Two weeks ago, I wrote about the Iran war and its impact on a global actor that’s enormously powerful, celebrated by many elites, and arguably in decline. Today we’ll turn the focus to the Democratic party and the institutional media, two global actors whose decline is less of an argument. Both are still viable and in many ways louder than ever, but the past month has highlighted some real limits in their capacity to respond to the modern world.
Absolute Insanity
Energy remains top of mind for everyone, so before we get to the war, let’s start with energy. Earlier this week, the Department of the Interior announced a deal with a French multinational energy conglomerate, TotalEnergies, that saw the U.S. terminate the company’s leases for offshore wind farms and redirect those investments into liquefied natural gas in Texas and offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
I learned about that story when I came across the tweet below:
There are a few different problems with that framing from Jon Lovett, an Obama speechwriter-turned-podcaster, and the New York Times. First, it’s pretty misleading to write that Trump is “taking a BILLION DOLLARS in tax money and giving it to a French conglomerate.” The deal here reimburses the company for money it previously paid to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management when it won auctions to build these wind farms in 2022. Second, as to the mechanics of reimbursement, the Times cites industry lawyers who expect the money will likely come from the DOJ’s settlement fund—i.e., funds paid by companies that have settled with the government, not “tax money” except in the broadest possible definition of the phrase. Third, the headline on that Times story would have you believe the Trump administration is bribing companies to abandon green energy projects and walk away, which, again, is not what’s happening. The government brokered a deal to redirect a company’s original investment into smarter energy projects. Fourth, and very much related, offshore wind is a disastrously stupid investment!
I’m not an energy expert, nor will I play one on this website, but at the risk of turning this into a monologue from Landman, I’ll simply relay that much of what I’ve read about offshore wind projects has boggled my mind. These projects are not only incredibly expensive, but horrible for ocean life, and not particularly effective at addressing power needs. While the Biden Administration throttled oil and natural gas production in all kinds of ways and made offshore wind a top priority, industry estimates near the end of his term noted that offshore wind construction costs were skyrocketing and even in the best case scenario the projects would only produce half the energy that was originally promised. Meanwhile, the indispensable energy blog Doomberg notes, “Despite claims that wind is the cheapest form of available energy and oodles of taxpayer money directed to the industry, we have yet to surface a profitable enterprise in the sector.” To take one of many examples, Siemens Energy of Germany posted a $2.4 billion wind loss in 2023 and a $1.59 billion loss in 2025. GE Vernova, a green energy firm spun out from General Electric, reported its earnings earlier this year and was doing well in every business line except wind.
Speaking of GE Vernova: They were the manufacturers of a massive turbine that failed off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard in 2024, leading to an economic and environmental mess that lasted the entire summer. That was part of a project led by Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, the foreign investors behind a $4 billion company called Vineyard Wind. In the middle of that controversy, there was a striking article from Robert Bryce that not only highlighted the environmental impact of this technology, but the increasingly unworkable physics of offshore wind turbines.
I encourage everyone to read the piece in full, but here’s what blew my mind:
The turbines now being deployed onshore and offshore are failing far sooner than expected. Why? They have gotten too big. Yes, bigger wind turbines are more efficient than their smaller cousins. But the larger the turbine, the more its components get hit by the stresses that come with their size and weight. The GE Vernova Haliade-X wind turbine used at Vineyard Wind stands 260 meters high and sweeps an area of 38,000 square meters. That means the turbine captures wind energy over an area five times larger than a soccer pitch.
But here’s the critical part: its blades are 107 meters (351 feet) long and weigh 70 tons. In addition, the rotor of the massive machine spans 220 meters. For comparison, the wingspan of a Boeing 737 is 34 meters. In other words, the turbines at Vineyard Wind are nearly as tall as the Eiffel Tower and each of their blades weighs more than a fully loaded 737.
As shown in the graphic above, the Haliade-X rotor is six and a half times wider than the wingspan of a 737. Given the enormity of the machines, it’s no wonder they are failing.
Essentially, offshore turbines and rotors have to be made larger and larger to meet ambitious power generation benchmarks, but the larger the turbines, the more likely they are to break, which then creates power shortages and disastrous environmental consequences for local ecosystems. Clean energy, not so much.
There are offshore wind success stories, but even the triumphs can only trumpet intermittent periods in which wind effectiveness matches gas. In general, this is technology that’s so expensive to develop and maintain that even under Biden, the developers, themselves, were paying breakup fees to exit projects and attempting to renegotiate state contracts and raise prices on wind farms that weren’t yet operational. Under Obama, the IRS allowed for onshore wind farms to re-start the clock on 10 years of tax credits whenever they cycle in new parts; the problem that created is giant piles of discarded turbines that are also effectively impossible to recycle. Offshore wind farms, meanwhile, are of course vulnerable to saltwater erosion and hurricanes. Finally, while their harmful impact on local fish and mammals is beyond dispute, offshore wind farms have also been accused of killingendangered whales, allegations that were rejected in a joint report prepared by two Biden agencies (whose t-shirt about not killing endangered whales does raise a few questions).
In general, with respect to the framing from the Obama podcaster and the Times: the question isn’t why the U.S. government is working to redirect offshore wind investments in favor of LNG, but why in the world were these projects ever pursued with so much institutional force? Why was the government offering huge tax subsidies to European companies to come to the U.S. and build power that’s unprofitable without government assistance, environmentally damaging, and not nearly effective enough to meet modern power demands?
And what, you might be wondering, does any of this have to do with the media’s response to the war?
The IRGC’s War Strategy Is a Media Strategy
Earlier this week, I enjoyed reading Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment, writing for The Atlantic and drawing on history to offer a sober rendition of the IRGC’s plan to retain power. Headlined “Iran Is Trying to Defeat America in the Living Room”, his article begins with this:
Among the first lessons that Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries learned after coming to power in 1979 was that their best ally against American power was American democracy. Their first test case was the seizing of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, in which 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days, an act that devastated Iran’s economy and international reputation but succeeded in humiliating Jimmy Carter and ending his chances of reelection. Over the decades, Iran gained repeated proof that it didn’t need to defeat America on the battlefield; it just had to make the American people feel the war in their living room. And now, in a war for its survival, Tehran is attempting the same play.
In April 1983, Iran—via its newly created Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah—carried out a suicide bombing against the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans. It was the deadliest attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in history. “First word is that Iranian Shiites did it,” Ronald Reagan wrote in his diary, “d__n them.” Although Reagan remained outwardly steadfast, he was briefed that his approval ratings were beginning to sour because of Lebanon. “The people just don’t know why we’re there,” he wrote in his diary. “There is a deeply buried isolationist sentiment in our land.”
Months later, in October, Hezbollah struck again, this time with two simultaneous truck bombs that killed 241 American service members and 58 French soldiers as they slept. Four days after the attack, Reagan addressed the nation and asked: “If we were to leave Lebanon now, what message would that send to those who foment instability and terrorism?” He answered himself four months later, when, under pressure from Congress, he ordered the complete withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Lebanon.
The regime’s bet 40 years later, Sadjadpour concludes, is that in lieu of kidnapping civilians, murdering hundreds of U.S. soldiers, or arming proxy extremists in Iraq, today’s IRGC can force American retreat by closing the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting the global economy, and spreading propaganda to undermine Trump’s credibility and fracture his base. The goal, as ever, is to “make war too unpopular with the American public for America’s president to continue.”
Sadjadpour is obviously correct about the goal, and though his insight is not necessarily novel, his piece was candid, cogent and grounded in historical perspective. What I find most interesting, though, is that “making war too unpopular” and “defeating America in the living room” may be harder than it used to be.
This is a different American media landscape and a unique American president. Trump is not seeking re-election in 2028, and years of relentless media criticism, court cases, and literal de-platforming from social media ultimately forced him and his movement to develop alternate means of connecting with Americans. What has emerged is a second term President who is far less preoccupied with what the New York Times is writing about him (remember Maggie Haberman?) and who has the political security to flatly ignore large swaths of both the psychotic right wing fringe and the neurotic neoliberal center.
After all, the sort of institutions and institutionalists who have traditionally pressured Presidents into retreat have been working to make this war politically toxic every single day since it began. Consider the talking points that have been deployed to make the White House look clownish and embarrassing and wholly unprepared for what’s transpiring in Iran:
Example 1: “US officials surprised by Iranian military response, did not expect retaliatory strikes to be extensive or sustained, planned for operations in Iran to go similarly to Venezuela”
Example 2: “The White House apparently did not anticipate that starting a war with Iran would cause oil prices to rise.”
Example 3: “We’ve never seen this level of incompetence in war-making in this country’s history.”
Example 4: “Ali Khamenei had issued a fatwa against developing nuclear weapons. Now his younger, more extreme son is in charge and is MORE likely to seek a nuke”
Example 5: “Here is what Trump expected when he started bombing Iran: its regime would collapse or unconditionally surrender within 72 hours. That was Plan A. Plan B did not exist”
Example 6: “A few days before we started bombing Iran, the Iranians put a proposal on the table in Geneva…my understanding is that our negotiators simply didn’t understand what they were being offered.”
Example 7: “A month of bombing Iran has achieved nothing. Will Donald Trump escalate, or talk? For now, at least, the advantage lies with the Islamic Republic.”
Example 8: “Exclusive: Trump approved Iran operation after Netanyahu argued for joint killing of Khamenei, sources say” (a splashy headline whose implication is undermined by the story itself: “By the time the call took place, Trump already had approved the idea of the United States carrying out a military operation against Iran but had not yet decided when”)
Without engaging each of those arguments individually, I’ll note that the hit rate is, impressively, even worse than IRGC missiles. Also, that final narrative above—that Americans should be outraged because this entire effort is Netanyahu-driven—is particularly rich. It’s a framing that tends to be advanced by people who are on one hand extremely online and invested in following the news, yet appear to be equally invested in ignoring public calls from the UAE to oust the Iranian regime and reports of private calls from the Saudis to do the same. Regardless, those “Israel first” arguments persist on a daily basis. So do all the others.
And have they made a material difference?
The past four weeks have brought the inverse of the sometimes-oppressive patriotism I remember from mainstream media during Iraq War, but my guess is that today’s relentless skepticism isn’t persuading anyone who hadn’t already decided. It’s certainly not swaying Trump. The U.S. has continued to prosecute the war, at least as I type this. Israel is doing the same. The regional support for the war is universal; U.S. alliances are deepening, not fracturing. Among the Iranian people, too, the support for the U.S. appears quite strong, as evidenced by some terrific NPR reporting this week.
Alongside those stories, the media’s narratives are irrelevant. What actually matters to the political prospects of Trump and Republicans is maintaining the stability of markets and the American economy. On that front, there has been more good news than bad. Oil prices are more stable today than they were four years ago, while the stock market is tolerating the global upheaval quite well. None of that success is guaranteed to stick—inflation seems inevitable—but those are the public opinion drivers the U.S. will remain focused on, and the administration has proven pretty adept at pulling levers to keep its domestic economy running smoothly.
As to the admin’s critics, the sheer volume of attacks begs the question: what was their plan for a hostile Iranian regime that was actively rearming and planned to be considerably more powerful four years from now?
Whatever You Need to Tell Yourself
Returning to wind as case study in modern liberalism, it’s genuinely scandalous that the Biden administration repeatedlythrottledoilandgasproduction while so much money was funneled into projects that make so little sense—particularly in retrospect, as the U.S. now faces an energy crunch from coast to coast. It’s also frustrating, but not surprising, that the New York Times is misleading its readers about efforts to walk that mistake back, while a famous liberal podcaster is coming pretty close to outright lying about what the government is doing.
The reason to start with that example, though, is to highlight how little any of their dissembling actually matters, and what the conversation omits. For one, the wind contracts have been canceled, investment is going to smarter projects, and regardless of what the Times writes, there will be no political consequences for any of those decisions. More tellingly, the liberal, institutional response to an offshore wind rollback is not to make the case that the Department of the Interior’s decision would leave the U.S. strategically weaker (a difficult case to make), but to frame this as some kind of corrupt handout designed to kill environmental progress. Elsewhere, Gavin Newsom’s response to gas prices is not to defend California’s “most aggressive, and thus expensive and limiting, environmental regulatory requirements in the world,” but to invoke Jeffrey Epstein.
That all tracks, too, of course. The practical implications of liberal policy choices are usually secondary to optics in these conversations. Likewise, most criticisms of Trump policy make no real effort to inform, grapple with trade-offs, or even explain (and risk legitimizing) the administration’s thinking. Accordingly, they blend into the same story media has been telling about this president—corrupt, craven, incompetent—for more than a decade.
That approach reminds me of another piece from The Atlantic, less useful than Sadjadpour’s, but more consistent with the politics of the moment. From Anne Applebaum, one week into the war:
Donald Trump does not think strategically. Nor does he think historically, geographically, or even rationally. He does not connect actions he takes on one day to events that occur weeks later. He does not think about how his behavior in one place will change the behavior of other people in other places.
He does not consider the wider implications of his decisions. He does not take responsibility when these decisions go wrong. Instead, he acts on whim and impulse, and when he changes his mind—when he feels new whims and new impulses—he simply lies about whatever he said or did before.
There are times when I read columns about President Trump and find myself wondering just how industrious his critics think he is. Do these people think that Trump, himself, is devising mission plans and Iran exit strategies based on his own personal whims? Is it reasonable to surmise that the entire U.S. intelligence and military apparatus has abdicated its judgment, planning and decision-making to a President who’s not even really paying attention? And if Trump has no ability to think strategically or rationally, then how does one explain 10 years of his ever-expanding power and success as he remakes the American political landscape and the world? Is there a hope that these arguments will get stronger the more often they’re repeated, and the more elections that Democrats lose?
I ask these questions not to glorify Trump or his administration, but to push a little bit on the critics who have spent the past few weeks rushing to frame the Iran war as an American failure or some kind of disaster-in-the-making. It’s fair to have questions about the war and what it portends for global stability—I sure do!—but the baseline operation at issue here is an attempt to cripple a regime that is demonstrably murderous, egregiously repressive, sexually violent to women and children, and which seeks nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles, while remaining deeply allied with America’s greatest modern adversaries, and constantly chanting “Death to America.”
The reflexive impulse to deride the U.S. exercise as definitionally stupid, or frivolous, strikes me as a political strategy that may not age well. It’s also a brand of moral laziness and intellectual bankruptcy that used to be more common on the right. We are quite clearly exiting the “nothing ever happens” era of geopolitics and modern history, yet so many pundits and citizens seem determined to experience this moment like replacement-level political operatives, without any hint of doubt or reflection, let alone rigorous interrogations of what is happening and why.
Two Truths and a Lie
I don’t know when or how this war will end. While tracking troop movements, ceasefire rumors and oil futures can feellike a means of staying informed, the marginal benefits of all that situation monitoring are unclear. What’s certain is that there are waves of war propaganda coming from all sides, at all hours of the day. Trump telegraphs a new strategy on Truth Social every 48 hours. Much of the left, and a huge swath of the right, is focused on Israel. The IRGC seems to have about 15 people speaking on its behalf, and those leaders are consistently amplified by outlets in the West without a trace of skepticism. The Chinese, who are waving their hands and seeking an end to hostilities that have problematic short and long term implications for China, may be the only constituency whose public messaging is sincere.
Vigilance can only take you so far when the information is this imperfect. We’ll see where it all goes. For now, I feel comfortable closing with three observations, four weeks into a “forever war” that may or may not be substantially finished by the second round of the NBA Playoffs.
First, the success or failure of the U.S. war in Iran should be judged by whether American interests are better off afterward. It’s unclear whether regime change will be achievable; for the sake of the Iranian people, I hope it will be. For the U.S., though, whenever this is resolved, the question to evaluate is not whether America “won,” but whether American economic and security interests are improved from where they were in late-February. I won’t speculate on what that might mean, but between severely weakening the most active sponsor of terror in the world, becoming further entrenched as the world’s leading energy superpower, deepening security relationships with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and potentially gaining leverage over imports that China needs for its own survival, there are a number of benefits within sight.
Second, Trump and his administration have their eye on the ball to an extent that his first administration did not. Critics have missed this. The first administration was an utter mess in lots of ways, staffed by political outcasts, and schizophrenic in its execution of practically every strategy it had. By contrast, I’ve been told (by a Democrat!) that today’s White House runs more like a hedge fund than a government, complete with aggressive investments in critical infrastructure, multi-step strategies, contingencies, and lots of competent people. One minor example: while the administration was pilloried for rolling back EV and wind subsidies, it retained and supplemented programs for grid batteries that are very important to the future of grid stability, solar power, and AI power supply; thanks to those Biden policies, the U.S. is now doing quite well in that area. As for Trump, I won’t try to prove this to anyone and I concede that Truth Social is damning evidence to the contrary, but I think the notion that this admin is flying by the seat of Trump’s pants and setting policy on a whim, in Iran or anywhere else, is almost certainly wrong.
Finally, writing as someone who’s only ever voted for Democrats, I can’t stand how much of the modern liberal project is founded on smearing opponents as either stupid, amoral, or both. It’s worth taking seriously the possibility that Trump is neither, and that the net effects of this war will be positive and potentially transformative for U.S. interests in a variety of dimensions. It’s also worth wondering whether demonizing every Trump initiative will ultimately make a Democratic political recovery harder, not easier, and render the entire movement less credible. In any event, no one on the left is asking those questions. A generation of pundits and leaders raised on Jon Stewart and the Iraq War have spent the past month trying to convince themselves and the world that we now have George W. Bush 2.0 in the White House.
That environment produces lots of fun reporting, and there are new, sardonic Trump takedowns every single day. Perhaps one day soon, contemporary Democrats will remember how to offer coherent and serious visions of their own.
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