New, from me: The Trump administration isn’t just using social media to shape a narrative. They view the world through a social media lens in a way that is plausibly corrupting their judgment and undermining their performance. Welcome to the clicktatorship. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/life-under...

"But whatever surprises are in store, one fact is certain: our neighbour’s autocratic and avaricious leader is demonstrably eager to use his country’s massive military power to advance his interests. We must get ready." www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/983642c...

Important piece by @oonahathaway.bsky.social: "As the United States fails to abide by the underlying principle of the international legal system it once championed, the already ailing system faces total collapse." www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/o...

👇🏽 Non-solutions to problems that don’t exist is the national security strategy of this administration

this pitiful sum is the starkest measure I’ve seen of how dire the hardship driving the crisis must be in Iran, and how inadequate the government is at addressing it www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/w...

Trump didn't start the attack on int'l order, but he dealt mortal blows. Not dominos falling but smashing the domino table. With the US not just unwilling but unable to underwrite any order, it's Trumpian anarchy. 6/ @sdhyde.bsky.social @iojournal.bsky.social www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Wrote up this thread for @goodauth.bsky.social (thanks as always to the amazing editorial team!). goodauthority.org/news/what-ha...

"Trump’s new world order is now very much a reality. It has no obvious rules, no real allies, celebrates the jungle and is almost always about money. There is a lot of wealth under Venezuela’s soil. Trump is now committed to extracting it." My column. Free to read. as.ft.com/r/08b22b7a-4...

Yes, the post-liberal international order will look a lot more like the pre-liberal international order.

It seemed clear from the presser that this is all about Venezuelan oil. There’s no need for an occupation force as long as the oil companies close to Trump control the oil. Very reminiscent of early-to-mid 20th century Anglo-American indirect rule over resource-rich countries.

Trump is asked again if the US will keep military forces Venezuela. This time the answer is clearer: “Well, no. We’re going to have a presence in Venezuela as it pertains to oil.”

Imagine being a Venezuelan listening to all this.

This is going to make Iraq look like a very well planned occupation.

“We’re going to run the country, but don’t have any more details for you.”

I am wondering if this statement that the US will be running Venezuela is news to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the nation's top diplomat and acting head of the defunct USAID, which he might want to have around if this is the case.

What a chef’s kiss of a moment for all the “anti-interventionist” bros and podcasters cheering on this man back to power

Remarkable statement. Oil extraction and probably new prison industrial complex to house mass deportations from the US.

👇🏽 Once the dust settles, this will have been nothing more than a resource grab for Trump’s circle of benefactors and allies.

The whole @profsaunders.bsky.social thread is excellent, but this is worth emphasizing. I'm going to do that via shameless self-promotion. @cooleyoneurasia.bsky.social and I first formulated the book that became Exit from Hegemony in the '00s, but we wrote the bulk of the actual text in 2018. 🧵

one thing about trump is he is always eager to say the quiet part loud

Not to mention that even with an AUMF this is bad thing to do.

THREAD: Verified videos of anti-establishment protests in Iran on 1 January A group of protesters in the small city of Azna, in the western porvince of Lorestan, set fire to the local police station. Location: maps.app.goo.gl/Qz7rbxSWTp34...

Of all the bowl games the “Lockheed Martin Armed Forces Bowl” is the most aptly named.

Fresh in the journal PEDIATRICS! Please read and don’t succumb to parental/child exceptionalism. It takes one thoughtless parent to set in motion a tsunami of anxiety and depression in classrooms and friend circles! publications.aap.org/pediatrics/a...

Many of my students will remember screening the film Bashu, the Little Stranger in my courses. Bahram Beyzaie's moving classic depicts the homefront during the Iran-Iraq war, while showing Iran as a multi-racial, mutli-ethnic country. His passing is a true loss.

Pluribus Adam and Eve symbolism on Christmas Eve release is 👌🏽

The CBS investigation portrays a modern concentration camp, similar to the Soviet GULAG (like CECOT, an acronym): sadistic guards, 24 hour lighting, isolation cells. Americans once opposed this inhumane system. The Trump administration sent innocent people there to suffer.

😬

Is “conservative” even remotely the correct moniker here?

Bari Weiss, TurningPointUSA, Trump Admin, broligarchs, etc. - America and the world enjoyed more freedom, equality, and diversity of all kinds before they took over the reins. This is what it all comes down to.

A very good person.

Moyn in 2017: Trump isn't a threat to constitutional democracy. The courts will stop him. Liberals, and their "Tyrannophobia," are the real problem. Moyn in 2025: The Court is illegitimate and must be destroyed. Liberals, and their unwillingness to see this, are the real problem.

“We are pausing all dinner parties because we learned a bad person attended a dinner party once” www.nytimes.com/live/2025/12...

Scholarship is truly an ongoing exercise in seeing the error of your ways (of thinking - and sometimes of being - in the world). Liberation is felt most when you see an error as clearly as the tree planted outside your window.

This is so bad that I’m worried they’ll get think only invading Venezuela could change the subject.

I greet all polls after the last election with a recitation of lines from Brecht: … Stating that the people Had forfeited the confidence of the government And could win it back only By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?

15+ years of handwritten final exams and I don’t regret a thing about it. Once I got over myself about the compressed and arduous grading period, I haven’t looked back. The big change for me in the past 3 years has been to also give my smaller advanced seminars the Blue Books treatment. #AnalogueEd

The only takeaways from this should be the truisms we've known all along: no one controls Trump, he decides and acts on whims and vibes, he's surrounded by persons of low character and assorted personal demons, and he's a bundle of appetites and aversions with no connective reflective tissue.

Astute observations here 👇

I spent time over last Christmas reading the MS for review. I liked it and here it is. Congratulations to @mattsleat.bsky.social - a fine book. Also for those paying attention this and Ed Hall’s book mark out Politics @polshef.bsky.social as perhaps the top UK theory dept this year…

What a violent weekend this was.

Larry Ellison increasingly looks like a Saudi royal on visits to Western capitals.

Every Christopher Caldwell opinion piece attacking the EU is motivated by specific views he holds about Muslims. Without fail, a few paragraphs in you see them spread like butter on milk toast for a certain kind of European man grasping for his threatened civilization www.nytimes.com/2025/12/11/o...

So I'd respectfully modify this assessment a bit. A) He had a much weaker hold over congressional Republicans in his first term; and B) Other Republicans having red lines of their own doesn't mean they still don't agree with 98% of his agenda and culture war strategies.

I personally know three of the Republican state senators who voted against this and I can confirm without hesitation that for most of the 21 the main issue was the vulgar intimidation campaign he launched on them or their colleagues and the fact that the WH never bothered to even bargain with them.

A couple of quick points for context: 1) Republicans DOMINATE elected state offices in Indiana 4:1, 6:1 if you extend to local offices and sheriffs; and 2) It helped a lot probably that the Democratic Party is all but nonexistent, so there were no state-level scarecrows.

Here, I explain how today’s action - in which 21 out of 40 Republican state senators went against the President of the United States - is deeply in the interest of their state. With a likely Democratc Congress in 2027, they need bipartisan representation. samwang.substack.com/p/will-hoosi...

19-31 vote means that it wasn’t that close in the end.

One of the most blatantly authoritarian threats in a Trump term full of them

Days after FIFA awarded Trump a fake peace prize, DOJ moves to drop charges in FIFA corruption case www.nytimes.com/2025/12/10/n...