This story incorporates reporting fromThe Daily Gazette, techxplore and NBC Los Angeles.

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A second Trump administration was sure to come down hard on whichever Latin American country first defied it—few in the region expected otherwise. But Colombia was perhaps the United States’ most steadfast friend in South America, and the speed with which a 100-year relationship seemed to crumble last night was frightening.

Or perhaps exhilarating, if you were a Chinese diplomat in Latin America observing the presidential spat.

First, Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, refused to allow U.S.-military deportation flights that were already airborne to land in his country. Petro balked at reports of migrants arriving handcuffed and said that Colombia would allow such flights only if deportees were treated with “dignity and respect.” President Donald Trump’s response—grossly disproportionate—was to threaten tariffs, visa restrictions, and even banking sanctions against a strategic U.S. ally. The two countries worked out a late-night deal that seems to have averted a crisis, but the speed of escalation left much of Latin American unnerved.

[From the September 2024 issue: Seventy miles in hell]

If Americans are under the impression that Trump’s penchant for reckless, heat-of-the-moment policy making is unique, they don’t have the measure of Gustavo Petro. Colombia’s radical left-wing president has appalled friends and foes alike with X tiffs and stunts such as repeatedly tagging a parody account for his defense minister and amplifying false rumors that Colombian kids lost in the Amazon jungle had been found. Some of his posts come across as just plain bonkers—such as the one he wrote to Trump in the middle of yesterday’s crisis.

At 4:15 p.m. on Sunday, diplomats were working furiously behind the scenes to smooth over the rift between the two presidents when Petro hit back with a long, incoherent rant. Starting with a curt dismissal of tourism in the U.S. as “boring,” the missive went everywhere: Petro slammed American racism, asserted his refusal to “shake hands with white slavers,” and celebrated Walt Whitman. He also recalled the U.S. involvement in the 1973 coup against Chile’s leftist president Salvador Allende, celebrated Colombia’s putative roots in the caliphate of Córdoba, and protested the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, a Coolidge-era U.S. scandal involving the supposed racial profiling of two Italian American anarchists. In other words, at a moment of peril for his country, Colombia’s president posted a word salad—and then pinned it to the top of his X account.

The moment called for careful diplomacy, not a fit of pique. In Brazil, where the mistreatment of deportees on U.S. military flights had already caused controversy, Colombia’s spat narrowed the Brazilian government’s room for maneuver still further. And throughout the region, governments struggling to figure out what to do with large numbers of deportees found themselves staring into the abyss: Most Latin American governments do not like how the U.S. government is behaving but cannot afford a trade war with Uncle Sam.

Or can they? Zoom out a bit and one might wonder. The era of uncontested U.S. leadership in the region is fading fast in the rearview mirror. These days, China provides an obvious alternative to the United States in the realms of trade, finance, and technology. In fact, most of South America—including big countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Peru—now trades more with China than with the United States. If you exclude Mexico, Chinese trade now dwarfs American trade in the region.

[Juliette Kayyem: The border got quieter, so Trump had to act]

After Trump was reelected, discussion in the region centered on how to balance growing Chinese influence with existing ties with the United States. Most countries were of a mind to try to stay neutral between the two powers and maintain good relations with both Washington and Beijing. Countless university seminars agonized over what a war in the Taiwan Strait would mean for Latin America: No country in the region would want to take sides, though many recognized that they might not have a choice. All along, the assumption tended to be that a crisis that started outside Latin America would have repercussions within it. What few at the time foresaw was that the region could be delivered to China through Trump’s sheer impetuosity, or his inability to think before posting.

For now, Trumpian aggression has won the day: U.S. and Colombian diplomats—who know each other well and are used to collaborating closely—had little trouble finding a compromise to de-escalate the crisis. That de-escalation can be expected to last about as long as the two countries’ intemperate presidents manage to stay off X.

But for excellent historical reasons, Latin Americans hate being dictated to by gringos and won’t support leaders who meekly allow it. Trump’s hyper-aggressive approach to Latin America risks tying up the region with a bow and leaving it on Beijing’s doorstep. Most Latin American leaders will resist a decisive break with Washington—the U.S. is still too important a trade and diplomatic partner to antagonize just for kicks. But Latin American leaders will not wish to be seen submitting passively to the United States in full imperialist mode. Not when the Chinese embassy is just one phone call away.

One week ago, a new and formidable challenger for OpenAI’s throne emerged. A Chinese AI start-up, DeepSeek, launched a model that appeared to match the most powerful version of ChatGPT—but, at least according to its creator, was a fraction of the cost to build. The program, called DeepSeek-R1, has incited plenty of concern: Ultrapowerful Chinese AI models are exactly what many leaders of American AI companies feared when they, and more recently President Donald Trump, have sounded alarms about a technological race between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. This is a “wake up call for America,” Alexandr Wang, the CEO of Scale AI, commented on social media.

But at the same time, many Americans—including much of the tech industry—appear to be lauding this Chinese AI. As of this morning, DeepSeek had overtaken ChatGPT as the top free application on Apple’s mobile-app store in the U.S. Researchers, executives, and investors have been heaping on praise. The new DeepSeek model “is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen,” the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, an outspoken supporter of Trump, wrote on X. The program shows “the power of open research,” Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, wrote online.

Indeed, the most notable feature of DeepSeek may be not that it is Chinese, but that it is relatively open. Unlike top American AI labs—OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind—which keep their research almost entirely under wraps, DeepSeek has made the program’s final code, as well as an in-depth technical explanation of the program, free to view, download, and modify. In other words, anybody from any country, including the U.S., can use, adapt, and even improve upon the program. That openness makes DeepSeek a boon for American start-ups and researchers—and an even bigger threat to the top U.S. companies, as well as the government’s national-security interests.

To understand what’s so impressive about DeepSeek, one has to look back to December, when OpenAI launched its own technical breakthrough: the full release of o1, a new kind of AI model that, unlike all the “GPT”-style programs before it, appears able to “reason” through challenging problems. o1 displayed leaps in performance on some of the most challenging math, coding, and other tests available, and sent the rest of the AI industry scrambling to replicate the new reasoning model—which OpenAI disclosed very few technical details about. The start-up, and thus the American AI industry, were on top. (The Atlantic recently entered into a corporate partnership with OpenAI.)

DeepSeek, less than two months later, not only exhibits those same “reasoning” capabilities apparently at much lower costs, but has spilled at least one way to match OpenAI’s more covert methods to the rest of the world. The program is not entirely open-source—its training data, for instance, and the fine details of its creation are not public—but, unlike with ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, researchers and start-ups can still study the DeepSearch research paper and directly work with its code. OpenAI has enormous amounts of capital, computer chips, and other resources, and has been working on AI for a decade. In comparison, DeepSeek is a smaller team formed two years ago with far less access to essential AI hardware, because of U.S. export controls on advanced AI chips, but it has relied on various software and efficiency improvements to catch up. DeepSeek has reported that the final training run of a previous iteration of the model that R1 is built from, released in December, cost less than $6 million. Meanwhile, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has said that U.S. companies are already spending on the order of $1 billion to train future models. Exactly how much the latest DeepSeek cost to build is uncertain—some researchers and executives, including Wang, have cast doubt on just how cheap it could have been—but the price for software developers to incorporate DeepSeek-R1 into their own products is roughly 95 percent cheaper than incorporating OpenAI’s o1, as measured by the price of every “token”—basically, every word—the model generates.

DeepSeek’s success has abruptly forced a wedge between Americans most directly invested in outcompeting China and those who benefit from any access to the best, most reliable AI models. (It’s a divide that echoes Americans’ attitudes about TikTok—China hawks versus content creators—and China’s other apps and platforms.) For the start-up and research community, DeepSeek is an enormous win. “A non-US company is keeping the original mission of OpenAI alive,” Jim Fan, a top AI researcher at the chipmaker Nvidia and former OpenAI employee, wrote on X. “Truly open, frontier research that empowers all.”

But for America’s top AI companies, and the nation’s government, what DeepSeek represents is unclear. The stocks of many major tech firms—including Nvidia, Alphabet, and Microsoft—dropped this morning amid the excitement around the Chinese model. And Meta, which has branded itself as a champion of open-source models in contrast to OpenAI, now seems a step behind. (The company is reportedly panicking.) To some investors, all those massive data centers, billions of dollars of investment, or even the half-a-trillion-dollar AI-infrastructure joint venture from OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank, which Trump recently announced from the White House, could seem far less essential. Maybe bigger AI isn’t better. For those who fear that AI will strengthen “the Chinese Communist Party’s global influence,” as OpenAI wrote in a recent lobbying document, this is legitimately concerning: The DeepSeek app refuses to answer questions about, for instance, the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre of 1989 (although the censorship may be relatively easy to circumvent).

None of that is to say the AI boom is over, or will take a radically different form going forward. The next iteration of OpenAI’s reasoning models, o3, appears far more powerful than o1 and will soon be available to the public. There are some signs that DeepSeek trained on ChatGPT outputs (outputting “I’m ChatGPT” when asked what model it is), although perhaps not intentionally—if that’s the case, it’s possible that DeepSeek could only get a head start thanks to other high-quality chatbots. America’s AI innovation is accelerating, and its major forms are beginning to take on a technical research focus other than reasoning: “agents,” or AI systems that can use computers on behalf of humans. American tech giants could, in the end, even benefit. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, framed DeepSeek as a win: More efficient AI means that use of AI across the board will “skyrocket, turning it into a commodity we just can’t get enough of,” he wrote on X today—which, if true, would help Microsoft’s profits as well.

Still, the pressure is on OpenAI, Google, and their competitors to maintain their edge. With the release of DeepSeek, the nature of any U.S.-China AI “arms race” has shifted. Preventing AI computer chips and code from spreading to China evidently has not tamped the ability of researchers and companies located there to innovate. And the relatively transparent, publicly available version of DeepSeek, rather than leading American programs, could mean Chinese programs and approaches become global technological standards for AI—akin to how the open-source Linux operating system is now standard for major web servers and supercomputers. Being democratic—in the sense of vesting power in software developers and users—is precisely what has made DeepSeek a success. If Chinese AI maintains its transparency and accessibility, despite emerging from an authoritarian regime whose citizens can’t even freely use the web, it is moving in exactly the opposite direction of where America’s tech industry is heading.

The attempt to end birthright citizenship in the United States is an attempt to reverse history, to push our nation back, way back, before the Dred Scott decision of 1857 and the secession crisis that soon delivered the nation into the Civil War. Calling this action “unconstitutional” is utterly inadequate; the maneuver is the soiling of sacred text with profane lies.

Birthright citizenship is a shield of protection to anyone born in this country, as close to a national self-definition as we have; it is our legal DNA. Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment should be emblazoned on small laminated cards and carried in every American’s pocket. The language is amply clear:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.

That language is as fundamental to the Constitution as any other provision, perhaps even more important to the survival and growth of our pluralistic republic than the First Amendment, which protects free speech, free press, the right of assembly, and the right to petition the government. It is as inherent to constitutional function as federalism itself.

[Read: The Attack on Birthright Citizenship Is a Big Test for the Constitution]

The Trump administration now scoffs at this history, purporting to end this guarantee with an executive order signed on Donald Trump’s first day back in the Oval Office and tragically titled, in a fantastic act of Orwellian doublespeak, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” The administration makes a phony originalist argument based on the claim that the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee extended only to the freedmen and their descendants. Quite the contrary, the amendment’s authors explicitly envisioned the immigrant population and its descendants as part of their plan. Congressman John Bingham, Section 1’s author, defended the amendment by drawing on the authority of the Constitution’s Framers, who had “invited the workers and builders whose honest toil clothes and shelters nations,” and who hailed from “every civilized nationality” to become “citizens of the Republic.” This is why, in blocking Trump’s order last week, the Federal District Court Judge John C. Coughenour said without caveat: “This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.”

Section 1’s origins lie deep in our past. It is rooted in the petitions of African Americans during and after the American Revolution that demanded freedom and natural rights for their service to the patriot cause. It stems from many ideas and strategies of the British and American abolition movements. It echoes Thomas Jefferson’s inclusion of equality among “these truths” in the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln’s use of the same word in the Gettysburg Address, as well as his full-throated embrace of immigration well before the Civil War. Its most direct and powerful harbinger is the emancipation of nearly 4 million slaves in the midst of the war. Without that greatest transformation in American history, there would be no Fourteenth Amendment—no birthright citizenship and no equal-protection clause either, a codification just as sacred.  

Most profound, birthright citizenship is rooted in the blood of more than 700,000 Americans who died in the Civil War, a catastrophe that made possible what most historians now call the “second founding” of America. The rebirth harkened in the Fourteenth Amendment is the core of this phrase’s meaning. The Trump administration’s desire to obliterate birthright citizenship is part of a larger quest to undo most of this egalitarian tradition, to shift American history into a kind of permanent reverse gear back to an age of secure constitutional white supremacy.

[Read: The Coming Assault on Birthright Citizenship]

One cannot overstate the gravity of Trump’s proposed action, nor the historical ignorance on which it stands. The original Republicans who crafted birthright citizenship into the amendment were doing nothing less than harvesting the greatest results of the Civil War, making good on the promise of freedom for millions of any creed, color, or national origin at the time and for all time to come. Section 1 explained to the world what that war had meant. To erase any part of it now is to tarnish the legacy of William McKinley, Trump’s new favorite president, who fought in the Battle of Antietam. The Union victory there is what prompted the Emancipation Proclamation.

For Bingham, a deeply Christian abolitionist Republican from Ohio, this debate went back at least to the 1850s crises over the expansion of slavery. In 1858 he said, “Every man knows that under our free institutions, every person born of free parents within the jurisdiction of the United States … is a citizen of the United States.” Bingham, of course, overestimated such consensus, because Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in Dred Scott v. Sandford had ruled for a 7–2 majority of the Supreme Court the previous year that Black people possessed “no rights” whatsoever under American law. One of the grand purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment was to relegate the Dred Scott decision to history.

By the winter of 1866, as Congress debated the content of an amendment, it faced many overwhelming obstacles, especially bone-level, historical racism and the doctrine of federalism that fundamentally protected states’ rights. Congress had just fought an all-out war to restore the Confederate states to the Union and to end slavery with an overwhelming use of federal power.

But the Republicans, despite fierce debates, were confident. “I can hardly believe,” wrote Thaddeus Stevens, the radical floor manager for his party, “that any person can be found who will not admit that every one of these proposals is just.” They knew exactly what they intended to achieve. Bingham defended the amendment as protection of the “in-born rights of every person.” Stevens thought they had to “fix the foundations of the government on principles of eternal justice.” Senator Lyman Trumbull saw them advancing principles “which the great Author of all has implanted in every human breast.” They believed that they were enacting justice and morality, not only for freed slaves but for the country’s immigrant future, a fact they deeply understood because they had lived through the recent waves of Irish and German immigration.

[Read: The Real Origins of Birthright Citizenship]

As for states’ rights, Bingham had a constant answer. For “generations to come,” he announced, he sought to “arm Congress … with the power to enforce the Bill of Rights as it stands in the Constitution … in the states.” In the states, by federal power.

In floor debates, Bingham spoke with great eloquence about the purposes of the amendment. “The day of the freedman’s deliverance has come,” he declared, “not without suffering, not without sorrow, not without martyrdom, not without broken altars and broken hearts.” But now he saw potential days of glory, not only for ex-slaves but for the immigrant. The Constitution could now “provide that no man, no matter what his color, no matter beneath what sky he may have been born, no matter in what disastrous conflict or by what tyrannical hand his liberty may have been cloven down, no matter how poor, no matter how friendless … shall be deprived of life or liberty or property without due process of law.” Above everything, “all persons born” here were forever citizens.  

Trump and his allies have picked a fight over this crucial provision in the Constitution. Americans have to engage the fight, in the courts and with every mode of persuasion. Trump and his allies’ vision is an egregious abuse of real history and the new Constitution it forged in the 1860s. If they succeed, then Grant has surrendered to Lee at Appomattox.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Updated on January 25, 2025 at 2:31 p.m. ET

Dear Mr. Secretary,

Tradition dictates that I begin by congratulating you on your confirmation. You seem like a man who appreciates frankness, and so I will spare you empty decorum: It would be disingenuous of me to deny that I have been opposed to your nomination to lead the Department of Defense from the moment it was announced. But the Senate has voted, and you are now the leader of the most powerful military on the planet.

Rather than offer you insincere congratulations, I hope you will accept—in the spirit of the love of country that I know we both share—some unsolicited advice. You face unique challenges: You are among the least qualified major Cabinet nominees in modern American history, you have no background in leading a large organization, and you come into office with serious questions about your character and fitness, even from some in your own party. I must tell you that I believe you should have told Donald Trump last fall that you could not, in good conscience, accept his offer.

But you did accept it, and so I write to you today not as a critic, but as a fellow American. I know—as you do—that your success is essential to the security and safety of our nation, and so all of us with something to offer owe you our best efforts, including our direct and honest views.

I send these thoughts to you without partisanship or ill will: The time for that is over. We live in dangerous times and you cannot fail in your new duties. I have no interest in lecturing you about your personal life, or your reported use of alcohol. I have been through such struggles myself, and I believe that even—perhaps especially—in challenging moments, you will choose to approach your new responsibilities with both physical and intellectual sobriety.

I worked in national security and defense affairs for nearly 40 years, including a quarter-century in which my responsibility was to educate American officers. I do not know how to be a Secretary of Defense, but based on my experience, I have three recommendations for you that I hope will contribute to a successful tenure leading America’s military.

First, and most important, I implore you to listen to the men and women working for you who have served our nation. Listening is a sign of strength, Mr. Secretary, not weakness. Every bad senior leader I ever encountered in my career, including generals, admirals, and elected officials, all had the same flaw: Insecurity. They talked and opined and issued orders instead of listening. (From your own military days, you probably remember this expression: They only had Transmit Mode, no Receive Mode.) I know you’ve been charged with shaking up the Pentagon, but the dangerous world around us will not put their plans on pause if you get distracted by a superficial domestic culture war.

You will have the power of decision on almost anything that crosses your path, but you are not omniscient. You are surrounded by a wealth of experience and expertise. Yes, some of the people under you will not be happy about the election or your confirmation, but they respect the terrible burden you’re carrying, and they are there to help you. They share your love of country, and your sense of duty. Their success is your success. They are not the enemy. Hear them out.

Speaking of enemies, you must contend with the reality that you are entering office with almost no credibility with your opposite numbers in Moscow and Beijing (and elsewhere). I say this not as an insult, but to describe in plain terms the conditions you face abroad. I have long experience with the Russians, in particular, and while they will treat you with formal courtesy, make no mistake: These are hard and dangerous people who will have no respect for a former O-4 and talk-show host. I realize it is an uncomfortable truth, but defensiveness about this will only distract you from the work ahead.

You must cover a lot of distance with those opponents. Your previous skills as a public commentator will be of no help and in fact will prove counterproductive in such situations. You cannot bully and speechify your way to respect with such people; they are tough in a way that cannot be countered with macho posturing or rants about DEI. The facile charm that worked for you in public life will be a vulnerability in dealing with our enemies, who will seek to exploit every thoughtless word. The combative punditry that works so well on cable television in America might have helped you burn time during your confirmation hearing, but none of that will serve you well in negotiations or discussions with our dedicated foes. (It won’t do you much good talking to our allies, either.)

Instead, you will find that you must rely on people who have been in the rooms you’ve never seen until now. You are not required to take their advice, Mr. Secretary, but when your counterparts call you, your staff will be able to assist you in ways you might not have considered. They can warn you about your opponent’s strategies—and weaknesses—before you even pick up the phone. Your previous career has rewarded bombast and bluster; now you will have to master judiciousness, restraint, and the strategic use of silence.

Finally, I hope that you will leave behind the kind of rhetoric that brought you to prominence. I know that you gained this post by being a loyal soldier for President Trump. The truth is that most Americans—including the Americans who serve in the U.S. military—don’t really care nearly as much as you’d think about the cultural issues that brought you into the Trump administration. You are no longer a pundit or a provocateur: From today, your fellow citizens are trusting you with the lives of their children. (“Thank you for giving us your son,” a general told one of my friends whose boy, like you, went through ROTC. “We’ll take good care of him.”)  

The rest of us are trusting you with all our lives. You could well be the last person to speak to the president before he decides to go to war—or considers using nuclear weapons. Partisan attachments will be meaningless at such moments.

When I was barely 30 years old, I advised a Republican senator who was trying to decide whether to support President George H. W. Bush’s 1990 decision to go to war against Iraq in Kuwait. “Am I doing the right thing?” he asked me. At that moment, I felt as if the world had fallen on my shoulders. Nothing else mattered. “Yes, I think so,” I stammered. And then we spent hours in the gloom of a winter afternoon discussing his eventual vote to send young Americans into battle.

You will face decisions galactically greater than my one small moment with my boss 35 years ago. Some decisions you make will feel small to you, but they will have an impact on hundreds of thousands of people in the military community, and others will live with them long after you’ve left government service. More importantly, some of your answers may have existential consequences for humanity itself. The election and the speeches are over. The lives of millions—or perhaps billions—now depend on things you say that no one but the president might hear.

You are a man of faith, Mr. Secretary. We have that in common. And so I’ll close with my sincere wish that the Lord keep you and guide you in the days to come.

This article has been updated to correct Hegseth’s rank in the Army.

“I’d summarize it as: fuck.” That’s what one senior university administrator told me when I asked about the chaos that erupted at the National Institutes of Health this week. Academics are in panic mode in the face of sudden new restrictions from the Trump administration. The Department of Health and Human Services has told employees of several health agencies, including the NIH, to stop communicating with the public. Even more disruptive for universities, the committee meetings for reviewing NIH grant proposals have also been abruptly put on hold until at least February 1.

“This will halt science and devastate research budgets in universities,” Jane Liebschutz, a medical doctor and professor at the University of Pittsburgh, posted on Bluesky, in reference to the grant-review shutdown. The UCLA professor Lindsay Wiley echoed the sentiment, adding on Bluesky that the pause, which affects the distribution of a multibillion-dollar pool of public-research money, “will have long-term effects on medicine & short-term effects on state, higher education & hospital budgets. This affects all of us, not just researchers.”

Even if the mayhem ends early next month, it would still represent a large and lasting threat to universities in years to come. The NIH funds a major portion of the research that gets done on campus, and money from its grants also helps pay for universities’ general operations. The fact that this support has been switched off so haphazardly, for reasons that remain unclear, and despite the scope of troubles it creates, suggests that higher ed will be profoundly vulnerable during the second Trump era.

It’s hard to overstate the role of HHS, and the NIH in particular, in funding universities. In 2023, the department contributed $33 billion in research grants to American institutions of higher education, representing more than half of all federal spending on academic R&D. Indeed, HHS alone accounts for nearly one-third of all funding for university research—most of which is distributed by the NIH.

This situation makes the NIH a golden goose for universities, and also a canary in a coal mine. Researchers know just how much research capital comes from the agency—and they worry about the calamity that might ensue if those funds were to be tied up more than momentarily. NIH money funds everything from basic science research (figuring out what a particular gene does, for example) to the work that makes that knowledge useful (inventing a new gene-editing treatment, say). And its resources are put to use well beyond the field of medicine, with grants for work in biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, social sciences, and social work, among other fields. Take that all away, all at once, and a mess of different kinds of researchers are left uncertain as to whether and how long their labs, personnel, and experiments can be sustained.

Not only is the NIH the most generous provider of government funding for research, but it also gives out money in a way that has secondary benefits for grantees and their institutions. For one thing, it generally doles out funds in larger chunks than other agencies. That’s good for individual recipients: Writing grant proposals is a lot of work, so the fewer grants you have to chase, the more time you can spend doing actual science. Some NIH programs allow researchers to ask for standardized, “modular” allocations—say, $250,000 a year—instead of itemizing every element of a budget request. That saves time for science.

NIH grants have their own appeal for university administrators too, in the form of payments for what are called “indirect costs.” Most federal grants pay fees to cover overhead for whatever research has been funded. That money helps pay for all of the campus infrastructure that goes into doing the research. This includes the buildings and labs in which the work gets done; the maintenance and management of those facilities; specialized equipment; the badge scanners, payroll services, and other costs associated with the postdoctoral researchers or research scientists who staff the labs; and other operational expenses.

Exactly how much federal grant money gets added to a grant for “indirect costs” is subject to negotiation. Universities work with federal agencies to determine the percentage, which may change from year to year. Some funding sources, such as the Department of Agriculture, tend to pay lower rates, with perhaps a 30 percent premium going to indirect costs. But the NIH goes very high, in general: Its rates will at times exceed 60 percent. Under such an arrangement, for every $1 million the agency gives to a scientist, that scientist’s university gets $600,000.

These overhead funds, of which the NIH is such an important source, are mysterious and complicated. Many universities rely on them to balance their budget. The problem is, schools almost always have to spend more money to support research than they take in from grants. They do the work anyway both because research is part of their mission and because it helps them compete for better students, faculty, and rankings. But with grant-funded research already operating at a loss, any long-term interruption of schools’ indirect-cost revenue could create a real financial crisis on campus.

Holden Thorp, the editor in chief of Science and a former university chancellor and provost, told me that many schools could weather these disruptions without issue: A university with a big hospital, for example, might use clinical revenue to offset uncompensated research costs. But some schools could be destabilized by even a small-scale interference with the flow of agency grants, and most research institutions would be thrown into at least some disarray.

An extended pause on grant funding isn’t happening, or at least not yet. And Thorp said that panic isn’t a useful response to whatever is happening at the NIH. It’s totally understandable for researchers, students, and administrators to be unnerved, he said, but there are many possible explanations, and “it’s best to keep calm and carry on.” My own university, Washington University in St. Louis, made the same suggestion in a statement sent to faculty from the vice chancellor for research. It read, in part, “While these disruptions are frustrating, they are occurring government-wide and are not focusing on university research activities or targeting specific scientific disciplines.”

But the NIH freak-out may have less to do with the present disruption (however long it lasts) than with what it signifies. If the viability of university research, and of universities themselves, can be so upended by a disarrangement of a single unit of the Department of Health and Human Services, then what might be coming next? Donald Trump’s nominee to run the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, has floated the idea of linking grants to measures of free speech on campus, according to The Wall Street Journal. And Trump’s executive orders have already made clear that any federal grantee will have to answer for its own DEI initiatives. The Trump administration has many bones to pick with higher education, and it seems willing to abide—and even encourage—whatever chaos those squabbles may produce. The present situation might be a fluke, or it might be a test.

“I was okay with being a convict,” Jason Riddle told me this week, not long after learning that he was among the roughly 1,500 recipients of sweeping presidential pardons. Some Americans, including President Donald Trump, believe that Riddle and others who rioted at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, were unjustly persecuted and thus deserving of clemency—if not celebration. Riddle, a 36-year-old New Hampshire resident, rejects this framing. “I’m not a patriot or a hero just because the guy who started the riot says it’s okay,” he told me.

On Thursday, after consulting with his public defender, Riddle sent a pithy email to the Department of Justice:

To whom it may concern,

I’d like to reject my pardon please.

Sincerely,
Jason Riddle

Sent from my iPhone

Declining the pardon falls within Riddle’s legal rights. Many other January 6ers are holding out their hands for the president’s gift. “I can’t look myself in the mirror and do that,” Riddle said. Rather than whitewash his unsavory past, he feels called to own his behavior, even his most shameful moments—a tenet of Alcoholics Anonymous, which he says has saved him.

Some insurrectionists stormed the Capitol as true ideological warriors. Enrique Tarrio, a former leader of the Proud Boys, and Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, for example, were convicted of seditious conspiracy against the United States (and both men are now free). But many others who participated in the violence and destruction that day were similar to Riddle—people with ordinary lives and ordinary problems who found community and catharsis in the MAGA movement.

None of the above is an excuse for taking part in one of the ugliest moments in American history. But actively planning to carry out violence is arguably different from getting swept up in a mob. Today, Riddle doesn’t shirk his complicity. But the path that led him to the Capitol sheds light on how someone without much direction suddenly found it in a day of rage and mayhem. His story also raises an intriguing possibility: A person who stumbled into the darker corners of Trumpism can also stumble out.

For Riddle, the road to January 6 began after he graduated from high school, years before Trump’s first campaign. He served in the Navy and, according to his sentencing memo, “was honorably released from active duty to the naval reserves in light of reocurring [sic] struggles with alcohol use.” In college, at Southern Connecticut State University, as an older student, he decided to major in political science. On campus, he recalls feeling surrounded by younger Bernie Sanders supporters, while he took a liking to Trump. He described himself and another early Trump-supporting buddy as “obnoxious,” noting that they’d frequently drink in class. During Trump’s first presidential campaign, Riddle drove to rallies all over the country. At first he told himself that, as a poli-sci major, he was making anthropological field trips. In truth, he was becoming swept up in MAGA world.

He liked the excitement and controversy that surrounded Trump. “There was this aggression. I think I really enjoyed it,” he said. He’d pregame before the rallies, then join the crowds listening to the future president rant. “You go, you know, bond with these strangers,” he said. At that time in his life, Riddle remembers having barely any other interests or hobbies. He didn’t watch sports or exercise. He’d sit at home, drinking and trolling. “I spent all my time in those comments [sections] on social media, arguing with strangers,” Riddle said. “It was all about proving someone wrong. That would make me feel good about myself.”

After college, he struggled to hold down a job. Eventually, he found work as a mail carrier for the Postal Service. On his route, he’d ruminate. He’d carry on long conversations with a drinking buddy. “I would just be on the phone with my Bluetooth in, talking to another maniac who thinks like me, while just slowly going crazy,” Riddle said.

Radicalization can be a gradual process. He described himself as more of a libertarian than a MAGA Republican. In Trumpism, though, Riddle found an always-there outlet for his pent-up dissatisfaction with how his life was unfolding. But Trump’s time in office was running out. As he plotted to cling to power by desperate means, the president and his allies were spreading conspiracy theories about alleged voter fraud, including lies about mail-in ballots. “So I’m, like, literally working at the mail, which is what I believed to be part of the problem with the election,” Riddle said. In the weeks before the insurrection, he told me, he was drinking more heavily than ever. Sometimes, he’d stash additional booze in the mailbag he carried for the day’s rounds.

One day, drunk on the job, he abruptly quit, leaving piles of mail in his truck. Soon, he and two friends were driving from New Hampshire to Washington, D.C. One was a Trump supporter; the other, Riddle now thinks, was just along for the ride. Riddle’s own commitment to the “Stop the Steal” narrative involved some doublethink. “I know I’m wrong,” Riddle recalls telling himself. “Fuck it; I’m going down anyways.”

He recalls very clearly when he stepped over a barrier and marched into the Capitol. His friends stopped following him. “I remember actually seeing politicians from where I was standing,” he told me. “I could tell they were scared. I do remember enjoying that.”

Images of some of the other Capitol invaders soon spread on social media: the Viking-helmeted QAnon Shaman, the man with his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, the guy carrying the speaker’s lectern. Riddle, too, achieved a kind of immortality: He was the insurrectionist hoisting a bottle of wine. In the immediate aftermath of the event, Riddle felt no remorse, or shame, or need to hide. He bragged about his exploits on a local newscast, and briefly enjoyed his newfound virality. He soon received a visit from the FBI.

In addition to pilfering booze from the Senate parliamentarian’s office, Riddle had stolen a leather-bound book labeled Senate Procedure, and quickly hawked it to a fellow rioter for $40. On April 4, 2022, at federal court in Washington, he was sentenced to 90 days in prison. “Three months for trying to stop the steal, one sip of wine at a time?” Riddle bragged to a New Hampshire newspaper. “Totally worth it.”

Even in prison, he still had his fame—or infamy. He remembers a correctional officer muttering “Let’s go, Brandon” to him on his first day, he told me, and that his fellow inmates nicknamed him “Trump.” But unlike some January 6ers, Riddle wasn’t further radicalized in prison, where he spent the summer of 2022. But neither did his conviction immediately lead him to repudiate the cause that had taken him to the Capitol. Riddle talked about running for Congress, leveraging what remained of his fleeting celebrity. He once filed paperwork, but never got any campaign off the ground.

Riddle thought he’d be able to manage his drinking after his release. But he struggled, and soon began attending daily Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He has relapsed a few times, but thanks largely to what he calls the “forced intervention” of his encounter with the criminal-justice system, he’s been living his “new life” for a little more than two years. Although sobriety remains a daily project, he feels he has finally gained insight into the reckless and self-destructive behavior that led him to the January 6 insurrection.

These days, he’s working at a restaurant in Concord, New Hampshire. He told me he feels comfortable in chaotic environments, and he’s thinking about looking for a job at a hospital or in mental-health services. Sobriety has changed his political perspective, too. Whereas he once viewed Trump as a bold truth teller, raw and unvarnished, he now sees the president as self-serving. When Trump called for public protests around the time of his indictments, Riddle felt especially played. “And I remember thinking, like, why would he do that? People died at the Capitol riot,” Riddle said. “That was the ‘duh’ moment I had with myself: Well, obviously because he doesn’t care about anybody other than himself, and you’re an idiot for thinking otherwise.”

Last fall, he donated to the Kamala Harris campaign, and voted for her in the election. An irony for him, after Trump’s reelection, is that he could be reliving his 2021 viral popularity—if he were still willing to exchange his version of reality for Trump’s. “One common thing I always hear is, like, ‘Good for you for going down there and expressing your views,’” he told me. “People who say that obviously don’t understand what they’re saying.”

The frustration in his voice was audible. “If I accept this pardon, if I agree to this pardon,” Riddle told me, “that means I disagree with that forced intervention.” Truth has finally collided with the president’s lies. Riddle may be enjoying one last hit of attention over his refusal of a pardon, but after the experience this week of seeing the insurrection’s ringleaders walk free, unrepentant, he is choosing a different path.

In Blaine, Washington, there is a very special Starbucks. Like every Starbucks, this one has tables and chairs and coffee and pastries and a pacifying sort of vibe. Also like (most) Starbucks, it has a bathroom, open to anyone who walks in. The bathroom is important because this Starbucks is located about three-quarters of a mile past Peace Arch, the busiest border crossing west of Detroit, and a wretched, wretched place where you can sometimes get stuck in a car for several hours without warning. The Blaine Starbucks looks out onto the magnificent Semiahmoo Bay and is, I guess for that reason, designed like a working lighthouse; at night, you can see it from all over the city center. The metaphor is almost too beautiful: Here is Starbucks and here is its warm light, guiding you to shore. Just about as soon as your huddled masses enter America, Starbucks is ready to take care of you. Do you need to pee? Of course you do.

Too bad. Last week, Starbucks, which has had a new CEO since September, announced an updated “Code of Conduct,” which mandates that the coffee shop’s spaces—including “cafes, patios and restrooms”—will soon be for paying customers only. “There is a need,” Sara Trilling, the president of Starbucks North America, wrote in a letter to store managers, “to reset expectations for how our spaces should be used, and who uses them.” Starbucks—the chain that took over the world by being everywhere and for everyone—is now a little less for everyone.

[Read: The luxury makeover of the worst pastry on Earth]

The change appears to be pitched at returning Starbucks to its former glory, when Starbucks was, in theory at least, not just a store but also a gathering space. “If you look at the landscape of retail and restaurants in America, there is such a fracturing of places where people meet,” the company’s famed former CEO, Howard Schultz, told an industry publication in 1995. “There’s nowhere for people to go. So we created a place where people can feel comfortable.” Starbucks was to feel like a “third place,” an idea borrowed from the sociologist Ray Oldenburg: not home, not work, but somewhere else—a place where community is formed and civility is fostered; a place, like church, where people gather on equal footing and find meaning.

For a while, it actually worked, in both the high-minded sense and the business sense. Starbucks was America’s, and then the world’s, second living room, a place where people were happy to spend their money every day. The chairs were comfortable enough, and all those laptop-clackers and book-readers were like extras in the movie everyone thinks they are starring in. People may not have been forging deep connections with their fellow man at Starbucks, but they were, demonstrably, living their lives there: Americans have given birth at Starbucks, proposed at Starbucks, gotten married at Starbucks, died at Starbucks. In 1987, there were 17 Starbucks stores. In 2007, there were more than 15,000, in 43 countries.

But now, the internet has become our third space, and Starbucks has become, by and large, a well-outfitted to-go counter. Seven out of 10 Starbucks orders are completed via mobile app or drive-through. Walk into any store and you will see harried baristas frantically making drinks for people whose goal is certainly not to build community but rather to sprint in and sort through the forest of Frappuccinos to find theirs, if it’s ready. Last year, on a podcast, Schultz, who is no longer Starbucks’ CEO but is still a major shareholder, described the scene as “a mosh pit” (and not in a positive way). During the second quarter of 2024, transactions dropped 7 percent, the chain’s worst quarter that didn’t involve a pandemic or a great recession. Three months later, Brian Niccol took over as CEO. His second day on the job, he released a statement titled “Back to Starbucks.” It described the café as “a gathering space, a community center where conversations are sparked, friendships form, and everyone is greeted by a welcoming barista.”

Many customers “still experience this magic every day, but in some places—especially in the U.S.—we aren’t always delivering,” Niccol wrote. “It can feel transactional, menus can feel overwhelming, product is inconsistent, the wait too long or the handoff too hectic. These moments are opportunities for us to do better.”

Though the new code of conduct does not include the word loitering, the implication that Starbucks wants to ban it is there: The company wants to be a place for people to hang out—but not just any people. This is, of course, any company’s prerogative. Still, Starbucks making this decision in the name of becoming a better “community center” is both patently silly and a little delusional. Community centers don’t typically require you to buy a cake pop to enter. And to the degree that Starbucks brings people together, it is because they are all using the same services (Wi-Fi, outlets, air-conditioning, water, bathrooms) at the same time. It’s not a church; it’s a rest stop.

[Read: Eat your vegetables like an adult]

But the corporate grandiosity also speaks to something somewhat profound, and sad, about what Starbucks does offer, and what no other large-scale entity does. Public restrooms, once an ordinary feature of urban American life, are disappearing. So are public water fountains. One in 15 Americans does not have access to high-speed internet, and widespread, free, municipal Wi-Fi, a dream of the techno-utopian 2000s, has yet to come to pass. Libraries across the country are cutting their hours. All the people who were left without a place to work after the pandemic closed their offices do not necessarily have a public replacement. Urban spaces are being explicitly designed to be annoying or impossible to sit in. Starbucks is, or was, a respite from all that, but of course, making a global corporation a municipal utility is not exactly a long-term solution.

Starbucks is a business. The company formalized its open-door bathroom policy several years ago, after two Black men were arrested for trying to use the facilities while having a meeting, the video of which went viral and caused a public-relations crisis. Now Starbucks is reversing it, also, presumably, for reasons having to do with being a business, one that is accountable to its shareholders every quarter. (The company’s stock price has indeed risen by about 6 percent since the bathroom change was announced.) Starbucks doesn’t sell community, because community isn’t something you can buy—it sells coffee because coffee is something you can.

Joe Biden has now left office, but the fight over the meaning of his Middle East policies is only just beginning.

Biden’s defenders argue that he left the incoming Trump administration with the strongest American position in the region in decades—and that his decision to back Israel to the hilt following the Hamas attacks was hard but ultimately strategically correct. Biden’s detractors within the Democratic Party argue that he caused irreparable harm to America’s interests and undermined international norms by what they see as his unquestioning support for Israel regardless of a steadily mounting civilian death toll.

Both sides’ arguments have their merits—and which of them ends up winning the debate matters, because the Trump administration and administrations to come will set their policies based in some part on how Biden’s foreign policy is remembered.

Undeniably, the Trump administration inherits a region that looks dramatically different—in a way that favors U.S. interests—from the one that Donald Trump left in 2021. America’s principal adversaries in the region—Iran, Russia, Hezbollah, and Hamas—are all in retreat.

Iran in particular has suffered humiliating losses over the past six months, mainly but not exclusively at the hands of the U.S.-backed Israel Defense Forces. For more than four decades, Iran had worked to construct a “Shia crescent” of aligned forces that stretched from its territory through Iraq and into Lebanon to squeeze Israel and its majority Sunni Muslim neighbors.

This would-be Iranian empire has collapsed. The regime of the Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad, and his father before him, is gone after half a century in power. Israel has eliminated much of Hezbollah’s senior leadership and has otherwise battered the group beyond recognition. Aides to President Biden swept into Lebanon while bombs were still falling to negotiate a cease-fire and shepherd a political process. In a rare diplomatic triumph for the administration, those efforts helped Lebanon usher in a new president and prime minister, both of whom Hezbollah would surely have blocked were that group still powerful enough to do so. Biden’s aides also deserve credit for working closely with Trump’s team to win a cease-fire in Gaza during the administration’s waning days.

Iran’s regional power has long rested on three pillars: support to militant groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah; conventional missiles and other weapons; and an incipient nuclear program. Other than Yemen’s Houthis, Iran’s proxies have been humbled. So, too, has its conventional military posture, as Israel and its partners, including the United States, swatted Iran’s missiles aside not once but twice in 2024. Only Iran’s nuclear program remains (more on that in a bit).

[Read: How Israel could be changing Iran’s nuclear calculus]

But Iran isn’t the only U.S. rival on the retreat in the Middle East. Russia, bled dry by the war in Ukraine and unwilling (and likely unable) to intervene again on Assad’s behalf, finds its treasured warm-water port in Syria now at risk, because the new government in Damascus is anxious to expel foreign militaries from its territory.

Some of Biden’s aides have been telling their colleagues and journalists that the position in which they are leaving the region vindicates the president’s decision—backed by his closest aides but disputed by many other advisers—to support Israel to the fullest extent since the horrific October 7 attacks by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups. Sources in the administration have told me that, as they see it, no U.S. president will have inherited such favorable terrain in the globally strategic region since Bill Clinton came into office in 1993.

These claims infuriate the president’s many critics in the Democratic Party. They argue that Biden and his team, through their policies in the Middle East, have done incalculable damage to America and its image across the globe, and that any strategic gains will ultimately be proved ephemeral as Hamas and Hezbollah rearm and reassert themselves in Gaza and Lebanon, respectively. Pointing to tens of thousands of dead Palestinian and Lebanese civilians—and the use of American weapons in killing them—they claim that Biden undermined international norms to a greater extent than Trump did in his first term. These critics are largely unpersuaded by and impatient with American and Israeli arguments that Hamas alone necessitated this level of carnage by using human shields, or that a high civilian death toll was inevitable in densely urban terrain. The Department of State under Antony Blinken, they complain, had no evident problem assessing war crimes in other jurisdictions yet never seemed to have enough evidence to do so in the Palestinian territories.

Some of Biden’s Democratic critics are particularly despondent that Trump—never a huge fan of Israel’s wars, which don’t play very well on television—was able to seize the mantle of peacemaker, forcefully directing Israel to arrive at a cease-fire agreement before even taking office. Many Americans have embraced isolationism after the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and some progressives worry that the Democratic Party anachronistically remains “the party of war.” Other critics—and I include myself here—argue that largely ceding all major questions of policy and strategy to Israel in 2023 and 2024 was an unforgivable choice for the world’s only superpower to have made.

The Biden administration will not be remembered for injecting much fresh thinking into American foreign policy. Almost all of Biden’s senior aides were also senior aides to President Barack Obama, and many of the most senior stayed the full four years rather than making room for younger talents. Whether the next Democratic administration similarly staffs itself with alumni from the Biden administration will largely depend on which assessment of the president’s policies prevails within the party.

My biggest worry about the next four years is that a weakened Iran will seek solace and protection in the acquisition of nuclear weapons. A new nuclear era in the Middle East could erase many of the past year’s strategic gains. The Trump administration can try to degrade or slow Iran’s nuclear development through military action, but the only way to stave it off altogether is through a process of diplomatic engagement, similar to the much-hated Iran deal of 2015. Trump, ever the pragmatist, might confound his more hawkish aides by reaching out to Iran in its moment of weakness and his moment of strength. He would be wise to do so.

*Sources: Samuel Corum/Getty; Ilia Yefimovich / picture alliance / Getty; Ashraf Amra / Anadolu Agency / Getty.