theatlantic--2020-01-07--The Senate Republicans Who Could Still Turn Against Trump

The defection of just four Republicans—in combination with a unanimous Democratic vote—would mean that a majority of the Senate and a majority of the entire Congress had found that the president committed high crimes and misdemeanors in his dealings with Ukraine and his obstruction of the House ’ s impeachment investigation .
A majority vote would also distinguish the Trump impeachment from that of former President Bill Clinton , whom most senators voted to acquit in 1999 .
While Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made no secret of his support for Trump , a sizable portion of his conference @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Although many Senate Republicans have criticized House Democrats for rushing the impeachment process , several have also declined to take a position on the charges against Trump in deference to their role as likely “ jurors ” in the trial .
Their silence leaves open the possibility—albeit a slim one—that testimony from Bolton and others could alter the dynamic within the Senate GOP .
The resulting vote might not be sufficient to remove Trump , but a bipartisan condemnation of the president months before his reelection bid might be the most his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Here is a guide to some of the key groups of Senate Republicans to watch as the trial gets under way , from those firmly in Trump ’ s corner to those who might end up deserting him .
The list of Trump ’ s most fervent defenders in the Senate is certainly longer than these five , but they are the ones you ’ re most likely to see on TV before and after the trial ’ s sessions , deploying the same over-the-top rhetoric— “ a sham !
” “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ used to denigrate the process .
Graham , Paul , and Cruz have all gone from denouncing Trump during their rivalry in the 2016 GOP primary to standing between him and the Democratic efforts to kick him out of the White House .
Graham has used his position as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee to launch an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter—exactly what Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to do in their July phone call .
Cruz has said he ’ d support a bid @ @ @ @ @ @ @ subpoena the Bidens to testify in a Senate trial .
Lee , another onetime Trump critic on the right , has emerged as one of his staunchest allies behind the scenes , and , in contrast to some of his colleagues , he has said that the president “ has done nothing wrong ” in his dealings with Zelensky .
Hawley is new to the Senate , but he ’ s tried to make a name for himself by attacking Democrats for their handling of impeachment .
The Missouri freshman has introduced a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dismiss the charges against Trump without even holding a trial if Pelosi continues to delay formally sending the articles of impeachment across the Capitol .
Ten Republican senators have signed on to the measure , including Cruz .

The great Senate anticlimax will soon be upon us, if you haven’t heard—an impeachment trial that will acquit President Donald Trump just as predictably as the Democratic-led House voted to charge him last month.
It’s an outcome so widely assumed that, given Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s delay in formally sending articles of impeachment over to the Senate, the public may be wondering whether there’s going to be a trial at all.
Yet while it is indeed nearly impossible to foresee 67 senators voting to remove Trump from office 10 months before a presidential election, there remains a lot more intrigue and uncertainty in the Senate than there was in the House, where not a single Republican broke with the president to back impeachment.
Trump’s fate will rest largely with the 53 Senate Republicans. At least 20 GOP senators would have to vote to convict the president, and there’s virtually no way that many will turn against a man who has tightened his viselike grip on their party. But a bipartisan rebuke is still possible. The range of votes for removal could go as high as the low 50s, if a handful of Republicans break with Trump, or it could fall much lower if the president secures total support from the GOP and picks off red-state Democrats like Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Doug Jones of Alabama, and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. And the trial itself could be a relatively dry rehash of the House hearings, or it could feature dramatic new testimony from high-ranking administration officials who refused to cooperate with the House inquiry. That includes John Bolton, the former national security adviser, who yesterday announced that he would comply if the Senate votes to subpoena him.
The defection of just four Republicans—in combination with a unanimous Democratic vote—would mean that a majority of the Senate and a majority of the entire Congress had found that the president committed high crimes and misdemeanors in his dealings with Ukraine and his obstruction of the House’s impeachment investigation. A majority vote would also distinguish the Trump impeachment from that of former President Bill Clinton, whom most senators voted to acquit in 1999.
While Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made no secret of his support for Trump, a sizable portion of his conference has kept much quieter about their views. Although many Senate Republicans have criticized House Democrats for rushing the impeachment process, several have also declined to take a position on the charges against Trump in deference to their role as likely “jurors” in the trial.
Their silence leaves open the possibility—albeit a slim one—that testimony from Bolton and others could alter the dynamic within the Senate GOP. The resulting vote might not be sufficient to remove Trump, but a bipartisan condemnation of the president months before his reelection bid might be the most his opponents can now realistically hope to achieve.
Here is a guide to some of the key groups of Senate Republicans to watch as the trial gets under way, from those firmly in Trump’s corner to those who might end up deserting him.
The Loyalists
Lindsey Graham, South Carolina
Rand Paul, Kentucky
Ted Cruz, Texas
Mike Lee, Utah
Josh Hawley, Missouri
The list of Trump’s most fervent defenders in the Senate is certainly longer than these five, but they are the ones you’re most likely to see on TV before and after the trial’s sessions, deploying the same over-the-top rhetoric—“a sham!” “fake impeachment”—that the president has used to denigrate the process. Graham, Paul, and Cruz have all gone from denouncing Trump during their rivalry in the 2016 GOP primary to standing between him and the Democratic efforts to kick him out of the White House. Graham has used his position as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee to launch an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter—exactly what Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to do in their July phone call. Cruz has said he’d support a bid by the president’s lawyers to subpoena the Bidens to testify in a Senate trial.
Lee, another onetime Trump critic on the right, has emerged as one of his staunchest allies behind the scenes, and, in contrast to some of his colleagues, he has said that the president “has done nothing wrong” in his dealings with Zelensky. Hawley is new to the Senate, but he’s tried to make a name for himself by attacking Democrats for their handling of impeachment. The Missouri freshman has introduced a motion that would allow the Senate to dismiss the charges against Trump without even holding a trial if Pelosi continues to delay formally sending the articles of impeachment across the Capitol. Ten Republican senators have signed on to the measure, including Cruz.
The Vulnerables
Joni Ernst, Iowa
Martha McSally, Arizona
Thom Tillis, North Carolina
Cory Gardner, Colorado
Dan Sullivan, Alaska
Democrats may have hoped that the handful of first-term Republicans facing competitive reelection bids this year might find it in their political interest to break with the president.
It hasn’t worked out that way.
Apparently feeling they need the support of Trump’s conservative base, Ernst, McSally, and Tillis have rallied behind the president and largely refrained from criticizing his actions on Ukraine at all. They’ve criticized House Democrats for their handling of the impeachment inquiry and appear locks to vote for acquittal. McSally may be taking the biggest risk: She was appointed to her seat only after losing a Senate race to Sinema in 2018 and is facing a serious challenge in November from Democrat Mark Kelly, the astronaut and husband of former Representative Gabrielle Giffords.
Gardner and Sullivan have stayed more neutral. Gardner, who is considered the more vulnerable of the two, has mostly dodged questions about impeachment, although he did refer to the inquiry as a “political circus” and criticized Pelosi for her handling of it in October. Sullivan defeated Democratic Senator Mark Begich in 2014 and has kept a low profile during his first term. He told the Alaska Daily News last month that he might have avoided mentioning Biden specifically to the Ukrainian president if he were Trump, but he questioned whether the president’s actions rose to the level of an impeachable offense. “That’s the real question, and I think that’s a pretty high bar,” he said.
The Retirees
Lamar Alexander, Tennessee
Pat Roberts, Kansas
Mike Enzi, Wyoming
These are the true Senate wild cards—three aging institutionalists with no built-in ties to Trump whose decision not to seek reelection this fall conceivably frees them from a ballot-box confrontation with the president’s voters if they go against him. None of the three has given definitive indications of how they might vote, relying on the “I’ll be a juror” defense to avoid weighing in substantively on the charges. Still, what little they have said should give some comfort to Trump. Alexander, while calling the president’s call with Zelensky “inappropriate,” said in October that impeachment would be “a mistake” and later signed on to a resolution criticizing the House process before public hearings began. Roberts, meanwhile, has referred to impeachment as “political theater” and suggested that it’s a distraction from more important work Congress should be doing.
The Quiet Ones
Jim Risch, Idaho
Richard Burr, North Carolina
Risch and Burr, the chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees, respectively, have said so little about the substance of the impeachment inquiry that there is at least a tiny bit of doubt about where they’ll come down. “I’m going to keep an open mind,” Risch told a local television station around Christmas. Burr, who worked closely with Democratic Senator Mark Warner on the Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election, is also not likely to face voters again, having said he’ll retire when his second Senate term ends in early 2023.
The Critics
Mitt Romney, Utah
Ben Sasse, Nebraska
Lisa Murkowski, Alaska
Susan Collins, Maine
If there are any Republican votes to convict Trump, they are most likely to come from this group. And in the unlikelier event that a Senate majority votes against the president, this is the gang that would make it happen. Romney and Sasse were the sharpest GOP critics of Trump after the White House released a summary of the president’s call with Zelensky last fall. Romney said it was “troubling in the extreme,” while Sasse warned Republicans not to “circle the wagons” around Trump and said there were “some really troubling things here.” Yet both have been quieter about the impeachment charges in the months since.
Murkowski and Collins have long been the GOP senators likeliest to buck Trump; both joined with the late Senator John McCain of Arizona to kill the party’s attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017, and Murkowski was the lone Republican to oppose Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Collins is facing the added pressure of a formidable Democratic challenge to her reelection in 2020. Though she has withheld judgment on the articles of impeachment, Collins strongly criticized Trump for publicly asking China to investigate the Bidens in October, after he’d made the same request of Ukraine. She and Murkowski have also distanced themselves from McConnell’s acknowledgment last month that he was coordinating with the White House on how to structure the Senate trial. “When I heard that, I was disturbed,” Murkowski told an Alaska television station. “We have to take that step back from being hand in glove with the defense.”
So far, these four Republicans have all backed McConnell’s push to defer key decisions about issuing subpoenas until after a trial begins. But long before a final vote, Democrats will look to these senators—and perhaps others mentioned above—for support in calling witnesses, like Bolton, who they hope can bolster the case for impeachment. Whether Republicans go along with that request will likely be the biggest sign of just how persuadable they really are.
Christian Paz contributed reporting.


theatlantic--2020-01-07--Bots Are Destroying Political Discourse As We Know It

What is a robot , really ?
The question is more complicated than it seems .
These efforts will only get more sophisticated .
In a recent experiment , the Harvard senior Max Weiss used a text-generation program to create 1,000 comments in response to a government call on a Medicaid issue .
These comments were all unique , and sounded like real people advocating for a specific policy position .
They fooled the Medicaid.gov administrators , who accepted them as genuine concerns from actual human beings .
This being research , Weiss subsequently identified the comments and asked for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ no actual policy debate would be unfairly biased .
The next group to try this won ’ t be so honorable .
Chatbots have been skewing social-media discussions for years .
About a fifth of all tweets about the 2016 presidential election were published by bots , according to one estimate , as were about a third of all tweets about that year ’ s Brexit vote .
An Oxford Internet Institute report from last year found evidence of bots being used to spread propaganda in 50 countries .
These tended to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ quarter million pro-Saudi “ We all have trust in Mohammed bin Salman ” tweets following the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi , for example .
Detecting many bots with a few followers each is harder than detecting a few bots with lots of followers .
And measuring the effectiveness of these bots is difficult .
The best analyses indicate that they did not affect the 2016 U.S. presidential election .
More likely , they distort people ’ s sense of public sentiment and their faith in reasoned political debate .
We are all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ experiment .
Over the years , algorithmic bots have evolved to have personas .
They have fake names , fake bios , and fake photos—sometimes generated by AI .
Instead of endlessly spewing propaganda , they post only occasionally .
Researchers can detect that these are bots and not people based on their patterns of posting , but the bot technology is getting better all the time , outpacing tracking attempts .
Future groups won ’ t be so easily identified .
They ’ ll embed themselves in human social groups better .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ interwoven in tweets about topics relevant to those social groups .
Combine these two trends and you have the recipe for nonhuman chatter to overwhelm actual political speech .
Soon , AI-driven personas will be able to write personalized letters to newspapers and elected officials , submit individual comments to public rule-making processes , and intelligently debate political issues on social media .
They will be able to comment on social-media posts , news sites , and elsewhere , creating persistent personas that seem real even to someone scrutinizing them .
They will @ @ @ @ @ @ @ social media and send personalized texts .
They will be replicated in the millions and engage on the issues around the clock , sending billions of messages , long and short .
Putting all this together , they ’ ll be able to drown out any actual debate on the internet .
Not just on social media , but everywhere there ’ s commentary .

Presidential-campaign season is officially, officially, upon us now, which means it’s time to confront the weird and insidious ways in which technology is warping politics. One of the biggest threats on the horizon: Artificial personas are coming, and they’re poised to take over political debate. The risk arises from two separate threads coming together: artificial-intelligence-driven text generation and social-media chatbots. These computer-generated “people” will drown out actual human discussions on the internet.
Text-generation software is already good enough to fool most people most of the time. It’s writing news stories, particularly in sports and finance. It’s talking with customers on merchant websites. It’s writing convincing op-eds on topics in the news (though there are limitations). And it’s being used to bulk up “pink-slime journalism”—websites meant to appear like legitimate local news outlets but that publish propaganda instead.
There’s a record of algorithmic content pretending to be from individuals, as well. In 2017, the Federal Communications Commission had an online public-commenting period for its plans to repeal net neutrality. A staggering 22 million comments were received. Many of them—maybe half—were fake, using stolen identities. These comments were also crude; 1.3 million were generated from the same template, with some words altered to make them appear unique. They didn’t stand up to even cursory scrutiny.
What is a robot, really? The question is more complicated than it seems.
These efforts will only get more sophisticated. In a recent experiment, the Harvard senior Max Weiss used a text-generation program to create 1,000 comments in response to a government call on a Medicaid issue. These comments were all unique, and sounded like real people advocating for a specific policy position. They fooled the Medicaid.gov administrators, who accepted them as genuine concerns from actual human beings. This being research, Weiss subsequently identified the comments and asked for them to be removed, so that no actual policy debate would be unfairly biased. The next group to try this won’t be so honorable.
Chatbots have been skewing social-media discussions for years. About a fifth of all tweets about the 2016 presidential election were published by bots, according to one estimate, as were about a third of all tweets about that year’s Brexit vote. An Oxford Internet Institute report from last year found evidence of bots being used to spread propaganda in 50 countries. These tended to be simple programs mindlessly repeating slogans: a quarter million pro-Saudi “We all have trust in Mohammed bin Salman” tweets following the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, for example. Detecting many bots with a few followers each is harder than detecting a few bots with lots of followers. And measuring the effectiveness of these bots is difficult. The best analyses indicate that they did not affect the 2016 U.S. presidential election. More likely, they distort people’s sense of public sentiment and their faith in reasoned political debate. We are all in the middle of a novel social experiment.
Over the years, algorithmic bots have evolved to have personas. They have fake names, fake bios, and fake photos—sometimes generated by AI. Instead of endlessly spewing propaganda, they post only occasionally. Researchers can detect that these are bots and not people based on their patterns of posting, but the bot technology is getting better all the time, outpacing tracking attempts. Future groups won’t be so easily identified. They’ll embed themselves in human social groups better. Their propaganda will be subtle, and interwoven in tweets about topics relevant to those social groups.
Combine these two trends and you have the recipe for nonhuman chatter to overwhelm actual political speech.
Soon, AI-driven personas will be able to write personalized letters to newspapers and elected officials, submit individual comments to public rule-making processes, and intelligently debate political issues on social media. They will be able to comment on social-media posts, news sites, and elsewhere, creating persistent personas that seem real even to someone scrutinizing them. They will be able to pose as individuals on social media and send personalized texts. They will be replicated in the millions and engage on the issues around the clock, sending billions of messages, long and short. Putting all this together, they’ll be able to drown out any actual debate on the internet. Not just on social media, but everywhere there’s commentary.
Maybe these persona bots will be controlled by foreign actors. Maybe it’ll be domestic political groups. Maybe it’ll be the candidates themselves. Most likely, it’ll be everybody. The most important lesson from the 2016 election about misinformation isn’t that misinformation occurred; it is how cheap and easy misinforming people was. Future technological improvements will make it all even more affordable.
Our future will consist of boisterous political debate, mostly bots arguing with other bots. This is not what we think of when we laud the marketplace of ideas, or any democratic political process. Democracy requires two things to function properly: information and agency. Artificial personas can starve people of both.
Solutions are hard to imagine. We can regulate the use of bots—a proposed California law would require bots to identify themselves—but that is effective only against legitimate influence campaigns, such as advertising. Surreptitious influence operations will be much harder to detect. The most obvious defense is to develop and standardize better authentication methods. If social networks verify that an actual person is behind each account, then they can better weed out fake personas. But fake accounts are already regularly created for real people without their knowledge or consent, and anonymous speech is essential for robust political debate, especially when speakers are from disadvantaged or marginalized communities. We don’t have an authentication system that both protects privacy and scales to the billions of users.
We can hope that our ability to identify artificial personas keeps up with our ability to disguise them. If the arms race between deep fakes and deep-fake detectors is any guide, that’ll be hard as well. The technologies of obfuscation always seem one step ahead of the technologies of detection. And artificial personas will be designed to act exactly like real people.
In the end, any solutions have to be nontechnical. We have to recognize the limitations of online political conversation, and again prioritize face-to-face interactions. These are harder to automate, and we know the people we’re talking with are actual people. This would be a cultural shift away from the internet and text, stepping back from social media and comment threads. Today that seems like a completely unrealistic solution.
Misinformation efforts are now common around the globe, conducted in more than 70 countries. This is the normal way to push propaganda in countries with authoritarian leanings, and it’s becoming the way to run a political campaign, for either a candidate or an issue.
Artificial personas are the future of propaganda. And while they may not be effective in tilting debate to one side or another, they easily drown out debate entirely. We don’t know the effect of that noise on democracy, only that it’ll be pernicious, and that it’s inevitable.


theatlantic--2020-01-07--The Atlantic Politics Daily: What’s Unpredictable About the Impeachment Trial

The list of Trump ’ s zealous defenders in the Senate is a long one—from Lindsey Graham , the president ’ s golf buddy who ’ s gone full MAGA , to Ted Cruz , whose father Trump once ( falsely ) accused of killing John F. Kennedy , and whose wife Trump once ridiculed .
But it ’ s freshman Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri , the lesser-known of the loyalist crew , who ’ s most directly positioned himself as the go-to leader of Trumpism after Trump .
Read my colleague Emma Green ’ s profile of Hawley @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the rest of his party ’ s .
Mitt Romney isn ’ t the only GOP senator who ’ s been critical of Trump .
Lisa Murkowski of Alaska in particular seems to have kindled an independent streak , voting against the GOP ’ s health-care-repeal efforts and against Brett Kavanaugh ’ s Supreme Court nomination—the lone GOP senator to do so .
Here ’ s the full guide to the other key groups of Senate Republicans to watch .
Scattered protesters supporting impeachment walk around silently today inside the Hart Senate office @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Maybe these persona bots will be controlled by foreign actors .
Maybe it ’ ll be domestic political groups .
Maybe it ’ ll be the candidates themselves.
” Is the future just bots yelling at other bots ?
Artificial intelligence is getting smarter , better , and sneakier , meaning political conversations are only going to get noisier .
That ’ s something that should concern all Americans , Bruce Schneier writes .
2 .
“ People of color and young people are treated like political cattle who must be whipped @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they often don ’ t like.
” The term “ swing voter ” often focuses on the white , sometimes working-class Americans who oscillate between supporting the Republican or Democratic on Election Day .
That narrow view overlooks the many voters of color who sit out elections because they reject or dislike the Democrats ’ drift , Ibram X. Kendi writes .
3 .
“ His money allowed him to drown out the opposition—and often made potential rivals hold their tongue.
” When Michael Bloomberg spends his billions of dollars , observers often @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the 2020 primary ( his campaign just secured a Super Bowl ad spot ) .
But the former New York mayor ’ s track record shows that his personal spending and donations while in office reveal more about how he operates , Edward-Isaac Dovere writes .
Even though President Trump has tried to prop up coal-burning plants like this one outside Rock Springs , Wyoming , the coal industry had its worst year ever in 2019 .
( JIM URQUHART / REUTERS ) The only bit of good news in a new @ @ @ @ @ @ @ consumption reached its lowest point since 1975 , and that has led to real lives saved and emissions reductions .
As coal declined , the health of ordinary Americans improved .
From 2005 to 2016 , coal-plant shutdowns led to such significant air-quality improvements that they saved the lives of about 26,000 Americans , according to a separate study published this week in Nature Sustainability .
( Data is not yet available to extrapolate those results to 2019 . )
The bad news is everything else , Robinson Meyer writes .
Today ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , an associate editor on our Politics team and Christian Paz , a Politics fellow .
It was edited by Shan Wang , who oversees newsletters .
You can reply directly to this newsletter with questions or comments , or send a note to politicsdaily @ theatlantic.com .
Your support makes our journalism possible .
Subscribe here .

67: That’s how many senators would have to buck Trump in the impending impeachment trial for the president to be booted from the White House.
It’s Tuesday, January 7. In today’s newsletter: The significance of 67. Plus: The other, overlooked swing voters.
*
« TODAY IN POLITICS »
(Arsh Raziuddin / The Atlantic)
The magic number is 67.
That’s how many senators would have to buck Trump in the impending impeachment trial for the president to be booted from the White House.
To count it another way, at least 20 Senate Republicans would have to vote to convict Trump.
Don’t write the impeachment trial off yet as the political equivalent of The Irishman: significant, drawn out, and ultimately kind of … boring.
Even a few Republican defections could still make the trial a lot more interesting. Considering that many senators haven’t made their impeachment views clear, surprises are still possible.
1. The Vulnerables
Though they’ve mostly rallied behind the president, Senate Republicans up for reelection in purple states might soon feel the heat on impeachment from their constituents.
Arizona Senator Martha McSally’s perch was tenuous to begin with. She lost a close race in 2018, only to be appointed to the late John McCain’s seat a few weeks later.
“Not since Abraham Lincoln has a Republican scored a better consolation prize for losing a Senate race,” Russell Berman wrote at the time.
2. The Loyalists
The list of Trump’s zealous defenders in the Senate is a long one—from Lindsey Graham, the president’s golf buddy who’s gone full MAGA, to Ted Cruz, whose father Trump once (falsely) accused of killing John F. Kennedy, and whose wife Trump once ridiculed.
But it’s freshman Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, the lesser-known of the loyalist crew, who’s most directly positioned himself as the go-to leader of Trumpism after Trump. Read my colleague Emma Green’s profile of Hawley, whose economic positions sound nothing like the rest of his party’s.
3. The Critics
Mitt Romney isn’t the only GOP senator who’s been critical of Trump. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska in particular seems to have kindled an independent streak, voting against the GOP’s health-care-repeal efforts and against Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination—the lone GOP senator to do so.
Here’s the full guide to the other key groups of Senate Republicans to watch.
—Saahil Desai
*
« SNAPSHOT »
(Leah Millis / Reuters)
Scattered protesters supporting impeachment walk around silently today inside the Hart Senate office building on Capitol Hill.
*
« IDEAS AND ARGUMENTS »
(The Atlantic / Getty)
1. “Maybe these persona bots will be controlled by foreign actors. Maybe it’ll be domestic political groups. Maybe it’ll be the candidates themselves.”
Is the future just bots yelling at other bots? Artificial intelligence is getting smarter, better, and sneakier, meaning political conversations are only going to get noisier. That’s something that should concern all Americans, Bruce Schneier writes.
2. “People of color and young people are treated like political cattle who must be whipped into shape to turn out for candidates they often don’t like.”
The term “swing voter” often focuses on the white, sometimes working-class Americans who oscillate between supporting the Republican or Democratic on Election Day. That narrow view overlooks the many voters of color who sit out elections because they reject or dislike the Democrats’ drift, Ibram X. Kendi writes.
3. “His money allowed him to drown out the opposition—and often made potential rivals hold their tongue.”
When Michael Bloomberg spends his billions of dollars, observers often focus on his unprecedented amount of spending in the 2020 primary (his campaign just secured a Super Bowl ad spot). But the former New York mayor’s track record shows that his personal spending and donations while in office reveal more about how he operates, Edward-Isaac Dovere writes.
*
« EVENING READ »
Even though President Trump has tried to prop up coal-burning plants like this one outside Rock Springs, Wyoming, the coal industry had its worst year ever in 2019. (JIM URQUHART / REUTERS)
Coal ↓; Everything Else ↑
The only bit of good news in a new report released today is that American coal consumption reached its lowest point since 1975, and that has led to real lives saved and emissions reductions.
As coal declined, the health of ordinary Americans improved. From 2005 to 2016, coal-plant shutdowns led to such significant air-quality improvements that they saved the lives of about 26,000 Americans, according to a separate study published this week in Nature Sustainability. (Data is not yet available to extrapolate those results to 2019.)
The bad news is everything else, Robinson Meyer writes.
*


theatlantic--2020-01-08--Where Does Elizabeth Warren Actually Stand in the Race?

Then , suddenly the party was back on .
“ We ’ re going to have some fun tonight !
” Warren declared .
There would be no more references to Iran ; indeed , there would no further mention of foreign policy at all from Warren .
She is not a candidate who focuses on foreign policy , yet the onset of a global crisis comes at a precarious moment for her campaign .
Warren ’ s goal last night—joined with a flurry of media appearances in the past few days—was to recapture the momentum that she has lost @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the crowd not a new song but a collection of her greatest hits , a reminder of what fueled her rise in the first place .
She did , however , debut a new sidekick : Julián Castro , the former Obama administration housing secretary , who announced his support for her presidential bid just days after ending his own .
Castro told the room how , when he would meet voters in Iowa , many of them gently let him know that he was their second choice ; Warren was first .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ this race , more than any other candidate that ’ s going to be on that debate stage in a few days , Elizabeth Warren is the candidate who can unite the entire Democratic Party , ” he said .
“ She can bring people together .
She can appeal to all sides.
” The two drew an enormous ovation when they embraced on stage , creating a tableau of a potential presidential ticket in the fall—a possibility that people in the audience were already speculating about in the lead-up to the event @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nomination first , and underneath all the enthusiasm inside the theatre last night was a creeping nervousness about her diminished standing in the race and one dominant theory about what explained it .
“ I ’ m petrified , ” Brent Lomas , a 33-year-old who handles communications for a nonprofit , told me .
“ I think it has more to do with sexism than anything Elizabeth Warren has done.
” “ That may be hurting her right now , ” added Tom Williams , 74 , a retired attorney from Long @ @ @ @ @ @ @ natural reluctance ” on the part of many people , and white men in particular , to vote for a woman for president .
“ I do think it ’ s because she ’ s a woman , ” said Ariel Jacobs , a 33-year-old piano teacher .
Warren ’ s slide from a slim lead in early state and national polls , in the fall , to third or fourth place now , followed sustained criticism she received from her rivals over her detailed plan to pay for her Medicare for All @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with last night acknowledged that correlation , but they said she was facing more scrutiny over her policy plans than the three male candidates—former Vice President Joe Biden , Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont , and former South Bend , Indiana , Mayor Pete Buttigieg—who had eclipsed her in the polls .
“ Bernie Sanders literally had a heart attack !
” Lomas noted .
“ It just reminds me of how Hillary was treated , ” he added , referring in part to the wall-to-wall news coverage after Clinton fainted at a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2016 election .

Sitting inside the cavernous Brooklyn auditorium where Senator Elizabeth Warren rallied before 3,000 cheering fans last night, you’d never have known that an Iranian retaliatory strike had brought the United States one step closer to another war in the Middle East. Nor would you have guessed that the candidate these people had waited, in some cases, more than four hours to see had recently lost her lead in the Democratic-primary polls and had found herself suddenly on the outer edge of the top tier less than a month before the primary season kicks off in Iowa.
For a while at least, Kings Theatre seemed to be an oasis from all that. A capacity crowd danced to Whitney Houston and tried, haphazardly but energetically, to start the wave while they waited for the late-arriving Warren. The jubilant vibe was no different from the last time the senator from Massachusetts held a major event in New York, in mid-September, when 20,000 people filled Washington Square Park to hear from the Democrat who was then surging to the front-runner’s perch.
Only when Warren opened her remarks by detailing the reports of Iran’s attack did the enthusiasm, briefly, go out of the room. “We have to start on a very sober note,” she said. Warren offered prayers for U.S. service members stationed around the world, noting that her three older brothers had all served in the military. “This is a reminder of why we need to de-escalate tensions in the Middle East,” she said. “The American people do not want a war with Iran.” That last line drew a big cheer, as Warren moved on to acknowledging the earthquake in Puerto Rico.
Then, suddenly, the party was back on. “We’re going to have some fun tonight!” Warren declared.
There would be no more references to Iran; indeed, there would be no further mention of foreign policy at all from Warren. She is not a candidate who focuses on foreign policy, yet the onset of a global crisis comes at a precarious moment for her campaign. Warren’s goal last night—joined with a flurry of media appearances in the past few days—was to recapture the momentum that she has lost in recent months, and she gave the crowd not a new song but a collection of her greatest hits, a reminder of what had fueled her rise in the first place.
Read: Warren’s fans aren’t naive about her plans
She did, however, debut a new sidekick: Julián Castro, the former Obama-administration housing secretary, who announced his support for her presidential bid just days after ending his own.
Castro told the room how, when he would meet voters in Iowa, many of them gently let him know that he was their second choice; Warren was first. “More than any other candidate in this race, more than any other candidate that’s going to be on that debate stage in a few days, Elizabeth Warren is the candidate who can unite the entire Democratic Party,” he said. “She can bring people together. She can appeal to all sides.”
The two drew an enormous ovation when they embraced onstage, creating a tableau of a potential presidential ticket in the fall—a possibility that people in the audience were already speculating about in the lead-up to the event.
Yet Warren has to win the nomination first, and underneath all the enthusiasm inside the theater last night was a creeping nervousness about her diminished standing in the race, and one dominant theory about what explained it. “I’m petrified,” Brent Lomas, a 33-year-old who handles communications for a nonprofit, told me. “I think it has more to do with sexism than anything Elizabeth Warren has done.”
“That may be hurting her right now,” added Tom Williams, 74, a retired attorney from Long Island. He referred to “a natural reluctance” on the part of many people, and white men in particular, to vote for a woman for president.
“I do think it’s because she’s a woman,” said Ariel Jacobs, a 33-year-old piano teacher.
Warren’s slide from a slim lead in early state and national polls in the fall, to third or fourth place now, followed sustained criticism she received from her rivals over her detailed plan to pay for her Medicare for All proposal. The Warren fans I spoke with last night acknowledged that correlation, but they said she was facing more scrutiny over her policy plans than the three male candidates—former Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg—who had eclipsed her in the polls. “Bernie Sanders literally had a heart attack!” Lomas noted. “It just reminds me of how Hillary was treated,” he added, referring in part to the wall-to-wall news coverage after Clinton fainted at a 9/11 remembrance ceremony two months before the 2016 election.
Others I spoke with last night expressed no such worries, and dismissed the recent polling as inaccurate or noted—correctly—that many voters in Iowa and New Hampshire remain undecided or open to changing their minds in the weeks before the caucuses and primary in those states. Warren has largely refrained from attacking her rivals directly, but there was more urgency to the message that she and Castro delivered last night.
“We’re meeting at a very special moment in this entire campaign cycle,” Castro said. His argument that Warren was the one candidate “who can unite the entire Democratic Party” was light on specifics, but it seemed aimed at holding her up as a consensus alternative who could bridge the yawning gap between supporters of Biden and Sanders. Castro also talked up Warren’s on-the-ground operation in the early states, an indirect way of rebutting polls that show her lagging behind her rivals. “She has the best damn organization in these early states,” Castro told the crowd.
Warren stuck to the argument she has been making for months—that her far-reaching proposals and her call for “big structural change” are both necessary as policy and smart as politics. “We need big ideas to solve the big problems in this country,” she said. “I get it: You could look oh so sophisticated, oh so smart, by backing off from the big ideas. ‘Not now. Too hard. Can’t do this.’” At that point, a person in the crowd shouted, “Mayor Pete!” The crowd laughed and cheered.
“I didn’t hear that,” Warren joked. She quickly moved on with her stump speech.
The storms overhead—political and otherwise—would stay outside Kings Theatre for the night.


theatlantic--2020-01-08--Trump’s Chance to Take the High Road With Iran

“ Right now it appears that this was a proportional response .
Iran needed to respond publicly—send a signal to its population , the United States , and the world—but it also wanted to avoid an all-out war .
For the moment , it has managed to do so with a highly visible and symbolic strike that avoided killing , ” Goldenberg , now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security , told me .
“ If this was the extent of the response , the smartest move for the U.S. would be to stand down.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ America ’ s most consequential strike this century In an address today , President Donald Trump walked back his recent escalatory rhetoric , expressing relief that no U.S. lives had been lost .
Evan as he condemned Iran , vowed that it would never have a nuclear weapon , and pledged to impose new sanctions , he offered a starkly different tone from his threats earlier this week to bomb Iranian cultural sites .
“ To the people and leaders of Iran , we want you to have a future , and a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of prosperity at home and harmony with the nations of the world , ” he said .
“ The United States is ready to embrace peace with all who seek it.
” The U.S. government was likely expecting the strikes , Douglas London , a professor at Georgetown who recently retired from a 34-year career in the CIA ’ s clandestine service , told me .
The U.S. intelligence community has long assessed , he said , how Iran would respond to an attack like the one that killed Soleimani .
This assessment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” to American presidents , he added .
“ There were no surprises here .
Iran appears to have telegraphed and pulled its punches somewhat.
” London , who focused on Iran during his CIA career , noted the difference between a successful drone and missile attack against a Saudi oil facility in September , which U.S. officials have attributed to Iran , and the attack on Tuesday , in which all 22 of the missiles Iran fired managed to miss Americans .
“ The Iranians don ’ t have accidents like that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there may be an opportunity “ for both sides to walk away.
” But will Trump take it ?
“ We killed Soleimani to establish deterrence and impose some sort of escalation dominance on Iran—that we are willing to go farther in this cycle than they are—because it had obviously crossed a number of red lines in recent months .
Clearly Iran has to respond , ” Faysal Itani , a deputy director at the Center for Global Policy , told me .
For months , Iran-backed militias in Iraq had been launching @ @ @ @ @ @ @ attack on December 27 killed an American contractor .
After Trump responded with strikes that killed militiamen , and Iran-backed protesters attempted to storm the U.S. embassy in Baghdad , Trump ordered the strike on Soleimani .
Itani said that if Tuesday ’ s missile attacks are the extent of Iran ’ s retaliation for its commander ’ s death , there ’ s no need for America to respond .
“ The U.S. hit them harder than they hit it , and deterrence is in place , ” he said .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ see it that way , and may choose to escalate yet again .
”

It could have been much worse.
It’s a measure of this dangerous moment that many observers felt relief on Tuesday night after the Pentagon announced that there had been no American casualties following Iran’s launch of 22 ballistic missiles at bases housing U.S. troops in Iraq. “It’s been a very long time since U.S. forces have been directly struck by ballistic missiles,” Ilan Goldenberg, a former Defense Department official who focused on Iran in the Obama administration, told me, describing the attack as “historic.”
But in the wake of last week’s killing of Iran’s top general, Qassem Soleimani, Goldenberg and other veteran Iran watchers told me, the limited damage from Iran’s response may actually present a chance for both sides to step back from the brink. Iran is clearly capable of much worse, in Iraq and elsewhere. The proxy and terrorist networks that Soleimani spent a lifetime building remain strong after his death. The missiles caused no American or Iraqi deaths as of Wednesday morning. Iraq’s prime minister said that Iran even provided advance warning. Though Iran’s response was uncharacteristic in that it claimed responsibility for the attack—usually it prefers to have some deniability—the country’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, seemed to offer a message of de-escalation, tweeting that Iran “took and concluded proportionate measures in self-defense.” He added: “We do not seek escalation or war.”
“Right now it appears that this was a proportional response. Iran needed to respond publicly—send a signal to its population, the United States, and the world—but it also wanted to avoid an all-out war. For the moment, it has managed to do so with a highly visible and symbolic strike that avoided killing,” Goldenberg, now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told me. “If this was the extent of the response, the smartest move for the U.S. would be to stand down.”
Read: The Soleimani assassination is America’s most consequential strike this century
In an address today, President Donald Trump walked back his recent escalatory rhetoric, expressing relief that no U.S. lives had been lost. Evan as he condemned Iran, vowed that it would never have a nuclear weapon, and pledged to impose new sanctions, he offered a starkly different tone from his threats earlier this week to bomb Iranian cultural sites. “To the people and leaders of Iran, we want you to have a future, and a great future, one that you deserve—one of prosperity at home and harmony with the nations of the world,” he said. “The United States is ready to embrace peace with all who seek it.”
The U.S. government was likely expecting the strikes, Douglas London, a professor at Georgetown who recently retired from a 34-year career in the CIA’s clandestine service, told me. The U.S. intelligence community has long assessed, he said, how Iran would respond to an attack like the one that killed Soleimani. This assessment “has been consistent and well briefed” to American presidents, he added. “There were no surprises here. Iran appears to have telegraphed and pulled its punches somewhat.”
London, who focused on Iran during his CIA career, noted the difference between a successful drone and missile attack against a Saudi oil facility in September, which U.S. officials have attributed to Iran, and the attack on Tuesday, in which all 22 of the missiles Iran fired managed to miss Americans. “The Iranians don’t have accidents like that,” London told me. So there may be an opportunity “for both sides to walk away.”
But will Trump take it?
“We killed Soleimani to establish deterrence and impose some sort of escalation dominance on Iran—that we are willing to go farther in this cycle than they are—because it had obviously crossed a number of red lines in recent months. Clearly Iran has to respond,” Faysal Itani, a deputy director at the Center for Global Policy, told me. For months, Iran-backed militias in Iraq had been launching rockets toward U.S. troops, until an attack on December 27 killed an American contractor. After Trump responded with strikes that killed militiamen, and Iran-backed protesters attempted to storm the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Trump ordered the strike on Soleimani. Itani said that if Tuesday’s missile attacks are the extent of Iran’s retaliation for its commander’s death, there’s no need for America to respond. “The U.S. hit them harder than they hit it, and deterrence is in place,” he said. “My fear is that Trump may not see it that way, and may choose to escalate yet again.”
Trump’s conflicting impulses on Iran have brought America to the edge of war without any apparent plan for an endgame. On the one hand, Trump has been eager to appear tough on Iran and to undo Barack Obama’s legacy, walking away from the 2015 nuclear accord and ramping up sanctions in an effort to cripple Iran’s economy. On the other hand, Trump has repeatedly recoiled from the idea of starting a new war, and talks often about pulling U.S. troops from the Middle East. After Tehran downed a U.S. drone this summer, Trump prepared to take the drastic step of launching strikes inside Iran, then canceled the strikes at virtually the last minute. Yet he then ordered the killing of Soleimani—a decision two U.S. presidents before him had declined to make, because its repercussions promised to be so unpredictable and so potentially deadly.
Read: It wasn’t the law that stopped other presidents from killing Soleimani
Trump and his advisers say that the goal of their so-called maximum-pressure campaign is to bring Iran back to the negotiating table, yet it often feels more like a push to topple the regime. In any case, it has not stopped any of the Iranian activities U.S. officials so often criticize—threats of further nuclear enrichment, support for proxies, expanding influence around the Middle East.
Even so, this precarious moment offers Trump the chance to pull a tenuous win from the flotsam of his Iran strategy. “Iran appears to be standing down, which is a good thing for all parties concerned and a very good thing for the world,” Trump said in today’s address. As Michael Pregent, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who worked as a U.S. intelligence officer in Iraq, told me, Trump’s decision to kill Soleimani “was such a blow to the regime that it may actually be the de-escalation event we were looking for. If this is it, then we got Soleimani, and they know this American president is serious.”
That assumes that this is the most tense moment—and that Trump will continue to take the high road not just today but every day as the standoff simmers. One likely outcome, London and others told me, is that Iran, having launched this rare public strike, now returns to the kind of shadow and proxy warfare for which it is notorious. While he stopped short of vowing another military strike, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, threatened further retaliation, saying that true retribution for Soleimani’s death would come against U.S. troops leaving the Middle East. If the Iraqi Parliament’s recent vote is enforced, U.S. troops will be out of Iraq before too long.
Read: America’s self-sabotage in the Middle East
Colin Clarke, a research fellow at the Soufan Center, told me that the next phase of Iranian retribution could focus on “a prolonged campaign of proxy attacks by the range of Iranian proxy forces, including Lebanese Hezbollah, Iraqi Shia militias, and the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Both sides likely want to de-escalate tensions, but that merely brings things back to the status-quo ante, which is where things stood in the summer of 2019.”
In other words, the U.S. and Iran may be right back where they were before the Soleimani strike—caught in a precarious standoff in which they may be one American death away from the new war Trump says he doesn’t want.


theatlantic--2020-01-08--The Atlantic Politics Daily: Will Trump Take the High Road?

It ’ s Wednesday , January 8 .
In today ’ s newsletter : De-escalation to the status quo .
Plus : An Elizabeth Warren rally , as Warren loses ground .
Anti-war activists protest in front of the White House .
( ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP / GETTY ) Qassem Soleimani ’ s killing changed everything .
Qassem Soleimani ’ s killing changed nothing at all .
Days after President Donald Trump launched the strike against the top Iranian general , the U.S. and Iran seem to be careening toward all-out war .
A war seemed even closer after @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But the limited scope of Iran ’ s latest attack on U.S. bases in Iraq—no American or Iraqi deaths were reported—could also pave the way for de-escalation .
As my colleague Mike Giglio put it , “ it could have been much worse.
” Iran ’ s retaliatory response—statement-making but narrow , terror-inducing but predictable—is in line with the country ’ s usual playbook : Picking its battles with the U.S. very , very strategically .
( Uri Friedman spoke to several experts for this prescient piece on the Iranian way of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ backs away , the two countries look to be in the same place they were before the killing of Soleimani , Mike writes : “ Caught in a precarious standoff in which they may be one American death away from the new war Trump says he doesn ’ t want .
”

The two countries look to be in the same place they were before the killing of Qassem Soleimani: “Caught in a precarious standoff.” Plus: Inside a Warren rally.
It’s Wednesday, January 8. In today’s newsletter: De-escalation to the status quo. Plus: An Elizabeth Warren rally, as Warren loses ground.
*
« TODAY IN POLITICS »
Anti-war activists protest in front of the White House. (ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP / GETTY)
Qassem Soleimani’s killing changed everything. Qassem Soleimani’s killing changed nothing at all.
Days after President Donald Trump launched the strike against the top Iranian general, the U.S. and Iran seem to be careening toward all-out war. A war seemed even closer after Iran retaliated with strikes of their own.
But the limited scope of Iran’s latest attack on U.S. bases in Iraq—no American or Iraqi deaths were reported—could also pave the way for de-escalation. As my colleague Mike Giglio put it, “it could have been much worse.”
Iran’s retaliatory response—statement-making but narrow, terror-inducing but predictable—is in line with the country’s usual playbook: Picking its battles with the U.S. very, very strategically. (Uri Friedman spoke to several experts for this prescient piece on the Iranian way of war.)
Even if the U.S. backs away, the two countries look to be in the same place they were before the killing of Soleimani, Mike writes: “Caught in a precarious standoff in which they may be one American death away from the new war Trump says he doesn’t want.”
And while Trump declared victory in his public remarks today, the administration’s goal to ensure that Iran doesn’t acquire nuclear weapons seems no more realistic now than it did a week ago. Soleimani’s death may not have addressed the central problem.
—Saahil Desai
*
« SNAPSHOT »
(Tom Brenner / Reuters)
Journalists pursue Senator Elizabeth Warren as she walks to a classified national security briefing today for the Senate on developments in the U.S.-Iran conflict.
*
« IDEAS AND ARGUMENTS »
(JONATHAN ERNST / REUTERS)
1. “He is the least trusted president in the history of polling. Two-thirds of Americans regard him as dishonest. Sixty-one percent say he does not respect democracy.”
There has been no “rally around the flag” effect after the targeted killing of Qassem Soleimani and the subsequent Iranian response in Iraq. But a president who’s spent years alienating half the country, can’t expect support and confidence now, David Frum argues.
2. “Would you ban the mail, just because some political operatives got good at using it to win elections?”
That’s the distillation of an argument from a Facebook executive, in an internal post titled “Thoughts for 2020.”
Facebook is credited with—blamed for—helping tip the 2016 election to Trump. It looks poised to play a similarly influential role in politics in 2020, but the leaked memo seems to suggest the company isn’t really acknowledging the power it has to amplify divisions and capitalize on people’s impulses, Alexis C. Madrigal writes.
*
« EVENING READ »
(BEBETO MATTHEWS / AP)
The Selfie Lines Are Still Long Though
When did the one-time Democratic frontrunner fall into the periphery of frontrunner-dom?
Warren’s dropped to a distant fourth in both Iowa and New Hampshire, as she tries to reignite her campaign with a major rally in Brooklyn. Russell Berman reported from the scene:
Sitting inside the cavernous Brooklyn auditorium where Senator Elizabeth Warren rallied before 3,000 cheering fans last night, you’d never have known that an Iranian retaliatory strike had brought the United States one step closer to another war in the Middle East. Nor would you have guessed that the candidate that these people had waited, in some cases, more than four hours to see, had recently lost her lead in the Democratic primary polls and had found herself suddenly on the outer edge of the top tier less than a month before the primary season kicks off in Iowa.
Warren is now at a real crossroads, Russell writes.
*


theatlantic--2020-01-09--The World’s Nuclear Guardrails Are Disappearing

Iranian missile attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq .
Deadly chaos in Iran .
A sudden halt of the fight against the Islamic State .
Utter confusion over whether U.S. troops will remain in Iraq , and even whether the United States still respects the laws of war .
The fallout from the Trump administration ’ s killing of Qassem Soleimani has been swift and serious .
But one potential knock-on effect may not come into clear view for some time : the emergence of Iran as the next nuclear-weapons state , at the very moment when the world appears @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nuclear age .
It ’ s possible that the Reaper drone hovering over Baghdad ’ s airport last week destroyed not only an infamous Iranian general , but also the last hope of curbing Iran ’ s nuclear ambitions .
Before he ’ d even said “ good morning ” during an address to the nation yesterday , Donald Trump vowed that Iran would “ never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon ” as long as he ’ s president of the United States .
Yet as he urged other world powers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the Obama administration negotiated with Iran , and that Trump withdrew the U.S. from in 2018 , he offered no details on his plan to obtain a better deal .
When the Iranian government announced that it would suspend more ( though not yet all ) of its commitments under the nuclear agreement , in a move made after Soleimani ’ s death but planned beforehand , I recalled something Richard Burt , the U.S. diplomat behind the largest nuclear-weapons reduction in history , told me back in 2018 .
He noted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he negotiated the START I treaty with the Soviet Union , people were acutely aware of the existential dangers of a nuclear conflict .
That ’ s no longer the case , he warned .

We’ve gone from the first decade since the advent of the atomic age to not yield a new nuclear-weapons state to the brink of war between the U.S. and Iran.
Iranian missile attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq. Deadly chaos in Iran. A sudden halt of the fight against the Islamic State. Utter confusion over whether U.S. troops will remain in Iraq, and even whether the United States still respects the laws of war. The fallout from the Trump administration’s killing of Qassem Soleimani has been swift and serious.
But one potential knock-on effect may not come into clear view for some time: the emergence of Iran as the next nuclear-weapons state, at the very moment when the world appears on the cusp of a more perilous nuclear age. It’s possible that the Reaper drone hovering over Baghdad’s airport last week destroyed not only an infamous Iranian general, but also the last hope of curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Before he’d even said “good morning” during an address to the nation yesterday, Donald Trump vowed that Iran would “never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon” as long as he’s president of the United States. Yet as he urged other world powers to abandon the nuclear deal that they and the Obama administration negotiated with Iran, and that Trump withdrew the U.S. from in 2018, he offered no details on his plan to obtain a better deal.
When the Iranian government announced that it would suspend more (though not yet all) of its commitments under the nuclear agreement, in a move made after Soleimani’s death but planned beforehand, I recalled something Richard Burt, the U.S. diplomat behind the largest nuclear-weapons reduction in history, told me back in 2018. He noted that in the ’80s, when he negotiated the START I treaty with the Soviet Union, people were acutely aware of the existential dangers of a nuclear conflict. That’s no longer the case, he warned.
“No one is focusing on the fact that the existing framework for nuclear control and constraints is unraveling” and giving way to “unrestrained nuclear competition,” Burt observed. What we’re witnessing, he argued, is not some sort of creative destruction, in which an outdated Cold War framework is being discarded in favor of a more modern one. It’s “just destruction.”
Read: A bigger foreign-policy mess than anyone predicted
Indeed, we’ve gone from the first decade since the advent of the atomic age to not yield a new nuclear-weapons state to, in the first days of 2020, the brink of war between the world’s leading nuclear power and a nuclear aspirant. The Trump administration is now poised to face at least two simultaneous nuclear crises along with an escalating and unprecedented tripartite nuclear-arms race, all of which will threaten the miraculously perfect track record of nuclear deterrence since 1945. Even if there are no nuclear tests or exchanges in the year ahead, the systems, accords, and norms that have helped mitigate the risks of nuclear conflict are vanishing, ushering in a more hazardous era that the United States won’t be able to control.
Consider what has transpired in the past year alone:
A newly unconstrained Iranian nuclear program: Iran has gradually cast off the shackles of the 2015 nuclear agreement following Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the pact, though it is still cooperating with international inspectors and leaving itself space to return to compliance if the United States lifts sanctions against Tehran. Experts estimate that with the recent steps away from the deal, the time that Iran would need to generate enough fuel for a nuclear bomb could decrease from roughly a year to a matter of months.
Iran has gradually cast off the shackles of the 2015 nuclear agreement following Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the pact, though it is still cooperating with international inspectors and leaving itself space to return to compliance if the United States lifts sanctions against Tehran. Experts estimate that with the recent steps away from the deal, the time that Iran would need to generate enough fuel for a nuclear bomb could decrease from roughly a year to a matter of months. An emerging North Korean nuclear-weapons power: The North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed over New Year’s to further advance his nuclear-weapons program, which is already likely sophisticated enough to threaten the whole world, after nuclear talks with the United States fell apart. The targeted killing of a top Iranian official, just a few years after the Iranians struck the nuclear accord with the United States, will probably only reinforce Kim’s belief that the only way for his regime to avoid a similar fate is to cling to its nuclear weapons. The former North Korean diplomat Thae Yong Ho told me he’s concerned Kim could go well beyond that in the coming year, perhaps declaring that the U.S. economic blockade of his country has left his nation no choice but to survive by selling nuclear and missile technologies to other parties, including U.S. adversaries.
The North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed over New Year’s to further advance his nuclear-weapons program, which is already likely sophisticated enough to threaten the whole world, after nuclear talks with the United States fell apart. The targeted killing of a top Iranian official, just a few years after the Iranians struck the nuclear accord with the United States, will probably only reinforce Kim’s belief that the only way for his regime to avoid a similar fate is to cling to its nuclear weapons. The former North Korean diplomat Thae Yong Ho told me he’s concerned Kim could go well beyond that in the coming year, perhaps declaring that the U.S. economic blockade of his country has left his nation no choice but to survive by selling nuclear and missile technologies to other parties, including U.S. adversaries. The specter of other countries going nuclear: Failing efforts to denuclearize North Korea and broker a better nuclear deal with Iran, coupled with concerns among U.S. allies about Trump’s commitment to providing for their security against these adversaries, have generated talk of Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Saudi Arabia exploring nuclear weapons of their own rather than relying on America’s nuclear deterrent. In a forecast of possible geopolitical risks in 2020, published a couple of weeks before Soleimani’s killing, two scholars at the Atlantic Council predicted that South Korea and Australia, “already pondering nukes, may move to the next stage of actively considering them in 2020, as may Japan. If the Iran nuclear crisis is not resolved, expect the Saudis to buy or rent a nuke from Pakistan.”
Failing efforts to denuclearize North Korea and broker a better nuclear deal with Iran, coupled with concerns among U.S. allies about Trump’s commitment to providing for their security against these adversaries, have generated talk of Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Saudi Arabia exploring nuclear weapons of their own rather than relying on America’s nuclear deterrent. In a forecast of possible geopolitical risks in 2020, published a couple of weeks before Soleimani’s killing, two scholars at the Atlantic Council predicted that South Korea and Australia, “already pondering nukes, may move to the next stage of actively considering them in 2020, as may Japan. If the Iran nuclear crisis is not resolved, expect the Saudis to buy or rent a nuke from Pakistan.” Emboldened nuclear states in South Asia: Clashes between India and Pakistan in February 2019, sparked by an attack on Indian security forces by Pakistani militants in the disputed territory of Kashmir, didn’t go nuclear. But they did escalate to an Indian air strike on a terrorist training camp in Pakistan—an act the nuclear experts Nicholas Miller and Vipin Narang have described as “the first ever attack by a nuclear power against the undisputed sovereign territory of another nuclear power.” These were nuclear powers with growing arsenals, no less.
Clashes between India and Pakistan in February 2019, sparked by an attack on Indian security forces by Pakistani militants in the disputed territory of Kashmir, didn’t go nuclear. But they did escalate to an Indian air strike on a terrorist training camp in Pakistan—an act the nuclear experts Nicholas Miller and Vipin Narang have described as “the first ever attack by a nuclear power against the undisputed sovereign territory of another nuclear power.” These were nuclear powers with growing arsenals, no less. The demise of U.S.-Russian arms control: Blaming Russian violations of the agreement and the unfairness of China not being a party to it, the United States officially withdrew in August from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which banned an entire class of ground-launched nuclear weapons. The Trump administration has also signaled that it may not renew New START, a 2010 successor to START I that’s due to expire next year and limits the number of nuclear warheads that the U.S. and Russia can deploy on longer-range missiles. The hope is that this will free up the United States to reach a more comprehensive deal that includes China, but so far that idea seems fantastical. A New START lapse would do away with the only remaining nuclear-arms-control treaty. It would also mark the first time since 1972 that America and Russia, which together account for more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, haven’t had any legally binding restrictions on their nuclear forces.
Blaming Russian violations of the agreement and the unfairness of China not being a party to it, the United States officially withdrew in August from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which banned an entire class of ground-launched nuclear weapons. The Trump administration has also signaled that it may not renew New START, a 2010 successor to START I that’s due to expire next year and limits the number of nuclear warheads that the U.S. and Russia can deploy on longer-range missiles. The hope is that this will free up the United States to reach a more comprehensive deal that includes China, but so far that idea seems fantastical. A New START lapse would do away with the only remaining nuclear-arms-control treaty. It would also mark the first time since 1972 that America and Russia, which together account for more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, haven’t had any legally binding restrictions on their nuclear forces. The outbreak of great-power competition: The collapse of the INF Treaty coincides with heightened rivalry among the United States, China, and Russia, threatening to accelerate their budding nuclear-arms race. They’re already investing heavily in modernizing their nuclear arsenals and in new technologies such as hypersonic glide vehicles, which evade missile defenses; cyberweapons against command-and-control systems; and artificial intelligence to incorporate into those systems. Meanwhile, the U.S.-China trade war hacks away at the economic interdependence that has helped deter conflict between the two nuclear-armed superpowers.
Read: Inside the collapse of Trump’s Korea policy
These dismal circumstances follow substantial advances in halting the spread of nuclear weapons. In the ’60s, the decade in which the most new nuclear states emerged (France, China, and, unofficially, Israel), John F. Kennedy predicted that there would be “15 or 20” nuclear powers by 1975. Today there are nine, a rate of about one to two entrants into the nuclear club per decade, with the latest being North Korea in 2006. The nuclear-security scholar Jim Walsh has noted that three-fourths of countries that were once interested in developing nuclear weapons ultimately chose not to do so, and that since the ’90s, more states have given up nuclear weapons than acquired them.
The number of nuclear weapons in the world, moreover, has dropped from more than 70,000 in 1986 to fewer than 14,000 today because of arms-control efforts. (That’s still enough, of course, to kill billions of people and envelop the world in a nuclear winter. When it comes to nuclear nonproliferation, progress is only heartening when expressed in relative terms.)
Most of the reductions in these weapons, however, occurred in the ’90s, and the pace of cuts has slowed ever since. We now live in a period when the barriers to acquiring nuclear weapons, a 75-year-old technology, are much lower than they once were. It’s also a time when, as James Holmes of the U.S. Naval War College once explained to me, there are more nuclear-weapons states “of different shapes and sizes … [and] different trajectories,” making the “geometry” of nuclear deterrence “far more complex and harder to manage” than during the comparatively symmetrical Cold War.
Read: The new concept everyone in Washington is talking about
Add to that the fading memory of the Cold War and fiercer competition among the great powers, and it’s no surprise that the guardrails on the world’s most destructive weapons are disappearing.
The past year may be remembered “as the turning point from an era of relative calm” to “the dawn of a dangerous new nuclear age,” Miller and Narang wrote last month in Foreign Affairs. The consequences could be “catastrophic.”


theatlantic--2020-01-09--What the Iran Clash Taught Us About Trump

Two days later , facing opposition that stretched from the Pentagon to his own party ’ s leadership on Capitol Hill , Trump folded .
“ I like to obey the law , ” he told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday .
Kelly Magsamen , a national-security official in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations , told me that Trump ’ s interest in targeting Iranian cultural sites did not come from the Department of Defense .
“ Where is that coming from ?
Is that coming from a political adviser ?
From the latest person he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ asked rhetorically .
“ I worked at the Pentagon .
Any U.S. soldier—all the way down to a private , all the way up to four-star general—would know that ’ s violation of international law .
And it ’ s un-American.
” I ’ ve spent the past several days trying to learn where the idea originated .
One Trump-administration official told me that the news media were the ones who used the term cultural sites , not the president .
I reminded this person that Trump had specifically used the term twice @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
” came the response .
I asked White House officials about another idea floated to me : whether Trump ’ s intention was more specific , to target political monuments ; they did not confirm that it aligned with Trump ’ s intention .
Read : Trump ’ s chance to take the high road with Iran I posed the cultural-sites question to Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina , a Trump confidant who was briefed in advance on the Soleimani drone strike during a golf trip with the president at Mar-a-Lago @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that he didn ’ t know where Trump got the idea.
“ I understand it ’ s an emotional time and he wants to create maximum deterrence .
In my view , this doesn ’ t create deterrence .
The goal is to divide the Iranian people from the regime .
They ’ re already divided .
I wouldn ’ t want to do anything to unite them.
” A former White House official , who , after insisting that no one in the national-security establishment could possibly have advised the president to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Persepolis , told me : “ I know the man well enough to know that ’ s something he dreamed up all by himself.
” If Barack Obama did x , Trump will do y Listening to the president ’ s 10-minute address at the White House yesterday , a non-Iranian foe seemed to be on his mind : Barack Obama .
Since inauguration weekend 2017 , a guiding principle of Trump ’ s White House has been , simply : If Obama did it , undo it .
Trump devoted part of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the signature foreign-policy moves of the Obama administration : a deal with Iran aimed at curbing the regime ’ s nuclear-weapons program .
Trump pulled the U.S. out of the agreement in 2018 , even though his own administration had deemed Iran to have complied with its terms .
In his remarks , Trump called the agreement “ foolish ” and “ very defective , ” and then gave a distorted account of its terms .
He said , for example , that the Obama administration had “ given ” Iran $ 150 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In fact , the money came from Iran regaining its own assets , which had been frozen .
Trump also claimed that the missiles fired by Iran were financed “ with the funds made available by the last administration.
” That baseless assertion implies that if Americans are killed by Iranian attacks , Obama has blood on his hands .
Having undermined Obama ’ s nuclear deal with Iran , Trump has yet to put forward a concrete plan to replace it .
He opened his speech by declaring that Iran would never @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But negating Obama ’ s work isn ’ t a strategy to bring that about ; it ’ s a tactic to tarnish his legacy .

Donald Trump is seen on a television screen in the Pentagon briefing room as he delivers a statement about Iran at the White House.
For now, President Donald Trump seems to have sidestepped an all-out war with Iran, opting instead for an uneasy standoff. The question is whether it will hold.
Since the launch of his campaign, Trump’s foreign-policy vision has never gone much deeper than simple sloganeering: No endless wars! America first! Following the targeted killing of Qassem Soleimani and the resulting tension with Iran, though, we have more clarity on what drives Trump as commander in chief, and what sort of wartime president he’d make.
Here are three lessons to draw from his handling of the Iran situation so far.
Trump has a red line
In May, Trump threatened Iran with annihilation if it “wanted to fight.” That was only bluster. A month later, Iran downed an unarmed U.S. drone. Trump ordered an armed counterattack—then abruptly called it off.
What he wouldn’t overlook, however, was an American fatality. On December 27, an American contractor was killed inside a military base in Iraq. Nawres Hamid, who was 33, died in a rocket attack launched by an Iranian-backed militia group. Two days after the assault, U.S. warplanes bombed five sites in Iraq and Syria tied to the militia group, Kataib Hezbollah, resulting in 25 deaths.
Not lost on Trump is the 2012 attack on a diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that resulted in the death of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Benghazi! has been a longtime rallying cry for Trump and his fellow Republicans who saw the tragedy as a symbol of President Barack Obama’s fecklessness and then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s unfitness for higher office. “Don’t let Obama get away with allowing Americans to die,” Trump tweeted on the eve of the 2012 presidential election, two months after the Benghazi attack. “Kick him out of office tomorrow.”
Now up for reelection, Trump believes that he can’t tolerate a Benghazi of his own, people close to the president told me. They said the president felt the need to avenge Hamid’s death.
“People underestimate the death of the American contractor,” Christopher Ruddy, a friend of Trump, told me. “Donald Trump might feel sympathy if 100 people die, but if they’re not American, in his mind it’s not his problem. He does not like to have Americans dying on his watch.”
Read: It wasn’t the law that stopped other presidents from killing Soleimani
Richard Goldberg, who until recently served in the White House as a National Security Council official responsible for countering Iran’s weapons program, told me: “If you look at the president’s views and the direction he’s given, along with the personnel he’s put in place, the attitude is, We’ll never have another Benghazi.”
There were no fatalities as a result of the missile attacks that Iran launched this week at air bases in Iraq housing U.S. troops. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters yesterday that he believed Iran had indeed “intended to kill personnel” and that there weren’t any casualties, thanks to the defensive measures taken by U.S. forces. In a televised appearance yesterday morning, Trump signaled that he would refrain from further action against Iran in the near term. Had any Americans been killed, Trump likely would have launched a retaliatory strike that would have pushed the two countries closer to conventional war.
When the enemy goes low, Trump’s instinct is to go low
In a tweet Saturday, Trump wrote that the United States had devised 52 Iranian targets. The number was an eye-for-eye approach, nodding to the hostage crisis of 1979, when Iranian demonstrators stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held captive 52 Americans for 444 days. The idea came from Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, who earlier served as the president’s special envoy for hostage affairs, a White House aide told me.
In that same tweet, Trump also revealed that in a war, he wouldn’t spare Iran’s cultural treasures. They’d also be targeted, he warned. That’s forbidden. The U.S. is bound by a 1954 international treaty that calls for the protection of cultural property during wartime. Given a full day to think about the unlawful threat he’d just made, and perhaps to reconsider whether preserving invaluable artifacts might be worthy of a great nation, Trump went all in. “They’re allowed to kill our people,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One during a flight back to Washington from Palm Beach, Florida, on Sunday. “They’re allowed to torture and maim our people. They’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people. And we’re not allowed to touch their cultural site? It doesn’t work that way.”
Two days later, facing opposition that stretched from the Pentagon to his own party’s leadership on Capitol Hill, Trump folded. “I like to obey the law,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. Kelly Magsamen, a national-security official in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, told me that Trump’s interest in targeting Iranian cultural sites did not come from the Department of Defense. “Where is that coming from? Is that coming from a political adviser? From the latest person he spoke to at Mar-a-Lago?” she asked rhetorically. “I worked at the Pentagon. Any U.S. soldier—all the way down to a private, all the way up to four-star general—would know that’s violation of international law. And it’s un-American.”
I’ve spent the past several days trying to learn where the idea originated. One Trump-administration official told me that the news media were the ones who used the term cultural sites, not the president. I reminded this person that Trump had specifically used the term twice in two days. “Did he?” came the response.
I asked White House officials about another idea floated to me: whether Trump’s intention was more specific, to target political monuments; they did not confirm that it aligned with Trump’s intention.
Read: Trump’s chance to take the high road with Iran
I posed the cultural-sites question to Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Trump confidant who was briefed in advance on the Soleimani drone strike during a golf trip with the president at Mar-a-Lago over the holidays. Graham told me that he didn’t know where Trump got the idea.“I understand it’s an emotional time and he wants to create maximum deterrence. In my view, this doesn’t create deterrence. The goal is to divide the Iranian people from the regime. They’re already divided. I wouldn’t want to do anything to unite them.”
A former White House official, who, after insisting that no one in the national-security establishment could possibly have advised the president to demolish, say, the ruins of Persepolis, told me: “I know the man well enough to know that’s something he dreamed up all by himself.”
If Barack Obama did x, Trump will do y
Listening to the president’s 10-minute address at the White House yesterday, a non-Iranian foe seemed to be on his mind: Barack Obama.
Since inauguration weekend 2017, a guiding principle of Trump’s White House has been, simply: If Obama did it, undo it. Trump devoted part of his speech yesterday to denouncing one of the signature foreign-policy moves of the Obama administration: a deal with Iran aimed at curbing the regime’s nuclear-weapons program. Trump pulled the U.S. out of the agreement in 2018, even though his own administration had deemed Iran to have complied with its terms.
In his remarks, Trump called the agreement “foolish” and “very defective,” and then gave a distorted account of its terms. He said, for example, that the Obama administration had “given” Iran $150 billion as part of the deal. In fact, the money came from Iran regaining its own assets, which had been frozen. Trump also claimed that the missiles fired by Iran were financed “with the funds made available by the last administration.” That baseless assertion implies that if Americans are killed by Iranian attacks, Obama has blood on his hands.
Having undermined Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, Trump has yet to put forward a concrete plan to replace it. He opened his speech by declaring that Iran would never get a nuclear weapon on his watch. But negating Obama’s work isn’t a strategy to bring that about; it’s a tactic to tarnish his legacy.


theatlantic--2020-01-09--Radio Atlantic: ‘He Doesn’t Understand War’

Dovere : You thought about revenge .
How do you process that ?
Gallego : First , you have to understand why we even think that way … Clearly these Iraqi villagers could have told us or they could have given us a warning .
We had all these ways for them to actually call and anonymously give us tips .
I remember when I met one of the first firefights I got into , I was going through this road along the river and all of a sudden everyone just disappeared , and as soon as that happened , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fire .
And they had clearly set this up for quite a while , and they basically let us go into an ambush .
So the way you think about this is , like , you know , they 're not innocent .
They 're now part of the enemy , because they 're helping out the enemy … And the way that I kind of got myself out of it is I try to give myself some rules , and the two rules was that I was going to survive .
And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ going to survive , I was going to go honorably .
Dovere : Revenge is what escalation is .
How do we get out of that ?
Gallego : If you 're a marine , the first thing they teach you is mission objective .
And a war crime is by nature horrible , because you 're targeting innocent civilians and basically going against the basic rules of humanity .
But it also will endanger your mission , endanger your men .
And I think if you 're someone like the Iranians or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ think about that .
What is the mission here ?
The mission of Iran is pretty simple : get the United States out of Iraq , make Iraq a proxy state .
So that way Iran can control from Tehran all the way to the Mediterranean , a swath of land that they 've always wanted to control .
Our objective should be to have a stable , secular Iraq that is a buffer to Iran .
Right now , if President Trump is smart—and we 'll find out pretty soon—our goal is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ally in Iraq and not seek revenge and not allow the Iranians to have their goals met .
And if they keep that in mind , instead of the idea of revenge , I think we could we as the United States could be in a better position .
Dovere : If you were in the field and were told to target civilians or cultural sites , what would happen ?
Gallego : I would refuse .
I think most would .
We are trained to understand what war crimes are .
Dovere @ @ @ @ @ @ @ disconcerted by a commander in chief who talks about committing war crimes ?
Gallego : These men and women are going to do whatever they think is lawful for this president .
The problem is that this president , I do n't think [ he ] sees them as America 's forces .
He sees them as his forces .
And he is going to use them for whatever he believes is best for him , not for this country .
Dovere : What would you say to those talking about World War @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Eh , calm down .
No .
1 : A war with Iran will be a totally different war than we know .
I mean , we could basically destroy their navy , destroy every piece of aircraft platform they have .
And we would still be at war , right ?

A congressman and combat veteran talks about what happens when the commander in chief has no sense of what life on the front lines is like.
Ruben Gallego is an Iraq War veteran, a three-term congressman, and a member of the House Armed Services Committee. Despite all that, he’s as confused as most Americans about what’s happening with Iran.
America isn’t at war, he told me in an interview Wednesday morning, but that “doesn’t mean that we’re not in conflict … and we don’t know how long it’s going to take.” As we spoke, Gallego was preparing to head to a classified briefing on the Iran situation, but he wasn’t confident about getting answers anytime soon. He kept using the word “scary” to describe what’s ahead. But the point he stressed repeatedly was how detached the politicized debate in Washington—as well as the chatter that erupted on social media about World War III after the strike killing Iranian General Qasem Soleimani—can feel to the troops on the ground.
Gallego fought alongside many marines who were killed in Iraq, including his best friend, and at several points in our interview started to cry, remembering what happened to them. He said he wishes President Donald Trump could feel more immediately the fear of death, and the thoughts of revenge, that come with serving on the front lines. A lack of strategic clarity around a conflict, of the sort that exists in our current confusing stance toward Iran, makes things much worse. “If you’re a marine,” he said, “the first thing they teach you is mission objective.”
What follows is an edited and condensed transcript of an interview that can be heard in full on Radio Atlantic.
Subscribe to Radio Atlantic: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher (How to Listen)
Edward-Isaac Dovere: You served in Iraq. Were there times where you would see something that was being talked about, something like [the Iran situation]—a big [news] event that's going to affect your day to day experience?
Ruben Gallego: It's difficult to say. We were fairly shut off. We weren't on a base that had radio. Or any type of satellite TV. Most of the time [we spent] actually patrolling out in the towns. And we slept in people's houses or we slept in, like, abandoned buildings. I do remember one time, I was in a house, where we were clearing this town of insurgents. And what happens back in the day when you were done for the night, it's called going firm. You'd go take over a house, offer money to the occupants. Tell them they can stay or they can go—it's their call. And then you basically barricade yourself in. So that way you don't get infiltrated at night by the insurgents. And this one family had satellite TV. And so we turned it on. And, you know, we were watching, I can't remember what it was—like BBC or something like that. And I think it was [Donald] Rumsfeld was talking about how the war was going great. And I'm like surrounded by eight or 10 Iraqi National Guard dudes. And we had just had a hard day of fighting. And I literally threw my shoe at the TV. It was just like, come on, could this be any crazier? And then we switched to The Amazing Race—you know, the contest? And I actually saw one of my frickin’ college friends on that show, and he was crying because he's having such a hard day. And then I threw my other shoe at the TV.
Dovere: There is a day that obviously stands out for the worst reasons when your best friend was killed. He was killed by an IED. How did you find out what happened?
Gallego: Well, I was right next to him. I was in a vehicle in front of him and my vehicle rolled over the IED. And by protocol, if you're the vehicle behind you, you're supposed to follow our tracks. And so for some reason, it was triggered—basically a landmine, huge landmine. For some reason, the IED didn't go off on me; it went off on him.
Dovere: What is that like to have had your friend killed when it could have been you?
Gallego: Two days earlier, we had just gotten through a full day of combat where we lost two other platoon members … And then we had a bunch of other injuries in a daylong battle along the Syrian border. And I was actually in a different part of town fighting insurgents. And over the radio, I had heard actually that [my friend] had died in that situation. And until I fought my way back to base, and I saw him—I was so happy to see he was alive, and two days later, he's dead. That's very difficult.
Dovere: You thought about revenge. How do you process that?
Gallego: First, you have to understand why we even think that way … Clearly these Iraqi villagers could have told us or they could have given us a warning. We had all these ways for them to actually call and anonymously give us tips. I remember when I met one of the first firefights I got into, I was going through this road along the river and all of a sudden everyone just disappeared, and as soon as that happened, they hit us with RPGs and machine-gun fire. And they had clearly set this up for quite a while, and they basically let us go into an ambush. So the way you think about this is, like, you know, they're not innocent. They're now part of the enemy, because they're helping out the enemy … And the way that I kind of got myself out of it is I try to give myself some rules, and the two rules was that I was going to survive. And when I didn't think I was going to survive, I was going to go honorably.
Dovere: Revenge is what escalation is. How do we get out of that?
Gallego: If you're a marine, the first thing they teach you is mission objective. And a war crime is, by nature, horrible, because you're targeting innocent civilians and basically going against the basic rules of humanity. But it also will endanger your mission, endanger your men. And I think if you're someone like the Iranians or President Trump, you really need to think about that. What is the mission here? The mission of Iran is pretty simple: get the United States out of Iraq, make Iraq a proxy state. So that way Iran can control from Tehran all the way to the Mediterranean, a swath of land that they've always wanted to control. Our objective should be to have a stable, secular Iraq that is a buffer to Iran. Right now, if President Trump is smart—and we'll find out pretty soon—our goal is to make sure that we have an ally in Iraq and not seek revenge and not allow the Iranians to have their goals met. And if they keep that in mind, instead of the idea of revenge, I think we could—we as the United States could be in a better position.
Dovere: If you were in the field and were told to target civilians or cultural sites, what would happen?
Gallego: I would refuse. I think most would. We are trained to understand what war crimes are.
Dovere: As a veteran, are you disconcerted by a commander in chief who talks about committing war crimes?
Gallego: These men and women are going to do whatever they think is lawful for this president. The problem is that this president, I don't think [he] sees them as America's forces. He sees them as his forces. And he is going to use them for whatever he believes is best for him, not for this country.
Dovere: What would you say to those talking about World War III on social media?
Gallego: Eh, calm down. No. 1: A war with Iran will be a totally different war than we know. I mean, we could basically destroy their navy, destroy every piece of aircraft platform they have. And we would still be at war, right?
Dovere: What would make it war?
Gallego: Whenever your country tries to kill another country’s men, that's war.
Dovere: And so a base being fired on is not war?
Gallego: A base being fired on with no intent to kill anybody is probably an opportunity for us to de-escalate … I think what you have to figure out is … how to get out of it. So even if we can't define what war is, if you know that things are bad, let's get out of it. And the way to do that is through de-escalation. And so how does that occur? Well, you have the president through back channels convey to Iran, like, “Hey, we're all going back to our corners. No more funny business back and forth, and then we'll move from there.”
Dovere: Do you feel any less confused and uncertain than Americans at large feel at this point?
Gallego: I guess for me this is kind of normal. I mean, if you are ever in war like I was, like you just get so used to chaos and ambiguity.
Dovere: Chaos like this? Like when the U.S. military says it accidentally released what was meant to be a draft letter, saying that the U.S. was moving troops out of Iraq?
Gallego: Let me tell you, there were dumbasses in the war when I was there, too … We have some of the best minds that are in the Pentagon. We also have some of the dumbest minds at the Pentagon. And the question is, who's in charge that day?
Dovere: So between the best minds and the dumbest minds at the Pentagon, who seems to be in charge right now?
Gallego: Well, at this point, that's the biggest problem. I can't tell you who's in charge. I don't know who the president's talking to. I don’t know from whom the president's getting advice.