u/Reddenbawker

>Iran has weighed attacking US military targets in Europe should Donald Trump escalate the war, according to people close to the regime, as Tehran considers its options to increase the stakes of the conflict.

>Two regime insiders told the FT that Iranian forces have assessed striking US assets in south-eastern European countries such as Bulgaria, which last month approved the use of its Bezmer air base for US refuelling aircraft.

>One of the insiders added that Cyprus, where a British air base was struck by a drone in March, was also among potential targets for retaliation in the event of any renewed US offensive.

>The insiders said Iranian forces have separately examined attacking subsea fibre-optic cables in the Strait of Hormuz in the event of an escalation.

>The threats reflect the defiant mood in Tehran, where many within the regime increasingly see a resumption of the war as a matter of when, not if.

>Negotiations to reopen the strait have stalled, and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei last week elevated hardliners to top security and military posts. Trump on Tuesday said there were “no talks or conversations going on, or scheduled” with Tehran.

>The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other military commanders have warned that, in any new full-scale conflict, Iran would move beyond its previous strategy of attacking US military assets, energy facilities and other infrastructure in the Middle East to targets further afield.

>The guards last month threatened the UK over American use of British military bases, saying that “any base that is used to launch an attack on Iranian territory will be considered a legitimate target”.

>Sidharth Kaushal, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank in London, described the threat posed by Iranian missiles to targets in Europe and elsewhere as “real, but limited”.

>Iran could deploy medium-range ballistic missiles against US assets in southern and southeastern Europe, such as its Shahab series, but Kaushal said these would struggle to do damage at longer ranges.

>Iran’s retaliation would depend on Washington’s actions, according to the insiders.

>One said the regime was preparing a plan to expand the conflict further were Trump to make good on previous threats to attack Iranian infrastructure. The US president last month said Washington would destroy an Iranian bridge or power plant every time the Islamic republic targeted a ship in the strait.

>The second insider said Iran would place “no limits” on its response in the event of US aggression. “Should the US go too far, Iran will defend itself at any price, go beyond the region and hit Europe too,” the person said.

>Iran has demonstrated its willingness to attack distant targets. In the weeks after the US and Israel launched the war in February, Washington accused Tehran of firing multiple missiles — none of which reached their target — at Diego Garcia, a joint US-UK military base in the Indian Ocean some 4,000km away.

>Turkey in March said Nato’s air defences had intercepted several ballistic missiles launched from Iran, while the UK’s air base in Akrotiri, Cyprus, was struck by a drone the same month. Western officials at the time said they suspected it was an Iranian drone fired by regional proxy forces rather than Tehran itself.

>The insiders said an Iranian attack last month on the US base in Jordan, which killed three American service members, was the most precise long-range attack the Islamic republic has carried out and demonstrated its capability to hit targets over longer distances.

>“This was also a message to Europe: it can receive missiles, so it should know where it should stand in this war,” the first insider said. “A very big mistake, such as hitting our infrastructure, could make the war go beyond the region and reach Europe.”

>A June memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran fell apart last month after Tehran attacked vessels in the strait and both sides accused each other of violating the interim deal, leading to rounds of tit-for-tat strikes and a renewed US blockade on Iranian ports.

>Weeks of diplomatic efforts have failed to yield a breakthrough to reopen the waterway and resume negotiations over a broader deal to end the war, and Trump has grown increasingly frustrated over the stalemate.

>Rusi’s Kaushal said heavier-duty missiles could also be deployed, but would have to carry a lighter payload to travel far enough — meaning damage would be minimal. 

>He suggested “it would be more fruitful for them to work through proxies”, which include militant groups such as Shia militias in Iraq, Hizbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.

>Douglas Barrie at the International Institute for Strategic Studies said: “Those strikes they attempted on Diego Garcia this year are kind of indicative that they have got weapons with ranges greater than 2,000km.”

>“How many of these they actually hold is a different question, and whether or not they would be willing to use even a handful to make some kind of grandstanding statement is an open question.”

>“The risk is that the missiles fail or are shot down, so how would they benefit? The longer the range, the harder it is to be really accurate.”

>Some within the Iranian regime worry Tehran is overplaying its hand. Many hardliners within the system believe the US cannot be trusted to implement any deal, and Iran must inflict a greater cost on Washington to ensure it meets its obligations of any final settlement. 

>This includes Mohsen Rezaei, a former Guards commander who Khamenei last week appointed as the country’s top security official.

>Iranian analysts interpreted the move as a sign that figures such as Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the country’s top negotiator, have been pushed aside for now as prospects for a lasting agreement appear increasingly bleak.

>Iran “is sending a clear message that if you don’t reach an agreement with Ghalibaf, you have to deal with Rezaei”, said the second insider. “The message is: ‘Don’t be mad, because I’m madder than you are.’”

>For the past decade, police have been stationed outside the door of one of China’s most prominent native Jews. “They see who goes in, who talks. They can hear who is saying what inside the house,” says that person’s sibling, who now lives in Israel (to protect their identities, this article will refer to the one living in Israel as Zhao Lao’er and the one living in Kaifeng as Zhao Laoda). The police monitoring Zhao Laoda’s life are national-level police. “They are like the FBI, not local Kaifeng police.” Several times a year, Zhao Laoda is hauled in by the police for questioning about activities in the Jewish community.

>The recent crackdown under President Xi Jinping’s rule has focused on erasing Kaifeng’s Jewish history.

>Most of what we know of the small Jewish community in this central Chinese city is carved in stone on four tablets that, for centuries, were located outside the Kaifeng synagogue, particularly the tablets from 1489 and 1512. Those tablets used to be the highlight of the former Kaifeng Museum, drawing foreign tourists willing to pay extra to see them. The old Kaifeng Museum, near the site of the city’s former synagogue, was shuttered early in the crackdown, in 2016. What became of the tablets remained unknown for several years.

>A new museum opened in 2018 in Kaifeng’s distant suburbs. All mentions of the Jews had been scrubbed from the new museum, and the tablets were not on display. When Noam Urbach, an Israeli expert on the Kaifeng Jews, visited the new museum on opening day, he asked where the tablets were. Museum staff called around. Eventually they told him, “We have them, but they are not on display.” Later, Urbach learned from a source who entered the closed museum that the tablets had been thrown into an outdoor courtyard. Rebecca Bitterman, a curator at the Israel Museum, once asked Beijing to lend the tablets for an exhibition on China but was rebuffed. “They said they will never leave China,” she says. Today, the tablets China once considered too valuable to leave the country lie in the dirt of an abandoned museum.

>This crackdown began in April 2015, when Rebecca Davis wrote about Kaifeng’s Jewish revival for The New York Times. She attended a seder hosted by a mix of foreign and Kaifeng Jews, with one government official present. “That article was a very big problem,” Zhao Lao’er said. Zhao Laoda was interrogated for 10 hours. Around this time, police were ordered to guard the entrance to their house, though a worse fate awaited the official who participated in the seder. “He was arrested,” Zhao Lao’er said.

>The pressure spread. Rabbi Marvin Tokayer had been leading Jewish tours to Kaifeng. In 2015, he was stopped mid-tour and was not allowed into the city. Ester Guo Yan, one of the community’s leaders, was harassed by police, who demanded to check identification while she was guiding tours. Two years later, authorities shut down a small, unofficial museum of the Kaifeng Jews that she had cobbled together in an apartment next to the site of the old synagogue.

>A month after the Times article, Xi announced a broader campaign against foreign religions. This campaign focused on the larger religions it perceived as foreign, Christianity and Islam, but the Davis article appears to have brought Kaifeng’s tiny Jewish community into the campaign’s sights.

>Things grew increasingly frightening. In April 2023, thugs disappeared Guo for five days. Later, she sent an email to The Sino-Judaic Institute, an American group that works closely with the Kaifeng Jews, saying she feared that the next time they abducted her, she would be killed. As the pressure intensified, Chinese officials covered up the city’s Jewish history, sometimes literally. A mikvah, one of the last remnants of the synagogue, was buried. Stars of David and street signs indicating the city’s Jewish past were stripped from walls. Historical markers vanished. The campaign was no longer simply to suppress Jewish life today, but to erase evidence of its long history.

>The community has deep roots in China. As best scholars can tell, the Jews arrived in Kaifeng sometime between 1000 and 1100 A.D., when Kaifeng was the largest city in the world. By 1163, as trade networks all over Asia were linking China to far-flung markets, they built the city’s first synagogue.

>But over the following centuries, commerce shifted. The Chinese Jews were cut off from the rest of the Jewish world, becoming more Chinese. Blending the Jewish creation story with the Chinese creator deity, the 1489 tablet begins by saying, “Abraham, the patriarch who founded the religion of Israel, was of the nineteenth generation from Pangu Adam.” The community sought to justify Judaism as being as good as Confucianism. They even ditched halachic descent through the mother and instead modeled the patrilineal system in which Jewishness passed from the father.

>Ink rubbing of the 1512 stone inscription of the Kaifeng Jews. Jérôme Tobar, Inscriptions juives de K’ai-Fong-fou (Shanghai: 1900).

>Public domain via Google Books

>As the Chinese Jews were isolated, pressure on them to assimilate grew. The Kaifeng community, at various times estimated to number several hundred to several thousand Jews, was one of several Jewish communities in China. As trade networks contracted, the others disappeared into surrounding Han Chinese or Muslim communities. The community in Kaifeng would have also disappeared had it not been for one Jesuit.

>In 1605, Matteo Ricci was building a church in Beijing when Ai Tian, a Jewish Kaifeng bureaucrat, wandered in. Ai had read about a group of recently arrived foreigners from the far Western Ocean who were monotheists yet not Muslims. Ai and the others in Kaifeng had only ever heard of two groups of people who believed in only one god: Muslims and Jews. Ai assumed that these must be some of the Jews from the far Western Ocean that the 1489 tablet spoke of.

>When Ai Tian first entered his church, Ricci assumed that Ai, with his deep biblical knowledge, was a Christian. For some time, the two conversed, each mistakenly believing that they had discovered long-lost coreligionists. Ricci genuflected before paintings of Mary, Jesus, and John the Baptist. Believing they were Rebecca, Jacob and Esau, Ai followed his lead.

>Eventually Ricci realized that Ai was not a Christian, but a member of a long-lost Jewish community. It is unclear if the Chinese Jews ever understood that Ricci was not Jewish. The city’s chief rabbi was sick, and the community was struggling to maintain its Judaism. The rabbi sent a letter saying that although he found Ricci’s belief that the messiah had already appeared odd, he would still like Ricci to take over as the chief rabbi in Kaifeng.

>During the three centuries after Ricci’s encounter with Ai, Kaifeng witnessed the near destruction of its Jewish community. A 1642 flood destroyed the synagogue and soaked many of its scriptures. The synagogue was rebuilt, but the scriptures proved nearly impossible to replace, as the community had no means to contact the wider Jewish world.

>In 1810, Kaifeng’s last rabbi died. Almost all knowledge of Hebrew disappeared, along with the practice of halachically converting Chinese women who married into the community. In the 1850s, another flood destroyed the synagogue, this time for good. By 1888, an anonymous Christian traveler wrote of a visit to Kaifeng. The street where the synagogue once stood was still named after the Jews, but the building’s ruins had become a public urinal. Two Jewish families were found, but they had become secularized. No one knew Hebrew. The last thing that bore witness to the Jewish community was the stone tablets.

>In 1914, the city’s Jews had dwindled to the point that the few Jewish families with a memory of their heritage decided to sell the site of the synagogue to a Protestant missionary. After 751 years in Jewish hands, the land was turned into a YMCA playground. But even then, embers of Jewish identity persisted. In 1932, David Abraham Brown, the publisher of the American Hebrew and Jewish Tribune, landed in Kaifeng and met with more than 200 Kaifeng Jews who told him that they wanted to rebuild the synagogue.

>But a new threat to the remnants of the Kaifeng’s Jews was rising.

>Marxists, skeptical of religion, were always unlikely to recognize this small band of Jews when they took over China. But after the 1949 takeover, the Chinese Communist Party at least considered it.

>Like the Soviets, Mao promised to give special preferences to ethnic minorities, but that required the CCP to determine who counted as an ethnic group. In October 1952, the Ai and Shi clans sent representatives to Beijing to plead their case with Zhou Enlai, the second-most important leader after Mao. They asked if Beijing would recognize the Kaifeng Jews as an official ethnic group, which would protect their religious practice and offer privileges.

>A few days later, Beijing rejected their claim. “Among China’s ethnic groups, there is no Jewish minority; nevertheless, they say they are Jewish, so they must be cared for,” stated a letter to the Kaifeng government. The Kaifeng Jews did not meet the Stalinist criteria for an ethnic minority: They were too small, and they had no distinct language and possessed no territory of their own. Yet the second clause—”they must be cared for”—left local officials room to recognize them informally. Many had the word Jew listed as their ethnicity on their government IDs.

>During the two decades of high Maoism, the Jews of Kaifeng were, like the rest of China, pushed to torch their pasts. Most Jewish artifacts were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. One Kaifeng Jew was accused of being an Israeli spy and subjected to daily accusations, and the ethnicity listed on his ID was changed from Jew to Spy. The tablets were neglected; when members of The Sino-Judaic Institute found them in June 1990, one was leaning against a storage building outside, and two were lying on the ground in the Kaifeng museum’s basement.

>The community survived. After Mao’s death, foreigners began to return to Kaifeng, looking for the remaining Jews. Since Mao died, Kaifeng’s Jews have faced several cycles of repression, each one following a pattern. Jewish activity would draw the attention of foreigners, making Beijing nervous and triggering a crackdown. After a few years, pressure would ease, and the community would revive.

>Wendy Abraham, the Matteo Ricci of the 1980s, was one of the first to establish a bond with Kaifeng’s Jews. In September 1985, during a second visit to Kaifeng, she returned to collect oral histories of the community. She spent days in the Shi family household, quizzing them about the city’s Jewish past. The Shi family introduced Abraham to Kaifeng’s other Jews, like Li Rongxin— who hailed her with a “Shalom, landsman!”—and Ai Fengmian, one of the men who had traveled to Beijing in 1952 to plead with Zhou Enlai to recognize Kaifeng’s Jews. But Ai no longer seemed interested in his Jewish identity. Unlike the Shi family, when Abraham quizzed Ai’s children about local Jewish history, they “all stared blank-faced. They either did not know or did not care,” she concluded.

>At 5:30 the morning after meeting Ai, a hotel worker called Abraham: “Three people are waiting for you.” The waiting police took her passport and packed her into a Mercedes-Benz, whisking her away for an eight-hour interrogation. By the end of the day, they scribbled a list of everything she had told them, using red ink to circle every illegal thing she had admitted to. Her crimes included being in Kaifeng alone and traveling without being part of a tour group. But the highest of her high crimes was this: “I was not supposed to be talking to these people who did not exist. It was like something out of Kafka.”

>Abraham had arrived in Kaifeng during the middle of the first post-Mao crackdown on the Kaifeng Jews. In August 1985, Rabbi Arnold Belzer, founding board member of The Sino-Judaic Institute, had passed through the city without any problem, arranging for the bar mitzvah of the son of a Chinese Jewish couple to be held in front of the stone tablets in the Kaifeng Museum. But by September, news of a Time article, “A New Hope for the Jews of China,” had roiled the city’s leadership with its claims of a Jewish revival. Beijing was pushing local officials to suppress all signs of Jewish identity in the city, particularly anything connected with foreigners.

>At least Abraham escaped without betraying anyone. “I never gave [the officer] the names of anyone I had met. I agreed I had met with people, but conveniently, I didn’t remember their names. He wanted that more than anything else, and I realized they would be in deep shit if I gave it to them,” she told me in a phone interview. When the police ejected her from the city, they smiled and told her, “We warmly welcome you back to China, we warmly welcome you back to Kaifeng, but you are never allowed to speak to these people again.”

>In 1989, Marvin Josephson, founder of one of the world’s largest talent agencies, and his wife, Tina Chen, wanted a bat mitzvah that blended Chinese and Jewish traditions. They hired Rabbi Arnold Belzer to conduct the service in front of the stone tablets in the Kaifeng Museum. But word of the religious ceremony with foreigners reached Beijing. National leaders panicked and ordered the ceremony cancelled. Eventually, leaders agreed to green-light the bat mitzvah, but only if it was held in a hotel in front of carbon cutouts of the tablets. No Chinese Jews were allowed to attend.

>By the early 1990s, however, restrictions had eased. The local government raised $3,957,170 to build a Jewish museum on the site of the old synagogue. Shlomo Jin Guangyuan, a leader of the Kaifeng Jews, was able to travel to Beijing, where he showed his ID listing his ethnicity as “Jew” to the Israeli embassy, hoping to demonstrate to Israeli diplomats his effort to revive Judaism in Kaifeng. Zhao Xiangru, an important Kaifeng scholar, began to publicly identify as a Jew. He and Andrew Plaks, a Jewish expert on Chinese literature at Princeton University, held a conference in 1993 where more than 50 Jews were brought together, the largest gathering of Chinese Jews since 1932. Zhao called on conference attendees to return to Judaism and began to discuss creating a special economic zone in Kaifeng for foreign Jews and building a Jews-only hotel.

>Beijing responded with another crackdown. Plans to build a Jewish museum were ditched, and the nearly $4 million disappeared. Shlomo Jin and the other Kaifeng Jews were forced to turn in their old ID cards for new ones. They could no longer list their ethnicity as “Jew” on the cards. Instead, they had to decide whether their ethnicity would be Han Chinese or Hui Muslim. Zhao Xiangru was sacked from his job and placed under house arrest.

>The 2015 crackdown initially followed a similar pattern: Local authorities allowed the Kaifeng Jews latitude to practice their religion, but when signs of a Jewish revival made it to the world outside China, Beijing struck back with a heavy hand. Freedom to practice was strictly curtailed, only to be loosened five or 10 years later.

>This most recent crackdown under Xi was severe, but today, there are signs that it is loosening somewhat. Last year, an Argentine Jewish YouTuber posted a of himself attending a Shabbat dinner with members of several Kaifeng families. David, a Kaifeng Jew who hosted the dinner, showed off a photo of an associate’s former ID card listing their ethnicity as “Jew.” There were no signs anyone was punished for the video, and David stated that up to half a dozen Shabbat dinners occur across the city every week. “Before, surveillance was 24 hours a day, and they would not let foreign tourists visit them. Now, it is not so bad,” Zhao Lao’er said. The sibling is now one of only three to four families being closely watched by the police.

>A rumor has spread throughout the community that Xi has personally said that the Jews of Kaifeng are not to be harassed as long as they practice their faith in private. This rumor, impossible to prove, is nevertheless widespread. “People in Kaifeng believe this. I was told by someone who was told by the police that this was coming directly from Xi,” Urbach said to me over Zoom.

>But there has been no letup in the government’s attempts to erase the Jews from Kaifeng’s history. References to the Kaifeng Jews are missing from most official and semiofficial websites discussing the city’s history, and the stone tablets that were the foundation of Jewish history remain hidden. “The Xi era crackdown is different. They are erasing history, they are denying history, they are making it a taboo subject,” said Urbach.

>Even as surveillance loosens, there is no sign that Beijing intends to let the Kaifeng Jews back into the history books. Neither the future nor the past of Kaifeng’s Jews is carved in stone.

>As Greg Bovino strode towards the stage, the crowd erupted into chants: “USA! USA! USA!” It was late May, several months since Bovino’s ignoble ousting as the greatcoat-clad “commander at large” of US border control.

>But for this audience, Bovino’s record was not a liability. It was his calling card.

>In Figueira da Foz, a sleepy Portuguese beach town just south of Porto, a few hundred of Europe’s most important far-right influencers, decision makers and activists had gathered for the “Remigration Summit”. A gathering to strategise how to expel millions of migrants deemed ethnically “unsuitable” from Europe, by force or encouragement, including those legally settled.

>The Americans — not just Bovino but several dozen, including Stefano Forte, president of the New York Young Republican Club — were the guests of honour. Remigration, Bovino told his audience, is the defining political issue of our time.

>“I’ll make you a deal, Europe,” he said. “We get this remigration under way full throttle in Europe, I’ll break that trench coat [sic] out, and I’ll wear it on European soil.”

>For Europe’s far-right parties, Donald Trump’s second presidency has brought as many complications as opportunities: his war in Iran, tariffs and threats to seize European territory have proved deeply unpopular, making any open embrace of Maga politically awkward.

>But for the activists pushing remigration, US support in recent months has been transformational.

>The cause they espouse is an ethnonationalist project that seeks to shrink immigrant communities in western countries in the name of restoring cultural homogeneity. At its mildest, it means stricter immigration rules and tougher enforcement. In its most extreme form, it means adopting measures to encourage or even coerce the removal of “unassimilated” legal residents and even naturalised citizens to their countries of “origin”.

>Remigration began as a fringe idea but Trump and his Maga supporters have put it at the centre of their domestic political agenda — and in doing so, have given its European proponents a massive boost.  

>A concept that was once too toxic to mention in Europe has become the rallying call for a powerful new movement of young influencers and radicals.

>“What’s happening in the US over the past 18 months is definitely a normalisation of the term — 100 per cent,” said Martin Sellner, the Austrian far-right activist credited with leading the remigration movement.

>Remigration’s journey from Europe to America and back again reveals the depth of the new right’s transatlantic networks. It also shows how US-controlled social media platforms have blurred the line between America’s domestic politics and Europe’s own radical right movements.

>“It’s stuff I didn’t think I would see in my lifetime,” said Bernhard Weidinger, an Austria-based extremism researcher who monitors online narratives. “I am baffled and shocked by how fast things have become sayable and doable [in America] . . . and I think it is a cautionary tale for Europe. It is coming here.”

>What is remarkable, Weidinger said, “is that in many places in Europe [far right] parties are soaring in the polls even as they become more radical”.

>Remigration is at the heart of that shift, he added. Among its proponents, the feeling is that, with the White House behind them, their time has come: “The general sense is that they are winning. And that they are winning big.”

>In November 2023, a year before Trump’s re-election, Sellner laid out his plan for remigration to a select group of far-right influencers and politicians at Villa Adlon, a lakeside neo-baroque residence in Potsdam just outside Berlin.

>Participants discussed measures to remove illegal immigrants, asylum seekers and even non-native residents and “unassimilated” German citizens — including to a “model city” in north Africa, according to media reports. When those reports emerged weeks later, they triggered mass protests and a backlash that reached into the far right.

>Remigration was considered so toxic that even Alternative for Germany (AfD) distanced itself from members who had attended. Two months later, after waves of protests across German cities, Sellner was banned from Germany — though the ban has since been overturned.

>Sellner is the most prominent of Europe’s Identitarians, a movement that began in France two decades ago and later flourished in Austria and Germany — classified as extremist by European domestic security services. The Identitarians have made remigration their rallying cry.

>In the same month that Sellner was banned from Germany, he was also reinstated on X, as part of Elon Musk’s liberalisation of the platform’s rules. Sellner’s return to the site was a pivotal moment: it accelerated remigration’s journey into the US right, where he increasingly presented his thoughts and ideas around the subject in English.

>The backlash to Potsdam ultimately proved counter-productive. Had the meeting gone unnoticed, remigration might have remained a fringe concept. Instead, the outrage helped carry the idea into the Anglosphere.

>Remigration soon entered the lexicon of those involved with Project 2025, the policy plan advocated by the rightwing conservative Heritage Foundation for Trump’s second term. 

>Stephen Miller, Trump’s soon-to-be deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser, wrote on X: “THE TRUMP PLAN TO END THE INVASION OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA: REMIGRATION!”

>From there, the term rose quickly through the Trump White House tweetocracy: first Miller, then the Department of Homeland Security, then Trump himself became regular users. “Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation,” the president posted last year.

>Asked on Air Force One days later what he meant, Trump said: “It means get people out of here who are in our country. Get them out. I wanna get them out.”

>In May, just before the Portugal summit he co-organised, Sellner saw the White House’s X account post an image of Trump at a lectern. Underneath, the words “replacement migration” were crossed out. Beneath them, in oversized type, stood: “Remigration”.

>“It’s absolutely been a breakthrough, having the president say this,” said Sellner. “This picture — it could have been an Identitarian graphic,” he said.

>“Having the most powerful man in the world start talking about remigration — that’s definitely a victory. The effects of it will last even after the Trump presidency.”

>Words matter greatly, in Sellner’s view, as much as funding or electoral victories. He sees himself as a “metapolitical” campaigner, constantly pushing the boundaries of what is sayable and doable.

>Across Europe, far-right parliamentary parties are now talking about remigration.

>In Italy, a citizens’ initiative launched in January under the banner “Remigration and Reconquest” gathered more than 150,000 signatures and forced a parliamentary debate.

>In mid-July, Sellner and Dutch political commentator and far-right activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek arrived in Brussels with a wheelbarrow of paper: 500,000 signatures calling for remigration to be registered as a European Citizens’ Initiative, the threshold at which the European Commission must consider a response.

>In Germany, remigration is official AfD policy. In Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD is on course to win more than 40 per cent in September’s election, local leaders have promised to begin deportations “from day one”.

>In the UK, the Restore Britain party, which seeks to outflank Nigel Farage from the right, has made it a central theme. Harrison Pitt, Restore’s chief ideologue, has travelled to Vienna to meet Sellner and discuss common ground and tactics.

>In Sellner’s telling, X has become a “LinkedIn for the [far] right” with Musk as their champion. “Anyone who does not support remigration is a traitor,” Musk wrote on X on July 25.

>Once fragmented by language and national politics, Europe’s hardliners are now plugged into a US-led conversation, Sellner said.

>“What happens in America matters . . . it’s consumed, read, internalised by all the young rightwing politicians, influencers and brought into the debate. [Maga] is a huge cultural influence for the new right.”

>In June, Sellner announced a new “Institute for Remigration”, a “think-tank” he wants to become a lobby group for far-right parliamentarians — “a National Rifle Association, but for deportations”, as he puts it.

>Since Bovino’s encouragement in Portugal, Sellner said the movement “made a huge leap” in contacts with American think-tanks and people close to the Washington establishment. “We are in way deeper now.”

>A new transatlantic relationship was being forged, he said, “based not on neoconservatism or Pax Americana . . . but on identitarianism”.

>US campaigning expertise was already professionalising Europe’s far right, he added. Sellner is developing “customer relationship management” software to mobilise what he claimed were about 100,000 pro-remigration activists across Europe.

>For all the noise, however, the route to actual policy remains uncertain. Identitarian rallies have often been met by larger counter-demonstrations, while far-right parties remain wary of alienating the voters they need to reach office.

>In France, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National has been notably reluctant to adopt the language of remigration. She fell out with the AfD over the Adlon villa meeting in 2024 and hasn’t patched up relations since.

>Sellner is unperturbed. Short-term electoral gains and losses, he argues, matter less than shifting the debate before it reaches parliament.

>“It’s already happening. The debate is already shifting in Europe. I don’t really think I have to do anything any more. The ball is rolling.”

Hell yeah, we got cancer vaccines now!

>An experimental mRNA-based vaccine succeeded in preventing cancer from coming back or spreading in a study of high-risk melanoma patients, Moderna and its partner Merck said Wednesday, paving the way for a potentially new life-extending treatment for the thousands of people diagnosed with the deadly skin cancer each year.

>The study looked at people who had surgery to remove a melanoma—the point of the treatment was to reduce the risk of it coming back.

>The companies said the late-stage study, which tested the personalized cancer vaccine intismeran in combination with Merck’s blockbuster cancer immunotherapy Keytruda, met its main goal of extending the time before cancer returns in high-risk patients. The study also met a secondary goal of preventing the disease from spreading to different organs.

>“I have a feeling that this is just the beginning of a new field,” said Jane Healy, a vice president of oncology at Merck, adding the goal for patients is “to give them longer without having to worry about treatments for cancer.”

>Moderna shares surged more than 80% in early trading Wednesday, while Merck’s stock rose 8%.

>The companies didn’t provide specific details about how long patients taking the Moderna-Merck combination lived without their cancer progressing or how long they lived on average. The companies will present more details at a medical conference later this year.

>Investors and researchers will be watching closely to see how effective and tolerable the vaccine proves to be, as that has the potential to dictate its chances for approval and how widely it is used.

>The results mark the first successful late-stage trial for a personalized mRNA cancer therapy, validating decades of research into custom treatments engineered specifically for an individual’s tumor mutations.

>For Moderna, these results could pave the way for its entry into the $240-plus-billion cancer-drug market, a boon for a company that has been dependent Covid-19 vaccine sales, which have been falling. For Merck, this could bring a new drug into its arsenal to help offset the impending patent loss for Keytruda, one of the top-selling drugs in the world.

>Moderna has been trying to regain financial ground after years of consecutive losses since the Covid-19 pandemic started to wane.

>“We are now an oncology company,” said Moderna Chief Executive Stéphane Bancel. “By Christmas, you could have a company that’s going back into sales growth for the first time in four years.”

>The melanoma study followed more than 1,000 patients who were randomized to either receive a combination of intismeran and Keytruda or Keytruda alone for about a year.

>Unlike traditional vaccines designed to prevent infections, intismeran is a personalized therapeutic vaccine built for a single person. The process begins after a patient undergoes surgery to remove a high-risk melanoma tumor. Doctors send a blood sample and biopsy of the tumor, where the cancer’s genetic profile is analyzed. 

>Scientists home in on unique mutations on the cancer cells that are likely to alert the immune system. Those mutation targets are encoded into mRNA and manufactured into a vaccine—a process that takes about six weeks from the date of the biopsy.

>Meanwhile, patients recover from their surgery and start a regimen of Keytruda to keep the disease in check while their personalized shot is prepared.

>Moderna and Merck teamed up in 2016 to jointly develop personalized mRNA cancer vaccines and expanded that partnership over time. The researchers began by studying the vaccine in melanoma because those tumors are typically highly mutated. There are other studies under way in different types of cancer, including bladder cancer, a common form of lung cancer and kidney cancer. 

>Ahead of the news, Citi analyst Geoff Meacham said the study could be a “defining catalyst” for Moderna’s cancer drug business and that strong results could speed FDA review. Bancel said the company hopes to have the drug on the market in 2027.

>Earlier trial readouts showed that the vaccine in combination with Keytruda reduced the risk of melanoma recurrence or death by 49% compared with Keytruda alone. 

>Moderna recently won approval for its mRNA-based flu vaccine, though analysts said this was more likely to be a long-term growth driver than an immediate financial windfall.

>Personalized cancer vaccines are complicated and expensive to produce. Questions remain as to how accessible the vaccines will be if they are approved. The only FDA-approved therapeutic cancer vaccine to date is Provenge, a personalized immunotherapy for prostate cancer.

>The driverless future is here—but, to borrow from William Gibson, it’s not evenly distributed. Waymo’s self-driving robotaxis are available in cities in California, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas. Aside from California, where the technology originated, those are all red or purple states. In every other blue state, meanwhile, driverless taxis are still not allowed to operate. If you live in Miami or Dallas, you can summon a Waymo to get where you’re going. If you live in Boston or New York, you can’t.

>This is not an accident. In Democratic jurisdictions, a coalition of labor unions, anti-tech activists, and politicians have kept driverless vehicles off the streets. (Colorado, which passed a bill authorizing driverless vehicles in 2017, before the current backlash, is on track to become the exception later this year.) They argue that the new technology would make the roads more dangerous and throw millions of human drivers out of work, all to enrich a handful of tech oligarchs.

>A version of this fight is now playing out in Washington, D.C., where Kamala Harris won more than 90 percent of the vote in 2024 and where local officials recently introduced a bill that would provide a pathway for robotaxis to begin operating. Some residents have welcomed that prospect. But others are digging in their heels. Bill Davis, the president of the local Teamsters union, declared in a statement that the legislation “doesn’t benefit anyone outside of Silicon Valley billionaires” and “comes at the expense of middle-class professional drivers and anyone else who wants safer streets in our city.”

>Driverless cars will indeed cost some workers their jobs. But unlike so many other recent Silicon Valley innovations, they have already demonstrated the potential to bring immense societal benefits. About 40,000 Americans die in car accidents every year. The number of crash-related injuries is much larger. As many as 10,000 crash victims enter emergency rooms around the country every day. Waymos are so much safer than human drivers that deploying them widely could avert countless injuries and deaths every year.

>They will also make transportation more affordable: A taxi without a driver is much cheaper. Waymo is currently more expensive than Uber and Lyft, but that’s largely because supply is artificially constrained and demand is high. The price differential is dropping fast and will go away soon. Waymos also show promise in reducing carbon emissions and air pollution (the cars are electric), and providing reliable access to people who live in poor neighborhoods (who are routinely turned down by rideshare drivers). Saying no to Waymo is saying no to a technology that will change the world for the better.

>There is a name for a political movement that taps into people’s resistance to change and defense of the status quo. William F. Buckley famously described a conservative as “someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” Progressivism was founded on the opposite ethic: that scientific and technological progress can bring about a better, more equitable future, provided that it’s steered in the right direction. In this sense, self-driving cars are a test for American progressives—a test of whether they have become so captured by interest groups, so hostile to corporations, and so fearful of technological change that they’ve transformed into enemies of progress itself.

>In much of the country, the popular conception of self-driving cars is something between a bumbling idiot and a mechanical death trap. Videos of Waymo vehicles making ridiculous errors go viral online. Earlier this year, a Waymo hit a child who ran into the road near an elementary school in Santa Monica, California, causing minor injuries. When a jurisdiction considers whether to allow Waymos, stories like these come up again and again. “I’m also deeply concerned about the safety issues autonomous vehicles have already had in other cities,” Helen Raynor-Hughes, a longtime D.C.-area resident, testified during a public hearing in July, citing “reports of crashes, traffic disruptions, and situations where these vehicles failed to respond properly to pedestrians, cyclists, and other drivers.”

>But anecdotes can mislead. The question is how robotaxis’ error rate stacks up against that of human drivers. In a recent study, researchers at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety compared the crash and accident data on a per-mile basis for Waymo vehicles with those of human drivers in the cities where Waymos operated from 2021 to 2024. They found that Waymos were involved in 68 percent fewer crashes serious enough to be reported to police and 81 percent fewer crashes that caused an injury. These findings are “likely conservative” because human drivers regularly fail to report accidents, Eric Teoh, the report’s lead author, told me.

>Several other studies have produced even more favorable results. These studies are co-authored by Waymo researchers but have been peer-reviewed by independent academics. Every expert I spoke with for this story, including Waymo skeptics, told me that they consider the research to be high-quality. “Reductions this big are basically unheard of when it comes to traffic safety,” Noah Goodall, a senior research scientist at the Virginia Transportation Research Council, told me. “Not even seat belts or airbags achieved the kinds of numbers we’re seeing here.” (Waymo, which is owned by Alphabet, is the only company that has demonstrated such a strong safety record. The others, including Tesla, have not disclosed the data needed to make safety claims.)

>Even these figures probably underestimate how safe Waymos are. The journalists Timothy B. Lee and Kai Williams recently reviewed the details of the 78 accidents that Waymo vehicles had been involved in over a seven-month period and that were serious enough to cause an injury or trigger an airbag deployment. They found just one example where Waymo “could plausibly bear some responsibility” for a taxi crashing into another vehicle or a pedestrian—the Santa Monica–school incident—and another three where culpability was “mixed or unclear.” “We went into this looking for any evidence that Waymo could even remotely be at fault for a given crash,” Lee told me. “But those cases were just really hard to find.”

>The big caveat to Waymo’s safety record is its difficulty with so-called edge cases—unpredictable situations for which its algorithm is unprepared and in which human judgment really comes in handy. When a power outage knocked out a third of San Francisco’s traffic lights last December, at least 60 Waymos abruptly idled mid-road, causing severe gridlock and delays. Something similar happened to a few dozen Waymos this year when the driverless vehicles encountered unexpected road closures during San Francisco’s Fourth of July celebrations. Waymos have obstructed emergency vehicles in several cities, typically because of their tendency to freeze when they encounter alarms, sirens, or temporary road closures. The company has not done nearly enough to fix the problem. “Competent driving is about a lot more than crash statistics,” Philip Koopman, an emeritus professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon, told me. “If Waymo isn’t able to address some of these problematic patterns, it is going to be very hard to convince the public they are safe.”

>Even so, the fact that Waymos are considerably safer than human drivers is undeniable. A robot driver can’t drink and drive, fall asleep at the wheel, or check its phone. It won’t flout the rules of the road when it’s running late or trying to impress its friends. And it is equipped with more than a dozen different cameras, plus radar and laser sensors, meaning it doesn’t have blind spots. Bryant Walker Smith, an associate law professor at the University of South Carolina, has advised governments on how to regulate self-driving cars. “What I always tell policy makers is that we absolutely should be concerned about automated driving,” he told me. “But we should be terrified of human driving.”

>Safety might be the average American’s top concern about driverless cars, but the average American isn’t spearheading the political resistance to Waymo. Labor unions are. The campaign against driverless vehicles has been led by a coalition of unions representing taxi, rideshare, and truck drivers who argue that self-driving cars will destroy millions of working-class jobs. (Although experts believe that self-driving trucks and delivery vehicles are at least several years away from being a regular presence on roads, labor unions see robotaxi legalization as a stepping stone to a fully automated driving future.) Indeed, Helen Raynor-Hughes, the area resident who testified about Waymo’s safety record, began by identifying herself as a Service Employees International Union member who drives for Uber and Lyft.

>In 2026 alone, this Labor United Against Waymo coalition has helped defeat or delay legislation to authorize driverless vehicles in Illinois, Minnesota, Maryland, Virginia, Oregon, and Washington State. In January, New York Governor Kathy Hochul declared that she would pursue a bill to allow robotaxis to operate in the state, only to backtrack a few weeks later following an outcry from labor leaders.

>When I arrived at D.C.’s city hall in July for a public hearing on the proposed bill to authorize Waymo, I passed dozens of protesters from various labor groups chanting and holding signs with slogans such as WAYMO? HELL NO and AI DOESN’T VOTE. We Do. Inside, about a dozen labor leaders and rideshare drivers demanded that city officials vote against the bill. Crystal Middleton, a D.C. resident who drives Uber and Lyft part-time to support her family, testified that if Waymo were adopted in the city, “many D.C. families, including mine, will struggle to make ends meet.”

>I’m sympathetic to that argument. When I was growing up, my dad spent years driving Uber and Lyft on the weekends to help pay the bills. Like many drivers, he resented the meager pay and lack of benefits. (There’s an irony that unions and Democratic lawmakers are rallying to defend the type of precarious gig work that they have spent more than a decade criticizing.) But it’s hard to imagine what our family would have done without the extra income. The impulse to protect workers like him—not to mention the delivery and truck drivers who fear that they’ll be next—from being displaced by a new technology is understandable.

>That approach, however, ignores the larger number of people who would benefit from a change to the status quo. At the public hearing, local nonprofit leaders and politicians, including Shane Simenstad, the director of public policy for Safe Kids Worldwide, pointed out that rideshare drivers often refuse to enter less desirable parts of the city, leaving residents of poor neighborhoods without a reliable way to get to work or school. Claire Stanley, the director of advocacy and governmental affairs for the American Council of the Blind, spoke about being denied Uber and Lyft rides because of her service dog. Multiple women testified about their fear of being harassed or assaulted by rideshare drivers. (According to a 2025 New York Times investigation, Uber received a report of sexual assault or misconduct nearly every eight minutes on average in the U.S. from 2017 to 2022.)

>Some of the most moving testimonies came from the victims of car crashes and their loved ones. Rameez Tase, a local resident and avid cyclist, told the story of a friend who had been nearly killed after being hit by a car. “Anyone who knows me well knows that my biggest fear of death is being struck and killed by a distracted driver—and leaving my three young children without a father for the rest of their lives,” he said. Cesar Toledo, a member of the D.C. Commission on Poverty, recounted a childhood “marked by the terrifying reality of riding in vehicles driven by family members under the influence.”

>Car accidents kill roughly as many Americans each year as breast cancer does, and twice the number of people who die from homicides. It is a leading cause of death among children and young adults. “The number of traffic deaths in America is the equivalent of a Boeing 737 crashing every single day,” Jonathan Slotkin, a neurosurgeon who regularly treats crash victims, told me. “That’s what we’ve chosen to tolerate as the price of mobility.”

>Waymos, to be clear, wouldn’t solve this problem right away. Although rideshare and taxi drivers get into accidents at higher rates than the average driver, they make up a small fraction of cars on the road. But operating robotaxis is a key step for Waymo and other companies to perfect their self-driving technology, which could then be sold to vehicle manufacturers like Toyota to include as an optional feature in every car. “If we had a drug that showed these kinds of results, we’d be doing everything we could to get it out to as many people as fast as possible,” Slotkin said.

>Widespread adoption of driverless vehicles would further a litany of goals that anyone should celebrate, especially those who claim to be progressive: slashing traffic injuries and deaths; helping the poor and disabled secure stable employment; making cities safer places to bike and walk; reducing the prevelance of sexual assault and misconduct; putting more electric vehicles on the roads. And yet progressives are the ones standing in the way. “Honestly, it’s just embarrassing,” Colin Mortimer, the director of the Center for New Liberalism, a center-left advocacy group, told me. “Liberals are always talking about how we’re the party that believes in science, that believes in data, that believes in helping the vulnerable. But on this issue we’re doing the exact opposite.”

>Some Washington, D.C., legislators believe that the nation’s capital can pioneer a different approach to Waymo. In May, the D.C. Council member Charles Allen introduced a bill that would authorize driverless vehicles to begin operating in the district, but only if their makers meet certain key conditions designed in part to address the edge-case problem and reduce the impact on the city’s labor force. These include completing stringent testing and safety requirements and submitting a plan for interacting with first responders. Even then, the total number of driverless vehicles would be capped at a few hundred during the initial rollout. Each vehicle would also be subject to a per-mile tax used to fund public transit, as well as workforce training and compensation for displaced rideshare and taxi drivers. “We have to be honest with ourselves: This technology is already here and is only going to become a bigger part of our lives going forward,” Allen told me a few weeks after the hearing. “And so we can either bury our heads in the sand and have this change happen to us. Or we can put guardrails in place to make sure the technology works for us and our communities.”

>In Allen’s view, too many restrictions would risk throttling a technology that could otherwise bring huge benefits; too few would invite a high-profile incident that draws a public backlash. Getting the balance right will be difficult. My own view is that the bill should have more restrictive testing requirements around edge cases—for instance, simulating power outages or major emergencies—before driverless vehicles can be deployed. But it should also create a less bureaucratic process for increasing the number of vehicles once those requirements have been met. The bill also faces several political obstacles, including an incoming mayor who expressed skepticism about Waymo expansion on the campaign trail. But Allen is trying to do something that no city has done before: chart a middle course between letting the new technology rip and blocking it altogether.

>One-hundred and fifty years ago, the United States was experiencing the advent of a brand-new transportation technology. Railroads reduced cross-country travel from months to days, turned the U.S. into an industrial powerhouse, and enabled the modern consumer economy. But they also displaced workers, such as canal operators and stagecoach drivers; led to skyrocketing inequality; and produced corrupt monopolies presided over by ruthless oligarchs. A new political movement formed in response. Its adherents passed legislation that protected workers, created novel regulatory agencies, broke up powerful monopolies, and developed safety standards. Neither techno-utopians nor luddites, they believed that technology could be a force for progress—but only if it was actively shaped and regulated by the public. They thus called themselves progressives. Their political descendants would do well to remember their example.

>Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul have announced that some communities in New York City will receive free 2-K (daycare for two-year-olds) seats this fall. Their supporters are hailing the move as a major step toward universal childcare, such as that provided in Sweden.

>The American Left reveres Sweden’s childcare system. Jacobin celebrates it as delivering on a “collective responsibility.” The People’s Policy Project praises the Nordic nation’s generous public funding. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Elizabeth Warren champion taxpayer-funded universal childcare modeled in part on Sweden. “What we have in mind and what my policies most closely resemble are what we see . . . in Sweden,” Ocasio-Cortez has said of her broader policy agenda.

>They’re right that Sweden heavily subsidizes childcare, with public funding following families using public or private providers. But one feature of Sweden’s childcare system would shock many on the American Left.

>Sweden, often held up as an exemplar of high-quality early childhood education, does not regulate preschool staffing through mandated child-to-staff ratios.

>That’s right. Sweden has no legally mandated child-to-staff ratio for förskola (preschool), which serves children ages one to five. Many other countries do, and all U.S. states do. Yet as the OECD notes, “There is no regulation or guideline for child-staff ratios” in Sweden.

>Has the lack of a government mandate led to mayhem in Sweden? Does the absence of a required ratio mean that a single overburdened childcare worker is expected somehow to supervise hundreds of children alone?

>Not in Sweden, which has a similar proportion of children in its population as the United States. Even without any explicit mandate, typical child-to-staff ratios remain quite reasonable. According to the Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket), the ratio of full-time staff positions to children in preschool is roughly 5:1.

>If the government is not prescribing every staffing decision, what ensures that providers make responsible choices? Competition and market signals.

>A preschool that created unreasonable conditions would swiftly face reputational consequences. Sweden gives families the freedom to choose private preschools. Parents can select environments they feel best meet their children’s needs, encouraging preschools to provide a high-quality environment as they compete for families. About 22 percent of Swedish preschoolers attend privately run preschools.

>Judging by Sweden’s example, child-to-staff ratio mandates apparently aren’t necessary. And it’s not clear that they offer many benefits, either. A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis of studies from the United States and several other countries found surprisingly little high-quality evidence that smaller ratios improve child outcomes among children ages zero through five. The researchers noted that any effects on measures such as literacy were “inconclusive” and that existing research provides “little guidance on what the appropriate adult/child ratios and group sizes are.”

>But while any benefits remain uncertain, one effect of strict ratio requirements is well documented: they raise costs, reducing affordability.

>In the United States, the wide variation in state regulations—from California and Michigan, which allow one staff member to supervise no more than four toddlers (ages one to three), to Florida and Texas, which allow up to 11—provides ample opportunity to examine the effects of more stringent staff-to-child ratio requirements.

>In the state with the least restrictive child-staff ratio mandate, toddler care costs $7,254 annually, while in states with the most restrictive child-staff ratio, toddler care costs an average of $20,196—more than 2.5 times as much. One explanation is that high-income states have both stricter ratios and more expensive childcare. But even after controlling for state income, stricter childcare regulations are associated with higher costs for families. Research shows that more regulations mean fewer childcare centers, especially in lower-income communities.

>In part, that’s because these strict ratios also create needless compliance burdens: inspectors may cite childcare centers when a teacher briefly steps out of a classroom that remains supervised by several other staff members.

>By not regulating staffing ratios, Sweden proves the choice isn’t between mandates and bad care. In the United States, the choice often comes down to trusting the people closest to the children or pricing their families out of care altogether.

>Sweden’s approach asks policymakers to place their confidence in childcare professionals and families instead of micromanaging these arrangements. If Sweden can trust parents and providers to deliver quality care, so can we.

>The Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) new platform promises a world without bills. In their utopia, you’d see no rent check. No health insurance premium. No student loan repayment. No electricity bill. Life’s basics, including food, education, medicine, and transportation, would all become “common goods and utilities.” 

>That might sound appealing to Americans struggling with the cost of living after a bout of high inflation. But it’s just an accounting trick. A bill reflects the price of the service you were provided and how much of it you used. The DSA can socialize that payment, charging an out-of-pocket price of zero while taxpayers cover the tab. It cannot abolish the underlying cost of providing the service. 

>Nor can it abolish scarcity. A doctor’s time is limited. Apartments in Manhattan are scarce. Only so much electricity-generating capacity is available at 6 p.m. on a hot day in August. All goods and services require finite resources, whether they’re skilled teachers, construction workers, bus drivers, farmland, or whatever else. This is the central constraint nonmarket systems face when suspending market prices. 

>Market prices help manage that scarcity by conveying information about supply and demand. If a harvest fails, a crop becomes scarcer, and its price rises. That discourages some consumption—often by shifting to similar, lower-price substitutes—while encouraging additional production. 

>But DSA-style socialists see rising prices as a moral failure. The virtue of prices is not that they identify who is most deserving; it is that they allow millions of strangers to coordinate what they produce and consume without the impossibility of a central authority knowing everyone’s circumstances. 

>So that leaves the question: if not market prices, then what? What system of rationing replaces it? And who does get the bill? 

>No Prices Means Rationing by Something Else

>Government-provided services are not produced for nothing. What changes when the government makes something “free” is the marginal price to the user. Setting it to zero means the supply is financed through taxes, fees, government appropriations, and political budgets. 

>Set out-of-pocket prices at zero, and the quantity demanded rises. Why not book the doctor’s appointment for your cold, occupy the larger apartment, or use more electricity when each appears costless? 

>If supply cannot expand enough to meet that demand, the service must be rationed in some other way. The cost becomes time spent searching or waiting, complicated eligibility rules, lower quality, restricted choice, geographic limitations, or political discretion.

>A free road at rush hour provides a simple illustration. Nobody receives an invoice for entering it, yet drivers pay dearly in lost time. Congestion is the price. In health care, the equivalent might be a waitlist, triage based on the severity of your condition, or a limit on how much the government will pay for your treatment. The dollar price vanishes, but the shadow price moves into the waiting room.

>In Britain’s National Health Service, patients do not receive a cash bill for a hip replacement or cataract operation. But at the end of May 2026, there were 7.3 million referral-to-treatment pathways awaiting care, representing roughly 6.2 million people. More than 104,000 pathways had waited over a year, and one-third had waited beyond the NHS’s 18-week standard. 

>Rationing also occurs through what medicines are available. The Alzheimer’s drugs lecanemab and donanemab were licensed in Britain, yet NICE’s final draft guidance concluded that their benefits were too small to justify the extra public cost. A medicine can exist, be legally approved, and still be unavailable because a committee must compare its value with everything else the same budget could buy.

>Government-managed housing prices present the same problem. A rent-controlled apartment is amazing for the lucky incumbent. But for a newcomer looking for a new home, the relevant price may be years of searching, living farther from work, crowding into an unsuitable unit, or cultivating the right connections. Existing tenants also cling to below-market apartments long after the units cease to fit their needs, while families who value the larger space more struggle to find it. 

>Private Bills Become Public Taxes

>Even if a nonmarket system successfully allocates scarce goods, it still must produce them. The government can declare that patients will receive health care without a bill, but doctors and nurses still have to be paid, the hospitals they work in must be built, and the medicines they prescribe and the medical equipment they use must be developed and manufactured. The same is true for all the other “common goods” in the DSA vision; each requires costly labor, land, and capital.

>Public provision of goods and services, therefore, primarily shifts the cost from the individual consumer to the government, and at the scale envisioned by the DSA, those fiscal costs become enormous. 

>Comparable progressive proposals put the ten-year federal cost of Medicare for All at more than $33 trillion almost a decade ago. Large-scale energy and infrastructure programs have been estimated at $8 trillion to $12 trillion. Free college, loan cancellation, reparations, housing for all, job guarantees, and an expansion of Social Security would cost tens of trillions more. 

>Depending on the assumptions used, comparable versions of these proposals imply additional ten-year federal costs running from roughly $70 trillion to more than $200 trillion. That would come on top of a federal government already projected to spend roughly $94 trillion over the same period. 

>Those resources will ultimately come from the same households that no longer have bills. The only question is how visibly they pay.

>The government can finance spending through taxes, borrowing, or money creation. Borrowing postpones taxes, but it cannot permanently replace them. Money creation imposes costs through inflation, an opaque and unsustainable form of tax. 

>This leaves direct taxes as the only sustainable way to fund a comprehensive fiscal agenda. The DSA presents “aggressive wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations” as the obvious source of that revenue. But even at confiscatory tax rates, there is not enough wealth held or income earned by billionaires and their businesses to finance a spending agenda of more than $7 trillion a year. 

>For example, the total wealth of the 400 wealthiest Americans is about $6.6 trillion—not even enough to fund one year of the contemplated spending. And that is a one-time revenue source. Once the wealth is confiscated and spent, it cannot finance the next year’s benefits. 

>The same arithmetic explains why countries with large welfare states do not finance them solely with taxes on billionaires and corporations. They rely heavily on broad taxes on wages, income, and consumption. Universal benefits require a universal tax base that includes people at every income level. 

>Making Scarcity Worse

>Socialized provision can do more than move costs around. The combination of suppressed prices, diminished profits, and high taxes makes the underlying goods harder to produce and reduces the likelihood of new innovations. 

>In a market, a high price and the prospect of profit create a supply response. They tell builders where homes are wanted, entrepreneurs which medicines patients want, and retailers where shelves are empty. Capital and labor move toward those opportunities when government regulations allow them to. 

>A queue or waitlist sends a much weaker signal. It does not automatically generate revenue, attract new entrants, or reward anyone for eliminating it. Under public provision, capacity expands only if officials recognize the shortage, secure a budget, design a program, hire staff, and survive the next election. A higher price and the profit that comes with it do all that with a shorter wait. 

>Existing rent control laws show how today’s relief shrinks tomorrow’s supply. When San Francisco extended controls in 1994, affected landlords reduced the rental housing supply by 15 percent, largely by converting units to owner-occupied use or redeveloping them. Protected tenants benefited, but would-be tenants faced fewer homes and higher rents. Rent control did not merely redistribute existing apartments; it reduced future availability.

>Hold utility prices too low, and investment in pipes, generating capacity, or grid resilience gets underfunded. Set payments for medical services too low to attract enough staff, and access deteriorates even though the nominal price remains low. 

>Social provision also can’t simply eliminate profits and pocket the difference. 

>Take food. US food retailers earned an average net profit margin of just 2.1 percent in 2025. Confiscate every cent of profit and assume government-run stores are equally efficient, and a $100 grocery basket becomes $97.90. Costco’s fiscal 2025 net income was about $8.1 billion on $269.9 billion of merchandise sales. That’s roughly three cents per sales dollar. The other 97 cents paid for food, wages, warehouses, refrigeration, transport, spoilage, energy, property, technology, interest, and tax.

>And where profits are high, they attract new entrants, whose competition pushes prices—and profits—down. When a drug’s branded exclusivity ends, the FDA reports that just one new competitor creating a generic version can cut prices by about 30 percent, while five competitors are associated with reductions approaching 85 percent. The prospect of profit drives entry, and then competition passes much of the gain to consumers.

>Profit also helps drive new supply and innovation. The possibility of new earnings persuades people to risk capital on a new store, drug, power plant, or transportation route before anyone knows whether the investment will succeed. Loss performs the opposite function. 

>Business owners invest in research and development of new technology to improve efficiency. In the case of supermarkets, owners have invested in just-in-time supply chains and complex forecasting to reduce wasted stock. These investments lower prices for shoppers and increase profits for business owners. Those profits are what Thomas Sowell explained as “the price paid for efficiency.” 

>A firm that repeatedly wastes resources eventually runs out of investors willing to finance it. A publicly run service has no profit or loss to signal its value and can thus live on forever through taxpayer funding.

>None of this means every observed profit is virtuous. Profits can reflect monopoly privilege, licensing barriers, import protection, patent abuse, zoning restrictions, or regulatory capture. The remedy is to strip away unjustified privilege and enable entry. Nor must every useful institution be organized for profit. Charities, mutuals, cooperatives, and even some public bodies can work well when embedded in a broader market system. 

>But it’s a mistake to imagine that eliminating prices and profit across a swath of industries leaves incentives unchanged. This is the central contradiction in the DSA affordability agenda. It promises greater access to housing, medicine, education, and transportation while adopting policies that discourage the production of these goods.

>The DSA can obscure the bill. It cannot abolish the cost; it can only shift it to another mechanism while undermining choice, quality, and innovation. 

>BY THE TIME he received the call from Stockholm, it felt overdue. In 2024 Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shared the Nobel prize in economics with Simon Johnson and James Robinson for work on how institutions shape prosperity. Mr Acemoglu is only 58 years old, but for some time he has been the discipline’s colossus. He has written seven books, including a new one about democracy and the economic impact of artificial intelligence, not counting a couple of popular textbooks. His hundreds of papers, more than ten of them published so far this year, are often stuffed with complex mathematics. He competes with Andrei Shleifer of Harvard University for top spot on a citation ranking of economists produced by IDEAS/RePEc, a research database. His opinions carry great weight with other wonks and the media.

>Give an economist a few drinks, however, and some of them will venture their true opinions about this giant. “Much of his theoretical work is useful, but he uses his models to inform populist policies that have been tried before and failed,” blasts one well-known economist. Some commentators do not require Dutch courage. “I’ve been yelling about Acemoglu for literally a decade,” Noah Smith, an economics blogger, has said, in response to a flurry of online criticism of Mr Acemoglu’s work.

>No one accuses the prolific economist of truly poor research, let alone academic malpractice. “He is obviously a genius,” says another, who also points out that he is generous to PhD students and junior colleagues. The question is whether Mr Acemoglu’s reputation at the very apex of the economics profession—and the intellectual influence that goes with it—is justified by his scholarship.

>Start with his empirical methods. His Nobel rests heavily on a paper released in 2001 with Messrs Johnson and Robinson, which researchers have cited more than 23,000 times. It seeks to explain why some countries are rich and others poor. In places where European settlers died in droves, perhaps because of disease, colonisers built “extractive” institutions, with power and resources concentrated in the hands of an elite few, to take as many resources from the area as possible. But in more agreeable climates, settlers survived. In these places the colonists built more inclusive institutions, with proper roads, schools and medical services. Those institutions persisted, with the effect that places with lower settler mortality during colonial times are richer today.

>Economists now take these results seriously but not literally. The paper encouraged wonks to think more deeply about institutions, but they have also picked it apart. The Nobel committee’s report in 2024 conceded that the mortality data are “sometimes sketchy”. In 2012 David Albouy of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign showed that some countries were assigned mortality rates borrowed from other countries, among other adjustments. Correct for these, he found, and the paper’s estimates become unreliable. A paper last year by Martin Buchner of RWI-Essen, a research institute, and colleagues found that experts they surveyed were somewhat more likely to side with Mr Albouy on the matter.

>Mr Acemoglu says that “these discussions and some critiques are hugely valuable.” But he counters that Mr Albouy reaches his conclusion by omitting half the data from the original sample, including on important countries like America, Canada and Australia. It is this combination, along with some statistical choices, that introduces the unreliability, he says. He also adds that if he were redoing the paper today, he would make “a number of changes, including in some of the estimation details”—though not to the mortality data.

>Most recently, researchers have examined a paper that Mr Acemoglu released in June, with a series of co-authors, which reported that lower birth rates are associated with faster growth in GDP per working-age adult. This is a striking finding, seeming to suggest that places that are losing population, like Japan, do not have much to worry about. Yet other economists, including Jesús Fernández-Villaverde of the University of Pennsylvania, question whether historical relationships are really useful to understanding the present, where in many countries birth rates are collapsing. It is a perfectly reasonable point—and Mr Acemoglu and his co-authors raise it briefly in their conclusion. But it can get lost and can seem unsophisticated when set against the reams of mathematics Mr Acemoglu deploys.

>After prodding and probing, a determined critic could find holes in almost any researcher’s work—and Mr Acemoglu is the biggest target in economics. Yet fame-induced scrutiny cannot explain the second problem: that Mr Acemoglu’s ideas can seem underwhelming for a titan of social science. His public commentary, especially on American politics, is unadventurous. His “unified theory of Trump”, for instance, asserts that the American president operates “by elevating executive power and destroying constraining institutions and norms”. Well, obviously.

>Institutions and institurtles

>More worrying is that his grand thesis of institutions may not reveal very much. Nations prosper when institutions are good, and stagnate when they are bad. True. But what, exactly, is an institution? Rules, norms, enforcement, culture—everything, really. Where do institutions come from? From “critical junctures” and “institutional drift”, whatever that means.

>Reviewing one of Mr Acemoglu’s books in 2011, Tyler Cowen of George Mason University noted that the institutional changes it describes only seem to come from other institutional changes, making the core argument regress for ever—turtles all the way down. Duncan Green of the London School of Economics has argued that the framework works mainly in hindsight. Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University has argued that the book waves away the example of China, which has seen blistering economic growth alongside institutions that can quite plausibly be described as extractive.

>Mr Acemoglu retorts that the book devotes two chapters partly or mostly to China. As for the turtles, he observes that “to understand institutional change from an institutional perspective you must consider the specific institutions in the past and the historical events…that influence them.” “I don’t think this is tautological at all,” he says.

>To the extent that Mr Acemoglu breaks from received wisdom, it is mainly to espouse remarkably glum views about technology. “Power and Progress”, a book from 2023 co-written with Mr Johnson, treats a thousand years of innovation largely as a story of elite capture and unintended consequences. The cotton gin was the handmaiden of slavery, while the Haber-Bosch process created weapons. Ordinary people apparently gained only when they could steer capitalists to consider their interests. The book plays down a much more compelling claim: that technological progress in and of itself has made the average person many times richer than in pre-industrial times.

>Mr Acemoglu’s arguments about AI are also pessimistic to the point of losing their credibility. In a paper released in 2024 he calculates that AI will boost American productivity by only a small amount over ten years. The paper reaches this conclusion by ignoring the potentially transformative effect of new AI products coming to market. “He leaves out entirely in that analysis the possibility that we will have more rapid scientific progress, more rapid social-scientific progress, or better decision-making because of artificial intelligence,” according to Lawrence Summers, president emeritus of Harvard University (and former treasury secretary).

>“This is a valid criticism,” says Mr Acemoglu. “I did not foresee agentic AI and it was not incorporated in my predictions.” He also notes that AI models may be more useful in scientific research than he imagined. But he stands by his methods of estimating the productivity effects of AI, as well as injecting “some realism into the claims about huge coming productivity improvements”.

>These academic disputes may seem unimportant, but they could end up mattering a great deal. Mr Acemoglu may not think AI is about to turbocharge productivity, but he does worry about its effects on democracy and jobs. His new book focuses on the potential social harms of the technology (worsening atomisation, spreading political fakery) rather than its potential benefits. His proposal to limit those harms, “pro-worker AI” that would augment the value of human labour rather than replacing it, sounds terrific—and obvious.

>Mr Acemoglu’s influence in the AI debate is clear in a recent statement, signed by dozens of prominent economists, which argues that “we must act now” to “steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society”. Who is the “we”, exactly? The Trump administration? And who is to decide what sort of AI does and does not complement humans? Even economists who signed the petition say they are not entirely sure. So great is Mr Acemoglu’s stardom that it can sometimes blind the critical faculties. ■

This article is from a week ago, but it never got posted, and I feel like this is a significant first to take note of. We have now seen the first cyberattack by a state actor using fully autonomous AI agents.

>
Suspected Chinese hackers used publicly available AI tools to compromise government websites in Taiwan in a first-of-a-kind breach, highlighting how artificial intelligence is transforming cyber warfare.

>The attackers used open-source AI agents to build an autonomous hacking tool that behaved like a co-ordinated cyber team, according to researchers at Dream, an Israeli AI company that first identified the intrusion.

>Over four days at the start of July, the tool simultaneously deployed up to eight autonomous agents that mapped 21 government systems, researched vulnerabilities and changed tactics when blocked.

>The tool compromised at least 85 government user accounts, extracting more than 2,500 personnel records before expanding the attack to Taiwan’s nuclear safety agency and at least seven energy companies, the research showed.

>The discovery comes as the AI and cyber industries wrestle with the ability of the latest models to identify and exploit software vulnerabilities. Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta have also reported new AI models launching unexpected cyber attacks during testing.

>Dream’s chief strategy officer, Amir Becker, who previously headed cyber operations for Israel’s elite signals intelligence Unit 8200, said he had never before seen such an “end-to-end autonomous attack” on a government target.

>The advent of AI tools meant governments must now assume they are under permanent cyber attack, he added, saying: “This must be the basic assumption of every government around the globe.”

>A person with knowledge of the attack said the target was Taiwan. Dream declined to confirm the identity of the targeted government, citing company policy, but said it had informed a country in “Asia-Pacific” of the breach.

>Dream has not attributed the attack to a specific group, but researchers said the use of Simplified Chinese in internal communications linked to the hack meant there was a high probability the operator was connected to China.

In contrast, the data recovered from the target was written in Traditional Chinese, as is common only on government websites in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.

>A spokesperson at Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs declined to comment on the hack, citing confidentiality issues. They added that all incidents “involving government agencies or critical infrastructure will be handled according to established reporting and response procedures”.

>“Hacker attack methods have become increasingly diverse, and in recent years, the integration of AI technology has further transformed the nature of cyber security incidents,” the spokesperson said. “AI agents have brought new dual challenges to network security defence: the attacks are automated, and AI agents themselves become new vulnerabilities.”

>Chinese authorities did not respond to requests for comment.

>Dream was founded in 2023 by Israeli cyber entrepreneur Shalev Hulio and Austria’s 39-year-old former chancellor Sebastian Kurz.

>Hulio rose to prominence in the 2010s as a co-founder of NSO Group, the controversial cyber-surveillance group that was blacklisted by the US in 2021 over the alleged use of its Pegasus software by certain governments to spy on journalists and opposition figures.

>Headquartered in Tel Aviv, Dream describes itself as a national sovereign AI and cyberdefence company. It was valued at $3bn in June, up from $1.1bn after a $260mn funding round with investors including Bain Capital.

Dream’s researchers said they found evidence of the July cyber attack in a 160MB online archive identified during the company’s general investigations into the evolving activities of cyberthreat actors.

>The archive contained 1,395 files showing the hacking tool used two open-source AI agent systems, Hermes and OpenClaw, which can be downloaded and enable AI models to carry out tasks autonomously.

>The researchers could not identify which AI model was used to power the agents. However, the data showed that the underlying model’s safeguards had been bypassed by presenting the hacking activity as an authorised exercise to test for system vulnerabilities.

>The most striking feature of the July attack was how the tool continuously ranked and reprioritised possible attack paths based on available evidence, Dream said. 

>When one attack path failed, the tool deployed another agent to scour the internet for information and devise a new approach as a human hacker would.

>In its January report, Taiwan’s National Security Bureau said the island faced an average of 2.6mn Chinese cyber attacks a day in 2025, up 6 per cent from a year earlier. Beijing claims Taiwan as part of its territory and threatens to annex it by force if Taipei refuses indefinitely to submit to its control.

>If anyone were to be immune to America’s loneliness epidemic, it would be college students. For years, Americans have been going to fewer parties and spending more time alone. But college has historically been about socializing—or, let’s just say it, partying—as much as it has been about education. It’s where young people escape parental supervision, move in with roommates, and encounter thousands of potential new friends.

>But the antisocial century has arrived on campus. Today’s students spend much less time socializing than past generations did. In 1994, 32 percent of college seniors spent more than six hours a week partying. By 2026, that was 21 percent, according to an analysis of survey data by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute. The percentage who spend more than six hours a week socializing face-to-face with friends fell from 74 to 65 percent over the same period. Meanwhile, the share of first-year students who reported feeling frequently isolated from campus life has more than doubled in the past two decades. (These surveys are not nationally representative, but they line up with what professors, administrators, and students told me they have observed anecdotally.)

>Nationally, college students report higher rates of loneliness than adults do. On the National Survey of Student Engagement, run out of Indiana University’s Center for Postsecondary Research, more students report having positive interactions with professors than with peers. A rising senior at MIT told me that, despite being involved in Greek life and athletics, he eats alone most days. “I feel like I’m somebody who seeks social interactions,” he said, yet “I would say I am alone at least four or five days a week.” (He spoke anonymously because he didn’t want to be perceived as criticizing MIT when he still needs letters of recommendation from the faculty.) University leaders now find themselves in the odd position of encouraging students to spend more time goofing off with friends.

>Researchers who track social interactions have several theories as to what’s going on. The first is that smartphones and social media are to blame. Much of the increase in loneliness occurred during the 2010s, at the same time that the iPhone was becoming ubiquitous, Daniel Eisenberg, a professor of health policy and management at UCLA, told me. Hours spent on social media crowded out time that people might previously have devoted to social interactions. And it’s easy for students to feel that their social life pales in comparison with what they see in highlight reels on Instagram and TikTok.

>Meanwhile, extracurricular activities, once a mainstay of campus social life, have mutated into a way to stand out to employers in an era of grade inflation. Especially at elite universities, clubs now more closely resemble jobs than socializing opportunities. Finance and consulting clubs require students to submit résumés, sit for interviews, and prepare mock cases or deliverables. Improv, a cappella, and even some volunteering clubs accept only a distinguished few. Cat Moore, who spent six years as the University of Southern California’s director of belonging, told me that students were busier than ever with extracurriculars, jobs, and internship applications. Even when they tried to build in time for socializing, it frequently tipped into networking. “USC had over 1,000 student clubs, yet their loneliness is out of control,” Moore said. “So the answer is not more clubs. The answer is not more programming.”

>The coronavirus pandemic seems to have had a lasting effect on in-person interaction on campus. This is partly a matter of psychology. Many current college students were in middle school when classes and activities went remote. They missed out on a crucial period of learning to interact with other people, Ryan Patel, an assistant director of psychiatry at Ohio State University, told me. “When you lose practice doing those things, it can affect your ability to do them now,” Patel said. College administrators have started to pick up on students’ stunted social development. Justin Schwartz, the chancellor of University of Colorado Boulder, told me that he and his colleagues now have to support students through challenges that many would previously have faced in adolescence, such as trying alcohol for the first time and having their first romantic relationships—and accompanying heartbreaks. From 2019 to 2024, the share of college students who said they’d never had sex rose by 10 percentage points, according to the National College Health Assessment.

>The pandemic also led to changes in how universities operate. Universities now routinely offer remote courses, and professors are under pressure to record and post videos of their lectures. Before the pandemic, 15 percent of undergraduates were completely remote. As of 2024, according to federal data, that number was 24 percent. “Along the way, you’ve lost social interactions that you may have had with people,” OSU’s Patel said. “You walk down the hall and you pass by somebody, you hold the door open for someone, you go to the dining hall to eat, you walk over to class and you see people along the way—these kinds of social interactions, that just fell off.” The rising senior at MIT said that because lectures are posted online and grades are dependent mostly on exams, fewer than a quarter of his classmates are likely to attend a lecture on any given day. “I have a class where, on paper, I should have five of my friends in that class,” he told me. “But then I show up, and I just go the whole week without seeing my friends, really, which is tough.”

>Of course, college, where many students are away from their family and friends for the first time, has always made some people feel lonely. And some of the apparent rise in loneliness could reflect a change in how students label their feelings, as opposed to a change in actual circumstances. “I don’t think there’s any question that loneliness has increased among young people,” Richard Weissbourd, a senior lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, told me. But he also thinks that the shift is partly a result of students viewing normal desires for more friends as unusual or even pathological. Previous generations might have felt similarly disconnected but chosen not to identify themselves as lonely. “This is the most psychologically literate and articulate generation in history,” he said. “People are much more proficient at and much more inclined to label their emotional states.”

>This tendency creates a challenge for college leaders who hope to address high rates of loneliness. At USC, for example, Moore developed a course to teach students how to make friends, which MIT now uses. Drawing attention to the problem risks inflating the number of students who report feeling lonely. It’s normal, even important, for students to struggle as they adjust to a new environment, UCLA’s Eisenberg told me. That helps them grow.

>Some administrators have explored more creative solutions. Brian Casey, the president of Colgate University, told me that he had new footpaths built across lawns on campus to increase the odds of students physically encountering one another. He has invested in landscaping to beautify the grounds and encourage students to hang out outside. And he has insisted that new buildings be designed with more common areas to all but force students to interact. “The more I can get students to run into each other, the better,” he said.

>Whether through similar interventions or because the pandemic has further receded from view, there are some signs that student loneliness is beginning to decline. The Healthy Minds Study, which Eisenberg helps administer, has documented a slight drop over the past few years, to pre-COVID levels. The National College Health Assessment has tracked a similar trend, the American College Health Association’s chief research officer, Mary Hoban, told me. But even if numbers are returning to their pre-pandemic baseline, that’s about half of all students reporting being lonely. “It’s still wildly high,” she said. “We’ve got a problem and need to address it.” All that partying college students used to do? It might have served a purpose after all.

>After President Trump signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran in mid-June, administration officials fanned out to build support for an agreement they hoped would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and start winding down the war.

>Iran’s hard-line leaders huddled in Tehran and came up with a different plan, according to Iranian and Arab officials. In their view the pact was likely just an attempt by the U.S. and Israel to take pressure off the global economy and buy time for a bigger attack down the road. Instead of putting faith in talks, they took the past two months to prepare for a bigger fight. 

>Their efforts include giving the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps more control of the country’s regular army, appointing hardened veterans of the war with Iraq and past internal crackdowns to key posts, expanding domestic counterintelligence operations and ramping up production of missiles and drones. The leadership quickly seized the initiative, attacking ships to tighten Iran’s grip on Hormuz and expanding the battlefield to the Red Sea, which Saudi Arabia has used to get around Iran’s chokehold on the Persian Gulf.

>Strikes by Iran-backed Houthi rebels on the city of Moktah, Yemen, on Aug. 9 killed at least 11 people and damaged the city’s port. Khaled Ziad/AFP/Getty Images

>Arab intelligence officials have picked up evidence—including communications between Iran and militia allies in countries such as Yemen and Iraq—of a strategic shift inside the country’s hard-line leadership to get their forces ready to widen the war and raise the costs for the U.S., officials familiar with the findings say. Alarming weaker Gulf countries like Kuwait, Iran’s leaders are increasingly talking about offensive operations on enemy territory.

>Their overriding goal is to inflict enough pain to ensure the kind of attacks Iran has endured with the 12-day war last year and the continuing conflict aren’t repeated.

>“There is also a widespread view in Iran that the main war has not yet begun,” said Mohammad Hassan Sangtarash, a Tehran-based defense analyst close to the Iranian government. “What we have seen so far is increasingly interpreted through the lens of ‘salami-slicing’ tactics—limited, incremental escalation designed to weaken capabilities before a larger confrontation.”

>The Iranian preparations point to an enormous gulf between how Washington and Tehran are perceiving this stage of the war. The divergence has driven a hard-line negotiating stance and reluctance to close deals by Iran’s leaders that has persistently flummoxed Trump, who has called them crazy and accused them of lying.

>Iran’s readiness to fight also highlights a deep lack of trust that is likely to keep the two sides from reaching a durable deal to end the conflict any time soon. 

>Iran’s proclamations include plenty of bravado. The country’s military and economic base have been battered by U.S. and Israeli airstrikes. More pragmatic members of the leadership including Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian have repeatedly warned Iran needs to negotiate a deal to end the war that brings sanctions relief or face the collapse of its economy.

>But Iran is rebuilding its infrastructure and restoring access to missile bases much more quickly than expected, a concern to Israeli officials who are familiar with the progress. It also has successfully targeted U.S. bases and retains enough firepower to threaten ships and Gulf energy infrastructure. Arab officials are bracing for continued fighting and an extended disruption of energy supplies.

>For the regime, “the baseline is war,” said Alan Eyre, a former senior U.S. diplomat and nuclear negotiator with Iran. “Iran will remain on a wartime footing, preparing for a subsequent attack.”

>When Trump signed the memorandum of understanding with Iran on June 17 at the French palace of Versailles, it looked like the biggest hurdle would be convincing American critics that it wasn’t overly generous to Tehran. 

>The deal promised sanctions waivers to let Iran sell its oil, access to billions of dollars in frozen cash and the prospect of a $300 billion fund to rebuild the country. Iran’s main obligation was to open the Strait of Hormuz to shipping traffic and then negotiate in good faith on its nuclear program.

>President Trump signs a memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran in Versailles, France, on June 17. White House/Planet Pix/ZUMA Press

>When Iran started shooting at ships the U.S. was guiding through the strait three weeks later in early July, it caught the U.S. by surprise.

>“The very dangerous people from Iran, they’re sick,” said Trump, who also called Iran’s leaders scum. “There’s something wrong with them.”

>In fact Iran was pursuing a two-track policy. While his diplomats pursued a peace deal with the U.S., Iranian leader Mojtaba Khamenei was taking steps to prepare the security apparatus for an expanded confrontation that may be initiated by Tehran itself. 

>The Revolutionary Guard used the calm created by the memorandum of understanding to lay the groundwork with allied militias around the region to step up attacks if needed, sending advisers to Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon to discuss the plans, the officials familiar with recent Arab intelligence findings said.

>The intelligence including intercepted communications showed the Revolutionary Guard sending commanders to areas controlled by Yemen’s Houthis to plan for a stepped-up confrontation with Saudi Arabia in coordination with Iraqi militias that also are backed by Iran.

>The Revolutionary Guard supervised deployments of missiles, naval weapons and drone launchers to positions overlooking the Red Sea. It also provided the Yemeni militants with intelligence, target lists including Saudi ports and energy facilities, and advice on sheltering from Saudi retaliation, the officials said.

>The result was fighting that escalated through late July. The Houthis struck Yemeni government forces backed by Saudi Arabia and declared the Bab al-Mandeb Strait that links the Red Sea to world markets closed to Saudi Arabia. The militant group has fired on Saudi ships, complicating the kingdom’s efforts to export its oil and raising the supply risks for global markets.

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>Around the same time, Saudi Arabia said Iran-backed militias in Iraq had launched drone attacks on its oil facilities. 

>The Revolutionary Guard threatened Gulf states that it would destroy their energy facilities if the U.S. were to hit similar sites in Iran—going as far as sending detailed lists of individual targets to its Arab counterparts, the officials said.

>This satellite image shows smoke rising from the Saudi Aramco oil processing facility in Abqaiq, Saudi Arabia, in July. Planet Labs PBC/AP

>Iran also escalated its attacks on American troops. Tehran surprised the U.S. by firing five ballistic missiles at Jordan during a lull in the conflict. The attack came two weeks after another Iranian strike in Jordan killed three U.S. servicemembers.

>Officials in the Gulf grew more alarmed as they watched the scope of attacks grow and Iranian missiles evade U.S. defenses and hit targets more precisely in Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain. The fighting spilled into August, with Iran striking six United Arab Emirates ships over the past two weeks as they tried to transit the Strait of Hormuz. 

>A team carries the remains of a U.S. servicemember who was believed to be killed by an Iranian airstrike in Jordan. Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Shutterstock

>“We took full advantage of the ceasefire period,” Revolutionary Guard spokesman Brig. Gen. Hossein Mohebbi said in an interview with the Guard-affiliated Tasnim news agency in July. “We enhanced our capabilities, accelerated our missile production rate and improved missile accuracy.”

>Behind the scenes, Supreme Leader Khamenei was positioning his forces for a more aggressive fight, lining up seven key security leaders to run revamped military and repression institutions in a reorganization that was unveiled a week ago.

>The appointments came with aggressive goals that included tightening the military chain of command, turning an ideological militia into a neighborhood intelligence agency and emphasizing an offensive approach.

>Mohsen Rezaei, who led the Revolutionary Guard during the war with Iraq in the 1980s, was named secretary of Iran’s top decision-making body, the Supreme National Security Council, where he will be Khamenei’s representative. In the past week, the council squelched progress on a deal to gradually open Hormuz.

>To step up internal security, Khamenei returned veteran Hossein Taeb, a close associate who led a deadly crackdown on protests in 2009, to the helm of the Basij. The supreme leader tasked him with pivoting the volunteer force into a “popular intelligence network” in the wake of two wars that showed how thoroughly Iran had been breached by Israeli intelligence.

>Mohsen Rezaei attends a farewell ceremony for Iran's late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed on Feb. 28 during Israeli and U.S. airstrikes on Iran. Mohammed Salem/Reuters

>Iranian government advisers see the next stage of the confrontation going beyond conventional warfare to include external attempts to foster domestic unrest. The government brutally suppressed protests over the country’s economic crisis in January and fears it’s only a matter of time before the continued deterioration under U.S. pressure brings demonstrators back to the street.

>Khamenei also consolidated Revolutionary Guard influence over the regular army by unifying control of the two military arms under Brig. Gen. Ali Abdollahi, a veteran Revolutionary Guard senior commander and military leader who has aggressively advocated attacks on Arab states hosting U.S. bases around the Persian Gulf. 

>New Revolutionary Guard Commander in Chief Ahmad Vahidi—who has been unofficially on the job since March—was formally given the position and tasked with “powerful offensive operations against the enemy,” the decree appointing him said Monday. The next day, Gen. Mohammad Reza Naghdi, an adviser to Vahidi, said the paramilitary force must be prepared to take operations into enemy territory.

>“Vahidi’s elevation is consistent with a leadership preparing the security establishment for a period of sustained confrontation rather than a return to normal peacetime politics,” said Saeid Golkar, an expert on Iran’s security services at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

>Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Commander in Chief Ahmad Vahidi. Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters

>The Revolutionary Guard—an armed force nearly 200,000 strong—has devised new plans for further escalation including pre-emptive strikes, according to Iranian officials and public statements. Among the options: sabotaging internet cables in the Persian Gulf, creating political unrest in countries with Shia communities such as Kuwait and Bahrain, and potentially even ground operations in Kuwait.

>Kuwait takes those risks seriously. In early May, the tiny Gulf sheikhdom said its security forces had intercepted six Revolutionary Guard troops that used a rented fishing boat to land on a Kuwaiti island separated from Iran only by a thin strip of Iraqi territory. Some Iranian political figures have suggested the Revolutionary Guard could launch ground raids via southern Iraq if the U.S. were to threaten Iranian territory like Kharg Island.

>Some Gulf officials said Iran’s recent behavior is fueling uncertainty about relations with the much larger, newly more aggressive neighbor after the war. They say it remains difficult to assess the extent of the damage the U.S. and Israel did to the Revolutionary Guard’s capabilities. Still, it’s clear the organization hasn’t been defeated or deterred, and its hold on Hormuz has strengthened its regional position, they said. 

>That reality has helped push Gulf states to support even unfavorable deals that would acknowledge Iranian oversight of the strait if it stops further escalation. But regional leaders are also growing more frustrated by the lack of fundamental changes in Tehran’s behavior in response to diplomatic outreach. 

>Iran’s security-minded leadership, they said, appears to be growing more confident in its demands.

>Commercial vessels are anchored near a beach in the Strait of Hormuz off Bandar Abbas, Iran. Amirhosein Khorgooi/ISNA/AP

>Mediators in the talks said Iranian diplomats agreed early in the month on a deal with Oman to set up and oversee routes through Hormuz that would lead to the gradual reopening of the strait. Those efforts were blocked by the Revolutionary Guard, which went back to attacking ships.

>With negotiations blocked and Iran not backing away from escalating the fight, Trump has stepped back to see if the economic pressure from sanctions and the Navy’s blockade will soften Iran’s position, U.S. officials said.

>But Iran’s leaders are deeply skeptical of Trump’s motives and are slipping into a survival economy aimed at holding out.

>People close to Iran’s top negotiators have warned peace talks could be just an interlude before more conflict. Mehdi Mohammadi, a strategic adviser to chief Iranian negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, described the current stalemate Tuesday as the calm before the storm. 

>In an earlier social-media post, Mohammadi said the drivers of continued conflict include a “generational project for blood vengeance” for the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Mojtaba’s father, in the opening strikes of the war.

>“The Iranian nation still has much unfinished business with Trump,” said Mohammadi, who is also a member of Iran’s negotiating team. “Iran is prepared for the great confrontation.”

>During her January 2025 confirmation hearing to be secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem was asked how she would strengthen the nation’s cyberdefenses. Noem told senators that she would make the department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency “smaller” and “more nimble.” President Trump had created CISA as a stand-alone agency within the Department of Homeland Security during his first term to give cybersecurity more institutional heft, and it had grown quickly with support from lawmakers of both parties. But after CISA declared the 2020 presidential election to be “the most secure in American history” and the agency’s director, Christopher Krebs, refused to back Trump’s claims that the vote had been stolen, Krebs became a target for the president’s fury and a seething grudge.

>During the DOGE fever of the first few months of Trump’s return, CISA’s budget was reduced and its staff cut by one-third. The agency hasn’t had a permanent, Senate-confirmed director since Trump retook office. In April, the White House proposed deeper cuts to CISA’s budget, but Republican lawmakers have raised concerns that critical U.S. infrastructure is already too vulnerable.

>In June, Noem’s replacement, Markwayne Mullin, reversed course. He told lawmakers during a DHS budget hearing that he wants to add 600 positions at CISA. The agency has scheduled new hiring expos, and Acting Director Nicholas Andersen says that he’s “ruthlessly prioritizing” critical cyberdefense roles. But the United States is now nearly six months into a war with Iran, an aggressive and capable cyber foe—and preparations for the midterm elections are under way, with far less intelligence from CISA about foreign and domestic threats.

>Hackers with suspected ties to Iran targeted U.S. water and wastewater systems late last month in more than a dozen states. In Braham, Minnesota, the attacks temporarily shut down the water system. The town was one of more than 30 systems that were targeted, state officials said, describing the attacks as the most extensive they’ve seen. The Trump administration has not confirmed Iran’s purported role in the water-system hacks or said how many states or utility systems have been affected—or whether there have been other breaches. Three port facilities in North Carolina reported disruptions to operations from cyberattacks two weeks ago, although authorities haven’t linked the incidents to a specific actor. But CISA, the FBI, and the EPA warned last month that Iran-affiliated hackers are attempting to exploit vulnerabilities in U.S. systems. Cybersecurity experts told us that hacking attempts could spread as the midterms approach and hostilities with Tehran enter what Trump has characterized as a more low-key phase aimed at squeezing the Iranian economy. Iran may respond by going after U.S. infrastructure. DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

>Despite the elevated threat from Iran, the Trump administration continues to focus its attention on questioning the integrity of U.S. elections. The president and Andersen have each met recently with election deniers who have spent years attacking the officials who carry out the democratic process and calling for votes to be counted by hand. The administration has halted federal intelligence briefings for state officials responsible for overseeing the vote, and it has ended funding for an information-sharing network. Federal employees who worked to combat foreign disinformation within CISA were put on leave, and DHS hired Heather Honey, a conservative activist who’d tried to help overturn Trump’s 2020 defeat, to oversee election integrity. The administration is investigating the 2020 elections in Georgia and Arizona, and demanding access to data about voters—and Mullin has threatened to throw election officials in prison if they don’t comply.

>The administration’s stances are deepening distrust and straining relations with state and local election officials, especially those who are Democrats. Although the ability of foreign attackers to change election results remains low, given the decentralization of the system, former CISA officials told us, the broader goal of hackers would be to undermine confidence in democratic institutions and the integrity of U.S. elections. But that’s what the president and his allies are already doing as they continue to make false or unproven claims about rampant voter fraud. State officials worry that if a foreign hack actually happens, the administration will use the incident as a justification to press for more federal control.

>CISA was meant to provide nonpartisan, technical expertise and function like the Transportation Security Administration or the Secret Service. It has no regulatory authority, so it relies on the trust of state and local officials who want its support and advice. But the hope that it would float above politics was damaged after the 2020 presidential election. Republican lawmakers erupted at the Biden administration’s attempts to enlist CISA against foreign misinformation campaigns, accusing the administration of “weaponizing” the agency to pressure social-media companies and censor conservative speech.

>Today, it’s mostly Democratic officials who are wary of the agency. Half a dozen Democratic secretaries of state, along with some of their staff members, told us that they no longer look to CISA as a reliable partner to help safeguard their election-related systems. They have tried to replace the role of the agency by sharing information with one another and enlisting the help of private contractors, state and local law enforcement, state homeland-security departments and National Guard, emergency-management agencies, and nonprofit organizations (including one filled with ex-CISA officials).

>But no other entity can replace the extensive intelligence gathering and threat analysis that the federal government performs by drawing on its web of agencies and cyber units, experts told us. It took years for CISA to earn the trust of state and local election officials, some of whom had been suspicious of the agency during its early days but came to appreciate its help in responding to cyber threats, limiting damage, and even assessing buildings for vulnerabilities in an era shaped by political violence.

>Krebs, now an independent consultant, was singled out by the White House in an April 2025 presidential memorandum titled “Addressing Risks From Chris Krebs and Government Censorship” that claimed that he’d “falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines.”

>The attacks on water systems may be a warm-up. Krebs told us that cyberattackers target utilities that are in some way connected to the internet. Many smaller water systems with fewer employees lack expertise but may have a greater need to perform remote operations that require connectivity. During previous attacks on water utilities, hackers sought out systems with poor password security, which allowed them to disrupt operations until the interference was detected. Krebs said that these weaknesses are a result of a wider, lackluster approach to cyber risks, but he added that it’s unfair for Trump officials to tell local governments that it’s solely their responsibility to fend off the attacks.

>The U.S. bombing campaign in Iran has hit bridges, desalination plants, and power stations, and Trump has threatened to wipe out the rest of the country’s physical infrastructure. Although Iran can’t retaliate from the air, it can try to hit back online.

>“If you’re gonna go start a shooting war with someone that we know has capabilities, you have a responsibility to work with state and local partners and give them a hand,” Krebs said. “You can’t have a geopolitical conflict on a global level that’s going to manifest at the local level and not do anything in between.”

>Jen Easterly, who ran CISA during the Biden administration, told us that water systems and other U.S. utilities were created to maximize efficiency and reliability, not security. “They have a lot of inherent weaknesses, but I don’t think these small towns and municipalities should have to defend themselves from the Iranian government,” she said. AI models are making it easier for hackers to find vulnerabilities and exploit these systems, she said: “The threats are moving faster and the risks are more dangerous than ever.”

>Most of the voting equipment used in U.S. elections is not connected to the internet and produces paper ballots as a backup against manipulated tallies. It is the other, online elements of the electoral process that remain most vulnerable, including voter-registration systems and state and local election websites that report results. If hackers can inflict outages or make abrupt changes by hacking those sites, they can damage public confidence.

>Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who serves as secretary of state in Arizona, told us that he remains skeptical of CISA and the administration it reports to. “They cut off all support for us; they’ve threatened to investigate us, they’ve continued to promote falsehoods against election officials across the country,” he said. “And that’s not the posture that an ally would take. That’s what an adversary would do.”

>One day after the United States struck Iran’s nuclear capabilities last summer, a suspected pro-Iranian intruder gained access to the Arizona secretary of state’s server and websites. The cyberattacker defaced websites displaying election results dating to 2016 and replaced candidate photos with images of a late Iranian ayatollah. State staff scrambled to limit the damage and alerted state-government officials. But given CISA’s new direction and staff, Fontes did not directly tell the agency as he would have previously. Instead, his office asked state homeland-security officials to connect with CISA—but without identifying the office that was affected. “I don’t trust them,” Fontes told us at the time, adding that he had lost confidence that the agency was collaborating in good faith.

>Some state election officials told us that they fear that any information they share with CISA about cyber intrusions, weaknesses, or threats could be used against them as evidence of malfeasance or wrongdoing. They watched that scenario unfold when Trump blamed Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, for cyberattacks on his state’s water utilities, not Iran, the suspected culprit. “The strange thing is, after this water incident and others, I don’t have to worry about state and nonstate malicious actors,” Walz told us. “I have to worry about this administration.”

>One election official in a battleground state told us that he had received a threat briefing in April from major technology companies that said that, based on their intelligence, they have a “high degree of confidence that Iran is going to attempt to disrupt the general election this year.” The state official said that he wasn’t surprised by the information but that he was baffled when a CISA official reached out a few weeks ago, after Trump’s prime-time address questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election, for the first time in many months to let him know that CISA “would like to come back and help.” He remains skeptical.

>Andersen, CISA’s acting director, faced sharp questioning from Democratic secretaries of state when he appeared on a video call with them on Monday, twirling a pen and sipping an energy drink, according to people on the call. They asked him why they should trust the agency, whether CISA would resume offering them intelligence briefings, and whether it would restart penetration testing of their systems (another service that they said had gone dormant) before the November election. Andersen sidestepped some of the questions, gave noncommittal responses to others, and said that government shutdowns had affected various services. He also told the group that some of the services for election officials might resume in 2027, those on the call said.

>Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, told us that he got the impression that CISA is “mostly writing off the 2026 election cycle” when it comes to direct services for states. “They kind of seemed resigned to looking forward to the next election cycle and not this one,” Simon said. Several secretaries of state said that although they hope the federal government will restore the services before the November election, it is late in the cycle for CISA to help in any meaningful way.

>IT IS AS unusual in Germany as anywhere to see conservatives cavort with Marxists. But at a demonstration in Bitterfeld, a town in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, flags bearing the names of almost all Germany’s political parties flutter in the breeze, from the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) to the Greens and Social Democrats (SPD) all the way to the hard-left Die Linke. The *Bunt statt braun (*colourful instead of brown) demos began last year to counter rallies organised by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). For many in Bitterfeld’s town square, the prospect of the AfD in power is a horrifying reminder of German history’s darkest period.

>But as the flags suggest, a broad popular front may be needed to stop it. On September 6th Saxony-Anhalt will hold one of the most important state elections in postwar German history. The AfD, currently polling above 40%, could secure an absolute majority and take office for the first time in a German state. The threat is concentrating minds. The biggest cheer of the evening goes to a CDU member who tells the left-leaning crowd that “democracy is more important than political differences.”

>Germany’s proportional-voting system means absolute majorities are unusual. Of the country’s 16 states, only tiny Saarland has a single-party government. Parties assemble in a variety of coalitions, often given colourful names. But the AfD has been blocked from power everywhere by a Brandmauer, or firewall, that other parties have erected around it. The most important firewall is that maintained by the CDU, Germany’s ruling party and traditionally its largest. It formalised the policy in 2018 with an “incompatibility resolution” banning co-operation with both the AfD and Die Linke.

>But as the AfD has grown, the Brandmauer has become something like an organising principle of public life. Legislative measures that could win majorities are ruled out, because AfD votes cannot be allowed to tip the scale. Parliamentary rules are changed to stop the party from thwarting the election of judges. AfD MPs are excluded from Bundestag vice-presidencies, and even from its football team. “They don’t greet you, they don’t shake your hand, you are a non-person,” says Gerold Otten, an AfD MP, of his colleagues in leftist parties. The Brandmauer even extends beyond politics. Business groups have retracted invitations to AfD MPs after furious backlashes.

>Has the policy worked? For some, keeping the AfD out of power is justification enough. The AfD is among the more extreme of Europe’s populist outfits, many of which shun its company. It flirts with racism and Nazi imagery, has sympathy for Vladimir Putin and harbours former neo-Nazis in its ranks. Its boorish behaviour demeans parliaments. “We don’t exclude the AfD because of the 2018 resolution, but because we don’t share any values with it,” says Wiebke Winter, head of the CDU in the city-state of Bremen.

>Chart: The Economist

>Yet the Brandmauer has failed to arrest the AfD’s rise. In 2018 Friedrich Merz, now the CDU leader and Germany’s chancellor, vowed to halve the AfD’s vote. He hoped tacking right on immigration and governing well could win back voters seduced by the AfD’s narrative. None of this has worked. Irregular immigration has plummeted, but the AfD has simply moved further right, now raging against “culturally foreign” workers and urging “remigration” (a slippery term that can mean anything from deporting asylum-seekers to ethnic cleansing). The CDU is nudging record lows in polls, while the AfD has enjoyed a lead for months (see chart). Its support has doubled since Mr Merz’s pledge.

>And in Saxony-Anhalt and other AfD strongholds, the Brandmauer is already struggling to hold. Armin Schenk, Bitterfeld’s CDU mayor, found lurking on the edge of the protest, says the “right-wing extremist” AfD should be kept from power in the country that perpetrated the Holocaust. But in Bitterfeld, he adds, “the Brandmauer is not a reality,” because “in most cases decisions cannot be taken without the AfD.” With 15 of the city’s 40 council seats, it is the largest party.

>Even when the Brandmauer holds, it forces other parties to contort themselves around it. Thuringia and Saxony, two other eastern states, assembled incoherent or unstable CDU-led minority governments after a strong AfD performance in elections in 2024. They are held together by strong leaders. But they serve the AfD’s narrative that the mainstream outfits are indistinguishable Kartellparteien (“cartel parties”).

>Saxony-Anhalt threatens to push the strategy to its limits. If the AfD wins on September 6th, the Brandmauer is irrelevant. If it falls just short, the CDU will probably need support from every other party, including Die Linke, to take office. Confronted with that prospect, some CDU members might defect: one AfD candidate in Saxony-Anhalt reckons five are ready to jump. If not, the strains of buying off the hard left would test Mr Merz’s authority so sorely that some think it could end his career. And if, as polls suggest, the AfD wins twice as many seats as the CDU yet remains locked out of power, it will not only be AfD supporters who ask whether German democracy is working.

>It is dawning on the CDU that it has painted itself into a corner. “Anyone still talking about firewalls has not recognised the signs of the times,” said Michael Kretschmer, the CDU premier of Saxony, recently. The Brandmauer in effect obliges the party to seek coalitions only to its left, especially with the SPD, which has been in power in Germany almost without interruption since 1998—despite these days barely polling in double figures. CDU members’ frustration with concessions to the SPD inspires occasional calls for a minority government that could, on certain issues (such as migration, tax and energy), seek a “conservative majority” with the AfD. Voters are shifting, too. Support for the anti-AfD Brandmauer has dwindled from a clear majority to 41%.

>Yet the CDU has no easy way out. Tearing down the Brandmauer would split the party down the middle and trigger a voter exodus. Even minor violations have caused trouble. In 2020 the CDU voted with the AfD to elect a (short-lived) premier in Thuringia; the ensuing furore toppled Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the party’s national leader. In January 2025 Mr Merz ordered his party to vote with the AfD on symbolic anti-migration measures in the Bundestag. This sparked protests across Germany and boosted support for Die Linke at the subsequent election. The chancellor is said to be traumatised by the experience.

>To avoid these dilemmas, some in the CDU quietly hope for an AfD majority in Saxony-Anhalt. But this does not amount to a strategy. “There has never been a reasonable debate about how to handle the AfD in the CDU, just a reflex to exclude them as the new Nazis,” says Andreas Rödder, a professor who in 2023 resigned as head of the CDU’s fundamental-values commission over his calls for openness to minority governments rather than a rigid Brandmauer.

>As for the AfD, it once railed against the Brandmauer as a gross violation of democracy. But these days many in the AfD look forward to governing alone. “We don’t think about how to make ourselves nice so that the CDU asks us for a coalition,” says Malte Kaufmann, an AfD MP. The party’s deputy chairman in Saxony-Anhalt has said their voters want them to “finish off” the CDU rather than co-operate with it.

>In some countries populists have moderated to gain power. But behind the Brandmauer, the AfD has had no incentive to do so. Torben Braga, another MP, says those in the party who would like to tack to the centre have lost the argument for two reasons. First, “our election results are getting better and better without us being forced to change.” Second, the party fears that moderating its positions and ejecting hardliners would alienate some voters. “The Brandmauer protects us from having to deal with very difficult questions,” Mr Braga says.

>That seems right. Although it has professionalised its organisation and communication, the AfD is riven by scandal, power struggles and discord, especially on foreign policy. It has no coherent governing programme. Off the record, party figures are extraordinarily rude about one another. But none of this seems to matter. Behind the Brandmauer you can promise anything, says Christian Stecker, a political scientist at the Technical University in Darmstadt. “It protects them from the disappointment that accountability in a democracy implies.”

>In despair, some mainstream politicians, including Ms Winter in the CDU, now look favourably on calls to ban the AfD, something explicitly allowed under Germany’s constitution. But even if parliament approved that proposal, which seems unlikely, the constitutional court would take years to rule on it. Others hope that the centre can somehow win back its lost voters: perhaps by ditching the wildly unpopular Mr Merz.

>The Brandmauer looks intact for now. One former CDU minister says that 90% of senior figures in the party are opposed to working with the AfD. “It would not only damage us politically but would be against the principles that define our republic,” he says. But a growing number sympathise with Mr Stecker’s gloomier view. “It’s too late for the CDU to turn around, and too late for the AfD to accept any turnaround,” he says. “Some things will tumble down, new things will emerge—and we don’t know what it will all look like.” ■

>“HEALTH-CARE reform...is the great unfinished business of our society,” observed Ted Kennedy, a Democratic senator, before he died in 2009. America was the only large rich country that did not have universal health care. Instead, its system was a patchwork. The old, poor and disabled were covered by government programmes. Most working-age Americans got insurance through their jobs. But pity those without such coverage, who had to navigate the fragmented, expensive and often bewildering individual insurance market.

>The Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010, tried to keep America’s system more or less intact, but expand insurance for the poor and make it easier for individuals to buy coverage, through new “exchanges” where they could compare and buy plans. Obamacare was never enough for the likes of Bernie Sanders, a leftist senator who preferred universal coverage. Those calls are now being amplified by a new generation of Democrats such as Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Senate nominee, who has made Medicare-for-all a central part of his campaign. Back in 2010 even Obamacare’s most fervent advocates acknowledged, in private, that it was an imperfect bandage, particularly for those on the individual market. New data show how that bandage is unravelling.

>To help expand coverage for individuals, Obamacare gave subsidies to help poor and middle-class Americans cover the cost of plans on the new exchanges. But the mandate to buy insurance was effectively eliminated in 2019. Uptake was limited until 2021, when Congress made subsidies more generous for those who already qualified and available to some who hadn’t. Enrolment then nearly doubled by 2025. Democrats sought unsuccessfully to extend the extra financial assistance, which would have cost about $35bn this year—about as much as the Iran war so far, according to the Pentagon’s estimate. Now that those subsidies are diminished, the individual market looks more frail than ever.

>Figures from insurers and state marketplaces show the effect of the rollback. The number of people buying coverage through the exchanges has already fallen to 19.2m from 21.8m last year. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a non-partisan scorekeeper, reckons that by the end of this year it is likely to fall below 17m. Of those who dropped off the exchanges, most appear to be going without coverage.

>The leavers tend to be more healthy than those who remain on the exchanges, which means the latter are more costly to insure. Combine a sicker patient population and general inflation in health costs, and the result is higher premiums: this year the average payment increased from $113 to $178 per month. To avoid the new costs, many enrollees are buying skimpier plans. In the past year the average amount an individual must pay out of pocket before insurance kicks in has jumped by nearly 40%, to $3,800.

>This has raised fears of an adverse-selection feedback loop, where higher premiums and skimpier plans make insurance still less attractive, particularly to healthier customers. As they leave the exchanges, premiums are driven higher yet. Insurers have proposed a median premium increase of 15% for 2027, according to KFF, a health-policy think-tank. These increases must be reviewed by state regulators. If they materialise, pre-subsidy premiums will have grown by more than a third since 2025. The KFF imagines a 40-year-old in Indiana earning $65,000. In 2025, with subsidies, her monthly premium was $316. This year it is $477. Next year it will probably be close to $550.

>Does this threaten the viability of the exchanges? The CBO estimates that by 2028, 10m fewer Americans will get insurance on the marketplaces compared with last year. But they will probably avoid collapse, says Ben Sommers, a health economist at Harvard. The remaining subsidies should convince enough people to remain enrolled. “The changes basically get us back to what the marketplace looked like from 2016 to 2019,” says Mr Sommers. The exchanges will be smaller, with fewer participating insurers and sicker customers.

>There will also be more people without insurance. Evidence suggests that they will put off needed treatment, like certain prescription medicines and surgeries. “We know that from a decade or more of research on the Affordable Care Act,” explains Mr Sommers. Hospitals must still provide emergency care for them, even if they cannot pay. In May unpaid care was up by an average of 16% compared with a year earlier, according to Kaufman Hall, a consultancy. HCA Healthcare, a for-profit hospital group, reckons the new uninsured population will cost the chain at least $1bn in operating profits this year, equivalent to about 15% of predicted net income. The experience shows “people generally want health insurance,” says Cynthia Cox of KFF. “It’s just a question of whether they can afford it or not.” ■

>One evening six years ago Saakin Abdi, a young civil servant, enjoyed an ice-cream in central Mogadishu. Back then, residing in the Somali capital meant living with the knowledge that at any moment you could be the next victim of al-Shabab, al-Qaeda’s richest and deadliest affiliate. The next evening, a friend of Ms Abdi’s was in the same ice-cream parlour when a militant burst through the door and blew himself up. Her friend and six others were killed. They were among at least 320 people who died in al-Shabab attacks in the city in 2020.

>Mogadishu has been synonymous with violence ever since Somalia’s central state collapsed in the 1990s. Yet in recent years it has undergone a quiet transformation. Al-Shabab’s attacks in the city have fallen from 144 in the third quarter of 2022, when Hassan Sheikh Mohamud took office as president, to just five in the second quarter of this year. Data collected by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED), a monitoring group, suggest the number of deaths in Mogadishu linked to al-Shabab is on track in 2026 to be the lowest since the group emerged in the mid-2000s (see chart).

>Chart: The Economist

>“This is the biggest achievement of Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s administration,” says Omar Mahmood of the International Crisis Group (ICG), a think-tank. Residents used to avoid venturing out after dark, because “al-Shabab, or those fighting it, might kill you,” recalls Ms Abdi. Today, dozens of new cafés are open past midnight, thronged with young Somalis posting videos on TikTok and Instagram. On July 1st Mr Mohamud, who has survived multiple assassination attempts including one in Baidoa, the seat of government of South-West state, earlier this year, marked Somalia’s independence day by giving an unprecedented public address at one of Mogadishu’s most frequently targeted junctions. Hundreds joined him.

>That is a marked change from the late 2010s, when “we never knew if we’d return home alive when we went out in the morning,” recalls a Somali MP. An official says he survived six different explosions after joining the government in 2014. A lorry bomb in 2017 killed almost 600 people.

>Photograph: Planet Labs PBC

>The fruits of better security are plain to see. “Business is booming,” says Gamal Hassan, the commerce minister. New buildings are going up at a frenetic pace. The district around the airport, in particular, has grown much denser (see satellite images). Dahab Tower, a 26-floor confection of luxury flats, a mall, a gym and a mosque, is due to open this year. It sits close to the spot where, in 1993, the bodies of two American soldiers were dragged through the streets after militiamen shot down a Black Hawk helicopter. Nearby is Beydan Coffee, a thriving pan-African chain founded by a Somali who returned from Sweden in the 2010s.

>Photograph: Eduardo Soteras Jalil/ Panos Pictures

>What explains the lull in attacks is less obvious. The government boasts that, in the words of a former intelligence officer, it has “completely closed the doors” on al-Shabab. Mr Mahmood of the ICG credits “prosaic” measures such as the spread of CCTV cameras, and an electronic database that police equipped with iPads use to identify civilian cars at checkpoints. Plainclothes intelligence officers have been deployed in large numbers.

>Turkey, the staunchest foreign backer of Mr Mohamud’s government, has played a big role. “It’s the Turks,” says a Western diplomat in Mogadishu, asked to explain improved security. Under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, the country has become Somalia’s most important investor, with business interests including the airport and the port, a new spaceport and offshore oil-and-gas exploration, all clustered in or around the capital. Since Turkey opened its largest overseas military base in Mogadishu in 2017, its forces have trained Somali soldiers, conducted drone strikes and joined Somalia’s national army in operations against al-Shabab.

>How much this has weakened al-Shabab beyond the capital is unclear. Since Donald Trump returned to office in 2025, Turkish and Somali air strikes outside Mogadishu have been accompanied by the most intensive American aerial campaign in Somalia’s history. Yet the federal government’s territorial reach has barely budged in 18 months. Much of Mogadishu’s hinterland remains under al-Shabab’s control.

>Some analysts suspect the group may be purposefully restraining itself. “Al-Shabab itself has changed its strategy and tactics,” argues Afyare Abdi Elmi of City University of Mogadishu. Fewer mass-casualty attacks in the capital may be a bid to soften its image. Al-Shabab is benefiting from a status quo where it can extort businesses in the capital largely unchecked. For now, it may see little cause to step up attacks.

>Yet there are several reasons to mistrust the calm. The first is a stand-off over delayed elections between the president and his rivals. In June brief clashes between the army and militias linked to two opposition leaders killed at least 13 people.

>Even more worrying is the president’s escalating confrontation with Somalia’s regional states. In March Mr Mohamud sent troops into Baidoa to depose the governor. In recent weeks he has been trying to mobilise local forces against the leadership of the northern state of Puntland. “They started well against al-Shabab in 2022,” says Ahmed Koshin, a former defence official, of Mr Mohamud’s government. “But since then they’ve put the state’s resources into political infighting.”

>Those resources are shrinking. On July 1st America said it would no longer support UNSOS, the UN’s logistics body responsible for supplying the African Union peacekeepers that have propped up the federal government since 2007. European sources say the EU will not plug the gap, leaving the peacekeeping mission in the lurch. Without an alternative, Mr Mahmood reckons it could fold as early as 2027.

>Somali officials appear confident that the country’s strategic position at one of the two gateways to the Red Sea means foreign partners will not step back entirely. A jihadist takeover of Mogadishu remains remote. But it would take much less to shatter the newfound sense of security. “You never know,” says Ms Abdi. “It sometimes feels like things can go back.” ■

>The Home Office is investigating claims that China is funding pro-Palestinian marches, The Telegraph can reveal.

>On Thursday, The Telegraph revealed a US investigation into the British activities of Code Pink, a far-Left feminist protest group, that has organised marches in Whitehall and protests at military bases.

>Code Pink has organised protests in the UK against Britain’s involvement in “the genocide in Gaza”, encouraged its activists to demonstrate outside RAF bases, and issued statements claiming that Britain’s leaders have been “bought by Zionism”.

>It is understood that the Home Office is “looking into the issues raised” as part of its remit to counter foreign interference in Britain.

>Code Pink protest in London in 2025 Credit: Instagram/@codepinkalert

>A Government spokesman said: “The first duty of government is to protect our national security. That is why we have brought forward some of the most robust measures to defend our country and democracy from state-backed threats.

>“Protecting the UK’s democracy and democratic institutions is fundamental to our national security, and we will continue to take whatever action is necessary to safeguard them.”

>The US investigation focuses on Neville Roy Singham, a tech tycoon who has given millions of dollars to Code Pink, which is run by his wife, Jodie Evans.

>The congressional ways and means committee and the US department of justice are both examining claims that Mr Singham used his money to spread pro-China propaganda and advance the interests of Beijing.

>The committee’s lines of inquiry include £250,000 in alleged payments to a company linked with Code Pink in the UK, from businesses connected to Mr Singham.

>Neville Roy Singham, a tech tycoon has given millions of dollars to Code Pink, which is run by his wife, Jodie Evans Credit: Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images North America

>It comes amid concern that Beijing is seeking to exploit divisive causes in the West to deepen social tensions and wage what critics describe as “political warfare” against its adversaries.

>Luke de Pulford, of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, said: “It is good news the Home Office has responded positively to the Telegraph report.

>“But we have to be honest – the UK is under siege from China and practically defenceless on the battlefield. The CCP is engaged in a whole-of-state effort to manipulate narratives abroad, to sow division and chaos.

>“Communist Party academics call this kind of activity unrestricted warfare: seeking advantage through non-military means, and they’re very good at it.

>“We have yet to even recognise this acute threat, let alone defend ourselves appropriately.”

>Code Pink encourages activists to join mass pro-Palestinian marches and has organised demonstrations at the Ministry of Defence as well as the London office of an arms company.

>It describes itself as a feminist grassroots organisation working to end warfare and imperialism, and support peace and human rights.

>Campaigner Suzy Gilbert has been described as Code Pink’s ‘contact in Britain’

>One of the movement’s senior campaign organisers in the UK is Suzie Gilbert, who has been described as its “contact in Britain”.

>Her work with the group has included campaigning for peace with Iran, demonstrations calling for the removal of British military bases in Cyprus, and visiting China under the theme that it “is not our enemy”.

>On Thursday night, a spokesman for Ms Gilbert denied being part of any “propaganda campaign” on behalf of Beijing.

>Code Pink in the US has received millions of dollars from Mr Singham, who is facing multiple investigations over allegations that his network has produced pro-China propaganda on behalf of the communist regime in Beijing.

>The ways and means committee has claimed that Code Pink – which was founded by Ms Evans, appeared to have been “funded and influenced by Mr Singham and the communist Chinese government”.

>Luke de Pulford, of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, said that the Chinese Communist Party is ‘engaged in a whole-of-state effort to manipulate narratives abroad, to sow division and chaos’ Credit: SOPA Images/LightRocket

>Jason Smith, the committee’s chairman, told The Telegraph: “It’s clear from the investigation that Singham’s money and influence does not stop at America’s borders.

>“The committee is well aware that Singham’s funding is supporting pro-Hamas and pro-communist causes not only in the United States, but also overseas, including in the United Kingdom.”

>The department of justice, meanwhile, has launched a federal grand jury investigation into his links with China.

>The allegations prompted MPs to call for British authorities to investigate the network.

>Mr Singham has previously denied working on behalf of China.

>When allegations first surfaced about him in 2023, he said: “I categorically deny and repudiate any suggestion that I am a member of, work for, take orders from, or follow instructions of any political party or government or their representatives.

>“I am solely guided by my beliefs, which are my long-held personal views.”

>It’s difficult to believe that after half a century of dealing with the Islamic Republic of Iran, the United States remains “perplexed,” as The New York Times recently described it, by the nature of its revolutionary regime. Curiously, however, every American administration since the birth of the Islamic Republic in 1979 has posited the same theory about the regime’s nature: namely, that the ruling clique in Iran is composed of moderates and hard-liners who continually vie for power, and that America can meaningfully affect Iranian internal power dynamics.

>The belief in the centrality of this supposed factional war has governed Washington’s dealings with Tehran for the past five decades. As the NYT put it*,* “Mr. Trump is hardly the first U.S. president who has struggled to read Iran. Each of his predecessors since the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution has tried to decode Iran’s murky power structure and the mind-set of its political leadership.”

>This convention serves a function for American political leaders, primarily as a way of deflecting criticism of concessions to Iran. It has evolved from a misreading of a nascent revolutionary regime to a cover for cutting deals with it and for delegitimizing domestic opponents.

>First Encounters:

>In the months after the shah’s fall, the Carter administration bet on Iran’s first postrevolutionary government led by Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan and Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi, which was considered a relatively secular, technocratic provisional leadership distinct from Ruhollah Khomeini’s clerical circle, with which the United States could have a working relationship. Recalling the period in a later interview, Carter described securing a personal commitment from Bazargan that Iran’s government would prevent any attack on the American embassy. But the gambit quickly failed when, as Carter noted, Khomeini endorsed the students who seized the embassy. “This cemented they were without a government,” Carter said.

>That is, all that mattered was Khomeini. Bazargan’s government was dismissed, and the moderate interlocutor Washington had been counting on to restrain the revolution turned out to have no power. On Jan. 19, 1981, the outgoing Carter administration and the new Islamic Republic signed the Algiers Accords, ending the 444-day hostage crisis. On paper, it was a diplomatic achievement, but none of it mattered as Tehran kept sponsoring hostage-taking and attacks on American targets for decades afterwards.

>The lesson of the first American encounter with the revolutionary regime was that Iranian diplomatic figures have a specific function within a system run by the security and clerical apparatus and do not represent an alternate, let alone viable, power center.

>

>The Reagan Years:

>Facing a new wave of American hostages abducted in Lebanon, the Reagan administration secretly agreed to sell arms via Israel to Iran—which was then in the middle of its war with Iraq—in the hope of empowering what officials described to themselves as moderate elements inside the Iranian government who might reciprocate with influence over the hostage takers. As the 1987 Tower Commission Report detailed, the president approved a plan for Israel to ship U.S.-made TOW missiles to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages. One of the drivers of the decision, the report added, was that “the U.S. Government had a latent and unresolved interest in establishing ties to Iran.” In handwritten, since-declassified notes of a Nov. 10, 1986, White House meeting, Chief of Staff Donald Regan recorded National Security Adviser John Poindexter telling the president and his top aides that the objectives of the Iran program had been to establish contact with “more moderate elements” inside the regime, curb Iran’s export of terrorism, and secure the hostages’ release.

>The scheme accomplished almost none of its stated goals. Some hostages were freed, but others were promptly taken to replace them. No moderate faction was empowered by the arms sales. There was only a scandal that consumed the last two years of Reagan’s presidency. Addressing the nation on March 4, 1987, Reagan told Americans that what began as a strategic opening to Iran had deteriorated, “in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages,” and that he took full responsibility. But Reagan defended the rationale behind the opening: namely, “to develop relations with those who might assume leadership in a post-Khomeini government.”

>Washington’s interest in establishing ties to the Islamic Republic remained latent and unresolved, and it would continue to animate American Iran policy for the next four decades.

>The Clinton Years:

>A year after the Iranian proxy Hezbollah al-Hejaz bombed a U.S. military housing complex in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. airmen, the election of Mohammad Khatami as Iran’s president in 1997 provided the Clinton administration with an opportunity to once again engage the regime. Khatami ran on a platform of dialogue with the West and domestic liberalization, which allowed Washington to claim that a genuine reformist opening had arrived. On March 17, 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright rehashed the same conceit about the alleged perennial struggle between moderates and hard-liners in Iran. “As in any diverse society, there are many currents swirling about in Iran. Some are driving the country forward; others are holding it back,” Albright said. And while the military and foreign policy remain in the wrong hands, Albright added, “the momentum in the direction of internal reform, freedom and openness is growing stronger.”

>U.S. policy, then, was to tip the scales in favor of the reformers and moderates. And so, Albright announced that Washington would ease sanctions on Iranian carpets, food, and other goods, expand academic and cultural exchanges, and work toward settling outstanding legal claims between the two countries. Albright went further, acknowledging that the 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh had been, in her words, a setback for Iran’s political development, in an apparent bid to clear a manufactured historical grievance the Iranian government invoked constantly.

>Of course, the U.S. posture did not alter Iran’s foreign policy, the regime’s decision-making hierarchy, or the system of repression on which it rested. In fact, it was under Mohammad Khatami that the Islamic Republic scaled up its nuclear weapons program, including nuclear warhead development and the then-secret nuclear facility at Natanz and the heavy water facility at Arak, setting it on the trajectory it’s been on for the past quarter century.

>In other words, it wasn’t that the empowered so-called moderate failed to change the things that mattered because the apparatus that wielded actual power blocked him—which alone should have put the entire paradigm to rest. Rather, the Khatami presidency showed that “moderates” and “hard-liners” were two facets of a single system, in which the moderates’ function is to manage Westerners on behalf of the system, allowing Western officials to develop a more palatable communications strategy for their domestic audiences.

>The Bush Years:

>The post-9/11 revelation of Iran’s secret nuclear facilities and the subsequent U.S. war in Iraq colored the next chapter of U.S.-Iran relations. First, a variant of the Iran engagement narrative gained traction in Washington in the form of a fictional 2003 offer of a “grand bargain” with Tehran, which was marketed especially by a D.C. couple who worked in the Bush administration.

>In this mythical iteration, the Iranians were supposedly offering to stop supporting terrorist groups, shut down their nuclear weapons program, and even recognize Israel if the United States were to guarantee that it would forgo any plans for regime change. This variant also introduced another twist in that it proposed a system-wide deal with the Iranians and was not predicated on the supposed moderate vs. hard-liner factional divide.

>While this offer was purely imaginary, it did serve to establish engagement with Iran as the default position in Washington—which would be greased by Iranian lobbyists at the behest of regime officials. The expression of this establishment conventional wisdom came in the form of the 2006 Iraq Study Group report (aka the Baker-Hamilton report, named after the bipartisan congressional commission’s co-chairs, former Secretary of State James Baker and former Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton). As George W. Bush’s Iraq campaign stalled, the bipartisan commission’s report recommended a diplomatic outreach to Iran. One of the report’s authors was Ben Rhodes, future senior official in the Barack Obama White House.

>A key premise of the report, which would serve as the baseline for Obama’s approach, was that Washington and Tehran were natural allies—if only the United States would back away from its belligerence toward Iran and establish daylight between itself and Israel.

>The Obama Years:

>Barack Obama, who campaigned on diplomatic engagement with Iran, brought about a paradigm shift once in office. During his presidency, what began decades earlier as largely improvised outreach now matured into a full-blown, formal political and communications strategy that would define U.S. policy over Obama’s two terms in office and beyond.

>Under Obama, the original conceit of “moderates vs. hard-liners” was thoroughly reconfigured and repurposed. Although upon taking office Obama had invited Iran to “unclench its fist” and accept his offer for dialogue, he did not restrict his invitation to “moderates” to the exclusion of “hard-liners.” In fact, beginning in 2009, he sent letters directly to then-Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, first after the beginning of a wave of anti-regime protests in June and then in September, after the regime had brutally put them down. The administration was able to hide the lack of any reciprocity behind the fact that, throughout Obama’s first term, Iran’s government was led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a “hard-liner” who could not be spun as a “moderate” or “pragmatist.” At the same time, however, Obama not only sent a third letter to Khamenei in January 2012, but also, in July, a few months before the U.S. election, sent representatives to meet secretly with Ahmadinejad government officials in Oman.

>Upon his reelection, Obama ramped up the outreach, unencumbered by a “hard-line” government in Tehran, months before the Iranians would have their own election. The election of Hassan Rouhani in 2013 then gave the administration cover to press ahead with its opening to the Islamic Republic.

>The administration’s comms spun revisionist yarn around Rouhani’s election, aligning its diplomatic opening with the familiar narrative of “moderates vs. hard-liners.” In a November 2013 background briefing on the signing of the Joint Plan of Action interim deal with Iran, a senior official laid out the administration’s argument for relieving sanctions pressure on Iran: the administration’s approach had changed the Iranians’ calculus, and “we began to see that with the election of a new President who ran on a mandate to achieve sanctions relief through a more moderate foreign policy towards the West.”

>To market the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which was agreed to in July 2015, and to keep its critics off balance, the administration developed a multifaceted comms strategy. When it came to the relationship between the deal and regime moderation, Obama talked from both sides of his mouth, at once insisting that no such calculation lay behind the JCPOA while also putting forward that the deal would empower moderate voices in Iran. As he stated in a 2015 interview with NPR (reiterating what he had told Jeffrey Goldberg a year earlier), “it is possible that if we sign this nuclear deal, we strengthen the hand of those more moderate forces inside of Iran.”

>This innovation in the use of the “moderates vs. hard-liners” taxonomy further allowed Obama to disconnect his deal from continued Iranian terrorist activity. After all, while he suggested that it would strengthen moderates, Obama also said that the JCPOA wasn’t predicated on ending Iranian malign behavior. But even as Obama positioned himself above the conceit of Iranian factionalism, the administration implemented a region-wide policy of de facto partnership with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), using the anti-ISIS campaign as justification and cover. Obama went so far as to express to Gulf Arab leaders his admiration for IRGC-Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, and as he had done with Khamenei, he sent letters to the Iranian terror chief. Moreover, far from constraining the “hard-liners,” one of the provisions of the JCPOA was the eventual lifting of sanctions on Soleimani.

>Obama’s other major innovation was to inject the “moderates vs. hard-liners” categories into American political discourse and weaponize them against his domestic opponents. Critics of the JCPOA were thus dubbed “hard-liners” who mirrored their Iranian counterparts and made common cause with them against the forces of moderation and reason in both Tehran and Washington.

>As a key corollary of this tactic, Obama also mainstreamed the scapegoating of Israel and its domestic supporters as obstacles to a reasonable deal with Iran—a line that was often amplified by allied Iranian validators and lobbyists, such as Trita Parsi.

>Obama’s innovations have fundamentally reshaped U.S. policy and domestic discourse and continue to frame them to this day.

>Trump I and the Biden Interregnum:

>Donald Trump’s first term seemed like a rejection of the pattern and its underlying premise. On May 8, 2018, Trump announced that the United States was withdrawing from the JCPOA and reimposing sanctions on Iran. At the same time, the White House did not abandon the pursuit of a new, comprehensive deal that would explicitly include ending the Islamic Republic’s broader malign activities. However, the first Trump administration refrained from framing its diplomatic effort in terms of “moderates” and “hard-liners.”

>But Trump made two moves that would derail his predecessor’s attempt at an accommodation and partnership with the “hard-liners” that ran Iran. Trump sanctioned the IRGC—first in October 2017, as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist under Executive Order 13224, and then, more consequentially, in April 2019 as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) under Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Then, in January 2020, Trump ordered a drone strike that killed Soleimani, “the number-one terrorist anywhere in the world.” These two actions broke with all of Trump’s predecessors while also laying down obstacles for the Obama team’s effort to revive the JCPOA under the Biden administration.

>Underscoring the duplicitousness of Obama’s “moderates vs. hard-liners” narrative, the Biden administration, in a desperate effort to resurrect the JCPOA spearheaded by Obama’s Iran point man Robert Malley, attempted to delist the IRGC, even as the latter was actively running plots to assassinate senior U.S. officials on American soil. Ultimately, the effort failed, but the Biden administration did not enforce sanctions, and during its tenure, the Iranians expanded their installation of advanced centrifuges and increased their highly enriched uranium stockpiles.

>The Iran War:

>Obama would have the last laugh in Trump’s second term. Despite the joint U.S. and Israeli military operation destroying much of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure in summer 2025 and spring 2026, Trump, eager to secure a deal with Iran, reverted to the “moderates vs. hard-liners” paradigm, whose core function has always been to provide cover for cutting deals with the “Death to America” regime.

>Right from the beginning of Operation Epic Fury, after it had killed Khamenei, the Trump administration was already laying out scenarios for how to deal with the regime, including a so-called Venezuela option, which meant dealing with an IRGC regime minus those who have been eliminated. Early on, IRGC veteran and Parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf was floated as the Iranian version of Venezuela’s Delcy Rodriguez: the regime insider who would cut a deal with the Americans in exchange for regime continuity. Soon the administration began negotiating with the Iranians, led by Ghalibaf, and it immediately settled into its version of the “moderates vs. hard-liners” classification as it pursued talks over the next four months.

>Echoing Obama’s aforementioned use of the Rouhani election as cover, Trump labeled the Iranians with whom he was talking as “new” and “reasonable,” contrasting them with a previous tier that was eliminated in strikes. Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed this assessment in late March but refrained from disclosing the identities of the Iranian negotiators “because it probably would get them in trouble with some other groups of people inside of Iran,” suggesting an internal struggle with a more radical “hard-liner” faction. Although, Rubio added, it wasn’t clear which of the two factions was the one running the show. “At the end of the day, we have to see if these people”—that is, the “reasonable” moderates—“end up being the ones in charge, seeing if they’re the ones that have the power to deliver.”

>Vice President JD Vance, meanwhile, struck a more optimistic tone, including about the so-called hard-liners, claiming a breakthrough that had supposedly eluded every previous American administration for 47 years. In June, he told CNN that “the coolest thing about the progress we’ve made of the last few weeks is that you see people within the Iranian system—senior leadership, even IRGC officials—say, ‘You know what, we may have some animosity, we may have some mistrust, but we recognize the way that we’ve done business with the United States for 47 years is a mistake; let’s try something else.’ We’re gonna verify that, of course, but we’re certainly willing to try something else if they comply.”

>Of course, none of that was real. The regime’s behavior did not change, and talks broke down. So, in July, Vance pivoted from his assessment of the new and cool IRGC and reverted to a variant of the “hard-liners” as spoilers. Only in Vance’s telling, the hard-liners were going through growing pains in their evergreen struggle with the “pragmatists.” In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Vance offered his theory for why the deal he negotiated had unraveled: Iranian hard-liners, alarmed at how much leverage they had surrendered once the Strait of Hormuz reopened and oil began flowing again, panicked and started shooting at ships. “There was this kind of freak-out in their system. So they shot at a couple of ships,” Vance offered. “The hard-liners have really, really reacted strongly to all the oil that’s coming out of the Strait of Hormuz. … Now the pragmatists in their system are saying this was a mistake. Let’s keep on talking.”

>Trump and Vance had now introduced a variant of Obama’s innovation with the “moderates vs. hard-liners,” projecting that dichotomy onto the IRGC/hard-liners themselves. In a June 12 briefing, for example, a senior administration official—likely Vance himself—offered the following assessment: “The Iranian hard-liners, some of them want to kill the deal, but I think most of them actually want the deal.”

>But since nothing in Iran’s behavior had changed, with the regime continuously attacking U.S. bases, regional allies, and targeting international shipping while ignoring Trump’s threats and occasional retaliatory strikes, the U.S. president has oscillated between contradictory characterizations of the Iranians. The people he had earlier described as reasonable became lunatics and sick scum. But, now fully invested in his deal with them, Trump also leaned on one of the established functions of the “moderates vs. hard-liners” device, attributing bad behavior to the “hard-liners” and thereby justifying continued talks with the imaginary “moderates.” After a thwarted missile strike against U.S. positions in Jordan in late July, Trump attributed the action not to the reasonable, moderate pragmatists, but rather to those pesky radical hard-liners. “It was a different group than we’re dealing with,” he insisted. “They’ve already apologized.”

>Similarly, and using essentially the same language as the Obama administration more than a decade ago, Vance told Fox News in early August that the Iranians “have a fractured system. So there are people within their system who want the war to be over. There are also people in their system who are crazy radicals who want the war to continue.”

>In other words, as things stand, Trump has adopted entirely the framework, categories, and rhetorical devices of his predecessors, whom he had described as losers who didn’t know how to deal with the mendacious Iranian regime. And he has done so for the same reason: to justify continued talks with, and concessions to, the hard men of the IRGC.

>What’s more, the administration—specifically Vance—has adopted Obama’s other malignant innovation: blaming Israel and accusing domestic critics of being warmongering agents of influence on its behalf. As the vice president told Rogan last month, he knew “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that the Israeli government was trying to keep the war with Iran going indefinitely and that it was Israeli interference that sabotaged the cease-fire he and special envoy Steve Witkoff had negotiated. Moreover, Vance added, “certain elements within the Israeli government” had funded a campaign “to try to derail the negotiation and try to derail the deal.”

>Further echoing Obama’s language, in a June 15 briefing, a senior U.S. official—again, likely Vance himself—employed, verbatim, Obama’s characterization of domestic critics as a mirror of Iran’s hard-liners. “What you’re seeing now is hard-liners on both sides. In the Iranian system, they’re protesting [against the deal]. And we have certain people in the American system who say there’s no deal you could ever do with Iran ever, who are obviously making a lot of noise.”

>After five decades of dealing with the regime, to observe that the theory of an Iranian moderate faction opposed to the hard-line security establishment misreads the nature of the regime is to state the obvious. The fact is, going back at the very least to Obama—that is, two of those five decades—the U.S. government has perfectly understood what the Islamic Republic is.

>Israeli officials have argued publicly and consistently, since well before the JCPOA was signed, that a deal with the regime is futile not because they are uniquely hostile to diplomacy, but because they, too, have spent decades watching the IRGC’s behavior up close. But the Israelis, and American critics, are also missing the point. The function of the “moderate vs. hard-liners” instrument is not epistemological, a faulty understanding of the nature of the regime. The Americans know well what that regime is. Donald Trump certainly has known it since the 1980s. Rather, “moderates vs. hard-liners” has long ceased to be a genuine misreading of a nascent regime and is now firmly established as a rhetorical device the function of which is to justify an accommodation with the IRGC and paint domestic critics as treasonous warmongers working on behalf of the Jewish state.

>Jonathan didn’t want to leave Israel. When his wife first broached the idea, it was he who pushed back. But as the country’s war in Gaza dragged on, and the stresses of the conflict compounded the economic pressures and social tensions never far below Israel’s surface, he realised they had to go.

>Then one evening, as he returned to his apartment in Tel Aviv, he ran into the child of one of his neighbours. They spoke, and the boy, aged five or six, said he would see Jonathan that night in the building’s shelter, where residents would go to take refuge from missiles launched by Israel’s foes.

>“That was one of the big breaking points for me . . . [I thought:] that’s the future of the country and this is what he knows,” Jonathan recalls.

>“Imagine, for a couple of years now, people have been in this fight or flight mode. And there’s no escape from this cycle . . . When you combine all of the social, the economic, the political aspects, it just became untenable.”

>And so, in 2024, the 30-something real estate professional, who asked for his full name not to be used, packed up his home in Tel Aviv and moved to the US with his family, joining a wave of 150,000 Israelis who have left the country over the past three years.

>The outflow has been fuelled by a period of unprecedented tumult in Israel. In early 2023, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government launched a controversial drive to overhaul the judiciary, triggering the deepest domestic crisis in Israel’s near-80-year history. Then Hamas’s October 7 attack plunged the country into a war that became a years-long regional conflict, drawing in Iran and allied militant groups from Lebanon to Yemen.

>By international standards the share of Israelis who have left over this period is not huge. But for Israel the outflow is highly unusual — and has already had an outsized impact. Combined with a drop in immigration, the exodus turned Israel’s net migration negative in both 2023 and 2024 — something that happened only three times in the preceding century. Analysts expect overall figures for last year, which are not yet available, will also be negative.

>With studies — including one last week from Israel’s tax authority — suggesting rising numbers of those leaving are high earners, it has also awakened fears of a brain drain that could, if sustained, do serious damage to Israel’s tech-heavy economy, its public finances and even its military.

>“This is basically the first time in 100 years that there has been a continuing negative balance [in consecutive years],” says Sergio DellaPergola, professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, noting previous one-off instances in the 1920s, before Israel’s 1948 foundation, and then again in the 1950s and 1980s. “So this is absolutely exceptional.”

>Indeed, the idea of Israel as a country of immigration is central to its modern identity. The new state was founded as the world recoiled at the horrors of the Holocaust. Offering a home to Jews around the globe was a fundamental part of its raison d’être. Between 1948 and 1960, immigration accounted for 65 per cent of population growth. The share has dropped since, but was still close to 20 per cent in the two decades before the pandemic.

>For a long time, there was also a stigma around those who left. In the 1970s, then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin branded émigrés “moral lepers”, “the fallen among the weaklings” and, for good measure, “the dregs of the earth”. Language around the topic is freighted with judgment. The Hebrew word used for the immigration of Jews to Israel — aliyah — literally means “ascent”. Emigrants were often called yordim — or “those who descend”.

>“Emigrating was a mark of shame. The implication was: ‘You’re not going to take part in this grand experiment of recreating a Jewish homeland for the first time in 2,000 years. What are you? A traitor to the cause?’” says Alex Weinreb, research director at the Taub Center, a Jerusalem-based think-tank. “My father has 10 first cousins, all born in the 1930s and 1940s. Most have never set foot outside of Israel, on principle . . . They’re all part of the national religious community. And for them it’s a way to signal that in this time they are making a political statement just by being here.”

>With time, the stigma faded — Rabin took back his comments in the 1990s — and growing numbers of Israelis began to move abroad. But the topic remains highly politicised. When academics from Tel Aviv University released a study this month estimating continuing high levels of emigration in 2025, opposition politicians seized on it to attack the government.

>“They promised Gazans would emigrate voluntarily. But in the end the October 7 government encouraged voluntary emigration from Israel,” Meirav Cohen, from the centrist Yesh Atid party, wrote on X.

>The Tel Aviv study, which excluded newcomers who had lived in Israel for less than three years, calculated that 100,000 had left the country in 2023 and 2024 and estimated that another 45,000 to 50,000 departed last year.

>Leaving with sadness

>Migration is driven by multiple factors. But few who study it doubt that Israel’s polarised political climate and three years of unrelenting warfare — during which Israeli forces have laid waste to Gaza and southern Lebanon, and Hamas, Hizbollah and Iran have fired thousands of missiles at Israel — have played an important role in the current wave of emigration.

>Exits rose as Netanyahu’s far-right coalition embarked on a controversial attempt to limit the powers of the judiciary in early 2023 that sparked the biggest wave of protests in Israeli history. They then jumped sharply after Hamas’s October 7 attack, with 14,000 leaving in that month alone. Strikingly, the outflow has taken place at a time of widespread concern among Israelis over rising antisemitism in western countries.

>Lilach Lev Ari, a sociologist of immigration and demography and professor at Oranim College, carried out a qualitative survey in 2024 and 2025 of 71 Israelis who emigrated to the US. The interviewees expressed concerns about the social and political climate in Israel, primarily following the judicial reforms in 2023. Such concerns were more common among those who emigrated in the last three years than those who emigrated previously.

>“We can now definitely add the sociopolitical atmosphere in Israel to the reasons for the recent wave of emigration,” she says.

>For some Israelis, the idea of emigrating is inconceivable. Benjamin Blatt, from Jerusalem, speaks for many in saying that although war “pushes people away”, for him, personal connections in the country are more important. “I wouldn’t leave,” he adds.

>But among secular and more liberal Israelis, who have watched on as the country has lurched to the right under successive Netanyahu governments, concerns about the direction of the country are visceral. Many in this camp regard October’s election, which will pit Netanyahu’s coalition with extremist and ultrareligious parties against a more politically heterodox but largely secular opposition, as a make-or-break moment for Israel.

>DellaPergola at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem says that if there were “a change in running the country”, there might be an increase in the number of Israelis returning from abroad. “If there is no change, there might be an increase in those who leave because of political dissatisfaction with the government,” he adds.

>Among those who have already left is Adi, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, who moved with her family to Spain earlier this year. For years, she had worried about the growing influence of religion and ultranationalism in Israel’s public sphere, particularly in the school system that serves secular Jews and in the army. She was also horrified by the government’s attempts to weaken the judiciary “instead of fixing it”.

>As Israel’s war with Hamas morphed into a multiyear conflict on multiple fronts, her concerns about the direction of the country were compounded by the prospect that not only her husband, but eventually also her children would have to serve in an army “controlled by people whose values are different from mine, and whom I cannot trust any more”.

>“I decided to leave with sadness, but I feel it’s the right thing to do for my children. At least for now, I want to give them an opportunity to experience something else and to open the door for them to a life elsewhere in case Israel becomes an illiberal democracy,” she adds. “I truly hope Israel gets back on track and we can return to live there. But I’m not optimistic anymore . . . In the long term, I’m afraid there’s no future there for liberal people like us.”

>For many Israelis, financial considerations also play a key role. The country has long grappled with a high cost of living, and while the housing market has cooled since the start of the war, properties remain expensive, particularly in cities such as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

>Jonathan and his wife both had good jobs in Israel. But he says the affordability of housing was one of the big factors as they weighed whether to move abroad. “Finding anything reasonable [in Israel] was problematic. We’re talking about close to a million dollars for a 100 sq metre apartment in Petah Tikva,” he says, referring to a city near Tel Aviv.

>“Within a year of moving to America, we were able to buy a house we could never afford in Israel on a piece of land we could never afford in Israel.”

>‘A promo of the future’

>Emigration in the first half of 2025 was 20 per cent lower than the same period a year earlier. But net outflows are still expected for the year overall. Economists warn that if these persist, they will exacerbate the looming demographic strains on an economy in which male members of the fastest-growing population group — ultra-Orthodox Jews — have traditionally not entered the workforce or taken part in Israel’s obligatory military service.

>This month’s study by Israel’s tax authority found the rate of departure of affluent Israelis, including high-tech and healthcare workers, was almost twice as high in 2023 and 2024 as in 2019. If repeated, the annual loss in tax receipts could swell to $3.5bn in five years, it added.

>The findings echoed another study this year by researchers from Tel Aviv University, which found an increasing net outflow of Israelis who worked as doctors and engineers, or had a high-tech education or one focusing on science, engineering and maths.

>Itai Ater, an economics professor who was one of the authors of the study, says while Israel could cope with the current outflows, “the concern is what we see now is kind of a promo of the future”.

>“Israel as a country depends on its human capital. We are not rich in natural resources. That’s what makes a brain drain or emigration more dangerous or potentially dangerous,” he adds.

>Economists say the biggest risk would be if the departures hurt Israel’s powerhouse tech sector, which accounts for a fifth of economic output, as well as half of exports, and is highly dependent on high-skilled workers.

>But Eran Yashiv, a professor of economics at Tel Aviv University, contends that the implications are wider still, arguing that an outflow of workers from Israel’s most productive sectors would not just hit tax receipts.

>It would also add to the manpower strains on Israel’s already overstretched military — which depends on a system of national service and being able to call up reservists — as well as make government plans for a huge ramp-up in defence spending even harder to finance, he says.

>“It would mean longer reserve duty for the non-ultra-Orthodox Jews who remain in Israel, which hurts their own economic activity. It’s like a chain reaction that can have big knock-on effects as more of the military and economic burden is placed on a smaller group of people,” he adds.

>Others are more cautious. Weinreb at the Taub Center notes that highly skilled workers generally account for a higher share of emigrants than their population share, and previous warnings of a brain drain from Israel were wide of the mark. But he says there is a risk that if emigration becomes “normalised” it could generate a “self-perpetuating cycle”.

>“The more people leave, the more you have the establishment of communities and networks, and the more people get comfortable in the place they have moved to,” he adds. “Then there are social mechanisms which start to come into play that can reinforce and even accelerate levels of outward migration. That’s something which does concern me.”

>In recent months, the government has begun to take measures to encourage high-skilled workers to return. Among them are an exemption from tax on income earned and accrued outside Israel and a mechanism allowing workers to offset taxes paid abroad against income tax in Israel.

>Dror Bin, chief executive of the Israel Innovation Authority, says it is too soon to say if the changes have boosted returns, but he expects them to have a tangible impact in the coming years. “The changes are really fundamental, the tax benefits and certainty created by this reform,” he says. “This is a good time for [Israeli tech employees abroad] to come home.”

>Other officials expect geopolitical factors to be decisive. Eran Berkovich, director of the Aliyah and Integration Unit at the Jewish Agency for Israel, which helps Jews immigrate, said there had been an uptick in the number of people beginning the aliyah process after a ceasefire last year ended the worst of the fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

>“People are waiting to see how the security situation develops,” he says. “I have no doubt that if it stays as it has been in the last weeks and months, and the situation with Iran remains stable, we’re going to see more people coming to Israel in 2027.”

>Whether — and how soon — those who left over the past three years will return is a different question. Jonathan, the real estate worker, says that while the transition to life in the US has not been a “cakewalk”, “simple things” like the greater sense of safety and not having to run to air-raid shelters have made a big difference to his family’s quality of life.

>“My wife’s mother came to visit us after our son was born. And on the first day she was asking: ‘Where is the shelter?’ and why we don’t have one. I was like: ‘That’s not the reality we live in’. We’re very fortunate we could pick the reality where we want to raise our children. I recognise that’s not everybody’s reality,” he says.

>“Would we go back? It’s entirely possible, I wouldn’t rule it out. But right now I don’t see it as the best choice for people who have the social and economic mobility to go ahead and figure things out somewhere else.”

>In January 2024, a woman from Gaza created a crowdfunding campaign, asking strangers for donations to help reunite her family.

>“Rebuilding our lives: a journey from loss to hope,” she wrote, beneath photos of a beaming young family.

>The woman, Nieama al-Ghazzawi, said she and her two children had escaped Gaza, but her husband had been left behind.

>Her husband’s burger stand and their home had been destroyed, and the family could not afford fees for travel and a visa, al-Ghazzawi wrote on the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe.

>“Your assistance means a lot to us. It will bring us back together,” she wrote.

>The campaign circulated on pro-Palestinian social media, drawing hundreds of donations.

>US federal investigators are now investigating that appeal as part of a probe into Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi, who allegedly led a terrorist squad into Israel during the October 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught before moving to the US.

>The incident is one of three recent federal US terrorism cases investigating humanitarian crowdfunding campaigns, highlighting potential abuse on a lightly regulated avenue for financial activity and the intersection of terror financing, social media and cryptocurrency.

>In addition to the probe into al-Muhtadi, a second involves a New York-based anti-Zionist activist who was charged last month with sending funds to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group. The third investigation centers around a California man who was charged with using sham charities to fundraise for Hamas.

>A multibillion-dollar industry

>Israel and its supporters have long accused international humanitarian groups funded by donors of cooperating with Hamas in Gaza.

>In the US, the landmark case against the Holy Land Foundation in the 2000s found that the purported charity had funneled more than $12 million to Hamas.

>In the decades since, US investigators have cracked down on financing for terrorism through purported charity groups, including in a major international case this month.

>An FBI agent investigating the case said Hamas raises funds through several channels, including the diversion of humanitarian aid through “sham charities” that shield the terror group from law enforcement.

>Like major NGOs, crowdfunding platforms allow donors to contribute to humanitarian efforts in conflict zones like Gaza, but they differ in being more decentralized, enabling individuals to set up campaigns to collect small donations.

>

>The home page for the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe is shown on a device on October 16, 2024 in New York. (AP/Peter Morgan)

>The platforms raise funds for causes ranging from cancer treatments to student tuition, drawing in billions in donations each year. One of the leading firms, GoFundMe, founded in 2010, says it has raised more than $40 billion from a community of 200 million.

>The recent federal cases indicate the platforms could also be abused, though.

>Hans-Jakob Schindler, the senior director of the Counter Extremism Project, based in New York and Berlin, framed crowdfunding for terrorism amid larger issues surrounding humanitarian aid in conflict zones controlled by groups like Hamas in Gaza and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

>“You either pay [the ruling groups] or you don’t get access,” said Schindler, an adviser to government leaders on terror financing, including through crowdfunding.

>Schindler said that crowdfunding platforms are generally not regulated like financial institutions, such as banks, that are required to carry out due diligence to prevent crimes like tax evasion, money laundering and terrorism financing.

>“The same as with all new technologies, it’s pretty naive. They always think they cannot be misused, and, ‘This is making the world a better place.’ So their internal controls are, as a general rule, super weak,” he said, adding that the social media platforms hosting the campaigns are generally not legally obligated to monitor crowdfunding. Laws regulating crowdfunding vary by country.

>Gaza crowdfunding raises red flags

>Soon after the start of the Gaza war, crowdfunding campaigns for Gaza proliferated on social media, raising red flags.

>The FBI warned in November 2023 that “criminals are soliciting donations during the Israel-Hamas conflict.”

>“Foreign terrorist organizations often establish fake charities using social media platforms to misdirect unwitting donors to subsidize their operations,” the FBI said.

>Some of those concerns appear to have been borne out.

>

>Images sent to Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub Al-Muhtadi in 2019 show Al-Muhtadi wearing a red headband associated with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s National Resistance Brigades. (US Western District of Louisiana court)

>Al-Muhtadi allegedly assembled a team of armed terrorists and crossed into Israel to join the October 2023 attack at the behest of Hamas.

>In June 2024, he submitted an immigrant visa application for the US, saying he did not have any weapons training, had no ties to terrorist groups and had not participated in acts of violence.

>Al-Muhtadi arrived in Dallas, Texas, in September 2024. After Israeli investigators alerted the US to his alleged terrorism, FBI agents located him in Louisiana, where he was working at a restaurant.

>He faces charges related to terrorism, visa fraud and making false statements and faces up to life in prison.

>A court filing late last month showed that investigators were seeking records from several companies for evidence, including Google, Meta and GoFundMe.

>The filing identified al-Ghazzawi, who posted the GoFundMe campaign, as al-Muhtadi’s wife, and photos published on the campaign page matched images of al-Muhtadi in the indictment.

>

>A fundraiser posted by Nieama al-Ghazzawi. (Screenshot)

>The campaign was added to a list of Gaza crowdfunding efforts called GoFund♡Gaza and circulated on social media.

>The campaign received more than $13,000 from 401 donors, many of whom left encouraging messages for the family, like “Stay strong. The world loves you.”

>Al-Ghazzawi posted an update in March 2024 saying that, due to the donations, her husband had been able to leave Gaza and rejoin the family, around the time prosecutors said al-Muhtadi had left Gaza, and shortly before he applied for a visa.

>It does not appear that al-Ghazzawi has been charged with a crime. Al-Ghazzawi and lawyers for al-Muhtadi did not respond to requests for comment.

>GoFundMe did not respond to requests for comment. There is no indication GoFundMe was aware of al-Muhtadi’s alleged terror activities and the company was cooperating with investigators, court filings showed. The campaign was taken down after investigators requested records from GoFundMe.

>GoFundMe has specific provisions against terror financing, unlike some other crowdfunding platforms, and it has issued guidelines encouraging users to donate to Gaza through certified charities.

>‘Help him support his family’

>Schindler said that Hamas has several income streams, some of which, such as fees from smugglers and cash from Qatar, were cut off after the start of the war in Gaza, making fundraising a more important revenue source.

>He added that small operations claiming to deliver aid to Gaza should be viewed with skepticism because logistical complexities and security restrictions make it difficult to deliver aid.

>“If you are not a big international organization, in my opinion, it needs to be really closely looked at precisely because of the controls that Israel has instilled on humanitarian operations,” he said. “You cannot just be an organization in Cologne or in New York and then begin operating in Gaza. How? How are you going to get access?”

>In addition to anti-Israel activists, far-right networks have also made use of crowdfunding. The platform GiveSendGo has allowed groups like antisemitic white supremacists to raise millions. A Cornell University student who made headlines last month for saying he was “not interested in working for a Jew” has raised more than $26,000 on the platform.

>

>An undated image of Catherine Washburn on a phone in front of a Hamas flag and two hand grenades. (Western District of New York Court)

>In another terror financing case, last month, an anti-Zionist activist from New York State was charged with sending funds to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group.

>Catherine Washburn, 37, sent more than $30,000 in funds she had raised for purported humanitarian purposes to a member of the terror group, according to a federal criminal complaint.

>The complaint stated that Washburn had allegedly raised funds for a man in Gaza, identified by the initials H.H., starting in November 2024.

>The man told Washburn in February 2025 that he was a member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and had attacked IDF troops during the October 2023 attack. H.H. also told Washburn he had been carrying out “missions” in northern Gaza during the war and sent her photos of himself brandishing firearms, indicating she was aware of his continued terror activities. She continued transferring funds until April, investigators said.

>After she found out about his terrorist affiliation, Washburn posted an image of the alleged terrorist on Facebook and shared the page on WhatsApp, seeking donations to “help him support his family of 9,” according to the complaint.

>She raised donations through the Australia-based Chuffed, which says it is a fundraising platform for “the world’s social justice movements.” Chuffed did not respond to a request for comment and the fundraiser has been taken down.

>Washburn received 1,302 contributions, using the funds to buy cryptocurrency and then transferring the funds to a crypto wallet belonging to H.H., the complaint said.

>

>Images of alleged terrorist H.H., showing himself with weapons, that were sent to suspect Catherine Washburn. (Western District of New York Court)

>Between October 2025 and April 2026, Washburn made 80 cryptocurrency transfers to H.H. amounting to $30,116, investigators said.

>On social media, H.H. has shared fundraisers purportedly for his family, published videos about hardships in Gaza such as food shortages, and posted in support of the activist flotillas meant to break Israel’s blockade.

>Washburn’s Instagram account links to 10 fundraisers that she said were meant to help Palestinian families in Gaza.

>At least one other activist, an Irish protester who joined a Gaza flotilla and has more than 200,000 followers online, shared an appeal to support H.H. He also appeared on the account of a Gaza influencer with 1.3 million followers.

>H.H. has posted another fundraiser to his hundreds of thousands of followers.

>Nonprofit filings and crypto transfers

>In a third case, in June, US federal authorities charged a California man with fundraising for Hamas through sham charities.

>Reda Mazen Rida Sabassi, 38, was charged with terrorism, sanctions evasion, wire fraud, money laundering and making false statements.

>Sabassi allegedly collected more than $600,000 in donations from thousands of donors for humanitarian aid for Gaza, but directed the money to Hamas and for personal expenses.

>In 2022, Sabassi set up a nonprofit called Ikram — The Arab Charity Foundation, allowing him to collect tax-deductible donations for “emergency humanitarian relief to displaced families and refugees in Gaza.”

>The nonprofit raised $638,000 in donations in 2023 and Sabassi was the only staffer, filings showed.

>

>People carrying humanitarian aid in Nuseirat, central Gaza Strip, on September 30, 2025. (Eyad Baba/AFP)

>Sabassi solicited donations through his nonprofit’s website and posted charity campaigns on crowdsourcing platforms such as Fundly, which circulated on Telegram and social media. Fundly did not respond to a request for comment.

>“Help 4 orphans who fled from Gaza start a new life,” one of the campaigns said, alongside a photo of a child.

>For the financial transfers, Sabassi worked with the Hamas fundraising organization Gaza Now, and unnamed co-conspirators based abroad, investigators said. The US and the UK sanctioned Gaza Now for terror financing in 2024.

>An FBI investigator said using the Gaza Now branding was a way of “signaling to Hamas supporters that it was an official campaign, i.e., directly related to Hamas,” but to outside observers, it would appear legitimate.

>Sabassi and the unnamed suspects discussed how to transfer money to Hamas, such as using a decentralized blockchain or transferring funds between cryptocurrency wallets to obscure the money’s sources.

>Sabassi sent $116,000 to a Hamas member based abroad and tried to convert another $380,000 in the funds into cryptocurrency so he could send it to Hamas through Gaza Now, the complaint said.

>He also allegedly transferred tens of thousands of dollars to his personal bank account for expenses like rent and credit card bills, the complaint said.

>Both Washburn and Sabassi joked about being imprisoned, indicating they were aware the fundraising was illegal.

>“Based on my passed [sic.] fundraising and posting Im [sic.] gonna get put away for a few life times,” Washburn wrote to H.H., followed by a laughing emoji.

>Sabassi told a collaborator that one of their campaigns should have actually been titled “Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam,” followed by a laughing emoji. His co-conspirator replied, “Lol. Oh dear. Into prison.”

>Schindler said that raising humanitarian funds for Gaza is not inherently illegal or terrorism financing, but that there was a need for better controls and a better understanding of the complexity surrounding aid operations in Gaza, including from donors.

>“It’s very, very, very unlikely that individual, small organizations are even able to operate in Gaza,” he said. “If they’re not able to operate in Gaza, then immediately, the question is, ‘What happens to the money?’”

>It was in 2024 that Patrick Malone had what he calls his “oh, shit” moment. Malone is a physician turned investor who is a managing partner at KdT Ventures, which specializes in early stage biotechnology. He was in San Francisco for JPMorgan’s annual healthcare conference, prepping for a panel, when he saw a new report. He was startled by what he read.

>It used to be that the big global pharmaceutical companies didn’t license potential new drugs from China. Not only had that changed, but the chart was going vertical. In 2022, 23 percent of global deals over $50 million involved Chinese companies—up from almost nothing. By 2024, the number had risen to a stunning 44 percent.

>“Two things became very clear to me,” Malone said. “One, the way in which China has captured a remarkable share of global biopharma development at a pace without precedent. Two, the slope of that change is so steep, it’s very easy to extrapolate where this goes.”

>Tim Opler, who specializes in healthcare stocks at the investment bank Stifel Institutional, came to a similar realization earlier this year after an investor asked him what percentage of pharmaceutical deals were being done with Chinese companies. He found that in 2025, almost 70 percent of the dollars spent on global pharma deals—$137.7 billion—were with start-ups based in China. “I guess that was the first moment when we realized, ‘Oh, China could be a problem.’ ”

>

>Workers on a pharmaceutical production line in Shijiazhuang, China. (Yang Huafeng/China News Service via Getty Images)

>For Jason Kelly, the CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks, his moment came last December, when he was at a fundraiser in Boston that encouraged underprivileged kids to go into biotech. At his table, “everyone was bragging about their connections to China,” he later said at a conference sponsored by the publication Endpoints News, which covers the global biopharma industry. Kelly thought to himself, That’s where these kids are going to work.

>“That’s the whole reason I got crazy about this,” he said.

>Outside the drug industry, there’s still a perception that China makes cheap, copycat drugs. But industry insiders know that yesterday’s truth is today’s comforting fiction. Over 40 percent of the key building blocks for American medicines are sourced solely in China. The dependency is even higher in certain medicines, like cancer drugs and antibacterials. A decade ago, Chinese companies conducted almost none of the world’s clinical trials of the most innovative new drugs. By 2025, they conducted almost one-third.

>And increasingly, Chinese companies are innovating. Roughly one-third of new compounds that made their way into pharma pipelines were licensed from Chinese companies, according to Stifel. This is more pronounced within certain specialties. Chinese firms now have almost as many monoclonal antibodies in late-stage clinical trials than the rest of the world combined. Overall, China now has almost as large a pipeline of experimental treatments as the U.S., according to a study published in March in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

>Despite everything that’s been written about how China is stealing a march on America, you probably haven’t heard about what could well be the most important and scariest prospect of all: a Chinese takeover of the biotech industry so pervasive that it’s not inconceivable that Americans could become dependent on China for their medicine. The numbers are grim: Between 2011 and 2020, more than 60 percent of all new non-generic drugs approved by the FDA derived from American companies, according to BIO, the lobbying group for the biotech industry. But BIO warns that China could catch up as early as 2028. And Morgan Stanley predicts that by 2040, a third of all FDA-approved drugs could originate from China.

>“If the United States fails to act, the future of biotechnology could be catastrophic,” says a report published last year by the bipartisan National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology. “First, they steal. Then, they scale. Once they have cornered the market, they strangle,” the Commission concluded about China, and it urged the government to “take swift action.” Otherwise, it added, “we risk falling behind, a setback from which we may never recover.”

>“I think it’s the most important story in biotech for the next half-decade, more important than AI,” Drew Armstrong, the executive editor of Endpoints News, told me.

>Opler, after spending a week in June in China, wrote: “China is playing for keeps.”

>

>No one should be surprised by China’s rise as a biotech power, because the Chinese Communist Party has long said publicly that that was its aim. Since the 1980s, biotech has appeared repeatedly in the CCP’s plans to build strategic industries.

>Over the past decade, the massive public private venture capital vehicles that are backed by China’s central and local governments have distributed over $1 trillion to scale up technologies. The evidence is visible. “One of the most expensive things to build in the biotech pharmaceutical world is manufacturing plants,” said Otello Stampacchia, who runs Omega Funds, a life sciences investment firm. “And because China decided this is a strategic industry for them, they basically started building these manufacturing plants with substantial state incentives without actually having drugs to put in them.”

>In his report after his China trip, Opler wrote, “We drove around the outskirts of Beijing where there was an enormous amount of construction in the area known as CBP (China Biotech Park). This area has at least as much acreage as South San Francisco. And this is one of at least five distinct biotech parks in Beijing.”

>Another researcher, Dirk van der Kley, wrote after his own recent trip to China that “Three things are happening: steel in the ground; science combined with manufacturing; increasing numbers of cutting-edge start-ups. As always, there is a speed and urgency I have not seen elsewhere.”

>As is invariably the case when China enters a new industry, it started with the unglamorous end of the business: generic drugs and active pharmaceutical ingredients, or APIs—the substances that make medicines work. These products are low-margin and environmentally unpleasant to manufacture, and American and European companies were only too happy to outsource the work to China.

>The next step was to move up the value chain—not just supplying the materials used to make drugs but actually manufacturing the drugs themselves, and doing the clinical trials. In 2017, China began aligning much of its drug development framework with standards used by the FDA and European regulators so that data generated in China could be used in the rest of the world.

>

>A WuXi AppTec research facility in Shanghai. (Long Wei via Getty Images)

>The company that best showcases China’s rise in manufacturing and clinical trials is called WuXi. It was co-founded by Ge Li, who, after earning his doctorate in organic chemistry at Columbia and starting an American biotech company, returned to China to take advantage of a globalizing industry by doing labor-intensive work more cheaply. Launched in 2000, WuXi is an integrated web of companies that can shepherd a client’s molecule from the lab through clinical trials and into commercial production. “They’re literally the best at doing fast, cheap, and high-quality preclinical and manufacturing research, and for our companies not to use their capabilities is really tricky,” said Omega Funds’ Stampacchia. “To recreate what WuXi has done from scratch would take a long time and cost untold billions. They were able to do it because in addition to state incentives they kept salaries very low for a decade, compared to Western companies.”

>Investors tell me that data still comes out of China that appears to be unreliable, because it can’t be replicated. In a development that has the industry aswirl, STAT News just reported that two children died in clinical trials in China, raising fresh questions about regulatory oversight and transparency.

>It’s also true that China is still best at being a fast follower, creating iterations of other companies’ drugs. But that’s changing—and fast. Ben Zercher, an analyst at PitchBook, recently noted China’s “growing lead” in generating early stage drug candidates. Opler points to one company that is working on a novel approach for treating serious pain, and another that he says might emerge with the best-in-class approach for weight-loss drugs that also preserve muscle. There are over 25 Chinese companies working on RNAi therapeutics, a cutting-edge gene technology that blocks dangerous proteins from being made.

>It is fertile hunting ground for Big Pharma companies, which are facing a slew of patent expirations and need new drugs to replace the ones that are losing their patent protection. One example: In May, Pfizer agreed to pay $650 million upfront, and potentially $10.5 billion, for a sprawling partnership covering 12 early stage cancer programs from a Chinese company called Innovent.

>Venture capitalists discovered an equally elegant trade: License a new molecule from China, create a start-up around it, and sell the start-up to Big Pharma for far less than a comparable American start-up would cost. For instance, Bain Capital and others created an asthma company called Aiolos Bio around a drug licensed from China for an upfront payment of just over $20 million. Barely three months after the company launched, they sold it to GSK for an upfront $1 billion. “We’ve started five or six companies with assets out of China in the last 18 months,” says Omega Funds’ Stampacchia. “We had done zero for the preceding 22 years.”

>You will not be surprised to learn that the people who are doing these deals are unworried about the prospect of China becoming a major force in the biotech industry. Indeed, they think it is a positive. “Diseases cross borders. So should their cures,” opined The Economist in a recent op-ed. The defenders of biotech globalization insist that more innovation, whatever its source, benefits patients, and that’s all that matters.

>Besides, they say, the U.S. pharma industry is getting the better of the deals with China. “You can see very visibly how we’re exploiting Chinese innovation,” Opler told me. He pointed to a recent deal in which an American start-up called Vignette, backed by venture capitalists, licensed a molecule from a Chinese company for $60 million in cash and equity plus up to $575 million in royalties; Vignette was sold to another VC-backed company called Candid Therapeutics; just this May, Candid was acquired by Belgium’s UCB for $2 billion plus as much as $200 million in royalties. “Candid’s shareholders obviously did quite well relative to what they paid the Chinese company,” says Opler, in what might be one of the understatements of the year.

>“Some venture capital firms are literally pitching investors that this is our differentiated edge, our ability to go into China and not only source assets, but work very closely with Chinese scientists,” said Malone. “Things are quicker, faster, cheaper there.”

>But focusing on the short-term may be missing the long-term play China is making. Those who are worried point out that what Chinese companies want is the invaluable knowledge of how to commercialize a drug, and they are taking advantage of short-term greed. “The market will not correct this because the industry’s most powerful actors are benefiting from the shift,” Malone wrote in a draft of an op-ed he’s seeking to publish.

>There is also a fear that the ability to source drugs for less from China will siphon capital away from U.S. start-ups. Eventually, if the U.S. doesn’t act, “this is China discovering, developing, and commercializing those drugs. Full stop,” said Jacob Becraft, the CEO of Strand Therapeutics, speaking at that same Endpoints event as Kelly. “Where it becomes impossible to attract capital. . . here in the United States.” He added, “This is the Sputnik moment for biotechnology.”

>

>It isn’t that the U.S. government hasn’t noticed what has been happening. By the end of the Obama administration, government officials were already studying the need for a national biotech strategy. In 2020, during the pandemic, President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to identify vulnerabilities in the supply of essential medicines, and created a program that was supposed to stockpile the ingredients that make drugs work.

>Biden continued the work Trump had begun with an executive order that was supposed to advance biotechnology and biomanufacturing. “By the end of the Biden administration, a number of departments and agencies said, ‘We’re ready to go. We know what we need to do. We just need to have the resources to be able to execute,’ ” said one person who was there.

>When Trump returned to office he rescinded Biden’s order, calling it an effort to funnel federal resources into “radical biotech and biomanufacturing initiatives” in service of environmental policy.

>

>President Trump signs an executive order on prescription drug prices at the White House, on May 12, 2025. (Andrew Harnik via Getty Images)

>In the meantime, though, the Trump administration has signed bills purportedly designed to slow down the Chinese biotech advances.

>But in truth, the new laws have been largely toothless—little more than “grandstanding,” as Opler puts it. “There’s definitely not broad support within the Trump administration for restricting access to Chinese molecules,” he added. “That goes exactly against what they’re trying to do, which is to get costs down for drugs in the United States.”

>Right now, a bill that would restrict American investment in Chinese biotech companies is the subject of fierce lobbying. Its fate is unclear.

>The administration’s immigration policies are also helping China’s rise. Opler told me that he learned from Chinese CEOs during his visit that “good biotech talent is far more available now than just a few years ago” because Chinese scientists are self-deporting. And it’s not only Chinese scientists. Between the cuts in federal research budgets, hiring freezes at universities, and the termination of key programs, many researchers, especially early career scientists, are increasingly looking abroad, according to Nature magazine.

>“I think that we as an industry are still grappling with the big changes that we’re seeing in terms of the rise of capabilities in China,” said Kelly Seagraves, a former State Department official who now oversees national security and international affairs at BIO. Whether the U.S. should take action to stop its pharmaceutical industry from becoming dependent on China—as has happened with so many American industries—is “a critical choice that needs to be made,” a former senior pharmaceutical executive told me. Then he added, “I don’t think we can stop them.”

>

>Inside the industry, the fight between those who want to continue to source drugs from China and those who believe it will harm our national security has become ugly. With so much money at stake, PhrMA, which represents big pharmaceutical companies, prefers the status quo, while BIO, the biotech lobby, wants to put the brakes on deals with Chinese companies. “American biotech dominance is critical to our nation’s national security,” said BIO’s chief executive, John Crowley. “For nearly 20 years, the Chinese Communist Party has executed a bold national plan to supersede American biotech leadership and to reshape world markets to their favor. Their goal is clear: to use biotechnology as an instrument of national policy and global power.”

>PhRMA’s Robert Zirkelbach, meanwhile, told Axios that “Restricting U.S. companies from being able to access promising science coming out of China doesn’t help U.S. patients; it just gives China more control.”

>The contentiousness was on full display at the Endpoints conference that took place last week. Saying panelists came to fisticuffs would be an exaggeration, but not much of one. There was none of the bland decorum that usually pervades such events. People talked over each other. Emotions ran high. Everyone agrees that the U.S. needs to fix its own house and accelerate drug development here, but beyond that, there was little agreement.

>

>“No matter what China is doing and saying now, the reality is probably quite different, and not in a way that should give anyone much comfort,” writes Bethany McLean. (Ruan Xuefeng via Getty Images)

>“Ultimately, we share a common enemy, which is disease,” said Peter Kolchinsky of RA Capital, who thinks the U.S. should limit its biotech manufacturing to countries that are U.S. allies while making clinical trials more efficient. But he also believes that licensing deals with China should continue apace. By contrast, Kelly, the CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks, argued that if the U.S. simply blocks Chinese drugs, that would stop China in its tracks, because some 70 percent of pharmaceutical industry profits come from the U.S. “You know what the business plan of every start-up in China is right now? Sell their drug in the U.S. market. Don’t tell me for a second that we can’t control what gets into our market,” he said. “Of course we can.”

>Kolchinsky has argued that protectionism simply won’t work: If the U.S. were to block deals with Chinese drug companies, the only party that would get hurt would be America. Drugs that originate in China would be licensed to European companies and presented to the FDA as Western products, a process he dubbed “Euro-washing.” “It is the standard, predictable outcome of what happens whenever the U.S. walls China off without having a competitive enough alternative,” he wrote. “If American sponsors are forbidden by law from doing it, someone else will—and that someone is Europe.”

>The debate rages outside the conference too. “American patients deserve access to groundbreaking new drugs,” Atlas Venture partner Bruce Booth wrote in a blog post. “The origins of drugs have never really mattered, nor should they.” If more and more great drugs come from China, “where’s the harm?” asks Opler. “There is no harm.”

>But for those, like Kelly, who fear the worst, the question isn’t if China will weaponize biotech; it is when. Back in 2019, at a meeting of a top political advisory group to the CCP, the Chinese economist Li Daokui said, “Once the export is reduced, the medical systems of some developed countries will not work.” And in this view, the current licensing model is China’s short-term play. Once they’ve learned everything they need to know, the licensing will stop. Even though patents do provide a road map, we’ll still have lost the know-how required to actually make drugs. What has happened in other industries will happen in biotech.

>In this view, surrendering our ability to develop drugs means that eventually, we’ll have no agency over which drugs actually get developed. “The country that controls the development engine helps determine which diseases are pursued, which patients are included in trials, what endpoints count, and which compromises among speed, safety, consent, transparency, and quality become normal,” wrote the usually sedate Council on Foreign Relations in a recent report.

>Still, some things seem certain. No matter what China is doing and saying now, the reality is probably quite different, and not in a way that should give anyone much comfort. Malone says he heard another venture capitalist mention a book called The Hundred-Year Marathon, which argues that in general, while the U.S. beats its chest, China claims weakness. It resonated with him. “It’s ‘woe is me’ until you realize they’re holding the entire deck of cards and actually are way more powerful than you ever imagined,” he told me. The other certainty is that any action the U.S. takes will require some pain, whether for patients in the form of higher prices or for the profits of Big Pharma and biotech venture capitalists. Doing nothing will appear to cost nothing—until it doesn’t. If the American track record is any indication, we already know which path we’ll choose.

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