Tuesday, March 31, 2026
America Is Now a Rogue Superpower
Whenever and however America’s war with Iran ends, it has both exposed and exacerbated the dangers of our new, fractured, multipolar reality—driving deeper wedges between the United States and former friends and allies; strengthening the hands of the expansionist great powers, Russia and China; accelerating global political and economic chaos; and leaving the United States weaker and more isolated than at any time since the 1930s. Even success against Iran will be hollow if it hastens the collapse of the alliance system that for eight decades has been the true source of America’s power, influence, and security.
For America’s friends and allies in Europe, the Iran war has been a significant strategic setback. As Russia and Ukraine wage a grinding war that will be “won” by whoever can hold on the longest, the Iran war has materially and psychologically helped Russia and hurt Ukraine. Even before Donald Trump lifted oil sanctions on Russia, oil prices were skyrocketing—and filling Vladimir Putin’s war chest with billions of dollars, just as Russia’s wartime deficits were starting to cause significant pain. The unexpected windfall gives Putin more time and capacity to continue destroying Ukraine’s economic infrastructure and energy grid. Meanwhile, the Persian Gulf states are burning through U.S.-provided stocks of air-defense interceptors, drawing on the same limited supply that Ukraine depends on to defend its largest cities from Russian missile strikes.
More worrying for European allies has been the evident indifference of the United States to the consequences of its actions. For Europeans, the existential threat today comes not from a weakened and impoverished Iran but from a nuclear-armed Russia that invaded Ukraine in the most brazen act of cross-border territorial aggression in Europe since World War II. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told the Europeans last year to be ready by 2027 to defend themselves without American help, and so they have been desperately reorienting their economies and military strategies to take on the Russian threat without the United States. They have also taken on the bulk of military and economic support for Ukraine because they fear, as many American analysts do, that Putin’s territorial ambitions are extensive, and other European states may be next.
Trump’s decision to lift sanctions on Russian oil, over the opposition of Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, and the European Union, showed just how little regard the United States has for Europe’s security. The message to Europe, as the scholar Ivan Krastev has noted, is that “the trans-Atlantic relationship no longer matters.”
U.S. actions have been no less damaging to America’s friends and allies in East Asia and the Western Pacific. Japan gets 95 percent of its oil from the Middle East, and 70 percent of that passes through the now-blocked Strait of Hormuz. Yet Japanese and other Asian diplomats in the first weeks of the war complained that they were “not receiving any communication from the Trump administration.” At the same time, the United States has dispatched an aircraft-carrier battle group and other warships from the Western Pacific to the Persian Gulf, including elements of the Tripoli amphibious ready group, that would be needed for an American response to Chinese aggression, including an attack on Taiwan.
[N]othing about Trump’s willingness to bomb Iran suggests that he’s any more prone than before to seek a “direct confrontation” with Russia. On the contrary, Trump has consistently sought to appease Putin by cutting off direct supplies of U.S. weaponry to Ukraine, pressuring Ukraine to give in to Russian territorial demands, and now by lifting sanctions on Russian oil.
As for China, combined Israeli and American forces have demonstrated impressive capabilities, but their success is not necessarily replicable in the Pacific. Taking out an adversary’s sophisticated air defenses is a dangerous operation—one that Israel shouldered in Iran, making the subsequent U.S. assault possible. The U.S. had the capacity to take that first step but would not likely have assumed the risk. In the event of Chinese aggression against Taiwan, will the Israelis take out Chinese air-defense systems for the United States too?
Chinese leaders will also note that the United States has been fearful of sending warships to open the Strait of Hormuz lest they come under fire from a significantly depleted Iranian force. That’s understandable but not very intimidating. . . . . . the only thing preventing the United States from coming to the aid of Taiwan will be China shooting, with far superior and far more plentiful weaponry. Also not lost on the Chinese is the fact that the United States has had to pull significant air, naval, and ground forces from the Western Pacific, likely for months, in order to fight a decimated Iran.
Some analysts have suggested that Russia and China have failed to come to Iran’s defense, and that this somehow constitutes a defeat for them, because Iran was their ally. But the Russians are helping Iran by providing satellite imagery and advanced drone capabilities to strike more effectively at U.S. military and support installations. And China has not suffered a loss in Iran insofar as Iran has granted safe passage to its oil shipments.
More important, in Russia and China’s hierarchy of interests, defending Iran is of distinctly secondary importance; their primary goal is to expand their regional hegemony. For Putin, Ukraine is the big prize that will immeasurably strengthen Russia’s position vis-à-vis the rest of Europe. For China, the primary goal is to push the United States out of the Western Pacific, and anything that degrades America’s ability to project force in the region is a benefit. Indeed, the longer American attention and resources are tied up in the Middle East, the better for both Russia and China. Neither Moscow nor Beijing can be unhappy to see the war drive deep and perhaps permanent wedges between the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia.
The Trump administration, however, has turned America’s long-standing hierarchy of interests upside down. For eight decades, Americans were deeply involved in the greater Middle East not because the region was intrinsically a vital national-security interest but as part of a broader global commitment to the alliances and freedom of navigation that undergirded the American-led liberal world order.
America’s interests in the Middle East have always been indirect and secondary to larger global aims and strategies. During World War II, the United States led a coalition of nations that depended on the greater Middle East for oil and strategic position. During the Cold War, the United States assumed responsibility not only for the defense of the Jewish state but for the defense and economic well-being of European and Asian allies who depended on Middle Eastern oil. After the Cold War, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait, and the George H. W. Bush administration believed that failing to reverse that aggression would set an ominous precedent in the aborning “new world order.”
That sense of global responsibility is precisely what the Trump administration came to office to repudiate and undo. The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy, which has dramatically shifted the focus of American policy from world order to homeland security and hemispheric hegemony, appropriately downgraded the Middle East in the hierarchy of American concerns. . . . . Yet now, for reasons known only to the Trump administration, the Middle East has suddenly taken top priority; indeed, to supporters of Trump and the war, it seems to be the only priority, apparently worth any price, including the introduction of ground forces and even the destruction of the American alliance system.
This might make sense if there were no other threats to worry about. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the greatest perceived menace was from international terrorism. China was in an accommodating phase, under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao. Russia posed no threat to Europe; rather, these were the years of Russo-German partnership, a time when Western Europeans found the overall strategic situation so unthreatening that they were the ones doubting the necessity of NATO. Only Eastern Europeans still worried about the return of a revanchist Russia, . . .
Twenty-three years later, the situation is completely different. The greatest threats to world peace, and to the democracies of Europe and Asia, are not terrorism and Iran but two powerful and expansionist great powers, one of which has already invaded its neighbors and the other of which threatens to. Today’s world looks more like that of 1934 than like the supposedly post-historical paradise that some imagined after the Cold War.
One would be hard-pressed to find any nation in the world that has been reassured by the Israeli and American war against Iran, other than Israel itself. According to The Wall Street Journal, Gulf state leaders are “privately furious” with the U.S. for “triggering a war that put them in the crosshairs.” Despite its impressive power, the United States was unable to protect these countries from Iran’s attacks; now they have to hope that Trump will not leave them to face a weakened yet intact and angry Iranian regime but will instead double down on America’s long-term military commitment to the region, including by putting ground troops in Iran.
For Europeans, the problem is worse than American disregard and irresponsibility. They now face an unremittingly hostile United States—one that no longer treats its allies as allies or differentiates between allies and potential adversaries. The aggressive tariffs Washington imposed last year hit America’s erstwhile friends at least as hard as they hit Russia and China, and in some cases harder. Europeans must now wonder whether Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran makes it more or less likely that he will take similarly bold action on Greenland. The risks and costs of taking that undefended Danish territory, after all, would be far less than the risks and costs of waging the present war. Not some EU liberal but Trump’s conservative friend, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni recently warned that American actions have produced a “crisis in international law and multilateral organizations” and “the collapse of a shared world order.”
Trump has repeatedly made clear, including during this war, that if he is unhappy with an ally, he will withdraw American protection. He temporarily cut off intelligence sharing with Ukraine to punish it for refusing to bend to Moscow. He has warned that allies such as Japan and Korea should pay the United States for protection. During this war, he has threatened to leave the Strait of Hormuz closed and hand the problem off to those who need it more than the United States does. Trump’s tactics with allies consist almost entirely of threats: to tariff them, to abandon them, and, in the case of Greenland, to use force to seize their territory. When Trump discovered that he needed the help of allies against Iran, he did not ask them for help or work to persuade them. He simply “demanded” that they do what he said.
[T]hroughout the Cold War and for nearly four decades after it, allies and partners across the globe clung to the American order through thick and thin. It survived unpopular wars in Vietnam and Iraq. It survived made-in-America global economic calamities, such as the 2008 financial crisis. It even survived America’s relative economic and military decline. . . . Those days are now over and will not soon return. Nations that once bandwagoned with the United States will now remain aloof or align against it—not because they want to, but because the United States leaves them no choice, because it will neither protect them nor refrain from exploiting them. Welcome to the era of the rogue American superpower. It will be lonely and dangerous.
Monday, March 30, 2026
Sunday, March 29, 2026
The Reason for the New Homophobia
Homophobia of course never went away, but not long ago, it seemed like it might. Implicit and explicit bias against gay people fell steadily from 2007 to 2020 and was on track to soon hit zero (!), according to a 2022 study by the psychologists Tessa E. S. Charlesworth and Mahzarin R. Banaji. This accorded with the ambient feeling of late-2010s culture, when Lil Nas X was the pink-hatted prince of pop and Budweiser was striping its cans in rainbow colors without fear of a bullet from Kid Rock.
But something changed in the early 2020s. Pollsters began noting diminishing approval for LGBTQ legal protections. As trans issues became inescapable in polarized national politics, explicit anti-trans bias spiked 16 percent from 2021 to 2024, according to Charlesworth, Banaji, and the researcher Meriel Doyle. Less intuitively, the trend line of long-declining homophobia reversed, resulting in a 10-point jump for explicit anti-gay bias over that same period.
The past few months in politics have made this turn obvious. Prominent right-wing voices who justified the killing of the protester Renee Good described her as a “lesbian agitator” and a “rug munching leftist,” as though her sexuality might have any bearing on whether she deserved to die.
The White House advertised car deregulation with a video that mocked two blue-haired, queer-seeming people pathetically stalled in a Prius. Commentators have taken to treating gay and its synonyms as an insult. Conservative groups launched a campaign to roll back marriage rights, with the name “Greater Than”—as in, the well-being of kids (allegedly endangered by gay parents) is more important than equality.
In the wilds of digital culture, gay panic roams in more anarchic forms. Reels and TikTok teem with jokes about Jeffrey Epstein, Sean “Diddy” Combs, and a feminized version of Charlie Kirk preying on boys—though Epstein serially exploited girls and Kirk was a straight, married conservative whom no one has accused of abuse. Nicki Minaj, that longtime queer icon turned MAGA trophy, has taken to dissing “cocksuckas” like Don Lemon. Millions of views accumulated for a kid rapping about the demonic nature of LGBTQ people. Zesty became Zoomer-speak for “fruity” or “swishy” a few years back. And in livestreams and chat rooms, the old-school slurs seem as hot as ever.
This wave is one symptom of a broader cultural regression. During the 2020s, measures of intra-group prejudices of all sorts—racism, sexism, ageism—have been rising, according to a New York Times article about the return of homophobia by Charlesworth and her Northwestern colleague Eli J. Finkel. Trans folks, long the subject of sustained conservative criticism, continue losing not only public acceptance but legal rights; Kansas, for example, just revoked driver’s licenses for people whose listed gender doesn’t match what they were assigned at birth.
But although transphobia overlaps with homophobia, Charlesworth and Finkel argue that trans backlash is not the primary reason for rising anti-gay sentiment. Instead, they suggest that one factor explains the rise in all kinds of identity-based biases: the same blend of economic anxiety and anti-establishment sentiment that’s driving so much of American politics. They write, “Gay and lesbian people, newly woven into the fabric of mainstream society, may have been collateral damage in a broader revolt against a system that felt broken.”
The irony is that a minority once viewed as filled with sissies and losers is now portrayed as filled with bullies and power brokers, and straight people, especially men, seem to perceive themselves as the weak and afraid ones. This inversion explains a host of baffling political and cultural phenomena of late. It also shows that some of the most durable stereotypes about gay people were never really about sexuality—which might explain why the homophobes, more and more, seem to fit those stereotypes.
Over the past few months, the young and male-dominated online subculture of “looks-maxxing” has blown up into a mainstream-media cycle . . . . Looks-maxxing is an ethos of self-improvement taken to an extreme, and its more explicit inspirations are the pickup artists of early-2000s infamy and the incels of 2010s 4Chan. The idea is that in a society that has allegedly become hostile to men—male privilege coded as toxic masculinity, and so on—the only way for boys to gain an edge is to be handsome. Methods for maximizing looks range from workouts and skin-care routines to more radical options, such as chewing hard gum for hours to get a squarer jaw.
The poster child for this world is a waifish, wavy-haired 20-year-old who goes by the name Clavicular. He says he started taking testosterone at age 14 and that he does crystal meth to attain hollow cheeks. . . . . He’s also a frequent user of sexist, homophobic, and racist slurs—usually delivered in a tone of icy boredom—and is pals with the Hitler fan Nick Fuentes and the professional misogynist Andrew Tate.
The ostensible point of looks-maxxing is to bag hot chicks, but quite clearly the real fun comes from inspiring awe in men. To the Times, Clavicular described sex with women as mostly a waste of time—something that “is going to gain me nothing.” What he really wants to do is “mog,” meaning attain status over other dudes (mog is short for AMOG or “Alpha Male of the Group”). He’s considering getting double-jaw-replacement surgery in order to look like the guy who (according to his pseudoscientific calculations) has the the most handsome face on earth: Matt Bomer, a gay actor frequently featured in work by Ryan Murphy, TV’s king of queer dramedy.
As many social-media users have suggested, all of this seems a bit, well ... y’know. Clavicular is like a blend of Dorian Gray and Patrick Bateman, those fictional creations of gay authors out to probe the sinister side of male vanity.
The psychologist Alan Downs’s The Velvet Rage deconstructed the “best little boy in the world” syndrome that makes many gay guys into overachievers. Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” crystallized a way of seeing the world as full of artifice, which can lead queer people to behave in a self-conscious, knowingly false manner. Oscar-winning movies such as Moonlight and Brokeback Mountain depicted gay men disguising their gendered shame in traditionally manly trappings. The theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick examined the extent to which jealous imitation drives all manner of same-sex relations, straight and gay.
Gay people realize, at some early age, that the world isn’t made for people like them. And for men, raised with the social pressure to seek dominance, that realization can lead to an obsession with climbing the rungs—whether in the context of sex, money, or something else. All of which is to say: Gay men are the original incels. They are born into heightened status anxiety and must maneuver to get ahead. And one way to do that is to be hot.
The looks-maxxers have stumbled into a similar set of psychological conditions by dint of socioeconomic circumstances and social media. The 21st century’s obstacles for young men—as seen in deaths of despair and lagging employment—have been amply publicized both by credible journalists and by charlatans such as Fuentes. Clearly, many boys are struggling with a sense of futility. In one stream, Clavicular explained that he felt “we live in one of the worst societies ever throughout the entire history of the world.” What he meant, he went on to say, is that a woman will barely look at a man unless he’s high status.
Women and girls are becoming only more fixated on their beauty. But they’ve faced the pressure of being pretty for generations. . . . . . Straight men are just catching up, vanity-wise, and political opportunists have eagerly fed into their insecurities. Fuentes, a self-declared proud virgin at age 27, recently urged his followers to spend all their energy trying to “ascend,” the looks-maxxing term for becoming your best self. Tate has said that any man who has sex with women for pleasure is “gay” because they should be focused on procreation. Men like these preach that various historically marginalized groups—gays, Jews, Blacks, women—are to blame for the cultural conditions their viewers chafe at. Self-improvement, in this view, isn’t pursued to, well, improve the self. It’s to win a competition.
Yet the link between looks-maxxing and rising anti-gay sentiment is probably even simpler than that. Straight men feel they’ve fallen in the social hierarchy. And when they look up, who do they see?
The factual basis for broader perceptions of gay prosperity is mixed. . . . . In any case, the young generation that’s now transforming American politics grew up at a time when pop culture made LGBTQ people into aspirational figures. . . . . To many adults who’d grown up in a world in which LGBTQ people were stigmatized and sidelined, this visibility felt groundbreaking. To many of the kids who were just coming online then, gay acceptance was simply a mainstream norm—and queer people were affiliated with success. In the conspiracy-minded 2020s, that success is more widely feared than admired or understood.
This conflation of anti-establishment angst and homophobic paranoia didn’t arise organically. After Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, conservative activists looking to rebuild an electoral majority stoked conspiracy theories about queer people’s newfound cultural visibility. Efforts such as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law and the various protests against drag-queen story hour pushed back against an alleged liberal plot to “groom” or “indoctrinate” kids. And the censorious and controlling nature of those efforts offers a reminder of another comparison for the vanity of the new homophobes: fascism. A fascination with appearance, self-mastery, and masculinity has also long been the provenance of authoritarian regimes—including ones that brutalized gays, Jews, and immigrants. Mass status anxiety, history has shown time and again, can be exploited for the most dangerous kind of politics.
Saturday, March 28, 2026
Republicans Know This War Is Going Badly
Because the diplomatic option is so unappealing, Trump seems poised to seize an even worse one: dispatching ground troops to invade Iran. He is sending thousands of Marines and paratroopers to the region, and The Wall Street Journal reports that the Pentagon is considering whether to send another 10,000 ground troops.
“This is a dangerous point,” Vali Nasr, a veteran Iran watcher at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “Maybe Trump has no choice but to go down this path, because to go to the table right now would really admit defeat. But this is the quandary of his own making.”
Meanwhile polling in America shows very strong opposition to the war, particularly if it comes to involve a ground invasion even as gas prices at the pumps keep rising and aiding financial strain to average families and the stock markets continue to fall. As a second piece in the New York Times notes, even Republicans are beginning to realize that the Felon's war of choice is not going well and that no clear off ramp is in sight:
It is not just Democrats in Congress who fear that Donald Trump’s war in Iran is going sideways. After a classified Pentagon briefing on Wednesday, Republican lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee appeared shaken.
“We will not sacrifice American lives for the same failed foreign policies,” said Nancy Mace, warning about the possibility of American troops in Iran. The committee chair, Mike Rogers, complained that members aren’t getting nearly enough information about war plans. Troop movements, he said, should be “thoughtful and deliberate.” The implication was that they might not be.
“This is the first week where I have felt that there’s been really any resistance to this war from Republicans,” Jason Crow, a combat veteran and Democratic member of the committee, told me. His colleagues’ public comments, he suggested, only hint at the depth of their anxiety. In closed meetings, he said, they express many concerns “that they’re unwilling to show publicly.”
Some conservatives are still arguing that pessimism about the war stems from a blinkered and biased elite. . . . . But at least some of the Republicans hearing directly from the Pentagon aren’t so sanguine. “On a bipartisan basis, it was pretty clear to us that there was no plan, no strategy,” said Sara Jacobs, another Democratic member of the committee. The briefers, she said, “could not articulate an endgame, and we are three weeks into this war.”
The big question now is if an American ground invasion is imminent. I suspect people are underestimating the possibility because it’s such a manifestly terrible idea. Americans certainly don’t want to see troops on the ground: In a Reuters/Ipsos poll last week, only 34 percent of respondents said they would back the deployment of Special Forces soldiers into Iran, and a mere 7 percent support a larger-scale attack. The markets — one of the few forces that can constrain Trump — seem to assume a relatively quick resolution to the war, which is most likely why oil prices haven’t risen as much as some anticipated.
Yet despite all the reasons America shouldn’t escalate its war with Iran, there’s a good chance it will. Trump is sending thousands more troops to the Middle East, and in the past, when he’s massed military forces outside a hostile country, he’s used them. “Some U.S. officials think a crushing show of force to conclude the fighting would create more leverage in peace talks or simply give Trump something to point to and declare victory,” Axios reported on Thursday.
Jacobs, the Democratic congresswoman, told me that the Pentagon’s request for $200 billion to fund a war that’s burning through hundreds of millions of dollars a day is a tell. “That’s not a one-time cost to wrap things up,” she said. “That’s a down payment on a long war.”
This would not, obviously, be the first time the United States ramped up a war of choice just to avoid a humiliating defeat. In his memoir, former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wrote about how, during the Vietnam War, the C.I.A. warned that failure “would be damaging to U.S. prestige,” leading the United States to prolong a pointless conflict in the hope of saving face. During years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, Crow recalled, military leaders would repeatedly claim “that one more big troop surge, one more big offensive, would get it done and put us in a better position and win the war.”
Never before, however, did America arrive at the threshold of a quagmire so quickly, with so much advance warning about the precise errors it was making. . . . . And yet here we are, lurching toward a new version of a familiar catastrophe, suffering from some national form of neurotic repetition compulsion. “This is like the horrible, lame-dad cover band version of the worst of American foreign policy,” said Matt Duss, the executive vice president of the Center for International Policy.
Someday, perhaps, when we’re picking up the pieces from yet another ill-conceived war, Republicans will explain that behind the scenes, they opposed it. One of the biggest problems in Congress, said Crow, is the gap between what people say privately and their willingness to demonstrate “the strength of their convictions” in public. “I’m always trying to close that gap with folks, and I always remind people that it’s never too late to do the right thing,” he said. He may be right, but the sooner the better.
Friday, March 27, 2026
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)