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When the Panama Canal was unveiled by the United States in 1914, the roughly 50-mile-long waterway symbolized American power and technological advancement. But the glow of progress soon faded. Building the canal killed roughly 5,600 workers over a decade, and many historians think that the death toll was higher. “Beginning with Lyndon B. Johnson, American presidents of both parties understood the strategic necessity of handing the canal back,” my colleague Franklin Foer wrote last week. The 1964 anti-American riots in Panama revealed that “the anger over America’s presence would never subside.”

The 1977 U.S.-Panama treaties signed by President Jimmy Carter relinquished control of the canal to Panama and established the passageway’s neutrality. This move sowed discord in the Republican Party, the rumblings of which are most clearly felt in President Donald Trump’s recent pledge to retake the canal. I spoke with Franklin about why Trump is fixated on this waterway, and what his preoccupation reveals about his vision for American expansionism.

Stephanie Bai: In Donald Trump’s inauguration speech, and even before he assumed office, he promised to retake the Panama Canal. Is this an issue that Americans care about?

Franklin Foer: Until Trump started talking about it, the Panama Canal hardly ranked on the list of the top 500 strategic threats to America. Best I can tell, there were some toll increases, and the Chinese have started to pay greater interest to the canal over time. But there’s zero national-security reason for the United States to deploy its prestige and military might to take back the canal. When it comes to his domestic audience, I think what Trump is betting on is a rising sense of nationalism that he can tap into. And I think by framing the canal as a lost fragment of the American empire and implying that it’s rightfully ours, he’s betting that it will be a piece of the broader “Make America great again” sentiment that he coasts on.

Stephanie: You wrote in your recent story that “reclaiming the Panama Canal is an old obsession of the American right.” Why is it important to that faction of the country?

Franklin: Many countries failed to build a canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, so America’s success was seen as a feat of engineering—at least, Americans viewed it that way for much of the 20th century. But its construction exacted an enormous human toll; thousands of workers died. And by the 1960s, most American presidents pretty clearly realized that the canal generated so much resentment toward the United States that keeping it didn’t make sense.

But you also had a large sector of the American right that felt like we were abandoning our empire. And so Ronald Reagan, when he ran for president in 1976, made reclaiming the Panama Canal one of his central slogans. The issue was something that the insurgent New Right movement, a rising force in American politics, exploited mercilessly in order to raise money and garner enthusiasm.

Stephanie: Trump’s grievances include his claim that the canal’s neutrality has been violated because it’s under the control of China.

Franklin: China likes to involve itself in the operation of infrastructure, and it has lots of global trading routes that it aims to control and exert influence over. There is a new Chinese presence in the canal, but that doesn’t mean that they’re about to take it over.

One of the things that’s ludicrously self-defeating about Trump’s strategy within the hemisphere is that he’s deliberately aggravating countries that could conceivably be thrown into the arms of China. So Panama may not want to enter into any sort of alliance with the Chinese, but because Trump is threatening military action against it, the country may decide that aligning more closely with China is in its interest.

Stephanie: In response to Trump’s inauguration speech, Panama President José Raúl Mulino said that “the canal is and will remain Panama’s.” As you noted, Trump has already floated the idea of using military force to retake the canal. Do you think this could actually come to pass?

Franklin: I think Trump is testing limits to see what he can get. I would be surprised if he was asking the Pentagon to draw up plans right now to retake the Panama Canal. But the problem is: Once he goes down this road of threatening to use military force to take something back, what happens when Panama doesn’t give it back? I don’t think there’s an extremely high chance that we will go to war to take back the canal. But I think there’s at least some possibility that we’re going down that road.

Stephanie: American expansionism seems to be top of mind for Trump. He talked about his “manifest destiny” vision in his inauguration speech, and he has repeatedly spoken about annexing Greenland and Canada in addition to taking back the Panama Canal.

Franklin: The fact that he’s using the term manifest destiny, which is a callback to American expansion in the West in the 1840s and 1850s, shows that this is not a departure from American history but a return to the American history of imperialism.

This is a big shift in the way that America now thinks of its role in the world. I think for Trump, who is a real-estate guy, acquiring real estate is a token of his greatness. He looks at Vladimir Putin and sees the way in which Putin has projected his power to expand his territory with Ukraine and thinks, Well, that’s what powerful leaders and powerful nations do. And here he is starting to explore that possibility himself.

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Emperor Trump’s new map The political logic of Trump’s international threats

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Europe’s Elon Musk problem Trump can’t escape the laws of political gravity. Greenland’s prime minister wants the nightmare to end. Beware the weepy influencers.

Today’s News

Trump is expected to sign executive orders that would ban transgender people from the military, reinstate troops who were discharged for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine, and remove the military’s DEI programs. Colombia reached an agreement to accept the flights of deported migrants from the U.S. after Trump made threats that included steep tariffs and a travel ban on Colombian citizens. U.S. markets fell today after the Chinese AI company DeepSeek’s latest cutting-edge chatbot app shot up in popularity over the weekend.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: neal.fun.

The Worst Page on the Internet

By Yair Rosenberg

The worst page on the internet begins innocently enough. A small button beckons the user to “Click me.” When they do, the game commences. The player’s score, or “stimulation,” appears in the middle of the screen, and goes up with every subsequent click. These points can then be used to buy new features for the page—a CNN-style news ticker with questionable headlines (“Child Star Steals Hearts, Faces Prison”), a Gmail inbox, a true-crime podcast that plays in the background, a day-trading platform, and more. Engaging with these items—checking your email, answering a Duolingo trivia question, buying and selling stocks—earns the player more points to unlock even more features.

Read the full article.

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Greenland’s prime minister, Múte Egede, looked like he was being chased by an angry musk ox.

“Mr. Prime Minister, have you spoken to President Trump yet?” I asked as he fled a lunchtime news conference on Tuesday in the capital city, Nuuk (population 20,000). Egede, who is 37, wore a green zip-up sweater, stared straight ahead, and was walking toward me. He said nothing.

“Prime Minister Múte Egede,” I tried again, using his full name this time, for some reason.

He remained … mute.

I made one more attempt—“Have you talked to President Trump?”—to no avail.

As he walked out the door, Egede looked flushed and somewhat stunned. The briefing room had been tense, crowded with about three dozen journalists, several from other countries. This is—I’m guessing here—two and a half dozen more journalists than typically show up at his press conferences.

“This is not usual for us,” said Pele Broberg, a member of the Greenlandic Parliament and an off-and-on Egede nemesis, who had come to enjoy the spectacle and watch Egede squirm.

The briefing had lasted about 30 minutes and consisted of Egede giving a canned statement and then taking eight or nine questions, all on the same topic.

“Do we have reason to be afraid?” one Greenlandic journalist asked.

“Of course, what has happened is very serious,” Egede replied in Greenlandic. He projected the grave aura of a leader trying to be reassuring in a time of crisis; his tone and language seemed better suited to a natural disaster than a geopolitical quandary.

“We have to have faith that we can get through this,” Egede said. His hands shook slightly as he sipped from a glass of water.

“In Greenland,” he said, “there is a lot of unrest.”

Extreme cold was predicted for Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington, D.C., so I figured I’d decamp to somewhere warmer: Nuuk.

Temperatures in the icy capital were in the low 30s, or several degrees balmier than those in Washington. More to the point, this autonomous Danish territory—the world’s biggest non-continental island—has surfaced as a subject of diplomatic dispute.

Trump had first announced his interest in America buying the territory in 2019. At the time, the Danish prime minister promptly rebuffed the overture (she called it “absurd”), to which Trump responded predictably (he called her “nasty”). And then, after a few weeks, the episode melted away. That is, until Trump managed to get himself reelected and started piping up again about how he still coveted the place. Ever since then, his renewed designs on Greenland have become a source of global fascination. The furor grew earlier this month, when Trump, in response to a reporter’s question, refused to rule out using military force to resolve the matter.

“Greenland is in the center of the world,” Egede proclaimed a few days later in Copenhagen, perhaps overstating things but still offering a whiff of the heady sense of relevance that’s been sweeping through Official Nuuk.

I went to Greenland to watch this peculiar production unfold in this most unlikely of places. Another big objective was to meet Egede, the young and ambitious prime minister. Like many other minor global figures who become overnight attention magnets, Egede had seemed at first exhilarated by all the interest, then overwhelmed, and then regretful. Watching his recent public appearances from afar, I had noticed his demeanor sometimes shift from the burly confidence of a local wunderkind to the nervousness of someone fully aware that his actions were being observed closely, especially by Washington and Copenhagen.

[Anne Applebaum: Trump triggers a crisis in Denmark—and Europe]

“We are Greenlanders,” Egede often says, robotically, when asked—as he is constantly—about Trump’s continued focus on his country. “We don’t want to be Americans. We don’t want to be Danish, either.”

Egede just wants to be left alone, is the impression he is leaving these days. I learned this before I set out for Nuuk, when I placed a few calls to his office in an attempt to watch Trump’s inaugural speech with the prime minister. He shouldn’t be that hard to track down, I figured, given that the total number of humans in Greenland, which is roughly three times the physical size of Texas, is 56,000—smaller than the population of Bethesda, Maryland.

“Can you call back tomorrow?” his communications aide, Andreas Poulsen, pleaded on the phone. “We are very busy right now. Thank you for understanding.”

I tried the next day.

“Can you call back tomorrow?” Poulsen said again. “We are very busy right now.”

I sensed a pattern.

“Hi, Andreas,” I said when Poulsen picked up again on the third day. (Clearly Greenland’s government offices need more robust call-screening protocols.) “Do you have a second to talk now?”

“Can you call back tomorrow?” he said again. “I am very busy right now.” Poor guy sounded more beleaguered with each call. I empathized.

“Well, I’m going to be on my way to Greenland tomorrow,” I finally said, “so I’ll be in the air.”

(Silence.)

“Andreas, are you there?”

It’s not easy being in Greenland. Especially in January: never-ending snow, frigid winds, and maybe five or six hours of daylight, if you’re lucky. Greenland is known as Kalaallit Nunaat in the native tongue, which roughly translates, fittingly enough, to “Land of the Greenlanders.” Residents of Nuuk account for about one-third of the national population, the great majority of whom are all or part Inuit.

Greenland is also not easy to get to, even though Nuuk is in fact closer to the East Coast of the United States than to Copenhagen. There are currently no direct flights from the U.S., though United Airlines says it will begin direct routes to Nuuk from Newark in June. The few flights currently available, via Reykjavik, are often canceled due to weather. Until a recent renovation of the Nuuk airport, flying to the capital had required a stop in Kangerlussuaq, a former U.S. air base to the north, and then switching to a smaller plane. The airport-modernization project has been a source of local pride in Nuuk and a godsend of convenience to its visitors (no more nightmare layovers in Kangerlussuaq!).

On the Thursday before the inauguration, I managed to get the last seat on an Icelandair flight from Washington, which miraculously went off without major complication. When I arrived in Nuuk, I found the people of the capital to be nothing but warm and welcoming, starting with my cab driver from the airport. When I mentioned I was from Washington, he asked if I was in town “because of this situation with Trump.” Correct, I said.

In the grand and feverish scheme of Trump’s early agenda, Greenland remains a remote curiosity next to his higher-profile priorities such as mass deportations, mass pardons, and trying to end birthright citizenship. But his ongoing fascination with the country can’t be dismissed as merely the frivolous object of one egoist’s manifest destiny. For a variety of strategic reasons—energy, trade, and national security, among others—Greenland has become a legitimately prized territory. Melting ice has made for better access to valuable mineral deposits and potential oil bounties, and easier trade passage through Arctic waterways. To varying degrees, both Moscow and Beijing have shown that they want in on Greenland. “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

A Trump hat in Nuuk, Greenland  (Juliette Pavy / Hors Format)

Not surprisingly, this message has been received as something rotten in Denmark. The NATO ally has held sovereignty over Greenland for more than a century. (Greenland was a colony until 1953, when it became a territory of the Danish kingdom, though it gained home rule in 1979.) Although the Danes provide about $600 million in subsidies to the island each year—about half of Greenland’s annual budget—critics of its stewardship have said that Denmark lacks the will and resources to fully realize Greenland’s potential or protect it militarily. A strong majority of Greenlanders—68 percent—want independence from Denmark, according to a 2019 poll.

The degree to which Greenlanders would welcome closer ties to America, much less actually becoming a part of the United States, is unclear. For the most part, Trump’s proposal has been met with something at the junction of amused, flattered, and resistant to being associated with such a thundering and aggressive entity, as embodied by its president. These qualities, to say the least, run counter to the affable, happily innocuous, and slightly mysterious national image that Greenlanders have traditionally preferred.

[From the July/August 2024 issue: A wild plan to avert catastrophic sea-level rise]

If nothing else, Trump’s Greenland campaign has set off a blizzard of conspicuous attention from Copenhagen. Denmark recently increased its military spending on the island, stepped up its government services, and offered two new dog-sled patrol teams. In a truly magnanimous pander to Greenland from His Majesty, the Danish king even slapped a big new image of a polar bear onto the monarchy’s royal coat of arms.

“It’s a show for the Danes to try to reassure everybody else that they still have full control of Greenland,” said Broberg, the member of Parliament, who is a strong advocate for independence from Denmark.

I met him last Sunday, at a televised forum of Greenlandic political officials that was broadcast across Denmark and Greenland. The event, which included the prime minister, was held at a theater next to the Parliament building and drew a packed house of engaged students and professionals, similar to a suburban Manchester or Nashua town hall before the New Hampshire primary. The panelists included Greenlandic and Danish politicians debating the various permutations of “independence,” how realistic they would be, and the merits of Danish and U.S. proprietorship, if any.

“It’s a historic time that we live in,” an audience member named Niels-Olav Holst-Larsen, who moved to Nuuk from Denmark 18 months ago, told me. “Today was, I think, the biggest television-broadcasting event from Denmark in Greenland in a lot of years.”

Trump’s inaugural address the next day was shaping up to be another major television event in Greenland. “Don’t we all have to watch this speech?” Qupanuk Olsen, a candidate for Parliament who describes herself as “Greenland’s biggest influencer on social media,” told me.

I first encountered Olsen, who goes by “Q,” via a delightful YouTube video titled “How Do We Say ‘Hello’ in Greenlandic.” I resolved to find and meet her. This did not take long. Olsen told me that she considers Trump’s interest to be an “amazing” boon for her country, at least from a PR perspective. Spreading Greenland’s abundant charms, she said, is something of a life’s mission for her. “I’ve been working on showing the rest of the world what Greenland is really about.”

I asked Olsen whether she was hoping for an inaugural mention of Greenland. She paused for several seconds before declaring herself a yes. “If he doesn’t mention Greenland”—she turned strangely plaintive—“we’re just going to be forgotten again.”

I spent much of January 20 visiting members of the Greenlandic Parliament. Called Inatsisartut, or “those who make the law,” the Parliament consists of 31 members, who, from what I can tell, represent 31 nuanced flavors of pro-Greenlandic-independence. Egede, for instance, is a former member of Inatsisartut, where he represented the left-wing Inuit Ataqatigiit party, which supports independence. But as the nation’s chief executive now, he recognizes the pragmatic benefits of the status quo, which requires working closely with Denmark, especially given the recent uncertainty that Trump has introduced.

The low-slung parliamentary-office building felt a bit like a small college dorm. MPs wandered in and out of conference rooms, bantered in hallways, and shouted to one another across a courtyard. My first stop on my tour of Greenland’s greatest deliberative body was a meeting with Broberg. A member of the (also) pro-independence Naleraq party, he served for a while as foreign minister until his anti-Danish rhetoric began to wear thin in Copenhagen, as well as with key figures in Nuuk—notably, Egede.

Broberg told me he admires politicians who eschew niceties and jump right to the point. He appreciates this about Trump, whose pursuit of Greenland he says has been a blessing to the cause of independence. I noted the obvious contradiction here: that Trump’s desire to “buy” Greenland is by definition antithetical to independence. Broberg argued that existing laws and treaties would make it impossible for the U.S. to actually “own” Greenland. Still, Trump’s public zest for the country enhances its cachet, Broberg explained. It also brings the added benefit of freaking out Denmark, he said.

As he spoke, I noticed a bright-red baseball hat on a shelf. I pointed to it, wondering if it was a Trump hat. In fact, the cap was emblazoned with the words Great Greenland, which Broberg told me is a Greenlandic company that makes sealskin furs and jackets. He added that he is not a Trumper; he enjoys watching people react to the hat.

At the end of the interview, Qarsoq Høegh-Dam, a top official with the Naleraq party and an adviser to Olsen, popped in to say hello. Høegh-Dam is a gregarious politico, of a familiar sort you often find in insular government towns. He said he was trying to organize a “watch party” for Trump’s inauguration.

I noticed that he was wearing a massive claw on a necklace. A polar-bear nail, he told me. As I studied the menacing trinket—roughly the size of a small croissant broken in half—Høegh-Dam launched into an aside. “It’s an age-old debate,” he said—who would win a fight between a tiger and a polar bear? I told him I was just here to learn. “I’ve seen a tiger,” Høegh-Dam said. “I was surprised how small they were.” He told me his sister had once almost been eaten by a polar bear. “Nobody is for polar bears eating people,” Høegh-Dam said—a seemingly safe position, even within the blood sport of Greenlandic politics.

[Jonathan Chait: The intellectual rationalization for annexing Greenland]

This was all riveting, but I was late for a meeting with Aqqalu Jerimiassen, a conservative member of Parliament, who was waiting down the hall. I noticed a photo in Jerimiassen’s office of him wearing a Trump shirt and drinking a Guinness. He told me he belongs to “likely the most right-wing party in Greenland.” This does not mean he would call himself a Trump supporter (and, in fact, he told me a few days later that he had taken down the Trump-shirt photo). If he lived in the U.S., he said, he would probably have voted for Nikki Haley.

Still, Jerimiassen appreciates the recognition Trump has brought to his country. “If someone asked me 10 years ago where I’m from, and I say Greenland—for example, if I’m in Europe, in Bulgaria—nobody knows where that is,” he said.

Before we finished, Jerimiassen detoured to a topic about which he becomes endlessly animated: how the Nuussuaq Peninsula, near where he is from, boasts the finest-tasting reindeer in all of Greenland. Up north, he said, the reindeer eat more moss, as opposed to grass, which makes for a more piquant cervine experience. “The smell. Aromatic. It’s very, very aromatic, and the savoriness,” he raved. And the reindeer in Nuuk?

“Very plain,” he opined.

Nuuk, Greenland (Juliette Pavy / Hors Format)

The inauguration watch party took place in a Naleraq meeting room near Broberg’s office. Broberg was there. So was Olsen, or “Q,” the influencer, along with a few parliamentary staffers, operatives, and assorted European broadcasters on hand to capture “the scene.” As with most watch parties, this “scene” was not much to watch: a bunch of people sitting around staring at a TV and sharing a communal bowl of Bugles, or whatever the Greenland equivalent of those crunchy cone-shaped snacks is.

“Greenland, Greenland, Greenland,” Broberg called out as the newly sworn-in Trump began speaking at the Capitol. I took this to mean that he wanted Trump to mention Greenland, but Broberg had told me earlier that he couldn’t care less. “We are getting all the attention that we need anyways,” he said.

Soon, the room turned quiet. Trump’s dark and aggressive tenor appeared to make the viewers uneasy. I watched Olsen, who kept fidgeting whenever it seemed Trump might name-check Greenland. This was something she was no longer wishing for, it appeared.

“Here it comes,” I heard one person say, when Trump started talking about changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and how the U.S. should retake control of the Panama Canal. But the president did not mention Greenland.

[Franklin Foer: Emperor Trump’s new map]

The speech still had a ways to go. Trump stated his goal “to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.” He declared that “the spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts.” Olsen began nervously tapping her black boot on the floor. She grimaced. A few minutes later, the speech ended. No Greenland. Harpoon, dodged.

“Can you feel the sigh of relief in here?” Høegh-Dam remarked.

I asked Broberg what he thought of the speech. He chuckled and read aloud a text he’d just received.

“Greenland has a code name now,” he said. “Mars.”

Before I blew out of Nuuk, I figured I would make a final approach to Egede for an interview. His press conference on Tuesday felt like my best bet.

A pack of international journalists filed into the briefing room, like scavengers descending on a fresh caribou carcass. There were cursory checks of our press IDs, but no security checkpoints or metal detectors. The prime minister wandered in pretty much by himself, with no visible protective detail.

Egede, who has been Greenland’s prime minister since 2021, hewed closely to his scripted lines about how Greenland will decide its own future, and to a theme of national unity. “We are a small population, but togetherness is our strength,” he said via translation headphones issued to the press. He urged Greenlanders to stand firm, and said, “Together, we can get over this incident.”

[Eliot A. Cohen: Drop the outrage over Trump’s foreign-policy bluster]

As Egede’s news conference wore on, and the questions became more pointed, the prime minister looked a bit frozen. I noticed a guy in a black T-shirt standing behind a pane of glass, waving to get Egede’s attention. He looked familiar. I soon realized who it was: Andreas Poulsen, the PM’s snowed-under communications officer, whom I’d been harassing for days. He was trying to tell Egede to wrap things up.

I made a point of introducing myself to Poulsen, who stepped out from his glass booth. “I’m sorry I kept calling you last week,” I said. Not to worry, he replied. Nothing is normal in Nuuk these days. We chatted a bit, and then I shot my last shot.

“Would it be possible to interview the prime minister while I’m in Nuuk?”

“Not today, not today,” Poulsen said.

“How about tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “We’re very busy.”

Postscript: I was supposed to leave Greenland on Wednesday, but my flight home got snowed out. I was stuck indefinitely. (Nuuk in January, man. Next year, I’ll bring my whole family.) As it happened, I had a phone interview scheduled for Thursday, related to another project: a conversation with, of all people, Paul McCartney.

“Greenland?” McCartney greeted me when he came on the phone. Apparently someone had told him about my situation.

Yeah, I seem to be stranded here, I told him.

“Trump’s gonna buy it,” Sir Paul said. “So don’t worry.”

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.

For a few years in the 2010s, America seemed to be falling out of love with soda. But some blend of price-conscious shopping, kooky social-media trends (milk and coke, anyone?), and perhaps a streak of fatalistic behavior on the part of Americans has made the beverage newly relevant.

Soda consumption declined consistently over the decade leading up to 2015, in part because of backlash from a health-conscious public and a series of soda-tax battles; some soda drinking was also displaced by the likes of energy drinks, coffee, and bottled water. However, in 2017, the CDC announced that rates of sugary-beverage consumption had plateaued—at a rate far above the government-recommended limit. Now soda sales are ticking back up modestly: Coca-Cola and Dr Pepper both saw soda-case sales rise in the past year, and total sales volumes for soft drinks have risen, according to the investment-bank advisory firm Evercore ISI; last year, Coca-Cola was among the fastest-growing brands for women, Morning Consult found. Soda is having a cultural moment too: Addison Rae’s “Diet Pepsi” was a, if not the, song of the summer. And the U.S. president-elect is famously a fan of Diet Coke, reportedly drinking a dozen a day during his first term.

Compared with 20 years ago, Americans are drinking far fewer sugar-sweetened beverages, particularly soda—but compared with a decade ago, they are drinking almost as much, Dariush Mozaffarian, a physician and a nutrition expert at Tufts, told me. Researchers have suggested that there are links between drinking large amounts of sugary drinks and a range of negative health outcomes, but the people most open to changing their soda habits may have already changed them, Mozaffarian noted. In order for cultural norms around soda to shift, drinking it needs to become uncool, he argued. That’s not an impossible goal, but it can be achieved only through a combination of sustained policy efforts, strong messaging from public-health officials, and perhaps even a bit of help from celebrities.

Public-health messaging alone can’t get people to change their behavior. Soda brands have been “a part of our cultural life for decades,” my colleague Nicholas Florko, who covers health policy, told me. “And so there is going to be some reluctance if you tell people” to ease up on “this thing that your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents, have been drinking forever.” Part of the draw of soda is that it’s generally quite cheap. To undercut that appeal, activists and politicians have pushed to implement taxes on sugary drinks; in many cases, they have received major pushback from industry and business groups. Researchers have found that, in places where sugary-drink taxes managed to pass, they do help: One study last year found that sales of sugary drinks went down by a third in American cities with soda taxes, and there’s no evidence that people traveled beyond the area looking for cheaper drinks. But these taxes require political will—and pushing for people’s groceries to cost more is not always an appealing prospect for politicians, Nicholas pointed out, especially in our current moment, when Americans are still recovering from the effects of high inflation.

Soda taxes are controversial, but a soda tax isn’t just about cost: Part of the reason such policies work, says Justin White, a health-policy expert at Boston University, is that they can make sugary drinks seem less socially acceptable. “Policies affect the norms, and norms feed back into people’s choices,” he told me. Now new soda norms are emerging, including a crop of sodas that claim to be gut-healthy (although, Mozaffarian said, more research needs to be done to confirm such claims).

Soda feels like an intrinsic part of American life. But generations of canny advertising and celebrity endorsements, Mozaffarian noted, are responsible for embedding soda in so many parts of America—think of its placement in ballparks and other social spaces—and in the day-to-day rhythms of offices and schools. Curbing soda consumption would require a similarly intentional shift.

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Franklin Foer on how Biden destroyed his legacy Let’s not fool ourselves about TikTok. The secretary of hard problems L.A. isn’t ready for what’s next.

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The Supreme Court upheld a law that will effectively ban TikTok in the United States if the social-media platform’s Chinese parent company does not sell it by Sunday. The Israeli cabinet voted to approve a cease-fire deal with Hamas, which is expected to take effect Sunday. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem testified in her Senate confirmation hearing for the role of secretary of Homeland Security.

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The Books Briefing: Two novels take different approaches to resurrecting the dead, Maya Chung writes. Atlantic Intelligence: TikTok is set to be banned in the U.S., following a decision by the Supreme Court. But the legacy of its algorithm will live on, Damon Beres writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

‘I Won’t Touch Instagram’

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

If TikTok does indeed get banned or directly shut off by its parent company, it would be a seismic event in internet history. At least a third of American adults use the app, as do a majority of American teens, according to Pew Research Center data. These users have spent the past few days coming to terms with the app’s possible demise—and lashing out however they could think to.

Read the full article.

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Watch. The first season of Severance was a chilly riot, too cool to offer viewers catharsis. The second season (streaming on Apple TV+) digs into more human questions, Sophie Gilbert writes.

Commemorate. The death of David Lynch, America’s cinematic poet, is shocking only because it seemed he’d be with us forever, David Sims writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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A good deal is one in which everyone walks away happy or everyone walks away mad. The moods must match. By this standard, the deal between Israel and Hamas is good but not great: Both groups are relishing what they are getting, and choking a bit on what they have given up. Israel is choking more than Hamas. There will be scenes of jubilation and triumph from Gazans and Israelis, and efforts by both sides’ leadership to spin the Gaza war as a victory. But for Israel and Gaza, the past 15 months have been a miserable failure, and from the perspective of negotiation, the only good news is that both sides taste some of the bitterness.

No hostages have been freed yet, and the cease-fire doesn’t start until Sunday, so all reports so far remain speculative and optimistic. The terms resemble those leaked over the past week. Israel will release a large number of Palestinian prisoners. Hamas will release in tranches the remaining hostages, living and dead, whom it seized on October 7, 2023. Nearly 100 remain. The two sides will stop fighting for 42 days, with the aim (again, speculative) of making that cease-fire permanent and ending the war. The unaccounted-for Israeli hostages include civilians, among them the Bibas children, who were nine months old and 4 years old when they were kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz, after the slaughter of their grandparents.

Hamas’s failure even to acknowledge whether these children are alive, or to allow welfare checks by the Red Crescent, has done much to convince Israelis that negotiation with the group is pointless. Why talk with someone too sadistic to let you know whether they have shot a baby or fed him? Taking civilian hostages is a war crime, and negotiating with a group that brags about taking them is more like negotiating with the Joker than with Nelson Mandela. The act of kidnapping a child is particularly taxing on one’s moral imagination. It’s no surprise that negotiations have faltered so far. Negotiating demands trust, and it’s hard to trust someone who snatched a baby.

[Franklin Foer: How Netanyahu misread his relationship with Trump]

From the beginning of the war, Israel has struggled to define its goals—in part because it is, as a country, so divided about its nature and purpose that any real goal articulated would be unsatisfactory to a large portion of its population. It was left instead with reassuring but vague slogans. “Free the hostages” was a defensible one from the start—the objective was just, and within Israel’s rights—but it concealed many harder strategic questions. What if freeing the hostages involved freeing murderers and terrorists from Israeli prisons? Evidently it does. What if their freedom was conditional on letting Hamas survive and rule Gaza?

Evidently it is. Gaza is wrecked, and tens of thousands of its people are dead. But Hamas is still the only armed force likely to rule Gaza when Israel withdraws. If the intention is to end the war, then the war will end with Hamas bloodied but unbowed. Israel estimates that only two of Hamas’s battalions remain intact, but the analyst Seth Frantzman, a professional Bad News Bear on this topic, has listed the evidence that perhaps a dozen battalions’ worth of Hamas fighters have survived. Moreover, the plans for a post-Hamas Gaza amount to squat. For more than a year, Israel and its allies have been pondering a role for the Palestinian Authority, or the Gulf States, or Egypt in providing security forces in a post-Hamas Gaza. I wonder about the mental health of those proposing this option. Are these security forces in the room with us right now? So far there is no prospect that any such group will materialize, or that anyone will want to send soldiers into a rubble-strewn urban combat zone, to contend with Hamas fighters who are themselves reluctant to disarm.

Hamas will celebrate this deal, because it will survive, and by its survival it will demonstrate the failure of the other slogan Israel adopted, which was “Destroy Hamas.” That slogan, too, was easy and just. But like “Free the hostages,” it left all the big questions unanswered, and looming ahead of it like thunderclouds. The first question was whether Israel was willing to inflict collateral civilian casualties, and absorb military casualties, at a level that experts thought would be necessary to accomplish its goal. This question is partially answered: Israel has by its own account inflicted many civilian casualties, and taken remarkably few military casualties of its own. (Before the war, analysts predicted thousands of Israeli soldiers dead in tunnel-clearing operations.)

The second question about the slogan was whether Hamas’s “destruction” meant what it seemed to mean. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used it, it sounded a lot like eradication, so that Hamas would cease to exist in any form, the way ETA and the Red Army Faction have. It would lose and close up shop, without even maintaining a token website or leaving a masked dead-ender broadcasting from a basement somewhere. The other possible interpretation of destroy would be merely to destroy Hamas’s ability to perpetrate another attack like October 7. The latter, reduced version of the slogan offered a better chance of success. But it is also less satisfying, and no longer fits on a bumper sticker.

When I talked with Israeli national-security officials last year, the most realistic of them spoke of Gaza’s future as resembling the West Bank today. The Palestinian population would live unhappily, but under the day-to-day administration of a Palestinian government. Israel would go in regularly on missions to kill or capture Hamas members. This vision is consistent with the more limited version of Israel’s goal for Hamas: to reduce it to a permanent but manageable problem. A cease-fire in Gaza, as of right now, will leave Hamas in power at a level well beyond manageable for Israel. It will probably postpone large-scale fighting rather than end it for good.

There has always been one further Israeli goal—less often articulated publicly, but shared by most Israelis and certainly by their government. That is to establish regret among Gazans for the October 7 attacks, and deterrence for future ones. Deterrence means asking Hamas, Do you enjoy the fruits of your actions? It means asking Gazans, Are you willing to accept what Hamas has dragged you into? The most distressing thing about this hostage deal is that Gazans might regret the results of the October 7 attack, but Hamas is still celebrating it. Hamas is a military organization; militaries fight, and Hamas just fought a better-armed opponent to a draw.

[Yair Rosenberg: Trump made the Gaza cease-fire happen]

Tempering this enthusiasm is a downward trend in its allies’ fortunes. In the days after October 7, Israel was skittish and concerned, because it looked possible that Hezbollah would take advantage of the country’s post-raid shock to enter the war from the north. It was not obvious that Israel, having failed to defend itself against an attack in the south, could withstand a much more formidable one in the north. After Israel’s largely successful war with Hezbollah at the end of last year, and the downfall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Israel has removed, at least temporarily, two major potential distractions. Hamas now knows that it has Israel’s undivided attention—and that prospect may have motivated it to consider offers of negotiation that it rejected months ago.

In the end, the most promising aspect of the deal is that it breaks a streak of nearly a year, during which the war in Gaza went on and on, without any clearly articulated end point or plan. Israel fought Hamas and degraded it. But fighting is a tool rather than an objective; a cease-fire at least gives civilians on both sides a spell of relief, and a moment to pause and figure out what they want out of what comes next.