I generally believe that there's room for the U.S. to use military power to promote our values and ideals — under limited conditions.

(What about our “interests”? Because I think ideals and interests are inextricably intertwined, I can’t separate the two in my analysis. An intervention might advance short-term interests — such as degrading Iran’s military capabilities — but be at cross purposes with our values and ideals, and that’s a non-starter for me).

The question is what those limited conditions should be. I've said in the past that one such condition is a regime killing its own citizens en masse.

In Iran, that condition was met — at least 7000 people and likely many more were killed during the recent protests, according to the leading human rights documenter Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA). But other conditions were not met, not even close. There's clearly no plan for the day after and no vision for who should replace the top rung of Iranian leaders who were assassinated. Trump admitted that the initial strikes were "so successful it knocked out most of the candidates... Second or third place is dead." This is laughable and shows the lack of seriousness with which this operation was planned and conducted.

Intention and motivation matter. Secretary of State Marco Rubio's remarks — as well as similar remarks from top Republicans like Tom Cotton and Mike Johnson — suggest that the U.S. was dragged into this war at least in part because of Israel's determination to attack, regardless of how diplomatic negotiations were proceeding (and they were proceeding relatively well). Going to war at the behest of Israel — and with Israel — is not a good thing. Israel's policy in the Middle East is to promote weak, pliant regimes and to sow chaos so that Israel's regional dominance can remain unchallenged. In other words, Israel does not want to see a proud, unified, more democratic Iranian state emerge from this conflict. They want to prevent that outcome.

If a proud, unified, more democratic Iranian state could emerge from this war, then I'd be more sympathetic but there are few if any signs that the U.S. is pushing for this, based on the incoherent jumble of justifications that emerge in the statements of top American officials. Ayatollah Khamenei was a mass murderer who directly contributed to the killing of more than 500,000 Syrians during the civil war there, and no one should lament the fact that he's gone. But that's different than saying that whoever replaces him will be better. And that’s different than saying that we even have an idea of who can or should replace him, which we clearly don’t.

Similar to the Venezuela operation which didn't usher in anything resembling a more democratic outcome for the people of Venezuela. Put simply, the Trump administration doesn't have a humanitarian bone in its body and doesn't care about supporting democracy abroad. It's about exerting U.S. power divorced from any sense of moral constraint. The dominance is the point, where my argument has always been — including in my book The Case for American Power — that American dominance should be at the service of clearly defined values and ideals.

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The reason why campus activists aren't protesting about Iran is actually pretty simple. The U.S. isn't allied with Iran. The U.S. isn't facilitating the mass slaughter of Iranians by funding and arming the Iranian regime to the tune of billions of dollars.

To my knowledge, there's basically no one in the mainstream …

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Illustration by TIME (Source Image: hudiemm/Getty Images)

The history of American hypocrisy is tragically long. But over time I came to see something else. Hypocrisy is, in its own perverse way, an acknowledgment of our ideals. To be a hypocrite you must first affirm that certain principles matter—even if you fail to live up to them.

In my new TIME essay …

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It exists!

As some of you know, my new book The Case for American Power is coming out from Simon & Schuster in exactly two weeks, on November 11th. I’m really excited to share it with all of you. In some ways, this is a culmination of the work I’ve done over the past 15 years. Pre-orders make a big difference, so please consider ordering your copy. I’d …

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In my first major intervi…

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It was some solace, throughout all of this, that as bad as Trump was (is), George W. Bush still had a real claim to the title of worst American president o…

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Sometimes, unusual and extreme events mark the separation between old and new ways of thinking.

In the early weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Berlin-based journalist Elizabeth Zerofsky remarked that the moment reminded her of The World of Yesterday, the haunting memoir written Stefan Zweig as World War II raged on. In it, the Austrian novelist recalls the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with an almost naïve fondness.

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Before we get to this short July 4th post, some exciting news. My new book The Case for American Power is now available for pre-order from Simon & Schuster. Pre-orders make a big difference, so please consider supporting me and my work by getting yourself a copy. You can do so here.

Here is a teaser from the chapter on dec…

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In my new Washington Post column [free link], I spoke at length to Oren Cass, one of the country’s most prominent and articulate defenders of rebalancing trade by way of tariffs. For him, the most relevant metric is domestic manufacturing and re-industrialization. If that’s what you really care about, then tariffs will almost certainly get you closer to where you want to be than their absence. The question, then, will be: was it worth it? And that’s not an economic question as much as it is a political one.

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The problem is that when things bad — and they’re getting really bad — we develop coping mechanisms that might not be entirely healthy. The visceral nature of politics can get the better of us. I know this, because I feel it daily and I try my best to resist it, with mixed results.

An increasingly popular perspective o…

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I’m thrilled to be publishing this essay by David Polansky on the hidden conservative in us all. If liberals prefer the status quo, are they the real conservatives? Polansky is a political theorist who writes at Strange Frequencies, which you should check out and subscribe to. This is one of the best pieces of writing I…

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We talked about the chilling case of Mahmoud Khalil, the rise and fall of “woke” culture, and whether there might be any silver linings to the Trump era.

Subscribe to Ross’ substack “Political Current” here.

Join me for my next live video in the app. I’m hoping to do these more regularly.

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As longtime readers will know, I only really have one “non-negotiable” — respect for democratic outcomes that are not to our liking. This, for me, is the bedrock of a society like our own. Without it, all we have is brute power and coercion.

At some level, at least in retrospect, I think Trump’s re-election or something…

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Yesterday, I re-launched this newsletter under the new name The Agonist. More on that here. I’m really excited to be writing here more often and I look forward to engaging with more of you in the coming weeks and months.

— Shadi

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This Substack has been a bit dormant. That’s about to change. With that in mind, I’m re-launching and re-naming this newsletter to better reflect what I hope to share with you in my text and video posts.

Agonism is a somewhat obscure philosophy of democratic conflict and competition, drawing primarily on the theories of the Belgian philosopher Chantal M…

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In my latest Washington Post column, I tried to do something I generally like doing. It’s not for everyone though. Basically, I wanted to write something about Trump’s wild Gaza comments during his press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu — but without stating the obvious. Yes, what Trump said wasn’t just bad but morally abhorrent. But those of us who don’t like ethnic cleansing already know that ethnic cleansing is bad.

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