Some 80% of the Old City of Mosul, in northern Iraq, was destroyed under the Islamic State group.

Perhaps you’ve heard: Young people aren’t dating anymore. News media and social media are awash in commentary about the decline in youth romance. It’s visible in the corporate data, with dating-app engagement taking a hit. And it’s visible in the survey data, where the share of 12th graders who say they’ve dated has fallen from about 85 percent in the 1980s to less than 50 percent in the early 2020s, with the decline particularly steep in the past few years.

Naturally, young people’s habits are catnip to news commentators. But although I consider the story of declining youth romance important, I don’t find it particularly mysterious. In my essay on the anti-social century, I reported that young people have retreated from all manner of physical-world relationships, whether because of smartphones, over-parenting, or a combination of factors. Compared with previous generations of teens, they have fewer friends, spend significantly less time with the friends they do have, attend fewer parties, and spend much more time alone. Romantic relationships theoretically imply a certain physicality; so it’s easy to imagine that the collapse of physical-world socializing for young people would involve the decline of romance.

[From the February 2025 issue: The anti-social century]

Adults have a way of projecting their anxieties and realities onto their children. In the case of romance, the fixation on young people masks a deeper—and, to me, far more mysterious—phenomenon: What is happening to adult relationships?

American adults are significantly less likely to be married or to live with a partner than they used to be. The national marriage rate is hovering near its all-time low, while the share of women under 65 who aren’t living with a partner has grown steadily since the 1980s. The past decade seems to be the only period since at least the 1970s when women under 35 were more likely to live with their parents than with a spouse.

People’s lives are diverse, and so are their wants and desires and circumstances. It’s hard, and perhaps impossible, to identify a tiny number of factors that explain hundreds of millions of people’s decisions to couple up, split apart, or remain single. But according to Lyman Stone, a researcher at the Institute for Family Studies, the most important reason marriage and coupling are declining in the U.S. is actually quite straightforward: Many young men are falling behind economically.

A marriage or romantic partnership can be many things: friendship, love, sex, someone to gossip with, someone to remind you to take out the trash. But, practically speaking, Stone told me, marriage is also insurance. Women have historically relied on men to act as insurance policies—against the threat of violence, the risk of poverty. To some, this might sound like an old-fashioned, even reactionary, description of marriage, but its logic still applies. “Men’s odds of being in a relationship today are still highly correlated with their income,” Stone said. “Women do not typically invest in long-term relationships with men who have nothing to contribute economically.” In the past few decades, young and especially less educated men’s income has stagnated, even as women have charged into the workforce and seen their college-graduation rates soar. For single non-college-educated men, average inflation-adjusted earnings at age 45 have fallen by nearly 25 percent in the past half century, while for the country as a whole, average real earnings have more than doubled. As a result, “a lot of young men today just don’t look like what women have come to think of as ‘marriage material,’” he said.

In January, the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch published an analysis of the “relationship recession” that lent strong support to Stone’s theory. Contrary to the idea that declining fertility in the U.S. is mostly about happily childless DINKs (dual-income, no-kid couples), “the drop in relationship formation is steepest among the poorest,” he observed. I asked Burn-Murdoch to share his analysis of Current Population Survey data so that I could take a closer look. What I found is that, in the past 40 years, coupling has declined more than twice as fast among Americans without a college degree, compared with college graduates. This represents a dramatic historic inversion. In 1980, Americans ages 25 to 34 without a bachelor’s degree were more likely than college graduates to get married; today, it’s flipped, and the education gap in coupling is widening every year. Marriage produces wealth by pooling two people’s income, but, conversely, wealth also produces marriage.

Contraception technology might also play a role. Before cheap birth control became widespread in the 1970s, sexual activity was generally yoked to commitment: It was a cultural norm for a man to marry a girl if he’d gotten her pregnant, and single parenthood was uncommon. But as the (married!) economists George Akerlof and Janet Yellen observed in a famous 1996 paper, contraception helped disentangle sex and marriage. Couples could sleep together without any implicit promise to stay together. Ultimately, Akerlof and Yellen posit, the availability of contraception, which gave women the tools to control the number and the timing of their kids, decimated the tradition of shotgun marriages, and therefore contributed to an increase in children born to low-income single parents.

The theory that the relationship recession is driven by young men falling behind seems to hold up in the U.S. But what about around the world? Rates of coupling are declining throughout Europe, as well. In England and Wales, the marriage rate for people under 30 has declined by more than 50 percent since 1990.

And it’s not just Europe. The gender researcher Alice Evans has shown that coupling is down just about everywhere. In Iran, annual marriages plummeted by 40 percent in 10 years. Some Islamic authorities blame Western values and social media for the shift. They might have a point. When women are exposed to more Western media, Evans argues, their life expectations expand. Fitted with TikTok and Instagram and other windows into Western culture, young women around the world can seek the independence of a career over the codependency (or, worse, the outright loss of freedom) that might come with marriage in their own country. Social media, a woman veterinarian in Tehran told the Financial Times, also glamorizes the single life “by showing how unmarried people lead carefree and successful lives … People keep comparing their partners to mostly fake idols on social platforms.”

[Read: The happiness trinity]

According to Evans, several trends are driving this global decline in coupling. Smartphones and social media may have narrowed many young people’s lives, pinning them to their couches and bedrooms. But they’ve also opened women’s minds to the possibility of professional and personal development. When men fail to support their dreams, relationships fail to flourish, and the sexes drift apart.

If I had to sum up this big messy story in a sentence, it would be this: Coupling is declining around the world, as women’s expectations rise and lower-income men’s fortunes fall; this combination is subverting the traditional role of straight marriage, in which men are seen as necessary for the economic insurance of their family.

So why does all this matter? Two of the more urgent sociological narratives of this moment are declining fertility and rising unhappiness. The relationship recession makes contact with both. First, marriage and fertility are tightly interconnected. Unsurprisingly, one of the strongest predictors of declining fertility around the world is declining coupling rates, as Burn-Murdoch has written. Second, marriage is strongly associated with happiness. According to General Social Survey data, Americans’ self-described life satisfaction has been decreasing for decades. In a 2023 analysis of the GSS data, the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman concluded that marriage was more correlated with this measure of happiness than any other variable he considered, including income. (As Stone would rush to point out here, marriage itself is correlated with income.)

The social crisis of our time is not just that Americans are more socially isolated than ever, but also that social isolation is rising alongside romantic isolation, as the economic and cultural trajectories of men and women move in opposite directions. And, perhaps most troubling, the Americans with the least financial wealth also seem to have the least “social wealth,” so to speak. It is the poor, who might especially need the support of friends and partners, who have the fewest close friends and the fewest long-term partners. Money might not buy happiness, but it can buy the things that buy happiness.

Trump says he ordered military airstrikes on a senior Islamic State attack planner in Somalia.

Islamic law and ethics require us to help bring the abusers of children to justice, whoever they may be.

The past few years may well be remembered as the nadir of Iranian-Israeli relations, and the first occasion when the two countries attacked each other directly. But they were also a golden period for Iranian-Israeli collaboration in cinema. In 2023, Tatami was the first-ever film to be co-directed by an Israeli (Guy Nattiv) and an Iranian (Zar Amir). And in 2024 came Reading Lolita in Tehran, directed by Eran Riklis, who is Israeli, and adapted from a book by an Iranian author, with an almost entirely Iranian cast. The film premiered at the Rome Film Fest last year and is now starting to tour the United States.

Anyone old enough to remember cultural life at the beginning of this century will know the book. Azar Nafisi’s memoir came out in 2003, spent 36 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, and quickly developed a cult following. A reviewer for The Nation confessed to missing a dental appointment, a business lunch, and a deadline just because she couldn’t put the book aside.

Literary scholars—Nafisi is an English professor—are not known for their page-turning thrillers. But Nafisi’s story and prose are captivating. She’d gone to Iran shortly after the 1979 revolution in the hope of putting her American education to use by teaching English at a university. Instead, she was hounded out of the classroom by authorities hostile to Western literature. She wound up holding clandestine seminars for young women in her living room, delving into the masterpieces that the Islamic Republic forbade: the Vladimir Nabokov novel that gives the memoir its name, alongside the works of Henry James and Jane Austen, as well as one of Nafisi’s favorites, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Nafisi brings these classics into dialogue with the real-life stories of young Iranians in the heady decades following the 1979 revolution. Her book isn’t just about reading and teaching literature under a repressive regime, but about how literature in and of itself could serve as an antidote to all that the regime stood for.

[Read: The problem with boycotting Israel]

Despite its global fame and translation into 32 languages, Reading Lolita in Tehran was never turned into a film before now, mostly because Nafisi didn’t like the proposals she’d received. Then, seven years ago, Riklis came around, as he recounted to a New York audience on January 13, after a special screening of the film. The Israeli director managed to convince Nafisi of his vision—and then to secure the funding, assemble a suitable Iranian cast, and settle on Rome as the shooting location, given that Tehran was not an option.

When the book was initially released in 2003, the American zeitgeist, shaped by 9/11 and the Bush administration’s global War on Terror, was rife with debates about the representations of Muslim women and life in the Middle East. Nafisi’s was one of several popular memoirs by Iranian women published during this period, including Firoozeh Dumas’s Funny in Farsi (2003) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis series (2000–03). And perhaps inevitably, given its success, Nafisi’s book became the subject of political scrutiny, much of it bearing little relation to the book’s content. Although Nafisi opposed the Iraq War, some critics lumped her in with neoconservatives because she portrayed the travails of Iranians under an anti-American regime. One scholar even proclaimed that he saw no difference between her and American soldiers convicted of abusing prisoners in Iraq.

More than 20 years later, Riklis’s loyal adaptation has opponents just as the book did, and even more so because of the nationality of its director. In Tehran, the regime media have denounced the film as furnishing a “pretext for attacking Iran” and called its Iranian actors “traitors working with Zionists.” One outlet claimed that the film peddled a “violent, anti-culture, anti-art, and anti-human view of Iran and Iranians.”

The idea that Reading Lolita in Tehran is anti-Iranian because of its portrayal of the Islamic Republic, and of the life of women under its rule, was always patently ridiculous. The claim bears up particularly poorly in 2024, two years after women-centered protests rocked Iran under the slogan “Women, Life, Freedom.” What Nafisi does best, and the reason her work has endured, is precisely to refuse cartoonish portrayals and basic morality plays.

In Riklis, known for his empathetic depiction of Israelis and Palestinians in films such as Lemon Tree and Dancing Arabs, her book finds an able interpreter who has stayed true to its ethos. The film isn’t neutral. It vividly tells the story of how puritanical Islamist goons attacked universities in the early years after 1979, imposed mandatory veiling on women, and banned books they didn’t like. But neither is it a simple story of scary Islamists versus heroic women resisters.

The film captures the atmosphere of Iran in the 1980s and ’90s remarkably well for having been shot in Italy and directed by an Israeli who has never set foot in the country. The dialogue is mostly in Persian, a language Riklis doesn’t speak; he was able to pull this off with the help of a carefully chosen cast of diasporic Iranians. Golshifteh Farahani, perhaps the best-known Iranian actor outside the country, is at her height as Nafisi, whom she plays as confident but humane, by turns brazen and vulnerable.

The young women of the clandestine class include Sanaz (Zar Amir), who has survived imprisonment and torture; Mahshid (Bahar Beihaghi, in one of the film’s most delightful performances), who, unlike most of her classmates, wore the Islamic veil even before the revolution and defends an ideal of modesty as virtue; and Azin (Lara Wolf), whose multiple divorces make her an object of fascination to the less experienced students, but who turns out to be suffering from domestic abuse.

In Nafisi’s apartment, the students are far from the prying eyes of the regime and also of men (even the professor’s husband is barred from their meetings). They construct for themselves, in that all-female room, a little literary republic that survives the years of war and revolution. In one memorable scene, Nafisi has the students practice a Jane Austen–era dance as part of their study of Pride and Prejudice, drawing parallels between the stifling rules of courtship in Victorian England and those of some contemporary families in Iran.

The film also ventures beyond that cloistered space. Bahri (Reza Diako), a devout 1979 revolutionary, is nevertheless an avid student in Nafisi’s class at the university before it is shut down. Despite their diametrically opposed politics, Nafisi and Bahri form a bond. Early in the story, she tells him his essay on Huckleberry Finn is the best she’s ever received from a student, even in America. The two reconnect when Bahri returns from the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–88, having lost an arm. He has used his family connections to the regime to obtain a surprise gift for his old professor: two tickets to The Sacrifice, by Andrei Tarkovsky, showing at the Tehran film festival. The connection between Nafisi and Bahri is presented with complexity and without sentimentality, neither papering over political differences nor caricaturing Bahri as a generic revolutionary.

In this way, both film and book avoid didacticism. And in doing so, they demonstrate exactly the point Nafisi explores with her students, which is the power of literature to stir empathy across seemingly unbridgeable divides. When the group discusses The Great Gatsby, Nafisi insists on understanding the forbidden love that Daisy Buchanan, the married socialite, has for Jay Gatsby as a true human feeling, not a symbol of Western perfidy, as some of her more revolutionary students claim it to be. The latter advocate banning the book. Nafisi organizes a mock trial for the novel in her class, with students divided into teams for and against.

[Mona Simpson: Book group in chadors]

Nafisi calls on students on both sides of the political divide to treat each other with humanity. When she catches some in her class expressing glee at the wartime deaths of pro-regime peers, she enjoins them not to become like their oppressors. And she is no dogmatic opponent of Islam, only of religiously inspired repressive government: At one point Nafisi tells Bahri, “My grandmother was the most devout Muslim I knew. She never missed a prayer. But she wore her scarf because she was devout, not because she was a symbol.” (I am not the only critic with a Muslim background who found this line powerful.)

The point here isn’t just to repeat the liberal platitude that “the problem isn’t with Islam but with its repressive enforcement.” Rather, Nafisi is rejecting the revolutionaries’ tendency to treat all that surrounds them as a field of symbols. People are worth more than that, she tells them and us, as though echoing the Kantian dictum to treat one another “as an end, never merely as a means.”

This message about the humane power of literature makes Reading Lolita in Tehran a work of art rather than an exercise in sloganeering. And the fact that now, more than two decades after the book’s release, and at a time of regional tension, an Israeli filmmaker has worked with Iranians to adapt Nafisi’s book to the screen gives the film a special power.

The audience at the screening I attended, at a Jewish community center on the Upper West Side, included American Jews, Israelis, and Iranians. What we had in common was the experience of being gripped by a story about the capacity of literature to reveal us to one another as ends rather than as means. The setup might sound mawkish. But I recommend avoiding the temptation of cynicism and embracing the film as truly one for these times.

Long before Donald Trump rewarded Tulsi Gabbard’s loyalty with a nomination to be the next director of national intelligence, before her friendliness with Tucker Carlson, and before her association with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, she was loyal to another charismatic leader. A man who remains mostly unknown outside Hawaii but is reputed to have a powerful hold over his followers.

That leader is Chris Butler, the founder of an offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement in Hinduism, called the Science of Identity Foundation. Butler’s followers know him as Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, and Gabbard, who identifies as Hindu, has called him her “guru-dev,” or spiritual master. According to its website, the foundation promotes yoga meditation to achieve spiritual and physical enlightenment, but Butler, well known for his fervent and graphic sermons about the evils of gay sex, does not appear to tolerate dissent from his followers. Some former devotees have called the secretive group a cult.

Other than raw ambition, Gabbard’s adherence to Butler’s foundation has been the only perceptible through line in her switchbacking, two-decade political career. First there was an astonishingly quick leap from enigmatic state lawmaker to national Democratic Party leader; then came Gabbard’s almost-as-quick falling-out with the party establishment; there followed an inscrutable congressional record, including a seemingly inexplicable visit with a Middle East dictator; after that was Gabbard’s stint as a Fox News media darling, and finally her rebirth as a MAGA Republican, nominated to be America’s next spymaster.

While Gabbard awaits a confirmation hearing, even senators in Trump’s party seem concerned about her suitability. Maybe they should be: Democrats figured out the hard way that they couldn’t rely on Gabbard; Republicans may soon learn the same.

To understand how Gabbard ended up in the middle of such a strange ideological Venn diagram, it helps to know about her early years. Born in American Samoa, Gabbard grew up in Hawaii, where she was homeschooled and spent time surfing in the blue waves off Oahu. Her father, Mike, is now a Democratic state senator, but he’s done a bit of his own party-flipping; during Gabbard’s childhood, Mike was an independent, and later switched to the Republican Party, after leading Hawaii’s movement against same-sex marriage. He launched a group called Stop Promoting Homosexuality Hawaii and hosted a radio show titled Let’s Talk Straight Hawaii. In 1998, Mike Gabbard put out a TV ad featuring a teenage Tulsi and her siblings that likened marrying someone of the same sex to marrying your dog.

The Gabbard family was—and, according to several Hawaii residents and people familiar with the group, still is—devoted to Butler and his foundation. “The belief system was [Butler’s] interpretation of the Hare Krishna belief system, plus Buddhism, Christianity, and whatever else,” Lalita Mann, a former disciple of Butler’s, told me. Fraternizing with outsiders was frowned upon, Mann said; complete obedience was expected: “To offend him would be offending God.” Gabbard’s own aunt once described the group as “the alt-right of the Hare Krishna movement.”

Butler had an appetite for temporal as well as spiritual power. Gabbard, a smart, good-looking girl from a political family, always appealed to him, Mann and Anita Van Duyn, another defector from the group, told me. Butler described Gabbard as a stellar pupil of his teaching. In her teens, Gabbard reportedly attended a school run by Butler’s followers in the Philippines. “He always wanted someone to be high up in the federal government” to direct the culture toward godliness, Van Duyn told me. Trump’s team rejected this characterization. “This is a targeted hit on her faith, fomenting Hinduphobia,” Alexa Henning, a spokesperson for the Trump transition, told me. “The repeated attacks that she has sustained from the media and Democrats about her faith and her loyalty to our country are not only false smears; they are bigoted as well.” (Gabbard herself did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)

The Science of Identity Foundation leader was not the only person to see Gabbard’s appeal. The people I interviewed described the surfer cum mixed-martial-arts aficionado as shy but warm. She has a rich, low voice, and always greets people with a friendly “Aloha.” Her demeanor helps explain how quickly she rocketed to political success from a young age. She chooses her words carefully, and listens intently, often seeming like the most mature person in a room, even when she is one of the youngest. “She cocks her head, and she pulls you in” to the “Tulsi hug,” one Hawaii Democrat told me. “It’s very mesmerizing.” Gabbard, in other words, has charisma. And she has always made it count.

In 2002, soon after she married her first husband, Gabbard dropped out of community college and ran for a seat in the Hawaii state House. In that race, and in others that followed, a swarm of volunteers associated with Butler’s group would descend on the district to knock on doors and pass out yard signs, according to someone who worked with Gabbard’s campaign in those early days, and who asked for anonymity to speak candidly. Back then, Gabbard shared her father’s views on same-sex marriage and opposed abortion rights, two positions that were—particularly in recent years—politically risky in solid-blue Hawaii. But she was clearly struggling to form her ideology, the former campaign colleague said, and determine a political identity of her own.

After one term in office, Gabbard joined the Hawaii Army National Guard, and went to Iraq as part of a medical unit, the first of two Middle East deployments. After her return, she and her husband divorced. In 2010, she ran successfully for a seat on the Honolulu city council. “She was as ambitious as you could possibly be,” Gabbard’s campaign colleague told me. And she was respected. Gabbard was racking up experiences, fleshing out her political résumé. Congress was next for Gabbard, and everybody knew it.

In the fall of 2011, something happened that shocked politicians in Hawaii. EMILY’s List, the national organization whose goal is to elect pro-abortion-rights women to Congress, announced that it was backing Gabbard. To political observers, it didn’t make sense. Gabbard had a D behind her name, but was she really a Democrat? Behind the scenes, EMILY’s List was wondering the same thing. Although her position on abortion had evolved in ways acceptable to the organization, Gabbard was still iffy on same-sex marriage. Her answers on the EMILY’s List application had made its leaders uneasy, one former staffer told me, and that staffer was asked to call Gabbard for clarification. During their conversation, Gabbard said she didn’t want the government involved in marriage. The staffer pointed out that the government was already involved in heterosexual marriage, so it wouldn’t be fair to deny the same access to gay couples. Gabbard seemed not to have considered this, the staffer told me, and after only a few minutes on the phone, Gabbard declared that her position had changed. Politicians typically do some finagling to secure the support of special-interest groups, but this was different.

“I’ve never had another conversation like that,” said the staffer, who still works in Democratic politics but asked to remain anonymous in order to speak candidly. “She was willing to do or say whatever. It was like she had absolutely no moral compass.” I heard the same sentiment from numerous people who have worked with Gabbard, both in Hawaii and at the federal level.

Gabbard’s leftward journey was well under way. Her second Middle East deployment, to Kuwait, had inspired a “gradual metamorphosis” on social issues, she told Honolulu Civil Beat in 2012, adding, “I’m not my dad. I’m me.” By the time she got to Congress, in 2013, Democrats had embraced her like a long-lost friend. Gabbard was celebrated as the first Hindu member of Congress and was eagerly welcomed in the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. Nancy Pelosi called her an “emerging star,” and House leaders gave her a seat on the prominent Armed Forces Committee. She was, to use a more contemporary comparison, AOC before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“There was this initial huge fascination with Gabbard” inside the party, a former Democratic House staffer, who requested anonymity to speak about his time working closely with Gabbard, told me. President Barack Obama himself lobbied for Gabbard to get a vice chairmanship on the Democratic National Committee, its former chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz told me. The Florida lawmaker hesitated at first. “I was warned early on that she was close to extremists in Hawaii,” Wasserman Schultz told me, referring to anti-gay activists. Still, she gave Gabbard the benefit of the doubt.

Gabbard proved popular among the other freshmen. “She was funny, she was engaging,” a former House colleague and friend of Gabbard’s, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, told me. She ran around with a small, bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Representatives Beto O’Rourke of Texas, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma; some of them met for CrossFit in the mornings.

But the congressional crush on Gabbard fizzled almost as quickly as it began. Wasserman Schultz told me that the DNC had a hard time getting Gabbard to show up for meetings or conference calls. When a House vote against employment discrimination came up, Gabbard was difficult to pin down, Wasserman Schultz said—even though, as a DNC vice chair, she should have been “the easiest ‘yes’ in the caucus.”

[Read: The thing that binds Gabbard, Gaetz, and Hegseth to Trump]

Gabbard seemed eager to stand out in a different way. She took to sitting on the Republican side of the House chamber. Despite her DNC perch, she voted with Republicans to condemn the Obama administration for not alerting Congress about a prisoner exchange with the Taliban in 2014, and the next year criticized the Democratic president’s reluctance to refer to Islamic State terrorists as “Islamic extremists.”

The representative from Hawaii was not facing a tough reelection, so none of these positions made sense to her fellow Democrats. Some suggested that she was a rare independent thinker in Congress; others identified in her a less virtuous strain of opportunism. Gabbard had “masked herself as a progressive to gain power,” Wasserman Schultz told me. After all, voters in Hawaii almost never elect Republicans to Congress.

Others pointed to deeper forces. “I think something happened around 2013,” Gabbard’s campaign colleague from Hawaii told me, pointing out that, at the time, several of her original congressional staffers resigned, and Gabbard replaced them with people affiliated with the Science of Identity Foundation. In 2015, Gabbard married Abraham Williams, the son of her office manager, both of whom, the colleague told me, were involved in the group. The couple’s Oahu wedding was attended by several members of Congress, including then–House Whip Steny Hoyer, as well as a representative from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist party. It seemed as though Butler’s group had reeled her back in, the campaign colleague said. He remembers thinking, “I don’t know who the hell you are anymore.”

During the 2016 Democratic primary, Gabbard resigned from the DNC and endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign for president because, she said, Hillary Clinton was too hawkish. Sanders-aligned progressives appreciated her support, especially because the Vermont senator had just been shellacked in South Carolina. On the trail, Gabbard spoke confidently about anti-interventionism, climate change, and Medicare for All. “I couldn’t think of an issue then where we had any degree of separation,” Larry Cohen, a union leader and the chair of the pro-Sanders progressive group Our Revolution, told me.

Senator Bernie Sanders with Gabbard at his campaign rally in Gettysburg ahead of the Democratic primary election in Pennsylvania, April 2016 (Mark Wilson / Getty)

But, in 2017, Gabbard made a move that stumped her new progressive friends, as well as most everyone else: She flew to Syria, in the middle of its civil war, and twice met with the now-deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad, who had by then already killed hundreds of his own people using chemical weapons, and who clung to power thanks to aid from Vladimir Putin. The original plan, according to a former staffer for Gabbard, had been to meet with everyday Syrians and “bear witness.” But as The Washington Post reported today, the trip’s actual itinerary deviated dramatically from the one that had been approved by the House Ethics Committee. The meetings with Assad had not been in the plan, and even Gabbard’s staffer, like others on her team, did not know about them until after they’d happened. “You fucked us,” the staffer, who also asked for anonymity to speak about confidential matters, remembers telling Gabbard later. “The reason you told us you were going on this trip will never come up again. It will only ever be about you meeting with Assad.”

For D.C. institutionalists, Gabbard’s conversations with Assad broke a long-standing convention that members of Congress do not conduct freelance foreign policy. But many also saw the trip as an unforgivable swerve toward autocracy.

Outside the Washington scene, Gabbard’s independence and charisma still counted. When Gabbard ran in the Democratic presidential primary in 2019, she could still muster an enthusiastic if motley alliance of progressives, libertarians, and conservative Hindus. She also did well among the kind of people who are fond of saying that all politicians are corrupt and neither political party is good for America. “I’m voting for her. I decided. I like her. I met her in person. Fuck it,” Joe Rogan said on his podcast that year.

Despite that glowing endorsement, Gabbard never scored above single digits in the contest, and dropped out of the race in March 2020. In the years that followed, she would pop up now and again with new and surprising takes. In December 2020, Gabbard introduced a bill to ban trans women and girls from playing women’s sports, plus two pieces of anti-abortion legislation. In 2021, she left Congress altogether. The next year, when Russia invaded Ukraine, she blamed President Joe Biden and NATO for ignoring “Russia’s legitimate security concerns.” Then she turned up as a featured speaker at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

At a late-summer conference in Michigan last year, Gabbard announced that she was supporting Donald Trump for president. She completed her political migration in October at a MAGA rally in North Carolina, when she said that she was joining the Republican Party. She praised Trump for transforming the GOP into “the party of the people and the party of peace.” Her message was that she hadn’t left the Democrats; they had left her. “People evolve on politics all the time,” the former House colleague and friend told me. “But that’s a long way from saying Hey, the party went too far to embracing Donald Trump.”

Gabbard’s instincts are those of a “moth to a flame of power,” Wasserman Schultz told me. And Trump’s flame is burning brightly again. But in Gabbard’s dogged pursuit of power, or at least of proximity to power, others see the influence not of a new guru, but of the old one: Butler. “She’s his loyal servant,” Van Duyn, the Science of Identity Foundation defector, said, and Gabbard regards him as “possessing infallible authority.” Van Duyn also told me that she has sent letters to several Democratic lawmakers, asking them to vote against Gabbard’s confirmation as DNI because she fears that sensitive intelligence “can and will be communicated to her guru.”

Each of the current and former Democratic lawmakers I spoke with for this story had concerns about the Gabbard-Butler relationship. “There are some very tough questions that need to be asked,” Representative Jill Tokuda, Democrat of Hawaii, told me. “Who’s really calling the shots when it comes to what Tulsi Gabbard believes?”

Gabbard at the Trump campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, on October 27, 2024 (Michael M. Santiago / Getty)

Butler, who is now in his late 70s and reportedly living in a beachfront home in Kailua, did not respond to a request for comment. But in a statement, Jeannie Bishop, the foundation’s president, disputed the accounts of people whom the group considers to be “propagating misconceptions,” and accused the media of “fomenting” Hinduphobia. (Butler’s foundation, along with a collection of 50 Hindu groups, sent out a press release last week blasting recent media coverage as “Hinduphobic.”)

[Tom Nichols: Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination is a national-security risk]

Regardless of whom her opportunism ultimately serves, political opportunity has come again for Gabbard. After she hitched her wagon to Trump, he chose her to be his spymaster in chief—a position for which she does not seem remotely qualified. The current director, Avril Haines, was confirmed after previously serving as deputy national security adviser, deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and deputy counsel to the president for national-security affairs in the Office of White House Counsel. Gabbard has no similar background in intelligence or agency leadership. Henning, the Trump spokesperson, pointed to Gabbard’s endorsement from former CIA Director of Counterterrorism Bernard Hudson, who has commended Gabbard’s “independent thinking.”

Gabbard’s Assad visit and her pro-Russian views also remain fresh in the minds of many in Congress. Nothing proves that Gabbard is a “Russian asset,” as Hillary Clinton once famously put it, but Moscow seems gleeful about her selection to lead the intelligence agency: “The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. are trembling,” the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda crowed after her nomination was announced. Another Russian state outlet called Gabbard a “comrade.”

Judging by the congressional hearings so far, traditional expertise and credentials may not matter much to the GOP lawmakers charged with confirming Trump’s picks. But the incoherence of Gabbard’s ideological evolution may yet count against her: Reliability could be the sticking point. Republicans should know, as well as Democrats, that “she’s ruthless in her pursuit of personal power,” the Hawaii campaign colleague told me. “Even if that means disappointing MAGA folks or Trump, it’s clear she’d do it in a heartbeat.”

During her eight years in Congress, Gabbard was a fierce defender of privacy rights, something her supporters on both the right and the left long admired. In particular, she had opposed the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, legislation that permits some warrantless surveillance of American citizens. But after meeting with senators last week, Gabbard announced that the act’s surveillance capability “must be safeguarded.” The would-be director of national intelligence had had a change of heart.

The Iranian presidency seems to be a cursed position. Of the eight men who have held it before the current president, five eventually found themselves politically marginalized after their term finished. Two others fell to violent deaths in office (a bomb attack in 1981, a helicopter crash in 2024). The only exception is Ali Khamenei, who went on to become the supreme leader.

Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s centrist president from 2013 to 2021, could be poised to break the spell and stage a political comeback.

The prospect seemed far-fetched until recently. Pressed on one side by hard-liners and on the other by opponents of the Islamic Republic, the regime’s centrists and reformists had become political nonentities. In the last years of his rule, Rouhani was among the most hated men in Iran. His landmark achievement, the 2015 nuclear deal with the Obama administration and five other powerful countries, was destroyed when President Donald Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018. Iran’s security forces, which are not controlled by the president, killed hundreds of protesters in 2017 and 2019 while he looked on. He was followed as president by the hard-line Ebrahim Raisi, picked in 2021 in an uncompetitive election. With Khamenei’s backing, the hard-liners went on to capture most of the available instruments of power in Tehran. Last January, Rouhani was even denied a run for the seat he had held since 2000 in the Assembly of Experts, a body tasked with appointing the supreme leader.

But the events of 2024 shifted the balance of power in the Middle East—and inside Iran. Israel’s battering of Hamas and Hezbollah greatly weakened Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance. The fall of the Assad regime in Syria last month was the final nail in the axis’s coffin. Khamenei’s foreign policy now lies in ruins. Last year, for the first time in their history, Iran and Israel exchanged missile and drone attacks on each other’s territory. Following Raisi’s death in a helicopter crash in May, Khamenei allowed a reformist, Masoud Pezeshkian, to run for and win the presidency—a significant concession, as reformists have been effectively sidelined, if not barred, from national politics for nearly two decades. Now Rouhani’s star foreign minister, Javad Zarif, is back as Pezeshkian’s vice president for strategic affairs. Both Rouhani and Zarif campaigned for Pezeshkian and have found themselves on the winning team.

[Read: RIP, the Axis of Resistance]

Having brought international isolation, domestic repression, and economic ruin to the country, hard-liners find themselves red-faced. Although the almost 86-year-old Khamenei is still fully in charge, he has lost much respect, not only among the people but also among the elites, and the battle to succeed him is already under way. Recently, Khamenei has signaled his possible openness to abiding by the anti-money-laundering conditions set by the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force. If Iran is to have any hope of solving its economic problems, it has no other choice: The country is currently one of only three (the other two are North Korea and Myanmar) on the FATF’s blacklist. But the issue has long been a touchy one for hard-liners, who see cooperating with the FATF as capitulation to the West and fear that it will force Iran to curtail its support for terror groups.

An emboldened Rouhani is back in the spotlight, giving speeches and defending his time in office. In the past few months, he has repeatedly complained that his administration could have engaged Trump directly but was stopped from doing so. (This is an implied dig at Khamenei who, in 2019, publicly rejected a message that then–Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe brought to Tehran from Trump.) Rouhani has called for “constructive interaction with the world,” which is regime-speak for negotiations with the United States in the interest of sanctions relief. None of Iran’s problems can be solved without addressing sanctions, he recently said. He has also called for “listening to the will of the majority of people” and freer elections. These statements have made him the target of renewed attacks by hard-liners, such as Saeed Jalili, who lost the election to Pezeshkian last year.

What may look like factional bickering is significant in this case. Rouhani speaks for part of the Iranian establishment that rejects Khamenei’s saber-rattling against the U.S. and Israel on pragmatic grounds. He is in many ways the political heir to Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a once-powerful former president who eventually ran afoul of Khamenei and died in 2017. Rafsanjani and Rouhani are often compared to the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. They sought to transform Iran from an ideologically anti-Western state to a technocratic one, with a pragmatic, even West-facing, foreign policy. During his presidency, Rouhani made state visits to France and Italy and was accused of neglecting Iran’s ties with China and Venezuela. His cabinet included many American-educated technocrats, and his administration tried to purchase American-made Boeing planes.

[Read: The collapse of the Khamenei doctrine]

Iran’s centrists are less interested than the reformists in democratization, and more focused on fostering economic development and good governance. This emphasis allows them to extend a broad umbrella. Rouhani’s agenda of pragmatic developmentalism is shared to varying degrees not just by reformists, but by many powerful conservatives, including the Larijani brothers (a wealthy clerical clan that includes several former top officials), former Speaker of Parliament Ali Akbar Nateq Nuri, former Interior Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi, and even the current speaker of parliament, Mohammad-Bagher Qalibaf (who was for years a top commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps).

Iran’s current weakness and desperation offer Rouhani and his allies an opportunity to wrest back power. Doing so could put them in a favorable spot for that inevitable moment when Khamenei dies, and the next supreme leader must be chosen. Rouhani has some qualities that will serve him well in this internal power struggle. Unlike the soft-spoken reformist clerics, such as former President Mohammad Khatami, he is a wily player who spent decades in top security positions before becoming president. (Khatami had been Iran’s chief librarian and culture minister; Rouhani was the national security adviser.) During his two-term presidency, Rouhani confronted rival power centers, such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, without fear. His experience negotiating with the West goes back well before the Obama era. In early 2000s, he led Iran’s first nuclear negotiating team, earning the moniker “the diplomatic sheikh.” In the mid-1980s, Rouhani led the negotiation team that met with President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser, Robert McFarlane, in the arms-for-hostages deal known in the U.S. as Iran-Contra. In 1986, Rouhani even met with a top Israeli security official, Amiram Nir (who was posing as an American), to ask for help in countering Iranian hard-liners.

But does Rouhani have any reasonable chance of returning to power? As always, Tehran is full of discordant voices. According to one conservative former official who spoke with me on the phone from Tehran, Rouhani is a major candidate for succeeding Khamenei as supreme leader. The official asked to be anonymous, given that “we have been ordered not to discuss the succession.” A high-ranking cleric and a former reformist MP cited the same gag order, but observed that Rouhani’s fortunes were rising; they declined to predict whether he could become supreme leader.  

Mohammad Taqi Fazel Meybodi, a reformist cleric, is not so hopeful. “I don’t believe folks like Rouhani can do much,” he told me by phone from his house in Qom. “They don’t hold power, and hard-liners oppose them. These hard-liners continue to oppose the U.S. and have an ideological worldview. They control the parliament and many other bodies.”

Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, a former reformist MP who is now an activist based in Boston, believes that the regime will seek a deal with the U.S. regardless of who is in power. “There have long been two views in the regime,” she told me: “a developmentalist one and one that wants to export the Islamic Revolution. But the project of the latter now remains defeated. Iran has no way but to go back to development.” Even in what many consider a worst-case scenario—if Mojtaba Khamenei, the leader’s son known for his ties to the security establishment, succeeds his father—he, too, will be forced to adopt the developmentalist line, Haghighatjooo says.

[Read: Iranian dissidents don’t want war with Israel—but they can’t stop it]

Haghighatjoo is even hopeful that the new Trump administration, with its willingness to break with past norms, will provide an opportunity for normalization between Iran and the U.S. Such an approach would “give strength to the developmentalists, especially now that the Axis is weakened,” she said.

Khamenei continues to resist such notions. In a defiant speech on January 8, he lambasted the U.S. as an imperialist power and pledged that Iran would continue to “back the resistance in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Yemen.” He criticized “those who want us to negotiate with the U.S. … and have their embassy in Iran.”

But Iran is in dire straits, and the supreme leader can ignore the facts for only so long. In many ways, he resembles his predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolutionary leader who, in 1988, likened his acceptance of a cease-fire with Iraq to “drinking a chalice of poison.” Having promised for years that Iran would continue to fight until it overthrew Saddam Hussein, Khomeini’s volte-face came out of desperation—and at the urging of Rafsanjani and Rouhani (a young Zarif, then a diplomat at Iran’s UN mission, helped write Iran’s letter to the UN Security Council, officially accepting the cease-fire).

Many analysts now loudly wonder whether Khamenei, too, will drink his chalice of poison. He might have no other choice. The old ayatollah’s project has evidently run aground—and Iran’s pragmatists have fresh wind in their sails.  

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

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

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

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

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty

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

[Read: How to succeed at failure]

The Radium Girls, by Kate Moore

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

Whalefall, by Daniel Kraus

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

[Read: How kids learn resilience]

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

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

The Half Life of Valery K, by Natasha Pulley

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

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

A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit, by Noliwe Rooks

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

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

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

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

[Read: Foreign leaders face the Trump test]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: What Trump got right about national security]

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

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

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

The curriculum will take on a more Islamic slant, with evolution and Big Bang theory dropped from science.