Trump's 'Liberation Day' Tariffs: Fair trade or global trade war?

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How Gaza Has Accelerated the Social and Political Forces Driving the Countries Apart Dahlia Scheindlin The Death of an Iranian Hard-Liner Ebrahim Raisi Helped Engineer the Islamic Republic’s Hawkish Turn—and Whoever Succeeds Him Won’t Change Course Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar A Theory of Victory for Ukraine With the Right Support and Approach, Kyiv Can Still Win Andriy Zagorodnyuk and Eliot A. Cohen China’s Quixotic Quest to Innovate A Statist Economy Can’t Foster Creativity By George Magnus May 29, 2024 Assembling solar panels at a factory in Hefei, China, May 2024 By now, the systemic problems that bedevil China’s economy are obvious. The country is suffering from slowing economic growth, stagnating productivity, a malfunctioning property sector, the misallocation and inefficient use of capital, debt-capacity constraints, and weak household income and consumer demand. But it is less clear how Beijing should fix these problems. Many economists outside China, as well as some inside the country, believe that it must recalibrate its development model by making it far more market-oriented and driven by consumer spending. Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP), however, cannot accept the political and institutional changes that such a recalibration would require. So Xi has chosen a different path: a growth strategy centered on industrial policy, aimed at boosting what he and the CCP call “new productive forces.” In Marx’s thinking, this phrase describes the process whereby major changes in technology clash with the existing economic order, enabling communists to overthrow it. For Xi, these new forces are the sectors now at the vanguard of scientific and technological development, such as clean energy, electric vehicles, and batteries—in which China already leads—as well as industrial machinery, semiconductors and computing, artificial intelligence and robotics, the life sciences industries, and biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. Xi’s ambition is for China to achieve self-sufficiency in all these sectors. Xi believes that by focusing on industrial policy and innovation, he can rescue China’s beleaguered economy, seize geopolitical opportunities to lead the twenty-first century’s new industrial revolution, and end the United States’ dominance in the international system. But this strategy is unlikely to work as Xi intends. China is without a doubt the world’s leading manufacturing nation. Beijing has proved that it can set successful industrial policy in some areas and encourage the rise of powerful companies. But it cannot create a true climate of economic innovation so long as its rigid politics and governance and exclusionary approach to institution building remain in place. In fact, an innovation-based industrial strategy may not be transformative if the government is unable to address basic systemic weaknesses such as youth unemployment, frailties in China’s banking and financial systems, and weak consumer demand. It is unlikely that China can succeed at encouraging the kind of broad innovation and disruptive change on which its economic growth strategy depends, especially in its current lower-growth environment. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. COURSE CORRECTION Xi hopes that an innovation-focused industrial strategy can heal the embarrassment of China’s failure to modernize in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to the CCP’s interpretation of history, Chinese leaders did not adequately respond to industrialization and imperialist intrusions by—for example—Britain, France, and Russia, yielding the so-called century of humiliation, during which foreign powers carved up the nation. He is determined not to flub what he sees as a similar moment. Many elements of Xi’s new economic strategy remain unclear—for example, how it will be financed and whether financially strapped local governments can provide the funding. But what is clear is that the government intends to place an even greater emphasis on industrial policy to make China the undisputed top provider of tech-forward products such as IT hardware, industrial machinery, pharmaceuticals and biotech products, clean energy technologies, and electric vehicles, as well as a global leader in communications networks and nuclear, space, and life sciences research. These industries already accounted for nearly eight percent of China’s GDP in 2014 and 13 percent in 2022. Chinese officials aim to get that proportion of GDP up to 17 percent by 2025. This approach is not new. It can best be understood as the latest initiative in a long line of industrial policy strategies that China has pursued since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Yet however Xi characterizes it, it is also purely and simply industrial policy in a country that already accounts for a third of global manufacturing. The policy’s price tag is likely to be eye-popping. According to recent studies by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, industrial firms in China receive substantially greater subsidies and other forms of state aid compared with their peers elsewhere. In 2021, the economist Barry Naughton described China’s investments in innovation from 2000 as “the greatest single commitment of government resources to an industrial policy objective in history.” Maintaining high levels of support for industry will become one of China’s biggest headaches. The CCP’s hope is that placing China at the vanguard of technological and scientific progress will not only cement its aspirations to lead the global economic and political systems but provide new growth momentum and prosperity at home. This outcome is unlikely, however, and not just because the cost of fulfilling the strategy may be prohibitive. Some government outlays will undoubtedly go toward boosting successful enterprises, but China’s top-down style of governance, its statist economic philosophy, and its preponderance of corruption mean that a great deal of the investment is likely to end up in waste and loss. In the case of initiatives for which failure is deemed to be a political embarrassment, officials will likely fail to account for losses properly. The success of China’s new policy will depend on proper audits in order to identify failing initiatives before they become entrenched and efficiently allocate resources to the most commercially viable enterprises. But proper audits and assessments are tremendously difficult to do in China, given the government’s lack of transparency on funding and financing. Take the solar and wind industries: although the direct cash flows to leading firms can be measured, the indirect subsidies and assistance that flow through the supply chain cannot. Local governments are normally the agents of most industrial policy spending, but in China, these are generally in too poor financial shape to take on additional spending burdens. Estimates by the Center for Strategic and International Studies suggest that industrial policy subsidies amounted to about 1.7 percent of GDP in 2019—a huge percentage compared with other countries, including the United States, where the equivalent figure was 0.4 percent. And that number is bound to have increased since then, especially as China has stepped up industrial support in the wake of export controls and restrictions that the United States and other countries have placed on China, especially those regarding semiconductor chips. Maintaining these high levels of support for industry will become one of China’s biggest headaches, especially given faltering national revenues and a host of other growing expenses, such as those brought about by a housing bust, an aging society, and rising spending on the military and on internal security. FALSE ADVERTISING The most fundamental challenge, however, is that the CCP persistently conflates industrial policy with innovation, which are not the same thing. Industrial policy is a vertical strategy that positions the state at the apex of the economy, leading the development, financing, and funding for designated industries and sectors with a view toward creating national champions. Fostering innovation, by contrast, is a more horizontal concept in which government initiatives are explicitly designed to create stronger and more inclusive institutions and conditions that encourage more development and creativity across a swath of sectors, including those often considered traditional, such as retail, wholesaling, transportation, and distribution. When a government seeks to boost innovation, it typically focuses on regulatory policies, encouraging competition, education and skill formation, infrastructure investments, and tax and labor policies. The government is mostly an enabler and facilitator, whereas with a more formally defined industrial policy the government takes on a more specific leading role indistinguishable from its role in promoting trade and exports. But China’s track record on innovation is mixed. In 2023, the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Global Innovation Index—which ranks 132 countries by innovativeness based on 80 indicators—situated China in 12th place. This position looks impressive for a country with China’s income per head; China is the only middle-income country ranked among the survey’s top 30 most innovative nations. China’s overall score, however, conceals an important distinction. The index’s indicators are divided between so-called innovation inputs, which capture the aspects of an economy that enable creativity and innovation, and innovation outputs, the end results of innovation. Inputs include things like the quality of an economy’s regulatory, legal, and business institutions; educational attainment; research and development; communications and energy infrastructure, and measures of business and market sophistication. Outputs comprise knowledge creation, intellectual property, patents, labor productivity, software spending, intellectual property, high-tech exports, trademarks, brand value, and online creativity. In the World Intellectual Property Organization’s 2023 survey, China ranks eighth in terms of innovation outputs but 25th in terms of inputs—a noteworthy difference, because over the long run, strength in inputs ultimately determines an economy’s strength in outputs. That distinction reveals that China’s manufacturing prowess and ability to absorb and exploit knowledge and technology is world-class. But the broad variety of institutional factors that ultimately help nurture creativity and initiative across society are not in the same league. Consider, also, China’s prowess in one often cited measure of innovation capacity, patent registration. Globally, China now accounts for almost half of global patents. Yet the overwhelming majority of Chinese registered patents are of the lower-value utility type—for example, the creation of particular products or processes—as opposed to the more science- and innovation-oriented design type in which Germany, Japan, and the United States excel, which safeguard unique design characteristics that could be applied to an infinite array of future products. Less than ten percent of Chinese patents are filed and granted abroad, suggesting that a lot of effort goes into patent registration domestically that is not recognized or valued abroad. In a 2024 study, Yuen Yuen Ang and other authors examined 4.6 million patents filed between 1990 and 2014 in 333 mainland Chinese cities. They discovered a high level of gaming of top-down patent targets. China’s patent registrations can often be attributed to wasteful subsidies and duplicative and low-value patents. SYSTEMS FAILURE Xi’s new “productive forces”-focused industrial policy will also fail to address the systemic weaknesses that have put China’s economy in danger. Because it will encourage overproduction and expansion in industries with relatively low labor input, it will be unlikely to reverse the tide of jobs flowing out of other forms of manufacturing and construction into lower-paid, lower-skill sectors such as delivery, ride-hailing, and selling products on online platforms. The emphasis on industrial policy also fails to address the serious damage that Xi’s repressive governance has wrought on the private sector. Superficially, Xi’s government has lately adopted more encouraging rhetoric toward private enterprise. But Beijing has not made real adjustments to the political and regulatory environment that constrains private enterprise, especially the national-security and anti-espionage regulations that conflate the collection, use, and transfer of information that is essential for due diligence with misconduct and criminality. In accord with Xi’s famous dictum that “government, military, civilian, and academic; east, west, south, north, and center, the party leads everything,” the Chinese government still affords top priority to state-owned firms and metes out arbitrary punishments to businesspeople who fall afoul of its wishes. That political inclination also means that Xi’s industrial policy ignores the need to boost consumption in China. While CCP leaders pay lip service to the need to boost consumer demand, they do not actually hold policies to drive consumption in high esteem, because their ideology rejects “Western” consumerism. Xi’s emphasis on industrial policy fails to address the damage that repressive governance has wrought on the private sector. Finally, the new policy risks simply externalizing the consequences of its economic and industrial policies in the form of higher exports, lower prices, and, for countries such as the United States, bigger trade deficits. It is impossible to envisage how China, whose manufacturing sector now represents 29 percent of GDP and a third of global manufacturing, could further subsidize and boost manufacturing without incurring bigger imbalances and debt at home and imposing larger trade deficits on the rest of the world. By externalizing the Chinese economy’s demand weaknesses, Beijing will likely trigger more and more retaliatory policies from other countries, and these could also damage the Chinese economy. In May, the Biden administration announced a number of new and additional tariffs on Chinese products such as steel, aluminum, semiconductors, lithium batteries, solar cells, some medical products, and ship-to-shore cranes, while tariffs on electric vehicles have been raised to 100 percent. The EU, for its part, has launched an investigation into China’s alleged distortion of the market for electric vehicles, as well as inquiries into railway engines and wind turbines. The European Commission’s concerns about China’s market-distorting practices could lead to retroactive countervailing tariffs. Even some countries in the global South, which China regards as a bedrock of support, have lately pushed back against what they regard as intrusive trade practices. NO SHORTCUTS Although China will undoubtedly make some headway with its new industrial-policy goals, its hope to lead the world in innovation cannot be easily reconciled with its unswerving belief in the effectiveness of government direction, its distaste for free market competition, its weak legal and regulatory institutions, and the rent-seeking and corruption that characterizes its economy. Japan offers a worthwhile point of reference. Writing about Japan’s industrial, corporate, and trade policies in Foreign Affairs in 1987, George Packard predicted that the country’s “strategy will result in spectacular advances and growing supremacy in a variety of fields such as industrial ceramics, lasers, semiconductors, biotechnology, solar energy, robotics, superconductors and possibly in space exploration. These advances, in turn, will be largely used in consumer products and will lead to increasing exports, rising ‘techno-nationalism,’ and deepening fears among Americans that we can no longer compete.” One might be forgiven for thinking that this passage was written recently about China. Predictions that Japan would achieve worldwide industrial supremacy never came true. As a result of deep-seated systemic flaws in Japan’s economy and misguided policies, by 1990, leading Japanese companies such as Sony, Hitachi, Toyota, Honda, Matsushita, and Sumitomo succumbed to the bursting of Japan’s asset bubble, precipitating a relative macroeconomic decline that lasted for almost three decades. The causes and consequences of the economic shock in Japan were compounded by important institutional weaknesses, including the government’s resistance to reform the role of financial institutions, rigid corporate governance, archaic labor-market practices such as lifetime employment, and nepotism between firms and the public sector. Many of these factors are also present in China today. And although China does not lack laws, it does not—and cannot—develop an economy governed by the rule of law. The example of Japan shows how two things can be true at the same time. An economy boasting world-class companies and striking achievements in innovation can also be an economy in which systemic imbalances, asset bubbles, political contradictions, and institutional rigidities run too deep for the most impressive companies to drive sustainable nationwide growth. Great firms and a strong top-down industrial policy do not protect an economy against bad macroeconomic outcomes. Technological islands of excellence are no substitute for good macroeconomic governance and well-institutionalized technology ecosystems that diffuse benefits throughout the economy—neither of which the Chinese system seems likely to produce any time soon. GEORGE MAGNUS is a research associate at Oxford University’s China Centre and at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies, the former Chief Economist at UBS, and the author of Red Flags: Why Xi’s China Is in Jeopardy. MORE BY GEORGE MAGNUS More: China Economics Business Economic Development Trade Politics & Society Xi Jinping Most-Read Articles An “America First” World What Trump’s Return Might Mean for Global Order Hal Brands Modi’s Middling Economy How Inequality, Unemployment, and Slow Growth Hold India Back Rohit Lamba and Raghuram Rajan A Reset for America and Mexico? What New Leadership—Possibly in Both Countries—​Might Mean for Cooperation Shannon K. O’Neil South Africa’s High-Stakes, Low-Impact Election Why an End to the ANC’s 30-Year Reign Won’t Change the Country Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh Recommended Articles How Will Taiwan’s New President Handle China? Lai Ching-te’s Precarious Balancing Act Nick Frisch Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi attends a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Beijing, April 2024 America, China, and the Trap of Fatalism How to Manage the World’s Most Important Relationship Zhou Bo The Shallow Roots of Iran’s War With Israel Beneath Tehran’s Extremism, a Lost History of Deep Iranian-Jewish Ties By Ali M. Ansari May 29, 2024 An anti-Israeli billboard in Tehran, October 2023 In early April, the cold war between Iran and Israel suddenly turned hot. A dramatic Israeli air attack in Damascus that killed seven senior commanders in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps put Iranian leaders in a bind. If they launched a commensurate military response, they risked an escalation that could destabilize the very foundations of their regime. If they did not, they faced a credibility crisis among their own hard-liners and allies in Iran’s axis of resistance, a network that includes Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and various Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria, several of which were already chafing at Iran’s restraint in responding to the war in Gaza. In the end, through a mixture of telegraphing and technical incompetence, Iran’s leaders managed to produce a Goldilocks outcome. On April 13, they launched a massive aerial assault on Israel with more than 300 missiles and drones. But sound Western intelligence and the advanced warning technology and air defenses deployed by Israel and its allies ensured that there was little damage. Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, proclaimed that it was the attack itself and not the “hitting of the target” that mattered. Israel was encouraged to “take the win” and, after a restrained retaliation of its own, the status quo between the two sworn enemies was restored with surprising alacrity. In the weeks since Israel and Iran came perilously close to war, other developments have for the moment pushed the episode into the background. Since the deaths of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian in a helicopter crash on May 19, international attention has returned to the regime’s stability and the looming issue of who will succeed Khamenei. Similarly, the events of early April and their unexpectedly speedy resolution raise significant questions about the regime and the ways in which the Islamic Republic’s strident antagonism toward the Jewish state has often been tempered by its increasingly fractious domestic politics. For one thing, ordinary Iranians have shown relatively little interest in the war in Gaza. Although Iran is Hamas’s chief backer, it is the one Muslim country in the Middle East whose government has struggled to generate enthusiasm for the Palestinian cause, which is notable even when taking into account the regime’s anxiety about allowing excitable crowds to gather in the streets. Indeed, in stark contrast to the large-scale protests against Israel that have gripped Western and Arab capitals, the largest such gathering in Tehran since the war began involved a paltry 3,000 people. The Iranian government has struggled to generate enthusiasm for the Palestinian cause. There are some obvious political reasons for this, starting with general dissatisfaction among Iranians with the leadership in Tehran and with Islamism in general. Many Iranians see a win for Hamas as a win for the repressive clerical regime that rules over them. Moreover, Iranians tend to be focused on their own problems, including high unemployment and a declining quality of life. When they do stage protests, it is common to hear the chant, “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran!” Fighting for rights in their own country that many in the West take for granted, they are at once bewildered and horrified by the pro-Hamas commentary coming from university campuses in the United States. But Iranian ambivalence about the war also has deeper social and cultural roots. Beneath the regime’s long-dominant rhetoric about a “Zionist occupying state” lies a more complex dynamic with Israel. In the pre-Islamic era in particular, successive Persian states enjoyed a surprisingly intimate connection to the Jewish people. For several decades of the twentieth century, Iran and Israel seemed to have more in common with each other than either country did with the Arab world. Nor did this affinity entirely end with the Islamic Revolution in 1979. One of the most important thinkers behind the revolution wrote a laudatory account of the young Jewish state, and until the early years of this century, Iranian leaders at times showed a surprisingly nuanced view of Israel’s role in the Middle East. Today, this legacy is submerged by hard-liners on both sides, and the proxy conflict between Iran and Israel could still erupt into a catastrophic direct war. Yet the long history of Persian and Jewish coexistence suggests that the current geostrategic rivalry may be considerably more contingent than it appears. However great the enmity between the region’s arch-antagonists, their shared history offers alternatives that could, under different circumstances, be tapped in the future. ISRAEL THE MOTHER, IRAN THE FATHER A visitor to Jerusalem may be surprised to find that one of the streets is named in honor of a Persian king. During his reign in the sixth century BC, Cyrus the Great—Kourosh in Persian, Koresh in Hebrew—was famous for having liberated the Jews from Babylonian captivity. As a result of his decision to allow them to return to their homeland and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, Jews developed a sympathy for the Iranians that lasted through much of the ancient period. (Many Jews did not return to Jerusalem and were content to settle into life at the heart of the Persian Empire in Babylon, where theological developments in what is known as the “Babylonian” Talmud reflected their Persian environment.) On the two other occasions that Iranian armies found themselves at the gates of Jerusalem—under the Parthians in 40 BC and the Sassanians six and a half centuries later—the Jews welcomed them as liberators. In fact, this political relationship was in many ways secondary to even deeper cultural and religious ties. With his predilection for ideology over history, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has used the book of Esther to argue that Persia has always sought the destruction of the Jews. But the biblical narrative actually portrays Esther as a queen of Persia, who warns her king, Ahasuerus—thought to be Xerxes, the grandson of Cyrus—of a plot against her people by his evil vizier, Haman. In the end, Ahasuerus, in a fury, has Haman hanged “for scheming against the Jews” and gives Haman’s property to Esther. In other words, it was once again a Persian king who saved the Jews. Underscoring the importance of these biblical connections are the holy sites of Esther’s and her cousin Mordecai’s tombs in Hamadan in western Iran—a pilgrimage site for Jews to this day—and that of the Prophet Daniel in Susa in southwestern Iran. A woman with a picture of the founders of Iran’s Jewish society, in Tehran, March 2007 A woman with a picture of the founders of Iran’s Jewish society, in Tehran, March 2007 Morteza Nikoubazl / Reuters With the Arab conquest of Persia in the seventh century, an Islamic caliphate was established, and the Jews became protected People of the Book within the wider Islamic community. Judeo-Persian traditions nevertheless continued. Some of the earliest surviving examples of the New Persian language, emerging in the aftermath, were written in Hebrew characters. Over the centuries that followed, both Iranian and Jewish thinkers strove to preserve the distinctive legacy of Persia’s pre-Islamic past. In the fourteenth century, Shahin Shirazi, a Jewish writer, wrote the Ardashir Nameh, a Persian epic poem based on the life of the biblical Esther; it conjures a son named Cyrus, born—quite ahistorically—of the union of the Jewish Esther and the Persian Ahasuerus (Ardashir). Steeped in such legend, it is unsurprising that Iranian Jews sometimes talk of Israel as the mother and Iran as the father. After the Safavid dynasty established Shiism as the official religion of Iran in the sixteenth century, Jews were more tolerated than embraced. Although they rarely suffered the more brutal persecutions faced by other religious minorities, such as the Zoroastrians, and from the nineteenth century onward, the Bahais, their fortunes fluctuated according to the inclinations of particular rulers. Shah Abbas the Great, for example, invited them to settle in his capital, Isfahan, in the late sixteenth century, whereas his great-grandson Abbas II sought to convert Jews to Islam by force, a stricture that was later modified to the requirement that they adopt distinctive clothing. By the time of Iran’s 1906 Constitutional Revolution, the movement that led to the establishment of the region’s first parliamentary system, the Jewish community, estimated at around 35,000, had become a protected minority and was soon granted its own representative in the new parliament. Like other religious minorities, Jews joined in the nationalist mood, assuming that the emergence of a secular Iranian national identity could only enhance their general position. Despite routine prejudice, their situation gradually improved. CYRUS AND THE ZIONISTS In Iran, unlike the Arab states, the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 did not force a reckoning for its Jewish community. In contrast to the anti-Jewish violence that swept across Egypt, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, there were no pogroms and no mass exodus to the Promised Land. Much like their forebears at the time of Cyrus, many Iranian Jews were happy to stay where they were: although perhaps 60,000 emigrated to Israel between 1948 and 1978, a significant number, about 85,000, remained, comprising by some estimates the largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside Israel. Where Arab leaders saw the new Jewish state as a dispossessor of Arab land and a threat to Arab unity, Iranian politicians tended to view it as a potentially ally. This was especially true of the monarch Mohammad Reza (Shah) Pahlavi, who acceded to the throne in 1941. Following in his father’s footsteps, he set out to establish a modern, pro-Western secular monarchy, and his fascination with Cyrus the Great drew the enthusiastic endorsement of Israeli politicians. To the shah, Israel represented another non-Arab state in the Middle East with a shared ancient pedigree. Although he refrained from officially recognizing Israel to avoid antagonizing Arab governments and his own domestic religious constituency, the shah quietly cultivated close relations, notably in economic development and cooperation on intelligence. There may have been no official Israeli embassy in Tehran during his reign, but everyone knew where the informal embassy was located and who the Israeli “ambassador” was, and Iran maintained an office in Tel Aviv. El Al, the Israeli airline, flew twice a week to Tehran. Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Iranian diplomat Reza Saffinia at a party in Jerusalem, 1950 Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Iranian diplomat Reza Saffinia at a party in Jerusalem, 1950 Israeli Government Press Office But it wasn’t merely the monarchy that endorsed Israel. Iranian dissidents and revolutionary thinkers also found much to admire in the fledgling Jewish state. Jalal Al-e Ahmad, a prolific dissident writer who later wrote one of the canonical texts of the Islamic Revolution, visited Israel in 1963 and was highly impressed by what he found. In a travelogue titled Safar beh Velayat-e Israel (Journey to the Land of Israel), he lauded the pioneering spirit and collectivist ethos of Zionism of that time, which he saw as a template for an anticapitalist social democratic future. Iranian opinion began to cool after the 1967 war, which ended in Israel’s conquest and occupation of Arab territory. Al-e Ahmad complained that the Zionists were beginning to emulate the colonial powers they had defined themselves against. But the shah continued to see Israel as a friend and an ally. Notably, Iran did not join the Arab oil embargo imposed in response to the Nixon administration’s support for Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War—although it helped engineer and profited hugely from the rise in oil prices by the end of that year. The shah also remained scrupulously impartial in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Three years later, when he was asked on the television news program 60 Minutes about the “Jewish lobby” in the United States, he complained darkly that it “controlled many things” and was having a counterproductive influence. Nonetheless, astute observers noted that his criticism did not extend to the state of Israel itself. By the late 1970s, however, the autocratic Iranian regime was beset with high inflation and volatile unrest. Engulfed by protests from both leftists and Islamists, it became increasingly paranoid, and the casual anti-Semitism that the shah had voiced in 1976 began to surface with growing regularity. His advisers did not help. Struggling to comprehend what was happening and unwilling to admit that the Iranians had become disaffected or that Islamists might be capable of autonomous organization, aides suggested that he “apologize” to various people he might have offended and who were clearly now taking their revenge—specifically the “Jewish lobby” and the British. (The shah had made some critical remarks about the British work ethic in an interview in 1974). That such fears extended to the United Kingdom suggests that this had more to do with his regime’s obsession with foreign interference than with anti-Semitism per se. HANGOVERS AND HARD-LINERS When the regime finally succumbed to the Islamic Revolution, however, all the old geopolitical understandings were cast aside. Following his triumphant return to Iran in February 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was unsparing in his criticism of the shah and his American and Zionist allies, although he made little distinction between Zionists and Jews in general. The Islamists’ revenge on the monarchical state was swift and brutal, and soon included overrunning the U.S. embassy and taking more than 50 American hostages. Because Iranian Jews were viewed as enthusiastic royalists, they, too, faced the wrath of the new order. During the revolution, Habib Elghanian, the businessman who led Tehran’s Jewish community, was executed on charges of corruption and “links” with Israel—an event that spurred rapid Jewish emigration to Israel and the United States. Soon the flourishing community had dwindled to around 20,000 people. As with its relationship with Washington, Iran’s approach to Israel had definitively changed, with the Islamic Republic pivoting to an ideology of uncompromising hostility. The country’s new leaders swiftly turned Israel’s unofficial diplomatic facilities in Tehran over to the Palestine Liberation Organization, in whose hands they remain today. Regionally, they also began to rally opinion and mobilize proxy forces against Israel. But Iran’s war with Iraq, which began in September 1980, proved more difficult than the revolutionary leadership had anticipated. As it progressed, Iran found itself increasingly isolated: Arab states had backed the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from the outset, and the PLO chairman, Yasir Arafat, who had been the first foreign dignitary to visit the new Islamic Republic, decided to switch his organization’s support to Iraq—much to Iran’s surprise and indignation. By the mid-1980s, the regime was also short of spare parts for the American-made military hardware it had inherited from the shah. It then decided to quietly begin procuring arms from an unlikely source in the episode that became known as the Iran-contra scandal. Rafsanjani viewed Israel through more of a political than an ideological lens. Using the services of an Iranian Jewish arms dealer named Manuchehr Ghorbanifar, the Reagan administration and the Israeli government decided on an elaborate strategy: they would secretly approach Tehran with an offer of much-needed arms in exchange for the possibility of détente. The belief was that once the revolutionary dust had settled, the geopolitical reality of Iran’s encirclement by potentially hostile Arab states would reassert itself. Much of this was wishful thinking born of a hangover from the pre-revolutionary days, but what was perhaps most remarkable was that Tehran considered the arms deal at all. When the secret negotiations were disclosed in a Lebanese newspaper, the Iranians were quick to shut them down, going so far as to execute the reported source of the leak. Notably, the official who was thought to have been Tehran’s chief interlocutor in the Iran-contra deal was the wily speaker of the Iranian parliament, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who became president in 1989 in the aftermath of Khomeini’s death. Widely regarded as a pragmatist, he was less concerned with the export of the revolution than many of his co-revolutionaries, and this meant he viewed Israel through more of a political than an ideological lens. Above all, for Rafsanjani, it was the presidency and the republic that mattered, rather than the revolutionary and religious organs of power that gathered around the new supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Rafsanjani’s outlook proved to be optimistic. He was widely mocked for trying to impose an imperial presidency on the country and was soon outgunned by the increasingly powerful office of the supreme leader. In establishing his own authority, Khamenei was keen to distance himself from Rafsanjani’s policies and began to draw around him a circle of hard-liners who took a far more inflexible view of the revolution and its ambitions. Ceding ground on revolutionary principles was not an option. RETURN OF THE PURITANS Just as Rafsanjani had to negotiate and compromise with the revolutionary elite at home, he soon found himself outmaneuvered abroad, as well. When the Oslo peace process became public in 1993, Iranian government officials publicly opposed it, claiming it would deprive Palestinians of their rights. Privately, they wanted to know why they had not been invited to the negotiations. One of the reasons they weren’t, of course, was because the circle around Khamenei were determined to pursue ideological purity. In any case, after Hezbollah, and ultimately Iran, was blamed for a series of international terrorist attacks—namely the deadly suicide bombings of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 and the city’s Jewish Center in 1994—any notion of bringing Iran in from the cold had been laid to rest. Israel for its part, moved away from the kind of wishful thinking about Iran that had fed the Iran-contra plan. In line with Israel’s budding rapprochement with the Arab world—it had signed a peace treaty with Jordan in 1994—it switched its strategic perspective from one that cast Iran as a balancer to one that saw Iran as the enemy. Henceforth, the United States would be encouraged to ostracize and isolate the Islamic Republic, and the Clinton administration was only too willing to oblige. When Rafsanjani offered the U.S. oil company Conoco a $1 billion contract to develop an oilfield in Iran in 1995—a remarkable act of expediency over ideology that would have ended years of economic isolation from the West—the deal was summarily blocked in Washington. Iran could not be more Palestinian than the Palestinians. The tension between pragmatism and purity continued under President Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005), a reformist. On the question of Israel, Khatami sought to moderate Iran’s approach, even allowing the name “Israel” to be used in government circles in place of the usual “Zionist entity.” His general view was that Iran could not be more Palestinian than the Palestinians, and that if the Palestinians wanted to pursue what many Iranian hard-liners perceived to be an unjust peace, that was their choice. As one official in the Khatami administration told me at the time, “Israel is a reality, we have to deal with it.” The high tide of Khatami’s conciliatory approach came in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, with the realization that the hijackers had been Sunni and not Shiite. This presented an inconvenient truth to those who saw Iran as the source of all evil but also a rare opportunity for détente with the United States. But throughout this period, Khatami’s hard-line opponents in Tehran did everything they could to undercut his policies. Moreover, the window that had briefly opened after 9/11 closed precipitously with the Israeli discovery of an apparent arms shipment from Iran to the Palestinians and the Bush administration’s fateful decision in January 2002 to label Iran as part of an “axis of evil.” The final turning point came the following year, when a somewhat opaque last-ditch Iranian attempt at a “grand bargain” was unceremoniously dismissed by the United States. With the Bush administration now consumed by its war in Iraq, it had little bandwidth to engage constructively with its neighbor. In any case, Washington’s focus was now shifting toward Iran’s clandestine nuclear program. Meanwhile, hard-liners in Tehran used Khatami’s failures at home and abroad to consolidate their position. Their triumph came in 2005 with the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the firebrand who breathed new life into the regime’s most extreme anti-Israel tendencies. MORE HISTORY, LESS HATE By asserting that “Israel would be wiped from the pages of history,” Ahmadinejad claimed to be reverting to the basic truths espoused by Khomeini. But his inflammatory restatement, along with his denial of the Holocaust, provided an unwelcome clarity. To this hateful message, Ahmadinejad added a healthy dose of radical leftist ideology according to which Israel was the keystone of an unjust Western capitalist hegemony constructed after World War II. To anyone who took this as mere rhetoric, Iranian missiles draped with flags announcing Israel’s demise should have removed any doubt. By denouncing what he called the “myth” of the Holocaust, the Iranian president was seeking to undermine the moral justification for the Israeli state. Ahmadinejad’s extreme stance soon began to color Iran’s official pronouncements. The supposedly imminent collapse of Israel was envisaged as a precursor to the general decline of the capitalist West and the long-awaited return of the Hidden Imam, the occulted 12th imam, who according to Shiite belief will return at the end of time. Now, he was to herald a new world order that was unashamedly Iranian Shiite. Among other absurdities to emerge in this period, Ahmadinejad told horrified German officials that he understood their pain over the unjust “peace settlement” imposed on their country in 1945 and that all would soon be resolved. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a Holocaust denial conference in Tehran, December 2006 Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a Holocaust denial conference in Tehran, December 2006 Raheb Homavandi / Reuters Many ordinary Iranians were distressed by these developments and particularly embarrassed by the government’s decision to host a Holocaust denial conference in Tehran in 2006—leaving aside its effect on the country’s remaining Jews. Similarly, although occasions might still arise in which Iranians and Israelis found themselves attending the same international meeting, the Iranians diligently avoided the gaze of their counterparts, refusing to shake their hands. The Israelis, who craved normalization with the major states of the Middle East, had no such qualms. Although Ahmadinejad’s vulgarity was unusual, the ideological currents behind it ran deep. His successor, Hassan Rouhani, tried to soften the rhetoric as he focused on securing a nuclear deal with the Obama administration that was supposed to end Iran’s economic isolation. But even if Rouhani’s loquacious foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, harked back to the old pragmatism, there was no going back to the cultivated ambiguity and ambivalence of the Rafsanjani-Khatami years. The elimination of the state of Israel had now emphatically become state ideology: the regime faithful defined themselves from the rest through their adherence to it, and they doubled down. Needless to say, this in turn fed anti-Iranian narratives among Israel’s own hard-liners, creating a mutual feedback loop that deepened the animosity. If Rouhani had sought to tone down the oratory, Raisi, who succeeded him in 2021, reinforced it, and there is little indication that this will change with Raisi’s successor. A greater tragedy is that most of the Iranian public recognizes the ideology for what it is: a test of loyalty for a revolutionary elite that believes the new world order “goes through Jerusalem”—thereby requiring the defeat of Israel. They want no part of it. Like many Israelis, they simply crave a normal existence within the region and the wider world. For those seeking a resolution or even a mere cooling off of the conflict between their countries, the challenges are obvious. How to create a dialogue between the two sides when one does not recognize the other’s right to exist and is agitating for its demise, and the other indulges in wild historical illiteracy? One route, of course, is to play to the ancient connections between Jews and Iranians, an approach that Israeli officials have been attempting to some extent by distinguishing between the Tehran government and broader Iranian society. More boldly, Western and international powers could invite Iran to participate in any post-Gaza peace talks that involve a two-state solution in return for normalization. There is of course little chance that any such offer would yield a positive result, but it might provide some moral clarity to a situation that sorely needs it. The increasingly inescapable lesson of the Islamic Republic’s relations with Israel and with the wider Jewish community is that there is too much politics in the history and not enough history in the politics. Until that imbalance can be addressed, the opportunities for meaningful progress are slight. ALI M. ANSARI is Professor of Iranian History at the University of St. Andrews. He is the author of Modern Iran Since 1797: Reform and Revolution. MORE BY ALI M. ANSARI More: Israel Palestinian Territories Iran Geopolitics Security Defense & Military Strategy & Conflict War & Military Strategy Hamas Gaza Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Israel-Hamas War Most-Read Articles An “America First” World What Trump’s Return Might Mean for Global Order Hal Brands Modi’s Middling Economy How Inequality, Unemployment, and Slow Growth Hold India Back Rohit Lamba and Raghuram Rajan A Reset for America and Mexico? What New Leadership—Possibly in Both Countries—​Might Mean for Cooperation Shannon K. O’Neil South Africa’s High-Stakes, Low-Impact Election Why an End to the ANC’s 30-Year Reign Won’t Change the Country Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh Recommended Articles At a funeral for Raisi and others killed in a helicopter crash, Tehran, May 2024 The Death of an Iranian Hard-Liner Ebrahim Raisi Helped Engineer the Islamic Republic’s Hawkish Turn—and Whoever Succeeds Him Won’t Change Course Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar A funeral procession for Abu Baqir al-Saadi, a Kataib Hezbollah leader killed in a U.S. airstrike, Najaf, Iraq, February 2024 America, Iran, and the Patron’s Dilemma The Backers of Israel and Hamas Didn’t Start the War in Gaza—but They Can End It Joost Hiltermann An “America First” World What Trump’s Return Might Mean for Global Order By Hal Brands May 27, 2024 Former U.S. President Donald Trump campaigning in New York City, May 2024 What would become of the world if the United States became a normal great power? This isn’t to ask what would happen if the United States retreated into outright isolationism. It’s simply to ask what would happen if the country behaved in the same narrowly self-interested, frequently exploitive way as many great powers throughout history—if it rejected the idea that it has a special responsibility to shape a liberal order that benefits the wider world. That would be an epic departure from 80 years of American strategy. But it’s not an outlandish prospect anymore. In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency on an “America first” platform. He sought a United States that would be mighty but aloof, one that would maximize its advantages while minimizing its entanglements. Indeed, the defining feature of Trump’s worldview is his belief that the United States has no obligation to pursue anything larger than its own self-interest, narrowly construed. Today, Trump is again vying for the presidency, as his legion of foreign policy followers within the Republican Party grows. Meanwhile, fatigue with key aspects of American globalism has become a bipartisan affair. Sooner or later, under Trump or another president, the world could face a superpower that consistently puts “America first.” That version of the United States wouldn’t be a global dropout. On some issues, it might be more aggressive than before. But it would also be far less concerned with defending global norms, providing public goods, and protecting distant allies. Its foreign policy would become less principled, more zero-sum. Most broadly, this version of the United States would wield outsized power absent any outsized ethos of responsibility—so it would decline to bear unequal burdens in pursuit of the real but diffuse benefits the liberal order provides. The results would not be pretty. A more normal U.S. foreign policy would produce a world that would also be more normal—that is, more vicious and chaotic. An “America first” world could be fatal for Ukraine and other states vulnerable to autocratic aggression. It would release the disorder U.S. hegemony has long contained. Yet the United States itself might not do so badly—at least for a while—in a world where raw power matters more because the liberal order has been gutted. And even if things really fell apart, Americans would be the last ones to notice. “America first” is so seductive because it reflects a basic truth. The United States would ultimately suffer in a more anarchic world—but between now and then, everyone else would pay the greater price. A DIFFERENT SORT OF SUPERPOWER All countries pursue their interests, but not all countries define those interests the same way. The concept of national interest traditionally emphasized the protection of one’s territory, population, wealth, and influence. Since World War II, however, most American leaders and elites have rejected the notion that it should be a normal country acting in normal way. After all, the war had demonstrated how the normal rhythms of international affairs could plunge humanity, and even a distant United States, into horror. It had thereby discredited the original “America First” movement, made up of opponents of U.S. intervention in World War II—and made clear that the world’s mightiest country must radically enlarge its view of what its interests entailed. The resulting project was unprecedented in scope. It involved forging alliances that circled the globe and protected countries thousands of miles away, rebuilding devastated countries and creating a thriving free world economy, and cultivating democracy in distant lands. Not least, it meant abjuring the policies of conquest and naked exploitation that other great powers had so commonly pursued, and instead defending norms—nonaggression, self-determination, freedom of the commons—that would offer humanity a more peaceful and cooperative path. The United States was now assuming “the responsibility which God Almighty intended,” President Harry Truman declared in 1949, “for the welfare of the world in generations to come.” This language of “responsibility” was revealing. American policymakers never doubted that their country would benefit from living in a healthier world. But creating that world required Washington to calculate issues of self-interest in a remarkably capacious way. No prior definition of national interest had required the world’s most secure, invulnerable country to risk nuclear war over territories on distant continents, or to rebuild former enemies as industrial dynamos and economic competitors. And no prior definition of national interest required making dramatically unequal contributions to the common security so one’s allies could deliberately underspend on their own defense. “I see the advantages to the Western world,” President John Kennedy griped, in the early 1960s, of one such arrangement—Washington’s role in stabilizing and lubricating the international economy. “But what is the national, narrow advantage” for the United States? U.S. policy only made sense if one believed that the pursuit of national, narrow advantage had previously consigned the world to carnage—so Washington must create a larger international climate that benefited Americans by benefiting like-minded peoples around the globe. “The pattern of leadership,” Secretary of State Dean Acheson had explained in 1952, “is a pattern of responsibility.” Americans must “take no narrow view of our interests but . . . conceive of them in a broad and understanding way.” RISE AND SHINE One doesn’t have to think that everything has been wonderful since 1945 to recognize that history changed fundamentally once this “pattern of responsibility” began to animate American statecraft. Growth exploded and living standards soared—first in the West, and then globally—in the climate of security and economic cooperation that U.S. leadership fostered. War persisted, but great-power war and outright territorial conquest became artifacts of an earlier, darker age. Democracy flourished in the West and radiated outward. The U.S. security blanket smothered the embers that had recently set western Europe and East Asia alight, allowing one-time enemies to reconcile and turning those regions into relative oases of prosperity and peace. Humanity never had it so good, and the United States stood at the center of a liberal order that gradually expanded to cover much of the globe. Yet Americans were never entirely sold on the idea that they should maintain this order indefinitely. As the Cold War began, the U.S. diplomat George Kennan doubted that Americans were up to the task of global leadership. As that conflict ended, with a stunning Western victory, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote that the United States could now become “a normal country in a normal time.” Kirkpatrick was right that there was no precedent in the first 150 years of American history for the commitments the country had undertaken since 1945. These abnormal commitments had emerged from profoundly abnormal circumstances. American leaders had believed that they must pursue an audaciously global foreign policy because a world left to its own devices had just suffered two cataclysmic crackups in a generation—and the onset of the Cold War threatened a third. They could do so because World War II left the United States with roughly as much economic and military heft as all the other powers combined. This combination of strength and fear transformed U.S. policy. But nowhere is it written that Washington must forever persist in this project as the conditions that produced it fade into the past. And today, there are indications Washington won’t keep doing it indefinitely. Creating a healthier world required Washington to calculate issues of self-interest in a remarkably capacious way. The last three U.S. presidents have all aspired to escape the Middle East. As military threats multiply, the Pentagon is struggling to uphold stability in all three key theaters of Eurasia at once. Protectionism is surging; both major parties disdain the major trade deals Washington once used to drive the global economy forward. In late 2023 and early 2024, it took an agonizing six months of delay for Congress to approve life-giving aid for Ukraine. And nowhere is this new mood more palpable than in Trump’s vision of “America first.” That phrase has obvious echoes of the 1930s, which is why Trump is often called an isolationist. But he isn’t one, and neither were the original “isolationists.” The America Firsters of the 1930s favored U.S. dominance of the Western Hemisphere and supported a strong defense in a dangerous world. What they opposed was the idea that Washington should be responsible for upholding a larger global order, or that it should pick fights with countries that—whatever their crimes—weren’t directly menacing the United States itself. The crucial link between Trump and this earlier America First movement is that he wants to take the country back to a more conventional view of its interests abroad. Trump has questioned why the United States should risk sparking World War III for the sake of defending small states in Europe or Asia. He has been skeptical of supporting Ukraine against Russia and defending Taiwan from a Chinese assault. (Contrary to what some analysts argue, there isn’t an Indo-Pacific exception in Trump’s version of “America first.”) Trump bemoans the costs and belittles the benefits of U.S. alliances; he bristles at the asymmetries of a global economy Washington has long overseen. He evinces little interest in supporting democracy or protecting important if intangible norms such as nonaggression. To be sure, under Trump, the United States was hardly a passive superpower. As his trade war with China, ratcheting up of tensions with Iran and North Korea, and economic dustups with U.S. allies between demonstrated, Trump does believe Washington should throw its weight around when its interests are at stake. He just doesn’t believe those interests include the liberal order U.S. power has long sustained. AMERICA UNBOUND “America first” never got a full test during Trump’s presidency, thanks to the obstruction of more mainstream advisers, the opposition of Republican internationalists in Congress, and the indiscipline of Trump himself. Yet the first two factors could be less salient if Trump retakes the White House, given his growing ideological sway in the GOP and the care he will take to surround himself with acolytes this time around. And regardless of whether Trump wins in November, his ideas are increasingly central to the U.S. debate. So it’s worth imagining the contours and consequences of an “America first” agenda, consistently applied. One element of this strategy would be a deglobalized defense. The United States might maintain unmatched military strength. It might invest more heavily in missile defense, cyber-capabilities, and other tools to protect the homeland. It might hit back hard when adversaries attacked its citizens or challenged its sovereignty. Yet Washington wouldn’t keep defending distant states whose survival wasn’t obviously critical to American security or keep providing public goods that were mostly consumed by others. Why should the United States risk war with Russia over Ukraine and the Baltic states, or with China over semi-submerged rocks in the South China Sea? Why must the Pentagon protect Chinese trade with Europe from Houthi attacks? A normal country wouldn’t. A more normal United States would also be a more reticent ally. Great powers haven’t always viewed alliances as sacred; the history of alliance politics is full of disappointments and double-crosses. At the very least, then, Washington would treat its alliances less as strategic blood oaths than as bargains perpetually ripe for renegotiation. In exchange for continued protection, it might demand much higher defense spending from the Europeans or oil production from the Saudis. Or maybe Washington would simply quit its alliances, leaving Eurasia to the Eurasians—and counting on the United States’s geographic isolation, ability to control its maritime approaches, and nuclear arsenal to keep aggressors away. Continentalism might thus displace globalism. Even a more restrained United States would strive to dominate the Western Hemisphere. This would become more important as Washington gave up the ability to manage Eurasia’s security affairs. So “America first” would feature a reenergized Monroe Doctrine: U.S. retrenchment from Old World outposts would presage intensified and perhaps heavier-handed efforts to safeguard American influence in the New World, and to prevent rivals from gaining a foothold there. A more normal United States would also be a more reticent ally. Economically, an “America first” strategy would feature protectionism and predation. The United States would remain engaged in the global economy. But it would seek to dramatically rebalance the burdens and benefits of that involvement. There would be no more tolerating asymmetric discrimination by trade partners, even democratic allies. Washington would, rather, wield its unmatched power to wring greater benefits out of key relationships. Just as Trump pummeled China and the European Union with tariffs, the United States would get more coercive with allies and adversaries alike. The United States could afford to pull its punches when it accounted for half of global production, the thinking goes, but a more economically competitive world would require a bare-knuckle response. Not least, the United States would pull back from the liberal aspects of the liberal order. If Trump’s first term is any guide, the United States would invest less in promoting democracy and human rights in faraway, seemingly inhospitable places. It would become more likely to cut explicitly transactional deals with undemocratic regimes. Under a second Trump administration, the United States might even become a model for illiberal behavior, as aspiring strongmen overseas imitated the tactics of the aspiring strongman in the White House. Washington could also deemphasize international law and international organizations, in hopes of loosening the constraints—legal or institutional—the liberal order sometimes placed on American power. What would all this mean for U.S. relations with rival powers? An “America first” strategy might entail persistent friction with China, especially over trade. Where autocratic aggression impinged directly on U.S. security and prosperity—Iranian attacks that killed American citizens or a Chinese bid that choked off the flow of advanced semiconductors from Taiwan—the tensions could be sharp indeed. Yet a U.S. policy that downgraded liberal values would be reassuring to illiberal leaders, and Washington would be less inclined to confront Beijing, Moscow, or Tehran over violations of international norms or the coercion of small states thousands of miles from American shores. A certain accommodation of autocrats would fit naturally within this foreign policy. Any remaining conflict would be more a matter of traditional great-power rivalry—large, ambitious states clashing for wealth and influence—than something flowing from the American defense of an endangered liberal order. In fact, the United States would still be a very great power in this scenario. Even if Washington focused only on maintaining primacy in the Western Hemisphere, it would have a sphere of influence larger than any other. In some areas, the United States would seek unilateral advantage less abashedly than before. A less exceptional United States might be less present and more predatory—a combination that could remake the wider world. POWER WITHOUT PURPOSE? Critics of “America first” have warned that it would be devastating to global stability, and they’re probably right. The history of world politics before 1945 doesn’t give much hope that things will somehow sort themselves out. American leadership caged the demons—the programs of global expansion, the fratricidal fights within vital regions, the mutually immiserating protectionism, the threat of autocratic ascendancy—that tormented the world before. Today, the United States is less powerful, relative to its competitors, than it was in 1945 or 1991. But American power still underpins what order the world enjoys. Just ask Ukraine, which would have been crushed by Russia without the arms, intelligence, and money Washington provided. Or ask the European countries clinging to NATO for protection against the Russian threat. In Asia, there is no coalition that can check Chinese power without U.S. participation. In the Middle East, recent events serve as a reminder that only the United States has the ability to defend vital sea-lanes and coordinate a regional defense against Iranian attacks. This won’t change any time soon. Advocates of restraint may hope that American retrenchment will compel like-minded countries to step forward. But today—as Russia and China churn out arms and too many European and Asian democracies struggle to field minimally capable militaries—it seems a safer bet that the vacuum created by American retrenchment would be filled by the world’s most aggressive states. In all likelihood, “America first” would be a disaster for frontline states—beginning but not ending with Ukraine—which would lose the support of the superpower that has bolstered them against aggressors next door. It would invite surging instability in global hotspots such as eastern Europe or the South China Sea, where autocratic powers confront weaker rivals. Norms that many people take for granted—the ability of commerce to traverse the seas unhindered, or the idea that conquest is inadmissible—could erode with shocking speed. Countries that have been able to cooperate under American protection might start eyeing one another more suspiciously once again. As disorder deepens, countries throughout Eurasia might arm themselves to the teeth, including with nuclear weapons, to ensure their survival. Or perhaps predation would simply run rampant as American retrenchment reduced the price on malign behavior. Meanwhile, the global travails of democracy would worsen, particularly where fragile democracies coped with pressure exerted by powerful autocracies nearby. Mercantilism and protectionism might surge as the United States quit defending a positive-sum global economy—or even the relatively cooperative free-world economy the Biden administration has emphasized. States might scramble to lock up resources and markets if they no longer counted on the United States to sustain an open economic and maritime order. It took extraordinary U.S. commitment to turn the state of nature into Pax Americana. The return trip won’t be pleasant. A WORLD OF REGRET For the United States itself, though, it might not be so bad. The great irony of post-1945 foreign policy is that the country that created the liberal order is the country that least needs it. After all, the United States remains the world’s strongest actor. It has unrivaled geographic blessings and economic advantages. In a world rendered more anarchic by its policy choices, Washington might do okay, for a time. The erosion of security around the Eurasian periphery would undo decades of geopolitical progress, but it wouldn’t immediately endanger the physical safety of the United States. In the 1930s, most Americans didn’t want to die for Danzig; in the 2020s, how many would really mind if Narva fell? Likewise, the return of territorial conquest would be tragic for smaller, vulnerable states, but it wouldn’t immediately inconvenience a superpower with nuclear weapons and oceanic moats. The United States could also ride out the fragmentation of the international economy far better than most countries. Its unmatched power would give it tremendous leverage if commerce turned cutthroat—and its enormous resource endowments, vast internal market, and relatively modest trade dependence would leave it comparatively well suited for a protectionist world. The United States wouldn’t exactly thrive in this scenario: turbulence that disrupted Middle Eastern oil flows or semiconductor shipments from Taiwan, could create global economic havoc that would not leave Americans unscathed. But perversely, such chaos might still benefit the United States in relative terms, because other countries would fare so much worse. American power still underpins what order the world enjoys. Countries in Europe and East Asia would find themselves compelled to make huge new investments in defense, while also contending with resurgent rivalries that might tear their regions apart. The collapse of security in the sea-lanes of the Middle East would primarily affect the European and Asian countries that depended on those trade routes most. Even Washington’s chief rival, China, would suffer tremendous damage if the liberal order collapsed, because—Chinese President Xi Jinping’s drive for self-reliance notwithstanding—it relied so heavily on foreign inputs and export markets. Eventually, of course, the United States would pay a higher price. If China were someday able to dominate East Asia after American retrenchment, it might gain the power to coerce the United States economically and diplomatically, even if it could never invade militarily. The proliferation of Chinese influence in regions around the world could gradually give Beijing powerful geopolitical and geoeconomic advantages, rendering the United States insecure even within its hemispheric fortress. In the meantime, the international economic friction created by protectionism and chaos would drag down American growth, which could exacerbate social and political conflicts at home. And if democracy receded overseas and powerful autocracies advanced, autocratic voices within the United States might be empowered—as indeed happened in the 1930s. In the ugliest scenario—but one that historians would immediately recognize—the United States would ultimately decide that the collapse of global order did require it to reengage, but from a significantly worse position, once matters within Eurasia had spun out of control. Yet it might take quite a while for this to happen. When the United States pulled back after World War I, it took a generation for the world to unravel so completely that Washington felt compelled to reengage. Until disaster struck, and the balance of power collapsed in Europe and Asia simultaneously, cascading disorder convinced most Americans to stay out of global affairs, rather than get back in. The same characteristics that insulate the United States from the deterioration of world order in the near term mean that Washington can wait a long time until that deterioration becomes intolerable. The allure, and the tragedy, of “America first” is that a superpower’s good fortune will shield it—temporarily—from the consequences of its own bad decision-making. In time, the United States, too, would rue the rise of an “America first” world—but only after so many other countries had come to rue it first. HAL BRANDS is Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of the forthcoming book The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World. MORE BY HAL BRANDS More: United States Diplomacy Geopolitics Security Defense & Military U.S. Foreign Policy Trump Administration U.S. Politics World Order War in Ukraine U.S.-Chinese Relations Most-Read Articles Don’t Go to War With the ICC America Can Help Israel Without Attacking the Court Oona A. 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O'Neil May 27, 2024 Demonstrating in support of democracy in Mexico City, May 2024 Gustavo Graf / Reuters On June 2, Mexican voters will head to the polls to elect a new president, congress, nine governors, and tens of thousands of local officials. Competing for the top job are Claudia Sheinbaum—the chosen candidate of Morena, the ruling party, and former Mexico City mayor, who commands a significant lead in the polls—and Xóchitl Gálvez, a successful businesswoman and former senator supported by a coalition of opposition parties. Six months later, north of the border, the United States will follow suit, with U.S. President Joe Biden and Donald Trump each seeking a second presidential term. Over the past six years, the tenor of U.S.-Mexican relations has been set by Mexico’s current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, also known as AMLO, who has wielded his domestic popularity and influence over migration to the United States to shape bilateral relations in his favor. This has allowed him often to ignore commercial disputes with the United States, domestic security issues, and U.S. concerns over governance in Mexico—a dynamic that has not always sat well with leaders in Washington. Mexico’s next president, however, will not have the domestic political leeway AMLO enjoys. Whether in or out of office, AMLO has been a fixture of Mexican politics for decades. He commands the personal loyalty of a broad and ideologically diverse set of politicians, is enormously popular throughout the country, and has consolidated a personalist brand of power. His successor will have to navigate the country’s messy political landscape without these advantages. She will also have less money to spend. Despite symbolic austerity measures, such as cutting his own and other public salaries and selling the presidential plane, AMLO has spent lavishly on white elephant infrastructure projects; patronage programs for the elderly, students, and farmers; and bailing out out the state-owned energy company Pemex, which has lost money due to rising labor costs, among other things. These measures boosted his popularity but will hamstring the next administration, as it will not have the resources to sustain such governmental largesse. On top of fiscal constraints, the next president will also have to operate with a more fragile political coalition. Neither candidate is likely to have as strong a congressional majority or as much sway over members of congress as AMLO has enjoyed. Mexico’s down-ballot races are close, and today’s uneasy political coalitions could fracture. This situation leaves space, whether by inclination or necessity, for broader discussions and joint efforts with the United States. The coming change in administration in Mexico—and the possible return of Trump in the United States—will present an opportunity to reset relations between the two countries. For its own security and prosperity, the United States should seek to boost economic ties with Mexico by enforcing free trade rules and insisting on the fair and equal treatment of businesses. It should also encourage Mexico’s green transition, improve regional security, and work with Mexico to address a host of global issues including financial stability and climate change. For too long, Washington has feared that publicly airing differences with Mexico City would provoke knee-jerk nationalism among the Mexican public. But the United States must not be afraid of committing to defend democracy and human rights in Mexico and supporting Mexican civil society and leaders who demand political transparency and accountability. If it fails to do so, it will squander an opportunity to help make its southern neighbor safer, greener, more prosperous, and more democratic—all of which will also ultimately benefit the United States. THE CONSEQUENCES OF NEGLECT During the past two U.S. administrations, the fixation on migration has made cooperation on other critical challenges more difficult. AMLO, eager to avoid tariffs and U.S. interference in his country’s politics, agreed to Trump’s push to expand the so-called Remain in Mexico policy, which left Mexico hosting tens of thousands of asylum seekers awaiting processing by the U.S. immigration system. He also acquiesced to Trump’s use of the COVID-19 public health emergency measure known as Title 42 to expel hundreds of thousands more migrants across the border. Trump also worked to tackle perceived trade imbalances, replacing the 26-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), at the expense of other important subjects, including human rights abuses in Mexico, potential democratic backsliding, fitful efforts to combat climate change, and even security issues. But for all of Trump’s rhetorical tirades against Mexico, he and AMLO still got along relatively well. After all, both proved transactional in their politics and fundamentally more interested in their own domestic political projects than in investing in international relationships. When Biden took office in 2021, he tried to forge a broader, more cooperative, and less publicly combative relationship with Mexico. The two governments restarted discussions on security issues, supply chains, and commerce. The United States included Mexico in its industrial policy plans, giving the country special access to Inflation Reduction Act subsidies for electric vehicles. Washington also leaned on USMCA enforcement rules to support Mexican unionization efforts, and U.S. legislators and other officials expressed concerns about human rights abuses in Mexico, including about the murder of journalists. Yet the challenges posed by millions of people arriving at the U.S. southern border quickly subsumed these other issues, and AMLO took advantage of migration’s political salience in the United States to narrow the bilateral agenda to his liking—to migration, where he could extract the most concessions from Mexico’s northern neighbor. Moreover, the Biden administration’s decision to deal with its Mexican counterparts mostly in back rooms rather than in public helped the Mexican president dismiss U.S. concerns about the erosion of democratic institutions, the increasing power of organized crime, and Mexico’s reneging on climate change commitments. AMLO has faced little pushback from U.S. diplomats nor had to address any kind of counternarrative advanced by Washington. Allowed a free hand, AMLO has pressed his domestic political advantage at the cost of U.S. economic access, the rule of law in Mexico, and democratic checks and balances, leaving his country less safe, less prosperous, and less democratic—and a greater challenge for the United States. STRENGTH THROUGH TRADE After it becomes clear who will be in charge in Mexico City and Washington, the two administrations must set about strengthening commercial ties. To be sure, trade between the two countries is flourishing. Mexico has displaced China as the United States’ biggest trading partner, with exchanges nearing $900 billion a year. U.S. efforts to near-shore manufacturing and secure supply chains have also boosted investment in Mexico; foreign investors spent over $35 billion each year in 2022 and 2023, and investment in 2024 continues to climb. These deepening commercial ties help the United States gain greater market access across Latin America and establish supply chains in a host of strategic sectors—including the production of large-capacity batteries, electric vehicles, semiconductors, and pharmaceuticals—that have fewer connections to China. But the recent economic surge comes largely in spite of government policies, not because of them. The AMLO administration, propelled by economic nationalism and a desire for political control, has not been particularly friendly to U.S. policies, including nearshoring. Mexico City has been slow to issue permits and construction licenses for industrial parks and in streamlining customs and border controls, slowing the arrival of new operations and the cross-border movement of goods. It has not invested in energy, water, roads, rails, ports, or other connecting infrastructure that would lower logistics costs and enhance Mexico’s economic competitiveness. And since AMLO came to power, U.S. companies have found it harder to do business in Mexico. They have faced challenges in the form of arbitrary regulatory changes and enforcement practices, the politicization of the granting of permits and licenses, barriers to market access, and even the sudden abrogation of contracts, to the point that many companies have turned to the U.S. government and the terms of the USMCA for help. The biggest concerns center on energy. In 2013, under the leadership of President Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico altered its constitution to allow private investment in all aspects of the energy sector. Hundreds of billions of dollars flowed into energy exploration, renewable power generation, storage and distribution, and retail gas stations. AMLO, who as a statist and nationalist is ideologically opposed to these reforms, has thwarted private-sector investments in Mexican energy by suspending auctions, denying permits and grid access, and passing legislation to favor state-owned power producers over private ones (measures later deemed unconstitutional by the country’s Supreme Court). More broadly, investors are increasingly nervous about the possibility that the USMCA might be repealed, with the trade agreement headed for a mandatory review in 2026. If Washington, Ottawa, and Mexico City cannot agree on the terms of the agreement—with divisions already looming over energy, corn, dairy, cars, and Chinese influence in North American supply chains—then the protections for extant foreign investments will become temporary and will have to be renegotiated every year. Although both of Mexico’s presidential candidates have expressed support for the USMCA, tensions and disagreements remain, particularly around energy and genetically modified food. Where Sheinbaum supports the current government’s more nationalist stance, Gálvez has asserted that she will embrace private investment in energy and work to resolve other outstanding cases. A CLEAN ENERGY FUTURE? Another area that could benefit from closer collaboration between Washington and Mexico City is the decarbonization of Mexico’s economy. Access to clean and affordable energy underpins Mexico’s future economic growth. Yet Mexico has doubled down on dirtier fuels in its energy mix and backtracked on its Paris Agreement commitments, setting targets that, according to the Climate Action Tracker, will raise emissions. And with AMLO having sidelined the private sector, asserting the preeminence of state-owned companies and utilities, Mexico has lost out on the investment necessary to guarantee the country’s energy security. A 2023 study by Morgan Stanley estimates that Mexico will need nearly $40 billion in investment over the next five years in electricity generation to keep up with demand—money its state-owned enterprises do not currently have. To attract multinational corporations that have pledged to decarbonize production, much of Mexico’s new capacity will need to be green. This is an area where the two candidates appear to diverge more firmly. Gálvez has embraced private-sector energy investment and laid out plans to close inefficient refineries and electricity generators to stanch the losses at Pemex and the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), the country’s largest state-owned electric utility. And although Sheinbaum, a climate scientist, is known for her green credentials, she is still AMLO’s hand-picked successor who will have little leeway to diverge from his statist and nationalist vision. She has advocated for more renewable sources of energy, such as solar plants, but ultimately remains determined to rely on the cash-strapped Pemex and CFE to lead the way, an emphasis that will invariably slow the energy transition. AN EPIDEMIC OF VIOLENCE The United States can also help Mexico get a better handle on the deteriorating security situation in the country. Before AMLO took office, violence plagued Mexico as organized crime rings clashed with each other and with the authorities in what amounted to a bloody, low-grade nationwide war. The circumstances have only worsened under AMLO. His security strategy, aptly captured by his phrase “hugs, not bullets,” involved easing off criminals and crime rings, expanding social policies, and relying on the military rather than state and local police forces to ensure public safety. Over five years, it has done little to reduce violence—or to stymie the illegal export of fentanyl and other drugs into the United States, where they kill over a hundred thousand Americans each year. Moreover, as corruption and impunity have run rampant among the ranks of elected officials and law enforcement, Mexico’s organized crime networks have continued to expand throughout the country and into other sectors, including by forming protection rackets around the export of avocados and limes, the sale of contraband oil, and the smuggling of migrants. AMLO has neither sought nor allowed much assistance from Washington. Upon entering office, AMLO worked to wind down security cooperation with the United States. He ended the Mérida Initiative—a bilateral program that ran from 2008 to 2021 and allocated billions of dollars for equipment, training, and judicial programs to strengthen the rule of law in Mexico—because of his long-held suspicion of U.S. involvement in Mexican affairs. It was replaced by the policy-light U.S.-Mexico Bicentennial Framework for Security, Public Health, and Safe Communities, under which bilateral programming and spending have fallen significantly. AMLO has also hamstrung Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) operations in Mexico and limited other joint security initiatives, reducing the number of drug and asset seizures and arrests, and limiting visibility into illegal drug supply chains even as U.S. overdoses related to these substances continue to rise. As mayor of Mexico City from 2018 to 2023, Sheinbaum took a different tack. She focused on enforcement, hiring thousands of new police officers to patrol the capital, installing tens of thousands of cameras, and expanding police training and raising salaries to improve skills and performance. She granted more police the power to investigate crimes and to work with prosecutors to build stronger cases against criminals, and she created neighborhood watch programs to involve communities in crime prevention and public safety. And her city government was, albeit quietly, more open to working with the U.S. government and the DEA. Gálvez, too, has promised to go after criminal groups and expressed openness to working with the United States, calling for an as-yet-to-be-defined North American security agreement. She is less keen on the military taking the lead, as troops are not trained in domestic law enforcement or legally able to investigate crimes. Instead, she has promised to prioritize civilian policing, a measure that would both improve public safety and strengthen the rule of law. THE MIGRATION CONUNDRUM Migration will continue to loom large in the bilateral relationship. In both 2022 and 2023, U.S. authorities had over two million encounters with migrants crossing the southern border, breaking the previous record highs from around two decades ago. And where once most migrants hailed from Mexico and Central America, more than half of those stopped at the border today come from countries much farther afield, such as China, Colombia, Ecuador, India, Turkey, and Venezuela—the knock-on effect of mounting global crises, such as climate change, as well as economic instability, political repression, and violence. The Biden administration has maintained Trump’s policies, forcing Mexico to take back tens of thousands of migrants of many nationalities, where they must either wait for asylum proceedings or are consigned to permanent deportation. At Washington’s behest, Mexico has broken up migrant caravans, pulled people off trains, set up checkpoints, and bused people back down south toward the border with Guatemala. In the presidential campaign, neither Mexican candidate has delved into exactly how they would cooperate with the United States on this issue or address the challenges of integrating hundreds of thousands of people stranded on the Mexican side of the border. If either lets the status quo persist, the border could well become even more chaotic and deadly. DEMOCRACY NOW The fate of Mexico’s democratic institutions will affect the United States in the years to come, as their further corrosion will likely slow economic growth, increase insecurity, and spur migration. Mexico’s democracy remains young; the country’s official transition to democracy only took place in 2000, after decades of single-party rule under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). But it is fragile and made weaker by AMLO’s actions. He has eroded or done away with many of the painstakingly built checks and balances over his five years in office. Throughout his tenure, AMLO has vilified and cut funding to the independent electoral agency and the freedom of information institute in an effort to personalize and expand his presidential powers. He has replaced experts and civil servants with loyalists in once-independent regulatory agencies, independent watchdogs, and the Supreme Court. He routinely attacks journalists and civil society leaders in his daily press conferences, brooking no criticism for his government or his policies. It is unclear whether Sheinbaum will follow AMLO’s lead on the use of presidential power. Although she may be more technocratically inclined, and could reinstall some experts in relevant governmental roles, she, too, supports limiting the independence of government watchdogs and courts. Gálvez, on the other hand, has promised to reinstate experts in regulatory agencies and oversight committees and maintain the independence of judges. She has also discussed bringing back the National Anticorruption System, an agency designed to go after public graft, as it was effectively shuttered under AMLO. A RELATIONSHIP BUILT TO LAST Of course, the status of U.S.-Mexican relations also depends on the outcome of the United States’s own elections. A Biden administration is more likely to lean into green transition, human rights advocacy, and a broader security agenda. A second-term Trump administration, however, is likely to care little for renewables, less for private investment guarantees, or for the niceties of human rights and democracy, doubling down instead on suppressing migration—red meat for the Republican Party’s base. Trump is also likely to bring back the public threats in dialogue with Mexico’s leader. In the short term, this may be more effective than Biden’s quieter, more conciliatory approach and may lead Mexico to acquiesce when challenged on matters such as migration. But the singular focus on the southern border, and on unilateral policy rather than cooperation, would be a mistake; Mexico’s economic, social, and political health are also of major importance to the United States. Regardless of which administration ends up in the White House, several key policies will serve U.S. interests with its southern neighbor. For starters, Washington should work to shore up the USMCA. The Biden administration has formally disputed Mexico’s restrictions on genetically modified corn imports, which affect U.S. farmers, but hesitated to officially do much on energy—the largest companies involved have managed to reach resolutions without Washington’s intervention, and the issue is very politically sensitive. This serves neither economy well, favoring powerful companies while still subjecting small and medium-sized enterprises to unfair treatment on the part of the Mexican government, discouraging future investment. More aggressive enforcement of USMCA regulations, along with a commitment to sustaining the accord well into the future, is vital to spur investment in Mexico—in ways that will ultimately benefit the U.S. economy as well. Mexico’s next president will not have the domestic political leeway AMLO enjoys. Migration will remain a central subject in the bilateral relationship, as people keep coming; and both Biden’s and Trump’s failures to stem the flow of migrants signal that it is time for a major policy change. Mexico is likely at its breaking point, with the government incapable of halting the hundreds of thousands of people heading north each month—or of supporting the millions who wind up remaining in the country. To prove that it is willing to act as a partner on this shared issue, the United States can provide more resources to support Mexico’s asylum system, which is groaning under the weight of nearly 400,000 backlogged cases of its own, and for communities looking to integrate millions of refugees and asylum seekers. Most important, the United States can speed its own migrant processing system by adding hundreds of judges and asylum officers so that wait times can fall from years to months. Greater transparency, efficiency, and efficacy at the border will bring more certainty to migrants with credible asylum cases and help dissuade those unlikely to pass the legal threshold of asylum from embarking on the arduous journey to begin with. And the United States can continue to expand legal pathways for migrants, including through guest worker programs, family reunification, and humanitarian visas, so that people do not have to trek to the U.S. border simply to present themselves to U.S. officials. As the United States expands its agenda with Mexico, it is also time to change diplomatic tactics. Confidential conversations remain helpful when addressing difficult issues. But public disagreements are useful, too, setting guardrails on issues that matter to Washington, including the unequal treatment of companies, unfulfilled climate change pledges, corruption, and state-sponsored political persecution south of the border. And for the many Mexicans pushing for more openness, transparency, and accountability from their own government, the United States should publicly reaffirm that it takes its own commitment to democratic values seriously. Little change in the bilateral relationship will happen between now and the resolution of both countries’ elections as domestic politics reign. But as the two new presidential terms begin, both neighbors should work together to better address the host of inescapable and shared challenges they face. SHANNON K. O’NEIL is Vice President of Studies and Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Globalization Myth: Why Regions Matter. MORE BY SHANNON K. O’NEIL More: Mexico United States Campaigns & Elections Diplomacy Globalization Economics Business Economic Development Labor Trade Energy Food & Agriculture Politics & Society Civil Society Corruption Crime Human Rights Media and Journalism Refugees & Migration Security U.S. Foreign Policy Democracy Most-Read Articles Don’t Go to War With the ICC America Can Help Israel Without Attacking the Court Oona A. 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Hathaway May 24, 2024 The International Criminal Court building in The Hague, Netherlands, January 2019 For weeks now, Israeli government officials have taken aim at the International Criminal Court, which they expected would issue arrest warrants against Israeli leaders for alleged war crimes. It is now clear they were right to be concerned. On May 20, ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan announced that he has applied for arrest warrants for three leaders of Hamas—including its chief, Yahya Sinwar—as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the country’s minister of defense. He is charging the Hamas leaders with war crimes and crimes against humanity stemming from the group’s October 7 attack on Israel, when it killed and assaulted over 1,100 people, and its continued holding and mistreatment of hostages inside the Gaza Strip. The alleged Israeli crimes include using starvation as a weapon and withholding humanitarian aid from the civilian population in Gaza. It is now up to the court’s pre-trial chamber whether to issue the warrants, a decision that could take several months to consider. Israel has made clear that it intends to attack the court, not cooperate with it. Many have argued the United States should join the Israelis in this effort. Indeed, earlier this month, 12 Republican senators signed a letter promising to retaliate against the court if the cases proceed. “Target Israel and we will target you,” they warned, threatening to sanction ICC employees and associates, and even their family members. U.S. President Joe Biden denounced the ICC’s decision to pursue Israeli leaders for war crimes, calling the application for arrest warrants “outrageous.” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 21 that the administration would consider Republican proposals to retaliate against the court and “take it from there.” Attacking the ICC is the wrong way to respond. The Biden administration has not suggested the charges are baseless, nor can it. For months, the administration has been highly critical of the Netanyahu government’s failure to allow enough aid into Gaza. Earlier this month, it released a report finding that the Israel Defense Forces “has struck humanitarian workers and facilities” and that “numerous credible” reports “have raised questions about Israel’s compliance with its legal obligations under [international humanitarian law] and with best practices for mitigating civilian harm.” Sanctioning the court and its officials would send a clear message: the United States’ commitment to international justice is not principled but purely political. Instead, the Biden administration should work with Israel to take advantage of the one sure way to derail the proceedings against Israeli officials while allowing the cases against the Hamas leaders to proceed: encourage Israel to undertake its own genuine investigation of its actions in Gaza. CASE BY CASE One might reasonably wonder whether the court even has jurisdiction over Hamas leaders and Israeli government officials. Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute, the treaty that created the court. But the “State of Palestine” has been a party to the court since it signed on to the Rome Statute in 2015. Around the same time, it submitted a declaration accepting the jurisdiction of the ICC “in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.” Based on that declaration, then Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced that she had opened a “preliminary examination” into the situation in Palestine, and in December 2019 she sought a ruling to clarify the territorial scope of the ICC’s jurisdiction. In 2021, the pre-trial chamber determined that the court’s jurisdiction “extends to Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.” At the time, the United States objected to the ICC’s decision to extend its jurisdiction to those places. It stated, “The Palestinians do not qualify as a sovereign state and therefore, are not qualified to obtain membership as a state in, participate as a state in, or delegate jurisdiction to the ICC.” The United States is not a party to the Rome Statute, however, and that limits its influence over how the ICC operates. Moreover, although the United States and Israel do not recognize Palestine as a state, over 140 other states do, including Spain, Norway, and Ireland as of this week. Earlier this month, the United Nations General Assembly voted 143 to nine in favor of a resolution that grants new “rights and privileges” to the “State of Palestine” at the UN, extending to its delegation nearly all rights except the right to vote, which is a privilege only the Security Council, where the United States wields a veto, can grant. The United States was one of the nine states, together with Israel, who voted against the resolution. Following Khan’s announcement, Blinken reaffirmed the U.S. view that the ICC has no jurisdiction over “this matter.” For Israel, the acts at issue are its alleged use of starvation as a method of war and the denial of humanitarian relief to the people of Gaza. As Khan’s statement explains, “Israel has intentionally and systematically deprived the civilian population in all parts of Gaza of objects indispensable to human survival.” The statement cites the warning from UN Secretary-General António Guterres two months ago, when he said, “1.1 million people in Gaza are facing catastrophic hunger—the highest number of people ever recorded—anywhere, anytime” as a result of an “entirely manmade disaster.” Since then, World Food Program Director Cindy McCain has reported that “full-blown famine” is underway in northern Gaza. In mid-April, Samantha Power, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said it was “credible” to assess that famine was occurring in parts of Gaza. The United States has repeatedly pressed Netanyahu to increase the flow of aid into Gaza, largely unsuccessfully. Attacking the ICC is the wrong way to respond. Khan is likely focusing on starvation and restriction of aid for the simple reason that these crimes are the easiest to demonstrate. Indeed, on October 9, Gallant made a statement that has been seen by some as essentially a confession to precisely the acts being charged by Khan. Gallant declared, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” The ICC prosecutor’s application is far from the first time these allegations have been made against Israel since October 7. On March 19, the UN’s human rights chief, Volker Türk, said that Israel’s policies of restricting the flow of aid into Gaza might amount to a war crime. That same month, Oxfam, a nongovernmental organization focused on the alleviation of global poverty, issued a statement that Israel “has been using starvation as a weapon of war for over five months now.” Although the decision to seek the arrest of Netanyahu and Gallant is getting the most attention, it is important to note that Khan is also seeking warrants for top Hamas officials. That application focuses on Hamas’s October 7 assault and the treatment of the hostages taken on that day, many of whom continue to be held and abused in Gaza. Khan alleges numerous war crimes committed against the hostages held in captivity in Gaza, including rape and other acts of sexual violence, torture, other inhumane acts, cruel treatment, and outrages against personal dignity. Both Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, commander-in-chief of the military wing of Hamas, are believed to be living in Gaza, but Ismail Haniyeh, the chairman of Hamas’s political bureau, lives in Doha, Qatar. Qatar is not a party to the ICC, and therefore not obligated to turn him over, but Khan’s request for an arrest warrant will likely increase the pressure Qatar faces from ICC member states to turn him over for prosecution. COURT OF LAST RESORT So far, there are only applications for arrest warrants. It remains possible that the pre-trial chamber will not grant the applications. Given the political sensitivity of the matter, however, Khan almost certainly limited this opening request to warrants he believes he will be successful in obtaining. He is likely right. A panel of leading international law experts convened by Khan to review the full applications and the materials supporting them—none of which has yet been publicly released—concluded that the materials “demonstrate reasonable grounds to believe that the Court has jurisdiction over the crimes set out in the applications for arrest warrants, that these crimes were committed and that the suspects are responsible for them.” Israel still has one surefire way to derail the cases against Netanyahu and Gallant: investigate and, if warranted, prosecute them itself. The Rome Statute makes clear that the ICC can exercise its jurisdiction only when a state is either unwilling or unable to complete an investigation and, if necessary, prosecute a crime itself. Khan’s office said it had not received "any information that has demonstrated genuine action at the domestic level [in Israel] to address the crimes alleged or the individuals under investigation." If Israel began an active and genuine investigation of the same cases, it could challenge their admissibility before the court. This challenge would prevail even if they are ultimately exonerated, as long as the proceedings are genuine. There are almost certainly more requests for arrest warrants coming. These, too, could be headed off by a genuine investigation by Israel. Indeed, Israel could have successfully stalled and perhaps even altogether prevented the current request by opening an investigation and then requesting a deferral of the court’s investigation in whole or in part in light of its own domestic proceedings—a step it declined to take. But it is not too late to change course. COLLATERAL DAMAGE There are those in Congress who want to return to the Trump administration’s all-out war on the court. A bill proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives—dubbed the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act—would sanction and revoke the visas of any ICC employee or associate involved in the investigation into the war in Gaza. Although this proposed bill may not win enough votes to pass, the Biden administration has signaled it is open to working with Republicans to retaliate against the court. That would be a huge mistake. Even if the court issues arrest warrants, the chance of a criminal trial for either Netanyahu or Gallant remains a remote possibility. Israel is highly unlikely to turn either one over to be tried any time soon. The main effect of arrest warrants will likely be to undermine their legitimacy and make it impossible for them to travel to any ICC member state without risk of apprehension. Meanwhile, sanctions on ICC staff would undermine Washington’s efforts to bring Russia to justice for its crimes in Ukraine. In the wake of Russia’s invasion, a Senate resolution sponsored by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham and cosponsored by members of both parties described the court as “an international tribunal that seeks to uphold the rule of law, especially in areas where no rule of law exists.” Legislation passed in 2023 amended existing law to allow the United States to assist with investigations and prosecutions of foreign nationals related to the situation in Ukraine. That has, in turn, led to unprecedented levels of cooperation between the ICC and the United States, resulting so far in four arrest warrants—including one for Russian President Vladimir Putin himself. Sanctions also would put at risk cooperation over accountability for crimes in Sudan as a new genocide looms, as well as witness protection and fugitive apprehension efforts. Israel should launch a genuine investigation of its own. Retaliating against the ICC would also cripple the United States’ capacity to advocate for international justice in other situations in the future. The United States has long made advocacy for global criminal justice a key element of its foreign policy. Ambassador-at-large for Global Criminal Justice Beth Van Schaack travels the world pressing states to meet their international legal obligations and ensure that they hold those who commit international crimes to account. Those efforts would be rendered ineffective if the United States is seen to support criminal accountability only for geopolitical opponents. Demonstrating hypocrisy in response to the ICC’s work would further isolate and alienate the United States on the global stage at a moment when it is engaged in a contest for the hearts and minds of people and states around the globe to uphold the rules-based international order. The effort to win influence abroad does not just require creating effective economic or military ties. It also requires demonstrating that the United States can live up to the principles it claims to support. Attacking the ICC proves just the opposite: it shows that the United States supports global justice only when applied to its adversaries. And in doing so, it suggests that the United States’ commitment to the rule of law extends only so far as its short-term naked self-interest allows. There is no surer way to erode the global legal order. The United States should continue to offer its strongest support for the security of Israel. But that does not require attacking the court. If the United States and Israel truly believe there is no legal basis for the charges, they should call the ICC prosecutor’s bluff. Israel should launch a genuine investigation of its own. It should demonstrate its commitment to the rule of law and justice by carefully reviewing the evidence and showing that the charges are, indeed, groundless. Opening a genuine investigation would force the court’s hand, as it would have no choice under its own rules but to find the cases against Netanyahu and Gallant inadmissible, while allowing the cases against the leaders of Hamas to continue. Of course, Netanyahu, who is already facing domestic corruption charges, is extremely unlikely to agree to a domestic investigation. He has proven impervious to U.S. pressure, ignoring the Biden administration’s calls to better protect civilians in Gaza again and again, as he and Gallant continue to wage a war that Biden has called “indiscriminate” and “over the top.” If Israel will not take advantage of the one surefire way to end the proceedings before they go any further, the United States should not shred its credibility simply to protect the men who have ignored every warning. OONA A. HATHAWAY is Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School and a Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In 2014–15, she took leave to serve as Special Counsel to the General Counsel at the U.S. Department of Defense. MORE BY OONA A. HATHAWAY More: Israel Palestinian Territories Crime Law Security Defense & Military Humanitarian Intervention War & Military Strategy U.S. Foreign Policy Biden Administration Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Israel-Hamas War U.S.-Israeli Relations Gaza Most-Read Articles How China Will Squeeze, Not Seize, Taiwan A Slow Strangulation Could Be Just as Bad as a War Isaac Kardon and Jennifer Kavanagh Don’t Go to War With the ICC America Can Help Israel Without Attacking the Court Oona A. Hathaway Can America’s Special Relationship With Israel Survive? 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By the end of April, right before the aid package passed, the war-torn country was emptying its last reserves of ammunition and rationing artillery rounds and shells—and Ukrainian forces began to lose ground in part as a result. The $60 billion now flowing into Ukraine will help correct these disparities, providing Kyiv an opportunity to stop Russia’s offensive. The aid package also serves as a massive psychological boost, giving Ukrainians newfound confidence that they will not be abandoned by their most important partner. But the aid package alone cannot answer the central question facing Ukraine: how to win the war. Neither can contributions from Europe and beyond, necessary as they are to keeping Kyiv afloat as the conflict drags on. What Ukraine needs is not just more assistance but also a theory of victory—something that some of its partners have studiously avoided discussing. The United States has never planned out its support for Kyiv beyond a few months at a time, even as Congress mandated the provision of a long-term U.S. strategy for its support of Ukraine as a part of the aid bill. It has focused on short-term maneuvers, such as the much-anticipated 2023 counteroffensive, rather than viable long-term strategies or aims—including a potential triumph over Russia. Until end of last year, U.S. officials refrained from even using the term “victory” in public. Similarly, the United States has generally avoided describing its goal in Ukraine as a Russian defeat. Washington’s only real long-term statement—that it will support Ukraine “for as long as it takes”—is, by itself, meaningless. To this point, Ukraine has been clear about its objectives. They include the liberation of all territory within its internationally recognized borders; the return of prisoners of war, deported citizens, and kidnapped children; justice through war crimes prosecution and compensation; and the establishment of long-term security arrangements. But Kyiv and its partners are not yet on the same page regarding how these might be achieved. No one, it seems, has come up with a theory for how Kyiv can win. It is time for that to change. The West must explicitly state that its goal is a decisive Ukrainian victory and Russian defeat, and it must commit to supplying Kyiv with direct military aid and to supporting the country’s burgeoning defense industry. Ukrainian forces, meanwhile, must work to advance until they can expel Russian forces from all occupied territory, including Crimea. As Ukraine makes progress toward this goal, it will eventually become clear to Russian citizens that they will continue to lose not only ground in Ukraine but also vast human and economic resources—and their future prospects for prosperity and stability. At that point, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime could come under substantial pressure, from both within and without, to end the war on terms favorable to Ukraine. Threatening Russia’s control of Crimea—and inflicting grave damage to its economy and society—will, of course, be difficult. But it is a more realistic strategy than the proposed alternative: a negotiated settlement while Putin is in office. Putin has never agreed to respect Ukrainian sovereignty—and never will. If anything, Russia’s rhetoric about the war has become more annihilationist, invoking the Russian Orthodox Church and suggesting that the conflict is something like a holy war, with existential consequences. Any negotiation in the current circumstances would at best leave Ukraine crippled, partitioned, and at the mercy of a second Russian invasion. At worst, it would eliminate the country altogether. No sustainable, long-term peace can emerge from negotiations with an aggressor that has genocidal intent. Ukraine and the West must either win or face devastating consequences. As Americans and Europeans ponder whether to help Kyiv avoid this horrible fate, U.S. officials should remember that if the West falters, it will invite further Russian invasions. Senior military leaders and intelligence officials in European countries are sounding the alarm on this prospect. Russia is already menacing its other neighbors, including NATO states, and it may make a move if it can subjugate Ukraine first. A Russian victory would also fuel China’s territorial ambitions in the Indo-Pacific, as it would reveal the limits of the West’s commitment to safeguarding its partners’ sovereignty. The Russian-Ukrainian conflict is not taking place in a vacuum. An adverse outcome would be felt around the globe. ENDGAME FIRST The fact that Ukraine and its partners lack a strategy for victory, three years into the war, is a serious problem. Without an end in mind, leaders in Kyiv, Washington, and Brussels are making key decisions on an incremental and ultimately incoherent basis. Ukraine may achieve local successes, but not a comprehensive defeat of the enemy; for their part, Kyiv’s Western partners tend to think only about the next tranche of supplies. And without a strategic picture, it will be difficult to sustain morale and the will to fight in Ukraine and beyond. Coming up with a theory of victory will be much harder today than it would have been in 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion. Since then, Russia has militarized its economy, prepared for a long war, managed to recruit hordes of soldiers, and produced large stockpiles of equipment. But despite these successes, Moscow’s land-war doctrine is still unsophisticated. It centers on using small infantry groups with the support of a few armored vehicles to attack various spots on a frontline that stretches for over 1,000 miles. These tactics have allowed Moscow to make limited territorial gains—but only after losing enormous amounts of troops and weapons. Russia’s losses, including as many as a thousand or more casualties a day, roughly match its intake of new troops, which are of a much lower quality than those of 2022. Despite its massive investments, Moscow’s capabilities are not infinite. Each month, for instance, Russia is losing as many vehicles as its manufacturers produce, and it is burning through its stockpiles of older armored vehicles at an unsustainable rate. And, importantly, Russia is facing both a labor shortage and resources shortage, the latter partially thanks to a combination of Western sanctions, export control measures, and a Ukrainian bombardment campaign that is limiting Russia’s capacity to refine and then sell oil. Moscow is no invincible juggernaut. Russia’s small gains were made possible only by its overwhelming advantage in firepower—which occurred only as a result of the disruption of Western aid. The country’s artillery systems are based on old models and lack precision and long-range capabilities, and its multiple-launch rocket systems, tanks, and aviation equipment are no match for Western models. If Ukraine can increase precision strikes by long-range artillery, it can turn the war’s arithmetic against Russia and impose an unacceptable rate of attrition on Moscow. Eventually, Russia will be unable to replace its manpower and materiel fast enough. The country’s economy simply will not be able to sustain this war in the face of constant losses. If Ukraine has enough supplies, it will be able to keep Russian artillery at bay. Enhanced air defenses, including F-16 fighter jets equipped with long-range air-to-air missiles, would reduce Russian attacks on critical infrastructure inside Ukraine as well as on units stationed near the front. With Russia’s forces increasingly paralyzed, Ukraine would soon be able to use its Western long-range systems—such as its Army Tactical Missile Systems (better known as ATACMS)—to take down Russian command-and-control centers and air-defense assets. The West must explicitly state that its goal is a decisive Ukrainian victory and Russian defeat. Kyiv must also use drones in much larger numbers to fulfill all these tasks. Ukraine has already demonstrated that it can wield unmanned vehicles with devastating effects; it is thanks to drone attacks, for instance, that Russia’s Black Sea Fleet has been disabled. Drones have also helped prevent large-scale Russian maneuvers on the ground. And they are making it possible for Ukraine to strike deep into Russia, hitting Russian oil facilities, military bases, and weapons factories. To counter that threat, Moscow may need to station most of its air defense systems at home. Russia is simply too large for its defenses to simultaneously shield the homeland and the battlefront. It will become even more vulnerable if the United States allows Ukraine to strike legitimate targets within Russia using U.S.-donated weapons. The process of softening Russian positions and weakening Russian resolve will likely take about a year, after which Ukraine should reclaim the initiative. Kyiv should again launch limited counteroffensives, which will allow it to retake key terrain. If this assault is successful, Putin’s regime could face a crisis bred of heavy losses and battlefield failures. The Russian political system, after all, is already showing cracks. The mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed 2023 mutiny, the demotion or arrest of senior military officials including General Sergei Surovikin, and the shocking success of Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists at striking inside Moscow in March all reflect the regime’s mounting vulnerability. If Ukraine advances to a point where Russia can no longer hold on to gains, Putin will find himself in deep trouble. His 2014 seizure of Crimea is critical to his domestic popularity; to see Russia’s control of the peninsula threatened would be a major symbolic defeat. Ukraine’s success on land, air, and sea must be coupled with extensive pressure on the economic and information fronts. The United States and Europe should introduce a much more aggressive sanctions campaign that includes secondary sanctions on any company operating in Russia. Russians must see their national wealth dissipating, and their economy headed for permanent stunting, for the consequences of Putin’s invasion to hit home. The West must also mount an aggressive information campaign—comparable to that waged against Nazi Germany in World War II or the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War—to intensify the divisions over perception of the war within and outside Russia. Russians have accepted the war passively: they need to be reminded, through an array of techniques that include both overt and covert propaganda, of its intolerable human and societal costs. Putin has too much at stake to end the war himself, but the same is not true of those around him who do not wish to see Russia reduced to indefinite impoverishment; drained of physical resources, youth, and talent; and subjugated to a state of permanent vassalage to China. Putin and his leadership are the center of gravity of the Russian war effort; any effort to end the war must begin with undermining his regime and its appearance of success and infallibility. Ukraine’s military strategy must be integrated with its political agenda. Russian history shows that disastrous Russian wars lead to political change. Russia’s defeat at the hands of Ottoman and European forces in the 1853–56 Crimean War barred Russia from deploying a navy in the Black Sea and trimmed its expansionist goals for years, and the bloody losses of the 1904–5 Russo-Japanese war led to a major break in the absolute autocracy of tsarist rule. A military humiliation today could prompt similar political upheaval. The Putin regime may not seem weak on the surface, but its stability is a mirage produced by the repression it exerts. TO ACHIEVE VICTORY, STOP FEARING IT Ukraine is already stepping up to meet the challenge. Kyiv is increasing its ability to tap into its manpower reserves by lowering the conscription age and rolling back exemptions from military service. This step is painful but necessary and brings to mind the drafts instituted by many Western nations throughout both world wars. The West, led by the United States, is continuing to provide training and advice, especially for commanders. And the West should continue to deliver large quantities of materiel—particularly having seen how delays in aid can give Russia the upper hand on the battlefield. Such assistance is essential to Kyiv’s success. But there is another major contribution the West can make: direct collaboration with Ukraine’s defense industry. The sector has grown exponentially over the last two years; the drone industry, for instance, went from producing a handful of drones in 2022 to manufacturing tens of thousands of them today. Ukrainian-made systems have also grown more sophisticated, managing to strike targets deep in Russia in ways that would have been unthinkable in 2022. The country’s success should not have come as a surprise. Ukraine was at the core of the Soviet Union’s aerospace industry, and today it has plenty of skilled engineers and an entrepreneurial spirit. But it needs Western technologies, components, production equipment, vendor financing, and partnerships to reach its full potential. If the West can deliver these resources, Ukraine’s manufacturing capacity will skyrocket, bolstering the country’s battlefield success. With Western help, for example, Kyiv would be able to increase drone production by an order of magnitude and get them onto the battlefield even faster. A joint Western-Ukrainian industrial strategy is as critical as a military one. If the West can help Ukraine’s defense industry get fully up to speed, Russia’s positions will grow untenable. The country’s strategy depends on mass, its ability to allocate and concentrate forces, and some elements of technical sophistication, such as electronic warfare. But Russia is tactically poor, which makes it vulnerable to a sustained and large-scale drone-based campaign. A Ukrainian air offensive that dismantles Russian logistics, puts increasing pressure on Russia’s economy and military infrastructure, and destroys (rather than neutralizes) the country’s Black Sea Fleet would produce shocks at home that would likely endanger Putin’s regime. Moscow is no invincible juggernaut. At the moment, Putin’s subordinates believe that the war is winnable. Only by breaking that belief through Russian defeats can Ukraine and the West open the door to Putin’s withdrawal or eventual overthrow. Under such conditions, Putin will likely choose self-preservation over victory. And if for some reason he does not, others may make that choice for him. In any event, Ukraine should press on with its campaign to retake territory. A different kind of land offensive—one that comes after Kyiv has achieved air superiority with its drone campaign—could isolate and liberate Crimea. Some Western analysts, fearing nuclear escalation, may be scared of this kind of Ukrainian victory. Putin has certainly tried to encourage such fears over the past two years, hinting that he might use nuclear weapons when the West has considered providing tanks, missiles, and jets. But Putin has never acted on his belligerent rhetoric, even as the West invariably crossed each of those redlines. Instead, Ukraine has incurred the costs of U.S. and European dithering; in the summer of 2022, while its partners debated what assistance to offer, Kyiv lost critical opportunities to capitalize on its first successful counterattacks by continuing with a swift destruction of Putin’s forces. The reality is that a Russian nuclear attack would provoke such a fierce Western response, particularly from the United States, that Putin is highly unlikely to take the risk. He is especially unlikely to go nuclear given that Putin’s friends in Beijing are also dead set against such strikes. The West’s general fear of instability is grounded in fact: a decisive defeat may indeed spell the end of Putinism, leaving Russia in a state of political uncertainty. But it is not the task of the West to save a criminal regime from collapsing. Russia today is a state that routinely commits mass murder, torture, and rape; it conducts sabotage operations and killings on NATO soil; and it carries out disinformation and political interference campaigns. It has pledged unremitting hostility to the West not because of what the West has done but because of what it is. Putin’s regime, in other words, long ago left the community of civilized nations. The only chance Russia has to return to normalcy is through defeat, which will crush Putin’s imperial ambitions and allow the country to soberly reevaluate its path and eventually rejoin the society of civilized nations. This does not mean that the West’s strategy should openly aim for regime change. But it does mean Ukraine and its partners should not fear the self-destruction of Putin and his apparatus of control. In this war, resources, funds, and technology all overwhelmingly favor the West. If they are channeled to Ukraine in sufficient amounts, including to the country’s defense industry, Kyiv can win. Russia simply lacks the military power to defeat a Western-backed Ukraine, and so its only hope lies in manipulating Western concerns. It is therefore well past time for NATO governments to stop falling into Putin’s trap. For the West to achieve a victory, it must stop fearing it. In doing so, it can attain security for itself and Ukraine—which has sacrificed so much, both for its own cause and for the larger cause of freedom. ANDRIY P. ZAGORODNYUK is Chair of the Centre for Defence Strategies. From 2019 to 2020, he was Minister of Defense of Ukraine. He is a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council. ELIOT A. COHEN is Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. MORE BY ANDRIY ZAGORODNYUK MORE BY ELIOT A. 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How Gaza Has Accelerated the Social and Political Forces Driving the Countries Apart By Dahlia Scheindlin May 23, 2024 Protesting weapons shipments to Israel in front of the White House, Washington, D.C., May 2024 On May 8, the Biden administration confirmed that it was withholding a major weapons shipment to the Israel Defense Forces. It was the biggest step that the United States has taken in decades to restrain Israel’s actions. The decision concerned a consignment of 2,000-pound bombs—weapons that the United States generally avoids in urban warfare, and which White House officials believed that Israel would use in its Rafah operation in the Gaza Strip—and did not affect other weapons transfers. Nonetheless, the administration’s willingness to employ measures that could materially constrain Israel’s behavior reflected its growing frustration with Israel’s nearly eight-month-old war in Gaza. But the announcement also underscored something else: the growing partisan divide within the United States over Israel. For months, some Democratic leaders in Congress and many Democratic voters felt that the administration was far too indulgent of Israel’s conduct in the war, which they believe it enabled with overwhelming military, financial, and political support. On the other side, Biden’s decision on the bombs was excoriated by dozens of Republican members of Congress, who have called him a “pawn for Hamas” and a “terrible friend to Israel.” On May 19, Republican Representative Elise Stefanik, of New York, went further, traveling to Jerusalem and publicly denouncing Biden’s policy in a meeting with a caucus of the Israeli Knesset. Washington prides itself on its tradition of bipartisan support for Israel, but in reality a partisan gap has been growing for years. Many Democratic voters, and younger Americans generally, have become critical of Israel’s long-standing denial of Palestinian human rights and national self-determination. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s populist, illiberal policies and his theocratic governing-coalition allies have alienated them further. On the other hand, Republicans and many religious conservatives have seized on support for Israel—including unrestrained backing for right-wing Israeli governments—as an article of faith, and, increasingly, a political litmus test. The increasingly partisan reading of the bilateral relationship isn’t only on the American side. Despite the Biden administration’s strong support for Israel after October 7 and through much of the war—and despite the fact that a large majority of American Jews have traditionally voted Democratic—Israelis show that they prefer Donald Trump to Joe Biden by a wide margin. Unlike in past decades, a majority of Israelis also approve of their leaders’ defying U.S. policy preferences. And it’s not clear that these Israelis are much concerned about a rupture in the U.S.-Israeli relationship or that Israeli defiance might one day jeopardize the extensive military aid on which Israel relies. The growing friction between Israelis and Americans didn’t emerge with the current war in Gaza. Longer-term social and political trajectories in both countries suggest that the famous “shared values” that have for decades underpinned the relationship were already under pressure. But the war has brought this tension, and the partisan politics driving it, into full view. This does not mean that the countries are on a collision course, but it raises important questions about the nature of alliance for the years to come. FRIENDSHIP FIRST To understand the significance of the current rift, it is important to recall that the U.S.-Israeli alliance has weathered many disagreements over the decades. In the past, each side presumed that the underlying relationship was sufficiently solid to absorb tensions or even crises. A U.S. administration that pushed back on Israeli behavior or demanded significant concessions might generate controversy, but opinion surveys, where available, indicated that the Israelis generally deferred to the Americans, regardless of who was in the White House. (Unless otherwise specified, historic data cited here comes from the Data Israel resource, hosted by the Israel Democracy Institute.) Take the Carter administration. Breaking with decades of U.S. policy, in 1977, President Jimmy Carter became the first U.S. president to speak publicly about the need for a Palestinian homeland, in an unscripted remark at a Massachusetts town hall meeting. The idea was broadly anathema to Israeli Jews at the time. In a survey taken two years earlier, 70 percent of them supported a boycott of the Palestinian Liberation Organization at the United Nations. Even Stuart Eizenstat, who was Carter’s chief domestic policy adviser and heavily involved in the administration’s Middle East policy, was caught by surprise. “I nearly fell off my bench,” he recalled in an interview. Nonetheless, in 1978, Carter hosted the Camp David negotiations between Egypt and Israel, cajoling Israel to make an unpopular land withdrawal from the Sinai, which it had occupied after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and putting the Palestinian issue squarely on the negotiating agenda. When Israeli Jews were asked that September how much they trusted Carter, almost two-thirds said that they trusted him somewhat or a great deal, and that number remained high, even rising slightly, in early 1980. During President Ronald Reagan’s first few months in office, a similarly large majority, between 63 and 70 percent of Israeli Jews, said that they trusted him regarding Israel. (Unfortunately for researchers, the limited surveys of Israel’s Arab citizens at the time were separate from surveys of Jewish Israelis, and usually asked different questions.) Secretary of State Antony Blinken and President Joe Biden meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, Tel Aviv, October 2023 Secretary of State Antony Blinken and President Joe Biden meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, Tel Aviv, October 2023 Miriam Alster / Reuters President Bill Clinton also maintained wide support in Israel, even when he was advocating for controversial policies. In 1994, a year after the Oslo accords were signed, 65 percent of Israelis said they were somewhat or very satisfied with Clinton. In the coming year, Israel lived through a wave of suicide bombings and the assassination of its prime minister, and there was sufficient concern about the accords that Israelis elected Netanyahu; nonetheless, support for Clinton remained. In the summer of 2000, days before Clinton hosted the Camp David summit between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority chairman Yasir Arafat, surveys I conducted as an analyst for Stan Greenberg, who was advising Barak, found that nearly the same portion, two-thirds of Israeli Jews, gave Clinton a favorable rating. This was despite the fact that Israelis knew the United States would press for significant and highly divisive Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. Even after the talks collapsed and the second intifada broke out, Clinton remained popular. Moreover, an Israeli leader who defied a U.S. president too brazenly could face serious political consequences at home. In early 1992, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker threatened to withhold U.S. loan guarantees to deter right-wing Israeli leader Yitzhak Shamir from using the funds to build settlements. Shamir’s government rejected the U.S. terms, and the rift was widely reported to have contributed to Shamir’s loss in the 1992 Israeli election. His successor, Yitzhak Rabin, ushered in a left-leaning government that quickly agreed to cease settlement expansion in certain areas and broke the impasse with the United States (although settlement growth ultimately continued). Israelis prefer Donald Trump to Joe Biden by a wide margin. But it’s not at all clear that these patterns hold true today. Despite Biden’s sweeping support for Israel after the October 7 attack and throughout the war, Israelis have shown only lukewarm approval. In November 2023 and January 2024, studies from the Israel Democracy Institute reminded Israeli respondents that Biden had offered unyielding support, and then asked them if Israel should meet some U.S. demands in return; in both surveys, a larger number (a plurality) of Israelis said that Israel should make its own decisions rather than coordinate with Washington. And in mid-March, an opinion survey for Israel’s News 12 network found that Israelis preferred Trump to Biden in the 2024 U.S. presidential election by 14 points: 44 percent for Trump, versus just 30 percent for Biden. This was well before the administration had announced the decision to withhold the weapons shipment and just before the administration said that it would sanction a small number of violent West Bank settlers. In May, the IDI found a similar preference for Trump over Biden, primarily among Israeli Jews. As in the case of U.S. attitudes about Israel’s leadership, Israeli attitudes about U.S. administrations also align strongly with political affiliation: in the News 12 poll, nearly three-quarters of those who support Netanyahu’s coalition said that they preferred Trump, whereas 55 percent of those who support parties opposed to Netanyahu preferred Biden. In fact, this partisan divide reflects the culmination of social and political forces that have been underway in both Israel and the United States for years. DEMOCRATIC DISCONTENT In the months preceding Biden’s announcement about delaying the weapons shipment, Democratic discontent with Israel’s war in Gaza was running high. Progressive members of Congress were pressing the Biden administration to take a tougher stand against Netanyahu’s policies. And this past March, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer—a centrist Democrat and well-known Israel supporter—broke precedent to publicly criticize Netanyahu and call for early Israeli elections. Parts of the Democratic electorate, especially younger Americans and those on the left, have been at least as vocal as politicians in criticizing the war. Notably, weeks before Biden made his announcement about withholding the 2,000-pound bombs, a poll by the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that a large majority of Democrats, and a bare majority of all Americans, supported halting weapons shipments to Israel. But these developments also reflect longer-term trends in U.S. opinion about Israel. It’s important to note that, as in previous decades, a firm majority of Americans support Israel. Netanyahu himself has cited a Harvard CAPS / Harris Poll from March that found that 82 percent of American adults support Israel over Hamas in the current war. The following month, a Harvard CAPS / Harris Poll found that 52 percent of Americans gave Israel a “favorable” or “very favorable” rating, compared to just 16 percent for the Palestinian Authority—and 14 percent for Hamas (a figure that is perhaps surprisingly high, though the group ranked dead last in favorability on a list of 18 countries or groups). Even among college and university students, whose pro-Palestinian protests have been widely covered, opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are far more measured than has often been portrayed in the media. For example, a survey conducted in early May for Axios found that 83 percent—an overwhelming majority—of U.S. college and university students believe that Israel has a right to exist. Counter-protesters in front of a Pro-Palestinian student encampment, Seattle, May 2024 Counter-protesters in front of a Pro-Palestinian student encampment, Seattle, May 2024 David Ryder / Reuters Yet Americans have become increasingly critical of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. According to Gallup polling, the overall portion of Americans who side with Israel over the Palestinians has declined from 64 percent in 2018 to just 51 percent in early 2024. Pew surveys have also revealed a growing partisan gap on this question. In 2001, just 50 percent of Republicans sided with Israel; by 2018, the number had increased to 79 percent; conversely, among Democrats, those who chose Israel shrunk from 38 percent in 2001 to just 27 percent in 2018. This divergence seems only to have solidified in the years since. At the same time, a large generational divide has also emerged in American views about Israel. A February 2024 survey by Pew found that 78 percent of older Americans (over 65) see Israel’s reasons for fighting the war as valid, whereas just 38 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds do—a 40-point gap. And although students in the Axios survey overwhelmingly agreed with Israel’s right to exist, nearly half of them—45 percent—supported the campus protests “which seek to boycott and protest against Israel,” whereas only 24 percent were opposed. (The remainder were neutral.) The Harvard CAPS / Harris Poll from April also found that respondents between 18 and 24 years old were almost evenly divided between those who believed that Israel was mostly responsible for “the crisis in Gaza”— 49 percent—and those who held Hamas mostly responsible—51 percent. By contrast, among people over 65, just 14 percent blamed Israel. Regardless of how one interprets the behavior of young Americans during the current war, these trends should not be surprising: in most of the Western world, young people tend to skew liberal and progressive. And in Western countries, liberal or left-leaning politics tends to involve supporting oppressed people, a pattern that has helped fuel pro-Palestinian protests by young Americans. The political preferences of young people are sure to evolve over time, but the trends are sufficiently established to suggest the future direction of Democratic positions on Israel. Notably, the progressive tilt of young people in the West appears to be the opposite of where young Israelis are moving. BIBI’S YOUNG GUNS For at least 15 years, in-depth studies have shown firm right-wing trends among young Israeli Jews. There are two immediate explanations for this phenomenon. One is demographics: more young Israeli Jews are religious than was the case in earlier decades because religious families tend to have many children, and religious Jews are reliably more right-wing than less religious Jews in Israel. The second is the prevailing political environment in Israel during the past two decades: young Israelis today have grown up in the heavily nationalist right-wing era of Netanyahu. They carry no memories of any peace process and have plenty of experience of war, having grown up amid numerous rounds of fighting with Hamas, frequent rocket attacks, and waves of conflict-related violence. In fact, the rightward tilt of younger Israeli voters has closely coincided with Netanyahu’s own efforts to make the U.S.-Israeli relationship more partisan. Shortly after Netanyahu returned to power in 2009, a plurality of Israelis held positive views of President Barack Obama, more than those who held negative views. But Netanyahu and his proxies began systematically attacking Obama—tellingly, for taking positions that were close to a policy consensus at the time, such as the president’s 2011 support for a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, the 1949 armistice lines, with adjustments. Netanyahu’s accusations ricocheted back to the United States, where Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for president in 2012, accused Obama of “throwing Israel under the bus.” In 2015, Netanyahu took an even bigger gamble: breaking a long-standing taboo, he delivered a speech in Congress at the unilateral invitation of Republican lawmakers, in which he made a broadside attack on the Obama administration’s efforts to secure a deal with Iran to rein in its nuclear program. Why did Netanyahu play roulette with Israel’s most essential ally? He was facing a cutthroat reelection bid at the time, and he wagered that his global statesmanship, even if it meant directly challenging a U.S. president (perhaps especially so) would actually help his campaign. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu preparing to address Congress, Washington, D.C., March 2015 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu preparing to address Congress, Washington, D.C., March 2015 Joshua Roberts / Reuters Netanyahu was mostly right. With Israeli society firmly trending right-ward by the mid-2010s, he won the Israeli election handily (though there can be numerous explanations), and the insult to Obama did not dissuade the president from signing what was at the time one of the biggest U.S. aid packages in history—$38 billion for Israel, over ten years. During the Trump administration, Netanyahu portrayed Trump as Israel’s best friend. “Pro-Israel” had long since reflected a right-wing agenda, and now came to mean embracing Trump’s policies: humiliating the Palestinians, proposing plans for Israel to annex parts of the West Bank, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Since a majority of Israeli Jews by this point identified with the political right, it is not surprising that Israelis viewed him favorably. By contrast, even before he entered the Oval Office, Biden’s lifelong record as a devoted pro-Israel Democrat left many Israelis cold. In October 2020, ahead of the U.S. election that year, a survey conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) found that 63 percent of Israelis preferred to see Trump reelected; just 17 percent preferred Biden. Following Biden’s victory, an even larger percentage of Israelis—73 percent—said that Biden was likely to be somewhat or much worse than Trump for Israel, according to another IDI poll. These figures make clear that it’s not just the current tensions over the war in Gaza that are contributing to Biden’s low levels of support in Israel, but also deeper changes within the Israeli electorate. Moreover, after the war, Israel’s right-wing majority could grow further, even as U.S. voters become more dissatisfied with Israeli behavior. LOST EQUILIBRIUM Public opinion fluctuates, and polls should never drive policy. In an interview, former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren observed that Israeli opinion about the United States isn’t very consequential to U.S. policymakers (although it may have an indirect impact because it affects American Jewish opinion). But in the past, generally positive Israeli attitudes toward the U.S. president have sometimes helped give the president the authority to advance policies in Israel that reflect U.S. interests. Eizenstat noted that Carter’s team read Israeli polls closely to discern whether Israelis supported the president’s efforts to reach an Israeli-Egyptian peace. Israelis generally did, Eizenstat recalls, and his team learned about the Israeli public’s specific security concerns that would need to be met as they worked out the details. By contrast, in April 2024, after the United States gathered an international coalition that included even Arab states to provide extraordinary military support to Israel, using their combined air defenses to thwart a massive Iranian missile attack, Israelis seemed no more favorable toward the Biden administration than before. Following the attack, the IDI reminded Israelis of this highly effective coalition and asked if they would now “agree in principle to the future establishment of a Palestinian state, in return for a permanent regional defense agreement.” Israeli numbers didn’t budge: a majority of 55 percent rejected the idea, while just 34 percent agreed. The rate was even lower among Israeli Jews: only 26 percent agreed. Young voters in both countries are drifting apart. Yet Israelis are also tracking the growing partisan division of U.S. opinion toward Israel with alarm. They know well that Biden is watching polls showing how his positions on Israel and the war are viewed among critical constituencies in the American public during his difficult reelection campaign against Trump. Informally, many Israelis think that Biden has succumbed to pressure from the left, that American university students protesting the war in Gaza have been brainwashed, and that anti-Semitism has surged to dangerous levels. It should be noted that continued divergence of American and Israeli public opinion is not the only possible near-term outcome of the current situation. If Trump succeeds in defeating Biden, and continues policies that favor the Israeli right, the current rift between the two countries, at least at the government level, may shift to a populist right-wing alignment. But it seems likely that in the years to come, the shifts that have already taken place among younger voters in both countries will continue, presenting a significant challenge for the two allies as they seek to agree on a common policy agenda. The basis of the U.S.-Israeli relationship was once grounded in shared interests, but with a much-prized sense of values. In terms of interests, the geopolitics of the Cold War are long gone. But the two countries still have overlapping regional concerns. The question of shared values, however, is more complicated: do both countries continue to share a commitment to democracy, especially liberal democracy? Israel has been moving away from that identity, and the United States will decide its own path in November. Much is unknown about where both countries will go, especially given the continuing war and upheaval in Israel. But if the core values of the United States and Israel diverge further, the next generation of leaders in both places may no longer see each other as kindred spirits. In that case, shared strategic interests can ensure that the countries remain allies, but they might cease to have the “special relationship” they have counted on in the past. DAHLIA SCHEINDLIN is a pollster, a Policy Fellow at Century International, and a columnist at Haaretz. She is the author of The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel: Promise Unfulfilled. 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How Gaza Has Accelerated the Social and Political Forces Driving the Countries Apart Dahlia Scheindlin The Death of an Iranian Hard-Liner Ebrahim Raisi Helped Engineer the Islamic Republic’s Hawkish Turn—and Whoever Succeeds Him Won’t Change Course Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar Recommended Articles Protesters demanding government action to return Israeli hostages, Jerusalem, November 2023 Why Israel Won’t Change The War in Gaza Will Likely Reinforce the Country’s Rightward Tilt Dahlia Scheindlin Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu walking to a cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, December 2023 Israel’s Unfinished Democracy How the War in Gaza Could Lead to a New Constitutional Order Yohanan Plesner The Death of an Iranian Hard-Liner Ebrahim Raisi Helped Engineer the Islamic Republic’s Hawkish Turn—and Whoever Succeeds Him Won’t Change Course By Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar May 24, 2024 At a funeral for Raisi and others killed in a helicopter crash, Tehran, May 2024 The sudden death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash on May 19 marked a momentous day for the Islamic Republic. His presidency ushered in a new era for his country, characterized by increased militarization abroad and growing tumult at home. Not since the 1979 revolution had Iran’s political system faced such a fast-paced transformation. Externally, the country surprised the world with its military capabilities and its willingness to deploy them. Internally, Iran grappled with rising secularization, putting society at odds with the government. These shifts meant that the Iran that exists today is very different from the one that existed when Raisi came to power just three years ago. Without Raisi, it may seem like Iran is headed for a period of great turbulence. Before his ascent, Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, spent 30 years in near-constant conflict with Iran’s presidents, sparring over what path the country should take at home and abroad. But Raisi adopted Khamenei’s preferred, Middle East–first approach to foreign policy, expanding Iran’s regional influence and improving relations with its neighbors, including its rival, Saudi Arabia. He made sure that Iran’s presidential bureaucracy synced up with the supreme leader’s. He deepened ties with China and Russia and vastly expanded his country’s nuclear program. Raisi was so loyal to Khamenei that he was widely viewed as his heir apparent. Yet it is unlikely that Raisi’s death will cause much tumult in Tehran. In fact, it is unlikely to prompt much change at all. Despite popular discontent and an expanding crisis of legitimacy, Iran’s powerful ruling class remains steadfast in its commitment to Raisi and Khamenei’s strategy. Iranian elites will ensure that the presidency stays in the hands of a loyal establishment conservative. They will keep the country’s policies steady. There will still be palace intrigue, as the country gears up for a snap election and ambitious politicians launch their candidacies to succeed Raisi. But Iran’s next president will almost certainly be just like its last one, and nationwide grief at Raisi’s death will ensure that the winning candidate has a smooth transition. THICK AND THIN Raisi’s rise to power began in the 1980s. Then a prosecutor and judge, he made a name for himself by having thousands of leftist prisoners executed. A student of Khamenei’s jurisprudence classes, he eventually advanced to become Iran’s attorney general, taking up the post in 2014. He next presided over a multibillion-dollar religious foundation in the holy city of Mashhad before being tapped in 2019 to head the judiciary. Raisi ran to become Iran’s president in 2017, but lost to the incumbent, Hassan Rouhani. His defeat in that contest also turned into a defeat for Khamenei. Although the supreme leader controls key institutions, including the military forces, and sets Tehran’s overall policies, Iranian presidents control a vast bureaucracy and budget that give them many levers to shape, challenge, delay, or sabotage Khamenei’s programs. Iran’s presidents also derive some legitimacy from being elected directly, unlike the supreme leader. Rouhani, for example, used his power to chart a course far more moderate than that preferred by Khamenei, including pursuing a nuclear deal with the United States during his first term. As a result, in the leadup to the 2021 election, Khamenei maneuvered to ensure that Raisi would win. Seizing on the collapse of the nuclear agreement, which was precipitated by the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the deal in 2018, the supreme leader had Iran’s Guardian Council disqualify all other serious contenders. The result was less a contest than a carefully managed coronation. With Khamenei’s blessing, Raisi won office with 62 percent of the vote—and the lowest voter turnout in the Islamic Republic’s history. Many of Raisi’s supposed wins have little to do with his decisions. Raisi took over the executive branch when Iran was under economic siege. The Trump administration had imposed crippling sanctions in 2019. U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration tried to leverage those sanctions to reach what Biden called a “longer and better” deal. But Raisi, unlike his predecessors, showed little interest in talks. Instead, he shifted Iran’s foreign policy from a westward-looking approach aimed at removing U.S. sanctions—what Khamenei derisively termed a “begging” foreign policy—to a more Middle Eastern and Asian- focused strategy aimed at neutralizing them. This policy aligned with the vision that Iran’s supreme leader had been advocating for decades. The Iranian Foreign Ministry, for example, has traditionally been at odds with the supreme leader’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which prioritizes supporting Iran’s extensive network of nonstate proxies, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. But Raisi tapped Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, a diplomat close to senior corps officials, to lead the ministry. (Amir-Abdollahian died in the helicopter crash with Raisi.) Once marginalized for being too tightly in sync with the IRGC, Amir-Abdollahian set about making sure that his ministry acted in tandem with the corps. He promoted other diplomats with ties to the IRGC and provided more support for Iran’s allied forces throughout the region The result of this realignment was an assertive foreign policy. The IRGC, for example, was once so constrained by the Foreign Ministry that the head of the corps’ aerospace division bitterly complained about efforts by Rouhani’s officials to block missile tests. But when Raisi came to power, the IRGC began testing at will. It also began launching more outright missile attacks, such as the barrage unleashed on Israel in April after Israel bombed Iran’s embassy in Damascus. Under previous presidents, the corps might not responded with such force. FOR BETTER AND FOR WORSE The Raisi administration had some unambiguous accomplishments. It managed to reestablish relations with Saudi Arabia, for instance, and it forged new economic ties with China. According to the Financial Times, the Islamic Republic succeeded in increasing its oil exports from roughly 400,000 barrels per day to 1.5 million—despite crushing U.S. sanctions. But many of Raisi’s supposed wins have little to do with his decisions. The new ties to China and Russia, for example, are the product of growing tensions between Washington and Beijing and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—not developments in Tehran. And many of the Iranian president’s other policies have failed. His attempt to create an inward-looking self-sufficient economic policy, an aim shared by Khamenei, fell flat. Raisi spent a significant portion of his presidency traveling throughout the country, reopening bankrupt factories, building roads, and initiating various infrastructure projects. In fact, he was returning from the opening ceremony for a dam when he died. But despite his claims that the Islamic Republic could thrive under Western sanctions, the country continued to suffer from major economic problems. The country’s inflation rate, for example, has remained above 40 percent. Raisi also faced social unrest. Even government-sponsored reports acknowledge that Iran is rapidly becoming more secular. The vast majority of the population supports separating religion and politics, and many Iranian women walk around unveiled, particularly in major urban centers. The government’s decision to arrest and jail people for doing so prompted major protests in 2022. Even some traditionally conservative women are now bucking the regime’s dress code, if only to avoid being associated by other Iranians with the political system and its failures (especially its draconian human rights record). Raisi continued to enforce the country’s dress requirements, and he responded to the mass protests with more mass executions. But despite the violence, the Islamic Republic is reluctantly acknowledging its population’s secular shift. During the 2021 presidential campaign, for example, women who did not adhere to traditional veiling practices appeared in pro-Raisi advertisements. And today, state-controlled media show people from all walks of life paying respect to the late president. In a television interview from a vigil in Tehran, one mournful, partially unveiled woman told Iran’s state broadcaster that although her “appearance may not be what it should be,” nobody had forced her to attend. “I came here myself with all my being.” MEET THE NEW BOSS Raisi’s vice president, Mohammad Mokhber, is now the country’s acting president. Like Raisi, he is a Khamenei loyalist; Mokhber joined the administration after overseeing business conglomerates controlled by the supreme leader. But his tenure may not last long. Under Iran’s constitution, a new election must be held within 50 days, and multiple candidates will vie for the presidency. The election could reopen Iran’s old factional wounds as candidates from different camps enter the race, only to be disqualified. Yet such an outcome is unlikely. Instead, the tragic circumstances leading to the election will probably strengthen conservatives’ hands, mending or covering over such fault lines. Prominent moderates are already mourning Raisi: Rouhani, for example, has offered condolences, as has another moderate former president, Mohammad Khatami. They have done so even though they have been marginalized from politics by Khamenei. The national mourning could shape more than just this election: it could mold the presidency in the image of Raisi for years to come. The country’s clerical elite will memorialize the late president as the kind of loyal Iranian public servant that all future presidents should aspire to be. Their ideal successor will, accordingly, be a conservative associate of Raisi—someone capable of quickly assuming office and ensuring that “there will be no disturbances in the country’s affairs,” as Khamenei promised in his first statement about the helicopter crash in which Raisi perished. In the official narrative, Raisi will be remembered for putting Iran on the right path. Iranian society itself might also embrace Khamenei’s policies. Iran’s elite may struggle to win over the public through religious messaging, but it does gain support by promoting nationalistic narratives that portray Iran as a great power under siege from the West. After the United States assassinated the senior IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani in 2020, for example, the country experienced a powerful rally-round-the flag effect, with hundreds of thousands of Iranians coming out to pay tribute. Although Raisi’s death was an accident, it could have a similar effect. Because he was killed while serving the nation, the government declared him a martyr. In a country facing external challenges, his death while on duty will resonate with many citizens, particularly the regime’s base. The Islamic Republic is a resourceful system that benefits from having loyal elites, living and dead. None of this means that Raisi’s death will deal no damage to Iran. The president was viewed as the top contender to be Iran’s next supreme leader, and Khamenei, age 85, will now have to scramble to find someone else. There is no clear answer to who that might be. Some analysts have speculated that Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, and the current head of the judiciary, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejei, are the leading candidates. But ultimately, the individual chosen may not matter as much as the kingmaker. The conservative institutions that choose the next supreme leader, and that backed Raisi as president and as a potential successor to Khamenei, will have great power over whoever comes next. That means that Iran’s long-term trajectory is unlikely to change. Whoever becomes president will be a loyal insider. He will be as politically similar to Raisi as one can be. In fact, Raisi’s successor could even explicitly claim the latest president’s mantle. After all, in the official narrative of the Islamic Republic, Raisi will be remembered for putting Iran on the right path after a series of presidents who challenged the supreme leader’s vision. He will be memorialized for positioning Iran as a nuclear threshold state and establishing it as a rising power—and for doing so not despite external pressure, but because of it. MOHAMMAD AYATOLLAHI TABAAR is a Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, Associate Professor of International Affairs at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service and a Fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. He is the author of Religious Statecraft: The Politics of Islam in Iran. 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