Keen On America

“If we leave words like evil in the hands of people who are fanatical, who are demonizing, we are leaving the most powerful weapons we have in the hands of people who don’t know how to use them.” — Susan Neiman
 
Susan Neiman is cornering the market in books about evil. First there was her 2002 Evil in Modern Thought, an alternative history of philosophy. Then Learning from the Germans, her 2019 treatise about race and the memory of evil. And now Call It Evil, an attempt to understand the Trump era which offers an alternative history of contemporary economics.
 
So what, exactly, is “evil”? Rather than defining what she describes as our most “explosive” word, she gracefully dances around it with all the elliptical subtlety of a clever philosopher. In spite of its Trumpian subtitle (“Understanding the Trump Era”), the book isn’t an inventory of Trump’s crimes. Instead, it investigates why half of America accepted a man whose (evil?) character was already blatantly self-evident.
 
Her answer focuses on economics rather than politics. The major source of evil in our age, she argues, is an ideology built on a falsified Adam Smith — self-interest as the whole of human nature — propped up by evolutionary psychologists misreading Darwin, and sold so effectively that we now mistake it for common sense. In a word: neo-liberalism. The (a)moral universe of the Heritage Foundation, Milton Friedman and Margaret “there is no alternative” Thatcher.
 
So is capitalism evil? Yes, the philosopher suggests, quoting Einstein and borrowing from contemporary economists like Amartya Sen. But rather than a return to Marx, she wants us to reimagine the 19th century Kantian socialist, Eduard Bernstein, in the context of the injustices of contemporary capitalism. Rather than evil, Neiman really is a philosopher of the good. She wants us to imagine that gap between the way the world is and the way it ought to be. Doing good means standing up to evil, she says. Like Henry Fonda’s performance as the morally defiant juror in the 1957 movie Twelve Angry Men.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Why She Won’t Define It. Evil is “the most explosive word we have,” and Neiman refuses to reduce it to a sentence — as, she notes, Kant refused before her. It is not a theological concept (the Bible itself shows moral concepts precede theological ones); it is the point at which the gap between the world as it is and as it ought to be becomes so large “that we don’t know how to live in a world where that abyss opens up.” Children spot the gap first, though they call it unfair: the bully in the sandbox is the first lesson in a world that contains injustice. Her real argument is strategic. We have become afraid of moral concepts because we cannot give necessary and sufficient conditions for them — and the cost of that squeamishness is that the word passes to the polemical and the demonizing. Andrew pressed her twice on the dodge; her answer, eventually, was sharp: she is not unwilling to use the word, she is simply more interested in analyzing it than defining it — which is why she has called both the 9/11 attacks and the Bush administration’s response evil, two entirely different kinds, and why any single definition covering both would let one of them off.
•       The Falsified Adam Smith. The book’s core, and its surprise: a moral philosopher writing about economics. The major source of evil in our time, Neiman argues, is the ideology derived from a bad and simplistic reading of Adam Smith — that we are driven by self-interest and nothing else matters — a reading she calls not a simplification but a falsification, touted by Milton Friedman and still pumped out daily by the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution. Reinforcing it: evolutionary psychologists misreading Darwin, explaining that altruism is a puzzle and that we know how hunter-gatherers thought two hundred thousand years ago (we know almost nothing). Is capitalism evil, Andrew asked — the question she never quite answers in print. “Oh, I do, actually,” she said, and reached for Einstein, a committed socialist who said so all his life. Her favorite Thatcher line isn’t “there is no alternative” but the quieter one: economics is the method, the object is to change the soul. That, she says, is exactly what has happened — and when someone tells you at dinner that human nature is just that way, they are making a philosophical claim without knowing it.
•       Not a Book About Trump. Andrew put it to her that Call It Evil is barely about Trump, and got a flat correction when he pushed further: “I really think you’re twisting my arguments.” No, she does not say we are all evil. The point of the book is not to count his sins — for that, read Haberman and Swan, “a sickening” but excellent reminder of flooding the zone — but to ask how even half the country accepted him a second time, knowing everything. Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of the ideology: unabashed, unashamed self-advantage in the most powerful job on earth, “a way of giving permission” for everyone else to behave the same way. Against that: the woman helping a stranger with a baby carriage on the subway stairs, and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, who died protecting a neighbor’s rights. We know not everyone is evil because we all have such moments. And the 9/11 quotation Andrew found most revealing of all — Trump noting that his building was now the tallest in New York.
•       Socialism Needs More Kant. The alternative tradition, and the hour’s intellectual heart. Neiman is a Kantian — the human condition as the struggle between the world as it is and as it ought to be, with an innate sense of justice we are born capable of but not guaranteed. Against Kant she sets Hume (custom, habit, emotion: fine for ordinary life, useless when a society is built on slavery or colonialism and someone wants to challenge it) and, behind him, the Nietzscheans. Her hero is Eduard Bernstein, the German social democrat who said socialism needs more Kant, an early champion of women’s and gay rights, in London during Wilde’s trial, who voted against the First World War. What Bernstein saw in Marx is what she rejects: that ideas are superstructure, “the foam on the beer,” while economics is the drink underneath. Her contemporary proof is Zohran Mamdani, whose win everyone credited to affordability — halal sandwiches, daycare — but who always framed it as justice: it is unjust that the teachers, nurses, taxi drivers and sanitation workers who keep New York running cannot afford to live in it. And Rawls, her teacher, was moving toward a Kantian democratic socialism before the strokes.
•       How Ordinary People Behave. On Gaza she is unequivocal — yes, genocide, following Omer Bartov’s careful reversal and the Israeli human rights organizations, though she notes the gap between genocide and crime against humanity is not gigantic. What drives the global outrage, in her reading, is not antisemitism (millions of Jews are outraged too) but the use of the twentieth century’s one moral consensus — that the Holocaust was evil — to justify another crime: “the use of one evil to justify another is something that’s morally obscene.” Truman’s bomb: evil, and not only for the dead but as the opening salvo of a Cold War we are still paying for. On Arendt: the banality thesis is right — we are endangered less by sadists than by the thoughtle...

Something unprecedented happened yesterday. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Dario Amodei — rivals who rarely agree on anything — all called for an AI slowdown. It came after more and more doomsday warnings from experts which seem to have finally woken Congress up to AI’s potentially existential threat. Axios even claimed that Speaker Mike Johnson is considering canceling the House recess to force members back to the Capitol to discuss the crisis. This seems to have been the week that the AI zeitgeist has finally shifted. Seven days that have changed the AI world.
 
For That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare, it’s time to shut up or shut down. While he remains a sceptic about the autonomy of AI agents, he recognizes its potential danger. “The minute there is recursive self-learning, there’s no speedometer. It’s either on or off,” he says. “You either control it or you don’t.” In terms of AI policy, he argues, you can’t be half-pregnant. Either leave it alone or flip the off switch. Anything else fudges the issue and allows slippery characters like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei to pursue their own agenda.
 
I don’t disagree. The real world, however, is forever half-pregnant. Investment in AI and the upcoming Anthropic IPO are the driving force of the economy. So AI’s existential threat isn’t just to “humanity.” It’s also to American prosperity, a politically existential threat (thus Trump’s opposition to any regulation). So, yes, this was the week that the AI zeitgeist shifted. The die is, indeed, cast. But it’s only the beginning rather than the end of this remarkable story. Pass the popcorn. Predicting the future might be a fool’s game, but it’s certainly going to get real interesting.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Calling BS on the Slowdown. The week’s convergence was genuinely new — a Dario Amodei essay warning that humans could lose control, Altman and Musk jumping aboard, all three major papers leading with it, Congress “waking up,” and an Axios scoop that Speaker Mike Johnson is being urged to cancel the House recess. Keith’s diagnosis is withering: it illustrates “the weakness of AI leadership,” swayed by a six-week employee who resigned, wrote an essay, and went on TV. His deeper claim: there is no such thing as AI as an independent actor, so the entire scare is misconstrued — “AI is not dangerous, period.” What the slowdown talk really represents, he argues, is the economic self-interest of incumbents in containing open-source AI — rules that prevent others from playing. Is anything new, Andrew pressed? “The heat is ramped up a notch. That’s about it.”
•       No Speedometer. The episode’s logical core. If you believe recursive self-improvement can’t be controlled by humans, and that the agents it produces will be malicious, then slowing down is incoherent — “the only logical thing is not to slow it down, but to shut it down”: no Anthropic, no IPO, a ban. “The minute there is recursive self-learning, there’s no speedometer. It’s either on or off.” Scott Bessent’s speech — the week’s most prescient, in Keith’s view — made the practical version: recursion can’t be stopped, and 3,500 mostly open-source models already sit in the Hugging Face store. Stephen Witt’s NYT taxonomy (shut it down, air-crash investigations, monitoring, the kill switch — with his closing COVID-epidemiologist analogy) gets respect but fails Keith’s test: none of it solves the problem if the problem is real. In AI policy, as Andrew’s intro has it, you can’t be half-pregnant: either leave it alone or flip the off switch — anything else fudges the issue. His counter-gameplay: for AI to threaten humanity it needs biological or nuclear weapons, and that chain of events is “fantastical.” Andrew’s retort — so was hijacking planes into the World Trade Center. Keith: “9/11 is one airplane.”
•       The IPO Game. Why would the leaders sound alarms about their own products? Keith’s fork: they’re naive (buying space by taking heat out of the conversation — which won’t work, since demands to stop will only grow) or manipulative. The tell arrived mid-week: Altman told Fortune that OpenAI won’t IPO this year, given the safety discussion — which Keith reads as calling Dario’s bluff. Will Anthropic pull its $2 trillion listing? “I don’t think he is. I think he’s playing a game… a high-stakes game.” Andrew’s materialist reading: with the American economy increasingly dependent on the AI sector and its impending IPOs, nothing gets shut down short of an AI 9/11 or COVID event — the story is now about the whole future of the American economy. Keith’s post-midterm forecast: the White House does nothing, and unless Democrats take both houses, “nothing changes” — markets settle, IPOs happen, AI continues. And his path to peace: most innovations become acceptable only after they deliver the bacon; people must feel AI’s benefits to discount its fears. Andrew’s verdict: the AI zeitgeist has shifted and the die is, indeed, cast — but this is the beginning rather than the end of the story. Pass the popcorn.
•       Open Source Wins — China Included. Against Noah Smith’s America-is-winning scorecard, Keith reframes the race entirely: the real contest is open versus closed source — with the Chinese, ironically, in the open camp and the Americans building walled gardens. History’s lesson: “open source leaks like water into every crevice” — the cloud is almost 100% Linux. The week’s stranger revelation: reports that Kimi was routing every query to Claude — “there was actually no Kimi” — plus the training-dependency chain that keeps Chinese models about a year behind. The money agrees with American dominance either way: the FT’s moonshot-capitalism piece has US deep-tech VC at $246 billion (80% of it California) against China’s $105 billion and the UK’s 26 — with the power law concentrating it all into a handful of companies, and Andreessen Horowitz reporting that post-SpaceX-IPO venture returns now dwarf private equity. As for regulation: California’s new chatbot and teen-social-media laws are, per Keith, light and barely policed.
•       The Rest of the Week. Starbucks’ billion-dollar bet on the coffeehouse as antidote to lonely digital lives — Keith’s analyst verdict: Barnes & Noble tried the sofas, and “the biggest problem is the coffee isn’t very good.” How writers actually use AI, via Every’s interviews: Kevin Roose structured The AGI Chronicles himself, then let AI do what he calls three to four years of work in one — exactly, Keith notes, the process behind his own The Human Dividend. The Edmans crossover, from Monday’s interview of the week: do smart people make dumb investments? Keith’s Wall Street history says the best investors are “working class street smart kids” who smell deals — inventors are not gamblers — though Musk is the exception, and as for Dario: “I think Dario would be good at anything,” Andrew offered. “He’s pretty good at politics.” Apple’s iPhone Duo foldable arrives with, per Ben Thompson, still no AI strategy — while Facebook ships Muse, a full agent with a virtual machine that would need 27 million physical computers at Meta scale. And farewell to Bill Draper — among the first venture capitalists, first into Skype before his son Tim, a seeker of contrarian difference “a bit like AI now.”
 
About the Co-Host
 
Keith Teare is the publisher of the That Was The...

“One believes in democracy and the rule of law, and right now, the other doesn’t.” — Adam Jentleson
 
Yesterday, William Hitchcock explained FDR’s ability to build and maintain supermajorities. Today, Adam Jentleson — Harry Reid’s former deputy chief of staff and chief of staff to John Fetterman — talks about how the Democrats can build lasting power in the 21st century. The strategy is laid out in Supermajority, Jentleson’s follow-up to the acclaimed Kill Switch.
 
Is the Democratic Party too woke? “We are still too rigid” is Jentleson’s euphemistic take on the dramatic class flip in American politics. JFK won two-thirds of working-class voters in 1960, Jentleson reminds us, while Kamala Harris lost two-thirds in 2024. His prescription is FDR-style heterodoxy. Dems need to hold to their core commitments (healthcare, the safety net, progressive taxation, civil rights) while broadening their base in red states. His examples of tent wideners include a Kansan megachurch pastor, a pro-drilling Alaskan candidate, and an Iowan hopeful whose flat “no” on trans sports silenced a right-wing radio host. The model for winning back the working class, Jentleson argues, is Bernie Sanders circa 2016, an economic populist, but to Hillary Clinton’s right on immigration and guns.
 
The much maligned John Fetterman, Jentleson’s old boss, is the cautionary tale. It’s what happens, Jentleson warns, when the fighting “becomes the entire point” and a politician comes unmoored from principle. Jon Ossoff, Jentleson suggests, seems the anti-Fetterman in writing his own speeches and appearing authentic rather than opportunistic. Ossoff certainly isn’t FDR, but he might be the best chance the Dems have of defeating an increasingly authoritarian Republican party in 2028.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The FDR Lessons Nobody Tells. Picking up where yesterday’s Hitchcock episode left off: FDR built the New Deal supermajority not by bowling opponents over with progressive rhetoric but through a deeply heterodox coalition — including factions today’s Democrats would expel — and sold it in conservative wrappers: Social Security pitched as fiscally responsible and earned, not given (he railed against the dole in cabinet meetings). The uncomfortable ledger: FDR actively worked against every civil rights bill of his era to keep self-declared white supremacists in the tent — which means, Jentleson argues, that today’s trade-offs (a Kansas candidate with questions about trans sports, a border-security Democrat) “pale in comparison” to the compromises that built the twentieth century’s Democratic dominance. The Kansas case in point: megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton, running in a state Trump won by twenty points, holds the line on healthcare, the safety net, and progressive taxes — and the alternative to his heterodoxy is a MAGA senator.
•       Too Rigid, Not Too Woke. Asked the New Yorker’s question — is the party still too woke? — Jentleson answers with his own euphemistic diagnosis: “we are still too rigid.” The evidence is the class flip: JFK won about two-thirds of working-class voters; Harris lost about two-thirds, while the college-educated — once the party of Romney, Rockefeller, and Eisenhower — became the Democratic base. And the sociology cuts deep: education correlates with ideological rigidity, while working-class voters hold heterodox mixes — the focus-group regular who wants the 2008 CEOs jailed and undocumented immigrants deported in the same breath. Hence the echo-chamber problem (Andrew’s San Francisco testimony included): the decline of unions, parties, and Elks halls narrowed the aperture to funders and interest groups, and the Harris circle heard only itself. The fix costs nothing: choose diverse advisers, model good-faith disagreement — a preview of next week’s Susan Neiman conversation — and collect what Jentleson calls the electoral windfall waiting for whichever party does it first.
•       It’s Working Right Now. To Andrew’s two-state-solution objection — lovely in theory, impossible in practice — Jentleson answers from the November polls: Mary Peltola leading in Alaska (Trump +double digits) as a pro-drilling Democrat; James Talarico leading in Texas as a fossil-fuels-as-bridge Democrat; and Rob Sand in Iowa, whose flat “no” on a right-wing radio show — the host admitted he’d prepared follow-ups for the expected wriggle — took the wedge off the table and freed his anti-corruption message. As recently as 2009, he reminds us, Democrats held Senate seats in Arkansas, both Dakotas, Louisiana, and Montana. The forgotten exemplar: Bernie Sanders 2016 — economically populist but a 2007 immigration-bill no vote, “open borders is a Koch brothers proposal,” Lou Dobbs appearances, and gun rights to Hillary’s right — the heterodox mix that produced his crossover appeal, against Clinton’s across-the-board orthodoxy. Jentleson’s 2028 read: the primary won’t resolve for the left, and Ossoff, Cooper, and Peltola are the model — though he tips his hat to the DSA’s weeknight commitment to Robert’s Rules.
•       The Fetterman Cautionary Tale. The hour’s most personal stretch: Jentleson was John Fetterman’s chief of staff, and his verdict on his old boss — who cameoed at Trump’s convention this week — is that Fetterman shows what happens when the heterodox strategy is “taken too far”: the fighting “has become the entire point of his career,” unmoored from the principles that make divergence meaningful. On the Wall Street Journal’s reporting — the children’s hospital he refused to meet, the York police funerals he skipped — Jentleson wasn’t a source (“if you’re going to say something, you should say it on the record and put your name on it”) but confirms it “resonated with my experience.” His primary emotion: “sadness and regret… he’s letting a tremendous number of people down, including the people of Pennsylvania, who are basically down a senator.” The lesson for the book’s own thesis: heterodoxy is a powerful tool, and like all powerful tools it needs to stay rooted in why you entered politics at all — or it leads “to some dark places.”
•       The Vision Thing. Why supermajority and not Madisonian faction? Because, Jentleson argues, this era has something genuinely new: “the first time in American history where we have one political party that is entirely aligned with a sympathy towards authoritarianism” — not flashes like McCarthy or Father Coughlin (yesterday’s villain, returning), but a party whose convention this week featured Trump leading “a pledge to cheat in elections,” with no internal pushback. (FDR’s court-packing, by contrast, was the exception proving the rule: the system brushed him back in 1938.) Hence the pull quote — and yet democracy-talk alone doesn’t win: “Biden tried to run on soul of the nation… and it didn’t work.” The closing agreement, via Andrew’s wrapper argument: the New Deal and the Great Society were named visions; Clinton and Obama never articulated one. Jentleson’s candidate: finish FDR’s cradle-to-grave social insurance — wage insurance against AI’s disruptions, everything earned rather than handed out, aimed at bank accounts and the pump rather than the soul of the nation. And his 2028 intrigue, on the record: Jon Ossoff — the anti-Fetterman — who writes his own speeches, wins Georgia repeatedly, and conditioned aid to Israel early enou...

“We’ve taken our democratic functioning for granted, and we’ve forgotten what it looks like to actually have to fight for it.” — William Hitchcock
 
Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, and there’s a lot of sombre talk about the forever wars triggered by the attack. But sometimes, fighting evil might be necessary. So argues William Hitchcock, whose A Shadow Over the World is a major new history of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the rise of fascism, and the making of American involvement in World War II.
 
We got the thirties wrong, Hitchcock says. The conventional view is that an interventionist FDR was hamstrung by an isolationist American public. Thus the US’s tardy entry into the war. The truth, Hitchcock argues, is the opposite. Judging from the period’s magazines, radio, films, and plays, he finds that most Americans hated fascism and wanted to act, while Roosevelt wanted nothing to do with Europe until after Munich. Having become an interventionist, FDR managed the propaganda war with such trademark sophistication that “isolationist” and “appeasement” became the nastiest insults in Washington DC. So insulting, in fact, that American policy makers still deploy them today, with every adversary a new Hitler, every negotiation a new Munich.
 
Because the isolationists ended up as history’s villains, Hitchcock says, we’ve back-projected a narrative in which the 1930s public had its head in the sand and FDR was the lone farsighted interventionist. So the real thirties — featuring a vibrant public conversation about America’s role in the world, with the public actually more anti-fascist than the president — has gotten buried under FDR’s own accomplished myth-making.
 
And then there’s the F word. Are we back in fascist times? Is the 2020s a repeat of the 1930s? The UVA professor lives in Charlottesville, so it’s a particularly timely question for him. Hitchcock sees fascist behavior, he confesses, but not a fascist country. In the face of authoritarianism, he notes, America remains a vibrant democracy. Maybe that’s what the 2020s, with its public resistance to authoritarianism, has in common with the 1930s. History doesn’t repeat itself, as the line attributed to Mr America himself, Mark Twain, has it — but it rhymes.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       We Got the Thirties Wrong. The book’s revisionist core, against libraries of Roosevelt biography: the standard story — an interventionist FDR hamstrung by an isolationist public — is backwards. From fresh research in the periodicals, radio speeches, films, and plays of 1930s political culture, Hitchcock finds an American public that hated fascism and wanted to do something, while Roosevelt wanted nothing to do with Europe or Asia from 1933 all the way to Munich in September 1938. His gift, once converted, was finding ways to act short of war — and then vilifying the isolationists so thoroughly that appeasement became the great sin — insults American policy makers still deploy today, with every adversary a new Hitler and every negotiation a new Munich. The thirties Americans were more sophisticated than the caricature: they struggled to fight fascism while avoiding war. The decade, Hitchcock insists, was not a cautionary tale of heads in the sand but “a time much like our own,” when Americans argued about the right role for their country in the world.
•       Coughlin, Not Lindbergh. The corrective to Philip Roth: The Plot Against America is a wonderful novel that overstates its villain. Lindbergh came late — speaking out only in 1940, joining America First in spring 1941, by which time “the table was set” and Roosevelt had won the war of ideas; polling showed two-thirds of Americans against Lindbergh’s views. The German American Bund, swastikas in Madison Square Garden notwithstanding, was small. Far more dangerous was Father Coughlin, the radio priest with millions of listeners undermining Roosevelt at every turn. The deeper discomfort: fascism was popular in America later than we like to admit — elites welcomed Mussolini in 1922, dictatorship carried no stigma, and Studebaker sold a sedan called the Dictator until 1937. (“Roth missed the trick,” Andrew noted. It should have been a Ford.) As for the New-Deal-as-fascism charge, leveled then and since: Roosevelt’s own answer — he was saving capitalism by making it fairer — holds, because fascism is not an economic program but war on enemies at home and abroad.
•       The Sheriff and the Same Tree. The South’s paradoxes, which deserve a book of their own. In Congress, southern Democrats — including Carter Glass of Virginia, among the most racist senators of a racist era — were ardent interventionists, not least because rearmament dollars flowed to southern military bases. Meanwhile African Americans were the first to recognize fascism, because they already lived under it: “he’s right here in our courthouse… He’s the sheriff. He’s the mayor” — Jim Crow and fascism, branches of the same tree, as the Black press argued years before Pearl Harbor. Hence A. Philip Randolph’s high-stakes poker in 1941: threatening a million-man march he might not have mustered, he extracted the executive order barring segregation in federally funded defense plants — the first federal lever of the modern civil rights era. The enduring puzzle Hitchcock presses on his disbelieving students: America fought and won the great war for democracy with a segregated army. And civil rights remains, in his verdict, one of the biggest stains on FDR’s reputation — Eleanor’s Black Cabinet notwithstanding.
•       The Making of a World Power. The trail of tears first: Abyssinia invaded, and America wouldn’t even embargo oil; Spain’s elected government denied weapons while the fascists poured in guns; the Anschluss, the Sudetenland, Munich — nothing. The switch, Hitchcock argues, came at Munich: Roosevelt grasped that American military weakness was itself the problem — nothing could deter Hitler’s testing — and by early 1939 the Neutrality Act was being unwound, billions were flowing into a new Navy (even isolationists loved a picket fence around the hemisphere), and 1940 brought peacetime conscription. The supporting cast makes the chapter: Martha Gellhorn’s letters from Spain — “a dress rehearsal of the coming conflict” — reaching FDR through Eleanor; the loathed Chamberlain (“there’s one thing Roosevelt couldn’t stand — condescending Europeans”); the Stalin gamble that made him look a fool at the pact and a prophet at Lend-Lease; and Dorothy Thompson, the Republican journalist expelled by the Gestapo, whose Herald Tribune columns FDR’s speechwriters lifted by the page. And then Hollywood’s convergence: Casablanca — written after its playwright visited Vichy France to rescue his wife’s Jewish family — with Rick as Roosevelt, hesitating in a cafe called White House until he joins the fight, in theaters just as GIs landed in North Africa.
•       Not at Midnight Yet. The 2026 lessons, delivered from Charlottesville — Exhibit A, where 2017’s riot was “the kind of thing you could have seen in Weimar Germany.” First: normalization is the danger — the salami tactics of fascists mean “if they can get away with a little slice, they’ll keep slicing,” and the thirties’ sin was depicting Mussolini as harmless. Second: the demonizing instinct should be resisted — pressed on Susan Neiman’s forthcoming Ca...

“I’m a military correspondent, but I would be totally happy if there was world peace and I had to change jobs.” — Yonah Jeremy Bob
 
Oil hit $100 a barrel (again) today. Donald Trump confessed, with uncharacteristic honesty, that the Iran war won’t end until after the November elections. And while Israel’s war with Iran ended back in April, America’s hasn’t, with the US and Iran shooting at each other most of the time since February. So, with the 25th anniversary of 9/11 tomorrow, is this about to become America’s new forever war?
 
Yonah Jeremy Bob is the senior military correspondent at The Jerusalem Post and co-author of In the War Room, the inside story of Israel’s fight against the Iranian “axis.” The Baltimore-born and Jerusalem-based journalist confesses that he watches this conflict with “two brains.” For Israelis of both left and right, it’s a war of survival. His US brain, however, has the more down-to-earth reading of a conflict that offers no existential threat.
 
So is this the new forever war? America after 9/11 “was at war for about a decade,” Bob responds. A nation in post-traumatic shock. A quarter of a century later, most Americans think of today’s Iran war in terms of domestic gas prices. Thus Trump’s presentation of the conflict in the context of an election calendar is not a forever war. Like all things Trumpian, it’s just another transactional campaign. As for the senior military correspondent himself, he’d be totally happy, Bob confesses, if world peace put him out of a job.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Split Screen. Bob — Baltimore-born, Jerusalem-based — says he watches this war with two brains, and they see different wars. The American brain sees a US-Iran conflict that hasn’t stopped: strikes, sabotage, and bombing traded almost nonstop since February 28. The Israeli brain sees a war that ended on April 7 — one 24-hour exception aside — leaving Israel calmer about Iran than Washington is. What actually agitates Israelis this week is diplomatic: Britain and a dozen mostly European countries (plus Canada) sanctioning the West Bank — not Israel proper, but a stain and a loss all the same. On Witkoff and Kushner, whom Ed Luce’s FT column accused of “blind amateurism,” Bob’s ledger is mixed: genuine credit for ending the Israel-Hamas war in October 2025 and bringing home all 250 hostages — the war’s forgotten center of gravity for most Israelis — against failure to close any Iran nuclear deal and near-nothing on Ukraine.
•       The Transactional Ally. Bob’s three-level model of the Trump-Netanyahu relationship: lower-official criticism gets ignored; a direct Trump request gets “yes, but”; and a genuine Trump threat gets obeyed — every time. The astonishing exhibit: Israeli aircraft already en route to bomb Iran, recalled mid-flight after Trump tweeted “those aircraft better come back.” Bob can list three or four such episodes; Netanyahu backed off in all of them, because American support is more essential now than ever — which is the second story: Israel’s worst diplomatic isolation in decades, with bipartisan American support frayed and Europe largely gone. The counterweights: India, whose closeness to Israel — military, intelligence, and AI agreements — has never been higher, and the UAE, now closer to Israel than Egypt or Jordan. The original Abraham Accords held through the war; the grand prize didn’t — MBS was publicly “weeks away” from normalization in September 2023, and stopping that clock, Bob believes, is very possibly why Sinwar invaded when he did.
•       The Book Bibi Doesn’t Like. In the War Room’s revisionist core: the early-war Netanyahu was the hesitant man in the room — it took roughly three weeks for the rest of the war cabinet to convince him to invade Gaza at all, consistent with a career of avoiding big ground operations — until, with victories in northern Gaza and Khan Younis behind him, he flipped in spring 2024 into the war room’s most aggressive member, pressing on to Hezbollah and Iran as his own defense chiefs turned toward ending it. Netanyahu, Bob reports dryly, dislikes exactly those chapters: “we’re in touch… we got an earful” — from both political directions, which the authors take as evidence they nailed it. On October 7 itself: warnings — including one relayed from the UAE — were ignored by everyone, Netanyahu, the IDF’s Halevi, and the Shin Bet’s Bar alike, all captive to the concept that Hamas was deterred; Bob’s author’s note says all of them should have resigned, as their 1973 predecessors did. The conspiracy theory that Bibi wanted the invasion gets “an unequivocal no.”
•       Between Genocide and Mistakes. Andrew put Al Jazeera’s headline to him directly, and Bob — Boston University Law before journalism — answered as a lawyer: on genocide, “unequivocally no,” for want of intent (Bret Stephens’s point: a state that wanted genocide had the bombs to commit it in weeks, and wouldn’t have spent the war moving civilians out of the way). Then he did the arithmetic against his own side’s comfort: of roughly 70,000 dead, about 25,000 were Hamas and 3,000–5,000 were killed by Hamas itself — leaving 35,000 to 45,000 Palestinian civilians. “I think that’s too much.” The army has 150 criminal probes and some 3,000 disciplinary ones open; the World Central Kitchen strike — armed figures misread as Hamas boarding the trucks — stands as his anatomy of a terrible mistake that may yet be prosecuted as gross negligence. The insiders he talks to are genuinely sad about the civilian toll, and on the settlers he goes on record for the brass: top IDF and Shin Bet officials say the police under Itamar Ben-Gvir simply won’t crack down on Jewish extremist violence in the West Bank. “I point the mean finger at” Ben-Gvir — their words, he says, sounded out to the world.
•       The Nuclear Scorecard — and the Clock. His Jerusalem Post exclusive, summarized: what triggered June 2025 wasn’t just enriched uranium (Iran had ten weapons’ worth for years) but progress on the “weapons group” — the metallurgy and hemispheres needed to put a warhead on a missile. Today that weapons work is destroyed or inoperable, the vast majority of Iran’s 20,000 centrifuges are gone, and the 60-percent uranium sits under bombed rubble, watched by intelligence services Bob judges too deeply embedded for Iran to move it unseen. Rebuild in one to three years? Theoretically — if Israel and America fall asleep. The strategic errors he’d correct: selling regime change (the IRGC and Basij command hundreds of thousands of hardcore supporters; the messaging failure is now “an element of the current elections”) — and the split verdict stands: Israel’s war succeeded on its existential terms; America’s depends on Hormuz and the program’s end. On 9/11’s eve, his forever-war answer: America itself “was at war for about a decade” after the towers fell, but this one has a clock — Americans feel gas prices, not danger. And the sign-off: a military correspondent who’d be totally happy if world peace cost him the job.
 
About the Guest
 
Yonah Jeremy Bob is the senior military correspondent and analyst at The Jerusalem Post, with unparalleled access to top...