2026-04-02 10:10:09
2026年4月1日，美国总统唐纳德·特朗普在华盛顿白宫的Cross Hall发表晚间讲话，称伊朗战争已进入最后阶段，美国已“彻底摧毁”伊朗，并表示冲突将在未来两到三周内结束。然而，分析指出，战争可能并未真正结束，伊朗可能通过控制霍尔木兹海峡这一全球能源命脉，继续对美国及其盟友施加压力。此外，伊朗的地区代理人（如也门胡塞武装、伊拉克民兵和黎巴嫩真主党）虽被削弱，但仍可能持续攻击，而美国在战争中虽占据技术优势，但其军事资源的消耗也可能影响未来冲突。
特朗普强调不会允许伊朗拥有核武器，但伊朗仍保有450公斤浓缩铀库存，这使得美国难以彻底消除其核威胁。尽管战争造成超过1500名平民死亡，伊朗仍可能以“仍掌握政权”为由宣称胜利。与此同时，美国与以色列的空袭行动已对伊朗的常规武装、海军和导弹系统造成严重打击，但伊朗的袭击也显示出其战术能力的提升，可能对美国和以色列构成持续威胁。
特朗普倾向于避免大规模地面作战，尽管他支持对伊朗进行空袭。美国军方的资源分配问题也浮出水面，例如“福特号”航母因后勤问题多次延迟部署，凸显其军事行动的局限性。此外，伊朗通过封锁霍尔木兹海峡引发全球粮食、肥料等物资短缺，影响最严重的可能是贫困国家。
以色列在战争中采取了长期战略，包括对黎巴嫩南部的占领和对加沙的持续打击，其军事行动已造成超过1200人死亡和100万人流离失所。尽管战争在美国国内不受欢迎，但以色列仍视其为巩固地区优势的机会。
战争还改变了国际规则，例如俄罗斯因油价上涨和削弱北约而受益，特朗普则威胁削减对乌克兰援助，若欧洲国家不参与重启霍尔木兹海峡。北约的互防义务受到质疑，可能面临解体风险。此外，伊朗攻击亚马逊数据中心等事件表明，科技公司可能成为合法军事目标，而针对国家领导人的“斩首行动”也因精准打击技术的发展而变得更加危险。
尽管伊朗在战争中受损严重，但其风险承受能力和绝望感可能增强，未来核武器发展仍存不确定性。这场战争可能促使更多国家考虑拥有核武器，而非依赖核外交。全球局势因此变得更加复杂和危险。
The Iran war of 2026 will continue, but it appears to be entering its final phase. Or at least, that’s what President Donald Trump hopes.
Claiming that the “hard part is done,” Trump made the case in a televised address on Wednesday night that America has “beaten and completely decimated Iran” and suggested that the conflict was “very close” to completion and would wrap up over the next two to three weeks.
“Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating, large-scale losses in a matter of weeks,” Trump said, noting the damage inflicted to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, Navy, and missile program.
Trump said he would prefer to make a deal with Iran, and would launch attacks on Iran’s civilian infrastructure and energy facilities if it did not agree to one. But he appeared to suggest that the US would wrap up operations soon either way. Trump seemed to be asking Americans for patience, noting that the war was far shorter than previous conflicts like World War II and Vietnam.
There are a number of ways the situation could still change dramatically in the next few weeks, but if Trump is, in fact, starting the process of winding down the war, there are a few lessons we can already take from it.
One military cliché has been getting a workout over the past month: In any war plan, the enemy gets a vote. That’s just as true in any withdrawal plan. Iran may not stop fighting just because the United States stops bombing. Given that its air defenses proved completely incapable of stopping the US and Israeli bombardment, Iran could look to raise the costs to the US and its allies to the point where they will be deterred from simply coming back and bombing Iran again in six months.
In particular, Iran may not be in a rush to reopen the Strait of Hormuz — the vital global energy chokepoint it has effectively shut down. Hormuz has emerged as Iran’s main point of leverage in this conflict, and leaders in Tehran will be reluctant to give it up. Over the weekend, Iran’s parliament passed a measure authorizing the collection of tolls from ships transiting the Strait, though it’s not clear how that would work in practice.
Trump suggested in his speech that he was unbothered by this, saying that the Strait would “just open up naturally” once the war ended, but also calling on countries that rely on it to show some “long delayed courage” and reopen it themselves.
A group of European countries is reportedly preparing a diplomatic push to do that, with military options possible as a last resort. Some Persian Gulf countries, notably the United Arab Emirates, are also reportedly pushing for a military coalition to open the Strait by force.
It’s also worth noting that US forces are still heading to the region. A second Marine Expeditionary Unit, consisting of about 2,200 Marines and three warships, is due to arrive in a few weeks to join another MEU as well as elements of the 82nd Airborne Division, who were deployed to the region last week. These forces, designed for rapid deployments to seize and hold territory, could be a form of negotiating leverage for the US as it winds down the conflict, or could give the president additional military options if he changes his mind.
Then there’s the “axis of resistance”: Iran’s regional proxies, badly weakened by Israel’s post–Oct. 7 offensive, seemed like a non-factor in the war’s early days. But lately they’ve made their presence felt. Yemen’s Houthis, who sat out most of the war’s first month, have begun firing missiles at Israel. Iraqi militias have been stepping up their attack on US interests, and appear to have kidnapped an American journalist. Hezbollah, fighting Israeli forces in Southern Lebanon, has shown it can still fire barrages of hundreds of rockets into Israel. These groups aren’t as powerful as they used to be, but they’re not eliminated, and they may not halt their attacks when the war ends.
It’s important to remember that while Trump’s immediate justifications for this war have shifted over time, the one consistent case he has made is that, as he put it on Wednesday, I “would never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” It’s notable that in his speech, Trump did not refer to Iran’s stockpile of 450 kilograms of enriched uranium. As long as that stockpile remains, the US cannot credibly claim to have eliminated Iran’s nuclear threat, though Trump did vow to launch new airstrikes if any new nuclear activity is detected.
If the war winds down in the coming weeks, Iran will doubtless claim victory on the grounds that it is still in power, despite the onslaught, and was able to fight back more effectively than many expected via its missile and drone attacks throughout the region and its closure of the Strait. But we shouldn’t overstate that case either.
In addition to dozens of senior leaders, including its most prominent figures like Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and security chief Ali Larijani, Iran’s conventional armed forces, navy, and missile forces have sustained heavy damage. Its strikes across the Gulf have enraged the Gulf Arab nations with which it had reached a tentative detente in recent years. It’s unlikely to find many partners anxious to invest in its rebuilding effort.
Israeli airstrikes have also targeted the Basij militia, which led the efforts to crush anti-regime protests in Iran earlier this year. It’s hard to know yet what effect the war — which is estimated to have killed more than 1,500 civilians — has had on public opinion in Iran. But it seems likely that the regime’s opponents, whether on the streets of major cities or in ethnic minority regions, might soon want to test just how much it’s been weakened.
The relative success of “Operation Midnight Hammer” last June — Israel and America’s so-called 12-day war on Iran that targeted its nuclear facilities — and, even more so, the US operation to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January appear to have increased the military confidence of a president who, until recently, was campaigning for a Nobel Peace Prize. If Trump were running for office again, it would be hard for him to again campaign as the “pro-peace” candidate, but there do still appear to be some lines he’s reluctant to cross.
In recent weeks, there has been widespread reporting that the administration was considering risky operations to seize islands in and around the Strait of Hormuz to break Iran’s blockade or to deploy special forces to seize Iran’s uranium stockpile. Extracting 450 kilograms of radioactive material buried deep under rubble while taking heavy enemy fire always seemed like a tall order. The Hormuz operations may have been doable but would also raise the risk of American casualties — thirteen American servicemembers have been killed in the war, already — and prolong an already unpopular conflict. The escalations that Trump discussed in his speech involved bombing Iran “back to the stone age” — not sending in troops.
This may be the closest Trump has come to the sort of Mideast military quagmire that has bedeviled the US for the past 25 years, but despite his claims that the “doesn’t have the yips” when it comes to boots on the ground, he still seems intent on avoiding large-scale ground operations that would see a large number of Americans coming home in coffins.
Colin Powell’s famous “pottery barn rule” is no longer in effect: The US is fine just breaking things and moving on.
One of the main questions likely to perplex future historians of this war is why its planners did not anticipate and prepare for Iran blocking the Strait of Hormuz — a scenario that has dominated US strategic thinking about the region for decades. (A Marine Corps veteran I spoke with recently recalled war-gaming an amphibious operation on Iran’s Qeshm Island in the 1980s.) Ensuring the free flow of energy from the Gulf is one of the main justifications for having a large military presence in this region in the first place.
It’s true that Iran was able to effectively close the Strait more easily than many expected, with just a handful of demonstrative strikes on tankers rather than a large deployment of mines. But that could have been anticipated when the Houthis did the exact same thing in the Red Sea in 2024.
There are some parallels to how this administration escalated trade tensions with China last year, seemingly not anticipating that Beijing would leverage its dominance over the global supply of rare earth minerals — a scenario also discussed ad nauseam in Washington for years.
For years, the US leveraged its control of chokepoints in the global economy — the use of the dollar in international financial transactions; the global tech industry’s reliance on semiconductors made by US allies — to punish its rivals. Over the past year, we’ve seen those rivals learn to play the same game.
Closing the Strait has resulted in global shortages in food, fertilizer, and other commodities — the reverberations of which could be felt for months after the fighting stops — and those worst-affected by it will be those living in the world’s poorest countries, who had nothing to do with this war.
Much of this war has been a display of absolute tactical and technological dominance by the American military and its Israeli partners. They’ve been able to strike Iran seemingly at will, pulled off incredible intelligence coups in the targeting of senior leaders, and intercepted the vast majority of missiles and drones fired by Iran.
But we’ve seen the limits as well. In recent days, it’s been becoming clear that the Iranian strikes on US bases were more damaging than initially reported and that they’ve been having more success penetrating Israel’s air defenses as well. Whether that’s because Iran was learning how to evade those defenses (perhaps with Russian assistance) or because it has been saving its more sophisticated hardware for later in the war remains unclear.
The US and Gulf Countries were never really in danger of running out of vital interceptors, but their heavy use in this conflict, along with other sophisticated systems like Tomahawk missiles, has forced tough decisions about how to allocate them, and the reduced stockpile may be felt in future conflicts, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region.
The fate of the USS Gerald Ford, which in recent months has had its deployment twice extended as it was diverted from the Middle East for operations in Venezuela, then sent back for the war in Iran, then finally docked in Croatia after its laundry room caught on fire and its toilets began malfunctioning, may serve as a cautionary tale.
We’ve learned once again that even the most powerful and best-funded military in the world faces military constraints when the president is launching new major military operations every few months.
If not for Iran, Israel’s escalating war in Lebanon, which has killed more than 1,200 people and displaced more than a million, would have been the biggest story in the Middle East for the past month. Israeli leaders are discussing what sounds like a long-term occupation of parts of Southern Lebanon and are invoking Gaza as a model as they destroy buildings in the area.
As for Gaza itself, Israel appears to be fortifying its military presence within the enclave, aid has been severely restricted from entering the Strip, and talk of moving to a new phase of reconstruction feels like a distant memory.
Even as the Iran war was never popular in the United States, it was overwhelmingly so in Israel, despite much of the population spending the past month in and out of air raid shelters. Even if Trump forces the war to a close short of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ultimate goal of regime change in Tehran, the Israeli expectation has always been that they would simply continue to degrade Iran’s capabilities as much as possible for as long as the US would allow. As for what remains, there’s always the next time — a regional expansion of the “mowing the grass” strategy that Israel has long employed in Gaza. “If we see them make a move, even a move forward, will hit them with missiles very hard again,” Trump said on Wednesday, suggesting that the US may again take part int he mowing.
The war may have done serious damage to Israel’s standing in the US — and not only among Democrats, who were already a lost cause from Netanyahu’s perspective, but among Republicans looking for someone other than Trump to blame for this war. But that’s a concern for another day: For now, Israel sees its regional enemies on the back foot and will look to continue to press its advantage.
If there has been a clear winner from this war, it is Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has benefited from both an economic shot in the arm from high oil prices and from the further strain that the conflict has put on the transatlantic alliance. (The Financial Times reports that Trump had threatened to halt aid to Ukraine if European countries didn’t take part in an effort to reopen the Strait.) Trump is once again talking about pulling the US out of NATO, in light of the alliance’s reluctance to allow their bases to be used for military operations or to join a fight to reopen Hormuz. Given the skepticism Trump is voicing about the alliance’s all-important mutual defense obligation, it’s fair to ask if the alliance is effectively dead already. That’s a cause for concern in a world where interstate wars are starting to become more common again.
Not every country has access to something like the Strait of Hormuz, but other countries are likely to try to learn from Iran’s example of weaponizing chokepoints in the global economy to fight a more powerful adversary. Iran’s targeting of Amazon data centers may also portend a world in which tech firms are considered legitimate military targets.
Khamenei’s killing broke a precedent: There are very few modern examples of heads of state being deliberately killed in war. Given that new advances in precision targeting and drones have made “decapitation strikes” easier to carry out, this could make future wars a lot more dangerous for the leaders waging them.
Iran clearly has more incentive than ever to actually build a nuclear weapon — though whether it would actually be able to do this with much of its weapons program in shambles and its government penetrated by spies is another question. What’s more clear, though, is that the attack on Iran, the second launched by the US and Israel in the past year in the midst of ongoing nuclear negotiations, will convince many countries that it’s worth having a nuclear weapon and not trusting future efforts at nuclear diplomacy.
Iran itself may be weaker than it was a month ago — but its tolerance for risk and desperation are also higher. The damage inflicted on the regime in this war may have satisfied leaders in Washington and Jerusalem, but the world itself has likely gotten more dangerous.
2026-04-02 05:15:00
特朗普于2026年3月29日返回华盛顿特区后，在白宫南草坪上。本文出自《Logoff》每日简报，旨在帮助您了解特朗普政府的动态，而不会让政治新闻占据您的生活。订阅此处。欢迎来到《Logoff》：特朗普仍在试图限制邮寄投票。发生了什么？周二晚间，特朗普签署了一项行政命令，旨在创建新的公民名单以确定投票资格，并限制美国邮政服务可以向哪些人发送选票。这项命令是否可行？很可能不会，原因有几点。首先，它几乎肯定违宪：宪法赋予各州决定选举“时间、地点和方式”的权力，而没有涉及行政部门的职责。其次，还有实际操作上的障碍。美国企业研究所高级研究员凯文·R·科萨指出，即使该命令得以实施，要在2026年中期选举前完成也面临严重的物流挑战。背景是什么？自2020年大选失利以来，限制邮寄投票一直是特朗普的主要目标，他将选举失利归咎于邮寄选票。最近，他试图通过立法实现这一目标：目前卡在参议院的《拯救美国法案》不仅限制邮寄投票，还规定新的选民身份证要求。尽管特朗普不断攻击邮寄投票，但并无证据表明其与大规模选民欺诈有关。特朗普本人是否曾通过邮寄投票？是的。记录显示，尽管特朗普曾批评邮寄投票为“作弊”，但他本人却在佛罗里达州最近的特别选举中通过邮寄方式投票，当时他正在棕榈滩县。大局如何？加州大学洛杉矶分校法学院教授里克·哈森在一篇博客中指出，这项命令过于薄弱，更像是“选举否定主义”的表演，而非实质行动——旨在毫无根据地渲染美国选举不安全，需要改革。这种表演并非没有现实危险。尽管该命令不太可能引发美国选举的混乱，但它仍是特朗普长期削弱美国民众对民主程序信心的又一举措。## 说到这里，是时候下线了……今天是登月任务日！您可阅读同事凯特琳·德威的文章了解新的太空竞赛，也可在YouTube、C-SPAN等平台观看直播。两小时的发射窗口将于东部时间晚上6:24开启。等待期间，这里有一个特别链接，解释为何阿尔忒弥斯二号宇航服并非白色，而是特定的国际橙色（我个人非常喜欢这个颜色）。感谢阅读，祝您度过愉快的夜晚，我们明天再见！
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump is still trying to limit mail-in voting.
What happened? On Tuesday evening, Trump signed an executive order that would create new citizenship lists to determine eligibility to vote and limit who the US Postal Service can send ballots to.
Is this order going to go anywhere? Very likely not, for a number of reasons. First, it’s almost certainly unconstitutional: The Constitution gives states the power to determine the “Times, Places and Manner” of elections, with no role for the executive branch.
There are also practical obstacles. As Kevin R. Kosar, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, points out, the implementation of the order in time for the 2026 midterms — should it be allowed to go forward — would present serious logistical challenges.
What’s the context? Limiting mail-in voting has been Trump’s white whale since his defeat in the 2020 election, which he has blamed on mail ballots. Most recently, he’s tried to get it done legislatively: The SAVE America Act, which is currently stuck in the Senate (and unlikely to come unstuck), would not only limit mail-in voting, but impose new voter ID requirements.
Despite Trump’s attacks, there is no evidence that mail-in voting is associated with significant voter fraud.
Didn’t Trump vote by mail himself? Yes. Records show Trump, who has attacked mail-in voting as “cheating,” voted by mail in Florida’s recent special elections, despite being in Palm Beach at the time.
What’s the big picture? As Rick Hasen, a University of California Los Angeles law professor, pointed out in a blog post, the order is flimsy enough that it’s more “election denialism theater” than anything else — intended to paint US elections, baselessly, as not secure and in need of reform.
That kind of theater isn’t without real-world dangers. This specific order is unlikely to throw US elections into chaos — but it’s yet another entry in Trump’s long-running campaign to undermine Americans’ confidence in the democratic process.
It’s moon mission day! You can read my colleague Caitlin Dewey on the new space race here, and tune in to watch on YouTube, C-SPAN, and lots of other places. The two-hour launch window opens at 6:24 pm Eastern.
While you’re waiting, here’s a gift link explaining why the Artemis II spacesuits are not white but a specific shade called International Orange (I’m a fan, personally).
Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
2026-04-02 05:08:41
编辑注：4月1日，东部时间下午5点。本文中的采访是在2023年NASA首次公布阿尔忒弥斯II号任务宇航员名单时进行的。随着任务的推进，Vox重新发布此文。参与阿尔忒弥斯II号任务的宇航员队伍中包括两个历史性突破：首位女性宇航员克里斯蒂娜·科赫和首位有色人种宇航员维克多·格洛弗。NASA发言人称他们为“先驱者”和“探索者”，并以“人类的队伍”来形容他们。然而，阿尔忒弥斯II号计划背后隐藏着更多企业目标。不仅私人企业参与了飞船的建造，而且一些太空采矿公司竞标政府合同，希望将月球变成宇宙加油站。他们的愿景是开采月球表面的火箭燃料，以推动我们前往火星甚至更远的星际空间。玛丽-简·鲁宾斯坦表示，这种愿景让她感到恶心。她是韦斯利安大学宗教与科学社会学教授，著有《Astrotopia：企业太空竞赛的危险宗教》一书。她为何在书名中使用“宗教”一词？为何一位宗教学者会写关于太空计划的书？鲁宾斯坦认为，当前的企业太空竞赛实际上是20世纪50年代末至70年代初太空竞赛的延续和强化，而这一竞赛又与欧洲殖民美洲的项目密切相关。欧洲人横渡海洋征服美洲，随后白人美国人通过“昭昭天命”理念扩展至北美大陆，这一模式在20世纪中期被延伸至太空，成为新的殖民地。太空竞赛是欧洲式殖民主义的新篇章，旨在为帝国国家获取更多土地和资源。在美洲殖民过程中，宗教语言、宗教权威和宗教教义始终起着关键作用。例如，西班牙能够征服新大陆，是因为教皇亚历山大六世宣布新大陆属于西班牙。征服者得到了罗马天主教会的资助，因此上帝似乎在支持西班牙对新大陆的征服。这种语言后来被用于对土地和资源的宣称，以及对原住民社区的破坏，其依据是圣经中的说法。北美早期传教士称太空为“上帝的新以色列”，正如上帝曾将迦南地赐予以色列人，要求他们将其变为圣洁之地，现在上帝似乎将太空赐予欧洲人。这一理念意味着：进入太空，清除所有不洁之物，建立一个以上帝荣耀为宗旨的新王国。此外，美国有20个城镇以“新迦南”命名。因此，如果美国认为自己是上帝的新选民，那么这种宗教主题如何影响现代企业太空竞赛？鲁宾斯坦指出，特朗普在2018年曾引用《诗篇》139篇，称“即使我们飞向天空，上帝的手也会引导我们”。2020年，他在国情咨文中使用了“昭昭天命”一词，称太空探索是“美国在星辰中的昭昭天命”。这让人联想到过去“昭昭天命”理念，即上帝希望欧洲裔白人占据东海岸乃至整个大陆。如今，特朗普的愿景是让美国占据整个宇宙。鲁宾斯坦强调，这并非仅仅是特朗普的主张，拜登政府也延续了这一政策。她认为，无论是特朗普还是拜登，对太空的政策都并无二致。有人质疑在太空竞赛中使用“殖民主义”一词是否恰当，因为殖民主义通常被视为对已有人类居住地的破坏。然而，如果月球或火星等外星环境无人居住，这种说法是否适用？鲁宾斯坦指出，答案取决于个人的视角。对于原住民而言，比如澳大利亚的巴瓦卡人，他们认为太空并非空无一物，而是有祖先居住的地方。当人们去世时，他们的灵魂会升入银河系与星星一同存在。因此，如果我们在月球或火星采矿，实际上是在破坏祖先的栖息地。此外，行星本身常被视为神圣或神灵。因此，从不同角度看，太空并非空无一物。即使不考虑这一点，殖民主义对殖民者自身也造成了巨大破坏。目前，太空尚无完善的国际法律框架，若某国在月球建立采矿设施，就需要保护其利益，这可能意味着美国太空军将驻守矿区，防止他人进入。这将重现19世纪末殖民扩张引发的争夺，甚至导致世界大战。因此，太空竞赛可能带来类似的历史冲突。此外，追求财富和利润往往使已富裕的人更加富裕，这会加剧贫富差距，对大多数人不利。鲁宾斯坦还提到，一些学者认为不应破坏月球表面或污染它，因为月球“拥有基本权利”，并发布了《月球权利宣言》。这与“自然权利”运动类似，该运动已成功赋予湖泊和森林法律人格。她认为，将这种理念应用于外星环境是值得尝试的。她引用了哲学家霍尔姆斯·罗尔斯顿三世的观点，认为自然实体本身具有价值，而不仅仅是人类利用的价值。罗尔斯顿提出了判断是否应破坏某些事物的标准，如“具有历史价值的地点”、“自然项目中的极端”、“具有审美价值的地点”以及“具有变革价值的地点”。然而，鲁宾斯坦认为这些标准更多是关于人类对地点的工具性价值，而非其内在道德价值。她指出，人类很难衡量事物本身的内在价值，我们总是会从自己的视角出发，使用个人的审美标准。她认为，这种对“宗教”的讨论已经超越了传统宗教，而是以“末世论”逻辑出现，即“世界即将终结”，一方面有迫近的灾难，另一方面有永恒的救赎。这种宗教运作的中心从教会转移到了私人“弥赛亚”身上。这些私人弥赛亚并非代表任何正式宗教，但其逻辑却与基督教中“在地上受苦，来世得救”的理念相似。最后，鲁宾斯坦提到，如果太空探索能以不损害人类、动物、地球或其他星球的方式进行，她完全支持。她认为，有许多懂得如何可持续生活的人可以作为榜样，但我们需要倾听他们的经验，并首先在地球上进行实践。
Editor’s Note, April 1, 5:00 pm ET: The interview in this piece was conducted when NASA first revealed the crew for Artemis II in 2023. With the launch now taking place, Vox is republishing the piece.
The crew taking part in the Artemis II launch includes two historic firsts: the first woman, Christina Koch, and the first person of color, Victor Glover, to go on a lunar mission. Hailed by NASA spokespeople as “pioneers” and “explorers,” they have been greeted with fanfare befitting “humanity’s crew.”
But behind the Artemis II program are much more corporate goals. It’s not just that private industry helped build the program’s spacecraft. Space mining companies competing for government contracts want to turn the moon into a cosmic gas station. The vision is to mine the lunar surface for rocket fuel that can then propel us all the way to Mars — and beyond, as humanity takes its self-appointed place in the stars.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein told me that vision makes her want to throw up. A Wesleyan professor of religion and science in society, she’s the author of the book Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race.
What’s “religion” doing in that title, and why is a religion professor writing a book about the space program? Rubenstein argues that today’s corporate space race — helmed by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and others who propose to “save” humanity from a dying planet — is actually rehashing old Christian themes that go all the way back to the 15th century, when European Christians colonized the Americas. Remember how Donald Trump described the Artemis mission and eventual settlement of the moon and Mars? He called it “America’s manifest destiny in the stars.”
But as Rubenstein points out, not everyone thinks it’s the moon’s destiny to be strip-mined, or Mars’s destiny to be settled by human colonists. In fact, some believe these celestial bodies should have fundamental rights of their own.
I talked to Rubenstein about the fear of screwing up space like we’ve screwed up Earth: Is that really a fear of trampling on space’s own intrinsic value, or is it more a fear about human nature? A transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.
When you see news about space exploration, like the announcement about who will be going to the moon next year, is your dominant feeling … excitement? Dread?
It’s a little bit of dread. Because I worry that all this is getting going before the public really understands what’s happening.
One thing I’m worried about is that some of the astronauts will be tokenized to make it clear that Artemis is a feminist and anti-racist movement. But if we’re looking to make space exploration a liberationist project, just putting representatives of different identity groups there isn’t going to be enough. I worry that it’ll look like the job is somehow done because there is a woman and a person of color on this mission.
The mission itself needs to be analyzed from a feminist and anti-racist perspective first. Then you figure out how to do it well, and then you figure out who’s going to be on it.
There are two words you use to refer to the corporate space race in your book, and the rationale for using those words might not be obvious to readers. You talk about it as “religion” and as “colonial.” Why?
What I’m arguing is that the new corporate space race is an extension and intensification of the initial space race of the late ’50s and into the early ’70s. And that that space race is an extension and intensification of the colonial project that settled the Americas.
The journey that Europeans made across the seas to conquer the Americas and then the journey that white-descended Americans made across the North American continent through what’s known as Manifest Destiny gets extended in the mid-20th century as a new frontier is proclaimed to be open, the frontier of outer space. The space race is a new chapter in European-style colonialism — a vertical extension of that colonial project — as an effort to get more land and more resources for an imperial nation.
The colonial project that settled the Americas was underwritten at every major turn by religious language, religious authorities, religious doctrines. Perhaps most profoundly, the reason Spain was able to conquer the New World was that Pope Alexander VI declared that the New World was his to give — and he gave it to Spain. The conquistadors were underwritten by the head of the Roman Catholic Church; therefore God was endorsing the Spanish conquest of the New World.
This language gets taken up in different ways later. You find a claim to land and resources and a justification for destroying indigenous communities, all authorized by biblical claims. North America is understood very early on to be what early preachers will call God’s New Israel. Just as God gave the Land of Canaan to the Israelites on the proviso that they make it a holy land, God was now giving Europeans a new Canaan. The idea is: Go in there, cleanse it of all unholiness and devotion to any other gods, and establish a new kingdom dedicated to the glory of God.
By the way, there are 20 towns in the US that are named New Canaan.
So if America is understanding itself to be God’s new Israel, it’s like saying Americans are God’s new chosen people. How do those religious themes underwrite the modern corporate space race?
When Mike Pence spoke to space-industry professionals [in 2018], he quoted Psalm 139 and said that “even if we go up to the heavens, even there His hand will guide us.” Then in 2020, Trump used the language of Manifest Destiny in his last State of the Union address when he was declaring his priorities for a second term. This was in the [beginning] of the pandemic, people were dying, and his first priority was going to the moon — to embrace “America’s manifest destiny in the stars.”
That was a call-out to the old idea of Manifest Destiny, that God wants light-skinned people of European heritage to inhabit not only the Eastern seaboard but the entire continent. Now the idea that Trump set forth was, it’s not just the continent that God wants America to have, it’s the entire universe.
And just to be clear, lest people think this is just a Trump thing, this is very much something that the Biden administration has decided to continue, right?
Absolutely. There’s absolutely no difference between the Trump administration and the Biden administration when it comes to space.
Some people object to using the word “colonialism” in this context. We think of colonialism as a hugely harmful thing mostly because European colonizers were coming to inhabited lands and destroying indigenous peoples. But if the moon or Mars or space beyond our solar system is uninhabited, how does “colonialism” apply?
The answer that seems compelling to you totally depends on your frame of reference. Perhaps the most difficult for secular, white Westerners to take on would be this. If you talk to indigenous people — I’m thinking particularly of Inuit cosmology, of Ojibwe cosmology, of Bawaka cosmology from Australia — they will tell you that outer space isn’t empty at all, that it actually is inhabited, that there are indigenous people there: their ancestors.
For the Bawaka People, when people die, they’re actually carried up into the Milky Way alongside the stars. So they’re really concerned that if we mine there, we’re actually doing damage to the habitation of the ancestors. And planetary bodies are often said to be sacred or to be divinities themselves. So, from different perspectives, it’s not just a foregone conclusion that there is nothing out there.
If that doesn’t do it for you, colonialism was also fairly destructive for the nations who were doing the colonizing! At the moment we do not have a robust international legal structure in space. If you’re able to set up, say, a mine there, you’re going to have to defend your mine. So the US Space Force is going to be stationed around the mine to make sure nobody else goes there. And suddenly you’ve got the same clamoring for land and resources that tore the nations apart in the late 19th century, and we had two world wars resulting from that. It seems like a bad idea to set ourselves up for that in space.
Also, the pursuit of wealth and explosion of profit tends to make those who are already wealthy much wealthier. We know that widening the gap between exceedingly rich people and exceedingly poor people is not good for most of the population.
What about ways that an extractive approach to space could potentially do damage to land?
This approach means we’re going to get even more rocket launches than we currently have — Elon Musk sends 60 satellites up at a time — and more launch pads being created and those are usually created in spaces like wetlands. Boca Chica, Texas, for example, has been absolutely destroyed by the operations of SpaceX in that area. Ecologically it’s a disaster. And low-Earth orbit is already so crowded that it’s very hard to see the stars, even for astronomers.
The next thing to point out is that the colonial project has been destructive not only of communities, but of land itself. So then the question becomes whether the land of the moon or Mars has any value in itself, which is to say beyond its value to us.
You write about a group of Australian scholars who argue that it’s not okay to damage the surface of the moon or pollute it, that the moon “possesses fundamental rights.” They’ve even issued a Declaration of the Rights of the Moon. This echoes the “rights of nature” movement, which has successfully won legal personhood rights for lakes and forests. Do you think it makes sense to apply that sort of thinking to an extraterrestrial body?
It’s such a hard question. On the one hand, I can understand that people might think there are severe limitations to applying human-derived rights language to natural formations. We might be concerned that modeling the rights of nature on the rights of humans only allows us to value something insofar as it seems human-ish. But my sense is that we’re working within a complicated and insufficient legal framework and that any strategy that works is worth trying.
You cite the philosopher Holmes Rolston III who argues that natural entities have their own value independent of anything humans might want from them. That doesn’t mean we should never eat a carrot or dig up a weed, but it does mean we should spend time considering what we take from the world and how. Rolston offers criteria for how to know when we shouldn’t destroy something. For example, we should respect “places of historical value,” “extremes in natural projects,” “places of aesthetic value,” and “places of transformative value.”
But are these really about a place’s intrinsic moral worth? To me this sounds more like people grasping for language to talk about instrumental worth — what certain places do for us.
I think it’s very hard to measure the value of something in itself. We’re always going to slip into the language of human perspective; we’re always going sneak in our own aesthetic criteria. This project has really demolished anything like academic purism in me. I think we’re going to have to give up on purity, inviolable categories or absolute measurements.
But even if there were just some kind of attention to the landscape itself and to what’s important to us (taken broadly) about that landscape … even if we were just to approach the bodies of outer space in the ways that we approach national parks, where you carry out anything you bring in … we would be doing a lot better.
I like this idea of human judgments as a floor or a minimum. Even if we just are thinking about how to protect a place vis-à-vis what is of instrumental worth to us humans, that’s already going to be some improvement.
I think a lot of people are painfully aware of how humanity has screwed up the Earth. And so maybe there’s this fear about screwing up space. But is that really more of a fear about human nature, as opposed to really being about space’s own intrinsic value?
I don’t think it’s so much a panic with respect to human nature as it is a panic with respect to capitalist nature. It’s not all of humanity that wants to conquer the stars; it’s a destructive subsection of humanity that claims to be speaking on behalf of all of humanity and telling us that either all of humanity is going to become extinct forever or we need to nuke Mars [to terraform it, per Musk’s ideas]. It’s a false zero-sum game.
Right, everyone from Musk to Bezos to Branson says the corporate space race will be for the benefit of humanity. This goes back to Eisenhower, who said the US must develop a national space program “for the benefit of all mankind.” I’ve seen this in the AI race too — OpenAI, for example, says its mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence “benefits all of humanity.”
In your book you take issue with this language of saving all humanity from going extinct, and you write, “The operative fallacy here is known as longtermism.” Longtermism is a controversial spinoff of a social movement called effective altruism, but you say it’s actually a high-tech version of what Malcolm X called “pie in the sky and heaven in the hereafter.” He blamed America’s racist social system on the Christian teaching that those who suffer on Earth will be rewarded in the afterlife, which he said dissuaded Black Americans from overthrowing their oppressors. How does that map onto your worry about longtermism?
In the book I try to expose the clearly religious heritage of colonialism and the remnants of the kind of thinking we find in Pence and Trump when they say that God wants us to conquer the cosmos. But that’s not the most interesting place that religion is showing up at this point. The most interesting place is much more subtle: It’s in the proclamations that “the world is coming to an end.” They’re offering us a classic messianic logic of impending disaster on the one hand and eternal salvation on the other.
So the locus of religious operation has changed from the Church to these private messiahs. The private messiahs aren’t speaking in the name of any recognized religion — the logic claims to be totally secular. But it actually looks a lot like the Christian logic that says suffering on Earth is justified because there’s going to be redemption in another world.
So is your worry that the longtermist doctrine prioritizes the existence of our species in the far future, so it risks propping up the current destructive systems and keeping us docile about them?
Absolutely. Longtermism gives us a recommended sacrifice of the poor, homeless, and hungry of the Earth, because they’re not the future. It’s actually worse than the Christian promise. The Christian promise is that you yourself may suffer for 80 years but you will be rewarded in the afterlife. Here, there’s no reward for the particular people who are suffering. They’re just going to be thrown by the wayside and die in conditions of poverty and misery. But the human species itself will triumph.
The human species will see the Promised Land but the individuals of today will languish in the desert.
Exactly.
Last question for you: If space exploration can be done in a way that doesn’t screw over people or animals or our planet or other planets, are you all for it?
I’m absolutely for it! And there are so many teachers who know how to do this better. They may not be astronomers and they’re probably not corporate leaders. But there are people who know how to live sustainably. If we can find a way to listen to their example, then great! But that would involve locating those people and probably trying this out on Earth first.
2026-04-02 02:20:06
美国食品药品监督管理局（FDA）于周三批准了礼来公司（Eli Lilly）的GLP-1口服药Foundayo上市，这标志着GLP-1类药物在技术上的重要突破，也推动了美国乃至全球肥胖治疗的变革。此前，GLP-1药物主要以注射剂形式存在，患者需自行处理针头以获得减重效果。尽管难以准确评估针头恐惧对药物使用率的影响，但患者调查表明，成本、长期安全性和副作用担忧，以及对其他减重方式的偏好，也是影响其普及的重要因素。目前，约12%的美国人尝试过GLP-1药物，而肥胖人群约占37%，这表明仍有大量潜在受益者未使用这些药物。礼来公司认为，新的口服药将为这些人提供更便捷的选择，无需针头，更易融入日常用药习惯。
礼来公司的GLP-1口服药与诺和诺德（Novo Nordisk）的Wegovy不同，后者是大分子肽类药物，需严格服用方法，而礼来药为小分子药物，更易生产且减少药物相互作用风险。尽管临床试验显示其减重效果与Ozempic注射剂相当，略低于Mounjaro和Zepbound等药物，但其便利性可能成为关键优势。此外，该药的月供价格为149美元，后续续费为299美元，低于Wegovy注射剂的初始价格，但仍可能对部分患者构成负担。礼来已与医保达成协议，将每月自付费用控制在50美元，但低收入人群的保险覆盖仍不完善。
未来，GLP-1药物可能更加个性化。例如，某些患者可能因同时治疗睡眠呼吸暂停等疾病而选择特定药物。医生和患者需共同考虑以下问题：希望减重多少？更倾向于每周注射一次还是每天服药一次？是否需要治疗其他慢性疾病？目前，美国肥胖数据已出现所谓的“Ozempic效应”，即药物使用带来的积极影响。若能扩大药物可及性并加强患者支持，GLP-1药物有望进一步推动美国肥胖治疗的进展。然而，随着药物使用迅速增加，而初级医疗资源逐渐减少，临床医生是否能有效应对这一挑战仍需观察。此外，GLP-1药物并非最终形式，未来可能会有更多结合不同成分的新药出现，以提高疗效或减少副作用。
The semaglutide revolution took its next leap forward on Wednesday: The Food and Drug Administration has approved Eli Lilly’s GLP-1 oral pill for sale in the United States.
The approval for the drug, which will be sold under the brand name Foundayo, marks an important technological inflection point for this class of drugs that is transforming obesity care in the US and around the world. The previous generation of GLP-1 treatments were injections: Patients (or their doctors) had to handle a needle and insert it into their body in order to reap the weight-loss benefits.
It’s hard to estimate exactly how much Americans’ needle aversion has tamped down their uptake of GLP-1 drugs. Other factors — especially costs, as well as concerns about long-term safety and side effects, and a preference for other weight-loss tactics — have undoubtedly played a role, based on patient surveys. But the gap between the share of Americans who have tried a GLP-1 drug (about 12 percent as of last year) and the share who are obese (about 37 percent) suggests there is a sizable percentage of people who could benefit from these drugs but have not been taking them.
It’s possible some of those holdouts were waiting for a more convenient option, without the hassle of a needle — and Lilly is betting their new pill will make GLP-1s accessible for many of them.
“This is an oral medication in the sense that we’re used to an oral medication that we can just put it in our Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday tray and take it with our other oral medications without regard to food or most worries about drug interactions or anything like that,” Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks told me in an interview last week. “That’s pretty different from a weekly injectable. Obviously, a lot of people use weekly injectables very successfully. But what we’ve learned, I think, is that there are a lot of people waiting for something like this. It’s just a little easier to fit into their busy life.”
How those hopes play out in reality now that the FDA has given its green light remains to be seen. And, as always, a new drug comes with some caveats and tradeoffs. Here’s what you need to know.
If you are thinking, “Wait, isn’t there already a GLP-1 pill?”, you’d be right — but there is a catch.
Novo Nordisk received approval for its Wegovy weight-loss pill in December, and it’s been on the market for a few months. But that drug is a peptide, delivering semaglutide in a large-molecule form that is harder to manufacture and requires more care when taking it. The company advises patients to take their pill immediately upon waking up, with 4 ounces of water, and to then wait for at least 30 minutes before eating or drinking anything else.
The Lilly pill is a small-molecule drug — closer in form to statins or blood-pressure medications. That makes it cheaper to manufacture and avoids some of the drug interaction concerns. The GLP-1 market has been periodically hampered by shortages, and Lilly is betting that putting the drug into this new form will allow them to produce a more robust supply. As Ricks put it to me: “We can make basically as much as we need.”
“Given it is in a pill and not an injection, which reduces supply chain needs around plastics and cold storage, and that is does not have special instructions to take it, it is likely to become a popular choice for primary care [physicians] as they won’t have to demonstrate pen usage, etc.,” Dr. Deborah Horn, medical director for the UT Physicians Center for Obesity Medicine and Metabolic Performance, who has consulted for Lilly, told me over email.
You’re not going to take the Lilly pill for its groundbreaking efficacy: Its convenience is the real pitch.
The pill form could also help mitigate one of the recurring challenges with GLP-1s: people regaining weight if they stop taking it. Injectables can be difficult to stick with over the long term: People get sick of the shots, they might find it hard to stay on top of a once-weekly injection, they don’t want to have to worry about refrigeration when traveling, etc. A once-a-day pill that you can make part of your existing medication routine could, in theory, make it easier for patients to stay on a GLP-1 if that’s appropriate or necessary.
It’s possible that we are in the midst of the “statin-fication” of GLP-1s. Much like statins have become a drug you take long-term to manage your cholesterol, a GLP-1 pill might become something you take for years to manage your weight. People could also potentially shift to a lower dose over time or switch from an injectable to a pill to make the drug more of a maintenance med to keep your weight stable.
“People often lose a lot of weight on Zepbound and get to their goal weight; maybe they lose about 50 pounds. And they’re like, ‘Okay, I don’t need to keep losing weight,’” Ricks said. “An option — and we’ve done the studies and it’ll be indicated within our label — is you can switch to an oral form. And maybe that fits into your life more easily.”
Here’s what the Lilly pill does not represent: a major advance in how effective these GLP-1 drugs are. In clinical trials, patients lost 12 percent of their body weight on average, in line with the original Ozempic injection, but a smidge lower than Mounjaro, Zepbound, and some of the more recent entries into this drug class. You’re not going to take the Lilly pill for its groundbreaking efficacy: Its convenience is the real pitch.
Cost and equitable access are ongoing challenges. Lilly plans to debut the pill at $149 for a month’s supply of the lowest dose, and refills will then be available for $299 within the next 45 days. That’s lower than the initial price point for a month of Wegovy injections available through Costco, for example, but still potentially out of reach for some patients. Ricks told me that Lilly has struck a deal with Medicare to cover the new pill and other GLP-1 treatments for a copay of $50 per month. He added that many insurance plans for higher earners have also started to cover GLP-1 drugs.
But insurance coverage for lower-income Americans, whether on private insurance or Medicaid, remains spotty. Ricks is hopeful that more insurers will come around as the drugs show their long-term value in reducing not only obesity but its associated conditions like heart disease; as part of the company’s deal with the US government, the drug’s cost and health effects will be assessed over time by federal officials, Ricks said.
“It’s hard to think, if it’s 2030, and we have many of these medicines that we’ve proven the benefits for chronic diseases and the government said it’s worth it after this two-year pilot they’re doing — it’s hard to think of too many employers who would say, ‘That’s not for me,” Ricks told me. “If [the government says] it’s worth it, I think that’s a pretty ringing endorsement for insurance.”
Like folks using the injections, some people who took the pill in clinical trials reported unwanted side effects, including gastrointestinal distress and debilitating muscle loss. Those symptoms can often be mitigated through appropriate diet and exercise, but my own reporting suggests that not everyone is receiving the necessary support to avoid those negative consequences. The proliferation of virtual pharmacies that exist largely to prescribe GLP-1s, with no other long-term patient-doctor relationship, adds to the risk that people go on these drugs without appropriate supervision and support.
To truly make the most of the GLP-1 drugs, the entire health care system needs to evolve to make that kind of holistic treatment the norm. But as GLP-1 use rapidly expands at the same time access to primary care is shrinking, it is reasonable to worry whether overstretched clinicians will be able to adapt — or whether many people will still be left to navigate their weight-loss journey on their own.
And finally, this is not the last GLP-1 drug. New iterations are in the works, combining different ingredients to make the treatments more effective or to tamp down on undesirable side effects. The Lilly pill may not be the standard of care for long. GLP-treatment could start to become highly personalized: As Horn put it to me, somebody with obstructive sleep apnea may still want to take Zepbound because that drug has proven effective for both that condition and weight loss at the same time.
She shared a few questions doctors and patients might consider together when deciding which GLP-1 would be right:
We are already seeing the so-called Ozempic effect in obesity data. The US may be finally starting to turn the corner on one of our longstanding health crises. A GLP-1 pill offers a chance to push that progress even further — if we can figure out how to expand access and how to better support patients so they can lose weight in a healthy way.
2026-04-02 02:00:00
2026年4月1日，美国总统唐纳德·特朗普预计抵达华盛顿特区之际，人们在美最高法院外举行示威活动。最高法院正在审理特朗普诉巴芭拉案，以判断特朗普试图通过行政命令终止出生公民权是否符合宪法。尽管特朗普曾试图通过该命令剥夺无证移民子女以及部分合法居留但尚未获得永久居留权人士的公民身份，但这一行政命令在法律上站不住脚。美国宪法第十四修正案明确规定，所有在美国出生的人都是公民，仅有一个例外情况，而该例外并不适用于本案。特朗普的行政命令在发布仅三天后便被一位由里根任命的联邦法官裁定为违宪，该法官表示此案的法律问题非常明确，他“四十年来从未遇到过如此清晰的案例”。此后，下级法院多次下令阻止该命令生效，这些裁决均援引了1898年的美国诉温戈金·阿克案（United States v. Wong Kim Ark），该案驳回了类似限制美国公民身份的尝试。然而，特朗普显然认为，拥有6-3共和党多数席位的最高法院会因党派立场而忽视宪法文本和温戈金·阿克案，支持其行政命令。但周三的口头辩论表明，特朗普的这一赌注很可能失败。九位大法官中，只有保守派的塞缪尔·阿利托明确支持特朗普，而克拉伦斯·托马斯则提出模糊问题，可能与阿利托持不同意见。其余七位大法官似乎认为，特朗普无法通过行政命令推翻第十四修正案。特朗普的法律论点在辩论中遭到驳斥，尤其是他试图扩大“受美国管辖”（subject to the jurisdiction）的例外情况，以涵盖无证移民子女和临时居留者。例如，当美国司法部长约翰·索尔试图论证温戈金·阿克案支持特朗普的立场时，尼尔·戈萨奇大法官回应称“我不确定你多依赖温戈金·阿克案”。首席大法官约翰·罗伯茨则指出“虽然世界变了，但宪法没变”。布雷特·卡瓦诺大法官则暗示他已决定反对特朗普，并试图寻找法律依据。艾米·康妮·巴雷特大法官则通过一个假设案例揭示了特朗普法律论点的矛盾：如果一个奴隶被强行带到美国，且从未打算留在美国，根据特朗普的“居留地”（domicile）理论，他无法获得公民身份，但第十四修正案确实赋予了解放奴隶公民身份。因此，这四位共和党大法官与三位民主党大法官很可能重申温戈金·阿克案的裁决，并判定特朗普的行政命令违宪。这表明，即使面对如此明显的非法行为，最高法院仍可能作出反对特朗普的裁决。
If you’ve been worried that this Supreme Court might give President Donald Trump the power to strip citizenship away from Americans, you can go ahead and exhale.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara, a case challenging an executive order Trump issued on his first day back in office, which purports to strip citizenship from children born to undocumented immigrants and from many people who are lawfully present in the United States but who are not yet authorized to remain here permanently.
There is no plausible argument that Trump’s executive order is constitutional. The Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment provides that “all persons” born in the United States are citizens, with one narrow exception that does not apply in Barbara. Just three days after the executive order was issued, a Reagan-appointed federal judge blocked it — after saying that he’s “been on the bench for over four decades” and that he “can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is.”
Trump’s order has never taken effect thanks to lower court orders against it. Many of those orders relied on United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), a Supreme Court case that rejected a similar effort to restrict who can be a citizen of the United States nearly 130 years ago.
Still, Trump no doubt bet that this Court — which has a 6-3 Republican supermajority that previously ruled that Trump is allowed to use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes — would ignore both the text of the Constitution and Wong Kim Ark and decide the Barbara case based solely on their partisan loyalty to him.
Wednesday’s oral argument, however, left little doubt that Trump made a bad bet. Of the nine justices, only Justice Samuel Alito, the Court’s most reliable partisan for Republican Party causes, appeared to be a certain vote for Trump — although Justice Clarence Thomas asked ambiguous questions and might join Alito in dissent. That leaves seven justices who appear to believe that Trump cannot simply wipe away the Fourteenth Amendment’s text with an executive order.
The Barbara case turns on the meaning of a single word — “jurisdiction” — which appears in the first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
Someone is “subject to the jurisdiction” of a nation if they are bound by its laws. So, if Trump were correct that some children of immigrants are not subject to US jurisdiction, it would mean that the federal government was powerless to deport them — even if they were in this country illegally. It would also mean that the United States was powerless to arrest them if they robbed a bank.
As the Court explained many years ago in Wong Kim Ark, there are, in fact, some newborns who are born in the United States but not subject to its jurisdiction. When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, the most significant exemption to the birthright citizenship rule applied to citizens of American Indian tribes who were born on tribal lands — because those lands were considered a separate nation from the United States. But, in 1924, Congress granted citizenship to all Indigenous people born in the US.
Today, the Fourteenth Amendment’s “subject to the jurisdiction” rule primarily excludes the children of foreign ambassadors and similar foreign officials from US citizenship, because the families of diplomats often enjoy diplomatic immunity from US law.
Trump’s attempt to expand this “subject to the jurisdiction” exception to include children of undocumented immigrants and people here on a temporary basis received a cold reception from nearly all of the justices. After US Solicitor General John Sauer tried to argue that Wong Kim Ark actually supports Trump’s position, for example, Justice Neil Gorsuch quipped back, “I’m not sure how much you want to rely on Wong Kim Ark.”
Similarly, after Sauer claimed that we live in a new world where pregnant foreign nationals allegedly enter the United States to ensure that their child will be a US citizen, Chief Justice John Roberts responded that “It’s a new world; it’s the same Constitution.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, meanwhile, asked several questions suggesting that he’d already decided to rule against Trump and was merely trying to decide what the legal basis for that decision should be. At one point, he asked Cecillia Wang, the ACLU lawyer defending birthright citizenship, whether the Court should rule against Trump based on a 20th century statute that also protects birthright citizenship. At another point, he noted that Trump’s lawyers don’t actually ask the Court to overrule Wong Kim Ark, so he suggested that the Court could issue a very short opinion affirming the lower courts and citing that 1898 case.
For her part, Justice Amy Coney Barrett offered a clever hypothetical exposing a contradiction in Sauer’s legal argument. Sauer argued that the children of immigrants who are not “domiciled” in the United States — meaning that they did not intend to remain here indefinitely — are not citizens. But Sauer also concedes that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to extend citizenship to enslaved people freed during the Civil War.
So, Barrett asked about an enslaved person who was brought to the United States against their will, who always viewed themselves as a captive, and who never intended to remain in the US. Under Sauer’s “domicile” rule, she pointed out, this person could not be a citizen even though Sauer concedes that the Fourteenth Amendment does give citizenship to freed slaves.
These four Republican justices, along with the Court’s three Democrats, appear likely to reaffirm Wong Kim Ark and to declare Trump’s executive order unconstitutional. It appears that it is still possible for Trump to do something that is so clearly illegal that even this Supreme Court will rule against him.
2026-04-01 20:30:00
由于中东冲突导致供应链中断，2026年3月10日，印度金奈出现因商用液化石油气钢瓶短缺而关闭的餐厅。尽管这些国家并未实际参战，但它们都受到数千英里外战争影响的波及。美国和以色列对伊朗的袭击始于2月28日，引发了霍尔木兹海峡的关闭，这一狭窄水道（最窄处仅21英里）原本承担着全球20%的石油、20%的液化天然气（LNG）、三分之一的海运化肥以及近一半的硫磺出口。如今，商品运输量下降了95%，导致全球约32亿人面临燃料配给、停电或能源限制的影响。
食品危机
首先，食品供应受到冲击。印度主要通过霍尔木兹海峡进口烹饪用液化石油气（LPG），供应中断迅速显现。黑市LPG钢瓶价格几乎翻三倍，全国餐馆纷纷缩减菜单，如孟买一家70年的老字号餐厅将斋月多道菜套餐简化为四道菜，另一家连锁餐厅因需要明火制作多萨（dosas）而完全停售。班加罗尔一家餐厅的手写告示“因伊朗与美国战争导致气罐危机，今日无烙饼供应”在社交媒体上引发热议。仅泰米尔纳德邦就有近1万名餐馆面临关闭风险。化肥短缺虽尚未立即显现，但长期影响令人担忧。海湾地区供应全球三分之一的尿素，而春季种植期正值农业关键时段，导致多个国家如孟加拉国关闭四家国有尿素工厂，尼泊尔因国内无化肥生产，尿素价格在关键稻季前上涨40%。巴西糖厂则转向生产乙醇，以应对油价高于每桶100美元的情况，可能影响全球糖供应数月。世界粮食计划署警告称，全球可能有4500万人因危机陷入严重粮食不安全，较当前饥饿水平增加15%。此外，海峡关闭还导致联合国粮食援助滞留在迪拜仓库，削弱了救济机构的供应能力。
可怕的环境影响
环境影响可能是这场危机最深远的长期后果。清洁的LNG供应受阻，亚洲及其他地区煤炭使用量回升。日本计划放宽对老旧燃煤电厂的运行限制，韩国取消了煤炭发电的季节性上限并推迟关闭三座燃煤电厂，泰国、菲律宾和印尼均扩大煤炭业务，德国则重新评估重启搁置燃煤电厂的可行性。煤炭企业因战争受益，如澳大利亚的Yancoal股价上涨40%，美国宾夕法尼亚州的Core Natural Resources上涨30%。一旦重启，煤炭电厂短期内难以关闭，可能加剧碳锁定问题。然而，印度政府允许餐馆和酒店使用木材、干作物和牛粪作为燃料，这推翻了多年清洁能源政策，增加了健康风险。尽管如此，亚洲部分国家如尼泊尔已有70%的新车销售为电动车，巴基斯坦的电动三轮车售罄，中国电动车企比亚迪预计海外销量将比战前增长15%。有分析师称这为“亚洲的乌克兰时刻”，可能加速向可再生能源转型。但短期内，更多煤炭等污染燃料的使用仍会威胁全球更多人的生命。世界贫困人口虽未参与伊朗战争，却无疑正承受其后果。本文最初发表于《未来完美》通讯，欢迎订阅！
Butter chicken has disappeared from some restaurant menus in India. Sri Lanka declared every Wednesday a public holiday. Laos cut its school week to three days. Egypt ordered shops and cafes to close by 9 pm. In Thailand, government workers were told to take the stairs instead of the elevator. And in South Korea, the president urged citizens to take shorter showers.
These are wartime policies, even though none of these countries are actually fighting a war. All of them, however, are caught in the blast radius of one being fought thousands of miles away. That’s because the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, triggered by the US-Israeli strikes on Iran that began on February 28, has detonated a crisis that reaches into kitchens, classrooms, hospitals, and fields across the Global South.
Twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest point, before the war, the Strait carried 20 percent of global oil, 20 percent of liquefied natural gas (LNG), a third of seaborne fertilizer, and nearly half of the world’s sulfur exports. Commodity shipments have fallen by 95 percent. The Strait is, in effect, closed, and the consequences are cascading through the lives of an estimated 3.2 billion people in countries now subject to some form of fuel rationing, power cuts, or energy restrictions.
Start with food. India imports the majority of its cooking gas through the Strait, and the disruption hit almost immediately. Black-market prices for a single liquified petroleum gas (LPG) cylinder — the kind that powers a family kitchen there — have nearly tripled. Restaurants across the country have slashed their menus; a 70-year-old Mumbai institution trimmed its elaborate multicourse Ramadan offerings to just four dishes. A chain in the same city stopped selling dosa entirely, because the dish requires an open gas flame. A handwritten sign at a Bengaluru restaurant went viral: “There will be no roti due to gas cylinder crisis (due to war between Iran and USA).” Nearly 10,000 restaurants in the state of Tamil Nadu alone face closure.
The fertilizer crisis hasn’t yet had the same level of immediate effects, but the longer-term impact looks grim. The Gulf produces roughly a third of the world’s exports of urea, a key ingredient in fertilizer, and the closure hit at the single worst moment in the agricultural calendar — just as Northern Hemisphere farmers need to apply fertilizer for spring planting.
Bangladesh has shut down four of its five state-owned urea plants. Nepal, which produces zero chemical fertilizer domestically, has seen urea prices jump 40 percent ahead of its critical paddy season. In Brazil, sugar mills are diverting their new harvest toward ethanol — which is more profitable, with oil above $100 a barrel — which could tighten global sugar supplies for months.
The World Food Programme warns that 45 million more people globally could be pushed into acute food insecurity — an increase of 15 percent on current hunger levels. As if that’s not enough, the closure of the strait has stranded vital United Nations food aid in warehouses in Dubai, crippling the ability of relief agencies to get supplies where they’re needed most.
Then there’s the environmental fallout, which may be the single most consequential long-term effect of the crisis.
The disruption of relatively clean LNG supplies has triggered a coal resurgence across Asia and beyond. Japan is planning to lift rules that required its oldest, dirtiest coal plants to run at less than 50 percent capacity, which means more carbon dioxide and other pollution spewed into the air. South Korea removed its own seasonal cap on coal power and delayed the retirement of three coal plants. Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia are all expanding coal operations. And in Europe, Germany is reviewing whether to restart mothballed coal plants.
Coal companies — whose product is the single-biggest contributor to climate change — are reaping the benefit. Australia’s Yancoal is up 40 percent since the war began, while Pennsylvania-based Core Natural Resources is up 30 percent. And once turned on, coal plants can be politically difficult to shut down again, which would risk a longer-term carbon lock-in. And it’s not just about climate change. In India, the government has formally permitted restaurants and hotels to burn wood, dried crops, and cow dung — undoing years of clean-fuel progress and putting more lives at risk in the process in a single directive.
If you squint, there could be an eventual silver lining to all of this. In Nepal, over 70 percent of new car sales are already electric. Electric rickshaws are selling out in Pakistan. The Chinese electric car maker BYD is now projecting overseas sales to be 15 percent higher than they were expected before the war. One energy analyst called this “Asia’s Ukraine moment” — a shock that could accelerate the shift to renewables the way Russia’s invasion pushed Europe toward wind and solar.
Hastening the clean energy transition, however, won’t put food on the table for billions of people throughout the Global South, and more coal and other dirty fuels in the short term will endanger more lives around the globe. The world’s poor may not be fighting the Iran war, but they are surely suffering from it.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!