An Israeli man has been arrested for desecrating a Muslim cemetery by hanging the head of a donkey.

Fatima Bhutto talks with Marc Lamont Hill about support for Gaza in the Muslim world and attacks on Palestinian culture.

Exactly 750 years after death, Jalaluddin Mohammad Rumi remains a mystery. Was he a Muslim scholar or spiritual pundit?

Midway through last week’s Republican presidential-primary debate, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy started running through conspiracy theories like a frustrated child mashing buttons on Street Fighter, alleging that the Capitol riot was an “inside job” and that the so-called “Great Replacement” theory “is not some grand right-wing conspiracy theory, but a basic statement of the Democratic Party’s platform.”

Right-wing apologism for January 6 is no longer shocking, not even from Republican presidential candidates. Trumpists often vacillate between denying it happened, justifying and valorizing those who attempted to overthrow the government to keep Donald Trump in power, or insisting that they were somehow tricked into it by undercover agents provocateurs. But the basic facts remain: January 6 was a farcical but genuine attempt to overthrow the constitutional government, which many Trump supporters think is defensible because only conservatives should be allowed to hold power.

It was slightly more bizarre to watch Ramaswamy justify “the Great Replacement,” a white-supremacist conspiracy theory holding that, in the words of the disgraced former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, “the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.” This conviction has motivated slaughter in Buffalo, New York; El Paso, Texas; and as far away as New Zealand. Seeing Ramaswamy invoke it was strange because he, the practicing Hindu son of Indian immigrants, is an obvious example of why it is a dumb idea.

Since Trump’s election, in 2016, the Great Replacement has gone from the far-right fringe to the conservative mainstream. After a white supremacist in Texas targeted Hispanics, killing 23 people in 2019, many conservatives offered condemnations of both the act and the ideology that motivated it. But over the past several years, a concerted campaign by conservative elites in the right-wing media has made the theory more respectable. By 2022, after another white supremacist murdered 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, some prominent voices on the right were willing to claim that there was some validity to the argument that white people are being “replaced.”

[Adam Serwer: Conservatives are defending a sanitized version of ‘the Great Replacement’]

When Ramaswamy gave voice to it last week, white supremacists celebrated with joyful disbelief. Ramaswamy briefly liked and reposted one of those celebrations, despite telling CNN after the debate that “I don’t care about skin color.” The Great Replacement conspiracy theory does not make sense without reference to race. The theory itself is racist, in that it takes as a given that white Christians are the only true Americans; it opposes not illegal immigration but the presence of immigrants who are simply not white, and implies that the purpose of immigration policy should be to preserve a white majority. But it is also racist in assuming that nonwhite people are “obedient” or even liberal simply as a consequence of not being white. It manages to be both racist and stupid in assuming that political coalitions are permanently stable, and that they are not affected by the salience of particular issues, voters’ own personal experiences, or world events, because non-whites are simply interchangeable.

Arab American voters, both Christian and Muslim, are withdrawing support from Joe Biden over his thus-far unconditional support for Israel’s conduct in its war with Hamas. This shift, along with a drift to the right that had already begun among more conservative segments of the Muslim community over LGBTQ rights—is an obvious example of how religious and ethnic minority groups can realign politically in unanticipated ways. Muslim voters were a largely pro-Bush constituency in 2000, prior to the GOP embrace of anti-Muslim bigotry after 9/11. So  were Hispanic voters in 2000 and 2004, and Trump showed similar strength with such voters in 2020, as well as making gains with Black voters. Many immigrants who fled left-wing or Communist regimes in Asia and Latin America—Vietnamese, Venezuelans, Cubans—lean right, much as the influx of Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union in the 1990s did. Immigrants from West Africa are often highly religious and socially conservative. And even within particular groups, there are tremendous regional, cultural, class, and educational differences—Puerto Rican voters in Chicago will not necessarily have the same priorities and values as Tejano voters living in Laredo. The far right and its admirers are too busy railing against diversity to understand that diversity is precisely why “the Great Replacement” is nonsense.

In short, the Democratic Party cannot control how these constituencies vote, because it cannot control how they interpret the world or which issues become salient. Racial identities, including definitions of whiteness, are not stable or permanent across time, and are entirely dependent on politics.

The Republican Party, and its valorization of racial intolerance, has been the Democratic Party’s most effective ally in holding its multiracial coalition together. But even this is no guarantee of party loyalty. Black voters were once a core constituency of the Republican Party, but they preferred the economic agenda of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the party of Dixie to empty Republican platitudes about racial tolerance and being the party of Lincoln.

The fantasy of a “Great Replacement” as a plan to defeat conservatism is, in short, a really dumb idea on its own terms—unless, of course, you are a white nationalist who simply thinks that nonwhites should not be allowed to live in America. In that sense, the most telling thing about Ramaswamy’s invocation of the Great Replacement is that he clearly believes that it’s the kind of thing the Republican base wants to hear.

The Great Replacement is simply another log on the bonfire of right-wing victimhood, an ideology whose consistent position is that its adherents would have unquestioned political hegemony over American life if not for the powerful, shadowy forces arrayed against them. That is the greatest injustice of all—the existence of Americans who oppose them politically, a cataclysm so traumatic that it requires a library of conspiracies to explain.

Recently the Hamas politician Fathi Hammad went on TV to proclaim that the organization’s next step would be to declare a caliphate—a concept that the Islamic State had all but trademarked for its use in jihadist circles. The caliphate would be based in Jerusalem. Hammad also took aim at Muslim rivals (another ISIS obsession) and called for the ouster of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a secular figure. By invoking caliphates and gunning for Abbas, Hammad turned toward a different kind of warfare, religious not only in rhetoric but also in its specific goals. The shift was so noteworthy that it was featured by MEMRI, the monitoring service that specializes in publicizing the most cringey and embarrassing rhetoric from Arab media.

Not much has been said since October 7 about the religious nature of the current war. Anshel Pfeffer, a columnist at Israel’s Haaretz, broached this touchy subject in a recent article. “None of the international coverage and commentary on Hamas’s massacre in Gaza border communities, and the war it triggered, has addressed its religious aspects,” he wrote. Hamas’s fighters incessantly invoke God and use religious language, and at some point one must “take them at face value” and “listen to what they actually say.” Like Zionism, he wrote, Hamas is “rooted in religion,” and that makes the present conflict “fundamentally religious.”

Religion is a sticky and intractable kind of dogma, and if the war is religious, the prospects for negotiated resolution are poor. Luckily, Pfeffer’s contention—that Hamas is religious and therefore the conflict should be understood religiously—is incomplete. I have seen the same videos as Pfeffer and have listened to all the “allahu akbar”s from the Hamas raiders, and their gleeful references to killing “Jews” (not “Israelis”). But listening to what someone says and taking them at face value are often contradictory pursuits. And a close listen to Hamas suggests that although the organization is religious, its religiosity is flexible.

[Read: Understanding Hamas’s genocidal ideology]

Hardly a minute passes without Hamas supporters draping themselves literally or figuratively in Islamic idioms. Arabic conversation is filled with little stock phrases that mention God, and that through constant use can lose their religious sense. (English does the same: Few Americans have God on the mind when we say goodbye, literally “God be with ye.”) Even by this standard, though, the group’s religious references are frequent, and far from perfunctory. The GoPro videos from the massacre include footage Hamas could not have planned to leak, and it shows killers using religious language with one another, while alone, and with their dying breath. In one case the bearer of a GoPro is shot in the chest, and as his lungs fill with blood, he issues a last, wet, gurgled prayer.

I don’t doubt the sincerity or fanaticism of the death-rattle prayer, or of Hamas’s official statements. I don’t suggest that its leaders are or were insincere; Ahmed Yassin, Hamas’s founder, was not sneaking BLTs and Coors Lights after Friday prayers. But for an organization, or a movement, to have “religious roots” means something more than sincere rhetoric. And relative to some other jihadist groups, Hamas has shallow religious roots.

A religious group can bend its political goals to accommodate the demands of religion, or it can bend its religion to accommodate the demands of messy, modern politics. An example of the first is ISIS, which Israeli and American officials have understandably but inaptly compared to Hamas. I wrote previously that ISIS hates Hamas and has marked the group’s leaders for death. One source of ISIS’s enmity was Hamas’s willingness to adopt policies that ISIS considered without support in Islamic scripture or history. ISIS really did try to break free of the bonds of modernity and replace the law and politics of today with forms recognizable to Muslims 1,000 years ago: a caliphate, a criminal code straight from the Quran and the example of the Prophet Muhammad, even modes of dress and grooming. Adherence to these policies cost ISIS dearly. When the group seized new towns, the locals often found its ways weird and unpleasant. When ISIS took sex slaves, in what it described as emulation of the practices of the Prophet and his companions, even many of its supporters objected, and pretty much the entire world, including most Muslims, united against ISIS.

By contrast, Hamas’s political program tends toward modernization. The organization mentioned a caliphate as an afterthought. In its infamous charter, Hamas brings up Islam constantly, but only in broad terms. It lists as its first objective “discarding evil, crushing it and defeating it,” and goes on to say that Islam should reign and its land revert to its rightful owners. (It invokes, somewhat tendentiously, the Islamic legal concept of the waqf, an irrevocable religious endowment. Palestine as a whole was a waqf, it says, and thus it can never be ceded to non-Muslims, “until the Day of Resurrection.”) Islam, the charter says, is a “way of life”—a widely shared view among Muslims, but one that says little about whether Ismail Haniyeh or Mahmoud Abbas should be in charge, and what the punishment should be for drinking wine. The charter states that Hamas “draws its guidelines from Islam”—a contrast with ISIS’s deriving its actual laws from Islam.

[Graeme Wood: Hamas is not ISIS]

Hamas tries to take old concepts and mold them to fit new ones, including democracy, a form of government alien to Islam—and every other ancient religion—in its original form. Early Muslims counted as a key political concept bay’a, or loyalty oaths, and ISIS adopted these, whereas one Hamas ideologue likened multiparty democracy to a “modern bay’a,” as a way to legitimate the newfangled political concept. The group’s politics are replete with these concessions to life in a modern state. Even the supposed irrevocability of the waqf turns out to be flexible: The group has suggested that it would accept the existence of some version of Israel, and well before the Day of Resurrection.

What distinguishes a movement with deep, as opposed to shallow, religious roots is whether its actions make any sense, except in light of religious motivation—or whether, when you subtract the religious element, the movement stays pretty much the same. On the one hand, political violence by Palestinians is not an exclusively Muslim activity (Christians and atheists have partaken), and Hamas’s terrorism fits within that ecumenical tradition. Even Hammad, in his teaser about a caliphate, tried to keep his tent extra-large. He appealed to Islamic concepts, but he also appealed to a universal sense of self-respect, saying that he was “not even talking in terms of being Muslim, but in terms of being noble.” On the other hand, if Hamas were drained of its Muslim character, one would have a hard time imagining those youngsters running around the Gaza envelope, hoping to end the day with a bloody prayer on their lips. Non-Muslims have courted glorious and (in their minds, at least) heroic deaths just as Muslims have. But the particular headlong rush toward martyrdom does seem characteristic of jihadism.

The religious rhetoric is there; it is sincere; it is foundational. And yet the action on the basis of that rhetoric remains not completely religious in character. I see ample room for motivation by chauvinism, anti-Semitism, and, yes, legitimate political grievance. Fathi Hammad’s comments suggest that the religious roots are sinking deeper. But they haven’t hit bedrock yet.

This Is War evolved out of my work as a photographer covering some of the bloodiest conflicts of the late 20th century. The imagery is not pretty, nor could it be. But seeing it—looking squarely at the misery delivered by leaders who promised to do good for their people—is important. More than that, refusing to see it, whether out of personal or political discomfort, is a form of misinformation.

The book tells the story of war through the experiences of both civilians and combatants. The civilians were entering a labyrinth of grief that they would occupy for the rest of their lives. Many of the combatants naively viewed war as an opportunity, only to discover that their bodies were mere fodder for the powerful.

I first picked up a camera in El Salvador in the mid-1980s. I photographed the bodies that the notorious death squads left on street corners at night. In the early ’90s, I was posted to the former Yugoslavia, and later, to Africa. Unscrupulous leaders, driven by ego, profit, and ethnic, religious, or nationalist agendas, waged war on civilians and turned villages into killing fields.

To be a war photographer is to forge an intimate relationship with the dead and dying. We occupy disparate worlds, empathizing with those reeling from profound loss, even while interacting with those who take human lives. To witness brutality is to sustain psychic damage: What the eye sees, the brain records and cannot erase. For the war photographer, the conjunction of horror and opportunity adds a further twist.

1993, Sarajevo, Bosnia: Women and children wave to their loved ones as humanitarian convoys evacuate to safety hundreds of women, children, and the elderly suffering from indiscriminate attacks, hunger, and hardship. 1993, Sarajevo, Bosnia: Muslim women and children, who typically do not attend burials, grieve the deaths of several children killed by mortar fire.

I understood this ambivalence while photographing street battles between rival militias in Monrovia, Liberia, in 1996. I came upon a man foraging for food in a destroyed shop. A group of fighters pounced on him. They ignored his pleas for mercy as they dragged him through the streets and, moments later, executed him.    

Developing the film in the quiet of my hotel room, I retched as I relived what I had seen an hour earlier: A group of teenagers stripped an unarmed man who did not expect to die that day to his underwear and socks and murdered him in a ditch for no apparent reason. But I was also gratified when I discovered that the photos were in focus and powerful. I knew they would distinguish my career, and they did.  

May 1996, Monrovia, Liberia: A combatant fires a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) into a neighborhood occupied by the rival faction. May 1996, Monrovia, Liberia: Thousands of Liberian civilians crowd onto a ship to escape heavy fighting in the Liberian capital that had killed hundreds and brought Monrovia to its knees.

My life as a war photographer was punctuated by such moments of cognitive dissonance. Photographing the wounded in frenetic hospitals, mothers rocking in grief, soldiers stepping on land mines, and militiamen taunting, torturing, and killing one another, I wrestled with the awareness that the most painful episodes of these people’s lives were also occasions on which a part of me thrived.  

I produced this work at a frenzied pace: airport, war, photograph, airport, war, repeat. My images exposed atrocities, signaled the beginnings of epidemics, and set off alarms in world capitals. But as the years passed, I became aware that with each war, what I gained in stature as a photojournalist, I lost in human empathy.

The realization drove me from my profession and led me to another: documenting war crimes in West Africa for a human-rights organization by means of witness testimony. Immersing myself in a world of policy, justice, and state building, I worked to stop the atrocities I had witnessed as a conflict photographer. I had a daughter, I fostered a son, and I didn’t look back.  

September 1989, San Salvador, El Salvador: Wounded Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front combatants, and a little boy who sits beneath the amputated leg of his father, occupy the national cathedral to demand medical care. September 1993, Mostar, Bosnia: A little boy, wounded when a shell was lobbed by Bosnian Croat forces into the Muslim quarter of Mostar, stands in his destroyed home.

I stuffed boxes of negatives from my photojournalism days into footlockers. And then, 20 years later, I pulled them out again and saw the images I’d made through a different prism. I had spent decades analyzing how states fail and why wars persist. Raising children had forever altered my understanding of the aching magnitude of loss, and how this loss, if not managed, drives ever more violence.

This Is War represents a deeply personal journey—a reckoning with what I witnessed over a tumultuous decade and the toll it took on me. But the book is also my contribution to the historical record of the conflicts covered and the role women have played in conflict photojournalism.

June 1998, Mek’ele, Tigray Region, Ethiopia: A man wounded during an Eritrean air attack on a civilian neighborhood in the capital of Ethiopia’s northern Tigray Region is carried from the scene minutes after the attack. May 1994, Benako, Tanzania: Hutu refugees, many of whom participated in the massacre of 500,000 Tutsis, reside in a camp just across the border with Tanzania.

My work is also a call for reflection on why conflicts relapse. Way too many of the images I took decades ago could be taken today. At the time of writing, war has returned to Sudan, while in the Democratic Republic of Congo, it never left. El Salvador’s ideological war has been replaced by bloody gang violence. In Bosnia, ethnic tensions are on the rise. In too many places, the factors that drove conflicts in decades past—predatory governance, corruption, and crushing poverty—continue unabated. These images are a reminder that the parts of the world that are broken still need a durable fix.

To be the last person a dying woman, or a condemned man, sees on Earth is a morally uncomfortable thing, but also one that conveys a certain responsibility. War photographers are historians, artists, trespassers, and emotional bandits with complicated motives, some virtuous, some not. The images themselves, at their best, extract the essence of conflict, beseeching the viewer to honor those who have perished and to protect the rest of humanity from its worst, most abject failure: its capacity for war.  

This article was excerpted from Corinne Dufka’s book This Is War: A Decade of Conflict: Photographs

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

If Donald Trump wins the next election, he will attempt to turn the men and women of the United States armed forces into praetorians loyal not to the Constitution, but only to him. This project will likely be among his administration’s highest priorities. It will not be easy: The overwhelming majority of America’s service people are professionals and patriots. I know this from teaching senior officers for 25 years at the Naval War College. As president, Trump came to understand it too, when he found that “his generals” were not, in fact, mere employees of a Trump property.

But the former president and the people around him have learned from that experience. The last time around, Trump’s efforts to pack the Defense Department with cranks and flunkies came too late to bring the military under his full political control. The president and his advisers were slow-footed and disorganized, and lacked familiarity with Washington politics. They were hindered as well by the courage and professionalism of the military officers and civilian appointees who, side by side, serve in the Defense Department.

Trump now nurses deep grudges against these officers and civilians, who slow-rolled and smothered his various illegal and autocratic impulses, including his enraged demand to kill the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2017, and his desire to deploy America’s military against its own citizens during the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020.

The 2020 election, of course, is the source of Trump’s chief grudge against senior military leaders. General Mark Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was especially determined to keep the armed forces out of the various schemes to stay in office devised by the Trump team and its allies, including a delusional plan, proposed by retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, to have the military go into swing states and seize voting machines. Trump has since implied (in response to a profile of Milley by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg) that Milley should get the death penalty. Milley reportedly believes that Trump, if reelected, will try to jail him and other senior national-security figures, a concern shared by former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

[From the November 2023 issue: Jeffrey Goldberg on how Mark Milley held the line]

In a second term, Trump would combine his instincts for revenge and self-protection. He would seek not only to get even with an officer corps that he thinks betrayed him, but also to break the military as one of the few institutions able to constrain his attempts to act against the Constitution and the rule of law.

Publicly, Trump presents himself as an unflinching advocate for the military, but this is a charade. He has no respect for military people or their devotion to duty. He loves the pomp and the parades and the salutes and the continual use of “sir,” but as retired Marine General John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, said in 2023, Trump “couldn’t fathom people who served their nation honorably” when he was in office. Privately, as Goldberg has reported, Trump has called American war dead “losers” and “suckers,” and has said that wounded warriors are disgusting and should be kept out of sight.

Trump instead prizes military people who serve his ego and support his antidemocratic instincts. He thinks highly of Flynn, for example, who had to resign after 22 days as national security adviser and is now the marquee attraction at various gatherings of Christian nationalists and conspiracy theorists around the country. In late 2020, angered by his election loss and what he saw as the disloyalty within the national-security community, Trump fired or forced out top Defense Department leaders and tried to replace them with people more like Flynn. The brazen actions that the 45th president took in his final, desperate weeks in office—however haphazard—illustrate the magnitude of the threat he may pose to the military if he is reelected.

On November 9, 2020, Trump dumped Esper and named Christopher Miller, a retired colonel and Pentagon bureaucrat, as acting secretary of defense. Miller took along Kash Patel, a Trump sycophant, as his chief of staff. Trump sent Douglas Macgregor, another retired colonel and a pro-Russia Fox News regular, to Miller as a senior adviser. (Earlier, Trump had attempted and failed to make Macgregor the ambassador to Germany.) Trump installed Anthony Tata—a retired one-star Army general who has claimed that Barack Obama is a Muslim and that a former CIA director was trying to have Trump assassinated—in the third-most-senior job at the Pentagon. A few months earlier, the Senate had wisely declined to confirm Tata’s appointment to that position, but in November, Trump gave him the job in an acting capacity anyway.

These moves, among others, led all 10 living former secretaries of defense to issue a startling and unprecedented joint statement. On January 3, 2021, they directly enjoined Miller and his subordinates to uphold their constitutional duty and “refrain from any political actions that undermine the results of the election or hinder the success of the new team.” The letter pointedly reminded Miller and his team that they were “bound by oath, law and precedent,” and called upon them, “in the strongest terms,” to honor “the history of democratic transition in our great country.”

If reelected, Trump would attempt to gain authoritarian control of the Defense Department’s uppermost levels from the very beginning. There are more Anthony Tatas and Douglas Macgregors out there, and Trump’s allies are likely already seeking to identify them. If the Senate refused to confirm Trump’s appointees, it wouldn’t matter much: Trump has learned that he can keep rotating people through acting positions, daring the Senate to stop him.

The career civil servants underneath these appointees—who work on everything from recruiting to nuclear planning—would disobey Trump if he attacked the constitutional order. These civilians, by law, cannot be fired at will, a problem Trump tried to remedy in the last months of his administration by proposing a new category of government appointments (Schedule F) that would have converted some of the most important civil-service positions into political appointments directly controlled by the White House. President Joe Biden immediately repealed this move after taking office, but Trump has vowed to reinstate it.

[Read: Trump’s open plot to dismantle the federal government]

In his two-pronged offensive to capture the military establishment while eviscerating the civil service, Trump would likely rely on former officers such as Miller and fringe-dwelling civilians such as Patel, but he would also almost certainly find at least a few serving senior officers—he would not need many—who would accept his offer to abandon their oath. Together, they would make a run at changing the nature of the armed forces.

This is not abstract theorizing. The Heritage Foundation recently released “Project 2025,” a right-wing blueprint for the next Republican president’s administration. The Defense Department chapter was written by none other than former Acting Secretary Christopher Miller. It is mostly a rationalization for more spending, but it includes a clear call for a purge of the military’s senior ranks to clean out “Marxist indoctrination”—an accusation he does not define—along with demands for expelling trans service members and reinstating those service members who were dismissed for refusing COVID vaccinations.

The problems of ideological polarization and extremism in the armed forces are not as extensive as some critics of the military imagine, but they are more worrisome than the military leadership would like to admit. Military officers tend to be more conservative than the public, and as far back as the Clinton and Obama administrations, I occasionally heard senior officers speak of these liberal presidents in deeply contemptuous terms (potentially a crime under military regulations). Today, military bases are subjected to a constant barrage of Fox News in almost every area with a television, and toward the end of my teaching career (I retired in 2022), I often heard senior officers repeating almost verbatim some of the most overheated and paranoid talking points about politics and national affairs from the network’s prime-time hosts. Some of these officers would be tempted to answer Trump’s call.

The rest of the members of the professional military, despite their concerns, would likely follow their instincts and default to the orders of their chain of command. The American political system was never intended to cope with someone like Trump; the military is trained and organized to obey, not resist, the orders of the civilian commander in chief.

Trump’s plans would likely use this obedience to the chain of command to exploit an unfortunate vulnerability in the modern American armed forces: The military, in my experience, has a political-literacy problem. Too many people in uniform no longer have a basic grounding in the constitutional foundation of American government and the civil-military relationship. (Some of my colleagues who teach in senior-military educational institutions share this concern, and over the years, some of us have tried, often in vain, to push more study of the Constitution into the curricula.) These men and women are neither unintelligent nor disloyal. Rather, like many Americans, they are no longer taught basic civics, and they may struggle with the line between executing the orders of the president as the commander in chief and obeying the Constitution.

Trump’s appointees also would be able to influence the future of the armed forces through assignments and promotions (and non-promotions) within each branch—and through their behavior as examples to the rest of the military. With top cover from the White House, Trump’s functionaries in the Pentagon, working with his supporters in the ranks, could poison the military for years to come by ignoring laws, regulations, and traditions as they see fit. (Recall, for example, that Trump is an admirer of the disgraced Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, and intervened to make sure Gallagher kept his SEAL Trident after he was charged with war crimes and found guilty of posing for photos with a captive’s dead body.) America’s military is built on virtues such as honor and duty, but abusing and discarding the norms that support those virtues would change the military’s culture—and faster than we may realize.

Even if only some of the actions I’ve described here succeed, any number of disasters might follow. Trump could jeopardize national security by surrounding himself with military and defense officials who would help him dissolve our alliances (especially NATO), weaken our military readiness, undermine our intelligence services, and abandon our friends around the world, all while he seeks closer relations with authoritarian regimes—especially Vladimir Putin’s Russia. He could issue illegal orders to engage in torture or to commit other war crimes overseas. And he could bring the entire planet to disaster should senior military leaders obey his unhinged orders to kill foreign leaders, start a war, or even use nuclear weapons.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Anne Applebaum on how Trump will abandon NATO]

At home, Trump could order unconstitutional shows of military support for his administration to intimidate his opponents. He could order American soldiers into the streets against protesters. (Trump’s allies are reportedly drawing up plans to invoke the Insurrection Act on Inauguration Day to quell any demonstrations against his return to office.) Officers refusing such orders could be dismissed or reassigned, which in turn could provoke a political confrontation between the Trump loyalists in the high command and the rest of the armed forces, itself a frightening and previously unthinkable prospect.

And if Trump succeeds in simultaneously capturing the U.S. military while gutting the other key institutions that protect democracy—especially the courts and the Justice Department—nothing will stop him from using force to put down opposition and stay in power.

Some Americans fear that the United States is already in a struggle with fascism. The firm constitutional loyalty of the armed forces during Trump’s presidency was a reminder that such fears are overblown, at least for the moment. But Trump and his allies understand that by leaving the military outside their political control the last time around, they also left intact a crucial bulwark against their plans. They will not make the same mistake twice.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “A Military Loyal to Trump.”

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

The Trump years had a radicalizing effect on the American right. But, let’s be honest, they also sent many on the left completely around the bend. Some liberals, particularly upper-middle-class white ones, cracked up because other people couldn’t see what was obvious to them: that Trump was a bad candidate and an even worse president.

At first, liberals tried established tactics such as sit-ins and legal challenges; lawyers and activists rallied to protest the administration’s Muslim travel ban, and courts successfully blocked its early versions. Soon, however, the sheer volume of outrages overwhelmed Trump’s critics, and the self-styled resistance settled into a pattern of high-drama, low-impact indignation.

Rather than focusing on how to oppose Trump’s policies, or how to expose the hollowness of his promises, the resistance simply wished Trump would disappear. Many on the left insisted that he wasn’t a legitimate president, and that he was only in the White House because of Russian interference. Social media made everything worse, as it always does; the resistance became the #Resistance. Instead of concentrating on the hard work of door-knocking and community activism, its members tweeted to the choir, drawing no distinction between Trump’s crackpot comments and his serious transgressions. They fantasized about a deus ex machina—impeachment, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, the pee tape, outtakes from The Apprentice—leading to Trump’s removal from office, and became ever more frustrated as each successive news cycle failed to make the scales fall from his supporters’ eyes. The other side got wise to this trend, and coined a phrase to encapsulate it: “Orange Man Bad.”

The Trump presidency was a failure of right-wing elites; the Republican Party underestimated his appeal to disaffected voters and failed to find a candidate who could defeat him in the primary. Once he became president, the party establishment was content to grumble in private and grovel in public. But the Trump years demonstrated a failure of the left, too. Trump created an enormous reservoir of political energy, but that energy was too often misdirected. Many liberals turned inward, taking comfort in self-help and purification rituals. They might have to share a country with people who would vote for the Orange Man, but they could purge their Facebook feeds, friendship circles, and perhaps even workplaces of conservatives, contrarians, and the insufficiently progressive. Feeling under intense threat, they wanted everyone to pick a side on issues such as taking the Founding Fathers’ names off school buildings and giving puberty blockers to minors—and they insisted that ambivalence was not an option. (Nor was sitting out a debate, because “silence is violence.”) Any deviation from the progressive consensus was seen as a moral failing rather than a political difference.

The cataclysms of 2020—the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd—might have snapped the left out of its reverie. Instead, the resisters buried their heads deeper in the sand. Health experts insisted that anyone who broke social-distancing rules was selfish, before deciding that attending protests (for causes they supported, at least) was more important than observing COVID restrictions. The summer of 2020 made a best seller out of a white woman’s book about “white fragility,” but negotiations around a comprehensive police-reform bill collapsed the following year. As conservative Supreme Court justices laid the ground for the repeal of Roe v. Wade, activist organizations became fixated on purifying their language. (By 2021, the ACLU was so far gone, it rewrote a famous Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote on abortion to remove the word woman.) Demoralized and disorganized, having given up hope of changing Trump supporters’ minds, the left flexed its muscles in the few spaces in which it held power: liberal media, publishing, academia.

[From the April 2023 issue: George Packer on the moral case against equity language]

If you attempted to criticize these tendencies, the rejoinder was simple whataboutism: Why not focus on Trump? The answer, of course, was that a bad government demands a strong opposition—one that seeks converts rather than hunting heretics. Many of the most interesting Democratic politicians to emerge during this time—the CIA veteran Abigail Spanberger, in Virginia; the Baptist pastor Raphael Warnock, in Georgia; Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who promised to “fix the damn roads”—were pragmatists who flipped red territories blue. When it came to the 2020 election, Democrats ultimately nominated the moderate candidate most likely to defeat Trump.

That Joe Biden would prevail as the party’s candidate was hardly a given, however. He defeated his more progressive rivals for the Democratic nomination only after staging a comeback in the South Carolina primary. He was 44 points ahead of his closest rival, Bernie Sanders, among the state’s Black voters, according to an exit poll. That is not a coincidence. These voters recognized that they had far more to gain from a candidate like Biden, who regularly talked about working with Republicans, than from the activist wing of the party. As Biden put it in August 2020, responding to civil unrest across American cities: “Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters?”

Biden is older now, and a second victory is far from assured. If he loses, the challenges to American democratic norms will be enormous. The withering of Twitter may impede Trump’s ability to hijack the news cycle as effectively as last time, but he’ll only be more committed to enriching himself and seeking revenge. I hope that the left has learned its lesson, and will look outward rather than inward: The battle is not for control of Bud Light’s advertising strategy, or who gets published in The New York Times, but against gerrymandering and election interference, against women being locked up for having abortions, against transgender Americans losing access to health care, against domestic abusers being able to buy guns, against police violence going unpunished, against the empowerment of white nationalists, and against book bans.

The path back to sanity in the United States lies in persuasion—in defending freedom of speech and the rule of law, in clearly and calmly opposing Trump’s abuses of power, and in offering an attractive alternative. The left cannot afford to go bonkers at the exact moment America needs it most.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “The Left Can’t Afford to Go Mad.”

Now that Russian President Vladimir Putin finds himself in a war of attrition, his only chance at victory depends on outlasting both Ukraine and its military supporters. He isn’t merely counting on the demoralization of the Ukrainian people and on “Ukraine fatigue” in the West; he’s also assuming that his own country has the stamina for a long and brutal fight. Yet after nearly two years in which Putin has largely succeeded in insulating most of his subjects from the war, the effects of Western sanctions—coupled with the astronomical and growing human and monetary costs of the conflict—are finally beginning to cause pain for the Russian general public.

Immediately after the invasion of Ukraine early last year, when the United States, the European Union, and other democratic nations moved to disconnect Russia from global financial and trade networks, many Western commentators hoped that the country’s economy would quickly buckle, creating pressure on Putin to withdraw. That hasn’t happened. This year, the average Russian income is up, and the country’s GDP has grown by 2 percent. Unemployment is at a record low. Although widening, the budget deficit is still manageable at 2 percent of the GDP. Higher global oil prices have allowed Putin to avoid raising taxes on individuals while increasing levies on exporters and slapping a one-time windfall tax on corporate profits. Russia’s foreign-trade balance, while down from last year, is still net positive, despite the West’s sanctions.

[Annie Lowrey: Can sanctions stop Russia?]

Uninsured “gray fleet” tankers subvert the $60-dollar-a-barrel cap imposed by the West on the sale of Russian oil, which India and China continue to gobble up by the millions of barrels. Moscow spends some of this revenue in so-called parallel markets, such as Turkey and the former Soviet Central Asian republics, from where many sanctioned goods and technologies are shipped into Russia.

With time, though, Russia has begun to suffer from its isolation from the world’s wealthiest, most modern economies. The West’s sanctions are like a heavy boot on two hoses that sustained the Russian state and Russian society before 2022. One carries the oil and gas revenue, which constitutes close to half of the government’s budget, and the other brings imported goods that consumers, businesses, and military planners desperately need. The flows are impossible to choke off, but they are constricted.

Oil continues to bring billions of dollars, but China and India buy Russian exports at significant discounts from what European buyers paid before the invasion. Russia has also lost income from the sale of natural gas. Virtually all of the state-owned energy company Gazprom’s pipes run west, and building new ones takes years and an enormous amount of money.

Before the war, Russia imported most of its key commodities, and the parallel markets cannot make up for the loss of supplies since early 2022. Many necessities are more expensive, a lot are adulterated, and the quantities available typically are far smaller than before the war—sufficient to keep day-to-day operations going but not enough to ward off a steady degradation of economy and society. Made-in-Russia “replacements” have been falling short, and shortages and breakdowns are multiplying across the economy, involving products as varied as tires, printing paper, airplane parts, and cellular towers. Among the more painful privations is the disappearance of up to 65 percent of crucially important medicines in some large cities. The Ministry of Health has advised of a coming deficit of almost 200 essential drugs.  

Meanwhile, the direct consequences of Putin’s war and fiscal profligacy are becoming ever more evident. The military operation is squandering the Kremlin’s stores of money, supplies, and men. Already about 40 percent of the government budget, defense outlays are set to double next year. With an estimated $300 billion of Russian sovereign funds frozen in the West, the Kremlin has been forced to withdraw $38 billion from the rainy-day National Wealth Fund. That’s one-fifth of the fund and 2 percent of the country’s GDP. How long before Putin starts raising taxes and printing banknotes?

To combat the 7 percent inflation and shore up the ruble, which dipped to a record low of 100 per U.S. dollar at one point earlier this year, the central bank increased the interest rate to 15 percent, further depressing economic activity. In a sign of stagnation, if not yet recession, economic growth is projected to drop to 1 percent next year—or half this year’s rate, which itself was due mostly to the surge in weapons and ammunition production.

Making matters worse, Russian consumers may soon have trouble spending their money on their own needs. Along with claims that Russia is fighting Nazis in Ukraine, the Kremlin has resurrected another World War II trope: “All for the front, all for the victory!” (Vsyo dlya fronta, vsyo dlya pobedy!). The slogan is now being used to galvanize Russian society to donate “humanitarian” parcels to the soldiers in Ukraine, while private enterprises are pushed to switch to war production. The central bank’s governor, Elvira Nabiullina, has lamented the “inability” of domestic producers to satisfy consumer demand. For the first time since the 1990s, de facto price controls caused shortages of gasoline and diesel fuel in late summer and early fall, and greater scarcity and bottlenecks are certain to follow.

[David Frum: Can Putin recover from this?]

Nabiullina has also warned of a “sharp deficit” in the labor force. The trillions of rubles that the Kremlin is showering on the military-industrial complex cannot make up for the gaps in educated staff after hundreds of thousands of men ages 18 to 30 fled the country to escape the draft.

A still more troubling deficit is that of soldiers: The seemingly inexhaustible pool of potential conscripts is beginning to look rather shallow. Even as Putin sends an estimated 20,000 more men every month to fight in Ukraine, he is desperate to avoid a general mobilization—which is sure to be unpopular—before the presidential election next March. So he appears to be reaching for the bottom of the barrel. Conscripting prisoners into the Ukraine war started out as a bizarre campaign introduced by the Wagner Group, the ostensibly private military company led by the now-deceased former Putin crony turned mutineer Yevgeny Prigozhin, but has now become a standard practice. Incarcerated women too have been forced into military service. The prison population is down by an estimated 54,000 inmates. Rapists and murderers, some serving life sentences, are pardoned by Putin after six months in Ukraine.

[Tom Nichols: A very public execution in Russia]

Apparently still short of soldiers, the authorities have begun to press-gang many of the nation’s estimated 2.8 million migrant workers from predominantly Muslim countries in Central Asia. In the city of Moscow and the surrounding province of the same name—jurisdictions where at least 1 million Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Kirgiz now live—the police have raided mosques after services, forcing young men into buses that take them to military-induction centers.  

Up to now, Putin has tamped down domestic opposition to his war through a combination of repression, shrewd politics, and monetary largess. Criticizing the war—including by calling it a war, rather than a special military operation—is punishable by 15 years in jail. The Kremlin imposes high draft quotas on poor, rural Russians and on ethnic minorities in the north Caucasus and Siberia; it goes easy on large cities in central Russia, especially Moscow and St. Petersburg, to spare the sons of elites from military service. Soldiers who do end up in Ukraine are generously rewarded. This past July, a mobilized reservist’s starting monthly salary in Ukraine was 195,000 rubles ($2,200)—almost four times the national median income. The injury payout is 3 million rubles ($34,000), and the families of killed soldiers receive 5 million rubles ($54,600). These payments have buoyed veterans, their families, and even entire villages, but apparently they have not prompted a sufficient number of volunteers to replace the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who have been killed or wounded in Putin’s war.  

Putin’s resort to conscripting prisoners and immigrants, many of them undocumented, is unlikely to reverberate politically. But protests among ethnic Russians are another matter altogether. Last month, the wives and mothers of mobilized reservists staged a rally demanding the return of their loved ones who have spent a year in the trenches. “People are tired [of the war], and [it is] important [for the authorities] to demonstrate that nothing is threatening people’s normal lives,” the women wrote in a post on Put’ domoy (“The Road Home”), a Telegram channel with 25,000 subscribers. “But we are telling you, our friends: [your lives] are being threatened—and how! We have been fucked over and you will be fucked too. Here and now we are creating a foundation of societal unity against a mobilization of unlimited duration.”

Small and inchoate though it is, the Road Home movement signals more trouble for the Kremlin than the plunging ruble or a budget deficit. Wars of attrition are decided at least as much by the morale on the home front as by the advances and retreats on the battlefield.

In promoting his invasion of Ukraine, Putin has repeatedly evoked memories of World War II, in which the Soviet people made unimaginable sacrifices, while also sparing most of his citizenry from ill effects. But that won’t hold true forever. “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you,” the Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who led the Red Army to victory in the Russian civil war a century ago, supposedly said. Putin’s efforts notwithstanding, the war in Ukraine is unlikely to leave the people of Russia alone.

For most of my career, working as a psychiatrist in Jerusalem, I have run locked wards, serving people in distressed states who cannot remain in the community because of their need for round-the-clock care.

This life, indeed much life in Israel, feels precarious right now. The first air-raid sirens in more than a week have begun sounding in Jerusalem as I write. The comparisons between the Hamas attack of October 7 and the Holocaust reveal the extent to which our complacency has been shattered.

[Read: Younger than war]

That the residents of Gaza have it far worse is undeniably true. My 6-year-old son drew a self-portrait depicting himself supine, a bomb descending upon him, and I got upset. I would not trade places with the families carrying their bloodied children into the emergency rooms of Gaza, with no place but the floor to rest them between the wounded and dead. Just writing these words, I cry. And I’m outraged that Hamas could knowingly, willingly, invite this retribution for the atrocities it inflicted.

The foreign reader, then, will be excused for assuming that the life of Arabs and Jews within Israel is marked by unremitting mutual enmity and lust for vengeance. Such hostile feelings are present in generous doses, but much more is happening on the ground. And the locus of positive change is often the workplace.

The Israeli public health-care system, in which I work, is perhaps the most integrated sector in the country. About half of the recipients of medical licenses are Arabs (including Druze), far beyond their percentage in the population. Graduating nurses, pharmacists, and even dentists are more likely to be Arab than Jewish. Hospital patients can expect to be treated by multiethnic professionals. And at times like these, when many Jews have been called to the war for reserve duty, the role of Arabs, who generally do not serve in the military, becomes even more prominent.

A couple of generations ago, medicine was the ticket into respectable American society for a generation of Jews, eventually opening up other possibilities to them as well. Something similar may be happening for Arab Israelis, who remain underrepresented in other professional fields, such as tech, but among whom health care is a popular career choice for ambitious and capable students. The Israeli education system for Arabs has long been separate and unequal, in terms of both funding and results. The government has made an investment in changing this. Doing so will bring us closer not only to becoming a just society but to being a peaceful one as well.

I spend my work days (and occasional nights) within this cultural tapestry. I have worked in psychiatry since 1986, when I left New York in order to make my home in Jerusalem. Two years ago, I was given responsibility for directing the most active inpatient unit in Jerusalem, at Kfar Shaul Hospital, which is located on a scenic campus on the grounds of what was once the Arab village of Deir Yassin, the site of a reported 1948 massacre of Arab villagers by Jewish (not yet Israeli) troops. The place is steeped in history, which most manage to ignore in their daily activities. Yet the staff in my ward is highly integrated. Three of the five psychiatrists are Arabs. The head nurse and close to half of his staff are Arab. About a quarter of our patients are Arab, mostly from East Jerusalem. The staff coheres. We are a workforce operating in partnership to accomplish shared goals.

The warmth among workers belonging to these two tribes, Arab (overwhelmingly Muslim) and Jewish, is real and heartening. We attend one another’s family weddings, and some of us share vacations. We allow ourselves to poke good-natured fun at one another’s religious practices. Just recently, when a Christian patient smuggled a quantity of forbidden ham into the ward, we thanked him for uniting Jew and Muslim against a common enemy.  

My unscientific impression is that among acquaintances who work alone or only with their co-religionists, the level of fear and suspicion is higher. For example, an acquaintance in synagogue, a young man home for Shabbat from his reserve duty, spoke with me excitedly about the current situation. (I think that Judaism is more tolerant than the other monotheistic religions of schmoozing during services, but I hope not to get fact-checked on this point.) We were talking about the Hamas attack in the south and the Hezbollah threat in the north when he told me solemnly, “There is a much bigger threat looming, which we are going to have to overcome.”

“Iran?” I asked.

He shook his head dismissively. I was stumped.

“Bet Tsefafa,” he explained, referring to a nearby Arab neighborhood, which is well integrated into Jerusalem. He doesn’t work with Arabs in his civilian life. If he did, I don’t think that he would have believed this.

A war waged between our co-religionists so nearby—traversing the distance between Gaza and Jerusalem takes a car barely an hour and a half, or a missile a minute and a half—threatens to rip apart this fragile social fabric.

I was concerned that, since the outbreak of war, my hospital staff was not speaking openly about their feelings. Morning greetings had become mere formalities and were often rapidly concluded with formulaic wishes that we hear good tidings. Could we do better?

With this in mind, I convened a staff meeting one afternoon where 20 people, split almost evenly along ethnic lines, sat around a table and gingerly began to talk about coming to work at a time of destruction. Participating seemed easier for Jews: They felt more confident about their place. Many remarked that coming to work was like coming to family, all of us united in the service we provide. The Arabs were more hesitant at first. They knew that outside the workplace, they bore a burden of suspicion. One managed to tell us, haltingly, about friends in Gaza who opposed Hamas but now were fleeing with their young children from the bombarded north to the uncertain safety zones in the south. Another described his doubts about returning to the gym where he regularly works out, lest he be asked to leave. Fear of reprisals by would-be vigilantes roaming the streets was a common theme.

The meeting ended, but people lingered to continue the conversation (a welcome change, for me, from other staff meetings where people are impatient to disperse and get on with their work), in little animated, mixed groups of two or three. I felt that we had crossed a barrier. I learned more about the tragic hopelessness of Gazan citizens, enemies of Hamas, who had nowhere to flee. It had been so much easier not to see them. And I felt such closeness to all my staff, regardless of ethnicity.

[Rund Abdelfatah: The nameless children of Gaza]

Work is where these connections, this dialogue, can develop most naturally. If we cultivate these encounters, which are already blooming in many places, while minimizing the effect of the powerful ethnic isolationists and supremacists on both sides, there may yet be hope for a better, more peaceful future.

I don’t purport to speak for my Arab colleagues. As close as I feel to them, I know that their perspective in this miserable situation is necessarily different from mine. I occasionally discern that some are holding back, uncertain how far I can be trusted. And don’t I weigh my words more carefully when I’m with them? The ethnic divide deepens that essential chasm separating any two people; the bombs exploding around us leave craters there. I know that far more than the occasional staff meeting will be needed for us to defuse the tensions of the Middle East, which ineluctably seep into the department.

Yet I grasp onto the connections I’ve made and find strength in these encounters. I will not forget how, the morning after the savage October 7 assault, stunned by the extent of the atrocities, I arrived early at work and found a senior nurse, a devout Muslim, sitting alone, puffing anxiously on a cigarette, and seeming more withdrawn than is usual for this energetic, charismatic man. He had worked for many years in the department; of all the staff, only I speak a better Yiddish than he.

I sat myself down next to him, and we mournfully, fearfully, tried to understand how this could have happened. We spoke about the evils of fanaticism, and he tried to explain to me the sacrilege against the Quran entailed by these violent acts.

Hesitantly, I shared with him my fantasy: “I imagine myself abducted by these murderous bastards. And just as they are about to slit my throat, I somehow manage to convince them to allow me one call. And I dial, and you answer. And, on loudspeaker, you explain to them that they must not commit this horrific sin.”

He gave me one of his heartwarming smiles and said confidently, “Just call me, I will speak with them and tell them!”

For the first time since the catastrophe, I felt a vague twinge of hope.