Today’s story of Tennessee’s botched execution of Christa Pike three decades after the murder she committed as a teenager reminded me of this piece I wrote for TIME back in 2000 on America’s weird fascination with learning the final-meal requests of condemned prisoners — and what we learn from it about capital punishment. (Pike, btw, had declined to request a specific meal — though if she had, it’s contents would have been dutifully reported).

Indeed, press reports of a sample of Tennessee executions over the past few years tell us the following:

• Robert Glen Coe | April 19, 2000 | Fried catfish, white beans, hush puppies, coleslaw, French fries, pecan pie, and sweet tea.

• Sedley Alley | June 28, 2006 | Pizza pockets, ice cream, iced oatmeal cookies, and milk.

• Philip Ray Workman | May 9, 2007 | Declined food for himself; asked that a large vegetarian pizza be given to a homeless person in Nashville. Prison authorities declined the request.

• Daryl Keith Holton | September 12, 2007 | Declined a special meal; ate the standard meal: riblets on a bun, mixed vegetables, baked beans, white cake with white icing, and iced tea.

• Steve Henley | February 4, 2009 | A seafood plate: shrimp, oysters, fried fish, onion rings, and hush puppies.

• Billy Ray Irick | August 9, 2018 | A “super deluxe” cheeseburger-and-onion-rings combo, with Pepsi.

• Donnie Edward Johnson | May 16, 2019 | Declined a meal and asked supporters instead to donate meals to homeless people.

• Stephen Michael West | August 15, 2019 | Philly cheesesteak and French fries.

• Leroy Hall Jr. | December 5, 2019 | Philly cheesesteak, two orders of onion rings, a slice of cheesecake, and a Pepsi.

• Nicholas Sutton | February 20, 2020 | Fried pork chops, mashed potatoes with gravy, and peach pie with vanilla ice cream.

• Byron Lewis Black | August 5, 2025 | Pizza with mushrooms and sausage, doughnuts, and butter-pecan ice cream.

• Anthony Darrell Hines | August 2026 | Fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn, coleslaw, fries, biscuits, chocolate-chip cake, and sweet tea. Contemporary accounts differ slightly over whether a chicken sandwich was also included. [5][6] |

So, why do these final meal requests form part of media coverage of executions?

From my TIME piece:

Oliver David Cruz, the rapist-murderer executed in Texas Wednesday, chose a south-of-the-border theme for his last supper: spicy beef fajitas, beans and rice, flour tortillas, onions, tomatoes, avocados, a banana split and orange juice.

We know this because, in keeping with a morbid convention in media coverage of executions, the condemned person’s final meal has already been broadcast to the world by the wire services. And soon it will find its way onto what may be the most macabre culinary site on the Web: The Texas Department of Criminal Justices Final Meal Request page (sadly, it was taken down some years ago)

There we learn that Cruz’s choices are somewhat humble measured against the norm. Just two weeks, ago, for example, murderer Juan Soria wanted “chicken, three pieces of fish, burgers, pizza, fruit (grapes, plums, peaches, apples, tangerines), doughnuts, walnuts, chocolate candy bar, plain potato chips, picante sauce, hot sauce, salad with ranch dressing, Coke and Sprite” before going to meet his maker. A month earlier, Jessy San Miguel, who had killed four people execution-style while robbing a Taco Bell, had asked for “Pizza (beef, bacon bits, and multiple types of cheese), 10 quesadillas (5 mozzarella cheese, 5 cheddar cheese), 5 strips of open-flame grilled beef, 5 strips of stir-fried beef, chocolate peanut butter ice cream, sweet tea, double fudge chocolate cake, broccoli and grapes” before he lay down for the last time on that Huntsville gurney.

I can’t deny my own voyeuristic fascination as I scroll down through the choices of men being offered one final moment of the “freedom” to be a consumer. Their choices, as diverse, poignant and sometimes just plain wacky as they are, offer clues to their identities and character. But perhaps that fascination is simply a kind of “desert island discs” game that calls on the reader to consider his or her own menu for a final meal. But even more fascinating than the contents of the site, perhaps, is the decision by the folks down at Huntsville to post this information on the Web.

Governments are not in the habit of going out of their way to satisfy the voyeuristic impulses of a morbidly curious public. Perhaps there’s simply some bureaucratic sense of duty to record the minutiae of a condemned person’s last day on earth. Or perhaps our culture has evolved this ritual of the la carte last meal to sugarcoat what remains a grim act of violence by the state to redress a previous wrong. After all, in some countries, a condemned man’s last meal is whatever the prison kitchen happens to be serving that day, and death is by firing squad rather than the lethal injection ritual that gives the impression of a medical procedure rather than the more visible violence of shooting a man to death.

Where some Islamic cultures have evolved detailed instruction on the taking of life and limb as punishment for various crimes, an American culture that takes its moral reference points from the Old Testament and the New is stuck with the challenge of trying, if indeed this is possible, of finding morally agreeable rituals for executing offenders. And it’s not easy. The Last Meal Requests page records numerous instances of requests for a final cigarette. And these, the site notes, are denied in accordance with department policy. Could it be that the policy is designed to protect the condemned men’s health? It could simply be based on the judgment that a cigarette is a pleasure that should be denied a man who has committed crimes ugly enough to warrant execution. But then why allow the same man the pleasure of choosing his last meal, as opposed to simply giving him whatever the prison kitchen was serving that day?

There’s no correct answer, of course. Killing people is a morally messy business. Whether we allow a man carte blanche with junk food menus and then have a medic administer a lethal injection, or we simply serve him that day’s fried chicken and then shoot him in the head, the act is, in essence, the same. The difference, in the end, may have less to do with the condemned man’s perception than it does with the way his executioners — and the society that orders them to kill its capital convicts — experience his death.

Trump banning CNN and MSNBC from the White House would be a gift to journalism — if journalism, rather than entertainment, was the lingua franca of TV news. (Spoiler alert: TV is, inescapably, an entertainment medium, as the brilliant Huxleyan Neil Postman’s wrote…)

Anyone who imagines journalism — pretentiously imagined as “the first draft of history” — can be done from the performative spin-sparring of the White House press room, or even in the corridors outside where an administration official who wants to broadcast some particular piece of spin whispers it into the ear of a selected reporter who then rushes to their editor breathlessly proclaiming it a “get” — a feat of reporting ingenuity rather than a spoon-fed treat whose only nutritional value lies in understanding the reason it was offered — is suffering some sad delusions about the very nature of political communications.

The role of the White House press corps has for decades (across both Republican and Democrat administrations) been that of stenographers to power. That was the snot-klap (artful Afrikaans term for a blow to the head so sharp that it dislodges nasal mucus) so memorably struck by Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner.

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It was a memorably disruptive set, because the discomfort he visited on the President who had taken America into the cataclysmic failed war in Iraq was shared by the gathered nerd-prom hacks who had enabled it. They giggled nervously as each Colbert blow made Bush more and more uncomfortable, suddenly aware that they, too, were the butt of the joke because they’d played the role of stenographers.

Colbert’s merciless roast called attention to the chummy bonhomie of the White House-media relationship, in which the administration offers journalists the illusion of being treated as insiders or trusties in exchange for a compliant posture. Colbert drew attention to the things for which the media should hold the administration ought to be held account, making clear the extent of its failure because of its relationship with power.

In an op-ed I penned early in Trump’s first term, I argued that his war on the media offered a similar opportunity:

Unfortunately, it has been decades since America had [mainstream news media dedicated to holding power to account]. Instead, the press has allowed multiple presidential administrations to spoon-feed it information. News organizations in the United States have prioritized access to the corridors of power above all else, even when access is conditioned on avoiding uncomfortable questions or accepting evasive answers.

When “access journalism” leads senior editorial decision-makers to identify with political elites, explaining the government’s thinking to the public becomes their primary purpose. Combine that with cuts to news budgets, and political coverage becomes a mere endless cycle of sound bites from politicians and their surrogates – not unlike a dedicated sports channel covering a football season.

But no calamity better captures the dangers of a press corps too beholden to power than the invasion of Iraq, a cataclysmic blunder whose ghastly knock-on effects afflict the Middle East, as well as Europe, to this day. In the lead-up to the invasion, George W. Bush’s administration assiduously courted journalists at mainstream liberal and conservative news outlets, who then helped it win public support by disseminating what turned out to be false claims about weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

In the US, the only mainstream media organisation that ran consistently sceptical articles about the case for war was the Knight Ridder group (which has since been acquired by McClatchy). As reporters Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay later explained, their middle-tier news service was not granted top-level access, so they had to rely on sources from inside the intelligence community, who forthrightly pointed out the flaws in the Bush administration’s claims. Journalistic truth telling thrives when there is no need to nurture access.

So, once again, CNN and MSNBC are being offered the opportunity to do some journalism – Trump’s daily burblings clearly have zero value for understanding the moment we’re living through. The liberal media cling to the laughable fantasy that they’re penning the first draft of history – imagine writing the history of early 19^th century England by faithfully recording the utterances of (Mad) King George III… History should be written from below, from the perspective of the millions of people affected by the choices of those in power. It should prioritize assessing actions, impacts and patterns of power over what those in power say about themselves and their actions. (In the same way that we judge people in our daily lives not by what they say about themselves, but by what we can see about their behaviors and the consequences of those.) That’s what journalism requires; not the endless chronicling of the spin of those in power, but highlighting the real impact of their rule.

Safe bet: The media owned by a corporate class whose interests are fundamentally aligned with the policies of the Administration and are schooled in a culture of obeisance to power will, instead, kow-tow to get back onside, pay whatever the price demanded to restore their access to the empty rituals of White House press briefings.

Al-Qaeda probably saved my job at TIME magazine.

“Cost-cutting” had been all the rage as the corporate owners of what remained a profitable magazine were now obsessively focused on boosting their stock price. Profit wasn’t enough for Wall Street; those profits had to grow year on year — hard to do with a news magazine, except by relentlessly cutting costs through annual layoffs. So there I was in the summer of 2001 — ridiculously designated “The Summer of the Shark” by a magazine desperate to tap into America’s fear economy — with a decent track record of writing daily analysis pieces on war and politics in the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, South Asia, Latin America and beyond. But the only thing on my plate that quiet summer was the ethnic Albanian insurgency in North Macedonia. And with the magazine’s interest waning in wars with no U.S. troops at risk, I expected to be listed in the cost-cutting layoff cohort to be named at year’s end.

But Osama bin Laden would supplant the shark to become the premier brand in America’s mass-media manufacture of nightmares. The 9/11 attacks, and the imperial wars of choice they triggered, probably extended the usefulness of my analytical insights to TIME by a further decade.

I had been driving my wife down to her studio in TriBeCa that achingly blue-skied morning when we heard on the news that a plane had crashed in the north tower of the World Trade Center. So we drove down Sullivan Street in SoHo with its perfect view, and got out to join the excited crowd trying to make sense of the almost cartoonish cut-out shape of an aircraft in the façade of that tower. “Hi Mark, I’m going to be in late today. I’m down here at the World Trade Center looking at this plane crash,” I said on my supervisor’s voicemail, via a payphone. “I know we don’t really do local stories, but I figured I’ll hang out and see if I can get some color…” (Nobody had any idea what this plane crash meant in that moment between the two planes.)

Minutes later, a jet-engine roar made us look up as the second plane struck the south tower, and a Jerry Bruckheimer-esque plume of petroleum flame mushroomed out of its façade. Wait, WTF?!! How could two planes crash in the same place… “The President says its terrorism”, an elderly Italian-American woman who’d been watching on TV rasped out of her apartment window to no one and everyone on Sullivan Street that moment.

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I didn’t realize it in that moment, but my job was safe, for a while longer – because I knew something about the context.

I had written a number of pieces about Bin Laden and his network following the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Uganda, and then the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen. Even a “Cocktail Napkin Primer” on Bin Laden (hey, it was TIME magazine) a year before 9/11. And one of my key points in those early pieces was that Al Qaeda was a classic case of what the CIA calls “blowback” – where elements of a proxy operation come back to haunt the agency. In a TIME.com piece posted about ten weeks before 9/11, I’d written:

Bin Laden’s role has always been that of facilitator. That was his function in the ‘Islamist International’ formed, with the active encouragement of the CIA and Egyptian and Saudi intelligence, to recruit volunteers to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. His considerable wealth (and ability to raise funds from others) and his organizational expertise played a key role in helping the “Arab Afghans,” as the volunteers became known, play a creditable role in the war against the Soviets. And once that war was won, he continued to play the same role, keeping its veterans together and maintaining an infrastructure to arm, train and fund Islamist warriors for deployment in Muslim armies in places as diverse as Bosnia, Chechnya, Western China and the Philippines.

As a U.S. ally in Afghanistan, Bin Laden had been central to organizing Islamist volunteers from all over the world to fight the Soviet invaders. That program, covertly backed and orchestrated by the U.S. as well as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, saw an improbable triumph, as lightly-armed Afghan mujahedeen guerrilla forces, supported by their Arab comrades, eventually forced the withdrawal of the world’s largest conventional army. Now, though, his battle hardened international brigade had no way home, and would turn its attention to other powers occupying or intervening in Muslim lands. And by 1991, that meant the U.S. itself.

Bin Laden believed America could be beaten. His objective, of course, had never been conquer the U.S. but rather to end its presence and pervasive influence in the lands of Islam. Exhibit A for his optimism was the U.S. withdrawal from Beirut in 1985, after what became Hizballah blew up a Marine barracks there killing some 240 U.S. troops. The bloody carnage of Mogadishu in 1993, in which 17 U.S. soldiers were killed in an abortive raid on a local warlord, also led to a hasty retreat [EM] today U.S. officials believe operatives linked with bin Laden helped train the Somali gunmen who ambushed the Americans. And in his propaganda, bin Laden certainly claimed the incident as further proof of his basic thesis — that the U.S. would withdraw from Muslim countries if the cost of staying was rendered too high.

The 9/11 attacks on U.S. soil were intended to raise the cost of remaining in the Middle East. The Blowback had come home.

A second dimension noted in that pre-9/11 TIME piece was also worth noting: “In the language of advertising, Bin Laden has become a brand — a geopolitical Keyser Soze, an omnipresent menace whose very name invokes perils far beyond his capability.”

Terrorism as mass communication

The language of advertising is extremely relevant, here, because terrorism — the tactic of using military violence against a civilian population in order to send a political message to amplify a cause, to pressure political authorities to change course, or provoke an ultimately self-destructive response — is not a form of warfare. It does nothing to degrade an adversary’s forces in the field or ability to wage war, nor to contest control over any piece of territory. Terrorism is a brutal form of political communication, known in the literature as “propaganda of the deed”.

Some years later, in 2010, I had an opportunity to explain the concept to the TIME.com readership by analogy. That was when Pastor Terry Jones, a complete nobody in the Islamophobic Evangelical world — his entire congregation could fit into a single school bus — made himself an international celebrity and the target of thousands of protestors across the globe, even a warning from the Pentagon that he was endangering U.S. troops. How? He had staged a backyard Koran-burning for TV cameras. Like Terry Jones, Bin Laden understood how “propaganda of the deed” functioned in a society of the spectacle.

Despite his delusions of grandeur, Bin Laden had been a marginal figure, even in the realms of political Islam. But…

…When al-Qaeda attacked the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, people began to take notice — especially when President Clinton responded with a panicky fusillade of cruise missiles aimed in bin Laden’s general direction. But that was nothing compared with the epic notoriety the al-Qaeda leader would earn when 19 of his men in hijacked airliners brought down the World Trade Center and trashed the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, killing almost 3,000 Americans on home soil.

Suddenly, bin Laden and his little band became the living incarnation of America’s worst nightmare — the President of the United States literally declared war on him, although he commanded no divisions, held no territory and had precious few visible assets. The al-Qaeda leader dominated the U.S. national-security conversation for years after those attacks, even though his movement never came close to matching its grotesque feats of 9/11 again.

Terrorism’s basic device is “propaganda of the deed” — a marginal group of extremists can briefly overcome its deficiencies in real power and presence through spectacular acts of violence that draw the public’s attention, enabling the group to air its grievances and build its “brand.” That’s how bin Laden managed to convince Americans, although not the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims, that he was the leader of a global Islamist rebellion.

In this framework, the terror “deed” — via its amplification by mass media — forces the perpetrators and their cause into public consciousness at massively outsize scale. Although it kills or permanently scars many civilians, the act of terror is first and foremost a disruptive media intervention. As the live TV images of the World Trade Center attacks beamed into homes across the country, four out of ten Americans stayed home from their jobs that day. And the endless TV replays of the images of the World Trade Center being struck delivered on the goals of the perpetrators beyond their wildest expectations; they traumatized millions of Americans, manufacturing an illusion that they all faced an existential peril, every day, everywhere.

The biggest immediate beneficiaries were imperial and authoritarian forces in Washington, who took the climate of fear as an opportunity to violate domestic and international law at will – launch disastrous wars, torture captives, put their population under mass surveillance and more.

Israel was another major beneficiary: Then-foreign minister Benjamin Netanyahu chortled the next day that the 9/11 attacks were “a good thing”, because they cemented in the U.S. mind the narrative of an “Islamic terror threat” that bound it ever closer to his settler-colonial apartheid regime. The U.S. “war on terror” (an absurd formulation, of course) effectively ended any U.S. pressure on Israel to complete the Oslo process. And less than a week after the attacks Netanyahu was on Capitol Hill, urging the U.S. to attack not only Afghanistan, but also Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Sudan.

Despite its success on 9/11, Al-Qaeda remained a small network of a few hundred men, hardly a serious military threat to the U.S. When running for President in 2004, Senator John Kerry – mindful that one of the key metrics of success of a terror attack is the self-destructive response it provokes from its target authority – was ridiculed by the Bush Administration for pointing out that terrorism was essentially a law-enforcement and intelligence challenge rather than an existential national threat. “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance,” Kerry said. “[Al-Qaeda] isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.”

Such sobriety didn’t resonate with mainstream America, not least because of its mass media. The “Summer of the Shark” TIME cover had been a shallow and cynical attempt to capture Americans’ attention by invoking a phantom menace. But the specter of Osama bin Laden, manifested in the trope of those airliners hitting the World Trade Center, was a gift that kept on giving. Bin Laden’s image featured on at least 11 TIME covers — Hitler had only made it onto 6. The “Summer of the Shark” had morphed into the Decade of Al-Qaeda.

Al Qaeda’s “gift” was not only to the U.S. news industry, which made Bin Laden the resident monster-under-the-bed of the mainstream American nightmare — a role that had been vacant since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It also represented a unique opportunity for an alliance of U.S. arms-industry lobbyists and neoconservative ideologues who had for years been itching for an opportunity to use U.S. military force to remake the Middle East on U.S. and Israeli terms. (And, yes, it kept some of us who knew a bit about Al Qaeda and about the countries the U.S. invaded in response to the 9/11 attacks gainfully employed…)

Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld was famously quoted as urging, in a meeting the next day, that the U.S. response include attacking Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, which had no connection with the Al Qaeda strikes “Go massive,” he instructed U.S. intel officials. “Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

Rumsfeld and his fellow hawks knew the psychological impact of the 9/11 attacks would create public consent and bipartisan support for new imperial military expeditions in the name of protecting Americans from a phantom menace made plausible in the minds of millions. The fear of attack engendered by 9/11 allowed President George W. Bush to attack Iraq with public support, telling Americans they faced a nuclear attack from Saddam Hussein). Decades later, President Trump — who came to power castigating Bush for sending Americans to die in a war based on lies, told Americans to believe he was attacking Iran to protect them from a nuclear strike.

Even today, the (generationally) fading specter of 9/11 that had mainstreamed Islamophobia is being desperately revived as a centerpiece of campaigning by Republicans (and arguably even establishment Democrats) against Mayor Zohran Mamdani, senate candidate Abdul Al-Sayed and other politically progressive Muslims.

In the end, the greatest consequence of the 9/11 terror spectacle was the damage it allowed America’s leaders to do to Americans, and to the millions elsewhere whose lives have been destroyed in the wars that claimed “war on terror” justification. The legacy of wars and repression triggered have made America less safe, less free and more globally isolated and resented than at any point in its history.

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“The first thing I want to say is, mandate?! Mandate, my ass…” It was late 1984 and I was driving away from a conference of the United Democratic Front, plotting strategy for a “revolution [that] would not be televised”, but would (we hoped) put ordinary working people in the driving seat liberate our country from a system of white minority rule. Democracy was our goal. And on that note, the mighty poet Gil Scott-Heron, via my car’s cassette deck, wanted me to understand that the United States was not quite the democracy advertised by its Cold War branding. “It seems as though we’ve been convinced,” he continued, “that 26% of the registered voters — not even 26% of the American people, but 26% of the registered voters — form a mandate, or a landslide…” He was referring to the 1980 election, pointing out that Ronald Reagan’s win was an Electoral College landslide, but reflected the choice of just 1 in 4 registered voters — and, at the time, only 72% of voting-age Americans were registered.

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Of course, if you were fighting for liberation anywhere in the Global South, or the Third World as we proudly called it back then, you didn’t need Gil Scott-Heron to tell you that what the U.S. was exporting was anything but freedom and democracy — millions of dead, maimed, tortured and imprisoned bodies strewn across Asia, Africa and Latin America in defense of friendly despots had made that much clear. Cold War logic had even made Washington a key enabler of South Africa’s apartheid regime. And the poet laureate of untelevised revolution (whose father, BTW, became Glasgow Celtic’s first Black footballer in 1951!) was extending the inquiry, inviting us to question, also, the extent to which the U.S. government actually represented the American people.

I was reminded of that moment 26 years later when George W. Bush, who had lost the 2000 US presidential election by more than half a million votes, was declared the winner — after a Supreme Court dominated by judges appointed by his party had stopped the Florida vote count. Did the Democrats seek to stop what was clearly a steal? Nope. Their candidate, Al Gore simply shrugged and conceded, he said, “for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy”. Our “democracy” being the system that had made a loser of the candidate chosen by the most voters.

By the time Donald Trump won the presidency after finishing second by a margin of 3 million in 2016, the idea that the winner of the most votes could be the loser of an election had been so normalized for 21^st Century Americans and their media that the term “popular vote” was understood to designate the secondary status of the voters’ overall verdict. Like the audience award at a film festival, always secondary to the verdict of the judges. Just another symptom of a “democracy” whose elite media expected the population to simply accept that not all votes are equal.

As I’ve noted previously on here

… if in any African or Asian country, the candidate who finished second by 3 million votes was declared the winner, Western media and political institutions would deem this to have been a result of cheating. (Yet that’s exactly what happened here in 2016, and in 2000 – though in that year the winner had finished only half a million votes behind the loser.)

Yes, but that’s the Electoral College, say those weaned on the narrative of American “democracy”. But the Electoral College, which literally elects the president, is designed as a restraint on democracy: For example, it gives California one seat for every 709,000 residents, while Wyoming has one for every 193,000 residents, making a single presidential vote in Wyoming three times as powerful as one in California.

Joe Biden won 7 million more votes than Donald Trump in 2020, but he was the winner only because of the 10,000 votes by which he won Arizona’s Electoral College seats, the 11,000 votes that handed him Georgia’s, the 80,000 votes that won him Pennsylvania, and the 20,000 by which he won Wisconsin. Those 120,000 votes made him president; Trump would have won if he’d won those votes, i.e. even if, nationally, he finished 6.9 million votes behind Biden.

American democracy, then, to borrow from Gandhi, would be a good idea…

Do all U.S. citizens have the right and opportunity to cast a vote of equal value? No, they clearly don’t. And not only because of the Electoral College.

The U.S., bizarrely for a modern nation state, has no single national set of voting laws or national election commission; voting laws vary from “state” to “state” (provinces, really, in international terms). And state authorities are able to make it difficult for voters they suspect will vote against them to actually get to the polls to cast their votes. [The U.S. Supreme Court upholds their right to do this as long as their stated motivations are partisan, not racial… Yeah, exactly.]

Republicans have leveraged their state-level majorities to place a thicket of legal and logistical obstacles between the ballot box and poorer Black, brown and indigenous citizens: voter ID laws, a dysfunctional voter registration system, reduced numbers of voting locations, etc. Rolling back the voting rights won by Black people in the bitter civil rights struggles of the 1960s has been a core part of the GOP strategy for years. Another key plank has been taking control of the Supreme Court, which liberals refuse to understand is a partisan political chamber even if it conducts its business in the language of jurisprudence…

And if the Electoral College is a distortion of democracy, the U.S. Senate — the most powerful legislative body, which of course also effectively picks the Supreme Court — is an even more grotesque example. That’s because the U.S. Constitution awards two Senate seats to each state, regardless of population size. Wyoming’s half-million residents pick two Senators, as do California’s 39 million — meaning, of course, that a single vote in Wyoming has the same value as 78 votes in California. The U.S. Senate can, in fact, be controlled with the support of less than 20% of the nationwide vote. Etc. etc.

The morbid symptoms of the USA at 250 — far too many to parse here, and more added every day — are not unconnected from the way power is structured in this society. They’re enabled and fostered by it. And the founding DNA of the U.S. system, which is shares with the apartheid states of Israel and South Africa pre 1994 — settler democracy and independence from its colonial patron — is not coincidental here.

In 2016, Trump won a majority in every demographic slice of the white vote, whether measured by age, income, gender or education level. Even then, of course, his tally remained a minority of the electorate, but “our democracy” did not require that he win the support of the majority of voters to become president. Trump never offered -- nor later even pretended -- to be the President of all Americans; his electoral strategy focused on rallying white voters to deliver him the Electoral College. The political institutions bequeathed by America’s 18^th Century Constitution made that a plausible path to power; they had been built to enable a minority of rich white men to rule while inventing “whiteness” to enlist support beyond their elite circles, and that’s what they did.

Trump had not staged a coup, and it’s a self-soothing liberal delusion to imagine that it was some kind of Russian mind-manipulation of the voters that got him elected; he was and is, again, legitimately the President of the United States, thanks to a Constitutional system whose design enables white minority rule.

Is democracy — as in a system where governments are chosen by elections in which every citizen has the right and ability to cast a vote of equal value — even possible under the rules of America’s 18^th century constitution? Quite possibly not. That was certainly never the intent of its framers, any more so than the South African state created by the Act of Union in 1910 could be said to have intended democratic equality among all those who inhabited its territory.

The U.S. Constitution was written by and for a coterie of rich white settlers freeing themselves from British rule — the community imagined as “We, the people” in the US Declaration of Independence, though, was confined to property-owning white settlers, proclaiming self-government first and foremost in order to continue their rapacious theft of the land of the indigenous nations by defying the British crown’s prohibition on Westward expansion of the settler-colony to seize more native land beyond the Mississippi River. The spirit of independence was unapologetically tied to the expansion of the settler-colonial realm, by an economy still heavily dependent on the industrial-scale brutalization of enslaved Africans. And it gave free rein to the genocide of the native nations that stood in the way of colonial expansion. (Here, I really recommend the work of Gregg Grandin, or for a quick primer, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s “Indigenous People’s History of the United States”, which also informed Peck’s excellent film).

Like the settler-democracies of apartheid South Africa and Israel, both also created by the settler population violently shrugging off the supervision of the colonial power under whose auspices they were settled, the USA was created principally as a polity to regulate the interests of the settler population, and rule over those displaced and subordinated by the settler-colonial project (including the white women and unpropertied men also subordinated to the wealthy settler class by and for whom the system was designed).

Like its cousins in the later settler colonies of South Africa and Israel, the “Founding Fathers” created a political system designed by and for settler communities to break from British and create a form of representative government restricted to the settlers themselves as they amassed wealth by brutalizing the millions of Brown and Black people all around them.

And it’s clear that America’s settler-democratic constitution remains the most important weapon in the arsenal of today’s white nationalists, who leverage its many anti-democratic provisions to remake the electoral map in ways likely to cement Republican rule for the foreseeable future without needing to resort to violence to ensure white minority rule.

The idea that South African settler-colonialism might have conceptual relevance to our understanding of the U.S. political system might even be deemed ridiculous by mainstream American liberals, but making such connections is hardly new: Malcolm X did so repeatedly, as did numerous other Black liberation thinkers in the United States. Even the journalistic legend, Edward R. Murrow, in his 1960 excoriation of the treatment of farmworkers in the US, Harvest of Shame, opens with images of Black day laborers in Florida, with Murrow’s voice telling his audience that these images were not, as they might have assumed from the poverty and degradation they captured, from South Africa. His point was to draw a connection between the circumstances of Black life in the American South in 1960 and that under South Africa’s apartheid regime. Support for South Africa’s liberation struggle in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s was driven by an acute awareness of that connection.

Like the United States created by the Founders, apartheid South Africa was a nation-state of laws and elected government, but its democracy was exclusive to the settler community, enabling the ruthless dispossession and exploitation of its Black population, which was policed as if under colonial occupation. America’s European settlers had created a sovereign nation state of laws and representative government free of British imperial rule, with citizenship confined to a settler elite that built its own wealth and power through the violent dispossession and subjugation of indigenous and enslaved African people.

It turns out they even exchanged notes, according to Mahmoud Mamdani, whose research has noted that the official term “reserve” used for proto-Bantustans in South Africa derived from a study mission white officials had undertaken to the USA, to learn from the experience of Native American “reservations”.

Settler democracy in the United States followed a trajectory quite different from South Africa. Decades of struggle by those excluded has forced a formal expansion of the American community of citizens with the attendant political rights to include white women, and Black and brown people. But the country’s transformation from an oligarchic settler state into an inclusive, egalitarian democracy was never completed. Whether the racist terror that ended the promising interlude of post-Civil War Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation and mass lynching, incarceration and other measures in force for decades in the U.S. South for many decades after the Civil War to ensure white supremacy remained undisturbed — despite democratic rights being formally extended to Black people. The trajectory was different, again, though not fundamentally so or in the often violent urban ghetto segregation in the major cities of the West, Midwest and Northeast over the ensuing century. The crisis created by the urban rebellions of the 1960s, coinciding with the peak of the Cold War which arguably boosted Washington’s incentives to stabilize the home front, resulted in milestone victories in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts.

But a long view of American history suggests those gains may yet turn out to have been products of a temporary interlude in which the narrative and even the structures of US governance were determined by the Cold War, and which are being steadily eroded in the post-Cold War era.

Today’s struggles over voting rights remind us that progress towards democratic equality in America was uneven, its promise only partly fulfilled — and that the Republican Party makes no bones about its intention to roll back some of that progress. The apartheid DNA of the US Constitutional system provides them with the tools to do just that. Today, state-level Republican Parties are using Constitutional means to ensure Black and brown citizens are denied the ability to effectively shape the country’s future via electoral participation.

Post-apartheid South Africa had invited its citizens to reimagine the national community based on a new set of institutions reflecting radically transformed structures of power. Has there ever been an equivalent moment in the United States, an effective dismantling of the settler-colonial state and a genuinely democratic reordering of power in a system where Americans are invited to imagine their national community anew, in inclusive and egalitarian terms?

The U.S. system appears to have adapted itself, without an equivalent reckoning to what we saw in South Africa. Instead, we’ve seen a kind of narrative sleight of hand, a pretense that the system was founded on principles of democratic equality, even if some glitches had to be worked out along the way (i.e. slavery, the genocidal wars of conquest against America’s original inhabitants barely get a mention even in the liberal telling). But all that unpleasantness is thankfully behind us, we’re told, and we are invited to annually mark Dr Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday by acts of neighborhood kindness as if the murdered Civil Rights leader had been a kind of harmless Mr. Rogers figure rather than the dangerous revolutionary haunting J. Edgar Hoover’s nights in the 1960s. (The same, btw, has been done with the image of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, now invoked by white elites — who have grown ever richer at the expense of the Black majority in the post-apartheid years — as absolution.) The union forged by the Founders has somehow been “perfected” over the years in continuity with their intentions – hence today’s discomfort over critically evaluating what has been sold as a glorious past in which the U.S. nation state only ever signaled freedom and democracy.

Mainstream liberalism, which has long venerated the very Constitution Republicans are using to buttress white power, wants us to imagine today’s American political drama as an aberration, a case of an established democracy imperiled by an authoritarian turn. But that’s misleading and disarming, and a failure to recognize the expiration of the Cold War-era bipartisan political contract. The post-Cold War Republican Party has reverted to a nationalist identity with diminished interest in proclaiming democracy as the American idea. Its ideologues now insist – not incorrectly – that democracy was never the intention of the framers of America’s 18^th century constitution. They also, clearly, see their own party as America’s only legitimate ruling party, as their actions have made clear through the Clinton, Obama and Biden presidencies.

It’s precisely because of the less-than-democratic nature of the U.S. system itself that a white nationalist party can quite legally and constitutionally, cement its hold on power by suppressing the votes of people of color (as long as it says it’s doing so not because of their “race” or ethnicity, but because they’ll vote against the ruling party!).

U.S. democracy is an unfinished project. The institutions and practices of settler democracy established by the constitution were not designed to create a society where everyone, and every vote, has equal value. They were designed to entrench the power of settler elites. But there’s a dialectic here: While those institutions can be effectively used to block progress towards democracy, they can and have been effectively used, also, as vehicles to pursue democratic equality — when driven by grassroots organizing and struggle outside of the corridors of power. But is the existing electoral system sufficient to complete the democratization of America?

Today, the GOP, likely America’s ruling party for years to come, is moving consciously and rapidly to limit the extent to which the electoral system can be — and has been — used to advance democracy America. The United States of America will never be a true democracy until every citizen is able to cast a vote of equal value in choosing our government. Perhaps the white nationalist backlash represented by today’s GOP can also be read as a sign that today’s equivalent of the settler elites, i.e. the corporate oligarchy, are anxious that too much progress was made towards democracy in the post-World War 2 era?

Whatever the case, the narrative glue of that post World War 2 “bipartisan” elite governing consensus has long-since dissolved, along with the national imaginary that constituted “American” identity to which it was hinged. Today, it is the institutions forged after 1776 that are buttressing an increasingly authoritarian, oligarchic system pursuing and maintaining a society that works for them, at the expense of most.

Yet, the pursuit of genuine democracy in the U.S. remains alive and active in political challenges to that oligarchy. The past is an unfinished story; the future is unwritten.

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Starting Friday June 26 at 10am Eastern, a weekly hour of thoughtful conversation about the World Cup. Tune in here. Don’t worry if you can’t make the live taping, we’ll post a YouTube version after.

This isn’t “Sportswashing”; this is the end of a decrepit world order

My friend Abdullah Al-Arian nailed it when he recently wrote that “rather than sanitizing the US image, the World Cup is actually serving as an extension of its war on the world”.

I have no time for the concept of “sportwashing”, of course, because of its colonial underpinnings. As Daniel Levy and I wrote around the Qatar 2022 tournament, it applies standards and measures to countries of the Global South hosting major international tournaments that are never applied to Western host countries. It assumes the West is “clean” of corruption, human rights violations, much less its often enduring colonial legacies, while those in the Global South need to “wash” themselves by hosting sports tournaments. We tabulated some of the moral and physical hazards of hosting a World Cup in the United States (it’s actually worse than we imagined back then) noting “We all know the BBC [and Western mainstream media] would never question the bona fides of any Western country as a World Cup host [because of their] habitual inability to step outside of the self-serving narratives spun by [their] own rulers.”

But as Abdullah is pointing out, the U.S. is not trying to be seen to conform to some global moral standard by hosting the World Cup. On the contrary, the restrictions it has imposed on teams, referees, journalists and fans from a number of Global South participants reflect a shameless trashing of the norms and rules that have long applied to host countries of the FIFA tournament. (No previous host would have gotten away with keeping its hosting rights while barring entry to so many…) And in doing so, the U.S. host is demonstrating a belligerent contempt not only for FIFA norms, but also its wider contempt for international law and norms. The U.S. wages an illegal and unprovoked war on Iran; it extrajudicially executes boatmen in the Caribbean and Pacific who it accuses (with no evidence) of being drug traffickers (former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte is on trial at the Hague for extra-judicial killing of drug traffikcers); it invades Venezuela to kidnap its leader and install an alternative; it continues to arm and abet Israel’s genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleaning in the West Bank and Lebanon; it demands sovereignty over Greenland, seeks to buy an Albanian island, take control of Cuba, and on and on…

This is the power — and it’s all about power — that literally eclipsed the U.N. Security Council, creating a pay-to-play “Board of Peace” to legitimize Israel’s ongoing effort to erase Palestinian life in Gaza. So why would anyone expect it to abide by FIFA rules and norms? On the contrary, FIFA’s Quisling President appears quite happy to be owned by the United States, telling the football world to chill out and enjoy the occupation of the global game.

There was a time when, for better and for worse, the FIFA President ranked among heads of government as an eminence of global civil society, a kind of secular pontiff or sporting U.N. Secretary General. Infantinto by contrast presents as a kind of MAGA court flunky in a USA baseball cap, showering his master with invented “peace prizes” (equivalent in social value to the gold-foil-wrapped chocolates known as hanukah gelt) and simpering like a midtable donor/CEO seeking a regulatory favor.

If the World Cup is some sort of mirror to the state of our world, then what it reveals is that the what was left of the post-World War 2 global order in which multilateral institutions supposedly upheld and enforced a set of norms, rules and laws that supposedly applied equally to all nation states, is dead and buried. He who holds the whip hand can ignore those norms and laws at will, and suffer no consequences. Of course, the Gaza genocide made that much clear. So FIFA chilling out and learning to love and normalize the violation of its norms and rules should come as no surprise. Sportswashing? That would assume the U.S. believed its reputation needed “washing”. But those in power in the U.S. simply don’t care what the rest of humanity think. And the rest of humanity, particularly outside of the West, has taken notice.

Another U.S. Own-Goal vs. Iran

You only have to count the number of sympathetic articles in the regular, “apolitical” sports media (e.g. ESPN, Sports Illustrated, BBC etc. ) drawing attention to the U.S. authorities’ gratuitous abuse of the Iran’s team at the tournament, patently unfair and mocking the idea that the World Cup sees football teams compete on a level playing field, to realize that those U.S. authorities have scored yet another spectacular own-goal in their political contest with the Islamic Republic. Because watching this team face constant harassment when crossing borders, forced to bivouac in Tijuana, Mexico, despite playing their matches in the United States, having their time in and around the stadiums ahead of the games restricted, being forced to fly back to Mexico immediately after the game when players from other teams are warming down, getting their muscles massaged, healing in ice baths etc. — all of that has created an unprecedented level of sympathy for the Iranians among the politically neutral global football public. Forcing Iran to play in metaphorical shackles is clearly abnormal and uncalled for in the eyes of the global football public. And moves by the same politically clumsy U.S. authorities late in the tournament to cope with the negative publicity by easing these requirements has simply made it abundantly clear that they were always baseless, gratuitous acts of political punishment that had no basis in any legitimate security concerns.

It’s blindingly obvious that Iran’s Team Melli, regardless of what anyone thinks of Iran’s regime, has been used as a kind of symbolic whipping boy to be ritually humiliated for the disastrous failure of the U.S. to topple that regime or achieve any kind of victory over it in 100-plus days of fullblown war despite being militarily vastly more powerful. My friend offers a crisp summary of that epic geopolitical own-goal in this excellent piece.

And, of course, Ishaan’s piece notes that the morbid impact of Trump’s failed war on the ability of the Global South to feed itself — another echo of what we see in a World Cup where fans from a number of countries are excluded, barred from traveling here, while even many of those who did come, even players, were subjected to humiliating searches and interrogations, simply confirming that this United States has little love or respect for the Global South. In hosting the World Cup, then, as in waging his unprovoked war, the Trump Administration has done a remarkable job generating sympathy for Iran. Mexican fans in Tijuana singing “Iran, hermano, ya eres Mexicano” (Iran, brother, you are Mexican!) captures the spirit of a World Cup being forged despite, and against, the U.S. co-host, challenging a global context in which the dignity and humanity of the Global South are subordinate to the whims of those in power in the West.

This week’s news of growing support in the U.S. Congress for restricting arms sales to Israel, at the same time as the same legislature also voted to deepen U.S. military cooperation with Israel, reminded me of Rashid Khalidi’s recent interview (video above) in which he urged Palestine activists in the U.S. to adopt a strategic mindset rather than a performative radicalism. From a strategic perspective on the range of possibilities and priorities in the U.S. — what Rashid called “inside the belly of the beast” — will Palestine be liberated by any plausible shifts in the U.S. Congress? Highly unlikely. But could Israel’s ability to physically erase Palestine be weakened by any plausible shifts in the U.S. Congress? Potentially, even if, as the case of the struggle for U.S. sanctions on apartheid South Africa shows, it could take years of work.

On the other hand, we could ask, will Palestine be liberated by proclamations on the smart phones or streets of U.S. cities of support for armed resistance and a vision of freedom and equality from River to Sea? Not very likely. And will such proclamations hinder Israel’s ability to physically erase Palestine? Again, probably not.

Of course it’s not a simple binary — it’s only the pressure of mass mobilization demanding changes in the U.S. government enabling the genocide that drives any legislative shifts, and the sudden rush to disavow any connection with AIPAC signals an awareness by mainstream Democrats that their party’s voters are growing increasingly intolerant of bipartisan enabling of genocide. Still, it’s U.S. government backing for Israel’s criminality that is the most powerful connection between U.S. politics and the fate of Palestine.

So, I was reminded of Rashid’s admonitions last week when a fusillade of fiery tweets by some social-media feed-ayeen who had discovered in a 2017 interview clip that Bernie Sanders may still cling to the liberal Zionist fantasy that Israel could, in some imagined “two-state” future, exist as a Jewish ethno-state without being the genocidal apartheid regime the world has come to loathe. Some of those most dedicated to freeing Palestine via ideological cleansing on social media jumped to dismiss Sanders as no different from any monstrous enabler of Israel’s criminality.

There are multiple layers of strategic misconception here — about Bernie Sanders and his significance in the fight to stop the U.S. enabling the day-to-day annihilation of Palestinian life; about the value to the Palestinian liberation project of allies willing to work on shared immediate goals despite differing long-term visions; and about the limits, possibilities and priorities of fighting for Palestine in the U.S. political space. Such misconceptions are hardly uncommon in the performative realm of social-media political combat, which isn’t exactly grounded in real-world struggle. But they reminded me of Rashid’s insistence that young U.S.-based Palestinians think strategically about how the most useful site-specific contribution they can make to the liberation struggle from “behind enemy lines”, as it were.

Strategy is grounded in the real-world struggle for power that will decide the fate of the apartheid-colonial regime in Palestine. It is the calculating science of winning, by tipping a balance of power that favors the enemy camp (the settler-colonial status quo) to one that favors the people’s camp (those seeking freedom for Palestine and dismantling apartheid). The lessons of successful liberation movements suggest that strategy is not an expression of feelings or identity, and while it is guided by morality, that morality is expansive and inclusive. It is willing to make new allies even if those alliances are limited to narrow but urgent shared objectives whose achievement would positively affect the balance of power, rather than making a shared blueprint for the long-term future the prerequisite for working together. Rather than “those who are not with us are against us,” it begins from the premise that “those who are not against us could be with us”, even if only for part of the journey.

It is also mindful of the potential for individuals and organizations to shift their positions as a result of the experience of engaging in joint struggles, preferring to welcome those who previously pitched their tents outside of the people’s camp rather than to impose a restrictive credentialing based on past positions.

And a central pillar of liberation-movement strategy has been attention to the weakening and dividing the enemy camp by isolating its most dangerous elements from allies on whom those enemies have relied, even if those allies don’t embrace the vision of the liberation project. Even moving erstwhile allies of the most dangerous enemy only as far as the neutral column weakens that enemy’s ability to wage war.

These concepts were central to the South African liberation project, whose leadership worked across all theaters of action (each of which required different tactics shaped by the site-specific priorities) to always be strengthening the peoples camp and at the same time as always taking every opportunity to weaken the enemy camp. Both are essential tasks, because power is a relationship, always in dynamic balance.

Strengthening the people’s camp required building the base of the liberation movement and its capacities to engage across a wide range of theaters and forms of struggle, to enlist new comrades but also new allies — comrades and allies are not the same thing. The former will march the full distance in your cohort, guided by a shared vision of the final destination. An ally, by definition, is one who doesn’t necessarily share that ultimate destination nor do they necessarily embrace all the forms of struggle the liberation movement deems necessary to get there: But their own morality and judgment is appalled by the actions of those who lead the enemy camp, making them increasingly willing to act against it. That didn’t mean they shared the liberation movement’s vision of a post-apartheid South Africa, but they were willing to work together on immediate priorities of restraining the violence the regime had unleashed against the Black majority.

Their value to the liberation struggle was measured by their willingness to march together for part of the route, guided by their own morality and interests, in pursuit of shared priorities that would weaken the apartheid regime ability to wage war on Black South Africa, and seek its replacement by an inclusive, democratic process to shape the future (in which process they’d still seek support for their own vision).

One example that helped the South Africa’s liberation movement leadership understand the connection between the importance of strengthening the people’s camp and that of weakening the enemy camp, was how tiny, impoverished Vietnam defeated the superpower that had invaded it: A combination of resilient resistance; a constant search for allies within Vietnam who did not share the ideology of the revolutionary leadership, but who had been alienated by the occupier and his proxies; and an acute sense of the importance of building a massive antiwar constituency in the United States — broadening the base of that antiwar movement far, far beyond small groups of mostly student radicals who supported the ideology of Vietnam’s National Liberation Front (NLF). Instead, the Vietnamese leadership sought to isolate the most dangerous elements in Washington from even establishment liberals who shared the Cold War ideology of the invaders, but who came to recognize the strategic folly and moral catastrophe of “fighting communism” (a goal they shared) by waging a brutal colonial war on the people of a distant, decolonizing country in Southeast Asia. The antiwar consensus in the United States actively nurtured by the Vietnamese revolutionaries eventually grew strong enough to force the U.S. to withdraw in defeat.

Bernie Sanders, btw, was an active part of that U.S. antiwar coalition. He was not a supporter of the NLF; he was a pacifist who saw the war was disastrous not only for Vietnam, but also for America. His entire political career has been focused on fighting for social justice in the U.S., which is why he has opposed America’s imperial wars – because they’re bad for Americans as well as for the world.

Sanders became a popular national political figure in 2016 by running for the Democratic nomination against Hillary Clinton, the candidate of the neoliberal elites whose policies had produced grotesque levels of social inequality. And it was his willingness to tackle those elites (the Clintons, Obama etc.) and their system head-on that made him the champion of the young voters to whom it offered a grim future.

The same Democrat establishment that opposed Sanders’ social-justice campaign is also deeply beholden to Israel and its lobby. And Sanders has over the past decade acted to weaken that establishment’s hold on power. Palestine has never been his primary motivation, but challenging the Democrat establishment’s Israel consensus is inextricably linked to his efforts to steer the party in a more progressive direction.

Sanders has been central to breaking the Democratic Party’s taboo on calling out Israel’s war crimes and seeking to block arms transfers that enable it. He confronted Clinton in their 2016 contest over her ties with AIPAC, and her refusal to even mention Palestinians. He demanded the U.S. “treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity”. None of that was particularly radical, of course, but no major-party presidential candidate had ever dared criticize Israel and AIPAC, nor demand respect and dignity for Palestinians. Sanders hadn’t signed up for Palestinian liberation nor even been willing to go beyond the comforting fiction that the problem is simply Netanyahu. Still, he breached a U.S. political consensus profoundly damaging to Palestinians. And the schism he opened continues to grow.

His legislative efforts for restrictions on U.S. arms to Israel are not framed as a complete break with the Zionist project. But he has agitated for the Senate to recognize that the U.S. munitions raining down on Gaza (and now Lebanon and Iran) are used in violation of international law, and to block their delivery. Last April, he had managed to persuade 14 of the 47-member Senate Democrat caucus to join him; this year he managed to win over 39 – reflecting a slow but unmistakable shift in U.S. public opinion fueled by the genocide.

Slow progress, of course, and on quite a limited agenda. But Sanders’ attack on the genocide’s supply lines, and his trashing of the taboo on challenging Israel’s military actions have been treated as a major crisis by AIPAC and the ADL, who have sharply denounced him, but to no effect: In 2020 he denounced AIPAC as a platform for bigots who “oppose basic Palestinian rights”; last year he called it an oligarchy that had helped Trump into power and smeared progressive Democrats. And as he moves to restrict arms transfers to Israel, its lobby’s attacks on him grow more shrill.

Has he succeeded in stopping the transfer of weapons? No. Has he played a major role in building a growing consensus behind that goal? AIPAC clearly fear that he has. How long before such a consensus prevails? Well, it took 14 years from the introduction of the first comprehensive sanctions bill targeting South African apartheid to the U.S. Congress adopting effective sanctions in 1986.

But Sanders has never professed to be part of the Palestinian liberation movement any more than he professed to be part of the Vietnamese one. And he never renounced the “left-Zionist” fantasies common to many Jewish-American progressives in the early 1960s — fantasies blind to the impact of Zionism on Palestinians, analogous to the impact of U.S. settler-colonialism on Native Americans. But such fantasies were widespread in his cohort, especially for those like Sanders who had lost family to the Nazis and who were (mis-)led to believe that Israel represented a redemption from the Holocaust rather than its triumph.

I’m not here to defend Bernie Sanders’ misguided belief that Israel can exist without genocide and ethnic cleansing. But Rashid is arguing that this is not the priority strategic question at this moment in the United States. A strategic perspective begins by recognizing what Sanders is (an anti-establishment U.S. politician whose influence is growing within the political system on which Israel depends, and who has led an until-now unprecedented effort on Capitol Hill to materially restrict U.S. enabling of Israel’s crimes) and what he is not and has never professed to be (a comrade to the Palestinian liberation movement).

A strategic perspective on the significance of Bernie Sanders asks

* in what particular theater of struggle relevant to Palestine is Sanders operating, and what is the significance of that theater to the balance of power in Palestine?

* what are the immediate priority, achievable goals in that theater that could help shift the balance of power in ways helpful to Palestinians?

* and what are the most effective tactics for pursuing those priorities and possibilities?

The U.S. government is the primary armorer, facilitator, enabler and protector of Israel’s campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing. So, Rashid sees the overwhelming priority of those working in the U.S. as being to cut off supply lines of weapons, ammunition and political cover that enables the genocide, and shields it from accountability. To the extent that supply line can be disrupted, the most dangerous enemy is weakened; Israel could not have waged its genocide without a steady resupply of American weapons.

Rashid warns against assuming a militant posture — cosplaying the actual resistance on the ground in Gaza while marching down the infinitely safer streets of New York City, for example, as if that will somehow advance the struggle on the ground. It probably won’t, in any meaningful way. The U.S. is (hopefully!) not where the terms are set for Palestine’s freedom, nor is there a concrete opportunity in the U.S. mainstream to win masses of converts to the dismantling of the apartheid State of Israel; if solidarity activism here confined itself to that goal, it misses an opportunity to make a concrete difference to the conditions under which Palestinians on the ground wage their struggle. A far larger constituency of Americans who wouldn’t necessarily support dismantling the Zionist state are nonetheless willing, based on the horrors they’ve seen from Gaza and their own government’s complicity in it, to march, vote and take action against sending any more bombs to shred the bodies of Palestinian children.

It’s possible, Rashid suggests, to even mobilize many “with whom we disagree” (over the future of Palestine) to pressure the U.S. government to cut the supply lines of the genocide.

Palestinian intellectuals are clearer than ever on visualizing what liberation should look like, but a sober look at the strategic balance of forces that will decide Palestine’s fate suggests that defining the terms of liberation may not be as urgent a challenge as that of saving what’s left of Palestine and Palestinians from obliteration by the enemy’s monstrous, illegal but entirely unrestrained assault. Zionism’s freedom of action to seek Palestine’s erasure on the ground has never been greater as the edifice of 20th century international law and norms appears shattered beyond repair.

Bernie Sanders’ belief in the legitimacy of a Jewish ethno-state in a two-state configuration represents an anachronistic fantasy (even if it’s one shared by the leadership of the PLO since 1988). If Sanders were running for leadership a Palestinian national movement, his positions on Israel would likely disqualify him — though the same may be true for the PLO leadership, which hasn’t faced elections in decades. But Sanders is not running for a Palestinian leadership position. His value to the Palestinian struggle is the impact his moral and political stances have had in the American mainstream, in eroding the consensus that arms and enables the genocide. The strategically significant question is not how he envisages a future relationship between Jews, Muslims and Christians living between the River and the Sea. Given his geographic and political location, the measure of Sanders’ significance is whether he is potentially disrupting the supply lines of Israel’s war crimes.

He’s not part of a Palestinian liberation movement, so it seems misguided to judge him on the extent to which he aligns or doesn’t with a political program for such a movement. He’s a mainstream U.S. social democrat whose broad stance against American injustice has moved him on Palestine, making him an ally who can help lead a growing bloc of Americans (many previously neutral or even reflexively aligned with Israel) to move to limit the U.S. support that enables Israel’s genocide.

To the extent Sanders succeeds on that front, he makes a positive difference to the balance of power on the ground in Palestine. His significance is not undermined by the extent to which he clings to some residual Zionist beliefs; if anything it’s enhanced by that, because it tells us that his actions and statements — and the path he’s traveled, and may well travel further on — reflect a widening rift in the power structure that has long sustained the settler colonial apartheid regime of Israel. But Bernie Sanders is not about Palestine; Bernie Sanders is about America, and changing it in a direction that will help, but not solve Palestine.

The British government was so freaked out by the DPRK (North Korea) qualifying for the 1966 World Cup while still technically at war with the U.S. and Western powers that it sought to refuse the Koreans visas to enter Britain. FIFA made clear that denying visas to a team that had qualified would result in the tournament being moved elsewhere. (Would today’s Infantino FIFA show the same backbone? Open question, eh?) But while their Cold War-squeamish rulers clutched their pearls, the working-class people of Middlesborough, where the North Korean squad was housed, took the visitors to their hearts, cheering them on to a historic 1-0 defeat of Italy (“who are they?” a young fan might well ask, these days, 12 years and counting since the Azzuri last appeared at a World Cup…). That propelled North Korea into a quarterfinal showdown with Portugal, which they heroically lost 5-3. But such was the depth of the proletarian internationalism of the Boro fans that some 3,000 of them traveled to Liverpool to support their adopted comrades in the quarterfinal!

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2. Chile vs. USSR 1973

The U.S.-backed coup that overthrew Chile’s democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende turned the Santiago Stadium into a massive torture chamber, where hundreds of Chileans (including the legendary musician Victor Jara) were brutalized and murdered. Two months later, Chile was to play the Soviet Union in a decider for qualification to the 1974 World Cup in Germany – but the Soviet authorities refused to play “in the stadium of Santiago, splashed with the blood of Chilean patriots”. The game went ahead with only the Chileans playing – the “ghost game” as it became known – scoring into an empty net, and being granted the win. The USSR was disqualified for its boycott action.

3. West Germany vs. East Germany 1974

Germany was in many ways the epicenter of the Cold War, with the Red Army’s defeat of the Wehrmacht in 1945 and the geopolitical tensions that followed having split the country into a NATO-aligned Federal Republic (West Germany) and a Soviet-controlled Germany Democratic Republic (East Germany). This also resulted in FIFA admitting two Germanies. Of course, the Cold War propaganda requirements of each side required that it showed its population the superiority of its system — and we know the value of football in that respect. So you can imagine the consternation caused by their sole encounter — at the 1974 World Cup hosted by West Germany — saw the GDR record a shocking 1-0 victory over their capitalist neighbors. Such was the sturm und drang reverberation in the West German camp that they went on to win the tournament against the far better Dutch.

P.S. Apropos of absolutely nothing, there was at least one publicly-identifying Marxist in the West German team, the left back Paul Breitner (rocking the Afro in the clip above). Even the New York Times noticed his embrace of Marx and Mao, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh! (But not Erich Honecker…)

4. FC Start vs. Flakelf 1942

After Nazi Germany had occupied Kiev, the occupation authorities tried to normalize their presence by allowing the resumption of a football league. The players of Soviet champions Dinamo Kiev had all secretly taken jobs at a local bakery, whose owner entered them in the league created by the Germans. And naturally, they beat all comers. And when they beat teams drawn from the local Wehrmacht garrison, tens of thousands of Soviet citizens turned out to cheer and mock their occupiers. This wouldn’t do, so the Nazis brought a pan-European elite Luftwaffe team to teach the upstarts a lesson. Wasn’t working. According to a somewhat mythologized tale that became a centerpiece of both Soviet and Ukrainian identity, the Germans were cheating, but still couldn’t stop the dominance of FC Start. At half time, they were threatened with execution if they didn’t lose. They won 5-3, and months later a number of the players were arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp, where three were executed. The game is remembered and honored as a statement of Soviet citizen defiance against the invaders.

5. Germany vs. England 1938

At the height of the British government’s policy of appeasing Hitler in the hope that he’d attack the Soviet Union instead of invade Western Europe, the English FA (under Stanley Rous – who later became head of FIFA and did his best to normalize apartheid South Africa’s participation in international sport) instructed the England team that was due to face Germany, an hour before kick-off, that they were expected to give the “Heil Hitler” open hand salute during the playing of the German anthem. Most complied, albeit fairly reluctantly. One player, Wolverhampton Wanderers winger Stan Cullis, refused — and so was dropped from the team lest he spoil an appeasement photo opportunity…

6. El Salvador Honduras 1969

Yes, the storied “Football War.” Of course, the issues were longstanding disputes regarding borders and migration, but football is widely cited as the tinder that sparked the 100-hour war between the Central American neighbors. Two legs of a World Cup qualifier were inconclusive in producing a winner, though both devolved into violent chaos, and anti-Salvadoran riots in Honduras after the second leg. El Salvador won the decider in Mexico City, but the path to war had already been joined, with skirmishes followed by a Salvadoran invasion of Honduras. Shades of “other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?”

7. Dinamo Zagreb vs. Red Star Belgrade 1990

The first violence of the war that broke apart Yugoslavia came in a football stadium in the Croatian capital of Zagreb. Ethnic tensions stoked by self-serving nationalist entrepreneurs had reached boiling point by the time Red Star Belgrade traveled to Dinamo Zagreb for a traditional grudge match, and the ultras of both sides were fighting a fierce battle even before the kickoff. The fight was the only thing that kicked off, with a riot spilling onto the field that pitched the Croat fans and also players against the Serb police and Red Star ultras. (The video clips are all restricted, so I posted the twitter thread above instead.) The match was abandoned, and you know the rest. Well, one detail worth noting is that the core of the vicious Serb “Tiger” militia responsible for savage war crimes in Bosnia and Croatia (led by the notorious “Arkan”) was drawn from the Red Star Belgrade ultras.

Oh, and a weird spinoff: Denmark owes its greatest football triumph — winning the 1992 Euros — to Yugoslavia’s catastrophic collapse. The Danes hadn’t even qualified for the tournament, but Yugoslavia had ceased to exist by the time of the tournament and Denmark took its place…

8. Argentina vs. England 1986

It may have looked to the English players and the Anglophone world like a simple act of foul play when Diego Maradona used his hand to beat England goalkeeper Peter Shilton to score the opener in their fraught 1986 showdown. But to Argentines, and those in the know, Maradona was using his hand not to gain unfair advantage per the rules of the game, but to gain symbolic revenge. Just four years earlier in the war over Las Malvinas/The Falklands, the Royal Navy had sunk the General Belgrano, an Argentinian troop ship outside of the British exclusion zone and sailing away from it, killing 323 Argentine sailors. They knew Maradona had used his hand, but to Argentina and much of the Global South, England wasn’t renowned for playing fair. Perhaps to leave no uncertainty over the justice of Argentina’s victory that day, Maradona went on to score the “Goal of the Century”, dribbling past five England players before slotting past Shilton.

9. U.S. vs Iran 1998

Well, duh! The geopolitical freighting couldn’t have been more obvious in 1998 World Cup showdown, which Iran won 2-1 setting off a frenzy of celebration back home that actually made the clerics anxious. And the atmosphere couldn’t have been more different than today: Iran’s reformist then-President Mohammed Khatami was seeking coexistence; the Clinton Administration was thinking on similar lines, and the Iranian players presented their U.S. counterparts with white roses before the kickoff as a gesture of peace-seeking. But whether or not the draw ever puts them together, today the U.S. as host nation is waging (and failing to win) an unprovoked and illegal war on Iran, casting doubt over whether and how it will guarantee the safety and dignity of the Iranian team, whose matches in Los Angeles are likely to be a scene of mass protest by that city’s fiercely royalist (and even pro-Israel) Iranian community.

10. France vs. Algeria friendly 2001

The first ever encounter between France and its former colony – that won its independence through a ferocious armed struggle, but also mass political work that included creating a national football team before the nation was independent (depriving France’s 1958 squad of the services of Rachid Mekhloufi) – was billed as a gesture of reconciliation. But the marginalized youth of Paris’s banlieue were not having it. The French anthem was booed, and jeering at the French team continued throughout, until a pitch invasion by French youth waving Algerian flags forced the match to be abandoned in the 76^th minute. It may have been at peace with its former colony, but France was not at peace with itself.

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Comrade Molly Crabapple! What a brilliant nomme d’guerre! What a brilliant artist! What a brilliant revolutionary! And what an utterly extraordinary writer!

There are many, many reasons to read, reread, and study her exquisite and vital history of the Bund — I’ll probably keep circling back on them, because there really is so much to digest in this book. I’ve never read such a vivid and vivifying history of the revolutionary struggles in the old Tsarist empire — having read so many deadening histories of the debates in the Petrograd Soviet etc. etc. ad nauseum, I’m utterly in awe of her craft, her ability (hewn in part from many years of her own activism to the organizational drudgery of which she clearly brings an artist’s life-affirming imagination) to channel so much of what it felt like to be there. Her pen breathes an emotional complexity rare in the writing of history into the characters in these great historical dramas from the Russian Revolutions, both (well, all three), to Warsaw Ghetto fighters choosing to die on their feet fighting back, like Gaza’s youth (a connection she draws repeatedly, as did the legendary Bundist Warsaw Ghetto fighter Marek Edelman many years later).

And the urgency of her project couldn’t be sharper, as many thousands of young Jewish people around the world grapple with a genocide being committed in their name in Gaza, and an apartheid regime that claims to represent them — Molly’s book unearths a history and tradition of Jewish resistance to Zionism that Zionism has long sought to erase along with its violent erasure of Palestine. (The Bundists had warned for decades before Israel’s creation that the consequence of European Jews, under the aegis of British colonialism, creating a settler state on Arab land would end in a lot of blood and a lot of tears).

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The vital service Molly’s book provides is to show today’s many thousands of Jews who oppose Zionism, apartheid and genocide, that they have a proud history — that the Jewish youth of Eastern Europe who fought against the pogromists who terrorized their communities and later against Polish fascists and the Nazis, who joined the struggle to overthrow the Tsar and who stood for socialism and human solidarity, had also firmly resisted Zionism.

Critically important, and as relevant today as it was a century ago, is the sub-stream of clarity running through the book that connects Zionism and Western anti-Semitism.

Sometimes that connection was literal collaboration, various Zionist establishments essentially lobbying European anti-Semitic governments for support in settling Palestine on the basis of their shared goal of forcing Jews out of Europe. But the strategic and philosophical connection ran even deeper.

In my teenage years in the Zionist left, I was taught that “liquidating the Galut” (Hebrew for “the exile”, the Zionist term for the Jewish Diaspora) was one of the aims of our movement — a belief that Jewish life in the Diaspora was doomed, and should be ended via mass migration to Palestine. And it’s not hard to see how that goal aligned squarely with how the rightwing anti-Semitic regimes of Europes saw the presence of Jews in the countries they shared.

Fighting anti-Semitism — an existential priority of the Bund — was never Zionism’s intention. On the contrary, the movement’s founder, Theodore Herzl deemed it eternal and immutable, even natural where Jews lived among gentiles. He wrote in his diary of the conclusion he reached while covering the Dreyfuss trial:

In Paris, then, I gained a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism which I now began to understand historically and make allowances for. Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of efforts to “combat anti-Semitism.”

Instead, he famously noted that in his goal of settling European Jews in Palestine, “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies. We want to emigrate as respected people.”

The Bund instead embraced solidarity, and a common fight against anti-Semitism as part of a broader socialist agenda. “Here where we live is our country” was its motto. Of course many — millions, actually — of Eastern Europe’s Jews chose to leave the spectacularly brutal lives under unceasing pogroms. (Molly vividly captures the horrifying experience of mass, sustained anti-Semitic violence that made life in parts of the old Russian empire, and Poland before, during and even after the war (at the hands not simply of Nazis, but of nationalist Poles.) But the overwhelming majority of those who chose to leave didn’t go to Palestine; they went to the United States.

As I wrote here earlier,

I’ve always wondered at the silence in the contemporary Jewish-American mainstream narrative when it comes to reckoning with official U.S. anti-Semitism of a century ago that condemned hundreds of thousands of European Jews to die at Hitler’s hand, or else to be conscripted into the violent colonization of Palestine as their only option for survival. Immigration laws passed with bipartisan support in 1924 barred the vast majority of European Jews fleeing pogroms and later, even genocide, from landing on these shores. Yes, shocking as it may sound to a contemporary American culture that from the late 1970s began to quite bizarrely make the Nazi Holocaust a central feature of the national memory, the immigration policies that barred most Jewish survivors of the camps from immigrating here continued to apply even after World War 2.

It is fair to ask, I think, based on simple demographics, whether the State of Israel would even exist were it not for official U.S. anti-Semitism?

Consider: Between 1881 and 1925, the number of Jews who migrated from the Yiddish speaking heim of Eastern Europe to Palestine, was less than 100,000. In the same period, the number of Jewish immigrants fleeing Yiddish Eastern Europe to settle in the United States was between 2.3m and 2.5m. America was the overwhelming preference of Jews seeking a safe home away from the pogroms and violent anti-Semitism of Eastern Europe.

But things changed in 1925, when the U.S. Immigration Act sharply restricted Jewish immigration in line with the white-nationalist preference for Northern European settlement. Before World War 1, America’s average annual intake of Jewish immigrants had been 115,000; from 1925 to 1934, it slowed to just 9,200 per year — and consciously anti-Semitic visa policies reduced it even further after the Nazis came to power in Germany.

Some 210,000 Jews settled in Palestine between the wars, not because they were necessarily imbued with Zionist ideology, but because the preferred U.S. option was now closed for most. (It remained closed, or sharply restricted, for two decades after the Holocaust.) The historic impact of American anti-Semitism is rarely discussed, but would the Zionists have built a viable Yishuv without it?

Ben Gurion, it turns out, had asked — and answered — the same question, making clear how essential American anti-Semitism had been to the success of the Zionist project: “Had the gates to America opened wide after the war, it may well be that the masses of Jews would have flowed to America and only a minority would have come here,” he said shortly after Israel’s creation, in a quote cited by Molly.

The Zionist establishment in America literally discouraged the U.S. government from opening those gates to Jewish survivors. FDR confidante and ACLU lawyer Morris Ernst was berated for his efforts to persuade the President to allow in more Jews from Europe’s IDP camps; FDR told his friend that the American Jewish establishment had rejected throwing open America’s closed gates to survivors lest this weaken the case for creating a Jewish state in Palestine.

Tom Segev has done a magisterial job in his essential book, “The Seventh Million: Israeli Jews and the Holocaust” of unpacking the shockingly cynical approach of the Zionist Yishuv to the Holocaust from the early 1930s through the early 1960s. But less attention is paid to the U.S. Zionist establishment’s obvious awareness that the success of their project required that America’s gates remained mostly shut to Jewish immigration: Morris Ernst has been furiously denounced and even accused of treason by the Zionist establishment for his efforts to persuade FDR to accept 150,000 Jewish refugees from Europe. For the Zionist movement, the Jews of Europe who had survived the Holocaust had to be left with no choice but to settle in Palestine.

I was reminded of that episode in 2004, when Israeli government official Sallai Merridor attacked Germany for making it too easy for Jewish refugees from the former Soviet bloc to settle there: “The German government is enticing Jews to emigrate from the Former Soviet Union to Germany under refugee status, despite the fact that the State of Israel has already existed for over 56 years,” he said. “The government of Israel must take serious steps to counter Germany since this situation drastically affects immigration to Israel.” (Once again, Jews looking to migrate from difficult situations should be given only one choice, per the Zionists…)

Zionism as a movement, really, has always been premised on anti-Semitism, and mirrored some of its core beliefs — particularly on Jews never belonging in predominantly non-Jewish societies. This ontology stretches all the way back to Herzl.

But there’s a second reason for citing the U.S. example in the way we think about anti-Semitism: That would be the need to understand anti-Semitism in historical context, rather than in the Zionist fable of anti-Semitism being the universal leitmotif of human history, or more correctly, that somehow hovers above and outside of human history, a single undifferentiated hatred that periodically intervenes.

In this instance, it’s worth remembering that the prejudices behind the 1925 Immigration Act were not confined to Jews: The Act set harsh quota limits on all the brown-eyed peoples. Before it, the annual intake of Italian immigrants to the U.S. had been 200,000; after the 1925 Act an average of just 4,000 Italians a year were accepted as immigrants here.

It’s also worth remembering that while the vast majority of its inmates and victims were Jewish, Auschwitz also held and murdered Roma and Sinti people, as well as people of a number of other nationalities.

South Africa was a great place to learn the underlying lesson. There, we lived under an apartheid regime, whose leaders were literally Nazis and whose anti-Semitism coexisted quite comfortably with their support for Israel. And where there was never any doubt that primary victims of this Nazism were not Jews, but were South Africa’s Black majority. It could only be defeated by making common cause with their liberation struggle. The lesson, the leitmotif that runs throughout Molly’s book, is that solidarity is all we have.

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“Imagine that the BBC chose to ignore the opening ceremony of the 2026 World Cup hosted by Canada, Mexico, and the United States, and to instead devote an hour of programming to the moral—and physical—hazards of staging a part of that tournament in the US,” Daniel Levy and I wrote in the Nation four years ago, drawing attention to Western media’s hypocritical treatment of Qatar 2022.

“How safe can visiting fans really feel, the presenter might ask, in a country where the authorities are unable or unwilling to prevent them from being shot dead on any day of the week in a mall, in a gay nightclub, in a church, synagogue, mosque, or anywhere else? And how safe are visiting Black fans (those lucky enough to get visas) in a country with shocking levels of racist police violence?

“How could visitors really feel comfortable enjoying a sports festival in a country where, on any given day, there 2 million people are behind bars, more than half a million are homeless, and 41 million face hunger—in the world’s richest country, which spends more on arming its military than the next nine countries combined (and which has shown an unfortunate willingness to unleash that military abroad to disastrous effect and with scant regard for international law)? A country where one in six women has been raped or sexually assaulted, but where legal protection of women’s bodily autonomy is being systematically eroded…

“There’s more than enough for an hour of gripping television there, but it’s a hypothetical, of course. We all know the BBC would never question the bona fides of any Western country as a World Cup host. Nor is the BBC alone: The Western mainstream media has a habitual inability to step outside of the self-serving narratives spun by its own rulers.”

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Fast forward four years, and the morbid symptoms we noted above are even more dire. Not only that; there are new, and monstrously troubling ones that, if they applied elsewhere, would certainly disqualify any non-Western country from hosting the World Cup:

• Mass shootings, i.e. when four or more victims are killed or wounded, continue apace: There were 134 in the United States during the first four months of 2026 _— an average of more than one a day (Source: Gun Violence Archive)

• Police killed 371 people during the first 120 days of 2026, with Black people three times more likely to be the victims (during the same period there were just four days on which nobody was killed by police) (Source: Gun Violence Archive)

• 45 people have died in ICE custody since Trump’s second term began, while its officers have killed a further 8 people and wounded at least 19. (Source: ACLU)

• To the 2 million people typically behind bars on any given day in the U.S., now add a further 60,000 detained in ICE facilities, 71% of them with no criminal convictions; and some 6,200 children having been detained by ICE since Trump’s inauguration. (Source: ACLU)

• Many visitors from Africa and Latin America holding valid visas have been detained and held for days or even weeks, simply because of their origins — it’s not hard to see that any World Cup visitor from those continents, or with family roots there, could fall prey to the racist profiling of ICE. (Source: Multiple reports)

• That’s if fans from many of those countries can get visas to enter the U.S. Haiti, Iran, Ivory Coast, and Senegal may have qualified for the tournament, but their fans are prohibited by a visa ban. Fans from a number of other qualifying nations will be required to post a $15,000 bond – this may even apply to players from these countries. Extra screening (meaning a probable no) will be applied to fans of Egypt, Ghana, Jordan, Morocco, Uruguay, Uzbekistan. And, of course, further arbitrary denials of entry are widely expected at points of entry. (Source: Multiple)

• And that’s before we even get to the ideological screening. Visa applicants are required to submit five years’ of their social-media output for scrutiny. Recent State Department guidance tells officers to look out for those who “bear hostile attitudes toward our citizens, culture, government, institutions or founding principles.” And then there’s “anti-Semitism”, which the U.S. government defines as including challenging the racist, genocidal state of Israel. So it sounds like the intent is to deny entry to anyone who, like most of humanity, demands Palestinian freedom and an end to Israel’s genocide, or opposes the illegal and unprovoked U.S. war on Iran. (Source: Amnesty International)

• Homelessness: It’s now an average of 771,000 a night; food insecurity or hunger now affects 48 million people, meaning 1 in 7 people in America and 1 in 5 children. But the government is planning to spend $1.5 trillion on its military in the next year, which has in Iran and Venezuela demonstrated what Daniel and I wrote about “an unfortunate willingness to unleash that military abroad to disastrous effect and with scant regard for international law”

• Even the weather raises the likelihood of an abnormal World Cup: It’s being held during peak thunderstorm season across Eastern and Southern North America – a threat exacerbated in recent years by global heating. A single strike of lightning within a 13 km (8 mile) radius of a stadium requires that the game be stopped for a minimum 30 minutes, the field and uncovered stands vacated, and any further lightning strikes in the same area reset that 30-minute clock. There’s a significant risk of matches being disrupted by up to one-hour midgame delays, which can seriously alter the outcome. Four matches were disrupted in this way during last summer’s Club World Cup. (Source: The Athletic)

FIFA’s failure to challenge the U.S. human rights record or seek guarantees for the safety of visiting fans from state violence has been condemned by human rights groups. “Attacks on immigrants and those visiting the United States are at an all-time high,” the American Civil Liberties Union warned in a statement last December. “ICE is conducting raids across the country, tearing families apart, deporting thousands, without due process, and holding an unprecedented number in inhumane detention centers, including on military bases. The host cities of the upcoming World Cup are among the most heavily impacted – with cities like Los Angeles and Chicago facing extreme surveillance, National Guard deployment and immigration enforcement activity. The Trump administration actions threaten our communities and tourists-fans alike – and FIFA has unique leverage to push for change not to whitewash and capitulate.”

That statement condemned Infantino’s unfathomable decision to invent a “FIFA Peace Prize” and award it to Trump – a pally relationship clearly in violation of FIFA’s ethics that require political neutrality, particular when it comes to sitting leaders.

“The FIFA Peace Prize is presented annually on behalf of the billions of football-loving people from around the world to a distinguished individual who exemplifies an unwavering commitment to advancing peace and unity throughout the world, through their notable leadership and action,” Infantino in a sentence remarkable for the number of falsehoods it contains (besides the inconvenient Trump wars, there was no FIFA Peace Prize before Infantino invented it for Trump, and the billions of football fans around the world and the Federations that represent them were never consulted).

“This is what we want from a leader” Infantino gushed at the award. “You definitely deserve the first FIFA Peace Prize for your action for what you have obtained in your way but you obtained it in an incredible way and you can always count, Mr. President, on my support.” The absurdity of these statements is evident every day, and has made many in FIFA deeply uncomfortable. But Infantino is a MAGA fan boy. He celebrated Trump’s 2025 inauguration with a video message declaring “Together we will make not only America great again, but also the entire world.”

God save football from Infantino. But hey, FIFA is projecting that it will earn some $11 billion from this year’s tournament. And clearly, that buys a lot of supplication.

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You know Edson Arantes de Nascimento by his futebol nomme d’guerre, “Pelé”. And you’ve probably heard that he was proclaimed as the game’s G.O.A.T long before Messi and Ronaldo were born. What’s remarkable about the comparison, though, is how little the world’s football fans had seen of him in real-time action by the time that accolade became conventional wisdom. And in that distinction, something remarkable about how humanity’s relationship to football has evolved with globalization and technology.

Pelé burst onto the scene at age 17 in the 1958 World Cup in Sweden. But only one of Brazil’s games – their triumph over Sweden in the final – was televised live. And that was in a grainy black-and-white broadcast beamed only as far a handful of television sets in some parts of Europe. It was in the newsreel highlight films of his first World Cup that people may have gotten a glimpse of Pelé’s sublime skills, but certainly not in his club football day job with Santos in Brazil. And 1959 was the only time he featured for Brazil in the Copa America, and it seems that was captured mostly on newsreel film like this.

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The wider world would have to wait four years at a time to catch a glimpse of the player deemed the greatest of his time, and even then, only sparingly. At the 1962 tournament in Chile, he played only one full game before suffering an injury that kept him out for the remainder of the tournament – also not globally televised.

The 1966 World Cup Final was the first broadcast live across countries and continents, enabled by the new technology of orbiting communications satellites — and watched by an estimated 400m people, the largest ever TV audience for a single event until that point. It was televised in black-and-white, of course, which is why England wore their red away shirt having lost the toss to wear their first-choice white strip (to Germany, whose shirts were also white) – and the need for contrast in monochrome video requiring a color that didn’t read as lighter.

Pelé’s fortunes in 1966 though, were shaped by the brutal fouling that routinely targeted ball-players in the era before the yellow card was introduced to the game in 1970. Pelé was repeatedly fouled in the opening game against Bulgaria, forcing him out of the next fixture against Hungary, and then turning out with a knee injury against Portugal whose defenders kicked him out of the game.

So, it really wasn’t until 1970, the first tournament televised in color, complete with multiple camera angles and extensive use of slo-mo replays, that something approaching today’s experience of watching a World Cup first appeared. Brazil, thrashed Italy 4-1, in what would be Pelé’s final World Cup.

After that, it was back to Santos – and Brazilian league games weren’t globally televised – and then in a de facto retirement from top-level football, he moved to the New York Cosmos in 1975. He had retired from the national team in 1971, and declined to return to the selecao for the 1974 tournament – a decision he much later claimed was a protest against Brazil’s U.S.-backed military dictatorship.

So, the glorious color-TV spectacle of the 1970 final, which was beamed live to hundreds of millions of viewers around the world, was probably the only time most of those who proclaimed him the king of football had ever had the opportunity to watch him in real-time action.

It’s pretty safe to say Pelé’s reputation was cemented by newsreels and promotional films – like the one below, which was shown in a darkened hall at my high school in 1975, probably as part of a Pepsi marketing campaign.

Compare that to today’s reality, were every exceptionally talented Brazilian teenager is already known to tens of millions of fans around the world watching YouTube clips, and will more than likely have been playing in a European elite league since before he turned 20 – think Vini Jr., Rodrygo and Endrick at Real, Estevao at Chelsea, Savinho at City or Arsenal’s Gabriel Martinelli, and many more.

Thus the globalization of club football, the quotidian form of the game that sustains us between World Cups, and which accelerated sharply after Falcao, Zico and Socrates followed their 1982 World Cup heroics by moving to Italy’s Serie A. Pelé and his 1970 teammates all earned their wages at Brazilian clubs; 85% of Brazil’s 2022 in Qatar played their club football in Europe — where the money, and therefore, the top talent are centered.

In the recent era when Messi and Ronaldo were framed as competing for the G.O.A.T. title, hundreds of millions of fans around the world would watch them play live not only during the quadrennial World Cup tournaments, but once or twice a week in the English Premier League, La Liga and the European Champion’s League as Ronaldo represented Manchester United and then Real Madrid, while Messi shone for Barcelona and then PSG.

They were the kings of replica merchandize, each generating hundreds of millions of dollars in sales of their club shirts, not because the hundreds of thousands of fans who bought those shirts had ever been inside the stadium to watch them play, but because of the live broadcasts of their club games via satellite television. The average global TV audience for a Champions League game is around 145 million, and three times as many watch that competition’s final. The English Premier League estimates that some 1.8 billion people worldwide interact with its content at least once a week.

The World Cup will generate $4.2 billion for FIFA in the sale of the broadcast rights. It’s the largest single source of profit for the tournament, as it is for club football — the fee for the global TV rights to broadcast the English Premier League is close to $9 billion over three years, while the European Champions League generates some $3.5 billion a year. No surprise that both the English Premier League and the European Champions league are now weighing launching proprietary direct-to-consumer subscription streaming platforms with an eye to cashing in on the demand their product creates.

The World Cup’s technological compression of time and space also puts hundreds of millions of people around the world into direct conversation, in the way that a crowd inside a stadium might be. The 2022 final match generated 25 million Whatsapp messages per second and 24,000 tweets per second; overall that tournament generated 6 billion social media interactions.

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Football’s evolution as a global spectacle, from Pelé on newsreels to the hand-held intimacy of Vinicius Jr. live on millions of phone feeds, has created a shared, real-time global experience of unprecedented scale in human history. And, the moment during the 2018 final, the triumph of presiding over such a moment by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin was disrupted by a guerrilla-theater protest action by the dissident performance-art troupe Pussy Riot, reminded us of both the perils, and the possibilities of the global football spectacle.

Indeed, the Morocco players who brandished the Palestinian flag to celebrate their historic quarterfinal victory over Spain at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar smashed their way through FIFA’s ugly silence over Israel’s violent regime of occupation over Palestinians. They were on the field, in front of cameras streaming to the five continents, and beyond the reach of both FIFA officialdom and whatever minders their own government had sent along — Morocco, remember, was one of just four signatories to the “Abraham Accords,” a concoction of the Trump Administration to normalize Arab ties with Israel on the assumption that Arab autocrats could legitimize Israeli apartheid. The heroes of their unprecedented World Cup success dissented — using one of the most powerful platforms available; international football’s real-time reach onto billions of digital devices across the platform. It’s not hard to imagine that will have been the last such display.

Today’s news that the Republican Supreme Court (let’s face it, this is just another partisan chamber even if it speaks a language of jurisprudence) is further weakening the Voting Rights Act should be read in historical perspective. The United States has never been quite the democracy proclaimed on its packaging. Its Constitution was written by and for a small group of rich, white landowners who relied on the labor of viciously enslaved Africans, and was only gradually extended, as a result of decades of intense struggle, to white male workers, then white women, and later Black people.

But the country’s transformation from an oligarchic settler state into an inclusive, egalitarian democracy was never completed. Whether the racist terror that ended the promising interlude of post-Civil War Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation and mass lynching, incarceration and other measures in force for decades in the U.S. South for many decades after the Civil War to ensure white supremacy remained undisturbed — despite democratic rights being formally extended to Black people. The trajectory was different, again, though not fundamentally so or in the often violent urban ghetto segregation in the major cities of the West, Midwest and Northeast over the ensuing century. As my friend Aziz Rana has noted, it was the crisis created by the urban rebellions of the 1960s coinciding with the peak of the Cold War sensibility that boosted Washington’s incentives to stabilize the home front, and give the U.S. any chance of enlisting support from the newly decolonized world, that undergirded milestone victories in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. He notes that the Pentagon and State Department actually filed amicus briefs with the Supreme Court to that affect.

And a long view of American history suggests those gains may even turn out to have been products of a temporary interlude in which the narrative and even the structures of US governance were determined by the Cold War, and which are being steadily eroded in the post-Cold War era. Today’s struggles over voting rights remind us that progress towards democratic equality in America was uneven, its promise only partly fulfilled — and that the Republican Party makes no bones about its intention to roll back some of that progress.

The settler-DNA of the U.S. constitutional system gives that plenty of tools to do just that. This is a system in which candidates get to choose their voters, by redrawing boundaries of electoral districts. The U.S., bizarrely for a modern nation state, has no single national set of voting laws or national election commission; voting laws vary from “state” to “state” (provinces, really, in international terms). And state authorities are able to make it difficult for voters they suspect will vote against them to actually get to the polls to cast their votes. The Supreme Court (effectively a political chamber chosen by the U.S. Senate, the bulwark of white minority rule in the U.S.) sanctifies decisions that dilute the power of local Black voters. (The argument upheld by the Court is that because redistricting targeting voters on a partisan rather than a “racial” basis, it’s legitimate.)

The end of the Cold War began the collapse of the post-WW2 bipartisan governing consensus in Washington. Today’s GOP is a white nationalist party, unashamedly cementing its hold on power by leveraging its state-level majorities to place a thicket of legal and logistical obstacles between the ballot box and poorer Black, brown and indigenous citizens: voter ID laws, a dysfunctional voter registration system, reduced numbers of voting locations, etc. Rolling back the voting rights won by Black people in the bitter civil rights struggles of the 1960s has been a core part of the GOP strategy for years.

Having disabused themselves of the Red Dawn fantasy, and retired the imperial hegemony project (the U.S. today doesn’t bother to persuade any other country that it acts in their interests; Washington today relies on coercion and extortion rather than persuading others that it represents the good guys) there’s no longer an external incentive for honoring the citizenship rights of Black and brown Americans. And for those liberals who love to venerate the constitution, it seems the constitution doesn’t love them back.

Oil markets seem to have recognized that Trump’s two-week truce announced Wednesday is unlikely to mean the end of his war on Iran. Having dropped $15 a barrel on the announcement, the Brent Crude index is creeping steadily back up as it becomes clear that it’s too soon to believe the U.S.-Israeli aggression against Iran has ended. Nor is the spoiler factor simply the determination of Israel and the UAE to sabotage any deal: If the war was ended on the basis of the current balance of force, and on the terms outlined in the Iranian 10-point plan Trump says he’s accepted, he’d be unable to hide or spin the reality that the war of choice into which Israel led him has been an epic defeat for the U.S. So, there are many factors that will pressure him to renew the hostilities he has now paused — the U.S. is already declaring that the 10-point plan agreed by Iran isn’t the same one they saw…

The fact that Israel unleashed a massacre from the air on Lebanon after the truce was announced – Pakistan, the supposed mediator (though there are indications that the U.S. instructed the Pakistani leadership to declare a truce), said the truce included the Lebanon front; Israel insisted it did not. Even the European Union leadership insisted it should. But Trump Administration officials deny the agreement extended to the savagery of its Israeli protégé/tutor in Lebanon. So, the immediate state of the Lebanon front will be a key early indicator of the balance of leverage at the negotiating table: If Israel, even quietly, dials back its bombing campaign, that will be a sign that Iran is able to set the terms of negotiation, at least at this point. For all the genocidal huffery of Trump and Hegseth, it’s clear that the two-week ceasefire proclaimed by Trump was initiated by the U.S. side.

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Of course, it remains extremely unlikely that the U.S. side would agree to all of Iran’s demands (compensation, recognition of Iran’s right to charge rents on shipping transiting the Strait of Hormuz, an end to all U.S. sanctions – many of those would require a congressional vote, giving Israel plenty of room to influence a reversal) but clearly he has been forced to make some gestures towards Tehran’s demands.

But the reason the Israelis, the Emiratis and longtime Iran hawks in Washington would oppose a peace agreement right now are plain to see: The war has simply not accomplished any strategic purpose; in fact it’s been more of a strategic reversal for the U.S. There was never any “nuclear threat” from Iran, nor was Iran threatening to launch aggression against any of its neighbors before the U.S.-Israeli bombing began. The only plausible goal of launching the U.S.-Israeli aggression, besides a performative demonstration of U.S. power hoping to intimidate all challengers into quiescence (a Persian Venezuela model) was to topple Iran’s regime and replace it with a U.S.-Israel friendly alternative. Needless to say, it has failed thus far on both counts.

After 40 days of pounding by the world’s most powerful military (helped, if not directed by the region’s most powerful military)

• Iran’s regime has survived – effectively a victory in an asymmetrical conflict where the unconventional military wins by not losing

• It has continued to fire missiles across the region throughout the U.S.-Israel operation

• It’s mastery of the Strait of Hormuz, with the resultant choking effect on global trade, has actually strengthened Iran’s position — Trump found himself centering his war aims on reopening the Strait, which had been open before he started his war, i.e. Trump ended up forced to try and solve a problem his war had created. Even then, he was unable to achieve it by force, and was forced to negotiate a solution with a regime he’d hoped to have eliminated, but had inadvertently strengthened.

In contrast, the war has strategically weakened the U.S.

• It has shown the limits of what its immense military power can achieve;

• It has left the U.S. more globally isolated than ever because of the economic impact of its reckless decision to start a war no one other than Israel saw as necessary, and has left U.S. allies in the region considering the long-term viability of a U.S.-centered security order

• it has wrought profound, global economic damage from which there’ll be no short-term recovery even if the war has, in fact ended, not least in the U.S. itself where Trump will cut social services relied on by much of his MAGA base in order to pay for his war

For Israel, of course, it’s a win – they managed to drag the U.S. into doing something they could never have done alone, and at the same time expanded its dominion into Lebanon, cemented its control of the West Bank while unleashing settler terror to pursue ethnic cleansing, and has continued to throttle Gaza.

But Israeli overreach is looming, with everything from the head of the military complaining that the demands on its troops was raising the danger of collapse, its population having experienced significant damage (hidden from the media) that undermines its leaders’ promise of security through war, and potentially now being blamed by U.S. leaders for having created this disaster.

So, yes, if this is indeed the end, Trump’s “excursion” in Iran will be judged by history alongside the likes of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan as epic imperial failures. And that’s why we should assume it will continue, in one form or another.

Again, as I wrote last week, it’s worth remembering the Vietnam example:

A month into the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, we shouldn’t be distracted by the illusion that Trump’s talk of negotiations promising an imminent end to hostilities. On the contrary, “negotiations” or posturing over the terms of an agreement to end the war are — as the U.S. war on Vietnam showed us — simply another front on which the war is fought. And usually when, as we’ve seen now, the two sides of an expeditionary war set out dramatically different terms as their basis for negotiating a resolution, each side seeks to reinforce the leverage behind its demands by inflicting greater levels of pain on its adversary. The militarily stronger side tries to bludgeon its enemy into collapse or capitulation; while the weaker party seeks to raise the cost to the aggressor of continuing the war. Both sides know that nothing can be won at the negotiating table that hasn’t been won in the field, but both sides also see value in appearing ready for peace.

Like the Strait of Hormuz and the skies above Tehran and Beirut, the negotiating table for now remains another theater of battle.

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And to the extent, as is the case thus far, that Iran is able to set terms that codify a U.S. strategic defeat there, the likelihood of continued confrontation on other fronts remains high.

A month into the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, we shouldn’t be distracted by the illusion that Trump’s talk of negotiations promising an imminent end to hostilities. On the contrary, “negotiations” or posturing over the terms of an agreement to end the war are — as the U.S. war on Vietnam showed us — simply another front on which the war is fought. And usually when, as we’ve seen now, the two sides of an expeditionary war set out dramatically different terms as their basis for negotiating a resolution, each side seeks to reinforce the leverage behind its demands by inflicting greater levels of pain on its adversary. The militarily stronger side tries to bludgeon its enemy into collapse or capitulation; while the weaker party seeks to raise the cost to the aggressor of continuing the war. Both sides know that nothing can be won at the negotiating table that hasn’t been won in the field, but both sides also see value in appearing ready for peace.

(Nixon carpet-bombed Hanoi and Haiphong over 11 days in December of 1972 in hopes of forcing the Vietnamese to accept his terms in their ongoing negotiations. The bombings, which killed some 2,000 Vietnamese civilians, were called “terrorism on an unprecedented scale” by the New York Times! But they failed to force Vietnamese capitulation. Still, they’re an enduring reminder how epic levels of violence can be a form of “negotiation” by the U.S. in such situations.)

If anything we can expect the war to escalate on wider fronts: Sure, Trump has extended the deadline for his threat to bomb Iran’s power grid, perhaps he’ll abide by that, perhaps not (he’s hardly proven himself to be a reliable negotiating partner). But that only refers to one particular tactic; there’s plenty more to bomb. Still, the bombing campaign as a whole, despite massive destruction it has wrought, shows no sign of achieving U.S. goals. (Again, echoes of Vietnam, where as the war criminal Henry Kissinger put it, the U.S. side lost by not winning; the Vietnamese side won by not losing – an apt metric for assessing the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran). So, what other forms of leverage could Trump, and his Iranian adversary, introduce?

Until now, U.S. goals have been frustrated by

* Iran’s system retaining its coherence and ability to continue punishing strikes of its own using missiles and drones despite a month of U.S. and Israeli bombing and “decapitation strikes”;

* Iran’s “horizontal escalation”, targeting both military and civilian infrastructure across the Gulf, particularly by stopping shipping passing through the Gulf of Hormuz – which has plunged the world economy into turmoil from which it won’t quickly recover;

* Iran’s suprising capabilities in its vertical escalation, continuing to inflict significant damage on U.S. facilities across the region (including early-warning radar system and even, it seems, an aircraft carrier) and on Israel, where muzzling of media coverage keeps the full impact from public view.

* By the Trump Administration’s geopolitical and domestic political isolation: Western and Arab allies are furious at the U.S. for launching a war that has hurt them all, with no consultation or even clear plan, and declined U.S. demands for military help on a widening battlefield. Only one in three Americans supported the decision to start the war; three out of four oppose adding any U.S. ground troops to the fight. And they’re already feeling the inflationary impact of the war, with average prices Americans they’re paying for gasoline having surged by more than 30% over the past month.

* Israel — the genocidal apartheid regime that may have goaded Trump into the war is a growing political liability in the region where it’s Greater Israel goals require weakening and humiliating both friend and foe of the United States, while its targeting of Iran’s civilian infrastructure, from steel factories to universities, make abundantly clear that this is a war on the entire Iranian nation. It’s hard to see how the Trump “Abraham Accords/Board of Peace” survive his choice to fight Israel’s war. Oh, and it seems the Greater Israel exertions have prompted the Israeli military to warn that it faces a manpower crisis that puts it on the verge of collapse.

With the failure of quantitative escalation of bombing, it now looks increasingly likely that Trump will be persuaded (again by false expectations of an easy win) to – to the surprise of many of us – seek a qualitative escalation of the attack on Iran by deploying ground forces, albeit in some limited fashion. Western media have obsessed on the expectation that 10,000 or so Marines and paratroopers would be tasked with capturing Kharg Island, Iran’s oil export terminal. But that would be the escalatory equivalent of destroying the power grid, and would make widespread retaliation against Gulf energy infrastructure more likely. And it would subject U.S. forces there to sustained counterattacks from the nearby Iranian mainland.

More plausible, perhaps, is the scenario outlined here by Mouin Rabbani: A ground raid on one or more of three smaller and less strategically significant islands claimed by Iran under the Shah in 1971, but which are recognized by most Arab countries as belonging to the United Arab Emirates. And the big strategic bonus for the U.S. side would be that the UAE would participate directly in such an action. It would mark a pivot towards dramatic qualitative escalation because even if Trump has been persuaded that it would force Iran’s collapse or capitulation, Mouin writes that instead it would set the stage for further escalation on a massive scale because once the U.S. had landed just a few thousand US troops on Iranian territory, the escalation logic would lead to exponentially more. (Like Vietnam…)

Indeed, it’s already clear as we’ve reported that Israel opposes any deal with Iran’s regime and seeks to keep the war going. The likelihood of it trying to sabotage any such deal via air strikes remains high — but right now its more effective weapon is its influence over President Trump and those around him, combined with similar lobbying from the UAE, pressing him to avoid what would be universally viewed as a defeat.

Still, there’s no doubt Iran has planned for a long war that it wins by not losing, while exhausting the U.S. will to maintain its aggression because of the costs, on the battlefield and off.

Iran’s most effective leverage thus far has been its control over the Strait of Hormuz, and its its ability to determine which ships are allowed to pass through this arterial channel of global energy trade. (The low likelihood of any imminent negotiated agreement is also reflected in Iran’s demand that under any settlement, its adversaries give it a postwar right to police the strait and extract tolls for passage through it — needless to say that demand is also a maximalist non-starter not just for the U.S. but for all of the Arab, Asian and Western countries that depend on the free passage of shipping through the Strait.)

One potential strategic asset Iran has not deployed is the ability of its Yemeni ally, Ansar-al-Islam (aka “the Houthis”) to choke off the Red Sea alternative route at the Bab al-Mandeb strait, inflicting further economic pain and adding to the burden on U.S.-allied militaries. Ansar entered the fray by targeting Israel with missile strikes over the weekend…

So, despite the talk of negotiation (Trump statements are designed also to soothe oil prices and reassure investors, but the movement of the indexes shows us the diminishing returns on each new promise by Trump of an imminent off-ramp) this looks more likely to be a violent contest that persists for some time, escalates and creates a new, globally painful, status quo.

And it’s fairly clear, already, that the Iran disaster will accelerate the weakening of the U.S. geopolitical position. But what scenarios will fill the vacuum of the vanishing Pax Americana? It is, to borrow a T-shirt worthy quote from Zhou Enlai, when asked in 1972 to comment on the French Revolution, “too soon to tell.”

I.

Any country that fails to accept Israel’s expansionist and genocidal prerogatives cannot rely on the United States for their security. Not only that, any Muslim or Arab country that aligns with the U.S. will be expected to accept increasingly humiliating terms — Trump’s surrogates now paint this as a “Judeo-Christian” holy war; Israel’s is the only voice that counts. And when the retaliatory rockets fly, it’s Israel that takes priority in missile defense, while America’s Gulf allies are left exposed — and global energy markets are imperiled. The scale of what America’s allies have been asked to sacrifice in service of Benjamin Netanyahu is quite astonishing. But this much should have been clear to them for some time now via the “Board of Peace” farce that required them to literally sanctify the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the marginalization of the United Nations and international law (what did anyone think was the intended messaging of sending Melania Trump to chair the UNSC?)

II.

The U.S. is more dangerous than ever by virtue of its destructive power and the thuggish inclination of its leadership to unleash that power without restraint or reason. And yet, at the same time, the U.S. is less coherent, and less competent in imperial warfare than at any point over the past century. This should be profoundly alarming to all of those governments who continue to, however reluctantly, throw in their lot with the U.S. in the absence of any ability to imagine an alternative order. Many of those governments seem to still imagine America in its Cold War national-security-state iteration, in which its imperial power projection was managed by a multilayered and predictable national security state whose “interagency process” and overall sense of prudence and restraint (produced in no small part by mindfulness of the power of the Soviet adversary) — an America that made many catastrophic mistakes, but nonetheless avoided impulsive recklessness, and acted with a coherent, if sometimes quite deranged, strategic logic.

That America shaped by the national-security state no longer exists, nor has it existed for some time; historians can debate the timeline of its post-Cold War hollowing out, but the hollowing out is unmistakable: America has been plunged (or been dragged by Israel) into a potentially cataclysmic war, under the sober, prudent and competent leadership of Donald Trump, the cartoonishly bloodthirsty Pete Hegseth, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Their strategic incompetence is impossible to ignore; they’re scrambling daily to define and redefine their war aims and how they plan to achieve those.

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To the extent that this crowd has any strategy in mind, it’s the belief that simply demonstrating America’s vast destructive power, and escalating in successive waves of increasingly deadly force unrestrained by any law or measure of future consequences, will bully the rest of the world to bend the knee to the emperor. A dying empire raging violently against the dimming of its ability to impose its will on the world.

Anyone with any understanding of Iran’s history and present (and presumably most of its Western and Arab allies) knows that was never going to happen. But Israel, which actually is guided by a clear and coherent (if despicable) strategy knows that the war into which it drew Trump won’t result in Iran bending the knee to him; it’s goal is to shatter and dismember the Iranian nation state, and if that is achieved at the expense of creating expanding circles of chaos radiating outward from Israel, all the better for Israel’s ability to dominate the region. Oh, and forget Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn rule” — Trump has made abundantly clear that the U.S. has no intention of cleaning up behind it, or even suturing the wounds his choices have inflicted across the region. All U.S. allies should be afraid. Very afraid.

III.

Could it be, as Daniel Levy argues, that the Israelis were ahead of the pack in recognizing the arc of decline of U.S. power, and seeing in its most dangerous symptom – the Trump presidency – a “use ‘em or lose ‘em” opportunity to deploy American power while they still could? Perhaps, though even if not, European and Arab leaders that have continued to throw in their lot with the U.S. in the hope that the debacle is just some temporary blip are learning the hard way that the America they imagine or once thought they knew is unsustainable illusion.

IV.

Asymmetrical warfare is always a political and economic battle of endurance. As in Vietnam, the U.S. adversary wins by not losing. And weakens the resolve of the aggressor by raising the economic and political cost of the aggression in theaters far removed from the battlefield. The awesome technological power the U.S. and Israel bring to the battlefield has an asymmetrical echo, also, in the evolving capabilities of its adversaries. Science doesn’t pick sides, and the Iranian side is able to marshal a cost-effective drone and missile strategy capable of inflicting considerable damage on the vulnerabilities of U.S. and allied basis, and to drain the resources of the aggressors.

This pain of this war will be felt far and wide, whether in the price and availability of food across the Global South, or the price of energy in Europe (which has already suffered a 60% increase in LNG prices) or the price Americans pay to fill up their cars and trucks. The inflationary effects are plain to see, and from my amateur perspective, it looks rather likely that the reckless Netanyahu-Trump war of choice will plunge the world into a painful economic recession.

It’s clear that Trump and those around him literally have no idea how the world works; just a grotesque fantasy of power and of the need to create a noisy and violent impression of power that doesn’t translate into any real ability to shape events.

V.

Here’s an interesting Israeli military establishment take on the stakes of this confrontation in the wider Muslim world. Ronit Marzan sees Iran

“waging a struggle for independent Persian Islam in an attempt to differentiate itself from dependence on the West. The question at the center of the struggle is whether the Islamic space can stand on its feet without Western help… This campaign’s symbolism and prestige have a strategic value worth as much as bombs. At the center of this struggle is a geopolitical confrontation between the non-Arab Islamic powers (Iran and Turkey, separately) and the Arab Gulf states.

"When Iran launches missiles against targets in the Gulf states, it’s not just doing so to deter them militarily or to apply pressure that would end the war against it. Rather, its goal is to expose their weakness. When Arab states with immense defense budgets, such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, find themselves vulnerable to attack or worse, and they are dependent on American radar and interceptors, it undermines their narrative as sovereign states.

“Their vulnerability goes beyond technical questions, such as the effectiveness of the U.S. Patriot missiles. It touches on the exposed nerve of security independence. Revealing the limitations of these Arab states’ military power presents their regimes as unable to defend themselves and reliant on external alliances.

“Iran is seeking to establish a counter-narrative of ‘independent Iranian strength’ versus ‘Arab dependence on a foreign umbrella.’ According to this narrative… Iran is fighting for so-called Persian honor, intended to allow Tehran to enter future negotiations from a heroic position, while undermining the political and security standing of its Arab rivals in the eyes of the world’s Muslims.”

VI.
What the confrontation is making clear is how politically untenable the Trump’s decisions have made reliance on the U.S. “security umbrella” for Arab allies, by making it clear that the U.S. puts Israeli interests above all of theirs. Israel’s interests are to subordinate and humiliate the region all around it, not just of the Palestinians but of all who potentially challenge its domination of Greater Israel. Trump’s (Israeli) war on Iran simply highlights the reality, already clear in the “Board of Peace” being used to legitimize Israel’s ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, that falling in line with Trump means bending the knee to Israel and accepting Arab humiliation.

VII.

It’s too soon to predict the outcome. A U.S. war with no clear strategic logic; no narrative that has taken root in the U.S. public, with no more than one in three Americans supporting it; no allied support or buy-in outside of Israel, etc. won’t be hard for Trump to pivot – declaring victory (none of his narrative makes any sense, or is even consistent from day to day) – and moving on to Cuba. (I’m grimly reminded of how Ronald Reagan’s absurd invasion of Grenada in 1983 came literally two days after the U.S. lost 241 men to a truck bombing of their barracks in Beirut…) Then again, he may be double down. Still, what’s not too soon to predict is that there’ll be no reversion to the region’s status quo-ante. All the key players will be left facing new choices as those of the past prove redundant. The image of Condolleeza Rice visiting the White House last week (or was that an imitator in a Condi Halloween costume for Purim?) reminded me of her 2006 ostensibly reassuring comments as Beirut burned that “we are seeing the birth pangs of a new Middle East.” Indeed, but it may well be a Middle East quite different from what U.S. officials have imagined.

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