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It should come as no surprise that Leo dedicated the first encyclical of his papacy to AI. Just two days after his election last May, the Chicago-born pontiff met with the cardinals who elected him and offered some insights into the choice of his name. He recalled his predecessor Pope Leo XIII’s landmark 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, which addressed many of the urgent questions that the world faced during the Industrial Revolution.

Leo XIII took note of what was happening in the world around him: In London, the then-financial center of the world, industry was booming but the divide between the rich and the poor was widening, which led to protests against harsh working conditions. In France, construction on the Eiffel Tower—meant to showcase the heights of human progress—was in full force while the country’s factories were rife with disease from unsafe and unsanitary conditions. And in New York, the Gilded Age’s booming new industries and railroads changed the face of the city and the country, bringing incredible wealth to the hands of a few. At the same time, poverty and desperate housing conditions prompted urgent calls for urban reform.

With all of this in mind, Leo XIII waded into the fray with a document condemning “the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses.” In that 1891 letter, he rejected an economic model that concentrated capital in the hands of a select few and supported workers’ rights to fair wages, trade unions, and safer working conditions. “All men are equal; there is here no difference between rich and poor, master and servant, ruler and ruled, ‘for the same is Lord over all,’” he wrote. “No man may with impunity outrage that human dignity which God Himself treats with great reverence.”

It was a revolutionary era, and Leo XIII left no doubt as to whom the church was siding with. Now, more than a century later, another Leo is surveying the world in the face of what he describes as a “fourth industrial revolution” that poses, as he told the cardinals that elected him, “new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”

To be clear, Magnifica Humanitas is not a message of doomerism. It recognizes that AI has incredible potential for economic, educational, and health care benefits. But this will not happen, Leo warned, unless digital infrastructures and algorithms are designed to protect society’s most fragile and offer equitable access to opportunities. The document is clear-eyed about how AI could turbocharge mass job displacement that could eliminate the middle class and deal a serious blow to young people’s futures, how AI data centers can lead to worrisome environmental degradation, and how vulnerable populations are likely to be the most threatened, all under the banner of “progress.”

“Technological innovations, including artificial intelligence, are not neutral, for they can either foster participation and justice or they can exacerbate inequality, control and exclusion,” Leo wrote. “For this reason, they must be evaluated by asking a crucial question: Do they truly help individuals and peoples to become more humane and fraternal, while respecting our common home and future generations?”

In his encyclical, Leo asked world leaders and everyday citizens alike to ensure that new technologies are used for the flourishing of all instead of plowing ahead unheedingly and risking dehumanization. Part of what makes us human, the pope writes, is accepting that human beings have limits and weaknesses. AI, and its pursuit of perfection, control, and automation, risks erasing that.

“Humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them,” the pope writes—reminding readers that some of the world’s greatest art and music attests to this reality, as do the hard fought victories of the Civil Rights movement and ending apartheid.

For almost a decade now, the Vatican has been engaging with some of the ethical questions related to AI, and, in 2020, it brought together major leaders from companies like Microsoft, Cisco, and IBM to sign an agreement committing to AI development buttressed on the principle of human dignity and guided by transparency, accountability, and inclusion. In 2023, Pope Francis called for a binding international treaty to regulate AI and warned of a “technological dictatorship” threatening humanity. In 2024, he made history as the first pope to address a G-7 summit, where he dedicated his remarks to AI and called for a ban on lethal autonomous weapons.

At the encyclical’s recent launch event at the Vatican, Leo was joined by Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, who candidly admitted that tech companies, like his own, are motivated by profit, geopolitical pressure, and pride. “We need informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing,” he said. “We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend.”

In his new encyclical, Leo built on what his predecessors—both Leo XIII and Francis—said by naming AI development as one of the most urgent moral issues of our time, and he urged extreme caution and reflection on how the world moves forward.

The pope is clear that neither he, nor the Catholic Church, is offering specific policy proposals, but rather offering moral principles for consideration. But at the same time, his letter is clearly nudging governments and other international institutions to lead the way in enacting new regulations to mitigate the AI risks that he warns about in the encyclical. It was a conversation started at the Vatican this week, but it’s already informing discussions from the likes of the European Commission to the high-takes California governor’s race. Silicon Valley has effectively been put on notice.

Just days before the document’s release, Trump was all set to sign an executive order that would have required the federal government to evaluate AI models before their release—only to change his mind at the last second and declare that it “gets in the way” of development. “We’re leading China, we’re leading everybody, and I don’t want to do anything that’s going to get in the way of that lead,” Trump said.

Trump’s approach to AI development is likely to once again put his administration in direct conflict with Leo; in April, Leo’s calls for an end to the war in Iran led to a barrage of attacks by Trump. At a White House press briefing in May, Vance—a recent convert to Roman Catholicism—said that he looked forward to reading the pope’s encyclical. “I’m sure it will contain a lot of insights, some of which I’ll probably agree with, some of which I may not, but I think that it’s going to be a very, very important document,” Vance said. “My guess is it’s going to have a lot of influence.”

The monarchist faction has battled rivals in the diaspora for years, targeting moderate anti-war activists, policy analysts, and journalists it accuses of collusion with the regime. It has waged that campaign through social media harassment and pro-Pahlavi news outlets such as the London-based television network Iran International.

But since Iran’s early January uprising and the subsequent war, the Pahlavists have become more confrontational and thuggish. The same month that monarchists crashed the IFC, the anti-Islamic Republic activist Masood Masjoody was murdered in Canada by two followers of Pahlavi, apparently for his outspoken criticism of the son of Iran’s last shah. Monarchist demonstrations in European and U.S. cities have become increasingly militaristic, with Pahlavists dressing in fatigues and brandishing the flags of SAVAK, the shah’s notorious secret police, in Germany’s Regensburg earlier in May.

Whether the war flares up again or not, it has become clear to many in the diaspora that Iran needs a kinder, gentler, and more palatable opposition. This is the gap the IFC is aiming to fill.

Zamani, a wealthy businessman who left Iran in 2022 and the IFC’s main funder, was moved to start the initiative when he heard that U.S. President Donald Trump had decided to wage war on Iran without consulting any serious diaspora experts, he said. Zamani saw that a major segment of the diaspora, critical of the regime but neither monarchist nor pro-war, had no platform or voice. Strident, well-organized monarchist communities in the West were successfully petitioning governments to harden their policies on the Islamic Republic, but a silent majority had no vehicle to express its views.

“When Trump said, ‘Help is on the way,’ I thought to myself that Iranian people have no say in all this; that history is in the making for Iran and we as Iranians are nobody in this,” Zamani said. “And it really hurt.”

The IFC, which started up in January driven by a commitment to pluralism, is still figuring itself out. The nascent group officially presents itself as a purely civic organization seeking to promote mutual understanding and coordination among disparate Iranian opposition factions. It is spearheaded by senior figures formerly close to Pahlavi, who have spent years dealing with Western officials, remain in touch with elites inside Iran, and view the present monarchist strategy as dangerously counterproductive and more likely to cause ambivalent regime insiders to retrench.

One leading figure, Shahriar Ahy, is a shrewd political strategist who mentored Pahlavi for decades. He warned in a widely discussed January interview with BBC Persian that the opposition needed to change course. The Pahlavi camp’s loudest voices threaten retribution to and prosecution of regime collaborators and trumpet a government-in-exile ready to displace the Islamic Republic upon its fragmentation or collapse. “The correct strategy in such conditions is to divide the enemy, not to show a face that makes the enemy think the gallows await all of them,” Ahy said.

Ahy cautioned against pursuing a parliament-in-exile or opposition structure that would fall apart trying to agree over a future cabinet, a goal that is at present fantastical and has failed repeatedly in the past. He saw a vision like what the IFC is pursuing, a coalition of broad forces that seeks to create rifts within the regime elite and incentives to break away, as the more productive strategy. “It is enough for them to sit together and say, ‘You are doing this; I am doing that. How can we make these actions more synergistic?’ without a single executive apparatus,” Ahy said.

But some members of the IFC—such as Kambiz Ghafouri, a journalist based in Finland who earlier this month was elected to be a board member on the IFC’s five-person presidium—hope to shape the coalition into a sort of government-in-exile, ready to rule Iran should the time come for a political transition. “Otherwise, there would be no reason to form such a congress,” Ghafouri said. Meanwhile, he believes, the international community should recognize and enter dialogue with the opposition, while isolating the Islamic Republic by expelling its ambassadors and diplomats.

The presidium members were elected by the organization’s assembly, made up of about 100 people. Elections for a 13-person “central council” took place earlier this month. The two bodies are akin, some members said, to a legislative and executive branch, respectively. The IFC is certainly structuring itself like a political organization with governing ambitions.

One key way the IFC seeks to distinguish itself is through more progressive, inclusive membership. Naeimeh Doustdar, a journalist based in Sweden who sits on the IFC’s presidium, joined the movement because the monarchist opposition was sidelining feminist voices, she said. Doustdar said she had long been harassed by supporters of Pahlavi, who are notorious for misogynistic attacks on Iranian women journalists and activists. “Women who express disagreement, they are targeted more harshly than men,” Doustdar said. The Pahlavists “don’t believe in pluralism, and they don’t believe in giving women a role in politics,” she said.

Doustdar pointed out that Pahlavi has removed the “Women, Life, Freedom” slogan from his bio on the social platform X, and that his organization and supporters have effectively abandoned the ethos of the 2022 Iranian women’s rights movement that mobilized the diaspora opposition globally. Pahlavi increasingly surrounds himself with a clique of aggressive male advisors who, she said, mimic the hypermasculinity of far-right populists.

The former crown prince has hitched his political future to these authoritarian forces, but the tactics are driving moderates and feminists to find an alternative opposition umbrella. “Before the Women, Life, Freedom movement, I got more attacks from hardliners inside Iran, the ideological supporters of the regime,” Doustdar said. “But now, there are no hardliners, only Pahlavi supporters. It’s a real change.”

he graybeards in the IFC, long-time opposition figures in the diaspora, also noted in the early days of the war that the Trump team saw Pahlavi as lacking credibility or sufficient links to the opposition inside. They saw potential for a new opposition coalition that was willing to work with leading dissidents and players inside the country.

The IFC has successfully courted Kurdish nationalists with ties to militant groups in Iran and neighboring Iraq. Zamani, who transferred his businesses to partners when he left Iran, also aims to leverage his connections to Iranian elites close to the system, persuaded that the IFC needs to have entry points and ties with decision-makers inside.

In January, Pahlavi’s team came under fire for putting out unsecure QR codes and Google Forms to log defecting members of Iran’s security forces and government, of which he claimed there were more than 50,000 (and later more than 100,000). Zamani sees the better approach as coaching business elites on how to oppose the regime through civil disobedience while maintaining their business interests. “If we have stronger support from inside, we will be taken more seriously from the international community,” Zamani said. “And if we have enough connections with the international community, of course, the elites will see us as more effective. It’s a two-way system.”

While getting Western governments fully on board with his program proved difficult for Pahlavi, the IFC may have an advantage. The group is still working on its official international strategy and has not yet formally engaged any governments. But many of the IFC’s members come with informal links to major global powers that give it a built-in edge, said Mehrdad Marty Youssefiani, a founding member of the group and Pahlavi’s former chief of staff. Youssefiani, like Ahy, has cultivated relationships with influential politicians, diplomats, and activists across the West and the Middle East for more than two decades. This makes it easy to get decision-makers on the phone—and potentially influence their policies. “Those with various proximities are able to capitalize on those relationships,” said Youssefiani, who also works for the pro-Israel think tank Middle East Forum in Washington. “When the time comes, those relations are part of the assets of the IFC.”

The Iranian diaspora in the West has indeed achieved notably high status, with many earning great wealth and prominent positions in business and government. But that affluence has historically not translated into significant influence on Iran policy, said Dina Esfandiary, lead Middle East analyst for Bloomberg Economics. When it comes to the major issues vis-à-vis Iran that Washington has considered over the years—such as whether to tighten the sanctions regime or offer relief, back nuclear negotiations, and pursue military options—U.S. policy has long been shaped by Israeli interests, she said, rather than the counsel of Iranian exiles. “The Iranian opposition was just useful insofar as what they asked for fit in with what the United States was going to do to begin with,” Esfandiary said.

With the war at a stalemate and the Islamic Republic resiliently in place, though, there is growing demand for fresh policy views more connected to realities on the ground in Iran, said Alireza Nader, a Washington-based policy analyst who used to be close with Pahlavi. Movements and organizations such as the Pahlavists, the pro-engagement National Iranian American Council, or the cultlike People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran each represent very narrow segments of the Iranian diaspora, he explained, but a group like the IFC could pique more interest in Washington.

“For any American decision maker, they would want to meet with a group that has some legitimacy,” Nader said. “And I think if there’s a broad coalition of democratic groups and forces, there’d be a very big appetite for it.”

To avoid repeating Pahlavi’s failure in leading the Iranian opposition, the IFC must tread especially carefully on its ties with Israel. Pahlavi’s alliance with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and especially his controversial visit to the Jewish state in April 2023, alienated many in the Iranian opposition who are concerned that aligning too closely with Israel’s security interests both hobbles the former crown prince as a nationalist broker and pushes him toward positions that fail to serve Iran.

In late March, Middle East Eye reported that a pro-Israel public relations firm headquartered in Florida was working to promote the IFC. Zamani said that the story was damaging for the IFC’s reputation, and he acknowledged that getting too close to Israel would threaten the congress’s legitimacy as an independent movement. “It’s not only Israel; any government who tries to be somehow influential in our internal dynamics of the IFC, we will absolutely reject and resist,” Zamani said.

But those internal dynamics, too, may pose a problem going forward. In a statement posted on Facebook, Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan official Asso Hassan Zadeh said he had withdrawn his candidacy from an IFC election earlier this month in protest of what he characterized as the organization’s sidelining of minority political parties in favor of creating a “centralized and assimilatory” state parliament, which could lead the Iranian opposition to “reproduce the very same approaches that have condemned Iran to tyranny for a hundred years.”

The Kurdish party remains in the IFC for now, but it is waiting to see how the congress’s positions shape up before participating at a leadership level. Disagreements over tactical issues have slowed the group’s decision-making, said Arash Azizi, an Iranian academic based in New York who attended the IFC’s London event. For example, he said, the group failed to pass a resolution condemning the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran due to resistance from hardline, pro-intervention ethnic parties including that of Hassan Zadeh, even though most within the IFC oppose the war. “We can benefit from them, and they can be an important part of any coalition, but so long as we have points of agreement,” Azizi said.

Zamani, though, remains optimistic about the IFC’s ability to hold its diverse coalition together. “You have great legitimacy because a lot of people are at a table, but it would be difficult to have efficiency because there are very limited issues that you could get a decision on,” Zamani said. “But I think this is a problem with any congress or any political system that is created.”

Early episodes included the 1965 Camarioca boatlift, during which Cuban leader Fidel Castro, seeking to rid the island of dissidents, allowed Cubans with relatives in the United States to depart from the northern port of Camarioca. Several thousand Cubans left the island this way and were assisted by the U.S. Coast Guard. The boat crossings were later ended by a U.S.-Cuba agreement establishing the more formal Freedom Flights program, which consisted of twice-daily flights between the two countries that ultimately brought hundreds of thousands of Cuban refugees to the United States.

“Those who seek refuge here will find it,” declared U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson in October 1965, as thousands of Cubans sought to escape the Castro regime. Johnson’s comments—and his later passage of the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, which granted lawful permanent residency to Cuban natives residing in the United States for at least a year—established the United States as the default landing place for future Cuban migrants.

Subsequent policies reinforced the United States’ preferential treatment of Cubans, including the 1995 “wet foot, dry foot” policy, which allowed Cuban migrants who reached U.S. soil without visas to stay and apply for permanent residency, while those intercepted at sea were generally returned home.

Later waves of migration followed a similar pattern. The 1980 Mariel boatlift—a larger, more chaotic version of the Camarioca boatlift—saw an estimated 125,000 Cubans leave the island. Years later, the 1994 Balsero crisis unfolded during Cuba’s so-called “special period,” when roughly 35,000 Cubans fled severe economic depression caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Throughout these episodes, Cuban authorities allowed large-scale departures to alleviate domestic pressure. The latest exodus, which began in 2021, has seen between 1 and 2 million Cubans leave, according to most estimates.

The Trump administration’s policies toward Cuba have only exacerbated the island’s humanitarian situation, creating the conditions for a continuation of an exodus already underway.

Shortly after taking office for his second term, Trump issued an executive order stating that “the policies, practices, and actions” of the Cuban government “constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat … to the national security and foreign policy of the United States,” owing to Havana’s ties with U.S. adversaries, including China and Russia. As a result of Trump’s hard-line Cuba policy, including a monthslong U.S. oil embargo, the island’s economic situation has further deteriorated. Inflation is soaring, basic goods are scarce, fuel is gone, and Cuba’s aging power grid is nearing collapse.

The Trump administration has so far been successful in keeping Cuban migrants from entering the United States. Irregular border encounters with Cuban migrants have dropped by 99 percent compared to similar periods under Biden. But data from elsewhere in the hemisphere indicate that Cubans are still leaving the island in large numbers, albeit for new destinations.

In Brazil, Cuban asylum applications nearly doubled from 22,288 in 2024 to 41,919 in 2025, making Cubans 55 percent of all asylum-seekers in the country and the single largest nationality group among applicants. A March 2026 report from the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) Displacement Tracking Matrix found that net regular Cuban migration into Brazil nearly tripled over the same period, with no negative monthly balances recorded throughout 2025. Cubans now enter primarily through Guyana, for which they do not need a visa, before crossing into Brazil’s northern state of Roraima and continuing south toward São Paulo and Paraná for work, according to the IOM report.

Farther north, in Mexico, Cubans accounted for 23 percent of all humanitarian visitor cards issued by Mexican immigration authorities from January through November 2024. From January through July 2025, that number jumped to 78 percent—the clearest signal that Cubans are entering the Mexican asylum pipeline in numbers that Mexico has never experienced. Cuban shares of temporary and permanent residence cards also rose during the same 2024 and 2025 time periods, from 7 to 8 percent and from 9 to 16 percent, respectively, suggesting that an earlier cohort is settling in Mexico rather than transiting the country.

In Uruguay, meanwhile, the National Directorate of Migration recorded Cubans as the largest single foreign nationality requesting residency in 2025. Spain, where 2025 figures are not yet available, has likewise seen sustained growth in Cuban arrivals through both asylum applications and the citizenship-by-descent provisions of the country’s 2022 Democratic Memory Law.

Cubans have redirected themselves to these countries because they offer legal entry pathways, work authorization while immigration cases are pending, and established Cuban communities to facilitate arrival.

The shift in Cuban migration patterns could complicate the Trump administration’s hemispheric strategy. If Cubans were heading to Argentina, Chile, or El Salvador—all led by right-wing presidents who are friendly with Trump—the new destination states would be ready-made partners for the administration. Instead, Cubans are mostly settling in Brazil, Mexico, and Uruguay—all of which are governed by left-leaning presidents whose disputes with Washington over migration, trade, and policy toward Cuba are matters of public record.

The leverage that these governments gain from absorbing more Cuban migrants could be considerable. Hosting large numbers of Cuban migrants could strain asylum processing and the provision of public resources and services—real economic costs of the United States’ Cuba policy that might empower countries to demand concessions in bilateral negotiations with Washington over trade, migration, or other priorities.

More immediately, the Trump administration’s hard-line approach to addressing migration in the hemisphere hinges on safe third-country agreements, forced third-country transfers, and bilateral agreements enabling deportation flights. Countries that are absorbing a significant number of Cubans, such as Brazil and Mexico, have even less incentive to participate in the U.S. migration framework. In fact, the only country that currently plays a significant role in regional Cuban migration and is aligned with the United States is Guyana, which attended the Shield of the Americas summit in March.

Havana has been here before. After allowing—and occasionally encouraging—a Cuban exile community to grow in Miami as a short-term survival strategy, the Cuban government found itself facing a formidable and durable anti-Castro lobby that gained real power in U.S. politics. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Cuban American who has long been critical of the island’s government, is only the most prominent example.

Growing Cuban diasporas in São Paulo, Mexico City, and Montevideo could seed analogous communities—though whether they cohere into anti-Castro pressure groups or assimilate into political cultures less hostile to the regime in Havana remains an open question.

In April 2023, a power struggle between SAF leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo—more commonly known as Hemeti—led conflict to break out in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum. In the years since, external actors have provided arms, funding, and other support to both sides, dragging out the crisis and turning it into a proxy war. The parallel conflict in the Middle East has made this picture more complex.

Sudan was once Iran’s closest ally in Africa, but Khartoum severed ties with Tehran in 2016—out of loyalty to another partner, Saudi Arabia, after Iran executed a Saudi cleric. Sudan and Iran reestablished diplomatic ties a few months into the Sudanese civil war, in a move widely seen as an effort to bolster the SAF with Iranian military support. Though SAF leadership has been coy about the relationship, early reports indicated that Iran was supplying drones to the Sudanese army.

Saudi Arabia remains one of the SAF’s key political and financial backers—an unlikely convergence for longtime rivals Riyadh and Tehran. When the United States and Israel first launched strikes on Iran in February, some SAF allies within Sudan expressed support for the Islamic Republic. But once Iran initiated retaliatory strikes across the region, pressure from Gulf states prompted Burhan to condemn the attacks.

Burhan then met separately with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Omani Sultan Haitham bin Tariq, signaling solidarity and an effort to secure support for his own war effort in Sudan—even as reports suggested that the crown prince was urging the United States to intensify attacks against Iran. The war in the Middle East has forced Burhan and the SAF to juggle the competing interests of their allies, placing Sudan’s government in a precarious position abroad as it fights its own war at home.

On the other side, Sudan and human rights groups have accused both Russia and the UAE of supplying the RSF with arms, mercenaries, and financial support, whether through direct funding or illicit gold smuggling networks. The Russian paramilitary Wagner Group had operated in Sudan since 2017, but Moscow declared public support for the SAF in 2024, a year after the Africa Corps, which operates directly under the Russian government, formally succeeded Wagner.

This seemed to reflect Russia’s broader goal of securing port access to the Red Sea shipping corridor, which has only increased in importance amid the maritime disruptions caused by the Iran war.

Sudan initiated proceedings against the UAE before the International Court of Justice in March 2025, accusing the country of being complicit in genocide by supporting the RSF. (The UAE denied these allegations.) The UAE has come under Iranian attack in the Gulf, potentially disrupting flows of funding and support to the RSF. But Le Monde reported that the UAE is now working with the RSF to develop new supply routes for arms transfers through Ethiopia and the Central African Republic.

The UAE is also reportedly funding and providing military assistance to an RSF training base in Ethiopia’s Benishangul-Gumuz region. Other than Egypt and Eritrea, which are aligned with the SAF, every country bordering Sudan has allowed the RSF to “operate in some way on its territory,” The Economist noted. The most aggressive of these operations have been drone attacks. The SAF’s accusations that Ethiopia and the UAE carried out strikes in May came just ahead of a new U.N. report asserting that armed drones are the leading cause of civilian deaths in Sudan.

Critically, both Saudi Arabia and the UAE are members of the so-called Quad for Sudan—alongside the United States and Egypt—tasked with pursuing a diplomatic end to the civil war. The initiative was flawed from the start, as the three Arab states back opposing sides and Washington’s commitment to the peace process is tenuous at best.

This tension was evident when the U.S. State Department designated the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization in March. The department’s statement highlighted the group’s ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps but failed to acknowledge its role in sustaining former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir’s three-decade dictatorship or the Muslim Brotherhood’s long-standing influence in the SAF—suggesting that Washington’s priorities lie in reinforcing its confrontation with Tehran.

The overall lack of political will has brought talks on ending the Sudan war to a performative crawl. The Quad’s most recent negotiation efforts stalled on the coattails of yet another round of failed cease-fire talks between the RSF and SAF in February, in which the SAF rejected a U.S. proposal endorsed by the Quad.

Quad members and other parties met for the now-annual International Conference for Sudan in Berlin on the war’s third anniversary in April. The conference secured more than $1 billion in humanitarian funding to U.N. operations in Sudan, but actionable measures to end the fighting and hold the warring parties and their supporters accountable were largely absent—as were representatives from the warring sides themselves.

Alternate negotiation channels could prove viable. On May 13, Burhan visited Bahrain to discuss Sudan’s war with King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa as part of Bahraini efforts to facilitate talks between the SAF and the UAE. After the trip, Burhan told the Middle East Eye that he would be willing to open talks with the UAE if it ceased support for the RSF.

But with the Quad preoccupied by negotiations elsewhere in the Middle East—while the UAE continues to insist on its neutrality—meaningful engagement seems unlikely.

Beyond the diplomatic circus, the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz and resulting price spikes are worsening an already dire humanitarian crisis. The International Rescue Committee estimated that Sudan alone accounts for more than 10 percent of global humanitarian need, which is reflected in rising starvation and disease outbreaks in the absence of a functioning state.

The Iran war’s disruptions to supply chains have brought the global humanitarian delivery pipeline to its knees. More than $130,000 in pharmaceutical supplies bound for Sudan were stranded in Dubai in late March, while lifesaving medical shipments for more than 400,000 children were delayed. According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, the costs for some relief shipments have more than doubled.

A U.N. World Food Program official warned in March that if disruptions persist through June, 45 million additional people across multiple countries could face acute hunger. In a world without the U.S. Agency for International Development, and with aid infrastructure already hollowed out, even minor delivery disruptions put countless lives at risk.

Simply reopening the Strait of Hormuz now won’t fix the crisis. The war in Sudan had already decimated agricultural output in what was known as the breadbasket of Africa. In 2024, Sudan imported 54 percent of its fertilizer from the Persian Gulf, leaving it highly vulnerable to maritime disruptions.

Global prices of urea, a nitrogen-based fertilizer, surged by nearly 99 percent year-to-date in April. The damage is already done: When planting for Sudan’s fall harvest begins in June, farmers are already likely to reap little in return.

As Sudanese voices inside and outside the country continue to push for a resolution to Sudan’s war, attention has never felt further away. But by boosting humanitarian and financial efforts so that affected Sudanese citizens aren’t responsible for absorbing rising costs, the short-term impacts of the war in Iran on aid can be mitigated.

The $1 billion raised in Berlin is a start, but as U.N. official Tom Fletcher noted at the conference, more than $2.2 billion is needed this year for U.N. operations in Sudan. This figure doesn’t account for the funding and material needs of civil society groups or neighborhood-run mutual aid initiatives, which have been integral to the preservation of Sudanese society during the war.

His first campaign for premiership in 1996 captured this balance. “Netanyahu: Making a Secure Peace” was a slogan designed precisely for voters who wanted reconciliation but feared terrorism. Netanyahu harshly criticized the dovish policies of Shimon Peres, his opponent from the Labor party, but he also promised to respect the Oslo agreements signed between the Israeli government and the Palestinians in the early 1990s. After winning by a razor-thin margin, he signed additional agreements with the Palestinian Authority (the Hebron Protocol and the Wye River Memorandum), accepting limited territorial withdrawals from the West Bank.

This was Netanyahu the triangulator; but then came 1999. After his efforts to court the center, Netanyahu lost elections after only three years in office. He left the office of prime minister with a clear lesson that would shape the next quarter century of Israeli politics: Governing with the aim of appealing to moderates was dangerous. In his efforts to capture the median voter, Netanyahu let the right down but also failed to earn support from the left.

In the new theory of winning elections that began to emerge, moderation was not a bridge but a trap. If compromise alienated the base and still failed to win over hostile opponents, then why compromise? In a society with a natural majority of self-defined right wingers, better to bind supporters emotionally and make defection feel like betrayal—that is, to convince voters that the alternative on the left was not merely wrong but illegitimate.

This was the beginning of Netanyahu 2.0: winning not by moving to the center, but through destroying the social legitimacy of crossing over to the other side.

The shift was gradual. When Netanyahu returned to power in 2009, he still practiced parts of the old politics. He invited partners from the center-left to join his government. He accepted, at least rhetorically, the idea of a demilitarized Palestinian state and governed as a risk-averse conservative whose chief aim was to prevent any dramatic change.

But beneath the surface, the architecture of a new politics was taking shape. Netanyahu increasingly treated the left not as a normal electoral opponent but as a hostile entity: un-Jewish, naïve, foreign-funded, aligned with Arabs, indifferent to security. The media were no longer merely critical; they were actively mobilized against the people. Civil society protesters were not democratic dissenters; they were radicals refusing to accept election results.

The decisive moment was 2015.

With his party facing possible defeat in legislative elections, Netanyahu ran one of the most memorable campaigns in Israeli history. In the final hours of election day, he released a video clip in which he warned that Arab voters were going to the polls “in droves,” aided by left-wing organizations. The message was brutally effective, distilling the Netanyahu style into one short appeal: Voting for the right was emergency mobilization against a leftist threat from within.

Netanyahu’s decisive victory signaled a change that went beyond one video, away from the center and toward the base. Data collected by Varieties of Democracy, which monitors the quality of democracy across the globe based on experts’ surveys, shows that around this time, Netanyahu’s Likud party changed. Specifically, it shifted its stance toward more intense demonization of political opponents, adopted an anti-pluralist view of politics and a rejection of minority rights, and railed against “elites” who purportedly work against the “real people.”

Other data sources support this view of political change in the Netanyahu 2.0 era. Another dataset that compares political parties cross-nationally, the Chapel Hill Expert Surveys, indicates that Likud today looks less like a European mainstream conservative party and more like the radical-right populist parties of Europe: anti-elite, majoritarian, hostile to institutional checks, and built around a leader who claims to embody the people.

The consequences for Israeli democracy were profound. Israel was never a fully liberal democracy. The occupation and the unequal status of Palestinian citizens of Israel, including the frequent exclusion of their parties from government, always made Israeli democracy flawed. But Netanyahu’s later project attacked the liberal elements that did exist: judicial independence, professional bureaucracy, active civil society, and the basic norm that political rivals are loyal opponents rather than enemies of the nation.

In 2023, Netanyahu’s sixth government sought to advance a major judicial overhaul intended to concentrate power in the hands of the executive by severely weakening the system of checks and balances, primarily by undermining the courts. This was the culmination of close to a decade of mobilization against political opponents and state institutions. Mass protest soon followed, as deep divisions spread across Israeli society, including its military.

Against this backdrop came the horrors of Oct. 7, 2023, the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. This catastrophe was widely believed to spell the end of Netanyahu’s time in office. How could any leader withstand the worst security failure in the country’s history happening under their watch?

Not only did Netanyahu survive in office, he used the following months to hone his us-against-them style of governing. Everything about the war in Gaza—from Netanyahu’s unwillingness to take personal responsibility for the failures that led to the Hamas attacks, to his wartime strategy, and even his scuttling of hostage negotiations—was presented to the public through the binary prism. This narrative cast true patriots (Netanyahu’s base) against those who try to undermine Israel’s standing (everyone else, including ideological right-wing figures who reject Netanyahu’s leadership, such as former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett).

Our analysis of survey data collected in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack and the war that followed shows that the public remains deeply polarized about Netanyahu. Among his opponents, he is not merely disliked but intensely reviled; among his supporters, he continues to command deep loyalty, even admiration. He did not benefit from the “rally ’round the flag” effect that leaders often expect during wartime, a sign of how profoundly many Israelis reject him. But crucially, he also did not lose his base. His core supporters largely stayed with him, underscoring the powerful grip he continues to exert over his political camp.

Netanyahu’s career offers a broader lesson for democracies beyond Israel. In many ways, he foreshadowed a political approach later seen in Hungary, India, the United States, and elsewhere. The most successful leaders of his type do not always win by persuading a majority that they are admirable. They win by persuading enough voters that the alternative is intolerable. Their grip on power does not require maximizing affection. Instead, it relies on establishing an insurmountable emotional divide such that no voter on their side would consider defecting to the other side. But Netanyahu’s case also suggests that such strong emotions are a double-edged sword: They rally an admiring base but also mobilize an opposition that passionately loathes the strongman leader.

The rift began to widen last month, when reports emerged that two CIA agents were killed in a car accident during an operation to take down a drug lab in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Sheinbaum’s government claimed to have no knowledge of the agents’ presence in Mexico—a potential violation of sovereignty and the Mexican Constitution.

The CIA operation also set off alarm bells given Trump’s threats to send ground troops into Mexico. “This is not something that should be taken lightly by any Mexican,” Sheinbaum said at a news conference.

Sheinbaum has spent much of the past year keeping a cool head and trying to appease Trump, from halting oil shipments to Cuba to sending nearly 100 cartel members to face justice in the United States. But she has drawn a clear red line when it comes to direct involvement of U.S. troops on Mexican soil.

“There’s a real duel between the presidents of Mexico and the United States, a challenge that’s been brewing for months,” said Rafael Fernández de Castro, the director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego. “This is without a doubt the most difficult year in many decades in terms of the bilateral relationship.”

Days after the CIA accident, Johnson gave a provocative speech at a factory groundbreaking in the state of Sinaloa, hinting that the Trump administration’s next target in Mexico would be government corruption. Trump has long railed against the “intolerable alliance” between Mexican officials and the cartels, saying that cartels have a “tremendous grip” on politicians.

Citing Mexico’s corruption as a threat to international investment and the USMCA, during his speech in Sinaloa, Johnson called on the country “to criminalize bribery and corruption and enforce codes of conduct for public officials.” He added, “We may soon see significant action on this front. So, stay tuned.”

On April 29, Washington made good on its threat. The U.S. Justice Department charged the governor of Sinaloa, Rubén Rocha Moya, and nine other current and former officials on allegations of working with the Sinaloa cartel to distribute massive amounts of fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine to the United States.

The U.S. charges and extradition request landed like a bomb in Mexico. Rocha Moya is a member of Mexico’s governing Morena party, was a close ally of former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and was publicly backed by Sheinbaum.

“There’s no doubt that there’s a before and after the extradition request,” Fernández de Castro said. “It was unprecedented. This really strained the bilateral relationship.”

Sheinbaum was evidently caught off guard, demanding more evidence before considering extradition. There was no sign that the president had any intention of investigating Rocha Moya before the U.S. charges. “We will not cover up for anyone who has committed a crime,” Sheinbaum said. “However, if there is no clear evidence, it is evident that the objective of these charges by the Department of Justice is political.”

The charges against Rocha Moya put Sheinbaum in an impossible bind. She must make efforts to appease the United States if Mexico wants a chance at emerging from the trade talks with a good deal. At the same time, she needs to mollify the anti-American fervor within the Morena party, which won’t take Rocha Moya’s extradition lightly. Even with the USMCA on the table, Morena hard-liners will push for the Sinaloa governor to stay in Mexico.

Given the sluggishness of Mexico’s economy and its dependence on the U.S. market, it’s likely that Sheinbaum will eventually hand over Rocha Moya to mollify Trump.

The extradition request proved to be just the beginning. CNN reported this month that the CIA had expanded its presence in Mexico and was involved in the assassination of a cartel member in March. (Sheinbaum called the report a “fiction the size of the universe.” A CIA spokesperson also denied it.) Days later, the New York Times reported that the U.S. Justice Department was pushing to increase indictments of “corrupt Mexican officials” under terrorism statutes.

On May 15, reports emerged that two indicted officials from Rocha Moya’s administration had turned themselves in to U.S. authorities, lending even greater credibility to Washington’s accusations and ramping up the pressure on Sheinbaum to turn over more officials.

“It’s building up to a crescendo,” said Arturo Sarukhan, a former Mexican ambassador to the United States. “We may be left in the worst of worlds: a relationship that collapses at a tactical level and the perception in Washington that the Mexican government is in fact protecting and Teflon-coating links between politics, politicians, and transnational criminal organizations.”

With the USMCA review now underway, the collapse of the bilateral relationship could not have come at a worse time. For Mexico, the stakes are tremendous.

“It’s urgent and of utmost necessity for Mexico to preserve the agreement,” Fernández de Castro said. “Thanks to the USMCA, Mexico is now the United States’ number one trading partner. And Mexico is also one of the countries in the world with the lowest tariffs in the era of Trump 2.0.”

Trade with the United States alone represents more than 80 percent of Mexican exports. In these negotiations, Mexico will want to keep the USMCA as stable as possible while protecting energy sovereignty and limiting the use of tariffs for nontrade issues such as migration or security.

Under USMCA rules, the three countries must decide by July 1 whether to extend the agreement for another 16 years. If not, the agreement will remain in force but undergo annual review until 2036, when it could expire. Countries may also withdraw from the agreement altogether, which would have dire consequences for North America.

Trump has also irked Canada with threats including annexation, blocking a new bridge between Michigan and Ontario, and imposing a 100 percent tariff should Canada make a trade deal with China. Ottawa may now be looking for trade deals elsewhere. During the USMCA review, Canada will likely aim to resolve disputes on issues such as forestry and look for the United States to remove tariffs on steel and aluminum. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has not yet announced a schedule for formal negotiations with Canada.

Given the strained relationships between the United States and its contiguous neighbors, analysts say that it is unlikely that all three countries will agree to extend the deal. Though Trump has flirted with exiting the USMCA altogether, an annual review process is the most likely outcome.

That is particularly bad news for Mexico. “That means that at least for the next three years, the U.S. administration will have a very important leverage point against the Mexican government,” Sarukhan said, because USMCA talks and tariff negotiations “are inextricably linked, from Washington’s view, on the level of collaboration by Mexico in law enforcement and counter-drug matters.”

Mexico does have at least one important card to play. With the U.S. midterm elections looming, smooth trade negotiations will ensure stable prices for many goods that affect voters’ pocketbooks, from avocados to auto parts. It is a key factor for affordability, the “most important word” in the midterms, Fernández de Castro said. “That is something that all the companies in the United States that have interests in Mexico understand—even if Trump does not.”

According to Fernández de Castro, these companies might lobby Trump to ensure a good deal. “Those American companies with interests in Mexico saved NAFTA in 2018, and I’m sure they’re going to save the USMCA,” he added.

Still, defeating drug cartels remains Trump’s guiding principle in the relationship with Mexico. No matter what happens with the trade agreement, there is little doubt that the United States will continue exerting pressure on Sheinbaum over collusion between members of her party and drug trafficking groups.

One such opportunity was rolled out at an emergency European Union summit in Cyprus in April, when Sharaa positioned Syria as a solution to European energy security concerns. “Syria, which was once an arena for others’ conflicts, has today chosen … to be a bridge to security and a fundamental pillar of the solution,” he said, calling his country an “alternative and secure artery connecting Central Asia and the Gulf to the heart of the European continent.”

In Cyprus, Sharaa proposed activating the old and never-realized “Four Seas” project, in which Syria would act as a point of commercial and logistics connectivity through railways, roadways, and pipelines that linked maritime channels in the Mediterranean Sea, Black Sea, Caspian Sea, and the Gulf.

Such a transnational project would significantly reduce reliance on the Strait of Hormuz by establishing a network of overland routes through the Middle East and toward Europe. That public rollout came after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Damascus and Turkey announced an end to customs restrictions with Armenia—both openings necessary for access to and use of the Caspian and Black seas.

By any calculation, the vision conveyed by Sharaa will take many years to realize. The Syria of today lacks the money to pay its own public-sector employees and the country’s reconstruction bill is hundreds of billions of dollars.

Crucially, although much faster in speed, a land route cannot replace what maritime traffic is capable of moving in terms of volume. Until the current war with Iran, 27 percent of the world’s oil, 20 percent of liquefied natural gas, and 30 percent of the world’s fertilizer passed through the Strait of Hormuz. In terms of consumer goods, at least 26 million containers pass through the strait every year, making its closure a threat of global import. For the Gulf states, food security is a major concern, with approximately 85 percent of their collective food supply being imported via the strait.

But if Syria were to realize its ambitions and become a global logistics hub and commercial corridor, that would offset the world’s overreliance on the Strait of Hormuz. Syria could become one alternative overland artery in a network of new ones, spanning from the Gulf, to Egypt, to Jordan.

This would be of enormous global significance—to regional states and Gulf energy producers, to customers in Europe, and, of course, for Syria itself. Iran’s shuttering of the Strait of Hormuz has also surged maritime shipping insurance rates, which, even if peace returns, are not expected to return to pre-conflict levels, thereby making overland transit structurally competitive. More broadly, were it to become what many now hope, Syria’s recovery and prosperity would have significant positive ripple effects for its neighbors, fostering the kind of stability and regional integration that the Levant has rarely, if ever, seen.

It is no accident that Sharaa’s economic vision, which aims to attract international support for Syria’s recovery, aligns with the world’s current security and diplomatic challenges. Without a geopolitical cause, Syria’s calls for investment would likely fall on deaf ears. While cautionary assessments that note how degraded Syria’s infrastructure currently is are undeniably accurate, everything has to start somewhere. And rarely has the Middle East needed causes of hope that promise to facilitate interconnectivity and shared benefit as much as today.

Another opening for Syria comes in response to acute food security concerns in the Gulf, where 85 percent of food is imported via the Strait of Hormuz. While the region’s sizeable food reserves and short-term ability to finance more supplies from other sources have prevented any major shortages, the long-term uncertainty has triggered consideration of alternatives. For example, Saudi Arabia is assessing the feasibility of a high-speed railway line to transport food and other commercial goods from Syria through Jordan to the northern Saudi city of Arar.

Meanwhile, Syria, Jordan, and Turkey have formed a trilateral body aimed at establishing a regional trade corridor that utilizes roadways and, eventually, a revitalized Hejaz Railway line connecting the port of Aqaba with Turkish ports via Syria. Again, the development of regional corridors like these will simultaneously offset reliance on the Strait of Hormuz and position Syria at the heart of alternatives.

Regional energy connectivity also looks set to transform in the coming years, with at least four major transnational oil and gas pipeline projects undergoing technical assessments for rehabilitation and reactivation, or expansion into Syria and beyond—namely the Arab Gas Pipeline (from Egypt to Turkey, via Jordan and Syria), the Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline between Iraq and Syria, the Qatar-Turkey pipeline (via Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria), and a reactivation of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline from Saudi Arabia to Syria and Lebanon (via Jordan).

Already, the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline linking Azerbaijan into Turkey and north into Europe has been extended south into Aleppo, stabilizing Syria’s northern electricity grid. Such large-scale pipeline projects would redirect oil and gas flows from maritime routes passing through the Strait of Hormuz and ease heightening energy security concerns in Europe.

While these major projects will unquestionably take time to come to fruition, regional energy producers are already using Syria as an alternative route. Iraq is moving oil through Syria and onward to the Mediterranean and European buyers, and some reports suggest that the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf states are doing so, as well.

These strategic projects will require substantial investment from stakeholders seeking to benefit from new routes. In the region, Saudi Arabia and Qatar were the earliest backers, concluding investment deals in energy, air transportation, and, in the case of Saudi Arabia, establishing an East-to-Mediterranean Data Corridor. The UAE is now redoubling its engagement, too, including in its ownership and expansion of the port of Tartus. For now, most of the Middle East’s biggest energy players have already concluded agreements in the oil and gas sector, including QatarEnergy and Arabian Drilling.

Another champion has been the Trump administration, through swift sanctions relief, political backing, and the mediated entry of U.S. energy companies into the Syrian market, including signed deals with Chevron and ConocoPhillips. That support remains vital, as does U.S. President Donald Trump’s promise to remove the Assad-era designation of Syria as a state sponsor of terrorism.

Supporting Syria’s continued stabilization and integration into the international economic and commercial system will also require Syria’s two enemies to back off. One of them, Iran, has suffered great losses in recent months and will likely itself be preoccupied with reconstruction for the immediate future.

The test of Trump’s leverage may soon be on display when the U.S.-Iran negotiations move toward an endgame on a memorandum of understanding. Based on what we know, the approach that the administration is adopting will be seen by Netanyahu and his domestic opponents as a lose-lose.

The Iranian regime will remain in place, harder-line than its predecessor, and no conditions for regime change will have been laid. The regime is more cohesive, and the deterrence card has been undermined by the fact that Iran weathered a major attack by the United States and now has a new weapon to be employed at will in the future—namely, the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz and expose the vulnerability of the Persian Gulf states. Equally, there is no evidence at this point that the United States can impose serious restrictions on Iran’s damaged nuclear infrastructure.

Unfortunately for Netanyahu, while he may have had a key influence on how, why, and when the war began, it’s highly unlikely that he’ll have much to say as to how and when it ends. If the memorandum of understanding plays out as we might expect, the cessation of hostilities will allow a period of negotiations to deal with all the issues, and the prospect of renewed U.S.-Israeli attacks will end.

Once the strait reopens, even gradually, and the U.S. blockade is removed, the blame game will begin. Netanyahu will stew, while unnamed political associates will argue that the United States failed to achieve regime change due to a lack of will. Trump won’t allow Netanyahu to muck up an agreement that ends the war, and he will insulate himself from domestic U.S. criticism by blaming Israel for overreach, especially in Lebanon. Trump will brook no pushback from Netanyahu or any further Israeli military actions that threaten to draw in the Americans. Remember, Trump big-footed Netanyahu after Israel bombed Hamas’s external leadership in Doha, and he will not be pushed again by Netanyahu into renewing the war. The Israeli leader’s only real hope in this scenario is that Iran overplays its hand and the process breaks down.

Lebanon is also likely to end badly for Netanyahu. Hezbollah has not complied with the cease-fire, is not disarming, and is recovering faster and with more capacity than Israel imagined. The Lebanese government is showing more backbone, especially its willingness to meet directly with Israel under Washington’s auspices, but it lacks the will and capacity to forcibly disarm Hezbollah. Israel is exacerbating the situation by occupying parts of the south, ordering more villages to evacuate, and killing Lebanese civilians in its efforts to strike Hezbollah. While offensive military action is popular in Israel, especially among the northern border communities, it’s placed the Lebanese government in a tight spot.

The main event is how Lebanon might figure in the U.S.-Iranian dance. Until now, the Trump administration had given Israel leeway to continue its campaign in Lebanon. But today, in response to Iran’s decision to suspend negotiations with the United States unless Israel agreed to accept a ceasefire, Trump called Netanyahu and pressed him to halt Israeli strikes in the Beirut area. It’s an indication of what may come if Iran and the United States reach a deal. Indeed, should the memorandum of understanding come to fruition and should Iran make it contingent on a real cease-fire in Lebanon, Trump will not hesitate to force Netanyahu to stand down. Netanyahu will have no choice but to comply.

Trump recently used his bully pulpit to link the Iran deal with the Gulf states joining the Abraham Accords. No one can figure this out, as this linkage is untethered to reality in the Gulf. Trump might assess that this demand will offer protection from domestic critics if he needs to pressure Israel on Iran and Lebanon.

But there is no chance that Gulf states will tether themselves to an Israeli government that is annexing the West Bank, occupying parts of Lebanon, and appearing to gear up for another major military operation in Gaza. Other than the United Arab Emirates, which appears to be doubling down on its relationship with Israel, the last thing that the others need, especially the Saudis, is a high-profile relationship with the Netanyahu government.

The bottom line, then, is that Trump’s bullying, threats, and leverage have yielded mixed results. He has not yet produced an Iran deal, he does not have an answer to the future of the highly enriched uranium buried under Iranian rubble, he has given Iran the gift of leverage in the Strait of Hormuz, and his Board of Peace in Gaza has failed thus far to get Hamas to disarm. And pressure is mounting daily in the West Bank, though surprisingly, this does not seem to worry Trump or his peace negotiators.

Great powers, first of all, have a set of behaviors in common. They always expect to shape or at least be consulted on the main global issues of the day. They make their presence felt, and their absence creates a vacuum to be filled. Often, great powers will insist on their own absolute sovereignty but admit only the qualified sovereignty of lesser powers, especially if they are nearby. In extremis, they reserve the right to change regimes that threaten or displease them but are able to deny any such right with respect to themselves.

At times, the great powers will claim to be above international law. At other times, they will make a virtue of vindicating that law or claim to defend international norms. In other words, the great powers have the power to make the rules and to break them; they are never just rule-takers. They are the orderers, not the ordered.

What enables the great powers to behave this way are their superior capabilities compared to the middling and smaller states. The first such capability is resources. Does the state in question have the military capacity to impose its will or to resist that of others? There is no entirely satisfactory way of assessing military strength, but how much the state spends on its military and how effectively is a rough measure of its defense capabilities.

Deployable nuclear weapons are also an indispensable component of great-power status today. The guaranteed ability to deliver an atomic bomb and thus to deter a nuclear attack gives a state a special position in the world. This is why the great powers take on the immense burdens of planning, researching, maintaining, storing, training, and safeguarding associated with those weapons. Not all nuclear powers are great powers, but all great powers are nuclear.

Then there is the economy. Is the state strong enough to survive the financial headwinds of geopolitical competition and to sustain a substantial military effort? Usually, economic strength is measured by GDP, which covers everything produced within a state’s borders. The alternative metric of purchasing power parity takes into account how far a sum of money goes in the domestic economy. It privileges non-Western countries with lower standards of living and production costs.

Very important—and difficult to assess—is the question how national these resources are. Peacetime GDP, GDP in a conflictual situation, and wartime GDP are three very different things. Cut a state off from its markets, sources of credit, raw materials, and food supply through tariffs, sanctions, or a blockade, and its economy will soon take on a completely different aspect. This is where command of the global commons outside the jurisdiction of any one state—particularly the world’s sea lanes—is so important to determining great-power status, or at least the hierarchy among the great powers.

Economic power is thus important, but it is not conclusive in determining great-power status. The strongest militaries of the world measured in terms of capabilities and spending over the past 20 years are the United States, which comfortably leads the pack, and China, followed at some distance by the United Kingdom and Russia. The first three are also among the five or six largest economies in the world. Russia, which is economically weaker, makes the grade on the strength of its outsize nuclear arsenal—the largest in the world.

The second criterion of great-power status is reach. Is the state a global power or merely a regional power, and how willing and able is it to deploy force far from home? Does it have a recognized geographical sphere of influence? Can that state draw on a global network of bases? Does it control key transport nodes and chokepoints? Can its intelligence agencies provide top-quality information on most parts of the world, as well as for cyberspace and space? Does it have a large and sophisticated diplomatic service? Has it a large overseas aid budget?

Reach can be both geographic and virtual. A great power will have the capacity to make its presence felt well beyond its own region, but it will also have the capacity to influence or even coopt global institutions such as the United Nations, the markets, or other fora.

Today, reach is very unevenly distributed among powers. The United States stands out through its sprawling network of military bases. Britain does not enjoy remotely the same global position it once did, but it still maintains important sovereign bases worldwide, including Gibraltar, Cyprus, and the Falkland Islands; it also has a presence in places such as Duqm in Oman on the Indian Ocean. Russia claims a sphere of influence in its near-abroad, though it has recently lost ground in Africa and the Middle East. Russia also enjoys global reach in the fields of propaganda, disinformation, and disruptive digital activity.

China may yet become a major global military player, with a base in Djibouti and a large paramilitary presence protecting infrastructure projects across the world. Its real global reach, though, lies in its partial control of the world’s supply chains and critical minerals (such as lithium) needed to power the technological and green revolutions.

The third criterion is reputation. Is the state considered a great power by others, especially other great powers, and almost as importantly, does it consider itself a great power? Few doubt that the United States and China are great powers today and many consider Russia so on account of its military capacity to shape or at least disrupt the global order. Though the status of the United Kingdom is disputed, most Europeans still consider it a major power.

Finland and Sweden, for example, sought a bilateral security guarantee from the U.K. in 2022 before NATO’s kicked in; the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force contributes heavily to the security of the Baltic and High North. The United Kingdom is also prized as an ally by important actors in Asia, such as Japan, as well as in the Levant and Persian Gulf. Besides, if the United States withdraws from Europe and Asia, Britain’s much more limited capabilities will gain in importance.

Moreover, a great power always stands for something beyond brute force. Its greatness is also cultural and ideological. Today, the United Kingdom and other Western powers stand for a liberal international order based on democratic principles and free trade. Britain reinforced that image, proving that it is not the “poodle” of the United States, by refusing to join U.S. President Donald Trump’s attack on Iran. Other powers have positioned themselves in more civilizational terms.

For example, Chinese President Xi Jinping has said that China, as a “major country,” should conduct a “distinctive” diplomacy marked by a “salient Chinese feature and a Chinese vision.” Even Russia, perhaps the most brutal of the great powers and one that constantly emphasizes its military and nuclear might, claims that it represents Christian and family values globally against the “soulless” West. What exactly the United States, once the mainstay of the rules-based international order, stands for after the second coming of Trump is not yet clear.

Reputation rests in part on a state’s position in the architecture of global governance. The United States plays a major role—some would say dominates—economic organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It is also a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, along with a Russia, China, Britain and France. All five powers thereby enjoy significant privileges in the international system, and while these are frequently challenged, reform of the U.N. is as far away as it ever was.

The fourth criterion for great-power status, resilience, concerns how much pain a society and its economy can absorb. Historical performance plays an important role. In the past, victory has not always gone to those who can inflict the most, but sometimes to those who can suffer the most. Past great powers, such as the Habsburg Empire, showed enormous staying power in adversity. Losing and recovering is as critical as winning. A state may command extensive resources and enjoy an impressive reach and reputation yet fall short as a great power if it lacks resilience.

The most resilient powers over time have been Britain and the United States. They have proved able to maintain long contests and to recover from serious defeats, such as the loss of the American colonies or the war in Vietnam. Though both countries are in domestic crisis today in different ways, they can be expected to recover relatively quickly. Russia and China, by contrast, are relatively young powers in their current form, and both have recent memory of political trauma and fragmentation. Like so much else, resilience is rooted in history and especially in the development of social cohesion over time.

According to these criteria, several great-power contenders can be discounted. Some economically significant actors such as Germany and Japan lack the military capabilities, especially nuclear weapons, to be great powers.

When it comes to reach, Germany, Japan, Brazil, and Indonesia have largely regional military capabilities; some of them enjoy considerable global influence through their diplomatic services and overseas aid policies. Germany and Japan have substantial soft power, but Brazil and Indonesia do not. All four have shown themselves to be brittle in the past and thus lack the necessary resilience.

Despite the endorsement of many, India does not meet most of the criteria either. It has nuclear weapons and the world’s fifth- or sixth-largest economy, but New Delhi’s military reach is largely regional. India claims a reputation as a “world teacher,” but it understands this role in non-great-power terms. Given the country’s relative youth in its modern form, India’s resilience is hard to measure—but its propensity to suffer terrorist and communal violence and its persisting poverty suggests vulnerabilities.

France is hard to assess. It is a large economy and commands a nuclear arsenal more independent than that of Britain, but it has lost important parts of its sovereignty, such as control over its own borders and currency, to the European Union. Paris still enjoys a lot of influence in Africa and has a significant presence in the Indo-Pacific, but it is on the retreat in the former and challenged by anticolonial movements in the latter. France also enjoys a global brand distinct from the Anglo-Saxons, China, and Russia.

In terms of resilience, though, France has repeatedly experienced state collapse in the 19th and 20th centuries, most notably when it was overrun by Germany in 1940 and had to be re-constituted by the Anglo-Americans after the war. It is much more brittle than the United Kingdom.

What is clear is that the extent to which the great powers enjoy resources, reach, reputation and resilience, and the balance between these capabilities, varies considerably. No great power is configured quite like any other, and they differ considerably in capacity and vulnerabilities. It has always been thus. In the past, none of the great powers were exactly as strong as any other, and some were considerably weaker—for example, 18th-century Prussia and late 19th-century Austria-Hungary.

Likewise, the great powers of today differ considerably from each other both in terms of individual strengths and overall strength. Though the United States and China are economically and militarily far ahead of Russia and the United Kingdom, all four states have attributes that mark them out from the next rung of major actors on the world scene. There is also one country, France, whose great-power status is unclear.

Rubio, who also serves as national security advisor, told Kaine that he was not involved in conversations on the targeting criteria because “those are largely legal decisions.”

“Every strike has a legal officer on the deck that has to make a determination about whether the call is legal or not, and this is done by the Department of War, the way it’s been done in other theaters around the world,” Rubio said. “There have been strikes that they’ve walked away from, because it doesn’t meet the criteria, or because there’s doubt.”

Kaine did not dispute that the strikes met the targeting criteria, but he repeatedly emphasized how notable it was that “the presence of narcotics on a boat is not one of the targeting criteria.” He then encouraged his colleagues to “get the same briefing I’ve got, take a look at the strike files, you’ll be as surprised as I am.”

The fact that evidence of the presence of narcotics is not listed “is very contradictory to the administration’s public messaging and the way that they have framed Operation Southern Spear,” said a Senate source familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the issue.

The White House, Defense Department, and Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Kaine has been among the most vocal critics of the strikes on alleged drug boats, among other military actions taken by U.S. President Donald Trump during his second term, and he has decried them as illegal. The strikes have not been authorized by Congress. But congressional lawmakers have so far failed in various efforts to prevent the Trump administration from continuing the strikes, which are also linked to the military operation in January that led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Top legal experts have also contended that the strikes violate both domestic and international law and that drug trafficking does not constitute grounds for the use of lethal military force. Counterterrorism experts have also underscored that drug traffickers, while dangerous, should not be considered terrorists.

The Trump administration has not provided concrete evidence to back up its public justifications for the strikes, which have killed over 200 people since the campaign began in September, and questions have been raised by congressional lawmakers over whether the boats targeted actually belonged to drug cartels. In a sign that the Trump administration is aware it’s operating in legally dubious territory, the OLC in a classified memo last summer said that U.S. troops involved in the lethal strikes would not be exposed to prosecution in the future.

During Tuesday’s hearing, Republican Sen. Rand Paul—another vocal critic of the strikes on the alleged drug boats—also brought up the targeting criteria. “It’s interesting that the three secret criteria we’re using to blow up the boats doesn’t include whether they have drugs on board,” said Paul, who has criticized GOP colleagues for not speaking out against the strikes.