Today’s Republican Party has made a turn toward foreign-policy isolationism or, less pejoratively, realism and restraint. After Donald Trump shattered the GOP’s omertà about the disastrous Iraq War—a “big fat mistake,” he called it in 2016—Republicans quickly learned to decry “endless wars” and, often quite sensibly, argue for shrinking America’s global military footprint. During the 2020 election, Trump’s supporters touted his refusal to start any new wars while in office (though he got very close).

When it comes to America’s southern neighbor, however, Republicans have grown more hawkish. Party leaders, including members of Congress and presidential candidates, now regularly advocate for direct U.S. military intervention in Mexico to attack drug cartels manufacturing the deadly fentanyl flooding into America. “Building the wall is not enough,” Vivek Ramaswamy said at Wednesday night’s GOP-primary debate. The best defense is now a good offense.

The strategic stupidity of any potential U.S. military intervention in Mexico is difficult to overstate. The calls for such an intervention are also deeply ironic: Even as Trump’s epigones inveigh against the possibility of an “endless war” in Ukraine similar to those in Iraq and Afghanistan, they are reprising the arguments, tools, and rhetoric of the global War on Terror that many of them belatedly turned against.

The War on Terror was a disaster, devastating countries and leaving hundreds of thousands of people dead and millions of refugees adrift. A botched U.S. attack on Mexico, America’s largest trading partner, could create a failed state on the 2,000-mile U.S. southern border, an outcome that would be far, far worse for the United States. The toll of the U.S. fentanyl epidemic is staggering: More than 100,000 Americans died of an overdose in 2022. But a unilateral military “solution” holds the potential, if not the near certainty, of causing far more death and destruction than any drug.

[Read: ‘Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber’]

Trump, not surprisingly, sowed the seeds for this new jingoism. After launching his presidential campaign in 2015 with an infamous verbal attack against Mexican migrants, in office he mused about shooting missiles at Mexican fentanyl labs, according to the memoir of his then–defense secretary, Mark Esper. “No one would know it was us,” Trump assured a stunned Esper.

Fast-forward to last month, at this election cycle’s first Republican presidential debate: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis pledged to launch Special Operations raids into Mexico on his first day in office. His rivals for the nomination have issued similar promises to wage war against the cartels—in the form of drone strikes, blockades, and military raids. Former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley breezily promised at this week’s debate to “send in our Special Operations” to Mexico. Republican senators and representatives have introduced bills to classify fentanyl as a chemical weapon, designate Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and authorize the use of military force in Mexico.

If you’re inclined to dismiss this saber-rattling as primary-season bluster, don’t be so sure. Pundits and voters seem to be falling in line behind the politicians. The conservative commentator Ben Domenech recently said that he is “close to becoming a single issue voter” on the issue of attacking Mexico (he’s for it). A recent poll found that as many GOP voters consider Mexico an enemy of the United States as an ally, a marked shift from just a few years ago.

The parallels to the War on Terror aren’t exact—no prominent Republican has advocated a full-scale invasion and occupation of Mexico, at least not yet. But the rhetorical similarities are hard to ignore. America’s tragic interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan began with politicians inflating threats; seeking to militarize complex international problems; and promising clean, swift, decisive military victories. The language regarding Mexico today is eerily similar. The Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld recently assured his viewers that a unilateral attack on Mexico would “be over in minutes.” The labeling of Mexican cartel leaders as “terrorists” sidelines even the most basic analysis of the costs and consequences of a potential war. Just like in Iraq, a war on Mexico would be a war of choice, with American moral culpability for whatever furies it unleashes.

[David Frum: The new Republican litmus test is very dangerous]

It’s worth remembering that the war in Afghanistan included a failed counter-drug campaign. In my time there as a Marine lieutenant a decade ago, U.S. troops engaged in erratic, futile attempts to interrupt opium-poppy cultivation. Partnered with Afghanistan’s version of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, my company wasted days fruitlessly searching motorcycles at checkpoints on dusty village trails, finding no drugs. On one occasion, I was ordered to confiscate farmers’ wooden poppy scorers, simple finger-mounted tools used to harvest opium; at a cost of maybe a penny a piece, they were immediately replaced. U.S. planes bombed 200 Afghan drug labs during the occupation. Yet opium production skyrocketed—Afghanistan produced more than 80 percent of the global supply of the drug in the last years of the war.

Mexico would be an even riskier proposition. Start with the obvious: proximity. The direct costs to the United States of the War on Terror were enormous: $8 trillion squandered, more than 7,000 U.S. troops killed in action, tens of thousands wounded. Across the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, hundreds of thousands of people, most of them civilians, were killed in counterinsurgency campaigns and civil wars. Governments were toppled, leaving behind anarchy and nearly 40 million refugees, who have further destabilized the region and its neighbors. But America itself was shielded from the worst effects of its hubris and militarism. Flanked by oceans and friendly neighbors, Americans didn’t have to worry about the conflicts coming home.

Any unilateral U.S. military action in Mexico would risk the collapse of a neighboring country of 130 million people. It could unleash civil war and a humanitarian crisis that would dwarf those in Iraq and Syria. This carnage would not be confined to Mexico. Some of America’s largest and wealthiest cities are a few hours’ drive from the border; nearly 40 million Americans are of Mexican descent, many of them with family members still living across the border. The cartels would not have far to travel to launch retaliatory terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. And the refugee crisis that many Republicans consider the preeminent national-security crisis would worsen.

The United States would also lack one major War on Terror asset: partners. A host of NATO and non-NATO partners contributed troops and resources to the fighting in Afghanistan; none would be willing to participate in an American attack on Mexico. Despite government corruption in Iraq and Afghanistan and dependency on U.S. weapons and technology, soldiers from those countries did the lion’s share of the fighting and dying in the long struggle against insurgents there. But Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has publicly rejected U.S. military intervention. One can easily imagine uniformed Mexican soldiers and policemen firing on American troops and aiding the cartels. If the U.S. were to attempt to build competing Mexican militias or proxies in response, it would further fracture the Mexican state.

[David Frum: The autocrat next door]

If there is an overriding lesson of America’s post-9/11 conflicts, it is that war unleashes a host of unintended consequences. A war of choice seldom respects the goals or limits set by its architects. External military intervention in a country fighting an insurgency—ideological, criminal, or otherwise—is particularly fraught. Foreign troops are far more likely to be an accelerant of violence than a dampener. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, cartel members would be likely to hide out among civilians, infiltrate Mexico’s already compromised security services, and find havens in bordering countries (the United States included). American forces would in turn be susceptible to corruption and infiltration, especially if an intervention were to drag on longer than expected.

Lacking a definable end state, a counter-cartel campaign would likely devolve into a manhunt for a few narco kingpins. Such an operation would be liable to create folk heroes out of brutal drug traffickers, one accidental wedding-party drone strike at a time. Some of the worst men on Earth could become global symbols of resistance to U.S. imperialism, especially if they are able to evade U.S. forces for a decade, as Osama bin Laden did. A U.S.-Mexico conflict would then become an opportunity for other American adversaries. Russia and China would undoubtedly be happy to arm the cartel insurgents, perhaps even overtly. Mexico already hosts more members of the GRU—Russia’s military intelligence—than any other foreign country. American arms and assistance are taking Russian lives in Ukraine, as they did in Afghanistan a generation before. The Russians would welcome an easy opportunity to return the favor.

Since Trump’s ascent in 2016, the most bellicose neoconservatives in the GOP have been ousted, the Republican Party’s views on Russia and China have become muddled, and the Iraq War is now widely accepted as a disaster. But Republicans’ enthusiasm for launching a war on Mexico reveals the shallowness of their conversion. The rise of fentanyl is mostly a demand-side problem. Whatever Republican leaders say about “endless wars,” they’re once again pulling out the military hammer first, then looking for nails.

I should not have been surprised, but I still marveled at just how little it took to get under the skin of President Donald Trump and his allies. By February 2019, I had been the executive editor of The Washington Post for six years. That month, the newspaper aired a one-minute Super Bowl ad, with a voice-over by Tom Hanks, championing the role of a free press, commemorating journalists killed and captured, and concluding with the Post’s logo and the message “Democracy dies in darkness.” The ad highlighted the strong and often courageous work done by journalists at the Post and elsewhere—including by Fox News’s Bret Baier—because we were striving to signal that this wasn’t just about us and wasn’t a political statement.

“There’s someone to gather the facts,” Hanks said in the ad. “To bring you the story. No matter the cost. Because knowing empowers us. Knowing helps us decide. Knowing keeps us free.”

Even that simple, foundational idea of democracy was a step too far for the Trump clan. The president’s son Donald Trump Jr. couldn’t contain himself. “You know how MSM journalists could avoid having to spend millions on a #superbowl commercial to gain some undeserved credibility?” he tweeted with typical two-bit belligerence. “How about report the news and not their leftist BS for a change.”

Two years earlier—a month into Trump’s presidency—the Post had affixed “Democracy dies in darkness” under its nameplate on the printed newspaper, as well as at the top of its website and on everything it produced. As the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, envisioned it, this was not a slogan but a “mission statement.” And it was not about Trump, although his allies took it to be. Producing a mission statement had been in the works for two years before Trump took office. That it emerged when it did is testimony to the tortuous, and torturous, process of coming up with something sufficiently memorable and meaningful that Bezos would bless.

Bezos, the founder and now executive chair of Amazon, had bought The Washington Post in 2013. In early 2015, he had expressed his wish for a phrase that might encapsulate the newspaper’s purpose: a phrase that would convey an idea, not a product; fit nicely on a T-shirt; make a claim uniquely ours, given our heritage and our base in the nation’s capital; and be both aspirational and disruptive. “Not a paper I want to subscribe to,” as Bezos put it, but rather “an idea I want to belong to.” The idea: We love this country, so we hold it accountable.

No small order, coming up with the right phrase. And Bezos was no distant observer. “On this topic,” he told us, “I’d like to see all the sausage-making. Don’t worry about whether it’s a good use of my time.” Bezos, so fixated on metrics in other contexts, now advised ditching them. “I just think we’re going to have to use gut and intuition.” And he insisted that the chosen words recognize our “historic mission,” not a new one. “We don’t have to be afraid of the democracy word,” he said; it’s “the thing that makes the Post unique.”

Staff teams were assembled. Months of meetings were held. Frustrations deepened. Outside branding consultants were retained, to no avail. (“Typical,” Bezos said.) Desperation led to a long list of options, venturing into the inane. The ideas totaled at least 1,000: “A bias for truth,” “Know,” “A right to know,” “You have a right to know,” “Unstoppable journalism,” “The power is yours,” “Power read,” “Relentless pursuit of the truth,” “The facts matter,” “It’s about America,” “Spotlight on democracy,” “Democracy matters,” “A light on the nation,” “Democracy lives in light,” “Democracy takes work. We’ll do our part,” “The news democracy needs,” “Toward a more perfect union” (rejected lest it summon thoughts of our own workforce union).

By September 2016, an impatient Bezos was forcing the issue. We had to settle on something. Nine Post executives and Bezos met in a private room at the Four Seasons in Georgetown to finally get over the finish line. Because of Bezos’s tight schedule, we had only half an hour, starting at 7:45 a.m. A handful of options remained on the table: “A bright light for a free people” or, simply, “A bright light for free people”; “The story must be told” (recalling the inspiring words of the late photographer Michel du Cille); “To challenge and inform”; “For a world that demands to know”; “For people who demand to know.” None of those passed muster.

In the end, we settled on “A free people demand to know” (subject to a grammar check by our copy desk, which gave its assent). Success was short-lived—mercifully, no doubt. Late that evening, Bezos dispatched an email in the “not what you’re hoping for category,” as he put it. He had run our consensus pick by his then-wife, MacKenzie Scott, a novelist and “my in-house wordsmith,” who had pronounced the phrase clunky. “Frankenslogan” was the word she used.

By then, we needed Bezos to take unilateral action. Finally, he did. “Let’s go with ‘Democracy dies in darkness,’ ” he decreed. It had been on our list from the start, and was a phrase Bezos had used previously in speaking of the Post’s mission; he himself had heard it from the Washington Post legend Bob Woodward. It was a twist on a phrase in a 2002 ruling by the federal-appellate-court judge Damon J. Keith, who wrote that “democracies die behind closed doors.”

“Democracy dies in darkness” made its debut, without announcement, in mid-February 2017. And I’ve never seen a slogan—I mean, mission statement—get such a reaction. It even drew attention from People’s Daily in China, which tweeted, “ ‘Democracy dies in darkness’ @washingtonpost puts on new slogan, on the same day @realDonaldTrump calls media as the enemy of Americans.” Merriam-Webster reported a sudden surge in searches for the word democracy. The Late Show host Stephen Colbert joked that some of the rejected phrases had included “No, you shut up” and “We took down Nixon—who wants next?” Twitter commentators remarked on the Post’s “new goth vibe.” The media critic Jack Shafer tweeted a handful of his own “rejected Washington Post mottos,” among them “We’re really full of ourselves” and “Democracy Gets Sunburned If It Doesn’t Use Sunscreen.”

Bezos couldn’t have been more thrilled. The mission statement was getting noticed. “It’s a good sign when you’re the subject of satire,” he said a couple of weeks later. The four words atop our journalism had certainly drawn attention to our mission. Much worse would have been a collective shrug. Like others at the Post, I had questioned the wisdom of branding all our work with death and darkness. All I could think of at that point, though, was the Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”

But the phrase stuck with readers, who saw it as perfect for the Trump era, even if that was not its intent.

The Post’s publisher, Fred Ryan, speaks to the newsroom as the staff celebrates winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty)

We must have been an odd-looking group, sitting around the dining-room table in the egg-shaped Blue Room of the White House: Bezos, recognizable anywhere by his bald head, short stature, booming laugh, and radiant intensity; Fred Ryan, the Post’s publisher, an alumnus of the Reagan administration who was a head taller than my own 5 feet 11 inches, with graying blond hair and a giant, glistening smile; the editorial-page editor, Fred Hiatt, a 36-year Post veteran and former foreign correspondent with an earnest, bookish look; and me, with a trimmed gray beard, woolly head of hair, and what was invariably described as a dour and taciturn demeanor.

Five months after his inauguration, President Trump had responded to a request from the publisher for a meeting, and had invited us to dinner. We were joined by the first lady, Melania Trump, and Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. By coincidence, just as we were sitting down, at 7 p.m., the Post published a report that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was inquiring into Kushner’s business dealings in Russia, part of Mueller’s investigation into that country’s interference in the 2016 election. The story followed another by the Post revealing that Kushner had met secretly with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, and had proposed that a Russian diplomatic post be used to provide a secure communications line between Trump officials and the Kremlin. The Post had reported as well that Kushner met later with Sergey Gorkov, the head of a Russian-owned development bank.

Hope Hicks, a young Trump aide, handed Kushner her phone. Our news alert had just gone out, reaching millions of mobile devices, including hers. “Very Shakespearean,” she whispered to Kushner. “Dining with your enemies.” Hiatt, who had overheard, whispered back, “We’re not your enemies.”

[Read: Trump’s war against the media isn’t a war]

As we dined on cheese soufflé, pan-roasted Dover sole, and chocolate-cream tart, Trump crowed about his election victory, mocked his rivals and even people in his own orbit, boasted of imagined accomplishments, calculated how he could win yet again in four years, and described The Washington Post as the worst of all media outlets, with The New York Times just behind us in his ranking in that moment.

Trump, his family, and his team had put the Post on their enemies list, and nothing was going to change anyone’s mind. We had been neither servile nor sycophantic toward Trump, and we weren’t going to be. Our job was to report aggressively on the president and to hold his administration, like all others, to account. In the mind of the president and those around him, that made us the opposition.

There was political benefit to Trump in going further: We were not just his enemy—we were the country’s enemy. In his telling, we were traitors. Less than a month into his presidency, Trump had denounced the press as “the enemy of the American People” on Twitter. It was an ominous echo of the phrase “enemy of the people,” invoked by Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Hitler’s propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, and deployed for the purpose of repression and murder. Trump could not have cared less about the history of such incendiary language or how it might incite physical attacks on journalists.

Whenever I was asked about Trump’s rhetoric, my own response was straightforward: “We are not at war with the administration. We are at work.” But it was clear that Trump saw all of us at that table as his foes, most especially Bezos, because he owned the Post and, in Trump’s mind, was pulling the strings—or could pull them if he wished.

At our dinner, Trump sought at times to be charming. It was a superficial charm, without warmth or authenticity. He did almost all the talking. We scarcely said a word, and I said the least, out of discomfort at being there and seeking to avoid any confrontation with him over our coverage. Anything I said could set him off.

He let loose on a long list of perceived enemies and slights: The chief executive of Macy’s was a “coward” for pulling Trump products from store shelves in reaction to Trump’s remarks portraying Mexican immigrants as rapists; he would have been picketed by only “20 Mexicans. Who cares?” Trump had better relations with foreign leaders than former President Barack Obama, who was lazy and never called them. Obama had left disasters around the world for him to solve. Obama had been hesitant to allow the military to kill people in Afghanistan. He, Trump, told the military to just do it; don’t ask for permission. Mueller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, fired FBI Director James Comey, and FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe were slammed for reasons that are now familiar.

Two themes stayed with me from that dinner. First, Trump would govern primarily to retain the support of his base. At the table, he pulled a sheet of paper from his jacket pocket. The figure “47%” appeared above his photo. “This is the latest Rasmussen poll. I can win with that.” The message was clear: That level of support, if he held key states, was all he needed to secure a second term. What other voters thought of him, he seemed to say, would not matter.

Second, his list of grievances appeared limitless. Atop them all was the press, and atop the press was the Post. During dinner, he derided what he had been hearing about our story on the special counsel and his son-in-law, suggesting incorrectly that it alleged money laundering. “He’s a good kid,” he said of Kushner, who at the time was 36 and a father of three, and sitting right there at the table. The Post was awful, Trump said repeatedly. We treated him unfairly. With every such utterance, he poked me in the shoulder with his left elbow.

Baron’s office at the Post. (The Washington Post / Getty)

A few times during that dinner, Trump—for all the shots he had taken during the campaign at Bezos’s company—mentioned that Melania was a big Amazon shopper, prompting Bezos to joke at one point, “Consider me your personal customer-service rep.” Trump’s concern, of course, wasn’t Amazon’s delivery. He wanted Bezos to deliver him from the Post’s coverage.

The effort quickened the next day. Kushner called Fred Ryan in the morning to get his read on how the dinner had gone. After Ryan offered thanks for their generosity and graciousness with their time, Kushner inquired whether the Post’s coverage would now improve as a result. Ryan diplomatically rebuffed him with a reminder that there were to be no expectations about coverage. “It’s not a dial we have to turn one way to make it better and another way to make it worse,” he said.

Trump would be the one to call Bezos’s cellphone that same morning at eight, urging him to get the Post to be “more fair to me.” He said, “I don’t know if you get involved in the newsroom, but I’m sure you do to some degree.” Bezos replied that he didn’t and then delivered a line he’d been prepared to say at the dinner itself if Trump had leaned on him then: “It’s really not appropriate to … I’d feel really bad about it my whole life if I did.” The call ended without bullying about Amazon but with an invitation for Bezos to seek a favor. “If there’s anything I can do for you,” Trump said.

Three days later, the bullying began. Leaders of the technology sector gathered at the White House for a meeting of the American Technology Council, which had been created by executive order a month earlier. Trump briefly pulled Bezos aside to complain bitterly about the Post’s coverage. The dinner, he said, was apparently a wasted two and a half hours.

Then, later in the year, four days after Christmas, Trump in a tweet called for the Postal Service to charge Amazon “MUCH MORE” for package deliveries, claiming that Amazon’s rates were a rip-off of American taxpayers. The following year, he attempted to intervene to obstruct Amazon in its pursuit of a $10 billion cloud-computing contract from the Defense Department. Bezos was to be punished for not reining in the Post.

Meanwhile, Trump was salivating to have an antitrust case filed against Amazon. The hedge-fund titan Leon Cooperman revealed in a CNBC interview that Trump had asked him twice at a White House dinner that summer whether Amazon was a monopoly. On July 24, 2017, Trump tweeted, “Is Fake News Washington Post being used as a lobbyist weapon against Congress to keep Politicians from looking into Amazon no-tax monopoly?”

As Trump sought to tighten the screws, Bezos made plain that the paper had no need to fear that he might capitulate. In March 2018, as we concluded one of our business meetings, Bezos offered some parting words: “You may have noticed that Trump keeps tweeting about us.” The remark was met with silence. “Or maybe you haven’t noticed!” Bezos joked. He wanted to reinforce a statement I had publicly made before. “We are not at war with them,” Bezos said. “They may be at war with us. We just need to do the work.” In July of that year, he once again spoke up unprompted at a business meeting. “Do not worry about me,” he said. “Just do the work. And I’ve got your back.”

A huge advantage of Bezos’s ownership was that he had his eye on a long time horizon. In Texas, he was building a “10,000-year clock” in a hollowed-out mountain—intended as a symbol, he explained, of long-term thinking. He often spoke of what the business or the landscape might look like in “20 years.” When I first heard that timeline, I was startled. News executives I’d dealt with routinely spoke, at best, of next year—and, at worst, next quarter. Even so, Bezos also made decisions at a speed that was unprecedented in my experience. He personally owned 100 percent of the company. He didn’t need to consult anyone. Whatever he spent came directly out of his bank account.

[From the November 2019 issue: Franklin Foer on Jeff Bezos’s master plan]

In my interactions with him, Bezos showed integrity and spine. Early in his ownership, he displayed an intuitive appreciation that an ethical compass for the Post was inseparable from its business success. There was much about Bezos and Amazon that the Post needed to vigorously cover and investigate—such as his company’s escalating market power, its heavy-handed labor practices, and the ramifications for individual privacy of its voracious data collection. There was also the announcement that Bezos and MacKenzie Scott were seeking a divorce—followed immediately by an explosive report in the National Enquirer disclosing that Bezos had been involved in a long-running extramarital relationship with Lauren Sánchez, a former TV reporter and news anchor. We were determined to fulfill our journalistic obligations with complete independence, and did so without restriction.

I came to like the Post’s owner as a human being and found him to be a far more complex, thoughtful, and agreeable character than routinely portrayed. He can be startlingly easy to talk to: Just block out any thought of his net worth. Our meetings took place typically every two weeks by teleconference, and only rarely in person. During the pandemic, we were subjected to Amazon’s exasperatingly inferior videoconferencing system, called Chime. The one-hour meetings were a lesson in his unconventional thinking, wry humor (“This is me enthusiastic. Sometimes it’s hard to tell”), and fantastic aphorisms: “Most people start building before they know what they’re building”; “The things that everybody knows are going to work, everybody is already doing.” At one session, we were discussing group subscriptions for college students. Bezos wanted to know the size of the market. As we all started to Google, Bezos interjected, “Hey, why don’t we try this? Alexa, how many college students are there in the United States?” (Alexa pulled up the data from the National Center for Education Statistics.)

In conversation, Bezos could be witty and self-deprecating (“Nothing makes me feel dumber than a New Yorker cartoon”), laughed easily, and posed penetrating questions. When a Post staffer asked him whether he’d join the crew of his space company, Blue Origin, on one of its early launches, he said he wasn’t sure. “Why don’t you wait a while and see how things go?” I advised. “That,” he said, “is the nicest thing you’ve ever said about me.”

Science fiction—particularly Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven—had a huge influence on Bezos in his teenage years. He has spoken of how his interest in space goes back to his childhood love of the Star Trek TV series. Star Trek inspired both the voice-activated Alexa and the name of his holding company, Zefram, drawn from the fictional character Zefram Cochrane, who developed “warp drive,” a technology that allowed space travel at faster-than-light speeds. “The reason he’s earning so much money,” his high-school girlfriend, Ursula Werner, said early in Amazon’s history, “is to get to outer space.”

Baron and the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, in 2016 (The Washington Post / Getty)

From the moment Bezos acquired the Post, he made clear that its historic journalistic mission was at the core of its business. I had been in journalism long enough to witness some executives—unmoored by crushing pressures on circulation, advertising, and profits—abandon the foundational journalistic culture, even shunning the vocabulary we use to describe our work. Many publishers took to calling journalism “content,” a term so hollow that I sarcastically advised substituting “stuff.” Journalists were recategorized as “content producers,” top editors retitled “chief content officers.” Bezos was a different breed.

He seemed to value and enjoy encounters with the news staff in small groups, even if they were infrequent. Once, at a dinner with some of the Post’s Pulitzer Prize winners, Bezos asked Carol Leonnig, who had won for exposing security lapses by the Secret Service, how she was able to get people to talk to her when the risks for them were so high. It had to be a subject of understandable curiosity for the head of Amazon, a company that routinely rebuffed reporters’ inquiries with “No comment.” Carol told him she was straightforward about what she sought and directly addressed individuals’ fears and motivations. The Post’s reputation for serious, careful investigative reporting, she told Bezos, carried a lot of weight with potential sources. They wanted injustice or malfeasance revealed, and we needed their help. The Post would protect their identity.

Anonymous leaking out of the government didn’t begin with the Trump administration. It has a long tradition in Washington. Leaks are often the only way for journalists to learn and report what is happening behind the scenes. If sources come forward publicly, they risk being fired, demoted, sidelined, or even prosecuted. The risks were heightened with a vengeful Trump targeting the so-called deep state, what he imagined to be influential government officials conspiring against him. The Department of Justice had announced early in his term that it would become even more aggressive in its search for leakers of classified national-security information. And Trump’s allies and supporters could be counted on to make life a nightmare for anyone who crossed him.

Journalists would much prefer to have government sources on the record, but anonymity has become an inextricable feature of Washington reporting. Though Trump-administration officials claimed to be unjust victims of anonymous sourcing, they were skillful practitioners and beneficiaries as well. The Trump administration was the leakiest in memory. Senior officials leaked regularly, typically as a result of internal rivalries. Trump himself leaked to get news out in a way that he viewed as helpful, just as he had done as a private citizen in New York.

Trump had assembled his government haphazardly, enlisting many individuals who had no relevant experience and no history of previously collaborating with one another—“kind of a crowd of misfit toys,” as Josh Dawsey, a White House reporter for the Post, put it to me. Some were mere opportunists. Many officials, as the Post’s Ashley Parker has observed, came to believe that working in the administration was like being a character in Game of Thrones : Better to knife others before you got knifed yourself. Odds were high that Trump would do the stabbing someday on his own. But many in government leaked out of principle. They were astonished to see the norms of governance and democracy being violated—and by the pervasive lying.

Trump’s gripes about anonymity weren’t based on the rigor of the reporting—or even, for that matter, its veracity. Leaks that reflected poorly on him were condemned as false, and the sources therefore nonexistent, even as he pressed for investigations to identify the supposedly nonexistent sources. With his followers’ distrust of the media, he had little trouble convincing them that the stories were fabrications by media out to get him—and them. Conflating his political self-interest with the public interest, he was prone to labeling the leaks as treasonous.

At the Post, the aim was to get at the facts, no matter the obstacles Trump and his allies put in our way. In January 2018, Dawsey reported that Trump, during a discussion with lawmakers about protecting immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries as part of an immigration deal, asked: “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” In March, Dawsey, Leonnig, and David Nakamura reported that Trump had defied cautions from his national security advisers not to offer well-wishes to Russian President Vladimir Putin on winning reelection to another six-year term. “DO NOT CONGRATULATE,” warned briefing material that Trump may or may not have read. Such advice should have been unnecessary in the first place. After all, it had been anything but a fair election. Prominent opponents were excluded from the ballot, and much of the Russian news media are controlled by the state. “If this story is accurate, that means someone leaked the president’s briefing papers,” said a senior White House official who, as was common in an administration that condemned anonymous sources, insisted on anonymity.

To be sure, sources sometimes want anonymity for ignoble reasons. But providing anonymity is essential to legitimate news-gathering in the public interest. If any doubt remains as to why so many government officials require anonymity to come forward—and why responsible news outlets give them anonymity when necessary—the story of Trump’s famous phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky offers an instructive case study.

In September 2019, congressional committees received a letter from Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for the intelligence community. A whistleblower had filed a complaint with him, he wrote, and in Atkinson’s assessment, it qualified as credible and a matter of “urgent concern”—defined as a “serious or flagrant problem, abuse or violation of the law or Executive Order” that involves classified information but “does not include differences of opinion concerning public policy matters.”

Soon, a trio of Post national-security reporters published a story that began to flesh out the contents of the whistleblower complaint. The article, written by Ellen Nakashima, Greg Miller, and Shane Harris, cited anonymous sources in reporting that the complaint involved “President Trump’s communications with a foreign leader.” The incident was said to revolve around a phone call.

Step by careful step, news organizations excavated the basic facts: In a phone call with Zelensky, Trump had effectively agreed to provide $250 million in military aid to Ukraine—approved by Congress, but inexplicably put on hold by the administration—only if Zelensky launched an investigation into his likely Democratic foe in the 2020 election, Joe Biden, and his alleged activities in Ukraine. This attempted extortion would lead directly to Trump’s impeachment, making him only the third president in American history to be formally accused by the House of Representatives of high crimes and misdemeanors.

The entire universe of Trump allies endeavored to have the whistleblower’s identity revealed—widely circulating a name—with the spiteful aim of subjecting that individual to fierce harassment and intimidation, or worse. Others who ultimately went public with their concerns, as they responded to congressional subpoenas and provided sworn testimony, became targets of relentless attacks and mockery.

Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman of the National Security Council, who had listened in on the phone call as part of his job, became a central witness, implicating Trump during the impeachment hearings. He was fired after having endured condemnation from the White House and deceitful insinuations by Trump allies that he might be a double agent. Vindman’s twin brother, Yevgeny, an NSC staffer who had raised protests internally about Trump’s phone call with Zelensky, was fired too. Gordon Sondland—the hotelier and Trump donor who was the ambassador to the European Union and an emissary of sorts to Ukraine as well—was also fired. He had admitted in congressional testimony that there had been an explicit quid pro quo conditioning a Zelensky visit to the White House on a Ukrainian investigation of Biden. The Vindmans and Sondland were all dismissed within two days of Trump’s acquittal in his first impeachment trial. Just before their ousters, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham had suggested on Fox News that “people should pay” for what Trump went through.

The acting Pentagon comptroller, Elaine McCusker, had her promotion rescinded, evidently for having merely questioned whether Ukraine aid could be legally withheld. She later resigned. Atkinson, the intelligence community’s inspector general, was fired as well, leaving with a plea for whistleblowers to “use authorized channels to bravely speak up—there is no disgrace for doing so.”

“The Washington Post is constantly quoting ‘anonymous sources’ that do not exist,” Trump had tweeted in 2018 in one of his familiar lines of attack. “Rarely do they use the name of anyone because there is no one to give them the kind of negative quote that they are looking for.” The Ukraine episode made it clear that real people with incriminating information existed in substantial numbers. If they went public, they risked unemployment. If they chose anonymity, as the whistleblower did, Trump and his allies would aim to expose them and have them publicly and savagely denounced.

“We are not at war with the administration. We are at work.” When I made that comment, many fellow journalists enthusiastically embraced the idea that we should not think of ourselves as warriors but instead as professionals merely doing our job to keep the public informed. Others came to view that posture as naive: When truth and democracy are under attack, the only proper response is to be more fiercely and unashamedly bellicose ourselves. One outside critic went so far as to label my statement an “atrocity” when, after my retirement, Fred Ryan, the Post’s publisher, had my quote mounted on the wall overlooking the paper’s national desk.

I believe that responsible journalists should be guided by fundamental principles. Among them: We must support and defend democracy. Citizens have a right to self-governance. Without democracy, there can be no independent press, and without an independent press, there can be no democracy. We must work hard and honestly to discover the truth, and we should tell the public unflinchingly what we learn. We should support the right of all citizens to participate in the electoral process without impediment. We should endorse free speech and understand that vigorous debate over policy is essential to democracy. We should favor equitable treatment for everyone, under the law and out of moral obligation, and abundant opportunity for all to attain what they hope for themselves and their families. We owe special attention to the least fortunate in our society, and have a duty to give voice to those who otherwise would not be heard. We must oppose intolerance and hate, and stand against violence, repression, and abuse of power.

I also believe journalists can best honor those ideals by adhering to traditional professional principles. The press will do itself and our democracy no favors if it abandons what have long been bedrock standards. Too many norms of civic discourse have been trampled. For the press to hold power to account today, we will have to maintain standards that demonstrate that we are practicing our craft honorably, thoroughly, and fairly, with an open mind and with a reverence for evidence over our own opinions. In short, we should practice objective journalism.

The idea of objective journalism has uncertain origins. But it can be traced to the early 20th century, in the aftermath of World War I, when democracy seemed imperiled and propaganda had been developed into a polished instrument for manipulating public opinion and the press during warfare—and, in the United States, for deepening suspicions about marginalized people who were then widely regarded as not fully American.

Baron and his Boston Globe colleagues react to winning the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for the paper’s coverage of sexual abuse by priests in the Roman Catholic Church. (The Boston Globe / Getty)

The renowned journalist and thinker Walter Lippmann helped give currency to the term when he wrote Liberty and the News, published in 1920. In that slim volume, he described a time that sounds remarkably similar to today. “There is everywhere an increasingly angry disillusionment about the press, a growing sense of being baffled and misled,” he wrote. The onslaught of news was “helter-skelter, in inconceivable confusion.” The public suffered from “no rules of evidence.” He worried over democratic institutions being pushed off their foundations by the media environment.

[From the December 1919 issue: Walter Lippmann’s “Liberty and the News”]

Lippmann made no assumption that journalists could be freed of their own opinions. He assumed, in fact, just the opposite: They were as subject to biases as anyone else. He proposed an “objective” method for moving beyond them: Journalists should pursue “as impartial an investigation of the facts as is humanly possible.” That idea of objectivity doesn’t preclude the lie-detector role for the press; it argues for it. It is not an idea that fosters prejudice; it labors against it. “I am convinced,” he wrote, in a line that mirrors my own thinking, “that we shall accomplish more by fighting for truth than by fighting for our theories.”

In championing “objectivity” in our work, I am swimming against what has become, lamentably, a mighty tide in my profession of nearly half a century. No word seems more unpopular today among many mainstream journalists. A report in January 2023 by a previous executive editor at The Washington Post, Leonard Downie Jr., and a former CBS News president, Andrew Heyward, argued that objectivity in journalism is outmoded. They quoted a former close colleague of mine: “Objectivity has got to go.”

Objectivity, in my view, has got to stay. Maintaining that standard does not guarantee the public’s confidence. But it increases the odds that journalists will earn it. The principle of objectivity has been under siege for years, but perhaps never more ferociously than during Trump’s presidency and its aftermath. Several arguments are leveled against it by my fellow journalists: None of us can honestly claim to be objective, and we shouldn’t profess to be. We all have our opinions. Objectivity also is seen as just another word for neutrality, balance, and so-called both-sidesism. It pretends, according to this view, that all assertions deserve equal weight, even when the evidence shows they don’t, and so it fails to deliver the plain truth to the public. Finally, critics argue that objectivity historically excluded the perspectives of those who have long been among the most marginalized in society (and media): women, Black Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Indigenous Americans, the LGBTQ community, and others.

Genuine objectivity, however, does not mean any of that. This is what it really means: As journalists, we can never stop obsessing over how to get at the truth—or, to use a less lofty term, “objective reality.” Doing that requires an open mind and a rigorous method. We must be more impressed by what we don’t know than by what we know, or think we know.

[Darrell Hartman: The invention of objectivity]

Journalists routinely expect objectivity from others. Like everyone else, we want objective judges. We want objective juries. We want police officers to be objective when they make arrests and detectives to be objective in assessing evidence. We want prosecutors to evaluate cases objectively, with no prejudice or preexisting agendas. Without objectivity, there can be no equity in law enforcement, as abhorrent abuses have demonstrated all too often. We want doctors to be objective in diagnosing the medical conditions of their patients, uncontaminated by bigotry or baseless hunches. We want medical researchers and regulators to be objective in determining whether new drugs might work and can be safely consumed. We want scientists to be objective in evaluating the impact of chemicals in the soil, air, and water.

Objectivity in all these fields, and others, gets no argument from journalists. We accept it, even insist on it by seeking to expose transgressions. Journalists should insist on it for ourselves as well.

This article was adapted from Martin Baron’s book, Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post, which will be published in October 2023. It appears in the November 2023 print edition with the headline “We Are Not at War. We Are at Work.”

The sporting event is the first since the militant group took power again in Afghanistan in 2021, lessening the rights of women under their rule.

Recently signed contracts will help the country tackle unemployment, underdevelopment and currency issues.

Mining contracts could help Afghanistan develop, but they could also hurt its people if they are mismanaged.

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In The Atlantic’s next cover story, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg profiled General Mark Milley, who served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the last 16 months of Donald Trump’s presidency. What Milley saw as the nation’s highest-ranking officer is a graphic warning of the existential danger America will be in should Trump return to office.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The American face of authoritarian propaganda Airlines are just banks now. Millennials have lost their grip on fashion.

A Patriot and His Duty

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the highest-ranking military position in the United States, designated by law as the principal military adviser to the president, the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council. It is a post of vital national importance, but most Americans probably have no idea who serves in it at any given time.

And yet, for almost two years, the safety of the United States and the sanctity of its Constitution may well have depended more than any American could have known on Mark Milley, a career Army officer who became the 20th chairman in late 2019. Milley’s experiences in the waning days of the Trump administration should appall and alarm every sensible American.

Milley served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the most fraught period of civil-military dysfunction in U.S. history. As The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, writes in our next cover story, Milley faced an unprecedented situation in which the president—a man, Jeff notes, horrendously addled by “cognitive unfitness and moral derangement”—was himself the greatest threat to the Constitution.

If that sounds dramatic, consider what Milley’s senior colleagues—career military men who served in the Trump White House—told Jeff about the nightmare facing the chairman. “Mark Milley had to contain the impulses of people who wanted to use the United States military in very dangerous ways,” according to retired Marine General John Kelly, who served as Trump’s second chief of staff. (Milley, for his part, was worried that Trump would try to overcome his electoral loss by creating a “Reichstag moment,” perhaps by sparking a foreign war or by using the military against civilians.)

Army Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, who served as one of Trump’s many hired-and-fired national security advisers, commented on the immensity of the challenge facing Milley by posing a terrifying hypothetical to Jeff: “As chairman, you swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, but what if the commander in chief is undermining the Constitution?” (We might add to this an even more unsettling question: What if millions of Americans don’t seem to care?)

Even those who may think they’ve fully grasped Trump’s depravity will be shocked by some of the events that Jeff reports.

For example, at the ceremony welcoming him as the new chairman, Milley invited Captain Luis Avila to sing “God Bless America.” Avila had completed five combat tours, lost a leg in an IED attack in Afghanistan, and suffered two heart attacks, two strokes, and brain damage as a result of his injuries. Jeff writes:

After Avila’s performance, Trump walked over to congratulate him, but then said to Milley, within earshot of several witnesses, “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.”

Never let Avila appear in public again, Trump told Milley.

“Milley’s family,” Jeff continues,“venerated the military, and Trump’s attitude toward the uniformed services seemed superficial, callous, and, at the deepest human level, repugnant.”

But Trump did respect some military personnel, especially Eddie Gallagher, the Navy SEAL who was court-martialed on multiple charges and whose own comrades testified to his bloodthirsty and reckless behavior. (Gallagher was acquitted of all charges except for posing with a slain enemy’s corpse.) Trump intervened in the question of whether Gallagher, despite his acquittals, should keep his SEAL pin—a decision traditionally made by fellow SEALs.

Milley tried to stop Trump from interfering with this important tradition. Trump, according to Jeff, “called Gallagher a hero and said he didn’t understand why he was being punished.”

“Because he slit the throat of a wounded prisoner,” Milley said.

“The guy was going to die anyway,” Trump said.

It’s a war crime, Milley protested, to no avail. Trump refused to see what the “big deal” was all about. “You guys”—and here he meant combat soldiers—“are all just killers. What’s the difference?”

Gallagher got to keep his pin.

If Trump’s ideal military is one in which Eddie Gallagher is celebrated as a hero and Luis Avila is warehoused out of sight, what does that suggest about who might lead the military if Trump returns to office? Who would have the fortitude to turn back the unlawful orders of a vicious and cowardly commander in chief to kill prisoners, to act as a praetorian guard around the White House, or even to use nuclear arms?

When Trump lost the election, and especially after the January 6 insurrection, Milley was apparently growing concerned about Trump’s emotional stability. The chairman called all of America’s top nuclear officers to a meeting, in which he said, “If anything weird or crazy happens, just make sure we all know.” He then asked each officer to affirm that he understood the proper procedures for the release of nuclear weapons. He also called his Chinese counterpart to assure him that America was not in the kind of chaos that could lead to war.

Milley’s critics raged that the chairman was undermining the president’s authority, and, as Jeff notes, they wanted to see the general in leg-irons—or worse. These charges were partisan nonsense. What should be more concerning to every citizen of the United States is that Mark Milley, and many others around him, felt it was important to reassure the Chinese, and to keep the lines of communication around America’s nuclear command structure clear and open. In normal times, no one would think to do such things, but, as Jeff notes, Milley’s months serving under Trump “were not normal, because Trump was exceptionally unfit to serve.”

Reading Jeff’s article, I kept thinking of the 1965 novel Night of Camp David, by Fletcher Knebel (who also co-wrote Seven Days in May, about a military coup in the United States). It’s not a great book, but the premise is scary enough: A young American senator, after a long evening alone with the president at his famous retreat, realizes that the commander in chief has descended into madness and is brewing grandiose plans for conquest that will ignite World War III. In the light of day, the president seems like a reasonable man, so no one but the senator knows that he’s gone completely bonkers.

Milley faced the opposite and more difficult problem: Everyone knew Trump was unhinged. It wasn’t even remotely a secret. General James Mattis even told friends and colleagues that Trump was “more dangerous than anyone could imagine.” But again, nobody had to imagine it; anyone who was ever in the same room as Trump knew it. And yet, few acted to stop him. (Mike Pence’s one day of courage on January 6 is an honorable and important exception.) Many others did not do their duty—including the Republican members of the United States Congress, whose lives Trump endangered.

Milley, unlike so many in Washington, continued to honor his oath to the Constitution. The next time, we will not be so lucky. The next time, Trump will not make the same mistake twice: He will ensure that no one like Mark Milley will be in the National Security Council, or at the Pentagon— or guarding America’s nuclear forces at Strategic Command. The next time, when Trump’s narcissism and cruelty tell him that he must exact revenge on the country, perhaps even on the world, no one will be there to stop him.

Related:

Trump could still start a last-ditch war with Iran. (From 2020) Trump: Americans who died in war are “losers” and “suckers.” (From 2020)

Today’s News

The U.S. temporarily granted expanded access to work permits and deportation relief to about half a million Venezuelans who are already in the country.    House Republicans failed to advance an appropriations bill for the Defense Department in a setback for Speaker Kevin McCarthy as a potential government shutdown looms. Poland will stop providing weapons to Ukraine. The two countries continue to disagree about a temporary ban on Ukrainian grain imports.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: David McNew / Getty; Haldeman Papers.

Elon Musk’s Anti-Semitic, Apartheid-Loving Grandfather

By Joshua Benton

In Walter Isaacson’s new biography, Elon Musk, a mere page and a half is devoted to introducing Musk’s grandfather, a Canadian chiropractor named Joshua N. Haldeman. Isaacson describes him as a source of Musk’s great affection for danger—“a daredevil adventurer with strongly held opinions” and “quirky conservative populist views” who did rope tricks at rodeos and rode freight trains like a hobo. “He knew that real adventures involve risk,” Isaacson quotes Musk as having said. “Risk energized him.”

But in 1950, Haldeman’s “quirky” politics led him to make an unusual and dramatic choice: to leave Canada for South Africa … What would make a man undertake such a radical change? Isaacson writes that Haldeman had come “to believe that the Canadian government was usurping too much control over the lives of individuals and that the country had gone soft.” One of Haldeman’s sons has written that it may have simply been “his adventurous spirit and the desire for a more pleasant climate in which to raise his family.” But another factor was at play: his strong support for the brand-new apartheid regime.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

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Listen. In the latest episode of Radio Atlantic, host Hanna Rosin sits down with senior editor Jenisha Watts to discuss her October cover story about growing up in a crack house.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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On September 18, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stood before his country’s Parliament and leveled a dramatic charge: Ottawa had “credible evidence” that the Indian government had assassinated a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil. The citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, had been gunned down outside the Sikh temple where he served as president. Trudeau declared the killing “an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty” and “contrary to the fundamental rules by which free, open, and democratic societies conduct themselves.”

The prime minister’s claim made headlines around the planet, but it shouldn’t have been altogether surprising. Nijjar was a prominent activist who called for Sikhs—a religious group mostly concentrated in northern India—to break away from New Delhi and form an independent nation. As a result, New Delhi had labeled him a terrorist. The Indian government has denied involvement in the killing, but under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it has become illiberal at home and bellicose abroad, such that assassinations on foreign soil are no longer an unimaginable part of its agenda. New Delhi, in other words, could well be a government that will do anything to silence dissidents.  

Nijjar is not the first Canadian whom India has labeled a terrorist, and he is hardly the first to support Sikh secession. During the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, Sikh insurgents in northern India waged a violent campaign to establish an independent Sikh nation, called Khalistan, and many Sikhs in Canada supported them by raising money and promoting the movement’s message in Canadian temples. Some Canadian Sikhs helped separatist cadres travel to Pakistan, where they received financial and military help. And in 1985, Talwinder Singh Parmar—a Sikh Canadian—orchestrated the bombing of Air India Flight 182. The plane exploded over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 329 passengers and crew members in a plane attack deadlier than any the world would see until September 11, 2001.

Parmar was a terrorist, and experts believe that the Khalistani movement, with all its bloodshed, was unpopular among Indian Sikhs. But New Delhi was no less vicious. India responded to the Sikh insurgency with unremitting violence that killed thousands of civilians. At one point, separatists took shelter in the country’s Golden Temple, Sikhism’s holiest site, and the Indian government sent in the military, killing scores of people and damaging the building. Two Sikhs then assassinated India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi, which in turn prompted an anti-Sikh pogrom. Pamar himself was shot by police when he traveled to India after the plane bombing.

Nijjar, then, wouldn’t even be the first Canadian to be killed by Indian state actors. But his fate feels discontinuous with this history. His activism was peaceful, the Sikh insurgency having come to an end more than two decades ago. If India is behind Nijjar’s killing, its actions don’t reflect fears of Sikh secession so much as India’s transformation into an illiberal state where the government has elevated one religion—Hinduism—at the expense of all others, and where policy makers tolerate little dissent.

Since Modi came to power in 2014, violence against India’s minorities has dramatically increased, and New Delhi has moved to strip many non-Hindus of protections. The country revoked the partial autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir—India’s only Muslim-majority state—and split the entity in half. It passed a law that could deprive millions of Muslims of their citizenship, and it has done conspicuously little to stop the killing of members of tribal minorities in India’s northeast.

[Read: Violence is the engine of Modi’s politics]

So far, Sikhs have been spared the worst ethnonationalist measures. But this week’s incident suggests that they are no longer as exempt, and the reasons are not hard to fathom. Sikh farmers played a major role in forcing Modi to withdraw his agricultural-reform bills in 2021, one of his few political defeats. The prime minister may worry that, as his Hindu-nationalist project becomes more dominant, Sikhs could throw more obstacles in its path—or rekindle a separatist insurgency. He may have decided that the time has come to wage an open battle against the religion. But if he thought that doing so would preempt calls for secession, he miscalculated: Sikh activists across the world have already responded to Nijjar’s death with protests, some of them calling for the creation of Khalistan.

The killing has also antagonized Canada. But Ottawa’s anger is unlikely to trouble New Delhi. India has prohibited Jagmeet Singh—a Sikh Canadian politician and an outspoken defender of Sikh rights—from entering the country. (Singh now leads Canada’s third-largest political party.) India’s foreign minister has accused critics of the Modi government of colonialism and said that outsiders have no right to question India’s behavior. And India’s main Hindu-nationalist organization, to which Modi belongs, has called for the creation of Akhand Bharat: a greater India encompassing all or parts of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Tibet. India unveiled a new Parliament building in May that featured a mural of Akhand Bharat. Three countries lodged complaints in response.

[Read: Indian dissidents have had it with America praising Modi]

So far, Washington has professed to be “deeply concerned” by Trudeau’s allegations but has issued no serious rebuke to India, at least in public. In fact, according to The Washington Post, Trudeau originally asked the United States and its other closest allies to jointly announce the Canadian findings, but was rebuffed. (The Canadian government denied the Post’s report.)

The silence might seem logical: The United States sees India as an essential partner in its competition with China, so it does not want to alienate New Delhi. But American policy makers don’t just refrain from criticizing India. They praise the country’s politics and repeatedly declare that New Delhi is a natural partner for Washington. They invited Modi to address a joint session of Congress, where the prime minister crowned India the “mother of democracy,” its ambitions guided by the notion of “one Earth, one family, one future.”

Trudeau’s claim, if true, should remind the United States that India is not, in fact, a natural friend. The Indian government is trying to create not a great, peaceful democracy but an avowedly Hindu power that dominates South Asia. It may work with America to constrain China, but that is because challenging Beijing is in India’s interests, not because India supports the West.

Afghan health professionals - thousands of female among them - are defying daily challenges to provide critical care.

For three years now, I’ve had a recurring dream. I am walking into the British Parliament, which seems to have become a cathedral. Passing beneath coffered ceilings, Gothic wallpaper, and sinuous brass work, I arrive at a marble version of the debating chamber, in which I can see my sometimes-antagonist, the Conservative member of Parliament Jacob Rees-Mogg, lying in what appears to be a bishop’s surplice on one of the pews. When I step in to join my other colleagues, a large man in a tailcoat intercepts me, indicates courteously that this place is no longer for me, and escorts me out.

I had thought that I was reconciled to my break with Britain’s Conservative Party. My dreams suggest otherwise.

That break was sudden. Four years ago, Boris Johnson became prime minister. Almost overnight, the liberal-centrist tradition of the Conservative Party, which I had championed, was replaced by a right-wing, anti-immigrant platform for populists who reveled in stoking culture wars. The new prime minister threatened that MPs who tried to block his hard-Brexit proposals would be expelled from the party. Twenty-one of us chose to do so. He was true to his word: We all lost our seats. The party that I had served in Parliament for nearly a decade, and latterly for several years as a government minister, disinherited me. Friends turned against me.

Reckoning with Johnson’s legacy has made me very conscious of Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party, and I often wonder what general lessons can be drawn about alienation from a political party as it shifts from the center-right to the extreme. I can hardly claim to have found a formula, but I am beginning to believe that conservative populism can be defeated and that there is a route back to the center ground of democratic politics, where I believe most voters naturally are.

I was once a Labour Party member, but my years working in Iraq and Afghanistan alienated me from Tony Blair’s technocratic triumphalism. I was drawn to David Cameron’s Tory Party because I felt it better reflected my instincts about tradition, country, the wisdom of local communities, restraint abroad, and prudence at home. But perhaps because I had been a civil servant, I still largely viewed becoming a politician as a practical administrative challenge, rather than an exercise in party politicking.

I became a member of Parliament in 2010, when Cameron led a coalition government of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. We campaigned and voted together not only for localism, but also for gay marriage, net-zero emissions growth, and far more spending on international development. When later, as a government minister with responsibility first for prisons and then for the environment, I moved to reduce the number of people incarcerated and double the U.K.’s expenditure on tackling climate change, I did not feel any friction with my party.

[Read: Why would anyone become a politician?]

Of course, I was aware of other traditions of Toryism: I had colleagues who still supported the death penalty, tough restrictions on immigration, and draconian laws on crime. Margaret Thatcher might have mistrusted people like me—liberal Tories whom she perceived as “wets”—yet she always included some of them in her cabinet. Thirty years after the end of her leadership, the Conservative Party still had room for us.

Even after the Brexit referendum of 2016, and the election of Theresa May as prime minister, Tories of all stripes—“one nation” centrists, admirers of pageantry, libertarian free-marketeers, Catholic conservatives, advocates for same-sex marriage—continued mostly to vote in a single bloc. Colleagues more right-wing than me nevertheless invited me to speak to their constituents, traveled with me on international trips, and included me in conversations about their favorite subjects: the Victorians, military history, and Christianity.

In retrospect, I see that the unraveling began in October 2018, when I became one of the most prominent supporters of Prime Minister Theresa May’s proposals for a moderate “soft Brexit.” I had voted to remain in the European Union, but in the aftermath of the close result in the referendum (Brexit won 52–48), her approach seemed the only sensible course of action—a way to forge a compromise between bitterly divided Remain and Leave voters. But in the eyes of hard Brexiteers, my decision marked me as a careerist and a traitor.

Three MPs with whom I felt I had a friendly and respectful relationship attacked me in the press as “a laughing stock,” a hypocritical “huckster,” and a “narcissist.” The Daily Telegraph, the champion of the Tory right, claimed that when I was in Afghanistan, soldiers had nicknamed me “Florence of Belgravia” because of a supposed “propensity to want to compromise with the very terrorists who were killing British troops.” (I had in fact established a nonprofit, Turquoise Mountain, which restored a section of the old city of Kabul and supported women and men producing traditional crafts.)

Despite the rising intransigence of the Brexiteer wing of the party, these factional fissures need not have been fatal. The collapse came not when the right showed its teeth, but when the center enabled the right’s worst excesses.

The problem began at the top. All of my fellow cabinet ministers had spent two years studying Brexit. They had endorsed May’s moderate approach because they understood that a no-deal scenario—which would have involved the U.K. pulling out of the EU with no agreement on trade, market access, or the status of Northern Ireland—would be catastrophic. But some of the most senior people in the party were ambitious to replace May as prime minister and began to deny the risks of “no deal” in order to win over the support of party members who were significantly more right-wing than the general population (for they would be the electorate in a leadership election). May resigned in May 2019.

At this point, I decided to put myself forward for the party’s leadership election. Surely, I reasoned, a candidate of the center could still beat the leading contender of the right, Johnson? The public knew, I believed, that he was an insubstantial clown, with a rackety private life and rickety personal finances. MPs understood that he would use evasions, half-truths, and lies to mobilize a right-wing voter base and further polarize an already divided country. His Brexit proposals were incoherent and dangerous. But I soon realized that I’d underestimated the hold populism had taken on the party: Johnson was winning the support of moderate MPs, who saw him as their best electoral prospect.

“How can you possibly support him?” I asked a Yorkshire MP whom I had previously trusted.

“Because he is a winner.” Trying to ignore the obvious implication that I was a loser, I objected: “But he will make a terrible prime minister.”

“No one will be prime minister if we don’t win the next election.”

Johnson, of course, became prime minister. Many of those who backed him were rewarded with a seat in his cabinet—and then went out to the television studios to defend his blunders, his gross carelessness, and his ever-more blatant lies. Before it came time to vote on his no-deal Brexit proposals, in September 2019, some 100 Conservative MPs had seemed determined to take a stand against him. In the end, this number dwindled to just 21, though among us were six cabinet ministers, two former chancellors of the Exchequer, and Winston Churchill’s grandson. Together with opposition-party MPs, we had the votes to block his plan.

[Read: The party’s over]

At other times, voting against your party and government had been an acceptable part of British politics and parliamentary procedure—in fact, in the context of our first-past-the-post electoral system and unwritten constitution, it was a precious guarantee of independence for the legislature and a way of maintaining a broad coalition of opinion in Parliament. But the Tory Party in full populist ferment was not interested in constitutional conventions: Johnson responded by expelling us from the Conservative Party caucus, then he dissolved Parliament and called an election. In so doing, he decreed that only MPs who were prepared to back a possible no-deal Brexit could stand as Conservative candidates—thus ensuring that we rebels could not reenter Parliament.

The price of our opposition was exclusion from political life. I watched from this exile as Johnson proceeded to abolish my former Department for International Development, slash the overseas-aid budget, break his international legal obligations to the EU, flout his own pandemic regulations, and generally heap one scandal or shame upon another.

My failures to beat Johnson in the leadership contest, and to prevent him, as the prime minister, from leading a hard Brexit and the rightward lurch of the Conservative Party, were the most painful of my life. After losing the leadership race, I spent 11 days in a silent retreat, during which my chagrin at Johnson seemed to translate into an intense pain in my left knee.

Johnson got his comeuppance when, deserted by cabinet colleagues, he was forced to resign in July 2022. But he left his brand of right-wing populism deeply embedded in the party.

[Read: London’s mayoralty—Britain’s last political refuge?]

It has taken me a long time to acknowledge how and why my center-right tradition failed. But I am beginning to grasp how the Tory Party I signed up to spent too much time making technocratic arguments about policy, which offered no emotional connection for voters. The political class to which I belonged upheld a system that distanced us from a proper sense of shame at how bad things in our country had become.

Politicians like me were slow to acknowledge our past mistakes: how market orthodoxies and globalization had led to stagnant incomes, inequality, and lost industries; how the fantasies of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan were brutally exposed; and how the rise of China undermined our complacent assumptions about prosperity, democracy, and global security. These were the failures that populism exploited, and we could not defeat populism by defending the system that created it.  

We need to reject the old ideas and develop new ones: trade and industrial policies that evaluate investments for more than simply financial returns, and that consider their consequences for the environment and social justice; climate-change policies that do not hit the poorest hardest; economic policies that deliver results for the middle class without reducing foreign policy to domestic self-interest. And we need to convince a polarized world not with sermons but with political deftness, emotional connection, an inspiring moral vision, and a bit more ease and humor.

It’s taken me a long time to get to this realization. Many are the false steps before the glimmers of progress in learning how not to be a politician.

There is much to be learned about power and the press from the fact that former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson once evaded a reporter’s tough questions by hiding in an industrial fridge.

The reporter, Jonathan Swain of Good Morning Britain, ambushed Johnson at Modern Milkman dairy, where he was stopping for a folksy photo shoot in December 2019. For months, Johnson, a former journalist himself, had refused to be interviewed on prime-time breakfast television. If Johnson wouldn’t go to Good Morning Britain, then Good Morning Britain would go to him. Swain, broadcasting live to a national audience, surprised Johnson and asked him if he’d be willing to spare a few moments for an interview right then and there.

“I’ll be with you in a second,” Johnson said, hoping Swain would go away.

“I have an earpiece in my hands, ready to go,” Swain offered.

Johnson then proceeded into an industrial refrigerator to wait it out.

“He’s gone into the fridge,” the host Piers Morgan helpfully noted as Johnson hunkered down behind an enormous metal door.

[Kathryn Cramer Brownell: The problem with Fox News goes way, way back]

It was political theater at its finest. But it was also indicative of the adversarial spirit of Britain’s television media, which show little deference to authority. Former Prime Minister Liz Truss was toppled after just 49 days in power, a demise accelerated because she was humiliated in a series of “car crash” interviews, a standard term in British politics for when a politician is taken to task live on air. In one of the most memorable Boris Johnson interviews, the journalist Eddie Mair set the stage with objective facts about Johnson’s past misdeeds, then asked him the following question: “Making up quotes, lying to your party leader, wanting to be part of someone being physically assaulted: You’re a nasty piece of work, aren’t you?” Johnson sputtered and tried to change the subject, but the damage was done.

Here in the United States, by contrast, our leaders have plenty to answer for, but with few exceptions, American TV-news hosts lob softball questions at politicians rather than play hardball. When the politician is evasive, the interviewer too often moves on, letting the politician slither away. Ron DeSantis managed, for nearly three years, to evade giving a straight answer to the simple question as to who won the 2020 presidential election: He finally acknowledged, only last month, that Donald Trump lost. Unlike Boris Johnson, Trump has never had to hide in a fridge.

Last week, however, MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan did something unusual in American TV news. In a now-viral interview with the slick Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, Hasan decided to just keep asking the same questions until he got an answer. Ramaswamy was caught off guard, no doubt because the style of questioning was so different from what he had previously experienced on the campaign trail.

I’ve lived in Britain for 12 years, and in that time, I’ve come to realize that there is an enormous gulf between British and American broadcast political interviews. British journalism tends to approach broadcast interviews from a skeptical premise of, to quote the late British journalist Louis Heren, “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?”

By contrast, American broadcast political interviewing too often defers to power, is allergic to aggressive pushback, fails to follow up, and treats questions that expose a politician’s ignorance of basic facts as though they were a violation of social norms. Why, for example, has no American television interviewer ever asked Trump to locate Afghanistan on a map? A decade ago in The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf lamented the breezy questions from 60 Minutes to President Barack Obama. But the issue became even more obvious in the face of Trump’s firehose of lies, whose output frequently went undisputed, particularly on fawning right-wing media outlets. Maria Bartiromo, a pro-Trump sycophant on Fox News, grilled Trump in May 2020 by asking him, “I’ve never seen anybody take a punch and then get right back up and keep punching. I mean, where does this resilience come from?” In a similarly “tough” 2020 interview with Sean Hannity, Trump was asked to name any of his priorities for a second term. When he failed to name even a single one, Hannity just moved on.

But even outside the propaganda of the pro-Trump mediaverse, journalists in the mainstream American TV press can be ineffective at holding power to account on air. In one high-profile case from 2019, Chuck Todd, then the host of Meet the Press, faced significant criticism for letting President Trump spend much of the interview repeating blatant lies and falsehoods mostly unchallenged.  

Consider the interview that drew the most political blood during the Trump era. It was conducted by Jonathan Swan (not to be confused with Jonathan Swain of Boris Johnson–fridge fame). Swan, an Australian journalist who was working for Axios, interviewed Trump during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. What Swan did—which few have done so successfully before or since with Trump—was follow up, counter with facts, and refuse to move on after Trump’s throwaway lines.

“There are those who say you can test [for COVID] too much,” Trump claimed.

“Who says that?” Swan asked.

“Just read the manuals, read the books.”

“Manuals? What books?” Swan asked, perplexed.

“When I took over, we didn’t even have a [COVID] test,” Trump later boasted.

“Why would you have a test? The virus didn’t exist.”

Swan’s interview went viral because it broke from the standard American interview script—a script that Trump has mastered. Swan didn’t just ask Trump for his opinions but instead followed up with facts when Trump trotted out vapid, meaningless lines. As Swan’s face showed his complete puzzlement, his interview captured what many of those watching were thinking: What in the world is Trump talking about? (Swan’s expressions quickly became a popular internet meme.)

But Swan is, notably, not American, and had cut his teeth as a reporter in Canberra, not Washington. In fact, two of the most effective adversarial journalists in contemporary American media are CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and MSNBC’s Hasan, both of whom are British. Amanpour worked her way up within CNN, but Hasan trained in Britain’s aggressive press culture, and both established their career far outside the D.C. Beltway.

As Rob Burley explains in his new book, Why Is This Lying Bastard Lying to Me?, British political interviewing wasn’t always so adversarial, and politicians didn’t always lie or deflect. They had no need to: Up through the late 1950s, British media interviews were little more than broadcast press releases, and accountability was regarded as a job for Parliament, not the press. Prime Minister’s Questions, a bizarre spectacle that takes place every Wednesday when Parliament is in session, is a televised political jousting match, where elected officials challenge, debate, and make fun of one another, and try to score political points by cutting their rivals down to size, in many cases set to that very British soundtrack of jeers and harrumphing. (It’s an extraordinary contrast to American governance by C-SPAN, in which American elected officials are usually delivering their speeches to cameras but in a completely empty chamber.)

[David A. Graham: C-SPAN isn’t all good]

The British journalist Robin Day changed the culture of British political broadcast interviewing in 1958 when he broke from journalistic convention to ask the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, polite but pointed questions. The norm of reporters’ deferring to powerful men shattered, and politicians in Westminster began to accept being grilled not just in Parliament but also on the airwaves.

Then, in 1997, Jeremy Paxman, at the time the host of BBC Newsnight, set a new standard for combative interviews. Paxman has long been a household name in Britain, known for an attack-dog style of journalism that struck fear into every politician he ever interviewed. In the 1997 interview, the politician Michael Howard refused to answer Paxman’s yes-or-no question about whether he had threatened a senior civil servant, but Paxman refused to back down. He asked the question 12 times in a row, spanning a minute and a half of deliciously uncomfortable television as Howard squirmed, hoping that Paxman would do what most interviewers do: move on. Paxman didn’t, and the result is now regarded as perhaps the most famous British political interview of all time.

British political media have produced a pantheon of adversarial legends—Paxman, Brian Walden, Andrew Neil, Andrew Marr, Emily Maitlis, and Beth Rigby, to name a few—figures who are renowned for dissecting their political guests, exposing lies and hypocrisy with surgical precision. (The Maitlis interview with Prince Andrew, in 2019, sealed the royal’s fate as a modern pariah).

The Today program on BBC Radio 4 sets the British political agenda more than any comparable American show—and its “10 past eight” interview slot is often a ritual morning dressing-down of whichever government minister dares to go on it. Why would politicians subject themselves to this? Surely few relish the thought of being interrupted, cajoled, and contradicted live on air. But politicians who hope to rise have to meet the public, and the BBC stations dominate news coverage: From 2010 to 2020, 57 to 65 percent of Britons got their TV news from BBC One. Likewise, BBC radio stations have six times the news-market share of their nearest competitor.

“There is nowhere for politicians to hide,” Justin Webb, one of the main hosts of BBC Radio 4’s Today program, told me. “They can’t just go to a place where they talk to their own people.” Webb, who worked for the BBC in Washington during the presidency of George W. Bush, noted that the dynamics are completely different in the United States, where Republicans gravitate toward Fox News and Democrats more frequently appear on MSNBC. This way, some can just avoid tough questions altogether.  

In Washington, politicians can penalize outlets that are too harsh by refusing to appear on their networks again—hence the concern about “access journalism,” in which interviewers avoid crossing invisible lines of deference to maintain cordial relationships with politicians whose presence raises their network’s ratings and revenue. In one instance, the head of CNN even directly intervened to remove references to a sexual-abuse case Trump had lost in court from the chyron banner scrolling underneath the live video feed, lest it would upset Trump before he appeared on the network.

[Read: Inside the meltdown at CNN]

In Britain, by contrast, politicians who won’t subject themselves to cross-examination from a hostile press can be subjected to ridicule. Boris Johnson skipped a debate about climate change, so the TV channel hosting the discussion kept his lectern in place but put a melting block of ice on it to represent his absence. When he skipped a preelection interview on the BBC, they broadcast a monologue with the host, Andrew Neil, about the importance of answering questions—next to a conspicuously empty chair for the truant Johnson. When Trump skipped the first GOP debate last month, there was no empty lectern to highlight his absence.

The BBC, unlike most American broadcast-news networks, is nonprofit and does not break for commercials the way American news programs do. Reporters therefore have more time and space to follow up and press for answers, Webb said. Hasan of MSNBC acknowledges that added constraint on American cable news: “There’s definitely a pressure with ad breaks to keep interviews tight,” he told me. Prerecording interviews can help get around this problem, but doing so is not always viable. Still, Hasan suggests that the time constraints can become an excuse for pulling punches: “The number of times I’ve seen an interviewer have someone on the ropes and then say, ‘That’s all we have time for,’ or, ‘Moving on’—the phrase moving on is poison to me. It’s poison to a TV interview.”

But before Americans rush to import Jeremy Paxman and Emily Maitlis, be warned: Relentless adversarial journalism can have undesirable consequences. Politicians become cagey, always trying to sniff out an ulterior motive to even the most innocuous line of questioning. Even worse, to survive in British politics, government ministers must undergo rigorous media training, in which they learn how to be suitably slippery, never to become entangled in a gotcha moment by Webb or his colleagues. Tough questions sometimes yield few answers. Paxman’s notorious interview is a case in point: Even after 12 tries, his political prey still didn’t answer the question. Plenty of heat, yes, but how much light?

Politics may even suffer a chilling effect, as the more the field becomes defined by dangerous jousting matches between reporters and politicians, the fewer normal people will want to enter it. The profession could continue to appeal to the graduates of the Oxford Union debating societies, where adversarial witticisms are the currency of elite social capital, but turn off ordinary people who can think of more pleasant ways to enact change without risking national mortification. (Of course, even without the threat of constant adversarial interviews, most Americans find the prospect of entering politics repulsive, and few U.S. politicians give straight answers.)

Nonetheless, American broadcast interviewing needs more well-prepared follow-ups, more challenges from journalists who have done their homework, and, yes, more gotcha questions and fewer “what do you think of” opinion questions. We used to be able to take for granted that politicians knew basic facts about the world they were trying to help govern. That’s no longer the case. So, when politicians don’t know basic facts, exposing a dangerous ignorance is in the public interest. Doing so is not rude; it’s journalism. When Vivek Ramaswamy says that he would subject young voters to a civics test before allowing them to vote, for example, why not ask him some questions live on air to see if he could pass a civics test himself?

The Trump era made clear that the American model of broadcast political interviewing isn’t fit for purpose. It could benefit from a few British-style upgrades. And maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if, every so often, our most evasive American politicians had to cower in a freezer if they wanted to escape a journalist who’s willing to hound them until they actually answer the question.