2025-09-04 05:30:00
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: The Trump administration is promising to “wage combat” against drug cartels following a strike targeting an alleged Venezuelan drug boat.
What happened? On Tuesday, the US destroyed a small boat carrying 11 people in the southern Caribbean Sea. The boat was in international waters at the time of the strike, and its destination was unclear, though Donald Trump said it was bound for the US and the passengers were “Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists.”
What’s the context? The Trump administration has made a string of aggressive moves against Venezuela in recent months, accusing it of “narcoterrorism” and cooperating with Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang operating transnationally. Last week, the administration dispatched multiple US warships and an attack submarine to the Caribbean near the country.
What’s the big picture? This could just be the start of the Trump administration’s war on cartels. Trump has long expressed interest in taking direct military action against cartels, including reportedly asking during his first term about launching missiles into Mexico to target “drug labs.” Last month, Trump signed an order directing the use of force against drug cartels his organization has designated as terrorist organizations, including Tren de Aragua.
Why does this matter? Tuesday’s strike represents new, questionable territory for the US military. Though Tren de Aragua has been declared a foreign terrorist organization by the Trump administration, that doesn’t give the president the authority to order 11 deaths with no pretense of process. But the strikes are likely to continue: Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters Wednesday that “it’ll happen again.”
I love a good space story, and this one from Vox Future Perfect fellow Shayna Korol is no exception. She writes that, before humanity manages to send a person to Mars, space medicine — a real medical field! — has a few things to figure out about what going there would mean for the human body.
The good news is that, while there’s lots more to do, researchers are starting to look into the question. What’s more, whatever they discover might be a boon for human health right here on Earth, too. You can read Shayna’s story here. Have a great night, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
2025-09-04 03:45:00
At the height of the Iraq war, bloggers coined the term “Friedman unit” in reference to the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s habit of claiming that the next six months would be critical in determining the outcome of the conflict.
Everything has sped up quite a bit in our post-Twitter era, so perhaps it’s appropriate that the Ukraine war equivalent — the Trump unit — is only two weeks. President Donald Trump said last month he would give Russian President Vladimir Putin a “couple of weeks” to take serious steps toward ending the war before he imposed new penalties on Russia. “I’ll know in two weeks what I’m going to do,” he told CNN. Trump has previously given Putin two more weeks in April, May, and July. (This is not the only issue that Trump has promised to resolve in a fortnight.)
Trump had promised to end the war within 24 hours of taking office, and eight months later, there appear to be two constants: Trump’s frustration that Putin might be “tapping me along” as he continues to launch attacks on Ukrainian cities, and his seemingly unshakeable faith that Putin is serious about making peace — in which case, a resolution to the war may be just around the corner.
“I think [Putin] wants to make a deal for me, you understand, as crazy as it sounds,” he told French President Emanuel Macron in a hot mic moment at the White House on August 18. Two weeks later, he declared himself “very disappointed” in Putin.
None of this is to say that talks with Russia are pointless; even the most fleeting chance of a negotiated outcome should be explored. But the unfortunate fact is that there’s a high likelihood this war will continue for quite some time.
The biggest change in the war since Trump took office is that the two sides are talking. US officials have been holding direct talks with their Russian counterparts over Ukraine since February, a reversal of the Joe Biden-era mantra that there would be no talks “about Ukraine without Ukraine.” Russia and Ukraine have also held their first direct talks since the first weeks of the war, agreeing to several prisoner swaps, but making little progress toward a ceasefire.
There’s been some softening of the Ukrainian position. It was once an article of faith in Kyiv that it would not agree to an end to the war until Russian troops were expelled from all of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory. But now, Ukrainian leaders are pushing for a ceasefire that would leave a significant portion of its territory under Russian occupation, with hopes it could be regained later. Battlefield realities probably would have dictated this shift no matter who was in the White House, but Trump’s desire for a quick end to the war, and Ukraine’s need to keep him mollified, probably hastened it.
As for Russia, while even Putin may accept now that his military is unlikely to topple Ukraine’s government entirely, it’s not at all clear that he’s backed down on demands that would essentially turn Ukraine into a subservient satellite state. Moscow has demanded that Ukraine not only give up territory currently under Russian control but that it cede additional territory that Russia has claimed but not yet conquered. Other recently reported demands include international recognition of Russia’s territorial claims, Ukraine’s political neutrality, and restrictions on its military and the international military aid it receives. These might just be maximalist negotiating positions, but some Russian observers say there are red lines Putin is unlikely ever to budge on.
“The unfortunate reality is that we haven’t really learned very much [about Russia’s willingness to compromise], and that we’re basically in the same position that we were prior to the flurry of diplomacy, and maybe even slightly worse off,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, director of the Transatlantic Security Program and the Center for a New American Security.
“In this kind of war, you can either win or you lose, and if you lose, it’s disastrous for Russia.”
Andrei Soldatov, Russian journalist and analyst
Since Trump’s Alaska summit with Putin and his meeting in Washington with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Europe’s leaders, much of the discussion in European capitals has been around future security guarantees for Ukraine, including what are reportedly “pretty precise plans” for post-conflict troop deployments to back up those guarantees. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have said the US would provide some backing for these guarantees, though not “boots on the ground.”
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has stressed, however, that Russia wants to be part of the discussions over security guarantees, that it wants its ally China as one of the guarantors, and that there must be no foreign troops deployed to Ukraine. As such, all the discussions in Washington, Kyiv, and European capitals over what form these guarantees will take are still a bit theoretical.
“The whole question about foreign soldiers on Ukrainian soil, it’s just absolutely a no-go for the Kremlin,” said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian journalist and analyst based in the United Kingdom at the Center for European Policy Analysis. Putin “would fight until the last soldier against it.”
Putin has repeatedly said that the “root causes” of the conflict need to be addressed, by which he means NATO expansion and the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s Russian-backed government, which he describes as a Western-backed “coup d’état.” This is, in other words, about much more than “land swapping.”
Soldatov says the stakes of this conflict for Russian leaders who saw the breakup of the Soviet Union in the years following the Cold War as a period of humiliating defeat for Russia, should not be underestimated.
“They believe that this is an existential war, and not just with Ukraine, but with the West as well,” he said. “In this kind of war, you can either win or you lose, and if you lose, it’s disastrous for Russia.”
All that being said, Russia is more than willing to continue to participate in negotiations, if only because Trump has been repeatedly unwilling to impose any serious consequences on Russia so long as it is nominally involved in the peace process.
“Putin thinks he has solved the Trump problem,” John Herbst, a former US ambassador to Ukraine now at the Atlantic Council, told Vox. “Trump has allowed his red lines to be crossed without taking any steps.”
If Putin doesn’t actually want to make a deal just to do Trump a solid, could he be coerced through more pressure?
In recent days, the administration has touted its tariffs on India (White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt called them “sanctions,” a fairly incendiary term in New Delhi) as evidence that the US is getting serious about dialing up the pressure. The road to peace runs, at least partly, right through New Delhi,” said Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro.
This is an odd stance: It’s true that India now buys a significant amount of oil from Russia, but China buys even more, and the administration has been notably quieter about that. In any event, the tariffs seem to have pushed India closer to China rather than away from Russia.
There’s little bilateral trade to speak of between the US and Russia, so Trump’s preferred pressure tactic — tariffs — isn’t well-suited for pressuring Putin. Experts say there are additional steps the US could take, such as cracking down more on the “shadow fleet” of oil tankers transporting Russian crude around the world in violation of wWestern restrictions, or seizing Russia’s frozen sovereign assets.
Trump has also suggested removing restrictions on Ukraine’s long-range strikes into Russia, which are having an impact on Russia’s domestic energy supply. He has called Biden incompetent for not allowing Ukraine to “fight back,” which is notably not what he was saying at the time.
But Samuel Charap, a former State Department staffer now at the RAND Corporation, is skeptical of calls to dial up the pressure.
“The bottom line is that there is not a plausible pain threshold that we could cross that would make Putin fundamentally alter his approach to Ukraine,” he said.
What could presumably give Ukraine as much if not more leverage than any new weapons system or capability or sanctions program, is simply confidence that American assistance will continue. There have been some brief pauses in weapons deliveries to Ukraine as well as intelligence sharing since Trump took office, and it was recently reported that the Pentagon has been blocking Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles.
For the time being, so long as Europe pays for the weapons, and so long as a Nobel-worthy peace deal looms, Trump seems inclined not to abandon Ukraine entirely. (His vice president may be a different story.) But there’s no guarantee that Trump won’t have a change of heart, and that alone is incentive for Russia to keep up the fight.
“I do think, from the Russian perspective, that there’s still maybe some hope that Trump is going to grow frustrated with this process and walk away,” said Kendall-Taylor of the Center for a New American Security.
RAND’s Charap, who has been a leading proponent of negotiations since the early days of the war, says we’re still not far enough along into the process to know if there’s a chance for a negotiated settlement. He points out that it took hundreds of meetings to negotiate the armistice that ended the Korean War, and 22 months to negotiate the Good Friday Accords in Northern Ireland. Though Trump has put great emphasis on holding a three-way summit between himself, Putin, and Zelenskyy, the details of these agreements tend to be hammered out over months in much less high profile meetings by much lower level officials. (Trump’s staff cuts have thinned out the ranks of Russia experts at the State Department, National Security Council, and CIA.)
“We’ve seen that Russia is willing to talk,” Charap said. “Whether or not they’re willing to end the war on terms that are acceptable to that Ukraine can live with — we’ve yet to fully test that proposition.” Testing that proposition, he emphasizes, will take time and patience.
Russia continues to make steady gains on the battlefield, albeit at a grindingly slow pace with shockingly high casualty rates. The unfortunate fact, though, is that Russia simply has more people and materiel to throw into the fight and — North Korea’s soldiers and munitions notwithstanding — is less concerned about international support. The Alaska summit followed by this past week’s shindig in Beijing showed that international efforts to isolate Putin are breaking down. Despite efforts to ramp up production in the US and Europe, Russia is still producing far more ammunition than its Western rivals, which — despite the justified attention given to high-tech drones — is still the key variable for a long, drawn-out war of attrition like this one. Even as the talks have drawn on, Russia has only intensified its efforts to gain ground on the battlefield and inflict damage on Ukrainian cities.
Past examples also suggest Putin may have time on his side. One widely cited study published in 1998 examining wars between democracies and autocracies in the 19th and 20th centuries found that once conflicts reached the 18-month mark, the “advantage in fighting passes to the autocratic state.” Why? States where leaders are less beholden to public opinion, less concerned about casualties, and more able to turn their entire domestic economy into a war machine tend to have the advantage.
This war passed that point 24 months ago. While Putin may eventually cut a deal, in all likelihood, he’s far from finished.
2025-09-04 02:00:00
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2025-09-03 23:45:00
What happens when you put four of the Trump right’s leading intellectuals together in a room? You see what it looks like when a political movement gets high on its own supply.
The conversation in question is a recently published two-hour video roundtable hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an organization dedicated to educating and connecting young conservatives. The panelists are tech monarchist Curtis Yarvin, “postliberal” political theorist Patrick Deneen, the culture war activist Chris Rufo, and globetrotting journalist Christopher Caldwell.
Prior to Trump, Caldwell was the only member of the panel with a claim to real influence. Since, however, each has become a defining figure in the pro-Trump coalition. Yarvin’s ideas helped inspire DOGE. Deneen is a major influence on Vice President JD Vance. Rufo shaped Trump’s war on higher ed, and Caldwell’s ideas influenced its attack on civil rights law.
On a casual watch, their conversation seems like a debate over the American experiment. Yarvin is opposed, repeatedly suggesting that the US take lessons from French autocrats like Louis XIV and Napoleon. The other panelists disagree, arguing that it’s possible to build a better America by making the current system more right-wing.
But what’s actually important is how much all four of them agree about what a “more right-wing” America should look like.
“We all have strong opinions — agreements, disagreements — but it all seems like we’re moving in the same direction,” Rufo says near the roundtable’s end. “We can hash out the ideas among ourselves [because] we had the big debate with the left between 2020 and 2024. I think we’ve effectively won that debate.”
That overall direction, it is clear, is giving more and more power over our lives to Donald J. Trump. Over and over again, the speakers praise Trump’s consolidation of power over the executive branch and urge him to go further, ignoring or mocking concerns about legality and democracy. Yarvin’s authoritarian provocations aren’t immediately dismissed or scorned by his co-panelists, but serve as a conversational focal point that permits the others to indulge their own radicalism. Their shared ambition is explicitly revolutionary, aiming not merely to transform the government but also to remake the very souls of American citizens.
“I think the aim should be not simply to dismantle, but to replace,” Deneen says. “And not just replace the government, but replace the America that — in some ways — fostered and brought it into being.”
But that’s abstract. To understand not just how radical, but how weird the pro-Trump right has become, take these three moments from the conversation:
About 20 minutes into the discussion, Yarvin proposes a distinction between two types of Americans that the other panelists rather like (they return to it repeatedly throughout the two hours).
On the one hand, Yarvin says, you have “modern” Americans who flourish in a society that gives them control over the direction of their own lives. On the other hand, you have “pre-modern” Americans who “cannot take care of themselves in a civilized society.” He picks, as an example of the latter, “a gangbanger in Baltimore” — and proceeds to propose a flagrantly illegal scheme for putting their entire life under control of a local church:
You are going to get your welfare check from your minister. And you are part of that community. You don’t pay taxes — basically, your relationship with the state is intermediated through your church. Your minister can drug test you, he can assign you work, he can put an AirTag on you, he can tell you where to go [and] where not to go.
Yarvin never says the word “Black,” but we all know who “gangbanger in Baltimore” is supposed to refer to. What he’s describing, in short, is the government turning Black men who it labels “gangbangers” into serfs whose lives are fully managed by state-blessed churches. This isn’t a call to reinstitute slavery, but it’s pretty damn close.
And nobody objects to this in principle! Not one person says, “Hey, what you’re talking about is both a gross violation of human rights and quite a bit racist.” In fact, the rest of the panel takes Yarvin’s ideas and runs with them.
The first response, from Caldwell, is that Yarvin’s scheme would be unconstitutional under the First and 14th Amendments. The First Amendment prohibits the federal government from establishing a religion, and the 14th “incorporates” the First, a legal term for applying the protections in the Bill of Rights to state governments. The state of Maryland cannot legally turn the population of Baltimore into church property because that would effectively establish a religion.
After pointing this out, Caldwell then suggests repealing the 14th Amendment. It’s not exactly clear if he thinks that’s a good idea, or suggesting it’s a big problem for Yarvin that his plan would require something as big as repealing an amendment.
Before Caldwell can fully clarify, Deneen interjects with a different proposal: for the Supreme Court to un-incorporate the First Amendment. He wants, quite explicitly, for the Court to allow states to make certain religions official and privileged — describing this as a way that people can live together in a divided country.
“Religion, in the original Constitution, was officially established,” Deneen declares (dubiously). “The First Amendment was written to allow for the establishment of religion in the states.”
The point here is not merely that these ideas are wild and illiberal (imagine, say, an Alabama where the dictates of the Southern Baptist Church enjoy force of law). It is that Yarvin’s bizarre ramblings about Baltimore, which should be dismissed by any sensible person, were instead used as a jumping-off point for various other radical schemes designed to transform the American social compact.
Around the 40-minute mark, the conversation turns to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — whose tenure, nearly everyone agreed, prefigured the aggressive use of political power Trump is currently deploying. Rufo worked closely with DeSantis, particularly his attempt to impose state controls on higher ed, and spent much of his conversation singing the governor’s praises.
His biggest critique, in fact, was that DeSantis erred strategically by running against Trump.
“He would have been better off saying, ‘Hey, I’m very popular, Florida should repeal term limits and I will rule Florida for 25 years,’” Rufo moots.
Not to be outdone, Yarvin proposes that DeSantis should have ramped up his “heresies” against American liberalism “by 10x” or even “100x.” He suggests DeSantis should have established “a branch of the Boy Scouts, where they’re the Florida Scouts, where they wear Florida uniforms.”
Deneen immediately replies that “that’s a good idea” — prompting a bit of nervous laughter given that, as Rufo notes, “it’s been tried before.” I took that as a reference to the Hitler Youth, though Yarvin swiftly clarified that he was thinking of the Young Pioneer groups in the Soviet Union and Communist China.
As with the Baltimore discussion, nobody is willing to directly attack Yarvin on the obvious grounds: In this case, that totalitarian youth indoctrination shouldn’t be a model for policy in 21st-century America. Remarkably, Rufo tries to defend DeSantis by arguing that he actually did something like what Yarvin wanted — specifically by reviving the Florida State Guard, a state militia that had been inactive since 1947.
Caldwell did challenge Yarvin somewhat, arguing that “not every reform benefits from being deptupled.” But note that his objection was not the direction of change — authoritarian — but rather the size and speed of the change.
Nearly an hour and a half into the video, the panelists get into an argument about Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. There was consensus that its true purpose was not efficiency, but rather conducting an ideological purge. Their debate was about the wisdom of using “efficiency” as window dressing.
Caldwell argues that Musk’s talk of efficiency was a “necessary smoke screen” to hide its true purpose from the public. Had the Trump administration been honest about DOGE’s true purpose, which is firing anyone who disagreed with it, they would have faced significant mass resistance.
“It’s a much less acceptable story to present to the public than ‘we’re saving money,” he argues.
Rufo, largely backed by Deneen and Yarvin, takes exception. He claims that Trump and Musk should have openly claimed that they had a mandate to remove liberals from the state, to conduct a “systematic extirpation” of anyone in the federal government who might have qualms about their agenda.
“President Trump won. So he gets to determine who is in his administration,” Rufo says. This efficiency talk was “a mistake that Elon made, because he thought that DOGE was a clever meme…and that he is a libertarian.”
Once again, the shared premise here is more important than the surface disagreement. There is, for the most part, a general sense that an ideological purge is basically a good idea. Much like the Florida youth cadres discussion, the kind of behavior that’s widely seen as a mark of democratic backsliding and authoritarian mismanagement in other countries is seen by the panelists as a masterstroke in the war on liberalism.
There are moments, in the conversation, where it appears as if Caldwell is willing to question this premise. “It’s a corrosive thing to say that you can’t work in the federal government if you believe this-or-that,” he says.
But challenged by Rufo, who explicitly endorses such a political test for public employment, he reverts back to the public relations argument — saying the problem with Rufo’s position is that “it doesn’t command majority support.”
Caldwell is no moderate. He has repeatedly written favorably about foreign right-wing authoritarians, like Viktor Orbán and Narendra Modi. In his book on civil rights, he writes that white people “fell asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.”
Yet in this conversation, he is clearly the voice of restraint relative to the other three panelists. His willingness to give on the DOGE question reflects the fact that he is, in fact, no moderate — he is a radically aggressive culture warrior, just one who is somewhat less open about his authoritarian means than Yarvin or Rufo (who explicitly describes himself in the conversation as producing “propaganda” professionally).
I would call it a mask-off moment for the right’s intellectual cadres. But I think the mask has been off for quite some time.
This story was adapted from the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.
2025-09-03 18:45:00
Democratic strategists think the party has a messaging problem. Post-election autopsies overflowed with countless cross-tabs of how Democrats “underperformed” with demographic after demographic. There are endless debates about which words poll better (should Democrats stop using “microaggression”?) — as if anybody were even listening.
Third Way’s “Signal Project” exemplifies this paralysis. The center-left think tank launched an 18-month project to identify which Trump actions are “most relevant to key voters.” Their profound discovery? “Shuttering USAID, using government power to attack political opponents, firing indiscriminately, degrading the civil service, releasing J6ers, or blaming Ukraine for the Russian invasion all are a combination of unwise, unethical, illegal, or unconstitutional,” according to Axios. “But none resonate much with key voters.” Who knew?
Should we say “working families” or “working people”? Frame ourselves as “Team Normal” versus “Team Extreme”? Who notices? House Democrats test “America is too expensive” versus “People Over Politics.” Say “poor,” or say “economically disadvantaged”? “Addiction” or “substance use disorder”? Who cares?
Yet, leading Democrats seem to think that if only they spend another $50 million to identify the right message for lost working-class voters, they can “win them back” (tellingly, the “them” in the “Win Them Back Fund” gives away the flawed premise of the project).
Certainly, polling and focus-group testing have their place. Polling, when done well, offers a snapshot of public opinion to see what is resonating (though even polling results are highly sensitive to question wording). Focus groups, when done well, can better capture the complex and often contradictory ways in which citizens think through politics, and can pick up on concerns that poll writers might miss or struggle to distill into simple questions (though moderators can very easily direct the results, often without realizing it).
They have accepted a losing political battle they never chose without even realizing it.
But both are reactive to current news, almost by definition. They can never shape the dominant conflict. Only political leaders taking decisive actions can do that.
The Democrats don’t have a messaging problem. They have a much bigger problem: They have accepted a losing political battle they never chose without even realizing it.
Messaging is how you talk about the fight once the battle has been chosen. It’s the tactics, slogans, and talking points deployed within an accepted frame. The conflict defines the possible frames. The frames — the greater story — shape the specific messages.
Democrats have a framing problem — once you’ve accepted a losing political gambit, it’s hard to regain your position with language alone, no matter how many focus groups and polls you commission. The lines are not always clear, but if politics were a pop song, think of conflict as the mood, instrumentation, and beat; frame as the melody, chords, and bubble-gum lyrics; and messaging as the vocal flourishes.
As the opposition party in Congress, Democrats’ ability to shift the conflict in Washington is depressingly limited. But America is a big country, with many Democratic governors and even more Democratic mayors. Consider the gerrymandering wars. Democratic governors have responded to Texas’s new gerrymander by promising to redraw their own lines, thus accepting the brutal reality. But why not use this focusing moment to instead call for proportional representation as an end to single-member districts that enable gerrymandering altogether and an end to the two-party system that single-member districts create, thus reshaping the conflict entirely?
Consider this: What was Kamala Harris’s 2024 slogan?
Most people can’t even remember, because the campaign never settled on one. The closest thing — “We’re Not Going Back” — defined the party in purely defensive terms. Campaign slogans may be silly. But they are the one opportunity to distill a campaign and define a conflict. And all successful political movements understand, whether by design or accident, that the side that defines what the dominant fight is about usually wins.
Take the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill: After some message testing, Democrats settled on calling it “One Big, Ugly Bill.” (How much did that message-testing cost?) Democrats tried to emphasize the cuts to Medicaid, which were generally unpopular, as were most pieces of the bill. But this is hard to message: In many states, Medicaid operates under a different name, and its funding flows through different programs, so it’s hard to see it as a direct benefit. Plus, these cuts will go into effect after the 2026 midterm elections.
By contrast, Vice President JD Vance telegraphed Republicans’ strategy clearly on X: “Everything else—the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”
Come the midterms, which conflict — Medicaid policy or border security — will resonate more? Which conflict has been more central to American politics for a decade? If you are not sure, you may not understand how conflict works in politics; the more emotional, high-intensity conflict dominates.
Conflict defines politics. And if you don’t have a theory of conflict, it doesn’t matter what your theory of messaging or mobilization or issue-speak looks like.
So what does a theory of conflict look like? The best guide remains E.E. Schattschneider’s 1960 classic The Semi-Sovereign People. He writes:
What happens in politics depends on the way in which people are divided into factions, parties, groups, classes. The outcome of the game of politics depends on which of a multitude of possible conflicts gains the dominant position.
His insights are deceptively simple: Conflict organizes politics because conflict is interesting, and the most important political battle is always the battle over which battle matters most. Coalitions and majorities follow from the battle lines.
“The definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power,” Schattschneider argues. “He who determines what politics is about runs the country, because the definition of the alternatives is the choice of conflicts.”
Another example is President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Trump has framed tariffs as a recipe for American greatness and strength. Trump defines the conflict as between those who see the long-term benefit of an American manufacturing renaissance (a promise about the future), against those who might complain about having to pay a little more.
By focusing on prices, Democrats are accepting this frame, and thus, the conflict about American greatness. They are ignoring that the larger story is about the status and might of America. Even calling it a “tax” accepts this premise. People may grumble about taxes, but they can be willing to pay higher taxes if they think they are getting something in return.
So why not name the tax more directly to make its unpopularity stick a little more? ? Naming things gives them a specificity that makes them more memorable.
Could Democrats define the conflict around tariffs not as a generic tax, but as an “isolation tax” — a premium we are paying to isolate ourselves from the world? This substitutes a different conflict: whether America wants to cut itself off from the world. Or: a “nostalgia tax” — a premium we are paying to recreate the past. This substitutes in a new conflict — past vs. future.
Such conflicts only work, however, if they fit with a larger set of policy fights that reinforce the conflict. They can’t just be floating messages. The important thing here is to understand how conflicts define the alternatives. And most importantly how consistent actions reinforce the conflicts, even if they are stunts; as long as they are interesting stunts. Trump showing up to work at McDonald’s or dressing up as a garbage collector during the campaign was an obvious stunt. But it was interesting and memorable.
This works in mundane contexts too. When I want my kids to clean up, I don’t ask whether they want to clean or not — I ask whether they want to clean now or in five minutes. They always choose five minutes, having failed to recognize my displacement of the real conflict by my strategic definition of alternatives. They would make excellent Democratic campaign managers.
For a master class in political conflict definition, consider how Franklin D. Roosevelt framed the 1936 election. Rather than defending New Deal policies on technical merits, he redefined the entire battle as a struggle between ordinary Americans and corrupt elites. His October 31 speech at Madison Square Garden demonstrated this strategy perfectly:
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. … Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.
The MAGA-infused Republican Party’s frame has in many ways echoed the broad strokes of the FDR-led Democratic Party. Mitt Romney’s Republicans fought on traditional conservative terrain: “job creators vs. job takers,” with immigration as a technocratic problem requiring “self-deportation.” Trump torched this framework entirely. His conflict: Corrupt elites betrayed ordinary Americans. Immigration became invasion. Republicans transformed from the party of capital gains tax cuts and H-1B visas into the party of working-class rage against globalist elites who shipped jobs overseas.
At times, Democrats have steered the conflict. Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign defined a brighter future against the failed politics of the Bush administration, particularly around the Iraq War. But Obama’s “hope and change” offensive became eight years of governing reality. By 2016, Democrats had transformed from insurgents into incumbents, with Hillary Clinton running explicitly as Obama’s third term — defender of Obamacare, guardian of norms, and seller of the narrative that America already was great.
Joe Biden doubled down on the defensive, campaigning as democracy’s bodyguard who would restore “normalcy” and “decency.” When Trump redefined politics as “the people vs. corrupt institutions,” Democrats defended those very institutions against populist insurgency. Democrats have been struggling on this battlefield ever since. They never recognized how they got trapped there. In casting themselves as the stewards of democracy in 2024, they offered only a meager defense of the unpopular status quo.
As Schattschneider understood, “Strategy is the heart of politics, as it is of war.” When frontal assault produces stalemate, you don’t need better tactics — you need a different battlefield.
New conflicts can emerge from identifying real contradictions that current politics can’t resolve and starting new fights. These are hard to find, and even harder to commit to, because to succeed they often require picking fights with your own side (as Trump did in 2016).
One leading contender on the Democratic side comes from the Abundance movement. The movement identified a genuine problem: America struggles to build. Housing, clean energy, transit — all blocked by regulations, lawsuits. Their solution: Make it easier to build.
New conflicts create excitement — they bring in people who were sitting out the old fight. They create new enemies and new allies. They scramble existing coalitions.
Sounds nice. But where’s the conflict? It’s too polite, too technocratic. Who exactly is doing the blocking? The movement gestures vaguely at “NIMBYs” and “regulations,” but it doesn’t name names.
Real conflict transformation requires what FDR understood: You need villains. (As he famously put it: “They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”)
What if you take the Abundance insight, but name the enemy? Call them the Extractors. These are the people who hoard their existing wealth, be they private equity firms, the oligarchs, NIMBY homeowners, monopolists, or Trump and his cronies.
They extract your rent through housing monopolies. They extract your data through tech monopolies. They extract your repair rights through hardware monopolies. Trump extracts your wealth through tariffs (a Trump Extraction Tax) — creating artificial scarcity at the border, then selling exemptions to the highest bidder. Extraction without building.
This also inverts Romney’s old frame about “makers” and “takers.” The nurse in the understaffed private equity hospital? She’s a maker. She’s making people healthier. The firm that cut staff to extract fees? They’re the takers. The farmer growing food? A maker, producing sustenance for the country. John Deere blocking their right to repair their own tractors? Taker.
New conflicts create excitement — they bring in people who were sitting out the old fight. They create new enemies and new allies. They scramble existing coalitions. When you redefine the conflict from “liberal elites vs. the real Americans” to “builders vs. extractors,” the farmer who voted Trump because of cultural grievances might join with the young progressive who can’t afford rent along with the entrepreneur who can’t start a business and the social media content creator who finds all her data is now being used against her. All are makers and builders, oppressed by current extractors. And the extractor-in-chief, Trump, is getting rich while creating the ultimate scarcity through executive graft and tariffs.
Maybe “builders vs. extractors” isn’t the right conflict. Maybe it’s something else entirely. But the point is this: You can’t message your way out of fighting on unfavorable terrain. You need new terrain. You need a new conflict if you are losing the old one.
Schattschneider called the people “semi-sovereign” because they can only choose between conflicting alternatives, developed by the major parties. The implication: Popular sovereignty depends on leaders willing to open up new conflicts and create new choices. As he understood: “The people are powerless if the political enterprise is not competitive. It is the competition of political organizations that provides the people with the opportunity to make a choice. Without this opportunity popular sovereignty amounts to nothing.”
The people are waiting to be sovereign. They just need somebody to give them a fight worth joining.
2025-09-03 00:10:00
Editor’s note, September 2, 12:10 pm ET: This week, the leaders of Iran, North Korea, and Russia, along with around two dozen other heads of state, are in China for a military parade marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, which doubles as an advertisement for China’s bid for global leadership. In February, Vox reported on how American policymakers and scholars are increasingly looking at these four countries as a cohesive unit, brought together by a mutual interest in overturning a US-led international order.
Since then, the limitations of this alliance have been illustrated: Iran’s allies notably did not provide much aid when it came under Israeli and US airstrikes in June. The Trump administration has also been far less interested than Biden’s in isolating and pushing back against these regimes, as shown by President Donald Trump’s recent summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska. But this week’s festivities in Beijing also make clear that these countries continue to work closely together and that others — perhaps India — may be falling into their orbit in the face of an increasingly erratic US foreign policy. The story below was originally published on February 3.
Hours after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, China’s Xi Jinping made a call to Russian President Vladimir Putin in which, according to the Chinese foreign ministry’s readout, the two leaders pledged to deepen their “strategic coordination” and “practical cooperation” and “firmly support each other.”
Just a few days earlier on January 17, Putin and his Iranian counterpart, Masoud Pezeshkian, signed a 20-year strategic partnership agreement, pledging a wide range of military cooperation.
Meanwhile, North Korea is pledging to send more troops to Russia, where they have been fighting alongside Russian forces against Ukraine since last October, taking shockingly high losses.
It’s clear that America’s principal global adversaries are increasingly cooperating, and policymakers and experts are increasingly treating these four countries in particular — China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea — as a cohesive unit. They’ve been called the “axis of upheaval,” the “quartet of chaos,” or simply the “CRINKs.”
The cooperation between the four is hard to deny, and while some of these countries have been erstwhile friends since the Cold War, the relationship has certainly deepened since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But what does this “axis” actually stand for? Is it just an alliance of convenience or something deeper? And how will a new US administration, one that takes a much more transactional approach to foreign policy and is far less invested in promoting democracy abroad, deal with the quartet?
The four members of this group are all autocracies, but they don’t share an official ideology. China is a one-party communist party state with capitalist characteristics. Russia is a conservative, nationalist oligarchy. Iran is a Shiite Islamic theocracy, and North Korea is a hybrid of state communism, radical self-reliance, and racial supremacism.
Nor do they have much in common economically: China is the world’s second-largest economy, largest exporter, and an inextricable centerpiece of the global economy, while North Korea is basically an economic nonentity (unless you count cybercrime).
But as Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine of the Center for a New America Security (CNAS) argued in an influential article for Foreign Affairs last year, the four countries “are united in their opposition to the prevailing world order and its US leadership.” What Western countries see as the “rules based international order” established out of the ashes of World War II, these countries see as a cloak for American power.
There are other commonalities.
“They share a belief in state-based political rights rather than any kind of individual rights or human rights,” Kendall-Taylor, director of the Transatlantic Security Program at CNAS, said. “They share a vision of spheres of influence.” In other words, it’s countries’ interests on the world stage that have to be respected, not those of their citizens.
Or as Xi and Putin put it in their joint communique issued shortly after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, they “stand against attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions.”
All four also view themselves as the inheritors of important historical civilizations. Putin’s arguments for the invasion of Ukraine at times seem to refer more often to events in the ninth century than to recent grievances. North Koreans are taught that their country is one of the cradles of world civilization. And China has sought to promote an “Ancient Civilizations Forum,” composed of countries deemed to have inherited “great ancient civilizations” — one of which is Iran.
Kendall-Taylor and Fontaine have dubbed the alliance the “axis of upheaval” — a term that brings to mind the “axis of evil” — referred to by President George W. Bush in his 2002 State of the Union address, where he built a case for the war in Iraq. That “axis” of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea never made much sense. For one thing, at the time, the Iranian and Iraqi governments were mortal enemies, and only became much closer as a result of the American invasion of Iraq.
By contrast, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea actually are working together. But the “axis of evil” association is one reason why Peter Van Praagh, founder and president of the Halifax Security Forum, a high-profile annual national security gathering, prefers “CRINKs,” an acronym he coined in 2023.
Van Praagh contrasts the term to BRICS (the economic grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), which he told Vox “evokes strength and sort of the action of building something, whereas CRINK has a certain stench to it.”
Iran and North Korea are generally viewed as the junior partners in the quartet, due to their relative size and economic clout. China is undoubtedly the most powerful and influential of the four, as reflected in America’s most recent National Defense Strategy, which defined the People’s Republic of China as the “pacing challenge” for American national security.
But Russia is in many ways the catalyst driving the group forward and bringing it together. The 2022 invasion of Ukraine accelerated the deepening of ties that had already been developing for years.
Shortly after Russia’s invasion, Putin and Xi meant to proclaim a friendship with “no limits,” including Russia affirming its support for Beijing’s position that Taiwan is part of China. Though China is not believed to have directly provided weapons to Russia since the war began, trade between the two countries has grown dramatically over the course of the war as Western countries have imposed increasingly draconian sanctions on the Russian economy.
China is now Russia’s key supplier of civilian consumer goods like cars and clothing as well as “dual use” materials, like the microchips and machine parts that Russia uses to sustain its war machine. China, in return, has been buying massive amounts of Russian oil at a discount — thanks to sanctions. According to US officials, China has been receiving Russian technical help with its submarine and missile programs as well.
In September 2023, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un rode his private train to Russia for talks with Putin amid reports that the Russians were buying millions of North Korean artillery shells and rockets. North Korea and Russia signed a mutual defense treaty last summer, and last October, thousands of North Korean troops were sent to Russia to help retake territory in the Kursk region which is currently occupied by Ukrainian forces.
Russia and Iran were the principal backers of Bashar al-Assad’s now-toppled regime in Syria. Iran has also long been a customer of Russian military hardware, notably including several S-300 air defense missile systems as well as tanks and submarines. Since the invasion, however, Russia has been the customer, particularly of Iran’s Shahed “kamikaze” drones. According to the Ukrainian government, Russia has launched more than 8,000 Iranian drones since the start of the war. The US also says Iran has been sending Russia short-range ballistic missiles.
At times, the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have seemed increasingly intertwined. Russia was reportedly in talks last year to send missiles to the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, while Ukraine provided aid to the rebels fighting Assad in Syria. In 2023, Iran was invited, along with several other countries, to join the BRICS, which Russia in particular has sought to promote an alternative to Western-led groupings like the G7.
To explain the alliance that has developed since the war in Ukraine, Yun Sun, a senior fellow and director of the East Asia program at the Stimson Center, said Chinese commentators often use the phrase: “They form a circle and they keep each other warm in a harsh winter. That’s the mentality. They’re looking for someone to have their back when they’re in this strategic competition with the United States.”
One other thing these countries have in common is that they’re all the target of a US-led economic sanctions regime, and extremely eager to find ways to overturn that regime. Putin, in particular, has been keen to develop a global payment system as an alternative to the dollar, which he argues the US uses as a political weapon.
Some experts argue that it’s actually US economic pressure that has created the axis.
“This is an alliance of United States’ making,” says Vali Nasr, professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “It’s not that these countries have natural affinities or strategic convergence. But going back several presidents, the US has basically followed the same strategy against all these countries at the same time in a way that brings them together.”
For example, a so-called “shadow fleet” of opaquely registered and insured oil tankers that has emerged to transport Russian and Iranian oil around the world, including to China, effectively creating a parallel global oil market.
Others question whether the four countries should really be grouped together this way. “I don’t think it’s a useful construct, because our relationship with Russia is very different from our relationship with China,” said Eugene Rumer, director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment and a critic of the axis concept. “In order to deal with these countries effectively, the threats that they pose to us, I think we need to look at them in a more disaggregated manner.”
Framing global politics as a competition between ideologically opposed blocs also risks raising the ire of non-Western democracies such as India, Brazil, and South Africa, all of whom have also sought to maintain good relations with Washington.
Some would say that’s the point: a country like South Africa can’t claim to uphold international law when it comes to Gaza while also effectively helping to enable Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
But leaders of these countries, suffice it to say, don’t see it that way. “Many insist on dividing the world into friends and enemies. But the most vulnerable are not interested in simplistic dichotomies,” Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said at a recent BRICS summit.
Kendall-Taylor acknowledged that US economic pressure and other pressures may have deepened ties between the axis countries, but asked, “What would have been the alternatives to the US policies that were pursued? When Russia invades Ukraine, should we not sanction them?”
Even if these countries form a coherent grouping today, many don’t expect it to last.
Rumer points at the Russian-Iran relationship as an example of the fragility of ties between these countries. The recently signed partnership between the two countries is notably not a mutual defense agreement — they’re under no obligation to help each other if they come under attack. In fact, it’s more or less an open secret that Russia, which operated air defense systems in Syria, tolerated Israeli air strikes against Iranian assets and proxies in that country for years.
“If I were Iran, I certainly wouldn’t count on Russia to be a reliable protector if, say, the United States and Israel decide it’s time to strike Iranian nuclear facilities,” Rumer said.
Complicating the discussion of the future of the CRINKs axis is the arrival of a new US president with a very different approach. In the last weeks of his presidency, President Joe Biden approved a classified national security memorandum, which reportedly lays out the threat posed by cooperation between the four countries — including efforts to interfere in America’s elections — and proposed measures to combat them.
Critics of the Biden administration often argued that for all the former president’s invocations of a struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, and upholding international law, it often fell short of those ideals in, for example, its support of the war in Gaza or its relationship with Saudi Arabia.
Trump, on the other hand, is unlikely to refer to these ideals at all. Noting the administration’s early decisions to pull out of the Paris climate agreements and the World Health Organization, Kendall-Taylor said that during Trump’s first term, “we really didn’t have people present in the UN and a lot of the committees where a lot of important business is done. And we ceded a lot of that space to China and other countries that might be sympathetic to their vision for the future.”
Some of Trump’s advisers are also inherently skeptical of taking on all four of these countries at once. Sometimes referred to as “prioritizers,” they argue that the US needs to extract itself from conflicts with Russia in Europe and Iran in the Middle East to focus on the real threat: China.
“Is it in America’s interest, are we going to put in the time, the treasure, the resources that we need in the Pacific right now badly?” national security adviser Mike Waltz said at a recent event, referring to US support for Ukraine.
During his first term, Trump famously “fell in love” with Kim during their unusual nuclear diplomacy, and for all his China-bashing rhetoric, often touted his good working relationship with Xi and pushed for a trade deal with Beijing. As he enters his second, he’s seeking a deal with Russia and Ukraine to end the war, and hasn’t ruled out seeking a new nuclear deal with Iran, despite the fact that he pulled out of the last nuclear deal during his first term.
Nasr, who served as a senior adviser on Afghanistan in President Barack Obama’s State Department, pointed to Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon’s outreach to China during the Cold War as an example of how the US could seek to divide its adversaries rather than continuing to unite them.
“We’ve been following a kind of a moralistic, simplistic view that is based on casting your enemies sort of in the most negative light, which they may deserve, but that’s not strategy,” he said. “The clever strategy would be to say, ‘Okay, what incentive could get Iran to separate itself from Russia?’”
There are certainly fissures within the group. The Chinese-North Korean relationship — so close it’s been traditionally referred to as like “lips and teeth,” has reportedly been strained by the North Koreans’ deepening relations with Russia; Russian leaders are clearly uneasy about their growing economic reliance on China, but don’t have much choice in the matter as long as they keep pursuing the costly war in Ukraine. Exploiting those fissures to the US’s benefit is another matter.
Van Praagh is skeptical. “There’s not going to be any separating Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China,” he said. “And there’s not going to be any separating Russia from Iran and North Korea, because it needs their material support right now.”
Rather than compromising on Ukraine to focus on China, he argues that the outcome of the Ukraine war is what will determine whether China feels it can have its way in Taiwan. “We really have to achieve Ukrainian victory, and that means pushing Russia out of Ukraine, and that, in and of itself, is going to provide incredible opportunities to the whole world,” he said.
Of course, Trump has also expressed some sympathy toward Russia’s position that NATO was encroaching on its sphere of influence in Ukraine. And his position on the importance of defending Taiwan’s sovereignty has been pretty noncommittal. His rhetoric on Greenland and Panama and extreme hardball approach to an immigration dispute with Colombia suggests his views of spheres of influence might parallel Russia and China’s in some ways. As Yaroslav Trofimov of the Wall Street Journal wrote in a recent essay, “Today the concept of a rules-based international order looks more and more utopian.” We may instead be returning to a 19th-century style global order in which “empires recognized each other’s spheres of influence worldwide, including the right to oppress and dominate less powerful countries and peoples within those spheres.”
In other words, failing to defeat the axis, or divide it, the US may simply end up joining it.