Shorter America This Week: The consequences of not caring; The enemy of your enemy is not your friend; Visions for the future

Every week, I stare at the screen and wonder how on Earth I’m going to summarise the last seven days. The Vice President of the United States cosplaying as Hillbilly Diplomat in Islamabad, then mansplaining theology to the Pope. The President of the United States posting AI images of himself depicted as Jesus. The Secretary of Defense paraphrasing fake Bible verses from Pulp Fiction. It’s all exactly as stupid – and as dangerous – as you think it is.

This week:

• The consequences of not caring
• The enemy of your enemy is not your friend
• Visions for the future

The consequences of not caring

President Donald Trump has made a career out of not caring. And he’s never really had to face consequences for it. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. It’s possible the President’s “little excursion” in Iran might finally be bringing that home to him. We’re watching the Trump administration realise, in real time, that they did not think this through and that they do not know why they got into it or how to get out.

The reality is that they can’t get out of this one. They can leave, sure – but the consequences will remain, for the United States and the world. In Project Syndicate, Yanis Varoufakis outlines how those consequences could be catastrophic for American hegemony. Entirely foreseeable immediate consequences, like the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, alongside longer-term structural change in economies and how the rest of the world views American power, “foreshadow the rise of an alternative financial architecture that is not controlled by the US and in which Europe is spectacularly irrelevant”.

And then there are the more immediate consequences of not caring and not planning. USA Today is running a truly wild story about how US Marines across the Middle East are not receiving care packages from their families, who are “worried that their loved ones deployed to the Middle East are going hungry”.

As my colleagues in the national security establishment like to remind me, I’m not a military expert. And I’m the first to admit I’m no Napoleon. But making sure your soldiers are fed properly does seem like it might be kinda important, and that not doing that could have some, you know, consequences.

The enemy of your enemy is not your friend

Tucker Carlson is a singular force in American political culture. If I had a dollar for every time someone told me I should listen to him, I’d have a lot more dollars. And it certainly is useful to listen to him to understand what’s happening in the right-wing universe. But. But. We do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to Tucker Carlson.

Carlson is certainly opposed to the Trump administration’s war on Iran, just as he is to Netanyahu’s war on Lebanon. Exploiting cracks in the MAGA universe is a politically logical thing to do – it is incumbent on those opposed to these illegal wars to use any leverage we can to stop them. But many Americans (and Australians) deeply opposed to Trumpism seem to be taking that a step further, suggesting Carlson might be an ally. As Rafi Schwartz so clearly outlines in The Nation, he is not.

Opposing the forces of fascism is relentless work. And it requires offering more than just reactionary opposition – as Zohran Mamdani is demonstrating in New York, it requires grassroots coalition building and a genuine, alternative vision for a better future. Writing for the Guardian with Professors Joseph Stiglitz and Gabriel Zucman, Mamdani outlines a vision for “restoring a basic social principle: that those with the most should contribute their fair share so that everyone can live with dignity.” It’s not one Tucker would support.

Visions of the future

That vision is one that my favourite science fiction writer, Kim Stanley Robinson, has long explored in his books. I loved this piece of his in New Scientist, reflecting on his Red Mars trilogy and calling out the “fantasy” of billionaire dreams of conquering space. If you haven’t read it, I can’t recommend his latest book, The Ministry for the Future, highly enough. And I would never normally recommend the Ezra Klein podcast, but if you can get past Klein, KSR was characteristically brilliant on it.