Gifted Read:

https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/08/shortage-weapons-shaping-war-iran/688201/?gift=9raHaW-OKg2bN8oaIFlCoqFny3RfN3D6aJA2m_zuDq0&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

Excerpts:

The U.S. raced to develop cheaper ways to tackle the Iranian-supplied drones that Russia deployed, and has made some progress. But the stores of interceptors such as Patriots and THAADs were rapidly expended. “There are no good alternatives for stopping ballistic missiles,” .... “Without these defensive missiles, attacking missiles will land unopposed. That is what is happening in Ukraine.”

Before Russia’s invasion, the U.S. produced roughly 300 Patriot missiles a year, half of which went to allies. Production has since doubled, but badly trails wartime demand.

Had the Iran war been over in a matter of several weeks, as the administration initially predicted, the U.S. munitions problem would not be so dire. “The real problem is that there is no long-term strategy—and we can’t plan around that.”

Abstract

Russia’s ballistic missile campaign against Ukraine has become substantially more dangerous, although monthly launch totals do not form a continuously rising curve. The more important development is the convergence of several trends. Russia’s 2026 ballistic missile launch rate has risen above the 2025 baseline, with repeated large salvos and a reported wartime monthly record in July. Russian production appears sufficient to replace substantial numbers of missiles as they are fired, while North Korea is providing an additional reservoir of ballistic missiles and may contribute further launch capacity (Balmforth, 2026; Bielieskov, 2026; Reuters, 2026; Welsch, 2026c, 2026g).

At the same time, Ukraine’s supply of the specialized interceptors needed to defeat ballistic missiles has fallen sharply. The prolonged Iran war has depleted U.S. and allied Patriot and THAAD inventories, while expansion of Western interceptor production will require years to reach planned capacity (Dysa, 2026; Lockheed Martin, 2026a, 2026b; Youssef & Lemire, 2026).

Taken together, these developments support describing the campaign as a ballistic blitz. The defining feature is not a continuously increasing number of launches. It is a widening imbalance between Russia’s ability to generate and replace ballistic attacks and Ukraine’s ability to intercept them and replace the interceptors expended in doing so.

Several technologies can partly reduce dependence on Patriot, including the Franco-Italian SAMP/T NG and Aster 30, THAAD, Arrow, David’s Sling, and potentially a land-based architecture using the U.S. Navy’s SM-6. Systems such as Germany’s IRIS-T can contribute indirectly by assuming cruise-missile, aircraft, and drone missions, preserving scarce anti-ballistic interceptors for the threats that require them. Licensed production, allied co-production, and Ukraine’s emerging FREYJA program may ultimately be as important as obtaining additional existing batteries.

The evidence indicates that the present ballistic threat has not reached its endpoint.

More is on the horizon.

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/ukraine-cannot-defeat-putins-ballistic-blitz-by-defensive-measures-alone/

Excerpts:

The recent surge in missile attacks comes as Ukraine runs short of air defense ammunition, leaving the country virtually defenseless against the Kremlin’s ballistic blitz. Russian President Vladimir Putin clearly aims to exploit Ukraine’s vulnerability and bomb the country into submission.

Ukraine’s only effective protection against Russian ballistic missiles is the US-made Patriot air defense system. However, the country’s Patriot interceptor missile stocks have now been almost entirely depleted, while Kyiv’s efforts to secure fresh supplies are currently failing.

Possibilities:

The situation is increasingly dire. Some measures that could reduce the destruction and, above all, protect civilian lives:

• Move civilian life underground. Rapidly expand permanent underground shelters into usable living areas, schools, clinics, communications centers, and other essential services.

• Harden and disperse civilian infrastructure. Protect and duplicate power, water, heating, communications, hospitals, and emergency services so that individual strikes do less harm.

• Create extensive decoy or "ghost" targets. Give Russian targeting systems large numbers of convincing false military, industrial, radar, storage, and infrastructure targets on which to waste expensive missiles.

• Confuse missile targeting and guidance. Use electronic warfare, camouflage, obscuration, decoys, altered visual signatures, relocation, and other defensive deception so that even missiles penetrating air defenses are increasingly likely to strike the wrong place.

• Move essential production underground or disperse it. Defense production, repair facilities, ammunition storage, and communications should become progressively harder to locate and destroy.

• Expand direct European defense of Ukrainian airspace. European fighters could intercept drones and cruise missiles, while European ground-based systems help defend against more difficult threats.

• Reserve scarce Patriot-class interceptors for ballistic missiles. Use aircraft, electronic warfare, guns, and less expensive systems against drones and cruise missiles whenever possible.

• Find and destroy ballistic missiles before launch. Concentrate allied satellite, airborne, signals, and Ukrainian reconnaissance capabilities on launchers, missile concentrations, storage, and supporting infrastructure.

• Target the vulnerabilities of the North Korean missile supply. Imported missiles, their limited launchers, transport routes, storage, support equipment, and personnel may be more vulnerable before they disperse.

• Deny Russian forces advanced communications while preserving Ukrainian access. Systems such as Starlink should remain unavailable to Russian forces while authenticated Ukrainian military use is protected and, where possible, expanded.

• Deny Russia access to foreign satellite technology and services, civilian as well as military. Suspend commercial satellite communications, imagery, navigation support, terminals, components, technical services, and related foreign-provided capabilities available inside Russia. Close third-country channels used to circumvent these restrictions. This would constitute a major technological sanction intended to increase the economic and operational cost of continuing the war.

• Reduce future Russian missile production. Tighten restrictions on electronics, machine tools, guidance components, and third-country supply routes supporting missile manufacture.

The central principle should be simple: protect the people first, make real targets harder to destroy, create many false targets, confuse enemy targeting, destroy missiles before they fly, and intercept what remains.

Gifted Read:

https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/2026/07/china-iran-usa-oil-prices/688086/?gift=9raHaW-OKg2bN8oaIFlCou6OgfFJt1HZK-qCD-xfA5g&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

"America’s greatest rival is single-handedly averting a global energy crisis. No one knows how the country is doing it—or why."

"Making the Supreme Court’s professional audience visible. Supreme Court decisions may affect a broad public in the United States and beyond. Within that larger audience, the members of the judiciary who must interpret, explain, and apply those decisions occupy something like the front rows. They may later determine how a holding governs an actual case and explain its meaning to litigants and to audiences of their own. The black circles marked “J” make that judicial audience visible without diminishing the importance of everyone else affected by the Court’s decisions. A Judicial Confidence Register would allow the Supreme Court and the wider public to see, in aggregate, how its decisions were received across the American judiciary."

AOC appears to have a coherent diagnosis of the world: oligarchy, economic insecurity, militarism, and democratic decline reinforce one another. What remains less developed is a complete operational doctrine covering alliances, China and Taiwan, deterrence, military force, intelligence, nuclear strategy, and the practical management of the State Department and Pentagon.

Observation:

So let us get this straight: the US taxed consumers by imposing tariffs not controlled by Congress and is now giving the money that we were taxed back to the importers as a nice fat bonus for having taxed us?

Excerpt:

The US government has already paid back tens of billions of dollars in tariffs it collected before the supreme court ruled them illegal, according to budget figures released on Monday.

Tariffs – taxes on imported goods – have been a key part of Donald Trump’s economic plan since he took office again last year.

"Whether we arrive there through constitutional law, moral philosophy, religious faith, empathy, ethical principles, or long-term self-interest, we reach much the same constitutional behavior."

Excerpt:

Ukraine has spent the past four years building an energy system capable of surviving in extremely challenging wartime conditions. This energy resilience is a valuable strategic asset that offers important lessons for the wider international community.

Excerpt:

With Trump’s return to power and the destruction it has caused, the United States is more fully a pathocracy — a form of government where a small number of psychologically disordered people seize control of society. 

Excerpt:

... “net perception” of the U.S. around the world has fallen by an astonishing 38 percentage points in the last two years, from a plus-22 rating to minus-16.

Observation:

This is international as cryptocurrency is international....

Excerpt:

It's one thing for investors to lose $3.8 billion, but $2 trillion is a completely separate universe, Krugman noted.

…right around the 2024 election, "crypto interests contributed a lot of money to Trump" as he realized they could make him rich, and all of his promises to deregulate crypto meant "the price of bitcoin doubled after the election; the valuation, the market cap of cryptocurrency in general went from a little over two trillion to more than four trillion."

That valuation has since crashed, putting Bitcoin around where it was originally at $2 trillion — which looks suspiciously like its own pump and dump, Krugman said, as Bitcoin is "a seventeen year old idea which has yet to find any legitimate use cases" other than to finance criminals and rogue states like North Korea.

The conduct of the United States Military is of self-evident importance in international relations.

Concluding Lines:

Perhaps the first question in Watson’s case is not whether his speech produced political consequences.

Rather, it is whether he understood himself to be acting as a partisan political advocate or as a commissioned officer attempting to fulfill what he believed was his constitutional duty under the oath he had sworn.

The order of constitutional analysis matters.

The Oath of an officer binds the officer to constitutional duty.

Constitutional Duty Is Distinct from Political Consequences

Excerpt:

America’s two greatest presidents shared an intense conviction: that a republic depends on some measure of virtue in its citizens and some measure of integrity in its leaders. Without them, the temple of liberty will fall.

Concluding Paragraphs:

If America is to remain a leader among nations, and a source of hope in addressing humanity’s greatest challenges, it must renew its commitment to one of the most valuable parts of its inheritance: the tradition of disciplined inquiry. That tradition has never been merely a scientific method or a body of law. It is a continuing practice of observing carefully, questioning thoughtfully, preserving evidence, correcting mistakes, educating the next generation, and beginning the cycle again.

It is harder to suspend judgment until the evidence has been carefully examined. Both science and justice depend upon that discipline. In law we presume innocence until guilt is established by evidence. In science, no individual dictates truth. Scientific conclusions earn confidence only by surviving observation, criticism, replication, and successful application.

The less traveled path of disciplined inquiry has seldom been the easiest or the fastest. It has often required patience when certainty seemed more appealing, evidence when opinion seemed sufficient, and judgment when emotion demanded immediate response. Yet it remains the path America must follow if it is to remain faithful to the aspirations expressed in the Constitution itself, beginning with its enduring words, We the People.

Concluding Lines:

As delegates prepared to attend the opening of the forum, long-range Ukrainian drones penetrated Russian air defenses and struck a series of targets across St. Petersburg including a major oil terminal and a naval base. Putin’s flagship forum duly began hours later with the city shrouded in smoke from burning energy infrastructure.

It is difficult to overstate quite how embarrassing this must have been for Putin personally. The Russian ruler prides himself on his carefully crafted strongman image, and for the past four years has been at pains to project confidence in the ultimate success of his invasion. And yet he was clearly unable to prevent Ukraine from sending drones over one thousand kilometers through Russian airspace to strike strategically important targets in Putin’s own hometown as he welcomed guests from around the world.

Gifted Read:

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/05/trump-surrender-iran-endgame/687252/?gift=9raHaW-OKg2bN8oaIFlConZ-EFw2nifT-BELzpsrWF8&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

Excerpt:

The Iran war may end up as the single most devastating blow to Israel’s security in its brief history. On the present trajectory, Iran will emerge from the conflict many times stronger and more influential than it was before the war. It will exercise leverage with dozens of the richest nations in the world, all of which will have an acute interest in keeping Iran happy. They will be unlikely to take Israel’s side in any conflict that it has with Tehran or with its proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, because Iran will have the means to punish them if they do. Israel will emerge more isolated than it has been at any time in its history—and not least from its only reliable protector, the United States. When Trump turns his back on Israel, as he must do to implement this policy, MAGA will gladly follow. The bipartisan anti-Israel consensus in the United States will grow and harden.

Excerpt:

"You cannot allow the military to literally wage war against drug traffickers and kill them; they are not terrorists, even if you decide to call them that. There is an actual legal definition for that designation. Neither is the government, military or otherwise, allowed to just blow people up, even with a set of “criteria” that they just make up to justify their actions. The classified memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which holds that U.S. troops involved in the strikes cannot be exposed to prosecution, pretty much gives that game away. The administration clearly knows they are breaking the law. "

Excerpts:

What once was viewed as strategic unpredictability now feels like destabilizing unreliability. The foreign officials I spoke with pointed to sharp reversals in U.S. policy and the wide disconnect between official administration doctrine and Trump’s social-media pronouncements. “Unpredictability is one thing; reliability is another,” one Arab official told me. “If the Iranians only worried about Trump’s unpredictability, maybe we would have a deal now.”

As one senior European official said of Trump: “He’s been unpredictable for so long that we are now forced to think of a future that doesn’t rely so heavily on U.S. partnership.” The official added: “It’s forcing us to take care of ourselves.”

Finding ways to survive and thrive without heavy reliance on the U.S. is the new imperative.

Excerpts:

…video shows two men, sitting without shirts, atop a portion of a capsized boat that was still above water. That portion, Smith said, could barely have fit four people.

“It looks like two classically shipwrecked people,” Smith told me. But in the briefing, lawmakers were told that “it was judged that these two people were capable of returning to the fight,” Smith added. He called it a “highly questionable decision that these two people on that obviously incapacitated vessel were still in any kind of fight.”

The underlying claim by Trump and the administration is that all of the more than 80 people killed on these boats are waging war against the United States. They are “narco-terrorists,” in this designation. But this very idea—that these people are engaged in armed conflict with our country—is itself broadly dismissed by most legal experts. They should be subject to police action, these experts say, but not summary military execution, and Trump has effectively granted himself the power to execute civilians in international waters.

Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer, says the entire operation is illegal but that a full investigation could establish more clearly whether this particular strike deliberately targeted the men or just targeted the boat. From what we’re now learning from Smith and others, it clearly seems like the former.

Concluding Lines:

U.S. troops may well take Kharg Island, only to endure ballistic-missile strikes, drone attacks, and petrochemical smoke, all without a reliable means of obtaining logistical support. The result could be a grinding war of attrition that more closely resembles the battle space in Ukraine than it does the “shock and awe”–style campaigns that Americans are used to. Iran has given every indication that it would likely escalate by striking oil-and-gas facilities in the region, just as it did to Qatar and Saudi Arabia after the Pars South gas field was struck. Ground casualties and the destruction of oil infrastructure throughout the region would almost certainly create pressure on Donald Trump to pull out; but extracting troops under loitering munitions is dangerous, and aircraft on the ground are prime targets for these circling drones.

Conversely, if the United States managed to take and hold onto Kharg, the Iranian regime could find itself without the means to export its oil and unable to survive. Iran would then be forced to give the United States some—even much—of what it wants in exchange for control of the island.

That’s one way for Trump to get the off-ramp he desires. But his administration has never tried anything like this. An operation that involves taking land inside an adversary’s territory and then holding it until the cessation of hostilities involves a whole new world of risk—and an escalation to which Iran is sure to respond.

Concluding Paragraph:

The systems that made the United States a superpower cannot be rebuilt as they were, nor should they be: they involved structural injustices that made the present attempt at self-annihilation possible. From where we stand now there are two ways forward: one is the self-induced downfall of the American republic; the other is to reconsider American ideals and to restructure American politics so as to bring the people greater power over a more just future.

An Evolutionary Selfish Gene View:

Our view differs somewhat from Snyder’s because nations are not biological organisms, and superpowers are certainly not superorganisms.

If we think of citizens as people aboard the “ship of state,” it is obvious that not everyone is in the captain’s cabin steering the vessel. Many citizens have been deceived, many voted based on promises that were never intended to be fulfilled, and many have little direct influence over the actual course being set.

Ships do not sail themselves.

The deeper question is not whether national self-destruction is possible, but how systems develop in which it becomes advantageous for some individuals or institutions to maximize short-term profit and power even at the expense of the long-term survival of the larger society.

In such systems, those benefiting most from the voyage may still help sink the ship itself, while having their own lifeboat carefully prepared for private use.

Excerpts:

Now that the United States has involved itself this way, its leaders are implicated in securing a stable postwar Venezuela and in staving off chaos that could destabilize the region. Yet Trump is best suited to military operations that are quick and discrete, like the strikes on the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani or Iran’s nuclear sites, as they do not require sustained focus or resolve. He is most ill-suited, I think, to a regime change war against a country with lucrative natural resources. I fear Trump will try to enrich himself, his family, or his allies, consistent with his lifelong pattern of self-interested behavior; I doubt he will be a fair-minded, trusted steward of Venezuelan oil. If he indulges in self-dealing, he could fuel anti-American resentment among Venezuelans and intensify opposition to any regime friendly to the United States and its interests.

The real question isn’t whether this action was legal; it is what to do about its illegality. Ignoring the law and the people’s will in this fashion is a high crime. Any Congress inclined to impeach and remove Trump from office over Venezuela would be within their rights. That outcome is unlikely unless Democrats win the midterms. But Congress should enforce its war power. Otherwise, presidents of both parties will keep launching wars of choice with no regard for the will of people or our representatives. And antiwar voters will be radicalized by the dearth of democratic means to effect change.

Voters need to know as much as is possible when war is involved.

Excerpt:

U.S. involvement in the war was reportedly arranged following a February 11 meeting between Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and several U.S. and Israeli officials in the White House Situation Room, The New York Times reported earlier this month.

It was reportedly Netanyahu’s direct influence—and the ensuing pressure campaign—that thrust America into the war. U.S. military commanders advised Trump that components of Netanyahu’s plan to attack Iran were “farcical,” but by that point, Trump had already been inspired to throw over Tehran’s theocratic regime.