John Feffer's Blog

In the universe of far-right politics, the three members of the Axis of Evil are Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Viktor Orban. The first presides over the most powerful country in the world. The second launched the first major land invasion in Europe in over 75 years. The third has done his best to destroy the European Union from within.

On Sunday, the axis lost its littlest member. After 16 consecutive years as the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban—the joint-custody mini-me of Putin and Trump—went down for the count. His party, Fidesz, didn’t just lose the latest election. It lost bigly.

It wasn’t exactly a swing of the political pendulum in Hungary. The winning party, Tisza, is quite conservative in its outlook. It ran not so much on an ideological platform but against Orban’s corruption, authoritarianism, and deep-seated anti-Europeanism. Simply put, Hungarians had grown sick and tired of Orban’s excesses.

Only three political parties made it above the 5 percent threshold in the parliamentary elections. The opposition Tisza party captured a supermajority of parliamentary seats. Orban’s Fidesz came in a distant second. And the Our Homeland Movement, which is even further to the right than Fidesz, just squeaked in.

Significantly, all vaguely progressive or liberal parties have effectively disappeared from the Hungarian political landscape. This is perhaps Orban’s most ominous achievement, in addition to clinging to power for 16 years (which is a long time in any ostensibly democratic society but a veritable eternity in the quicksilver politics of East-Central Europe).

Like so many of his political brethren, Orban is a world-class opportunist. Long before Trump changed his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican and before Putin traded in his communist credentials for nationalist ones, Orban sniffed the air and sensed an opportunity on the right side of the political spectrum. He swapped out the political identity of his liberal party for a nationalist, anti-immigrant, culturally conservative alternative.

In the 1990s, Orban served as the John the Baptist of illiberalism. Now that he has had his head served on a platter, it is tempting to conclude that Orban’s political end also heralds the end of an era. Of course, Orban could be resurrected in a few years, like Trump. Or, more deliciously, he could be jailed for his malfeasance, like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.

Regardless of Orban’s specific fate, the more important question is: Will Trump and even Putin be next in line for their political comeuppance?

I came of political age in a world defined by Viktor Orban.

In 1989, when I was living in Poland and trying to launch a career as a freelance journalist, Orban was a newly minted lawyer in Budapest. That year, the young Orban established his bona fides as an opposition leader at the reburial of Imre Nagy, the leader of the doomed Hungarian experiment in reform in 1956. That ceremony took place on June 16, 1989—several days after the Solidarity movement won Poland’s historic semi-free election—and symbolized the cutting edge of the reform process in Hungary. Orban, 26 years old at the time, tested the limits of the new reform by calling for the removal of Warsaw Pact troops from Hungary.

The previous year, Orban and his friends had put together Fidesz, the Alliance of Young Democrats, to combine the three most salient attributes of the anti-communist youth opposition, its liberal, alternative, and radical strands. Ostensibly, Fidesz was the under-35 equivalent of the major liberal party, the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ), which was founded by the country’s leading dissidents. But SZDSZ was, by comparison, a bunch of rather predictable intellectuals and proto-politicians. No other country in the region created a party as audacious as Fidesz. One of the famous Fidesz campaign posters of that period showed East German Communist leader Erich Honecker sharing a kiss with Russia’s Leonid Brezhnev. “Make your choice,” ran the tag line separating that photo from another of two young people kissing.

In 1990, I was in Budapest, interviewing Fidesz members and attending one of the party’s summer camps. It was hard not to believe that this cadre of 20-somethings was the future of politics in Eastern Europe. By that point, however, the more alternative and radical members of Fidesz were already complaining quietly about Orban. He was ambitious, thoroughly centrist in orientation, and full of himself. Welcome to the world of real politics, I thought at the time.

Fidesz was not the future of Hungarian politics, at least not that version of the party. Together with SZDSZ, the liberals failed to win Hungary’s first free elections in 1990. Instead, the center-right Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) won the overwhelming number of parliamentary seats because voters responded more positively to the party’s nationalist, Christian-inflected messages. During that election, SZDSZ posters were defaced with anti-Semitic slogans attacking the many Jewish members of the party. That reactionary undercurrent, not the exuberance of Fidesz or the deep dissident experience of SZDSZ, anticipated Hungary’s political future.

Four years later, the liberals again failed to come out on top as the reconstituted Socialist Party roared back to take control of parliament. SZDSZ decided to form a government with the Socialists, which they did again in 2002 and 2006. Tactically, it was a brilliant move. Strategically, by linking liberalism to Hungary’s communist legacy, the decision doomed the party. It was this left-liberal alliance that Viktor Orban challenged when he guided Fidesz to an electoral victory in 1998.

By 1998, Orban had dragged Fidesz solidly to the conservative side. But he governed, at least at first, like a Christian Democrat. Fidesz was, Hungarian sociology Andras Bozoki explained to me a decade ago,

still in this neoliberal framework, but they were already starting to make some populist arguments for an ethno-nationalist understanding of Hungary: not as a political community but as an ethnic community including every Hungarian living outside the boundaries of the country. Suddenly Fidesz discovered the power of nationalism as a constitutive force. Nationalism substituted for this missing link, the spirit of democracy, and this was how people could be mobilized. Even as it remained within the framework of liberal democracy at that time, Fidesz moved from the liberal center to the conservative-nationalist Right for pragmatic reasons. They realized that there was a space for them to occupy and attract a stronger and longer lasting constituency.

Orban decided, as a result of that first taste of power, that he needed more authority to push through his agenda. The same guy who called for the expulsion of Soviet troops in 1989 now enthusiastically embraced Putin’s illiberal project and the Russian leader’s tactics for turning a weak democracy into a strong autocracy.

When he regained office in 2010, Orban had a supermajority in parliament that he used to push through legislation. If the courts deemed the changes illegal, Orban simply changed the constitution (multiple times). Among other changes, the new constitution insisted that marriage could only be between a man and a woman and that the state only recognized two genders.

One the economic side, Orban decisively broke with his remaining liberal tenets by pushing for a more “sovereign” approach independent of Brussels and the global economy. Ironically, the initial economic success that his government enjoyed was almost entirely dependent on outside factors, “including an influx of foreign capital, massive European Union funds and a booming industrial cycle in Germany, which had made Hungary its subcontracting base,” writes Stephane Lauer.

The boom didn’t last. Burdened by corruption—Hungary was listed as Europe’s most corrupt country for four years in a row by Transparency International—the economy eventually ground to a halt. Living standards stagnated. The EU froze $21 billion in funds because of concerns over the Orban government’s illiberal moves. And while Europe has worked to cut its dependence on Russian energy sources, Hungary actually relied more on Putin over the last five years. In 2021, Hungary imported 61 percent of its oil from Russia; by 2025, that percentage had risen to 93 percent.

Once showcasing a vibrant mix of parties, the Hungarian political spectrum was overwhelmed by nationalism. SZDSZ folded in 2013, and all subsequent left-of-center efforts have withered away. Civil society has contracted as a result of a series of anti-NGO laws. When I returned to Hungary in 2013, several people requested anonymity and even declined to be interviewed for fear of retribution.

It’s unclear how thoroughly Peter Magyar will hit rewind in Hungary. He was once in the top echelons of Fidesz, he touts his conservative beliefs, and his own nationalist appeals served him well in the campaign (as did his last name, which means “Hungarian” in Hungarian). If he does decide to clean out the Augean stables, he will inevitably encounter opposition. Orban’s “deep state” is not going to give up power without a fight.

Hungary is not the only thorn in the side of the European Union. Both Slovakia and the Czech Republic are currently led by nationalist populists.

Slovakia’s Robert Fico comes out of the left, though it took until last October for the European Socialists to finally expel his party from their ranks. Fico, after all, has borrowed illiberally from Orban’s playbook, even to the point of visiting Moscow several times to pay fealty to Vladimir Putin.

Andrij Babis, who won the Czech elections in the fall, is a billionaire populist in the mold of Donald Trump. He, too, is attempting to steer his country Orbanward. Last month, 200,000 people protested in the center of Prague against an anti-NGO law and a media law that both resemble what Orban imposed in Hungary.

But without Orban, who has built up extensive contacts with far-right forces throughout Europe and the world, the Czech-Slovak populists won’t be able to marshal the same kind of anti-EU and pro-Russian sentiment. Euroskepticism lost one of its major proponents when Orban lost the election.

Of course, Europe also could use Orban as a convenient person to blame for all the tensions accumulating within the Union. With him gone, the EU will have to squarely face disagreements over how to help Ukraine, whether to push forward with expansion, and perhaps most importantly, how to deal with the disintegration of transatlantic ties. Creating an independent military force to replace NATO is a big lift both politically and fiscally. It’s the kind of enormous project that will either kill the EU or make it incomparably stronger.

In the meantime, Hungary under Peter Magyar will remain lukewarm on supporting Ukraine. There are still points of contention around the costs of that assistance, the Hungarian minority in Ukraine, and the tens of thousands of Ukrainian migrants, mostly women and children, living in Hungary. Nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment remain strong in the country. At the least, Hungary will stop blocking the current aid package of around $100 billion that will keep Ukraine afloat. But Magyar has also been clear on his opposition to sending arms to Ukraine, and he might not even support future financial assistance either.

Vladimir Putin has shrugged off Orban’s loss. “We were never friends with Orban,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said after the election, a stunning smackdown after all the love (and secret information) Orban sent to the Kremlin. It’s only the latest proof that Putin, like Trump, only likes winners. The Russian leader, meanwhile, will not be worried about a similar electoral scenario happening in some future Russian election. He has gone much further than Orban in suppressing the opposition and eliminating possible challengers.

Donald Trump, however, should be very worried. Unlike the electoral intervention in Poland that perhaps provided a little boost to Karol Nawrocki’s presidential chances last year, JD Vance’s last-ditch effort to save Orban on the eve of the election was a failure, even proving counterproductive by aligning the corrupt Hungarian with the corrupt Americans. It’s an important reminder that autocrats in more-or-less democratic societies, no matter how much they try to steal elections, must ultimately face the will of the disgruntled.

Trump might believe himself more powerful than the Pope. He might even cast himself as a Jesus figure. Ultimately, as in Hungary, the people will decide. And right now, the very same factors that doomed Orban—his autocratic tendencies and his corruption—are pointing to a similar electoral result for Trump and his party come November.

FPIF, April 15, 2026

Before he became one of the great diplomats of the twentieth century, Henry Kissinger wrote his dissertation about the Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich. Kissinger closely studied how European diplomats like Metternich constructed a new regional order after the defeat of Napoleon. Metternich was an early expert in the art of herding cats, with the felines being powerful European leaders.

Drawing on those insights during his stint as national security advisor under Richard Nixon, Kissinger famously orchestrated the U.S. détente with China and a raft of arms control treaties with the Soviet Union. He also introduced “shuttle diplomacy” in his successful efforts to reduce animosities in the Middle East. He shared a Nobel Peace Prize for his part in the negotiations to end the Vietnam War.

Kissinger was no peacenik. He was involved in any number of military interventions and morally indefensible actions, such as destabilizing Chile under socialist Salvador Allende and supporting Pakistan in its genocidal campaign against Bengalis. In the case of the Vietnam War, he was a key architect of the secret bombing campaign in Cambodia and Laos, an involvement that calls into question the legitimacy of his Nobel Peace Prize. He was both a master diplomat and a war criminal.

The United States has long operated in these two registers: deploying overwhelming military force and using its diplomatic skills to broker peace deals. The two strategies have often gone hand in hand, as they did with Kissinger.

But what was once a matter of some sophistication—if often wrapped in secret violence—has now simply become heavy-handed and transparently brutal. The Trump administration has touted a series of peace deals that, at least in their sheer quantity, rival the successes of Henry Kissinger. Examined more carefully, however, those deals are either premature, non-existent, or largely a function of showmanship. The “peace deal” in Gaza, for instance, was hastily assembled and poorly thought-through; it’s no wonder that it hasn’t gotten to its second stage.

At the same time, Trump and company have embarked on a series of military campaigns that have culminated in the current Operation Epic Fury against Iran. Here, too, Trump toggles back and forth between war and peace, sometimes in the same remarks to the press. He promises an end to the war, whether Iran agrees to a deal or not, and then threatens to blast “Iran into oblivion or, as they say, back to the Stone Ages!!!”

Ophir Falk, foreign policy adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu, put the matter succinctly when answering a question from National Public Radio about whether the Israeli prime minister supported Trump’s peace overtures to Iran.

“We’re negotiating with bombs,” Falk said.

The utter absurdity of this statement didn’t give him pause or elicit any reaction from the NPR interviewer. In its way, though, the brief statement encapsulates the approach of both Netanyahu and Trump. They are not interested in diplomacy, even when they talk about the value of talks. Negotiations, which require time and a certain amount of delicacy, are a waste of energy.

They prefer to change facts on the ground through sheer force.

Israel has never claimed the mantle of master negotiator or nimble mediator. But the United States has long claimed to have the experience, the relationships, and the economic and military leverage to make deals. The United States has played key roles in resolving conflicts in Northern Ireland, in the former Yugoslavia, between Egypt and Israel, and so on.

Superficially, Trump promises to continue that tradition. He is, of course, the self-proclaimed master of the “art of the deal.”

The truth is, however, that Trump was never a great dealmaker. He was famous for ripping off his business partners. His career is littered with failed businesses like Trump Airlines, Trump University, and Trump Magazine. Many of his biggest deals—the West Side of Manhattan, Trump Tower Tampa—fell through. He famously endured six bankruptcies.

It’s not just that Trump’s diplomatic deals are similarly fake. Rather, he is threatening to put U.S. diplomacy as a whole into receivership.

After his decision to attack Iran in the middle of negotiations with the country – not just once but twice! – there is no good reason for any country to trust what U.S. diplomats say to them. Diplomacy, after all, is all about trust. In this way, Trump has squandered what remains of U.S. diplomatic capital.

Looking to the future, Trump has also eviscerated the cadre of diplomats that could bring about some return to the previous status quo. Last July, the administration fired 1,300 State Department workers, including nearly 250 foreign service officers. That included staffers focused on the Middle East who were responsible for working out scenarios if the Strait of Hormuz were closed. U.S. overseas aid has been effectively dismantled. The latest budget would reduce State Department and foreign operations by another 22 percent.

Alongside these reductions, Trump increased military spending to $1 trillion and has requested another 50 percent hike to $1.5 trillion. This is the fiscal equivalent of “negotiating with bombs.” After all the staff and budget cuts at the State Department, practically the only thing left that the United States possesses with which to do diplomacy are bombs.

The evisceration of U.S. diplomacy is not exactly a tragedy. U.S. diplomatic activities have always reflected naked self-interest. And other countries can certain step in as mediators: the European Union, China, Oman.

The tragedy lies elsewhere. As long as the United States is no longer pursuing real diplomatic options—in contrast to the Three Stooges method of conflict resolution where Trump bangs together the heads of the primary combatants—it will continue to rely on force as the first resort. Washington will talk in the future almost exclusively with bombs. It will be Kissinger without the diplomatic knowledge. It will be all sticks, no carrots.

Thanks to Trump, the United States has become a thug nation. The only remaining question is whether the rest of the world can somehow preserve the art of diplomacy—as Pakistan has done to avert the latest threats of escalation in the Iran War—and reverse the current trend of using bombs to negotiate.

Hankyoreh, April 8, 2026

The latest technology can prove decisive in war. Think of the atomic bomb in World War II. Or the stirrup in the Mongol conquest of Europe and the Middle East.

More recently, after the two sides had been deadlocked for decades, Azerbaijan defeated Armenia in 2020 in a matter of days and took over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenia prided itself on its powerful army and fearsome soldiers. They were no match for the drones that Azerbaijan bought with the proceeds from its oil exports.

“Azerbaijan used its drone fleet — purchased from Israel and Turkey — to stalk and destroy Armenia’s weapons systems in Nagorno-Karabakh, shattering its defenses and enabling a swift advance,” reported the Washington Post‘s Robyn Dixon. “Armenia found that air defense systems in Nagorno-Karabakh, many of them older Soviet systems, were impossible to defend against drone attacks, and losses quickly piled up.”

Ukraine has similarly used drone technology to level the battlefield in its war against Russia. The Kremlin has more money, more soldiers, more heavy artillery, even more drones than Ukraine. But the Ukrainians have proven more adept at producing new varieties of drones that can substitute for scarce Patriot missiles in defending against Russia’s daily aerial assault. Ukraine has also used a variety of drones to strike at targets deep in Russian territory. Drones are the slingshot by which little David hopes to bring down the Russian Goliath.

And now the war in Iran.

Perhaps Donald Trump was persuaded—by his generals, by his buddies in Silicon Valley, by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—that American military superiority would make quick work of the Iranian military. In addition to the aircraft carriers, the Stealth bombers, the Tomahawk missiles, and the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, Trump could also call upon the assistance of Claude and his buddies.

Claude, of course, is the artificial intelligence system developed by the company Anthropic, which had objected to the misuse of its model in the U.S. raid that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and his wife. Trump retaliated against Anthropic’s caution by ordering the Pentagon to sever its relationship with Claude—only to discover that the AI was already too integrated into U.S. military operations. Not the first conscript ordered to fight against its will, Claude helped the Pentagon identify Iranian targets, prioritize them, and furnish precise coordinates. Going forward, however, the Pentagon will rely instead on Open AI’s ChatGPT.

All of this technological sophistication has not brought Donald Trump the quick victory he so desired. What Trump and company didn’t anticipate—but which any reasonably competent foreign policy professional could have pointed out if DOGE hadn’t cashiered so many of them—was that Iran could rely on much simpler tactics to stymie the combined U.S.-Israeli forces.

History provides plenty of examples of adversaries who successfully defeated U.S. forces despite facing much more technologically advanced weaponry. The Vietnamese endured massive bombing campaigns, Iraqi insurgents relied on IEDs to destroy U.S. infantry forces, and the Taliban outwaited the occupying army. These experiences presumably inspired Donald Trump to promise, as a presidential candidate, not to get involved in any quagmires or expose U.S. troops to such risks again.

All that went out the window when he attacked Iran.

And now, Iran has used its location and the unchangeable facts of geography to their full advantage. It has effectively blocked the Strait of Hormuz, restricted the flow of oil and natural gas to the global market, and driven up the price of petroleum at the pump. It. It has also relied on the utter stupidity of the industrialized world. If global gas-guzzlers had weaned themselves of their addiction to fossil fuels—as they had promised in climate negotiations—the reduced flow of oil would not now be having such a great impact.

To turn the tables, the United States could seize Kharg Island, located in the Persian Gulf about 400 miles north of the Strait of Hormuz. If Iran were to lose the island, the transit point for 90 percent of Iran’s crude oil exports, much of its geographic advantage would disappear. Or would it?

Although it might not represent a huge challenge for the United States to take the island, it’s another matter altogether to hold it. The Iranians could keep up a steady barrage of aerial strikes on occupation forces hunkered down on the exposed island. The continued disruption of Strait traffic—along with the destruction of Iranian energy infrastructure—would not achieve Trump’s current primary goal: the reduction of prices at the pump.

What might seem like a war between two distinct adversaries—Armenia vs. Azerbaijan, Russia vs. Ukraine, United States vs. Iran—often boils down to a very different kind of conflict. The battle on the ground frequently pits old tactics against new tech. Sometimes the gadgets win; sometimes old-school approaches prevail.

Many countries still go to war believing that God is on their side. Just as dangerous are those that believe that they will win because technology is on their side.

The era of the “intelligent kill web” has arrived.

The military planner sits like a venomous spider at the center of a web of AI applications that calculate targets, probabilities, and complex interactions faster than any human can comprehend. Linked to actual weapons, these AI models conduct war with ever increasing efficiency and lethality. The execution of kill chains—which connect the identification of a target with its destruction—has been compressed to mere seconds. In a targeting exercise conducted by the U.S. Air Force in January, the AI system was over 100 times faster than its human counterpart; it also achieved a “tactical viability” rate of 97 percent compared to the human’s 48 percent.

Such figures are no consolation to the families of the victims of the U.S. bombing of a primary school in Iran on February 28 that killed nearly 200 people, mostly little girls. The targeting of the U.S. aerial campaign was orchestrated by Maven, the AI platform designed by Palantir. But don’t blame the robots. As Kevin Baker points out in The Guardian, it’s people who are responsible for catastrophes like this: the ones who failed to update the database of targets, who designed Maven, and who put these systems at the center of their battle plans.

Analysts worry that countries like the United States are on the verge of removing people from the kill web because the human mind just slows things down and the smallest advantage can prove critical in determining the outcome of a battle.

That is certainly a concern. Equally terrifying, as the war in Iran is proving, is to keep a human being like Secretary of War Pete Hegseth at the center of the kill web. In other words, the only thing worse than an intelligent kill web is a stupid kill web.

Or, to put it more dismally, any human at the center of the kill web will be as stupid as Pete Hegseth because that’s just a function of the degree of magnitude that currently separates cyberspace and meatspace.

Will AI, without human guidance, escalate a war to the nuclear threshold and beyond? This is not a consoling thought, but at this point, frankly, the humans that run operations in the Trump administration are not morally distinguishable from killer robots.

To assassinate Iran’s top leader Ayatollah Khamenei, Israeli cyber-operatives hacked into the traffic cameras in Tehran. According to a Financial Times report:

Israel gained access to the cameras years ago, and found that one particular camera was angled in such a way that it showed where members of Khamenei’s security team parked their cars. Through the cameras, Israeli intelligence built files on the guards’ addresses, work schedules, and who they were assigned to protect. On the day of the attack, Israel and the US also disrupted cellular service on Tehran’s Pasteur Street, where Khamenei was assassinated, so those trying to reach the bodyguards and deliver possible warnings would receive busy signals.

Some years ago, the United States and Israel collaborated on smuggling the Stuxnet worm into Iran’s nuclear operations, which prompted the centrifuges that enrich uranium to spin out of control and destroy themselves. It was only a temporary setback for Iran. For the world, however, the consequences have been irreversible, given that this first large-scale cyberattack kicked off a digital arms race.

During this current war, Iran has conducted cyberoperations of its own, such as targeting a medical devices company and hacking into FBI Director Kash Patel’s email. However, Iran is at a serious disadvantage. The United States and Israel have been pouring money into such technologies for years.

So, too, has the Kremlin. Russian cyberops are especially widespread. U.S. media has focused on Russian efforts to swing U.S. elections, but Russia has focused most of its attention on Europe. There it has engaged in conventional sabotage, such as hiring single-use operatives to plant explosives, set fires, and generally cause havoc. The even more destabilizing operations, however, are hidden from view because they take place in cyberspace.

Beginning in September 2024, for instance, a new Russian group nicknamed Laundry Bear began to hack into the accounts of Dutch police officials and conduct cyber-espionage against high-tech companies. The Baltic countries have been dealing for years with Russian cyber operations that have jammed GPS navigation near airports, disrupted underwater cables, and hacked into energy systems. In one recent example, anonymous social media accounts started to call for the secession of a majority-Russian region around the Estonian city of Narva. The historical parallels are unnerving. Similar calls for secession, also stage-managed by Moscow, precipitated the Crimean and Donbas crises in 2014 that led to Russian intervention and war in Ukraine.

Scientists warn against the futility of trying to stop scientific advances. The nuclear genie, despite some intermittent efforts at imposing controls, has not been stuffed back into the bottle, not even halfway. A similar debate is taking place today around AI, between techno-optimists and techno-pessimists.

One way around this debate has been to furnish AI with hard-and-fast constraints, something like the laws that Isaac Asimov imagined for his fictional robots. Anthropic has drafted a “constitution” for Claude that forbids it from, among other things, creating “cyberweapons or malicious code that could cause significant damage if deployed” or engaging “in an attempt to kill or disempower the vast majority of humanity or the human species as a whole.”

That seems reasonable. But when Donald Trump took office in 2025, he eliminated all efforts to apply such rules across the industry. Rules, regulations, laws—these are all impediments to “making America great again” or, more accurately, to preventing Trump from assuming autocratic control. So, Claude and its constitution are now out of the loop, much as Trump has taken the U.S. constitution out of the loop.

In any case, talk of techno-utopias and techno-apocalypses is really just a matter of projection. AI reflects the best and worst of humanity. “Garbage in, garbage out,” goes the slogan of Silicon Valley. Instead of just focusing on treating the end product, then, it would be better to address the waste farther upstream, nearer to the source. That means more funds for education, not just for science and technology but the ethics involved in translating discoveries into products.

Ah, but wait: the Trump administration is also cutting the funding to research and education. The secretary of health and human services is a fount of junk science. The executive branch is governed by the morality of Mordor.

It is a horrifying aspect of today’s politics in the United States that AI is an improvement on all that. Intelligence of whatever variety trumps stupidity almost every time, though not so much in U.S. elections.

Speaking of elections, now that Claude has been kicked out of the Pentagon, maybe it should run for president.

FPIF, April 1, 2026

To combat climate change, the entire world has to make the transition away from fossil fuels. If a major emitter like the United States or India doesn’t substantially reduce its emissions, it will doom the entire enterprise. As never before in human history, richer and poorer must work together.

But what will that joint action look like?

The industrial revolution, which coincided with peak colonialism, enriched the Global North at the expense of the Global South. In the process of spewing out vast quantities of greenhouse gasses, richer countries also racked up an enormous climate debt beginning in the nineteenth century. Now, the richer countries—and the richest individuals wherever they might live—must pay back this debt by funding the clean energy transition of poorer communities.

Paying reparations in this way is not just an act of justice. It is indispensable to the saving of the planet.

In theory, that’s what the Just Energy Transition Partnerships are all about. South Africa’s JET-P, for instance, is designed to finance the country’s shift away from coal-fired power plants to renewable sources of energy. Currently, 83 percent of South African electricity is generated by fossil fuels, with 58 percent coming from the dirtiest source, coal.

The JET-P for South Africa, which it launched with a consortium of richer nations in 2021, has marshaled around $12.4 billion. This money has been earmarked for building out solar and wind capacity, expanding the electricity grid to support that buildout, and setting up programs for retraining workers, particularly those in the coal sector.

“It’s a big fund,” notes University of Johannesburg sociology professor Patrick Bond, “and it should allow us to close down our coal-fired power plants early. And to the extent that we need to import turbines for wind or solar panels and batteries and inverters, then we can make that transition.”

After five years, however, the project is still in its early stages.

“We are talking about replacing 88 coal-fired power units that produce just under 50GW of electricity,” explains Roland Ngam, Project Manager for Climate Justice at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung’s South Africa office. “If it has taken a half decade just to put the bureaucracy in place, you can imagine how long doing the brick-and-mortar work will take. Replacing these coal-fired units and expanding green capacity also means laying 14,000 kilometers of high-voltage transmission lines – and that will cost $26 billion to complete. If we throw the global political climate into the mix, one begins to see how this thing can take at least a few decades to complete.”

It’s not just the timeline that’s problematic. Most of the funding comes in the form of loans—92 percent—rather than grants. And while the interest rate for the loans is rather low, it still adds to the country’s already sizable debt burden of around $350 billion. South Africa spends nearly $22 billion each year just to service that debt, which is considerably more than what the government spends on public health. Also, the outlays so far have gone to “the consultancies,” Patrick Bond adds, “these big firms, the KPMGs, the Ernsts and Youngs, all the big boys who do this work, instead of local environmental justice groups.” He points out that the same firms were complicit in looting the South African state by facilitating widespread corruption in the 2010s.

There are ways to push the JET-P more in the direction of climate justice. “For example, rural populations should be empowered with the infrastructure and funds to set up microgrids,” Roland Ngam suggests. “That will unlock a lot of opportunities and help draw many workers from the coal sector. Right now, most rural communities have zero benefit from the dozens of solar power stations that big business is building everywhere. Second, instead of focusing on power stations, why not empower thousands of young people with the skills and resources to install rooftop solar, windmills, etc. and through that, make the rest of the population see the benefits of solar and wind?”

Climate justice, especially as it’s discussed in international fora like the annual Conference of Parties (COP), can sound abstract, at least in terms of the dollar amounts demanded by countries most affected by climate change and the considerably smaller sums offered by rich countries. South Africa’s JET-P illustrates the concrete challenges faced by poorer countries that want to shift to a clean energy economy and the specific methods by which the richer countries continue to shirk their responsibilities.

The notion of climate reparations—a debt that the rich, for once, owe to the poor—is a powerful but still marginal part of the official climate debate. “Climate reparations as such hasn’t really been acknowledged or even desired in the formal policy space,” observes David Williams, head of International Climate Justice Program at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in New York. “So, actually, in my view, there isn’t a big greenwashing of the term yet.”

Climate reparations, then, present a way to mobilize poorer countries and extract real commitments from the richer ones. As with reparations in the African American community and the landback movement among Native Americans, such arguments are moving from the periphery of debate to the very center of discussions about the path forward.

The famous “hockey stick” graph, formulated by climate scientist Michael Mann and popularized in the documentary The Inconvenient Truth, demonstrates that the sharp increase in levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere coincided with the use of fossil fuels to expand industrial manufacturing and stimulate a consumer boom in the early twentieth century. Although climate changes do come in cycles, the graph definitively shows that the current warming of the planet stems from human activity—and that human activity has taken place predominantly where industrial manufacturing and industrial-strength consumerism have been concentrated.

“Much of the historical emissions are due to the Global North, particularly the United States and Europe and even Japan,” notes Meena Raman of the Third World Network in Malaysia. “And a lot of the impacts that are being witnessed today are being borne by the Global South,” with some of the largest impacts felt in India and China.

Another way of thinking of this inequitable distribution of responsibility is through the concept of a “carbon budget”—the overall amount of carbon that can be released into the atmosphere before global temperatures rise above either the 1.5 degree or the 2 degree centigrade mark (over pre-industrial levels) that the scientific community has established as red lines. “What the Global North is doing is overusing its atmospheric space,” David Williams says. “A sort of atmospheric appropriation is happening.”

There’s almost no carbon left in the budget. “Today, we are already at a 1.4 degree temperature rise,” reports Meena Raman. “We are really close to breaching the 1.5 degree centigrade limit, and whether we will even limit temperature rise within 2 degrees is highly questionable.”

The Paris agreement, negotiated in 2014, was supposed to prevent this scenario, with countries committing voluntarily to limits that have become increasingly stringent. However, only 15 countries have even submitted their plans to meet the latest benchmarks.

The world thus faces two clearly demarcated paths forward. If countries ignore their commitments, withdraw from the Paris agreement, and continue to use fossil fuels unabated—as the United States has done under the Trump administration—the temperature could rise above a catastrophic 4 degrees centigrade by 2100. If, however, countries recommit to global cooperation and a rapid shift to renewable energy, the rise could be brought back down, after a terrifying overshoot, to 1.8 degrees by the end of the century.

This global cooperation requires a major transfer of funds to poorer countries so that they, too, can make the transition. Not only do most countries in the Global South not have these funds, they are struggling with high amounts of financial debt. Worse, the bill for debt service has recently risen to its highest level since 1994.

“Over 60 percent of Global South countries are suffering from illegitimate and completely unsustainable debt, and there’s really no chance of their ever paying it back,” David Williams points out. “Take Kenya, for example, where protests erupted due to tax increases introduced to manage a heavy debt burden. Debt servicing consumes almost half of government revenue. The IMF and World Bank have demanded cuts to public services and austerity measures. We’re talking about education, healthcare, transport, all these systems upon which societies rely.”

Colonial authorities once extracted huge amounts of wealth from the countries of the Global South. That unequal exchange continues today, “typically estimated at about $2 trillion a year in the flow from the Global South to the Global North,” says climate activist Tom Athanasiou. “That’s $2 trillion in minerals and other things extracted from the Global South.” That sum also includes debt repayment and illicit flows of capital.

Even after they achieved political independence, countries throughout the Global South were still locked in neo-colonial economic relations characterized by debt, unequal terms of trade, and, most recently, the extraction of the materials needed for an energy transition—lithium, copper—that has predominantly taken place in the Global North. In this larger context, climate reparations can be considered the ultimate stage of decolonization.

“This is not about begging,” Meena Raman says. “This is not about charity, this is really about colonialism, post-colonialism, and the way in which economies have been run and are still run today.”

Two numbers, both of them very large, are at the center of the climate debt debate. The first number is the amount of money to “make things right,” to compensate for the environmental damage done to the Global South during that march by the industrial north to a prosperity predicated on fossil-fuel use.

According to one analysis for the IMF, economists calculate a debt of about $60 trillion, across an approximately 60-year period, from 1959-2018, with the United States leading the way with a share of $14 trillion. From 2019 to 2035, however, they project that China and India will emit at a faster pace and take the lead. Although this analysis notes that the United States continues to have the highest climate debt per person across that entire time frame, the study doesn’t account for pre-1959 emissions or the embedded emissions in products consumed in the richer world but produced in places like China and India.

A much larger estimate comes from environmental economist Andrew Fanning and anthropologist Jason Hickel in an analysis published in 2023 that argues that the big emitters owe the low emitters $192 trillion over a 30-year period for their overuse of the carbon budget. That overall sum translates to a little more than $6 trillion a year—or about 8 percent of global GDP—to pay the debt.

These big numbers depend on the social costs—such as environmental impact—associated with the emission of a ton of carbon into the atmosphere. The IMF economists use a carbon price of $100 (for each ton of carbon emitted).  Fanning and Hickel arrive at a higher overall figure by using a carbon price of $198, which is close to the $190 per ton that the Environmental Protection Agency proposed in 2023.

But not everyone agrees. “Two economists, Adrien Bilal and Diego Känzig, in their current working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, a very conservative mainstream institution, put the social cost of carbon at over $1,200 a ton,” reports Patrick Bond. “Compare that to Barack Obama, who put it at $51, and Trump, who put it down to one dollar and is now just ignoring this entirely.”

The second figure—how much will a global energy transition actually cost—is also huge. In 2019, Stanford researchers put that figure at $73 trillion. In the short term, to have any meaningful impact on climate change, investment into the global energy transition would have to hit about $28 trillion or $5.6 trillion each year from 2025 to 2030, according to BloombergNEF. Although such investments set a record at $2.1 trillion in 2024, they fell far short of the target. The UN puts the figure a little higher – $5.8 trillion a year (between 2023 and 2030) – for just the developing world.

In an ideal world, these two large numbers would intersect. The payment of climate reparations at around $6 trillion a year would cover the $5.8 trillion price tag for the poorest countries to make their energy transition.

But this is not an ideal world. In the run-up to the Paris climate agreement, the wealthier countries pledged to eventually provide a mere $100 billion annually by 2020. “The Global South has actually demanded $1.3 trillion annually by 2030,” reports Meena Raman. At the COP in Baku, the official goal was pushed up to $300 billion a year. But that’s still a far cry from what has been mobilized so far—$116 billion in 2022—and what is both demanded ($1.3 trillion) and what is needed ($5.8 trillion).

These numbers come with several caveats. The first concerns loans versus grants. In an ideal world, the payment of the climate debt would be in the form of public grants (as the UN urges) not private loans (as Bloomberg and the Stanford researchers imagine). As with South Africa’s JET-P, most climate financing comes in the form of loans. According to Oxfam, almost 70 percent of climate financing consists of loans, which means that richer countries are profiting from rather than paying off their own climate debt.

“There are different viewpoints within the climate justice movement whether to solely demand grants or whether to open up the possibility for highly concessional loans as well,” explains David Williams. “Some negotiating groups say, ‘Getting $5 trillion in grants is just unrealistic. The problem is urgent, and we need to do something about it now. So, we need to have a look at the private sector and different types of financial instruments.’”

Second, it’s not entirely clear to what categories the $1.3 trillion figure applies. “Are we only talking about mitigation, and in particular, about techno-economic transformation?” asks Tom Athanasiou. “Or are we also talking about the finance that’s necessary for adaptation? Or the finance that’s necessary for loss and damage? Or the finance that’s necessary for a just transition?”

These questions lead to the next key issue: the mechanisms by which climate reparations currently flow (intermittently, insufficiently) from richer to poorer.

One obvious mechanism for freeing up large sums of money in the Global South to push ahead with a clean-energy transition is to cancel the crushing debt burden that so many countries shoulder. Large-scale debt relief for impoverished countries is not unprecedented. Somalia was relieved of $4.5 billion in debt service payments through the World Bank’s Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative. China provided significant debt relief during the COVID era, including $3.9 billion in debt service from Angola.

But the most salient example is Germany. Impoverished by its defeat in World War II, Germany after 1945 “had 50 percent of its external debt canceled, and the rest was capped and tied to economic growth,” notes David Williams. “This allowed for the Wirtschaftswunder, the economic wonder of Germany. The government didn’t have to undertake any sort of austerity measures. It could invest in public infrastructure, industry, social welfare. This was accepted as a good idea because unsustainable debt undermines democracy and stability.”

German debt was forgiven as well because of the perceived external threat of Soviet expansion in Europe during the Cold War. Debt cancellation can be similarly justified today because of the very real external threat of climate change.

Many countries in the Global South—along with climate justice advocates—view debt relief as essential to any just energy transition. But the only real options offered at the moment, and not in large quantities, by richer countries are “debt-for-climate” swaps. On the face of it, such swaps appear to be win-win solutions: reduce debt, save the environment. However, they suffer from problems of accountability and transparency. Moreover, “these agreements are often tied to strict conditions that limit how freed-up resources can be used, reducing flexibility for governments to direct funds to the most urgent energy needs,” write climate activists Karabo Mokgonyana and Tess Woolfenden. “This can lead to projects that favor private-sector interests over community-led renewable energy solutions.”

Another mechanism favored by the Global North is the carbon market, where permits to pollute are traded according to a floating price of carbon (approximately $86 in the European Union as of mid-February 2026 but subject to considerable fluctuation). Carbon markets “are just a scheme to allow rich countries and corporations to continue to pollute and trade one community’s health for another,” says Hopi and Akimel O’odham environmental defender Jacob Johns, an argument he extends even to the Tropical Forest Forever Facility heralded at the Belem COP. “When you look at the TFFF, it still just solidifies carbon markets that utilize indigenous wisdom and indigenous ways of knowing as a means of greenwashing the ongoing pollution to our environment.”

With large-scale debt relief off the table, the international community has put together a number of institutions to oversee the energy transition. Many of those have been proposed within the structures of the Conference of Parties, organized by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Taking place every year since 1995, the COPs have produced the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris agreement, and more recently such mechanisms as the Loss and Damage Fund.

However, given that carbon emissions continue to rise, reaching a record high in 2025, there has been a perennial frustration that the COPs have not produced more results. The influence of fossil fuel lobbyists, who have pressured countries not to ban oil and gas, has been another obstacle. “One out of every 25 people at the COP in Belem were brought there by the fossil fuel industry,” reports Jacob Johns. “This year, there were more delegates from the fossil fuel industry than there were environmental activists or civil society. The COP is meant to be an interaction platform for civil society and world leaders!”

Despite these challenges—and the withdrawal of the United States from the UNFCCC—the COP remains the only place where international deals involving (almost) the entire world can take place. “The COPs are consensus-based,” David Williams points out. “There are 200 countries at the table, which also reflects the diversity of global views on societal issues. Of course, there’s going to be some inertia, and it’s a very complicated and arduous process. But if we’re going to make progress on a globally interconnected issue like climate change, we just need it.”

Three key institutions coming out of the COP process and related to climate reparations are the Green Climate Fund, the Loss and Damage Fund, and the new Just Transition Fund.

The Green Climate Fund, which became operational in 2015, is the primary dedicated institution for financing adaptation and mitigation in the Global South (it is second behind the World Bank in providing grants for climate action). The amount of money disbursed to specific projects in the Global South is not inconsequential—$3.2 billion in 2024—but it is also doesn’t approach the need. The projects it supports suffer from the same problems discussed above, such as the prioritizing of loans and the heavy reliance on private sector support (in part because of the relative paucity of public sector financing). Some of this support goes to firms in the Global South, like clean energy start-ups in India, while other loans benefit Global North corporations like the French energy giants invested in the Renewstable Barbados project.

On top of that, it’s hard for really poor countries to access the fund. Very little money trickles down to farmers. And indigenous people have been largely shut out of the process as well.

“Indigenous people, people who have been colonized, have no access to these international climate funds,” reports Jacob Johns. “One of our top demands this year was to make it possible for Indigenous people to access those funds without having to go to their colonial overlords. Recognizing that Indigenous people are protecting 80 percent of the world’s lasting biodiversity, it makes sense to put money into the hands of the communities that are defending that biodiversity.”

The Green Climate Fund and its cousins—the Global Environment Facility, the Adaptation Fund, and the Climate Investment Funds—all focus on mitigation and adaptation. But climate change has advanced to such a degree that countries have already been experiencing catastrophic damage related to rising oceans, super-powerful storms, and drought.

In 2023, after a concerted campaign by Global South countries over many years, the Loss and Damage finally became operational. In 2026, it will disburse a first round of $250 million, with the most vulnerable countries guaranteed half the funds during the start-up period.

“It was a huge victory,” comments David Williams. “Of course, it’s hosted by the World Bank, an inherently undemocratic, stakeholder-led organization. But, still, it gets really, really close to acknowledging the need for some form of compensation, even though the actual text states very clearly that this is not on the basis of compensation or liability.”

At the COP in Belem in 2025, delegates agreed to launch a new Just Transition fund. “It’s the embodiment of all that we have fought for, and it only came about because of the fight and the unity of the Global South,” Meena Raman reports. “Just look at the messages that came out there: the need to be inclusive, to include Indigenous peoples, to include free, prior, and informed consent from local communities, the right to environment, to clean air, labor rights, human rights. These are building blocks.”

The international community has not mobilized anything close to what it has promised for mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage, or a just transition. What it has offered has been largely in the form of loans. And those promises fall far short of paying off the climate debt and supplying the Global South what it needs to leave fossil fuels behind.

“The right-wing politicians in the Global North are always saying that they’re broke,” Tom Athanasiou says. “But in last year’s civil society equity review, we did a very detailed analysis of possible places that the money could come from, everything from a financial transaction tax and wealth taxes of various kinds to pollution taxes, the redirection of subsidies from fossils to renewables, the closing of tax havens, and the redirection of military budgets to just transition budgets.”

The money, in other words, is out there – in the budgets of the wealthy governments, in the profit margins of wealthy corporations, and in the pockets of wealthy individuals.

One logical place to start the search for the necessary funds would be the International Monetary Fund, which periodically issues assets to its members that can be exchanged for currency. These Special Drawing Rights (SDR) function like a reserve that can be drawn upon in emergencies. “This was done during the COVID pandemic when $650 billion was issued overnight,” Meena Raman remembers. “It largely went to the developed world for the economic crisis that the Global North was facing in particular. So, it can be done.” But right now the United States, which holds sway in the IMF, does not support the issuance of SDR to address the climate crisis.

Another obvious place to find the money would be in the military budgets of the wealthiest countries. In 2024, global military spending reached $2.7 trillion, a nearly 10 percent increase from the year before. The U.S. military budget alone tops $1 trillion, and Trump wants to add another $500 billion. A full-scale global arms race is taking place, accelerated by several ongoing wars and an erosion in faith in U.S. alliance commitments.

Then there are the subsidies that national governments provide to fossil fuel companies. In 2022, those subsidies totaled $7 trillion. Some of these subsidies come in the form of tax incentives, and the Trump administration recently added another $4 billion per year for a decade. But the majority of these subsidies come in the form of low prices for gas and oil that do not incorporate the true environmental costs of their extraction and use. As several IMF economists point out, “scrapping explicit and implicit fossil-fuel subsidies would prevent 1.6 million premature deaths annually, raise government revenues by $4.4 trillion, and put emissions on track toward reaching global warming targets. It would also redistribute income as fuel subsidies benefit rich households more than poor ones.”

There’s also the strategy of taxing the fossil fuel corporations that raked in half a trillion dollars in profits in 2024. Oxfam estimates that a Rich Polluter Profit Tax could generate $400 billion a year while an Excess Profit Tax applied to all large corporations could raise around $680 billion annually. Making a transition away from fossil fuels contingent on taxes generated from fossil fuels may, however, prolong the transition. “When transition finance depends on continued extraction, governments risk building fiscal dependence on the very activity they aim to wind down,” writes climate activist Daphne Wysham. “The incentive becomes subtle but powerful: maintain production to maintain revenues.”

Another strategy is to go after wealthy individuals. “Since 2015, the world’s richest one percent— most but not all of whom live in the Global North—has gained at least 33.9 trillion in wealth,” reports Tom Athanasiou. To get at that money, he proposes “a nationally harmonized system of taxes that is tied to a visionary and detailed and strategically astute transition strategy that takes account of the absolute imperative of phasing out fossil energy as soon as possible.” According to a fair-share approach, the individuals who profited from colonial and neocolonial interests, wherever they might live, should shoulder the burden of paying for transition.

The challenge historically with national wealth taxes is that wealthy individuals and corporations will often move their assets around to avoid payment. The United Nations is currently negotiating a global tax convention that would close at least some of the loopholes that favor the wealthy. “Tax avoidance, tax havens, all these things need to be combated,” David Williams notes. “What’s happening at the UN level is actually quite encouraging. There’s a lot of hope that this process will establish an international tax system, but also democratize the current system, where Global South countries have no say whatsoever about all these decisions which affect them the most.”

Another option in the tax realm is to focus on financial transactions. Some countries, such as France, Spain, and Brazil, have introduced such a tax on financial transactions taking place within their borders. Depending on the scope, an international financial transaction tax could generate nearly a trillion dollars a year.

Just as billionaires seek to avoid taxation, carbon emitters often try to avoid regulation. The European Union has developed the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) “to stop the outsourcing of emissions—that is, when a company in Europe sends its dirty industries to emerging markets,” Patrick Bond explains. CBAM assesses a tax on “dirty” products, thus serving as an incentive for companies that want to export to the European market to reduce the “embodied carbon” in their products. Such a tax adversely affects exporters in the Global South. “South Africa will be among the hardest hit,” he continues. “We rank number 10 of the countries that export to Europe. And the most important exports this year are steel and aluminum, and those have very intensive CO2 emissions embedded within them. That heavy carbon intensity means that we will probably start losing more jobs in these crucial metal sectors.”

There are some more general problems with CBAM. In its tariff calculations, the mechanism defines green energy to include methane gas. “Methane gas is 85 times more potent than CO2 emissions, yet some sleazy Brussels dealmakers put that into the ‘clean energy’ taxonomy, with nuclear as well,” Bond points out. Second, the money generated by the tariffs is largely redistributed within Europe rather than sent in the form of financing to help countries “clean up” their industrial production. “They are still refusing to acknowledge climate debt,” Bond continues. “They are obviously just using the CBAM revenues for their own internal needs in Europe.”

This European mechanism is one example of the “polluter pays” principle. The problem with CBAM, from an equity point of view, is that the polluters in the Global South are paying rather than the polluters in the Global North, and the money generated stays largely in Europe. An alternative would be for Global South countries to assess the taxes and keep all the revenues.

Another polluter-pays approach is the Climate Superfund in New York state. “It functions a bit like a tax on the highest emitting companies to generate $75 billion over the next 25 years to fund climate change adaptation,” explains David Williams. A Global Climate Superfund, financed by something akin to the Excess Profit Tax on such big emitters as airlines, industrial farms, and data centers, could generate trillions of dollars.

The conversations around climate justice in UN circles do not conform neatly to the categories of Global South and Global North. In the debates over a roadmap for transition at the last COP in Belem, for instance, countries like India and Nigeria opposed the inclusion of language supporting a fossil fuel phaseout, while many of the least developed countries in the world favored the more radical approach. “There was a split within the Brazilian delegation on this, a split within the COP presidency, and a split within the G77,” Tom Athanasiou observes. As Patrick Bond points out, the interests of the BRICS nations have generally aligned with the G7 on climate issues.

The example of China demonstrates the challenge of categorization. It is technically part of the Global South, though it has one of the top economies in the world. It is now the largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, though not on a per-capita basis. Chinese emissions also come with a caveat. “China has become a factory for the rest of the world, where much of the industries from the West have gone,” points out Meena Raman. “A lot of the emissions it is emitting are also due to the consumption of the Global North.”

Although it is still heavily dependent on imported oil and natural gas, China is also producing more of the infrastructure for renewable energy (solar panels, wind turbines) than any other country. “If today, solar and wind and all is much cheaper, it’s largely because of the efforts of the Chinese,” Raman adds. “Thanks to the Chinese, we are able to scale up renewable energy.”

China has provided considerable funds for infrastructure development in the Global South through its Belt and Road Initiative. In 2025, for instance, it provided $18.3 billion for wind, solar, and waste-to-energy projects mostly in the form of loans and export credits. At the same time, however, it provided nearly four times that amount—over $71 billion—for oil and gas development.

Since it straddles a number of categories, China often functions as a bridge builder. “It has very central roles in country groupings like G77 plus China, like the like-minded developing countries,” Williams says. “It champions the concept of common but differentiated responsibilities. But it does that with the fact in mind that it strengthens its own position.”

According to a fair shares approach to an energy transition, the various blocs are irrelevant. “Individual countries have their individual obligations to participate in the climate transition based on their individual economic structure, their class structure, their capacity, and their responsibility,” Tom Athanasiou notes.

Among those countries, the United States has a particular obligation. It has the largest economy in the world. And it has contributed by far the most carbon emissions since 1750 of any country—fully one-quarter of the overall total.

“As Americans, we owe the rest of the world a lot of money,” Jacob Johns concludes. “We owe the rest of the world a lot of reparations for what has been done to the ecosystem. And instead of admitting the faults of our own past, and righting the wrongs of our history, we’re stepping away from that and embracing fascism.”

Until the biggest polluter in history pays, climate reparations will remain an aspiration, even an inspiration, but not a functioning institution.

Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, March 18, 2026

World War III will not start with an exchange of nuclear weapons. It won’t ignite from the jostling of great empires. Nor will it result from a single madman (or two) bent on taking over the world.

It won’t be any of those things because World War III has already begun.

The current global conflagration began not with the joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran. It began with the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. This blatant land grab was not only a massive war crime. Russian President Vladimir Putin also had another target in mind: the rules-based order.

This attack on international law was the Fort Sumter moment for World War III. By invading Ukraine—and then systematically breaking one article of the Geneva Convention after another—Putin effectively seceded from the international community.

There have been other major violations of international law since the end of the Cold War, including the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the U.S. drone attacks in various countries, Israel’s multiple incursions into Lebanon, Rwanda’s invasion of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and so on.

But none of these attacks, however abhorrent, challenged the fundamental structure of the rules-based order like Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Putin didn’t try to enlist the UN on his side, as Bush did in Iraq and Obama did in Libya. He didn’t seize land temporarily to create a buffer zone as Israel has attempted to do in Lebanon. Rather, he was determined to force regime change in Kyiv and undermine the entire European security system.

In Iran, Donald Trump is simply following Putin’s game plan. Like Putin, he expected a quick victory, so much so that he didn’t arrange military escorts for tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz or prepare for an emergency drawdown from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to offset the inevitable spike in gas prices. Like Putin, he didn’t bother to rally the UN to his side or even build a coalition of the willing. Like Putin, he expected (and continues to expect) to install a puppet government that can do his bidding.

Also like Putin, who took Russia out of the Council of Europe and the UN Human Rights Council, Trump has withdrawn from as many international institutions as he can, from the World Health Organization to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Russia and the United States have become partners in secession, despite the Kremlin’s protests to the contrary.

“We have all lost what we call international law,” a Russian spokesman said in the aftermath of the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran. “I don’t even understand how anyone can be called upon to follow the norms and principles of international law. It effectively no longer exists.”

The guy’s right. Sort of. He’s off by four years. And his country is the OG.

Trump generally follows the lead of others when it comes to major military operations. He only bombed Iran over the summer after Israel took the initiative. He has attacked Iran this time only because Israel is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. He probably would have seized Greenland if, say, Alberta secessionists had sent an initial amphibious unit.

And now Trump has stuck his knife into the body of international law—after Putin already severed its femoral artery.

To understand what happens next in Iran, the latest front in World War III, just look to Vladimir Putin.

Any sane world leader would have agreed to a ceasefire in Ukraine by this point. Putin doesn’t meet that particular definition of sanity.

The Russian leader has watched his country jettison its geopolitical position, with allies in Armenia, Syria, Venezuela, and now Iran left exposed and vulnerable. Putin has lost a great swath of Russia’s “best and brightest” to war and exile, sacrificing more soldiers in Ukraine at this point than he can recruit. The Russian economy has finally come down off its sugar high of military Keynesianism, with growth bottoming out and debt mounting rapidly. Not even the current spike in oil prices can help stabilize the Russian economy as long as Putin continues to bang his head against Ukrainian fortifications in the Donbas. Russia’s loss of Starlink data has even enabled Ukrainians to seize back more territory in the last couple weeks than Russia has managed to grab.

Donald Trump, having failed to achieve his initial objectives, would be well-advised to agree to a ceasefire in Iran. But he, too, doesn’t meet that particular definition of sanity.

Trump continues to insist that his action in Venezuela should be the template for Iran. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, he is still looking for the Iranian version of Delcy Rodriguez, the Venezuelan leader he has coopted. He continues to call for Iran to surrender even as Tehran vows to revenge the assassination of its leader, the death of more than 1,200 citizens, and the destruction of its infrastructure. He hasn’t ruled out the introduction of ground troops (or the use of proxies if he can somehow convince the Kurds that America won’t abandon them yet again).

Meanwhile, the conflict isn’t even two weeks old, and the toll on Trump and the United States has been huge. Russia’s military reputation suffered enormously because of its inability to defeat Ukraine. So, too, has the Iran war revealed weaknesses in U.S. power such as the deficit in weapons necessary to sustain an effort of this scale, the imprecise targeting that produced the horrific bombing of an elementary school, and the general inability to dictate facts on the ground despite overwhelming force.

At home, polling suggests that a majority of Americans oppose the war. Even some Trump supporters who naively believed that their leader would focus on domestic issues rather than be drawn into a Mideast quagmire are furious, while others, particularly in Congress, simply look foolish for contradicting their previously held “anti-war” positions. Before gas prices started to rise, Trump was already having difficulty wrapping his mind around “affordability.” With war, tariffs, and lavishly funded ICE operations, Republicans are practically dead in the water on pocketbook issues with mid-term elections rapidly approaching.

None of that will push Trump toward compromise. At least Putin has deep ideological reasons—connected to the expansion of the Russian lebensraum—for insisting on his war aims in Ukraine. No one is really sure why Trump launched the war in Iran. He has thrown out lots of rationales in the hopes that one will pass the plausibility test—Iran threatened U.S. national security (no), the United States had to preempt Iranian attacks after Israeli strikes (what?!), Iran tried to assassinate him (a stretch), Iran has a nuclear program (true, but didn’t Trump also say that he’d destroyed it over the summer?).

The decision to attack probably came down to Trump’s desire to outdo all his modern presidential predecessors. During his first term, he focused on North Korea because a solution to the nuclear crisis there had eluded Obama. Now he wants to be the president who has done what his elders and betters could not do: restores U.S. dignity after nearly 50 years of humiliation at the hands of the ayatollahs.

Good luck with that.

The war in Iran has already become a regional conflict, with Israel attacking Lebanon, Iran launching missiles at targets in the Gulf States and beyond, and Shia militias in Iraq entering the fray. It could escalate if Shia communities rise up en masse in the Middle East and/or majority Sunni governments crack down. Iran’s “axis of resistance,” although weakened by the fall of Bashar al-Assad and Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah and Hamas, could still mobilize for a long-haul conflict, like the Iraq War insurgency on steroids.

It’s true that the Iran War has already generated major protests in South Asia. But with Russia and China pushing for a negotiated solution, the war is not likely to become a global conflict.

But World War III is not about a particular armed conflict. It’s about the assault on the international order by ruthless authoritarian leaders: Putin, Trump, Netanyahu. It’s the attempt to dismantle the structures that have maintained a very imperfect semblance of peace since 1945. The very mechanisms designed to prevent another world war—the United Nations, global trade mechanisms, the human rights architecture—are melting away.

A ceasefire in Iran is not out of reach. The pressure of Gulf states, the relative non-cooperation of European allies, the fracturing of the MAGA coalition, overall U.S. public opinion in the face of a worsening economy, and the continued resistance of the government in Tehran: all of these factors could lead to the end of the Iran War.

Ending World War III is a different matter. That will require defeating not just one autocrat but several. It will require remaking internationalism to the benefit of everyone who has been left behind by globalization. It will require a universal recognition of the huge costs of war, militarism, fossil fuel use, and immense concentrations of wealth.

World War II produced enormous suffering. But after 1945, the world was reborn.

World War III has produced comparable sacrifices so far in Ukraine and Russia, in Gaza and Iran, in Sudan and Myanmar. But it’s not too early to prepare now for the end of this latest global cataclysm.

FPIF, March 11, 2026

An elected leader who tries to seize absolute power through a military coup commits the most serious political transgression that can take place in a democracy.

In December 2024, Yoon Suk Yeol attempted just such a coup to overcome opposition in the National Assembly that he called “anti-state” and blamed for the country’s political paralysis. In the face of Yoon’s declaration of martial law, that same opposition was not at all paralyzed when it mobilized in defense of Korea’s democratic state. Once they made it past police barricades and into the parliament building, Korean legislators repealed the martial law declaration.

Yoon was impeached, removed from office, and arrested. A court in Korea recently sentenced him to life in prison.

Yoon is not the only elected leader who is sitting in jail after a failed coup attempt. In November, Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro began the 27-year-year prison sentence he received for launching a coup attempt to remain in office after his term ended. Since he is 70 years old, he is effectively serving a life sentence.

Some leaders, initially elected to office, have stayed in power through more gradual consolidations of authority. Vladimir Putin has been Russia’s top leader for more than a quarter century, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan has ruled Turkey since 2003. Nayib Bukele has been Salvadoran president only since 2019, but the 44-year-old changed the constitution so that he can be leader for life.

In contrast to Korea and Brazil, there is currently no accountability in Russia, Turkey, or El Salvador. The leaders there can act with impunity. They do not fear electoral recall or any penalties for wrongdoing. These countries are no longer fully functioning democracies.

Hungary has long been heading in the same direction. Since taking office (for a second time) in 2010, Viktor Orban has similarly amassed extraordinary power as the country’s prime minister. But his party is 20 percentage points down in the polls with an election coming up in April. It’s never too late for citizens to demand and achieve accountability.

And then there’s the United States.

Donald Trump also attempted to stay in office by overturning the 2020 elections. He didn’t call out the military—it wouldn’t likely have supported him—but he did try tamper with the election results and rally his supporters to disrupt the official confirmation of the election on January 6, 2021. In the aftermath of the Capitol insurrection, Trump was impeached a second time. He was not convicted.

However, he was convicted of another felony in 2024 (for trying illegally to influence the 2016 election). At that time, he was also under indictment and investigation for multiple other crimes, including his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. But then, in an extraordinary misfunctioning of democracy, American voters returned Trump to the White House in 2024.

America’s accountability problem didn’t begin with Trump. Confederate leaders were generally not punished after the Civil War—even Confederate president Jefferson Davis was never tried for treason. Over a century later, former president Richard Nixon never served time for his Watergate crimes. And only a single banker went to prison for the massive fraud that culminated in the financial meltdown of 2008.

Trump is just the latest in a series of rich men who have gotten off scot-free. Back in office, he is doing everything he can to further disrupt the mechanism of accountability and safeguard his own immunity from future prosecution.

Trump pardoned all of the January 6 rioters, even the ones convicted of serious crimes. He, his family, and his friends have profited enormously from their political positions, which in any other country would constitute criminal corruption. He has lavished funds on border protection forces that have acted above the law—killing three U.S. citizens and a number of undocumented immigrants—and that have functioned like a paramilitary answerable only to the president. Trump has also proposed changes in the election laws to make it more difficult for Americans to vote and less likely for the opposition Democratic Party to win in the mid-term election this November.

Trump has not yet overturned U.S. democracy. But he aspires to do so.

One issue above all has sown dissension among the ranks of his supporters: the Jeffrey Epstein files.

These files contain information about Epstein’s extensive network of friends and contacts. Many prominent people have lost their jobs because of their various associations with the convicted pedophile, who committed suicide in his jail cell in 2019. These include: former UK ambassador to the United States Peter Mandelson, former French culture minister Jack Lang, and former Norwegian premier Thorbjorn Jagland. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been stripped of his royal titles and arrested.

This is what accountability looks like. Not surprisingly, the Trump administration has not followed suit. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, despite having longstanding business ties with Epstein and lying about them, has not resigned.

Trump supporters—and many others—are upset that the administration hasn’t released all the Epstein files as the president had promised as a candidate. The unreleased materials might implicate more members of the administration, including perhaps Trump himself. Recently, a journalist discovered that information related to an accusation that Trump abused an underage girl has simply disappeared from the files.

Accountability is the life blood of democracy. It regulates the circulatory system by expelling poisons from the body politic. Political systems that lack such mechanisms become toxic: corrupt, violent, stagnant.

Having established a system of accountability after it left authoritarianism behind, Koreans were not eager to see Yoon resurrect the bad old days. Brazilians, too, had experienced dictatorship and thus worked hard to apply the accountability mechanisms to the renegade Bolsonaro.

Americans have never known dictatorship during the 250-year history of the country. This second Trump term is a test of just how durable American democracy really is. Beginning with the friends and facilitators of Jeffrey Epstein and then all of those who have aided the criminal acts of the Trump administration, Americans can break with history and finally put accountability into practice. If these deeds go unpunished, American democracy cannot possibly survive.

The choice is stark. Either the United States goes the way of Korea and Brazil by expelling the toxins from its body politic. Or it will become as sterile and authoritarian as Russia under Vladimir Putin.

Hankyoreh, March 4, 2026

The Supreme Court’s decision is clear. The president did not have the authority to impose most of his tariffs.

Trump argued that, under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, his actions were justified because of a national emergency caused by a foreign threat. In the 6-3 ruling, the Court said that, on the contrary, that Act provides Congress with that authority, which hadn’t delegated it to the president. The tariffs left standing are largely by sector: cars, semiconductors, steel.

Trump, like the infamous honey badger, don’t care.

The president immediately insulted the six justices who ruled against him, calling them “disloyal, unpatriotic” and “lapdogs…for the radical left Democrats.” Then he turned around and reimposed a global 15 percent tariff rate.

For a lot of countries, that new rate is actually an improvement. Mexico and Canada have faced higher tariffs, at least for products not covered under the existing US-Mexico-Canada Agreement. China, Brazil, and India will also benefit from the Court decision. But for countries that negotiated lower rates with the Trump team—Japan, Indonesia—it’s a slap in the face. That should teach them to made deals with the devil.

To justify his reassertion of tariffs, Trump is using another law, which establishes a ceiling of 15 percent and a 150-day limit before Congress can weigh in. No previous president has invoked this law to impose tariffs. For good reason: its provisions reference not a trade deficit but an “international payments problem” connected to fixed exchange rates and the gold standard, a world that no longer exists. As such, Trump is simply graduating from one illegality to another. It may not be long before Trump dispenses altogether with his misinterpretation of esoteric laws to sanctify his lawlessness.

A sensible president might have used the Court decision as an opportunity to jettison an unpopular policy and pivot toward “affordability” in the run-up to the mid-term elections in November, as his advisors have been urging. But that’s not Trump’s style. He almost always doubles down in the face of resistance.

And resistance there will be. The Court ruling opens up the possibility for companies to file suit against the U.S. government to recover costs associated with the tariffs. In his dissenting opinion, Brett “OG Lapdog” Kavanagh warned that this could usher in a “mess.” Perhaps Kavanagh slept through his econ classes at Yale, because the “mess” was already created by Trump’s chaotic approach to trade in the first place.

Trump’s intransigence will naturally interfere with a court-driven effort to restore a measure of predictability to U.S. trade policy. However, perhaps the Court decision—on top of other judicial setbacks Trump has faced—may well mark the high tide of the president’s overreach. Low approval ratings, pushback by some Republicans against Trump’s federal diktats, intimations of rebellion from countries like Canada: these are signs that guardrails are going back up to protect against a presidential monster truck gone amok.

The United States continues to run a huge trade deficit—in goods and services—of roughly $901 billion. There was a slight decline last year—of $2 billion—that amounted to a reduction of .2 percent—a far cry from the 78 percent decline that Trump has claimed. Worse, from Trump’s point of view, the deficit in goods—which his tariffs were supposed to target—went up 2.1 percent.

Okay, but hasn’t the United States pulled in a lot of revenue from these tariffs? With an effective rate of 11.7 percent—the average for the previous two years was 2.7 percent—tariffs brought in $194.8 billion in 2025. That’s not a small figure. It ends up in the same place as domestic taxes: the U.S. treasury. From there, Congress makes decisions regarding spending (which the Trump administration has, on occasion, unconstitionally ignored).

The more important concern is: who pays?

A majority of Republicans believes that foreigners pay the cost of these tariffs. They are just following the president, who argued this week in his State of the Union that “tariffs, paid for by foreign countries, will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax.”

However, since they apply to goods entering the United States from other countries, it’s actually American importers who pay the tax. That includes car manufacturers that are using foreign-made components, big retailers like Walmart that are selling foreign-made products, and service providers like FedEx that deliver goods across borders.

Ordinarily, U.S. companies will pass on the cost of tariffs to the consumer. And there has been an overall increase in inflation over the last year: an uptick of 2.7 percent in consumer prices in December 2025 from the year before. The rising cost of autos is a case in point. The average cost of a car hit a new record in December at just over $50,000. And that’s with car companies making the decision not to pass on to the consumer many of the additional costs associated with imported components. Companies are not likely to continue swallowing their losses in 2026.

It’s not just consumers who are paying for the tariffs in the form of higher costs. It’s also American farmers who aren’t selling their soybeans to China because of the reciprocal tariffs that Beijing has imposed. This year, crop farmers in the United States lost nearly $35 billion, though not all of that can be connected to tariffs. The $12 billion the Trump administration has pledged in agricultural assistance this year only goes part of the way to limit the damage.

The Supreme Court decision opens up the possibility for companies to sue the federal government to recover some of the costs inflated by the tariffs. According to economists at Wharton, the total could reach as high as $175 billion. If companies went after that full amount, that would leave only $20 billion of the tariff revenues in the federal kitty.

To get the issue to the Supreme Court, thousands of companies, including Costco, Revlon, and Goodyear Tires, had already sued the Trump administration. Ford says that it has lost $2 billion because of the tariffs.

The president imposed these tariffs in order to help American businesses. Those same businesses are saying pretty clearly, “no, thank you.”

FedEx is the first company to take the administration to the U.S. Court of International Trade after the Supreme Court ruling. This federal court, located in New York, already ruled against Trump’s tariffs back in May, with even Trump’s appointee to the court siding against him. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has also sent Washington a bill for $8.6 billion, the proceeds to be distributed to all of the state’s households.

Trump promised to run the country like a business. But he has more experience navigating bankruptcy than posting genuine profits.

The U.S. president is still exercising his erratic unilateralism in the global arena. He continues to threaten Iran with military strikes if it doesn’t bend to his will. He has encircled Cuba with a new embargo covering oil shipments. The Pentagon is still bombing alleged narcotraffickers in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, with six strikes this month alone.

But the Supreme Court decision is a sign that U.S. institutions are attempting to claw back authority from an overreaching executive. Some Republicans have pushed back against Trump’s insane moves to seize Greenland. CEOs and the Chamber of Commerce are starting to test the waters with mild criticisms of Trump’s economically destabilizing policies. Back in December, the Republican-controlled Senate in Indiana rejected the redistricting plan the Trump administration was trying to push down the state’s throat.

The president has abysmal approval ratings. But it’s not so much fear of public disapproval as of Trump’s retribution that has kept critics within his party and in the economic elite in line. Politicians prefer to retire—Marjorie Taylor Greene from the House, Thom Tillis from the Senate—rather than face the outpouring of hate and death threats that Trump unleashes when he wants you out of office.

Like most bullies, Trump backs down if confronted with comparable power and resolve. China played chicken with Trump over tariffs, and the U.S. president swerved out of the way. The power of the street in Minnesota forced the administration to reduce its ICE presence in the state. And some independent-thinking Republicans are standing firm—Lisa Murkowski from Alaska, Thomas Massie and Rand Paul from Kentucky.

Trump seems to be growing increasingly erratic. He has threatened Iran with not just a targeted attack but a rapid escalation. He has lashed out against his judicial allies (like Neil Gorsuch on the Court). Rather than deal with all the backlash against his heavy-handed approach to the Kennedy Center programming, he decided just to close down the center “for repairs.”

The president’s attention-deficit problems are legendary. His unlimited capacity to insult people goes all the way back to his youth. But his most recent tirades seem to be tinged with desperation, like the tantrums of a child who can’t get out of the crib no matter how much it screams and shakes its rattle.

It’s not as if Trump will mature into the job of president. He is, after all, already well into his second childhood. The only solution is to take away his toys before he hurts himself and everyone else. The Supreme Court has shown the way.

FPIF, February 25, 2026

A mere 15 years ago, during an epoch that now seems as distant as the Paleozoic era, an American president attempted to use military power to prevent a dictator from slaughtering his own citizens. Barack Obama billed the action in Libya as a humanitarian intervention, citing the new U.N. doctrine of “responsibility to protect” (R2P). The president hoped to avert a massacre by Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi rather than, as usual, coming in afterwards to count the dead and try to bring the malefactors to justice.

Obama intervened like a global police officer, following the letter of the (international) law. Eager to be seen as a “good cop,” the president even promised to “lead from behind.” It’s impossible to know if the U.S.-led action did indeed prevent massive war crimes. However, the disastrous aftermath of that Libyan campaign — the summary execution of Qaddafi and a civil war that would kill tens of thousands — was yet more evidence that Washington’s attempts to police the world are quixotic at best.

Public support for the Libyan action was decidedly mixed, with criticism of the president coming from all sides of the political spectrum. On the left, former Congressman Dennis Kucinich thundered that “we have moved from President Bush’s doctrine of preventive war to President Obama’s assertion of the right to go to war without even the pretext of a threat to our nation.” Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation complained that Obama was too scrupulous in his adherence to the principles of R2P, which might only raise the bar for future U.S. interventions.

Ah, the good old days, when the left and the right both took international law seriously enough to argue over how a U.S. president should engage with it!

Donald J. Trump has shown no such scruples. He considers international law nothing more than a trifling impediment by which the weak try to drag down the strong. He boasts that he didn’t even bother to consult the U.N. when pursuing his trumped-up peace plans and creating his laughably ill-named “Board of Peace.” He certainly didn’t consider international law recently when he bombed Nigeria, seized Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, and threatened to annex Greenland. He may be the first American president to treat international law as if it were as fictional as intergalactic law.

By contrast, the only principle that Trump now invokes in his foreign policy is the infamous law of the jungle. He believes that power — its threat and its exercise — is all that matters for apex predators like the United States (and himself). The rest is just the chittering of potential prey.

“My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” the amoral Trump told the New York Times in a recent (and terrifying) interview. “I don’t need international law.”

Global cop, then, would not seem to be a suitable aspiration for the likes of Donald Trump. Unlike Obama, he’s not interested in making sure that laws are observed and miscreants punished. Instead, Trump practically fawns over the miscreants: Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman. The duties of policing the planet — both the adherence to law and the expenditure of resources — simply don’t appeal to him.

“We’re spending tremendous amounts of money for decades policing the world, and that shouldn’t be the priority,” Trump said back in 2018. “We want to police ourselves and we want to rebuild our country.”

That was the old Trump. The new Trump looks at things quite differently.

Maybe when you hear the expression “world’s policeman,” you think of Officer Clemmons on the once-popular children’s TV show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: a genial upholder of community morals, but on a global scale.

Or maybe you’re like former NATO head Anders Fogh Rasmussen who, in 2023, pined for an upright world policeman with superpowers and lofty principles. “We desperately need a U.S. president who is able and willing to lead the free world and counter autocrats like President Putin,” he wrote. “The world needs such a policeman if freedom and prosperity are to prevail against the forces of oppression, and the only capable, reliable and desirable candidate for the position is the United States.”

Donald Trump doesn’t want either of those jobs.

But let’s face it, that’s not how a large number of police officers actually operate. In 2025, police across the United States killed 98 unarmed people, the majority people of color. The misconduct of more than 1,000 dirty cops in Chicago — ranging from false arrests to the use of excessive force — cost that city nearly $300 million in court judgments between 2019 and 2022 alone, a pattern repeated at different magnitudes across the country and still ongoing, given the recent ICE killings in Minneapolis.

Elsewhere in the world, the police suppress dissent and fill prisons at the behest of dictators from Russia and North Korea to Saudi Arabia and El Salvador.

In democracies, the police break laws, often with impunity; in autocracies, they follow unjust laws while systemically violating human rights.

A globocop embracing that kind of outlaw justice would disregard international law, make a mockery of institutions like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, and attempt to establish alternative bodies that privilege the powerful. That’s exactly the kind of police officer that Donald Trump aspires to be, wielding power not on behalf of principle but in the service of personal gain and autocratic control.

The United States has long been tempted to play good cop/bad cop with the world. President Trump is simply taking things to the next distinctly psychopathic level.

The first American president to dream of raising his country to the status of world policeman was Teddy Roosevelt. As a former police commissioner of New York City, he ardently believed that the federal government needed to use its constabulary power to intervene in society to maintain order, including suppressing labor unrest.

At the international level, like Trump, Roosevelt articulated his vision as a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In a 1904 address to Congress, he laid out his vision this way:

“Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”

Roosevelt believed that the United States — and other major powers — had to step in to right wrongs in the absence of robust international institutions. He proposed a global “League of Peace” to prevent wars and end conflicts. In the meantime, according to his problematic take on “civilized” behavior, Roosevelt justified U.S. interventions not only in the Western hemisphere but also farther afield. In fact, Roosevelt won a Nobel Prize for his mediation of the Russo-Japanese War where, in a secret agreement, he gave Japan control of Korea in exchange for U.S. control over the Philippines.

Trump has borrowed much from Roosevelt in his approach to global affairs, now aptly known as the Donroe Doctrine. The “League of Peace” has become Trump’s “Board of Peace.” Roosevelt’s interventions in the Western Hemisphere to keep out European powers have become selective moves to push out the Chinese and (less so) the Russians in Venezuela and elsewhere. Roosevelt’s “civilizing mission” has become an equally abhorrent commitment by the Trump administration to advancing the interests of White people, as in the preferential treatment of White South Africans when it comes to immigration to this country. Like Roosevelt, Trump considered a “spheres of influence” swap with Russia, exchanging Ukraine for Venezuela, before ultimately rejecting the deal.

By now, all of America’s historical justifications for acting as the world’s policeman have fallen away, including the assertion of self-determination (Woodrow Wilson), the mobilization against fascism (Franklin Delano Roosevelt), the crusade against communism (Harry Truman et al), and all talk of global democracy and human rights (the post-Cold War-era presidents). Trump has instead quite openly embraced Teddy Roosevelt, big stick and all, along with Roosevelt’s tendency to link the suppression of conflict at home and abroad. In Donald Trump’s world, ICE agents killing protestors Renée Good and Alex Pretti, and Special Forces kidnapping Nicolás Maduro are two sides of the same impulse: the use of constabulary force to extinguish dissent and maintain a pyramidic order nationally and hemispherically, with Donald Trump on top of it all.

Like Roosevelt, Trump showed no regard for the principles of sovereignty in his intervention in Venezuela. Roosevelt didn’t think Filipinos were civilized enough for self-government and Trump, by insisting that Greenlanders must submit to U.S. control, repeats the colonialist pattern. Trump’s major innovation: speak loudly and carry that big stick.

The trajectory of the world order over the last 75 years has been in the direction of safeguards for weaker nations and controls on the exercise of power by stronger nations. An elaborate system of international agreements governing human rights has been designed to protect individuals and groups from the predations of states and corporations.

Trump wants to reverse that trajectory, just as he wants to roll back all the gains social movements have made within the United States, from civil rights and feminism to the victories of the LGBTQ community.

In TrumpWorld, those with the guns make the rules. They take Crimea, Gaza, and Greenland—at gunpoint, if necessary.

Corrupt cops have long been involved in protection rackets, shaking down gambling establishments, prostitutes, and drug dealers. Trump, a shady businessman at heart, thrills to that side of the globocop business. All of his “peace deals” cut him or his cronies in on a piece of the action.

Take, for instance, last year’s deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan. It includes a “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” that connects Azerbaijan with its enclave of Nakhichevan. In addition to naming rights, Trump negotiated as part of the agreement a TRIPP Development Company to construct the corridor, with the United States owning 74% of its shares for the first 49 years.

There’s no word yet on who the members of the U.S.-Armenian steering committee will be for that project. If Gaza is any indication, however, it will be yet one more goodie to be distributed to friends and CEOs through Trump’s patronage system. The Gaza peace deal established a Board of Peace whose executive committee is dominated by Trump cronies, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, diplomatic emissaries Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, billionaire businessman Marc Rowan, and Trump security advisor Robert Gabriel.

An even more audacious profit-seeking deal was his recent multipoint proposal to end the war in Ukraine. In it, Witkoff and his Russian counterpart imagined a scenario in which U.S. businesses would profit by gaining access to frozen Russian funds for the reconstruction of Ukraine, while also making billions from restarting business relations with Russia. Again, it’s not difficult to imagine who would profit from such arrangements. After all, Jared Kushner, architect of the Abrahamic Accords that normalized diplomatic relations between Arab countries and Israel, became a billionaire thanks to contacts in and investments from the Gulf States.

Trump is all about extraction. If he has his way, the Venezuelan operation will net billions of dollars in oil revenues for major U.S. companies. Similarly, his obsession with Greenland is driven, at least in part, by his lust for the reputed mineral wealth that lies beneath that giant island’s snow and ice. The United States is dependent on imports of critical minerals, many now controlled by China. Like a cop who eyes the riches generated by someone else’s protection racket, Trump is desperate to muscle in to grab some of the profits.

Perhaps the most vulgar expression of his desire to run a global protection racket is that Board of Peace of his. Countries that want to have permanent seats on it have to pony up a billion dollars apiece. Warmongers like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates are welcome as members as long as they’re willing to fork over the money. On the other hand, Canada has been banned from it because, in a speech at Davos, its prime minister, Mark Carney, tried to rally the globe’s middle powers against the United States and other rule-breaking great powers.

Originally established to administer the Gaza peace deal, the Board seems to have much greater ambitions. As its “president for life,” Trump has promised to cooperate with the United Nations. But the Board’s membership, with the United States first among unequals, suggests a rival body with no interest in abiding by international law. Think of it as the UN’s evil twin and its creation as a signal that the United States has officially gone rogue cop.

Not everyone in the MAGAverse is happy with America as a globocop.

Some isolationist remnants of the Republican Party have criticized the operations in Venezuela, though not enough to make a difference in Congress. Marjorie Taylor Greene, once Trump’s greatest congressional advocate, parted ways with the president on a number of issues, including the Venezuela intervention, and decided to step down early from her position rather than face his political vengefulness.

Trump has insisted that, the attacks on Venezuela’s sovereignty notwithstanding, the United States is not at war with that country. He ruled out any alternative interpretations of MAGA doctrine. “MAGA is me,” he said. “MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too.”

Trump has made some noises about a spheres-of-influence approach with his Donroe Doctrine, prioritizing U.S. control over the Western hemisphere. He has been happy to reward Russia for its “policing” of neighboring Ukraine, and he’s been ambiguous at best about coming to the defense of Taiwan, should China threaten it. Indeed, he has been more than happy to delegate such responsibilities to others, whether it’s Israel in the Middle East or acting president Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela. In a complex world as full of nukes and conventional missiles as the United States is of handguns, globocops need their deputies.

However, neither isolationism nor the idea of global spheres of influence has truly captured Trump’s imagination. In the first year of his second term, he has instead driven a stake through the very idea of isolationism by launching military operations in Venezuela, Nigeria, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Syria. Nor has he shown any deep interest in confining his ambitions to the Western hemisphere. Instead, he has continued to build the Pentagon budget to counter China, while fancying himself a peacemaker across the Global South. Wherever his critics continue to dance beyond his grasp, as in Cuba and Iran, and wherever valuable resources can be extracted for personal and political gain, as in Greenland and the Congo, Trump will try to press any military advantage he might have.

For all of us who found fault with the “good cop” approach of Obama in Libya — and there was much fault to be found — it’s once again time to get a taste of America as the “bad cop.” So far, Trump’s targets have been weak (Venezuela) or easy to attack (Iran, after Israel destroyed its air defenses). The grave danger is that, encouraged by such “successes,” Trump may move on to larger targets like China or the 60% of American citizens who oppose his policies.

Cops, protected by their badges and their guns, often think they’re invincible. Taken to court over their crimes and corruption, they suddenly discover that they’re not in fact above the law. Trump is now turning the United States into a “bad cop.” Let’s hope that he learns a lesson about the limits of his power before he goes apocalyptically rogue.

TomDispatch, February 18, 2026

By some measures, the Palestinian bid for statehood has never been stronger.

By the end of last year, at least 157 countries had recognized the state of Palestine, which represents slightly more than 80 percent of the world’s nations. Some of those countries are quite powerful, such as China, India, Indonesia, the UK, France, Australia, and Russia. Palestine is a member of the International Criminal Court, UNESCO, the Group of 77. A Palestinian delegation has competed in every summer Olympics since 1996.

The Palestinian Authority, which functions as the closest thing to an internationally recognized government, has even prepared a draft constitution that would, if it passes a referendum, formally transform Palestinian lands into a state.

And yet, the territory that could be included in such a state is disappearing like sand in an hourglass. What’s happening today in both Gaza and the West Bank is a deliberate effort by the Israeli government to change the facts on the ground and make any “two-state solution” a territorial impossibility.

Palestine is disappearing in another sense as well. What was once a unifying goal for countries in the Middle East—siding with the powerless in an effort to create a state—has been replaced by an overriding desire to make deals with powerful countries, the United States chief among them. In the scrum of Donald Trump’s mano a mano diplomacy, Palestinians simply don’t have the leverage to gain a meaningful position.

As Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney memorably stated in Davos last month, if you’re not at the table in these carnivorous times, then you’re on the menu.

Gaza has been reduced to 61 million tons of rubble. According to the UN Development Program, it will take seven years just to clear away the debris. It’s hard to create a homeland when 92 percent of homes have been damaged.

It’s not just buildings. Much of the area’s infrastructure lies in ruins. Water, sewage, electricity, roads: these bare necessities weren’t in great shape before the recent war. Now Gaza has become a hellscape.

Still, structures can be rebuilt. Palestinians could return and, if given a significant helping hand, even flourish.

At the moment, however, the Israel military occupies over half of Gaza. It has continued to kill Palestinians—over 500 since October 10—that it accuses of violating the ceasefire. And the Yellow Line, meant to be a temporary feature of the ceasefire dividing the Israel army from Hamas, is becoming more like a semi-permanent border.

Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, according to the three-stage peace plan, is predicated on the disarmament of Hamas. But the Palestinian militants have shown no willingness to give up what may well be their only form of leverage—the arms they retain that can strike at Israeli cities.

As a result, the development plans for the reconstruction of Gaza—either as a zone for Palestinians or a luxury resort for vacationing oligarchs—are on hold. A transitional authority of 15 technocrats has been formed, with a former Palestinian Authority minister in the top post, but it hasn’t entered Gaza or started functioning (though it did announce the recent opening of the Rafah crossing to Egypt). There is no international stabilization force on the ground to enforce the terms of the ceasefire.

Meanwhile, the Israeli far right has attempted to cross into Gaza to realize a long-held dream: the resettlement of the region.

It was two decades ago that the Israel government, bowing to the demographic reality that Israeli Arabs would eventually outnumber Israeli Jews, withdrew from Gaza and prepared the ground for Palestinian self-government. Israelis faced shocking pictures of their government physically removing Jewish settlers from their Gaza houses. The far right has long desired to reverse that decision.

The far-right activists who last week climbed a fence to enter Gaza and plant trees, before being returned across the border by Israeli soldiers, are not isolated kooks. Reports Haaretz:

Ministers and lawmakers from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party said they would take part in a tree-planting event organized by the Nachala settlement movement, in which posters shared on social media call for “no surrender to Trump’s dictates, no to an international Gaza, yes to a Jewish Gaza!”

The Israeli far right is still only dreaming about Gaza. It is making its dream a reality in the West Bank.

The West Bank contains some of the most iconic Palestinian areas, including the cities of Hebron, Ramallah, Jenin, and Bethlehem. There is also east Jerusalem, which many Palestinians consider the capital of a future Palestine even though Israel has occupied the area since 1967.

The Oslo Accords in the 1990s divided the West Bank as a temporary measure into three zones: A, B, and C. The first is under Palestinian control, the third under Israeli control, and Zone B is jointly administered, though all three were eventually supposed to fall under Palestinian governance. In addition to all the territory it controls in the West Bank, the Israeli government has also supported the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian land where 700,000 Israelis live in 250 settlements.

Israeli authorities have long demolished Palestinian homes in the Israeli-controlled Zone C. But now the government has authorized the destruction of Palestinian homes in A and B as well. Over the course of its war in Gaza, Israeli forces also killed over 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank, detained over 20,000 people, and displaced more than 30,000 people.

The Israeli authorities have long fragmented the West Bank with walls and checkpoints. But the government has recently gone even further—thanks, in part, to Donald Trump.

Since the 1990s, Israel has planned a housing development east of Jerusalem called E1. The plan, which was held up for years by U.S. pressure, cleared the Israeli courts over the summer once Trump removed U.S. objections. The development is now up for construction bids. The plan calls for 3,401 housing units and a road that will effectively cut the West Bank in half.

Lest you think that any description of E1 as an instrument of apartheid is an overstatement, consider this statement by Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich. “Those in the world trying to recognize a Palestinian state will get an answer from us on the ground,” he has said. “Not through documents, not through decisions or declarations, but through facts. Facts of homes, neighborhoods, roads and Jewish families building their lives.”

E1, he continued, would “bury the idea of a Palestinian state.”

Israel, like the United States, is a settler state. The Palestinians, like Native Americans, face a future of limited sovereignty, fragmented land holdings, and “land acknowledgements” on behalf of people who have disappeared from the land.

Unlike some stateless people—the Roma, the Kurds, the Rohingya—international opinion overwhelmingly favors statehood for the Palestinians. But even that support has withered where it matters most—the Middle East.

The Abraham Accords that the Trump administration pushed in its first term was designed to solidify diplomatic recognition of Israel at the expense of Palestinians. Even Saudi Arabia was on the verge of recognizing Israel while removing its longstanding demand for Palestinian statehood. The attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023 disrupted that process (and was likely a major reason for the timing of the action).

Today, Saudi Arabia is no closer to recognizing Israel. Israel’s attack on Hamas leadership in Qatar last year revived Gulf opposition to Israel and support for Palestinian statehood, all the while undermining its faith in U.S. assurances. However, Saudi Arabia and the other Arab countries that have joined Trump’s Board of Peace are falling back on another position that effectively prioritizes economic over political benefits for Palestinians. Gulf money will flow to rebuild Gaza, but the status quo will likely remain unchanged: no Saudi recognition of Israel and no Israeli recognition of a Palestinian state.

The problem for the Palestinians is that the regional order has been disrupted, and not in their favor. Iran, once a major supporter of both Hamas and Hezbollah, has lost its regional allies and is struggling to suppress dissent at home and fend off U.S. threats from abroad. It has little muscle left over to push for Palestinian statehood. Its ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah, pummeled by Israel, agreed to a ceasefire last November. According to the Lebanese government, however, Israel has continued its attacks, violating the ceasefire 2,000 times in the final three months of 2025. Israel continues to occupy five villages in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah poses no threat to Israel.

Syria had an off-and-on-again relationship with Hamas under Bashar al-Assad. The new Syrian government supports Palestine, but it is also preoccupied with holding the country together and working out a new security understanding with Israel. Egypt and Jordan, home to large Palestinian communities, have consistently supported Palestinian ambitions, if only to encourage Palestinians to return to their lands. But they alone cannot persuade either Israel or Hamas to change their positions.

The Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, like the Russian government of Vladimir Putin, has refused to back away from its maximalist position: destruction of Hamas, creeping annexation of the West Bank, and prevention of any Palestinian state. Elections in 2026 might bring new leadership to Israel but a fragile opposition coalition shares Netanyahu’s rejection of Palestinian statehood. So does about 70 percent of the Israeli public.

Palestinians face a very narrow path to statehood. They can hope to achieve some compromise on Hamas demilitarization—with the group giving up their rockets but retaining small arms and some disguised role in the administration of Gaza—alongside pressure from the international community to stop Israel from fully taking over the West Bank. With time perhaps, Palestinians can recuperate and rebuild.

Here, they can take some inspiration from Native Americans who have successfully regained control of some of the lands taken from them. “There was a time when it was questionable whether our people were even going to survive,” Native American Rick Williams told me recently. “In 1900, there were only 250,000 American Indians left in North America, and we were expected to become extinct by 1913. But we’ve continued to survive. We’ve continued to grow.” Today, there’s somewhere between 3.1 million and 8.7 million Native Americans, a more than tenfold increase.

Palestinians have shown similar resilience in the face of unimaginable adversity. They, too, may one day soon have a successful landback movement. But in the push for an independent state, it must be Palestinians—not Donald Trump, not Saudi Arabia, and certainly not Israel—who are the architects of their own future.

FPIF, February 11, 2026

China has been nipping at the heels of the United States for a quarter of a century. By some measures, the size of the Chinese economy exceeded that of the United States about a decade ago. China has a huge trade surplus thanks to the fact that it is the leading trade partner of 145 countries (about 70 percent of the world). Although the U.S. military remains globally dominant—based on extraordinary expenditures and state-subsidized research—China’s military power has been growing and now bests that of the United States in some fields, like size of navy.

At the level of society, China puts the United States to shame in terms of level of public transportation, bridges and tunnels, and other amenities. China’s high-speed Internet connectivity is much greater than the United States. Eight of the top ten universities in the world according to scientific output are Chinese.

And it’s not just Beijing or Shanghai. Dan Wang, a Canadian technology analyst, writes of his visit to Guizhou province: “China’s fourth-poorest province, I was surprised to see, had much better levels of infrastructure than one could find in much wealthier places in the United States, like New York State or California.”

China has also been investing a lot into soft power, moving up from a rather lowly eighth position in 2020 in the Global Soft Power Index to the number two spot in 2025. If you haven’t seen the movie Nhe Zha 2 or played the video game Black Myth: Wukong or bought a Labubu, then you haven’t experienced Chinese influence. But it’s capturing the imagination of your friends and your kids.

China possesses one quality above all that has put it on this upward trajectory. It is consistent—or, at least, it has been consistent since the 1990s and the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests. With the advantage of economic planning and a ruthless determination to suppress political opposition, the Chinese Communist Party has taken the country from the wild vicissitudes of the Mao era to the predictable equilibrium of the current era.

Planning, predictability, expansion of soft power—these hallmarks of current Chinese governance are the complete opposite of Donald Trump’s approach to politics and economics. And this is why 2025 will mark the turning point in the relative power of the two countries.

China isn’t just eating our lunch. The Trump administration is preparing the meal and delivering it all the way to Beijing on a silver platter.

If the Chinese had managed to install a real Manchurian Candidate in the White House, it couldn’t have done a better job than Donald Trump.

The first thing Trump did was eliminate U.S. soft power. He zeroed out U.S. humanitarian assistance, leading to the death so far of hundreds of thousands of people. He cut back on U.S.-positive messaging like radio broadcasts through Voice of America and defunded programs in the sciences and the arts that showcased American talent abroad and encouraged collaboration with U.S. counterparts.

Next, he made it super-difficult to come to the United States. The administration suspended immigrant visa processing for 75 countries. It raised the cost of the H-1B work visa from a couple thousand dollars to $100,000. And forget about achieving refugee status unless you’re a white South African.

With a punishing series of tariffs, Trump has pushed countries to diversify their trade portfolio. It has become more expensive to sell goods in the U.S. market, so countries are looking for other buyers. By politicizing tariffs, making them contingent on for instance accepting administration policies around deportation, the administration has further alienated allies. The sheer unpredictability associated with U.S. economic policy—Trump’s tariffs, Trump’s “chickening out”—has added more stress to trade relations that require at least a measure of stability.

Finally, there’s been Trump’s blithe disregard for international law. His threats to take Greenland, by military force if necessary, was the last straw for a lot of governments. If Trump was willing to go to war with NATO allies, the United States could not be depended upon for anything. Europe is boosting its independent military capacity. So are Japan and South Korea. No one trusts the United States any more.

All of this unpredictability has had its effect on the U.S. dollar, which has plummeted in value. Huge government budget deficits, which contribute to a massive overall debt, contribute to the problem. But the “Trump factor” is driving the recent downturn, as David Lynch explains in The Washington Post:

But perhaps the key to the dollar’s drop is the ripple effect of the president’s erratic policymaking, including abrupt stops and starts with tariffs and military action against a lengthening list of countries. After more than a year of nonstop upheaval emanating from the White House, many foreign investment managers are exhausted.

Even the most even-tempered of allies have had it with Trump and his tantrums.

Mark Carney, Canada’s otherwise straight-laced prime minister, delivered a shot across the U.S. bow at the World Economic Forum earlier this month.

“We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically,” he told the audience in Davos. “We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”

Canada, like many countries, is not sitting back and watching the rupture happen.

By visiting China just before the meeting in Davos, Carney made clear that other, less stressful, options exist. The trade deal—Canada reducing tariffs for about 50,000 Chinese EVs and China reducing duties on canola—is relatively modest in size. But it is huge in significance. The United States has made a bipartisan push to keep Chinese electric cars out of North America. The Trump administration was making noises about using the U.S-Mexico-Canada Agreement—the successor to NAFTA—to circle the wagons against China. Carney’s visit to Beijing effectively raised a middle finger to Washington.

It’s not just trade. In December, Canada joined the European Union’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) program, an effort to reorient military spending away from dependency on U.S. contractors. Carney said that participation in SAFE would provide Canadian defense companies “tremendous opportunities” in a “dangerous and divided world.” Ordinarily such a phrase might refer to U.S.-Russian or U.S.-Chinese rivalry. But Carney also had in mind the border dividing Canada from the United States.

You’ve been arrested along with your two friends. All three of you are held in separate cells. The police officer visits you in your cell and offers you a deal. If you implicate your two friends, they’ll go easy on you.

You’re tired and scared. But you have enough presence of mind to know that this scenario is being repeated in the other two cells.

So, what do you do? If all three of you refuse to make deals with the authorities, there’s a good chance you’re all go free. But you can’t call your friends to find out what they’re thinking. You have to make a decision in the dark.

This is the “prisoner’s dilemma.” The Trump administration is effectively holding the world hostage with its erratic trade and security policies. So far, each country has decided to make deals with Trump out of fear that they will be punished.

But countries are not prisoners in cells without the ability to communicate with one another. Carney has publicly declared that there are other options for middle powers. In response to his threats to take Greenland, European leaders threatened retaliation of their own. Even the European far right, previously Trump’s greatest fans, has realized that the U.S. president is a huge liability, given his widespread unpopularity across the political spectrum in Europe.

What is lacking so far is a determined collective response to the Trump administration. China is quietly taking advantage of all the opportunities that Trump is throwing its way. Canada and the European Union are increasingly coordinating their economic and security policies. Other countries are diversifying their portfolios to reduce dependence on U.S. trade and financial decisions.

There’s not enough common ground among these diverse actors to create an anti-Trump bloc. But they could put together an alliance in defense of at least a minimal adherence to international law. That could save some of the essential parts of the rules-based order with regard to such things as sovereignty, maritime security, and even some basic human rights.

The optimal solution to the prisoner’s dilemma, after one round, is the selfish one—make a deal and forget about your friends. But if you run a simulation across multiple rounds, the case for cooperation and solidarity among “prisoners” becomes stronger.

Trump, the bully, has so far successfully pushed his “tit-for-tat” strategy. Only now, as the world heads into more rounds of engagement with an erratic United States have countries begun to explore other, more useful strategies. China has billed itself as the more responsible partner, and it’s a compelling argument. Meanwhile, Beijing continues to feast on the lunches that Trump is delivering on a daily basis.

FPIF, February 4, 2026