U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the Trump administration’s foreign policy is based on restraint and realism. But U.S. foreign policy actions across the world suggest a lack of understanding for what the concept means in practice. Restraint values diplomatic engagement over military coercion and domination. so don’t be fooled by Pompeo’s hollow language. The latest video from the Quincy Institute explains:
Back in March 2011, the Israeli consulate in New York City had a problem. A group of soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were coming to the U.S. on a PR trip, and Israeli officials needed help persuading influential media outlets to interview the delegation.
Luckily for the consulate, a new organization called Act For Israel, led by Israeli-American actor Noa Tishby, was prepared to swing into action. “[I]n mid March 2011, the New York Consulate requested our assistance,” Tishby’s organization wrote in a document revealed in a recent trove of leaked emails.
“Act For Israel quickly arranged seven interviews with the top ranks of U.S. blogs and radio shows,” the document explained, highlighting that their efforts helped promote “Israel’s narrative” in Red State, which it described as the “most read blog by US Senators and Congress representatives.”
The previously unreported campaign appears to have violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which mandates that American citizens and organizations publicly disclose any work that seeks to influence American politics on behalf of a foreign power. “That sounds like a slam-dunk case of activities that should have required FARA registration,” said Ben Freeman, a FARA expert at the Quincy Institute, which publishes RS.
The leak provides a rare window into how some pro-Israel activists have skirted rules aimed at providing transparency about foreign influence over American politics — a practice that has helped obscure the scale of Israeli propaganda efforts in the United States. In public, Act For Israel appeared to be no more than a group of pro-Israel Americans advocating for a stronger U.S.-Israel relationship. But the leaked emails and documents show that representatives of the organization sought to shape U.S. public opinion while boasting privately of their intimate collaboration with the Israeli government.
A bio of Tishby contained in the leak, for example, describes her as working “closely with Israel’s Government, Israel’s Embassy and consulates to advocate for Israel.”
The documents come from a leak of the emails of Gabi Ashkenazi, a former IDF chief of staff who joined Act For Israel as a board member starting in mid-2011. RS was unable to independently verify the authenticity of the emails, which were leaked by a pro-Iran hacking group called Handala. But many of the details found in the documents comport with publicly available information about Act For Israel. Neither Tishby nor Ashkenazi responded to requests for comment.
FARA experts have long suspected that “there was more work being done on behalf of the Israeli government” than public disclosures revealed, according to Freeman. “There was an underlying assumption that Israel didn't have to play by the rules,” he said. “With this, we're getting a sense that our suspicions were right.”
2011 was a stressful year for conservative commentator Joshua Trevino. A few years after founding the influential political blog Red State, Trevino had launched another platform called Malaysia Matters, and rumors had started to circulate saying that Trevino was running this blog on behalf of Malaysian officials.
Trevino strenuously denied any secret work for Malaysia at the time. “I am confident I am within the law,” he said. Two years later, though, he changed his tune and agreed to retroactively register as a foreign agent for Malaysia, all while claiming to have been unaware of FARA.
In retrospect, it turns out that this wasn’t Trevino’s only work that may have violated FARA.The leaked emails suggest that he was also doing PR on behalf of Act For Israel — and, by extension, the Israeli government.
Various documents show that Trevino worked with Act For Israel as an adviser and “media director” starting in late 2010. This work appeared to include efforts to place pro-Israel content in popular American blogs, including Red State. It is not clear whether the organization paid Trevino for this work, though even unpaid activities are covered by FARA, according to Freeman. (The statute of limitations for FARA violations is five years, meaning that neither Trevino nor anyone else in this story faces legal risk for any activities carried out on behalf of Act For Israel.)
Trevino also appears to have helped put together at least one media junket to Israel with the organization. Even as he denied acting as a foreign agent on behalf of Malaysia, Trevino revealed that he “also offer[ed] people paid trips to Israel.” This seems to be a reference to the Act For Israel Media Fellowship, a fully-funded excursion that the organization described in previously undisclosed documents as part of a “strong partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”
International press trips are not uncommon, but this one stood out because it required participants to “produce a minimum of 6 articles on national publications as a result of the fellowship,” according to a leaked document. Act For Israel claimed that this led to the publication of 48 articles in a dozen “distinguished media outlets.” (RS was unable to find these articles but did find several blog posts.)
Participants in the 2011 junket included several notable media figures, such as blogger and former Senate candidate Chuck DeVore; essayist Claire Berlinski; Tim Mak, who went on to work for the Washington Examiner, NPR and the Daily Beast; Seth Mandel, now a senior editor at Commentary Magazine; and Mollie Hemingway, now the editor-in-chief of the Federalist. During the trip, a right-wing Israeli newspaper interviewed DeVore and Berlinski, who criticized international coverage of the conflict and urged foreign reporters to better portray Israeli narratives.
An itinerary obtained by RS shows that the delegation participated in a series of high-level meetings, including conversations with Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon and Mark Regev, then the deputy head of communications in the prime minister’s office. The group also received a briefing on the “Iranian threat” from the Israeli foreign ministry and joined an IDF spokesperson for a tour of Israel’s border with Lebanon.
RS could not confirm whether the participants were aware of the writing requirement. But if they knew about the condition and complied — and were aware of the Israeli government’s relationship to the junket — then they should have also registered as foreign agents, according to Freeman.
Around the time of the trip, Trevino was paying Mandel, Berlinski, and DeVore to write articles about Malaysia as part of Trevino’s efforts on behalf of Malaysian officials. (All three deny any knowledge that the money came from the Malaysian government.)
Trevino appears to have ended his partnership with Act For Israel in late 2011. He now works on domestic policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and on Latin American security issues for the America First Policy Institute. Neither Trevino nor the journalists who participated in the junket responded to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, Tishby, Act for Israel’s founder, and Sharone Levinson, the group’s co-founder, continued working hard to raise money from pro-Israel groups in the U.S. to help fund their activities. In their pitch, the pair told prospective donors that “Act For Israel will continue to work in partnership with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to develop a network of pro-Israel ‘Thought Influencers’ who can reach the masses digitally” — an early precursor to a similar pro-Israel influence campaign that RS revealed in September. The group was particularly determined to turn Americans against a series of civilian “flotillas” that were attempting to break the Israeli blockade on Gaza.
These efforts elicited a high-level endorsement from the Israeli government. In a 2011 letter to Tishby revealed in the leak, then-Israeli President Shimon Peres called Act For Israel “a solution to a new form of de-legitimization” of Israel.
“You provide a quick and active appeal to youth around the world,” Peres wrote in the previously unreported letter. “By doing so you are a great help to the Public Relations efforts which are lead by the State of Israel.”
Act For Israel appears to have folded in the intervening years. But several of its affiliates have continued working to shape Americans’ views of Israel. Tishby, in particular, has become an influential voice advocating for the return of Israeli hostages while railing against “so-called pro-Palestinian movements” in the U.S. Her pop-history of Israel remains one of the most popular books about the conflict on Amazon. “She is the voice of this Jewish generation,” Yoav Davis, a frequent collaborator of Tishby’s, told the New York Times in 2023. “I keep telling her that God has been grooming her for this moment.”
In 2022, Tishby registered as a foreign agent for the first time during a two-year-long stint as Israel’s Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism and the Delegitimization of Israel. But the leaked emails reveal that the scope and timeline of her work on behalf of Israeli interests went far beyond the disclosures shared in that registration. And there is reason to believe that some of these activities are ongoing.
One possible clue is the fact that Davis, her collaborator and a former IDF spokesperson, recently registered as a foreign agent for Israel. In a pair of FARA filings, Davis said that the Israeli government is paying him $161,000 to do PR about “Hostage and humanitarian awareness” through his comms shop, Davis Media NY LLC. In the month and a half since that disclosure was filed, Tishby and Davis have collaborated on several hostage-related videos that Tishby has pushed out to her 927,000 followers on Instagram.
RS could not establish any direct link between the contract and these videos, which reflect Tishby’s long-held views. Davis did not respond to a request for comment.
There is also some indication that Davis has done more work for Israel than his recent FARA filing suggests. As early as 2020, Davis listed the Israeli Consulate in New York City as a client of his PR firm, which produces and directs short-form video content. According to Freeman, any PR work done on behalf of the consulate would almost certainly require registration under FARA.
“The folks who are doing this work should take a hard look at whether they should be registered under FARA,” Freeman said. “If they don't register, this might be a case where the Department of Justice wants to take a look.”
Even if war ended tomorrow, Europe could be on the hook for 135 billion euros (nearly $160 billion) over the next two years to keep Ukraine afloat. Brussels does not appear to have a plan B up its sleeve.
I first warned in September 2024 that using immobilized Russian assets to fund war fighting in Ukraine would disincentivize Russia from suing for peace. Nothing has changed since then. Russia maintains the battlefield advantage, has the financial reserves, extremely low levels of debt by Western standards, and can afford to keep fighting, despite the human cost. Putin is self-evidently waiting the Europeans out, knowing they will run out of money before he does.
For now, his strategy appears to be working, because Ukraine has no money and Europe — unwilling to see Ukraine pushed into an unfavorable peace — is groaning under the obligation to find an answer. In May I also reported that “Ukraine is already asking for more money to continue fighting into 2026, a sure sign that President Volodmyr Zelensky has no plans to end the war.”
At that time, the likely cost of war fighting for another year was estimated at around $43.3 billion. The bill has since gone up to $63 billion in 2026 and, according to the IMF, $136.6 billion over the next four years.
Europe simply does not have this level of funding freely available. As a result, European political leaders are descending into panic mode as the chicken of Ukraine’s enormous budget shortfall comes home to roost.
That chicken, to quote the prime minister of Belgium, Bart de Wever, in remarks after the October European council meeting, is the $140 billion in immobilized Russian assets that the European Commission would like to use to back a “reparations loan” to Ukraine. Self-evidently, this money isn’t intended for reparations, but rather to soak up Ukraine’s expected deficits going forward.
All of the money would be pumped into Ukraine’s treasury to meet day to day expenses, with the defense bill alone costing $172 million every day right now, compared to $140 million per day one year ago. And on the basis that Ukraine’s budget estimates only ever go up and not down, that money won’t last forever.
At this point, one might be tempted to think that Ukraine’s vast defense spending, which accounts for around 63% of the Ukrainian government’s budget, will fall away if the war ends this year, in response to President Trump’s peace initiative. But such an assumption is, I fear, misplaced. Europe has been pressuring the U.S. not to cap the size of Ukraine’s near one million strong army in any peace deal. In a best-case scenario, Ukraine might decide in a graduated way to reduce the size of its army over time. But that would still leave a large budget black hole for some years to come. Yet a large army won’t pay for itself and the Europeans will be left to pay the bill.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Belgians are saying “non” to the use of immobilized assets in its country to fund Ukraine’s fiscal deficit. Prime Minister de Wever claims that doing so will derail U.S.-led efforts to bring the near four-year long war to a close, by disincentivizing Russia from settling, which takes us back to the point I made 15 months ago.
However, the deeper issue for Belgium is a fear that sanctioning the expropriation of Russian sovereign assets on shaky legal ground would shred its financial reputation and scare off investors from the developing world. Belgium-based Euroclear, where the immobilized Russian assets are held, has a stock of $4 trillion in sovereign assets from around the globe. Starting to eat the chicken of these assets, as Belgium’s prime minister puts it, by essentially lending those assets to Ukraine, could "damage Belgium's reputation as a reliable financial hub and erode trust in the euro and the EU financial system."
Predictably, that has led to a storm of protest from other European states that are piling increasing pressure on Belgium to relent and so free up the monies for Ukraine’s cause. But as de Wever has pointed out on numerous occasions, those European states, for example, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, are not offering to unleash immobilized Russian assets in their jurisdictions and so share the financial risk. Nor are they willing to back the loan of assets held in Belgium with guarantees to repay a proportion of the cost, should Russia mount a successful legal challenge after the war ends. So, for now, Belgium is holding out and blocking the loan, with few signs that it will back down.
As a result, the matter has been kicked back to December for a final decision buying time for the Eurocrats in Brussels to sway their recalcitrant Belgian hosts. If agreement cannot be reached, Ukraine faces the prospect of running out of money to fight, on the basis that it is locked out of access to Western capital markets, given its moratorium on the repayment of debt.
That leaves the European Commission in the position of possibly having to raise capital on the markets to make a non-repayable grant to Ukraine to cover its financing needs in 2026.
How did we end up here? Since 2024, Western sponsors of the war in Ukraine have progressively shifted from offering free cash to loans, most notably the last big G7 loan of $50 billion that was agreed in June of 2024. But with Ukraine’s national debt to GDP having risen from 49% in 2021 to 109% now, piling more debt on the war-ravaged country may literally equate to killing Ukraine with kindness.
The reparations loan was clearly intended as a means to make Russia pay so that neither Ukraine, nor Europe, had to. Efforts to find off-budget means to pay for the war in Ukraine have always been “an unseemly quest for alternatives to western taxpayers funding.” Put simply, cash-strapped European governments can’t easily afford to give Ukraine their own money at a time when their governments face rising political headwinds at home from nationalist parties.
Mainstream European political leaders have remained implacably set against the idea of bringing the senseless war in Ukraine to a much-needed close. They will pay the price for this at the polls in the coming years, as the big fiscal chicken of war spending pecks away at their legitimacy at home. This is all the more depressing for having been so utterly predictable.
“I know of no one in America better qualified to take over the post of Defense Secretary than Bob McNamara,” wrote Ford chief executive Henry Ford II in late 1960.
It had been only fifty-one days since the former Harvard Business School whiz had become the automaker’s president, but now he was off to Washington to join President-elect John F. Kennedy’s brain trust. At 44, about a year older than JFK, Robert S. McNamara had forged a reputation as a brilliant, if arrogant, manager and problem-solver with a computer-like mastery of facts and statistics. He seemed unstoppable.
Yet, despite sterling qualifications to run the Pentagon, McNamara would encounter a problem his managerial acumen could not solve — at least not in the way the Cold War consensus may have demanded. Under two presidents, he sank the country into an unwinnable war in Vietnam. He misled the American people, drove decisions that brought about the deaths of 58,000 U.S. service members and millions of Vietnamese, and lived out his last decades a tormented man, wracked by guilt and regret but never formally apologizing for the epic disaster he helped create in Southeast Asia, as his personal correspondence and his public memoirs attest.
In all his charts and graphs and body count stats, McNamara failed to measure what mattered most: the unrelenting determination of the Vietnamese people to liberate their country from foreign occupation.
This is, of course, a familiar story told many times before. McNamara’s memoirs were published in 1995, two years after Deborah Shapley’s biography. An anguished McNamara, then in his late eighties, appeared in Errol Morris’ documentary Fog of War in 2003. Library shelves are groaning under the weight of Vietnam studies.
Thus, breaking new ground here may seem rather difficult. Yet the brothers Philip and William Taubman have written “a new history,” to borrow the subtitle of their portrait of the reviled defense secretary, that “benefited from access to materials previously unavailable to McNamara biographers,” including a trove of personal letters exchanged between McNamara and his mother, wife, and Jackie Kennedy.
There is never a bad time to cast a fresh pair of eyes — or, in this case, two pairs of eyes — on such an important story, and the authors succeed in revealing the obscure sides of McNamara’s complicated persona in their humane, yet unsparing, “McNamara at War.” We are in reliable hands: Philip Taubman covered U.S. foreign policy at The New York Times for three decades and authored three books on the Cold War. Older brother William, a career academic, has written biographies of Gorbachev and Khrushchev. The latter earned a Pulitzer Prize.
This book lands as an overdue debate roils Washington concerning the United States’ global role. Questions straight from the Vietnam Era demand our attention. What are the core national interests? Which ones are peripheral? What are the limits of American military power? Thus, the rise and fall of Robert McNamara as told by the Taubmans is as relevant as ever. Their “new” political-psychological portrait poses questions McNamara spent his post-Pentagon years struggling to answer. Namely, why did the government’s sharpest minds around Presidents Kennedy and Johnson screw up so badly?
The Robert McNamara who appears in these pages was no strident ideologue as he prepared to escalate the war in 1964-65, although he neither questioned the validity of the Domino Theory nor doubted the importance of upholding U.S. Cold War credibility.
Perhaps more importantly, McNamara — and he was hardly alone in this — conflated loyalty to the president with loyalty to the Constitution. The authors also compel us to consider the negative influence of his personality, which was not unlike that of the volatile, insecure Lyndon B. Johnson. Driven by ego and fear of failure, McNamara simply could not quit a problem. Yet, as is frustratingly clear in the contemporaneous phone conversations, official memos, and private letters that fill hundreds of the Taubmans’ pages, McNamara from a relatively early stage — autumn 1965 — already harbored serious doubts the war could be won.
Still, he never directly counseled Johnson to withdraw while repeatedly misleading the public about imaginary progress on the battlefield. He chose the path of least resistance, a middle ground between capitulation and an all-out war that might provoke either China or the Soviets to join. The authors’ use of McNamara’s personal highs and lows, related in letters to his tormented family and JFK’s widow, provides a fuller picture of the man, but doesn’t altogether enhance our understanding of what led the Johnson administration to wage war in Vietnam.
McNamara knew almost nothing about Vietnamese culture or history, similar to the ignorance that led the George W. Bush administration to leap headlong into Iraq in 2003. However, he had a chance to at least understand war’s horrors, if at a distance, from his service under General Curtis LeMay during the strategic bombing campaign against Japan in 1945. “His time at Guam deserves greater attention,” the Taubmans contend, referring to McNamara's statistical analysis of aerial bombardment of Japanese cities, “brutal tactics that McNamara favored at the time.”
The March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo killed approximately 100,000 people and left a million homeless. “At least one historian, having noted that McNamara helped ‘kill hundreds of thousands of civilians,’ described him as seemingly ‘impervious to the human cost of his work,’” the authors say. This mechanical, data-driven approach informed McNamara’s war planning 20 years later. It remains astonishing, even after the passage of 60 years, that President Johnson and his chief advisers convinced themselves they were undertaking a “limited” bombing campaign as the Vietnamese shook under the force of B-52 raids. Our leaders lied to the public and themselves.
Even now, the unlearned lessons here are many, which may be why the Taubman’s dedicate their last 100 pages to Robert McNamara’s strained efforts to publicly atone for his crimes after exiting the Pentagon in 1968. It took him decades to do so, a lapse for which his critics never forgave him. Still, the managerial genius brought low by Vietnam hoped his 1995 memoirs would be read widely by policymakers to avoid past mistakes. If read, the lessons weren’t heeded. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq – shall we count the repetitions?
No one should pity the life of Robert McNamara, but his story reinforces the notion that powerful structural forces, such as Cold War ideology or Vietnamese nationalism, can overwhelm or tame an individual’s will to reverse course. Still, McNamara eventually attempted to make amends by admitting what were avoidable mistakes and advocating for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
Readers of “McNamara at War” may compare his self-flagellation with the utter lack of remorse exhibited by two other major figures who recently died. Despite living very long lives, neither Henry Kissinger nor Dick Cheney ever atoned for their crimes. Philip and William Taubman aptly conclude, “More than any other political leader we can think of, Robert McNamara admitted his grave mistakes in the hope of helping others to do better than he did. But the final ironies of his life are that many who continued to pursue peace among peoples and nations… have been no more successful than he was.”
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