The Strategic and Moral Disaster of Trump’s Outlandish Threats

And more from this week…

There are weeks when decades happen, and this felt like one of them. Whether your concern is global affairs, artificial intelligence, or the long shadow of Chris Webber’s ill-advised timeout, a lot transpired. At Commonplace, our mission is to cover “what matters in America,” so we are frustrated when we find ourselves having to talk so much about Iran. But when a nation launches a war, that becomes what matters, which is itself an underrated cost of such foreign adventurism. (Oren wrote about this problem a couple of weeks ago in “Trump’s Biggest Mistake on Iran.”)

On Tuesday, Oren posted a short commentary on Twitter on President Trump’s early morning threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” It circulated quickly online and received widespread international media coverage, but of course, that audience is a very different one from our Understanding America readership. And while that particular day’s crisis has passed, the Strait of Hormuz does not in fact appear to have opened, so the analysis remains relevant to whatever may come next. As such, we share it with you here:

I mostly avoid commenting on what President Trump says from day to day, while pulling no punches in my assessments, whether positive or negative, of his policy. His Iran ultimatums feel different. Making such threats is a policy. If he were to follow through on them, the consequences would be immediate, irreversible, and catastrophic on a world-historical scale.

So while some will inevitably insist he should be “taken seriously rather than literally,” or that he is executing a sophisticated “madman” strategy in a complex game of 5-D chess, or that he needs everyone’s steadfast support to maximize his leverage, now rather than later seems the time to say that the actions that he is proposing would be a disaster for our country, both strategically and morally, which makes the remarks themselves a terrible mistake.

Simply put, what’s the point of all this? If these are empty threats that we all know he will not carry out, then they are ineffective threats (the Iranians are on X too!), merely making the president and our nation look foolish. If they are not empty threats, then the president is asserting the American position that such actions are acceptable in this situation and ones we are willing to take. We are not living in some quantum thought experiment where he simultaneously is and is not serious. We cannot expect the Iranians, but only the Iranians, will believe him.

Whether the threats are empty or not, we should be willing to say: This is wrong. We should not establish a pattern of threatening escalation from a blockaded strait to elimination of a civilization. We should not launch strikes intended to devastate the lives of millions of people and take our nation to total war without indisputable justification, or before the American people have deliberated upon and assented to the path with full understanding of what total war might mean for them. Those principles are vital to our Republic, independent of whether the strategy could “work.”

But it’s also worth emphasizing that the strategy is a dead end. This war is actively weakening American power, increasing the danger to American citizens, and frustrating the president’s important efforts at addressing our many domestic challenges. It has closed a strait that was previously open, strengthened the incentive for other nations to pursue nuclear weapons, and in this most recent rhetoric made more plausible their use. Our choices for continuing the war appear to be catastrophic escalation of the air war or extensive deployment of ground troops, neither of which were planned or had support at the outset.

Stepping back from these threats and admitting such actions do not offer a path to resolving the conflict may be unpalatable, but it is by far the least unpalatable option available. Let us all hope cooler heads prevail. – Oren

GOOD READS FOR THE WEEKEND

Shadi Hamid had a provocative column in the Washington Post, “Muslims Shouldn’t Have to Assimilate to Belong,” to which Glenn Loury offers a sharp rebuttal in UnHerd, “Muslims and the Uneasy Truth About Assimilation.” Muslims are an illustrative example here, but the issue is fundamental.

Hamid’s core point: “The assimilation defense — look how well we’ve integrated — is satisfying to make. But it concedes a premise I no longer accept: that a minority community’s right to be in the United States depends on its willingness to converge with the cultural mainstream. It shouldn’t depend on that. It shouldn’t depend on anything.”

Loury’s core point: “Societies are not sustained by declarations of inclusion alone. They are held together by what I have elsewhere called an informal social economy: a web of expectations, judgments, and norms through which trust is allocated, and cooperation becomes possible. These norms are not written into law. They are enforced through reputation, honor, shame, and the quiet but consequential decisions people make about whom to trust. Hamid’s argument abstracts from this reality. It treats belonging as a moral entitlement rather than as a social achievement. But in practice, belonging is mediated through relations, not merely proclaimed through rights.”

Both worth reading in full.

The New Yorker, of all places, has an excellent review of Lead Like Jael, the new book by Emma Waters (who joined Oren on the podcast this week): Will Biblical Womanhood Box You In or Set You Free? It’s a good look at some of the conservative arguments that land best across the political spectrum.

And a really great listen for you from Ross Douthat’s podcast: How Ben Sasse Is Living Now That He Is Dying.

BAD READ

Ever since Jeff Bezos announced that “we are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” the decline of the Washington Post’s editorial board has been fascinating to watch. They reached a new low this week with “A Bipartisan Bill That Would Hurt Employers and Unions,” which criticizes the Faster Labor Contracts Act, legislation that would impose arbitrated labor agreements when a newly formed union and management cannot reach a deal after several months.

The cynic would note that just last week, as we told you here:

Lest you forget, the workers at that Amazon warehouse who organized four years ago are still trying to negotiate a contract. The Republican-majority National Labor Relations Board has just ruled that Amazon illegally refused to bargain, which means… the parties head into federal court. It’s a classic illustration of how the legal rights granted to workers under the National Labor Relations Act can be nearly impossible to exercise in practice, in the face of employer intransigence and endless litigation. And it helps explain why Republicans Senators Josh Hawley and Bernie Moreno are helping lead the push for the Faster Labor Contracts Act.

But it’s actually funnier, and more appalling, to think that the editorial board received no directive on the matter from Mr. Bezos and simply, of their own accord, thought this was a good time to take up the issue and try to argue that:

Unions hope that the mere threat of arbitration would force employers to make concessions. It’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of their own abilities to negotiate that they think they need this heavy-handed approach to make deals. And rather than being able to hold out indefinitely for better terms, the legislation would force unions to accept provisions from the arbitrators that they vociferously oppose.

Mmhmm. That’s definitely the problem.

The Post’s argument rests on the same bizarre framing one hears often in the “right-to-work” context, that “Americans have a right to how to use their own labor” and “because of the monopolistic nature of American labor law, all workers in the bargaining unit — union members or not — would be bound by the contract that the arbitrators impose. This is not a power that the federal government should have.” But obviously, no one is forcing anyone to work at a particular firm under particular conditions. Indeed, it is the exact same “free market” advocates who always and eagerly note that employees have the freedom to leave any time they want. The question is what terms and conditions will obtain in any given workplace. The choices are (a) ones set broadly by regulators, (b) ones set for particular worksites by collective bargaining or, in this case, arbitration, or (c) ones set unilaterally by the employer.

The hypothetical scenario in which individual Americans with their “right to how to use their own labor” negotiate independent terms and conditions with their employer does not exist in practice for the frontline workers in large firms that labor law primarily addresses (and indeed, a voluntary choice to unionize is perhaps the best indicator of that reality in a particular place). The Post is just advocating for option (c). Workers, when they choose to unionize, are indicating that at least a majority of them would prefer (b). One can make various arguments for (c) over (b), but in the process, one should not pretend this has anything to do with the rights or interests of workers.

ELSEWHERE IN THE ECONOMY

Good news for sports fans: Justice Department Opens Investigation Into NFL (Wall Street Journal). In many respects, the league is a victim of its own success: instead of fans mainly wanting to watch their home team (for which the broadcast is still almost always available in the home market), they want access to all the big games. Teams require an antitrust exemption to negotiate the deals for those broadcast rights as a collective league, and pushing the games onto subscription-only services may be pushing things too far.

Bad news for sports fans: Private Equity is Destroying Youth Sports (American Economic Liberties Project). They’ve got some great examples that illustrate the problem we’ve called “moral arbitrage.”

But this week’s award recognizing absurdity in financialization goes to: Nicholas Wealth Management! They’ve launched an ETF that buys Bitcoin when American markets close in the afternoon and sells when markets open again in the morning, allowing you to bet on Bitcoin consistently performing better at night. So much value.

As for artificial intelligence, the talk this week has been all about Anthropic’s new Mythos model and its implications for cybersecurity, but for a good discussion of AI’s broader economic implications and potential policy responses, read Jennifer Harris’s New York Times op-ed, We Are Witnessing the Rise of a New Aristocracy. While some analysts have been optimistic that AI could reverse the oft-cited “skills-based bias” in technological change, which has tended to benefit knowledge workers at the expense of others, Harris warns we may instead get yet another instance of it: “In a recent survey, 750 chief financial officers were twice as likely to say that A.I. could lead to job cuts in low-skill office work as they were to say it would enhance this work. And a majority thought A.I. would augment, rather than replace, higher-skill roles — especially those requiring high levels of education.”

What is to be done? (Two Lenin references in one newsletter!) OpenAI made a big splash this week with the release of Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First, which it described as “a slate of people-first policy ideas⁠ (opens in a new window) designed to expand opportunity, share prosperity, and build resilient institutions—ensuring that advanced AI benefits everyone.” Some small measure of credit is due for working on the issue, but the remarkable feature of the final product is its complete lack of ambition. It reads roughly like a mid-2000s neoliberal tract about opportunity in the new economy. The policy recommendations fall under the heading of “Building an Open Economy” and land in categories like:

• “Worker perspectives” (though not power, mind you)

• “AI-first entrepreneurs”

• “Right to AI” (“Support the education, infrastructure, connectivity, and training…”)

• “Modernize the tax base”

• “Public Wealth Fund”

You get the idea. There’s also a safety net with automatic stabilizers, portable benefits, more investment in scientific research, and so on. On the one hand, some of these may be good ideas and relevant regardless of what trajectory AI takes. On the other, they are so miscalibrated to the scale of change the OpenAI claims is coming (“superintelligence”), that they raise the question which half of the equation is just unserious: Is “superintelligence” just a talking point, and “portable benefits” are a key response to the technology’s actual capabilities? Or is the world about to be unrecognizably transformed, and “portable benefits” are just something to keep everyone busy reading and writing white papers in the meantime? Discussion of a new social contract would be interesting and may indeed be necessary. Reprinting the social contract with AI-generated cover art, less so.

MEANWHILE, AMONG THE HUMANS…

Why the U.S. Fertility Rate Has Hit a Record Low (Wall Street Journal): “The nation’s fertility rates hit record lows in 2025 as childbearing continued to shift toward older women, according to new federal data released Thursday. For the sixth straight year, the number of children born in the U.S. remained at roughly 3.6 million. … The lack of growth in births continues to be driven by uncertainty about the future, including concern over finances, relationship stability and the political climate, according to Wendy Manning, a demographer at Bowling Green State University.” Not noted anywhere in the article, oddly: the declining marriage rate.

See also Patrick Brown’s excellent essay in Commonplace, The Long Shadow of the Population Bomb.

Definitely not helping: the continued failure of basic public services. Failure to shovel the snow was bad enough. But even now that the sidewalks are clear… ‘Open the school!’ Hundreds of parents demand Fairfax County add more 5-day school weeks (WJLA-7News)

ALSO NOT HELPING: THE WTO

Be sure to read Jamieson Greer’s Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Another Fish Story From the WTO,” declaring the WTO era ended:

The U.S. isn’t going to spend 30 years waiting for the WTO to respond to the needs of American workers and businesses. The WTO was of no use during the first “China shock,” which crushed American manufacturing, and it’s no help amid today’s huge trade imbalances. So the U.S. is charting its own course on trade policy—working regionally, bilaterally and, where necessary, unilaterally. The Trump administration’s recent wave of reciprocal trade agreements has been the most successful effort in years to open foreign markets while protecting domestic production and disciplining out-of-control imports. The U.S. is driving reform on trade globally, tackling tariffs and nontariff barriers, addressing structural imbalances in trade, and diversifying and securing supply chains. The WTO is nowhere to be seen on these issues. Instead, it’s spending time on silly fish songs.

You may be wondering if “fish song” is just some trade negotiator term of art with which you are not familiar. But no, the Ambassador is referring to “the triumphant finale of the four-hour opening session of the 14th Ministerial Conference in Yaoundé, Cameroon, on March 26. The WTO’s leadership was playing a self-congratulatory song about progress on an incomplete agreement on fisheries subsidies.” We thank him for his service in sitting through it.

Fund the Trade Police. Especially as trade policy moves toward bilateral agreements and begins to hold bad actors accountable, enforcement of deal provisions becomes increasingly vital. In the New York Times: “‘Definitely a Sham’: As Tariffs Climb, Trade Fraud and Accounting Tricks Proliferate.”

Daniel also has a great piece at Commonplace this week on the archetypical case: new agreements struck between the United States and trading partners that commit both sides to holding the line against China:

A tariff barrier, however, is only effective if other countries help reinforce the perimeter. Most commentary on the U.S.-China trading relationship focuses on the headline drama: tariff hikes, retaliation, ceasefires, and summits. Less attention has gone to the quieter construction of that perimeter, embedded in the nine Agreements on Reciprocal Trade that USTR has finalized with Malaysia, Cambodia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina, Bangladesh, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Ecuador,and which will likely feature in agreements to come.

To that end, “Trump budget asks for major funding increases for USTR, BIS,” per Politico—a 45% increase for USTR (including 70 additional staffers) and a doubling for the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security.

AS FOR CHINA…

Narrative Reinforcement: “In ever more technologies, China is moving towards monopoly.” The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which has been publishing research that shows China overtaking the U.S. in nearly all critical technologies, reports in its 2026 update that “China’s research leadership is no longer a trend; it’s a structural condition in most of the domains that will define military capability, economic competitiveness and technological sovereignty over the next two decades.” For the first time, it now characterizes the Chinese lead as “monopolistic” in the majority of the 74 technologies tracked.

Narrative Violation: In some ways, though China is still catching up. It’s important to note that the ASPI analysis focuses on which countries are publishing the most important research, a sign of who will have leadership going forward, not who has it at the moment. Likewise, the latest report from the International Federation of Robotics finds that China still lags significantly in robot density (robots installed per 10,000 employees), at just 166 compared to 307 in the United States and more than 1,200 in Korea.

On one hand, western industrial powers still have advantages they can build upon. On the other hand, if China’s industry is dominating already, imagine what it will look like as it further deepens its capital base. On robotics especially, China has established itself as the leader. As the Wall Street Journal reports, “Under the Skin of America’s Humanoid Robots: Chinese Technology.” Whether the United States will try to stay in the game is a major question on the table for the upcoming summit between Presidents Trump and Xi, says Politico:

The White House is weighing how aggressively to target China’s booming robotics industry, a decision that now hinges on how President Donald Trump leaves his summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping next month. If the meeting hardens Trump against Xi, the administration could impose strict trade restrictions or tariffs on robots focusing on national security risks. But if the summit extends the current trade detente, as the administration hopes, the strategy could take a softer tone towards China’s robotics dominance. For now, the White House wants to avoid inflaming tensions with Beijing ahead of the summit, said a Trump administration official, in line with the administration’s effort to tread carefully in managing its fragile truce with China.

Trump’s careful treading on China may be prudent up to a point, but it is also attracting a lot of attention and concern. In Politico, last weekend, “‘Walking on eggshells’: How Trump is managing his delicate China truce.” And in the Wall Street Journal this morning, “Trump Quietly Scraps His Own Playbook on China”:

The dramatic reversals, which have alarmed some of Trump’s own national security aides, are in part aimed at laying the groundwork for Trump’s May meeting with Xi, according to current and former U.S. officials. Many China hawks in the administration have taken to gallows humor, calling the shift the ‘Busan Freeze,’ named for the South Korea meeting between the leaders that produced a fragile trade detente.

It’s not clear, though, to what extent these policy decisions represent “reversals” as opposed to continuation of President Trump’s long-held perspective: that China is ripping us off and he will get a better deal. Across two presidential terms, he has consistently focused on getting a deal, alternating between pressure and conciliation as it suited him. While the desire to challenge China, or to see the trading relationship as a damaging one, once marked him as a China hawk. Today that exact same strategy makes him the dove in a room of people who believe there is no deal to be had.

The most important question on the table in Beijing next month: foreign direct investment into the United States. Last month, we sent a letter to the president on this point:

Pursuing Chinese FDI would repeat the mistake that the world made a generation ago when it welcomed China into the World Trade Organization. As with cheap imports then, the decision by North American, European, and East Asian countries to welcome large-scale Chinese investment now, and accept the Chinese industrial dominance that follows, may deliver the appearance of a short-term gain. Economists will undoubtedly cheer. But the result will be the much greater long-term pain of American decline.

In remarks this week at the Hudson Institute, Ambassador Greer articulated an encouraging position on the issue (Politico): “I don’t think we are at the point in our relationship with the Chinese where we want to talk about investment programs either way — we really need to get that trade deficit under control.”

And when it comes to cars in particular, Greer says regulations in progress are likely to keep China out for the foreseeable future (Bloomberg):

The top US trade official said restrictions on foreign technology will likely keep Chinese carmakers out of the US for the foreseeable future, throwing cold water on the prospect of those manufacturers establishing a foothold in the domestic auto market.Rules prohibiting connected vehicle technology and software made by so-called foreign entities of concern pose a steep barrier for many Chinese companies, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told reporters Thursday. Those rules are taking effect over the next 12 to 18 months, he said. “We don’t see any change in that,” Greer said during a tour of a Stellantis NV plant in Michigan. “It would probably be difficult for certain countries to establish new production here, given those sets of rules.”

Here, too, U.S. industry will need to get its act together. In recent comments about the Chinese auto sector, Toyota’s CEO has said, “unless things change, we will not survive,” Honda’s CEO has said, “we have no chance against this,” and Ford’s CEO has said, “they have enough capacity in China with existing factories to serve the entire North American market, put us all out of business.”

As Canada tries to show its toughness and independence by… welcoming BYD dealerships, we should probably consider a policy that stops them at the border.

Enjoy the weekend!