This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: As the Iran war drags on, the US may be running perilously low on key munitions.

What’s happening? According to reporting by Reuters this week, the US has used “virtually all” of its stockpiles of two kinds of precision long-range missiles since the start of the US-Iran war in late February. Its defensive capabilities may be slipping, too. CNN reported on Tuesday that the US has also depleted “nearly 80%” of its supply of THAAD interceptor missiles and around half of its Patriot interceptors.

What do these shortages mean for the Iran conflict? 1) They could limit the US’s military options against Iran. Reporting suggests that this is already happening. According to the New York Times, President Donald Trump decided against a “major escalation” of the US-Iran war late last month after three US troops were killed, at least partially because of concerns about munitions shortages. 

2) The shortage of interceptors increases the danger for US troops and allies in the region. According to the Atlantic, US forces are now at the point where they have to make snap decisions about whether to use an interceptor or ride out an attack. They’re also at a mathematical disadvantage; the US has relatively few interceptors, which cost millions to produce. Iran, meanwhile, can hurl mass-produced drones at the US for about $35,000 each.

How is Trump responding? Not well. The shortages are reportedly causing friction between Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and the president has lashed out on social media. 

“The U.S. has massive amounts of ‘munitions,’ especially of certain types,” Trump posted on Friday. “The ‘leakers’ of these treasonous statements are being hunted down. Long term jail sentences will be sought!”

What’s next? One effect of the shortage could be to encourage an end to the fighting. A new agreement over the Strait of Hormuz between Iran and Oman is reportedly in the works, which could be a step toward ending the war — if the US is willing to make some concessions.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers, this newsletter will be off tomorrow. We’d like to preemptively encourage you to log off and enjoy the summer weekend. We’ll see you back here on Monday. 

Now, before we go: Did you know there are World Dog Surfing Championships? I did not, so I was especially delighted to encounter this photo gallery from the Atlantic, collecting competitors from several recent years. You can find them all here with a gift link — enjoy!

In 2014, Narendra Modi pioneered the use of social media and digital campaigning in India to become prime minister. Known as one of the first global politicians to harness the power of the internet, he has the most social media followers of any world leader currently in office. 

Today, over a decade since Modi’s digital-first political campaign, an internet-fueled youth movement called the Cockroach Janta Party (or the Cockroach People’s Party) is using the same social media platforms to organize protests, successfully forcing the resignation of one of Prime Minister Modi’s top advisers. The Indian government has responded with a crackdown, arresting protesters and increasingly censoring X, Meta, and other social meda sites. The legacy of the Cockroach Janta Party will be complex: On one hand, it brought to the forefront important conversations around Gen Z unemployment and meritocracy; on the other, it may have pushed the Indian government to create stricter new censorship laws to silence future dissent.

The internet that helped propel Modi to power is becoming a tool that a new generation uses against him. How much further will Modi’s government go to censor its people and restrict free speech? 

Read more about censorship in India and the Cockroach Janta Party:

• Censorship tracker on MediaNama, a live list of censorship following the Jantar Mantar protests in New Delhi
• “Social Media Modi-Fication: Narendra Modi’s use of Social Media in Indian Elections 2014”
• “India CJP protests: Young women face harassment and abuse”
• “Activists decry AI surveillance at CJP protests”
• “India’s young are more educated than ever. Why are so many jobless?”

If you enjoy our reporting and want to hear more from Vox journalists, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/vox. Each month, our members get access to exclusive videos, livestreams, and chats with our newsroom.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: It’s clearer than ever that President Donald Trump has no way out on Iran. 

What’s happening? Over the weekend, Trump posted to social media that he had agreed to “hold off any attack” on Iran because “the perimeters of a deal has been agreed to.” The deal, he said, would include the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and a nebulous “end to Iran’s nuclear threat.” 

That should all sound fairly familiar, since it’s essentially what the US and Iran agreed to — and subsequently abandoned — in June. As of Monday morning, though, Trump had already pivoted, accusing Iran of being “unbelievably duplicitous” in negotiating.

“This is a last chance for them to sign a good document,” he told reporters in the Oval Office Monday afternoon, threatening “decapitation” — essentially the same warning he issued in April. 

What’s the context? Since the collapse of the June “memorandum of understanding” between the US and Iran, which ended the immediate conflict and set out a path for negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program, the two countries have resumed hostilities, if not full-scale war. In July, three more US servicemembers were killed in Iranian attacks.

The strait also remains largely closed, with only a handful of vessels per day passing through.

Why does this matter? The Logoff has tried to steer clear of blow-by-blow coverage of the Iran war, because this kind of reversal happens a lot: Trump is constantly blustering, promising a deal, threatening massive retaliation, backing down, and doing it all over again. 

This latest episode, more than five months into the war and tidily compressed into just a few days, is little different. We’re writing about it anyway because it’s a good reminder of what has emerged as the essential fact of the war: Trump may have started the conflict, but he doesn’t seem to have any real plan in place to end it — and the longer things drag on, the greater the risk to the US troops fighting it.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Vox’s Unexplainable podcast is tackling the “holy grail of sensory biology” — magnetoreception, which lets birds navigate using Earth’s magnetic field — this week with some help from author and journalist Ed Yong. You can listen here, and I also recommend Yong’s newsletter, which regularly features some spectacular bird photos.

Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow! 

Both Washington and Silicon Valley are in the midst of a collective freak-out over China’s recent advancements in artificial intelligence.

The latest round of consternation was triggered this month when a little-known Chinese AI startup called Moonshot released a new large language model called Kimi K3. The conventional wisdom had been that the leading AI models developed by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic were between six to 12 months ahead of their Chinese competitors. Kimi dashed those assumptions: now, analysts say American companies may be as little as two to three months behind. 

Dean Ball, a former Trump administration official now with OpenAI, warned in a bleak post on X that models like Kimi K3 could lead to a world of “full AI communism” and a “dystopian hellscape” of AI under full government control. 

Policymakers have worried for years now about China gaining an edge over the US in the AI race. Both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations took steps to slow China’s AI progress, including blocking the export of the most advanced US semiconductors.  

The White House is already reportedly considering taking steps to ban “open-weight” models — models that are easier to adapt for a user’s own purposes — like Kimi K3 in the United States. The Trump administration has also accused Moonshot of using the unauthorized “distillation” of one of Anthropic’s models — basically using another model’s outputs to train itself rather than raw data — as well as gaining access to blacklisted Nvidia chips in Thailand.

But often lost in the debates about what to do about China’s accelerating AI capabilities is the question of why the US cares about this at all. Obviously, the American companies developing the latest frontier models care about maintaining their edge, but why should it matter to Americans if the chatbot in their pocket was developed in Silicon Valley or Shanghai? And perhaps even more so, why should it matter what chatbots people in Nairobi or Brussels are using? 

The concerns in the US about Chinese AI generally fall into three broad buckets: cybersecurity concerns; military and national security concerns; and human rights or democracy concerns.

For the moment, concerns about who is winning the AI race can feel a bit abstract, but as AI becomes more embedded into governments, militaries, and ordinary people’s lives, the difference will start to be felt in a much more material way at both a national and personal level. In general, there is a growing sense that it matters which of the world’s vastly different superpowers builds the technology that could transform everything. 

“People’s relationship with AI is becoming foundational to how they live their lives, so the choices people make about whose model they use and where they are physically hosted, as they share some of their most intimate secrets and ask for life advice and business guidance, and run an increasing share of their life — those are incredibly important,” said Ryan Fedasiuk, a former State Department technology adviser now at the American Enterprise Institute. “It’s a contest between the United States and China to define the operating systems through which people live and work.”

Here’s what else America loses if it loses that contest.

Chinese AI could be more vulnerable to cyberattacks 

The concerns about using Chinese AI are in some ways a repeat of the concerns over Huawei, the Chinese telecoms firm that built much of the world’s 5G internet infrastructure, but which the US government banned from operating in the United States during the first Trump administration over concerns that the Chinese government could intercept information transmitted over these networks. 

Today, the concern is that many firms are increasingly integrating Chinese AI models into their systems, both because they are often cheaper and because they are “open-weight.” (“Weights” refer to the setting an AI model uses to process a user’s inputs. “Open-weight” models make these publicly available for users to tinker with, rather than charging for access.) 

There are some indications that Americans using Chinese AI models are already vulnerable. A Booz Allen study from earlier this year tested four Chinese models commonly used by US developers and found that three of them generated software with far more “hidden vulnerabilities” that could be exploited by hackers than their US counterparts. There’s no proof that the models were doing this intentionally, but the study did find that the models were “changing their behavior depending on who the user seemed to be or what country the request referenced.”

AI can also be used to carry out cyberattacks. Although nearly all the leading models have safety protocols meant to prevent this, they’re not bulletproof. Even Anthropic’s Claude, generally considered one of the most secure models, was adapted by Chinese hackers last year to engage in cyber espionage. The open weights of the leading Chinese models could make it even easier to strip out the safety protocols. 

AI could give China a military edge

The simplest and most obvious argument for why AI matters for American national security is that it’s all too conceivable that the US and China could be at war in the years to come, and AI could be a major factor in determining who wins. 

The conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran have shown that modern militaries are already extensively using AI for intelligence collection and targeting. Semi- or fully-autonomous drone swarms are a major component of US plans for repelling a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Then there’s the risk of AI being used to generate new bioweapons or other dangerous threats. 

US experts believe China has pursued a “military-civil fusion” strategy, encouraging the People’s Liberation Army and Chinese defense contractors to collaborate closely with civilian technology companies and research institutions in order to gain an edge in military AI applications like intelligence analysis and drone swarms. It’s difficult to know exactly which of these capabilities China is focusing on, but procurement data suggests leading Chinese technology firms like Deepseek and Alibaba are involved in work with potential military applications. Analysts also accuse China of using outputs from US models like ChatGPT and Claude to train AI systems that could help develop China’s defense capabilities. 

And that’s just conventional weapons. The US government has alleged that Chinese labs have “continued to engage in biological activities with potential [bioweapon] applications” amid concerns that artificial intelligence could help make such weapons more sophisticated and deadly. 

China could export digital authoritarianism

Last year, it was reported that Miiloo, a fuzzy children’s plush toy with a built-in AI chatbot, would, if prompted, happily tell users Chinese Communist Party talking points like “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China.” The hubbub over Miiloo reached the US Senate floor. While it’s hard to imagine that many users were really asking Miiloo to help clear up East Asian territorial disputes, the affair illustrated much larger concerns about the dangers of letting AI models built by an authoritarian government with one of the world’s strictest censorship regimes become the global standard. 

Chinese generative AI tools are legally required to uphold the country’s “core socialist values,” according to a document published by its national cybersecurity standards committee. So it’s little surprise that DeepSeek, the Chinese chatbot that sent shockwaves through the US tech industry in 2025, politely declines to answer when you ask it what happened on June 4, 1989, in Tiananmen Square. 

It’s not just that Chinese AI could help shape the political narratives absorbed by billions around the world, at a time when US soft power is ebbing and surveys show people in many countries already now have a more positive view of China than the United States.

 The Chinese government is also increasingly integrating AI into its own censorship and surveillance apparatus, and is exporting tools like facial recognition technology to other authoritarian countries. 

The fact that under Xi Jinping, China’s government was centralizing power and becoming more, not less, authoritarian in the years leading up to the recent advances in AI are a major factor driving the mistrust in its technology. 

“I think many of the sincere arguments about the risks of these models and what China would do with them stems from the coercive authoritarian approach of China’s current leader,” said Mieke Eoyang, former US  deputy assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy. “I don’t think we would be having this conversation in the same way with someone like [China’s previous leaders] Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao.”

It is a serious concern if models built to conform to the values and political priorities of China’s current government become the global standard. But some are skeptical of the idea that human rights and democracy should be the goal of AI competition, worrying that the damage has already been done. The premise of that idea has gotten “shakier in recent years,” says Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and author of the book The Rise of Digital Repression. Under this administration, the US has cut support for democracy and human rights programs overseas, and often allied itself with authoritarian governments. Then there’s the fact that at least one leading chatbot often seems to mimic the racist and antisemitic views of the world’s richest man who is also an ally of the current president. 

While it’s still true that Chinese AI reflects the authoritarian values and priorities of China’s leaders, Feldstein notes, “this idea that the US is standing at the forefront of protecting and advancing democracy, human rights, that we’re not sort of there to manipulate information or to push a narrative agenda that reflects the ideological preferences of its leaders, has started to fray.” 

The race to AGI 

There’s also a set of concerns around the topic of “artificial general intelligence,” the hypothetical point at which AI exceeds human capabilities and is able to improve itself. The concern, expressed by both US government commissions and senior officials in both administrations, is that China is “racing” toward AGI and that whichever country achieves it first will have a massive geopolitical advantage. This is the type of thinking behind invocations of the nuclear-era Manhattan Project to justify massive government investments in AI development. 

Chinese leaders do not appear to view AI competition this way. “The US conversation around this is much more ‘AGI-pilled’,” says Jeffrey Ding, a professor at George Washington University and expert on US-China technology competition. “The concern here is that we are very much on the brink of this explosion of more and more powerful AI that leads to it dominating everything.” Chinese leaders, on the other hand, “generally see AI as a productivity tool.”

If Chinese AI is a problem, what should we be doing about it? 

This is not just a Beltway or Silicon Valley concern. A recent Pew survey found that 43 percent Americans believe it is very important for the US to remain the leader in AI development, versus 22 percent who said it was not that important. Interestingly, the survey also found that most Americans believe China is already ahead on AI, though the expert consensus is that it’s still slightly behind. 

“We’ve gotten so used to the fact that the US has been the leading player in technological revolutions from like mobile internet to the internet era, so it’s worrying to feel we may no longer have that dominant strength,” said Selina Xu, China and AI policy lead in the office of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. 

Even if there’s some consensus that AI competition is a priority, there’s less agreement on how to go about it. The challenge, Xu says, is “How do you manage the very concrete national security risks that come from competing with China on AI, but not turn technological competition into blanket protectionism?”

Often, the policy responses to this challenge have been contradictory. 

The Trump administration, in its first term, pioneered the policy of restricting the export of the most advanced semiconductor chips to China, but Trump undermined that policy last year by permitting Nvidia to sell its advanced H200 chips there. The move flummoxed China hawks in Washington and went against the preferences of AI developers like Anthropic, but probably had a lot to do with lobbying by chip maker Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, CEO of the world’s most valuable company. 

In some cases, the US may be inadvertently making China’s models more appealing. In June, the Trump administration placed export controls on Anthropic’s advanced Fable model. This move prompted the company to take the model down for all users and led to the first time that AI capabilities meant for the global public took a step backward.In response, French President Emmanuel Macron warned, “We will not buy any model made by [US AI] companies if from one day to the next you can just turn off the switch.” Chinese models are hardly immune from concerns about kill switches or back doors, but if both governments involved in the AI race are seen as meddling, customers may just opt for whichever one is cheaper. 

The latest flashpoint in the debate concerns the reports that the administration is considering banning open-weight models.  This prompted an open letter from dozens of leading tech companies including Nvidia and OpenAI defending access to these models as necessary for helping the US maintain AI leadership. Advocates note that open-weight models can help respond to vulnerabilities as well as create them: When a rogue OpenAI model recently hacked into the startup Hugging Face’s systems, Hugging Face’s engineers used an open-weight model developed by China’s Z.ai to analyze the attack. 

Despite the frequent comparisons, AI is not a national security competition like the early days of nuclear weapons or the space race. It’s a technology with potentially grave national security implications, that’s also used by millions of people around the world to plan their Tuesday night dinner or help with their homework. The log-in for Claude is not carried by a military officer at the president’s side. And much of the important work on developing these new technologies is being done by private tech companies, not government labs or defense contractors. 

It may be that AI capability will help determine which country has the edge in the 21st century. It may also be that the benefits of these capabilities will be shared: Chinese companies might be no less capable than their American counterparts when it comes to developing new medications or clean energy technology. 

The challenge of crafting technology to prevent a “dystopian hellscape” is to not accidentally make the existing world worse. 

The International Criminal Court is in the trenches right now.

Last week, its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, was voted out of his position. In a first-of-its-kind vote, 82 member states decided that he engaged in misconduct and a serious breach of duty. The vote comes after he was accused of sexual misconduct by a female colleague at the ICC, which Khan has denied.

It’s a mess, and it’s hitting the ICC at an inopportune time. On top of this internal turmoil, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently launched an all-out attack on the court.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this month, Rubio wrote that the Trump administration’s goal is to “dismantle the ICC—brick by brick, if necessary,” citing the possibility that the court could “target” American citizens, such as Border Patrol agents or US soldiers.

The US is not a member of the ICC, and has a history of wariness about the organization.

Beth Van Schaack previously served as the US ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, a role that led her to work directly with the International Criminal Court. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the decades-long tumultuous relationship between the US and the ICC. And they discuss whether, if the ICC is now weaker than ever, the Trump administration can actually break it for good.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

If the International Criminal Court is charged with dealing with people who have allegedly done very bad things and then trying them, why is the United States not a member?

The United States signed the treaty in the waning days of the Clinton administration, but never submitted it for ratification to the Senate. And one of the concerns is that the final treaty allows for jurisdiction over individuals who may commit crimes on the territory of state parties. And the United States has always been concerned about that principle because we have troop commitments.

Supporters of the court have always said the United States and its personnel are vulnerable regardless of whether you join. If US personnel are committing crimes on the territory of state parties, which we saw in Afghanistan, the response is to do those cases domestically and there’ll be no occasion for the International Criminal Court to consider those matters.

There’ve been peaks and valleys in the relationship between the ICC and the United States. So we’re in a frankly pretty deep valley right now with this new campaign that Secretary Rubio announced.

But back in the Bush administration, there was also very acute concern and it stemmed from this Afghanistan investigation. The Bush administration and Congress both put in place measures that they thought would be protective of US servicemembers. So that was one valley.

Now what’s interesting is in the second term of the Bush administration, many of these measures were dismantled because the Bush administration realized that the court was doing important work in some areas where it also cared about justice — in particular, Darfur.

Then, the Obama administration announced a reset in its relationship with the court, and that’s where I entered the picture. The Obama administration directed various executive agencies to look for ways to support the court where the work that it was doing was consistent with US policy.

Then, we had the first Trump administration, which reversed course almost immediately and eventually imposed sanctions on senior figures, including the prosecutor herself and one of her key aides.

Then, we get to the Biden-Harris administration. They pulled down those sanctions and again launched a reset of the relationship. At that point, there were a number of situations where the court was working, including following the brutal war of aggression by Russia against Ukraine.

Here we saw a remarkable rise of bipartisan support for the work of the court. You had senior Republican figures in Congress supporting the court. The late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) led a resolution that was supporting justice in Ukraine. Secretary Rubio, then Sen. Rubio, joined that resolution. There was new legislation passed that made it easier for the United States to support the work of the court.

Of course, with the second Trump administration, we have reversed course again, and in particular with Rubio’s announcement.

Well, let’s talk about the reversal. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is at one point on board with the ICC, and then recently he vows to dismantle it. What happened here?

It’s not clear what the precipitating event is, to be honest. There is no existential threat at present. Obviously, there’s always the concern that this is some kind of a distraction because matters are not going well in Iran and with respect to the economy — that this is something to pull eyeballs away from those matters onto something that he can look tough in. Is this just kind of red meat for anti-multilateralism or is there something that is not made public that is happening?

Is there anything actually that Marco Rubio or anyone else in the United States at the highest level could do to the International Criminal Court to put an end to it?

The International Criminal Court is part of a larger system of the rules-based order that we’ve been trying to build since World War II. Almost all of our friends and allies are members of this court and they care deeply about its success. They are committed to seeing a system of international criminal justice. So, no is the answer. The United States alone cannot dismantle this court.

Now, it can injure the court and it has already done so. There are already eight ICC judges, including judges who hail from some of our closest allies — France, for example — who have been subjected to brutal sanctions. They can’t use credit cards that pass through New York. They can’t make reservations online because of financial sanctions. They can’t travel to the United States because of travel bans, et cetera. The chief prosecutor and two of his two deputies have been sanctioned. Non-governmental organizations that are involved in human rights in Palestine have been sanctioned and a UN figure has been sanctioned. Those measures are already in place.

What his most recent campaign seems to announce is some diplomatic move to try and convince states to leave the court or to cease their cooperation with the court. And we have seen in recent days a couple of states announcing that they were withdrawing. These are mostly states within Africa, but also Venezuela, subject to investigation by the prosecutor’s office. The United States can certainly injure the court, but there’s no way that we could dismantle the court.

Most Americans don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the International Criminal Court, but they may know it because lately, it has gotten a lot of attention that the court has issued an arrest warrant for [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has said he would like to see Netanyahu arrested if he comes to New York.

Mamdani has said he does not have that power. He cannot order the NYPD to do it, but he would like for it to happen. What are the chances that Benjamin Netanyahu comes to the United States and is arrested?

Pretty close to zero, if not actually zero. This is a matter of federal law and international law. And the Headquarters Agreement between the United States and the United Nations, which placed the headquarters of the UN in New York, basically gives certain privileges and immunities to individuals who are coming to New York to attend official functions.

New Yorkers are a feisty bunch. So when word is out that Benjamin Netanyahu is in New York, can you imagine the protests that would happen? Can you imagine the embarrassment that he might experience when he’s supposed to be giving his remarks at the General Assembly High-level Week where all the heads of states convene to deal with transnational issues and his motorcade is ensnarled in protests protected by the First Amendment, calling for his arrest for various international crimes? If I were his lawyer, I would say, “There’s no chance you’re going to get arrested.” But honestly, it could be a miserable visit, given all of the strong support for accountability in this matter in the United States.

This is a lot of drama for a body that for a long time seems to have avoided a ton of very public drama. So who gets hurt in all of this? Is it the court? Is it the US and its reputation? Where do you think this leads?

Unfortunately, I think everyone comes out not looking great here. The court needs to put in place measures to be able to receive those complaints by witnesses, whistleblowers, victims themselves, process them quickly, but also fairly to all parties involved. The United States looks terrible as well, launching a campaign like this against an international organization whose mandate it is to deliver justice for the worst crimes known to humankind.

The AI industry’s investors and critics don’t agree on much. But many in each camp share at least one basic conviction: America’s top labs are about to make a killing. 

Capital markets have signaled their faith in Anthropic and OpenAI’s impending hyper-profitability, valuing each at nearly $1 trillion. Many of Silicon Valley’s progressive adversaries also expect the labs to grow filthy rich but fear the implications, warning that AI-induced automation could transfer vast sums of money from ordinary workers to a handful of giant tech companies. Sen. Bernie Sanders’s call for nationalizing the top AI labs rests partly on that concern. 

But recent advances in Chinese AI call all of this into question.

Over the past two months, Chinese companies have released three AI models that are nearly as powerful as America’s frontier systems — and radically less expensive. 

In June, Beijing’s Z.ai debuted a model that performed nearly as well as Claude and ChatGPT’s second-tier systems on independent benchmarks. Weeks later, another Chinese firm, Moonshot, unveiled “Kimi K3,” a model that allegedly outperforms all of its American rivals except for the very latest versions of Claude and ChatGPT. Finally, just days ago, Alibaba launched a preview of Qwen3.8 Max, which purportedly outclasses even OpenAI’s most advanced systems, while trailing only Claude’s Fable in its capabilities. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)

These developments don’t merely threaten America’s AI giants with stiffer competition in the race for superintelligence. Rather, they raise a more harrowing prospect: that the AI race’s ultimate rewards will be far smaller than anticipated. In a world where new advances can regularly be leapfrogged by cheaper upstarts, hoarding the technology — and its profits — will be harder for any one company to do.

In other words, building a machine God might not be as lucrative as it’s cracked up to be. AI, it turns out, may “want to be free.”

How AI was supposed to pay off

To see how China’s new models threaten Anthropic’s profit expectations, we must first examine why those expectations have been so high.

This is not entirely self-evident. After all, AI labs aren’t much like the hyper-profitable tech giants of the 2010s. Facebook and Airbrb were relatively capital-light businesses with ultra-low marginal costs (adding a profile to Facebook or listing to Airbnb costs the companies virtually nothing). And once each gained a foothold in their respective markets, network effects enabled them to retain formidable positions without needing to constantly upgrade their products.

Building a state-of-the-art AI company is a much more involved — and astronomically more expensive — endeavor. To get to the frontier, Anthropic and OpenAI have sunk (at least) tens of billions into semiconductors, data centers, power plants, and other capital investments. Staying at the cutting-edge, meanwhile, compels them to perpetually churn out evermore costly models.

To put a new Claude model through its initial training — in which it spends months digesting the internet and sussing out statistical patterns within its text — can now cost hundreds of millions of dollars. And such foundational computation is only the beginning. A truly superlative model requires several additional months of fine-tuning. Armies of contracted experts — such as computer scientists, physicians, and mathematicians — tutor the models, grading their answers and guiding them towards better ones. Then the AI systems complete millions of rounds of practice, in which they learn through trial and error how to solve countless problems. This arduous process, known as “post-training,” compounds the costs of a single model’s development. 

All of which raises the question: Why would investors expect businesses with a cost-structure this challenging to be not merely profitable, but massively so?

There are (at least) two answers. The first (and most obvious) is that the market for superintelligent machines is liable to be vast. Frontier AI systems promise to reduce costs and improve performance in myriad white-collar sectors. And Anthropic’s soaring revenues indicate that firms do, in fact, find Claude useful. A company like AirBnB has earned billions by revolutionizing a single industry; imagine then what a technology that remade virtually all industries might be worth.

Of course, plenty of technologies are valuable but not massively profitable to produce. After all, in well-functioning markets, competition should eventually erode individual firms’ margins, even if the underlying technology continues generating huge value. 

But this is where the second answer comes in: Frontier labs’ immense costs are a burden, but they’re also a safeguard against competition — or, in industry parlance, a “moat.”

Startups may be able to afford to build or acquire more rudimentary models, many of which are “open source.” But, the thinking goes, they won’t be able to deliver Claude Fable-level performance without raising giant amounts of capital. And what investors will be willing to pour hundreds of billions into an AI pipsqueak that’s light-years behind Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI?

Alas, the Chinese AI labs’ rapid progress — and the way it was achieved — suggest that Anthropic’s moat may be shallower than previously thought.

How Moonshot swam Anthropic’s moat

The existence of powerful, Chinese AI systems is neither new nor surprising. Xi Jinping’s government has made vying for global AI dominance a key economic goal. And China’s DeepSeek, which also has stunned US companies with its lower-cost competitive models, surpassed ChatGPT as the most-downloaded free iPhone app more than a year ago.

The latest models, however, have dramatically narrowed the gap in capabilities between frontier American systems and their Chinese rivals. Just as critically, they’ve done so in a manner that other, relatively underfunded AI upstarts might be able to emulate.

Alibaba and Moonshot needed to invest massive resources to train their base models. But they allegedly found a low-cost way to refine those models into near-frontier systems: Just ask Claude.

Or, more specifically: Engage Claude in 16 million conversations, using 24,000 fake accounts. In each of those exchanges, ask the model to not only answer countless difficult questions but also, walk you through its reasoning, step by step. Then take all of this data and feed it into your own model as study material, training it to respond to the world’s most challenging queries as Claude would. 

Through this process — known as “distillation” — an AI lab can replicate virtually all of a frontier model’s capacities, without sinking vast sums into human experts and post-training computing runs. 

China’s AI labs have not admitted to using distillation. But OpenAI and Anthropic both reportedly uncovered Chinese distillation attempts earlier this year. And some of the new models appear to display tell-tale signs of distillation in conversations with ordinary users; Kimi K3 has routinely identified itself as “Claude.”

Chinese AI companies are hardly alone in using distillation to catch up with frontier labs. Earlier this year, Elon Musk admitted in court that xAI enhanced Grok’s capabilities by running distillation techniques on Claude and ChatGPT. Nonetheless, China’s latest models appear to demonstrate that distillation can help take a second-tier model to the frontier’s threshold.

America’s frontier labs have tried to defend themselves against such imitators. But this is technically difficult when distillers can assemble massive networks of bots, each asking an inconspicuous number of questions. And legally, it is difficult for America’s AI giants to argue that distillers are stealing their intellectual property. After all, in a sense, China’s copycats are merely doing to Anthropic and OpenAI what those companies did to journalists, coders, lawyers and other specialists: Feeding their public-facing outputs into a model, which then replicates their capabilities by discerning underlying patterns within the text.

Oh, and China’s giving these models away

The new Chinese models would have caused Silicon Valley enough headaches, if they merely provided stiffer competition, while demonstrating the power of distillation. 

What makes Kimi K3 and Qwen3.8 Max especially threatening to the American AI giants’ profitmaking potential, however, is that they are officially open source — meaning that the models’ parameters can be downloaded for free. (Alibaba and Moonshot have not yet released these parameters, but they say they will shortly.)

In other words, any company or hobbyist with enough computing power will soon be able to run a near-frontier Chinese model on their own hardware, modify that model to better serve a specialized purpose, and then sell access to their new version — without paying Alibiba a single yuan.

As Kimi and Qwen grow more capable, their market-share is likely to grow, at American AI giants’ expense.

For many of Anthropic and OpenAI’s potential customers, that proposition may be hard to turn down. Most businesses don’t need the world’s smartest AI, just one competent at their enterprise’s core tasks — compiling legal research, answering IT queries, writing working code, etc. A model that produces outputs 90 percent as good as Claude’s — at roughly one-sixth of the cost — will sound pretty good to many corporations.

Further, open source models aren’t just cheaper than frontier systems, but potentially more secure. If you run an AI on your firm’s own servers, then you don’t need to entrust sensitive data to Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI.

All this had led much of corporate America to embrace open-source models, even before the latest versions narrowed the capabilities gap. In a Linux Foundation survey, 63 percent of organizations reported using open-source AI systems.

And increasingly, those models are Chinese. According to Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley’s premier venture capitalist firms, a majority of American AI startups now use open-source Chinese systems. As Kimi and Qwen grow more capable, their market-share is likely to grow, at American AI giants’ expense.

What’s bad for OpenAI is good (and/or catastrophic) for humanity

All this said, it is still entirely possible that OpenAI and Anthropic will justify their colossal valuations. In many highly competitive economic domains, having access to the world’s very best AI model will remain highly valuable. And America’s frontier labs still outperform all their peers. 

But it’s increasingly plausible that selling state-of-the-art AI systems will prove to be a low-margin undertaking. In a world of ubiquitous, near-frontier open source models, the AI sector’s big winners probably won’t be its top labs, but rather, its chipmakers and cloud computing providers. 

For ordinary people, a future where superintelligence is dirt cheap — and rival AI companies are constantly rising and falling, rather than consolidating into mega-corporations — would look somewhat different than the cyberpunk dystopia that the left’s been dreading. 

And not entirely in a good way. For one thing, in that reality, mitigating AI’s biggest risks would be immensely difficult. Having a handful of firms monopolize control over frontier AI systems is bad in many respects. But it does make those models easier to regulate, as the Trump administration’s decision to temporarily block Claude’s Fable in the name of cybersecurity demonstrated. 

By contrast, if recipes for ultra-powerful AI models are published all over the internet — and anyone with modest technical skills can modify them at will — then systems willing to help their users hack government bureaucracies or engineer bio-weapons are liable to proliferate.

From another angle, however, the “AI becomes almost free” scenario may look like capitalism at its finest: Retrospectively, such a development would mean that a small number of extremely rich people bankrolled the creation of an immensely useful technology, under the expectation of massive profits, only to see competition erode their returns — and disperse that tech’s benefits across a wider group of businesses and consumers. 

Granted, in the case of AI, this process might also generate a super-virus that kills us all. But hey, no system is perfect.

There was a backup plan for getting oil out of the Middle East. We may need another one.

 On July 20, the Iran-backed Yemeni rebel movement known as the Houthis declared a “blockade” against their long-time enemy Saudi Arabia, and a short time later attacked two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea. Shortly afterward, several ships carrying Saudi crude oil through the Red Sea made abrupt U-turns to avoid going near the Yemeni coast.  

With Iran now blocking shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea was supposed to be an alternative way to get oil out of the Middle East and to the world market. Now, though, the importance of the route has merely created fresh leverage in the long-simmering conflict between the Houthis and their longtime enemies in Saudi Arabia. These attacks were a major factor in pushing oil back over $100 a barrel last week.  

The Houthis have their own agenda partly unrelated to the Iran conflict. But in launching the Iran conflict, the US has inadvertently given them outsized influence in the region: The sea lane they control is more important than ever. Now, in opening up a new front, they may have just made the war harder to end. 

The Red Sea has become increasingly important to Saudi Arabia and energy markets as shippers have avoided Hormuz in recent months. Saudi Arabia has diverted around 70 percent of its oil exports via a pipeline connecting the oil fields on the Persian Gulf to the port of Yanbu on its Red Sea coast. This means that tankers need to use the Red Sea to get oil to Asia. As a result, the Red Sea now accounts for around 7 percent of the world’s energy supplies. 

This release valve is one reason why the price of oil — and the price of gas for American drivers — has not risen as much as many experts expected when the Hormuz crisis began shortly after the US-Israel strikes on Iran. 

But now, that release valve is also under threat, putting the region and the world in what shipping experts call a “double chokehold.”

The Houthis have used their location to cause chaos before: In 2023 and 2024, they attacked over 100 ships they accused of links to Israel, and dramatically drove down shipping through the Red Sea. Those attacks stopped after the Israel-Hamas ceasefire last year, but shipping has still not fully recovered. 

President Donald Trump has threatened both the Houthis and Iran with “major military punishment” over the attacks in recent days. And the attacks also make it likelier that the conflict in Iran could make oil pricier than ever, increasing political pressure on Trump. 

What do the Houthis want? 

The Houthis are a member of Iran’s network of regional proxies, known as the “Axis of Resistance,” along with Hezbollah, Hamas, and a number of Iraqi militias. But most experts believe that while they rely on Iranian support, they operate independently and don’t take their marching orders from Tehran. 

Officially known as Ansar Allah, the Houthis are members of the minority Zaydi sect of Shia Islam. They’ve been fighting for control of Yemen since the 1990s and took over Yemen’s capital city, Sanaa, in 2014, though most countries do not recognize them as Yemen’s legitimate government. 

The Houthis fought a brutal decade-long war against Yemen’s internationally recognized government and an international coalition led by Saudi Arabia, which ended with a UN-mediated ceasefire in 2022. 

The Saudi-Houthi peace has largely held since then, even as the Houthis gained global notoriety during the Gaza war. When this year’s war began, many expected the Houthis to join the fight against Iran’s enemies, the United States and Israel, but for the first few weeks of the conflict, they were conspicuously quiet. Their impact was felt in a different way, though. 

Iran’s success in using cheap drones and missiles to effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz almost certainly drew on lessons gained from the Houthi campaign in the Red Sea in 2023 and 2024.

In March, the Houthis made their first move toward actively joining the Iran war when they launched a round of missiles at Israel. But things really escalated in mid-July when they began launching attacks on Saudi Arabia in response to an attack on the Sanaa airport, which they blamed on the Saudis. (The initial attack was claimed by Yemen’s internationally-backed government.)

In addition to the Red Sea attacks, the Houthis also claimed an attack on a Saudi oil refinery last Saturday, the group’s first attack on Saudi energy infrastructure since 2022, followed by attacks on oil depots along the Red Sea coast on Sunday. Several Iran-backed militias in Iraq also carried out their own attacks on Saudi Arabia over the past few days. 

The Houthis have now entered the conflict, but it would be a mistake to view them just as Iranian proxies. They have their own demands and agenda in this fight. 

“When the whole Iran war started, they were kind of observing and waiting for the right moment,” said Mohammed al-Basha, a US-based security analyst and Yemen expert. Basha suspects that the Houthis saw the leverage and concessions Iran had gained throughout the region and wanted to exert some leverage of their own. “Their aggressiveness went from zero to 60 last week,” he said. “They’re all in.”

All in for what, exactly? The Houthis’ demands from the Saudis include billions in reparations payments and full control of their coastline and airspace. In the long term, they aim to be Yemen’s internationally recognized government. 

The Saudis, then, who fought a brutal and unpopular war against the Houthis that ended in a stalemate, are faced with the unappealing choice between placating the group by agreeing to its demands or a return to war. 

What about the US? The US carried out more than 1,000 airstrikes over 52 days against the Houthis in 2025. While this campaign, known as Operation Rough Rider, caused significant damage to the group’s infrastructure, it did not succeed in fully restoring shipping in the Red Sea. 

Trump has threatened retaliation, but given concerns over munitions stockpiles, the US capacity to retaliate, much less expand this war to a new front, is probably limited.

How many chokeholds is too many?

For the moment, the Bab el-Mandeb is not completely closed — shipping is down around 22 percent since the blockade was declared, but 28 ships were able to transit the strait on Monday. The Houthis maintain that their blockade targets only Saudi Arabia, but Chinese supertankers have been allowed to leave the Red Sea carrying Saudi oil.  

But shippers recall that during the Houthis’ last Red Sea campaign in 2024, they were theoretically only targeting ships linked to Israel, but had a pretty broad definition of “linked to Israel.”  Under these circumstances, many shippers, and more importantly their insurers, might not want to take the risk. 

“We’ve seen what the Houthis can do,” said Noam Raydan, an expert on energy and maritime shipping at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “We know that they can sink ships. We know that they can hit a ship with drones, missiles, and then even board the ship. We know that they can hijack a vessel. This is why a lot of operators, in my opinion, would really be hesitant right now to go through the Bab al-Mandab.” 

There’s also still the risk that this new front in the war could escalate. Iran’s government has asked the Houthis to shut the Bab el-Mandeb entirely if the US launches airstrikes against Iran’s power network, which Trump has repeatedly threatened to do.

This adds a new complicating factor to the larger conflict in the Middle East. The fact that the price of oil never rose as high as many experts had predicted during Operation Epic Fury, the initial strikes in the spring and early summer, is probably one reason why Trump has often seemed willing to continue the conflict, rather than cutting a quick deal on Iran’s terms. But Saudi Arabia’s access to the Red Sea is one important reason why oil has not reached $120 or even $200 a barrel. A full closure of the Bab el-Mandeb would test even the ever-adaptable global oil industry’s ability to adapt.

It’s possible the Saudis may still be able to cut a deal with the Houthis that ends the attacks. But it’s also clear that for the foreseeable future, two of the Middle East’s most important energy chokepoints are going to be under continual threat of closure by adversaries of the United States. 

For now, oil can still leave the Red Sea via the Suez Canal at its northern end, then head toward Asia around the southern tip of Africa. (Since the largest tankers aren’t able to transit the Suez while fully loaded, this is a complicated process that involves them pumping their oil into a pipeline, then meeting it at the other end in the Mediterranean.) 

“It just gets harder and harder,” said Robin Mills, CEO of the Dubai-based energy analysis firm Qamar Energy. “Can they get all of the oil from Yanbu out through the Suez? I think they probably can but it’s a little bit tight. If [the Houthi campaign] were to expand, it becomes more of a problem.” 

The Suez Canal itself is also a potential target for disruption or sabotage, retired US Adm. James Stavridis recently warned. 

The disruptions at sea will increase interest in workaround projects such as a proposed pipeline from Iraq to Turkey, bypassing sea routes entirely, but these are still a long way off. The Houthis and their allies in Iraq also demonstrated this week that they can attack oil infrastructure and pipelines in addition to ships. 

The oil and shipping industries are nothing if not adaptable. Previous disruptions, whether the tanker that ran aground in Suez in 2021, the container ship pileups caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, or the Houthis’ previous Red Sea campaign, have been temporary. Goods eventually find their way to market, even if that means another month sailing around Africa.

But as the number of armed conflicts grow, and actors like the Houthis and Iran learn how to effectively weaponize the global economy’s chokepoints to punish much larger and more powerful adversaries, the stresses on the system are growing, and the question becomes whether there’s a breaking point.   

Last week, the Trump administration announced a landmark civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia. The deal would allow the kingdom to develop nuclear power using American technology and could eventually pave the way for uranium enrichment on Saudi soil. But the agreement must first undergo congressional review — and survive President Donald Trump’s social media feed.

When the Trump administration announced its agreement, it made no mention of the possibility of normalizing diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. But that omission and the possibility that Saudi Arabia could eventually enrich uranium alarmed Israelis — and Trump quickly threw in both conditions in a Truth Social post.

The chaos around the agreement comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heads to Washington, DC, this week to meet with Trump. The Saudi deal — as well as growing friction over differences on the goals and trajectory of the renewed US war with Iran and frustration in Washington over Israeli military operations in southern Lebanon — will undoubtedly be topics.

Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswame spoke with Michael Koplow, chief policy officer at the Israel Policy Forum, about the relationship between the two countries and its leaders ahead of Netanyahu’s visit. 

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What are we expecting from the meeting between Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump?

I suspect this will be among the most tense meetings that they have had because there are a number of issues on the table where President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu are on different pages. The issue that they used to be on the same page about was Iran, and I don’t think that is the case anymore. 

As we’ve seen the Iran war unfold, the Israeli view is still the view that they had at the outset of the war, which is that this is necessary to deal with Iran’s nuclear program, with its ballistic missiles, with its proxies. And ultimately what the Israelis wanted to see, and what they still want to see, is a different regime in Iran. President Trump may still share those goals, but it’s pretty clear that, as the war has not gone the way he anticipated, he’s looking for an exit strategy and his main focus is the Strait of Hormuz, which is not something that the Israelis care about at all. 

I think at this point, when Prime Minister Netanyahu arrives at the White House, he’s probably going to try to convince the president that the original goal should be on the table, that the US and Israel should keep going, and President Trump seems to have a different view of things.

And now we have this new deal with Saudi Arabia. Was Israel taken by surprise by the deal? 

It absolutely took Israel by surprise. When the deal was announced on Wednesday, it was a deal to provide Saudi Arabia with nuclear power and nuclear infrastructure. There was no mention of Israel. There was no mention of normalization. There was no mention of anything outside of the bounds of a nuclear agreement. 

President Trump on Thursday put out his Truth Social where he said that the deal is absolutely contingent on Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords. And what’s curious about that is that when the deal was announced, there was no mention of it, and the deal was actually signed. So either the president is intending to change the terms of the deal after it’s been signed, or he’s willing to back out of it if this new condition is not met. 

Or, and I suspect that this is the actual answer, he will secure some sort of commitment from the Saudis to examine joining the Abraham Accords at some point down the road when Israel has met a number of conditions and there’s been progress toward a Palestinian state. And if that is how it unfolds, it will leave the Israelis behind. And I think this comes as a pretty big shock to [Israel] given that President Trump’s previous policy was that a deal between the US and Saudi Arabia would involve normalization.

Was Netanyahu himself surprised by this deal? 

I think he must have been surprised by this deal. It is true that Trump and Netanyahu have seemed to have had a very cushy relationship, not only during this term, but during President Trump’s first term as well. But it’s not a relationship of equals.

We’ve seen President Trump — particularly over the past few months, I think in response to criticism here in the United States over the role that Israel and the role that the prime minister may have had in convincing President Trump to go to war — repeatedly talk about the fact that he is in charge, that Prime Minister Netanyahu is going to do what he says, that he is the decider and Prime Minister Netanyahu is not. 

I do think they have a good relationship, but President Trump, at least publicly, seems to be signaling that he is in charge and he wants everybody to know that. I think that Prime Minister Netanyahu undoubtedly is feeling some stress in this relationship. And when he shows up here tomorrow, he’s going to do whatever he can to try and repair any rifts that there are.

Israel wanted this war, but hates this deal that the president may very likely complete with Saudi Arabia. Did they miscalculate somewhere in here? 

I think the Israelis have miscalculated in a number of ways. And the biggest is that consistently since 2017 or 2018, you hear Israeli officials, political officials, security officials, even ordinary Israelis, talk routinely about President Trump being the best friend that Israel has ever had and exhibiting a faith in President Trump that he will never do anything that will hang Israel out to dry. 

And a lot of what they’ve done has proceeded on that assumption. And even though everybody is aware of President Trump’s transactional nature, even though everybody is aware that he is relatively volatile, that he slips on policy issues all the time, the Israelis had this faith that they would always be an exception to that rule. And I think what we’re seeing is that they’re not necessarily an exception to that rule. 

And it’s important to stress that when it comes to this Saudi nuclear deal, the problem for the Israelis is not just that it was signed without any hint of normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia being part of the deal itself. It may open the door for countries that have signed more restrictive agreements in the region, like the UAE, to do the same. And ultimately, all of this is a bet that the trajectory of Saudi Arabia is going to continue, that it’s going to continue modernizing, continue becoming more moderate and pragmatic, and continue improving relations with Israel. 

If that’s not the case, once you’ve handed the Saudis a nuclear program, that’s irreversible. People shouldn’t forget that Iran’s nuclear program started off as a civilian nuclear program that the United States provided for it under the days of the Shah. So for Israelis, the normalization part of this is absolutely worrisome, but the deal itself is problematic too. And I think that’s where the Israelis are feeling panicked.

The American right has a new enemy.

In a new report on Cuba, the State Department argued that Havana has become “the beating heart of a new and distinct kind of Marxism” — which the State Department calls “Third Worldism.” Cuba is spreading this doctrine, per Secretary of State of Marco Rubio, with the explicit intent of fomenting revolution in America.

Here, the Trump administration is following conservative influencers — who in recent months have become increasingly preoccupied by the “third worldist” threat. 

“The Left is moving from ‘woke’ to Third-Worldism,” Chris Rufo, perhaps the right’s leading activist, recently wrote. “Third-Worldism is a more serious threat to life, liberty, and property.” 

Ben Shapiro, one of conservatism’s leading media voices, declared in April that “the future of the Democratic Party is radical third worldism.”

And Reihan Salam, the president of the influential Manhattan Institute (which employs Rufo), has warned that “Third Worldism, left unchecked, won’t remain on the radical fringe” — citing New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani as the chief example of a third worldist in power.

All of this may be news to Mamdani and other Democrats, who virtually never use the term to describe their own views. So what are Rubio, Rufo, and Shapiro talking about? And is there any truth in the various claims about rising third worldist influence?

The answer is more complicated than it might seem.

Conservatives are using “third worldist” a lot like the terms “woke” and “critical race theory” before it: as an ill-defined concept that serves as a clearinghouse for various right-wing grievances and can be used as a slur to discredit and demonize the left.

Yet at the same time, they’ve actually put their fingers on something real. Among a very specific and visible sub-section of the socialist left, a set of views that can be reasonably termed “third worldist” are rising in prominence. For progressives outside this camp, deciding what comes next will require engaging with the right-wing critique directly and not dismissing it as a smear. 

What “third worldism” means, on both the left and the right

The term “third world” itself originated in a 1952 article by the French thinker Alfred Sauvy. 

The capitalist West was the “first world,” and the Communist Eastern bloc “the second.” Most countries outside of North America and Europe were, at the time, aligned with neither bloc — making up the “third world.” 

For this reason, the earliest ideology that fits the term “third worldism” was not Marxist, but rather efforts like the Non-Aligned Movement to build global solidarity between post-colonial states who were trying to avoid being dominated by the two competing world powers.

But Communist regimes in the Global South — most notably, China and Cuba — became inspirations for a distinctively Marxist spin on third worldism that emerged in the 1960s and ’70s.

This theory held that the locus of revolutionary activity had shifted to 1) armed revolutionaries of the Global South and 2) militant movements within the capitalist world led by oppressed minorities. Out with the Communist Party USA and the Soviet Union; in with the Black Panthers and the Viet Cong.

This broad worldview had many ideological influences — ranging from Mao’s Little Red Book to the French psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Some leftist writings, like the Weather Underground manifesto Prairie Fire or the well-known pamphlet The Mythology of the White Proletariat, are clear examples of what might be termed “third worldist” thought.

But on the whole, this kind of third worldism is frustratingly tricky to pin down. It has no authoritative spokesperson, no text or movement that clarified its core principles in any detail. It is a label attached to ideas from the outside, as often by those ideas’ enemies as by their allies.

“‘Third worldist’ is almost a pejorative [term] you would use on the left,” said Bhaskar Sunkara, the president of The Nation magazine and author of Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World.

The Trump administration and its allies are basically arguing that people like Sunkara are trying to trick you. Whatever the modern left’s protestations, their actual views are still basically pretty similar to those of Cold War American radicals who apologized for the Khmer Rouge. Only in this case, the most admired Third World militants are now jihadists rather than Communists.

The most influential work in this vein comes from Zineb Riboua, a fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute think tank. She sees third worldism as a joint product of anti-American governments, including Cuba, and leftist intellectuals in American universities. Its recent prominence, in her view, is a function of October 7 and the Gaza war — which allowed third worldist logic to fuse “seamlessly with the decolonial language” that became popular during the woke era.

“In this viewpoint, a terrorist organization like Hamas comes to be seen as the armed expression of a national liberation struggle,” Riboua writes. “The question ceases to be what Hamas actually did and becomes what Israel is presumed to represent. And because Israel is positioned as the forward post of American imperial power, defending Hamas becomes, almost automatically, a moral gesture directed against the United States itself.”

But Riboua does not stop with foreign policy. In her view, third worldism has become a kind of “universal ideology” that is “applied to everything from university hiring and border policy to museum curation.” When leftists talk about “decolonization,” she argues, they are really talking about the planned demolition of America from the inside.

“The ideology asks a country to accept that its power is a historical accident awaiting either correction with a sort of new Red Terror or annihilation,” she writes. 

This, for the right, represents the left’s emerging “post-woke” animating doctrine. While the 2020-era left was interested in policing conservative speech on social issues, it is now interested in acquiring political power and using it to tangibly transform America’s policy and political institutions along Marxist and third worldist lines. It is “a vicious, lowest-common-denominator leftism that imports anticolonial resentments to the metropole,” writes Sarah Rogers, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy.

The effect, ultimately, will be to transform the American governing model into something that more closely resembles that of a “third world” country: corrupt, lawless, violent, and chaotic. The language they use to warn of this can be unmistakably racialized.

“Mamdani wants to plunder New York like the Somalis plundered Minnesota,” Rufo writes. “Legal or illegal, it’s all piracy, looting, and expropriation. Pure third-worldism.”

What the right gets wrong about third worldism — and what it gets right

By the time we get to “Zohran Mamdani is a pirate,” it’s clear that the analytic train has gone off the rails. Third worldism is no longer being used to define a specific and recognizable approach to geopolitics, but rather a pure insult with ugly racial insinuations.

Indeed, while Mamdani is certainly a socialist with pro-Palestine politics — he announced this week he looked into arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but lacked legal authority — there is no evidence to suggest he is an anti-American Hamas admirer.

As mayor, his governance has focused primarily on quality of life and cost of living issues. And far from couching his arguments in the language of anti-American revolution, Mamdani’s recent address on July 4 was a classically patriotic text, whose praise for American soldiers and meditations on our “grand experiment in self-governance” sound far more like Lincoln than Fanon.

The attempt to lump Mamdani into a scary, foreign-sounding category recalls nothing more than the efforts to rebrand other left-wing ideas — like “critical race theory” — into millstones to hang around Democrats’ necks. Rufo was the intellectual force behind the CRT panic, back in 2021, and admitted at the time that his intent was political warfare rather than rigorous analysis. By coming up with a catch-all term for problematic left-wing politics, they could apply it not only to the real “critical race theory” — which were largely abstruse academic texts — but also ordinary Democratic policy or generic liberal ideas. 

“We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category,” he wrote. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

Read in this light, the right-wing allegation that third worldism is supplanting woke is more confession than anything else. From McCarthyism to the Reagan era and on through Newt Gingrich warning of Barack Obama’s “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview, the right has deployed fearmongering about foreign subversion as a central tactic to delegitimize its opponents and rally the base. The sweeping allegations about the entire Democratic Party being overtaken by third worldism represent a fusion of this old Red Scare blueprint with the new Rufo tactics of mimetic-conceptual warfare.

“There’s really nothing new here,” said David Austin Walsh, a historian of the right at the University of Virginia. “Third worldism is a term that’s being utilized to describe the exact same thing as what was meant by ‘the international Communist conspiracy’ back in the 1950s and 1960s.”

Yet Walsh, who is himself a DSA member, also acknowledges that there’s a nugget of truth here. Much as the Communist Party USA actually was a Soviet cut-out, there are people and factions on the American left that actually fit the description of “third worldism” advanced by Riboua and her fellow travelers.

The most obvious example is Hasan Piker, the streamer and provocateur who has become a lightning rod in debates over the Democratic Party’s direction.

Piker has repeatedly expressed admiration for the Chinese Communist Party, despite its vicious authoritarian tendencies, and said he would vote for Hamas “1,000 times” over Israel. My colleague Eric Levitz described his worldview as “campist,” an old leftist term for someone who aligns themselves with any government that opposes the American-led bloc, and one that I think is a bit more precise than “third worldist.” But Piker’s fascination with anti-American militancy and terrorists — he once gave a fawning interview to a Houthi fighter on stream — suggests that third worldist is at least a reasonable descriptor.

Another example is Neville Roy Singham, a Chicago businessman who sold his consultancy for $785 million and has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to leftist causes around the world. Singham, who was known to monologue to his employees about the virtues of Che Guevara, is at the center of what the New York Times describes as “a lavishly funded influence campaign that defends China and pushes its propaganda.” Though he funds American leftist organizations like Code Pink — in fact, his wife, Jodie Evans, is its cofounder — he currently resides in Shanghai.

There is also a third worldist activist current. The International Caucus of the DSA, one of many sub-organizations within the leftist faction, has celebrated the “achievements” of Cuba’s authoritarian government and whitewashed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (which, again, is more precisely campist than third worldist). Students for Justice in Palestine, the leading pro-Palestine campus activist group, praised the October 7 attacks as “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.”

And this tendency could be gaining its first representative in Congress. Darializa Avila Chevalier, a DSA candidate who recently unseated a multi-term House incumbent in a Democratic primary in New York, has accused Black and Latino men of “fetishizing ugly colonizer women” and retweeted a message praising Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro. While her public statements are more limited than those of Piker or the DSA IC, there’s at least reasonable grounds for believing that she’s cut from the same cloth.

The left’s third worldist problem

So what to make of all this?

Right-wingers like Riboua are picking up on real trends in leftist ideology, ones that are reflected to some degree in its institutional infrastructure. And interestingly, the leftists I spoke with conceded that there were some things to worry about here. Arash Azizi, a socialist historian at Yale University, said that this “negative third worldism” was a “serious trend” on the broader left. Sunkara was more skeptical of the term “third worldist, but he did express concerns with the DSA IC’s tendency to forget “first principles” — by which he meant core commitments to democracy and anti-authoritarianism. He also critiqued pro-October 7 statements on the left as “antiquated, ineffective, and morally questionable.”

At the same time, it is concomitantly clear that people on the right are overstating the significance of the problem.

Views that might accurately be called “third worldist” are controversial inside the left and even within the DSA. And the left does not currently dominate the Democratic Party, despite a handful of primary victories this cycle. To say that third worldism has conquered the Democrats, or even that third worldism is the new “woke,” is to get miles ahead of the evidence.

Putting those two conclusions together yields a more precise diagnosis: that third worldist views are, by virtue of the DSA’s electoral success, becoming a more prominent part of the broader left coalition even as its reach remains limited overall.

While Mamdani cannot reasonably be described as a “third worldist,” he operates in coalition with people who are. He filmed chummy videos with Hasan Piker; his endorsement rocketed Darializa Avila Chevalier to her primary victory. Like any political faction, the socialist left depends on alliances between sub-groups who have real and meaningful differences in worldview and approach.

When talking about this, Sunkara tried to disassociate the broader left from the third worldist subcurrent by analogy.

“It would almost be like me saying ‘the Republican Party is programmatically committed to white nationalism’ as opposed to saying ‘the Republican Party sure does have some vocal white nationalists around,’” he said. “The difference is key.”

But of course, the Republican Party’s relationship with white nationalists has been a significant political problem — and a moral one. However Democrats ultimately decide to handle these ideas floating around progressive circles, the process starts with acknowledging that they’re real. 

The Trump administration may have just signed an agreement so controversial that President Donald Trump himself is opposed to it. 

On Wednesday, the US and Saudi Arabia signed a 30-year, multibillion-dollar nuclear energy cooperation agreement. The terms of the deal signed by Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and his Saudi counterpart have not been released, but some of the details discussed by officials in reporting by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times earlier this week raised eyebrows, mainly the fact that in addition to helping the Saudis construct nuclear reactors, the US could potentially help the Saudis construct facilities to enrich their own uranium.

The timing is particularly awkward with the US currently at war with Saudi Arabia’s rival Iran, in large part due to concerns about that country’s nuclear enrichment program. 

It is also happening in the context of an emerging new nuclear world, where last century’s arms control agreements are falling by the wayside, regimes like Russia are increasingly employing nuclear threats, and longtime US allies are increasingly nuclear-curious due to both growing military threats and skepticism about the value of American security guarantees. It could raise the risk that other countries will seek the capability to raise the bomb, even if they don’t immediately build one. 

“It’s unprecedented in the history of US nuclear policy,” said Matthew Kroenig, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of the book, Exporting the Bomb. “Never before have we helped another country build a uranium enrichment facility. All the way back to Eisenhower, the deal has been: If you want nuclear energy, terrific. We’re happy to help you, but you can’t make the fuel because once you make the fuel, it’s too dangerous.”

Whether the deal will even happen is getting less clear. The agreement was already going to face significant opposition in Congress, where it must be sent for review, but Trump added to the confusion on Thursday morning with a Truth Social post that contradicted much of what had been reported the day before. Trump wrote that there would be “no enrichment of material” under the deal and that the agreement is “totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords,” referring to the series of diplomatic normalization agreements between Israel and a number of Muslim countries signed during Trump’s first term. This was not reported in any of the media accounts earlier in the week, which were based on statements from US officials. 

The Saudi government has not yet responded to Trump’s latest statement, but sources close to the talks have indicated that no such pledge was included in the negotiations. 

Saudi Arabia has long insisted that it will not normalize relations with Israel until the creation of a Palestinian state, and if they had caved on that position prior to the agreement, it seems unlikely that no one would have mentioned it before today. At a press briefing on Thursday, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt affirmed that the deal would be “off” unless Saudi Arabia joined the Abraham Accords. Asked for clarification on the discrepancy between Wednesday’s reporting and Trump’s announcement on Thursday, the White House press office referred Vox to Leavitt’s statement. 

At the moment, there’s more confusion than clarity around the deal, and what it means for the future of both the Middle East and global efforts to control nuclear weapons. 

What’s standing between Saudi Arabia and a nuke?

This idea behind the Saudi deal isn’t new: Both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration pursued a civilian nuclear deal with the kingdom. It’s been a controversial notion for just as long, given Saudi Arabia’s often aggressive foreign policy, human rights record — including the high-profile murder of US citizens — and the fact that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has said in the past that his country would seek to build its own nuclear bomb if Iran ever acquired one. 

Saudi Arabia insists that its interest in nuclear energy is purely peaceful — part of a larger goal to diversify its economy away from oil and gas and to generate power for a nascent artificial intelligence industry. Proponents in the US argue that a deal would deepen ties between the US and an important security partner. It would also, they argue, head off the risk of Saudi Arabia cooperating instead with China or Russia to build a nuclear program and be a potential windfall for the US nuclear power industry. 

The US has previously entered into 29 nuclear cooperation agreements — commonly known as “123 deals” for Section 123, the legislation that governs them — involving 49 countries. The deals require countries to submit to a number of safeguards to prevent them from weaponizing these nuclear programs, including requiring US consent for any enrichment of uranium for the US-built nuclear plants. 

In more recent US deals, most countries have agreed to give the International Atomic Energy Agency even more stringent inspection authorities. Some have gone further: Under the deal signed with the United Arab Emirates in 2009 and Taiwan in 2013, the countries agreed to forswear any enrichment of uranium on their soil, including for projects in which the United States is not involved. This has been called the “gold standard” for nuclear sharing deals, and it’s what the US pushed for in previous nuclear sharing negotiations with Saudi Arabia. 

The Saudis have long balked at some of the stricter provisions in some more recent US deals, such as additional IAEA inspections and a pledge to enrich no uranium at all. The kingdom has argued these are intrusive infringements on its sovereignty, particularly given that Iran was allowed to continue enriching under previous agreements with the US. But, Kroenig said, there’s little plausible reason to oppose these restrictions if Saudi Arabia is only interested in civilian energy.

“They probably haven’t decided to build nuclear weapons yet, but it seems like they want the option,” Kroenig said.

Saudi Arabia is not going to build a bomb overnight. It’s not even going to start enriching uranium for some time. Under the deal — at least the version that was reported earlier this week by the Wall Street Journal — US companies would immediately begin work on building nuclear power plants when the deal goes into force, while US and Saudi officials would conduct a two-year study to determine “value of enrichment for Saudi Arabia.” (This, notably, would likely be concluded during Trump’s term.)

In this respect, the deal may in fact be tougher than the never-concluded Biden agreement, which reportedly would have allowed enrichment to begin immediately. 

If the study concludes Saudi Arabia needs to enrich, the enrichment facility would be constructed in a secretive “black box” to prevent the Saudis from acquiring sensitive technology. If the US objects to Saudi enrichment after the study, the Saudis couldn’t enrich for another 10 years. After that, it’s not clear what happens. 

The safeguards do not mollify many nonproliferation experts. 

“Skeptical is a mild way of putting it,” said James Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment. “Even if you black-box the technology, Saudi Arabia could still nationalize the facility. This is a country that has overtly declared an interest in proliferation. Once it’s on Saudi soil, you have very limited options to stop it from misusing that technology if it decides to do so.”

The most difficult and expensive part of building a nuclear device is uranium enrichment, and the US will have helped Saudi Arabia a long way down that path. That doesn’t mean the kingdom is necessarily planning to build a bomb, but if it decides on that course of action down the road, it will have a significant head start.

“Saudi Arabia’s nuclear program does not pose a near-term proliferation risk,” said Kelsey Davenport, director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association. Rather than trying to quickly build a bomb, she suggested that “the more likely scenario is that Saudi Arabia will continue to acquire the capabilities that would be necessary to weaponize and move to the threshold of nuclear weapons, which would enable a rapid move to build the deterrent if the decision were made.”

This, she added, would both complicate ongoing nuclear talks with Iran and “set a terrible precedent” for future nuclear agreements. 

What happens now? 

“Look, there are some benefits to the deal,”  said Robert Einhorn, a former State Department special adviser for nonproliferation and arms control. “It will give a boost to the US nuclear industry. It will help cement US-Saudi strategic relations. It will deny Russia and China a foothold in an important element of the Saudi economy. But the Trump administration will have to work hard to convince the Congress and the American public that the shortcomings of the deal are not disqualifying.”

That process starts this week. The agreement will now be submitted to Congress for a 90-day review period. This isn’t a formal treaty that requires approval. Congress has to pass a joint resolution opposing it.

The deal is likely to draw opposition on both sides of the aisle. In 2019, then-Republican Sen. Marco Rubio (FL), now secretary of state, sponsored legislation that would require any 123 agreement with Saudi Arabia to be affirmatively approved by Congress.  (“I miss Sen. Rubio,” Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), a co-sponsor of the House version of the bill, said during a hearing on Wednesday.)

In addition to security concerns, the potential conflicts of interest around the bill may also draw scrutiny. Tom Barrack, a close Trump confidante who is now US ambassador to Turkey and an adviser on Middle East policy, was investigated by federal authorities and was the subject of a House probe during Trump’s first term for lobbying for nuclear deals with Saudi Arabia and the UAE while he had significant real estate investments in those countries and ties to the government.  

ProPublica also reported in 2019 that Barrack had sought a major financial stake in Westinghouse, the nuclear reactor builder. The Wall Street Journal wrote that Westinghouse Electric is likely to be one of the main beneficiaries of the deal to build nuclear reactors in the Kingdom.

It still seems unlikely that opponents of the deal in Congress will be able to cobble together a veto-proof majority to block it. The better question is whether Trump is effectively blocking it. If he is really going to insist on Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords, that could be a nonstarter for Mohammed bin Salman. 

A new nuclear world takes shape

Events in recent years have led Saudi leaders to doubt the extent to which the US would really come to their aid in a worst-case scenario. There have been mixed reports about whether Saudi Arabia backed or opposed Trump’s decision to launch this year’s war on Iran — the Saudi government denies supporting it — but either way, if this war ends with Iran’s regime still in place, in possession of its uranium stockpile, and in control of the world’s most critical energy chokepoint, the doubts in Riyadh about America’s reliability will only increase, along with their nuclear ambitions. 

In the coming weeks, the White House will make the case that this deal is safer and more comprehensive than the ones the US would not agree to in the Biden administration and Trump’s first term. But that argument will be harder to make against the notion that Saudi Arabia’s incentive to build a bomb has only grown since then. 

Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump has seemingly called off a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia after his energy secretary already formally signed it.

What happened? On Wednesday, the Trump administration formally concluded what’s called a “123 Agreement” to work with Saudi Arabia on the development of its civilian nuclear power infrastructure. This kind of deal allows the United States to provide another country with nuclear fuel and equipment on the condition that they submit to safeguards against building a nuclear weapon.

But on Thursday morning, after the negotiations were quite literally concluded, Trump threw a monkey wrench into things — posting on Truth Social that the deal was “totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords.”

The Abraham Accords are a series of agreements from Trump’s first term that normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and some nearby Arab states. In effect, then, Trump is saying that Saudi Arabia will not get its 123 Agreement unless it formally recognizes the State of Israel. Which the Saudis are unwilling to do absent the creation of a Palestinian state.

Why is Trump doing this? As is often the case with his strange last-minute decisions, no one really knows. There are a few leading guesses, though.

The first is that the agreement with Saudi Arabia was a bad idea on the merits. Experts on nuclear weapons, the Middle East, and international relations more broadly all said that the deal gave Saudis exactly what they wanted with virtually nothing in return, effectively surrendering a key piece of leverage Washington has on Riyadh.

The second is that other American friends in the Middle East got angry. The Israelis are a leading candidate, as they have long opposed any agreement that might bring the Saudis closer to a nuke. The Emiratis, often in competition with Saudis for regional influence, are another; their nuclear deal with the US, inked in 2009, is a lot stricter.

The third is bipartisan opposition in Congress, which would need to approve any deal.

What’s the takeaway: Unless something changes radically, Trump has blown up a nuclear deal that’s already been signed — humiliating his negotiators and angering the Saudis.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

As of today, we are officially two weeks away from the NFL’s first preseason game. Our long national nightmare of calling soccer “football” is almost over.

Last week, House Democrats voted on an amendment that would have cut $3.3 billion in annual US military aid to Israel from a State Department funding bill. The amendment was brought to the floor by Rep. Thomas Massie, an outgoing Republican from Kentucky. It failed 314-104, but 103 Democrats — nearly half of the House Democratic caucus — supported it, signaling a significant shift in the party’s longstanding support for aid to Israel.

In 2024, a similar vote came up in the House to cut military aid to Israel. Then, just 37 House Democrats voted for the measure. Now, two years later, 103 House Democrats voted to cut funding. That shift in support was accelerated after the October 7 Hamas attacks and Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza, which has killed large numbers of Palestinian civilians. The debate is also playing out in Democratic primaries across the country. In New York and Colorado, Democratic socialist candidates who have sharply criticized Israel and opposed continued US military aid recently won House primaries.

Historically, Jewish Americans have overwhelmingly identified with and voted for the Democratic Party, while Democratic lawmakers have generally supported Israel and US military assistance to the country. In 2016, the Obama administration signed a 10-year memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Israel, committing the US to seek $38 billion in military assistance for fiscal years 2019 through 2028. Congress must vote to approve this funding, so the shift in Democratic support of Israel could have real consequences.

There is still a very strong support for Israel among many House Democrats, but the shifting views are notable. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries opposed the Massie amendment, arguing that it was overly broad and could jeopardize humanitarian assistance. But in a letter addressed to his House colleagues he also called for a “major reset” in US policy toward what he described as Israel’s “far-right Netanyahu government.”

Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Democratic Rep. Brad Schneider, who represents Illinois’s 10th Congressional District, and remains a strong supporter of Israel.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

Can you walk us through last week’s vote? You voted against the measure to cut aid to Israel, and a lot of your colleagues obviously did not. How did that play out for you?

Growing up in the ’60s, ’70s, and for the last 65 years, I fundamentally believe that the US-Israel relationship is important. I also believe that the aspiration for peace in the Middle East, not just between Israelis and Palestinians, but broadly throughout the region, is something that is in the United States’s interest and the interest of the people in the region. So this is not a new issue to me, and it’s something I thought long and hard about. 

Tom Massie doesn’t believe any of that. His intentions with this amendment were anything but pure. It was hastily crafted and poorly written. And one of the biggest issues with it is not only does it [not] address this 10-year memorandum of understanding, something negotiated by President Obama eight years ago, but there are also two years left on the MOU. 

It was a messaging bill and nothing more, and it was a negative message. I voted no because I think if we’re going to move toward peace, we need to do so in a constructive way. A lot of my colleagues were saying we need to send a message to the Netanyahu government.

“I have to hold onto that optimism for the prospects of peace because the alternative is too dark.”

I’ve been extremely critical of this government, their failure to address the settler violence in the West Bank, the failure to plan for a day-after in Gaza following what was a horrific war. If we’re going to move towards peace, if we’re going to find a path where Israelis and Palestinians can live side by side and the region can have the peace they deserve. Because we’re not just talking about Israelis and Palestinians; there’s progress being made between Lebanon and Israel in giving Lebanon, the people of Lebanon, the liberty and freedom they all deserve. 

Can I ask you if you still take money from AIPAC? And if so, how much?

I appreciate the support I get from people who care about the issues that I advocate for. So people who are pro-Israel, pro-US-Israel relationship are likely to support me because I’m pro-US-Israel, pro-US-Israel relationship. I’m also pro-addressing gun safety and reducing gun violence in this country. So I get the support of those groups. The support I get doesn’t determine my positions. I think my positions determine who supports me. 

Has your position on Israel shifted at all since October 7th, or at any point in your political career? And if so, can you tell us how?

So my position hasn’t changed because I’ve always been committed to promoting peace between Israelis and Palestinians and finding a path where both can live together, which I believe ultimately is two states: a Jewish democratic state of Israel, and a Palestinian state living side by side. My frustration with the current Israeli government has grown and continues to grow. Every conversation I have with them, whether it’s the US ambassador to Israel, whom I’ve had the privilege of working with many times, or my meetings with Prime Minister Netanyahu. I’ve had an engagement with the prime minister going back now for almost 30 years. But in the last several years, every single conversation I have with them talks about the need to address settler violence, the need to get humanitarian aid.

One of the things that I am proud of and will say loudly and proudly is that immediately after October 7th, as the war began, my team and I worked hard to push for humanitarian aid into Gaza to do everything we could to make sure that the civilians who were always caught in the middle of any war wouldn’t suffer more than they did. And the suffering was horrific. And I did challenge Israel when they made what I’ll call ill-conceived, ill-advised, in some cases illegal decisions to deprive humanitarian relief from entering Gaza. We pushed hard, and we worked with the Egyptians to get the Rafah crossing open. We pushed the Israelis to open the Karam Shalom crossing. And to not just get aid to those crossings, but get aid into and across the territories within Gaza.

Why are you so optimistic about the situation? 

I am always going to be optimistic. I have to hold onto that optimism for the prospects of peace because the alternative is too dark. And let’s separate the issue for folks living in the region and the folks living here. And for the Israelis and Palestinians, these are two peoples who are totally traumatized — traumatized not just over the last couple of years, but for decades. So I recognize the trauma that Israelis have and are experiencing, and I recognize the trauma that the Palestinians have and are experiencing. And that’s part of what I feel is my obligation: to hold onto that optimism and speak to a better future and work to try to find ways to bring the parties on both sides of the issue together to make the hard choices and take the risk to get to a path to peace.

So the reason I’m holding onto optimism — and it’s not 24/7; I have my moments when I am down and where I feel like the hill we’re climbing is just too steep — is you take a deep breath and you dig deep, and you say, I can’t give up on hoping and working towards peace because otherwise peace is never going to happen. And I want to find people who are like-minded.

And that is not just on the Israeli side of the equation. We have to find people on the Palestinian side, and for those on the Palestinian side, we have to find Israelis. And I meet, and I spend time with them on a regular basis. They come to my office. When I’m in the region, I talk to them. We have to strengthen and empower those voices who believe that peace will only come when the Israelis see the Palestinians as a people worthy of engagement and a shared future, and the Palestinians see the Israeli as a people worthy of engagement and a shared future, and recognize that until they get there, there’s no future for either side. We’ve got to have a path where both are pointing in the same direction.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

President Donald Trump seemed visibly irked when asked about his plans for Iran on Tuesday. “You don’t know anything,” he snapped at a reporter who said Iran showed no signs of deescalating. 

You have to forgive the man his vexation — he is in something of a bind. The war in Iran, never popular to begin with, has only become more of a lemon since a tenuous ceasefire collapsed earlier this month. In the two weeks since, Iran has bombarded targets across the Middle East with missiles and drone strikes. The onslaught badly damaged US bases and, just last week, killed three American soldiers’ lives.

Now Iran and its allies, metaphorically drunk on their recent successes (…alcohol is technically illegal in Iran!), appear to be revving for a new round of attacks. Iran launched strikes on Kuwait, Jordan, and Bahrain this week, reportedly targeting both US bases and civilian infrastructure. And on Monday, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militia also threatened to shut down a second key waterway that could further strain global oil markets. 

The world is running out of soldiers

The latest US casualties are a grim reminder that — for all the talk of drones and precision missiles — wars are still fought by actual, human people. 

But major military powers are running short on soldiers: The US, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan have all recently struggled to recruit troops. And the forces driving that shortage aren’t easily reversed. 

For starters, falling birth rates and aging populations have left many countries with fewer military-age adults. Being the right age is also only half of the equation. In the US, factors including weight, drug use and physical or mental health conditions would disqualify an estimated three-quarters of young Americans from military service.

Then there’s the military’s image problem: Polls show that young people around the world are becoming less willing to fight for their respective countries. And young Americans, in particular, have more negative views of both the military and the war in Iran than do their parents or grandparents.

There is another way to fill the ranks, of course…but it isn’t popular. The US ended its draft in 1973, and most Western militaries have similarly transitioned to all-volunteer forces. If the US did ever need to restart its draft, both the politics and the logistics could prove formidable. 

One link for later

➨ Treat yourself to a froyo. The go-to dessert of my misspent 20s is apparently very much back in vogue. But this time, it’s less about the zany flavors and maximalist toppings and more about wellness buzzwords like…protein and probiotics. Hmmmm. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that carrots don’t actually improve your vision? The myth originated as part of a World War II propaganda campaign to conceal Britain’s development of radar technology.
• Today’s trivia: How many countries are in North America? Don’t look it up — just guess! (Our daily trivia generally comes from Vox’s daily crossword, but today’s tidbit comes from my colleague Sean Rameswaram.) 
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday I asked you to name the Mesoamerican civilization that spoke Nahuatl. That would be the Aztecs — though 1.5 million people in central Mexico still speak the language now.

Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump announced giant new tariffs on Canada, which are scheduled to start in 30 days. Now negotiators from both countries are scrambling to see if they can be avoided.

What happened? Late on Monday, the White House announced 50 percent tariffs on a slew of Canadian goods — including whiskey, cheese, down jackets, and (naturally) hockey sticks. Because the Supreme Court sharply limited his tariff powers earlier this year, Trump is invoking a largely forgotten and possibly defunct authority under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930.

Previously, these goods had been covered under the USMCA, the trade deal Trump negotiated with Canada and Mexico in his first term to replace NAFTA. But on July 1, the agreement expired and the US declined to renew it. 

Why is Trump doing this? The White House claimed three key grievances: Canadian duties and restrictions on American alcohol, dairy products, and automobiles. Liquor appears to be a special irritant: All but two Canadian provinces have pulled US-made booze from government liquor stores, and even some Democrats have complained.

However, the alcohol boycott began as retaliation for the trade war Trump launched in early 2025, when he was talking regularly about Canada becoming America’s 51st state. Much like his effort to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Trump is trying to fix a problem he caused in the first place.

Interestingly, the tariffs will not go into effect for 30 days. This suggests that they may be less a serious policy initiative than a negotiating tactic. 

What’s the takeaway: Trump’s lifelong fascination with economic warfare has survived the Supreme Court’s rebuke, and he continues to fixate on Canada as a special target of his ire. It is unclear why; both countries have suffered from the breakdown in bilateral relations. 

But whatever the motivation, the ultimate outcome is clear: Icy relations to the north are a permanent fixture of the Trump presidency.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

The Odyssey officially had the biggest opening of any live-action movie of the year, as the new Avengers: Doomsday trailer is greeted with yawns. Here’s to the new MCU: the Mycenaean Cinematic Universe.

Even as the US conflict with Iran threatens to escalate once again, diplomatic talks break down, and US and Israel officials again flirt with the idea of pushing for regime change, President Donald Trump remains reportedly very reluctant to send US ground forces into Iran. That would risk causing large numbers of American casualties and pushing a war that many Americans have largely tuned out, even if they oppose it, back to the center of public debate. 

But that, tragically, does not mean that American troops involved in the conflict are necessarily safe. The past few days have been the deadliest for US forces since an initial ceasefire went into effect in April. On Friday, two US servicemembers were killed in a missile strike on a base in Jordan, marking the second time in two days that Iranian missiles had managed a direct hit on the base. On Saturday, a third US servicemember was killed in Iraq during the attempted controlled detonation of a downed Iranian attack drone. Altogether at least 17 US servicemembers have now been killed since the beginning of Operation Epic Fury in February. 

The US escalated its own attacks on Iran in retaliation, including a strike against the missile base in Tabriz, Iran where the attack on Jordan is thought to have originated. Iran has also fired missiles and drones at targets in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar in recent days, most of them intercepted, as well as at several commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, where traffic has again ground to a near halt.

If Iran’s ability to shut down the strait has been the biggest surprise of this war, it’s ability to hold targets on land throughout the region at risk, including energy infrastructure and US military bases, with missiles and drones, may be the second. 

This suggests the risks to the US military as well as US allies from Iranian retaliation may only grow, the longer this conflict drags on, even if Trump never commits to “boots on the ground.” The president has sought to portray this as a war where the risk of death and destruction is borne only by one side, and certainly Iran has sustained far more damage. But there have already been a number of surprises in this war and the risks to the American military may be higher than most anticipated a few months ago.

The growing risk to US troops in the Middle East 

In the early days of the war, the military began shifting troops and equipment from bases in Persian Gulf countries like Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar farther west to Jordan and Israel, where they are subject to fewer local restrictions and where they sit farther from Iranian missile launchers. Satellite imagery and subsequent reporting has revealed that Iranian strikes did far more damage to these bases during the first phase of this war than was revealed at the time. 

More distant US bases may be harder to hit, but they are clearly still within the range of Iran’s missiles and Shahed drones. Some analysts also say the shift may have created new vulnerabilities by concentrating US personnel and equipment in fewer locations. 

The missile strike that killed Lt. Tyler James Feehan and Pvt. Isabella Gonzales on Friday was one of four Iranian attacks against bases in Jordan in just five days. The Iranians in fact appear to be striking Jordan more than Israel in recent days, which could be because these targets are less well-defended than Israeli bases or because they carry less escalation risk: Israeli leaders, unlike Trump, are eager to rejoin the war. 

 US officials suggested to the Wall Street Journal that Iran is adapting to US air defenses by “firing missiles that travel at extremely high speeds and can maneuver as they streak toward the earth,” making them harder to intercept. The officials also suggested the Iranians may be receiving targeting assistance from China or Russia. 

Or it may simply be that if Iranians can keep firing missiles and drones, no system will be able to provide perfect protection. 

“What it actually shows is that Iran is in a lot better shape than was assumed,” said Nicole Grajewski, an expert on Iran’s missile program and professor at Sciences Po in Paris. “Contrary to a lot of the US statements from early parts of the war, Iran still retains quite a significant amount of missile and drone capabilities, and because they’re not operating now under constant aerial bombardment, they may have been able to reconstruct part of it.” 

According to assessments reported in June, Iran still has access to most of its missile sites and around 70 percent of its prewar stockpile. 

And while Iran still possesses the ability to punch, there are growing questions about whether the US air defense capabilities are depleting. At the time of the April ceasefire, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated, the US had likely burned through more than 1,000 of its roughly 2,300 stockpile of Patriot interceptors, and between 50-80 percent of the highly advanced THAAD interceptors, designed for use against high-altitude, long-range ballistic missiles. 

The Pentagon has been pushing defense manufacturers to accelerate the production and bring down the costs of advanced interceptors, but that will take months if not longer, depending on the system. In the short term, missile defense scarcity is going to continue to be a source of stress if this conflict escalates. 

“We do not have enough [munitions] to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that,” one US official told the Washington Post this week. 

The US no longer dominates the skies the way it once did

US troops in the Middle East have long been vulnerable to missile attacks. One particularly infamous Iraqi Scud missile strike killed 27 American soldiers during the first Gulf War in 1991. 

But the proliferation of one-way attack drones like Iran’s Shaheds have shifted the balance, giving weaker adversaries the ability to target US bases at low cost. The attack that killed the two servicemembers on Friday was, like many of Iran’s attacks in this war, a combined missile and drone barrage intended to overwhelm the facility’s defenses. The best-case scenario from these strikes, from a US perspective, is that they are intercepted, albeit at the cost of draining valuable air defense resources. In the worst case, US soldiers are killed. 

A strike on another base in Jordan in early 2024 by the Iran-backed militia group the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, during the war in Gaza, that killed three US servicemembers was in some ways a warning of the risks US troops would face in a scenario where Iran itself targeted them with its full capabilities. Since at least the Korean War, the US military has gotten used to fighting with more or less full control of the skies. As far back as 2022, Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of US forces in the Middle East, warned that “air superiority is something that we no longer have all the time” due to the proliferation of low-cost drones, which he compared to the improvised explosive devices, many planted by Iranian proxies, that killed hundreds of US troops during the war in Iraq. 

Thankfully, US casualties in this war are still nowhere close to those of either Iraq war. Trump told reporters on Sunday that “We feel very badly” about the deaths but that “those great patriots were out there fighting so that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon.” In recent weeks, the main focus of the war has been control of the Strait of Hormuz, rather than Iran’s nuclear program. 

The hard logic is that just as high fuel prices and declining poll numbers have not yet been enough to deter Trump from continuing to fight Iran, a few American casualties are not enough to be a deterrent to military action. In fact, as this weekend’s retaliatory strikes against Tabriz showed, they may only pull the US deeper into the war. 

As long as Trump avoids a ground invasion, Iran’s ability to target and kill US troops will remain limited. But as this past weekend’s events showed, that ability exists, and there is only so much the US can do to prevent it. The risk of an even larger catastrophe for American troops in the Middle East will only grow the longer this war goes on.  

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

The first thing you need to know about the UK’s new prime minister is that he’s previously moonlighted as a DJ. 

Okay: probably not the first thing you needed to know. And sure: That DJ gig was for charity. 

But it still tells you a little something about Andy Burnham, who today became the UK’s seventh prime minister in 10 years. He’s widely seen as a pragmatic, affable, down-to-earth kind of guy — more Zohran Mamdani than Keir Starmer. 

As the longtime former mayor of Manchester, the UK’s second-largest city, Burnham won adoration for his focus on improving public transit and affordable housing. His vocal advocacy for England’s post-industrial cities even earned him the nickname “the King of the North.”

Burnham’s first speech as prime minister, delivered (without notes!) on Monday morning, doubled down on some of those populist themes — including the need to bring down Britain’s cost of living and address homelessness.

Political observers don’t expect Burnham’s policies to actually differ all that much from those of Starmer, his predecessor. (They’re both members of Britain’s center-left Labour Party.) And the fundamental relationship between the UK and US is also expected to stay much the same. 

Asked how he’d relate to President Donald Trump, Burnham said: “I like to think I’ve got some personality myself.” You can be the judge of that! There’s video of his 2022 DJ set.

Will Britain’s new PM reverse Brexit?

Here’s one place where Burnham does break from his predecessor: He wants Britain to rejoin the European Union in his lifetime. (Though he’s also promised not to relitigate Brexit.)

Call it a breturn or a brejoinder — it’s a tantalizing prospect for the majority of Britons, who now either have soured on their country’s 2016 vote to depart from the EU or never supported Brexit to begin with.

But undoing Britain’s break with Europe would be a monumental undertaking. First, the government would likely need a clear political mandate from British voters, either through a second referendum or a general election where a breturn figured heavily. 

Then the UK would have to negotiate its way back into the bloc…and convince all 27 member states to give it another go. Some could approve accession with parliamentary votes. But others, including France, could require national referendums of their own. 

“Countries have very different views of Britain,” one European observer told Vox last month. “There are those that still think that the EU is better off without Britain.”

One link for later

➨ Slow down time — or at least your subjective experience of it. Neuroscience research shows that both novelty and strong emotions seem to stretch time out a bit. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that despite all the evidence to the contrary — license plates, hip-hop lyrics, etc. — a minority of American peaches are actually grown in the great state of Georgia? 
• Today’s trivia: Nahuatl is still spoken by millions of people today. But it was also the primary language of which former Mesoamerican civilization? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Friday’s trivia: On Friday, my colleague Dylan Scott asked you for a Russian name that means “holy.” That would be Oleg, as in Oleg Cassini — the Russian count turned designer who dressed former first lady Jackie Kennedy. 

Last week presented a stark contrast in the trajectories of the Trump administration’s two riskiest foreign policy ventures. On July 13, the President Donald Trump formally declared a return to military action in Iran, making clear that a war that he had anticipated would last just four or five weeks will stretch past the five month mark and probably longer. Trump appears increasingly frustrated by Iran’s failure to concede to his demand to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, comparing the country to a “great boxer”: “You think you have them beat, and then all of a sudden he comes back and he gives you a shot.”

On the far side of the globe, however, the other country Trump attacked this term has proven much more manageable. Venezuela’s government — now led by former Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who took power when Nicolás Maduro was captured in a US raid in January — agreed to talks with an opposition leader handpicked by the US that aimed at “strengthening democracy.” 

The New York Times reported earlier this week that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is effectively the “viceroy” of Venezuela, ruling the country in absentia from Washington, DC. (“Viceroy” is traditionally an official who governs a country or colony as a direct representative of a monarch.) The US has direct control over the revenues Venezuela receives from selling its oil abroad, giving Rubio effective power over the country’s budget. The grip is so tight, the Times reports, that Rodriguez asks for White House approval before appearing on Fox News, much to Trump’s delight. 

Two different countries in two different parts of the world with two different responses to Trumpian military pressure. But when future historians tell the story of how this administration ended up enmeshed in exactly the sort of Middle East quagmire that he had run for office pledging to avoid, they’re likely to devote at least a few paragraphs to Venezuela. The easy success of one operation set the stage for the still unfolding disaster of the other. 

Exporting the Venezuela model

In a daring predawn raid on January 3, US Special Forces managed to capture Maduro in a matter of hours, with no US troops killed. Contrary to the warnings of critics that such regime change would result in chaos — and to the hopes of the Venezuelan opposition that it would lead to democracy — Trump and Rubio successfully replaced Maduro with his much more pliant vice president, who has proven more than happy to let Washington call the shots. Trump now regularly muses about making Venezuela the 51st state. 

The operation was, the Times reported, “evidence to the president of the unmatched prowess of U.S. forces” and, along with the relative success of the first round of airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear program last June, emboldened him to take further military action. 

“What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect scenario,” Trump said in early March, referring to prospects for regime change in Iran. And in one sense it worked; the US was able to remove the head of state within hours of launching military action, with Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei killed in a joint US-Israeli airstrike. 

 “I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy in Venezuela,” Trump said, when Iran’s regime was considering Khamenei’s successor. 

Trump was not involved. Iran’s Assembly of experts chose the former supreme leader’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, whom Trump dismissed as “unacceptable” and a “lightweight”.

Despite this, Trump continued to insist that regime change had effectively happened in Iran and that its new leaders were “much more reasonable.” While Iran’s new political system is still very much a work in progress, its insistence on maintaining control of the state and ongoing attacks against shipping and US allies in the region have made it fairly clear that it will not be taking orders from Marco Rubio or anyone else in DC. 

Why Iran is not Venezuela

On the surface, there are some striking similarities between Iran and Venezuela: They were once close allies of each other, as well as of Russia and China. Both are oil dependent authoritarian states espousing a revolutionary ideology defined in large part by opposition to the United States. Both are known for sponsoring foreign militant groups. Both have a history of disputed elections and crushing opposition protests. Both have large and vocal exile communities in the US. Both have struggling economies and have spent years under US sanctions. 

That’s where the similarities end, however. Start with the military: Iran’s combined forces are roughly three times the size of Venezuela’s and far better equipped, possessing missile and drone capabilities that have spread chaos across the region for months. Iran’s senior leaders came of age during the brutal Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and have spent decades engaged in proxy battles with the US and Israel, whereas Venezuela has not fought an interstate war in modern times. It’s telling that Maduro was relying on Cuban personnel for his own security. 

Then, there’s geography. Thanks to its fortuitous location on the western side of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has means to retaliate against the US by blocking shipping through the world’s most important energy chokepoint, driving up oil prices. Venezuela may have the world’s largest oil reserves, but it doesn’t have anywhere near the ability to disrupt global energy flows. 

Iran was able to attack US allies throughout the Gulf with both its own missiles and via the military groups it supports throughout the region. Despite Trump’s misleading claims that Maduro’s government was in direct control of gangs in the US or weaponizing migration, Venezuela simply didn’t have the same kind of leverage with which to fight back. 

There’s history, too. Even at the nadir of relations with the US, when Venezuela was under heavy American sanctions and formal diplomatic contacts were cut off, there were still periodic talks over energy issues and prisoner releases. The US oil company Chevron continued to operate inside the country. Rodriguez herself was a familiar figure to US officials, having participated in talks with both the Biden and Trump administrations. 

And finally, there’s ideology. Venezuela’s rulers may still be publicly committed to the “Bolivarian” socialist vision of former leader Hugo Chávez, but, in reality, the regime operates as “an extreme form of crony capitalism with some pretenses of redistribution of oil windfalls to the poor,” said Chris Sabatini, director of the Latin America program at the think tank Chatham House. Senior civilian and military officials were heavily involved in a range of enterprises of varying degrees of legality from the oil industry, from gold mining to drug trafficking. When push came to shove, they were more interested in preserving their fiefdoms than standing up for a long-dead revolution. 

According to some reporting, denied by the Venezuelan government, Rodríguez had been in direct contact with US officials prior to Maduro’s capture, assuring them of her cooperation, which would make this less a regime change invasion than a US-enabled coup. Even Interior Minister Diasdello Cabello, considered the hardest of the hardline Chavistas with a US price on his head, has been more than happy to play ball with the country’s new American overlords. 

Iran has widespread corruption, as well, but the regime is far more organized, disciplined, and committed to the radical Islamist ideology of the 1979 revolution. Iran’s leaders had long been planning for invasion and had detailed succession plans in place for when top leaders were eliminated.  The fact that the US’s Israeli partners were reportedly cultivating Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former president best remembered for calling for Israel to be wiped off the map and promoting a long-shot plan to arm Kurdish rebels to mount a ground invasion, is an indication that there were simply no plausible candidates for an “Iranian Delcy.” 

It should have been obvious from the start that a quick and easy operation that would replace Iran’s top leaders with more cooperative ones without requiring a dangerous and costly ground invasion by US troops was never a realistic prospect. It’s notable that the administration sidelined many of its own Iran experts ahead of the war, but, in fairness, Trump’s own CIA director dismissed Israel’s optimistic regime change scenarios as “farcical.” 

“President Trump has not really taken the time to study the history of Iran-US relations going back to 1979, or even earlier,” said the Middle East Institute’s Alex Vatanka. “If he had studied that relationship, I think he would have taken a different approach.” But Trump may have been thinking less about what happened in Tehran in 1979 than what had happened in Caracas just a few weeks earlier. 

The end of hubris?

Many scoffed in January when Trump suggested that the US would be “running” Venezuela for the foreseeable future, but that appears to be more or less what’s happening now. It’s not clear how long this arrangement can last. Discontent with both Rodríguez and Trump is growing in Venezuela, and many in the opposition accuse the government of using the recent devastating earthquake as a pretext to delay called-for democratic reforms. Venezuelans may come to hold the United States responsible for the failures of the government it is remotely controlling. 

But the initial success of the Venezuela operation was a vindication for a president who often sees himself as running the world in addition to the United States.

Has Trump faith in his ability to bend other countries to his will been shaken at all by the Iran experience? He has frequently described Cuba as “next” on the list of countries he’d like to “take” after Venezuela and Cuba.

In terms of culture and geography, Cuba may look more like Venezuela. But in terms of its political system, it’s “more like Iran,” said Sabatini. “It’s completely state-centric, vertical, disciplined.” Dealing with a system still fiercely devoted to its founding revolutionary ideology that has been largely isolated from the US for decades, the administration may have no better luck finding a “Cuban Delcy” than it did finding an Iranian one. 

Trump still hasn’t ruled out taking over Cuba in some fashion, and Pentagon planners are reportedly examining a range of options for action against the island, though he claimed Rubio wants to “get [Iran] finished first.” If that’s true, it may be a long wait until Iran is “finished.” 

On the other hand, Trump is once again talking about taking over Greenland and posting memes referencing his desire to annex Canada. Iran may have proven that Venezuela was the exception, not the rule, when it comes to regime change, but Trump’s ambitions for world domination do not seem to have disappeared.