Something happened yesterday, and Trump is now determined to take the country to a war of choice. He can change his mind at the last minute, as he did in 2019, but short of that, there will be war.
It is important to understand that capitulation is most likely not an option for Iran for a variety of reasons.
First, Trump's conduct in the past 10 days has destroyed any confidence Tehran has in him and his desire for a peaceful outcome. For the Iranians to ever back down from their long-standing position to never give up enrichment, they must have confidence that backing down ends the conflict. They have no such confidence in Trump at this moment. They don't think he will stop there.
Second, Tehran has lost confidence in Trump's ability or willingness to say no to Israel (that confidence existed earlier to some extent). And Israel will not be content with even a complete dismantlement of Iran's nuclear program.
If the nuclear program is destroyed, Israel will then turn to Iran's missile program. It will not accept Iran having missiles that can wreak havoc on Israel — as Iran has done in the last few days. Without missiles, an air force, or a nuclear deterrent, Iran will be completely exposed and defenseless. Once that is achieved, the Israelis will push for regime change or regime collapse.
And after that, as the Israelis have done in Syria after Assad fell, they will push to destroy the rest of Iran's conventional military so that Iran won't be able to challenge Israel's emerging regional military hegemony for decades to come. Iran's territorial integrity will also be put at risk.
As a result, Tehran does not view capitulation — even if they desired it, which I don't think they do — as a stable outcome.
In their view, their only chance is to fight back.By making the war as costly as possible for the US — even if they will lose it — they think they can either deter Trump, or make him cut the war short. As he did in Yemen.
Thus, if new talks take place and Trump insists on capitulation, he will get war. Iran will pay an immeasurable price. As will the region. But the U.S. will also pay a very heavy price. Scores of American soldiers may be killed. Oil prices will skyrocket, and gas prices in hot summer months in the US will soar. Inflation will go up.
Trump's Iran war may destroy his presidency as Bush's Iraq invasion destroyed his.
Iran will lose. But so will the US. Israel is perhaps the only country that will benefit from this war of choice.
Top image credit: BEIJING, CHINA - SEPTEMBER 03: The airborne unmanned warfare formation attends V-Day military parade to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the victory in the Chinese People's War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War on September 3, 2025 in Beijing, China. (Photo by VCG/VCG via REUTERS)
Yet this interpretation is both misleading and unhelpful. The parade did not mark the transfer of unipolar dominance from Washington to Beijing. Rather, it highlighted how China seeks to consolidate its position as a central pole in a world that is already multipolar.
To understand why, it helps to recall the categories outlined by Amitav Acharya, professor of international relations at American University, in “The End of American World Order” — regional powers, great powers, and superpowers. The United States after 1945 reached the level of a superpower not simply because of its vast economy but because economic power was combined with military might, technological superiority, political legitimacy, and a dense alliance system. It had the dollar as a convertible global currency, forward basing across multiple continents, and an architecture of institutions that embedded its primacy. America’s rise was comprehensive.
China’s military parade this week was an acknowledgment of this reality. It was not only a show of missiles, drones, and precision weapons but also a statement that Beijing understands that sustained global influence requires more than GDP. It requires the ability to defend trade routes, project power, and demonstrate resilience in the face of coercion. In other words, China knows that economic growth must be backed by military and political capability if it is to be translated into long-term status. The parade was therefore a performance of China’s determination to link its economic trajectory to credible hard power.
But the conclusion that China is therefore the next hegemon is premature. China still lacks many of the systemic features that underpinned U.S. primacy. The renminbi — China’s currency — is not yet fully convertible and cannot anchor the global financial system in the way the dollar has. Beijing has partners and organizations like the SCO and BRICS, but it does not possess an alliance system comparable to NATO or America’s treaty network in Asia. Its overseas basing is minimal. Its ability to project force globally is limited compared to Washington’s naval and air dominance. What the parade demonstrated was progress and intent, not the arrival of unipolarity.
This is why it is more accurate to see the current moment as the consolidation of multipolarity. The United States still retains key advantages: technological leadership, alliance density, and the institutional depth of the liberal order. But it no longer enjoys uncontested primacy, as recent wars and crises have made clear. China, Russia, India, and other major states each have capacities to shape the system but none can impose rules alone. The Global South, too, is asserting agency, diversifying partnerships, and resisting being folded into a binary competition. The world looks less like the dominance of one and more like what Acharya calls an “archipelago of powers.”
The parade in Beijing, then, should not be read as the curtain-raiser for a Chinese century. It should be seen as part of a larger process in which China is moving to solidify its role as one pole in a plural order. This is consistent with its economic strategy of building connectivity projects through the Belt and Road, its political diplomacy within the SCO and BRICS, and its growing military modernization. Yet it is not evidence of a coming unipole. It is evidence of Beijing’s understanding that status in the 21st century comes from integration of multiple dimensions of power.
What emerges from this perspective is a sobering but also stabilizing lesson: the age of single superpowers is over. The United States is not disappearing, but it is no longer unrivaled. China is rising, but it will not enjoy hegemonic dominance. Instead, the near future will be shaped by several major powers whose interactions, rivalries, and limited cooperation will form the texture of world politics. Recognizing this reality can help prevent the false expectations that fuel confrontation. The real challenge is to build mechanisms for coexistence among poles rather than to seek another unipolar order that will never come.
China’s parade was a symbol of ambition, confidence, and intent. But it was not a coronation. It was a reminder that multipolarity is here to stay, and that the future will be decided not by a single superpower but by how the great powers manage to live together in an archipelago of power.
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump (Shutterstock/Joey Sussman) and old Department of War seal, decommissioned in 1947. (Wikimedia commons)
There are reports that President Donald Trump will announce the change from the Department of Defense back to its old name, the Department of War, today.
This change requires congressional approval and Republican Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) has already introduced a bill to change the name back to what it was before it was abandoned in 1947.
“For the first 150 years of our military’s history, Americans defeated their enemies and protected their homeland under the War Department,” Lee said in a news release Tuesday.
The War Department was established in 1789 after President George Washington signed it into law, and today includes under its banner all five branches of the U.S. military: the Army, Navy (along with the Marine Corps), Air Force, and the newest addition, the Space Force.
It also oversees 11 massive combatant commands including the most familiar and active: CENTCOM (the Middle East area of operations) and IndoPacom (the Asia Pacific).
“It used to be called the Department of War and it had a stronger sound,” Trump said in the Oval Office last week.
"We want defense, but we want offense too,” he added. “As [the] Department of War we won everything. We won everything and I think we're going to have to go back to that."
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has assured Trump that the name change is “coming soon.”
On face value, many observers took Trump’s pledge to mean a more hawkish posture by this administration with some on the left and right having a negative reaction to the possible change. He also appears to associate the old name with winning, like a talisman. Unfortunately, aside from Persian Gulf I, most Americans associate World War II as the last time they associate America with “winning” a major war.
But for others, even non-interventionists and foreign policy realists, the name change is just more honest.
For example, Mr. Antiwar himself, libertarian icon Ron Paul wrote on Tuesday, “the US has been at war nearly constantly since the end of World War II, so it’s not like the ‘Defense Department’ has been in any way a defensive department.”
“With that in mind, returning the Department of Defense to the Department of War, which is how it started, may not be such a bad idea after all – as long as we can be honest about the rest of the terms around our warmaking,” Paul observed.
The former Republican congressman emphasized that the name change could refocus attention on the constitutionally legal way to go to war, adding that continuing to merely call it the “defense” department is just a “charade.”
The libertarian Institute for Justice’s Patrick Jaicomo shared, “Apparently the President and I both favor restoring the Department of Defense’s original name: THE DEPARTMENT OF WAR.”
He added, “Given how few U.S. military interventions have been defensive, it’s an honest name. And it may make Americans reconsider the department’s budget and actions.”
Breaking Points correspondent James Li noted, “Hot Take: The function of the modern U.S. military is basically to invade countries that don’t want to give us their oil and to bomb whoever Israel tells us to.”
“So yes, changing the name to the Department of War makes total sense,” Li added.
Medea Benjamin of Code Pink agrees. "I'm glad Trump is changing the name of the Defense Department to the War Dept because it has never been about defense," she Tweeted.
When reports started coming in that the change would be happening journalist and podcaster Glenn Greenwald wrote, “Far more honest.”
Others also seemed glad to finally label the “Defense” Department correctly.
Dan Caldwell. former adviser to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, wrote, “FWIW: the U.S. became a much more interventionist power after the creation of the Department of Defense subsumed the Department of War (and Navy) in 1947. Renaming DoD the Department of War is just acknowledging the reality of what DoD's actual role has been the last 80 years.”
Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy Michael Vlahos seconded Caldwell, observing, “From our vantage today officially restoring the original appellation should deprive our state and military of the fig leaf that our constant use of lethal force is somehow in the righteous cause of ‘Defense.’ Now it will be plainly in the pursuit of ‘War.’
“A small truth regained!” Vlahos added.
Truth indeed. “War is the health of the state” World War I-era progressive Randolph Bourne famously wrote, and as Caldwell noted that under the Department of Defense, America became even more interventionist abroad as the U.S. government grew larger domestically, the two not necessarily being a coincidence.
Few could be mad at the notion of “defense,” which is any nation’s right. It’s an inherent positive, rhetorically. So much so that it becomes easier to deploy troops, send foreign aid or spend money at home in the name of it. To get away with pretty much anything in the name of it.
But “war?” Is that something the U.S. should get involved in? Shouldn’t Congress be included? Sounds serious.
The truth is that America has been involved in many wars for many decades that have all been portrayed as national “defense,” when they really weren’t, with a government department of the same name to reinforce those illusions.
Words have meaning and can confirm reality. The Department of Defense should be called the Department of War again, because that’s what it was, and that’s what it is.
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Top image credit: U.S. President Doanld Trump and the President of Poland Karol Nawrocki speak during a meeting in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 3, 2025. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
Since taking office on August 6, Poland’s president Karol Nawrocki has stood in sharp opposition to Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his cabinet, drawn from a somewhat fragile coalition of center right and center left parties.
Nawrocki’s challenge to Tusk primarily revolves around disputed judicial reforms, abortion rights, migration, and the role of the Catholic church — all emblematic of a conservative political and social agenda.
But foreign and security policy differences matter as well. Both men see Russia as Poland’s primary threat and agree that the U.S. military support is crucial. Neither Tusk nor Nawrocki want to commit Polish troops to a “reassurance force” in postwar Ukraine, prioritizing instead Poland’s own national defense. Poland spends 4.5% of GDP on defense, a higher share than any other NATO member, and it has a strong preference for American equipment and weapons.
There are, however, substantial differences between Nawrocki’s outlook and that of Tusk on the European Union and bilateral relations with Germany and Ukraine. Nawrocki, backed by the right populist Law and Justice Party (PiS) that governed Poland from 2015 to 2023,has clearly chosen foreign and defense policy to focus his challenge to Tusk’s government, in the expectation that PiS and parties to its right can prevail in the next parliamentary elections, to be held no later than 2027.
Contending for Trump’s favor
Nawrocki’s visit to the White House on Wednesday followed an open dispute with Tusk and his foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski. Although the prime minister has the principal constitutional authority in foreign policy, Nawrocki has staked out an independent role for himself. He clearly has a better rapport with Trump than the pro-EU and pro-Ukraine Tusk. A conservative “sovereigntist,” Nawrocki is aligned with Trump’s domestic policy agenda on migration and social issues.
Breaking with established practice, Nawrocki invited no one from the Foreign Ministry nor even Poland’s ambassador to attend the meeting.
Though at odds on several other issues, Nawrocki and the Tusk government agreed that he should seek assurances that the U.S. troop deployments in Poland would not be reduced. Trump enthusiastically agreed to this in the presidents’ press availability on Wednesday.
In an X post addressed to Nawrocki on the eve of the meeting, Sikorski asked Nawrocki to “make clear” to Trump Putin’s “real intentions” in Ukraine and to insist that Trump agree to pursue a “just peace.” Seated beside Nawrocki, Trump told reporters he wanted to stop the daily loss of life by both Russian and Ukrainian soldiers, and that he would continue to try to end the war. Nawrocki did not interject anything, and appeared throughout to agree with all of Trump’s responses to reporters’ questions. Trump also declined a reporter’s invitation to “send a message” to Putin.
Nawrocki views on Ukraine
During his winning presidential campaign, Nawrocki declared his opposition to NATO membership and EU accession for Ukraine, positions that are sharply at odds with the Tusk government’s stance. He recently vetoed a proposed extension of financial support for Ukrainian refugees in Poland, which may also have implications for Poland’s funding of Starlink communications for Ukraine.
Nawrocki’s career has been devoted to advancing a strongly nationalist interpretation of Poland’s history in the 20th century, as director of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) and of the World War II history museum in Gdansk. The Volhynia massacre, mass killings and expulsions in 1943 of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists in two regions of eastern Poland (now western Ukraine) has been a major preoccupation of the IPN. Ukraine’s leaders cannot readily condemn the Ukrainian nationalists who perpetrated the massacre, because of the esteem they enjoy among many Ukrainians. This controversy remains an obstacle to unreserved reconciliation with Ukraine in the minds of nationalist-traditionalist Poles, the core of Nawrocki’s electorate. Nawrocki has recently called for banning the display in Poland of Ukrainian nationalist flags.
Nawrocki views on Germany and the EU
Nawrocki commemorated the September 1 anniversary of the beginning of WWII in the 1939 German attack on the port of Gdansk with a passionate speech calling for German reparations for the deaths and destruction Poland suffered under occupation. This demand was a source of tension with Germany during the PiS government.
Tusk replied that Poland should prioritize its strong rapport with Germany and not to allow the reparations issue to undermine the spirit of European unity, especially given the danger posed by Russia. Germany for its part continues to argue that the reparations issue has long been closed. Tusk has accepted Germany’s repeated official admissions of responsibility and contrition, in part to protect Poland’s standing within the EU. Nawrocki clearly does not have the same sensitivities.
Tusk and his cabinet are also committed fully to the EU and to respecting the European Commission’s critique of the PiS-era judicial reforms, seen as undermining judicial independence. Tusk and his government value American military support, but also see Poland’s security enhanced through rising to the top table of EU decision making in the so-called Weimar group with Germany and France.
Nawrocki shares in part the worldview of Hungary’s Viktor Orban or Slovakia’s Robert Fico, but does not support their inclination to accommodate Russia’s demands on Ukraine. Nawrocki is interested in prioritizing relations with neighbors in Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltic countries, Denmark and Sweden. He clearly intends to conduct presidential diplomacy without seeking permission from the Tusk government.
Effects of the power struggle
A Poland riven by conflict is certainly bad news for the EU. The bitter contest in a polarized political environment is tantamount to a permanent election campaign, with actual elections nearly two years away. While the Tusk government stands firm with the EU consensus on full support for Ukraine, Nawrocki seems to believe his Euro-skepticism, strong commitment to increased defense spending, and unambiguous preference for falling in behind American leadership will see Poland through turbulent times.
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