Can President Donald Trump pen a new chapter in his love story with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un? 

In Trump’s first term, the two leaders, in Trump’s words, “fell in love” after exchanging letters and held three historic meetings, but failed to make much progress toward the goal of denuclearizing the heavily armed hermit state. 

Now, Trump appears to be trying to recapture the magic, reportedly urging aides to set up a meeting with Kim as soon as this fall. This news comes soon after Trump’s Truth Social post on Sunday announcing he had ordered the US military to “substantially reduce” joint military exercises with ally South Korea in part because it would send “a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful” — North Korea. 

Trump has claimed, without elaborating, that Kim has responded to this overture, but there’s been no public response from Pyongyang yet. 

Trump’s outreach didn’t come entirely out of nowhere. Trump has made clear since the beginning of his term that he would like to meet with Kim again, and there was speculation that a meeting might happen when Trump traveled to South Korea for a summit last fall. North Korea’s UN Mission in New York has also rebuffed several attempts by US officials to deliver a personal letter from Trump seeking to restart dialogue. 

In the midst of an unpopular conflict with Iran that seems unlikely to end in anything resembling a victory, it makes sense that Trump might be reaching back to what he sees as one of the foreign policy high points of his first term. “Kim Jong ​Un has always treated me with great respect,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “I understand him. He understands me.”

Beyond reconnecting with an old friend, it’s not entirely clear what Trump actually wants out of North Korea. But if his goal is a new diplomatic breakthrough, that will be even harder than it was the first time: The country is a much different place than it was the last time the two leaders sat down and even if they were to meet again, Kim seems even less likely to make real concessions. 

Like it or not, North Korea is a nuclear power now

Analysts believe North Korea possesses around 50 nuclear weapons with enough fissile material to build 40 more. It has missiles that are theoretically capable of reaching the US mainland. There was a time when the North Koreans were willing to at least discuss giving up their program in exchange for sanctions relief and major concessions on US military support to South Korea, but that time is probably over, partly thanks to Trump’s own actions. 

“There is no chance that North Korea is going to denuclearize. Zero chance,” said Joseph Yun, a veteran US-North Korea negotiator who recently served as acting US ambassador to South Korea. “They have seen what happened to Iran. They have seen what happened to Ukraine. The way they see it, their nuclear weapons are what protects them.” Last year, the country’s official news agency dismissed denuclearization as an “unrealizable pipe dream.”

On top of that, North Korea is in a much stronger negotiating position than it was the last time these two leaders met for a photo op.

“It’s a very different North Korea now. It’s stronger geopolitically, and Kim is stronger domestically.”

Jung Pak, served as US special representative for North Korea in the Biden administration

In 2018, North Korea was heavily isolated and struggling under an international sanctions regime that was at least officially — if not always in practice — supported by China and Russia as well as the United States. For a young leader still looking to establish his internal legitimacy and international standing, a meeting with the sitting US president was a major coup. 

But things improved dramatically for North Korea after the pandemic. After it began lifting its Covid-era lockdown — one of the toughest in the world — North Korea has become what the Wall Street Journal has called “the world’s most unlikely growth story.”

The country’s economy has grown for three straight years, and while it’s still an impoverished country where nearly half the population is malnourished, Pyongyang is by all accounts booming, with thousands of new homes built along with a surge in Western-style restaurants and ride-hailing apps. 

“North Korea emerged from the pandemic stronger, despite the odds,” said Jung Pak, who served as US special representative for North Korea in the Biden administration. “It’s a very different North Korea now. It’s stronger geopolitically, and Kim is stronger domestically.”

North Korea has been one of the main beneficiaries of the war in Ukraine, sending thousands of soldiers and munitions to help the Russian war effort. While thousands of those troops have died, the North Korean regime has gained billions of dollars in revenue and military aid from Russia in response, as well as invaluable battlefield experience for its commanders and weapons systems.     

Russian President Vladimir Putin has come through for the North Koreans in other ways. In 2024, Russia vetoed the mandate of the UN body that monitored the enforcement of international sanctions on North Korea, effectively shredding the international sanctions regime. In 2025, trade between North Korea and China, its main economic partner, rose 25 percent.  

The regime has found other innovative ways of raising revenue, reportedly netting billions through cybercrime targeted at foreign banks and cryptocurrency exchanges. 

Kim is also less desperate for legitimacy these days. In September 2025, he stood alongside Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin at a massive military parade in Beijing, a powerful demonstration of unity among three US adversaries. These days, Kim likely feels he’s the one being wooed. Xi’s high profile trip to Pyongyang in June was interpreted by many as a sign that China, warily eyeing the increasingly close relationship between Russia and North Korea, was looking to shore up its ties with its longtime ally. 

Domestically, when the world’s first millennial dictator took power after his father died in 2011, many wondered how long he would last. Today, he’s feeling secure enough to be thinking about long-term handoff plans, publicly positioning his 13-year-old daughter as his future successor. 

Kim is clearly not desperate to meet with Trump, and these days, the United States has fewer means to pressure him. Without Chinese and Russian support, the US can only dial up international sanctions so much. As for military pressure, the US has been moving military assets out of the Korean peninsula to the Middle East and recently redeployed its last aircraft carrier out of Asia. 

As Trump’s actions this week demonstrate, he’s not all that interested in working with US allies in the region to pressure the North Koreans. But if he were considering pairing his warm overtures to Kim with a stick, a “fire and fury” threat wouldn’t pack the same punch today.  

Is there any reason for new US-North Korea talks?

Still, there are reasons Kim might want to sit down with Trump again. North Korea would still like US sanctions lifted. Kim’s influential sister has stated that the regime is looking for the US to formally accept its status as a nuclear power, as Russia has now done.  

Former US State Department North Korea negotiator Joel Wit suspects that given Trump’s desperation for talks, Pyongyang might try to press its advantage even further. 

“If I was a North Korean, I would ask the United States for what I would call a ‘peace agenda,’” he said. “That would mean more than just reducing the size of US-[South Korean] exercises. It could include cutting back on US troops in South Korea or even Guam.”

Trump, who has repeatedly, including in his recent Truth Social post, made clear that he sees the US military presence in South Korea as a waste and the South Koreans as coddled, wealthy freeloaders, might be amenable to concessions like this. 

But what could the US get out of talking to North Korea if denuclearization is off the table? Some analysts have suggested a limited deal might be possible, which could see North Korea dismantle its reactors or some of its centrifuges, slowing down the growth of its nuclear program if not eliminating it. 

Pak also noted that given North Korea’s refusal to engage in nearly any diplomacy with the US since 2019, just holding talks and building some confidence between the two sides would be progress. “The meeting itself would be the win,” Pak said. 

On the other hand, holding talks that do not explicitly aim at eliminating North Korea’s nuclear program would be seen as effectively accepting that North Korea is a nuclear power now. At this point, there’s a strong realist case to be made for accepting North Korea’s nuclear status and proceeding from there, but it’s hard to square with the administration’s stance on Iran’s nuclear program. 

It’s also likely that the kind of incremental concessions North Korea might, in the best of circumstances, be willing to offer, would not satisfy a US president with a penchant for grand bargains. 

In his first term, just the fact that Trump and Kim sat down made history. Now that that’s been accomplished, they may find that, like many a romance a few years in, they’ve run out of things to talk about. 

Since January, many Cubans have lived a life of near-constant darkness. The Trump administration’s oil blockades have led the country into a worsening energy crisis, collapsing what was already an eroding national power grid. 

Daily blackouts have plunged the Cuban nationalized, universal health system, once the pride of the country, into a humanitarian crisis. For months, hospitals have been without necessary power and ambulances strapped for fuel. Piles of trash line the streets, increasing the risk of disease. Cold storage issues threaten lifesaving vaccines, and a combination of the frail economy and US sanctions has left pharmacy shelves almost empty. 

The public health crisis exposes an often overlooked aspect of the way we tend to think about the promise of universal healthcare. Having accessible and free medical services is only one part of the solution. While Cuba’s once-vaunted health system is bound up in its own history and national context, it still demonstrates that public health of all kinds can only be as resilient as the electricity, water, transportation, refrigeration, supply chains, and institutions that enable it. 

An old prototype for universal healthcare 

Not long ago, Cuba’s health system was seen as a promising model for successful free universal healthcare. In the years following Fidel Castro’s rise to power, health authorities focused on the integration of healthcare delivery models into a single public system. The Castro government aimed to expand services once concentrated in Havana into rural areas, such that the entire population would have access to basic care services. In 1974, the government launched community-based polyclinics that placed primary care specialists in almost every Cuban community. 

Over the decades that followed, that widened access to healthcare led to significant, measurable returns. Infant mortality in the country has dropped from 37 per 1,000 live births right after the revolution to seven per 1,000 live births in 2024. Infectious and parasitic disease mortality also improved, dropping from a rate of 45.4 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1970 to 9.8 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2019, according to data reported by the Cuban Public Health Ministry. 

It’s not entirely surprising that the successful Cuban national health model has been the site of curiosity and enthusiastic scrutiny in American health equity circles, despite vast differences in state ideologies. The US has never ensured that every citizen has affordable access to healthcare, and large disparities persist in low-income and rural populations. The chokehold of private insurance has ensured that, unlike nearly every other country in the world, the US has largely rejected the prospect of universal care. Even historic gains in insurance coverage have faced rollback threats under the One Big Beautiful Bill. 

On certain key metrics, the US also falls far behind Cuba, which boasted 9.5 physicians to 1,000 people in 2021. That same year, the US reported just 3.7 physicians to every 1,000 people. The 2019 measles epidemic demonstrated a gap in childhood vaccination rates as well: 92 percent of children ages 13 to 17 in the US received two doses or more of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine. In Cuba, the childhood completion rates were well over 99 percent, and the country has not seen a measles outbreak since 1993. 

From its early years, the Cuban health system has functioned against a background of economic decline particular to the country, one attributable to a complex combination of external pressures, among them US blockades, a complicated economic reliance on Venezuela, a struggling state-run economy, and a flailing industry heavily impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. 

While other sectors faced attrition, Cuba’s health system, at least, appeared capable of weathering these crises. During the pandemic, the country proved to be a model in global health, having developed a homegrown Covid-19 vaccine rapidly and reaching a 95 percent vaccination rate. Its robust supply of trained health professionals made headlines when Cuban healthcare workers provided essential pandemic aid to a small town in Italy.

 So why has this system proved to be so fragile now? 

New blockades deal the final blow after Hurricane Melissa 

Torrents of rain and flooding from the Category 3 Hurricane Melissa hit Cuba in October of last year, affecting much of the island’s eastern provinces. More than 735,000 people were evacuated, and the environmental disaster has put the country’s basic health infrastructure in a precarious state. 

In the storm’s wake, a combination of flooding and damaged water systems increased the spread of viral infections of arboviral diseases such as dengue and oropouche. A report by the Pan American Health Organization published in March placed water, food, and vector-borne diseases in the “very high” health risk categories. Apart from damaged water and sanitation infrastructure, the report describes how disruptions to health service access, routine surveillance of disease vectors, and environmental conditions that breed mosquito-borne disease outbreaks have dramatically increased the risk of infectious disease spread. 

Hurricane Melissa arrived during a recovery period from earlier storms, such as Hurricane Rafael in late 2024, as well as sporadic earthquakes in recent years. These natural disasters also heavily damaged health facilities, leading to collapsed roofing, damaged roads and cables, and the loss of supplies and equipment. 

For years, Cuba’s economy was propped up in large part by its relationship with Venezuela. In exchange for support from Cuba’s highly trained professionals — especially healthcare workers — Venezuela long provided a critical supply of crude oil, which helped the country keep the lights on even in the face of US sanctions. 

That partnership ended in January after the nighttime capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and the sweeping Trump oil blockade soon after has dealt a challenge too difficult for the energy infrastructure to withstand. 

Already struggling to recover from other disasters, Cuba plunged further into its present crisis. Mario Cruz Peñate, Pan American Health Organization representative for Cuba, said that while the public health situation has been evolving for a while, he has seen more acute upheavals as sanctions persist, causing mass blackouts that have made it impossible to sustain vital health services and emergency care.

Disease control continues to struggle post-Melissa, with aid organizations worrying about communicable food- and water-borne diseases, such as hepatitis A and diarrhea, that can be caused by unrefrigerated food. On the administrative level, limited transportation resources and electricity have led to a dearth of vaccine supplies, which typically require cold rooms for transfer and storage. 

Continuity of care, in particular, has been affected for the worse. More than 100,000 elective and reconstructive surgeries have been postponed, for example, because of a lack of supplies and a backlog of emergency surgeries. At a briefing in May, representatives of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the World Health Organization reported that over 32,000 pregnant women faced limited access to diagnostics and limited amounts of the stable electricity needed to sustain neonatal units. Prenatal care faces delays because of the lack of everything from testing supplies to available facilities. And now, even once successful improvements in health indicators have fallen: a report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research measured an increase in infant mortality rates from 4.0 to 9.9 per 1,000 births between 2018 and 2025. 

For humanitarian aid organizations, alleviating this health crisis also poses a stark challenge. Cruz Peñate ascribes this to availability, timing, and opportunity to distribute aid supplies, all of which have been made inconsistent by the ongoing blockade. 

“The response to the situation in Cuba has to increase; we have to scale up the response. All the support we can manage to receive will be important,” Cruz Peñate said. “Here in Cuba there is really a situation that needs attention.”

Is Cuba now an outdated prototype for universal healthcare? 

While Cuba’s healthcare system was never bound to map precisely onto the US, some of its most notable successes — the high physician-to-patient ratio, the almost entirely vaccinated population, the ample health screenings — still remain desirable. And yet those very accomplishments have crumbled under the threat of extreme weather events and the country’s inability to restore its broken power grid.  

Trump targeted even more petroleum suppliers in his latest round of sanctions on July 23, leaving Cuba scrambling still further to revitalize its energy sector. Those same sanctions also took aim at the Cuban healthcare export economy, alleging that it involves forced labor. 

Earlier this month, Cuba’s government loosened constraints on a handful of private operations, including pharmaceuticals and elder-care facilities, in response to the shortage of medicine in the country.  With state-stocked shelves running empty, the new decree allows private pharmacies with Cuban health registration to fill in the medicine gap. Similarly, privatized elder facilities are also allowed to operate at a capped rate of 60 people per home, with mandatory visits from state physicians. 

The government still prohibits private sector medical and dental care, and Cuban officials remain adamant that the “socialist state enterprise keeps its central role,” so it’s difficult to claim that the country’s medical model is being pressured towards privatization. But the erosion of some of its elements still speaks to a state-run health system under strain. 

We often think of healthcare itself as an equation of medical services along with healthcare personnel and the authorities — government, industry, or both — that control it. But the crisis facing Cuba gets at the dependence of all of these factors on the broader energy ecosystem. Even a once-promising healthcare model can quickly collapse when a crucial component is missing: fuel.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

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

Hi readers, it’s me again! Caitlin will be back on Wednesday. Now, for today’s news: President Donald Trump, South Korea, and the state of the US’s military alliances.

Remember Trump’s first-term “love letters” with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un? Trump was so fond of them that he took them with him when he left the presidency in 2021 (the National Archives did not approve). Now, it seems like the two leaders are taking up where they left off.

Over the weekend, Trump announced in a social media post that he would “substantially reduce” scheduled joint military exercises between the US and South Korea, which get underway today. The reason? His “very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea.” 

But there may have been another reason. Trump also wrote that “While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, “No thanks!””

The US-South Korea exercises “are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!),” Trump wrote, “but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful.”

That last part — “unthreatening and respectful” — is not exactly true; in 2017, Kim called Trump “a mentally deranged US dotard” whom North Korea would “tame…with fire.” But in the present day, Trump’s announcement is a boon to the North Korean leader, who has denounced the military exercises. 

It’s also just the latest incident in the historically close US-South Korea relationship (the two countries have held military exercises annually for more than 70 years). Earlier this year, Trump lashed out with new tariffs, accusing South Korea of “not living up to its Deal,” referring to a 2025 agreement on trade and security between the two countries that South Korea’s legislature had not yet approved.

Go a little deeper

The US has more permanent troops in South Korea than it does almost anywhere else in the world, behind only its deployments in Japan and Germany. Under Trump, though, those once-durable commitments have started to look a lot shakier.

Europe — and Germany in particular — has borne the brunt of Trump’s second-term harassment: In May, Trump announced his intent to remove 5,000 US troops from Germany and threatened to go “a lot further”; the Pentagon has said that withdrawal will take place within 12 months. The US currently has more than 38,000 troops stationed in Germany.

Trump has made similar threats about US troops stationed in Italy and Spain, and even suggested removing all US troops from Europe.

Most of these threats have been triggered by Trump’s unhappiness with European defense spending, which he’s eternally trying to boost. 

But in his second term, the threats have grown much more tightly tied to Trump’s personal ambitions and grievances. Trump’s Germany announcement followed a clash with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz over the US war with Iran, which Trump has tried — unsuccessfully — to drag US allies into. Spain, in particular, has also drawn Trump’s ire for vocally opposing the war. 

Last month, he also tied the US troop presence in Europe to his insistence that the US be allowed to take over Greenland, which belongs to Denmark, a US ally and founding NATO member.

One link for later

➨ A low-tech way to save coral reefs. My colleague Benji Jones visited the island nation of Palau, in the western Pacific Ocean, to learn about a new approach to reef restoration. Scientists there are testing species of coral specifically for heat resistance to find better options for replanting reefs — all using some plastic picnic coolers and a bit of hot water. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the Chilean Andes has the largest digital camera ever made? It captured its “first light” last year in staggering high-definition. 
• Today’s trivia: What was the title of Iran’s ruler until 1979? (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, we asked you which US president responded to inflation by ordering wage and price freezes. That was President Richard Nixon.

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: The cracks are starting to show in President Donald Trump’s Iran campaign.

What’s happening? Conditions on a US warship deployed in the Middle East have grown so dire, multiple sailors have reportedly tried to go overboard (at least one did so but was rescued safely, according to CNN). 

The attempts to jump overboard comes as family members of sailors are raising concerns with Democratic lawmakers about deteriorating mental health on the ship amid sanitation issues and shortages of food and basic supplies. 

The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier has been deployed for more than 250 days, starting last November, including a stretch of more than 200 days at sea — a modern record. Its deployment was supposed to end months ago, in May, but has continued as Trump’s Iran war stretches on. 

How is the administration responding? Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Thursday that reports about conditions on the Lincoln are “completely misrepresented.” Help is on the way for the Lincoln, though, with another US aircraft carrier en route to the area to replace it (according to the Wall Street Journal, the replacement was already planned, and not in response to deteriorating conditions on the Lincoln).

Why does this matter? Conditions on the Lincoln are not the only recent stumbling block for the US war with Iran. Earlier this month, we learned more about the US’s increasingly serious shortages of key offensive and defensive missiles, including THAAD and Patriot interceptors used to protect US troops and allies. On top of that, the Washington Post reported Thursday that the US has run through around a quarter of its Reaper drones, which cost tens of millions of dollars apiece. 

It’s the latest example of how the math of the war is starting to slant against the US: Reaper drones and Patriot missiles are incredibly expensive, while Iran has figured out how to mass-produce attack drones on the cheap. And with no end in sight, shortages and situations like the Lincoln will only become a larger problem.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Here’s some good news from my colleague Adam Clark Estes: As wrecked as your attention span may feel, it’s not permanently degraded. He talked with attention experts to figure out how to repair his, and how we can all do the same. You can read his full story here with a gift link — and then, for all of our brains’ sake, let’s log off. We’ll see you back here tomorrow. 

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee — better known by its short name, AIPAC — bills itself as a bipartisan advocate “for policies that strengthen the US-Israel partnership.” In 2026, it’s become something else: a major — and seemingly, losing — issue in Democratic politics. 

Progressive Democratic candidates in primaries across the country are explicitly calling out their opponents’ relationship with AIPAC, often using the connection as a rallying point to persuade voters about the problem of “dark money” in politics. Most recently, in Michigan, AIPAC spent about $30 million boosting Rep. Haley Stevens in her bid for the state’s Democratic Senate nomination. Her opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, drew attention to it again and again. She lost. 

As one of the biggest spenders in US elections, the group has gone well beyond its origins lobbying members of Congress to support its agenda. According to David Dayen, executive editor of the American Prospect, AIPAC is spending millions of dollars against candidates who speak out against Israel’s actions in Palestine — sometimes using advertisements that have nothing to do with Israel, and may appear unrelated to AIPAC.

Dayen spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the backlash surrounding AIPAC’s spending, the group’s complicated web of shell PACs,  and what it all means for the Democratic Party’s quickly evolving stance on Israel.

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. 

What is AIPAC?

AIPAC started out as a lobbying organization. It was inaugurated in the 1950s. It has historically been seen as one of the more powerful lobbying organizations in Washington. And its goal is to strengthen and maintain the relationship between the US and Israel.

They have annual conventions where pretty much everybody across the political spectrum attends and gives speeches. But something changed about five years ago. AIPAC was not content to just lobby members of Congress. They wanted to influence who actually got to Washington. And they began to engage in the use of super PACs to run advertising and other forms of political engagement in campaigns, and particularly in primary campaigns that determine who actually gets to a general election.  

Why did they want to influence who got to Washington? Maybe that sounds like an obvious question, but it wasn’t happening before, so why did it start happening?

One thing that happened is in 2018, we saw the rise of what is known as “The Squad,” and that included Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib — people who had very strident views, particularly about the US-Israel relationship. Those progressive Democrats were very successful in winning safe seat races. And I’m not in their head, but it could be that AIPAC wanted to try to provide a counterweight, and stop that from happening, and use their resources — very prodigious resources — to spend money in these campaigns and to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

Once upon a time, an endorsement from AIPAC was a powerful thing. It could be a huge benefit to a candidate. What exactly did it get you when AIPAC said, “This is our guy, this is our gal?”

I mean, in practical terms, it probably got you $5,000 because that’s the limit on a corporate PAC. But because AIPAC was powerful and also a bipartisan organization, getting your name on the list of AIPAC endorsees was something that you could tout in your election. It was something that showed that you had a commitment to what has historically been an important bond between the US and Israel. 

It certainly wasn’t as controversial in the years before 2023 as it is today. After October 7, we saw what a lot of people have termed a genocide against the Palestinian people. The changing attitudes around the US-Israel relationship more broadly, where large numbers of Americans now view that relationship negatively, have changed what the meaning of an AIPAC endorsement really is.

I know that you’ve dug into the numbers. What do we know about how much money AIPAC is specifically spending this midterm cycle?

It’s a hard question to answer. If you go by the Federal Election Commission disclosures, AIPAC has raised about a hundred million dollars this election cycle, and has spent in independent expenditures — that’s TV ads and mailers and these kinds of things — about $28 million. 

But that is an undercount for a couple different reasons. When I say those numbers, I am going by the specific super PAC that AIPAC has created. It’s called United Democracy Project. United Democracy Project has sent money to other PACs — about $9 million worth.

Is this a lot of money?

I think the real innovation here is the transfer of money from, in this case, pro-Israel PACs, to these pop-up PACs, these shell PACs that are created specifically for a particular election and then funded through AIPAC and, in some cases, other other pro-Israel PACs. 

They are sort of laundering this money through to other PACs, so those other PACs run the ads and it doesn’t look like it’s coming from AIPAC. A perfect example was the first real major primary state of the cycle, which was Illinois.

There were four open seats in the Chicago area that are pretty strongly blue. A Democrat is going to win the general election. And so these primaries were highly contested. AIPAC set up two PACs, one called Elect Chicago Women and the other called Affordable Chicago Now. And millions of dollars went from AIPAC’s super PAC, which is called United Democracy Project, into these two pop-up PACs. 

And those two PACs then funded ads for four candidates in those four open seat races. Now, if you were watching that on television, you would say, “Hey, elect Chicago women. That sounds like a good idea. I’m gonna watch this ad” or “Affordable Chicago now. I like affordability.” The truth is that this money was coming from AIPAC into these ads and supporting candidates that were generally supportive of the US-Israel relationship. 

Now, those four races — AIPAC won two of them and they lost two of them. And it was really interesting, I think, where they were successful, and where they weren’t. In one race up in the Evanston area, it became a big issue that AIPAC actually was behind these ads from Elect Chicago Women and Affordable Chicago Now. 

The [AIPAC] candidate, a state senator named Laura Fine, actually was harmed, I think, in the election by this fact that this got out, and that this became a major issue in the campaign. And she ended up finishing third in that primary, despite having millions of dollars supporting her. There were other races where this wasn’t sort of as explicit a factor in the election itself, and those candidates were able to win. 

This all sounds quite shady and yet I wonder — how unusual is it for an interest group in politics to be doing something like this?

I think it’s pretty unusual. It’s not something I’ve seen a whole lot of. We saw it to a smaller degree in some other election cycles — two years ago, four years ago — but it has become a concerted strategy this time. 

And so there are these pop-up PACS that are specific to a campaign, but also some established PACs that have been around for a while are receiving money from AIPAC and affiliated groups and using that in campaigns. 

Emily’s List is a very well-known political organization that supports pro-choice women. They took [hundreds of thousands of dollars] from an organization called Democratic Majority for Israel that is not affiliated with AIPAC per se, but aligns on similar candidates. 

There are other examples of this, more obscure examples. Like there’s a PAC called Crush MAGA PAC. And it’s affiliated with a different, I’m gonna sound crazy when I say this, but Crush MAGA PAC is affiliated with a different pack called Save Democracy, and Save Democracy has received $100,000 from United Democracy Project, which is AIPAC Super PAC. So sometimes the layers here are two or three or even four PACs deep. 

And it can be really hard to untangle all this and figure out where the money has come from, because AIPAC certainly isn’t saying, “We’re funding that campaign.” They’re releasing disclosures as required by the Federal Election Commission, but they’re not saying where the money is earmarked for, if it’s for a specific race, if it’s for a specific candidate.

AIPAC at times has responded to criticism of it by appearing to conflate it with criticism of Israel or criticism of Jews. Last year, Sen. Bernie Sanders comes out with a statement. He denounces Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for what he says is the “extermination of Gaza.” He calls for an end to military aid to Israel. He says people are starving to death.

AIPAC attacks Sanders’s statement, calling it a hate-filled rant and blood libel, and pointing out that in his statement, he didn’t mention Hamas’s attack on Israel. So AIPAC is now public in a way that historically it has not been. And it is tying criticism of Israel to antisemitic sentiment. Does this help or hurt AIPAC’s cause, do you think?

It depends on the messenger, but the issue is that there’s a very straight line between how this money is being used, transferred, spent, concealed, and a broader critique that I think a lot of Democrats have about money in politics. And so when AIPAC decides, “Okay, we’re going respond to criticism that is rooted in what AIPAC believes, and the conditions in Israel and Gaza and the West Bank, et cetera,” to saying, you know, “Any criticism of what we’re doing is antisemitic — I think people who see this as a broader problem about money in politics see that as an extremely cynical take.”

I don’t think that really connects to one of the big reasons why people are really objecting to this, which is that they don’t want to see their politicians essentially bought.

But it’s additionally fraught because there are antisemitic tropes where, you know, a cabal of Jews is secretly controlling the government and finance, right? It feels triply complicated.

Look, I’m Jewish, and in having to cover this, I have to try to follow money from Jewish groups from one place to another, and that can certainly be uncomfortable. And it does add some weight to this issue. 

But I feel like we are talking here not about somebody’s religion, but about a policy. And it’s a twofold policy. One is the policy of the US government funding, to the tune of billions of dollars, the destruction of an entire region, and also the policy of allowing super PACs to dictate who ends up making decisions in Washington.

When the Russia-Ukraine conflict erupted into full-scale war in 2022, things looked grim for Ukraine. Its capital, Kyiv, was under threat almost immediately, and there were questions about how long the smaller country could hold out, even with US support. More than four years later, however, the dynamic is changing. US military support has waned, but not only has Ukraine held its own in years of grinding, attritional fighting, it increasingly has Russia on the defensive.

According to Marcus Walker, who covers Ukraine as South Europe Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal, “it’s certainly possible for the smaller country to survive and have a chance of winning only because it is more nimble and and better at improvising and for large periods of the war has had the edge in terms of innovation.” 

Walker, who, last month, reported on how the war is beginning to shift against Russian President Vladimir Putin, talked with Today, Explained co-host Noel King to explain how Ukraine has held on this long — and how it’s successfully improvising on the battlefield to press its advantage.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, including how Ukraine has recently gained a new ally on the American right who has Trump’s ear. You can listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

You recently wrote that Ukraine has Russia on its back foot. How?

To understand what happened this year, we have to go back to the very beginnings of the war, which were in 2014 when Russia seized Crimea and the Eastern Donbas region in a smaller-scale war. And, at the time, Ukraine was a militarily weak country. Its army was pretty backward and had outdated equipment; although, it fought as hard as it could. The society was politically divided, especially over its relationship with Russia and with the West and with Europe. And Russia seems to have drawn the lesson that Ukraine would be a pushover when it launched its full scale invasion in 2022. And, at the time, now four and a half years ago, even most Western governments and intelligence services thought that Russia would win the war easily.

Instead, the very fact of Russian pressure on Ukraine had somehow welded Ukrainians together and created a stronger, more united society and state that shared — whatever the internal differences — at least the determination to have a country called Ukraine. And, in the meantime, they did a lot of reforms to their country and to their military. 

And so, when Russia launched a full scale invasion — thinking, “this will be easy,” — instead they found themselves in a full-scale war that they’ve been unable to win. On balance, Russia is really struggling to get any military result despite the investment of massive resources and the loss of incredible numbers of soldiers in trying to win this war. It just isn’t able to turn its advantage in numbers into victory. 

Right now, it’s hard to see Ukraine collapsing. However, Ukraine’s a long way from winning outright. And the outcome of this war is ultimately still open.

Ukraine must be doing something right on the battlefield. What is it doing right?

It has found ways to counteract Russia’s advantage in numbers, in manpower, and in equipment. And, above all, the asymmetric war that Ukraine has been fighting has come to rely heavily on drones, on its know-how, and on its skill at improvisation to develop a new form of drone warfare that other countries around the world have been trying to learn from, including the US military, including Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, and including other NATO countries in Europe — and, of course, the Russians, too. 

There is a constant arms race here in terms of drone technology and tactics. And both sides are now using incredible numbers of these often very tiny weapons — often 12 or 15 inches big with four little propellers — that can kill at ranges of 20 to 30 miles.

What is Ukraine using the drones to do, exactly?

They’re the most important tactical weapon at the front for killing Russian infantry. They are also using larger bomber drones with propellers or with wings to try and destroy Russian logistics, to blow up trucks transporting ammunition or other supplies on the supply roads far behind the front. They’re using long-range drones that can fly for a thousand miles or more to destroy Russian oil refineries deep inside Russia in an attempt to cut off the oil revenues that are vital for the Russian state and for Putin’s ability to finance the war. 

On the front line, drones are also doing all sorts of work that humans used to do, such as transporting ammunition, and food, and water to infantry soldiers on the front line. So, if you go to frontline areas now, or anywhere near them, you can see ground drones: little remote-control vehicles with big chunky wheels trundling along on their own with no human in sight. 

They also, for example, evacuate wounded Ukrainian soldiers. They will lie down on these ground drones and be ferried out, because that is better than having six men carry you out on a stretcher where, if you’re hit again, then you might have seven casualties.

How did Ukraine end up using drones in so many areas — and so successfully? Is this just weaponry evolving the way it tends to?

Obviously, in all wars, innovation happens very fast under the pressure of necessity. But there is something very particular about Ukraine. It is a country of people who like to improvise. It’s also a country with a large software sector, a large IT sector. And it’s a place where large parts of the military have a culture of, as we journalists sometimes put it, trying to MacGyver solutions. You take what you have, and you improvise. 

It so happened that the drone revolution started with consumer drones, the same kind of quadcopters that people were using to take pictures on holiday. And they worked out ways to attach a claw to them that can then drop a grenade or strap some explosives to it and crash the whole drone into a Russian vehicle. That was how it began at the start of this war in 2022. But, now, these things have become really a deadly fleet of flying killer robots that saturate the frontline area. 

Of course, the Russians are doing the same. So, on both sides of the front line, it has become extremely difficult and dangerous to move under a sky full of these killer robots.

I was reading this weekend that Ukraine has been using drones to target warehouses for this company called Wildberries. It’s kind of like Amazon for Russia. What’s the strategy there?

There are a couple of aspects to that. One is that Wildberries has also been selling a large amount of military gear, such as body armor or drone components. It’s more like an Amazon from which the soldiers can order a lot of gear to continue the war, so it is a way of disrupting military logistics. 

But, also, it strikes a blow to Russian civilian perceptions of the war, because, for years, Putin tried to tell the Russian population that this war is something happening far away, and it wouldn’t touch them directly. Now, it turns out that their equivalent of Amazon deliveries are not going to be arriving, because the warehouse burned down. 

At the same time, it’s a way of damaging the Russian economy, because Wildberries also owes a lot of money to banks. And so, if the company is in trouble, then it also causes trouble for the Russian banking system. And it hurts the tax revenues of the Russian government that pay for the war.

Is Russia showing evolution on the battlefield, as well?

Yes, they have. They have also come up with their own innovations. For example, in the last couple of years, since about 2024, they’ve been using large numbers of drones on fiber optic cables. That means the pilot that’s flying them is attached via a long thin plastic cable or fiber optic cable to a drone that carries a spool and is unspooling this cable as it flies. Now, what does that do? It means that electronic interference with the radio signal is no longer possible, because there is a physical connection between the pilot and the drone. So, that was an innovation that bypassed electronic warfare or the interception of the radio signal of the video feed that pilots need to fly their drones. 

They’ve had other innovations too. The Russians last year, for example, came up with a whole new class of medium-range drones — cheap, fixed-wing drones. The Ukrainians have now responded and made their own versions, which are better, but it really is a constant race of innovation and adaptation. And every time I come back and talk to military units here, everything’s changed. The tactics that worked last year no longer work. And the drones that work now didn’t exist three months ago.

Is there some possibility that Ukraine can win this war by not losing it?

Yes. Winning in war means achieving political war aims. And Ukraine’s aim is to survive as an independent nation state. It can do that. It can achieve that even if it loses currently about 20 percent of its territory that’s under Russian occupation. 

I think it’s hard to see how Russia can achieve its own central war aim, which was to reimpose political control over Ukraine to turn it into a kind of protectorate — really to take back control of the place that was once Russia’s largest colony. It’s very hard to see how the Russians can achieve that. The Russians seem to be counting on the West, on the US and the Europeans getting tired of supporting Ukraine, of sending financing and loans and weaponry. Putin seems to believe that, without this international support from the West, Kyiv won’t be able to carry this on forever.

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 may have to settle for the hand-me-down Nobel Prize medal that he scored several months ago. Despite their best efforts, his envoys don’t seem to be having much luck advancing a peace deal in Gaza. 

Over the weekend — just days after Trump announced a “HISTORIC” agreement to gradually disarm Hamas and stand down Israeli troops — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the framework. 

The plan, brokered by Trump’s Board of Peace, would have seen both sides ramp down in tandem. But that’s apparently a nonstarter for Netanyahu, who said Hamas must disarm before Israeli troops withdraw. Israel still controls about 70 percent of the Gaza Strip, according to NPR — and has continued launching attacks in the territory, even after an October ceasefire.

What happens if the US cuts off aid to Israel?

It’s the latest setback in what has been a long and ugly conflict — a conflict that has turned many Americans against their longtime ally, Israel. Against that backdrop, some Democratic lawmakers and pro-Palestinian activists are advancing a once-fringe policy in the hopes of forcing Israel to end the war in Gaza and change its course in the occupied West Bank: cutting off military aid to Israel. 

It’s an intuitive approach to behavior modification, familiar to any parent who has denied a child a desired toy or treat: withhold something they want until they behave. But Israel, in this admittedly imperfect metaphor, is not a toddler. It’s a full-grown adult with a $600 billion economy and a mind of its own…and it can absolutely buy its own drones and missile-defense systems.

Here’s a statistic that really drove that point home for me: In 2025, Israel spent about 7.9 percent of its GDP on its military, plus US aid. To sustain that level of military investment without US support, Israel would need to allocate 8.5 percent of GDP to its military. Not exactly a massive change. 

There are other valid arguments for the US to end Israeli aid, of course. (Among the most common: to avoid complicity in war crimes and possible genocide in the Gaza Strip.) But if US lawmakers hope to force Israel’s hand, on the two-state solution or anything else, then cutting military aid probably won’t provide enough leverage. 

One link for later

➨ About that organic chicken…many consumers shell out twice as much for organic poultry because they believe it was raised humanely. But while an organic certification does, on paper, require more space, fresh air and outdoor access for chickens, farms that supply Costco and other major retailers have been accused of serious animal welfare violations. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that migratory birds can sense the Earth’s magnetic field and use it to navigate? But scientists still don’t know which body part the birds use to do that sensing.
• Today’s trivia: What is Dorothy’s last name in The Wizard of Oz? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: On Thursday, we asked you for the fourth-largest Great Lake. That would be Lake Erie, which ranks as the 11th largest lake globally. 

In recent months, two ideas that were once on the fringes of Democratic policy thinking — cutting off financial support and stopping arms transfers to Israel — have gone mainstream.

Nearly half of House Democrats voted to end aid to Israel last month, while roughly 40 percent of the caucus has called for blocking the sale of offensive weapons to the Israeli government until it persuades Congress that it will not use American bombs to perpetrate war crimes. 

Many of the party’s 2028 hopefuls have also embraced these general concepts. Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and consummate centrist, recently suggested that America should end aid to Israel and condition arms sales on its compliance with US law. Progressive Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland has gone several steps further, saying that Israel should be barred from accessing US-made offensive weapons until it “agrees to a time-bound plan to end the occupation and enact a two-state solution.”

If recent elections are any indication, these ideas will only grow more prominent in the coming years. Over the past two months, a slew of Democratic candidates — often with establishment backing and largely progressive voting records — lost to left-wing rivals who promised to take a more adversarial posture toward Israel. Rep. Haley Stevens’s apparent defeat at the hands of the staunchly pro-Palestinian Abdul El-Sayed in this week’s Democratic Senate primary is the latest and perhaps most consequential example of this trend.

The Democratic Party’s burgeoning support for restricting aid and arms transfers to Israel is well-founded. In prosecuting its war with Hamas, the Israeli government has subjected Gaza’s civilian population to grotesque and illegal forms of collective punishment (if not genocide). Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, Israel is expanding illegal settlements and allowing Jewish settlers to violently dispossess Palestinian residents. In this context, supplying Israel with money and weapons is contrary to both America’s moral obligations and security interests. It is wrong to subsidize or provision any foreign military’s assaults on human rights. And doing so undermines global respect for both the United States and the concept of international law.

For many Democrats, however, the purpose of cutting off aid and weapons to Israel is not merely to end America’s complicity in its crimes. Rather, the objective is to effect a radical change in Israeli policy — and ultimately, a peaceful resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Such Democrats believe that the Israeli government will not seriously pursue a two-state solution (much less, a binational democratic state) unless it is forced to do so. Fortunately, in this view, Israel’s reliance on American aid and military technology provides the US with potent leverage over its internal policies: If America ceases to provide the Israeli military with cash and offensive weapons, then Tel Aviv will eventually have little choice but to start upholding its end of the two-state bargain.

But this is probably too optimistic. Ending aid and conditioning arms sales may be preconditions for realigning Israeli policy. But coercing its government into an acceptance of Palestinian statehood would likely require measures far more sweeping — and controversial — than those that congressional Democrats are presently entertaining.

Israel doesn’t need our money 

Of all the Democratic Party’s proposals for disciplining Israel, ending US aid may be the most politically palatable — yet least effective.

The notion that the United States should stop giving Israel $3.8 billion each year has some appeal on the left, right, and center. Which is not surprising: One doesn’t need to be passionately pro-Palestinian to be skeptical of America giving billions in aid to a rich, foreign country. In his Senate race, El-Sayed tried to tap into this isolationist sentiment, describing his plans for slashing aid to Israel — and increasing benefits for US citizens — as an “America First” agenda.

Unfortunately, ending aid would have little impact on Israeli policy. And for the very reason that such assistance is hard to justify, even to those who care little about the Palestinians: Israel is a wealthy nation that can fund its own military.

In 2025, Israel spent about 7.9 percent of its GDP on the military, not counting its use of American aid. To sustain its 2025 level of defense funding — without American aid — Israel would need to dedicate 8.5 percent of GDP to its military. This increase might be slightly inconvenient for Israeli taxpayers. But it’s clearly doable. 

And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to do it. 

Or so he told 60 Minutes in May, saying that he would like to “draw down to zero the American financial support, the financial component of the military cooperation that we have.” In the view of some Israeli analysts, forgoing US aid would give Israel a freer hand to pursue its security objectives as it sees fit without worrying about a backlash from politicians thousands of miles away. The American Enterprise Institute’s Daniel J. Samet and former Israeli Defense Forces Maj. Raphael BenLevi spelled out the logic of this position back in 2023, writing, “As long as aid continues, the temptation to dictate Israel’s policies will be too strong for Washington to resist, while Israeli officials will be inclined to seek approval for every action they take.”

This doesn’t mean that the US should continue funding Israel’s military; revoking such aid could improve America’s global image while saving taxpayers a little money. By itself, however, canceling all military grants to Israel would not force its government to make any real changes in its security strategies, much less to accept Palestinian statehood.

Blocking bombs would have a bigger impact 

Although Israel does not need America’s dollars, it does currently require our weaponry. Between 2021 and 2025, the United States supplied 68 percent of Israel’s imported major arms.

Israel can domestically manufacture many of these weapons — including drones, missiles, air-defense systems, armored vehicles, and aerial, artillery, and tank munitions. But its arms industry is not capable of churning all of these out at the rate required by its intensive, multifront wars since October 7, 2023. 

Meanwhile, Israel is wholly reliant on America for its combat aircraft fleet. They don’t make F-15s, F-16s, or F-35s in Haifa. Critically, this doesn’t just leave Israel dependent on the US for new fighter jets but also for the maintenance of its existing ones. 

“The F-35 is a system that is deeply reliant on just-in-time delivery of spare parts,” Josh Paul, a former Biden State Department official who resigned in protest of American arms transfers to Israel, told me. “And were the US to say we’re not going to provide you those spare parts, it wouldn’t be more than one or two months before Israel’s F-35s would not fly, certainly at the current operational paces.”

Thus, conditionally freezing sales of US military equipment to Israel would place real constraints on its martial capabilities. Although, the scale of those constraints depends a lot on the details of US policy. 

The most prominent proposal for an arms embargo in Congress, the Block the Bombs Act, would freeze the transfer of select classes of weaponry, including bunker-busting bombs and precision missiles. This policy might force Israel to scale back or delay certain aerial campaigns. In the long run, however, Israel has domestic substitutes for these weapons. 

By contrast, were the US to choke off military supplies more broadly — leaving the Israeli air force bereft of fighter jets and component parts — the implications for Israeli security strategy would be far more profound.

In either scenario, however, it seems unlikely that the Israeli government would respond to an embargo by agreeing to cede territory or autonomy to the Palestinians, in service of a two-state solution. 

The reasons for this are twofold. First, although an embargo would substantially diminish Israel’s military capabilities, those capacities would remain formidable. As already noted, Israel domestically produces a great deal of military hardware — so much, it actually exported more arms than all but six countries between 2021 and 2025. 

What’s more, the Israeli government has already launched an effort to achieve “munitions independence.” This entails a $110 billion investment into its arms industry, including initiatives to increase Israeli production of aerial munitions, heavy bombs, and artillery shells.

At the same time, Israel is also developing a plan for expanding its domestic raw materials industry, so that it enjoys sovereignty over the inputs necessary for arms production.

Given all this, even without access to American weapons, Israel would still be able to militarily dominate the West Bank and Gaza. 

“Israel’s dependence on US weapons is more about its position in the region; its capacity to deter Iran and so forth, not in the Palestinian context,” Paul said. “Cut off Israel’s access to US weapons, and it would still have overwhelming military superiority over any Palestinian resistance group.”

Further, in the face of a US arms embargo, Israel would not only remain capable of sustaining its subjugation of the Palestinians; it would also likely retain the will to do so. 

Israeli opinion on politics in general — and the Palestinian issue in particular — has been drifting rightward for decades. In a 2025 Gallup poll, 27 percent of Israelis supported a two-state solution while 63 percent opposed one. And opposition to Palestinian statehood is even more pronounced among Jewish Israelis, who dominate the nation’s politics. In a Pew survey from last year, only 16 percent of Israeli Jews agreed that peaceful coexistence with a Palestinian state was possible — down from 46 percent in 2013. Support for a binational, democratic state of Israel-Palestine — the “one-state solution” favored by many on the American left — is all-but non-existent among Israeli Jews, with only 1 percent backing the policy in a 2025 poll.

Israeli political leaders share its electorate’s opposition to Palestinian statehood. Netanyahu’s leading rival in Israel’s upcoming election, former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot, recently told an interviewer, “I have never said two states for two peoples, because I understand the depth of this religious-national-social conflict, and anyone who talks about ‘peace now’ and two states doesn’t understand the conflict.”

Israeli attitudes toward Palestinian sovereignty do shift with events; after the horrors of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks, skepticism of a two-state solution among Jewish Israelis spiked. It is therefore conceivable that Israelis might become more open to Palestinian statehood, were the people of Gaza and the West Bank to unify behind conciliatory political leaders, who were prepared to accept the existence of a Jewish state within Israel’s legal borders. But that is an unlikely prospect in the near or medium term — and one that Israel’s criminality makes evermore remote. 

Absent such a development, a US arms embargo is unlikely to realign Israeli politics fundamentally. Historically, when great powers have tried to force weaker states to shift their policies through coercion, the latter often resist, even at a high cost. Iran’s refusal to submit to US demands on its regional policies and weapons programs, amid years of devastating sanctions and months of bombardment, may be today’s most salient example. 

The Iranian regime’s recalcitrance may partly reflect its authoritarian character. But democratic states have also routinely bucked the strong-arming of foreign powers. For example, in the 1980s, New Zealand barred the United States from docking nuclear-powered or armed ships at its ports. The US tried to coerce the Kiwis into reversing this policy by suspending America’s commitment to defend New Zealand from military attack in 1986. But New Zealanders remained undaunted; indeed, support for the anti-nuclear policy grew over the ensuing years.

What getting tough on Israel would really look like

This is not to say that no amount of sustained American coercion could shift Israel’s political calculus on its conflict with the Palestinians. But the scale and duration of US pressure would likely need to be much greater than what congressional Democrats are presently contemplating. 

Specifically, such a campaign would likely require an arms embargo more far-reaching than the one proposed by the Block the Bombs Act, along with sweeping economic sanctions, and the withdrawal of American diplomatic protection at the United Nations. 

The Biden administration created the architecture for such a sanctions policy when it froze the US-held assets and visas of Israeli settlers who’d perpetrated acts of violence in the West Bank, along with those who had materially assisted them. These sanctions could be expanded to cover all involved in settlement expansion, including construction companies, banks, financial institutions and government agencies that facilitate the colonization of Palestinian territory. Should this prove insufficient to change Israeli policy, America could apply sanctions to those populating and serving already-existing Israeli settlements.

For reasons previously noted, Israel’s first response to all of this is liable to be resistance. To the extent that these measures were politically controversial within the US — and opposed by the Republican Party — Israel would probably seek to undermine and wait out a Democratic government that implemented them, rather than making substantial concessions to Palestinian autonomy. 

America’s pressure campaign may therefore need to be sustained for a prolonged period — and enjoy a measure of bipartisan support — before having any transformative impact on Israeli policy. 

This could be challenging. As El-Sayed’s “America First” message indicates, many Americans favor cutting off aid to Israel because they want to disengage from Middle Eastern conflicts and focus attention on domestic problems. But the case for blocking arms sales, sanctioning large financial institutions — and, more broadly, expending political capital and energy on a protracted fight over a foreign country’s internal policies — cannot rest on mere isolationism.  

An effective pressure campaign would also require long-term resolve across multiple administrations, who may be tempted to reengage with Israel if the US runs into new challenges abroad in which Israeli intelligence, military assets, diplomatic ties, or technology might be useful. When Joe Biden took office, he initially sought to treat Saudi Arabia as a “pariah” over the regime’s appalling record on human rights, only to come calling to its leaders in person, in order to secure its cooperation with regional issues and the global energy supply. Since then, President Trump has drawn the two nations even closer.  

In any case, for now, the idea of not merely cutting off aid and select “offensive” weapons to Israel — but rather, forbidding the sale of all military goods to its government, sanctioning all involved in settling the occupied West Bank, and withdrawing US diplomatic support at the UN — remains too radical an agenda for most congressional progressives, much less their Republican colleagues.

Even if Democrats can’t change Israeli policy, they can reduce American complicity

None of this means that ending US aid to Israel — or restricting the sale of offensive weapons to its military — aren’t worthy objectives. Such measures could constrain Israel’s capacity to bomb civilian infrastructure and launch wars of choice. They just might not be sufficient to singlehandedly overwhelm Israeli resistance to Palestinian sovereignty.

Regardless, the congressional left’s Israel agenda would improve America’s moral health and global image. And this should arguably be US lawmakers’ priority. 

“The United States played an enormous role in creating Israel’s conventional military advantage as a player in the Middle East,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the nonprofit Arms Control Association, told me. “And in the face of the devastation that the Israeli government has wrought in Gaza and now on the West Bank — which involves, by any objective measure, serious war crimes — the United States needs to exert its leverage, so as not to be complicit in such behavior. Whether that changes Israeli policy regarding a two-state solution, or its ongoing treatment of Palestinians in occupied territories, is ultimately a separate question.”

Of all the extinction-level threats vying for our attention, AI, climate change, and nuclear war tend to get most of the airplay. But Annie Jacobsen thinks biological war should be near the top of our mental list of doomsday scenarios, too.

She should know — Jacobsen has carved out a unique niche as America’s foremost reporter on the ways we could end the world. Her bestselling 2024 book Nuclear War: A Scenario terrified readers and experts alike, and has been optioned by Hollywood. 

It was while conducting dozens of interviews with high-level government sources for Nuclear War that Jacobsen was told repeatedly that biowarfare should be her next focus.

She took their advice. Her gripping new book Biological War: A Scenario follows a similar ticking-clock format that shows, step by step, just how a humanity-threatening man-made biological catastrophe could play out. (Spoiler alert: not great.)

The result feels like dystopian science fiction, albeit the kind that comes heavily footnoted with government studies that come to similarly grim conclusions. The fact that tech CEOs are also sounding the alarm that advanced AI could make creating killer germs even easier only adds to the growing sense of anxiety. And this book has also been optioned by Hollywood for a TV adaptation. 

Jacobsen sat down with Today, Explained host Noel King to talk through the plot of her nightmare scenario, why we’re still developing biological weapons despite the clear risks, and what needs to happen to avoid disaster. 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.

How does your book start?

The inciting incident in the book is an accident at a Biosafety Level 4 lab, shorthand BSL-4, in Siberia called Vector. And it’s an actual BSL-4 lab, the highest classification. … And there was an actual accident, an explosion there in 2019. 

In that real-life incident, a deadly pathogen was not released that we know of. But of course, in Biological War: A Scenario, a deadly pathogen is released. And it’s a form of pneumonic plague, which is a nightmare pathogen and sits at the top of the Tier 1 select agent list of the CDC. And so in the first act of the book, I show the scrambling of the intelligence community and the Defense Department, trying desperately to determine if something got out and what it is. … The release of the pathogen widens, and so once you have escape. You do not have mitigation, which has to happen in the first 24, 48 hours. Now you have a situation which is unstoppable.

You say this is now an unstoppable scenario. What is it?

A plague itself, of course, conjures up images and ideas of the bubonic plague of the 14th century, the Black Death. That killed between one half and one third of Europe. The bacteria is called Yersinia pestis. And pneumonic plague is the airborne version of plague. The problem with an airborne pathogen is that because the delivery system is the human lungs, it can move very quickly from a scientist in that lab who now has Yersinia pestis in his lungs out to the general public. And that is precisely what happens in the scenario.

How does it spread from there? The city where this BSL-4 lab sits isn’t Moscow. What happens once the pathogen is in the lungs of the people who work in that lab, or the janitor who was cleaning it that night?

That’s right. Well, suddenly it’s in everyone’s lungs, and those people go out into their community. And even though Koltsovo, the science town where Vector is located, is a small town, it is just 12 miles from Novosibirsk, which is the third-largest city in Russia. And, also, there happens to be in this scenario a group of international hunters on a hunting trip in that area who come across a dying scientist in the snow. One of them gives him CPR, being the Good Samaritan that he is. And lo and behold, those travelers suddenly are now getting on an airplane in Novosibirsk, flying home to where they reside in five or six of the continents.

What makes this form of plague so novel, so dangerous?

I pull this information from actual facts of the Soviet Cold War-era biological weapons program that we know about from Soviet defectors. And I want you to keep in mind: This is 40 years ago when gene editing was in its infancy. But there are two things specifically that the Soviet bioweapons engineers did to plague. 

Their idea was to create a super plague weapon. And one of them has never been revealed before. They were working to insert the gene for euphoria into the plague pathogen. … When you get a disease, a pneumonic-type disease, pneumonia, tubercular, you want to go home and get under the covers because you feel terrible. And when you do that, you’re infecting a lot less people than you would if a gene for euphoria had been inserted into the pathogen, which would make you feel terrific, which would make you want to go out and socialize with people, perhaps even go to a crowded disco. 

And the other thing that the Soviet scientists were working on was a way to defeat medical countermeasures, but with an added component of psychological distress. They inserted a gene into the pathogen that would be triggered by the taking of antibiotics. And that second pathogen would give you encephalitis, which is a swelling of the brain. The psychological part of it, according to the Soviet scientists, was that they wanted the last thought of the person dying of what they thought was pneumonic plague, but would in fact be encephalitist to be, “My government and Western medicine has failed me.”

Those of us who try to remain optimistic think there’s a way to stop it. In the movies, there’s an outbreak, then the government gets it under control, and okay, maybe a lot of people die, but we’re all right. That is not where your book is headed. How does your scenario end?

So in the book, I take readers from outbreak to anarchy in six days. Anarchy is what will happen according to Pentagon war gaming and pandemic planning. And this is because fear of infection becomes a secondary weapon, if you will. People begin to behave like they are about to die, which is most certainly underpinning everyone’s mind. And so after those first six days, the Principals Committee, the President’s Biodefense Committee, must make a decision. The president has to declare the Insurrection Act, which allows the military to step in as a law enforcement agency. 

“Imagine the president — with a few Secret Service outside the door, the military aide with the nuclear football — sitting alone in a room wearing a gas mask.”

What happens to the president really blew my mind as a reporter. He goes somewhere in the United States very far away from everyone. Because the idea, the goal, is to make sure that the president doesn’t get the airborne pathogen in his lungs. So maybe I’ll leave you with an image. Imagine the president — with a few Secret Service outside the door, the military aide with the nuclear football — sitting alone in a room wearing a gas mask.

In the book, the people who survive are the ones who have gas masks. Everyone else is gone.

And look, we hope we never get to that, by all means. But yes, the Pentagon has issued 1.7 million gas masks to its military personnel. And that is a spooky thought in and of itself, coupled with the idea that the military is predominantly male. There’s something like 17 percent women in the military. And so, unlike the Nuclear War scenario in which I had science-based nuclear winter theory to work from, in Biological War, nothing has been written on the science record about what it might be after. And so the one imaginative part of the book is the very end where I write about biological twilight. … And it is a very, very ugly world.

Let’s back up. We did outlaw biological weapons at some point, right?

That’s right. Very mysteriously in 1969, President Nixon just unilaterally declared that the arsenal was going to be destroyed. At the same time that all of the nations of the world were working to sign this treaty called the Biological Weapons Convention Treaty, which would outlaw bioweapons. Soviet Russia at the time signed it but immediately began work on an illegal biological weapons program that was colossal. And this went without notice, without any idea really by the CIA and the Pentagon all the way until 1989, when one of the Soviet scientists named Vladimir Pasechnik had a crisis of conscience and he defected and he told British intelligence all about the program.

Where have we seen biological weapons used?

Maybe the most important example of a biological attack in the past, certainly here in the United States, are the anthrax attacks, which occurred right after 9/11. Weaponized anthrax was sent through the mail to US senators and a number of media outlets. So five people ended up dying; 22 got sick in four states. But that really kicked off what can be considered the biological military-industrial complex, if you will, which led to this buildup in BSL-4 labs around the world today. There are 110 BSL-4 labs around the world. There are more than 3,500 BSL-3 labs.

Your book has a map of where those labs are, which I found weirdly comforting, mainly because I don’t live too near any of them. If one of these things is going to be released, either accidentally or deliberately, where is the threat coming from? A rogue nation? Terrorists?

Certainly, bad actors getting a hold of a biological weapon was the great concern of the post-anthrax situation. And that is why so much emphasis was put on bioterrorism. Now I avoided that specifically in the book. … And I didn’t even have an attack. Rather, I had an incident. I had a lab leak because I have learned in the decades since that really is the greatest concern. So many of these BSL-3 and 4 labs are in places without a lot of security, including in countries where there are wars going on.

Could somebody be making a biological weapon in a basement somewhere, off books?

Absolutely. And another disturbing document I came across, unclassified in the Pentagon, was a threat spectrum that showed weapons of mass destruction in terms of destructiveness. And of course, nuclear weapons sit at the far end of the spectrum. They are the most destructive. But very close behind were biological weapons. And even more startling was the notion that biological weapons present the greatest overall threat. 

Nuclear weapons have an extremely high barrier for entry. You have to have fissile material. … You have to have a weapons delivery system like an ICBM or a submarine. … That creates a situation where most nuclear weapons, all nuclear weapons, if you will, are in the hands of a command-and-control system within a nation. 

Biological weapons have no such barriers. In fact, the barriers for entry are getting lower literally by the day. You now can have a situation where someone with very limited knowledge of biology can create a biological weapon in their basement with the use of computational systems like an AI system, for example.

Your book reads like a thriller. How much have you exaggerated? How much have you novelized in order to hold our attention?

Everything in the book is based in science fact, meaning all of the facts, all of the figures. I write a hundred or so pages of notes in the back of the book for readers to be able to answer the question that you are asking me. … In the notes, you can find that answer.

Did any of those people give you good recommendations for how to avoid a disaster scenario, or at least how to avoid these things proliferating?

Well, you know, the ticking clock scenario that I write has an even more urgent ticking clock, which is the public’s pressure on lawmakers to absolutely do something about this nightmare scenario before it happens. Look, we have a world right now where you have the CEOs of the largest AI companies in the world admitting publicly that the lane of bio mixed with AI is of their top concern. You don’t hear that about nuclear. You hear that about bio.

How do you sleep through the night?

Anyone who knows me personally can vouch for the fact that I am an optimist at heart. I really believe that information is king. Once you know things, it gives you a lot of power. Perhaps that’s whistling by the graveyard, but that’s what works for me.

Do you have a biohazard suit?

I do not. I do not. But I do have a few gas masks. I must tell the truth.

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.