Tag: perpetual war

The Chief Legacy of 9/11

The chief legacy of 9/11 is as obvious as it is tragic: a state of permanent warfare in the United States, both abroad and in the “homeland” (a term not used in normal discourse before the 9/11 attacks), with millions dead and displaced for no defensible reason.

If you’re 25 years old or younger in America, you’ve never known a time when your country wasn’t at war. “Peace” is no longer seen as desirable, let alone possible. War is seen as America’s natural state; a land of warriors are we, imbued with a “warrior ethos” that applauds kicking other countries when their down and beating the snot out of them just because we can.

Meanwhile, in the “homeland,” surveillance grows ever more intrusive by the day as agents of ICE kick down doors and haul people away to detention centers that are being rapidly expanded. Personal privacy is increasingly a thing of the past as the government wraps itself in a shroud of secrecy that makes oversight and accountability well-nigh impossible.

The global war on terror has become a war of terror. War begets more war, with no end in sight.

Re-reading the Atlantic Monthly 150th anniversary issue from November 2007, I came across this gem of a quote from America’s 9/11 mayor, Rudolph Giuliani:

We’ve got to be patient and committed [in Iraq], but we’ve got to multitask… We’ve got to talk about Iran – Iran is more dangerous than Iraq – and we have got to get the job done in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.

That was Giuliani in July of 2007 when he ran as a Republican presidential candidate. In America, that’s how you get treated as a “serous” candidate for the presidency – by urging for war not just with Iraq and Afghanistan but with Pakistan and Iran as well. We can “multitask” our wars! Truly a sign of American greatness.

Well, Giuliani’s dream has come true – we are talking a lot about Iran today.

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When War Comes Home: A Constitutional Warning

A failed war does not end when the drones stop flying. It creates a new danger: A government that refuses to admit defeat and a president who, having failed abroad, seeks muscular victories elsewhere.

The war against Iran is a case study in the limits of military power, the dangers of presidential overreach and the enduring wisdom of the Constitution’s separation of powers. It was unauthorized, unconstitutional, illegal, strategically incoherent and — by the standards by which wars must be judged — a geopolitical failure.

The American people were told that force would achieve clear objectives. Iran would be compelled to surrender. Somehow, American security would be enhanced. The region would become more stable.

Instead, the United States expended enormous resources, consumed scarce munitions, deepened regional instability and failed to produce the political outcome President Donald Trump promised. Senior military officials just last week warned him that extending large-scale operations risked exhausting critical military capabilities and weakening America’s ability to respond elsewhere.

The United States can destroy buildings, eliminate targets, deploy aircraft, ships, missiles, drones and troops anywhere on the planet. But war is not a video game in which the destruction of enemy assets automatically produces political surrender. War is a contest of wills, societies, culture and endurance.

And here is the constitutional question that should have been asked before the first bomb was dropped: Who gave the president the authority to begin this war? The Constitution did not.

Article I, Section 8 gives Congress — not the president — the power to declare war. The framers deliberately rejected the British model in which kings could drag nations into conflicts based upon personal judgment, ambition or political convenience. James Madison warned that the executive branch was “the branch of power most interested in war,” and therefore the Constitution placed the decision to enter war outside the president’s constitutional reach.

The president is commander in chief. He commands forces after lawful congressional decisions have been made. He does not possess the power to transform his title into a personal authority to begin wars.

That principle has been repeatedly recognized by the Supreme Court. In cases such as Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, the Court rejected the idea that President Harry Truman had unlimited power simply because he claimed national security. Justice Robert Jackson’s famous concurrence warned that executive power is most dangerous when it operates in a “zone of twilight” where presidents attempt to expand authority beyond constitutional boundaries and without congressional concurrence.

The Iran war belongs precisely in that twilight — where executive ambition collides with constitutional restraint.

The administration may argue that modern threats require flexibility. That argument has been made by presidents of both parties for decades. But flexibility is not the same as unlimited authority. The Constitution was written for difficult moments, not easy ones. It was designed to restrain presidents even when they believe they have compelling reasons to act.

The military failure abroad has created a political dilemma at home. A president who promised victory must now confront the reality that victory was never achieved.

The danger is what happens next.

History teaches that political leaders who suffer public humiliation abroad often seek demonstrations of strength elsewhere. Foreign-policy failure can produce domestic overreach. Leaders who cannot achieve the desired result overseas may attempt to prove their power through actions at home.

That is where the war comes home.

The president, frustrated by military limitations, may turn toward radical immigration enforcement, Supreme Court-prohibited tariffs, statutorily prohibited domestic deployments of military forces, stealing foreign-owned oil, and assertions of executive authority that collide with free speech and free association.

But the Constitution does not permit a president to substitute disappointment for law.

The Fifth Amendment guarantees that no person — not just Americans — shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. The Sixth Amendment guarantees all persons — not just Americans — from whom the government seeks life, liberty or property the right to a public trial before an impartial jury, and other constitutional protections. These protections apply not because accused persons are necessarily innocent but because government power is too dangerous to operate without restraints.

Evidence is not conviction. Accusation is not guilt. Presidential assertion is not judicial judgment.

The executive branch cannot simply identify alleged criminals in speedboats or elsewhere, declare them enemies and impose punishment without trial. That is a system the American Revolution rejected.

The same principle applies to the use of military force inside the United States. The founders were deeply suspicious of standing armies being used for law enforcement. That suspicion produced constitutional protections and later statutes prohibiting the military’s role in civilian law enforcement.

The military exists to defend the nation from foreign threats. It is not a presidential police force.

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Repeat After Media: Data Centers Are Wonderful and Good

If you follow conservative media and Republican politicians, you could be convinced that any opposition to AI data centers is not due to their sprawling footprint, greed for electricity or insatiable need for cooling water. Rather, it’s the result of a Chinese Communist plot.

These data centers are dreadfully unpopular. “Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed,” according to Gallup (5/13/26). From YouGov (9/1/26): “About half (51%) of Americans say that the construction of new data centers is a bad thing for the country. Only 20% say it is a good thing.”

The reasons for this opposition is that these centers put enormous strain on the electrical grid, need loads of water for cooling, can be extremely noisy and take up lots of space in communities. “The environmental footprint of data centers already rivals some of the world’s largest countries,” AP (6/3/26) reported.

Much like how some liberals have convinced themselves that MAGA and American nationalism are fueled by Kremlin disinformation, the right-wing line is that communities opposing these giant data centers are motivated not by their own interests or common sense, but some unseen Beijing-manufactured psychosis.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) demanded that the Justice Department “investigate foreign influence efforts targeting the buildout of American AI infrastructure,” as he suspected that a “network of foreign actors, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is attempting to manipulate US policy and public opinion on data centers.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), in the words of Newsmax (9/2/26), believes “China is helping fuel opposition to artificial intelligence data centers in the United States.” “Beijing has a strategic interest in convincing Americans to slow construction of the infrastructure needed to compete in the global AI race,” the far-right outlet paraphrased.

The Washington Examiner‘s Facebook page (8/30/26) featured a cartoon from A.F. Branco depicting a Chinese data center running a psy-op on Americans who oppose data centers.

The National Interest (9/1/26) said:

Chinese entities have a long history of collaborating with far-left causes, and they have again found common ground in opposing the construction of data centers. They are pushing mutually reinforcing messages that criticize a host of alleged environmental and ethical concerns as reasons to disempower American growth in a critical economic and competitive sector. Officials at the federal, state and local levels should recognize this noxious alliance as they field criticism of data centers.

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Palestine Action: From UK Direct Action to US Terror Designation

On August 26, 2026, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control designated Palestine Action, a UK organization proscribed as a terrorist group in July 2025. The designation also included the transnational group Masar Badil and the Italy-based digital services provider Autistici Inventati as part of a broader action against the growing threat of violent far-left terrorism.

Palestine Action was founded in 2020 by Huda Ammori and Richard Barnard as a UK-based direct-action group. It describes itself as targeting “corporate enablers of the Israeli military-industrial complex” to “make it impossible for these companies to profit from the oppression of Palestinians.”

The group has targeted Israeli and Western defense manufacturers, a global logistics firm, a British military base, the office of a pro-Israel advocacy organization, a university, and a golf resort owned by President Trump.

Since its founding, the group has forced the permanent closure of Elbit’s Oldham factory and pushed the company to abandon its London headquarters. In 2021, American activist Max Geller was arrested in Kent for chaining himself to a van outside an Elbit-owned weapons factory. In 2022, the group attacked a factory in Glasgow, causing what UK officials later described as millions of dollars in damage.

In May 2023, activists broke into the Kuehne + Nagel offices at Leicester’s Meridian Business Park. They spray-painted the building and dismantled equipment, including phones and computers. In a separate action, a man drove to the gate of Elbit’s UAV Tactical Systems factory with his hands glued to the steering wheel while a woman locked herself inside the car. The protest camp at the site brought the total number of arrests to 43.

In May 2024, activists at the same business park rammed a truck through the factory’s perimeter fence. They climbed onto the roof, broke through it with tools, and sprayed red paint across the building. Seven people were arrested.

On August 6, 2024, seven people aged 20 to 51 broke into Elbit’s Filton facility near Bristol. They were charged with criminal damage, violent disorder, and aggravated burglary. One was also charged with causing grievous bodily harm with intent for allegedly striking a police officer with a sledgehammer.

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25 Years Ago, 9/11 Triggered a US Crusade of Torture

A quarter-century has passed since the terrorist attack that killed almost 3,000 people in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. During the first seven years after that mass atrocity, Pentagon spending doubled. The aftermath of 9/11 was also a huge boost for “the intelligence community.” Despite – and because of – their failure to prevent the carnage on that day, the CIA and the National Security Agency as well as 14 smaller spy agencies boomed with enormous jolts of funds.

Along the way, some line items paid for torture that persisted during the George W. Bush presidency under the euphemism of “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

The most publicized location was Guantánamo on the island of Cuba. There, “the U.S. opened the offshore detention facility in an attempt to evade the rule of law,” the London-based organization Freedom From Torture reports. “In the name of the U.S.’s ‘War on Terror,’ people deemed by the U.S. to be ‘enemy combatants’ were detained at the facility. Many were tortured and denied basic human rights and due process… Since the first detainees arrived in 2002, Guantánamo Bay has imprisoned 780 men and boys from 48 countries… Yet only 16 detainees have ever been convicted of a crime – just 2 percent.”

Despite public pressure, Bush vetoed a version of the Intelligence Authorization Act in March 2008 that would have required CIA interrogators to adhere to Army Field Manual regulations. As soon as Barack Obama became president, he issued an executive order rescinding the free hand for the CIA director on interrogations that Bush had reaffirmed in a July 2007 order. Obama’s directive removed the CIA’s detention power and required the agency to follow Army Field Manual rules.

Yet five and a half years went by before President Obama acknowledged, in his notable words, “We tortured some folks.” He told a news conference: “When we engaged in some of these enhanced interrogation techniques, techniques that I believe and I think any fair-minded person would believe were torture, we crossed a line.”

The acknowledgement came four months before the long-awaited release of a report in December 2014 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. While heavily redacted, it was a political indictment of torture. “CIA personnel, aided by two outside contractors, decided to initiate a program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation techniques in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our values,” wrote the committee’s chair, Senator Dianne Feinstein. Among the report’s conclusions:

  • “The CIA’s justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.”
  • “The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.”
  • “The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program.”
  • “Two contract psychologists devised the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques and played a central role in the operation, assessments, and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.”

Months later, the New England Journal of Medicine summed up aspects of the Senate committee’s findings: “Medical professionals, primarily private contractors, filled four basic roles at the black sites: clearing terrorist suspects as ‘medically fit’ for torture; monitoring torture to prevent death and treat injuries; developing novel torture methods; and actually torturing prisoners. All these actions were taken only after CIA and U.S. Department of Justice attorneys assured the medical professionals that they had immunity from prosecution and would not be held legally responsible for violating U.S. and international law against torture as long as they used the techniques approved in legal memos (since withdrawn) written to justify their actions. Lawyers agreed to provide immunity assurances that specific torture techniques were legal ‘enhanced interrogation’ methods only if the physicians assured them that they would be present to prevent permanent harm to prisoners. The CIA opened more than a dozen black sites around the world after 9/11, in which at least 117 prisoners were held; 39 of these prisoners were subjected to one or more torture techniques.”

At least hundreds more “suspected terrorists” who’d been captured by the U.S. were turned over to ruthless governments. “If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan,” former CIA officer Bob Baer said. “If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear – never to see them again – you send them to Egypt.”

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A New Cold War for a Dying World Order

Washington is more united than is often thought. Despite the ruptures with an imagined past that have been said to have been caused by the chaos agent in the White House, the foreign policy consensus (underwritten by the national religion of American exceptionalism) has shown itself to possess a remarkable resiliency in the three and a half decades since the end of the first Cold War (1946-1988). There today exists a broad consensus across the American political spectrum that it is Washington’s duty (to say nothing of its ability – now for the first time being seriously questioned thanks to Trump’s ongoing debacle in Iran) to suit up and take the field in a global fight to defend ‘democracy’ which, as we have been incessantly informed for a decade starting in 2016, is ‘under attack’ (the starting point of the great ‘democracy panic’ is hardly a coincidence). As the progressive standard bearer Bernie Sanders put it back in 2017, “in the struggle of democracy versus authoritarianism, we intend to win.”

The architect of the Cold War containment doctrine, George F. Kennan, once observed that “there is nothing in nature more egocentric than the embattled democracy.” And the elected (and, perhaps more importantly, unelected) leaders of our own “embattled democracy” with over 2 million men and women under arms; over 5,000 nuclear warheads; surrounded by 3,000 miles of ocean to the east and 12,000 miles of ocean to the west, is widely thought to remain vulnerable to coercion by an ‘Axis of Authoritarianism’ led by China and Russia – with a supporting (and growing) cast made up of Iran, North Korea, and occasionally, depending on the politics of the analyst, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and certain political parties in Germany, Hungary, Italy, and France.

The prevailing narrative has a shapeshifting quality to it: some days we are informed that the global authoritarian threat is driven by shadowy agents of disinformation employed by the Kremlin; at other times, the threat comes in the form of authoritarian oligarchs and authoritarian kleptocrats. But at all times, our democracy – and the right of our “allies” such as Ukraine to practice democracy – is said to be under threat by the authoritarian axis. This, then, is the narrative, and in Washington, as in America at large, it is the narrative that counts, never mind the substance. As the essayist and president of the Simone Weil Center, Paul Grenier, has elsewhere observed, to the extent that there is a debate over foreign policy in this country, “what we universally observe is the substitution of narrative for reality.” Such preferred narratives “either advance the interests of this or that segment of the power elite, or advance the careers of this or that sector of the national security bureaucracy. That these narratives typically ignore what is true and what is in touch with reality turns out to be of little concern.”

Cold Wars, New and Old

The Cold Wars, both new and old, by which I mean those wars of ’necessity’ waged by Washington on behalf of the Western democracies against, respectively, ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘communism,’ have been, from the first, a project of the American elite dating back to the administration of Harry S. Truman.

On January 31, 1968, at the very moment US troops were under furious assault half a world away in Saigon and Hue, a German academic named Hans Magnus Enzensberger was composing a letter of resignation from his position at Wesleyan University in the rather more congenial environs of Middletown, Connecticut. He had seen enough of America; it was time to move on. Enzensberger felt that “most Americans have no idea of what they and their country look like to the outside world.” And Vietnam was not, as many believed, “an unfortunate accident” made by otherwise well-intentioned men; it was, rather, “the most visible outcome… the bloodiest test case of a coherent international policy which applied to five continents.” It was a project of an American “ruling class” which he considered to be “the most dangerous body of men on earth.” “In one way or another,” wrote Enzensberger, “this class is a threat to anyone who is not part of it… its aim is to establish its political, economic, and military predominance over every other power in the world.”

Same as it ever was.

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Israel Orders UK Jerusalem Consulate Closed And Expels British Diplomats Over West Bank Sanctions

Israel began to take action against Britain on Tuesday after twelve Western countries including Britain imposed trade restrictions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Israel ordered the closure of the British consulate in Jerusalem within 30 days and expelled British representatives from two international coordination centers in the country, including the International Support Center for Gaza in Kiryat Gat.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar announced the retaliatory package after UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband confirmed that Britain — joined by France, Canada, and nine other countries — would ban imports of all goods originating from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, along with certain services including financing, construction, infrastructure, and real estate related to those settlements.

Sa’ar said the UK representatives at the Gaza coordination centers would be expelled within a month, British training operations for Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank would be terminated, and more than a dozen British politicians would be barred from entering Israel.

The UK had briefed the Trump administration before the announcement. U.S. officials confirmed Trump was briefed but that the White House did not ask London to hold off — signaling Washington’s ambivalence. American Ambassador Mike Huckabee said the U.S. “takes a different approach to the settlements” but expressed concern and said the intent could be achieved by other means.

Israel’s government called the sanctions “a political attempt to impair our sovereignty and prevent us from defending our citizens and interests.” A statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office added: “These measures will not succeed in deterring us.”

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Israeli Legal Group Unveils ‘Self-Defense’ App to Protect IDF Veterans from Foreign Arrest Campaigns

Israeli legal advocacy group Shurat HaDin has launched a new app designed to protect Israel Defense Forces (IDF) veterans from efforts to arrest them while traveling abroad, with the organization’s president warning that pro-Palestinian groups are actively tracking Israeli soldiers and pursuing legal action against them in foreign countries.

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, founder and president of Shurat HaDin-Israel Law Center, told Breitbart News that the threat has become serious enough that Israeli diplomatic officials are regularly warning veterans about potential efforts to detain them.

“It’s a real danger because pro-Palestinian organizations, like Hind Rajab or the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, are tracing IDF soldiers,” Darshan-Leitner said. “Every week there are soldiers who get warnings from the Israeli consulate or the Israeli ambassador to leave a certain country because of an arrest warrant that these organizations are seeking against them.”

Shurat HaDin launched the app, called Shachpatz — Hebrew for “bulletproof vest” — in late August to give veterans a centralized system for preparing to travel, receiving warnings while abroad, and obtaining assistance if they encounter legal trouble.

The app incorporates travel warnings and alerts from Israel’s Foreign Ministry and IDF, legal information, emergency and diplomatic contacts, a pre-travel checklist, and instructions explaining what travelers should do if questioned or detained.

Darshan-Leitner said the organization has also assembled a “war room” of more than 600 lawyers across 17 countries prepared to provide emergency legal assistance.

“If something happens, we put it on the app. If somebody else hears about it, they immediately put it on the app,” she explained. “It has instructions on what to do to try to avoid such an incident, how to take care of yourself before you travel, what to be alert to when you travel, and what to do if you get interrogated or arrested.”

Travelers can also report their own experiences, allowing Israelis to alert one another about hostile incidents or identify destinations where they have been treated particularly well.

“You know, they protected us, so now we have to protect them,” Darshan-Leitner said. The goal, she added, is to create “a community of travelers from Israel” capable of warning one another when problems arise.

Darshan-Leitner identified Belgium, South Africa, Canada, Thailand, and the Netherlands among countries where she believes Israeli veterans face heightened legal risks, pointing particularly to countries whose legal systems recognize forms of universal jurisdiction.

She sharply rejected the premise that foreign courts should be policing the conduct of Israeli soldiers, arguing that Israel maintains its own system for investigating allegations of misconduct by its forces.

“Israel does not need a foreign country to govern its soldiers,” she said. “Israel has a very strong law-enforcement system that prosecutes soldiers if they need to.”

Darshan-Leitner argued that the groups pursuing Israeli veterans are ultimately interested less in securing convictions than in generating the spectacle of an Israeli soldier being detained abroad.

“All they need to claim a victory is a photo of an IDF soldier arrested in a foreign airport,” she said.

Such an arrest, she warned, could have repercussions far beyond the individual involved by making reservists reluctant to travel and potentially causing young Israelis preparing for military service to reconsider joining combat units.

“People who served in reserve 300 days or 600 days and now want to go on vacation to chill out shouldn’t be afraid to go everywhere in the world,” she said.

Shurat HaDin’s involvement in the issue predates the current war. Darshan-Leitner said the organization has spent roughly 15 years fighting legal actions targeting Israeli soldiers and officials, including proceedings involving the International Criminal Court.

The organization has also pursued legal actions of its own against Hamas and Palestinian Authority officials and challenged international legal proceedings against Israeli officials.

Earlier this year, Shurat HaDin filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court against Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and other senior Spanish officials, alleging that Madrid enabled Iran’s “terror machine” through the export of dual-use components to the Islamic Republic.

Darshan-Leitner described Shachpatz as an extension of that broader legal campaign, but one aimed directly at protecting individual Israelis before an attempted detention can become an international incident.

“This time, the act is actually an act of self-defense,” she said, “to defend the IDF soldiers and do anything possible in order to prevent such arrest warrants.”

Because Shachpatz had been available for only about a week when Darshan-Leitner spoke with Breitbart News, the app itself had not yet been used to intervene in an attempted arrest, although Shurat HaDin had previously assisted Israelis facing legal threats abroad through its existing network.

Thousands of people had already downloaded the app, she said.

“We don’t want to see it happen,” Darshan-Leitner said of an arrest attempt requiring the app’s emergency resources, “but I’m sure it will become handy, unfortunately.”

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Ukraine Peace Talks: No Deal Reached, More War Expected

U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner held more than three hours of talks with Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Sept. 5, marking their first visit to the city since January.

In recent months, the war in Ukraine has received less attention as Washington has focused U.S. foreign policy and military resources on the conflict with Iran. The Moscow visit was intended to revive negotiations that had been stalled for nearly eight months.

The Kremlin meeting concluded without an immediate announcement about its outcome. Putin’s adviser Yuri Ushakov described the talks as “constructive and extremely frank.” He said the two sides discussed resolving the war, economic issues, and potential “mutually beneficial Russian-American projects.”

Ushakov told Russian reporters that “note was made of the Russian army’s tangible advances in the combat zone.” The passive, unattributed phrasing is typical of Kremlin readouts of closed-door diplomatic sessions. Moscow was placing its military progress on the record with the Americans, likely to project strength and shape its negotiating position.

Ushakov added that the talks needed to address the “root causes” of the conflict. “Root causes” is longstanding Kremlin language, used since before the 2022 invasion, for Russia’s underlying justifications for the war.

These include Ukraine’s NATO aspirations and broader Western military alignment; Ukraine’s governance and political orientation, which Russia has at times framed around “denazification” and the protection of Russian speakers; and the post-Cold War security architecture in Europe, which Russia argues expanded NATO into its sphere.

In this framing, Russia’s demands go beyond retaining the territory it currently occupies. They also include Ukraine renouncing NATO membership and reducing the size of its armed forces. Moscow separately said it remains confident that it can achieve its military objective of seizing the remainder of eastern Ukraine.

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Washington Is Underwriting the Proliferation It Went to War To Stop

The Trump administration sent Congress its civil nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia. Asked what the deal permits, the president wrote: There will be no enrichment of material. His own Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, has said the opposite. The agreement gives Riyadh a pathway to enrich uranium on its own soil, and in doing so the potential for a Saudi nuclear Bomb. To placate fears Wright has put enrichment years down the road but not in doubt. Wright is describing the document. Trump is describing a country he is at war with to prevent from doing exactly this.

The war is meanwhile six months old and the reader knows its shape. American and Israeli aircraft killed the Supreme Leader of Iran in February to end all Iranian enrichment and prevent Iran from ever building a weapon. It has not ended. A settlement deadline passed on 17 August with the president in no rush, and his Treasury Secretary now promises an economic D-Day, the toughest sanctions in the country’s history, on the concession that the bombing did not do what was promised. Enrichment is the thing the war is supposedly being waged for. It is also the thing the Saudi contract is for.

The agreement is a 123 agreement, the legal instrument that lets American firms build a foreign country’s nuclear program, and the Energy Department’s announcement calls it peaceful, upholding the highest standards of nonproliferation. Not so fast. Past American deals kept enrichment out of the recipient’s hands, because low-enriched fuel for a reactor and the highly enriched metal of a warhead come off the same cascades; the separative work that makes the first does most of the work of the second. The Saudi deal instead preserves the enrichment option and, on the reporting, opens a route to reprocess spent fuel, the plutonium road to a bomb that runs parallel to the uranium one. In place of international inspection it substitutes a bilateral arrangement whose terms are not public.

There is a standard for this, and it was set relatively recently and right next door. When a US firm built the Emirates’ reactors in 2009, the UAE volunteered the strictest safeguards on offer, renounced enrichment and reprocessing outright, and today draws a quarter of its electricity from nuclear power without owning a single centrifuge. Saudi Arabia has refused that bargain. It has declined to sign the Additional Protocol, the enhanced-inspection regime that 144 states accept and that lets the International Atomic Energy Agency hunt for undeclared sites, and in 2024 it rescinded even the small-quantities protocol it once held. The country being handed the fuel cycle is the one refusing the cameras. The country being bombed to give up enrichment, Iran, was under those cameras, and before the war the IAEA director general said there was no proof of a systematic Iranian move toward a weapon.

The American reassurances offered for the Saudi deal deserve scrutiny. The deal is called conditional: the president announced, the day after his own Secretary signed it, that it would proceed only if Saudi Arabia joined the Abraham Accords and normalized relations with Israel, a term absent from the agreed text. A condition attached by afterthought can be lifted by afterthought. The deal is called subject to congressional review: in practice, lawmakers have ninety days to pass a resolution killing it, the clock can be stopped and has been stopped before, and if the two chambers do nothing it takes effect. Congress must muster a veto-proof majority to halt what it never voted for. Silence is assent. Some of the members are not silent. In November a group of them wrote to the secretary of state warning that the deal could enable Saudi Arabia to produce a nuclear bomb, and reminding him that he had once, as a senator, demanded the gold standard himself.

To see why enrichment is a reason for war in Tehran and a business line in Riyadh, look at what Saudi Arabia has already bought. In September last year, days after Israel bombed Doha and Washington did nothing, the kingdom signed a mutual defense pact with Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state that never joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty and holds an estimated 170 weapons. Any attack on one, the pact says, is an attack on both. Asked whether it covered the arsenal, a Saudi official called it a comprehensive agreement encompassing all military means. Pakistan’s defense minister said the capabilities his country holds will be made available; once the sentence had done its work he said nuclear weapons were not on the radar. The saying and the unsaying are not a muddle to be resolved. They are the product. Riyadh takes the deterrent value of a Pakistani umbrella and the deniability of an official denial, and the world is left to guess. This is called strategic ambiguity and has been applied by Israel for decades. Three weeks ago the arrangement widened: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, extending the same all-for-one clause across three states, with Pakistani troops and aircraft already deployed on Saudi soil.

This is the government the United States has decided can be trusted with enrichment. Its crown prince has said, on the record and more than once, that if Iran gets a weapon Saudi Arabia will follow suit. Its own officials tie the nuclear question openly to Iran’s. It shelters under a foreign bomb it will not confirm and refuses the inspections Iran accepted. Nonproliferation experts read the deal for what it is, a US-blessed hedging strategy toward a bomb option, and say so.

There is one more fact, and it does not go in a footnote, because the war was sold on the memory of exactly this kind of fact. Fifteen of the nineteen men who flew airliners into American buildings on 11 September 2001 were citizens of Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden was born in the kingdom, a son of one of its richest families. None of the nineteen was Iranian. The state that produced the hijackers and the man who directed them is being handed a path to enrichment. The state that produced none of them is being currently bombed back into the stone age.

What connects the two decisions is money, and it runs through one family. Jared Kushner ran Middle East policy from the Trump White House and cultivated the Saudi crown prince throughout it. Six months after he left office, the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund put $2 billion into his new and untested firm. The fund’s own screening panel had recommended against it, finding the operation unsatisfactory in all aspects and the fees excessive. It was overruled by the fund’s chairman, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the man the CIA concluded had ordered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi lured into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and cut apart, and whom Kushner had defended. The kingdom pays Kushner’s firm about 1.25 percent of $2 billion a year on that money, – do the math. The House committee that examined the arrangement called it the appearance of a quid pro quo for his foreign-policy work. The president’s son-in-law draws a continuous income from the Saudi state while the president tells the public, falsely, the Saudi state is not getting the thing it wants most, enrichment.

No investigation, if there was one, has shown the money bought the policy. What can be set down is narrower and still hard to look away from. A denial as flat as no enrichment, said over a document that permits enrichment, by a man whose Energy Secretary confirms the pathway and whose family is on the Saudi payroll, is not the language of a president who has not considered the future the document contains.

Set the pieces in a row and the shape stops looking like contradiction. The United States is bombing one country to deny it enrichment while writing enrichment into a contract for another. It invokes nonproliferation in the press release for the act that proliferates. It strikes the state that admits inspectors and sells the fuel cycle to the state that turns them away. It bombs the country that produced no hijackers and arms the country that produced fifteen. Each decision has a reason, and the reasons are not the ones on the label.

The label is where the empire now does its work. A power able to enforce nonproliferation would not need to kill a head of state to attempt it, and would not find itself six months later reaching for sanctions because the strikes had failed. Its clients are interpreting the weakness for exactly what it is. They watched Doha burn and Washington stay silent, watched their own refineries burn and the guarantor offer only more war, and concluded that the protector cannot protect. So they bought a Pakistani deterrent and widened it into a three-state pact, and they extracted an American enrichment pathway as the price of a normalization the president wanted more than they did. The order the United States built and policed for eighty years is fraying at the hands of the government that claims to enforce it, and the fraying does not stop at the Gulf. The same erosion of trust in the American umbrella is visible in Seoul and in Warsaw. What a disarmament body called a tradable security service is what the end of an order looks like from inside it. The enforcer has begun to auction the thing it once forbade, because the auction is the leverage it has left.

No enrichment, the president wrote. In a few years, when the feasibility study is filed and the centrifuges the contract allows begin to turn, the sentence will read as the first official confirmation that the enrichment was always coming.

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