You’d be forgiven for thinking that America’s continental shelf couldn’t get any bigger. It is, after all, mostly rock, the submerged landmass linking shore and abyss. But in late 2023, after a long and expensive mapping project, the State Department announced that the continental shelf had grown by 1 million square kilometers—more than two Californias.

The United States had ample motive to decide that the continental shelf extends farther than it had previously realized. A larger shelf means legal access to more of the ocean floor’s riches: animals, hydrocarbons, and, perhaps most important, minerals to power electric-vehicle batteries. America has no immediate plans to excavate its new seabed, which includes chunks of the Arctic Ocean, Bering Sea, and Atlantic, as well as several small pockets of the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific. But, according to the State Department, the combined area could be worth trillions of dollars.

The announcement shows just how shrewdly the U.S. has gamed the international system. Since 1982, a United Nations agreement called the Law of the Sea has served as the cornerstone of the global maritime order. In its expansion project, the U.S. abided by the treaty’s rules dictating how nations can extend their shelves—but, notably, it never ratified the agreement, which means that unlike the 169 nations that did, it doesn’t have to pay royalties on the resources it extracts. Apparently America can have its cake and eat it, too: a brand-new shelf, acquired in seemingly good order, that it can mine for free. This gold rush in the making can be seen as the culmination of a long national bet that even though America helped create the global maritime order, it’s better off not joining.

America’s undersea enlargement would not have been possible without Larry Mayer. An oceanographer at the University of New Hampshire, Mayer began the U.S. government’s largest-ever offshore-mapping effort in 2003. Over the next 20 years, he led a team of scientists that dragged sensors across America’s neighboring oceans, scanning more than 1 million square miles of seabed. “When you do that at nine miles an hour, it takes time,” Mayer told me. The project logged more than three years afloat, “a lot of it in the Arctic, which takes even more time because we’ve got to break ice.”

[From the January/February 2020 issue: History’s largest mining operation is about to begin]

Forty voyages and more than $100 million later, Mayer returned with four terabytes of data, which State Department officials plugged into formulas laid out by the treaty. “Not all countries have the ability to hire Larry Mayer and the scientific wherewithal to go out for 20 years and spend tens of millions” to grow their shelf, says James Kraska, a law professor at the U.S. Naval War College who also teaches a course at Harvard Law School on international maritime code. “Ghana hasn’t done this.”

America first claimed jurisdiction over its continental shelf in 1945, a few weeks after Japan’s surrender in World War II. For several years, the U.S. government had been concerned about Japanese ships catching salmon off Alaska, as well as other nations drilling for oil off American shores. With the war over, President Harry Truman proclaimed that an underwater area of some 750,000 square miles—about 4.5 Californias—now belonged to America.

No internationally agreed-upon definition of continental shelves existed until 1958, when 86 countries gathered at the first UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The group decided, somewhat unhelpfully, that a shelf could extend as far and as deep as a nation could drill. By the following decade, technology had advanced so quickly that a country could claim virtually an entire ocean. Sure enough, one member of Congress from Florida proposed that the U.S. occupy what amounted to two-thirds of the North Atlantic.

President Lyndon B. Johnson warned against such expansionism. In a 1966 speech, he denounced the “new form of colonial competition” that threatened to emerge among maritime nations. “We must ensure that the deep seas and the ocean bottoms are, and remain, the legacy of all human beings,” he said. The following year, Arvid Pardo, an ambassador from Malta, called on the UN to deem the ocean floor “the common heritage of mankind.” In 1970, the U.S. voted alongside 107 other nations to do precisely that.

The UN reconvened in 1973 to legislate a shared vision of the seas. Over the next nine years, more than 150 nations and as many as 5,000 people gathered for off-and-on negotiating sessions in New York City and Geneva. They discussed a wide range of topics—freedom of navigation, fishing, scientific research, pollution, the seabed—and ultimately produced the Law of the Sea.

The U.S. had helped pave the way. Three years before the convention, the Nixon administration had presented a draft treaty that proposed a forerunner to the International Seabed Authority: an agency established by the Law of the Sea that would collect royalties from underwater resources and distribute them to the developing world. But the nation’s posture changed after Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. American delegates began showing up to negotiating sessions wearing ties that bore the image of Adam Smith, the father of free markets. It was an early sign of the administration’s reluctance to regulate the maritime economy.

In 1982, the U.S. voted against adopting the Law of the Sea—one of only four countries to do so—and said it would refuse to ratify the finalized treaty. Reagan’s reason: the regulations on mining, which he thought would hamper America’s ability to exploit undersea mineral resources. He seemed particularly worried about the royalty scheme that would govern the international seafloor, a vast virgin deep that lies beyond the jurisdiction of any one state and makes up about half of the world’s ocean floor.

That June, Reagan reportedly told his National Security Council, “We’re policed and patrolled on land and there is so much regulation that I kind of thought that when you go out on the high seas you can do what you want.” The president was concerned about “free oceans closing where we were getting along fine before,” minutes from the meeting show. He dispatched onetime Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to persuade other nations to reject the treaty, but the mission failed.

Just 16 years earlier, the U.S. under Johnson had set out to prevent nations from making unilateral claims to the high seas. Then America made its own. Months after the Law of the Sea was finalized, Reagan said the U.S. would abide by its rules on “traditional uses of the oceans,” such as navigation, but not by the “unnecessary political and economic restraints” that the treaty imposed on mining. Instead, Reagan claimed jurisdiction over all the natural and mineral resources within 200 nautical miles of the nation’s shores (230 regular miles), an allowance that the Law of the Sea granted only signatories. That is, he cited “international law” for permission, even though he had refused to ratify that law. Reagan showed that the U.S. could take what it wanted from the treaty without submitting to the UN. Judging by the newly extended shelf, it still can.

The State Department’s Extended Continental Shelf Project works out of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration building in Boulder, Colorado, some 800 miles from the nearest ocean. Its office is down the hall from the Space Weather Prediction Center. When I visited last year, maps of the Arctic adorned the walls, and a whiteboard showed an elementary red drawing of the U.S. and Canada protruding into the Atlantic. Inside sat Brian Van Pay, the director of the project, and Kevin Baumert, its lawyer.

Van Pay and Baumert are picky about words. When I asked whether America had just gotten bigger, Van Pay replied: “It depends on how you define it. If you’re talking about sovereignty”—he emphasized the last syllable—then no. “But if you’re talking about sovereign rights”—maybe. “But it’s not territory.”

[From the April 1969 issue: The deep-sea bed]

According to the Law of the Sea, a continental shelf stretches 200 nautical miles from a nation’s shores. Any country can mine this area without worrying about royalties. But the treaty lays out two formulas for tacking on “extended” shelf; calculating this is what kept Van Pay and Baumert busy. If you mine there, you need to pay royalties to the International Seabed Authority—unless you’re America and haven’t ratified the treaty.

The first formula requires finding the “foot of the continental slope,” where the seabed starts to flatten out. For the next 60 nautical miles beyond that point, you’ve got continental shelf. The second formula involves the sediment on the ocean floor. (This goes by the technical name “ooze.” It’s plankton skeletons, mainly.) Shelves extend as long as the sediment covering them is thick enough that oil and gas could plausibly be stashed underneath. A team of scientists, led by the geologist Debbie Hutchinson, scanned the ocean floor with seismic sensors to find this boundary. Two regulatory limits circumscribed Van Pay and Baumert’s calculations: No shelf can spread more than 350 nautical miles from shore, or more than 100 nautical miles beyond 2,500 meters of depth. The formulas yielded 1,279 coordinate points delineating the new shelf.

The rules are objective, but the results depend on other nations’ recognition. Parts of America’s new shelf overlap with those of the Bahamas, Canada, and Japan, prompting ongoing negotiations. And in March, Russia’s foreign ministry said that it wouldn’t recognize America’s shelf, because the U.S. hadn’t sent its data to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, the agency created by the Law of the Sea to review such submissions.

Russia’s claim relates to a broader concern that the U.S. has essentially ignored unfriendly provisions in the treaty—such as oversight requirements—while exploiting advantageous ones, such as formulas for shelf expansion. Van Pay and Baumert disagree with that characterization. Baumert told me that America’s expansion is not unprecedented; more than three dozen countries have extended their shelves without ratifying the Law of the Sea. (Only four of those still haven’t ratified, though: Syria, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, and the United States.)

Furthermore, Van Pay and Baumert told me that they hadn’t sent in their new coordinate points because the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf had never considered submissions from a nation that wasn’t a party to the Law of the Sea. I asked the commission, If America submitted its shelf boundaries, would you review them? “This question has never been raised,” Aldino Campos, the chair of the commission, told me. He said it wouldn’t discuss whether to consider such a submission unless it actually receives one. But ultimately the commission only makes recommendations; actually asserting the new limits of a continental shelf falls to the United States.

Even though America hasn’t ratified the treaty, Kraska, the law professor, told me it has an obligation to comply with it. He argued that it has taken on the force of “customary international law”—that is, a set of norms and practices that are so widely followed that they become binding to all nations, whether or not they’re signatories. All told, he said, the U.S. has made a “credible, good-faith effort” to extend its continental shelf in accordance with the Law of the Sea.

Most mainstream U.S. government officials want America to ratify the treaty. Five presidents and at least five secretaries of state have urged Congress to join, arguing that it would help bolster the international rule of law. Becoming a party to the Law of the Sea would also allow the U.S. to further legitimize its expanded shelf.

Ever since Reagan, though, Republican lawmakers have staved off ratification, which requires two-thirds of the Senate. Along with conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation, they worry that the royalty schemes would impose an undue financial burden and that joining the treaty could result in a “dangerous loss of American sovereignty.”

Their calculus may soon change. As early as this year, the International Seabed Authority could finalize regulations that would open up mining on the international seafloor. Because America hasn’t ratified the Law of the Sea, it won’t have the right to participate. (Some conservatives argue, however, that the U.S. can simply do as it pleases on the international seafloor.) Pressure is mounting on lawmakers: In March, more than 300 former political and military leaders called on the Senate to ratify, reflecting concerns that America might not be able to keep up with China if it relies solely on its own shelf.

America may not mine its new seabed for decades anyhow. The role of the State Department, Van Pay and Baumert insist, is to set the fence posts, not referee what happens within them. In the meantime, America’s shelf could keep growing. “We always want to leave open that possibility,” Van Pay told me. More data could be collected, he said. “There are more invisible lines to draw.”

Many themes run through the Christian Bible: grace, forgiveness, concern for the suffering, love for neighbors, the pursuit of holiness. One theme that stands out clearly is the inscrutability and transcendence of God. In a passage in the book of Isaiah, God declares, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways … As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

Although Christians believe that God reigns supreme over history and will direct things to their proper end, the meanings of individual events are much more difficult to discern. For this reason, Christians are not quick to attribute natural disasters as a sign of God’s judgment on a particular place. We don’t believe that one can count the number of Christians on a sporting team and then give the team with the most Christians the victory. The world is more complicated than that. We are not always sure why some people get sick and their prayers for healing are answered, and why some people get sick and die. Promising prosperity and declaring a secret knowledge about the purposes of God have always been ways to gain applause, power, and money, but they are also dangerous and potentially heretical.

If all this is true of illness and catastrophe, how much more so of a presidential election? I know that more people cast their vote for Donald Trump than for Kamala Harris, and for that reason he was inaugurated yesterday. I cannot with confidence speak about God’s intervention in the matter. I was surprised, then, to hear the invocation at the inauguration attribute the outcome of the 2024 election to God’s positive will for America, and as an occasion for praise. That strikes me as hubris because it assumes the ability to know God’s opinion on an event in history.

[Read: Did God save Donald Trump?]

The story of Israel’s first king might be instructive. According to the narrative in the Bible, the people of Israel were often defeated by surrounding countries with better fighters. Therefore, the people asked for a king that was like the kings of other nations around the world. God gave the people exactly what they wanted, not as a sign of favor but in part as an act of judgment. Saul’s reign was long and troubled and ended in disaster, even though he came as an answer to the people’s request. One lesson from this event is that sometimes God allows people’s worst instincts to flourish so that they see the full error of their ways. According to the Bible, God later chose a different king, David, whom the people did not ask for or initially want.

The story of David and Saul, and the wider story of God, should make Christians cautious when trying to interpret events. There is just too much we do not know. Was the election of Donald Trump an occasion of God giving people what they want as a form of judgment, as with King Saul, or was it the raising up of God’s chosen, as with David? For a variety of character reasons, I am confident it is not the latter. God has already raised up the greater David—Jesus—and humanity is no longer in need of a savior. Still, I can’t say that Trump’s return to the White House is the result of God’s judgment upon America. History is too messy to make such plain proclamations.

I do know that Christians are commanded to pray for rulers and those in authority, because the more power a politician has, the more influence he wields in people’s lives. I will pray for Donald Trump just as I prayed for Joe Biden before him. Those prayers ought to have a certain focus: that our leaders use their power wisely to protect the vulnerable and establish justice for all.

[Tim Alberta: My father, my faith, and Donald Trump]

And when a member of the clergy is given the honor of praying in front of a leader, the prayer should not merely evoke a kind of divine mandate but remind the leader of his solemn responsibility. We serve those in power well when we help them remember there is someone to whom they must give an account. A good prayer for a person in power ought to leave them with knees trembling rather than head nodding.

I have strong disagreements with this president and his administration. I had strong disagreements with the previous administration as well. But I will pray for Donald Trump, because for good or ill, the fate of this president and the lives of so many here and abroad are now linked. Lord, have mercy.

In his contentious confirmation hearing, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, affirmed that his mission is “to bring the warrior culture back to the Department of Defense.” It is a terrible idea.

The archetype of the Western warrior is Homer’s Achilles. Superbly fit, the “swift runner” Achilles is magnificent in battle. He is an individualist, with dazzling armor and a troop of admiring Myrmidons who would follow him anywhere. His prowess in combat is unsurpassable. He is brought down only by a poisoned arrow (a sneaky weapon if ever there was one) fired by the wimpy Paris, whose seduction of Helen had started the Trojan War.

He is also the man who comes close to killing his boss, Agamemnon, over a favorite concubine; sulks in his tent; and weeps when he feels dishonored until his mother (a goddess) comforts him. In a rage over the death of his friend Patroclus in a fair fight, Achilles not only kills the Trojan prince Hector but then drags his body around Troy for his horrified parents and widow to see. An intervention by the gods is all that prevents the body from being ripped apart by this treatment, although Achilles’s initial hope (snarled at the dying Hector) was that dog packs and birds would rend the corpse of the man who fought to defend his city from the horrors of a sacking.

Achilles is a warrior, not a soldier. History has had plenty of warrior types, including some (think Geronimo) whom we celebrate even after vanquishing them. But let us remember that the brave (and yes, they are brave) ghazi fighters of the Islamic State and the mercenary killers of the Wagner Group had and have warrior cultures. Warriors are people who exult in killing, who prize individual courage and daring, who obsess about honor (often in self-destructive ways), who frequently take trophies from the bodies of their enemies, and whose behavior on and off the battlefield often veers into atrocity.

Soldiers are different. They are servants of the state. In well-governed countries, they are bound by discipline, the rule of law, and commitment to comrades and organizations—not to self-glorification. Their virtues are obedience, stoicism, perseverance, and competence. They serve a common good, and duty, not glory, is their prime motivation.

The distinction matters. If Europe and the United States overran large parts of the planet, it was because they deployed disciplined soldiers against, in many instances, more numerous warriors. Even well-organized warriors—think of Shaka’s Zulus, or the Iroquois confederacy—could rarely defeat well-drilled infantry. The British General C. E. Callwell’s Small Wars, a manual on imperial warfare, explains the outcomes of those and many other fights far better than Homer’s Iliad.

To be sure, these are ideal types, and in reality they may coexist, although with one set of qualities predominating. Arguably, for example, the armies of the Confederacy were more like warriors (the rebel yell, J. E. B. Stuart’s plumed hat, Pickett’s death-defying charge), and the Union more like soldiers (repeating rifles, rumpled Ulysses S. Grant, an ever-tightening naval blockade). We know how that turned out. It is no coincidence that one book that tries to explain the Confederacy’s exceptionally high losses, particularly among general officers, bears the title Attack and Die. Southern warriors liked to charge with the bayonet. And atrocities such as the Fort Pillow massacre of African American troops and the cruelty and mismanagement of Andersonville Prison had a lot to do with nonsoldierly behavior.

The infatuation with warrior culture—the strut and swagger, the desire to battle mano a mano—is not atypical of a certain kind of junior officer, which is what Hegseth was in the National Guard. It is a world apart from how the armed forces operate at scale, and from the extraordinarily complex business of the Department of Defense.

You don’t want Achilles in a nuclear submarine, you don’t need El Cid maintaining your stealth bomber, and you surely do not want Crazy Horse presiding over the urgent problem of renovating the American defense industrial base.

I have known some great soldiers (using the term to include sailors, airmen, and Marines), and by and large they are wary of warrior culture. They know that violence on the battlefield can easily spin out of control; they know that a very large part of their duty is the orchestration of large and intricate organizations and complex technologies. They prefer steadiness to impulse, calculation to intuition, and, above all, thoughtfulness about their profession to raging glorification of bloodshed. Jim Mattis and David Petraeus (to mention just two) are readers (and writers) of books; the special operators Stan McChrystal and William McRaven are anything but yellers and screamers.

And those are just the military people. Secretaries of defense are civilians, or should be. The appointment of Mattis in the first Trump administration could be supported on the grounds that an erratic new president needed someone in that position who would temper his wilder instincts. Typical for Trump though, he was disappointed to learn that Mattis was not, in fact, known as “Mad Dog” and hated the president’s use of the nickname. The appointment by President Joe Biden of another retired general, Lloyd Austin, was but one of a number of unforced errors that made his administration in many respects a failure.

The civilian secretary of defense should be tough and highly experienced—Bob Gates or, earlier, Melvin Laird—as well as a capable organizer, a respected counselor, a shrewd politician, and a forceful leader from outside military culture. The defense secretary’s job is often to represent civilian values to the military (think racial integration and acceptance of homosexuals in military service) and military values to the civilian world. They must administer a sprawling department with millions of civilian and military members, set an enormous range of policies, and, most important, exercise the consistent civilian oversight of military operations, which a president cannot. They are not in the warrior business. Indeed, some of the most effective secretaries have had negligible military experience, or none whatsoever.

Hegseth, quite apart from his turbulent personal life, has no qualifications for this position. The organizations he ran failed or lost considerable sums of money; his testimony (before an admittedly less-than-exacting set of interrogators) revealed broad areas of ignorance about defense. He seems to have gotten the nod because of his servility to Trump, and the tough-guy bluster of a resentful junior officer raging against higher-ups—an altogether common type throughout history, a trope rather than a qualification.

And this warrior-culture rhetoric is potentially dangerous. In his first term, President Trump reversed a number of decisions that the military made to enforce discipline—restoring rank and the coveted SEAL trident pin to Eddie Gallagher, and pardoning other officers convicted of or headed to trial for war crimes. Trump could do much worse with a secretary of defense who thinks his job is to free up the tough guys to do tough-guy things. Hegseth’s sneers at judge advocate general officers—military lawyers—were not merely juvenile but dangerous.

The real peril here is not a plot to destroy American liberties but fecklessness and ignorance about what it takes to build, strengthen, and direct a military that is powerful but not, in relative terms, as dominant as it once was. Half a century ago, the great student of management, Peter Drucker, said that running the Department of Defense might well be impossible. Perhaps, but it is most certainly impossible in the hands of someone whose idea of leadership of that organization is a jutting jaw, bravado, and war paint.

The mood of a Donald Trump rally typically follows a downhill trajectory, beginning with hot pretzels and Andrew Lloyd Webber, and concluding with grievances aired and retribution promised. But last night at Capital One Arena, the mood was jubilant all the way through.

This was Trump’s final rally before his triumphant return to the White House, and like high schoolers facing the promise of a lightly supervised all-night lock-in, attendees were giddy with anticipation. Fans dressed in Uncle Sam hats and scarlet peacoats crammed into the arena, which was lit up in shades of red and royal blue. Each rally-goer I spoke with was looking forward to something different from the next Trump presidency. “They’re doing a nice big raid up in Chicago, and I’m excited about that,” Will Matthews, from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, told me, referring to yet-unconfirmed rumors about where Trump’s promised mass deportations will begin. Jenny Heinl, who wore a PROUD J6ER sweatshirt, told me that she was eager “to hear about the pardons.”

The message across MAGA world was clear: The next four years are going to be big. “Everyone in our country will prosper; every family will thrive,” Trump promised last night. Speaking before him, Stephen Miller, the incoming deputy chief of staff for policy, predicted that America is “now at the dawn of our greatest victory.” Earlier in the day, Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist and the host of the War Room podcast, had hosted a brunch on Capitol Hill. He’d dubbed the event “The Beginning of History,” and, for better or worse, it is.

Throughout yesterday’s rain and snow in Washington, D.C., Trump’s supporters held tight to their joy. “I can’t believe we’re in!” I heard a woman shout to a friend as they dashed through the arena doors. The preceding few days had been bewildering. Citing the low temperatures, the Trump transition team announced on Friday that the inauguration would be moved indoors, to the Capitol Rotunda. A mad scramble ensued for the very limited supply of new tickets. In the end, a few fans will still get to watch in person. Most of them, though, will be right back at Capital One for an inauguration watch party.

One group of Trump fans had carpooled together from Canada to attend the inauguration, and wore matching red sweatshirts reading MAPLE SYRUP MAGA. They were disappointed about the venue change—14 degrees is not cold, the Canadians insisted—but they were still happy they’d made the trip. “If Trump hadn’t been elected,” Mary, who had come from St. Catharines, Ontario, and asked to use only her first name, told me, there would be more and more “woke bullshit.” For Mary and her friends, Trump’s reelection means that there will instead be an end to the fentanyl crisis, tighter border security, and a stronger example for other Western countries.

Sharon Stevenson, from Cartersville, Georgia, had joined a caravan of dozens of Georgians traveling to the rally, and had waited in line for more than seven hours to get inside the arena. The effort, she assured me, was “100 percent worth it.” Stevenson and her friends were eager to lay out their expectations for Trump. “The biggest thing for me is to investigate all the fraud,” she said. The “stolen election,” the January 6 “massacre”—“it’s going to come out under this administration.” Her friend, Anita Stewart from Suwanee, Georgia, told me that her priority was health, and that she was particularly excited about the prospect of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the Department of Health and Human Services. “I’m looking forward to hopefully no more commercials for drugs!” Plus affordable groceries, she said—and cheap gas.

With a wishlist so long, and expectations so immense, one wonders how Trump’s supporters will respond if the about-to-be president doesn’t meet them all. When I asked Stevenson that question, she smiled and shook her head. “Promises made, promises kept,” she said. “If there’s one person who keeps their word, it’s Donald Trump.”

[Read: What Trump did to law enforcement]

During the roughly three hours before the headliner took the stage, his supporters ate chicken fingers and posed for the Jumbotron camera as it swung around the arena. They bowed their heads when the hosts of the MAGA favorite Girls Gone Bible podcast asked God to bless Trump, and sang along as the musician Kid Rock performed a mini-concert, including his 2022 single “We the People,” featuring a brand-new lyric in honor of the inauguration: “Straighten up, sucker, cause Daddy’s home.”

The political pronouncements really got going at about 4 p.m., starting with Miller, who received a hero’s welcome from the crowd and said that Trump’s win represented “the triumph of the everyday citizen over a corrupt system.” (As he spoke, the incoming first lady, Melania Trump, was on X announcing the launch of a meme coin to match her husband’s new one, a development that turned the family into crypto-billionaires over the weekend.) Later, Megyn Kelly, the former Fox host turned MAGA podcaster, hailed “the goodness that is about to rain down” under Trump’s leadership. And Donald Trump Jr., fresh from his recent mission to Greenland, affirmed that the next four years will be his father’s “pièce de résistance.”

When at last Trump arrived onstage, he was greeted ecstatically as the embodiment of his allies’ declarations and his followers’ dreams. He teased his plans to sign nearly 100 executive orders today, including what he has described as a “joint venture” with the parent company of TikTok and a ban on transgender people serving openly in the military. “You’re gonna have a lot of fun watching television,” he predicted. Before welcoming the Village People to join him onstage for an exuberant rendition of “YMCA,” Trump ran through a list of additional priorities to come: the largest deportation operation in American history, lower taxes, higher wages, and an end to overseas wars. “The American people have given us their trust,” Trump declared, “and in return we’re going to give them the best first day, the biggest first week, and the most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history.”

That history begins at noon.

In 2016, the South Korean novelist Han Kang won the International Booker Prize for The Vegetarian, the first of her novels to be translated into English. The novel, in which a woman who suddenly refuses to eat meat is treated as if she were mad, was read as a parable of the modern condition, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis or “A Hunger Artist,” updated for the age of feminism and ecopolitics. In October, with three more of her novels now available in English and at least 20 other languages, the Swedish Academy awarded Han the Nobel Prize, elevating her to the empyrean realm reserved for writers of what is sometimes called world literature.

Internationally famous authors need no pity, but the status comes with vulnerabilities. Having been turned into global ambassadors for their culture, they are often accused of becoming deracinated and defanged. Han has dodged the charge so far. But suspicion fell on the English-language translator of The Vegetarian, Deborah Smith, when the novel was propelled into the spotlight. Smith mistranslated some words, but her harsher detractors accused her of betraying Han’s limpid, understated style, torquing it so as to hold the attention of Western readers.

Works transposed into foreign languages—and cultures—inevitably suffer omissions and distortion. That doesn’t make them less authentic. But if you’re trying to understand what Han is up to, adjudicating the stylistic accuracy of the translation is less important than deepening your knowledge of the work’s context, which, like South Korea itself, is at once decidedly Korean and very cosmopolitan.

In The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century, Adam Kirsch argues that “globalism is not just a fate thrust upon writers, but a theme that writers see it as a duty and an opportunity to explore.” What makes a novel global is not that its author has become a worldwide brand, but that it originates in a consciousness of living and writing in a world with permeable borders, and a desire to make sense of that experience. By Kirsch’s definition, Han writes global novels. Most of them deal—some more obliquely than others—with South Korea’s bloody past as a pawn in great-power politics and the war against Communism.

Perhaps that sounds didactic; rest assured that her novels foreground richly specific narratives about individual characters. History still seeps in, and all the more so when the details have largely been forgotten or obscured. Memories of horrors that younger South Koreans can no longer name produce uncanny symptoms in their bodies and dreams. Han, who is also a poet, commands an impressive arsenal of literary devices, and in her hands, the national repression of trauma—what Milan Kundera called “organized forgetting”—even affects the weather. The pathetic fallacy hasn’t been put to such good use in fiction since Wuthering Heights.

Weather plays a major role in, and may in fact be the main character of, Han’s latest novel, We Do Not Part, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. Much of the action takes place during a massive blizzard, and the wind and precipitation and skies all have an eerie salience. The snow, though, is most saturated with meaning. It exhibits both agency and pathos, as if possessed by ghosts. Snow blocks the narrator’s way during an urgent journey. It effaces the features of people and landscapes the way amnesia erases memories, and yet it also awakens recollections, many of them unbearable, in those it falls upon. Snow clings desolately to eyelashes and noses. It even weeps, blowing into eyes and melting into tears.

We Do Not Part opens with a nightmare that torments the narrator, Kyungha, night after night, and always makes her wake up in a panic. She is standing before a plain containing vast numbers of ink-black lopped-off tree trunks. Suddenly the sea rises and starts to flood the plain. She knows, with the certainty of a dream, that the mutilated trees mark graves, and that she must stop the water, right now, from dredging up and desecrating the bones. But how?

Kyungha is a writer who published a book about a massacre that took place in a city referred to as G—. As it happens, Han wrote a novel Human Acts, about a pro-democracy movement led by students and activists in Gwangju in 1980 that was put down with extreme violence. Possibly as many as 2,000 protesters (the exact number is not known), most of them young and all deemed to be Communists, were murdered. The novel describes, among other barbaric acts, how soldiers and police threw bodies carelessly into trucks that carted them off to be hidden or burned. Kyungha’s research into G— has left her in a suicidal fugue. She has lost touch with friends; her husband has abandoned her and seems to have taken their daughter with him. Now she lives alone in a tiny rental apartment just outside Seoul, if endlessly rewriting her will and not eating or sleeping can be called living. She is as helpless in life as she is in the nightmare.

[Read: Han Kang’s transgressive art]

Kyungha comes up with a project that she thinks will exorcize it. She will collaborate with a friend, Inseon, a documentary filmmaker, on an art film. The plan is to re-create the dream, setting up dozens of tree trunks on a large piece of land, and then wait for winter and shoot the snow falling over the trunks, “as white as cloth to drape down from the skies and blanket them all.” Han doesn’t interpret the dream or its remedy for us, but we understand that the trunks and bones are meant to stand in for the unburied dead of G—, and that the snow is to serve as their shroud.

Han’s novels vary in style, but they form an unusually interconnected whole—in an interview, a member of the Nobel Prize committee noted “a continuity as to themes that is quite remarkable”—and the color white is a motif in all of them. It is mostly associated with birth and death. Han’s brief, lyrical novel The White Book, about an older sister of the narrator who died a few hours after she was born, begins with a list of “white things,” each of which then becomes the subject of a short meditation. Included on the list are “shroud” and “snow,” as well as “white bird”; along with the enshrouding snow, white birds play a role in We Do Not Part.

The temptation to read the white things of this novel as metaphors or omens is hard to resist. They do function figuratively. Looking through the window of an airplane at an approaching blizzard, for instance, Kyungha mistakes the swirling snow for “tens of thousands of white-feathered birds flying right along the horizon.” They could be albatrosses hovering over the Ancient Mariner.

But the white things do more than symbolize. Like the snow, white birds participate in the action as full-fledged characters. Inseon, who lives alone on Jeju Island, off the coast of the Korean peninsula, is devoted to a pair of white budgerigars—a kind of parakeet—that are nominally pets, but really companions; they speak in words because that’s what parakeets do, but maybe there’s more to it than that. Kyungha is flying into a storm because Inseon, who has been evacuated to a mainland hospital after a horrible accident, has asked her to travel to her remote mountain home to rescue one of the budgies (the other died earlier). Kyungha is incredulous that she agreed to undertake such a dangerous expedition just to save a bird. As she transfers from the plane to a bus, from which she will transfer to another bus and then walk to Inseon’s house, the wind picks up and the snow falls ever more heavily.

Kyungha’s trip to Jeju Island turns out to be merely a frame narrative for a much more terrifying journey, which is into history: Inseon’s history is bound up with the history of the island, which in turn recapitulates the history of South Korea itself. Over the course of the novel, Inseon tells Kyungha how she pieced together a past that her mother had shielded her from. Han’s ability to drop references to momentous events offhandedly, as if they were part of everyday life, is on full display here. As an angry teenager who develops a passionate hatred for everything about her life, particularly her stooped, seemingly subservient mother, Inseon runs away to Seoul, falls through a snowbank into a pit, and nearly dies. When she wakes up in a hospital several days later, her mother is by her side. She had known that something had happened to Inseon, she tells her daughter, because she’d dreamed that she saw her with snow on her face.

A little later, Inseon explains why her mother would have had that dream: “When she was young, soldiers and police had murdered everyone in her village.” (Most of Inseon’s stories are in italics, at least in the translation.) Inseon’s mother and her older sister had been away visiting cousins in another village; when they came home, snow had fallen on the corpses heaped on the grounds of the elementary school, covering their faces, and the sisters couldn’t figure out which were the bodies of family members. So the older sister took out her handkerchief and told Inseon’s mother that she’d wipe the faces, and “you get a good look at them.” And that, Inseon says, is how her mother, as a child, learned that when people died, “snow remained on their cheeks, and a thin layer of bloody ice set over their faces.”

[Read: A novel in which language hits its limit—and keeps on going]

As Inseon follows clues left by her mother, whom she cared for during the last years of her life, We Do Not Part turns into a mystery and a ghost story. It’s a mystery because what happened on Jeju Island—in reality, not just in this novel—is not well known in South Korea, any more than it was to Inseon: In the run-up to the Korean War, the authorities suppressed an uprising there with shocking brutality, in the name of anti-Communism. Historians still aren’t sure whether the death toll was 30,000 or upwards of 80,000, out of a population of about 300,000—far more deadly than the outcome in Gwangju. For half a century afterward, well into the 1990s, few people talked about the slaughter on Jeju Island or dared to search for the dead and missing, because to do so was a crime punishable by torture and imprisonment. In the novel, Inseon learns that her quiet mother had, over the course of decades and in the face of real danger, been active in the movement to recover the remains, inspired by the disappearance of her brother, whom Inseon had never even heard of.

The novel is also a ghost story because hauntings are involved, both the usual kind and others that are the product of Han’s singular imagination. Once Kyungha makes it to Inseon’s home, the place turns out to be suspended between life and death. Neither Kyungha nor the reader is sure whether she is being visited by the revenants of the house’s previous occupants or has already joined them in the afterlife. Outside the house, the wind howls and the snow falls and, having fallen, muffles all sound, and we grasp that the elements are animated by the restless spirits of the tens of thousands who were never accounted for or given a proper burial.

Beyond that, a very large specter broods, palpable even though it never quite comes into view. You could call it the ghost of global history. The proximate cause of the war crimes chronicled in Han’s novels is South Korea’s succession of authoritarian governments, their soldiers and police; on Jeju Island, these were joined by gangs of right-wing thugs. But some of us in the West may have forgotten who the occupying power was at the time, and those who have not forgotten may never have known the extent to which it propped up those regimes and participated in anti-Communist counterinsurgency campaigns—including on Jeju Island. I knew very little of this history when I began to read Han’s novels, nor was I aware that during the Vietnam War, the same foreign government used more than 300,000 Korean troops, essentially as mercenaries, among them soldiers later accused of committing atrocities against Vietnamese civilians. Some Korean veterans of that war were also involved in suppressing uprisings such as the one in Gwangju. These discoveries came as a shock, because the occupier I’m talking about is, of course, the United States.

With her characteristically light touch, Han alludes to American culpability only in passing. In The Vegetarian, we learn that the protagonist’s abusive father earned a medal for his service in Vietnam, but the significance of that fact is not explained. In Human Acts, a character recounts a story about Korean soldiers burning Vietnamese villagers alive and adds, “Some of those who came to slaughter us did so with the memory of those previous times.” A line in We Do Not Part informs us that American military planes released propaganda leaflets over Jeju Island promising amnesty to rebels who turned themselves in; they were arrested anyway.

People in one country often fail to realize how implicated they are in the personal histories of people in countries halfway around the world. Han’s novels never make direct accusations, but her very tact makes the implied indictment all the more devastating. She draws American readers into foreign calamities that their own forebears had a hand in creating, and then offers a very limited kind of redemption—the chance to discover, for themselves, that legacy of shame. Better yet, we do so from the edges of the drama, not the center, where so many American movies about interventions in places like Vietnam seem determined to put us. Globalization is responsible for many bad things, but as Han demonstrates, the global novel is not one of them.

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “Where Han Kang’s Nightmares Come From.”

A century after your death, what traces of your life will remain? Perhaps someone might find discarded clothing or a few boxes’ worth of cherished effects: china, jewelry, a watch, a toy. Your signature on official forms may linger, along with plenty of photos, likely in an outdated file format. What will these scattered items say about you? Even if everything from your time on Earth—every letter, text, tax filing, piece of furniture, and knickknack—were to be preserved, would you be confident that a researcher drawing on your personal archive could accurately describe the kind of person you were, or understand the life you led? Would you want them to speak for you?

Now consider how little of consequence actually survives the churn of human affairs. Mold eats away at diaries and letters. Technological failures and fires swallow family photos. Natural disasters displace neighbors. War annihilates the keepers of memories. The constellation of small things that make up a life is blown apart so easily that historians, biographers, and archivists make accounting for these commonplace losses part of their process.

But there are other ways to reconstitute a person’s life. Fiction, which thrives on the tiny, telling details most easily lost to time, finds opportunity in these open spaces. Whatever can’t be found can be imagined. Here, many writers have flourished, creating works of historical recovery that seek to excavate the dead and the lost. Novels such as Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail and Patrick Modiano’s pair of Dora Bruder books home in on individual lives and intimate experiences effaced by barbarities or tragedies. But the endeavor to resurrect the forgotten can be fraught—especially when the person being brought back was the victim of a shattering atrocity.

In her new novel, The Rest Is Memory, Lily Tuck tries out this mode. About a decade ago, the writer came across three photos in The New York Times of a 14-year-old Polish Catholic girl named Czesława Kwoka. In the pictures, taken during her imprisonment at Auschwitz, Czesława appears starved and bruised, with a shaved head and frightened stare. The images grabbed Tuck, who cut them out of the paper and kept them. She could find only the most basic information about the girl with the glare: Czesława came from a small village in southeastern Poland; arrived at Auschwitz on December 13, 1942, with her mother; was tattooed with an ID number, 26947; and was executed on March 12, 1943. Everything else was lost.

So Tuck aimed to fill in the blanks. In an afterword, she describes Memory as “an attempt to bring to life a young life tragically lost.” She imagines Czesława’s life as a Polish Catholic peasant through a collection of broad attributes easily extrapolated from what’s known about her class, her time, and her home. Tuck writes that Czesława has a father, Pawel, who poaches game animals and yells; a mother who once fell in love with a pilot; a guard dog who makes her anxious; a favorite orange hen named Kinga; and a youthful crush on a boy with a motorcycle. Tuck presents these characteristics in a series of fragmented present-tense passages, some declarative—“Her mother’s name is Katarzyna”—and some descriptive, such as a passage about her favorite food, the creamy karpatka cake.

But Tuck also attempts to illuminate the particular life of the girl and her family with textural, novelistic details. We learn, for instance, that her father’s laugh “makes shivers run up and down her back,” and that he is missing the middle finger of his left hand from “an accident skinning the wild boar,” which left a stump that still bleeds. Czesława likes to taste the snow on her tongue, loves to play jacks, and reads to her grandmother from her favorite book: Kaytek the Wizard, by Janusz Korczak.

Tuck embeds her fictionalized passages within a panoply of explicitly nonfictional paragraphs, full of footnoted information on Nazi agrarian policy, the 1940 Katyń massacre, and the operations of the Auschwitz camps, as well as excerpts from a book about the prisoner and photographer Wilhelm Brasse, who took the pictures that so grabbed Tuck. She quotes from perverse evidence, such as ID numbers, camp records, and estimates of the market value of shaved human hair, and she uses these pieces of corroboration to expand outward. Eventually, the novel grows to encompass a network of victims and perpetrators: Polish aristocrats, other prisoners in the women’s barracks, the famed writer Tadeusz Borowski, and the camp commandant Rudolf Höss, along with his wife, Hedwig.

In these factual sections, Tuck’s voice is sober and unadorned, befitting the overwhelming horror of the subject matter. Set beside the naturalistic fictions, they shock, particularly when Tuck leaps associatively between the two modes. A short description of how the ashes and excrement of the Auschwitz prisoners were dumped into the Vistula and Sola Rivers is immediately followed by a discussion between two girls about swimming—a disturbing evocation of the domestic in the demonic. Tuck denies us the comforts of the novel, refusing to quarantine the real at a safe distance from the fictional. She demands that we consider them side by side, two expressions of the same material.

This approach firmly establishes the context for Czesława’s suffering and death. But per Tuck, Memory is meant to bring her back to life, and here the author stumbles. The details she dreams up for Czesława recur throughout the novel, first as descriptions and then as conversation in the camp, twisted brutally by the circumstances: Her youthful love of karpatka curdles into a reflection on starvation. Yet when juxtaposed against the litany of facts and figures, these inventions are exposed as flimsy, easily dwarfed by the documentation. The more solidly Tuck draws the world around her protagonist, the more uncertain the writer’s picture of her becomes. Surely there was much more to her life than her chicken, her mother, her cakes, and her death. Surely she had bugbears, irritations, and emotional leaps both characteristic of and distinct from those of her parents, her neighbors, and her annihilated countrypeople. But, unable or perhaps unwilling to sufficiently imagine these things, Tuck reduces Czesława to an amalgam of facts, details, and anecdotes—a person viewed from the outside in. The author becomes less novelist than prosecutor, establishing the facts of the case but losing the texture of experience, which is to say: what distinguishes life from evidence.

Bringing the dead to life is no easy task, of course. To take up their voice is to run the risk of effacing it altogether—and when other writers make the attempt, it is typically with an acknowledgment of their limitations. In Minor Detail, released in English in 2020, Adania Shibli tells the true story of the 1949 rape and murder of a Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers. She, like Tuck, fractures her narrative, depicting it first from the perspective of the child’s killers and then from the point of view of a fictional modern-day Palestinian woman, whose investigation of the buried incident results in her own death. This recurrence of atrocity is made inevitable, the novel shows, by the laws and restrictions created by those who had committed the crime in the first place.

Shibli’s narrator feels drawn to her subject by a coincidence: The murder occurred on her birthday, 25 years before she was born. Patrick Modiano feels a similar kinship to the subject of his two books about a young Jewish girl who disappeared in a part of Paris with which he was deeply familiar. At first, the Nobel winner had little more information on Dora Bruder than a missing-person’s report, published on New Year’s Eve 1941: a description of a “young girl … age 15, height 1 m 55,” with a round face, a sports jacket, and “brown gym shoes.” Dora had defied the curfew and run away from her parents, who were asking the public for help. The description grabbed him, and in his 1990 novel, Honeymoon, he imagined a life for her as a fugitive who survives the Holocaust by meeting a man and fleeing to the south.

Yet this imagined survival was not enough for him. Over the next several years, Modiano continued to investigate Dora’s story, discovering her birth certificate, photos of her family, and, eventually, the record of her deportation to Auschwitz on September 18, 1942, six months before Czesława’s murder in the camp. For his follow-up about Dora, named Dora Bruder after her, Modiano has much more data at his disposal than Tuck, allowing him to include other forms of evidence, such as the letter from a deportee found at a bookstall along the Seine.

Still, Dora Bruder is also filled with many qualifications; perhaps might be the author’s favorite word. There is too much he doesn’t know and can’t ever find out—including where Dora went when she ran away. “I shall never know how she spent [those] days,” he concludes, “a poor and precious secret that not even the executioners, the decrees, the occupying authorities, the Dépôt, the barracks, the camps, History, time—everything that defiles and destroys you—have been able to take away from her.” This gap, this absence, is Dora Bruder, and by refusing to fill it, Modiano allows the absence to testify on her behalf: She hid, she lived, and for a time she was a human being who transcended the incomplete image of her conjured by all this evidence. Her escape from the author stands in for a greater spiritual liberation; wisely, he lets her get away.

In Memory, Tuck too seeks knowledge she cannot gain. But rather than acknowledging this unfixable emptiness, she attempts to patch it over with her ultimately insufficient inventions, creating a fiction that, when surrounded by so much indisputable fact, can only collapse inward. Some holes can’t be filled, and no writer, no matter how skilled, can return their subject to anything truly resembling life.

The outgoing Canadian prime minister was a 'progressive' fraud and a liar. History will judge him harshly.

In September 2016, the CIA sent a classified memo to the FBI, which was investigating Russian interference in the presidential election. According to Russian intelligence sources, Hillary Clinton had approved a plan to publicly tie Donald Trump to the country’s hack of the Democratic National Committee. The Russians reportedly said that Clinton wanted to distract the public from the scandal over her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.

As secret tips from spies go, this one was not earth-shattering. FBI agents didn’t need the CIA to tell them that Clinton was painting Trump as an ally of the Kremlin—her campaign chair was on CNN saying just that. Trump was also making Clinton’s case for her: In late July, he had publicly encouraged the Russians to hack her email, which they then tried to do.

The CIA memo may have been obvious and not particularly useful. But it did contain “sensitive information that could be source revealing,” its authors cautioned, so the information was limited to those with a “need-to-know” status and “should not be released in any form.” Exposing human sources—spies—compromises intelligence gathering and can sometimes get them killed. For four years, the document’s stewards complied and kept it secret. Then it caught the attention of John Ratcliffe, President Trump’s director of national intelligence.

[Read: Clinton: Just trust me on this one]

Ratcliffe had been a divisive pick for the nation’s top intelligence adviser, made late in Trump’s term. His critics said he lacked sufficient national-security experience and was a partisan warrior. As a freshman Republican congressman from Texas, he had risen to national prominence by suggesting a theory, during committee hearings and television appearances, that Clinton had engineered the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible connections to Russian interference. (Ratcliffe surely knew that she had not, because this had been exhaustively established by multiple investigations, including one led by Senate Republicans.)

In late September 2020, weeks before voters would choose between Trump and Joe Biden, Ratcliffe declassified and released the CIA memo, along with some notes from an intelligence briefing given to President Barack Obama. He claimed that he was responding to requests from Congress to shed light on the FBI’s Russia investigation, but the documents didn’t provide much new information.

Intelligence officials were appalled. History had repeatedly, painfully, shown that politics and intelligence were a dangerous mix, and as the DNI, Ratcliffe was expected to avoid partisan behavior and safeguard sources and methods. Also, officials warned, the Russians might have wanted that memo to be released; even four years on, anything mentioning Clinton, Russia, and Trump was politically combustible and potentially disruptive to the election. Gina Haspel, then the director of the CIA (a Trump appointment), opposed the document’s release. So did officials at the National Security Agency.

But to Trump and some of his advisers, the memo had a certain expedience. The president seized on it as new evidence of Clinton’s hidden hand in the “Russia hoax,” a subject that reliably caused him to rage against his supposed enemies inside the intelligence agencies.

[Read: Trump vs. the spies]

“It is imperative that the American people now learn what then–Vice President Joe Biden knew about this conspiracy and when he knew it,” the Trump campaign’s communications director said in a statement at the time. “Biden must give a full accounting of his knowledge and his conversations about Clinton’s scheme, which was known to the highest reaches of his administration.”

Trump himself made passing reference to the intelligence in his first debate with Biden, accusing Clinton of “a whole big con job” and the intelligence community of “spying on my campaign.”

Ratcliffe had cherry-picked just the thing to feed Trump’s fixation on “deep state” chicanery and malfeasance. The act was nakedly political. And it surprised no one.

Ratcliffe’s appeal to Trump has always been clear: He’s a political operator willing to push the boundaries of a historically apolitical position in a manner that serves the president’s interests. In November, Trump nominated Ratcliffe for an even more important job than the previous one: CIA director. The question likely to hang over his tenure is how much further he will go to enable Trump’s attacks on the intelligence community.

When Trump nominated Ratcliffe as the DNI in 2019, he gave him marching orders to “rein in” the forces that the president believed were undermining him. “As I think you’ve all learned, the intelligence agencies have run amok,” Trump told reporters. Ratcliffe would get them back in line. But lawmakers were wary of appointing such a staunch partisan, and amid concerns about his experience, Democrats and key Republicans questioned whether he had exaggerated his credentials, something Ratcliffe denied. After only five days, Ratcliffe (who declined to be interviewed for this article) withdrew his candidacy. Trump nominated him again in 2020, and he was narrowly confirmed along party lines, 49–44. He received more votes in opposition than any DNI in the office’s 15-year history.

[Read: Ratcliffe’s withdrawal reveals Trump still doesn’t understand appointments]

When Trump named Ratcliffe as his pick for CIA director, he again made his expectations clear: He praised Ratcliffe for exposing alleged abuses by the FBI and former intelligence officials, and for showing “fake Russian collusion to be a Clinton campaign operation.” But this time, the response in Washington has been muted.

Having served as the DNI for eight months, Ratcliffe is now better qualified to run an intelligence agency. He also benefits from comparison with Trump’s other choices for top national-security positions: at the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth, who has been accused of sexual assault and alcohol abuse (he has denied the allegations); at the FBI, Kash Patel, a fervent Trump supporter who has threatened to investigate the president’s critics, including journalists; and for the DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, a former congresswoman who has expressed sympathy for some of the world’s most notorious anti-American dictators, including Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad.

Compared with these selections, Ratcliffe looks like an elder statesman, and he has essentially been anointed: The Senate will almost certainly confirm him, which will make Ratcliffe the only person ever to have served as both the DNI and the director of the CIA. Several U.S. and allied intelligence officials told me that they would welcome this development, given the alternatives. Patel had been on Trump’s shortlist to run the CIA, some reminded me.

[Read: Trump’s ‘deep state’ revenge]

But the question of where Ratcliffe’s limits lie is even more salient in Trump’s second term. Though the DNI technically ranks higher than the director of the CIA, the latter is the more powerful post. The DNI is largely a managerial job; the CIA director is operational. From Langley, Ratcliffe would control covert intelligence activity. He could learn the locations and identities of spies. The CIA is also the primary interlocutor for foreign intelligence services, which share information that could implicate their sources if exposed. Several foreign intelligence officials have recently told me that they are taking steps to limit how much sensitive intelligence they share with the Trump administration, for fear that it might be leaked or used for political ends.

Some U.S. officials fear that Trump could direct the CIA to undertake illegal activities, such as aiding paramilitary forces inside the United States to secure the border, or clandestinely spying on Americans, knowing that the president would enjoy criminal immunity for official acts thanks to a recent Supreme Court opinion. These are extreme examples, and Trump would surely face internal resistance. But Ratcliffe has demonstrated that he’s willing to break norms and traditions. How would he respond if the president asked—or ordered—him to do something more drastic than declassify documents?

Though Trump has turned to Ratcliffe twice to “rein in” the deep state, his political origin story is actually rooted in the security state’s expansion. After graduating from Notre Dame in 1986, when he was only 20, Ratcliffe went to law school and then into private practice in Texas. “But something was missing,” he told senators at his DNI confirmation hearing. On September 11, 2001, Ratcliffe said, he was at work in a high-rise office building in Dallas that “looked a whole lot like the ones in New York that were under attack”—and he wondered, in the months that followed, how he might devote his time to more meaningful work.

Ratcliffe had gotten to know Matt Orwig, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas and a George W. Bush appointee. Orwig needed someone to run a joint terrorism task force, one of the dozens set up after the attacks to coordinate federal and regional security efforts. The goal was not only to prosecute terrorism crimes but to prevent them from happening. Ratcliffe took the job in 2004.

“The whole law-enforcement structure was being remade,” Orwig told me. “There was a lot of information flooding in from different authorities. It was a really big job.” In 2007, Orwig stepped down, and Ratcliffe became U.S. attorney for 11 months. Afterward, he returned to private practice, running the Dallas office of a firm he co-founded with John Ashcroft, Bush’s first attorney general.

Ashcroft became Ratcliffe’s political mentor, an association that seems ironic in retrospect. Ashcroft was in many ways an architect of the powerful national-security bureaucracy that Trump and Ratcliffe now rail against. After 9/11, the attorney general oversaw and approved controversial applications of the PATRIOT Act and other new authorities, including secret wiretapping of phone calls involving Americans. Such counterterrorism measures enhanced the powers of the Justice Department and the intelligence community, and occasionally encroached on civil liberties that Americans had long taken for granted.

Ratcliffe and Ashcroft shared a deeply conservative political outlook, and Ashcroft admired the younger attorney’s commitment to community service. Ratcliffe was also serving as the mayor of Heath, Texas, a bedroom community where he lived with his wife and two children. Ashcroft thought Ratcliffe was suited for national leadership. “We decided he should run for Congress,” Ashcroft told me, and in 2014, Ratcliffe did.

Ratcliffe at his congressional-campaign headquarters in Heath, Texas, March 19, 2014 (Kim Leeson / The Washington Post / Getty)

[Read: The case of John Ashcroft]

Getting to Washington would test Ratcliffe’s budding political skills. Ralph Hall, a conservative Democrat who switched to the GOP in 2004, had reliably represented the fourth congressional district, where Ratcliffe lived, since 1981. At 91, Hall was the oldest-ever member of the House of Representatives, and his voters seemed in no mood to replace him with a young upstart. But the Tea Party was elevating a new generation of conservatives who were suspicious of entrenched power, and in a bid for change that avoided taking aim at Hall’s age, Ratcliffe promised to bring “energetic leadership” to the district. “It’ll be up to the voters to decide whether or not a candidate is too old,” Ratcliffe, who was 42 years younger than Hall, told reporters at the time.

Ratcliffe picked up endorsements from conservative groups, including the Club for Growth, and eventually defeated Hall in a runoff. He was the first primary challenger to beat a Republican incumbent in Texas in 20 years. His political acumen was now beyond dispute, according to Todd Gillman, a reporter for The Dallas Morning News. “Affable. Discreet. Knife fighter,” Gillman wrote in a recent column for The Washington Post. “All of it was there to see when Ratcliffe took down the oldest member of Congress ever without coming off like a jerk.”

In Washington, Ratcliffe discovered the full extent of his talents, which included a lawyerly facility for constructing political narratives that appealed to Republicans. He fell in with fellow conservatives who were also new to Congress. Trey Gowdy, another former federal prosecutor, introduced him to his fellow South Carolinian Tim Scott. The three spent many evenings together, eating dinner and talking about their lives and political ideas.

Gowdy helped Ratcliffe raise his national profile and get Trump’s attention. At a hearing in September 2016, the congressman grilled James Comey, the FBI director, about the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server, questioning whether officials had already decided that there was no prosecutable crime when they sat down to interview the presidential candidate. Ratcliffe was aggressive but not hectoring. His questions were clearly prepared, but his delivery seemed unrehearsed. He corrected Comey’s account of a chain of events in the FBI’s investigation, prompting the director to admit that he might have been misremembering. It wasn’t exactly a gotcha moment, but Ratcliffe showed that he could confuse an adversary with a blizzard of facts.

After Ratcliffe finished with Comey, Gowdy passed him a handwritten note: “100 percent A+.”

“That was really a moment for me where I thought, You know, I’m really where I’m supposed to be,” Ratcliffe recalled in 2021 on a podcast that Gowdy hosts.

Ratcliffe credited Gowdy with steering his career. “You said to me, ‘Johnny, focus on what you do well, get better at it, and shut up about the rest.’ And I literally followed that advice. In other words, only go on TV to talk about things that you know about. Don’t try and be a master of all trades. Do the things that you do really well and people will notice, and it will serve you well. And it did.”

Gowdy helped make Ratcliffe a go-to interrogator when congressional committees wanted to quiz the FBI or poke holes in the Russia investigation. Ratcliffe stuck to a theme of pernicious bias against Trump. He suggested that political animus, not genuine concern about foreign-intelligence threats, was the impetus behind the Russia probe. He also suggested that the CIA—the agency he is about to lead—may have kicked off the investigation. (It did not, and this is among the fringiest views that Ratcliffe has flirted with.)

[Read: Don’t let the Russia probe become the new Benghazi]

Ratcliffe’s performances impressed Trump. But although he, Gowdy, and Scott are deeply conservative, they are not MAGA Republicans. They seem to share Trump’s antipathy toward the federal bureaucracy. But their political ideas were shaped by forces that gave rise to Trump, not by the man himself. Gowdy, who left Congress in 2019, got on Trump’s bad side for not embracing his conspiracy theories about Democrats spying on his campaign, and Scott competed against Trump in the GOP’s 2024 presidential primary.

As for Ratcliffe, he has more fiercely defended Trump as a victim of an unfair system than championed him as a hero sent to fix it. In one of the most-watched hearings of the Trump era, Ratcliffe lit into Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the language of his final report, which stated that although the investigation “does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” That was an unfair standard no American should face, Ratcliffe insisted. “Donald Trump is not above the law,” he thundered. “But he damn sure shouldn’t be below the law.”

It was a principled position, and perhaps a reflection of sincere disquiet about the politicization of law enforcement and the intelligence community. Ashcroft told me that he shares such concerns and speaks with Ratcliffe four or five times a year about reforming the system. But when Ratcliffe takes these stances, he also gives credence to Trump’s refrains about “Crooked Hillary” and the deep state. And he makes little effort to distinguish Trump’s critique from his own.

Jim Jordan speaks to Ratcliffe during a House Judiciary Committee hearing, December 9, 2019. (Zach Gibson / Getty)

[Read: Republicans take their shot at Mueller—and narrowly miss]

Ratcliffe probably wouldn’t have become the director of national intelligence if not for another pro-Trump partisan, Richard Grenell. The then-ambassador to Germany was also serving as the acting intelligence director when Trump nominated Ratcliffe for the second time, in 2020. The president essentially forced the Senate to choose between the two. Grenell had long been loathed and even feared in some quarters of Congress for his heated rhetoric and vicious social-media attacks. Suddenly, Ratcliffe seemed like the less political option.

Ratcliffe took office less than six months before the 2020 election. The intelligence agencies he now led were on guard against foreign governments trying to skew political contests with misleading social-media posts and divisive propaganda. Russia, once again, was a top concern.

Nothing angered Trump like talk of Russia trying to help him win an election. His aides had learned to avoid the subject. The president had identified China as the biggest strategic threat to the United States, an assessment that many Democrats and Republicans shared, Ratcliffe among them. But career intelligence analysts doubted that China intended to disrupt the election. What Beijing really wanted was stability in its relationship with Washington, they argued. Trying to help one candidate win, as Russia had in 2016, could backfire.

[Read: Trump’s intelligence war is also an election story]

In August 2020, the intelligence community produced a classified assessment of election threats. Then Ratcliffe intervened, analysts have said, and inserted a warning about China that was an “outrageous misrepresentation of their analysis,” according to a later report by an intelligence ombudsman.

The DNI typically does not help write intelligence assessments, because he is a political appointee, and so his involvement could present a conflict of interest. But Ratcliffe argued that although his intervention was unusual, it was not unprecedented, nor was it inappropriate. He maintained that the analysts were thinking too narrowly: China’s well-documented efforts to lobby state and local officials, and to steal corporate intellectual property and classified government information, were aimed at achieving political outcomes. That made them, in effect, a kind of election interference. The ombudsman also found that the analysts working on China and the ones working on Russia used different definitions for influence and interference. Ratcliffe argued that such discrepancies could create the false impression that Russia was trying to affect the U.S. election but China was not.

“I know my conclusions are right, based on the intelligence that I see,” he said, according to the ombudsman. “Many analysts think I am going off the script. They don’t realize that I did it based on the intelligence.”

Ratcliffe’s defenders say that his role as the DNI obligated him to speak up, even if that meant straying into red-hot political topics. “What I saw was him reflecting a value of transparency and informing the public,” said one U.S. intelligence official who worked for Ratcliffe when he was the DNI and asked not to be identified by name. “Sometimes he would challenge assessments and assumptions, I think in the interest of seeing if they would hold. He is an attorney by trade. You kind of have to keep that in mind when you brief him.”

Ratcliffe wasn’t the only one to gauge the threat from China more broadly: Two senior intelligence officers also expressed views on China’s interference activities that were in line with Ratcliffe’s assessment. But Ratcliffe didn’t raise the same level of concern about Russia, which many analysts thought posed the more direct threat to the election. He framed the issue, not for the first time, in a way that lent support to Trump’s political argument. And because the DNI was making that case, the ostensibly objective work of intelligence now had a partisan gloss.

Ratcliffe leaving a meeting with Senate Minority Whip John Thune after being nominated to be the CIA director, December 4, 2024 (Andrew Harnik / Getty)

[Read: Trump calls out election meddling—by China]

When announcing Ratcliffe’s nomination for CIA director, Trump indicated what he valued most in his pick: From “exposing” the Russia investigation as the alleged handiwork of the Clinton campaign to catching the FBI’s abuse of Civil Liberties at the FISA Court, John Ratcliffe has always been a warrior for Truth and Honesty with the American public,” Trump wrote in a social-media post. The reference to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was shorthand for one of Trump’s elastic theories about how Democrats had spied on his 2016 campaign.

He also lauded Ratcliffe for publicly refuting 51 former intelligence officers who had claimed in a letter that the 2020 discovery of emails on a laptop purporting to belong to Joe Biden’s son Hunter had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Ratcliffe was right about that one: No evidence linked Hunter Biden’s laptop to a Russian plot to harm his father. But the letter by the former officials was an act of free speech and an expression of opinion by former officials and experts—not something that the DNI traditionally makes his business.

In the four years he has been out of government, Ratcliffe has remained an enthusiastic critic of the intelligence community. He co-authored a September 2023 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal with a former aide, reflecting on “a dangerous trend inside the CIA to politicize intelligence on China, and to suppress dissenting views that stray from the company line.” He was particularly worried about resistance to investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. The once-fringe view that the virus likely originated in a laboratory in China, which Ratcliffe believes, has gained more respectability thanks in part to U.S. intelligence.

[Read: The coronavirus conspiracy boom]

Tim Scott told me that Ratcliffe’s controversial positions have aged well. “Some of the time he stood alone or in the minority and took a scathing rebuke from the intellectuals in our country,” the senator said. “I think the truth of the matter is, he was right—about the origins of COVID, the Biden laptop, and Russiagate.”

In other scenarios, however—the memo about the Clinton campaign and Russian hacking comes to mind—Ratcliffe conducted himself less like an intelligence adviser, who is supposed to help the president make a decision, and more like a litigator doing his best to help his client win an argument, or a political pugilist eager to score points.

Still, unlike some others in Trump’s orbit—most notably Kash Patel—Ratcliffe has shown that he does have limits. Shortly after the 2020 election, Trump offered Ratcliffe the job that he had long wanted, and that his friend Trey Gowdy had said he was perfect for: attorney general. The president was prepared to fire Bill Barr, who’d rejected Trump’s baseless notions of widespread voter fraud. According to an account in Michael Bender’s book, Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, Ratcliffe had privately told Trump that no intelligence suggested that foreign governments had hacked voting machines or changed the outcome of the election. If he became attorney general, he’d be expected to advocate for an idea he knew wasn’t true. Ratcliffe declined Trump’s offer.

In this respect, Ratcliffe might seem like one of the so-called adults in the room during the first Trump administration—the officials who slow-rolled orders or even tried to block them as a check against what they considered to be the president’s worst impulses. But people who know Ratcliffe told me that this was not his profile. He is on board with Trump’s policies and doesn’t believe that regulating the president is his job. He won’t cross his boss, either. To this day, nearly eight years after the CIA, FBI, and NSA reached a unanimous, unclassified assessment on Russian election interference in 2016, Ratcliffe has never said publicly whether he agrees with one of its key findings: that the Russians were trying to help Trump win.

[Read: The U.S. needs to face up to its long history of election meddling]

If he disagrees with that position, he surely would have said so, just as he has disputed other intelligence judgments he finds lacking or wrong. But his silence is telling. If he does agree, and says so publicly, he will not be the next director of the CIA.

At his confirmation hearing, senators are likely to ask Ratcliffe whether he plans to further Trump’s interests. Not the president’s policies—all CIA directors do that—but his political preferences, prejudices, and vendettas. Only Ratcliffe knows the answer to this question. But alone among Trump’s picks to head the national-security agencies, he comes with a clear track record in the role.