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      Americans disagree on much – but this week, we have been coming together | Robert Reich

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      We are relearning the meaning of “solidarity”. This week, across the US, people have been coming together.We may disagree on immigration policy, but we don’t want a president deploying federal troops in our cities when governors and mayors say they’re not needed.We may disagree on how laws should be enforced, but we don’t want federal agents to arbitrarily abduct people off our streets or at places of business or in courthouses and detain them without any process to determine if such detention is justified.Or target hardworking members of our community. Or arrest judges. Or ship people off to brutal prisons in foreign lands.We may disagree on questions of freedom of speech, but we don’t think people should be penalized for peacefully expressing their views.We may disagree on the federal budget, but we don’t believe a president should spend tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on a giant military parade designed in part to celebrate himself.As we resist Donald Trump’s tyranny, America gains in solidarity. As we gain solidarity, we feel more courageous. As we feel courageous and stand up to the president, we weaken him and his regime. As we weaken Trump and his regime, we have less to fear.In downtown Kansas City, Missouri, this week, protesters holding signs reading “solidarity” marched peacefully. “I felt it was my right and my duty to come here – as what I had to go through to come here, and yell, and say I went through the system,” one of them told the local channel KSHB.In Denver, a crowd gathered outside the Colorado state capitol peacefully marched in solidarity with Los Angeles protesters, carrying flags and signs with slogans such as “Abolish ICE,” “No human is illegal” and “Keep the immigrants. Deport the fascists!”In downtown Tucson, people gathered at the Garcés Footbridge to show their solidarity. Reminders of the protest were written in chalk on sidewalks: “No one is illegal on stolen land,” “Love over Hate” and “Free Our Families.”In Boston, they gathered outside of the Massachusetts state house to express solidarity, citing two local students who they said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) abducted and detained for no reason, Rümeysa Öztürk and Marcelo Gomes da Silva.In Sioux City, Iowa, they marched along Singing Hills Boulevard, outside the Ice office, to peacefully protest. One of them, Zayden Reffitt, said: “We’re showing people that we’re not going to be silent and we’re not just going to let all this go through without us saying something about it.”In Chicago, thousands marched through the Loop, creating a standstill on DuSable Lake Shore Drive near Grant Park. As one explained: “I’m a first-generation citizen – my parents were born in Mexico. It’s something I’m super passionate about. My family is safe, but there are many who aren’t. This is impacting our community, and we need to stand up for those who can’t speak up for themselves.”In Des Moines, they rallied peacefully at Cowles Commons in solidarity with others. “We’re here to stand up for members of our community. For immigrants. For migrants. For refugees. For people with disabilities. For people on Medicaid. For seniors. For all the working class, because we are all under attack right now,” said one. “And Trump is trying to scapegoat immigrants and make them the enemy, calling them criminals.”In Austin, Texas, they gathered in front of the Texas capitol, holding flags and signs while chanting: “Whose streets? Our streets.” Authorities used pepper spray and teargas against the protesters and arrested more than a dozen of them, the governor, Greg Abbott, said.In San Antonio, hundreds gathered outside city hall, chanting, “People united will never be divided!” and holding signs that read, “No human is illegal” and “I’m speaking for those who can’t.”It was much the same in Sacramento; Raleigh, North Carolina; St Louis and in hundreds of other cities.All across the US, people who have never before participated in a demonstration are feeling compelled to show their solidarity – with immigrants who are being targeted by Trump, with people who are determined to preserve due process and the rule of law, with Americans who don’t want to live in a dictatorship.Peaceful protests don’t get covered by the national media. Most of the people who come together in places such as Des Moines and Kansas City to express their outrage at what Trump is doing aren’t heard or seen by the rest of us.Yet such solidarity is the foundation of the common good. And although the number of people expressing it is still relatively small, it is growing across the land.This is the silver lining on the dark Trumpian cloud.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      ‘No Kings’ protests across US loom over Trump’s military parade

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      As tanks and soldiers parade through the streets of Washington on Saturday, millions of people around the country are expected to turn out in their communities to speak out against the excesses of Donald Trump’s administration in what’s expected to be the biggest day of protest since his second term began.The protests, dubbed “No Kings”, are set to take place throughout Saturday in about 2,000 sites nationwide, from big cities to small towns. A coalition of more than 100 groups have joined to plan the protests, which are committed to a principle of nonviolence.This week, Trump has deployed national guard and US marine troops to Los Angeles to crack down on protesters who have demonstrated against his ramped-up deportations, defying state and local authorities in a show of military force that hasn’t been seen in the US since the civil rights era. Interest in the Saturday protests has risen as a result, organizers said.Texas governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, deployed his state’s national guard to manage protests ahead of No Kings and amid ongoing demonstrations against Trump’s immigration agenda. In Florida, Republican governor Ron DeSantis said that people could legally run over protesters with their cars if they were surrounded. “You don’t have to sit there and just be a sitting duck and let the mob grab you out of your car and drag you through the streets. You have a right to defend yourself in Florida,” he said.A website for the protest cites Trump’s defying of the courts, mass deportations, attacks on civil rights and slashing of services as reasons for the protests, saying: “The corruption has gone too far. No thrones. No crowns. No kings.”The coalition will not hold a protest in Washington DC – an intentional choice to draw contrast with the military parade and to not give the president an excuse to crack down on peaceful protest. Philadelphia will host a flagship march instead, and a DC-based organization is hosting a “DC Joy Day” in the district that will “celebrate DC’s people, culture, and our connections to one another”.Trump initially said people who protested the parade would be met with “very big force”, though the White House then attempted to clarify he was fine with peaceful protest. Asked about the No Kings protests during a White House event on Thursday, Trump said: “I don’t feel like a king. I have to go through hell to get things approved.”Since the start of his second term, opposition to Trump has grown, manifesting in protests and demonstrations including against Elon Musk at his car company, against deportations, around his retribution agenda and government cuts.Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium, which tracks political crowds, found that there had been three times as many protests by the end of March 2025 compared to 2017, during Trump’s first term, and that was before major protests in April and May. The biggest day of protest so far came on April 5, with “Hands Off”, which the consortium estimated drew as many as 1.5 million people, a lower figure than organizers cited.“Overall, 2017’s numbers pale in comparison to the scale and scope of mobilization in 2025 – a fact often unnoticed in the public discourse about the response to Trump’s actions,” a new analysis from the consortium said. More

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      Trump is deeply obsessed with US history – but he has learned all the wrong lessons from it | David Reynolds

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      Today the US army will parade in style along the National Mall in Washington DC to celebrate its 250th anniversary. This also just happens to be the 79th birthday of President Donald J Trump. As commander-in-chief, he will take the salute from a viewing platform on Constitution Avenue.But this is not a mere vanity project, as some critics have claimed. History really matters to the US’s 47th president. One of Trump’s last acts before reluctantly leaving the White House in January 2021 was to publish a report by his “1776 Commission”, created to “restore understanding of the greatness of the American Founding”. Deliberately, the commissioners included few university historians because universities were described as often being “hotbeds of anti-Americanism, libel, and censorship that combine to generate in students and in the broader culture at the very least disdain and at worst outright hatred for this country”.The 1776 Commission demanded a return to truly “patriotic education”, declaring: “We must resolve to teach future generations of Americans an accurate history of our country so that we all learn and cherish our founding principles once again. We must renew the pride and gratitude we have for this incredible nation that we are blessed to call home.”In this spirit, on 2 May this year, the president posted that he was renaming 8 May and 11 November respectively as “Victory Day for World War II and Victory Day for World War I” because “we won both Wars, nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance”, and it was time for the US to “start celebrating our victories again!”The parade on 14 June is also intended to raise the curtain on a spectacular nationwide celebration of the 250th anniversary of US independence, extending right across the country and culminating on 4 July 2026. According to the White House website, one feature will be a video history series that “tells the remarkable story of American Independence. It will highlight the stories of the crucial characters and events that resulted in a small rag-tag army defeating the mightiest empire in the world and establishing the greatest republic ever to exist.”History on parade, indeed. As is often the case, Trump does start with a valid point. After he witnessed the extravaganza of Bastille Day in 2017, where French and American troops marched down the Champs-Élysées to celebrate the centenary of the US’s entry into the first world war, he was determined to stage a parade of his own. So what’s wrong with that? Shouldn’t countries be proud of their past?OK (if you don’t mind the cost). But pride should be rooted in honesty, especially when Nato in Europe is engaged in a proxy war in Ukraine against Vladimir Putin, a systematic falsifier of history. And if we’re trying to be honest, world wars aren’t like the World Series with one country trumping all the others and winning almost single-handedly.Take the second world war. On 3 May this year, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev dismissed Trump’s claims as “pretentious nonsense”, asserting that “Victory Day is ours and it is 9 May. So it was, so it is, so it will always be!” Medvedev is now an obedient Putinist, but he and other Russians rightly point to their huge losses in 1941-45 – roughly 27 million people. Stated differently, in the three years from June 1941 to June 1944, between Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and the D-day landings in Normandy, more than 90% of the German army’s battle casualties (killed, wounded, missing and prisoners) were inflicted by the Red Army. That puts Alamein and Tunis, Anzio and the liberation of Rome into a different perspective.View image in fullscreenYet Americans can rightly say that they were in a league of their own as a “superpower” – a word coined in 1944 to signify “great power and great mobility of power”. Their huge C-47 transport planes and the B-17 and B-24 bombers allowed the US to wage war right across the world. Their modern fleets of aircraft carriers, built to avenge Pearl Harbor, island-hopped across the Pacific to Japan itself. The Pacific war ended with the firebombing of Tokyo and the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Or consider the speed of the remarkable breakout from Normandy that enabled allied armies to liberate Brussels on 3 September 1944, occupying positions they had not expected to reach until May 1945. When an astonished Winston Churchill asked how the GIs were being fed and supplied, US general Omar Bradley said he was running trucks up to the front “bumper to bumper, 24 hours a day”. Ford delivered the goods.But Britain also played a crucial part in victory. Had our embattled island gone the same way as Scandinavia, France and the Low Countries in the summer of 1940, Hitler would have thrown all his resources against the Soviet Union, while Roosevelt’s US would probably have turned in on itself and concentrated on defending the western hemisphere. Instead, a combination of Churchillian leadership, modern fighters linked to the new Chain Home system of radar and the courage of the RAF pilots managed to keep Hitler at bay. Eventually, Britain became the essential supply base and launchpad for the liberation of Hitler’s Fortress Europe.And so in 1944-45, the allied armies converged on Germany from east, west and south. Of course, it was an unholy alliance, animated by divergent aims and values. But the extermination of nazism was a goal all the allies shared.With this in mind, let’s glance back to the US’s most important victory: independence. Yes, this was in large measure a David v Goliath story of “a small rag-tag army defeating the mightiest empire in the world”. The US’s independence was indeed testimony to George Washington’s leadership and his troops’ courage and resilience (reinforced by his insistence on inoculation against the smallpox epidemic). But this was also a world war as the British empire battled against its global foes. Crucially, by the 1780s Britain lost naval supremacy because (unusually) three rival seapowers had combined against it: France, Spain and the Dutch. It was blockade by the French fleet that forced Lord Cornwallis’s historic surrender at Yorktown in 1781 and British acceptance of American independence.The purpose of historical research is to set events in context, not to boost national pride. The story of the US’s founding, like that of Hitler’s defeat, reminds us that allies matter – in the past, the present and the future. That should not be forgotten when history goes on parade.

      David Reynolds’s most recent book is Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the leaders who shaped him. He co-hosts the Creating History podcast More

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      Mahmoud Khalil: US judge denies release of detained Palestinian activist

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      A federal judge declined to order the release of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a setback for the former Columbia University student days after a major ruling against the Trump administration’s efforts to keep him detained.Khalil, a green-card holder who has not been charged with a crime, is one of the most high-profile people targeted by the US government’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus activism. Despite key rulings in his favor, Khalil has been detained since March, missing the birth of his son.His advocates were hopeful earlier in the week that he was close to walking free. On Wednesday, Judge Michael E Farbiarz ruled the Trump administration could no longer detain Khalil on the basis of claims that he posed a threat to US foreign policy. The federal judge in New Jersey said efforts to deport him based on those grounds were likely unconstitutional.Farbiarz had given the US government until Friday morning to appeal against the order, which the Trump administration did not do. Khalil’s lawyers then argued he must be released immediately, but the government said it would keep him detained in a remote detention facility in Louisiana. The administration argued it was authorized to continue detaining him based on alternative grounds – its allegations that he lied on his green-card application.On Friday, Farbiarz said Khalil’s lawyers had failed to present enough evidence that detention based on the green-card claims was unlawful, suggesting attorneys for the 30-year-old activist could seek bail from a Louisiana immigration judge.Khalil’s have strongly rejected the government’s assertions about problems with his green-card application, arguing the claims were a pretext to keep him detained.“Mahmoud Khalil was detained in retaliation for his advocacy for Palestinian rights,” Amy Greer, one of his attorneys, said in a statement on Friday evening.“The government is now using cruel, transparent delay tactics to keep him away from his wife and newborn son ahead of their first Father’s Day as a family. Instead of celebrating together, he is languishing in [immigration] detention as punishment for his advocacy on behalf of his fellow Palestinians. It is unjust, it is shocking, and it is disgraceful.”Khalil has previously disputed the notion that he omitted information on his application.In a filing last week, he maintained he was never employed by or served as an “officer” of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, as the administration claims, but completed an internship approved by the university as part of his graduate studies.Khalil said he also stopped working for the British embassy in Beirut in December 2022, when he moved to the US, despite the administration’s claims that he had worked in the embassy’s Syria office longer.The Friday ruling prolonging his detention came the same day a group of celebrity fathers filmed a video reading Khalil’s letter to his newborn son. The Father’s Day campaign, published by the American Civil Liberties Union, called for Khalil’s freedom and included actors Mark Ruffalo, Mahershala Ali, Arian Moayed and Alex Winter.Earlier in the week, when there was a ruling in Khalil’s favor, Dr Noor Abdalla, his wife, released a statement, saying: “True justice would mean Mahmoud was never taken away from us in the first place, that no Palestinian father, from New York to Gaza, would have to endure the painful separation of prison walls like Mahmoud has. I will not rest until Mahmoud is free.”Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, has previously claimed Khalil must be expelled because his continued presence would harm American foreign policy, an effort that civil rights advocates said was a blatant crackdown on lawful free speech. More

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      Trump news at a glance: Marines arrive in LA and Republicans back Israel on attacking Iran

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      About 200 US marines arrived in Los Angeles on Friday morning and detained a man soon after in the first known detention by active-duty troops since their deployment.Marines also took charge of a federal building in a rare domestic use of US troops after days of protests over immigration raids.Federal troops continued to be on duty in LA’s streets on Friday after a series of court rulings and more arrived, with large protests planned in California and across the country this weekend against the Trump administration’s aggressive anti-immigration raids and a big military parade in Washington DC.Here’s our round-up of key Trump stories of the day:Hundreds of marines arrive in LA US marines deployed to Los Angeles on Friday temporarily detained a civilian, the US military confirmed, in the first known detention by active-duty troops deployed there by Donald Trump. Reuters images showed marines apprehending a man, restraining his hands with zip ties and then handing him over to civilians from the Department of Homeland Security. A US military spokesperson said active-duty forces “may temporarily detain an individual in specific circumstances”.Read the full storyRepublicans back Israeli attack on IranDonald Trump and Republicans in Washington on Friday cheered Israel for carrying out long-threatened strikes on Iran. But several Democrats accused the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, of deliberately sabotaging talks to peacefully resolve the question of Tehran’s nuclear program.Read the full storyJudge blocks Trump order to require proof of citizenship to voteA second federal judge has rejected parts of Donald Trump’s executive order on elections, dealing another blow to the president’s directive that would require proof of citizenship to vote in US elections.Read the full storyTrump parade to produce planet-heating pollution costsDonald Trump’s military parade this weekend will bring thousands of troops out to march – and will also produce more than 2m kilograms of planet-heating pollution, equivalent to the amount created by producing 67m plastic bags or the energy used to power about 300 homes in one year, according to a review by a progressive thinktank and the Guardian.Read the full storyÁbrego García pleads not guilty to human smuggling chargesKilmar Ábrego García, the man returned to the United States last week after being wrongfully deported to his native El Salvador, pleaded not guilty on Friday to criminal charges of taking part in a conspiracy to smuggle migrants into the US.Read the full storyTrump loses bid to overturn $5m damages award to E Jean CarrollThe president has lost his latest legal attempt to challenge the $5m in damages awarded against him for defaming E Jean Carroll, the New York writer who a jury found was sexually abused by Trump in the 1990s, before he embarked on his political career.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Trump pulled the US government from a historic agreement to recover the salmon population in the Pacific north-west, calling the plan “radical environmentalism”.

      Democrats are demanding the acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission enforce civil rights protections for transgender and nonbinary people.

      A Republican member of South Carolina’s state house has been arrested and charged with 10 counts of distributing sexual abuse material involving children.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 12 June 2025. More

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      What the foreign flags at the LA protests really mean

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      At the White House on Wednesday, the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters Donald Trump’s decision to dispatch the military to Los Angeles had been triggered by something he’d seen: “images of foreign flags being waved” during protests over federal immigration raids.Leavitt did not specify which images the president had been so disturbed by, but the fact that some protesters denouncing his immigration crackdown have waved Mexican, Guatemalan and Salvadorian flags, or hybrid flags that combine those banners with the American flag, has been taken as an affront by supporters of his mass deportation campaign.The architect of that policy, Stephen Miller, has complained bitterly about flag-waving protesters on the streets of his Los Angeles hometown, and shared video of demonstrators on social media with the comment: “Look at all the foreign flags. Los Angeles is occupied territory.”Trump himself even claimed, during his deeply partisan speech to soldiers at Fort Bragg on Tuesday, that his deployment of active-duty marines to the city was justified because of the protesters he called “rioters bearing foreign flags with the aim of continuing a foreign invasion”.But observers with a more nuanced understanding of the Los Angeles communities being targeted in these raids, and of the nation’s history as a refuge for immigrants, suggest that the flags are not intended to signal allegiance to any foreign government but rather to signal solidarity with immigrants from those places and, for Americans with roots in those countries, to express pride in their heritage.Lalo Alcaraz, a Mexican American satirist and editorial cartoonist, who coined the term “self-deportation” in the 1990s as part of an elaborate prank in response to the anti-immigrant policies of then California governor Pete Wilson, said that the protesters carrying those flags in LA are not immigrants themselves, but “the younger generation that are American citizens and that have pride in their immigrant parents”. Their parents, he said, “are hard-working good people who come from other countries – Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador. This is why they proudly wave those flags.”“Of course they’re proud of their roots, and honestly, what has the American flag done for them but persecute their families?” Alcaraz added. “They are promised that there is a right way to immigrate, that there will be a pathway to citizenship, but this promise has been ignored because corporations make profits off the low wages and hard work of these immigrants, and want to keep them in limbo because it’s easier to control them.”That sentiment was echoed by a protester named Jesus, who told NPR during a protest this week that he waved the Mexican flag because “I’m proud of my Mexican heritage, you know? Even though it was several generations ago, my family members were immigrants.”As NPR’s Adrian Florido pointed out, the large number of flags from other parts of the Americas at these protests contrasted sharply with what was seen in the same place two decades ago.View image in fullscreenIn 2006, when huge marches brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets of LA to protest against Republicans in Congress introducing a restrictive immigration bill that would close off paths to citizenship and build fences along the border, organizers urged the demonstrators to wave American flags.“Apparently taking stock of complaints about the number of Mexican flags in previous demonstrations, organizers made sure that the vast majority of marchers Monday carried American flags,” the Los Angeles Times reported in 2006 on the massive May Day march that year. Images from that rally showed that Mexican flags were vastly outnumbered in a sea of American flags.Others have pointed out that, for Americans with European roots, waving the flags of their ancestors, from Ireland or Italy, for example, is considered uncontroversial.“The reason Mexicans and Mexican Americans wave the Mexican flag is the same reason the Irish wave the Irish flag,” David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, wrote on Friday. “Not because they want to go back there, but because they are proud of their Heritage and want to stand up for people with their ancestry.”“When you persecute a minority, it makes them more aware of their identity and differences from the majority, slowing assimilation,” he added. “In other words, the Trump agenda is bad for the very thing Trumpists claim to want.”In that light, it is worth recalling that charges of dual loyalty were once hurled at Irish and Italian immigrants, too. Less than a century ago, in fact, American citizens from Irish and Italian families were viewed with hatred and suspicion by native-born, white Protestants.To take one example, when 1,000 robed members of the Ku Klux Klan rioted at the 1927 Memorial Day parade in Queens, and seven men were arrested, one of their chief targets was New York’s Irish American-led police force, which tried to prevent them from marching. One of those men was the current president’s father, Fred Trump. (A report from the time in a Brooklyn newspaper said that “a charge of refusing to disperse from a parade when ordered to do so” against Trump was quickly dismissed.)The deep vein of hatred Italian immigrants faced was even a motivating factor in the the first Columbus Day proclamation, issued by Benjamin Harrison in 1892. The then US president hoped to gain support from new Italian American voters, but he was also trying to absolve the country of the stain from a deadly anti-Italian riot the year before in New Orleans, in which 11 Italian immigrants had been falsely accused of murder and were lynched by a mob.One of Trump’s first acts on returning to office this year was to issue a proclamation that Columbus Day would be celebrated during his administration without any acknowledgement of the Indigenous people who suffered so much in the centuries after his voyage to this hemisphere. More

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      Director of National Portrait Gallery resigns after Trump’s effort to fire her

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      The director of the National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet, has resigned just two weeks after Donald Trump attempted to fire her and accused her of being “highly partisan and a strong supporter of DEI”.“We thank Kim for her service. Her decision to put the museum first is to be applauded and appreciated. I know this was not an easy decision. She put the needs of the Institution above her own, and for that we thank her,” Lonnie Bunch, the Smithsonian secretary, wrote in a Friday internal email that was obtained by multiple outlets.“We are grateful to Kim for leading the National Portrait Gallery with passion and creativity for 12 years. Throughout her tenure, she has reimagined and reshaped the impact and storytelling of portraiture.”The announcement comes after the Smithsonian Institution earlier this week rebuffed Trump’s attempt to fire Sajet, with the museum’s governing board asserting its independence and turning away the president’s claim of authority over the institution’s staffing.Trump announced on 30 May that he had fired Sajet, calling her a “highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position”.His attack focused, among other reasons, on her Democratic political donations and her rejection of a pro-Trump painting by artist Julian Raven. Sajet reportedly told Raven his artwork was “too pro-Trump” and “too political” for the gallery, the artist told the Washingtonian in 2019.In a statement on Monday, the Smithsonian’s board of regents declared that “all personnel decisions are made by and subject to the direction of the secretary, with oversight by the board”. The statement did not name Sajet or mention the Trump administration directly.Following Trump’s announcement, Sajet continued reporting to work throughout early June, creating a direct confrontation between the White House and the Smithsonian Institution – the country’s flagship cultural institution that has a 178-year-old governance structure built against political interference.Appointed in 2013, Sajet became the National Portrait Gallery’s first female director. Kevin Gover, undersecretary for museums and culture, has replaced her as acting director of the museum.In a statement shared by the internal memo on Friday, Sajet said it had been “the honor of a lifetime to lead the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery”.“This was not an easy decision, but I believe it is the right one,” she wrote. “From the very beginning, my guiding principle has been to put the museum first. Today, I believe that stepping aside is the best way to serve the institution I hold so deeply in my heart.“The role of a museum director has never been about one individual – it is a shared mission, driven by the passion, creativity, and dedication of an extraordinary team.”A statement from a White House spokesperson, David Ingle, reads: “On day one, President Trump made clear that there is no place for dangerous anti-American ideology in our government and institutions.“In align with this objective, he ordered the termination of Kim Sajet. The Trump Administration is committed to restoring American greatness and celebrating our nation’s proud history.” More

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      Donald Trump is losing control of American foreign policy | Christopher S Chivvis

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      Iran and the US have stood at a crossroads in recent weeks. Down one path lay negotiations that, while difficult, promised benefits to the citizens of both countries. Down the other path, a protracted war that promised little more than destruction.Back in 2018, Donald Trump had blocked the diplomatic path by tearing up the existing nuclear agreement with Iran – the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. But since beginning his second term in January he has been surprisingly open to negotiations with Tehran. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seemed ready to go along.But the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has now decided for them in favor of the path of war, and despite initial hesitation, Trump now appears to be following him. Though uniquely positioned to rein in Netanyahu – more than any US president in decades – Trump has jumped on his bandwagon.After entering office, Trump rightly pursued a deal that would offer Iran sanctions relief in return for an end to its nuclear weapons program. This deal would have served the interests of both parties. The risk of an Iranian nuclear breakout would have been greatly reduced, thus reducing pressure on other regional and global powers to pursue nuclear weapons themselves. Global energy markets would have benefited. The United States could have meanwhile pursued the drawdown of its military forces in the region, thus furthering a goal of every US president since Barack Obama. Improved US relations with Iran would also have helped to complicate Iran’s deepening ties to Russia and China.But the Israeli government wanted none of this and has therefore spoiled the Trump administration’s negotiations. The Israeli government claims that Iran was days away from a bomb and that it had no choice but to attack. This is hard to believe. For years, experts, including the US intelligence community, have estimated it would take months if not years for Iran to not only produce enough highly enriched uranium but to also build a bomb with it. If this timeline had changed in recent days, the US would almost certainly have joined Israel in these strikes.The strikes also will not end Iran’s nuclear program. The damage will be real, and military operations are ongoing, but Israel is ultimately only capable of destroying parts of Iran’s program. The destruction of the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz is a setback for Iran, but these facilities can be rebuilt. The assassination of Iran’s nuclear scientists is a blow, but their knowledge can also be replaced over time. History shows that so-called decapitation strikes can have a near-term effect, but they rarely work in the long term. Even if the United States now joins Israel in strikes, this will not eliminate Iran’s weapons program entirely without a regime change operation against Tehran. That strategy would repeat the tragic errors of the 2003 Iraq war, but on an even larger scale.Iran’s nuclear weapons program will thus remain in some form. But hope of negotiations to control it is now badly damaged. The result is the worst of both worlds: a vengeful Iran even more determined to get nuclear weapons and no hope of negotiating a way out.Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, has wisely attempted to distance the United States from Israel’s attack. Trump, however, who initially tried to rein in Israel’s attack, has now tried to use it as leverage to get Tehran to sign up for his deal. Aligning America so closely with Israel at this juncture is only likely to draw the United States more deeply into the conflict and expose it to Iranian reprisals.As a negotiating tactic it is also unlikely to work. The autocrats in Tehran cannot allow themselves to be visibly coerced into a deal lest it damage their domestic legitimacy. Some powerful Iranian officials moreover benefit from the status quo under sanctions, which have enriched a powerful few at the cost of the Iranian people.Israel’s audacious move is another example of US partners seizing the strategic initiative from Trump. Israel’s strikes come on the heels of the decision by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to strike deep into Russia with drones at the very moment the US was attempting to negotiate a ceasefire with Moscow.With the US focused on the turmoil the Trump administration is whipping up domestically, and so much uncertainty about the trajectory of Trump’s global policy goals, other actors are probably going to do the same. Unless the administration can find the discipline and focus to get control over its own foreign policy, the United States risks getting dragged into more conflicts that will not serve the interests of the American people.

      Chris Chivvis is a senior fellow and director of the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace More