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The Unfightable Fire

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › science › archive › 2025 › 01 › los-angeles-palisades-eaton › 681269

In an ember storm, every opening in a house is a portal to hell. A vent without a screen, a crack in the siding, a missing roof tile—each is an opportunity for a spark to smolder. A gutter full of dry leaves is a cradle for an inferno. Think of a rosebush against a bedroom window: fire food. The roses burn first, melting the vinyl seal around the window. The glass pane falls. A shoal of embers enter the house like a school of glowing fish. Then the house is lost.

As the Palisades Fire, just 8 percent contained this morning, and the Eaton Fire, still uncontained, devour Los Angeles neighborhoods, one thing is clear: Urban fire in the U.S. is coming back. For generations, American cities would burn in era-defining conflagrations: the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, the San Francisco fires of 1906. Then came fire-prevention building codes, which made large city burns a memory of a more naive time. Generations of western firefighters turned, instead, toward wildland burns, the big forest devastations. An urban conflagration was the worst-case scenario, the one they hoped they’d never see. And for a long time, they mostly didn’t.

Now more people live at the flammable edges of wildlands, making places that are primed to burn into de facto suburbs. That, combined with the water whiplash that climate change has visited on parts of California—extraordinarily wet years followed by extraordinarily dry ones—means the region is at risk for urban fire once again. And our ability to fight the most extreme fire conditions has reached its limit. The Palisades Fire alone has already destroyed more than 5,300 structures and the Eaton Fire more than 4,000, making both among the most destructive fires in California’s history. When the worst factors align, the fires are beyond what firefighting can meaningfully battle. With climate change, this type of fire will only grow more frequent.

The start of the Palisades and Eaton Fires was a case of terrible timing: A drought had turned abundant vegetation into crisp fire fuel, and the winter rains were absent. A strong bout of Santa Ana winds made what was already probable fire weather into all but a guarantee. Something—it remains to be seen what—ignited these blazes, and once they started, there was nothing anyone could do to stop them. The winds, speeding up to 100 miles an hour at times, sent showers of embers far across the landscape to ignite spot fires. The high winds meant that traditional firefighting was, at least in the beginning, all but impossible, David Acuna, a battalion chief for Cal Fire, told me: He saw videos of firefighters pointing their hoses toward flames, and the wind blowing the water in the other direction. And for a while, fire planes couldn’t fly. Even if they had, it wouldn’t have mattered, Acuna said. The fire retardant or water they would have dropped would have blown away, like the hose water. “It’s just physics,” he said.

California, and Southern California in particular, has some of the most well-equipped firefighting forces in the world, which have had to think more about fire than perhaps any other in the United States. On his YouTube livestream discussing the fires, the climate scientist Daniel Swain compared the combined fleet of vehicles, aircraft, and personnel to the army of a small nation. If these firefighters couldn’t quickly get this fire contained, likely no one could. This week’s series of fires is testing the upper limits of the profession’s capacity to fight wind-driven fires under dry conditions, Swain said, and rather than call these firefighters incompetent, it’s better to wonder how “all of this has unfolded despite that.”  

The reality is that in conditions like these, once a few houses caught fire in the Pacific Palisades, even the best firefighting could likely do little to keep the blaze from spreading, Michael Wara, a former member of California’s wildfire commission who now directs a climate-and-energy-policy program at Stanford, told me. “Firefighting is not going to be effective in the context we saw a few days ago,” when winds were highest, he said. “You could put a fire truck in every driveway and it would not matter.” He recounted that he was once offered a job at UCLA, but when the university took him to look at potential places to live in the Pacific Palisades, he immediately saw hazards. “It had terrible evacuation routes, but also the street layout was aligned with the Santa Ana winds so that the houses would burn down like dominoes,” he said. “The houses themselves were built very, very close together, so that the radiant heat from one house would ignite the house next door.”

In California, the shift toward ungovernable fires in populated places has been under way for several years. For the former Cal Fire chief deputy director Christopher Anthony, who retired in 2023, the turning point was 2017, when wildfires in populated places in Northern California’s wine country killed 44 people and burned nearly a quarter million acres. The firefighting profession, he told me, started to recognize then that fortifying communities before these more ferocious blazes start would be the only meaningful way to change their outcome. The Camp Fire, which decimated the town of Paradise in 2018, “was the moment that we realized that this wasn’t, you know, an anomaly,” he said. The new fire regime was here. This new kind of fire, once begun, would “very quickly overwhelm the operational capabilities of all of the fire agencies to be able to effectively respond,” he said.

As Wara put it, in fires like these, houses survive, or don’t, on their own. Sealed against ember incursion with screened vents, built using fire-resistant materials, separated from anything flammable—fencing, firewood, but especially vegetation—by at least five feet, a house has a chance. In 2020, California passed a law (yet to be enforced) requiring such borders around houses where fire hazard is highest. It’s a hard sell, having five feet of stone and concrete lining the perimeter of one’s house, instead of California’s many floral delights. Making that the norm would require a serious social shift. But it could meaningfully cut losses, Kate Dargan, a former California state fire marshal, told me.

Still, eliminating the risk of this type of wind-driven fire is now impossible. Dargan started out in wildland firefighting in the 1970s, but now she and other firefighters see the work they did, of putting out all possible blazes, as “somewhat misguided.” Fire is a natural and necessary part of California’s ecosystem, and suppressing it entirely only stokes bigger blazes later. She wants to see the state further embrace preventative fires, to restore it to its natural cycles. But the fires in Southern California this week are a different story, unlikely to have been prevented by prescribed burns alone. When the humidity drops low and the land is in the middle of a drought and the winds are blowing at 100 miles an hour, “we’re not going to prevent losses completely,” Dargan said. “And with climate change, those conditions are likely to occur more frequently.” Avoiding all loss would mean leaving L.A. altogether.

Rebuilding means choosing a different kind of future. Dargan hopes that the Pacific Palisades rebuilds with fire safety in mind; if it does, it will have a better chance of not going through this kind of experience again. Some may still want to grow a rosebush outside their window. After this is over, the bargaining with nature will begin. “Every community gets to pick how safe they want to be,” Dargan said.

What to Read When You Feel Counted Out

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › books › archive › 2025 › 01 › powerless-hope-book-recommendations › 681265

Almost everyone knows what it’s like to face insurmountable odds—to feel ineffective, unable to see a way out, doubtful that the struggle to prevail is even worth the fight. Sometimes a challenge is genuinely life-and-death, or involves dire consequences; other times, the obstacles in your path may be lower stakes, but still feel frustratingly immovable. As diverse as these experiences can be, they tend to share a common quality: They can become powerful stories.

As a result, literature is full of reminders that long odds can sometimes be surmounted—that David can defeat Goliath, that perseverance can pay off, and that action can lead to change. The seven books below follow people who faced extraordinary predicaments and, instead of caving in, found ways to push back. Some protagonists overcome their obstacles; others confront them on their own terms or weaken the systems they’re up against. Many of their stories are infuriating, but the unlikely achievements within are all elementally hopeful, because they might galvanize readers to fight another day.

All In: An Autobiography, by Billie Jean King with Johnette Howard and Maryanne Vollers

When King came up in tennis in the 1960s, female players were an afterthought at best. The money they received for winning tournaments was a fraction of what men received, and the sexism was constant: King was once told she’d be No. 1 someday because she was ugly. In her autobiography, King frankly recounts the opposition she faced on and off the court, and also recognizes the challenges faced by other barrier-breaking players such as Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe, and Renée Richards. “There was this gap between what I thought I was capable of and the world as it was,” she writes. “I saw that gulf clearly. I was less sure how to breach it.” King found a way across: In addition to winning 39 Grand Slam titles, she helped create a women-only invitational that proved female players could sell tickets. In 1973, she also defeated Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes, a watershed cultural moment watched by 90 million people.  All In reads like one of King’s tennis matches: An intense volley of obstacles fly at her, and she returns them all with power and headlong determination.

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty

In many works of fiction, pirates—even the most plundering, pillaging types—are portrayed sympathetically, as people who don’t fit into society and turn to a life on the high seas in order to be their authentic selves. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi is one of those stories. The novel takes place in a fantastical version of the medieval Islamic world, specifically on the Indian Ocean, where the titular captain, Amina, once helmed her own ship and crew. Ten years after leaving the pirate life, she’s older, and a mother; she has the aches and pains to prove it. Unsurprisingly, given how these stories usually go, circumstances draw her back to her ship and the sea: She needs to rescue the daughter of a dead crewmate, and her journey gets her embroiled with magical forces that are literally leviathan in nature. Her specific challenges are, obviously, not of our world, but her desire to control her own life, and her refusal to be whipped around by powerful, indifferent forces, is deeply relatable. And although the themes of the story are serious, the tone is relatively light—hope and humor lash its pages, making for a swashbuckling read.

[Read: How to succeed at failure]

The Radium Girls, by Kate Moore

In the late 1910s, corporations used radium, a radioactive material found in uranium ore, to make the numbers and dials on watches glow in the dark. They hired young women to paint the substance on, and employees were encouraged to twirl the brushes between their lips to get them to a fine point. The radium accumulated in their bones, killing many of them—they glowed at night as it destroyed their bodies from the inside. Ultimately, groups of these women took two separate companies—the United States Radium Corporation and the Radium Dial Company—to court, and after years of efforts, their former employers were finally held accountable. Although financial compensation was important to cover medical bills and support their families, the women mainly wanted the truth exposed; at least 50 of them died before the trials concluded. Moore demonstrates that USRC and Radium Dial knowingly sentenced the painters to death for the sake of profit, denying that there was any risk to their health even when their own medical examinations proved otherwise. More important, she puts these workers front and center, as women who had full lives before, and after, they picked up a paintbrush.

Whalefall, by Daniel Kraus

On the surface, Whalefall spins a wild premise into a gripping tale: A young diver, Jay, is fighting to escape a sperm whale that inadvertently swallows him while hunting a giant squid. As you get deeper into the novel, however, the plot becomes more complex. Yes, it’s a thrilling story of survival—Jay’s body is shattered, beaten and ruptured in various places, and the oxygen in his tank is rapidly dwindling. But it’s also about his grief for his estranged father: Kraus flits between Jay’s Herculean efforts to stay alive inside the whale’s stomach and memories of his dad, who—ravaged by terminal cancer—ultimately chose to die in these same waters. Whalefall interweaves past and present via short, immediate prose as “Jay lived and died and lived again in the deep.”

[Read: How kids learn resilience]

Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, by Jeff Guinn

In the early 20th century, the media and Hollywood turned Bonnie and Clyde into infamous bank robbers, inflating their often-fumbling exploits to super-gangster status. As Guinn explains in Go Down Together—a book that aims to move past the myth and paint a more accurate picture of the two—many Americans eagerly bought into the image the press created. Reality didn’t matter: The story of the couple became a touchstone for people’s frustrations. “In 1933 bankers and law enforcement officials, widely perceived to have no sympathy for decent people impoverished through no fault of their own, were considered the enemy by many Americans,” Guinn writes. “For them, Clyde and Bonnie’s criminal acts offered a vicarious sense of revenge.” In reality, Clyde—who had been serially raped by another inmate in prison—“was more interested in getting even than in getting ahead,” and Bonnie wanted a life filled with fame and adventures, and “was willing to risk arrest to have them.” What their legend truly shows is just how badly the American public wanted to crown a hero who stood up to the establishment on its behalf—an impulse that persists, dangerously, to this day.

The Half Life of Valery K, by Natasha Pulley

From its first pages, The Half Life of Valery K gets to the core of what humans facing a seemingly hopeless situation must do to carry on. “The way to not sink into self-pity and despair—the way not to die—was to look forward to things,” Valery thinks. “Anything; the tinier the better, because then you were more likely to get it.” Incarcerated in a Siberian prison, he must stave off “the terrible docility that came before you gave up.” Valery is a Soviet biochemist specializing in radiation who gets transferred to City 40, ostensibly to study the effect of a nuclear accident the government has spun as a planned “experiment” on an ecosystem. Pulley’s novel is inspired by real events: In September 1957, an explosion in the Soviet Union spread radioactive material, causing mass evacuations and contamination. The book itself has sharp edges. Pulley’s characters are not only physically wounded; they are forever scarred by their trauma. But Valery, despite his lack of power in a despotic system, is able to help others, and finds a way to not just survive his pain but also live with its lasting effects.

[Read: Schopenhauer’s advice on how to achieve great things]

A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit, by Noliwe Rooks

Rooks’s history of the educator, philanthropist, and civil-rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune is more of a meditation on the effect she had on those in the Black community, including the author, than a formal biography. “I think Bethune—her image, her statues, her name—may be a kind of talisman, or maybe a light, guiding, promising, showing a path,” Rooks writes early on. Over about 200 pages, Rooks unpacks Bethune’s legacy in fighting racism, exploring her efforts to found a school and secure investors to buy land near the ocean and create Bethune Beach, the only beach in Florida’s Volusia County where Black Americans could congregate without restrictions during Jim Crow. In 2022, a statue of Bethune replaced that of a Confederate general in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall, where she represents the state of Florida. As Rooks puts it, the activist “taught me that there is strength in numbers, always a reason to hope, and that if someone disrespects you and yours, it is in your best interest to find a way to use the metaphorical flag that professes your citizenship, rights, and humanity as a weapon, and ‘get it done.’”

Bird Flu Could Have Been Contained

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › health › archive › 2025 › 01 › bird-flu-embarrassing › 681264

Three years ago, when it was trickling into the United States, the bird-flu virus that recently killed a man in Louisiana was, to most Americans, an obscure and distant threat. Now it has spread through all 50 states, affecting more than 100 million birds, most of them domestic poultry; nearly 1,000 herds of dairy cattle have been confirmed to be harboring the virus too. At least 66 Americans, most of them working in close contact with cows, have fallen sick. A full-blown H5N1 pandemic is not guaranteed—the CDC judges the risk of one developing to be “moderate.” But this virus is fundamentally more difficult to manage than even a few months ago and is now poised to become a persistent danger to people.

That didn’t have to be the reality for the United States. “The experiment of whether H5 can ever be successful in human populations is happening before our eyes,” Seema Lakdawala, a flu virologist at Emory University, told me. “And we are doing nothing to stop it.” The story of bird flu in this country could have been shorter. It could have involved far fewer cows. The U.S. has just chosen not to write it that way.

[Read: America’s infectious-disease barometer is off]

The USDA and the CDC have doggedly defended their response to H5N1, arguing that their interventions have been appropriately aggressive and timely. And governments, of course, don’t have complete control over outbreaks. But compared at least with the infectious threat most prominent in very recent memory, H5N1 should have been a manageable foe, experts outside of federal agencies told me. When SARS-CoV-2, the virus that sparked the coronavirus pandemic, first spilled into humans, almost nothing stood in its way. It was a brand-new pathogen, entering a population with no preexisting immunity, public awareness, tests, antivirals, or vaccines to fight it.

H5N1, meanwhile, is a flu virus that scientists have been studying since the 1990s, when it was first detected in Chinese fowl. It has spent decades triggering sporadic outbreaks in people. Researchers have tracked its movements in the wild and studied it in the lab; governments have stockpiled vaccines against it and have effective antivirals ready. And although this virus has proved itself capable of infiltrating us, and has continued to evolve, “this virus is still very much a bird virus,” Richard Webby, the director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals and Birds, told me. It does not yet seem capable of moving efficiently between people, and may never develop the ability to. Most human cases in the United States have been linked to a clear animal source, and have not turned severe.

The U.S., in other words, might have routed the virus early on. Instead, agencies tasked with responding to outbreaks and upholding animal and human health held back on mitigation tactics—testing, surveillance, protective equipment, quarantines of potentially infected animals—from the very start. “We are underutilizing the tools available to us,” Carol Cardona, an avian-influenza expert at the University of Minnesota, told me. As the virus ripped through wild-animal populations, devastated the nation’s poultry, spilled into livestock, started infecting farmworkers, and accumulated mutations that signaled better adaptation to mammals, the country largely sat back and watched.

When I asked experts if the outbreak had a clear inflection point—a moment at which it was crucial for U.S. leaders to more concertedly intervene—nearly all of them pointed to the late winter or early spring of last year, when farmers and researchers first confirmed that H5N1 had breached the country’s cattle, in the Texas panhandle. This marked a tipping point. The jump into cattle, most likely from wild birds, is thought to have happened only once. It may have been impossible to prevent. But once a pathogen is in domestic animals, Lakdawala told me, “we as humans have a lot of control.” Officials could have immediately halted cow transport, and organized a careful and concerted cull of infected herds. Perhaps the virus “would never have spread past Texas” and neighboring regions, Lakdawala told me. Dozens of humans might not have been infected.

[Read: America’s bird-flu luck has officially run out]

Those sorts of interventions would have at least bought more of the nation time to provision farmworkers with information and protection, and perhaps develop a plan to strategically deploy vaccines. Government officials could also have purchased animals from the private sector to study how the virus was spreading, Cardona told me. “We could have figured it out,” she said. “By April, by May, we would have known how to control it.” This sliver of opportunity was narrow but clear, Sam Scarpino, an infectious-disease modeler and flu researcher at Northeastern University, whose team has been closely tracking a timeline of the American outbreak, told me. In hindsight, “realistically, that was probably our window,” he said. “We were just too slow.”

The virus, by contrast, picked up speed. By April, a human case had been identified in Texas; by the end of June, H5N1 had infected herds in at least a dozen states and more than 100 dairy farms. Now, less than 10 months after the USDA first announced the dairy outbreak, the number of herds affected is verging on 1,000—and those are just the ones that officials know about.

The USDA has repeatedly disputed that its response has been inadequate, pointing out to The Atlantic and other publications that it quickly initiated studies this past spring to monitor the virus’s movements through dairy herds. “It is patently false, and a significant discredit to the many scientists involved in this work, to say that USDA was slow to respond,” Eric Deeble, the USDA’s deputy undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, wrote in an email.

And the agency’s task was not an easy one: Cows had never been a known source of H5N1, and dairy farmers had never had to manage a disease like this. The best mitigation tactics were also commercially formidable. The most efficient ways to milk cows invariably send a plume of milk droplets into the air—and sanitizing equipment is cumbersome. Plus, “the dairy industry has been built around movement” of herds, a surefire way to move infections around too, Cardona told me. The dairy-worker population also includes many undocumented workers who have little incentive to disclose their infections, especially to government officials, or heed their advice. At the start of the outbreak, especially, “there was a dearth of trust,” Nirav Shah, the principal deputy director of the CDC, told me. “You don’t cure that overnight.” Even as, from the CDC’s perspective, that situation has improved, such attitudes have continued to impede efforts to deploy protective equipment on farms and catch infections, Shah acknowledged.

Last month, the USDA did announce a new plan to combat H5N1, which requires farms nationwide to comply with requests for milk testing. But Lakdawala and others still criticized the strategy as too little, too late. Although the USDA has called for farms with infected herds to enhance biosecurity, implementation is left up to the states. And even now, testing of individual cows is largely left up to the discretion of farmers. That leaves too few animals tested, Lakdawala said, and cloaks the virus’s true reach.

The USDA’s plan also aims to eliminate the virus from the nation’s dairy herds—a tall order, when no one knows exactly how many cattle have been affected or even how, exactly, the virus is moving among its hosts. “How do you get rid of something like this that’s now so widespread?” Webby told me. Eliminating the virus from cattle may no longer actually be an option. The virus also shows no signs of exiting bird populations—which have historically been responsible for the more severe cases of avian flu that have been detected among humans, including the lethal Louisiana case. With birds and cows both harboring the pathogen, “we’re really fighting a two-fronted battle,” Cardona told me.

Most of the experts I spoke with also expressed frustration that the CDC is still not offering farmworkers bird-flu-specific vaccines. When I asked Shah about this policy, he defended his agency’s focus on protective gear and antivirals, noting that worker safety remains “top of mind.” In the absence of consistently severe disease and evidence of person-to-person transmission, he told me, “it’s far from clear that vaccines are the right tool for the job.”

[Read: How much worse would a bird-flu pandemic be?]


With flu season well under way, getting farmworkers any flu vaccine is one of the most essential measures the country has to limit H5N1’s threat. The spread of seasonal flu will only complicate health officials’ ability to detect new H5N1 infections. And each time bird flu infects a person who’s already harboring a seasonal flu, the viruses will have the opportunity to swap genetic material, potentially speeding H5N1’s adaptation to us. Aubree Gordon, a flu epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, told me that’s her biggest worry now. Already, Lakdawala worries that some human-to-human transmission may be happening; the United States just hasn’t implemented the infrastructure to know. If and when testing finally confirms it, she told me, “I’m not going to be surprised.”

How to Respond to Trump’s Foreign-Policy Bluster

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2025 › 01 › trump-bluster-foreign-policy-greenland-canada › 681268

Donald Trump has had a remarkably vocal pre-presidency, particularly on foreign policy. Against the background of a no less astonishing silence from President Joe Biden, Trump has threatened to unleash hell on Hamas unless it cuts a deal with Israel before he is sworn in, mused about seizing the Panama Canal and Greenland, and advocated the annexation of Canada—not to mention that he has promised to end the war in Ukraine and inflict tariffs on friend and foe alike.

That Trump observes none of the foreign-policy decorum that presidents, let alone presidents-elect, are supposed to maintain should come as no surprise. We have long known that he has no filters; that he makes outlandish, boorish, menacing, ridiculous promises and threats.

It does not help, however, when the foreign-policy commentariat responds by shrieking in justifiable but futile outrage. It only gratifies Trump and that portion of his followers, who—like J. K. Rowling’s Crabbe and Goyle, the followers of the malicious Draco Malfoy—derive an oafish satisfaction when their bullying leader upsets the good kids. Why give them the pleasure of getting visibly riled?

[Jonathan Chait: The political logic of Trump’s international threats]

But it does make sense to figure out where these statements come from, and, more important, what consequences they may have. They are, on their face, absurd. There is nothing more that the United States can do to Hamas that the Israelis are not already doing—American troops would not help, and plenty of American bombs have been supplied to people who know the targets much better than the U.S. Air Force. Does Trump really plan to expose American soldiers to Latin American guerrillas, and the Panama Canal to almost certain sabotage, in an occupation? Would he really give Europe an opening to align against the United States in defense of what is, after all, a part of Denmark? As for Canada, we have been there before. In 1775, the rebellious colonies launched an invasion, declaring that the inhabitants would be “conquered into liberty,” an infelicitous phrase if ever there was one, and during the War of 1812, we had another go. We got thoroughly whipped twice. Canadians are not as wimpy as we think, nor as peace-loving as they believe.

As Trump’s former national security adviser H. R. McMaster has pointed out, during his first term, he hesitated to use force. So why does he say these belligerent things? For the pleasure of trolling the eminently trollable elites that he despises, no doubt, but there is more to it than that.

Part of Trump’s modus operandi is throwing those around him off balance. He plays his own people off each other, he keeps friends and allies guessing to the end whether he will support them or not, and he wants possible opponents not to know what he will do next. The tactic is not uncommon, nor is it ineffective. It is also a way (in his mind) of setting up negotiations. In his business life as in his political life, Trump has never negotiated in good faith, does not believe in sticking to a deal (as his creditors know), and has always believed that the only defense is an unremitting offense.

That is a bad way to transact the nation’s affairs internationally, because diplomacy relies more than many people realize on good faith and predictability—but then again, Trump does not understand that. He also does not care about the details of the deals he cuts, so long as they look big and beautiful.

Each of Trump’s foreign-policy eruptions also contains a very small kernel of something real, which his whisperers may have shared with him. The United States has not, until now, loudly insisted that Hamas release the hostages, take safe passage for some of their leaders, and surrender. The rest of the world most certainly has not. Although the Biden administration periodically mentions the fact that some of those hostages are Americans, it has not made a big deal of it: Trump intends to.

It is a commonplace that our view of the world tends to form in our 20s. That, for Trump, would have been in the late 1960s, a time closer to the construction of the Panama Canal than to the present. Even during the ’70s, the decision to hand the canal over to Panama met fierce opposition. And although Trump may be interested in getting deals for American shippers, it is reasonable to be anxious about the nature of Chinese infrastructure investments in the Canal Zone, given that the line between Chinese business and the Chinese government is blurry.

As for Greenland, a vast and important territory because of its strategic position and potential mineral wealth, its inhabitants have periodically made noises about independence from Denmark. There are only 57,000 Greenlanders, and the Chinese have been clever and aggressive in penetrating and corrupting the governments of islands with much larger populations than that. The United States tried to buy Greenland in 1867 and again in 1946 and considered it on other occasions as well. It is not a completely insane idea.

And Americans have periodically indulged in dreams of absorbing Canada. In addition to the two botched invasions, the United States and Great Britain came close to blows over American support for Canadian armed rebellions in 1837 and 1838, and the Fenian raids by Americans (including veterans of the Union army) in 1866 and 1870. William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, wanted Canada, and so have many others. The charming fortifications that tourists can enjoy on the Canadian side of the border in Ontario and Quebec were, let us remember, built to defend them from us, and they were still being built five years after the Civil War.

In short, these are all ridiculous proposals, but not 100 percent unhinged from reality. (Although, if today’s Republican Party loathes wokery in all of its forms, why does it believe the United States would benefit from making adherents of the more toxic Canadian variant of wokeness into citizens?)

[Robinson Meyer: Trump is thinking of buying a giant socialist island]

There are, however, two real dangers in Trump’s foreign-policy blither. The first is that sooner or later, he will need to be taken seriously, particularly because the world is a far more unstable and dangerous place than it was in his first term. It is already clear that Russian President Vladimir Putin does not take anything he says seriously—and indeed, Putin has had his television channels stick in the knife by showing nude pictures of the once and future first lady. Trump’s lack of credibility could be dangerous.

The other may follow from what a German civil servant in 1934 referred to as “working towards the Führer”—doing not what the leader has ordered, so much as what you believe he would like done. It has become a cliché that Trump’s opponents take him literally but not seriously, and his supporters take him seriously but not literally. There will be those among the compromised individuals he will recruit into government, or MAGA-inspired officials and soldiers already there, who do both. And they may be inclined to do dangerous things.

The way to deal with the foreign-policy bombast is not so much through outrage as by turning it against a leader who is inconstant and leads a movement that is actually deeply divided. The Republican Party now has a more or less isolationist wing now, and it would not hurt to call this promiscuous lack of restraint to its attention. Which is why, one hopes, Senator Rand Paul, among many others, will have to field persistent questions about just how much he supports the program of violent Trumpian foreign-policy twaddle.

Trump Is Right That Pax Americana Is Over

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › international › archive › 2025 › 01 › trump-foreign-policy-isolationism › 681259

As he sat in prison in 1930, at the opening of a fateful decade, the Italian anti-fascist Antonio Gramsci wrote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

The world is now in a Gramscian interregnum. The old order—Pax Americana—is breaking down. Electorates across the West are in revolt as the industrial era’s social contract has given way to the socioeconomic insecurity of the digital age. Waves of immigration have sparked an angry ethno-nationalism that advantages ideological extremes. Power in the international system is shifting from West to East and North to South, undermining a global order that rested on the West’s material and ideological primacy. Russia and China are pushing back against a liberal order that they see as a mask for U.S. hegemony. Many in the global South have grown impatient with an international system they see as exploitative, inequitable, and unjust.

Pax Americana is past its expiration date, but the United States won’t let go. Instead of beginning the hard work of figuring out what comes next, the Biden administration spent its four years defending the “liberal rules-based order” that emerged after World War II and seeking to turn back any and all challenges to it. The results are telling: disaffection at home and disorder abroad. The old is dying, the new cannot be born, and a great variety of morbid symptoms has appeared.

[Read: Foreign leaders face the Trump test]

In this context, Donald Trump could be a necessary agent of change. His “America First” brand of statecraft—transactional, neo-isolationist, unilateralist, and protectionist—breaks decisively from the liberal internationalist mold that has shaped the grand strategy of successive administrations since World War II. But though that mold may well need to be shattered, it will also need to be replaced. And Trump is more demolition man than architect. Instead of helping build a new and better international order, he may well bring down the old one and simply leave the United States and the rest of the world standing in the rubble.

Trump will nevertheless be the president of the world’s most powerful country for the next four years. Americans will have to make the best of his efforts to revamp U.S. foreign policy. That means welcoming Trump’s recognition that the country needs a new grand strategy—then pushing him to pursue change that is radical but responsible, and to reform the world that America made rather than merely destroying it.

Pax Americana was born during the 1940s. World War II and the onset of the Cold War whetted the country’s appetite for an expansive internationalism. Democrats and Republicans both rallied behind a grand strategy that secured geopolitical stability and prosperity by projecting U.S. power globally and establishing an open, multilateral order among like-minded democracies.

Today, that internationalist consensus has shattered. Deindustrialization and the hollowing out of the middle class, decades of strategic overreach and hyperglobalization, and an influx of immigrants that has contributed to rapid shifts in the country’s demographic makeup have all sapped political support for liberal internationalism. Enter Trump and his politics of grievance. “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer,” he pledged in his inaugural address in 2017. “From this moment on, it’s going to be America First. Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families.”

Trump in his first term failed to get “forgotten” Americans back up on their feet. This is one of the reasons he lost his bid for reelection to Joe Biden. Biden then oversaw a “restoration” presidency, reinstating liberal internationalism and standing firmly behind Pax Americana. But the foreign policy he pursued was better matched to the world that was. Biden consolidated traditional American alliances in Europe and Asia and took the lead in helping Ukraine defend itself against Russian aggression. But he leaves office amid deepening global disorder, and without having even tried to negotiate an end to a war that Ukraine cannot win. Biden pledged to pursue a “foreign policy for the middle class,” but during his presidency, the electorate remained polarized, and blue-collar voters further gravitated toward Trump.

Now Trump has a chance to try again. His “America First” agenda tends to make the foreign-policy establishment recoil, but it offers distinct advantages. Trump’s transactional and pragmatic engagement with adversaries may do more to tame geopolitical rivalry than Biden’s view of a globe defined by a clash between democracy and autocracy. Trump’s readiness to negotiate with Russia, China, and Iran is exactly what’s needed.

Preparing a diplomatic push to end Russia’s war against Ukraine is pragmatism, not capitulation; the death and destruction need to stop. Trump was smart to invite Xi Jinping to his inauguration; if he can eventually sit down with Xi, cut a trade deal, and ease rising geopolitical tensions, more power to him. Elon Musk, one of Trump’s confidants, has already met with Iran’s UN ambassador; now that Israel has weakened Tehran and pummeled its proxies in the Middle East, a diplomatic breakthrough may be achievable. Should Trump succeed in lowering the temperature with adversaries, he will make the world a safer place while scaling back the nation’s onerous commitments abroad, thereby easing the chronic strategic overreach that has led Americans to turn inward.

Trump also understands that globalization has left many workers behind and that open trade has benefited far too few Americans; he is appropriately looking to level the commercial playing field. He is heading in the right direction by seeking a solution to illegal immigration, responding to the clamor of an electorate that knows full well that the country lacks a functioning immigration system. And Trump will be doing the nation a service if he can downsize the federal government, make it more efficient, and help reduce the national debt.

[Read: The political logic of Trump’s international threats]

More pragmatism and less ideology, more restraint and fewer wars, more focus on solving problems at home and less on defending democracy abroad, more government efficiency and less waste—these strategic shifts should serve the United States well is it seeks to manage a world of growing disarray, diffusing power, and stark political diversity. Trump’s statecraft is in these respects not the impulse of a misguided and capricious demagogue but an appropriate response to a changing world and a changing America.

Yet even if Trump’s “America First” foreign policy has considerable promise, it is also fraught with risk. His transactional approach to diplomacy could morph into a stiff-necked unilateralism that undermines collective efforts where they are needed. His effort to limit U.S. entanglements abroad could lead to U.S. underreach, leaving dangerous vacuums of power. His reluctance to promote democracy overseas could shade into disregard for democratic norms at home, potentially resulting in irreversible damage to the nation’s representative institutions. And in his determination to shake up the political establishment, Trump could break the U.S. government rather than reform it. A broken federal government will be in no shape to fix a broken America or a broken world.

Trump’s strategy could easily descend into excess and incoherence. The work ahead will be to encourage Trump’s better instincts, counter his more malign ones, and channel both into something resembling a coherent and constructive grand strategy.

For the past four years, the Biden administration has tightened relations with allies but neglected diplomacy where it was most needed, with Russia and China. Trump’s readiness to engage adversaries could be a welcome shift. But now the hazard will lie on the other side—that Trump will embrace a self-defeating unilateralism and shun alliances and other collective efforts; “America First” would then become “America Alone.”

During his first term, for instance, Trump pulled out of the Paris climate agreement, the World Health Organization, and other multilateral arrangements. He still expresses an aversion to “international unions that tie us up and bring America down.” He has a history of demeaning allies and viewing alliances as encumbrances; he just might act on his threat to withdraw from NATO. And Trump’s unilateralist threats to use economic coercion to annex Canada and military coercion to take control of the Panama Canal and Greenland are simply off the wall.

Unilateralism won’t work in today’s world; no nation can opt out of a globe that has grown irreversibly interdependent. Countering aggression, managing international commerce, arresting global warming, preventing nuclear proliferation, regulating the development and deployment of AI—these are only a few of the shared challenges that necessitate international teamwork. If the United States walks away from collective effort, others will do the same. And allies don’t diminish U.S. power; they augment it. Having fellow democracies by Washington’s side will only increase Trump’s leverage as he negotiates with Russia, China, and other adversaries. In contrast, if Trump gives allies cause to question America’s commitment to collective defense, they will pursue other options, leaving the United States isolated and vulnerable. That’s not putting America first.

Trump’s enthusiasm for tariffs is another worrying plank of his unilateralist agenda. Modest and selective tariffs could do some good, protecting sensitive technological sectors, bringing home a few manufacturing jobs, and pressuring foreign governments to provide U.S. goods with better market access. But Trump has more ambitious plans. He’s eyeing 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico and has hinted that he could impose levies as high as 60 percent on imports from China.

If Trump puts up these tariff walls, he could well spark a trade war that wreaks havoc on international trade and global prosperity. Tariff barriers would also hurt, not help, America’s working families by increasing the cost of consumer goods while failing to turn the United States back into the “manufacturing powerhouse” that Trump has promised. Largely as a consequence of automation, some 80 percent of the U.S. workforce is already employed in the service sector; those workers are not returning to the production line. A trade war with allies and adversaries would also inflame geopolitical tensions, confronting the United States with the prospect of strategic isolation amid growing global disarray.

Trump is right that the United States tends to overreach abroad; “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan are a case in point. But Trump will need to seek a middle ground between doing too much and doing too little.

Ukraine will be an early test. Trump is right to try to end the conflict; a war that drags on indefinitely could eventually turn Ukraine into a failed state. But even though he has made clear his discontent with the costly provision of assistance to Kyiv, Trump cannot simply cut off the flow of U.S. aid, which would only encourage Vladimir Putin to keep up his quest to subjugate Ukraine. Trump also needs to hold out for a good deal, not just any deal that ends the war. Russia will almost certainly retain the 20 percent of Ukraine it now occupies. But Washington must ensure that the other 80 percent is sovereign and secure. To do otherwise would leave Ukraine permanently subject to Moscow’s predation and coercion—and hand a victory not only to Russia but to China, Iran, and North Korea, all of which are backing Russian aggression.

[Robert Kagan: Trump is facing a catastrophic defeat in Ukraine]

The role for the U.S. in the Middle East is similar: Stepping back is good policy, but stepping away would be folly. The United States certainly erred in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, effectively turning all three into failed states. But disengagement, which is what Trump seems to have in mind, goes too far in the other direction. When the regime of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad collapsed last month, Trump posted, “Syria is a mess . . . . THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!” Yet the United States can’t really steer clear of Syria, which hosts a sizable contingent of American troops; is home to extremist groups, such as the Islamic State; and borders three U.S. allies—Turkey, Jordan, and Israel. Especially at a time of widespread upheaval in the Middle East, U.S. engagement is needed to guide the region to a stable peace.

Trump appears likely to either overdo or underdo China. He’s a hawk when it comes to trade but could well balk at the risks of a military dustup with Beijing over Taiwan. In the past he has demanded that Taiwan pay for U.S. “protection,” claimed that it had “stolen” America’s semiconductor industry, and equivocated about defending the island. Trump’s larger China policy could ultimately determine which way he goes on Taiwan. A trade war could lead him to ratchet up geopolitical rivalry and double down on defending Taipei, risking an irreparable rupture with China. Conversely, he might sell out Taiwan as part of a grand bargain with Beijing that he could tout as the consummate deal, leaving China unchecked and allies everywhere unsettled. The more responsible path is to undertake cautious but constructive engagement, aiming to rebalance trade, ratchet down geopolitical tension, and carve out a working relationship on issues such as technological competition and global health—all while preserving a stable status quo on Taiwan.

Ideological hubris has often pushed U.S. statecraft off course, and Trump exhibits due caution toward the overzealous promotion of democracy abroad. He has correctly traced American overreach in the Middle East to the “dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a Western democracy.” And he is right to reassure foreign nations that “we do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone.”

Yet Trump could well end up pairing this tolerance of political diversity abroad with efforts to compromise liberal democracy at home. Indeed, he has already shown a worrying disdain for democratic norms. He still claims spuriously to have won the 2020 election, threatens to pursue vendettas against political opponents, pledges to punish media outlets and companies that criticize him, and plans to disregard the Constitution by denying birthright citizenship.

Decency is at stake as well as democracy. Trump is a convicted felon, and a good number of his appointees are of dubious character. Tycoons such as Musk, whom he has tapped to help improve government efficiency, will beset the administration with conflicts of interest, as Trump’s globe-spanning family businesses already do. Immigration-policy reform is overdue, but forcibly deporting millions of undocumented migrants would be both indecent and inhumane. So much for the United States leading through the power of its example.

Democracy is in recession in all quarters of the globe, including in the West, where political centrism has been steadily losing ground to illiberal populism. If that trend is to be reversed, the United States needs to get its own house in order and demonstrate to the rest of the world that democratic governments can indeed deliver for their citizens and outperform the autocratic competition. At this historic inflection point, the trajectory of American democracy may well determine the trajectory of democracy around the world.

If Trump contravenes the laws, norms, and practices that anchor republican government, he could do irreparable harm to the cause of democracy not just in the United States but globally. The legislature, the courts, the media, and the American people will bear the responsibility for stopping him.

Trump has a mandate to take on the political establishment and upend its conventional wisdom. New faces and a measure of unpredictability in Washington are not all bad; they can produce fresh ideas and keep adversaries guessing and off-balance.

[Read: What Trump got right about national security]

But many of the outsiders and iconoclasts Trump has nominated for top posts have questionable qualifications, and his pledge to purge the civil service and military in order to feather both with loyalists who will do his bidding goes too far. Trump has mused about dismantling the Department of Education at a time when the nation’s public schools desperately need more federal funding and guidance. And if his first term is any indication, Trump’s erratic management is likely to produce a ballooning national debt and policy incoherence, not a lean and coordinated government.

The status quo certainly deserves shaking up, yet Trump will need a functioning executive branch to make and implement policy. Cabinet officials can be iconoclasts, but they must have the managerial experience needed to run large organizations. Substantive experts and diplomats are not subversive agents of the “deep state”; they are vital to making and executing effective policy and staffing the nation’s outposts abroad. Trump simply cannot afford to bring down the house—and must be stopped from doing so.

The task facing Americans, allies, and even foreign adversaries is to ensure that the promise of Trump’s second term prevails over its peril. America and the world need Trump to be a disrupter and reformer, not merely a destroyer. Americans and foreigners can and should work with Trump the disrupter and reformer. But if he becomes the destroyer, then checks and balances at home and abroad must shut Trump down.

Biden’s Tarnished Legacy

The Atlantic

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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.

President Joe Biden still imagines that he could have won. Asked by USA Today’s Susan Page whether he could have beaten Donald Trump if he had stayed in the race, Biden responded: “It’s presumptuous to say that, but I think yes.”

Reality thinks not.

Of course, we’ll never know for sure, but the evidence (including polling) suggests that he would have been crushed by an even larger margin than Kamala Harris was. Biden’s answer is a reminder that his legacy will be tarnished by his fundamental misreading of the moment and his own role in it.

To be sure, Biden can point to some impressive successes. He leaves behind a healthy and growing economy, a record of legislative accomplishment, and more than 230 judicial appointments, including a Supreme Court justice. And then there were the failures: the chaotic exit from Afghanistan; a massive surge of migrants at the border in 2023. Although Biden was not solely to blame for inflation—factors included the Federal Reserve’s low-interest-rate policy and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—his spending policies contributed to the problem. And even though he rallied Europe to the defense of Ukraine, critics suggest that he also misread that moment—Phillips Payson O’Brien argued in The Atlantic in November that the Biden administration “treated the conflict like a crisis to be managed, not a war to be won.” Ukraine’s uncertain fate is now left to Biden’s successor.

A charismatic and energetic president might have been able to overcome these failures and win a run for reelection. Some presidents seize the public’s imagination; Biden barely even got its attention. He presumed that he could return to a Before Times style of politics, where the president was a backroom bipartisan dealmaker. Whereas Trump dominated the news, Biden seemed to fade into the background almost from the beginning, seldom using his bully pulpit to rally public support or explain his vision for the country. Trump was always in our faces, but it often felt like Biden was … elsewhere.

Biden also misread the trajectory of Trumpism. Like so many others, he thought that the problem of Trump had taken care of itself and that his election meant a return to normalcy. So he chose as his attorney general Merrick Garland, who seems to have seen his role as restoring the Department of Justice rather than pursuing accountability for the man who’d tried to overturn the election. Eventually, Garland turned the cases over to Special Counsel Jack Smith, who brought indictments. But it was too late. With time running out and a Supreme Court ruling in favor of broad presidential immunity, Trump emerged unscathed. And then came the sad final chapter of Biden’s presidency, which may well overshadow everything else.

When he ran for president in 2020, Biden described himself as a “transition candidate” and a “bridge” to a new generation of leaders. But instead of stepping aside for those younger leaders, Biden chose to seek another term, despite the growing evidence of his decline. With the future of democracy at stake, Biden’s inner circle appeared to shield the octogenarian president. His team didn’t just insist that voters ignore what was in front of their eyes; it also maintained that the aging president could serve out another four-year term. Some Democrats clung to denial—and shouted down internal critics—until Biden’s disastrous debate performance put an end to the charade.

Even then, Biden stubbornly tried to hang on, before intense pressure from his own party forced him to drop out of the race in July. Now he is shuffling to the end of his presidency, already shunted aside by his successor and still in denial.

As the passing of Jimmy Carter reminds us, presidential legacies are complicated matters, and it is difficult to predict the verdict of history. But as Biden leaves office, he is less a transformational figure than a historical parenthesis. He failed to grasp both the political moment and the essential mission of his presidency.

Other presidents have misunderstood their mandate. But in Biden’s case, the consequences were existential: By his own logic, the Prime Directive of his presidency was to preserve democracy by preventing Donald Trump’s return to power. His failure to do so will likely be the lasting legacy of his four years in office.

Related:

Biden’s unpardonable hypocrisy How Biden made a mess of Ukraine

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The army of God comes out of the shadows. “The Palisades Fire is destroying places that I’ve loved.” Why “late regime” presidencies fail

Today’s News

Former President Jimmy Carter’s state funeral took place in Washington, D.C. Carter’s casket was flown to Georgia after; he will be buried in his hometown of Plains. At least five people are dead in the wildfires that have spread across parts of the Los Angeles area. More than 2,000 structures have been damaged or destroyed. New York’s highest court denied Donald Trump’s request to halt the sentencing hearing in his criminal hush-money case.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Early-career poetry often poses a tantalizing question: How did this poet start off so terrible—and end up so good? But a writer’s final works are compelling for a different reason, Walt Hunter writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

You’re Going to Die. That’s a Good Thing.

By Arthur C. Brooks

Death is inevitable, of course; the most ordinary aspect of life is that it ends. And yet, the prospect of that ending feels so foreign and frightening to us. The American anthropologist Ernest Becker explored this strangeness in his 1973 book, The Denial of Death, which led to the development by other scholars of “terror management theory.” This theory argues that we fill our lives with pastimes and distractions precisely to avoid dealing with death …

If we could resolve this dissonance and accept reality, wouldn’t life be better? The answer is most definitely yes.

Read the full article.

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Watch. Abbott Elementary and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia don’t have much common ground. That’s why their first crossover episode (available on Hulu) felt so fresh, Hannah Giorgis writes.

Explore. Why do so many people hate winter? Research suggests that there are two kinds of people who tolerate the cold very well, Olga Khazan wrote in 2018.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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