Yesterday was not a good day for House Republicans or for their struggling leader, Speaker Kevin McCarthy. In the morning, McCarthy was forced to scrap a procedural vote on a GOP proposal to avert a government shutdown that will commence at the end of this month if Congress doesn’t act. In the afternoon, a handful of conservatives tanked McCarthy’s bid to advance legislation funding the Pentagon.

The failure of the proposal to prevent a shutdown was the more ominous defeat, both for Republicans and for the country. Yet even if McCarthy manages to pass a version of this, it will almost certainly be an exercise in futility. For starters, it would fund the government for a mere 30 additional days. And its basic provisions—cutting spending by 8 percent for all but the Defense and Veterans Affairs Departments, restarting construction of the southern border wall, cutting off pathways for asylum seekers—will likely be stripped out by Senate Democrats.

Despite the GOP’s evident dysfunction, Representative Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota was in a chipper mood when he called me from the Capitol. The McCarthy ally was scurrying between meetings in an effort to help resolve the latest crisis threatening the speaker. “We’re a long way from landing the plane, but there are really productive conversations going on,” Armstrong told me. If the plane represents, in Armstrong’s metaphor, a functioning federal government, then House Republicans are still hovering at about 30,000 feet, with the runway coming rapidly into view.

[Watch: The Republicans threatening to shut down the government]

The Democrats who run the Senate aren’t involved in the “productive conversations” Armstrong was referencing. If they were, McCarthy might already have lost his job. Before he can negotiate with the Democrats, the speaker must broker a peace among the warring factions of his own party, who cannot even agree on an opening offer. Groups representing the conservative Freedom Caucus and the more pragmatic Main Street Caucus announced a deal on Sunday to support the 30-day extension, with spending cuts and border restrictions attached. But almost immediately, hard-liners rejected the proposal as insufficiently austere. Led by Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, several of these Republicans are threatening to oust McCarthy if he caves to Democrats on spending, and a few of them are openly itching for a government shutdown.

Any five Republicans can torpedo proposals that don’t have Democratic support—as five GOP lawmakers did yesterday in blocking the defense bill—and any five could topple McCarthy by voting along with Democrats for a procedural tool known as a motion to vacate the chair. This has effectively made him a hostage of his caucus, with precious little room to maneuver.

Even the relatively optimistic Armstrong acknowledged the difficulty of McCarthy’s position. “It’s a pretty untenable argument to say you don’t have enough Republican votes to pass anything and you can’t negotiate with Democrats on anything,” Armstrong told me.

McCarthy has tried many times to shake off threats to his speakership, alternately daring members like Gaetz to make a bid to oust him and pointing out that with such a narrow majority, any other Republican replacement would find themselves in the same unenviable position. I asked Armstrong whether McCarthy should simply ignore the hard-liners in his conference and strike a deal with Democrats to keep the government open, come what may. “I’m not sure he should yet,” he said.

House Republicans have received hardly any backing from their brethren in the Senate, who have shown no appetite for a shutdown fight and have been more willing to uphold the budget deal that McCarthy struck with President Joe Biden in the spring. By bowing to conservative demands for deeper spending cuts, the speaker is reneging on the same agreement, which allowed Congress to raise the debt ceiling and avoid a catastrophic default. “I’m not a fan of government shutdowns,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters yesterday. “I’ve seen a few of them over the years. They have never produced a policy change, and they’ve always been a loser for Republicans.”

For now, McCarthy allies such as Armstrong are adamant that this spending battle must result in a change in administration policy. They have zeroed in on the border, seeing an opportunity to force Biden’s hand and take advantage of an issue on which even some Democrats, such as New York City Mayor Eric Adams, have been critical of the president. “If we can’t use this fight to deal with the single most pressing national-security issue and humanitarian issue of our time, then shame on us,” Armstrong said.

[Read: Kevin McCarthy is a hostage]

Yet House Republicans have found themselves isolated, and bickering over legislation that—like most of their proposals this year—stands no chance of becoming law. A bipartisan majority in the Senate is likely to simply return a temporary spending bill to the House without the conservative priorities, perhaps with additional funding to aid Ukraine in its war with Russia. What then? I asked Armstrong. “I would shut it down,” he replied.

Democrats in the House, meanwhile, have watched the unfolding GOP drama with a mix of schadenfreude and growing horror. The Republican infighting could help Democrats win back a House majority next year. But a shutdown would not reflect well on either party, and voters could end up blaming Biden as well as the GOP for the fallout. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers would be furloughed, and millions of Americans might have to wait longer for Social Security checks and other needed benefits. “The rest of the world looks at us like we’re incompetent and dysfunctional,” Representative Gerry Connolly, a Democrat whose Northern Virginia district includes thousands of federal workers, told me. “How do you explain to our European allies that we can’t fund our government?”

Connolly is in his eighth term and, like America’s allies, has seen this brinkmanship play out several times before. He told me that whereas earlier in the month he thought Congress had a 50–50 chance of keeping the government open, he now puts the odds of a shutdown at 90 percent. “Sometimes you feel like we’re going to avert this cliff, and then there are times that you go, ‘No, we’re going off this cliff,’” Connolly said. “This one feels like we’re going off the cliff.”

US Department of Defense officials often face intense scrutiny from Congress, specifically because their agency has never been able to pass an audit. In 2022, the DoD had its fifth self-led audit in the department’s entire history, and 1,600 auditors couldn’t get it to account for roughly 60% of its $3.5 trillion in…

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The thunder of war in Ukraine drowns out a lot of other news from Russia. A few days ago, however, the Russian foreign intelligence service quietly did something rather odd. Sergei Naryshkin, the director of the Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki, or SVR (the Russian version of the CIA), unveiled a statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police.

At first sight, this seems another sign of President Vladimir Putin’s nostalgia for the good old days of Soviet repression, when an aspiring young secret policeman could live a comfortable life by intimidating his neighbors and tormenting his fellow citizens. But the reappearance of a monument to this hated figure in Soviet history might be related more to Russia’s elite politics than to Putin’s nostalgia.

Before we get into the modern Kremlinology, let’s look back at the early days of the Soviet intelligence services.

Dzerzhinsky was a Polish national with a long history of revolutionary activity. He joined the Russian Bolsheviks, and shortly after the 1917 revolution, Vladimir Lenin put him in charge of creating a secret-police organization. (The czars had one, of course; the Bolsheviks wanted their own.) He became the director of the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage, known by the Russian initials VChK, soon abbreviated to its last two letters, pronounced “che” and “ka,” which is why the secret police were called “the Cheka.” To this day, Russia’s spooks proudly call themselves “Chekists”—as do their enemies, pejoratively.

[Read: How to repurpose a bad statue]

Dzerzhinsky died in 1926 after gaining a reputation as a ruthless, incorruptible fanatic and setting the tone for his successors in the secret police. Over the years, the Cheka mutated into various Soviet government entities, some of them famous in Cold War lore (such as the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or the dreaded NKVD). For a time, Joseph Stalin split the foreign and domestic intelligence agencies into two ministries. As with many countries’ intelligence organizations, something of a rivalry existed between the cops who did internal security and the secret agents who operated against the Soviet Union’s enemies abroad. The Soviet military, too, had its own spy service, the coldly brutal GRU, which still exists today. To put this in American terms, think of the traditional tensions among the FBI, the CIA, and the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (minus any democratic oversight).

In 1954, the Soviets decided to combine all of these organizations into a giant interagency group called the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, the Committee for State Security, or KGB—an acronym well known to Americans during the Cold War and the organization that Putin joined in 1975. The foreign spies and the domestic goons were in different departments, and worked in different buildings, but they were all under one director.

After the fall of the U.S.S.R., in 1991, the new (and short-lived) Russian democracy decided to weaken the Soviet-era police-state monolith by once again splitting up the foreign and domestic services. The foreign spy agency became the SVR and remained in its modernist digs out in the southern reaches of the Russian capital, in Moscow’s Yasenevo neighborhood. The domestic service—the thugs whom Russians fear on a daily basis—became the Federal’naia Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, and it stayed in the old KGB building in central Moscow.

[Read: Is Stalin making a comeback in Russia?]

Here’s where the story of the new statue gets interesting. The original monument—at 15 tons, a hunk of metal so large that Muscovites attached Derzhinsky’s nickname, “Iron Feliks,” to the statue itself—was erected in front of the downtown KGB headquarters in 1958. (The imposing building in Lubyanka Square was also across the way from a big Soviet toy store called Child World, and Soviet citizens would joke darkly that someone in trouble with the authorities had “gone to Child World.”) After the 1991 coup attempt against the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, the statue was torn down on the demand of Moscow’s citizens.

So when I read the first reports that a new statue was being raised, I thought it was an aggressive message from Putin to the people of the capital. In 2021, the Moscow city government had scheduled a vote on whether to bring Iron Feliks back to the downtown location or to erect a new statue in its place of the 13th-century Russian saint and hero Alexander Nevsky. The city’s mayor, citing “deep divisions,” canceled the popular poll. To return Iron Feliks to his place of honor in front of Moscow’s most notorious stronghold of repression would have been heavy-handed symbolism even from Putin.

But Feliks isn’t back in his old neighborhood; he’s out in Yasenevo. (He’s also not as tall or as heavy as he used to be; the new statue is a replica of the original, but smaller.) So what’s going on? And who is this stunt’s intended audience?

One clue might be found in the remarks that the SVR’s director, Sergey Naryshkin, made at the unveiling. Instead of celebrating Dzerzhinsky’s harsh legacy, Naryshkin praised his honesty and dedication, and gushed that Dzerzhinsky “remained faithful to his ideals to the end—the ideals of goodness and justice.” He then noted that the statue was facing toward the NATO members neighboring Russia—Poland and the Baltic states—which he identified as the source of foreign threats:

The erected monument is an exact, somewhat scaled-down copy of the famous monument of an outstanding Soviet sculptor, and that’s why we simply didn’t have the right to change the direction of the view of the monument’s hero. And the fact is that threats remain to our country, to our citizens, from the northwest—yes, this is obvious.

Dzerzhinsky is a progenitor of sorts of the foreign intelligence agency, but this bit of theater is strange—something akin to the CIA erecting a statue of the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in front of its headquarters and extolling Hoover’s noble struggles against the Soviet enemy. (In case you’re wondering, a statue already stands outside the agency’s Langley front door—of America’s first spy, Nathan Hale, from the Revolutionary War era.) You could argue, I suppose, that Hoover did his part by setting the bureau’s agents on Soviet spies in America, but looking east and facing down the Reds is not really how we remember him.

[Read or listen: How Putin thinks]

Without getting too in the weeds, other clues about what’s going on may lie in recent machinations within the Russian government.

In a February 2020 meeting just days before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin humiliated Naryshkin on national television when the SVR chief seemed caught off guard by Putin’s questions during an audience with the president. The FSB, at that moment, was riding high; its spies were supposed to have paved the way for the collapse of Kyiv that Putin expected in the first days of the war.

We all know how that went, and Putin turned his fury on the incompetent agents in Lubyanka Square who had promised much and delivered nothing. Possibly, then, Naryshkin is now making a play for the SVR to eclipse the FSB as Russia’s premier intelligence service. Or he might be signaling his agency’s commitment to opposing NATO as part of fighting the war in Ukraine. Or maybe he’s just reminding everyone that he hasn’t forgotten that his job, regardless of the Ukraine war, is to combat Western spies. Either way, Naryshkin may be doing a bit of “managing up.”

Who knows, though? Perhaps the SVR had a spare copy of the Iron Feliks statue sitting in the basement and just decided to make a day of it. (Or perhaps Dzerzhinsky’s admirers hope it’s less likely to be vandalized out in Yasenevo.)

One thing is certain: Neither Naryshkin nor Putin—nor indeed the FSB’s chief, Alexander Bortnikov, who remains close to Putin despite his agency’s colossal screwup over Ukraine—risked putting Iron Feliks up in central Moscow. Putin’s power is not limitless, and he would have nothing to gain by antagonizing citizens in the capital with a statue few of them would want. And perhaps not even the president wants to see Iron Feliks through his limo window and be reminded of better days, when the Soviet Union still existed, the KGB was nearly omnipotent, and Vladimir Putin wasn’t one of the most hated people in Russia.

The U.S. government faces a dilemma. Starlink, a private satellite venture devised and controlled by Elon Musk, offers capabilities that no government or other company can match. Its innovations are the fruit of Musk’s drive and ambitions. But they have become enmeshed with American foreign and national-security policy, and Musk is widely seen as an erratic leader who can’t be trusted with the country’s security needs. In other words, the United States has urgent uses for Starlink’s technology—but not for the freewheeling foreign-policy impulses of its creator.

The conundrum is substantially new for Washington. During World War I, wealthy industrialists, such as Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan, poured considerable resources into the American war effort: Ford’s factories produced boats, trucks, and artillery for military use; Morgan lent money. After the war, John D. Rockefeller Jr. funded the League of Nations. But Musk is doing something different. He supplies his product directly to foreign countries, and he retains personal control over which countries can obtain his equipment and how they can use it. That discretion has military and political implications. As one U.S. defense official admitted to The New Yorker, “Living in the world we live in, in which Elon runs this company and it is a private business under his control, we are living off his good graces.”

The dilemma is currently clearest in Ukraine. Starlink satellites, which Musk generously supplied at the start of the conflict so that Ukrainians would not lose internet access, have allowed for satellite-guided drones to help the Ukrainian military observe battlefield movements and target precision missiles. Experts describe Starlink’s military advantage as akin to providing an “Uber for howitzers.” But its disadvantage is Musk’s outsize role in determining the conduct of the war. That influence has come under scrutiny in recent days, with the release of excerpts from a forthcoming biography that highlight Musk’s mercurial decision making in Ukraine.

[Read: Demon mode activated]

Musk’s assent is required to maintain satellite internet connectivity in the country, and for reasons of his own, he has refused it near Crimea and imposed other restrictions that limit where Starlink services are available to Ukrainian forces. He told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that he felt responsible for the offensive operations Starlink might enable, and that he had spoken with the Russian ambassador about how Moscow might react to them. At significant junctures during Ukrainian offensive operations, Starlink communication devices have experienced mysterious “outages.” The outages became enough of a problem that in June, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin specially negotiated the purchase of 400 to 500 new Starlink terminals that the Defense Department would directly control for use by Ukrainian forces.

The concerns about relying on Musk don’t end with Ukraine or even with questions of temperament. Musk’s commercial holdings could expose Washington to unwanted entanglements. Take, for example, his ownership of Tesla, which has a large factory and market presence in China. In the event of an invasion of Taiwan, would Musk willingly provide Starlink terminals to Taiwanese forces—at the behest of the United States—and take huge financial losses as a result? Last October, Musk told the Financial Times that China had already pressured him about Starlink, seeking “assurances” that he will not give satellite internet to Chinese citizens. He did not make clear in the interview how he responded, but Starlink was then and remains unavailable in China.

So what is the U.S. government to do about its own entanglement with Musk? One idea that experts have floated is to invoke the Defense Production Act, which authorizes the president to direct private companies to prioritize fulfilling orders from the federal government. The Pentagon estimates that it already uses DPA authority to place roughly 300,000 orders a year for various equipment items. Using it to regularize deliveries from Starlink would be relatively straightforward and could ensure a continuous flow of devices and connectivity for Ukraine’s forces. The U.S. government could even add language to the contract mandating that decisions to turn connectivity on or off would reside with public officials and not Musk.

But what if Musk decided to contest the terms of the contract? What if his factories suddenly faced supply “shortages” affecting delivery rates of crucial devices? The DPA could serve as a hedge against Musk’s impulses, but it would not be a full guarantee against disruptions.

If the government wanted to get really aggressive, it could nationalize Starlink, taking effective control over the company’s operations and removing Musk as its head. As extreme as this scenario sounds, the U.S. government has actually nationalized corporations many times in its history: During World Wars I and II, the government nationalized railways, coal mines, trucking operators, telegraph lines, and even the gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson. Following the September 11 terrorist attacks, the United States nationalized the airport-security industry.

But past government takeovers nearly all took place under conditions of war or financial crisis. Today, no national crisis equivalent to the 9/11 attacks can provide political cover for such a move. And Musk would be sure to fight back: He built Starlink from scratch, and the company is deeply personal to him. A government takeover would be acrimonious, politically messy, and not necessarily successful.

More likely, it would be counterproductive: As a private company, Starlink can provide products that assist Ukrainian forces even while claiming that it’s simply offering a service and not taking sides. That posture hasn’t prevented Moscow from testing weapons to sabotage Starlink, nor has it stopped Beijing from developing an alternate satellite network. But the company’s independence has likely deterred U.S. rivals from targeting its infrastructure for destruction. Nationalization would change this equation and send the message that Starlink is an instrument of American power and should be treated as such.

[Read: What Russia got by scaring Elon Musk]

So if Starlink has to remain independent—but needs to be less of a wild card for national security—the government’s best bet may be to negotiate one or several agreements with Starlink to ensure its compliance with U.S. interests. Starlink could then act as something more like a traditional military-contracting company. The contracts could build in provisions stipulating that in the event of a crisis, Starlink’s regular operations would be suspended, and all manufacturing and distribution decisions would run through U.S. regulators.

Musk might find such a deal attractive. His company would get long-term government funding and a reputational boost. But government contracts also come with restrictions that would likely irk him over time—limitations on which other clients Starlink could sell to, for example. He might also balk at the implications for his other businesses, such as Tesla, in foreign markets. If he soured on the arrangement, he could terminate the contract or undermine the effectiveness of his product—for example, by slow-walking software updates or declining to invest in upgrades.

The only sustainable solution to the problem of Elon Musk is for the American market to produce alternatives to Starlink. But even here, the obstacles are legion. Musk was able to turbocharge Starlink in part because he used rockets from his adjoining company, SpaceX, to deliver thousands of satellites into space. A competitor would have to not only match Starlink’s technical innovation but also secure enough rockets to get masses of satellites into orbit. And because satellite-based networks work better the more devices come online, a rival company’s service would lag behind Starlink’s for a long period of time. So far, the efforts of would-be competitors have been underwhelming. Amazon was reportedly preparing to launch its very first satellites in May but had to put the effort on hold because of rocket testing problems.

A viable Starlink competitor may be a long way off, but U.S. national security requires the pursuit of one. The government should encourage competition in the satellite market by offering subsidies and commercial tax breaks, among other incentives, because in the long run, only diversification will alleviate pressure on the United States and its allies to conform to Musk’s whims. With a choice of providers, the United States—or Ukraine, for that matter—could choose which company it wished to contract with, and redundancies could fill the gap in the case of an unexpected supply shortage or a snag in one company’s production line.

Elon Musk’s monopoly on satellite internet technology is the product of an original idea—launching a great many low-orbiting satellites in place of a distant, high-orbiting few— and a big gamble he made with his own capital. The venture has brought him undue influence over national-security affairs that the U.S. government can’t possibly tolerate. The surest way to curtail it is to make sure he isn’t the only one innovating or launching satellites into space.

Prognosticating about war is always a chancy business. Even the most arrogant pundit or politician soon learns to slip a qualifying “You never can tell” into their predictions. But making all allowance for that, it is striking just how bad Western governments, commentators, and leaders have been over the past few decades at gauging not only what course wars might take but how they have gone as they have unfolded.

In 1990, many respectable analysts and journalists predicted a bloodbath followed by a quagmire in the Kuwaiti and Iraqi deserts as battle-hardened Iraqi troops faced their outnumbered and supposedly softer American counterparts. The Gulf War, however, ended up being a swift conflict in which friendly fire and accidents did as much damage to the U.S. Army as hostile fire. The Iraqis were outgunned, outmaneuvered, out-led, and—as we later learned—actually outnumbered by the forces ranged against them.

[Garrett M. Graff: After 9/11, the U.S. got almost everything wrong]

American and European planners similarly overestimated their opponents in the Balkans in the 1990s. Historically misinformed references to the numbers of German divisions pinned down by Tito’s partisans during World War II had defense planners and commentators convinced that although the U.S. had won a smashing victory with ease against Iraq, intervening in Bosnia would be a much tougher fight. It wasn’t.

Misestimates in both directions have continued ever since. For four years after the start of the Iraq War in 2003, the U.S. flailed about, convincing itself that it was merely fighting a declining number of “former regime elements” and “bitter-enders” waging irregular warfare, who could be disposed of by the shaky new Iraqi army. It took a more realistic view—and the war’s best commander, General David Petraeus—to turn around both assessment and strategy.

If overoptimism had bedeviled the U.S. government in Iraq before 2007, and in Afghanistan as well, persistent and equally ungrounded pessimism about the possibilities of reversing the situation pervaded Congress. In fact, a freshman senator from Illinois and a senior senator from Delaware, both of whom would become president, were convinced that the Iraq War was hopeless just as Petraeus and his five new brigades turned it around. Back to overoptimism again: American administrations misjudged the pace and extent of the Taliban’s war against our Afghan allies in the early 2000s; in 2021, they were stunned by the collapse of the Afghan regime once we had announced our final withdrawal. They had been equally surprised by the re-eruption of the Islamic State after a similar, if lesser, withdrawal from Iraq a decade earlier.

Prominent analysts of the Russian military confidently projected a Russian blitzkrieg against Ukraine in February 2022. Yet well before the full weight of Western aid could be felt in Ukraine, the invader was shown to be far less competent, and the defenders far more effective, than anyone had anticipated. A similar pattern is occurring now, as anonymous military leakers and supposed experts say that the Ukrainian counteroffensive is a failure because fighters are not maneuvering in the manner of George S. Patton and the Third Army in the breakout from the Normandy beachheads in 1944.

How and why has this happened? Failing to project the actual course of a war is, after all, a phenomenon on both the right and the left of the political spectrum, and quite as common among serving officers and intelligence officials as among journalists and commentators.

To some extent, the explanations vary with the cases. The Iraq and Afghanistan misjudgments reflected in part the difficulty of overcoming the military’s self-imposed amnesia about counterinsurgency after Vietnam. The “We will never do that again” sentiment led the U.S. Army in particular to stop thinking about counterinsurgency. When I led a study for the Defense Policy Board on the subject in 2004, I discovered that the counterinsurgency manuals still on hand were of Vietnam vintage, presuming an opposing army of Communist-indoctrinated peasants in straw hats and black pajamas.

The Ukraine misjudgments came from different sources: narrow focus on numbers of weapons and pieces of kit, confusion of military doctrine with actual ability to execute it, and the enduring American suspicion that if you are allied with the United States, you are probably corrupt, incompetent, and cowardly. That was unfair with regard to the Vietnamese, Afghans, and Iraqis, who were in some measure each set up to fail, but it was grossly wrong with regard to Ukraine. And with an analytic subculture built around a certain reverence for the Russian bear, some had difficulty accepting that the bruin was rheumatic, myopic, mangy, and had mangled claws.

Very few people study war. In the past three or four decades, universities have been filled with courses on “security studies,” which means, in practice, things such as arms control, deterrence theory, and bargaining under threat. That is where today’s journalists, scholars, and officials were educated. Universities that once had eminent military historians—a Mac Coffman at the University of Wisconsin, a Gunther Rothenberg at Purdue, a Gordon Craig at Stanford, a Theodore Ropp at Duke—saw them replaced by respectable scholars who were less directly concerned (or not engaged at all) with what happens when nations summon up armies, fleets, and air armadas to make the final argument of kings.

For civilians, the end of the draft meant the vanishing of a gritty familiarity with what makes militaries work, and, just as important, with their numerous stupidities and inefficiencies. As military experience dried up in the political, scholarly, and journalistic worlds, professional officers operated exclusively in an environment in which, however, grueling and lethal the forever wars might seem, the United States always had overwhelming advantages, including supremacy in the air and in space, and secure logistical bases and lines of communication. These conflicts were hard and often bitter experiences, but they were not wars of the kind that kill hundreds or even thousands in a day, and they were not wars against countries that could contest our dominance in the air or at sea. That has not happened since 1945.

Our systems of higher military education only partly compensate for this lack of direct experience. When he was secretary of defense, James Mattis called for “putting the war back in war college.” But the war colleges, with important and respectable exceptions in terms of faculty and courses, are primarily designed to bring mid-career officers into the political-military world of international politics and foreign policy, of defense decision making and analysis. These are not the hatcheries of the elite war planners and scholars of war that we need.

The conviction remains in many quarters that somehow, real war will not again come to us. That is why even though military leaders know that ammunition stocks are way too low, they do not pound their civilian superiors’ desks pleading to build them up. It is why political leaders, in turn, fail to level with the American people that we need to spend more—a lot more—on defense, if we hope to prevent in other parts of the world the horrors that have befallen Ukraine. It is why humanitarian restrictions on some valuable weapons—mines and cluster munitions in particular—can make their way into law or policy, because we somehow think that these horrors will never become necessities.

[David Frum: The Iraq War reconsidered]

Two antidotes come to mind. The first is a lot more military history all around—old-fashioned guns-and-trumpets stuff, as antiquated and embarrassing as that is to the contemporary academic mind. One should read military history in width and depth, the 20th century’s greatest English-speaking military historian, Michael Howard, once said. One should know something about a lot of wars and a great deal about a few, to develop an instinct about what things in war will go well and which poorly, what one can anticipate and what one cannot.

And we should keep an honest accounting. Errors—even big errors—of military judgment are inevitable. But when misjudgments occur, those who make them should ask themselves some painful and searching questions. (I wrote the second chapter of  The Big Stick to reckon with my own misjudgments about Iraq.) And when such miscalls are truly egregious, persistent, and, what is much worse, unacknowledged and unexamined, journalists, pundits, and officials should consider whether that well-known name should still be on speed dial, as is the case with the Ukraine war today. Otherwise, the most recent set of errors will most definitely not be the last, or even the worst.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Democracy is under attack around the world; in the United States, the summer brought good news and bad news. The institutions of democracy are still functioning, but not for long if enough Americans continue to support authoritarianism.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Tim Alberta: The thrill of defeat The metaphor that explains why America needs to prosecute Trump There’s a word for blaming Jews for anti-Semitism. What were the Russians doing in Chornobyl?

Layered Repression

Almost two years ago, I engaged in a thought experiment about what the failure of democracy in the United States might look like. I wrote it for an Atlantic subscriber newsletter I had back then, and I hope you’ll forgive me for revisiting it, but after a summer in which American democracy has been walking a tightrope over the authoritarian chasm, it’s worth looking back to see how we’ve done since early 2022.

The most important point, and the one that I think bears repeating, is that the failure of democracy in America will not look like a scene from a movie, where some fascist in a black tunic ascends the steps of the Capitol on Inauguration Day and proclaims the end of freedom:

The collapse of democracy in the United States will look more like an unspooling or an unwinding rather than some dramatic installation of Gilead or Oceania. My guess—and again, this is just my stab at speculative dystopianism—is that it will be a federal breakdown that returns us to the late 1950s in all of the worst ways.

We’re already seeing this unwinding in slow motion. Donald Trump and many on the American right (including the national Republican Party) have made clear their plans to subvert America’s democratic institutions. They made continuous efforts to undermine the will of the voters at the state level, most notably in Georgia, after the 2020 presidential election, and then they tried to overrule the results at the national level by setting a mob on Congress on January 6, 2021. If Trump returns to the Oval Office, he and his underlings will set up a system designed to set up a series of cascading democratic failures from Washington to every locality they can reach.

They intend to pack courts with judges who are loyal to Trump instead of to the Constitution. They want to destroy an independent federal civil service by making all major civil servants political appointees, which would allow the right to stuff every national agency with cronies at will. They want to neuter independent law-enforcement institutions such as the FBI, even if that means disbanding them. They will likely try to pare down the senior military ranks until the only remaining admirals and generals are men and women sworn not to the defense of the United States but to the defense of Donald Trump, even if that means employing military force against the American public.

Trump and his supporters are not even coy about some of these ideas. The Heritage Foundation—once a powerhouse think tank on the right that has since collapsed into unhinged extremism and admiration for foreign strongmen—has a “Project 2025” posted on its website, with sections that read like extended Facebook comments. I took a look so that you don’t have to, including at a policy-guide chapter on the military authored by former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller.

Heritage and Miller (a seat warmer brought in by Trump at the tail end of his administration) think it’s very important for the next president—I wonder who they could possibly have in mind—to “eliminate Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs” and to reinstate personnel dismissed for disobeying orders to get vaccinated.

Also:

Codify language to instruct senior military officers (three and four stars) to make certain that they understand their primary duty to be ensuring the readiness of the armed forces, not pursuing a social engineering agenda.

Why not just write up a loyalty oath to Trump? Little wonder that Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama is holding up the promotion of some 300 senior officers; perhaps it’s occurred to him (or others) that sitting on those promotions until 2025 might open the door for Heritage’s unnamed next U.S. president to sweep out the Marxist gender theorists and replace them with “real Americans” who know that their duty is to a man rather than a moldering document in the National Archives.

The rest of Project 2025 is a lot of putative big-think from wannabe conservative intellectuals such as Ken Cuccinelli, Ben Carson, Stephen Moore, and Peter Navarro (who is currently on trial for contempt of Congress). Much of this stuff is nonsense, of course, but it’ll be nonsense right up until the point it isn’t: These are all names that would reappear in a second Trump administration, and this time, they’d move a lot faster in breaking down the federal guardrails around democracy.

This layered state, federal, and local repression is what I worried about back in early 2022:

This is where we really will have “free” and “unfree” Americas, side by side. To drive from Massachusetts to Alabama—especially for women and people of color—will not be crossing the Mason-Dixon line so much as it will be like falling through the Time Tunnel and emerging in a pre-1964 America where civil rights and equal treatment before the government are a matter of the state’s forbearance. If an American citizen’s constitutional rights are violated, there will be no Justice Department that will intervene, no Supreme Court that will overrule. (And arresting seditionists? Good luck with that. I expect that if Trump is reelected, he will pardon everyone involved with January 6.)

Trump, of course, has since made the promise to drop pardons like gentle rain from the sky. America’s democratic immune system, however, is for now still functioning. The courts have done their duty even when elected officials have refused to do theirs. (Imagine how much healthier American democracy would be right now if the Senate had convicted Trump in his second impeachment. Alas.) Trump is now under indictment for 91 alleged crimes, and Jack Smith seems undaunted in his pursuit of justice.

Likewise, the major ringleaders of January 6—all but one, I should say—have been convicted of seditious conspiracy, among other crimes, and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. Some of these supposed tough guys ended up blubbering and pleading for mercy in a federal courtroom, but to no avail. The would-be Oath Keepers centurion Stewart Rhodes and a leader of the Proud Boys, Ethan Nordean, each got 18 years, a record broken yesterday when a Trump-appointed federal judge sent the ex–Proud Boys chair Enrique Tarrio inside for 22 years, meaning he will be sitting out the next five presidential elections.

This is the good news, but none of it will matter if Trump returns to the White House.

I shouldn’t end on such a dire note. Trump is the likely nominee, and although I still feel a chill about the threat of authoritarianism, I also can’t shake the feeling that most Americans in most states want no part of this ongoing madness. I still have faith that most people, when faced with the choice, will continue to support the constitutional freedoms of the United States—but only if they understand how endangered those freedoms are.

Related:

The former Proud Boys leader finds out. Is Tennessee a democracy?

Today’s News

A Russian missile strike killed at least 17 people and injured dozens of others in Kostyantynivka, according to Ukrainian officials. A federal judge found Donald Trump liable for making defamatory statements against the writer E. Jean Carroll in 2019, carrying over a federal jury’s verdict in a related defamation case earlier this year. Trump has appealed the jury’s verdict. Delta Air Lines announced that it is bringing Tom Brady on board as a strategic adviser.

Evening Read

Photograph by Erik Paul Howard for The Atlantic

Hip-Hop’s Fiercest Critic

By Spencer Kornhaber

One sunny day in 1995, the Notorious B.I.G. sat in the passenger seat of a black Mercedes-Benz, smoking joints and talking shit. Of course, Biggie did these things on many days during his short lifetime, but on this particular day, a neighborhood friend named dream hampton was in the back seat with a video camera. Wearing Versace sunglasses and a checked purple shirt, the 23-year-old rapper—whose breakout album, Ready to Die, had come out the year before—held a chunky cellphone to his ear. He was making plans and talking about girls, riffing in his lisped woof of a voice. He laughed and brought a square of rolling paper, full of pot leaves, to his lips.

From behind the camera, hampton asked whether he intended to consume their entire bag of weed. Annoyed at the interruption, Biggie mocked her question. Hampton’s voice turned sharp. “Why are you going at me today?” she asked. “What’s the problem? Do we need to do something before we go on the road? Take this outside?” The video cut to static.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

I voted yesterday in Rhode Island, where our district had a special primary election to choose contenders to replace resigning Representative David Cicilline. Rhode Island CD 1 is a heavily Democratic district (it went for Joe Biden in 2020 by 29 points), so the winner of the Democratic primary is likely to prevail in the general election. Yesterday’s Democratic winner was Gabe Amo, a young man who worked in the Obama and Biden administrations. Amo is Black, and if he goes to Washington, he’ll be the first person of color to represent Rhode Island in Congress.

But what fascinated me yesterday was that we all voted in Rhode Island CD 1 without having much of an idea who was likely to win. For various reasons, including the short run-up to the primary, none of the local media outlets or universities did any polling. Twelve candidates, including several Rhode Island elected officials, ran in the primary. A few looked to be prohibitive favorites early on; one was felled at the last minute by scandal. Another, Aaron Regunberg, seemed to be ubiquitous on the airwaves, with ads touting his endorsement from Bernie Sanders. (Probably not a great idea in Rhode Island; Regunberg came in second but ran more than seven points behind Amo.)

I often say that people should vote as if their one vote will make the difference; for once, I walked into the booth with the thought that my vote could, in fact, be the deciding vote. As a political junkie, I love polls, but it was nice to be able to cast a ballot without knowing whether my preferred candidate was the likely winner or loser.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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