The Quasi-Wars

Top Stories of the Year: #4

The anatomy of a murder: “The order was to kill everybody.”

I’m counting down the top stories of 2025 a little bit early this year, while I run a Thanksgiving Sale in place of the usual end-of-year Holiday Sale.

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And of course, buy my new book, Dictator From Day One, to get ahead of the Christmas rush.

Remember that the real top stories of 2025 are the ones I covered in the book, which tells the one big story of the year: Donald Trump’s attempt to seize total power over the American political system—and our economic system. So let me take a moment to recap that part of the story.

See an excerpt from the book that was reprinted at Persuasion, where I talk about Trump’s view that the American economy is one big store, and he owns it.

Here’s what I see as the crucial observation. Coming out of the context of the 20th Century, we naturally think the opposite of capitalism is socialism. But there are other, older forms of anti-capitalism.

Here is how I describe it in the book.

We are used to thinking of free markets and capitalism as the established economic system, the status quo protected by conservatives and vested interests. But it is worth remembering that capitalism was once a radical new system that swept away the vested interests that came before it, replacing feudalism and aristocracy. Those are the older and more primitive economic systems Trump is attempting to revive.

You can view this as the ultimate conservatism—not an ideological conservatism, but a purely reactionary rejection of the entire modern world. In its place, the reactionary wants to return to a pre-modern system centered around a king or chieftain, where anyone who wants to start a business or trade goods has to show the local boss their obedience—and pay him a bribe. The most extreme version of this system is patrimonialism, in which an entire country, and everyone in it, is regarded as the personal property of the ruler. He literally owns the store.

If you’ve been following my Executive Watch at The UnPopulist, you’ve seen me tracking some of that bribe-taking, and there’s more to come.

Now to #4 in my countdown of the top five other stories of 2025.

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The Quasi-War

This is a story that’s important enough that I’ve covered it a bit this year, but not in the kind of detail I might have done if someone wasn’t actively dismantling the American political system back here at home.

The fourth item in this countdown is the progress, or rather the lack thereof, in the low-grade war in the Middle East following the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel.

A lot of big things happened last year, which I covered in last year’s roundup. You may remember a stunning Israeli decapitation attack on the Iranian proxy Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, followed by the sudden and rapid collapse of the Assad regime in Syria. Taken together, these two events deprived the Iranian regime of nearly all the proxies that have allowed it to exert regional influence. Given that Iran is one of the main drivers of war in the region, that’s a good thing.

This year, though, the war has been grinding to more muddled results.

The biggest development was Israel’s massive air campaign against Iran. I asked readers to draw back a little from the immediate context and look at the Iranian regime’s longstanding malignant influence.

The main context here is that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been a menace since its founding in 1979. The regime was founded as a religious dictatorship based on a truly insane theology whose central idea is an apocalyptic religious war.

The Iranian regime has repeatedly visited terror and murder on its own people, what one Amnesty International report called a “torture epidemic.”…

A little over a year ago, I described Iran as one of the world’s “generators of war.” Iran has been arming, funding, and stoking conflicts in five different countries. Make that six: The other big global “generator of war” is Russia, and Iran has long provided substantial aid to Russian aggression in Ukraine, especially by providing it with the Shahed drones that are still being used to terrorize Ukrainian cities.

So weakening the Iranian regime is a good thing, and boy did the Israelis do that.

One of the reasons Israel’s policy has been so bold and extensive since October 7 is precisely because that was such a massive intelligence failure…. The sheer breadth of Israel’s response since then is an effort to re-establish deterrence by showing that terrorist attacks on Israel will lead to disastrous consequences for those who support them.

Consider that deterrence re-established. Israel’s initial attack dismantled Iran’s air defenses and cleared the skies for Israeli operations over the Western half of the country, including Tehran, and subsequent attacks have significantly diminished Iran’s military capabilities.

A few years ago, Iran could claim to be a regional power capable of projecting force across the whole Middle East. Now its military has been exposed as hollow, unable even to defend their own country. It is weakened and shrunken. Given Iran’s role as a generator of war, this is a good thing.

Even worse for Iran, the precision of Israel’s strikes, particularly its strikes against Iranian leadership, indicate that its intelligence services have comprehensively penetrated the Iranian regime. They know all the answers to who and what and where. The failure of Israeli intelligence on October 7 has been counteracted by their triumphs against Hezbollah and Iran.

After seeing the success of the Israeli strikes—this was literally his motive, that he saw the Israelis getting good press and wanted in on it—Donald Trump then ordered an American bunker-buster strike on Iran’s big underground nuclear facility. As I noted, the strike probably failed to achieve its objectives.

This problem could have been avoided if the US had coordinated with Israel ahead of time, bombing Fordow at the beginning of the Israeli campaign while we still had the element of surprise—and if we had then engaged in the weeks of follow-up attacks described above. But that implies a president who engages in strategic, long-term thinking and doesn’t make decisions impulsively based on what he sees on Fox News.

Moreover, the very lightness of the influences that brought Trump into this are quickly bringing him out again. He saw the Israelis looking tough and launching successful air attacks on Iran, so he wanted to be able to show that he, too, could be tough and announce a successful airstrike of his own. He did that, whether it was really true or not, and now he’s ready to move on.

This should not be a surprise. This is the same administration that launched a series of airstrikes against the Houthis that didn’t accomplish much, then declared victory and moved on.

J.D. Vance’s insistence that this attack wasn’t really a war led me to borrow the name of the Quasi-War.

This lack of strategic thinking extends to some extent to Israel’s war in Gaza.

I expressed misgivings about Israel’s approach to that war, a long grind in which thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed and more have been threatened by disease and starvation. No, the Israeli policy is not a deliberate genocide—but my misgivings were about the continued grind of civilians deaths, and the deaths of Israel’s own soldiers, without a clear strategy or a vision for the end-goal of the war. I became concerned Israel had no plan for how the war would end, other than ethnic cleansing—the plan actually floated by Trump—or just the continued deaths by attrition of Palestinian civilians.

It turns out the actual end-result was arguably worse—all of this killing, and now Hamas is still in charge in Gaza. Israel accepted a peace deal blessed by Trump in which it achieved exactly one of its big objectives: the return of the remaining living hostages from the October 7 attacks (and the bodies of the dead). But the cost for this was that Israel released Hamas prisoners who flooded back into Gaza and promptly reasserted their control.

Here is the state of things from just a few weeks ago, in early November.

Palestinian political factions are holding closed-door discussions that could see Hamas play a role in shaping a postwar administration in Gaza, despite Israel’s vow to eliminate the militant group’s political influence in the enclave and a decades-old feud between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority….

Two years after Israel launched a devastating war to eradicate Hamas, and three weeks after the ceasefire was announced, the inter-Palestinian talks reflect a simple truth: Hamas remains an armed and influential presence in the Gaza Strip.

And how did they regain that influence? Like this:

Violent clashes have erupted between Hamas and rival groups in several areas across Gaza, including an incident that culminated in an apparent public execution, as worries grow about the security situation following Israel’s withdrawal from parts of the territory.

Reports of violence have been shared widely on social media channels, with one particularly gruesome video that was shared by Hamas-affiliated channels showing a group of masked fighters, some of whom are wearing green Hamas headbands, killing eight blindfolded people in a square in Gaza City while large crowds are watching, a possible sign of the brutality Hamas is using to reassert itself as the security force….

[I]t is likely the incident took place after the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas came into effect.

All that death and destruction, just to return to the status quo ante.

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The Anatomy of a Murder

The most salient thing about the US attack on Iran' is that it was done with no input or authorization from the US Congress, as part of Donald Trump’s attempt to strip Congress of its power and relevance.

He has already been doing that in a seeming buildup to a war against the Maduro regime in Venezuela, which has so far mostly included murdering hapless people on boats in the Caribbean.

And I really do mean murder. Trump has justified military strikes against small boats off the coast of Venezuela on the grounds that the people on these boats were drug smugglers. A New York Times report on congressional briefings on this policy—or the lack thereof—contains a startling claim that puts that in serious doubt.

Representative Sara Jacobs, Democrat of California, said the Pentagon officials conceded that the administration did not know the identities of all of the individuals who were killed in the strikes….

Ms. Jacobs said Pentagon officials said they needed to prove only that the targeted people were connected to designated terrorist organizations, even if the connection is “as much as three hops away from a known member” of a designated terrorist organization.

“Three hops away” means that if you know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who runs drugs, then you’re fair game. There is a theory that everyone on earth can be connected by no more than six degrees of separation. Three degrees of separation means that this administration is just killing people at random.

And this policy of random killing is becoming even more obvious. The latest news is that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made deliberate murder his open policy.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

These were survivors clinging to the boat, who posed no possible threat. To shoot helpless survivors would be a war crime on the battlefield—and we’re not even in a war.

The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the US, these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any of the men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the US counterterrorism campaign.

Even if the US were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.

A law professor and former special counsel to the Department of Defense expressed the universal consensus among legal and military experts: This is a “textbook war crime/extrajudicial killing.”

Congress has finally shown some small signs of life, and both houses have launched investigations in to these killing. If there is going to be one thing that brings long-term consequences for this administration and its members once they are out of office, it will be this case. It opens all of them, from the president on down, to legal responsibility for the commission of a string of murders. Crucially, they may get presidential pardons, and Trump himself may claim immunity, but this case opens them up to international prosecution.

For us back at home, it also sets an ominous precedent. The president and his top lackeys are establishing a system under which they can kill anyone, for any reason, under any circumstances. That should especially concern us when these same people are ordering troops to American cities. (Though I should note that so far, those troops have turned out to be targets rather than a threat.)

And then just to show the dishonesty of the whole rationale behind it, we get the news that Trump is pardoning a Honduran former leader convicted in the US of massive drug smuggling.

President Donald Trump said Friday he intends to grant a “full and complete pardon” to former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, a move that would erase a major US drug-trafficking conviction for a onetime US ally who is currently serving a 45-year federal prison sentence….

Prosecutors had accused Hernández of conspiring with drug cartels during his tenure as they moved more than 400 tons of cocaine through Honduras toward the United States. In exchange, prosecutors said, Hernández received millions of dollars in bribes that he used to fuel his rise in Honduran politics.

During his years in office, the Justice Department said, Hernández “protected and enriched the drug traffickers in his inner circle.” Prosecutors cited his use of executive power to support extraditions to the US of certain drug traffickers “who threatened his grip on power,” while “promising drug traffickers who paid him and followed his instructions that they would remain in Honduras.”

Note how this fits in with Trump’s alliance with Salvadoran strongman Nayib Bukele, who is also in league with criminal gangs. That pattern may contradict Trump’s whole justification for his immigration crackdown, for the strikes against boats in the Caribbean, for his war buildup against Venezuela. But on a higher level, it is consistent with one over-arching idea: that right-wing leaders should have absolute power and never face legal consequences for their actions.

This may help explain the strange reaction from those of us who generally favor a more active and interventionist foreign policy, who are now deeply leery of Trump’s war buildup against Venezuela. See the old neocons at The Bulwark struggling with this, largely on the grounds that Trump seems to be going to war without any kind of congressional approval—something George W. Bush never did. We might want to see the Maduro regime fall, but not at the expense of the fall of our own republic.

But also, I’m concerned this will be yet another quasi-war fought by a mercurial commander in chief who wants to look tough on TV, but who doesn’t have the mental discipline to set a clear strategy or follow through to achieve clear results. And his policies this year give good grounds for that concern.

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