sucking up to Vladimir Putin," Blumenthal added. "I hope my Republican colleagues will join me in condemning this craven, cowardly action."
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Something Else to Worry About: Biological Weapons
Recent reports that a young woman working in a Russian biolab became ill and died echo Annie Jacobsen’s new book, Biological War: A Scenario. How concerned should we be?
Oct 17, 2026
A few months ago, I ordered a pre-publication copy of Annie Jacobsen’s new non-fiction book, Biological War: A Scenario, which followed on from her excellent book, Nuclear War: A Scenario—not because I enjoy reading about existential risks, but because I’m an information seeker and feel that it’s important to stay informed. But when it arrived a few weeks later, in spite of having written an opinion piece about her nuclear book, entitled, “Why We Avoid Thinking About Nuclear War—and Why We Shouldn’t,” after seeing the frightening cover illustration of men in hazmat suits, I stashed it on the bookshelf of my study rather than reading it—for the same reasons I discussed in my earlier piece: I didn’t want to know!
But after the recent reports of a biolab accident in Russia, I retrieved it from the bookshelf and read it in two days.
The “scenario” in the book is that of a “biological weapons lab accident,” where a scientist working to modify pneumonic plague into a deadly biological weapon experiences remorse and tries to destroy it. But the small fire he lights causes an explosion that propels the Yersinia pestis bacteria (which causes the plague) into the atmosphere. In the process, he becomes infected with his weaponized pneumonic plague, although he doesn’t yet know it.
Although most of us cannot directly influence negotiations about strengthening the BWC, there are things that we can do to support such efforts and to lessen the increasingly grave dangers that confront us.
The next morning, he goes to an Orthodox church to confess where, by coughing in the midst of confession, he infects the priest, as well as the next person in line—a pre-med foreign exchange student, who is back in this small Russian town visiting family—before returning to the US shortly thereafter, where he is studying and doing volunteer work with homeless people. The student subsequently infects scores on Skid Row, who, in turn, infect the first responders who come to help them and, ultimately, the whole city of Los Angeles.
Following his confession, the scientist goes into the woods to shoot himself but collapses from the symptoms of plague. He is found by men on an international hunting trip, who administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and carry him back to their hunting lodge, where he is collected by officials. After dining together, using the same sauna and steam bath, and driving to the airport in the same van, seven of the hunters board flights to six of the world’s seven continents, while another goes off on a sea cruise—spreading pneumonic plague on their flights and sea voyage—and ultimately around the world.
In the real-world scenario, reported on October 2, Darya Shipilova, a 28-year old laboratory technician working in an “Anti-Plague Institute” in Irkutsk, Siberia died, according to Russian officials, of “a pneumonia of unknown etiology.” A Russian news agency reported that she had broken a test tube containing live bacteria of the pneumonic plague pathogen, leading to widespread speculation that she had, indeed, died of pneumonic plague.
These concerns were reinforced by reports that Russian health authorities imposed sweeping quarantine restrictions on the lab where she worked, the hospital where she died, and other nearby hospitals. Neighbors also reported that workers in protective suits and gas masks repeatedly disinfected the building where she lived, telling residents that it was “for cockroaches,” although the building has no cockroaches. More recently, Russia’s health agency asserted that the plague was not detected in follow-up tests of “thousands of people in the region.”
The overall opacity (a familiar playbook for crises in Russia) of Russian public health officials in responding to urgent requests for more information from the World Health Organization, the US, and other governments led to considerable disquiet around the world.
When asked if her death was related to a bioweapon, President Donald Trump responded, not very reassuringly, “We don’t think so.” He also acknowledged the similarities in how Chinese officials handled Covid-19 before it became a global pandemic: “China didn’t say much, and Russia is not saying much either.”
The Biological Weapons Convention Was Supposed to Prevent This, Then Came the Secret Soviet Biological Weapons Program
The 1925 Geneva Protocol banned the use of biological weapons, but not their development or possession. Although ratified by a number of countries in the 1920s and 30s, it wasn’t ratified by the US until 1975.
After 27 years of a US biological weapons program, President Richard Nixon unexpectedly announced on November 25, 1969 that the US would unilaterally end its offensive biological weapons program, stating, “The United States shall renounce the use of lethal biological agents and weapons, and all other methods of biological warfare… [and] confine its biological research to defensive measures such as immunization and safety measures.” Over the next years, US biological weapons stocks were destroyed with the process completed in May 1972.
Subsequently, the United Nations Conference on Disarmament negotiated “The Biological Weapons Convention” (BWC), the first multilateral treaty to ban an entire class of weapons of mass destruction. It was opened for signature on April 10, 1972 and signed by the US, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union the same day. It entered into force on March 26, 1975. Currently, it has 189 State Parties and four Signatory States, with only four States outside the Convention.
Because it was the first of its kind, however, the BWC lacked the important monitoring and verification procedures that were later included in the Chemical Weapons Convention. There are no mandatory verified declarations of biological facilities or activities; no inspections or site visits to verify compliance; no international organization to oversee implementation; and no penalties for non-compliance, although complaints can be made to the UN Security Council (which are subject to veto by any of the five Permanent Members). Only four staff are involved in its tiny Implementation Support Unit, compared with over 500 for the Chemical Weapons Convention.
In spite of the Soviet Union becoming a signatory to the BWC in 1972, the USSR continued to covertly develop and produce offensive biological weapons in what became the world’s largest and most sophisticated biological weapons program, with 40-50 biological research facilities scattered around the country, employing 65,000 people. The aim was to create “exotic biological weapons using techniques made possible by recombinant DNA.” Recombinant DNA, also called genetic engineering, involves joining the DNA from two entirely different species to make new pathogens.
Not detecting this vast biological weapons program was one of the biggest intelligence failures of the Cold War as it was totally unknown in the West until 1989, when a Soviet scientist, Vladimir Pasechnik, defected, shocking the British Intelligence Services and the CIA with details of the massive program and its deadly stockpiles. They learned that the Soviets had “genetically engineered a strain of Yersinia pestis to resist antibiotics” and had also stockpiled vast volumes of other deadly pathogens in the labs’ freezers, such as smallpox, anthrax, ebola, Marburg virus disease, and many others—all weaponized to kill populations in the most diabolical manner.
The terrifying extent of this biowarfare program was later confirmed by other defecting Soviet scientists, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In January 1992, Boris Yeltsin admitted that he knew about the program and pledged to close down the institutes, retire their directors, and ask for international inspections. But the two generals he appointed to carry out this mission resisted his orders. In 1992, a Trilateral Agreement was signed by Russia with the United States and the United Kingdom “promising to end biological weapons programs and convert facilities to benevolent purposes, but compliance with the agreement—and the fate of the former Soviet bio-agents and facilities—is still mostly undocumented.”
The State Department’s 2025 compliance report states: “The United States assesses that Russia maintains an offensive biological warfare program and is in violation of its obligations under Article I and II of the BWC… Key military biological facilities associated with the Soviet offensive program remain, inaccessible and not transparent, nearly 30 years after Yeltsin’s decree.”
Jacobsen’s Book Is Based on the Secret Soviet Biological Weapons Program
The latter part of Jacobsen’s book deals with the breakdown of law and order, as mass death and panic take hold and cause chaos. Ultimately, the president deploys the Insurrection Act, whereby military forces attempt to establish martial law for the first time in American history. Just as they are about to release the strategic national stockpiles of medicine, scientists at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease receive their first bacterial specimens (from the infected hunter who landed in Dallas and died in a local hospital). Microbiologists in biocontainment suits examine the specimens, and plague cultures are grown and used to test for antibiotic resistance in small animals. Simultaneously, microbiologists extract DNA from the specimen and feed it into a high-speed sequencing machine to get a genetic fingerprint of the pathogen.
What they discover is appalling—the organism has been bioengineered and “looks alarmingly like a 21st century version of something Russian scientists worked on during the Soviet-era secret biological weapons programs.” It is a combination of two pathogens, one concealed within another, referred to as a “bobby-trap bio-weapon,” whereby, after a person becomes infected with pneumonic plague and takes antibiotics as soon as possible under the assumption they will be cured, the antibiotics trigger the chimera weapon’s bobby-trap mechanism—in this fictional case, the Venezuelan equine encephalitis gene which has been covertly spliced into the Yersinia pestis genome to cause acute neurological symptoms and death. As a result, there is no cure.
The book is not meant to create unnecessary fear. It is meant to make clear what is now possible, and what is at stake. The tools to engineer life are advancing faster than the rules that govern them. This gap is where existential danger lives. The point is not panic; the point is pressure. To demand guardrails, oversight, and accountability before the science outruns our ability to control it. Before we set something irreversible in motion.
Although the real-life situation in Siberia will hopefully not turn out to be the same as in Annie Jacobsen’s book, it should cause us to take notice.
Attempts to Improve the Biological Weapons Convention
Serious attempts have been made in the past to strengthen the BWC but without success. An Ad Hoc Group labored from 1995 to 2001 to create a protocol where states would submit declarations of treaty-relevant facilities and activities to an international body that would conduct routine on-site visits, as well as challenge inspections of suspect facilities and activities. But the draft was rejected by the US under President George W. Bush, who argued that it could harm US national security. Nothing more happened for many years.
Another attempt is currently underway, although progress is slow. A Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention Working Group was established at the 2022 BWC Review Conference and has been working steadily over the last four years to come up with the text of draft recommendations before the 2027 BWC Review Conference. At their August meeting this year, 90.6% of the text had been agreed, although fundamental disagreements over verification frameworks, transfer controls, and funding remain—and tensions are high.
The chair of the Working Group has highlighted the urgency, arguing that the sudden convergence of artificial intelligence and biology is “creating new security challenges,” warning that a gap “may emerge between these rapidly advancing capabilities and our collective ability to understand their governance and prevent their misuse.”
What We Can Do
Although most of us cannot directly influence negotiations about strengthening the BWC, there are things that we can do to support such efforts and to lessen the increasingly grave dangers that confront us.
We can be sure to vote in the upcoming midterms for Democratic candidates, who have been more likely to support regulatory controls in Congress, as well as multilaterally. We can support these candidates with financial contributions and by working on their campaigns to ensure that they get elected, since time is short. Once elected, we can strive to persuade them to urgently implement appropriate policies.
After all, who wants human extinction? Presumably, none of us—no matter how jaded we may have become.
We can educate ourselves about the threats by reading widely, including Jacobsen’s excellent books, as well as opinion pieces on the subject, such as ones I’ve written on AI and nuclear weapons. We can do online research to identify, join, financially support, and work with others in public advocacy organizations against threats that are of particular concern to us. We can attend protest rallies and discuss our concerns with friends, encouraging them to also become active, so that we can develop a large public constituency to combat these extreme dangers.
Just a couple of days ago, on October 11, The Lancet Commission on 21st Century Global Threats to Health highlighted 17 major threats to human health over the next 75 years, asserting that, “Malicious use of AI, including bioweapons, and nuclear conflict with nuclear famine [caused by nuclear winter] carry risks of extinction in the next 75 years.” There are so many existential dangers to confront that it can sometimes feel overwhelming and lead us to a state of helplessness when what we need, instead, is a pro-active approach that will foster resourcefulness.
By facing up to our natural tendency to avoid frightening information and by confronting our fears head-on, we can gain a true sense of self-efficacy and social responsibility. In this way, we can save those we love; ensure that future generations thrive; preserve the rich cultural heritage we have created; protect the magnificent array of other species on Earth; and safeguard our beautiful, one-of-a-kind planet—from all of these truly insane and, frankly, evil machinations—often designed by normal people, who have been seduced by competitive processes; rationales that “everyone is doing it”; lucrative remuneration; lapse of conscience; and bad ideas into creating conditions for the most dystopian futures imaginable.
As Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister, former president and CEO of the International Crisis Group, and co-chair of the Commission on Nuclear Proliferation and Disarmament has recently commented with regard to the nuclear threat, “It is up to those of us who passionately believe in both the possibility and necessity of a nuclear weapon free world, however disappointed and frustrated we may be right now, to get out there and continue to campaign our hearts out for it.” I suggest that we extend his call to action to all the existential threats we face. After all, who wants human extinction? Presumably, none of us—no matter how jaded we may have become. We must assume responsibility for the continuation of our kind and choose human survival.
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Trump Crosses New Thresholds of American Shame
From the International Criminal Court to the home of Ilhan Omar, the use of government power demands more than another news cycle of outrage.
Oct 14, 2026
I am tired of writing about Donald Trump.
I have spent years writing about this man, and lately I find myself wondering what more there is to say. Another attack on an institution, another spectacle, another announcement that sends the news cycle spinning. An editor at City Watch LA recently told me he was no longer interested in receiving Trump pieces because readers were tuning out. I understood. I have felt that fatigue myself.
Still, four developments in the first 12 days of October have been difficult to ignore. The Trump administration imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court, announced plans to live stream a military execution, struck an agreement for Russian diesel, and sent federal agents to search the Washington home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)
What matters now is whether the public continues to demand explanations, whether institutions retain the independence to do their jobs, and whether the law applies equally to the powerful and their critics.
These events are different. They should not be collapsed into a single accusation of wrongdoing. But together they raise a question that reaches beyond the latest controversy: What happens when the exercise of government power becomes so relentless that the public begins to accept what once would have demanded sustained scrutiny?
Consider the International Criminal Court (ICC). Navi Pillay, the South African jurist whose career challenged apartheid and advanced the prosecution of sexual violence as a weapon of genocide, was recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her human rights work. She also led a United Nations commission that concluded Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, a finding Israel rejects.
Trump responded by resharing a social media post claiming he deserved the prize. His administration imposed sanctions on the ICC, accusing the court of unfairly targeting Americans.
The timing does not establish that the Nobel decision caused the sanctions. The underlying issue is more consequential than presidential resentment. International courts exist to investigate grave crimes, including those committed by people with political power. Their decisions can be challenged, their jurisdiction disputed, and their procedures scrutinized. None of this gives governments a blank check to punish institutions for examining their conduct.
Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” King was confronting a country that repeatedly found reasons to delay accountability for its own injustices. His words remain relevant when governments invoke sovereignty to resist scrutiny they expect other nations to accept.
The United States cannot credibly demand accountability abroad while treating the prospect of international accountability as an intolerable affront at home.
The proposed military execution raises a different concern. Nidal Malik Hasan, a former Army psychiatrist, murdered 13 people and wounded 32 others at Fort Hood in 2009. His scheduled execution by firing squad on December 3 is expected to be live streamed, according to Associated Press reporting.
The victims and their families deserve to remain at the center of any discussion of Hasan's crimes. Their suffering does not, however, settle the question of what the state should make of an execution.
Capital punishment is already an assertion of the government's power to take a human life. Broadcasting that act introduces another question: What purpose does the spectacle serve?
In Reflections on the Guillotine, Albert Camus called capital punishment “the most premeditated of murders.” He was challenging the assumption that the state's decision to kill becomes morally uncomplicated once it has passed through a legal process.
A sentence can be lawful and still invite serious moral examination. If a public broadcast is supposed to deter violence, the administration should explain the evidence supporting that claim. We should be wary of a government that treats the public display of death as a demonstration of strength.
The Russian diesel agreement presents a more practical contradiction. On October 9, Trump announced that Russia would supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel, with additional shipments expected. The announcement came as the administration was pursuing economic pressure on Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine.
Negotiating with an adversary is not inherently wrong. Fuel prices matter to families, workers, and businesses, and a president has a responsibility to address them. An energy agreement might have an economic rationale.
But the administration owes the public an explanation of how this arrangement fits its broader policy. If economic pressure is meant to persuade Moscow to change its conduct, what happens when Washington purchases a major energy supply from Russia? What are the terms, when will the fuel arrive, and how much relief can consumers reasonably expect?
For Ukrainians living with the consequences of the invasion, American commitments matter. For Americans struggling with fuel costs, promised savings matter. Neither group should have to rely on presidential boasts in place of a clear accounting.
Then, on Monday morning, federal agents searched Ilhan Omar's home in Washington, DC.
The Justice Department confirmed that Homeland Security Investigations had executed a judicially authorized search warrant as part of an ongoing criminal investigation. Authorities provided few details about the inquiry. Reporting indicated that it involved immigration-related allegations, which Omar has denied.
A search warrant does not establish guilt. The public does not yet have enough information to determine whether the search was justified or whether political considerations influenced the investigation. Those distinctions are essential.
But the circumstances deserve attention. Trump has repeatedly attacked Omar, questioned her patriotism, and told her to return to where she came from. The search occurred weeks before the November midterm elections, as Omar seeks reelection. Omar described the action as an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement. Democratic congressional leaders also questioned the timing.
The Justice Department must be able to investigate credible allegations against elected officials. No member of Congress should be above the law. But the reverse principle matters just as much: No president should be able to use federal law enforcement to intimidate political opponents.
The question is not whether Omar should receive special treatment. It is whether she is receiving the same treatment any other American would receive, under the same standards, free of political interference.
When a president repeatedly singles out an opponent and federal agents subsequently search her home shortly before an election, the public has legitimate reasons to demand answers. The government should welcome the scrutiny necessary to establish that its actions are lawful and impartial.
These four stories concern different institutions and different forms of power. Their connection lies in the questions they leave unanswered. Who holds powerful people accountable? What limits should constrain the state's use of violence? Can a government reconcile its economic decisions with its international commitments? Can federal law enforcement remain independent when the president has made a political opponent the target of repeated attacks?
I hesitate to call any particular week a turning point. American history contains too many grave injustices for that claim to come easily. The country has survived slavery, segregation, political repression, and wars justified by falsehoods. Yet history offers no guarantee that democratic institutions will protect themselves. They depend on people willing to defend their purpose and insist on their independence.
I do not expect this article to change the administration's course. I am not even certain that writing another article about Trump will reach readers who have stopped paying attention. But exhaustion is not an argument for silence. It is a condition that those who benefit from public distraction can exploit.
A threshold is not always crossed in a single dramatic moment. It can become visible through a series of decisions, each defended on its own terms, until the accumulation begins to change what a country considers acceptable.
The Nobel Prize, the proposed execution broadcast, the diesel agreement, and the search of Omar's home may ultimately be remembered as separate episodes. Their consequences will depend on facts still emerging and decisions yet to be made. What matters now is whether the public continues to demand explanations, whether institutions retain the independence to do their jobs, and whether the law applies equally to the powerful and their critics.
I am tired of writing about Donald Trump. I am more concerned about what happens if we become too tired to ask what his administration is doing in our name.
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Trump Strikes 'Deal With the Devil' for Russian Diesel as High Prices Hinder GOP in Midterms
"He's helping fund Russia's war machine, while our allies pay the price," said one congressional Democrat.
Oct 09, 2026
Democrats in Congress and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday swiftly condemned US President Donald Trump's plan to secure diesel from Russia in hopes of combating fuel prices that have skyrocketed due to his illegal war on Iran.
"I have just concluded a highly successful discussion with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, wherein it was agreed that Russia will immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel to the American and Global Marketplace, another 500,000 Tons during the month of November, and 1,000,000 Tons immediately thereafter," Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, with the US midterm elections just weeks away, and voters frustrated by the country's affordability crisis.
"Additionally, based on the condition of their Diesel Refineries, Russia will then deliver, within a short period of time, 3,000,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel," Trump said. "Between our TOTAL CONTROL of the Strait of Hormuz, and this great announcement on Russian Energy, Diesel Prices for Americans and, indeed, the World, will be COMING DOWN, IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST! Lower prices for Americans, especially our Great Farmers, Ranchers, and Truckers, is my Greatest Priority. This is a very big and important announcement. Additionally, it must be understood, that Iran will not have a Nuclear Weapon!"
After Trump's post, the Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control issued a general license "authorizing transactions related to the sale, delivery, offloading, and importation of diesel" from Russia—which launched a full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine in 2022. In response, Congress has appropriated over $170 billion to help Ukraine.
The Associated Press pointed out that Trump announced the deal with Putin after "he signed a sweeping Russia sanctions law last month that aimed at clamping down on Russia's energy revenues," and as "his envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner were meeting with Ukrainian officials in Miami to discuss a proposal to try to end the Russia-Ukraine war."
In a lengthy statement, the Ukrainian president warned Friday that "any easing of sanctions against Russia without a clear and lasting de-escalation agreement with Russia is an obvious weakness. It plays into Russia's hands—allowing it to kill more, wage war for longer, have even less respect for America, and inflict even greater losses and damage on the world."
US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) declared that "Trump is doing a deal with the devil to try to help his flailing political fortunes from the shockingly high diesel prices caused by his own reckless, illegal war in the Middle East. This filthy deal will only aid and abet the same Putin who is helping the Iranians to target and try to kill American troops in the Middle East and who illegally and viciously invaded our ally Ukraine."
According to an online tracker launched by Brown University's Costs of War Project, since Trump started bombing Iran without congressional authorization in February, Americans have paid over $130 billion more for fuel—$71.74 billion for gasoline and $58.56 billion for diesel—or nearly $1,000 per household.
Several other Democratic lawmakers from both chambers of Congress—which Democrats hope to reclaim from Trump's Republican Party in November—were also critical, including Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who said that striking a deal "with a murdering dictator" to lift sanctions "is an embarrassment and makes us complicit in Putin's war against Ukraine."
"This poorly concealed attempt to mitigate the havoc caused by Trump's illegal war in Iran will only benefit the Chinese and Russian economies, and lead to the slaughter of more innocents in Ukraine," he argued. "The president should rescind this agreement immediately. To the American companies considering taking Putin's blood money: Congress is watching."
Denouncing Trump's announcement as "a disgrace," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said: "You know how Trump could bring down gas and diesel prices? By ending his illegal war with Iran. Instead, he's going to help fund Putin's war machine."
Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) described Trump's approach as "desperate and shortsighted," adding: "Trump ran on America First but has no idea how to actually deliver for the American people. We wouldn't be in this mess without his wasteful war with Iran. We need to build opportunity for Americans with our foreign policy, not Putin. End this war and not a single dime to Russia."
House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Gregory Meeks (D-NY) also slammed the president's reversal on sanctions against Russia, stressing that "instead of putting economic pressure on Putin for his invasion of Ukraine, Trump continues to appease him. His disastrous Iran War has sent gas and diesel costs soaring, and Americans are paying the price."
Congresswoman Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) similarly said: "Desperate to escape the consequences of his failed Iran war, Trump is preparing to stab Ukraine in the back and buy diesel from Putin. He's helping fund Russia's war machine, while our allies pay the price."
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Canada and the United States of Coercion
In the face of Trump administration threats, Canada has learned from Russia and Iran how to stand up to US economic pressure.
Sep 01, 2026
Cuba is starving. Iran is being economically cut off from the world. And Russia is the target of a sanctions regime unlike any that a major nation has ever faced.
The US secretary of state has abandoned his post to play viceroy of Venezuela, and his role has been filled by the amateur team of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. American evolution has favoured the Pentagon and Treasury, while the State Department has gone extinct. Coercion is America’s only foreign policy strategy, and bombs, sanctions, and tariffs are its only tools. The US “will negotiate with bombs” and with “economic statecraft.”
Canada, previously America’s closest ally and its second largest trading partner, is now feeling the weight of that coercion in an economic assault unimaginable for most of the modern history of Canadian-American relations. The relationship changed at the start of President Donald Trump’s second term when he announced that he was prepared to use “economic force” to absorb Canada into the United States. “You’re at war when you get attacked,” Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, said. “We got attacked.” Canada has been subjected to economy-crushing tariffs and warned to “fall in line or, the consequences for Canada will be far WORSE!”
The punishing 50% tariffs are meant to coerce Canada into surrendering aspects of its sovereignty. Part of what caused the latest round of trade talks to explode was demands that made Canada “a subsidiary of the United States” and “compromise[d] Canada’s sovereignty.”
The US is no longer a hegemon that leads for the mutual benefit of the West. It is a bully that coerces its former friends to “fall in line” for the singular benefit of America.
The US reportedly demanded compromises on the protection of French language and culture that is essential to Canadian federalism and unity. The US wanted Canada to repeal laws that promote French language shows to Canadian subscribers of streaming platforms and wave requirements that package labeling be in French as well as English (a demand the US now seems to have dropped).
They also demanded fealty on crucial trade decisions. The Trump administration demanded that Canada comply with American demands on what tariffs it places on other countries and what countries it trades with. Negotiators went so far as to insist on the right “to review and potentially dictate the terms for Canada’s trade agreements with other countries.” American dominance would be enshrined with the prerogative “to change tariff policy against Canada at any time, irrespective of the agreement.”
The US had already set the precedent for this imperial strategy in other countries. In March, Trump declared that he “will be having the honor of taking Cuba.” Toward that end, he cut Cuba off, mandating that “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA—ZERO,” adding that “I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.” He then signed an executive order imposing tariffs on any country that sends oil to Cuba.
Despite the devastation that embargo has caused the people of Cuba, the Trump administration has continued to tighten its stranglehold, ever increasing the sanctions. “We have a pretty deep toolbox, especially when it comes to sanctions and enforcing them,” a senior administration official told Axios. “More is on the way.” On August 20, the US announced further sanctions.
The same playbook is being employed in Iran where Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has become Trump’s chief executioner, has boasted of America’s ability to starve people into the streets and countries into submission. “President Trump ordered… maximum pressure on Iran. And it’s worked,” he said, “because in December, their economy collapsed... and this is why the people took to the street. This is economic statecraft.” Bessent told the Senate Banking Committee that “what we have done is created a dollar shortage in the country… The Iranian currency went into free fall, inflation exploded, and hence we have seen the Iranian people out on the street.”
But neither the people in the streets nor the brutal bombing campaign accomplished America’s goals in Iran. So, Washington turned to intensified economic warfare. Bessent has threatened the “toughest sanctions in history.” Trump called it “economic D-day,” "Economic Warfare and Isolation on an unprecedented scale.”
But the coercion extended beyond Iran. Trump warned that “ANY country that… provide[s] any type of lifeline to Iran will itself face TREMENDOUS Economic Consequences.” Bessent provided the details, announcing “an economic onslaught against Iran’s financial connections around the globe.” He said, “Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until it stands alone.” He then threatened that “any economic engagement of any kind with this murderous regime will expose those responsible to the full reach of American power.”
That global coercion is being challenged. China called the US threat “illegal unilateral sanctions” and promised that it will “take all necessary measures to firmly safeguard its own rights and interests.” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian said, “Cooperation between China and Iran has always been conducted within the framework of international law and should not be interfered with or disrupted."
Shockingly, like Cuba, neither Russia, Iran, nor Canada have backed down. Though Canada can hardly be called a fellow traveler of Russia or Iran, it has learned similar lessons and come to similar conclusions.
Like Russia, Canada has learned that, in the face of tariffs or sanctions, it must rely less on the US and more on itself. Russia has tried to substitute lost American business with domestic replacements. “Building at home,” Carney said, is “our plan A.” He says that Canada is “focused on building strength at home…. Launching big nation-building projects…. And… building Canada strong.”
Like Iran, Canada has learned that America’s “signature [is] written in pencil” and that countries negotiating with the US need to call “into question the reliability of any deal.” Like Iran, Canada has learned that deals with the US can be broken, like the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement and the US-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement. Like Iran, Canada has learned not to make any concessions in exchange for future promises but to get everything guaranteed up front because the US can change the terms any time, irrespective of the agreement.
The US is no longer a hegemon that leads for the mutual benefit of the West. It is a bully that coerces its former friends to “fall in line” for the singular benefit of America. Its former friends follow, no longer out of partnership, but out of fear.
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Raskin Launches Investigation Into Evidence Epstein Was 'Foreign Agent' Working to Influence Trump Policies
"Numerous recently released documents now show he acted aggressively on behalf of multiple foreign governments... in order to influence policies of the first Trump administration."
Jul 21, 2026
The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin, launched an investigation Monday into whether the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein worked on behalf of foreign governments to influence President Donald Trump during his first term.
In a letter addressed to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche; Trump’s nominee to be director of national intelligence, Jay Clayton; and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Raskin (D-Md.) said that files provided to the Judiciary Committee show “substantial evidence” that Epstein acted to advance the interests of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, advised the Russian government on its dealings with Trump, and worked as a consultant to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
“Jeffrey Epstein never registered as a foreign agent," Raskin said. "Yet numerous recently released documents now show he acted aggressively on behalf of multiple foreign governments, including several with interests adverse to the United States, in order to influence policies of the first Trump administration."
Epstein, a convicted sex criminal who was found dead in his jail cell in 2019 after being charged with trafficking minors, has long been surrounded by questions about his relationships to foreign governments. But this is the first time an inquiry from the US Congress has expressly focused on them.
Raskin called attention to a trip taken by Epstein to Riyadh in November 2016, the week of Trump's first election, during which he met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) before sending one of his representatives an email offering to become the "financial confidant" to members of the Saudi government. "I am happy to represent [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia] interests. period," he said.
Epstein also apparently offered to represent Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund in the US and serve as an adviser to a development project overseen by MBS. The crown prince's response to the proposal has not been provided to the committee, according to Raskin.
Several emails to friends and confidantes indicate that around the same time, Epstein was regularly boasting of his visits to Trump Tower and meetings with "Trump people" during the presidential transition, which he said presented "lots of opportunity."
Other correspondence seems to indicate that Epstein coached the emir of Kuwait on how to deal with Trump. In May 2017, prior to a summit of Gulf states in Riyadh, Epstein wrote to an unnamed political figure that he had “much to do around the Trump trip.”
The figure responded that he wanted “tips on how we should communicate with Trump,” specifically on the Saudi-led war against Yemen; Kuwait had played host to three months of UN-led negotiations related to the conflict the year before.
It is unclear from the records which US officials, if any, Epstein intended to engage on Kuwait's behalf.
Raskin also highlighted what is perhaps Epstein's most well-documented foreign government contact, Ehud Barak, who served as Israel's prime minister from 1999 to 2001 and later its minister of defense.
According to a trove of leaked emails published by Drop Site News last year, Epstein worked to create a backchannel between Barak and the Russian government and helped him to pursue a meeting with President Vladimir Putin in 2013 as he pushed for Russia to abandon its support for then-Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which was a major national security priority of Israel.
Epstein also provided information about US officials to Barak as he tried to push the Obama administration to take a harder stance toward Iran and Syria.
It is one of many instances in which Epstein and Barak worked to advance Israeli interests across the world, including brokering security and surveillance agreements with the governments of Mongolia and Côte d'Ivoire and helping to build the relationship between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.
Other emails reveal Epstein advising high-ranking Russian officials on how to deal with Trump as they sought to avoid sanctions placed by the US over its interference in the 2016 election and its aggression toward Ukraine.
Raskin said that Epstein seemed to be consciously acting as a foreign agent despite never registering as one under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The congressman pointed to exchanges in which Epstein appeared to advise Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon on how to avoid FARA reporting requirements.
Raskin argued that Epstein's deep well of knowledge about Trump and his apparent access to members of his circle "posed a major national security liability." Epstein often bragged that he had leverage over the president and said he was "the one able to take [Trump] down."
The congressman argued for transparency in light of the administration’s efforts to delay the release of the files and withhold information despite congressional requirements.
Beyond potentially embarrassing revelations about Trump, he said the repeated use of the White House Situation Room to discuss the Epstein scandal indicated that it posed possible national security concerns that have not been disclosed to the public.
Raskin called on the Department of Justice and State Department to release all files referencing Epstein and other foreign nations and information that may point to his efforts to avoid FARA requirements.
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Ukraine: America's Enduring Proxy War on Russia
Eisenhower’s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason the US sustains the Ukraine war: Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale
Jul 21, 2026
In his farewell address of January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans against the "acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex," and the danger that "public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite." Sixty-five years on, Eisenhower’s warnings have been repeatedly and tragically vindicated. American democracy hangs by a thread, while the military-industrial complex, now including Silicon Valley, runs American foreign policy over the objections of the American people.
The aim is American primacy, meaning the unchallenged wealth, power, and prerogatives of American elites, unchecked by any other nation or group of nations. What this means in practice is that Wall Street, military contractors, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil control American foreign policy to maximize elite wealth and access to global resources, supply chains, and strategic choke points. The rest of the world is to fall in line.
The military-industrial complex deploys a toolkit that we summarize as “regime control,” directed at subordinating the rest of the world’s governments to the United States. The instruments used for regime control include the imposition or removal of trade barriers; the access to or denial of technologies; the introduction or removal of economic sanctions; the ownership and manipulation of foreign media; electoral interference of varying extent; political assassinations, color revolutions, CIA-backed coups; the instigation of overseas bank runs and the supply of emergency loans when states submit; the freezing and unfreezing of foreign assets; the targeting of foreign officials with corruption claims, extradition, or kidnapping; and, when none of these suffice for regime control, outright war. The US wars of choice (really, wars for regime control) are perpetual, and lucrative for the war industries, though the deep state typically prefers that other governments cave in without a fight.
Geopolitical Pivots and American Primacy
Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard (1997) laid out the goal of regime control with remarkable candor. Eurasia is the board on which America’s global primacy must be secured. To succeed, America should dominate “geopolitical pivots,” meaning states that are unimportant to America per se but useful for weakening another major power. Brzezinski named key geopolitical pivots, the most important of which was Ukraine. He repeatedly proclaimed that Russia without Ukraine ceases to be a great power. He identified Iran as another pivot. Control over Iran secures America’s hold on the Persian Gulf, Mideast oil, and the Caspian region. It is no surprise that US wars rage in both places.
The US does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing.
This is important to understand the decisions of six seemingly different presidents, who all pursued one consistent Ukraine policy. Bill Clinton set out to enlarge NATO to Ukraine and other border states of Russia, counting on Russia being too weak to object. He and subsequent presidents assumed that Russia would ultimately accept its diminished global status, accept the reality of NATO on its borders, and settle into a subordinate role of supplying raw materials to the West within an American-ordered Eurasia.
Clinton launched NATO enlargement in the 1990s, over George Kennan’s warning that it was "the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold-War era" and despite the legally binding assurances given by the US to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would move "not one inch eastward." George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty and, at Bucharest in 2008, committed NATO to membership for Ukraine and Georgia, crossing what William Burns, then ambassador in Moscow and later CIA director, privately called "the brightest of all redlines" for the entire Russian elite. Barack Obama’s administration backed the 2014 Maidan overthrow of Ukraine’s elected, neutral government (we know this through Victoria Nuland’s intercepted call where she discusses choosing the next prime minister), and then supported the new regime’s bid to join NATO. Donald Trump, in his first term, sent Javelin systems to the US-backed regime in Kyiv to fight the breakaway, Russian-speaking Donbas. Joe Biden brushed aside Russia’s December 2021 draft security treaties without negotiating and scuttled the near-agreement between Russia and Ukraine at Istanbul in the spring of 2022, which would have ended the war. And so the war continues to this day.
Trump's Vacuous Anti-War Campaign Promises
Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 as the man who would end America’s forever wars. This turned out to be far from the truth.
The year 2025 opened with theater including the Oval Office humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February, the taunt that Ukraine had "no cards," and in March a week-long suspension of US intelligence sharing with Kyiv. That week proved two things. First, this is an American war: Deprived of US intelligence for only a few days, Ukraine’s deep-strike capacity and battlefield awareness visibly degraded. Second, the White House pressure was aimed not at peace with Moscow but at obedience from Kyiv. The US military spigot was reopened, and what followed, behind a proscenium of summits and phone calls, was the most systematic escalation of the American military role since 2022.
In June 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14307, "Unleashing American Drone Dominance," directing the rebuilding of the American drone industrial base and instructing that the Pentagon "must be able to procure, integrate, and train using low-cost, high-performing drones." In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth staged a drone demonstration at the Pentagon and stripped away procurement restrictions to "unleash" military drone dominance; the same month, on a call with Zelenskyy, Trump asked, according to the Financial Times’ later reporting, whether Ukraine could strike Moscow if given longer-range weapons.
From midsummer 2025, the US supplied the intelligence for Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign against Russian refineries, pipelines, and power stations, shaping route planning, altitude, timing, and mission decisions; by some officials’ account, setting the target priorities itself. In August came the Alaska summit, suggesting diplomacy, yet at the same time the sale of Extended Range Attack Munitions for Ukraine, with European allies paying. By October, Trump had formally authorized the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies to hand Ukraine targeting data for strikes on Russian energy infrastructure deep inside Russia, a step the Biden administration itself had refused as too escalatory, while Washington pressed NATO allies to do the same and openly debated Tomahawks with the range to reach Moscow. Through it all, CIA Director John Ratcliffe kept the agency’s presence in Ukraine at its highest level, increased funding for its programs there, coordinated Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries by sharing intelligence on infrastructure vulnerabilities, and patiently guided Trump toward blessing the campaign. The United States, it emerged, had spent billions building Ukraine’s drone program from the start, in an effort backed by the CIA throughout.
Trump lies constantly, and much of it is the improvisation of a vain and careless man. But the consequential lying is systematic, and in one direction: in the service of the military-industrial complex.
The Laboratory
Eisenhower’s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason the US sustains the Ukraine war. Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale: millions of drone sorties, a continuous adaptation race against a peer adversary’s electronic warfare, and thousands of hours of combat data that constitute the most valuable military AI asset on Earth.
At the center of this sits Palantir, born of CIA seed money, running the Pentagon’s Maven targeting enterprise, and threaded through the British security establishment via a revolving door that includes a former MI6 chief among more than 30 UK officials hired or contracted by the company. Its chief executive openly boasts that Palantir software performs "most of the targeting" done by Ukraine. In January 2026 Ukraine’s defense ministry announced that Palantir was building the "Brave1 Dataroom" to feed real battlefield data into the AI brains of interceptor drones; by May, minister and CEO were discussing expanded cooperation in battlefield analysis and military planning, the ministry promising to "transfer the war onto Russian territory."
Nor is Iran a separate story from the Ukraine saga. Recall that in Brzezinski’s geography the arc from the Persian Gulf through the Caspian is the second great prize, with Iran as its keystone pivot. Ukrainian interceptor teams have deployed to Jordan against Iranian drones; the counter-drone systems proven against Russia are marketed to the Gulf. Two geopolitical pivots, one chessboard, and one ultimate source of these two wars of choice: the military-industrial complex.
Kissinger’s Admonition to Friends of the US
Henry Kissinger is famously credited with telling the truth to nations that the US would use and discard: To be an enemy of the United States may be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.
Ukraine is dying at American hands. Thirty years since Brzezinski pointed to Ukraine as the key geopolitical pivot for American primacy, Ukraine has been demographically hollowed and territorially truncated, with its energy grid pounded, its elections suspended, and its politics reduced to corrupted palace intrigues. This month’s rupture in Kyiv shows that in the midst of what Western coverage calls Ukraine’s great comeback, Zelenskyy dissolved his government for the fourth time in the war; dispatched his prime minister toward the Washington embassy to manage the "key partner;" and summarily sacked Mykhailo Fedorov, the popular minister celebrated as the architect of the drone ecosystem. A country truly winning its war does not behave this way.
The deepest cruelty is that Russia sought, repeatedly and for 30 years, a security arrangement with the US in which both countries and their neighborhoods would live in peace, mutual respect, and indivisible security. Yet the US does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing. In the process, it sacrifices Ukraine and Iran to its hubris. Peace in Ukraine requires only that the US relinquish the hubris it has maintained for decades that Russia can be pressured into surrender, and instead accept Ukraine as a neutral bridge between Europe and Russia rather than a geopolitical pivot to be used against Russia. Eisenhower foresaw why acceptance of peace would be so hard: The military-industrial complex does not merely influence policy; it defines it. Until the American people reclaim the democracy from Palantir, BlackRock, SpaceX, Chevron, and their ilk, the battlefield “laboratories” will stay open, and Ukraine will pay the fatal price for American “friendship.”
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Toward Dialogue and Survival in a Perilous Time
Common security lessons for the US and Russia in a world without arms control.
Jul 05, 2026
The following article was initially written at the request of Oleg Bodrov, a Russian physicist with commitments to peace and environmental sustainability and safety. I met Oleg about a decade ago during the World Conference against A- & H- Bombs in Hiroshima, and today we both serve on the board of the International Peace Bureau, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient organization. In addition to serving on IPB’s board, Oleg is chairman of the Public Council of the South Coast of the Gulf of Finland. He lives outside of St. Petersburg and does what he can given the limits of the possible in Putin’s Russia. When he and I last spoke, Ukrainian drones had devastated a massive Russian oil refinery, spewing toxins into the Baltic Sea and across many Russian communities. With Ukrainian drones flying overhead he hadn’t slept the previous night, making Oleg one more innocent caught in that mutually disastrous war.
In our exchanges, Oleg came up with a proposal to take a small step toward bridging the divisions of the new US-Russian Cold War and building for the time when the missiles, drones, and guns of the Ukraine War have been silenced. His idea: I should write an article that shared US peace movement thinking and named actions that can reduce the increasingly perilous military tensions and serve as foundations for a future era of US-NATO-Russian Common security. Oleg would translate the article and arrange for its publication in a Russian scientific journal. As we corresponded about the article’s publication, it occurred to us that it might also prove helpful for US readers, hence its publication here in Common Dreams. Where this will lead, only time will tell. But the truth is that both the US and Russia are going to be around for a long time, and a just and peaceful Common Security order will be essential for this and future generations.
Most Dangerous Moment Since the Cuban Missile Crisis
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock report warns us that we face Cuban Missile Crisis level danger. Back then, in 1962, senior officials in the Kennedy administration thought the odds of the missile crisis leading to a nuclear war were 50-50. In the aftermath of the eyeball-to-eyeball nuclear confrontation, Daniel Ellsberg, a senior Kennedy nuclear adviser, became so pessimistic about humanity’s future that, not expecting to live to an old age, he ceased paying into his pension fund.
But both President John F. Kennedy and Chairman Nikita Khrushchev, along with their ruling circles, were sufficiently sobered by the specter of nuclear annihilation. They moved quickly to negotiate the Limited Test Ban Treaty. Their successors built on this foundation, constructing the six-decade-old arms control regime. They negotiated treaties from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to the SALT and START agreements. They limited, but failed to erase, the dangers of nuclear annihilation.
The Collapse of the Arms Control Architecture
That arms control regime is now history. First came the loss of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty almost 25 years ago. Then came the expiration of the New START Treaty. Now, President Donald Trump is obsessed with resuming nuclear-weapons testing, and both the US and Russia are moving to deploy new nuclear-capable missile systems.
Predictably, more and more nations are learning a lesson from North Korea: Great powers will not attack you if you have a nuclear arsenal.
Adding to nuclear dangers, Beijing is increasing its nuclear arsenal in pursuit of parity with Moscow and Washington. We are becoming three nuclear-armed scorpions in a bottle. This, together with Russian concerns about the French and British nuclear arsenals, complicates any possible future arms reduction diplomacy. The inability of the US, Russia, and China to find common ground—or even to agree on a least common denominator consensus document—was a major factor that dictated the third consecutive failure of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference this past May.
The geopolitical landscape is further complicated by the US-Israeli-Iran war. During that conflict, President Trump speculated about possible low-yield nuclear attacks against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
Predictably, more and more nations are learning a lesson from North Korea: Great powers will not attack you if you have a nuclear arsenal. Political pressures for nuclear-weapons proliferation are therefore building in threshold nations from Seoul to Stockholm, including Iran, Poland, and Japan, among others.
“Human Beings and Nuclear Weapons Cannot Coexist”
Political realism and the survival of our species point in two complementary directions. As the Japanese A-bomb survivors and their organization Nihon Hidankyo (awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize) warn, it should be obvious: “Human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”
We have already had too many close calls with extinction: false nuclear alerts, mistaken launch orders, accidents, and geopolitical miscalculations. And as Nobel Peace Laureate Joseph Rotblat, the founder of the Pugwash Conferences and the only senior Manhattan Project scientist to quit for reasons of conscience, explained, humanity faces a stark choice. We can either completely eliminate the world’s nuclear arsenals, or we will see their proliferation and eventual use. Why? Because no nation will long tolerate what it perceives as an unjust and threatening imbalance of power—in this case, the imbalance of nuclear terror.
Even in the best of circumstances, it will take valuable time—possibly more time than we have—to build the trust and to conduct the negotiations needed for a nuclear-weapon-free world. This, in turn, forces us to learn another lesson from US-Russian history: the possibility of Common Security. In crisis, as our Chinese friends remind us, there is opportunity as well as danger.
The Lesson of Common Security and the Palme Commission
In the 1980s humanity faced a similar situation. The two great powers flirted with triggering a catastrophic war that could have caused a nuclear winter. The US and the Soviet Union brought the world to the nuclear brink with the planned deployments of SS-20, cruise, and Pershing II missiles.
The combination of popular movements calling for a halt to the nuclear arms race, and President Mikhail Gorbachev’s understanding that military spending had to be reduced if the Soviet economy were to be salvaged, led Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme to convene the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Bush regime, great power relations reverted to the rules of the game among Mafia families.
Georgi Arbatov, the most senior military adviser to Gorbachev, later wrote about the commission’s work and its world-changing recommendations. In meetings with former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and leaders from Austria, Germany, Norway, India, and elsewhere, “a new approach to nuclear arms emerged.” Its essence, in Arbatov’s words, was that “we cannot guarantee our own security at the expense or detriment of someone else’s, but only on the basis of mutual interests.”
To reverse the spiraling arms race, each side needed to name the other’s actions that were most threatening to it and then negotiate agreements that would remove those threats without weakening anyone’s security. Those difficult negotiations led in 1987 to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which prohibited the SS-20, cruise, and Pershing II deployments, and functionally ended the Cold War two years before the Berlin Wall fell.
Defining the Contexts of Today’s Crisis
Context is almost everything. Reflecting on the failure of the 2026 NPT Review Conference, Vietnamese Ambassador Do Hung Viet, the conference president, commented that it is a “fair judgment” to conclude that the US-Iran impasse, which “hung over our heads from the beginning,” together with the Ukraine War and North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, made consensus impossible. “Political concerns,” he said—including the race for artificial intelligence supremacy—“were overwhelming.”
As generations succeed one another, knowledge and wisdom are inevitably lost as well as gained. After two calamitous world wars that claimed between 75 and 97 million lives, the surviving great powers sought “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” They attempted to do so while simultaneously securing their imperial powers and privileges. Thus Article 1 of the United Nations Charter committed governments “to maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace…”
For the most part, this first commitment was honored—with significant exceptions in Indochina, Afghanistan, and interventions in Eastern Europe and the Caribbean. However, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Bush regime, great power relations reverted to the rules of the game among Mafia families. Drunk with arrogance, the US Bush government boasted: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality, we’ll act again, creating other new realities… We’re history’s actors.”
Washington’s arrogance of power continued into the 1990s with the Bill Clinton Administration. Rather than respect Russian history, political culture, sensitivities, and ordinary Russians’ need for economic security, Clinton and his mandarins imposed another cataclysmic revolutionary change: neoliberal economic shock therapy. The result was massive dislocation, impoverishment, a rising death rate, and the restoration of an authoritarian government in Moscow.
Russia’s political and economic systems imploded during Boris Yeltsin’s rule. Despite George Kennan’s warning—Kennan was the architect of Cold War containment—that NATO expansion would lead to disastrous conflict; President Clinton did exactly that in 1999. He initiated NATO enlargement, bringing Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into the alliance. As “history’s actors,” Bush II added seven Central and Eastern European nations to NATO in 2004. Then, in 2008, against the advice of his senior adviser Fiona Hill and over the opposition of Germany and France, Bush the Lesser forced an invitation to Ukraine and Georgia through NATO’s summit.
Given Russia’s memories of invasions from the west—Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler—the Kremlin responded as Kennan and Hill had predicted. In an obvious breach of the UN Charter, the ostensibly defensive Russian invasion of Georgia followed. Meanwhile, even without Kiev becoming a formal NATO member, and in response to the alliance’s expanding military presence in Ukraine, President Putin reportedly began planning what became the disastrous “special military operation” as early as 2007. Even before, among the earliest and most egregious Bush-Cheney acts was the withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, then a cornerstone of arms control.
The little remaining mutual trust between the West and Russia was among the first casualties of the war. The war also spurred further NATO expansion, with Finland and Sweden joining the alliance and thus doubling the line of contact between NATO and Russia. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian casualties, US-Russian arms control agreements, including New START and Open Skies, became collateral damage. The new Cold War became even more dangerous as the US military-industrial complex and the Kremlin pressed to “modernize” their nuclear forces, and as European nations—fearing what Russian territorial ambitions might become—laid the foundations for a new European military superpower.
Nuclear Threats and the Arms Race
There is a mistaken but widespread belief that nuclear weapons have not been used since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. This is wrong. As Daniel Ellsberg later wrote, during international crises and wars, US presidents have prepared to initiate nuclear war and have threatened to do so. They have done so in the same way that an armed robber points his gun at his victim’s head: Whether or not the trigger is pulled, the gun has been used. Not only during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but repeatedly during wars and interventions in the Middle East, the Vietnam War, the Taiwan Strait, and other crises, the United States has resorted to nuclear extortion. As former US Defense Secretary Harold Brown put it, with the US first-strike capacity and doctrine in place, our conventional forces become “meaningful instruments of military and political power.”
Noam Chomsky put it differently: “That means that under this umbrella of strategic nuclear weapons… we have succeeded in sufficiently intimidating anyone who might help protect people we are determined to attack.”
Although current geopolitical and technological landscapes are very different from those at the height of the first Cold War, we are not without diplomatic structures and models that can serve as foundations for trust-building dialogue and negotiations.
The United States is not the only nuclear power that has practiced nuclear blackmail. Every other nuclear-weapons state has done so at least once. As early as 1956, Prime Minister Nikolai Bulganin threatened London and Paris, hoping that the threat would force their withdrawal from Egypt during the Suez War. More recently, and to considerable effect, President Putin and former President and current Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev have engaged in nuclear saber-rattling.
Nuclear powers seek to legitimize their arsenals and “modernization” on the basis of deterrence theory—the idea that each new development is necessitated by the need to prevent a nuclear attack by a rival. In reality, the George H.W. Bush administration’s initial “Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations” gave the game away. As that document stated, “The focus of US deterrence efforts is… to influence potential adversaries to withhold actions intended to harm US national interests” The same applies to all other nuclear-weapons states. And as the history of false alerts, mistaken launch orders, accidents, and ill-conceived aggressions demonstrates, deterrence only works—until it doesn’t.
Even before the New START Treaty’s limit of 1,550 deployed strategic missiles expired, Washington and Moscow were arms racing. The US is spending $1.7 trillion to “modernize” and replace its entire nuclear triad—including its “use-them-or-lose-them” first-strike land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)—and is racing to renew warhead pit production.
Seeking to maintain parity, Russia is also developing and moving to deploy a range of new strategic-range weapons. These include a hypersonic boost-glide vehicle carried by the Sarmat “super-heavy” ICBM; an air-launched hypersonic ballistic missile capable of evasive maneuvers; a nuclear-powered cruise missile of “unlimited range”; a nuclear-powered unmanned underwater vehicle of “unlimited range”; and a sea-launched hypersonic missile.
President Trump, committed to regaining nuclear and high-tech superiority and to prevailing in the artificial intelligence competition with China, also seeks to spend trillions of dollars on his “Golden Dome” missile defense system. It will never work, but it will be profoundly destabilizing and will bankrupt the United States.
Making matters still more dangerous, US-Russian military-to-military communications are at their nadir. Moscow has made clear that it is disinterested in renewed risk reduction and arms control diplomacy until it is satisfied with the outcome of the Ukraine War.
What Is to Be Done?
Rebuilding trust is essential for any risk and arms reductions, but it will require patience and steadfast commitments on all sides. It seems clear that negotiating a new European security system will only become possible when the post-Ukraine War dust settles over the European strategic landscape. Similarly, greater clarity about Washington’s commitment to NATO, and about the credibility of massive European rearmament, will be critically important factors in approaching any new risk-reduction and strategic-stability negotiations.
In approaching the urgent need to restore stability to US-Russian-European relations, we should reflect on the differences between Western and Chinese approaches to arms control diplomacy. We can learn from the Chinese.
The Western approach has been an exclusive focus on negotiations about particular nuclear-weapons systems and doctrines. Chinese diplomats and leaders, on the other hand, wisely think it necessary to identify and address the underlying causes that drive nuclear arms races and potential conflict.
Given that there is no military solution to the Ukraine War, it is past time for a ceasefire, for compromises, and for multidimensional peace negotiations—Ukraine-Russia, EU-Russia, US-Russia. Only then can we begin to address the existential US-Russian nuclear risks with Common Security diplomacy.
Although current geopolitical and technological landscapes are very different from those at the height of the first Cold War, we are not without diplomatic structures and models that can serve as foundations for trust-building dialogue and negotiations.
Resources for Rebuilding Trust
Among these resources is the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). A post-Ukraine War 21st-century version of that conference could be a constructive way to begin building a new Common Security order. Although its 57 European, North American, and Asian member states have reduced their financial and other commitments to the OSCE—which is mandated to work for stability, peace, and democracy in Europe—it can still serve as a neutral forum for diplomatic engagement and negotiations for a new Eurasian and Euro-Atlantic order.
The OSCE grew out of the 1973 Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), “a multilateral forum for dialogue and negotiation between East and West.” Among its initiatives was the Helsinki Process, involving 35 nations that agreed to the inviolability of post-World War II frontiers, reinforced commitments to human rights, and facilitated the institutionalization of the OSCE.
Track II and other discussions among Europeans, Russians, and Americans have continued despite the war, and they have identified numerous traditional paths to nuclear risk reduction and arms control possibilities. A laundry list of sometimes competing proposals has been developed and can be drawn on when the time is ripe.
We can create visions and policies that reduce the growing nuclear danger and lead to arms control, common security, and nuclear disarmament.
Alexey Arbatov, of the Center for International Security at the Primakov Institute in Moscow, identified two conditions essential for arms control diplomacy during the Cold War: “a state of mutual nuclear deterrence” and “the emergence of approximate equality (parity) of strategic forces” of the dominant nuclear powers. A new conceptual approach, he argues, requires acknowledging the realities of multilateral deterrence, incorporating the security interests of all nuclear-armed states, and rebuilding strategic stability through inclusive frameworks rather than bilateral bargains. Chinese, French, and British nuclear arsenals, plus the nuclear four outside the NPT regime, must be factored into any negotiations. We are thus challenged by at least a four-dimensional diplomatic puzzle, and finding a solution is an urgent necessity.
There is a third requirement without which there can be no exit from a bellicose and mutually debilitating future: trust. It can only be developed over time, through patient confidence-building measures. These could include continuing to honor New START deployment limits and refraining from uploading additional warheads onto existing missiles. Wolfgang Richter, a former German colonel now associated with the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, writes that overcoming the current vicious circle of distrust requires “renewed and credible mutual commitment confirming that the independence and territorial integrity of states will be respected.” This could be achieved by a settlement of the Russia-Ukraine War and by trust-building initiatives between Russia and its European neighbors.
Even before the Ukraine War ends and opens the way for risk reduction and arms control negotiations, many on both sides of the US-Russia divide agree that the first priority must be preventing a resumption of nuclear-weapons testing, which President Trump has threatened. Related, and possibly of equal importance, is to honor and sustain the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in the wake of the recent failed review conference.
Another limited but encouraging proposal is to convene a US-Russia-China leadership summit, at which a version of the Reagan-Gorbachev warning—that nuclear war can never be won and must not be fought—is reiterated. This would open the way for officials and experts to explore jointly how to reduce nuclear risk.
Unhinged and dangerous as he is, we need to acknowledge that despite his recent nuclear threat to Iran, over the years Trump has been willing to talk with Russia, and he has repeatedly stated that he wants movement toward denuclearization. Not that he has done much to make that happen.
Given the political environment in most European countries, and with Germany and France now competing for European military leadership as confidence in NATO wanes, initiatives for risk reduction and greater strategic stability inevitably lie with Washington and Moscow. If progress can be made by the US and Russia, Europeans could then be brought in.
Military-to-military communication needs to be revitalized, perhaps beginning with crisis communications, especially as drone warfare and wayward Ukrainian and Russian drones increase the danger of miscalculation. Building on the tradition of the Vienna Document, communication could then be expanded regarding troop movements, military exercises, and more. Addressing the growing military competition for control of the Arctic could be one place to begin.
Even though Russia and the United States have functionally withdrawn from the Open Skies verification treaty, 32 member states continue to honor it. A return to Russian and US participation would be a comparatively easy means to signal intentions to improve relations, and an important step toward trust building.
Like cultural exchanges in the past, trust can be built in many ways by renewing cooperative commitments. Low-hanging fruit could include building on the decades-long International Space Station collaboration; renewed scientific cooperation across the Arctic, where thawing permafrost poses increasing climate and health dangers; and, always, people-to-people exchanges.
Magic wands are in short supply. As the biblical proverb advises, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Across the lines and structures that divide us, like the Hibakusha and the men and women who preserved human survival through the worst of the Cold War, we can create visions and policies that reduce the growing nuclear danger and lead to arms control, common security, and nuclear disarmament. Naming, dialogue, and debate are essential building blocks to get there.
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Documentary 'An Ordinary Insanity' Keeps Daniel Ellsberg's Anti-Nuclear Warning Alive
If we are to dismantle the Doomsday Machine, it will require widespread and concerted efforts to awaken from the spell of this ordinary insanity. In other words, we need to cultivate an ordinary sanity.
Jun 14, 2026
This film presents a synthesis of my father’s book The Doomsday Machine. His book depicts the evil murderousness of nuclear war plans, and the particular dangers posed by intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, with their first strike capability, intended to be launched on warning.
He believed that with these weapons both the US and the USSR, now Russia, had constructed Doomsday Machines, capable of destroying most life on Earth—machines that are particularly dangerous because neither side acknowledges this reality but continue to proceed as if there were some circumstances in which it was possible to win a nuclear war.
The epigraph from Dad’s book is from Nietzsche: “Madness in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”
And I am very glad that this film expands on that particular theme with the title: “Ordinary Insanity”—ordinary, as he says, because it is so widely shared.
My dad said that until his last breath he would continue to do everything he could to avert this peril.
And that points to a theme that underlies his most recent, posthumous book, Truth and Consequence: Reflections on Catastrophe, Civil Resistance, and Hope. These reflections, drawn from notes he wrote for himself over 50 years, reflect his deep meditation on what kind of flaw in the human species makes us vulnerable to this kind of insanity.
In other words, we have to face, on the one hand, the particular danger posed by the weapons we have created and the strategies that dictate their function and use. But we also have to contend with the kind of danger posed by human beings—all of us capable of participating in projects that are evil, participating in the widest sense through our silence.
If we are to dismantle the Doomsday Machine, it will require widespread and concerted efforts to awaken from the spell of this ordinary insanity. In other words, we need to cultivate an ordinary sanity.
One of the ways of promoting that is through educational efforts such as this film, which may alert the public to the dangers we are facing. But it will also require widespread conscientious action, a kind of pandemic of courage, wisdom, enlightenment, and dedication to the survival of our planet.
Only when such sanity becomes ordinary will we have a chance of surviving the nuclear era.
My dad said that until his last breath he would continue to do everything he could to avert this peril. I am happy that through this film, even after his last breath, he may continue to plant seeds of sanity and hope.
An Ordinary Insanity is free for viewing on the film’s website or on YouTube.
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