Opinion

The latest round of negotiations between the United States and Iran in Geneva feels less like diplomacy and more like ritual, the kind performed because everyone expects it, not because anyone believes it will work. The language is familiar to the point of fatigue: “constructive atmosphere,” “frank exchanges,” “more time needed.” Strip that away and what remains is a stark … [Read more...] about Geneva Is Not a Peace Table, It’s the Last Stop Before Force

What sharpens this moment isn’t just the Supreme Court clipping Trump’s tariff authority, it’s how familiar the pattern feels once you stop looking at it as isolated policy news. Again and again in modern history, leaders who lose leverage at home instinctively reach outward, not because foreign conflict solves domestic problems, but because it reframes them. Tariffs were … [Read more...] about Inevitability as Political Theater: Trump, Tariffs, and the Drift Toward Iran

Today’s decision by the Supreme Court of the United States redraws an important boundary in U.S. trade policy, ruling that President Donald Trump did not have the legal authority to impose sweeping tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. In a 6–3 opinion, the Court struck down the so-called Trafficking Tariffs and Reciprocal Tariffs that had been in place … [Read more...] about Supreme Court Tariff Ruling Reshapes IEEPA, But Uncertainty Stays

At some point the question stops being what Donald Trump intends to do next and becomes how much institutional abuse the American presidency can absorb before it is permanently warped. What we are watching is not merely a controversial administration or a polarizing leader doing polarizing things. It is the steady, deliberate stress-testing of norms that were never designed to … [Read more...] about Trump: How Much More Abuse This Presidency Can Take

One of the most likely outcomes in the U.S.–Iran standoff is not escalation, not a durable agreement, and not even a strategic retreat, but a familiar fiction: a declared victory that leaves reality essentially untouched. For Donald Trump, this is not a theoretical risk but a governing habit. Diplomatic initiatives are launched with dramatic flair, meetings are teased as … [Read more...] about Trampaesque: Victory Without Substance