Region: Americas

The Danger of Loyalty Tests in U.S. Foreign Policy

Sina Toossi is a senior nonresident fellow at the Center for International Policy.

Shahed Ghoreishi was a career‑level press officer who drafted a single, straightforward line for the State Department press office: “We do not support forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza.” A short time later his proposed language was cut, and days after that he was fired — an action colleagues told reporters sent a “chilling message” through the building that veering from the administration’s framing could threaten a person’s job.

That is far more than a personnel dispute. It is a window into a deeper pathology in U.S. foreign policy: a system — inside government and across its think tanks, media, and political circles — that too often punishes facts, rewards conformity, and makes it perilous for professionals to tell leaders what they need to hear.

Social scientists have a name for this dynamic: groupthink. Far from being an abstract academic idea, it describes what happens when teams value unity over truth. Psychologist Irving Janis, who coined the term, defined it as “a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”

In other words, the stronger the pull of conformity, the weaker the capacity for independent judgment. The result, Janis warned, is a deterioration of decision-making: mental efficiency declines, reality testing erodes, and moral judgement falters.

Institutionalize dissent: Require leaders to hear alternative analyses, include minority views in the record, and respond directly to objections from skeptics. Protect public servants: Strengthen whistleblower protections, safeguard career staff from political retribution, and lower the personal cost of speaking inconvenient truths. Reinforce external checks: Support investigative journalism and congressional oversight as structural safeguards against conformity and executive overreach.

The process is easy to spot: decisions made within small, insulated circles create pressure to conform. Those who disagree either stay silent or are pushed aside, a false sense of consensus emerges, and what Irving Janis called “mindguards” step in—members who shield leaders from uncomfortable information and preserve the illusion of unanimity. The consequences are serious. Scholars of U.S. foreign policy have linked this very pattern to disastrous mistakes, from fatally flawed contingency planning to the manipulation and misuse of intelligence that paved the way for war.

That explains why Ghoreishi’s firing should make us uneasy. It communicates to tens of thousands of public servants that nuance can be dangerous, that raising inconvenient facts is a political liability, and that professional judgment may be judged less on merit than on loyalty to a preferred frame.

Protect honest debate

Public debate only works when people are willing to risk being unpopular in order to correct mistakes. As legal scholar Cass Sunstein has noted, dissenters who bring forward inconvenient facts are “to be prized,” because even one honest voice can puncture a false consensus. But when criticism is immediately treated as a political attack, the cost of speaking rises too high, and people choose silence instead.

When organizations go after people’s motives instead of addressing their arguments, real debate is replaced by character assassination. The Ghoreishi case was not just a routine decision by a manager; it was driven by a political appointee with an ideological agenda, and it was followed by a vicious smear campaign from far-right activist Laura Loomer. The message to career officials was unmistakable: even language consistent with long-standing U.S. policy could end a career. Such a culture silences public servants and leaves leaders deaf to the truth.

The consequences of manufactured consensus are not hypothetical. They were on full display in the run-up to the Iraq war, when insulated teams, reinforced by pressure from the top, narrowed intelligence assessments and sidelined skeptics. It was a textbook case of groupthink. Iraq proved that when dissent is punished, institutions lose the very safeguards that can prevent catastrophe.

Re‑center evidence over ideology

Good foreign policy begins with clear-eyed diagnosis and an honest weighing of costs and alternatives. Too often, though, the language of government cables and committee deliberations favors a politically convenient frame over a messy truth. The result is policy built on selective intelligence, comforting assumptions, and incomplete evidence.

Research on group decision-making shows why this happens. Some cohesion can help teams move faster, but only if dissent is protected and confirmation bias kept low. Once conformity takes hold and critics are silenced, decision quality quickly collapses. As Cass Sunstein warns, that fragile balance breaks down when powerful voices dominate, turning healthy teamwork into conformity, self-censorship, and collective error.

That is why reforming how decisions are made is urgent. Leaders should be required to hear out alternative analyses, include minority views in the record, and respond directly to objections from skeptics. These are not box-checking exercises. They are simple guardrails that make it harder for institutions to ignore inconvenient evidence before locking in a course of action.

Safeguard public servants

If we want honest debate, we must make dissent less costly. The scholarship is blunt: dissent must be rewarded or at least protected, especially when it benefits the public interest. That requires stronger safeguards for career staff and whistleblowers, real channels for internal disagreement, and institutional incentives that value critical review over blind loyalty.

But rules on paper only go so far. Culture ultimately decides whether people speak up or stay silent. In today’s climate, self-censorship is rising. Fear of reputational damage leads many to hold their tongue, and that instinct seeps into elite institutions where insiders are reluctant to challenge prevailing narratives. The Ghoreishi case makes the point: it taught public servants not just what language is permitted, but what truths are too dangerous to even raise.

Ultimately, even the healthiest institutions need outside pressure to stay honest. That is why external checks are indispensable. A free press and a Congress willing to investigate provide the counterweights to executive overreach and groupthink. These mechanisms are not partisan weapons; they are structural safeguards. By forcing leaders to explain their decisions, confront inconvenient facts, and stay accountable, they keep the system honest, and the country safer.

Why defending dissent is patriotic and vital for national security

Dissent is often painted as disloyalty. In reality, the opposite is true: telling leaders uncomfortable truths is a patriotic duty. When analysts, diplomats, or generals speak up, they reduce the chances that the nation will stumble into unnecessary wars, misjudge adversaries, or ignore the human costs of reckless policies.

That is why Shahed Ghoreishi’s firing should alarm anyone who cares about sound statecraft. It signals a climate where loyalty to the script outweighs telling the truth. And when silence becomes the safer career path, the nation loses its best safeguard against small mistakes growing into strategic disasters.

The fixes are not complicated. Institutions can create formal channels for dissent, assign rotating devil’s advocates, test plans against adversarial analysis, and shield career professionals from political retribution. These steps will not prevent every mistake, but they will make policy sturdier and leaders better informed.

History shows that even a single dissenter can break a false consensus and steer a group back toward sound judgment. Protecting those voices is not weakness; it is prudence. It is how democracies learn, adapt, and survive.

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El Salvador’s actions show Human Rights law matters

Anjali Dayal is an associate professor of international politics at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus. She is the author of Incredible Commitments: How UN Peacekeeping Failures Shape Peace Processes (Cambridge University Press, 2021). She can be found online at  @anjalikdayal.bsky.social on bluesky.

Under the rule of President Nayib Bukele’s personalist authoritarianism, El Salvador has publicly positioned itself as above critique. Despite this posturing, El Salvador’s government is behaving as though there might be future political, legal, and social consequences for its role in jailing migrants who were kidnapped by the Trump administration, taken to El Salvador’s notorious maximum security CECOT prison, and then returned to Venezuela in violation of their rights under international law. In recently disclosed court filings, El Salvador writes to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances and tries to assign the US government sole responsibility under international law for migrants detained in CECOT.

This response, complete with El Salvador’s officials shifting blame to the US, shows us we don’t yet live in a time of inevitable impunity for human rights violations. Because fears about future accountability for violating human rights remain salient concerns for some violators, they also remain critical sites of mobilization for civil resistance against a fully fascist future. 

Pressure governments to sanction or isolate El Salvador, the US, or both Call for investigations by multilateral human rights bodies, building a body of evidence that might later help move the levers of international justice. Demand signatories refer El Salvador to the International Criminal Court American opposition leaders can and should credibly signal that there will be accountability and consequences for the Trump administration’s human rights abuses Democratic presidential contenders should promise to join the ICC if they come to power

In these reports, submitted to experts working under the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights and then made public as part of these detainees’ litigation against the US government, El Salvador’s government asserts its own compliance with human rights law, despite what it describes as an agreement with the Trump administration to provide detention facilities for men disappeared from the United States, and carefully specifies that El Salvador itself is upholding international laws that protect people from being snatched off the street by their governments. 

El Salvador’s argument in these documents is particularly striking since the Salvadoran president and other key officials have openly expressed their disdain for human rights law. Instead, claiming compliance with human rights law, as El Salvador’s government does, accords these laws importance and legitimacy even as the government of El Salvador’s actions flout them. We can infer from these documents, then, that the government of El Salvador is writing with an eye to a future where these laws might matter, where violating these laws might have consequences, and where there might be accountability for the crimes committed against migrants to the US. 

As autocratic breakthrough in the US reshapes domestic and international norms and arrangements, all institutions, states, and organizations that confront the Trump administration must make a practical and moral calculation: do they expect this authoritarian period in US politics to endure, or do they anticipate future legal and political accountability for the crimes and injustices now unfolding? Analysts often distinguish between those who fold to authoritarian demands and those who fight them: those betting on a lawless future where accommodating corruption and repression offers protection, and where the future prospect of accountability or reputational damage for legitimatizing lawless behavior are unlikely to matter much, versus those betting on democratic resurgence, with the attendant accountability necessary to a peaceful, pluralist future. In these documents, El Salvador is hedging a bet against the lawless future, not assuming enduring impunity for the Trump administration’s treatment of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. 

If the government of El Salvador believes future accountability is possible, then it sees a future world where the international laws that protect the rights of individuals matter. These laws are meaningful when people believe they matter, and they are meaningless when people don’t believe they matter. What we see in these documents, then, is the political space and possibility for other governments, for activists, for civil society groups, for international organizations, and for the families of the disappeared to help change the stakes of betting on authoritarian future—to push for accountability, to expand and reassert the norms and values that protect people from state violence, and to make it more compelling for people to behave as though the future will include justice and rights, not merely impunity and repression.

Hedging the Bet: Constructing Deniability 

As Chris Geidner reported, lawyers with the ACLU and Democracy Forward presented these documents from El Salvador as support for their argument that the US government “maintains constructive custody over the people it sent to CECOT”—that, contrary to US attorneys’ claims in court, the US government, and not El Salvador, retained ultimate authority over the detention and disposition of CECOT plaintiffs.  

The documents were entered into the court record as part of the original J.G.G. v. Trump litigation before Chief Judge James Boasberg at the D.C. federal court, which challenges the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to send migrants in the US to El Salvador with no due process, while the documents themselves originate from a specific request to El Salvador from the UN’s human rights experts. The UN’s Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances asked El Salvador to provide information about specific individuals flown to CECOT after their families asked the working group for an inquiry. 

The Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances is a special procedure of the UN’s Human Rights Council, and like many of the UN’s human rights procedures, it documents and produces information about human rights violations on behalf of victims. 

Enforced disappearance is a state crime: the state or agents acting on behalf of the state take someone, place them outside the law, and hide their whereabouts from their friends, families, and advocates. Victims of enforced disappearances, who include the family and loved ones of the disappeared, can contact the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. The Working Group can in turn serve as a channel of communication between the state on the one hand, and families, civil society, and the legal community on the other, asking states to provide information about the whereabouts and status of disappeared persons.

The reports filed as part of the Alien Enemies cases emerge from this process, and we can accordingly understand them as the narrative the government of El Salvador wanted the UN’s working group and the victims of enforced disappearance in this case to have. The reports they submitted argue that, while the government of El Salvador did facilitate the use of its prison infrastructure by the US, “the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons lie exclusively” with the US. In fact, El Salvador claims that ICE and the US Government are solely responsible for any arrest, detention, or transferring of persons in violation of international law—if enforced disappearance is a crime perpetrated by state agents, then those state agents, they say, are the US’s, not El Salvador’s. Instead of coauthoring these acts, they say, their government merely provided Salvadoran prisons for “the custody of persons detained within the scope of the justice system and law enforcement” of the US via bilateral agreements. 

While legal analysts have noted these bilateral agreements are mere fig leaves on illegal arrangements, El Salvador’s argument to the UN is that it can’t be held responsible for refoulement—returning migrants to a place they fled from in fear—or for violating international law on enforced disappearance since, per these agreements, it simply provided a detention facility for people the US sent them. Because, El Salvador asserts, these persons weren’t under their jurisdiction “at the time of their alleged deprivation of liberty or when they were last seen,” there’s no basis for the working group to request information from them, and the cases should be excluded from their national statistics—in other words, they may have housed the men, but they didn’t kidnap them. The government “reiterates its commitment to complying with its international human rights obligations, including the prevention of enforced disappearances,” and claims they have solid laws and regulations that protect the “rights of persons deprived of liberty, regardless of their nationality.” These documents reveal, then, that government officials in El Salvador want to avoid blame and culpability for the fates of migrants abducted from the US: El Salvador believes it’s in its best interests to say it is complying with human rights law, even when it clearly is not. 

The Purposes of Deniability 

Despite these claims, the eventual release of the detainees to Venezuela in a prisoner swap has revealed the horror of their time at CECOT—their accounts of torture, sexual abuse, and cruelty in the prison indicate the government of El Salvador’s deep disregard for their rights. There were at least two other ways for El Salvador to have approached these reports: government officials could have flouted requests from the Working Group and continued to publicly boast of the torture, pain, and fear inflicted on CECOT’s detainees, or they could have returned blanket denials to the Working Group that did not try to parse their legal responsibility. Instead, they chose to treat the requests as an opportunity to try and mitigate their liability for human rights violations. 

The attempt instead to assign the US sole legal responsibility is particularly notable because neither the US nor El Salvador are state parties to the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, and accordingly neither has explicitly accepted the legal obligations that follow from that agreement. In fact, a different UN body, the Committee on Enforced Disappearances, would be taking the lead if El Salvador were a signatory to the convention. While this distinction may seem academic, the effect is substantive. The convention is a newer human rights agreement—adopted in 2006 and ratified in 2010, it specifically defines enforced disappearance as a crime and a crime against humanity, and today it is one of the nine core human rights instruments under the UN umbrella, with 116 signatories and 77 ratifications. It is binding on all states who have ratified it, meaning that they treat it as law. Each of the nine core instruments also has a treaty body associated with it: committees of experts who consider state parties’ reports, consider individual complaints of violations, and conduct site visits and inquiries, among other tasks. The Committee on Enforced Disappearances serves this task for states that have signed the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance and agreed to accord the agreement the status of law.

The body involved in the El Salvador case, the UN’s Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, on the other hand, was established in 1980, and is one of the older procedures of the Human Rights Council. Its origins date to a time when disappearing people was a calling card of modern dictatorship, but before the adoption of a formal agreement defined explicit state obligations for protecting people against enforced disappearance. Instead, the Working Group has a monitoring and humanitarian mandate anchored in the Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which the UN General Assembly adopted in 1992. This makes the Working Group part of an apparatus of “soft law”—it provides guidance to states without the necessity of formal ratification or accession to a treaty. In the specific case of the Working Group, its humanitarian mandate means it assists families in “determining the fate and whereabouts of disappeared relatives” by serving as a channel between victims and states, while its monitoring mandate means it may  send urgent appeals to the relevant minister of foreign affairs when they receive credible allegations that someone has been “arrested, detained, abducted, or otherwise deprived of liberty and has been forcibly disappeared or is at risk of being disappeared,” or whenever it deems it necessary.

Put another way, the Working Group can involve itself in the affairs of any state primarily by offering guidance, or by appealing to states for information on behalf of victims; it has taken the lead in this case because neither El Salvador nor the US have signed the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.

But the Convention, like many human rights agreements, is to some extent redundant—it defines a crime that was already prohibited by broader and overlapping treaties, agreements, and shared norms, and establishes more specific obligations for the states that ratify it. In the case of enforced disappearance, the three core elements of the crime—the deprivation of a person’s liberty, the involvement of the state, and the concealment of the person’s fate and whereabouts—are also prohibited by other bodies of international law. 

Under the Rome Statute that underpins the International Criminal Court, and to which El Salvador is a party, enforced disappearance qualifies as a crime against humanity. The cruel treatment of the disappeared is barred under the Convention Against Torture, which specifies torture as a crime that can be prosecuted with universal jurisdiction. And under customary international law, as embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and understood as a baseline for state behavior, no state can abrogate a person’s right to enjoy liberty, security, legal representation, a fair trial, and equal protection under the law, and every person should enjoy freedom from torture. The Refugee Convention’s prohibition against refoulement—returning refugees and asylum seekers to the place they are fleeing from—also applies to the CECOT detainees. With its efforts to minimize its own transgressions of these laws, agreements, and norms, El Salvador is therefore behaving as though it is bound by the nested, overlapping web of norms, laws, and obligations that regulate state treatment of individuals, even as it is clearly violating these norms, laws, and obligations. 

El Salvador is far from the first state to comply with the formal procedures of human rights law while flagrantly violating its core principles. Human rights law is practically weak but rhetorically powerful: it’s enforced by states via their domestic legal codes, and if states violate the rights of people living under their jurisdiction—as they often do—then other states, organizations, groups, and individuals can mostly only try to make them stop via indirect mechanisms, like sanctions, social pressure, boycotts, or slow-moving international litigation. States adopt all international legal obligations voluntarily, and there are no direct or automatic penalties for non-compliance with human rights law; there are also few easy ways to stop a state committed to violating the rights of people who live within its border. But the prevailing norms of the post-WWII international order have framed human rights violations as moral and legal atrocities; the investigative and information-producing powers of multilateral and non-governmental organizations have subjected abusive states to historically unprecedented levels of international scrutiny; and states have until very recently been reluctant to openly own their human rights violations—preferring instead to cloak their deeds in the language of counterterrorism, or issuing denials. This duality incentivizes states to pay lip service to the underlying values of human rights law while facing few consequences for transgressing them, and these efforts have often been understood as a strategy of buying political cover for human rights violations—a strategy that allows allies to frame box-checking as actual compliance. But lip service is still an acknowledgement that the law is meaningful in some way, and that acknowledgment is also an opportunity.

Changing the Stakes 

In this case, El Salvador is voluntarily claiming it’s in compliance with international laws, even though, technically speaking, nothing will happen to El Salvador if it isn’t in compliance with international law, absent significant effort from other states. Paradoxically, this means international law can serve as a critical tool in confronting the global wave of far-right autocracies bent on breaking already-fragile human rights norms: it can serve as a way to change the stakes of violating human rights. 

Pointing to international law as an aide can seem naive at best and maliciously impotent at worst, particularly when stacked against the horror of human rights violations. And framing international law as a pathway to redress harms can seem particularly obtuse when the misplaced faith that legal institutions would serve as the primary bulwark against authoritarianism is, after all, one way we got to the point where an open authoritarian could win the US presidency a second time and build a lawless government. In the domestic context, law is backed by the enforcement of state power, and people often view the existence of laws as automatically regulating behavior or guarding against impunity—but international law is very clearly a specific set of arguments about appropriate, tolerable behavior, with no expectation of automaticity attached to it. In this context, human rights law is a tool, not a weapon—not the sole sword of restitution, but a way to change the calculus people make when they weigh future consequences.

Without the backing of state power or any straightforward paths to enforcement, ironically, human rights law shows us how all law has to be backed by political power and pressure to be meaningful—less an ideal than a straightforward deal.  

El Salvador’s effort to minimize its culpability will not necessarily help its government officials avoid legal culpability for enforced disappearance (since accomplices to enforced disappearance can still be legally responsible for the crime), nor for its crimes against humanity, its torture of detainees, or its refoulment of refugees—if there is political will to hold them accountable. Human rights have usually been indirectly enforced by social mechanisms; prosecutions or threatened prosecutions; and, rarely and at the extreme, military action.  Social mechanisms work by trying to place countries outside the community of “good” states via naming-and-shaming tactics, grassroots pressure and activism from groups inside and outside the offending state. They can escalate to boycotts and sanctions—more coercive measures that strive to cut states off from economic and military benefits in order to shape their behavior. 

These mechanisms work hand-in-hand with the international legal working groups and committees that produce knowledge about human rights violations and direct international scrutiny at violators. International justice can proceed via prosecutions in domestic courts that have ratified human rights agreements; regional courts, like the European Court of Justice or the Inter-American Court of Justice; or via international courts including the International Court of Justice, where states attempt to hold other states to account for violations of international law, and the International Criminal Court, where individuals can be prosecuted for genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression. And rarely and controversially, human rights violations can produce joint military action under the Responsibility to Protect. Each one of these responses requires sustained political pressure and mobilization to hold violators accountable. In this context, there are political pathways forward for people who want to uphold human rights, reject impunity, and build accountability—not just for El Salvador’s government (which thinks it might experience consequences), but also for the Trump administration, which is proceeding as though there will never be justice for its crimes against refugees, migrants, and dissidents. International advocates for human rights can build social pressure by building and sustaining pressure on their own governments to sanction or isolate El Salvador, the US, or both. They can work with international experts to open investigations in multilateral human rights bodies, building a body of evidence that might later help move the levers of international justice. And states that believe in human rights can refer El Salvador to the International Criminal Court—El Salvador is a member, so the court has jurisdiction over its crimes against humanity. 

US domestic opposition to the Trump administration can also work to build grassroots pressure on the government via activism—indeed, both the administration’s move to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the US and the prisoner swap that ultimately sent the CECOT detainees to Venezuela reveal that the administration is susceptible to domestic political pressure. Critically, American opposition leaders can and should credibly signal that there will be accountability and consequences for the Trump administration’s human rights abuses—that, should they ever return to power, they will not paper over past abuses, as the Obama administration did despite their evidence that the Bush administration “tortured some folks”. One way for leaders to make these promises of accountability credible is to promise they will join the ICC if they come to power, following the lead of other states that have joined the ICC after a period of violence as a way to externalize punishment for abuses, reassuring both international allies and nervous domestic populations that there will be justice even if domestic courts aren’t up to the task. 

None of these measures would be a guarantee, but each one of them would help make a future commitment to justice more plausible, changing the stakes of the decisions that other states, groups, and individuals make in the face of autocratic breakthrough. Actors looking at the current landscape and foreseeing a future of impunity for the Trump administration’s crimes may be tempted to throw their lot in with the administration’s abuses, or at least to implicitly legitimize them. Actors looking at a landscape where pressure for future accountability comes from many directions may instead look at this period in American history as a chapter with an eventual end that will require an answer and an account for abuse. In this sense, El Salvador’s hedged bet shows us how we can stack the deck toward justice. 

Climate Crisis Demands a More Humane Alternative to Mass Deportation  

Kelsey Coolidge (she/her) is the Director of the War Prevention Initiative of the Jubitz Family Foundation. Her work focuses on the intersection of peace and security, climate change, and the environment.   

Mass deportations, the terrorizing of immigrant communities, and the illegal detention of immigrants—whether documented or not—are a defining feature of the second Trump Administration. It was a campaign promise delivered at stunning (and illegal) speed, and one now set to be bolstered by $170 billion in the “Big, Beautiful Bill”. These deportations are underpinned by erroneous claims of disproportionate migrant crime rates1, white supremacist and nationalist narratives, and the scapegoating immigrants as the driver of social ills.  

The national security infrastructure in the U.S. appears uncomfortably primed to engage in mass violence against civilians on its own soil (putting aside, for this paper, the gross violations of civilian rights as part of military operations beyond our borders). Astronomical sums of money are proposed to the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense to thoroughly militarize U.S. immigration policy, while humanitarian and aid programs are totally gutted. The “Big, Beautiful Bill” is ugly for immigrants—Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) is now the largest federal law enforcement agency (with a budget larger than most of the world’s militaries2) with $45 billion for new “detention centers” to “double immigrant detention capacity” with extremely limited Congressional oversight, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.3 How has the country of “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” come to embrace such an anti-immigrant stance?  

Use humanizing language about migrants, to ground this work on shared values of human rights and dignity Reinstate previous funding levels to the U.S. State Department and USAID, offering a policy and programmatic approach that supports the human security of migrants to the U.S. while addressing the conditions that drive migrants to flee in the first place. Reduce military spending by closing unnecessary global military bases and reducing the military’s global footprint.

There is an unexplored driver of a militarized approach to immigration. Mass deportations and border militarization is a national security priority not only because of President Trump’s racist claims—but also because our country’s national security leaders have deemed it a consequence of a warming world. Climate change, and specifically the Pentagon’s strategic planning for climate change, has justified mass deportations as a national security issue. By securitizing climate change, we have (perhaps unintentionally) securitized migrants, naming people as a security threat of climate change, and thereby undermining their human rights and dignity. 

Academics write about securitization theory as a framework to explain how policy issues become urgent, necessitating extraordinary action beyond what is considered normal. 4 A policy becomes securitized in part by how political elites frame and understand the issue. Immigration has been securitized by military and political elites’ narrative framing of mass immigration as key national security threat of climate change. Rather than pursue strategies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions or increasing collaboration among regional partners, the U.S. has set itself on a crash course of violent, costly, and inefficient responses to both immigration and climate change. An alternative approach is available, grounded in our common humanity with immigrants and a belief that global warming can proactively address through meaningful reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.  

SECURITIZING CLIMATE CHANGE 

Climate change has been effectively framed as a security threat by epistemic and national security communities. There were good intentions behind this effort—elevating the risks of climate change as “hard” security was thought to facilitate more urgent action. However, this approach fails to account for the role of militarism in U.S. national security and foreign policy, and the massive environmental toll of military operations. Militarism elevates military solutions as the means to attain safety and security; and with it, an adherence to the use of force, domination, and lethal violence. Climate change cannot be bombed away. 

The very system that produces bombs, ships them, and drops them around the globe is wildly exacerbating the climate crisis through its massive consumption of fossil fuels and GHG emissions. According to the Conflict and Environment Observatory, military GHG emissions are estimated to be around 5.5% of the world’s total emissions making it the fourth largest “country” in terms of total carbon emissions.5 As the largest military spender in the world, the U.S. military emits an extraordinary amount of GHG. According to new estimates by Neta Crawford, “from 1979 to 2023, the Pentagon generated almost 4,000 [metric tons of] CO2e – about the same as the entire 2023 emissions reported by India, a country of 1.4 billion people.”6 The U.S. military is also reported as the world’s largest institutional consumer of oil (and correspondingly the highest institutional emitter of GHG).7   

The unintended consequence of this security framing has diverted away from actions that meaningfully mitigate GHG emissions, increase resilience against climate-related natural disasters, or invest in the necessary green economic transition. Ironically, a security framing of climate change has reaffirmed the centrality of fossil fuels to our national security policy by situating the military as an actor to protect the country against the effects of climate change instead of addressing how military activities themselves contribute to the crisis.  

THE PENTAGON’S APPROACH TO CLIMATE CHANGE AND MIGRATION 

For decades, the Pentagon has advanced the idea of climate change as a national security threat and detailed plans for an anticipated military response. Corey Payne and Ori Swed conducted a review of Pentagon strategy documents finding that overall, “the military does not see saving the planet from a climate catastrophe as a goal that falls within its mandate,”8 and, “views its job [as] to ensure that the United States will be among the “winners” of the unfolding climate catastrophe.”9  While the majority of these strategy documents detail the ways in which the effects of climate change effect operational readiness and scenario-planning, it is impossible to ignore the frequency of dehumanizing, anti-immigrant language that directly names migrants as a security threat.  

Climate migrants are to be, “approached as a security issue and [met] with a militarized response.”10  In his book All Hell Breaking Loose, Michael T. Klare provides a deeply uncritical but comprehensive review of the Pentagon’s approach to climate change, detailing to extent to which migration has been named and blamed as the security threat stemming from climate change.11 It is almost comical how badly migrants are portrayed in this book, writing about the likelihood of, “massive waves of human migration and help spread infectious disease, producing disarray across the planet,”12 or how, “more privileged states [will be] besieged by waves of desperate “climate refugees.”13    

Throughout the book, Klare references the security threat of migration as a persistent concern emanating from the Pentagon’s plan to address climate change. “Whenever U.S security analysts have considered the risks of climate change, a perpetual concern has been that extreme events and prolonged droughts could trigger a massive flight of desperate people seeking refuge in other locales, provoking chaos and hostility wherever they travel…and it has remained a major theme to the present day.”14  Some references include:  

  • A 2007 CNA Corporation report warned that climate change, “can fuel migrations in less develop countries, and these migrations can lead to international political conflict.”15 Klare writes that the CNA report suggests “the primary security threats to the U.S. arise from the potential demand for humanitarian aid and a likely increase in immigration from neighbor states.”16  

      • A 2015 National Security Implications of Climate-Related Risks and Changing Climate report17 which pulled insights from the military’s six geographic combatant commend centers (Northern, Southern, European, Africa, Central, and IndoPacific) and found “the threat of mass migrations arising from extreme drought, coastal flooding, food scarcity, and state collapse was a recurring theme in several of these reports.”18  

      • In a 2014 report to the Senate Armed Services Committee, General John F. Kelly, “emphasized the importance of taking steps to prevent future climate refugees from entering the United States,” detailing how SouthCom’s exercises modeling the military’s response to a mass migration event used, “Guantanamo Bay to oversee a mock crisis-response mission.”19  

    The underlying logic of the Pentagon’s approach to climate change is based off an assumption that climate change will create clear and predictable “winners” and “losers” on a global scale.20 An early commissioned report from 2003 suggests that “the United State could likely survive shortened growing cycles and harsh weather conditions without catastrophic losses. Borders will be strengthened around the country to hold back unwanted starving immigrants from the Caribbean islands (an especially severe problem), Mexico, and South America.”21 While it is not egregious to suggest that wealthier countries are best suited to withstand the shocks of climate change, it is also naïve to underplay the fundamental ways in which the U.S economy is reliant on imported food and migrant labor.22 Further, the defining feature of climate change is unpredictability. “Unchecked global climate change will disrupt a dynamic ecological equilibrium in ways that are difficult to predict. The new ecosystem is likely to be unstable and in continual flux for decades of longer. Today’s “winner” could be tomorrow’s big-time loser.”23 To create a response based on an assumed, predictable outcome on continued dominance is short-sighted, at best, and at worst wholly underestimates the possible severity of catastrophic outcomes.  

    POLICY PROPOSALS 

    We have, during the second Trump administration, watched Pentagon hypotheticals and training exercises move into actual practice. There was no guarantee that the Pentagon’s preparations for a “mass migration event”, meant enacting such a response at Guantanamo Bay, yet now the base is holding site for mass deportations.24 As the War on Terror transformed the imperial spoils from naval base to infamous extralegal prison, the militarized response to immigration is expanding it yet again into the front line of an undeclared war on refugees. Even if the military’s assistance in Trump’s mass deportation scheme is not directly linked to its views on climate change, it is certainly the vision of the future that the Pentagon is preparing for as climate change accelerates. If anything, the Pentagon is actively refining its approach in front of our eyes.     

    Personally, I cannot subscribe to that vision as the only path forward. Ever the optimist, I believe that we can still mitigate the effects of climate change, bring an end to the era of fossil fuels, and orient our national security, foreign, and immigration policies on shared values of human rights and dignity.  A 2007 joint report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security summed on the national security implications of climate change summarized it nicely: “In order to emerge form a period of severe climate change as a civilization with hopes for a better future and with prospects for further human development, the very model of what constitutes happiness must change. Globalization will have to be redirected…This can occur either as the result of the collapse of the present system, or by its purposeful reconfiguration.”25  

    Let us detail what a “purposeful reconfiguration” may look like.  

    A 2021 White House report on climate migration offers a few useful starting points.26 It outlines a dual strategy of supporting the human security of migrants to the U.S. while supporting would-be migrants to “who desire to stay as long and safely as possible in their home areas” through investments in U.S. foreign assistance, humanitarian aid, and legal support services. It states, “the foreign assistance infrastructure brings together a powerful combination of tools [and] partnerships to address many elements of the complex issues of climate change and migration. However, current funding levels, structure, and coordination of U.S. foreign assistance is inadequate to meet the challenge…”27 It is safe to say that current funding levels in 2025 are even more inadequate to address the challenge of climate migrants. The hollowing out of USAID and the State Department is a heavy-handed gut-punch to the possibility of a more humane and dignified migration policy. An easy policy recommendation is to reinstate USAID and State funding at least to the previous level and absolutely oppose a reconciliation package that would revoke $8.3 billion in foreign aid from fiscal years 2024 and 2025.  

    That budget, likely inadequate, is several orders of magnitude smaller than the Pentagon’s outrageous budget of $1 trillion.28 When considering the climate impact of military emissions, we simply cannot expect to mitigate climate change while increasing the military’s budget. Instead of building up the war machine to fight people fleeing drought, starvation, and unlivable heat, the United States could scale down its military, in turn reducing production of greenhouse gases. There are available policy proposals that reduce Pentagon spending and lower the climate impact of the military, actually making the world a much safer place for people and the natural environment.  

    It is possible to create compassionate immigration policies29 paired with robust humanitarian and peacebuilding programs that aim to prevent the disasters that drive people to flee their homes in the first place. These kinds of proposals are inherently less climate-intensive and more dignified than a militarized response to immigration. A starting point is a complete abolition on dehumanizing language about migrants. They are not unwanted “hordes” spreading “disease” and “conflict” wherever they go—they are humans. Centering their humanity should compel us to consider our own complicity in exaggerating the climate crisis and funneling exorbitant amounts of money into a military industrial complex that harms people and the planet. There are a range of policy responses that limit the military’s GHG emissions and reduce harm, namely through military spending cuts and reducing the military’s global footprint. Closing unnecessary global military bases reduces the fossil fuels needed to support such infrastructure while offering the bonus of making it more difficult to carry-out clandestine, climate-intensive, and offensive military activities.30   

    We are not alone. All these efforts are amplified and improved through global cooperation and diplomacy, especially with neighboring states and international governance organizations. The investment in the military has eroded diplomatic channels that cultivated a peaceful world—we must claw back and reaffirm global relationships to see a sustainable, peaceful future.     

    End Notes

      1. Brianna Seid, Rosemary Nidiry, and Ram Subramanian, “Debunking the Myth of the ‘Migrant Crime Wave,’” Brennan Center for Justice, September 26, 2024, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/debunking-myth-migrant-crime-wave.

      1. “ICE Budget Now Bigger than Most of the World’s Militaries,” Newsweek, July 2, 2025, https://www.newsweek.com/immigration-ice-bill-trump-2093456.

      1. Lauren-Brooke Eisen, “Budget Bill Massively Increases Funding for Immigration Detention,” Brennan Center for Justice, March 12, 2025, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/budget-bill-massively-increases-funding-immigration-detention. 

      1. Mikkel Flohr, “Key Concept: Securitization (Copenhagen School),” Critical Legal Thinking (blog), March 31, 2025, https://criticallegalthinking.com/2025/03/31/key-concept-securitization-copenhagen-school/. 

      1. “New Estimate: Global Military Is Responsible for More Emissions than Russia,” CEOBS (blog), November 10, 2022, https://ceobs.org/new-estimate-global-military-is-responsible-for-more-emissions-than-russia/.

      1. Nina Lakhani, “How the US Became the Biggest Military Emitter and Stopped Everyone Finding Out,” The Guardian, May 30, 2025, sec. Environment, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/30/donald-trump-geopolitics-could-deepen-planetary-catastrophe-expert-warns. 

      1. Crawford, Neta C., “Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War” (Costs of War, November 13, 2019), https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/Pentagon%20Fuel%20Use%2C%20Climate%20Change%20and%20the%20Costs%20of%20War%20Revised%20November%202019%20Crawford.pdf. 

      1. Corey R. Payne and Ori Swed, “Disentangling the US Military’s Climate Change Paradox: An Institutional Approach,” Sociology Compass 18, no. 1 (2024): 3, https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.13127. 

      1. Payne and Swed, 7.

      1. Paul J. Smith, “Climate Change, Mass Migration and the Military Response,” Orbis 51, no. 4 (January 1, 2007): 617–33, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orbis.2007.08.006.

      1. Michael T. Klare, All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019).

      1. Klare, 33. Emphasis added.  

      1. Klare, 34. Emphasis added. 

      1. Klare, 112. Emphasis added.  

      1. “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change” (CNA Corporation, 2007), 18, https://www.cna.org/archive/CNA_Files/pdf/national%20security%20and%20the%20threat%20of%20climate%20change.pdf.

      1. Klare, All Hell Breaking Loose, 115.

      1. “Findings from Select Federal Reports: The National Security Implications of a Changing Climate” (The White House, May 2015), https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/docs/National_Security_Implications_of_Changing_Climate_Final_051915.pdf.

      1. Klare, All Hell Breaking Loose, 27.

      1. Klare, 115–16. Emphasis added. 

      1. Payne and Swed, “Disentangling the US Military’s Climate Change Paradox.”

      1. Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security,” n.d. Emphasis added.  

      1. “Mass Deportation,” American Immigration Council (blog), accessed June 24, 2025, https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/mass-deportation/.

      1. Kurt M Campbell et al., “The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change,” n.d., 8. 

      1. “Trump Preparing to Send Thousands of Immigrants Including Europeans to Guantanamo Military Prison: Reports | The Independent,” accessed June 26, 2025, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-immigrants-guantanamo-bay-prison-b2767628.html.

      1. Campbell et al., “The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change,” 78. 

      1. “Report on the Impact of Climate Change on Migration” (The White House, October 2021), https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Report-on-the-Impact-of-Climate-Change-on-Migration.pdf.

      1. “Report on the Impact of Climate Change on Migration” (The White House, October 2021), https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Report-on-the-Impact-of-Climate-Change-on-Migration.pdf.

      1. Valerie Insinna, “Trump Administration to Request $1T Defense Budget Using Reconciliation Funds,” Breaking Defense (blog), May 2, 2025, https://breakingdefense.com/2025/05/trump-administration-to-request-1t-defense-budget-using-reconciliation-funds/.

      1. “Compassionate Migration Policies Are Also the Right Call Politically,” CIP (blog), April 12, 2022, https://internationalpolicy.org/publications/compassionate-migration-policies-are-also-the-right-call-politically/.

      1. “Drawdown: Improving U.S. and Global Security Through Military Base Closures Abroad,” Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft (blog), September 20, 2021, https://quincyinst.org/research/drawdown-improving-u-s-and-global-security-through-military-base-closures-abroad/. 

State Needs Reorganization, Rubio’s Plan Isn’t It

Cole Donovan is an associate director at the Federation of American Scientists. He previously had international S&T roles in the Biden White House, State Department, and Office of Space Commerce.

On May 29, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent a Congressional Notification to Congress outlining his proposed changes to the U.S. Department of State as part of President Trump’s chaotic redesign of the U.S. government. This planned reorganization of state alienates foreign diplomats, further undermines foreign assistance, and leaves the State less capable.

There are major issues with the Secretary’s proposal. To foreign partners, the redesign looks like a manifestation of the United States’ worst instincts, focused primarily on telling others how to run their countries while emphasizing our supreme military and economic power. Humanitarians are justifiably shocked at the wholesale demolition of foreign assistance mechanisms, whose remnants are being shifted to regional offices with neither the manpower nor contracting experience to responsibly manage those funds. Anyone familiar with the work necessary to effectively manage the myriad issues State has to tackle is likely to notice the demolition of coordinating mechanisms throughout the Department, which served bureau leadership by sorting through the multitude of disparate and disconnected issues that they might encounter in a single meeting with a foreign principal.

To match the service terms of other foreign ministries, State can slow the tempo and increase the depth of Foreign Service deployments. State’s humanitarian functions are best supported by reinstating USAID, which had in-house technical and development skill that’s harder to develop within State. While Rubio’s reorganization is likely aimed at producing splashy headlines for Trump, a thoughtful reorganization would take diplomacy seriously – as well as the actual value that State can bring to the table.

While many of these changes are set to diminish how State functions, there is positive potential in a reorganization designed with the long-term prospects of US diplomacy, rather than the short-term whims of an administration, in mind. The status quo, as well as the general operating model of the Department for the last several decades, is not ideal. The desire for improvement is such that some of Rubio’s changes may well be welcomed, including by officers serving in offices whose responsibilities are being merged or consolidated. 

Over time, the Government has added numerous offices and functions to State with the intent to signal that specific issues are important to the sitting government. Consider State’s technical offices. In addition to an Office of Science and Technology Cooperation (which dates back to the Cold War), you also had an Office of the Science and Technology Advisor to the Secretary of State (established in the early 2000s), a Special Envoy for Critical and Emerging Technology, and a Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy (established under Secretary Blinken). 

Which of these offices manages the International Science and Technology Center? That would be the Office of Cooperative Threat Reduction in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation (created in 2005 out of the merger of two other offices). If I were to ask a foreign service officer from one of those four organizations about the Center, I’d likely receive a blank stare (inevitably followed by a flurry of activity as that officer attempts to make sure they are as involved in the Center as they can possibly be). They wouldn’t need to worry for long, though. Soon that officer will rotate to their next assignment and the cycle can begin anew.

Retooling diplomacy for the long haul

That rotational churn creates other issues for American diplomacy. Foreign Service Officers rotate through two-year assignments, making frequent moves and retraining a constant part of their careers. A foreign service officer spends their first six months of a rotation learning how to do their new job and an additional four to five months trying to do the best job that they can. The next five are devoted to finding their next assignment, and the next few are spent trying to maximize their performance reviews before they begin preparations for their next job. One of my deputy directors on the EU desk once told me that he didn’t realize when he joined the government that he would spend the rest of his life searching for a job. This incentivizes managers to wait for foreign service rotations to avoid challenging performance management conversations, creating the risk that poor performers or toxic managers may be able to survive the next promotion cycle. 

Increasing the assignment term to five years (so that American diplomats can demonstrate a similar level of competence in a particular job as their counterparts in other foreign ministries and focus on delivering longer-term results) would be a good place to start. This is particularly important for officers working on issues that have inherently long lead times, like managing U.S. interests related to the EU or China’s seven- and five-year legislative program cycles, respectively. At the very least, it would help the Department spend its language training and relocation dollars more effectively. 

Politicizing the workforce, as this Administration is doing, through actions like Schedule Policy/Career and its free response questions as part of the hiring process, inherently cuts against this capability. If this administration fires its experienced workforce, particularly those performing newly-relocated statutory responsibilities, the Administration will deprive consolidated offices of the experience and expertise necessary to maximize their productivity. The real value lost through consolidating isn’t the name of the office, but pushing out the people who deeply understand the history, context, and nuance of diplomatic interactions. These are not skills that can be easily or responsibly replicated by AI tools. As interesting as a large language model might be, it is less likely to proactively identify key points that might be missing from a foreign partner’s remarks or isolate bloviating on behalf of one’s own government from that person’s in-private, in-person ability to get things done.

Long Timelines Versus Short Headlines

The biggest problem that any reorganization of State needs to address is the fundamental misalignment between what the Department is good at doing with the jobs that it is assigned by its political leadership. As the government’s foreign ministry, State works best when assisting other agencies in accomplishing their objectives overseas or advocating on behalf of U.S. interests in particular domains, like intellectual property or agricultural regulations. Some bureaucratic tension between offices with similar missions is even helpful, allowing the Department to predict tension between promoting and protecting American interests.

Not all offices are as successful, like the recently-formed Special Envoy for Critical and Emerging Technology. The intent of this office was to address the increasing relevance of emerging technology issues in global competition. Among the many activities that the office proposed included the creation of an alliance of like-minded countries on quantum science and technology. There was just one problem: another office at the State Department already organized such a partnership with the White House National Quantum Coordination Office. That group held their first meeting almost a year before the Special Envoy had even been named, leading to an extended back and forth between the White House and competing offices at State on how to manage a new political demand signal that had just been answered

Such follies are a likely predictor of what will happen with Secretary Rubio’s new Bureau of Emerging Threats. It’s not clear exactly what value-add this bureau will provide the U.S. government, especially given the numerous offices throughout the government dealing with dangerous critical and emerging technologies, especially within the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community (let alone those that already exist within the Department). This can cause problems. 

In 2011, Secretary Clinton created the Bureau of Energy and Natural Resources (ENR) given a broad recognition of energy policy’s relevance to international stability and achieving the United State’s broader international objectives. A 2016 OIG Inspection found that the Bureau had great relationships with the rest of the Government–just not the Department of Energy (DOE) with which it most needed to work. The OIG reported numerous problems in ENR reported by foreign service officers in Embassies as well as their DOE colleagues, including competing missions, inadequate communication and coordination, and difficulty promulgating a single U.S. energy message to foreign governments. Similar dynamics are captured in the 2015 documentary “The Diplomat”, which described the struggles between the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan with other parts of the U.S. government, each of which thought itself primarily responsible for Afghan and Pakistan Policy.

Invariably, if new offices struggle to identify opportunities in their defined mission space, they begin to move into areas long-occupied by others (or they discover that other offices have already been working in their assumed domains all along and may even have statutory responsibilities in that space), including in other government agencies. Knowing the lay of the land should be essential before starting any reorganization of State aimed at the long-term viability of the diplomatic apparatus of the United States. 

Any future attempt to reorganize the Department should ask itself the following questions before creating any new body, including the appointment of a new special representative:

  1. Does another government agency or office have the legislative mandate and capability to do this work?
  2. Is this work distributed across many agencies who are in tension with one another, where the Department could negotiate a consolidated U.S. position on the subject (and perhaps in doing so help expedite the resolution of domestic policy disputes)?
  3. Is it better if a foreign policy expert speaks to this subject, or should the face that the United States presents to the world be a recognized expert speaking from a position of authority elsewhere in the government? ie; should negotiations on nuclear enrichment be carried out primarily through State or the Department of Energy?
  4. Is there another coordinating body on the subject in the U.S. government?
  5. What are people in this bureau or office going to do when they show up on the job? Who are they likely to clash with?
  6. Can this body follow through with any promises that it might make to foreign governments?
  7. Are the people who State expects to share their resources willing to provide them to this new body, and for what purposes?
  8. What will the organization’s primary leverage be in achieving whatever goals it sets out to accomplish on behalf of a given administration?

When a new body forms and doesn’t have a clear mission, the answer is usually to schedule as many meetings with foreign governments as possible and try to bend the arms of other government agencies to come forward with major commitments. It drains time and resources available to other government agencies, making it harder for them to accomplish their domestic missions. U.S. efforts are placed in stark relief against those of our allies and competitors, alike. 

Well-resourced offices that create value, like PEPFAR, have clearly made substantial progress in their respective domains and moved the needle on important global issues. This makes the loss of bureaus like Education and Cultural Affairs, which ran the Fulbright program and numerous visitor programs that exposed foreign audiences to the best elements of America’s people and culture, all the more tragic. When a bureau lacks resources, it is often forced to try to trip up international competitors in order to accomplish a goal, or coax foreign partners to use resources that the U.S. government does not have. Such efforts are usually transparent to foreign partners, who do not always appreciate being caught between the United States and one of its many foreign policy objectives. They may question why the richest and most powerful country in the world isn’t willing to put its own resources behind the effort.

I cannot predict what the State Department will actually look like in 10 months given the current chaos, let alone at the end of this government’s term. Other government bodies–particularly the NSC and other White House Policy Councils–would also do well to embrace these recommendations. What I can say is that future governments will need to do a much better job aligning the resources of the Department with its ability to execute its lofty goals–all of which are critical for ensuring the future of American security.

MSNBC: Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ system is an expensive way to make America less safe

At MSNBC, Chief Editor Kelsey D. Atherton walks through how Trump’s recent announcement of a “Golden Dome” missile defense system is an expensive investment in insecurity.

“If missile defense works as promised,” writes Atherton, “it creates an opportunity for the leadership of the protected country to launch nuclear strikes without fear of suffering nuclear retaliation in return. This is true even if missile defense does not actually work as a defense, because overcoming planned defenses means building a larger arsenal and possibly taking a gamble on launching a nuclear first strike, rather than forever losing that deterrent effect.”

Read Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ system is an expensive way to make America less safe at MSNBC.

Labor deserves better than Trump’s disastrous tariffs

Joe Mayall is a Denver-based labor activist and writer whose work has appeared in Jacobin, PRISM, and The Progressive Magazine. He writes the JoeWrote newsletter, and you can follow him on Blue Sky (@joemayall.bsky.social) and X(@joemayall).

During his second inaugural address, President Donald Trump stated he would enact his campaign promise to “tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.” To the surprise and horror of many, including members of Trump’s inner circle, the President has followed through with his chaotic plans. With shifting country-specific rates and conflicting statements from press briefings and Truth Social, the president’s trade policy has upturned financial markets and left everyone from world leaders to small business owners scratching their heads.

As for why these tariffs were enacted, Occam’s razor points to a mix of ignorance and corruption. The president claims they are closing trade deficits, which he misunderstands as the amount a foreign nation is “stealing” from America. Trump boasted about how much he and his friends made manipulating the market, so one can’t discount that the tariffs are a means to personal enrichment.

The absurd rationale and design of the tariffs were only outdone by their implementation. Economists quickly deduced the administration was using an incorrect formula to produce the country-specific tariff rates. However, they’re changing so rapidly that it might not matter.

Just four days after the tariffs went into effect, the White House announced a ninety-day pause. China was the lone exception, receiving a 125% tariff, which was then increased to 145% to include tariffs for fentanyl, an illegal drug rarely disclosed at ports. Predictably, this has caused a trade war, with nations pledging retaliatory tariffs ranging from 25% to 125%.

As the public’s frustration builds with every point their 401(k)s fall, many wonder what the point of tariffs is and whether they can be used for good at all. UAW President Shawn Fain and Congressman Chris Deluzio—neither a fan of Trump—have praised some tariffs as necessary to protect American workers. While oppositional politics have Democrats condemning Trump’s plan, politicians from both parties would be wise not to overcorrect into anti-tariff absolutism.

Instead, they should propose a calculated trade policy that avoids the turmoil of Trump’s tariffs while fostering a dignified life for workers within and outside the United States.

Pair Tariffs with Domestic Investment

For most of the 20th century, Democrats favored tariffs to deter offshoring production to countries with lower wages and lax labor protections.

Before the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the United States tariffed the “value-added” on products shipped abroad for assembly and then re-imported for sale. This artificial cost cut into corporations’ profit margins, motivating companies to keep production in America. 

During the 1970s, a typical American automotive assembly plant used parts from over a thousand producers. But when NAFTA removed tariffs in 1994, production was consolidated in maquiladoras, foreign-owned factories in Mexico. By the turn of the millennium, American automotive plants only used between seven and eight hundred part producers, contributing to the estimated 850,000 American manufacturing jobs lost by NAFTA.

While targeted tariffs like those implemented before NAFTA are beneficial, Trump’s decision to tariff entire countries offers no advantage for workers. As the President’s plan taxes everything from the affected country, American consumers will have to pay higher prices for imported products, even if there is no American alternative worth protecting. Coffee is the foremost example of this problem. 

As coffee grows in tropical climates, only 1% of the coffee Americans drink is domestic. The rest is imported. As our leading coffee suppliers (Brazil, Colombia, and Vietnam) are now under heavy tariffs, Americans will be forced to pay higher prices, as there is not enough non-taxed domestic-grown coffee to go around. Here, Trump’s tariffs hurt American consumers as well as domestic and foreign coffee producers, who will see demand fall.

That’s why tariffs should be surgical, implemented only when the net benefit outweighs the costs. However, the U.S. can’t rely only on discouraging the consumption of foreign-made products. Washington must pair tariffs with domestic investments to create an effective trade policy that benefits workers and consumers alike. Fortunately, this concept is not novel, so policymakers don’t need to start from scratch. 

A good example of the tariff-and-invest strategy is America’s current tariffs on Asian solar panels, which were paired with the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) $60 billion investment in green energy manufacturing. 

In 2018, President Trump placed a tariff on Asian solar imports, which Biden preserved when he took office. Combined with the IRA’s benefits, the tariffs motivated the South Korean solar panel manufacturer Qcells (and its parent company Hanwha) to move production out of China and into the U.S. In 2023, Qcells expanded its plant in Dalton, GA, with another plant scheduled to open in nearby Cartersville later this year.

While the full impact of the IRA funding and solar tariffs will take time to materialize, they provide a sound foundation for a labor-friendly trade policy. To ensure future investments benefit workers as much as capitalists, Congress could require any company that receives public investments to have a unionized workforce and ban them from buying back stock. Washington could even emulate the German Codetermination Act of 1976, mandating that companies benefiting from public policy give workers a say in managerial decisions through board seats and supervisory councils. 

A Leahy Law for Labor

Whenever tariffs are suggested, many critics claim that while they may protect American workers, they harm laborers in the developing world by keeping jobs in the U.S. Even when made in good faith, this critique misunderstands that reasonable trade policy protects all workers, foreign and domestic. Once again, NAFTA serves as an adequate example. 

Prior to implementation, free trade advocates argued the deal would improve the quality of life for foreign workers, specifically Mexicans. In reality, NAFTA harmed workers on both sides of the Rio Grande. 

After two decades of free trade, Mexico’s real wages remained stagnant at 1994 levels. While discussions about NAFTA frequently center auto and manufacturing workers, they weren’t the only victims. With Mexico’s tariffs no longer in effect, American-subsidized corn flooded the country’s food markets, wiping out approximately 1.9 million Mexican agricultural jobs and driving undocumented immigration. 

As American companies are known to offshore manufacturing to take advantage of easily exploitable laborers, Congress should pass a Leahy Law for labor. Just as the Vermont Senator’s namesake legislation bars weapons sales to human rights abusers, the United States should set a standard for ethical labor and place punitive tariffs on any company that violates it. This would apply upward pressure on global labor standards and eliminate the cost-cutting benefit of offshoring manufacturing, incentivizing companies to keep production in the U.S. Again, Washington would not have to devise such a policy from scratch. 

For over a century, the International Labour Organization (ILO) has published recommended labor standards designed to help world leaders implement trade policy that respects the international working class. Recently updated in 2019, the ILO’s handbook provides guidance on everything from child labor (no dangerous work for anyone under eighteen) to appropriate wages (no company vouchers or coupons). There are even tailored recommendations for specific industries (fishers, dockworkers, etc.) and marginalized groups such as migrants, pregnant people, and indigenous communities. 

With the intent to uplift the quality of life for American and foreign workers, adopting these standards and setting substantial, punitive tariffs for companies that violate them would benefit both American workers and their foreign counterparts. With companies deterred from offshoring to employ cheap, vulnerable labor, the American working class can rest assured that exercising their collective bargaining rights won’t result in their employer shipping their jobs overseas. 

While Trump’s chaotic tariff plan warrants condemnation, politicians should avoid slipping into anti-tariff absolutism. Not only are tariffs an effective tool in the trade policy toolbox, but domestic politics demands addressing the consequences of free trade. Those willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater and expel tariffs for good would be wise to remember that Donald Trump’s opposition to NAFTA made him popular with working-class communities that were once reliable Democratic voters. Running on a full return to the lost free trade regime of the past might temporarily thwart Trump, but it will not end the social and economic frustration that birthed his reactionary movement. 

The Real Scandal Is Bombing Yemen, Not the Group Chat

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Matt Duss on the contradictions of Trump’s foreign policy.

Might Makes Right: Matt Duss on Trump’s Foreign Policy Doctrine, from Ukraine to Gaza

Watch the Full Interview with Democracy Now

Transcript:

Matt, welcome back to Democracy Now! Talk about what you understand at this point. At the time of this broadcast, the meeting between Zelensky and Trump has not taken place at the White House yet.

MATT DUSS: Right. Well, what we understand — what I understand right now is that a few weeks ago this deal on rare earth minerals actually originated with the Ukrainians in the hopes that this would be a way to entice Donald Trump into offering U.S. security guarantees. They understand, I think quite rightly, that Donald Trump is always interested in how he can profit, how he can — how he can cut deals. And the hope was that an exchange for some claim to Ukraine’s rare earth mineral wealth, this would translate into real military security guarantees from the United States to Ukraine’s security.

Donald Trump responded to that by saying, “I love this idea. I’m not going to give you any real security guarantees.” However, he does seem to imply that by giving the United States a stake in the future — in future profits in Ukraine, this, in itself, could translate into a form of security guarantee. He has talked about U.S. workers being present doing this work in Ukraine as a form of a guarantee, but believing that would also mean that Donald Trump, the United States would respond militarily to an attack by Russia that endangered those Americans. So, this is still unclear, as are the actual details of this minerals deal.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I mean, it’s very interesting, because you’d think the person who’s most concerned about this — I mean, Zelensky, for reasons of just how much of the rare earth minerals they would be promising to the U.S. — but the person who would be most concerned about this is the president of Russia, is Putin.

MATT DUSS: I mean, I think that’s right. You know, he obviously does not want the United States and Ukraine to be drawing into a closer relationship. So, again, this is why I say we really do need to wait and see the actual details of this deal. As of right now, it has Ukraine promising to invest some portion of their mineral wealth into a shared fund between Ukraine and the United States, and which would also be reinvested in Ukraine, although U.S. companies would be the ones developing this. Donald Trump sees this as a way of getting the United States, quote, “paid back” for its support for Ukraine’s defense. But you’re right: Anything that draws the U.S. and Ukraine closer is something that can’t make Vladimir Putin very happy.

AMY GOODMAN: During his first Cabinet meeting this week, President Trump was asked by reporters about tariffs on the European Union. And I’m asking you this as Trump just met, of course, with the British Prime Minister Starmer. They also talked about Ukraine. But this is particularly interesting, what he said, what Trump said about the European Union.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I mean, look, let’s be honest: The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States. That’s the purpose of it. And they’ve done a good job of it. But now I’m president.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the history and what Trump is talking about?

MATT DUSS: From his perspective, he clearly sees the EU as a way to just form a larger economic bloc that could compete with and possibly, as he said it, screw the United States. But, obviously, it’s much more complicated than that. Economic competition is part of it. I mean, coming out of World War II, there was a huge security and political component of this, Europe trying to draw together to coordinate and to talk more effectively to avoid a third round. We went through two world wars, you know, driven by European economic and military competition. So it was a real effort to avoid that. But Donald Trump simply sees it as a way, as he said, to screw the United States by separate European countries drawing together into one large economic formation that could make joint economic decisions.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, now President Trump is threatening tariffs, starting Tuesday, on Mexico, on Canada, increased tariffs on China, and threatening to tariff the whole European Union.

MATT DUSS: Right. I mean, he did this in his first term. You know, he sees tariffs as yet another way to extract concessions. It’s hard to know exactly how far he’s going to go, as we saw in his comments just now about Zelensky. Last week, he was calling Zelensky a dictator; this week, he can’t believe he said that. You know, frankly, I can’t believe he said that, either. So we’ll have to wait and see what he actually does.

I think what’s interesting about all these meetings we’ve been seeing from European leaders — Macron last week and Starmer just yesterday, and I’m sure we’ll see this from Zelensky today — is that they all understand that they do not want to be in public spats with Donald Trump. They are seeking ways to flatter him. They’re seeking ways to demonstrate that he can profit from a better relationship with their countries.

AMY GOODMAN: In your recent piece for The Guardian, where you talk about “What are we to make of Trump’s Ukraine policy?” you talk about discussions between the U.S. and Moscow in deciding the future of Ukraine. You also compare this to U.S.-Israel relations as both nations plan the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza. So, if you can talk about, in both cases, the first, leaving out Ukraine — though he’s meeting with Zelensky today and denying he said — of course, he did say that Zelensky is a dictator — but leaving out Ukraine and leaving out the Palestinians when it comes to their fate?

MATT DUSS: Right. I mean, I see a great deal of similarity, you know, a consistency to Trump’s approach. He sees the global order as one in which great powers, powerful countries make the decisions, and less powerful countries, less powerful communities and peoples simply have to live with the consequences. We saw that in the negotiation between the United States and Russia, hosted by Saudi Arabia, where Russia and the United States were essentially determining the future of Ukraine. We saw this in the appearance at the White House with Benjamin Netanyahu a few weeks ago, where he announced his proposal for the removal — essentially, the ethnic cleansing — of Gaza, a decision with huge consequences for the Palestinian people and for the region made without a Palestinian in sight. So, again, I think this is how Trump sees the world. The United States, by dint of its enormous economic and military power, sits with other great powers and simply determines the rules of the road, and weaker countries and other peoples who aren’t in the room have to deal with it.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, you saw this video, AI-generated video, that President Trump retweeted on his social media, on Truth Social, this horrific video about Gaza.

MATT DUSS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And it has Trump Gaza, a huge hotel. It has a gold statue of President Trump. It has Elon Musk walking down the streets. And it has Netanyahu and Trump sitting on beach chairs on the ocean with their cocktails. And finally, it has Trump dancing with an almost completely naked, her bottom naked, woman. What is this?

MATT DUSS: I don’t have a good answer for you. I don’t know who dropped acid and made that video. But, you know, it really —

AMY GOODMAN: The point isn’t who made it. The point is he tweeted it.

MATT DUSS: That’s right. No, that’s right. You know, clearly, that appealed to him. But, I mean, we saw this from his comments with Netanyahu, is that he sees the redevelopment, as he would say it, of Gaza as a source of potential profit, just as he sees this deal on rare earth minerals with Ukraine as a source of potential profit. In both of these cases, you always have to follow the money. You know, the thing to ask about every decision Donald Trump makes is: How does this translate into money in Donald Trump’s pocket? So, he clearly sees some advantage into this garish redevelopment of Gaza into, you know, one big Trump casino and golf course — of course, without any consideration for the people who actually live there right now.

What are we to make of Trump’s Ukraine policy? | The Guardian

It’s been quite a week for US foreign policy. Following a phone call last week between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, US and Russian delegates met in Saudi Arabia to smooth relations between the two countries and discuss possible paths to ending the war in Ukraine.

Ukraine was not invited to the talks. Quite reasonably, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said his country would not be bound by decisions taken without their participation. Trump responded to this by falsely claiming that Ukraine had started the war, and sought to undermine Zelenskyy’s legitimacy by claiming in a Truth Social post that he “refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls … A Dictator without Elections.”

In reality, Zelenskyy’s current approval rating is more than 50%, which is higher than Trump’s. And while it’s fair to ask whether Ukraine should have elections during the war, only a total rube would believe that Trump is bringing this up because he cares about democracy.

In terms of optics, the talks themselves are a clear victory for Putin, a validation of his well-known aspiration to restore the great power status to which he believes Russia is historically entitled. In this view, the future of Ukraine, and of Europe, is something to be determined by the United States and Russia irrespective of the populations involved.

For Trump’s part, it fits neatly with his modus operandi that Russia and the United States would get to make those decisions. Just as with the spectacle of the US president and Israeli prime minister a few weeks ago determining the future of the Palestinians who weren’t even in the room, in Trump’s jungle the powerful make decisions that the weak must simply accept, international law and human rights be damned.

You can say this for Trump: at least he’s consistent. The previous administration’s approach to two major wars – Ukraine and Gaza – was characterized by a glaring double standard in which Russia’s blatant violations of the laws of war were rightly condemned, while Israel’s commission of the same were shamefully excused and supported. The rights of the Ukrainian people to freedom and self-determination were treated as unquestionable, while those same rights for the Palestinian people were considered negotiable, if considered at all.

Trump now appears to be resolving this tension by throwing the Ukrainians under the bus along with the Palestinians. And as with his forced-displacement proposal for Gaza, he seems to see Russian talks over Ukraine as primarily a business venture, with the state department readout of the meeting highlighting possible new “investment opportunities” in warming US-Russia relations. (This shows again how wildly off the mark the Washington establishment’s “isolationist” criticisms of Trump have been. In truth, Trump is much more an old-school imperialist, always looking for new spoils to be enjoyed. The amount of time and energy devoted to the idea that Trump is a “Russian asset” obscured the more prosaic homegrown danger posed by his predatory authoritarian capitalism.)

That said, it’s important not to overreact to these talks by dismissing the notion of diplomacy to end the war, nor lose sight of the larger problem in what Trump is doing and how these foreign policy moves tie into his broader agenda. While Trump’s comments indicate a troubling direction of travel and a propaganda victory for Putin, that in and of itself is not enough reason not to avoid negotiations. We should be talking to our adversaries more, not less. The question is what we get from them. And if this initial dialogue helps lead to a durable end to the war, that’s positive. The details will matter.

As will Ukrainian buy-in. There’s some evidence that Ukrainians could support an agreement that comes short of total victory. According to a November Gallup poll, 52% of Ukrainians would like to see their country negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible. According to the same poll, more than half of this group (52%) believe that Ukraine should be open to making some territorial concessions as part of such an agreement.

But for any such agreement to be more than just a temporary halt to conflict, it will need to ensure Ukraine’s security and sovereignty. Simply imposing an agreement that returns Ukraine to Russian vassal state status is not only unjust, but it will also not work. No people would accept decisions about their fate made over their heads, nor should they be expected to. The Ukrainians won’t, just as the Palestinians won’t.

European allies have responded with understandable alarm to Trump’s abrupt policy shift, even if they have no excuse not to have seen it coming. Europeans can no more be cut out of negotiations over the future of their region than Ukraine can be excised from talks over its own fate. If this latest shock finally, at long last, spurs our European allies to take greater responsibility for their own region’s security, that would be a positive outcome. But given how quickly the urgency of past “turning points” has faded, we shouldn’t hold our breath.

The tone and choice of location for this week’s talks in Riyadh (itself a propaganda victory for the Saudi regime) are just one piece of a larger picture in which the United States is now aligning itself more fully with the global forces of ethnonationalism, authoritarianism and oligarchy. As the Trump administration draws closer to rightwing autocrats internationally, it is also hard at work here at home dismantling the administrative state and divvying up the spoils among its own oligarch allies.

Until Democrats are willing to look more honestly and critically at the influence that wealthy interests have on their own party and their governing choices, they won’t be able to offer a compelling and convincing alternative.

Read in The Guardian.

Trump Would Make America Greater by Reducing Pentagon Spending, Nuclear Weapons

In response to President Trump’s comments suggesting denuclearization and reducing defense spending in line with Russia and China, Center for International Policy executive vice-president Matt Duss issued the following statement:

“If Trump is serious about significantly reducing nuclear arsenals and Pentagon spending in step with Russia and China — lawmakers and civil society should stand ready to help do it right, thereby improving national security and human security in the US and globally.

There is no good reason to continue our current trajectory of proliferating nuclear weapons and ever-increasing defense budgets, half of which goes to giant defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, with minimal transparency or accountability. This practice has raised numerous concerns regarding waste and corruption. It is primarily greed, self-interest and a lack of political will that propagates the nearly $1 trillion –half of our discretionary budget—that goes annually to these programs. These spending levels make us less, not more, secure by making conflict more likely and fueling the flawed strategy of American hegemony behind so many of the costly US foreign policy boondoggles of the 21st century and the nuclear near-misses of the last 80 years.

The Trump administration has not always made good on past pledges –including a similar suggestion in his first term— and many of the promises upon which he’s acted do great damage, but this is a promise he should keep for the good of Americans and people around the world.”

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