The New YorkerModify

Why is Zendaya a mononymic star? It was an early bet on her potential for leading-lady singularity. Interviewed at twenty, on the cusp of graduating from sitcom-teen workhorse to the love interest in “Spider-Man,” Zendaya explained, in her gracefully blasé way, that she “just thought it was cool, like Cher or Prince.” She will turn thirty in September. With four film projects landing this year, from a salty indie to a summer blockbuster, along with the latest season of “Euphoria,” her ascent to rarified fame seems uncontested. But what about who she is—her interiority—as a grown-up performer? Zendaya and her film audience still seem to be figuring that out.

She isn’t burdened by the need to shed a darker, more mercenary child-star past. From the outset, the right decisions were made. She began as a Disney fixture: first, as one of the leads in “Shake It Up,” a buddy comedy about two background dancers, and, later, in “K.C. Undercover,” a secret-life sitcom in which the titular K.C., her parents, and her two younger siblings double as government spies, and which managed to credibly link itself to the tradition of nineteen-nineties Black sitcoms. Kadeem Hardison—known for playing Dwayne Wayne on “A Different World”—took the role of her father. (We will see him again in Season 3 of “Euphoria.”) The nuclear family was Black, apparently at the insistence of the show’s young star. Zendaya had about her the air of a Raven-Symoné, the type of savvy young Black performer who could play the genial child entertainer onscreen but, when the cameras cut, did not play about her business.

This hyperawareness of Hollywood’s machinery—and how Black actresses function within the caste system of the industry—has shaped Zendaya’s career since, especially as she’s transitioned into the world of film. Professionalism is the lens through which we can understand her. She is poised and adroit as she submits to the press-tour circuit. She dodges rumor, most recently, about whether she has secretly married her partner and “Spider-Man” co-star, Tom Holland, with a kind of winking tact. Onscreen, there is rarely the sense that she is performing from the full, liberated joy of her power but, rather, that she is working through a complex casting strategy that will yield carefully calibrated wins. Rather than sit back and wait for casting agents to dial, she has proactively shaped her performer’s self into a reproducible version of a Zeitgeist woman—her vocal patterns, her laugh, her scowl, all sculpted to the moment. So, when I watch her, I am often struck by the feeling that her charisma is a cover for a realness that she is withholding, which she has calculated is not prudent to fully expose.

Is her professionalism an obstacle to risk? Fatal to artistry? She speaks matter-of-factly about her relative privilege in the industry. She is not “only” an actress; she is a producer, which dates back to her time on “K.C. Undercover.” As a cultural figure, she strikes me as a code-switcher. She is not the crossover case, who distances herself from Black Hollywood. The prognosticators on the industry podcast “The Town” hand-wring over her box-office pull, but they might not register the meaning of her attending the Essence Black Women in Hollywood Awards, in vintage Caché initially worn by Whitney Houston. Zendaya is biracial—her mother is white German Scottish, her father, African American. She knows she benefits from colorism, being what she has called “Hollywood’s acceptable version of a Black girl.” She is not playing the faux naïf; she deliberately capitalizes on her industry’s trend toward race-blind casting. She was open about her tactics securing her role as M.J., the latest iteration of Mary Jane Watson, in “Spider-Man,” a character that had most recently been played by Kirsten Dunst. The character had been written as white, but Zendaya tried out anyway; her auditioning called the bluff of liberal Hollywood.

Now Zendaya is everywhere, and everything: she is the tennis star puppeteering two lovesick adversaries in “Challengers”; she’s the emperor’s mistress in the “Dune” series; she is the neglected girlfriend of a hotshot director in “Malcolm & Marie.” That film, directed by Sam Levinson—who first worked with Zendaya on “Euphoria,” the series that won her a Golden Globe and an Emmy—is total shlock, but it does provide the id moment in her career. Zendaya’s character, Marie, a depressive addict, who finds herself at complete unease in the Hollywood bestiary, claws at Malcolm, played by John David Washington, who is nothing more than a vessel for Levinson’s entitled auteur grievances. Still, it is the one film in which Zendaya inhabits a Black heterosexual world, because Malcolm is a Black man, even if he’s a double for Levinson, a white filmmaker.

How Zendaya’s film characters are “raced” is almost always an outgrowth of their romantic or sexual worlds, which are almost unilaterally with white men. An extremely fragile veneer of post-racial logic blankets these spiky romances, which take place in conspicuously progressive cities. Tashi Duncan sneering “I’m taking good care of my little white boys,” in “Challengers,” is a perfunctory gesture—really, a tell—in a film that had no use for her psychology elsewhere. Because Zendaya plays young women, these women still have parents, and the actors cast to play her parents—which is to say her history, the expository reasons for her Blackness—typically flit in and out of the background, there to signify and do nothing else. It can often feel as if Zendaya has been added to a preëxisting story, like salt on a finished dish. The ostensible fear is that of identity hardening into a cudgel, foreshortening a character’s emotional palette. But why can’t it expand that palette?

Her latest role, Emma, in Kristoffer Borgli’s wedding-disaster movie “The Drama,” is the one that I keep thinking about. We live in the age of the oppressive publicity campaign. Zendaya did her style-as-cosplay thing, in the weeks leading up to the film’s release, looking modelesque in bridal looks across the globe. In the actual movie, Robert Pattinson’s Charlie, a mussed Englishman, spins out after he learns that Emma, his fiancée and dream girl, once planned to carry out a school shooting when she was a bullied, unhappy teen in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Charlie prods Emma incessantly, digging for a reason that could justify her adolescent rage, though he never asks if her sense of isolation stems from being different. Because the film has banished acknowledgment of race from its quarters, the scenes can make you feel insane. The only catharsis is in the actress Jordan Cuyet, who plays the younger version of Emma, whom we see doing target practice in the woods, and basking in the computer glow of incel chatrooms. But even this Emma is largely a figment of Charlie’s imagination; when we see her point a shotgun at a dog, which she ultimately doesn’t shoot, it’s unclear whether the scenario is one that he concocted in his head. For the film to sustain itself as an elongated question about how well you really know your partner, Emma’s interiority has to be put on the pyre; she must be rendered a void. As Rachel, her maid of honor—a woman whom Emma met through Charlie—notes in a nasty reception speech, she doesn’t even have friends. Where are her people? Borgli isolates Emma, stranding her in a mostly white world, because it’s the only way his movie can make conceptual sense.

Borgli is a Norwegian director who, in the wake of his film’s release, has taken heat for having the audacity to bring America’s trauma of school shootings to the casual level of a romantic comedy. I don’t particularly like him as a figure; his director persona is one of entitlement. But I did like “The Drama,” a movie about reality, projections, and the risk of loving another (or should I say, the other?). I couldn’t love it, though, because I didn’t really care what Emma thought about the disintegration of her panicked partner. I cared about what Zendaya thinks. ♦

In a capital where politicians and policymakers often argue one side and then the other, Elbridge Colby has stood out over the past decade for his consistent and often single-minded position that the United States should shift its military and geopolitical world view toward countering the rise of China. Known to friends and colleagues as Bridge, Colby is something of national-defense royalty: his grandfather was William Colby, a legendary C.I.A. director who had served as the agency’s station chief in Saigon in the early years of the Vietnam War. During the first Trump Administration, Colby, then a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, helped devise the 2018 National Defense Strategy, which directed the department to reorient its focus from the Middle East to China (a perennial-but-never-realized staple of U.S. policy since the Obama Administration proclaimed a “pivot to Asia” in 2011). After Joe Biden was elected, Colby continued to argue that the world was returning to an era of Great Power competition, publishing a book, “The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict,” writing op-eds, and leading a think tank, the Marathon Initiative, which he had co-founded with the promise to “develop the diplomatic, military, and economic strategies the nation will need to navigate a protracted competition with great power rivals.”

After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February, 2022, Colby opposed the Biden Administration’s surge of arms, military assets, and munitions to aid the country in its fight. In Colby’s view, Europe needed to take the lead on its own defense, and the U.S. needed to conserve its weapons for China and the Pacific. As he wrote in an op-ed in November, 2022, “This military scarcity confronting the United States is felt not so much in overall number of soldiers or total expenditures, but rather in the critical platforms, weapons, and enablers that are the key sources of advantage in modern warfare—heavy bombers, attack submarines, sea and airlift, logistics, and precision munitions.”

Two weeks after Donald Trump won the 2024 election, Colby retweeted a warning based on comments by Samuel Paparo, a top U.S. admiral, that “conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East are eating away at U.S. stockpiles of air defenses.” In December, Colby shared a tweet by Mike Waltz—who was soon to be Trump’s national-security adviser—in which Waltz proclaimed, “President Trump received an overwhelming mandate to avoid the U.S. being dragged into another Middle East war on his watch.” Later that month, Trump nominated Colby as his Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy—one of the Pentagon’s most powerful roles. The Wall Street Journal editorial board called him “the intellectual front man for a wing of the political right that argues the U.S. should retreat from commitments in Europe and the Middle East.”

Last summer, soon after the so-called Twelve-Day War, in which the U.S. and Israel bombed Iran, press reports accused Colby of using his new position to quietly orchestrate a freeze on key weapons shipments to Ukraine—a move that was said to surprise even the White House and which was quickly reversed. (According to a senior Pentagon policy official, last year’s disruption of U.S. aid to Ukraine was the result of “a process foul in the bowels of the Pentagon,” and the reporting that Colby directed—or even recommended—such a pause is “categorically false.”)

More recently, the White House made clear in its National Security Strategy that the Administration hoped to avoid in the Middle East “the ‘forever wars’ that bogged us down in that region at great cost,” and Colby’s office helped drive the Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy, which came out in January and highlighted how the U.S. had been focussed elsewhere in recent years as “all the while, China and its military grew more powerful in the Indo-Pacific region, the world’s largest and most dynamic market area, with significant implications for Americans’ own security, freedom, and prosperity.”

Now, with the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran in a fragile and uncertain ceasefire, it’s clear that there was something to Colby’s arguments all along. Despite spending more than eight hundred billion dollars a year on defense, the U.S. is uncomfortably short on key munitions, weapons platforms, and even some ships and planes after six weeks of fighting Trump’s war of choice in the Middle East.

Trump’s Pentagon has made frequent use of Tomahawk cruise missiles—highly advanced multimillion-dollar missiles with the ability to strike targets a thousand miles away—throughout his second term, as part of military strikes conducted in a total of seven countries. Tomahawks were fired at Houthi rebels in Yemen last March; at Iran, during the Twelve-Day War; and at suspected ISIS militants in Nigeria in December. Other reports have indicated that the U.S. may have also used Tomahawks in Syria and Venezuela in recent months. An even steeper toll on U.S. stockpiles, munitions, and weapons systems has been incurred during the latest war in Iran. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, D.C., estimates that the U.S. currently has between three thousand and four thousand Tomahawk missiles. (The exact number is classified.) Citing “people familiar with the matter,” the Washington Post reported that the U.S. used more than eight hundred and fifty Tomahawks in just the first month of the war in Iran—that’s as much as three billion dollars’ worth of a single weapon. Meanwhile, the 2026 U.S. defense budget funds the purchase of only fifty-seven new Tomahawk missiles. “If you’re in China, you are gleefully counting on a little hand clicker all the Tomahawks that are being expended,” Tom Karako, who directs the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said. “Iran is not what the Tomahawk is for. Iran is what Small Diameter Bombs—gravity bombs—are for. Thousand-plus-kilometre cruise missiles are for when you have to suppress a wicked thicket of air defenses in China, because you don’t want to fly your bombers in without doing that.”

U.S. interceptor missiles and air-defense systems turn out to be similarly ill-provisioned. Last summer, during the bombing campaign against Iran, the Islamic Republic retaliated against Israel with large waves of ballistic missiles. The U.S. deployed two Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense systems, or THAADs, to Israel, which reportedly fired off more than a hundred and fifty interceptors—roughly a quarter of the number the Pentagon has ever purchased. Lockheed Martin, a defense contractor, previously made about a hundred interceptors a year, each of which cost close to thirteen million dollars. (A full THAAD battery, including missiles and radar, costs upward of a billion dollars.)

The U.S. has only eight THAAD batteries worldwide. At least one of them has been damaged by Iranian strikes in the current conflict, and the U.S. is now moving in components from a system in South Korea, where it had been considered a key part of North Korean deterrence. “The reports of some number of those eight radars being disabled—even if temporarily—ought to really concern you, because those are the kind of things that they’re small in number, they’re really good at what they do, and they’re going to be really important on a bad day with China,” Karako said. “And—oh, by the way—we didn’t have enough of them already.”

A 2023 war game developed by C.S.I.S., and later run for the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, found that, in a conflict with China over Taiwan, the U.S. would run out of key munitions in just a month—and, in the case of one missile, in three to seven days—a worrisome conclusion even before the giant depletion of stockpiles caused by the Iran war. “What we learned, in a protracted war—our defense industrial base does not have the resources it needs to win that war,” John Moolenaar, a Republican House member from Michigan, who chairs the committee, said in an interview on Fox News. Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia and the vice-chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told me that he worries Chinese officials might be watching the U.S. war in Iran and thinking that the strength of the U.S. military isn’t all that they might have imagined. “They have to be seeing some of the full might of the U.S. and Israel, and that Iran is still standing,” he said. “I’m afraid that they may be amazed at the specificity of our ability to target, but it raises the question of our staying power.”

The crisis of American defense production has been slowly worsening since the start of the Russian invasion in Ukraine. “Official Washington added a new word to its vocabulary in the months after February, 2022, and that new word was ‘munitions,’ ” Karako told me. Jon Finer, who served as Biden’s principal deputy national-security adviser, said that the limited ability of the United States to meet the endless need for weapons in the war in Ukraine was the “the most jarring thing that I learned during the entire time I was in government.”

Heavy-duty munitions had long been an afterthought in the “global war on terror,” which prioritized close fighting, special forces, and weapons platforms such as the Predator and Reaper drones. “We adjust our industrial base to the kinds of wars that we are fighting,” Finer told me. “I think we got out of the mind-set where we were ever going to fight a very munitions-heavy war again. That was a bit of a failure of imagination.” At the same time, the nation’s weapons manufacturers—part of what is known inside the Beltway as the defense-industrial base, or DIB—have grown cautious after years of fast-shifting congressional priorities. “If you’re a defense prime, you have basically had to use a Ouija board and a divining rod to try to guess what number of munitions that the government will want to buy two years from now,” Karako said. “These are publicly traded companies—they have to maximize the return for their stockholders—and they can’t, unfortunately, as good Americans, build stuff on spec and hope that the government will show up and buy it.”

The Pentagon has tried to revamp its famously slow and sclerotic acquisitions pipeline. Last summer, Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg began leading the newly formed Munitions Acceleration Council, which focussed on rapidly growing the production of a dozen weapons that the Pentagon believes would be key to a future conflict with China—including Patriot interceptor missiles and joint air-to-surface standoff missiles, known as JASSMs. (In early April, before the ceasefire, Bloomberg reported that the U.S. was redeploying stockpiles of JASSMs from the Pacific to the Middle East, a move that would leave around four hundred and twenty-five of the missiles, out of a prewar stockpile of more than two thousand, for the rest of the world.) Later in the fall, as part of what the Department of Defense dubbed an “Acquisition Transformation Strategy,” the Pentagon laid out how it aimed to rebuild the nation’s defense production; one of the main strategies is to give companies “bigger, longer deals, so they’ll be willing to invest more to grow the industrial base that supplies our weapons.”

In September, the Army awarded Lockheed Martin a nearly ten-billion-dollar contract for the production of Patriot interceptor missiles, the largest in the company’s history; in early January, the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin announced a deal to more than triple the production of the missiles, each of which costs about four million dollars, from six hundred to two thousand a year. Michael Duffey, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, called the deal “a fundamental shift in how we rapidly expand munitions production and magazine depth, and how we collaborate with our industry partners.”

On April 3rd, as the war in Iran approached its sixth week, the White House released a budget request for 2027, which called for $1.5 trillion in defense spending—a more than forty-per-cent increase that, by itself, would be larger than any other nation’s annual defense budget. Much of that money would go to increased investments in munitions and missile-defense systems; Trump said that such spending on “military protection” should take priority over funding for health care and other safety-net programs. “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all of these individual things,” he said. “They can do it on a state basis.”

But Iran’s reliance on cheap drones has also exposed the ways in which expensive U.S. systems are ill-matched for many facets of modern warfare. For decades, U.S. war planners had assumed that Iran would be reluctant to fully close the Strait of Hormuz with naval mines because doing so would render it impassable to Iran’s own oil-tanker fleet. But Iran was ultimately able to choke the global economy by enforcing a closure largely with drones aimed at foreign tankers. “The idea of an operation to quote-unquote open the strait is a little bit of a misnomer, because even troops on the coast are not going to do anything about drones fired from apartment buildings, mountains, and whatever else inland,” Finer said. “We never imagined a scenario in which the Iranians were under so little pressure to open the strait for the rest of the world, because they are able to get more of their own product out than they were able before.”

Deborah Lee James, who served as Secretary of the Air Force from 2013 to 2017, told me that she hopes the weaknesses the current war has exposed in procurement systems will help spur a moment of innovation. She noted the former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s mandate for a “crash program,” in 2007, to rapidly manufacture armored troop transports that could withstand the blasts of improvised explosive devices, which were killing and maiming U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Defense manufacturers such as BAE Systems and Oshkosh manufactured tens of thousands of mine-resistant, ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicles at a cost of nearly fifty billion dollars before the program was ended in 2012. “I think this has now gotten that type of attention,” James said. “This is going to, I hope, be an MRAP moment for the United States when it comes to counter-drone [technologies].”

The Pentagon, though, has continued to project confidence that, despite the past month and a half of fighting in Iran, the U.S. military is still well positioned to deter China in the Pacific. “The Department is laser-focussed on ‘deterrence by denial,’ ” the Pentagon official said. “Our goal is very simply to convince our counterparts that whatever their ambitions are from a military standpoint, they just are not going to be able to achieve them with the kind of confidence they’re looking for—and so they are better off not trying.”

Ultimately, President Xi Jinping’s decision about whether to move against Taiwan will almost certainly be driven by internal considerations—how much confidence he has in his own military leadership, which has faced repeated purges in attempts to root out corruption, and how much progress the military makes in building advanced sea, aerial, and amphibious capability. But some defense analysts believe that the so-called Davidson Window, the period when China could be ready to seize Taiwan, might begin as early as next year—meaning that every missile fired against Iran is a missile unlikely to be replaced by then. “We are vaporizing many billions of dollars of offensive and defensive munitions, specifically the kind that you would want to have in large quantities to deter or fight a war with China,” Karako said. “The biggest danger is that this sets us up for provoking China to do something for which we now have fewer strike missiles and many fewer missile-defense capabilities.” ♦

This is drawn from “Anxietyland.”

On Saturday evening, President Donald Trump took his two daughters, Tiffany and Ivanka, and his son Donald, Jr., to watch a series of Ultimate Fighting Championship bouts in Miami. In one of the best White House pool reports of the year, Katie Rogers, of the Times, described the President sitting ringside as two heavyweight fighters “batter and bloody each other.” The crowd, she went on, “is chanting ‘this is awesome’ as blood or saliva sprays with each punch.” In an interlude between fights, the theme song from Mortal Kombat played. Trump, to celebrate his eightieth birthday, in June, is hosting another major U.F.C. event on the South Lawn of the White House. A five-thousand-seat arena will be constructed for the occasion. Trump savors fights, whether in the ring or on the world stage.

For all his now-laughable lust for a Nobel Peace Prize, Trump is leaving the actual diplomacy to others. As he watched the fights in Miami, his Vice-President, J. D. Vance, was in Islamabad, Pakistan, meeting with a high-powered Iranian delegation to try to negotiate an end to a war that has killed thousands, cost billions, triggered violence across the already volatile Middle East, crippled global energy supply lines, jacked up natural-gas and oil prices everywhere, and undermined the long-standing U.S. alliance with Europe. In just six weeks, the conflict has produced once-in-a-generation turbulence around the world. Vance, who was wary of going to war with Iran in the first place, got stuck navigating an end to it. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State and national-security adviser, was in Miami, at the U.F.C. event, with Trump.

After twenty-one hours, the negotiations ended without resolution. The talks had been civil, both sides reported. Vance shook hands with Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the powerful speaker of parliament and a former Revolutionary Guard commander, although there were no photo ops. It was the highest-level contact between Iran and the United States since the Islamic Revolution, in 1979. “We’ve made it very clear what our redlines are,” Vance said at a brief post-talks press conference. “And they’ve chosen not to accept our terms.” The U.S. needs “an affirmative commitment” that Iran will cease any efforts to develop a nuclear weapon, Vance said. He did not mention other flash points—including ballistic-missile stockpiles, protesters, and regime change—that have been cited by Trump in the past. The Vice-President described the U.S. position as the “final and best” offer. “We’ll see if the Iranians accept it.”

As Vance made the long slog back to Washington, Trump announced, late on Sunday morning, that the U.S. would immediately “begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz.” He added, “Any Iranian who fires at us, or at peaceful vessels, will be BLOWN TO HELL!”

That night, Trump was back online, this time launching a tirade against the first American Pope, Leo XIV. Earlier in the week, the President had claimed that God supports the U.S. and Israel in their war against Iran. At a prayer vigil at St. Peter’s Basilica on Saturday, the Pope warned about the “delusion of omnipotence that surrounds us and is becoming increasingly unpredictable and aggressive.” He did not mention Trump by name, but it wasn’t hard to infer. “Enough of the idolatry of self and money!” Leo said. “Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!” Among those in attendance at the service was the Archbishop of Tehran.

En route back to Washington from Florida, Trump issued a blistering attack on the Pontiff on Truth Social. Leo was “terrible” on foreign policy for not supporting the U.S. military operation in Venezuela, in January, or the war in Iran, he said. “I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do.” Leo was only elected to the papacy, Trump charged, because the Church thought that an American would know how to deal with Trump. “If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican,” he said. The Pope should “get his act together” and “stop catering to the Radical Left,” the post went on. “It’s hurting him very badly and, more importantly, it’s hurting the Catholic Church!” Later, Trump posted an A.I. image of what appeared to be himself as Jesus Christ.

On Monday, Leo, who was starting a four-nation tour of Africa, said that he had no fear of the Trump Administration. When pressed by reporters on his plane about Trump’s remarks on Truth Social, he replied, “It’s ironic—the name of the site itself. Say no more.”

As the shaky ceasefire enters its second week, the U.S. blockade, now under way, changes the dynamics in the Persian Gulf. Since the war began, Iran has choked off most maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, letting only some “friendly” ships pass through. Now the U.S. will block all ships bound for or coming from Iran or its coastal areas.

The strategic calculus, for both countries, is about holding out longer than the other. “The United States and Iran are drifting into a familiar and dangerous pattern: a war of attrition where each side believes it can impose more pain than it can absorb,” Danny Citrinowicz, the former head of Iran analysis in Israeli military intelligence who is now at the Institute for National Security Studies, warned on Monday. “This is a recipe not for resolution, but for escalation.” He also wrote, “Closing the Strait of Hormuz will not force Iran into submission, at least not from Tehran’s perspective. What did not work after five weeks of sustained aerial pressure is unlikely to succeed through maritime pressure alone.”

The markets agreed. On Monday, the price of oil quickly surged above a hundred dollars a barrel. In the U.S., the cost of gas had already topped four dollars a gallon. That, along with continued volatility in the stock market, has led many Republicans to fear consequences in the midterm elections in November. An English-language post on X, which purports to be from Ghalibaf, responded to Trump’s blockade announcement with a quip, “Enjoy the current pump figures. With the so-called ‘blockade’, Soon you’ll be nostalgic for $4–$5 gas.” Ghalibaf is emerging as the most powerful politician in Iran after the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—and the reported injuries to his son Mojtaba, the new Supreme Leader—in U.S. and Israeli air strikes on the first day of the war.

Iran, whose infrastructure has been hard hit by more than thirteen thousand U.S. air strikes and more than ten thousand Israeli strikes, may suffer huge financial losses, too. A blockade could cost the nation more than four hundred million dollars a day in lost trade, or some thirteen billion dollars a month, according to Miad Maleki, an Iranian American sanctions expert formerly at the Treasury Department and now at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The Iranian rial is already verging on collapse. On the eve of the talks in Pakistan, it traded at 1.5 million to the dollar. “The blockade makes continued resistance economically impossible,” Maleki said.

An end to the six-week war—and a half century of enmity—was never going to be resolved in a single day. The nuclear deal brokered by the Obama Administration, in 2015, which Trump abandoned in 2018, took two years of meticulous negotiations. After the failed talks this past weekend, both sides issued ultimatums—and indications that diplomacy was not over. Ghalibaf claimed, on social media, that he had offered some “forward-looking” initiatives. The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said that the two countries were “just minutes” away from an agreement, which focussed heavily on Iran’s nuclear program and, in turn, the release of Iranian frozen assets when “we encountered maximalism, shifting goalposts and blockade.” He noted, “Good will begets good will. Enmity begets enmity.” And rhetoric, it could be said, begets more rhetoric.

At the heart of every crisis between Washington and Tehran since 1979 has been the conundrum of how these two former allies, which aided each other throughout the Cold War, can ever rebuild that trust. For decades, both countries have inflated threats posed by the other, which has hardened their resolve against finding common ground, Robert Malley, a former White House official who negotiated with Iran for the 2015 nuclear deal, and who is now a senior fellow at Yale’s Jackson School, told me. “The old conundrum has now been compounded by the failure of the Trump Administration to establish the minimum level of trust that any deal requires.”

Pakistan—and Turkey and Egypt—is scrambling to organize another round of U.S.-Iran talks before the ceasefire runs out. In the meantime, close American allies are showing no interest in endorsing Trump’s blockade. The British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, told the BBC that his government would not help cordon off Iran. “It ‌is, ⁠in my view, vital that we get the Strait open and fully ⁠open, and that’s where we’ve put all of our efforts,” he said. France is trying to mobilize dozens of countries on a “defensive mission, distinct from the belligerents,” President Emmanuel Macron said. In a televised interview, Margarita Robles, the Spanish defense minister, said that the blockade “makes no sense.”

On Sunday, Trump predicted that Iran would return to the table and cede on every issue. “I don’t care if they come back or not,” he told reporters after returning from the U.F.C. event in Miami. “If they don’t come back, I’m fine.” And then the war just goes on. ♦

On Saturday, the night before Election Day in Hungary, I had dinner in Budapest with a political philosopher named Zoltán Miklósi. “Rationally, I can see all the signs that the opposition is gaining ground, and I don’t see a way for Orbán to overcome it,” he said. “But, I have to confess, when I try to think of Orbán simply losing and walking away, I can’t quite imagine it.” Dozens of Hungarians had told me much the same thing. Viktor Orbán, the longest-serving Prime Minister in the European Union, had been in office since 2010, pioneering a system of legalized autocracy that became a model for aspiring strongmen all over the world, including President Donald Trump. In the past three years, though, the Hungarian economy faltered, and what was left of its independent media focussed relentlessly on the corruption and rot in the Orbán regime. Péter Magyar, a former official in Orbán’s party, became an ascendant opposition candidate, drawing unprecedented crowds at rallies across the country and eventually leading in most polls. Business élites started to signal dissatisfaction with Orbán. Whistle-blowers emerged from the military and the police. Orbán’s grip on power, unquestionable for a decade and a half, suddenly looked vulnerable. (Even he seemed to know it: at a joint press conference with Vice-President J. D. Vance, who’d come to Hungary to stump for him, Vance said, “Viktor Orbán is going to win the next election,” and Orbán made a tentative so-so hand gesture that immediately became a meme.)

Every Hungarian I spoke with could recite these facts, but still, on the eve of the election, no one seemed able to internalize them. In the previous election, the opposition had stirred up hope, only to endure a crushing defeat. Surely Orbán would find a way to triumph once again, even if no one could anticipate how. “I have friends who are worried about some sort of legal trickery, or last-minute intervention by the Russians,” Miklósi told me. “Others are worried about violence.” The only scenario that seemed impossible to contemplate was a clear win for Magyar, a quick concession from Orbán, and a moment of national catharsis.

The first time I interviewed Miklósi, last year, I asked him whether the U.S. was sleepwalking down the trail that Hungary had blazed a decade earlier, and, if so, whether American exceptionalism might make this harder for us to see. He validated this concern, but he also raised an inverse problem—not an exceptionalism that insists that a descent into authoritarianism is impossible, but a defeatism suggesting that, once authoritarianism takes hold, there’s no way out. “It’s understandable, after so many years of setbacks and humiliations, but it’s one of the biggest dangers, because it deprives you of political agency,” Miklosi told me. “Defeatism breeds defeat.”

The key fact about the autocratic regime that Orbán engineered in Hungary—the very thing that made it a useful prototype for Trump and other elected autocrats—is that it was a form of competitive authoritarianism, not totalitarianism. Orbán had used a supermajority in Parliament to rewrite the constitution, consolidating his power and tilting key institutions toward his interests. Still, Hungary was not North Korea, or Egypt, or Azerbaijan; it was more like India, or Turkey, or the United States. Elections were held every four years, and these elections remained competitive. Orbán used the tools of autocratic legalism (extreme gerrymandering, courts stacked with loyalists) to tilt the system in his favor, but he never cancelled elections, or ordered the police to shoot at protesters, or conjured votes out of thin air. Miklósi, in a recent journal article called “Perversity, futility, complicity: Should democrats participate in autocratic elections?,” considers a range of philosophical arguments against voting in a “normatively illegitimate” regime. And yet he keeps warning readers, and perhaps himself, against defeatism: “The outcome of autocratic elections, despite the immense advantages of the ruling party, is not entirely predetermined. Electoral autocracies are unique among autocracies in that their ruling party can, though rarely, be defeated by an opposition that plays within the autocrat’s own formal rules of the game.”

On Sunday, what the Hungarians got was precisely what they’d found hardest to imagine. Magyar won a clear majority, enough for his party to secure a two-thirds supermajority in Parliament. At around 10 P.M., Orbán called Magyar to concede; after that, the streets of Budapest erupted in what can only be described as catharsis. “We don’t do Carnival here, but this is our Hungarian Carnival,” Ákos Takács, an architect and a former progressive activist, said (or, really, shouted), passing around cups of champagne in a square in downtown Budapest. All around us, grown men hugged and cried; young parents hoisted children on their shoulders; a few police officers stood on a street corner, chatting amiably with passersby. One of Takács’s friends, speaking English for my benefit, kept shouting “Fuck, fuck, fucking fuck!” (“I have Tourette’s, but in the happy way,” she hastened to explain, unnecessarily.) People waved Hungarian flags and erupted in patriotic chants. “In this hip, lefty part of the city, you wouldn’t see this sort of patriotism, ever, except at this moment,” Takács said.

Péter Magyar may now be a global icon of democratic resistance, but, as the revellers on the square were well aware, he is no progressive hero. In some ways, he ran to Orbán’s left, voicing broad support for the E.U. and antipathy toward Vladimir Putin; in other ways, he sounded like as much of a right-wing hard-liner as Orbán did, maintaining a number of socially conservative positions and, in the final months of the campaign, insinuating that Filipino immigrants were eating the ducks in the Budapest Zoo. For the most part, he ran as a Hungarian Everyman, dodging divisive policy questions and preferring to speak about the most universal issues in the broadest possible terms: rooting out corruption, restoring power to the people. This was, of course, an astute political strategy. It also makes him something of a cipher. He has the square jaw and coiffed blond hair of an action figure. Magyar, in Hungarian, means “Hungarian.” (Imagine a strapping guy named Joe America, running as the nominee of the Freedom and Grilled-Meat Party, and you won’t be too far off.)

Even under competitive authoritarianism, politics is still politics. Viktor Orbán was a politician—a ruthless, cunning one, unusually capable of bending and breaking the rules of liberal democracy—but not, in the end, an invincible superhero. He did what he could to lock in his power, but he couldn’t manufacture popular support simply by willing it into existence. (Neither, it’s worth reminding ourselves, can Donald Trump.) Orbán’s party will have a supermajority in Parliament for a few more weeks, and some analysts worry that this leaves room for mischief. But Magyar, in his victory speech on the banks of the Danube River, reiterated that “those who have robbed the country will be held accountable.” In the closing days of his campaign, Magyar pledged that, even if he won a two-thirds majority, he would not use it to rewrite the constitution unilaterally, as Orbán did sixteen years ago. For now, we’ll have to take his word for it. ♦