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May 1, 9 a.m., was once the hour of chaos in New York City. In a tradition dating back to colonial days, leases all over the city expired precisely at that time. Thousands of tenants would load their belongings on carts and move, stepping around other people’s piles of clothing and furniture. Paintings of that day look like a mass eviction, or the aftermath of some kind of disaster. In fact, that day represented a novel American form of hope. Mobility, or the right to decide where you wanted to live, was a great American innovation. But lately, that mobility is stalling, with real consequences for politics, culture, and the national mood.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Yoni Appelbaum, a senior editor and the author of the new book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. Appelbaum explains how, over the decades, several forces combined to make it harder for the average American to move and improve their circumstances. And he lands at some surprising culprits: progressives, such as Jane Jacobs, who wanted to save cities but instead wound up blocking natural urban evolution and shutting newcomers out.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

I have moved many times in my life: across continents, across the country, back and forth across D.C., which is where I live now. And I didn’t think much about it. I just chalked it up to restlessness—until I read Yoni Appelbaum’s new book, which is also the March cover story in The Atlantic. The book is called Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.

Appelbaum argues that there is and always has been something quintessentially American—and also, quintessentially hopeful—about moving. In the 19th century, Moving Day was, like, a thing—a holiday celebrated across different American cities at different times, when everybody would just up and move. To quote Appelbaum: “Nothing quite so astonished visitors from abroad as the spectacle of thousands upon thousands of people picking up and swapping homes in a single day.”

But moving isn’t happening so much anymore. As Appelbaum writes: “Every year, fewer Americans can afford to live where they want to.” So what happens to a country—geographically, culturally, politically, and, in some ways, psychologically—when mobility starts to stall?

[Music]

Rosin: Can you read this from your intro, these couple of sentences?

Yoni Appelbaum: “The notion that people should be able to choose their own communities—instead of being stuck where they happen to be born—is America’s most profound contribution to the world … The fact that it is now endangered is not just a problem for housing markets; it’s a lethal threat to the entire American project.”

Rosin: Okay. Let’s start with the second half: Why is mobility the thing that defines the American project?

Appelbaum: It is the thing that defines the American project, because it was the first thing that anyone who got here from Europe noticed. People would come to the United States and gawk. They saw this as either our greatest asset or our great national character flaw. But they were amazed at how often Americans moved. And they were particularly amazed that the Americans who were moving were not moving out of desperation, that Americans tended to be doing okay in one place and to still want something more for themselves—want something better for their children—and to move someplace else in pursuit of it.

Rosin: And you’re not just describing something geographic. You’re describing something psychological.

Appelbaum: Yeah. I’m talking about an attitude that Americans believed that they could change their destinies by changing their address, that they could move someplace new and do better than they were doing. And also—and this is the second half of the answer—Americans believed that they were not defined by the circumstances of their birth. That was the great gift that mobility gave us. And that had really profound implications that took me a while to unravel.

Rosin: Right. Because it’s not just about geography. It’s not just about money.

It’s about a sense of yourself as having infinite possibilities. Like, you could just move and move. You weren’t class-bound in any way.

Appelbaum: Here’s the thing about American individualism: We are individuals, in the sense that we have the ability to construct our own identities, but we define ourselves by virtue of the communities that we choose to join.

Throughout the world, communities tended to choose their members. Even in the early United States, in the colonial era, if you tried to move in someplace, you could be warned out. The town had the right to say, Hey. You may have bought property here. You may have leased a building. You may have a job. We don’t want you here. And not surprisingly, they disproportionately warned out the poor. They warned out minorities. Really, American communities, for the first couple hundred years of European settlement, were members-only clubs.

And then in the early 19th century, there’s a legal revolution. And instead of allowing communities to choose their members, we allow people to choose their communities. You could move someplace and say, I intend to live here, and that was enough to become a legal resident of that place.

Rosin: So just in numbers, can you give a sense of where we are now? What’s the statistic that shows most starkly the decline in mobility now?

Appelbaum: In the 19th century, as best I can calculate it, probably one out of three Americans moved every year.

Rosin: Every year?

Appelbaum: Every year. In some cities, it might be half. In the 20th century, as late as 1970, it was one out of five. And the census in December told us we just set a new record, an all-time low. It’s dropped over the last 50 years to one out of 13. It is the most profound social change to overcome America in the last half century.

Rosin: It’s so interesting, because if you told me that someone moved that many times in a year, I would not associate that with upward mobility. I would associate that with desperation and problems.

Appelbaum: For a long time, that’s exactly what historians thought too. There was this guy, Stephan Thernstrom, who set out to investigate this, and thought what he had discovered, in all this moving about, was what he called the “floating proletariat,” right? Here was evidence that, in America, the American dream was chimerical. You couldn’t actually attain it. There was this great mass of people just moving from one place to another to another.

And several decades later, as we got better data-mining tools, we were able to follow up on the floating proletariat and find out what happened to them. The people who had stayed in one place, Thernstrom saw—they were doing a little better than they had before. But when we could track the people who had left, it turned out, they were doing much better, that the people who relocate—even the ones at the bottom of the class structure—across every decade that historians can study, it’s the case that the people who move do better economically. And this is really key: Their kids do better than the people who stayed where they were.

Rosin: It’s like Americans are, in their soul, psychological immigrants. Like, that we behave the way we think of immigrants behaving, and the more robustly we do that, the better off Americans are. The most evocative image that you draw is something called “Moving Day,” from an earlier era. I had never heard of that. Can you paint a picture of what that is?

Appelbaum: We’ve got these wonderful accounts of Moving Day from people who came over, more or less, just to see it. By law or by custom, in most cities and in most rural areas, all unwritten leases expired on the same day of the year. And this actually gave renters an enormous leg up in the world in most times, in most places, because it meant that an enormous number of properties were potentially available to them. They could go back to their landlord and say, If you want me to stay for another year, you gotta fix the leaky sink. Or they could try someplace better.

And they would all pile their possessions down at the curb. First thing in the morning, they’d hire a cart to take them across town or down the lane, and then they would push past the family that was moving out of some other apartment or townhouse or home. As they were taking their stuff out, they’d be moving their stuff in. But between sunup and sundown, a quarter, a third, half of a city might relocate. And there are these descriptions of trash lining the gutters as things fell out of the carts or there wasn’t room for it in the new apartment, and people would go scavenging through the gutters, trying to find, out of the trash, their own treasures.

It was raucous and wild, and respectable Americans always looked down on it. And yet, for the people who participated in it, it was a way to have their home be kind of like an iPhone or a car: You keep the one you have for a year or two, and then you trade up for a newer model.

Rosin: So upgrades. Now, where is this happening? Is this happening in cities of a certain size, in immigrant communities? Like, who is doing all this chaotic moving?

Appelbaum: Well, that’s one thing that really upset the upper crust.

Rosin: And who are they? Let’s define all the sides. Who are the respectable Americans?

Appelbaum: The respectable Americans are those of long-standing stock who are trying very hard to impress the European cousins. And they are appalled that this defect of their national character—that people don’t know their place. They don’t know their station. They’re always moving around looking for something better for themselves, and they write about it in those kinds of moralistic terms.

But the people who are participating in it, it’s very broad. I mean, when you’re talking about half the city moving, what you’re talking about is activity that’s as much a middle-class and upper-middle-class activity as it is a working-class activity. As long as you are adding a good number of fresh new homes to the market every year, pretty much everybody who moved could move up, because the wealthy were buying brand-new homes that had just been erected.

But they were vacating, you know, homes that were a few years older or apartments that they were moving out of, and those became available to the upper-middle class, right? And you’d get a chain of moves. You can trace this, you know, a dozen, 15 moves, one family succeeding another, succeeding another—and everybody moving up to something a little bit better than they had the year before. And, you know, just like an iPhone or a car, they’re chasing technological innovation. One year, you move into a new apartment, and it’s got running water. And, you know, two years later, the water runs hot and cold, and it’s a miracle, right? So everybody is constantly moving up in the world as they constantly relocate.

Rosin: So there are decades of massive amounts of mobility. It’s considered respectable enough. And then, at some moment, a few forces start to slow this all down. So can you tell the story of what happens in Lower Manhattan?

Appelbaum: Yeah. It’s sort of a sad story when you look closely at it. Lower Manhattan, the Lower East Side, is like no place that’s ever existed before or since. It is so dense. People are living in tenements at a sort of rate per acre, the way demographers measure this, that is multiples of any place in Manhattan today.

Rosin: Do you remember the numbers? Because I think they’re extraordinary. Maybe I’m just remembering this from going to the Tenement Museum, but when you actually look at the density numbers, they are just hard to get your head around.

Appelbaum: Yeah. I think it’s, like, 600 per acre. It’s really, really, really high. There’s no place in Manhattan today that’s even a third as dense, even though the buildings are now much, much taller. So they’re really squeezed in there. And reformers are appalled. And there are real problems with some of these, you know—what they’re really appalled about, it turns out, is less the housing conditions than the presence of so many immigrants, with their foreign ways, foreign religion, foreign languages, weird foods, odd smells, right?

They’re looking at this, and they are not happy that this is invading their city. They’re not subtle about it. They’re quite clear that they think that apartments are themselves degrading. This is the original progressive era, and there’s a tight intertwining between the reformers and government, and they move fluidly among them.

Rosin: Wait. Like, who is the “they”? Are we talking about city planners? Just, this is a really interesting moment. So I just want to—because it’s unexpected, this part of the history.

Appelbaum: Lawrence Veiller is sort of Mr. Tenement Reform. He’s the guy who will write most of the reports, who’ll serve on the commissions, who’ll move in as the first deputy commissioner of the Tenement Office when New York creates one. Like, he is both a government official and a reformer, and that was pretty typical. They move fluidly among these jobs. And he is the guy who really goes on a crusade against tenements.

And maybe the most remarkable moment in my research was stumbling across a speech he gave at a conference, where somebody had asked, How do you keep apartments out of your city? And he says, Well, you know. The problem is: If you put it to a vote, you can’t keep them out of your city, because people actually like living in apartments. They serve a useful function. So what you have to do is solve it the way I’ve done it in New York: You call it fire-safety regulation. And you put a bunch of regulations on the apartments that make them prohibitively expensive to build. But be careful not to put any fire-safety regulations on single- or two-family homes, because that would make them too expensive. And as long as you call it “fire safety,” you can get away with keeping the apartments and their residents out of your neighborhoods.

And it’s one of those moments where, you know, you just sort of gape at the page, and you think, I can’t believe he actually said it. I was worried, maybe, I was reading too much into some of the other things that he’d said. But here he is straightforwardly saying that much of the regulatory project that he and other progressives pursued was purely pretextual. They were trying to find a whole set of rules that could make it too expensive for immigrants to move into their neighborhoods.

Rosin: So we’re in a moment of just resistance to tenements and apartments and crowdedness. How does this, then, become encoded? What’s the next step they take?

Appelbaum: You know, the problem with building codes is that, ultimately, there are ways around them. People are developing new technologies. It’s not enough to keep the apartments back. It’s not enough to pen the immigrants into the Lower East Side.

And there’s a bigger problem, which is that the garment industry in New York is moving up Fifth Avenue. And on their lunch breaks, the Jewish garment workers are getting some fresh air on the sidewalks, and this infuriates the owners of the wealthy department stores on Fifth Avenue, who say, You’re scaring off our wealthy customers. And they want to push them out. They try rounding them up and carting them off in police wagons. They try negotiating with the garment-factory owners. But, of course, these workers want to be out on the sidewalk. It’s their one chance for fresh air, and it’s a public sidewalk. So there’s a limit to what they can do, and they finally hit on a new solution, which is: If you change the law so that you can’t build tall buildings near these department stores, then you can push the garment factories back down toward the Lower East Side.

Rosin: You know, anytime you step into the history of the technical and possibly boring word zoning, you hit racism.

Appelbaum: You know, the thing about zoning, which is sort of the original sin of zoning—which is a tool invented on the West Coast to push the Chinese out of towns and then applied—

Rosin: —in progressive Berkeley! That’s another thing I learned in your book, is how Berkeley, essentially, has such racist zoning origins.

Appelbaum: It’s a really painful story, and zoning, ultimately, is about saying there are always laws, which said there are things that you can’t do in crowded residential areas. But zoning was a set of tools, which said, Some things are going to be okay on one side of the tracks and not okay on the other. And given that that was the approach from the beginning, it was always about separating populations into different spaces.

And so New York adopts the first citywide zoning code. And at first, this is spreading from city to city. The New Deal will take it national.

Rosin: And what does—the zoning code is not explicitly racist? What does it actually say in the government documents?

Appelbaum: Well, that’s the brilliance of the zoning code. The courts have been striking down explicit racial segregation. But if you wrote your ordinance carefully enough and never mentioned race, you could segregate land by its use. You could figure out how to allow in some parts of your city only really expensive housing, or in other parts of your city, you could put all of the jobs that a particular immigrant group tended to have.

Rosin: Like the Chinese laundromat on the West Coast. Like, No laundromats. That’s the famous one.

Appelbaum: Exactly. That’s the original zoning ordinance: We’re gonna push all the laundries back into Chinatown. And if you push the laundries into Chinatown, you’re pushing their workers into Chinatown. So there were ways to effectively segregate—not foolproof, but effectively segregate—your population without ever having to use any racial language in the ordinance, and so it could stand up in court but still segregate your population.

Rosin: Okay, so we have zoning laws, we have government complicity in kind of dividing where people live, and then we have someone who comes in as a supposed savior, particularly of Lower Manhattan. Maybe not a savior, but someone who appreciates the diversity in the city as it is, and that’s Jane Jacobs. And you tell a very different story of the role she plays in all of this, which really brings us to the modern era. So can you talk about who she is and what role she played in transforming Lower Manhattan?

Appelbaum: Yeah, it’s a little heartbreaking sometimes to look closely at your heroes and find out that the story you thought you knew is not the one that actually played out. Jane Jacobs was a woman who saw clearly what it was that made cities great, at a time when almost nobody wanted to recognize that.

She saw the diversity of their populations, of their uses, the way that people mixed together as being not, as the progressives had it, something that needed to be corrected with rational planning, but as a strength that needed to be recognized and rescued and reinforced. And she stood tall against urban renewal, against the notion that the way to save cities was to knock them flat and to rebuild them with all the uses very carefully segregated out.

And she wrote this brilliant book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, that laid out these principles, and she saved her own neighborhood from urban renewal and became, in the process, sort of the patron saint of urbanism. And her great lesson that she took from all of these experiences was that you needed to empower individuals with a deep appreciation of urban life, with the tools to stop governments. And that was the gospel that she preached. And in many ways, it was necessary at that moment, at the peak of urban renewal. But what she didn’t understand at the time—maybe couldn’t have understood at the time—was that she was going to create problems that were even worse than the problems that she was trying to prevent.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: how Jane Jacobs inadvertently contributed to the stuckness of America.

[Break]

Rosin: Okay, so here we have Jane Jacobs. She moves into—what street was that that she moved into?

Appelbaum: She moves into 555 Hudson Street.

Rosin: Okay, she’s on Hudson Street. That’s an amazing place to live. What had been all around her was—who was living there at the time? It wasn’t other people like her.

Appelbaum: No, it mostly wasn’t. She and her husband are two working professionals in Manhattan who are able to pay all cash for a townhouse on this block that is mostly filled with immigrant families. And it’s changing at the time. She’s not alone in coming in, in that way.

But it’s mostly been a neighborhood of immigrants, the children of immigrants. It’s got tons of street-front retail, and she writes about this beautifully, which activates the street front. The eyes on the street keep them safe during the day. She writes about the intricate ballet of the sidewalk as people dodge around each other, and people each pursuing their own tasks are able to live in harmony, in concert. She writes about this block absolutely beautifully, even as she is killing all of it.

Rosin: So if we freeze her there, then she’s a heroine of the city who appreciates it in all its diversity. So then what happens? How does the tragedy begin?

Appelbaum: You know, I tracked down the family that was in that building before she bought it. It was a man named Rudolph Hechler. Two of his adult children and his wife were working in a candy store on the ground floor. So they were renting, living above the shop that they operated, and that shop was everything that Jacobs says make cities great. It was a place where you could go and drop your keys if you’re going to be out for a while, and your kid could come pick them up and let themselves into the house. It was a place where you could just stop and talk to your neighbors.

It was the kind of thing that Jacobs praised, but when she buys the building, she gut renovates it. She tears out the storefront. She turns it into a single-family home. She rips off the facade of this historic building and replaces it with modern metal-sash windows. She so thoroughly alters the appearance, presents a blank front to the street, where before there’d been a lively storefront, that when they eventually, at her urging, historically landmark the block, they find that the building that she lives in has no historic value whatsoever.

And so here, you have somebody who has written this ode to the way people are living around her but buys a building within it and changes it to suit her own family’s need—which was a reasonable thing, I should say, for her to do under the circumstances—but then landmarks the block, which prevents people from building new buildings in the way that that block had always had. So there’s a couple buildings right next to hers that have been torn down and turned into a six-story apartment building before she moves in. But her changes make it so that nobody can do that again. And if you’re not building new buildings to accommodate growth, what you’re going to have in response to mounting demand is rising prices.

Rosin: So the counterfactual history with no Jane Jacobs—I understand that this is imaginary—is what? You just build bigger, taller apartment buildings that more people can afford to move into, and you maintain it as a mixed neighborhood, which is partly immigrant, partly young professors?

Appelbaum: Yeah, the counterfactual is that her neighborhood and other urban neighborhoods throughout the country continue to do what they had done right up until about 1970, which is that they evolve. Sometimes the buildings get taller; sometimes they get shorter. I lived in a neighborhood once that had seen lots of buildings have their top stories shorn off when demand had fallen.

Cities morphed; they changed. And yes, in response to mounting demand, you would have had to build up. You have to make space for people to live in cities if you want to continue to attract new generations and give them the kinds of opportunities that previous generations have had. But she did not want that. And in fact, almost nobody ever wants that, which is a real challenge.

Rosin: And is this aesthetic? Is it just that it’s historic preservation? Is it just about: People arrive at a place, and they have an aesthetic preference, and that’s what ends up freezing change? Like, that’s what ends up preventing change?

Appelbaum: Well, let’s go back to the beginning of the 19th century, when we get this legal change, which says, You can just move someplace and establish residence. The reason that states make that change is because they are looking around at communities, and they see that communities individually are walling themselves off to new arrivals, even though, collectively, it is in the interest of the individual states and the United States to let people move around.

They take that right away from communities. They recognize that if you let communities govern themselves, they will always wall themselves off. Change is really hard. It is uncomfortable. Even if a lot of changes leave you better off, while you’re going through them, you may not welcome them. And if you give communities the power to say, We’re going to pick and choose what we allow. We’re going to pick and choose who can live here, then those communities will almost always exercise that power in exclusionary ways.

And this is even worse: The communities that exercise it most effectively will be the ones that are filled with people with the time and the money and the resources and the education to do that. And so you’ll separate out your population by race, by income. That’s what happens. That’s what was happening in the United States when we opened ourselves up to mobility. And we reversed that, and for a long stretch, we were this remarkable place where people could move where they wanted.

And as we’ve switched that and given the tools back to local communities to make these decisions, the communities are behaving the way that local communities have always behaved, which is with a strong aversion to change and a disinclination to allow the interests of people who might move into the community to trump the interests of those who are already there.

Rosin: And I guess the communities who are less willing to see themselves that way, because it goes against their sense of themselves, or progressive communities—like people who are interested in historic preservation, who say they love cities, who are interested in urban renewal—like, those are not the same people who think of themselves as complicit. I mean, your subtitle is accusatory. It’s like, “breaking the engine of opportunity.”

Appelbaum: It is, and it’s led to a lot of uncomfortable conversations with friends. But when I look out at the country, what I see clearly is that the people who believe that government can make a difference in the world, the people who believe that through laws and collective action, we can pursue public goods—they want government to do things like preserve history, protect the environment, help historically marginalized populations. Well, they create a set of tools to do this. They’re inclined to see government use those tools. When, invariably, those tools get twisted against their original purposes and get used, instead, to reward affluence, it is the most progressive jurisdictions where this happens to the greatest extent.

I’ll give you a statistic from California that blew my mind, which is that for every 10 points the liberal vote share goes up in a California city, the number of new housing permits it issues drops by 30 percent.

Rosin: You talked about how this changes our framework on certain things, like a housing crisis—that we tend to say there’s a housing crisis, but that isn’t quite right.

Appelbaum: Yeah. We talk a lot about an affordable-housing crisis, but what we’ve got is a mobility crisis. And the distinction is twofold: One, there’s a lot of cheap housing in America. It’s not in the places where most people want to live. Housing tends to get really, really cheap when all the jobs disappear. I would not recommend relocating large numbers of Americans to those communities. Their prospects will be pretty bleak. You want the housing to be where the opportunities are rich. And so if all we’re trying to do is make housing affordable, without an eye on where that housing is located, on what kinds of opportunities it opens up, we’re pursuing the wrong solutions.

We also often—and this is the other side of it—create solutions. If we think of it as an affordable-housing problem, you can do something like build a lot of new public housing. But we’ve never in this country managed to build enough public housing to meet demand. Usually, if you manage to get in, it’s like a winning lottery ticket. Why would you ever give that up? Which is to say that you are stuck in place. You are tied to the place where you happen to be lucky enough to get the rent-controlled apartment, to get the public-housing unit, to get your voucher accepted after months of fruitless searching. And then you’re really disinclined to leave, even if staying in that place puts you and your family at all kinds of disadvantages.

And so if we have policy that’s focused on allowing people to live where they want, rather than policy that’s simply focused on affordability, we’re likely to return not just the kind of social and economic dynamism that have made America a wonderful place to live, but we’re also likely to return the sense of personal agency.

Rosin: Okay. Last thing: In reading this book and having this conversation, what struck me is that, essentially, you’re making a defense of America—its rootlessness, America’s infinite choice. And right now, those two things—our rootlessness and our infinite choice—are things which we think of as cursing us. The words we often use now are loneliness, lack of community, bowling alone—however you want to call it. We talk a lot about our spiritual collapse as related to the same mobility and rootlessness that you describe as a positive force in the book. And I wonder how you’ve talked about that or reconciled it.

Appelbaum: If you take a graph of when Americans joined a lot of clubs—the Bowling Alone graph, right, where Americans belong to a lot of voluntary associations and when they didn’t—and you match it against the graph of when Americans have moved a lot and when they haven’t, they line up really well, and they line up in a surprising way.

When we’re moving a lot, we’re much likelier to build really vibrant communities. When you leave someplace and start over, you’re gonna go to church on Sunday to try to find friends and build connections. Or if church is not for you, maybe you go to the local bar. Maybe you join the PTA. It depends on the phase of life that you’re in. But when people relocate, they tend to be much more proactive in seeking out social connection. Over the course of time, we fall into familiar ruts. We tend not to make as many new connections. We tend not to join as many new organizations. And people who have been a resident for a long time in a place—they may list a lot more things that they belong to, but they’re less likely to be attending them, and they’re less likely to add new ones.

The peak of American communal life comes during our peaks of mobility. When we’re moving around a lot, we’re creating a really vibrant civil society that was the envy of the world. And over the last 50 years, as we’ve moved less and less and less, all of those things have atrophied. And there’s one other side, too, which is: It’s not just about measuring the health of voluntary organizations. If you’re moving a lot, you’re giving yourself a chance to define who you want to be, to build the connections that are important and meaningful to you, as opposed to the ones that you’ve inherited.

We know something about how that works psychologically. People who are trapped in inherited identities tend to become more cynical, more embittered, more disconnected over time. People who have the chance to choose their identities tend to be more hopeful. They tend to see a growing pie that can be divided more ways, and therefore they’re more welcoming of strangers and new arrivals. They tend to be more optimistic. And if you restore that dynamism, it doesn’t mean that you’ve got to leave behind your inherited identities. It means that committing to those inherited identities becomes a matter of active choice too.

And so the United States, traditionally, was a country that was much more religious than the rest of the world, because people could commit to those faiths that they were adopting or sticking with. Americans were expected to have a narrative of, like, Why do I go to church? It wasn’t something which was really comprehensible to somebody who came from a country where everybody had the same faith. You didn’t have to ask yourself, Why am I Muslim? Why am I Catholic? In America, you always did.

And so our faith traditions tended to be particularly vibrant. So it’s not some sort of assault on tradition. I’m not advocating that we dissolve our social ties and each new generation negotiate new ones. I’m saying, the thing that has made American traditions very vibrant, the thing that often made American immigrants more patriotic than the people in the lands they left behind, and American churchgoers more religious than they had been in the old world was precisely the fact that they got to choose.

And even committing to your old traditions and your inherited identities became a matter of active choice, and something that was much more important to folks. And so you got the vibrancy both ways—both the new affiliations that you could create, the old traditions that you chose to double down on. But it all stemmed from individual agency. You have to give people the chance to start over so that their decision to stay is equally meaningful. If you choose to stay, that’s great. If you feel like you’ve got no choice, that’s really terrible.

Rosin: All right. Well, thank you, Yoni, for laying that out and joining us today.

Appelbaum: Oh, it’s a pleasure.

[Music]

Rosin: Thanks again to Yoni Appelbaum. His book, again, is Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of audio at The Atlantic, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

It is a basic fact of American life, so widely known that it hardly needs to be said: College is getting ever more unaffordable. In survey after survey, Americans say that the cost of getting a degree just keeps rising.

But this basic fact of life is not a fact at all. In reality, Americans are paying less for college, on average, than they were a decade ago. Since the 2014–15 school year, the cost of attending a public four-year university has fallen by 21 percent, before adjusting for inflation, according to College Board data analyzed by Judith Scott-Clayton, a professor of economics and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. (Nearly three-quarters of American college students attend a public institution.) The cost of attending a private university has risen in raw terms over the same time period, but is down 12 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars. Once tax benefits are factored in, according to a recent Brookings Institution analysis, the average American is paying the same amount for tuition as they were in the 1990s. “People have it in their heads that prices just keep going up, up, up,” Sandy Baum, a nonresident senior fellow at the Urban Institute, told me. “And that’s actually not what’s happening.”

The confusion comes from the idiosyncratic way in which college is priced. Schools set a staggering official price that only a subset of the wealthiest students pay in full. Universities rely on that money to offer financial aid to low-income students; in effect, rich families subsidize the cost of attendance for everyone else. This means that there’s often a chasm between the published cost of attendance, or sticker price, and what people actually pay once financial aid is factored in, or the net price. Unfortunately, the eye-popping sticker prices tend to get the most attention. Within higher-education reporting, articles anticipating the arrival of the $100,000 year of college have become practically a genre unto themselves. “There’s massive problems in the higher-education sector—and we focus on all the wrong ones,” Phillip Levine, an economics professor at Wellesley College, told me. “We can’t stand the fact that the sticker price is so high despite the fact that nobody pays it.”

This pricing strategy took hold in the early 1980s. Since then, Levine has found, the sticker cost of attending a four-year public or private university—tuition plus fees and room and board—has almost tripled after adjusting for inflation. (The past four years, during which pandemic-induced inflation outpaced tuition growth, are an exception to the trend.) With this pace of increase, it’s no wonder that people think college prices are out of control.

[Rose Horowitch: The perverse consequences of tuition-free medical school]

But, as sticker prices have soared, so has the gap between them and the amount that people actually pay. The effect is most pronounced for low-income families, but middle- and upper-middle-income families receive substantial discounts too. In the 2021–22 school year, 82 percent of first-time, full-time undergraduates at public four-year schools received aid, as did 87 percent of those at private institutions. Only students whose families make more than about $300,000 a year and who attend private institutions with very large endowments pay more than they did a decade ago, Levine said.

Higher education might not be cheap—many families still get far less financial aid than they need, and the cost of attendance can rise unpredictably from year to year—but it is clearly getting cheaper. A mix of factors appear to be behind the trend. Increases to the federal Pell Grant have limited out-of-pocket costs for low-income students, David Deming, a political-economy professor at Harvard, told me. State appropriations have rebounded for public universities since the Great Recession. And colleges themselves appear to be offering more aid, which accounts for 70 percent of all discounts, Adam Looney, an economist at the University of Utah who wrote the Brookings study, told me.

Most of the researchers I spoke with predicted that net prices would keep falling over the next few years. The number of 18-year-old high-school graduates is expected to peak this year, followed by a long decline. This will reduce demand for college and force institutions to compete even harder with one another for applicants.

College is getting more affordable: That’s the good news. The bad news is that no one seems to have heard the good news. Nearly half of all adults in the U.S. think that universities charge everyone the same amount, according to a 2023 survey by the Association of American Universities. And, even as college costs fall, a recent poll found that 44 percent of people think that their state’s public-college tuition is likely to increase in the next year. (Twelve percent thought it would decrease, and the rest predicted no change.)

One study found that most high-achieving, low-income students chose not to apply to highly selective colleges with steep sticker prices. They opted instead for schools with lower sticker prices that ended up offering much less financial aid and thus costing more. (For low-income students who are admitted, elite universities, which draw on their enormous wealth to offer generous need-based aid, are almost always the most affordable option.) Another study found that low-income students were less likely to apply to a school when it raised its sticker price, even if those students would have qualified for a full ride based on their financial need. More unfortunate still, sticker shock can lead students to forego college entirely.

In recent years, public confidence in higher education has fallen sharply; researchers attribute much of the decline to perceptions of college costs. More and more Americans are saying that a degree isn’t worth the investment, even though the so-called college wage premium still far outstrips the cost of attendance.

[David Deming: The college backlash is going too far]

When researchers tell people how much more they stand to earn if they graduate from college, their study subjects are more likely to apply. Clearly, colleges should do a better job advertising their value proposition, even as they stress that most people don’t pay the full sticker price. But, given the opacity of the system, just telling people the difference between sticker and net prices has been shown to have little effect on whether those people attend college. Some research suggests that it would be more effective for schools to commit up front to one price for the full four years, something they are loathe to do. “You have to fix knowledge, but then also make some promises to students that, not only is this real, but we’re not going to switch up on you after a year or two—which, to be frank, many universities currently do,” Zach Bleemer, an economics professor at Princeton, told me.

As colleges prepare for a tough enrollment picture, they can’t afford to push students away. And yet higher education’s weird pricing model is probably not going anywhere. After all, colleges haven’t found a better way to get the funding they need for financial aid. “I remember 30 years ago, people saying: ‘This can’t go on. They can’t keep doing this,’” Baum, the Urban Institute fellow, told me. “And they do. And they have to because if you charged everybody the same price, that price would simply be too high for many people.” In other words, it might not be long before we’re hearing about the rise of the $110,000 year of college—even as students are paying less than they do today.

The best way to dismantle the federal government, then repurpose it as a tool of personal power and ideological warfare, is to start with the soft targets. Entitlements and defense, which comprise more than half of federal spending and a large share of its fraud and waste, enjoy too much support for Elon Musk to roll them up easily. But nothing is less popular than sending taxpayers’ money to unknown people in poor, faraway countries that might be rife with corruption. Americans dislike foreign aid so much that they wrongly believe it consumes at least a quarter of the budget (in the previous fiscal year, aid constituted barely 1 percent). President John F. Kennedy understood the problem, and after creating the United States Agency for International Development, in 1961, he told his advisers: “We hope we can tie this whole concept of aid to the safety of the United States. That is the reason we give aid. The test is whether it will serve the United States. Aid is not a good word. Perhaps we can describe it better as ‘Mutual Assistance.’ ” At another meeting, Kennedy suggested “International Security.”

USAID continued for the next six decades because leaders of both parties believed that ending polio, preventing famine, stabilizing poor countries, strengthening democracies, and opening new markets served the United States. But on January 20, within hours of his inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that froze foreign aid. USAID was instructed to stop nearly all work. Its Washington headquarters was occupied and sensitive data were seized by whiz kids from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. One of their elder members, a 25-year-old software engineer and Matt Gaetz fan named Gavin Kliger, acquired an official email address to instruct the staff of USAID to stay home.

Contractors were fired and employees were placed on indefinite leave; those on overseas missions were given 30 days to return to the States with their families. Under orders to remain silent, they used pseudo­nyms on encrypted chats to inform the outside world of what was going on. When I spoke on Signal with government employees, they sounded as if they were in Moscow or Tehran. “It felt like it went very authoritarian very quickly,” one civil servant told me. “You have to watch everything you say and do in a way that is gross.”

The website usaid.gov vanished, then reappeared with a bare-bones announcement of the organization’s dismemberment, followed by the message “Thank you for your service.” A veteran USAID official called it “brutal—­from some 20-year-old idiot who doesn’t know anything. What the fuck do you know about my service?” A curtain fell over the public information that could have served to challenge the outpouring of lies and distortions from the White House and from Musk, who called USAID “a criminal organization” and “evil.” If you looked into the charges, nearly all turned out to be outright falsehoods, highly misleading, or isolated examples of the kind of stupid, wasteful programs that exist in any organization.

A grant for hundreds of ethnic-minority students from Myanmar to attend universities throughout Southeast Asia became a propaganda tool in the hands of the wrecking crew because it went under the name “Diversity and Inclusion Scholar­ship Program”—as if the money were going to a “woke” bureaucracy, not to Rohingya refugees from the military regime’s genocide. The orthodoxy of a previous administration required the terminology; the orthodoxy of the new one has ended the students’ education and forced them to return to the country that oppressed them. One of Trump’s executive orders is called “Defending Women Against Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”; meanwhile, the administration suspended the online education of nearly 1,000 women in Afghanistan who had been studying undetected by the Taliban with funding from the State Department.

But hardly anyone in this country knows these things. Contesting Musk’s algorithmically boosted lies on X with the tools of a reporter is like fighting a wildfire with a garden hose.

With no workforce or funding, USAID’s efforts around the world—vaccine campaigns in Nepal, HIV-drug distribution in Nigeria, nutrition for starving children in Sudanese refugee camps—were forced to end. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who championed USAID as a senator and now, as the agency’s acting head, is its executioner) issued a waiver for lifesaving programs. But it proved almost meaningless, because the people needed to run the programs were locked out of their computers, had no way to communicate, and feared punishment if they kept working.

The heedlessness of the aid wreckers recalls Nick Carraway’s description in The Great Gatsby of Tom and Daisy Buchanan: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” An agency of 10,000 employees is shrinking to about 300 and, despite its statutory independence, being dissolved into the State Department. The veteran USAID official I spoke with foresaw a skeletal operation reduced to health and food assistance, with everything else—education, the environment, governance, economic development—gone. But even basic humanitarian programs will be nearly impossible to sustain with the numbers that the administration envisions—for example, 12 staff members for all of Africa.

“This is the infrastructure and architecture that has given us a doubling of the human lifespan,” Atul Gawande, the writer and surgeon who was the most recent, and perhaps last, head of the agency’s Bureau for Global Health, told me. “Taking it down kills people.”

Trump and Musk’s destruction of USAID was a trial blitzkrieg: Send tanks and bombers into defenseless Poland to see what works before turning on the Western powers. The assault provided a model for eviscerating the rest of the federal bureaucracy. It also demonstrated the radicalism of Trump’s view of America’s role in the world.

Every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Barack Obama understood that American power was enhanced, not threatened, by attaching it to alliances, institutions, and values that the American people support, such as freedom, pluralism, and humanitarianism. This was the common idea behind Harry Truman’s Marshall Plan for postwar Europe, Kennedy’s establishment of USAID, Jimmy Carter’s creation of the U.S. refugee program, and George W. Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. These weren’t simple acts of generosity. They were designed to prevent chaos and misery from overwhelming other countries and, eventually, harming our own. They expanded American influence by attraction rather than coercion, showing people around the world that the Leviathan could benefit them, too. Political scientists call this “soft power.”

Every president betrayed these ideas in one way or another, making U.S. foreign policy a fat target for criticism at home and abroad, by the left and the right. Kennedy used foreign aid to wage a bloody counterinsurgency in South Vietnam; Carter put human rights at the center of his policy and then toasted the repressive shah of Iran; Bush, claiming to be spreading democracy to the Middle East, seriously damaged America’s global legitimacy. USAID antagonized host governments and local populations with its arrogance and bloat. “We had a hand in our own destruction,” one longtime official told me. “We threw money in areas we didn’t need to.”

But the alternative to the hypocrisies of soft power and the postwar liberal order was never going to be a chastened, humbler American foreign policy—­neither the left’s fantasy of a plus-size Norway nor the right’s of a return to the isolationist 1920s. The U.S. is far too big, strong, and messianic for voluntary diminish­ment. The choice for this superpower is between enlightened self-­interest, with all its blind spots and failures, and raw coercion.

Trump is showing what raw coercion looks like. Rather than negotiate with Canada and Mexico, impose U.S. demands with tariffs; rather than strengthen NATO, undermine it and threaten a conflict with one of its smallest, most benign member countries; rather than review aid programs for their efficacy, shut them down, slander the people who make them work, and shrug at the humanitarian catastrophe that follows. The deeper reason for the extinction event at USAID is Trump’s contempt for anything that looks like cooperation between the strong and the weak. “America First” is more imperialist than isolationist, which is why William McKinley, not George Washington or John Quincy Adams, is Donald Trump’s new presidential hero. He’s using a techno-futurist billionaire to return America to the late 19th century, when the civil service was a patronage network and great-power doctrine held that “might makes right.” He’s ridding himself and the country of restraining codes—the rule of law at home, the rules-based order abroad—and replacing them with a simple test: “What’s in it for me?” He’s unilaterally disarming America of its soft power, making the United States no different from China, Russia, or Iran. This is why the gutting of USAID has received propaganda assistance and glowing reviews from Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran.

Transactional logic has an obvious appeal. Dispensing with the annoying niceties of multilateral partnerships and foreign aid brings a kind of clarity to international relations, showing where the real muscle is, like a strip-down before a wrestling match. Set loose, the U.S. might be strong enough to work its will on weaker friends and neighbors, or at least claim to do so. Trump’s threat of tariffs to intimidate Colombia into allowing deportation flights to land there was like the assault on USAID—an easy demonstration project. His domination of the propaganda sphere allows him to convince the public of victories even where, as with Canada, there was never much of a dispute to begin with. If NATO dissolved while the U.S. grabbed Greenland, many Americans would regard it as a net win: We’d save money and gain a strategic chunk of the North Atlantic while freeing ourselves of an obligation whose benefit to us wasn’t entirely clear.

It isn’t obvious why funding the education of oppressed Burmese students serves our national interest. It’s easier to see the advantages of strong-­arming weak countries into giving in to our demands. If this creates resentment, well, who said gratitude mattered between nations? Strength has its own attractive force. A sizable cohort of Americans have made their peace with Trump, not because he tempered his cruelty and checked his abuses but because he is at the height of his power and is using it without restraint. This is called power worship. The Russian invasion of Ukraine won Vladimir Putin a certain admiration in countries of the global South, as well as among MAGA Americans, while Joe Biden’s appeals to democratic values seemed pallid and hypocritical. The law of “might makes right” is the political norm in most countries. Trump needs no explaining in Nigeria or India.

Coercion also depends on the American people’s shortsightedness and incuriosity. Trump’s flood of executive orders and Musk’s assault on the federal government are intended to create such chaos that not even the insiders most affected understand what’s happening. An inattentive public might simply see a Washington melee—the disrupters against the bureaucrats. Short of going to war, if the U.S. starts behaving like the great powers of earlier centuries and the rival powers of our own, how many Americans will notice a difference in their own lives?

According to Rubio, the purpose of the aid pause is to weed out programs that don’t advance “core national interests.” Gawande compared the process to stopping a plane in midair and firing the crew in order to conduct a review of the airline industry. But the light of the bonfire burning in Washington makes it easier to see how soft power actually works—how most aid programs do serve the national interest. Shutting down African health programs makes monitoring the recent outbreak of Ebola in Uganda, and preventing its spread from that region to the rest of the world, nearly impossible. In many countries, the end of aid opens the door wider to predatory Chinese loans and propaganda. As one USAID official explained: “My job literally was countering China, providing develop­ment assistance in a much nicer, kinder, partnership way to local people who were being pressured and had their arms twisted.” When 70 Afghan students in central Asia, mostly women, had their scholarships to American universities suddenly suspended and in some cases their plane tickets canceled, the values of freedom and open inquiry lost a bit of their attractiveness. The American college administrator responsible for the students told me, “Young people who are sympathetic to the United States and share our best values are not only not being welcomed; they’re having the door slammed in their faces.”

Most Americans don’t want to believe that their government is taking life­saving medicine away from sick people in Africa, or betraying Afghans who sacrificed for this country. They might disapprove of foreign aid, but they want starving children to be fed. This native generosity explains why Trump and Musk have gone to such lengths to clog the internet with falsehoods and hide the consequences of their cruelty. The only obstacle to ending American soft power isn’t Congress, the bureaucracy, or the courts, but public opinion.

One of the country’s most popular programs is the resettlement of refugees. For decades, ordinary American citizens have welcomed the world’s most persecuted and desperate people—European Jews after World War II, Vietnamese after the fall of Saigon, Afghans after the fall of Kabul. Refugees are in a separate category from most immigrants: After years of waiting and vetting by U.S. and international agencies, they come here legally, with local sponsors. But Trump and his adviser Stephen Miller see them as no different from migrants crossing the southern border. The flurry of executive orders and memos has halted the processing of all refugees and ended funding for resettlement. The story has received little attention.

Here’s what the program’s shutdown means: I spoke with an Afghan special-forces captain who served alongside Americans—­when Kabul was about to fall in 2021, he prevented armed Taliban at the airport from seizing U.S. weaponry, but he was left behind during the evacuation. Arrested by the new regime, the captain was imprisoned for seven months and suffered regular and severe torture, including the amputation of a testicle. He managed to escape with his family to Pakistan in 2023 and was near the end of being processed as a refugee when Trump took office. He had heard Trump criticize the Biden administration for leaving military equipment behind in Afghanistan. Because he had worked to prevent that from happening, he told me, “that gave me a hope that the new administration would value my work and look at me as a valuable person, a person who is aligned with all the administration is hoping to achieve, and that would give a chance for my kids and family to be moved out safely.” Biden’s ineptitude stranded the captain once; Trump’s coldheartedness is doing it again.

A sense of loyalty and compassion isn’t extraneous to American identity; it is at the core of national pride, and its betrayal exacts a cost that can’t be easily measured. The Biden administration created a program called Welcome Corps that allows ordinary Americans to act as resettlement agencies. (My wife and I participated in it.) In Pennsylvania, a retiree named Chuck Pugh formed a sponsor group to bring an Afghan family here, and the final medical exam was completed just before Inauguration Day. When resettlement was abruptly ended, Pugh found himself wondering, Who are we? I know what I want to think, but I’m just not sure. The sponsor group includes Pugh’s sister, Virginia Mirra. She and her husband are devout Christians and ardent Trump supporters. When I asked her early this month how she felt about the suspension of the refugee program, she sounded surprised, and disappointed—she hadn’t heard the news. “I feel sad about that,” she said. “It does bother me. It’s starting to sink in. With these people in danger, I would wonder if there would be an exception made for them. How would we go about that?” Her husband frequently sends American-flag lapel pins to Trump, and I suggested that he write the president about the Afghan family. “I will talk to my husband tonight,” Mirra said. “And I will continue to pray that the Lord will protect them and bring them to this country by some means. I do believe in miracles.”

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Era of Might Makes Right.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

For eight decades, America’s alliances with other democracies have been the bedrock of American foreign policy, trade policy, and cultural influence. American investments in allies’ security helped keep the peace in formerly unstable parts of the world, allowing democratic societies from Germany to Japan to prosper, by preventing predatory autocracies from destroying them. We prospered too. Thanks to its allies, the U.S. obtained unprecedented political and economic influence in Europe and Asia, and unprecedented power everywhere else.

The Trump administration is now bringing the post-World War II era to an end. No one should be surprised: This was predictable, and indeed was predicted. Donald Trump has been a vocal opponent to what he considers to be the high cost of U.S. alliances, since 1987, when he bought full-page ads in three newspapers, claiming that “for decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.” In 2000, he wrote that “pulling back from Europe would save this country millions of dollars annually.”  

[David Frum: A cautionary tale for Trump appointees]

In his first term as president, Trump’s Cabinet members and advisers repeatedly restrained him from insulting allies or severing military and diplomatic links. Now he has surrounded himself with people who are prepared to enact and even encourage the radical changes he always wanted, cheered on by thousands of anonymous accounts on X. Of course America’s relations with allies are complex and multilayered, and in some form they will endure. But American allies, especially in Europe, need to face up to this new reality and make some dramatic changes.

This shift began with what felt at first like ad hoc, perhaps unserious attacks on the sovereignty of Denmark, Canada, and Panama. Events over the past week or so have provided further clarification. At a major multinational security conference in Munich last weekend, I sat in a room full of defense ministers, four-star generals and security analysts—people who procure ammunition for Ukrainian missile defense, or who worry about Russian ships cutting fiber optic cables in the Baltic Sea. All of them were expecting Vice President J. D. Vance to address these kinds of concerns. Instead, Vance told a series of misleading stories designed to demonstrate that European democracies aren’t democratic.

Vance, a leading member of the political movement that launched the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, had to know what he was doing: flipping the narrative, turning arguments upside down in the manner of a Russian propagandist. But the content of his speech, which cherry-picked stories designed to portray the U.K., Germany, Romania and other democracies as enemies of free expression, was less important than the fact that he gave a speech that wasn’t about the very real Russian threat to the continent at all: He was telling Europeans present that he wasn’t interested in discussing their security. They got the message.

A few days before the Munich conference, the U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went to Kyiv and presented President Volodymyr Zelensky with a two-page document and asked him to sign. Details of this proposed agreement began to leak last weekend. It calls for the U.S. to take 50 percent of all “economic value associated with resources of Ukraine,” including “mineral resources, oil and gas resources, ports, other infrastructure,” not just now but forever, as the British newspaper The Telegraph reported and others confirmed: “For all future licenses the U.S. will have a right of first refusal for the purchase of exportable minerals,” the document says.

Europeans have contributed more resources to Ukraine’s military and economic survival than the U.S. has—despite Trump’s repeated, untruthful claims to the contrary—but would presumably be cut out of this deal. The Ukrainians, who have suffered hundreds of thousands of military and civilian casualties, whose cities have been turned to rubble, whose national finances have been decimated, and whose personal lives disrupted, are offered nothing in exchange for half their wealth: No security guarantees, no investment, nothing. These terms resemble nothing so much as the Versailles Treaty imposed on a defeated Germany after World War I, and are dramatically worse than those imposed on Germany and Japan after World War II. As currently written, they could not be carried out under Ukrainian law. Zelensky, for the moment, did not sign.

The cruelty of the document is remarkable, as are its ambiguities. People who have seen it say it does not explain exactly which Americans would be the beneficiaries of this deal. Perhaps the American government? Perhaps the president’s friends and business partners? The document also reportedly says that all disputes would be resolved by courts in New York, as if a New York court could adjudicate something so open-ended. But the document at least served to reiterate Vance’s message, and to add a new element: The U.S. doesn’t need or want allies—unless they can pay.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Incompetence mixed with malignity]

Trump made this new policy even clearer during a press conference on Tuesday, when he made a series of false statements about Ukraine that he later repeated in social-media posts. No, Ukraine did not start the war; Russia launched the invasion, Russia is still attacking Ukraine, and Russia could end the war today if it stopped attacking Ukraine. No, the U.S. did not spend “$350 billion” in Ukraine. No, Volodymyr Zelensky does not have “four percent” popularity; the real number is more than 50 percent, higher than Trump’s. No, Zelensky is not a “dictator”; Ukrainians, unlike Russians, freely debate and argue about politics. But because they are under daily threat of attack, the Ukrainian government has declared martial law and postponed elections until a ceasefire. With so many people displaced and so many soldiers at the front line, Ukrainians fear an election would be dangerous, unfair, and an obvious target for Russian manipulation, as even Zelensky’s harshest critics agree.

I can’t tell you exactly why Trump chose to repeat these falsehoods, or why his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, once made a TikTok video of herself repeating them, or why they directly echo the Russian propaganda that has long sought to portray Zelensky, along with the nation of Ukraine itself, as illegitimate. Plenty of Republicans, including some I met in Munich, know that these claims aren’t true. American allies must draw a lesson: Trump is demonstrating that he can and will align himself with whoever he wants—Vladimir Putin, Mohammed bin Salman, perhaps eventually with Xi Jinping—in defiance of past treaties and agreements. In order to bully Ukraine into signing unfavorable deals, he is even willing to distort reality.

In these circumstances, everything is up for grabs, any relationship is subject to bargaining. Zelensky knows this already: It was he who originally proposed giving Americans access to rare-earth metals, in order to appeal to a transactional U.S. president, although without imagining that the concession would be in exchange for nothing. Zelensky is trying to acquire other kinds of leverage too. This week he flew to Istanbul, where the Turkish leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, reaffirmed his support for Ukraine’s sovereignty, in defiance of the U.S.

Europeans need to act in the same spirit and acquire some leverage too. At the start of this war, international financial institutions froze $300 billion of Russian assets, mostly in Europe. There are sound legal and moral arguments for seizing these assets and giving them to Ukraine, both to reconstruct the country and to allow Ukrainians to continue to defend themselves. Now there are urgent political reasons too. This is enough money to impress Trump; to buy weapons, including American weapons; and to spook the Russians into fearing the war will not end as quickly as they now hope.

Europeans also need to create, immediately, a coalition of the willing that is prepared to militarily defend Ukraine, as well as other allies who might be attacked in future. Deterrence has a psychological component. If Russia refrains from attacking Lithuania, or indeed Germany, that is in part because Putin fears a U.S. response. Now that the U.S. has become unpredictable, Europeans have to provide the deterrence themselves. There is talk of a defense bank to finance new military investment, but that’s just the beginning. They need to radically increase military spending, planning and coordination. If they speak and act as a group, Europeans will have more power and more credibility than if they speak separately.

Sometime in the future, historians will wonder what might have been, what kind of peace could have been achieved, if Trump had done what he himself suggested doing a few weeks ago: keep up military aid for Ukraine; tighten sanctions on Russia; bully the aggressors, not their victims, into suing for peace. Perhaps we might also someday find out who or what, exactly, changed his mind, why he chose to follow a policy that seems designed to encourage not just Russia but Russia’s allies in China, Iran, North Korea, Belarus, Cuba, or Venezuela. But now is not the moment to speculate, or to imagine alternate storylines. Now is the moment to recognize the scale of the seismic change now underway, and to find new ways to live in the world that a very different kind of America is beginning to create.

US president's proposal comes amid scepticism of claimed savings from Elon Musk's cost-cutting drive.