Trump’s pursuit of Greenland is becoming increasingly unpopular: Denmark, Greenland, many NATO allies, and even some Republican lawmakers are in direct opposition. Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, said there is a “fundamental disagreement” with the Trump administration after he and his Greenland counterpart met with JD Vance and Marco Rubio at the White House on Wednesday. “Ideas that would not respect territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Denmark and the right of self-determination of the Greenlandic people are, of course, totally unacceptable,” Rasmussen continued. But they agreed to try to “accommodate the concerns of the president while we at the same time respect the red lines of the Kingdom of Denmark.” Some GOP senators criticized the Trump administration’s actions toward Greenland on Wednesday.  “I have yet to hear from this Administration a single thing we need from Greenland that this sovereign people is not already willing to grant us,” Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said in a speech on the Senate floor. “The proposition at hand today is very straightforward: incinerating the hard-won trust of loyal allies in exchange for no meaningful change in U.S. access to the Arctic.” A bipartisan group of senators also introduced a bill on Tuesday to prevent Trump from using Defense Department or State Department funding to occupy, annex, or otherwise assert control over Greenland without congressional approval.  “The mere notion that America would use our vast resources against our allies is deeply troubling and must be wholly rejected by Congress in statute,” Sen. Murkowski (R-AK) said in a statement. Earlier on Wednesday, in a Truth Social post, the president insisted that NATO should be “leading the way” to help the US get Greenland, otherwise Russia or China would take the island. He added that the US getting Greenland would make NATO’s military might “far more formidable and effective.”  Following the meeting, Trump repeated the importance of acquiring Greenland for national security and to protect the territory and the Arctic region: “There’s not a thing that Denmark can do about it if Russia or China wants to occupy Greenland, but there’s everything we can do.” But as former American military and diplomatic officials told the Wall Street Journal in a Monday report, the US already has a dominant group of overseas military bases—121 foreign bases in at least 51 countries—without taking over other land. There is also no evidence of a Russian or Chinese military presence just off Greenland’s coast.  In response to pressure from the Trump administration, Denmark’s defense ministry announced an increased Danish military presence—including receiving NATO-allied troops, bringing in ships, and deploying fighter jets—in and around Greenland, noting rising “security tensions.”  “Danish military units have a duty to defend Danish territory if it is subjected to an armed attack, including by taking immediate defensive action if required,” Tobias Roed Jensen, spokesperson for the Danish Defense Command, told The Intercept, referencing a 1952 royal decree that applies to the entire Kingdom of Denmark, including Greenland. Denmark’s defense ministry confirmed that the directive is still in effect.  Sweden Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said Wednesday that several officers of their armed forces would be arriving in Greenland that same day as part of a multinational allied group to prepare for Denmark’s increased military presence. Germany will send 13 soldiers to Greenland on Thursday and Norway’s defense minister said they have already sent two military personnel.  The Trump administration’s threats make all of these moves necessary.

Phillip Abram, a Jewish Bondi resident, places flowers at a growing memorial near Bondi Beach following the Bondi Hanukkah terror attack.James West/Mother Jones

Last year, a US district court sentenced Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking. Orlando was convicted of accepting millions of dollars in bribes and importing 500 tons of cocaine into the United States, where he was extradited after completing his second presidential term in 2022. The Biden administration’s Department of Justice considered the Hernández conviction a victory. “As President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández abused his power to support one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world, and the people of Honduras and the United States bore the consequences,” wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland in a statement last year. “The Justice Department will hold accountable all those who engage in violent drug trafficking, regardless of how powerful they are or what position they hold.” > “I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan > Orlando Hernandez, who has been, according to many people that I greatly > respect, treated very harshly and unfairly.” That is, until this week, when President Donald Trump abruptly pardoned Hernández in the midst of a tumultuous Honduran election. “I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. The pardon came during the same week that US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was facing scrutiny for his role in lethal strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats, and Trump accused Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro of “narco terrorism.” So why would an administration hell bent on punishing drug traffickers pardon a kingpin like Hernandez? Some have argued that this could simply be a way to make trouble for the left- wing successor to Hernández, the current Honduran president Xiomara Castro, who has been a strong critic of Trump’s mass deportations. In a recent thread on X, right-wing extremism researcher Jennifer Cohn unearthed an article from January that Trump’s longtime adviser Roger Stone—the convicted and now pardoned felon and political strategist—wrote with conservative commentator Shane Trejo. They suggested that Trump pardon Hernández as a way of trolling Castro: > Castro’s statements in recent weeks in defiance of President Trump’s proposal > of mass deportations have raised her profile and caused enmity to build > against her from the ‘America First’ right. Castro’s provocations of President > Trump, a desperate attempt to rally Hondurans to her side in an election year, > may backfire and prove to be her undoing as Trump has quite a bit of leverage > at his disposal to upend her fledgling regime. But they went further in elaborating the benefits of this strategy. In helping to unseat Castro, Stone and Trejo wrote, Trump could both “crush socialism and save a freedom city in Honduras.” The “freedom city” in question, they explained, was Próspera, a special economic zone founded in Honduras by a cadre of American tech titans including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen—both friends and fans of Trump family. While Hernández strongly supported Próspera, his successor, Castro, spoke out against the project, which she saw as merely a shelter for foreign actors to undermine Honduran sovereignty and to skirt labor and environmental regulations they may face elsewhere. Last year, the Honduran Supreme Court declared special economic zones like Próspera unconstitutional, a move that Stone and Trejo described as “a starkly political maneuver.” Próspera is an example of the tech-right concept of the network state, a phrase coined by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan. I wrote about it earlier this year: > In a 2021 essay on his website, Srinivasan laid out his vision for people > seeking to build a new utopia or, as he put it, “a fresh start.” Sure, there > were conventional ways to do this—forming a new country through revolution or > war. But that would be, well, really hard, not to mention unpredictable. A > cruise ship or somewhere in space were appealing options, but both presented > ­logistical challenges. Far simpler and more practical was “tech Zionism,” > creating an online nation, complete with its own culture, economy, tax > structure, and, of course, startup-friendly laws. > > Eventually, Srinivasan mused, such a community could acquire actual physical > property where people would gather and live under the laws dreamed up by the > founders—a “reverse diaspora,” he called it—but that land didn’t even need to > be contiguous. “A community that forms first on the internet, builds a culture > online,” he said, “and only then comes together in person to build dwellings > and structures.” Acknowledging that the idea might sound a little goofy—like > live-action Minecraft—he emphasized that it was also a serious proposition. > “Once we remember that Facebook has 3B users, Twitter has 300M, and many > individual influencers”—himself included—“have more than 1M followers,” he > wrote, “it starts to be not too crazy to imagine we can build a 1-10M person > social network with a genuine sense of national consciousness, an integrated > cryptocurrency, and a plan to crowdfund many pieces of territory around the > world.” > > > A network state would, like a kind of Pac-Man, gobble up little pieces of > actual land, eventually amassing so much economic power that other nations > would be forced to recognize it. Once that happens, laws in more conventional > nations could become almost irrelevant. Why on earth would, say, a > pharmaceutical company with a new drug choose to spend billions of dollars and > decades on mandated testing when it could go to a deregulated network state > and take it to market in record time? As Srinivasan argued in a Zoom talk at > last year’s conference, “Just like it was easier to start bitcoin and then to > reform the Fed,” he said, “it is literally easier to start a new country than > to reform the FDA.” Trump has expressed some interest in this idea; on the campaign trail, he proposed building “freedom cities” on federal land. Still, it’s not entirely clear why the American president would care so much about saving a special economic zone in Latin America. That is, until one takes a look at Próspera’s Trump-aligned investors. That list includes Paypal’s Thiel, a Trump campaign donor who also is said to have played a key role in the selection of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate. Another prominent Próspera investor is venture capitalist Andreessen, who made significant campaign contributions to Trump and has also served as an adviser. Both Andreessen and Thiel have investment companies that benefit from government tech and defense contracts awarded under Trump. At any rate, Stone appears to be taking a victory lap for having engineered the pardon. “Thank you, President Trump, for doing justice and granting the presidential pardon in the case of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was framed by Biden for an alleged drug trafficking that never existed,” he posted last week. “For a long time, I have advocated for a pardon in this case.” Indeed, as he put it in his January article: > Castro’s regime could be upended and Honduras liberated without firing a > single shot or deploying a single troop in what would be a massive strategic > victory for US interests in the region. May the Próspera experiment prevail, > the common good be saved, and global leftism be damned by the benevolent hand > of President Trump!

In a rare instance of bipartisan alarm, Republican-chaired committees in the House and Senate announced that they have launched inquiries into an explosive Washington Post report alleging Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had given a spoken order to “kill everybody” aboard a vessel carrying suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean. The occupants included two people who had survived an initial missile strike on the vessel and were seen “clinging” to the wreckage. “We take seriously the reports of follow-on strikes on boats alleged to be ferrying narcotics in the SOUTHCOM region and are taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question,” the leaders of the House Armed Services Committee said in a joint statement on Friday. “The Committee has directed inquiries to the [Department of Defense], and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances,” leaders in the Senate Armed Services Committee said. The September 2 attack kicked off what has now been nearly two dozen attacks, killing at least 83 people, who the US military claims, without evidence, had been attempting to smuggle drugs into the US. The attacks, which President Trump justifies as a part of an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, have been likened to extrajudicial killings. Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona told CNN on Sunday that Hegseth’s actions, as reported by the Post, appear to be a war crime. “If what has been reported is accurate, I’ve got serious concerns about anybody in that chain of command stepping over a line that they should never step over,” Kelly said. “We are not Russia. We are not Iraq. We hold ourselves to a very high standard of professionalism.” Kelly is locked in a related battle of words with Hegseth after Kelly participated in a social media video with five other Democrats seeking to remind members of the military that they can “refuse illegal orders.” Hegseth has blasted the Post’s reporting on the missile strikes as “fabricated.” “As usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland,” he wrote on X.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Despite historic environmental rollbacks under a president who pulled the United States from a key international climate treaty—and recently called global warming “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”—US civil society groups say they are gearing up to push for bold international climate action at a major UN conference next month. “This is a really important moment to illustrate that Trump does not represent the entirety, or even anywhere near a majority, of us,” said Collin Rees, US program manager at the environmental nonprofit Oil Change International, who will attend the annual UN climate conference, known as Cop30. The negotiations will take place in the Brazilian city of Belém near the Amazon delta. It is expected to convene delegations from nearly every government in the world to discuss the implementation of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Trump, who began the process of pulling the US from the Paris accord on his first day in office, is not expected to send a delegation to the negotiations. But hundreds of US activist organizations are planning to attend, despite widespread logistical challenges and high accommodation costs in a region with limited tourist infrastructure. “Yes, the federal administration has changed radically…but the actual US climate movement is still here,” said John Noel, senior strategist at Greenpeace International who formerly worked on the US team. The conference will take place amid growing awareness that the vast majority of the world’s population—as much as 89 percent, according to a recent study—want more to be done about the climate crisis but mistakenly assume their peers do not. In the US, the world’s largest historical emitter, three-quarters of those surveyed said their government should do more. But Donald Trump has pushed the country in the opposite direction. The Trump administration’s anti-climate stance puts it out of step with many governments around the world who have realized that environmental action can deliver economic benefits. More than 100 countries, for instance, have been able to cut back on fossil fuel imports thanks to renewable energy growth, which has in turn enabled them to save $1.3 trillion since 2010, according to the International Energy Agency. The expansion of wind, solar, and other carbon-free power sources has also created millions of jobs. And many global south countries are upping their sales of electric vehicles, which lower fuel and maintenance costs. “There are different trends showing that the rest of the world is still working towards getting their economy more resilient for a more prosperous future, and that prosperous future cannot happen without taking into account the climate,” said Yamide Dagnet, the Washington DC-based senior vice-president of international work at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Unlike the US, other countries are also showing an increasing interest in international climate negotiations. Colombia last month offered to host the first-ever International Conference for the Phase-Out of Fossil Fuels in April 2026, after countries pushing for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty called for such a meeting. At Cop30, climate activists will work to support governments that have undertaken such action and push more officials to follow suit. And they will aim to highlight local- and state-level climate action taking place in the US, such as the successful fight for laws requiring polluters to pay climate damages in Vermont and New York last year. “We want to put a spotlight on those ‘polluter pay’ mechanisms, and highlight that they are winnable and that other states are considering them,” said Noel. “And Cop presents a good opportunity to market those solutions.” The Trump administration is urging the courts to strike those policies down, and though it will not officially participate in November’s UN negotiations, climate groups say the administration may also try to pressure countries not to take ambitious international climate action. It’s something officials did as recently as last week: The US derailed the enactment of a global carbon fee on shipping at an international maritime meeting as Trump called the scheme a “Global Green New Scam” on social media. Washington also threatened to impose sanctions and visa restrictions on nations that supported the deal. “If there’s a real inflection point and the US sees fossil fuel interests as somehow being constrained, it’s not hard to imagine that there’ll be some type of statements from the administration trying to color the negotiations from afar,” said Noel of Greenpeace. The US worked to block strong international climate policy long before Trump entered office. It refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol in 1997, and more recently has underfunded international climate finance, opposed language to phase out fossil fuels, and worked to obstruct requirements to phase out fossil fuels. Since re-entering the White House in January, Trump has placed dozens of fossil fuel allies in his cabinet. He has also waged broad attacks on climate and energy policies, as well as renewable energy expansion, despite data showing most Americans support the energy transition and the growth of carbon-free power. And the president has taken steps to dismantle climate research by an array of US agencies, something recent polls show is highly unpopular, even with Republicans. Trump officials have also shown animosity for multilateralism. During the negotiations, activists will be on high alert for a potential announcement that the president intends to remove the country from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, a 1992 treaty serving as the structure for intergovernmental climate policies. But in Belém, said Noel, US-based campaigners plan to “reassure our global comrades and colleagues that there’s still a robust movement in the states to maintain pressure around various forms of climate action.” That will entail putting pressure on global leaders to commit to ambitious emissions reduction and climate adaptation schemes with vigorous and realistic plans to achieve them. “We’ve got to show the rest of the world that the administration’s assault on the climate is unpopular,” said Jean Su, energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity, who will attend Cop30. “The United States…has always been a bad faith actor when it comes to climate action, and the biggest blocker of meaningful progress,” said Rachel Rose Jackson, a research director at Corporate Accountability. “It has walked away from doing its fair share time and time again; the only difference now is that its bad intentions are on public display for all to see more clearly.” Jackson said she expected that even without an official delegation, the US will still have its “tentacles all over the UN climate talks,” working on the sidelines with other participants such as the EU and Canada to “orchestrate their great escape from climate action. And it still controls the purse strings.” US campaigners can provide an important counterweight to that kind of pressure, activists say, from both the halls of the official Cop30 negotiations and from the demonstrations expected nearby in Belém. The protests are expected to be the largest seen at any Cop conference in years. “Those actions can help put pressure on negotiators,” said Rees. “And they can also help build people’s movements, build power and confidence to go back to national capitals and provincial capitals or state level capitals and continue that advocacy from the bottom up.” Su, of the Center for Biological Diversity, said Cop30 provided a “powerful” opportunity to show the world that climate action is not only necessary, but also popular. Though activists are under no illusions that the negotiations will be the “pinnacle of democracy,” she said they would be an important time to exercise the right to free assembly—something guaranteed in Brazil and the US alike. As experts—and the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—warn that the US and other countries are creeping toward authoritarianism, Cop will allow activists to push for “people power,” Su said. “During this dark turn,” Su said, “this type of physical collective showing humanity couldn’t be more important.”

On Friday, the Trump administration escalated its military presence in the Caribbean and South America by announcing the deployment of an aircraft carrier group to the region. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave the green light to send the USS Gerald R. Ford—described by the US Navy as “the most capable, adaptable, and lethal combat platform in the world”—to “bolster US capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities,” according to the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson. Also on Friday, Hegseth said the United States had carried out yet another military strike on a boat in the Caribbean Sea, killing six people on board. He alleged that the vessel was operated by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which the Trump administration has designated a terrorist organization alongside drug cartels. It has accused Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro of controlling the criminal group and enabling the smuggling of drugs into the United States. Since September, the administration has conducted at least 10 attacks against alleged drug boats, including in the Pacific Ocean. As many as 43 people have been killed so far. The expanding campaign, which legal experts have warned violates international law and amounts to extrajudicial killings, has raised alarm in Latin America, worsening tensions between the Trump administration and leaders in the region, and reviving the specter of American meddling and intervention in other countries. Reacting to news of the deployment of the world’s largest aircraft carrier, Maduro charged the administration with “fabricating a new war.” Speaking last month at the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York, Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro condemned the attacks and called for an investigation into President Donald Trump and other US officials involved in the strikes. “Launching missiles over two people in a small boat is a war crime,” Petro told CBS News this week. In response, Trump described Petro as a “bad guy” and a “thug.” On Friday, the war of words escalated into action, as the administration imposed sanctions on the Colombian president and his family, claiming that he had allowed drug cartels to flourish. “What the US Treasury is doing is an arbitrariness typical of an oppressive regime,” Petro fired back on social media. The country’s interior minister, who was also targeted for sanctions, had strong words for the White House. “For the US, a nonviolent statement is the same as being a drug trafficker,” Armando Benedetti wrote on X. “Gringos, go home.” > “For the US, a nonviolent statement is the same as being a drug trafficker.” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has also opposed the Trump administration’s strikes. “Obviously, we do not agree,” she said of the military campaign during a recent press conference. “There are international laws on how to operate when dealing with the alleged illegal transport of drugs or guns on international waters, and we have expressed this to the government of the United States and publicly.” As the Trump administration escalates the military build-up in the region to become the largest in decades—ostensibly to fight trafficking and stop the flow of drugs to the United States—government officials have, internally, clarified the goal of the campaign: to force Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of power. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has accused Maduro of being the leader of a narco-terrorist organization and “responsible for trafficking drugs into the United States.” In a recent interview with the AFP, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s adviser Celso Amorim expressed concerns about what a potential direct military intervention in Venezuela to topple Maduro could mean for the rest of the region. “We cannot accept an outside intervention because it will trigger immense resentment,” he said. “It could inflame South America and lead to radicalization of politics on the whole continent.” President Lula, who is expected to meet with Trump in Malaysia over the weekend, indicated to reporters on Friday that he could bring up the issue in conversation with his American counterpart. “If this becomes a trend,” he said, “if each one thinks they can invade another’s territory to do whatever they want, where is the respect for the sovereignty of nations?”

In March, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, glanced at his phone and couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He’d been inadvertently included in a secret chat on Signal among the Trump administration’s national security team about imminent military strikes in Yemen. The Signal chat leaks—which inevitably became known as “Signalgate”—called into question President Donald Trump’s national security team and how it handled top secret information. Many of those same officials oversaw recent military operations against Iran and its nuclear facilities. Few journalists have seen how the administration operates from the inside out better than Goldberg. He says those Signal chats revealed something about how he believes Trump’s officials view their jobs, especially Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. “I almost felt like, at a very basic level, he was showing off for the vice president, who was also in the chat,” Goldberg says. “The thought I had was, ‘Dude, you don’t have to cosplay being secretary of defense. You are secretary of defense.’” He adds that while it was happening, he didn’t “contemplate just how amazingly stupid the whole thing was.” On this week’s More To The Story, Goldberg sits down with host Al Letson to reflect on the Signal chat leaks, fears of World War III, and what truly worries him about the future of US democracy. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe. This interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: So after the US bombed Iran, I’ve seen all over the place that people feel like this could be the beginning of World War III. What are your thoughts? Jeffrey Goldberg: Yeah, I see that and I read it. I just, no one’s explained to me how this leads to World War III yet. That is not to say that things can’t spin out of control in the Middle East. The Middle East, the only constant in the Middle East is sudden and dramatic change, so something can go off the rails even as we’re speaking. There’s a larger point, and sorry to give you this lengthy answer, but I actually think that we’re in World War III and we’ve been in World War III since the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago. And by that I mean, when you have a situation in which Russia, aided by North Korean troops and Iranian drones and supported diplomatically by China, is invading a neighboring country that is supported by Western Europe and until today at least, the United States, that seems like a low-grade world war. Right? It’s controlled, it’s conventional, it’s mostly done through proxies, at least from the western side it’s done through proxies. But we’re having all of these eruptions all the time now, and the world is not at peace because the major powers are battling it out through proxies and in other ways. I think what has been a little bit surprising for me with this new front or change in the Middle East when it comes to Iran and Israel, is seeing that some people on the right are really against American intervention with Iran. And I’m thinking specifically about Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. I saw her saying that she thought that this was going to become a nuclear war. And then you’ve got Tucker Carlson who really grilled Ted Cruz and brought his thoughts to the forefront. I don’t know, I just did not expect to see that happen. I’m going to go deep here for a second and I’m going to argue against the idea that Americans don’t like wars. I think Americans are fine with wars as long as they’re short wars that we win. Agree. So I think, look, one of the differences and I just wrote a piece about this. I covered Barack Obama and as foreign policy, national security policy in depth so I know something about that and I know something about Donald Trump. Barack Obama was interesting because he would study the second and third and fourth order consequences of actions America could take, and that would frequently paralyze him into not taking any action. Remember, the Syrian red line controversy is a good example. Donald Trump, I don’t think understands intellectually the idea that there’s consequences to actions, right? And so they’re wildly different. And so when you have somebody like that, like Donald Trump, who doesn’t really ask analytically, what could happen down the road if I do X or Y or Z? You’re really rolling the dice. I think maybe more than any journalist, you have seen up close the incompetence of the Trump Administration. And obviously- Oh, I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t know. I mean, you were added to a top secret group chat about a bombing. I think I would stand by my statement just because of that. Okay, maybe yes, in the sense that it was coming in on my phone. Yes, it was very close. Yes, I would say that- I was getting a firsthand glimpse. I’m not going to argue the point. How much confidence do you have in this team? And I’m talking about Secretary of Defense Hegseth, I’m talking about Trump, I’m talking about all the people that are around these decisions. How confident are you in their ability to execute a plan and to protect American lives? I have confidence in, let me put it this way, the General in charge of Central Command, General Kurilla, who oversaw this operation, highly competent. There’s a lot of competent people still in government. I have no confidence in Pete Hegseth’s management or analytic or moral capabilities. Marco Rubio is a mystery to me because I knew Marco Rubio a bit and I was an admirer of his brain and many of his policy ideas and now he’s completely done one of these invasion of the body snatchers things where he’s just whatever Trump says is the thing. Trump himself tweets or Truth Socials or whatever the verb is for posting on Truth Social, a kind of goading text about Russia and its nuclear capabilities. And I worry about Trump’s understanding of the way the national security systems of autocracies work. And I worry that, I mean, it would be the greatest irony of them all, it would be sort of a, that’s a hell of a way to destroy the planet if the planet were eventually destroyed because Donald Trump put something on Truth Social that was misinterpreted by a nuclear armed enemy of the United States who felt as if they had to respond by escalating. I don’t think Donald Trump wants a nuclear war. Donald Trump has actually been very interesting on the subject of nuclear war and warfare in general. And as you know, he’s not very much into generally speaking into foreign adventures, or at least he’s said as much. I worry that he doesn’t have the self-restraint, maturity, analytic ability, and today the advisors to keep us out of an escalatory cycle with a major power. Iran is a minor power, but I’m talking about China and Russia, North Korea to some extent because they already have nuclear weapons. So that’s what I worry about. You want somebody in that office who’s not impetuous and who is not reactionary. I don’t mean reactionary in the political sense, I mean reactionary in the characterological sense, is easily poked, somebody who’s chill. I mean, if you remember, he was goading the leader of North Korea, this was eight years ago. Little rocket man, and my button is bigger than your button. It’s like, you don’t have to spend years in grad school studying nuclear weapons doctrine to know that ridiculing and threatening people with nuclear weapons is not a great idea. And so if the question is how worried I am that this is the man in charge of our nuclear weapons, and remember, even though we are a democracy, the President of the United States is an absolute nuclear monarch. The President of the United States can use a nuclear weapon when he wants to. So I don’t feel great about the match of the responsibility that the president has and this particular person in the role. The foreign power that I think about, the conflict that could be coming, I worry a lot about China and Taiwan and how President Trump would respond to any aggression from China towards Taiwan. And I mean, because I don’t know if you can say that this administration has a definable foreign policy, because you can’t really tell what they’re going to do from one day to the next. I wonder, all bets are off the table if China moves in on Taiwan. Yeah, that’s interesting. By the way, there’s an argument to be made that a president who is unpredictable is useful, in terms of managing adversaries. Sure. It’s known in foreign policy is the crazy Nixon approach. Kissinger would tell the Russian, “Look, I understand what you’re talking about, but my boss, he’s a little bit nuts. We don’t know what he is going to do.” The problem with that is for the crazy Nixon approach to work, the president can’t actually be crazy. It seems to me that this administration, specifically this president, if you whisper sweet nothing’s in his ear and find a way to get money into his coffers, aggression seems to go away. Yes, and, I mean, the Iranians didn’t try, to be fair. So, we don’t know. Right, I mean, the joke in the first term or at least the joke that I heard was that either the Trump presidency ends with Trump bombing Iran or building a casino in Tehran. You don’t know, right? You don’t know which way anything’s going to go. On the Taiwan issue, I would ask you what you think because I have no idea of knowing whether when push comes to shove, Donald Trump would go and defend Taiwan or not. He’s a very transactional person. He wants to do business with China on the one hand, he sees China as an adversary, as another. Does he care who runs Taiwan? No. He cares who’s in control of the smooth flow of semiconductors out of Taiwan into American manufacturing facilities. Right? So I don’t know what he would do. On the one hand, he’s transactional quasi isolationist so he doesn’t seem to be the sort of person who’s going to commit US bodies, meaning soldiers, to a fight to defend Taiwan. On the other hand, he’s very reactive, like we were talking. And so maybe he would be like, “China doesn’t get to do that. Only I get to do that sort of thing, so I’m going to go defend Taiwan.” I don’t know. Do you have any insight into it? I have zero insight into it. I think the thing that I think about a lot is that there’s two paths, right? There’s a path that he says, “I don’t really care, as long as we get the superconductors, who cares?” There’s the other path where maybe China has a little bluster in their step and says something like challenging the United States, then anything could happen at that point. So, who knows? Yeah, that’s what I mean about someone who is emotions based in these situations. Right. No, I mean, if you’re Taiwan, if you’re Poland, if you’re the Baltic States, you have to be asking, especially with the Europeans because he obviously has a softer spot for Putin than he has for Xi. If you’re the Europeans, you have to say, “I don’t know if this guy’s going to actually come in and save us if we need saving.” But on the particular issue of Hegseth and Signalgate, obviously what I saw coming over my phone was to some degree a group of people, mainly Hegseth, cosplaying at running the country and running the national security apparatus of the country. This is why they were sort of putting things on Signal like, “The bombers leave at whatever.” And you know what the thought I had when I was seeing it? The thought I had was, dude, you don’t have to cosplay being Secretary of Defense. You are Secretary of Defense. You are. Right, exactly. You are. We’re good, we’re good. We’re good. I got it, you’re cool. You got all the bombers, that’s great. You don’t have to show… I mean, I almost felt like at a very basic level, he was showing off for the Vice President, who was also in the chat, and I was like, oh, this is not… You just want people in government, the people who have life-and-death responsibilities to be calm, cool, a lot of cool is necessary, mature, analytic. They don’t take things personally, they’re not getting tattoos to show how cool they are. You want smooth professionals who aren’t looking for glory, they just want to do their job because they believe that they have a responsibility to their country. Where were you and what did you think when you realized exactly what was happening? Well, I didn’t realize what was happening until it was happening. What happened was I got a connection request from Mike Waltz who, despite what Mike Waltz later said, I do know, I have met, my phone number would be in his phone. That’s not an impossible thing. And so I sort, oh, wow, Mike Waltz wants to chat, I haven’t talked to that guy in a long time. Maybe he wants to open up a channel, that’s great. So I accepted it and then the next day or two days after that, I was added to the, I think PC Houthi Small Group, it was called. And I thought, oh, this is somebody’s punking me. This is obviously some kind of scam. And then it continued in that vein until the actual messages about the bombing started coming in and I thought, well, if this is real, then we’re about to see some bombing in Yemen. And sure enough, it was real. And this is a couple of months ago already, and when I do think about it, it still seems absurd because I was in the middle of this. And it’s not that common, as you know, for a reporter to be part of the story in the way that I became part of that story for a week. So in the middle of that swirl, I didn’t really contemplate just how amazingly stupid the whole thing was. What are the chances of that happening, right? And that goes back to your original question, which is, are these guys good at their jobs? In this case, they weren’t very good at their jobs. No. Why did you decide to take yourself out of the chat? You are making an assumption that I was making decisions alone. All I can say is that I had a great number of very, very skilled lawyers assisting me through this process because none of them had ever seen anything like this before. And so the prudent course of action was to remove myself from the chat, and obviously we thought that that would trigger… When you leave a Signal chat, the rest of the people on the chat are told that you’ve left the Signal chat. So we were expecting all kinds of high jinks to ensue. They didn’t because it seemed like nobody noticed that I had left the chat. What I would say is, apart from various legal exposures and all the rest, I didn’t want to be in that chat. I have to be honest with you. I want to know as much as I can about the decision-making process and the arguments and the strategy of the United States National Security Complex. I do not as a civilian want to know when the bombers are taking off, from what base they’re taking off, what ships are firing, what missiles at what targets. I don’t want to know. I am not qualified to have that information, I don’t think it’s the place of a journalist to have that. I’m happy to find out later, but I don’t want specific tactical information to be coming to me. And not just because of all the exposure that that would open up, open you up to all kinds of Espionage Act issues. I don’t need to know what kind of gun the soldiers are using. Well, it’s also a heavy responsibility, right? I mean- That’s what I mean. It’s not my… that’s not what I- Yeah, I don’t want to know that. I don’t want to know that, and I have no problem with this. I’ve gotten into this argument subsequently. It’s like, what is your role as a journalist in these kind of circumstances? And for some people, for a lot of people, by staying in the chat at all and writing about it, I was a traitor and I was violating something. I don’t know what I was violating. To them I say, “Look, my job is to figure out what powerful people are doing on our behalf.” And so if they wanted to invite me to the chat, I’m in the chat and I’m going to tell the readers of The Atlantic what’s going on. There are some people who’ve said, “You should stay in the chat forever and then report out immediately what they’re attacking.” And it’s like, look, I’m an American journalist, right? I’m a patriotic American, I’m not doing anything. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to do anything that endangers the lives of another American. So, what went into your decision to publish the chat? Well, there are two phases. One, I wasn’t going to. A lot of the stuff, as you know, seemed to me to be obviously classified, secret information. What kind of missiles, when they’re going to leave, when they’re going to land, who they’re targeting, etc, etc, etc. What I did with all that information is along with colleagues, we measured the question of publishing, what benefit would become from publishing that specific information and what harm could ensue? So I willingly held back information that I thought was operational because it’s not my interest to provide operational details to stated sworn adversaries of America. And remember, the Houthis slogan is, “Death to America, death to the Jews, or whatever.” I’m like all the categories, right? I mean, death to left-handed Yankees fans. I’d be like, oh my God, they really know me. And so, I have no interest in sharing that kind of information. They come out and call me all kinds of names and say that I’m lying and that there was nothing in the chat that was secret. And so they actually kind of weirdly forced my hand. So we spent the day after the first story appeared, vetting again the information that I had that I had not published, and making sure that no American would be harmed by the publication of that information. And then we went to all the different agencies and said, “Look, this is what I’m going to put in The Atlantic tomorrow. If you can make a compelling case why I shouldn’t publish this, make it now.” The CIA came back and asked that we not publish one specific thing about a specific person and I said yes, because my interest is not harming that specific person. Other than that, they were like, “Nope, we’re not raising objections.” So then I published it. They could have had this become a two-day story by simply saying, and look, this is what an ideal administration or even a normal administration might’ve done. They might have said, “Oh, wow, that was a doozy. We really shouldn’t have been communicating on Signal. From now on we’re not going to communicate on Signal anymore and we’re going to investigate how this happened and investigate how this journalist was brought in.” And for whatever reason, their impulse was to attack me and say that I’m lying and call me a scumbag and call me… I mean, Mike Waltz literally called me a loser. And the funniest part of that is that I didn’t ask you to send me all this stuff. Right, you, you added me. I was literally, I mean, was literally sitting in a supermarket when I got off. I was shopping and I’m getting all this stuff, and it’s like, well, you could call me a loser but at least I know how to text. Right, right. I think in normal times though, it wouldn’t just be, we’re not going to use Signal again. It would be, we’re not going to use Signal again and someone’s going to be held accountable. We’re going to fire somebody. And really, that didn’t happen here. This administration just kind of doubled down and said, “Jeff is stupid,” and that’s where it ends, Jeff was stupid. No, but here’s a serious thing and anyone who is active duty military or works in the intelligence community who’s listening to this or any veteran is going to understand what I’m saying immediately. You can get in serious trouble if you’re a soldier for revealing the fact that you’re in a truck moving from X base to Y base, right? You can get into trouble for… The government over classifies, let’s stipulate that, they classify everything. But let’s also stipulate that there’s some stuff that’s worth classifying, making secret. There are so many soldiers who’ve been punished, including jail time, for revealing things that are so much less serious than the stuff that was revealed in the Signal chat. And what I heard from non-political rank and file soldiers, veterans, etc, was, “I would’ve gone to jail for that. These guys don’t even lose a day’s pay, but I would’ve gone to jail.” And that hypocrisy, let’s talk about what leadership is, right? That on the part of Pete Hegseth, Mike Waltz, etc, that is not modeling good leadership for the people who report to you. Yeah. Are you scared for this country, where we are right now? In my mind, we’re either experiencing a midlife crisis, a nervous breakdown, or a terminal illness. I know we’re going through something. We’re going through something. Social media, reality TV before it and the coming AI, it created a situation in which one of these things could happen. I don’t even know if democracy can survive in an age of social media, that’s a large question for another day. But I literally don’t know if we’re going through a thing where it’s like, all we need to do is buy a sports car and we’re going to be fine, or we just need a little bit of rest and relaxation and maybe some drugs and we’ll be fine, or if the American experiment is under such pressure that maybe it doesn’t make it. I would note, colleague of mine, Yoni Appelbaum has noted this in writing in the past, that there’s never been this sort of experiment before in human history. A large, very large, multi-ethnic democracy has never flourished before over the long term. And I do think that introducing social media and conspiracism and the fakery of AI and all the rest has really affected our ability to keep it together. But I just don’t know. Obviously, I’m hoping for the best. I do think that America’s a great country. I think that we’re an indispensable nation. I think we are a force for good more than we’re a force for bad in the world, especially when you look around the world and see what actually is out there. I’ve got kids, I want them to live in a flourishing country, but I don’t know where we’re at. I do know this. I do know that passivity in the face of outrage is not going to get us anywhere. And I do know that there are some people who believe that as long as we shovel enough cheap calories at Americans and multifarious forms of entertainment, we’ll keep them quiet and quiescent. And I think that people need to really contemplate what we have and what our system is and think about ways to make it better and not just let it get destroyed by people who don’t care about our democratic experiment. Sorry, I didn’t mean to start giving you a big speech there, but I really feel this. I feel like there’s a lot of passivity right now about things. I agree with you. I think passivity, and I think that in a lot of ways, so many things, social media, the media we consume, all of it brings us further away from our humanity. And I think that- Look at the way people talk to each other in this country. Exactly, the way we talk to each other. Also, the fact that we’ve just lost touch with having empathy for people who aren’t in our immediate circle, and- Well, this goes to my exact point. It’s like, you know what? You know what I call MAGA supporters? Americans. I want them to call us Americans too. I want people to look at journalists as patriots and not as traitors. I want people to operate within the boundaries of decent behavior and self-restraint, because we’re going to be living here together no matter what, so it might as well work.

When President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social on Saturday that the United States had bombed three sites in Iran, he spoke to a MAGA-verse divided. Many of his most ardent supporters—former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, for instance, and far-right political activist Laura Loomer—applauded his decision. But others—including media personality Tucker Carlson, hard-right commentator Candace Owens, and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon—were against the bombing from the beginning. “A bombing campaign against Iran will set off a war, and it will be America’s war,” Carlson warned his 16.4 million followers on X in March. “Don’t let the propagandists lie to you.” The political fight seemed to boil down to a battle between those who believed that the United States had a responsibility to its foreign allies and others who saw Trump’s decision as a betrayal of his “America First” campaign promise. But there is another dynamic propelling the deepening rift within the MAGA faithful. Underlying the divide over intervention in the Middle East is not geopolitics but a substantial theological schism within the community of Christian nationalists, and their belief about the “end times,” or the imminent end of the world. Broadly speaking—though there are certainly exceptions— many of the most ardent supporters of Trump’s decision to bomb Iran identify as Christian Zionists, a group that believes that Israel and the Jewish people will play a key role in bringing about the second coming of the Messiah. As Christians, they are called to hasten this scenario, says Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies (ICJS) in Baltimore and author of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy. “The mission, so to speak, is to get the Jews back to Israel and to establish themselves within Israel,” he says. “Then you fulfill the preconditions, or one of the preconditions, for the second coming.” During his first term, Taylor noted, Trump made strong connections with influential figures in the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic Christian movement that teaches followers to take “dominion” over all aspects of society, including government. Over the last decade or so, Christian Zionism has become an important part of NAR theology—so much so that during worship, some adherents now wear Jewish prayer shawls and blow shofars, the ram’s horn instruments that ancient Israelites used to call troops to battle and still features in some Jewish holidays. This is an example of what Taylor refers to as philosemitism—the idea of loving Jewish customs and cultures. But within end-times theology lurks a dark side to Christian Zionists’ fixation on Judaism. Once the Messiah arrives, many Christian Zionists are convinced that the Jews will convert en masse to Christianity; in many versions, those who don’t convert will perish. “If you actually read up on antisemitism and philosemitism,”  Taylor says, “they really are two sides of the same coin.” > “If you actually read up on antisemitism and philosemitism, they really are > two sides of the same coin.” Even before the bombs were dropped that Saturday, Christian Zionists were hailing a possible strike as divinely ordained. One of their most prominent and politically powerful adherents is former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who currently serves as the US ambassador to Israel. On a podcast last year, Huckabee described himself as an “unapologetic, unreformed Zionist,” adding, “there really isn’t such a thing” as Palestine. He refers to the West Bank exclusively by its biblical name, “Judea and Samaria.” In the Jerusalem Post’s list of the most influential Christian Zionists, Huckabee comes in second. He follows former Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who recently helped launch an Israel institute at Regent University, a Christian college in Virginia Beach, Virginia. On June 18, three days before the United States bombed Iran, Huckabee texted President Trump, comparing him to “Truman in 1945,” who was faced with the existential decision of whether to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “God spared you in Butler, Pennsylvania, to be the most consequential president in a century, maybe ever,” Huckabee wrote. “I believe you will hear from heaven and that voice is far more important than mine or ANYONE else’s.” Hours before news of the bombing broke, Lance Wallnau, an influential Texas NAR leader, with robust ties to the Trump administration—last year he hosted a Pennsylvania campaign event for JD Vance— warned his 129,000 followers on X, “Satan would love to crush Israel, humiliate the United States, destroy President Trump’s hope of recovery for America, and plunge the world into war.” But then he reassured them, “That’s not going to happen. Why? I was reminded again just a few moments ago what the Lord told me about Donald Trump in 2015.” He explained that he had received a message from God that Trump was a “modern-day Cyrus,” an Old Testament Persian king whom God used to free the Jews, his chosen people. On his YouTube channel two days after the bombing, Wallnau concluded that the prophecy was coming true. “Jesus is coming back, and I believe this is all part of him setting the stage for his return,” he said. In Trump’s speech shortly after the bombing, he appeared to give a presidential nod to the Christian Zionist crowd, saying, “I want to thank—in particular—God. I want to just say, ‘We love you, God!’” In those words, some evangelicals thought they heard an affirmation of a common Christian Zionist refrain: “God will bless those who bless Israel.” Eric Metaxas, an evangelical radio host who has collaborated with Wallnau and was present at the rally leading up to the January 6th attack on the Capital, tweeted to his 240,000 followers, “Trump was obviously choked up & meant it,” he wrote. “No president has ever said anything like that. An extraordinary & historic public declaration of faith. God WILL bless this nation. Hallelujah.” Taylor noted that another NAR leader, the Colorado evangelist Dutch Sheets, had a similar message for his 359,000 YouTube followers on Monday. “We are entering this time,” he said. “Millions of [Iranians] will come to Christ. Be assured: God is involved in this war.” A key figure in the campaign to overturn the 2020 election and the leadup to the January 6th attack on the Capital, Sheets has long held that Trump is a divinely appointed leader. The Heritage Foundation, the powerful right-wing think tank that was the driving force behind the Project 2025 roadmap for Trump’s second term, also celebrated the Iran strikes. A particularly vocal Heritage staffer on this issue is Victoria Coates, vice president of the group’s Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy. Coates, a Christian, leads Project Esther, Heritage’s roadmap for quashing the pro-Palestine movement in the United States; the name is a reference to Queen Esther, a biblical heroine who saved the Jews in Persia from slaughter. Coates is also the author of the 2023 book The Battle for the Jewish State: How Israel―And America―Can Win. In a statement the Heritage Foundation released the day after the attack, Coates made the case that by bombing Iran, the United States actually progressed toward ending the age-old conflicts in the Middle East. “Now that Iran’s self-defeating dreams of nuclear military power have been decimated,” she said, “we are closer to peace.” Unlike the Christian Zionists, some Christian members of the crowd that criticizes Trump’s decision to bomb Iran believe modern-day Israel has little to do with the Holy Land of the Bible. In fact, some of them hold that the Christian church now plays the role that Israel itself once did in ancient times, explains Taylor, the religion scholar. He explains the dynamic as more of the absorption of Jewish and Gentile Christians into a single church unit, which then becomes “a kind of replacement theology” in which Christianity supersedes Judaism and “replaces it.” One group that strongly rejects the idea that Israel and the Jewish people are key to the second coming is the TheoBros, mostly millennial, extremely online men who proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Great fans of Trump, in the wake of the US bombing, some of the TheoBros’ comments have veered into the terrain of antisemitism. The day after Trump announced the bombing, Stephen Wolfe, author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, tweeted to his 31,000 followers, “2% of the population demand 100% of the wars,” presumably an oblique reference to the roughly 2 percent of the American population who identifies as Jewish. (Wolfe did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.) The same day, Texas pastor Joel Webbon, another Christian nationalist TheoBro, weighed in, tweeting to his 39,000 followers, “Gentile Christians are not second class citizens of heaven, and Jews aren’t special.” On a Monday airing of his podcast, he clarified that his disdain for Israel did not amount to tacit support for Muslims, using slurs as he referred to adherents of that faith. “I’m not a fan of sand demons and the sand people who worship them, and I’m also not a fan of the synagogue of Satan.” Later in the same episode, he said, “My son is not going to go to war and bleed out and die for my country, with its gay rainbow flag, defending Judaism and Christ-rejecting, hating, spitting-on-Christians Israel, no sir.”   > “My son is not going to go to war and bleed out and die for my country, with > its gay rainbow flag, defending Judaism and Christ-rejecting, hating, > spitting-on-Christians Israel, no sir.”   One of the loudest critics of the Iran strikes is right-wing media personality and erstwhile Trump fan Tucker Carlson—and on this issue, he has clashed dramatically with the Christian Zionist crowd that sees Israel and Judaism as one and the same. A few days before the bombing, Carlson interviewed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a Christian Zionist who strongly supports American military action in Iran. The exchange was a microcosm of the broader MAGA divide. Cruz accused Carlson of having an “obsession with Israel,” to which Carlson responded, “Oh, I’m an antisemite now?” and added, “Shame on you for conflating Jews and Israel.” Cruz was apoplectic. “Give me another reason, if you’re not an antisemite, why the obsession with Israel?” Carlson mainly sees the Middle East conflict as a geopolitical quagmire, not a spiritual battle for a holy land. This stance is likely influenced by the “America First” anti-interventionist crowd he’s long been aligned with. But he too has strong ties to the TheoBro world. Earlier this year, he hosted Andrew Isker, a podcaster and pastor who is part of a movement to build a Christian nationalist community in Appalachia, and regularly tweets about his desire for Jews to convert to Christianity. He also strongly endorses the idea that Jews no longer have any particular claim to Israel. “You talk a lot about the Old Covenant and this idea of Jews and Gentiles. Is that all done now, are they one?” Tucker asked Isker. “Absolutely,” replied Isker. “In the New Testament, Paul makes it clear—there is ‘neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free’; in Christ we are one true Israel. The old dividing lines are abolished.” Carlson chuckled. “To come to the opposite conclusion does sort of make you wonder—have you actually read the Bible?” A curious figure in the religious MAGA infighting over Iran is US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. While Hegseth currently attends a TheoBro-adjacent church, in the past he was a devoted Christian Zionist. In 2018, when he was still a Fox News anchor, he gave a speech in Jerusalem at a conference hosted by the right-wing Israeli news site Israel National News. “If you walk the ground today, you understand there is no such thing as the outcome of a two-state solution,” he said. “There is one state.” In the same speech, he referred to the return of the prophesied Jewish diaspora to Israel, the event that Christian Zionists believe will herald the second coming of the Messiah. “There’s no reason why the miracle of the reestablishment of the Temple on the Temple Mount is not possible,” he said. “I don’t know how it would happen. You don’t know how it would happen. But I know that it could happen.” Despite his current church’s beliefs, Hegseth appears to be holding fast to his Christian Zionist roots—and his allegiance to Trump. At a Wednesday press conference, the defense secretary railed against the media for reporting on intelligence that found that Iran’s nuclear program had not been completely destroyed. Shortly after, he tweeted, “I will always defend @POTUS leadership, especially our skilled and amazing warfighters.” To Taylor, the divide between the Christian Zionists and their also-Christian detractors reveals a deeper truth about the theological clashes within the MAGA movement. “Everyone can kind of be pro-Trump and pro-Maga, but underneath that, there are real theological and ideological disagreements, and especially in around Jews and Judaism,” he says. “The ideological rift, even among the Christian Trump supporters, is very, very real.” --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At nearly 8 p.m ET Saturday, President Donald Trump delivered shocking news that would quickly rouse global angst about the threat of nuclear war. He did so on social media. “A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow,” he thumbed out on Truth Social about three Iranian nuclear enrichment sites that U.S. military had, apparently, just attacked. “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE! Thank you for your attention to this matter.” Us lowly civilians across the country weren’t the only ones to learn of the military strike that evening; members of Congress were notified around the same time. In theory, that isn’t how it’s supposed to work: Presidents are expected to consult Congress before deploying armed forces, and—at least in the past—that was Trump’s position too. In March 2015, when Trump was merely flirting with the idea of launching an aspirational bid for president, he told the New Hampshire Union Leader that presidents should “always” get Congressional approval to launch military action. > Reporter: “Under what circumstances would you think the president should be > able to use military force without authorization from Congress?” > > > Trump: “I think we should always get authorization, and if something is right, > you can get authorization and quickly. Whether you’re a Republican or > Democrat, they want to see this country survive and do well. And I think you > should get authorization.” His answer at the time reflected Article 1 of the Constitution, which says that Congress—and Congress alone—has the authority to declare war. But the 1973 War Powers Resolution gives presidents some temporary wiggle room: It stipulates that, in situations where war hasn’t been declared, presidents must still notify Congress within 48 hours of military action, and provide rationale for why, and under which authority, the decision was made. (The resolution also says that military action not pre-authorized by Congress must end within 60 days.) Many Democrats have expressed concern over Trump bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites without consulting—or even properly notifying—Congress. According to the Associated Press, lawmakers hadn’t received any new intelligence about Iran’s nuclear program since March, when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said the administration did not believe the country was building a nuclear weapon. After canceling an earlier briefing, the Trump administration says CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio will hold a closed-door session with senators on Thursday; House members are slated to receive a similar briefing on Friday. Like Trump, Rubio has previously boasted about the importance of Congress’ role in decisions on the use of military force. “You can’t put strategy in legislation, that’s up to the commander-in-chief working with military officials,” Rubio told a journalist in 2015. “We can certainly have oversight over the strategy, criticize it and not fund it if we think it’s wrong and so forth—but the most important role we play is whether or not to authorize it.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In October 1978, two leaders of the Iranian opposition to the British-backed shah of Iran met in the Paris suburbs of Neauphle-le-Château to plan for the final stages of the revolution, a revolution that after 46 momentous and often brutal years may now be close to expiring. The two men had little in common but their nationality, age, and determination to remove the shah from power. Karim Sanjabi, the leader of the secular liberal National Front, was a former Sorbonne-educated professor of law. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was the leading Shia opponent of the Iranian monarchy since the 1960s. Both were in their 70s at the time. Sanjabi had arrived in Paris with the draft declaration of goals of the coming revolution the two men were to lead. The document stated that the revolution would be grounded on two principles: that it be democratic and Islamic. Yet Sanjabi later recalled to historians that at the Paris meeting Khomeini in his own handwriting added a third principle to the declaration—independence. > Iran’s politics as a result for the past decade has been shaped by the sense > that it was the wronged partner. That third principle, the primacy of independence, born of Iran’s history of exploitation by colonial powers, helps to explain what may seem otherwise mysterious in the current dispute between Iran and the US: Iran’s dogmatic insistence that it must have the right to enrich uranium. It has been the issue that dogged the talks between Iran and the west over Tehran’s nuclear program since the turn of the century and was the sticking point in the two years of discussions that were eventually settled in Iran’s favor when the joint comprehensive plan of action (JCPOA) was agreed under the Obama administration in 2015. It is the reason why Iran is being bombed now by Israel and, over the weekend, by the US. Yet to many American eyes, this obsession with enrichment inside Iran, instead of importing, for instance, from Russia, is only explicable if it is accepted that Iran covertly wants to build a nuclear bomb. The fatwa against “un-Islamic” nuclear weapons twice issued by the supreme leader has to be a smokescreen, this US perspective goes. On social media last week, Vice-President JD Vance largely took that view. He wrote: “It’s one thing to want civilian nuclear energy. It’s another thing to demand sophisticated enrichment capacity. And it’s still another to cling to enrichment while simultaneously violating basic non-proliferation obligations and enriching right to the point of weapons-grade uranium. “I have yet to see a single good argument for why Iran needed to enrich uranium well above the threshold for civilian use. I’ve yet to see a single good argument for why Iran was justified in violating its nonproliferation obligations.” The process for enriching uranium to make civil nuclear energy and a nuclear bomb is broadly the same. It is generally accepted that uranium enriched to 3.67 percent is sufficient for civil nuclear energy, while purity levels of 90 percent are required for a nuclear weapon. Once purity levels reach 60 percent, as in the case of Iran, it is not a lengthy process to proceed to 90 percent. Iran, of course, argues there is no mystery why it has enriched to these high levels of purity. It was part of a clearly signalled staged escalatory response to Donald Trump unilaterally pulling the US out of the JCPOA in 2018—an act that that had deprived Iran of the sanctions relief it had negotiated. Moreover, Trump, by imposing secondary sanctions, made it impossible for Europe to trade with Iran, the second planned benefit of the JCPOA. Iran’s politics as a result for the past decade has been shaped by the sense that it was the wronged partner, and the US confirmed as inherently untrustworthy. Centrist figures such as the former president Hassan Rouhani and the foreign minister Javad Zarif expended huge internal political capital to sign a deal with the west, and the west promptly reneged on it. Meanwhile, Israel, a country that is not a member of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty—unlike Iran—and which has a totally unmonitored and undeclared nuclear weapon, receives largesse and support from the west. Nevertheless, Vance may have a point. As a casus belli, the right to enrich uranium to purity levels of 3.67 percent, the level permitted under the JCPOA, seems on the surface an implausible issue for the current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, to risk martyrdom. Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (pointing) during a visit to the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in 2008. Associated Press Why did a country with large oil reserves feel such a need to have homegrown civil nuclear energy? A persuasive new account by Vali Nasr, entitled Iran’s Grand Strategy, helps unlock the key to that question by placing the answer in Iran’s colonial exploitation and its search for independence. He wrote: “Before the revolution itself, before the hostage crisis or US sanctions, before the Iran-Iraq war or efforts to export the revolution, as well as the sordid legacy of Iran’s confrontations with the west, the future supreme religious guide and leader of Iran valued independence from foreign influence as equal to the enshrining principles of Islam in the state.” Khamenei was indeed asked once what was the benefit of the revolution, and he replied “now all decisions are made in Tehran.” > It was the British and the Americans who introduced nuclear power to Iran. Nasr argues that as many of the lofty ideals of the revolution such as democracy and Islam have been eroded or distorted, the principle of Iranian independence has endured. The quest for sovereignty, he argues, arose from Iran’s benighted history. In the 19th century, Iran was squeezed between the British and Russian imperial powers. In the 20th century its oil resources were exploited by British oil companies. Twice its leaders—in 1941 and 1953—were removed from office by the British and Americans. The popular prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was removed in a CIA-engineered coup in 1953 due to his demand to control Iran’s oil resources. No event in contemporary Iranian history is more scarring than Mosaddegh’s toppling. For Khomeini it confirmed Iran still did not control its destiny, or its energy resources. Although civil nuclear power and the right to enrich became a symbol of independence and sovereignty after the revolution, Ellie Geranmayeh from the European Council on Foreign Relations points out it was the British and the Americans that introduced nuclear power to Iran in what was named an “atoms for peace” program. The shah of Iran, with US approval, embarked on a plan to build 23 civil nuclear power stations, making it possible for Iran to export electricity to neighboring countries and achieve the status of a modern state. Michael Axworthy, the pre-eminent British historian of contemporary Iran, said: “Using oil profits in this way seemed a then sensible way of investing a finite resource in order to create an infinite one.” In an interview with the Washington Post, Henry Kissinger later admitted that as US secretary of state he raised no objections to the plants being built. “I don’t think the issue of proliferation came up,” he said. Work started on two nuclear reactors including one at the port city of Bushehr with the help of the German firm Kraftwerk Union a subdivision of Siemens and AEG. The shah recognized the dual use for nuclear power, and in June 1974 even told an American journalist that “Iran would have nuclear weapons without a doubt sooner than you think,” a remark he rapidly denied. Gradually the US became more nervous that the shah’s obsession with weaponry might mean Iran’s civil program turning nuclear. > “In my view, Iran’s nuclear program is a means to an end: it wants to be > recognized as a regional power.” After the Iranian revolution in 1979, progress on the near-complete two stations ground to a halt. Khomeini regarded nuclear power as a symbol of western decadence arguing bloated infrastructure projects would make Iran more dependent on western imperialist technology. He said he wanted no “westoxificiation,” or gharbzadegi in Farsi. The program was largely ended, to the disappointment of some nuclear scientists. But within a year or two electricity shortages and the population boom put pressure on Tehran’s policy elite to start a discreet reversal of the shutdown. Iraq’s use of chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, Tehran’s sense of diplomatic isolation in seeking international condemnation of Iraq’s repeated attacks on the incomplete Bushehr nuclear station, and finally multibillion-dollar legal wrangles with European firms over the incomplete nuclear program of the shah, together spawned a nuclear nationalism. By 1990, Iran’s Atomic Energy Authority declared that by 2005, 20 percent of the country’s energy could be produced by nuclear electric power and 10 power vaults would be built over the next decade. Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran’s speaker of the parliament during the 1980-88 war and then president from 1989 to 1997, made numerous appeals to Iran’s nuclear scientists to return home and build the program. In 1988 he said: “If you do not serve Iran, whom will you serve?” Suddenly Iran’s nuclear program had shifted from a symbol of western modernism to a source of patriotic pride. By the turn of the century, the Iranian nuclear program was erroneously thought to consist primarily of several small research reactors and the nuclear light water reactor being constructed by Iran and now Russia at Bushehr. Rafsanjani later admitted Iran first considered a deterrent capability during the Iran-Iraq war, when the nuclear program first resumed. He said: “When we first began, we were at war and we sought to have that possibility for the day that the enemy might use a nuclear weapon. That was the thinking. But it never became real.” Rafsanjani travelled to Pakistan to try to meet Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program who later helped North Korea to develop an atomic bomb. In mid 2002, a leak from a dissident group, possibly via the Mossad, revealed that Iran had two secret nuclear installations designed for enriching uranium at Natanz near Isfahan and Kashan in central Iran. Iran said it was under no obligation to notify the International Atomic Energy Agency UN nuclear inspectorate of the existence of the plants because they were not operational. Iran added the nonproliferation treaty declared it was the “inalienable right” of all states to develop nuclear programs for peaceful purposes under IAEA safeguards. In itself, uranium enrichment is not a sign of seeking to make a nuclear weapon, but critics said it was hard to explain why Iran needed to make nuclear fuel at a stage in which it had no functioning nuclear reactor. From then on, the diplomatic dance started and has continued at various levels of intensity ever since. In October 2003 via the Tehran declaration, Iran under huge international pressure due to the leak, agreed to sign the additional protocol, which authorized the the IAEA to make short-notice inspections. In November 2004, under the Paris agreement, Iran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment temporarily pending proposals from the E3 (France, Germany and the UK) on how to handle the issue on a more long-term basis. But in deference to Iran’s sovereignty, the E3 recognized that this suspension was a voluntary confidence-building measure and not a legal obligation. But Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s populist president elected in June 2005, became more assertive, insisting Iran’s technology was the peaceful outcome of the scientific achievements of the country’s youth. “We need the peaceful nuclear technology for energy, medical and agricultural purposes, and our scientific progress,” he said. Gradually the case for negotiation increased. With the US demanding an end to enrichment and Iran insisting on its legal right to enrich, the E3 were caught in the middle. All kinds of compromises were floated, including by Brazil and India. But western opinion was shaped by the then head of the UN nuclear inspectorate, Mohamed ElBaradei, who said: “In my view Iran’s nuclear program is a means to an end: it wants to be recognized as a regional power, they believe that the nuclear knowhow brings prestige, brings power, and they would like to see the US engaging them.” Rouhani made a similar point in an article in the Washington Post. He said: “To us, mastering the atomic fuel cycle and generating nuclear power is as much about diversifying our energy resources as it is about who Iranians are as a nation, our demand for dignity and respect and our consequent place in the world. Without comprehending the role of identity, many issues we all face will remain unresolved.” Nevertheless, if Iran’s goal with its nuclear program was security and independence, and not something more sinister, the leadership has paid a huge and probably self-defeating price.